Review by New York Times Review
HISTORICAL mysteries often convey a sense of yearning for people and places irretrievably lost in time. That feeling surfaced in Mark Mills's haunting first novel, "Amagansett," as a lyrical lament for a Long Island fishing community whose traditional way of life was doomed by the booming prosperity of postwar America. Although a keen sense of loss and longing also suffuses Mills's second novel, THE SAVAGE GARDEN (Putnam, $24.95), the youth of its protagonist and the thrill of his exploits as an amateur sleuth keep depression at bay in this romantic and gracefully executed literary puzzle. Adam Strickland is drifting toward a degree in art history at Cambridge University in 1958 when his mentor comes up with a fascinating thesis topic and the funds to pursue it. Adam is to spend two weeks as the guest of the aged Francesca Docci at her villa in the Tuscan hills, studying a Renaissance garden built by a Florentine banker in memory of his wife, who died in 1548 at the age of 25. With precise references to well-known Renaissance paintings and famous gardens like Bomarzo and the Boboli, Mills creates an enchanting vision of wooded glades and grottoes, temples and reflecting pools, amphitheaters and classical statues of "petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage." But Adam is struck by certain discordant elements in the iconography of the garden - including a rather provocative marble statue of the banker's wife - and it's only by consulting sources like Ovid and Dante that he's able to unlock the garden's sad and ultimately shocking secrets. Mark Mills Although the aesthetic clues unearthed by Adam's classical scholarship are the most elegant aspect of the novel's design, the allegory of the Renaissance garden isn't the only mystery to be solved. As he did in "Amagansett," Mills uses a suspicious death as a way of examining the scars of war that never heal in a tight-knit community. Here on the estate, it's the murder of the elder Docci son and heir, ostensibly shot in the last days of the war by German soldiers occupying the villa, but a source of deep curiosity to Adam because he hears conflicting accounts of it from everyone in the household. Struggling to keep his head in this seductively drawn company of educated and refined landowners, Adam applies his academic approach to the tantalizing mystery and, at no small cost to his own ego, eventually solves it. But in the process this naïve young man also learns more than any outsider needs to know about the desperate measures families will adopt to survive the wounds of war. Playing the hero in a crime novel is a tough job at the best of times, but that professional burden falls especially hard on lawmen in western mysteries who have taken up environmental causes. In FREE FIRE (Putnam, $24.95), Joe Pickett, the Wyoming game warden who normally gives chase to cattle rustlers, out-of-season hunters and bug-eyed wilderness survivalists in the rugged outdoor novels of C. J. Box, is entrusted with nothing less than the well-being of Yellowstone National Park. Not even the governor grasps the magnitude of the threat to its natural resources when he dispatches Joe to investigate the bizarre case of a man who got away with killing four people because the murders were committed on a patch of ground beyond the legal jurisdiction of three states and, given a loophole in the law, federal prosecutors as well. "When I think of crime committed out-of-doors, I think of Joe Pickett," the governor says. So do we. And Joe doesn't let us down, leading us on an exhilarating tour of the park that covers every natural wonder, from showy Old Faithful to secret thermal springs spewing microbes, found nowhere else on earth, that may have great scientific and commercial value. But Box reaches too far with a convoluted plot about the environmental threat of "bio-mining" for these rare microbes, a subject that taxes his expository skills and undercuts Joe's greater value as a guide to nature in the raw. Hugh Davoren, the narrator of Neil McMahon's noir western thriller, LONE CREEK (HarperCollins, $24.95), admits that "wanting the old ways to stay was backward, selfish and above all futile." But that doesn't stop this cowboy existentialist from playing judge, jury and executioner when he discovers two shotgunned and gutted horses buried in the dump at the Montana ranch where he works as a construction hand. Davoren's rationale for dispensing violent justice to those who are destroying the old West would be more persuasive if he were less self-absorbed - and not such a sucker for the wiles of dangerous women. Nonetheless, McMahon is a writer and a half, and whenever he peels away from his brooding hero to look at the landscape or listen to the thoughts of humbler men, his words carry for miles. Maverick cops who write their own rules out of frustration with the criminal justice system are hardly unknown in detective fiction, but it's rare to find one whose decline and fall is as tragic as that of Detective Inspector Harry Synnott, the Dublin police officer who loses his soul in Gene Kerrigan's gripping procedural, THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR (Europa, paper, $14.95). Synnott is well aware that his old-fashioned values are out of sync with those of the new, entrepreneurial Ireland. But while the Celtic Tiger may have joined the modern world, Synnott can see that "we're still committing the same old crimes," and it eats him up when a rape case is compromised by his hard-nosed ethical code. To Synnott's grief, his efforts to game the system on another case go seriously awry, endangering the life of a young informant. "You're not the first policeman to find himself tripping over an ambiguous moral line," a superior officer observes. While that's hardly any comfort for Harry Synnott, it's good news for readers who can appreciate the moral complexities of this flawed hero. In Mark Milk's second historical mystery, a young British scholar unearths the sad, shocking secrets of a Renaissance garden.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
The title of this crime novel might remind you of Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys0 , but don't expect anything like that rambunctious, hard-hitting satire of cop life. Kerrigan's moody, unsettling tale explores the criminal underside of Dublin and, by extension, the dark, hidden face of twenty-first-century Ireland. The plot follows several stories: a woman tries to mug a pair of tourists with a syringe as her weapon; a man plans a jewelry heist; a gangster's life is torn apart by his brother's murder; a detective builds a case against an accused rapist. Kerrigan, a veteran journalist who lives in Dublin, presents his city as almost schizophrenic: on the one hand it's newly revitalized, refreshed, striding boldly into the future; on the other, just under the surface, it's seedy, falling apart, a throwback to a violent past. There is no attempt to reconcile these two very different Dublins; rather, Kerrigan makes the point that, despite cosmetic changes, the city has stayed pretty much the same. Gripping crime fiction in which the setting is unequivocally the protagonist. --David Pitt Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The current Irish economic and real estate boom forms the backdrop for the assured second novel from Irish journalist Kerrigan (after Little Criminals). Any smalltime hood with an entrepreneurial bent and a workable scam can quickly work himself into the ranks of the millionaires produced by the boom, forcing police departments all over the country to scramble to keep up. In Dublin, Det. Insp. Harry Synnot, a man with an acute sense of morality and justice, is working a rape and a jewelry store robbery, manipulating his snitch, Dixie Peyton, and being groomed for a job in the Serious Crime Department of Europol. Meanwhile in Galway, policeman Joe Mills is investigating a mysterious double murder, probably committed by a man he's just rescued from a rooftop suicide attempt. While much of the fun is in puzzling out unfamiliar words like "gurriers" and "gaff," it's Kerrigan's firm control of the procedural genre and the breathtaking twist he gives his plot that show him to be a master of the form. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A dour Celtic copper does duty in a capital city in the British Isles and runs afoul of the authorities while working with (and sometimes against) his colleagues. No, it's not a new Ian Rankin novel but a "Garda procedural," the first publication to appear in the United States by award-winning Irish newspaperman/novelist Kerrigan (Little Criminals). The story is set in what is clearly the "new" Ireland, the preserve of all things on the way up: Bono, Ryanair, and any number of shiny new solicitors. Slogging his way through a seemingly mundane rape case, Det. Insp. Harry Synott of Dublin feels that he, too, has earned his promised promotion up the ladder to Europol. At his side is Det. Garda Rose Cheney, who is able to tick off the astronomically rising cost of real estate in the Irish capital. It turns out, though, that the island is as tight as ever, with the rape case having repercussions throughout Irish society, from down-and-out Dixie Peyton to its higher echelons, from Dublin to Galway. Kerrigan gets the midnight choir humming in an intricately plotted novel that can safely be mentioned in the same breath as those by Rankin. For all larger public libraries.--Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A clutch of violent cases challenges the Gard, Ireland's storied police force. While Garda Joe Mills tries to talk a jumper in from a ledge in Galway, his boss, Inspector Harry Synnott, is interrogating young Teresa Hunt about a rape charge in Dublin. On a nearby street, drug addict Dixie Peyton uses a syringe filled with red liquid to rob American tourists. The turmoil of multiple urgent cases is typical of life at Dublin's Gard and of this sequel to Little Criminals (2000). After Mills talks down the jumper, Wayne Kemp, he clams up in his cell for days. Synnott hits a temporary roadblock with alleged rapist Max Hapgood, whose irrational family tries to thwart the investigation at every turn. And Dixie has inside information she's afraid to disclose about a daring bank robbery. Solving the robbery becomes crucial to Synnott's hoped-for promotion. Woven in are several minor cases, along with the personal stories of the detectives and some revealing glimpses of Dublin's criminal underworld. Veteran journalist Kerrigan focuses especially on crime boss Lar MacKendrick, whose involvement in the robbery seems obvious, as he deals with both the violent murder of his brother Jo-Jo and the unexpected death of reliable muscle Owen, Dixie's late boyfriend. A ripping crime tale, impressive in scope and crackling with energy, as well as a fascinating portrait of contemporary Ireland. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
