Review by New York Times Review
Every college has its golden lads and lasses who take pleasure in breaking the hearts of freshmen from more humble social ranks. That's why we have first novels - to let those freshmen pour out their tales of terrible and wonderful collegiate crushes. THE NIGHT CLIMBERS (Simon Spotlight Entertainment/Simon & Schuster, $24), a book written by Ivo Stourton when he was barely out of Cambridge, sets some familiar scenes - languid floating picnics on the Cam, fox hunts at dawn, private clubs and manicured cricket lawns - filled with dauntingly rich and impossibly beautiful people. But Stourton adds his own distinctive touch by giving his undergraduate hedonists a taste for a dangerous sport: the scaling of college buildings by night, an apt metaphor for the breathtaking sense of superiority claimed by their privileged social set. James Walker, the son of a man of modest means, thinks he will die if he can't swan about in the company of the aristocratic playboy Francis Manley; his cool blond girlfriend, Jessica Katz; and their elite coterie of upper-class friends. But for all his freshman innocence, James is a youth of cunning and guile; once initiated into their "shadowy, glamorous world," he sets his sights higher, aiming to win their acceptance and validation. When Francis, disinherited after a stunt so reckless that he finally attracts his father's notice, proposes an audacious criminal enterprise to raise millions, James falls right in with it. Narrating the story in the present day, after learning that this old crime may yet be discovered, James is a richer but much diminished man, addicted to pornography and expensive prostitutes. But he's still fixated on the past and enthralled by Francis and Jessica, whose exclusive relationship shut him out "like a locked room in my own home." An assured stylist, Stourton adopts a voice of mannered elegance that captures James's pretentiousness and Francis's natural grace, although he stiffens up when delivering jejune observations about social restraints on freedom and imagination. A more telling statement is conveyed when these heedless children are seen cutting lines of cocaine on the glass of a framed Picasso drawing. No one would accuse James Swain of writing mandarin prose; in fact, he uses language with such blunt force he could be hammering in nails. But that's just the sort of directness you want in a story like MIDNIGHT RAMBLER (Ballantine/Random House, $24.95), a sturdy thriller featuring Jack Carpenter, an excop who finds missing children for understaffed police forces all over Florida. In broad outline, the guy is pretty much a cliché: drummed out of the force for putting a sex pervert in the hospital, estranged from his wife, living alone with his ugly dog over a sleazy bar and always broke. But like Tony Valentine, the gaming consultant who sniffs out crooked play in gambling casinos in a popular Swain series, Carpenter has uncanny gifts in his chosen field, and he uses them here in the dogged pursuit of a serial killer who leaves no traces of his abducted victims. Even more intriguing, perhaps, are the cases - like the disappearance of an infant from a pediatrics ward - that the tough-guy hero solves on the fly and with no apparent mental sweat. Scandinavian crime writers tend to be gloomy, but they don't all sound alike, as three new northerly novels make plain. Arnaldur Indridason's bleakly beautiful fiction probably comes closest to the depressive sensibility you might expect to find in Iceland. In VOICES (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95), it's the Christmas tourist season, and Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson and his colleagues on the Reykjavik police force are called to a hotel to investigate the stabbing death of the house Santa Claus, who was also the doorman. Appalled by the mean little room where the man was housed, and by the indifference of both management and staff, Erlendur tries to dignify this forgotten soul by solving his murder - a job that uncovers some melancholy realities about the mistreatment of children. Although also set in Reykjavik at Christmastime, Yrsa Sigurdardottir's LAST RITUALS (Morrow, $23.95) is more of an academic detective story, with a bright young lawyer, Thora Gudmundsdottir, doing the snooping. Thora undertakes a historical survey course in Icelandic black magic after a German exchange student who wrote his thesis on the execution of children suspected of sorcery is ritualistically murdered and mutilated. After learning that the student was involved in a society named after "Malleus Maleficarum," an ancient (and famously gruesome) handbook on the proper inquisition of witches, Thora heads for a remote, rural region where the manual may still be in use. Fanciful, yes, but history is more fun when it's horrid. Mari Jungstedt's UNSPOKEN (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) presents itself as a classic police procedural featuring a conventional cop, the stern and sober Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas, who keeps the peace in Visby, a medieval city on the Swedish resort island of Gotland. But the narrative voice is so intimate that the book is best described as a suspense story. As such, it's nicely written, with interesting characters and a crackling good tale about neglected and lonely children who become the prey of pedophiles. At the same time, the plot is ripe with extraneous details about the private lives and romantic adventures of anyone even remotely involved in the criminal investigation - so ripe that you tend to forget exactly what it is you're supposed to be reading in the first place. Ivo Stourton gives his undergraduates a taste for a dangerous sport: scaling college buildings by night.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
