Wash this blood clean from my hand

DONNA LEON has staked out Venice, Magdalen Nabb knows every narrow street in Florence, and Andrea Camilleri holds Sicily in the palm of his hand. But only Michael Dibdin, in the clever and exuberantly witty police procedurals he created for a dyspeptic cop named Aurelio Zen, tried to wrap his arms around the whole of Italy. Braving his way province by province - from the mountains of Alto Adige (in "Medusa") to the caves of Sardinia (in "Vendetta") - the British-born author produced crime stories that capture the idiosyncratic essence of each region while contributing to a dynamic study of the Italian national character in all its unruly glory. When he died last spring, Dibdin was well along in this ambitious deconstruction process, with END GAMES (Pantheon, $23.95), the last Zen novel, providing a key piece in the jigsaw design of the series. The story is set in the remote and rugged hill towns of Calabria, a southern region known to the French as "la Calabre sauvage" and one that Zen views with wary amusement - partly because he's filling in for a provincial chief of police who has shot himself in the foot while cleaning his pistol. But when an American lawyer working for a shady Hollywood film company is kidnapped and then killed, and when it later comes to light that the victim was actually a Calabrian, born into the oldest and richest family in the area, Zen begins to get a sense of a more cunning criminal mentality at work behind the transparently thuggish manner of the locals. Dibdin is outrageously funny, as always, in conveying Zen's snobby Venetian attitude toward his regional postings. Here, he heaps scorn on the tomato-based cuisine ("roba del sud," his mother would have dismissed it - "southern stuff"), the unrefined architecture (the offensive town church is declared "a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions") and the rude local dialect ("incomprehensible" even to native Italians). More pointedly, Zen is "sick to death of this romantic mystique of the south" and "fed up with hearing how crime down here is ineradicable because it feeds off an unfathomable collective tradition of blood, honor and tragedy." Even as he allows Zen to rail against the xenophobic customs of this cruel and dangerous place, Dibdin registers respect for the games of survival adopted by the fatalistic populace as a way of life. And while satire invariably triumphs over sentiment when his colorful Calabrian lowlifes are joined in their criminal games by the ruthless Americans from the film company, Dibdin also gives his detective Zen-like moments of enlightenment into the soul of the region. "It depresses me," he tells a friend, responding to "the sense of a generalized and ineradicable sadness about the place." But in the end, he makes peace with this foreign land before he leaves for home. Michael Harvey, one of the originators and currently an executive producer of the addictive TV-documentary crime show "Cold case Files," applies his inside expertise shrewdly in his first novel, THE CHICAGO WAY (Knopf, $23.95). Working from a tight plot about an old rape case that heats up after the detective who tries to reopen it is murdered, Harvey writes his best when he gets up close to a subject, as he does in a shocker of a scene in a police warehouse stuffed with boxes of evidence from unsolved rape cases. The efficiency of his cinematic style also suits the brisk, animated shots of Chicago that give the story both grit and authenticity. But Harvey has only mixed success in adapting his up-to-date material to the vintage noir style he aims to emulate. His sleuth, a young private eye named Michael Kelly, initially has trouble finding his narrative groove and sounds a bit like Dick Powell doing a voice-over. He loosens up once the investigation into the cover-up of a serial rapist begins to get interesting; all the same, certain procedural devices just don't wash. In classic P.I. novels, the hero tricks the cops and leans on a reporter pal to pick up information. Here, the ex-cop Kelly is so friendly with the fuzz they issue him invitations to crime scenes and autopsies and work up DNA evidence for him in the forensic lab. Nice try, but I don't think so. Joe Sandilands, the Scotland Yard detective who served so honorably in Barbara Cleverly's historical mysteries set in India, reveals another aspect of his sensitive nature in TUG OF WAR (Carroll & Graf, $24.95). The year is 1926, and Sandilands has been dispatched to Reims, France, to determine the identity of a mute, shell-shocked World War I veteran whose sad condition (and sizable military pension) has attracted multiple claims. Listening to the heartbreaking war stories of the major applicants, including the widow of a Champagne vintner who disappeared on the battlefield of Chemin des Dames "in the middle of the corpse-strewn Marne," is enough to rattle the detective, who fought at Passchendaele. But despite her mastery at vivid scene-setting, Cleverly never loses sight of the historical puzzle that is central to her story. Simply put, it's a stunner. There's usually an element of the supernatural - or at least, the macabre - in Fred Vargas's insanely imaginative procedurals featuring Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Although Adamsberg is commissaire of the prestigious Serious Crime Squad in Paris, his messy personal life has a way of taking over his criminal investigations. This is precisely what happens in WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HAND (Penguin, paper, $14) when an eventful trip to Canada leads him to be hunted for murder on two continents. But one doesn't read for logic in this novel (which maintains its loopy quality in Sian Reynolds's translation from the French); one reads to be amazed by the fantastic twists in the bizarre plot about a long-dead serial killer who seems to be pursuing his quarry from the grave. One reads as well to be delighted by the literary grace notes. Even when the formal symbolism gets a bit thick, who can resist a detective who cracks a case by researching the etymology of a killer's name? Michael Dibdin Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels capture regional Italy - and the gloriously unruly national character.

It gets personal in the third Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg mystery to reach the U.S. Previously, the eccentric commissaire of the French national police has maintained a disconcerting detachment, solving cases like a lone ranger or a Zen archer who went straight to the target. This time, though, Adamsberg faces his personal demon, a serial killer called the Trident who, 30 years previously, framed the commissaire's brother for a murder, successfully avoiding prosecution for that and numerous other slayings. Supposedly dead for more than 15 years, the Trident has risen from the grave or so Adamsberg believes after encountering a new victim whose corpse bears the tell-tale signs of the Trident's work. Convincing anyone of this fact is impossible, of course, and distracted by a trip to Ottawa to attend a forensics course Adamsberg returns to Paris to find himself well and truly framed for the murder of a young woman. Vargas continues to mix styles effectively, combining the light, comic touch of the best Simenon with much darker themes. This time, too, with the hero forced to look deep into himself, the novel adds an extra pinch of Rendellian psychology to the stewpot.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2007 Booklist

A 30-year sequence of murders continues to haunt Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, who's very personally involved. All over France people have been dying of three abdominal wounds in a curiously straight line evidently inflicted by some kind of trident. In almost every case, someone's been convicted of the murder. Only Adamsberg knows, but cannot prove, that the real killer is the politically powerful Judge Fulgence. Adamsberg's beloved brother Rapha"l was accused of murdering his girlfriend in this fashion when Fulgence was living in their village. Although Adamsberg hid evidence to get Rapha"l acquitted, his brother departed, leaving Adamsberg bereft. The ordeal influences all his future relationships. When he learns of another similar murder, Adamsberg goes to the scene and accuses the judge, who was buried in 1987, only to be dismissed as obsessive. Digging deeper, he learns that each suspect who's been arrested was drunk and remembers nothing. When Adamsberg and his department are sent to Canada for DNA training, he's framed for a copycat murder. The RCMP orders him detained, but before his arrest, he escapes back to France, where he hides out while a computer expert looks for evidence to clear him before he's arrested for a murder even he's not sure he didn't commit. Another of Vargas's powerful explorations of unusual crimes (Seeking Whom He May Devour, 2006, etc.): first-class from start to finish. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I Leaning his shoulder against the dark basement wall, jean-Baptiste Adamsberg stood contemplating the enormous central heating boiler which had suddenly stopped working, two days before. On a Saturday, October 4, when the outside temperature had dropped to one degree Celsius, as cold air had arrived from the Arctic. The commissaire knew nothing about heating systems, and was examining the silent tank and pipework, in the hope that his benign gaze would either restore the boiler's energy or perhaps conjure up the engineer, who was supposed to be there but hadn't turned up. Not that he felt the cold, nor was he distressed by the situation. On the contrary, the idea that the north wind should sometimes come funnelling down from the polar ice cap to the streets of the 13th arrondissement of Paris gave him the sensation that he was only one step away from the frozen wastes, that he could walk across them and dig a hole to hunt seals, if he felt like it. He had put on a pullover under his black jacket, and if it was up to him, he would have waited patiently for the repairman to come, while watching for the whiskers of a seal to pop up out of the ice. But in its own way, the powerful heating system down in the basement was a full-time participant in the handling of the cases that poured in all day long to the Paris Serious Crime Squad, as it conveyed its warmth to the thirty-four radiators and twenty-eight police officers in the building. The said officers were at present shivering with cold, huddled into anoraks and crowding round the coffee machine, warming their gloved hands on the white beakers. Or else they had simply left the building for one of the nearby bars. Their files were consequently frozen solid too. Important files, dealing with violent crimes. But the boiler wasn't concerned with all that. It was simply waiting, in lordly and tyrannical fashion, for the man with the magic touch to arrive and kneel in front of it. So as a gesture of goodwill, Adamsberg had gone downstairs to pay it brief and unsuccessful homage, and in particular to find a quiet dark place where he could escape from the complaints of his colleagues. Their curses at the cold, since the inside temperature was, after all, about 10 degrees, did not augur well for the vote on the proposed DNA profiling course in Quebec, where the autumn was turning out severe -- minus 4 yesterday in Ottawa, and it was already snowing in places. They were being offered two weeks' full-time study of genetic imprints, using saliva, blood, sweat, tears, urine and other excretions, now captured on electronic circuits, classified and broken down. All body fluids had become battleground weapons in criminology. A week before the planned departure date, Adamsberg's thoughts had already taken off towards the Canadian forests, which he had been told were immense and dotted with millions of lakes. His second-in-command, Capitaine Danglard, had reminded him crossly that they would be staring at computer screens, not gazing out over lakes. Danglard had been angry with him for a year now. Adamsberg knew why, and was waiting patiently for the grumbling to subside. Danglard was not dreaming about lakes, but praying every day that some urgent case would keep the entire squad back home. For weeks he had been imagining his imminent death, as the plane blew up over the Atlantic. But since the heating engineer had failed to arrive, he had cheered up somewhat. He was hoping that the unforeseen breakdown of the boiler and the sudden cold snap would put paid to the absurd idea of travelling to Canada's icy wastes. Adamsberg put his hand on the tank and smiled. Would Danglard have been capable of scuppering the boiler, since he was well aware that it would spread alarm and despondency? And then making sure that the technician didn't turn up? Yes, Danglard would have been quite capable of that. His fluid intelligence could slip into the narrowest mechanisms of the human mind. As long as the mechanisms were those of reason and logic. And it was precisely along that watershed, between reason and instinct, that Adamsberg and his deputy so diametrically differed, and had done for years. The commissaire went back up the spiral staircase and crossed the large room on the ground floor where people were walking about slowly, heavy shapes bundled up in extra sweaters and scarves. Nobody knew quite why, but they called this the Council Chamber, presumably, Adamsberg thought, because of the full-scale meetings and consultations that took place there. Alongside it was the similarly named Chapter Room, where smaller gatherings were held. Where the names came from, Adamsberg did not know, but probably from Danglard, whose encyclopedic knowledge seemed to him sometimes to be unlimited, and almost toxic. The capitaine was capable of sudden outbursts of information, as frequent as they were uncontrollable, rather like the snorting of a horse. It could take a trifle -- an unusual word, an imperfectly formulated idea -- for him to launch into an erudite and not always well-timed lecture, which could be stopped by a warning gesture. Shaking his head, Adamsberg communicated to the faces that looked up as he passed that the boiler was still showing no signs of life. He walked into Danglard's office. His deputy was finishing off various urgent reports with a gloomy air, just in case the disastrous expedition to Labrador went ahead as planned, although of course he would never reach Canada, on account of the mid-Atlantic explosion, caused by the fire in the left-hand engine, which would have been knocked out by a flock of starlings. The prospect gave him a cast-iron excuse for opening a bottle of white wine before six o'clock. Adamsberg perched on a corner of his desk. 'Where are we in the D'Hernoncourt case, Danglard?' 'All sewn up. The old baron has confessed. Full confession, crystal clear.' 'Too crystal clear by half,' said Adamsberg, pushing the report aside and picking up the newspaper which was lying neatly folded on the desk. 'A family dinner turns into a bloodbath, and we have an old man who stumbles and stutters and can't express himself. Then all at once, he starts expressing himself with absolute clarity. No light and shade. No, Danglard, I'm not signing that.' Excerpted from Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand by Fred Vargas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.