Review by New York Times Review
With historical mysteries so thick on the ground, doesn't it sometimes feel like a horse race? ("Going into the backstretch, the Victorians are holding the lead, but the Medievalists are gaining, and heeeere comes the Age of Enlightenment!") Maybe that's why Frank Tallis has surged to the front of the field riding his dark horse, Vienna in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Opening in the Hapsburg capital at the height of the social season, FATAL LIES (Random House, paper, $15) immediately transports us back to the sophisticated world Tallis captured in "A Death in Vienna" and "Vienna Blood." Dr. Max Liebermann (whose psychoanalytic methods give this series its peculiar fascination) and his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are both at the Detectives' Ball when Rheinhardt is called away to investigate the death of a cadet at St. Florian's military academy. Despite his respect for science - including new theories of psychopathic sexuality that Liebermann is studying with Prof. Sigmund Freud - Rheinhardt isn't immune to the cultural prompts of his Germanic heritage, and his spooky carriage ride through the Vienna woods is like a scene from the Brothers Grimm. "There was something about a deep, dark wood that held unspeakable terrors for the Teutonic imagination," Tallis tells us. The same impulse will later grip Liebermann when he suspects the seductive woman he's romancing may be a witch. This alone could account for the deeper appeal of the series - the suggestion that during this transitional era, the equilibrium of both state and psyche will keep shifting between cool reason and dark romance. In this context, St. Florian's can be seen as something of a microcosm, an Old World institution buffeted by new ideas, some all the more dangerous for being imperfectly understood. Although the dead cadet appears to have succumbed to natural causes, his body shows obvious marks of abuse, causing Rheinhardt to take a closer look at the way foreign scholarship students - and indeed, all outsiders - are persecuted by the privileged classes at St. Florian's and beyond its gates. So, while it's always a delight to visit the ballrooms where Strauss is played and the opera house where Mahler is rehearsing and the coffeehouses where ideas are devoured mit Schlag, this smart series has far more to offer than decorative charm. Readers who like their mysteries with a little meat on the bone probably think first of Sara Paretsky and Denise Mina, who find sociological significance in every neighborhood crime. Val McDermid puts the same substantive thought into A DARKER DOMAIN (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99), using a missing persons case to revisit the devastating 1984 coal miners' strike that tore apart a working-class Scottish community. The daughter of a miner long assumed to have deserted the union cause and fled to England now has a pressing need to locate her father. That near-impossible task falls to Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, who grew up in these parts and finds herself viewing the grim lives of the miners' families with a mixture of compassion and horror. McDermid writes with gruff eloquence about the worn-down residents of a region where "the men didn't easily take to women with an education" and the women found a variety of outlets for their bitterness. Had McDermid kept her focus, this story might have maintained its blunt impact. But by introducing a parallel plot, set in the same time frame and also having to do with a missing person, she loads the narrative with so much weight that it falls right into the pit she's dug for it. Sooner or later, every Inspector Salvo Montalbano adventure abandons the pretense of being a conventional police procedural and collapses into opera buffa. In Stephen Sartarelli's translation Of AUGUST HEAT (Penguin, paper, $14), Andrea Camilleri's endearing Sicilian detective has a perfectly legitimate mystery to solve. The body of a teenage girl has been found in the illegally constructed basement apartment of a seaside rental property, and Montalbano is already on the case - because he rented the house and found the body. But because everything that happens in Sicily seems tied to crooked deals, often in chummy collusion with the Mafia, the investigation is soon tied in knots. At which point, the excitable Montalbano resolves the case through the sheer force of his glorious temper. People who love the Marx Brothers don't usually go for the Three Stooges. Since the same assumption applies to comic mysteries, here's one from each end of the taste spectrum. Tim Dorsey's NUCLEAR JELLYFISH (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99), the latest entry in the saga of Serge Storms, is pure gonzo humor. Serge being Serge (meaning certifiable), sex, violence and hilarity ensue as he pinballs along the Florida highways, pursuing his dream of authenticating every bit of the state's anecdotal history. Dorsey devises plenty of Stoogelike antics for Serge, but he also offers clever parodies of the tourists, truckers and conventioneers who stumble into his manic hero's path. THE LOVE POTION MURDERS IN THE MUSEUM OF MAN (Zoland/Steerforth, paper, $14.95) is no less giddy, but in a dry, snide style. Uppity Wainscott University is caught on Alfred Alcorn's blade when two antagonistic academics are found on the floor of the genetics lab, victims of an industrial-strength aphrodisiac and done to death by sexual excess. The Marx Brothers would be very welcome at this quirky institution. The military academy in Frank Tallis's latest Viennese mystery is an Old World institution buffeted by new ideas.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Camilleri's alternately brooding and life-loving Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano may be the most agonizingly human lead character in the mystery genre. The inspector's all-too-recognizable shortcomings, from lethargy to lust, are on view in this latest episode in which a summer rental procured by Salvo for friends of his girlfriend, Livia becomes a kind of Italian Amityville horror. If an insect infestation isn't enough to turn the holiday into a fiasco, the body found in a concealed basement apartment does the trick nicely, leaving Montalbano on the outs with Livia and forced to contend with a six-year-old murder. As the inspector endures the August heat (often by sitting in his office in his underwear), he faces an even more formidable obstacle: his overwhelming attraction to the victim's stunning twin sister. Montalbano's various weaknesses lead directly to the troubling finale, leaving him forced to, yes, strip off his clothes one more time and dive into the sea, hoping to swim away his regrets. Combine the movies Body Heat and The Seven-Year Itch, blending the noir of the former with the farce of the latter, and you have something like this beguiling tragicomedy.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Camilleri's 10th mystery to feature Sicilian Insp. Salvo Montalbano (after 2008's Paper Moon) cleverly balances a compelling story line with engaging characters. Urged by his girlfriend, Livia, to find a summer rental for a friend of hers in Vigàta, Montalbano ends up selecting a house with a tainted past. The man who built the house died in a fall soon after its construction, and his 20-year-old stepson, Ralf Gudrun, vanished. After the young son of Livia's friend disappears, Montalbano finds the missing boy, essentially unharmed, but in the process stumbles upon a corpse, later identified as that of an attractive 16-year-old girl who disappeared six years earlier. Suspects include a real estate developer with unhealthy sexual appetites as well as the missing Gudrun. While the solution is less complicated than, say, those Peter Lovesey provides for his similar series sleuth, Peter Diamond, the humor and humanity of Montalbano make him an equally winning lead character. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The victim in Inspector Salvo Montalbano's tenth case (The Paper Moon, 2008, etc.) has been waiting six years in a chest in an illegally constructed apartment. It's not easy to find a Sicilian beach house for rent during August. So when his girlfriend Livia, denied a vacation with the inspector by his colleague's change of summer plans, insists that he find a rental for her friend Laura, Montalbano's proud of his discovery, until the plagues begin: cockroaches, mice, spiders, floods. Finally Laura's toddler disappearsinto a pit, it turns out, that leads to a secret ground-floor apartment constructed and buried in defiance of the building code. It's the exact duplicate of Laura's apartment, except for the corpse in the chest. The victim, 16-year-old Caterina Morreale, was obviously assaulted and killed by someone who had access to the apartment on the day it was hidden from view to await a government amnesty on illegal construction. Was the killer well-connected contractor Michele Spitaleri, who liked his girls young? Foreman Angelino Dipasquale? Mason Gaspare Miccich'? Watchman Filiberto Attanasio, a habitual offender? Or Ralf Speciale, late stepson of the German businessman for whom the apartment was built? With help from a most unusual young woman, Montalbano battles the usual corruption, incompetence and indifference, compounded this time by heat that repeatedly moves him to strip to his underwear. He comes up with a solution as satisfying as it is unsurprising. Despite its noirish undertones, the perfect beach read for those lucky enough to have found suitable accommodations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
