Review by New York Times Review
IRISH SONS ARE brought up to honor their mothers. To Jimmy Phelan, the most feared gangster in the city of Cork, that means cleaning up his mother's kitchen after she bashes an intruder to a bloody pulp with a gaudy religious artifact she calls her "holy stone." This tragicomic scene captures the wonderfully offbeat voice of Lisa Mclnerney, whose irreverent first novel, THE GLORIOUS HERESIES (Tim Duggan, $27), descends into the city's seedy underworld and finds a community of alcoholics, prostitutes, drug dealers and their customers, who live like rats but speak like street poets. Ireland is gripped in a recession, and a lot of people have no jobs - but not down here, where everyone's working in the shadow economy, selling drugs or sex or someone else's stuff. Maureen Phelan's rash act sets off a roundelay of events that sweeps through the neighborhood, eventually putting her son's illegal business at risk. Tony Cusack, who helps Jimmy with the cleanup, has no choice in the matter, burdened as he is with six children and a drinking problem that makes him mean as a skunk. His 15-year-old son, Ryan, the closest thing to a likable character, wears the bruises to prove it. McInerney's characters aren't what anyone would call saints, but they're so richly drawn you have to respect the way they think and sympathize with their moral conflicts. After disposing of the body on Maureen Phelan's kitchen floor, Tony feels awful that he's unable to inform the victim's mother. But what's he supposed to say? "Missus O'Donovan? I'm sorry to catch you unawares, ... but your son is dead as a... dodo"? He actually puts it more crudely than that. Not only is McInerney's prose ripe with foul language and blasphemous curses delivered in the impenetrable local idiom, but her style is so flamboyantly colorful it can't always be contained. Just the same, when Maureen Phelan's guilty conscience kicks in, sending her to confession and devising ways to make reparation for her sins, the words that come out of her mouth are hard as stones, but pure poetry. WHEN DID IT start, the deterioration of the old river towns and the ruination of the children? Jesse Donaldson thinks it was somewhere around 1998, the year in which he's set his fine first novel, THE MORE THEY DISAPPEAR (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $26.99). The grown-ups in Marathon, Ky., are still drinking themselves senseless, but OxyContin has become their children's drug of choice. Harlan Dupee, the decent new sheriff, would like to help kids like Mary Jane Finley, who snorts Oxy to forget what a disappointment she is to her family, and her boyfriend, Mark, who pushes pills and is studying pharmacy to advance his trade. But a more pressing job for Sheriff Dupee is finding the killer of his widely beloved but utterly crooked predecessor. Donaldson is a soulful writer, especially sensitive to imagery that reflects the young sheriff's sense of desolation: "The lit parking lot of Walmart shimmered as he came into town - Marathon's sad way of announcing itself." There isn't a lot to the plot, but when the author mourns "a tree that had died before growing tall enough to offer shade," we understand exactly how the sheriff feels about his battered town. JUST WHAT A nice Canadian town like Port Dundas needs - bones in the backyard. Well, not exactly in the backyard, but on the building site of a hotly contested new subdivision. That's where Honey Eisen finds a human bone, in Inger Ash Wolfe's intense new procedural mystery, THE NIGHT BELL (Pegasus Crime, $25.95). When more bones turn up, and are determined to be the remains of teenage boys hacked to death some 40 years earlier, police attention turns to the ruins of the old county home for boys that still stands on this spot. To Inspector Hazel Micallef, the very sharp detective in this series (which the Canadian author Michael Redhill writes under a pseudonym), this was a significant time in her life, which we see in crisp flashbacks. She was almost 15, her mother was the town mayor and her bratty adopted brother was blamed for the disappearance of a "bad" wild girl. Readers are advised to forget the "nice" reputation that sticks to Canada. This is pretty gory - and kind of sad. COLIN COTTERILL graciously issues a "mental health warning" to readers that l SHOT THE BUDDHA (Soho Crime, $26.95), his dazzling if thoroughly dizzying new novel set in Indochina, arrives "heavily spiced with supernatural elements." By 1979, the Pathet Lao government had pretty much wiped out the national religion of Buddhism in Laos, home of the elderly, irascible Dr. Siri Paiboun and his merry band of political misfits. Denied their deities, "rural folk were reanimating pagan gods and seeking advice from spirits." Since Siri is often visited by the dead, and since he's "desperate for entertainment," he and his clever wife agree to accompany the supreme patriarch of Lao Buddhists to Thailand on a mission to intercede in the fate of a monk charged with three murders. Happily, their adventure takes them to a village inhabited entirely by shamans banished from their own villages. "The Disneyland of animism," in Siri's wry opinion of the place, is easily the highlight of this mind-bending book.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Murder hits close to home again for Port Dundas, Ontario, Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef when young boys' bones are discovered in a new development's unfinished lots. Then Sergeant Melvin Renard is kidnapped during the department's sweep for more remains, and Hazel is warned off as the RCMP pulls rank. Hazel's instincts point to the foreboding Dublin Home for Boys, which sits at the development's border. Her adopted and long-deceased brother, Alan, spoke of the horrors in that state boy's home, where he spent his early years. Against orders, Hazel scours records to find Dublin Home boys who never became official adults, and looks for witnesses among those who did. As she searches for the truth behind the boys' murders, Hazel is haunted by the disappearance of a classmate in 1957 and struggles with her mother's increasing dementia. Wolfe, a pseudonym for Canadian writer Michael Redhill, blankets this thriller in an eerie, suspenseful calmness and showcases Hazel (played by Susan Sarandon in the movie version of The Calling, 2014) as a tenacious, sharply intelligent, reader-courting heroine.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The pseudonymous Wolfe's provocative yet ponderous fourth Hazel Micallef mystery (after 2012's Door in the River) highlights the mistreatment of those at the margins. After residents of a new housing development in Port Dundas, Ontario, begin finding bones in their yards, the police comb an adjacent field. Behind an old orphanage that abuts it, they discover bones from 18 adolescent boys, all of them murder victims. Meanwhile, an officer is kidnapped, and three people associated with the development are savagely murdered. The Mounties take over the case, displacing Hazel and her team, but the 64-year-old detective inspector remains determined to identify the dead children, rescue her colleague, and bring past and present criminals to justice. Flashbacks to 1957 follow 14-year-old Hazel's efforts to locate a missing teenager. Factual and thematic ties bind the two story lines and provide the foundation for a sprawling mystery with emotional heft, but Wolfe's attempts to raise stakes and add a ticking clock render the plot improbable. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Literary. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The discovery of children's bones on land that was formerly a county foster home leads to the killings of three residents of the new subdivision built on the property. Employing the murders of the present to reflect upon unsolved crimes of the past template to excellent effect. This fourth installment (after A Door in the River) in the Det. Hazel Micallef series touches on issues of child abuse, wards of the state, office politics, real estate corruption, and the tricks played by memory and is the strongest title yet. While the mystery keeps things moving, the characterizations-from the brief bitter glimpses of a murder victim's last banal thoughts to Hazel, nearing retirement age and juggling the demands of her job and caring for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia-are tremendous. Fans of the series will enjoy the flashbacks and seeing younger versions of Hazel and her mother, but the work is inviting and accessible to readers new to the books. Verdict Aficionados of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Giles Blunt, and Minette Walters will enjoy this dark Canadian import.-Julie Elliott, Indiana Univ. Lib., South Bend © Copyright 2016. 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
In this fourth installment (A Door in the River, 2012, etc.), Ontario police inspector Hazel Micallef becomes intimately involved in a case connecting back to her childhood.The trouble starts with Tournament Acres, a new housing development in Port Dundas that has fallen short of its promises. Unhappy tenants find bones on the empty land intended to become a golf course, and soon DI Micallef is in the office of property manager Brendan Givens. He's being harassed and wants protection, and tenants want something done about the development's failures, but these problems seem like child's play when the bones turn out to be human. Micallef orders the land, which used to belong to the Dublin Home for Boys, to be canvassed. This task yields even more bones, but during the search, an officer goes missing after a threatening voice speaks over his radio. The situation intensifies further when a couple from the development is brutally murdered overnight (in a scene that will give you chills). It becomes clear that something much larger is going on at Tournament Acres, and it goes back decadesDublin Home has been in ruin for years. The realization that the bones belong to adolescent boys hits Micallef hard, since her brother, Alan, was adopted from a similar home in the 1950s. This takes the narrative back to 1957, when troubled Alan is suspected of foul play when a teenage girl goes missing. To complicate things, Micallef and her friend Gloria Whitman, the daughters of the mayor and the town doctor respectively, are the last to see the girl alive. The two timelines feel like separate stories for most of the book, but youre safe to suspect that the dots will be connectedthough with great haste. Wolfe's main character is alert, hard-bitten, and extremely loyal, and it's a pleasure to get to know her more deeply through her precocious younger self. The pleasure runs out by the final chapters, which read like a chaos of competing sounds; you'll be deafened before the final note. DI Micallef is sure to win your favor, but expect your initial excitement to slowly fizzle out. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
