Glass houses

LOUISE PENNY wrote the book on escapist mysteries - a dozen of them, in fact, almost all set in the sheltered Canadian village of Three Pines. "It was a haven, a buffer, from the cares and cruelty of the world," she tells us in GLASS HOUSES (Minotaur, $28.99), a place seemingly so free of malice and discord that Armand Gamache, chief superintendent of the Surete du Québec, and his wife, Reine-Marie, have made it their sanctuary. One of the pleasures of returning to this series is visiting old friends in the village like Gabri and Olivier, who run the convivial B&B; the artist Clara Morrow, whose startling portraits will haunt you; and (a personal favorite) Ruth ¿ardo, a poet who accurately describes herself as "a crazy old woman who prays for Satan and has a duck." The strangeness starts with the traditional Halloween party at the local bistro, attended by a masked, hooded figure in a black cloak who reappears the following day to take up sentry duty on the village green. Still as death and silent as the grave, the visitor resists efforts to engage him in conversation. After a while, people just leave him alone and go about their business - all except a Spanish-speaking guest at the B&B who identifies this specter as a cobrador del frac, a collector of unpaid debts (including moral debts) who follows defaulters, shaming them with his remorseless gaze. In the presence of this wraith, the villagers begin to exhume their own guilty secrets. A creepy twist in the narrative traces the cobrador back to medieval Spain, when plague victims, lepers and witches were consigned to a remote island to die. Those who survived and managed to return to the mainland silently stalked the people who had banished them and, over the years, became mythic figures. In his dark robes, the cobrador becomes a vivid metaphor for opioids like fentanyl, the "modern-day Black Death" that drug cartels are smuggling across the border through Three Pines and into Vermont. If Gamache can't contain this plague, our last hope may be Superman. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, a "celluloid necropolis" for folks like Alex Whitman, a snarky film fanatic who has been hired by another fanatic to find what may be the first motion picture ever made. Jonathan Skariton's debut novel, SÉANCE INFERNALE (Knopf, $26.95), named for that very item, is a dense but thrilling exploration of the mystery surrounding a film that was said to have predated both Edison and the brothers Lumiere, but disappeared, along with its inventor, on a train to Paris in 1890. The plot is packed with film ephemera, some of it mesmerizing, some of it as unnecessary as the secondary plot, set in Edinburgh (what would mystery writers do without Edinburgh?), about a present-day serial killer who stashes his victims in the underground vaults of the Old City. "Some of these art-house freak films make my skin crawl," says a police constable, referring to the killer's snuff video. But as long as Skariton keeps to movie history, we can concentrate on other mysteries - like whether Edison murdered his rival. A CHILD'S rage can be fierce. Consider Ruby, the almost feral heroine of Kate Hamer's domestic thriller, THE DOLL FUNERAL (Melville House, $25.99), who learns on her 13th birthday that she was adopted. Ruby is helpless to do anything about the beatings she receives from the man she thought was her father, but the dramas she stages for her dolls tell the story. "My play had changed: I now arranged for them to have little accidents about the house - a trip and a tumble down the stairs, or Sindy's head stuck in the oven while Paul stood outside and watched her through the window." So it's no surprise when Ruby puts a match to her tormentor's clothes and sets a greenhouse on fire. Hamer's melodic voice hovers between the cold realism of those vicious beatings and an otherworldly mysticism that empowers Ruby to see dead people like Shadow, a young soul who longs to be alive again. But it takes a kind doctor to identify Ruby's ghosts as her ancestors. "There's no specters, or apparitions," he tells her. "The real ghosts are just family." The family she's longed for her entire life. GUTS, GORE AND A LITTLE S&M - what else would you expect from Paul Cleave, a New Zealand author who uses words like lethal weapons. A KILLER HARVEST (Atria, $26) tosses another ingredient into the mix: the fear of losing your identity. In an experimental operation, Joshua Logan, 16 years old and blind since birth, receives the eyes of his father, a detective with the Christchurch Police Department who died during the ill-timed arrest of a chain-saw killer. The operation doesn't go exactly as planned, leaving Joshua's newfound vision a bit, well, warped. Cleave follows the boy as he explores his surroundings with a sense of anxiety and awe, but for the most part he writes rough stuff. Dogs are killed, young women are kidnapped and tied up, and one unfortunate soul is chopped into pieces, then stashed in the freezer for a rainy day. And there's an inspired cliffhanger ending that promises a lot more mayhem to come. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.