Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

*** Parnell Hall: Dead Man’s Puzzle , Minotaur, $24.95. Like both Monk and Hood, Puzzle Lady Cora Felton inhabits a world where details are realistic, but the big picture is pleasantly fanciful. Three crosswords by Manny Nosowsky and a sudoku by Will Shortz are keys to the plot, and even if the cute-dialogue-as-page-filler gets a bit tiresome, the almost Queenian solution is ingenious.

** Denis Johnson: Nobody Move , Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $23. Gambler Jimmy Luntz, on the run from loan sharks in Bakersfield, California, joins forces with Anita Desilvera, framed for embezzlement by her prosecutor husband and a corrupt judge. An exercise in sex and violence, flashy but lacking sympathetic characters or an engaging plot, merits grudging respect for crisp prose and punchy, darkly comic dialogue. Jacket-flap comparisons to Hammett and Chandler are way off the mark. (Also on CD, read by Will Patton [Macmillan Audio, $24.95]).

** John Shannon: Palos Verdes Blue , Pegasus, $25. The title refers to both an endangered California coastal butterfly species and the habitat-conscious missing teenager sought by unofficial private eye Jack Liffey. The much-praised Shannon writes well and has a good eye for Southern California social strata, but he represents much that is wrong with contemporary crime fiction: excessive back story, self-indulgent literary references, smugly pretentious dialogue, weak plot, and soap opera contrivances. Liffey’s sentimental determination to keep alive an animal in severe pain from cancer made me doubt his moral compass.

** Matthew Glass: Ultimatum , Atlantic Monthly, $24. This international relations thriller, totally undistinguished for prose, dialogue, and characterization, offers an involving story and plenty of wonky policy debate as the newly elected President (the year is 2032) tries to figure out how to reach an agreement with China and save the world from galloping climate change.

Finally, four juvenile novels, all directed at readers twelve and up:

*** Rachel Wright: You’ve Got Blackmail , Putnam, $16.99. Fourteen-year-old Lozzie Cracknell’s slangy and comical first-person narrative is distinctively British but also unmistakably contemporary teen, so the few unfamiliar terms shouldn’t discourage young American readers. School bullies, separated parents, and a blackmailing scheme that may involve Lozzie’s novelist English teacher figure in a fast-moving, highly enjoyable tale that is also a genuine detective story.

*** Brent Hartinger: Project Sweet Life , HarperTeen, $16.99. Tacoma 15-year-old Dave and his two best friends, ordered by their fathers to get summer jobs, explore ways to make the requisite cash without working, including solving a series of bank robberies and seeking a treasure hidden in the city’s underground tunnels. Some young readers will have fun shooting holes in this episodic comic novel’s preposterous plot, but expert telling and healthily moral message disarm criticism. One plot element, the history of Tacoma’s treatment of its Chinese population, is expanded upon in a concluding author’s note.

** Jennifer Sturman: And Then Every-thing Unraveled , Scholastic/Point, $16.99 16-year-old Delia Truesdale, sent from her Palo Alto home to Manhattan and the management of two aunts, refuses to believe her socially conscious mother was lost at sea. The first-person humor and romantic subplot may charm the target readership, but the mystery fizzles: psychic and off-stage detection are cop-outs, and the incomplete ending requires waiting for a sequel.

** Robert B. Parker: Chasing the Bear , Philomel, $14.99. How did Boston private eye Spenser’s western upbringing by a widowed father and two maternal uncles turn him into the literate and principled macho man we know so well? While young readers will enjoy the suspenseful river pursuit, it’s hard to imagine them relating to the framing device: present-day commentary on the action via the sleuth’s customary arch dialogue with Susan Silverman.

Copyright © 2009 by Jon L. Breen

Translated from the Dutch by Josh Pachter

Called “one of Europe’s most accomplished novelists” by Kirkus Reviews, Dutch writer Tessa de Loo is a Soho Press author in the U.S., with two novels out so far in English: The Twins and A Bed in Heaven. She is also a superb short-story writer. In Holland, her stories have recently been reissued in a collection. The story we selected for translation for her EQMM debut is one of her most famous. It has previously been translated into a number of other languages, but never before English.

“Who wants a piece?” Cora asks.

Her plump hand holds out the half-empty candy box, but as usual, no one pays any attention to it.

Trix wipes a stray strand of blond hair from the corner of her mouth, but it’s impossible to tell if it’s hers or his. Lien struggles to light a cigarette without success. Her hands tremble.

I just sit there, staring at them, vaguely expecting one of them to explain what’s just happened, to assign some responsibility for it. Is there some special word that labels the guilt we all feel, some legal designation?

“Well, I’ll eat them, then,” Cora says, and one after another, the bonbons disappear between her scarlet lips.

“Dammit,” says Lien, gazing at us meaningfully, each in turn, through the thick lenses of her glasses.

We laugh nervously.

Trix’s eyes shine, the palest blue I’ve ever seen them. “If they start asking questions,” she whispers, “I don’t know a thing about it.”

“None of us knows a thing about it.” Cora’s fingers fumble with a pink wrapper. “They can ask whatever they like.”

“We never even saw him.” Lien claws her heavy glasses from her doll’s nose, dramatically exposing her half-blind eyes. “Never,” she repeats with conviction. Then, as if her words have startled her, she strikes another match and touches the flame to her cigarette. This time it lights, and she coughs wildly, choking on the smoke as if she were a child experimenting with tobacco for the very first time. Tears spill from her eyes and run down her cheeks.

My thoughts tumble over each other feverishly, and although each of them is clear, its meaning obvious, together they cause me only confusion. Have we — although each of us has her own independent life from the moment we step down from this train, exhausted, at the end of the day, until the following morning when we drag our sleepy bodies back up the metal steps into our compartment — have we now somehow shackled ourselves together? Will the events of this morning rivet us to each other for all eternity? How can the warm sense of camaraderie which flows through me reconcile with the clammy conviction that I myself am responsible for what has happened?

We approach our destination. The sterile landscape of arrow-straight canals will soon give way to the crazy patchwork of gardens that announce our arrival in the city. Till now, I’ve always shivered at the thought of having to live on one of the farms that dot this geometric no man’s land. Not today, though: today the world has shrunk down to this one compartment and we four women who occupy it.

“Before morning, one of you will betray me,” says Trix, her voice hollow, and I imagine that the look she gives me is intended to remind me that I am, after all, the newcomer in this company.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Cora cries. “We’re all in the same boat.” Same as every morning, she stuffs her empty candy box into the trash can below the window and sighs, satisfied. She’s had her breakfast.