Рон Гуларт - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

**** P.D. James: The Lighthouse, Knopf, $25.95. This time, the threatened institution (a James specialty) is a private island off Cornwall that has become an R-and-R destination for weary VIPs. A widely hated novelist is murdered, and the isolated setting makes for a typically excellent closed-circle whodunit for Adam Dalgliesh and his team, with an enthralling cast of suspects and clues to the killer broad and fair enough to be interpreted by armchair sleuths more alert than this one.

**** Thomas H. Cook: Red Leaves, Harcourt, $23. Photo-shop proprietor Eric Moore’s seemingly perfect life all starts to unravel when an eight-year-old girl disappears from her home on a night his teenage son had babysat her. This grim study in suspicion, loss, and multigenerational family relationships explodes artificial distinctions between literary and category, character- and plot-driven fiction. As in earlier novels, Cook doesn’t “transcend” the crime-suspense genre but works within it brilliantly, and while firmly based in character, this is also a gem of construction.

*** Stephen King: The Colorado Kid, Hard Case, $5.99. Told mostly in dialogue, between two veterans of a small Maine weekly and the young woman they are training in the journalist’s art, this understandably controversial novel makes for compelling reading: The author has a matchless narrative gift, and the characters are beautifully drawn. It sets a tantalizing mystery puzzle and examines it from all angles with near Queenian thoroughness, and it makes valid points about news media and human nature. But it will help to know two things going in: this is not a detective story but an anti- detective story, and it does not fit the hardboiled fiction noir category in which its publisher specializes. If King had chosen to solve the case, you could even call it a cozy.

*** Walter Mosley: The Wave, Warner, $22.95. What starts like a ghost story — Errol Porter gets late-night phone calls ostensibly from his ten-years-dead father — morphs into a wild science-fiction adventure in which the Los Angeles computer expert turned potter must save a superior alien race from a sinister government agency. There’s plenty of allegory, symbolism, and political commentary, but they don’t get in the way of a fast-moving thriller plot with romantic and criminous interludes.

*** Maddy Hunter: Hula Done It? Pocket, $6.99. Iowa tour leader Emily Andrew takes her senior-citizen charges on a Hawaiian Island cruise, resulting in a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World- style treasure hunt. You may anticipate the solution, but the attraction of this series is the humor — farce, slapstick, and situational — that is somehow sustained over 300 hilarious pages.

*** Mat Coward: Open and Closed, Five Star, $25.95. London cops Don Packham and Frank Mitchell look into the murder of an octogenarian activist during the occupation of a public library threatened with closure. The book offers the author’s customary humor, sociopolitical messages, and nimble manipulation of plot, characters, and language.

*** Ralph E. Vaughan: Sherlock Holmes and the Coils of Time, Gryphon, $16. This hundred-page novella is a richly atmospheric cross-pollination of the Baker Street sleuth’s return to 1890s London, as described in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” and the events of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

*** Dean Koontz: Velocity, Bantam, $27 hardcover; $7.99 paper-back reprint. In a fresh variation on a familiar situation, the nutty games-playing serial killer’s antagonist is not a cop but a Napa Valley bartender. The wild and tricky plotting, hyped-up suspense, moral ponderings, and unconventional romance demonstrate that over-the-top can be a good thing.

** Dean Koontz: Forever Odd, Bantam, $27. Koontz’s second 2005 book, a sequel to 2004’s Odd Thomas, about the psychic detective and fry cook whose unwelcome ability to see and communicate with the dead includes a relationship with a displaced Elvis Presley, has its moments but is far from its extraordinary predecessor in originality and emotional impact.

** Kent Conwell: The Ying On Triad, Avalon, $21.95. In his fifth case, Austin P.I. Tony Boudreaux has a week to save an innocent man from execution. The publisher’s products, directed mainly to a Middle American library market, usually fly under the reviewer radar. While this one presents a broad target — it’s simplistic in plot and development, old-fashioned in language and attitudes, unoriginal, and lacking a surprise finish — it is smoothly readable and should please its intended audience.

Those whose interest in mystery fiction extends beyond reading — e.g., to attending conventions, subscribing to fanzines, posting to online discussion groups — will love Marvin Lachman’s The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom (Poisoned Pen, $16.95), which is enjoyably written, scrupulously accurate, and admirably willing to address controversy.

Elizabeth George’s long novels about Scotland Yard detectives Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers have been distilled into hour-and-a-half TV adaptations with the excellent acting and production values typical of the British imports seen on PBs’s Mystery. The Inspector Lynley Series 3 (WGBH Boston, $39.95 DVD or VHS) draws compact and diverting whodunits from A Traitor to Memory, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, and A Cry for Justice, but If Wishes Were Horses overdoes the series’ soap opera elements and has numerous improbabilities leading up to its annoying cliffhanger climax.

Copyright © 2006 Jon L. Breen

Helen Tucker is not known for creating series characters. This time she makes an exception and brings back her anti-hero from the EQMM story “The Ice Storm.” “Sometimes it’s more fun to work with the dumb wicked than the smart righteous,” she says. “And I may use Brody again if I can think up another daft scam for him.”

The whole stinking mess started as he went out the gate of Rocky River Prison Camp and the guard at the gate looked on his clipboard and read, “Micah Brody, number 46503, paroled after serving three years and four months.” The guard looked Brody up and down, gave a little snort, and said, “How was your stay with us, Brody?”

Brody, who thought all guards were slimy scum, gave this one his biggest smile and said, “It was a day at the beach.”

That spontaneous sentence was the beginning of the whole damn thing.

The guard opened the gate, still scowling as though he hated to let anyone out, and snarled, “Don’t forget to check regularly with your parole officer or you’ll be back, heh, heh.”

Brody didn’t answer, didn’t even bother to nod, but walked through the steel gate into bright sunshine and out to the road where his friend Nathan waited in his car to take Brody away from the accommodations from hell.

As Brody got in the car, Nathan sang out, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty you’re free at last.” He was the custodian and sometime preacher at the Church of the Divine Word and usually he was high — often too high for Brody — on religion. Like he’d had a shot of it in his arm or maybe sniffed too much of it.

Brody gave his friend a good looking-over now. Nathan seemed to have aged in the three-plus years. His hair was cut short where it had been shoulder length before and his brown stubble was now a grayish beard. His face was craggy, but his eyes still had that piercing quality, as though he could see inside your head and know every sin you’d ever committed.