Book Reviews: Heroic Suspense Novels
Connie Ogle - Miami Herald
Mar 25, 2008
The past returns to haunt the investigators in several new suspense novels.
Cross: A Novel by Ken Bruen. St. Martin's. 288 pages. $23.95.
Bruen's latest novel opens with a crucifixion and ends with devastating personal news. In between it staggers from violent revenge to shattering guilt and heartbreaking loss. These sorrows come as no shock: sunny days rarely shine in the gloomy life of Jack Taylor, a former Irish cop-turned-private investigator.
Jack, a reformed drunk perilously close to falling off the wagon, has reached such a tolerance for torment that he's ordering booze at the pub and not drinking it. "The pint looked like all the prayers I'd ever hoped to have answered," he muses. "The Jameson, riding point, was its own glory."
Cross -- so appropriate, this title, as stark as the suffering endured by every character in the book -- is the sixth in Bruen's gritty yet poignant series, which is set in a gloomy and rapidly evolving Galway. Lattes and Red Bull are as common as Guinness, and smokers can no longer light up in a pub. Property values have skyrocketed, but the ugly side of human nature hasn't changed a bit, Jack discovers, as he tracks a series of appallingly brutal killings and struggles with his grief over the shooting of his adopted son Cody, now in a coma because of Jack's past sins.
Bruen's previous novel, Priest, is a finalist for this year's Edgar Award, and it's a terrific story of vengeance. Cross, however, may be even better, another dark journey into a tarnished Emerald Isle and a damaged soul on the verge of surrendering hope forever. "If I continued as I was, Galway would kill me," Jack thinks. Here's hoping Bruen gives him another shot at redemption.
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Killer Heat by Linda Fairstein. Doubleday. 370 pages. $26.
So you think you've had a rough time at work lately? In Fairstein's latest thriller, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper has got you beat by a mile. She's the prosecutor in the retrial of a rapist who skipped town more than 30 years ago, who's been brought back to court by DNA testing and the courage of one of his victims. That's more than enough work for any lawyer, but Alex is also facing increasingly violent attacks from members of a street gang whose leader she helped to convict. And, when two young women are found beaten to death, she fears a serial killer may be on the loose.
Killer Heat, the 10th book in Fairstein's entertaining series, is perhaps the best example of the author's dexterity. Fairstein juggles the book's numerous elements as confidently as Alex juggles cases. She writes crisply about courtroom battles and negotiations and forensic science. She always unearths an interesting slice of New York City history -- in this case the intriguing military past of Governors Island -- and helpfully has made one of her most likable characters, detective Mike Chapman, a history buff to lay out all the details for us.
Best of all, Fairstein warmly evokes the casual camaraderie of investigators who devote themselves to their cases, and she crafts a final, thrilling set piece that's nerve-wracking and satisfying. Alex Cooper may be a superb multitasker, but her creator is equally adept.
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Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson. Morrow. 384 pages. $24.95.
Robinson's enticing 17th novel reaches back to revisit a nightmare from one of the best books in his carefully constructed, inventive procedural series set in Yorkshire, England. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his former lover, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot, find themselves investigating two gruesome but unrelated murders in different towns.
Banks' case involves a young woman raped and strangled in the Maze, a labyrinthine complex smack in the heart of Eastvale's downtown, while Cabbot faces the mysterious throatslitting of a quadriplegic woman along a cliff's edge in the district to which she is temporarily on loan.
As they discover the true identity of the wheelchair-bound victim -- which leads back to the events in Robinson's chilling Aftermath about a husband/wife serial killer team a la real-life monsters Fred and Rosemary West -- Banks and Cabbot struggle to find steady ground in their shaky working relationship.
Robinson is equally skilled at reflecting procedural details and treating his flesh-and-blood characters -- despite their flaws -- with compassion and humor.
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Dead Time by Stephen White. Dutton. 400 pages. $25.95.
White's 16th novel finds psychotherapist Alan Gregory far from his comfort zone of Boulder, Colo. In Dead Time, Alan finds himself on both coasts, in New York with his adopted son and then in Los Angeles, where he grapples with the past and an uncertain future.
Alan's relationship with his wife Lauren remains shaky -- she's traveling in Holland with their daughter -- and is further strained by the return of Meredith, Alan's flamboyant ex-wife. Meredith wants Alan to look into a young woman's disappearance in the Grand Canyon years earlier; her fiance was part of a group linked to the disappearance.
Alan's decision to help his ex leads to the unraveling of many secrets and to temptation that further threatens his marriage. Alternately narrated by Meredith and Alan, Dead Time is a well-paced thriller with plenty of action as well as psychological implications, proving that White has plenty of material left in his literary arsenal.
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