L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
Blood of Victory
Alan Furst
Random House: 288 pp., $24.95
In Alan Furst’s latest, it is November 1940. Victorious in both East and West, the Germans are trying to bomb Britain into submission and are gearing up to invade Russia. Serebin, a Russian emigre writer living in German-occupied Paris, boards a Bulgarian freighter from the Romanian port of Constanta to Istanbul. He is part of a circus of British-run amateur spies chugging through southeastern Europe -- Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and France. Objective: to deny the Germans use of the Romanian oil crucial to their tanks and planes. Oil is the “blood of victory,” and Furst charts the Keystone Kop-like endeavors of Serebin and company to sabotage the Germans through a Luna Park of varied bloodlettings.Furst is a master atmosphere-spinner. Understated sentiment, deprecatory charm, digressions aplenty, more nuances than action, more subtlety than slaughter, hints, nudges, whispers and incredible stories one would like to believe are the ingredients of his style. The recipe has worked before, and here it works again. Who would want to complain?
*
Chasing the Dime
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown: 400 pp., $25.95
Once upon a time, the respectable classes looked upon crime as shocking -- on the eruption of violence in everyday life as exceptional, on a body found in the library astonishing. In a society in which the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2001 records 15,980 homicides for the year, a corpse is less astonishing than a library, crime is routine, respectability a volatile variable and events -- with all their chads left hanging -- tend to be unaccountable and opaque. Michael Connelly is a compelling conjurer of chaos theory adjusted to breaking news, and his “Chasing the Dime” is a stunning exercise in suspense and sci-fi technomagickry.
*
A Darker Justice
Sallie Bissell
Bantam: 352 pp., $22.95
Sallie Bissell’s “A Darker Justice” is another page-turner: a chiller that delivers thrills as fast as it telegraphs them. Someone is knocking off federal judges and we know why. A coven of religious lunatics and rich, powerful men is scheming to get richer and more powerful still by getting a television preacher elected president. They have been offing congressional incumbents for years and getting their own candidates elected in their stead. Now they have cooked up a wacky prediction and broadcast it on the Internet: When it is fulfilled and the last judge is purged, it should bolster the electoral fortunes of their candidate for the White House.
*
Hell to Pay
George P. Pelecanos
Little, Brown: 288 pp., $24.95
Walter Scott defined the novel as a fictitious narrative accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, which is why novels, in their 18th and 19th century heyday, were social novels. Then they became literary novels characterized by form, not content, their primary virtue being inaccessibility. The major remaining representatives of old-style novels are detective stories, mysteries and thrillers, which still tell tales of action “accommodated to the ordinary train of human events.” George P. Pelecanos does this very well, and his “Hell to Pay” is a terrific thriller, a rip-roaring read. It is also a mine of information about cultures and subcultures in our land, specifically in Washington, D.C. The plot is intricate, fast-cut, fast-moving, compelling and perfectly satisfying. The voice of Pelecanos -- raspy, brutal, vivid, moving -- is one not to forget.
*
In the Clear
Steve Lopez
Harcourt: 356 pp., $25
“In the Clear” is a howl. Steve Lopez probably overdoes the hilariousness, but reading him is too much fun to notice, let alone to mind. A Los Angeles Times columnist, Lopez introduces us to Albert La Rosa, sheriff of a small town, Harbor Light, on the New Jersey shore. Bored from a diet of nothing-much-doing, Albert is middle-aged, graying at the edges, tired round the eyes, weary of playing it safe. Then he’s offered a job as chief of security at a new casino to be built in town and all hell breaks loose. The prospect of Atlantic City moving in splits the little town. Albert’s friends turn against him. The listless world of Harbor Light is vivified but threatened. So is Albert. Will his sister’s warning that there are no fresh starts in life, just new opportunities to screw up, prove right? No chance. Albert fends off both filthy lucre and his rutted groove to solve the mysteries and live as a free spirit.
*
The Last Temptation
Val McDermid
St. Martin’s Minotaur: 448 pp., $24.95
Double-cross and double-dealing on all sides, traffic in drugs, videos and human beings, kidnapping, smuggling, murder, rape, lies, betrayal, impostures, evasions, pursuits, snares and pitfalls throng Val McDermid’s “The Last Temptation” and set its feverish pace. A ruthless international trafficker and an equally ruthless but more impenetrable psychopathic serial killer are being tracked by British, German and Dutch police forces and by Europol, but especially by Tony Hill, a psychologist-profiler, and his once-and-again partner, Det. Chief Inspector Carol Jordan. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. As Tony and Carol struggle to unravel the web of danger and deceit they’re caught up in, to save their threatened lives and help each other, the syncopated plot leads them to Berlin and along the Rhine. The apparently separate cases interweave to carry them through a crime-streaked string of startling incidents, adventures and misadventures. Relentless, electric and absorbing, this is a thriller not to miss.
*
Only Child
Andrew Vachss
Alfred A. Knopf: 288 pp., $24
As Andrew Vachss’ “Only Child” opens, his antihero, Burke, has been on the run for years. Now he returns to New York City and has to make a living. He is recruited by two Mafia barons to riddle out the culprit and the motive for the horrific murder of a 16-year-old Long Island girl. His investigation carries him deep into teenage culture, Internet effervescence, furtive filmmaking and kinky sex. With Vachss, atmosphere is all, and the atmosphere here is grungy and ominous, the wardrobe lurches between louche sloppiness and plain uglification, weather is sullen, light bleary, mood murky, settings sullied and action ruthlessly blunt. Vachss’ style is personal, laconic, shaded and, of course, creepy. If you like hard-boiled punk narrative, this is a read for you.
*
Put a Lid On It
By Donald E. Westlake
Mysterious Press: 248 pp., $23.95
Donald E. Westlake’s “Put a Lid on It” is a great caper, fast-cut and facetious, about the interface between politics and crime, which have a lot in common, as we know. As the book opens, Francis Xavier Meehan, a recidivist thief, is held for a federal crime in the Manhattan Correctional Center. When it closes, he’s looking for rehabilitation, preferably in the company of his lawyer, Mrs. Goldfarb. In between, Meehan robs the rich to give to the richer (and keep a little for himself).
The president has recklessly given away sensitive intelligence affecting national security and the security of others. Neither the lapse nor the bloody mess it caused would matter much if the indiscretion did not teeter on the brink of exposure. Only expert intervention can save the president’s bacon and the forthcoming election. Meehan provides it, and his ramble ‘twixt the two points is great fun. Scenes that are not hilarious are breathless; scenes that aren’t whimsical are nimble. Mostly, though, they’re all of the above. Sometimes Westlake’s farces are better than the ones they put on in Washington, D.C.
*
The Veteran
Five Heart-Stopping Stories
Frederick Forsyth
St. Martin’s Press: 368 pp., $24.95
Frederick Forsyth is the author of 10 page-turners that include such bestsellers as “The Day of the Jackal” and “The Odessa File.” He also believes, as does his namesake Federico Fellini, that reality distorts. Forsyth’s realities are false fronts: Apparent factuality is there to ensnare; straightforward narrative decoys unwary readers into authorial ambush. In “The Veteran,” he offers not one more novel but five long stories cleverly crafted to string us along to the sting in their tail. Lucid, vivid and delightfully readable, Forsyth is a master wordsmith and a master of meticulous detail too.
*
Reversible Errors
Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 448 pp., $36
Scott Turow’s “Reversible Errors,” is about ambition, affection, attraction, hope, anger and dissembling; about two love affairs blundering toward resolution; and about the power of law, which, at its drabbest, is about words on a page and tricks of a trade but also about life and death. In the end, law saves lives or ruins them or ends them. Or perhaps people do. Turow’s people are as slippery and mutable as the law in practice. Turow has constructed a mazy, tortuous tale, as easy to misread as it is to read. In legal parlance, reversible error is a mistake so significant that an appellate court must reverse the judgment that was based on it. But errors may prove more reversible in court than they are in life. Crooks and criminals may yet be pardoned: saved. Can error-prone, self-destructive, unimpeachable adults hope for as much?