On the trail of violence

If “Dead Men Rise Up Never,” as Ron Faust protests in A.C. Swinburne’s wake, dead women loom persistently and some dead men do too. But that is by way of the charming and violent tale Faust tells. It unfolds mostly in Bell Harbor, on the Florida Keys, where criminal activity seems as prevalent as used-car lots. Dan Shaw, investigator and process server, gets on the bad side of a thug on whom he served a subpoena before beating him up. A bad guy with bad friends, Gary Tolliver thereafter vows to kill him. Of more immediate concern, however, is Thomas Petrie, a high-priced legal eagle who wants Shaw to find a missing client, Peter Falconer. Possessed by powerful creative drives but talent for little except kinky pursuits, Falconer is about to become very rich and make Petrie richer too. But he may be in hiding to avoid answering for a heinous crime, or he may be kidnapped. Which turns out to be the case and the gist of Dan Shaw’s task.

So, while dogged by Tolliver, Dan has to pursue and face the boss kidnapper, an ugly hulk who calls himself Raven Ahriman, vastly more fetid than Tolliver and endowed with even badder chums. Dan’s dangerous trawl after Falconer and Raven will involve voluble villains, wise friends and fickle ones, feral boys, seascapes, shipscapes and a lot of water hazards. As you might guess, Shaw scores in the end; but getting there is half the fun. Though he assumes that readers need terms like “surrealism” explained (and perhaps they do), Faust writes well and inflicts few product placement plugs. He also delivers an alpha aphorism. “Is living well the best revenge? No: revenge is the best revenge.”

The collapse of communism in Soviet Russia was not discomforting for commissars alone, or for Russians left to the tender mercies of their kleptocracies. The U.S. military had serious reasons to worry about losing the foe whose menace fed their budgets; and defense contractors would miss pretexts for their sales. Lee Child’s “The Enemy” is about the tensions, plots and planning these painful prospects produced and the dread anticipation of the Cold War fading out.

The year 1989 is turning into 1990 and the Berlin Wall is halfway down. On the eve of New Year’s Eve, Child’s action hero, Jack Reacher, army cop extraordinaire, begins to investigate the death of a two-star general apparently felled by a heart attack in a blowsy motel outside Fort Bird, N.C. As he dives into a cat’s cradle of stratagems, subterfuges, chicanery and crime that takes him from Washington, D.C., to Paris and from one end of our continent to the other, danger dogs his heels. His efforts are further bedeviled by the fact that the enemy he pursues and who seeks to waylay him, is us: his own alleged team. But the stoic, relentless Reacher is more dangerous than his most dangerous foes. More economical too, if you compare the trail of corpses the opposition leaves behind with the trickle of vermin that he executes.

It will come as no surprise to Reacher fans that the end proves cheerless. So here’s one more of Child’s vexing, lively, rapid-fire tales, interrupted only by interjections about Army life, equipment, lore and law that fill out the sauce. But the dish is spicy; so skip the esoterica unless you’re an Army buff. Just lap up the good stuff.

Karin Fossum’s “Don’t Look Back” is an endlessly convoluted, relentlessly gripping police procedural. A little girl is kidnapped. Wrong: She’s not. But it makes a stunning start. Then a bigger girl is found dead. Was she offed and, if so, why? By whom? We’re in a small Norwegian community not far from Oslo, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives doing what ordinary people do: shopping, walking the dog, hooking up with the wrong person. Everyone knows everyone else and their secrets too, though obviously not all their secrets. And everyone apparently trusts everyone. The violent, unexpected death leaves the victim’s neighbors bewildered and confused.

Police Inspector Konrad Sejer and Jacob Skarre, a junior policeman half his age, investigate. Almost anyone could be a suspect. Three or four characters might be the culprit. Yet none seem to qualify. Calm and nonthreatening, Sejer and Skarre talk to all, over and over, careful not to jolt sensibilities; straining to evoke gossip, clues, evidence; struggling to winkle out bits of a puzzle that hangs on personalities and on reluctance to confide. As they press their questions, they watch disbelief and shock flooding frightened faces but learn little that seems useful until coincidence and doggedness produce unexpected revelations. The riddle is solved, the guilty party nabbed; but the little girl is ensnared again. Has she been kidnapped this time?

Some accomplished professionals cannot resist veering from the work they do so well to expound on causes that are close to their hearts but whose pulpitry slackens pace and suspense. George Pelecanos does it in his bouncy tales of Washington, D.C.; John le Carre overdoes it in recent political parables; Henning Mankell has begun to do it too, first coaching readers about African affairs, now cautioning them about Nazism resurgent. Deservedly successful at his work, Mankell can probably write his own ticket, and publishers would be reluctant to suggest cuts or changes that might restore the momentum sacrificed to personal pieties. The publishers would be right for, even at his most earnest, Mankell fascinates as he spins spellbinding tales of stretched-out investigations. That is so in “The Return of the Dancing Master,” which abandons familiar Ystad and Inspector Wallander for new settings and a new cast.

Stefan Lindman is a police officer in Boras, near Goteborg in southwest Sweden, not as far south as Ystad. He has just been told that he has cancer when he learns that Herbert Molin, a senior retired colleague whom he liked, has been horridly murdered in the far north of the land. On sick leave pending treatment and hence at loose ends, Lindman takes off for the hill-and-forest country where his retired superior lived as a recluse. As Lindman’s private snoopings mesh with the inquiries of the local police, the victim’s past turns out very different from what he and others imagined. The ominous atmosphere and sense of looming danger are heightened by wintry weather. “Early November. And the worst is yet to come. All that awful winter.” Everything looks gray. Soon it begins to snow. As in neighboring Norway, people are eager to help but also taciturn, guarded, reserved. Police must wade through private miseries and mysteries, while they peel away layers of Molin’s mystifications and pierce the clandestine conspiracies around them.

There’s as much driving as in L.A., cellphones abound and so, as Lindman digs deeper, do occult politics that obsess about degeneration, decay and indiscriminate immigration. “Everything is going to the dogs. No discipline. We don’t have borders anymore. Anybody can get in, wherever they like, whenever they like.” His cancer in remission (is that a metaphor?), “We’ve got to fight this lunacy,” says Lindman. He does, he wins and he goes back to his job in Boras. *