*** Aaron Elkins: Dead Men’s Hearts, Mysterious, $18.95. Like the Jenny Cains, the cases of Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver are not usually considered husband-and-wife mysteries, but spouse Julie is always on the scene to help demonstrate one of mystery fiction’s happiest marriages. This time the couple travel to Egypt for the filming of a documentary on an institute called Horizon House and wind up looking into the murder of its overbearing director. As usual in this series, a strong sense of background combines with solid classical puzzlespinning. Then there’s the fun of toting up the food references.
*** R.D. Zimmerman: Red Trance, Morrow, $20. Maddy and Alex Phillips, appearing for the third time, are another and rarer variety of male/female sleuthing team. She is a blind and paraplegic forensic hypnotist who lives in wealthy seclusion on Lake Michigan, while he is her brother, legman, and Watson. Most of the novel is in flashback as Alex, in a hypnotic trance that heightens his memory and observation, recounts to Maddy his dangerous adventures in St. Petersburg, where an old friend has been murdered. The picture of post-Soviet Russia, a locale the author knows well, is vivid and fascinating. The unusual structural technique, combined with an emotionally charged, not-quite-over-the-top first-person narrative style, places Zimmerman among the most individual voices in the genre.
*** Nick Gaitano: Special Victims, Simon and Schuster, $21. Some of the best ironic titles (e.g. The Best Years of Our Lives, All Quiet on the Western Front) allude to war. This one, referring to a Chicago police section that, says one character, “they created for dead people who got money,” takes its resonance from the war on crime — and the probing reader can undoubtedly find multiple meanings for it. Lieutenant Tony Tulio, head of the unit, goes after a unique serial killer known as the Collector, who harvests body parts for the ailing relatives of his clients. Though the set-up seems conventional, the way it plays out is anything but, finishing with as thorough a bloodbath as any Shakespearean tragedy. Gaitano is a pseudonym of the Edgar-nominated Eugene Izzi.
*** Paul Bishop: Kill Me Again, Avon, $4.99. The latest from one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s best-known officer-novelists has at its center a fascinating legal issue: can a man who years before was tried and convicted for killing his wife, although her body was never found, be charged with killing her again when she turns up as a fresh corpse shortly after he has been released on parole? Legal buffs may be disappointed that the matter isn’t resolved in court, but satisfying plot twists, exciting action sequences, and insider details of police work make up for the lapse. Homicide detective Fey Croaker is a strong central figure, though she shares her last initial with too many other characters: Colby, Cordell, Craven, and Cahill.
In a field as crowded and competitive as the contemporary mystery, how does the overwhelmed reader navigate from one worthwhile author to another with similar qualities? One way is through a book like By a Woman’s Hand: A Guide to Mystery Fiction by Women (Berkley, $10), expertly written by Jean Swanson and Dean James and covering about 250 contemporary female writers. The alleged male ascendancy in secondary coverage, which has been overstated to put it mildly, is used to justify such a helpful encyclopedic reference source as this being confined to writers of one sex.
Rarely does one renowned American mystery novelist write the life of another. The late Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1978 book on Erle Stanley Gardner was one example of the phenomenon. Charlotte MacLeod gives us another in Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart (Mysterious, $21.95). MacLeod emphasizes the early life of her subject, a gifted and important writer of popular fiction who has sometimes been unfairly patronized by the mystery genre’s historians.
Come Night, Come Silence
by Suzanne Jones
© 1994 by Suzanne Jones
After earning a Ph.D. in literature and discovering that her education provided no marketable skills, Suzanne Jones decided to go into the insurance business. In 1986 a company transfer from Colorado to Los Angeles gave her a chance to experience the southern California lifestyle she depicts in this new psychological thriller, in which an insurance executive confesses to the most heinous crimes...
Edward Brennan stands in his bare feet in the shadowy kitchen. In the night-light from the stove, the cutlery on the magnetic strip above the counter doesn’t glimmer. The immaculately clean tile beneath the palms of his hands doesn’t shine. He has just uncorked a bottle of Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon (Reserve).
He is a man of just under average height whose broad shoulders seem to stretch the fabric of his snowy shirt although it has been expressly tailored for him by a shirtmaker in Beverly Hills. His monograms on the heavy cuffs are closely worked in a burgundy thread. In the dim light they look like spots of blood.
He runs one of his hands over his smooth head. Every morning in the shower he shaves the stubble from his scalp. The hair surrounding the tonsure is red-gold and is as vigorous as his closely cropped beard. His lips in the nest of curly hair are as soft and full as a girl’s.
The house creaks in the wind from the desert, although it is a new house. It was built on the dry brown hills west of Thousand Oaks by a homesick Englishman after one of the Tudor manor houses he had admired as a child. The door immediately to Edward’s left leads to the back stairs — the scullery stairs, his wife calls them — and the next two floors. From his wife’s bedroom on the third floor, when the wind from the desert drives the smog out to sea, one can see a glittering expanse of blue water, the curve of the beach at Malibu, and far, far away, fading like a dream, buildings of white stone and black glass.
Edward has to open several drawers before he finds a clean white cloth. He moves quietly. The servants are asleep. Everyone is asleep.
Marianne lay on her side in the bed flipping irritably through the latest catalog from Spivey. She had pulled the satin sheet carelessly up only to her waist, and beneath it she was naked. From time to time she glanced irritably at the back of Roger’s head as he finished dressing in front of the full-length mirror. She knew he was admiring the angle of his jaw, the cleanness of the line. Roger was very proud of his jawline, and rightly so. He pretended to adjust his tie.
“I don’t think you understand how humiliating this is for me,” she said. She stared at the back of his head, and he sighed.
“Of course I do, darling. It’s not every day of the week that Friar Tuck—”
“Don’t call him that,” she said.
“—confesses to murder.”
He left the mirror a little unwillingly and came to sit on the edge of the bed.
She sank back on the oversized pillows and glared at the squares set in the plaster ceiling some ten feet above her. The afternoon sun poured across the peach carpet from a mauve sky and touched the expensive highlights in her chestnut hair. Beyond the diamond-paned window, shrouded by the dense air, the sea swept ashore at Malibu.
“But darling,” he said, “what can you expect from a Jesuit who married a nun? The man is fundamentally weird.”