> WHODUNIT
Hard Cash Valley
By Brian Panowich Minotaur, 304 pages, $36.50
If you’re in the market for characters with addictions to drugs, booze and cockfighting, in stories where not even the good guys emerge more than barely alive, then Brian Panowich is the writer for you.
Panowich sets his works of hillbilly noir in the raw country of northern Georgia. His latest book gets under way when an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation named Dane Kirby gets on to a particularly ugly murder case involving a victim who has been burned to death. Kirby, a hick with a heart, ties the killing into a massive fraud linked to the lucrative cockfighting business.
Panowich takes his own sweet time in stringing out the narrative, but one thing for certain, leisurely or not, the story can be counted on to drip with blood, gore and savagery.
Bitter Paradise
By Ross Pennie ECW, 352 pages, $19.95
The only item missing from Ross Pennie’s new novel that would make it entirely topical is a Trump-like figure. Otherwise everything currently striking the world — the spreading of an infectious disease, medical characters on the lofty order of Anthony Fauci, innocent victims — are in place, though hardly on the universal scale of today’s real life.
The scene is Hamilton, Ont., where children are dropping like flies from a deadly vaccine-resistant brand of polio. A local infectious disease expert named Zol Szabo gets into the crisis, at the same time sleuthing a separate murder case affecting the city’s Syrian refugee community.
What gives the book its powerful sense of reality is Ross Pennie’s own credentials as a retired surgeon who devoted his talents to infectious diseases. You want the real thing? Pennie delivers.
Postmark Berlin By Anne Emery ECW, 376 pages, $32.95
It’s a cold 1996 winter night in Halifax. Father Brennan Burke, Catholic priest, music teacher and occasional sleuth, has promised to guide a woman through a mysterious problem in a meeting at
10 p.m. But Father
Brennan, drunk in a bar, misses the appointment, and someone murders the woman. The priest spends the rest of the book, the
11th in the Burke series, hunting down the killer. It’s a search that becomes an intricate piece of sleuthing through Halifax’s military community and deep into the murdered woman’s old connections in the former communist East Germany.
As in the earlier novels, this one relies on two particular strengths — immaculate research and moral worthiness — and along the way, it slides expertly around a whole slew of narrative conundrums.
Deadly Anniversaries
Short Stories, Edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini Hanover Square Press, 400 pages, $35.50
The new collection from the Mystery Writers of America includes among its 19 stories the work of such varied and talented authors as Laura Lippman, Lee Child and Laurie R. King. Apart from a couple of hiccups — Child’s story seems oddly rushed and eccentric — everybody is up to scratch. In some cases — the wonderfully clever Peter Lovesey’s story is one — the writers are in form that qualifies as authentically outstanding.
Several of the best stories work similar territory, building their plots around murders attempted, and usually completed, when a husband or wife takes a run at the other partner. Typically in this sub-genre the late Sue Grafton, in her last piece of fiction, turns her plot into a nice piece of dark comedy. And Toronto’s own Peter Robinson gives his story of love gone sour an ending worthy of a wicked O. Henry.
Jack Batten is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star