> WHODUNIT
The Walls By Hollie Overton Redhook, 405 pages, $32
Kristy Tucker married the wrong man. Kristy is a hard-working single mom when she hooks up with a muscular martial arts teacher named Lance. Not long into the marriage, Lance begins to beat on Kristy. Kristy takes the problem to her place of employment, which happens to be The Walls. It’s in Huntsville, Texas, and is home to the most active death chamber in the entire U.S.
Kristy’s job in this fearsome place is entirely benign — she serves as its public information officer — but it gives her access to guys with ideas about what to do about wife-beaters such as Lance.
For most of the book, the narrative deals with the questions of how and how soon Kristy can save herself from Lance’s increasingly lethal attacks. The answers are scary, inventive and ultimately final.
A Promise of Ruin By Cuyler Overholt Sourcebooks, 320 pages, $22.50
This is Cuyler Overholt’s second period crime novel, the period being New York City of the early 20th century when the central character of the series, Dr. Genevieve Summerford, is setting up a practice as a psychiatrist.
Summerford could have been the second coming of Sigmund Freud and she’d still have trouble selling the idea of a woman handling a piece of psychoanalysis. But, as it happens, she has a mystery of a different sort to occupy her. Just after a young Italian woman’s body is pulled from the East River, a second young woman, also Italian, goes missing. It isn’t long until Summerford comes to the realization that sex traffickers are at their ugly work. Our resourceful shrink dives into the case in a story that features plenty of absorbing period research and just enough of a puzzle to hold the reader’s interest.
The Winners’ Circle By Gail Bowen McClelland and Stewart, 272 pages, $32
In the 17th book of her absorbing Joanne Kilbourn series, Gail Bowen sets up a whodunit situation that is as tight and puzzling as these things get.
The plot centres on the law firm where Joanne’s husband Zach is a founding partner. A firm outlier, a lawyer who longs to be included in its inner circle among the “winners” of the title, allows his desperation to show all too nakedly. In the horror that follows, in the “tragedy” referred to in the book’s first sentence, three people are shot dead in one burst of gunfire.
Things unfold from there in classic mystery fashion with Joanne in her customary role as the more or less accidental sleuth and with all of the action recorded in Bowen’s ever distinctive literary style. A Gail Bowen sentence, as we readers have happily come to recognize, is as one-of-a-kind as a Conan Doyle sentence.
Harbour Master By Daniel Pembrey No Exit, 320 pages, $15.95
Police detectives tend to be independent souls, guys who go off on tangents that irritate their superiors. Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, for example, has spent much of his career getting out from under the interference of the odious Deputy Chief Irvin Irving. But Bosch has it easy compared to Henk van der Pol, a senior detective on the Amsterdam Police.
At dangerous stages of his investigations, van der Pol is hassled by both Amsterdam’s police commissioner and an overly ambitious junior detective.
Van der Pol, an attractive character, survives and succeeds mostly because he’s been around the block a few times. He’s especially adept at turning aside the sneaky enemies who seek to bring him down from within.