> WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
DOMINIC By Mark Pryor Seventh Street, 256 pages, $15.95
A character named Dominic describes himself in Mark Pryor’s new book as “a psychopath.” He says he has “an absence of fear, an inability to love, and a total lack of empathy.” Apart from this disturbing catalogue of traits, he’s an engaging enough guy with a lot of slick moves.
Dominic — no surname ever revealed, not even in a conversation with an Uber driver — is a prosecutor in the Austin, Texas, district attorney’s office, currently handling juvenile cases. A 15-year-old delinquent kid known to Dominic goes missing. When a police inspector turns up shot to death, the kid is suspected of the murder. Then, someone kills the kid.
Dominic goes into action, pulling several diabolical tricks that solve the murders, simultaneously confirming Dominic’s own status as a psychopath in a clever book that has a significant number of puzzles and an equal list of tantalizing answers.
THE IMAM OF TAWI-TAWI By Ian Hamilton Spiderline, 375 pages, $19.95
The 10th novel in the series featuring Ava Lee, the beautiful and brainy Chinese-Canadian accountant with the instincts of a sleuth, is unlike the preceding nine. In this one, Ava isn’t called on to mess in the usual complex business problems, but rather she finds herself in the unusual position of taking a swing at Trumpian political practices.
The plot begins relatively innocently when Ava agrees, as a favour to old friends, to check on an Islamic college in a remote part of the Philippines. Events move more deliberately than in earlier Ava sagas, and what our girl mainly needs to rely on for most of the narrative is her nifty talent for interrogation.
Eventually, a series of sudden surprises arising out of Ava’s grilling of suspicious characters lands her dead centre in an overheated international crisis of the kind that gets the American president riled up.
THE BOMB MAKER By Thomas Perry Mysterious Press, 384 pages, $31.95
The character described in the title doesn’t just make bombs. He sets them off, too. Most of his bombing takes place in Los Angeles where, early on in the book, he blasts to death 14 LAPD cops who constituted half the bomb technicians on the force.
What’s the guy’s motivation?
He just likes the idea that he has “the ability to obliterate anything he wanted.”
Almost immediately, the book evolves into a struggle between the perverse bomber and the whiz among the surviving members of the bomb squad. Readers are given heavy doses of technical data from both the bomb maker and the bomb disabler. This is intricate stuff that makes for a slow intake in many passages, but the readers’ careful study is rewarded when events move through the detailed data into terrifying climaxes when the bombs either wipe out whole Los Angeles neighbourhoods or, ultimately, they don’t.
FEAR By Dirk Kurbjuweit Spiderline, 297 pages, $19.95
At the beginning of Fear, a thriller that is beautifully written (in German) and just as beautifully translated (into English), a 77-year-old Berlin man prepares to shoot to death the threateningly oddball neighbour of the older man’s son and the son’s family.
In very quick order, the elderly shooter is arrested, convicted of the neighbour’s murder and sentenced to a long prison term.
What follows in the rest of the book is the full story that leads up to and comes after the killing. But this isn’t the story of the old man; rather it’s his son’s story, one that he narrates, shapes and analyzes.
He’s a successful architect, a somewhat problematic husband but conscientious with his own children, and a man given to deep pondering of family life in general and his own in particular. In all of this, he emerges as a character who gives readers material that is authentically chilling and leads us to a wham-bang finale.