WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
Testimony By Scott Turow Grand Central, 485 pages, $38
The central character in Scott Turow’s engrossing new book is a trial lawyer with too much on his plate.
Bill ten Boom is mid-50s, a litigation ace in Kindle County, pulling in huge fees, married and the father of two grown sons. Then he junks it all in order to “start my life again.”
The new beginning takes Boom to the International Criminal Court in The Hague where the book’s plot gets rolling in a trajectory that, through all its zigs and zags, is never without surprises and thrills, both intellectual and physical.
Boom’s assignment is to track the villains who slaughtered 400 Roma in one horrendous butchering during the Serbian-Bosnian War and to bring the perpetrators to trial. Turow is masterful at telling Boom’s story, revealing that nothing in it, including the parts involving the lawyer’s romantic interludes, comes even remotely close to what we readers expected.
Rocks Beat Paper By Mike Knowles ECW, 296 pages, $17.95
The central figure in this novel by Hamilton writer Mike Knowles, is a thief and killer with nerve, brains and a single name, Wilson. Wilson owes much to Parker, the one-named robber/murderer in the late Donald E. Westlake’s riveting series written under the pen name of Richard Stark.
If Knowles’s work hasn’t yet climbed to Stark territory, he’s confidently on his way. His plotting is even more intricate than Stark’s, though his writing isn’t as smooth and convincing. The novel is set in New York City where Wilson has assembled a crew to pull a complicated heist in Manhattan’s diamond district. When the planned robbery goes off the rails, as it does more than once, Wilson needs to rework the details on the fly. In the course of all the improvising, Wilson offers readers a highly entertaining textbook on the tricky and often violent art of identifying and stealing the world’s most priceless jewelry.
What My Body Remembers By Agnete Friis Soho, 304 pages, $25.95
In writing partnership with her fellow Dane, Lena Kaaberbol, Agnete Friis co-authored four thrilling novels featuring the heroic Red Cross nurse Nina Borg. Now Friis is off on her own, producing a book that is long on characters in extreme distress.
The story features 27-year-old Ella who has known a life of foster homes, addictions and severe cases of paranoia. Ella has an 11-year-old son named Alex who is on the edge of falling into an existence not unlike his mother’s.
The source of all the grief seems to lie with Ella’s parents. Did the dad murder the mother when Ella was a child? Ella begins an investigation into her past, a process that consists mostly of staggering from one disaster to the next while keeping her wits about her. The process is grim and breathtaking.
Crime Song By David Swinson Mulholland, 368 pages, $34
Did Crime Song’s author, David Swinson, a former Washington D.C. police detective, draw on his own experiences in writing about Frank Maar, his book’s central character? Not too much, one hopes, since Maar happens to be a former Washington homicide detective whose devotion to booze and drugs got him kicked off the job. Now he’s a PI with apparently no intention of cleaning up his act.
Maar’s latest case begins with his nephew’s murder, and involves him and the readers in a nightmare of drug dealing, police corruption and bravura displays of violence. It’s hard not to occasionally turn away from the page in some of the book’s more lurid passages, but Swinson’s writing is so convincing that his depictions of the dark stuff become compulsively readable.