WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
Poughkeepsie Shuffle By Dietrich Kalteis ECW, 280 pages, $17.95
It’s the 1980s, and Jeff Nichols has just walked out of the Don Jail after doing a term for swiping cars. Jeff is crowding 50, an age when he figures he ought to settle down to law-abiding citizenry.
His contacts in the Toronto criminal subculture line him up for a supposedly straight job selling vehicles at a used car lot. The catch is that the too-flashy-by-half guy who owns the lot runs a lucrative sideline smuggling guns into Canada hidden in the used cars he buys from Upper New York State dealers. Honestly intentioned as our guy Jeff is, he can’t resist the chance to sign up with the other car guys who expect to score a big payoff in the gunrunning side of the business.
Dietrich Kaltes writes about 1980s Toronto crooks in a style that’s breezy and confident, comic and ribald — and he’s especially letter perfect in portraying characters who’ve got “loser” stamped smack in the middle of their foreheads.
Idyll Hands By Stephanie Gayle Seventh Street, 304 pages, $15.95
The breathtaking homophobia that came into play in the first two books featuring Thomas Lynch, the gay chief of police of small-town Idyll, Conn., hasn’t slacked off notably in the third book, though a few more of the bigots do also appear to appreciate the chief ’s good points.
Whatever the state of social relations in town, the police force is more focused on a pair of very cold cases. The Idyll books have many appeals: gentle humour, Stephanie Gayle’s comfortable writing style, her portrayal of a mostly gentle and oldfashioned community. But in addition to the familiar positives, the new book also features two unique mysteries.
In both cases, in unconnected murders going back a quarter century, the victims are females whose killings appear to have left behind the tiniest of clues. Neither science nor brilliant bursts of ratiocination solve the crimes. Rather, it’s oldfashioned slogging and a nudging around of details that lock together and get the job done. It makes for satisfying policing and even more pleasing reading for us fans of Chief Lynch.
The Forbidden Place By Susanne Jansson Grand Central, 352 pages, $34
In this captivating first novel, locale means everything. The story is set among the huge peat bogs of northern Sweden. Since the Iron Age, the bogs have swallowed people alive. That’s still going on today, except that now the disappearances look more like murders.
Two women in particular figure out that something fishy is happening in the part of the area known as the Mossmarken wetlands.
One woman is Nathalie, a young biologist carrying out field experiments in the bogs; the other is Maya, an art photographer shooting photos of wetlands life for an exhibition.
Both women are smart, curious and brave, and both are drawn into the mysteries of killings that mix science, ancient legends and dicey family relations among bog residents.
The Man Who Came Uptown By George Pelecanos Mulholland, 271 pages, $35
Pelecanos, a novelist in the Elmore Leonard tradition, knows how to keep us readers turning the pages, and he’s reliable in providing at least one character per book in whom we develop a rooting interest.
In “The Man Who Came Uptown,” set as usual with Pelecanos in and around Washington, D.C., it’s a 28-year-old Black man named Michael, uneducated and fresh from prison, who wins us to his side. Michael is determined to succeed in the straight life until a very smooth operator suckers him into an enterprise that’s both lucrative and illegal.
Will Michael survive? Will he straighten himself out? Answering those questions (not unlike the ones posed in “Poughkeepsie Shuffle,” above) are what the book is, enticingly, all about.