WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
Three Strikes By Kate Kessler Redhook, 390 pages, $20.99
In Kate Kessler’s third book featuring Audrey Harte, the child psychologist practising in the small Maine town where she grew up, life seems to be at last breaking Audrey’s way. Earlier in her often harrowing personal saga, at age 13, she killed the father of her best friend, Maggie, because the he was sexually abusing Maggie. Audrey served time, got out and redeemed herself. Maggie gave birth to a baby girl, conceived with a male not her father, put the child out for adoption, then lost her life. Maggie’s baby, now 18, turns up, anxious to find her birth father. It’s a search, directed by Audrey, that turns suspenseful and dangerous, and it’s up to Audrey in a book that’s part thriller and part redneck soap opera to find not just the father, but a measure of peace for all parties.
Bloody January By Alan Parks Canongate, 323 pages, $31.95
It’s the bitter early January days of Glasgow in 1973. Harry McCoy, a police detective at a youngish 30, carries a heavy emotional and psychological load. Beaten by his drunken father as a boy, deserted by his mother, locked in a home for wayward boys, abused by priests. Understandably, he carries a big chip on his shoulder. He drinks a lot, and when authority figures push him around, he shoves back. Nevertheless, he has an undeniable ability to solve difficult crimes, a talent that goes doggedly on display when a young man and woman are shot dead in highly public Glaswegian circumstances. It’s a grim case, in a book that’s both grim and comic, and it subjects Harry to ferocious treatment before he produces the forensic goods.
The Usual Santas: A Collection of Soho Crime Christmas Capers By Soho Crime Writers Soho, 416 pages, $19.95
Soho Press is a relatively new publisher, founded in 1986, but it has accumulated an impressive stable of global crime writers. In this new collection, Soho sets loose its authors to write 18 Christmas stories set in locales as exotic as Seoul and Havana, Copenhagen and Goteborg, Laos, Thailand, Bombay and the Mormon precincts of Utah. There’s not a narrative dud in the bunch, though some have only the faintest ring of Christmas. And, for a solid crime action story, we get the excellent Martin Limon doing his stuff among the rambunctious American troops in Korea at 1970s Christmastime.
Written in Blood By Layton Green Seventh Street, 336 pages, $17
Preach Everson isn’t your typical homicide cop. He once served as a prison chaplain, and during his time on the Atlanta P.D., he suffered a nervous breakdown. Now he’s on the police force back in his hometown, the bohemian Creekville, N.C., where he takes on a murder case that’s as unusual as he is. The first victim is the owner of the local book store, and it seems that the dead man died the same miserable way that the pawnbroker in “Crime and Punishment” met his end.
Another murder follows, this one echoing Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” To further complicate matters, Preach Everson takes on a handful of colourful characters to assist in the sleuthing. This makes for an often overly crowded narrative, but the road to the plot’s resolution is loaded with nifty teases.