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Clear My Name By Paula Daly Atlantic Monthly, 304 pages, $38.95
“Clear My Name” has got it all: A murder that’s ghastly but understandably so; a sleuth figure who wavers between perfect and not perfect at all; narrative variations that the reader can’t identify as either red herrings or the real deal; a mother-daughter storyline that’s just about heartbreaking; two endings — or is it three?
Events unfold in the English countryside outside Manchester. Tess, the perfect/ imperfect sleuth, works for a charitable outfit that takes as its clients people convicted of murders which they insist they didn’t commit. Tess’s current client is Carrie, who is doing time for the killing of the woman her husband was seeing on the side. The husband is a swine, but Tess can’t let that influence her investigation. Lots of diversions get in Tess’s way and it’s not until she’s almost run out of pages in this very smart mystery that she leads the readers to an ultimate revelation.
Elevator Pitch By Linwood Barclay Doubleday, 464 pages, $24
Canadian writer Linwood Barclay has gone Big City. Until now, his standalone bestsellers have been set in large towns in and around Upper New York State. But with “Elevator Pitch,” he has moved the action to the Big Apple, New York City itself in all its glory and tumult.
Barclay paints a nice picture of the familiar Manhattan (though one wonders, do all New Yorkers have such foul mouths? Every character, male or female, sophisticate or hard case piles on the four-letter cuss words). The plot gets rolling when an unknown fiend of exceptional technical skills sets off a series of deadly elevator crashes in highrise buildings. Is he intending to hold the city hostage? Numerous big shots get on the case, a group that includes the nasty mayor, a nervy political columnist and an engaging pair of cop investigators, all of them determined to solve the #*@%&*$ mystery.
The Cold Way Home By Julia Keller Minotaur, 320 pages, $37.99
Bell Elkin was once the local prosecutor until a crime she committed as a child gets her tossed out of the job. Jake Oakes served as a deputy sheriff, and then an accident put him in a wheelchair permanently. Nick Fogelsong, a retired sheriff, is just old, tired and ornery. These three, living lives somewhere between troubled and tragic, run the unlikely detective agency in the unlikely town of Acker’s Gap, W.Va., where everybody teeters toward tragedy.
The murder the threesome work in this beautifully written book reaches back to a long shut down psychiatric hospital for poor girls (were there ever any other kind of girls in town except those who were poor and victimized?). And in the course of the sleuthing, the reader comes to adore the three detectives, especially the resourceful and appealing Bell.
The Long Call By Ann Cleeves Pan Macmillan, 400 pages, $38.99
As with her crime novels set in the Shetlands and her series featuring the intrepid Inspector Vera Stanhope, Ann Cleeves’s new book is crowded and clever. It offers multiples of everything, of crimes and suspects, of authentic leads and possibilities that don’t pan out. It also introduces somebody brand new — a fresh sleuth who is unlike any character in Cleeves’ previous work.
The setting is North Devon, and the newcomer is Detective Matthew Venn, who happens to be gay and married to his husband. The murdered man of the piece seems to have left behind suspicious contacts with a wide range of North Devon’s communities: the rich folks, the do-gooders, the artistic crowd and a group of families who have children with Down syndrome.
In sleuthing through all of this, Venn is a cop given less to brilliant deductions and more to insistent slogging in a lengthy story that never grows tedious.