Cool cat Virgil is back
By Brad Smith Scribner, 307 pages. $18.99 For a farmer in Upper New York State, Virgil Cain is a pretty cool guy. That’s cool as in the Elmore Leonard sense. Like Leonard’s Jack Foley from Out of Sight or his George Moran from Cat Chaser, Brad Smith’s Virgil stays calm and collected under the most dire circumstances. Bad guys can’t read Virgil. He frustrates them into submission.
Smith, the author of seven novels, introduced Virgil in his fast and smart 2011 book, Red Means Run, and now revisits him in Crow’s Landing. The new book’s plot gets going when Virgil, out fishing, hauls in a heavy cylinder that has been sitting on the bottom of the local river for seven years, The cylinder is stuffed with cocaine, and as word of the find gets around, numerous villains with different agendas come after Virgil.
He acquires one ally in Dusty, the carpenter and single mom who’s kind of cool herself. Dusty has a history with the cylinder, which helped put her in prison for a short stretch. But she’s straight now, and doesn’t want the past to return and bite her in the rear.
Once the players are in place — Virgil and Dusty against practically everybody else — the story line knocks around agreeably, much like those in Elmore Leonard novels. The comparisons between the two authors are inevitable, and while Leonard’s books have more depth, Smith still spins highly readable narratives with appealing central characters.
THE DEAD OF WINTER
By Peter Kirby Linda Leith Publishing, 283 pages, $21.95 Inspector Luc Vanier of the Montreal PD seems a character likely to join the ranks of Canada’s enduring sleuth figures. Vanier belongs to the abrasive yet sensitive school of crime solvers, not a guy to suffer fools gladly, but worth a smile when he gets on a vituperative roll. Kirby, a Montreal lawyer, has a nice touch with Vanier, though his hand isn’t quite so sure with the plot. It involves the murder of several street people, suspicious dealings in the Catholic Church and devious stuff among Montreal developers. This narrative overload threatens to tumble until our man Luc saves the day.
THE SAINT ZITA SOCIETY
By Ruth Rendell Doubleday, 279 pages, $22.95 Rendell, now in her 82nd year, has written a comic and alarming novel that makes an almost perfect little book. The story centres on a well-to-do cul-de-sac around the corner from Buckingham Palace. We meet all the neighbourhood servants and some of their employers. After chapters of delicious scene-setting, one character is killed. The crime lets loose much tense and funny misbehaviour.
STRANGER IN THE ROOM
By Amanda Kyle Williams Bantam, 309 pages, $31 Reading this cleverly written book is like eating chocolate ice cream covered in chocolate sauce. An enticing idea, but maybe a little excessive? The central character, an Atlanta private eye named Keye Street, is a Chinese-American recovering alcoholic with white adoptive parents, a gay African-American brother and a cop boyfriend. Keye is tracking a serial killer, but that’s just one of several crimes that involve her in this novel of too many riches. Jack Batten is a Toronto author who writes the Whodunit column every second Sunday.