> WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
THE DOUBLE By George Pelecanos Little Brown, 304 pages, $29
Early in George Pelecanos’s new book, his central character, Spero Lucas, thinks about the kind of novel he likes to read. Lucas says the novel has got to offer “a good story told with clean, efficient writing, a plot involving a problem to be solved or surmounted, and everyday characters the reader could relate to.”
Does The Double meet Lucas’s own standards? Not quite. Pelecanos’s writing, as always, keeps the story moving with clarity and style, and the plot has a satisfying share of puzzles presented and resolved. It’s the part about characters, we readers can relate to, where things go off the rails.
The Double is Pelecanos’s second book, after The Cut, to feature Lucas, a freelance investigator in the business of recovering stolen goods for a fee. He comes with great credentials. He’s 30, handsome, keeps fit with serious biking and kayaking, Though Lucas isn’t book educated, he can recognize a clue when he spots one, and his crime-detecting logic is impeccable.
In The Double, Lucas is on the trail of a valuable painting heisted by a very bad guy. Lucas’s sleuthing is clever and exciting, but it also brings into play a practice he learned during his years as a marine in Iraq caught in the bloody combat at Fallujah. Even back home, Lucas can’t stop killing people.
A bright sleuth could have recovered the painting in The Double without spilling blood. Not Lucas.
Needlessly whacking the villains and their friends seems an irresistible impulse in him. That hardly makes Lucas “an everyday character the reader could relate to.”
ALWAYS LOVE A VILLAIN ON SAN JUAN ISLAND By Sandy Frances Duncan & George Szanto Touchwood, 256 pages, $9.99
Noel Franklin and Kyra Rachel are private sleuthing partners who take cases only on the islands off lower British Columbia and Washington State. This time out, on San Juan Island, they find themselves in a case involving a kidnapping and dodgy stuff with American national security. The plotting is not bad, but what most makes the reader hang on to the end is a smaller case involving plagiarism. Has a university student stolen the novella he’s written for his master’s thesis from a better writer? The question’s not easy to answer.
LET IT BURN By Steve Hamilton Minotaur, 276 pages, $29.99
Steve Hamilton’s part-time PI, Alex McKnight, spends most books sniffing around the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
But McKnight was once a Detroit cop whose identification testimony put a kid in prison for murder.
Now, decades later, McKnight revisits both Detroit and the jailbird, finding both in a bad way. There’s nothing he can do about the bankrupt and decaying city, but the old murder case is another matter. McKnight concludes the wrong guy went to prison, and he’s motivated to nail the real killer.
As always, Hamilton tells a suspenseful story in a crisp and effective style.
SUMMERTIME, ALL THE CATS ARE BORED By Philippe Georget Europa Editions, 431 pages, $18
Apart from the misleading title and a tendency to offer too much information, this French first novel tells a good story in highly readable prose and receives an excellent translation. The setting is a corner in the south of France where somebody seems to be kidnapping and murdering young Dutch women on vacation.
Inspector Gilles Sebag, an altogether likeable figure, gets on the case.
The plot line, with its share of red herrings and false leads, offers just enough confusion to persuade readers to persist all the way to the satisfying denouement.
Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every second Sunday