> WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
PERFECT SINS By Jo Bannister Minotaur, 304 pages, $29.99
A year ago, in Deadly Virtues, the prolific English crime writer Jo Bannister introduced us to Hazel Best and Gabriel Ash. They turned out to be a pair of characters worth embracing. She is 26, a probationary police constable in rural Cambridgeshire, clever, gregarious, and so generous to others that someone says of Hazel “she has a compulsive helping disorder.” Ash, a different type, is 40, a British national security specialist now on the shelf, wise, private and troubled.
Four years earlier, Ash’s wife and two sons were kidnapped by Somali pirates. Ash still doesn’t know whether his family is alive or dead. The strain is driving him more than a little mad. Hazel gives Ash a hand up, psychologically speaking, when the two come across one another during a bizarre murder case, and that process continues as the pair’s friendship deepens in the exquisitely written
Perfect Sins.
Hazel and Ash, both on leave time, happen to be visiting the neighbourhood where Hazel grew up. Also by happenstance, the body of a young boy, buried for decades, is discovered on the vast property of the local titled person. The boy’s identity brings many mysteries into the present, requiring Hazel and Ash to pull off some delicate sleuthing.
During this entertaining byplay, the fate of Ash’s family is never far from everybody’s mind. Will Ash and Hazel return in another novel and push toward answers to the Somali kidnapping? To the reader’s relief, these essential questions are addressed in the book’s last two words.
THE BISHOP’S WIFE By Mette Ivie Harrison Soho, 352 pages, $26.95
Mette Ivie Harrison, a clear and careful writer and the holder of a Princeton doctorate in German literature, is a Mormon. She lives in Utah and has four children. We can assume from her credentials that The Bishop’s Wife, set among the Mormons of a small Utah town, is giving us the real dope about the church’s teachings, particularly about the ways it deals with spousal and child abuse. The novel’s vivid and disturbing story is narrated by the wife of a local Mormon bigwig. Whenever trouble erupts, murder included, she suspects a twisted husband or father lies behind the violence. Often enough, she’s proven right.
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN By Paula Hawkins Doubleday, 319 pages, $24.95
The principal narrator of this confidently written English novel, a book with the juice to become one of the season’s genre hits, is a drunk named Rachel. Poor Rachel. Her husband Tom dumps her and marries the sexy, blond Anna. Another sexy blond, Megan, and her husband, Scott, seem intimately connected to the Tom-Anna duo. So does a therapist named Kamal. One of these six — not Rachel of course — is murdered. Since the coppers figure the erratic, hard-drinking Rachel to be a likely suspect, she needs to stay off the spirits long enough to track the real killer on her own.
DIE AGAIN By Tess Gerritsen Ballantine, 339 pages, $32
It’s natural that Boston’s top taxidermist is all in favour of evisceration. He just didn’t think somebody would apply it to him. With the taxidermist’s gruesome murder, a case involving many more episodes of comprehensive bloodletting gets under way for the dauntless Boston duo of Jane Rizzoli (homicide detective) and Maura Isles (medical examiner). The mysteries reach all the way to Botswana where similarly blood-soaked murders have struck down a safari. This is the 11th Rizzoli-Isles novel for Gerritsen, plus four TV seasons, and it’s clear she’s got the series down to a slick and entertaining pattern.
Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every other Sunday.