> WHODUNIT:
OBLIVION By Arnaldur Indridason Harvill Secker, 345 pages, $24.99
Within little more than a year, two of crime fiction’s most compelling sleuth figures vanished from the crime-solving business. First, in the late great Swedish writer Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man ( 2009), his long-suffering Inspector Kurt Wallander surrendered to Alzheimer’s disease. Then in the brilliant Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason’s Strange Shores (2010), the enigmatic Inspector Erlendur (no first names required in patronymic Iceland) may or may not have died, but whatever his fate, he could not be expected back to solve future cases.
Fortunately for bereft readers, Indridason has restored Erlendur to the printed page by way of an obvious device: he tells us stories of Erlendur’s earliest cases back in the days when the young detective first found his calling as an investigator. Indridason’s initial revisit came in the gripping Reykjavik Nights (2012) and continues now with the even more compelling Oblivion.
The year is 1979, Erlendur is 33 years old and just discovering, as he says, “how much the role of detective appealed to him.” Working with his early mentor, Marion Briem, Erlendur takes on two cases. One involves the disappearance of a teenage girl almost a quarter century earlier. And the other, in which a man’s body is found dumped in a remote lagoon, takes Erlendur nosing into the business of the gigantic American military base on Iceland’s territory (Erlendur is no fan of the military or of Americans).
By nature and by circumstance given to gloom, Erlendur finds relief in his profession. For a man with a retiring personality, he shows a remarkable brand of the particular nerve it takes to effectively interrogate witnesses, and throughout Oblivion, he perseveres in pieces of bravura investigation. It’s the quality of detecting that keeps us readers nailed to the narrative as only master homicide cops can do it.
THE SCAM By Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg Bantam, 296 pages, $34
Reading the Evanovich-Goldberg series — this is their fourth book together — is like hanging out with crime fiction’s equivalent of America’s 1 per cent. Even FBI guys are funded in far-fetched schemes to the tune of millions. In their latest adventure, the investigative team of Kate O’Hare and Nick Fox is assigned to bring down the scurrilous owner of gambling casinos in Vegas and Macau. The book turns into a blur of high-end brand names, expensive strategies and a ton of research into the life that only billions can buy.
OPEN SEASON By Peter Kirby Linda Leith Publishing, 300 pages, $16.95
Peter Kirby seems exactly the author with the right background to write hardnosed police procedurals about such issues as trafficking in Eastern European prostitutes in Montreal. The product of a tough South London childhood, Kirby is now a lawyer in the Montreal offices of Fasken Martineau specializing in trade and regulatory issues. His novels featuring Montreal Det. Insp. Luc Vanier — Open Season is the third — hit all the right notes. They are exact, precise and entirely convincing.
THE KILLING LESSONS By Saul Black St. Martin’s. 336 pages, $29.99
Brilliantly written and as shocking as a thriller can get, this one features a serial killer roaming the U.S. West leaving a different foreign object in the body of each of his female victims. The sleuthing by a San Francisco female cop to catch this vile guy is inspired — especially admirable since she has her own troubles with vodka. And as irredeemably gruesome as events become, most readers will probably find themselves still turning pages into the final cruelties. Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every second weekend.