> WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
THE QUEEN’S ACCOMPLICE By Susan Elia MacNeal Bantam, 355 pages, $22
The sixth book in the very readable series featuring the plucky Maggie Hope represents a shift in gears.
Maggie is an American in London during the Second World War; in the earlier books she saved the bacon for everybody from Churchill to the young Princess Elizabeth.
But in The Queen’s Accomplice, set in March 1942, she gets involved in a more strictly civilian piece of business.
It seems that someone is mimicking Jack the Ripper, killing young London women in the same detailed manner in which the Ripper carried out his murders a century earlier.
Maggie is seconded from her MI5 war duties to assist the London cops in fingering the killer.
This requires some not-bad sleuthing, but more promising are a couple of war-related subplots that set the stage for Maggie to get back in the spying game in the next book, something that’s bound to offer more usual rewards for the reader.
THE HEAVENS MAY FALL By Allen Eskens Seventh Street, 300 pages, $17
Allen Eskens, a criminal defence lawyer in Minneapolis, is yet another in the legions of American law- yers who have turned to writing courtroom thrillers.
But Eskens has an edge over his fellow lawyer/writers; unlike them, he’s figured out ways of finessing technical legal concepts — the infernal rules of evidence, for one — so that they don’t act as a drag on a cracking good yarn.
In the case at the centre of the new book, a prominent Minneapolis-St. Paul criminal lawyer is on trial for the murder of his independently wealthy wife.
It happens that the accused lawyer has a complicated history with both the lead homicide detective on the case and the defence lawyer at the trial.
Needless to say, these relationships make for much suspense.
But events in the courtroom provide the plot’s ultimate tension and this is where Eskens comes off as an especially resourceful writer of pure legal drama.
CONCLAVE By Robert Harris Random House, 291 pages, $24.95
Early on in Robert Harris’s impeccably researched and stylishly written new thriller, it looks like the sneakiest operator in the entire Vatican is a cardinal from — gasp! — Canada.
Harris, an English writer, is noted for the ambitious settings where his plots unfold and they don’t get much more ambitious than the Vatican when 118 of the mightiest Catholic clergy gather to choose a new pope.
The story is told through the steady eyes of Cardinal Lomeli, the highly principled officer of the church in charge of running the vote. It’s not long into the process before Lomeli spots dodgy business among certain cardinals jockeying for a run at the papacy.
No one seems dodgier than Cardinal Tremblay of Quebec, a man who “combines a bland personality with passionate ambition.”
The story, neatly balancing lessons in Vatican history against straightforward thrills, builds to a nifty climax in Harris’s dependably entertaining fashion.
WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER By Peter Robinson McClelland and Stewart, 496 pages, $29.95
The excellent Alan Banks, newly promoted to Detective-Superintendent, has one sex case on his hands and the equally talented DI Annie Cabbot is involved in another sex crime of a different sort.
Banks’s case is very cold, the kind that’s been turning up in real-life news stories lately (think Bill Cosby). It seems an aging and very wealthy pop music compere is finally having the whistle blown on him after decades of molesting young girls.
Cabbot’s case, on the other hand, begins with the discovery of the body of a 14-year-old girl who has been drugged, sexually battered, then kicked to death.
Both cases require sleuthing of the intensively slogging variety, and nobody’s better at getting down to the nitty gritty in describing these kinds of investigations than Peter Robinson.