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THE FIX By David Baldacci Grand Central, 448 pages, $38
The Fix has a congenial feel. It’s a quality that will no doubt make it, as with many past Baldacci crime novels, a bestseller. Characters die painfully, other characters suffer (not a lot but enough) and even the central figure has a background of misery. Yet, The Fix somehow never loses a feel that can only be described as congeniality. Amos Decker, whom Baldacci fans will remember from two previous procedurals, is the man in charge of the sleuthing. He’s an Ohio homicide cop on loan to an FBI task force in Washington. It happens that Decker is only a few feet from a man on a street near FBI headquarters when the man shoots a woman dead, then kills himself. Decker and his fellow task force members get on the hunt for answers to this bizarre misadventure, an undertaking that is cleverly perverse, full of surprises and touched throughout by the curious sense of congeniality.
THE HELL OF IT ALL By Bob Kroll ECW, 312 pages, $17.95
This is the second book in the veteran Nova Scotia writer Bob Kroll’s series featuring the hard-nosed but vulnerable cop T.J. Peterson. The setting, which readers will figure out, must be Halifax. But the specific designation, Halifax, never appears in the book’s pages. Why not? Because, as Kroll said in a recent interview, he thinks if readers are told the city where events take place, they will “start paying attention to that and lose track of the story.”
A contrary view might be that a failure to name the city could irritate readers into fretting over the locale rather than rolling happily with the narrative.
Either way, Kroll writes a solid story. This time out he loads Peterson with half a dozen menacing situations, a list that includes his banishment from the police force. Does this exclusion take Peterson out of the sleuthing game? Not for a single heartbeat in this thriller of detection.
THE CUTAWAY By Christina Kovac Atria, 320 pages, $22
As a debut novelist, Christina Kovac sets her book in the milieu she knows most intimately. That happens to be the world of television news — Kovac worked for the Washington bureaus of both ABC and NBC — and she does an entertaining job of presenting the competitiveness, romantic dalliances and professional jealousies that enliven life among journalists chasing stories in the national’s capital.
The story’s central character is Virginia Knightly, who reports for an evening news program on a Washington TV station. Knightly is smart, nervy and likable even if she does her best to annoy her bosses and colleagues. Then she clicks into an old story about a missing woman. Everybody else figures this for a dead-end. Knightly hangs in, a decision that gets the narrative moving into a series of complexities that make for an engaging story.
PROVING GROUND By Peter Blauner Minotaur, 368 pages, $36.99
This is the excellent New York writer Peter Blauner’s first crime novel in 10 years — he took time out to work for TV’s Law & Order franchise — and he returns to print with a dense and involving piece of work.
The scene is the gritty neighbourhoods of Brooklyn where the action begins with the murder of a veteran criminal defence lawyer. It happens that the lawyer was representing a Muslim immigrant in his lawsuit against the federal cops who identified the man, wrongly, as a terrorist and submitted him to torture.
The case, which shapes up as a slam dunk for the lawyer, makes the FBI look like solid suspects in the murder. But the book, in a narrative that never rests, is filled with complexities involving the lawyer’s family, his legal associates and other complicating but believable connections reaching back to his hippy roots.