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Many Rivers To Cross By Peter Robinson McClelland & Stewart, 384 pages, $29.95
This is the 26th police procedural in the ever reliable series by Peter Robinson, and all the usual gang are once again at work nailing the bad guys throughout Yorkshire. The brainy DS Alan Banks runs the show, the independent-minded pair of DI Annie Cabbot and DC Gerry Masterson handle the leg work, and all the techs pitch in to nail a massive operation involving drugs and other organized crime enterprises.
It’s all intricate stuff, familiar in content but still entertaining. Where the story comes to fresh life coincides with appearances by a character new to the books. This is the woman who calls herself Zelda, and her contribution to the plot, especially in her own back story, is harrowing.
When she was a kid, terrifically vicious guys in Moldavia bundled her off to England to slave in the sex trade.
Zelda survived, and now she sets out to face down one of her victimizers from years earlier.
In the Key of Thirteen By The Mesdames of Mayhem Carrick Publishing, 372 pages, $20
For the fourth collection of crime short stories from the Mesdames of Mayhem, music is the theme, and one of the book’s appeals lies in the often ingenious ways the writers sneak Mozart or the Beach Boys or “Turandot” into the plots. Melodie Campbell deserves a prize in the ingenuity category for saving the only musical mention in her clever story until its last two words which happen to be the title to an Elvis song.
Overall, the stories reach more diabolical peaks than the previous collections. What else but diabolical is a tale about a dentist conceiving nasty things by way of root canal? Or, more playfully, a sinister narrative centred on the value (immense apparently) of a CHUM chart for a week in September 1974?
Probably the most affecting piece in the collection comes from Sylvia Maultash Warsh whose story features the exquisite revenge taken by a Russian survivor of the gulags who, across the world in a lush Yorkville apartment 29 years removed from her internment, finally gets even with her most evil tormentor.
The Butterfly Girl By Rene Denfeld HarperCollins, 265 pages, $23.99
A couple of years ago in a novel titled “The Child Finder,” the Portland, Ore., writer Rene Denfeld introduced a private investigator named Naomi, a central character who carried a far heavier burden than most sleuth figures. Abandoned and abused as a child, Naomi specialized as an adult in rescuing children who had gone missing and were at the mercy of rapists and murderers.
Naomi returns in “The Butterfly Girl” on a more personal mission. This time she is determined to locate her younger sister who endured her own personal hell and now may be under the threat of a serial killer.
Naomi shares the book’s narrative half and half with Celia, a 12-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and rejected by her mother and now lives with other forsaken kids among Portland’s population of homeless souls.
Ghastly as all this sounds, Denfeld tells her twinned stories with a remarkable sense of calm and forbearance in prose that is close to lyrical.
Sarah Jane By James Sallis Soho, 207 pages, $27.95
For Sarah Jane Pullman, life is one damn thing after another. Raised on a marginal chicken farm, in trouble with the law, forced to join the army, then a career as a shortorder cook, a miserable marriage, always on the move in the rural backwaters of the southern United States.
But then a quarter of the way into this gorgeously written book, Sarah Jane becomes, of all unlikely occupations, a small-town sheriff. She’s a natural at it.
“The way you move in and out of situations,” her predecessor in the job tells her, “those aren’t things that get taught, they’re in you or they’re not.”
Sarah Jane tells her own story, this succession of damn things one after the other, and as she does, the crime novel smooths into what is essentially a terrific autobiography.