Harry Bosch returns
Michael Connelly on the opioid epidemic, an inner-city Sherlock Holmes, bedjumping among the rich and Italian corruption: Crime has infinite permutations. Fortunately, mystery novelist Charles Finch is on the scene.
Ferocity By Nicola Lagioia Europa, 447 pp.
Clara Salvemini, the beautiful scion of a powerful family in the Italian city of Bari, commits suicide, throwing herself from the roof of a multilevel parking lot. That’s the story, anyhow — only her halfbrother Michele, to whom everyone but Clara has been mostly unkind, doubts it.
Ferocity (
Nicola Lagioia’s rich, dense, difficult novel, a sensation in his home country, is a family saga, with numerous strands crossing numerous time periods. It darts between the pretentious and profound, sometimes in a single sentence. But its atmosphere of awful unease seems to define a certain darkness and anger about contemporary Italy. Readers who survive Lagioia’s occasional opacity and floridity will understand that tragic sensation with a rawness few books offer. Charles Finch is author of the Charles Lenox mystery series.
Righteous By Joe Ide Mulholland, 336 pp.
One of last year’s most exciting debuts was IQ, about a cryptic, brilliantly observant consulting detective named Isaiah Quintabe (aka IQ), working small cases in the gang-dominated streets of East
Long Beach. His pattering sidekick was Dodson
— rhymes with
Watson, if you like. Righteous
( its sequel, is a classic second book in many ways, overfull and undercooked. The book’s shaggy plot line sends the duo to confront triads and loan sharks in Las Vegas, a setting that leaves Ide too far afield of the community he evoked so superbly in IQ, and IQ himself in circumstances that require action, not his signature brainwork. As a result, his survival of the events of Righteous is barely credible — but also, given Ide’s sense of humor, his effervescent dialogue and his knack for moments of emotion, all are still present here, terrific news for readers.
Two Kinds of Truth By Michael Connelly Little, Brown, 402 pp.
Boy, Michael Connelly has been so ubiquitous this year — introducing a new lead character in the excellent The
Late Show in July, executive-producing the screen adaptation Bosch for Amazon — that you might have expected some slight slackening in his control of his signature series featuring retired LAPD detective Harry
Bosch. You’d be wrong. Two Kinds
of Truth ( is vintage Connelly, with Harry, now working freelance for the San Fernando, Calif., police, infiltrating an opioid ring and reckoning with a killer he long ago put behind bars. Connelly went through a weak period recently, especially in the later Mickey Haller books, but his immaculate plotting and gift for bringing procedural intricacies to life now seem as strong as ever. One can tire of his vision of life — a reflexive, undemanding noir — while freely conceding that he writes the best detective novels around.
The Last Mrs. Parrish By Liv Constantine Harper, 390 pp.
This stilted, sometimes silly, but utterly irresistible novel is about a young woman named Amber Patterson, newly arrived in an ultra-rich town on Long Island Sound and ready to ascend into its firmament by whatever means she has to use.
She decides to play mousy friend and aide-decamp to Daphne
Parrish, the beautiful and glamorous wife of Jackson Parrish — except when Daphne happens to be away, Amber turns seductress. Liv Constantine is the pseudonym of a pair of sisters who “spend hours plotting via Skype,” and those hours have paid off.
The Last Mrs. Parrish ( pivots on an enormous and satisfying twist, forcing Amber to rejigger her schemes and Daphne and Jackson to wonder what their new acquaintance’s past might contain. The writing goes from workmanlike to wondrously bad, but the pages keep flying, flying, flying by.