Death Unleashed by Marilyn Stasio

Death Unleashed by Marilyn Stasio


Crime

Subversive writer that she is, Ruth Rendell slyly sends up two iconic figures of English society — the animal lover and the guardian of political correctness — in her new Inspector Wexford mystery, THE MONSTER IN THE BOX (Scribner, $26). Far from getting a free pass because he loves dogs (and snakes and lions), Eric Targo is presented as an archvillain. Back when Wexford was just a green recruit on the Kingsmarkham police force, he became convinced that this mild-mannered chap who went everywhere with a beloved dog was a “hobby” killer. But with little to show for his suspicion beyond visceral repulsion, Wexford had to let it go. Now Targo has resurfaced, another dog at his side, and Wexford is reminded of the first Mrs. Targo’s appraisal of her ex-husband: “He likes animals better than people. Well, he doesn’t like people at all.”

While Wexford is considering whether his own gardener might have become Targo’s latest victim, one of Wexford’s colleagues, Hannah Goldsmith, is sure that a Muslim family have compelled their 16-year-old daughter to leave school and are forcing her into an arranged marriage. But the young officer’s patronizing attitude toward immigrants is so transparent to the family she insults by being “excessively polite, flattering and considerate” that her investigation goes nowhere.

Although the plot mechanics linking these two story lines are a bit creaky, it’s a pleasure to have flashbacks to a boyish Wexford in hot pursuit of girls of a certain alluring type. It’s also a revelation to see how meticulously Rendell reconstructs that long-ago period and place from mere glimpses of a street without cars or an open field where a boy could see the stars. Charm aside, this nostalgia trip shows us how Wexford’s character was shaped by his experiences as a sensitive, bookish youth. Even in those days, “he wanted justice to be done,” Rendell tells us. “The wicked must not be allowed to flourish like the green bay tree.”

Whenever authors interrupt a conventional plot to send their series sleuth to some exotic clime, you tend to suspect them of writing off a vacation as a research trip. Michael Connelly doesn’t quite put that suspicion to rest with NINE DRAGONS (Little, Brown, $27.99), in which he takes a long pause from an investigation into the murder of an old Chinese shopkeeper in Los Angeles and dispatches his detective, Harry Bosch, on a daredevil mission to Hong Kong. But Connelly goes on to resolve both Harry’s home-turf case and that nasty business in Hong Kong in his customary ­double-barreled style of action and intelligence. So let’s just say that a good writer can get away with just about anything he wants to.

The trip to Hong Kong is pure thriller material, giving Harry only one “39-hour day” to find his 13-year-old daughter, presumably kidnapped by gangsters to make Harry drop an investigation into their stateside activities. And while the Los Angeles case isn’t half as exciting, it puts a human face on the way criminal triads function in immigrant communities. There’s also something quietly gripping about a case that makes us consider the hard lives of people trying to make an honest living in a tough neighborhood.

Books are books — except when they’re movies trapped between the covers of a book. BOX 21 (­Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26) has something of that trapped quality. Scene by violent scene, this thriller by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom (in a blunt, uncredited translation from the Swedish) never loses sight of Lydia Grajauskas, who was exposed to violence as a child in Lithuania before being duped into prostitution and ferried over to Sweden to cater to the tastes of rough men with disgusting sexual habits. After landing in the hospital when the Lithuanian diplomat who moonlights as her pimp flays the skin off her back with a bullwhip, Lydia embarks on a daring plan to take vengeance — a plan that involves holding hostages in the hospital morgue and occasionally blowing one up with Semtex. For all their cinematic hyperbole, the authors don’t contribute to any further degradation of Lydia, who makes a believably tragic model for all the real women exploited by human traffickers.

Archer Mayor’s Vermont police procedurals are the best thing going in regional crime writing because every one of his stories emerges from social and economic conditions that determine the criminal activities specific to the area. Mayor has a couple of things on his mind in the ­series’s latest entry, THE PRICE OF MALICE (Minotaur, $24.99). As robustly written as all his novels, this one opens with the mutilation murder of a suspected pedophile in a rundown neighborhood near downtown Brattleboro and uses the crime to show what happens when a famously tolerant region suffers an economic downturn, becoming overwhelmed by the poor and the needy — and the people who prey on them.

Joe Gunther, a senior lawman with the Vermont Bureau of Investigation and the epitome of the kind of “hardy, inventive, independent” New Englander you meet in Mayor’s books, also gets caught up in illegal activities down in Gloucester, Mass., where his girlfriend’s family comes from. Mayor writes with feeling of this historic fishing village, with its narrow lanes “riding a hilly terrain like boats on a rolling sea,” and he’s sensitive to the financial pressures that can turn law-abiding fishermen into smugglers. That’s what you want from a regional mystery: the sense that someone really cares about this sorry old place.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Crime-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb3