Death Among Neighbors
By MARILYN STASIO
Nothing brings neighbors
together faster than a murder on the block. Or so says Ruth Rendell,
who subjects the residents of an apartment house in Kenilworth (“as
dreary as only a London outer suburb can be”) to intense
psychological scrutiny in her morbidly witty suspense novel
TIGERLILY’S ORCHIDS (Scribner, $26) before selecting one of them as her murder
victim.
Aside from the wretched
woman in Flat No. 6 who is systematically drinking herself to death,
the residents of Lichfield House take their sweet time in revealing
themselves through the secret vices and obsessions that will bring
several of them to grief. But that doesn’t inhibit Duncan Yeardon,
the lonely widower and self-acknowledged “people watcher” who lives
across the street, from speculating wildly (and mistakenly) on the
intimate details of their lives. Stuart Font, the conspicuously
beautiful narcissist who has recently moved into the building, gives
everyone something to gossip about when the raging-bull husband of
his mistress crashes his housewarming party. And both Stuart and
Duncan spin romantic fantasies about an elusive Asian woman
they call Tigerlily. But it takes a murder to accelerate the
destructive actions of ostensibly civilized strangers when they’re
suddenly involved in their neighbors’ private lives.
Rendell builds her
characters with such subtle strokes that it’s impossible to catch
the moment when she begins to tear them down. Yet at some point in
this story, everyone in Lichfield House will cross a behavioral line
and do something rash or foolish or even criminal — but which
somehow seems entirely in character. A possessive lover will become
a stalker, a greedy girl will resurface as a thief and someone will
turn into a killer. What interests Rendell is the public reaction to
these transformations. Even those residents of Lichfield House who
have surrendered to their own base instincts become fiercely
judgmental after one of their neighbors is suspected of being a
pedophile. When the matter intrudes on the funeral of the murder
victim, an awkward question arises: “Does that mean that we think
looking at indecent pictures of children is a more heinous crime than
killing someone?” Although Rendell graciously allows that people
might just consider a sex scandal “more interesting” than murder,
there’s a hint of cynical laughter in her tone.
Even by stringent
Scandinavian standards, Hakan Nesser’s detective, Chief Inspector
Van Veeteren, is a gloomy guy. “One of these days I simply won’t be
able to stand this world anymore,” he tells himself in THE INSPECTOR AND
SILENCE (Pantheon, $24.95) when faced with the rape and killing of
two adolescent girls devoting themselves to “prayers, self-denial,
purity” at the summer camp of a cult leader who lives with three
women (or “three pale slaves,” as Laurie Thompson puts it in his
keen translation). The most appealing thing about Nesser’s morose cop, who
tackles a murder investigation as if it were a knotty chess problem,
is the way his mind works. A visit to a bar called Plato’s Cave
prompts the observation that “there is no such thing as objective
reality,” which persuades the logical Van Veeteren simply to trust
his intuition. This may be a bit dry for readers expecting the
sadomasochistic thrills offered by less phlegmatic Scandinavian
authors, but there’s much to be said for a quiet man with a good
mind.
Smart girls love scary
stories, and Helen Grant gratifies that perverse taste with THE GLASS DEMON
(Bantam, paper, $15), a clever genre mash-up of bildungsroman,
horror tale, historical whodunit, buried-treasure adventure and
academic mystery. Seventeen-year-old Lin Fox is an odd duck in the
German village where her father, a flamboyant English medieval
scholar, has impulsively transplanted his family while he searches
for the medievalist’s “holy grail.” That would be a set of
500-year-old stained-glass windows long missing from the monastery
church of Allerheiligen Abbey. Once the locals convince Lin that a demon
inhabits the panels, protecting them from treasure-hunters, and
two murders persuade her to assume the role of her father’s
protector, Grant turns this folk legend into a nice, scary novel.
But she also educates readers on how rare and precious glass was in
medieval times, and how natural it was for superstitious
churchgoers, given this “breathtaking glimpse of magic,” to believe
that the vibrant figures in the windows actually lived within the
glass.
Some Americans abroad
fantasize about lingering in Paris to paint or jumping ship in
Jamaica to become beach bums. Conor Fitzgerald had a better idea in
his first novel, “The Dogs of Rome,” when he allowed his expat hero,
Alec Blume, to put down roots in Rome as a homicide cop.
A free-spirited maverick, Commissario Blume returns in THE FATAL
TOUCH (Bloomsbury, $25) to investigate the death of an old tramp, a
notorious brawler and a drunk, assumed to have been killed during a mugging.
But this routine case takes a tricky turn once Blume, whose parents
were art historians, determines that this was no mugging and that
the victim was really a skilled forger with clients in high places.
Although an organized crime angle injects an element of danger into
the investigation, there’s more pleasure to be had from Fitzgerald’s
commentary on the victim’s dodgy trade, including fascinating
technical instruction for “forgers, interpreters, emulators, admirers
and genuine artists.”
This
article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 17,
2011
A brief report in the
Crime column on July 3 about “The Inspector and Silence,” by the Swedish author
Hakan Nesser, referred incorrectly to the book’s translator. Laurie Thompson is
a man.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário