quarta-feira, 4 de abril de 2012

Death Among Neighbors By MARILYN STASIO


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.

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