The Old Neighborhood by Marilyn Stasio

     Tana French’s mysteries are like big old trees: the deeper their roots, the more luxurious the foliage they wave in your face. Like her two previous mysteries, both set in Dublin, FAITHFUL PLACE (Viking, $25.95) is sunk in local history, drawing on a tangle of family ties and generational feuds for its thick plot about the impact on a poor-but-proud community when a 22-year-old murder comes to light. Although the story revolves around its sympathetic narrator, a tough-minded police officer who wised up years ago and made a clean break from the old neighborhood, the street he grew up on is the novel’s main character and the source of its raging vitality.

     “You won’t find Faithful Place unless you know where to look,” Detective Frank Mackey says of this narrow cul-de-sac of red-brick houses, cramped home to factory workers, bricklayers, bakers “and the odd lucky bastard who worked in Guinness’s and got health care.” Frank knows where to look, but he’d rather not. He hasn’t been home since the night Rosie Daly stood him up when they were set to elope and he took off on his own.

     When the suitcase Rosie was carrying when she presumably made her independent escape turns up in an abandoned building, Frank is forced to make peace with his alcoholic father, his belligerent mother and his “mental” brothers and sisters (“mental” being “a family tradition”). Frank’s hasty visit is extended when Rosie’s body is discovered, and extended again when a member of the Mackey family dies violently, prompting a drunken wake with enough drama, pathos, comedy, song and spectacle to fuel a three-act play.

     For all the bizarre antics of the brawling Mackey clan, “Faithful Place” isn’t as eccentric as French’s previous novels. Here her characters are grounded in the insular ethos of a narrow-minded world where they live hard and do their rowdy best to kick up a fuss before they die. Those who couldn’t get away settle for small comforts, like Frank’s browbeaten but resilient sisters, or simmer in their own rage, like the angry Mackey men. Or else they flame out in tragic style, like poor Rosie. But even those like Frank, who have managed to leave, never really manage to escape.

     James Lee Burke  knows his territory. This chunk of Louisiana Cajun country along Bayou Teche doesn’t look like much on a map, but the region is rich in history and teeming with the many creatures that flourish in swamps. Kermit Abelard is one of the forms of wildlife Burke studies in THE GLASS RAINBOW (Simon & Schuster, $25.99). As the scion of an old family that made its fortune on the backs of slaves, this rich kid is already damned in the eyes of Dave Robicheaux, the Iberia Parish sheriff’s deputy. Worse still, Kermit is dating Robicheaux’s daughter and has introduced her to a celebrity author who was once a convict. In the lawman’s view, this “sociopath and narcissist and manipulator” is still a very dangerous man.

     Recognizing the face of evil when he sees it, Robicheaux knows those swell folks up at the Abelard mansion are involved in the series of unsolved murders he’s investigating. But until he can make his case, he’s reduced to consulting the ghosts of the dead that he always carries with him and observing the past repeat itself in an endless cycle of violence. When your job is to keep watch over a bloody patch of ancient ground, as this moody detective has been doing for more than 20 years, it’s no wonder you subscribe to the theory that “all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream inside the mind of God.”

     Catherine O’Flynn writes in a quiet voice that’s hard to hear above the roar of the best sellers. Soft and heartbreakingly funny, it gently navigates a television newscaster through a midlife crisis in THE NEWS WHERE YOU ARE (Holt, paper, $15). After churning out ridiculous human-interest features for 20 years on “Heart of England Reports,” Frank Allcroft is suddenly struck by the inconsequential nature of his work and the banality of his life. Further depressed by the wholesale demolition of the noble structures built by his father’s architectural firm, Frank broods on the vanishing values and forgotten hopes of his generation. Mourning in particular those lost souls who die alone and unnoticed, he not only drops off floral tributes and attends their funerals, he also initiates amateur investigations into their deaths. Frank’s enchanting 8-year-old daughter eventually saves him from his own morbidity, but not before O’Flynn makes us reconsider the things we choose to lose — and the things we forget to remember until it’s too late.

     Parnell Hall is another writer whose voice you have to lean in close to catch, mainly because his Stanley Hastings mysteries depend on subversively sly wordplay. In CAPER (Pegasus, $25), the gullible P.I. falls for the tall tale of a comely client who hires him to extricate her daughter from illegal after-school activities, only to wind up being arrested for kidnapping. Stanley is amusing as a lovable goof-sleuth, but the real fun lies in watching him try to talk himself out of a jam, whether it’s in convoluted arguments with his wife (“a master of sarcasm and irony” in “the art of mortal conversation”) or debates with his friend Sergeant MacAullif, who shreds his points of logic the way a dog demolishes a slipper. Catching criminals is all very well, but in the violently verbal world he inhabits, Stanley would be happy just to win an argument. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Crime-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb3&pagewanted=print