The Buried Past Book Review By Marilyn Stasio

The Buried Past

Book Review By Marilyn Stasio

     It’s 1920 at the opening of A LONELY DEATH (Morrow/Harper­Collins, $24.99), the latest of Charles Todd’s masterly novels about England’s slow and painful recovery from the Great War. Ian Rutledge, the Scotland Yard inspector at the center of this series, is one of the walking wounded who never speak of their experiences but share a silent bond. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that Rutledge is so unnerved by the suicide of a friend, a despondent former artillery captain, that he packs a loaded service revolver when he makes his first return visit to the French battlefield where he was buried alive under the bodies of the soldiers he commanded.

The 12 young men who went off to war from Eastfield, a Sussex town so small it’s “hardly more than a village that has outgrown itself,” were typical of England’s homegrown fighting companies. Two soldiers were killed in battle, and the 10 who survived came home profoundly changed, so circumspect about life in the trenches that a mother might actually believe that her son had slept on clean sheets every night. But when three of the survivors are garroted in deadly nocturnal attacks, Rutledge is dispatched from London to determine who murdered these unremarkable farmers and tradesmen, and left the military identity tags of other, unknown soldiers in their mouths.

While respectful of the resilient spirit of communities like Eastfield, Todd (the nom de plume of the mother-and-son writing team of Charles and Caroline Todd) doesn’t shrink from challenging the assumptions about class and economic privilege that once sustained their insular way of life. Once again, Rutledge comes to realize that war changes everything. Just as a fearful lad might have found courage in the trenches, a schoolyard bully might have developed a taste for killing — or an unpopular boy, once resigned to being browbeaten, acquired the skills to avenge himself on his tormentors. As one English town learns to its sorrow, the boys who marched off to war never really returned.

     “Law & Order” screenwriters aren’t the only ones with a knack for ripping stories from the headlines. The Swedish writing team of Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom turned one social scourge — the sex trade in teenage girls from former Soviet bloc countries — into “Box 21,” a taut thriller that introduced English-speaking readers to their gritty material and hyper-realistic style. In THREE SECONDS (Silver Oak, $24.95), translated by Kari Dickson, they take on the organized drug traffic in Scandinavian prisons, a lucrative industry run by Polish “businessmen.”

The authorities in Stockholm have a chance to disrupt the trade when Piet Hoffmann, an undercover police officer who has successfully infiltrated the Polish mafia, is put in charge of extending the mob’s international franchise in Sweden. Once installed in a maximum security prison, where he’s passing himself off as one bad dude, Hoffmann is cynically betrayed by the top police brass and maneuvered into a thrill-a-minute cat-and-mouse game with his merciless mob associates. But the real threat comes from an incorruptible police inspector whose unrelenting pursuit compromises the entire operation — even as this old-school cop supplies the only moral ballast in a grimly amoral tale.

     Some fact-based novels, no matter how closely researched, read as if they were ripped from comic books. That applies to most of T. Jefferson Parker’s Southern California thrillers, with their outlandish plots, frenetic action and creatively insane characters. Like the previous books in this guilty-pleasure series featuring Charlie Hood, a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy who seems to be on permanent loan to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, THE BORDER LORDS (Dutton, $26.95) is solidly grounded in the rampant gun smuggling that powers the multibillion-­dollar drug trade between Mexico and the United States. But once past the ultrarealistic massacre of three young pistoleros hiding out in a safe house, the narrative trips into hallucinatory territory. An undercover agent goes rogue and sets himself up as a faith healer; a crooked rookie cop turns unbelievably heroic; and the savage war between Mexican drug cartels veers into farce. Parker is a connoisseur of the macabre, and even at their most absurd, his fantasies are always madly entertaining.

     Ever since Sherlock Holmes put down his violin to inject himself with cocaine, it has become de rigueur for a private detective to have a distinguishing quirk or two. But the antihero of R. Scott Bakker’s offbeat noir mystery, DISCIPLE OF THE DOG (Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.99), still defies all genre conventions. Disciple Manning (call him Diss) has hyperthymestic syndrome, or total recall. (“The one thing you need to remember about me is that I don’t forget. Anything. Ever.”) And while it does seem to be driving him crazy, explaining his addiction to a number of unhealthy habits, this uncommon affliction has also made him uncommonly philosophical. The missing-­person case that takes Diss to a Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania gives this arch cynic (“Did you know that the word cynic comes from the ancient Greek for ‘dog’?”) the opportunity to match wits with both the professorial guru of an end-of-days cult and an evangelist preacher of the fire-and-brimstone persuasion. These exchanges are bracing for all parties involved, including readers who can appreciate a private eye adept at the Socratic method.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Crime-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb3&pagewanted=print