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Mysteries
The return of Spenser adds depth to a series -- and more.
By Paula L. Woods, The
Washington Post, Sunday,
April 3,
2005
Cold Case
Robert B. Parker has written so many Spenser novels that
they stand almost as legend, full of faces and places we've
come to know by heart. The series's longevity lends the
characters an air of immutability, as if Spenser, the
Marlowesque P.I.; Hawk, his black alter ego; Susan
Silverman, Spenser's lady love; and the rest will never age,
even though the first Spenser mystery, The Godwulf
Manuscript, appeared in 1973.
Yet there have been subtle changes over the 30-plus
books, hints that time moves on and that our heroes are, if
not preternaturally young, at least mortal. One of the
clearest signals came in 1997's Small Vices, when
Spenser was almost killed and was nursed back to health by
Hawk and Susan. Now, in Cold Service (Putnam's,
$24.95), Hawk is shot trying to protect bookie Luther
Gillespie and his family from the Ukrainian mob. With
Gillespie and most of his family wiped out, Hawk is
honor-bound to avenge their deaths, and Spenser is equally
bound to assist. But when the Boston police arrest a suspect
in a tavern-owner's murder, and he fingers the men
responsible for the Gillespie hit, it appears that Hawk will
not get to exact his revenge. Then the suspect changes his
story and refuses to give up his accomplices, a reversal
that sets them free and breathes new life into Hawk's quest
for vengeance.
With major legwork provided by
Spenser, Hawk's search leads to the small town of Marshport,
where traditionally black-run vice, narcotics and other
criminal enterprises have been usurped by the same Ukrainian
mobsters who shot Hawk and whose activities are being
protected by Mayor Boots Podolak as well as a good chunk of
the Marshport police force. Watching Hawk and Spenser outfox
Boots and the mobsters, complete with echoes from the film
"High Noon," is a treat even as our heroes' exploits raise
questions about the blind eye that modern law enforcement
seems willing to turn on their vigilante activities.
Some quietly powerful scenes between Spenser and Hawk
show the depth of their long-term friendship, and equally
thoughtful exchanges between Spenser and Susan reveal an
enduring and enviable love. Allthis in a package that
features writing as lean and seductive as poetry -- plus
Hawk dishing up his own brand of retribution -- makes
Cold Service one hot mystery.
Game Boy
Also hot, literally, is Ricky Smith, an overweight gambler
who jumps from the fifth floor of a burning Las Vegas hotel
in the opening pages of Mr. Lucky: A Novel of High Stakes
(Ballantine, $19.95). This is the fifth installment of
James Swain's series featuring ex-Atlantic City cop Tony
Valentine, now head of Grift Sense, a consulting firm that
specializes in catching cheaters for casinos all over the
world. Ricky lands in the pool, emerges dripping wet and
wanders into the Mint Casino across the street, where he
begins to win every bet at every table on the premises. A
million dollars later, Ricky's feats have earned him the
name Mr. Lucky in the national media and drawn the attention
of Mint Casino's management and the Nevada Gaming Control
Board, which enlist the help of Valentine and his son Gerry
in determining whether "Ricky's halo was really a pair of
horns."
Valentine decides to check out
Ricky in the gambler's hometown of Slippery Rock, N.C., a
picture-postcard-perfect town straight out of a Jan Karon
novel, while Gerry heads for a casino in Gulfport, Miss., to
interview Tex "All In" Snyder, a World Series of Poker
champion whom Ricky bested during his lucky streak at the
Mint. Swain recounts the dual adventures of father and son
with wit and an impeccable sense of pacing. Readers will
keep turning pages even as they want to linger over the
numerous gambling scams and schemes that Valentine
elucidates along the way.
Swain has hit on a winning combination in Mr. Lucky,
creating not only considerable thrills but a rogue's gallery
of likable characters, including Mabel Struck, Tony's
colorful neighbor and assistant; Gerry, who is desperately
trying to change his grifting ways; and Ricky Smith himself,
who still earns our sympathy after we realize that he's a
first-class jerk. And Swain's take on what lurks beneath the
surface of an all-American small town gives the plot a few
extra twists. But the vibrant heart of Mr. Lucky and
the series is Tony Valentine, who can not only suss out
casino scams but cares deeply about the people in his life
and the lives he must occasionally take. He's the kind of
man you wouldn't mind having on your side in a high-stakes
poker game, let alone the game of life.
The Drugged Detective
On the other hand, another ex-cop, Jack Taylor, is a mess,
someone you'd be hard-pressed to call anything close to a
hero. Over the course of three books in Ken Bruen's searing
noir series set in Ireland, Taylor has been on a slow,
downward spiral, fueled by prodigious amounts of Irish
whisky and enough bad decisions to populate his nightmares
for years to come: "The line of dead who accuse me at every
turn of sleep, they come in silent dread, the eyes fixed on
me as I twist and moan in vain hope of escape."
In The Magdalen Martyrs (St. Martin's/Minotaur,
$22.95), Taylor is trying sobriety after a rough case and a
disastrously short marriage landed him back in Galway at a
residential hotel, with a wardrobe composed of thrift-shop
suits. In spite of his flaws, we keep rooting for Taylor, a
man who loves books and is as likely to quote Raymond
Chandler, Thomas Merton or W.B. Yeats as throw a punch.
Two cases provide Taylor with a new chance at
redemption. In one, gangster Bill Cassell asks him to find
Rita Monroe, one of the women confined to the infamous
Magdalen laundries, who befriended and protected Cassell's
now-deceased mother; in the other, Terry Boyle, a gay
businessman, hires Taylor to prove that his stepmother
killed his wealthy father. But Taylor can't lay off the
booze, pills and coke, and soon botches both jobs, leading
to two murders and an affair with Boyle's stepmother that
has deadly consequences.
As grim as this may sound,
readers of The Magdalen Martyrs will find themselves
hoping that Taylor can snatch a measure of victory from the
train wreck his life has become. Our fascination is due in
large part to Bruen's spare, evocative prose, which, not
unlike Parker's, reduces a man and his demons to their
essences without diminishing either.
In the Name of the
Father
Michael Rips exerts a similar power in The Face of a
Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery (Houghton Mifflin,
$24), a memoir that reads like a detective novel. Several
years after the death of his father, the unassuming owner of
an optical factory, Rips returned to Omaha to select
mementos to take back to New York and stumbled upon a
portfolio of drawings his father had made of a nude black
woman, completely unknown to Rips or his family. The
discovery suggested intriguing depths to his father's
otherwise placid persona; Rips felt compelled to search for
the unknown woman in the drawings and, in a sense, for the
equally obscure man who made them. He hoped, Rips writes,
that "everything would be clear to me, including . . . my
father and the life that he kept from his family."
What ensues is a meandering, peculiarly
engrossing journey through the hidden histories of the Rips
family and of Omaha, including brothels, bootleggers, Al
Capone, race riots, murders, homeless millionaires, war, a
woman who could fly and the true history of the Reuben
sandwich. As fantastic as they sound, the threads of
narrative are held together by a running meditation on the
theories of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Bible stories
and Rips's own artful prose, which reconstructs his father
from shards of memory as a complex man of greater depth and
compassion than his friends or family ever imagined. With
its multiple discoveries, The Face of a Naked Lady is
as enjoyable as it is offbeat.
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