Book review: four mysteries

MYSTERIES
For most of us, there's something in our past -- a person, a relationship, a place, an incident -- that, forgotten for months, even years, occasionally re-enters our conscious minds. For Ruth Rendell's Inspector Reginald Wexford, it's his conviction of three-plus decades that a man he met while a young policeman is a serial killer.

The Monster in the Box (297 pages, Scribner, $26), Rendell's 22nd novel featuring Wexford, begins with the brilliant and intuitive cop remembering Eric Targo, a man he had seen near the site of a woman's strangling many years ago. Targo had been walking his dog but turned and stared at Wexford; in that moment, Wexford was certain he was looking into the eyes of a killer.

But the victim's husband was arrested, years passed and Wexford rarely saw Targo. Now he has resurfaced, and Wexford begins telling his longtime colleague, a skeptical Mike Burden, the story, which includes another death for which Wexford believes Targo was responsible. It's not long before another murder takes place, and this one hits particularly close to Wexford and his colleagues in Kingsmarkham.

Meanwhile, Rendell spins a canny subplot about a well-to-do family of Pakistani immigrants that one of Wexford's zealous officers thinks may be arranging a forced marriage for their 16-year-old daughter.

As Rendell's plots often do, the two stories dovetail in unexpected ways, and Rendell carries it off with believability and empathy. In spare but arresting prose, the distinguished and Ober-prolific British author elucidates Wexford's past while telling a compelling story of the present. A master of psychological suspense, Rendell brings her profound talents to bear on a tale that, if not quite at the top of her form, nevertheless commands the reader's attention.

. . .

Things gone before also play a prominent role in The Brutal Telling (372 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the fifth installment in Louise Penny's eternally lovely and deeply affecting series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec police.

The first three books were set in Three Pines, a picturesque and placid Quebec village just north of the U.S. border. In the fourth, Penny took a fascinating detour of setting, but "The Brutal Telling" returns to Three Pines, where the body of a stranger is found inside the bistro run by gay partners and beloved village residents Olivier Brulé and Gabriel Dubeau.

But Brulé has many hidden secrets, and his past begins to close in on him as he becomes the chief suspect in the slaying. And as Gamache and his team learn more about the victim, the case takes on the haunted histories of eastern Europe and the Haida Indians of Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands.

All of this is told in Penny's elegant prose, such as this:

"There was someone very dangerous walking among them. Someone who looked happy, thoughtful, gentle even. But it was a deceit. A mask. Gamache knew that when he found the murderer and ripped the mask off, the skin would come too. The mask had become the man. The deceit was total."

The talented Penny has again created a stylish mystery that transcends the genre and works, as worthy literature should, on multiple levels. Richly textured and peopled with characters the reader considers friends, "The Brutal Telling" is moving but never melodramatic, heart-wrenching but never histrionic.

A treat for the mind and a lesson for the soul, this is a novel filled with surprises and, as always, with Penny's keen understanding and profound sense of morality and mercy.

. . .

Death by poison -- a familiar device of decades past -- is not often found in the genre nowadays, and it's a delight to see arsenic as the weapon of choice in Dark Mirror (329 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the 10th entry in Barry Maitland's series featuring British cops David Brock and Kathy Kolla.

As "Dark Mirror" opens, Kolla has recently been promoted to detective inspector, and her first case is an intricate one. A graduate student, Marion Summers, dies while doing research in the London Library, a victim of a massive dose of arsenic.

Summers has been studying the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th-century British artists and writers who rejected what had come since the work of Raphael. As part of her research, Marion seemed to fixate on arsenic, which often was found in the paints of the 19th century.

What Kolla finds is a victim whose life seemed to be as puzzling as her death, a slew of suspects and a wealth of potential motives, including professional sabotage and old-fashioned adultery. But Maitland isn't content with a simple explanation, and the shocking conclusion is worthy of Agatha Christie.

Maitland spices "Dark Mirror" with further insights into Brock's and Kolla's personal lives -- something notably lacking in this book's immediate predecessor. Maitland's strength has always been his skill at combining a roaring good story with appealing protagonists, and it's a pleasure to see both aspects at the forefront of this complex and fulfilling mystery.

. . .

She was an advocate of women's rights who urged her husband to "remember the ladies" when creating a new nation. She was a practical homemaker who hung her wash in the unfinished East Room of the White House. But an amateur detective?

That's the premise of The Ninth Daughter (368 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $14), the first in Barbara Hamilton's projected series featuring Abigail Adams as an 18th-century crime-solver.

It's late 1773 in Boston, and 29-year-old Abigail has dropped in to visit her friend Rebecca Malvern, who, like Abigail and her husband, John Adams, is involved in the Sons of Liberty, a group agitating against the tyranny of the British. But Rebecca is missing, the brutalized body of an elegantly dressed young woman is on the floor and the British suspect John Adams.

Against a backdrop of the Great Awakening and the Boston Tea Party, Hamilton fashions a dandy mystery that draws on politics and perversion, provides the reader with rich historical detail and portrays Abigail as a heroine of detection as well as revolution.

Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or .