On Crime

A trip down another dark boulevard

By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe December 27, 2009

LONDON BOULEVARD

By Ken Bruen
Minotaur, 256 pp., $24.99

THE BODY IN THE SLEIGH

By Katherine Hall Page
Morrow, 272 pp., $15.99

FACES OF THE GONE
By Brad Parks
Minotaur, 336 pp., $25.95

Ken Bruen weaves a dark homage to Billy Wilder’s classic movie “Sunset Boulevard” in “London Boulevard.” Instead of a two-bit screenwriter, the protagonist is jaded ex-con Mitchell who views the world through a scrim of movies, novels, poems, and song lyrics. The crumbling mansion he’s hired to repair is in the affluent Holland Park district of London. And Norma Desmond’s stand-in is a has-been star of the London stage, Lillian Palmer. She’s “an expensive sixty” and still glamorous. Theater posters and portraits of her in her heyday remind Mitchell of “a laid-back Lauren Bacall with ferocity.” The enigmatic Jordan - is he the great actress’s butler or something more? - reminds Mitchell of “Oddjob from the Bond movie.” In the background, associates from Mitchell’s sketchy past are nipping at his heels, eager to harness his powers of ruthless persuasion in the messy business of collecting overdue debts.

Bruen’s literary style is so intensely spare and telegraphic that some readers may find it distracting. Idiosyncratic line breaks give the narrative the feel of haiku (“Three years in prison, you lose/time/compassion/and the ability to be surprised”). And a little too often, Bruen uses the same pattern of delivering a deadpan one-two punch of thought and dialogue (“I had no idea, said,/‘I’ve no idea.’ ”).

For all the sparseness of the prose, Bruen delivers a cast of characters that are fully formed and utterly fascinating. Mitchell himself is a complicated bloke. While he’s capable of cold-blooded violence, he cares deeply for his sister Briony (“a true out-and-out nutter”) and falls hard for a good Irish girl.

Readers who like their noir pitch black will find this novel compulsively readable and horrifyingly funny, with an appropriately bleak and unexpected ending.

Katherine Hall Page’s 18 Faith Fairchild mysteries sit comfortably at the lighter end of the crime fiction spectrum. In “The Body in the Sleigh,” murder and mystery follow Faith to Sanpere Island off the coast of Maine. There, her family hopes to enjoy a much needed break while the Rev. Fairchild recovers from pancreatitis.

Page does a lovely job bringing to the page Sanpere at Christmas, Currier-and-Ives beauty festooned with goofy decorations including a tree “constructed of fifty lobster traps, trimmed with pot buoys and topped with a huge star.”

On Christmas Eve, Mary Bethany, a self-sufficient spinster who raises goats and makes delectable chevre, discovers a basket left in her warm barn. In the basket, surrounded by her beloved goats, is a baby. Tucked in with him is a note that contains this plea: “Keep him safe and raise him to be a good man. His name is Christopher.”

That same night Faith discovers, to her horror, that one of the three passengers in an antique sleigh on display in front of the local historical society is not a mannequin. It’s a dead girl, Norah Taft, a troubled teenager who dropped out of high school and probably turned to drugs.

It’s up to Faith to unravel whether the death and birth, both discovered on the same night, are coincidental, and to keep an babe out of harm’s way.

Throughout this story of innocence and evil, Page weaves Christmas themes and images, not to mention comfort foods such as chocolate bread pudding and pumpkin pie soup. Though Page has no qualms about taking her readers to dark places, there’s never any doubt that the end will be light.

“Faces of the Gone,” Brad Parks’ debut novel, takes the reader to the darkest corners of Newark. The reader gets to ride along with young hotshot journalist Carter Ross as he investigates the slayings of four drug dealers, shot execution-style in an abandoned lot. Ross suspects a police coverup. After the newspaper prints his story, the villain wreaks vengeance on Ross and his sources. Infuriated, Ross sets out to find the killer by himself.

A former reporter, Parks creates a convincing newsroom. His dark streets of Newark with gang members, homeless people, and folks just trying to get through the day ring true. But his main character is a conundrum.

Ross starts out a believable reporter who cares about his job (“I believe the world is a wonderful, chaotic, fascinating place and that I’ve done my job if I can help people understand it just a little bit better”). But midway through the novel, he’s become a Teflon smart aleck, undercut by jokes about boners and erectile dysfunction, snarky comments about TV newswomen, unfunny routines with a gay sidekick, and a running plot line about how his gorgeous female boss wants him to father her child. The rest of the cast are characters we’ve seen before, from blustery boss to prostitute with a heart of gold to hopelessly clueless police and federal agents more concerned with battling each other than solving the crime.

Interspersed with Ross’s first-person narrative are heavy-handed diatribes written from the viewpoint of the cold-blooded drug lord who orchestrates the murders. These seem like an attempt to shift the novel into thriller gear, but they deflate momentum by telegraphing coming plot twists.

Shifting from light to dark to shades of gray, “Faces” loses its way by trying to be all of them.