On Crime

The warp and woof of murder

By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe February 22, 2009

DOG ON IT

By Spencer Quinn
Atria, 320 pp., $25

A DARKER DOMAIN

By Val McDermid
Harper, 355 pp., $24.99

THE MANUAL OF DETECTION

By Jedediah Berry
Penguin, 288 pp., $25.95

Cape Cod author Spencer Quinn's "Dog on It" has an animal detective - a very funny dog named Chet - who sniffs out clues and narrates from a distinctly canine perspective. Nuance he doesn't get. Humor he does. Loyalty is his middle name, and there's nothing he won't do for his beloved master, private investigator Bernie Little.

Chet is definitely the doggiest dog I've ever encountered in paw-riddled crime fiction. He is endowed with acute night vision, a sharp sense of smell, and a distinct lack of impulse control. Before he knows it, his tail is thumping or he's barking or napping or digging for an elusive snake.

As Watson to Bernie's Holmes, Chet has a warped understanding of human behavior. "The crying thing," for example: "They get upset, humans, and then water comes out of their eyes, especially the women. What is that all about?" But Chet is acutely observant. Watching the hands of humans, for example, "you can find out just about everything you need to know."

Bernie gets hired by Cynthia Chambliss to find her teenage daughter, Madison, who didn't come home the night before. As the days tick by, Bernie becomes convinced that Madison was kidnapped for ransom, a conclusion reinforced by the strange behavior of Cynthia's ex, who runs a sketchy business developing gated communities and wants Bernie and Chet to stop looking for his daughter.

I'm not a dog fancier, but I had a great time reading this book. The mystery is workmanlike, but Chet is a hoot - or should I say a howl.

Val McDermid's "A Darker Domain" opens with a brief scene set in 1985 in Fife, Scotland. A group of unnamed conspirators prepares to move forward with some kind of plan. The action then switches to Fife in 2007, with Misha Gibson showing up at a police station to report her coal miner father's disappearance. She baffles the desk officer by revealing that her dad was last seen in 1985 in the midst of an infamous miners' strike.

Detective Inspector Karen Pirie doesn't scoff at the tardiness of the report, especially when Misha explains that she needs to find her father now because his bone marrow may be a match for her ailing son.

This is just the kind of intractable conundrum that Pirie, head of the cold cases unit, relishes. She remembers the 1985 strike and the "gung-ho violence" with which police wielded their truncheons. When the mines were closed, local villages turned into ghost towns.

Pirie is cheeky, overweight, headstrong, and ambitious. She's gotten where she is by putting her former boss in prison for murder. Her investigation is no sooner launched than her new boss and nemesis, Assistant Chief Constable Simon Lees, demands that she turn her attention to another 22-year-old case, the kidnapping and murder of heiress Catriona Maclennan and the disappearance of her young son, Adam. Catriona's ruthless, powerful father has been handed new evidence by an enterprising reporter, Bel Richmond. More than anything, he wants to find his missing grandson.

Pirie takes on both cases and, layer after layer, excavates the past. It's confusing at first as time and viewpoints shift with barely a break to cue the reader. But as McDermid lofts numerous narrators and their story lines, the transitions become transparent.

McDermid, who grew up in Fife and whose grandfathers were miners, writes with great sympathy and understanding about the labor strike and with a sharp eye for class differences. This rich novel keeps the reader asking "And what happens next?" right up to an abrupt ending that, though it explains the conspiracy with which the novel began, leaves more than a few unanswered questions and issues to ponder.

The reluctant detective in Massachusetts author Jedediah Berry's debut novel, "The Manual of Detection," is Charles Unwin, an unassuming drone in the elaborate hierarchy of an "Agency" that could only exist in a parallel universe. Unwin is a proper fellow who rides his bicycle and carries an umbrella to work each day. He finds himself inexplicably drawn before work to Central Terminal, where he waits for a woman in a plaid coat to disembark. Each morning, she stands there waiting for someone to meet her, someone who never comes.

On the seventh morning, she drops her umbrella, and time literally stands still. Moments later, Unwin is whisked off and finds that he's been noticed ("And there's no way now to get yourself unnoticed") and promoted to operative. He's assigned to replace Travis Sivart, the missing detective he clerked for, and handed "The Manual of Detection."

All he wants is to get his old job back, but in order to do that, he has to find Sivart. Soon he's reexamining Sivart's closed cases, including "The Man Who Stole November Twelfth" and "The Oldest Murdered Man," and hanging out at a mysterious defunct carnival in the company of a woman whose siren song puts her listeners instantly to sleep.

Attentive readers will recognize that the missing detective's name, Travis Sivart, is a palindrome - the first hint of many that we're in the hands of an author who relishes puzzles and inside jokes. Surreal, absurd, and cerebral, full of sly humor and winks, this novel is meticulously written and plotted. Fans of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Jasper Fforde, take notice.