The Knights of the Cornerstone, What the Dead Know, Into the Blue, The Iron Rose

I've been in the middle of a few books for a while, and finished them more or less simultaneously.


First one was one that I've had on my to-read list for a while, What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman.  It's a solid, accomplished crime novel by a novelist who seems at the top of her game (but I'm guessing a bit, having only read short stories by her before this).  This is also the kind of book that goes right to the heart of what's most interesting about crime fiction -- that it shows us people under stress by placing them into some of the most trying circumstances.

In this case, Lippman writes about the abduction of two girls (12 and 15 years old) from a mall in Baltimore.  The story starts twenty or so years later when a woman shows up claiming to be one of the girls, and then proceeds mostly in flashbacks to the day itself, and then 5, 10, 15 years later.  In each case, we get a glimpse of one of the girls, her father, and her mother, and Lippman shows us the gradual disintegration of the parents' marriage, as well as the residual guilt they feel over the kidnapping.

The main "mystery" of the novel -- is this mystery woman actually one of the girls? -- is not very interesting, and I think Lippman put it in as a sop to genre conventions, that there has to be some mystery.  The solution is pretty transparent from early on, and the time she spends on it is really just a further way to illuminate the woman's state of mind.

But the body of the novel, the flashbacks, is absorbing reading; Lippman shows us the ripples from the kidnapping with a lot of skill and sensitivity.

Into the Blue, by Robert Goddard, is a different kind of crime novel, where the point is in the twists and turns of the plot.  Harry Barnett is showing a friend around the Greek island of Profitis Ilias, when she disappears.  He's the primary suspect, of course, but actually clears that up surprisingly quickly.  He then decides to track her down, following a trail of her last few months in England.  Goddard entices us with some standard tropes of the genre, such as secret societies and evil psychiatrists, but each one leads to a dead end, which was a nice change.

In the end, the whole thing ties together a bit too neatly for my tastes, but in this kind of book the journey is really the point, and Goddard does a nice job.  Harry's contacts are all sketched out nicely; even people that he only talks to for a few pages are given enough space to feel like people, not simply signboards whose job is to send Harry to the next place in his quest.  The down-side, though, is that the pace is so deliberate that there's no feeling of suspense or a race against time; we never really feel that Harry is in danger, and that's a pity in something that is, after all, supposed to be a suspense novel.

James Blaylock has been a writer who works his Christianity into his work for a long time, usually subtly.  (Somewhat like his friend Tim Powers).  In Knights of the Cornerstone, though, he's at his most explicit, with its Knights Templar, a saint-blessed veil, and Godly miracles.  The earnestness is usually balanced by his fairly goofy heroes, who are very flawed, and often just barely competent.  Unfortunately, that trait is missing from Knights; Calvin, his protagonist, is almost average, with just a touch of the eccentric, and for large stretches of the novel he's not particularly funny or interesting.

It's a real pity, because Blaylock's silly heroes have always been the reason to recommend his writing; I can't imagine recommending this to anyone who's not already a Blaylock fan.

Adrian McKinty got me interested in Peter Temple when he mentioned that Temple had won the Australian equivalent of the Booker Prize, so I decided to start with one of his earliest books The Iron Rose.  I think I'm going to have to jump ahead to the later ones -- The Iron Rose has some good stuff, but it's mixed in with some fairly derivative pieces.  Mac Faraday is a former Federal Police officer who retired and became a black-smith, and, as the novel starts, one of his old cases has come back to haunt him.

Temple is very economical in this novel; everything that happens, even it seems extraneous, turns out to matter to the central plot.  Nevertheless, I found the most peripheral parts to be the best -- descriptions of Faraday's workaday life, his work on restoring a garden, the weekly soccer matches, all of these trump the fairly creaky drug smuggling plot.  The good news is that, the way the novel ties together, Temple spends quite a bit of time on those pieces, and so overall I enjoyed the book, certainly well enough to read more by Temple.