Short Story Collection from James R. Benn, THE REFUSAL CAMP

Crime and war. Unfortunately, they go well together. Especially in the hands of James R. Benn, whose 17 Billy Boyle mysteries place an Irish-American cop at various sites and trenches of World War II, investigating the dark side of moneyed warfare on behalf of his distant cousin General Dwight Eisenhower.

THE REFUSAL CAMP gives Benn the space to air tales of other wars, other time periods, and of course other motivated protagonists (although there is a gem of a Billy Boyle story tucked among these). The collection opens during the years when Connecticut settlers still enslaved Africans, and unfolds from the point of view of an enslaved teen. It swiftly becomes a crime story, one where the most disadvantaged person on the scene must summon both courage and insight, as well as a clever riposte, if he's to escape hanging.

There are eight more stories—one published in an earlier Soho Crime Collection, The Usual Santas. Billy Boyle fans will especially enjoy the Boston investigation "Irish Tommy," featuring police lieutenant Daniel Boyle, as well as "Billy Boyle: The Lost Prologue," a tale removed from the first Billy Boyle mystery before publication. The cleverest may well be "The Secret of Hemlock Hill," a haunted Civil War tale brought into the present. "The Refusal Camp" offers a concentration-camp possibility that reminds us that "victims" often found effective ways to hold their own.

Seasoned Benn/Boyle fans need this collection for their shelves featuring the youthful, loyal, and often rash wartime detective; those new to Benn's work may find the character-focused and neatly plotted and twisted stories so satisfying that they'll wish to dip into the full Boyle series.

Best of all, this nicely balanced collection can temper the rest of the Northern Hemisphere winter season, providing good reading for the last of the fireside evenings and lazy weekends before the yard, gardens, and outdoor sports reassert their siren calls.

Soho Crime/Soho Press will release the collection on March 14; this is a good time to place a pre-order to be sure to get a copy "hot off the press," as Billy Boyle would have said.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

TINA, MAFIA SOLDIER, Striking New Sicilian Crime Fiction from Maria Rosa Cutrufelli

The opening chapters of TINA, MAFIA SOLDIER go very slowly, as the narrator—would-be author of a biography of Cettina, now Tina, a Mafia youth—renews her acquaintance with Gela, a city in Sicily. This harsh frontier-like city, once a coveted location in ancient history, is now a battered orphan of the petrochemical industry. Its historic face has vanished; instead, the narrator sees it as "Young and cruel. It's a cruel landscape that I find hard to recognize and doesn't correspond to the map of my memory anymore."

The city itself reeks of masculine violence and brutality. But embedded in it today is Tina, a' masculidda, Tina the little tomboy, documented in a folder the narrator carries with her. Recently imprisoned, Tina isn't yet 20 years old, but her leadership of her small teen gang within the Mafia culture has brought her strength and notoriety.

The quest for Tina herself begins with interview upon interview of relatives and friends of this "Mafia soldier" in hopes of gaining a visit with the prisoner, who can choose whether or not to admit someone, almost a bizarre form of royalty. And in fact, Tina is a figure worth admiring, even worshiping, with her motorbike, her weapons, the loyalty she's demanded and inspired.

Bear with this narrator and the translation (by Robin Pickering-Jazzi), because the discomfort of the chapters builds toward an awkward yet compelling understanding of Tina herself and the "cruel" city that has brought her into being. A sexual intermediate, neither muscled male nor seductive female, Tina is a quintessential "other," trans in every aspect of her being.

Here is a taste of Tina, struggling to outwait the customers at the beauty salon operated by her cousin Giovanna:

The roots of her bad mood sank down into embedded realities that were different and deeper than dissatisfaction or unfulfilled needs. She would have liked to make a spectacular entrance that day. She dreamed of the splendor of an entrance worthy of her. The Alfa 164 and black leather jacket. ... "Did you all see her? Rambo." Constraining her to give tough answers, always poised on a razor's edge.

Then there's Tina's friend Graziella, who works for a production company and represents another side of the muddled sexuality and violence of the place:

Graziella is a nervous brunette who's going back and forth between a printer and a video, extricating herself from snarls of wires that are hanging down and getting entangled between stools and tables, obviously hindering her movements. But more than her exuberant nature, I think it's her still very young age that makes her easily confront a job whose dangers she doesn't see, even though she knows perfectly well what they are, and complain about the job just being temporary.

Though men are interviewed too, it's the women who love Tina for herself and would do anything for her. Giovanna, for instance, "raises the cigarette to her mouth, a darting little snake with a pointed tip, and says as she exhales the smoke, 'She's a warrior.' A reverential fear that gradually dissolves in veiled disapproval."

By the time our narrator finally forms a connection with Tina herself, the grim, assaultive, and sexually confusing journey into the teenager's life, into the Cosa Nostra, into Sicily and its asphyxiative presence, has changed her irretrievably. What she will facilitate at last for Tina will tear apart the fabric she has spent so much time and effort crafting, as she calls Tina out of the cell and into compelling pages.

TINA, MAFIA SOLDIER is complex, with seductive metaphors and a grimly poisonous atmosphere that daunts the emergence of any necessary self-love. Once it picks up speed, it's compelling and potent. There can be no return to any mythic Sicily after this fictive immersion in reality provided by Sicilian-born Maria Rosa Cutrufelli.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Brief Mention: LAST SEEN IN LAPAZ, by Kwei Quartey

Collecting international crime fiction? Ghana-born physician and author Kwei Quartey's Darko Dawson series, set mostly in Ghana, has been a pleasure; Quartey's current series is a spinoff that features Emma Djan, a private detective always alert to gender discrimination as she works her way up in a local agency (the police force dumped her, early in the series).

LAST SEE IN LAPAZ opens with the disappearance of a young Nigerian woman, daughter of a friend of the agency owner. (Lapaz is a town in the Accra Metropolitan District -- not related at all to La Paz, New Mexico.)  The attractive and hard-working Ngozi seems to have run away from home, across the national border, and might be in Accra. If, that is, she's alive.

Emma Djan isn't yet authorized to do a lot of investigation on her own, but she has an advantage here, because she can perform a flirtatious role with the greedy (in every sense) hotel owners who seem linked to the disappearance. When one hotel turns out to be supplying female companions, perhaps forced into this upscale prostitution, Emma's both horrified and fascinated. Anything to avoid the boredom of routine PI work!

Her insight into women's lives also gives her an advantage as she investigates with Boateng, the local DI (inspector on the police force):

Boateng grunted. "You seem to be studying this room closely, Djan. What do you see?"

"No disorder, no chaos. It has a controlled feeling. Someone who has been in this room was trying to gain control over the other, but couldn't quite do it. ... This entire house is a clue."

Despite his California location, Quartey's writing continues to have the choppy feel of translated material, possibly an intentional effect to suggest the movement among local languages and dialects. The book suffers somewhat from quick changes in point of view, among investigators and criminals. But it's still a revelatory experience of urban life in Ghana, and neatly plotted, with caste and related attitudes deftly portrayed. 

Collect it for your African mystery shelf, as well as for the diverse spread of Soho Crime's continued global outreach.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Third Crime Novel for Sheriff Gideon Stoltz, LAY THIS BODY DOWN, by Charles Fergus

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Fergus’s writing lays out both the struggles of a new nation, and the pains of growing into determined manhood with its allegiances, regrets, and consolations. If murder and kidnapping can be halted, why not enslavement, also?”

 

The lines of good and evil are firm in this third antebellum mystery from Charles Fergus: Enslavement is brutal, and deprives the 1837 American nation of honor. Immediate emancipation could restore that honor—but in Sheriff Gideon Stoltz’s industrial Pennsylvanian town of Adamant, a rough crowd jeers at a visiting speaker advancing such an argument, and Gideon’s role as lawman is keeping the peace. Not advancing abolition.

 

However, Fergus positions Gideon as an outsider himself, with a strong “Pennyslvania Dutch” German accent that marks his difference in the hardscrabble Scotch-Irish town. Young and inexperienced for his job and without training, supported by his wife and a few friends, Gideon identifies with runaways and victims. It’s a dangerous position when there’s a national law requiring that he enforce “property ownership” toward Black fugitives. Although his state backs away from that position, the town is just 80 miles from Maryland, and his neighbors, a mostly rough crew, could inform on a runaway and expect Gideon to jail that person.

 

“What if the right thing—whatever it is—and what the law requires turn out to be two different things?” Gideon asks his wife True. Her answer: “I hope you would do the right thing.”

 

Chapters of Lay This Body Down open with excerpts from historically real reward notices seeking fugitives. When slave hunters turn up in Adamant, seeking a Black youth who’s helped Gideon in the past, what he’ll choose is never in doubt: He owes a debt, and servicing it fits with his growing belief that enslavement is cruel and wrong. Instead, the rapidly ramped-up tension in the book comes from the prevalence of malice among those hunting fugitives and those who already despise Gideon as not one of them, neither by heritage nor by attitude. As he struggles to find and protect this and other runaways, he plunges into personal danger.

 

In that sense, this is an intimate novel of connection among working men with opposing worldviews. Gideon will only succeed and survive if he can find enough allies to defend his choices and actions. It’s soon clear he’s even being betrayed within his own office. His own superior in law enforcement doesn’t even have his back. But his wife does.

 

Readers of the earlier two titles in this series (A Stranger Here Below; Nighthawk’s Wing) will not find much of the mystical and supernatural that appeared in those books, although True Burn Stoltz, finding her way out of her long depression over the loss of the couple’s child to illness, clearly relies on a related set of beliefs. Instead, the conflict in this novel foreshadows what was already erupting across the nation’s frontier at the time: ardent beliefs in independence and the sanctity of property, playing against philosophical and humanist efforts to impose a better form of civilization.

Gideon’s weaknesses, part psychological from his own mother’s murder, part physical as a residue of concussion (alas for the results of horse accidents and human beatings!), hold potential to transform into powerful incentives to action. As he prunes away the rot around him, he finds himself able to say to a stranger, “Maybe you can help me.”

 

Fergus’s writing lays out both the struggles of a new nation, and the pains of growing into determined manhood with its allegiances, regrets, and consolations. If murder and kidnapping can be halted, why not enslavement, also? The author’s meticulous historical portrayal offers a potent integrity, to ground the growth of Gideon Stoltz into a man who’s certain of the right thing to do, after all.

 

 PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Engaging Mystery from J. D. Robb, ENCORE IN DEATH

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“It’s unusual to find a crime page-turner that’s this compelling while also probing affection and loyalty, without gore or grotesque maneuvers. Motive, means, opportunity—Encore in Death is classic crime fiction at its best.”

 

Setting the Eve Dallas crime thrillers ahead in time, with a few more technological advances, doesn’t really give this homicide detective any more of an edge than today’s savvy sleuths. After all, even if test results come more quickly and communication is fine-tuned, solving a crime still comes down to getting inside the minds and emotions of potential suspects.

 

So when theatrical stars Eliza Lane and her husband Brant Fitzhugh throw an A-lister gala for patrons of their work, just as Eliza’s new Broadway show is about to open in the year 2036, it turns out that Brant’s sudden death is from cyanide, that well-known almond-scented poison. And the roster of suspects is no different than today’s would be: friends true or false, family, lovers, and competitors for the spotlight and awards.

 

But really, who could want to hurt Brant? His wife, a much edgier and sharp-tongued person, can’t imagine any reason. “Brant didn’t like conflict, and found ways to avoid it,” Eliza sums him up. Generous as an actor, a friend, a spouse, and even philanthropist, his death comes from toasting his wife with a sip from her specially prepared champagne cocktail. So who was the intended victim—husband or wife?

 

J. D. Robb’s polished and well-paced writing, honed in more than 200 novels so far, keeps the narrative on the move. Its second line of action takes place between Eve and her own husband, the wealthy Irish entrepreneur Roarke—who, whether by contagion or interest, is starting to “think like a cop” and lending a hand to Eve and her investigation. Eve spots this even before Roarke’s willing to admit he’s caught up in puzzle and how to solve it, as she outlines the need to follow the money here, and says she’ll take a look. Roarke steps right into her trap:

 

“I could do that for you while you dig down on the cast and crew. You may find it’s not the person who didn’t get the part, but a friend—as you were looking at Sylvie—a relative, a lover. Someone who’d do the deed for someone else.”

 

Roarke’s ability to quickly deep-dive into financials adds power to the investigation; his deft and determined efforts to support Eve’s work and the couple’s gentle jockeying in support of each other add charm and passion (and some lovely teasing) to the story, too.

 

As Robb lays out the plot with her quick professional skills, she paints solid marriages just as effectively. It’s unusual to find a crime page-turner that’s this compelling while also probing affection and loyalty, without gore or grotesque maneuvers. Motive, means, opportunity—Encore in Death is classic crime fiction at its best.

 

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.