Going Global: To Florence with Marco Vichi, DEATH IN SARDINIA; to Dublin with Louise Phillips, RED RIBBONS

Reading darker crime fiction lately? Here are two authors whose mysteries probe very different kinds of evil -- where each redeems the story in a very different way.

Louise Phillips is a significant award winner in Ireland, and Hachette Ireland recently brought her series to the United States. I started with RED RIBBONS, a forensic investigation featuring Dr. Kate Pearson -- she's a criminal profiler in Dublin, where there's plenty of skepticism about her craft and skills among the usual police investigative teams. But the discovery of a murdered child, carefully posed in her grave in ways that must have meaning to the murderer (why the braids and red ribbon? why the prayerful position), pulls Kate into a race-the-clock partnership with Detective Inspector O'Connor and his team. It's clear the killer's likely to strike again, and also pretty obvious that the timing of the next murder may be a lot faster than the investigation can move.

Phillips is deft and sure with pace, suspense, and twists. She lays out two other important narratives: one, the mind of the killer -- at least as skillful as the investigators, and in the lead on this perverse dance; and the other, the confusion of Ellie Brady a woman who's spent years in a psychiatric hospital, numbed with medication, after declaring she'd killed her own daughter. As the strands pull closer to each other, the risk for the probing profiler takes on menace toward her and her family.

RED RIBBONS could take place in most locations where urban landscape meets preserved wilder lands, and the main "feel" of Ireland here is the structure of police responsibilities, as well as a throbbing sense of the power of religious imagery. Even when the crime is solved, there's no recovery from damage done. But (unlike Stuart Neville's books, for instance) it's not especially steeped in Irish history.

In that sense, it's very different from Marco Vichi's series.

DEATH IN SARDINIA is the third in Vichi's Inspector Bordelli series, which is gradually making its way here via release in English in the UK, then in America, thanks to Pegasus Crime - but the series is originally in Italian. This title opens in the December holiday season of 1965, just 20 years from the end of World War II. Through Bordelli, a lonely bachelor unable to quite kick the cigarette habit, or the habit of socializing with a former prostitute, the war is an unforgettable part of his own life. His city of Florence is tinged with the sorrow, loss, and anger that the war's left behind. And although the crime he's investigating -- the murder of a loan shark who seems to have few pleasant qualities -- is clearly personal and related to some recent pressure on a victim-turned-killer, Bordelli keeps coming across threads that lead back to the war: a scandalous photo from a concentration camp, for instance.

Meanwhile he's missing one of his officers, the young police office Piras, who's recovering from a gunshot wound at his parents' home in Sardinia. When Piras realizes that a death in the village community is also murder, for Inspector Bordelli there is significant relief in being able to help the younger man's investigation move quickly forward.

The pace and the dolor of midlife frustrations for Inspector Bordelli echo Henning Mankell's Wallender series -- but with some lovely interludes, like the visits Bordelli pays to the hospital room of a dying colleague, to play cards with the frail Baragli and pretend death's not approaching, while also discussing the case:

"It was probably one of his debtors that did it," Baragli muttered with a wheezy voice.

"That's exactly where I'll begin."

"You've got your work cut out for you, if there are as many as you say."

... "I also found some photographs of a very young girl hidden behind a picture frame on the wall. I've got some men looking for her," said Bordelli, to let him feel part of the investigation. And indeed the sergeant seemed pleased.

Even this small sample reveals the slightly stilted language of the translation, which I suspect reflects partly the original and partly the deliberately slow uncovering of the everyday evils that Bordelli is confronting. There were moments when I felt like I was reading a Russian novel -- one memorable paragraph lasted for two pages! -- but the warmth with which Vichi's protagonists interact with their colleagues and friends kept me reading. It's good to savor this kind of portrait of teamwork and to see the author letting it gently reflect the bonds that soldiers in a long war also form.

I enjoyed DEATH IN SARDINIA, and I'll look for more Vichi crime fiction ... to read when I can make time to linger with the language and characters. Winter turned out to be a good time to read this one.

Florentine Detective Mystery: Magdalen Nabb Excels With THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE

THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE is the final Marshal Guarnaccia investigation that Soho Crime expects to publish; author Magdalen Nabb died in 2007. It is one of the most provocative and unusual mysteries I've read this year, and I highly recommend it for any collection of international mysteries, detective series, and crime fiction.

That said, brace yourself for a reading experience that takes you inside the mind of an aging, humble, and insecure detective who knows he is easily confused and, in his wife's absence, handicapped by his inability to cope with simple tasks like making sure he has enough to eat, or laundering his clothes, or -- most essential for an investigator of serial murder -- discharging the disturbing images from his work, in order to sleep. In fact, Marshal Guarnaccia is plagued by nightmares and the sense of having half seen a significant clue or connection. And when he is forced to stay in Florence over the Christmas holidays, while his wife Teresa and his sons go to Sicily for the annual visit with both his and her relatives there, the Marshal's insecurities and night disturbances mount up in proportion to the twisted psychology of the suspects around him. And then, of course, there are the twists and manipulations of the politically prominent detective leading the task force to which he's been assigned.

That assignment, to a group trying to round up evidence to imprison the main suspect in a decades-long series of murders of couples in their cars after lovemaking, frightens the Marshal with its irrationality and uncertainties. Why should he be given standing on a high-profile case? As he tells Teresa, "I've never been on an important case. The only case I ever solved was when that poor creature Cipolla shot that Englishman. And he only did it by accident and after that he was just hanging around waiting for me to arrest him."

What the Marshal does have, though, is both integrity and an enormous sense of responsibility, especially to young men suffering injustice. Even as he struggles to catch up with reading and digesting the copious files of the case against the Suspect -- files that seem to have been edited to enforce a particular conclusion -- he's trying to help a young friend who's inherited a piece of art that may be a forgery.  And then the contortions of the task force, and the probability of injustice, take the Marshal exactly where he knows he shouldn't go: into re-investigating the murder cases, going to the scenes himself, and questioning some of the witnesses and possible other suspects.

What Nabb does that feels particularly disturbing is spin the Marshal's thoughts and efforts within his personal crisis of faith in himself, his aging thought processes, his "man-lost-without-his-wife" handicaps -- and take the reader into the mists of confusion and fear. And all this in Florence, Italy, far from the despair-filled settings of Scandinavian noir!

THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE is not noir, anyway; hope, love, and friendship glimmer in it unexpectedly and sweetly, like carefully shielded candles in a storm. By the end of this satisfyingly thick and rich mystery, I recognized that I was also grieving: for the loss of Nabb, and of her struggling yet persistent and committed and deeply humane Marshal Guarnaccia.

A note for those who follow European crime: This book is indeed inspired by seven double homicides in the area around Florence from 1968 to 1985. What Nabb does with that inspiration, however, is intended as fiction -- fiction well worth reading.

And here are the preceding Marshal Guarnaccia titles , from oldest to newest (not necessary to read the first, but you may want to gather them later):

Death of a Dutchman

Death of an Englishman

Death in Springtime
Death in Autumn
The Marshal and the Murderer
The Marshal and the Madwoman
The Marshal's Own Case
The Marshal Makes His Report
The Marshal at the Villa Torrini
Some Bitter Taste
Property of Blood
The Innocent