Author Daniel Silva plays a game with the reader here, unlike anything I have noticed in his past novels. Here, art restorer Gabriel Allon changes from the Allon we have known in the past, becoming quite a different person. Instead of maintaining his honesty and sense of honor, in which he has always prided himself, he joins the large group of art fraudsters and their financiers throughout the western world and begins to create fraudulent “masterpieces” by the “greatest painters” of the western world. He becomes almost totally dissociated from his wife and children in Venice and leads a separate life of crime, surrounded by some of his own fraudulent “masterpieces” which appear throughout Europe and New York. He is so effective at creating these that he can produce one new “old masterpiece” painting every three or four days – each one so “authentic,” even in the craquelure – the little cracks in the paint and varnish which ancient paintings have – that no one can tell that they are newly created. The extent of the unregulated art fraud business comes into full play here, as Allon works among the crooks.
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In one of the most unusual international novels to be released this year, Korean author Kwon Yeo-sun, reports a murder, its possible motives, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding this death. The facts of the death are far less important to the author and, ultimately, the reader, however, than the inner lives of the main characters themselves, and how and why they view as they do the death of a beautiful girl in her late teens. Three characters narrate the story of Kim Hae-on, the innocent school-age victim of a bloody murder sixteen years ago, a crime that has never brought resolution to the main characters or a conclusion. As a result, this is the story of a murder, but it is not a classic “murder mystery.” Instead, it intensely examines episodes from the lives of the main characters over the sixteen years since Hae-on’s death, leaving the reader to draw conclusions.
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May God Forgive, Alan Parks’s fifth novel in his Tartan noir series featuring Glasgow detective Harry McCoy, has three grisly deaths for McCoy to look into in the first fifty pages, and twenty characters are also involved. McCoy who has just been released from a month’s stay in hospital for a bleeding ulcer, caused by his drinking, smoking, and hard living. As he investigates these and other crimes going forward, the characters increase, the complex involvements of various gangs create issues, and McCoy spends more time investigating on his own than he does as a representative of the police. Making the novel more personal, father-son relationships become an issue, including for McCoy. The action ultimately features a character list of about 40 characters, competing criminal gangs, and some vivid details of violence, torture, mutilation, and maiming, making this novel a stomach-churning experience in which characters driven by their own senses of “justice” have more sway on all levels than the local police.
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In the fifth installment of the Wyndham and Banerjee mysteries, set in 1923, author Abir Mukherjee once again recreates the complex issues of colonialism in India after World War I, laying the groundwork for the tensions, the hostility among those of competing religious views, and the overriding fear that an all-out religious war might break out at any moment. The Hindus, Muslims, devotees of Mahatma Gandhi, and the British are all committed to keeping India free from tyranny, but each wants his own version of “freedom,” and no one agrees with anyone else. Author Abir Mukherjee is able to convey this confusion and frustration among all those of influence by using two very different characters. Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee, often known as “Surrender Not” Banerjee for his attitudes and the pun on his name – is a Hindu from Calcutta who is working with Sam Wyndham of the British Imperial Police Force, to try to bring peace and avoid anarchy as a result of all the competing social and religious interests. Then the bombings and fires begin. Full of action, a wide variety of characters, complex relationships, and a history of India and the forces that made it what it is today, this book presents all the details.
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John Banville, writing here under his own name, has returned to writing mystery stories featuring the often unlovable Dublin police pathologist, Quirke, and he clearly enjoys the freedom of his mystery writing. This novel opens in London, where an Irishman who “liked killing people” is hired to kill a mother who plans to leave her son out of her will. Grabbing her bag “to make it look like garden snatch job done by some panicky kid,” he does the job and escapes. The second setting is in Donostia, Spain, where Quirke, a recently married pathologist for the Dublin police, and his wife Evelyn, a psychiatrist, are on holiday. In Spain, Quirke twice sees an Irish woman from a distance and believes he has seen her before, dismissing, temporarily, the idea that a physician friend of his daughter Phoebe in Dublin, missing and presumed dead, might actually be the person he has seen. Creating many darkly ironic scenes and descriptions, Banville creates his characters, using them to present plot elements which many other “literary” authors would be unable to include in a mystery without being accused of “sensationalism.” APRIL IIN SPAIN is a coherent, tense, and wide-ranging mystery, written with drama and flair, with no subject considered off-limits.
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