With the latest entry in his crime series set in Pizzofalcone, a precinct high atop a hill in Naples, author Maurizio de Giovanni adds another layer to the characters who have made themselves so intriguing to readers of the previous four novels in this series. With a title like Puppies, this latest Pizzofalcone mystery sounds more like a “cozy” than a noir mystery. De Giovanni, however, is clever. He draws in readers with the action here, starting with the last thoughts of a dying woman, followed by a section in which two people are talking about leaving something – not identified as human or animal – outside in an alley where it will get noticed without delay. The novel then focuses on officer Romano, a hulk who has trouble controlling his temper. As Romano leaves for work, he passes the alley with garbage cans, just as a “broken doll” starts to cry. A newborn baby has been left with the trash. By the time the police get to the scene of the baby, Romano has opened his shirt and placed the baby on his chest to warm it and help it breathe. Before long, he has been asked to give the weak baby a name to help it be “real” while in the hospital. No puppies are mentioned at all until about fifty pages into the book, by which time several plot threads and all six characters are being featured. Gradually, the reader comes to understand that “puppies” are symbolic of lives that cannot survive without help. De Giovanni has done it again.
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Fourteen-year-old Erik Wassman has been working on a graphic novel and keeping himself otherwise occupied in the summer of 1962, hoping to get past some of the problems he faces. He is a very young fourteen, just beginning to look at the world from a wider perspective, and his father has just told him it will be a “rough summer,” as his mother is dying of cancer in hospital. Hoping to make life easier for Erik, his father has arranged for him to go to the family’s lakeside summer retreat on Lake Möckeln with his older brother Henry, now twenty-two. He has also suggested that Erik invite a classmate, Edmund, whom Erik does not know well, to come to the lake with him. The summer place is only fifteen miles from home, and it will be possible for Erik to visit his mother if he needs to. Author Håkan Nesser, the winner of many prizes for his crime novels, maintains a quiet calm here as he introduces his main characters and setting, especially with Erik, and as new characters are introduced, it becomes clear that much of this novel will be concerned with Erik’s psychological growth, rather than with hard crime. Then a Kim Novak look-alike arrives , and some dark machinations lead to murder.
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Dealing simultaneously with past and present, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez appears at first to be a fairly straightforward and unpretentious murder mystery, but it is far more complex than it seems. It shifts back and forth over the course of twenty-seven years as one person who was present at the time of a murder returns to the town many years later to re-examine his memories and those of others in an effort to identify the guilty party. The murder takes place after a three-day wedding celebration, as Santiago Nasar prepares to go to the port, naively going out the back door while the two men who plan to kill him wait for him at the front. All this because the groom, Bayardo San Roman, has returned the “soiled” bride to her family on their wedding night, and Santiago is thought to be involved.
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In this finely written and often subtle literary thriller, debut author Sara Mesa focuses on an elite boarding school in rural northeast Spain. The school, Wybrany College, has been built in a man-made meadow on the road from Cardenas to the now defunct city of Vado. No signs along the road indicate any access to the property, and the school’s website does not provide an exact location for it. There are no photographs of the school or its grounds. Said to have been founded in 1943 by Andrzej Wybrany, a wealthy, exiled Polish businessman, who had been “moved by the fate of exiled orphans who had lost their parents,” the school was intended to educate and care for these orphans “with all the resources they would have enjoyed had the destinies of their families remained unaltered.” The reader soon discovers that nothing at the school is what the new teacher Isidro Bedragare expects, and the reader soon learns that even Isidro is not what the reader expects. Isidro has to admit that “my free time in the afternoon doesn’t compensate for the stress of every morning, the continual shifting between pretense and mockery, appearance and uncertainty,” with everyone speaking in code – both students and faculty. Gradually, the grim, hidden stories behind the school evolve, and as author Sara Mesa begins to show them in increasingly symbolic light, Isidro gets ready to take action.
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In his darkest and most “noir” novel yet, Massimo Carlotto continues his “Alligator” series, featuring Marco Buratti, a man haunted by the evil which consumes the society in which he tries to live. In touch with members of organized crime and its violence throughout Europe, he also understands crime on a local scale among the people he knows in his home of Padua, Italy. The local police department knows Buratti well for many reasons, and they sometimes ask him for help on their most challenging cases – some of which feature crimes within their own department and the implication that their request for help is something he must not refuse. With over thirty characters, some of them known by aliases, a complex plot which is developed in Padua, Bern, Vienna, and Munich, and two narrators giving conflicting information regarding crimes and responsibility, this is a challenging novel. The violence is fully described and sometimes shocking, and there are no people here who can be considered true heroes. Buratti occasionally gets twinges of conscience regarding deaths he has witnessed, but he is, he says, very aware of “the difference between justice and vengeance.” His own idea of justice “didn’t involve cops and courts,” especially when he and his parters were “playing multiple tables at a time.”
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