A DARKER DOMAIN
By Val McDermid, Harper, 355 pages, $31.30
Val McDermid is one author who knows exactly how to pull me into a story. In A Darker Domain, she sets the hook with just a couple of opening paragraphs that end with: "This is how it begins." From that point on, I couldn't put this book down.
It's June, 2007, when a young woman goes to the Glenrothes Police Station in Fife, Scotland, to report a missing person. The individual is a miner named Mick Prentice, and he has been gone for 24 years. Why did no one report him gone? Because it's been presumed that he was a "blackleg," a miner who, during the horrific miners strike in 1985, left his family to work as a scab. No one reported him missing because his wife and child, his neighbours and former friends, no longer cared to know anything about him.
But his daughter needs him to save her child's life, and so, after much soul-searching, she has decided to find him. But after more than two decades, he's not where he's supposed to be, where everyone believed he was. He is missing.
The case comes to Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, of the Cold Case Review Team. Technically, Prentice isn't a cold case, since from all the meagre evidence, he's alive somewhere. But Pirie is intrigued by the possibilities, and she is moved by the young mother's plight.
The real problem is that Pirie is already deeply involved in a more politically important cold case. New evidence has appeared in the 1985 abduction and murder of Catriona Maclennan Grant, only daughter of the richest man in Scotland and one of the wealthiest in the world. Catriona was beautiful and talented. She was kidnapped with her infant son and, in the course of the ransom handover, she was shot and killed. Her child disappeared and is presumed dead.
But now a clue to the case has appeared in, of all places, an abandoned villa in Tuscany. And the Grant family hires its own journalist to handle the publicity and the investigation.
McDermid carries the two cases back and forth from several different points of view, and it works beautifully. The suspense is harrowing, especially when a dead body turns up in a very surprising spot. What Pirie knows, learns and doesn't know is all carefully plotted, and while you may figure out some of the story, you won't uncover it all. This is definitely first-class McDermid, and that is very, very good.
THE REDEEMER
By Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett, Random House Canada, 457 pages, $27.95
The Redeemer is the fourth Harry Hole novel in translation from Norwegian author Jo Nesbo. and it's a tour de force. Nesbo has a plot here that is so tightly constructed and compelling that it's impossible to put the book down.
This is a serial-killer story, and one with a punch. The killer is as faceless and proficient as the Jackal in Frederick Forsythe's masterwork. The victim is killed in Oslo during a Salvation Army band performance, and, before anyone dies, some Salvation Army officers engage in some slightly sinful acts.
But just what is going on with these young people? Nesbo puts some slight touches of evil into quite normal little interchanges. All is not quite right with a pair of lovers and a couple of unhappy brothers. Nesbo is a subtle writer and the suspense is in the nuances.
As for Harry Hole, the policeman hero of the series, he's one of the best of the new breed of Scandinavian coppers. He's both professional and intuitive, and he relies on his team to uncover a trail of death moving across Western Europe.
What's clever is just how the clues are dug up in a seemingly impenetrable case. There is no connection between the killer and the victim, no weapon and, of course, no discernible motive. How Hole uncovers the links in a chain of death is what keeps the story moving, and Nesbo never lets up on the truly gripping suspense. Absolutely Nesbo's best translated into English so far, and, I expect, one of the year's best.
THE RENEGADES
By T. Jefferson Parker, Dutton, 338 pages, $29.50
