CECILIAN VESPERS
By Anne Emery, ECW, 288 pages, $24.95
Anne Emery has already won one Arthur Ellis Award for her first Monty Collins mystery, and this one should get her on the short list for another. Cecilian Vespers is slick, smart and populated with lively characters. It's also a nicely crafted mystery.
The setting is Halifax in 1991. Criminal lawyer and blues aficionado Montague Collins's old friend Father Brennan Burke is realizing his long-held dream of an academy of church music to reintroduce the great works of the Catholic Church's past to a new generation of clergy and laypeople.
The school's first class comes from all over the world, and Father Burke is thrilled. Like many Catholics, he's not a fan of the “new” musical efforts that arose following Vatican II. He wants to reintroduce Mozart and motets, but some of the students aren't happy with his “elitist” ideas. They want to invent completely new liturgical music.
Clashes over music may seem slight as a setting for murder, but as one who lived through the years when Latin was replaced by colloquial languages and the Tantum Ergo morphed into “Eat my body, drink my blood/ And we'll all sing a song of love,” I can attest to the ferocity of many Catholics' feeling over the new rites. Not everyone adored the Singing Nun and her guitar.
With this as background, a renowned theologian is murdered in a Halifax church, just before Vespers on Saint Cecilia's day. And not just killed, but almost decapitated, and spread on the altar of an old church that is about to be demolished. There were plenty of people who disagreed with the dead man's theological positions, including high-ranking Vatican bureaucrats, but no one can believe someone would commit murder over theology. Or would they?
Monty and Father Burke face a range of suspects that includes an ex-cop from the former East Berlin police, a Vatican enforcer, a renegade priest and an angry woman who hates the changes wrought by Vatican II.
Emery's book requires her to elucidate some fairly arcane bits of church history, along with complex theological ideas. She manages this with some talky dialogue, but it doesn't drag down the essential plot, finding the motive for a heinous crime.
RED APRIL
By Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Edith Grossman, Pantheon, 271 pages, $28.95
It's hard to imagine a more riveting thriller than this English-language debut by a young Peruvian. From the opening chapter, a dry bureaucratic account of a terrifying incident, we know we are in for something very different from the run-of-the-mill mystery.
The bureaucrat is Felix Chacaltana Saldivar, associate prosecutor for the district of Huamanga and the town of Ayacucho. Saldivar is the most stolid of men, one who loves his reports and takes care with all the minute details of who said what, including selecting words that have no letter “ñ” in them, since his aging typewriter can't make that character any longer. Possibly, one day, Lima will see fit to send him a new IBM; until then, he makes do.
There is nothing in Saldivar's life to prepare him to supervise a murder investigation, particularly one with dangerous political dimensions. As the case unfolds, with bizarre clues that seem to lead only to more strange mysteries, Saldivar knows only that he has to keep moving, keep chasing the leads until he comes to the end. He will either find the solution to the mystery, or it will kill him.
Roncagliolo is working with the classic noir form here, as many other Latin American crime novelists have, but his take is original. Maybe it's the backdrop of the Senderista insurgent movement, or maybe it's the mysterious spirit of Nazca desert, but Red April ends up (after many, many original twists) in a class all its own.
THE CROSSING PLACES
By Elly Griffiths, McClelland & Stewart, 304 pages, $29.99
There are crime novels with such gripping central characters that the plot becomes secondary. The Crossing Places is one of these. Ruth Galloway, university lecturer and forensic archeologist, is one of those characters. This novel appears to be the first of a projected series, and it's an extremely promising beginning.
