MIDNIGHT FUGUE
By Reginald Hill, Harper, 368 pages, $27.75
Reginald Hill is one of the most inventive of the current crop of top British crime writers. He has tackled politics (Underworld) and race (the Joe Sixsmith series). He has tinkered with the form (Deadheads) and he has paid homage to Dickens (Recalled To Life) and Austen (The Price of Butcher's Meat).
In the process, he has kept his very long-running series with Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe from drifting into the slough of repetition that dogs so many other fine series. Hill has always been a perfectionist when it comes to style – no shoddy sex or dull meals to fill out the paragraphs – but Midnight Fugue, the 24th Pascoe and Dalziel novel, is a triumph.
Hill takes his theme not from literature but from music. This novel is structured as a fugue – a set of variations of contrapuntal voices arranged around a specific theme – and all set in a single day. Bach, composer of The Art of the Fugue (he gets a credit), couldn't have done it better.
The theme of Fugue is the fugue, a state of amnesia related to a trauma. Andy Dalziel, still recovering from his near-death in an explosion, awakes and rushes to work, muddled and having lost a day. En route to the Mid-Yorkshire office, he stops, encounters a beautiful woman who asks for his assistance with a peculiar puzzle. Her husband, a long-missing DI, may or may not be alive and living in Yorkshire. Andy agrees to assist and that leads to, among other events, a murder and a brutal attack on Shirley Novello. The story builds, just as a fugue in music builds, as the different characters each enter and add their bit to the plot. There are climaxes, crescendos and a very delicate diminuendo – and to say more is to give away a very beautifully constructed plot.
Hill's achievement here should be savoured. I've read some of his works more than a dozen times. This one is going onto my permanent shelf and I've already consumed it twice. Save it for a time when you can read it straight through, taking time to read each passage and follow each variation and, above all, don't push to the end. It's a tiny perfect trill of perfection. This is one of Hill's best novels, one of the best this year or any year.
13½
By Nevada Barr, Vanguard Press, 320 pages, $32.95
This is not an Anna Pigeon novel, but Barr's legions of fans shouldn't pass it by. This stand-alone thriller is one of Barr's best books ever and, once begun, it's hard to stop reading her harrowing story of bloody murder.
In a note at the beginning, Barr says she has had the idea of a story about a child who murders his family for several years. Her killer is 11-year-old Dylan Raines, “the Butcher Boy” who, in 1968, killed his parents, baby sister and family cat with an axe. The only survivor of the carnage was his older brother, Rich, who, seriously injured, managed to call for help. Rich stands by his little brother through a decade in a juvenile facility and then a new life in New Orleans.
But Dylan hasn't changed, not really. And as love, in the form of a gallant and lovely woman, herself brutally abused as a child, comes into his life, it appears that the old secrets and fears of the past are about to emerge and explode in her present.
Barr builds this story with her usual intelligence and knack for chilling suspense. You will figure out the “who” on this one pretty fast. It's the “why” that intrigues, and she saves that one for the very final pages.
SHERLOCK HOLMES HANDBOOK
By Christopher Redmond, Dundurn, 336 pages, $32
This is the second edition of a book that is an essential item for any serious Sherlockian. The 1993 version, assembled by Redmond, one of Canada's most renowned experts on Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle and what is known to the cognoscenti as “The Canon,” is 14 years out of date. The new edition fills in the gaps of films, DVDs and the dozens of new books on, by, starring, about and featuring all things Holmes.
