A QUIET FLAME
By Philip Kerr, Putnam, 389 pages, $33.50
There are few authors who can set a scene like Philip Kerr. He's a master at conjuring the place and the time. That talent, and his ability to create unforgettable and unusual characters (I loved the smart, killer office building in The Grid ) make his novels a pleasure to read.
And in all his fine books, no character has ever held a reader like policeman Bernie Gunther, unwilling participant in and witness to the rise and destruction of Nazi Germany. Bernie's adventures were supposed to be a trilogy and end with the end of the Second World War, but Kerr brought him back for a fourth book, and now for a fifth.
It's 1950 and Bernie, a fugitive wanted for war crimes, arrives in Buenos Aires. Argentina has no problem providing sanctuary for Germans of all stripes. There are thousands of Jews who escaped from pogroms and Hitler and, along with Bernie Gunther, there's Adolf Eichmann. Under the not-so-benign dictatorship of Juan Peron, the hunted can relax, drink some coffee, enjoy the breeze.
But Bernie Gunther is a policeman, a homicide cop, and it appears that he has an international reputation. The head of the Argentine secret police is an admirer, and says Gunther is the man who turned him from the law and into policing.
When a young girl is killed and mutilated, he summons Gunther to headquarters. The death is remarkably similar to a case Bernie failed to solve. It appears that a serial killer from Berlin is at work in BA, and another young girl, the daughter of a wealthy banker, is missing. Bernie's past, never far behind him and always in his thoughts, is about to catch him again.
Once again, Kerr – who loves the unusual – takes readers right into the sounds and smells of Peron's Argentina, a country on the cusp, full of promise. Who else could describe a desk “big as a trebuchet”? Or make Juan Peron appealing? All that and a riveting plot make this book one not to miss.
STILL LIFE
By Joy Fielding, Doubleday, Canada, 369 pages, $29.95
Joy Fielding has made a solid career writing about smart, successful women who wake up one day and find their lives torn apart. Still Life is the latest and most ambitious book she has done, primarily because she borrows a plot line from the master of terror, Cornell Woolrich. It's about a woman who can hear her murderer planning to kill her, but who cannot move or speak.
We first meet Casey Marshall at lunch with her two best friends. It's a typical ladies' lunch: salad, wine and chat. After lunch, Casey heads to the parking garage. It's there that her life as she knows it ends when she's mowed down by a car. When she next opens her eyes, she sees nothing. She can hear but not speak or move. She learns that she's in a deep coma from a brain injury. She is on life support and no one knows when or if she'll recover. More important, a policeman believes that her “accident” was, in fact, an attempted murder.
Fielding takes this plot line as far as it can go without veering into the ugly realities of books like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Casey remains a Sleeping Beauty, perfectly arrayed and groomed). Readers will figure out the motive quickly (in fact, Fielding gives it away early on), but there's still a lot of suspense as Casey, locked in her own body, works to reach out to someone who can save her.
BLOOD MOON
By Garry Disher, Soho Press, 336 pages, $24 U.S.
This is the fifth novel in a series set on Australia's Mornington Peninsula, featuring the team of Inspector Hal Challis and Sergeant Ellen Destry. I haven't read the other four, but on the strength of this one, I plan to search them out at the earliest opportunity. Disher is a solid crime writer, from the old school, the one where character and psychology drive the narrative and there's no need to insert gobbets of gore to fill in the holes in the plot.
Ludmilla Wishart is an abused woman, no doubt about it. Her husband, Adrian, measures everything from the fat on her body to the water in her shower. He times her phone calls, snoops into her purse and computer, follows her to appointments. Then there's also the occasional punch, for which he's always deeply apologetic afterward.
