Crime fiction roundup
Magnus “Steps” Craig, the FBI tracker introduced in Spencer Kope's auspicious debut, “Collecting the Dead,” was born with a gift that guaranteed his future. He can see the “shine” left behind by serial killers, and he has used his secret talent to stop no less than 17 such monsters in the last five years. His failed efforts haunt his dreams, and tromping through darkened forests would give him the willies even if he wasn't searching for bodies. But the emotional attachment to the victims he develops keeps him going. And when he uncovers the names of young women being targeted by the prolific Sad Face, Steps becomes obsessed with preventing their killings. Fortunately, he has in Special Agent Jimmy Donovan a partner who provides the anchoring presence he needs to get the job done. He also can take a break from his visions by donning special glasses that nullify his powers. Kope, a working crime analyst, uses his experience to enliven the plot with the intricacies of profiling and detection.
Swedish crime novels in the post-“Dragon Tattoo” era have offered a full slate of grotesque sex crimes, murder, torture and other precipitous drops into the human void. But there's been nothing with the cracked intensity or wild ambition of the pseudonymous Erik Axl Sund's 800-page event, “The Crow Girl.” Arriving here six years after becoming a Swedish-language hit in Europe, the book unfolds in kaleidoscopic fashion, making obvious and surprising connections between past and present atrocities in places ranging from Stockholm to war-torn Sierra Leone. Child abuse is the main offering: fathers committing unspeakable things with underage girls, young boys getting mutilated, grown-up victims — or the split personalities they have developed to deal with the trauma — carrying out graphic acts of vengeance. The two central figures are Jeanette, an unhappily married Stockholm policewoman probing the dismemberment of a boy injected with anesthetic, and Sofia, a psychiatrist specializing in abuse victims to whom Jeanette turns for assistance. About Victoria, an abuse victim whose oral journals Sofia compulsively listens to, the less said the better. Ultimately, “The Crow Girl” — the first entry, I hasten to point out, in a trilogy — is unable to keep up with itself. But fired up by moral concerns, this book's engine never stops humming.
In “Charcoal Joe,” the 14th installment in Walter Mosley's incomparable Easy Rawlins series, it may seem like the L.A. detective is not in quite as driven a state as he is in some of the previous installments. “I had built the kind of life I wanted,” says Easy, who with his cash fallout from “Rose Gold” runs a three-man detective firm in a building he owns, has gotten his daughter Feather into a private school in a white section of L.A. and is counting on his girlfriend, Bonnie, saying yes to his marriage proposal. Hired by the feared black fixer Charcoal Joe to clear the name of his friend's son — a brainy black Stanford student arrested for the murder of two white guys — Easy quickly finds himself in a mess. His trigger-happy friend Mouse and the imposing Fearless Jones are in the picture, so you know that violence will play a key role. But Easy finds a way to rise above such circumstances — and the heartbreak of losing Bonnie to a marked-for-death African royal who needs her more than he does — and cling to his sense of decency.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
