Four New Crime Novels - The New York Times
Murder is a shock to anyone’s system, but especially so for Molly Gray, the titular character of Nita Prose’s endearing debut, THE MAID (Ballantine, 304 pp., $27). Molly, who revels in her job at the Regency Grand Hotel, where she transforms guests’ chaos into sparkling clean rooms, is still reeling from the death of her grandmother — guardian, longtime protector and buffer against a cruel neurotypical world.
So the corpse in the fancy suite comes as a surprise. Or does it? The dead man is one Charles Black, who racked up enemies (and ex-wives) through a mixture of wealth, insouciance and cruelty. The list of suspects could be long, but Molly’s demeanor — literal, awkward, candid except when she isn’t — causes the cops to gaze at her and only her.
Prose (a pseudonym for the Canadian book publishing executive Nita Pronovost) threads a steady needle with the intricate plotting, the locked-room elements of the mystery and especially Molly’s character. The reader comes to understand Molly’s worldview, and to sympathize with her longing to be accepted — a quest that gives “The Maid” real emotional heft.
When I think of Aurel Timescu, the diplomat protagonist of Jean-Christophe Rufin’s engaging THE HANGED MAN OF CONAKRY (Europa, 203 pp., paper, $16.99), he’s seated at the piano in a hotel bar, waiting for Jocelyn Mayères, the sister of a man whose death he’s compelled to investigate even though he has no real jurisdiction to do so. The Romanian-born Frenchman has a past as a piano bar man, and almost without thinking, he begins to play Schumann, then Shostakovich, then some salsa music, before the sister taps him on the shoulder, startling him out of his reverie.
Why is this scene important? Because Aurel’s piano skills will prove vital in solving the murder of the hanged man. (All I will say about that is that one should be careful to note exactly which fingers are on which keys.) It’s also a testament to his less than orthodox approach to investigating crimes. “Let’s just say I do my own thinking and try to find out useful things,” he tells Jocelyn.
Rufin, a prizewinning novelist, appears to draw on his own diplomatic past in depicting the dislocation and isolation Aurel feels being posted to Guinea, so far away from home. The translation by Alison Anderson captures the diplomat’s quirky character and gallant affect, as well as a welcome sense of surprise — especially when pianos are involved.
Joanne Harris’s previous novels set at the tweedy British boarding school St. Oswald’s, “Gentlemen and Players” and “Different Class,” embodied the spirit of a fierce chess match. The icy rage and ruthless revenge that animated both books is turned up even higher in A NARROW DOOR (Pegasus Crime, 448 pp., $26.95), in which St. Oswald’s, long a boys-only domain, is dragged into the current century with the appointment of its first headmistress in its 500-year-old existence.
To the chagrin of the elderly Latin master Roy Straitley, Rebecca Buckfast’s arrival not only portends change, it leads to the excavation of secrets from St. Oswald’s depths — namely, the literal unearthing of a long-buried body. As Harris reveals with carefully parceled-out suspense, this discovery goes to the very core of “La Buckfast,” who tells Straitley her story, from fearful childhood to damaged adulthood to steel-trap middle age.
“I often find that men like you underestimate women like me,” she tells him candidly. “You think … that we must hate men for the way they have excluded women from their boys’ clubs, holding them back, abusing them, exploiting them, for centuries. Well, yes, you may have a point.”
Readers will learn the dead person’s identity, but the novel’s most shocking revelations have to do with the loss of one woman’s agency and the means, however terrible, even monstrous, through which she can reclaim it.
Darby Kane deserves credit for dispensing with anything resembling a slow burn in THE REPLACEMENT WIFE (Morrow, 404 pp., paper, $16.99). Because when your main character suspects her brother-in-law is a multiple murderer, why dole out that hunch over hundreds of pages when it could be present from the first few sentences? Instead, Elisa Wright’s challenge is to get someone — anyone — in her family to believe her.
She has good reason to be suspicious. Josh, that brother-in-law, was once engaged to Elisa’s best friend, who subsequently vanished. Before that, his wife died in an accident. Now that Josh has a new girlfriend who seems to be behaving oddly, Elisa doesn’t know what to do or where to turn for help — certainly not to her husband, who is devoted to his brother. Sitting across from Josh at the dinner table one night, “she couldn’t shake the now familiar anxious churning. With every forkful of food, every joke, every smile he gifted them, the word murderer flashed in her mind.”
There is a rollicking, almost absurdist tone to Kane’s writing that kept me engaged, even as the mounting plot twists grew more preposterous by the chapter. Finally, after several doses of sociopathy, more than a little gaslighting and arguments galore, nearly all of Elisa’s suspicions are confirmed in the worst possible way.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/books/review/new-crime-novels.html
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