On Crime

First do no harm - then kill

By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe January 25, 2009

BEAT THE REAPER
By Josh Bazell
Little, Brown, 310 pp., $24.99

FIDEL'S LAST DAYS
By Roland Merullo
Shaye Areheart, 268 pp., $23

A MATTER OF JUSTICE
By Charles Todd
Morrow, 336 pp., $24.99

A pigeon and a rat fight in the snow on a sidewalk in Manhattan, and Dr. Peter Brown pauses to watch. His mugger soon discovers that he's made a spectacularly bad choice for a victim. Dr. Brown (né Pietro Brnwa and also known as Bearclaw) is a former mafia hit man with built-in instincts he can barely control. When Brown is finished with the mugger, he rolls him over, checks his vitals, resets his dislocated elbow, throws him over his shoulder ("He's light and stinky, like a urine-logged towel"), and carries him to the hospital.

Brown, who looks like "an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman," is the narrator of Josh Bazell's debut novel, "Beat the Reaper." His take on the world is sharp, acerbic, and bitterly comic. In the hospital, Brown's brilliance, brutal efficiency, and condescension to interns reminded me of TV's Dr. Gregory House in Arnold Schwarzenegger's body with a voice borrowed from Hemingway by way of Alexander Portnoy.

Brown is trying to keep the eponymous Reaper from catching up with him and his patients. When a cancer patient threatens to give away Brown's whereabouts to former associates who'd like to see him dead, Brown doesn't know whether to kill the guy or cure him.

Scenes from Brown's past explain how he has turned into this fascinating and horrifying creature. The footnotes are hilarious insider riffs on medical arcana. Pay attention to the one on the fibula. (Later there will be a test.)

The violence, profanity, vulgar humor, and sheer audacity of this novel won't be for everyone, and there were times when the vivid descriptions had me holding it at arm's length and holding my nose. But I found Bazell's original voice, the humanity of his main character, and the novel's unique combination of heartbreak and hilarity irresistible. This is one of the most original and entertaining novels I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Massachusetts author Roland Merullo's "Fidel's Last Days" is a maze of espionage and counterespionage, with Carolina Anzar Perez playing the "Femme Nikita" role as the woman trained to do whatever it takes to carry out missions whose purposes are secret, even to her. A former CIA agent, she has spent the last four years proving herself, putting her considerable resources (she's multilingual, knock-down-dead gorgeous, a brilliant actress, a sharpshooter, a street fighter) to work for a shadowy organization, White Orchid. At last, she's been assigned a key role in the Havana Project. Its goal, she believes, is to assassinate Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, in Cuba, Carlos Gutierrez, a physician who is the government minister of health, prepares to play his part, too.

As the niece of Roberto Anzar, one of Miami's powerful Cuban-born, anti-Castro expatriates, Carolina understands how her countrymen have demonized Castro as "the Evil One," blaming him for "everything from their lost haciendas to the ear infections of their children." The grim reality of the brutal regime is revealed by Ernesto Salvador, a Cuban living in Havana who gets rounded up by government goons and taken to Montefiore Prison, a.k.a. the Torture House, where he meets the legendary Olochon ("the Dentist"), head of Cuba's dreaded D-7 secret police.

This riveting read has no Teflon heroes who bounce back after being knocked around. There's no literary scrim to protect the reader from the smell, feel, and taste of fear and violence as these characters face their ultimate test in a world rife with moral ambiguities. The open-ended finish seems just right and oddly satisfying.

Charles Todd's "A Matter of Justice" is a worthy new entry by the mother-son team in the British-based Inspector Ian Rutledge series. This time, Rutledge is called to an estate in the Somerset town of Cambury to investigate the murder of Harold Quarles, a wealthy financial adviser. Quarles was bashed in the head. Someone tethered "thickly feathered wings" outspread as if in flight to his back and then hoisted his body in an open-work cage to the rafters of his barn. Gazing up in horror, Rutledge is immediately reminded of white feathers British women handed out during the war to brand as cowards men they felt should have joined the armed forces.

Cambury's Inspector Padgett, who called Scotland Yard to send an investigator, had little use for the victim ("but he was a hard man to like"). There's no shortage of suspects. As Padgett comments, "If we find the murderer, half the village will be up in arms to protect him. Or her." The investigation takes Rutledge to Quarles's home, where his estranged wife sheds no tears, and to London to find his sketchy former business partner.

Rutledge is still recovering from psychological scars and oppressive guilt from the World War I battlefield. He's plagued by the belief that he didn't do enough to save men who put their ultimate faith in him. Rutledge's sidekick is the ever-present Hamish, the voice of one of the men he couldn't save, and who now hectors and directs from inside his head.

This is a thick, complex, British-style police procedural that explores the intersection of justice and vengeance served up cold. It's especially recommended for readers who relish P. D. James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries.