Sleuths bearing wrenches, and old wounds
By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe January 27, 2008
Blue Heaven
By D. J. Box
St. Martin's, 344 pp., $24.95
The Book of Old Houses
By Sarah Graves
Bantam, 294 pp., $22
The Fault Tree
By Louise Ure
St. Martin's, 352 pp., $24.95
The new year gets off to an auspicious start with C. J. Box's "Blue Heaven," a thriller set in ranch-country northern Idaho, where retired Los Angeles Police Department officers have found retirement nirvana. They live lavishly, isolated from their neighbors, hoping their pasts won't catch up with them.
The book opens with a pair of smart, scrappy kids - 12-year-old Annie Taylor and her brother, 10-year-old William - tracing Sand Creek, "angry and swollen with runoff," looking for a place to fish. They witness an execution-style killing. Before they can hide, the killers see them. The children race for safety while the villains try to catch them before they can talk about what they've seen. Meanwhile, retired LAPD Detective Eduardo Villatoro arrives in town, following up a lead and determined to crack a robbery-and-murder case whose solution has eluded him for more than a decade.
The ranch setting, combined with a rich, complex story, gives the novel the flavor of a Western saga. Cliffhanger scene shifts, a ticking clock, and escalating danger lend it all the trappings of a suspense novel, but with characters that make the reader care. The children's lonely mother, Monica, is a heartbreaker with a disastrous weakness for the wrong men. Crusty, struggling, solitary Jess Rawlins, with whom Annie and William find refuge, feels like a rancher version of Shane. The villains are served up with delicious nastiness, from town gossip Fiona Pritzle, who snoops through the mail before she delivers it, to a quartet of ruthless, retired police-detective bully boys.
Against a backdrop of wilderness, rich with the scent of pine and cattle, there are strong elements of classic tragedy here as well, as yearning propels all of the characters, good and bad, into mortal peril. "Blue Heaven" is my favorite kind of thriller - one with a heart.
From the opposite end of the crime-fiction spectrum comes Sarah Graves's "The Book of Old Houses," featuring small-town Maine sleuth and handyperson Jacobia "Jake" Tiptree. A Jessica Fletcher in bib overalls, Jake swings a mean sledgehammer. The book opens with her literally taking out a bathroom ("kerblooie! went the pedestal sink"). She hits a snag with the oversized bathtub, which won't fit through the door or window.
The mystery involves the recent murder of rare-book expert Horace Robotham. He was bludgeoned to death soon after Jake sent him a book she discovered lodged in the foundation of her home. The book contained the names of residents, past and present, including Jake and her family, written apparently in blood and on apparently ancient parchment. Mysteriously, the book has disappeared from Horace's home. In one of the leaps of logic that the book requires, it is patently obvious to Jake that Horace was murdered because of her book.
To enjoy this series, readers must be able to check disbelief at the door of this old house. Police procedure is nonexistent - the local police detective gives Jake carte blanche to tromp through murder scenes and sends her to interview suspects while he listens through the wall. There's plenty of slapstick, farce, and home-repair tips amid the mayhem, and between the tub sliding down the stairs, a tea party for the "propah" local ladies, and a romance gone haywire for Jake's father and her housekeeper, quite a few characters meet their bloody end. Regular series readers will be at an advantage figuring out who's going to bite the dust next. (Hint: not the repeating characters.)
For a female sleuth in greasy coveralls, there's Louise Ure's second novel, "The Fault Tree." As in her first novel, "Forcing Amaryllis," Ure sets up a wounded survivor as her protagonist. Cadence Moran was blinded when the car she was driving collided head-on with a truck. She survived; her passenger, her brother's young daughter, didn't. Eight years later, she's still wracked with guilt and grief, terrified of ever again being responsible for another human being ("I didn't want anything that relied upon me for food or water, companionship, or a job").
Set in Tucson, the novel opens with Moran working late at Walt's Auto Shop, finishing a tune-up on an old Impala. Ure gives us a fascinating insider's view of blindness as Cadence closes up shop and taps her way home, her world alive with scents and sounds. She hears a cry, and she's nearly run down by a car, which she later discovers was fleeing a nearby murder. The killers think Cadence saw them.
Cadence is fiercely independent, whip smart, and enormously appealing, and in the beginning she seems to stay one step ahead of the killers pursuing her and the cops pursuing the killers. Later, it's hard to fathom why, after a second attempt on her life, she doesn't go stay somewhere where she'll be safe.
The novel is strongest when told from Cadence's quirky viewpoint. It becomes less compelling when the narrator is Police Detective August Dupree, whose partner is your basic dumb-cop stereotype. When the author puts the reader inside the head of a villain, any potential for surprise evaporates in the hot desert air.
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