Dreams of Justice

by Dick Adler

  WRONGFUL DEATH, by Baine Kerr (Lisa Drew/Scribner)

  Can a commercial work of crime fiction carry the weight not only of medical malpractice and legal gymnastics but also the moral quagmire of Bosnian war crimes? Baine Kerr makes believers of us all as he moves his hero—a railroad lawyer named Elliot Stone—home to Boulder, Colorado after two years of working with the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Stone wants to be a federal judge, but he lets himself get talked into being appointed conservator in a case involving a man severely brain-damaged in a train accident by his friend and Bosnian colleague Dr. Hans Leitner—an expert medical witness known as “Dr. God” because of his skill in swaying juries.

  When the brain-damaged man is charged with attacking his wife and putting her into an irreversible coma, Stone and his beautiful, sharply-rendered lady friend—a Dutch/Indonesian scientist named Quierin—join with the comatose woman’s determined daughter in a complicated but vastly entertaining court battle against the dangerously sanctimonious Dr. Leitner and a team of legal heavyweights. Kerr’s talents positively gleam here as he has Stone use what he learned in Bosnia to expose a particularly vile act of homegrown evil.

  HELL TO PAY, By George P. Pelecanos (Little, Brown)

  A critic once called George Pelecanos “the Zola of Washington, D.C.,” because of the way he deliberately peoples his excellent crime novels with the low and the powerless. I’d amend that description to “the Seurat of Washington, D.C.,” because like the great pointillist painter he piles on tiny details of ordinary working lives until they glow with an inner light.

  “Soon the colors would change in Rock Creek Park. And then would come those weeks near Thanksgiving, when the weather turned for real and the leaves were still coming down off the trees. Strange had his own name for it: Deep Fall. It was his favorite time of the year in D.C.”

  That’s Derek Strange, an African American private detective in his 50s, going about his business in Pelecanos’s second book in his trenchant new series. What links Strange to the sons and grandsons of Greek and Italian immigrants who have inhabited his previous books are the same common interests and ways of making their days more bearable: work, sports, drink, sex and especially the throb of popular music which soundtracks their lives. Strange has been singing along to Teddy Pendergrass’s “Wake Up Everybody” as he drives past Rock Creek Park; he’ll do the same to an old Al Green tape on his way home from coaching a Pee Wee football team a few pages later. And a Commodores instrumental jam will be playing near the book’s end as Strange’s partner, a disgraced ex-cop named Terry Quinn, fights a vicious pimp called Worldwide Wilson to avenge a girl’s death.

  “Hell To Pay” is set in the decidedly non-tourist parts of Washington, D.C.—neighborhoods where so many young black children die regularly from drugs and guns that selling T-shirts with their pictures printed on them at their wakes and funerals has become a part of the local economy. First introduced in “Right As Rain,” Strange is a rich and complex character, not always easy to understand but finally hard to resist. His addictions to booze and furtive sex threaten his chance at a promising relationship—not in a melodramatic way but with the natural inevitability of old habits that are hard to break.

  Like Pelecanos himself, his characters have job resumes that include unglamorous entries like short order cook, bartender, shoe salesman, record store employee. The cases that Derek Strange works on here are also deceptively low key: he investigates a suspiciously slick young man who wants to marry his friend’s daughter, and searches for the dazed and demented trio of young killers who live on fast food and who ended the life of his nine-year-old star quarterback for the most chillingly banal of reasons. But all around these commonplace details—and largely because of them—shines that unmistakable light of true art.

  HARD REVOLUTION, by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)

  Reviewers of George Pelecanos’s terrific crime novels have compared him to Zola and Balzac. I’d like to add, at the risk of appearing pretentious (which has never stopped me before) another major French novelist - Proust. The search through past memories propels and colors all of Pelecanos’s stories; people who work at Greek-owned diners are the glue holding several worlds together; the flashy or reliably sturdy cars that the good guys and the hoodlums drive in this new book are earlier versions of the ones they’ll live and die in down through the years; the popular music they batter and soothe their souls with have lasting echoes; the sports stars they worship are equally eternal and interchangeable.

  As in Proust, the characters move on and offstage with the random predictability of a clever cuckoo clock: Nick Stefanos, a major player in several Pelecanos books, stumbles on the scene briefly in his latest; and a baby called Granville Oliver, helped by a young, still idealistic cop named Derek Strange, will grow up to be the fascinating heavy of another novel.

  Readers of the last three Pelecanos books, “Soul Circus,” “Hell to Pay” and “Right As Rain” —the ones that finally pushed him into the arena of fame and fortune he has always deserved—will recognize Strange as the 50ish black private detective who tries to save young boys by teaching them to play football, but who can’t always resist his own temptations. Pelecanos takes a big chance by making his new book a prequel to those modern outings: he shows us Derek first in 1959, a 12-year-old boy learning to live within the law and the racial tensions of the time; and then nine years later, as a rookie cop whose first major test becomes the riots that explode through Washington’s black neighborhoods after Martin Luther King is killed. But any chance that these earlier versions of the Derek we’ve already come to know will turn out to be mere psychological conjuring tricks is quickly blown away by the author’s most important talent: the ability to put us into a character’s skin and make everything about him understandable.

  “Hard Revolution” is packed with many such revealed souls: from Derek’s heartbreakingly fragile older brother, Dennis, to a hateful but instantly recognizable trio of white hoodlums whose determination to kill and die is a part of their DNA. Written in a clean, chiseled prose style that strips away sentimentality yet still makes you weep for the lives lost and wasted, it’s a major structure on our country’s highway of history.

  WESTERFIELD’S CHAIN, by Jack Clark (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur)

  “Westerfield’s Chain,” a first novel by a Chicago cab driver who writes a column for the Reader, is a pure delight for many reasons, not the least of which is the way Jack Clark both celebrates and rings a few changes on the familiar private eye script. Nick Acropolis isn’t even Greek; his sailor father once visited Athens and changed the family name. And Nick is an ex-cop forced into the private sector when his former partner decided to rob a bank while Nick was waiting in line to cash his paycheck. Now he works mostly for a lawyer who defends other fired cops—one of whom, a slick article called Tracy Grace, is accused of shooting up a drugstore employee’s car after a traffic accident.

  Another wellspring of the book’s pleasure is its palpable nostalgia for the old West Side, which Acropolis remembers as an urban paradise. As his investigation turns into a search for a wealthy pharmacist who owns a chain of rundown drugstores, including one on Madison where “thirty years of arson, neglect and civil insurrection had taken their toll,” Nick makes us mourn the death of many people’s memories and aspirations. The missing drugstore magnate’s wife is, like Nick, a former Austin High student, and when he mentions the Green Grill luncheonette across from the school, she invites him to lunch at a similar place in Wilmette where she has a phosphate with her hamburger and he has a malted. It’s a totally honest moment, based on emotions that are wide if not particularly deep—the kind that most of us have but feel unsure of airing because they might be seen as frivolous.

  “Westerfield’s Chain” also features a massive Public Aid scam that conjurs up a host of recent civic scandals. (One old lady, asked by Nick if she ever got the hot water bottle that the pharmacy billed the state fo
r in her name, answers plaintively, “I wish I had a hot water bottle…”) There’s a memorable moment like that on virtually every page, and I dearly hope that Clark is working on his second Acropolis outing in between well-tipped sessions of flying in his taxi…

  THE WALKAWAY, by Scott Phillips (Ballantine)

  If you read Scott Phillips’s absolutely terrific first novel, “The Ice Harvest,” one of the best mysteries of 2000, you’ll remember Gunther Fahnstiel as the cop in the house trailer at the end of the book, the one who gets two serious surprises on Christmas morning, 1979. “The Walkaway” stands on its own legs as a complete work of art, but it’s also a bit like Monet’s paintings of haystacks: knowing one gives the others an extra depth of color and meaning.

  Although “The Walkaway” has a short preface set a few days after “The Ice Harvest” ends, most of it takes place 10 years later, as Gunther—sliding into quiet dementia—walks away from the Wichita, Kansas rest home where he’s been living and stirs up a storm of emotions and memories among his family and friends. But it’s not quite a sequel to the first book, because several scenes take place in 1952, when a morally corrupt soldier named Wayne Ogden returns to Wichita to poison several lives and plant the seeds of future evil.

  What keeps this all from sinking into artifice, confusion or pretense is Phillips’s awesome ability to balance the darkest of noir material—Fahnsteil and his lover, Sally Ogden, the soldier’s abandoned wife, run a working-class brothel in a local quarry; the fields around Wichita seem to be full of murder victims; everyone has at least one illegitimate child—with moments of absurdist humor and, most important of all, the sweet sadness of vanished midwestern America. “I’d sure love to live in a house again, he thought as he stood there waiting for the light on the oven door to go off,” Phillips writes after Gunther breaks into a house owned by Sally’s daughter and heats up some frozen pizza rolls. “He’d spent the twenty-two years between his third and fourth marriages living in bachelor apartments and efficiency studios, sad dark rooms with Murphy beds and hot plate kitchens he never used.” This scene makes a perfect bookend with a later one, where Gunther, who has trouble remembering almost anything about the present, passes a cemetery where a former colleague is buried: “On reflection he could think of four other cops and two of their wives who were buried there, and off the top of his head he found that he could name seven local cemeteries and their street addresses, and at least two or three people he knew buried in each.” Fahnstiel, who we first met almost as a convenient afterthought in “The Ice Harvest,” has by the end of “The Walkaway” become a part of our own past lives—and a link from wherever we live now to the harsh but homelike fields of Kansas.

  SINCE THE LAYOFFS, by Iain Levison (Soho)

  Next time you’re in a 24-hour convenience store, stocking up on beef jerky, take a good look at the guy behind the counter. Could he be a former loading dock foreman at the local tractor parts factory which just shut its doors? How about a gifted amateur hit man? How about both?

  Mysteries about people being forced to change their line of work by bad economic conditions range from Harold Adams’s wonderful Carl Wilcox series set in 1930s South Dakota to Donald Westlake’s eerily prescient “The Ax,” a 1997 story about a laid-off executive who murders the competition for a job in the paper industry. Iain Levison, who did his basic research with the 42 jobs he held in 10 years after college and wrote about last year in his non-fiction book “A Working Stiff’s Manifesto,” now joins this subgenre with a novel that manages to be exciting, funny, poignant and sociologically important—all in 176 pages.

  Jake Skowran has lost much more than his job since the tractor parts plant shut down in the unnamed Michigan city where he has lived since birth. His girlfriend, Kelly, has split with a new car salesman for Ypsilanti; his 1997 Dodge Viper has been downsized to a rusty 1980 Honda Civic; his furniture is gone; his cable has been turned off; and he owes his bookmaker Ken Gardocki $4200 for suicidal bets on Canadian football.

  So when Gardocki offers him five grand to kill his wife—an ex-stripper who is having an affair with an airline pilot—Skowran’s first thought isn’t a moral one or even a practical “Could I do it?” He thinks about that extra $800: “I hadn’t seen that much money in nine months. I could go to a bar and pay my tab with cash. I could buy milk and bread and make sandwiches and buy real cheddar instead of that government crap…”

  Jake takes the job, and while he’s waiting to do the dirty deed (the first of several, as it turns out) another employment offer lands in his lap. His best friend Tommy, manager of a Gas ‘n’ Go convenience store, needs somebody to take over the night shift, at $6 an hour. Jake can’t say no without a good excuse, and the truth is he actually likes the idea.

  “This, I realize, is something that I have missed about working,” says Jake as he surveys his midnight empire of candy bars and canned drinks, in a moving and beautifully-crafted passage that could be the book’s coda. “I was good at managing the loading dock… And here, things are no different. I want things in my workplace to be right. Working for the man has nothing to with it… Me and the guys I worked with weren’t there for them, or even for our paychecks. We were there for ourselves, for the knowledge that we could work as a team and get things accomplished. And that was the worst part of getting laid off, the sudden realization that the team was a mirage…”

  BETRAYED, by Brendan DuBois (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur)

  The nagging doubt that our government has never really done everything in its power to discover the final fate of hundreds of Vietnam MIAs explodes into a dark and totally credible cloud of fear and anger in Brendan DuBois’ powerful and heartbreaking new thriller.

  DuBois creates a striking scenario: a group of Vietnam MIA’s are secretly shipped in the 1970s to the Soviet Union, where they are grilled by intelligence agents for over 20 years. Then, when the USSR implodes, an even stranger shift occurs, and one man—Capt. Roy Harper, a bomber pilot shot down in 1972—makes it back home to Berwick, Maine, where he begins to tell his younger brother, Jason, a mildly underachieving local newspaper editor, a fantastic story. But Roy is being pursued by two heavily armed Russian mercenaries, who rudely interrupt his narrative and scare the hell out of Jason’s harder-headed wife, Patty.

  Jason goes off with his idolized big brother to confront a retired Washington hotshot who supposedly can prove Roy’s story, while Patty—who has serious doubts about Roy’s identity, or at least his motives—reluctantly goes into hiding with their six-year-old son.

  DuBois has a gift for taking stock thriller characters—the slick statesman in secret thrall of kinky sex; the hired killer whose energy, imagination and resources are virtually boundless—and surprising us with new insights into their behavior. As the Harper brothers try to get the real story of what happened to Roy and his fellow MIA’s out to the world, anyone who lived through the Vietnam era or grew up in its shadow should respond to “Betrayed” and its deep emotional roots.

  BLACK MAPS, by Peter Spiegelman (Knopf)

  There are plenty of things to admire in Peter Spiegelman’s debut thriller: the skill with which he quickly makes exciting sense of the crime of international money-laundering, for one, and why it’s so hard to uncover and prove. But my favorite is the way he has of doling out the backstory—the reasons why John March, once a happily-married cop in a small town in upstate New York, is now a gloomy private detective working for a major Manhattan law firm that specializes in financial misdealings. Spiegelman turns over March’s cards slowly, the way life does—using a terse conversation with his former father-in-law to light one small candle and a passing comment by an attractive new upstairs neighbor to supply some needed warmth.

  March, who comes from a wealthy banking family himself, has been hired by his best friend, lawyer Mike Metz, to help an investment banker client find out who is trying to blackmail him and destroy his chances at a hard-earned, well-deserved partnership. All sig
ns point to Gerard Nassouli, former managing director of Merchant’s Worldwide Bank, who has been missing for the three years since MWB imploded in a debacle that shook the financial world and triggered several ongoing federal investigations.

  Now it looks like someone with access to Nassouli’s files—possibly the man himself, and/or his creepy former head of security—has managed to hide enough damaging material from probers’ eyes to set himself up in the blackmail business.

  Spiegelman has a fine eye for the details of Manhattan corporate life—what people wear, how they live, what and where they eat—and after awhile you might find yourself skipping over shirt fabrics and Chinese appetizers. Even more disturbing is the way March gets beaten up with increasing regularity. But these are minor distractions in an important and fascinating book.

  NO MAN STANDING, by Barbara Seranella (Scribner)

  One of the best things about her Munch Mancini books is the way Barbara Seranella continues to make everything in Mancini’s life so believably fragile and difficult to achieve. Despite a work ethic that would choke a yuppie lawyer (she’s an auto mechanic by day and a limo driver by night) and a personal moral code as rigorous as a monk’s (if you don’t count the sex), Mancini always seems to be on the brink of chaos—about to lose her job, her car, her adopted daughter and her home and be forced to return to the prison life that shaped her thorny character. We gasp and curse as Mancini appears to deliberately court disaster by defending not only her own turf but that of those she loves, andthen watch in helpless awe as Seranella steers her and us through to safety one more time.

  This time out, Ellen Summers, Mancini’s best buddy from her bad old days as a junkie hooker, gets out of the California Institute for Women to find that her mother and stepfather have been tortured and murdered, most likely because somebody thought they knew where Summers had hidden some stolen counterfeit money before she went away. Mancini, about to move from her Venice rental to a house (you can tell it’s 1985 because a working mother can afford a Santa Monica mortgage, strip clubs with names like the Spearmint Rhino are the new thing and gas stations still sell leaded high octane), puts it all at risk to help her backsliding, duplicitous friend.