The Lost Woman
By Sara Blaedel
Grand Central, 320 pages, $34
The latest book in the engrossing Danish series starring the Copenhagen cop Louise Rick offers, among other original features, a thorough examination of assisted suicide or, as it’s called in the Zurich clinic where the service is on offer, “free death.”
As the plot gets under way, the murder of a Danish woman in Bristol, England, reaches back to Rick’s Copenhagen unit in ways both legal and personal. Once Rick starts sleuthing, assisted suicide figures into the story as a motivating force in the Bristol murder and several other killings. Of necessity, Rick and reporter Camilla Lind take a close look at every aspect — legal, moral, technical and financial — of the free death method of ending life. How much, for instance, does it cost? Apparently thirteen thousand Swiss francs or about twenty thousand dollars (Canadian). Plus airfare.
The Dime
By Kathleen Kent
Mulholland, 352 pages, $34
Half way through The Dime, its central character refers to herself as “obnoxious.” Among attitudes for a police detective, especially one who’s a gay woman in Texas, obnoxiousness proves to be a helpful trait.
The detective in question is Betty Rhyzyk of Dallas’s Narcotics Squad. Six feet tall and red haired, Rhyzyk originally arrived in Texas from a family of Polish-American cops in Brooklyn where she got her own early toughening-up experience.
Rhyzyk’s testiness is partly a reaction to the less than generous treatment her lesbianism draws in Texas and partly a personal trait; she is, as everybody can’t help but notice, as thin-skinned as Donald Trump. The major case that Rhyzyk is working centres on an enormous drug deal that Mexican cartels are running in and around Dallas. Drug wars remain constant in the book’s plot, incredibly complex and murderous, and generally enough to carry the narrative on its long journey to justice. Rhyzyk sticks it out, along for more than the ride, and is entertainingly obnoxious every mile of the way.
Garden of Lamentations
By Deborah Crombie
HarperCollins, 432 pages, $21.99
The series of smoothly presented novels featuring the husband and wife team of Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James has been going on for so long now — this is the 17th book — that it’s beginning to seem like one long extended story. Certainly in the new book, most of Kincaid’s time is devoted to tidying up a mystery that got started a couple of volumes back.
At the same time, James puts her considerable sleuthing skills into figuring out who murdered the lovely young nanny whose body turns up one morning in a Notting Hill private garden. This half of the book’s plot offers all the pleasures that makes the series so popular: plenty of serious suspects and lots of convincing social details that fix in place the swells of posh Notting Hill, plus Gemma James in full tilt at the top of her investigative game.
Home Sweet Home
By April Smith
Knopf, 357 pages, $35.95
The murder comes on the first page of this smoothly told historical and political story set in South Dakota. Bludgeoned to death at home in Rapid City on Christmas Eve 1985 is the wife of a local lawyer named Lance Kusek. In the same attack, the lawyer and the couple’s young son have been bashed into unconsciousness.
Then the story drops back 35 years to the time when Lance Kusek’s parents, a couple of New York lefties, moved with their two kids to a farm outside Rapid City. The couple’s politics bring them smack up against the far right Republicanism natural to South Dakota. HomeStreet Home is meticulous in laying out the liberal-conservative clashes over the decades, leaving to the end the answer to the question: how did the politics lead to murder all these years later?
Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every second Saturday.
Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every second Saturday.
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