New York Review of Books Review

As she managed to do so well in her first novel, "Black Water Rising," Locke draws on the past to remind her characters how much it has shaped their identities and how much it continues to shape the choices they make. The de facto historian at Belle Vie is Caren Gray, who grew up there as the daughter of a plantation cook and has been this tourist attraction's general manager ever since she and her 9-year-old daughter left New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Although Caren is almost frighteningly self-possessed, her sang-froid is shaken when she stumbles over the body of a murdered migrant worker employed by the giant sugarcane operation adjacent to Belle Vie. The police are quick to suspect Donovan Isaacs, a member of the troupe of actors who perform a scripted re-enactment of the plantation's role in the Civil War. In coming to Donovan's defense, Caren is startled to discover that this young firebrand - entrusted with such deathless dialogue as: "Dem Yankee whites can't make me leave dis here land. Dis here mah home. Freedom weren't meant nothing without Belle Vie" - recently quit school to film his own corrective version of local history. For a character so smart and so appealing, Caren is astonishingly dense about a lot of things that are going on behind her back. Even more astounding is her disinclination to follow up on the shocking revelations that bring the mystery to a close. But if the schematic plot and dangling resolution speak badly for Locke's construction values, the language of her storytelling is sturdy and absorbing. Who can resist the opening scene of a wedding in which a cottonmouth "measuring the length of a Cadillac" falls from a live oak into the lap of the bride's future mother-in-law, then is brushed away with the observation that "it only briefly stopped the ceremony, this being Louisiana after all." Scandinavian sadism, which took a nose dive after the untimely death of Stieg Larsson, perked up when the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen muscled onto the scene with "The Keeper of Lost Causes," which devised a special cold-case division called Department Q for a maverick homicide cop named Carl Morck. Although relegated to the basement and presented with a Syrian maintenance man as an assistant, Morck managed to find a female politician who had been kept captive and starved for five years. Morck and his colleague, Assad, are still in the basement in THE ABSENT ONE (Dutton, $26.95), but they've been joined by Rose Knudsen, a gifted researcher who never made it out of the police academy but proves invaluable on an investigation involving a group of Copenhagen millionaires who get erotic thrills from tracking and killing exotic animals. Adler-Olsen may lack Larsson's political passion, but he brings great inventiveness to descriptions of the techniques of torture, which keeps the sadistic brutality from becoming repetitive or even (God help us) dull. There's nothing shameful about love, so no reader should feel embarrassed about mourning the loss of a beloved sleuth like Marshal Guarnaccia, the kindly detective who figured in the Florentine mysteries of Magdalen Nabb, who died in 2007. But Florence is still in good hands, entrusted to a private investigator named Sandro Cellini, who keeps a wary eye on the ancient city in a string of mysteries by Christobel Kent. It took me a while to catch up with the "impatient, irascible, impetuous" Cellini, who is more temperamentally akin to Aurelio Zen, the detective in Michael Dibdin's politically charged mysteries. THE DEAD SEASON (Pegasus, $25.95) isn't the first book in this series, but it's a terrific introduction to the intractable problems of a modern-day city plagued by illegal immigrants, an exhausted economy and a broken system of government. Call them what she will, Laura Lippman's out-of-series "mysteries" tend to be extended character studies of interesting women caught up in unusual circumstances that can get a little dicey without posing a convincing threat to life, limb or personal happiness. AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) runs true to form, but as usual, the circumstances are so extraordinary that the absence of tension tends to be forgotten - if not forgiven. Heloise Lewis, the heroine of Lippman's latest nota-mystery, is a single mother with an 11-year-old son who keeps an extremely low profile in her suburban Maryland community. She calls herself a "socially progressive libertarian," lobbies on behalf of underemployed women and belongs to an unorthodox, and highly entertaining, church. But behind the scenes, Heloise is actually the madam of a high-priced call girl operation that requires an authorial struggle to turn into something capable of attracting a serious criminal element. Without taking away from the nice character profiling, Lippman's effort falls flatter than Heloise's attempt to play at being a soccer mom. Attica Locke's mystery opens with a snake falling into the lap of the brides future mother-in-law.