New York Review of Books Review
They never should have let Ray Boy Calabrese out of the slammer. "A lot got washed away in 16 years," William Boyle acknowledges in GRAVESEND (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), but who knew that Conway DTnnocenzio was still bent on getting revenge for the murder of his brother, Duncan? All this time, Conway has been working a crummy job at a Brooklyn Rite Aid, brooding on the coldblooded crime and waiting for his chance to put Ray Boy in the ground. After coming up with a solid plan and even going to the trouble of learning how to shoot a gun, Conway confronts Ray Boy at his family's upstate summer house near Monticello. But before he pulls the trigger, Conway insists on hearing his brother's last words. "He went, 'Remember third grade. We were friends. Please don't do this,' " Ray Boy tells him, then breaks down crying. Although he's disgusted with himself, Conway can't manage to do the deed. Instead, he sticks Ray Boy in the trunk of his car and drives to Plumb Beach, where Duncan was killed, hoping for a shot of courage. But he still can't pull the trigger, so he leaves Ray Boy in the sand and heads straight to a booth at Murphy's Irish to brood over "shots of Jack and a two pitchers of Bud" with a worn-out cop named McKenna. Conway doesn't want sympathy; he wants a good kick to stiffen his resolve. But McKenna is determined to save him from himself: "I'm telling you, you're gonna live with Hell inside of you. It's gonna crawl up in you. Not purgatory. Hell with a capital H." Boyle chews the local dialect like a Nathan's hot dog, biting into the juices of pure Brooklynese and savoring the mustardy aftertaste. The sound is especially sharp coming from Ray Boy's 15-year-old nephew, Eugene, who wants to be "tough" like his uncle and adds "yo" to his curses. A neighborhood woman named Alessandra, a failed actress who's spent time in California, speaks with a classier accent, but after a few weeks at home with her widowed father, she's snapping her syllabic gum with the best of them. TALK ABOUT tempting fate! In DEPTH OF WINTER (Viking, $28), Walt Longmire, the laconic hero of Craig Johnson's Western mysteries, arrives in Juarez shortly before the Día de los Muertos, Mexico's Day of the Dead. Walt, who serves as the sheriff of Absaroka County back in Wyoming, is way out of his jurisdiction in "the real-deal Wild West" south of the border, but he's got an alarming reason to be there: His daughter, Cady, has been kidnapped by Tomás Bidarte, the sadistic head of a drug cartel, who plans to auction her off for sport - and to settle a score with her father. Johnson gives Walt a voice as dry as desert dust. "This was a strange land for me," he says of the harsh back country where he's tracked down Bidarte, "and strangely enough I liked it." A man's man, Johnson can be eloquent about both the beauty of a sunrise and the sadness of a woman in an isolated village who sees what Walt is reading and confesses, "I miss books - tell me about it." But he also has fun teasing his principled hero about his resemblance to a pro football player, which gets him star treatment in the middle of a raucous street parade. "you won't catch it." That's what Edie Beckett's therapist keeps telling her in Kate Moretti's morbid IN HER BONES (Atria, paper, $16). But with her mother, Lilith, on death row for murdering six women, it's understandable that Edie would be hesitant to peer too deeply into her gene pool. Unable to quiet her fears ("Am I like her?"), she follows an online forum called "Healing Hope," intended for victims of violent crimes, and develops an unhealthy obsession with the children of her mother's victims. At first, she stalks them silently online and finds that "the hunt thrilled me." But she goes too far when she seduces one of them and becomes the chief suspect when he's murdered. Moretti pulls some tricky tricks when she sends Edie on the run, where she slips in and out of some neat disguises and suffers just enough to satisfy the most judgmental reader. when a woman's decomposing body washes up on the beach at Far Rockaway in Peter Blauner's nifty police procedural, SUNRISE HIGHWAY (Minotaur, $27.99), Detective Lourdes Robles of the Queens Homicide Task Force instantly spots what the guys don't even notice: The woman was pregnant. "There was a collection of small brittle bones between the fingers," we're told, "almost like the victim was trying to hold onto a fragile little bird." The pregnancy doesn't contribute to the subsequent homicide investigation into the murders of six young women over the past 15 years, but it does make clear why Robles is such a good cop: She notices things. And just as Robles notes the empty Bacardi bottles and crushed Capri Sun juice packs littering the beach, so too does Blauner keep a tight focus on his regional setting. Outsiders may think Long Island is "all white beaches and clay tennis courts, summer in the Hamptons," but they never see "the ghettos of Wyandanch" or the "shooting galleries in Smithtown." Or the bodies on the beaches. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.