Fall Preview 2014: Part Four

Here we are again, previewing books. It's a fun time for us Material Witnesses because as we're spotting promising books for ourselves, we're also assessing books for each other. There's a World War II book for Sister Mary. Noir? Georgette. I bet Peri would like that one by Karin Fossum. And that European police procedural? It has the Maltese Condor's name all over it. Among the five of us, I hope we're showing you some books that are up your alley, too.

Recently, I've been watching the TV series The Americans. It's set in the 1980s and concerns two Soviet KGB officers. They're posing as a married couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, living in suburban Washington, DC with their kids. More than a story about spies, The Americans is the story of these two Russians and their marriage. (Sister Mary wrote about the first season of the series here.)

Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin (pen name of Xuefei Jin) uses an espionage novel, A Map of Betrayal (Pantheon, November 4), in a similar way. He examines Gary Shang's divided loyalties in both love and politics. Shang loves China, where he was born and married. He also loves the United States, where he has an American wife, a daughter, Lilian, a trusted Chinese-American mistress––and a job as a Chinese mole at the CIA.

The book is narrated by the adult Lilian, who received her father's diaries from his mistress after her parents' deaths. Lilian knows the US convicted her father of treason, but she knows nothing of his previous existence in China. A Map of Betrayal follows two story lines written from two different perspectives: Gary Shang's life, as he lived it, and Lilian's attempts to learn about it after his death. Ha Jin is a masterful writer about conflicted individuals (in Waiting, for example, a man waits 18 years to divorce his wife because he loves another and, once divorced, isn't happy about it). This one sounds both complex and moving.

Many of us love books set in the world of books, in which the characters are librarians, writers, publishers, booksellers or obsessional readers. Here's one like that. The Forgers will be published by Mysterious Press on November 4th. Its author, Bradford Morrow, is known for his gothic tales about troubled (and troubling) people. From the beginning, we're unsure how much we can trust the narrator, Will. He tells us he was a gifted forger of 19th-century manuscripts and signatures, but that life was behind him when Adam Diehl is found, dead and his hands severed, surrounded by his collection of rare manuscripts and books.

Will's efforts to create a new life with Adam's sister, Meghan, are hampered when he receives threatening letters apparently written by authors from the grave. I doubt The Forgers is as wonderfully bizarre as Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2014), in which letters penned by English literary figure Dr. Samuel Johnson are found on modern paper in 21st-century London. Still, it looks good to me.

No one familiar with Ruth Rendell's writing will look at the cover of her upcoming stand-alone, The Girl Next Door (Scribner, October 7), and expect something lovely in that battered tin. No matter if she's writing about Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, stand-alones or dark psychological suspense pseudonymously as Barbara Vine, Rendell sees evil simmering under the surface of everyday suburbia.

Construction work unearthed the tin box containing a pair of mismatched hands on Essex property where children played in underground tunnels during World War II. After a police inspector tracks them down, the now-elderly friends get together to investigate their childhood secrets. Among the amateur investigators are Alan and his wife, Rosemary; widowed Daphne, whom Alan once loved; Michael, whose mother disappeared and who now considers getting together with his distant father; and Lewis, whose Uncle James was occasionally in the tunnels before he too disappeared. While thinking about this novel, I pictured the final scene of the movie Deliverance, in which Ed awakens screaming from a nightmare when a dead hand reaches above the surface of a lake. A recurring theme in mystery fiction is the decades-old crime solved when it reaches into the present. There's something artistically pleasing about it reaching with a long-dead hand. Or two.

Let's set aside the morality of a career murdering people and think about it in purely practical terms. The job stress would drive me totally bonkers and I'm curious about people who become pro killers and what they do if they live long enough to retire (see Who Ya Gonna Call? here). Don Winslow's Frank Machianno surfs and sells fish in San Diego now that he's no longer Frankie Machine, the Mafia's efficient killer (The Winter of Frankie Machine). In Lenny Kleinfeld's hip and hilarious Shooters & Chasers, a crew of killers is headed by Arthur Reid, a wine connoisseur whose retirement goal is owning a vineyard that supplies a great red for a White House state dinner.

Tod Goldberg's Gangsterland (Counterpoint, September 9) features a Chicago Outfit killer, Sal Cupertino, who might feel at home with Kleinfeld's eccentric characters. Sal longs to be reunited with his wife and toddler and simply disappear. But he messed up and killed three FBI agents and the feds are now on his trail. After Sal undergoes several plastic surgeries and does a lot of studying, the crime syndicate resurrects him in Las Vegas, where they expect his help in an organized crime scheme operating out of a local synagogue, of all places. Yes, Sal is now Rabbi David Cohen, who delivers rabbinical homilies sprinkled with lyrics from Springsteen. Goldberg's book is earning reviewers' praise, including this verdict from Kirkus: "Clever plotting, a colorful cast of characters and priceless situations make this comedic crime novel an instant classic."

Ha Jin isn't the only writer on my fall books-to-read list to explore the topics of love and betrayal. David Bezmozgis wrote his book, The Betrayers (Little, Brown, September 23), before Gaza erupted this summer, but his themes of patriotism, sacrifice, ultimate truth, what it means to be a moral man and the double-edged nature of deeply-held principles are timeless.

The book is set over the course of a day in August 2013. A smear campaign targeting Israeli politician Baruch Kotler, who supports West Bank settlements, causes the married Kotler and his much-younger mistress, Leora, to flee to a Crimean resort town Kotler remembers from his childhood. A surprise for Kotler awaits at the house the couple has rented. The owner is Chaim Tankilevich, the friend who betrayed Kotler to the KGB four decades earlier. Kotler was sentenced to 13 years in a gulag. Both men have suffered in the past, and both struggle with issues now. In a settling of scores, who owes what to whom?

I'm thinking about recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and what they say about race relations in the US as I add Walter Mosley's Rose Gold (Doubleday, September 23) to my list of fall books. It's 13th in the series about Easy Rawlins, a World War II vet who moved from Texas to Los Angeles in the late 1940s. Easy opened a "research and delivery" office because, as a black man, he was unable to obtain a private detective's license. Over the years, white city leaders have consulted him when they need a bridge to the black community. In exchange, Easy received a PI license, but there is still only one white cop Easy trusts.

Mosley is a gifted storyteller, and Easy is about as engaging a narrator as you could possibly meet. Through his observations and experiences, he delivers a picture of what life is like for a street-smart but honorable and hard-working black man in Los Angeles from the late '40s to 1967. That's the year he purposefully runs his car off the road (Blonde Faith, 2007). Several months later, he's out of a coma and searching for a missing young man among hippies on Sunset Strip (Little Green, 2013; see review here). In Rose Gold, it's still 1967. Easy juggles several cases at once, including one for Roger Frisk, assistant to the chief of police. Frisk asks Easy to find Rosemary Goldsmith, daughter of a weapons manufacturer. She has disappeared from her UC Santa Barbara dorm and there's a question of whether a black ex-boxer, who changed his name to Uhuru Nolica and leads the revolutionary group Scorched Earth, is involved. The feds and other LA cops try to warn off Easy but good luck with that. As usual, Easy will trade favors and use his head to clear things up. Having Easy for company in a case with shades of Patty Hearst spells an irresistible read.

I'm fascinated by people (and fictional characters) who refuse to be shackled by society's expectations. I recently enjoyed Erin Lindsay McCabe's I Shall Be Near to You (Crown, January 2014) about one such woman. When her husband, Jeremiah Wakefield, joins the Union Army, Rosetta Edwards won't hear of staying home. She becomes "Ross Stone" and fights in the American Civil War at his side with other volunteers from rural New York who keep her secret. This book is based on letters home by women who actually fought in the Civil War.

Rosetta Edwards doesn't want her husband to enlist, and I Shall Be Near to You is primarily a love story. In contrast, in Laird Hunt's Neverhome (Little, Brown, September 9), narrator Constance Thompson feels so strongly about supporting the Union cause she enlists as "Ash" Thompson while her husband, Bartholomew, stays home on their Indiana farm. She's a crack shot and fits in with the men until she's betrayed by someone she thought she could trust. Reviewers' raves compare Neverhome to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, but describe Constance's journey as her own. Publishers Weekly says, "Hunt’s characterization of Constance transcends simplistic distinctions between male and female, good and bad. The language of her narration is triumphant as well: sometimes blunt, sometimes visionary, and always fascinating."

I'll give you a few of the steps I went through to research Robert Jackson Bennett's book, City of Stairs (Broadway Books/Random House paperback original, September 9), about intelligence officer Shara Komayd's investigation of the politically explosive murder of academic Efrem Pangyui in the city of Bulikov.

I read the publisher's blurb ("A densely atmospheric and intrigue-filled fantasy novel of living spies, dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, ever-changing city—from one of America’s most acclaimed young SF writers"), Georgette's post about a previous Robert Jackson Bennett book, American Elsewhere, and a starred Library Journal review of City of Stairs. It states, in part, "The world Bennett (The Troupe; American Elsewhere) has constructed is a complex political landscape of a subjugated people holding onto the memories of their glory days and protective gods and the conquerors reaping revenge for their own previous subjugation. An excellent spy story wrapped in a vivid imaginary world." This book is definitely for me. Is it also for you?

Next week, I'll tell you about more fall books I'm excited about. Tomorrow, we'll see some other books that caught Georgette's eye.

The Perfect Travel Companion

I laughed when one of my friends wished she had somewhere to go, so she could listen to an audio book in the car. I know exactly what she means, though. Sitting in a moving vehicle for hours can be a treat if you have the perfect travel companion: entertaining enough to merit attention, but not so demanding as to make your head spin. While this also goes for the human in the seat next to you, let's focus now on books along for the ride.

Max Kinnings's Baptism (Quercus, 2014) is a minute-by-minute account of a London Underground train hijacking. Tommy and Belle Denning, religious fanatic twins, kidnap conductor George Wakeham's kids and thereby force him to stop the train in the tunnel between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road stations. The book is amazingly suspenseful. Initially, the 300+ passengers, with a few exceptions, don't know the train has been hijacked. Point of view varies among the Dennings; some of the Dennings' former associates; Wakeham and his wife, who is also on the train; MI5; and DCI Ed Mallory, the blind hostage negotiator. Unlike many thriller writers, Kinnings draws compelling psychological portraits of his characters. Graphic violence. Riveting; the hours will fly by.

There's a pleasing symmetry about reading a book involving a train while traveling by train. One of these days I'll devote an entire post to train settings, but in the meantime, let me tell you about I Married a Dead Man, William Irish's 1958 classic. Irish is one of the pseudonyms used by noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich was a master at creating an atmosphere of paranoia, and does he ever in this book about Helen Georgesson, a woman abandoned by her lover when she became pregnant. Helen is traveling across the country when she meets Patrice and Hugh Hazzard, newlyweds expecting a child. When their train crashes, only Helen survives. She decides to pass herself off as Patrice to Hugh's wealthy, grieving family, who have never met Patrice. Things get tough for Helen/"Patrice" when her old lover comes weaseling around.

If you like eccentric British characters, clever traditional mysteries, and witty language that makes you laugh out loud, Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles are for you. In the first book, Coffin Scarcely Used, DI Purbright and Sgt. Love investigate a series of murders, beginning with unlikable newspaper editor Marcus Gwill, who is found electrocuted in his slippers, his mouth filled with marshmallows, and flower shapes burned into his palms.

All twelve books in this series are fun, but be sure not to miss Lonelyheart 4122, in which you'll meet lovely conwoman Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who signs up with a matrimonial bureau.

On the weekend before Christmas, robbers shoot two super-mall guards and disappear with a whole heap of money in Silvermeadow by Barry Maitland. Scotland Yard's DCI David Brock and Sgt. Kathy Kolla investigate the robbery, as well as the death of a young girl, which is tied into disappearances from the mall. I like the chemistry between Brock and Kolla, and I also like the information that writer/architect Maitland adds to his books. In this one, the fifth of the 12-book series (you don't have to read its predecessors to enjoy it), we learn about how malls are designed to encourage consumption.

Ruth Rendell writes the excellent 24-book series featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. In the 2013 book, No Man's Nightingale (Scribner), Wexford has retired from the Kingsmarkham police force. Mike Burden brings him in as a consultant when the controversial vicar, Sarah Hussein, is murdered in her vicarage. This isn't among Rendell's best Wexford books, but it's still very enjoyable to spend time in the company of Wexford; Burden; Wexford's wife, Dora; and Rendell's other meticulously drawn characters.

When I'm traveling by plane or train with my husband, we often work on a crossword puzzle together. We alternate between impressing and amusing each other with our right and wrong guesses. A good book après-crossword puzzle is Ruth Rendell's standalone of psychological suspense, One Across, Two Down. It features a no-good named Stanley Manning. Stanley is addicted to cross-word puzzles, and he can hardly wait for the mother of his long-suffering wife, Vera, to die so he can spend the inheritance.

Happy traveling, and happy reading!

Book Review of Ruth Rendell's The St. Zita Society

The St. Zita Society by Ruth Rendell

In this, her sixty-second book, Ruth Rendell channels ethologist Jane Goodall. The population under study, however, isn't lowland gorillas, but the residents of Hexam Place, a swanky street of white-painted stucco or golden brick Georgian houses in Knightsbridge, London.

Living in these houses is a diverse group in class, character, and ethnicity. Lord and Lady Studley, their two servants, and their driver, Henry Copley, reside at the large, detached Number 11. Gay men Damian Philemon and Roland Albert, Thea, who teaches information technology classes, and 92-year-old Miss Grieves all have flats in Number 8. Rabia Siddiqui, a widowed Muslim woman who's wonderfully warm and honest, is the nanny for Preston and Lucy Still's youngest child at Number 7. Monserrat Tresser, 23-year-old daughter of one of Preston's friends, is their live-in au pair. Her Serene Highness the Princess Susan Hapsburg has lived at Number 6 with her lady's maid, June Caldwell, since the Princess left her husband, an iffy Italian prince, 60 years earlier. The Princess's cleaner was born in Antigua and also cleans several other Hexam Place homes. The Kleins, a pair of Americans, celebrate Thanksgiving at Number 14. At Number 3 is an easy-going pediatrician, Dr. Simon Jefferson, and his handsome driver Jimmy, who has a bedroom downstairs. Dr. Jefferson's gardener, Dex Flitch, also tends Ivor Neville-Smith's garden at Number 5.

Of all the characters we meet, Dex shows us most openly that The St. Zita Society is a Rendell creation. Dex is a former patient of Dr. Jefferson's friend Dr. Mettage. After trying to kill his mother, Dex has been declared sane. He has seen no evil spirits since coming to work for the kindly Dr. Jefferson in Hexam Place, but sometimes it takes weeks of observing and following them before Dex can be sure. To Dex, people appear as if they wear featureless masks. His smiles scare Jimmy. He never told Dr. Mettage or Dr. Jefferson that women feel like a threat to him, although he did tell Peach, his god. Peach resides in his cell phone and communicates with Dex in enigmatic ways. Then again, what are a god's ways––stopping the rain, making the sun shine, getting Dex a job––if not mysterious?

Like the rest of England, Hexam Place is not a classless society, but the upper and lower classes intertwine, as well as interact in the roles of employer and employee. Monserrat, a not-so-nice woman, doesn't do much for anyone unless it's to her advantage; socialite Lucy Still makes use of this trait when she wants to see her lover. Preston Still, a wealthy insurance baron, loves his children, but expresses it only in his concern for their health. Seemingly more than both of them put together, Rabia loves their baby, Thomas. Dr. Jefferson came from a working-class family and wouldn't hear of Jimmy, his driver, calling him "sir" and would walk half a mile without complaint to where the car is parked. Jimmy, rather than despising Dr. Jefferson for this, rather likes him. On the other hand, Lord Studley thinks nothing of making Henry wait in the car outside Number 11 for two hours. And this is the reason some of the Hexam Place household help meet at the neighborhood pub, the Dugong, to form the St. Zita Society.

St. Zita

St. Zita, June informs them, is the patron saint of domestic servants. ("If you see a picture of her, she'll be holding a bag and a bunch of keys.") Although Thea isn't a servant, she does many unpaid tasks for Damian, Roland, and Miss Grieves, and is part of the Society. They tackle such problems as dog walkers who don't clean up satisfactorily, noise, pigeons, and cats. They do not tackle the problem of Lord Studley's rudeness to Henry, because Henry has a fit at the very idea. Henry, who has a "marked resemblance to Michelangelo's David," had a difficult time finding this job, and his flat at Number 11 is very pleasant. Its one drawback is that it doesn't have a lock, and Lady Studley, with whom Henry believes he has no choice but to have an affair if he wants to keep his job, has the habit of simply walking in. This makes Henry feel as if he's living by the skin of his teeth, because he's also having an affair with the Studleys' beautiful college-age daughter, who is crazy about him and wants to tell her father. Henry thinks this is crazy.

Hexam Place is united, more or less, by the tradition of candles in the windows at Christmas time. The neighbors share the visits of an urban fox that slinks from house to house, but prefers the garbage of Miss Grieves. Miss Grieves can't get up the stairs fast enough to chase the fox, but she keeps a gimlet eye out for it and on her fellow citizens. The fox can be excused for its manners; after all, it is a wild animal. What about Hexam Place's human residents? How does one account for their immoral behavior and their deliciously unexpected deaths?

photo by Jerry Bauer

Ruth Rendell has received the Diamond Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers Association and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She writes the wonderful series featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford set in Sussex, England, and nonseries books. Her most complex and disturbing psychological suspense is written under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. The St. Zita Society, a nonseries book published in August 2012 by Scribner, isn't that type of unsettling story; rather, it's an insightful and amusing sociological study of upstairs, downstairs and down-the-street relationships enlivened by death. It's for people who enjoy a very character-driven plot and perfect for an autumn evening.

Note: It's easy to learn the characters' names and their relationships if you photocopy the street map, which shows the houses and their occupants, on the inside cover of the book.

Have You Had Your Serial Today?

It must be a mixed blessing to write a successful mystery series. The benefits are obvious: a built-in audience for each successive title in the series, characters who can be explored at length and in depth, and a protagonist with name recognition who may even become an icon like Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple.

But writing a series has its challenges. Readers may come to feel so invested in the protagonist and other regular characters that they are offended if the author wants to change direction. Previous descriptions of the protagonist's background restrict what the author can do with the protagonist later on. The author may come to feel the series' success is as restrictive as golden handcuffs.

Arthur Conan Doyle resented that the success of his Sherlock Holmes stories kept him from more important pursuits and he killed off Holmes in 1893, only to succumb to public demand and resurrect him in 1901. Agatha Christie's grandson says that she had many ideas for plots that were inappropriate for Hercule Poirot and wanted to create new lead characters. But Poirot was her most popular protagonist and her publishers and public demanded she continue to produce new tales featuring the little Belgian with the active little grey cells. So, despite the fact that she had come to view her creation as a bombastic, detestable creep within 10 years or so of his first appearance, she churned out her Poirot stories for more than half a century.

The challenge for the serial writer is keeping the story fresh and interesting within the boundaries created by earlier books in the series. How many series have you read that eventually appeared to be phoned in by the author, with the protagonist's character seeming to be preserved in amber and plots settled into well-worn ruts?

In the past couple of weeks, I've read three new books in successful and long-running series. These were all series I had on my must-read list from the start. How well their authors managed the challenge of sustaining interest varied.

Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache/Three Pines series could be a prime candidate to fall into dull repetition. After all, how much can you do with a series set in a remote, idyllic village in the forests of Québec's Eastern Townships region? How many villagers can be killed off before the town's residents would have to flee for their lives if they weren't completely nuts? Louise Penny tackles the inherent restrictions of her setting—and the incongruity of Three Pines being a place of art, friendship and hospitality and, at the same time, a locale with an appallingly high murder rate—with wry humor. In her latest book in the series, A Trick of the Light, local bookseller Myrna describes Three Pines as "a shelter[, t]hough, clearly, not a no-kill shelter."

Penny also knows it's best to mix things up a bit by moving her location on occasion. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is a detective stationed in Québec City, which opens up more possibilities. In A Rule Against Murder (also published as The Murder Stone), Gamache and his wife are on vacation at a resort when a murder occurs. Bury Your Dead takes place almost entirely in Québec City during its winter carnival.

For A Trick of the Light, Penny returns to Three Pines, though she opens the action in Montréal's Musée d'Art Contemporain, where Clara Morrow, one of the Three Pines regular characters, is about to enter a preview of a solo show of her work. Clara is 50, far beyond the age when most artists are discovered, but after working in her successful artist husband's shadow for decades, she has become an overnight sensation.

After the preview, Clara returns to Three Pines for a celebratory party with her village friends, and artists, gallery owners and artists'agents from Montréal. In the category of friends are Gamache and his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache and Beauvoir have become acquainted with Three Pines and its quirky residents during their investigations of several prior murders.

The celebratory mood is swept away when, early the next morning, the murdered corpse of a woman is found in Clara's garden. The woman is identified as Lillian Dyson, a childhood friend of Clara's who cruelly betrayed her while they were in art college. But what was Lillian doing in Three Pines when Clara hadn't laid eyes on her in over 20 years?

Traditional detection methods of examining means and opportunity still leave Gamache and Beauvoir with a wide field of suspects. They shift their focus to motive, which reveals a huge gap between the type of person Lillian is widely reported to have been 20 years earlier and how she is seen contemporarily by her new circle of acquaintances.

Gamache realizes that the question of Lillian's true personality is the key to the mystery, because only through understanding her nature can the investigators learn how she inspired murderous hatred and in whom. In the course of their investigation, Gamache and Beauvoir also confront the horrors they still live with as survivors of a deadly attack on their team the year before. The experience has affected Gamache profoundly, but it has not shaken his fundamental belief in people. Beauvoir thinks: "The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you'll find good.  He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn't. He believed that if you sift through good, you'll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Clara's new-found success and Lillian's murder also bring to a boil the problems of envy and lack of understanding that have plagued her marriage for several years. In fact, envy is a persistent theme in this book, as another deadly sin, greed, was in Penny's prior book, A Brutal Telling.

What Louise Penny does best, and what allows her to write a mystery series that stays fresh, is to focus on the human heart and spirit, nature and the small pleasures and concerns of life (especially food!), rather than on forensics, timetables, violent action or gimmicky personalities. She writes about envy, resentment and fear eating away at people, threatening friendships, marriages, partnerships and even lives, but also about love, forgiveness and redemption offering hope for change and a forging of new, stronger bonds.

A Trick of the Light was released on August 30 and if I were you I'd rush right out and get it.

What do you suppose is the longest-running mystery series among currently living authors? Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series must be one of them. She started in 1964 with From Doon With Death and is up to her 24th in the series, The Vault (published in the UK August 4, 2011 and to be published in the US September 13, 2011). In addition to Inspector Wexford, Rendell has 35 non-series books and 13 more written as Barbara Vine. Just thinking about her work ethic makes me want to sit down and put my feet up.

In 2009, London's Telegraph newspaper reported that Rendell didn't want to write any more Inspector Wexford novels after that year's The Monster in the Box. I was worried that Rendell was fed up with Wexford and that The Monster in the Box would show it, but my concerns were unfounded. The book was a truly enjoyable wrap-up to the series, with Wexford tackling a case that took him back to his earliest days in the police force, and his mixed-up personal life at that time.

What a surprise to hear this year that there would be a new Wexford book. The Vault finds Wexford retired and splitting his time, with his wife Dora, between their longtime home in Kingsmarkham and the coach house of their actress daughter's upmarket home in London. Retirement is good for Wexford's physical health, as he spends hours a day taking long walks in the city, but he finds himself at loose ends without his work. He's relieved when Tom Ede of London's Metropolitan Police, an old acquaintance, asks him to provide consulting assistance in the investigation of four long-dead bodies found down an ancient coal-hole on the grounds of a house in quiet St. John's Wood.

The Vault is a sequel of sorts to one of Rendell's non-Wexford novels, A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999). While it's not necessary to read the other book to understand The Vault, it might be a good idea, since it's bound to make The Vault more interesting. And that would be a good thing. While The Monster in the Box seemed to breathe new life into the Wexford series, The Vault is tired. Most of the witnesses and suspects are so one dimensional that it's hard to keep them straight. The secondary-story strand about the Wexfords' Kingsmarkham daughter, Sylvia, manages to be simultaneously lurid and dull. Some of the writing is sloppy and unclear as well.

Still, Rendell has Wexford make some interesting observations about his new role as a consulting detective with no official standing and how it affects his interactions with interviewees and the police. I wish I knew why Rendell decided to write another Wexford after The Monster in the Box made such a good series conclusion. Pressure, as in Christie's and Conan Doyle's cases? Or does she believe she still has something to say about Wexford and his cases? If it's the latter, I hope she exploits the possibilities in Wexford's new role to create a more fully dimensional and coherent book next time around.

And that brings me to the third new series book, Laurie R. King's eleventh and latest in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, Pirate King (to be published September 6, 2011). I loved the first book in the series, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and have read every book in the series as soon as it was published.

I was delighted from the start of the series when the young bluestocking, Mary Russell, met up with Sherlock Holmes. Their partnership was filled with erudite and witty repartee, and they traveled the world together sleuthing in ingenious disguises and using elaborate ruses to escape peril. But then something strange happened. King began separating Holmes and Russell. At first, the books would describe each of the partners' doings, which were bookended with scenes of them together. Later on, though, their time together became strictly limited and Mary's separate role was emphasized.

Pirate King takes this trend even further. In this book, Holmes is entirely absent for a good two-thirds of the book and the pair are together for very few pages. I would estimate that scenes of the two of them together total only about 20 pages or so out of more than 300 pages.

Mary is persuaded by Holmes and Inspector Lestrade to go undercover as a director's assistant with Fflytte Films as they head to Lisbon and Morocco to make a silent film about Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. "How can there be a silent film about an operetta?," I hear you ask. It turns out the project is about a film crew trying to make a film about The Pirates of Penzance. The play-within-a-play conceit becomes ever-more elaborate, as Mary works with actors playing the parts of pirates, constables, British officers and coquettish daughters, and many of the actors turn out to be something other than what they seem.

Mary's task is to see what she can find out about Fflytte Films that might explain why crime seems to follow its films in ways related to the subject matter of each film, and why the previous director's assistant disappeared before the crew left England for Portugal. A series of minor disasters besets the cast and crew in Lisbon, but real danger begins as their sailing ship approaches North Africa. In this third part of the book, Holmes has joined the cast incognito, as an actor playing the Major General, and he and Mary must rescue the party from grave danger. This third part of the book, which takes up a little over 70 pages, has all the derring-do, action and spirit that are lacking in the rest of the book. It is cleverly written in a way that I could imagine as a script for a silent-film adventure story.

I'm puzzled why Laurie R. King has altered this series to de-emphasize the Russell/Holmes collaboration almost to the disappearing point. Having so much of the book devoted to Mary working alone forced it into an awkward first-person narrative that reads like a well-educated and earnest young businesswoman's travel diary. I wasn't particularly interested to read in detail about her dealings on behalf of and with the cast and crew, her seasickness, rehearsal travails and the like. (And I'll admit I was a little miffed by Mary's scornful attitude toward my beloved Gilbert & Sullivan.)

Though the book returned to the series' old form at the end, I couldn't help noticing that the subjects of Mary's investigation were mere afterthoughts in the resolution of the story. It made me wonder about the utility of so many of the previous pages detailing Mary’s sleuthing.

Has Laurie R. King come to feel so restricted by the Russell/Holmes partnership that she separated them? Is the weight of Sherlock Holmes's legendary persona so burdensome that she wants to cut him loose? She's the creator and, of course, she's free to do that. But I'm one of those pesky fans who don't like to see a change in a winning formula.

Note: I received The Pirate King and A Trick of the Light as free review copies. Also, portions of the reviews in this post appear in book reviews posted on the books' product pages on Amazon, under my Amazon pen name.