Review of Serge Quadruppani's The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees

That yellowish glob is the bee's pollen basket

The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees by Serge Quadruppani (translated from the Italian by Delia Casa)

We're already flabbergasted by the ongoing shutdown of the United States government, which keeps many federal workers home, so why not look at another perplexing workers' disappearance?

Colony collapse disorder involves the sudden vanishing of worker honey bees from their hives. While the queen bee continues tirelessly laying her eggs, there are no workers to provide food for the colony. The cause of CCD isn't clear. Because pollinating bees play an essential role in the world's food production, this mysterious new syndrome is receiving a lot of attention.

Honey bees are at the heart of Serge Quadruppani's The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees, published on September 3 by Arcade. The story begins when vacationing Commissario Simona Tavianello and her husband, Marco, a recently retired police chief, pay a visit to Giovanni Minoncelli's honey shop in Italy's Piedmont region. The long-married Tavianellos are both stubborn and, despite their deep love for each other, they often resemble two rams with their horns locked. Their relationship—already frosty because Simona is resentful that they're vacationing in the mountains rather than at the sea—drops a few more degrees when her attempt to open Minoncelli's door is blocked by a corpse on the floor inside. Nearby is a piece of paper that proclaims, "THE WORKER BEE REVOLUTION."

It turns out that beekeeper Minoncelli is a militant environmentalist well known to the police, and the dead man, Bertolazzi, was an engineer with Sacropiano, a corporation involved with genetically modified organisms and pesticides. But the case is more complex than it looks at first glance. Minoncelli has an alibi for the time of the shooting, and the gun used was the one Simona had left in her hotel room. Therefore, she feels an obligation to assist Maresciallo Calabonda, whose life was made miserable when the local newspaper welcomed him to Torre Pellice by misspelling his name as "Cacabonda," and the name stuck. Calabonda is happy to have the help of Simona, famous for her work with the National Antimafia Commission, as long as she is willing to let Calabonda take the credit.

It isn't long before Simona is convinced that the mountain air leads to lunacy, as crimes mount, identities are mistaken, and immigrants are misunderstood. She interacts with one eccentric technophile after another, including an extremely shy newspaper reporter named Felice, who is passionately interested in a neural network software program applied to crime scenes; a cranky coroner; and the expert on bees, Prof. Aldo Martini, described as a "huge, lanky insect."

In fact, people described in animal terms is only one aspect of a theme in this book: how humans are just one cog in nature, but they're mucking up the whole works. Hikers make their way up into the "great embrace" of the mountains, but all the valley's toxic emissions are captured in the snow of the mountain peaks, where cows in their pastures look down on the world with "sweet, fly-encircled, melancholy gazes." Deer pause, looking askance at what humans are doing. For a short time, we see the world through the eyes of a tiny Slovenian worker bee. She is depicted in such gorgeous sensual terms one dreads anything bad happening to her; it's writing like this that makes CCD seem a personal tragedy.

In addition to the witty and beautiful passages about nature, there are mouth-watering little moments devoted to food. Marco is Neopolitan and proud, but he's curious about "exotic" cuisines, which for him begin about 20 miles outside of his home city, and he is tormented by the thought of Simona enjoying good food and drink without him. I was tortured, too. It was all I could do not to hit the wine aisle at the nearby grocery store after reading about "the cheerful scent of violets wafting off the plaisentif cheese and mingling with the bouquet of that same delicate flower in a bottle of Barolo Fossati 2000."

Quadruppani's English crime-fiction debut is charming; at 203 pages, it left me wishing for more fleshed-out sequels. It reminds me a bit of Margaret Atwood's dystopian trilogy in its obvious love of nature and cautious stance toward corporations, and of Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano books in its squabbling characters and leftist takes on the exploitation of immigrants, the sad state of investigative journalism, and the corrosive power of governmental bureaucracies.

We should all be concerned about what happens when capitalists and governments get their hands on miraculous scientific breakthroughs in nano-, bio-, and computer technologies. The very nature of living things, including humans, is vulnerable to modification in both good and evil ways. Modifications might look beneficial but carry unforeseen consequences. I appreciated The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees as entertaining crime fiction, but mostly for the questions it raises about the artificialization and commoditization of all natural organisms.

Review of Wolf Haas's The Bone Man

The Bone Man by Wolf Haas (translated from the German by Annie Janusch)

I swear I will talk to you about The Bone Man without using phrases such as "choking on words," "picking a bone with," and "putting somebody through the meat grinder," even though I'm in the mood to be snarky after reading the book's droll narration by someone I can only assume is meant to be God.

Maybe I'm wildly off the mark. The narration is an unusual combination of omniscience (the characters are psychoanalyzed, and their behavior is bemoaned or complimented), philosophizing, and breezy self-deprecation ("Anyway, where am I going with this"). The narrator pulls the reader close with chatty little questions ("she looked like that actress in the French film—real quick, what's it called again, the one they reran on TV recently") and heartfelt advice ("Now, when you're close to hysteria, it's best if you eat something"). Then the narrator winks and pokes an elbow into the reader's ribs by abruptly changing the subject or falling into free association. The narration must have been a challenge for Janusch to translate without changing its flavor, and whether you find it entertaining or think it gets old or in the way of the story will determine in large part whether you like this 176-page book.

The story begins at Löschenkohl's Grill, a restaurant catering to day trippers in the sleepy town of Klöch, East Styria, Austria. It is famous for its crispy fried chicken; in a good week, the restaurant serves 10,000 chickens. That translates into four tons of bones, pulverized in the basement bone grinder by former Yugoslovian soccer player Goran Milovanovic. In 1995, Milo made a gruesome discovery: among the chicken bones was the femur of a middle-aged man. Unlike the health inspectors, who always found something, the police were unable to identify either victim or perpetrator. Later, renowned Styrian artist Gottfried Horvath disappeared.

Today, private eye Simon Brenner arrives at the urgent request of the restaurant manager, old man Löschenkohl's daughter-in-law, Angelika, but she's nowhere to be seen. It's not unusual for Angelika to leave her husband Paul for a few days, but Paul insists Brenner find her. Brenner moves into a room up in the attic, next door to the cheerful waitress, who only eats frankfurters. More disappearances and the appearance of a severed head in a bag of soccer balls prod Brenner to stop contemplating his long-gone fiancée's incessant chicken-eating and "huge rack" (surely, the result of eating hormone-fed chickens) and focus on his investigation.

Brenner is an unassuming and appealing character, a lonely ex-cop whose favorite technique is to sound people out by not asking them follow-up questions. His thoughts readily stray from the case to the wife of a former police colleague, the time he went to a whorehouse on business, the music and games of his youth. For a book of under 200 pages, there are quite a few characters, but I didn't have problems keeping them straight. Their activities—disappearances, soccer, travel by bus and car, creating and collecting art—provide plenty of grist for Brenner and that deadpan, omniscient narrator. The action takes place in a surrealistic haze until it breaks out to run helter skelter across the finish line.

Austrian writer Haas's award-winning Simon Brenner books are very popular in Europe and have been made into three German films. It appears as if the seven-book German-language series is being translated willy-nilly like those of Jo Nesbø and Nele Neuhaus, but Melville International Crime is working to bring out the entire series. The most recent book, Brenner and God, is the first English translation. The Bone Man is second in the series, and second to be translated. It can stand alone in its wackiness, and you'll either get a kick out of it, like I did, or you won't. I recommend it to readers who enjoy quirky crime fiction, black humor, and digressive narration.

Note: I received a free review copy of The Bone Man, published by Melville International Crime, in March 2013.