New mysteries offer some killer plots
Last Winter, We Parted
By Fuminori Nakamura
Soho Press, 224 pp.
***½ out of four
This slim, icy, outstanding thriller, reminiscent of Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith, should establish Fuminori Nakamura as one of the most interesting Japanese crime novelists at work today. In enigmatic glimpses, it tells the story of a writer visiting a photographer in prison, where he awaits execution for killing two women by a terrible method: setting them on fire. His sister, at large in the world, is an equally frightening person, however, and the writer must negotiate his way toward a larger truth about the deaths. Two-thirds of the way in, as the story doubled on itself yet again, I worried that it would be the usual bag of Murakami and Auster tricks — never quite an answer. But Nakamura pulls off his solution both convincingly and surprisingly, without ever sacrificing the ultimate mysteriousness of his characters' motives.
The Killer Next Door
By Alex Marwood
Penguin, 400 pp.
***
Seven tenants share a cheap London house, paying cash, each with a different reason to lie low — one of them because he's a serial killer, slowly mummifying women's corpses in his flat to give him companionship. Alex Marwood (The Wicked Girls) creates three beautifully sympathetic female characters for the killer to endanger, including a runaway, a forlorn but great-hearted old woman and most centrally Colette, who's on the run from gangsters with a bag of their cash. The Killer Next Door is an odd book: way too long, the killer revealed too early and casually, and more than half of its cast, the men of the house, unknowable, because they have to be held in reserve as suspects. But watch out for Marwood. Gillian Flynn, just to take an example, also started out with two flawed but accomplished and vivid novels, and then she gave us Gone Girl.
The Scent of Death
By Andrew Taylor
HarperCollins, 480 pp.
***
Bad historical novelists almost always give themselves away with their dialogue first ("Blimey, old egg!"), and in good ones the reverse is true — we slide indiscernibly into the rhythms of an older mode of speech, until after a few pages it seems as natural as our own. That's the case in this skillful novel, which perfectly reproduces the loyalist experience of the American Revolution in the year 1778, when the British were beginning to panic about their chances of victory. Its amiable narrator is Edward Savill; he arrives from London to aid his countrymen, but is soon shanghaied into becoming both spy and detective, too. The mystery he hopes to solve, about a murder wrongly pinned to a runaway slave, takes too long to pick up. When it does, though, its threads come together nicely, and throughout the atmosphere makes this a note-perfect voyage into a different time.
The Forgers
By Bradford Morrow
Mysterious Press, 258 pp.
**½
"They never found his hands" — it's a great opener, and establishes the tone of this uneven but consistently unnerving mystery set in the world of rare books. A reformed forger named Will describes the circumstances surrounding the death of his girlfriend's brother, also a trader in unusual volumes. Is Will a good guy, or is he a psychopath? That's the question, and Morrow handles it fairly well, though the best moments in The Forgers come not from its sometimes tedious plot but from its intimate knowledge of books, details about signatures, ink, bindings, the slant of Arthur Conan Doyle's handwriting. Its overegged prose ("Meghan's thoughts were every bit as stormy as the clouds that were piling up, nor'easter-like, along the purple horizon") somehow works, weirdly, creating an ambience of old-fashioned gothic suspense that bibliophiles in particular will enjoy.
Charles Finch writes the Charles Lenox mystery series. The latest is The Laws of Murder.