New York Review of Books Review
This remarkable expedition takes us miles away from the home base of the traditional village mystery and into the far-off land of the odyssey. For that seems to be what Peter has undertaken in his solitary travels from Quebec City to Toronto to Paris to Scotland and to a wild and remote stretch of the St. Lawrence River known as "the land God gave to Cain." That is, the heroic quest to reinvent himself as an artist and claim a new identity as "a brave man in a brave country." In another departure from genre convention, the murder that usually opens the narrative doesn't come until the end. But the execution of it is both creative and diabolical, a thematically satisfying finish for a story that sets out to probe the mysteries of the artistic process. While Penny has thoughtful things to say about the evolution of an artist's style, she's even more keen to examine the dark side of an artist's sensibility. As someone observes of the professional jealousy that corrupted Peter, "It's like drinking acid and expecting the other person to die." And what an artistic way that is to commit murder-suicide. IN THRILLER LAND, there ÍS something very dangerous and sexy about the teacher-pupil dynamic, especially where guns are involved. Jack Reacher, the massive hunk of a hero who travels light and flies solo in Lee Child's action-heavy novels, is burdened by a sidekick in PERSONAL (Deiacorte, $28). That doesn't stop this former Army M.P. from carrying out an assignment that takes him from Arkansas to London, where a crack sniper has fixed his sights on the world leaders at a planned G-8 conference. But Casey Nice, the green C.I.A. officer attached to this mission, is such an empty vessel you keep expecting an alien to pop out of her rib cage. Reacher is always up for a good fight, most entertainingly when he goes mano a mano with a seven-foot, 300-pound monster of a mobster named Little Joey. But it's Reacher the Teacher who wows here, instructing Casey Nice and us in the assets of the AK-47 and the properties of bulletproof glass, while passing on neat tricks like how to stroll through airport security, buy a gun when you're out of town and smash a guy's nose with your elbow. NO ONE COULD possibly have a more refined grasp of social status than the 16-year-old schoolgirls in Tana French's perceptive psychological suspense novel the SECRET PLACE (Viking, $27.95) - except, perhaps, the two Dublin police officers who turn up at their private school to reopen the investigation into the unsolved murder of a popular student at a nearby boys' academy. Antoinette Conway, the lead detective on the year-old case, comes fully armored with the underdog attitude of a tough kid from the slums. Stephen Moran, the sensitive young cop from a working-class background who narrates the procedural aspects of the story, arrives at St. Kilda's College with stars in his eyes. "It was beautiful," he says of the elegant mansion. "I love beautiful." He also appreciates the beauty of a friendship that enfolds four "enchanted girls" in a magical circle that protects them from the cruelties of a girls' boarding school. With her awesome facility at girl-speak, French constructs an idiom that is clever and crude and vulgar and vicious in one breath and deeply, profoundly tragic in the next. WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, who draws his stories from Indian life and legend in the rugged north woods of Minnesota, writes with fresh passion and purpose in WINDIGO ISLAND (Atria, $24.99) about the local sex trade. When the body of a 14-year-old runaway from the Bad Bluff Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin washes up on an uninhabited island in Lake Superior, a frightened family begs good-guy Cork O'Connor to find the girl who ran away with her. Since most runaways head for Duluth, that's where Cork and the relatives go for a fast and brutal education in how the traffickers procure, groom, brainwash and turn the girls into prostitutes to service the men who sail into the huge harbor of "the Emerald City." Krueger has always written sympathetically about conditions on the reservations that make native children feel their lives are hopeless. Now he tells us that to human predators their lives are actually worthless.