Once women got tired of being cast as helpless victims in crime novels and began running their own investigative agencies, authors had to scramble for other marginalized groups requiring the services of a detective hero. For more than a decade, P. L. Gaus has been writing quietly spellbinding mysteries about one such group, the conservative Old Order Amish of Holmes County, Ohio. Returning to the region in the seventh installment of his series, HARMLESS AS DOVES (Ohio University, $24.95), Gaus offers a sensitive account of the impact on this community when outsiders (that is, the cops) descend to deal with an Amish youth who has confessed to the murder of his fiancée’s older, richer and very persistent admirer.
Gaus takes an evenhanded approach to the conflicting values of the otherworldly Plain People, who travel by horse and buggy and shun electricity on their farms, as well as intruders from “the modern world of gadgets.” But he also writes with feeling about the dissension within the Amish community whenever unruly human passions threaten its members’ pacifist principles.
Holmes County is also the setting for Linda Castillo’s more conventional procedural mysteries featuring Kate Burkholder, an Amish-born (but excommunicated) chief of police who feels torn between two cultures whenever her job takes her back to the old community. Kate’s divided loyalties make her a sympathetic narrator in BREAKING SILENCE (Minotaur, $24.99) when three members of an Amish family are found dead in the manure pit of their pig farm, a tragedy she fears may be related to a recent rash of hate crimes. Kate seems a competent if sentimental cop, and for some reason her banal, clichéd interrogations don’t incite the plain-spoken Amish to drive her off with pitchforks.
David Loogan, the personable amateur sleuth in Harry Dolan’s first crime novel, “Bad Things Happen,” finds himself entangled in another literary murder case in VERY BAD MEN (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $25.95). As the editor of a mystery magazine called Gray Streets, Loogan is used to dealing with peculiar authors. But when a killer drops off a manuscript in which he confesses to one murder and thoughtfully provides the next name on his hit list, Loogan feels compelled to horn in on the investigation headed by his girlfriend, a detective on the police force in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Although the dynamic of this relationship is fairly bland, the characterization of the killer is more inspired. Anthony Lark suffers from synesthesia, a rare condition that causes him to perceive written words as having color and movement. He can read most crime stories without difficulty because of their simple language, but ornate writing styles leave him queasy, and adverbs, which “swarmed like marching ants,” make his skin crawl.
If Lark could actually read this convoluted account of his mad mission to rectify the unjust outcome of a 17-year-old robbery, the killer might indeed be seeing red. That reaction would have less to do with Dolan’s language, which is clean and crisp, than with his excessive use of plot twists, character reversals and irrelevant clues — devices that, like adverbs, should be used sparingly by writers who don’t want to find themselves on some crazy reader’s hit list.
It’s a fact of crime fiction that social misfits make the best amateur detectives. That’s certainly true of the endearing sleuth of Colin Cotterill’s first mystery series, Dr. Siri Paiboun, an aged pathologist who is amused and appalled to find himself one of the last surviving free-thinking intellectuals in 1970s Communist Laos. In KILLED AT THE WHIM OF A HAT (Minotaur, $24.99), Cotterill expands on his outsider theme with a beguiling new series set in contemporary Thailand. His scrappy young heroine, Jimm Juree, feels the sting of social alienation when her mother’s impulsive decision to buy a shabby resort on the Gulf of Thailand forces a move south from Chiang Mai, dashing Jimm’s dreams of becoming the local paper’s first-string crime reporter.
Stuck in this rural backwater, where southerners dislike northerners and northerners scorn southerners and everyone hates the Chinese, Jimm can identify with the lonely stand of evergreen trees she spies growing here in the tropics: “I wondered if they had dreams of snow.” Luckily for her, two drifters from a bygone era suddenly surface when a workman digs up a 1972 Volkswagen camper with their skeletons inside. Now that’s something you don’t often see up north, a hint that Jimm’s life in the south is going to be much more interesting than she thought.
Don’t believe the hype about THE HYPNOTIST (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27), a calculating thriller by two Swedish authors writing as Lars Kepler. This lengthy story of a spree killer who wipes out three members of a family in a murderous rage and the discredited hypnotist who comes out of professional exile to help catch him does contain strokes of good writing (“Josef had a particular smell about him, a smell of rage, of burning chemicals,” in Ann Long’s blunt translation). And the maniac of the piece is certainly an eye-catching villain. But the dislocations in time, glib psychology and repetitious depiction of guts and gore create more discomfort than tension. For genuinely stylish sadism, stick to Stieg Larsson; for cruelty executed with true cunning, read Jo Nesbo; and if ponderous philosophizing is called for, no one can beat Henning Mankell.
