Character studies and complexities make 'Vanished Hands' quite a find
The Vanished Hands
By Robert Wilson
Harcourt, 360 pp, $25
What does the face of suffering look like? That's the question that occupies Maddy Krugman, a seductive photographer who is constantly playing for attention in Robert Wilson's brooding new mystery, "The Vanished Hands." Fixated on appearances and what they reveal (or don't), the desperate redhead has made a career out of shooting people "suffering in intensely private moments, but out in the open," and her candid photographs may provide evidence that a dead man murdered his wife and then committed suicide -- or that he had other crimes on his conscience.
The "very white" American is also very well aware of her own visual appeal, artfully arranging herself in silhouette or attractive deshabille whenever Wilson's susceptible protagonist, the police inspector chief Javier Falcon, comes by during his quest to explain the two deaths in the villa next door to Maddy and her older husband.
Suffering -- and the ways it makes itself seen in a wealthy Lisbon enclave -- seems to fascinate author Wilson as well. Falcon, for example, drinks too much and watches his emotions flip about like dying fish, particularly when reacting to his home, his sister, or the other women in his life. Clearly, he is still recovering from the revelations and trauma of his first fictional outing, 2003's "The Blind Man of Seville." So, too, is Consuelo Jimenez, who was widowed in that last, harsher book through a series of crimes that have drawn her and the honorable Falcon together.
Add a troubled convict who may be a child abuser, a hard-drinking actor with sewage problems, and a series of other characters with dark secrets -- both from the neighborhood and Falcon's office -- and it soon becomes clear that pain prompts the donning of many masks. Through a series of images and scenes played out with a subtlety Maddy Krugman could not imagine, Wilson builds a many-layered portrait of survivors and perpetrators, each consumed by rage, guilt, or depression, and each wearing a different face.
It's these character studies that propel "The Vanished Hands." Although the mystery surrounding those two deaths, and several subsequent ones, is a compelling one, this is not primarily a plot-driven book. In part, that's because the story line starts out simply but soon grows almost hopelessly convoluted. From the start, for example, Falcon wants to follow his instincts and investigate the married couple's deaths as murder, not a murder-suicide.
The legal implications of his investigation are quickly tied up in politics, both statewide and personal (just for starters, a presiding judge is romantically involved with Falcon's ex-wife). Connections then seem to appear between the dead couple and the Russian mafia and to this crime syndicate's sex trade in both adults and children. Various figures from "The Blind Man" surface, and numerous old characters are revived, usually with enough background so that even those who didn't read the previous book can catch up. But it's a twisted tale through some very twisted lives, and can be hard to follow.
It's also a sad story. Although by the book's end Falcon seems to be putting his life back together, his happiness is far from guaranteed. And many of the minor characters -- notably a Ukrainian prostitute named Nadia Kouzmikheva -- are abandoned to much grimmer fates, or simply dropped from the book entirely. But somehow, Wilson keeps us reading.
It's not that Wilson can't plot with the best of them. The author won a Gold Dagger Award for his "A Small Death in Lisbon," a wonderful thriller that brought Lisbon's World War II-era history back to life, and that book and his subsequent Bruce Medway/West Africa series prove that he's a master of more straightforward whodunits. But unlike those sophisticated, stylistically simpler books, "The Vanished Hands" aims for a lower-key human drama. Psychology is the motivator here, as much as money, blood, or sex, and Falcon is the sensitive medium who picks up on everyone's undercurrents.
Those undercurrents are what draw the reader in: Instead of action, this book's appeal lies in the empathy that Wilson builds for his characters. Falcon and Jimenez, in particular, have both been damaged, and when they reach for each other, the reader can't help rooting for them. When they run into their own boundaries -- the invisible scar tissue of trauma -- we believe in their shock and pain.
This can be tough on both our protagonist and the reader. Unlike in the Medway books, such as "Blood Is Dirt" and "The Darkening Stain," the Falcon series neither softens the blows with humor nor builds up resistance with noir-style overkill. It's a riskier strategy, and in "The Blind Man" it often backfired -- the sheer cruelty of the crime was hard to take. Somehow, perhaps because the initial crime seems less horrible, in "The Vanished Hands" this strategy works.
Few of us, probably, have undergone the kind of trauma that Falcon, Jimenez, and their compatriots have survived -- the loss of identity, of security, and more. But the way Wilson portrays this suffering reveals its humanity, and brings us closer to his characters and ourselves.
