White vs. red, and other conflicts
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Red Knife
By William Kent Krueger
Atria, 320 pp., $25
Sweetheart
By Chelsea Cain
St. Martin's Minotaur, 328 pp., $24.95
It's a Crime
By Jacqueline Carey
Ballantine, 288 pp., $24
William Kent Krueger takes the reader into alien territory in his new Cork O'Connor mystery, "Red Knife." The place, rural Tamarack County, Minn., is the borderland between whites and the native Ojibwe. The atmosphere is explosive as tinder in the aftermath of the death of a white teenager, Kristi Reinhardt. She overdosed on cocaine, given to her by an Ojibwe youth, Lonnie Thunder, supposedly a member of the Red Boyz gang. Whites vow retribution against the Red Boyz, while gang members insist that they don't do drugs, and furthermore Lonnie is not one of them.
Alex Kingbird, a Red Boyz leader, enlists former sheriff O'Connor to help set up a meeting with Kristi's father, Buck Reinhardt, promising to "give him what he wants" in order to defuse the crisis. "Why me?" Cork asks. "Because you're not just another white man," Alex answers. With some Ojibwe blood, Cork is trusted by both sides.
But before the meeting can take place, Alex and his young wife are murdered, and Cork finds himself dead center in a conflagration that threatens to consume both sides. There are more casualties and threats before Cork figures out exactly what's going on.
A talented writer, Krueger tells his story from wide-ranging viewpoints. The story is intricately plotted, and in the end the pieces pull together, though I was baffled by a final-final ending that felt tacked on. The writing is spare and strong, and Krueger provides fascinating insights into Ojibwe culture.
Chelsea Cain's second novel, "Sweetheart," is profoundly creepy and disturbing - intentionally so. She picks up the story of Portland, Ore., detective Archie Sheridan two years after his near-fatal run-in with beautiful serial killer Gretchen Lowell.
Gretchen is in jail in solitary confinement. Archie has to visit her regularly, he tells himself, to get her to reveal the identities of more of the hundreds of victims she claims to have sliced, diced, and, after having had her fun with them, executed. Half the delight for her is leaving their desecrated bodies where their loved ones can find them. Her calling card is the heart-shaped wound she carves in her victims, though it may be hard to find amid all the gore.
This female Svengali robs the men she chooses of all common sense, then gets them to do her murderous bidding and commit suicide. The reader is meant to wonder whether she has, in fact, hypnotized Archie into functioning as one of her minions. In the aftermath of his encounter with her, he's a shell of his former self, addicted to painkillers and estranged from a wife who loves him, and from his kids. But Gretchen possesses him, and the reader knows it's just a matter of time before she comes after Archie to finish what she started.
If you're in the mood for sadomasochistic sex and graphic violence, here's the book for you. File it under "Hannibal Lite."
Jacqueline Carey's "It's a Crime" tells of an
The first section of the novel is narrated by erstwhile landscape gardener Pat Foy, wife of Frank Foy, one of the poor shlubs who end up in prison. The setting is Hart Ridge, N.J. (think Montclair). Pat's lucrative landscaping contracts smack of make-work, thinly disguised insider bonuses funded by the company for her husband's wealthy colleagues. Naïve and self-obsessed, she is slow to realize the gravity of Frank's situation. When he goes to prison, she embarks on a picaresque journey, tracking down the people whose savings evaporated when the firm imploded. She wants to apologize and reimburse them from what seems like a bottomless bank account.
One such victim is a childhood friend, the dour, black-clad Virginia Howley, a onetime mystery writer who invested in the company and now works as a waitress in a diner. Virginia narrates the middle section of the novel, which, by then, feels like one of her own novels, in which "who knew what the hell was going on, but it wasn't pursuit or deduction in the usual sense."
Pat brings Virginia home, along with Will, the 20-year-old son of Pat's former lover, a prolific mystery author. Will hangs out at the Foys' and picks up the narration of the final section of the novel. While Pat is trying to hatch a scheme to pay back more victims, her daughter inveigles Will into helping her wreak her own, equally harebrained version of justice.
The novel meanders freely from present to past and back again. Following the narrative threads feels like watching wisps of smoke drifting and circling one another. This journey down the rabbit hole is not your mother's crime fiction, but in the shadow of Wall Street's current upheavals, it's oddly not that farfetched.
Hallie Ephron is author of "Never Tell a Lie," to be published in January by Morrow. Contact her through www.hallieephron.com.
