7-04-05, 9:15 am

Walter Mosley, Little Scarlet, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2004.


Walter Mosley returns to the Easy Rawlins series with this novel set in the midst of the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles in 1965. Little Scarlet sees our hero hired by a worried police commissioner fearful that rumors of the death and rape of a Black woman at the hands of a white man will ignite more violence. As the crime was committed in a neighborhood hard hit by fires and looting, the police are also squeamish about conducting a homicide investigation surrounded by angry Black people. So they turn to Easy Rawlins to discover the truth, or perhaps to hide it. The violence of racism and the struggle for universal justice are interwoven into this fast-paced detective drama. Here again Mosley combines the elegance of a finely told tale, a convincing mystery, and the insights into the American racial drama. Few detective writers match Mosley’s skill.

Andrea Camilleri, Voice of the Violin, New York, Penguin Books, 2003.

Voice of the Violin is the superbly translated edition of the second volume in Camilleri’s Inspector Silva Montalbano series is funny, moving, and an intricate mystery plot. Montalbano is an Italian police inspector whose gift for detail, love of food, and devotion to intimate pleasures are matched only by his allegiance to the working class. At one point in the story, Montalbano roundly chastises an underling who had the nerve to ignore Montalbano’s standing order that those in his charge are not to go out to intervene in labor disputes where police often are ordered by their superiors to turn their nightsticks on striking workers.

In this story, a woman is found brutally murdered and all signs point toward a slightly disturbed admirer or, one might say, devoted stalker. And the establishment police are intent on making their case against the number one suspect despite Montalbano’s doubts and gut feelings about his innocence. Thus, Montalbano’s job is not only to discover who committed this heinous act, but also to foil the attempt to frame an innocent man. Can he accomplish this before something dire happens to the unlucky suspect?

This riveting little novel is a page-turner.

John Grisham, The Broker, New York, Doubleday, 2005.

Grisham’s latest thriller is a tale of a former Washington lobbyist and power broker, Joel Backman, who, after six years in the federal penitentiary, is released into a sort of witness protection program. This time, however, our protagonist isn’t being protected but is rather being offered as bait. Backman is planted quietly under CIA observation in the mid-size town of Bologna, with its coterie of leftist intellectuals and working-class, anti-fascist roots.

The Broker is a taut thriller that is unlike any of its predecessors. In the hunt for Backman and the secrets he is supposed to possess are Israel assassins, Chinese agents, perhaps Russian spies, and don’t forget the good ol’ CIA. Backman will have to use his good sense and is wits to survive this dangerous game. Interestingly, Grisham’s tale narrates the transformation of a major figure in US power politics, a leading actor in the capitalist ruling class who’s fortunes are reduced to prison and a run for his life when competing sections of the ruling class don’t like what he is doing and what he has. In an extraordinary scene with an Italian professor who happens to be an exiled American communist, Backman ridicules the history of the communist movement, running down a litany of failures and abuses that he has been taught are linked to the legacy of the communist movement.

But, then again, he thinks, 'What has capitalism done for you?' Grisham’s work is daring and inconolastic. Take a look.

Leonarda Padura Fuentes, Havana Red, London, Bitter Lemon Press, 2005.

A transvestite dressed in red silk is discovered strangled in a Havana park. The death of this son of a high-placed Cuban government official has Lieutenant Mario Conde off of official suspension and on the case in this first novel of Padura’s four-part series called the Havana Quartet starring the introspective and astute Cuban detective. For assistance on the case Conde is forced to seek out an aging, gay writer who was blacklisted in his youth. Padura won Spain’s Dashiell Hammett prize for Havana Red and is regarded in Cuba as one of its most popular and treasured writers.

Havana Red is a beautifully written crime story and is a thriller through and through, but it is also imbued with insights into Cuban society readers aren’t likely to find elsewhere. It challenges traditionally accepted views of sexuality, the lesbian, gay, and transgendered community in Cuba, and reexamines closely the question of art’s political role. It is simultaneously a fast-paced investigation into a homicide and a tale of the personal and social transformation of its main protagonist.

This novel is a prime example of Padura’s acute strengths and his well-deserved respect worldwide. Havana Red deserves much wider attention in the US.