Chills and Thrills

Most mystery addicts would concede that a very attractive quality about the genre is its ability to relieve stress. It is arguably vital for a work of crime fiction to be utterly compelling, or else you might be tempted to turn to science fiction or romance novels to satisfy your cravings for mental comfort food. I read these books during an angst-filled month that found my husband and me flying to Siberia on short notice to adopt a 7-month-old boy. If they could hold my interest, rest assured, you too can safely escape reality in their pages.

Because the collected works of Anne Perry had gotten me through six months of byzantine adoption paperwork, I turned gratefully to “Ashworth Hall,” her latest Victorian mystery, when I needed a break from packing two weeks’ worth of diapers, formula, baby clothes and polar gear. This time, Supt. Thomas Pitt and his crafty, highborn wife, Charlotte, are guests at an upscale country house party hosted by her wealthy sister, Emily, and her politician second husband, Jack Radley. Pitt has been sent there undercover to guard a secret conference of Catholics and Protestants who have gathered, somewhat improbably, to determine home rule for Ireland. When the chairman of the conference is found dead in his bath, Pitt must act swiftly because nothing less than the future of Ireland depends upon him.

This hyperbole notwithstanding, I enjoyed the unfolding drama of the characters’ lives. Gracie, the Pitts’ all-purpose spunky maid, is particularly endearing in her efforts to pass as a proper lady’s maid. As usual, Perry offers up fascinating 19th century housekeeping details, such as always putting white clothes away in a box or drawer lined with blue paper or cloth to keep them from turning yellow. Perry also feels obliged to give readers a history lesson, and the long riffs about Irish home rule slow the book down.

En route to Moscow, I was completely captivated by “The Echo,” by Minette Walters, who won the Edgar Award for her first novel, “The Sculptress.” Walters is like an innovative chef who tosses a mess of seemingly unrelated ingredients into a pan and comes up with a gastronomic delight. Billy Blake, a homeless man, dies of starvation inches from a well-stocked freezer in the garage of Amanda Powell, a soigne architect who lives on an private estate near London. Powell’s merchant banker husband, James Streeter, disappeared years earlier, after allegedly defrauding his employers of 10 million pounds.

Not only does Powell pay for Blake’s funeral, she presses Michael Deacon, a feckless journalist for a left-wing paper, to find out why Blake died. Deacon’s interest (and lust) are piqued by the architect’s request, and he wonders: Could the vagrant actually be her long-missing husband?

In his quest to find the truth (and write a career-saving story), he is assisted by a cast of singular and memorable characters, most notably Terry, a ‘90s reincarnation of Dickens’ Artful Dodger. Although Walters cleverly sprinkles her prose with faux news clippings to give the reader a chance to figure things out, nothing about the novel is predictable.

Later, I was holed up in a claustrophobic, minimally heated Russian apartment when I began the evocative and poetic “Faceless Killers,” winner of Sweden’s Best Mystery Award. The fifth in a popular series starring Kurt Wallander, a policeman in the tiny Swedish town of Skane, it is Henning Mankell’s first mystery to be translated into English.

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The result is an exquisite novel of mesmerizing depth and suspense, far more accessible than Peter Hoeg’s recent “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” One night after having stayed up late listening to the recordings of Maria Callas, Wallander is awakened from an intense dream by a call from his office to take up an investigation. An old farmer--alarmed because his neighbor’s mare didn’t neigh in the night, as she usually did when she heard her master moving around--has reported that his elderly neighbor is dead and that the neighbor’s wife is tied up on the floor.

Wallander is called to the scene and discovers the worst murder he has ever seen, “and he had seen plenty.” The old woman, savagely beaten, lives long enough to utter one word, “foreign.” Wallander does more with this scanty hint than other detectives do with a smoking gun, and I confess I have a crush on the Swedish sleuth, who exhibits an appealing combination of Scandinavian melancholy and a surprising joie de vivre. The depiction of ordinary life in the Far North is exotic yet strangely familiar. Of course, it may have helped that I read this novel in Siberia.

I was hopeful that best-selling author and former cop Nancy Taylor Rosenberg would get me through the long flight home. But her heroine, the gratingly earnest Rachel Simmons, a police officer in the small California town of Oak Grove, endures so much torment and humiliation that after 50 pages, I looked longingly at the in-flight magazine. Rachel--a poor, overworked, sleep-deprived widow and former kidnapping victim--is struggling to raise her two children. As if she doesn’t have enough problems, she decides to report a male colleague for excessive brutality when, during an arrest, he uses an innocent bystander as a human shield. She winds up being ostracized and harassed by her male-dominated precinct and, strangely enough, is surprised. At one point, her teenage daughter declares in exasperation: “I’m not like you, Mother. You believe bad things can be turned into good things. Bad things are just bad things.” I inherently dislike books in which dimwitted women suffer endlessly, and nothing in the fast-paced but morally dubious plot changed my mind.

I gladly finished Rosenberg’s mystery and woke my new baby for an engrossing game of peekaboo.