Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 17, 1993 TAG: 9310170215
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Martha Grimes. Alfred A. Knopf. $21.
At her best, Martha Grimes writes mysteries many cuts above the average. With this latest in her popular series featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Richard Jury, she has returned to that level of quality.
For one thing, Jury in "The Horse" isn't so much the cloying Mr. Sensitive that gunks up some novels in the series. For another, Grimes' merry olde rural England was getting a tad stale. Getting Jury out of England for a week and into the United States - mostly Baltimore, a city that the American Grimes obviously knows well - seems to have refreshed her gift for satiric sparkle.
The characterizations are vivid; the writing, masterful. (Grimes' parody of Edgar Allan Poe, albeit respectful, is a hoot.) Like the other books in the series, the title of this one comes from a fictional pub (or, in this case, bar) that Jury and his entourage fre quent. That device, Grimes has one of her characters say self-referentially, makes a weird kind of sense. So, in "The Horse You Came In On," does the mystery and its solution.
Actor.
By Parnell Hall. The Mysterious Press. $18.95.
Mixed review here. I rather enjoyed "Actor." But while it's the sort of lighthearted-with-a-bit-of-bite mystery that my spouse usually favors, not this time.
The protagonist-narrator is Stanley Hastings, a New York City private investigator called at the last minute by an old college classmate to appear as an emergency replacement in the cast of a summer-stock theatrical production in New England.
To my spouse, Hastings' sexist remarks, and his tendency to forget the names of other characters in the book, were irritating. To me, they were mildly amusing, tongue-in-cheek reminders of human fallibility.
Bottom Liner Blues.
By K. C. Constantine. The Mysterious Press. $18.95.
Like the earlier books in this series featuring Rocksburg, Pa., Police Chief Mario Balzic, "Bottom Liner Blues" weds the backdrop of an economically depressed Rustbelt town with the spiritual and physical ennui of its main character.
That sounds wearier than Constantine's mysteries generally are. Brightening this one are its population of long-distance truckers, a young West Virginia mother highly suspicious of authority, and a Russian-American writer whose oddball economic theories Constantine somehow manages to bring just inside the realm of possibility.
The Cain Conversion.
By Richard Aellen. Donald I. Fine. $21.95.
International thrillers pose a mystery of their own: How do they continue to thrive, as exemplified by Aellen's page-turner, despite the real-world collapse of the Soviet Union as America's Moriarty?
Aellen's answer in "The Cain Conversion" is to assume that the Cold War left loose ends for the spy world to tie up. Among them is the novel's bad guy, a renegade and psychopathic ex-KGB agent.
This opens the way for traditional themes of the genre: bureaucratic intrigue and rivalry, the evil powers of Soviet-style psychiatry, the willingness of an implacable foe to plant destructive seeds and wait years for them to bear their corrupt fruit, and an American innocent caught in the middle.
Geoff Seamans writes editorials for this newspaper.
by CNB