I have a confession to make. Choosing which mysteries to review each month gives me both pleasure and pain, because it means that there are always a few that don’t fit the theme of a particular column or were published in a month full of good choices. So here are some of those titles that deserve your consideration.This is not the Bookshelf of Misfit Toys. Consider them instead as gifts that fell out of Santa’s sleigh when it hit turbulence.
My favorite is John Banville’s Venetian Vespers, which isn’t part of his popular Quirke series. It’s part gothic thriller and part Henry James pastiche (the novel’s epigraph is the first clue, the long and winding sentences another), set in 1899, and narrated by Evelyn Dolman, a self-confessed hack writer who has somehow managed to marry an American heiress.
Their honeymoon in Venice goes awry when his wife disappears from the palazzo they’ve rented and Dolman falls under the spell of a pair of seductive brother-sister twins, who bring out inclinations he didn’t know he had. Banville conjures up an atmosphere of heightened, almost hallucinatory awareness as the avid but hapless Dolman pursues his demons through the sinister side streets of Venice. The beast in me, indeed.
There are several figurative beasts in French writer Joël Dicker’s stylish and sexy Wild Animal, in which an inconvenient romantic obsession transforms into something more twisty, involving a jewelry heist in Geneva.
The smitten obsessive is the married head of a SWAT team, who has fallen for his alluring neighbor, also married. Despite a wealth disparity, the neighboring couples are friends, intensifying the ickiness of the situation. The policeman begins to stalk the magnetic beauty with the tools of his profession, bugging her bedroom as well as watching her from the woods nearby. Things get stranger when what appears to be another stalker materializes and the game changes.
Nearly everyone in Wild Animal gives in to urges they really should resist. As it turns out, the glamorous couple keep many secrets, even from each other, which Dicker unravels expertly and propulsively. Heists, shifty rich people, glamorous international settings, an ingenious plot—what more could a reader want?
Though many mysteries contain references to opera—usually as a signifier that someone is insufferable or a villain—there aren’t many explicitly about opera. (Donna Leon’s terrific Death at La Fenice excepted.) Therefore, a bouquet of bravas to Morgan Richter for The Understudy, her look at backstage intrigue—and murder—at a small New York opera company about to debut its version of the movie Barbarella.
The rising star they’d snagged for the titular role has become unavailable, so her understudy, Kit Margolis, is the new Barbarella. Kit is a more than competent singer, but a young Jane Fonda she’s not. Unfortunately for Kit, Yolanda Archambeau, the new understudy, is drop-dead gorgeous. Not operatically trained, but try taking your eyes off of her.
She’s also lethally ambitious. Like many a fictional understudy before her, the unstable Yolanda will stop at nothing to get the part. But Kit didn’t get where she is by being a wilting camellia, so she starts investigating her enemy’s sketchy past as the show’s wobbly financing threatens to render the casting battle moot.
Even as the story evolves into more of a madcap farce, Richter manages to get all things opera right. (Yes, an opera understudy is more correctly called a “cover,” but a book called The Cover would just be mystifying.) Any lover of behind-the-scenes backstabbing should enjoy this, but some knowledge of opera would be an enhancer.
If it’s Scandi noir you crave, you might want to try The Glass Man. It’s the second in Swedish writer Anders de la Motte’s series about police detective Leonore Asker, head of the Department of Lost Souls, which describes her team as well as the odd cases they take on. All the elements that made the series’ first book, The Mountain King, so strong and original are back: Leo’s toxic relationship with her alpha-male boss; her friendship with Martin Hill, a professor and urban explorer; and the infuriating existence of her crazy, survivalist father.
The Glass Man begins with Leo taking a call from this long-absent parent. He’s convinced he’s being framed for murder, and he wants her to intervene, otherwise heaven help any cops who try to arrest him. Leo does her best to manage her volatile dad; he’s nuts but highly intelligent and fully capable of taking out her colleagues.
The other pillar of the book is Martin Hill’s story. He’s been asked by a distinguished biomedical entrepreneur to write a history of his company, which would entail spending time at Astroholm Manor, where the family lives, and the rare chance to visit an abandoned observatory nearby.
Astroholm turns out to be one scary place. Martin pokes around as explorers do, and discovers that the family is secretly up to all sorts of futuristic medical shenanigans, putting himself in peril.
In The Glass Man, de la Motte digs into niche-y subjects like U.F.O.’s, abandoned buildings, and cryogenics and builds a crime into them—call it adventure crime. What gives it emotional heft is his handling of Leo’s complex inner life, which makes this follow-up satisfying on all levels.
Nick, Alistair, Damian, Justin, Jonathan, André—the handsome con artist at the center of Lisa Jewell’s Don’t Let Him In has assumed so many identities he barely remembers his real name. It’s how he’s constructed his life, sauntering from one woman to the next, sometimes marrying and having children with them, until he’s squeezed them dry and moves on.
Jewell introduces him as Nick Radcliffe, the tall, silver-haired fellow who’s oh-so-gently insinuating himself into the life of Nina Swann, the recent widow of a well-known restaurateur. He’s transitioning from his wife Martha, the lovely florist he, as Alistair Grey, could have sworn he was in love with but, well, Nina is wealthier. Luckily, Nina has a suspicious daughter who’s still grieving her father and doesn’t buy Nick’s perfect-boyfriend act.
As he tries to keep Martha sweet while wooing Nina, Nick looks back on his other cons in self-narrated chapters, revealing his nuanced technique for reeling in vulnerable women, the triggers for his misogyny and violence, and the lies he tells himself. Jewell is interested in what makes sociopaths like him tick—her look inside Nick’s head is harrowing.
Don’t Let Him In is so good at turning the screws, you’ll want to finish it in one sitting, rooting for these wronged women and the comeuppance of its multi-monikered Dirty John.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
