Though she’s written only two novels, Clémence Michallon has already made a distinct impression with characters who exist on a different plane from the rest of us. There are good reasons for their sense of separateness. In her breakthrough debut, The Quiet Tenant, a young woman was held captive by a disturbed man for five years, making her isolation quite literal. In her latest, Our Last Resort, another woman, Frida Nilsen, spent her childhood cut off from society in a cult, along with her brother of choice Gabriel Miller, with whom she shares a fierce bond. (Biological relationships are blurred.)
Cults have recently provided writers such as Lisa Jewell and Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) with rich material. The Family Upstairs, Jewell’s book about a degraded aristocratic English family that falls prey to a controlling con artist, deals with the ways trauma has shaped those who have escaped, while Galbraith’s The Running Grave drops us directly into the middle of a high-functioning cult, painting a harrowing picture of how the trauma is inflicted.
Michallon’s book runs more along the lines of the Jewell model. It’s set in the present, when Gabriel and Frida are adults and the damage has been done. Michallon weaves in flashbacks to their childhood in the upstate New York cult to show how it warped members’ minds. The kids dream of escape, though when they finally do, their arrival in Manhattan, coughed out onto a teeming train platform in Grand Central Terminal, is a Dickensian shock.
These orphans of the storm are so intertwined in their struggle to survive that it seems like nothing could pry them apart. Yet Gabriel gets married young, and when his wife dies, under strange circumstances, the suspicion that falls upon him sends him to Seattle to start over, while Frida remains in New York.
When the book begins, they haven’t seen each other in five years, but the time has come to discuss something important, so they meet at the luxurious Ara resort in the Utah desert. Among their fellow guests is a visibly unhappy couple: a beautiful, vibrant young woman and her older, famously wealthy husband. When she is found murdered in the desert, her husband is the obvious suspect, but it seems Gabriel can’t escape his past and once again finds himself in the crosshairs of the law.
Michallon’s commitment to these characters is powerful and her plotting is elegant, so I was surprised that she would turn to the White Lotus trope of rich people imploding at a high-end resort. Gabriel and Frida are not, after all, typical Ara guests. But as Michallon points out in a note, her last book was about someone stuck in a shed for years, so opening up her geographical perspective felt right. And, actually, there is something appropriately off-kilter about a luxury resort in the Utah desert. The coyotes that yowl in the night echo the loneliness of two people who will never fit comfortably into society. Ultimately, they may only have each other.
Starting with its no-frills title, Art Detectives seems precision-engineered for the Acorn TV audience. Its six discrete episodes feature a 50-ish detective, still fit and attractive, and his saucy, even fitter young female partner; arcane subject matter—art and antiques—made simple; and crimes that take the detectives to the more picturesque sectors of the U.K. It’s Midsomer Murders crossed with Antiques Roadshow, though without the gleefully bonkers storylines of the former.
Mick Palmer (True Blood’s Stephen Moyer) and his partner, Shazia Malik (Nina Singh), make up the Heritage Crime Unit, which investigates art fraud or theft that’s often tied to murder. There’s enough variety and novelty in the crimes—everything from stealing Viking booty to faking fine wines—to keep interest without straining the brain.
Expressing intense concentration, whether it’s focused on an overpainted canvas or a dead body, is pretty interior work for an actor, but Moyer makes a credible show of it, projecting an air of scholarly competence and quiet decency. I appreciate these qualities in a moment when the only art anyone’s talking about are Trump’s Sharpie sketches. Most of the ass-kicking is outsourced to Singh, who’s an appealing foil.
Art Detectives doesn’t have the sparky eccentricity of Ludwig, but it’s a soothing comfort watch that doesn’t insult your intelligence and may even add to it.
If the streets of L.A. are more your thing, by all means give Ballard a look. Or two. I found it hard to stop watching after one episode. Just as Titus Welliver became writer Michael Connelly’s iconic L.A.P.D. cop, Harry Bosch, to viewers of the Bosch series, so now Maggie Q inhabits Bosch’s sometime colleague Renée Ballard with equal authority. Whether or not you’ve read the Ballard and Bosch books and formed an idea of her, from the opening scene, with Ballard’s wielding a shotgun to corner a suspect in a dry cleaner’s, you’ll be sold.
There’s more to Ballard than the kind of action Maggie Q is known for, however. It was smart of Michael Alaimo and Kendall Sherwood, the show’s creators, to hit us with that initial blast and then proceed with a nuanced portrait of this complicated woman.
Caught up in the rampant corruption and misogyny she encountered as a homicide detective in the L.A.P.D., Ballard has been exiled to a new job as head of a cold-case unit. It’s headquartered in a basement (nicer than the one in Dept. Q!) and staffed with volunteers played by a terrific group of character actors. The unit exists mainly because of a local councilman’s obsession with the unsolved murder of his sister, but Ballard and her crew find their way to other related cases, walking a dangerous line with the councilman and certain dirty cops just waiting for her to trip up.
The 10-episode series is a mash-up of the books, so it’s chock-full of suspenseful ongoing storylines. But even amid the steady pulsing of gnarly cases, Ballard emerges as a fully fleshed-out character. At work she’s a reserved, driven, no-nonsense boss, but when she goes home to her grandmother (the wonderful Amy Hill), her rescue dog, and her surfboard, she loosens up a bit. She’s never going to be warm and fuzzy, but at least these scenes allow her to crack a rare smile.
Fans familiar with the characters will know that Bosch is part of the unsolved-case unit in Connelly’s books, but he doesn’t appear much in the show. Ballard rightly belongs to Maggie Q, and like that shotgun in the opener, she shoulders it handily on her own.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
