“The Prisoner of Guantanamo,” by David Fesperman (Knopf, 323 pages, $24)
The author, a veteran war correspondent whose previous novels have been set in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, turns his attention here to the U.S. prisoner camp at Guantanamo. Revere Falk, a maverick FBI agent and former Marine, an expert interrogator and fluent in Arabic, is working with a young Yemeni “detainee” who is about to divulge important information about al-Qaeda. But when a dead American G.I. washes ashore in Cuba, Falk is reassigned to investigate what is clearly a murder.
But it’s not just any murder. Soon the base is crawling with high-level intelligence agents, and Falk quickly realizes he’s become a pawn in a very frightening game – even more frightening because of secrets in his past that may be connected with the present. Fesperman writes with a journalist’s eye for the facts and a novelist’s eye for character, and the result is an informed and intelligent topical thriller of the highest order.
“Still Life,” by Louise Penny (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 312 pages, $22.95)
Into the quiet village of Three Pines south of Montreal comes Inspector Armand Gamache when an old lady is killed in the brilliant autumn woods not far from her home. Her death has the makings of a hunting accident, but Gamache and his team aren’t so sure, and the only way to find out is to get to know Jane Neal’s friends and neighbors in this idyllic spot, historically an English loyalist stronghold in French Quebec.
Gamache slowly wins over the villagers, only partly because of his patience, intelligence and innate kindness. His subjects are a well-drawn and unexpectedly cosmopolitan lot, including a pair of married artists, an ebullient gay innkeeper and his perceptive partner, and the dead woman’s greedy niece, who aches to put her own imprint on her aunt’s house. Always in the background are the tensions between the English and French, which add complexity to this perfectly executed traditional mystery, the author’s first.
“Ten Second Staircase,” by Christopher Fowler (Bantam, 356 pages, $24)
The Peculiar Crimes Unit was established in London during World War II and staffed largely by brilliant but unconventional academics to solve unusual, high-profile crimes. Its two senior detectives, the rude, devious, technologically challenged Arthur Bryant and his slightly younger and more personable colleague John May, are still around in the present day, considerably the worse for wear but still crafty and keenly inquisitive.
But the PCU may become history if these mismatched and cranky detectives can’t crack their latest case, the baffling murder of a controversial artist found dead in her own much-reviled installation, who, according to an eyewitness, was put there by a caped man in a tricorn hat mounted on a black stallion. Soon dubbed The Highwayman, he starts turning up all over London, linked to equally bizarre crimes, and he may just be the undoing of the PCU. This is the impossible-crime mystery at its ingenious best.
Tom and Enid Schantz write a monthly column on new mysteries.
