NONFICTION
The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases, by Michael Capuzzo, $26 Forget that dusty edition of the board game Clue moldering at the back of the cedar closet: In real life, solving murders is more complicated than placing Col. Mustard in the library with the lead pipe. So complicated, in fact, that in 1990 a group of detectives in Philadelphia formed the Vidocq Society, in honor of Eugène François Vidocq, a 19th-century criminal turned crime-fighter.
On the third Thursday of every month the group gathers, Superfriends-style, to take on the most gruesome and puzzling homicides the world’s psychopaths can dream up.
In “The Murder Room,” Michael Capuzzo outlines the society’s mission: “In a world that had forgotten its heroes, they resolved, by the light of a twelfth-century chivalric pledge, to hunt down murderers in cold cases, punish the guilty, free the innocent, avenge, protect, and succor families victimized by murder.”
Unfortunately, Capuzzo, who has also written about the real shark attack that inspired Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” is a schmaltzy writer who gets too intimate with his subjects. We learn way too much, for example, about one Vidocq member’s “gargantuan sexual appetite.” Still, Capuzzo is redeemed by page-turning passages about the cases Vidocq conquers with little more than a psychological profile or a pile of old bones by focusing on clues like the “depth psychology of the murdering mind, its artistic, symbolic expressions in the positioning of the body just so, the hidden meaning of the knife in the chest.”
Real-life Prof. Plums and Miss Scarlets: Plot your dastardly deeds at your own risk.
FICTION
The French Revolution, by Matt Stewart, $15.95, paperback You’ve got to admire a guy who, unable to sell his book, breaks it down into 140-character bits, releases them one by one on Twitter, garners publicity, turns the tweets back into novelese and then — voila! — gets a publisher. It’s harder, though, to admire the novel itself.
While this story of a family in contemporary San Francisco mirrors the French Revolution, you don’t have to be a student of guillotines, peasants and aristocrats to follow its broad references. No subtlety here challenges the reader.
Esmerelda Van Twinkle, once a pastry chef awarded a planetarium’s worth of culinary stars, is now so obese that she needs hydraulic lifts to get to her job as the cashier at a copy store. She also requires an extra-wide and triply reinforced chair, the Gargantuan.
Soon enough, Jasper, a coupon salesman, seduces her with cake (take that, Marie Antoinette!) in a repulsive sex scene involving a swimming pool and a winch. Nine months later, on Bastille Day, the twins Marat and Robespierre are born, joining a family dysfunctional in a multitude of ways: alcoholism, abandonment, drugs, handicaps, orgies, scandal and incest, for starters.
Blame the cake: It’s responsible not only for the twins’ birth but also for Esmerelda’s girth. She regards the recipe as “the culinary equivalent of finding Christ under her pillow.” Food, in fact, is the best part of this novel.
“The cakes dwarfed everything else, towering leviathans, slice after slice liquefying in Esmerelda’s mouth, alighting the dim portions of her brain and helping her see across continents, into the future, through the webbing of souls.”
In due course, Robespierre heads for Stanford, Marat for the army instead of jail. And Esmerelda, “a cigarette of beef jerky hanging from (her) cud,” decides “this eating’s got to stop,” exchanging the Gargantuan for an apron she can tie around her waist.
Jasper reappears. Robespierre runs for office. Marat makes a pot of money not just from pot. Has the old recollapsed? All revolutions and revelations lead to Waterloo — a mayoral race cast as a Keystone Kops farce. Perhaps only a hipster can appreciate the slapstick and the excess. But to this reviewer, it’s liberte, egalite, gimmickry.
