DETECTIVE SPOOF: YOUNG SLEUTH
You Killed Wesley Payne by Sean Beaudoin
Cliques rule the school at Salt River High as teen private-eye Dalton Rev discovers when investigating the murder of nice-guy Wesley Payne. Wesley kept everything in the school balanced, but without him the Balls, Pinker Caskets, Euclidians and Sis Boom Bahs (also known, respectively, as jocks, rockers, brainiacs and cheerleaders) vie for power. In this clever spoof of the detective genre, Dalton may appear not so much hard-boiled as hilariously scrambled as he consults his favorite pulp novels for tips.
He is helped and hindered by a siren in thigh-high boots and a pudgy sidekick named Mole. Though his cute client (also Wesley’s sister) tempts him to drop the “tough-guy posturing,” Dalton sticks with the case through all its plot-twisty turns, right to the heart-jolting end. Mary Quattlebaum, Washington Post Writers Group
FICTION: PIRATE TALE
Hurricane Dancers by Margarita Engle
Three main characters tell intertwined stories in this skillfully structured novel-in-poems about real-life pirates of the Caribbean. The effect: different versions of historical events rather than one fixed through a particular viewpoint as “the truth.” The book opens compellingly in 1510, with Quebrado, an orphan of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, trapped on the pirate ship of brutal Bernardino de Talavera. Also on board as a wounded hostage is the cruel Spanish conquistador, Alonso de Ojeda, a man haunted by feverish visions of the Indians he killed and enslaved. When a hurricane casts them into the sea, each comes to the same island with a different attitude and skills. Quebrado recognizes his former home, with its “moist soil” and “pineapples . . . like golden sunlight.”
But Talavera and Ojeda consider the place hostile and swampy. When the three meet again, the boy, now the one with power, must decide whether to help or harm them. Although Quebrado is fictitious, the others are historical figures, and a note in the back explains their actual fates. Mary Quattlebaum, Washington Post Writers Group
TRUE CRIME: N.J. CORRUPTION
The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Corrupt Pols, Money- laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought it All Down by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin
It was like a small military undertaking when the FBI deployed more than 300 agents in eastern New Jersey and the New York borough of Brooklyn early one July morning in 2009.
They captured 44 people, including five rabbis. Most were accused of political bribery, money laundering and tax evasion. One rabbi was charged with trafficking in human kidneys.
The story of “The Jersey Sting” is meticulously, seriously — and humorously — told by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, two reporters at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. Margolin now works for the New York Post.
The tale is complex. It centers on the career of Solomon Dwek, the son of a rabbi. He combined the roles of an unlicensed real estate broker, school executive, money launderer, political operator with a specialty in bribes, and an FBI informant wearing a concealed camera and voice recorder.
Dwek’s work for the FBI was authorized by U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, now governor of New Jersey and a not-too-dark horse for the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential race.
Christie was also the first to announce Dwek’s arrest after a plea agreement. Dwek pleaded guilty to trying to defraud a bank by cashing two phony checks — $25 million each. It was an attempt to shore up a Ponzi scheme in connection with his real estate business. He faces nine to 11 years in prison, remaining under house arrest while other cases are being decided.
So it’s not light reading to undertake instead of a TV whodunit after a heavy dinner and a long day at the office. The alert reader also will get an introduction to New Jersey politics and its reputation for corruption. It’s helpful that the authors have furnished a convenient cast of characters with nearly 100 names and roles. Carl Hartman, The Associated Press
FICTION: STALIN’S POGROM
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
Wrenched from comfortable homes, Lina Vilkas, 15, and her mother, younger brother and a few neighbors on “the list” are transported to a barren, frozen land.
Lina, a talented artist, chronicles their suffering on scraps of paper and cloth and smuggles the notes out . . . but help never comes. Her father has been imprisoned, and the larger world busies itself with a distant war.
Though this may sound like the latest dystopian novel, Lina’s story actually takes place in 1941, against the backdrop of Joseph Stalin’s “cleansing” of the Baltic states. To evoke the horrors and hope of this time in Siberia, author Ruta Sepetys interviewed her Lithuanian relatives and many other deportees.
Her prose is restrained and powerful, as unadorned as the landscape in which her characters struggle to survive. In this way, the occasional metaphors and descriptions shine more brightly, especially those involving a kind boy who steals food from the guards for the sick, gives Lina a birthday gift and softly kisses her. Few books are beautifully written, fewer still are important; this novel is both. Carl Hartman, The Associated Press
