Unmasking Magic and Murder in the Best New Crime

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/books/review/benjamin-black-wolf-on-a-string.html

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Every 16th-century savant and scholar and crackpot aspired to study in Prague under great minds like the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the court mathematician, Tycho Brahe. As a novice in the occult arts, Christian Stern, the young narrator of Benjamin Black’s WOLF ON A STRING (Holt, $28), is desperate to extend his studies in that “capital of magic.” But no sooner does he arrive in the city, in the winter of 1599, than he comes upon the corpse of a well-dressed woman, savagely murdered and dumped in the snow. Her grieving father warns Christian to travel on to Dresden or some other center of learning. “Prague is no place for you,” he’s told. “Here everything is tainted and sick.”

Because of his name, which, in the view of the learned if eccentric Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, marks him as a messenger sent by Christ, Christian is invited to court and is even housed in the same room once used by Dr. John Dee, a master alchemist “steeped in the mysteries of the kabbalah.” There’s not much magic in this tale and Christian never gets a chance to study the occult arts, but he encounters plenty of intrigue, enough to convince this naïve hero that he’s landed at “the center of an intricately devised, immensely subtle and cruelly malicious game.” He’s introduced to Turkish coffee (which hits him like “a bolt of lightning”) by the papal nuncio, seduced by the emperor’s concubine and charged by the emperor with finding the murderer.

John Banville’s novel “Kepler” was published in 1981. Now, using the pen name he has adopted for his mystery novels, he returns to this exciting era when science and superstition were battling for supremacy. He even gives the emperor and Christian an opportunity to discuss the “living, harmonious continuum” that connects “the countless parts of creation.” The ornate style of Christian’s narrative suits both this rich historical period and the courtly language of Prague, this “city of masks and make-believe.”

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Don Winslow’s New York cop novel THE FORCE (Morrow/HarperCollins, $27.99) is a scorcher, and if his sources are on the level it’s time for another Knapp Commission. Winslow’s charismatic hero, who is also the chief villain, is Detective First Grade Dennis John Malone, proud leader of the Manhattan North Special Task Force, which has recently made the biggest heroin bust in memory.

They own the city, these roughnecks whose minds are deep in the gutter and whose language is as ripe as rotten fruit. But they’re also crooked, having taken 50 kilos of heroin and close to $2 million in cash from that same haul. Just because these detectives are crooks doesn’t mean they can’t police their turf. In fact, the task force handles quotidian misdeeds like regular gentlemen, and the way Malone deflects an all-out gang war is genius. Like so much else in the story (the Christmas envelopes of cash, the payoffs to the wiseguys, even the turkey giveaway), Malone’s methods are thoughtful and inventive. They just aren’t entirely lawful.

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St. Denis, the picturesque town in the French countryside where Martin Walker sets his enchanting mysteries, is blessed, and occasionally burdened, with a history that dates back to the early cave dwellers. In THE TEMPLARS’ LAST SECRET (Knopf, $25.95), an unknown woman falls to her death while scaling the cliff to Commarque, a medieval fortress that was once a stronghold of the Knights Templar. Bruno Courrèges, the chief of police, learns that the last master of this very rich order was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, and legend has it that there’s buried treasure at this local landmark.

Meanwhile, excavations in search of prehistoric caves continue at the base of the cliff, and a medieval mystery will gum up the works at the dig, where a Venus fertility figurine has recently been found. It’s Bruno’s firm belief that food is “a village policeman’s secret weapon,” but with so much going on, he’s hard-pressed for time to cook one of his fabulous feasts. As the current owner of Commarque observes, “Sometimes I wonder if we don’t have too much history here in France.”

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If you can pass up a mystery with a bookstore in the title, you have great willpower. Personally, I couldn’t resist Matthew Sullivan’s MIDNIGHT AT THE BRIGHT IDEAS BOOKSTORE (Scribner, $26), an appealing first novel featuring Lydia Smith, a kindhearted Denver bookseller with a soft spot for the homeless men who haunt the aisles. (BookFrogs, she calls them, since to her they resemble Jeremy Fisher, Beatrix Potter’s lanky frog.)

But Lydia’s favorite, a “shattered young man,” hangs himself in an alcove and leaves her all his earthly possessions, including a crate of books defaced in a way that sends her a message about himself — and her own horrid history. The oddball characters and layered plot make this puzzle mystery both charming and challenging. Keep an eye out for a childhood friend of Lydia’s who went to their fourth-grade Halloween party in a red dress with a fake knife in her chest, declaring that she was “Annie, only stabbed.”