In the Best New Crime, Lethal Lasagna, Honor Killings and Nanny Cams
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Version 0 of 1. Honor-based violence — which covers everything from beatings and kidnapping to mutilation and murder — is a scourge in Britain, where the Crown Prosecution Service estimates that the 12 or so honor killings reported each year are only a fraction of the true number committed in Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. In LOVE LIKE BLOOD (Atlantic Monthly, $26), Mark Billingham puts human faces on one such case, telling the story of Amaya and Kamal, two Bangladeshi teenagers who run away together to avoid arranged marriages. They make it as far as the London Underground, and the rest is pure savagery. “There isn’t an ounce of anything like nobility in what these people do,” Detective Inspector Nicola Tanner hotly informs her colleague Tom Thorne. “It’s murder, pure and simple, pretending to be something else.” Although “dishonored” male relatives are prime suspects in most cases of punitive violence, squeamish families often prefer to shop the job to a middleman with access to professional hit men — thugs like Muldoon and Riaz, who collaborate efficiently but whose cultural clashes can be morbidly funny. (Riaz enjoys Bollywood movies, while Muldoon is amused by these musical fantasies about forlorn lovers. “In a film or whatever, you get to sing about it,” he observes, “but in real life you get the likes of us turning up.”) Billingham allows his plot to wander down some pretty dark alleys. A friend of Amaya’s is gang-raped, considered appropriate retribution for talking to the police. And it’s disconcerting to learn that in Pakistan some honor killings can be forgiven by the victim’s family, with no punishment for the murderers. But Billingham saves his real animus for the Metropolitan Police’s Honor Crimes Unit, which receives 3,000 incident reports a year but doesn’t have a website — or even a sign on the door. “There’s a Royal Protection Unit and a Marine Unit and a big, hairy Dog Support Unit,” Thorne notes, but nothing about an Honor Crimes Unit. “It’s as if it doesn’t officially exist.” Which is what the victims assumed all along. ♦ Detective Manon Bradshaw was endearingly klutzy in last year’s “Missing, Presumed,” by Susie Steiner. Since she’s five months pregnant in PERSONS UNKNOWN (Random House, $27), she’s even more ungainly, but still endearing, in a novel that’s nominally a mystery but is actually a smart and funny rumination on motherhood. Manon has returned to Cambridgeshire with her adopted 12-year-old son, Fly, to protect him from the indignities of growing up black in London. The irony is that the boy becomes a major suspect in the murder of a London banker who turns out to be the ex-husband of Manon’s sister, Ellie, and the father of her 3-year-old son. Although the plot — involving the sleaze merchants of an international prostitution ring — is a mess, the racial theme cuts deep enough to hurt, and the characters are distinctive. Secondary players like Detective Sergeant Davy Walker, who lives to help others, and Birdie Fielding, a prize specimen of the Beatles’ lonely people, are sweethearts. But since Steiner seems to judge all her characters on the strength of their mothering instincts, the Latvian gangsters don’t get any love. Margaret Maron is one of those authors whose devoted fans would follow them anywhere. Now that she has retired her wonderful Deborah Knott series set in North Carolina, readers must head for New York City, the setting of TAKE OUT (Grand Central, $27), the final mystery in another series, which features Sigrid Harald. Lieutenant Harald’s policing may seem old-fashioned, but that’s because the novel’s action takes place in the 1990s. When two homeless men are found dead on a bench, the detective learns they were poisoned by some takeout food. But this part of Greenwich Village is very neighborly and the locals, who include the widow of a mafia don and a former opera star, were always bringing them home-cooked meals. Which one was meant to die? And who delivered the lethal lasagna? Sigrid has a coolly analytic mind; it’s sad to think we’re watching her puzzle out her last case. ♦ Aside from mounting surveillance with a nanny cam, will having an 8-month-old bébé cramp Aimée Leduc’s ineffable style? The modish heroine of MURDER IN SAINT-GERMAIN (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other delicious Parisian mysteries by Cara Black must juggle motherhood with finding a nasty blackmailer, overseeing computer security at the École des Beaux-Arts and hunting down a Serbian warlord. This is Black’s 17th Leduc novel, each set in a different neighborhood, and the formula still charms. Although the business of the warlord is a lot more interesting than Aimée’s bread-and-butter cyber security jobs, finding a babysitter in July and August, when “toute Paris had disappeared,” is even more challenging. The criminal elements of the story aren’t taxing, but the abiding pleasure of this series is the chance to ride with a cabdriver who wants to discuss Sartre or just tearing around Paris on Aimée’s pink Vespa, making stops at the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Île Saint-Louis, where Aimée has an apartment. Lucky girl. |