What’s a wobble? you ask. In Victorian England, it was a grueling, six-day speedwalking race, a fad that also became popular in America. This eccentric sport inspired Peter Lovesey’s first murder mystery, “Wobble to Death,” originally published in 1970.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the novel, Lovesey has written a companion piece, THE FINISHER (Soho Crime, 353 pp., $27.95), about another footrace and another murder that becomes a baffling case for his enduring series detective, Peter Diamond of the Bath police. That classically designed English city might not seem like the ideal setting for a marathon. But Lovesey knows his city intimately, and once the 5,000 or so entrants are off and running — along with “the pirates, pantomime horses, fairies, carrots, bananas, spacemen, dinosaurs” and other costumed entrants running for the fun of it — he treats us to lovingly detailed descriptions of the civic highlights. The runners he follows are an interesting cross section of the citizenry, from Maeve Kelly, a primary schoolteacher whose drab life gets its sparkle after she takes up running, to an illegal immigrant named Spiro, who escapes virtual slavery in his native Albania only to find himself running for his life in Bath.
Lovesey is careful to remind us that Bath holds hidden secrets behind its gracious Georgian architecture. “It offers unrivaled facilities for getting rid of unwanted corpses,” he says. “Beneath the creamy, sun-kissed squares, crescents and terraces is a rat-infested underworld undreamed of by most visitors.” This is the secret world traveled by “the Finisher,” a murderer who leaves no traces because of his intimate knowledge of the city’s “dark, dank warren of cellars, vaults, culverts, sewers and drains.” The light and dark imagery is a fixture of Lovesey’s Bath novels, in which life is lived on many levels, some in full sunshine and others buried in shadow.
It’s the middle of winter in Matt Goldman’s DEAD WEST (Forge, 320 pp., $26.99), and Minnesota temperatures are below zero. That’s reason enough for Goldman’s engaging private eye, Nils Shapiro, to jump on an assignment that will take him to warm and sunny Los Angeles. The job seems like a no-brainer; all he has to do is reassure his client that her grandson, Ebben Mayer, hasn’t blown his $50 million inheritance on something stupid, like the movie business. But when he gets to California, Shapiro finds Ebben mourning the suspicious death of his fiancée and deeply invested in a film.
Always a clever writer, Goldman is flat-out hilarious when he’s satirizing Hollywood hustlers and their outlandish projects. In this town, he notes, even a Russian gangster has a screenplay in his trunk. (“Russian tragedy. Will make you cry.”) Individually, these agents, managers, writers, producers, et al. are endearingly awful; but observing them in groups — pitching ideas, taking meetings and poisoning their best friends — is too funny for words.
Let’s say you want to isolate a group of people from the outside world. Where would you put them? A ship at sea would work. So would a mansion in the Scottish Highlands. Ruth Ware has already used those settings, so she sets the bar higher in ONE BY ONE (Scout Press, 372 pp., $27.99) by burying her principal players in an Alpine chalet beneath an avalanche.
“There is a definite gilded quality to this group,” Ware writes. They’re an insufferable lot for the most part, especially when they’re fighting over stock shares, so that lovely avalanche can’t arrive soon enough. One awed observer sees “what looks like a wall of snow coming down. But not a wall — that implies something solid. This is something else. A boiling mass that is air and ice and earth all rolled together.”
Happily, most of these twits know how to ski, so there are stunning scenes on the mountain as, one by one, they fall off cliffs, plunge into ravines and tumble into snowbanks. Readers will recognize the obvious homage to Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” but with enough ingenious twists to make this whodunit another triumph for Ware.
My idea of a good psychological suspense story is one that messes with your head. No cheap thrills, just lots of disorienting plot twists that have you doubting your own mental faculties. AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN (Scarlet, 312 pp., $25.95), a remarkably polished first mystery by Stéphanie Buelens, succeeds at these mind games with a taut plot about Claire Fontaine, a woman who can’t convince anyone that her ex-husband, Simon, had abused her daughter and caused her death. But in her determination to keep him from doing the same thing to another woman’s daughter, Claire devotes herself to stalking him. Another strong woman enters the story when Simon hires Sloan Wilson, a “sin eater” who makes her clients’ problems go away.
So, what’s the story here? Is Simon a monster? Is Claire delusional, “the madwoman in the attic”? And will the marvelous Sloan Wilson come back to fix more broken souls? One hopes.
