The Drowned
By John Banville
I’ve long been amused by John Banville’s grumpy comments about how easy it is for him to write crime fiction, while he sometimes labors for years over his prizewinning literary novels. He even adopted a pseudonym, Benjamin Black, to distinguish between brows high and low. But Black vanished in 2021, and now Banville’s real name is on all his books. Banville told The Times that in rereading the Black books, he “was surprised and highly gratified to discover that they weren’t bad at all, and in fact might even be quite good. … I said to myself, ‘Why do I need this rascal anyway?’ So I shut him in a room with a pistol, a phial of sleeping pills and a bottle of Scotch, and that was the end of him.”
THE DROWNED (Hanover Square Press, 299 pp., $28.99), Banville’s latest, returns readers to 1950s-era Ireland and to the mercurial pathologist Quirke and his frenemy, Detective Inspector Strafford. The latter is summoned to a rural patch where a professor claims his wife has drowned herself. The trouble, as Strafford soon discovers, is that another young woman in the professor’s orbit disappeared, and it seems once again that justice may slip away.
Banville has a lot of sour fun watching Strafford cluelessly bumble through his relationships, be they with Quirke (adversary, mentor) or Quirke’s daughter Phoebe (paramour), who happens to be connected to the case in surprising ways.
Banville puts care into crafting his mysteries, and it shows.
The Arizona Triangle
By Sydney Graves
I adore some of Kate Christensen’s early novels, especially “In the Drink” and “The Great Man,” so I was delighted to hear she was publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym Sydney Graves. I’m even more delighted to report that THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE (Harper, 292 pp., paperback, $18.99), the first in a new detective series, is a juicy, propulsive mystery that explores urban and rural Arizona’s darkest corners.
Justine Bailen, better known as Jo, fled her hometown, and the smoking crater of her longtime relationships with her childhood pal, Rose, and high school boyfriend, Tyler. She’s working for an all-female detective agency in Tucson, living as carefree, queer and independent a life as she can. But when Rose goes missing and her mother hires Jo to find her, dormant demons re-emerge, forcing Jo to face the life she left behind square-on, even if it kills her.
What could have a been by-the-numbers story in lesser hands is rendered more assuredly by Christensen, despite an ending that gets a little purple. Jo is a terrific character — up to her ears in trouble, no doubt, but her complexities set her up wonderfully for future installments.
Brooklyn Kills Me
By Emily Schultz
In Emily Schultz’s earlier psychological suspense tale, “Sleeping With Friends,” the editor-turned-sleuth Agnes Nielsen figured out who tried to murder one of her best friends and, as we learn in BROOKLYN KILLS ME (Thomas & Mercer, 235 pp., paperback $17), became the subject of a viral New York magazine article about the case: “Someone tried to kill her BFF. She hosted a real-life mystery weekend to solve the crime.” The notoriety soon leads to another case, that of the heiress and gallery owner Charlotte Bond, who tumbles to her death from the balcony of her 20th-floor condo.
It’s an accident, according to the police. Agnes is not so sure, and neither is Derek Anand, whose family owns the building. He hires her to investigate: “You know what the insurance company will do to my premiums if it’s not a homicide?” he asks her. “You cannot imagine.”
Is Agnes up to the task of playing reluctant detective again? It would seem so — even if, after speaking to Derek, she rushes home “to purchase a YouTube master class on private investigation.”
Exposure
By Ramona Emerson
I was surprised when Ramona Emerson’s 2022 series debut, “Shutter,” garnered so much literary acclaim, including a slot on the National Book Award fiction longlist. It was a good and memorable mystery, but there were at least a dozen others I liked better that year.
I wondered what effect, if any, the hosannas had on Emerson’s follow-up, EXPOSURE (Soho Crime, 279 pp., $29.95), which brings back the Navajo crime scene photographer Rita Todacheene to investigate more homicides in New Mexico. The prose style seems even more visceral and sharpened, and Rita, with her visions of the dead and her righteous need to find justice for the marginalized, remains an indelible protagonist.
This time she is on the trail of a serial killer who targets the most vulnerable population, Indigenous women and girls — knowing he may very well get away with it. But Rita’s camera, at every aperture, is a worthy adversary, and Emerson ratchets up the pace for a particularly cathartic confrontation.
“Exposure” confirms Emerson’s talents. She’s a writer to watch.
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