Friday, June 16, 2017

Motion, in three recent novels

I've recently read three crime novels that have a lot of movement, back and forth across Paris, Galway, and the Italian peninsula. In two of them, the motion is a bit dizzying, and in the third it's punctuated by conversations that are perhaps more dizzying than the physical movement.

Cara Black's Aimee Leduc is frequently portrayed in movement, across the particular arrondissement of Paris in which her current novel is set. But
in Murder in Saint-Germain, the crisscrossing of that neighborhood and across several plotlines seems to be motion for its own sake, rather than activity that keeps the plot moving. Still, for fans of detective Leduc, the book has its charms, as well as some forward motion in the overarching plot of Aimee's personal and family life.

The movement in Ken Bruen's The Emerald Lie seems more gratuitous. Bruen's plots sometimes meander, for sure, but this novel seems more to lurch. The murders and murderers are quickly dealt with and then the perpetually down-and-out private detective and former Garda Jack Taylor veers off toward another one--without influencing the action very much himself. What The Emerald Lie has to offer is Bruen's distinctive voice, his constant references to other crime writers, several distinctive characters we meet along the way, and what pleasure the reader may take from seeing how the author can manage to take Taylor even further on the road to dissolution.

The Second Day of the Renaissance is a belated sequel to Timothy Williams's excellent series of novels set in northern Italy, featuring irritable Commissario Piero Trotti. In the new novel, he's retired, but a series of events brings some of the cases in the earlier novels into the story. Trotti travels from his foggy home town to Florence (where he meets a young girl at the train station, an encounter that has repercussions later), Siena (where he has a long and often oblique conversation with a Carabiniere officer who tells him that there's someone trying to kill Trotti), to Rome (where his god-daughter and a former colleague are getting married) to Bologna (fleeing from a killer but inadvertently leading the violence toward his own daughter). There's a lot of dialogue in the story, much of it indirect (Trotti is not an easy person to engage in a conversation), along with considerable discussion of Italy's troubled past (particularly the "years of lead," when the international rebellions of 1968 threatened to spiral into terrorism, in the north, and  the mafia was resurgent in the south. No one would say that Trotti is good company, through all this, but the reader will nonetheless care about him and his fate as well as that of all those who are near him. And the reader will also learn much about the Italy beyond the monuments and tourist attractions.



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