Gruley's attractive formula works for third time in series

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SIGRID ESTRADA Bryan Gruley

Chicago journalist Bryan Gruley's Starvation Lake mysteries offer just about everything for the Canadian reader whose taste leans to small-town whodunits.

Gruley's lake-strewn northern Michigan community features extremes of weather and prosperity, a core of well-drawn residents who all know each other, dark secrets that occasionally tear at its fabric -- and hockey. Lots of hockey.

At times, it's hard to say whether the bumpy climb of the local River Rats to the state championship is more enervating to townsfolk than the mysterious break-ins that end in the murder of an elderly widow in The Skeleton Box (Touchstone, 336 pages, $29).

But Gus Carpenter, a former big-time journo whose professional indiscretions leave him running his hometown's dying weekly paper, keeps his eye on the murder puck -- the victim is the mother of his sometimes-paramour and his own mother's best friend.

As with Gruley's two previous Starvation entries, Carpenter's perilous investigation immerses him in local politics and the town's mottled past, linking the 1940s-era disappearance of a nun and a priest's scandalous behaviour to some modern-day Church machinations and a secretive group of born-again Christians.

It's an attractive formula, one that Gruley manages with practised ease.

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It's hard to come up with a wholly unique character in the burgeoning mystery game, but Oklahoma's Sheldon Russell has managed it with Hook Runyon, an aptly named, one-armed, 1940s railroad bull.

Runyon lives in a dilapidated caboose with his near-feral mutt Mixer, shunted around the Southwest wherever the Santa Fe Railroad needs his dubious policing services. In Dead Man's Tunnel (Minotaur, 328 pages, $30), that's a scrapyard siding in the Arizona desert, where he's tracking copper thieves and the truth behind the gruesome death of a military guard in a strategic railway tunnel.

While the plot careers to a somewhat far-fetched resolution, it's the intimate colour Russell imparts to the era that makes this third Runyon caper a compulsive page-turner. The battered bull's insult-laden jabberings with a cantankerous junkyard owner, his unsympathetic boss and hard-bitten rail crews are just laugh-out-loud funny.

Toss in a comely-but-cagey army lieutenant, an AWOL soldier on a holdup spree and various (and hilarious) transportation challenges, and Runyon's travails become a reader's delight.

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Bern Fortier, protagonist of Deryn Collier's Confined Space (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $20), is an early-retired Canadian Forces commander with a dark Afghanistan past who takes a slow-paced coroner's job and tends to his garden in the brewery town of Kootenay Landing.

But when a worker is killed in a bottling machine and his girlfriend also turns up dead, Fortin discovers there's more than a few nasty bugs at the Bugaboo Brewery.

While it's often noted that getting a female character right can be tough for a male author, the reverse is equally true. Collier manages this with sympathetic poignancy, and Fortin's budding romance with the brewery's intrepid safety boss is realistic and engaging.

Confined Space was shortlisted for an Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished crime debut in 2010. We can thank an on-the-ball publisher for seeing the injustice in that "Unhanged Arthur" state.

TAKE A PASS

Beach Strip, by John Lawrence Reynolds (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $23): What's with Hamilton, Ont., fast becoming CanLit's murder capital? Alas, this latest in a rush of steeltown entries just doesn't pass muster. Self-pitying, adulterous police widow Josie Marshall is so off-putting that it's hard to be moved as her campaign to prove her detective husband didn't commit suicide stutters to a predictable conclusion.

The Paris Detective, by Gerald Jay (Nan A. Talese, 336 pages, $30): Portly Dordogne police inspector Paul Mazarelle hails from a long line of peculiar foreign coppers, from Christie's Poirot to Fred Vargas's Adamsberg. But he's simply not memorable enough to carry this black-politics tale of two vacationing American couples who meet a grisly end. That cause isn't aided by his opponent, who has to be the dumbest master-assassin extant.

John Sullivan is editor of the Free Press Autos, Homes and Travel sections and specialty websites.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 14, 2012 J9