SUSPENSE: Lehane offers conventional mob tale

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Dennis Lehane (CP)

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Allusions to The Godfather saga, usually with "epic" appended, seem to be the de rigueur toast to the first two instalments of Dennis Lehane's ambitious post-First World War trilogy chronicling the fractious Coughlin family.

Live by Night (William Morrow, 416 pages, $30), the much-anticipated sequel to 2008's The Given Day, definitely has the decades-spanning sweep, from Boston speakeasies to Tampa dockyards to the cane fields of Batista-era Cuba. And all the big themes (love, loss, loyalty, betrayal, redemption, et al) are encompassed in the bloody, harrowing rise of "outlaw" son Joe from low-level stickup man to rum-running Prohibition kingpin.

Yet, despite Lehane's lean, wry prose, varied and striking characters, engaging historical colour and vast storytelling prowess, this one never quite manages to transcend a conventional mob book. We've seen and read it all before.

It's solid and worthy, just not terribly memorable.

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When a washed-up songwriter on a mushroom hunt finds a half-buried newborn girl who screams and later sings in perfect pitch, becoming a wild-child Internet cult phenomenon, you know something is seriously twisted about Little Star (Thomas Dunne, 544 pages, $32).

But John Alvide Lindqvist is not a Swedish Stephen King, despite the hype. He's better. While King's dread-soaked atmospherics telegraph his machinations, Lindqvist sucker-punches, cloaking this highly allegorical diagnosis of Columbine-era teen angst in banal, middle-class Nordic conventions.

Not a mystery (though puzzling in the extreme), not a horror-story (yet thoroughly horrific) and loaded with redemption (just not the church-going variety), this is a first-rate literary foray into a chilling alternate reality born of pain and perspective.

You'll never look at your kids quite the same way again.

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Seven Days, by Deon Meyer (Random House, 352 pages, $25): Someone is shooting cops, claiming a coverup in the investigation of a woman lawyer's death. But nothing is quite as it seems in murky Cape Town.

Meyer streamlines cast and plot, drops the international intrigue and ups his game with a more focused and insightful South African caper starring self-doubting detective Bennie Griessel, bulldog colleague Mbali Kaleni and an eclectic homicide team that's gelling quite nicely

Rush of Blood, by Mark Billingham (Little Brown, 400 pages, $35): It's always good to stretch. Taking a bye from his much-praised, TV-adapted but fairly conventional DI Tom Thorne procedurals, the Birmingham native crafts a nifty psychodrama of three unconnected British couples who become embroiled in the murder of a mentally challenged teen while holidaying at the same Florida resort.

Almost in passing, Billingham also scores with doggedly ambitious London Met trainee detective Jenny Quinlan, who deserves more than a standalone fate.

The Cutting Season, by Attica Locke (Harper, 424 pages, $29): A single mom, a museum manager at a Louisiana plantation, is confronted by the murder of a migrant worker with disturbing links to both modern corporate skullduggery and her own family's past.

As with her acclaimed 2009 debut, Black Water Rising, this young, Los Angeles-based screenwriter captures both the conflicted inheritors and nebulous inheritance of racially charged Deep South history in all its bitter complexity. A rising star.

Trojan Horse, by Mark Russinovich (Thomas Dunne, 336 pages, $29): The Microsoft honcho reboots his rough-and-tumble IT security team of Jeff Aiken and Daryl Haugen (after last year's Zero Day) with another plausible, scare-the-bejesus-out-of-you techno-thriller. Basically, everything you really didn't want to know about viruses, wrapped in a Chinese cyber-terrorism plot.

Nuke that Facebook page, pull the plug on your Wi-Fi and just hide under the covers, because this is one helluva cautionary tale.

Rogue, by Mark Sullivan (Minotaur, 384 pages, $29): Sullivan sheds the well-deserved anonymity of a Jimmy Patterson sausage-factory collaborator (Private Games) to enter the morass of high-stakes, high-tech, globe-trotting espionage fantasy. Way too cute (the charitable protagonist is an ex-CIA thief named Robin), it's the Mission Impossible team headed by Jason Bourne. Movie magic.

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

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 13, 2012 J9