It's a mystery, but Falcon prequel works

After all, Dashiell Hammett's iconic Sam Spade potboiler -- both the 1930 book and 1941 Bogie film -- is on top-100 lists of the 20th century and prefaced the post-Second World War American noir movement. Why risk tarnishing pure gold to get more Spade?

Well, against all odds, the gambit works in Spade & Archer (Knopf, 352 pages, $28), with three-time Edgar winner and Hammett scholar Joe Gores re-creating the master's voice to pulpy perfection. (It's even printed on yellowed, chunky pages, an insufferable conceit were it not for Gores' able hand.)

Set in Hammett/Spade's Prohibition-era San Francisco, the book predates the hard-bitten PI's reluctant partnership with "son-of-a-bitch" Miles Archer, the murderous dissolution of which is central to Falcon. Cleanly episodic, the book traces three deadly encounters with a crafty villain from 1921 to 1928 after Spade opens his own agency -- a gold heist from an Australian steamer, a shady banker's apparent suicide and a treasure hunt on behalf of the illegitimate daughter of Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.

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Sigh. Here we go again.

Unfazed by the chorus of critical raspberries that greeted her impenetrable offering of The Front last May, American über-author Patricia Cornwell soldiers on with Scarpetta (Putnam, 512 pages, $31), her 16th outing (over two decades) with forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta.

None too convincingly, all the usual suspects -- Kay's ex-FBI profiler husband Benton Wesley, Net ninja niece Lucy, exiled bad-boy cop Marino, etc, -- are all transplanted to New York as the intrepid Scarpetta is called in to investigate the murder of a female dwarf.

More unlikely, Cornwell has half the NYPD, as well as the Big Apple's top prosecutor, politicians and fickle newshounds all fixating on a single no-name murder for days. Sure.

The chief suspect, a similarly-sized boyfriend, raves paranoid-delusional, convinced he's being stalked and psychologically tortured.

You'll empathize if you make it through this weary mess.

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A Swedish-born English professor is inexplicably gunned down in a mall parking lot in upstate New York.

From this single, random-seeming act of violence, Derek Nikitas' Pyres (Griffin, 320 pages, $15) weaves a near-supernatural survival tale of four painfully drawn women: alienated, Goth-dressing, 15-year-old Lucia (Luc), who survives her father's murder only to be kidnapped by his low-life assassin; her mother, left amnesiac by a failed suicide attempt; a pregnant and abused accomplice to the hit; and timeworn Rochester, N.Y. police investigator Greta Hurd, estranged from her own daughter but maternally obsessed with finding Luc.

An Edgar Award nominee for best first novel, Pyres is a harsh, bleeding nightmare full of Scandinavian angst and American mayhem, a fairy tale with all "the brutal bits."

In a genre ploughed deep, it breaks new ground. Don't miss it.

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Dan Brown meets Tom Clancy in Steve Perry's latest "The" novel, The Charlemagne Pursuit (Ballantine, 528 pages, $30).

In his fourth Cotton Malone venture, the globe-trotting Georgia lawyer-cum-historical fantasist has the ultra-macho ex-Justice Depaarment agent pursuing the truth behind his father's 1971 shadowy death. Which turns out to be -- wait for it -- a secret submarine mission to Antarctica on the trail of Nazis and a lost civilization!

Pure escapist nonsense, but fun.

John Sullivan is manager of online research and development at the Free Press. His column runs on the second Sunday of the month.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 11, 2009 D0