SUSPENSE: Crime-meister Koryta delivers subtle menace

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This article was published 09/07/2011 (5559 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Much like our late, unlamented spring, there’s more gloom than sunshine among these latest mystery offerings. But the couple of gems shine brightly.

Bargaining with the gods and their minions (in the main, unsuccessfully) has been rampant since we invented them to explain the permutations of human fortune. Knowledge, power, riches, love — all have spawned Faustian pacts, at the price of a forfeited soul. But what if the offer is survival, a return from certain death, in exchange for….

In Michael Koryta’s The Ridge (Little, Brown, 368 pages, $28), a curmudgeonly hermit in rural Kentucky builds a landlocked lighthouse to protect a dark place of too many accidents, too many murders.

A forlorn cop loves a woman who shot him after killing her abusive husband. Though his paper has folded, a small-town reporter wants one more scoop. A young widow fights to establish a big-cat sanctuary — in the wrong place.

With last year’s So Cold the River, 20-something American prodigy Koryta took a hard turn into goosebumps territory from the hard-boiled neo-noir P.I. stuff that earned him some acclaim. As writer Stewart O’Nan has acutely observed, The Ridge is “another roadside attraction from his haunted heartland.” Its shroud of subtle menace cements Koryta’s place in the King-Koontz-Connolly pantheon of supernatural crime-meisters.

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Det. Jacob Striker can’t catch a break. First day back on the job, his wife dead, his teenage daughter angry and rebellious, he stumbles into a shootout with three gunmen who attack a Vancouver high school. Stranger things have happened, right?

In Sean Slater’s The Survivor (Simon & Schuster, 528 pages, $20), once Striker figures out the bad guys have targeted certain victims among the dead, he and his (of course, gorgeous) partner are off and running to figure out why and stop the surviving assassin from killing again.

OK, so Striker is archetypal, others are stereotypical and the whole scenario apocryphal. But, as an extended high-octane chase scene, it’s rollicking summer fun.

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MISSES

Those in Peril, by Wilbur Smith (Macmillan, 386 pages, $35): The spring/summer mystery onslaught brings with it a survival rule: If there are no redeeming qualities within the first 50 pages, game over.

Despite its vast over-promotion and “ripped from the headlines” premise (an oil heiress’s yacht hijacked by Somali pirates, her daughter kidnapped), this hackneyed, movie-formula competitor staggered to the cut-off. “Beach fare” would be kind.

No Rest for the Dead (Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $29): There’s more vanity than novelty to the compilation novel, but a kind of train-wreck curiosity is stirred by the sheer logistics of marshalling 26 writers — from the familiar (Deaver, Jance, Kellerman, Reichs, McCall Smith, Parker, Margolin) to the relatively obscure — in aid of an ex-cop’s quest to exonerate a woman executed for her husband’s murder.

While David Baldacci’s intro is hyberbolic in claiming “there is not a weak spot in the bunch” and that readers will not conjure the whodunit, the amalgam is relatively cohesive. Still, the point is … ?

Sleep Like the Dead, by Alex Gray (Little, Brown, 384 pages, $35): “Detective Chief Inspector William Lorimer felt the swish of the plastic tape behind him as he entered the crime scene.”

Memo to Brit crime writers: If you begin a novel like this, seasoned readers will have no doubt of the base mediocrity that awaits them. It’s been done. To death. Move it along, buddy, move it along. Nothing to see here.

Death Mask, by Kathryn Fox (Hodder & Stoughton, 384 pages, $25): It’s all very serious, worthy and — boring. The idea of Aussie forensic expert Anya Crichton consulting on gang rapes by pro football players in New York has possibilities. But, by the halfway mark, there’s barely a wisp of a plot and the characters are thin stereotypes or stick-figures, including our heroine. Part-lecture, part-travelogue, all tedious.

The Vault, by Boyd Morrison (Touchstone, 448 pages, $20): It’s been a busy June for King Midas. Hard on the heels of Canadian D.J. McIntosh’s scholarly treasure-hunt, The Witch of Babylon, comes this tale of a ruthless criminal’s quest to find the mythical monarch’s alchemical secrets by unravelling clues in long-lost manuscripts and artifacts by Greek mathematician Archimedes.

A rich, hunky engineer and gorgeous classics expert (who else?) have to stop him, since the villain also plans to corner the gold market by irradiating the U.S. gold supply with a dirty bomb.

No loss if this one’s buried in the sand.

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