| People can never tell the exact moment their old neighborhood disappears. One day, everybody knows where you came from and where you're going; the next, you don't recognize a soul. VISITATION STREET (Dennis Lehane/ Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99), a powerfully beautiful novel by Ivy Pochoda, lingers on the moment the working-class neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, changed forever: the night 15-year-old June Giatto went out into the Upper Bay in a pink raft with her best friend, Val Marino, and never returned. Nothing was the same after that: developers discovered the historic waterfront, initiating a gentrification that was swift and unstoppable. Even the longshoremen's bars had their history "buffed and polished away." But on the night June disappeared, families still lived in the shabby row houses and worked at blue-collar jobs while their children dreamed of sailing away on a pink raft. A violent death can do that, mark the instant when people suddenly notice the ground has shifted. Pochoda picks her moment well and lets people from the neighborhood - diverse characters who are vibrantly, insistently alive - tell the story. Val is the one you want to protect. She's smart and sensible, but so crushed with guilt over June's death that she's easy bait for the sharks that swim in these streets. Cree James, a kid from the projects who gave Val her first kiss, is also vulnerable because he was seen on the pier, which was enough for the police to question him. Jonathan Sprouse, the high school music teacher who pulled Val from the bay, feels so protective he's now stalking her. Meanwhile, the graffiti artist known as RunDown slips unnoticed through the streets of the waterfront, finding beauty as well as danger. Then there are the dead people who come up from the cracks, their voices heard only by a few women with the gift. They're all part of the neighborhood portrait Pochoda pieces together from the detritus, sharing her vision with a favorite character like Cree, who gradually "becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook - the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, . . . the living walking on top of the dead - the waterfront dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead - everyone still there. A neighborhood of ghosts. It's not such a bad place." Over the years, James Lee Burke's voice has grown more messianic, his books more biblical. He's in full fire-and-brimstone mode in LIGHT OF THE WORLD (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), the 20th novel in a series featuring Dave Robicheaux, a Louisiana sheriff's detective and onetime alcoholic brawler whose struggles with his own demons set the fiery tone (and high body count) of these modern morality tales. Robicheaux and posse (wife, daughter and best buddy) are on a friend's ranch in western Montana, where, for reasons that would make sense only to another sociopath, a savage killer named Asa Surrette has tracked them down and delivered an especially gruesome murder as his calling card. Robicheaux, who maintains a superstitious belief in tangible evil that can be overcome by earthly men of honor, swears Surrette is the devil incarnate, citing his abominable sulfuric odor as proof. "He's not a mythological figure," a more pragmatic gunslinger points out. "He's a serial killer from Kansas." Demon or not, Surrette is a monstrous villain, and he makes life a living hell for an expanded cast of the quaintly insane characters who are Burke's specialty. For that alone, let's give this devil his due. Bill James's urbanely amusing Harpur and Iles novels, about high-placed British coppers who work together while hating each other's guts, have come to feel like lethal entries in the Child's Garden of Evil Jokes. PLAY DEAD (Crème de la Crime, $28.95), the 30th book in this cunning series, finds Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur subtly undermining the fastidious efforts of his superior, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, to revisit an unfinished case of police corruption. The longer the case drags on, the more foul-tempered Iles becomes, until he inevitably brings up Harpur's ill-advised affair with his wife. Speaking in a voice that is "wonderfully mild, conversational and dangerous," Iles repeatedly flays Harpur in public for consorting with her "in fourth-rate rooming joints, under evergreen hedgerows, in marly fields, on river banks, in cars" and so forth. Harpur's infuriating response is to open up some opaque line of dialogue that has them talking at cross-purposes until they come to blows. It's amazing how much venom goes into the friendly banter of sworn enemies. As chief of police of St. Denis, a picturesque village in the valley of the Dordogne, Bruno Courrèges is unprepared for the sensational case that occupies him in THE DEVIL'S CAVE (Knopf, $24.95). In Martin Walker's latest novel set in "the gastronomic and sporting heartland of France," the naked body of a woman with a pentagram on her torso comes floating down the Vézère River in a small boat. That bizarre event, along with the ritual trappings of a Black Mass found in one of the region's prehistoric limestone caves, is enough to put St. Denis on the map as a hotbed of devil worship. As one local entrepreneur observes, "This Satan stuff is good for business." But while the swell of tourists ruffles the tranquillity of the town, it also gives Walker more opportunity to play tour guide, leading us through the checkered history of this astonishing region. In the Red Hook neighborhood where Ivy Pochoda sets her novel, the living walk 'on top of the dead.' |
