Brief reviews, January 13

Peter Mergendahl, Jane Dickinson, Mark Graham & Natalie Soto, Special to the News

Friday, January 13, 2006

THRILLERS

Lang

By Kjell Westo (Carroll & Graf, $13.95). Grade: A

You're not likely to find another story this year that combines a mounting sense of dread with such a lack of actual violence. More philosophical than fast-paced, Lang features a more common form of crime than generally deemed worthy of the genre.

The narrator of the tale is a friend of the famous Finnish author and talk show host Christian Lang. He receives a phone call from Lang late one night asking if he can borrow a strong shovel. Thus we hear the end of Lang's years long obsession with a beautiful young woman before we hear the rest of the story.

Christian Lang had been feeling depressed and rife with ennui when he visited a pizzeria and meets the beguiling and secretive Sarita. They spend the afternoon together without Lang learning her last name or address. Lang becomes obsessed with finding Sarita again and spends a summer month scouring Helsinki before locating her. Thus begins a torrid and seductive affair.

For his own reasons, Lang wants to keep the affair with the young single mother a secret. Sarita has reasons as well: She has an ex-husband who is as obsessed with his ex-wife as Lang is. Lang is an intellectual and fearful of the physical, drug dealing Marko, who hangs around the edges of Sarita and her son's lives.

As Marko becomes more psychotic and dangerous, Lang realizes that his life is in danger, but his compulsions and need for Sarita drive him ever deeper into a triangle that is obviously going to end badly.

Someone will pay the price for these emotional entanglements - or perhaps everyone will. It is the noirish and dark slide to that point that makes this story so compelling. We know intuitively why Lang needed that shovel. It is in the telling of how he got there that we learn the power of obsession over a man's ability to feel other emotions like fear.

This may be a Finnish novel written in Swedish and translated into English, but it's a universal story you won't quickly forget.

Peter Mergendahl

MYSTERY

DeKok and the Death of a Clown

By A. C. Baantjer (Speck Press, $14). Grade: A-

Mystery lovers who yearn for a nice, old-fashioned police procedural will find a Dutch treat in the Inspector DeKok series. Written by the prolific A. C. Baantjer, one of the Netherlands' most widely read authors and an Amsterdam homicide detective for 25 years, the series has bounced from one small U.S. publishing house to another in the last decade. But DeKok seems to have found a home recently with Denver's own Speck Press, and DeKok and the Death of a Clown is their fourth book featuring the avuncular inspector.

Murder remains rare in Amsterdam, so DeKok and his partner Dick Vledder take up a burglary case to fill in the gaps. A well-to-do businessman reports that part of his beloved collection of antique jewelry has vanished, with no sign of a break-in. At a loss to explain the situation, which he realizes looks "like a clumsy attempt at fraud," he seeks DeKok's help. But before the detectives get started, they are called to the scene of a murder, where a clown in full costume lies with a knife in his back.

DeKok, a Dutch Columbo with a long-running TV series in the Netherlands, interviews members of the clown's circus troupe as well as his underworld contact, barman Little Lowee, ambling around Amsterdam by foot and streetcar as much as possible. His sympathetic approach comes through in the translation by H. G. Smittenaar, despite a few blunders, such as having DeKok say of his boss, "He's all about solving the robberies in The Hague" - a laughably non-DeKok expression. All in all, though, this solid, nonviolent mystery deserves lots of American readers.

Jane Dickinson

UNREAL WORLDS

The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

By Tim Pratt (Bantam, $12). Grade: B+

The cover of Tim Pratt's first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, looks like a much-read pulp Western novel, complete with creases, cracks and tears. The last time I saw this technique used was in 1994, on Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music. This must be a pretty good marketing ploy, because it got me to read both books.

During the current season of global disasters, from tsunamis to hurricanes and earthquakes, Rangergirl is particularly timely, concentrating on a destructive "godlet" whose mission is to wipe-out the West Coast of the United States.

Back in 1989, this small-time deity got a good start with the Loma Prieta quake that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. But Garamond Ray, a hippie artist with a cult following, was able to paint him into a virtual prison in the back room of the commune where he lived, and the San Andreas Fault has been relative quiet since.

Zoom to the present where Marzipan McCarty works as a barista at Genius Loci, the coffeehouse that occupies the building where Garamond Ray painted his murals. By night, Marzi writes and illustrates the locally produced Rangergirl comic book. Unbeknownst to her, the earthquake god has taken over the persona of the Outlaw, the consummate villain of Marzi's comic series.

And now Rangergirl's adventures are becoming reality for Marzi and her friends.

When the Outlaw escapes from the back room of Genius Loci in his Western bad man guise, the only hope is that Marzi, along with a motley collection of cronies, including a lesbian biker chick and Garamond Ray, himself, can outwit the bumbling godlet and save the world.

Although The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl struggles at times and is much longer than it needs to be, the story is quirky and fun, a weird Western that fans of Joe Lansdale and Nancy Collins should enjoy.

Whether Pratt's subsequent works will measure up to Lethem's highly praised later novels remains to be seen.

Mark Graham

YOUNG ADULT

Copper Sun

By Sharon M. Draper (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, $16.95, ages 14 and up). Grade: B+

The story of a 15-year-old girl taken from her small village in Africa offers an unflinching look at slavery in America that is painful and compelling.

Amari loves everything about her village, Ziavi: the sound of the birds, the smells food cooking, her 8-year-old brother, her parents, and Besa, her betrothed. But all of that changes when members of a nearby Ashanti tribe escort "pale, unhealthy-looking men who carried large bundles and unusual-looking sticks" into Ziavi.

After watching the murders of her family members, Amari is shackled with 23 other surviving villagers and forced to walk a seemingly endless amount of days to Cape Coast Castle, where they're held until enough have been captured for voyage to America. There, even the Ashanti warriors who had helped the white men are captured for sale.

Amari befriends Afi, a woman who had already been enslaved by a "fat white man" in an African city who grew tired of her and sold her. She explains slavery to Amari, particularly what it means for female slaves, which she experiences almost nightly with different men on the huge ship.

The story switches points of view a quarter of the way into the book (and sporadically throughout), to Polly, an indentured white girl who witnesses the buying of Amari by Percival Derby as a gift for his son's 16th birthday. Polly can't understand why the "negro" women wail during the sale: "Living here in the colonies had to be better than living like a savage in the jungle."

Polly is assigned to teach Amari English and how to act, and they both work in the kitchen with Teenie and her 4-year-old son Tidbit. Readers witness how their relationship changes because of the horrible conditions on Derby's rice plantation. Author Sharon Draper injects Amari's feelings of hopelessness, anger, and fear throughout the book, reminding readers of the spirit others see in her and what she will need when she, Polly and Tidbit are given a chance to escape.

While the book squeezes so many details about that time in America that it can feel like overload, it is an unforgettable story.

Natalie Soto