Thomas Chippendale supplied wealthy families in 18th-century England with intricately carved pieces: chairs, card tables, even candlesticks. He also crafted desks and cabinets designed with secret compartments that distracted attention from compartments even more secret, so that a casual searcher, finding the first, would not look for another.
The Grenadillo Box by Janet Gleeson (Bantam Press) has a bit of that, as most good mysteries should. It has atmosphere, engaging characters, and a lot of information on cabinet-making. Oddly enough, especially when the melodrama begins, it’s the cabinetmaking that holds the attention.
Chippendale’s journeyman Nathaniel Hopson has finished installing a Chippendale library in the country home of the unpleasant Lord Montfort when a shot is heard and Montfort is found dead, leeches round his neck and blood all over a windowsill. In his hand he’s clutching the eponymous box. Nathaniel is drawn into the investigation — and the reader is drawn into this truly excellent book by an author who knows the subject well: among her non-fiction credits is Miller’s Antiques and Collectibles.
Charlotte Carter’s Walking Bones (Serpent’s Tail) is less a mystery, more a slim, brilliant and devastating volume of noir. It’s a love story, of a sort, set largely in bars — one expects Hoagy Carmichael to slide in somewhere, playing the odd chord and murmuring “hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate”. The protagonists are deeply wounded people: the black and beautiful Nettie, a failed model only recently emerged from a nervous breakdown; her rescuer and bar-hopping companion, the small, dapper Rufus Beard, a gay man with a taste for rough trade; and an alcoholic white publisher who lives on guilt. The combination is a tragedy waiting to happen.
The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L Carter (Jonathan Cape) is as different from Walking Bones as a book can be. This Carter is wordy, the author digresses — which is why his book runs to 654 pages. It’s a first novel by a Yale University law professor who has written much non-fiction: on politics and religion, the American federal appointments process, civil rights. All this, along with a passion for chess, informs The Emperor of Ocean Park, as does Carter’s membership in what he defines as “the Gold Coast (as we style our narrow, upper-middle-class strip of the darker nation)”.
Ivy League law professor Talcott Garland is the son of a black judge who missed being appointed to
the United States Supreme Court because of his friendship with a white gangster. The judge dies; Talcott’s sister is convinced he’s been murdered; and Talcott, who first refuses to look into it, changes his mind when people begin dying around him. For readers less impatient than this reviewer, it’s well written, its highways and byways are interesting, and the twist at the end comes as a surprise.
Time of Death by Jessica Snyder Sachs (Century) isn’t a thriller at all — it’s an exploration of the multiple methods investigators have used for the past several hundred years to determine the time of death where there is no witness. If you believe it can be estimated by the progress of rigor mortis, or lividity, or stomach contents, surprise — it can’t. The imperfect nature of these estimates has not prevented the courts from pinning crimes on suspects, some of them clearly innocent, and so the search has gone on since the time of Julius Caesar to find an accurate formula.
That formula has been waiting in the wings since the gravediggers in Hamlet mused about worms infesting bodies. It seems it’s bugs — a number of different species whose life stages can be counted to the hour — and plants that can pinpoint not only when a person died but where, and there is an army of forensic pathologists who take delight in finding that out. There are passages in this fascinating book that seem to have tumbled straight out of Kathy Reichs or Patricia Cornwell, which only shows how well these novelists have done their homework — and how well Sachs knows her stuff.