THE SILVER SWAN -- By Benjamin Black Holt / 290 pages / $25
Whenever a writer of literary fiction decides to move into mystery territory, it's almost a guarantee there will be a new battle on the genre war front. But Black, the pseudonym for Booker Prize winner John Banville, proved he could walk the crime fiction walk with the Edgar-nominated Christine Falls, and now his luminous prose gets an even better infrastructure with the sequel, a faster-paced, further melancholic slice of the noir life of Dublin pathologist Quirke. Once again, he is recruited into a tenuous investigation of the suspicious death a young woman mistreated by the city's harsh environment, but this time her name is Deirdre Hunt. And once again, the investigation will encompass Quirke's own family, this time his daughter Phoebe, a stunning creation of malcontent and self-destruction. Black seamlessly intercuts Quirke's ruminations and stop-start searching with the devolving story of how Deirdre's naive idealism darkened into something far deadlier, consistently pointing out the shadows that kept 1950s-era Dublin in an oppressively cloistered manner.
CALUMET CITY
By Charlie Newton Touchstone / 352 pages / $14
Patti Black is a real-life Chicago police officer whom Charlie Newton rode along with to gather material for his arresting debut novel. But the real Patti, I hope, has had a very different life from her fictional alter ego, who battles more demons than a necromancer knows what to do with. She's managed to block out an early life of systematic abuse at the hands of her foster father in order to function as a more or less bad-ass policewoman, but the door to her previously tortured life opens wide open when seemingly disparate events - the attempted assassination of the mayor, a lawyer's murder and the discovery of a body hidden in a house basement wall - force Patti to reckon with what really happened in the dark period she spent in Calumet City. At times Newton, a Chicagoan now based in South Africa, overstuffs the narrative with too many events and shocks, but his version of Patti Black is a potent mix of pain and toughness, vulnerability and adrenalin that anchors the book any time it threatens to careen out of control. She may be too damaged to return, but here's hoping for more from Newton.
An Incomplete Revenge
By Jacqueline Winspear Holt / 306 pages / $24
