Lovejoy is back. Jonathan Gash is giving us The Ten Word Game (Thomas Dunne Books, $23.95, 320 pages), the usual mad romp with Lovejoy, who expends his energy equally in finding antiques, catching willing women and getting into life-threatening situations only an author as good as Mr. Gash could make us believe.
Lovejoy is a “divvy,” gifted with a physical reaction set off by the presence of a genuine antique. If the things Mr. Gash tells us about faking antiques are any indication, Lovejoy is worth his weight in Etruscan gold jewelry.
This time round, Lovejoy, predictably, is in trouble with both the law and the lawless after a failed caper involving the theft of a forged Van Gogh. Lovejoy was both forger and thief, showing that his talents extend far beyond divvying and “making smiles.”
He is smuggled aboard a cruise ship by people who seem to have mixed intentions about his future. He is permitted to run around like a dog on a long leash, but eventually he ends up where they want him.
What he finds out and what he does about it repay the read. But along the way Mr. Gash also informs, amuses and educates in a most lively fashion. No, you don’t have to know a thing about antiques to enjoy meeting Lovejoy.
David Holland’s The Devil’s Acre (Thomas Dunne Books, $23.95, 280 pages) is a visit to a part of Victorian London where life is so dire it can be bought for pence. Dean Tuckworth is more accustomed to the peace and relative sanity of a small town in the countryside, where he is waging an underfunded effort to restore the Bellminster Cathedral after a disastrous fire.
If it were not for the need of money, the dean would not have ventured into London and would not have been in the home of a reclusive and slightly repulsive philanthrophist. And he would not have found a murdered body the police are too quick to identify and dismiss.
With the connivance of writer Leigh Hunt, he becomes involved in a mystery that eventually takes him into London’s hell on earth and into the darkness of one man’s soul.
The plotting in this one is intriguing and excellent, with clues abounding and threads all gathered up and knotted by the final page.
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It is always a pleasure to find one of Ruth Rendel’s Chief Inspector Wexford mysteries in the review pile and this veteran writer does not disappoint with The Babes in the Wood (Crown, $25, 325 pages). When a babysitter and two of her charges disappear during a flood, it is easy to fear the worst, even if they disappear from a house safely above the waters.
Police don’t need much investigation to establish that this is a dysfunctional family, but finding the babysitter and the children proves much more difficult. Have they been kidnapped? Are they even still alive? For that matter, did they all leave under their own steam?
Miss Rendel is a master of the psychological twist and she throws in several before Wexford finds all the answers (and discovers that for the first time in his life he has stolen something). If you are a fan, you are already out the door to the bookstore. If you are not a fan, read this and you will be.
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Part-time detective and full-time rancher Trade Ellis is suffering a surfeit of secrecy in Sinclair Browning’s Traggedy Ann (Dell, $5.99, 388 pages), where a woman wants her sister found — but no one is to know she is missing.
How can Trade resist? She tries, until the missing woman is linked to one of Trade’s more valued friends. At the friend’s insistence, Trade takes the case — and follows it into some strange territory indeed. It seems the missing woman was investigating reports of a sex cult specializing in some of the more pathological expressions of that basic urge. Despite threats and a serious distaste for what she is finding, Trade keeps after her missing woman, convinced against reason that she might still be alive.
Trade’s client is a painter who has some pathological expressions of her own. Her subject is always a doll, a suffering doll. Trade begins to believe that the pathology extends into the rest of the sisters’ family. She finds that very few of the people she meets are what they seem; and what they are is something no rational person wants to encourage as a companion.
In this third outing, Trade has become a fully developed and thoroughly likable character, though one would think twice about following her around.
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Just a final note: Forge Books and Otto Penzler have brought out one of the early works of Donald E. Westlake, God Save the Mark ($14.95, 268 pages). There is no credible way to describe the plot of a Westlake opus, except to say it is funny. In fact it is so funny that each book should come with an Ace bandage for bruised ribs.
Do not read this one in public because someone, alarmed by your laughter, will end up dropping a net over you. If you have never read a Westlake caper, you are missing one of the true delights of the mystery genre.
Bless you, Forge. Bless you, Mr. Penzler. And bless you, Mr. Westlake, for your truly warped mind.
Judith Kreiner is a copy editor at The Washington Times.
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