"Science most foul"
Summertime, and the reading is easy. You don't escape to the beach or the mountains to fritter away your lazy hours fretting about the pollution of the Arctic or the effects of invasive species on Hawaiian biodiversity. No, what you want is a healthy homicide. It's best if the crime is outrageous, the suspects menacing, and the investigator both noble and quirky. Still, there's no reason not to mix in a little science with the mayhem. After all, wasn't Sherlock Holmes a master chemist, and Watson a trained physician?
Everyone has perennial choices, I'm sure. High on my list would be almost any novel by Nevada Barr, whose crime-stopping park ranger Anna Pigeon seems to have worked at most of the great scenic wonders of North America. Less well known, but equally entertaining, is Morgan, the creation of the Canadian novelist Alex. He may be one of the few detectives whose specialty is scientific-research fraud, and her latest adventure, Cold Dark (2005), authentically set in a large mountaintop observatory, involves murder, mayhem, and, not incidentally, spectroscopy of distant galaxies.
Thankfully, there seems to be no shortage of writers who can artfully blend mystery and science. Among the most enjoyable new publications that have graced my nightstand in recent months are these prime candidates for summer fun:
Gideon Oliver, forensic anthropologist extraordinaire, makes his thirteenth appearance in this latest novel by Edgar Award-winner Aaron Elkins. The setting is pure Agatha Christie: a brooding castle in the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast of England, where a small group of environmental experts--including Gideon's spouse, Julie, an expert on wildfire management--have assembled for a weeklong brainstorming session hosted by an eccentric Russian entrepreneur. While Julie deals with the inflammable mix of personalities at the daily colloquia, Gideon kills time examining artifacts at the local museum. Mixed in with the museum's prehistoric skeletal remains, he discovers, is a human bone that, to his trained eye, shows signs of murder most foul. Soon more bones show up on a local beach, and it becomes clear that they all belong to the victim of a brutal dismemberment that took place a bit more recently than the Bronze Age. There is no record, however, of any local person gone missing. So whose bones are they?
As Gideon ponders the evidence and the local police chief investigates, the fog rolls in and the fog rolls out. Tempers flare and passions simmer among the invitees at the castle. Then, one mistshrouded midnight, a participant in the workshop is forcibly precipitated from a parapet. Could there be a connection between this murder and the dismembered bones? Well, of course there is, but you must resist the temptation to leapfrog to the obligatory scene in which all the assembled suspects find out which of them is guilty. The pleasure of summer readinglies not in resolution but in investigation, and Elkins keeps things moving with plenty of local atmosphere, compelling characterization, and a refreshingly low level of violence. CSI: Miami it's not, but it would make a lovely episode on the BBC Mystery Monday series.
The Darwin Conspiracy by John
After five vigorous years aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin returned to England a broken man. His mind was sharper than ever, to be sure, and many decades of groundbreaking research and writing lay ahead, but his body was already beginning to fail. For the rest of his life he complained of nausea, vomiting, flatulence, skin rashes, headaches, vertigo, and countless other maladies. For all of them he sought remedies that, given the primitive state of medicine at the time, may have done him more harm than good. At various times Darwin dosed himself with opium, shocked himself with electricity, and wrapped his body with towels soaked in freezing water--all to no avail.
Darwin's illness is a real historical mystery: How could a young man who galloped on horseback over the Pampas and backpacked (sans Gore-Tex) in the Andes, turn so prematurely into an elderly invalid, obsessed with rampant bodily dysfunctions?
To the shelf of scholarly monographs addressing this question, vacation readers should welcome The Darwin, a fast-paced novel of romance and intellectual intrigue by John, who was editor and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Its protagonists are Hugh Kellem, an anthropologist, and Beth, an evolutionary biologist, whose pursuit of the Darwinian lore--and of each other--begins on a remote island of the Galapagos, amidst the finches that helped inspire the theory of natural selection.
The two return to England and become fascinated with the hidden threads of life, aided by the fortuitous discovery of a series of journals written by daughter Lizzie. There are a few side plots, and numerous flashbacks re-creating travels on the Beagle, but most of the detective work here is of the academic sort, carried out in dimly-lit archives, vaguely suggestive of The Da Vinci Code, but nowhere near as ominous.
If you're a Darwin buff, you may find much of Darnton's narrative familiar, since he has scrupulously mined information from Darwin's journals and letters as well as from the many Darwin biographies written over the years. But the writing is snappy and smart, and the final diagnosis of Darwin's debility is so audacious and amusing that even the most jaded summer reader will regard the few hours unraveling The Darwin Conspiracy as time well spent.
The Book of the Dead by Douglas and Lincoln
Most of the action of this gothic tale of Gotham takes place in the remote galleries of the "New York Museum" a thin disguise for the American Museum of Natural History at Central Park West and Seventy-ninth Street. But that's plenty of real estate, considering that the fictional museum includes thirty-four interconnected buildings with more than 2 million square feet of space and more than eighteen miles of corridors. Most of the collection has never been seen by the public, including (according to Douglas and Lincoln ) the Tomb of Senef, a colossal Egyptian monument imported stone by stone in the 1800s, but sealed off for more than three-quarters of a century.
Archaeologist Nora Kelly is in charge of renovating the tomb for a new exhibition, partly to burnish the reputation of the museum, which has been shaken by a recent murder and the theft of its entire diamond collection by archfiend Diogenes Pendergast. But there is much more bloodshed to come, as the master criminal unfolds his plan to terrorize the rich and powerful of New York City at the official opening of the new exhibition. Only one man can stop the impending catastrophe: Diogenes' older brother, F.B.I. Special Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast. Alas, Aloysins is locked up in a federal maximum security cell, flamed for a murder his brother committed. Is all hope lost?
Not to worry. Agent Pendergast, whose crime-fighting skill makes Sherlock Holmes look like Inspector Clouseau, has his own plan. With the help of a group of lower Manhattan irregulars, he busts out of stir just in time to stop the massacre of the innocents and to track down his evil sibling.
I doubt I've given too much away. Agent Pendergast and his crew have appeared in several best-selling novels by Preston and Child, and by the time The Book of the Dead opens, he's already pursued the incorrigible Diogenes through Brimstone and Dance of Death. A short review can hardly do justice to the large cast and relentless pace of action of the trilogy, but be warned, once you start reading, it will be hard to stop. The characterization never rises above the level of caricature, to be sure, and the plotting is never less than over-the-top. But isn't that reason enough to put it on your summer list?
The Oxygen by Camille
Not many murder mysteries are illustrated by diagrams of inorganic molecules, but that seems entirely appropriate if the crime involves Gloria Lamerino, a retired Berkeley physicist currently residing in the north Boston suburb of Revere. This time around, she's in New York City, doing Christmas shopping, enjoying the cuisine of Little Italy, and, incidentally, trying to find the killer of a cinematographer found suffocated in the midtown apartment of her husband's niece. The niece, it turns out, is making a documentary about ozone ([O.sub.3]) pollution in the workplace, and it could be that one of the business establishments she was spotlighting took drastic measures to conceal their violations of environmental law. Then again, it could have been one of the people her cinematographer was blackmailing.
At first read, Lamerino seems more like an Italian grandmother than a hard-nosed detective. She's a reluctant investigator, driven mostly by curiosity and the need to do something with her brain now that she's no longer in the lab. Afraid of guns, she even worries herself into a tizzy when she pilfers an incriminating document from a suspect's filing cabinet. But give her a PowerPoint presentation or a chalkboard, and she hits her stride. Two-or three-page science lectures immediately come forth, such as how CFCs harm the ozone layers, that read as if they were lifted from a textbook. And, pushed into action, she's sharp-eyed and resourceful, and she always seems to come through her inevitable encounters with perps suffering only minor injuries.
That's fortunate, because Lamerino has a remarkable proclivity for encountering crimes. She's solved seven "element" murders before this one, starting from the top of the periodic table: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron (well, actually, boric acid), carbon, and nitrogen.
The pattern was no doubt inspired by Sue , whose "Alphabet" series, featuring detective Kinsey , is up to "S" (S is for Silence). But if Camille Minichino's pattern continues, she'll be writing a lot longer than Grafton will, since the number of naturally occurring chemical elements (ninety-two) is a good deal greater than the number of letters in the alphabet. If Minichino, like Gloria Lamerino, is looking forward to an easy and crime-free retirement, she's out of luck--which is very good news for summer readers.
