CultureWatch Reviews by Nanda and Gregg Provide Gift Ideas: Crime and Culture, Three Extraordinary Murder Mysteries
Reviewed by Serena Nanda and Joan Gregg*
A Dark Redemption
By Stav Shavez, 2012
Published by Faber and Faber, London; 383 pages
Zaddik
By David Rosenbaum, 1993
Published by Invisible Cities Press, Montpelier, VT; 431 pages
Murder Casts a Shadow
By Victoria N. Kneubuhl, 1993; 276 pages
Published by University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, HI
Old is Gold. Culture plays an essential role in the crimes committed in these three extraordinary murder mysteries in the lives of the victims and perpetrators and in the interactions of the investigations. Each narrative situates its action in historical realities that extend from the past into the present. These novels are all available through public libraries and Amazon.com.
A Dark Redemption, the only true police procedural of the three, is set in London, and if you cut your teeth on British "cozies" such as Agatha Christie's, you’ll find this complicated policier suspenseful and even alarming.
Police Detective Jack Carrigan, featured in this new British series, is a complex personality who has never forgotten a horrendous act from his past. The novel explores many dark themes of the human condition: gruesome sexual murders; the mixed motives of a slew of native born and immigrant cops as well as perpetrators; female detectives 'with issues' and a Police Department's top brass who continually monitor their cops' findings in order to bury information and change the investigation's direction to protect their image. Carrigan, who has just made Detective, still butts head with his superiors, but he has developed a good rapport with his ornery newly assigned sergeant, Genevre, who is keeping her own secrets.
The redemption of the novel's title refers to a horrific incident from 25 years before when Jack Carrigan and two friends took their University graduation trip to Africa. It irrevocably marked the lives of all three men, one of whom, we learn indirectly through Jack's thoughts, is now deceased. The second man still alive, now a successful lawyer with a suburban home and attractive family, has consciously buried his memory of the incident, because there is more to it than Jack knows. It is not until the very end of the novel that Jack gains full understanding of the incident and then realizes that the full redemption he has sought will be impossible to achieve.
A widower still single, the lovable loner, Jack, has recently been raised to Detective rank, and with Genevre is working on a gruesome case of a young African female's murder that connects to a number of other African students and Professors in the field of African Studies.
The first killing takes place in an African neighborhood and Jack's investigation moves forward through the neighborhood's links to historical events in African colonialism and its subsequent fratricidal wars and homicidal military leaders who have emerged on the continent. Not your Baedeker's London for sure! But Carrigan and Genevre, using old fashioned footwork and highly intricate modern electronic devices extend their investigation into a complicated series of criminal activities based in the little known and sometimes confusing swath of London's African immigrant sections.
Part of the unusual pleasure of this graphic, frightening mystery is following this pair through all their smart — but sometimes wrongheaded — maneuvers and enjoying the development of their growing relationship and success in solving the original murder and the several other related ones that follow. With two additional Jack Carrigan policiers in print we can look forward to following this sympathetic Detective through other tangled cases that, like A Dark Redemption, will ultimately reveal to us a lot of things we didn't know we didn't know.
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