As Leonard conducts his concise and knowing tour of the pop-music business in Los Angeles, he makes the same joke work that made ““Get Shorty’’ so funny. The nicest, most honest man in sight is Chili, an ex-mobster who just stumbles into legitimacy. But Leonard freshens the formula with enough new twists and baroque characters–like Elliott, the gay half-Samoan rock bodyguard who wants to get into pictures–that you forget you’ve more or less read this one before. The nicest touch–Chili discovers a budding female rock star when he calls an escort service and likes the voice of the woman working the phones. And as always with Leonard, you read to hear talk the way it is really talked in this country. ““Tell you the truth,’’ Chili’s girlfriend says, ““I’m smoking more now since I quit.’’ The plot, something about Chili’s helping a rock band get an album made, is–like all Leonard plots–buried in there somewhere. But who cares? What you care about is keeping company with Chili, a stand-up guy and a very funny man. Elmore, don’t hesitate to bring him back again.
MALCOLM JONES
THRILLER FANS BADLY MISS THE COLD war. So does Fluke Kelso, the British historian who is the hero of the sizzling new novel from Robert Harris, archangel (416 pages. Random House. $24.95). Kelso, a Stalin expert, is glad the right side won, but ““the fact was, almost nothing had gone right for him since the Cold War had ended.’’ That is, until he goes to an academic conference in Moscow. There, he gets onto the trail of Stalin’s greatest secret, contained in a notebook that disappeared when the dictator died. Just as in Harris’s first blockbuster, ““Fatherland,’’ which was premised on Nazi Germany’s victory in World War II, this quasi-historical backdrop is a nifty device.
The main protagonists are perfectly at odds with each other. There’s Feliks Suvorin, the suave KGB major who wants to bury the past. He’s up against two men obsessed with Stalin: Vladimir Mamantov, who leads a party dedicated to bringing back Stalinism, and Kelso, who has spent his life trying to expose the evils of the tyrant. Harris splices in glimpses of the new Russia and its splashy wealth, decadence and desperation.
As Kelso races across Moscow and then to Russia’s far north to discover Stalin’s secret, readers will need to suspend their disbelief at times. But thriller lovers are used to this. What they may not realize is how accurate Kelso’s portrayal of Stalin and the monstrous system he created is. And how plausible his–or Harris’s–case is that Stalinism is far from buried. Harris has written a zinger precisely because in Russia, past or present, virtually nothing is too absurd to be possible.
ANDREW NAGORSKI
HARRY BOSCH IS BACK. THAT’S THE good news–and the bad. An LAPD detective who made so much trouble in the elite robbery-homicide division that he was booted down to the grimy Hollywood squad, Bosch is one of the most compelling, complex protagonists in recent crime fiction. In angels flight by Michael Connelly (393 pages. Little, Brown. $25), the sixth installment in the Bosch series, he has a particularly freighted case–the murder of a headline-making African-American attorney who has made a career, and a fortune, by suing the city’s police department. Bosch faces more than the obvious political pressures in a city still raw from the Rodney King affair: he must play on an investigative team that includes his nemesis, a loathsome internal-affairs officer, and a woman who Bosch (but no one else) knows was the victim’s lover. The murder suspects: half the force.
Connelly, a former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is an elegant, insightful writer. (““Bosch could not be surprised anymore by the horrors people inflicted on each other. But the horrors people saved for themselves were a different story.’’) As always, he creates both a searingly vivid urban landscape and a labyrinthine story line. The trouble is that he breathes no new life into Bosch. Great serialists–Walter Mosley, say, or Sue Grafton–adroitly sketch their detectives’ pasts while adding more layers to their psychological profiles. Readers new to Bosch won’t know how darkly fascinating he is, and how he got that way; and those who already know him will hunger for more.
KATRINE AMES
