The New York Times-20080127-Shades of the Muckrakers

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Shades of the Muckrakers

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The shades of Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair must have been looking over Loren D. Estleman's shoulder when he wrote GAS CITY (Forge, $24.95). Set in a Midwestern metropolis that grew up around a refinery, his muscular novel initially takes a long view of the cynical bargain struck between civic leaders and organized crime -- and only moves in for the kill when a key figure in this devil's dance decides to reform. Like earlier muckraking writers, Estleman is always looking for the tipping point where our frontier values of independent entrepreneurship and community justice tumble into criminality. And his characters never stop asking whether it's possible to go back and get it right.

Everyone in Gas City seems to be in on the deal that keeps crime and vice confined to 10 downtown blocks, well away from the commercial and residential districts. Francis X. Russell, the corrupt chief of police, is actually best friends with the mob boss Tony Z. But when Russell's beloved wife dies, he goes into mourning for the lost ideals of the generations of immigrants who built his working-class city and resolves to make peace with his conscience. Police raids close down the most notorious criminal establishments. Illicit income dries up for gangsters and cops on the take. Fortunes shift in the coming mayoral race.

But once the delicate power-sharing mechanism held by Gas City's legal and illegal bosses breaks down, so does municipal order. At this point, Estleman has to ask whether one crooked cop's personal reformation is worth the chaos it causes. It's a loaded question, since the author has made individual (and perhaps national) redemption his central theme, even to the whimsical point of extending it to a serial killer known as Beaver Cleaver, who has shifted his pattern of butchery. (My theory, a criminal profiler says, is he's trying to cut down, like a smoker or an alcoholic tapering off his intake until he's beaten the addiction.) While this parallel plot isn't entirely integrated into the main story, it lets more raffish downtown characters into the mix, adding their irreverent voices to the higher debate over how much it profits a man to build a shining city and lose his faith in himself.

Before she loses her nerve in a way that a true queen of the night (like Ruth Rendell or her alter ego, Barbara Vine) never would, Minette Walters spins a gripping tale of suspense in THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW (Knopf, $24.95). Sticking to her habitual method of storytelling, Walters draws all eyes to Lt. Charles Acland, a 26-year-old British soldier who is gravely injured but escapes death after his armored vehicle is obliterated by terrorist bombs in Iraq. From the time he's first met, badly disfigured and sullenly silent on a hospital ward, Acland commands our attention, which only intensifies as he reveals the anger, grief, guilt and rage that torment him.

Walters's portrait of this wounded soldier is so persuasively shaded that when he comes under suspicion as a serial killer we're forced to examine the existential question of whether a personality can truly be destroyed -- and what that says about military combat. Unhappily, the story's sensationalism undermines this character study, while the procedural format, with its routine police work and inept cops, only distracts from the deeper issues this psychological thriller raises.

The perverse tones of Madeline Dare rake their fingernails across the mental blackboard in THE CRAZY SCHOOL (Grand Central, $23.99). And how nice it is to hear that rebel voice again. After making her nervy debut in A Field of Darkness, Cornelia Read's renegade debutante took to the hills of New England, and here she is in 1989 in the Berkshires, teaching at the Santangelo Academy, a therapeutic boarding school for the troubled progeny of the filthy rich. In addition to appealing to all manner of seekers and lost boys, wild girls and pagan sprites, and those misguided souls who would teach them more practical social skills, the region also attracts a murderer who kills two students and makes the deaths look like a double suicide. Only the iconoclastic Madeline, who really cares about her vulnerable charges, is skeptical enough to see through the sham. While hardly taxing, the whodunit plot is funny and twisted, and it gives Madeline plenty of opportunities to air her caustic views on the evolutionary decline of her social class.

As alluring as it is disorienting, THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX (Atlantic Monthly, $22) introduces American readers to Christopher G. Moore's exotic private-eye mysteries set in Bangkok and featuring an American expatriate named Vincent Calvino. While hard-pressed to maintain his own moral ballast within this permissive society, Calvino has a sense of irony that allows him to work for ex-pat wives who want sordid proof of their husbands' infidelity in the Thai capital, which ranks No. 1 internationally as the hub of marriage destruction. But this cynical private eye also has a streak of integrity (and a need for cash) that compels him to take up the cause of a client who was murdered when he tried to expose a case of drug piracy so far-reaching it could bring down the government. Although the tone of the narrative is slightly off -- the general satire seems a bit too blunt, and downright mean in its specific consideration of those ex-pat wives -- Moore's flashy style successfully captures the dizzying contradictions of this vertiginous landscape.

[Illustration]DRAWING (DRAWING BY WES DUVALL)