This month’s column is all about firsts — debut authors, new series beginnings or both. I make it a point to pick up books by new authors whenever I can. Sure, there’s pleasure to be had in discovering someone 10 books into a series and binge-reading them all, but I like embracing promising careers at the ground level, too.
MAY THE WOLF DIE (Penguin Books, 359 pp., paperback, $20), the first book from Elizabeth Heider, a physicist and former U.S. Navy research analyst, bowled me over with its descriptions of Naples — seedy, beautiful, baroque — and the trials and tribulations of its main character, Nikki Serafino. Nikki, a liaison between the local police and the American military, works in a unit called Phoenix Seven where the men, when they aren’t “barraging her with sex jokes,” undermine and condescend to her at every turn. Nikki, “short and compact and muscular with a dynamic, interesting face,” can handle them just fine, thank you very much.
Then, within 24 hours, she stumbles across two bodies. The first, submerged in water, is an American naval officer, and the other has connections to the military base, too. The investigation unfolds with all manner of surprises, and Nikki, to the chagrin of her Neapolitan colleagues, will be the one to solve it.
Delia Pitts begins a new series with TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN (Minotaur, 312 pp., $28), which introduces Vandy Myrick. A private detective who’s recently returned to her New Jersey hometown, she’s working in the shadow of her former cop father, who now has dementia, and grieving the death of her daughter, Monica. The sleepy Queenstown that Vandy remembers as a child has changed; it’s now a nest of secrets, teeming with corruption and bigotry.
Vandy excels at her job, especially when it comes to divorce cases, which she calls “the bread and butter of my P.I. work. Nasty, lucrative, fun in an unwholesome way.” When the mayor’s nephew, Leo Hannah, comes to her before leaving his wife, he tells Vandy, “I want proof of her infidelity.”
But when two shooting deaths turn the case sideways, Vandy can’t help mistrusting everything Leo has told her. At first it’s a gut feeling, but soon it’s more than that. As she connects the dots between the cases, it feels as if the entire town must be involved, including her own family.
“Trouble in Queenstown” starts at a simmer, but when Vandy’s investigation gets going, it reaches a full boil.
For lighter fare with some bite, IT’S ELEMENTARY (Berkley, 353 pp., paperback, $19), the adult mystery series debut by the Y.A. writer Elise Bryant, is a delightful mash-up of P.T.A. wars, adorable children, a hot school psychologist and the eminently winning Mavis Miller. She’s perpetually fighting exhaustion as the single mom of 7-year-old Pearl and coping with the stress of whether her promotion at a nonprofit will go through. She doesn’t really want to chair the D.E.I. committee at Knoll Elementary, which her daughter attends, but acquiesces to the P.T.A. president’s demands — the woman, Trisha, is a bully — and gets far more than she bargained for.
“D.E.I. means diversity, equity and inclusion, sure,” Mavis says. “But it also means free labor to be given willingly to fix problems that we didn’t create. It means a box checked with no real change made.”
After an ugly confrontation at Back to School Night between Trisha and the school principal, the man vanishes. And Mavis, out walking her dog afterward, sees Trisha dragging large trash bags and empty bottles of Clorox.
There are conflicts aplenty here, including a white-knuckle scene involving hidden camera footage. In Bryant’s fiction, just as in the real world, the smallest conflicts can cause the most damage.
Finally, the onetime New Orleans public defender Joshua Perry turns to fiction for the first time with SERAPHIM (Melville House, 262 pp., paperback, $18.99), which reminded me a little of classic Richard Price novels, examining injustice and the ways in which it marks those working in and outside the system. But “Seraphim” also veers off into larger examinations of Jewish faith and mysticism.
Perry’s main character, Ben Alder, has abandoned his rabbinical studies to become a criminal defense lawyer. In a New Orleans still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, he and Boris Pasternak (yes, that’s really his name) spend their days in the public defender’s office, representing children who have been charged as adults. The case they’re currently dealing with is a tough one: Robert, 16, has confessed to the murder of a local restaurant owner, a “daughter of the city’s Creole royalty,” who was helping the city’s recovery efforts in every way she could.
Structurally, “Seraphim” is less a crime novel than it is a meditation on the cumulative effect of crime on individuals, and on a city. Perry writes as if he has seen too much and come through the other side.
