Friday's Forgotten Books, Friday, June 27, 2014

 TWO WEEKS TO FEMME FATALE WEEK on JULY 11TH.


(From the archives)

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok Thrillers and the Junior Bender Mysteries. His next Poke Rafferty book, The Fear Artist, will come out in July.

Gitana, Dominic Martell

Gitana is the third and final book in an unhappily short series (the others are Lying Crying Dying and The Republic of Night) by Dominic Martell. The hero, Pasqual Rose, lives a life on the margins in Barcelona, working at a small bar in a dicey neighborhood. This isn't the Barcelona of Gaudi or even Woody Allen, it's a much tougher town, populated by Gypsies, skinheads, and the occasional slumming tourist, a maze of ancient alleyways, dark enough to cloak the worst of misdeeds.

Pascual is shielding an enormous secret: a more than a decade ago, as a young, impressionable man, he fell in with the Palestinian cause and committed acts of terror in its name before he recoiled from what he'd become and fled into hiding. He's ridden with guilt and hopelessly seeking some kind of absolution—but he's still got the reflexes and instincts developed by years spent looking over his shoulder. When an American man comes into the bar and calls him by name, alarms go off in Pascual's head; and when the American is murdered shortly afterward, Pascual knows that someone or something is sniffing him out.

And then there's Sara, who sings in the bar where Pasqual works, and whom he's fallen in love with, and there's Serrano, the cop who knows part of Pasqual's story, and there's Campos, the journalist who may know nearly all of it and wants to write a book. And back behind all of it, cranking on clockwork Pascual can only guess at, is someone who wants him dead and who doesn't care about collateral damage. And there's also the secret in Sara's past, that Pascual can't even guess at.

Gitana is beautifully plotted and written. Martell obviously knows Barcelona inside out, because I've rarely read a book with a stronger and more persuasive sense of place. The triumph of the book for me, though, is characterization—there isn't a character in the book, who doesn't leap off the page, who doesn't seem to possess a genuine subconscious. I read the book for the skill with which it's written and the spell of the setting, but I loved it because of the people in its pages, Dominic Martell, who also writes crackerjack Chicago thrillers as Sam Reaves, is (I think) a criminally underrated writer, and I'm delighted to see the Pascual trilogy gradually becoming available in ebook form. The first one, Lying Crying Dying is available now here on Amazon.

Yvetter Banek, THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Joe Barone, THE CASE OF THE BAITED HOOK, Erle Stanley Gardner
Brian Busby, REENTRY, John Wesley White
Bill Crider, DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE: ACE, James A. Corrick
Martin Edwards, NIGHT OF THE MOCKING WIDOW, Carter Dickson
Curt Evans, CRACK OF DOOM, Leo Bruce
Rick Horton, ROGUE MALE, Geoffrey Household
Jerry House, EQUAL TIME FOR POGO, Walt Kelly
Randy Johnson, RED-HEADED SINNERS, Jonathan Craig
Nick Jones, RIPLEY'S GAME and  THE AMERICAN FRIEND, Patricia Highsmith, book and movie
George Kelley, WARRIOR OF LLARN, THIEF OF LLARN, Gardner Fox
Margot Kinberg, THE BOUNDARY, Nicole Watson
Rob Kitchin, KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE, Horace McCoy and TO DIE IN BEVERLY HILLS, Gerald Pietrivich
B.V. Lawson, SHROUD OF CANVAS, Isobel Mary Lambot
Evan Lewis, THE  PHOTO-JOURNAL GUIDE TO COMIC BOOKS
Steve Lewis/David Vineyard, SCORPIO RISING, Anthony Horowitz
Todd Mason, TBA
J.F. Norris, COLD HAND IN MINE, Robert Aichman
J. Kingston Pierce, Thomas Blanchard Dewey 
James Reasoner, HANGMAN'S HARVEST, M.E. Chabor
Richard Robinson, TETHER'S END, Margorie Allingham
Gerard Saylor, INK IMAGE, VICTOR GISCHLER
Ron Scheer, THE HOMESTEADERS, Kate and Virgil Boyd
TomCat, A TIP OF THE VEIL, DeWaal and Baantjer
Kevin Tipple/Patrick Ohl, COP-HATER, Ed McBain
TracyK, THE MOTHER HUNT, Rex Stout
James Winter, HEARTS OF ATLANTIS, Stephen King