Dreams of Justice by Dick Adler Read Free Book Online Page B

survive.
    “Castrati are famous for having the small, delicately formed larynx of a woman and the prodigious lung capacity of a man,” says Tito—who is both proud of his art and resentful at the price he has paid for it. “…I had once witnessed a virtuoso performance by the great Farnelli in Naples. During his arias, all eyes were glued to his face and gestures… Some of the women, and even a few of the men, seemed transported by sensation… they appeared nothing short of enraptured.”
    The best thing about Beverle Graves Myers’s rivetting first mystery—which involves the poisoning of a beautiful, aging opera star and the charging of Felice with the crime—is how quickly we slip into the world she has so expertly recreated, despite its distance and initial oddness. It’s a world where castrati-bashing by gangs of louts on the street (and verbal insults by solid citizens behind closed doors) is a fact of life; where a government would rather have fast justice than slow truth; where a powerful businessman buys and sells people along with his other trade goods. Sound like any place you know?
    THE GAME, by Laurie R. King (Bantam Hardcover)
    Laurie R. King has done some excellent work in her crime novels about contemporary female cops, but I’d venture to guess that her series about Mary Russell—the young American woman who marries Sherlock Holmes in his later years—will earn her the most honors. King has managed to capture in Mary all the smart, angry, overqualified women who came boiling out of the world’s cities and colleges in the early 1900s, willing to risk everything from scorn to physical violence to be given a chance of proving their worth.
    Mary’s scholarship—her knowledge of language, history and literature—play a large part in the adventurous investigations she conducts with Holmes, and King cleverly uses her own erudition to set up the action. In this seventh outing, a plea from Sherlock’s ailing older brother Mycroft sends them off to India in search of a British intelligence agent called Kimball O’Hara—who it turns out was the model for Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” when he was a boy.
    The other great strength of the Mary Russell books is that King never forgets the true spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps as underrated as a writer of thrilling adventures as he is overvalued (by some) as a writer of credible detective stories. “O Jerusalem,” the fifth book in the series, was a marvelous journey into Arabian politics, and “The Game” distills the essence of the decline of the British Raj into one extremely exciting volume.
    COTTONWOOD, by Scott Phillips (Ballantine)
    In the always interesting, often surprising online January Magazine, Bill Crider was talking about the general lack of respect paid to mysteries set in the Old West. Crider, who wrote a fine one himself (“A Time for Hanging” in 1989), will probably be as delighted as I am with this third book from Scott Phillips—whose first two novels set in 20th Century Kansas (“The Ice Harvest” and “The Walkaway”) were bleakly comic affairs connected by a brilliant link of shared history.
    There’s a similar link in “Cottonwood,” but you have to wait for the epilogue to fully appreciate it. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the pleasures of Phillips’s unique and pungent prose, as well as his skill and daring at moving us through a narrative landscape which at first glance might seem to have been well covered as part of our myth and memory.
    The story begins in 1872, in the frozen mud of Cottonwood, Kansas, a profoundly unpromising place where an ambitious 27-year-old man named Bill Ogden has largely abandoned his failing farm to run the local saloon and try to work at what he really likes—photography. Left to their own devices on the farm, Ogden’s young son treats him with a decided lack of interest and his wife has taken to sleeping with the hired hands. This doesn’t seem to bother Bill, who has his own