Sleuths stuck in their own tracks

December 30, 2007|Hallie Ephron

Person of Interest
By Theresa Schwegel
St. Martin's, 384 pp, $24.95

Absolution
By Caro Ramsay
Pegasus, 401 pp., $25

Souls of Angels
By Thomas Eidson
Random House, 304 pp., $24.95

Today's crime novels often feed off a toxic triangle of the detective, his or her family, and the detective's all-consuming work.

In Theresa Schwegel's third novel, "Person of Interest," we get a poisonously unhappy family, each one self-obsessed and not in the least bit likable, set against a backdrop of gang violence. Chicago detective Craig McHugh of the Gang Unit has been working undercover, trying to infiltrate the world of Chinese and Vietnamese gangs. His access point is a Chinese poker game, and he's been working overtime and gambling with his own money to stay in the game. But any break in the case remains elusive. One night, a bunch of black-suited thugs show up like a SWAT team, and the game turns seriously nasty.

Leslie, Craig's unhappy wife, works a dead-end, $10-an-hour job as a florist. One minute, she's mooning over her daughter's handsome boyfriend, and the next, she's getting what sounds like the call that every police officer's wife dreads. Worse, she discovers that she's so angry with her husband's neglect that she'd actually be happy to hear that he's been killed in the line of duty. Their sulky, 17-year-old daughter Ivy is troubled, too. She's been arrested at a nightclub, holding tabs of ecstasy that she claims belong to someone else.

Ambitious and carefully constructed, with complex characters and a warped moral compass, the novel is propelled forward by misunderstandings and by information that Craig, Leslie, and Ivy withhold from one another until all are in mortal peril. The graphic violence and abject humiliation the characters undergo are unflinching, riveting, and, at the same time, hard for this reader to get through. Schwegel nails the estranged husband-wife dynamic, but she's less convincing with the mother-daughter bond.

Schwegel, who came on like gangbusters with her Edgar Award-winning first novel, "Officer Down," delivers a tough, hard-bitten story with an ultimately redemptive ending.

With Scottish writer Caro Ramsay's debut novel, "Absolution," we get another burnt-out, alcoholic detective, this one obsessed with finding a serial killer and haunted by the deaths of his brother, his mother, and a beautiful woman whose murder he never solved.