Tracking both hunter and prey in compelling mystery

July 27, 2010|Nathaniel Bellows, Globe Correspondent

‘The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge’’ is the fourth novel from British writer and academic Patricia Duncker. It begins with a group of hunters finding fresh human corpses — adults and children fully clothed, poisoned, and arranged in a circular formation in a snowy forest. Commissaire Andre Schweigen is brought in, and he in turn summons the “Judge,’’ investigator Dominique Carpentier, a “sect hunter,’’ famous for applying her cold, exacting intelligence (and petite, powerful allure) to expose and dismantle the cults and other offbeat religious factions of the world.

The Judge immediately connects the group suicide to a similar incident that took place years before in Switzerland, a case botched by the authorities and left unsolved. She knows that both cases, however, are characteristic of a mysterious European sect called the Faith, a group that, despite counting high-profile doctors, scientists, and artists among its members, is elusive to the point of invisibility. The organization turns for direction to a large, elaborate, leather-bound book known as “The Guide.’’ The volume, highly adorned and written in a mysterious code, is found among the belongings of one of the recent victims, and the Judge deduces that it is the key to cracking open the secrets of the Faith.

The Judge sifts through, and scrutinizes every possible clue and scenario related to the Faith with the help of her wisecracking, punk-rock assistant, Gaëlle, and the erratic contributions of the brash Schweigen, whose infatuation with both the case and the Judge grows more powerful the closer they come to an answer. Eventually, through dogged research and tireless tracking, the Judge finds a bookbinder in Lübeck, Germany, whose father had restored and rebound “The Guide’’ many years before.

The receipt for the service reveals that the customer was Friedrich Grosz, a famous and highly regarded contemporary composer, whom Carpentier already had on her radar. The first time she sees him, at the funeral of one of the dead, she is uncharacteristically taken by him: “The effect [of his words] on [her] was electric. She shifted against the wood and lifted her head like a cheetah that has just seen the wildebeest, ambling toward the river.’’