VOICES
by Arnaldur Indridason
translated by Bernard Scudder
Harvill Secker, £12.99; 313pp

A LOYAL CHARACTER DANCER
by Qiu Xiaolong
Sceptre, £17.99; 351pp

PEGASUS DESCENDING is the fifteenth of James Lee Burke’s David Robicheaux novels, and one of the best — and that is saying something. Burke is the most poetic and lyrical of today’s American crime writers; and also the most insistent that the past — whether a person’s, a society’s or a place’s — governs the present.

Robicheaux, a Vietnam War veteran and once a great drunkard, has much in his past to haunt him. A quarter century ago, as an alcoholic young cop, he chanced upon an armed robbery that ended with the death of his friend, Dallas Klein. He could have saved Klein, but was too drunk. Now Klein’s trouble-making daughter, Trish, is bent on revenge against her father’s killers.

In New Iberia, Louisiana, where Robicheaux works as a low-level cop, a happy young student has inexplicably killed herself; a black drug dealer is messing with the pampered sons of rich whites, and a vagrant is killed by a passing car. Robicheaux seeks the connections. The search provokes him — and others — into extreme violence. Once more, he has to confront the dark forces in his mind while tackling the malevolence of others.

In other hands, Pegasus Descending would be merely a gritty noir novel featuring a tough, tormented cop. But Burke turns it into an elegaic, almost mystical tale of human frailty, redemption, vengeance and loyalty.

In Voices, Inspector Erlendur spends the days before Christmas in one of Reykjavik’s leading hotels, investigating the murder of Gudlaugur, its doorman and occasional Santa Claus, who has been found stabbed in his tiny basement room in a sexually compromising position.

Gudlaugur had worked for the hotel for more than 20 years, yet no one knew him well. It emerges that he was famous as a child, until a single ghastly event ruined his career overnight. Why might that have led to his sleazy death decades later? Erlendur discovers that the hotel is not quite the respectable establishment that it pretends to be; the dead man’s relatives come forward only reluctantly, an eccentric Englishman has been in Reykjavik to meet him. Everyone who knew Gudlaugur has a secret. Morosely, intelligently, Erlendur unravels the mystery. With Voices, Indridason proves that his Golden Dagger victory for Silence of the Grave last year was no fluke.

Qiu Xiaolong is a Chinese author and academic, now living in the US and writing in English, although his books are set in modern China. Through his poetry-loving hero, Inspector Chen, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, Xiaolong provides a fascinating glimpse of a society in transition, confident yet uncertain.

In A Loyal Character Dancer, Chen tries to find a woman whose husband is a key witness in the US trial of a gang of people-smugglers; he will not give evidence unless his wife is able to leave China and join him. Chen and the attractive US marshal sent to help him find themselves up against gangsters and political conspiracies.

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