The first moral of this story is: if you like mysteries, read The Last Child.

Additionally, the story “Amapola,” by Luis Alberto Urrea, published in Phoenix Noir, won the Edgar for Best Short Story. The City Noir series seems solid, Mike Beeman liked Boston Noir very much.

I missed one and hit one, I’m pretty happy with that first average. I’ll try to improve/expand in year two.

And there’s one other takeaway: David Cristofano’s The Girl She Used to Be didn’t win and hence the world did not end. Girl was one of the worst books I’ve read in years, and its loss is right up there with Avatar not winning an Oscar. Character is not dead.

You can relive the entire C4 Edgar series at this link. And you can see the full list of winners here.

In two posts today, I'll recap each novel, and handicap the two categories before the awards are presented tonight. This post will focus on the Best Novel category; click here for Best First Novel by an American Author).]

Best Novel is a much more competitive category than Best First Novel, as you might expect. All of these books have serious strong suits, and I wouldn’t be completely flabbergasted to see any of them win. The top three novels, especially, are well worth reading, and close enough to each other that their odds of winning are almost identical.

That said, a quick word on how I ordered my own rankings: suspense. Quality matters, but I gave my #1 to the most suspenseful book in the category (and in the whole of the Edgars).

As for this post itself, it will do a few different jobs (if you read the Best First Novel post already, skip right to the jump).

First of all, it’ll provide quick summaries and capsule reviews of all six novels nominated for Best Novel. Secondly, this post reflects my own rankings of these six novels. #1 is my favorite, #6 my least favorite. Thirdly, I’ll estimate the odds of each book actually being picked by the judges. So the odds don’t necessarily match up with my rankings (especially my top three).

Now then: get out there and gamble! (Unless I’m somehow liable for your gambling using these odds, in which case: get out there and non-monetarily enjoy the knowledge of which books I think have the best chances of winning!)

Hit the jump to see my pick for Best Novel. Click the links to read the full reviews of these books.

1. The Last Child, by John Hart

Odds of winning: 3-1

The Last Child was one of the first Edgar novels I read, and it quickly became the standard by which I measured the others. Quite simply, Child is the most suspenseful, most compelling novel of the twelve I read. It’s about a 13-year-old boy and his unceasing search for his sister, who disappeared a year before the novel begins. There are a few hiccups, and certain elements of the story are a little manipulative, but Child simply grips you and won’t let go. That’s exactly what I’m looking for in a mystery, and that’s why I would give it the Edgar.

2. A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn

Odds of winning: 3-1

A Beautiful Place to Die is one of the the top three books in this category, and Malla Nunn is without question the best prose stylist among all twelve Edgar nominees… when she wants to be. Beautiful lays down a phenomenal first half, but then flags down the stretch and becomes merely solid. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it wins, but it doesn’t offer the white-knuckle thrill ride of The Last Child. I’m ranking it second, but it’s well worth the read, and Malla Nunn is definitely worth watching.

3. The Odds, by Kathleen George

Odds of winning: 4-1

The Odds is something of an oddity: it’s much more enjoyable than it sounds like it should be. For one thing, it’s not a mystery, despite its subtitle. Like The Missing, below, The Odds features a multitude of perspectives, so there’s never a whodunit in play. Instead of suspense, The Odds offers a quartet of orphaned kids—honest, tough, street-smart, compassionate—trying to make it on their own without getting broken up by the foster care system. I normally don’t like that kind of formulaic feel-goodery, especially falsely advertised as a mystery, but this one hooked me. George keeps it unformulaic and non-cloying (no easy feat), and instead The Odds is the simple story of a hard life, and it’s impossible not to root for those kids. As a bonus, The Odds features the best female character in all of the Edgars. I don’t see it winning over the two novels above, but it’s certainly worth a read.

I draw the line here. I recommend reading those first three, and I recommend not reading any of the following.

4. The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux

Odds of winning: 9-1

The Missing is a strange hybrid novel, halfway between mystery and literary, but satisfying as neither. It follows an honorable man named Sam Simoneaux as he sets out to find a girl whose disappearance he feels responsible for. But Gautreaux tells the story from multiple perspectives, including one that reveals the identities of the kidnappers, so there’s no mystery there. Simoneaux isn’t deep enough or, frankly, interesting enough to sustain a novel with his thoughts or actions alone, so the whole thing felt unsatisfying to me.

Gautreaux’s a pretty good writer, though, and he writes great descriptions. If you’re looking for a meandering, lushly described novel about steamboats in 1920s Louisiana, this is it. For either a mystery or a deeply engaging literary novel, though, look somewhere else.

5. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston

Odds of winning: 11-1

Mystic Arts is an energetic novel, but it doesn’t have the underlying foundation to be a really good mystery. It’s about a young slacker who gets a job as a crime scene cleaner—and several of the novel’s best moments are gleefully gruesome descriptions of messy deaths. The mystery and tension, such as they are, are entirely deflated by a woefully lackluster ending. Basically, this novel feels juvenile: exuberant but undisciplined, full of talent but with no direction to take it. Much of the novel offers enough fun to outweigh the structural shortcomings, but that ending is so bad that Huston simply couldn’t recover from it.

6. Nemesis by Jo Nesbø

Odds of winning: 8-1

Nemesis is a police procedural, in that Nesbø documents every single, solitary, excruciating action that his detective takes. He takes what could be a pretty exciting 250-page mystery, and bloats it up to 500 pages by describing every excruciating investigational detail (click the link above and read the full review for examples). This seems to be a Scandinavian thing—at least, Stieg Larsson suffers from the same problem. In fact, I gave Nemesis a little odds boost because people seem to love these bloaty, blathering books. If you really like Larsson, think about giving this one a chance, but otherwise prepare to be bored by the awkwardly named Detective Harry Hole.

That does it for Best Novel. Get your bets in; post time is 8:00 PM tonight. If you haven’t already, check out my picks and rankings for Best First Novel, the other big Edgar category.

Author: Malla Nunn

Washington Square Press, 2009

Filed under: Mystery

In A Beautiful Place to Die, a Johannesburg detective, Emmanuel Cooper, travels into the “deep country” of South Africa to investigate a hoax in a small town called Jacob’s Rest. It turns out to be a real case, the murder of a white police captain, possibly by a black or “coloured” (meaning, roughly, mixed-race) worker.

Beautiful takes place in the early 1950s, when race relations in SA were strictly governed by the Immorality Act, which explicitly bans interracial sex, and implicitly bans most other kinds of interracial contact.

The themes of race, racism and morality not only serve as emotional undercurrents, they also actively influence the case and Emmanuel’s attempt to solve it. The investigation is further complicated by small-town politics, national politics, laws, secrets, vendettas, bigotry, and more. It’s a case that could cost Emmanuel his career or even his life, and a very solid premise for a novel.

Additionally, Malla Nunn is the best prose stylist among the Edgar nominees…. when she wants to be. The first half of this novel is enjoyable and engrossing, thanks in no small part to her style and the lush, brutal setting. The second half is solid, but bows more to plot and the mechanics of the case, and forgets the fractured soul of the country Emmanuel finds himself in.

Nunn’s at her best when she’s lyrical and emotional, but still tough, when Emmanuel is investigating the case but also staying aware of the complex world around him, and its people. Here are a few examples. The first is a moment when Emmanuel enlists the help of the town’s German ex-doctor, who brings his wife along:

The old Jew and the woman were as different as a gumboot and a ball gown. Zweigman could have been any old man serving behind any dusty counter in South Africa, but the woman belonged to a cool climate place with Persian carpets and a grand piano tucked into the corner.

The word “liebchen” tripped from the woman’s mouth in a repetitive loop that stopped only when Zweigman gently placed his fingers to her lips. They stood close together, surrounded by a sadness that forced Emmanuel onto his back foot.

Here’s the simple, terrific moment when the Security Branch—the vicious secret police—first arrives:

In the churchyard, the Security Branch goons were deep in conversation with Paul Pretorius. They’d be down at the police station this afternoon, pissing in all the corners to make sure everyone knew the investigation was theirs.

And here’s Emmanuel’s response to a joke about him joining the Security Branch:

“I’m not interested in redrawing the map of the world with a thumbscrew and a steel pipe.”

As great writers do, Nunn at her best doesn’t tell you what to think about what happens to her characters, and her best writing leaves you many paths to walk with it. She also—for what it’s worth—excels at scenes of graphic sex and violence. She’s neither shy about it nor enamored of it, and that’s a hard trick to pull off.

Unfortunately, those great qualities take something of a vacation in the second half. The novel changes into a more or less standard detective story, devoid of much of the complexity and nuance the first half promises. It’s not bad by any means, but it loses some of the depth of interaction and life.

Plotwise, Emmanuel doggedly digs deeper and deeper into the secret life of the dead captain, who was Afrikaner “volk,” meaning that he was essentially a white supremacist. Despite the staunch, unwavering race fear of his sons, the captain turns out to be a more complicated man, and something doesn’t quite add up in his family.

In addition to the murder case, there’s a molester on the loose (uninvestigated by the local cops because he only targets non-whites), and all the different parts and parties of the world.

Nunn weaves together a complex plot and sketches out a vivid setting, and in the end we’ve got a quite solid mystery. Beautiful is among the best of the Edgars, but it’s just not quite as compelling as The Last Child.

Similar reads: The only other traditional detective novels nominated for Edgars this year are Nemesis and In the Shadow of Gotham; I can’t recommend either of them. Instead, I’d recommend The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon, which you can read about in this post. For more WWII-era South Africa, there’s always The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay.

Edgar impact: Nunn is the best prose writer in the Edgars, but A Beautiful Place to Die doesn’t quite deliver suspense in the haunting, lasting way The Last Child does. I’d give the Best Novel Edgar to Child, but I wouldn’t be surprised if either book won it (or The Odds, for that matter). I would be surprised if none of those three won it.

Author: Kathleen George

Minotaur, 2009

Filed under: Literary

I was surprised by how much I liked The Odds. It’s not a mystery, for one thing, despite what its cover says. It also starts slowly, with a large cast of characters and perspectives connected in a languidly moving series of interactions. The plot never really thickens or twists, it just ambles along the track it initially lays out.

Mostly, that track centers around a quartet of orphaned kids—the Philips children—trying to live on their own, without being split up by the foster care system. There are complications, but most of the drama comes from these honest, unselfish children carving out a place for themselves and watching out for each other. It’s not the kind of thing I usually like, but Kathleen George never lets it get cloying or cliched, in the way that kind of thing usually gets.

Basically, we’ve got a bit of a magic trick: The Odds is a simple story that’s much more enjoyable than any of its individual elements would lead you to believe.

Other than the Philips children, the other main characters include a street kid who sells drugs, a man who runs a pizza joint cover for Pittsburgh’s drug kingpin, and a detective. There are also scenes from the perspectives of another half-dozen or so ancillary characters. Some of these could have been pruned back, but George does a pretty good job of handling the interweaving stories, and it rarely feels cumbersome.

I have a few quibbles with the characters. The pizza man and the Philips kids are so tough and honest and scrupulous that they verge on caricatures. But they’re also so humble and selfless that it’s impossible not to root for them. You can’t confuse them for real people, but they keep the story moving, simply because you want them to succeed.

And there’s a bonus: the best female character in any Edgar-nominated novel I’ve read so far. Too often in the Edgar books (this one and this one, especially), the main female characters are vapid, superficial cutouts. They primp and preen and worry about what men think of them, to the exclusion of any thoughts of substance.

On the other end of the spectrum is The Odds‘s Detective Colleen Greer. She’s unmistakeably feminine, and she has her share of romantic thoughts, but she also has grit, determination, and independence. She doesn’t collapse and let a man take over when the going gets tough; she doesn’t obsess about her hair when there are more important things happening. She has hunches and street smarts, and she uses them. She has conflicting emotions and motives, but she doesn’t let them paralyze her with indecision. She’s the best and most nuanced character in The Odds. More than one Edgar author could take a lesson.

The writing itself isn’t quite as good. Everybody’s dialogue sounds the same, whether it’s the nerdy whip-smart Philips girl or a junky seventh-grader shooting up in an abandoned house. It’s all clipped. Noirish. Gruff. Incomplete sentences. That kind of thing.

The prose, likewise, doesn’t stand out. George sometimes writes inscrutable lines like this one, when the detective gets fingerprint results back:

The prints came up all right. They came up like three limes on a slot machine.

At her best, George can drop a half-hard-boiled pseudo-aphoristic phrase like this one, from the perspective of a man with cancer:

How bizarre that you could walk around in your body for months, years, and not know the bad things going on inside it until the chaos reached certain proportions and the alarms went off. Then the body talked back, all right.

George doesn’t reach for poetry, though, and her restraint means that the language in this novel stands aside and lets the story through, which works to great effect.

As I mentioned, there’s no mystery here—I have a feeling that that subtitle was the publisher’s doing. There’s a murder case tying the characters together in different ways, but the variety of perspectives means we know exactly how everything happened almost as soon as it happens, and that’s never the point of the novel.

Most of the drama comes from the Philips kids simply trying to survive. I’m not going to say anything else about the plot so as not to spoil anything, but it works well for the story it sets out to tell. Suffice it to say that those kids and the pizza man won my sympathy quickly and completely, and I was willing to watch them do whatever they needed to.

Detective Greer has the least to do, mostly figuring out what the reader already knows. So it’s good she’s the most interesting character—that carries her sections when the plot drags.

In the end, The Odds is a heartwarming, heartbreaking story about some good people trying make it in the world. It’s a simple story, but greatly enjoyable.

Similar books: The Boxcar Children series, by Gertrude Chandler Warner (The Odds is not for children, though). I was also reminded, embarassingly enough, of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, which I listened to once on audiobook as a joke. It was a joke, I swear. Patterson’s book also features a quartet of orphan kids looking out for each other, but, obviously, it was much worse.

Edgar impact: The Odds is certainly in the top tier of Best Novel nominees. I don’t think it should win an Edgar simply because it’s not a mystery, but it’s definitely worth reading.

Author: Tim Gautreaux

Knopf, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thrillers

The Missing doesn’t quite know where to stand, genre-wise. On the one hand, there’s a bit of a mystery—a young girl is kidnapped in department store and the security guard on duty at the time, Sam Simoneaux, sets out to find her and get her back.

On the other hand, Gautreaux reveals by page 90 the culprits behind the kidnapping, and even the rednecks they paid to do the actual deed. That means the mystery is reduced to a yes/no question—will Sam find the girl or not?—and we still have 300 pages to get through.

I’m guessing, from those facts, that Gautreaux wants this to be a literary thriller, one of those “the true mystery is how it happens” books. It doesn’t work.

The story takes place in 1920s Louisiana and Mississippi, just after World War I. Gautreaux writes pretty good prose, among the best of the Edgar-nominated writers. He can turn a phrase, and the sound (as opposed to the content) of his dialogue is one of his strong suits.

Gautreaux also does great work describing the quality of life at this point in history. Most of the novel takes place on a rattletrap steamboat called the Ambassador, and you can almost feel her tacked-together deck boards creaking under your feet. For instance, this excellent description:

He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down—regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, … and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.

Unfortunately, that’s most of the novel: description. The steamboat has no part to play in the mystery, it’s just where Sam and the kidnapped child’s parents work. There are plenty of characters on the boat, and race relations to keep track of, jazz to enjoy. But none of it changes, and no drama ever develops.

Instead it just goes like this: everybody works hard on the boat. And then they’re tired. Passengers get drunk and start fights. Sam breaks them up. Then everybody’s tired. They play some music. Then everybody’s tired from working so hard. Since the boat never plays into the mystery at all—other than being a staging ground for Sam’s occasional investigative forays into the wilderness ashore—lifelike description can’t save us from severe monotony.

The same goes for the characters. Sam is more or less an automaton, blankly going through the motions of this case, not letting his emotions get in the way—ever. Sam would be passable as the hero of a real mystery, but when there’s no suspense and no case to really solve (even Sam knows everything by halfway through), he just doesn’t have enough personality to carry a novel.

Pacing is another problem, and Sam’s character starts taking wild swings as an excuse to stretch the story out for a few hundred more pages. Gautreaux also tries a late twist, which more or less falls flat, as it happens off-screen, and then we still have another hundred pages to wade through.

Too much of the time, we’re left with Sam tracking down people we already know. That sometimes reads (and always feels) like this:

“Can you tell me where Graysoner is?”

The chief steward looked at his face and winced. “Rough time last night. Graysoner the new man what replaced that old Jenkins boy with the broke leg?”

“No, it’s a town in Kentucky.”

“It’s a town.”

“That’s right.”

“Go see Mr. Check in the kitchen. He’s from Kentucky.”

Mr. Check, the head cook, was scraping down a stove top with a firebrick. “Naw, I ain’t from Kentucky. … The steward’s thinking of that Meldon feller who cooked for us two years gone. Go ask the captain. … ”

That goes on for about four times that length. Sam talks to a total of five people before he figures out where Graysoner is. It doesn’t provide any suspense, and Sam is too shallow a character to be compelling. We don’t get any insight into what he thinks about things, or what he’s learned about life (except the fact that he doesn’t believe in exacting revenge—he learned that when he was a baby and says it over and over and over).

As far as action, Gautreaux does OK. He sprinkles in scenes of brutality and handles well, and he often hits plot points in satisfying ways. The problem, again, is that those gut-wrenching scenes don’t change anything, and they don’t reveal anything new. They serve, by and large, merely to corroborate what we initially learned about the characters. If someone’s mean, he’ll be mean; if he hates shooting guns, he’ll hate it.

Ultimately there isn’t the perceptive interior life or the depth of character to drive a plotless literary novel, and there isn’t enough plot to drive a mystery. Sometimes these cross-genre projects work out; this time it didn’t.

Similar reads: Serena, by Ron Rash; Land of Marvels, by Barry Unsworth

Opposite read: The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford. It takes place over a weekend. Almost nothing happens, except a phenomenal depth of interior life. The sequel, Independence Day, won a Pulitzer.

Edgar impact: Somewhere between a literary novel and a mystery, The Missing is unsatisfying as either, though its prose is quite well crafted. Still, it’s tied for second with The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. Still in the lead is The Last Child.

Author: Jo Nesbø

Translated by: Don Bartlett

Harper, 2009 (English edition)

Filed under: Mystery

Nemesis is the second installment in Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s detective series about the unfortunately named Harry Hole. I would describe it as a procedural novel, meaning the chief characteristic of the narrative is Nesbø’s tendency to exhaustively catalog each and every action taken and word spoken by Inspector Hole.

Nemesis is 500 pages long; it could easily be 300 pages, and we wouldn’t miss a thing. Much like Stieg Larsson, Nesbø suffers from a chronic lack of brevity and the result is a mildly compelling mystery wrapped in an extra few hundred pages of tortuous prose. Some questionable translating decisions exacerbate the careless feel of the book, and it’s ultimately not worth the read.

Read this book as a last resort on a cross-country flight. In any other situation, skip it.

Harry Hole, as difficult as his name is to take seriously, is Oslo’s best detective and a severe alcoholic. When the novel opens, he’s investigating a bank robbery during which a teller was brutally murdered. Then Hole goes and gets drunk. He blacks out and when he wakes up his phone is missing and the woman he’d gone to see is dead.

The mystery unwinds from there. Mostly, it unwinds in the form of excruciatingly overlong accounts of the mundane details of investigation. Sometimes (rarely) we get a good line, like this little gem:

‘For something called a life. Nothing that would interest you.’

Harry imitated a smile to show that he understood it was meant to be a witticism.

To get one of those, though, you have to wade through page after page of spiritless stuff like this:

‘She looks wonderful,’ Sandemann said. ‘Peaceful. Restful. Dignified. Are you a member of the family?’

‘Not exactly.’ Harry showed his police card in the hope that sincerity was reserved for closest family. It wasn’t.

‘Tragic that such a young life should pass on in this way.’ Sandemann smiled, pressing his palms together. The funeral director’s fingers were unusually thin and crooked.

‘I would like to have a look at the clothes the deceased was wearing when she was found,’ Harry said. ‘At the office they said you had brought them here.’

Sandemann nodded, fetched a white plastic bag and explained that he had done this in case parents or siblings turned up, and he could dispose of them. Harry searched in vain for pockets in the black dress.

This whole passage could be summed up like this: “Harry got Anna’s dress from the funeral director.” Even Harry himself is bored by all this bland dialogue.

In another scene, Hole finds out that a bottle with the murderer’s fingerprint on it was thrown in a Dumpster outside the bank. The Dumpster’s just been picked up, so they have to chase it down. Instead of simply telling us whether they get the bottle or not, Nesbø makes Hole get the number from the guy at 7-11, call the trash company, drive around looking for the truck it’s on, argue with his driver about which route to take, flag the truck down, get in the Dumpster, root around in the trash… One sentence turns into 3 and a half pages of bloat.

Drama, even in a mystery, does not come from revealing exactly how the hero chases down a Dumpster. Drama comes from the intentional actions of people and a detective who reads into those actions and deduces the motivation and identity of the culprit. It does not matter how Hole chases down the Dumpster, only whether or not he gets the fingerprint, and what he makes of it. We don’t need to see him canvassing potential witnesses or taking affidavits; we need to see him interrogating suspects, deciding who to trust, and using the results of those boring police procedures to tie everything together.

Harry Hole himself is a somewhat interesting character, partially because Nesbø doesn’t shy away from a pretty brutal portrayal of Harry’s alcoholism. But Harry can’t save this novel from everything else that goes wrong. The plot is decent but not stellar, partially because Nesbø throws in so many nonsensical plot twists in the third act that the ending feels more like Nesbø desperately trying to surprise you and less like a feasible solution to the mystery. But it’s clear by that point that Nesbø doesn’t much care.

The English translator doesn’t care either. For instance, the name “Harry Hole” is presumably (and grossly) translated, as is his title, “Inspector.” However, most proper names and titles are not translated. That means we get “Politiavdelingssjef Ivarsson” instead of Chief Johnson, and the cast list reads like a Norwegian phone book. I had a very tough time figuring out whether characters were male or female (Ola? Vigdis? Stine? Trond?—m, f, f, m), let alone remembering what jobs they had or who they were. And there’s no American localization, which also creates some easily avoidable problems.

All of this makes it clear that Nemesis is a product, and not a work of art. Nesbø’s a little Norwegian book factory and this was the ’03 model. If you liked Stieg Larsson’s books, you might like this one. Otherwise it’s got about the same specialness and originality as a tin of canned herring.

Similar reads: Stieg Larsson’s novels, including The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Edgar impact: Simply too much bloat. It shouldn’t beat The Last Child.

Author: John Hart

Minotaur, 2009

Filed under: Mystery

The Last Child follows 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon on his unceasing quest to find out what happened to his twin sister, Alyssa, who disappeared one year before the novel begins. Since her disappearance, Johnny’s life has taken a sharp downturn: his father left and his mother has taken up with an evil new lover.

The narrative switches between Johnny and Detective Clyde Hunt, who was assigned to Alyssa’s case and never solved it. Hunt still feels responsible for Alyssa’s disappearance and the wretched state of Johnny’s life, and he does all he can to protect Johnny and his mother.

Despite underwhelming prose and a few hiccups along the way, Child is a ferociously compelling mystery, full of suspense and tension. Of the five Edgar books I’ve read so far, Child is by far the best.

Let me get the hiccups out of the way first. First, there are Hart’s prose pitfalls, most noticeably an amateurish way of describing things in incomplete sentences, like this description of a bike:

Cold metal and rust. Rubber rotted through.

And here’s Hart’s oft-repeated but nonsensical moral refrain:

Darkness is a cancer of the human heart.

These attempts to be poetic or eloquent usually fall flat, and the prose calls more attention to itself that perhaps it should. But the dialogue is pretty good, and by halfway through the novel Hart’s great knack for suspense covers his minor sentence-level weaknesses.

A little more detrimental are a couple of character choices Hart makes. The evil lover who takes up with Johnny’s mother is the richest man in town, Ken Holloway. Instead of wooing the poor, broke woman with money, Holloway needlessly gets her addicted to drugs and controls her by keeping her high and powerless. Hart gives us a rationale as to why, but it’s thin, and the real reason for Holloway’s behavior is that Hart wants Johnny’s life to be as bad as possible in the novel’s beginning. It’s a pretty cheap trick.

Another character, Levi Freemantle, is a mentally handicapped man who hears voices, specifically the voices of God and the devil. That’s OK at first, but as God’s voice leads Levi to things he couldn’t possibly know, Levi slips from religious to supernatural. That’s a detriment for a mystery since it provides the constant possibility of an easy way out, but luckily Hart doesn’t let God solve the case.

All that said, the positives of this novel far outweigh those few quibbles. While some minor characters are a little flat, the two protagonists, Johnny and Hunt, are believable and unique, and the way Hart balances the crime-solving between them makes both essential.

Even better, Hart has a great talent for plotting, which makes this novel consistently entertaining and compelling. He lays down solid plot twists at regular intervals and milks his material for all the suspense it’s worth.

Child does suffer from a relatively slow start, but once it gets going, there are conspiracies, child molesters, possibly crooked cops, personal vendettas, power plays, and some good old-fashioned who-can-you-trust. By halfway through, we’re running downhill, and there are very few pauses in the tension from then until the very end.

That ending is, by the way, quite good. It’s not a world-beater, but it’s not a gimmick, and its roots stretch back through the entire novel. Basically, it makes one whole, neat piece of a twisting narrative, and satisfies without overreaching. That’s something more than one of these Edgar-nominated authors could take a lesson from.

The Last Child is a solid, ungimmicky mystery (ungimmicky except the slight tinge of the supernatural from Levi Freemantle). It’s a plot-before-character kind of book, but it knocks that plot out of the park.

Similar books: Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn; The Glister, by John Burnside

Edgar impact: If suspense is the primary attribute of an Edgar Award-winner, as it should be, The Last Child is leading the Best Novel pack.