DE NUESTROS SOCIOS: ROBERTO AMPUERO

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• BOOKSHELF
• Updated December 14, 2012, 3:53 p.m. ET

WALL STREET JOURNAL: THE NERUDA CASE among the 10 best mysteries published in United States 2012 (Riverhead/Penguin):

The Case Books of 2012

Tom Nolan selects his favorite mysteries from the past year.

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The most audacious crime-fiction novel of 2012 is also a debut: Ariel S. Winter's "The Twenty-Year Death," a hat-trick of linked books written in a pastiche of genre-masters Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. The work's linking character, Shem Rosenkrantz, is first encountered in France in 1931, married to a beautiful woman with connections to a killer hunted by an Inspector Maigret-like detective. Ten years later, he and his wife are in Southern California—she now a fear-ridden movie star, he a philandering author, with their travails watched by a Philip Marlowe-style private eye. Rosenkrantz takes the narrator's role for the final section, set in 1951 Maryland, where the washed-up writer, in a Thompson-like mode, returns to his hometown in hopes of a life-saving legacy. Mr. Winters's superb mimicries avoid stylistic excess and cut to the dark heart of the matter.

 

Patrick Conlon/The Wall Street Journal

Tom Nolan's Favorites

The Neruda Case
By Roberto Ampuero (Riverhead)
Vengeance
By Benjamin Black (Henry Holt)
The Black Box
By Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
Gone Girl
By Gillian Flynn (Crown)
Angelmaker
By Nick Harkaway (Knopf)
The Thief
By Fuminori Nakamura (Soho)
Ministers of Fire
By Mark Harril Saunders (Ohio)
Guilt
By Ferdinand von Schirach (Knopf)
American Spy
By Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin's)
The Twenty-Year Death
By Ariel S. Winter (Titan)

 

Simenon figures into Roberto Ampuero's "The Neruda Case," set in Chile in 1973, when the poet Pablo Neruda is suffering autumnal ailments as Salvador Allende's government (in which Neruda serves as a diplomat) is besieged. Neruda hires a Cuban émigré to find a doctor he knew in Cuba decades before, telling his employee to study Inspector Maigret for detective lessons. But the young man discovers that "it was easier to be an excellent detective in a crime novel than a mediocre detective in implacable reality." There's nothing mediocre about this novel, though, by the Chilean-born Mr. Ampuero, whose lyrical prose (translated by Carolina de Robertis) often evokes Neruda's voice.

The Best of the Year in Books

 
 

Benjamin Black (the pen name of the Irish novelist John Banville) displays a melancholy poet's touch in "Vengeance," the fifth installment of a series, set in 1950s-era Dublin, involving a pathologist named Quirke and his colleague, Detective Inspector Hackett. The sleuthing here centers on a suicide at sea and a later death, but the absorbed and absorbing Quirke, "a great man for a drink," is as much concerned with the mystery of his own and others' existence as he is with solving the crime.
Things are done more by the book in "The Black Box," Michael Connelly's latest police-procedural featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch—not that Bosch doesn't bend the rules in pursuit of justice. In 2012, he is given the chance to reopen a case unsolved for 20 years: the killing of a female Danish photo-journalist during the 1992 L.A. riots. Bosch himself was at the scene that fatal, chaotic night and feels guilty about his failure to track down the killer. In "The Black Box" he is after justice for the victim and redemption for himself.
The defense attorney narrating the stories in "Guilt," by German author Ferdinand von Schirach, might wish to enlarge the category of "victims" to include "perpetrators." The stories are written in spare sentences (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) and packed with awful detail ("he'd heard the blows interspersed with the screams, a dull, wet sound like you hear at the butcher's"). Bleak, horrific, poignant, even (sometimes) comic—there is no predicting what turn a tale may take.
"The Thief," by the Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura, brings to mind Highsmith, Mishima and Dostoevsky. The unnamed narrator is a Tokyo pickpocket who approaches his craft in an almost abstract manner—except for the excitement he feels. Life becomes more menacing when he is drawn into the crew of an evil boss. As translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates, Mr. Nakamura's narrative is, in its minimalist way, tense and chilling.
Being in charge of one's fate is a driving concern in Gillian Flynn's tricky, twist-filled "Gone Girl," told by the alternating voices of Nick and Amy Dunne, a Missouri couple each with a convincing way of conveying alleged truth. Amy disappears the day of the Dunnes' fifth wedding anniversary, leaving evidence of her demise at the hands of Nick. As he struggles to prove his innocence, he gains painful insights about himself and his vanished spouse. The dueling protagonists in "Gone Girl" raise the unreliable-narrator bar Everest-high.
There is uncertainty as well in Olen Steinhauer's brain-teasing "An American Spy," which ends (for now) a globe-spanning saga begun in the author's previous two best sellers. Retired CIA man Alan Drummond, agonizing over the assassination by Chinese counterparts of several U.S. agents, plans a rogue retaliatory mission. It's not long before trouble comes calling in the form of a shrewd Chinese spymaster. The action spins from Manhattan to London to China, and the mysteries multiply—most of them cleverly solved by book's end.
In Mark Harril Saunders's gripping first novel, "Ministers of Fire," tensions and ambiguities induce moral guilt and mortal dread. Ex-CIA station chief Lucius Burling, trying to live down a disastrous Afghanistan venture, is forced once more to become a man of action when word leaks of a dissident Chinese scientist eager to make friends with the West. Is the approach genuine or a fake? Mr. Saunders makes his large cast of international characters come to life with quick strokes. "Ministers of Fire" deserves a place next to the works of such masters as Charles McCarry and Robert Stone.
Global peril is put to a more rococo purpose in Nick Harkaway's "Angelmaker," a head-spinning cliffhanger that reads a bit like a "Harry Potter" book for grown-ups. Joe Spork, an antique-clock repairman in modern London, is the son of a gangster and the grandson of legendary inventors of world-class, world-shaping gizmos. Events conspire to make Joe aware of a threat to the planet's existence, as well as a slim chance for survival. The latter depends on Spork leading a coalition of secretive aesthetes, covert shape-shifters, underground criminals and humanist robot-bees in battle. It would be a shame if no movie were made from this glorious piece of kaleidoscope-fiction.