The fifth element /

WHEN SHE'S writing about her beloved Venice, Donna Leon can do no wrong. And earthly REMAINS (Atlantic Monthly, $25), her new mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best. It's also one of her saddest, dealing as it does with the seemingly unstoppable polluting of the great lagoon. "We've poisoned it all, killed it all," mourns Davide Casati, the aged caretaker of the house on the island of Sant'Erasmo where Brunetti is taking a medical leave for job-induced stress. Casati is a wonderful character. (This would seem to make him doomed to die, but you never know.) An authentic boatman who built his own puparin, a graceful, gondola-like rowing boat that makes Brunetti swoon, Casati loves every watery inch of his domain. He's familiar with each nook and canal, and he even raises bees. It's the bees that give the book both its plot and its heart. "Man's turned against them," the boatman says, referring to the human and industrial waste that's poisoning their habitat. The death of the bees reverberates through the story, a warning to all. An ardent classicist who anticipates long stretches of boredom on his enforced vacation, Brunetti has packed plenty of reading matter: Pliny, Herodotus, Euripides and that avid gossip, Suetonius. Instead, he puts himself in Casati's hands. He rows with him, goes swimming with him, and soaks up his knowledge of the vast lagoon and its floating spits of land. He learns about "bees and fish and birds, and how to build a boat, and how to navigate by the stars." But when murder enters the story, as it must, Brunetti remembers that he's a cop and opens an investigation. "The islands are small places," he declares, "and there are no secrets." Before tragedy strikes, this conscientious cop is the happiest we've ever seen him in this socially aware and intensely felt series. But when he calls his wife and tries to describe his experiences, "Brunetti knew that, no matter how much he babbled, he was incapable of conveying the magic of the scene." Leon dares to try, once again earning the gratitude of her devoted readers. IF LANDSCAPES COULD kill, the English Fenland would surely be high on the suspect list. Fran Hall never wanted to move to the "flat, watery, abandoned" place that Christobel Kent describes so severely in her domestic thriller THE LOVING HUSBAND (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27). But Fran's husband, Nathan, who grew up in this forbidding terrain, made the decision for her; and before she knew it, she had given up her job in London and was hanging blackout curtains to screen her view of its sinister scenery. Imagine her horror, then, when she finds Nathan dead in a ditch, stabbed with one of their kitchen knives. Kent is a champion plotter, using well-placed flashbacks to find interesting characters who might reveal the real Nathan to a wife who hadn't known her enigmatic mate very well. (If he wasn't spending his cherished one or two nights a week at the pub, where was he going?) But when an old friend of Nathan's does turn up, he accuses Fran of the murder. The novel's slow-building resolution comes silently, engulfing you like quicksand. "THIS IS A dangerous country," a character in Jorgen Brekke's chilly thriller the fifth element (Minotaur, $26.99) says of Norway. "Not everyone can stand as much silence as they have here." Factor in the incessant snowstorms and the vast arctic forests and it's a wonder that Odd Singsaker, a police inspector in the cathedral city of Trondheim, doesn't have more homicides (and suicides) to contend with. Singsaker is actually more concerned about his alcoholic wife, Felicia, who went on a bender, failed to catch her flight home from Oslo and is now missing. The search for Felicia is soon buried under additional plot layers. A book collector is murdered and his young son kidnapped. A couple of students steal a dope dealer's stash. After choking a marijuana grower by forcing him to eat an entire batch of cannabis brownies, a philosophical killer ponders the existence of evil. In Steven T. Murray's translation, it's all very entertaining, but the mash-up of these plots with Felicia's disappearance proves to be a stretch too far. BERNIE GUNTHER IS living on the Riviera, working as a hotel concierge when Prussian blue (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27) opens in 1956. Philip Kerr's unorthodox German hero, who survived World War II as a Berlin hotel detective, revisits his past in flashbacks to 1939, when he was a cop on the Murder Commission, and not a very popular one at that. In 1956, with his hotel closed for the winter, Bernie is strongarmed by Gen. Erich Mielke, the deputy head of the East German Stasi, into finding and eliminating a female agent who's now too dangerous to remain alive. But in an unlucky turnabout, Bernie the hunter becomes Bernie the prey as this chase merges in his mind with one from before the war, in which he was fed amphetamines while tracking a murderer who fouled the mountain retreat where Hitler was soon to celebrate his birthday. Even on a dope binge, Bernie is still one of the most appealing detectives in the field. ? MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

In the third Odd Singsaker novel (after Dreamless, 2015), Brekke weaves a seemingly disparate set of subplots into a tale of deadly opportunism. Trondheim DI Singsaker's wife, Felicia Stone, becomes prey when she witnesses a killer's escape from a crime scene. As Felicia dodges the killer through a frozen Norwegian forest, Odd tries to convince his colleagues that she's in danger. Hoping to enlist his friend Jensen to help search for Felicia, Odd tags along on Jensen's investigations into a law student's murder and the robbery of an elderly landlord. While Jensen's cases intersect and draw them toward a fishing cabin in Hitra, Felicia is captured by the killer and also brought to Hitra. Weeks later, Odd faces an internal-affairs investigation into three killings in Hitra, and the stories converge in his gripping recollection. The plot's leapfrogging flashbacks are challenging to follow, but Felicia's fight for survival, the suspense building to the final catastrophe, and the starkly rendered Scandinavian atmosphere offer strong appeal for Nordic-crime fans.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist

Set in northern Norway around Trondheim, Brekke's stellar third installment in his Odd Singsaker homicide detective series (after 2015's Dreamless) is divided into four sections. Each part centers on one of the lead characters, and each is named for one of the Aristotelian elements-phlegm, black bile, blood, and yellow bile-once thought to ensure good health when in balance in the body. This narrative device is initially perplexing, but it all makes perfect sense in the end. Police inspector Singsaker, who's on medical leave after being wounded in a previous case, is suffering from the postsurgical effects of a brain tumor that will eventually recur and kill him. His American wife, Felicia, vanished weeks earlier, and readers must assemble the puzzle of her fate piece by often gruesome piece, up to a shockingly ironic close. Violence seems to be rapidly getting worse in today's relatively peaceful Norway, Singsaker concludes. For him, the horrors of this case-which involves drugs, extortion, and spousal abuse-outdo even the murderous exploits of the ancient Viking period. Agent: Nicole K. James, Chalberg & Sussman. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

What happened to Felicia Stone, and did her husband, Norwegian cop Odd Singsaker, have something to do with it? That's the question at the heart of Brekke's third book featuring Singsaker (after Dreamless), which opens with the Trondheim detective waking up on an island off the coast of Norway with no memory of how he got there, why he has a shotgun, and why there's a corpse next to him. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.