The Asylum /

It's been six years since Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins drove off a cliff in "Blonde Faith." But time is a flexible concept in the mysteries Walter Mosley writes about a black private eye who works irregular cases in his own neighborhood of Watts and throughout Los Angeles. So it's still 1967 when LITTLE GREEN (Doubleday, $25.95) Opens, and only two months since Easy's accident. Death being just another wobbly notion in this series, Mosley's clearly immortal sleuth emerges from his near-fatal coma and is soon off on a new case. At the urging of his best friend, the violence-prone Raymond (Mouse) Alexander, Easy agrees to search for Evander Noon, known as Little Green, a young black man who wandered up to the Sunset Strip "to see what all the hippies looked like" and went off with a white girl named Ruby. Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on, and the hippie counter-culture of the late '60s perfectly feeds his style. His descriptions of the crash pad where Ruby took Evander during an acid trip are as vivid as any true-life memoir. The bloody laundry bag of cash the boy has somehow acquired proves a smart way to take the narrative into criminal territory, introducing unsavory characters who can shoulder the plot's antisocial behavioral burdens, like shooting people. Easy and Mouse originally burst into this series with guns blazing; but while they still talk the talk, they've mellowed since the old days, and Easy has completed his transformation from tough guy to knight errant. While the relative absence of violence doesn't diminish the novel, the surprisingly pallid language does. A lot of social barriers went down after the Watts riots, and things have changed in Easy's life. ("I was just a witness to the new world.") But the younger generation of liberated blacks, whites and have-it-your-way hippies contribute nothing to the local lingo. Better examples of Mosley's dynamic verbal style are still found in the exchanges between Easy and familiars like Mouse ("That woman hates the water I drink and the sun that shine on my back") and Jackson Blue (a smart man who is "forever thinking, and a thinking man is always in trouble") as well as Mama Jo ("There was no arguing metaphysics with her"), a witch who keeps a raven, a near-feral cat and a couple of armadillos in the cottage where she brews Easy a potent batch of "Gator's Blood" to get him in fighting shape. When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you're in the hands of a real writer. Every character in Richard Lange's ANGEL BABY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) feels like flesh and bone, even the ones who show up just to be killed. The story hangs on the entwined fortunes of Rolando, a Tijuana crime boss respectfully known as el Príncipe; his drug-addled wife, Luz; and Kevin Malone, an American drifter who drives illegals across the Mexican border. The plot explodes after Luz kicks her habit, cleans out her husband's safe, shoots her bodyguards and heads for the border "like a woman on fire." Even for a skilled smuggler like Malone, this is a treacherous journey because el Príncipe has put a ruthless killer, Jerónimo Cruz (street name: el Apache), on their trail. As vividly as the others are drawn, I'd throw them all under the bus for Jerónimo, the morally conflicted killer who becomes the beating heart of the story. "I woke, as it seemed, from a nightmare." Surely that gasp of fear and its sober reflection - "or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me?" - has escaped the lips of many a heroine in an 18th-century novel, something thrilling by Mrs. Radcliffe, perhaps. Actually, the line comes from THE ASYLUM (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), John Harwood's clever simulation of a sensation novel. The woman who awakens from a long sleep to find herself in a mental asylum in Cornwall knows herself to be Georgina Ferrars, an unmarried woman who lives with her uncle, a bookseller in the Bloomsbury section of London. But the head of the asylum swears she presented herself as Lucy Ashton (after the tragic heroine of Sir Walter Scott's feverish novel, "The Bride of Lammermoor"), and the uncle in London insists that his niece, Georgina, is at that moment under his roof. Working with a plot drawn from Wilkie Collins's "Woman in White," Harwood puts together a deliciously spooky pastiche of the high and low Gothic traditions and the tender heroines who live and die by them. THE BLACK COUNTRY (Putnam, $26.95) isn't as lurid as "The Yard," Alex Grecian's previous novel about Scotland Yard's original Murder Squad. But the overstuffed plot is still ripe with gory details, like the eyeball a little girl finds in a bird's nest and the leeches a doctor uses to treat those suffering from a mysterious plague. A missing family brings Inspector Walter Day to Blackhampton, a bleak coal town in the English Midlands that's steadily sinking into the tunnels and mine shafts beneath it. Grecian may not know how to hold a meandering plot together, but he has a flair for descriptive drama, so there are strong scenes of giant trees being wrenched from the ground, homes disappearing below the earth and superstitious villagers hiding from the monster that waits in the mines to snatch the unwary. "Our customs are important to us," says an innkeeper who seems to be an authority on Blackhampton's bizarre beliefs. Sometimes they're "what binds people together." Or what makes them craaaazy. Walter Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on - this time the late '60s.

Author of The Seance (2009) and The Ghost Writer (2004), Harwood, master of creeping Victorian horror, does it again in his latest tale of pervasive evil and madness. Tregannon House in the Cornwall countryside was not always an asylum, but, having been in the hands of weak-minded, ailing owners over generations, it now houses insane and depressed mental patients under the care and control of Dr. Maynard Straker. Unfortunately, Miss Georgina Ferrars is neither mad nor voluntarily committed. She awakens in a locked cell lacking memory of how she arrived and not knowing where she is, though she is certain of her identity. But the staff is convinced she's Lucy Ashton and insist that she stay until she recovers her correct memory. The reader begins to question Georgina/Lucy's narrative reliability as the story progresses: Is she lying or is the kindly doctor serving some evil purpose? Twisted in every sense of the word and wonderfully atmospheric, this dark psychological tale shocks by degree until truth of a sort is revealed, in a style similar to that of Joanne Harris' Sleep, Pale Sister and D. J. Taylor's Kept.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2010 Booklist

Rosalyn Landor proves a fine choice to narrate this Gothic tale of mystery, mistaken identity, and madness. Georgina Ferrars awakens to find herself in a private asylum called Tregannon House. With no memory of the past several days, Georgina learns that she checked herself into the facility under the name Lucy Ashton. What follows is a suspenseful story of dark intrigue, as Georgina struggles to convince her captors of her true identity, even as mounting evidence begins to shake her belief in her own sanity. Landor's clear, accented reading pulls the listener into the sinister halls of Tregannon, and her first-person narration perfectly conveys the heroine's sense of confusion and growing desperation. With her crisp, straightforward delivery, Landor keeps the listener enthralled as one clue after another is revealed, leading to a climax that is as satisfying as it is surprising. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Georgina Ferrars discovers that she's locked in a Victorian asylum. She's lost some of her memory, and what she has left does not seem to match the reality outside the asylum. She must learn who she truly is, and find out who-or what-is responsible for her current situation. Harwood's (The Seance) writing seems designed to emulate books of the era, which is both a strength and a weakness. While the vocabulary and tone make the story feel more authentic, the writing seems to replicate different authors' styles. This makes it feel as though a completely different story is taking place at various points, which is especially off-putting at the climax. The Victorian prose also makes topics more freely discussed in the modern era, such as the lead character's lesbianism, feminism, and atheism, stand out. Rosalyn Landor's excellent pronunciation and diction can work against her, as the reading tends to become staccato and hard on the ear over time. In spite of these drawbacks, the well-crafted mystery keeps drawing in the listener. Verdict For readers who like Shirley Jackson-style slow-burn horror and historical fiction lovers who can deal with the heroine's modern sensibilities. ["Harwood focuses on creating a suitably chilling atmosphere and an appealing, if helpless, heroine, but the cardboard villains are obvious and uninspired. The middle section of the novel, in epistolary style, is far more compelling than the straightforward narrative," read the review of the Houghton Harcourt hc, LJ 4/15/13.]-Tristan M. Boyd, Westbank Community Lib., Austin, TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Creepy doings--certificates of insanity, switched identities, morbid personalities--in and around an asylum in 19th-century England. While it's not exactly clear why the Victorian period is so amenable to such sinister and disturbing phenomena, Harwood certainly makes the atmosphere work here. In 1882, a young woman wakes up at Tregannon House, a former mansion in Cornwall, now turned into an insane asylum run by Dr. Straker and his gruesomely unwholesome assistant, Frederic Mordaunt. Although the day before she had introduced herself as Lucy Ashton, later that night she is found unconscious, and when she emerges from a nightmare the following morning, she's convinced her name is Georgina Ferrars and that she lives with her uncle in London. When Dr. Straker goes to London to sort out the confusion with Ferrars' (or is it Ashton's?) identity, he comes back to Tregannon House with the disturbing report that she must be an imposter, for he met the "real" Georgina Ferrars at her uncle's. Disturbingly, the more the Georgina in the asylum tries to assert her identity, the more the authority figures are persuaded she's delusional, so she's committed to the involuntary wing of the asylum, where she's convinced the only way for her to reclaim her identity is to escape. Also upsetting is that she begins to have flashbacks to childhood memories in which she had an imaginary friend/alter ego named Rosina. We're then taken back to a series of letters from Rosina Wentworth to Emily Ferrars about 20 years previously--and eventually to a journal written by Georgina Ferrars. Rosina breathlessly reports to her cousin all the latest gossip, dwelling especially on her own romantic entanglements with Felix Mordaunt, owner of a mansion in Cornwall. Once again, identities shift. While the Gothicism works well, at times Harwood's convolutions become as mystifying to the reader as to the characters he depicts.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.