13 Is a Dangerous Number in Vatican Whodunit

It grievously violates my sense of karma that William Montalbano died in March before he could savor the accolades that his splendid novel, “Basilica” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 304 pages, $23.95), so richly deserves. Montalbano, who co-wrote three mysteries with Carl Hiaasen while they were working at the Miami Herald, and who later served as the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in San Salvador, Buenos Aires, Rome and London, has concocted a Vatican whodunit that shows off his insider’s knowledge to terrific advantage.

Revolving around the friendship and dark shared history between Paul, an ex-cop turned Roman Catholic brother, and Rico, the recently elected, young and vigorous Pope Pius XIII--informally known as Tredi from the Italian word for 13--the page-turner is original and heartfelt.

Tredi, the first bishop of Rome from Latin America, has inherited a “divided and fractious church,” and while Brother Paul’s ostensible role in the Vatican is to “straighten out problems that never officially occur,” mindful of their mutual enemies, he’s there to watch his friend’s back. So when a priest close to the pope is pushed from the gallery beneath the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, and another’s neck is broken, Brother Paul’s concern for the holy father’s safety results in behavior that would keep a confessor busy for months.

The flashbacks, set in Miami and Colombia, are chilling, but what captivated me were the details--from the mechanics of dispensing communion to thousands at a papal Mass to the attitudes of the “Vaticanisti,” the reporters on the religious beat. I guessed the killer early on, but it didn’t stop my racing pulse. How sad that Brother Paul’s first outing will be his last.

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At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum is Lindsay Maracotta’s deliciously witty “Playing Dead” (Morrow, 264 pages, $24), her third Hollywood mystery. Heroine Lucy Freers, an award-winning animator, is a denizen of over-the-top Tinseltown by virtue of being Mrs. Big-Time Producer--husband Kit’s last movie was a “$200-million-grossing blockbuster.” Their daughter, Chloe, attends the nauseatingly tony Windemere Academy, where donations to the school’s fund-raising auction include a full set of Porthault linens and “a restored Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce that once belonged to Cary Grant!”

The book takes off like a Gulfstream V-jet when the four-months-pregnant Lucy, asked by police to identify her husband’s body at the morgue, spends 15 minutes obsessing over her vintage wardrobe to determine which retro outfit would be most suitable. The driver of her husband’s green BMW has been shot near Topanga Canyon. The good news? Kit is alive and smarmy as ever. (If she doesn’t dump this creep by the next book, I’ll be amazed.) The bad news: The corpse is Lucy’s first lover, Brandon McKenna, a documentary filmmaker who was living at the Freers’ house and working as Chloe’s nanny. Brandon has no driver’s license and a fake Social Security number; still, the police swiftly close the case. That is, until Lucy finds a videotape shot by Brandon that shows a child killing an adult.

“We don’t even know when this was taken,” argues Detective Terry Shoe, Lucy’s foil on the LAPD. In her best Sherlock-shops-Montana fashion, Lucy deduces that the crime must have taken place between two and four years ago because the victim was wearing 4-year-old Manolo Blahnik platform pumps, “and I doubt she’d have worn a style for more than a couple years.”

Before you can say aromatherapy facial, we learn that the victim was a casting director, the murder took place at an open audition for a kids’ musical, and our intrepid sleuth is questioning the precocious child stars and cutthroat stage mothers at her daughter’s school. The plot is clever and believable, at least to anyone living in L.A. But the pleasure of the book is laugh-out-loud zingers like, “If there should ever be a telethon for the Prevention of Children in Show Business . . .”

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The opening chapters of “An Accidental Murder” (Scribner, 288 pages, $22), Robert Rosenberg’s fourth Avram Cohen mystery, suck you in like one of those super vacuums advertised on late-night infomercials. Cohen, a Dachau survivor and the former Jerusalem chief of criminal investigations, writes his memoirs more as an experiment to learn how his new computer works than from a desire to write a book. He gives it to a journalist friend, Benny Lassman, who translates it into English and shows it to a U.S. literary agent.

Cohen is pleased and flattered when a media giant offers $1 million for the North American rights. It isn’t until after his publisher’s publicity panzers start rolling that Cohen “finally began to realize that he was in over his head.” Independently wealthy, he cancels his U.S. tour and only reluctantly agrees to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Given that Cohen’s family, who perished during the Holocaust, were publishers, given that he was born in Berlin, given his history of playing vigilante after the war, it isn’t unexpected that someone tries to kill him during the fair. It is a shock that he hops the first plane back to Israel, where soon afterward, Nissim Levy, his longtime protege, is murdered. Though retired, Cohen seeks his killer, and while his clandestine investigation into the new Russian underworld is suspenseful and exquisitely executed, it seems like the author took a sharp detour from the more passionate beginning. The denouement makes little sense, and yet Cohen was such a cerebral and complicated personality, I enjoyed his company.

The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman on audio books.

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For More Reviews, See Sunday Book Review: This week, “Let’s Go, France”: Sunil Khilnani on the idea of France, Eugen Weber on the French Enlightenment and Flora Lewis on the European century.