Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
Here’s the second in a splendid new crime series set in 21st century Argentina, where it’s still the case that the rich and well-connected are never brought to trial for such minor crime as murder, rape or drug dealing.
Journalist Veronica Rosenthal (the series hero) befriends the two foreign girls (Italian and Norwegian) of the title, then makes the mistake of taking them to a party and leaving them to make their own way back to their hotel. Somewhere en route they are raped and murdered – and Veronica is convinced that their attackers were among the well-heeled guests at the party.
I’m giving little away here: the murders are revealed at the start in a short sequence of emails to Veronica’s editor. We then track back more slowly through the events leading up to the crime and, via some intercutting scenes with an escaped hit-man, we find that Veronica is in more danger than she knows, for the hit-man is employed to kill her – not that he needs extra motivation: she killed his confederates in the previous book and put him in jail. His first thought upon escaping is to pay her back.
The complexities of this story have hardly begun. The rape & murder seems to reflect similar crimes in past decades. And now the rich and well-connected want her off the case. So do the police. Her own father wants her off it. Each of her new boyfriends (she’s promiscuous) want her off it. But, like the hitman, Veronica Rosenthal is determined on revenge.
This is an adult novel – not in the soft-porn sense but in that it is pensive, digressive and illuminating. I did lose track of who was who at times, but I never stopped being fully engaged with the story.
Editor’s note: Translated by Miranda France
