It’s a Mystery: “Where money speaks, conscience is silent”

Proving GroundBy Peter BlaunerMinotaur, 2017The ThirstBy Jo NesbøKnopf, 2017The Pulitzer Prizes, U.S. journalism’s highest honors, were awarded mid-April. Among the winners was C.J. Chivers for his New York Times magazine piece on a young veteran of the war in Afghanistan suffering from PTSD. Mr. Chivers dizzyingly detailed account revealed the lasting effects of combat and violence. The veteran, haunted by his war experiences, was imprisoned upon his return home after a fight with a stranger. The reporting by Mr. Chivers—himself a former Marine—prompted the state of Illinois to vacate the veteran’s jail sentence.This leads me to Nathanial Dresden, aka Natty Dread, the protagonist of Peter Blauner’s stunning novel Proving Ground. As the novel opens, Nathaniel is awaiting arraignment in a New York holding cell for severely beating a fireman. He is informed of this by two of his cellmates, big dudes wearing menacing expressions and navy-blue t-shirts with FDNY emblems:

…The older of the two comes over. A Brooklyn redwood in Levis and work boots with salt and pepper commas of hair and the confident stare of a battalion captain…“I think you fucked yourself,” the captain says.“Yeah? How’d I do that?”“You jumped one of our brothers.”“He need jumping?”“He’s in the ICU now.”“Because of what I did?”Unlikely this is a coincidence, being placed in a holding cell with people he’d had a conflictwith earlier. Protocol should have separated them.…”Here’s the thing.” The captain lowers his voice. “Our crew, we’re a family. …You hurt one of us, you hurt all of us.”“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Natty shrugs.But little pinpricks of concern are giving way to a massive bubble of panic forming. He has literally no memory of what happened after ten o’clock last night.

Natty, who was practicing law in Florida, returned to New York for the funeral of his father, David Dresden. A crusading civil rights attorney who has plagued the NYPD by providing crackerjack counsel for people the cops want behind bars, David was gunned down outside his Brooklyn home. Natty, a veteran of two Iraq tours, has been estranged from his father for years. He attended the funeral more in anger than sorrow. Natty suffers from severe PTSD. Anything can trigger nightmarish war memories. He constantly relives his killing of a little Iraqi boy who was literally blown out of his sneakers. A loud noise on a corner makes him flinch. A stray plastic bag on the street turns into a hallucinatory explosive in Sadr City. A drink after his father’s funeral in an ex-firefighter’s bar turns into a brawl.Natty is sprung from jail by his father’s best friend and law partner, Benjamin Grimaldi. Ever since Natty can remember, Ben, who had no sons of his own (just two snooty daughters) has been there for him:

Ben was the Man. The first call you’d make when you were in trouble, needed something explained that you were embarrassed to talk to your parents about…. While Dad was off at protest marches…it was Ben, a former Golden Gloves fighter, who taught him how to box.… After Natty made it through basic training at Fort Benning, it was Ben, who’d served in Vietnam, taking him out for a steak dinner at Peter Luger’s to celebrate.

Now it’s Ben who gets Natty into counseling for PTSD in lieu of incarceration. It is also Ben who takes up David Dresden’s $12 million suit against the FBI. The senior Dresden was suing the FBI on behalf of a Muslim-American mailman who was tortured and imprisoned for five years based on the false claims of a fellow Muslim worker. In a compelling show-and-tell scene with the mailman, Ben dragoons Natty into helping him on the suit. This leads to Natty’s confrontation with the FBI and a revelation from them about Ben. He has won a suspiciously large number of cases where hostile witnesses have failed to testify because they were killed.This statistic on Ben has not been lost on the two detectives working on the Dresden murder. Detective Lourdes Robles, known as “LRo,” and Detective Kevin “Sully” Sullivan are an unlikely and completely appealing duo. Lourdes is a young brash Latina cop who is trying to get back in the squad’s good graces after a PR fiasco instigated by her “fuckwit partner”. Sullivan is nearing retirement, a larger than life legend whose almost mystical reputation precedes him. Together they buck the FBI’s lack of cooperation about what they glean was their real relationship with David Dresden. More significantly, they find themselves on a collision course with Natty over Ben that puts them more in sync with the FBI than they care to be.Plus, there is an amazing late plot twist, a double whammy eye opener that turns everything you’ve been reading upside down. And finally, there is an affecting and deeply moving scene between Natty and the father of the boy he killed who has immigrated to New Jersey, that adds a whole new dimension to Natty. I’d call it his downward path to wisdom.Proving Ground is an intricate, character-driven mosaic of a novel. Nothing is as it seems. The dialogue and descriptions are savvy, cutting edge smartass humor laced with just the right amount of acid. No surprise, as Blauner has been an integral part of some of television’s top cop shows for a decade, including the superb Blue Bloods. This only makes Proving Ground, his seventh novel, an even more remarkable achievement.The Thirst is the eleventh Jo Nesbo novel to feature the magnetic, maverick Oslo detective Harry Hole. At the conclusion of the last one, 2013’s Police, he married his longtime love, Rakel. And while the case in Police was solved, another killer roamed free at the end: escaped convict Valentin Gjertsen. Heremains at large here, having undergone another round of facial surgery to make himself unrecognizable. Though he still has the grotesque tattoo on his chest of a screaming face. Alas, the only ones who see this are his victims.As The Thirst opens, there’s a whole new dimension to Harry Hole. To appreciate that, one must remember that Harry is a recovering alcoholic who is weighed down with inner demons. He puts those he loves in harm’s way, he breaks the law, he disobeys orders from his superiors, and his natural state is stress. In other words, he’s vastly flawed and quite human. He’s troubled and endearing. As Detective Inspector Katrine Bratt, a woman with her own heavy-duty psychological problems, puts it,

He may well have been the Crime Squad’s drunk, arrogant enfant terrible, someone who had directly or indirectly caused the deaths of other officers, and whose working methods were highly questionable. But he still made them sit up and pay attention. Because he still had the same dour, almost frightening charisma, and his achievements were beyond question. Off the top of her head, she could only think of one person he had failed to catch. Maybe Harry was right when he said that longevity bestowed respect, even upon a whorehouse madam if she kept going for long enough.

The new Harry is happy, a state he’s not used to. He is no longer working as a detective but is currently a sober lecturer at Oslo’s Police College, where Rakel’s son Oleg is enrolled. Harry himself describes this new feeling of happiness as being like walking on thin ice. He wakes every day hoping for more of the status quo, for the new day to be a repetition of the last, for the ice to hold: “If he could have, he would have been more than happy to copy and paste the three years that had passed since the wedding and relive those days over and over again.”Then a young woman is found murdered in a particularly grisly fashion. Her neck was bitten by what turns out to be a set of iron jaws. And the blood was sucked out of her. The one major clue is that she was a self-declared addict of the dating app Tinder. The Chief of Police Mikael Bellman knows Harry is the only one for the job and is not above blackmailing him with something in Oleg’s past to get him back. After all, we discovered he was a dirty cop in Police. So Harry is back in the game.Hard on the heels of the first victim, another woman is found murdered. She’s the same age as the first woman and also a Tinder fan. The scene of the crime is equally macabre, if not more so, as it appears the killer mixed her blood in a blender with lemon juice before he drank it. Most significantly, he left a “V” written in blood on the front door. Katrine and Harry are transfixed by it:

“V for vampirist,” Katrine said.…”I don’t know,” Harry said….”Mm. V for vampirist might not be a bad suggestion. It could fit with the fact that he’s putting a lot of effort into telling us precisely this.”“Precisely what?”“That he’s something special. The iron teeth, the blender, the letter.… He wants us to get closer.”…Harry was looking at the letter. It was no longer an echo of a scream. It was the scream itself. The scream of a demon.

Harry knows in his gut that this depraved monster is his nemesis. The one that got away. Only this time he’s determined to nail him. Jo Nesbo’s The Thirst is a brilliantly evoked, twisted journey through the heart of darkness. It’s a mesmerizing cat-and-mouse chase that will grip you till the very end. That finale was touted as pure Agatha Christie, but I think it’s more The Silence of the Lambs. You will be shocked, surprised, and very frightened!____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.