Winter Study (hardcover, $24.95), by Nevada Barr

Reading this book on a frosty spring day in Portland is like eating ice cream in a freezer. Everything seems just a little bit colder.

The latest release in the Anna Pigeon series takes us back to Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, site of Barr’s A Superior Death. Actually, Barr’s successful gimmick is she tries to place Park Ranger/Investigator Pigeon in a new national park in every book. This time, however, the park is not leafy and inviting; it is winter and a small group of people have amassed for varying reasons to study the wolves that live on the island. (A real-life long-term study of the moose and wolf populations on the island provides the background for the novel.)

So, how cold is it? Apparently it is so cold that even a wolf, kept inactive in a trap for a period of time, could freeze to death. This is one of the many interesting facts with which Barr laces her story. The author’s description of Isle Royale and its environment stripped of summer tourists is wonderful. There are also vivid descriptions of hypothermia, what blood looks like frozen, frostbite, and the perils of the cold in general.

In our terror-centric world, even this remote park is a potential gateway for terrorists, so say the administration-that-be, and a Homeland Security duo is sent to accompany the researchers and park ranger Anna for six weeks of study. In positively no time one of the group is dead, apparently savaged by wolves who, contrary to popular fear, do not attack humans. Huge paw marks appear in the snow. In the best Agatha Christie tradition, the weather turns nasty and the islanders are cut off from the rest of the world and left to solve their own problems.

As far as mystery stories go, this is one heck of a good nature story. The mystery part of it suffered from back-and-forth-itis. There is a lot of tromping around in the snow, and I cringed whenever Anna had to swaddle herself in winter gear, which was never enough to keep her (or me ) warm. In a bow to a horror-movie convention, the comeuppance at the end goes on and on -- but it is a spectacular ending. And a warning for you tender readers: there is also a medium “ick” factor when Barr describes the death and a prior crime committed by the criminal.

But frankly, the mystery is not always why I read Nevada Barr. Her nature writing is “superior” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), and I love Anna Pigeon’s mixture of humor, practicality, orneriness, and unpredictability. The girl’s got dignified sass!

Even if it’s 78 degrees outside your window, make yourself a hot mug of Ovaltine and pull on your mukluks to read Winter Study.

Lush Life (trade, $15), by Richard Price

If the calendar year were to end today and I had to choose my top pick of the year for the store’s “best of” list, this is the book I would pick.

I began reading Lush Life, Richard Price’s latest gritty, city-wise novel, because of other reviews, almost all of which are laudatory, and because Price was an occasional contributing writer of the magnificent HBO series, “The Wire,” the demise of which has left me bereft. The New York Times, in particular, spent an inordinate amount of ink on this book. Let’s look at why the critics have been gushing.

Price is the author of The Wanderers, Clockers and Freedomland, all of which have been much praised as books and movies. If you haven’t read any of those books, here are two longish quotes to give you a taste of his style. Perhaps you’ll see why Price should be read slowly and with savor, although you will want to rush to the end higgledy-piggeldy to find out what happens.

As a rule he is soft-spoken, leaning in to the driver’s window to conversate, to explain, his expression baggy with patience, going eye to eye as if to make sure what he’s explicating here is being digested, seemingly deaf to the obligatory sputtering, the misdemeanors of verbal abuse, but … if the driver says that one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off, he steps back, reaches for the door handle, and the world as they knew it, is no more.

And later:

…leaving Matty in the middle of the room with a cardboard box of 61s and 5s and no backup except, maybe out of pity, Yolonda; everyone else tacitly avoiding him on this one like a landlocked Ahab, like an ass-pain Ancient Mariner, like he had halitosis of the brain.

[I just want to point out that I just used the word “savor” for the second time since starting these reviews for Murder By the Book. I just want it out there in case anyone is keeping track. Not that I’m equating myself with her, but the mysterious Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times’s chief book reviewer, has been castigated for using the word “limn” too frequently, and I just want to be ahead of whoever out there is keeping count of such things. By the way, I had to look “limn” up.]

Lush Life is Price’s song of life in the city that never sleeps. In fact, sleeplessness begins the tale. Early one morning Ike is shot dead. Eric, one of his two companions, tells Matty and Yolonda, the detectives assigned to the case, that two young men tried to rob them and one of them shot Ike. Is he telling the truth? Further witnesses come forward to say they only saw three white men and not the two alleged dark-skinned robbers. Steven, the third man, is so intoxicated he has to be hospitalized, so it’s left to Eric and the other witnesses to repeat and repeat their stories to the point of fatigue, the detectives listening while their own fugue deepens. In the process of investigating the shooting, Ike’s father, Billy, is introduced. We watch while he struggles with an overload of emotion and guilt, estranging himself from the rest of his family. Other peripheral but fully defined characters help us understand Eric, Matty, and Billy.

Complicating the story are opportunities the detectives miss to solve the case and tactics they use which backfire. Also, little side stories highlighting New York City and its eccentricities pop up to flesh out the sad/mad world of Lush Life. All this adds to the realism and tension of the story. Price writes with such authenticity about a city he both loves and censures.

People don’t really get what’s coming to them in the end so much as wander into their destiny. There’s a certain untidiness to it, but perhaps that is as it should be in a book that echoes with such realism. One can imagine the characters in Price’s book living out the final lines of Billy Strayhorn’s classic song:

I'll live a lush life in some small dive,

And there I'll be, while I rot

With the rest of those whose lies are lonely, too.

Restless (trade, $14.95), by William Boyd

Grade: A

William Boyd shows us in his latest novel, Restless, that in the blink of an historical eye alliances can change. In both the larger scale of country to country and the smaller scale of person to person, the word “friendship” is meaningless and we can never know for certain where a person’s loyalties lie. Since part of the novel takes place in the time period just before the United States entered World War II, with the benefit of knowing what came after, we can also see that what seemed benign at the time grew into a malignity in the future. The other part of the novel takes place in 1976, and again with the benefit of foreknowledge, we see nascent and well-behaved political unrest that will grow into something more chaotic and dangerous in our present world. The larger issues play in the background -- albeit, a sometimes loud and insistent background -- to the front stories of a mother and her daughter.

Sally Gilmartin is really Eva Delectorskaya, a resident of Paris, by birth a Russian, and a woman who loses this identity when she becomes a spy for Great Britain during World War II. You’ve seen the bumper sticker, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t after me”? In 1976, Sally is a grandmother and Eva has long disappeared, but an unknown event has triggered a paranoia in Sally that her past is on the verge of catching up with her. She decides to tell her daughter, Ruth, about her hidden life. Boyd tells Ruth’s and Sally’s stories in alternating chapters.

Ruth has a small life in Oxford as an academic, a teacher of English to foreigners, a mother to a young boy, and the ex-girlfriend of a German man whose wayward brother has insidiously moved into Ruth’s apartment. When her mother slowly begins to reveal who Eva was, Ruth is uncertain whether her mother is telling the truth or sick from some delusional ailment.

Eva’s story begins with a casual recruitment by a strange acquaintance of her dead brother. Gradually Eva becomes more enmeshed in the propaganda machine Great Britain uses to sway other countries into allying with them and is later involved in more intricate activities. Initially, Ruth’s story is ordinary and uneventful in counterpoint to the increasing strangeness and exoticism of her mother’s tale, but we gradually learn that certain associations Ruth has tie into a dangerous part of the world in 1976, with implications for something more serious in the future. The spy apple may not fall far from the tree!

Boyd’s story of Eva is clever and harkens to a world of le Carré with its ambiguous relationships and shadowy power plays. He uses a gentler touch with Ruth and breathes life into her world without the underlying thrum of tension and suspense he uses for Eva. The bottom line: a great story with masterful writing.

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