The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns (hardcover, $26.95)

It's been a while since Stephen Dobyns released a novel. (Carolyn really likes his "Saratoga" series and gave one of them an MBTB star, if I remember correctly.) This (so far) standalone novel, "The Burn Palace," is a cross between "Our Town" and "The X-Files."

For about the first hundred pages, we meet the people of Brewster, Rhode Island, a small town that used to have only small town problems. It was hard to figure out who the alpha character was; Dobyns introduces many residents and each one has at least a paragraph attached. Actually, the next couple hundred pages does much the same thing: more characters and more little stories.

Woody Potter turns out to be a pivotal character. He is a state police detective. He is a veteran of Iraq. He is, unfortunately for his brand-new ex-girlfriend, also the strong, silent type and has difficulty expressing his emotions, which is directly responsible for making his girlfriend an ex.

Bobby Anderson, another state police detective, also bears watching.

Woody and Bobby have the unenviable task of joining forces with other law enforcement types, including the token buffoon in the barrel shape of the local "acting" chief of police in Brewster, to figure out what the heck is with all the woo-woo stuff going on in Brewster. First a newborn baby is stolen from the hospital and a snake left in his place. Then there are rumors and accusations of satanic rites and witchcraft. And there's an ominous and unprecedented gathering of coyotes in the area. Usually timid creatures, these coyotes are aggressive and wide-ranging.

"The Burn Palace" is biographies stitched together by a trickle of a sinister plot. In terms of action, the tension doesn't rev up until the last eighty or so pages, although there are a few jump-from-your-seat moments before that. There's also an awkward (or satiric, if you want to give the author the benefit of the doubt) sex scene. However, most of the bios are interesting, some of them clever (state police detective Beth Lajoie, for instance), some evoking pathos (e.g., Ernest Hartmann, the first murder victim, who was scalped to boot), and some just odd (e.g., young Baldo Bonaldo of fart machine fame). The most intriguing character is the narrator, a voice that sometimes has more shape than in most third-person novels, like the Stage Director in "Our Town."

Could Dobyns have done with fewer pages? Yes.

The Complaints by Ian Rankin ($14.99) (c2009)

[I've arrived a little late to this party. "The Complaints" was written in 2009.]

R.I.P. John Rebus and know that you are missed. Scottish author Ian Rankin retired his long-serving homicide detective John Rebus (19 novels since 1987, plus a recent sneak return in "Standing in Another Man's Grave"). However, as he stated in interview material in the back of the paperback edition of "The Complaints," Rankin stumbled across interesting material about the Scottish police version of Internal Affairs, the police department that investigates other police officers for misconduct, and couldn't pass it up. At the time he wouldn't resurrect Rebus -- although he changed his mind a couple of years later, as noted above -- so he created a new series.

"The Complaints" is very well constructed. I loved the complexity of plot points, the layering of storylines, and the way Rankin assembled all the pieces at the end. BUT. But the story didn't start moving along until nearly the end of the book.

Malcolm Fox, a sincere detective in Edinburgh police department's Complaints and Conduct, aka The Dark Side, aka Complaints, is the focal point of the book. He is rather plodding, although there are intermittent flashes of dry wit and a couple of notes of life's song humming about him. For the most part he is his job and his job is what he is.

A few other detectives in Complaints fill some of the pages: Tony Kaye is Fox's friend, Bob McEwan is his boss. After sealing and delivering evidence of inappropriate dealings by Detective Glen Heaton, Fox is suddenly assigned to help Annie Inglis in cornering another detective in Heaton's division, this time for child pornography. Jamie Breck appears pleasant, competent, and charismatic, which belies the accusation Fox is asked to investigate. Inglis says perpetrators often appear charming.

Vince Faulkner, the no-good boyfriend of Fox's sister, Jude, is murdered after injuring Jude in a domestic altercation. Suddenly Fox is on the other side of the fence. He is being eyed for the position of chief suspect. Fox teeters precariously between keeping to his job investigating Breck and having a back door look into who offed Vince, hoping all the while that it wasn't his sister.

One of the biggest strengths of "The Complaints" is Rankin's stark and intelligent look into the economics of Scotland at the time. Banks were failing, housing developments were in trouble, and jobs were scarce. Rankin weaves it all together with the smaller threads of individual human frailty and venality.

While Fox is no Rebus -- and who among us Rankin readers can avoid the comparison -- he is steadfast and true. Jamie Becker is the charismatic light and steals the show whenever he appears. Whether he is guilty or not of the pornography charge, he ends up as the strangely matched, unofficial partner to Fox in unraveling their concurrent miseries.

How could I not root for Becker to be innocent? It is to Rankin's credit that there are no assumptions that can be made about any of the characters, including Fox, since this is the first in the Complaints series. It went down to the wire.

Norwegian by Night by Derek Miller (hardcover, $26)

I was sad when this book was over. It had all the elements that I love: comedy, tragedy, quirkiness. They were mixed in impeccable proportions, solidified by solid pacing and lyrical writing.

Norwegian by Night is not a true mystery because you know who the victim is and who killed her. This is a story of people on the run from the bad guys, but it's not like any other on-the-run story you've ever read. One of the people on the run is dressed in a tin foil makeshift Viking outfit with a dust bunny tied up in a pillowcase.

After the recent death of Sheldon Horowitz's wife, he moved from New York to Oslo, Norway, to live with his granddaughter, Rhea, and her Norwegian husband, Lars. Mabel, Sheldon's wife, was convinced that Sheldon had dementia and that thought has passed to their granddaughter, who was raised by Sheldon and Mabel. "'What am I going to do there?'" Sheldon asks, "'I'm an American. I'm a Jew. I'm eighty-two. I'm a retired widower. A Marine. A watch repairman. It takes me an hour to pee. Is there a club there I'm unaware of?'" (He is also the modest author of a popular book of photographs entitled, "What?" In it are portraits of angry people. Sheldon reveals that he sometimes has done outrageous things to get his subjects angry.)

Sheldon's eccentricities or dementia are tied to a contradictory dwelling in the past and at the same time a stubborn avoidance of it. Sheldon fought in the Korean War. Events from that war, which are revealed slowly, have affected him profoundly, although he is unable to talk about what happened. When we first meet Sheldon, he is concerned about North Koreans following him: "They'd been tracking him since 1951 -- he was sure of it. You don't kill twelve men named Kim from the top of a seawall at Inchon and think they're going to forgive and forget…They have Chinese patience, but an Italian-style vendetta streak."

Sometimes his befuddlement is not of his own making. Lars says that two hunting rifles he owns are named Moses and Aaron. "'You have Jewish rifles?'" Sheldon asks. No, Lars explains, they are named after two Norwegian cannons that sank a German ship. Even more puzzled, Sheldon asks: "'Norway has Nazi-killing Jewish cannons?'"

In recent times, he has insisted to Rhea and Lars that he was a sniper in Korea, contradicting what he told Mabel and everyone else for years, that he was a file clerk during the war. Was he a sniper or was he a file clerk? Sheldon says to one of the imaginary companions -- dead people from his past whom he has mentally resurrected -- who occasionally accompany him, "[I]t's not just about what I remember. It's what I don't remember…I don't remember filing anything." Sheldon's logic and memory may be shaky at times, but something is surely rising from his past to help him in his present. "In this life," he thinks, "my memories are the smoke I choke on, burning my eyes."

Rhea and Lars's upstairs neighbors are a Serbian emigré and her young son. One day, while Rhea and Lars are out, Sheldon hears shouting, then the obvious sounds of the woman and her child on the run. Without a large preponderance of thinking, Sheldon opens his door and pulls in the woman and child. Before they can get out a back way, they hear the front door kicked in. At the urging of the mother, Sheldon and the child hide in a closet, so they do not see the intruder who murders the mother. The shouting, the imprecations, the explanations are all in a language Sheldon does not understand. The boy, about 7 or 8 years old, cannot communicate with him. Now what?

Using a sort of thickheaded logic and, worse yet, in the absence of substantiating evidence, Sheldon decides that if it is the boy's father who has murdered the mother, he does not want to let "Paul," as he has nicknamed his silent charge, fall into the hands of the authorities who then might possibly turn him over to his father, the murderer. It would be a different story if this reasoning were faulty, so in fact, the murderer is the boy's father, a Kosovar soldier who finally tracked down the woman and her son, and Sheldon and Paul are justified in running away.

Sheldon eventually comes up with a plan to get to Rhea and Lars's summer home in a remote wooded area. He figures the police will be looking for an elderly American man with a Serbian child, so he pretends to be a German man with his Viking-obsessed grandson -- thus the aforementioned disguise. He plans to lie low until he hears that the killer has been caught.

In implementing his plan, it becomes obvious that Sheldon knows things that ordinary people do not. He also hears things that ordinary people do not. His invisible companions challenge his decisions and force him to revisit his past. WWII and the Korean, Vietnam, and Serbian Wars are the moral backdrops to the current story. The atrocities done in the name of patriotism and ideology -- can they be excused, excised, laid to rest? Are all survivors of war doomed to carry a private burden that sways even their smallest thoughts?  It is not just Sheldon's physical journey to escape a killer but his psychological journey to forgive himself that keeps him moving. 

Sheldon and Mabel's only child, Saul, died in the Vietnam War. Sheldon had been so proud that his son was fighting to defend his country. Too young to fight in WWII, Sheldon wasn't able to personally defend the European Jews against the atrocities there, so he fought in Korea and left a moral example for Saul to follow. Consequently, Sheldon blames himself for sending his son to his death. There are some moving passages as Sheldon imagines what Saul's last few moments must have been like.

Everything coalesces in the end, all of Sheldon's memories, experiences, guilt, courage, and what he truly is as opposed to what he thought he was. There is the final showdown and, like so much of the rest of the book, it is unexpected.

What part of this book is NOT quotable? I had a forest of post-its marking passages.

At one point, Sheldon is overwhelmed with his undertaking: "History itself constantly threatens to take him over and leave him defenseless under its weight. It's not dementia. It's mortality."

When Sheldon and Paul find shelter by breaking into someone's summer home, Sheldon muses on how different homes can be: "And wait until you get to England and find they put carpets in the bathrooms, as if that isn't the grossest idea in Western civilization. One New Year's party over there and you'll never walk barefoot again."

I haven't even mentioned Sigrid Ødegård, the police detective trying to catch the murderer and find Sheldon and Paul. She, too, is a fine eccentric character. But the story is Sheldon's, no argument. Everyone else is there to provide Sheldon with the means to carry on his emotional journey.

Perhaps it's true that the best sort of book is not unlike the best sort of food: sweet and sour. The yin and yang, if balanced, yields a delight to the senses. Derek Miller balances humor and sadness so well.

Graveland by Alan Glynn ($16)

Graveland is apparently the third in a loosely related series by Irish author Alan Glynn. It's set in the U.S. and concerns the financial world. Did I miss something by not reading the other two books (Winterland and Bloodland) first? Probably. The book seemed disjointed as a standalone.

Ellen Dorsey is a prickly journalist of lengthy magazine articles. Craig Howley is the second-in-command of a private equity firm. Frank Bishop used to be an architect and now works as the manager of an electronics store. Their paths intertwine when the head of a big investment bank and the CEO of a hedge fund are murdered. Persons unknown apparently are making a statement on behalf of the other 98%.

It felt as though the book was at an end about halfway through. There's a stand-off with the people who committed the murders. Although their cause and beliefs are at the crux of the crimes, they are given short shrift as characters and their incoherent manifesto is a fair throwaway. The second half of the book finally brings to the forefront what the three main characters have to do with each other.

There were many plot twists that were quite clever, but there were a lot of financial terms thrown around to retard the narrative pace. Not that I wanted an explanation, truncated or extended, academic or prosaic. There were just a heck of a lot of terms, phrases, coughing up of business hairballs.

At one point, Ellen Dorsey thinks:

"In discussing stuff like fractional reserve banking, the creation of the Fed, the Glass-Steagall Act, Keynes, the Chicago School, subprime, securitization, the bailouts, there'll be an initial hint of reasonableness, a striving for clarity -- for the holy grail of a coherent point -- but sooner or later, and without fail, each contribution will descend into ambiguity, internal contradiction, and ultimately gibberish."

Ironically, at times I just wanted clarity, too.