Captured by Neil Cross

Open Road Media, 268 pages, $13.99

The creator of “Luther,” the amazing, morally ambiguous British detective show, has written this standalone thriller. “Captured” is fast-paced, surprising, and violent.

Kenny Drummond has received a death sentence. The tumor in his brain will kill him within a matter of weeks. He decides that with his remaining time he must settle some unfinished business.

Although it has been more than two decades since he last saw her as a little girl, Kenny is determined to locate the only friend he had as a kid, Callie Barton. When he finds out that she disappeared as a young woman, he is convinced that Jonathan Reese, her husband, is responsible. The police treated Jonathan as a suspect at the time, but there was no proof that he murdered her. With nothing to lose, Kenny seeks revenge on Callie’s behalf. Just so you know, Kenny has no proof either.

Although Kenny is the main character, Neil Cross also created an assortment of other intriguing people. Besides Jonathan, there’s Mary, Kenny’s ex-wife, and her husband, Stever; Kenny’s friend, Pat Maxwell, a former cop and current tough broad; and Paul Sugar, a dissolute private detective.

You have to buy into the premise that a man who has shown no violent or hostile tendencies before would suddenly be capable of perpetrating horrors. Kenny does have a brain tumor, so it’s possible it has changed his personality; he certainly feels it has given him back his long-ago memories with a startling clarity.

Kenny is a portrait artist, and so is Neil Cross.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Scribner, 544 pages, $27

[4/21/15 Note: Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2015-Fiction]

This is one of those must-read books people joyously pass around to their friends and family. This last Christmas season must have been good to Anthony Doerr and his publisher.

The bottom line is that “All the Light We Cannot See” is not a mystery, even though there is a strong spy element that runs through the novel. Set during the time just before and during World War II, the stories of a young boy and a young blind girl run parallel until they are fated to meet in Saint-Malo, France. The young boy, Werner Pfennig, is German and is being groomed to be a tactical member of the German army. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the daughter of the keeper of the keys at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Her father is a craftsman who makes a model of the area of Paris in which they live, so his daughter can memorize the streets, giving her more independence.

With sweetness and gravity, Anthony Doerr tells an extraordinary and sometimes fantastical tale of a serendipitous intersection of lives.

Highly, highly recommended, even if you are neither my family nor my friend.

The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan

Henry Holt & Co., 272 pages, $26

“The Ploughmen” combines old-fashioned noir and new-fashioned storytelling, twisting the story from present to past and back again. It is a Montana poem composed between stark dialogue. It is a novel about crime, but more about compassion.

Young Val Millimaki, a deputy sheriff for rural Copper County, meets his symbiotic mate, John Gload, a seventy-something-year-old lifelong killer and thief, when Gload is finally captured. Trying to mitigate the sadism shown by another deputy, Val often shows sympathy and kindness for the prisoners. While on interminable night shift guarding the prisoners, Val’s act of kindness to Gload is to listen to him in the strange and melancholy hours of the early morning, while Val battles fatigue and Gload battles insomnia. Soon these sessions become a confessional for Val, with Gload obscured by shadows and Val highlighted by sputtering fluorescent lights. Kim Zupan paints a dramatic setting.

These static, yet dynamic, scenes are broken up by scenes of Val performing his other duty: hunting for people missing in the vast rural territory. With Tom, his three-year-old Shepherd, Val searches with increasing despair to find someone still alive after disappearing into the elements. His unlucky streak has been going for a while. Sometimes the people have gotten lost, sometimes they are victims of foul play. All become official photographs in Val’s “dead book.”

No wonder Val’s personal life is disintegrating as well. When his wife leaves him, he is angry, inchoate, and mystified. Why can’t he and his wife simply be happy the way they were in the beginning of their relationship? “The Ploughmen” also depicts Val’s struggles to find his place in the wider world. As Val’s night shift duties continue, he also struggles with a growing insomnia and his personality becomes more fragmented.

The significance of the title, “The Ploughmen”? Val and Gload both come from farming families. For Gload those memories are a comfort. Val has run as fast as he could from his, including the indelible memory of his mother’s suicide in the family barn. Gload’s bodies are buried in the earth. The authorities would love to know where. Val is tasked with finding out. Ploughman, unearth everyone’s secrets. Ploughman, bury them deep.

At one point in the book, within a few pages, I had to look up the meanings of “mackarel snapper,” “pogue,” “innominate,” “bolide,” and “griseous.” In a slyly ironical contrast, Zupan has Val and Gload admitting that neither knows what “turpitude” means. Zupan finds exotic ways of putting words together. He provides an outside, complex rhythm to Val and Gload’s simply-worded give-and-take.

This is Zupan on Val and Gload:

What he’d said was she was gone and that was a different thing entirely. But from his innominate shadows he could read in the young man’s eyes - insomniacal and familiar, so much like those that regarded him in the scarred and untrue polished metal of his cell’s mirror — a need for the comfort bestowed by mutual anguish.

The sheriff to Val, acknowledging the deficiencies of Voyle Dobek, the sadistic deputy:

‘Voyle is just a guy who’s been around too long and somewhere or other took the other course….He is a burdensome man.’

I admire this novel.

Near Death by Glenn Cooper

Lascaux Media, 334 pages, $12.75

I find Glenn Cooper’s books entertaining as hell. From a theological standpoint, there’s a good chance that hell will enter into it, too. Cooper mixes regular people — well-drawn regular people — with the bizarre. There’s ordinary investigative work here and far-out, science-stretching stuff there. He rubs them together and makes it work. John Case (the pseudonym for husband-and-wife authors Jim and Carolyn Hougan) was another author who could do this well.

Alex Weller is a pediatric doctor who is treating FBI agent Cyrus O’Malley’s young daughter, Tara. Tara has a brain tumor and she doesn’t have long to live. Given that parents sometimes look to doctors to be the gods who somehow miraculously will save their children, it is stunning how quickly O’Malley suspects Weller of having something to do with a series of murders in the Boston area.

In fact, straight from the start, you know that Weller indeed does have something to do with the murders — he is committing them. (Still, O’Malley comes to that conclusion stunningly fast.) The why is the far-out, science-stretching stuff. Weller thinks he has found the bridge between life and death, and the other side is way-groovy. Too bad people have to die for him to achieve it.

Good escapist reading.