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Juggling, coffee, wild geese — these are images that dance in my head after finishing Garry Ryan's fifth novel in the Detective Lane series. Malabarista, barista, Branta canadensis. They are part of the rich kaleidoscope of impressions that the novel makes. As before, the author plunges us into complex personal relationships on the part of the detective, his friends, the suspects, the witnesses, and dead man. It is amazing how much the author can pack into so few pages, without ever losing the reader. The major crime is the murder of Andelko Branimir, who, evidence steadily mounts to show, was a vicious Eastern European war criminal. Undergoing changes of identity, he has managed to flee to Calgary, Alberta, before his past apparently catches up with him. He leaves behind a wife, who is something of an enigma, and a teenage daughter. In one of those strange convergences of people into a single place, one of the war victims has also ended up in Calgary. Mladen is the juggler who gives the book its title. After being raped and maimed as a teenager, to the point that his leg had to be amputated, he was rescued and sent to Spain to recuperate. There he learned the art of juggling, malabarismo. Now he has teamed up with Leo, a trumpet player with a withered leg: "two dangerous one-legged street performers," Leo jokes. Has Mladen taken revenge on his oppressor? Or is something deeper, darker going on? That is not the only case confronting Lane. Fearful of being fired, he has to defend himself against a trumped-up charge initiated by his chief. His old partner has become deputy chief. His new partner, Keely Saliba, no sooner joins him than she becomes the target of a series of escalating threats, climaxing in a pipe bomb destroying her car. Keely worked undercover for the RCMP in an investigation of a criminal ring. Several police officers, including the chief, were tarnished as a result of that case. Is one or more of them now trying to enact revenge? Still other explosives are to come. Lane's problems are not confirmed to his job. His foster children — his own niece, Christine, and his husband's nephew, Matt, both abandoned by their parents — are still navigating the troubled waters of adolescence. Christine is now dating, so there are young men to be checked out. But his children are the least of Lane's personal worries. He girds himself to contest his homophobic father's will in a fight against his equally homophobic and treacherous brother in order to secure what he considers to be his children's rightful inheritance. Most frightening, his husband, Arthur, is diagnosed with breast cancer, the very disease which killed Matt's mother, Arthur's sister. Lane must become a malabarista himself. All this proves this time to be too much for the stoical detective. Everyone around him recognizes that he is displaying all the classic symptoms of depression. The care-giver needs care. His analyst is unlike any I've encountered in fiction before. She herself becomes a symbol of the positive possibilities of transformation. Throughout the previous novels, the reader has been given hints that Lane is the product of an abusive childhood. Under his psychiatrist's prodding most of the story now tumbles out. Once again, one can only marvel how in our society anyone who is the least bit different physically, sexually, or what-have-you manages to remain sane. Lane's first name is finally disclosed. The revelation is, to be honest, rather anticlimactic. Lane's renewed sense of self is anything but. Handicaps that must be overcome, child abuse that must be prevented or stopped, the pressures of everyday living are themes that run through the entire series. But the novels are always leavened with a bit of unexpected comedy. And always the reader is reminded to appreciate the moments that are given to us as an act of grace. I cannot resist quoting a bit of a scene that appears at the end of Chapter 5. Matt recognizes Lane's increasing depression. He insists that his father join him and their dog for a run in the park where Canadian geese congregate: "Lane could feel the air pushed by their wings. He looked right. A goose was flying beside him, honking. The tips of its wing brushed Lane's shoulder. Geese surrounded him now. Their necks bobbed as they worked to gain altitude. Lane felt as if he were about lift off as well. The wind kissed his face. The flock was all around him. For a moment, he was part of the undulating mass of Canadian geese. Lane screamed with unexpected joy." Ryan's books are proof that mysteries can be as satisfying in a literary sense as traditional novels. For convenience I have my copies shelved for the moment with my other mysteries. One day they will be transferred to sit with my permanent books. I note that they will then stand between translations of Rumi's and Umberto Saba's poetry. The books will fit nicely together. § Drewey Wayne Gunn is professor emeritus of Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He is currently editing a collection of scholarly essays on 1960s GAY PULP FICTION: THE FORGOTTEN HERITAGE.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, September 2011
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