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A Case of Matricide

By Graeme Macrae Burnet

I’ve long appreciated the way Burnet’s novels are in conversation with earlier times. “His Bloody Project” and “Case Study,” in particular, mine the postmodern era without pretense and with deep respect. And I harbor a soft spot for his Frenchified crime novels, those initially purported to be written by “Raymond Brunet,” which are in the vein of Georges Simenon’s romans durs and the work of Jean-Patrick Manchette.

The Brunet novels — “The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau,” “The Accident on the A35” and now A CASE OF MATRICIDE (Biblioasis, 243 pp., paperback, $18.95) — all feature the taciturn and befuddled Inspector Gorski, a detective in St.-Louis, France. When an elderly woman claims her novelist son is trying to kill her, Gorski is assigned to investigate. He visits the family often, trying to deduce how someone could be so monstrous, but he realizes all too late how porous the line is between acceptable and extreme behavior.

You can gulp down “A Case of Matricide” in one sitting, as the prose style seems to demand. But linger over Burnet’s novel, and its real pleasures emerge.

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Hotel Lucky Seven

By Kotaro Isaka

The hapless hit man Nanao, first introduced in Isaka’s “Bullet Train,” lamented that no matter what job he took, no matter whom he was contracted to kill, it would always, always go wrong. Imagine if Dortmunder, the iconic bank robber created by Donald E. Westlake, met up with Keller, Lawrence Block’s hit man character, and you get an idea of what Nanao was like in that earlier novel.

Nanao (code name: Ladybug) returns in HOTEL LUCKY SEVEN (The Overlook Press, 289 pp., $27) with another seemingly simple assignment: to deliver a framed painting to a guest at the Winton Palace Hotel. But the guest tries to strangle him and then, as Ladybug tells his handler, things went very, very wrong: “Maybe he slipped on the paper on the floor. He went ass over teakettle all on his own,” hit his head on a marble tabletop and died.

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