OKAY, SO I'M A LITTLE SUGGESTIBLE. My husband says hypochondriac; every time we move or rearrange the bookshelves, he makes my fat medical reference books a little less accessible, hoping to avoid another episode of me dramatically announcing "I think I have a detached retina" when what I had was an eyeglass prescription in need of an update.

But that's not really the reason that, a few chapters into Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, I started tapping my fingers five times on the tabletop and muttering curse words under my breath. It wasn't that I thought that, like Lethem's narrator Lionel Essrog, I had Tourette's syndrome. It's that Lethem makes Lionel so real, so right that he just about twitches off the page into life, shouting "Eat me, Bailey!" and bending language into new meaning, into a way to shape the world.

One reason the mystery novel endures and prospers as a literary form is its endless flexibility. Readers return to the mystery genre again and again because they know just what to expect, yet their greatest thrill is finding the unexpected. Sometimes that may be nothing but a shiny little gimmick; other times, it may be a lot more.

Lethem has made a career of mutating popular literary forms; his first four novels were alchemical gumbos of postapocalyptic science fiction, surreal crime noir, interplanetary western and the physics of romance, among other things.

In Motherless Brooklyn, he plays it relatively straight, or at least as straight as you can play it when your main character is an orphan with Tourette's, known to his friends as the Human Freakshow, who works for a detective agency in Brooklyn.

Tourette's syndrome is a condition intimately associated with how the brain processes information and language, and Lionel (and Lethem) make that clear from Page 1: "...the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys." Lionel often can't control the language that he speaks; his own name gets bent on his tongue into Liable Guesscog, Ironic Pissclam, Lullaby Gueststar. But that condition makes him acutely aware of words' power, and that awareness is what makes him, finally, into a classic detective hero -- for what else is the detective but the one who puts the dark story into words?

Lionel's dark story starts with the murder of his boss, Frank Minna, head of a Brooklyn detective agency/limo service. Lionel and Gilbert Coney, another one of the "Minna Men," are tagging along as backup while Minna goes to a mysterious meeting at the Yorkville Zendo, a religious retreat on the Upper East Side. Minna is wired, and Lionel listens in on an inexplicable conversation just before Minna is abducted, stabbed and left in a Dumpster. Lionel and Coney rush him to a hospital, but he bleeds to death -- after passing along a few more enigmatic clues.

Lionel's association with Minna began during Lionel's childhood in St. Vincent's Home for Boys, a.k.a. Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel and three of his pals, all of them half-formed adolescents, are taken under the wing of a local character. Minna is a small-time street boss, half businessman, half crook, full of dash and wisecracks. He borrows the four boys from the orphanage to unload trucks filled with stereo gear of unexplained provenance and to do other grunt work, but he soon becomes a role model/father figure to them, the one escape route they can see from their dreary home.

But just when that attachment is flourishing, Minna disappears, along with his brother. Lionel and his friends are devastated and clueless. A few years later, just as mysteriously, Minna returns, minus the brother but with a wife. True to the hard-boiled genre, Julia is the classic dangerously beautiful blonde. Minna's streetwise persona is none the worse for wear, and soon Lionel and his friends, old enough to be emancipated from St. Vincent's, are working for him full time, basking in his affectionate insults and learning about the world, or at least Brooklyn.

All that is shattered when Minna dies, Julia leaves town, and peculiar events begin to multiply, like Lionel's abduction by a squadron of doormen and his foray into the peaceful puzzle of the Zendo. Solving Minna's murder turns out to be a way of reconstructing the past and putting it into words, but not before Lionel finds himself sometimes at a loss for them. Following the trail of Minna's killer out of Brooklyn and into the unknown territory of wild Maine, Lionel says:

"Waves, sky, trees, Essrog -- I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud. Those walls of language had always been in place, I understood now, audible to me until the sky in Maine deafened them with a shout of silence. I staggered, put one hand on the rocks to steady myself. I needed to reply in some new tongue, to find a way to assert a self that had become tenuous, shrunk to a shred of Brooklyn stumbling on the coastal void: Orphan meets ocean. Jerk evaporates in salt mist."

It's Lethem's gift to us that Lionel is very much on the page, as original and engaging a character as I've come across in a good while.

Personal Injuries

Scott Turow's twist on the classic mystery has been to make all his characters officers of the law. In his best-selling novels, for the most part both bad guys and good guys are lawyers, judges and cops. Turow's specialty has been to unfold the secrets that drive those who are supposed to uphold the law to break it.

He does that again in Personal Injuries, the complex story of an investigation into judicial corruption in Turow's fictional territory of Kindle County. U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett is the driving force behind a sting aimed at bringing down judges who are taking bribes in personal injury cases. Sennett's bait is a highly successful, charismatic personal injury lawyer named Robbie Feaver.

Feaver is an unwilling goat. Sennett has nailed him for large-scale tax evasion, and Feaver will go to jail. Sennett's bargaining chip is Feaver's wife, Rainey, who is dying by inches of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. If Feaver will help Sennett bag a few judges by wearing a wire while he bribes them, Sennett will let him stay out of prison long enough to stay with Rainey to the end.

Feaver's keeper for the duration of the months-long operation is an FBI agent whose undercover name is Evon Miller. She is a driven, meticulous tightass to Feaver's extravagantly emotional charmer, but they share a talent for taking on roles.

Turow paints a detailed picture of the intricacies of this kind of investigation, its months of boredom and moments of high drama, the astounding numbers of people and dollars involved. There are no murders to solve, at least until the very end; the mystery here lies in the unraveling of the relationships among characters -- Feaver, his longtime law partner, his wife, his countless girlfriends, his sainted mother and Evon, not to mention the judges who talk tough in court and send their bailiffs to bag bribes.

What the book reveals is an array of powerful, successful, wealthy people who are all twisted by envy, greed, insecurity and anger. Despite their ritzy houses and corner offices and luxury cars and country club memberships, this is one miserable bunch, and morally bankrupt to boot, good guys included.

It's sort of a variation on the "Dallas" phenomenon, I guess. I always thought the huge success of that '70s soap opera was due to its depiction of the fabulously wealthy Ewings as venal, tiny-minded, sex-addicted creeps, allowing the masses who watched them the satisfaction of feeling they were better off than these rich bastards after all. Turow's books operate on the same principle, with the added attraction of reassuring readers that lawyers really are as rotten as non-lawyers suspect they are.

I don't know if Turow does that consciously -- he is, after all, a lawyer himself -- but there's finally no one in this book to identify with or like or even remember for long. I'd rather spend an evening with Lethem's obscenity-shouting Brooklyn Freakshow than any of them. Oh well, at least Personal Injuries didn't make me think I had ALS.

As always, titles reviewed in Colette's List may be purchased at a significant discount from The Bookstall.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette's List 17: Creating Colette: A Scandal In Paris

Colette's List 18: Rushdie: Shake, Rattle & Roll

Colette's List 19: Betrayal & Madness, Loss & Redemption

Colette's List 20: Summer Reading: Death Cruise

Colette's List 21: Dennis Lehane's Sinister City

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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