Accidents Will Happen

Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Rathbone (Sand Blind, Joseph) revels in his indisputable ear for the clipped, staccato rhythms of the neo-noir, his love of the twisting plot and his never-ending cast of Euro grotesques in this literate thriller about a whistle-blowing cop in a toxic new world order. In the fictional German city of Burg, Renata Fechter has been demoted from the Serious Crime Unit to head the Eco-Squad, a rag-tag group of misfits and cast-offs charged with ""investigating"" (i.e., ignoring) environmental crimes. Soon after the murder and cover-up of a nuclear accident, a crime syndicate that ships radioactive waste to the Baltics and Fechter's own illicit affair with a scheming businessman are steering the new chief into violent waters. Along the way, very little escapes Rathbone's powers of observation--perhaps too little. Rather than reveal character through action, he relies on exhausting catalogues of physical attributes: his purpled prose, his distractingly clinical sex scenes and his crowd of criminal cameos tend to undermine the tension and urgency in the novel's rollicking pace--and his noir nihilism is too often window dressing, rather than a window onto the hidden motives of his characters. Nevertheless, Rathbone's flashes of hardboiled poetry, his authentic feel for the small-time cockney hood and his generous doses of testosterone are all here, in spades. (Sept.)