Walking Dead

I want to correct the record here -- "lazy reviewer"'s review must refer to a different book, as "Walking Dead" does not have a heroine who is a feminist, but rather a male main character who is a scientist/researcher. It takes place on an imaginery caribbean island and involves moral dilemmas and adventure more than mystery. Well-written, with intriguing circumstances.

Peter Dickinson is my favorite mystery writer, so I'm biased, but this is one of his better mysteries--that's the best I can say because it's tied for first with about 6 others. [The section that follows is revised--an earlier errant version was about The Lively Dead, also a great book, corrected thanks to Pamela Johnson.] Johnson's review is right about the setting and importance of moral dilemmas, but underpresents both the complexity of the novel and the importance of the mystery. The book is almost 'Philip Marlowe meets voodoo Nazism' [but it's much more complex than that]. The main character is a [anomic, essentially soulless] master of scientific rationality--which is also the rationality of detectives, of the mystery form. He enters "another world", most obviously in using voodoo-like magic, but also in dealing with the twisted/demented rationality of his employing Company and especially of the island's dictatorial government and prison system, which feeds his scientific rationality back to him in a form similar to the Nazi concentration camps, so that he rebels against it and reclaims his soul, by making common cause with a group of "magic Marxists" who are also his experimental subjects. The mystery, of who killed the cleaning woman in his laboratory, is sidelined for most of the book, it's true, but I think the point is that to resolve the situation, he had to escape his initial identity as merely an instrument of his company. Solving the mystery is a rational/scientific task, and he performs it [and might have been able to do so early in the book, especially if he hadn't been carted off to prison.] But he uses the solution to the mystery to bargain for his freedom and better treatment for his group, something he could/would not have done without reclaiming his soul through his experience with the group. The book is not perfect as a mystery, but the way it develops the science/non-science dilemma is just neat. It does well what Paul Auster tries to do with shaky success. Five stars in my book.