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Artie Cohen, a New York City detective whose youth was spent in the Soviet Union, was raised on tales of the city told by his father, a KGB agent who was entranced by jazz and the vibe of the city. Now New York is Artie's home. He's a New Yorker in his bones, but when his former lover Lily calls out of the blue and asks for his help, he goes to meet her in Harlem – and finds himself in a city he doesn't know. It reminds him of his first days in America, getting lost in the subway, speaking with an accent, trying to learn the codes that would let him fit in. "For a long time now, I'd been at home here, along with all the millions of foreigners and outsiders," he thinks to himself. But Harlem is different, and he can't be sure he's reading anything right. Lily's neighbor, an imperious Russian woman living in the decaying glory in a once-elegant Sugar Hill apartment building, has just died and Lily feels somehow responsible. The building is full of elderly eccentrics, lorded over by a pillar of the African American community who worked for Goldman Sachs and is set on restoring the building to its former glory. Is he pushing too hard to gain control of their apartments? Is his overextended financial situation connected to the sudden deaths of several aged residents? Or does it have something to do with the Russian woman's past and the stories she had been telling Lily? In the course of one snowy, frigid weekend, Artie has to piece it together. Artie is not your standard-issue detective. He works on impulse and flashes of insight, and in this setting neither one is reliable. It doesn't help that Lily is now dating a black detective who sees Artie as a threat. The story takes the shape of a distorted village cozy, a claustrophobic community living in the past in a building left to fall into ruin until the real estate boom has made it a prime target for development - until the crash. Framed between the giddy suspense of election night and President Obama's inauguration, set in a time period when a moment of promise is hidden by the dust of the spectacular collapse of market economics, BLOOD COUNT takes place in a snow globe moment. In a few brief days Artie has to solve a crime in a in a building that holds Harlem's past in a bubble, the intersection of old-school Soviet politics and the Harlem Renaissance preserved in a decaying, glorious landmark. The evocative title is borrowed from the last song composed by jazz great Billy Strayhorn who also, ironically, wrote a song titled Sugar Hill Penthouse, which is where this story takes place. This is the ninth book in the Artie Cohen series, and like the others it is a kind of jazz improvisation, working variations on a time and place. It would be advisable to read at least the previous book in the series, LONDONGRAD, because it provides helpful background for this story. But that's no hardship, since it's a terrific book in its own right and a worthy introduction to an unusual and intriguing detective. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, August 2010
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