Return of the reluctant detective

The Fifth Season, a novel by Don Bredes, published by the Crown Publishing Group, New York.

Reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

Readers who got to know Hector Bellevance in Don Bredes' 1991 crime novel, Cold Comfort, will be delighted to know that he's back.

In The Fifth Season, Mr. Bredes' fourth novel, the reluctant detective returns to solve a series of murders that rock a small town in northeastern Vermont.

It seems that Mr. Bredes, who lives in Wheelock, has a good start on the Hector Bellevance series of crime novels. I hope so, because the ingredients are all in place for most satisfying series of good reads. As he demonstrated in his first novel, Hard Feelings, Mr. Bredes is a talented writer. He is mining the wealth of writer's material in the Northeast Kingdom with an eye that is sharp and sympathetic, but never sentimental. And as a crime fiction writer he is an honorable craftsman who brings this book to a conclusion that is at once astounding and damnably logical.

There are enough clues left along the way to make a reader feel that the game was fairly played.

In The Fifth Season, as in Cold Comfort, Hector is not the sort of hero who goes looking for trouble.

He retired from the Boston Police Department after a fatal incident which, while not yet fully explained, was bad enough to cause Hector to abandon his career.

He is also missing a beloved wife, who abandoned him.

Escaping these loses, Hector has returned to the home farm in northern Vermont to raise organic vegetables.

But his gardening is pretty predictably interrupted by outbreaks of violent crime that threaten to destroy someone Hector cares deeply about or, in the present novel, Hector himself.

Once Hector gets going, he's pretty hard to stop. And one of the least effective ways to try and stop him is with physical violence.

Here Mr. Bredes is in the great tradition of Dashiell Hammett, who pretty much defined the genre of American crime fiction.

The issue isn't whether Hector wins his fights. Unlike Robert Parker's much less realistic hero, Spencer, Hector isn't a perfectly invincible physical specimen. Sometimes he gets the tar beat out of him.

What matters is how Hector reacts to such punishment.

He doesn't. He just carries on doing what he set out to do.

Midway through Fifth Season, Hector gets into a fight with his favorite suspect in what is so far a double murder, and loses pretty badly.

The fight has an odd effect on our hero. "He could have killed me," Hector muses. "The killer would have."

Hector tends to think and talk in short sentences.

In his effort to solve the murders he gets sideways with a State Police detective, who sees Hector himself as a pretty good suspect. Here's the detective's challenge, and Hector's reply:

"A man with all your experience, how come it's so hard for you to grasp the position you're in?"

"I grasp it. If I didn't grasp it, I wouldn't be here."

Hector is somewhat humanized by his girlfriend, Wilma, who is emotional, pretty, smart, funny and wise. Okay, I like her because she's a reporter for the local paper.

Hector can be kind to children, and has a comforting way with disturbed adolescents and an addicted "skinny blond with a boob job."

But it’s his stubborn courage and his natural affinity for the criminal mind that equip him to deal with the craziest lawbreakers the Northeast Kingdom and Mr. Bredes can come up with.

May he encounter many more before he's through.