Pawel's success continues

Rebecca Pawel knows how to make the reader care.
By MARIETTA DUNN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Law of Return," by Rebecca Pawel (Soho, $24)
Rebecca Pawel is a gutsy writer and a risk-taker. She's also the best new mystery author I've read in a long time.
In Pawel's first novel, last year's Edgar-winning "Death of a Nationalist" -- set in an atmosphere of hatred and suspicion just after the Spanish Civil War -- her central character, Sgt. Carlos Tejada, commits an act of brutality so shocking that it leaves the reader stunned. That Pawel is then able to turn Tejada into the hero of her series is an astonishing achievement in writing and psychological development that carries over into her second book, "Law of Return."
In "Death of a Nationalist," Tejada, a self-righteous officer in the Civil Guard in Madrid, believes unquestioningly in the victory of Gen. Francisco Franco's right-wing Nationalists over the Communists and Socialists who supported the Republican government during Spain's three-year civil war. The toll in that war: as many as a half-million dead in battles, from air bombardments, through mass executions and starvation. Yet even with the fighting finished in 1939, Madrid's defeated "Reds" are being hunted by Tejada and his men, then jailed, tortured or killed. There is little mercy in the hearts of the victors.
But while Tejada is investigating the murder of a Nationalist guardsman, he is forced into personal contact with some of the rebels and with a Socialist schoolteacher named Elena, and slowly his code of honor and his sense of morality begin to tilt. Tejada, a landowner's son from a family of privilege, starts to see some humanity in his enemies and some flaws in himself and his blind ideology.
Second book
In Pawel's sequel, "Law of Return," it is 1940, and Tejada has been promoted to lieutenant and sent to Salamanca, a university city north of Madrid. Though the civil war has been over for a year, fear lingers in every part of Spain. In Salamanca, one of Tejada's jobs is overseeing the troublemakers; those on parole, those with Socialist leanings. One is a disgraced classics professor and the father of Elena.
"Law of Return" becomes as much a reluctant love story between Tejada and Elena as a double mystery: Tejada investigates the death of a one-time dissident at the same time that Elena and her family are trying to save a Jewish professor from the Nazis and hide him in Spain. This second book seems more a conventional mystery than the first, but it's still a finely thought-out examination of the "other victims" of war. Pawel poignantly captures the sense of isolation, humiliation and defeat of those who dared to question the regime and, as a result, lost their jobs and their places in society.
Though she is only in her 20s, Pawel, a Brooklyn high school teacher, seems to have a mature understanding of the human heart and its capacity for love and deceit. She knows how to make the reader care. Her books are intense, the writing impeccable. She propels the plots at a riveting pace.