CRIME SCENE: SARAJEVO

By John Skow

The world, or that part of the world that watches CNN, first tried to ignore Sarajevo and Bosnia. Then, as the horrors mounted, it struggled to make sense of what was happening. But sense quickly short-circuited to cynicism: humankind is fatally tribal, especially in its religious impulses, and it is in the nature of tribes to hate one another at all times and to slaughter one another when possible.

This brooding resignation takes over in one of the first cop novels to come out of Sarajevo's agony, The Monkey House (Crown; 384 pages; $25). Author John Fullerton, a British reporter who covered Sarajevo during the war, has patterned his story after Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith's shadowy 1981 tale of cold war Moscow. Rosso, Fullerton's cop, is a Croat chief inspector of detectives investigating a murder that may be tied to the city's metastasizing drug trade.

Fullerton gets a lot right, or so it seems to a safely distant observer. He writes about pervasive dread, the fear of small-arms fire whipping through glassless windows, mortar rounds going off as one walks up a city street. After an attack by Serbs, Rosso feels a brief adrenaline high at being alive while others have died. Then shame. He recognizes this and sees that guilt may be what drives him to pursue the swaggering gang leader Luka, who poses as a resistance hero, and may, in some perverted way, actually be one.

The author knows this killing ground well, but too often his writing is fast and sloppy. A burning department store is "engulfed in its death throes," and streets are "rivers of flame." Rosso, at a difficult moment, thinks "the buck stops here." No, the reader reflects, it was Harry Truman who thought that. Rosso needs a dialogue coach, and his author, alas for what otherwise is an effective novel, needs treatment for tin-ear disease.

--By John Skow