‘The Ruins’ review: Grisly murders in Lindenhurst

After four nonfiction books and a career in journalism, including Pulitzer Prize-winning work at this paper, Steve Wick has tried his hand at fiction. His interests in Long Island history and World War II remain at center stage in a debut crime novel titled “The Ruins.”

The story begins in 1954 in Lindenhurst, where veteran Paul Beirne is chief of police. The opening chapters confront Beirne with three grisly murders — a man killed by a train, a woman eviscerated in a field and, the next day, that woman’s husband, hanged and burned in his own home.

Beirne’s attempts to solve these crimes will take him on a complicated journey through past and present. Similarities to the murder of another local woman in the 1930s reveal connections to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, leading Beirne to visit a patient incarcerated at a mental institution where prefrontal lobotomies are performed. He will come up against corrupt local officials and law enforcement, as well as vicious opponents even closer to home: the editor of the Lindenhurst Star, who is sleeping with Beirne’s wife, and his own father, a German immigrant and Nazi sympathizer whose role in the long-ago disappearance of Beirne’s mother is unclear.

The chief’s allies are few: a Holocaust survivor and virtuoso pianist, local coroner Doc Liebmann; his none-too-competent deputy, Roger Cantwell; and a genial, fair-minded prosecutor named Lindsay Henry.

Like an early influence he credits in an afterword, “The Day of the Jackal” author Frederick Forsyth, Wick, who lives in Cutchogue, has built his narrative around a core of carefully researched real events, particularly the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the theory that not only was the executed man innocent, but that Lindbergh himself participated in the scheme. As Beirne works his way toward the solution of the crime, filling legal pads with notes and lists, a number of historical figures with Nazi connections make appearances. At one point, he comes upon a photo album documenting SS officers frolicking at a vacation resort near a blueberry field. This is the very real Höcker album, anonymously donated to the Holocaust Museum in 2007, also the inspiration for the recent play ”Here There Are Blueberries.”

As is probably clear, Wick’s tale is not for the faint of heart nor the weak of stomach, as the gruesome sights Beirne confronts in the present join those that already torment him as the survivor of a German POW camp and an abusive father.

Both Beirne and the reader enjoy a bit of respite on the chief’s occasional fishing excursions, depicted by Wick in lyrical detail. “The cloudless sky glowed a deep, rich blue. It was the kind of color, when sunlight bounces off salt water — his uncle out east called that “wet light” — that stilled the angriest mind and brought peace to a troubled man’s life.” Also vividly evoked are the delights of a lunch on the dock, a dozen littlenecks on the half shell and a cold beer. In fact, the title of the book refers to a fishing spot.

“The Ruins” is a spit of land north of Gardiners Island, that same uncle’s favorite place to go on his boat. It is visited in the final scene of the book, in which Wick’s troubled hero is finally able to lay some demons to rest.