Chamber Four

[2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel By An American Author---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]

Author: Attica Locke

Harper, 2009

Filed under: Mystery

Black Water Rising is a novel with two frustratingly unconnected story lines that are given almost equal weight. The primary narrative concerns a young black lawyer named Jay trying to carve out a law practice in early ’80s Houston. He and his wife go for a low-rent swamp cruise on their anniversary, they witness a crime, and they try to help a young woman running from a gunman. They drop her off at the police station and eventually a mystery unfurls.

The secondary narrative, interspersed with the first, is about Jay’s history with the SNCC (pronounced “snik”), a civil rights group in the ’60s that eventually split between proponents of nonviolent action, and Black Power-type followers of Stokely Carmichael.

One big problem with Rising is that these two discrete story lines have almost nothing to do with each other. The other, bigger problem, is that both are quite boring. …
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Edited by Dennis Lehane

Akashic Books, 2009

Filed Under: Thrillers, Short Stories, Mystery

The Boston Noir collection marks our fair city’s induction in the roving city-themed noir series, “Book Noir,” from Akashic Books. Already the series has seen collections from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Phoenix, among others. Dennis Lehane is an obvious choice as editor -I’d be be hard-pressed to come up with a close second in terms of Boston crime novelists. He proves a smart choice, as well, and has put together a collection of noir stories as he defines them: working-class tragedies. In this collection, Lehane explores not only crime, or, as he calls it “skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people,” but explores what the Boston means to the people who live in, and more often just-outside, New England’s second-place city. …
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[2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel By An American Author---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]

Author: Heather Gudenkauf

Mira, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Mystery

The Weight of Silence follows a relatively simple mystery, at the center of which is seven-year-old Calli Clark, who hasn’t spoken in three years. When Calli’s father drunkenly grabs her and drags her into the woods early one morning, the entire town sets about trying to figure out what happened to her (and her friend, Petra, who also wandered off that morning).

Most of the book deals with the people in Calli’s and Petra’s lives, and the relationships between them, as they appear in the light of crisis. When Gudenkauf tries to formulate a plot, though, it works for a little while, but eventually fizzles out in a two-fold ending full of underwhelming misdirection.

Silence features some phenomenal suspense and some engaging characters, but the actual mystery is lackluster. Most of the time it’s a real nail-biter of a book, even if all you wind up with is ragged nails.

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[2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel] — I’m reading all the Edgar nominees in the top two categories (Best Novel, Best First Novel By An American Author), and handicapping the choices before the winners are announced in late April. You can track all my reviews of Edgar nominees here.

Author: Charlie Huston

Ballantine Book, 2009

Filed under: Mystery

After I finished Mystic Arts, I was shocked to discover that it was Huston’s ninth novel, and not his first. It reads like a talented but inexperienced student wrote it; it bears almost every sign and symptom of a juvenile writer’s work. That’s not all bad: while Huston is guilty of simplicity of plot and character (especially emotional simplicity), he also charges the novel with exuberance and passion.

While Mystic Arts isn’t exactly well written, it offers stylish fun, snappy prose, and a flair for the fascinatingly gruesome. It’s a quick-reading, simplistic yarn that primarily wants to entertain you—a goal that’s all too rare these days. And it succeeds, at least until the final act, when the plot finally unravels and leaves the reader in the lurch.

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Author: J. Saunders Elmore

Three Rivers Press, 2009

Filed under: Thrillers, Mystery, Literary

Elmore’s epigraph for The Amateur American is from a John LeCarre novel. Pretty quickly, Elmore’s goal becomes clear: he wants to write a spy-ish thriller with an amateur protagonist.

Not a bad premise. Chuck is back for a second season, so I suppose people like the concept. OK, Chuck is an unfair comparison: Elmore’s a good writer with a funny, entertaining voice, and he creates some great characters.

But some pacing problems and the merging of the thriller narrative with a relatively ordinary young-man-abroad subplot keep this novel from living up to its potential.

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Author: Jedediah Berry

2009, Penguin

Filed under: Mystery, Literary

The Manual of Detection is about Charles Unwin, a clerk at a mysterious detective firm simply called The Agency. Each Agency detective is assigned a clerk to arrange his reports; when Unwin’s detective—the Agency’s most prestigious, a man named Sivart—goes missing, Unwin is promoted to replace him.

Unwin doesn’t want to be a detective and protests repeatedly, then reluctantly follows the clues before him, if only to find Sivart and get his old boring clerk job back.

Manual combines a semi-surreal, hard-boiled world with the soft, posh style of Unwin’s delicate sensibility. The narration can often be obnoxious to listen to, as Unwin minces around among fistfights and gunplay.

But Berry sets the hooks of his mystery carefully and well, and the result is a good mystery that can at times be unbearable, with its weirdness that borders on cloying cutesiness. It’s certainly better than your average detective paperback, but it’s not quite the knock-your-socks-off intellectual thriller it tries to be. …
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Author: Denis Lehane

2003, HarperCollins

Best ebook deal: Diesel eBooks

Filed under Mystery

I like to watch a movie and tell the person sitting next to me, “the book was sooo much better.” I’m one of those people. So when I saw a trailer for Shutter Island, I thought “I wonder if that is a book.” Turns out, it is. Denise Lehane (of book/movie combos Mystic River and Gone Baby, Gone) released Shutter Island in 2003. Shutter Island is a stretch for Lehane. Somewhat. …
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Author: Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrew

2009, New Directions

Best ebook deal: Not available

Filed under: Literary, Mystery

The Skating Rink is the most recent contribution to Roberto Bolaño’s growing body of work in English. Unlike the recently discovered missing volume of Bolaño’s masterwork, 2666, The Skating Rink is one of Bolaño’s older works. In publishing this so soon after his latests, seminal work, New Directions has given the English-only readers an interesting opportunity to take a look at Bolaño’s career as a whole.

In his slim novel, Bolaño sets up a tight murder-mystery in the fictional Spanish city of Z, involving a beautiful figure skater, a business owner, a vagrant poet, a local bureaucrat, and an impoverished opera singer, among others. Bolaño creates a lot of suspense and tension by playing these characters off each other, and by using the shifting narratives to alternately frustrate and satisfy the reader. But the context of the novel’s publication is just as interesting as what goes on inside the book’s covers. …
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Author: Stieg Larsson

Translated by: Reg Keeland

Knopf, 2009

Best ebook deal: eBooks.com

Filed under: Mystery

[Spoiler warning: The premise of this novel and this review of it rely on a few minor plot points from Larsson's previous book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If you're planning to read Dragon Tattoo, think twice about reading this review. If you've already read it, or you want to skip to Played with Fire, then go right ahead.]

When I read Larsson’s first novel in this series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I found it to be a riveting 200-page thriller… wrapped in an extra 250 pages of setup, exposition, and boredom.

The opening of Played with Fire has much more promise. Larsson doesn’t spend as much time setting up his characters in this installment, and instead he gives us a couple of hooks to pull the narrative forward while he lays the foundation for a new plot. Lisbeth Salander (Larsson’s tough-as-nails, pint-sized hacker heroine) is being pursued by the sadistic rapist whom she’s been blackmailing, and the prologue mentions a young girl held captive somewhere.

Unfortunately, Larsson never really makes good on the suspense he builds in the novel’s beginning. Instead of a satisfying story arc, he uses manipulative tricks to stretch out a relatively simple plot. He cuts away from action to build false tension, he creates mystery by withholding information from the reader, and he can bore you with bad writing at any moment. Essentially, Larsson is the Swedish Dan Brown.

To make matters worse, Larsson actually has talent. You can see it in glimpses here and there, but ultimately Larsson’s lack of discipline (and lack of a good editor) turns what could be a taut mystery into a sloppy, meandering revenge tale.

If you liked Larsson’s first book, you’ll probably like this one for the same reasons. It’s a quick read, too, for 500 pages, and I found it more consistently entertaining than Dragon Tattoo. Just don’t expect the best mystery you’ve ever read, like the hype says. In fact, it’s probably best not to expect a mystery at all.

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Author: Mario Acevedo

2009, Eos

Best ebook deal: Diesel eBooks

Filed under Horror, Mystery

I honestly can’t remember why, or when, I bought this book. I think it must have been on a whim while killing time in a bookstore one day, although I’m not sure what it says about me that I go for something called Jailbait Zombie on a whim.

The premise is silly to say the least: a vampire private eye teams up with an underage psychic harlot to put an end to a rash of zombie attacks in a remote Colorado town. There are mobsters and even machinated zombie chimera cyborgs too. It’s written with a satisfyingly noir-ish, hardboiled flavor, and the book, it turns out, is surprisingly entertaining. …
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