Author: Raymond Chandler

1939, Alfred A. Knopf

Filed Under: Mystery, Literary

As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).

Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:

Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.

The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.

It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.

This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Mystery, Fantasy

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Low Town is a genre mashup the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever read before. It combines the world of a gritty fantasy novel—and its attendant medieval melee and magic—with the plot of a mystery novel. The hero of the novel (though “hero” is a loose description of him) is the Warden. It’s unclear exactly what that title means, but it’s certain that the Warden is the primary drug dealer in Low Town, the nickname for the slums of a large city in Polansky’s fantastical Thirteen Lands.

When the Warden stumbles upon the gruesome murder of a child, he gets drawn into a mystery that involves cruel nobles, twisted magicians, and his own dark past as both a scarred army hero and a disgraced detective.

On paper, this looks like an easy home run, but the reality is not quite as successful. It’s a bit of a mystery itself as to why it doesn’t work as well as it should: my complaints are relatively small, and Polansky is quite skilled at the things he does well. For one thing, the fantasy side of this novel draws a lot more water than the mystery does. Low Town (the place) is well-detailed and intricately imagined, down to its smallest details, like the tidy tidbit that an incompetent branch of the city’s law enforcement is ruefully nicknamed “the hoax.”

The mystery side of things isn’t quite as enjoyable, mostly because it’s too simple for my taste. I prefer a nuanced, multilayered mystery; Low Town offers something closer to an adventure, the plot points coming in the form of logistical problems rather than secrets or lies to uncover.

The Warden’s team includes an old army buddy and a savvy street kid who’s a natural thief—it’s unclear why either shows the Warden the loyalty they do, as he repeatedly rejects their help, often with vicious and unnecessary meanness. He prefers to soldier on alone, ostensibly to protect his friends, but it’s an unconvincing and ultimately much less fun way to do things.

Also problematic is the bone-thin plot, especially when Polansky makes the Warden do inscrutable things to fill pages because there are no more clues to chase down. In one scene, after the Warden’s ex-partner is killed, he finds a spot on a roof and drinks himself stupid while he watches the hoax work the scene. For hours. This is not even an act of grief, as the best the Warden can muster is mild annoyance at the man’s death. It’s just a scene that takes up words.

When the plot has some bends to take, Polansky’s talent for writing hints at how good this book could’ve been. The Warden’s way of working revolves around his mouth and his connections. He has an insolent, insulting way of mocking those he sees as harmful to Low Town, which include the police, the guard, and the federal agents investigating the child’s murder.

This is generally good stuff, especially when he lays into a righteous kill like a vile noble with depraved hobbies. And while the patois of Polansky’s dialogue takes a bit of getting used to, it makes for a sometimes fun (though sometimes grating) read.

The Warden has a habit of using his fists when his mouth doesn’t work, and the ensuing action scenes are some of the best in the novel. Also, the end of the mystery is well done, even if the Warden seizes on a single suspect for far too long before the final turns.

Ultimately, though, the Warden’s unlikeable characterization soured me on this promising novel. I’m not usually one to complain about an unlikeable character. One of my favorite characters of all time is Parker, Richard Stark’s ruthless expert criminal. But even Parker knew when to accept help, and Parker’s best scenes were when he had to deal with other people.

Because, after all, that’s what novels are about: people dealing with people. A shame that this one didn’t strike gold, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Polansky in the future.

Similar books: Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith; The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry; The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher

2011, Dutton

Filed under: Mystery, Thriller

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The Keeper of Lost Causes is the first English-translated book in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling Danish crime series, about the unique Department Q. It stars Carl Morck, who’s one of Copenhagen’s best detectives… until he falls into an ambush and watches his partner crippled and another cop killed.

Morck is deeply traumatized by the incident, and his passion for detective work vanishes. Since his superiors can’t fire him without starting a union battle, they devise a plan to stash Morck away by creating a new department for high-profile cold cases, Department Q. Morck’s assignment to Q is technically a promotion, which appeases the police union, but really it’s a way to put Morck on ice. Nobody will care if the traumatized detective never solves one of the years-old crimes assigned to him, so it’s the perfect place for him to recuperate (i.e. not work very hard). Meanwhile, the bosses can route most of the government money earmarked for Dept. Q to their underfunded homicide division.

Morck, for his part, is more than happy to sit around staring at the covers of case files. Until, that is, he runs across an interesting case and his curiosity drags him back into an investigation. Keeper follows that investigation as a straightforward, quite entertaining police procedural.

The case Morck stumbles upon is the five-year-old disappearance of a prominent, attractive female politician, Merete Lynggaard, and the narrative bounces back and forth between Merete’s experience and Carl’s unraveling the case.

Though police originally thought Merete fell into the ocean during a nighttime cruise, she was actually kidnapped and imprisoned by mysterious people. The bulk of Merete’s sections detail the torments she faces in captivity: her kidnappers have put her in an empty room without so much as a window to the outside world. She lives in complete darkness for a year, without a toothbrush or a change of clothes. After 12 months, her tormentors turn on the lights for the next year, and increase the air pressure by one atmosphere, as they will each year until they decide to kill her by dropping the pressure back to normal and making all the tissues in her body explode.

Adler-Olsen’s strength lies in crafting suspense, and these consistently nauseating looks into Merete’s imprisonment serve just that purpose. As Morck investigates, uncovering one clue after another, the vignettes describing the brutality of Merete’s imprisonment provide urgency and stoke the need to see the bad people punished. In this way, Keeper reads like a much more polished, much more gripping version of Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo Girl books.

Unfortunately, Adler-Olsen’s writing gets muddied by a rough translation, which dilutes his prose and dialogue.

He looked like a boy whose request for an ice cream cone had been refused, but knows that if he stands there long enough, there’s still a chance he might get one.

Still, he’s a much sharper writer than Larsson, and he’s one of the best I’ve read from the new wave of Scandinavian crime novelists. For every one of those seemingly mandatory translation train wrecks, you get something pretty good. Lines are never quite phrased well in English, but there are a few that you can tell might have been good in the original Danish. Like this description of a mental ward:

Egely was a whitewashed building that splendidly proclaimed its purpose. No one ever entered voluntarily, and it was far from easy for anyone to get out. It was obvious that this was not a place for finger-painting or guitar lessons. This was where people with money and status placed the weak members of their families.

Similarly half-decent are Adler-Olsen’s characterizations of Morck’s new department and his capable but weird sidekick, Assad. Both are given a depth of attention that implies they will be around for the sequels. Morck himself is an amusing hero, if not exactly riveting on his own.

My biggest complaint is that, for the reader, the discovery of the evil mastermind behind this plot comes not from Carl’s investigation, but from that mastermind simply revealing himself to Merete on a whim, as he had categorically refused to do for five years. Still, while that feels programmatic and disappointing, it is necessary for the story, and Adler-Olsen manages to keep the suspense high even after the kidnappers are unmasked, which helps a lot.

All in all, this is a well-paced procedural mystery. Certainly not the best I’ve read, but better than most of these translated pulp novels, and a perfect fit for any fans of Scandinavian crime novels.

Similar reads: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, by Stieg Larsson

1934, Redbook

Filed Under: Mystery.

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For whatever reason, I’ve never really been into mystery novels. But after unexpectedly finding a lot of enjoyment in No Rest for the Dead, I wanted to ride the wave a little longer and figured I ought to hit some of the classics. I opted to hold off on Sir Doyle (A Study in Scarlet is in my short pile), and go for the more gumshoe-y cred of Dashiell Hammett. I wanted something that I would be totally ignorant of, so The Maltese Falcon was out–I love the film. The Thin Man, though it doesn’t have any written sequels, spawned a very popular series of films (that have been languishing in my Netflix–Qwikster?–queue for ages), and seemed to have a strong following of fans on the internet. So I went to library and snagged a copy.

This is more or less your straigth forward whodunnit. Julia Wolf, assistant to the eccentric, somewhat hermetic, Clyde Wynant turns up full of bullets, and Wynant is nowhere to be found. Nick Charles is a retired detective, returned to New York City from San Francisco for a vacation with his wife, Nora. An old acquaintance with the Wynants, and assumed by most everyone to be on the case (although he tries somewhat half-heartedly to not get involved), Nick is drawn into the investigation.

The book’s style is fun and breezy. Nick, with enough edge to be interesting, is perfectly set up to play the protagonist for a mystery like this: Hammett carefully keeps him one step ahead of the other characters but one step behind the unraveling mystery, thus orienting the reader in just the right spot for compelling tension. A similar balance is struck with the characterization–Nick means business, but he never takes things too seriously. The cast of characters around him are all strong, while still fulfilling the stereotypical (prototypical?) roles of the usual suspects you expect from a mystery like this: scheming, rich ex-wife; guilty-seeming oddball son; beautiful but naive young woman; shifty lawyer; hard boiled policeman; wormy stool pigeon, etc.

And man, do they drink a lot. The book mostly occurs in night clubs (namely speakeasies, since it occurs during Prohibition) and various characters’ apartments, and in every scene they’re tossing them back, often before breakfast. Despite the rampant boozing, Nick and Nora (who is sharp-as-a-whip) generally keep their wits, unlike some other characters who get a little “tight” on liquor. The ability to consume so much and still keep his edge adds a lot to Nick’s character (and to Nora’s as his foil). The mystery here is solid, but not overly meaty. It would be passable for a hard-boiled detective story, but the levity of Nick’s character and circumstance–he’s both retired and on vacation, remember–add a winning degree of personality to the book.

The Thin Man is a good package all around, and a solid pick-up for just about any reader. Most people can probably get through it in an afternoon pretty easily. It definitely brought me back to the old days of my childhood when I used to read a ton of Encyclopedia Brown books (though this is obviously more complex than those), and it whet my appetite for more classic mysteries like this.

Similar Reads: The Maltese Falcon (Hammett), No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.). Also, the recent video game L.A. Noire does some rather interesting mystery stuff storytelling-wise and cinematically…for a while, then it gets pretty stale.

[Note: If you need help with the September 20, 1999 NY Times crossword, the dog's name is Asta.]

2011, Touchstone

Filed Under: Mystery, Thriller.

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The inevitable first question when looking at a mystery book with 26* authors is, how did they do it? The second is, of course, does it work at all?

I’m still not really sure the answer to question number one. I had fun imagining, while reading this book, that each author was given a character, or a role, kind of like a dinner party parlor game. By the end of the book, with enough authors writing multiple entries from varying perspectives it becomes clear that this wasn’t the case.

It also becomes clear that Gulli is a fine and comprehensive editor. The answer to the second question? Yeah, it works; everything is sewn up nicely.

The book opens with an affluent woman from San Francisco, Rosemary Thomas, being executed by lethal injection for the murder of her husband, art gallery curator and socialite Chris Thomas. Chris’s body was found decomposed almost beyond recognition and stuffed into an iron maiden in a German museum. It’s pretty clear (to the reader at least) there’s reasonable doubt as far as Rosemary’s guilt is concerned, but it becomes a politiczed case and she is basically fast-tracked to execution.

Then we jump back a few years, set the scene, meet the characters. Chris was crooked, so there are black market art dealers and mobsters, and he was a philanderer, so there’re a few of his lovers:  the ambitious young art dealer who owes Chris her career, and a beautiful grifter cum call girl. There’s an artist friend of Rosemary–who has good professional reason to hate Chris and his sexual advances–and her ex-con husband. There the billionaire philanthropist who funds the gallery–he was Rosemary’s friend–and there’s Rosemary’s money-grubbing lawyer brother. These were the last people to see Chris alive. Then at the center of it all, we meet Jon Nunn, the cop whose damning testimony was the final nail in Rosemary’s coffin.

Fast forward back to the present. Much of the book revolves around Nunn, who has slipped into a deep alcoholic depression, trying to reopen the case. He now thinks he got it wrong. Meanwhile a shadowy figure is also sneaking around and amonymously attacking and threatening the characters. From here, much of the book is your typical thriller. It’s exciting and fast paced, if a little predictable. But, when you consider how many ladles are stirring this pot, that’s actually pretty impressive. There are a fair amount of plot threads and character threads at work, and however Gulli managed it, it’s quite a feat that the cord never frays and the story keeps its pace and momentum nicely.

The novel reaches what I found to be its highest point about 2/3 in, when it shifts from a more taught thriller to a nice little whodunnit. All the characters, with their collected motives and alibis are brought together through Nunn’s detective work. A game of Clue ensues, with each character playing his or her hand as best they can. I’m a pretty infrequent mystery reader, I’ll admit. So maybe this is just the way these books are alway structured, I really don’t know. Nonetheless, I liked this part very much. It plays out fairly quickly, but that short time is a little cerebral and quite exciting.

Now I don’t know if its through smoothing by Gulli’s hand, or the nature of popular mystery writing, but none of the various parts of this tale feel disparate. It’s certainly not a collection of linked stories like I more or less expected it to be. Occasionally you can tell a change in author (besides the name given at the start of each chapter) through something subtle like shift in balance between dialogue and exposition, but on the whole, the style is very uniform.

In fact, the only thing that I didn’t enjoy thoroughly was the ending. I won’t spoil it of course, but it’s pretty predictable. I sort of expected that; it mostly only bothered me because of David Baldacci’s challenge in his preface:

And in my humble opinion it’s a twist that is so original you won’t have to concern yourself with bragging on your blog about how you figured it all out long before the conclusion. Well, I guess you can, but you’d be lying.

I figured it out before the end of the prologue–and I’m not lying. But that didn’t ruin this book for me. To tell the truth I got a bit of a rush to finally find out I was right all along. And I enjoyed the ride, working through the mystery to see if my suspicions were founded. I think anyone who likes mysteries or any of the contributoing authors will like this book. It’s not literary fare, just a quick and easy to digest mystery book. If you see it on an airport bookstore shelf, pick it up. It would make a great flight companion.

Similar Reads: The Thousand (Guilfoile), The Wreckage (Robotham), The Reversal (Connelly)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

*Full List of Authors: Jeff Abbot, Lori Armstrong, Sandra Brown, Thomas Cook, Jeffery Deaver, Dana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, Andrew F. Fulli, Peter James, J.A. Jance, Faye Kellerman, Raymond Khoury, John Lescroart, Jeff Lindsay, Gayle Lynds, Philip Margolin, Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Palmer, T. Jefferson Parker, Matthew Pearl, Kathy Reichs, Marcus Sakey, Jonathan Santlofer, Lisa Scottoline, R.L. Stine, & Marcia Talley.

2011, Henry Holt and Company

Filed under: Literary, Mystery.

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A Death in Summer boasts no world-breaker plot, no nail-biting race to find a killer, and no chilling plot twists. In fact, for long stretches the mystery idles in the background, nearly forgotten as characters sit around and smoke cigarettes and talk.

For most mystery writers, that would mean the book fails. But Benjamin Black—or John Banville as he’s known when winning Bookers—isn’t most mystery writers. In his hands, such a premise becomes a pleasure, mostly because he’s such a damn good writer that simply existing in the world he creates will satisfy.

Benjamin Black mysteries follow, primarily, a pathologist named Dr. Quirke, who solves crimes in 1950s Dublin with the help of an assistant named Sinclair and a police inspector named Hackett.

The crime this time around is the murder of a newspaper tycoon. Or the possible murder, at least, as it first seems to be a suicide. Quirke and Hackett slowly, almost lazily trace the clues of the case down various branches. Their attitude suits the setting: horse-drawn carriages dominate the streets of Black’s Dublin, and Quirke’s corner of the city is its prim high society, where tranquility testifies to high standing.

As the investigation proceeds, the focus of the narrative shifts to Quirke’s affair with the dead man’s widow, and Quirke’s daughter taking up with his assistant. Much more time and energy are spent living these lives than chasing particular clues, and that’s fine because the star of the show is Black’s prose.

Like this passage, in which the assistant Sinclair sees a prostitute on the street, and his thoughts spool out:

There was a hazy green glow over the square, and mist on the grass behind the black railings. The whores were out, four or five of them, two of them keeping each other company, both skinny and dressed in black and starkly pale as the harpies in Dracula’s castle. They gave him a look as he passed by but made no overture: maybe they thought he was a plainclothes out to trap them. One of them had a limp—the clap, most likely. One day, not so far in the future, he might fold back the corner of a sheet and find her before him on the slab, that thin face, the bluish eyelids closed, her lip still swollen. He wondered, as he often wondered, if he should leave this city, try his luck somewhere else, London, New York, even. Quirke would never retire, or by the time he did it would be too late to be his successor; something that was in him now would have been used up, a vital force would be gone.

It’s not just the elegance of this prose that captivates me, it’s the way it loops through the character’s life, the way it connects large concepts like death and impermanence to these two people—Sinclair and the prostitute—who haven’t even spoken (yet), and the way it reflects the thinker at every line. The book’s greatness lies in passages like this, where Black exercises his understanding of people along with his talent for the written word.

And while the case of the dead newspaper tycoon eventually coughs up a twist or two, along with a few gruesome revelations, fans of the modern crime novel should brace themselves for a different kind of story, one that’s more of a late-night companion than an up-late page-turner.

Similar reads: Misadventure, by Millard Kaufman; Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon

2011, Touchstone

Filed Under: Mystery.

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Hot, Shot, and Bothered is the second installment of a planned trilogy of mysteries featuring Lilly Hawkins, a camerawoman for a local news station. (Although I haven’t read the first Hawkins story, the plot of this novel stands on its own just fine.) I’m no stranger to mystery series like this: churned out quickly with little pretense of literary quality. Such books can be high on mindless entertainment and great to read by a pool or on a plane. So I picked this up expecting Janet Evanovich, not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even by those standards, Hot, Shot, and Bothered fell pretty short.

The story opens with Lilly covering a wildfire in the mountains a few hours east of LA and spotting a coroner’s van on its way to the site of a drowning accident. Fifty pages of unnecessary and convoluted detail later, it’s finally revealed that Lilly knew the victim from her own “shady” past.* Despite more pressing news coverage of the fire and her boss’s direct orders to drop it, Lilly becomes increasingly determined to solve what she is certain is a homicide case. Her suspicions are founded entirely on believing that the victim was so wholesome when Lilly knew her thirteen years prior that she couldn’t possibly have been the “party girl” that she is now alleged to have become. Later, these suspicions are confirmed by a decidedly weak “aha!” type of reveal.

There is also a subplot around Lilly’s career aspirations and the development of her romantic relationship, which is woven nicely into the larger plot, adding some substance without ever taking over the main stage. And, having lived in a town bordering mandatory evacuation zones of a serious wildfire not too far from the setting of the story, I can say with confidence that McFarland’s treatment of the fire is the book’s strongest aspect. It was both well-researched and true to experience. It would have been an easy mistake to use the fire to drive plotlines by manufacturing urgency or manipulating situations, but to her credit, McFarland rarely did.

That strength can carry the book only so far, however. The mystery’s many pieces and strands for the most part connect well enough (minus a few minor red herrings)–but the writing is so riddled with absurdly unnecessary detail that it distracts from the actual story. I thought that perhaps in some of these details were cleverly placed clues that might resurface, but… no. Everywhere there are the marks of immature and hasty writing, left there by a too lenient editor. Remember in third grade, when your teacher told you to use describing words? So does McFarland.

… we passed a dirt lot where rows of blue Porta Potties had been set up. Bright lights ran off generators here, but farther out individual camping tents dotted the dark landscape. There were probably men inside trying to sleep in the few hours they had free. Bell walked quickly, despite her limp, and soon we’d reached the elementary school classrooms. The rooms were laid out in a simple U-shape with an outdoor courtyard. We stayed outside the U and approached the cafeteria from the rear, where the Dumpsters were. A single halogen lamp above the back door lit a group of young Conservation Corps members unloading pallets of food and water from a semitruck. We entered the kitchen and passed men in aprons opening crates of apples.

None of the above is in any way relevant to the plot. And it goes on for another two paragraphs. Eventually, I just stopped paying attention to anything that wasn’t dialogue or direct action.

There’s a half-way decent mystery buried in here somewhere, I think, but good luck unearthing it. Someone needs to tell McFarland that readers don’t need or want to be fed every last supplementary detail. Her style is  mildly tongue-in-cheek and could be genuinely funny if she weren’t constantly spelling everything out. Lilly makes for a fine protagonist with a consistent personality and some room for growth, and as the second in a trilogy, Hot, Shot, and Bothered creates some good openings for the third book without being too blatant. McFarland is worth watching; if she embraces a far more comprehensive editorial process, she has the potential to rise on the Evanovich scale of poolside mysteries.

Similar Reads: Smokin’ Seventeen: A Stephanie Plum Novel (Evanovich), The Reversal (Connelly), The Da Vinci Code (Brown)

[A review copy was provided.]

*Lilly’s “shady” past mostly consisted of some underage drinking and acts of mild teenage rebellion, yet she is ashamed to the point of hiding details from her boyfriend. The reputedly salacious history was so tame that it bordered on seriously sheltered at best and judgmental at worst. Personally, I found this irritating and not particularly believable. Something about a supposedly savvy news reporter in her early thirties who uses “crud” instead of ever swearing really challenges my suspension of disbelief.

2011, Thomas Dunne Books

Filed under: Mystery, Thriller

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I first read John Hart when his last novel, The Last Child, was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2010—Child later won that prize, giving Hart back-to-back wins for his second and third novels.

That streak is over. Iron House, Hart’s recently released fourth novel, shows that his writing relies on the strength and tightness of his plots. The Last Child‘s plotting was superb, and it outweighed Hart’s several flaws as a writer, such as his bombastically underwhelming prose and his over-emotive, two-dimensional characters.

Iron House, unfortunately, teeters on an unsteady premise that can’t support its own weight, and its plot delivers only mild thrills. As a result, those underlying problems become much more noticeable. Altogether, it makes for a disappointing mystery/thriller hybrid that can’t quite get off the ground.

A large part of the problem here derives from Iron House‘s setup, a discombobulating mish-mash that never gets its feet under itself. It goes like this:

Michael is the world’s best assassin. He works for a high-powered mob boss named Otto Kaitlin. He falls in love and decides to get out of the business. Kaitlin lets him go, but his son and henchmen vow to exact revenge on Michael, just as soon as the old man is dead. (Question one: If they’re going to disobey the old man’s wishes, why do they need to wait until he’s dead? Unclear.)

Kaitlin dies, and then the rest of the crime family comes after Michael. The rest of the crime family, incidentally, is irredeemably evil and mean, which I almost don’t need to say, right? And Michael is, you guessed it, kind-hearted and noble. Even though he’s an assassin. Anyway…

So Michael collects his pregnant girlfriend, holes up somewhere to wait for the evil men, and when they come he kills them, because he’s the best assassin in the world.

Wait, crap, that’s not enough material for a novel. OK, so Michael also has a … long-lost brother, who’s schizophrenic and vulnerable, and also in danger from the Kaitlins. So Michael has to go protect his brother as well. His brother happens to have been adopted by a billionaire senator, and he lives on a compound where they spend more than a million dollars on security every year.

So everything’s cool, and Michael rides off into the sunset.

Aw, hell, we still don’t have a hundred pages here. Hmm. How about this: when Michael is just about to ride off into the sunset, he discovers the dead body of a man he knew thirty years before, when he and his brother were orphans at the Iron Mountain Home for Boys. So Michael has to return to the orphanage to figure out who’s killing his brother’s childhood enemies, while protecting his brother and also his girlfriend (who is somewhat disappointed about the father of her child turning out to be a ruthless killer).

To say the least, this is not a tight plot. The chief trouble is that the two stories have nothing to do with each other, and they also have such vastly different tones and settings that the end result is a muddle of strings and knots that fall apart when they get poked.

For instance, it’s difficult to get terribly invested in one dead body found in a senator’s pond—at the same time Michael’s killing people by the dozen, without discrimination or remorse.

In the end, the two disparate pieces of the novel never braid together. The thriller storyline—the Kaitlin gang on Michael’s trail—possesses no mystery: we know what will happen when people attack the greatest assassin ever, and it happens. The mystery storyline—the bodies in the senator’s pond and what they have to do with Michael’s childhood—possesses no urgency, to the point that I had to force myself to finish the last 70 pages of this book. Plus the story’s full of holes (schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder).

All this isn’t to say that Hart doesn’t still have talent; it’s visible in stretches here and there, and he milks his material for more entertainment value than many mystery writers could have. But this runaway novel shows that he relies entirely on his plotting. I’ll be giving Hart another shot, even after this wreck, but you don’t need to read this book.

Similar reads: The Last Child, by John Hart. And the atrocious The Girl She Used to Be, at least in premise. Authors: please stop writing “thrillers” about mobsters who fall in love.

Author: Will Lavender

2011, Simon & Schuster

Filed under: Mystery

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Dominance is one of those books, like a bad one-night stand, that fills you with shame every time you remember another detail. Oh, and the flashbacks, I’ll think to myself, even now. Just awful. What was I thinking?

The plot goes like this: in 1994, Richard Aldiss—a professor who’s been convicted of two murders—teaches a literature class from jail by remote CCTV. The purpose of that class is to find the identity of a mysterious author named Paul Fallows, whose two puzzlesome books hold secrets, and might also hold the key to Aldiss’s freedom.

One of the students, Alex Shipley, does just that. She unlocks the mystery of Paul Fallows, which leads her to the real killer and helps her free Professor Aldiss. Fifteen years later, members of the “night class,” as the CCTV Fallows seminar is called, are being killed in the same manner as those two long-ago murders. It’s up to Alex to reconvene the members of the night class, and figure out which one of them is the killer.

The novel—the present timeline, at least—is a fairly basic locked-room mystery, with a lit-class face on it, presumably because Will Lavender was a literature professor. But none of this was why I started reading Dominance. Instead, it was this detail that seduced me: the way these students engage with the Fallows books, the way they unlock the secrets therein, is by playing a game called the Procedure.

What does such a game look like? How does it work? How does a book function as a puzzle? This, rather than who killed so-and-so, was the mystery that led me to pick up Dominance. I should’ve known better.

[Minor spoilers ahead regarding the Procedure and how dumb it is.]

Lavender stalls for half the book before he finally admits, with what must be a tinge of embarrassment, how the Procedure is played: you act out the books. You memorize the books and then you act them out. Ostensibly, this reveals things that you wouldn’t understand just by reading the books.

In practice, it doesn’t work. The clues Alex gets from the novels all come directly from the books themselves. A smudge on a page points to a line about “Plato’s liquid gold,” and she deduces the location of her next clue from that. She gets nothing, ever, from playing the Procedure.

It seems that Lavender wanted the Procedure to be a seductive danger to his characters. But it’s only seductive if there’s something to be gained (which there isn’t), and it’s only dangerous if the books contain scenes of violence or assault that the players must then act out. The two books they study in the night class don’t have any dangerous scenes, and so most of the potential impact of the Procedure is lost.

Likewise, many of Lavender’s ideas and plot mechanisms feel like improbable occurrences at best and cheap authorial machinations at worst. Lavender seems to know this, so his characters spend an inordinate amount of time giving laborious explanations or defenses of the weirdnesses in this world.

For instance, here’s old Dean Fisk explaining how he let Aldiss teach the night class in the first place:

“I wanted Fallows found and the mystery solved. I needed it to end. … [Aldiss] told me about a class he’d been thinking about, and I paid off the board of trustees at Jasper to make it happen. I had so much power at this college that no one challenged me.”

This little paragraph showcases the fundamental problems of Dominance. Unconvincing explanations only draw attention to Lavender’s faulty logic rather than resolving it. Did Dean Fisk have so much power that nobody challenged him? Or did he have to pay off board members so that they’d let him have this class? Never mind the fact that Aldiss knows the identity of Fallows the entire time, and could have simply, you know, told Fisk.

More tellingly, all this bluster focuses on ironing out the worldly details of an action rather than illuminating the psychology and motivation behind that action. Personally, I can believe a college would let a weird class be taught. The more important question is: why did Dean Fisk want Fallows found? Why did he want the mystery solved? Lavender glosses over Fisk’s motive entirely, just one of the many times he ignores questions of motivation in favor of logistical schematics. It makes for an ultimately unsatisfying mystery.

To pump up the suspense of a limp plot, Lavender spends a lot of time drawing out simple plot twists, or having characters who already know everything (there are several) give ominous portents when they could just be telling everybody what’s going on. Here’s chapter 33 in its entirety:

“Who did this?” Keller asked. “Who killed our friends, Dean Fisk?”

The dean looked ahead, his eyes pausing for a moment. “Isn’t it clear by now, Mr. Keller?”

There was something in that empty gaze. Something insistent. Pleading.

“No,” Alex said.

“Isn’t it clear?” the man repeated, his dead eyes wandering over them all, moving from face to face. “What’s happening to each of you? Isn’t it obvious what he’s doing?”

Um, no. Honestly, it’s not even clear who “he” is. Of course, it’s not supposed to be, because all 71 words of that chapter are meant to be nothing more than an extra few bars of dramatic music.

Worst of all is the hamfisted way Lavender structures the novel. The narrative switches back and forth between “present day” and the night class in 1994. Which means that we see Alex track down Fallows’s identity (which turns out to be absurdly disappointing) intercut with scenes of her trying to discover who the new killer is.

There’s a slight problem with this: we already know what happened in 1994. Alex found the real murderer and set Aldiss free. We don’t know quite all the details, but we know the capsule summation, because after all, the main storyline is based on Alex finding the real murderer and setting Aldiss free. That structure makes the flashbacks feel pedantic and frustrating and makes the present-day storyline feel thin and tangential.

In sum, it’s a sloppily constructed mystery, full of unconvincing details and useless characters. If I were acting out this book, I’d play the part of the guy who hangs himself before the story begins.

Similar reads: Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn, for great use of flashbacks in a mystery. I’d Know You Anywhere, by Laura Lippman, actually has good flashbacks but a bad present story.

2011, Reagan Arthur Books

Filed under: Mystery, Thriller, Sci-Fi

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Whenever I read a book by Dan Simmons, I learn something new about life, love, and literature. The man knows how to hook his readers. He grabs the emotional center of mass and never lets go. He also taps the intellectual core, using literary allusion and some well-worn clichés to recontextualize the story on the page. By engaging the reader on this risky and intelligent ground, Simmons crafts his books as equal parts thriller and college seminar.

His latest novel, Flashback, is the story of ex-detective Nick Bottom, who submerges into the depths of memory-enhancing drugs in order to revive an investigation gone cold.

His case is deceptively simple: the murder of a wealthy executive’s heir. Except that dozens of detectives failed to solve it already, and Nick’s only resource is his drug-addled memory. Using a combination of high technology, altered consciousness and ham-fisted detective work, Nick hacks and punches his way toward the shocking conclusion.

Anyone who knows their Midsummer Night’s Dream perks to attention at a character named Nick Bottom. He lives up to his namesake quite effectively: an ass trapped in a fantasy from which he must awaken. Nick is a great character from beginning to end: a deeply-flawed addict widower, lovable for his dry wit and jaw-dropping resourcefulness.

Nick is joined by his on-the-brink son, Val, and his scholarly father-in-law, Leonard. These compelling characters view their environment through totally unique filters. Nick through the haze of addiction, Val through the furious hormones of youth, and Leonard through the tired incomprehension of age.

Multiple point of views are the perfect method to introduce the world of Flashback to he reader. It’s a place at once alien and chillingly familiar. Thirty or so years into our future, the United States has not improved with age. A growing Muslim Caliphate, Japanese industrialists, and Mexican revolutionaries divvy up the bankrupt nation like a Christmas ham. Americans themselves are too bogged down with flashback addiction to bring their country back from the precipice. A final holdout exists in the Republic of Texas—a nigh unreachable Eden on the far side of a treacherous warzone.

Simmons puts his protagonists to work triangulating the world of Flashback. They are, appropriately, a young man, a middle-aged man, and an old man. Each of them offers a different perspective of the same events. Val’s story is practically its own book—the account of growing up among Los Angeles gangs, filled with rage and grief. Even as the trajectory of these characters drifts away, Simmons makes it that much sweeter when they come together at the plot’s focal point: the success or failure of Nick’s investigation.

Nick traverses the story as one haunted by the past, revisiting his dead wife during drug binges. His son, constantly looking toward the future, seeks a prosperous tomorrow. Leonard acts as a lovable support character, struggling to help Val and Nick to find their way. All of them are defined by their place within a generation. As a result, the future depicted in Flashback is one built of heavy and complex emotions—anxiety, terror, hope and humor. Simmons succeeds in crafting an immersive environment for the reader, rendering Flashback a high-stakes roller coaster with no seatbelts and broken tracks ahead.

On repeated occasions, Flashback offers an over-the-shoulder thumbs up to the works that came before. Nick and Val, both movie lovers, are aware that they take part in an action drama with a bevy of loquacious villains. Think it’s an overdone trope? Think again. Simmons cuts criticism off at the pass with the humored acknowledgment that he’s not the first writer to have a character hanging from a helicopter. Stifle your ego and have fun.

And let me emphasize: this book is fun. Simmons has a knack for ensuring that his books have a little of everything. From a family drama to world economics, and from a buddy cop shoot-em-up to literary debate. No matter who you are or what you read, Flashback is a real gem.

Similar reads: 1984, by George Orwell; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick; The Terror, by Dan Simmons; Drood, by Dan Simmons.

[A review copy of this book was provided.]