2011, Putnam Juvenile

Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult

It’s 1952. Janie is a regular 14-year-old American girl, living in Los Angeles… until she discovers that her parents are Communists, about to be arrested for un-American activities. The family flees to London.

Once there, Janie starts flirting with a boy in her class named Benjamin, and they embark on a mission to spy on a man that Benjamin thinks is a Russian agent. Only, the man he meets is Benjamin’s own father, the apothecary of the title.

From there, Benjamin and Janie begin a fairly typical young-adult-novel adventure: they follow clues, use newfound powers, and become embroiled in a massive conflict with no less than the world at stake.

It’s a familiar arc, and while Meloy writes it well, it’s a relatively forgettable novel. Except, that is, for one aspect, a facet of the mythos of The Apothecary that’s fairly original, but also quite uncomfortable. (Minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go in fresh, skip the rest of this. If you like Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books, you’ll probably like this one, as well.)

The odd facet has to do with Meloy’s chosen system of magic. It begins as herbology, a muddled herb in a cup of tea that makes the drinker tell the truth. But it quickly becomes proper magic, as Janie and co. receive a potion that will transmogrify them, temporarily, into birds.

The recipe for that potion, and for every other potion the apothecary can concoct, comes from a massive, centuries-old tome called the Pharmacoepia. That innocent detail makes a world of difference: it means that the magic contained in the Pharmacoepia is available to anyone who can read Latin. It means that Janie and Benjamin are not unique.

This means that the world of The Apothecary, and its magic, is more democratic. It also highlights the fact that one of the great pleasures of this brand of YA book comes from being included, which means, it comes from excluding people. When you read Harry Potter, you get to be a wizard, instead of some frumpy old muggle. And not only that, you get to be among the most famous, most important wizards in the world. If everyone could use magic, the thrill of inclusion would wane significantly.

To make it more palatable, authors ensure that the exclusive group is oppressed somehow, or that they don’t want to be part of the exclusive group. Katniss Everdeen hates fighting in the Hunger Games, but without the status the Games afford her, she’s nothing but a gruntwork drone, slowly starving to death in backwater Appalachia.

There is no such status, and no exclusivity, in The Apothecary. The knowledge of the Pharmacoepia comes from millenia of tireless study on the parts of a long line of apothecaries and alchemists. The Pharmacoepia itself is nothing but a glorified cookbook. Without it, a few people might remember a few potions, but the bulk of the knowledge, the bulk of the magic, will be lost.

Similarly, the users of the Pharmacoepia are interchangeable. If it falls into the wrong hands, the bad guys can use it just as well as the good guys. If Janie and Benjamin get lost or die, two other children could easily take their places. Any two children, from anywhere. They don’t even really need the children.

This makes for some uncomfortable moments. For example, at the end of the book (it’s also mentioned on the very first page), Benjamin slips Janie an alchemical roofie that makes her forget the previous three weeks, which is how long she’s been in London. She forgets all about the good guys and their fight against the bad guys. More unnervingly, she drops out of the alchemical brotherhood and instantly she’s just a regular girl again.

Knowledge of the Pharmacoepia is the only thing that ever makes her special, and because that knowledge can so easily be erased, so too can her specialness. It’s a weird, slippery philosophy for a YA book to be founded on. Meloy, for better or worse, never puts the replaceability of her heroes at the novel’s center, so it can easily be forgotten or ignored. But without it, The Apothecary is a fun but forgettable novel.

Similar books: The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins; the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling; the Unfortunate Events series, by Lemony Snicket; the Flavia de Luce series, by Alan Bradley

Author: Cody McFadyen

2008, Bantam

Filed Under: Thriller, Horror

This is a book that will in no way exercise your mind, or place any demands upon you as a reader. When I first started it, I read the first few pages, gave a book-snobby, mocking laugh, and put it right back down on my counter. I scooped it up on the way out the door to work a few days later, since I was running late and couldn’t remember where I had left 1Q84.

I crushed through the first third or so of the book on my commute that day, and found myself engaged and ready to read on the next day. A thriller about team of detectives hunting down a serial killer, The Darker Side takes a lot of cues from The Silence of the Lambs, and, since the murders center around a theme of Catholic contrition, even more from Seven.

Here’s the gist. I won’t give too much away since some of the motive stuff doesn’t come out until later in the book. Basically, bodies are being found in conspicuous places. The cause of death in each case is a sharp puncture wound to the heart, and in the wound is stuffed a numbered crucifix. The bodies pile up and come from more prominent places, and the killer, who calls himself The Preacher, releases “user-tube” videos of the victims’ forced Catholic confessions just prior to murder. The victims are picked because they have deep, dark secrets that somehow The Preacher has uncovered. An FBI team frantically tries to get ahead of the killings and prevent more from occurring, but it’s clear The Preacher is pulling all the strings.

The writing is not particularly good. The prose and syntax aren’t problematic, but never shine either. It’s the depictions of the stock characters that provide the initial sticking points.

The leader of the team of FBI investigators is Smoky Barrett. She’s serial killer expert who survived a violent rape followed by the gruesome murder of her family by a criminal she was hunting. Her face is scarred–like her psyche–but her broken and repaired constitution provides her just what she needs to be the best serial killer hunter there is. Clichéd though it may be, McFadyen depicts this side of Smoky adeptly. It’s when he tries to flesh her out with moments of woman-ness that things get a little off:

I’ve never had a penis, never wanted one, but I’ve held them in my hands. I know what they feel like, smell like, taste like, but I don’t know what it’s like to hold one and feel it being touched at the same time.

This is her trying to relate to a transsexual victim. I’m sure a woman detective could conceivably go through a logic like this when thinking about trannies, but it feels a lot more like a male author trying to make his female protagonist look more definitively female than it does any sort of depiction of natural sentiment. Then, here’s how she relates to motherhood:

She assumes I know what she means, and she’s right. It’s universal mother-speak. Every child knows, when Mom uses your first and last name together, you’re in trouble. First, middle, and last? That particular triumvirate is reserved or the worst offenses, the greatest angers. Duck, cover, and hold.

No father has ever resorted to using middle names, evidently. Mothers only. The rest of the team members are similarly stilted. There’s the wisecracking bitch, who actually has a heart of gold; the geeky young tech expert, who happens to be gay; the white-knight family man, who has but one chink in his armor, etc. Once you get past all that, though, the book is pretty good.

This story is a lot like the plot of Seven. Ultimately that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because I really like that movie. Things get quite grisly, and at times very graphic sexually, so if you don’t like that kind of thing in your thrillers, stay away. Unlike–and perhaps due in-part to–Seven, there is lots of cookiecutterness to be found here, namely in Smoky and her team and the stereotypical serial killer at large. But you’ll almost certainly become drawn-in in large part because of the victims.

The auxiliary characters are the best in the book. Occasionally McFadyen pulls away from the main narration (which is focused though Smoky), and gives small chapters focused on these victims. These usually dip into the character’s past, and unveil for the reader the horrible things the victims have suppressed and The Preacher has uncovered. I usually don’t like perspective shifts like this in books, since it too often feels like the easy way. But in this case, it works great. These segments humanize the victims very nicely, and they can be tough to read. More than one made me squirm. Had McFadyen merely related the information through Smoky or The Preacher, it would have dulled the impact a lot and made it, well, preachy.

The Darker Side did a great job of sopping up time for my daily commute. If you like books/movies like those I referenced in the second paragraph, this is a good choice to occupy your commute, or to take on vacation for a mindless escape.

Just for fun, here’s one more silly, overly-titillating example of McFadyen’s woman-think:

Those priest eyes fix on mine and I feel the old, familiar flush of guilt. He knows, he knows. He knows I masturbate sometimes with the help of a vibrator. He knows I take a secret pleasure at making a man come with my mouth.

Similar Reads: No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.), The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (Williams).

[Note: I found this book sitting at an Au Bon Pain with a sticker on it that said “FREE BOOK.” Someone “released it into the wild” through a program run by BookCrossing.com. I’ve since started releasing some books for others to find. It’s cool idea and a program worth checking out.

Author: Neal Stephenson

2011, William Morrow

Filed under: Literary, Thriller

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A few weeks after Reamde came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the ebook edition being full of typos. This is not surprising. The paper version has more than its share of typos, too. Not an overwhelming amount, perhaps two dozen mistakes over a thousand pages. But more than you see in most professionally published books.

I can entirely understand these errors. Reamde runs a thousand pages, roughly 400,000 words, and it was published just three years after Stephenson’s last novel. In addition, it’s a globe-trotting thriller, steeped in real-world facts and places, technology and tactics. And it has its own built-from-the-ground-up online virtual world.

It took me three weeks just to read this thing, let alone proofread it. I can’t even imagine editing or writing it. So a few mistakes are certainly forgivable. But they tell of Stephenson’s attitude toward writing, which has emphasized, in the past decade, length above all, moreso than ensuring the highest sentence-to-sentence quality possible.

This is not to say that Reamde feels rushed or shoddily produced. On the contrary, it’s very very good—entertaining, immersive, thrilling, fun, educational and full of great characters. But it’s not Stephenson’s best work. His best, in my mind, is still Snow Crash, the revolutionary information-disease cyberpunk epic that made his name. Snow Crash is also a hefty read at well over 100,000 words—I’d guess 150K—but it’s less than half the size of Reamde, and it shows a different Stephenson than the one from 2011.

When Stephenson labors over a passage, his prose is his best talent. Snow Crash teems with that kind of writing. But, since its publication (in 1992), Stephenson’s writing has expanded and sprawled. As Tom Bissell pointed out, he’s published six 1000-page novels in a dozen years. That’s an absurd pace, and it lends itself more toward new-Stephenson’s penchant for extensive logistical layout and much less toward old-Stephenson’s penchant for phrase-turning and bombastic character details.

For example, in Snow Crash, the main character is a samurai-sword-wielding pizza delivery driver, named Hiro Protagonist, who drives a very fancy car. This is how it’s described:

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big, sticky contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

In Reamde, the two main characters are a middle-aged game developer and his favorite niece, who was born in Eritrea and raised in Iowa. Here’s how the coolest car in that novel is described, from the perspective of the niece:

From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.

A lot of this comes down to taste. If you prefer a risky style, and shorter, more deliberate, and frankly more entertaining prose, you’d like Snow Crash more. If you prefer a very good but slightly long-winded and not quite as polished style, then you might well prefer Reamde.

Whatever your preference, it seems that Stephenson, as the last decade has proven, is the latter kind of writer, and Snow Crash was the exception to the rule.

That’s not to say Reamde doesn’t have its gems. In fact, it has a lot of them, but the sheer length of this book, the exhaustive setup and tangents Stephenson indulges, means that those real beauties are usually dozens of pages apart.

In this kind of format, Stephenson’s best talent is his world-building, a descriptor that usually attends science fiction or fantasy writing. In this case, the world Stephenson builds is an intensively realistic setting full of brilliantly realized characters. Each of his dozens of heroes and villains has a history and a unique worldview, habits, thoughts, good sides and weaknesses.

So, finally, the very worst you can say of Reamde is that it’s an outstanding thriller, one of the best ever and unique in its complexity and humanity. For the sake of thoroughness, and because it seems appropriate to have a review of Reamde run 1500 words, the rest of this review is a summary of the premise.

Richard Forthrast spent a good deal of his 20s ferrying pot across the US/Canada border. He made a whole lot of dirty cash, and so he spent a lot of time wondering and worrying about money laundering. Later on, after losing an entire decade to an addiction to World of Warcraft, he developed an idea for a similar medieval combat online role-playing game, one that wound up being called T’Rain, short for TERRAIN, the landform-generating program at the heart of the world.

T’Rain has a number of features that distinguish it from WoW, like its hyper-realistic land formations, and its ability to map real-life situations and actual jobs like airport security or business meetings into the game. Most of all, T’Rain’s distinguishing feature is that Forthrast built significant substructures into the game to cater to, of all groups, the masses of teenage Chinese “gold farmers” who slog through the game earning gold, weapons, and other things of value, and then selling them to rich Western players who have more money than time.

So, T’Rain features self-sustaining accounts, which don’t require credit cards, since Chinese teenagers don’t have credit cards. And it easily allows for transferring money back and forth from China, and so on and so forth. As Richard notices, gold farming is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, so catering to that market is not exactly insane.

But it also makes T’Rain ideal for money laundering, and for a particular kind of virus called ransomware, which worms into an infected computer, locks up all the documents it can find into one big encrypted zip file, and then charges the infectee for the key. The biggest new ransomware virus in T’Rain is called REAMDE, and it tells its victims to report with their ransom payment (a bargain-basement $73) to a certain location inside the game. That makes it difficult to actually pay, since hordes of predatory third-party gamers descend on the location in question and kill anyone who approaches.

Life’s tough in the real world, too. When a young hacker steals a bunch of credit card numbers and sells them to the Russian mafia, the file gets corrupted by REAMDE, and the Russian mafioso press-gangs the hacker’s girlfriend (who happens to be Richard Forthrast’s favorite niece) into service to track down the person responsible for the virus, so that he, the mafioso, can kill him.

All of that is just the beginning of the plot, the barest outlines of the premise. We’re still not even 100 pages into the novel’s massive girth. If you’re already bored, this probably isn’t the book for you. Things get more interesting, certainly, and there’s plenty of action, but Stephenson is never afraid to explain, in minute detail, the inner workings of a relatively minor detail, like how Richard stumbled across Pluto, his genius geologic-model maker, and why detailed geographic formations are important.

Stephenson’s writing is never quite dry, but it can be exhaustive, and hence exhausting. Still, a great novel, especially if you’re already a Stephenson fan.

Similar books: The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway; Zero History, by William Gibson; Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

2011, Mulholland Books

Filed Under: Thriller, Sci-Fi.

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I’m not exactly sure why I’ve been reading time travel books lately, but so far I’ve benefited nicely. Much like The Map of Time–though it is a very different book–The Revisionists mixes just the right amounts of elements from different genres to make for an exciting and compelling read.

Zed is from the future, a future that purposefully obfuscates its own history. Books are only allowed in print for so long before being utterly obliterated from the record. When a person dies, the government scrubs all trace of their existence down to seizing photographs and belongings from the their loved ones’ possession. Faced with such a situation and left with nothing to lose, Zed, who works as an investigator for the government, accepts an assignment to travel back in time in order to protect the Perfect Present.

Zed’s world came about through a chain of terror events (which stemmed from unregulated defense contracting and privatized espionage in the early 2000′s) that resulted in a world war. Years later when society was rebuilt with tighter government control, time travel was invented. Despite the governments best efforts at an iron fist, it fell into rebel hands. These rebels (known as “hags”) travel through time to pivotal moments in the human timeline in the hope of righting a former wrong–stopping an assassination, derailing the 9/11 plot, preventing the Holocaust. It’s the job of operatives like Zed to make sure these events still occur, to keep history from being rewritten and thus preserving the Perfect Present.

It’s damn near impossible to talk about a book like this without spoiling anything, so be warned there’s possible spoilers ahead. I’ve tried not too, but I’m sure there’s some minor points that might be considered spoiler-y, so if you want to avoid that, this is where the review ends for you: exciting political thriller that incorporates time travel is worth your time.

Ready? Okay.

The key to fiction that involves time travel is all in the handling. I imagine it’s pretty easy to get into a plot only to find you’ve written yourself into a paradox that can’t be explained away in the story. Here, time traveling is treated smartly, in that it doesn’t ever really happen on the page. This is not a leap-around-time adventure like Back to the Future. Instead it’s more like Terminator: time travelers from different factions are sent to our present with the purpose of affecting world events in order to steer the future to their designs.

What I liked so much about this book was how much this works in the periphery. Sure, Zed is an agent sent from the future, but the most immediate consequence lies in the present. His job is to make sure a catastrophic event occurs in Washington DC in our era. So we are introduced to the various characters involved (mostly unbeknownst to them) in the cataclysm that’s yet to transpire.

We know what the players don’t. They’re going to die. But Mullen offers a delicious twist on dramatic irony–through the actions of Zed and the hags, that outcome can be altered. And that, really, is why this book works so well: tightly knotted plot lines full of whistleblowers, double agents, treasonous ambassadors, scumbag defense contractors and oblivious lawyers. It’d be a solid political thriller without all the sci-fi stuff. Like any good piece of science fiction, its extraordinary elements work to enhance the book, rather than buckle when asked to support the work without much help.

Mullen shifts perspectives between a few characters (relating their stories or the event in question isn’t necessary for this review so I’ve left them fresh for you) and does a nice job of patiently drawing the different pieces and players together. Slowly Zed moves from the primary character to another player in the game, his story ultimately enmeshing with the others’ to make for a fine cohesive whole. This book went from piquing my interest in the first two chapters to having me riveted. It’s a solid thriller.

Similar Reads: Flashback (Simmons), The Thousand (Guilfoile) The Map of Time (Palma), How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Yu)

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

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.

1969, Titan

Filed Under: Horror, Thriller.

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This is a book that is (to the best of my knowledge) being reprinted for the first time since its original 1969 release. This is because it’s the basis for the movie Straw Dogs (1971), which is getting the remake treatment and hitting theaters this fall–with Dustin Hoffman being replaced by James Marsden. In fact, “Straw Dogs” is presented on the new cover in much larger type than the book’s actual title. This makes sense to me: with it’s one-dimensional characters and blindly stumbling plot, Trencher’s Farm would make a better horror movie than a book.

George MacGruder, an American professor on sabbatical, brings his family to a farm (Trencher’s Farm) in England so he can work on a book. George staunchly opposes the death penalty, and letters he wrote to the London Times and the British government influenced a widely debated capital punishment case in London. As a result, a deranged kiddy rapist was granted clemency. This pedophile, Henry Niles, escapes from an asylum ambulance on a road near Trencher’s Farm during a snowstorm, and soon after George runs him over in his car. Compassionate as he is, George takes him to Trencher’s, where they can ride out the storm and await the town doctor.

Meanwhile a little girl has gone missing, and as word spreads of Niles’s escape, townsfolk immediately correlate the two incidents. It doesn’t take the MacGruders long to realize Niles’s identity. This is where the book’s believability starts to fray. Instantly, George and his wife, Louise, go from feeling bad for the broken man on their sofa, to being mortally afraid of him, as if knowing he was a pedophile suddenly turned him into some invincible brute who could easily kill them all. It’s hard to swallow; Niles quickly proves to be nothing more than a harmless MacGuffin.

Then a search party shows up, looking for the girl. When George tells them he’s caught Henry Niles, they instantly go from drunk farmers to deranged psycho killers full of insatiable bloodlust. George barricades his family in, as he doesn’t want to give Niles up to people he believes will hang him without trial. Very soon after, the crazed farmers kill an innocent townsperson who stops by to check in during the storm, and the MacGruders find their house under siege.

That’s pretty much the set up for the remainder of the book. The whole thing is a long 3-vs-1 where drunks gone insane are too stupid to properly break into a farmhouse with one guy and his useless wife inside.

The rabidness of the farmers is pretty hard to swallow. I suppose it’s meant to be some weird insular community, like in The Wicker Man, but living in the English countryside isn’t enough to make their isolation believable. Coming together to cover up some dark town secret is one thing (and the heart of some decent horror books/movies), but being berserk murderers is another. Besides the fact they want to kill, Williams differentiates them from other English people with corny dialogue:

“Us’ll burn down the bloody house if us don’t get him.”

But even despite all that, there is very forced and jarring distinction between being English and American presented here. It fuels the attackers–and sets up some sort of artificial morality system to perpetuate the rage: Americans are soft and selfish, British are gritty and loyal to their communities. Every single character seems to have a fundamental understanding that Britons and Americans somehow occupy separate branches on the evolutionary tree. George’s do-nothing wife is continually used to prop this up.

“Don’t honey me, you all-forgiving bastard. What do you think being married is, the stupid PTA? God, you make me sick, look at you, all nicey-nicey smiles, you big sook. What’s going on in that great All-American head of yours? Eh? Be honest–for once.”

Now George really never does anything to cause all the American resentment, especially from his wife. And they’ve just relocated to England temporarily from their home in America, where we’re told they’ve lived for at least nine years, so it’s hard to imagine how she compartmentalized her resentment for so many years. The whole British and American thing simply makes no sense. Take this, again from Louise (Karen is their daughter):

Karen had her father’s habit of staring blankly at you, as though you had just told an obvious lie and she was giving you a chance to recant. It was a common characteristic in America. She’d never discovered whether the dead-pan face was meant to express contempt, or was a sign of incomprehension.

What? Her habits weren’t passed through George’s American DNA. Karen’s probably looking at her in contempt because she’s inconsistently stupid and vitriolic about Americans all of a sudden with no provocation, despite the fact that she’s lived there for a significant portion of her life and willfully raised a family there. The whole British/American thing is incessant and serves no purpose but to artificially and unconvincingly cram additional conflict into the story.

Five pages after that quote, Louise flip-flops and looks to her husband for comfort. Then she hates him again because he’s a peace-loving yankee. Then she loves him again. She rapidly cycles like a manic-depressive in need of a lithium dose. It’s just one more cheap move to prop up the toppling plot–keep in mind, during all this the murderous hick farmers are fighting a seemingly futile battle with the front door. Louise’s aberrant behavior is merely a way of forcing George into different emotional responses in order to distract the reader from the one-note story about those crazed lunatics throwing themselves against the door like a tsunami of rabid baboons. They can’t even manage to get through a window without George being able to defend himself in one way or another, so I can see the need to infuse additional tension, since that the logistics of the siege are hardly believable and not very sustainable.

That’s why the movie could be decent. You don’t need to worry about plausibility. You don’t have to rationalize psycho killers. Friday the 13th movies are watchable because (discounting the first) Jason’s basically a murderous robot. You don’t question his motives, nor are you expected to care. He’s built for that purpose. If there was a scene where he was drinking whiskey and thinking about how he could get away with wanton murder, it’d be lame. Or imagine if zombies had agendas. You don’t learn or want to learn the politics of the soon-to-be-victims. There are two possible outcomes, they live or die. The enjoyment comes from seeing that play out.

A movie adaptation can (and should easily) address the flaws in Willaims’s book. Louise’s outbursts will last only long enough to express marital discord–no need for motive or justification, we get it. George won’t need to turn to the screen and discuss the immorality of capital punishment, or dissect the irony involved when a threatened man is forced to contradict his pacifist beliefs for the safety of his family. It’ll just be a thrilling survive or die scenario. Take Jason again. You think he’s gone, the creepy music goes all andante… then bam, some naked girl gets her head cut off in a station wagon. If the whole movie was him failing to get into that station wagon while the girl argued with her boyfriend about whether he was an adequate lover or who was better at rolling up the windows, it would be stupid and unwatchable.

This book is what it is: an easy, mindless read, an empowerment fantasy, a paperback to be found on a take-a-book-leave-a-book shelf. And to that end, it’s all right I guess. If you’re looking for that sort of thing, it could be worth your time. Otherwise, wait for the movie.

Similar Reads: Lamplighter (Simmons). The movies The Shining and Cape Fear do a better job of conveying the type of thing I think Williams was going for.

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.

2011, Reagan Arthur Books

Filed Under: Literary, Thriller.

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The End of Everything is a curious beast. It manages to at once be a coming-of-age exploration of girlhood and a somewhat disturbing suburban thriller. What surprised me most was the depths Abbot was able to plumb in a relatively short, and at times predictable, story. It’s not a perfect book by any means, but a lot of different types of readers will find it to be worth their while.

It is the story of two girls in 1980′s Midwest suburbia. Lizzie and Evie are inseparable, both just beginning to navigate that awkward pubescent stage somewhere between childhood innocence and adult sexuality. Then one day Evie simply vanishes. The whole town goes upside-down, at least for a while, and Lizzie devotes her time to solving the mystery. She quickly proves an insightful narrator. When Evie’s father, Mr. Verver, hears a rumor of Evie’s possible drowning, Lizzie reads him perfectly:

What a tortured wisp of hope to cling to–instead of drowning, his daughter has been secreted away by a lurching man three times her age, but it’s there. It’s the strand we’ve got and we clutch at it madly.

Her perception and inferences make for a double-edged blade. Ultimately, Lizzie’s narration is both the book’s greatest asset and what holds it back from being truly great. As I mentioned, Lizzie is in the transformative stages of adolescence. Although she is no longer a child, she certainly lacks the experience or emotional maturity of an adult. But Lizzie sometimes internalizes far too wisely:

My head goes crazy with thoughts of Mr. Verver, [then] age twenty-one, a mop of dark hair and a boy’s body lurched fast over the keys. Did his collarbones jut, his Adam’s apple bob? Did he have that awkward slouch of boys who grew so fast they themselves seemed bewildered by it, faintly dazed in their own skin?

This wouldn’t be so jarring if she were a retrospective narrator, but the book is written in the first person in the present tense. At times, this causes a disconnect between Lizzie the character and Lizzie the narrator. It’s not always so, however–sometimes Abbot writes her pitch perfect:

Here’s the thing: Evie is gone, has been gone for six days, and no one can find her and it is not long, another day, before it starts to feel like no one really expects her to be found. It starts to feel like everyone is waiting to hear where the body was dumped and what was done to it.

The fluctuations in Lizzie’s narration aside, this is a very strong book. The plot (which I won’t divulge any further) is compelling all the way through. Even if some of the plot points are slightly predictable, witnessing Lizzie process things is almost as intriguing as the mystery at hand.

Abbot isn’t afraid to touch on some really dark stuff. She handles a looming, sinister sexuality between an adult male and adolescent girl with chilling care. It’s a treatment that I can’t help to compare with Lolita. Nabokov created one of the English language’s strongest narrators in Humbert Humbert. And while Abbot’s book can’t quite reach that, she certainly gets an A for effort. Her uses of plot and convention, as with her blending of genres, makes for a unique and haunting book. The End of Everything is worth your time.

Similar Reads: The Lovely Bones (Sebold), Housekeeping (Robinson), Lolita (Nabokov).

[A review copy was provided.]

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.]