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By Nico Vreeland, on April 29th, 2010 [Since 1954, the Mystery Writers of America have given Edgar Awards to the best work done each year in the mystery genre. I've spent the past two months reading 12 novels nominated for 2010 Edgars in two top categories.
In two posts today, I'll recap each novel, and handicap the two categories before the awards are presented tonight. This post will focus on the Best First Novel by an American Author category; click here for Best Novel. ]
 I’ve reached this conclusion: it all comes down to suspense.
To make a mystery novel good, it helps to have good characters, an original premise, a cool or unique idea, and richly detailed scenes and settings. But without suspense, that cake don’t rise.
Suspense keeps the pages turning, it keeps you up late, and it makes you miss your stop on the subway. That’s my one-step litmus test for good mystery (if you’ve got other ideas, by all means, please leave them in the comments).
This post will serve a few different purposes. First of all, it’ll provide quick summaries and capsule reviews of all six novels nominated for Best First Novel.
Secondly, this post reflects my own rankings of these six novels. The first one listed is my favorite, the one I would give the Edgar to, based on my suspense-is-king philosophy. From there it goes in order of preference down to Cristofano.
Thirdly, I’ll estimate the odds of each book actually winning. When the odds don’t match the rankings, that’s where I think me and the judges will differ. This should give you an idea of how closely matched the novels are, and it should also give you something to gamble on today. Those odds are also subjective and made up, so take that into account.
Without further ado, let’s get to it. Hit the jump to see my pick for Best First Novel by an American Author. Click the links to read the full reviews of these books. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 28th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: Malla Nunn
Washington Square Press, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
In A Beautiful Place to Die, a Johannesburg detective, Emmanuel Cooper, travels into the “deep country” of South Africa to investigate a hoax in a small town called Jacob’s Rest. It turns out to be a real case, the murder of a white police captain, possibly by a black or “coloured” (meaning, roughly, mixed-race) worker.
Beautiful takes place in the early 1950s, when race relations in SA were strictly governed by the Immorality Act, which explicitly bans interracial sex, and implicitly bans most other kinds of interracial contact.
The themes of race, racism and morality not only serve as emotional undercurrents, they also actively influence the case and Emmanuel’s attempt to solve it. The investigation is further complicated by small-town politics, national politics, laws, secrets, vendettas, bigotry, and more. It’s a case that could cost Emmanuel his career or even his life, and a very solid premise for a novel.
Additionally, Malla Nunn is the best prose stylist among the Edgar nominees…. when she wants to be. The first half of this novel is enjoyable and engrossing, thanks in no small part to her style and the lush, brutal setting. The second half is solid, but bows more to plot and the mechanics of the case, and forgets the fractured soul of the country Emmanuel finds himself in. …
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By Mike Beeman, on April 27th, 2010  Author: Yann Martel
2010, Spiegel & Grau
Filed Under Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
0 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
I feel conflicted about about panning this book. I really didn’t want to. I wanted to love Beatrice and Virgil (although when I heard Martel describe his next project as “a conversation taking place between two animals on a shirt,” I cringed). I did not let the many acerbic reviews it received everywhere stop me from buying the book because I felt that, as a fan of his other work, I owed it to the author and myself to find out first-hand. I loved Life of Pi. I loved Martel’s short story collection,The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, which I bought immediately after reading his Booker Prize winning novel. If you haven’t read either, do yourself a favor and grab them. And if you enjoy them, too, do yourself another favor and stop right there. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 26th, 2010 Drop everything and read Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre, now. See other entries in this series here.
 DBC Pierre is a Mexican author from Australia; his parents are English and he grew up largely in Texas. He was a cartoonist and a drug addict for a while, then he became an award-winning novelist on the first try. He’s not so easy to categorize, and neither is his work.
Pierre’s debut novel, Vernon God Little, won the Booker when he was 42. In it, our hero and narrator is Vernon Little, an awkward teenager in the small town of Martirio, Texas. Vernon’s voice is a mix of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. In other words, funny, quirky, cutting, perceptive, and with a realistic hillbilly twang.
Before the novel begins, Vernon’s best friend, Jesus Navarro, opened fire in the middle of the high school and killed many people before turning the gun on himself. Since Jesus is gone, the town wants someone else to blame, and they settle on Vernon.
Those previous two paragraphs don’t seem to work too well together. But Pierre somehow pulls it off and Vernon God Little is the funniest book about a school shooting that you’ll ever read. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 23rd, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: Kathleen George
Minotaur, 2009
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
I was surprised by how much I liked The Odds. It’s not a mystery, for one thing, despite what its cover says. It also starts slowly, with a large cast of characters and perspectives connected in a languidly moving series of interactions. The plot never really thickens or twists, it just ambles along the track it initially lays out.
Mostly, that track centers around a quartet of orphaned kids—the Philips children—trying to live on their own, without being split up by the foster care system. There are complications, but most of the drama comes from these honest, unselfish children carving out a place for themselves and watching out for each other. It’s not the kind of thing I usually like, but Kathleen George never lets it get cloying or cliched, in the way that kind of thing usually gets.
Basically, we’ve got a bit of a magic trick: The Odds is a simple story that’s much more enjoyable than any of its individual elements would lead you to believe. …
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By David Duhr, on April 22nd, 2010 This book has been chosen as a Great Read
 Author: Dan Chaon
Ballantine, 2009
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
The ruin lifestyle is what a dude named Breez calls it in Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply. We’re at the brink of destruction: melting polar caps, ocean dead zones, a looming food shortage. “Before long,” Breez says, “the question will have to be asked: how quickly can you eliminate three or four of the world’s six billion people?”
If you’re someone like Breez, the first step is to eliminate yourself. Leave home and slough off your original name and persona. Steal a new identity, or several. Live off of stolen credit cards procured with stolen birth certificates, and save your scammed cash in offshore accounts. Be Mark in Nevada, Vladimir in the Ivory Coast, Henry in Kiev. Never let anyone know who you really are. Forget everything about who you once were.
The identity of the 21st century—fluid, malleable, subject to change without notice or warning. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 21st, 2010
By Nico Vreeland, on April 21st, 2010  Starting this week, we’re using a new tag, babytown frolics. Basically, it’s the opposite of our Great Reads category. Where the Great Read designation recognizes outstanding literature that the reviewer thinks everyone should read, the babytown frolics tag designates awful literature that the reviewer thinks no one should read.
We’re not trying to pick on authors with this tag. Our contributors pick all their own books to review, nothing is assigned or required. So when a contributor writes a negative review, that reviewer genuinely thought he or she would like the book. Still, we make every effort to be even-handed and objective, and highlight the strengths of a book every bit as much as the weaknesses.
However, when a reviewer uses the babytown frolics tag, that means he or she thinks the book should never have been published. That means something in the book-producing, -marketing, -buying, and -reading process has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
All too often these days, certain publishers care about their bottom line, not just more than the quality of the books they produce, but to the exclusion of quality. A very important role in the publishing world is that of gatekeeper, the entity that keeps utter drivel from reaching the hands of innocent readers. Since publishers don’t seem to want this job anymore, we try to do our part to keep out the drivel. Most of the time we try to use a velvet rope, but sometimes we have to break out the tear gas. “Babytown frolics” is our way of trying to have fun while getting the dirty work done.
Occasionally, we might also drop the tag on an author whose ego and sense of entitlement has outgrown his talent (I’m looking at you, Douglas Preston).
The phrase “babytown frolics” comes from the pilot episode of the very funny animated show, Archer.
By Nico Vreeland, on April 20th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel By An American Author---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: Stefanie Pintoff
Minotaur, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
In the Shadow of Gotham has a very straightforward premise, and isn’t shy about laying it out. The story centers on Simon Ziele, a CSI-style police detective in early 1900s New York. Ziele embraces forensic evidence despite the fact that fingerprints are not admissible in court in 1905.
At the end of the first chapter, Ziele gives us the first of many updates on the case:
I had the unsettling sensation that we were being drawn into an even more complicated case than I’d originally thought—one that would draw upon our every power of deduction to unravel.
That mission statement contains the novel’s best and worst facets. The best is Pintoff’s clear desire to tell a detective story and nothing but. She puts a new spin on the tired theme of forensics-based detecting, and from the get-go she writes an unapologetic mystery.
The bad part, though, is that tone. In sounding historically authentic, the novel also sounds stodgy and droll. The characters are too honorable and the case too straightforward for Ziele to need his every power. …
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By Alex Reicherter, on April 19th, 2010 Drop everything and read Rebecca by Dapne Du Maurier now. Read other entries in this series here.
 I recommend reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca not because it will have a profound impact on your life (it won’t) or because it belongs in the upper echelon of contemporary literature (it doesn’t). Rather, this recommendation is intended for a very specific audience: aspiring writers. For anyone who has ever had trouble mastering the most basic and essential building blocks of good fiction (namely plot, setting and character), I can think of no better place to go for inspiration than this brilliant and engrossing mystery. …
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