The first moral of this story is: if you like mysteries, read The Last Child.

Additionally, the story “Amapola,” by Luis Alberto Urrea, published in Phoenix Noir, won the Edgar for Best Short Story. The City Noir series seems solid, Mike Beeman liked Boston Noir very much.

I missed one and hit one, I’m pretty happy with that first average. I’ll try to improve/expand in year two.

And there’s one other takeaway: David Cristofano’s The Girl She Used to Be didn’t win and hence the world did not end. Girl was one of the worst books I’ve read in years, and its loss is right up there with Avatar not winning an Oscar. Character is not dead.

You can relive the entire C4 Edgar series at this link. And you can see the full list of winners here.

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 Novel category; click here for Best First Novel by an American Author).]

Best Novel is a much more competitive category than Best First Novel, as you might expect. All of these books have serious strong suits, and I wouldn’t be completely flabbergasted to see any of them win. The top three novels, especially, are well worth reading, and close enough to each other that their odds of winning are almost identical.

That said, a quick word on how I ordered my own rankings: suspense. Quality matters, but I gave my #1 to the most suspenseful book in the category (and in the whole of the Edgars).

As for this post itself, it will do a few different jobs (if you read the Best First Novel post already, skip right to the jump).

First of all, it’ll provide quick summaries and capsule reviews of all six novels nominated for Best Novel. Secondly, this post reflects my own rankings of these six novels. #1 is my favorite, #6 my least favorite. Thirdly, I’ll estimate the odds of each book actually being picked by the judges. So the odds don’t necessarily match up with my rankings (especially my top three).

Now then: get out there and gamble! (Unless I’m somehow liable for your gambling using these odds, in which case: get out there and non-monetarily enjoy the knowledge of which books I think have the best chances of winning!)

Hit the jump to see my pick for Best Novel. Click the links to read the full reviews of these books.

1. The Last Child, by John Hart

Odds of winning: 3-1

The Last Child was one of the first Edgar novels I read, and it quickly became the standard by which I measured the others. Quite simply, Child is the most suspenseful, most compelling novel of the twelve I read. It’s about a 13-year-old boy and his unceasing search for his sister, who disappeared a year before the novel begins. There are a few hiccups, and certain elements of the story are a little manipulative, but Child simply grips you and won’t let go. That’s exactly what I’m looking for in a mystery, and that’s why I would give it the Edgar.

2. A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn

Odds of winning: 3-1

A Beautiful Place to Die is one of the the top three books in this category, and Malla Nunn is without question the best prose stylist among all twelve Edgar nominees… when she wants to be. Beautiful lays down a phenomenal first half, but then flags down the stretch and becomes merely solid. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it wins, but it doesn’t offer the white-knuckle thrill ride of The Last Child. I’m ranking it second, but it’s well worth the read, and Malla Nunn is definitely worth watching.

3. The Odds, by Kathleen George

Odds of winning: 4-1

The Odds is something of an oddity: it’s much more enjoyable than it sounds like it should be. For one thing, it’s not a mystery, despite its subtitle. Like The Missing, below, The Odds features a multitude of perspectives, so there’s never a whodunit in play. Instead of suspense, The Odds offers a quartet of orphaned kids—honest, tough, street-smart, compassionate—trying to make it on their own without getting broken up by the foster care system. I normally don’t like that kind of formulaic feel-goodery, especially falsely advertised as a mystery, but this one hooked me. George keeps it unformulaic and non-cloying (no easy feat), and instead The Odds is the simple story of a hard life, and it’s impossible not to root for those kids. As a bonus, The Odds features the best female character in all of the Edgars. I don’t see it winning over the two novels above, but it’s certainly worth a read.

I draw the line here. I recommend reading those first three, and I recommend not reading any of the following.

4. The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux

Odds of winning: 9-1

The Missing is a strange hybrid novel, halfway between mystery and literary, but satisfying as neither. It follows an honorable man named Sam Simoneaux as he sets out to find a girl whose disappearance he feels responsible for. But Gautreaux tells the story from multiple perspectives, including one that reveals the identities of the kidnappers, so there’s no mystery there. Simoneaux isn’t deep enough or, frankly, interesting enough to sustain a novel with his thoughts or actions alone, so the whole thing felt unsatisfying to me.

Gautreaux’s a pretty good writer, though, and he writes great descriptions. If you’re looking for a meandering, lushly described novel about steamboats in 1920s Louisiana, this is it. For either a mystery or a deeply engaging literary novel, though, look somewhere else.

5. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston

Odds of winning: 11-1

Mystic Arts is an energetic novel, but it doesn’t have the underlying foundation to be a really good mystery. It’s about a young slacker who gets a job as a crime scene cleaner—and several of the novel’s best moments are gleefully gruesome descriptions of messy deaths. The mystery and tension, such as they are, are entirely deflated by a woefully lackluster ending. Basically, this novel feels juvenile: exuberant but undisciplined, full of talent but with no direction to take it. Much of the novel offers enough fun to outweigh the structural shortcomings, but that ending is so bad that Huston simply couldn’t recover from it.

6. Nemesis by Jo Nesbø

Odds of winning: 8-1

Nemesis is a police procedural, in that Nesbø documents every single, solitary, excruciating action that his detective takes. He takes what could be a pretty exciting 250-page mystery, and bloats it up to 500 pages by describing every excruciating investigational detail (click the link above and read the full review for examples). This seems to be a Scandinavian thing—at least, Stieg Larsson suffers from the same problem. In fact, I gave Nemesis a little odds boost because people seem to love these bloaty, blathering books. If you really like Larsson, think about giving this one a chance, but otherwise prepare to be bored by the awkwardly named Detective Harry Hole.

That does it for Best Novel. Get your bets in; post time is 8:00 PM tonight. If you haven’t already, check out my picks and rankings for Best First Novel, the other big Edgar category.

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.

1. The Weight of Silence, by Heather Gudenkauf

Odds of winning: 4-1

This is my pick for Best First Novel, and it’s also me standing by what I said above about suspense. Starvation Lake (#2, below) is more competently written, but Silence more consistently delivers nail-biting tension. Silence‘s ending is a mess, but it kept me up late more often than any other book in the category.

The story revolves around a small girl who’s kidnapped by her drunk father early one morning, and the girl’s friend, who also goes missing. As the families and the authorities search for the girls, buried emotional histories rise to the surface. Silence is more of a thriller than a mystery—i.e. more tension comes from watching a known situation unfold, as opposed to uncovering the identity of the bad guy.

I’m guessing Edgar will choose Starvation Lake, but I’m leaning, just a bit, toward Silence. It’ll leave a bad taste in your mouth, but it’s a hell of a ride while it lasts.

2. Starvation Lake, by Bryan Gruley

Odds of winning: 3-1

Starvation is about a small-town newspaperman who investigates the suspicious circumstances surrounding the long-ago death of his childhood hockey coach. Gruley is probably the most competent writer in this category; he’s a career newspaperman himself, and his facility with language shows. However, his pacing is way off. By halfway through the book, he’s barely revealed that there was foul play involved in the coach’s death, and he saves all the plot twists—and all the tension—for the final hundred pages. If you want more suspense, go with Silence, but if you want a better story, go with Starvation.

I draw the line here. I recommend reading those first two, and recommend not reading the next four.

3. A Bad Day for Sorry, by Sophie Littlefield

Odds of winning: 10-1

Sorry is a revenge fantasy about a woman who hunts down and punishes abusive husbands. A righteous premise that promises some edge-of-your-seat thrills—except that the main character, Stella, has no connection to the woman she’s trying to help. In fact, Stella doesn’t even like her in the beginning. Sorry loses a lot of tension because Stella is never completely invested in this specific case of domestic abuse. A vague, noble urge to right wrongs is nice, but it just doesn’t grip the way a personal vendetta does. This might be intentional on Littlefield’s part, a conscious decision to lower the tension in favor of humor and feel-goodery. But I don’t like my suspense diluted, I like it pure, and this one doesn’t offer that.

4. In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff

Odds of winning: 7-1

Gotham gets an odds discrepancy because it’s already won the First Crime Novel Award, which is also given by the Mystery Writers of America. It’s a straightforward mystery novel starring a forensic detective circa 1900, when fingerprints were cutting-edge. It suffers from a stodgy voice that sucks the fun out of reading it, but Edgar might overlook that for its ingenuity and well- (if drily) executed premise.

5. Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke

Odds of winning: 9-1

Rising features another righteous premise, but it’s short on suspense and plot. It has two distinct storylines: one deals with race relations, the SNCC, and Stokely Carmichael; the other is about a murder, a young black lawyer, the white woman he helps, and some oil barons or something. The plot is meandering and slow, and the two storylines never quite mesh. Weirdly, this book is also nominated for the Orange Prize—for that, I gave it an odds boost. I think it’s better suited to a more literary award, but it shouldn’t win either.

6. The Girl She Used To Be, by David Cristofano

Odds of winning: 25-1

This book is a romance novel disguised as a mystery, and it’s very, very bad. It stars a supernaturally obnoxious woman named Melody, whose brain has room for only three thoughts: I’m sad; look at that hot guy; I wonder what he thinks about me. Reading about Melody’s inane adventures is only slightly less painful than tattooing your own brain with a Dremel tool. For more details, click the title link above, or read this monster post: What Makes a Bad Book Bad?

That does it for Best First Novel. Get your bets in; post time is 8:00 PM tonight. If you haven’t already, check out my picks and rankings for Best Novel, the other big Edgar category.

Author: Malla Nunn

Washington Square Press, 2009

Filed under: Mystery

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.

Nunn’s at her best when she’s lyrical and emotional, but still tough, when Emmanuel is investigating the case but also staying aware of the complex world around him, and its people. Here are a few examples. The first is a moment when Emmanuel enlists the help of the town’s German ex-doctor, who brings his wife along:

The old Jew and the woman were as different as a gumboot and a ball gown. Zweigman could have been any old man serving behind any dusty counter in South Africa, but the woman belonged to a cool climate place with Persian carpets and a grand piano tucked into the corner.

The word “liebchen” tripped from the woman’s mouth in a repetitive loop that stopped only when Zweigman gently placed his fingers to her lips. They stood close together, surrounded by a sadness that forced Emmanuel onto his back foot.

Here’s the simple, terrific moment when the Security Branch—the vicious secret police—first arrives:

In the churchyard, the Security Branch goons were deep in conversation with Paul Pretorius. They’d be down at the police station this afternoon, pissing in all the corners to make sure everyone knew the investigation was theirs.

And here’s Emmanuel’s response to a joke about him joining the Security Branch:

“I’m not interested in redrawing the map of the world with a thumbscrew and a steel pipe.”

As great writers do, Nunn at her best doesn’t tell you what to think about what happens to her characters, and her best writing leaves you many paths to walk with it. She also—for what it’s worth—excels at scenes of graphic sex and violence. She’s neither shy about it nor enamored of it, and that’s a hard trick to pull off.

Unfortunately, those great qualities take something of a vacation in the second half. The novel changes into a more or less standard detective story, devoid of much of the complexity and nuance the first half promises. It’s not bad by any means, but it loses some of the depth of interaction and life.

Plotwise, Emmanuel doggedly digs deeper and deeper into the secret life of the dead captain, who was Afrikaner “volk,” meaning that he was essentially a white supremacist. Despite the staunch, unwavering race fear of his sons, the captain turns out to be a more complicated man, and something doesn’t quite add up in his family.

In addition to the murder case, there’s a molester on the loose (uninvestigated by the local cops because he only targets non-whites), and all the different parts and parties of the world.

Nunn weaves together a complex plot and sketches out a vivid setting, and in the end we’ve got a quite solid mystery. Beautiful is among the best of the Edgars, but it’s just not quite as compelling as The Last Child.

Similar reads: The only other traditional detective novels nominated for Edgars this year are Nemesis and In the Shadow of Gotham; I can’t recommend either of them. Instead, I’d recommend The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon, which you can read about in this post. For more WWII-era South Africa, there’s always The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay.

Edgar impact: Nunn is the best prose writer in the Edgars, but A Beautiful Place to Die doesn’t quite deliver suspense in the haunting, lasting way The Last Child does. I’d give the Best Novel Edgar to Child, but I wouldn’t be surprised if either book won it (or The Odds, for that matter). I would be surprised if none of those three won it.

Author: Kathleen George

Minotaur, 2009

Filed under: Literary

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.

Other than the Philips children, the other main characters include a street kid who sells drugs, a man who runs a pizza joint cover for Pittsburgh’s drug kingpin, and a detective. There are also scenes from the perspectives of another half-dozen or so ancillary characters. Some of these could have been pruned back, but George does a pretty good job of handling the interweaving stories, and it rarely feels cumbersome.

I have a few quibbles with the characters. The pizza man and the Philips kids are so tough and honest and scrupulous that they verge on caricatures. But they’re also so humble and selfless that it’s impossible not to root for them. You can’t confuse them for real people, but they keep the story moving, simply because you want them to succeed.

And there’s a bonus: the best female character in any Edgar-nominated novel I’ve read so far. Too often in the Edgar books (this one and this one, especially), the main female characters are vapid, superficial cutouts. They primp and preen and worry about what men think of them, to the exclusion of any thoughts of substance.

On the other end of the spectrum is The Odds‘s Detective Colleen Greer. She’s unmistakeably feminine, and she has her share of romantic thoughts, but she also has grit, determination, and independence. She doesn’t collapse and let a man take over when the going gets tough; she doesn’t obsess about her hair when there are more important things happening. She has hunches and street smarts, and she uses them. She has conflicting emotions and motives, but she doesn’t let them paralyze her with indecision. She’s the best and most nuanced character in The Odds. More than one Edgar author could take a lesson.

The writing itself isn’t quite as good. Everybody’s dialogue sounds the same, whether it’s the nerdy whip-smart Philips girl or a junky seventh-grader shooting up in an abandoned house. It’s all clipped. Noirish. Gruff. Incomplete sentences. That kind of thing.

The prose, likewise, doesn’t stand out. George sometimes writes inscrutable lines like this one, when the detective gets fingerprint results back:

The prints came up all right. They came up like three limes on a slot machine.

At her best, George can drop a half-hard-boiled pseudo-aphoristic phrase like this one, from the perspective of a man with cancer:

How bizarre that you could walk around in your body for months, years, and not know the bad things going on inside it until the chaos reached certain proportions and the alarms went off. Then the body talked back, all right.

George doesn’t reach for poetry, though, and her restraint means that the language in this novel stands aside and lets the story through, which works to great effect.

As I mentioned, there’s no mystery here—I have a feeling that that subtitle was the publisher’s doing. There’s a murder case tying the characters together in different ways, but the variety of perspectives means we know exactly how everything happened almost as soon as it happens, and that’s never the point of the novel.

Most of the drama comes from the Philips kids simply trying to survive. I’m not going to say anything else about the plot so as not to spoil anything, but it works well for the story it sets out to tell. Suffice it to say that those kids and the pizza man won my sympathy quickly and completely, and I was willing to watch them do whatever they needed to.

Detective Greer has the least to do, mostly figuring out what the reader already knows. So it’s good she’s the most interesting character—that carries her sections when the plot drags.

In the end, The Odds is a heartwarming, heartbreaking story about some good people trying make it in the world. It’s a simple story, but greatly enjoyable.

Similar books: The Boxcar Children series, by Gertrude Chandler Warner (The Odds is not for children, though). I was also reminded, embarassingly enough, of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, which I listened to once on audiobook as a joke. It was a joke, I swear. Patterson’s book also features a quartet of orphan kids looking out for each other, but, obviously, it was much worse.

Edgar impact: The Odds is certainly in the top tier of Best Novel nominees. I don’t think it should win an Edgar simply because it’s not a mystery, but it’s definitely worth reading.

Author: Stefanie Pintoff

Minotaur, 2009

Filed under: Mystery

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.

Ziele is young—only thirty—and he’s already had a traumatic life and pulled back from it. His wife was killed in New York City, and he transferred from a mid-city precinct to a rural town 17 miles north called Dobson.

When a young woman is killed in Dobson—the first murder there in years—the investigation takes Ziele back to New York, and into the world of an eccentric criminologist named Alistair Sinclair.

Alistair is a professor at Columbia University. Actually, though, he’s an independently wealthy nutball who funds his criminology hobby through Columbia for some reason. He makes a pretty good counterpoint for Ziele, and together they do the bulk of the detecting.

On paper, so to speak, all this sounds great. But Ziele gives us such dry, joyless commentary that it’s difficult to actually enjoy the mystery. For example, take this passage in which Ziele, speaking first, asks a bartender about a person of interest:

“She’s a regular?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Izzy said. “Fancies herself a Broadway chorus girl, but probably generates her rent doing private shows.”

Izzy’s euphemism implied Clara Murphy was a prostitute rather than an actress—although there were some, I knew, who would maintain there was little difference between the two in the first place.

Employing a historical style is one thing, but Ziele continually explains obvious nuances and wordily comments on everything people say to him. It’s like having somebody next to you in a movie theater who won’t stop explaining what’s going on, even though it’s not that complicated or subtle.

Pintoff also frequently crosses the line from scene-setting to cluttering the narrative with extraneous details. Take this scene, in which Alistair and Ziele meet at a Chinese restaurant to discuss the case over lunch:

Apart from his fondness for Chinese food, I could see why Alistair chose this restaurant. It was a quiet place with very few tables, where we might talk undisturbed.

“We should order family style,” Alistair said. “Their chop suey is excellent, and the boneless stuffed chicken wings are the best I’ve tried outside of Hong Kong.”

I glanced at the menu. At a cost of $2.50—the most expensive item on the menu—I expected them to be.

“I’m also partial to the fried lobster in rice,” Alistair said.

Our waiter appeared at our table to take our order.

“We’ll begin with a pot of Lin Som tea,” Alistair said, “and the water nuts along with egg drop soup.”

That’s just a long list of things, with very little character-based reaction, outside of Alistair’s opinion that the food is good, and Ziele’s opinion that it’s expensive. The food itself has absolutely nothing to do with anything, and ultimately this passage doesn’t add enough to the story to justify its length.

Above and beyond the dry prose, perhaps the worst effect of this historical stodginess is that it turns the novel into a mystery of manners. Most everyone is reasonably polite and helpful and relatively honest, even the bad guys like Izzy from that first passage. Ziele briefly plays the odd game of who-can-you-trust, but those kinds of questions get sorted out quickly.

And Ziele himself is spare of personality. Though he narrates in word-count-heavy chunks, he doesn’t bring any spirit to the table, and the prose itself is too focused on sounding historical to spice up the experience with anything as modern as fun.

There’s a pretty good mystery at the heart of this novel, but too much propriety and wordiness lessens its impact and dilutes its tension. Unless you’re an avid lover of prim, eighteenth-century police procedurals, I’d think twice about Gotham. There simply wasn’t enough grit or spirit for me, and more importantly there wasn’t enough suspense.

Similar books: For time period, Gotham closely reflects the Sherlock Holmes stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle. For tone, Gotham‘s more like Nemesis, by Jo Nesbø. My favorite contemporary detective novel is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon.

Edgar impact: Interesting concept, but too much shoegazing dulls its edge. Gotham‘s in the middle of the First Novel pack.

Author: Sophie Littlefied

Minotaur Books, 2009

Filed under: Mystery, Thrillers

A Bad Day for Sorry is, at its core, a revenge fantasy about a woman who tracks down and punishes wife-beaters. It’s a righteous premise, and it’s entertaining in the way that wish fulfillment usually is.

Our heroine is Stella, the middle-aged owner of a sewing supply store. In her spare time, Stella helps battered women get peace and respite from the abusive men in their lives. She ties bad men up with bondage equipment, and does whatever needs doing in order to convince them to leave their women and never come back.

In Sorry, Stella hunts down one particular scumbag on behalf of a woman she barely knows. It’s a quick-reading and fairly entertaining story, but Stella’s detachment from the case at hand makes for a relatively tension-free narrative. She doesn’t really care all that much, and so it’s hard to care about her.

The woman at the center of the case is Chrissy Shaw, a friend of a friend of a friend of Stella’s. Chrissy’s husband, Roy Dean, kidnaps their infant son and takes off. There’s a bit of a mystery included as Stella follows a winding path to find Roy Dean, but the question at hand is never whether or not she’ll find him, only what she’ll do to him when she catches up.

The characters are not very complex. All the bad men, like Roy Dean, are wife-beaters and mafia henchmen and cold-blooded murderers. All the good men are noble and perfect and good-looking. Again, it’s wish fulfillment, and it makes sense to have clearly drawn teams. Littlefield’s prose is entertaining, if not dazzling, and it accomplishes what it sets out to do (though nothing was striking enough to quote for this review). There are some amusing moments, and some touching ones. But the plot is not very good, and, more importantly, there’s the problem of Stella’s motivation.

In the most compelling revenge stories I can think of (The Count of Monte Cristo and the movies Taken, Payback, and Oldboy come to mind), the formula is simple: an unjust act is committed against the hero, he is wronged so gut-wrenchingly that he does nothing but obsessively pursue revenge against the person who wronged him. That maniacal urge for revenge consumes him so completely that nothing else matters, and nothing will stop him, short of death. Depending on how deep the narrative gets, there might be questions of selfishness, sacrifice, guilt and innocence, and so forth. But the heart of the drama is always that burning need to right a personal wrong.

In Sorry, the wrong Stella tries to right is just not personal enough for her to be consumed by her quest. She got into the revenge-against-abusive-men business because of her own abusive husband Ollie, but she killed Ollie before the novel begins. After that, she’s never in any danger that she doesn’t seek out, and she could walk away at any time without any personal consequences. She doesn’t even like Chrissy in the beginning; the only thing tying them together is Stella’s vow to help any woman in need.

Now, I understand that those revenge movies I named all feature male heroes, and I certainly think there are and should be differences between the way men and women go about a thing like revenge. But the way Stella handles her business leaves a lot of tension on the table. She’s often bored by the case, and she can always take a moment away from it to fix her make-up or flirt with the sheriff. The bottom line is that Stella’s vague sense of noble purpose doesn’t translate to page-turning drama the way an all-consuming personal vendetta does.

Chrissy, on the other hand, blossoms somewhat and becomes the novel’s best character (that’s even her on the cover pictured above). In the face of a threat to her child, she turns from a ditzy trailer-park wife into an ass-kicking juggernaut. Unfortunately, there’s simply not enough of Chrissy in the story, and small doses of her passion can’t overcome Stella’s indifference.

Basically, Sorry is an OK book. It’s worth a read if you’re not expecting the nail-biting tension of a good mystery or thriller. If you’re looking for a light, sweet story and a touch of wife-beater revenge fantasy, you could do worse.

Similar reads: The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux, also deals with revenge. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is another book with a righteous premise that doesn’t really satisfy.

Edgar impact: A Bad Day for Sorry doesn’t have the tension needed to win an Edgar. With only one book left to review, Starvation Lake and The Weight of Silence are tied for the lead.

Author: Tim Gautreaux

Knopf, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thrillers

The Missing doesn’t quite know where to stand, genre-wise. On the one hand, there’s a bit of a mystery—a young girl is kidnapped in department store and the security guard on duty at the time, Sam Simoneaux, sets out to find her and get her back.

On the other hand, Gautreaux reveals by page 90 the culprits behind the kidnapping, and even the rednecks they paid to do the actual deed. That means the mystery is reduced to a yes/no question—will Sam find the girl or not?—and we still have 300 pages to get through.

I’m guessing, from those facts, that Gautreaux wants this to be a literary thriller, one of those “the true mystery is how it happens” books. It doesn’t work.

The story takes place in 1920s Louisiana and Mississippi, just after World War I. Gautreaux writes pretty good prose, among the best of the Edgar-nominated writers. He can turn a phrase, and the sound (as opposed to the content) of his dialogue is one of his strong suits.

Gautreaux also does great work describing the quality of life at this point in history. Most of the novel takes place on a rattletrap steamboat called the Ambassador, and you can almost feel her tacked-together deck boards creaking under your feet. For instance, this excellent description:

He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down—regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, … and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.

Unfortunately, that’s most of the novel: description. The steamboat has no part to play in the mystery, it’s just where Sam and the kidnapped child’s parents work. There are plenty of characters on the boat, and race relations to keep track of, jazz to enjoy. But none of it changes, and no drama ever develops.

Instead it just goes like this: everybody works hard on the boat. And then they’re tired. Passengers get drunk and start fights. Sam breaks them up. Then everybody’s tired. They play some music. Then everybody’s tired from working so hard. Since the boat never plays into the mystery at all—other than being a staging ground for Sam’s occasional investigative forays into the wilderness ashore—lifelike description can’t save us from severe monotony.

The same goes for the characters. Sam is more or less an automaton, blankly going through the motions of this case, not letting his emotions get in the way—ever. Sam would be passable as the hero of a real mystery, but when there’s no suspense and no case to really solve (even Sam knows everything by halfway through), he just doesn’t have enough personality to carry a novel.

Pacing is another problem, and Sam’s character starts taking wild swings as an excuse to stretch the story out for a few hundred more pages. Gautreaux also tries a late twist, which more or less falls flat, as it happens off-screen, and then we still have another hundred pages to wade through.

Too much of the time, we’re left with Sam tracking down people we already know. That sometimes reads (and always feels) like this:

“Can you tell me where Graysoner is?”

The chief steward looked at his face and winced. “Rough time last night. Graysoner the new man what replaced that old Jenkins boy with the broke leg?”

“No, it’s a town in Kentucky.”

“It’s a town.”

“That’s right.”

“Go see Mr. Check in the kitchen. He’s from Kentucky.”

Mr. Check, the head cook, was scraping down a stove top with a firebrick. “Naw, I ain’t from Kentucky. … The steward’s thinking of that Meldon feller who cooked for us two years gone. Go ask the captain. … ”

That goes on for about four times that length. Sam talks to a total of five people before he figures out where Graysoner is. It doesn’t provide any suspense, and Sam is too shallow a character to be compelling. We don’t get any insight into what he thinks about things, or what he’s learned about life (except the fact that he doesn’t believe in exacting revenge—he learned that when he was a baby and says it over and over and over).

As far as action, Gautreaux does OK. He sprinkles in scenes of brutality and handles well, and he often hits plot points in satisfying ways. The problem, again, is that those gut-wrenching scenes don’t change anything, and they don’t reveal anything new. They serve, by and large, merely to corroborate what we initially learned about the characters. If someone’s mean, he’ll be mean; if he hates shooting guns, he’ll hate it.

Ultimately there isn’t the perceptive interior life or the depth of character to drive a plotless literary novel, and there isn’t enough plot to drive a mystery. Sometimes these cross-genre projects work out; this time it didn’t.

Similar reads: Serena, by Ron Rash; Land of Marvels, by Barry Unsworth

Opposite read: The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford. It takes place over a weekend. Almost nothing happens, except a phenomenal depth of interior life. The sequel, Independence Day, won a Pulitzer.

Edgar impact: Somewhere between a literary novel and a mystery, The Missing is unsatisfying as either, though its prose is quite well crafted. Still, it’s tied for second with The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. Still in the lead is The Last Child.

Author: David Cristofano

Grand Central Publishing, 2009

Filed under: Mystery, Romance

I’ve seen almost nothing but adoring reviews for The Girl Used to Be. Do not be fooled by them.

Girl is a novel about the Witness Protection Program, and a girl named Melody who feels very sorry for herself because she’s in it. She feels so sorry for herself and so bored that she runs off with the son of the mafia don who had her parents killed. Charitably, that’s a difficult premise to pull off. Uncharitably, Girl is the worst book I’ve read in a long time.

I don’t think anybody should read this book, and all the glowing reviews out there are cause for concern. If you’re thinking of reading Girl, first allow me to lay out exactly why this “eloquent, haunting,” “humorous, poignant, and compelling” novel is actually none of those things.

In fact, it’s not really a mystery or a thriller, either—I’m only filing this review under “Mystery” because Girl‘s up for an Edgar Award. No, friends, this is a romance. And it’s a romance of the very worst kind.

To start with, we’ve got Melody. It seems like Cristofano wanted to portray her as a smart, traumatized juvenile (though she’s 26). He wants her to be defensive and rebellious and independent, but simultaneously dying to be noticed and loved for how smart and awesome she is. The problem is that Melody is neither smart nor awesome, she’s petulant, superficial, incompetent, weak-willed, and desperately dependent on men.

She’s always thinking about her looks (and hating them), and about whether or not this or that man is interested in her. She has no will or ambition, only a generalized resentment toward the world for her lot in life. She whines and moans constantly, and sometimes literally falls exhausted into a man’s strong arms.

The man often happens to be Jonathan Bovaro, son of Tony Bovaro. Tony is the mafioso whose crime Melody and her family witnessed, and who later had Melody’s parents killed. Knowing that, Melody promptly—and I mean promptly—takes off on a cross-country joyride with Jonathan. He woos her with an expensive, ugly sweater, and they fall in love immediately.

Let me just repeat that, because it’s such a stupid premise. Melody runs off—for no good reason—with the son of the man who killed her parents, and they fall in love after two days on the lam. Jonathan’s idiotic plan is to take Melody to see his father, the man who’s been trying to kill her for twenty years. That’s almost the entire plot of the novel. There is absolutely no mystery (except for why this book is up for an Edgar).

Jonathan, as a character, brings a whole host of problems with him. He’s a very gentle man who introduces himself to her by holding a pen to her throat and letting her think it’s a knife (then he says he won’t hurt her). He’s never killed anybody—only laundered money. He doesn’t want anything to do with his family’s crimes, but he has no problem spending their profits on lavish hotels and spa treatments. He’s nonviolent but threatens anybody who’s not Melody, and sometimes beats the ever-living bejeezus out of them. Basically, Jonathan doesn’t make a lick of sense.

It finally clicked for me after Melody kept getting turned on by Jonathan’s mean attitude toward the rest of the world. Jonathan is supposed to be perfect. Toward Melody, he’s the consummate gentleman: attractive, polite, generous, and gentle most of all. But toward the rest of the world, he’s strong and assertive to the point of assholishness, willing to do whatever it takes for Melody to be safe and comfortable, including being a huge jerk to everybody they come across for absolutely no reason. Melody falls for it, even though he’s the kind of guy any normal person would be embarrassed to go to dinner with.

As for why they’re suddenly in love (and, uh, why they ran off together, risking their lives), Cristofano hamfists half a rationale: they’re from different worlds but they’re oh so similar (except for every aspect of their personalities).

OK. I know I’m being harsh. Even with novels I don’t like, I try to find something about them that the author does well. I try to give credit where credit’s due, even when a book, on the whole, isn’t great. But that’s simply not going to happen this time. The Girl She Used to Be starts with an excruciatingly stupid premise, and manages to fail at every single stage of its execution. The dialogue is atrocious and obvious, the jokes are lame, the plot is boring and ridiculous, and all the scenes are ludicrous.

For instance, here’s an example of the kind of inane time-wasting that fills this book. In this scene, Melody—speaking first—is surprised that Jonathan suddenly pulls out a pack of gum instead of a cigarette.

“Is that Nicorette?”

He noshes it like a dog chewing a bone and he gets this sad look on his face, like he recently buried a close friend. “What can I say? You make me want to be a better man.”

I lose my smile. “Are you serious? You stopped smoking f0r me? But … I never asked.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have to.”

The surrender of an addiction might be the noblest of all gifts.

Ugh. Bear in mind they’ve known each other for two days at this point, and those two days have consisted of driving in a car and staying at a hotel.

Basically, this novel is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for teenage girls: all the men are super hot, and a man who is supposedly perfect thinks Melody is “flawless.” There’s even a five-page spa treatment scene, after which Melody becomes irresistibly attractive to all men (before the treatment, she was so ugly that men at bars dared each other to hit on her as a joke), and it’s all paid for by Jonathan. That’s right, Melody’s perfect man literally buys her beauty with money from the mafia family that killed her parents. But she loves it because she’s pretty now, and isn’t that what all girls want?

I guess that kind of insipid wish fulfillment is why Girl got such great reviews. It’s actually remarkably similar to the Twilight books, or, at least, to The Oatmeal’s analysis of the Twilight books. (Also see NPR’s thorough dismantling of Twilight‘s prose.) Why a middle-aged man with a wife and kids found it necessary to write a less nuanced version of Twilight, I do not know.

If you’re the kind of masochistic reader that likes to laugh at bad writing, Girl is a gold mine. If you’re looking for a well-written book with some hint of suspense (and you’re not a teenage girl), look somewhere else.

OK, I take that back. It’s not a good book for 13-year-old girls either; Melody is a terrible role model for young women.

For more specifics about the terrible writing in The Girl She Used to Be, check out my other post coming out today, What Makes a Bad Book Bad?

Similar reads: Girl is most similar, as I mentioned, to Twilight. For a slightly funnier comic mystery, try The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston. For a very, very funny crime/caper novel, read Lighthouse, by William Monahan (screenwriter of The Departed). It’s not in print anymore, but it’s worth the effort to find.

Edgar impact: I don’t know why this book is up for an Edgar. It certainly shouldn’t win.

Author: Jo Nesbø

Translated by: Don Bartlett

Harper, 2009 (English edition)

Filed under: Mystery

Nemesis is the second installment in Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s detective series about the unfortunately named Harry Hole. I would describe it as a procedural novel, meaning the chief characteristic of the narrative is Nesbø’s tendency to exhaustively catalog each and every action taken and word spoken by Inspector Hole.

Nemesis is 500 pages long; it could easily be 300 pages, and we wouldn’t miss a thing. Much like Stieg Larsson, Nesbø suffers from a chronic lack of brevity and the result is a mildly compelling mystery wrapped in an extra few hundred pages of tortuous prose. Some questionable translating decisions exacerbate the careless feel of the book, and it’s ultimately not worth the read.

Read this book as a last resort on a cross-country flight. In any other situation, skip it.

Harry Hole, as difficult as his name is to take seriously, is Oslo’s best detective and a severe alcoholic. When the novel opens, he’s investigating a bank robbery during which a teller was brutally murdered. Then Hole goes and gets drunk. He blacks out and when he wakes up his phone is missing and the woman he’d gone to see is dead.

The mystery unwinds from there. Mostly, it unwinds in the form of excruciatingly overlong accounts of the mundane details of investigation. Sometimes (rarely) we get a good line, like this little gem:

‘For something called a life. Nothing that would interest you.’

Harry imitated a smile to show that he understood it was meant to be a witticism.

To get one of those, though, you have to wade through page after page of spiritless stuff like this:

‘She looks wonderful,’ Sandemann said. ‘Peaceful. Restful. Dignified. Are you a member of the family?’

‘Not exactly.’ Harry showed his police card in the hope that sincerity was reserved for closest family. It wasn’t.

‘Tragic that such a young life should pass on in this way.’ Sandemann smiled, pressing his palms together. The funeral director’s fingers were unusually thin and crooked.

‘I would like to have a look at the clothes the deceased was wearing when she was found,’ Harry said. ‘At the office they said you had brought them here.’

Sandemann nodded, fetched a white plastic bag and explained that he had done this in case parents or siblings turned up, and he could dispose of them. Harry searched in vain for pockets in the black dress.

This whole passage could be summed up like this: “Harry got Anna’s dress from the funeral director.” Even Harry himself is bored by all this bland dialogue.

In another scene, Hole finds out that a bottle with the murderer’s fingerprint on it was thrown in a Dumpster outside the bank. The Dumpster’s just been picked up, so they have to chase it down. Instead of simply telling us whether they get the bottle or not, Nesbø makes Hole get the number from the guy at 7-11, call the trash company, drive around looking for the truck it’s on, argue with his driver about which route to take, flag the truck down, get in the Dumpster, root around in the trash… One sentence turns into 3 and a half pages of bloat.

Drama, even in a mystery, does not come from revealing exactly how the hero chases down a Dumpster. Drama comes from the intentional actions of people and a detective who reads into those actions and deduces the motivation and identity of the culprit. It does not matter how Hole chases down the Dumpster, only whether or not he gets the fingerprint, and what he makes of it. We don’t need to see him canvassing potential witnesses or taking affidavits; we need to see him interrogating suspects, deciding who to trust, and using the results of those boring police procedures to tie everything together.

Harry Hole himself is a somewhat interesting character, partially because Nesbø doesn’t shy away from a pretty brutal portrayal of Harry’s alcoholism. But Harry can’t save this novel from everything else that goes wrong. The plot is decent but not stellar, partially because Nesbø throws in so many nonsensical plot twists in the third act that the ending feels more like Nesbø desperately trying to surprise you and less like a feasible solution to the mystery. But it’s clear by that point that Nesbø doesn’t much care.

The English translator doesn’t care either. For instance, the name “Harry Hole” is presumably (and grossly) translated, as is his title, “Inspector.” However, most proper names and titles are not translated. That means we get “Politiavdelingssjef Ivarsson” instead of Chief Johnson, and the cast list reads like a Norwegian phone book. I had a very tough time figuring out whether characters were male or female (Ola? Vigdis? Stine? Trond?—m, f, f, m), let alone remembering what jobs they had or who they were. And there’s no American localization, which also creates some easily avoidable problems.

All of this makes it clear that Nemesis is a product, and not a work of art. Nesbø’s a little Norwegian book factory and this was the ’03 model. If you liked Stieg Larsson’s books, you might like this one. Otherwise it’s got about the same specialness and originality as a tin of canned herring.

Similar reads: Stieg Larsson’s novels, including The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Edgar impact: Simply too much bloat. It shouldn’t beat The Last Child.