The Fine Line Between a Mystery and a Whiplash Injury

S.G. Redling, Baggage

What’s worse: when a book feels so predictable, you see where it’s headed from page one? Or when the author deliberately coaches you to consider her book predictable, only to pull the rug from under you on page 200? Asking for a friend. That friend happens to be S.G. Redling.

February 17th doesn’t like Anna Ray. That’s the day her father died violently when she was eleven years old. It’s the day her husband hanged himself last year. Anna and her cousin-slash-enabler Jeannie celebrate 2/17 annually by getting blackout drunk—which doesn’t differ much from other days. Except this year, Anna sobers up to discover a cloying, excessively affectionate co-worker has been murdered in a manner clearly targeted at her.

Two lessons I remember from college creative writing classes:

1. The longer you withhold your Big Reveal, the bigger it’d better be.
2. The more adamantly your protagonist believes X on page one, the more surely X gets proven false by the end.

Redling violates both. Her structure is complicated enough that explaining the violations is impossible without spoilers, so bear with me. I’ll try to explain without giving too much away.

Anna, an assistant ombudsman at a secluded liberal arts college, doesn’t want male attention. Her husband hasn’t been dead one year. But nerdy art professor Ellis Trachtenberg doesn’t know that; he keeps pressing her with unwanted gifts and attention. His on-campus murder one snowy midnight feels almost relieving. Until, that is, Anna discovers the killer disfigured Ellis’s remains in ways eerily similar to her father’s death. The police notice, too.

The story unfolds in two parallel paths. In one, Anna narrates her story in traumatized shoe-gazing alternating with bursts of juvenile drunken self-immolation. Despite being nearly thirty and employed, the circumstances surrounding her father’s death keep her from embracing adulthood. Her mother sends regular letters from prison, which Anna hides, unopened, in a shoebox. Jeannie, her cousin and adoptive sister, joins her for celebratory binges. Anna is a functioning alcoholic.

S.G. Redling

The second path flashes back to Anna’s history. In third-person, we approach Anna’s father’s death circumspectly (her husband’s death merits only one late, hasty chapter). A failed artist and raging drunk, nobody apparently feels bad when Pops’ remains appear. But Anna concertedly buries the circumstances, terrified to address them directly. This exclusion becomes pointed when Anna divulges the full truth to her troubled husband—but not us. We’re getting stonewalled.

Redling presumably knows seasoned mystery audiences have certain learned habits. Among these, we pay attention not only to what authors say, but what they omit. As Anna repeatedly discusses her history, particularly her father’s death, we notice she’s remarkably circumspect about the event itself. She never actually specifies the killer. Veteran readers can’t help ourselves: we start a suspect list, and quickly winnow it down to only one likely prospect.

I say she “presumably knows” because Redling subverts those habits. Her Big Reveal is that we’re wrong, the death happened exactly like everyone assumes, our suspect list was a waste of time, and… what? Redling outright lied to readers by omission? I don’t mind red herrings. Reading thrillers without them gets boring. I mind when the false path deposits me, not at some unanticipated conclusion, but back at the beginning.

My doubts began with the first flashback chapter, where Jeannie’s mother shows Jeannie a newspaper clipping about the murder. Jeannie has a suitably horrified reaction, especially to the accompanying photograph, and—chapter break! Without telling us anything about the text or photo, we leave that behind, not returning for 150 pages. That’s where I began feeling Redling was treating us unfairly, withholding information the characters have available from the beginning.

Mysteries thrive on hidden information, I understand. Authors cannot tell us everything from the beginning, because facts must be uncovered incrementally. But this isn’t really a mystery; the procedural element is scanty, the police characters thinly developed, existing to propel the plot and (not kidding) burst through doors in timely manners. The mystery is ancillary to what could’ve been a character novel. Redling just withholds information to deliberately mislead us.

I’ve previously reviewed one S.G. Redling novel, dubbing Damocles one of the best books I read in 2013. That novel’s slow, cerebral pace excited me, spotlighting an element often overlooked in genre fiction. So I had high expectations from this novel. If she’d skipped the mystery, focusing on a promising character destroying herself to evade trauma, this could’ve worked. But as genre mystery, it feels more like a chain yank.

Who Is This Wendy Corsi Staub Person Anyway?

Wendy Corsi Staub, The Perfect Stranger and Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery

Months ago, I reviewed Wendy Corsi Staub’s thriller Blood Red, an interesting premise that descended into wordy, over-written excess. I considered Staub an interesting writer who desperately needed an editor, and forgot her. Recently, however, I’ve discovered she’s actually a bestseller who writes with James Patterson-like bounty. So I agreed to reconsider Staub, and accepted two review novels. Now I’m even more confused. Let’s start with The Perfect Stranger.

I knew I was probably facing a difficult slog with this novel in Chapter One, one character took three pages to descend a staircase. Not because she was slow-moving, or descending from the highest tower, but because author Staub kept intruding long expository recollections between steps. That set the tone for this entire novel: it’s difficult to make even incremental progress, because even minor actions trigger rambling recollections.

In today’s networked age, local actions have potentially global circumstances. Meredith Heywood is the unofficial mother hen of a blogger’s circle, comprised entirely of breast cancer patients and survivors. These women have built a transnational friendship, without bothering to meet, or in some cases to learn one another’s real names. So Meredith’s death prompts their first-ever meeting, at her funeral. Too bad Meredith was actually murdered.

Staub crafts a massive ensemble for a modernized, tech-friendly rendition of a classic Agatha Christie locked-room mystery. At its heart, the women bloggers have deep connections which they’ve shared only online. They believe they know one another intensely, but with passing scenes, it transpires that each keeps deep secrets they don’t divulge digitally. One of these friends has mysterious motives. And now they’re all in danger.

Wendy Corsi Staub

But upon this intriguing premise, Staub has layered countless, disjointed internal monologues. Every character has a backstory, expounded interminably, whether they advance the story or not. The cast of thousands each get their own moments, to the detriment of pacing. Single conversations challenge readers’ patience, because between successive exchanges, Staub inserts Proustian recollections, sometimes pages long. The promised mystery never quite begins, because these recollections never quite cease.

I wanted to enjoy this book, but Staub wouldn’t let me. In today’s media-saturated age, authors realistically get about thirty pages to engage readers’ attention in books this long; but well past page 100, Staub still indulges in chugging expository scene-setting. The narrow thematic focus prevents this being a Jane Austen-ish character novel, but Staub’s interminable narration doesn’t let it be a mystery. I tried, but I just got bored.

Though different in premise and character, Perfect Stranger suffered the basic limitations that burdened Blood Red: too much writer, not enough story. Somebody once said, exceptionally prolific writers basically tell the same story time and again. Consider Stephen King. I basically wrote Staub off as a niche author, and prepared to forget her. But she surprised me, and made me reëxamine my prejudices, with her most recent character mystery, Nine Lives.

Newly widowed, unemployed, and evicted, Bella Jordan packs her son Max and whatever she can carry. She intends to crash with her mother-in-law; but car trouble and a needy stray cat divert her to Lily Dale, New York, home of America’s (very real-world) largest table-tapping community and séance resort. A town whose local innkeeper was recently murdered, giving Bella and Max a job, a house, and a mystery to solve.

Staub, who has already written a series of young-adult mysteries set in Lily Dale, now revisits the milieu for adults. Though pitched as a mystery novel, Staub actually offers a charming, low-key character drama with components, which become driving only relatively late. She provides readers with her familiar viewpoint character, the youngish wife with burdens, and basically permits Bella to interact with her interesting, tormented setting.

Bella adjusts, first grudgingly, then warmly, to her new surroundings. Max bonds with his cat, makes friends, and demonstrates budding psychic tendencies. Bella becomes an ardent innkeeper, befriending Lily Dale’s eccentric supernatural community and its resulting tourists. But she also glimpses increasing evidence that the prior innkeeper, whose death everyone calls accidental, actually met foul play. (Can psychics get ambushed?) She dons her Miss Marple had and investigates.

This hardcover original from a usually straight-to-paperback author is undoubtedly the best Staub I’ve read. It suffers her usual weakness, very long expository scenes, but never feels sluggish or overstuffed. She reveals backstory whenever it’s needed, keeps herself (relatively) concise, and simply tells an interesting story. Though this book works better as character drama than noir thriller, it’s nevertheless engaging reading. Now I understand why readers love Staub.

Francis Bacon in the Empire of Indulgence

Janice Law, Moon over Tangier

Francis Bacon has grown bored and lovelorn in London. No, not that Francis Bacon, the other one: the Anglo-Irish figurative painter whose tortured, distorted human forms revolutionized postwar British art. So he follows his paramour and sometime torturer David to colonial Morocco, a paradise of anonymous sex and late imperial exoticism. Once in Tangier, however, he finds a warren of crime, including a mysterious murder tied to local art forgery.

Though this is American novelist Janice Law’s third, and reputedly final, “Francis Bacon Mystery,” the book itself is functionally freestanding. It doesn’t require any particular familiarity with prior novels, or Francis Bacon, or art generally, to grasp Law’s narrative of cruel romance, venal empire, and postwar chicanery. Though marketed as a mystery, Law essentially crafts a tale of character and circumstance, which just coincidentally involves fraud and murder.

Bacon simply wants to drink copiously and romance as many Moroccan “beach boys” as limited time and money allow. When one prominently flamboyant party host’s newly purchased Picasso proves forged, however, the local constable blackmails Francis into joining the investigation. Seems they have a blank warrant for David’s arrest, which they’ll sign if he doesn’t comply. Thus Francis becomes an unwilling, but entirely too proficient, art counterfeiter.

When it appears everybody lies about this deeply conflicted case, nobody appears particularly surprised, except perhaps Francis himself. The police have political motivations that don’t involve aestheticism or intellectual property. The party host proves remarkably duplicitous when the spotlight shines elsewhere. When Francis finds himself stalked by a suspiciously James Bond-like agent of the British Legation, he realizes he’s stumbled into a case with truly international implications.

Janice Law

Tangier, in Law’s telling, has a familiar yet discordant ring. As a colonial capital, it catches every expatriate the European homeland doesn’t want to see. But unlike Bogart’s Casablanca, this African melting pot doesn’t catch diverse wartime refugees fleeing Naziism and generalized homeland oppression; Tangier caters specifically to sexual outcasts, the bon vivants and sybarites forced into exile from Continental homes where homosexuality remains wholly illegal.

David, the man who induced Bacon’s newfound expat status, is the consummate charming abuser. A masterful musician and storyteller when sober, a raconteur of wartime extravagance, his fondness for gin transforms him into a knife-wielding psychopath. Francis admits his fondness for “rough trade,” but also opens his narrative by fleeing into a hog barn overnight to avoid David’s homicidal wrath. The romance apparently flees rough trade pretty quickly.

Yet Francis remains steadfastly willing to defend David, whose distant but amorous attentions combine mentor, lover, and big brother in equal, and equally terrifying, measures. The fact that neither Francis nor David remains particularly faithful reflects, not homosexuals’ innate moral corruption, but how pliable ethics become under circumstances of official oppression. As first-person narrator Francis explains, police often serve traumatic beat-downs to “beach boys” for sport.

One of Francis Bacon's iconic, and deeply
disturbing, Screaming Popes paintings

Readers selecting this book for gripping mystery may find this book awkwardly slow-moving compared to contemporary thrillers. Law doesn’t expend energy on creating complex mental puzzles, and though she does well in concealing her culprit, she doesn’t particularly care about red herrings and other familiar tropes. For Law’s money, historic Tangier and its milieu of Crumbled Empire decadence holds more interest. This is mainly a historical novel and costume drama.

And what a historical novel. More literate critics than I have extolled Law’s scrupulous attention to detail. Where less meticulous authors have recently frustrated me for their willingness to compromise accuracy to create a better-selling paperback, Law creates a narrative for audiences who desire the more difficult journey. Like visiting a foreign land, one gets the feeling nothing here is sanitized for modern Anglo-American sentiments. Bacon’s Tangier is very dangerous.

This painstaking accuracy sometimes results in moments that make modern readers distinctly uncomfortable. Watching the revolutionary independence movement evolve from their rooftop divans, Bacon and David are sometimes prone to observations we’d call racist. And although I balk at modern complaints about “cultural appropriation,” Bacon’s tendency to regard Moroccan culture as a profligate shopping trip uncomfortably reduces African culture to a shopping mall. As imperial conquerors often do.

But these very uncomfortable moments contribute to the immediacy of Law’s narrative. As Bacon navigates Tangier’s difficult political byroads, we sympathize with him, while still realizing he’s a colonial asshole. We want him to win, but not too much. Where suit-clad Bogart represented a pre-war antihero model, Bacon epitomizes postwar moral collapse. His narrative is immersive, and perilous. And we emerge wondering: how much am I like these colonial taskmasters?

The Teenage Spy Guild of the Mediterranean Coast

Ally Carter, Embassy Row #1: All Fall Down

Young Grace insists she witnessed her mother’s murder. Daughter of a Special Forces veteran and granddaughter of America’s esteemed ambassador to Adria, Grace knows something about keeping secrets; but her willful streak won’t let her keep quiet. When she moves into her grandfather’s embassy, she expects a life of diplomatic glad-handing and general boredom. Then, across a crowded palace, she spots the man who murdered her mother.

Grace insists she knows her mother’s murderer with such dedicated assurance, we know that by book’s end, she’ll either be spectacularly vindicated or have her entire universe turned upside down. Ally Carter, a generous author, attempts both. Having written two prior series featuring teenaged spy heroines, Carter turns her seasoned aplomb to true world affairs. Unfortunately, even part-time news followers will quickly spot serious problems with Carter’s universe.

Ancient, dynamic Valancia, capital of Adria, overlooks the Mediterranean shoreline, hosting many glamorous embassies in Renaissance-era manors. Carter’s description combines elements of Monaco, Dubrovnik, and Istanbul with fanciful imaginings of European splendor. This includes, apparently, remarkably modest land values, since embassies, not jet-setting millionaires, control Valancia’s prestigious waterfront properties. Also, nobody apparently pushes mops or waits tables. Carter creates a world of relentless, polished spy movie spectacle, and nothing else.

Into this world, Grace inserts herself, among children of Earth’s most influential embassies. Youth from the local International School flit among social circles with apparent abandon; ambassadors’ children apparently wed and start families, while functionally stateless teenagers weave continual soap-operatic social webs. This suggests a remarkably settled diplomatic corps. Grace’s grandfather says he’s spent twenty-five years in Adria. I don’t buy it; I’ve read In the Garden of Beasts.

But Grace remains undaunted, both by diplomatic prestige and monied splendor. She vaults walls into neighboring embassies, functionally invading other countries. She pulls James Bond surveillance in crowded Byzantine-era streets. She moves from begowned diplomatic receptions to arguments in rain-soaked streets with ease that makes Kate Beckinsale look flustered. One starts to suspect somebody’s keeping things both feasible and dramatic for her.

Ally Carter

Then there’s Grace’s absolute certainty. She knows, undeniably knows, she witnessed the Scarred Man assassinate her mother, the ambassador’s daughter. The complete lack of physical evidence—the absence of the bullet wound, the lack of accelerant from the bomb—does nothing to persuade Grace that this assassination couldn’t possibly have happened. Her dogged persistence, admirable in early chapters, gets wearing. But YA readers know, adult uselessness is a foregone conclusion.

This theme, admittedly, has become my Achilles’ heel recently. Adult uselessness has become so ubiquitous, it’s become the marketing segment’s signature move. Most recent YA novels commence with the understanding that children, unburdened by knowledge or predisposition, see truths adults willingly ignore. Sometimes this works: Katniss Everdeen challenges corrupt demagogues because she has no insider standing, no bills to pay. But sometimes, age and experience know things.

Surrounded by more embassies than any city outside the Hague, Grace nevertheless kicks doors, conducts espionage, and gathers guerilla evidence. Her grandfather attempts to teach her diplomacy; she defies him, in ways subtle and coarse. She clearly believes, and convinces fellow ambassadors’ kids, that world problems get better if diplomats stop acting diplomatically and practice teenagers’ unbridled honesty. Anyone who’s argued politics with college freshmen knows how that works.

Instead, Grace rampages through Valancia, aided by a cadre of fellows too young to drive. Sometimes she’s stymied and learns to behave discreetly; more often, her headstrong ways yield bountiful rewards. Grace resembles the kind of teenager who breaks others’ things because she doesn’t know what stuff costs. She yells, screams, threatens, engages in psychological blackmail, and by such degrees ekes out victory. That, frustratingly, seems to be our moral.

Carter assembles this novel from stereotypes salvaged from John le Carré novels, Pretty Little Liars episodes, and James Bond movies. Everything happens because it’s supposed to. Heroines like Grace deserve a sidekick, so Carter gives her one. Carter gives Grace a chaste but adversarial romance with the Russian ambassador’s son. Carter gives Grace friends willing to risk sedition and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to get in with the in crowd.

In early chapters, Grace had my sympathy. I believed her conspiracy theory, because I’ve read YA, and I accept the genre’s premises. But as she shows profound inability to learn her world’s ways—and Carter shows profound unfamiliarity with America’s foreign service apparatus—my patience wore thin. Okay, the conclusion isn’t a complete rout; Carter saves something for the next novel. But by then, I’d already stopped caring.

Joseph Finder and the Big Boston Cock-Up

Joseph Finder, The Fixer

Fired magazine editor Rick Hoffman thinks he’s lost everything: job, reputation, girlfriend. Then chance leads him to find $3.4 million in unmarked, non-sequential bills inside the walls of his father’s home. Stroke-ridden, former attorney Leonard Hoffman can’t explain the money, and his cryptic notes don’t help. Rick considers it a windfall—until Boston’s Irish Mafia comes calling, threatening grievous consequences. Suddenly Rick must awaken his disused investigative journalism skills before facts come looking for him.

Espionage specialist Joseph Finder stands out among today’s crowded thriller field, partly, because he doesn’t write series novels. Every Finder title introduces new characters, situations, and thrills, never letting audiences rest comfy on prior successes. This entails some risk: this novel’s premise could’ve turned into the straight version of the movie Dumb & Dumber. Though Finder doesn’t entirely shake the “lucky stiff falls bass-ackward into money” stigma, he offers a passably smart and well-paced character thriller.

Initial poking around this mysterious money uncovers secrets about his family Rick probably never wanted to know. He considered his father just another low-rent defense attorney, a necessary but unpleasant tick on Boston’s kiester. However, Rick quickly unearths not only the remarkably high ideals Len Hoffman once sacrificed, but the depths of his descent. Desperate, immobilized Len has ties to Boston’s most carefully buried mysteries. Some will pay to keep them buried; some will kill.

Readers familiar with Finder’s style will recognize certain authorial hallmarks here, especially the complex layering of secrets. If you can trust anything in Joseph Finder’s novels, it’s that you should trust nothing; not only will everybody lie to you, but the people lying received lies previously, so they’re lying about what they’re lying about. Your understanding rests on webs of deceit. Even into the final pages, everything you believe remains subject to complete, wrenching revision.

Rick doesn’t belong in this situation. Half lovable schlub, half capitalist burnout, he’s forgotten the ideals that first steered him into journalism. Glossy magazine work, with its snazzy lifestyle and the gifts he bought his sweetie, made him soft, but the Internet publishing revolution stole everything. When money steals the illusions he maintained about his seemingly dissolute but harmless father, it’s another nail in his coffin: he discovers he’s essentially living in a self-made dreamland.

Joseph Finder

Philosophers and epistemologists could read Joseph Finder’s work and see dollar signs. Finder regularly hinges complex stories on how little anybody knows about anything except by testimony, and how testimony collapses when people lie. From top-level official stories protecting the elite, to society’s most reprehensible denizens taking extreme measures to keep their misdeeds hidden, some people will do anything to keep secrets secret. “Reality” may be the network of lies we use to protect ourselves.

Even this marks Finder as unusual among thriller writers. Crime and espionage novels generally hinge on uncovering the truth, but that typically means collating facts while piercing the lies. Finder’s themes rely on principles more common in science fiction, like The Matrix or Star Trek holodeck episodes: what if testimonials lie? What if everything we believe is real  is wrong? How can we know truth when everyone around us lies? These answers don’t come easily.

In a largely unnecessary subplot, newly single Rick schemes to rekindle romance with a beautiful old flame. Unfortunately, everything he attempts turns out wrong. She demonstrates unerring ability to perforate every scheme he tries: when he judges her for looks, she showcases brains and entrepreneurial ambition. When he flashes cash, she disdains pretension, reveling in hard work and ingenuity. She gradually unpacks for Rick how, for all his lies, he’s deceived nobody more than himself.

I like the idea of this subplot. It has plentiful potential for guy-friendly romance coupled with the harsh light of truth. If Finder wrote it as a separate book, fleshed out to the degree its premise demands, I’d probably embrace it. However, this subplot intrudes on the master narrative so infrequently that it’s mostly just distracting. It serves Finder’s themes, but not his story, and in a book exceeding 400 pages, it probably isn’t necessary.

Finder’s work flourishes, here and in other novels, where our protagonist struggles between comfortable middle-class lies and harsh, unvarnished truths. Rick could abscond with the money, ignore everyone else, and rebuild a comfy life elsewhere. But, still a journalist at heart, he cannot rest easy while somebody else’s story languishes untold. Truth turns him into a champion of justice, even at great personal cost. One hopes Finder’s audiences might find themselves inspired to similar heights.

The Warrior Queen of Seattle

Cherie Priest, I Am Princess X

May Harper and Libby Deaton overcame their fifth-grade outcast status by creating Princess X, a katana-wielding superheroine whose exploits gave suburban life meaning. Then, in a tragic accident, Libby’s mother drove off a Seattle bridge, killing Libby and herself. Now sixteen, May drifts through life rudderless and alone… until she sees it. An image of Princess X on an abandoned storefront. A message meant only for her.

Locus Award-winning science fiction novelist Cherie Priest returns to her former adopted hometown of Seattle, the setting of her breakout novel Boneshaker. But that novel involved a carefully realized steampunk universe, where the contrast between real Seattle and Priest’s Seattle brimmed with satiric potential. This novel takes a more realistic tack, turning urbane, high-rise Seattle into a domain as complicated as any medieval dungeon.

That first Princess X image leads May to a thriving internet subculture dedicated to the Princess X webcomic. But that webcomic can’t possibly exist. Libby’s father discarded all their notebooks after her death, and these images tell an entirely new story. Aided by an affably harmless hacker from her building, May begins tracking subtle clues laced throughout Princess X’s story, an excruciating process that undermines everything she thinks she knows.

Priest offers the skeleton of an engaging story. The contrast between May’s unglamorous Seattle life and Princess X’s allegorical world, a network of complicated overlaps and correspondences, drives the story with urgency and panache. Priest gets good mileage from the theme of a complicated hidden reality, popular in multiple genres today. Coupling it with the complexities of Internet-based underground cultures and an urban quest feels like so much fun.

As May gradually unpacks clues laced throughout Princess X’s story, she realizes the webcomic creator couldn't have intended these complicated clues for general consumption. They refer to places from her own life, memories she never spoke of, experiences she shared with nobody else. Nobody but Libby. But that could only make sense of somebody is lying to her right now… or everybody has lied to her for at least three years.

Cherie Priest

Seattle, in Priest’s understated telling, resembles less an American city than a catacomb of forgotten rooms and unseen tunnels. Princess X leads May and her sidekick, Patrick, into half-demolished coffee shops, mausoleums, and the rain-slick underbelly of various tourist attractions. May winds up discovering parts of her city that the tourist board would probably prefer remain hidden. But a complicated parallel society dwells beneath polite Seattle, bearing secrets.

This novel aims for a conventional “young adult” audience. It has many familiar tropes from that marketing niche, including teenaged protagonists who don’t necessarily start out precocious, but must quickly teach themselves resilience; an adult enemy whose own damages boil over into wrath at innocence; and a supporting cast of adults who blinded by conformity. Though telling a good story, Priest doesn’t really break any new ground in her genre.

Priests’s story mixes her prose with original comic art by Kali Ciesemier. Though much of this art wasn’t complete in time for the pre-release reviewers’ edition, what did is remarkable. Ciesemier’s two-tone line drawings resemble the underground “comix” I remember reading in the 1990s. Back then, comix tended toward autobiography. This has more heroic overtones, but retains symbolic resonance with Sonic Youth-era confessionalism.

Some of Priest’s choices feel like low-hanging fruit. The homogeneously young, white, middle-class ensemble, for one. Unreliable, generally clueless adults feel overused, especially when coupled with elaborate excursions into Seattle’s forgotten underbelly. A pretty teenage girl wandering into that environment would need legitimate guidance to avoid getting trapped in a Russ Meyer film. Most youth I know would appreciate a story coupling resourceful young protagonists with actual stand-up adult counsel.

Also, why’s this book so short? Bestselling YA fiction, from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, indicates teens’ willingness to engage with epic-scale literature. Priest herself has been pretty voluble in her literature for grown-ups. At barely 200 pages, this book feels like a scanty pamphlet compared to many titles currently available on YA shelves. Especially with the compressed-feeling resolution, Priest probably could’ve afforded a little more description.

Still, that problem notwithstanding, Priest’s story will probably reach her intended audience with haste and concision. Though they, like me, may wish for a longer story with more characters, most readers will probably appreciate this novel for what it is. Accustomed to writing for a seasoned genre audience, Priest is clearly out of her element here. Yet she demonstrates wherewithal enough to burst in and make YA fiction her own.

The Comfortable Tudor Murder

Mary Lawrence, The Alchemist's Daughter

When pretty young Jolyn Chapman dies suddenly in her best friend Bianca Goddard’s laboratory, their Southwark neighborhood is scandalized. The coroner pronounces a poisoning verdict, and the constable makes to arrest Bianca. In an environment of rudimentary science and justice for the highest bidder, only Bianca has skills enough to prove her innocence and finger the guilty. Just another day in dying Henry VIII’s overcrowded, impoverished London.

To understand just how familiar Mary Lawrence’s debut novel feels, Google the title. Amazon.com lists at least six books entitled The Alchemist’s Daughter just since 2000. That signals what you’re getting in reading this novel: a perfectly pleasant rehash of historical fiction tropes that articulate an interesting story, without particularly breaking new ground. Lawrence’s intended audience will probably enjoy the product, but emerge essentially unchanged by the experience.

Bianca’s alchemist father and herbalist mother bequeathed her different ideas, which she combines in her Medicinals and Physickes. Southwark’s varied, but mostly poor, denizens consult Bianca for everything from ordinary medicines, to semi-lawful abortions, to rat poison. This makes her prime suspect in Jolyn’s poisoning. Loyal customers band together, though, temporarily preventing her arrest. This buys her time to investigate what corrupt, half-drunk Constable Patch won’t touch.

Poor Jolyn’s life took some remarkable turns in her final weeks. Rescued from abjection by a mysterious benefactor, she quickly learned the ways of London’s middle class, and acquired a well-connected suitor. Her great personal beauty also earned the admiration by a morally slipshod merchant and a boyishly naive servant with deep secrets. But she remained tight-lipped about certain details, like her suitor’s name, even after he gave her ostentatious gifts.

Bianca’s prodding uncovers good reason for such secrecy: everyone wanted something from Jolyn. Without meaning it, Jolyn had seized something that could restore flagging fortunes, repair damaged honor, and bring quick connections in the early days of newborn Imperial commerce. Now they think Bianca has what Jolyn died for, and they’re willing to kill for it. And how does this connect with a plague ship moored just outside London’s jurisdiction?

Mary Lawrence

Where conventional historical novelists like Philippa Gregory would focus storytelling on kings and aristocracy, Lawrence keeps King Henry at arm’s length. Her democratizing impulses permit a story of Londoners so completely impoverished that they comb rubbish out of tidal mud to buy their bread. This requires some imagination—we don’t know much about Tudor England’s urban peasantry—but better reflects today’s audience beliefs.

Lawrence combines a fully realized, immersive environment with a certain casual approach to historicity. Like similar historical novelists, she demonstrates selective anachronisms—the powerfully independent woman, leisurely dedication to period English, occasional displays of modern attitudes—to make her 500-year-old setting comprehensible for modern readers. She aims to help readers travel in time, even if that sometimes means sacrificing accuracy. She’s created an imaginative TARDIS, not a history textbook.

Some of Lawrence’s choices seem really forced. Particularly, ramrodding in Bianca’s romance with John, the silversmith’s apprentice, feels completely unnecessary, except that Lawrence’s audience expects a romance subplot. Bianca, the consummate professional, ignores John in pursuing her goals; he responds with foot-stomping tantrums. I kept wishing John would walk away altogether. Perhaps Bianca’s disinterest should’ve warned Lawrence that this subplot didn’t solve her story’s beating heart.

However. Lawrence writes for an audience accustomed to certain cues. It wouldn’t be unfair to note her target audience is substantially female; throughout history, women have both created and consumed the bulk of fiction. We’d also note how prior authors have conditioned Lawrence’s audience to expect red herrings, sudden revelations, the three-act structure, and romance. Lawrence provides everything her audience expects, in mostly the expected order, like reading a blueprint.

Therefore, how audiences receive Lawrence’s novel depends on their relationship with expectations. Some readers enjoy reading new takes on familiar boilerplates, while others prefer surprises and innovation. Lawrence certainly writes well, having researched middle Tudor English and created a version of period language comprehensible to modern readers. Lawrence doesn’t lack for ambition. She just takes that energy into story tropes so familiar, readers could build a pillow fort of them.

Despite my appreciation for her democratic inclinations, Lawrence doesn’t write for readers like me. I’ve reached a level of familiarity with enough diverse literary styles that the old tropes have become boring. I await the astonishment where authors invert our expectations and challenge us to grow. If you’re like me, you’ll grow bored waiting. Lawrence writes well for her audience, admittedly, but never expands or challenges that audience’s comfort.

Dare to Keep Kids Off Street Justice

Chuck Wendig, Atlanta Burns

“Recent films in which the good lawman comes to grief when he tries to fight the system (Walking Tall, Serpico) have the moral ‘Don’t stick your neck out’, but this may not be what the directors intend. … Content lies in the structure, in what happens, not in what the character say.”
—Keith Johnstone

Atlanta Burns never wanted to be a high school Charles Bronson. She simply saw an act of bullying in process, and stopped it. But now she has a reputation as the girl who “gets things done,” and local students begin hiring her to fix their hash. Sadly, Atlanta quickly discovers that fixing the awfulness in her face sometimes empowers the awfulness hiding behind her back.

I truly want to enjoy Chuck Wendig’s cult novel, now making its transition to mainstream audience awareness, but Wendig keeps getting in my way. His themes of peace through superior firepower would make me uncomfortable in an R-rated movie, much less a YA novel. And structurally, it mimics recent trends in screenwriting that reveal how Wendig would probably rather write a treatment script.

Chapter One starts with Atlanta witnessing three bullies whipping a Latino kid’s ass. A PTSD survivor herself, Atlanta maces all three, earning one new ally and three bitter foes. This follows Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! structure, starting with a selfless act of undisguised heroism. Except it places a brown person in the role reserved for a small, defenseless animal. You understand why that’s problematic.

Atlanta herself represents an aggressive doubling down on the Sam Spade story model. Deeply damaged, she views grown-ups with learned distrust. She believes in justice, but resents order. Thus, confronted with fellow students oppressed by adults, she commences what criminologists would charitably call a vigilante rampage, rebalancing the scales by whatever means come available.

She confronts two enemies herein. (This book combines two stories previously published separately.) First, a White Pride subculture perpetrating hate crimes on high school homosexuals conceals darker secrets permeating the adult community. Then, a schoolgirl’s horribly mangled puppy opens doors on suburban dogfighting, and a shocking pay-to-play violence ring.

Admittedly, Wendig tells these stories well. His prose flows fluidly, with telegraphic dialog and Elmore Leonard-like punch. If Wendig told this story with adult characters, I might not seek this book out, but I’d certainly appreciate his eye for telling detail and apt phrasing. Perhaps he follows occasional philosophical cow paths, and Atlanta sometimes soliloquizes, but in writing this dense, we can spare occasional minutes for authorial social conscience.

Chuck Wendig

No, my problem isn’t anything Wendig says, nor how he says it. It’s that everything accumulates, everything mounts up, until we see something hiding behind Wendig’s explicit narrative. Atlanta preaches anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-violence sermons while wielding guns and nightsticks. Wendig’s progressive social message camouflages nihilistic themes of humankind’s irresistible, ultimately savage nature.

This story putatively presents Atlanta as the antihero, a deeply flawed but basically admirable Warrior Woman standing fast against bullying teens and corrupt adults. But she gives me a different vibe. She deliberately antagonizes authority, trades justice for money, and has a strictly ad-hoc ethical code without external foundation. Basically, she has the psychology of a criminal.

Atlanta ain't Nancy Drew, kids.

She doesn't follow standard NRA guidelines about firearms safety, social engagement, or "good guys with a gun," either. Pointing a gun, whether or not she actually uses it, is her first choice. Her gun technique is so haphazard, only authorial grace keeps her from killing somebody. Because her technique resembles Seventies cop dramas, mercifully immune to blowback.

Seriously. At one point, she fires near another kid and misses his head by under twelve inches. With a borrowed Ladysmith revolver. Bullshit. Nobody, outside Hollywood, has such precision with a handgun.

My concern, or one anyway, is: what if teens consider what they read normative? Sometimes violence stops even worse violence. But not often, and even less when that worse violence has official status. Handguns, action heroes notwithstanding, are unreliable, and make better threats than tools. Powerful people use populist resistance to justify crackdowns. Answering evil people in their own language mainly ratifies their bigotry.

Wendig clearly wants us to derive moral lessons from Atlanta's exploits. He even concludes by citing weblinks to anti-hate crime and anti-dogfighting activist groups. But I have difficulty separating Wendig's moral from Atlanta's actions. The ultimate moral is seemingly: if anyone violates your values, shoot them. Or threaten to, anyway.

I think we've all seen too much Nietzschean street justice recently, don't you?

Sam Spade Stalks the Massive Data Sprawl

Reece Hirsch, Intrusion

You ever have that experience where you dive into a book, love its ideas, commit yourself to reading… then find the book leaves you really, really tired? This book is like that. Reece Hirsch, a career digital privacy attorney, writes a novel about a digital security attorney taking on Earth’s best international online saboteurs. It melds classic science fiction imagery with gritty noir. It addresses today’s top international security concerns. What could go wrong?

Plenty.

Attorney Chris Bruen knows something’s up when Zapper, America’s biggest search engine, phones after midnight. Seems hackers have stolen Zapper’s nigh-priceless proprietary algorithms. Hackers employed by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Zapper has assembled dozens of Earth’s top security specialists to plug the leak, but they need their lawyer to squelch possible market-destroying damage. Bruen boldly proposes personally visiting Shanghai.

Reviewers can’t make this shit up. A Silicon Valley attorney proposes personally infiltrating the PLA and bringing stolen data home, like Jack Damn Ryan or something. He admits having no plan, only outdated Chinese connections, and sketchy Mandarin. Yet, the next morning, Bruen arrives in Shanghai, tracking the PLA’s most secure cell, while outrunning Chinese counterintelligence. Either he’s a superhero, or he’ll die doing 25-to-life in Qincheng Prison.

Early on, I had a flash. Hirsch describes an assassin tracking a corporate executive through Tokyo’s neon-lit Shinjuku district, and I realized: this is just like William Gibson’s multiple award-winning novel Neuromancer (best opening line ever!). Hirsch’s present-day setting purges sci-fi trappings like “sprawl cowboys” and “wetware,” but advancing technology means that, exactly thirty years on, what Gibson originally postulated as science fiction, has become disturbingly real.

Twenty pages later, looking down a rain-slicked Shanghai streetscape, Chris Bruen has a flash: this looks just like a William Gibson novel! Though he’s right, I jumped, thinking: “WTF? Did Hirsch just intrude and tell me how to perceive his narration?” Yes, son. Yes he did. I forgave this hiccup, figuring anybody can make mistakes once. Sure, writing coaches encourage Padawans to avoid getting between audiences and their narration. But surely everyone’s occasionally gaffed that way.

Reece Hirsch

With Hirsch, though, it isn’t occasional. He lards his prose with long, discursive soliloquies about, say, China’s mix of authoritative government and semi-free-market capitalism, or how China erects cities cheaply and hastily, backfilling with high-tech architecture once jobs arrive. This doesn’t surprise me; I’ve read Xuefei Ren. Chinese inequality particularly bothers Bruen, Hirsch’s viewpoint character. (Hirsch says Bruen lives in San Francisco, Americas second most unequal city, after NYC.)

Seriously, this continues for pages upon pages upon pages. Also, secondary characters discourse lengthily upon IRC protocols, Chinese prisons, and computer security techniques. Popular thriller writers like Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell use technical descriptions to advance stories while convincing readers they’re learning something. But Hirsch doesn’t explain, he lectures, often in explicitly moralistic terms. He doesn’t want to guide audiences, he wants to dictate their responses.

But any response requires audiences accepting extreme unlikelihoods. Once, captured by a PLA cell, Bruen (again, a Frisco attorney) kills two hackers and their PLA handler, despite having a broken arm and possible concussion. Yeah, right. He then steals the hackers’ laptop and, on the return train to Shanghai, commences unlocking the hackers’ lengthy data trail. With a broken arm. Still. Anyone who’s ever broken a limb knows you can’t just power through, not without a splint and fistfuls of Tylenol.

Hirsch simultaneously intensively researches China’s situation, and demands readers accept staggering Hail Marys. In a nation of staggering urban poverty, Bruen never meets anybody who doesn’t speak either English or Mandarin, even in Cantonese-speaking regions. Though China notoriously surveils nearly all visiting foreign nationals, Bruen stakes out a PLA division HQ for two days, then follows key employees home, without attracting visible attention.

What does the bull say?

This story arguably deserves told. Chinese data piracy increasingly overshadows nuclear proliferation or religious extremism as America’s biggest national security threat. In an epigraph, Hirsch quotes two federal data security specialists saying: any corporation which hasn’t seen data piracy isn’t looking hard enough. If it isn’t already, data security will soon become modern life’s biggest, most persistent force of international instability.

One wonders whether Hirsch might prefer writing New Yorker articles over novels. He’s flush with facts and carefully differentiated information, but his story feels anemic. He lectures us eagerly, while Xerox characters describe various jigsaw puzzle pieces which events gradually assemble. Hirsch proves himself a masterful researcher with wonderfully panoptic view; sadly, he proves himself a really lackluster storyteller.

When the Prairie Sleeps, the Mystery Creeps

C.J. Box, Shots Fired: Stories from Joe Pickett Country

Somebody’s bound to say it somewhere, so let me say it first: it’s difficult to read this book without comparing it to Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the collection which gave us the original “Brokeback Mountain.” Assuming you’ve read Proulx, obviously. And if you haven’t, please do, because putting these two together provides a remarkable view of the wide, arid, hardworking domain America largely derides as “flyover country.”

Proulx, a Wyoming transplant, and Box, a native, both create languid, laconic characters whose actions deliver eloquent messages that mere words couldn’t convey. Their concise snapshots reveal a people whose lives have become integrated with the landscape, giving them a permanence transcending generations. But where Proulx’s literary approach conveys Wyomingites’ diverse struggles often in stolid silence, Box, a crime novelist, observes his protagonists through the lens of violence.

Box’s very earthy, hardworking, and concise English doesn’t eliminate poetry; often, it heightens stylistic power. Describing the North Platte River, Box writes, “the current gripped the flat-bottomed McKenzie boat and spun it like a cigarette butt in a flushed toilet.” Anyone who’s seen fishing boats in shallow water recognizes that surprising yet apt simile. Likewise, Box says so-and-so’s “face was round, like a hubcap.” He uses that one twice.

This approach, free of self-conscious ornamentation, is merely the surface layer of how Box’s characters think. Too busy with work, family, and survival to be “pretty,” they distribute words with Protestant thrift, and base their metaphors on common, workaday images. Yet their often unforeseen poetry doesn’t just make us see their objects anew; it forces us to acknowledge them as deep thinkers, though they may lack fancy East Coast credentials.

Four stories feature Box’s recurrent protagonist, game warden Joe Pickett. (Non-hunters may not realize game wardens are sworn law officers with arrest authority.) Pickett’s innate feel for Wyoming’s diverse ecology, and the humans who make their living off it, recalls dime novel tropes of Indians standing outside white society, yet still maintaining certain justice. Besides Proulx, I also recalled Zane Grey’s highly moral Westerns while reading Box.

Six other stories venture outside Box’s previous bibliography, while remaining around his Wyoming heart. (Okay, “Le Sauvage Noble” is set in South Dakota and Paris, France. Allow some latitude.) The most powerful stories in the collection feature some collision between the stable Wyoming equilibrium and outside forces which would remake the prairie in their image. Box’s stories manage the constant tapdance between down-home continuity and worldly disruption.

My favorite tale, “The Master Falconer,” features a naturalist and former soldier on society’s fringes. When a powerful Saudi plutocrat attempts to buy his loyalty, believing everybody is for sale, our hero finds himself imprisoned by overwhelming pressures. His understanding of the land and people lets him construct a sophisticated noose from the Saudi’s own rope. Remarkably, this is one of only two stories where nobody dies, though several people crawl away bloodied.

Other stories span the range of Western life, turning on ways people hurt, diminish, or steal power from others. “Dull Knife” describes a hard collision between modern Indian and White societies. Casual racism won’t surprise most readers who’ve lived near the Rez, but the flippant bigotry inherent in friendly White condescension remains shocking. “The End of Jim and Ezra” flips eras, depicting the brutality that drove early American expansionism.

Not everything works equally. “Every Day Is a Good Day on the River” billboards its impending conflict so blatantly, I wonder how these characters didn’t realize they’re trapped in a suspense thriller. Box took the easy option here. But that’s one weak story among ten. I’d forgive much worse for “Blood Knot,” a flash story with no physical violence, but deep insights into how people chisel away each other’s humanity.

Box’s stories resemble Proulx’s observations of ordinary people, pushed by austere circumstances into moments of chilling hostility. Mystery fans may prefer comparing Box to Craig “Longmire” Johnson, but beyond the Wyoming setting, the comparison rings hollow. Longmire channels classic Westerns and heroic myths, Box prefers a cold-eyed look at how people cling to society’s margins today. Box’s arid Wyoming prairie symbolizes his characters’ inner brokenness.

Don’t let my high-minded analysis deter you, though. Box creates high-energy adventures that test characters to destruction, revealing their secrets not through turgid discourse, but through action and moments of bleak, inescapable honesty. I can think of no greater praise a weary night-shift laborer can bestow upon this collection, than that I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish that last story.

What Happens In Fantasyland, Part 2

Vicki Pettersson, The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2)

This review is a follow-up to What Happens In Fantasyland Stays In Fantasyland.

Avenging angel Griffin “Grif” Shaw gets tapped to escort a suffering addict to his eternal rest. But Grif’s human honey, journalist Katherine “Kit” Craig, can’t let a lonely teen die in squalor, and tries to intervene. Deep inside a Las Vegas drug den, Kit discovers a new drug that causes a long, stuporous high, but rots the flesh from tweakers’ bones. To Grif’s horror, the drug does something worse: it provides a gateway for demons to take human flesh.

Unlike the first book in Pettersson’s “Celestial Blues” series, The Taken, in which supernatural gumshoe solves a human crime, this second volume more carefully integrates the transcendent and the earthly. The human characters see Sin City boiling into a gang war between Russians and Cubans. They don’t realize that their anger, venality, and selfish ambition open doors for powerful creatures that feed off sins. Be careful what you call; you may not like who answers.

Following the first book, Kit Craig and Grif Shaw have fallen into a comfortable relationship of sex, breaking hot stories, and taking the dead onto the next life. But tension exists. Grif, who died in 1960 and returned in the prior book (the explanation is not brief), has spent over fifty years amid transcendent beings who see the whole of time. Kit remains an idealist at twenty-nine years of age. This gulf colors their relationship, pushing their buttons at awkward moments.

Grif remains fixated on solving the mystery of his first life: who killed him and his wife one late Vegas night? This perfectly reasonable quest interferes with his relationship with Kit. Meanwhile, Kit so desires to do the right thing that she doesn’t think about what the right thing is in the long haul. Kit’s aggressive idealism appears flighty to Grif, while Grif’s desire to right erstwhile wrongs looks to Kit like he cannot commit to the present. Both want to do right, but talk past one another.

Kit and Grif’s investigation comes to include the police (Kit has a remarkable symbiotic relationship with an affable cop), but also two violent gangs who shadow the two heroes. In trying to do the right thing, in other words, the heroes help hasten a violent confrontation, a conflagration that threatens to bring Vegas down. Pettersson presents Sin City as gangrene on the face of the earth, which Kit and Grif must excise if they would save the patient.

Pettersson’s writing propels the characters through a strange, yet entirely natural, plot. As a dead soul made flesh from 1960, Grif is a man out of his time, a refugee from postwar noir classics. Kit, a “rockabilly” devotee, tries to recreate herself as a woman of Grif’s time, yet remains part of the Twenty-First century. Where most urban fantasies awkwardly try to tell Dashiell Hammett stories in the present without saying so, Pettersson makes her anachronisms explicit.

This extends to Pettersson’s language. Like many urban fantasy novelists, Pettersson cherry-picks plot stylings from romance writing, with its florid linguistic ornamentation. (Her sex scenes are much more judiciously written than Delilah Devlin's.) But her mystery elements reflect terse, laconic mid-century prose. At times, this shift really draws attention to itself: does anybody. Really. Talk. Like. This? But mostly, Pettersson manages the split well.

Fantasy generally flourishes by its reliance on larger-than-life events in a world transcending the ordinary. Urban fantasy has enjoyed faddish popularity by folding mythic content into real-world settings. But too many urban fantasists produce small, quotidian stories. Vicki Pettersson straddles the line: she gives us realistic, plausible crimes, but parallel stories of transcendent might. Not everyone will like this dualism, but it at least bespeaks willingness to take risks.

This book exceeds the first one, in that it’s more integrated. Maybe Pettersson needed to write the first book to set the stage, because many of the threads that bind this immensely complex story together come from what she wrote before. This means it’s hard to come into the story cold, even though this second novel is clearly stronger, more confident, and more thoroughly constructed than the first. But if you’ve read the first, this one makes a good payoff.

Urban fantasy often suffers from unimaginative, wheezy storytelling. Pettersson provides the noir paradigms readers have come to expect, the romantic encounters readers enjoy, and the hocus pocus that makes us dream. But she also steps outside her genre’s comfy confines and takes a shot in the dark. This whole genre is imperfect, but Petterson flourishes by taking smart chances.

Olson's Practical Primer in Ordinary Human Magic

Melissa F. Olson, Dead Spots

Melissa Olson salvages urban fantasy, one of the most over-saturated genres of pop fiction today, by reversing the usual boilerplates. Urban fantasy’s brand, based on an overlap between the modern world and a mythic supernatural otherworld, usually runs on the tension created when magic bleeds into today’s ordinary world. But Olson asks: what happens when the banal infects fairyland?

Scarlett Bernard is the rarest form of supernatural being, a Null. In her presence, magic stops working. Witches’ spells sputter out, werewolves turn human, and vampires come back to life. That makes her valuable, because she can clean up supernatural crime scenes before the LAPD can stumble upon them. But it also makes her a valuable commodity, traded among the undead like a desirable stock swap.

And when an inexperienced LAPD detective discovers Scarlett, wrist-deep in a grisly murder with a supernatural odor, vamps and weres are happy to let her hang. Anything to keep human law from finding out about the Old World. Suddenly Scarlett, with her werewolf apprentice Eli and the bemused Detective Cruz, have less than forty-eight hours to find the real killers, before they face street justice, to keep the peace.

In some ways, Olson gives us a straightforward take on the urban fantasy genre. She has created a character mystery that just happens to involve magic—more Charlaine Harris than Jim Butcher. Scarlett has some of the more common UF character traits, including hidden psychic scars, romantic frustration, and a proclivity to snarky witticisms, in the best Dashiell Hammett style. (She includes one supporting character named Dashiell. Consider it an Easter Egg.)

But in other ways, Olson yanks the rug from under our feet. Veteran readers who have grown bored of repetitive boilerplates (not me, but maybe you) will enjoy how she reverses some of our expectations. While some of the supernatural elements intrude into the ordinary world, spreading unhappiness and misery abroad, much more comes when human feelings bleed over into the other world. Our pain, yours and mine, has power to change fairyland, Olson says.

Relationships, not power, are the coin of Olson’s supernatural realm. Scarlett tries to take pride in her self-reliance, but learns quickly that she can’t. The human tendency to form ordinary bonds with one another proves her greatest advantage. And the complete lack of such routine empathy—not sunlight or silver—is the monsters’ greatest weakness. Olson spends a lot of time trading on the power of simple human understanding.

At first, I didn’t understand what Olson meant by this. Despite a couple of muscular action scenes in the opening chapters, her book does get off to a slow start. This is only intensified by some talky discursions in which Scarlett pauses the narrative to explain the Old World to Detective Cruz. I admit, it took me some fortitude to push through the first fifty pages or so.

But once I did, the story really opened up. Olson never pauses to explicitly say the seeming banality of those early chapters is the very point; we sort of pick it up as a dawning realization. The stuff that seems most commonplace, like watching TV with friends or one night stands or just chatting over morning coffee, all this stuff is the ordinary magic that gives Scarlett the strength to combat monsters that have lost the ability to care.

I particularly appreciate Olson’s voice. Instead of treating this story with the wide-eyed gooey sentimentality of paperback fantasy, which is one of the main reasons I drifted away from this genre two years ago, she writes like a mystery. She treats werewolves and witches and vamps (oh my) with the same earnest yet playful respect she would show the Cosa Nostra or the Crips, while still maintaining their magical integrity.

And she handles the romantic subplot, downright mandatory in genre fiction today, in a way that doesn’t draw attention to itself. Too many authors feel the need to highlight this theme, with searchlights and a small orchestra, as though we would miss it. For Olson, though, romance is just part of being human, a part Scarlett initially tries to squelch, though by the end her two competing beaus become her biggest asset.

In all, Olson has taken a fiction genre that has become primarily circular and monotonous, and made it her own. Though she respects the conventions, and gives paperback readers what they’ve come to expect, she isn’t content to merely do what others have done before. And that makes her debut exciting.

How Not To Write Mystery In One Easy Step

Vincent Zandri, The Innocent (Keeper Marconi, Book One)

So I’m reading Vincent Zandri’s first mystery novel, first published in 1999 and now making its mass market debut, and I can’t say why it doesn’t sit well with me. Sure, Zandri’s first-person narrator talks like Al Pacino, and his story has the familiarity of a bedtime story, but so what? If I hated every derivative novel to cross my desk, I’d run out of anything to read in a hurry. Then suddenly, and way too early in the book, it hits me.

In the spring of 1997, the story goes, convicted cop killer Eduard Vasquez stages a daring daylight escape from upstate New York’s Green Haven maximum security prison. Jack “Keeper” Marconi, warden of said monkey house, knows his job and his life’s work are on the line, and goes off the radar. The conspiracies and cover-ups he finds shake his faith in the criminal justice system he has worked in for nearly thirty years.

I persevered through Marconi’s wiseacre narration, self-consciously reminiscent of Robert Mitchum’s noir heyday. I refused to feel put off by the cops, so blatantly borrowed from the Raymond Chandler milieu that even Marconi feels the need to comment on it. I did everything I could to not let the obvious borrowings put me off the book, and read it as a genre fan would. After all, genre fiction tends to repeat past successes to give readers what they want.

Readers want a hard-bitten hero with a history, so Zandri writes a narrator who was a teen starting his corrections career when he was taken hostage at Attica (“Attica! Attica!”). They want a character wrapped in mourning, so Zandri gives Marconi a drinking problem to compensate for his wife’s violent death. They want a character with a hard fight he might not win, so Zandri forces Marconi to battle the shoddiest police work since the Coen brothers’ Fargo.

But around page sixty, Zandri introduces a new ensemble character, a state bull who carries a Glock. New York State police have carried Glocks since 1989, yet Marconi complains about how all the cops carry Glocks “now” (remember, this is 1997), though he refuses to bend to the trend. And he launches into a description of Glocks that is not only factually inaccurate, but repeats specific inaccuracies spoken by Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2.

That, I’m sorry, was one borrowing too many, too early. Though I tried to keep reading, I could no longer ignore the lack of story elements originating with Zandri himself. You could practically make a drinking game from spotting bits stolen from action films and noir classics. This obsessive mentioning makes readers do the hard work of creating characters and situations, which should be the author’s responsibility.

Some years ago, I sat in on a Q&A with mystery author Alex Kava. She described the painstaking process of cultivating relationships with local homicide investigators, whom she later mined for knowledge, a process she also details in her excellent novel One False Move. Though such first-person research requires a massive investment of time and energy, it has paid off in helping make Kava one of America’s best-selling female mystery novelists.

Instead of making such a personal investment, Zandri trades on our ability to recognize his trail of stereotypes and in-group nods. You don’t so much read this novel as assemble it like a jigsaw puzzle. Now, don’t misunderstand me: I don’t want authors to lead me through the story by the hand like a slow child. But instead of making me into an active reader, Zandri goes to the other extreme, practically making me write his book for him.

I suspect someone like Maxwell Perkins could coach Vincent Zandri into crafting a winning thriller. What I see here suggests Zandri at least has the enthusiasm that genre writing takes. But Perkins would have started by asking Zandri to go through his manuscript, finding any nugget with a visible pedigree, and killing it. Until he does, Zandri will keep producing work that fobs his authorial job off on you and me.

This is my third experience with Amazon.com’s recent publishing ventures, after Blues Highway Blues and Containment. Though the latter had a worthwhile payoff, all three books could have benefited from an aggressive editor. All three were previously self-published in print or digital form, and selected for reprint by customer enthusiasm. They do not inspire much hope in a publishing model that bypasses the slush pile. The old ways survive for a reason.

Sober, Naked, and Bleeding in an Orange County Sunset

Dan Barden, The Next Right Thing

Some days a good man can't catch a break. I mean, hell. You’d think, if your Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor died with smack in his arm, people would stop coming after you long enough to mourn. And that’s where you’d be wrong, bucko. Because an ex-cop with an assault jacket can’t leave that happy crappy alone. He has to poke where it hurts. He has to find the truth. And if the truth drives everyone away, well, ain’t nothing comes free in this world.

The best mystery protagonists have some monkey on their backs, and Dan Barden’s Randy Chalmers, is no different. But unlike the noir tradition, Randy cannot hide his self-destruction behind the savoire faire of drink and womanizing. That would blow the AA cool he’s spent eight years building. So his risks become outsized, his death wish exaggerated to the point of rueful comedy. Randy reads like the bastard son of Sam Spade and Brother Bill W.

Barden’s nihilistic, mordantly slapstick novel takes a simple premise, of a man with a question he needs answered, and pushes it as far as it will go. As Randy pursues his quest with relentless aggression, he blinds himself to what everyone else can see: that his demand to know the truth has become a substitute for his addiction. He embodies how disaster begets disaster. Yet we cannot help but respect his single-minded devotion to the mentor he loves.

Because that “once a junkie, always a junkie” bull he’s getting from the cops is no damn good. Randy’s sponsor, Terry Elias, had too much reason to live. He took no shellack of anyone, and he punched through everybody else’s pretenses, so Randy won’t believe he just tossed over fifteen years of sobriety for a syringe full of fake happiness. Come the heck on. Why would the guy who punctured everybody else’s pretenses die wrapped up in his own?

In addition to an excellent character, Barden hits us with remarkable voice. Randy’s foul-mouthed attempts to justify his behavior take on the ring of poetry, as he buries his own motivations in a Chinese puzzle box of self-delusion and moralisms. We know we can’t trust him to tell the truth about himself, yet we can’t help but listen to him spin his line of malarkey. He just does it so well.

Dan Barden

Randy reminds me of that friend we all have, the one where we cover our faces because we can’t believe he just did what he just did, yet we peek through our fingers to see what he’ll do next. You know the guy I mean. The same inappropriate tendencies that tell us to hold him at arm’s length also keep us coming back for more. Randy Chalmers’ very public flame-out is just too funny and charismatic for us to stay away.

Like the best tragedy, Randy has far to fall when he collapses into himself, and he takes a lot of people with him. After nearly beating a perp to death as a Santa Ana patrol cop, and losing his marriage and daugther to the bottle, he struggled his way to the top. He’s now an award-winning home designer, hired by the cream of Laguna Beach society. So when he goes off on a dry drunk, ignoring all the warnings, he becomes almost Sophoclean in his pathos.

In short, Randy Chalmers is a completely awful human being—and we can’t help rooting for him all the way. We want him to survive this horrible death spiral, even though we know he won’t. I can’t recall how long since I last saw a character of such compelling public amorality.

Unfortunately, Barden flinches at the end. After we watch Randy destroy everyone he loves in pursuit of the truth, we get two long, talky chapters in which he explains how he didn’t really lose everything. This concluding reversal suggests Barden couldn’t completely commit to his nihilistic vision. He has to slap a bandage on everything that came before. He did so well right up to that conclusion, that it feels soft for him to salve his character in the denouement.

That limitation notwithstanding, Dan Barden has created a book that isn’t quite like anything else on the market today. I can forgive him a flinch after the risks he took in the story up to that point. A character like this, in an edgy story that mostly doesn’t let us look away, is a rare enough bird to stand out in today’s competitive book space.

A Cautionary Tale in How to Write Historical

Susan Elia MacNeal, Mr. Churchill's Secretary

Historical fiction writers have to walk a fine line: how much detail is too much? Historical mystery writers have double that problem. After all, history is about sharing detail, while mystery relies on withholding detail until just the right moment. Authors can find it easy to share too little, keeping audiences confused, or hitting readers with a firehose of undifferentiated information. Sadly, in her debut novel, Susan Elia MacNeal chooses the latter option.

British born but American raised, Maggie Hope only intended to stay in London long enough to sell her late grandmother’s house. But the outbreak of World War II reawakens her “King and Country” sentiments. She joins the staff at 10 Downing Street, only to find that her old family secrets are less than secret in the halls of power. As war moves from possibility to reality, she becomes enmeshed in the inner workings of a country she still hardly knows.

Halfway through this book, one member of Maggie’s inner circle accuses another of a years-old rape. These two have sat to dinner together, carried on political conversations, and attended parties, without a hint of animosity. Neither character gives any hint of a prior history until two pages before the secret comes spilling out. This revelation occurs, I suspect, simply because the author thinks thinks we need one at this juncture.

Understand, please: this happens at the midpoint of a putative mystery, though no detection takes place. Despite a teaser intro about the murder of a member of Winston Churchill’s typing pool, the death occupies less than five of the subsequent 170 pages. A secondary plot about the IRA, Nazi sympathizers, and fifth columnists feels tacked on from another, possibly better book. The author’s attempts to sandwich in some red herrings are painfully obvious.

Instead, MacNeal barrages us with hundreds of pages of historical detail. This includes windy street scenes, descriptions of London before and during the Blitz, the privations of living in Britain on the brink of war, romances that begin and end with precious little detail, and extended soirees and assorted nightlife vignettes. While a few such scenes might have made interesting background, they swell to occupy numerous, interminable chapters. I could have read this in any war memoir.

Susan Elia MacNeal

Between these scenes, MacNeal continues to bury us. Several pages brim with transcripts of Churchill’s speeches to Commons, larded out with many authorial insertions about the characters’ emotional responses. In other places, characters have long, windy conversations about then-current affairs. Partway through one such discussion, which ran over ten pages, I realized the characters weren’t really talking to each other; they were explaining the history to me.

Then, while flooding us with so many external details, MacNeal withholds personal detail. One major part of this story deals with Maggie Hope’s elusive father, whom she believes dead. So many characters state so many times that she must not discover the truth, that I think I break no confidences to say that Maggie discovers he did not die when she thought, and everything she believed about him is false. MacNeal practically signals this fact with jazz hands.

Sometimes I praise books for their “cinematic quality.” Usually I mean that details are well realized, and the author communicates important points in actions rather than telling us what to think. I don’t mean a compliment this time, though. Scenes consistently break on cliffhangers, and so many chapters end with sudden revelations that readers can practically hear the cheesy organ music. This doesn’t read like a book so much as a treatment for an unproduced movie.

Prior to this novel, MacNeal’s greatest literary triumph was a book of recipes for mixed drinks. For some reason, she has chosen to move from the world of how-to, in which everything must be spelled out as explicitly as possible, to the world of literature, in which authors must make choices. Unfortunately, she still writes like every thought, image, and detail which occurs to her deserves a place on the page.

An author like Charles Todd uses history as milieu for an active story. For MacNeal, history is the story. Todd gives enough historic context to keep readers engaged, and focused on the characters. MacNeal uses the characters as authorial sock puppets to explain the history, and never quite gets around to her own story. I blush to admit, after the unearned midpoint revelation, I put this book down, and now can’t bring myself to pick it up again. And I see no reason I should.

Is This the Dumbest Fun You Can Have Between Two Covers?

Review, Kate White, So Pretty It Hurts: A Bailey Weggins Mystery

I ought to hate this book. It almost reads like a ritualistic litany of everything standard writing texts and experienced novelists forbid. Kate White handles mystery like she took an Agatha Christie plot intact, laminated it in Sex and the City chic, and peddled it as her own. Yet I polished it off in two fun evenings, putting off bedtime to finish quickly. Maybe that proves that old ways are the best ways, if you just have fun.

Crime reporter Bailey Weggins writes for a glossy Manhattan tabloid. Invited to a house party in an upstate dacha, she dives into a seething cauldron of sex, jealousy, and immense wealth. At the center stands Devon Barr, a powerful but fragile supermodel. When Bailey finds Barr dead in her sleep, the police rush to close the book on an apparent heart attack. But Bailey knows murder when she sees it, and pursues the case, even as it closes on her like a bear trap.

My criticism starts with the crime itself. Devon Barr appears in scene very little, and her death merely kick-starts the plot. The characters act as ciphers to provoke each other, and interactions consist mainly of one-on-one conversations. Indeed, the characters aren’t characters so much as walking, talking plot devices; the crime is a Chinese puzzle box, not a meaningful investigation.

White’s day job is editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and we can tell, as she obsesses over beauty, fashion, and sex. Characters evaluate each other on looks, and ugly people don’t merit mention. Clothes serve as shorthand for wealth, status, and cachet. Narrator Bailey doesn’t blush to discuss how hot she is, and how many men want to sleep with her. A romantic subplot titillates without adding much to the story.

Plot elements feel transplanted from elsewhere. When the characters get snowed in with a body; when Bailey gets kidnapped in a gypsy cab; when she loses her job on a specious accusation; when she executes a daring escape from a burning building, I can only think I’ve read (or seen!) this before. White’s chapters end on such melodramatic cliffhangers that I almost hear the cheesy calliope music.

Kate White

Characters name-drop several books and movies. The Shining, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Silence of the Lambs, Lifetime movies, and Miss Marple populate her dialogue. This lets White convey impressions by letting us do the work, but it also risks unfavorable comparisons: hey, this snowstorm isn’t nearly as scary as Stephen King’s! One character breathlessly exclaims, “Wow, that—that sounds like a damn movie!”

And how. Yet...

Yet I can’t help recalling this book with a smile. For all its dumb pretensions and feckless wanderings, White clearly had fun writing it. And if she doesn’t challenge us to new profundities and deep insights, she at least takes us out of our own mundane lives briefly for a guided tour of a New York as shady, dangerous, and exciting as downtown Beirut.

White’s first good choice was setting the story in the world of New York haute fashion. This area is not known for producing much eloquence; supermodels seldom double as novelists (White parodies this stereotype with biting dry wit). Others have skewered this industry from outside, but White tells the story from the viewpoint of people for whom fashion is neither myth nor mockery, but yet another thankless job.

She also has a strong heroine in Bailey Weggins. Not a fashionista herself, Bailey rose through the journalistic ranks by busting her chops upstate. This lets her straddle the fashion world’s boundaries, commenting knowledgeably while maintaining her outsider status. She’s at once one of “us” and one of “them.” Thus she can speak candidly, but not opaquely, to people famous for keeping their secrets.

And White tells a cracking good story. Her lickety-split pace, not mired in lengthy exposition or subtlety, probably guarantees her story limited shelf life; but it also lets us embrace her cat-and-mouse ethos. Bailey tells a grim story with understated humor, keeping us from bogging down in hip melancholy. Even her chapters, long by pop lit standards, sustain the momentum through intricate conspiracies.

Literary scholars like me famously love to make fun of popular fiction, then hide behind the excuse that “I love detective mysteries.” I’ve always made fun of that attitude. Yet Kate White’s unprepossessing sense of good, dumb fun has me wondering if I should maybe join the ranks. At the very least, it’ll give me an excuse to keep enjoying books like this one.