|
|
Aftermath by Peter Robinson (McClelland & Stewart) This remarkably intelligent serial-killer yarn doesn't begin until after all the murders have been committed, yet it loses nothing by avoiding gruesome episodes of carnage. Detective Inspector Alan Banks, heading the North Yorkshire half of a two-county joint task force assigned to investigate the disappearance and presumed murders of five young girls, suddenly gets a break in his case when a pair of cops -- entering what they presume is a domestic crime scene -- discover a 15-year-old girl, naked and abused, in a basement torture chamber. Other bodies subsequently turn up, and as Banks, police profiler Jenny Fuller and Banks' on-and-off lover, the ever-intriguing Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot, pursue different ends of the investigation, they're left wondering whether the recent series of killings should be credited to only one person ... or to a killer couple. Though it's grimmer than Robinson's best-known novel to date, In a Dry Season (1999), Aftermath is no less well stocked with misleading leads, easygoing dialogue and smartly conceived secondary characters. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Angel in Black by Max Allan Collins (New American Library) Having already tackled other unsolved or insufficiently resolved crimes of the 20th century, Chicago P.I. Nathan Heller now finds himself investigating the real-life 1947 murder in Los Angeles of Elizabeth Short, better known as "the Black Dahlia." According to history, Short's severed corpse was found in a vacant lot near Hollywood. Despite heavy newspaper coverage of the crime and an intensive LAPD investigation, no killer was ever identified. But as we learn in Angel in Black, Heller actually untangled the Dahlia mystery half a century ago. Visiting LA on an extended honeymoon and to establish a partnership with one of that city's foremost gumshoes, Heller arrives at the lot where Short's body has been dumped, only to realize that he knows the deceased. They'd had a fling back in Chicago, and less than a week before, Short had called Heller from LA, saying that she was pregnant and needed money. To clear himself of any involvement in this crime -- before the local cops or his new wife can learn of his connection to Short -- Heller sets off to interview the principal real-life players in the Dahlia drama. He also convinces the LAPD to call in former "Untouchable" Eliot Ness as a consultant on the Short slaying, then joins Ness in tracking down the killer. Collins delivers here a harrowing, hard-driving and well-researched tale that ranks among the best work he's ever done. And that's saying something. -- J. Kingston Pierce
A Spy's Life by Henry Porter (Orion UK) Perhaps the only good news to come from the September 11 attacks on America is that people are suddenly talking again about the value of international espionage. This can only prove healthy for spy fiction, the production of which had slowed after the Soviet Union's meltdown. Although A Spy's Life came out in Britain before 9/11, it is sure to benefit from its delayed U.S. publication (by Simon & Schuster), this coming March. The action begins with a bang. Literally. A dozen years after ending his career as a British spy, Robert Cope Harland is the only survivor of a jet crash in New York City. Eleven others perished, most of them -- like Harland -- employed by the United Nations. Naturally, there's an investigation of this disaster, and authorities want to know what Harland remembers about his final moments onboard, whether anything the passengers did might suggest sabotage. But there's a bigger, if murkier picture here, which Harland doesn't see until he starts asking some of his own questions ... and is quickly sucked back into the world of subterfuge he thought he'd escaped permanently. Porter, author of the acclaimed Remembrance Day (1999) and the British editor of Vanity Fair, is determined to keep his protagonist off-guard, whether by pitching into his path a previously unknown son (who may have something to do with coded radio transmissions emanating from Europe), or by raising connections between the New York crash, the alleged resurrection of a Bosnian war criminal, a Czech agent Harland had once loved and Harland's painful history as a prisoner during Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. This is an involved and involving novel that, while it may depend too consistently on assassination attempts to keep its plot rolling, still does a fine job of combining human emotional drama with the pyrotechnics and political deceptions that have long made spy fiction popular. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Beekeeper by J. Robert Janes (Orion UK) Readers who regret that Philip Kerr no longer writes novels about private eye Bernie Gunther (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem), all set in Berlin during World War II, should be gratified to discover Janes' books. The two series share a necessarily pessimistic perspective on the exercise of detection during wartime, though their respective sleuths are quite different from one another. Janes' stories about investigations in the corruption- and political-resistance-filled corners of Vichy France are conducted by Sûreté detective Jean-Louis St. Cyr and his unlikely partner, Gestapo Oberdetektiv Hermann Kohler. In Beekeeper, this pair are assigned to figure out who poisoned Alexandre de Bonnevies, an influential beekeeper in Belleville. Anyone familiar with Janes' stories knows that there are levels of complication well below the surface. The beekeeper's family is highly dysfunctional. His wife has grown distant from her husband and intensely devoted to their son (who's currently missing on the Russian front), while their daughter -- closer to her father and his passions -- ekes out a living by peddling black-market goods. De Bonnevies himself maintained a secretive life, firmly -- and bizarrely -- entwined with the rape and early death of his sister. The list of people who might have done in de Bonnevies is not short, and most of the suspects had either benefited from the dead man's enterprises or had used him or his family in the most egregious ways. Janes' prose is elegant, his characters enigmatic and his scenes dramatic, but his tales can be brutally explicit, exploring the innumerable ways in which humans mistreat each other. In the midst of war, killings unrelated to the battlefield seem amplified in their sadness. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Chasing the Devil's Tail by David Fulmer (Poisoned Pen Press) The sights and the smells and (crucially) the sounds of 1907 New Orleans are vividly conjured by this remarkable first novel set in the Storyville quarter where prostitution was practiced to a jazz beat. Legendary musicians Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton are among many real-life characters encountered by Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr as he hunts a killer victimizing Storyville women. The rhythms of newly born jazz seem to propel the sentences across Fulmer's well-crafted pages. E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime is too often invoked as a point of comparison and standard of praise for turn-of-the-last-century fiction using historical American figures; but here the reference is warranted. The realistic/mythic Chasing the Devil's Tail deserves inclusion on any must-read list. -- Tom Nolan
The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson (HarperCollins UK) Until a couple of years ago, Robert Wilson was practically unknown in the States and not much more familiar in Britain. He'd written four books (including A Darkening Stain and Blood is Dirt) about West African detective/troubleshooter Bruce Medway, but those had been appreciated mostly by connoisseurs of literary noir fiction. Then, however, Wilson produced A Small Death in Lisbon (1999), which won the British Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award for Fiction and suddenly turned him into an international sensation. His latest historical thriller, The Company of Strangers, justifies that acclaim. Whereas Small Death offered two parallel timelines, Strangers is told in linear fashion, beginning during World War II and leading to a shocking denouement set shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In between, we make the acquaintance of Andrea Aspinall, a comely but callow British mathematician who in 1944 escapes bomb-plagued London and her sheltering mother to work as a spy for the Allies at a time when speculation is high that Adolf Hitler might be developing atomic weapons. Under the guise of a new name, "Anne Ashworth," she sets off for Lisbon, Portugal, hungry for new experiences and imagining that the spy game will be just that -- a game. However, the stakes prove much higher. She encounters and then falls in love with a German military attaché, Karl Voss, whose commitment to the Nazi war effort has been seriously undermined by his brother's death during the Battle of Stalingrad. For these two, though, there can be no peace. Andrea finds herself in a dysfunctional Portuguese household, pursued by the husband and targeted by his crazed wife, who sees in Andrea a rival. Voss, meanwhile, is implicated in a coup attempt and taken back to Germany, where he reportedly perishes during interrogation. His death is the catalyst for everything that follows -- Andrea's marriage to a Portuguese major, her struggle against Portugal's fascist regime, even her eventual return to London, where she hopes to heal decades worth of wounds. The Company of Strangers is a compelling work, but less brutal than A Small Death in Lisbon. And in Andrea Aspinall, it boasts a protagonist of uncommon and enduring depth -- one stranger with whom the reader will be most pleased to keep company. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Diamond Eye by Arthur Rosenfeld (Forge) Thanks to America's anthrax scare, postal inspectors have received a lot more attention lately -- for good or ill. Yet Maximillian Diamond, the young Miami-area inspector introduced in Rosenthal's energetic and witty Diamond Eye, isn't tracing deadly spores. He's tracking kiddie porn. Or, rather the producers of kiddie porn -- specifically, whoever has been feeding snuff films into the steady stream of pornographic flicks pipelined through the U.S. postal system. Max's mission will have him following a distribution network that operates between South America and South Florida, and send him up against Cuco O'Burke, a Latino crime boss whose elegant doctor daughter can accomplish what neither rain nor snow nor dark of night could do: distract Max from his duty. Also along for the ride here are three old college chums of Diamond's, who may hold the key to solving not only the child pornography puzzle but murder, as well. Rosenfeld dexterously blends cinematic scenes with intricate, often humorous personality studies in what may be this year's most promising detective series introduction. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James (Knopf) A small Anglican theological school on a remote stretch of the English coast is the moody scene of P.D. James's latest Adam Dalgliesh mystery, a long novel rich in atmosphere and detail. Perhaps some of the length comes from tying loose ends in Commander Dalgliesh's personal story: this book has a "last-things" feel, as if it might serve as a final entry in the Dalgliesh saga if need be. In any event, it's enjoyable and instructive to see Baroness James both employ and transcend the "Golden Age" conventions in this complex tale of deadly sins in a holy setting. -- Tom Nolan
Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley (Little Brown) In this dark and sassy novel, the master of modern pulp noir brought us two new gumshoes to work their way through LA in the racially-turblent 1950s: Paris Minton and his large, strong friend Fearless Jones. This is the kind of novel that proves just how good Mosley is at the game writers like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett brought to a hard boil half-a-century ago. Sure, there are plenty of other hacks writing books populated with fast dames, sleazy crime lords and knuckle-punch gorilla-henchmen, but none of those writers come close to Mosley's ability to create memorable characters surviving in a gritty noirish landscape -- most of whom eventually find redemption of one sort or another. Here, Paris finds himself entangled in a labyrinthine plot that involves Jewish Holocaust survivors, Israeli secret agents and shady evangelicals -- all of them on the trail of a missing bond worth more money than Paris ever dreamed he'd see. What Mosley has that sets him apart from many contemporary mystery writers -- and Fearless Jones proves this admirably -- is his deep connection with his characters. He has the keen talent to capture the lingo, the fright, the bravery, the heart of those souls on the page. -- David Abrams
First Lady by Michael Malone (Sourcebooks Landmark) All too rarely, a book reaches out and grabs you and reminds you why you came to love crime fiction in the first place. Such a novel is First Lady, which reintroduces readers to a pair of cops who figured in two of Malone's earlier works, Uncivil Seasons (1983) and Time's Witness (1989). Police Chief Cuddy Mangum is working-class, arrogantly intelligent and deeply passionate about his responsibility for protecting the small town of Hillston, North Carolina. Lieutenant Justin Savile V, in charge of the HPD's homicide division, is the black sheep scion of a historically prominent family, a nostalgic and thoughtful gent in constant battle with his visceral appetites. First Lady has them both questioning their investigative skills, as they seek to determine who is killing local women. The solution may lie in the murderer's arcane taunts of Cuddy and Savile. The two women believed to be his earliest victims were dressed up in Guess T-shirts, leading the media to dub this slayer "Guess Who." However, successive murders -- including that of a waitress who may have been mistaken for chart-topping Irish singer Mavis Mahar, in Hillston to give a concert -- suggest that if there is truly a pattern to these tragedies, it's related more to the fates of Catholic women saints than to commercialism. As the press criticizes Cuddy's handling of the case, and as political forces threaten his authority in the investigation, the chief swears to bring Guess Who down by the Fourth of July -- or quit his job. Those stakes are made all the higher by the fact that one of Cuddy's principal suspects is Andrew Brookside, the state's philandering governor and husband to a woman Cuddy has loved for many years. Malone is a careful plotter, funneling his landslide of dead-ending clues and tertiary events toward a conclusion that seems inevitable only in retrospect. But more than anything else, it's his characters that make this a standout yarn. The determined Cuddy, the pleasantly flawed Savile, the governor's ludicrously protective press secretary, the congenitally seductive Mahar (with whom Savile can hardly help but begin an extramarital affair) -- these players stick with you like gravy on grits and are just as satisfying. Malone's descriptions of places and behaviors verge on the poetic, his dialogue rolls with wisecracks, and though the book's ending ties too much up a bit too neatly, one finishes First Lady with a "Wow!" Anyone searching for proof that crime fiction can be simultaneously plot driven and transporting in its literary aspirations need look no further than this novel. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Flinch by Robert Ferrigno (Pantheon) There's never been any doubt that Ferrigno (whose first novel, The Horse Latitudes, came out in 1990) had the stuff to be a great thriller writer. He always had a way with tense action sequences and dangerously captivating women, and showed an Elmore Leonardesque aptitude for creating offbeat bad guys. On top of all this, he's demonstrated a nicely cynical fondness for the singular culture of Southern California. But there was a consistent flaw in his books: their male protagonists, none of whom achieved the depth and interest of his supporting players. Until now. In Flinch, the focus is on Jimmy Gage, a reporter for SLAP magazine, a snide, trendy, tabloidish monthly (first introduced in Cheshire Moon, 1993). Once a rising star in the Los Angeles media firmament, Jimmy was brought down by his obsession with "The Eggman," a self-promoting serial killer who'd contacted him by mail, claiming responsibility for half a dozen unsolved murders. The cops investigated, but finally decided that this confession was bogus and that Jimmy was nothing better than a publicity hound. Chastened, Gage left the country, went to Europe and abandoned his golf pro girlfriend, Olivia. However, he's returned a year later, hoping to get his life and career back on track. Only the Eggman case won't leave him alone. In the midst of a teasing late-night rendezvous with Olivia, who during the last year wed Jimmy's plastic surgeon brother, Jonathan, he accidentally discovers "splatter shots" of corpses -- victims of The Eggman -- shuffled in with his sibling's trophy Polaroids of sexual encounters. Is this coincidence or proof that Jonathan is The Eggman? Jimmy's hunger for answers will be complicated by his lifelong rivalry with his hubristic sibling, the involvement of a woman detective who can't decide which brother to believe, and Jimmy's concurrent effort to avoid a sadistic black marketer who blames him for stealing a valuable supply of computer chips. In Jimmy Gage, Ferrigno has found his first three-dimensional leading man, a guy who can exercise both violence and generosity in equal measures, and in either case prefers to keep his doings private. Although this author's previous novel, Heartbreaker (1999), boasted a still stronger cast of morally repugnant crooks, the intense Gage makes Flinch the more memorable adventure. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Ice Lake by John Farrow (HarperCollins Canada) Like its acclaimed predecessor, City of Ice (1999), Farrow's latest work is set in wintry Montreal, Canada. The corpse of a man, shot once through the neck, has been pulled from an ice-fishing hole. It's up to French-Canadian police detective Émile Cinq-Mars and his younger Anglo partner, Bill Mathers, to both find the murderer and relate this slaying to a scheme that involves an idealistic Native American researcher, a gigantic pharmaceutical company and the distribution of lethal drug cocktails to U.S. AIDS patients. In this era when politicians want us to believe that good and bad guys are as different as black and white, it's thrilling in some peculiar way to find that those distinctions are not always obvious among Ice Lake's players. Though the story's interest flags a bit when Cinq-Mars is not at center stage, either engaged in verbal jousts with a corporate CEO or ruminating on his professional worth ("There are days when I know I'm useful. Other days when I believe the criminals are fortunate to have such a bungling idiot as an adversary"), Ice Lake maintains a decisive narrative drive, its facets expertly revealed. Also revealed here are new layers of Cinq-Mars' makeup, as he deals with the imminent demise of his father. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press) Red Hook, a debut novel by Gabriel Cohen, is a bridge that stretches from the mystery genre into the world of literary fiction. It's the tale of the last, harrowing case of Brooklyn cop Jack Leightner, and it reads like the final book in a crime fiction series: The veteran detective, having sacrificed his marriage and his family to forge a stellar career, finds himself faced with an apparently insoluble murder case. But Red Hook is as much an exploration of the human soul as a murder mystery. As he looks for clues to the stabbing death of a young Hispanic man in the quasi-industrial Red Hook section of Brooklyn, Leightner is forced to confront the memories of another death in the Red Hook -- an episode that has haunted him since childhood. When his superiors order him off the increasingly dangerous case, he risks his career and his life to get to the murderer and the truth. Red Hook is a fine police procedural, and much more. -- Karen G. Anderson
The Repentant Rake by Edward Marston (Headline UK) While he's best recognized for his series about crime-solving 16th-century theater manager Nicholas Bracewell (The Devil's Apprentice, The Wanton Angel), Marston has been concurrently composing three other estimable successions of lighthearted historical mysteries. The newest of these is built around an ambitious architect, Christopher Redmayne, and the sober-sided constable, Jonathan Bale, who has become his invaluable ally in bringing wrongdoers to rights in mid-17th-century London. That was an ideal time to be designing buildings in London; the Great Fire of 1666 had just decimated the city. But it was also an era of political turmoil, following the end of Oliver Cromwell's reign as Lord Protector and the restoration of the English monarchy, in the form of King Charles II. As The Repentant Rake (the third of Marston's Redmayne/Bale novels) begins, Sir Julius Cheever -- an abstemious former Cromwell supporter, who would like nothing better than to see London purged of the sins that survived its recent conflagration -- is preparing to take a seat in Parliament. Before doing so, he commissions Redmayne to build him a new residence in the city. Meanwhile, Bale, patrolling near the Thames River, happens upon the strangled corpse of Sir Julius' estranged and sybaritic son, Gabriel. Redmayne becomes involved in the murder inquiry after he learns that his own ne'er-do-well brother, Henry, was a longtime friend of Cheever fils and is being blackmailed (along with other local rakehells), using information that might well be traced back to Gabriel. Author Marston finds obvious delight in exploring the generously wicked side of Restoration London, and takes the opportunity here to flesh out the foppish character of Henry Redmayne, who played lesser roles in The King's Evil (1999) and The Amorous Nightingale (2000). This intelligently concocted romp is an ideal relief from a steady diet of grim crime tales. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Right as Rain by George Pelecanos (Warner Books)
Smuggler's Moon by Bruce Alexander (Putnam) Bruce Alexander (pseudonym of veteran American author Bruce Cook) has won glowing reviews and a loyal readership with his series of historical mysteries involving the blind 18th-century English magistrate Sir John Fielding and his teenaged apprentice, Jeremy Proctor. Smuggler's Moon, the eighth book in this series, takes Sir John and Jeremy to the seaport of Deal to investigate "owling," as illegal cargo smuggling was then known. Murder soon is added to the crimes at hand. Bruce Alexander has a great flair for bringing the past to life, and his engaging characters' adventures show how some of our present-day social ills and dilemmas looked to a previous century. Smuggler's Moon may be the best Sir John Fielding book yet. -- Tom Nolan
Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries By Ross Macdonald edited by Tom Nolan (Crippen & Landru) This first offering of "new" Ross Macdonald fiction since 1976 is a compilation of three previously unknown short stories, found by Tom Nolan -- a January Magazine contributing editor -- while he was gathering material for his excellent 1999 study, Ross Macdonald: A Biography. One, "Death by Water," was written in the 1940s for an Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine contest and features Joe Rogers, the private eye precursor to Macdonald's later series sleuth, Lew Archer. The other two entries here -- "Strangers in Town" and "The Angry Man" -- are both Archer outings, and provided starting points for a pair of Macdonald's novels. Strangers in Town includes a lengthy introduction by Nolan that sets these stories in context and provides a fine overview of Macdonald's career. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Tell No One by Harlan Coben (Delacorte) Taking a break after writing seven novels about sports agent/sleuth Myron Bolitar (The Final Detail, Darkest Fear, etc.), Coben offers a standalone thriller that is poignant, deceptive and unpredictable. Definitely not the kind of story to put you easily to sleep at night. The setup sucks you right in: David Beck and his new wife, Elizabeth, set off on what they think will be a peaceful escape to the Beck family's Pennsylvania retreat. But while they're frolicking around a lake one night, Elizabeth is kidnapped and Beck is clobbered over the head when he tries to rescue her. Now, jump ahead eight years. Beck has finished his training as a pediatrician, gone to work with poor Manhattan children and tried to put his life together again after Elizabeth's murder (which was apparently committed by a serial killer called KillRoy). All the horror of that tragic Pennsylvania evening comes rushing back at him, though, when he receives an e-mail message, seemingly composed by Elizabeth and sent on the anniversary of their first kiss. Could it be that his wife isn't dead, after all? Like Bolitar, Beck is basically a decent, thoughtful man, and the depth of his love for Elizabeth -- his childhood sweetheart -- emanates clearly from these pages. So it's easy to understand why the reader may get caught up in the Hitchcockian twists of Tell No One, as the innocent Beck struggles to resolve his wife's mystery. Making this bid for "closure" harder: the cops have come to think that Beck might have murdered his wife, killers are dogging his trail and he's grappling with suspicions that people he trusted may have been complicit in Elizabeth's fate. Beck's personal commitment to the case at the heart of this story, on top of author Coben's fast-paced writing style and calculated suspense-building, make this a book you'll want to tell everyone about. -- Jodi P. Pierce
Watchers of Time by Charles Todd (Bantam) Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent in 1919 to the English village of Osterley in order to mollify that area's bishop. He's supposed to make it appear that the Yard cares greatly about the slaying of a Catholic priest in the town, even though his brief doesn't include any real investigating of the tragedy. But, of course, Rutledge is too conscientious to ignore clues to a crime, so he's soon mucking about in Osterley's past and prejudices, questioning nearly everyone and raising discomforting doubts about the guilt of a "strong man" entertainer who's been incarcerated for the priest's killing. At the same time, the inspector -- pestered as always by the loquacious spirit of an executed Scottish soldier, Hamish MacLeod -- pursues connections between the clergyman's demise, the fact that that same priest was called recently to the deathbed of a devout Anglican (an elderly man who may have had secrets he could share with no one else) and one of the worst maritime disasters of the early 20th century. The Todd novels (of which this is the fifth) are wonderfully dense with damaged characters and well-detailed post-World War I atmospherics. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by Ed Gorman (Carroll & Graf) Gorman's charming series narrated by 1950s Iowa lawyer/private eye Sam McCain seems to get better with each book. This third entry starts with a visit to McCain's town of Black River Falls by Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev, who disarms the locals with his cornball style. There's nothing funny about the murders that follow in the wake of his departure, though. McCain sorts through several ideological blood-feuds -- and various romantic entanglements -- to find the deadly truth. Along the way, the reader revisits an era of popular and political culture that was neither as benevolent nor as bland as is often remembered. -- Tom Nolan
Ash by Holly Thompson (Stone Bridge Press) In 1970, in Kyoto, a childhood tragedy abruptly took Caitlin Ober's best friend. Unable to face the darkness threatening their own daughter, Caitlin's family cut their time in Japan short in order to return to the States. Now an adult in the 1980s, Caitlin has returned to Japan to teach. Living in Kagoshimi, a city positioned in the shadow of Sakurajima, an active volcano, Caitlin obscures her past as surely as the drifting ash from the volcano frequently obscures her vision. With phrasing as delicate as that of a Haiku, first-time novelist Holly Thompson crafts a deeply moving story that crosses cultural, emotional and even sexual barriers. A wonderful debut. -- Monica Stark
The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock (HarperFlamingo Canada) All the bitter ambiguities of war are laid bare in this timely novel of Hiroshima and its terrible aftermath. Two survivors of the tragedy meet in the most unlikely of circumstances. Though their viewpoints could not be farther apart, the tentative, ambivalent, yet powerful way they connect with each other is indescribably moving. Anton Boll is an elderly German-born scientist who is proud of his involvement in developing the technology that led to the bomb, until he meets a middle-aged Japanese-American woman named Emiko Amai. Emiko was literally at ground zero during the explosion, watched her little brother die and lost half her face and both her parents. Now she seeks to understand the tragedy which has shaped her life by making a documentary film. When she approaches Boll for an interview it sets off a sort of earthquake of conscience which changes him forever. Boll discovers that he too has been seared and scarred by the catastrophe he helped to unleash. Reading The Ash Garden helps you to understand the true meaning of that awful military expression, "collateral damage." -- Margaret Gunning
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler (Knopf) Anne Tyler has done it again, creating yet another quirky literary family that mirrors life both painfully and deliciously. Rebecca Davitch is a plump, pleasant-looking woman of 53, the emotional center of a large and boisterous family who take her generosity of spirit completely for granted. One day, unexpectedly, she wakes up and realizes that she has no idea who she is. As Tyler puts it, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." By marrying into the Davitch family, Rebecca discarded her personal dreams a long way back, coping with instant motherhood by marrying a divorced father of three, then enduring even worse strain on being widowed. Her life hasn't unfolded so much as fallen on her like a series of heavy boxes. Rebecca's attempts to get her old life back are both comic and poignant, as when she tries to renew a relationship with a former flame who has turned into a fussy old fuddy-duddy. Then there is Poppy, Rebecca's ancient uncle-in-law, a 100-year-old man who seems to exemplify all those relatives who linger around the fringes of family gatherings. Tyler's books breathe family reality in all its painful glory. This delightful novel is no exception. -- Margaret Gunning
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo (Scribner) Slimming the size down 600 pages from his end-of-millennium magnum opus, Underworld, Don DeLillo delivers an unconventional ghost story in his new novel, The Body Artist. The story involves an abruptly widowed performance artist who discovers that she's sharing her rented summer house with a stranger, a loosely strung man who seems somehow to know intimate details of her life. How long has he been there? Where did he come from? How much does he know? Who is he? DeLillo explores these questions -- and broader ones about grief, time and shifting reality -- in his customarily masterful style, leaving the reader with plenty to think about but few comforting answers. -- Charles Smyth
The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan (Putnam) Amy Tan has always written novels that stop short just this side of autobiography. Books like The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife have documented Chinese-American family life with such detail, such sincerity that it feels like we're having lunch with Tan and, over green tea and fortune cookies, she confides all the secrets in her ancestor's closet. That's why The Bonesetter's Daughter is such a surprise. I would have thought there were no more memories Tan could plumb, no more funny-true tales of mothers and daughters for her to serve up like a steaming Chinese buffet. Turns out I was wrong. The Bonesetter's Daughter is Tan's most intensely personal book to date and it is, by far, the best of her novels. As Ruth Young's mother, LuLing, slowly disintegrates into dementia, Tan weaves a multi-generation tale which shows how LuLing's tragic past holds the key to Ruth's restless present. The result is a shimmering, humorous, heart-wrenching, rewarding novel that has all the grace of Chinese calligraphy inked across the page. -- David Abrams
Channeling Biker Bob: Heart of a Warrior by Nik C. Colyer (Henrioulle Publishing) Is Stewart Chance awake or dreaming? As his wife continues sleeping in their bedroom, Stewart dons yesterday's clothes and goes to the Harley-riding stranger who beckons him through the window. "Come on damn it, we ain't got all night." Flying down the road on the back of the motorcycle without protective headgear, Stewart is told to "Relax. Bob sent me." Bob, we later learn, is the title's Biker Bob, a Harley-riding spirit guide sent to help Stewart, a computer geek with a surly wife, reclaim his inner biker. Channeling Biker Bob has the heart of an anthem. The sort of relationship book that both men and women can not only enjoy, but perhaps even take strength from. Self-published, the book's editing and design are second rate. It doesn't matter. Channeling Biker Bob is the start of something larger: you can feel it. It's exciting watching the beginning. -- Lincoln Cho
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates (Henry Holt) The Collected Stories of Richard Yates is late-arriving cause for celebration. Yates, long and widely admired by fellow writers, never gained popular appeal during his troubled lifetime. Now, thanks especially to the efforts of the novelist Richard Ford, a new generation of readers will have a chance to appreciate Yates' uncompromising work. Many of the stories deal with World War II vets who came down with tuberculosis during the war and ended up in government hospitals, often for the rest of their lives. (Yates himself had tuberculosis but recovered.) These stories are told with a painful clarity that makes them emotionally difficult to read at times. But Yates never condescends to his characters or oversentimentalizes their misfortune. He sees with an unflinching eye and writes with beautiful simplicity. As the writer Steward O'Nan put it in an appreciative essay for the Boston Review, Yates "wrote about the mundane sadness of domestic life in language that rarely if ever draws attention to itself." -- Charles Smyth
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) What a shame Franzen had to leave a bad taste in our mouths with the stink of the all-too-public Oprah brouhaha. Big "O" emblazoned on the cover or no big "O," this is one sharp, smart, well-constructed book. The Corrections eases us carefully into its intelligence. It's like the soft center of DeLillo-ism, the chewy caramel of David Foster Wallace-istic frenzy. Franzen is most concerned with spinning a good yarn. The saga of the dysfunctional, Oprah-ready Lamberts has plenty of heft, both physically and psychologically. On Franzen's pages, the nuclear family is ready to explode at any moment, leveling houses, trees and psyches in a milli-blink. These are our fathers, our mothers, our brothers and sisters -- perhaps, in some cases, ourselves. Franzen holds up the mirror and dares us to look away. -- David Abrams
The Deadwood Beetle by Myléne Dressler (BlueHen Putnam) Near the beginning of The Deadwood Beetle, the protagonist, Professor Emeritus Dr. Tristan Martens, buys an antique harp chair. "As chairs went, it was certainly a lovely one. The woven back did look something like a classical harp. Its curved arms ended in small clusters of carved roses. Its feet were small and turned under, like an animal's at bay. The seat was broad and inviting." The chair is small and delicate, yet strong and powerfully formed. The same could be said of Myléne Dressler's new novel: small and delicately written, it nonetheless touches you quickly and deeply. The story is set around an unlikely December romance with reverberations from Martens' childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland. The Deadwood Beetle follows Dressler's well-reviewed first book, 1997's The Medusa Tree. If these two books are any indication, Dressler's will be a name worth watching. -- Sienna Powers
Elvis in the Morning by William F. Buckley Jr. (Harcourt) Both the plot and the title sound very lighthearted and not entirely like a work that one would expect from William F. Buckley, literary icon extraordinaire. However, Buckley's payload is in the subtext of this gritty and unexpectedly darkly humorous 14th novel. The weaving of fictional and historical characters throughout Elvis in the Morning is skillful and not at all disconcerting. Buckley has done his research and his portrait of Elvis and the people around him reflects this. It is, however, not merely an Elvis story. The action throughout the book centers on a young man named Orson and the way his life is affected by the friendship that blossoms between him and Presley, 10 years his senior. It is also, like the best stories always are, a bit of a moral tale. Elvis' rise in the 1950s seems to reflect America's youthful innocence. Through the arc of the singer's life and career we view the turbulent 60s and the move into the self-destructive 70s. And, of course, we never reach the 1980s. Buckley has a knack for making us think and giving us pause no matter what, apparently, the subject matter. -- Aaron Blanton
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Knopf) Russo's particular gift is that he can write about the foibles and follies of small-town America without resorting to either shallow nostalgia or shameless caricature. Even if you can't imagine residing in the dead-end locales where he sets his tales or enduring the often unexpressed lives of his protagonists, it's impossible not to admire this author's comic invention and timing, as well as his manifest affection for unapologetic eccentrics. Empire Falls transports readers to a once-prosperous Maine river town, humbled by the failure of its textile and paper mills. Like so many other residents, Miles Roby has trimmed his expectations to fit the local norm. He has let himself be trapped in Empire Falls, giving up what he dreamed might be a career in academia to become the 40-something proprietor of a pocket-edition restaurant owned, like almost everything else in town, by the manipulative widow of the mills' last operator. It isn't such a bad life, as long as he can get past the facts that his ambitious wife is divorcing him to wed an aging health-club owner with a stronger sex drive; his alcoholic father is constantly trying to scam money off him; and his daughter is dating the arrogant, football-playing son of the arrogant, mean-spirited sheriff -- a man Miles grew up with, and who has recently taken a suspicious interest in the whole Roby clan. However, Miles has begun to doubt the efficacy of surrendering his life to fate, at the same time as he's wrestling with memories of a boyhood vacation to Martha's Vineyard. As Miles slowly (slower than most readers, probably) recognizes the significance of those recollections, he and the town that confines his spirit are both headed for a blowup. One destined to upset all previous bets about the future. -- J. Kingston Pierce
Generica by Will Ferguson (Penguin Canada) Something of an anti-hero in his own country, Will Ferguson is not well known outside of Canada. For the past several years he's cranked out a quick succession of non-fictive hits -- each one funnier and more cutting than the last. His run started with Why I Hate Canadians in 1997 and has included Bastards and Boneheads, Hokkaido Highway Blues and, just this autumn with brother Ian, How to be a Canadian. Generica, also published in 2001, is Ferguson's first novel: a little surprising when you realize the prolific young author is already about 10 books in. Surprising, also, is ... well ... everything about Generica. From an over-the-top plotline, to a well-developed set of characters and, most especially, to its quasi-Gothic tone. There is the feeling of 19th-century morals and expectations in Generica, although the plot is entirely today. An overworked editor at a mid-sized publishing house encounters a manuscript on the slush pile that pauses his hand in the midst of slapping an automatic rejection slip onto it. The manuscript, by one Tupak Soiree, is the self-help book to end all self-help books -- literally. When the book is published, calamity ensues because it delivers on its promises. Readers lose weight, stop smoking, enjoy otherworldly sex, find true happiness and all hell breaks loose in an "apocalyptic plague of happiness" while the economy collapses in a benign pile of self-satisfaction. Generica is, quite simply, delicious. -- Linda Richards
The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh (Random House) Ghosh's epic tale begins with the British invasion of Burma in the late 1800s and gallops through an awesome landscape of world events, taking us through two world wars all the way to the age of e-mail and the Internet. At the core of this saga lies a lifelong relationship between two marginalized characters: the orphaned survivor Rajkumar and the beautiful slave-girl Dolly, nursemaid to Queen Supayalat's daughters. Rajkumar and Dolly meet as children in a turbulent Burma that has just been taken over by the British. When the Burmese Royal family is exiled to India, Rajkumar believes he has lost Dolly forever, but fate brings them powerfully together years later in a union that will lead to intricate webs of family and relationship. The personal and the historical unfold side-by-side in a novel of huge scope and sweep, which somehow manages to get all the intimate details right. One of the most intriguing characters is Arjun, an eager recruit in the British Indian army who undergoes a huge upheaval in conscience when he realizes that serving the oppressor (and thereby gaining some personal status) is morally indefensible. It is these undercurrents of conscience that carry The Glass Palace beyond a rip-roaring good story to the level of real literature. -- Margaret Gunning
Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian (Broadway Books) A strange, convoluted and absolutely compelling first novel set around the time of the American Civil War. When the child, Gob, loses his twin brother, his grief is without measure. And, rather than ebbing over time as grief often does, Gob pulls it within himself and uses it to fuel his childish dream: he wants to bring his brother back. As he grows and learns, Gob's dream grows as well: after a time he comes to want to resurrect not only his brother, but to end death forever by way of a machine that will take him years to build. Though this barest skeleton of the plot sounds completely impossible and unlikely, Adrian manages to make all of the strangeness in his book not only possible, but probable -- at least, while you're reading it. Just as importantly, the author captures the agony of a conflict that, literally, pitted brother against brother as well as the grief that always comes as a part of war of any kind. -- Linda Richards
The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes (Picador) What happens when Nelson Humboldt, an adjunct lecturer at prestigious Midwest University, gets his right index finger severed in a freak accident? Well, for starters, after it's reattached, he discovers that by simply touching others with this fickle finger of fate he can will them to do his bidding. Just think of the possibilities. Add into the mix a cast of truly quirky characters -- the Canadian Lady Novelist; a Serbian theorist who considered himself "the Toshiro Mifune of cultural studies" along with his improbably named lover Lorraine Alsace and an American poet "who lived the persona of the wild Celtic writer, adopting an Irish accent and referring to himself in the third person as 'the Coogan'" -- and you get a spot-on send-up of the foibles of academe. This book made me laugh out loud so many times that I lost track. James Hynes won widespread praise with his 1997 triptych, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. With The Lecturer's Tale he has earned another A-plus. -- Pamela C. Patterson
Never Count Out the Dead by Boston Teran (Minotaur Books) Roaring back after his well-received, high-voltage debut novel, God Is a Bullet, Boston Teran again focuses on a scarred man and woman in his new thriller, Never Count Out the Dead. This time out, he pits the two leads against each other instead of pairing them up and plants her daughter right in the middle. As in Bullet, Teran's unique brand of edgy hipsterese propels the story forward with nerve-racking intensity. When the conspiratorial strands of a Los Angeles school-construction scam finally come together in a remote corner of San Frasquito Canyon, the gut-wrenching showdown will take your breath away. -- Charles Smyth
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (Atlantic Monthly Press) I still don't know how he did it, but Enger managed to weave one of the most literate of this year's stories, yet carve it so cleanly from what seems to be a universal adolescence that it's like we're barely reading a book at all. Instead, we experience Peace Like a River in a way that it resonates inside our hearts and heads for a long, long time after the last page has been turned. Few writers are able to discuss childhood in clear-eyed, yet rosy-nostalgia terms that will cause Grown-up Adults to nod so vigorously with recognition that their heads threaten to fall off their necks. Enger fills the nooks and crannies of every paragraph with Biblical language; faith and miracles crowd each page, dancing like the proverbial angels on the head of a pin. Characters literally walk on air, a pot of soup replenishes itself in loaves-and-fishes fashion, bodies are healed -- and, without spoiling too much, I can tell you that there's a vision of heaven so achingly beautiful that I'm ready to buy a ticket today. Of all the books I read this year, Enger's was by far the richest and most satisfying. -- David Abrams
Sister Crazy by Emma Richler (Knopf) The semi-autobiographical first novel of Emma Richler, daughter of the esteemed Canadian author Mordecai Richler, who died not long after the book's release. Sister Crazy is stunning: a collection of vignettes in the young life of Jemima Weiss, middle daughter of a well-known writer, as is Richler herself. The author consistently lightens the dark areas of Sister Crazy with humor and deepens humorous passages with dollops of darkness. Bizarrely, the book that results is well-balanced and even joyous. Sister Crazy is edgy, touching, dark and warm: not by turns, but all at once. -- Sienna Powers
Spadework by Timothy Findley (HarperFlamingo Canada) Well-loved Canadian author Timothy Findley famously follows-up one of his "serious" books with something light and immediately accessible. His last novel, the hugely successful and fairly epic Pilgrim, was his most recent "serious" work. Which means Spadework, with a smaller canvas and a fairly tight cast, is one of his lighter novels. The fact that all of the awards programs that usually clamor over Findley didn't seem to give Spadework a second glance would seem to confirm this. It's their loss, yet somehow ours as well because the book seemed to be almost completely ignored. Spadework is a grand novel. A small canvas, yes, but the human emotion and the careful examination of human relationships -- as well as the theater, one of Findley's grand passions -- make Spadework a quiet gem of a novel. -- Linda Richards
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (Knopf) The Australia-born Carey, author of such previous literary gems as Jack Maggs (1998) and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), has succeeded in capturing -- in brilliant half-literate vernacular and with abundant intrigue -- one of his country's most elusive and legendary figures: 19th-century outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly. In the course of his efforts, he's jiggered the oft-popular conception of Kelly as an Irish-Australian thug and murderer, giving him more of a Robin Hood-like cast as he plays up the man's opposition to greedy English landlords and the deliberately ignorant colonial government. Composed as a series of letters, True History of the Kelly Gang makes the most of its subject's escapades, including his 20-month evasion of a brutal police manhunt, the bank heists that supplemented his bushwhacking skills and the support he received from pretty much anybody not in authority. That you know Kelly is bound eventually to swing doesn't steal the excitement from this tale any more than the foreknowledge of William Wallace's fate robbed the movie Braveheart of its narrative dynamism. Carey has written here a western without the American West and a novel of crime that vastly exceeds one's expectations. -- J. Kingston Pierce
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow) Neil Gaiman's résumé must make most other authors envious, but until this year there was one thing missing from his impressive list of accomplishments: a great novel. After the false starts of Neverwhere and Stardust (neither of which was truly a novel in conception), he hit his stride as a novelist with American Gods. Much of it will be unsurprising to Gaiman's fans: it is about storytelling, about the undercurrents of myth and legend in modern life, about death and rebirth; it has wit, imagination, humanity. Nothing new there. What is unusual is its setting, for much of it takes place in the vast expanse of the Midwest, which seems an unlikely place for an epic conflict between the old gods of ancient cultures and the new gods of technology and power. Gaiman is as sure a storyteller as anyone writing just now and the setting seems inevitable. The fantastic conflict at the heart of the book says something essential about the heart of the land of America: what it is, where it comes from and where it is going. -- David Dalgleish
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (Ballantine/Del Rey) Perdido Street Station, the sophomore effort by British author China Miéville, arrived from the other side of the Atlantic trailing clouds of glory: the cover copy featured plaudits from such eminences as Brian Stableford, Jonathan Carroll and John Clute, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. And there is much to love about this large, intense, heartfelt, teeming novel. Its greatest achievement is its setting: New Crobuzon, a squalid alternate-world metropolis, populated uneasily by myriad species, brought magnificently to life by Miéville. By novel's end, New Crobuzon has become one of the landmarks of the imaginative landscape, a venue to be mentioned in the same breath as Arrakis, Gormenghast and Lankhmar. Miéville also handles his juggernaut of a narrative with verve, showing at times the control of a master; at other times, it seems overlong and the climax relies too much on some rather conventional action set-pieces and confrontations. There is no doubt, though, that Miéville is a major talent, and Perdido Street Station a major work of dark fantasy. It may not be too soon to call it a classic. -- David Dalgleish
The Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins) Terry Pratchett has dominated the British bestseller lists for two decades, fusing fantasy and social satire into a literary form that is hysterically funny and at times deeply moving as well. Like physicist Richard Feynman, Pratchett finds "everything is interesting if you look at it deeply enough." With The Thief of Time, he explores the mechanics and the metaphysics of time itself. A mad clockmaker, underwritten by a group of gray and humorless immortals known as the Auditors, is making a clock so perfect that it will stop time. A sage old monk and the young thief who is his pupil are out to stop them, with the assistance of two of Pratchett's most beloved repeating characters, Death and his schoolteacher granddaughter, Susan. While some of Pratchett's books have predictable endings, The Thief of Time concludes in a literary tour de force of suspense and surprise. It's a must for Pratchett admirers and a grand introduction if you've been wondering what the fuss is all about. -- Karen G. Anderson
The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll (Tor Books) Jonathan Carroll seems incapable of writing a bad book much less an uninteresting one and The Wooden Sea does nothing to dispel that impression; indeed, it is one of this maverick author's finest achievements. The pell-mell narrative jerks the bluff, good-humored protagonist, policeman Frannie McCabe, from mystery to crisis to revelation and back again, and shifts bewilderingly from past to future to present. As he is buffeted by forces beyond his ken and control, Frannie comes to see something which none of us in the non-fictive world are privileged to see: the entire shape of his life, before it ends. And he is forced to find the meaning of that life; his response is wise (as is rarely the case with Carroll's protagonists) and illuminating (as is always the case). Carroll borrows elements from various genres -- fantasy, horror, science fiction -- as needed and doesn't bother to fit them into a coherent framework or even to explain them; rather, he uses these elements almost impressionistically, to convey Frannie's emotional and moral dilemmas in unexpected ways. The result is gripping, baffling, unique. -- David Dalgleish
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
