Fall Preview 2014: Part One

While kids contemplate going back to school––or have even returned already!––at Read Me Deadly, we're sifting through publishers' fall catalogs and prepublication reviews, trying to figure out what to read. Over the next two weeks, we'll be sharing our ideas about what looks good. Grab a pen and paper, because here we go.

Okay, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it fans, you've read Peter Heller's poetic The Dog Stars, in which a Cessna pilot, Hig, and his dog, Jasper, navigate Colorado nine years after a super flu has eliminated most of humankind. You've visited the world 2,000 years after a nuclear war in Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban and witnessed the deaths of 99.4% of Earth's population and the resulting fight of good versus evil in Stephen King's The Stand. You've traveled through the crushing bleakness of the post-apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and puzzled over the mysterious Area X of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation; Authority; and Acceptance, to be released on September 2, 2014, by FSG Originals). Now, write this one down, because there's terrific buzz about Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (Knopf, September 9, 2014).

The novel begins with famous actor Arthur Leander's onstage heart attack during a performance of King Lear. Watching the doomed efforts of paparazzo Jeevan Chaudhary to save him is child actress Kirsten Raymonde. As Chaudhary later walks home, the Georgia Flu begins its swath of global destruction. The novel then weaves in and out, flashing back to the lives of Leander and his associates and examining the harsh existence of survivors years after his death. Kirsten is a member of a traveling troupe of Shakespearean actors on their way to an old airport housing the Museum of Civilization and a small settlement. Leander's gift to Kirsten, a graphic novel by his first wife titled Station Eleven, guides the troupe through the Great Lakes region, where a religious cult headed by the violent Prophet holds sway. In a decimated world, there are still plenty of ties that bind us.

For a while, it seemed there was no escaping books involving writers' quests. We had no sooner read about a year spent cooking a Julia Child dish daily before we were vicariously living a year spent Biblically. I enjoy quests at second-hand, but I prefer reading about a genuine obsession, such as a birder's attempt to see every bird species on earth, or one with personal meaning, such as an elderly man's effort to drive his lawn tractor 240 miles (top speed, about 6 miles/hour) across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his estranged, dying brother. These sorts of expeditions are of more psychological interest than one undertaken strictly for writing a book about it.

In Martha Baillie's The Search for Heinrich Schlögel (Tin House, distributed by PGW, September 9, 2014), an unnamed narrator uses letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and maps to understand a surreal hike across Canada's remote Baffin Island by a 20-year-old German named Heinrich Schlögel. Inspired by his sister Inge's interest in the Inuktitut language and the diary of his hero, Samuel Hearne, a real-life 18th-century British explorer of the Canadian Arctic, Schlögel returns from what he thinks is a two-week trip to find that 30 years have elapsed, although he himself has not aged. After reading reviews that praise the beauty of Baillie's writing, and learning of her interest in the works of German writer W. G. Sebald (I loved Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which involves a nameless narrator's walk through Norfolk, England, and the fascinating meditations about people and places the walk inspires), I quickly added this book to my list. It may not be for you if you dislike magical realism or best like linear stories with a definitive ending.

Maybe you remember the controversy over the ending of Irish writer Tana French's widely read 2007 book, In the Woods. Readers seemed to love or hate it. Like Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem, In the Woods won four crime-fiction awards for best first novel. It introduces the Dublin Murder Squad series, although it isn't necessary for enjoyment to read the books––a combination of psychological thriller and police procedural––in order. The fifth, The Secret Place, will be released by Penguin on September 2, 2014, and it is already receiving raves for French's meticulous plotting and stylish writing.

Its narrator is Dublin detective Stephen Moran, who works cold cases and dreams of joining the Murder Squad. His entrée comes when Holly Mackey, the teenage daughter of colleague Det. Frank Mackey, gives him a photo from a bulletin board for anonymous postings called "The Secret Place" at St. Kilda's School. In the photo is Chris Harper, a rich boy from a neighboring school, whose murder a year earlier remains unsolved. It's captioned "I know who killed him." French uses alternating chapters––and changes in timeline and point of view––to leap between the investigation of Murder Squad Detectives Moran and Antoinette Conway and four St. Kilda's girls in the school year up to Chris's murder and its aftermath.

All right, let's take a big hop from Ireland to Greece, where we find Jeffrey Siger's Andreas Kaldis. When we first meet Kaldis, in 2009's Murder in Mykonos, he is an Athens homicide detective. He is now the incorruptible (but realistic) head of Greece's Special Crimes Division. In 2012's Target: Tinos, Kaldis marries the wealthy and socially connected Lila Vardi, who is neither harebrained nor stuffy. Siger's characters age and their relationships change over time; it's enjoyable, but not necessary, to read these police procedurals in order of publication. This excellent series has a very strong sense of place: each book is set in a different part of Greece, and geography, history, culture, and current social issues are woven into the plot.

In the sixth book, Sons of Sparta (Poisoned Pen, October 7, 2014), Special Crimes Division Det. Yiannis Kouros is called out to the Mani from Athens by an uncle who once ran one of the region's crime syndicates. A land sale that will make the family rich is in the works until the uncle's death in a suspicious car accident calls the sale off. If Kouros successfully wraps up his investigation of the accident, it could avoid a family vendetta; however, his superior, Kaldis, working on a political corruption case in Athens, takes a sniff and smells fish. I'm looking forward to spending time with Siger's characters and inhaling a lesson about modern and ancient Greece.

I love satirical honeymoons set in fictional paradise. Of course, they turn into nothing like heaven, and we see how the newly married respond when fate deals their romantic expectations a below-the-belt hit. Writer Carl Hiaasen sends one Florida honeymooner fishing in the Keys, where he hooks a severed human arm (Bad Monkey). Another, Manhattan ad executive Max Lamb, seeking to inject some excitement into his Disney World honeymoon, grabs a camcorder and his new wife and drives into the path of an oncoming hurricane; this is by no means the end of the Lambs' perilous day (Stormy Weather).

Lydia Millet, whose 2009 short-story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, creates eccentric pairings between animals and celebrities, has also written an upcoming satirical thriller, Mermaids in Paradise (W. W. Norton, November 3, 2014). It features successful young Americans Chip and Deborah, who travel from Los Angeles to honeymoon at a resort in the British Virgin Islands at Chip's suggestion. From the get-go, Deb, the narrator, is skeptical of this destination; however, when a marine researcher takes some snorkelers to a coral reef, and they discover live mermaids, Deb is transformed. The group's efforts to keep their discovery secret fail, and the resort hurries to profit from it. But the group has some ideas about how to protect these mythical creatures, which I hope are fully half-baked––and completely entertaining.

Few of us read crime fiction only because we're into the bludgeoning; stabbing; strangling; shooting; poisoning; electrocuting; rigging equipment (such as tampering with a car's brakes or wiring dynamite to the engine); pushing off a cliff, out a window, into an empty elevator shaft, in front of a vehicle or herd of stampeding elephants; crushing under a hydraulic press or in one of those diabolical rooms you've seen on TV where the maniac pushes a button and the walls close in on the victim, who already suffers from claustrophobia; drowning in the tub––if the murderer can figure out how to close the drain (I've been in hotel tubs in which I've had to ask my husband); feeding into a tree chipper or dismembering with a chainsaw or something not gas-powered, like a hacksaw or Swiss Army knife (I dream of receiving this one as a gift); leaving out in the elements to die of exposure, be eaten by wolves, or be beamed up to a passing flying saucer, experimented upon, and tidily vaporized by overly curious outer-space aliens, conscientious to a fault about not leaving evidence of their existence behind.... To cut to the chase, I read crime fiction because I like puzzles and the exploration of human nature and society in the framework afforded by the commission, investigation, and solution of a crime.

That said, I don't read much modern crime fiction that would qualify for the Mary Higgins Clark Award (see here). Sometimes, though, it's a pleasure to pick up a book and find little graphic violence and a smart, likable, and independent female protagonist. If there's a well-done romance, it's all gravy.

Hank Phillippi Ryan's Jane Ryland series begins with the Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning The Other Woman. Jane is a former TV investigative reporter, now employed by the Boston Register. In the upcoming third book, Truth Be Told (Forge, October 7, 2014), Jane is working on stories about foreclosures and banking financial services, when a murdered body drops onto her plate. Her investigation expands and becomes more dangerous. Readers will be pleased, because hunky Det. Jake Brogan of the Boston PD is handling a cold-case investigation that may tie in with Jane's stories, and he has eyes in his head to see Jane is no slacker in the beauty and brains departments. Author Ryan, a TV investigative reporter who has won more Emmys and journalism awards than you would believe, is a skillful writer, and she combines an examination of social issues and a sure touch with Jane and Jake's will-they-or-won't-they relationship. That sort of smoldering helped make early years of the TV series Moonlighting, with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, very popular. How often do you find that special longing sweetness in your crime fiction?

I've been a Denis Johnson fan for a long time. If you're interested in influential American novelists whose subject is America, you may have read Jesus' Son, a collection of hallucinatory short stories revolving around some rural addicts; Tree of Smoke, an epic featuring Skip Sands, a CIA officer in the 1960s mess of Vietnam; or Train Dreams, a 116-page gem about Robert Grainier, a working man in the changing early-1900s American West.

On November 4th, Johnson's literary thriller, The Laughing Monsters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), will appear. Kirkus Reviews terms it a "taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he’s shadowing in Africa." The spy is NATO agent Roland Nair, a Scandinavian with a US passport, who returns to Africa to meet his old friend Michael Adriko and Michael's fiancée, Davidia, a college girl from Colorado, in Sierra Leone. Roland and Michael, who has worked as a soldier of fortune and as Roland's colleague in anti-terrorism, made a lot of money during Sierra Leone's civil war. Davidia, Michael, and Roland set off to visit Michael's family on the Congo-Uganda border, but all three may have a hidden agenda. They soon attract the interest of various espionage and law enforcement agencies, and their personal and professional loyalties undergo testing. A re-read of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness may be in order, and then I'm going to sit down with this one.

I enjoy Japanese writer Keigo Higashino's Detective Galileo books, which feature Manabu Yukawa, a brilliant physics professor with a knack for solving crime, and Tokyo police detective Kusanagi. The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint aren't so much whodunits as howdunits or whydunits or willtheygetawaywithits. The detective-suspect games of cat-and-mouse contain surprising twists, and the books explore the nature of guilt, anguish, loyalty, and human relationships.

When Malice (translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith, with Elye Alexander) is published by Minotaur Books on November 7th, we'll get a look at another Higashino series. This one features Kyochiro Kaga, a police detective in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's First Investigative Division. It's the first English translation, and it sounds like fun. It seems that best-selling Japanese novelist Kunihiko Hidaka has been strangled in a locked room of his locked house. The two people who find him are his wife and his best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi; they both appear to have solid alibis. When Kaga investigates, he discovers Nonoguchi is an old colleague from his days of teaching school, and his investigation gains a personal element.

I used to hang out with a bunch of physicists, and at some point during dinner, we non-physicists inevitably started peppering the physicists with questions. What happens if I bore a straight tunnel all the way through the earth, and then drop a ball down the hole? Do I stay drier in the rain if I walk or run to the front door from my car? They'd debate the answers and scribble on paper napkins for illustrations. Of course, as the night went on, our questions would become more preposterous––and their answers more entertaining.

If you love science and like to consider hypotheticals, you'll be interested in Randall Munroe's 320-page What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2, 2014). Munroe studied physics and then built robots at NASA before leaving to to draw comics on the internet full time. His xkcd.com is called "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," and it's an enjoyable and informative place to visit. You can see some questions and answers by clicking on "What If?". (Anyone who has ever struggled to answer a child's tough question about how the world works will be amused by questions that begin, "My six-year-old asked me....") Some question examples are as follows: "What if everyone only had one soulmate? How dangerous is it, really, in a pool in a thunderstorm? If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce? What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?" Munroe's answers are witty, well researched, and illustrated with cunningly drawn little stick figures, cartoons, diagrams, mathematical equations, etc. The book contains both new questions/answers and some of the most popular questions/answers from the xkcd website.  I definitely need to read this one.

That's it for today. I'll be back in a few days with more upcoming books. Tomorrow, Sister Mary will tell you about some great-looking fall books set during World War II and the Cold War.

The Badification of Love

Valentine's Day is Tuesday, February 14th. It's a time for celebrating love with greeting cards, gifts, champagne toasts and kisses. That's tomorrow.

This is today, at Read Me Deadly. It's a time for observing the badification of love in crime fiction. Let's look at some good books involving love that's unrequited, gone missing, gone awry, gone belly up . . . . In other words, love that's gone bad.

Unrequited or obsessional love has inspired many rock 'n' roll songs, and Eric Clapton's "Layla" is one of the best. You might want to play it while we think about books such as John Fowles's The Collector, in which a lonely young butterfly collector named Frederick Clegg kidnaps his beloved Miranda Grey and keeps her captive in the hopes that she will come to love him. Or Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's disturbing 1955 masterpiece about Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who falls in love with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, and then marries her mother.

Of course, unrequited love doesn't always inspire a crime. It may merely burrow into the heart of a criminal or a sleuth, making his or her life more or less miserable and leading readers to groan in empathy. In David Liss's wonderful historical fiction set in 18th-century London, Benjamin Weaver unrequitedly loves the very beautiful Miriam Lienzo, but he is a Jewish ex-prizefighter, and his ethnicity prevents his entry into higher society. He makes a living finding thieves and debtors for the wealthy. In A Conspiracy of Paper, the first book in this literary series, Weaver is hired to find the murderer of a client's father, and his search becomes a Russian nesting doll of financial jiggery-pokery and murderous intrigue.

Keigo Higashino creates a nightmare for his characters when brilliant high-school math teacher Ishigami hankers after his apartment-house neighbor Yasuko Hanaoka in the riveting 2011 book The Devotion of Suspect X. When Yasuko kills her cruel ex-husband, Ishigami leaps to help her dispose of the body and to fix an alibi. The body is discovered and identified, and the police are quickly led to Yasuko and Ishigami. A cat-and-mouse game that becomes increasingly complex develops between the police and Ishigami.

Sometimes the unresolved nature of unrequited love makes it haunt a heart forever. Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides involves the five young and lovely Lisbon sisters, who committed suicide one after another, and the mesmerizing effect these deaths have on their hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Hannah Pittard's Nora Lindell is 16 years old when she goes missing in The Fates Will Find Their Way and, in a similar way, this event stuns some adolescent boys. Nora's disappearance still preoccupies them 25 years later.

In 1962, Ben Wade was a Choctaw, Alabama, teenager secretly in love with a beautiful classmate, Kelli Troy, who had recently arrived from Maryland. It was the early days of desegregation, and Kelli was outspoken in her support of it. Then Kelli was murdered. In Breakheart Hill, by Thomas H. Cook, Wade, now a middle-aged physician, looks back at the days leading up to Kelli's death and its shattering aftermath. His halting narrative that dances around the facts reminds me of Ford Maddox Ford's John Dowell, who slowly teases out the surprising truth of his marriage in The Good Soldier.

Sometimes the death of a loved one creates a terrible void. So terrible for Frank Cairns, that he feels compelled to do something criminal about it. In Nicholas Blake's 1938 book, The Beast Must Die, Cairns begins with a vow: "I am going to kill a man. I don't know his name. I don't know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him." This unknown man is the hit-and-run driver who killed his seven-year-old son. The police have run out of leads, so Cairns builds some information and logical leaps into a case against a man whom he befriends in order to better plot his revenge. The Beast Must Die is both serious and lighthearted, full of twists and turns, and the fourth Nigel Strangeways book written by Nicholas Blake, the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, England's Poet Laureate and father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Edward Elgar, British ecclesiastical composer

Authors sometimes fill death's lonely void with a ghost, which the book's characters don't always appreciate. British fiction writers cannot leave Edward Elgar alone. The last time I saw this British composer, he was taking a fictional trip up the Amazon in James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius. (That is a stunning book, by the way, and I recommend it.) Now, Phil Rickman puts a dead Elgar to work as a ghost, haunting his beloved Malvern Hills, in The Remains of an Altar, the eighth Merrily Watkins book. When does this poor man get to retire? Merrily, Anglican vicar of Ledwardine, has been asked in her role of Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford to exorcise the bike-riding Elgar, who is causing road accidents. Proposed development on a Wychehill hillside possibly sacred to the Druids, Merrily's 17-year-old daughter Jane's activism, a new night club, and the ambitions of the church choirmaster are a troublesome stew coming to the boil. Rickman's series is an entertaining blend of historical research, mystery, and horror.

What does love got to do with it? Even if singer Tina Turner is less than thrilled with love, P. D. James's Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh is clear about its role in murder. Early in his career, he learned that all the motives for murder could be covered by the four L's: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. Check out these two traditional books of crime fiction, written with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that have the L's pretty well covered:

Bill Crider's eleventh Dan Rhodes book, the charming A Romantic Way to Die, finds Obert College the site of a romance writers' workshop. Townspeople of Clearview, Texas, are thrilled that local-boy-turned-famous-Fabio-dude Terry Don Coslin is back in town. Terry Don's aim is to appear on the cover of every single romance novel published. Given his pecs ("hard enough to strike a match on"), his flowing locks and his handsome face, this is a real possibility. Several local residents are also attending the workshop, including newly-published author, Vernell Lindsey. A well-known New York agent is even scheduling appointments at Obert. It's a cryin' shame when the conference is interrupted by a death, and laid-back Sheriff Rhodes must investigate.

Elizabeth Peters's Die for Love, third book in her entertaining Jacqueline Kirby series about a college librarian, is set at a New York City convention for historical romance writers and their fans. The enterprising Kirby wants an escape from Nebraska, so she travels to New York for this convention, where she poses as an author so she can write off the trip on her tax return. When a murder takes place, the always-curious Kirby feels compelled to investigate despite the warnings of a very attractive cop. D'oh!

Listening to the Righteous Brothers always makes me sing in the shower. I'd be curious to know if  "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" inspires you in that way, too. Maybe you'll feel inspired to read one of these books about love that's wandered away.

Dick Lochte's hardboiled novel Sleeping Dog is teeming with lost love and the just plain lost. The narrative alternates between Serendipity Dahlquist, the teenage granddaughter of a Los Angeles soap star, who prides herself on her worldiness and intelligence, and a tired but dedicated ex-cop turned private detective named Leo Bloodworth, aka "The Bloodhound." Serendipity is referred to Bloodworth when her dog Groucho is stolen, but they have barely met before Bloodworth's smarmy office mate is murdered. The two mismatched sleuths set off on a complicated trail. (Note: there is some material in this book that is painful reading for animal lovers, but I read it with a hand over one eye and the other eye half closed, and I survived.)

Drink to Yesterday by Manning Coles opens at a coroner's inquest in a small town in Hampshire, England, on July 19, 1924. A well-liked garage proprietor has been found dead in his home. After the jury reaches its verdict, the story looks back at Chappell's School in the spring of 1914, where a pump and some rubber tubing have been sitting in a lab for simply ages, just waiting to be used by some bored school boys to inject air into the gas line that lights their school. During the months that follow, teachers and staff disappear into the war effort, and one of the gas-line pranksters follows as well. The result is a grim, realistic story set behind German lines in 1941, but told in such a graceful way that it is a bittersweet pleasure to read. The spies are casual about their braveness, but they are very brave indeed. The people back home who love them need to be brave, too, because as Tommy Hambledon tells his young recruit, "Once the job has taken hold you'll find that nothing else in life has any kick in it, and apart from the job you're dead. Neither the fields of home nor the arts of peace nor the love of women will suffice." Being a spy can be heart breaking, and we're not talking about James Bond here.

What would crime fiction be without dangerous women who need a man's help? Ask private eye Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, insurance salesman Walter Neff in James M. Cain's Double Indemnity or Korean-American investigator Allen Choice in Leonard Chang's Fade to Clear. In the first Allen Choice book, Over the Shoulder, San Jose Sentinel reporter Linda Maldonado saw Choice through a horrific sequence of events, including his being framed for murder. The two became lovers, but then Linda called it off. Now, in Fade to Clear, the intriguing third book, she tells Choice her nine-year-old niece has been kidnapped by the girl's father, Frank Staunton, who is in the middle of a divorce from Linda's sister. The father and daughter have disappeared. Will Choice help? This is trouble all around for Choice, since Staunton is a real badass, Choice's current girlfriend will not appreciate his involvement in Linda's case, and Linda herself presents a problem. But Choice doesn't have a choice. (Oh come on, you completely saw that coming!) This is no place for a discussion of fate and free will. The point is, for better or worse, Choice doesn't stop thinking in Fade to Clear.

Now that we've whetted your appetite for some crime fiction involving love and warned you about the approach of Valentine's Day, you can't say that you don't see it coming TOMORROW. Don't forget your sweetie, family, pets, friends, and the people at work who make it bearable. You can be nice tomorrow. Today, after your Valentine's Day preparations are finished, you can kiss it all off by treating yourself to a nice book about crime.