Spring Preview 2015: Part One

Surely this dude could crawl faster after a
session with the toenail clippers.

Believe it or not, winter's days are numbered. S-l-o-w-l-y, but surely, birds' nests, daffodils, and green leaves are on their way. Spring books are coming, too, and some of them look pretty darn good.

Of course, what one reviewer describes as "riveting" may be another reader's "I just could not get into it." This spring, you ought to find something you like, given the books' wide variety.

Canadian writer Owen Laukkanen is a terrific storyteller. His series, set in Minnesota's Twin Cities, combines aspects of a police procedural with the pacing of a thriller laying rubber. Typically, chapters alternate between all the major characters' viewpoints, giving the reader a pleasantly head-spinning experience. His cops are an appealing odd couple: Kirk Stevens, a veteran agent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Carla Windermere, a hotshot FBI special agent. Stevens is a happily married, middle-aged white guy; Windermere is single, black, gorgeous, and tough.

Given other circumstances, some of Laukkanen's criminals might not have turned to crime; however, they graduated from college in a poor jobs market––but dream of an early retirement in the Maldives (The Professionals). Another unlikely crook over-leveraged himself with a hefty mortgage before he was laid off. Then, he discovers he enjoys the adrenalin rush of robbing banks (Criminal Enterprise). Crime seems to come more naturally to a wealthy capitalist who uses the internet and takes outrageous advantage of dead-eyed "assets" to satisfy the demand for pro killers––although at times running the business is a headache (Kill Fee) (see reviews here, here and here). You can count on Laukkanen for entertaining social criticism along with the hair-raising suspense.

In Laukkanen's fourth book, The Stolen Ones (Putnam, March 17), off-duty deputy sheriff Dale Friesen is killed after he questions a truck driver, and a young Romanian woman named Irina Milosovici escapes from the truck's container. Milosovici, found near Friesen's body, doesn't speak English and has no idea where she is. The missing 18-wheeler contains her sister and other victims of a sex-trafficking operation. While Windermere and Stevens search for the truck and the traffickers, the traffickers search for Milosovici.

Benjamin Percy, now writer in residence at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, is from Eugene, Oregon, and Oregon often appears in his settings. Like Owen Laukkanen, Percy focuses on current social issues. Red Moon (Grand Central, 2013) examines dispossession, marginalization, and terrorism in 21st-century America. The stigmatized and terrorists are lycans, and they are not the explode-into-fur-and-snarling-fangs-under-a-full-moon variety one usually encounters in werewolf fiction. This is an unusual supernatural thriller and alternative history.

A nuclear apocalypse and flu epidemic have decimated the world in Percy's upcoming dystopian novel, The Dead Lands (Grand Central, April 14). The United States has disintegrated, and a group of survivors are living under tyrannical leaders in the Sanctuary near what was once St. Louis, Missouri. A stranger arrives and talks about the land west of the Cascade Mountains, where crops still grow and civilization flourishes. Lewis Meriwether and Wilhemina Clark flee the Sanctuary with a band of followers. They'll recreate the early-19th-century expedition of Lewis and Clark as they travel westward through the continental divide to Oregon. The earlier explorers faced threats in the unknown territory, but surely those threats pale compared to the ones ahead of these travelers: treacherous militias with who-knows-what sort of agenda and creatures that have undergone mutations caused by nuclear fallout. Whoa!

If you've been planning to read Dennis Lehane's excellent historical novels about Joe Coughlin, now is the time. A movie based on the Edgar Award-winning second book, Live by Night (William Morrow, 2012) (reviewed here), will be out in the fall of 2016. Ben Affleck will write the screenplay, direct, and star as Joe, a police captain's black-sheep son who takes to a life in organized crime. (Oy, I disliked Affleck's Argo, but I will hope for the best. Live by Night should make a great movie, and Affleck could have been worse in Gone Girl.) Joining the Live by Night cast are Sienna Miller as Emma Gould, who two-times her Boston gangster boyfriend with handsome Joe; Elle Fanning as the enigmatic Loretta Figgis, daughter of the Ybor City, Florida, chief of police; and Zoe Saldana as beautiful Graciella Suarez, a pro-Batista Cuban Joe meets in Ybor City.

The Joe Coughlin books can be read alone, but to appreciate the characters' development and the arc of the story, they should really be read in order. Lehane deals with themes dear to his heart: fathers and sons, love, revenge and redemption, and the roles fate and luck play in our lives. The first book, The Given Day, features the Irish Roman Catholic family of cop Thomas Coughlin and is set in Boston against a backdrop of World War I, the police strike, political corruption, and a flu epidemic. Live by Night focuses on Joe, baby brother to Danny and Connor, and takes place mostly in Ybor City during Prohibition before the story moves to Cuba. Joe makes a particularly interesting mobster, because he has a set of ethics, although he doesn't feel alive unless he's living on the edge. World Gone By (William Morrow, March 10) begins a decade after the events of Live by Night. Joe has a son and now moves among the rich and powerful in Tampa, Florida; while the violence of his past seems behind him, he travels between Cuba and Tampa, operating behind the scenes as "the fixer for the entire Florida criminal syndicate." It's hard to believe someone won't force him to pay for his sins.

Are you a fan of alternative history, steampunk, science fiction, and fantasy mashups? If you haven't tried one, you should, and Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 10), first book in the projected Alchemy Wars trilogy, looks like a good bet for a lot of fun. Tregillis is a Ph.D. physicist and well-respected sci fi/fantasy writer. Publishers Weekly named this book one of its most highly anticipated 2015 novels, and professional reviewing services are showering it with starred reviews. Booklist says, ""The first thing readers will say after finishing this splendid book is: 'Wow.' The second thing will probably be: 'When can I read the next one?'"

The Mechanical postulates a Dutch empire ruled by the Brasswork Throne that defeated the French in the 17th century with an army of sentient mechanical men, powered by alchemy, called Clakkers. Three centuries later, the Netherlands, the world's sole superpower, is at truce with the French. The Clakkers are enslaved by the Dutch, and only New France (in what we call Canada) and small Papal outposts in the New World demand equal human rights for breathing and alchemical men. The tale is told from three points of view: the French spymaster Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord, Vicomtesse de Laval, at home in Marseilles-in-the-West; one of Berenice's agents, a Catholic priest working undercover in the Hague, Father Luuk Visser; and Jax, a Clakker who longs to be free, in the service of a wealthy Dutch banking family.

We already know Dan Simmons can spin a yarn. Before I tell you about what Simmons says Sherlock Holmes was up to in the years after he and Moriarty disappeared over Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland ("The Final Problem") and before he reappeared in The Hound of the Baskervilles, let's look at a couple of other Simmons novels for a taste of what his characters are in for. Consider, for example, The Abominable, in which George Mallory and Sandy Irvine have vanished on Mt. Everest in 1924, and a year later, three climbers work their way up the mountain to find them. Had this trio known what their creator planned, they would have been a blur as they tobogganed down Everest. Or take The Terror, involving the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The deadly cold and lack of food and provisions aren't the worst things Simmons has befall the poor men of the HMS Terror.

In Simmons's The Fifth Heart (Little, Brown, March 24), in the absence of Dr. John H. Watson, who do you think plays second fiddle to Holmes? You will never guess. Novelist Henry James. Yes, the man who wrote "The Turn of the Screw," The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors.... That Henry James. It is now 1893, and James is very depressed. He is about to leap into the Seine, when he chances upon another man on the brink of suicide––Holmes, devastated by the knowledge that he is only "a literary construct." The two men hit it off (how James reconciles Holmes's professed fictional existence and his own reality, I don't know) and travel to America, where they become involved in a political plot featuring President Grover Cleveland, Irene Adler (to Sherlock Holmes, she was always "The Woman"), Henry Adams––and, possibly, Moriarty.

This book sounds much too rich to pass up. I'm a fan of Henry James and Sherlock Holmes. I hear Simmons knows the Sherlockian Canon. (If I could make doves fly out of the page and music swell the air when you read that word "Canon," I would.) The Fifth Heart (624 pages!) looks like a doozy, perfect to tuck into your bag for pulling out and reading chunk by chunk while on Easter vacation.

Book Review of Dennis Lehane's Live by Night

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

Mamas, don't let your boys grow up to be gangsters. That is, if this book's opening quakes your bones:

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life––good or bad––had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.

It's the same Joe Coughlin, son of powerful Irish cop Thomas and younger brother of Aiden (Danny) and Connor, whom we met in Lehane's sprawling historical epic, The Given Day, set in 1918-19 Boston. While that 2008 book is about the Coughlins during a dizzying epidemic of flu, corruption, and striking police, Live by Night is all about handsome Joe, although his father appears and Danny drops in briefly. Joe was conceived in an effort to fill the hole at the center of his family, a chasm between his parents, and between them and the world at large. Rather than filling, the hole found its center in lawless Joe. Yet, despite Joe's refusal to heed his father's warnings or to obey the rules, he is the most open of Thomas's three sons, with a heart you can see "through the heaviest winter coat." Joe is an immensely conflicted and appealing young man. He lives for "moments in a world without nets––none to catch you and none to envelop you." Joe knows he'll probably die young. And now, here he sits, not yet 30, hands tied and feet encased in cement, while Lehane takes us back to watch the trajectory of Joe's career from rebellious outlaw to gangster prince.

It's 1926, and Prohibition is in full force. Mobs––split down ethnic lines of Italian, Jewish, and Irish––control illegal activities such as gambling and supplying alcohol. While most mobs deal in whiskey, the Hickey and Pescatore gang handles rum. They've cornered the market on sugar and molasses imported from Cuba into Tampa, Florida, where the alcohol is distilled and driven up the Eastern Seaboard in midnight runs.

Nineteen-year-old Joe comes across Emma when he and the Bartolo brothers rob a gaming room in a South Boston speakeasy. Until then, they had stuck to petty crimes. Had they known the speakeasy belonged to prominent mobster Albert White, they might have run as far as their legs would carry them. The stickup is a mistake. Joe compounds that error by losing his head over Emma, whose eyes, "pale as very cold gin," fit a young woman who hails from Charlestown, where "they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee." Emma is White's mistress.

White doesn't like being robbed, and he likes competition for Emma even less. He takes advantage of a bank heist's disastrous aftermath to vent his rage on Joe; however, White's actions take a backseat to those of Joe's father, Deputy Police Superintendent Thomas Coughlin. Like Lehane's series protagonist Patrick Kenzie, Joe has old grievances with his dad. Father-son issues––the limits of loyalty, the consequences of violence, and the nature of betrayal––provide the backdrop as Joe is incarcerated in Charlestown Penitentiary, "a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals." There, Joe finds another father figure in imprisoned mob boss Thomaso "Maso" Pescatore, who runs his bootlegging operation from behind bars and directs Joe to Florida upon his release.

Before radio and mechanization, Ybor City cigar
factory workers listened to someone reading aloud.

The outrageous heat and humidity aren't the only jungle-like attributes of Ybor City, the Tampa neighborhood where Joe muscles himself into a job. The survival of the strongest involves rival gangs fighting over bootlegging turf, and the judges, city councillors, and cops slipping in and out of the gangs' pockets. There's also what I'll refer to as the heat of Joe's loins. While Joe claims that he's "out of the heartbreak business," copper-dark Graciela Corrales, a pro-Batista Cuban who works in a Ybor cigar factory, captures his attention as soon as he hops off the train. Her body moves "under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water." Joe's lack of racial prejudice not only finds him a beautiful woman, it allows him to work directly with the Suarez siblings, Cubans who import sugar and molasses into Ybor City. In a few years, the Suarez-Coughlin gang has strengthened its grip on rum trafficking in Florida and is expanding into Louisiana; however, no matter how lucrative, racial inclusiveness isn't popular with Joe's Italian boss, Maso Pescatore. And it isn't at all popular with the Ku Klux Klan.

As the end of Prohibition approaches, the global economy is worsening. People need hope, as well as jobs, but they've often had to settle for a drink. When alcohol becomes legal, then what? While the world is changing, Joe has always believed people don't really change. Yet, he and Graciela have already started to live by day, "where the swells lived." How do good works follow bad money?

Questions such as this one arise from Lehane's examination of faith, love, redemption, and revenge, and the role luck and fate play in human destiny. Early on, Joe tells his father that there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself. Joe is a fascinating character due to his evolving interpretation of events, assessments of people, and understanding of himself over a decade. Clear prose and depth of characterization are Lehane trademarks, and following Joe is a treat. Unlike others who stayed on top in the rackets, Joe isn't known for having amputated his conscience. He's the kind of mobster who hopes he won't have to kill his best friend, but that's not to say he won't; he simply won't do it for reasons of greed. Joe's father Thomas Coughlin, Maso Pescatore, and best friend Dion Bartolo also develop; however, there's something unknowable about the book's three beautiful women. Perhaps it's because Joe doesn't really understand them, even though he realizes why the nuns rail against the sins of lust and covetousness, which can "possess you surer than a cancer," and "kill you twice as quick." I found the idealistic Graciela less interesting than the two more complex women: enigmatic Loretta Figgis, beautiful daughter of Ybor's Chief of Police Irving Figgis, and the inscrutable Emma Gould, behind whose pale eyes "lay something cold and caged . . . in a way that demanded nothing come in."

The tone and pace change from noirish suspense to a slower ending, suitable for its tropical location, but a little languid and mushy for my taste. No matter, Dennis Lehane has written a gangster novel, captivating for its characters and philosophical questions and moving in its bittersweetness, vividly set during Prohibition. The Coughlins aren't a Mafia family like the Corleones, but one can hope to see them vault from book pages onto the movie screen. I've heard that director Ben Affleck is interested. I've also heard that Lehane may make these two books into a trilogy, and my pulse does a rumba thinking about this.

Note: Dennis Lehane's Live by Night was published earlier this month by Morrow/HarperCollins. It isn't necessary to read The Given Day first, but a reader loses by not doing so. Now is the perfect time. The World Series is just around the corner, and baseball is one of The Given Day's pleasures. Be sure to close with Live by Night.

A Battle Between Good and Evil

Well, all right, I know we're not talking about THE battle between good and evil, okay? We're also not talking about a battle between the sexes, planets, nations, political philosophies or parties, superheroes and supervillains, man and nature, man and machine, predators and prey or natural enemies such as cats and dogs.

We're not even talking about the battle between dirt and cleanliness so extraordinary one can pretty darn well semi-safely eat off the floor if the floor owner is your German or Swiss grandmother or other nationality that has raised cleanliness next to godliness or maybe not, but you're up to date on your vaccinations such as tetanus, one hopes, or hope to God your luck holds, and don't ask yourself why in the world you don't pick up the food, shake it off, and stick it on a plate for pete's sake unless maybe you're out of plates because you're a bit behind on washing up or you're lying on the floor any way, and you just so happen to see something lying down there, uneaten for who knows why by the family dog or cat or your spouse or kids.

And we're not talking about sports that rightfully have umpteen billions of fans like soccer, known in most parts of the world as football or fútbol or whatever other name your native language calls it. (Pause for a breath and to mention writer Leighton Gage's blog about one of the sport's most wonderful players on and off the field, Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira.)

No.

No, we're talking here about the American sport of football, and its Great Big Day, Super Bowl Sunday. THIS SUNDAY. When the New England Patriots, ably led by quarterback Tom Brady, meet the New York Giants, I hope less ably led by quarterback Eli Manning, in Indianapolis, Indiana. While the Patriots and the Giants crack heads in Lucas Oil Stadium in Super Bowl XLVI, fans at home will (again, I hope) not crack heads over bowls of guacamole and chips and bottles of beer or Coca-Cola. Even people who aren't football fans will be watching, because this is the day that ad agencies try to outdo themselves and each other in debuting creative TV commercials (yes, "creative TV commercials" is too frequently an oxymoron), and Madonna, of all people, who in the world chose her to sing I'd like to know, tries to outdo herself and previous performers in entertaining us viewers at halftime.

Americans who aren't watching the Super Bowl will find shopping malls happily drained and ski slopes tantalizingly bare during the game. On the other hand, they will be tragically unable to compare favorite commercials (mine is always the Budweiser beer Clydesdales), intelligently criticize Madonna or argue bone-headed Super Bowl plays at the office water cooler on Monday.

If you can't bring yourself to watch the biggest football game of the year, you can excuse yourself by watching Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl VIII.

Or by reading one of these good mysteries, in which sleuths and criminals butt heads and engage in battle:

Bill Eidson's The Repo is set in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where former DEA agent Jack Merchant now lives on his sloop, The Lila. Sarah Ballard, who makes a living repossessing boats for banks, hires him to look for a missing couple and their yacht. It's an action-packed book with well-drawn characters. The Mayday is the next Ballard/Merchant book.

Walking Shadow, by Robert B. Parker, is the 21st appearance by Spenser, ex-boxer, ex-cop turned Boston private eye. In this book, Spenser is asked by his girlfriend to investigate the stalking of a theater company director. Fists fly and bodies pile up, but Spenser handles all of this with his usual aplomb and rustles up gourmet dinners at the same time. Some of the Spenser books are a little phoned in, but not this one.

Brattleboro, Vermont, is the ultimate New England town for artists and eccentrics. In Archer Mayor's Surrogate Thief, a gun involved in a shooting is linked to a robbery/murder that cop Joe Gunther handled 30 years ago as a rookie. This is a great small-town police procedural, and you don't have to begin at the series beginning.

Jane Langton's God in Concord is set in the town of Concord, Massachustts, home of Thoreau's Walden Pond and destination of Paul Revere's midnight ride in 1775. Developer Jefferson Grandison wants to build on the edge of Walden Pond. This doesn't sit well with everyone. This is the ninth book in the traditional mystery series featuring lawyer and ex-cop, now Harvard professor Homer Kelly. It contains Langton's charming line drawings.

Dennis Lehane's Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are about as good as it gets when it comes to a pair of New England hardboiled private detectives. Begin the series with A Drink Before the War, in which Kenzie and Gennaro look for a cleaning woman who took some papers belonging to a senator. Some terrific Lehane standalones include Mystic River, Coronado (a book of short stories), and The Given Day (a book of historical fiction).

There you are, a bunch of good mysteries set in the beautiful northeastern states of the USA, home of the New England Patriots. At about oh, say, 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, I'll be happy to read a good book set in New York, home of the New York Giants. I'll leave it to a Giants fan or someone else to suggest some. Right now I need to rustle up some snacks for Super Bowl Sunday.