Saying Goodbye to Boredom

I've been in the pits recently, overly busy, grouchy and bored. Things are so bad, I just caught myself watching an online cat video. It was Ninja Cat (with haunting music), but still. Enough is enough.

It's time to read something that kicks boredom to the curb. Here are a couple of books that worked this magic for me and a couple I'm reading now. If you're bored and fed up with your usual fare, maybe one of these will work for you too.

Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a 6'5", 230-pounder with blue eyes and dirty blond hair. This rootless ex-Army MP travels around the country with no cellphone or planned destination and only the clothes on his back. When he needs an outfit change, he buys something and throws the old ones away. Sleep happens wherever he lies down. From time to time, his Army past drags him back into action. For all his toughness and cynicism, Reacher knows what's what and how to use his head. In Personal (Delacorte, 2014), Reacher spots an old Army Times personal ad addressed to him by a man he owes a favor. Almost before Reacher knows it, he's on the hunt for a sniper so skilled only a few in the world are possible suspects. One of the possibilities is a man fresh out of prison who swore vengeance when Reacher put him there 16 years ago. Could he be the one who took the unsuccessful shot at the president of France?

The attempted assassination target and the race to capture a sniper are nods to Frederick Forsyth's 1971 classic, Day of the Jackal, and if you haven't read that thriller and seen the movie, do it. With another nod, this time to James Bond-creator Ian Fleming, whose Bond girls always have ridiculous names, Reacher's potential love interest and work colleague is named Casey Nice. Nice and Reacher (I almost said "Easy") are off to Paris and then London, where they rendezvous with their British counterparts and meet people who aren't Nice. (I can't be expected to pass up the chance to say that.) It's not one of the best Reacher books I've read but any Reacher is better than no Reacher.

Any day of the week, a lot of kids would consider Annette Vess a cool mom. She was a storyteller extraordinaire, especially about how she lost one of her two missing fingers––a mean woman got lucky with a knife in a South American jail. Sometimes "Uncle" Paul would appear and Annette, a spy and single mother, would leave for weeks. Three years after her death, her adult children, Dee and Simon, still find their mother mysterious, but there's no doubt Annette loved them and they loved her. As Jamie Mason's Monday's Lie (Gallery Books, February 2015) opens, Dee is following a blue sedan. We follow Dee back and forth in time as she explores growing up with her mother's spycraft games, her close relationship with her brother, Simon, a cop, and a marriage to a conventional man Dee thought was the antidote to her very unconventional childhood.

This is a book I liked, despite some overly elaborate writing, because at its heart is the great relationship between a spy and her two kids. Although Monday's Lie doesn't provoke the anxiety or provide the macabre humor of Mason's first book, Three Graves Full, there are enough twists and turns and the wonderful legacy Annette left to Dee and Simon to make me happy.

Here are two books I'm reading now. The first, Adam Roberts's Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer, won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel a few years ago. It's billed by the publisher, Gollancz, as Golden Age sci-fi meets Golden Age crime. There are three interconnected stories: a prison breakout, a locked-room mystery and a whodunit. It's set far in the future when humankind populates the solar system. The very wealthy occupy Earth while the very poor (the sumpolloi) are housed in orbiting shantytown bubbles.  Roberts's writing is witty and sly. We know the narrator, Jack Glass, is a murderer from the beginning but the reasons for his merciless nature are only gradually revealing themselves after the opening: "This narrative, which I hereby doctorwatson for your benefit, o reader, concerns the greatest mystery of our time."

Imagine yourself shuffling along when a hole to another universe opens suddenly in front of you. I don't know about you, but I would be just as likely to run screaming the other way as I would be to step in. I do, however, love portals and wormholes in fiction. (Think Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October). Coldbrook (Titan, 2014), sci-fi/horror by Tim Lebbon, is nothing like that quirky and comic Victorian Age gothic, but I was caught at its beginning: "Six hours after forging a pathway from his own reality to another, Jonah Jones closed his eyes to dream." Dream, schream, it's a nightmare for Jonah and the world. The human-like figure that steps out of that hole at Coldbrook, a secret lab in the Appalachians, is not exactly human, after all, and the lab's workers are soon infected. They and I are headed for a tension- and terror-filled apocalypse. Hard to be bored when that happens.

Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part One

Thanksgiving is almost upon us, and that means it's time to look at upcoming winter books. There's a lot to be thankful for, with books ranging from H. G. Adler's The Wall (translated from the German by Peter Filkins; Random House, December 2), a 720-page novel set during the Holocaust, to Angelina Mirabella's The Sweetheart (Simon & Schuster, January 20), a coming-of-age story set in the 1950s world of women's professional wrestling. While the focus of our Read Me Deadly previews is crime fiction, over the next few weeks we'll be showing you some other books that look good to us, as well. There's a feast of books waiting, so let's dig in!

December 2nd can't come soon enough, because that's the date Mulholland is releasing a thriller early reviewers are raving about, Kazuaki Takano's Genocide of One (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel). The one targeted for death in 2004 is a 3-year-old Kanga Pygmy named Akili living in the Congo, and the person ordering his elimination is U.S. President Gregory S. Burns (substituting for George W. Bush). Why does Burns think Akili needs to die? Burns has been informed a random mutation has made this kid so intellectually advanced, he's even now the smartest person on Earth. Akili threatens to make Homo sapiens extinct, much like we Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals.

This is already the basis for an exciting plot à la Tom Clancy, but Takano complicates it with an examination of culture, psychology, and current social issues, and he educates his reader about microbiological research. Playing a deadly game of chess are those Machiavellian connivers in Washington, DC, the Congo-bound band of private US military contractors clueless about the truth of their mission, a pharmaceutical researcher in Tokyo, and the uber-brainiac Akili, who may be able to put a spoke in President Burns's wheel. Yeah, sounds like a whole lotta fun to me.

When I learned Jamie Mason has a new book due February 3rd, I scrambled to scribble the title on my list of books to read. Her first novel, last year's witty and macabre Three Graves Full (Gallery Books), was inspired by her love of Hitchcock and a headline, "Landscapers Find Skull in Mulch Bed." It features an accidental murderer named Jason Getty, whose nightmarish situation takes a decided turn for the worse when his landscaper unearths a corpse, and the police arrive and dig up another body, neither of whom is Jason's own personally buried victim.

Mason's upcoming Monday's Lie (Gallery Books) sounds very promising if you're a Coen brothers fan: Dee Aldrich begins to suspect her husband, Patrick, is not the man she thought he is and may be plotting a life without her. This is an unexpected worry, since Dee married her predictable college boyfriend after being raised by an unconventional mother, a CIA operative. Is Dee merely being paranoid? She turns to her late mother's advice and games of subterfuge they played in her childhood to get a handle on her unraveling marriage.

All of us have our passions, whether it's World War II history or a quest to find the perfect-fitting pair of jeans. I'm interested in the nature of identity and enjoy fiction and nonfiction about amnesia, impersonation, misidentification as in Capgras delusion, twins, doubles, and doppelgängers. So I was thrilled to spot Andrew Pyper's The Damned (Simon & Schuster, February 10), about a pair of Detroit twins, one good and one evil. Good twin Danny Orchard is brought back to life after dying in the fire that killed his sociopathic twin, Ashleigh, on their 16th birthday. Danny has written a best-selling book about his near-death experience and met a nice woman, Willa, with a son, Eddie. Life would be dandy, but Ashleigh won't leave Danny alone.

The Kirkus reviewer calls The Damned "memorable and, perhaps, nightmare-inducing." In other words, perfect when a fierce storm is wrestling with your house and you retreat to bed armed with a book, hot tea, and a shortbread cookie. Or two. Oh, heck, let's get real. Put the cookie tin on your nightstand. We can always add losing five pounds to our New Year's resolutions, and the awards-winning crime fiction of Canadian writer Pyper, a lawyer by training, is worth staying up until dawn to read. It's literary and sophisticated and often combines thrills with horror. His Lost Girls is a combo of mysterious disappearances and courtroom drama. In The Demonologist, scholar David Ullman, an authority on Milton's Paradise Lost, travels to Venice and encounters a demonic possession. The Trade Mission's pair of Canadian software developers and their party take a terrifying trip up Brazil's Rio Negro river.

Okay, where are we? We have books in which a 3-year-old is pitted against a US president and his band of mercenaries; a wife uses CIA tactics to figure out her husband, who may want to kill her; and an evil twin haunts her angelic brother. Now, we come to an Appalachian morality tale/coming-of-age novel getting a lot of buzz because its publisher's sales reps and booksellers have fallen in love with it: Christopher Scotton's first novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth (Grand Central, January 6).

In it, an adult narrator, Kevin, looks back to the summer of 1985, when he was 14. He and his mother, grieving the loss of his younger brother, go to stay with Kevin's grandfather, Pops, a widowed veterinarian, in the Kentucky coal town of Medgar. An energy company is devastating the land by utilizing "mountaintop removal" to mine coal; the environmentalist leader of its opposition is a popular gay hairstylist. Kevin tags around with Pops and becomes friends with Buzzy, who witnesses a murder. I predict fans of Ron Rash and Wiley Cash will want to read this one.

All right, you tell me, how does one resist this next book? Emma and Otto and Russell and James (Simon & Schuster, January 20) is Canadian writer Emma Hooper's first. Early reviewers cite the beauty of the prose and the rich complexity of the characters. It's described as "a near homage" to The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's masterpiece of English literature recounting souls redeeming themselves through struggle, which hasn't been out of print since its publication in 1678.

Hooper's strugglers were shaped by the Depression, and they survived World War II. Etta opens the book with a note to her beloved husband Otto: "Otto, I've gone. I've never seen the water, so I’ve gone there. Don't worry, I've left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back. Yours (always), Etta"

Etta, now 82, is walking from Saskatchewan to Canada's east coast, because she's never seen the ocean. Along the way, she's joined by a talking coyote named James, courtesy of some magical realism. Writer Hooper travels back and forth through time as she weaves Etta's story together with those of Otto, who grew up on the Saskatchewan plains as one of 15 kids, and Russell, the boy who lived next door.

With all the winter holidays coming, I'm on the lookout for a thriller to read on the plane or train. Sebastian Rotella's The Convert's Song (Mulholland, December 9) looks promising. Rotella is an award-winning investigative journalist and foreign correspondent, and his Valentine Pescatore is a former San Diego Border Patrol agent (Triple Crossing), who now works as a private eye in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he runs into an old friend from Chicago, Raymond Mercer, an unsuccessful singer who has converted to Islam. After a terrorist attack kills hundreds at a local mall, police suspect Valentine and Raymond. Valentine's investigation takes him to Europe; along the way he is joined by French counterterrorism agent Fatima Belhaj and his ex-boss/ex-girlfriend Isabel Puente from San Diego.

Word is that Rotella's book about geopolitical terror has a complex plot, colorful characters, and lashings of hard-boiled humor and musical references.

I've been waiting for the English translation of the Franck Thilliez thriller Gataca for two years. Bred to Kill (translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, Viking Adult) will be published on January 8th. This sequel to Syndrome E (see review here) is the fourth Franck Sharko/Lucie Henebelle series book, but only the second to be translated into English. It looks like a doozy.

Reeling from the events at the end of Syndrome E, Paris homicide inspector Sharko and former Lille detective Henebelle investigate the murder of grad student Eva Louts, who was involved in human genome research that's tied to the theft of a Cro-Magnon mummy and the existence of a tribe in the Brazilian jungle. Her death is also linked to a tragedy dogging Henebelle.

Intriguing science (paleontology this time) and sleuths unique in their personal vulnerabilities combine to make these French thrillers exciting reads. One cares about Sharko and Henebelle. I'd like another Thilliez translation next Christmas.

I hope I've whetted your appetite for more winter books, because tomorrow Maltese Condor will bring in the second course.

And the Nominees Are . . . .

It's awards season, and I've got awards on the brain. The Golden Globes, honoring movies, were awarded last Sunday. The nominees for this year's Edgar Awards will be announced by the Mystery Writers of America sometime around Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, January 19th. If I could, I'd nominate some of these book characters for an award:

Most people are content to leave grave digging to the professionals, but sometimes fate intervenes. For best do-it-yourself burial: Jason Getty, in Jamie Mason's debut, Three Graves Full (Gallery Books, 2013). Although you could say the man was asking for it, Jason didn't mean to kill him. No matter, now Jason has little choice but to bury him on his property. Preparing the burial site and wrestling the corpse into it are comically macabre—entertaining for the reader, but not for poor Jason. His nightmares are only beginning, because one of his landscapers uncovers a body—just not the one Jason planted. This brings the police, who unearth yet another body—again, not Jason's. Then the police promise to bring over a dog in a few days, and a woman searching for her fiancé shows up. Jason is also in the running for best portrayal of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

They're a closeknit duo: Marnie and her "wee bit touched" younger sister, Nelly, who live on the Hazlehurst housing estate in Glasgow, Scotland. Marnie begins The Death of Bees, by Lisa O'Donnell (Harper, 2013), with these words: "Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." In fact, Izzy and Gene were much more into booze and drugs than they were parenting their kids. Now, as Marnie says, at least she and Nelly know where they are. In one year, Marnie will be of legal age to care for herself and Nelly. In the meantime, to keep out of the authorities' clutches, all they have to do is lie. They face questions by Lennie, the kind old man who lives next door; their friends; Gene's drug dealer; and the authorities. It's a coming-of-age tale that's narrated by eccentric characters Marnie, Nelly, and Lennie, and it's both funny and moving. Marnie and Nelly could join Jason in his nominated category, but let's nominate them instead for best navigation of a sticky situation.

Let's look at a nominee for best at being royally screwed. Lynn Coady's Gordon Rankin ("Rank") is a gentle, sensitive giant, who has used his hulking size to advantage as a goon and brutal hockey enforcer. In college, Rank poured out his soul to geeky Adam, who has now turned around and used what Rank told him to write a satirical novel based on Rank's life, featuring "a dangerously unbalanced thug with an innate criminality." The angry Rank spends three months writing unanswered emails to Adam in The Antagonist (Knopf, 2013), an original epistolary novel that examines a male friendship. Like Caroline Graham's excellent novel featuring a writing circle, Written in Blood, The Antagonist also weighs who owns a life—a writer or the man his character is based on.

If Irwin Dressler says to Junior Bender, "You're working for me," then that's what Junior will do—if he knows what's good for him. Despite his old age, Los Angeles gangster Dressler is still feared. Junior is a professional burglar who occasionally does private investigations for fellow crooks. The case in The Fame Thief, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Press, 2013), involves former starlet Dolores La Marr. Dolores was once called the most beautiful woman in the world, but her career stalled in 1950 when she was arrested after partying with gangsters in Las Vegas. While others arrested went free, Dolores was forced to testify before the Senate subcommittee on organized crime. At one time, Dressler was the power behind Hollywood studios, and now he wants to know who set up Dolores and ruined her career. So Junior digs. We'll nominate Junior, who's clever and always pushing the envelope, for best at getting out from under. It's the third book in this witty, character-driven series, and it's a pleasure to hang out with Junior and revisit the Hollywood Dolores knew.

Kathleen Kent's The Outcasts (Little, Brown & Co., 2013), is set in 1870s Texas, but it's not a simple western. It's historical fiction, an adventure, a treasure hunt, a chase, and a lot of fun. It features a lawman with a pure heart and a woman without one. We meet conniving Lucinda Carter as she flees a Fort Worth brothel, bound for Middle Bayou, Texas, where Lafitte's gold is supposedly buried. She has arranged the cover of a teaching job in order to await her lover's arrival. While Lucinda makes nice with the folks there, brand-new lawman Nate Cannon tracks down two experienced Texas Rangers, Capt. George Deerling and Dr. Tom Goddard, to notify them that their old nemesis, William McGill, has killed again. The lawmen, noses to the ground, give chase. The two story threads meet in Middle Bayou with a bang, but this tale is neither predictable nor sentimental. Let's nominate Lucinda and Nate for those we'd most like to see in a Sam Peckinpah movie.

We'll keep a lookout for the Edgar nominees this weekend. Now I need to saddle up and git to work.

Special Delivery before Midnight, 12/31/2012

I feel like a woman about to give birth, and it's not a comfortable sensation. I finished The Child's Child by Barbara Vine (the pen name Ruth Rendell uses for dark and complex psychological suspense), but this tale about Grace Easton, who becomes pregnant by her brother Andrew's lover and discovers an unpublished manuscript from 1951 that mirrors this triangular situation, is too sad to review on the last day of the year. I haven't quite finished Karen Englemann's delectable The Stockholm Octavo, in which seer Sofia Sparrow reads the cards and promises young Office of Customs and Excise bureaucrat Emil Larsson a golden path to love and connection in 1791 Stockholm. Rather than prolong my labor in writing a review, let me share some books I plan to read soon.

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus, translated by Steven T. Murray (Macmillan, January 2013). I want to revisit the Grimm's fairy tale refrain "White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony." In this multifaceted German police procedural, Altenhain cops Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein investigate the death of a woman whose son, Tobias Sartorius, was convicted 10 years earlier of murdering two teenage girls. The bodies were never found. Tobias has recently been released and moved back home. After more disappearances, townspeople are ready to take the law into their own hands. This is the fourth in a six-book series, and the only one published in English so far. What I've read about this police duo and the twisting plot of betrayal and revenge promises a great read.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Melville International Crime, 2001). Okay, you tell me how I can read the first sentence of a Kirkus review ("A writer is sucked gently into the evil new Ukrainian economy as his penguin flatmate watches.") and not scramble to read this book. Viktor Alekseyevich's life, in the dumps since his girlfriend left him, appears to be looking up. He's taken over the care of Misha, a "quiet and thoughtful" penguin de-accessioned from the Kiev zoo, and he's been hired by Capital News to write "pre-need" obituaries for underworld luminaries. Then Viktor realizes he's handing death sentences to these luminaries.

The Woman Who Wouldn't Die by Colin Cotterill (Random House, February 2013). It is now 1978, and Dr. Siri Paiboun is retired from his job as national coroner of Laos; however, a judge has asked Siri to look into a case involving the minister of agriculture's wife, who has hired the supposed-to-be-dead Madame Keui to lay rest the ghost of the minister's brother. Siri, who has a healthy regard for the supernatural, is the perfect man for the job. This is the ninth book in Cotterill's witty Dr. Siri Paiboun series. (Read Della Streetwise's review of the first book, The Coroner's Lunch, here.)

Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, February 2013). “There is very little peace for a man with a body buried in his backyard.” Thus begins Mason's debut about an ordinary man named Jason Getty, who kills and buries a man behind his house. That is enough to disconcert Jason right there, but things become even more complicated when police dig up two bodies, and neither is the one that Jason buried. The publisher says this book is for fans of offbeat, black thrillers and the Coen brothers' movies––in other words, for me, and you, too?

Perfect Hatred by Leighton Gage (Soho Crime, February 2013). For a police procedural that combines terrific characterization, action, setting, and social issues, Della Streetwise, Maltese Condor (see her review here), and I read Leighton Gage's Chief Inspector Mario Silva series, set in modern Brazil. In the sixth book, Silva's team investigates a suicide bombing, the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate, and the revenge plot of a newly released felon who hates Silva. It's not necessary to read Gage's books in order, but these characters grow over time, and you'll want to follow them. The first book is 2007's Blood of the Wicked, in which Bishop Dom Felipe is assassinated when he visits the agricultural town of Cascatas do Pontal.

What about you? What's on your schedule for early 2013?

I'll be back later this week to tell you about Vine's The Child's Child and Engelmann's The Stockholm Octavo. I hope your festivities tonight will deliver a wonderful 2013 for you.