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.

International Waffle Day

Yes, folks, March 25th is International Waffle Day. Observing this holiday means eating waffles for breakfast or waffling about decisions or issues. Or reading books in which characters do these things.

Andrew Pyper: Lost Girls (2000). An astonishingly fun and thought-provoking read narrated by a cynical, cocaine-snorting, and Keats-spouting Bartholomew Crane of Toronto's criminal law firm Lyle, Gederow & Associate (better known as "Lie, Get 'Em Off & Associate"). Teacher Thom Tripp is accused of murdering two teenage girls, whose bodies haven't been found, and Crane travels to the decrepit North Country town of Murdoch to take on his defense. There, Crane's usual disregard of the truth and own little-remembered past get a workout as he investigates his client's bizarre story of the girls' disappearance at Lake St. Christopher.

This literary legal mystery/psychological suspense/thriller is Canadian lawyer Pyper's debut novel. It has a nice touch of the frightening supernatural and an entertainingly acerbic lawyer/sleuth. Lost Girls was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2000 Edgar and Arthur Ellis Awards for Best First Novel.

Peter Guttridge: City of Dreadful Night (2010). Whether you'll enjoy this complex and compelling book, the first in Guttridge's Brighton series, all depends. Can you handle a plot's coincidence and the ambiguity of a tale left dangling at the end? If you can, and you like gritty British police procedurals set in the present, but that take a look at an unsolved real-life crime in the past, this may be something for you.

An armed police raid at a house in Brighton and Hove, a seaside resort in East Sussex, England, goes wrong, and four people are killed. Chief Constable Robert Watts is forced to resign, and his marriage ends when his affair with DS Sarah Gilchrist, who participated in the raid, becomes known. Despite his superiors' warnings to back off, Watts digs into the web of political and criminal relationships behind the botched raid and the deaths in its aftermath. Meanwhile, a diary related to an unclosed 1934 case, in which parts of a woman's body were discovered in trunks left at Brighton railroad stations, surfaces and may involve Watts's father, a former cop, and the father of Watts's old friend and government fixer, William Simpson. Helping Watts investigate are DS Gilchrist; a young reporter named Kate Simpson, who is William Simpson's daughter; and James Tingley, Watts's old MI5 friend. I'm looking forward to seeing these characters again in the next series book, 2011's The Last King of Brighton.

Rex Stout: Too Many Women (1947). Private eye extraordinaire Nero Wolfe considers Archie Goodwin an expert on young women. So when the president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc. asks Wolfe to investigate rumors about Wally Moore's hit-and-run death that are distracting his employees, Wolfe sends Archie to work undercover as an efficiency expert in the engineering firm's warehouse, which is full of beautiful young women. Although Archie goes through these obstructive women like a dolphin goes through waves, Wolfe doesn't decide to close the investigation before several more people die. It's an enjoyable mystery, as well as an interesting look at women in the post-WWII workforce.

Stout's Nero Wolfe books form an utterly charming traditional series, a slice of Americana set from its beginning in 1934 with Fer-de-Lance, to its conclusion, A Family Affair, in 1975. (An omnibus of earlier novellas, Death Times Three, was published in 1985.) Its main characters––Nero Wolfe, a gourmet food-, books-, and orchids-loving brainiac of a detective who refuses to leave his Manhattan brownstone on business, and Archie Goodwin, his competent right-hand man of action––are supported by a great cast of regulars who include Wolfe's household help, several New York City cops, a band of self-employed detectives hired by Wolfe, the doctor next door, and Archie's lovely inamorata, Lily Rowan. Stout supposedly published his first drafts, and the writing has a casual elegance and spontaneity that's fun to read.

Philipp Meyer: American Rust (2009). Sister Mary Murderous had no sooner reminded me of this book when I saw Meyer's The Son appear on Publishers Weekly's list of most anticipated books for Spring 2013. I'm not waffling when I say this: American Rust is wonderful.

It's set in the same economically devastated Pennsylvania country as K. C. Constantine's first-rate Mario Balzic series (see Maltese Condor's review of Constantine's The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes here). Buell's steel mill is shuttered, and many people have moved away. Isaac English and his older sister, Lee, were the smartest kids in their high school. When Lee goes to Yale, Isaac is left to take care of their disabled father. Now Lee is married and gone for good, and Isaac is desperate to leave Buell for his dream of studying astrophysics in California. Early one morning, Isaac packs his books into a backpack, robs his father's desk of $4,000, and walks to the house of his best friend Billy Poe. Billy is a none-too-smart, hot-tempered ex-high school football star on probation for assault. The two set out on foot. A chance meeting with transients in an abandoned factory where Isaac and Billy take shelter from a snowstorm leaves a man dead and Isaac's dream in pieces.

Meyer has been compared to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and William Faulkner. American Rust is about the unraveling of the American Dream. With beautiful prose, Meyer examines the price of loyalty and the constrained choices suffered by the working class. The book's characters––especially Isaac; Billy's self-sacrificing mother Grace, who earns minimum wage sewing wedding dresses for the wealthy and has her own dreams of returning to college; and Grace's lover, the sheriff––are three-dimensional enough to break your heart.

Lachlan Smith: Bear Is Broken (2013, Mysterious Press/Grove). Leo Maxwell has just received notice that he passed the California bar exam. He hopes the days of being called "Monkey Boy" by his 12-years-older brother, Teddy, are now a thing of the past. Teddy hasn't even congratulated Leo when they walk into a San Francisco restaurant to have lunch before closing arguments in one of Teddy's trial cases. Teddy is a highly successful criminal defense attorney, beloved by San Francisco's criminal class, but reviled by its cops and prosecutors, who insist that his success must be based on bribes and perjury. Leo and Teddy are waiting for their order when someone walks up behind Leo, shoots Teddy in the head, and disappears into a waiting car. While Teddy lies in a coma, Leo tries to understand his enigmatic brother, who was responsible for him after their mother died when Leo was 10 years old. Just how much of a rogue is Teddy? Leo now deals with Teddy's ex-wife, investigator, and clients. He also decides he can't trust the cops to adequately pursue the attempted murderer, so he will investigate himself. Leo opens Pandora's box.

Like Canadian writer Andrew Pyper, Lachlan Smith is a lawyer, and following his legal sleuth in the courtroom and in his sleuthing is enlightening as well as entertaining. Bear Is Broken is much less literary than Pyper's Lost Girls, and Leo is much less cynical than Pyper's Barth Crane, but both books involve a young lawyer's coming of age and evoke a tragic past. In this debut novel, Smith writes with unusual clarity and assurance as Leo shuffles a deck of likely suspects and plays a game of Solitaire. Smith slows the denouement a bit with a few too many details, but this by no means spoils the book's worth. I really liked it for its close and compassionate look at the tragic consequences of crime and at a San Francisco attorney who learns about himself and the nature of family loyalties. I'm happy that this is the first book of a proposed series.

On this important day, when we honor waffles and waffling, especially in crime fiction, be sure to get your fill of both. You may need to decline a second serving of breakfast, but there's nothing to stop you from being a glutton in your reading.