We Will See You Bleed by Ron Currie

 

This novel has approximately the same strengths as The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, though it is a prequel, and prequels face a pretty specific set of challenges. Good news: Currie handles those challenges brilliantly, in a way similar to in his previous novel--in the earlier novel, there was never any doubt Babs Dionne was going to die (it was right there in the title) so the questions had to be about moral challenges and whether the death was going to be worth it, in this novel, there's never any questions Babs Dionne is going to live (and take over the criminal underworld in her corrupt small town, arguably for her community's well-being) so the questions have to be what the price for that is going to be and whether it's worth it. Currie's prose is a complete fricking blast to read, even as the people in the novel are in some cases kinda collapsing morally. That said, as with the earlier novel, the people who are less outright greedy tend to get better endings. Grim and beautiful, bloody and at times hilarious.

Copper River by William Kent Kreuger

 

This is a pretty early Cork O'Connor novel--copyright 2006--and while it has Krueger's typical humanity and grace, it does not have anything like as much of the Ojibwe ... mysticism in it as the more recent entries. Cork's life is always full of tragedies and sorrows, though there are often joys as counterpoint, that remains constant. The writing is as solid, pacing and character and setting all just about pitch-perfect. It's an interesting novel in that what feels like the primary thread at the beginning mostly disappears until right near the end, just because there's a local situation that seems more urgent (and probably is). Also, the killing of an injured and arguably out-of-place cougar that's in the process of attacking a helpless (bound and gagged) teenager ends up feeling just about as tragic as any of the homicides in the novel, which ... I thought was probably pretty good, but I can see how someone might find it kinda offputting.

The Perfect Plan by Bryan Reardon

 

This is a pretty mediocre novel, really, but it's better than it seems it's going to be for the first hundred-ish pages, which are deeply muddled and kinda circular, and completely redolent with unreliable narration: specifically, the sort of unreliable narration where you know it's just that the narrator isn't telling you a thing that will make things make sense. Eventually the story stop spinning its wheels and kinda goes somewhere, but that somewhere is at best barely worth the opening slog. The prose here is kinda stolid and inert, there's not a lot of sense of who the characters are (which is a glaring weakness in a novel that aims at the sort/s of psychological conflicts and resolutions this one does) and the story makes remarkably little sense. The pacing tends toward a lot of pointless orbiting and repetition. I don't exactly resent my decision to finish the novel, but I wouldn't have regretted DNFing it, either.

Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks

 

This has been sitting n my shelf for a while, I figured I'd read it. The author is a professor at Georgetown Law, and she went through a program the Washington DC Metro Police (hereafter MPD) have that allows people who are probably (at least arguably) old enough to know better to become unpaid part-time police officers. The author eventually ends up being certified to operate alone, which apparently is kinda a big deal. She brings, well, not exactly a gimlet eye to things, but she has a background (professional and as it happens personal) that gives her a distinctly outsider POV on what goes on in the MPD, both during training and on the job. She has a clear sense of the broader structural flaws and of how the individual police officers think about--and rationalize--what they do, what their jobs are. There are some officers who come off not entirely well, here, they'd plausibly recognize themselves, though the author has anonymized them, but the book portrays the larger problems as systemic, a combination of mixed and perverse incentives alongside (maybe, at least in the now) unintended consequences. There's a thread about the author's family, especially her mom, being skeptical about the police thing, but that at least seems to have worked out more or less all right for everyone. Interesting and pretty informative.

Bad News by Donald E. Westlake

 

I finally found a couple of Westlake's Dortmunders. This one is a fricking blast: While there are complications and suchlike that emerge later on, there's really just the one bad decision and everything follows that. There are criminals of varying degrees of competence, Dortmunder (and his small handful of friendly acquaintances--maybe even friends) on the high end, the would-be grifters who rope Dortmunder, et al., into their scheme very much not so smart as they think they are. Westlake's prose cracks wise at just about every opportunity, but I never had the sense that either he or the characters weren't taking things seriously; that's not an easy tightrope to walk, Block walks it, Hiaasen walks it, it's rare. The characters are pretty believable and distinguishable, the pacing hums along nicely, the events all make sense within the context of the novel. A new pleasure has opened to me. Huzzah.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

 

This is Bradbury writing at his most beautiful, his most nostalgic. It's a paean to his childhood: As the introduction makes clear, the difference between Green Town, Illinois (the town in the novel) and Waukegan, Illinois (where Bradbury grew up) is not all that big, even with one of them being fictional. There are hints of weirdness, there's arguably a thesis that magic (good and bad) is objectively real for children in ways it isn't for adults (though there are adults who at least seem to be interacting with magic). There are threads that get woven throughout, but this is a very episodic novel; I don't think it's quite a fix-up, but I do think I've seen some of the vignettes collected elsewhere. The pacing is a little on the languid side, but the characters feel pretty real, and the incidents feel lived. The voice ... Bradbury's prose is fricking magic. I can see drinking from this vintage repeatedly, and I regret that I somehow haven't tasted it before now.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

 

One of the interesting things about reading a novel that's foundational to a (sub)genre is that often it's hard to see it with eyes that don't have like all of what's come since. There's a lot that's interesting in this novel: you can see things that were almost certainly innovations, or at least unique spins, that have since become tropes; you can see the casual cruelty that could get published in the mainstream in the 1920s; you can see that cluttered and noisy and serpentine plots have been a part of Noir from the start. Someone even slips Spade a mickey. And everyone drinks like a fricking fish. It's interesting that the physical description of Spade is so little like Bogart, but casting is weird like that sometimes, and Bogart certainly was a fine choice to play Spade. The plot is tangled and borders on jumbled, there's so much unreliable information (characters are lying, the narrator is not) that it's kinda hard to see past the near-century between then and now to catch whatever hints there might be who's lying (well, given that everyone is lying, who's lying more--and when). The characters are plausible enough, the prose and dialogue are more than solid.