The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon

 

This is ... not exactly narrative non-fiction, but there's a strong whiff of memoir to it--probably stronger than Lennon intended, but he's all over the book as a character, even though his crime is arguably less-examined than the other three. The book seems from the cover copy, and sometimes feels reading it as though it wants to be, a critique of true crime as a genre; but while it pokes some holes, it's really not exactly a takedown, at least most of the foibles Lennon aims at are ones I'm at least aware of. Three of the four killers here are not the sort who'd normally be profiled in some true crime book or show--there's the gay man who killed and dismembered his (arguably abusive) sugar daddy; the mentally ill Black man who took part in the murders of two priests; and the White drug dealer who killed someone who (he thought) was looking for an angle to take over his (possibly metaphysical) turf. Of course, the fourth one is a guy whose case broke big in the 1980s and has been occasionally reexamined over the past decade--part of the book's thesis is that there are only so many straight white people killing each other, and true crime is needing to reach out to find new stories, there's only so much reexamination the old stories will bear. Because the author is in prison--and all the other guys at least were when he spoke to them--there's also a fair amount about what prison life is like. Honestly, it probably says more about mass incarceration, the effects of the gutting of public mental health, the blowback effects of stripping education and other self-improvement programs out of prisons, and other aspects of the American (or at least New York's) criminal justice system, than it does really about true crime. It's a solid and interesting read, if not really a happy one.

Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie

 

This is a reasonably effective legal thriller (it's written by a former practicing lawyer, and it's steeped in legal and legalistic processes, it's a legal thriller regardless of whether the publisher bothers to call it one) that also has things to say about feminism and women's friendships and cults and hero-worship and family; the story is sturdy enough to carry much of that, though the cultish aspects of the sisterhood group in it are really obvious, as is the fact there's a larger plan at play. The story starts off in two timelines, more or less, but it's persistently clear about when you are, and you're always in the head of one (first-person) narrator. Many of the characters end up being really murky, because many of them are lying from the first time you see them and don't stop, which does sometimes make it a little hard to tell what's going on, but things do resolve pretty clearly, with a hint that at least some things will go better, that the good guys have won (and the protagonist--that first-person narrator--is very much a good-guy, as are some small number of other characters).

Departure 37 by Scott Carson

 

Scott Carson is Michael Koryta's pen name, when he writes something that leans more into Weirdness than his more-usual thrillers (he makes no secret of this) and Koryta can really write, and he seems to understand how to paste kinda implausible premises onto his high-intensity fiction--sometimes this looks like horror, which this book really is not. The instigating event, here is ... kinda plausible, if you squint a little, but this is a time-travel novel--though it seems to be forward, one-way-only, which is the least implausible form, I think. It actually plays pretty close to some of the technothrillers I've read (though that's not a genre I reach for much these days) though Koryta manages to avoid the trap so many of them that I read fall into, of getting into fields I know anything about and then getting everything wrong; it's possible he gets stuff wrong, but I didn't see anything that kicket me out of the novel or anything. There are some weird facts in the novel that are true, and the US government's reaction/s in the novel to thing events it depicts seems ... likely. The most-effective plot threads in it are the more-personal ones, which makes some sense; the characters are all plausible; the prose and dialogue are solid and occasionally lively. Really good.

The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North

 This turned out to be a reasonably decent psycho killer thriller, playing some similar games as last night's novel, at least in the sense of hiding said killer's identity among the novel's characters. It's not as funny or as pointed in its social commentary, but it's not setting out to be the latter or really much the former. Most of the characters are pretty well-defined and plausible--the psycho killer is a bit on the out-there side, but in novels they often are; it's not extremely clear for most of the novel that the killer is not a survivor of the novel's backstory, which isn't awesome. The novel is told in multiple timelines and from multiple POVs, but it mostly holds together reasonably well, there's some sleight-of-hand about some things but it's not pointless endless stupid twists the way so many modern thriller novels are.

Very Slowly All at Once by Lauren Schott

 

This was another surprisingly funny novel, though it's really much more a novel of social commentary--almost but not quite satire, I think--than it is something like a crime novel or a thriller, both of which genres it does at least abut. All sorts of things in the text and subtext about striving and social climbing and social gatekeeping and money, and how just about everyone has someone they're looking up at, or down on, and how in a lot of places the social strata are fixed in place. The mains are deeply human, remarkably easy to empathize with, completely believable and plausible, and well written; some of the other characters feel a little sketchy, but nothing super horrible. There is something of an omnicompetent sociopath lurking or looming, and that's not something I'm normally willing to gladly let slide, but I'll gladly let it slide here, because the misdirection about the sociopath's identity feeds into much of the rest of what the novel's doing (and their eventual identity is especially congruent with the novel's other themes). A suitably mixed ending. Really a good novel.

Pariah by Dan Fesperman

 

This was a really good current-day spy novel, laden with intent and point about the various trends and vectors in politics as the author saw them (novel is copyright 2025, so probably written 2023-2024); Fesperman clearly has a take, and I think it's a strong one (and not just because I tend toward agreement with it, I think). A slow-burn narrative that spirals in eventually almost claustrophobically, with threads of sharp characterization and gallows humor. The humor serves as relief, but lets the darker turns draw more blood. The main character is a believable schmuck, and there's at least parts--maybe even most--of a redemption arc for him, and it's hard-earned, and he legitimately won't ever be the same person. I've enjoyed one of Fesperman's other novels and struggled with another, this was a blast if perhaps a distinctly twisted one.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

 

I hadn't read any of this since like middle-school, and I figured it'd be interesting to renew my acquaintance. Uh, this ain't really good stuff, y'all. There are some occasional moments--every native English speaker probably knows some of them--but the overall things are really disjointed and shockingly uninteresting. I don't think it's just the datedness of the prose, it seems more like the wildly disjointed narrative wherein Alice is never really anything more than the one things are happening to, she rarely does much of anything (she's a seven-year-old Victorian girl, this is probably to be expected). What occurred to me was that the book probably does a decent job of what it's like to be a child--especially what it was like to be a Victorian chlld--with parents and other adults dragging you around without giving you any say and spouting things at you that make no sense but which they tell you are real. I dunno if I'm getting more contrarian as I get older (gawds, I hope not) but I was deeply unimpressed with this.