The Bang Devils by Patrick Foss

 

There is a kind of crime fiction that focuses on criminals who are out of their depth--sometimes my a lot, sometimes by enough to seem like idiots; this is very much a book like that, where the protagonists persistently make bad choices as the situation they've put themselves into spirals further and further out of control. While the main characters do not seem like the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, calling them idiots is probably in the direction of unfair--though there is not a single decision they make in the novel that a reasonably alert reader cannot tell is going to make things palpably worse. This is not exactly my favorite kind of crime fiction, mostly because the main characters could have walked away at almost any time and been OK--if there are going to be bad decisions, I very much prefer for the people making them to be under more pressure. The prose has some neat turns, and the story isn't badly told, for all it's not really to my preferences; the various POV characters do kinda blur together, and I'm not sure how I feel about some of the very extended bits of unattributed dialogue: It's not just that there aren't tags, it's literally just the words the characters are speaking and you have to work out one instance of who's talking and sorta propagate that out, the book isn't good enough to reward that amount of work.

Morbidly Curious by Coltan Scrivner

 

I read this little book in a coffee shop yesterday, after seeing a pretty strong recommendation online, and ... well, I was distinctly underwhelmed. It spends a fair amount of its relatively small space defending fans of dark fiction from various calumnies I personally haven't really encountered--though I also am not as a rule a fan of either slashers or torture porn. The author is apparently a real social scientist, or at least has done that kind of work, for real, but the book feels a lot more pop-psych to me, though without the readability and charm of someone like Mary Roach. Lots of recaps of various studies the author has worked on, or at least been associated with; lots of talk about purportedly haunted places in the real world (which I mostly don't buy, and the author says he doesn't but then seems to talk about experiences he's had in them). Not much is sticking a day later, which probably says something.

The Shadow Dancer by Margaret Coel

 

There are a small number of mystery series I'll read, and this is one. Coel's mysteries on teh Wind River Reservation are reasonably effective mysteries, and they're very effective dramas--not so much family drama in the way William Kent Krueger's are, but very much focused on the characters and the people they're attached to, and to the open and vast beauty of the place. This is pretty typical, and it's clear Coel spent some time having characters move back and forth between the Reservation and elsewhere (Denver, for instance) so she could have the same relationship dynamics available to her. This makes some sense, though it does make the various relevant timelines a little ... slippery. The fact the first murder victim here was tightly connected to one of Coel's mains is a bit of a vaguely nasty surprise, but a well-executed one. Coel clearly really likes her characters in these, and it's hard not to agree with her as a reader; I'll keep reading these as I keep finding ones I haven't read.

Crooks by Lou Berney

 

Saw this in the library and I remembered how much I enjoyed Dark Ride, so I checked it out. It's at least as enjoyable, though this is not anything like the "stoner noir" I described Dark Ride as. There's wit and sparkle in the prose, including the dialogue, and the stories here eventually add up to basically what's on the cover--a novel about crime and family. All the kids especially need to come to grips with both those things, and how in their particular instance they're intertwined. And those kids are well-distinguished from each other, both in their POVs and elsewise, Berney does a marvelous job of making it seem as though you're in seven different heads, here (not at once) and that's a real accomplishment. This isn't as intense as some other crime novels I've enjoyed, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Another Kind of Eden by James Lee Burke

 

I kinda figured this was at least in with a chance of bringing the kissing-the-light-socket feeling I like so much, and it brings that aplenty. While this probably isn't exactly a crime novel, there's definitely crime at its core, and probably something darker--especially toward the end as the novel veers explicitly toward the supernatural. It's the early 1960s and all the things that boiled over later in the decade are there just starting to simmer, and there's kinda casual bigotry of all sorts around, as well as drugs and violence (the worst violence seems to erupt from people who can't get the war/s they fought in out of their heads). There is beauty in the mountains of Colorado, but there is also rot. It's a love story that ends when one of the lovers disappears, and the other one kinda runs away. It's brutal and harsh, but it's Burke and it's laden with juicy turns of phrase and hard (in many senses) characters and incident. Beautiful and gripping.

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

 

Well, this was at least vaguely disappointing. The prose was (I presume intentionally) very much in the style and voice of mid-eighteenth-century writing, which I avoid more or less whenever possible, and while I think I at least got most of the incident, I didn't really see much point to it all. I guess the strong whiff of picaresque here explains some of the difficulty in discerning any point, though that's not strictly speaking inherent in picaresque. Whatever distinctions there might be among the characters is to my eye and ear buried under the willfully antiquated authorial voice. I'm sure Spufford more or less hit the target he was aiming for, but the target wasn't one I turned out to be all that interested in.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

 

I couldn't tell you when exactly I fell out of love with Greek Myth, but it happened somewhere along the way. This is a book that does a wonderful job of reminding me of at least part of the why: The deities (and in many cases, the heroes) of Greek Myth rarely behave much differently than spoiled toddlers. In this book that is absolutely true. The monsters aren't monsters, the heroes aren't heroes (Perseus especially comes off as an annoying twit--but so do Hermes and Athena); the gods are privilege personified, and the kings are better than the gods only for having less actual power. There's enough wit and anger here to qualify this as satire, I think; unfortunately the wit fades over the course of the novel, and by the end there's just the bitter taste of anger, before the story kinda fritters away. There is some sparkle to the prose, here, especially in the first quarter or so, but the characters have a tendency to kinda blur around the edges. While I started the novel with spirits and hopes high, by the end I mostly came away with the sense this novel had One Weird Trick, and I just got tired of it.