The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block

 

This turned out to be a clever and occasionally funny detective novel, with some reasonable twists and turns and suchlike along the way. Block could write funny with a distressingly casual ease, but he could also see things you might not have notices and phrase them in ways you might not have thought of--he could do that sort of cleverness without being exactly funny, and he did it well, and a lot, in this novel. I presume it's intended to be happening in the early 1990s, when it was written (I generally tend to presume that fiction is set when it's being written, unless there's a good reason to presume otherwise) and New York then was a somewhat grittier place, and many of the attitudes were really unfriendly--at least some of the words were (there's a transwoman who gets talked about in some kinda jarring ways to 2026 sensibilities, but she's always referred to as "she," which for 1993 is really progressive). The prose is sharp and sparkles like quartz, the characters are deeply believable. Really, really good, and it makes me wish the local libraries had more of Block's novels from the 1980s and 1990s as physical books, so I could read them.

City of Others by Jared Poon

 

Grabbed this off my wife's stack of books going back to the library, after she enjoyed it immensely, and it turned out to be kinda the book I needed this evening. Obviously Book One of a series, but that's fine, sometimes those are plenty charming--and this one is. It's laden with internal drama as well as external, and there's sparkle and wit and even joy just strewn all over it; the prose at times practically sings and quivers with it. Things happen that are supernatural, plausibly even monstrous, but most of the important stuff is deeply human. Really impressively good.

I Will Ruin You by Linwood Barclay

 

Tapped out of this one before getting a hundred pages in. Going for kaleidoscopic and failing by a wide margin, lots of uninteresting--some of them really fucking dim, even ones I don't think were supposed to be--POV-ish characters. Clearly something big and squidlike was going on in the local underworld, but I wasn't buying any of how it was manifesting in the putative main's life. That's another author I'm done with, I'm afraid.

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

 

I went into this novel with something like high hopes, and they more or less did not come to pass. The novel is cluttered and crowded, muddled and kinda muffled, and manages to feature both vague Lovecraftiana and incompetent (or at least out-of-their-league) criminals, two of (at the moment) my least favorite things. The characters all kinda blur together, and there's stuff going on that wraps up in like a last-minute rugpull. It's clear Igleasias holds Puerto Rico dear, which is about the only really good thing I can say about it.

Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen

 

When one sees a Hiaasen from the mid-late 1980s in the library, one checks it out. Obviously this is really early Hiaasen, but it's really goofy and really off the chain in ways he kinda got away from for a while, with less in the way of his current satirical inclinations. I suspect that if one knew Florida history well enough, one might be able to unpick some elements of reality from Skink's story--this is a really early version of Skink and might be the beginning of the character--but that's less relevant than it might seem. The characters kinda loop and swirl their way through the story, I guess it's possible there's at least a little punching-down at televangelists and their flocks, and at pro fishermen and their audience, but given Hiaasen's feelings about Florida and the environment and the fact that both the above are hip-deep in bad development (evergreen Florida, there) I think it's pretty easy to tell where the ire is really directed. Really funny and fast-paced and a great read, if not particularly great literature (or even intended to be).

Saints at the River by Ron Rash

 This novel starts with a heartbreak, and it doesn't get much easier. The people in it are almost all hurting, or soon will be, and Rash draws their suffering through a flame like a silver thread, and he weaves beauty. I was underwhelmed by another of his novels, but I'm glad I gave this novel a chance, it's beautiful and stark and craggy like the Carolina mountains it's set in. What peace or hope emerge are rooted in sorrow and pain, and they feel more precious for it; what answers there are neither simple nor easy. The characters are all well laid out and laid bare, the prose is solid, the ear for dialogue seems spot-on and manages to capture some regionalism without trying to capture dialect--there aren't cute improper words or grammar, here, just some phrasings.

Firewatching by Russ Thomas

 

I read this last night and kinda forgot to post about it. Oops. It's a decent enough procedural, I guess, lots of emphasis on LGBT+ characters and issues, which is fine, but there's some muddle through most of the novel that mostly arises from the decision to have a POV character suffering from pretty severe dementia, which makes her hard to trust ... and then she apparently turns out to have important information--not that "procedural" has all that much in common with "fair play," of course. The characters are often kinda murky, mostly because the author is doing slow reveals, there are really important things that come up kinda late in the novel. There are some dynamics between the characters that feel as though the author might intend or expect to write more novels around them, and he's welcome to but I won't be reading them. This wasn't anything like a good enough novel that I want to read more.