Burned by Edward Humes

 

Last trip to the library, I grabbed a handful of nonfiction. This is reported narrative nonfiction about an arson case that at least would be in with a chance of not being prosecuted today--the science of arson investigation has clarified some in the decades since, at least around what can't be proven, though different jurisdictions and different investigators will understand the meaning of that differently--and it serves as something of an indictment (heh) of the entire system and process of forensic criminal investigation: Too many of the methods haven't ever really been tested scientifically. Even fingerprint analysis has room for errors (some where between 1 in 306 cases and one in eighteen cases); other pattern-matching analysis, such as fibers or shoeprints or took impressions is worse, and don't even get me started on bite-marks. The fact that prosecutors tend to flat refuse to admit when some past prosecutor fucked up just makes me so angry I can barely see. Well-written and deeply reported, and very worth reading if it's the kind of thing you want to read about (you should probably read at least a little about this sort of thing, it's kinda important).

One of Us by Craig DiLouie

 

Made it about 250 out of about 400 pages, tapped out. Kinda dull and dreary and mostly lifeless, two murders felt boring, and and oncoming revolution felt tedious; and the tension between wildly implausible "science" and grittily realistic social fiction led to a Total Disbelief Collapse. Also the sound of axes on stones was the loudest thing in the book.

The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry

 

Barry is a pretty decent writer, working in the interstices between more conventional thrillers (a la Ludlum, though this doesn't have much specifically Ludlumesque in it) and various iterations of Fantasy/SF. This is kinda a crime thriller crossed with Multiverse stuff, doesn't seem to take itself all that seriously: Barry isn't a particularly funny writer, but there's plenty of wit and sparkle in his prose, here. Has some interesting things to say about identity and the subtle ways we change the world around us, and how every person might be important even if there are approximately infinite variations of them. Gets a little sloggy through the middle, but otherwise good and worth reading.

This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us by Edgar Cantero

 

I dunno. On the one hand there are some interesting ideas in this novel, and Cantero's prose sparkles with wit and joy. On the other hand, there are probably enough parodies of hard-boiled detective stories (Jean Kerr wrote one in the 1950s, you can find it in Please Don't Eat the Daisies) and I don't think the Kimreans are interesting enough characters, or the story here an interesting enough story, to really be the kind of witty inversion/subversion Cantero seems to intend--the kind that also serves as an example of the kind of story it's parodying. Nothing in the novel really holds together, and it persistently seemed to be fighting my ability to suspend disbelief. I had the thought that maybe this would have been better served by some sort of visual medium--movie or comic/graphic novel--since I know Cantero works in at least comics, and much of the novel seems to want to carry the story on the strength of imagery; that might just be a stray thought, though.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

 

I read this in a coffeeshop this morning. I was not entirely overwhelmed by it, but it was not horrible or anything. Things of note that caught my attention: Interesting for an instructor in creative writing to persist in dropping backhanded mockery of "proper novels"; Haddon did a reasonable job of humanizing his protagonist--Chris isn't much less of a hypocrite than many of the neurotypical folks he encounters, his insistence that he doesn't lie notwithstanding--but he still mostly failed to write a narrator I found particularly engaging. Somewhere around the midpoint of this short novel, the story became simultaneously more obvious and less interesting, probably when it stopped even putting on airs of being a mystery. No regrets, here, just a novel that didn't do much for me.

The Bomb Maker by Thomas Perry

Grabbed this because I've enjoyed all of Perry's novels I've read; this is no exception. It's less a novel of pursuit than some of the others have been, it plays out more like a crime-oriented Thriller bordering on Mystery, but Perry can do that, too. I was wondering, after reading that Forsyth novel a couple nights ago how much of that I'd see in Perry: Turns out, this is a highly technical novel, it has detailed (probably not entirely correct) steps for how to make explosives and bombs, and Perry seems to know his stuff, there. Perry has an interesting approach to writing burgeoning romantic relationships that is always kinda fun, usually surprising. The characters in the novel are clear, even the bomber--whom Perry made the decision not to name--and the story manages more than adequate narrative tension. Another solid novel, lf course I'll keep grabbing them as I see them.
 

Passing Through a Prairie Country by Dennis E. Staples

 

Somehow when I pulled this novel out of my TBR stack, I missed that it was kinda a Horror novel: Nothing wrong with that, just not really what I was looking for. Well, this was a shortish novel, around 250 pages, and it's pretty good. There are a lot of sequences that seem as though they might be muddled, but I think the characters' experiences are supposed to be muddled (or maybe reality itself) so I can't really call those passages mistakes. There are moments when knowing more about Ojibwe lore than I do (I know practically nothing, here) would clearly have been helpful, but the author really isn't duty-bound to relieve the reader's ignorance, and it's clear from text and context that these are Big Things--I have no complaints on this score. The characters are pretty clear, and the monstrous supernatural horror of the novel can plausibly be understood as a metaphor for the grim social horror of the rez (from what I can tell, just about any rez). The story kinda judders some, but nothing unforgiveable.