Apostle's Cove by William Kent Krueger

 

Yeah, I'm a sucker for Krueger's novels, the way he manages to tell such complex stories about a place he loves and the people he loves who live there; the remarkable honesty about the bad and about how it doesn't outweigh the good. This is one of those, with less family stuff than many of his more recent novels that I've read. There's a prologue of framing, then two parts; the first part is set like twenty-five years ago and lots of the changes wrought over the course of the novels haven't happened yet, which is bittersweet as hell; the second part is the pay off as at least some things that have plausibly been floating around for at least most of the series come home to roost like angry hens, or maybe harpies, or perhaps Furies. Krueger gets these people; they all act and speak as themselves, without notable artifice. The story feels a little rushed toward the end, perhaps, but it is a decent resolution. The spiritual stuff feels likewise unforced, though Henry is going to die eventually (possibly when Krueger does). I figure that if Krueger is your jam, you're probably already reading him, this fits in well with what he's been doing lately.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 

The cover copy seems kinda reluctant to admit this, but this novel is basically a cyberpunk novel--AI and hacking and science past the recognizable bleeding edge that manages to feel plausible; also literally murderous corporate maneuvering--though this novel has the advantage of being (or feeling) at least a couple decades closer to its future than, say, Neuromancer. There's more biology, specifically marine biology, on several levels of premise; the results of decades of chronic overfishing are part of the background, and very foregrounded in several of the arcs. The setting is at least as dark as one might guess: in addition to the murderous corporate maneuverings, there's human trafficking as one of the narrative engines. There's a thread that doesn't meet up with the rest of the novel until the epilogue, but that thread is playing a neat counterpoint, and I don't think I would want it excised. The prose is solid, occasionally sparkling and witty; the dialogue fits the characters well; the characters are mostly plausible. There are things floating around about what it means to be human (a classic SF theme) as well as some thoughtful takes on the problems of alien intelligences--and how shockingly alien other intelligences could be here on Earth. Really, really good.

Only Way Out by Tod Goldberg

 

This looked like a novel I'd enjoy yeading, and it most definitely was. The blurb by Stephen Graham Jones was a mixed thing--I dig Jones, but Leonard devolved into self-parody his last decade or more. Fortunately, this is a good novel, and while it's clear Goldberg has consumed rather a lot of Elmore Leonard's prose, the voice here feels natural. It also sparkles and dances and sings and growls and screams, as needed; Goldberg has some chops. The dialogue feels distinctive from the narrative voice, and the characters--some of them, at least--actually talk differently from each other. The story feels at first as though it's going to be a heist-gone-wrong thing, but it turns out to be more than that, with layers of blackmail and revenge and something like a love story burbling to the surface the last few chapters. I'll have to remember the name and look for some of his other novels, I'd even consider reading something in a series, which probably says enough about my feelings for this book.

The Devil Is a Southpaw by Brandon Hobson

 

This seemed, in the library, as though it might be an interesting novel about surviving childhood on the Rez, with all the ways the larger American culture tries to destroy the people/s struggling to do so. It was barely about that, and it wasn't really all that interesting. The various sentences, many of them most of a page, were often beautiful as prose, but they mostly said nothing and went nowhere. Also lots of tendencies to drop really obscure words, some of which might have been correct--I only recognized a few, and not all those usages seemed to be so. The novel played various games with unreliable narration and what might have been going on that the narrator didn't want to tell us; I was never interested enough to really care, though some of the lies the narrator was telling were really obvious. The envy at the core of the novel seemed really weak to me, and blown out of any reasonable proportion in the telling. Not a super-awesome novel, in spite of occasionally magnificent sentences.

The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

 

Yeah, Lansdale. This Lansdale writing about historic Texas, sometimes around the 1910s or thereabouts, it's not booming like the 1920s, and electric light and telephones and automobiles are around the edges of the small towns the novel is set in and around. Laden with delicious turns of phrase, well-paced, with characters that feel not just plausible but real. Gritty and violent--sometimes shockingly so--but with some real beauty showing through. I'm always happy to come across something by Lansdale I haven't read, this was really good.

The Cut by George Pelecanos

 

This was a pretty decent crime novel, in some ways pretty thoroughly in a vaguely noir tradition, in other ways very of its time (2011 copyright) with all sorts of very specific landmarks both geographical and social that have almost certainly shifted over the past fifteen years. It's also Book One of a series, which is often the one book to read in a series if you're going to read any, and I can sort of see some of the groundwork being laid for future novels. It's intermittently violent, most of the characters don't have a lot of inhibition about that, and there are indications that whatever good any of the characters achieve will be kinda minimal, which is definitely a noir thing. The prose is pretty decent, though there are all sorts of odd insertions where Pelecanos informs us of what things (such as Greek words) mean, where the people in the novel are eating and why, that sort of thing, as though he doesn't trust readers to either know those things or fill in some gaps; it makes for some weird juddering. The characters are pretty well-distinct, and the story is reasonably plausible (though events might have made parts of it obsolete). If I come across others of Pelecanos' books that aren't deep in one series or another I might give them a go, but I'm not going to be exactly looking for them.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

 

This book is simultaneously mundane almost to the point of nonexistence, and a very weird and difficult book for me to comment on. The POV character goes through some rough shit, about the same age I went through functionally the same rough shit, but his experience seems wildly more positive than mine--and the novel smells very strongly of autobiography, which doesn't make me inclined to like it better, if I'm honest: not because I dislike autofiction, but because it just makes me resent the author more than I resent the self-insert main, here. He got stuff he could turn into a bland bildungsroman, I spent four years disintegrating in my bedroom. Some of it is probably the ten years' difference (the novel is set in what has to be 1974, I went through my crap in 1985) and some of it is probably some fundamental difference between the kinds of suburbs. This is not a horrible novel, but I cannot muster the distance to say much else about it.