The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

 

It's a hardboiled/noir detective novel where the characters aren't completely sloshed the whole time--they drink kinda hard but it's not so constant as in many others (some of which Hammett wrote). This is a dark and cynical novel of big city politics as much as it is a mystery--both of those might well be described as "crime novel," true--and the political workings are more the heart of the story than the main character figuring out who the killer really is, in spite of at least one false confession. The solution is one of psychology more than like physical evidence, which seems kinda forward-thinking for 1931--but Hammett is one of the giants, so. The dialogue feels appropriately rough for the mingled mash of thugs and politicians the characters are drawn from and pulled out of, and the descriptions are effective if occasionally weird in ways that might be because the text is nearly a century old--absolutely some of the slang falls weird because of that. The story is a little muddled for much of the length, but it does clear up in the last quarter. The old story kicks pretty hard, even in old-fashioned mass-market paperback.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

 

There are--or at least have been--days I would have finished this thing as some sort of self-flagellation or something but this is not one of those days; after reading 158 of 338 pages and getting no pleasure therefrom, I stopped.

Behind Sunset by David Gordon

 

A standalone crime novel by an author who's written a lot of books I've enjoyed. Set in 1994, which does make communications less ubiquitous and reliable, and because the Internet is not such a dominant feature of every day life, it's harder to find information as quickly; it turns out it's also just about at the end of media, which makes the blackmail storyline here possible, at least the Maguffin part of it. Gordon has a knack for turning phrases, and an ear for dialogue, and both are on display through out the novel. The story is a little ... convoluted, but it's not endless mindless twists in pursuit of cleverness. Very readable and I'm happy I made a little extra effort to find it.

A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan

 

I read something by Klavan a while ago, it was more of an explicitly Christian very YA-seeming novel that seemed strangely unwilling to commit to there being at least one actual angel in it, and I found it strangely disappointing in spite of the prose itself being at times quite good. This is not that, what Christian references there are much more subtle, the morality is much grayer, it's not at all unwilling to commit to anything, and the prose is still quite good (there are some truly delicious turns of phrase scattered throughout). The story is perhaps a little loopy--I'm not sure I buy the psychological/pharmaceutical stuff--but it's easy enough to just decide to swallow it, and the novel holds together more than well enough once you make that choice. The characters are mostly believable (oddly, the 1st-person POV narrator is in some ways the least believable character in the book, see my comments about psychology and pharmaceuticals) and the events move along rapidly and smoothly. This seems to have a lot in common, thematically and otherwise, with at least some of Andrew Vachss' novels; it gets grim, but there is at least vengeance if not exactly a happy ending. Not perfect, but very good.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu

 This novel sits maybe somewhere just on the "better" side of mediocre, it reads vaguely like an attempt to reframe Simmons' *The Terror* (a vastly superior novel, as I remember) as a story about the Donner Party--though I'm sure Ms. Katsu wasn't thinking so crassly as that admittedly reductionist description makes it sound. I think much of the problem, here, is that there really aren't a lot of characters one ends up wholeheartedly rooting for: There are a couple who inarguably deserve better outcomes than the book hands them, but that's neither rare nor unreasonable in Horror, but it kinda reads like the main monster wins, here, without any real consequences to speak of (the ancillary monsters win but are arguably their own consequence). The prose is mostly solid, bordering on kinda stolid, there's not really much life or sparkle to it--even though it's not written in like 1840s vernacular or anything (not that I'm complaining about anachronism, tell the story as you can and as your reader will understand it). There's some subtext that's only barely not text about the white "settlers" being (or bringing) a disease, a plague; I don't disagree, but the novel is barely strong enough to carry even that weight.

Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke

 

I couldn't tell you exactly why I chose this novel rather than any of the others in my stack, but it made an interesting counterpoint to last night's novel, to be sure. Putatively more realistic. Absolutely steeped in ideas about manhood and how they're damaging to everyone. Violent as heck. Deeply personal, as all Burke's novels at least seem to be (I have zero doubt there's some artistry, that the things that look like Easter eggs from Burke's life are--at least mostly--something like authorial sleight of hand). This has all of Burke's usual strengths, and in 2005 the characters wouldn't be far too old for some of the stuff they get up to. The prose is lean but lyrical, laden with delicious turns of phrase; the characters are all eminently believable--even and especially the worst of them--the story loops and whorls and eventually unwinds. Every James Lee Burke novel feels like a treasure.

The Mermaid by Christina Henry

 At this point if I see a Christina Henry book I haven't read, I'll grab it (the actual seven-book series is probably an exception, sorry). I have some high expectations and this novel met them squarely then exceeded them. It's obviously a bit of a riff on Hans Christian Andersen, but there's an intentionally fictionalized P.T. Barnum in it (among other real-world derived characters) and the mermaid here is much more the driver of her own story--and it turns out to be a romantic story in ways really incompatible with the better-known versions of the fairy tales, especially the Disneyfied take. While the mermaid in Ms. Henry's story looks kinda monstrous, it's the humans in the novel who at least mostly turn out to be the monsters. A very strong, very modern and feminist spin on things. The anger that shows up in some of Ms. Henry's more outright horror novels is less present here, but there are moments when the flames catch.