Pariah by Dan Fesperman

 

This was a really good current-day spy novel, laden with intent and point about the various trends and vectors in politics as the author saw them (novel is copyright 2025, so probably written 2023-2024); Fesperman clearly has a take, and I think it's a strong one (and not just because I tend toward agreement with it, I think). A slow-burn narrative that spirals in eventually almost claustrophobically, with threads of sharp characterization and gallows humor. The humor serves as relief, but lets the darker turns draw more blood. The main character is a believable schmuck, and there's at least parts--maybe even most--of a redemption arc for him, and it's hard-earned, and he legitimately won't ever be the same person. I've enjoyed one of Fesperman's other novels and struggled with another, this was a blast if perhaps a distinctly twisted one.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

 

I hadn't read any of this since like middle-school, and I figured it'd be interesting to renew my acquaintance. Uh, this ain't really good stuff, y'all. There are some occasional moments--every native English speaker probably knows some of them--but the overall things are really disjointed and shockingly uninteresting. I don't think it's just the datedness of the prose, it seems more like the wildly disjointed narrative wherein Alice is never really anything more than the one things are happening to, she rarely does much of anything (she's a seven-year-old Victorian girl, this is probably to be expected). What occurred to me was that the book probably does a decent job of what it's like to be a child--especially what it was like to be a Victorian chlld--with parents and other adults dragging you around without giving you any say and spouting things at you that make no sense but which they tell you are real. I dunno if I'm getting more contrarian as I get older (gawds, I hope not) but I was deeply unimpressed with this.

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.