Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

 

This is ... not a horrible SF/Horror novel--the antecedents are obvious, but there are ideas stick around for decent reasons. It's clear, though, that Ms. Barnes isn't coming from as hard-SF a place as, say, Elizabeth Bear: at one point she seems to act as though the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt are the same (they're very much not); and she flubs some details, such as describing a baby grand piano as having four legs--the grand pianos I've interacted with (including moving one) have had three; and the vessels in the novel seem to move at the speed of plot, with little concept of just how vast the distances are even inside the Solar System. Those are mostly niggles, though--the story is mostly fine, the characters reasonably well-drawn, the structure (lots of flashbacks for a while) clearly handled; but the big reveal at the end vaguely reminds me of an old Three Investigators novel ...

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

 

This is a really, really good novel. It unfurls itself gradually and gracefully, making the point that what we know, or think we know, isn't always true and asking questions about true crime as an entertainment genre. The POV character is complex and something like complete, and remarkably sympathetic (if imperfect). There is some nifty--and honest--misdirection about what actually happened, but I think it's clear, and I think there will be people angry because there are two men who abused this teenage girl walking around free and an innocent man in prison for her murder.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

 An actual Horror novel, fueled by the contradiction between tradition and modern life--especially among Native Americans. There are elements here that play sorta like dark Magic Realism, and there are some instances where it's clear the characters are not experiencing things exactly as they are happening. There's some good prose, and some interesting characters--at least one of whom manages to live through the end of the novel (which I honestly wasn't sure was going to happen).

Rivers of Gold by Adam Dunn

 

A very noirish novel, set in what was then (and still is) a very plausible near future when it was published in 2010 but is now more than ten years in the past. More than half centered on the cops, with some large mob-type figures lurking and looming. There's some good turns of phrase here, and I'll never think of the Muppets' "Mana Mana" song quite the same way again.

The Weight by Andrew Vachss

 

A tightly paranoiac crime novel. Complicated almost to the point of overcomplication, but well-written with a character at the center of it who's interesting to spend time with. A weirdly romantic story at its heart, which isn't wildly atypical for Vachss. What violence there is is mostly toward the end, but it's not a messing-around sort of violence. Gritty with a heart of gold, I guess.

Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

 

After a break for vacation ...

This is a well-written, interestingly structured novel--the instigating event is like halfway through it, with the first half basically setting up *why* it's such an instigation. Stays in tight third person with the same character all the way through. There's more crime in this novel than it seems there will be for a long time, then it's all there, all at once. It's the first novel of Lehane's I've read that felt as though it was happening in the same world as "Until Gwen" (though it has no characters in common, that I can tell). It's also the first one that doesn't have a relentlessly downbeat ending.

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

 A Serious Novel. You can tell it's serious, because there's not a lot that happens in it. Or, there's a lot of people running around, and a narrative voice that head-hops as though Marra wants to be writing in the 19th century or something. It's not a novel without decent characters, interesting people (two overlapping, non-identical groups) and it's not exactly true that nothing happens, just that pretty much everything that happens in it happens at about the same level of tension. The authorial voice is pleasant enough, and there are some decent enough turns of phrase, but there's probably not enough to this to justify 400 pages.

Unruly by David Mitchell

 A breezy, kaleidoscopic, flippant history of the British monarchy through the death of Elizabeth I. A pretty enjoyable read, but there is--completely reasonably, it would make the book something like fifty times the size--so little context for most of what's in it that I don't expect much to stick for me. That's probably fine, because much of the point of the book, per the Afterword, is that kings and queens aren't really all that important, unless the people around them make them so; that's a sentiment I can get behind.