Blossom: A Burke Novel by Andrew Vachss

 

This is early Vachss, all taut and violent, more than a little murky to my mind. It is not good to be a sexual offender in a Vachss novel. It's pretty clear reading this that the POV character--and the author--have way more experience than they'd prefer with a certain kind of lowlife. It's OK to be a career criminal--not easy, sometimes brutal, but OK; there are people career criminals call *scum*. They mostly come to bad ends. The novel isn't exactly *fun*, but it's distinctly *satisfying.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

It's sometimes hard, reading a classic (genre or otherwise) to remember that at some point what that classic did was new and inventive--chances are (especially if the book's nearly a hundred years old) that you're used to seeing it as a trope, something to be riffed on, inverted, subverted. This is a classic, and deservedly so: It's quick and smart and fluctuates between violence and charm. Hammett seems to play a bit closer to whodunit than Chandler, though this book doesn't seem all that carefully plotted--and I kept finding myself wondering how effective the detectives (and other people) in the novel would be if they'd try being sober once in a while.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

 

This book reads like first-person narration of a woman spiraling into crazy for most of its length right up until maybe the very end--though I'm not sure I entirely believe she found or did what she says--told in a sort of clinically bloodless prose that stirs the blood to apathy. The best thing about this book, really, is that VanderMeer is donating a portion of his royalties to thematically appropriate charities.

Razor Girl by Carl Hiassen

 Now, this was a fun read. Sure, Hiassen has things he wants to say about American culture, and Florida in particular, and he cares deeply about the environment and about corruption in government (though that very last isn't really at play in this novel) but really this is just varyingly exaggerated characters making their way through a nested tangle of criminal schemes and reality TV programming. It's maybe not as wacky as some of his very early novels, at least as I remember them, but it's funny and engaging, and the characters with clearer moral codes generally come through the novel better than those without.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This is a pretty strong novel--no surprise--though it took me longer to read than most of the books I've been reading lately (it's longer). It's positively laden with Easter eggs for people who've learned myth and legend, and the main character is actually changed by events. Gaiman is powerfully readable, but I count three major problems with the book: First, while it's possible to spot the Old Gods, mostly (someone with a better grounding than I in myth and legend would probably manage more) there's like no clue what any of the New Gods are, they're just "this guy's probably something technological" and "this woman's like TV" but they don't stand out so much and there aren't anything like so many of them--maybe the Old Gods are not so threatened as all that and all that; second, the novel is remarkably grim--if you're expecting the gentle whimsy most people know (or think they know) Gaiman for, that's not in this book; third, the book doesn't really seem to have anything to say, if there's a point to the whole thing it's not very sharp--though it's possible that the twenty-three years that have passed since the book was published have obscured some of that.
 

What Never Happened by Rachel Howzell Hall

 

This is a pretty effective thriller, all in all, with some noir-ish elements, making some good use of the Pandemic (it's set in 2020) and the concomitant sense of all the walls closing in while the world crumbled. The main character is giving off some big Unreliable Narrator Energy for most of the book, but while she's twitchy and prone to jumping to bad conclusions, she's not the villain or anything. It's not exactly subtext, but there's also some interesting poking at some elements of the Black experience in America, here.

The Fast Red Road, a Plainsong by Stephen Graham Jones

 

I tapped out after maybe 100 pages. If I were generous, I'd say that this is a very young Jones, and he's probably still in the process of working out what his writing is going to be. As it is, though, I worked my way through looping pie-eyed stoner prose for that hundred pages, with affected oddball weirdness jarring against vague realism, and while I maybe could have finished the book, I wouldn't have enjoyed it. Not exactly unreadable, but not enjoyable to read.

The Librarian of Burned Books by Brianna Labuskes

 

Holy shit, this novel is good. I mean, there's subtext kinda constantly bubbling to the surface, but given the themes of censorship at play, here, that's hardly surprising, and given that the novel was published in the Year of Our Lord 2023 (and was therefore probably in process for a couple of years before that) it's almost certainly not an accident that there are parallels between the historical moments in the novel and the present day. All that subtext isn't anything like a problem because all the textual stories--I can think of at least three, two of which are love stories, one of those queer--are all strong as fuck (so to speak). I'm now powerfully curious about Ms. Labuskes' other books.

The Substitution Order by Martin Clark

 

An interesting legal thriller. I see why the blurbs and reviews mention Hiassen and Leonard and Grisham--those are among them a pretty decent set of comparisons (though Clark doesn't write such mannered prose as Leonard, which is a good thing). Definitely built around the American legal system and the ways it can be bent to one's aims, and lots of one determined lawyer working to bend it to his (relatively well-intentioned) intentions. Very quippy-funny, not quite so much Strange Local Color as Hiassen tends to have, very readable. In some ways deeply cynical but in others strongly romantic, an interesting admixture. I'll be looking for more, hoping I can find it at the libraries.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

 

I expect it's something of a known fact that award-winning fiction and I don't often get along well. This is emphatically an exception. The conceit here is that the Underground Railroad in this novel is not a metaphorical railroad, something you'd get from the cover copy. It's pretty linear, as modern vaguely-literary fiction goes, with just a few short threads from someone other than the POV protag, some of which happen out of their place in the novel's timeline; but it is not an easy read--though the horrors of chattel slavery are not literally shoved into the reader's face on every page, there is not a word of this novel that is not steeped in them. Graceful and brutal and eventually overwhelmingly bittersweet, survival is the happiest ending available.

House of the Rising Sun by James Lee Burke

 

So this is a pretty interesting novel, a little non-linear in its structure--though that's really more like a single big flashback. The POV/protag doesn't much like himself--and there are probably pretty decent reasons for that--he's violent, and he's a drunk, and he's not much good at human relationships--but there is a steely moral core in him, and Burke's got some chops when it comes to turning a phrase. There's some typical thrillerish violence here, especially as events build toward an and, and there are some women who are interesting characters with their own goals and priorities, which mostly seem to be not entirely parallel with the protag's. I haven't read a lot of Burke, but the couple I've read have been interesting, I'll be looking for more.

Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina

 

This is a powerfully grim novel about depression on a Native American reservation, and how the people there struggle with it, struggle to keep from being dragged into its belly, torn apart by it, killed by it. It's also a novel about how the people who survive depression, the people who avoid its fangs, the people personally untouched by it who watch their friends and family members and lovers disappear into its maw, how those people struggle with the aftermath of its meals, how they carry on, how they struggle to escape not just the depression but the reservation, how they get pulled back in clawing at the earth leaving bloody nail tracks. It's not a particularly graceful novel, the two timelines are kinda muddled and just about all characters who are neither elderly nor toddlers seem perpetually teenaged--I almost put the book down several times--but it's got the author's blood and pain all over its pages. Oh, and there's some spirit that's maybe going around making people kill people until it's put back underground by someone doing a traditional dance;  it's hard to say.

All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

 

Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with not one but two downbeat endings. Good work, podcaster and ghostwriter, good work! (And good job, ghostwriter, getting your name on the title page!) This novel is like the thematic opposite of I Have Some Questions for You, in that it's (at lesat in part) written by someone who does true crime podcasts (among others, including at least about the "supernatural" so there's clearly no limiting herself the the true) so there's no questioning the role of the media and journalists in the mangling of facts and stories and reputations, there's just a reporter following one bad conclusion after another on the way to a "twist" ending (that's also at least one of the downbeat ones). Amusingly, this novel doesn't make the media that cover murders look any better, really, than some of the other novels I've read that were more explicitly dubious about the matter; I'm pretty sure that's not intentional--there doesn't seem to be that level of clue available toe the authorship team, here.

The Curator by Owen King

 

If I'd looked through all the blurbs, I would have seen one from an author I avoid, and I would probably have avoided this book--at least, I would have gone in with lower expectations. This book is cluttered, busy, and borderline disjointed; the afterword/acknowledgments mention there was a short story first, and this definitely reads like a 500-page novel with a short story entombed within it. The setting sits in an uncanny valley, real enough to sorta fit the real world but fantastic enough (in a vaguely steampunkish sense) to seem almost otherworldly; the hints of the real world bleeding into the setting do not really help. There are characters I found myself rooting for, but they're really not the mains--that's probably not a great sign.

Icarus by Deon Meyer

 

I picked this up on kinda a whim, kinda on the strength of a mythological reference, and it's a pretty good police procedural--feels very much like one of a series, lots of arcs kinda in midair, pretty easy to figure out the general fictional position. There's a lot of Afrikaans thrown about, some of which is almost certainly slang (and some of the slang may not be entirely derived from Afrikaans) and it's not always easy to pick out all the meanings from context, but that's ... fine. The book was written in Afrikaans and translated to English, so some of that's probably the translator's choice--again, it's fine. The characters feel pretty well lived-in, human; the police are probably at least somewhat idealized, as is the way of fiction, and even the not-good people are probably smoothed out some, though there's plenty of human complexity, here.