Death in the Details by Katie Tietjen

This is a pretty good novel, plays mostly fair. I kinda spotted the who really early on, but not the why or anything. I'm familiar with the Nutshell Studies that inspired the novel, I've even seen them with my own eyes (probably about the same time as the author did). It's an interesting idea to turn what was mostly meant as an instructional tool into an investigatory one. A few minor glitches, and a slight tendency for earnestness, but mostly a decent novel.

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow

This is a longer book, past gritty through cynical, landing somewhere between bitter and angry. Lots of wasted lives, and lots of international bad neighboring. A slim ray of hope is a couple of people manage to get themselves clear of the violence, maybe a little out of the mud. Well written, with a gallows humor twisting the turns of phrase.

The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes

Sara spotted this in the library, after we both enjoyed the hell out of *The Librarian of Burned Books*, she read it first. This is maybe slightly better than that book, somehow managing to be more hopeful in spite (or maybe because) of the greater magnitude of loss in if. Multiple story lines carried off with remarkable grace, again a subtext bubbling to the surface screaming about the present day. Very highly recommended.

Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake

Hey, I read this book this morning in a coffee shop. Funny, quippy-witty, but tense as all heck, with some very-early-stage love story going on. Westlake's reputation does preceed him, and it's well earned. Definitely seems to have a knack for stories about normal guys in over their heads, sliding sideways.

Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath

A grim and gritty novel, bristling with menace, stuffed to the brim with characters it's difficult to like--mainly because they mostly don't seem to like themselves, especially the POV. It's a crime novel, and there are dead bodies, but the central crime is not murder (which seems kinda rare). Not a particularly graceful novel, in prose or story or character, but that may be a cultural difference; it absolutely stinks of lived experience. Just about everyone in the novel is a racist, it's a shock the wannabe White Savior is the worst.

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

This is a moderately creepy mystery, with interesting and functional Horror bits (or at least a ghost story). Lots of classic thriller/mystery/horror tropes being riffed on, inverted, subverted. A strong whiff of something like redemption, and a bright love story threaded in. Some moments of people (especially the POV) behaving dubiously, and some instances when the choice of present tense narration seems to clash with the story, but nothing crippling, and the art in the book (and in the story of the book) is a strength.

Black Wolf by Kathleen Kent

 

Weird to read a novel set in 1990, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union (well, sort of--the novel conveys a reality in which the collapse was a slow-motion thing, still ongoing in 1990, which comports with my memories, if not the common understanding/memory) that has spy stuff at its core, even if the novel is really at heart more about the serial killer in it, and all the misdirection around him. The prose is really more stolid than anything else, but it's functional, and the story is mostly plausible: serial killers in the US have thrived because they could move around; serial killer thrived in the USSR because the government refused to acknowledge that they could exist. The main character is interestingly quirky, but I'm not sure there's enough to her to sustain the length of this novel. Not horrible, not great.

The Pigeon by David Gordon

 

With this, I think I'm caught up on this series--alas, David Gordon is a hard author to track, there's at least one other author with the same name. It's the only series I'm bothering with, and I might look into acquiring copies for myself. This is another over-the-top caper novel of sorts, with both real romance (mostly back-burnered) and some glorious carnage, leavened with witty-quippy banter and laugh-out-loud passages, all written by someone who can write beautiful pages about a pigeon-keeper tending to his birds. Yes, seriously.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

 This is a novel that is getting all sorts of buzz all around the bookosphere, and I can kinda see why in some ways, but it's really a bit of a disjointed pile: It wants to be a light-hearted fish-out-of-water novel, it wants to be a spy novel, it wants to be a romance, it wants to be a hard-headed look at the ramifications of time travel (no, it really doesn't), it wants to be an eco-calamity novel ... it wants to be many things, but it really never manages to be any of them. It has its charms--nifty banter and turns of phrase, a strong sense of what it's like when the sense that a relationship is right and you can't keep your mind or your hands off each other, fervid optimism (or maybe blind hope) that the cascading environmental collapse in the novel isn't inevitable--but all the things the novel wants to be and all the things it wants to say mostly get in the way of the novel telling a story. Even the ending tries to be both heartliftingly happy and gutwrenchingly sad and mostly fails to be either.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller

 

This is a really, really good novel--not as light and breezy as some of Miller's others, nor quite so quippy, but at least as good. All the rage, Jewish and otherwise, that lurked somewhere in the middle-background or further back is front and center, here. The novel has real, interesting things to say about war and art, and about religion and gender and sexuality and identity (in all its meanings). Most of the events in the novel happened to someone, if not the characters in the novel, which ... makes much of the novel hard to cope with.

The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman

 This is a pretty standard vampires in the real-world novel, set in the wild days of the late 1960s. As you might guess from the title, the vampires are running around in souped up muscle cars killing and feeding and killing and feeding. It takes the courage of a bereaved mom-turned-novice-nun to put something of an end to the rampage. I know there are real upsides to writing in a time like the 1960s, from an author's point of view: The culture is not wildly different from present-day, and the differences are well-publicized; and there's not the sort of technology to track movements around the country in anything like real-time; and--related to the latter--there's not mostly-reliable communications anywhere, any time. Knowing that kinda makes the choice stand out a little, though. It's interesting to read a novel that plays the sorts of games this one does, and realize how little in overt debt it owes to King's *Salem's Lot*.

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

 

This was my evening read, a novel that probably takes itself much, much more seriously than Hendrix's. It's not much better, really, but it sure takes itself much more seriously. It has Things to say, and doesn't let you forget it. It couldn't be more the product of a coastal urban liberal if it tried, and it conveys the sense of having been rugpulled better than it does anything else. I suppose the desert hippy-dreg communities are plausible-- I know they exist, I've seen one--but the ease of sliding into and out of them seems beyond what can suspend my disbelief. The fact the physical climax (involving an escape from a Ferris wheel prison) and the emotional one (involving an escape from a luxury resort) are separated as they are is also a little weird. Not a bad book, but not the deathless literature some of the blurbs on the cover seem to imply.

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

 Hey, I read this book this afternoon. It's a pretty standard-issue Haunted Place horror story, but the Haunted Place is a downmarket IKEA knock-off. If you're worked retail (I have) or if you shop with any regularity at IKEA (I do) this book is laden with humorous Easter eggs, though I think most of what people who think is "witty" about Hendrix's novels is really something more like "arch." In the couple I've read, at least, there's a strong vibe of caricature and mockery.

Chloe Cates is Missing by Mandy McHugh

 

This appears to be one of those modern thriller/mystery novels with handsful of unreliable narrators and constant unfurling revelations in the back quarter. I am at best ambivalent about that structure--at some point further revelatory twists just feel ... cheap--but this novel is written reasonably competently, and Ms. McHugh does seem to have some insight into her characters. I've read at least one other novel recently where a detective with a baby on the way was investigating a crime against a child, I dunno if that's coincidence or something once clever that's drifting haplessly toward trope. This is a novel that feels grimier than anything by Joy or Cosby or Burke, mainly because the characters aren't fighting against such structural forces, they've mostly done this damage to themselves and each other.

The Current by Tim Johnston

 

This was a really excellent, really intense crime novel--not exactly like chewing on a live wire, but not far off. All kinds of small-town-rural pain and grief and social tensions, without any real Other or Othering. A great little prologue telling the story of how two people came to be friends, right before the instigating event; an old festering crime that is resolved, even if at least part of the instigating event continues to pend past the end of the novel. Juicy prose with a sound ear for dialogue and a clear eye for character. Lots of POVs, and at least two timelines, and sometimes it's not clear at least which timeline you're in, but things do clarify.

Here in Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton

This is a three hundred page novel with approximately zero likeable (or really even engaging) characters in it--some of them are too damaged to be pleasant, even in fiction, but most of them are just bland dreck and the more insight they pretend to have the less it's obvious they have. It also has like zero surprises in it, and one very obvious metaphor.

Money for Nothing by Donald E. Westlake

 

I've heard of Westlake, but this is the first of his novels I remember reading. Turns out the good things I've heard about him are true. This novel is clever and witty, living comfortably on the border between goofy fun and deadly serious. I wouldn't say the plot is plausible, exactly, but the behavior of most of the characters mostly is. What happens is pretty much the consequences of a small moral/ethical slip, and things going wildly non-linear; to the extent there's a theme, that's mostly it.

Hystopia by David Means

 

I suppose I have to admit this novel turned out to be better than I expected at the beginning. Sure, it remained committed to a mind-blasted gonzo quasipsychedelic aesthetic and storyline and narration and characters, and it jumped around between storylines and perspectives in ways that were (probably at least mostly intentionally) dizzying or maybe stupefying, and it was centered around story stuff that completely failed to sustain willing suspension of disbelief (eventually it became more like a determined suspension of disbelief, then shortly a resigned determination to finish the novel); but the prose--at least in its less stupid-bombed hippy trippy moments--is pretty lucid and readable, and even though novel doesn't really work on the story level (there are some really unwise structural choices, among other things) the points its struggling to make are at least worth considering. I wouldn't recommend this novel to anyone, but I at least don't feel as though I've wasted most of my evening.

Grey Dog by Elliott Gish

 

The author bio in the book says Ms. Gish "wants to creep you out." With this novel, she hasn't succeeded, at least in my case. It's not a bad novel, mind--it stands as a potent inversion of just about every part of "The Yellow Wallpaper" while addressing the same themes and agreeing violently. I don't think the narrator is particularly unreliable (though it's possible I'm wrong) but she--or possibly Ms. Gish--doesn't seem to be entirely aware of the destruction the entity she's treating with is doing; and the entity in the woods, the God of Outside in the novel's terms, is deeply destructive on both a social and individual level. Sure, the feminist rage here is absolutely justified, but destruction is destruction, and what happens in the novel doesn't even pretend to be about rebirth.