Choice of Evil by Andrew Vachss

 This is a typically grim novel from Vachss, but maybe in some ways less violent than some. I don't know the ways in which the New York of these novels reflects the real New York of the 1990s and early 2000s, but it's deeply internally consistent. I have to believe it reflects Vachss' day job, there's at least one lawyer in the novel who clearly reflects some of that experience (in a relatively light-haearted, humorous way). Vachss had an ear for dialogue, for sure, and a sense of how to structure a story so it could end almost abruptly, with questions unanswered, and still feel satisfying. Strong stuff and a good read.

The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke

 

This is a grimly violent crime novel, as one might--probably should--expect from Burke, at least when he's writing a crime novel. There's some real dark noir stuff going on, just about everyone except the mains and a small circle around them is some shade of corrupt, and there's outright evil that makes that seem like sunshine and light. And the mains are deep and complex themselves and not entirely the sorts of police officers most people would want protecting them from criminals. It's interesting seeing a writer as good as Burke nail certain trends in literary culture to the wall, I find myself wondering now much of that in the novel is Burke himself and how much is his narrator. Wonderful turns of phrase, paragraphs that make you want to read them aloud. A story that boils as dark as a tropical storm.

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

 

This novel predates the Brianna Labuskes books I liked so much, though it's playing in very similar territory--there's maybe at least as much overlap with Miller's The Curse of Pietro Houdini. This is just as much a novel of resistance to fascists (specifically Nazi Germany) as either of those, though it doesn't play the identity games that the Miller does and it's much less concerned with sexuality than either of the Labuskes. It's at least as romantic as either of the Labuskes, though the ending is like a romantically bittersweet gut punch. The story carries itself well and flows gracefully, and the characters are well-drawn and mostly clearly different. It's not as complex as either of the Labuskes or the Miller, but it's not trying to be, and there's no snark in any of that. Some slowish going in like the first quarter or third, but nothing horrible, never a temptation to stop.

Blood Memory by Margaret Coel

 

I grabbed this from the library because I've read a few books in this author's mystery series (as far as I know, she just has the one) and they've been pretty good; I was more than a little bit surprised when I sat down and realized this was a standalone. Cool, but in principle I'd much rather read a book set in the Wind River Valley than one set in Denver. On the other hand, this is a pretty tight little novel, all kinds of tension and some misdirection that doesn't end up making the main twist a complete rugpull (or, really, the minor twists). The characters are pretty clearly written and distinct, the setting is solid--Ms. Coel has clearly been to DC at some point, even and the story is solid (if probably very of its time, copyright 2008). The author's ongoing concerns with people using the Arapaho (and plausibly the other tribes) to further their own ends are ... A) legitimate concerns and B) ongoing; no snark. I might still be itching for one of her series mysteries, I'll see next time I'm in a library.

Black Sun by Owen Matthews

This was my book this evening, at home. It actually had about as many laugh-out-loud moments for me as the Ring Lardner did, but some large portion of that was probably humor of a distinctly gallows color. This is basically a mystery novel set in Soviet Russia, with a main character who's an investigator for the KGB. There's all kinds of tension here between the government's secrets and the characters' secrets, the main has a strong tendency toward self-destruction. The whole novel is told in tight-third from that main's POV and it's possible he's not an entirely reliable narrator, but if I were going to catetorize him on that I'd say he's somehow more naif than he is madman or liar (though it's possible he's lying to himself at least as much as he is to anyone else. The author knows Russia, he has family and professional ties there, and it shows.  I enjoyed this greatly.
 

You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner

 I read this in a coffee shop this morning. It's ... pretty light-hearted, I guess, though I imagine a good deal of the humor has been washed out over the intervening century-plus. There are some ... well, calling them Easter eggs is probably overstating their subtlety, but there are some references to real-world baseball greats in the novel that are aesthetically pleasing. It takes some attention to realize that Keefe (the narrator) is unreliable as hell, especially about his own performance. Whether he's blinded by his ego or desperately defending it is a question I don't have an answer to. A kinda charming glimpse of the USA in the 1910s, through the lens of baseball, if not as hilarious as I was expecting.

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

 

This is a crap novel, really. Marginally competent crap on some levels--the prose isn't complete garbage, and the characters are reasonably well delineated (with the glaring fucking exception of the POV character who's lying about who they are the whole time)--but the basic story premises, especially like the core reveal, the supernatural shit bolted onto lucid dreaming, are pretty much shit. The characters are pretty universally detestable, which makes the early going difficult enough to get through that perhaps it should be a warning to just stop now. I kinda wish I had.

And There He Kept Her by Joshua Moehling

 

This is a well-written, multithreaded thriller/crime novel. There are a couple of serial killers in it, and while they're not ultra-competent, they're more than enough to make for a plausible threat to the characters they're intended to menace; the small-town police are remarkably competent, overall (there's at least one exception) and remarkably open-minded, as it turns out--one of the POV characters is the acting sheriff, and he's gay. Which--kinda charmingly--turns out to be more of a problem for him than for the rest of the town, at least as long as he's trying to keep it private. There is some complicated tragic past, here, but it mostly serves as underpinning for the character. The rest of the characters are competently done, and there are some nifty turns of phrase lurking around corners.

Hit Me by Lawrence Block

 

This isn't so much a novel as it is a series of various-length short stories, plausibly told in order. That's fine, but it does mean there's less of an overarching thing happening--though the first and last stories do both involve the main character being called out of retirement. It's Block, one of the most casually witty authors I've read, so it's immensely readable and often laugh-out-loud funny. Block does like to have his characters know all kinds of weird stuff, which makes sense, because people do know all kinds of weird stuff.

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger

 

This is a disappointing novel. The writing is remarkably good on just about all levels--pacing, dialogue, characterization, description, the prose itself--but the story itself just did not work for me. It's structured very like a Horror novel, but it's really not, it's more like a conspiracy thriller, where the conspiracy (mostly) plays out while the characters are (mostly) trapped in a cave in the Grand Canyon filled with implausible ... somethings, really they're like really crappy SF written by people who've read too much Fortean stuff and taken it way too seriously. The biggest problem is that it tries to make everything that happens something vaguely Lovecraftian, a reality we just don't perceive because we just don't believe it. I prefer my Horror (mostly) not to be dressed in the garb of science. (SF and Horror overlap, but ... this isn't it.)

Don't Let the Devil Ride by Ace Atkins

 

This was a bit of a disappointment for a few reasons. The prose was pretty solid, with some nicely turned phrases, but that's about the extent of the good. The characters are various degrees of implausible--some heroic, some villainous, at least one way beyond hapless--and the story itself is just wildly complicated, even more complicated than the forty-three POVs make it seem. (That number is approximate and might be somewhat exaggerated.)  There's a really major character who's never a POV and thinking about it that's a negative space, probably intentional, definitely defensible, but the lack of any resolution to any of the questions about that character is definitely kinda unpalatable. Also, for some reason, it's set in 2010, though the copyright date is 2024, for no reason in the story, which makes me think this might have been sitting around for a while. Call me underwhelmed, and (now) completely uninterested in the series fiction he's writing.

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green

 

I said I'd grab this at some point, and I did, and I'm glad I read it. It wobbles some through the middle, and it suffers from different plausibility problems than the book it's a sequel to did, but it's a very readable book. Still very up with people, still very down on social media, but that consistency isn't a foolish hobgoblin, here. Some of the "futuristic" tech and internet stuff here is dated in the way that a five year old novel can be, but the point and meaning are solid and clear, here. Everything resolves, and the ending is a thing of joy.

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

 

I read this in a coffeeshop today. It's four short stories ("The Repairer of Reputations" might border on novella) and they're all really good. The influence on Lovecraft is glaringly obvious. There are other stories in Chambers' original collection, this just printed the four that all directly connect to the (fictional) play, "The King In Yellow." Pretty amazing stuff, given it was written around the turn of the 20th century--the prose still holds, though the imagined then-future looks distinctly strange. There are some unsurprising echoes in here of The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I get the sense Chambers and Wilde were writing about or responding to the same or similar artistic movements (I'd have to check how contemporaneous they were). Very interesting stuff, another demonstration that the past was a very weird place.

Distant Sons by Tim Johnston

 

So, this novel manages to tie into both Descent and The Current, but it does so subtly, and it doesn't matter if you're not like intimately familiar with either or both those other books--there are things that came back to me as I was reading this, but this novel is pretty well self-contained. It's set in small-town Minnesota/Wisconsin, and there are a lot of screwed-up people there, even aside from the crimes at the core of the novel, in the ways that small-town-Middle-America tends to screw people up: mostly drugs, but violence and blown chances have their say, too. The main here is probably less screwed up than most, and trying to make his way. He's basically a good guy who can't let bad stuff stand, and that keeps getting him into trouble (it did in Descent, too). This is a complex novel, though it's mostly linear--and there's a strong hint that the actual truth of the older crimes at the center of the novel dies with one of the POV characters, which might cut crossways to some people's preferences. The prose skitters toward beautiful, and the characters and the places are deeply believable. Highly recommended.

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

 

This is a competently-written novel, I guess, but it didn't do a lot for me. The story wasn't wildly bad, exactly: There are some twists, but they aren't complete rugpulls, everything makes at least some sense with regard to what's come before it; the events unfold with some tension; the various conflicts that can emerge in and with a community, centered on a biggish plot of land, are pretty clearly drawn. The prose sits very much on the right side of competent. Unfortunately, the more time the novel spent with a character, the less interested I became with them. I guess you can't have an amateur detective mystery novel without the police seeming like morons (collectively, there are one or maybe two exceptions) but here that's done with a very broad hand and a very heavy brush. The main characters' relationships seem irredeemably toxic to me, all various strains of utterly blinkered self-regard; the primary amateur detective, here, is probably the worst; the youngest of them is at least fifteen and might grow out of it.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

 

Um. I remember reading this in high school, or maybe college, or maybe right after I dropped out of college, and thinking it was good but liking Bradbury's short stories better. I might still hold out for some of Bradbury's short stories being some of the best fiction written in English, but I might not have been in a place to appreciate how fucking good this novel is. Just a few years older than Jim and Will, so it's easier to look down on them the way one does "the little kids"; no where near old enough to appreciate Charles Halloway as a character--he's much more important than I remember most people thinking. (I didn't read the stuff about the novel in the back of this edition, I just read it, thanks, I'll think my own thoughts.) The story here might be a little clunky, and spectacularly dated, even in the 1950s/1960s when Bradbury was writing it, but there's some real grit and blood and fear, here; the characters aren't quite interchangeable, but they're very much either Jim or Will, or they're someone else (Will's dad, Charles, is a bit of an exception to this). The villains are mostly bad because they're bad, pretty explicitly. The prose, though, oh my gawds the prose is enough to give anyone who writes fiction in English fucking imposter syndrome. These days I don't normally crank my prose to quite those heightened altitudes, but Bradbury makes it look so effortless, so tempting, I fear I am already lost.

I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

 

This is a weird novel, funny--occasionally hilariously so--with occasional glimpses of things it wants to say (mainly that things probably aren't as bad as you probably think they are) but oddly not a lot in the way of a story to tell. It's clear Pargin has One Weird Trick: Say what the ending is and improvise your way toward it. Whether that's a Weird Trick that works consistently and/or well is a debate I'm not going to wade into here, but this novel kinda maunders and meanders its way, jumping from POV to POV freely and almost randomly, there's a reasonable amount of tension, at least at points, but really not anything particularly like the payoff implied (if not necessarily promised). It's mostly just a bunch of not-really-intelligent people fumble-flailing their way through, which might be distressingly realistic but doesn't make for particularly satisfying fiction. Not a complete waste of the evening, but not all that great, either.

Pro Bono by Thomas Perry

 

Yeah, I wanted to read a novel I was confident I was going to like, that didn't feel like it was some sort of nostaliga-anticipointment tango, so I grabbed this from the stack. (I'll read Something Wicked This Way Comes soon enough, for the first time since I think college. That's more than thirty years. Agh.) I chose well, it's a tautly-written novel, feels as though it's probably the latest in a series but it's mostly self-contained and I didn't really miss whatever I haven't read, if anything. Perry can turn a phrase when he wants to, though his prose is normally pretty constrained and direct. This one kinda skitters into something at least bordering Legal Thriller territory, but that's fine, that stuff comes across as pretty believable to this moderately aware layman and it mostly informs much of what the main character does. Has some neat sequences around the relationship the main finds himself in.