Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

 Well, this is a kinda weird little post-cyberpunk novel, with strong hints of post-Singularity about it. Lots of stuff in it about authoritarian regimes bordering on totalitarian, powered by extrapolations of surveillance tech and AI that's maybe actual AGI (there isn't really anyone who interacts with it who isn't being completely puppeteered by it, it's mostly negative space in the novel, it's hard to say how super/intelligent it really is). The characters aren't exactly interchangeable, but they're all (with maybe two exceptions) really downtrodden by the social-governmental systems they're operating under--the AI-driven "rationalization" of governments does not seem to have gone as well as the governments claim. The prose is solid, though not overly witty, though extensive humor probably wouldn't fit all that well, here. I never really had problems suspending my disbelief. Very worth reading, though the subtextual messages are probably at least as important as the story.

Edison's Ghosts by Katie Spalding

 

Not a novel, this evening, more like a collection of short snarky antihagiographies. The thesis is that geniuses sometimes get out of their comfort zone, and are at least no more likely to make smarter decisions then than are the rest of us. Many of the geniuses are well-known, the stories are all interesting, there are a few that plausibly don't really go any way toward proving her thesis (the story about Maya Angelou comes to mind; and Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace were arguably fighting serious mental illness, which might disqualify some of their behavior from "geniuses acting stupidly") but in spite of that it's an interesting and readable book, with many moments of wry laugh-out-loud humor in it. Dr. Spalding isn't setting out here to kill anyone's idols, the people she writes about mostly come off as more human in their foibles, she doesn't deploy a whole lot of negative judgments.

Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger

 

This is the very first novel Krueger wrote with Cork O'Connor as a main, and while there is a lot of what makes the later novels go in this one, things are less spiritual and somewhat grimmer, and the family drama stuff is much less present. There are a lot of people involved in the various nested/connected conspiracies, more than seems strictly plausible (though this never really caused any trouble for me in the way of sustaining my suspension of disbelief) and things mostly don't end well for them, and there are some bad endings for people who are arguably more or less innocent. But it's a murder mystery and there are people who are willing to kill and willing to keep killing, so it's not like unreasonable. It's interesting seeing something this early, more than fifteen novels ago, and this turned out to be a superb novel, more than enough to help me shake free some of the crap I've been reading. I hope some of the other books I have by authors I don't know turn out to be worth my time.

Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead by Jenny Hollander

 

A waste of a great title. I got eighty-eight pages in, before I reached my limit on charmlessly despicable characters (all of the characters in the book are charmlessly despicable with the possible exception of the younger sister with Down Syndrome, who's across the Atlantic) and obviously intentionally dishonest narrators who still feel the need to be coy about it, and an authorial voice that started as kinda bad and by the time I tapped out was like nails on a blackboard. The prologue ending with a glaring grammatical error was a clue, and I didn't need to finish the garbage book to learn it this time. Yay, me.

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

 

I know this is a novel a lot of people liked, and I know there are four sequels, but this novel didn't really work for me. The prose struck me as mostly bland (except for some weird distinctly English class signaling) the characters who weren't Yashim seemed mostly interchangeable, and Istanbul came across as mostly a cesspit with no redeeming characteristics. The story was cluttered and jumbled and seemed to turn on several instances of someone (usually/probably Yashim) knowing something not yet revealed to the reader--this is fine, as it's not really trying to play at being a fair play mystery, but it does make have a distancing effect for me. Well, at least I know four novels I don't need to read; though I do wonder if the author's history books about Istanbul are more enjoyable.

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block

 

So this is a very early novel in the Matthew Scudder series, and it's deeply readable, with only a few things that make it seem like a time capsule from 1982--mostly the constant use of pay phones and other landlines, and the physical contacts book the main carries around. And of course, New York City is in some ways a very different city than it was forty years ago (though in some ways it isn't at all different). It's not a super-happy book, and it's got a few storylines going on, other than the killing that needs solved; the main alternate plotline is whether Scudder will figure out that he's past the point where his drinking will inevitably go nonlinear and kill him--the whole bottle isn't enough, and one drink is way too many. There's some wit and humor and verve, here, Block just naturally sees funny in things, but there's not as much laugh-out-loud funny as there is in some of his other novels. Good stuff.

The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks

 

I read another novel by Banks a couple-few months ago, maybe more, and I liked it enough that I've been poking around his books when I've seen them at the library, and this one finally ended up coming home with me. It's a really good novel, with some weirdness in the premise, and some neat character stuff--especially the main/POV. The whole thing is written with wit and energy and empathy, while echoes of prior art linger in the air. It's not the Florida that Hiaasen or Dorsey write about, but with a careful eye you can see that it's the foundation of that Florida. The parallels between Walt Disney World and the fallen Shaker Eden in the novel do substantial positive structural work.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

 

This was cluttered and jumbled and disjointed, when it was clearly intended to be kaleidoscopic, and though an alien visitation ("invasion" isn't quite right, though there's clearly an intended riff on colonialism, as they're basically imposing their ideas and ideals upon the people of Earth--specifically, upon the people of Lagos, Nigeria) is the inciting event, here, the story is much more about the people of Lagos and their various cultural disfunctions and malfunctions than it is anything else. This is, in principle, fine, but it left me without much of anything in the way of handles to grab onto. The heavy use of Pidgin English didn't really help me with that. Not a great book, alas: I really wanted to enjoy it.

Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott

 And we're back to the land of mediocrity. This isn't as bad as some of the less-than-stellar novels I've read the past week and change--the ending does manage to muster some tension--but the rest of the book is just a grind, you can see where things are going to go from about halfway into the novel, the non-POV characters are all so inscrutable as to be identical, and the POV ends up seeming kinda dim for not seeing what's coming, not recognizing at least the bones of the situation she's in. The novel does have things it wants to say about at least some of the ways women are scared of men (and, plausibly, some o why men say they're scared of women) but the story is all so jumbled and the prose--while being nicely turned, occasionally--is just so clunky and sometimes clumsy that it's hard to see much subtext in it.

Night Will Find You by Julia Heaberlin

 

After the mediocre-to-bad choices the last few nights, it was a refreshing change of pace to actually enjoy the novel I read without reservation. It's not perfect, there's perhaps a little too much unearned misdirection going on, and some of the characters and events don't ring entirely on-key; but it's a good novel. The prose is clean and displays some occasional verve, the overall story worked, and the tension inherent in the premise is important to the novel (if not entirely resolved). The fact the POV character is an astrophysicist who lives in the Big Bend area of Texas just sucked me right in at the start, but it wasn't as though I wasn't a willing passenger.

Splinter Effect by Andrew Ludington

 

Clearly this looked potentially interesting when I was at the library: Neat cover art, plausibly good title. I did not make it even fifty pages in. Wacky time-traveling archaeologist adventures with clunky prose and obvious characters ... nope. (I might have been able to cope, if the time-travel stuff had been a secret. At least The Ministry of Time got that right.)

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

 

And again we have a novel where the best thing about it is the title. The text itself has more or less no charms, what with flat and lifeless and barely-differentiated characters; jumbled nonlinearity and cluttered multiple POVs (who all seem to be varying shades of unreliable, which makes it really hard to believe a single word on the page, which is probably the novel's single biggest problem); and a basic completely linear plot line that's basically "watch the bad person do the bad things" with approximately zero narrative tension. The prose is tepid in that "because you are neither hot nor cold I shall spew you from my mouth" kinda way. I guess it's about as good to find a novelist I can avoid as one I can look for, right? I'll just keep telling myself that, I guess.

Dead Man Switch by Matthew Quirk

 It feels as though I'm in one helluva losing streak, but I think it's just the writers I'm trying out for the first time/s that ... I'm not finding to write books I particularly enjoy. I can't keep reading books by authors I know forever. Anyway, this book is maybe not quite as bad as last night's: The prose is solid bordering on inert, and the characters are wildly implausible--as is the story itself--but it's probably not wildly off-piste for a gun-loving thriller (it really does remind me of some of the garbage novels I ended up reading for professional reasons more than a decade ago). There's an overpowering spell of backstory here, as though it was like the fifteenth book in a series, but that I can see there's just the novel this was a sequel to and this: Given that the ending here feels very much as though there's at least one other shoe gonna drop, that feels like something of a waste. There's not much here in the way of wit or whimsy or even really memorable language, though there's some weirdness in the subtext and themes, I can't tell if it's a parody of American liberalism written by a conservative or a parody of American conservatism written by a liberal--the fact Quirk wrote for The Atlantic isn't at all dispositive, here.

Nine Lives by Peter Swanson

 

Well, this was a complete waste of my evening. Watered-down Christie, except the author doesn't have enough authorial nerve to cheat so boldly as Dame Agatha. Stolid prose--almost inert--with little wit or verve, jerky plotting, implausible characters; not least of the last is the omnicompetent sociopath. A thick smodge of mediocrity.

The Elephant of Surprise by Joe R. Lansdale

 

I don't know that I was looking for a Lansdale novel when I saw this at the library, but that title just made me smile and grab the book. Fortunately, the novel lives up to the title, in terms of the humor, of course, but also in terms of being a very effective thrillerish kinda crime novel, with some deeply imperfect characters on both sides of what turns out to be a pretty clear moral line. There are some things that are probably at least a little bit over the top, but nothing in the novel broke or even threatened my suspension of disbelief. A deeply human and immensely fun novel.

Hero by Thomas Perry

 

This is a very good thriller novel, with an interesting predator/prey relationship between the main and her antagonist (who is enough her opposite number that he probably counts as a foil). Perry's got an ear for dialogue and a knack for kinda understated prose that lays bricks kinda subtly and turns into a solid structure. He has things to say here about police investigations and modern media--though he's mostly writing about television and print media, here, which are probably not the primary sources anymore for anyone who is not old. This plays, oddly, kinda like an inversion of The Burglar, though it's still very much a novel of pursuit.

Anima Rising by Christopher Moore

 

Started this yesterday in a coffee shop (kinda on-the-nose for a novel set in Vienna) and finished it this evening. It's Christopher Moore, so there's bawdy goofy humor smeared all over, but it's also a pretty serious novel--or at least, it's a novel with some real, serious things to say, mostly about how men treat (constrain, abuse, belittle, subordinate) women. It's perhaps a little less goofy-hilarious than Sacre Bleu but it's arguably a better novel, in some ways maybe a counterpoint if not an outright corrective.  I mean, it's still funny: I don't think Christopher Moore could write an unfunny novel if he tried; I think this is just in some ways more respectful, the way Noir and Razzmatazz are, of the people in it who aren't privileged white guys.

The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni

 

This is one of the myriad novels foisted on the world in the wake of Dan Brown and his riff on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, at this point warmed-over and bland while being exaggerated almost to the point of parody. This particular example has that wonderful feature of a few "technothrillers" I've read of managing to get major things wrong when it abuts on fields I know anything about. Implausible and impossible to take seriously, a waste of religion and folklore, rarely makng a step that is not bleeding obvious. The prose is reasonably good, there are some segments in voices other than the main narration, they're handled well. The characters don't any of them seem to be anything like as smart as they or the author want the reader to think they are--though there's some interesting stuff about how the main, who has aquired savant syndrome, has a brain that does some things really really well--in ways that are mostly out of his control--while he himself is emphatically not an intellectual. The ending is especially laughable with 2022-vintage (or honestly 2025-vintage) tech.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

 

Somehow managed to miss this so far, figured I'd read it while it was in the house. It's mostly a picaresque of sorts, there isn't anything like a conventional arc to it, and the main character comes across more a someone to whom things happen or are done than someone who does things. There are flickers of wit and humor, but not anything like so much as the foreword would lead one to believe, and the prose is laden with startling poetic turns of phrase. It is, I have no doubt, an honest novelistic memoir--it's such an obvious roman a clef that it wasn't supposed to be published while Sylvia Plath's mother was alive--but that doesn't really make it a good novel. It's a scream of agony and rage, and an effective one.

The Girl in Red by Christina Henry

 

I read another novel by Ms. Henry and liked it enough that I grabbed this when I saw it at the library. While the antecedents are there and clear, it's not so much a modernized retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" you might guess from the cover copy; it has elements of Apocalyptic Plague in lines of King's The Stand or Wendig's Wanderers though it's a much more personal story than either of those novels. It's more hopeful in a lot of ways, too. The prose is solid and occasionally musical, the characters are well-conceptualized and clear, the story is remarkably clear while happening in a couple of timelines. It looks as though much of Ms. Henry's other work is novels in series, which means I won't chase those down, but I bet they're really good.