Trust Me by Hank Philippi Ryan

 

DNF. I was reading along fine, the main seemed a little overwrought about stuff, but she'd been through some shit and I was giving her as much room for grief as she needed so she could tell her story. Then around page 175 the novel did a thing so stupid and so implausible that I just stopped. What had come before sort of made some sense, though it took some rerouting of power to the disbelief suspenders; that move just broke me, if the author's going to do that sort of dumb shit I'll just stop now.

If She Wakes by Michael Koryta

 

After last night's damp fart, it seemed worthwhile to grab a book I was confident I was going to enjoy, and I chose exceedingly well. Yeah, Koryta's really good at thriller stuff, and here he has a witness with locked-in syndrome which makes for some interesting complications (Koryta seems to have done a little research on that). He also I guess got a lot of positive feedback on the sociopathic brothers from 

Those Who Wish Me Dead because one of them left a son behind and he shows up. He's scary, but in a lot of ways less scary than his dad and uncle. There's some car focus here, since one of the mains is a professional aggressive driver type, and she gets some resolution. There's a character here whose motivations are not as they present them, and this isn't the first time Koryta's done this; it's third-person narration so it's not total hack shit, but it's just a bit of a rugpull (I kinda twigged that something was up from the beginning, but still.) The prose is solid, the characters are mostly clear and clearly themselves, the pacing is spot-on. Koryta knows his shit.

Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

 

Tapped out after 125 pages in which absolutely nothing of any interest happened. There are whiffs on the air like sewage of tensions between moneyed and not, plausibly between school and townies. Some sense that the main character is--for whatever reason/s--not up for graduate school, now or maybe ever. Definitely people acting of their own free will against their better interests. This is the second very bad novel I've seen Harrow blurb, it's time to start ignoring her on that score.

Apostle's Cove by William Kent Krueger

 

Yeah, I'm a sucker for Krueger's novels, the way he manages to tell such complex stories about a place he loves and the people he loves who live there; the remarkable honesty about the bad and about how it doesn't outweigh the good. This is one of those, with less family stuff than many of his more recent novels that I've read. There's a prologue of framing, then two parts; the first part is set like twenty-five years ago and lots of the changes wrought over the course of the novels haven't happened yet, which is bittersweet as hell; the second part is the pay off as at least some things that have plausibly been floating around for at least most of the series come home to roost like angry hens, or maybe harpies, or perhaps Furies. Krueger gets these people; they all act and speak as themselves, without notable artifice. The story feels a little rushed toward the end, perhaps, but it is a decent resolution. The spiritual stuff feels likewise unforced, though Henry is going to die eventually (possibly when Krueger does). I figure that if Krueger is your jam, you're probably already reading him, this fits in well with what he's been doing lately.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 

The cover copy seems kinda reluctant to admit this, but this novel is basically a cyberpunk novel--AI and hacking and science past the recognizable bleeding edge that manages to feel plausible; also literally murderous corporate maneuvering--though this novel has the advantage of being (or feeling) at least a couple decades closer to its future than, say, Neuromancer. There's more biology, specifically marine biology, on several levels of premise; the results of decades of chronic overfishing are part of the background, and very foregrounded in several of the arcs. The setting is at least as dark as one might guess: in addition to the murderous corporate maneuverings, there's human trafficking as one of the narrative engines. There's a thread that doesn't meet up with the rest of the novel until the epilogue, but that thread is playing a neat counterpoint, and I don't think I would want it excised. The prose is solid, occasionally sparkling and witty; the dialogue fits the characters well; the characters are mostly plausible. There are things floating around about what it means to be human (a classic SF theme) as well as some thoughtful takes on the problems of alien intelligences--and how shockingly alien other intelligences could be here on Earth. Really, really good.

Only Way Out by Tod Goldberg

 

This looked like a novel I'd enjoy yeading, and it most definitely was. The blurb by Stephen Graham Jones was a mixed thing--I dig Jones, but Leonard devolved into self-parody his last decade or more. Fortunately, this is a good novel, and while it's clear Goldberg has consumed rather a lot of Elmore Leonard's prose, the voice here feels natural. It also sparkles and dances and sings and growls and screams, as needed; Goldberg has some chops. The dialogue feels distinctive from the narrative voice, and the characters--some of them, at least--actually talk differently from each other. The story feels at first as though it's going to be a heist-gone-wrong thing, but it turns out to be more than that, with layers of blackmail and revenge and something like a love story burbling to the surface the last few chapters. I'll have to remember the name and look for some of his other novels, I'd even consider reading something in a series, which probably says enough about my feelings for this book.

The Devil Is a Southpaw by Brandon Hobson

 

This seemed, in the library, as though it might be an interesting novel about surviving childhood on the Rez, with all the ways the larger American culture tries to destroy the people/s struggling to do so. It was barely about that, and it wasn't really all that interesting. The various sentences, many of them most of a page, were often beautiful as prose, but they mostly said nothing and went nowhere. Also lots of tendencies to drop really obscure words, some of which might have been correct--I only recognized a few, and not all those usages seemed to be so. The novel played various games with unreliable narration and what might have been going on that the narrator didn't want to tell us; I was never interested enough to really care, though some of the lies the narrator was telling were really obvious. The envy at the core of the novel seemed really weak to me, and blown out of any reasonable proportion in the telling. Not a super-awesome novel, in spite of occasionally magnificent sentences.

The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

 

Yeah, Lansdale. This Lansdale writing about historic Texas, sometimes around the 1910s or thereabouts, it's not booming like the 1920s, and electric light and telephones and automobiles are around the edges of the small towns the novel is set in and around. Laden with delicious turns of phrase, well-paced, with characters that feel not just plausible but real. Gritty and violent--sometimes shockingly so--but with some real beauty showing through. I'm always happy to come across something by Lansdale I haven't read, this was really good.

The Cut by George Pelecanos

 

This was a pretty decent crime novel, in some ways pretty thoroughly in a vaguely noir tradition, in other ways very of its time (2011 copyright) with all sorts of very specific landmarks both geographical and social that have almost certainly shifted over the past fifteen years. It's also Book One of a series, which is often the one book to read in a series if you're going to read any, and I can sort of see some of the groundwork being laid for future novels. It's intermittently violent, most of the characters don't have a lot of inhibition about that, and there are indications that whatever good any of the characters achieve will be kinda minimal, which is definitely a noir thing. The prose is pretty decent, though there are all sorts of odd insertions where Pelecanos informs us of what things (such as Greek words) mean, where the people in the novel are eating and why, that sort of thing, as though he doesn't trust readers to either know those things or fill in some gaps; it makes for some weird juddering. The characters are pretty well-distinct, and the story is reasonably plausible (though events might have made parts of it obsolete). If I come across others of Pelecanos' books that aren't deep in one series or another I might give them a go, but I'm not going to be exactly looking for them.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

 

This book is simultaneously mundane almost to the point of nonexistence, and a very weird and difficult book for me to comment on. The POV character goes through some rough shit, about the same age I went through functionally the same rough shit, but his experience seems wildly more positive than mine--and the novel smells very strongly of autobiography, which doesn't make me inclined to like it better, if I'm honest: not because I dislike autofiction, but because it just makes me resent the author more than I resent the self-insert main, here. He got stuff he could turn into a bland bildungsroman, I spent four years disintegrating in my bedroom. Some of it is probably the ten years' difference (the novel is set in what has to be 1974, I went through my crap in 1985) and some of it is probably some fundamental difference between the kinds of suburbs. This is not a horrible novel, but I cannot muster the distance to say much else about it.

Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

 

This was a kinda precious little find in the library--a Block novel from the mid-1970s. I've read a few of the later Scudder novels (this series) after Scudder has done work in twelve-step programs, and it's ... a little weird to see him just drinking a lot, and having like a two-day blackout, but still being at least mostly functional. Well, functional within the limits of being Scudder, at least. The prose is solid with moments of sparkle, as one would expect from Block, and the story and characters are solid, and the 1970s New York of the novel feels suitably gritty and grimy and livable.

Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney

 

So I read something else by Mahoney almost a year ago, and it was a really good horror novel. This is not a horror novel, but it also is really good--he seems to have written fantasy before he drifted toward horror, which is a reasonable thing to happen: a novelist writes the novels they happen to have. This is a weird fantastical 18th century, with stand-ins for England and France and America and Native Americans, but also lots of like ambient magic (mostly in plants that have no real-world parallels, but not exclusively). The prose here leans crisp and crackling, the characters are mostly well-realized and distinct, the storylines all ring reasonably true; there are probably thematic concerns with power and privilege and ambition and love (both familial and romantic); many of the textual and subtextual elements here put me in mind of Alix Harrow--no arrows of causality or influence, here, just noting the similarities--and someone who enjoys her novels might enjoy this.

While We Were Burning by Sara Koffi

 

This is not as good a book as the one I read the other night, it's ... stiff, I guess; it's also like astoundingly predictable, I kept reading well after I'd emotionally checked out, out of a morbid curiosity about whether it was going to be as flipping obvious as it looked. It was exactly as flipping obvious as it looked. I'm not really a big fan of stories about sociopaths doing sociopath things without much repercussions, and that's what this book is--at least it spends enough time in the head of the vengeful psychopath so you know why she's doing what she's doing. I'm pretty sure she's wrong, and I'm pretty sure she at least mostly knows it. The fact she's a little on the omnicompetent side is a turn off. The novel wants to say all kinds of things about race and class and privilege and all-a-that but it's so rigid and clumsy that it mostly fails at that. Oh, well.

The Divide by Morgan Richter

 

This has a lot in common with David Gordon's *Behind Sunset*, both being about people on the fringes of some part of what people think of as "Hollywood" digging into things, but this is much less on the lines of a period piece, and though it doesn't involve sex work as such it manages to be if anything grimier--this is not a novel that looks at the movie biz through any kind of rose-colored glasses, not even a little, and most of the people in it, even the Hollywood-successful ones, come off as grasping and as sort of clean skins wrapped around streaks of dirt. This is also, at least toward the end, an altogether weird novel, in ways I'm surprised any relatively major publisher (or imprint thereof) went with. The authorial voice crackles and sparkles with wit, the characters are amazingly distinct from each other, the LA it depicts is suitably rundown and kinda hollow. Has interesting things to say about the intersections and interactions and tensions between commerce and art, in ways that reflect both older Gen X-ish attitudes and more current ones. This is a really, really good novel, I hope Ms. Richter writes many more.

The Caretaker by Ron Rash

 

Yet another relatively skinny novel, yet another stunningly dense narrative. Impressively well-constructed and well-told, a story about a family that is so unwilling to live with their son's choices that they're willing to set their relationship with him on fire. Well, to be fair, their actions had a fuse of indefinite length, but the outcomes of the parents' choices were inevitable almost the instant their plans started taking narrative shape. A less violent novel than I would have expected, just the two instances of real violence, one an act of war and the other years' worth of enough paying off in a billiards hall. The prose hums like a live wire, the dialogue carries weight like a locomotive. Really a superb novel.

The Lonely Witness by William Boyle

 

This is a skinny little novel, but it's impressively dense, and remarkably relaxed about its pacing; things take some page-time to happen, more than you might think given there aren't much more than 250 pages. The prose scintillates, but the narrative threads seem to pull in an awful lot of directions at once, the POV character does a lot but spends most of the novel something less than entirely clear why she's doing it, mostly not even thinking about any actual intended aim. None of the people in this novel are exactly exemplars of superb mental health, probably because they're in what still exists of New York's underbelly, in places where gentrification can't even imagine going, and they're doing what they can to get by, and what they can do isn't always a lot, it's rarely more than barely enough. There are a lot of background characters in the novel that kinda run together, but that's reasonably explained as just having so little in common with the POV character or the people she prefers to hang around with. It eventually gets to a place that's worth the slim going, and it wasn't an unpleasant journey, it just felt a little rudderless through parts of the middle.