The Bouncer by David Gordon

 

This is a quippy-clever thrillerish crime novel from an author who seems to make quippy-clever thrillerish crime novels almost as a matter of course. The main character is suitably troubled and complex, but mostly decent--or at least not unrepentantly evil--and the authorial voice is appropriately light and brisk. Reminds me of some of the stuff Evan Hunter/Ed McBain wrote when he was feeling witty. There is approximately no way one could reasonably take the novel as a serious proposal for a sequence of events that could plausibly happen in consensus reality, but that's not entirely a bad thing.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

 

My wife loves beautiful books. This was her favorite book of the last six-ish months, and I see why. It takes a little while to get going, but once the storylines and timelines come together the book burns bright and glorious. Arguably skitters on the edge of YA, but that doesn't matter--that's probably because the love stuff is mostly chaste, especially in the mind of someone who's just read a book by Christopher Moore--and it's not as though YA is bad, exactly, and I suspect Ms. Harrow just wrote the story she had, and let things like reader categories and genre sort themselves out.

Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore

 

I'm a fan of Christopher Moore, and this is one of his better books--maybe better than Noir, which this is a sequel to. He wrapped enough things up here that I don't see another sequel coming, which is fine: I'm ambivalent at best about sequels, anyway. This novel, like its predecessor, catches the feel of Noir fiction--the language and the narrative beats--and like its predecessor this novel takes more than a few turns toward the giddily absurd.

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney

 

One of my current thoughts about genre fiction is that there are setting genres and story genres; SF is a setting genre and Mystery is a story one. This is a Mystery (specifically, something like Noir) story in an SF setting--a bit more than a century in the future, but Earthbound, after various Things have happened. The story as a whole does what a Noir story is supposed to do, it's a fun ride, the setting and some of the Maguffin-ish aspects don't seem to have gotten as much thought, or at least don't seem to comport with my understanding of how the world works, how science works; and there are some things that plausibly looked like The Future but weren't that stick out like proverbial sticky-out bits. Clearly set somewhere near Hawai'i (which from the blurb in the jacket is McKinney's home) and clearly catches some of the political subtext of classic Noir and makes it text. Very worth the read, despite the few nits.

Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker

 

A pretty weird, pretty grim novel--grim because it's about a pretty horrific (and pathetic) crime; weird because of how it's told: The narrative conceit of the novel is that all the characters are being interviewed, but apparently are being told what everyone else is saying. There are stretches where the characters feel as though they are talking to each other via the interviewer, which is ... a bit odd. The conceit also makes for a really fragmented POV, and ends up playing the unreliable-narrator game several times over. It says some unpleasant things about true crime as a genre, and about the Internet (especially social media) but there are some things that feel a bit anachronistic and there are some other stretches that lead me to believe Mr. Sweren-Becker maybe drove through Frederick, Maryland, once--and maybe that's not enough to set a novel with such a specific idea of its setting in a place. Very much worth the read, if you either feel you're not the target or don't mnd being targeted.

All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This is a grim as hell novel, knotty like that wad of fishing line you found in your graddad's tackle box. Not exactly *believable* but absolutely sincere. Apparently the author's moved more toward Horror than this, which reads like a deconstructed Serial Killer/Profiler novel. This is not a novel wherein the profile figures out what's going on and captures his UNSUB at little cost of any kind; the resolution here is bloody and painful and ongoing when the novel ends.

The Second Shooter by Nick Mamatas

 

A novel that manages to be a slightly gonzo take on America, complete with takes from all over leftish philosophy, while being actually readable. Not something I'd have put money on, given my local track record with the type. Part of the fun for me was spotting the various hat-tips to classics in genre fiction. Alas, I'm probably too bougie/normie/mundane to completely accept the novel's core premises, but it mostly delivers--though it sadly doesn't quite stick the landing, oh well. (I'm sure I'm supposed to be able to figure out the three word phrase that's the magic spell in the epilogue, but I cannot.)