The Disappearing by Lori Roy

 In many ways this is a standard-issue thriller novel: The main character who moved back home not entirely willingly; the creepy stalker-type who works as a groundskeeper; the daughters under threat; the family secrets; the past they don't talk about and barely understand. In other ways, it's not so standard-issue: The groundskeeper/creep is arguably not the biggest threat in the novel, among other things. It's even mostly a well-executed novel: The prose is well-executed and the story moves and grabs even with some weird non-linearity and most of the characters are pretty well-drawn and easily understood and mostly consistent (certainly consistent enough to be people); but the climax feels undercut by the twists going on, and what's going on with the downbeat ending--after the twists--isn't really clear.

Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

 

Carl Hiaasen writing about implausible criminal antics in Florida is always a good time, and a novel where he turns that slightly loopy ferocity on a certain artificially-colored commander in chief and veers from comedy to satire ... that's good stuff. This is not a novel written by someone who particularly likes things as they are, but it's also clearly a novel written by someone who sees the possibility of better things, better outcomes: I remember reading someone saying something to the effect that in order to write satire well you needed to be both angry and hopeful, and Hiassen is definitely both, here.

Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore

 This isn't a horrible book: The prose is deft, with nice turns of phrase; the characters (within limitations) are consistent and coherent; there's even something like a story. Problem is the premise is crap, and I honestly was hoping the main/s would have the courage of their convictions and reject what they were hearing from self-identified voices of the universe what the universe wanted of them. The promised escape from the endless cycle of reincarnation turns out to be a lie.

The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

 

This was a hard book to really get into, in the sense that I kept almost putting it down in the first half-ish--the characters weren't working for me and what was going on wasn't, either--but it came together, eventually. The characters started feeling as though they were behaving like people, and what was going on clarified, the stakes were revealed and named. In the Afterword, Wendig talks about the difficulties he had writing this novel, and all the drafts that might still be buried in it: That might be part of at least where the issues I had to start with came from.

Ragdoll by Daniel Cole

 

Wow, this is a stupid garbage-fire of a book. Not only is the story so graspingly convoluted that it's literally impossible to keep track of, not only is one of the POV characters being deceptive about his involvement with the situation--in third-person narration, where it's not a matter of what he's not telling you; the author switches POV characters mid-chapter, as though he's writing in the nineteenth century or something, and there are errors of grammar and usage (commas around one end of parentheticals but not the other; at least one instance of principals when the author clearly meant principles; at least one occasion where there are two apostrophes back to back, in either a contraction or a possessive) that are frankly fucking bizarre to find in a book from a major publisher. I guess it's piling on to point out that the characters are barely differentiated and still manage to be inconsistent and incoherent.

The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy

 

This is a book. It contains words. Those words describe people, places, things, and activities. What the words in the book describe seems to fall into a few different threads, which don't really seem to have any meaningful connection to each other. There is roughly no tension in the book, if it were a person I'd describe it as having "flat affect," nothing really goes anywhere and anything that might have had any meaning or point disappears like farts in the wind.

One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper

 

This novel was a genuine pleasure to read--the first in what feels like longer than two weeks, there were some mistakes made. Some wonderful, juicy turns of phrase, and characters that are a delight to spend some time with in a novel, even if many of them would almost certainly become wearying in life; actual thematic things to say: mostly arising naturally from the main character's ... understanding (so intuitive that it takes him most of the novel to articulate anything close to it) that if he's going to choose to live, his life should be worth living. This is another novel steeped in Jewishness that probably sounds more depressing when reduced to a blurb than it is.