The Art of Dying by Douglas Lindsay

Published digitally in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton/Mulholland Books on August 22, 2019

The Art of Dying is the third novel in a series set in Scotland, premised on the protagonist’s early retirement as a spy who now works as a homicide detective. Detective Inspector Westphall’s history as a man who has seen too much of the world’s ugliness positions him as a reliable noir character. He is haunted by people who have died, people he has hurt. His dreams may be portents of deaths to come.

Westphall begins the novel by investigating the beating death of a man at a football (soccer) game. The murder is witnessed by the victim’s stepson, who is clobbered while trying to intervene despite his belief that his stepdad is an asshole. The stepdad had challenged a racist comment that someone made about a member of the home team, making that unidentified fan the only initial suspect.

What appears to be a routine killing by a football hooligan turns into a complicated investigation when other suspects enter the picture. The victim was CEO of a rapidly expanding funeral business. He was despised by his sister but apparently loved by his wife. He regularly visited an infirm grandmother who squandered the family wealth on a painting. A Russian woman had an affair with him and then, acting on her father’s behalf, invested in his business. And so the list of suspects grows, even before a hedge fund guy who sits on the board of the victim’s business is disemboweled.

After another, and seemingly unrelated, disemboweled murder victim is found in a care home, Westphall has a mystery on his hands. The mystery compounds when another recent death in the care home is determined to have been caused by strangulation. And yes, this is the same care home where the grandmother who spent the family fortune on a gruesome painting of infanticide resides. She spends every day staring at the painting, oblivious to everything else in the world. The connection between art and death gives the novel its title.

Douglas Lindsay creates a strong noir atmosphere — rain and wind and the sea endlessly crashing against Scottish shores, a landscape that might drive anyone to commit murder. He also creates strong characters. The elderly residents of the care home have varying personalities. A blind man who plays chess against himself contributes a philosophical perspective that aids the investigation. The reason the grandmother stares at the painting without speaking a word, revealed only at the end, adds a poignant note to the story, as do the other seniors living isolated lives, surrounded by a beautiful landscape they never notice.

The mystery is resolved by one reveal after another until the final secret is uncovered. The story is built on intelligence rather than action. This is the kind of plot, complex but credible, that mystery lovers crave. Capping it off is Lindsay’s prose, graceful but not flashy, not a word out of place. Fans of British police procedurals (which are typically a good bit more interesting than their American counterparts) should seek out this series.

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A Book of Bones by John Connolly

First published in the UK in 2019; published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on October 15, 2019

A Book of Bones brings an end to the story arc that has developed over the last five or six Charlie Parker novels. The arc involves the efforts of a long-lived man named Quayle and his freakish female friend named Mons to assemble a book called The Fractured Atlas, whose parts have been woven into other books and scattered across Europe and America. When Quayle finishes his reassembly of The Fractured Atlas, a demonic universe of old gods will rip up the fabric of the universe we know, bringing everything to an end.

In A Book of Bones, a fellow named Holmby kills Romana Moon and leaves her body in the moors of Northumbria. The crime troubles the police, but they are even more troubled by what he left inside her body. The killing took place at a site once used by Familists as a place of worship. The Familists were a religious sect that believed all things are ruled by nature rather than God. They have played a key role in the story arc and one of the few remaining Familists assures that Romana is only the first in a series of victims whose deaths will help fracture the universe.

I would find an apocryphal plot of this sort a bit eye-rolling in the hands of most writers, but John Connolly isn’t most writers. He almost had me believing in lost gods and evil beings trapped in church windows. Connolly has a knack for the creepy, but he also has a gift for characterization. Parker is a complex, tormented man whose heroism isn’t based on muscles or skill with a gun but on a steadfast belief that standing up to evil is the right thing to do. In contrast to the parade of tough guys who populate thrillers, Parker is surprisingly gentle and humane. Even his stone-cold killer friend Louis and his burglar friend Angel (who are partnered in a touching relationship) display unusual sidekick depth for the thriller genre.

I’m glad to see the story arc conclude because the supernatural really isn’t what I look for in thrillers. I nevertheless recommend the entire series without reservation because Connolly is one of the best prose stylists in thrillerdom. There is quite a bit of prose in A Book of Bones (it weighs in at nearly 700 pages) but the story is never padded, the plot never drags, and there is never a confusion of characters. I credit that to Connolly’s craftsmanship as a storyteller. Connolly apparently plans to return Parker to his detective roots in the next book, without making the supernatural a key plot element. That’s fine with me, but anything Connolly does is fine with me. He’s just a joy to read.

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The Darkest Time of Night by Jeremy Finley

Published by St. Martin's Press on June 26, 2018

“The lights took him” is Brian’s explanation for his brother William’s disappearance. When she was a kid, Lynn Roseworth’s father warned her never to go into the woods. The same woods where William disappeared. Lynn is William’s grandmother. Lynn’s husband is a senator from Tennessee and a vice presidential candidate. It takes her some time to remember, but eventually Lynn understands what “the lights took him” means. William has been taken, just like the others. Lynn can’t talk about that without seeming crazy.

The Darkest Time of Night is reminiscent of an X-Files story. The truth is out there. But what is the truth? When Lynn was younger, she helped an astronomer research reports of alien abductions. Was William’s disappearance caused by an alien abduction? Or, as the senator fears, an abduction by suburban teen terrorists who were converted to jihadists by ISIS. (The senator is a bit paranoid.) Perhaps the FBI knows the truth, but Mulder and Scully aren’t part of the team. In this story, the FBI makes extreme efforts to conceal the truth.

All of this leads to a conspiracy (the novel wouldn’t be worthy of an X-Files comparison without one) and to a harrowing adventure involving two aging women. Lynn carries the novel, but her feisty, weed-growing, F-bombing 70-year-old friend Roxy is the most memorable character. Later in the novel, a couple of other senior citizens play important and heroic roles.

Lynn’s former relationship with the astronomer adds an element of domestic discord to the story, but the suspense arises from Lynn’s persistent efforts to find her grandson — and in so doing, to find the truth about her own childhood. The facts underlying the conspiracy are easy enough to accept — I mean space aliens, who knows what they might do, right? — but I found it harder to believe that the government managed to keep events under wraps for so long. The story invites readers to debate whether the government was right to keep the public in the dark, but the government’s ability to do so struck me as unlikely, given how easy it would be for significant numbers of people to observe the aliens doing their thing. The American government can’t keep anything secret (for which a free people should be grateful); the notion that a worldwide phenomenon could be hidden is a stretch.

But again, this is basically an X-Files story, and on that level (a level that allows for some suspension of disbelief) the novel succeeds. The key characters are likeable, they embody the kind of self-sacrificing decency that real people should emulate, and the story moves at a good pace to a satisfying conclusion. The conclusion, however, only wraps up part of the story. At the end of the novel, the truth is still out there. The story continues in the second book in the series, published this summer.

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The Dregs of the Day by Máirtin Ó Cadhain

Published in Ireland in 1970; Alan Titley translation published by Yale University Press on September 24, 2019

The scholar who translated The Dregs of the Day from the original Irish tells us that Máirtin Ó Cadhain “is recognized as the foremost author in Irish of the twentieth century.” He primarily wrote short stories, but The Dregs of the Day is long enough to qualify as a novella.

The protagonist is identified only as N. He works in the civil service, although he has taken quite a bit of time off because of his wife’s illness. Now his wife has died and N. is flummoxed. Her lifeless body awaits attention. His wife’s sisters expect N. to make arrangements for someone to prepare the body and then transport it to a church for burial, but N. isn’t sure how to go about doing that and doesn’t really want to spend the money. He needs a nurse and an undertaker and a casket and a priest, but he’s not certain of the order in which he should acquire everything he needs. He stops in a pub for advice, and after a few drinks stops in a department store where there seem to be so many items on sale that he should buy. Sadly, a robber makes off with his wallet before he has a chance.

As N. decides whether to go home and face his wife’s corpse (not to mention his sisters-in-law), he has a number of diverting encounters. He has sex with a woman while pondering his indifference to both the sex and the fact that his dead wife awaits him at home. He chats with a security guard who is charged with beating up clerical students who try to sneak through the windows of a whorehouse. By dawn, he has been kicked out of the department store, kicked out of a charity, kicked out of the property where the security guard finds him snoozing, and kicked out of a church. N. can’t quite bring himself to return home and might not get his act together in time to attend his wife’s funeral, assuming his wife’s sisters arrange it in his absence. He wonders idly whether he might be endangering his civil service position, leading to a funny description of life in the civil service.

As the novel nears its end, N. makes his way to another pub with an American sailor who extolls the virtues of America, where everything is free, particularly for the Irish population of Boston. N. considers whether the life described by the sailor might be better than the one he is living, although it seems clear that N.’s problems do not arise from his country of residence but from his own ineptitude or indifference.

The Dregs of the Day is a dark comedy. The tragedy of death lurks in the background as N. lurches from one preposterous situation to another. N. is a sympathetic character if the reader can forgive him for being appalling. N. doesn’t have an evil heart, but he might not have any heart at all. He seems to have little regard for anyone, including himself, despite being entirely self-absorbed. He could solve his immediate problems rather easily just by going home (where surely his sisters-in-law would tell him how to solve the remaining problems, or simply take over and do it all themselves), but he cannot resist his impulses, none of which lead him in a sensible direction. He is seemingly blown by the winds of chance, unable or unwilling to resist the directions in which he is blown. The reader’s sympathy derives from the sense that N. is entirely lost, not because his wife has died but because he doesn’t know what to make of the world, what to care about, what to do with his purposeless life. We all know people like that (most of them drink too much), and Máirtin Ó Cadhain captured them brilliantly in the character of N.

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The Obsoletes by Simeon Mills

Published by Skybound Books/Atria Books on May 14, 2019

Darryl and Kanga Livery are robot kids. Kanga sort of believes he is a real kid, having been raised that way by his robot parents. Their robot father was programmed to answer their questions with “Ask your mother” and their robot mother seemed to be depressed. The parents have disappeared, victims of obsolescence. Darryl is happy to see them gone but Kanga, who thought of them as real, misses them.

Parental absence leaves Darryl in the self-appointed role of mother, spending most of his time coaching Kanga not to do anything that would cause others to learn that he’s a robot. Anonymity is the key to robot survival. There are places in America where robots are accepted, other places where they are tolerated. In the Midwest, they are feared or viewed with anger because they take jobs away from humans. Are robots the story’s version of immigrants? You bet.

Darryl fears that Kanga’s skill at basketball will be the end of their anonymity. Darryl stops fretting about the loss of anonymity when he realizes that attending Kanga’s practices brings him into contact with Brooke Noon. Desire is apparently part of Darryl’s programming.

Being a sullen teen, on the other hand, is part of Kanga’s programming. Some of the story’s humor comes from Darryl’s efforts to keep his rebellious brother in check. And some of the humor derives from what initially seems to a competition between Darryl and Kanga for Brooke’s affection. Should Darryl’s loyalty be to his brother or to his robotic heart’s desire?

The story’s point lies in the realization that a young robot’s fears are pretty much the same as young human’s fears (apart from leaking oil): fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment, fear of growing up to be like your parents. And for nerdy boys, fear of girls. Coming to terms with those fears, developing an identity, deciding what’s important to you, is the same coming-of-age experience for every kid, even if the kid is a robot.

The Obsoletes pokes fun at American “values” (consisting chiefly of being American and winning international basketball competitions), parenting (“Few thrills in parenting compare with presenting a hypothetical consequence that immediately changes a kid’s behavior”), teachers, student athletes, prejudice, and hero worship. The basketball coach, who isn’t much of a coach and is an even worse teacher, is hilarious. His assistant, whose emotional development ended when he was a freshman basketball player, is almost as funny.

Maybe the story teaches obvious lessons, but it does so with an offbeat and entertaining plot. The story might not cut it as a coming-of-age story involving two human kids, but it adds a fresh take on a thoroughly explored theme by substituting robots. There are times (particularly when Kanga is on the basketball court) when the story goes too far over the top, and times (particularly when Darryl and Kanga interact with their creator) when the story loses its focus, but for the most part, The Obsoletes offers a view of growing up that emphasizes the familiar by contrasting it with the unconventional.

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