Die Next by Jonathan Stone

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 14, 2020

The first part of Die Next reads like a mediocre short story. So mediocre, in fact, that I considered giving up on the rest of the novel. The good news is that the novel gets better. The unfortunate news is that, by the end, it descends back into mediocrity.

Zack Yellin is at the counter of a coffee shop when he notices that the guy next to him has the same iPhone. He happens to see the guy unlocking the phone by punching numbers in a simple pattern. The guy, Joey Richter, mistakenly takes Zack’s phone, leaving his own on the counter when he departs. Zack unlocks it using the password that he conveniently knows and calls his own phone to arrange for a swap. But when curiosity or nosiness causes him to look at the phone’s contents while waiting for Joey to return, Zack discovers that Joey is a hired killer. Joey took photos of his victims as proof of death and didn’t bother to delete them.

Zack’s dilemma is that Joey now knows that Zack may have seen incriminating evidence. Zack decides that fleeing is the better part of valor, but Joey now has Zack’s phone, giving him contact information for Zack’s girlfriend Emily and his best friend Steve, who both become targets Joey can use to get his phone back.

Why doesn’t Zack just go to the police? Because that would bring the story to an abrupt end. He actually does go the police but leaves because he doesn’t think the police will believe him, photographic evidence notwithstanding. The improbable decision not to report murder evidence to the police sets up an improbable resolution of the novel’s first act.

The novel becomes more interesting when Zack agrees to do a solid for Joey after Joey is improbably acquitted of murder. Yes, the story is based on a good many improbabilities, too many to overlook, which is the novel’s chief weakness.

Zack’s good nature leads to tension with Steve and Emily, both of whom Joey tried to kill before he was captured. Jonathan Stone kept me reading by bringing characters together and driving them apart. Steve and Emily both endure credible conflicts between their feelings about Zack and their failure to understand why he’s trying to help the man who tried to kill them all. I particularly like the portrayal of Joey, who prefers prison life to the real world, where he has no need to think for himself. Joey only works as a killer on the outside because he doesn’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t want to be Joey’s neighbor, but as sociopathic characters go, Joey seems realistic. He doesn’t have any particular desire to kill anyone, he just isn’t bothered by doing it.

While interesting characters and Stone’s straightforward prose style kept me engaged, I was put off by the contrivances that keep the story going. Stone doesn’t seem to understand much about the justice system. After Zack beats the first murder rap, he’s set free while prosecutors wait weeks to have him arrested on new charges. That’s not how prosecutors behave when they know they can bring new charges against a murderer. While Joey is waiting for the inevitable return to jail, a murder victim files a wrongful death suit against him that proceeds to trial within weeks after it is filed. Joey is the defendant but he only learns about the trial when he gets a subpoena to come to court for the first day of trial. That isn’t how the system works. It isn’t even how subpoenas work. But the plot needs to bring Joey to court to further a ridiculous scheme orchestrated by the guy who paid Joey to be a killer. That scheme again involves Zack and a confusion of phones. Nice try, but I just didn’t buy it.

Die Next is a novel that almost works, but not quite. While it doesn’t make for a disagreeable reading experience, the plot has too many flaws to earn an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Published by Doubleday on June 9, 2020

Jane’s father was an alcoholic. Here’s the view of life he shared with Jane: “I think some people are just born broken. I think about life as one big Laundromat and some people just have one little bag to do — it’ll only take them a quick cycle to get through — but others, they have bags and bags of it, and it’s just so much that it’s overwhelming to even think about starting. Is there even enough laundry detergent to get everything clean?” Before he died, he also told Jane that he thought people would be happier if they lived alone on an island. It might not be surprising that Jane has some issues.

Jane is eighteen and pregnant, working as a pizza delivery girl who has no skills or education and no ambition to acquire any. Most nights, she sits in the shed where her father used to drink and has a few beers, pregnancy notwithstanding. She lives with her Korean mother and her boyfriend but she no longer lets them into her life, much to their distress. Jane doesn’t understand why she’s pushing away the people who love her but she’s clearly on a bad path. The novel’s drama comes from the reader’s fear that her path, like her father’s, will take her to a destination she will never be able to leave.

Jane used to love her boyfriend. She used to leave work and feel that, “for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.” Something has caused that to change. The precipitating event might be her pregnancy, but the defining cause of her current misery, apart from unhappy memories of her father, is unclear to Jane and thus to the reader.

The story is dark but it has a number of light moments. It begins when a woman in her late thirties orders a pizza. Jenny wants a pizza with pickles because her family recently moved to LA and her autistic son will only eat pizza with pickles. He’s having a meltdown because she can’t find one (adding pickles after the pizza is baked doesn’t cut it for him). Jane takes the order and is persuaded to buy a jar of pickles. After the cook prepares the pizza, she delivers it to a grateful Jenny, with whom Jane instantly bonds. Jane later babysits for Jenny’s child and discovers that Jenny has issues of her own, making Jane feel an even stronger bond and an attraction that might be sexual. Whether Jenny feels the same way is, at least for a moment, ambiguous.

It isn’t quite clear why Jane needs to cling to Jenny. Jane says she likes Jenny because Jenny listens to Jane, makes her feel that her life and opinions matter, but so does Jane’s boyfriend. Why Jane becomes obsessed with Jenny is a question to which the novel offers no satisfactory answer. Again, that might be a product of Jane not really understanding herself — a common enough affliction at her age.

Jane’s obsession leads to a dramatic but strange moment at the end that might best be described as Jane hitting bottom. What follows might be regarded as a happy ending if only because, having hit bottom, there is nowhere for Jane to go but up.

I enjoyed Pizza Girl largely because Jane is curious and observant. Despite her woes, she isn’t entirely self-absorbed. She envies a husband and wife who seem joyously attached to each other until she learns that the husband is abusing the wife. A church support group is attended by people more interested in judgment or self-pity than support. Her new friend Jenny seems happy but she’s trapped inside a head that is filled with thoughts and memories she can’t ignore. Jane’s boyfriend is falling apart, largely because Jane has withdrawn her attention from him. Her mother seems to be distant but is actually quite caring. The collateral characters work so well that ambiguities in Jane’s characterization are easy to overlook.

Jean Kyoung Frazier writes sharp and honest dialog, She makes it easy to sympathize with Jane and to hope that she will make better choices. The upbeat ending suggests that she will. I sometimes feel that endings of that nature are manipulative or hokey, but Frazier sold me on this one, and on the story as a whole.

RECOMMENDED

High Treason by Sean McFate

Published by William Morrow on June 9, 2020

I was reluctant to read High Treason because novels that feature the word Treason, Traitor, or Patriot in the title are usually pretty bad. I should have trusted my instincts. This is the third in a series of thrillers featuring Tom Locke. I didn’t read the first two but I don’t have the sense that I missed much.

One of the two cartoon villains in this novel is the president’s national security advisor, a lump named Jackson who thinks the president is a wimp and agrees to have him assassinated. Jackson’s goal is to “galvanize and harden” the American public so they will unite against national security threats, even if those threats must be fabricated to accomplish the goal. The improbable means of accomplishing the assassination is designed to lay the blame on Middle Eastern terrorists, but the assassins mistakenly take out the VP.

The assassins are supplied by the other cartoon villain, a snarly old man named Winters who made me picture Smithers of Simpsons fame. Winters was running a private firm of mercenaries called Apollo Outcomes before he supposedly met an unfortunate end that was arranged by the hero, Tom Locke. Winter’s demise, which apparently occurred in an earlier Locke novel, was greatly exaggerated. Winters is back from the dead and masterminding the scheme to kill the president, although he is doing so on behalf of a secret cabal. Naturally, some nuclear weapons are shipped into the United States along the way.

Locke is cartoonish himself, in the tradition of thriller superheroes. Pundits and Homeland Security are immediately convinced that the assassination is the work of ISIS, but Locke, having watched 30 seconds of footage on cable news, knows that the bridge was blown up by Apollo Outcomes because he used to be one of their mercenaries and he is certain that Apollo Outcomes is the only outfit that has ever had the idea to blow up a bridge. This being Thrillerworld, Locke is immediately convinced that only he can stop this grave new threat to American freedom and democracy. Naturally, he can’t go through normal channels because he is on the run due to his heroic deeds in earlier books.

Apart from his superhuman ability to base firm conclusions on no real evidence, Locke seems to be invulnerable. He miraculously survives mayhem — he is the lone survivor to occupy a vehicle that is hit by a Hellfire missile — only because miraculous survival is necessary to keep the book from coming to a premature end. While Locke does all the usual tough guy stuff, he tends to be more reliant on advanced weaponry than fisticuffs, at least when he isn’t fighting Winters, whose gimpy leg and advanced age give Locke a rather unfair advantage. Not that Locke cares, because he adheres to the tough guy bromide that if you fight fair you aren’t trying hard enough.

Locke is eventually joined by an FBI agent named Jennifer Lin, who — unlike the superiors who refused to consider her opinions — is convinced that the assassination attempt was the work of Russian agents. Her pursuit of her theories makes her a renegade outlaw who is hunted by her agency. Before meeting Locke, she gets herself captured by bad guys and fights her way free because all thriller superheroes are masters of whatever martial arts technique the author decides they should possess. Not to be outdone, Locke also gets himself captured and fights his way free. Action notwithstanding, I tried in vain to suppress yawns while zipping through the predictable story.

Readers won’t encounter anything new in High Treason, a novel that is derivative from the first scene to the last. Lin’s decision to place her career at risk by disregarding orders and going rogue to pursue her own investigation is a staple of thrillers. The key events are driven by one of those ancient conspiratorial organizations that thriller writers love. This one is called The Order and it dates back to the 1300s, which is a long time to keep secrets. A HALO descent onto a Manhattan rooftop is straight out of the last Mission Impossible movie. Nuclear bombs planted in three American cities is such an overused threat that it has become tiresome. The virile hero and the rogue heroine fight each other to a draw before lust overcomes their animosity, after which the hard-fighting woman “giggles” and “coos” when she’s in the arms of her man. I failed to detect an original scene in the entire novel.

Locke is the kind of thriller hero who is always applauding himself for how brave he is, reciting macho slogans like “Who dares wins” and making sure the reader understands that he’s no sissy. One-dimensional characters are common in thrillers but Locke barely manages even a single dimension. Jackson and Winters are just as bad as Locke. The two villains waste boring pages pontificating at each other while griping about what a supreme adversary they have in Locke.

Sean McFate treats his audience as a bunch of illiterates, smugly explaining, at least twice, the meaning of “wilco” as if the term is understood only by elite soldiers. McFate’s clunky prose style is pulp fiction at its worst (after Locke sets an adversary on fire, McFate tells us that “the shrieks were gruesome”). The dialog is silly. A sample of Locke’s grand pronouncements: “Apollo must be stopped.” “I have returned to render justice.” “I condemn you to death for high treason.” I condemned myself to finish the novel, which at least has the virtue of moving quickly, primarily because it is long on action and short on substance.

High Treason might appeal to fans of tech-driven military thrillers who care about the tech more than original plotting, believable characters, or polished prose. For anyone else, there are better choices.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Say Their Names

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Breonna Taylor

Ahmaud Arbery

Trayvon Martin

Tamir Rice

Tony Robinson Jr.

Aiyana Stanley-Jones

Michael Brown

Eric Garner

Atatiana Jefferson

Philando Castile

Ezell Ford

Kathryn Johnston

Antonio Valenzuela

Justin Howell

Atatiana Jefferson

Kayla Moore

Sean Monterrosa

Natasha McKenna

Jamel Floyd

Alberta Spruill

Jamar Clark

Pamela Turner

Dreasjon Reed

Botham Jean

Michelle Shirley

Delrawn Small

Rebel Jones

Kenney Watkins

Stephon Clark

Freddie Gray

Sandra Bland

Walter Scott

Eric Reason

Dominique Clayton

John Crawford III

Dante Parker

Michelle Cusseaux

Laquan McDonald

Marvin Booker

Akai Gurley

Jerame Reid

Samuel DuBose

Junior Prosper

Janet Wilson

Miguel Espinal

Kevin Hicks

Paul Childs

Frank Lobato

Victor White III

. . . and so many more.

#SayTheirNames

#Solidarity

Dead Land by Sara Paretsky

Published by William Morrow on April 21, 2020

Dead Land is Sara Paretsky’s twentieth V.I. Warshawski novel. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read, Dead Land included. Paretsky always mixes Chicago’s colorful history and atmosphere into a solid, traditional detective story. Much of Dead Land takes place on Chicago’s south side, in parkland near Lake Shore Drive.

V.I.’s goddaughter, Bernie Fouchard, is coaching a preteen girls’ soccer team that is sponsored by the South Lakefront Improvement Council (SLICK). V.I. and Bernie attend a SLICK meeting where the team is scheduled to be given some love. Before that can happen, the meeting addresses a plan to fill in part of the lakefront with a sand beach, some playground equipment, and maybe a nice restaurant or bar. The presentation is interrupted by a protestor named Coop who believes there is more to the proposal than they are being told. Naturally, the Chicago cops hustle Coop away so that the people in power can continue steamrolling the unsuspecting neighborhood residents.

V.I. and Bernie make their way into the park, where they hear Lydia Zamir singing a song called “Savage” that earned her a loyal following. Lydia is now homeless and a bit feral, playing her music on a toy piano and deathly afraid of anyone who comes near her. V.I. wants to help her, but Coop arrives and establishes himself as Lydia’s protector.

V.I. recounts all of this to her reporter friend, Murray Ryerson, who thinks there is a story in (1) the resurfacing of Lydia and (2) the plan to build a little beach area that might actually be a plan to do something else. When the news breaks about Lydia, her fans flock to the area, enraging Coop. After Lydia disappears, V.I. learns that Lydia went off the deep end four years earlier when environmental activist Hector Palurdo was killed by Arthur Morton, a sniper who carried out a mass shooting. Lydia was standing onstage next to Palurdo when he was shot. The law firm that swooped in to defend the mass killer got a restraining order against Lydia when she seemed to be losing it.

Paretsky's intricate plot involves nefarious developers, sneaky lawyers, corrupt politicians, a disputed South American inheritance, and a multitude of murders. Coop is suspected of killing the man he interrupted at the SLICK meeting, but V.I. has her doubts. She’s more interested in finding Lydia, as is the law firm that Lydia allegedly harassed. The more V.I. digs into Lydia’s history, the more she suspects a connection to murders — and to attempts to murder her —although the connections are elusive. The reader is invited to join V.I. as she juggles the puzzle pieces until they can be assembled into a recognizable picture.

The reader need not fear being overwhelmed by all the players and clues because Paretsky provides internal summaries to keep the details alive in the reader’s memory. She balances action scenes with pavement pounding detective work to keep the story moving at a good pace. The central characters are well established and offer no surprises, but Coop and Lydia give Paretsky a chance to explore damaged but decent individuals who are struggling with mental health issues in different ways. Paretsky writes about the unfortunate with compassion while entertaining the reader as V.I. unravels a challenging mystery one thread at a time.

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