Worse Angels by Laird Barron

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 26, 2020

Isaiah Coleridge was a more interesting character during the previous two books in this series, when he was still a mob enforcer. As an enlightened thug, he had a unique personality. Now that he’s a private detective, he’s just another private detective, albeit one with a colorful background. He has gone straight to prove to himself and everyone else that he can follow a better path, which stops just short of being self-righteous. Fortunately, he hasn’t crossed that line. He wants to kick the dopamine rush that comes from hitting people, but he regularly encounters people that try to hit him, so what choice does he have? His thuggish instincts are still at war with his better nature, and every now and then his worse angel allows barely controlled mayhem to rule. He proves that late in the novel by assuring that some troublesome people will never make trouble again. That’s the Coleridge of old.

My ultimate issue with Worse Angels is not that Coleridge has gone soft — by the end of the novel, it is clear that he is still a wrecking ball — but that the plot veers in the direction of the supernatural. With the exception of John Connolly, I prefer my thriller writers to stay grounded in reality. Granted, there might be non-supernatural explanations for certain phenomenon, but they are about as plausible as gaining the ability to climb walls after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Coleridge is improbably well read for a thug. In addition to summoning “the literary specters of Holmes and Mason; Poirot and Fletcher,” he quotes ancient Greeks and is familiar with history and mythology and philosophy. At least he has something to talk about. Unlike the thriller protagonists who describe their weapons in loving detail before running out of conversation, Coleridge ponders the mystery of existence, including the knowledge that all we have is “that fragile guttering flame between us and the endless void.” I probably like him because, despite his dark nature, he is good to dogs, only kills jerks, and detests the “righteous racism craze” that is “sweeping the nation.” For a hit man, he isn’t all bad.

Coleridge is hired by an ex-NYPD cop named Badja Adeyemi who worked as an assistant and bodyguard to Sen. Gerald Redlick, owner of a real estate business called the Redlick Group. The corporation laundered dirty Russian money. Adeyemi expects to be killed by Russian gangsters or arrested by the feds. Before that can happen, he hires Coleridge to look into the death of his nephew, Sean Pruitt, who was working on the Jeffers Large Particle Collider Project, an expensive and corrupt endeavor in which Redlick invested. Pruitt supposedly committed suicide by plunging down a shaft, but Adeyemi thinks there is a connection between that death and eight fatal accidents that occurred before construction came to a halt.

The first half of the novel drags a bit as Coleridge investigates the death with his associate Lionel Robard. The story take a strange turn when he encounters the Mares of Thrace, which seems to be a cult consisting of members who eat spoiled meat and dress like they are still in high school. The members become weirdly powerful when they make strange faces, perhaps owing to radiation, hence the Spiderman reference. None of that made much sense to me. The plot thread struck me as an unwelcome departure from the more reality-based stories Laird Barron told in the first two Coleridge books.

To be fair, I was feeling distracted when I read Worse Angels. I’m conscious of the fact that my mood affects my reading. Maybe Worse Angels is just as good as the earlier novels in the series and if I’d read it in a different week, I would have been more enthused. And to be fair, when the action picked up in the second half, I was drawn into the story. If nothing else, Barron’s sharp-edged prose is enough to keep me hooked on the series. I nevertheless hope the next book returns to the standard set by the first two.

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A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen

Published by Harper on January 28, 2020

Nick Brink and Clay Guillory are lovers and scammers. Their first scam is simple and based on convenient circumstances. The next one is more daring. The novel’s suspense is built upon whether the two novice criminals can get away with fraud, or whether evil will be their undoing.

When Nick travels to Venice to meet Clay, he plans to leave his New York life behind him. Nick has been working for and sleeping with an antiques dealer, apprenticing in the art of valuing old silver. Clay was living in Venice with a decaying man named Freddy van der Haar until Freddy died of an overdose. Freddy was from old money but his money was running out when he died. Freddy’s American friends had a memorial in New York, where Nick met Clay. By coincidence, Clay has engaged Nick’s boss/lover to value the remaining pieces of family silver that Freddy didn’t sell.

Freddy owned one side of a grand old home in Venice, or at least he owned an interest in it, together with an elderly sister who is living in South America. The house, like Freddy, has suffered from poor maintenance. Freddy left his half to Clay, who is widely believed to be a hustler. The other side is owned by Richard West, who hated Freddy and has no greater love for Clay, who now owns half of the house that West would love to possess in its entirety.

Clay devises a scam to sell some of Freddy’s relatively worthless silver to West, using Nick to inflate the value. To that end, Nick must find a way to meet West while pretending not to know Clay. When the plan appears to be a success, Clay makes a more audacious plan to sell his side of the house to West by forging the signature of Freddy’s sister on the title transfer documents.

When both schemes appear to be coming unraveled, coincidence gives Nick an opportunity, albeit at the cost of his soul, assuming he has one. Another coincidence gives Clay some information that he wasn’t expected to have. Still another strikes a character mute when one of the protagonists would otherwise be in dire straits. The coincidences are hard to swallow but necessary for the outcome that Christopher Bollen wanted to achieve.

Apart from its reliance on improbable coincidences, the plot is credible and carefully constructed. On the whole, characterization is strong, although neither Clay nor Nick is particularly admirable. They are, in fact, remarkably unconcerned about anyone except themselves. Fortunately, West is even slimier than the protagonists, so defrauding him doesn’t greatly offend the reader’s sensibilities. Nick, at least, has some moral qualms about a choice he makes and another that he contemplates. Those qualms hardly make him an exemplar of ethical behavior, but they humanize him a bit.

A Beautiful Crime is rich with atmosphere. This is a crumbling Venice, a place where preservationists are at war with tourists and seekers of quick profit. I almost like the atmosphere more than the characters or coincidence-driven plot, and the underwhelming ending seems improbably happy. Still, Bollen’s prose goes down like a wine made from the perfect blend of grapes — complex and surprising, smooth and luxurious. The prose was enough to overcome my reservations about unlikely coincidences and self-centered characters.

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Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

Published by Doubleday on March 10, 2020

Good Citizens Need Not Fear is an interlocking collection of wry, subversive stories about people who are living absurd lives in Ukraine. The first five take place while the Soviet Union was intact. The last four are post-breakup. Before the fall, people have money but nothing to spend it on. After the fall, there are fifteen brands of sausage but nobody can afford them.

Bureaucrats are the foil of the Soviet-era “Novostroïka.” Daniil’s building has no heat, but when he complains to the town council, they tell him the building does not exist. Deciding that Daniil is wasting the town’s gas by heating the apartment with a stove, the town turns off the gas. At the canning combine, Daniil pretends to work while the combine pretends to pay him. Daniil must go to extreme lengths to prove that his building exists — and perhaps to prove to himself that his own existence is real.

“Little Rabbit” introduces baby Zaya, who has been abandoned or orphaned and thus taken to the baby house. At five, her quirky nature causes the Commission to label her as a defective part in the Soviet machine, so she is sent to a psychoneurological internat for rehabilitation. Zaya, it turns out, is not so easily contained.

A poet in the Kirovka Cultural Club named Konstantin also earns rehabilitation when he is accused of telling a political joke. Since most of the words in the joke have been redacted from the report, the narrator of “Letter of Apology,” who has been assigned to rehabilitate Konstantin, does not know what the joke might have been. The narrator imagines himself destined for the Honor Guard, but after working with Konstantin and his beguiling wife Milena, the narrator will be lucky to keep his job. This is the most amusing story in the collection.

By the time “Miss USSR” takes place, Konstantin is running the Kirovka Cultural Club. He copies the American idea of holding a beauty pageant, but he is reprimanded for allowing an outlandish Ukranian beauty named Orynko to win on grounds that are suspected to be political. Konstantin is ordered to revoke her title, which he neglects to do. When his superior decides to hold a Miss USSR pageant, Konstantin wants to enter Orynko as Miss Ukraine, but she has been sent away. Konstantin recruits Zaya from the internat to stand as her replacement, leading to a bizarre chain of events that turn Konstantin into a local hero.

Konstantin returns in the post-Soviet story “Lucky Toss.” He has now purchased the apartment next to his own, where he displays a saint, charging pilgrims for the privilege of visiting her. He employs the bureaucrat who tried to rehabilitate him as a guard. The story takes a mystical turn after the guard accidentally breaks the saint’s teeth and then his own. “Lucky Toss” is one of only two stories in the book that didn’t appeal to me.

A couple of stories revolve around bootlegs of western record albums that are pressed into x-rays and thus known as “bone records.” “Bone Music” is set in the Soviet era. Smena has the luxury of living alone in a two-room apartment, but might lose it if she is sent to prison for making bootleg recordings of decadent Western rock ‘n’ roll. The post-Soviet story “Roach Brooch” recalls how a grandfather refused to get a tumor removed because its existence entitled him to a free monthly x-ray of his guitar-shaped pelvis. Bone records are even more valuable as post-Soviet memorabilia that tourists love to acquire. The story is ultimately about grandparents who feel abandoned by their children.

Finally, in the post-Soviet “Homecoming,” Zaya returns to the now shuttered internat. Playing interrogator or torturer or prison guard, she works for a business that recreates the experiences of Ivan Denisovich for tourists. The rather tame experience exposes tourists to an experience less harsh than the lives of the homeless people they see from the internat’s windows — until Zaya elevates their terror. The story, the last in the volume, reunites Zaya with Konstantin and gives the collection a sense of closure.

The least satisfying story, “The Ermine Coat,” features Milena as a seamstress who makes an ermine coat for the child of a wealthy Italian. She hopes to earn a commission that will allow her sister and niece to emigrate to Canada, a dream that the niece undermines.

The tragicomic stories in Good Citizens Need Not Fear illuminate life in Ukraine. I was struck by the similarity of living without freedom (during the Soviet days) and living with unbridled freedom (in the post-Soviet version of the Wild West). They are flip sides of the same coin of misery. The Soviet-era stories have more energy and bite, but the collection as a whole gives the reader a sense of the absurdity that characterized Ukrainian life as the nation transitioned from a Soviet to an independent state.

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The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on May 19, 2020

Lionel Shriver is known for picking a social trend and exploring its ramifications by building a novel around it. In The Motion of the Body Through Space, the trend is exercise, or as one character calls it, “the fetishization of fitness.” While it lasts, fitness can be a great thing, although like so many great things, it can also lead to smugness and a sense of moral superiority — I’m fit and you’re fat. The novel might be read as an indictment of self-righteous people who judge or condemn those who criticize their behavior. People who question slavish devotion to exercise, for example, are ridiculed as envious slugs, while those who criticize laziness are scorned as fitness freaks. But the novel explores more than the lifestyle of extreme exercise. Its ultimate subject is aging and the inevitable decay that no amount of fitness training can defeat.

As Shriver makes clear, we enjoy the illusion that we are in control of our bodies, but “only at the body’s behest” do we exist at all. Some people hate their bodies, an antagonism that grows “into the central battle of their lives.” Others are happy with their bodies until they fail, which they ultimately will. All it takes is “a moment of clumsiness on the stairs or a bad oyster” to come undone. If nothing else, age will rob the body of its vitality. One point of Shriver’s novel is that nothing lasts, that healthy bodies will inevitably be overtaken by decay and disease. All that smugness might one day be — like so many other things — a source of regret.

Unlike her husband, Serenata Terpsichore has always exercised regularly — to the point where, at 60, she is contemplating a knee replacement. Serenata is an insular, self-contained person. She has always resented it when something she enjoys doing becomes trendy. If she discovers a band or a kind of footwear, she hates knowing that “whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasm or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity.”

Serenata is married to Remington Alabaster, probably because he is the only other human whose company she finds tolerable. Remington thinks Serenata wants “to hog all the benefits” of her habits and can’t abide anyone else enjoying them. To Remington, Serenata’s “lack of communal ties is a little chilling,” but Serenata has “no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba.”

Serenata and Remington have a daughter named Valeria who largely ignored them before deciding that she forgave them for unspecified wrongdoing. Now Valeria wants to save their souls with born-again fanaticism. Their son Deacon, on the other hand, was apparently born evil and has no desire to change. Deacon plays a relatively small role but he’s the only likable character in the novel. Remington bemoans the fact that their kids grew up to be white trash. Serenata and Remington can at least bond over their failure as parents.

The first third of the novel addresses Remington’s training and participation in a marathon, which Serenata not-so-secretly views with derision. During the marathon, Remington meets and later hires a sexy fitness trainer who uses the professional name Bambi Buffer. Bambi encourages Remington to complete the marathon and then to move on to the latest trend, triathlons. Training is important, Remington decides, because “Life comes down to nothing more than the motion of the body through space.” “Traversing distances,” in his view, is “all there is to do.”

Most of the characters suspect Serenata of undermining Remington out of envy. With a gimpy knee, she can no longer compete with runners, and she doesn’t look as hot on her bicycle as the gear-clad babes. Serenata, on the other hand, justly worries that something catastrophic will happen to Remington, given that he is in no condition (and never will be) to compete in a triathlon. I give Shriver credit for being fair to both perspectives. Serenata might not understand why Remington feels a need to prove himself, and Remington might not understand why Serenata is so unsupportive, but the reader will understand them both.

At some point, the story detours to provide a surprisingly contrived explanation of how Remington lost his government job to political correctness. Her reliance on superficial caricatures rather than her customary deep probe of an issue is disappointing. Some of the points made by Remington and Serenata are sound — of course we shouldn’t automatically believe accusations of workplace abuse or harassment simply because they are made, and employers often rely on pretexts to fire aging employees before they qualify for a full pension — but the allegations of work rule violations that gave Remington a new life of leisure, and the questioning he endures (apparently with no civil service protections whatsoever), are so unrealistic that they damage the novel’s credibility. Fortunately, the detour is relatively brief.

Shriver took the risk of writing about two disagreeable characters. Readers who need to like characters to like a book might be turned off by Serenata and her husband. As Remington eventually tells Serenata, she is so separate from others, so disdainful of the need for company and contemptuous of their support, that she seems a creature of self-satisfied intellect, devoid of empathy. She has excluded everyone but Remington, including her children, from her bubble. Remington, on the other hand, is just plain stubborn, which might explain why their marriage has survived. He is also too easily taken in by the hot trainer, although that's a common enough failing of aging men.

So The Motion of the Body Through Space is about fitness and trends and families and the conflict between self and being part of something larger. Readers might draw their own lessons from those themes, but the humility that accompanies aging is the novel’s final lesson. “But this brand of humility wasn’t the sort you graciously embraced. It was foisted on you. You grew humble because you had been humbled.” At the same time, the epiphany that the great benefit of growing old is letting go (i.e., no longer caring about the world’s problems because you know you will die before the apocalypse) is one I hope I never have.

The penultimate chapter reads like a suspense novel as the reader wonders how Remington will fare in his greatest challenge. It is the best part of the novel. The rest of the ride is uneven, like the gravel road on which Remington wipes out while biking. Still, the story is always engaging. I am a fan of Shriver’s work and I enjoyed nearly all of this novel despite hitting a couple of potholes along the path to the novel's conclusion.

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Liar's Paradox by Taylor Stevens

Published by Kensington on December 18, 2018

As the first book in the Jack and Jill series (currently consisting of this novel and Liar’s Legacy), Liar’s Paradox introduces Clare and her two children. In a backstory that evolves into the central story, we learn that while Clare worked for the CIA as an agent in Moscow, she ran into some trouble with her handler, a fellow named Boris who wanted to take her to bed. Clare was already in bed with Dimitry, the son of the Ministry of Defense. Her rejection of Boris places her in a precarious position, as does her pregnancy by Dimitry, who might or might not be a KGB agent. Clare expected Dimitry to join her when she escaped from Moscow but he never made the rendezvous, for reasons she didn’t understand at the time.

The pregnancy turned into the twins known as Jack and Jill. Like most of the other characters, including Clare, they have used a variety of names during their lives. By the time they were born, Clare had amassed a following of enemies, both inside and outside the CIA. She knew that children would be a vulnerability, so she raised them to survive without her. Their survival skills at this point are well honed, but the consequence of Clare’s unorthodox parenting is that her children hate her. Or maybe it’s sort of a love-hate relationship. They don’t want Clare’s enemies to kill her, if only because they would prefer to kill her themselves.

As the story begins, Jill is a 26-year-old drug addict with an enabling lover named Robert. Jack kidnaps her (the only safe way to deal with her) because Clare wants to see them. In a panic, Robert goes to the police and the media give Jack and Jill a troubling amount of publicity. When they arrive at Clare’s home in the woods, however, they discover that it is under assault. A fellow named Holden has accepted a contract from the Broker to kidnap Clare, an endeavor that leads to the death of most of his team members. Ironically, Jill has taken a few contracts from the Broker herself, the better to make use of her skills when she’s not high.

Much of the plot develops Clare’s backstory, including her search over the years for Dimitry, who seems to be resurfacing, and about whom Jack and Jill know little. In the present, the plot turns into a credible action story. Clare finds herself bound and under guard in a vessel at port. As Jack and Jill try to find her, they need to go through Holden, whose nature turns out to be a surprise.

Taylor Stevens is the reigning master at creating damaged female thriller protagonists. Jill is an intriguing character because of her animosity toward her mother and, for that matter, all of society. At times, she is nearly feral in her reaction to others, including Jack. When she gains control of herself, she is smart and extraordinarily capable, although still driven by emotions she barely recognizes.

While Clare is entering her senior years, she is still cunning, devious, and deadly. Taken together, Clare and Jill are two of the most formidable female action heroes in thrillerworld. As she always does, Stevens achieves a perfect balance of characterization and action in this novel and in the one that follows.

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