The Wife and the Widow by Christian White

First published in Australia in 2019; published by St. Martin’s Publishing/Minotaur Books on January 21, 2020

The wife in the novel’s title is Abby Gilpin; her husband is Ray. The widow is Kate Keddie, who was married to John before he disappeared. Their stories are told in alternating chapters. Christian White invites the reader to fit the two stories together in an effort to understand how they relate to each other, both temporally and in the overlap of their characters.

John Keddie was a doctor. He disagreed with Kate about the need to activate parental controls on the internet. In John’s view, if parents don’t talk about the monsters in the world, their children won’t be ready to handle them when they appear.

John has monsters of his own, as Kate eventually discovers. Her mission of discovery begins when John doesn’t come home from a two-week research colloquium. She learns that he didn’t show up at the colloquium. She is even more perplexed when she learns that John stopped working at the Center for Palliative Care three months earlier, after the death of an elderly patient to whom he seemed drawn.

Kate believes John appreciates the fact that she is “passive to the point of invisible,” but passivity won’t serve her well if she is to learn what happened to John. She gets her first clue when an alarm is triggered at their holiday house on Belport Island, a place Kate would never expect John to go. According to John’s father, John spent his teen years on the island in a state of spiritual distress. Kate and her father-in-law travel to the island to look for John. His fate is telegraphed in the novel’s title.

Belport Island is the home of Abby, Ray, and their son Ed. Abby is troubled because Ray has been acting strangely. He seems to have lied to Abby about the places where he claims to have been when he was supposedly working. The pile of gay porn magazines hidden in the basement fuels her suspicion that Ray is concealing more than the magazines.

The reader is asked to consider how John’s disappearance relates to the Gilpin family. Like Kate, the reader will ask why John kept an obituary of a murdered man named David Stemple in the holiday home’s attic. Who killed Stemple and why? As in any good mystery, the obvious answers to the questions that the novel poses turn out to be false.

Kate is a sympathetic character. She must overcome her passivity to survive the story. a transition that enhances her likability. Abby is less sympathetic, although her desire to protect her family might cause some readers to empathize with her. John and Ray are developed in enough detail to explain their actions, but the novel’s focus is on Kate and Abby. Neither husband is likely to earn the reader’s sympathy or empathy.

White tells a plausible, well-paced story. Its clever structure helps conceal the relationship between the wife’s story and the widow’s until the reader has an “ah-ha” epiphany. The ending brings the titular characters together for a satisfying conclusion, making The Wife and the Widow a good bet for mystery fans.

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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Published by Random House on February 4, 2020

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a grim novel, but it uses humor to ease the pain that readers who empathize with the main characters will necessarily feel. Life is a mix of joy and sorrow; both are represented here.

Two boys and a girl have disappeared from a slum. The police, having no incentive to look for them, label them as runaways. Parents fear that they have been snatched and sold into slave labor or to harvesters of kidneys. Jai’s friend Faiz believes they have been stolen by a djinn. At age nine, Jai is prepared to believe all those theories. He also knows one of the missing boys.

Having watched countless episodes of Police Patrol, Jai decides to solve the case. He expects success to be rewarded with a career as a detective (jasoos). His house is the present headquarters of the Jasoos Jai Agency, but only when Runu, his elder sister, is not present to break up the meetings he holds with his assistants, Faiz and Pari. Runu is a track star, although running track is her own version of running away. Eventually other children go missing, including two Muslim kids, sending the basti residents into a justified panic.

While calling attention to trafficking and forced labor of children in India, Deepa Anappara also focuses on other problems: divisions of religion and caste, nationalism, sexism, corruption, poverty, and judgmental gossip. The first girl who went missing is rumored to have worked in a brothel. Cheating wives and abusive husbands are among those who “disassemble her character with the viciousness of starved dogs chancing upon a scrawny bird.” They condemn her because her skirts are too short and she has been seen chatting with a Muslim boy, proof of her “utter moral failure.” The absence of evidence that she is a brothel worker does not discourage the gossip. Some people, Anappara suggests, enjoy the misfortune of others if it gives them an opportunity to gossip and condemn.

Other examples of hypocrisy fuel Anappara’s humor. It is widely believed that djinns have taken over an abandoned palace, but Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and “maybe even Buddhists” join Muslims in leaving letters at the palace, filled with wishes they hope the djinns will grant. Some of the politicians “who became Union ministers only because they called us Muslims foreigners,” who “holler during rallies that Hindustan is only for Hindus, and that [Muslims] should go to Pakistan” sneak into the palace to leave their entreaties, first making sure no cameras can take pictures of them bowing to the djinns. Superstition has created the only place where all people are equal.

Jai’s family and other residents of the basti live in fear that the police will bring bulldozers and knock down their homes. They make regular payments to the police to keep their homes intact, but any trouble might provoke unwanted attention, spurring the government to demolish the slum. The police accept bribes to look for missing children but their only interest lies in protecting their own jobs, which means protecting the powerful. Jai’s father pretends not to worry because “Our basti has been here for years. We have identity cards, we have rights. We’re not Bangladeshis.” His mother argues that they only have rights two weeks before an election, the only time politicians pay attention to them.

The plot invites fear that Jai’s sister has been snatched, perhaps to avenge the beheading of a revered buffalo that lived in an alley near their home. Uncertainty about the fate of a missing child might be worse than certainty that the child is lost forever. Suspects are plentiful, as suspicion falls on anyone who has earned resentment, from bullies in the basti to prosperous hi-fi people who live in high-rise buildings, employing basti residents as servants.

In a sense, Djinn Patrol is a coming-of-age-early novel. Jai plays at being a detective, imagining he can use the skills he gleans from Police Patrol, but his imagination gives way to the harshness of reality by the time the story ends. He recognizes that crime reenactments are not stories, that losses viewed on television are not the same as losses experienced. He is not old enough to understand the words he hears from an older resident — the lucky are those who “grow old pretending they have some control over their lives, but even they will realize at some point that everything is uncertain, bound to disappear forever” — but it seems certain he will internalize the lesson.

Jai is a memorable character at the heart of a powerful story. The slow transition from humor to grim realism reminds readers that life is never as simple as we might wish it to be, and that it is wrong to turn away from the misfortune of others because they live in a different place, belong to a different religion, or live an impoverished life that they did not choose.

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Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

Published by Viking on October 22, 2019

No writer gives espionage a more human face than John Le Carré. His protagonists have regrets, but they make up for their mistakes with competence and an unfailing sense that doing the right thing is more important than doing what their bosses expect.

Nat is married to Prue. In their prime, they were both stationed in Russia, where they spied for the Secret Intelligence Service. Now Nat has an SIS desk job and Prue is a human rights lawyer. They live quietly in Battersea, have a daughter, and are generally happy. Events in this tight novel will test their contentment.

Nat is a badminton champ at Battersea’s Athleticus club. A young man named Ed Shannon has recently joined the club. He challenges Nat to a match because Nat is the best. They begin a sort of friendship, although Nat and Ed are both vague about their employment. Nat even brings a co-worker named Florence to a mixed doubles match, pretending that he doesn’t really know her. When Florence abruptly quits her job, the reader will suspect that the relationship between Nat and Ed and Florence will turn out to be bad for Nat’s career. That suspicion will be warranted, but the plot follows a surprising path.

Bryn Jordan, Nat’s former station chief in Moscow and currently “ruler-for-life of Russia department,” decides it is time to put Nat out to pasture. Nat doesn’t fit the new image of SIS, meaning he isn’t a young man with advanced computer skills. Rather than kicking Nat to the curb, Jordan sends him to London General. Its current head is Dominic Trench, who was station chief in Budapest when Nat was posted there. Dom is the kind of man “who takes you aside, anoints you his only friend in the world, regales you with the details of his private life you’d rather not hear, begs your advice, you give him none, he swears to follow it and next morning cuts you dead.”

Dom puts Nat in charge of the Haven, an all-but-defunct substation of London General, “a dumping ground for resettled defectors of nil value and fifth-rate informants on the skids.” Although it is a dead-end job, Nat endeavors to undermine Dom and Bryn by actually accomplishing something. He begins with a sleeper agent, a defector who is suddenly called to service by his Russian masters.

That story unfolds in the entertaining style a reader would expect of Le Carré, but it takes off when it circles back to Nat’s relationship with Ed. Naturally, Ed falls under suspicion and naturally, given the suspicious minds at work in SIS, Nat is regarded as a potentially culpable partner in crime. And naturally, everyone at SIS has it wrong, but it will take some quick thinking and astute tradecraft for Nat resolve the problem as best he can.

Nat, Prue, Ed, and Florence are in the vein of Le Carré’s most likeable characters. The “enemy” is kept backstage — for a time, it isn’t even clear which country is using its intelligence efforts against Britain — but Nat’s real enemies, as is often the case in a Le Carré novel, are the bureaucrats and politicians who have risen to the level of their incompetence. Brexit lurks in the background, as does Donald Trump, both mucking up the ability of Britain and America to work together to achieve common goals.

Even if his best work is behind him — and his best is the best — Le Carré remains the reigning champion of the espionage novel. He is still an astute observer of the human capacity for deception as well as the human fallibility that allows deceivers to triumph. He wrote this novel at the age of 88, but he has not forgotten, and refuses to condemn, the virtues of youthful idealism. Agent Running in the Field suggests that aging people can use their own brand of idealism to thwart, in some small way, a system that rewards duplicity and that confuses patriotism with blind obedience to rules that serve leaders, not the country.

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[Note: If you believe the reviewers (and I use the term loosely) who gave this novel one star on Amazon because it does not glorify Trump, you might conclude that the book is an anti-Trump diatribe. In fact, Trump barely rates a mention, although CIA machinations do play a role in concert with Brexit. The book is a best seller because it deserves to be, regardless of the mindless attacks launched by the right wing extremists who feel duty bound to attack anything they perceive as being even vaguely liberal.]

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 4, 2020

Cross Bull Durham with Desperate Housewives and you’ll get the flavor of The Cactus League. The story is filled with characters who have the kinds of problems that fuel melodrama. Players gamble or party or cheat on their wives. Employers boost their sense of power by treating employees with disrespect. Cougars prey on young talent. Wives complain about their husbands, the cougars, and the burdens that accompany marriage to an athlete who won’t be making Major League money forever.

The chapters have the feel of related stories rather than the building blocks of a cohesive novel. The musings of a retired sportswriter tie the chapters together. He used to write a sports column, “half human interest, half old man opining,” in the belief that his was the kind of writing a big-market paper needed, right up until he was fired. Now he’s hanging around a newly built stadium, enjoying the swirl of spring training.

The sportswriter eventually tells the reader that the book is about Jason Goodyear. The reader will figure that out long before the sportswriter announces that the book’s purpose is to recount “all the improbable things” that brought Goodyear to his destination, simply because Goodyear is the only character who is common to nearly every chapter. Goodyear is a star, a stud, a clean-living MVP who graces magazine covers, but his gambling (poker and craps, not sports betting) has gotten out of control. His wife, a first-grade teacher named Liana, can’t deal with it, but when she gives him a choice between gambling or her, addiction drives his choice.

Many of the players have two homes, one in Los Angeles (the home city of the Major League team for which they play), another in Scottsdale that is convenient to spring training. Their wives and ex-wives tend to renew bonds in the spring “like friends from summer camp — rambunctious, beautiful girls who were briefly the most important people in the world but now remembered in dull colors and with vague edges.”

An early chapter spotlights a cougar who, much like the Susan Sarandon character in Bull Durham, latches onto ball players in the belief that she can improve their game while getting laid. She spends a fateful evening with Goodyear after his separation, resulting in a criminal charge that could lead to the loss of an endorsement contract.

One chapter focuses on the housewives, only some of whom are desperate. One focuses on an aging batting coach whose Arizona house was trashed while he was with the team’s Triple-A club in Salt Lake. One focuses on Goodyear’s agent and the agent’s troubled assistant. One focuses on a team owner who befriends and betrays one of the team’s established players. A pitcher whose Tommy John surgery isn’t working out stars in a chapter, while a rookie who won’t make the cut stars in another. Even the new stadium’s organ player gets a chapter.

All of this is interesting as sort of a gossipy version of Inside Baseball. It’s disappointing that with so much attention given to characterization, nearly every character but Goodyear disappears (save for occasional cameos) after the chapters in which they are featured. If the point is to show us all the factors that shaped a year in Goodyear’s life, I can’t say the novel succeeds. The organ player waves at him. Other characters have a bit more interaction with him, but a majority of the chapters seem less than formative. The disappearance of those characters is even more disappointing because they are more interesting than Goodyear.

The story sort of fizzles away at the end, reinforcing that Goodyear is a decent man at heart while resolving nothing. Most of the chapters end the same way, with no real resolution of the problems that develop in the supporting characters’ lives. I guess that’s a microcosm of life — a bunch of intersecting people who lurch from one trouble to the next — but I can’t say it’s a satisfying approach to a novel. Still, the characterization is so strong and the scenes of life at spring training are so sharp that I feel compelled to recommend The Cactus League, even if it left me wanting more.

RECOMMENDED

Blue Moon by Lee Child

Published by Random House/Delacorte Press on October 29, 2019

Readers who crave gratuitous violence can count on Reacher novels to satisfy their addiction. Readers who enjoy a good thriller and don’t mind gratuitous violence can count on Reacher novels to push the right buttons. Lee Child’s punchy sentences and short chapters assure that the novel will move quickly, and he usually comes up with a plot that isn’t stale. Readers who want to root for decent characters will always find someone to like, while readers who appreciate the complexity of human nature will admire the darkness with which otherwise likeable characters are infused. Reacher novels are serious but characters occasionally say something amusing to relieve tension. There’s a little something for everyone in a Reacher novel.

Blue Moon follows that formula. The plot carries the ever-wandering Reacher into a small city that is divided down the middle. Both sides are controlled by criminal organizations. Albanians are in charge of crime on the east side while Ukrainians provide the crime on the west side. The operate protection rackets, loan sharking, prostitution, and other enterprises that, in the good old days, were Mafia-run businesses.

A kindly old gent named Aaron Shevick has borrowed from a loan shark to pay for an expensive treatment that might save his daughter’s life. He is on his way to repay the loan when a mugger interrupts him. Reacher knew this would happen we he saw the envelope full of cash in Shevick’s pocket, so he follows Shevick and thwarts the crime. Then he acts as a bodyguard and even stands in for the old guy to make the payment, something that is made possible because the regular Albanian hood has been replaced by a Ukrainian hood who doesn’t know Shevick. That happened because of a power grab that turns into a comedy of errors as each side misunderstands the forces driving their conflict. A confusion of identities follows, as both the Ukrainian and Albanian organizations operate under the mistaken belief that Reacher is Shevick. The Ukrainians even come to believe that Reacher is a representative of organized crime in Russia who has been sent to take over the entire city on behalf of Russian interests.

All of that, of course, is just an excuse for Reacher to bust heads and to shoot people for a worthy cause. In this case, the cause is to protect the Shevick family, although he also hopes he can help by locating Maxim Trulenko, who embezzled funds his company should have used to pay health insurance premiums for his employees, including Shevick. This leads to an interesting and possibly accurate discussion of how administrators of a government fund that is supposed to address problems like this one are motivated to save money by waiting for patients to die so they don’t need to pay their healthcare expenses.

That, however, is the only serious point in a novel that is dominated by Reacher proving again that he is the toughest guy on the planet. I lost track of the body count as Reacher gunned down every Ukranian and Albanian criminal in the city. This is tolerable because, unlike most tough guy protagonists in thriller world, Reacher isn’t obnoxious about his toughness. It’s just who he is. Being tough is something he does. No big deal. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the action, despite its implausibility. Also implausible is Reacher’s ability to guess at the existence and location of a secret guarded passage into an otherwise impregnable building, but hey, it’s Reacher. Of course he can do implausible things.

Between the action scenes, Reacher engages in his usual musings. Other characters join him in speculating about what might happen next and how to plan for it. All of that held my interest, as Child always does. Only at the very end does the story’s implausibility become hard to swallow. Still, happy endings are nearly always implausible. Readers want them anyway.

Reacher’s good-and-evil perspective appeals to readers who believe that answers to moral questions are never ambiguous, but to his credit, Child doesn’t pander to mean-spirited readers who view the world as a simplistic conflict of us against them. Central characters are primarily decent or villainous, but Child shades them with a touch of gray. Most of Reacher’s killings in Blue Moon are acts of self-defense, although some are outright murders of unarmed bad guys, at least one of whom committed no obvious crime that warranted the death penalty. If that sort of thing troubles you, there is hope for humanity. If it troubles you even to imagine such things, Blue Moon isn’t the book for you. Child doesn’t glorify the killings, so I can accept them for the sake of the story, even if I would want to see Reacher behind bars in the real world. Fortunately, the real world is pretty far removed from a Reacher novel, which makes it easier to recommend Blue Moon as one of Child’s typically well-executed tough guy fantasies.

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