Highfire by Eoin Colfer

Published by Harper Perennial on January 28, 2020

I don’t make a habit of reading books in which dragons play a central role — or any role — but Highfire delivered the offbeat humor that the description promised. It’s hard to take a dragon seriously when he wears a Flashdance t-shirt and cargo shorts.

Vern (a/k/a Wyvern, a/k/a Lord Highfire) is, so far as he knows, the last dragon on Earth. Humans “managed to all but extinctify dragons back the day with nothing but crossbows and malicious intent,” leaving Vern with a serious grudge against the human race. He lays low in a Louisiana swamp, where he is occasionally forced to teach the alligators who’s boss.

Although Vern does his best to stay away from humans, he crosses paths with a teenager named Everett “Squib” Moreau. Squib has taken a summer job running moonshine and untaxed cigarettes for Bodi Irwin. He hopes to pay off his mother’s debts so that he and his mother can move away from the swamp. One motivation for moving is to protect his mother from Regence Hooke, whose duty to enforce the law has been corrupted by the cash he makes running errands for a drug cartel. Hooke has his eye on Squib’s mother but he’s preoccupied with a scheme to advance his career by running guns from Louisiana (where they are cheap and plentiful) to California (where they are regulated and therefore command a higher price).

Squib is transporting moonshine through the swamp when he witnesses Hooke commit a murder. Fleeing before he can be identified, Squib comes upon Vern. He flees again before Vern can toast him. With both Vern and Hooke chasing after him, thinks look bleak for Squib. Circumstances nevertheless conspire to turn Squib into Vern’s employee, as Vern needs someone to make his beer runs, his mogwai buddy Waxman having gone into hibernation.

The plot generally involves Squib’s effort to stay alive as Vern and Hooke go to war against each other. You would think a dragon would have the upper hand, but Vern is getting old and he doesn’t always have the oil in his system that he needs to fuel his fire. Hooke, on the other hand, is heavily armed and can call upon the resources of a cartel for assistance. The novel culminates in a glorious battle of the bayou.

If the plot sounds silly, it isn’t meant to be anything else. The story works because Eoin Colfer writes a laugh or two into every page. Colfer litters the text with jokes, inventive dialog, and commentary that is both irreverent and irrelevant (Vern hates the way dragons are depicted on Game of Thrones but the song “Blue Bayou” brings a tear to his eye).

The novel does have a serious message about prejudice and tolerance — in this case, prejudice against humans, some of whom are admittedly intolerable. “Humans, dragons, mogwai —ain’t no bad species nor good species,” Waxman tells Vern, who sort of agrees by the end of the novel, given the efforts that a few decent humans make to save his dragon skin (before it sheds). Replacing “species” with “races” brings the message closer to home, but Highfire isn’t a preachy novel. It is instead a very funny novel, one that makes me glad I overcame my own prejudice against books that feature dragons.

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The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

Published by Doubleday on March 17, 2020

The Red Lotus is the name of a plague that has been weaponized as a bioweapon. It is a bit chilling to read about a plague in the midst of a pandemic, but the pandemic discussion is prescient. Says one character: “Got to be ready for the next pandemic. Got to have new antibiotics. Got to know what we’re up against. I mean, it’s coming, and New York City is the perfect place for a catastrophe. We have lots of people living in very close quarters.” Chris Bohjalian got that right.

The Red Lotus plague is carried by rats, although the weaponized version can spread from person to person. We learn quite a bit more than I needed to know about the rat world. Whether Vietnamese rats, having been exposed to Agent Orange, have evolved to be tougher than New York rats, which have been exposed to New Yorkers, is a question that preoccupies some of the characters. Saying much more about the nature of the plague might reveal spoilers. Instead, let’s look at how the plot sets up.

Alexis Remnick is an ER doctor who has a history of teenage angst that involved cutting herself. Now she blocks the pain by cutting her patients and sewing them back together, a task that helps her tend to herself by tending to others. Alexis met Austin Harper when he came to the ER for treatment of a gunshot wound, having been shot for apparently random reasons while playing darts in a bar. One thing leads to another and before long, Alexis and Austin are going bicycling in Vietnam, where Austin feels the need to pay his respects to relatives who were wounded or killed during the war.

Austin disappears in Vietnam. When his body is found, the police conclude that he was the victim of a hit-and-run while biking by himself. Alexis identifies his body in the morgue, but she also inspects it from a physician’s perspective, taking note of a puncture wound in his hand that isn’t consistent with a bicycling accident.

Back in America, Alexis meets with Austin’s parents and learns that the story he told about the war experiences of his relatives was bogus. Alexis hires a private investigator named Ken Sarafian to help her uncover the truth about Austin's death. A Vietnamese cop, an FBI agent stationed in southeast Asia, and friends of Alexis all play varying roles in helping Alexis understand what Austin was up to in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, it had something to do with rats. Intermixed with those chapters are chapters that follow the bad guys who had something to do with Austin’s death, or with rats, or both.

For the most part, characterization is strong. I’m not sure I quite bought Alexis’ need as an adult to get out her X-Acto knife and ponder the merits of once again being “the captain of her own pain” by cutting herself. Maybe old habits die hard, but it struck me as a contrivance in an adult who has made something of herself. Alexis is a smart, resourceful, and likeable character who would have earned just as much sympathy without the cutting.

While I didn’t entirely buy into the plot — Austin’s motivation for his actions is less than satisfying — I was carried along by Bohjalian’s smooth prose. The story is engaging because it requires some concentration to keep track of all the moving pieces. All of the pieces come together in an ending that isn’t particularly surprising until the epilog comes along. If for no other reason than its timely reminder that the United States should always be prepared for a pandemic, The Red Lotus is a thriller that merits attention.

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The Falling Woman by Richard Farrell

Published by Algonquin Books on June 23, 2020

The Falling Woman tells a fascinating story. Erin Geraghty knows her death from pancreatic cancer is approaching. Against her husband’s wishes, she flies across the country to attend a retreat for cancer victims. Somewhere over Kansas, the plane on which she is flying explodes. Erin should fall to her death — a quicker death than the one she has been expecting — but she miraculously survives. And then, without contacting her husband or her two daughters, she disappears, leaving them to assume that she died in the crash.

Part of the story addresses how surviving the immediate threat of death, against all odds, alters Erin’s life, in part by vanquishing her fear of death. The bulk of the story, however, follows Charlie Radford, an aviation accident investigator, who is charged with investigating whether rumors of a crash survivor are real. Charlie is understandably skeptical. He is a rational man whose life is cabined by facts. His job is to ask the right questions and to let the facts carry him to a logical conclusion. Airline passengers who survive a six-mile fall are not part of a rational, fact-driven crash investigation. But the media will not let go of the story and families will not let go of the hope that a loved one might have survived. Charlie is therefore assigned to conduct what amounts to a missing persons investigation that he views as a fruitless distraction from the work he should be doing.

There is an element of the miraculous in Erin’s survival, but people have survived such falls. The story does not suggest that Erin was the recipient of divine intervention. Rather, it posits that she simply benefitted from a freakish but plausible set of circumstances that slowed the final stage of her fall. Erin is nevertheless left to wonder at the irony of knowing that each of the other passengers would likely have had a much longer reprieve from death if they had survived in her stead.

The story gains a sense of realism from its detailed depiction of a crash investigation and from the bureaucratic infighting of the crash investigators. Like all sizable offices, some employees compete to be recognized, some are driven by flashes of insight, and some succeed by plodding through the details. Charlie does not do well with office politics. Yet he’s always wanted to work a major investigation and this is his chance. Being detailed to chase down a rumor rather than performing useful and productive work is a nightmare that, he fears, will make him the agency laughingstock.

While the plot is compelling and fast moving, characterization is the novel’s strength. Charlie’s sense of self-worth comes from his work. He grew up wanting to fly but a heart defect killed that dream. His wife should understand that he is driven to be the best crash investigator he can be (he is the same person she married), but her maternal instincts are kicking into high gear, perhaps because she craves the constant attention that a baby, unlike Charlie, will provide. Charlie repeatedly puts off talking about the baby issue, creating a rift in their relationship and providing some of the novel’s tension.

In some ways, Charlie’s relationship with his wife parallels Erin’s relationship with her husband. Erin’s husband was, she admits, a reliable provider and a fine human being, but she regards him as stiff and incapable of satisfying her need for spontaneity. Having fallen from the plane and into a new life, she turns for help to a married man who once satisfied her needs, but he thinks she is cruel for wanting to hide instead of returning to her husband and daughters.

The reader might also judge Erin for being selfish. At times, she judges herself. Yet as Erin and Charlie have long and meaningful talks about their lives — talks they never had with their spouses — they each learn something about themselves, and the reader learns that it isn’t easy to judge someone without living their lives.

The novel’s central question and dramatic focus is whether Charlie will be loyal to his agency by revealing the circumstances of Erin’s survival, or will respect Erin’s desire to be left alone so that she can live the last few months of her life in peace. There are strong arguments to be made in favor of either decision and it is a tribute to Richard Farrell that the outcome is far from clear until it arrives. In that sense, The Falling Woman succeeds as a suspense novel. In a broader sense, it succeeds as an insightful character-driven novel of substantial literary merit.

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A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 5, 2020

The stories in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth explore the multitude of ways in which lives are and have been lived, across time and geography, lives that resemble each other only in the experience of  emotions that define human existence. The nine stories cover an astonishing array of subjects, joined only by being set in the past.

Jacob Burke, a brawler known as Muscular, takes on his greatest challenge in “Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw.” Burke and Blindman Ben McGraw fight an epic battle in 1824 that attracts thousands. The story is less about fighting than the reason for fighting: “the reason he hit is that there was joy in hitting, real joy in the simplicity and the freedom and the astounding number of answers in a single movement of his arms.” The story’s attraction, apart from its depiction of grit and determination, is its exploration of good and evil. There is good in all of the story’s pugilists (although Burke wonders “how a hitter could be a good man, and whether he was good only because in the Great Scheme he was on the bottom and he couldn’t be anything else, that if conditions were different, he wouldn’t be so”) because they have open hearts, but there is evil in the men who exploit their pain for profit. This is my favorite story in the collection and it might become one of my all-time favorite short stories.

“The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace” follows a “bug collector, species man” who travels the world observing life. Wallace works out a theory of natural selection that he immediately sends to Darwin, a better known scientist who might be a bit reluctant to acknowledge Wallace’s contribution to the field. Not that recognition matters to Wallace; he is moved by his epiphany, his understanding that when he “looked upon the world,” what he saw “was not life, but life transforming.” In a very different story of a self-sustaining traveler, “The Line Agent Pascal” tells of a man who operates a telegraph station in a remote South American location, joined to humanity only by the daily signals sent by other line agents, a connection that sustains him despite the knowledge that isolated men might die unexpectedly in a multitude of horrible ways.

“For the Union Dead” is narrated by the grandson of immigrants. His American-born father served as a Navy physician in Vietnam while his foreign-born uncle, longed for a connection of his own to America. He found it by playing dead in Civil War reenactments, making a figurative sacrifice that made him feel truly American.

The most playful story adds to an account by Herodotus of an ancient’s Greek’s experiments in child development. A story about raising an asthmatic child in smoke-filled London, when leaches were the preferred cure for most maladies, examines a mother’s devotion to her son.

The last two stories have quasi-religious themes. One is about a female balloonist who, despite being shunned by the male natural scientists of her time, discovers and gives herself up to a rift in the sky. The title story tells of a man in an asylum who is making a registry of his life to share with God, a man who perceives angels and finds hidden connections in the objects he collects.

Some of the stories collected in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth appeal to the intellect more than the heart, but they are all heartfelt in the depth with which the explore the evolving human condition throughout history. The stories are stunningly fresh. Each delivers a nutritious serving of insight and hope. I’ve never read anything quite like them. This is Daniel Mason’s first story collection and the world is richer for it.

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You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 3, 2020

Initially, You Are Not Alone seems to be the story of a revenge club, a group of women who are dedicated to avenging atrocities — or, at least, events that in their overwrought imaginations they define as atrocities. We are introduced to two sisters, Cassandra and Jane Moore, and four other women who are apparently dedicated to inflicted harm on the men who have done them a perceived injustice. But three of the six women quickly drop out of the story, leaving the Moore sisters and a woman named Valerie as the primary agents of vengeance. The story is not actually about their efforts to obtain what they view as justice, but to cover their rears when they think they are about to be caught.

The novel’s protagonist is Shay Miller, a woman with no job, no boyfriend, and no self-esteem. Shay is keeping a notebook filled with depressing facts that she calls her Data Book. Every chapter she narrates opens with a (usually depressing) fact from the Data Book. Maybe if she abandoned her gloomy book, she would feel better about life.

Early in the novel, Shay watches a woman named Amanda jump in front of a subway train. Shay spots and keeps Amanda’s necklace, the first in a string of improbable occurrences. For reasons apparently related to her general battiness, Shay leaves some flowers at Amanda’s apartment and then attends her funeral, where she meets the Moore sisters. For no obvious reason, Shay invents a story about how she knew Amanda.

The Moore sisters pretend to befriend Shay because they are worried that Shay might have learned something incriminating about Amanda that might link to the sisters. They only believe this because Shay is bizarrely behaving as if she had a connection to Amanda. All of that seems like a contrivance to set a plot in motion.

Shay is so needy that she gleefully accepts the sisters' friendship. The Moores are PR specialists who know artists and celebrities. They might be clones of Samantha Jones on Sex and the City. Since they are glamorous and Shay is not, Shay feels unworthy of their attention.

The sisters soon hatch a wildly improbable scheme to set up Shay for a crime committed by another revenge club member. The scheme depends on the happy coincidence that when Shay cleans herself up, she bears a strong resemblance to Amanda.

What is it in the psychological makeup of Cassandra, Jane, Valerie, and the other revenge-obsessed women that allows them to feel justified when they do awful things to the men who wronged them? The authors do little to make them credible characters. Cassandra and Jane are portrayed as having a sense of entitlement which, combined with their evil natures, might be a plausible reason to believe that they would seek revenge for wrongs that affect them personally. People with that psychological makeup don’t tend to care about wrongs done to others, so their motivation to encourage others to seek revenge struck me as thin.

You Are Not Alone lacks the energy that should flow through an engaging thriller.  The story generates little suspense because, for all the rushing around and looking over her shoulder that Shay does, there is never a sense that she is in real danger. The novel’s other problem is that Shay isn’t terribly bright. When, near the novel’s end, it appears that someone is about to murder her, the reader will be wondering why she doesn’t understand what is about to happen and move away from the danger. Or the reader might not care because, as thriller characters go, Shay is screamingly dull. In any event, the reader will understand that Shay is in no danger at all, as the outcome of that scene is entirely predictable.

The plot encourages the reader to guess why and how Shay is being set up. The story was sufficiently effective to hold my interest. The novel earns a weak recommendation on that basis. Unfortunately, the novel’s merits are largely offset by its implausibility, its one-dimensional and unexciting characters, and its predictable climax.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS