They Come in All Colors by Malcolm Hansen

Published by Atria Books on May 29, 2018

They Come in All Colors is a story of southern racism and its less obvious northern counterpart, told from the perspective of a boy who is biracial, not white and not black and not accepted by anyone except his parents and a few friends. Most of the story is told in flashbacks to 1962 that acquaint the reader with the racist Georgia town in which Huey was born — so racist that the motel owner is forced to drain and clean the pool because a black kid swam in it. The civil rights struggle has reached the town as black activists from other states are arriving on busses to support the fight to eat at whites-only lunch counters. The flashbacks are told from Huey’s perspective as an eight-year-old — an eight-year-old who identifies as white, like his father, who believes his light-skinned mother is white, and who has no idea that he’s the reason the swimming pool has closed.

Huey’s father is a peanut farmer. He loves Huey, he loves his wife, and he isn’t as racist as most white people in his community, he is a product of his time. He has a complicated relationship with Toby Muncie, a black man who has worked for him for years. Toby, in turn, has a complicated relationship with Huey’s mother. Huey’s father has convinced himself that his wife is “a racial enigma,” that her race cannot be identified, but that neither she nor his son are “colored.” The rest of the town disagrees.

Toby is almost a part of Huey’s family and is widely respected as a knowledgeable farmer, but Toby is a passionate supporter of the Freedom Riders, a position that does not sit well with the town’s white residents. Huey is angry at blacks who protest for equal rights, but he becomes confused when school kids start calling him a mongrel and a nappy-haired love child. His true education begins when a black kid accuses him of acting white “just because he looks like a cracker.”

In the present, Huey’s mother is a nanny for a wealthy couple in New York City. Huey has been accepted at Claremont, an exclusive prep school, because he’s the kind of minority the school likes — different but not too different. His only friend is a math prodigy named Zukowski who is attending the school for the same reason. Yet Huey has no hope of fitting in. He worries about being embarrassed by his mother, who has embraced progressive values and opposes the Vietnam War, while Claremount kids understand that war is good for business and that imperialism and a ruling class are part of the world’s natural order. Eventually, Huey creates the kind of trouble that could follow him for the rest of his life.

They Come in All Colors can be understood as a coming of age story, in the sense that Huey begins to grow into an identity of his own and to see the world through adult eyes. As a child, Huey doesn’t know why his father will only take him to the lunch counter for ice cream in the only morning, before the place fills up. He hasn’t figured out racism and doesn’t know what people mean when they tell him to go back to Africa, given that he’s never left Georgia. Huey thinks a burning cross is a celebration of religion and readily accepts his parents’ assurance that the home of the town’s only black business owner burned down because of faulty wiring.

To a lesser degree, but only because she plays a lesser role, the novel is also a coming of age story for Huey’s mother. She grows into her own identity later in life than Huey does, but it’s never too late to grow.  She is the most eloquent speaker in the novel, and in some ways, she represents all the people who have been cheated by America's failure to live up to its promise of equal opportunity.

The novel raises important questions about racial identity in a time when race and identity have become a prominent part of the national conversation. According to Huey’s teacher in Georgia, the world is black and white: you’re one or the other. The lesson that Huey’s mother tries to teach him is that people come in all colors, and that race is not binary. Huey’s parents don’t try to teach him that color doesn’t matter because that lesson would be contrary to everything that Huey sees and hears, and in any event, Huey’s father doesn’t believe it. To Huey’s father, appearance determines race. The fact that Huey’s mom has tan skin, or that Huey has tightly curled hair, does not make them “colored.” That’s the only view of race that allows Huey’s father to keep his self-respect after falling in love with a black woman.

While They Come in All Colors raises important issues, it frames those issues from the perspective of a kid who is loquacious, imaginative, and funny. Huey’s inability to keep his mouth shut and his enjoyment of telling a tall tale eases the pain of reading about his experiences with racism. At the same time, by the time he reaches New York, Huey is living with a burning anger that will clearly take him years to understand. The story that the novel tells is important, but the story is captivating precisely because the reader so easily attaches to Huey as he works through his conflicts and begins to learn to be himself, even if he doesn’t fit inside the boxes that are constructed by the people he meets.

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One Way by S.J. Morden

Published by Orbit on April 10, 2018

Like The Martian, One Way is about an effort to survive on Mars when things go wrong. Unlike The Martian, all but one of the people on Mars in One Way are prisoners. They have practical skills apart from crime, but they aren’t engineers so they can’t “science the shit” out of their problems. And unlike The Martian, there are several of them, so some characters can die on Mars and the story can continue. S.J. Morden also throws in a mystery plot that takes off at about the novel’s midway point, making One Way something more than a survival novel.

An inmate named Frank Kittridge, serving a sentence too long to survive, is given the option to take his construction skills to Mars. With several other prisoners, he’s trained and rocketed off to space to build a habitat that will be occupied by astronauts and scientists who will arrive later. California has privatized some of its prisons, and the corporation that has the building contract on Mars also owns a private prison, so prison labor is pretty easy to find.

Despite all the cheerleading for the privatization of space exploration, Morden imagines that profit-motivated enterprises will work as they always have, cutting corners and maximizing profits at the expense of human safety. That’s particularly true, Morden posits, when the human workers are prisoners and thus disposable.

The private contractors hired by NASA to build a base on Mars have not been entirely forthright with NASA about the their cost-saving strategies. When Frank and the gang reach Mars, they discover that things haven’t gone according to plan (at least as they understood the plan), because the layers of redundancy that NASA would use to assure safety were deemed too costly by the corporation that sent the prisoners to Mars. And anyway, the corporation has its own employee supervising the prisoners who intends to sort things out for the corporation’s benefit before the astronauts arrive.

During the first two thirds of One Way, the prisoners train and travel to Mars and deal with adversity as they assemble a habitat and worry about producing food and water and oxygen and heat. In its later stages, the plot evolves from a Martian survival story to a Martian mystery novel. Frank learns that someone is driving the buggies at night. Then he learns that containers have been dropped on Mars that the prisoners weren’t told about. Then prisoners begin to die in ways that may or may not be accidental. It falls to Frank to find the clues and solve the mystery.

Morden tells a smart, lively story in One Way, although the story holds few surprises, which diminishes its value as a mystery. Characters have enough personality to distinguish them from each other, and important characters have enough personality to make them seem real. The scenes that take place on Mars seem credible and are vividly described. While I thought the story was working its way to a predictable ending, I was surpised to find that the story isn’t resolved. The ending isn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but there is at least one more novel on the way, and readers who want to know how the story concludes will need to read it. I enjoyed One Way (as a science fiction adventure story more than a science fiction mystery) so I have no objection to reading the next novel, but potential readers should know that One Way does not stand alone.

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Give-a-Damn Jones by Bill Pronzini

Published by Tor/Forge Books on May 8, 2018

As much as I love the lyrical descriptions of setting and the complex characterizations found in literary fiction, there is a special place in my heart for storytellers who confront memorable characters with compelling conflicts and resolve their plots without placing an unnecessary word on the page. Not many storytellers have that gift, but the prolific Bill Pronzini is one of them. While Pronzini primarily writes crime fiction, he’s authored a number of westerns, including his most recent, Give-a-Damn Jones.

Owen Hazard, who narrates the first and last chapters in Give-a-Damn Jones, meets Artemas Jones in Butte, where Hazard hopes to find temporary employment as a typesetter before resuming his roaming. Hazard is awestruck; Jones is something of a legend among itinerant typesetters.

When Jones moves on to Box Elder, the story moves with him. Various chapters are narrated by: a ramrod who works for a cantankerous rancher named Elijah Greathouse; the town’s newspaper owner and his son; the town marshal and his deputy; a farmer; a bartender; a saddle maker who is waiting to die at the hand of a newly released prisoner who vowed to kill him; the released prisoner, who is innocent of the crime for which he served time; a painless dentist who sells an elixir and has his own version of a traveling medicine show; and the dentist’s banjo-playing sidekick. And then there’s Greathouse’s daughter, who loves the released prisoner, despite Greathouse’s efforts to keep them apart. Greathouse — who wants to keep all the ranch land in eastern Montana for himself and is trying to drive off settlers and itinerant farmers who have every right to be there — is the novel’s primary villain, although the saddle maker is a close second.

With so many characters, the plot zigs and zags to interesting places before it settles on an ending. Part of the story addresses the conflict between Greathouse and the released prisoner while another involves the conflict between the released prisoner and the saddle maker. Greathouse schemes against the newspaper owner, whose animosity toward Greathouse is evident in frequent editorials. Still another subplot introduces a conflict between the painless dentist and a mean-spirit blacksmith who doesn’t think his tooth extraction was as painless as advertised. Jones stays in the background for much of the story, although he wanders into the plot at opportune moments.

Prozinski doesn’t use his carefully chosen words to describe the big Montana sky or how characters feel about their childhood, but he crafts easily visualized settings and gives each character a distinct personality. Most of his workmanlike prose is used to move the story along its winding path. I always enjoy Prozinski’s novels for exactly that reason: he puts the story first, without neglecting characterization or atmosphere.

Traditional westerns are known for confronting issues of justice and injustice in stark terms, for separating the white hats from the black hats, and Prozinksi furthers that tradition here. While Give-a-Damn Jones isn’t a story of moral ambiguity, and while Jones has the classic humility of a western loner hero, the novel has elements of realism (Greathouse’s daughter isn’t chaste; Jones carouses in bordellos and hates riding horses) that distinguish it from the Westerns of the 1950s. In the end, Give-a-Damn Jones gets my recommendation because Pronzini, as he always does, tells a good story.

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Old Black Magic by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 1, 2018

Technically, the title of this book is Robert B. Parker’s Old Black Magic, but since Parker (1932-2010) is dead and buried, it isn’t really his, even if it continues the Spenser stories that Parker created. At least G.P. Putnam’s Sons put Ace Atkins’ name on the cover shown above in a font that is noticeable, although not as large as the font used for Parker’s name. (Another version of the cover rather shamefully puts Atkins' name in much smaller font.) Read the Amazon reviews in a couple of months and I assure you that some readers will have purchased this book in the belief that Parker wrote it.

Spenser is hired to find an El Greco that was stolen from the Winthrop twenty years ago, along with a Picasso sketch and another painting. He makes inquiries among his aging connections in the police as well as the Boston underworld, and dutifully accompanies the woman who hired him as she prepares to pay a ransom for the return of the Picasso. One thing leads to another before Spenser is fired by the snooty museum Board and replaced by a snooty British investigator who specializes in art theft.

Of course, being fired won’t deter Spenser. His continued investigation leads him into old underworld feuds, including a closed case involving a mob murder that may or may not be related to the art theft. The El Greco seems to have changed hands more than once, making Spenser feel like he’s playing a game of “Mafia musical chairs.” More murders ensue, giving Spenser reason to wonder who will try to kill him next.

Atkins captures the banter and wisecracks that Parker employed to make Spenser a popular character, even if the series was getting a bit stale by the time of Parker’s death. I don’t know that Atkins has refreshed it — taking the series in a new direction would probably violate his contract, since books about beloved characters whose creators have died are meant to give readers more of the same — but he certainly hasn’t harmed the franchise. Spenser’s girlfriend Susan, his dog Pearl, and a variety of cops and mobsters have the opportunity to listen to Spenser’s irreverent wit. Nor has Atkins diminished Spenser’s love of good food (that he prepares in his kitchen or orders in restaurants) and pastries (that he buys from Boston bakeries or bums from his cop buddies).

The plot of Old Black Magic is more believable than is common in most modern crime novels. It makes enough detours to keep Spenser (and the story) moving, including a visit to Memphis, where the BBQ ribs are hard to beat. Meeting all the shady characters who might have some knowledge of the painting is enjoyable, and if the plot isn’t particularly exciting, it has the virtue of making sense — something that can’t always be said about modern crime novels. And there’s a shootout near the end of the story, proving that Spenser is in capable hands with Atkins.

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Head On by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on April 17, 2018

Head On is the second novel set in the “locked in” universe that John Scalzi created in Lock In. A virus called Haden’s Syndrome has caused a small percentage of the population to be “locked” inside their bodies. They can think but they can’t move or communicate in normal ways. Those people are called Hadens. Technology, in the form of a neural network, has made it possible for them to inhabit robots called threeps. The government has funded threeps as a health care benefit for Hadens but the funding is going dry.

Head On is a science fiction mystery featuring FBI agent Chris Shane, who happens to be a Haden. Shane has as much personality as soggy tofu; his edgier partner Vann is a better character. Thanks to his wealthy parents who are considering an investment in a Hilketa team, Shane (inhabiting a threep) is in a luxury box when a Hilketa player named Duane Chapman dies.

Hilketa is played on the field by threeps that are controlled by players who are off the field. The object of the game is to cut off the head of a designated opposing player and to score a goal by carrying, throwing, or punting the head over the goalposts. Threeps are usually operated by Hadens because their neural networks give them a reaction time advantage.

The players controlling the threeps aren’t supposed to be injured by their threep’s decapitation, but Chapman dies after his threep’s head is ripped off for the third time in the game. Shane is therefore front and center in a death investigation which arguably falls within the FBI’s jurisdiction because of the interstate nature of Hilketa, whose players are generally in a different state than the venue in which the game is played.

Hadens shouldn’t die from contact with their threeps, so establishing the cause of death is the first problem. Did Chapman’s use of a nutritional supplement that he didn’t endorse have anything to do with his death? Is the league covering something up?

As a science fiction murder mystery, Head On is about average. I enjoyed the science fiction setting more than the actual mystery, which has Shane watching a number of deaths pile up as he tries to piece together clues about how and why Chapman died and how the other deaths are related. The plot is reasonably complex but not wholly engaging, in part because Shane is just a dull guy. Still, Scalzi incorporates enough amusing background details (including vague suggestions about Hadens use threeps to have sex with other Hadens) to make the overall story more interesting than the mystery at its center.

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