Duke City Desperado by Max Austin

Published by Alibi on June 9, 2015

The Duke City novels combine believable but offbeat characters with fast-moving crime plots. Max Austin (the pen name Steve Brewer uses for these novels) always manages to give crime an amusing spin. Duke City Desperado is a little funnier and a little less poignant than the first two, but however Austin chooses to strike that balance, this series of Albuquerque crime stories is maintaining its high quality. I particularly like the fact that each novel focuses on a different character. That choice should keep the series fresh.

Dylan James is a trouble magnet. When he rabbits from a stolen van that his sky-high friend Doc Burnett uses in an attempt to rob a bank from a drive-through window, he begins life as an Albuquerque fugitive, a wanted desperado. His first stop is the house of his ex-girlfriend, who is now dating a tough guy named Antony. Then he meets Katrina ("like the hurricane"), a college student who is fascinated by crime.

Eventually Dylan is being chased by the police and the FBI, by Antony, and even by Katrina, while Antony is being chased by the sister of Dylan's ex-girlfriend, who does not appreciate the way Antony treats women. The sister is joined by a formidable group of women who wield footwear as weapons. A focal point for much of the action is the apartment of Dylan's stoner friend, whose attempts to play video games while maintaining a steady high are constantly interrupted by people who are looking for Dylan. The lighthearted hijinks that ensue (including Doc's antics as a federal prisoner) are consistently funny. Throughout the novel and particularly as it neared the end, I experienced a number of laugh-out-loud moments.

What I really like about these novels is their recognition that a good bit of crime is stupidly impulsive, that everyone deserves a fresh start (or nearly everyone), and that separating the good guys from the bad guys is often a matter of opinion. Austin's rogues are always affable, regular people whose lives have been dictated by unfortunate circumstance and bad choices but who never let go of their humanity. The plots are just as likable as the characters. Like the other novels in the series, Duke City Desperado is a light diversion from the usual darkness of crime stories.

RECOMMENDED

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 11, 2015

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a strange and puzzling book. I like books that are strange and puzzling unless they seem pointless. Winning prose, an enticing story, good humor, and a sympathetic protagonist sustained my interest in The Beautiful Bureaucrat even when I worried that the story -- a surrealistic fantasy -- might ultimately go nowhere.

After 19 months of unemployment, Josephine, wife of Joseph, takes a job inputting data from dusty gray files into a database. She does not understand the purpose of the data and her boss does not think she needs to know. Josephine's job is mysterious and meaningless in a Kafkaesque way. She sits behind a closed door in a windowless office in a building full of similar offices, all apparently occupied by employees who resemble Josephine in their averageness. Hallways are empty; workers eat at their desks; vending machines in break rooms are rumored but difficult to find. When Josephine tells Joseph that she is becoming a bureaucrat, he advises her to eat more vegetables.

Josephine is guardedly relieved to be befriended by Trishiffany, another bureaucrat, but relief is replaced by anxiety as Josephine begins to understand the meaning of the data she is inputting. The purpose of the database, however, is unclear for much of the novel, as are many other things in Josephine's life -- like how do "attempted delivery" notices end up on her apartment door every time (roughly once a week) she and her husband move to a new sublet? And why does everyone in Josephine's workplace look more-or-less like Josephine? Readers who expect a novel to answer all the questions it raises might be disappointed with The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Not everything becomes clear at the end.

Much of the story unfolds in Josephine's thoughts as she tries to make sense of her job, of her work environment, of her husband, of the assessment she receives from the waitress who reads her palm, of the childhood experiences that failed to prepare her to meet the mysteries of adult life. Near the end, I thought Helen Phillips might have written herself into an inescapable corner, but the story resolves rather neatly. Its meaning is open to interpretation, which might bother readers who crave the certainty of concrete stories that spell everything out, but the novel is not so wildly uncertain as to be empty of meaning.

It turns out that the story does have a point: bureaucracy is a matter of life and death. Or: life's problems can be solved with a little Wite-Out. They are funny, absurdist points but they might also be serious if taken as metaphors. Whether you want to do that is up to you. I wouldn't call this a novel of great depth, but it is a work of great charm.

RECOMMENDED

Disintegration by Richard Thomas

Published by Alibi on May 26, 2015

Disintegration might be the right word to describe the state of the main character's mind. It might describe the state of the reader's mind while trying to piece together the story. The chapters tend to be brief and at the end of most of early chapters, I was asking "What's going on here?" Since I am drawn to stories of that nature -- puzzling dark psychological thrillers -- I enjoyed reading Disintegration, but readers with different tastes should be warned that there is nothing cozy (or conventional) about this mystery.

The narrator is an alcoholic, a derelict, the victim of a haunted past. He has a complicated relationship with a woman named Holly who also has complicated relationships with other men. We never learn the narrator's name and it is not clear that he even knows it.

The narrator is also an unremorseful killer who gets a new tattoo to memorialize each new victim. He keeps a machete in his armoire because, well, just in case someone knocks on his door. But he likes puppies -- beats their abusers to death, in fact -- so he can't be all bad. He also adopts a stray cat he names Luscious. Cat lovers might end up worrying about Luscious more than the narrator, who lacks a cat's innocent charm.

The narrator meets a man he calls Vlad who gives him assignments and three unidentified drugs called Happy, Sad, and Recovery. The assignments involve killing people. Most of them are people who have inflicted their share of harm, which might make it easier for the narrator to live with himself.

Every now and then a very brief chapter appears that contains dialog from answering machine recordings that the narrator plays over and over. The reader eventually understands why the recordings are so important to the narrator.

Who is Vlad, what is his motivation, how does he choose his victims, and why is the narrator serving his needs? Those questions are all part of the mystery. Of course, a novel that is uncertain from beginning to end can be frustrating, but Disintegration gradually makes more sense as the story progresses. In fact, it begins to twist and turn in new and interesting ways.

The reader's questions are not necessarily answered in convincing detail, but we at least get a rough outline by the end. The story lacks credibility -- a lot of "how could that be possible?" questions go unanswered -- and the ending is predictable (given the story's mood), but Disintegration always kept me engaged.

Parts of Disintegration capture the tragedy of life in vivid detail. Not just the narrator's life, but the lives of drug dealers and crack addicts and rape victims. There is a good bit of darkness here and that might put off readers who only want to read sunshiny stories. On the other hand, readers who enjoy psychological thrillers about sociopaths are likely to regard Disintegration as a worthwhile read.

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The Insider Threat by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on June 30, 2015

Brad Taylor builds his Taskforce novels using a reliable formula. Pike's team is sent on a mission. The Oversight Council squabbles about the mission. Pike is ordered not to do something and he ignores the order so that he can complete the mission or he changes the mission to save lives or to save a team member. Pike's team members (particularly Knuckles) are wary of Pike's relationship with Jennifer and Jennifer is wary of their testosterone-laden view of the world. The Insider Threat follows that formula. It is about average for a Taskforce novel, which makes it better than most other thrillers about Americans who save the world from terrorists using their wits, high tech gadgetry, and state-of-the-art weapons.

Although the key bad guys in The Insider Threat are recruits of Islamic State, they are also Americans. Three of them escaped from a Florida reform school and consider their Islamic State recruitment to be joining another gang, albeit one that will give greater meaning to their violence. That's a clever spin that allows Taylor to avoid the obvious plots that burden similar thrillers, but I can't say he ever sold me on this one. Disenfranchised Americans do join radical causes, both foreign and domestic, but the motivation for these particular young men to give their allegiance (and lives) to Islamic State seems a bit thin.

Still, the plot is fun and the Lost Boys' target -- which becomes known to the reader with only a hundred pages remaining -- is not what I expected. Brad Taylor continues to avoid stereotyping when he creates his bad guys. They are always unique individuals with complex and convincing motivations, unlike the terrorist caricatures found in most novels of this nature.

The Insider Threat brings back Mossad's deadly Shoshana, setting up an interesting conflict with Jennifer, who is always the series' moral touchstone. Shoshana believes that slaughtering bad guys makes the world a better place while Jennifer argues that slaughtering bad guys makes you a bad guy. Jennifer never makes the mistake of dismissing innocent human beings as "collateral damage" simply because they aren't Americans. Yet Shoshana shows a bit of her own moral enlightenment as she explains the circumstances under which she refused to kill under Mossad's command. It is that sort of subtle thought that keeps me coming back to Brad Taylor while turning away from writers who see the conflict between good and evil in simplistic terms.

The Insider Threat lacks the imagination displayed in the best novels in this series. The ending reaches a predictable result via a mildly surprising path, but one of the final scenes is a bit hokey (unusual in a Taylor novel). The justification for Pike's team doing all the rescuing instead of swarming the target with police (or moving the target) is slim. Taylor has been cranking these books out at a phenomenal rate and this one seems a bit rushed. Having said that, I enjoyed the novel despite its flaws and I suspect most fans of the series will also have fun reading it.

RECOMMENDED

The Casualties by Nick Holdstock

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on August 4, 2015

The Casualties is a pre-apocalyptic novel more than it is a post-apocalyptic story. While the story is told from 60 years in the future, it begins in the past (our near future) because history teaches that "everything is determined by what came before." The novel's structure sets The Casualties apart from typical post-apocalyptic novels because, although we are immediately and frequently forewarned that a near-extinction event on three continents is coming, the story focuses on the lives and activities of an eccentric group of people in the Comely Bank neighborhood of Edinburgh during 2016 and 2017, before the apocalypse occurs.

From the narrator of The Casualties (whose identity the reader deduces from hints as the novel progresses), we learn that Sam Clark, manager of a charity bookshop, learned about people from the books they donated and from the ephemera they left in their pages (ticket stubs, pictures, letters). A man named Alasdair who lived under a bridge owned few possessions because possessions make people unhappy -- except a stranger's old photo album that he cherished until he didn't. Caitlin, who had a horrible skin condition that isolated her from the world, had a crush on Sam. Sinead, a goth who has abandoned promiscuity in favor of celibacy coupled with obsessive self-gratification, had sexual fantasies about Sam. Unfortunately for Caitlin and Sinead, Sam was too terrified of reproduction to have sex with anyone.

Other odd characters of Comely Bank include an obese man whose hunger seems to be partially satiated by watching cooking programs, the caretaker who tests that phenomenon experimentally, a woman who writes letters to a dead man, an alcoholic couple, a Filipina prostitute, and a Pakistani shopkeeper who feels unwanted in Comely Bank. No writers do "eccentric" as well as those from the British Isles, and Nick Holdstock is a worthy heir to that tradition.

A part of the plot deals with old black-and-white photographs (reproduced in the book) from the 1920s to the 1950s. If everything is determined by what came before, those pictures tie the past to the present. A challenging amalgamation of past and present in the last pages drives that point home.

The Casualties is about the need to understand others, to avoid judgment of lives we have not lived. It is about living with the past while living in the present. It is about "admitting the faults of the dead without saying that they deserved to die." It is about transformative experiences and how their occurrences are so often unexpected and seemingly random. It is about the relationship between the past and memories of the past. It is about "me" being a succession of selves defined by memories (selves that would be different if lost memories could be restored). It is about moving on when plans and expectations are shattered. It is about how everything that happens is determined by what came before.

Apart from a brief visit to 2047, it is only at the novel's midway point that we learn anything meaningful about the apocalyptic event. Most post-apocalyptic novels assume than an apocalyptic event is a bad thing. This one assumes that it is a bad thing for the 2 billion people who die but ultimately a good thing for the 5 billion who survive. That's a remarkably fresh take on a tired genre that, while not the novel's focal point and thus not fully explored, is yet another fascinating notion that makes The Casualties worth reading.

Since the story deals with contemporary, pre-apocalyptic lives, The Casualties might be a good science fiction novel for readers who don't really like science fiction. On the other hand, it might be a bad novel for readers who think post-apocalyptic fiction should be about zombies chewing on non-zombies or scavengers killing each other as they fight over scrap metal. Setting aside genres and expectations, I would say The Casualties is a worthwhile novel for any reader who enjoys strong characters, provocative thought, and a memorable mixture of humor and drama.

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