Housebreaking by Dan Pope

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 12, 2015

A troubled marriage, a rebellious child, extramarital sex, a workplace fling. All of those are ingredients of a standard domestic drama, but Housebreaking is more inventive than the norm. It spins off in directions I did not anticipate. The title has a couple of distinct meanings but the book is largely about a family that, while intact, is clearly broken.

The story introduces Andrew and Audrey Martin-Murray as they are house shopping in Wintonbury, a Hartford suburb. While Andrew can't understand how their family of three could possibly live in a 2,000 square foot home, Audrey is charmed by a dilapidated old house that has yet to be torn down in a neighborhood of McMansions. She is less charmed by a husband who is rarely home and with whom she has little in common. Her daughter Emily might be even harder to deal with than her husband. Their ways of coping with the loss of Emily's brother (a death that precedes the opening of the novel) are quite different.

Down the street, Benjamin Mandelbaum is, at the age of 44, back in the house where he grew up, having moved in with Leonard, his father, after separating from his wife in their 24th year of marriage. Benjamin, who spends most of his time trying to figure out what he wants, is linked to Audrey by the high school crush he once had on her.

The first section of the novel focuses on the Mandelbaums. The rest of the story provides an x-ray view of the interiors of Audrey, Andrew, and Emily. Each section of the novel reveals certain pivotal moments from the perspective of each family member. There is little overlap, however, since each character has his or her own story -- stories that are vastly different, reflecting lives lived apart from the family unit. Each family member has an ugly secret and each lives in fear that the other family members will discover that secret. They all have reason to feel guilty but they are all too self-absorbed to notice the guilty feelings that the other family members manifest. This is ultimately a story about family members who create tragedy by never being there for each other.

I love the life that Dan Pope breathes into his characters. The genius of this novel is its ability to create sympathy for badly behaving characters who aren't at all sympathetic. Small sections of the novel (primarily Emily's conversations with her dead brother) seem obvious and manipulative compared to the rest and I was disappointed that more was not made of Benjamin's father, given his early prominence. The story leaves much unresolved, but life is always unresolved until we die, so -- despite my curiosity about the outcome of Andrew's life -- the story's unfinished nature did not trouble me greatly.

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Archie in the Crosshairs by Robert Goldsborough

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on March 10, 2015

Archie in the Crosshairs is a Nero Wolfe novel. Someone is threatening to kill Archie (and even fired an errant shot in his direction) which puts a crimp in Archie's nightlife. More bullets are fired at Archie when he isn't busy flirting with every attractive female who enters the story. Meanwhile, Nero Wolfe takes on the case of a young woman who is being blackmailed over a dalliance she had during a trip to Florence -- one she would prefer to keep a secret from her fiancé and family.

Of course, Nero's job is to do the thinking, puzzling out the mystery of Archie's assailant and a couple of murders that occur during the course of the novel while unmasking the blackmailer. Archie does the legwork, interviews the woman's family members and a friend, then reports his findings to Wolfe, who (in classic detective fashion) calls for everyone to be assembled at his home so he can reveal the answer to the mystery. The time he spends dealing with those issues only mildly intrudes upon his orchid tending, gourmet dining, and beer guzzling, but any intrusion on those life-pursuits makes Nero unhappy.

I liked the complex entwined mysteries (some characters aptly call the blackmail plot convoluted). The novel is a worthy emulation of Rex Stout. That's both good and bad. The formality of the characters' dialog and what passes for banter strikes me as artificial (as it did in the Rex Stout books), even given the era in which the novel is set. All of the minor characters make their routine appearances and play their routine parts in ways that seem formulaic. Still, the story is good, even if it doesn't hit the heights of the best Rex Stout novels.

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Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People by Matthew Diffee

Published by Scribner on May 26, 2015

Matthew Diffey's cartoons are regularly published in the New Yorker. Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People might be described as a book of cartoons mixed with stand-up comedy. In fact, Diffey tells us that in terms of stand-up comedy, he is just like Chris Rock, except that Rock owns a mansion and Diffy owns some really nice pencils.

Narrative comedy introduces each chapter. The chapters collect (mostly) single-panel cartoons that will appeal to smart, attractive people (like you). Each chapter addresses a particular category of people: doctors, lumberjacks, pet owners, people in relationships, old people, people with tattoos, etc. Diffey sometimes mixes in multiple-panel cartoons and occasionally graces the bottom of a page with a sketch of someone delivering a one-liner.

My favorite cartoon: a seedy looking guy says to a florist "I want some flowers that say, `Here, have some friggin' flowers'." First runner up: a doorman says to a hooker, "And will he know what this is regarding?" Other highlights include an interview with a pretentious potato chip critic and a two page guide that will help you identify the religion that is best for you. But really, there are too many outstanding cartoons and jokes in this book to make it easy to single out any part of it. It's all pretty funny.

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Radiant Angel by Nelson DeMille

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 26, 2015

Colonel Vasily Petrov of the SVR receives a coded message instructing him to carry out his mission. John Corey, now working as a federal contract agent with the Diplomatic Surveillance Group, is assigned to watch Petrov. Corey and the DSG know Petrov is with the SVR but they don't know what nefarious purpose has caused him to masquerade as a diplomat. Corey is conducting surveillance with Tess, who claims to be a trainee with aspirations of joining the FBI. Corey isn't quite certain that her claim is truthful. He also has trust issues concerning his wife, which turns into a minor subplot as the story nears its conclusion.

Corey has an irreverent attitude that makes him a fun character. He holds some grudges against the CIA over a nasty incident in Yemen. He has more than a few grudges against Islamic terrorists but he's convinced that Russia continues to pose a greater security threat (an opinion that doesn't sit well with the State Department, politicians, or most of the intelligence community). Of course, following the universal law of thriller fiction, Corey is right and everyone else is wrong.

The first third of Radiant Angel, setting up the puzzle of what Petrov might be up to, is quite good. The next section, in which the focus shifts to Petrov, some Russian thugs, and a horde of hookers, is standard thriller fare. It moves quickly but the Russians are fairly dull and they're up to the same brand of mischief that has characterized Russian thriller villains for the last half century. The final third brings Corey and Tess back into the picture and the fun resumes.

Nelson DeMille kicked the rust off of a reliable formula and put it back in action, creating an unimaginative story that nevertheless conveys a sense of realism. DeMille has an undeniable gift for generating excitement, but Radiant Angel feels like a story I have read many times before. I give it high marks for "fun factor" but a low score for originality.

DeMille writes with a good deal of wit. Dialog is particularly enjoyable. Corey is an easy character to like. Those factors and the novel's excitement are all good reasons to enjoy the story, which I did. Still, Radiant Angel's staleness and its predictable ending prevent me from placing it on the top shelf of thriller fiction.

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Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Published by Minotaur Books on March 10, 2015

This is the second novel I've read that focuses on the horror story of Quebec's Duplessis orphanage, which was turned into an asylum because the church could collect more government funds by pretending that the orphans were mentally ill. Orphans were given experimental drug treatments and were abused in other ways. Building upon that real-life tragedy, Jeanette De Beauvoir concocts a plot involving a CIA-backed program to conduct experiments of a different nature. The nature of the CIA's nefarious dealings are the ordinary stuff of thrillers, plowing ground that is no longer fertile, but other aspects of De Beauvoir's story have greater value.

Martine LeDuc works for Montreal's mayor, running the city's public relations department. Montreal is in need of some good PR, given the four women have been killed in the city, apparently at random. LeDuc is assigned to act as liaison between the mayor and the chief of police, neither of whom like her. A detective, unpopular because he is Anglo rather than Franco, is assigned to babysit LeDuc. Naturally they work together to find the killer despite the absence of the words "criminal investigation" in Martine's job description.

The murder victims were all raped and mutilated, their bodies left left sitting upright on park benches. Their ages, appearances, and occupations are varied. Fans of serial killer novels know that discovering the connection between the victims is the key to catching the killer. That's a reliable crime novel formula but it is not put to good use here. The motivation for the murders is far-fetched and contrived. I didn't buy it.

LeDuc is given a stepmother's hectic home life that helps establish her personality, but some of the domestic scenes are mundane. The Montreal setting is used to nice effect as the reader is taken on a tour of the neighborhoods where the victims lived and the parks where their bodies were discovered. Simple French words like bon and alors constantly crop up in an apparent reminder that people speak French in Montreal, but since the rest of their dialog is in English, the frequent appearances of "first year French" are silly.

Italicized sections of the novel are told in the first person by Gabrielle, who was abandoned in an orphanage after being born to an unmarried woman who experienced a "moral lapse." The nuns who raised her later transferred her to Duplessis. Gabrielle's story is not as emotionally affecting as it was probably meant to be.

LeDuc finds herself threated by the killer toward the novel's end but (1) that section of the novel is too predictable to generate suspense and (2) since the killer should know that LeDuc has blabbed her suspicions about him to pretty much the whole world, killing LeDuc would be an act of supreme idiocy. The lengthy talkfest that follows, as the killer explains himself, is just dull.

I liked De Beauvoir's prose style. There are aspects of the novel that make for enjoyable reading, but the predictable ending, the failure to generate tension, and the far-fetched plot lead to disappointment by the novel's end.

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