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Tzer Island is produced on a small island in the Pacific. That island was recently devastated by a typhoon. Until electricity and reliable internet service are restored, reviews posted to Tzer Island may be delayed. I may also be posting reviews of older, print edition books to conserve the battery power required to read digital books. Thank you for your patience.

Billy Summers by Stephen King

Published by Scribner on August 3, 2021

Both gritty and darkly heartwarming, Billy Summers tells the story of a contract killer. Billy assures us that he only ever killed bad people. He sees himself as a “garbageman with a gun.” Billy knows he’s also a bad person, but that’s the kind of assurance that allows a reader to perceive Billy as likable, if not admirable.

Billy works with an intermediary named Bucky. When Nick Majarian asks Bucky whether Billy is available, Bucky says that Billy is thinking about retirement but might be willing to do one more job if the price right. Nick offers the right price ($2.5 million) to shoot an inmate from an office window as the inmate is being walked from a police car to the courthouse. Nick is a middleman. He won’t reveal the name of the man who wants the inmate dead. The inmate committed senseless murders and fits Billy’s definition of a bad guy who deserves to die, so Billy takes the job.

Nick doesn’t know when the inmate will be extradited to the state where the killing is supposed to occur. Until that date arrives, Billy will occupy the office from which he’ll shoot. Nick gives him a cover identity as a writer who needs to be isolated while he finishes his novel. Billy has always wanted to write a novel, so he uses his down time to write the story of his life. Nick also rents a house for Billy. While Billy knows better than to get friendly with his neighbors, Billy is a friendly guy. He plays Monopoly with the neighbor kids and attends cookouts, knowing his neighbors will be disappointed when they learn that Billy is an assassin. The novel’s first half disappears in the rearview mirror as the story moves forward.

Billy pretends to be stupid but he’s smart enough to figure out that Nick intends to take him out when the shooting is accomplished. Billy is put off by Nick’s rude behavior. He’s also anxious not to be cheated out of a fee. The reader knows that things will not go well for Nick, but Billy’s strategy for handling the betrayal is surprising.

In the novel's second act, Billy rescues a young woman named Alice Maxwell who has just been raped. The rest of the novel develops Billy’s relationship with Alice and with Bucky as the plot pivots toward Billy’s plan to get even with the guy who wants Nick to kill him. By the end, the reader will understand why the death of the inmate was so personal to the man who funded the assassination. The explanation is plausible.

While some aspects of the story are predictable — this is far from the first novel to feature a kindly assassin as the protagonist — Steven King offers so much detail that it almost seems fresh. The characters are pretty much who the reader would want them to be. Likable characters are almost comforting in a novel of this nature. Billy feels a sense of shame for not being a better person, but he redeems himself by taking care of Alice. Bucky is a gruff old loner who redeems himself in a similar fashion. Alice matures quickly, both by surviving her rape and by helping Billy. It’s easy to bond with the key players.

King provides a story within a story by sharing the book that Billy is writing. Billy’s book focuses on his horrific war experiences. The material is again predictable, but King is such a good storyteller that it’s easy to become lost in the narrative.

Billy Summers is not a horror novel, but King gives a nod to his early years as a horror novelist by placing a character near the site of the (now destroyed) Overlook Hotel, the setting of King’s The Shining. He also suggests that a guest house near the character’s home might be haunted. It’s fun to see King paying homage to his own roots.

There’s nothing special about Billy Summers apart from the fact that Stephen King wrote it. It’s the kind of book King can probably knock out during the halftime of a Patriots game. At the same time, King’s gift at storytelling sets him apart from writers who would have turned the same story into a melodrama or a silly action novel. King evokes true emotion, particularly in the final chapters as he finds a clever mechanism to resolve the story in a couple of different ways.

RECOMMENDED

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Published by Scribner on September 28, 2021

Anthony Doerr tells this story in multiple time frames. Each chapter begins with fragments of a story written by Antonius Diogenes, a second century storyteller. The title of Diogenes’ story translates as Cloud Cuckoo Land. The rest of the book bounces around in time. The segments are connected by Diogenes’ story. That connection reminds us of the importance of books and the ease with which, in the long stretch of time, knowledge is lost. We believe that everything will last “but that is only because of the extreme brevity of our own lives.” Cities “come and go like anthills.” “The houses of the rich burn as quick as any other.” From ancient works and the ruins of the past, we might discover lost knowledge that will help us understand how our present came into existence. We might also learn something about the universality of human experience.

Diogenes’ story tells of Aethon’s “journey to a utopian city in the sky.” The story was supposedly written on wooden slates that Diogenes discovered in Aethon’s tomb. Diogenes claimed to have transcribed the slates onto papyrus and had the transcripts delivered to his ailing niece, an entertainment designed to encourage her recovery.

Centuries later, as the Saracens prepare to sack Constantinople, a girl named Anna is ransacking a hidden trove of manuscripts, delivering them to monks who hope to find a book that contains the entire world. Anna believes Diogenes’ codex fits that description when it speaks of “a place of golden towers stacked on clouds, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots.”

North of Constantinople, Omeir was born with a facial deformity that makes his village regard him as a djinn. His grandfather cannot find it in himself to leave the baby to die. Omeir turns into a gentle child who raises and loves two oxen before he and his oxen are drafted to attack Constantinople. Omeir’s path eventually intersects Anna’s. Diogenes’ book, once important only to Anna, now becomes important to Omeir.

Zeno Ninis is a prisoner of war in Korea during the early 1950s, where he meets and falls in love with a scholar named Rex. Zeno learns root words in Greek from Rex, including a particularly telling phrase that translates as: “That’s what the gods do. They spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Seymour Stuhlman is a child in Lakeport, Idaho in the mid-2010s. Birds are losing their Lakeport habitat to developers who replace forests with parking lots. One of those birds was an owl Seymour knew as Trustyfriend. Medication is the adult answer to Seymour’s perception of the doomed world in which he lives, but Seymour has a bent for subversion that neither medication nor prison will change. His eventual purpose in life is to undo the lies that corporate America tells people who prefer a clean and cheerful world to the one they have created.

Zeno’s story collides with Seymour’s in 2020. Seymour is apparently prepared to blow up the Lakeport library as Zeno is upstairs, directing a children’s play.

Konstance lives on a generation ship making its way to a distant planet after Earth has succumbed to environmental disaster. Konstance loses herself in the generation ship’s computer, discovering Earth’s history, before she is forced into isolation to avoid a rapidly spreading contagion. Konstance’s father had a book called Cloud Cuckoo Land, translated from the Greek by Zeno Ninis. In the ship’s virtual library, she searches for information about Zeno and begins to guess the truth about her isolated existence.

Diogenes’ tale links all the characters, illustrating the reality that history has unforeseeable impacts on the future, that people who history does not recall have played their role in shaping our present. The novel’s characters are imbued with the same qualities as Aethon. They persist. They take wrong turns but eventually right their course. They stand in awe of a world they don’t understand, but they strive to gain knowledge of their place within it. They might get lost, they might lose things, but they come to understand that “sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” The characters are fighting not just to make sense of the world but to make sense of themselves.

Like his characters, Doerr’s prose is lively and surprising. He asks important questions: “Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we are young?” Why do we find it so hard to accept reality? Why do people want to conquer others when what they have is enough? Doerr gives the reader nutritious thoughts to chew upon, but he does so in the context of a story that gradually evolves from bewildering to astonishing.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Escape from Yokai Land by Charles Stross

Published by Tordotcom on March 1, 2022

Escape from Yokai Land (originally titled Escape from Puroland) is a novella set in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series. The events in the story take place just before the novel The Delerium Brief. Bob Howard is the featured character. Readers who are unfamiliar with the series will probably want to start elsewhere, as the story might otherwise be unendurably puzzling.

The Laundry Files series is set in an alternate universe in which magic is a function of mathematical equations. Between the two world wars, Great Britain (and eventually other countries) developed clandestine departments to protect their countries from incursions of various demons and monsters that are entering the universe through portals or bridges created by computational pollution. Great Britain’s organization is called the Laundry.

Different characters are featured in different novels, but Bob Howard is the first series protagonist and still my favorite. At this point in the series, Howard has risen through the bureaucracy and inherited the powers and duties of his deceased boss James Angleton, including Angleton’s status as the Eater of Souls. Howard is dispatched to Japan, where the counterpart to Howard’s agency viewed Angleton as less than woke in his interaction with the Japanese. Howard tries to do better.

The story is basic. An unusual number of threats have been entering Japan. Howard deals with them while maintaining diplomatic relations with the Japanese. As is often the case, the story’s primary interest lies in the observations that Stross makes as the story unfolds. I particularly liked the notion that Howard doesn’t go to church because he knows that gods are real, far from benign, and gain their power from worship. An amusement park in Japan has become the epicenter of extradimensional intrusions because children worship Hello Kitty, allowing the evil intruders to feed on their quasi-prayer.

The novella isn’t essential to series readers — nothing happens that advances the overall story — but it’s fun. I would recommend it to Stross fans for that reason. Readers who are intrigued by the concept of magic as computational fallout might want to start with the first novel and work their way forward.

RECOMMENDED

Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino

Published in Japan in 2018; published in translation by Minotaur Books on December 14, 2021

American mysteries tend to feature outlandish plots or brilliant but unrealistic forensic scientists or tough guys who solve the mysteries with their fighting skills or self-aggrandizing protagonists who can’t stop reminding the reader how much they care about victims. The age of clever but plausible plots and deduction that doesn’t depend on CSI gadgetry has largely passed. Fortunately, readers who enjoy the challenge of puzzling out the solution to a complex mystery can turn to Japanese mystery writers. Whodunit and how’d-he-do-it plots are plentiful in Japan, where fictional detectives use their wits rather than their weapons or crime labs to solve mysteries.

Saori Namiki is a teenager working as a waitress in her parents’ restaurant when she begins taking voice lessons from Naoki Niikura. His wife Rumi encourages Saori to pursue a career in music. Saori sees the appeal of pursuing stardom, but she also enjoys being pursued by one of the restaurant’s customers, Tomoya Takagaki.

Saori disappears one evening without explanation. Three years later, a house burns to the ground. Saori’s body is discovered in the rubble. The body of the old woman who owns the house is also discovered, but she died years before Saori, who died soon after she disappeared.

The old woman’s son, Kanichi Hasunuma, was a customer at the Namiki restaurant who took an unwholesome interest in Saori. Hasunuma’s ties to the house and to Saori make him the prime murder suspect. Two decades earlier, Hasunuma was suspected of killing a 12-year-old girl. Despite abundant circumstantial evidence, Hasunuma resisted the cultural urge to confess, having learned from his cop father that convictions are difficult to win without the suspect’s confession. True to his father’s teachings, Hasunuma avoided a conviction and even received compensation for his detention.

The investigation of Saori’s murder is led by Detective Chief Inspector Kusanagi of the Toykyo Metropolitan Police. Kusanagi was a young detective when he worked on the first case against Hasunuma. Kusanagi hopes he can bring Hasunuma to justice this time. The novel’s true star, however, is Kusanagi’s college friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, a/k/a Professor Galileo, a character who first appeared in The Devotion of Suspect X and has solved crimes in three other novels, including Silent Parade.

While Saori’s death is the novel’s initial focus, the fun starts with Hasunuma’s death. Was he murdered? If so, how? He appears to have died from natural causes, but Yukawa isn’t so sure. If he was killed, how did it happen? Yukawa propounds one hypothesis after another. Kusanagi dutifully sends officers to look for evidence that confirms or refutes the evolving theory. Many of the obvious suspects have an alibi involving a parade, complete with helium balloons, that the entire community attended.

Once the police settle on a likely means of Hasunuma's death, the mystery requires the killer to be identified. Revenge is the obvious motive, but Saori was beloved by her family, their friends, her lover, and pretty much the entire neighborhood. Just when it seems that the police have identified a killer, Yukawa mentions a fact that isn’t consistent with their theory and forces the investigation to reboot. By the novel’s end, everything the police (and reader) think they know is cast into doubt. The truth is out there, but like any good scientist, Yukawa knows that the truth is found by accounting for every fact rather than jumping to conclusions that are consistent with only some of the facts.

Keigo Higashino’s complex plots are among the best in modern mysteries. Nearly every character in Silent Parade, apart from Yukawa and the cops, is a potential suspect. Higashino gives each character, from Hasunuma to Saori to the various suspects, a sufficiently detailed background to explain why they behave as they do. The unfailing politeness of everyone except Hasunuma makes Silent Parade a relaxing departure from American crime fiction. Mystery fans who appreciate a challenge should appreciate Higashino's work.

RECOMMENDED