The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Published in the UK in 2021; published by Atria Books on January 25, 2022

A character in The Appeal knows a secret. That character is murdered to keep the secret from coming out. What is the secret? Which character will die? Who is the murderer? Those questions propel this delightfully unconventional epistolary novel.

A barrister gives a collection of documents — primarily texts, WhatsApp messages, and emails, although police interview transcripts, memos, and a few other documents are later added to the pile — to two law students. He asks them to read the documents without context and to answer some questions: Who committed the murder? Who knew it was going to happen? What three things did the victim tell people before the murder?  Who knew about the murder before the body was discovered? Who has been wrongly imprisoned for the crime? Who of the named people are not who they say they are?

The action surrounds an amateur theater group called The Fairway Players. Martin Hayward, a respected local businessman, chooses and directs the plays. His talented wife Helen plays the female lead. His daughter Paige usually plays a role. His son James is his assistant director. James’ wife Olivia is pregnant with twins so James’ time is limited. When the document dump begins, they are casting for All My Sons.

This production differs from others because Martin must devote his time to raising funds for his granddaughter Poppy, who is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor. Dr. Tish Bhatoa is sourcing experimental drugs from the US, but Martin will need a large sum of money (the total changes from time to time) to acquire them. He eventually does a fundraising appeal with other members of The Fairway Players. The appeal is managed by Sarah-Jane MacDonald, who has fundraising experience.

Samantha Greenwood and her husband Kel are newcomers to the group. They just returned to England from Africa, where they were relief workers. Samantha has some history in Africa with Dr. Bhatoa, who warns Martin that she is not to be trusted. Samantha meets Isabel (Issy) Beck at the hospital where they are both employed as nurses. Issy latches onto Samantha and recruits her (and Kel) to The Fairway Players. Issy desperately wants attention and is slavishly devoted to anyone who gives it to her, but most members of the group have a low opinion of her. Issy lives in a fantasy world and soon imagines that Samantha is her new best friend.

The fundraising takes unexpected turns as a potential donor disappears after asking questions about the miracle drugs that Dr. Bhatoa refuses to answer. An investment manager who promises to multiply the donations apparently disappears with the money. Sarah-Jane and others tell fibs (“Poppy is going blind!”) to encourage others to help with the appeal. Suspicions are formed, accusations are made, and eventually someone dies. The reader soon begins to question every fact related to the fundraiser and later to the murder.

Janice Hallett brings out the personalities of characters through their texts — Dr. Bhatoa is brusque, Issy is clingy, Martin is evasive, Samantha is principled. Each question that the barrister poses might have various plausible answers. The law students change their view of the evidence as they review the documents and acquire more information. The reader will do the same.

The novel is a true mystery, a whodunit mixed with uncertainty about what actually happened that led to the death. The novel’s construction, inviting the reader to tease the truth out of primary source documents, engages the reader’s attention and challenges the reader’s detective skills. Simply because of its structure, The Appeal is among the most innovative and entertaining crime novels I’ve read in recent years.

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Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala

First published in Argentina in 2019; published in translation by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on January 11, 2022

Had Raúl Iriarte been a half inch shorter, he would have avoided military service. Raúl’s father is short but muscular. He laments that Raúl, frail and physically weak, is just a little too tall to remain in Cuba. As soon as Raúl turns 18, Cuba sends him to Angola to support liberation forces in the Angolan Civil War.

Raúl goes willingly because he wants his mother to view him as a man. Yet his mother has long dressed Raúl as a woman so she can pretend that Raúl is her long-dead sister. Raúl has always preferred to dress like a woman. He is small, blonde and blue-eyed, not a typical Cuban. He doesn’t dress as a woman in his military unit, where he feels like a pretend soldier, but other soldiers still call him Marilyn Monroe or Olivia Newton-John. His captain regularly rapes him, supposedly because Raúl reminds the captain of his wife in Cuba. The captain depends on Raúl’s silence, as opposed to his own conduct, to preserve his good name.

Most people in Raúl’s life, including his brother and father, assume that he is gay, but Raúl feels no particular attraction to either gender. Raúl believes he has a gift of prophecy, like Cassandra from Greek mythology. He introduces himself as Cassandra when, before entering the military, he dresses as a woman and goes clubbing. Raúl likes being in the company of women — he gets along with his father’s Russian lover and feels some sympathy for his mother’s devotion to her lost sister — but only while partying with a transvestite friend who accompanies him to clubs does Raúl feel open to express himself.

In Angola, Raúl carries on an internal dialog with the mythical Cassandra. He seems to believe that he once existed as Cassandra, although he understands that others will assume he was influenced by reading The Iliad when he was still “a hypersensitive boy.” He believes he can sense the dead and the ancient gods. He believes he can foresee death, including his own, and his family’s reaction to it.

For such a powerful story, Call Me Cassandra is written in a remarkably gentle voice, Raúl’s first-person voice. Raúl spends his young life thinking about mythology, ultimately constructing one of his own. Given that Raúl’s death is foretold, the story is bleak. It is a story of a young man who cannot live as he chooses, whose gender choices are made in defiance of Cuban society, whose desire to study literature in a university is denied by a Cuban government that sends him to war, and whose freedom to live even a pleasureless life is taken away by a brutal military captain. Raúl accepts his fate but, as the last pages make clear, does not welcome it. Call Me Cassandra illustrates how repressive societies (and even subcultures of toxic masculinity within liberal democracies) destroy the concept of freedom that they claim to hold so dear.

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Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 18, 2022

Way too many thrillers have taken strip clubs as their themes. Usually, they are written from a male perspective. Sometimes, the writing is voyeuristic. Sometimes, the strip clubs exist for atmosphere, as Bada Bing! did in The Sopranos. Often, the stories take as a given that the strippers are performing for crude men as the natural outcome of a harsh life that presents few options. They remind me of Howard Stern interviewing sex workers (“So did your father molest you?”). The stripper-with-a-rough-life-but-a-heart-of-gold is often the extent of character development in strip club thrillers, particularly when (as is usually true) the strippers are collateral or secondary characters. Real Easy departs from the norm by making dancers the central characters and by exploring their lives in realistic detail, avoiding cliches and stereotypes of victimization.

The strip club is apparently in a suburb of Chicago. The first central character is Samantha Lind (stage name Ruby), whose boyfriend Nick reminds her that she is “part boy” when he wants to be mean. She has a boyish body thanks to a misplaced chromosome, but her new breasts make her feel more like a woman. Samantha is the club’s top earner but she’s always willing to give advice to the other dancers when she sees them making stupid mistakes (like drinking with a customer at the bar when she could be selling him dances in the champagne room).

Samantha lives with Nick. She disappears after giving Kimberly (stage name Lady Jade) a ride home, although Kimberly’s body is soon discovered. The killer ran their car off the road, leaving Kimberly’s body in a field and apparently abducting Samantha.

Detective Holly Meylin and her partner Victor investigate Nick and the club regulars who recently had contact with Samantha or Kimberly. Embarrassingly, one of the regulars, Tony Rabideaux, is a cop. Tony seems to have an alibi, as does Dale, the club owner. The dancers regard Dale as strict but reasonably fair. He keeps his hands to himself and is protective of his strippers, provided they earn their keep.

The other central character is a racially mixed dancer named Georgia (stage name Gigi). Georgia wants the club owner to believe that she’s taking care of her sick mother, which was true until her mother died. Now she has a built-in excuse for tardiness or missing shifts. Georgia knows she needs to find a new gig because “you have to be something more than beautiful to make a life for yourself that won’t end in despair.” Echoing that thought, another dancer observes that “women are allowed to feel powerful for ten years, and then they turn thirty and men barely look at them again.”

Like all workplaces, alliances are formed, backs are bitten. Employees help or undermine each other according to their natures. While the dancers have varying degrees of damage in their lives, Marie Rutkoski makes clear that damage does not dictate a profession. Holly, whose husband accidentally left their child in an overheated car and caused his death, has more damage than any of the novel’s strippers.

Real Easy works on multiple levels. Rutkoski’s prose is vivid and graceful. The setting and atmosphere are remarkable. The characters are crafted with a blend of realism and compassion. The plot is almost secondary, given the novel’s other merits, but the whodunit is far from obvious. The solution doesn’t come from out of the blue — a reader who pays attention might guess the killer’s identity before the reveal — but the story is plausible. Tension builds effectively as the plot nears its climax. Real Easy is an excellent novel and the best I’ve read in the strip club subgenre of crime fiction.

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The Runaway by Nick Petrie

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 18, 2022

Peter Ash thrillers always give a fresh twist to a reliable formula. The formula involves an action hero (Reacher is probably the prime example) who roams around, either searching for or stumbling upon wrongs to right. Some action heroes have a sidekick or two (Ash has a friend named Lewis) and some have a significant other (Ash is married to a woman named June) while others roam in solitude, but they all have a loner’s personality: independent, uncomfortable in a crowd, happiest when working out their aggression by laying waste to bad guys. They have generally been damaged by life (Ash suffers from PTSD, not an unusual condition for action heroes who are part of this formula).

At an early stage in The Runaway, Ash stumbles upon a woman named Helene. She took over her mother’s waitressing job at a rural gas station in Montana. Her employer, a deputy sheriff, allowed Helene to live in a trailer in exchange for her labor. The deputy has made plain his intent to rape her when she turns eighteen. She has sex with a transient who is working a temporary job in the area, but he leaves her behind when he moves on to his next job. When a good-looking and charming stranger stops at the gas station for a bite to eat, she empties the cash register and persuades the man to take him with her.

Roy Wiley turns out to be a burglar and a serial killer. With a gang of three, he burglarizes summer homes in Colorado and high-end residences in a nine-state area. By the time Helene figures out that Roy is a criminal, she’s married to him. By the time she figures out he’s a killer, she’s pregnant. When she announces her desire to end their relationship, her pregnancy is the only thing that keeps her alive. She knows she’s trapped and she knows Roy will kill her when he does the math and figures out that the baby isn’t his.

Helene is making a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to flee when Ash finds her. The rescue is short-lived. Roy and his gang chase Ash and reclaim Helene. The story follows Ash’s effort to track down Helene, sometimes with the assistance of Lewis and June and a tough woman named Bobbie who gets dragged into the plot when Ash tries to steal her truck.

Bobbie is a strong, sympathetic character who, like Helene, has been wronged more than once in her life and has learned to survive. Helene is a complex character who does what she needs to do to survive. Nick Petrie invites the reader to consider the moral question of just how much leeway a victim like Helene should be given when she harms others to save herself. Helene isn’t necessarily a bad person but she certainly isn’t the best person she could be. She’s far from helpless but she’s also far from innocent. How readers might react to her is up to the reader. Petrie deserves props for creating that kind of ambiguity in a crime victim.

While the plot has familiar elements, it isn’t a typical “serial killer kidnaps an innocent victim” story. The plot takes interesting detours as Ash tries to catch up with Roy, while the characterization of Helene helps the novel stand apart from typical serial killer stories. The swift pace is suitable to an action novel, but the story transcends action. This is a smart novel about people in difficult situations making hard choices.

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Quantum of Nightmares by Charles Stross

Published by ‎ Tordotcom on January 11, 2022

The latest Laundry Files novel departs from the usual theme of metahuman intelligence officers saving England from demonic threats. The three interwoven plot threads involve a nanny who has been tasked with kidnapping the four bratty kids of parents who are attending a summit for state-licensed superheroes, a sorceress who discovers that she inherited her boss’ cult after she made her boss disappear, and a supermarket that saves labor costs by animating employees made from meat.

The nanny is Mary MacCandless, who does not appreciate being mistaken for Mary Poppins. Mary’s purse holds far more than it should, including a variety of weapons, but the four kids have powers of their own (one controls plants, another brings toys to life) and are more than a match for Mary. It seems you can’t take metahuman children anywhere, at least if you don’t want the place you visit to be destroyed.

The sorceress is Eve, the executive assistant of Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Eve discovers after making Rupert disappear that she is the heir to his financial empire. Rupert owns an island in the Channel Islands, where he was leading a cult that gains power through human sacrifice. By using an email service from the afterlife, Rupert has instructed his acolytes to sacrifice four metahuman kids. The kids, of course, are Mary’s kidnap victims, although she didn’t realize when she took the job that human sacrifice was on the table. To her credit, that knowledge gives Mary some moral qualms. It’s one thing to kidnap but a much different thing to disembowel.

Eve’s brother Imp has the ability to push people toward decisions that Imp wants them to make. He leads a gang of metahuman criminals, although they spend most of their time playing video games. Eve invites Imp to the island, where they discover the sinister details of Rupert’s cult. Eve also discovers Rupert’s plan to buy a store called Flavrsmart, where a butcher has just been fired for having sex with an effigy he assembled from meat. He’s good at his job, but there are some work rule violations that HR just can’t overlook.

Much of the plot revolves around Flavrsmart’s participation in a “compulsory remedial work placement scheme for persistently non-entrepreneurial dependents — ‘useless eaters’ as the Prime Minister calls them.” The employees are given a mask to wear that projects a computer-generated face and interacts with customers, leaving the employees with nothing to do but stand and walk. The store is taking the government’s concept to a higher level by replacing living employees with dead ones — or just sacks of meat that have shaped into human form (“meat puppets”).

As always, Charles Stross pokes fun at Thatcherism and the conservative tendency toward authoritarianism. Still, Quantum of Nightmares is less political than some Laundry Files novels. It’s also funnier than most. While there is always a degree of playfulness in Laundry Files stories, some take supernatural threats to the planet more seriously than others. Stross added superheroes to the Laundry Files universe several years ago. Their appearance typically signals a lighter approach to his storytelling. This one takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to its over-the-top material.

My favorite Laundry Files novels feature Bob Howard. Most of those novels accept the absurdities of the Laundry Files universe at face value and work as well-told action/adventure stories. Quantum of Nightmares is nevertheless so carefully plotted, so goofily gruesome, and so filled with amusing characters that I have to recommend it. The novel is so far outside the mainstream for the series that readers should be able to understand and enjoy it as a standalone, even if they haven’t read any previous Laundry Files novel.

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