Deep Sleep by Steven Konkoly

Published by Thomas & Mercer on February 1, 2022

Deep Sleep is a “Russian sleeper network” story, a throwback to the days when spy thrillers focused on villains in Russia rather than China or the Middle East. The story does not end in the final chapter, so readers should be prepared to commit to reading at least one more book if they want to read a complete story.

The protagonist is Devin Gray. He’s a former FBI agent who now works in a private firm called MINERVA. (Other all-cap names of the kind that spy thriller writers love include DEVTEK and CONTROL). Gray’s mother Helen was a long-time operative of the CIA but she lost her job after she came to be seen as “psychotically paranoid.” And here I thought being psychotically paranoid was a job requirement.

Anyway, Helen kidnaps a man named Wilson and apparently kills a deputy sheriff before shooting herself. The reader will see that she didn’t kill the deputy but she definitely kidnaps Wilson and does some killing before she dies.

Gray’s mother had the foresight to send Gray messages that would be delivered in the event of her death. The messages take him to one of the few people who appeared at Helen’s funeral, a former CIA colleague named Karl Berg. From beyond the grave, Helen doles out clues to the location of a safehouse where, after a journey that occupies the first quarter of the novel, Gray and Berg find a room filled with files and surveillance photos.

The evidence that Gray’s mother assembled points to an ambitious Russian project. Not only did Russia place an unknown but large number of sleeper agents in the US back in the Soviet era, it made sure that the agents would breed, producing a second and possibly a third generation of loyal Russian spies. Now, everyone understands that American kids rebel against their parents. Instilling loyalty for Russia in kids who grow up as western materialists seems unlikely. Steven Konkoly tries to overcome that problem by sending the sleeper families to an annual summer camp near Branson, where loyalty to the motherland is reinforced. Kids who don’t get with the program (and parents who stray) end up at the bottom of a lake.

The story isn’t particularly credible but maybe it doesn’t need to be. This is an action story that hinges on surveillance drones and chases and shootouts and exploding helicopters. Credibility is an afterthought. At least Konkoly recognized the unlikely nature of his plot and tried to do something about it. Readers who enjoy the story can pretend he succeeded.

The other person who comes to Helen’s funeral is Marnie Young, a Marine helicopter pilot who is Gray’s good buddy and a potential love interest. Naturally, when it comes time to assemble a group to travel to Branson and check out the summer camp, Marnie tags along. Naturally, her ability to fly a helicopter turns out to be fortuitous.

Nothing much happens in this installment beyond setups and shootouts. We learn about some players in Russia. We meet the team of interchangeable mercenaries assembled by Berg. None of them, and for that matter none of the characters, including Gray, have any hint of a personality. After the action in Branson, the story fizzles out as Konkoly dumps another round of details that will presumably drive the next installment.

This installment is easy to read and the action is moderately entertaining, although there’s nothing in Deep Sleep that thriller fans will not have encountered many times before. Some of the book feels padded, likely because the premise doesn’t warrant multiple books. Maybe I will revise my thinking after (and if) I read the second installment. My guarded recommendation at this point is based on Konkoly's crisp writing style and his ability to hold my interest in a plot that would have been more timely during the Cold War.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

All Was Lost by Steven Maxwell

Published by ‎ Pushkin Vertigo on March 1, 2022

All Was Lost is an appropriate title for a story of desperate actions taken by people who are willing to risk losing everything. The plot is noir on steroids.

Orla McCabe, an Irish transplant to Liverpool, is photographing a crumbling abbey at night when a “lurching figure” leads her to a “shooting box,” a small enclosure used by hunters. She takes photos of a scene that resembles a small-scale death camp when someone shoots at her. Orla drops her camera and driver’s license as she flees. Outside the shooting box, she pauses to take a gun from the hand of a dead man. She also grabs a suitcase full of money that the dead man must have been guarding.

Orla’s impulsive decision raises questions about the morality of theft. In Orla’s judgment, she took money from bad people who would use it for bad purposes. Why should they have money when she struggles as a cleaner, when her husband has a month left on his work contract, when their home has been repossessed and when she has a baby to feed? In Orla’s view, the worst thing about not having money “isn’t that you don’t own things, it's that you don’t own yourself.” The money represents freedom.

News stories soon make clear that, seen in a different light, the money represents the fruits of human trafficking. Orla’s husband Liam doesn’t want anything to do with it. To him, it’s the devil’s money and Orla has cursed their family by taking it. To Orla, the harm caused by the traffickers has already been done. She believes the money will make them better people and will give their daughter the life she deserves. She clings to that belief long after it becomes apparent to the reader that Orla has no obvious way out of the predicament she made for herself.

While the philosophical struggle between Orla and Liam persists throughout the novel, Orla spends most of her time running. She runs from people who want the money and, when one of them finds it, she runs after the money. Her primary stalker is Dolan, who has been tasked by Cy Green with recovering his money. The pursuit leaves death in Orla’s wake and threatens the welfare of her husband and daughter.

As that story unfolds, Cy’s interest in human trafficking has become an embarrassment to the in-law who presides over their crime family. He assigns his son, Millar Sweet, the job of cleaning up Uncle Cy’s mess. The fast-moving action leaves the reader wondering whether Sweet or Dolan will find Orla before they settle scores with each other.

Two cops, Lynch and Carlin, are also on Orla’s trail. Carlin has his own money problems, thanks to loan sharks who are threatening his family. Lynch has a different problem, involving an affair with a married woman he hopes to rescue from a dangerous man. It does not seem that things will end well for anyone in this violent story of temptations and bad choices.

Apart from a couple of children, Liam is the novel’s only innocent character. His flaw is that he is too trusting. Lynch is not entirely innocent, but he at least feels the need to do something good with his life, something unselfish. Orla and Carlin have made their beds, but the reader will worry that they might suffer undue punishment for their sins. Orla might not be admirable, but she is determined and resourceful. That’s enough to make readers care about her.

Maxwell establishes a grim atmosphere with fading light, barking dogs, and abundant blood without slowing the pace of this tight novel. The plot is built on one surprise after another as the short chapters count down from 67 to 0. The penultimate chapter changes everything. Despite the shocks, the story never feels contrived. All Was Lost is a brutal crime novel, the kind of story that isn’t meant for weak stomachs, but it is also an intriguing character study of the choices people make when they feel lost, when temptation bumps against their sense of being crushed by life.

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Defenestrate by Renée Branum

Published by ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing on January 25, 2022

A family superstition underlies Marta’s obsession with falling. She thinks about people who have fallen from great heights and survived. She thinks about Buster Keaton, the undisputed master of falling. She ponders statistics about falls. She might see falling as a metaphor for her own life.

Marta and Nick are twins. Marta’s mother tells Marta that she has always had trouble being close to anyone other than Nick but cautions Marta that she cannot always be her brother’s keeper. Marta and Nick have much in common, including depression and possibly a suicidal ideation. Their mother is steeped in religion, the kind of religion that forces her to disown Nick when he comes out as gay. Their nonconfrontational father devoted most of his time to constructing a village for his model trains. Marta always wondered how that hobby was meant to keep them safe, but Marta is a bit obsessed with safety.

The family superstition — they avoid calling it a curse — began with Jiří, who in 1895 pushed a stonemason out a window in a cathedral tower that was under renovation in Prague. The stonemason may have seduced Jiří’s daughter, although the truth of the story might be quite different. Since Jiří defenestrated the stonemason, family members have fallen from railings or ladders or roofs, as if they cannot resist falling, their “bodies magnetized to the pavement.” Perhaps the family is being held accountable for the stonemason’s death, or perhaps the family curse has more to do with mental illness.

Marta and Nick visit Prague, a city that is famous for throwing men from windows, as if returning to the scene of their ancestor’s crime will help them “make sense of the shape our lives had taken.” Inevitably, Nick falls from a balcony in Prague, saved by the branches of a tree but nevertheless hospitalized. Whether his fall was accidental is ambiguous, although it gives Marta a chance to discuss a famous photograph with a man she meets in a bar. The photo, later made into art by Andy Warhol, is of a woman who landed on a car after jumping to her death from the Empire State Building. As conversations of seduction go, Marta’s needs some work.

The plot concerns Marta’s journey toward health and forgiveness. She drinks too much. She behaves carelessly. She blames (with a certain amount of good cause) her mother for poor parenting. After Nick promises her that he will try to be careful so that he doesn’t fall again, she comes to realize that trying to be careful might be the only promise she can make to anyone, including herself. Careful with herself, careful with her family, careful with her relationships.

The elegant voice that narrates Defenestrate is well suited to the story. The voice is calm and quiet, never reaching toward melodrama, always keeping the story grounded in Marta’s introspective melancholy. Sometimes Renée Branum reaches for descriptions that fail to resonate, but her prose is usually an appealing blend of the evocative and the precise. The falling metaphor is a bit overused; the examples of fall survivalists become redundant. The tales of Buster Keaton are interesting but ultimately add little of substance to the narrative. Small flaws aside, Branum’s confident and controlled narrative offers an intriguing view of a family learning to manage, and perhaps overcome, a perpetual state of self-inflicted crisis.

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Devil House by John Darnielle

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD) on January 25, 2022

Like all writers, true crime writers must make choices about the stories they tell. Maybe they make the wrong choices. Maybe they tell the wrong stories. Maybe they shade truth with fiction. Those thoughts underlie Devil House, a novel about a true crime writer who comes to question his craft.

The novel imagines that two significant crimes occurred in Milpitas. A teen strangled his girlfriend in 1981. Some of his friends were aware of the crime, saw the girl’s body, but said nothing about it. A movie called River’s Edge publicized the crime, raising predictable questions about the apathy of youth and suggesting the decline of civilization. Five years later, a realtor and a potential property buyer were slashed to death with a sword inside an abandoned porn shop. Teens who used the porn shop as a clubhouse may been involved. The people of Milpitas refused to talk about the crime, having suffered enough reputational damage from River’s Edge.

An editor finds the story of the porn shop murders and sends it to true crime writer Gage Chandler, whose first book — The White Witch of Morro Bay — recounted the story of two unarmed students, Jesse and Gene, who broke into the home of a female teacher with the intent to steal her property. The teacher was in the kitchen. She happened to be holding a knife when the boys entered her home. When Gene touched her breast while trying to ease the knife out of her hand, she snapped. After she finished stabbing both kids to death — while they are retreating from the home — she dismembered them in an effort to conceal the crime. The media portrayed the teacher as having groomed the kids with the intent to turn them into a human sacrifice. Chandler’s version of the truth was less sensational.

Chandler is reluctant to take on another book about teens, but he admits that the story of the porn shop murders is intriguing. He moves to Milpitas in 2001, buys the building, and recreates the murder scene because that’s the immersive method that he uses to write his books. Chandler decides to call the murder scene the Devil House. The killer was never charged; his identity remains the subject of conjecture. Or so Chandler tells the reader from time to time. The truth is obscure because, at the end of the first chapter, Chandler reveals that he has decided not to tell the story that he came to Milpitas to tell. In fact, Chandler starts the book by telling the reader that Devil House is not the true crime book he had contracted to write. It is instead “about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates.”

Chandler's reconstruction of the crime follows the owner of the porn shop, a man who is trying to remake his life in the small town, having failed in San Jose. After repeated rent increases, the owner decides to walk away from the store, leaving everything behind, knowing he’ll never get his cleaning deposit back from the landlord he despises.

Chandler then follows the teen who works in the porn shop, a seemingly ordinary kid named Derek who is finding a late high school balance between slacking and planning for an adult life. Derek keeps a key when the owner walks away from the shop. Chandler follows Derek’s friend Seth, an artistic loner who begins the project of remaking the porn shop, repurposing magazine and video covers as the tools of an art project that transforms the store into a haunted house. Chandler follows a homeless kid named Alex who begins to live in the shop, a kid who has some mental health issues and, like so many homeless people, has fallen through the cracks. Derek lets Alex stay in the shop because Derek is a decent kid.

After building a picture of the abandoned porn shop's occupants, Chandler follows his own efforts to turn his new dwelling into a crime scene. He tells of his investigation, his interviews, the documents and pictures he finds on eBay. Eventually he sorts the details into the story of two deaths. But is the story accurate? Can the truth ever be known? Do readers even want to know the truth?

The narrative pulls together several themes. More than once, we see how society throws away people who are homeless or mentally ill or poor or obviously troubled, creating a recipe for violence or despair that could be avoided by recognizing people who need help and helping them.

One chapter consists of Chandler reading a letter from Jesse’s mother, a letter that takes him to task for not telling her story, for leaving the impression that Jesse was a bad kid of her creation. That chapter could be read as an indictment of true crime writing. Even when true crime avoids sensationalism — a rare feat — even when it tunnels down to true causes of crime, it will only tell part of the story, perhaps the least important part. The mother’s lengthy letter is a controlled howl of pain from a parent who did her best and whose worthiness as a mother Chandler chose to ignore.

The final chapter, as Chandler meets up with a childhood friend who briefly lived in Milpitas, explores the malleability of memory and the dubious process of recreating the past. In that chapter, we learn that the story Chandler appears to be telling (we never see the final version) omits important facts about the crime and the killer and changes names while inventing at least one character who never existed. It seems that Chandler took liberties with the “true” part of “true crime” in the service of protecting the innocent. In any event, truth in the modern world is simply what someone chooses to believe. Truth has become the story that best fits our belief system, not the story that is best supported by verifiable facts.

The final chapter also invites discussion of “stand your ground” laws and whether they apply to squatters (they don’t, but some “stand your ground” advocates believe it’s appropriate to use violence against anyone in any location who is perceived as an intruder). The Devil House killer may have seen himself as protecting his castle from intruders. The teacher had a stronger “stand your ground” defense until she went after Jesse, who was trying to get out of the home when she killed him. If she hadn’t hacked him into pieces, she might have been acquitted.

An odd chapter called The Song of Gorbonian is the novel’s only misstep. Retelling a medieval Welsh legend, the fantasy about avenging a father’s death might have been intended to speak to issues raised by the larger narrative, but its attempt to capture an early version of English is a stylistic fail.

Fortunately, the rest of the novel is riveting and unpredictable. Its attention to detail, its focus on characters at the margin, and its philosophical exploration of truth make Devil House an impressive work.

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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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