Winter Water by Susanne Jansson

Published in Sweden in 2020; published in translation by Grand Central Publishing on December 7, 2021

Winter Water straddles the border between crime fiction and horror. The story begins with a missing child, an overused crime fiction concept that challenges writers, usually without success, to take a fresh approach. Susanne Jansson meets the challenge by using ambiguity to create the suspense that most missing child novels lack. Did four-year-old Adam fall into the ocean and drown? His bucket at the water’s edge and the discovery of his boot in the water lend support to that theory. But Martin, Adam’s father, has been receiving anonymous threats, perhaps related to a property dispute with his neighbor. Is it possible that the neighbor, or someone else, kidnapped the child? And what should we make of other children who have disappeared in the same location and on the same day, January 11, during the last half century?

Martin theorizes that a little girl who drowned in the 1960s is calling other children to join her. He finds some evidence to support that view and even feels the pull himself, heightening the supernatural theme. A woman named Maya who befriends Martin as he struggles with loss and despair pursues the theory that the child was kidnapped. Maya has done some part-time police photography that has fueled her investigative instincts. She uncovers ambiguous evidence to support her kidnapping theory, although she nearly dies in the attempt to prove she’s right.

Uncertainty builds suspense as Martin tries to go about his life during the year following the disappearance, always wondering about Adam and occasionally feeling the temptation to join him if he, in fact, accepted a drowned girl’s invitation to meet her beneath the waves. Maya’s investigation, on the other hand, seems to reach a dead end until new information helps her pull some clues together. Even after Adam’s fate is revealed, suspense continues to drive the story.

The characterization in Winter Water is more subtle than a reader might expect from a missing child story. Martin understandably falls apart, feeling the guilt of failing to prevent his son’s disappearance. His wife holds it together for the sake a new baby until their roles reverse and she falls apart. All of this is handled with admirable restraint. Where an American writer might have turned out horribly weepy scenes, Scandinavian writers seem to take tragedy and depression in stride, regarding them (as they often are) as a natural part of life that can be depicted without melodrama. Maya also gains sympathy in a relationship subplot as her investigation impedes a blossoming romance.

Jansson skillfully blends the conventions of crime fiction and horror stories to keep the reader guessing about Adam for most of the novel. Both theories about Adam's disappearance are plausible (at least for readers who suspend their disbelief in the supernatural for the sake of a good story). Without spoiling the clever plot, I can say that in some sense, both theories are valid. Jansson’s ability to balance the genres should make Winter Water appealing to horror fans and crime fiction fans, or to any reader who enjoys a good story.

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The Women I Love by Francesco Pacifico

Published in Italy in 2018; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on December 7, 2021

Through Marcello, the narrator of The Women I Love, Francesco Pacifico tells us that the novel is an “experiment in how to talk about women.” Talking about women might be easier than talking to them, a skill Marcello has not mastered. He mansplains, even to the extent of telling women what they are feeling. He is more in touch with his own feelings than the feelings of the women he loves, but Marcello’s feelings are difficult to understand. For no obvious reason, he tells us that he has lost “every feeling, every certainty that went into the experience of loving and being loved.” Marcello’s drama stems from jealousy, a strange reaction in light of the ease with which Marcello betrays Barbara, the woman he marries during the course of the novel. The Women I Love has been described as a parody of toxic masculinity in literature, and perhaps toxic is the best way to characterize Marcello’s experiment. Fortunately, the toxin is amusingly weak, much like Marcello.

Marcello is a poet turned editor. Marcello lives with Barbara in Rome and, early in the novel, is splitting his work life between the Milan and Rome offices of his employer. He begins his story with Eleonora, a lover he apparently took in the belief that having a girlfriend on the side is a duty of Italian men. Marcello tells Eleonora that their relationship is based on an excess of passion, not on anything that could be the foundation of a marriage. Still, Marcello seems surprised (or at least distressed) when Eleonora decides it is time to move on. Having convinced himself that Eleonora used him to get her editing job, Marcello naturally believes that Eleonora slept with the boss to get more prestigious editing assignments than Marcello is receiving. In reality, Eleonora simply cares about the content of books more than Marcello, whose is more concerned with promoting books than improving them.

Marcello tells us that Eleonora is the only one of his loves he doesn’t understand. It seems clear, however, that Marcello has made little effort to understood any of the women in his life. Even as Marcello describes the women in his memories, he wonders whether he understands women well enough to write about them. He addresses the male perception that women are incomprehensible by referring to writers like Philip Roth: “In these great males novels, men are restless, they make mistakes, they struggle, and the novel is a pinball machine where the women are bumpers that ring and light up when touched — they’re so striking, so crucial, that they seem like main characters, but they’re really only a function of the man’s little steel ball.”

When he thinks about women, Marcello wonders if he is only rating them from one to ten, judging them as if he were at a cow auction. No reader will accuse Marcello of being woke when it comes to women, although he might deserve credit for recognizing the superficiality of his interactions with them. As a writer, he claims to be making an effort to give them a serious role, to portray them as something more than background characters who support or condemn men. He wants to feel “truly attached to them and stop feeling that they’re only floating shadows.” That is a worthy goal for a writer even if Pacifico addresses it in parody.

Each chapter in The Women I Love is devoted to one of Marcello’s loves. At varying times in his life, Marcello’s thoughts of Eleonora and Barbara are passionate. His relationships with his sister, his mother, and his sister-in-law are platonic, although he’s certain that all men view their brothers’ wives as sex objects (a belief that, in my experience, is not remotely true). He also objectifies a friend’s live-in girlfriend, a woman who occasionally sleeps with his sister. Marcello feels like an idiot for taking so long to realize that his sister is a lesbian, a symptom of his failure to pay much attention to women at all unless he wants to screw them. Marcello gives us biographical details of his mother but then admits he doesn’t know her: “my language is muddled, imprecise — it’s all hearsay.” Although she doesn’t get her own chapter, Marcello’s grandmother also receives some love.

Marcello tells the reader that The Women I Love is “a novel of my memories.” True to its post-modernist form, Marcello speaks directly to the reader, occasionally explaining his textual revisions and stylistic choices, his decision to conceal certain names or details to avoid disturbing friendships after publication (“the enzyme of fiction allows for this: first confess, then conceal”). Sometimes he questions the inaccuracy of his memory; other times he discusses Italian literature.

The Women I Love has nothing approaching a plot, although it does follow Marcello through his late 30s as he gets married, separates, repeatedly changes jobs and his residence, and makes a wrong-footed attempt to rekindle a relationship with Eleonora, perhaps committing a sexual assault by refusing to acknowedge the word "stop." The novel ends abruptly, Marcello apparently having exhausted his observations of the women he loves. The reader might regard some of those observations as insightful. Other observations might just be intended to shock. Marcello rejects the common view that relationship success requires hard work. “What a bourgeois crock of shit,” he writes, “the couple as a business venture, where every day you roll up the shutter door, then roll up your sleeves.” Marcello also rejects the idea of women saving men because, in novels written by men, “a woman who saves someone is a woman who winds up punished on the following page; the role of savior that men apply to woman in some narrative form is our wooden horse, concealing our desire to penetrate and destroy.” The value of The Women I Love is its ability to provoke thoughts or conversation about nuggets like these, regardless of whether the reader ultimately agrees with or lampoons Marcello’s conclusions. For that reason, the novel might be a good book club selection, particularly if the book club has both male and female participants.

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Pay or Play by Howard Michael Gould

Published by Severn House on December 7, 2021

A drug dealer who mixes the language of the street with erudite references to literature and history takes an interest in the death of a homeless man he regards as his doppelgänger. From his study of literature, he knows that if someone disrespects your doppelgänger, “shit is on.” The dealer coerces Charlie Waldo into investigating the homeless man’s death.

The police assumed that the homeless man’s death was accidental, a conclusion that turns out to be unsupported by the man’s autopsy. Since the man was homeless, the police see no reason to question their initial assumption. Before he died, the victim went to legal aid and rambled something about “a hole under the fire.” As Charlie Waldo investigates the death, several attempts on Waldo’s life convince him that there is more to the death than he understands.

Waldo’s primary investigation, however, involves an attempt to blackmail a television judge, the disrespectful and nasty kind of judge (Judge Judy, Judge Wapner) that television viewers seem to crave. A blackmailer is threatening to expose Judge Ida’s involvement in an apparently accidental death that occurred during a frat initiation 35 years earlier. The blackmailer says the death was a murder. While denying her involvement, Judge Ida wants Waldo to find out if there’s any evidence that might link her to the death. After a long investigation built on false starts, digressions, and an uncomfortable expenditure of carbon emissions, Waldo realizes that he has a doppelgänger of his own. The ending is satisfying in its recognition that not all problems can be solved without giving birth to new and different problems.

Readers who have followed this series will know that Charlie Waldo represents quirkiness on steroids. He was a celebrated police detective until he left the force after blaming himself for an unnecessary death. To atone, he has become obsessed with living responsibly. He comes as near as he can to having a zero carbon footprint. He rides his collapsible bicycle wherever he can. To assure that he does no harm to the planet or its occupants, he allows himself to own only 100 Things at any given time. He won’t eat processed foods or drink beverages that have been packaged. All of that makes Waldo an amusing character, particularly when he needs to decide what Thing he can shed in order to possess, however temporarily, a new Thing. Waldo is also a refreshing change from crime novel protagonists in that he rarely finds it necessary to hit or shoot someone.

Followers of the series will also know that Waldo is locked in a struggle with his girlfriend, Lorena Nascimento, who wants him to work full-time for her detective agency. Lorena drives Waldo crazy by purchasing gadgets, particularly her single-serving coffee maker with its incredibly wasteful pods. The conflict heats up in Pay or Play as Waldo’s interest in solving a murder is at odds with Lorena’s belief that accusing her clients of murder is bad for business. Waldo has no interest in money; Lorena is driven by it. Yet her arguments in favor of earning a living aren’t all bad and she clearly loves Waldo. Whether their oil-and-water relationship has any chance of surviving is a question that will encourage romantic readers to keep returning to the series.

The plot of Pay or Play is intricate without becoming convoluted. Each new development challenges the reader to spot the murderers involved in each of the two deaths. As he did in his earlier Waldo novels, Howard Michael Gould has demonstrated his skill in creating clever mysteries with nontraditional characters. The entertainment value is enhanced by Gould’s characterization of Waldo as a man who knows his behavior is bizarre and that his personality is a bit alienating. His desire for redemption may be a sign of mental illness, but Waldo is such a good person that the world would be a nicer place if we all shared his concern with ethical and responsible behavior. He might be a bit extreme in his rigid adherence to owning no more than 100 Things, but his heart is in the right place. That makes Charlie Waldo one of my favorite modern crime novel protagonists.

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Seven Down by David Whitton

Published by Dundurn Press/Rare Machines on November 30, 2021

In 2010, several employees of a hotel in Toronto are recruited by an organization they only know as “the company” and trained for a mission. In 2022, they finally receive the instructions to which they have been trained to respond. One of them creates a diversion in the hotel lobby, although not quite the diversion that was intended. Another retrieves a container of chutney from kitchen storage in the basement and takes it to an upper floor. A bellhop swaps clothes with a man in the elevator who takes the chutney from the woman who retrieved it. Events pile upon events. Each person narrates his or her role to interviewers/interrogators after Operation Fear and Trembling has gone awry. The story is told through their interview transcripts.

Through most of Seven Down, the reader must guess at the significance of the characters’ actions. What is the mysterious organization that recruited the hotel members? What is Operation Fear and Trembling? How and why did it fail? What were the consequences of that failure? What will happen to the participants after their interviews are finished? Some of those questions go unanswered, although the reader is given sufficient information to imagine a variety of answers. A summative document at the end supplies some missing pieces. It also makes an observation that the reader will surely appreciate: Operation Fear and Trembling was a needlessly complex means of attaining an end that could have been achieved much more easily. No wonder it went tits up.

As the reader waits for the missing pieces to be supplied, the meandering interviews reveal the personalities of the recruited employees. Leonard Downey, the bellhop who swapped clothes in the elevator, was an anarchist before he took his hotel job. At the time of the interview, he’s being held captive on an island. As one might expect from an anarchist (or maybe from anyone who is being held captive), he's far from cooperative. But he’s also quite funny as he demands cigarettes and dodges uncomfortable questions and tries to justify his decision to set a police car on fire during a G7 protest and complains that, given his experience with mayhem, the company didn’t give him a more active role than trading clothes with someone on an elevator.

Kathy from Catering, the middle-aged woman who delivered the chutney, had a sexual encounter with another character while they were both carrying out their roles, although neither knew that the other was involved in the operation. Their different perspectives on who initiated the encounter and how it went are amusing. One suspects it was initiated by the woman since she repeatedly propositions her interviewer while complaining about her lackluster sex life.

Rhonda handles security in the hotel. She epitomizes the paranoid members of society who think vaccinations will turn them into zombies. She’s convinced that heavy metals in vaccines have turned her into a walking 5G receiver. An officious and self-involved hotel manager and a systems operator who places the company ahead of her family contribute their own quirks to the dysfunctional cast of characters.

The elaborate plot of Seven Down is really just an excuse to bring together a group of troubled people who gravitate toward the company in the hope that it will supply meaning or excitement or a purpose that their lives are missing. Apart from allowing the reader to occupy the minds of its all-too-human characters, Seven Down offers some observations about humankind that are either perceptive or obvious, depending on how much attention you’re paying to the world. A character notes, for instance, that the pandemic “swept its ultraviolet wand over the earth, exposing for all to see the douchebags and sociopaths who had overrun and debased it.” A riff on “disaster capitalists” who hope to exploit the next human tragedy is also worth considering. “Plagues are the future so let’s use them to make money” is a problematic philosophy.

As a dark comedy, Seven Down delivers more chuckles than belly laughs. Still, the characters have attitude and the plot is too unpredictable to permit a reader to lose interest.

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The Midnight Lock by Jeffery Deaver

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 30, 2021

The Midnight Lock weaves together several intriguing and timely themes. A tabloid publisher buys the rights to scandalous stories and kills the stories in exchange for political favors. A moderator for a YouTube clone needs to decide whether videos telling political lies or promoting violence should be deleted from the site. New York’s mayor, plagued with bad publicity about unsuccessful law enforcement efforts, decides to take the city’s failure out on private contractors rather than blaming the city’s police.

One of those private contractors is Lincoln Rhyme, the famed New York City criminalist who doesn’t let a wheelchair get in the way of solving crimes by analyzing flakes of dust. As the novel begins, Lincoln is being cross-examined in a murder case that he appears to have solved by analyzing six grains of sand. The cross-examination suggests that he was sloppy. The jury wisely decides not to base a murder verdict on six grains of sand. Outraged over unfavorable publicity about cases that the police seem to have botched, the mayor decides to shift the focus away from the city and blames Rhyme for the verdict. He cancels the city’s relationship with Rhyme and, in what seems like overkill, threatens to jail him for obstructing justice if he investigates any further crimes, and to discipline any cop who helps him.

The new rule might make Rhyme’s marital life awkward, given that he is married to Amelia Sachs, a cop who is intimately involved in his investigations. He also works with a team of cops who promptly ignore the edict and help Rhyme pursue The Locksmith, a fellow who picks complicated locks, enters the residences of women who live alone, and gazes at them. The well-founded fear is that The Locksmith will grow bored with gazing at women and will move on to more violent crimes. The reader will learn The Locksmith’s identity before it becomes apparent to Rhyme and Amelia.

It isn’t immediately clear how the family dispute over a publishing empire will play into the story. Imagine a Rupert Murdoch clone who gains a conscience and comes to believe that he should sell his holdings and invest the proceeds in an institute to advance ethical journalism. Hard to imagine, yes, but it’s easy to imagine that his family members will be displeased. Nor is clear how a social media influencer who has the credibility and following of Q will connect to the larger plot. A social media moderator is another key character who stars in a few chapters before the moderator’s role in the story becomes apparent.

Rhyme novels are always interesting. The Midnight Lock has less energy than some of the other books in the series, although it does give an action role to an ex-cop whose heroic exploits might allow him to return to the ranks of law enforcers. The story seems to be winding down long before it ends. That’s always a sign of misdirection. In a contrived ending, we learn that things were not as they seemed, but the surprise ending isn’t likely to surprise many readers. Still, the plot elements fit together nicely and it’s impossible not to learn something new while reading a Lincoln Rhyme novel. This installment isn’t special, but it's entertaining.

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