Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka

First published in Japan in 2010; published in translation by Overlook Press on August 3, 2021

Kotaro Isaka brings a playful sensibility to crime fiction. Bullet Train follows a number of murderous characters through a complex plot, but Isaka balances the grimness of crime with the amusing oddities of human behavior.

As the title suggests, the story takes place on a train. Two passengers, Lemon and Tangerine, were hired to recover the kidnapped son of crime boss Yoshio Minegishi. Their second and third priorities were to recover the ransom money and to kill the kidnappers. They board the train with the son, having accomplished all three objectives. Unfortunately for them, little time passes before the son dies of an unknown cause. To compound their trouble, a fellow named Nanao has been hired to steal the suitcase full of ransom money. He snatches the bag, but his lifetime of bad luck makes it impossible to disembark with the bag before someone else takes it.

The novel’s other key element involves an eleven-year-old boy named Satoshi “The Prince” Oji. A personification of evil, the Prince has mastered the art of manipulating adults and other kids to do his bidding. Killing and torture are not an issue for the Prince, although he typically forces others to do his killing for him. Yuichi Kimura boards the train to kill the Prince because Kimura believes that the Prince is responsible for his six-year-old son’s fall from a building and the son’s ensuing coma. Kimura quickly becomes the Prince’s captive.

The train is largely empty as it journeys from stop to stop. Most of the passengers are killers. They are familiar with each other by reputation, including two late arrivals who had retired from the game before circumstances compel them to prove that their senior status hasn’t slowed their wits or determination.

The rising body count assures that the plot moves as quickly as the train. While the plot is fun, the novel’s characters account for much of the reading pleasure. Nanao is certain that he travels under a cloud of bad luck. Kimura has been trying to recover from alcoholism since his son’s fall and blames himself for his son’s fate, in part because Kimura’s father regards him as worthless. Lemon is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine while Tangerine is a serious reader of fiction. The Prince asks nearly everyone he meets why it is wrong to commit murder and is never satisfied with their answers. Only the grandfather who appears near the novel’s end delivers a thoughtful answer to the question.

Who killed Minegishi’s son? Who hired Nanao to steal the bag of money and why? Can any of the adults outsmart the eleven-year-old Prince? Bullet Train eventually provides satisfactory answers to all those questions. Mystery and crime novel fans should enjoy the clever plot, but the quirky characters make Bullet Train stand apart from the self-impressed heros and cartoon villains who populate crime novels that readers in the West usually encounter.

RECOMMENDED

All's Well by Mona Awad

Published by ‎Simon & Schuster on August 3, 2021

The first several chapters of All’s Well made me question my willingness to endure the pathetic protagonist for an entire novel. In later chapters, the protagonist transforms from pathetic to wicked. A wicked protagonist is more interesting than a pathetic protagonist. The more wicked she became, the more I was hooked on the story.

Miranda Fitch is a stage actor — or she was until, while playing the role of Lady Macbeth, she took a tumble off the stage and was hospitalized for back and hip injuries. Miranda regards her finest moment as playing Helen in All’s Well that Ends Well. Miranda sometimes believes she is Helen although, in true Shakespearean tradition, identity confusion becomes a common occurrence as the story unfolds.

No longer capable of performing on stage and barely capable of existing, Miranda takes a job as a theater director at a small college. She fudges her credentials — she’s never actually directed a play — but she leaves much of the day-to-day work to Grace while she lays on the floor, trying to endure her constant pain. When Miranda walks, she drags one leg like an anchor. Her physical therapy sessions only increase her pain. Various doctors and healers have proposed treatments that have no positive impact, leading her mental health provider (and perhaps the reader) to suspect that the pain is all in Miranda’s head. I’m not sure whether Mona Awad wants the reader to believe the pain is real. From Miranda’s perspective, at least, it is real enough, but Miranda’s perceptions are not entirely reliable.

Miranda’s students want to perform Macbeth. Miranda has settled on All’s Well that Ends Well. A young woman named Brianna who always plays the lead by virtue of having wealthy parents who spoil her (and who contribute to the college) leads a rebellion in favor of scrapping All’s Well in favor of the Scottish play. When college administrators pressure Miranda to relent, she goes to a bar to drink her troubles away. There she meets three men who somehow know her name, who know of her desire to direct All’s Well, and who insist that they support her effort because they all “want to see a good show.” Miraculously, when one of them helps her to her feet after another tumble, her pain and disability seem to be receding. Soon she is cured, perhaps better than she ever was.

Are the three men witches? Is Miranda? How about the young woman who takes the role of Helen after Brianna becomes afflicted with the same kind of pain that once troubled Miranda? The novel inspires more questions than it answers. All we know is that people who give Miranda a hard time (including her physical therapist) seem to take on Miranda’s pain and infirmities.

Cause and effect are difficult judge in a novel that adopts the Shakespearean reality of witchcraft. Miranda’s unreliable perception of reality also makes it difficult to know whether the events we read about are only occurring in Miranda’s addled mind. As the novel progresses, her perceptions seem increasingly distant from those of everyone else, including her belief in her own glowing beauty after she comes to rehearsal in a seaweed covered dress, having (she is certain) slept in the sea. She frequently mistakes the ex-con set designer with whom she is sleeping for her ex-husband, although she is the only one who notices a resemblance. Theatrical performances strike her as brilliant that others regard with less enthusiasm. So the reader can’t quite trust Miranda to provide an accurate narrative, but where the truth might lie is never quite clear. Perhaps only the witches know.

All’s Well, like its namesake play, is both a comedy and a tragedy. It is more successful as a comedy. Awad’s dark humor works best when she mocks Briana, a child of privilege whose sense of entitlement encourages her to believe that the dean will believe her when she accuses Miranda of witchcraft. The tragic elements draw upon magic and delusion to transform Miranda into a bad person, or a person who thinks she’s bad, apparently to teach her that it’s better to be good. But Miranda wasn’t a bad person to begin with. At worst, she suffered from a psychosomatic illness that made her a drag to be around. At best, she actually suffered chronic pain that had a physical but undiagnosed cause. The point of Miranda’s delusions is one I could never find.

In addition to the novel's comic moments, I appreciated Awad’s portrayal of Grace as Miranda’s enabler, a false friend who encourages Miranda’s belief in her own pain to undermine her. It is satisfying to watch Grace and Briana take their falls, even if the degree of Grace’s fall is magnified by Miranda’s delusion. Yet by the end, all’s well, and it doesn’t seem that Grace or Briana have learned anything from their experiences. Maybe the experiences only occurred in Miranda’s mind so they had nothing to learn. Who knows?

All’s Well offers a bit of fun for readers who want to catch and interpret allusions to Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespearean themes. Yet Shakespeare made strangeness work — there are allusions here to The Tempest, a brilliantly strange play — while Awad offers a strange blend of magic and delusion that doesn’t always seem to have a point. Still, the story’s energy and humor, its transformation of Miranda from a pathetic character to a wicked one (before she apparently renounces her deal with the devil), and its moments of sharp humor give All’s Well enough good moments to offset the confusion caused by the novel’s ambiguous nature.

RECOMMENDED

Cause of Death by Jeffery Deaver

Published digitally by Amazon Original Stories on July 29, 2021

Patience “Pax” Addison travels quite often to do charity work, leaving behind her husband, a history professor named Jon Talbot. Jon gets a call telling him that Pax died in a car accident. Jon sees a man lurking in the woods during Pax’s funeral. When a police detective wants some additional information from Jon for the accident report, Jon wonders why a detective is filling out accident reports. When Jon learns that Pax’s phone and computer were not recovered at the accident scene, the circumstances of Pax’s death suddenly seem suspicious. He travels to the scene with the detective and finds evidence suggesting that there might have been more to the accident than hitting a deer.

The plot will obviously turn the history professor into a detective — a role that, in Jon’s opinion, history professors play every day. His investigation makes him wonder whether his wife was having an affair and whether her lover might have killed her. The lurking man is apparently following Jon, perhaps with nefarious intent. Jon’s investigation and the death of someone who might have been involved in the accident make the police wonder whether Jon might have killed Pax. An experienced crime fiction reader will suspect that the apparently unconnected drowning of a woman must be related to the plot or it wouldn’t be in the story.

As the reader ponders whether Jon’s theory (or possibly the police detective’s suspicion about Jon) might be true, Jeffery Deaver introduces a plot twist and a bit of action that leads to a surprising resolution of the mystery. Unlike many modern crime novels, the surprise is credible. Not particularly likely, but I can live with unlikely for the sake of a good story. As Deaver often does, he tells a good story here. The happy ending isn’t forced, in part because Jon will never be happy about the death his beloved wife, even if she kept some secrets from him.

The story is short; longer than the usual definition of “short story” but shorter than the usual definition of “novel.” It probably falls on the border between novelette and novella. Since Amazon hasn’t priced it as a novel, length will probably matter only to readers who only want to invest in books that take more time to read.

RECOMMENDED

Unthinkable by Brad Parks

Published by Thomas & Mercer on July 27, 2021

Unthinkable is a suspense novel/thriller that employs themes often explored by science fiction writers: the nature of time, whether the future is predetermined (perhaps because there is no meaningful distinction between the future and the past), and whether the exercise of free will makes it possible to change the future. Brad Parks splits the baby in half by positing that it is, in fact, possible to change the future, but only if the change is made by someone who can see the future. The rest of us are powerless and must accept that our futures are already written and whatever we do is what we were always going to do.

The nature of space-time and the question of free will are fascinating topics that Parks dances around with just enough dance steps to set up his thriller plot. Don’t expect the novel to be informed by a deep (or even coherent) theory of time. This isn’t a science fiction novel. If it were, it wouldn’t be a good one. This is instead a thriller that makes use of a science fiction theme. Just as it isn’t a good science fiction novel, it’s a mediocre thriller.

An accomplished lawyer named Jenny Welker is pursuing her career while the less accomplished lawyer to whom she is married stays home and raises their two kids. Jenny is bringing a massive lawsuit against a power company based on statistical evidence that the company’s air pollution is responsible for a pocket of cancer victims. Since lawsuits of that nature are expensive and difficult to win, her firm (which doesn’t seem like the kind of firm that cares about injury victims) is uncertain that she should continue to pursue it.

Jenny’s husband, Nate Lovejoy, begins the novel by being kidnapped. His kidnapper tells him that a wealthy man named Vanslow DeGange has the power to see the future. DeGrange formed a shadowy organization to carry out his various plans to change history. Thriller writers love shadowy organizations. This one is called the Praesidium. Nothing good can come of a shadowy group with a name like that. Nor is anything good likely to come from a novel that imagines the existence of yet another conspiratorial group with a pretentious name.

Nate is told that DeGrange has foreseen that Jenny will conjure up some brilliant new legal theory to win the case against the power company, creating a precedent that will allow every power company to be sued, a dire result that improbably makes global warming worse and leads to countless deaths. Naturally, the only way to save all those lives is to kill Jenny. And since DeGrange has seen the future, he knows that the world can only be saved if Nate kills Jenny. Why Nate? Because that’s how DeGrange saw it coming down. About half the novel is spent convincing Nate that DeGrange really can see the future and Nate really will kill Jenny. To give him an extra incentive, the Praesidium promises to kill his kids if he doesn’t kill his wife.

That tortured setup is supposed to explain why Nate doesn’t instantly go to the FBI and to Jenny to report this nonsensical threat. Instead, Nate tries to get to the bottom of the Praesidium because of course he does. That’s what thriller protagonists do. Eventually, Nate does get to the bottom of a conspiracy that proves to be easily unraveled and a little silly. But before that happens, we’re treated to the inevitable “will he or won’t he kill his wife?” moment. I won’t spoil it, but you know the answer already.

Brad Parks has written some decent books but he’s also written novels that, like this one, are just so contrived that they never create the sense of realism that is needed to generate suspense. I get the sense that he pitched this novel as “a man has no choice but to kill the wife he loves,” hears “that’s great, go for it” in response, and then writes himself into a corner to make it work. It doesn’t work. I have no problem with Parks’ writing style, but I have a huge problem with a concept that leads to a predictably climactic moment before fizzling out entirely over the last hundred pages.

NOT RECOMMENDED

How to Find Your Way in the Dark by Derek B. Miller

Published by Mariner Books on July 27, 2021

Billed as a “Sheldon Horowitz novel,” How to Find Your Way in the Dark features the elderly protagonist of Norwegian by Night during his tween and teen years. Beginning in the years before America’s entrance into World War II, Derek Miller’s novel focuses on Jewish boys who can’t understand why Americans of all religions aren’t asking their government to join the fight against Hitler. The story follows Sheldon from the age of eleven until his early adulthood, when America has finally entered the war and the country seems on the brink of confronting its own history of antisemitism. The novel’s social and political content serves as a background to a coming-of-age crime story about a boy who dreams of revenge for his father’s death.

Sheldon’s mother burned to death in a movie theater in Hartford. His father Joseph blamed himself for his wife’s presence in the theater, guilt that Sheldon believed his father did not deserve. Sheldon learned to hunt and shoot from his father. They made a living selling pelts to the Krupinski family, whose members skimmed the proceeds by lying about the money they received from buyers. Joseph knew he was being cheated but didn’t want to make waves. The consequence of not making waves is one of the novel’s themes.

The Krupinskis were cheating a mob family as well as Joseph. In the novel’s opening pages, Joseph borrows a truck from the Krupsinskis. A mob killer mistakes Joseph for a Krupinski and runs him off the road. Sheldon walks away from the accident, but his father dies. Getting revenge against the driver becomes young Sheldon’s mission in life.

Now an orphan, Sheldon goes to live with his father’s uncle, who is raising his son and daughter on his own. Abe and Mirabelle are both a bit older than Sheldon but they get along with him. Sheldon’s best friend, however, is Lenny Bernstein, whose plan in life is to make money as a comedian.

When Sheldon is fifteen, he and Lenny con their way into summer jobs as bellboys in a fancy Catskills resort. Lenny tries out his brand of anti-Nazi humor at various venues before Jewish audiences, earning lots of applause and laughter before he’s fired for telling political jokes instead of one-liners. In the background, albeit almost as an afterthought, Abe moves to Canada where he can enroll in the RAF and fight Nazis.

The plot gives Sheldon a chance to avenge his father’s death through a clever series of crimes at the resort. Sheldon’s scheme puts him at odds with Mirabelle, who indulges her desire for the good life by visiting the resort with a man Sheldon instantly loathes. The story combines humor and suspense as Sheldon tries to gain revenge without being murdered. When Sheldon moves to New York a few years later, revenge comes back to bite him, placing him in peril again.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark has been compared, at least in its blurbs, to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I had the sense that Miller intended to invite that comparison. The plots are entirely different but Miller’s story of young Jewish males on the East Coast during the pre-war years assures that the novels share certain themes. Chabon’s book is more nuanced than Miller’s in its depiction of American attitudes during the pre-war years, although Miller does give older Jewish characters the opportunity to explain their reluctance to work more aggressively to influence anti-Hitler opinion prior to Germany’s declaration of war against the United States. Chabon’s novel also creates a more carefully defined sense of American history that Miller’s.

While Miller’s book isn’t as remarkable as Chabon’s, few books are. If Miller’s novel comes up short, it is only by comparison to a Pulitzer Prize winner. Miller’s characters are sympathetic, the story is entertaining, and the sociopolitical background, while a bit heavy-handed, never threatens to overwhelm the storytelling.

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