A Distant Grave by Sarah Stewart Taylor

Published by ‎ Minotaur Books on June 22, 2021

Sarah Stewart Taylor understands the mechanics of storytelling. She tells her stories with fluid prose. That display of talent overcame my reservations about The Mountains Wild, the first book in the Maggie D’Arcy series. It isn’t quite enough to earn a full recommendation for the second book, A Distant Grave.

Maggie is a homicide detective in Long Island. In the first novel, Maggie traveled to Ireland, the home of her ancestors, and solved the disappearance of her cousin twenty years earlier. She made friends with some Irish cops and developed a love interest.

In the second novel, Maggie has planned a vacation to Ireland so she can shag her Irish boyfriend (my interpretation of the trip, although Taylor presents it in a more romantic light). Before she leaves, a man is murdered in a park. Maggie is worried that she won’t be able to take her trip because, it seems, she is the queen of Long Island homicides and therefore indispensable. I found that difficult to accept since Maggie doesn’t seem to have any deductive or procedural abilities that are beyond those of typical police detectives. When she isn’t using her work hours to take care of her personal problems, she’s giving mundane assignments to other cops. The qualities that make Maggie so special are difficult to recognize. In any event, by a happy coincidence, the murder victim turns out to be visiting from Ireland, giving Maggie a chance to combine work with pleasure, although her vacation turns out to be mostly work, much to the consternation of her boyfriend and daughter.

Taylor’s development of Maggie’s character focuses on how much she loves her daughter, how guilty she feels about disappointing her daughter and boyfriend because of her commitment to work, and how she worries that she won’t be able to make a life with her boyfriend because her job is in America and he doesn’t want to leave Ireland. Long distance relationships never work and Maggie should probably understand that, but Taylor’s instinct is mix a romance novel with a crime novel. In romance novels, love conquers all, so perhaps there is hope for Maggie. By the book’s end, I was so tired of Maggie fretting about her woes that I didn’t care. Nor did I care about Maggie’s tedious concern that she can’t be the supermom she wants to be despite telling her teenage daughter at every opportunity how much she is loved. All of that is meant to build characterization, but it isn’t terribly engaging and it seriously distracts from the story’s development. Perhaps insecure moms will have a different take on Maggie than mine.

Maggie is distracting in other ways, as well. She frets about an ongoing threat from a fellow who drove past her house, although that storyline eventually fizzles out, accomplishing nothing apart from giving Maggie another source of anxiety. Maggie frequently feels the need to tell us how her boyfriend smells, presumably to let us know how important everything about him is to his existence. One day he smells like rain and dog. Another day his deodorant smells green and his laundry detergent smells fluffy. Are green and fluffy even scents? It turns out that I don’t care.

The plot relies on too many coincidences. The story is needlessly convoluted. It involves the victim’s work for a humanitarian organization, his experience as a hostage in Afghanistan some years earlier, his rescuer, and a couple of politicians who feel the need to cover things up that, in a time when the public shrugs off scandals, could as easily have been ignored. A related murder occurs while Maggie is visiting Ireland. If her Irish cop buddies had any sense, they would tell her to stay home since her visits portend trouble, but they can’t because she’s just so loveable and perfect, even as she worries that she’s just not perfect enough.

The novel works a perceived social problem into the plot. Babies in Ireland who were born to a woman out of wedlock were given to a Catholic orphanage so the mothers could avoid shame. The babies were shipped to America where they were placed for adoption with Catholic families. Maggie is outraged about this, not because unwanted children were given the loving parents they deserved (which seems like a good thing), but because the children were not told they were Irish by birth. This seems to me to be a failure of the adoptive parents who kept that fact a secret, not a systemic evil that traces to Ireland, but the novel is largely driven by Maggie’s sense that all the players (other than the adoptive parents) were part of a monstrous plot to deprive babies of their Irish identity. In the grand scheme of social problems, I found it hard to share Maggie’s outrage.

So we have a well written novel with an unlikable protagonist and a convoluted plot that depends on unlikely coincidences and misplaced moral outrage. A Distant Grave isn’t awful but to continue reading the series, I would need to care about Maggie D’Arcy. I just don’t, so this will be the end of the series for me. Fans of romance novels that are driven by women who prevail despite their self-doubt might love this series, so as always, your mileage may vary.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

What You Can See from Here by Mariana Leky

First published in Germany in 2017; published in translation by‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 22, 2021

What You Can See from Here takes place in the German village of Westerwald. The story is narrated by Luisa, the granddaughter of Selma and Heinrich. She tells the story in three parts. The first focuses on the unsettled reaction of various villagers to the news that Selma dreamt of an okapi, a dream that always foretells a death. As they near the end of the time during which death is expected to claim one of them, the villagers tell each other truths that cannot later be unspoken.

The second part focuses on Luisa’s relationship with a Buddhist monk from Germany named Frederik who lives in a monastery in Japan. Frederik chats briefly with Luisa on a visit to Westerwald — she tells him every significant detail of her life in a single paragraph — and returns to spend time with her on a longer visit. Frederik gets to know all the villagers while doing his best (or not) to maintain a certain distance from Luisa. Whether the fate that brought them together will allow them to remain together is the novel’s plot driver.

The third part circles back to death, but this time death is presented not as something to fear, but as something to accept if everything goes smoothly, or even if it doesn’t. The love story of Luisa and Frederik is at least partially resolved, although perhaps not in a way that the reader will expect.

Luisa’s complicated family life adds to the novel’s humor. She never knew Heinrich, who built the crooked house in which she lives with her mother. Louisa’s father Peter is always traveling, perhaps in search of his father (a character points out that Heinrich’s death conveniently allows Peter’s search to occur anywhere in the world). Luisa’s mother is constantly fretting about whether she should leave Peter, suggesting an alternate explanation for Peter’s travels (“You can’t stay with someone who is always asking herself if she should leave you.”). She compromises by keeping company with the owner of the ice cream parlor, which isn't a bad choice.

We meet Luisa in her childhood when her best friend Martin is still alive. By the novel’s end, Luisa is in her thirties and the village is tolerating Martin’s father Palm, who has harnessed his demons but not his pain. Whether pain is meant to be endured or resolved is one of the novel’s themes, as reflected in the lives and experiences of several characters. Dr. Maschke believes that Peter suffers from encapsulated pain that is embodied in Alaska, a seemingly immortal dog that is devoted to Peter despite Peter’s rare appearances in the village. Palm learns to deal with his pain by boring villagers with quotations from the Bible. A villager named Marlies cannot bear company, including her own, but the villagers watch out for her despite her rejection of their companionship.

Death is obviously an additional theme, as is love. Luisa’s mother suggests that Luisa has linked them in her mind — that her conception of love is a form of death. She tells Luisa that love and death are “slightly different,” in that “a few people have returned from the kingdom of love.” A character known only as the optician has a secret love for Selma that he cannot reveal because inner voices tell him not to take the chance. He tries to tell Selma of his love in hundreds of letters but never makes it past the first sentence or two, sentences that set up a proclamation he fails to deliver.

Apart from Selma’s dreams of the okapi, little hints of magic appear at significant moments — a quiet stream suddenly roars, a moon shines more brightly than usual. Things fall when Luisa tells a lie. Heinrich’s sister Elsbeth is a source of home remedies (resting your forehead on the forehead of a horse cures headaches) but she has no protection against death.

The story is seasoned with the magic of laughter. I particularly enjoyed the fact that anyone calling Frederik’s monastery needs to engage with six monks, none of whom speak English, before Frederik finally comes to the phone.

The novel approaches questions of meaning and philosophy with tongue in cheek. The optician is obsessed with the question, “Is it true that something can disappear if we try to see it, but can’t disappear if we don’t try to see it?” The question seems very Zen, but Frederik doesn’t know what to make of it. The optician eventually devises an answer that he regards as illuminating. Frederik isn’t so sure, but he’s open to people finding their own path to enlightenment.

What you should do with yourself is the novel’s (and perhaps Buddhism’s) central question. Selma thought that “staying put was always exactly right.” Peter promised to stay put before he decided to travel the world instead. Luisa has always assumed that she would stay put until Frederik tells her that she was made to travel the seven seas — a description of her purpose that Luisa immediately rejects. By the novel’s end, after Frederik and Luisa have been corresponding for ten years, Luisa needs to decide how she wants to live her life.

Readers who love offbeat stories with quirky characters might want to put What You Can See from Here on top of their reading lists. It’s funny, charming, and insightful without making an obvious effort to be any of those things.

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Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza

Published by ‎G.P. Putnam's Sons on June 22, 2021

A mentally challenged member of the Samsal family is murdered while working at one of the gas stations that his family owns. The first two West Windsor Township officers on the scene are Niket Patel and Michelle Wu. Michelle is the mayor’s daughter. Both are rookies and not well trained. As they wonder what to do, Andrea Stern drives into the gas station with a van full of screaming children. As the cops try to tell her that the gas station is a crime scene, Andrea’s daughter contaminates the scene with a stream of pee. Having solved her immediate problem, Andrea returns her daughter to the van and drives away, but only after lecturing the cops about their failure to follow basic procedures to secure the crime scene. She also takes note of clues to which the local cops are oblivious.

Before she became a baby factory, Andrea was on track to be an FBI profiler. She had spent her childhood solving petty crimes committed at school. Unraveling mysteries is the work she felt destined to do. She married a man named Jeff who seemed on track to be a millionaire in his twenties. After an initial success with the FBI that earned favorable publicity, Andrea had four children (with a fifth on the way). Her husband committed crimes of his own, squandering their assets. Now Andrea feels stuck in a life that is the polar opposite of the life she had expected. The chance to solve the gas station murder gives her the lift that she needs.

The plot of this amusing novel demands that Andrea solve the crime, but her investigatory efforts are hampered by her need to keep track of four kids. She’s assisted in her investigation (and sometimes with childcare) by Kenny Lee, an investigative reporter who hopes to restore a career he trashed by fabricating the facts of a news story, and by a collection of suburban moms who call themselves the Cellulitists. Andrea knows that the Samsal kid wasn’t killed in a robbery and wasn’t (despite police-planted rumors) a drug dealer killed by Trenton gang members. She also finds it curious that the Samsal family was denied a permit to dig a hole for a swimming pool, reflecting a suspicious pattern of pool permit denials that have occurred since the township began to expand.

Suburban Dicks is a funny, fast-moving story. Apart from an FBI agent who gives a British caution rather than an American Miranda warning, the story is credible. The plot involves police corruption, a second murder that occurred decades earlier, the history of suburban and small-town bigotry against blacks, and the township’s institutional prejudice against residents with roots in Asia and India. Fabian Nicieza doesn’t lecture readers about America’s issues with race, but he doesn’t pretend that the suburbs are free from racial tension, notwithstanding the suburban attitude that big cities are the source of all crime.

Nicieza gives the characters believable personalities. Conflicts between the mayor and her daughter, between the mayor and her police chief, and between members of the dynasty that has long controlled the police department add to the plot, as does Kenny's willingness to use his friendship with the police chief's son to advance his investigation. Andrea is a fun protagonist. She makes no effort to be a supermom, doesn’t get along with the husband who keeps making her pregnant, but perseveres because children eventually grow up, pregnancies only last nine months, and husbands can always be divorced. In the meantime, there’s a mystery to solve, and it is the mystery that gives her life a rediscovered meaning. I hope Nicieza treats readers to more adventures of his antiheroic mommy. She’s a hoot.

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Shadow Target by David Ricciardi

Published by Berkley on June 15, 2021

Shadow Target is the fourth book in the Jake Keller series. I was indifferent to the first novel and didn’t read the next two. The fourth installment isn’t a bad action novel.

Jake works for the CIA in its “elite Special Activities Center,” meaning he kills people who, in the divine wisdom of the CIA, ought to be dead. He used to be named Zachary but he changed his face and name in response to adverse publicity. Not that paramilitary CIA officers are ever likely to attract favorable publicity.

The novel begins with a plane crash in the Alps. Jake is the only survivor, a tribute to the good luck enjoyed by thriller heroes. Jake crawls into the woods and conceals himself as a helicopter lands. The killers on the helicopter who want to seal his fate are chased away by a rescue helicopter before they can find Jake. When Jake wakes up, he has a dim memory of seeing something that explains the crash but he can’t remember what he saw. He is pretty sure, however, that someone tried to kill him.

As Jake frets about his lost memory and the foiled attempt on his life, he becomes convinced that too many other paramilitary operatives have been dying. His superiors don’t seem to have noticed, or they’ve chalked it up to a dangerous job. Jake decides that someone is deliberately killing CIA agents and that a betrayer in the CIA must be facilitating that project by providing information about agents’ identities and missions. Jake makes it his mission to save his own life and the lives of other CIA agents by learning the identities of the betrayer and the person who is orchestrating the betrayal.

Shadow Target is a standard action novel. In the words of Shadow, the CIA officer who is helping the bad guy, Jake is “the best paramilitary officer I’ve ever seen.” Of course he is. Unlike truly bad action fiction, Jake isn’t infallible or invulnerable, although he’s certainly hard to kill. Like nearly all action spies, he “threads the needle” between “doing what he thinks is right” and doing what he’s told to do. There’s nothing new or particularly interesting in Jake’s characterization. He does, however, have a thing going with a French spy — or at least he did before he changed his name and face and was presumed dead. She’s a bit cheesed off when he resurfaces after a period of being dead, without having sent so much as a postcard. The relationship and Jake’s total inability to understand women humanizes him.

While he’s going about his business, Jake discovers that a fellow named Nikolai Kozlov has a plan to kill a Very Important Person during a London visit. The plan involves an unlikely weapon and opening a window to use it, something that security police are likely to notice, but what the heck. Kozlov has some operatives of his own who are tasked with killing Jake because he’s the only person in the world who is likely to stop the assassination. Naturally, they aren’t up to Jake’s standards. Again, this is standard fare, but Jake’s ability to survive the various attempts to kill him keep the story moving at a good pace.

The plot delivers few surprises, but it does produce some fun action scenes. David Ricciardi’s explanation for the initial targeting of Jake is a bit convoluted but that’s life in the world of modern thrillers. In fact, the reason for Kozlov’s targeting of paramilitary CIA operatives in general is convoluted, in part because Ricciardi uses misdirection to keep the reader (or Jake) guessing. In the end, I was willing to buy into the story for the sake of enjoying the action, even if the plot skates on a thin sheet of credibility.

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The Museum of Rain by Dave Eggers

Published by ‎ McSweeney's Publishing on June 15, 2021

Humans are motivated to act for many reasons. We want to make a profit. We want to create a legacy. We want to impress others. But might there be motivations that are less easily understood? Might we do something just for the sake of doing it? Because we had an idea, no matter how pointless or silly, and transformed the idea to reality for the simple satisfaction of contributing to the human story?

Oisín is 72 years old. When he was young, he began to collect jars of rain from the places he visited them. He placed them on a shelf in the shade of a manzanita tree. He even engraved the words Museum of Rain on a piece of wood to mark the spot. And then, as he got older, he left the project behind. How many projects have we all started and abandoned as our lives moved forward?

Patrick Mahoney has turned 75. On the second day of a family reunion to mark the occasion, the Mahoney adults are hungover and the kids are bored. Patrick suggests that Oisín take the kids to see the Museum of Rain, a three-mile hike that will give the adults time to recover. It takes Oisín some time to remember the museum and a bit more time to be persuaded to take the kids there, but he eventually teaches the kids to make walking sticks and leads them on an adventure to find the lost museum.

Patrick told one of the kids that the Museum of Rain was Oisín’s monument to tears, but Oisín explains that he made the museum because he had the idea and followed it to its completion — or at least, he gave the museum a start as a work in progress before he abandoned it. If we insist on a “dramatic origin story” for every human endeavor, Oisín tells the child, “we deprive our species of the ability to simply conjure an idea. To just make stuff and do things.”

Eggers creates a sense of wonder in the ending, after building tension with Oisín’s fear that, after all these years, the shelf will have rotted and the jars will be broken or long gone. Even if the museum is still there, he suspects that the kids will be underwhelmed by a collection of labeled jars of ordinary water. Without resorting to the supernatural, Eggers infuses the ending with maagic, exploring the miracle that is an idea and how one person’s idea can endure by being shared with people its creator never met. Given the story’s simplicity, the story’s ending is surprisingly profound and moving.

“The Museum of Rain” is a short story. Given the dreariness of most stories collected in annual “Best Short Stories” anthologies, "The Museum of Rain" will certainly merit inclusion. Maybe Eggers won’t allow it to be anthologized since McSweeney’s is publishing it as a pocket book. Whatever a reader must do to acquire it, “The Museum of Rain” is worth finding.

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