House Standoff by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on April 6, 2021

In an earlier Joe DeMarco novel, DeMarco had a fling with Shannon Doyle, who abandoned her earlier life to write a novel. DeMarco thought their relationship might turn into more than a fling, but Shannon was chasing her dream and the dream led her to the west coast. DeMarco works as a fixer for a congressman and has no idea what he would do if he left that job. Besides, he’s happy to have a job that lets him spend more time golfing than working. Leaving D.C. isn’t in his immediate future. That’s good news for DeMarco fans.

At the beginning of House Standoff, DeMarco reads in the newspaper that Shannon was murdered in Wyoming. He pulls some strings with Wyoming’s congressman and learns that the local Sheriff’s deputy investigating the death believes that Shannon was murdered by a random trucker who entered her motel room and stole her laptop. DeMarco regards that theory as unlikely. He travels to Wyoming to pursue an investigation of his own, or at least to make a nuisance of himself until the deputy tries harder to solve the crime.

House Standoff is a good book for whodunit fans. DeMarco develops several suspects who might have wanted Shannon dead. Shannon had been gossiping with locals to develop a sense of atmosphere for her new book. She learned about an affair that would be troublesome if it were exposed. A jealous wife suspects Shannon of having an affair with her husband. And Shannon knew the secret of a woman who lives across the street from the motel, a woman who claims to have witnessed a female entering Shannon’s room shortly before she was murdered.

Another plot thread involves a wealthy and influential rancher who is at war with the BLM because he shares the common belief that, as a member of the public, all public land belongs to him. He doesn’t believe he should be required to pay grazing fees when his cattle are on public land. Not long after the rancher and a BLM agent were in a standoff, the BLM agent was shot in the back. DeMarco uses his unconventional approach to problem solving to gather evidence against the killer. (That part of the story, Mike Lawson reveals in an afterword, was inspired by an actual armed standoff in Wyoming. The prevalence of libertarian characters who believe that problems are best solved with guns was probably inspired by Wyoming’s existence.)

The whodunit reads like a classic mystery. Lawson develops the suspects in a fair amount of depth, revealing their potential motives while giving the reader reason to question whether they are likely to have committed a murder. The solution is surprising, all the more so because for all of the nosing around that DeMarco does, he has little to do with solving the crime.

Most of the characters, including an FBI agent, view DeMarco as ruining lives by meddling in people’s secrets. DeMarco doesn’t have much sympathy for the lives he might have ruined, although he does try to mitigate the damage. I like DeMarco because he’s shady but fundamentally decent. The same could be said of most of the murder suspects, although they fall on various points along the continuum between purity and corruption.

Lawson has hit his stride with the recent DeMarco novels. House Standoff is the latest in his series of beach reads that have a deceptive amount of depth.

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Northern Heist by Richard O'Rawe

First published in Ireland in 2018; published by Melville House on April 6, 2021

Northern Heist begins with the planning and execution of a bank robbery and ends with two trials. James “Ructions” O’Hare faces a criminal trial for masterminding the bank robbery. Tiny Murdoch faces an IRA court martial for misusing his position. From the robbery through the trials and at all points in between, Richard O’Rawe tells an absorbing and convincing crime story.

The robbery is conceived by Ructions and his uncle, Johnny “Panzer” O’Hare. The plan requires Ructions to have an affair with Eleanor Proctor, whose husband Frank is a Belfast banker. Ructions has a girlfriend named Maria but won’t let that stand in the way of the robbery. As Panzer notes with pride, Ructions has “a flair for handling the women.” From Eleanor, Ructions will obtain a schedule of staff rotations. Then their hired guns will kidnap two trusted bank employees who are scheduled to work together and will hold their families hostage while the employees give them access to the vault. One empty vault later and the O’Hares will be wealthy men.

The plan calls for Eleanor to be killed when she’s no longer useful, as she’s the only loose end who can identify Ructions. The plan takes a detour when Ructions falls in love with Eleanor. Another glitch arises when Murdoch suspects that Panzer is up to something. Murdoch taxes crimes on behalf of the IRA and he’s convinced that Panzer has committed crimes without paying the tax. Murdoch has long wanted to make trouble for Panzer’s son Finbarr, a suspected pedophile, and has long wanted to acquire Panzer’s farm. Using the IRA as a smokescreen, Murdoch launches a scheme to accomplish his goals.

Character motivations and dialog have an authentic feel. The crime’s intersection with the IRA gives the plot a unique twist. In contrast to most modern American crime novels, the crime that O’Rawe develops is simple and credible. The story’s credibility isn’t surprising. As a former IRA bank robber, O’Rawe understands his subject matter. At the same time, the plot unfolds with sufficient complexity to keep the reader guessing at what might happen next. This is O’Rawe’s debut novel, but it is executed with the sure hand of a master craftsman.

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The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin

Published by Harper on April 6, 2021

The Night Always Comes is a story of snowballing woe. At the age of thirty, Lynette is a fundamentally decent person who has, so far, survived a troubled life. She has anger management issues. When she was young, she tried to commit suicide. She left home to avoid being assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend. Her unstable mental health resulted in a hospitalization. Her choice of men has not been healthy.

The Portland Lynette knows is changing, but so is Lynette. She feels a darkness inside her that she is learning to keep contained. She takes care of her mentally disabled brother. She tries not to hurt people and she regrets the pain she has caused. Her friend Shirley tells Lynette that “you never give up, you’ve got a good heart, a damaged heart, but a good heart, and you want to do good.” That pretty well sums her up.

Lynette has made serious efforts to clean up her life. She works hard at a bakery although she earns extra cash through prostitution. She saves money because she wants to help her mother buy the crappy house that they’ve been renting. Despite soaring property values, the owner is willing to give them a deal. Lynette is sure they’ll never find a nearby dwelling that they can afford to rent if the owner sells it to someone else. The novel’s central conflict arises when Lynette learns that her mother is having second thoughts, or is only now sharing her thoughts, about the family’s future.

Lynette and her mother have long and difficult conversations during the novel’s two-day span. Lynette’s mother uses her constant exhaustion as an excuse to avoid unpleasant discussions, but Lynette and her mother eventually air their grievances and may, for the first time, begin to understand each other. Lynette might not be able to understand her mother’s selfishness, but her mother has been through a good bit of pain, some of it inflicted by Lynette during her teen years. Lynette’s mother is depressed, on the verge of giving up because she’s sure her life will never be better, no matter what she does. She has an irrational resentment of street people because, in her view, they don’t need to pay rent and they get free health care. Lynette, by contrast, sees the possibility of a better future that her mother refuses to embrace.

The story takes Lynette into some hairy situations. She steals a car, not to keep it but because its owner pissed her off. She steals a safe to collect money from a friend who refuses to repay a loan. She enlists the aid of a former boyfriend who tries to rip her off. She acquires some drugs and tries to sell them to a dealer who tries to rip her off. Lynette’s resourcefulness and determination keep her alive as she jumps from one precarious moment to another, yet it seems like only a matter of time before her actions catch up with her.

Willy Vlautin’s prose combines grit and elegance to shine a spotlight on Portland’s underbelly. While gentrification is moving the poor and the drug addicted out of their old haunts, the gentrified are seen only from a distance. Apart from a scene with a finance wizard who has been paying Lynette for sex — he dumps her when she asks him for free advice — people with money and stable lives occupy a world that does not welcome people like Lynette.

The plot serves to keep the story moving, but it is secondary to Lynette’s confrontations with her mother. Their dialog reflects the hesitancy of two people who never learned how to talk to each other, who don’t believe the other really wants to listen. The reader sees both characters in depth, two damaged women who have damaged each other. It is easy to feel sympathy for both of them, although it is easier to cheer for Lynette, simply because she hasn’t given up. By the novel’s end, Lynette doesn’t know where her life will go — no one does — but she knows she needs to take control of it. The reader can only admire her for persevering.

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How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Published by Random House on March 9, 2021

How Beautiful We Were tells a sorrowful story from multiple perspectives. The story is of Kosawa, an African village that has survived multiple challenges imposed by the outside world. The villagers avoided the Europeans who came with chains to snatch slaves for Americans. The villagers listened politely to missionaries who threatened them with damnation if they did not accept the white Spirit, but chose not to worship a Spirit who would “throw us into a fire if we hadn’t done anything to offend it.” Europeans arrived to take young men at gunpoint to work in rubber plantations, wiping out a generation. After the demand for rubber abated, villagers learned to live with Europeans and their strange notions of money and religion, in part because Europeans were less often visiting “not to befriend us but to make us do whatever it was they wanted us to do.”

The village’s latest ordeal involves an oil company called Pexton. The national government gave Pexton land that is adjacent to the village. Pexton has been drilling for oil and fouling the river with runoff. Village children are dying after drinking water contaminated by spillage. Attempts to negotiate with Pexton have resulted in smiles and promises of future action that never come to fruition. When a few villagers try to take matters into their own hands, fourteen villagers are massacred by soldiers. When a journalist tells an American audience about the oil company, their country’s president deports the journalist for hurting the president’s image. Villagers who dare to criticize the president are executed.

Five chapters are narrated by five key characters. Yaya is a grandmother and widow, the mother of Sachel, who lost her husband Molabo when he decided to travel to the capitol and ask for the government’s help. Tribal tradition prevents Sachel from taking another lover, although it is a tradition that Sachel longs to break. Yaya no longer believes in any tradition that binds women to the demands of men. She also comes to understand that traditions of secrecy might bind a village while destroying its inhabitants.

Sachel has a daughter named Thula who becomes the novel’s central character. Thula’s sister gets a chapter to describe life from a local perspective. Thula escapes the boundaries of Kosawa when she goes to America to pursue an education. She becomes a social justice warrior, writing letters that inspire the youth of her village to sabotage Pexton, much to the chagrin of village elders who worry about the consequences of protest. Thula preaches nonviolence but some of the village youth choose not to be limited by Thula’s vision. Whether they make the right choice is for each reader to decide.

Thula’s experiences in America are enriching, as is her relationship with the deported journalist, but they make her yearn for home. She has grown up eating savory dishes: pepper soup with goat meat, land snails with tomato sauce and rice. The cuisine to which she is exposed in New York has its merits, but it isn’t home cooking. Thula is therefore happy to return home, where she is granted a teaching position because the government needs people who are well educated. Thula’s goal is to inspire students and citizens to replace the dictator with a democratically elected government, but the government doesn’t worry about her because, after all, she’s just a woman.

The subordinate role of women in her society is one of the novel’s themes. Thula does make an impact on her village and nation, but revolutions are not easy to ignite, particularly the peaceful revolution that she champions. The gap between dreaming of change and bringing it about is another theme.

How Beautiful We Were is not a feel-good story. The title is in the past tense for a reason. The story spans decades. Villagers grow up, grow old, watch husbands disappear and children die while little about their relationship with Pexton changes.

Much of the story is tender and moving. Scenes of loving children caring for aging parents, of parents grieving for lost children, of celebratory dances and somber death rituals, illuminate lives that are superficially different from western experience yet fundamentally the same.

At the same time, the novel reads like a documentary. Despite (or perhaps because of) its first-person narration from multiple perspectives, the characters seem a bit distant. About half of the chapters are narrated by “the children,” a device that makes it easier to feel empathy for the characters than to make an emotional connection with them. By spreading the focus among multiple characters, some of them nameless, the novel loses some of its power.

Still, the horrifying story conveys a horrifying sense of reality. Corrupt dictators who rule in their own interests and in the interest of wealthy companies that support them cause havoc in developing nations around the world. The story takes an honest view of corporate America’s elevation of profit above morality and of the American government’s hand-off approach to foreign injustice caused by American businesses. The final chapter is sad only because it is honest. In the real world, stories of the powerless and oppressed always have a sad ending.

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Lurkers by Sandi Tan

Published by Soho Press on March 30, 2021

The characters in Lurkers are connected by their mutual residence on Santa Claus Lane in Alta Vista. A blue couch travels from one neighborhood home to another, while the owner of a third home wonders about its incongruence. A man writes bad fiction that his wife shares with a neighbor who is a published writer. Characters who occupied one home end up living in another. Characters’ lives are affected by neighbors they barely recognize.

Beverly Joon Park is a widow with two daughters. Her father was the pastor of a Korean evangelical church. Her husband converted to Christianity to marry her. When Beverly’s father died, her husband felt an obligation to take over as the church’s pastor. After her husband’s suicide, Beverly’s only desire is to sell her house (after she rids it of termites) so she can return with her daughters to Korea, a place she claimed to despise in the past. Now she just wants to live in a place that will not make her feel like a second-class citizen.

Beverly’s older daughter, Rosemary, is “a mysterious black box of womanly secrets.” She loses her virginity to a 16-year-old loser who turns out to be a bad choice for sexual partnership. Her obsession with a married drama teacher who might be a sexual predator is probably even worse. Yet Rosemary feels caged; only vigorous and frequent sex allows her to taste the freedom she craves. Beverly’s younger daughter, Mira, works to sabotage the move to Korea, a place where she imagines “all the men wore fake Air Jordans, burped kimchi and spent their spare time beating up their wives.”

Another neighborhood homeowner, Raymond van der Holt, is an aging gay man who made some money writing zombie novels and now spends his days brooding about his “casual brushes with the supernatural.” His muse has deserted him but he doesn’t want to write nonfiction, “a genre cherished beyond what it deserved by NPR-addled Americans.” His belief that Mira has been stalking him, masquerading as a demon, might be the product of a failing mind, as might certain other incidents that only Raymond perceives.

The other key neighbor is Kate Ireland, who occupies a house owned by her mother, Mary-Sue. Kate’s high school friend Bluto breezes into town and looks her up, bringing an underage girlfriend along for the ride. Against her better judgment, Kate ends up pregnant and stalked.

An ominous atmosphere pervades this darkly amusing novel. A police helicopter regularly circles the characters’ homes, perhaps looking for burglars who are plaguing the neighborhood. Men wearing hoods make threats and commit arson. A naked girl repeatedly slams her body against Raymond’s window, leaving smudged breast prints on the glass. At least two male characters are taking advantage of teenage girls. Sandi Tan leaves the impression that most men would do the same if they could get away with it.

While this is a novel of connections, few of the connections reach beyond the superficial, which I assume to be the point Tan is making about LA suburban life. Raymond is lonely, with only spirits to keep him company, in part because the people he encounters do not live up to his standards. Rosemary uses sex as a substitute for intimacy and sees nonphysical relationships as something to be endured. Kate has only her mother and the baby she created with Bluto, but it isn’t clear that she wants either of them in her life. There is little balance in this novel, little joy as a counterweight against gloom, but Tan peppers the story with enough moments of humor to keep the reader from joining Mr. Park in suicide. And despite the superficiality of their lives, the characters are developed in a satisfying degree of depth.

A letter from Beverly at the novel’s end might best sum up the novel’s philosophy. While she talks about Korea’s “culture of sadism, paranoia, and pointless rivalries” that, along with consumerism, keep people subservient, Beverly could just as easily be talking about her suburban life. The glimmers of hope we see in that old letter will, we know, eventually be lost.

An act of malice ends the novel on a surprising note, although the story’s absence of direction makes it surprising only in Tan’s refusal to compromise by delivering a happy ending. This isn’t a feel-good story. Life doesn’t always deliver the pleasure we desire. For some, pleasure is rare. Lurkers reflects that reality but does so in a nuanced way that never becomes overbearing or oppressive.

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