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.

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED

The Killing Hills by Chris Offutt

Published by ‎Grove Press on June 15, 2021

Notable for its sense of place, The Killing Hills takes the reader to Appalachia and to families that hold a grudge for generations. Chris Offutt goes beyond the stereotype of feuding hillbillies to tell an intriguing story of crime and corruption in an insular community.

Mick Hardin is a CID officer. After serving as a paratrooper, Hardin became the Army’s top criminal investigator. He comes home to Kentucky on leave after he learns from his sister that his wife is pregnant. He has always imagined growing old with his wife, “finishing their days side by side on a porch, quietly enjoying the birds, trees and flowers. He wanted to measure time by the growth of trees.” Yet Mick soon learns that his wife had a reason not to tell Mick about the pregnancy. That bit of domestic drama sends Mick into an alcohol-fueled haze and causes him to overstay his leave, making him AWOL.

Mick’s sister Linda is the county sheriff, having been elevated to that position by default. Linda gives Mick a reason to regain his sobriety after Nonnie Johnson is murdered. Linda needs Mick’s skills as a homicide investigator. Since Mick grew up in the community, he knows how to speak to people as a good old boy. Nobody opens up to anyone, but they’re more likely to talk to Mick than they are to answer Linda’s questions.

Mick wants to find the killer before Nonnie’s family takes the law into their own hands. Revenge killings are a local tradition, “an inbred conviction of vengeful purpose.” Unfortunately, the desire for revenge often sparks the killing of innocent suspects. A man who made his money in coal uses his influence to have an FBI agent arrest “the Dopted Boy,” an adopted boy named Tanner who was “personally liked but never accepted. In a culture that elevated blood family above all, the community never trusted Tanner.” Mick decides that the FBI’s arrest of a potentially innocent suspect won’t end his investigation.

Mick is a sympathetic character. He conceals his intelligence because that’s what smart people in the hills need to do. He approaches potential witnesses with patience, always introducing himself as “Nick Hardin’s boy,” talking about family connections to establish his credibility.

The murder has no obvious motive. Nonnie was a well-liked middle-aged woman who didn’t make trouble. Suspects include a heroin source, the source’s local dealer, and a man who searches the hills for ginseng. The mystery’s resolution isn’t flashy or shocking. On a superficial level, The Killing Hills is a murder mystery, but the story is really about the quest for the truth in a tight-lipped community. The truth that Mick discovers is almost secondary to the story of the hills and its population.

A character laments that everywhere else in the country, “folks live a little longer every year.” In the hills, the average life span is getting shorter. “The hills are killing us,” the character says. Violence and poverty, alcohol and drugs, decades of manual labor and poor health care. That’s the noir atmosphere that makes the story special. Coupled with Mick’s personal problems, The Killing Hills is very much a novel of place and characters. That the story is good is a bit of a bonus.

RECOMMENDED

Chasing the Lion by A.J. Tata

Published by St. Martin's Press on June 1, 2021

There are so many things to dislike about Chasing the Lion, it’s hard to know where to start. The protagonist, the plot, and the prose are unworthy of a reader’s time.

The protagonist is Garrett Sinclair, a lieutenant general in the Army. Sinclair is completely full of himself. He takes every opportunity to tell the reader just how special he is. He is “a leader of combat warriors,” worshipped by the team he leads. He has “wrestled al Qaeda terrorists in knife fights.” There is no person in the world who is better equipped to understand the novel’s evil Iranian villain than Sinclair. There is “no one better” at fighting bad guys. An antagonist might be half his age, but Sinclair is “twice as quick.” Even if a villain “removed his mind, his body would still be a killing machie, and if [the villain] removed his arms, his mind would be a killing machine.” Sinclair is proud of the “selfless sacrifice it took to serve the nation and not himself.” Sinclair claims his maxim is “We do our job and don’t brag or bitch” before spending an entire novel bragging and bitching.

Sinclair is special not only because of his mental and physical superiority, but because (he tells us) he has a high moral standard. The standard is, to put it nicely, flexible. He condemns Iranians for torturing people before he uses torture to get the information he wants. He declares that’s he’s not a murderer but engages in two unnecessary revenge murders. Sinclair is a hypocrite who is blind to his own hypocrisy. I guess that’s the one aspect of his character that’s realistic, but it doesn’t make him easy to tolerate.

Sinclair also tells us that he’s a true American patriot who loves his children. Frankly, if you’re a father, you’re supposed to love your children. You don’t get extra credit for reminding the reader every now and then how much you love them, particularly when you devoted your life to not seeing them very often. (Thank God he had a patriotic wife who stayed home and raised them for him.) We are probably supposed to believe that his children love him, but the only child who makes an actual appearance (as a hostage) doesn’t even rate a speaking part. He’s a prop, not a character. A.J. Tata doesn’t try to develop the kid’s personality because the kid exists only so that Sinclair can save him while telling us what a great dad he is.

Thanks to his position in Joint Special Operations Command, Sinclair knows the president-elect and everyone else who important because a certain kind of thriller hero is expected to hang out with important people as a signal that the hero is also important. Not content with being a military policy maker, however, Sinclair is an action hero, leading his little group of followers on dangerous missions around the world because that’s what aging lieutenant generals do. Well, not really, but that’s what Sinclair does. I didn’t believe for a second that an older guy of his rank would be getting into all the fistfights, knife fights, and gun fights that are meant as a substitute for a plot.

What passes for a plot is based on evil Iranians who have developed some kind of ill-defined “mind control” gas that — I’m not joking here — makes people look at their cellphone screens, as if everyone doesn’t do that already. How exactly minds are controlled by the gas or the cellphones or what the controlled people are supposed to do is never explained. Sinclair at one point is going to kill the president because of “mind control” but we’re never told how he was instructed to do that. Of course, Sinclair has the world’s most powerful mind, so hearing his dead wife telling him to be a good boy is all it takes to overcome the nefarious mind control device. Still, Sinclair knows all about mind control because that’s what “stay at home” orders were. Yeah, public health edicts to prevent a contagion from spreading during a pandemic are mind control. Give me a break.

Perhaps sensing that the whole mind control scheme is too silly to credit, Tata has an evil Iranian mix some sarin gas with the mind control gas and sends a bunch of drones to release the gasses at the presidential inauguration. So wait, is the plan to control minds or to hope that the sarin gas (which actually dissipates pretty quickly in open air) will kill a bunch of people? The plot is too muddled to deliver a clear answer. And if that’s not sufficiently nonsensical, evil Iran has just discovered that it has huge oil deposits, so it intends to use cruise missiles to take out American oil refineries, making America dependent on Iranian oil. As if American would do anything other than invade Iran and take its oil if it did anything like that. Are we supposed to believe the ayatollah doesn’t know that? The notion that Iran is sending submarines with cruise missiles to attack the US is preposterous.

Some neocon Americans are in on the scheme (which they assume is only a small attack at the inauguration) because they want to provoke a war with Iran. I didn’t buy that, either. It’s one thing for neocons to pretend that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction as a pretense for invading Iraq and quite another to aid and abet an enemy attack on American soil. Maybe if Tata were a better writer, he would have sold me on the conspiracy, but the plot comes across as the lunatic raving of someone who suffers from paranoid delusions.

Sinclair grinds multiple axes as the story tears through through the thin plot. Sinclair tells us that the intelligence community and the CIA have repeatedly betrayed America without explaining which mistakes he regards as betrayals. He often expresses his disdain for neocons (presumably meaning Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld), a common theme on Fox News, a network that worshipped Cheney and Rumsfeld before the new cons replaced the neocons. Sinclair doesn’t flesh out those complaints either, making it difficult to understand what Sinclair actually believes. He comes across as an angry man whose anger is ill-defined. Sadly, there are a lot of those in the country. They might be the novel's target audience.

On a smaller scale, the plot imagines that the conspiracy [spoiler alert] victimizes Sinclair’s wife (whose death may not have occurred in the way it was explained to Sinclair) [end spoiler alert]. That’s only possible because the whole world revolves around Sinclair, who is just so important that naturally his wife has to be drawn into the conspiracy. A collateral benefit of that plot twist is Sinclair’s ability to tell us what a wonderful guy he is because he loved his wife. (They met at church, of course, because where else would they have met?) I guess that loving his perfect God-and-America-loving wife makes Sinclair special, as does loving his kids.

Tata’s prose is functional but too often overwrought. Sinclair embarks on a “complex and daring raid” that is part of “the most sensitive, important op in our lifetime, perhaps since World War II.” Sinclair saves the nation from “unspeakable attacks.” The villain is “an Iranian madman” who plans to execute a “sweeping plan that would force America to a tipping point of economic and psychological collapse.” (The absence of any acknowledgement that a good Iranian might exist suggests that Sinclair doesn’t believe in that possibility.) Unfortunately, all of this self-aggrandizing, Iran-hating prose doesn’t create even the slightest bit of dramatic tension. The plot is silly, the protagonist and the villain are both cartoons, and the insinuation of ill-developed politics into the plot prevent Chasing the Lion from working even on the minimal level of a mindless action novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED