The System by Ryan Gattis

Published by Farrar, Straus and Girou/MCD on December 8, 2020

The System is a fascinating novel about the criminal justice system as seen from the perspectives of multiple characters. It is one of the most perceptive takes on crime and criminal justice I’ve encountered in some time.

There are actually two systems at work in the novel. Running parallel to the government’s system of law and order is one that imposes a different sort of order. It determines how prisoners run prisons and how gangs run streets.

Key characters experience events that change them in ways that are beneficial or unsettling or both. Some of the characters have epiphanies that the reader hopes will guide the rest of their lives. Those characters give the novel its heart. To their misfortune, other characters fail to take advantage of opportunities to change. Those characters contribute to the novel’s sense of realism.

The story begins with Angela Alvarez breaking up with her boyfriend, Jacob Safulu, a/k/a Dreamer. Angela is beautiful and smart. She lives in a house she inherited from her aunt in a low-income neighborhood. She lives with Dreamer and her cousin, Omar Tavira, a/k/a Wizard. She works as a barista and takes nursing classes because she wants to make a better life for herself. Dreamer and Wizard are good friends but Dreamer isn’t part of Wizard’s gang life. Dreamer doesn’t know what he wants to be. Angela thinks he’s drifting in order to avoid responsibility. That’s not what she wants in a boyfriend.

As Angela is delivering the bad news to Dreamer, Wizard is shooting a woman named Scrappy. The hit has been ordered by Wizard’s gang leader to send a message about Scrappy’s failure to respect territorial boundaries. An addict named Augie Clark was trying to score from Scrappy shortly before the shooting. He sees it go down and saves her life after the shooter flees. He also steals all the heroin she’s hidden on her person and the gun that the shooter dropped at the scene.

Augie’s parole agent, Phillip Petrillo, finds the drugs and the gun during a search of Augie’s room. Petrillo is also Wizard’s parole agent. When Augie admits that he stole the gun after watching Wizard shoot Scrappy, Petrillo convinces him to say that Wizard’s accomplice, who Augie didn’t recognize, was Dreamer, who Augie doesn’t know.

Petrillo wants to set up Dreamer because he knows Dreamer is dating Angela and, having met Angela a few times during home visits with Wizard, he knows Angela is hot. To get Dreamer out of the way, Petrillo searches Angela’s house and plants the gun in the room where Dreamer sleeps. Petrillo has used his position to further inappropriate relationships with many other young women but he sees Angela as his biggest conquest.

The plot moves forward through the arrest and trial of Wizard and Dreamer. Chapters narrate the story from each of their perspectives as well as those of Angela, a defense lawyer, a prosecutor, and a couple of cops. I love the variety of distinct voices in which the story is told. Each voice is articulate in its own way, reminding the reader that intelligence and formal education are two different things.

Angela is a sympathetic character. Through Petrillo, she gets a taste of what opportunities the world outside her neighborhood might hold. When she realizes what a cad Petrillo is, she struggles with the fact that she felt attracted to him and begins to realize that the attraction was not to Petrillo but to what he might represent.

Dreamer also changes, moving in different directions as the novel unfolds. His adaptation to prison life might in some ways be unhealthy, despite the imperative to do what it takes to survive. At the same time, he begins to realize that his loyalty to Wizard hasn’t been repaid and that the code of the street isn’t as important as the ideas he encounters after diving into the prison library. The fact that Dreamer and Angela both take advantage of the opportunity to confront life in a more positive way suggests that all of us might be able to do the same.

The novel encourages the reader to empathize with the kind of people who are often condemned by society. It similarly encourages the reader to understand that people who perform jobs that purportedly benefit society are sometimes interested only in benefiting themselves. Ultimately, the novel reminds us that life is more complex than people with limited experience imagine it to be.

The plot might be faulted for delivering such a satisfying ending. Trial scenes are compelling but not always accurate in detailing how the judicial system works. Those are insignificant quibbles about a story that kept me spellbound.

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Indigo by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on July 28, 2020

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the books Loren D. Estleman has written. Indigo is the sixth novel in his Valentino, Film Detective series. I’ve dipped into and enjoyed his Amos Walker mysteries but this was my first exposure to Valentino.

Valentino tracks down lost motion pictures for the Film and Television Archive at UCLA. He’s also rehabilitating an old theater called The Oracle and lives in an apartment in the projection booth. His girlfriend, Harriet Johansen, is a forensic pathologist but she doesn’t have much of a role in this novel.

Among Valentino’s many friends is Ignacio Bozal, who made some money somewhere, then bought and restored a resort in Acapulco that made even more money before he showed up in Hollywood and began making generous contributions to the Film and Television Archive. Bozal gets Valentino interested in a Hollywood actor named Van Oliver who made one movie, a noir called Bleak Street. Insiders who saw Oliver work thought the realism he brought to the part was revolutionary. Bozal suggests that Oliver had a shady past that gave him insight into the behavior of gangsters. Oliver disappeared in 1957 and was widely presumed to have been murdered.

Bozal got his hands on the only surviving copy of Bleak Street. He gives it to Valentino, whose boss thinks the premiere will get huge press if Valentino can solve the mystery of Van Oliver’s disappearance. As the plot unfolds, Valentino discovers that multiple people for multiple reasons want Bleak Street to remain out of the public eye.

Indigo is a pleasant novel written in Estleman’s erudite prose style. Estleman’s investigation introduces the reader to a variety of credible characters, including gangsters, cops, and a Hollywood retiree who might have something of value to contribute if he has a lucid moment. The story misdirects, as a classic mystery should. The solution to the mystery caught me off guard, as a classic mystery should.

Indigo is, in short, the kind of book that should appeal to fans of classic mysteries. It isn’t a thriller — don’t expect shootouts or car chases — but it does create tension at key moments. Valentino is a bright, unassuming fellow whose knowledge of film trivia seems to be unparalleled. That makes Indigo a good choice for fans of film noir as well as fans of mysteries.

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The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor

Published by Minotaur Books on June 23, 2020

Lucid prose makes it easy to follow the complex plot that carries a murder mystery across two continents and 23 years. The story jumps between two time periods as the protagonist tries to understand the circumstances that led to Erin Flaherty’s disappearance and presumed death.

Erin was raised in Long Island but she always had a strong interest in her family’s Irish history, in part because her father, Danny Flaherty, ran the kind of Irish bar that quietly passed the hat to support the IRA. She decides to visit Ireland in 1993, ostensibly to enjoy her youth. Her cousin Maggie D’Arcy eventually realizes that she had another motive.

Erin finds a place to stay in Dublin, where she is visited by some backpacking friends, including Brian Lombardi, who will marry Maggie and have a daughter with her before they divorce. Maggie bears a striking resemblance to Erin. They grew up as best friends.

Not long after the disappearance, Maggie goes to Dublin to look for Erin. Retracing Erin’s journeys, Maggie discovers that Erin had visited the Wicklow Mountains and made a return visit shortly before she disappeared. Other evidence suggests that Erin traveled to Dublin after her second visit to the mountains, but Maggie is poking around mountain paths when she finds Erin’s beloved necklace, making Maggie fear foul play. A German girl went missing in the area at about the same time, creating the fear of a serial killer. Unfortunately, neither Maggie nor the police can find an explanation for Erin’s disappearance.

In 2016, a Galway girl named Niamh Horrigan disappears in the mountains, potentially the latest victim of the serial killer. As the police search for her, they find human remains and a scarf that may have belonged to Erin. Danny doesn’t have the strength to go to Ireland himself so he asks Maggie to meet with the Irish police. By this point, Maggie has been a police officer for 20 years. She meets with Roly Byrne, the Irish cop who befriended her in 1993. After skillfully sidestepping Irish cops who want to freeze her out of the case, Maggie is given a consulting role that includes access to evidence concerning similar murders over the course of almost three decades. The key suspect seems to be Naill Deasey, but he wasn’t living in the mountains when all the murders were committed.

While the story follows a familiar crime thriller formula — girl goes missing, the protagonist must find her before her abductor causes her death — Sarah Stewart Taylor invigorates the story with the kind of detail that makes the formula seem fresh. Some clues point to the truth while others misdirect, causing both Maggie and the reader to wonder where the truth lies. The killer’s identity comes as a surprise, at least to me, although the information needed to solve the whodunit comes fairly late in the story. The parallel stories in 1993 and 2016 allow the two tracks of the story to merge effectively, eventually making clear that Maggie has more than one mystery to solve. The plot is surprisingly tight. Despite weaving together multiple characters, deaths, and time frames, it leaves no loose ends dangling.

Maggie engages in a bit too much handwringing for my taste. When the blurb compares Taylor to Tana French and Kate Atkinson, perhaps handwringing protagonists are what the blurb writer has in mind, but unlike French and Atkinson, Taylor does not make her protagonist’s anger with an unfair world unbearably sanctimonious. I liked the plot of The Mountains Wild more than I liked the protagonist, but the plot is reason enough to read the book.

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Rest and Be Thankful by Emma Glass

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Bloomsbury Circus on December 1, 2020

In exquisite and powerful prose, a nurse tells her story over the course of a few night shifts in a London hospital’s neonatal ward. The title notwithstanding, Laura gets no rest as she moves from baby to baby, changing lines and diapers, comforting parents, trying to relieve “the crushing weight of their worry.” She encourages fathers to hold their children rather than their cellphones. She dreads the death of her patients. Perhaps she should be thankful that her relationship with the partner who seems to despise her is ending, but he’s keeping the flat, forcing her to move into a single room in hospital residence housing.

There is value in reading about lives that a reader would never want to live. Holding a sleeping baby, Laura explains why she performs such a thankless job: “This is why I’m here. A sick baby on his way to being well. On his way to being well because of surgery, medication, holding, sleeping, something. I wish I knew which one it was because then we could do more. Save more babies. Sometimes none of it works. I think about this all the time.” Hers is a world of hope and despair in a constant struggle for supremacy.

Laura fears the struggle may be driving her mad. Perhaps it is. She is certain that she saw someone step onto the tracks of the subway she’s riding but the death she envisioned never happened. A coworker asks her what’s happening in her life “because you are always late and your hair is a bit of a mess and you don’t smell but it’s a slippery slope.” Death is never far from her mind. She starts the day on her last legs. In her sleep-deprived moments, Laura thinks she sees an apparition in black, perhaps the Grim Reaper, waiting in a hospital chair. The same figure haunts her dreams.

Laura’s life might be better without her partner, about whom we learn little. “I will miss the lick you give your lips before you speak,” Laura thinks to herself, “but I will not miss the words that follow and fall out of that wry wet mouth.” Yet it’s never quite clear whether it is her job or her partner or a traumatic event in her life that has shaped her sorrowed response to the days we glimpse.

A long road in Scotland is named Rest and Be Thankful, apparently because after a long uphill journey, travelers rest and are thankful they reached the top. Whether Laura will reach the top of her uphill climb, a place where she can rest, is unclear.

The novel is relatively short. It ends abruptly and ambiguously, resolving nothing. Readers who demand a plot won’t find one here. The story is simply Laura’s life told in a snapshot. The story left me wanting more but that’s better than a longer story that leaves me wondering why I read so many wasted words. The novel works because of Emma Glass’ ability to place the reader in Laura’s shoes, to make us feel her empathy, her frustation, her desperate unraveling.

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Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

Published by St. Martin's Press on July 21, 2020

Nils Ortega is a whistleblower or a nut or a combination of the two. In an alternate 2007, Nils is sort of a Julian Assange except his scoops involve claims that the government is hiding knowledge of aliens on Earth. He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t make life easier for Nils' family members who are harassed by the government or paparazzi or, eventually, aliens.

Nils’ daughter Cora has changed her last name to Sabino and deleted her profiles but still lives under the shadow of her father. Cora doesn’t know what to make of rumors about the Ampersand Event. Maybe an asteroid hit the Earth near Pasadena. Maybe it was an alien spaceship. Witnesses disappear and return days later with no memory of what happened. Some return with brain damage. Nils reported a leaked memo about captive aliens that has gone viral. Some of Cora’s friends think Nils is a hero. Cora thinks he’s a bad dad. She lost her scholarship in linguistics after the memo leaked. The government is working hard to shut down Nils and isn’t afraid to use his family against him.

Cora wants nothing to do with the controversy until she’s contacted by an alien who looks like a really big insect. She calls the alien Ampersand. The alien needs help communicating with humans. Cora, having knowledge of linguistics, seems like a good choice to be an intermediary, even if it isn’t a choice Cora would willingly make. Saving her family and possibly the planet eventually becomes Cora’s driving motivation. Cora’s mother, who knows more about aliens than she ever revealed, assures Cora that the aliens are incapable of communicating with humans. Cora eventually learns that it can be done, but communication comes with a price.

Axiom’s End makes the point that aliens will likely be so different from humans that understanding them may be impossible. Humans don’t even understand each other all that well, particularly when they come from different cultures. The aliens in Axiom’s End have a complex social structure. They aren’t very nice and they tend to be paranoid about potential threats, much as humans are. It may not be possible to bridge those gaps but Cora has the right blend of idealism and pragmatism to give it a try.

Novels about relationships between humans and aliens don’t usually take the topic as seriously as Axiom’s End. It’s as difficult to generalize about aliens as it is to generalize about people, which is presumably the lesson that Lindsay Ellis wants readers to internalize. Some aliens/humans are better than others. Some aliens/humans aren’t very good at all. And let’s face it, if aliens are too much like humans, either aliens will wipe out humans or humans will wipe out aliens because getting along isn’t in the cards. Maybe the only question is whether it will happen in the near or far future. But maybe communication creates at least the possibility of hope.

Through the struggles of both Cora and Ampersand to relate to each other, the novel suggests that it may be possible to have empathy for beings we don’t understand. Ellis made a strong effort to portray Cora as a decent but conflicted person who never knows if she is helping aliens or humans or if her efforts, either way, will make any difference. The alienness of Ampersand is convincing, although making him look like a praying mantis suggests a failure of imagination.

Characterization is the high point of a novel that, in the end, asks more questions than it answers. There’s nothing wrong with that in science fiction, a genre that encourages readers to ponder the unknowable. While Ellis sets up a plot that never quite takes off, the unanswered questions are sufficiently compelling to make the novel worthwhile.

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