The Scorpion's Tail by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on January 12, 2021

The Scorpion’s Tail is billed as the second Nora Kelly novel (following Old Bones), although it’s actually a Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson novel. Swanson is an FBI agent and a young protégé of Pendergast, who has a long-running series of his own. Kelly is an archeologist who, for the second time, has been called upon to join an FBI investigation that has need of her skills.

Old Bones involved the Donner Party. The Scorpion’s Tail takes a look at the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Co-author Douglas Preston has an interest in archeology that will apparently drive this series, as it drives some of the writing team’s other books.

Swanson is still viewed as a rookie and, despite her success in Old Bones, isn’t necessarily viewed with favor. When a body is discovered on federal property in a ghost town called High Lonesome, Swanson is sent to investigate. The body has been buried for decades. It shows no obvious evidence of homicide but the corpse’s face suggests that death was accompanied by terror or extreme pain. Corrie doesn’t want to mess up the evidence by digging it up herself. Nor does she want to waste the time of an evidence team if there was no murder. She instead decides to waste Kelly’s time.

Swanson also finds the remains of a mule that was shot through the head, but murdering a mule isn’t a federal crime. With the help of a glory-hogging medical examiner, Swanson decides that the corpse probably wasn't murdered. To identify the deceased, Swanson puts her forensic anthropology skills to use. Legwork reveals the corpse's identity and eventually his cause of death. Subsequent investigation takes Swanson and Kelly to an army base, to rumors of treasure hidden in the mountains, and to a descendent of Geronimo. Swanson also visits some bars because the best investigations are accomplished with a beer in hand.

Old Bones is formulaic and predictable. The Scorpion’s Tale is a more challenging whodunit. The story generates more suspense than Old Bones by placing the characters in more plausible danger. The plot is reasonably credible in comparison to modern thrillers, most of which have little concern with plausible storytelling. I’m not in love with either of the protagonists in this series (although Pendergast makes a brief but welcome cameo) but the authors gave me no reason to dislike them. Perhaps in the future they will develop personalities. I would still prefer to spend time with a Pendergast novel than a Nora Kelly novel, but The Scorpion’s Tail isn’t a bad way to pass the time until the authors get around to writing another Pendergast.

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Someone to Watch Over Me by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 12, 2021

Ace Atkins is the best writer in the Robert B. Parker factory. He’s tasked with churning out the Spenser novels. Parker has been dead for ten years and probably does little writing these days. You wouldn’t know of his death from the book cover, which places Atkins’ name in a much smaller font than Parker’s. Technically, the book’s title is Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me but it should be The Estate of Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me.

I imagine there is a blurb somewhere that says the novel is “torn from the headlines.” Don’t you hate that phrase? The villain is Jeffrey Epstein, except his name in the book is Peter Steiner. The girlfriend who is now facing trial for supplying underage girls to Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, is Poppy Palmer in the book.

Steiner befriends politicians and wealthy men, bringing them to his island in the Bahamas where underage girls can give them massages. Sorting out facts from salacious gossip and smear campaigns (no, John Roberts didn’t visit Epstein’s island) is proving to be difficult in the real world. Fortunately, Atkins stays away from the celebrity sideshow. Alan Dershowitz doesn’t even make a cameo and that guy is everywhere.

Mattie Sullivan is Parker’s “occasional secretary, part-time assistant, and sleuthing apprentice.” She learns about an underage girl who was paid a few hundred dollars to massage a man in an exclusive Boston club. The man dropped his trousers and the girl fled at the sight of his trouser snake, leaving her laptop behind. Spenser offers to help Mattie recover the laptop from the club and, in the process, learns that the man — who turns out to be Peter Steiner — has done similar things or worse with a number of minor females. Mattie makes it her mission to track down other victims (and a lawyer to help them) while Parker makes it his mission to help her whenever things might get dangerous. Inevitably, that happens regularly.

Much of the book explores familiar territory. Spenser hangs out with girlfriend Susan and dog Pearl (the third dog to which he’s given that name). Spenser exchanges witty repartee with his buddy Hawk when they aren’t busy killing people. Spenser also has a run-in with a past nemesis called the Gray Man, which seems to be a popular character name in thrillerworld.

Like a lot of “torn from the headlines” novels, this one just isn’t very interesting. Fiction can be more illuminating than fact, but when a novel hews closely to known events, it tends to sacrifice illumination for titillation. The novel has Spenser chasing Steiner and his thugs around Boston and Miami until its inevitable conclusion in the Bahamas. The outcome is predictable and the story offers too little suspense to sustain interest. Bringing Epstein to justice is much too easy, thanks in part to an implausible, out-of-the-blue twist at the end.

Still, Atkins is a craftsman. He knows how to move a plot along and, for what it’s worth, he has captured the tone of Parker’s Spenser novels (I always enjoyed Spenser for the Boston atmosphere more than the stories). Atkins’ own fiction reveals the depth of his characterization, but Spenser was never a deep guy and Atkins is constrained by the character he inherited. While Someone to Watch Over Me might be a good read for Spenser completists, I’d refer readers to Atkins’ Quinn Colson series for better plots and deeper characters.

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A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 5, 2021

The protagonist of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is haunted by guilt. He put his father in a home after dementia rendered him incapable of living independently. His wife had a “virtuous” abortion, a choice they made to avoid giving birth to a child who would have suffered from a rare and severe genetic defect. When he finally becomes a parent, his son is on the spectrum and he regrets the occasions on which he loses patience with him and behaves in an unloving way. Guilt about his parenting, guilt about the choice not to be a parent, guilt about his relationship with his parent, are emotions that cause him to question his decency, although only a decent person would feel such guilt.

To manage his guilt, the protagonist volunteers to escort women from their cars to an abortion clinic, shielding them from protestors who are motivated by the cruelty of their religious beliefs to shout “baby killer.” To forestall his guilt, the protagonist tries not to become upset with his wife and strives to make his son happy. His own happiness is always elusive, perhaps sacrificed to marriage and parenthood.

The story is told in the third person from the father’s perspective. The narrative is internal, a record of thoughts that allows us to see the mother and the son and the abortion clinic director only as the father sees them. The novel’s value lies in its deep penetration of the father’s mind. As the father anticipates all the inevitable ways in which his growing son will change, he wonders whether his own capacity for change has been stunted — by age or fear or inertia. He thinks about shame — how the world needs both more and less shame — and how shame makes us human. He concludes that doubts and regrets make pride possible, the flip side of shame. Whenever his son overcomes an obstacle or conquers a fear, the father is proud both of the son’s accomplishment and of the role he played in helping his son achieve. Still, he lives in fear of all the things he can’t control.

The father ponders the notion that children are about posterity, an “essential hedge against mortality.” He yearns for his son’s admiration and cowers from his judgment. He worries that he is not a good son to his own father and wonders what he is teaching his son about parental relationships.

Peter Ho Davies is at his best when the father contemplates the ethical issues surrounding abortion and the potential harm to living people caused by champions of the unborn. He is sensitive to the differing feelings — loss or relief — that might follow an abortion. He acknowledges the sincerity of abortion protestors while recognizing that those who choose abortion do not deserve to have feelings of shame or guilt amplified by strangers who have never needed to make the same choice (or hypocrites who have had abortions and then advocate taking that right away from others).

The novel has no plot beyond its narration of a few condensed years of the protagonist’s life and thoughts. It has few characters. Peter Ho Davies’ apparent goal is to offer an account of the fears a man might experience when confronting difficulties that he perceives as monumental — the choice to abort a fetus when he and his wife were hoping to become parents; the struggle to address a parent’s dementia; the struggle to raise an autistic child.

While Davies achieves that goal, his portrayal of most characters is abbreviated. Even the protagonist, who teaches literature and writing, is seen only in terms of his preoccupation with worries and fears. If his emotional range extends beyond anxiety, Davies felt no need to share. Perhaps the novel is intended as a study of anxiety, making other states of mind irrelevant to the story.

The honesty with which the man’s worries and fears are exposed is the novel’s saving grace. I expect that contemplative readers who have experienced fatherhood or agonized about an abortion will identify with the protagonist. Readers who prefer plot-driven fiction might have less interest in the story, although trying to place yourself in the mind of someone who has lived a life that differs from yours is one of the great rewards of reading.

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Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on January 5, 2021

The protagonist of Pickard County Atlas believes that people who respond to adversity either overcome or succumb. Adversity is a way of life for the characters in Chris Harding Thornton's debut novel. The story makes clear that people who base rash actions on incomplete evidence are likely to do harm. Rash actions and misunderstandings are the default behavior of Thornton's characters.

When Dell Reddick Jr. was seven, a farmhand killed him. The farmhand called the sheriff’s office, confessed, and killed himself. Dell Junior’s body was never found and the Reddick family has never overcome the tragedy. Dell Senior’s wife Virginia has made a habit of disrobing outside and setting fire to her clothes for reasons of her own. Dell Senior moved out and left his younger sons, Rick and Paul, to act as their mother’s caretakers. Now that they are older, Rick and Paul work for their father, buying and restoring trailers. They always hope to find a double wide so they can make some decent money.

Harley Jensen is a deputy sheriff. He spends his nights patrolling the county roads, occasionally interrupting teens making out on property that isn’t their own. Many of the houses in the county are empty and abandoned, including the house in which Harley grew up. Some of them have been torched by parties unknown.

Harley has had some run-ins with Paul Reddick over the years, beginning when he tried to have Paul committed after Paul climbed a water tower and acted like he was going to shoot people or himself. Paul seems to resent Harley’s failure to find Dell Junior’s body. Paul recently seems to be hanging out at Harley’s childhood home. Harley finds him there on one occasion with a girl who is too young for Paul, at least in Harley’s judgment.

While Harley is driving around at night, brooding about the past, he stumbles upon Rick Reddick’s wife, Pam, in whom Harley takes an interest that is not entirely professional. Pam isn’t happy with her hand-to-mouth existence. She fantasizes about running off, leaving her daughter with Rick. Her tendency to drive around at night in support of her fantasies leads Rick to a mistaken conclusion about Pam’s nighttime actions — or rather, he’s mistaken about the person she’s meeting. That mistake leads to some of the novel’s tension.

To the extent that it is possible to bring Nebraska to life (Nebraska is the only state in which I watched a weather report that took up the majority of the local news broadcast on a cloudless summer day), Chris Harding Thornton does so. He creates a rural midwestern atmosphere that captures the emptiness and desolation of both the landscape and the county’s inhabitants. Thornton’s prose is fluid and sharp without ever becoming self-consciously literary. Readers who crave likable characters won’t find any here, but the characters are unlikeable precisely because they are so realistic.

The themes of “brother against brother” and “small town secrets” have been done before but writers return to those themes because they speak to readers. The dark ending seems a bit forced, as do some of the interactions between characters, but Thornton’s ability to create gritty scenes that transfix a reader makes Pickard County Atlas a solid first novel.

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Kraft by Jonas Lüscher

First published in Germany in 2017; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 10, 2020

Kraft is the story of an intellectual named Richard Kraft. The story begins in the present, as Kraft is invited to America to compete with other scholars for a million-dollar prize. His task is to write and present an essay on “Why Whatever Is, Is Right and Why We Can Still Improve It.” Kraft understands the topic to be based on the proposition that we live in the best of all possible worlds — presumably because it was created by God — and that the best possible world is nevertheless permeated by evil, which suggests that evil can’t really be so bad. Or perhaps it is bad for the individual but necessary for the greater good of the whole. Kraft doesn’t agree with Alexander Pope’s thesis that “Whatever is, is right” — Kraft is no fan of theodicy — but he needs the million so he endeavors to craft an essay that will appeal to Tobias Erkner, who has funded the competition and will judge the competitors.

Kraft is a professor of rhetoric. Years earlier, as a student in West Germany, striving to stand out in intellectual circles, Kraft embraced neoclassical theory and market liberalism, the trickle-down notions of capitalism that were championed by Ronald Reagan’s advisors. Kraft understands that he has embraced ideas that are the economic equivalent of theodicy because they demand the acceptance of evil (in the form of poverty and injustice) as natural and beneficial to the greater good. He also understands that advancing in the intellectual world doesn’t require him to actually believe the ideas that he defends. As he struggles with his essay, Kraft knows he will need to dress up an economic system that repels him “with an aura of divine ordainment” because Erker is rich and will want to hear that his wealth is the outcome of a natural social order that recognizes his entitlement.

Flashbacks to and beyond Kraft’s student days tell of his friendship with István (a like-minded intellectual), his relationship with Ruth Lambsdorff (who fled without explanation, stimulating Kraft’s “vain craving for admiration”), his equally unsuccessful relationship with Johanna Hueffel (who, years later, takes issue with Kraft’s memory that she fled from him in anger), his past and present unhappy marriages and his ambiguous relationship with his children. Through all of this, Kraft sees himself as an honorable man, although it belatedly dawns on him that others might see him as a monster. In fact, he is neither or both. He would like the freedom of another divorce, but he can’t afford freedom unless he wins the million, a circumstance he finds shameful.

An undercurrent of comedy runs through the story. Usually understated, the comedy occasionally yields slapstick moments (Kraft being found naked in a field near Stanford after a “rowing adventure” is one example). István is almost a comic figure, a man who poses as a dissident intellectual who defected from Hungary when, in fact, he entered Germany as the shirt-washer for the Hungarian chess team and stayed behind when the bus left without him, the officer in charge having failed to notice his absence. The German obsession with David Hasselhoff also inspires some chuckles.

The moral question that Kraft must ultimately confront is whether he can dress up drivel as intellect — drivel he sees through and knows he cannot justify, despite his ability to advance arguments that purport to be honest — for money. Is the cost of being an intellectual sellout outweighed by the greater good of providing for his family? But this has been Kraft’s dilemma throughout his life. His dissertation extolled an economic system that he found repugnant and in which he had so little confidence that he spread the dissertation in all directions, welding on “any number of reinforcements and pointless rivets,” plastering it with his “stupendous knowledge of the relevant secondary literature,” and varnishing it with eloquent rhetoric to disguise its dishonesty.

Kraft is a fascinating novel because of its serious discussion of abstract philosophical concepts and their application to a concrete world. A dissenting voice (who doesn’t need the million dollars) argues that everything that is, is bad: rising nationalism, open acceptance of racism, the democratic election of despots, the embrace of anti-intellectualism and the “legitimation of ignorance,” the failure of countries like India and China to provide hope for a better future to their citizens. Kraft ponders an alternative view — that the coming Singularity that will advance humanity by merging real and artificial intelligence — but wonders whether the Singularity will lead to the enslavement of man by machine. It’s tough to be intellectually honest.

The novel’s humor doesn’t attempt to disguise the reality that world is a bleak place, for some more than others. The novel’s ending is also bleak, perhaps to drive home the point that sunny optimism alone can’t change reality. The ending struck me as something of a cop-out but it reflects a choice that, in a world of infinite choices, might be as valid as any other. Putting the ending aside, I admire Kraft for Jonas Lüscher’s willingness to confront the profound without forgetting that people of all intellectual levels muddle through their lives as best they can, struggling only occasionally (if at all) to make sense of it.

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