Dead Land by Sara Paretsky

Published by William Morrow on April 21, 2020

Dead Land is Sara Paretsky’s twentieth V.I. Warshawski novel. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read, Dead Land included. Paretsky always mixes Chicago’s colorful history and atmosphere into a solid, traditional detective story. Much of Dead Land takes place on Chicago’s south side, in parkland near Lake Shore Drive.

V.I.’s goddaughter, Bernie Fouchard, is coaching a preteen girls’ soccer team that is sponsored by the South Lakefront Improvement Council (SLICK). V.I. and Bernie attend a SLICK meeting where the team is scheduled to be given some love. Before that can happen, the meeting addresses a plan to fill in part of the lakefront with a sand beach, some playground equipment, and maybe a nice restaurant or bar. The presentation is interrupted by a protestor named Coop who believes there is more to the proposal than they are being told. Naturally, the Chicago cops hustle Coop away so that the people in power can continue steamrolling the unsuspecting neighborhood residents.

V.I. and Bernie make their way into the park, where they hear Lydia Zamir singing a song called “Savage” that earned her a loyal following. Lydia is now homeless and a bit feral, playing her music on a toy piano and deathly afraid of anyone who comes near her. V.I. wants to help her, but Coop arrives and establishes himself as Lydia’s protector.

V.I. recounts all of this to her reporter friend, Murray Ryerson, who thinks there is a story in (1) the resurfacing of Lydia and (2) the plan to build a little beach area that might actually be a plan to do something else. When the news breaks about Lydia, her fans flock to the area, enraging Coop. After Lydia disappears, V.I. learns that Lydia went off the deep end four years earlier when environmental activist Hector Palurdo was killed by Arthur Morton, a sniper who carried out a mass shooting. Lydia was standing onstage next to Palurdo when he was shot. The law firm that swooped in to defend the mass killer got a restraining order against Lydia when she seemed to be losing it.

Paretsky's intricate plot involves nefarious developers, sneaky lawyers, corrupt politicians, a disputed South American inheritance, and a multitude of murders. Coop is suspected of killing the man he interrupted at the SLICK meeting, but V.I. has her doubts. She’s more interested in finding Lydia, as is the law firm that Lydia allegedly harassed. The more V.I. digs into Lydia’s history, the more she suspects a connection to murders — and to attempts to murder her —although the connections are elusive. The reader is invited to join V.I. as she juggles the puzzle pieces until they can be assembled into a recognizable picture.

The reader need not fear being overwhelmed by all the players and clues because Paretsky provides internal summaries to keep the details alive in the reader’s memory. She balances action scenes with pavement pounding detective work to keep the story moving at a good pace. The central characters are well established and offer no surprises, but Coop and Lydia give Paretsky a chance to explore damaged but decent individuals who are struggling with mental health issues in different ways. Paretsky writes about the unfortunate with compassion while entertaining the reader as V.I. unravels a challenging mystery one thread at a time.

RECOMMENDED

Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 2, 2020

Luna is living an unusual life. While awaiting transportation in an ambulance, she watches a woman remove her shoes and place them in a mailbox, unless this is something she might have imagined. Her grandmother has been reincarnated as a bird, or so it seems to her. She is getting married to “the groom” if she decides to go through with it, but her grandmother-bird crapped all over her wedding dress so she needs to find another one. Every time the elevator door opens in the building where she plans to wed, she steps out onto the same floor. Stairs are no better because there are more flights of stairs than the building has floors. A diner turns into a ship sailing on the waves of the stock market, although Luna might have dreamt that one.

After a long estrangement, Luna reunites with her brother Tom, a former addict, and learns that Tom is now Simone, who holds a “woman’s grace and the person I used to know’s ability to entertain with an offhand gesture. She is simultaneous.” Tom/Simone wrote a successful play about Luna’s life called Parakeet and used the earnings to finance the first phase of a sex transition. Compared to the rest of Luna's life, her brother returning as a woman “is the only thing that makes sense.”

Luna wakes up with a hangover one morning and discovers that she has physically transformed into her mother. This doesn’t surprise Tom/Simone, who realizes that “sooner or later every woman wakes up and realizes she is her mother.” Fortunately, the physical transformation is short-term.

What are we to make of Luna? Her name suggests a character who is mentally troubled and her observations suggest an unreliable narrator. Yet she seems quite sane, or no less insane than most people who are on the verge of getting married. In the story’s second half, we learn about a formative trauma while Luna was a bit younger that clearly affected her life, but questions remain about what is real and what is delusion. Luna hears on a radio program that stories should not start with “Once upon a time” but with “This never happened,” perhaps a reminder that fiction can do violence to a reader’s understanding of reality because none of it real.

“Will Luna get married or not?” is a broad description of the plot, to the extent that one exists. Some of her mishaps might be interpreted as the manifestation of a desire to remain unwed. There may be good reason for Luna to avoid marriage. While the story has surrealistic moments, it is anchored in the reality of family. Luna is marrying into a conventional family. The groom’s mother secretly (and then openly) scorns her as a “brown gypsy.” Luna avoids her groom’s perfect family because it makes her yearn for her own, messed-up family. “And then I’d have to acknowledge that I was missing incorrect, anxious freaks, and that I was one of them. People with good families can’t fathom those without. Or that we don’t want to borrow theirs.” Parakeet reminds us that there are no good families or bad families. There are only our families.

We do not choose to be born into a family, but marriage is about making a family, and marriage is a voluntary choice. Even if it seems destined or the right thing to do, we can always decide that marrying and becoming a family, in general or with a particular person, is not something we want. The choice Luna will make is uncertain as she approaches and endures her wedding day. The resolution might or might not be seen as a happy ending, but happiness is a matter of perspective.

At the novel’s end, Luna wonders whether she is a good person. She thinks the answer depends on who you ask. Simone agrees and tells her “so you better be careful who you ask.” Readers might have different opinions about whether Luna is a good person. She is clearly a troubled person. Maybe she doesn’t always make wise choices. But when it counts, including standing up for Simone’s right to stop being Tom, she proves that she has a good heart.

The novel is ultimately about finding yourself and being open to the possibility that what you find might later change. “Tiny, inconsequential shifts” in the path your life takes produce “unexpected vistas” and each shift causes you “to make room for yourself again and again.” Parakeet is charming in its oddness and wise in the lessons it teaches.

RECOMMENDED

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press June 2, 2020

Clean Hands blends a modern financial/corporate espionage thriller with an old-fashioned criminal mob story. Yet at the end, it isn’t either of those. The clever plot travels in unexpected directions. The book might not be a good choice for readers who need a hero they can cheer for — corporate law firms, small-time thugs, and people who play dirty tricks in the clandestine world tend not to win a reader’s heart — but the characters all benefit from well-defined if disagreeable personalities.

Chris Crowley, an associate at the Carlyle firm, has his pocket picked. He loses the iPhone on which he has stored incriminating documents about a client of the firm. His failure to password protect the phone, coupled with videos that show Crowley making eye contact with the pickpocket, lead firm investigator Michael D’Angelo to suspect that Crowley is not telling the whole story.

The head of the firm, Elizabeth Carlyle, freaks out because the documents relate to a bank that is the firm’s key client. The bank is suing another bank and neither financial institution has clean hands. Carlyle is worried that the documents will expose her client, and thus her firm, to major liability. She contacts her go-to outside investigator, Valencia Walker, who promises to recover the phone.

The story follows the phone as it gets passed from one crook to another, and then follows Walker as she follows the trail of people who touched it. The investigation takes her to some small-time criminals who plan to trade the phone for money, but the plot conceals a deeper layer of intrigue. The extortion that the theft sets in motion is part of a more intricate scheme with more powerful players who manipulate characters in surprising ways.

The story never loses credibility despite its byzantine plot. The story is built on smart storytelling rather than meaningless action scenes, yet it moves quickly and cleanly, never bogging down in unnecessary detail. Characters are constructed in the same way, with sufficient background to make them real without burying the reader in unnecessary biographical data.

In the end, Clean Hands depicts Machiavellian characters whose hands are anything but clean, but creates sympathy for their self-involved lives by placing them in compromised situations. The story avoids a predictably happy ending, but there is a satisfying amount of karma in this story of morally ambiguous people who are manipulated by shadowy forces they barely perceive.

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Dark Water by Robert Bryndza

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Grand Central Publishing on October 1, 2019

Dark Water is the third novel in the Erika Foster series that began with The Girl in the Ice. DCI Erika Foster is now assigned to a unit that handles drug cases and other big investigations. As she leads a team that pulls a chest of heroin from the bottom of a flooded quarry, the divers also find the skeletal remains of a 7-year-old girl who went missing in 1990, 26 years earlier. While Erika’s until does not handle homicides, she was a murder investigator before her current assignment. Risking the wrath of her supervisor, she pulls some strings and is assigned to lead the investigation into Jessica Collins’ murder.

The original investigation was a mess that resulted in a successful lawsuit by one of the suspects. DCI Amanda Baker, who was part of that investigation, became the scapegoat for what was seen as a botched investigation. She was fired and is now a hard-drinking retiree. To be fair, Amanda deserved her fate. She arrested Trevor Marksman because he had a sex offender conviction and appeared to have an interest in Jessica (or girls who resembled Jessica). He had a solid alibi and had to be released, but Amanda tipped off local vigilantes who burned down Marksman’s house with Marksman inside, leaving him with permanent scars. She also shagged Jessica’s father, much to the displeasure of Jessica’s mother. While it isn’t surprising that Amanda is drowning her sorrows during her declining years, the sorrows are largely self-inflicted.

DC Crawford, a part of Erika’s team, was also a part of Amanda’s team. He seems to be less than forthcoming about his knowledge of the original investigation. Another thorn in Erika’s foot is a high-powered barrister named Oscar Browne, who was camping with Jessica’s sister Laura when Jessica disappeared. Oscar seems to feel the need to intervene in the reopened investigation to protect the feelings of Jessica’s mother.

Amanda had the quarry searched a few weeks after Jessica went missing and doesn’t understand why the body wasn’t discovered at the time. That’s one of many mysteries that the intricate plot challenges the reader to solve. Another is whether Marksman was innocent or guilty. Erika regards Bob Jennings, a mentally impaired man who lived in a shack near the quarry, as another good suspect, but he hung himself and is unavailable for questioning. Another sex offender eventually enters the plot to add to a growing list of suspects. New murders ensue, adding fresh meat to the mystery.

Erika is assembled from the small details that give a character credibility. Her Slovakian sister Lenka comes for a visit, adding a bit of family tension, given her husband’s connection to the Mafia. Erika is a bit cold and standoffish — in other words, she’s British — but characters don’t need to be huggable to drive a mystery, and she serves well as the kind of protagonist who, with plodding determination, is able to solve a whodunit. Amanda, for all her faults, finds momentary redemption by taking a break from the bottle to offer some help that contributes to the mystery's resolution.

My knock on Robert Bryndza is that his style is just as plodding as his detectives. He doesn't bring much zest to his prose, resulting in a story that bogs down at times. The reader's persistence is nevertheless rewarded with a clever payoff in the form of an unexpected but credible resolution to the mystery.

RECOMMENDED

The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H. Wilson

Published by Harper on November 12, 2019

I read The Andromeda Strain a few years after its 1969 publication, when I was still relatively young. The novel, the first that Michael Crichton published under his own name, is generally credited as the first technothriller, or at least the first that was widely read. The novel purports to assemble information from reports, transcripts, and other official documents that intermix with narrative storytelling in the voice of a documentarian who recounts a crisis narrowly averted. Crichton produced an uneven body of work during his career but The Andromeda Strain stands out both as his best novel and as an important contribution to science fiction.

The Andromeda Evolution is written as a sequel. It adopts the same quasi-documentary storytelling technique as the original. Unlike the original, the story has little credibility, fails as a thriller, and isn’t nearly as inventive as the work Daniel H. Wilson has published under his own name. Of course, Crichton’s name appears in a much larger font than Wilson’s on the cover, despite Crichton’s death more than ten years ago.

The original Andromeda infection involved a microorganism of extraterrestrial origin. The microorganism is deadly but the novel creates a medical mystery as scientists try to understand why an alcoholic and a ceaselessly crying infant survived exposure. The answer to that mystery provides a plot point that creeps into the ending of The Andromeda Evolution.

The novel begins with something that looks like a structure rising from the Amazon jungle. The military scientists who are keeping an eye out for evidence of the original Andromeda infection decide that the phenomenon is Andromeda related. The original team of Andromeda scientists was led by Dr. Jeremy Stone. His son, James Stone, is a last-minute addition to the team of scientists who are sent into the Amazon to investigate the phenomenon. It turns out to be related to the original microorganism, although its evolution accounts for the novel’s title.

Meanwhile, on the International Space Station, a disabled astronaut named Sophie Kline is doing work in a secret lab involving the original microorganism. The notion is that the microorganism, should anything go wrong, will be unable to bother anybody if it is in orbit. Somehow none of the people who vet astronauts noticed that Kline is completely bonkers. She has cooked up a wild plan that involves the phenomenon in the Amazon. The outcome of her scheme would be devastating for the human race and probably not all that good for terrestrial nonhumans. That she would get this far in implementing her scheme without anyone noticing is mind-boggling.

The intrepid scientists and some military types begin a plodding adventure through the jungle that will not end well for most of them. Their deaths are not particularly clever and thus don’t do much to stir the reader’s sense of dread. Unfortunately, the only character I liked — the only one who struck me as being an interesting and credible scientist — is fated to die.

Along the way, the team picks up an indigenous kid named Tupa whose parents and tribe are presumably wiped out by the evolved Andromeda thing. The rest of the novel is primarily an Indiana Jones-style adventure story as Stone and his partner-in-science-and-romance, Nidhi Vedala, battle against the creation they discover in the jungle before taking on the batty Kline aboard the space station.

How the scientists get to the space station is one of the aspects of this novel that stretch credibility beyond the threshold of my willingness to suspend disbelief. Since the story seemed more like a cartoon than a credible thriller, it had me leaning back in the Barcalounger rather than sitting on the edge of my seat.

I imagine the novel’s ending is meant to be heartwarming, but it is so predictable and unbelievable that heartburning might be a better description. The novel sets up the potential for a third book in the series that really doesn’t need to be written. With no particular attachment to the characters and no reason to overcome my skepticism about the plot, I can’t recommend The Andromeda Evolution, despite my admiration of some of Wilson’s other work.

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