Hard Cash Valley by Brian Panowich

Published by St. Martin's/Minotaur Books on May 5, 2020

Dane Kirby has lung cancer. It’s at stage two, but he doesn’t plan to get treatment. Years earlier, he lost his wife and daughter in a car accident after he hit a deer. Kirby has lost his enthusiasm for life. He is living with a woman but hasn’t told her about the cancer. He isn’t quite sure how to break the news, and saying it out loud would make it real. In any event, he never let go of his wife and has never fully invested in the new relationship.

Kirby works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation after spending most of his career fighting or investigating fires. He’s happy to end his years with a nice, obscure desk job. That plan goes up in smoke when FBI Assistant Director August O’Barr summons him to a crime scene in Florida. Arnie Blackwell was murdered in a motel room and his body was set on fire. The case appears to have a connection to Georgia, so Special Agent Roselita Velasquez is temporarily detached from her partner, Geoff Dahmer, and assigned to work with Kirby. Velasquez isn’t happy about the assignment. She’s a feisty, interesting character who makes some surprising decisions as the story unfolds.

An ordinary murder doesn’t seem like a federal crime, but a large amount of cash was stolen from the victim. The money was won in a cockfighting event in Georgia. Arnie managed the improbable feat of betting correctly on every contest. To discover the secret of his success, he was tortured and killed by two mobsters from the Philippines, where gambling on cockfights is a way of life.

That setup sends Kirby and Velasquez on an investigative path that leads to unexpected destinations. Their primary goal is to find Arnie’s autistic brother William, a goal shared by a formidable Filipino killer and a mysterious figure who occasionally commits a murder of his own.

The plot offers an intelligent blend of action, mystery, and suspense. Hard Cash Valley is one of those rare thrillers that actually thrills, in part because the story never loses its credibility. The threats that Kirby faces always seem genuine, and he’s not the kind of hero who is going to fight his way out of a jam. Kirby has to rely on his smarts, and he has just enough of those to do his job well.

The plot is sufficiently complex to keep the reader guessing but not so byzantine that the reader will lose track of details. A subplot involves Kirby’s estranged friend Nat Lemon, who seems to have committed a murder that is unconnected to the main plot. Connections eventually develop that tie the stories together.

Characterization is well above average for the genre. Velasquez is a lesbian so she doesn’t enter into a predictable romance with Kirby. That’s one of many good choices that Brian Panowich made to tell a fresh and convincing story. The resolution might depend on more karma than the world generally offers, but it’s difficult for a reader to complain about feeling good at the end of a novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Paladin by David Ignatius

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on May 5, 2020

A CIA cyberintelligence agent named Michael Dunne is assigned to infiltrate a group called Fallen Empire, which is suspected of engaging in WikiLeaks-like activities. The main person of interest is an American named Jason Howe who claims to be running a news organization. The CIA regards it as an enemy intelligence service, in part because it is assisted by a team headed by an Italian computer nerd. Dunne understands that the assignment is probably illegal and against CIA policy because (1) the CIA isn’t supposed to spy on Americans and (2) the CIA has promised not to mess with journalists. But the DDO, George Strafe, assures Dunne that the CIA will have his back so he breaks the law anyway.

Before the operation goes sideways, Dunne falls into a honeytrap and finds himself on the wrong end of a video camera with his pants down. After the operation goes sideways, the video gets sent to his wife (whose image is also deepfaked into a separate salacious video) and Dunne is prosecuted for a couple of federal crimes. Dunne’s pathetic excuse for a lawyer wants him to plead guilty before he conducts an investigation. The only good advice that the lawyer gives Dunne is to apologize for being a bad boy at sentencing. Dunne does just the opposite, protesting that his misfortune is all the fault of his superiors, which predictably results in a year in prison rather than probation. He loses wife and daughter and emerges from prison a bitter man, but at least he has connections.

Dunne starts his own cybersecurity firm and promptly makes it his mission to seek revenge. His primary targets are Howe and Strafe. Along the way he discovers a scheme to disrupt financial markets using nasty technology, including the deepfake tech that was used against his wife. The plot is a moderately interesting variation of stories that have told many times before.

I assume David Ignatius wants the reader to feel some sympathy for Dunne, but I felt none. He broke the law and blamed his bosses for his decision to do what he knew was wrong. Then he fell into an obvious honeytrap and blamed the people who videoed him. Only rarely and reluctantly does Dunne acknowledge that he is at least partially responsible for his own misfortunes. Just a few chapters into The Paladin, I gave up caring about Dunne. He constantly portrays himself as a victim, but he’s primarily a victim of his own selfishness and stupidity.

Near the novel’s end, I thought Ignatius might be setting up a truly daring ending, but the actual ending is predictable. The Paladin moves quickly and the story isn’t dull, but a mediocre plot, a disagreeable protagonist, and Ignatius’ lackluster prose offer little reason for thriller or spy novel fans to spend time with the novel. The Paladin isn’t an awful book, but there are better choices.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

Published by Flatiron Books on January 21, 2020

So much of American Dirt is either tense or heartbreaking that it is a relief to reach the end. This is such a powerful and moving novel that only the emptiest of hearts could remain untouched by the story.

American Dirt imagines that the most ruthless cartel leader in Acapulco, a man named Javier Fuentes, is a sensitive soul and an avid reader, a man who discusses poetry with his daughter and literature with a bookstore owner named Lydia Pérez. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián Pérez Delgado, is a reporter who does not let threats deter him from writing about the cartels. When he writes about Javier, cartel members murder Sebastián and sixteen members of his extended family. Only Lydia and her son Luca escape. Lydia eventually learns the reason for Javier’s extreme response, but her immediate need is to flee before Javier’s cartel kills her son.

American Dirt follow Lydia on her harrowing journey from Acapulco to the United States. As Lydia is trying to understand how to ride on top of a northbound train (la Bestia), she meets two teenage girls, Rebecca and Soledad, who are fleeing sexual violence in Honduras. The teens encounter more sexual violence on their northbound journey. Those scenes are implied — the text isn’t graphic — but American Dirt is not a book for the squeamish. The sense of realism that Jeanine Cummins conveys is one reason the story is so emotionally distressing.

The narrative is electrifying. Lydia navigates from one danger to another — boarding moving trains with a small child, eluding cartel members and lesser criminals, losing her money to corrupt authorities who kidnap and shake down migrants under the pretense of arresting them, following a coyote on a trek through the Arizona desert that is made more dangerous by flash floods and armed vigilantes who are itching to shoot migrants. The reader rarely has time to take a break from worrying about Lydia and Luca, as well as the other characters who have placed their lives at risk to cross the border illegally because they truly have no better choice.

For all its tragedy, American Dirt reminds the reader that instincts of decency still prompt people to help the less fortunate, sometimes at risk to their own well-being, even as indecent people exploit or attack them. The book is filled with small moments of hope, as people who live in poverty sacrifice to help others who are even less fortunate.

In an Author’s Note at the end of American Dirt, Cummins writes that the world has enough novels about the violent men who call themselves heroes. Cummins says she is more interested in victims, but (although Cummins doesn’t say it) Lydia and Rebecca and Soledad rise above the status of victims. They are heroes because they fight not just for survival, but to preserve their humanity. While some victims shut down or seek revenge when they are wronged, Lydia demonstrates heroic strength; “she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified.”

Cummins’ supple prose is just as remarkable as the story. American Dirt perfectly illustrates the horrors suffered by refugees and other migrants without preaching or politicizing. It is a book featuring almost no Americans that deserves to become an American classic.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Jack by Connie Willis

First published in 1991; published by Subterranean Press on April 30, 2020

Nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula, Jack is a novella by the incomparable Connie Willis that Subterranean Press has reissued in a signed, limited edition. It is one of many stories that Willis set in London during the Blitz. Some of those are time travel stories, but Jack is more a work of horror than science fiction. The Blitz is the novel’s true horror; nothing a lone man could do can compare to the carnage of war. Willis has a knack for conveying the terror of being present at a time when falling bombs and crumbling buildings caused indiscriminate death.

The narrator is named Jack. He works as an air-raid warden, helping rescue people who are buried under the rubble after the bombs fall. Jack tells us about another man named Jack who has recently come down from Yorkshire to do the same work. Jack Settle is particularly adept at finding people who are trapped. Another person in a different ward with the same talent is called a “bodysniffer” and claims the ability to read the minds of the people who are trapped.

So can Jack Settle read minds? Can he distinguish the scent of the living from the dead? Is his hearing exceptionally acute? Narrator Jack begins to understand how Jack Settle finds so many bodies, why he refuses to eat or drink, and why he disappears (supposedly to go to his day job) before the sun rises.

Jack Settle’s quirks will suggest an obvious explanation to fans of horror novels. Jack the narrator comes to that conclusion and regards Jack Settle as a monster. Maybe he is, but how should the reader balance Jack Settle’s nature against all the lives he saves? Is Jack really such a bad guy when compared to the men on both sides of the war who drop bombs that set cities on fire and tear children to pieces? Is he worse than the shopkeepers who keep young women working until closing time, even after the air raid sirens blow, forcing them to run through the blackout in the hope of finding shelter? People do what their natures compel them to do; whether that makes them monsters is a matter of perspective.

Willis gives life to a half dozen characters besides the Jacks, the names of whom will be familiar to readers of a famous horror novel. They are ordinary people whose ordinary lives are disturbed by the extraordinary forces of history. The characters are transformed by their experiences, in ways both big and small — a wallflower gains self-confidence, a man who always wanted to write produces a newsletter, a delinquent makes his father proud by earning a medal in the RAF. Even Jack Settle is transformed, because he finally has an opportunity to use his nature for a worthwhile purpose. As always, Willis takes a deep and meaningful look at what it means to be human, even when she writes about a character who might not be.

RECOMMENDED

Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on April 28, 2020

Take Me Apart is the story of two mentally ill women. Had Sara Sligar generated sympathy or created empathy for their plights, her concept might have been developed into a good book. Instead, Sligar offers too little reason to care about either woman while placing them in a contrived plot that never builds suspense.

Kate is an out-of-work copy editor who either quit or was forced out of her job after she reported sexual harassment (the truth of her departure from employment is concealed until the final third of the novel). Her aunt in Northern California recommends her services to Theo Brand, who wants an archivist to organize his mother’s papers.

Miranda Brand was a celebrated photographer whose mental health issues contributed to her fame. “Art is supposed to make you afraid,” she thinks, an emotion she hopes to evoke with photographs of blood-covered women. The circumstances of her death, when Theo was only eleven, triggered rumors that still persist in the  community where Miranda lived.

Miranda was married to a painter named Jake whose art earned less money than Miranda’s. Both artists were represented by the same agent, who now hopes to cash in on photographs that Kate might find while sorting through Miranda’s stuff, as well as the archive of documents that Kate compiles.

We learn about Miranda at the end of each chapter. The chapters begin by recounting Kate’s archival work and her interaction with Theo and his two children. Chapters end with excerpts from the material Kate is organizing: Miranda’s diary entries, medical records, media clippings, and cryptic notes scribbled on the backs of photographs.

Kate begins to wonder whether Miranda really killed herself. It’s really none of her business, but to satisfy her curiosity, she snoops through Theo’s house and interviews Miranda’s agent and a law enforcement officer who investigated the death. Naturally, she begins to suspect that young Theo committed the crime, but only harbors that suspicion once she begins sleeping with him. The decision to sleep with Theo follows on the heels of a good bit of gush that would have been better suited to a cheesy romance novel.

Kate is emotionally fragile and off her OCD meds. She probably deserves the reader’s empathy, but Sligar didn’t make me care about her problems, many of which exist solely to give the book a plot. Kate makes every wrong decision it would be possible to make, has only herself to blame, and eventually comes to the realization (spoiler alert) that she should have stayed on her meds. Well, no kidding. I’m not sure what insight a reader is supposed to take from that.

Nor did I care about Miranda’s mental health issues, which are apparently meant to parallel Kate’s, but their disorders are quite different. Mirands suffered from a sort of postpartum depression that made her fantasize about killing Theo after his birth.

Both women are portrayed as having been victimized by men. It isn’t anyone’s fault but Kate’s that she stopped taking her meds. I would sympathize with her as a sexual harassment victim if that were the novel’s focus, but the focus is on Kate’s manic behavior, which can’t reasonably be attributed to sexual harassment that she handled quite capably and that ended as a result of her complaints. Jake sometimes had sex with Miranda when she wasn’t in the mood, but Miranda was always in a depressed mood, and it’s not clear that she ever communicated her lack of desire for sex to her husband. Her underlying problem, like Kate’s, is her mental illness, not abuse by a man.

Not that the men are ideal characters. Jake may have been insenstive to his wife, but he was married to a basket case. He mishandles a delicate situation involving his son which might account for why Theo is screwed up. This is an awfully dysfunctional and self-pitying cast of characters. The question is whether Sligar did anything with them that might be worthy of a reader’s time.

The only reason to keep reading about these self-absorbed misfits is the mystery surrounding Miranda’s death. Sligar dutifully sets up a few suspects, including Jake, Theo, the agent, and a character named Kid with whom Miranda had something more than a friendship. Miranda’s theories and suspicions about the death seem to be rooted in her mania rather than facts an objective observer might find persuasive. The idea of a nutcase accidentally unraveling a murder might make a good story, but this isn’t it. The eventual reveal about Miranda’s death is underwhelming. A late, out-of-nowhere effort to add a plot twist involving a disappearing diary induced a shrug of indifference.

Sligar’s prose style is polished. As a debut novel, Take Me Apart shows glimpses of promise. It just doesn’t deliver a plot or characters that made me care about the outcome. Fans of predictable and cheesy romance might appreciate the final chapter, but that chapter and the novel as a whole were too unconvincing to hold any appeal for me.

NOT RECOMMENDED