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.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Of Mice and Minestrone by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Tachyon Publications on May 28, 2020

The prolific and versatile Joe Lansdale has done us the favor of writing some new Hap and Leonard stories, most of which appear here for the first time. The volume is subtitled “Hap and Leonard: The Early Years.” While the duo appeared in a three-season television series that I haven’t seen, Lansdale explains in an introduction that the television series and the print stories depart a bit in how the two friends first met. The print version of that meeting is told in a story that appears in Blood and Lemonade.

The first story in this volume, “The Kitchen,” sets the scene by describing Hap’s enjoyment of the smells in his mother’s kitchen. The volume begins to show Lansdale’s grit and wit in the next story, the two-part “Of Mice and Minestrone.” As events progress, Hap explains why, as a teen, he wanted out of Marvel Creek, Texas. “You might call it a one-horse town, and if you did, that horse was crippled and blind in one eye and needed to be put down.” Hap had a summer job mopping floors and doing errands for the local police, putting him in a position to see an older guy named Dash who abused his wife Minnie. Hap does his best to help but Minnie pays a price when she stands up for herself. The story then turns into a murder investigation. Hap’s contribution consists of sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong. He learns a lesson about making assumptions — his own and the opposing “good old boy” assumptions made by Dash’s buddy on the police force. The story showcases Lansdale’s ability to write powerful scenes that linger in memory.

Leonard finally makes an appearance in “The Watering Shed,” a story about friendship and racism in a slowly desegregating South. As always, Lansdale recognizes the complexity of race as an issue. Some of the characters are racists, some aren’t, some are in between. By the end of the story, Hap learns something about the importance of standing up for what’s right. In the last story, “The Sabine Was High,” Hap and Leonard meet for the first time after Hap’s release from prison and Leonard’s return from Vietnam. Leonard is proud that he served and Hap is proud that he went to prison for refusing the draft. Their experiences have changed them, but their friendship has only strengthened. The story is a reminder of a time in history when Americans could disagree about politics and still go fishing together as friends.

In between “The Watering Shed” and “The Sabine Was High,” Leonard enlists Hap to work as a sparring partner in the aptly titled “Sparring Partner.” Hap and Leonard are both decent amateur boxers. The small-time promoter who hires them has a history of finding black boxers to match against white boxers. The promoter doesn’t really care if the boxers are good, a callous attitude that places his boxers at risk. The trainer knows better but wants to keep his job. The story culminates in Leonard switching places with an untalented boxer and going up against a slow but monstrous brute. This might be the best boxing story I’ve ever read, but apart from the fight itself, the story addresses collateral characters who confront moral dilemmas and, in a couple of cases, make a selfless choice. This is a heartwarming story and my favorite in the volume.

The collection ends with recipes for southern delicacies (chili and pies and the like) that appear in the stories. Not being much of a cook, I can’t comment on whether they are good, but they did make me hungry for pie.

RECOMMENDED

Worse Angels by Laird Barron

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 26, 2020

Isaiah Coleridge was a more interesting character during the previous two books in this series, when he was still a mob enforcer. As an enlightened thug, he had a unique personality. Now that he’s a private detective, he’s just another private detective, albeit one with a colorful background. He has gone straight to prove to himself and everyone else that he can follow a better path, which stops just short of being self-righteous. Fortunately, he hasn’t crossed that line. He wants to kick the dopamine rush that comes from hitting people, but he regularly encounters people that try to hit him, so what choice does he have? His thuggish instincts are still at war with his better nature, and every now and then his worse angel allows barely controlled mayhem to rule. He proves that late in the novel by assuring that some troublesome people will never make trouble again. That’s the Coleridge of old.

My ultimate issue with Worse Angels is not that Coleridge has gone soft — by the end of the novel, it is clear that he is still a wrecking ball — but that the plot veers in the direction of the supernatural. With the exception of John Connolly, I prefer my thriller writers to stay grounded in reality. Granted, there might be non-supernatural explanations for certain phenomenon, but they are about as plausible as gaining the ability to climb walls after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Coleridge is improbably well read for a thug. In addition to summoning “the literary specters of Holmes and Mason; Poirot and Fletcher,” he quotes ancient Greeks and is familiar with history and mythology and philosophy. At least he has something to talk about. Unlike the thriller protagonists who describe their weapons in loving detail before running out of conversation, Coleridge ponders the mystery of existence, including the knowledge that all we have is “that fragile guttering flame between us and the endless void.” I probably like him because, despite his dark nature, he is good to dogs, only kills jerks, and detests the “righteous racism craze” that is “sweeping the nation.” For a hit man, he isn’t all bad.

Coleridge is hired by an ex-NYPD cop named Badja Adeyemi who worked as an assistant and bodyguard to Sen. Gerald Redlick, owner of a real estate business called the Redlick Group. The corporation laundered dirty Russian money. Adeyemi expects to be killed by Russian gangsters or arrested by the feds. Before that can happen, he hires Coleridge to look into the death of his nephew, Sean Pruitt, who was working on the Jeffers Large Particle Collider Project, an expensive and corrupt endeavor in which Redlick invested. Pruitt supposedly committed suicide by plunging down a shaft, but Adeyemi thinks there is a connection between that death and eight fatal accidents that occurred before construction came to a halt.

The first half of the novel drags a bit as Coleridge investigates the death with his associate Lionel Robard. The story take a strange turn when he encounters the Mares of Thrace, which seems to be a cult consisting of members who eat spoiled meat and dress like they are still in high school. The members become weirdly powerful when they make strange faces, perhaps owing to radiation, hence the Spiderman reference. None of that made much sense to me. The plot thread struck me as an unwelcome departure from the more reality-based stories Laird Barron told in the first two Coleridge books.

To be fair, I was feeling distracted when I read Worse Angels. I’m conscious of the fact that my mood affects my reading. Maybe Worse Angels is just as good as the earlier novels in the series and if I’d read it in a different week, I would have been more enthused. And to be fair, when the action picked up in the second half, I was drawn into the story. If nothing else, Barron’s sharp-edged prose is enough to keep me hooked on the series. I nevertheless hope the next book returns to the standard set by the first two.

RECOMMENDED

A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen

Published by Harper on January 28, 2020

Nick Brink and Clay Guillory are lovers and scammers. Their first scam is simple and based on convenient circumstances. The next one is more daring. The novel’s suspense is built upon whether the two novice criminals can get away with fraud, or whether evil will be their undoing.

When Nick travels to Venice to meet Clay, he plans to leave his New York life behind him. Nick has been working for and sleeping with an antiques dealer, apprenticing in the art of valuing old silver. Clay was living in Venice with a decaying man named Freddy van der Haar until Freddy died of an overdose. Freddy was from old money but his money was running out when he died. Freddy’s American friends had a memorial in New York, where Nick met Clay. By coincidence, Clay has engaged Nick’s boss/lover to value the remaining pieces of family silver that Freddy didn’t sell.

Freddy owned one side of a grand old home in Venice, or at least he owned an interest in it, together with an elderly sister who is living in South America. The house, like Freddy, has suffered from poor maintenance. Freddy left his half to Clay, who is widely believed to be a hustler. The other side is owned by Richard West, who hated Freddy and has no greater love for Clay, who now owns half of the house that West would love to possess in its entirety.

Clay devises a scam to sell some of Freddy’s relatively worthless silver to West, using Nick to inflate the value. To that end, Nick must find a way to meet West while pretending not to know Clay. When the plan appears to be a success, Clay makes a more audacious plan to sell his side of the house to West by forging the signature of Freddy’s sister on the title transfer documents.

When both schemes appear to be coming unraveled, coincidence gives Nick an opportunity, albeit at the cost of his soul, assuming he has one. Another coincidence gives Clay some information that he wasn’t expected to have. Still another strikes a character mute when one of the protagonists would otherwise be in dire straits. The coincidences are hard to swallow but necessary for the outcome that Christopher Bollen wanted to achieve.

Apart from its reliance on improbable coincidences, the plot is credible and carefully constructed. On the whole, characterization is strong, although neither Clay nor Nick is particularly admirable. They are, in fact, remarkably unconcerned about anyone except themselves. Fortunately, West is even slimier than the protagonists, so defrauding him doesn’t greatly offend the reader’s sensibilities. Nick, at least, has some moral qualms about a choice he makes and another that he contemplates. Those qualms hardly make him an exemplar of ethical behavior, but they humanize him a bit.

A Beautiful Crime is rich with atmosphere. This is a crumbling Venice, a place where preservationists are at war with tourists and seekers of quick profit. I almost like the atmosphere more than the characters or coincidence-driven plot, and the underwhelming ending seems improbably happy. Still, Bollen’s prose goes down like a wine made from the perfect blend of grapes — complex and surprising, smooth and luxurious. The prose was enough to overcome my reservations about unlikely coincidences and self-centered characters.

RECOMMENDED