Blame by Jeff Abbott

Published by Grand Central Publishing on July 18, 2017

Blame is often assigned as a way to avoid the powerless feeling that comes from accepting that tragic events are usually beyond our control. Bad things happen, but the pain of living with that reality is displaced by anger if we can blame someone for the tragedy. That, at least, is one theory of blame advanced in a novel that explores blame from several perspectives.

Jane Norton was in a car accident when she was seventeen. Two years later, she has no memory of the crash or of much of her life during the three years before the crash. David Hall died in the same accident. David’s mother and most of his friends blame Jane for his death because of a note that was found at the crash scene. Someone using the name Liv Danger has hacked Jane’s social media site and is threatening to reveal the truth about her role in David’s death — a truth Jane does not herself know. The words ALL WILL PAY appear in Liv Danger’s message. It’s also chalked on David’s gravestone on the anniversary of his death.

Jane is soon caught in a web of deceit as individuals (some of whom she trusts) appear to be withholding information or lying to her, including her mother, a girl who claims to have been her best friend before the accident, a couple of boys who may or may not have been her boyfriend before the accident, a private detective who investigated the accident, and a psychology student.

This is the kind of novel where a number of violent crimes are committed and each time, suspicion falls on the protagonist. The reader, like Jane, is challenged to figure out who is responsible for the mayhem, why it is taking place, which of the characters are telling Jane the truth, which characters are lying, and why the liars are deceiving her.

Jeff Abbott handles all of that with skill. A reader might guess some aspects of the novel’s resolution but I doubt that most readers will figure out the roles played by all the characters before Abbott reveals them. Abbott didn’t quite sell me on the motivations of certain characters, but stretching credulity for the sake of delivering a surprising story is a common feature of modern thrillers and, at least in this case, not one that greatly diminished my reading pleasure.

The plot is intricate and it generally held my interest, although the story is a bit drawn out, creating an uneven pace that builds suspense but lets it dissipate. I suspect this novel could have been 50 to 100 pages shorter without omitting anything crucial. The ending also leans toward melodrama. Everything resolves too neatly, delivering a form of justice to the characters who deserved it in a way that seems too convenient.

Blame has value beyond the plot. The real target of Blame is small town pettiness, the gossipy judgment that is viral in cloistered communities, as residents take secret (or open) delight in the embarrassment of others. Abbott also targets “confessional” bloggers who make celebrities of their family members (as does the writer of a mommy blog) without considering how that exposure will affect the child. I enjoyed reading Blame for those background themes almost as much as I enjoyed the plot ... maybe more.

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The Midnight Line by Lee Child

Published by Random House/Delacorte Press on Nov. 7, 2017

The Midnight Line is the best Reacher novel I’ve read in quite some time. Lee Child always stands out in the crowd of “tough guy” fiction authors, but The Midnight Line stands out because the “tough guy” aspect of the story is underplayed. Instead, Child focuses the story on a serious real-world issue: soldiers who suffer serious injuries in the line of duty, who become addicted to powerful pain medications, and who are then all but abandoned by the government that gave them their problem. Lee illustrates that issue by focusing on one woman’s struggle to make it through each day, which amounts to a struggle to find the opioids she needs to maintain a life she can handle.

Jack Reacher stumbles upon a ring in a pawn shop that was once owned by a female West Point graduate. The pawned ring suggests that the woman encountered some sort of trouble, so Reacher, being Reacher, decides to find her. His first step involves fighting a motorcycle gang. He is, after all, a tough guy, and it is a rule of tough guy novels that tough guy heroes must establish their tough guy credentials at the beginning of every story. Authors of lesser novels do nothing else, but the best writers search for a more compelling storyline than “tough guys are really tough.” Child usually comes through in that regard, although some of his books do it more successfully than others.

Reacher’s next step takes him to Rapid City and to a fellow named Shapiro who is suspected of all sorts of criminal activities by the local police. A private detective from Chicago who specializes in finding missing persons is also keeping an eye on Shapiro. It isn't hard to figure out which missing person the detective is trying to find. Eventually Reacher teams up with the private detective and the missing woman’s sister to look for the woman who belongs to the ring.

Reacher novels are compulsively readable, and this one is no exception. The pace is steady, calm and assured, exactly what a reader should expect from a confident writer. There is action from time to time, but after the fight with the motorcycle gang, this is a novel of anticipation more than action. I like that. With so many mindless tough guy novels on the market, a tough guy who doesn’t feel a constant need to prove his superiority to other tough guys is a welcome change.

The Midnight Line is a compassionate novel. The story is a little sad because for many people, life gets to be a little sad. Life goes where life takes us, and that isn’t always where we want our lives to go, but sad or not, life goes on until it stops. Reacher accepts that, and Child wants the reader to accept it, without all the hokey “make your own destiny” bromides that are so popular in novels and self-help books. When life doesn’t go well, you cope, and if you’re lucky, you cope without being judged and other people still respect your dignity and give you the decent treatment that should come with being human. We could use more of that sort of understanding.

The novel’s only flaw is that a police detective and her computer guy engage in some police work that struck me as fanciful. The method by which they figured out the phone number of a telephone sold by a convenience store and the phone company’s willingness to give the police a voicemail left on that number without a subpoena or warrant both struck me as implausible. But those are minor complaints about a novel that isn’t about police work so much as it is about a person dealing with a problem that she has in common with thousands of others. Child encourages the reader to understand her, and to understand and feel compassion for people like her (not just veterans). Kudos to Child for writing a tough guy novel that displays so much compassion and sensitivity — values that are in short supply, not just in tough guy novels, but in life.

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The Shape of Bones by Daniel Galera

First published in Brazil in 2006; published in translation by Penguin Press on August 15, 2017

The Shape of Bones reads like a collection of related stories that follow a group of characters in Brazil, but the stories eventually shape themselves into a novel. Each episode/chapter has a title and most can be read as a discrete story. Each is narrated by Hermano. The developing story in the present interweaves with memories of Hermano’s past.

The episodes in the past are set in Esplanada, a city in Northeast Brazil. They give shape to Hermano’s life. For example, “The Urban Cyclist” is Hermano as a ten-year-old boy who rides his bicycle at high speeds on the tricky pavements of suburban streets. The story tells of Hermano’s encounter with an old woman who explains the blood that is spilling from his knee after a tumble. Other cycling stories make clear that Hermano craves attention and is jealous of friends who receive more accolades than he can manage. The memories serve to establish Hermano’s character and to fix the city of Esplanada firmly in the reader’s mind.

Hermano’s memories of the past involve the people he hung with, the ones he liked and those he regarded as threats. The first story that features Bonobo is about a collision and its dangerous repercussions on a soccer field. In later memories, Bonobo becomes an important (but not well liked) figure in Hermano’s life, someone Hermano envies for the wrong reasons. Bonobo is eventually involved in the key dramatic moment that defines Hermano’s past, a moment that changes to suit Hermano as he retells it.

Other episodes reveal additional stages of Hermano’s life. In one, we see Hermano’s high school insecurity as he attends a girl’s birthday party, unsure whether he wants to dance, hesitant to make eye contact with girls, unable to intervene when another boy at the party is giving a girl a hard time. Cowardice is a recurring theme.

In the present, we discover that Hermano is a cosmetic surgeon, married with child, the completion of a goal-driven life. Most of the episodes set in the present take place minutes apart from each other. They tell of Hermano’s plan to join his friend Renan on an expedition to climb a mountain that has never been climbed. Each episode is titled with a time (such as “6:08 a.m.”) and each is told in long paragraph, which I imagine is meant to give them a sense of onrushing immediacy. That doesn’t work very well, since the content is often too contemplative to justify the form.

How are we to understand Hermano? I’m not sure we can, because Hermano does not understand why he has suddenly chosen to become “a solitary renegade deserting all ties to his life to seek something in his origins.” He has made a sudden, fateful and impulsive decision that will change his life for no obvious purpose. He is a quixotic character, perhaps in the grip of self-delusion. He briefly fancies himself a hero although he’s really kind of a dick. But maybe he’s just changing in a belated reaction to the dramatic moment that took place fifteen years earlier. The past always catches up to the present no matter how quickly we try to run from it, and that might be the ultimate point of The Shape of Bones.

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Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún

Published in Spanish in 2015; published in translation in 2016; published by Simon & Schuster on September 12, 2017

A German family relocates to La Paz after World War II. The father, Hans Ertl, was a cameraman for Nazi filmmaker/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. By the 1950s, Hans has reinvented himself as an explorer/photographer/documentarian. He disappears for months at a time, usually to climb mountains, but his goal as the novel starts is to find the lost city of Paitití. His daughter Monica, who doesn’t want to be in La Paz, agrees to join him on his quest, as does her sister Heidi. Point of view shifts from Heidi to her sister Trixi, who stays home with their mother Aurelia while Monica and Heidi are in the jungle with their father.

The novel tracks the family over a period of decades, but this is a short novel, so there are significant gaps in the family history after the search for Paititi. The story is set against a background that includes the Bolivian revolution, the military dictatorships that followed, and the unsuccessful guerrilla war waged by Che Guevara and others to bring down the dictatorships.

The background moves into the forefront when the novel focuses on Monica’s lover Reinhard, who is also the brother of her husband. Chapters devoted to Reinhard are told in Reinhard's voice, in the form of answers to questions, conveying the impression that Reinhard is being interrogated as he talks about Monica, who fell in love with a Bolivian guerrilla named Inti and became an indispensable part of the revolutionary movement. A brief chapter gives us the perspective of Inti before he becomes the ill-fated leader of Che’s National Liberation Army.

Toward the end of the 1960s, in the aftermath of Monica’s relationship with Inti, the story again touches upon Hans and his daughters. Hans has reinvented himself (again) after a failed expedition. His relationship with his family is strained, including an inevitable confrontation with Monica who (given her father’s history) should not be surprised by his willingness to tolerate a fascist government.

Affections tells an intense but ambiguous story, based in large part on real people. The events in family members' life are presented superficially but the characters (at least Monica and her father) are drawn in greater depth than the plot. Other characters have a tendency to drift away, giving the novel an episodic and unfinished feel. Rodrigo Hasbún leaves many questions unanswered, the kind of questions a literature professor might ask (What was Hasbún saying when Hans hired workers to dig a deep hole on his property?) and that have no clear answers. I found that mildly frustrating, probably due to my lack of imagination or an anal desire to have all questions firmly answered. But life is frustratingly full of unanswered questions and literature should reflect life, so I can’t fault the novel for doing that. In the end, I admired the novel’s atmosphere, its portrayal of key characters, and Hasbún’s prose. That’s enough to overcome my puzzlement and to earn a recommendation.

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Small Hours by Jennifer Kitses

Published by Grand Central Publishing on June 13, 2017

Small Hours is a slice-of-married-life family drama. The slice consists of an eventful, life-changing day for both spouses, although since they spend little of that day together. They make independent decisions after experiencing unrelated events, but their decisions are ultimately connected.

Tom and Helen Foster have moved to the “achingly quiet” town of Devon in the Hudson Valley to raise their two daughters. Tom, a wire service editor, is increasingly overwhelmed by anxiety while Helen, a graphic designer, works off her anger by punching a bag at the local gym.

Tom and Helen are keeping secrets. Tom’s anxiety concerns a recently born daughter Helen doesn’t know about. Tom would like to play an active parenting role with that daughter, just as he does with his other daughters, but he fears Helen would leave him if he told her the truth.

Helen knows about Tom’s affair and thinks she has moved past it. Still, Helen is consumed with anger. The anger is partly driven by credit card balances she hasn’t told Tom about, and partly by the difficulty of balancing the demands of her underpaid work-at-home job with the demands of her daughters. But Helen also feels her life spinning out of control in small ways that make her question her fitness as a mother, including her run-in with a couple of teenage girls she dismisses as white trash.

The slow build of tension makes the reader understand that the situations in which Tom and Helen find themselves are unsustainable. Tom’s bond with Donna’s child is growing, as is Donna’s concern about her daughter’s “secret daddy.” Tom and Helen are increasingly on edge as the story progresses. The characters are searching for a happy ending to their stories, but it seems likely that one character's happiness will hurt at least one other character. How all of that will shake out is the primary question that drive the plot.

Neither Helen nor Tom are ideal people. Helen is remarkably needy. Her needs are unfulfilled, and probably incapable of being fulfilled. Tom is remarkably selfish, as he demonstrates repeatedly. The story doesn’t make for pleasant reading because Helen and Tom are at their worst and I can’t imagine wanting to know either of them. The story nevertheless has value because Jennifer Kitses opens a window on the problems and attitudes of realistic characters. Even the secondary characters (particularly a teenage boy who stands up for Helen, a “good kid who made bad choices”) are recognizable as people, not just stereotypes inserted to move the story along.

The novel ends with Helen and Tom making decisions. They have more decisions to make, and their decisions will have consequences, but Kitses leaves it to the reader to imagine how it will all play out. Small Hours is a novel of small moments, but it offers big insights into the choices that are forced upon people as they struggle to decide how their lives should proceed.

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