Mangrove Lightning by Randy Wayne White

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 21, 2017

I get a kick out of the characters in the Doc Ford novels. The secondary characters primarily exist to provide comic relief. Tomlinson, in particular, is a perfect foil to Doc Ford. Tomlinson is good-hearted but annoying, and he’s a magnet for trouble, not that Ford can’t find enough trouble on his own.

In Mangrove Lightning, Ford and Tomlinson find themselves chasing crazy people in Florida’s mangroves, the kind who capture young women and find creative ways to torture and kill them. Ford is drawn into the investigation by Tomlinson, who is concerned about the disappearance of Gracie, the niece of legendary fishing guide Tootsie Barlow. Ford thinks he should know better than to listen to Tomlinson, but it turns out (as it has in other books in the series) that Tomlinson’s tenuous connection to the world sometimes delivers insights that less addled individuals fail to perceive.

In any event, finding the creepy swamp dwellers is only the start of Doc Ford’s latest adventure. The mystery, largely driven by Tomlinson’s spiritual awareness (or drug consumption), addresses the connection between the present and a history of Chinese slavery, rum runners from Cuba, gangsters, land developers in southern Florida, and demons from Chinese mythology … unless they aren’t mythological. There are even crazy killers who kill with lightning, which is a creative twist on the crazy killer theme.

The plot is strange in a good way, the story more about Tomlinson than Doc Ford, who is off on a romp of his own, investigating a child porn ring. I didn’t have a problem with spotlighting Tomlinson since the character really shines in this story. Hannah Smith, another good character from the past, also plays a key role. The creepiness of the villains might be a bit much for sensitive readers, but the story isn’t overly graphic. Randy Wayne White allows the reader’s imagination to fill in the bloodier gaps.

Despite the novel’s tongue-in-cheek nature, Mangrove Lightning races to a powerful conclusion. The ending is very dark, much more so than the story that precedes it, and generally darker than is common in the series. It might not be a good fit for readers who want unfailingly happy endings. There is nevertheless some light in the darkness, in that this turns out to be a story about courage and endurance in the face of extreme peril … and creepiness.

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Executive Order by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 11, 2017

Executive Order is the last of a trilogy involving largely unrelated stories that focus on the three branches of government. The first two are Supreme Justice and Fate of the Union.

I’m not generally a fan of “massive conspiracy of hidden government employees in all branches of government who plan an overthrow” novels, unless they were written decades ago by Robert Ludlum or Fredrick Forsythe. The subgenre has pretty well run its course and it is increasingly difficult to believe that the self-proclaimed “patriots” who would engage in such a conspiracy are capable of ordering lunch at a drive-thru, much less organizing hundreds of conspirators at the highest levels of government (and keeping it all a secret). Executive Order isn’t a particularly plausible conspiracy novel, for exactly those reasons, but I enjoyed it anyway.

In 2031, the Russians are threatening to invade Azbekistan and the CIA has sent four operatives to watch. They get caught in a firefight, which cheeses off President Harrison, who ordered the CIA not to send operatives into the potential war zone. Harrison wants to know who violated his orders by sending CIA operatives to die.

The answer involves a conspiracy to provoke a war with Russian on the ground that Harrison is a “tepid” president who will not take action unless he is forced to do so by right-thinking patriots who do not feel bound by the constraints of democracy or morality. To that extent, the novel has political overtones and might not be appreciated by readers who believe that defending freedom means taking it away from everyone they don’t like.

Realizing he can’t trust the CIA director or the military, the president asks Joe Reeder to find out who would be so foolish as to want to start a needless war with Russia. Meanwhile, Reeder believes that the Secretary of the Interior, who died of a food allergy, was murdered. He passes that tip along to Patti Rogers, who needs to find and solve a high-profile crime to assure that her elite FBI unit will continue to be funded.

With that background established, Reeder and Rogers and a handful of good guys begin an action-filled race to learn the truth before full-scale war breaks out. The plot isn’t special — it’s a little late in the day for a conspiracy novel to feel special, unless it contains original elements that Executive Order lacks — but it moves quickly, the action scenes are mostly credible, and the Reeder/Rogers team is an easy one to like.

Sometimes a novel that requires a small number of heroic figures to defeat overwhelming numbers of adversaries with military training are fun and sometimes they’re preposterous. Executive Order is both. My “aw, c’mon” reaction as Reeder breaches some of the world’s toughest security was stifled a bit when Max Allan Collins later provided a plausible explanation for Reeder’s success. The explanation only makes the whole scenario slightly less preposterous, but the book is still fun. Executive Order stretched my willingness to suspend disbelief, but in the end, I enjoyed the story.

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A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas

Published in France in 2015; published in translation by Penguin Books on March 7, 2017

A Climate of Fear contains the memorable line, “Please, fetch me some horse manure. I want it now.” What more could a reader ask?

Alice Gauthier, with some help she never learns about, posts a letter just before she dies. Her death is regarded as a suicide, but the retired maths teacher seems an unlikely candidate to take her own life. She drew a sign before she died, and Commandant Adrien Danglard of the Serious Crime Squad is called upon to puzzle out its meaning due to his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure facts.

Tracking down the letter leads Danglard and Jean Baptiste Adamsberg and a few other Parisian crime investigators to another apparent suicide where the same strange sign appears, as well as an suspicious deaths in Iceland ten years earlier. The investigation begins with a myth about an Icelandic island where a warm stone is said to offer eternal life. There does, we eventually learn, seem to be something creepy about the island, where visitors seem more likely to find eternal death.

The investigation takes a twist when evidence suggests that the victims were studying the writings of Robespierre, sending the detectives to a club where the government of Robespierre is reenacted. Some members seem to have infiltrated the club to spy on others. Some members are secret descendants of people who were guillotined during the Revolution, and who may be pursuing an agenda of their own.

The various characters in the club get a bit carried away, which I might not find credible except that Americans get a bit carried away with their Civil War reenactments, so perhaps the French are no different in the allegiance to one side or the other in their colorful history.

Fred Vargas has a background in history and archeology, both of which play a role in A Climate of Fear. In fact, I learned considerably more about Robespierre than I really needed to know. Still, the detail with which Vargas reconstructs French history is also evident in the detailed plot, which ties together multiple killings in an odd conspiracy — but then, all conspiracies seem odd to people who have not embraced them.

A Climate of Fear moves at a sedate pace, taking time to develop characters and (mostly) background. The pace might be a bit too sedate, but that’s preferable to modern thriller writers who, sacrificing content for speed, don’t want to burden readers with sentences of more than five words. The pace does pick up a bit at the end, before the traditional information dump in which Adamsberg explains the plot and ties the storylines together.

The police characters have obviously been developed throughout the series (this is the first Adamsberg novel I’ve read) and their personalities are clearly established. The novel might have been tighter, but the complex mystery should appeal to readers who enjoy misdirection and the opportunitiy to unravel complex mysteries.

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Himself by Jess Kidd

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Atria Books on March 14, 2017

I’m a sucker for novels by Irish writers who populate small Irish villages with eccentric residents. Himself is sort of a murder mystery, but Jess Kidd’s delightful prose and quirky characters, some of whom are dead, set it apart. The plot is engaging but almost beside the point.

The dead take particular note of Mahoney, who as a baby was saved from death by a forest that hid him from his murderous father. That was in Mulderrig, a place Mahoney doesn’t recall, but to which he returns 26 years later, prompted by a letter that was held by the orphanage that raised him, to be passed on to Mahoney after he was grown.

Mahoney’s mother was Orla Sweeney, a name that is still well known in Mulderrig. She might have been a witch, or perhaps was merely mistaken for one. Orla was unjustly regarded as wicked because she passed messages from the dead to the living, and the people of Mulderrig didn’t appreciate the news that the departed revealed. The reader meets Orla in flashbacks.

In the present, Mahoney meets a priest whose face can’t be trusted; a woman who produces plays for the church that the priest considers to be scandalous; a lecherous old man who has his sights set on a widow; the widow he chases, who is anxious for Mahoney to leave the village; a couple of women who are anxious for the handsome Mahoney to stay; a gossipy cat lady; the village police officer; and a variety of ghosts.

Mahoney (like many in the village) assumes that someone did away with his mother. The plot centers on the efforts of Mahoney, assisted by the play producer and opposed by nearly everyone else, as he tries to uncover the truth about Orla’s disappearance. Even a little dead girl warns him away from his quest.

Ireland is a land of folklore, a fact that Irish fiction often reflects. I always like the ghosts in Irish novels. Unlike American ghosts, they tend to be foul-mouthed, gossipy, and quite funny. There are plenty of ghosts in Himself, including a priest who haunts a commode, but most of them are silent. They confine themselves to shaking their heads or drawing their fingers across their throats when they want to communicate. Other supernatural elements include signs and portents for characters to interpret or misinterpret and quarrel about.

Like many modern Irish tales, Himself shines a light on the condition of Ireland, which a scholarly character describes as “a dying civilization, romantic Ireland, the ancient and untarnished imagination of the pure and noble peasant making sense of the harshness and beauty of their life and the landscape.” There is, as that description suggests, a serious undercurrent to Himself, enough to give the novel literary heft, but it doesn’t detract from the novel’s reliance of several forms of humor, including slapstick, farce, burlesque, satire, and parody. The humor is gentle rather than mordant, light rather than dark (despite some gruesome murders).

Himself isn’t really a murder mystery, given that the reader learns at least some of the truth long before Mahoney. But the village is good at keeping secrets from outsiders even as they gossip among themselves. Some things they would rather not to discuss at all, preferring to let the dead rest — which they aren’t about to do after Mahoney’s return stirs them to recall fragments of the lives they once had. While it’s not a mystery, Himself is a tale of good versus evil, of the few village residents who want to expose the truth versus those who have a motive to hide it. But most of all, regardless of its higher ambitions, this imaginative novel is tremendously entertaining.

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Setting Free the Kites by Alex George

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 21, 2017

Robert Carter lives in Maine. His father owns a small amusement park that assures Robert (and most Haverford teens) of a summer job. His brother Liam has a disease that will kill him before he leaves his teens, although Liam is more optimistic about his fate than his parents. His mother’s mental stability is questionable.

Robert is bullied every year by a bigger student named Hollis. During his first beating of the new school year, a new student named Nathan Tilly intervenes. Nathan is smaller than Hollis, but fearless, at least when it comes to bullies. He seems to have inherited that trait from his raucous father, who suffers an unfortunate death while flying a kite soon after Robert meets Nathan.

There are several dramatic moments early in Setting Free the Kites, but the drama is understated, which makes it all the more dramatic. On the other hand, too many middle chapters are devoted to Nathan’s unrequited longing for an older girl who is way out his league, and to Robert’s plan, sparked by a romance novel, to encourage Nathan to express his love. That section of the book includes a synopsis of the melodramatic romance novel that I could have lived without.

Later in the novel, additional dramatic scenes, while continuing to avoid melodrama, seem contrived. The novel builds toward metaphors of flight, but its metaphorical moments lack the power that Alex George must have intended, perhaps because the metaphor — or the final action taken in support of the metaphor — is too obvious.

In the end, as the epilogue reveals, Setting Free the Kites is a coming-of-age novel. The epilogue is an information dump that updates Robert’s knowledge of the characters after his own defining moment, but in such an abbreviated fashion that the impact of the defining moment on Robert’s life is unclear. The lessons he learns — nobody is innocent, everyone shares blame — are good but a bit simplistic. Still, George’s prose is graceful and the characters are fully developed. Setting Free the Kites has some shortcomings, but every serious novelist seems compelled to write a coming-of-age novel, and this one is better than most.

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