Fatal by John Lescroart

Published by Atria Books on January 24, 2017

The characters in Fatal, regardless of gender, have trouble keeping their pants on, at least when they are with someone else’s spouse. Fatal isn’t quite Fatal Attraction, although there are overtones of obsessive desire leading to dangerous consequences.

Geoff and Bina Cooke bring their friends Peter and Jill Ash together with their friends Ron and Kate Jameson. Kate comes home with the overpowering desire to shag Peter. One seduction later, Kate has satisfied herself but has transferred the obsession to Peter, who can’t stop thinking about her. This apparently transforms Peter’s life in ways that I didn’t understand or believe.

Frank Rinaldi is the murder victim in an apparent murder-suicide. Beth Tully, investigating the case, thinks his wife killed herself after she killed Frank, probably after learning that he was having an affair with Laurie Shaw. Beth, who starts dating Laurie’s brother Alan, happens to be a good friend of Kate. You might need a spreadsheet to keep track of the intersecting relationships in Fatal.

All of this seems more like a soap opera than a thriller until a group of terrorists start shooting people and blowing things up near the coffee shop where Beth and Kate are chatting about Kate’s infidelity. Hello, terrorists? That comes out of nowhere, and it’s followed by Peter’s murder. So now we’ve got a thriller. But then we’re back to a soap opera as Beth helps Laurie deal with her anorexia while adding her friend Kate to the lengthening list of women who might have wanted Peter dead. That’s a little too much soap for me.

John Lescroart should stick to writing about lawyers. This is a novel about cops, and his cops are tedious and annoying. Beth is more interested in her intuition than evidence and her partner is more interested in being a bully than in doing legitimate police work. When they finally settle on one of a few different competing theories, the partner isn’t the least bit troubled that no evidence establishes the purported killer’s motive. That reflects the sad reality of law enforcement — everyone they meet is a suspect, the presumption of innocence doesn’t exist, and clearing a case is more important than arresting the right person — but as realistic as Beth and her partner might be, I wouldn’t want to know them.

And unfortunately, by the end of Fatal, I didn’t care who shot Peter. The investigating cops are so unlikable and self-righteous that I would have been just as happy to see the crime unsolved — maybe happier, since I didn’t think they deserved to solve it. My favorite character was a CSI guy who kept telling them to stop bothering him until they had some actual evidence that merited investigation.

The solution to the mystery isn’t terribly surprising and the ending is silly, but I don’t have a problem with the plot so much as the disagreeable characters. I hope Lescroart returns to writing about Dismas Hardy. That’s a character I can enjoy.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Conviction by Julia Dahl

Published by Minotaur Books on March 28, 2017

Given how often the justice system produces unjust results, I’m always intrigued by stories that shine a spotlight on wrongful convictions. Conviction uses the conviction of an innocent man to spotlight injustice in other ways, and it accomplishes that task by telling an entertaining story.

Rebekah Roberts is a freelance reporter. She works as a stringer for a tabloid while aspiring to be a meaningful journalist. Some years earlier, the police discovered the dead bodies of the Davis family (husband, wife, foster daughter) in Brooklyn. One son found the bodies; a foster son, DeShawn, was convicted of murdering the victims. Roberts decides to investigate a claim that DeShawn was wrongfully convicted. Along the way, she learns that the ex-cop to whom her mother is currently attached helped investigate the killing.

The story follows Roberts as she tracks down witnesses in the closed case. Alternating chapters follow the police in 1992 as they investigate the murders. Conviction makes the point that it is ridiculously easy to frame someone for a crime, and just as easy for the police to bully an innocent person into giving a confession.

The reader knows early on that DeShawn is innocent. As Rebekah investigates, she suspects he’s telling the truth, but that leads to the mystery at the heart of the story: who killed DeShawn’s foster parents, and why would anyone murder such nice people?

The story shifts gears at the midway point as it begins to follow a boy who rejects his family’s religious views and adopts a less relaxed form of Judaism. He also becomes disproportionately violent when he’s being picked on. The young man is clearly headed for a life of violence.

Julia Dahl deserves credit for understanding how wrongful convictions happen with depressing regularity — in this case (like many real-world examples) because the police fail to play by the rules that are meant to protect the innocent. At the same time, she doesn’t paint all police officers with the same brush. As in the real world, some are sympathetic, some are lazy, some are corrupt, some are good, and many are a combination of all those things. The novel reflects the sad reality that many police officers and prosecutors care more about getting a conviction than convicting the right person, however well-intentioned they might be.

Conviction is notable for its descriptions of poverty and urban decay in Brooklyn and for its depiction of vigilantes that purport to protect their insular communities by attacking outsiders. The book is also notable for its descriptions of racial tension between the black and Jewish communities in 1990s Brooklyn, including mutual resentment between slumlords and tenants. I appreciated the fearless and balanced way in which that conflict is portrayed. Dahl looks for truth beyond stereotypes and finds it in a nuanced drama about crime and injustice.

The end of the story stretches the plausibility limit a bit, but far less than most modern thrillers. There’s a little too much melodrama in the last chapters, but the melodrama is far from overwhelming. On the whole, Conviction is a strong tale of social and individual injustice.

RECOMMENDED

Guardian by Joe Haldeman

First published in 1992; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

Rosa Tolliver leaves her husband in Boston after he sodomizes their son. Rosa and her son travel to Dodge City, which is still the far west at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the journey is by steamboat, giving Joe Haldeman a chance to reflect on Mark Twain and to discuss a number of historical facts that he seems to toss out at random. Not much else of substance happens in the first third of the novel, except for the occasional appearance of a talkative but cryptic raven.

Eventually Rosa takes a lover and her son gets the idea to prospect for gold in Alaska. Rosa gets a gig teaching in a small Alaskan town while her son and new lover are off in the mountains mining for gold. Rosa agrees to this plan despite her raven friend telling her “No Gold.” Rosa is eventually accused of being a witch, and she might be one, given the amount of advice she receives from ravens. Or maybe the raven is a witch. Or maybe the local Alaskan shaman gave Rosa some peyote when she wasn’t looking. The would explain the interplanetary travel that pops up in the last third of the novel.

Assuming they’re real and even if they’re not, the aliens Rosa meets are the most interesting part of the book. Until they appear, the story is pleasant and humane but a little dull. After they leave, the story returns to being pleasant and humane but a little dull.

Rosa’s travels with her raven guardian allow Haldeman another chance to philosophize. His musings — metaphor presented as reality — might not be profound, but they are reasonably wise and intellectually stimulating.

Haldeman had an occasional tendency to delve into religious themes (Forever Free being an obvious example). Guardian flirts with the concept of God but doesn’t pretend to offer any answers. Haldeman is at his best when he writes about war and its consequences, and there is a bit of that here. Haldeman’s prose is also, at times, quite elegant, and in places the story is touching.

Despite the injection of the guardian and angelic aliens and a place where souls dwell and a chatty raven, Haldeman manages to make Guardian into a science fiction novel (rather than the fantasy it initially seems to be) thanks to alternate universes, which can be used to explain just about anything if you set your mind to it. Still, the story seems to be inspired by Carlos Castaneda and I have the strong suspicion that peyote is a better explanation for Rosa’s experiences than travels though the multiverse with a guardian raven.

I’m not sure Guardian coheres as it jumbles together an adventure story, a travelogue, an alternate history, religious mythology, and a mixture of fantasy and science fiction themes. There are certainly parts of the novel I enjoyed and I didn’t dislike any of it, but a good bit of purposeless description does little to advance the late-arriving themes that give the story its heft. The really good parts of the novel are too brief to make the novel as a whole really good

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

Published in the Netherlands in 2014; published in translation by Hogarth on September 6, 2016

Dear Mr. M is one of those books that substitutes initials for the names of certain people and places. That’s fine if you’re Kafka but it’s a little precious when most modern writers adopt the technique. Still, I think it suits the narrator.

M is a literary novelist living in the Netherlands who has had some success but his luster is fading. During interviews, he is grilled not about his books, but about the inglorious role his father played in the Second World War. It is that past, perhaps, that compels M to write so many books about the war.

PartS of Dear Mr. M are narrated by M’s downstairs neighbor, who is rather obsessed with M and his family. The neighbor doesn’t think much of M, but the reliability of his opinions is suspect. On the other hand, M does seem to be petty and shallow and vindictive. He also defends indefensible views. So is he a good person or a bad person? When he defends his writing at book signings, he says he avoids stereotyping by creating characters who are mixtures of good and bad. M is probably just such a mixture, as are most people. But who is the narrator and why is he obsessed with M? Initially nameless, the neighbor’s identity becomes apparent after the book shifts gears.

The shift occurs when the story, now told in the third person, begins to follow students who are suspected of complicity in the disappearance of a history teacher who is rumored to have been overly affectionate with his female students. This lengthy section of the novel is presented as a “true” story upon which M based his most famous novel. A skinny kid who has attracted the most beautiful girl in his class is the dynamic that attracted M’s attention, but M’s novel omitted another girl who is either a friend or rival of the beautiful girl. This section of Dear Mr. M is rich with the jealousies and alliances and insecurities of teens, although it sacrifices plot development for character development.

The sections that follow alternate between M’s present and the past story of the missing teacher. The past and present are eventually connected. Saying anything else about the plot would risk spoiling it, so I’ll leave it at that.

Like many books that feature a writer as a main character, Dear Mr. M is in part about the process of writing. Parts of the book, in fact, seem designed to expose the pettiness of writers, their obsession with sales figures and status within the community of writers. Herman Koch portrays writers as back-stabbers with swollen egos, a description that pretty much defines a subset of any profession. While the extended discussions of imaginary writers were a little too self-referential to hold my interest, M’s self-destructive behavior is entertaining, if only because it is satisfying to imagine that obnoxious people might pay some price for their bad behavior.

In an interview, M explains his departures from reality in his construction of fiction. Those choices are central to the plot. The novel’s conceit (writers steal from and transform reality, but should they pay a price when they borrow from the lives of real people?) is clever, and the payoff at the story’s end makes the novel worth reading. Unfortunately, reaching that payoff requires the reader to wade through descriptions of teenage anxieties that are longer than necessary to set the stage for the ending.

RECOMMENDED

The Ice Beneath Her by Camilla Grebe

First published in Sweden in 2015; published in translation by Ballantine Books on December 27, 2016

Peter Lindgren is a character in a Scandinavian novel, which means he’s depressed. He feels weak and ambivalent and unable to commit to anything. His marriage to Hanne failed long ago. He rarely sees his 15-year-old son. His mother and sister are dead and his father is drinking himself to death. He blames himself for his sister’s death as the result of family drama during his childhood. He’s a homicide cop but arresting people doesn’t make the victims less dead, so he wonders if his life has meaning. That attitude manifests itself in various hand-wringing passages as the novel progresses. Eventually Peter’s self-doubting personality gets old. It also slows the novel’s pace, as does the hand-wringing of the other depressed characters.

Peter and Manfred Olsson investigate the death of a beheaded woman in suburban Stockholm. Her body is in the home of Jesper Orre, a successful Stockholm clothing retailer, but her identity is unknown. There are similarities to a case that has been unsolved for ten years. That prompts Manfred to call Hanne Lagerlind-Schőn. Now retired as a police consultant and in the early stages of dementia, Hanne reluctantly agrees to study the possible connection between the two cases. Yes, this is the same Hanne who was once married to Peter. Hanne, of course, is also depressed, but she has good reason to be, apart from being Scandanavian.

Point of view changes from chapter to chapter. First person accounts of the investigation (and of the general depression that apparently accompanies all life in Scandinavia) come from Peter and Hanne. Hanne’s depression stems from her current controlling husband and the realization that her slow onset of dementia will eventually lead her to lose her memories and, for all practical purposes, to lose herself.

A third perspective comes from Emma Bohman. Emma’s story starts two months earlier, when Jesper doesn’t show up for her engagement dinner. Emma complains that Jesper has been borrowing money from her, which surprises the reader, given that Emma has a drudge job in one of his stores. Emma spends quite a bit of time wondering why Jesper, her secret lover, has suddenly stopped returning her calls. Her self-doubt, like Peter’s, gets old. And like Peter, Emma has a sad childhood experience that left her a little broken.

Using a technique that has become common in thrillers, Emma’s narrative of the past eventually links up to the present narratives of Peter and Hanne. This lets the reader understand the background to the crime and to guess at its solution while the investigators probe the past. The solution is a bit contrived but it’s not over the top, as is the case with many modern thrillers.

Camilla Grebe builds suspense effectively, although this isn’t a frenetically-paced, action-filled thriller. The novel is more about characters than crime, but the characters are interesting and believable (albeit depressed) and the plot is at least moderately surprising. All of that squeaks the novel into recommended territory, but I would primarily recommend it to fans of Scandinavian fiction who have not grown weary reading about characters who are tired of living.

RECOMMENDED