The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 7, 2024

At some point in The Instruments of Darkness, Charlie Parker tells a cop that he’s read all the John Sandford novels and believes Sandford is “as good as they come.” There’s no doubt that Sandford is an excellent storyteller. He populates credible plots with strong characters and writes snappy dialog. But John Connolly is also a gifted storyteller. Plus, Connolly’s prose has a literary quality that only a handful of crime writers can match.

Colleen Clark has been charged with murdering her son. She’s hired Moxie Castin to represent her. As usual, Castin has hired Parker to look into the charges. The police don’t have a body or proof of death, but Colleen’s husband says he found a bloody blanket in the trunk of Colleen’s car. The blanket came from their house, making Colleen a prime suspect.

Colleen suffered from postpartum depression and made the kind of remarks that parents typically make about regretting her choice to have a child. Parker believes those facts merit sympathy but knows they’ll be used against her. Her husband called the police when he found the blanket and, this being an election year, a decision was made to prosecute Colleen for manslaughter — with a promised upgrade to murder if the police find evidence that Colleen intended to kill her son.

The setup might seem flimsy, but the prosecution is based on the political reality that it doesn’t look good for the death of a child to go unpunished. Charging Colleen will satisfy the perpetually outraged public and help the career of an attorney general who wants to be governor and a prosecutor who wants to be attorney general. The prosecutor assumes that jurors will ignore the absence of evidence (apart from the bloody blanket) because they will be too outraged to care about reasonable doubt. This is a cynical and entirely accurate view of how the criminal justice system works. “A child was missing and his mother was about to be dragged into the machinery of the law. It chewed people up, the innocent as well as the guilty, and called the result justice, but only a fool would accept that as true.”

Colleen tells Parker that her husband admitted to having an affair but she doesn’t believe he would have killed their son. Parker’s investigation leads to a puzzling inability to find the woman with whom Colleen’s husband had sex. How that plays into Colleen’s innocence or guilt is revealed late in the story.

Connolly usually adds a supernatural element to his stories, both because he sees Maine as a creepy place (it produced Stephen King, right?) and because the supernatural is a way of envisioning evil as a force — the kind of force that is necessary to abduct and kill a child. A key character is a medium who speaks to (or at least hears) the dead. Parker has been known to converse with his dead daughter, so he is open to the woman’s help.

Another force of evil is white supremacy and nationalism, represented here by a group of kooks who live on land that is adjacent to land owned by a family of misfits — a family that seems to be harboring or perhaps ruled by the malevolent force that the medium senses. Connolly describes one of the nationalists as “a frightened creature, fearful of change; fearful of anyone whose color, creed, or language was different from his own; and most of all, fearful of others who refused to follow his path.” That about sums it up.

Parker and his two foot soldiers, Angel and Louis, have had unfortunate encounters with the supremacists before, paving the way for more violence when Parker interferes with their plans. The trio (plus Castin) engage in darkly amusing dialog, balancing dark drama with dark humor.

The Instruments of Darkness blends a detective novel with a horror story, although Connolly downplays the horror to an extent, at least as compared to some of his other books. I prefer detectives to look for clues and, while Parker does that for much of the story, he ultimately relies on the medium to solve the mystery. Still, Connolly maintains tension and ties up every thread by the time the story ends. Charlie Parker novels are always a joy to read, if only for Parker’s guardedly optimistic view of humanity as it struggles against evil. This one is no exception.

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Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood

Short story published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on May 1, 2024

Fern has MS, for which her three old (pardon me, “older”) friends blame eight men — or is it nine? — who caused her so much stress that they put her in “a wheelchair rolling downhill to the morgue.” The women plot revenge and since they are well educated, they quote Macbeth. The women all taught at universities at some point, but Myra wonders why anyone would want to teach these days, with students so eager to “rat the professors out for the slightest verbal misstep.” Look at Chrissy, who was mobbed on social media as being anti-woman for teaching ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Never mind that she chose it as an example of misogyny. In Myra’s view, kids today only want to study literary works in which everyone behaves perfectly all the time. “How French Revolution of them,” says Leonie. The story makes clear the difficulty of walking the line between sensitivity to the feelings of others and the excessive demands of expressive conformity on college campuses.

Amusing digressions to comment upon the state of the world (and the new cheeses they try during their weekly meetings) occupy more of the story than the plot to murder eight men (or is it nine?). The women all began their careers in the literary world (mostly as proofreaders), writing for each other in the hope that their work might reach a larger audience before opting for academia and steady paychecks. They still have connections in that world, mostly to the authors with whom they slept, but Fern is the only one who earns a living writing books.

Back to the plot. The eight or nine men savaged an anthology that Fern edited because she decided not to include a story by Humphrey Vacher, an affluent and conceited author who owns a few small press publications, the only publications that will consider their work. Because they owe Vacher, they trashed Fern’s work on the ground that it appealed to “the sloppy middle-age women and easily duped teenage girls” who are the reading public. They even condemned it as “girly,” a term they wouldn’t be allowed to use today.

Coming up with a successful assassination plan proves to be challenging. “Their respect for murderers is increasing: not so easy, this murdering business.” Ultimately they settle upon a workable revenge scheme that, naturally enough, does not go as planned.

The women learn that revenge, when served cold, might no longer have a purpose by the time it is executed. Which leads to the lesson that revenge is better left unserved. That’s always a lesson worthy of illustration, and Margaret Atwood does so in an enjoyable story that mixes amusing characters, pointed insights, and a few laugh-out-loud moments.

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The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 7, 2024

Like most crime novels, The Return of Ellie Black fails to live up to its marketing hype. This is nevertheless the kind of novel that certain readers seem to crave. It is the story of a serial kidnapper of teenage (or younger) girls. The villain brutalizes, brainwashes, rapes, and eventually kills his victims — apart from Ellie Black. Serial kidnappers, like serial killers, are far more prevalent in the world of crime fiction than they are in the real world, but the market for child snatching stories never seems to be saturated.

Michael and David apparently work together to kidnap teenage girls (and at least one preteen). Assisted by a woman named Serenity, they hold the girls in a buried bus for two weeks to break down their sense of identity. Some of the girls apparently starve to death before they forget who they are. The men give the survivors names like Faith and Hope. They hold the girls captive, using them as their sex slaves with the apparent aim to make them pregnant.

The story departs from the formula when a kidnap victim is found alive. Ellie Black has been missing for two years. She turns up in the woods in a shattered emotional state. Ellie is not cooperative with the police, a fact that the police attribute to her unwillingness to revisit her trauma. Yet there may be another cause of her reticence, which proves to be the only interesting aspect of a novel that is otherwise formulaic.

Most of the story is told in the third person as it follows Detective Chelsey Calhoun and her investigation of Ellie’s kidnapping. An article of clothing Ellie is wearing links her to a couple of other missing females. A few scattered chapters are told in the first person as Ellie recalls her ordeal.

Emiko Jean gives us the usual theme of a police detective who thinks “If only these [missing] girls could talk” and imagines them whispering “Find us, please.” Some readers seem to have an appetite for obvious efforts to manipulate their sympathies. Sometimes the mention of the word “victim” is enough to draw them into the story.

Fictional female detectives like Calhoun — dedicated to victims, unable to sleep because they are haunted by the victims’ voices, who “will do anything to save a life” — are ubiquitous in crime fiction. They are usually one dimensional. “Just think of the victims” becomes a substitute for a writer’s inability to think of interesting characters. Jean is no exception in that flawed approach to crime fiction writing. I usually avoid stories of that nature but the marketing hype made me think this one might be different. It isn’t.

Calhoun’s insecurity, followed by her eventual triumph, is another part of the formula. Also formulaic is Calhoun’s motivation for becoming a cop — a missing and murdered sister — and Calhoun’s self-recrimination because she didn’t prevent her sister from dating the wrong guy. Have you heard this story before? If you read enough crime fiction, you’ve encountered it over and over.

Another tired cliché of thriller writing is Calhoun’s boss, who takes credit for her successes and blames her for failures that weren’t entirely her fault. And, of course, Calhoun makes predictable decisions to defy authority and do what’s necessary because she just cares so much about victims. Victims are more important than her job or her relationships or anything else because victims.

Ellie has a dark secret that makes her feel guilty. It can’t be too dark because the reader is meant to sympathize with Ellie, even when she does something awful. The true reason for Ellie’s failure to cooperate with the investigation ties into the secret. It isn’t at all credible, but it is at least a departure from the formula.

Jean’s prose style is acceptable and she tells the story with good pace. The reveal of a kidnapper’s true identity is standard thriller fare — contrived and unsurprising. The villains are caricatures of evil men with mommy issues. The story’s positive qualities permit a tepid recommendation, but its familiarity prevents me from recommending it to anyone who doesn’t crave stories that feature detectives who can’t stop talking about how much they care about victims.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on May 7, 2024

I’m not always a fan of domestic drama, but I’m a huge fan of Colm Tóibín. He writes about couples in crisis with honesty rather than melodrama. Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn, a continuation of that story of relationship uncertainty in the context of cultural clashes.

Readers of Brooklyn (or viewers of the movie) will recall that Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland to America, found a job, endured homesickness, met and married a young Italian man named Tony who was working as a plumber, returned to Ireland to attend her sister’s funeral, and found herself torn between remaining in Ireland (where both familiarity and a young Irishman named Jim Farrell appealed to her) and returning to her husband in Brooklyn. She decides in favor of her marriage, prompted in part by local gossip that makes it impossible to pretend she is single.

Twenty years later, Jim owns a pub in Enniscorthy. He is having a clandestine dalliance with Nancy Sheridan, a widow who owns a nearby chip shop. He has finally worked his way around to proposing, more or less, when Eilis comes back to visit her mother. Notwithstanding his relationship with Nancy, Jim cannot help revisiting the sense of loss he felt when Eilis left for America twenty years earlier.

During those twenty years, Tony and Eilis accomplished Tony’s dream of moving to Long Island. They built a home that was surrounded by the homes of Tony’s siblings and parents. Tony and Eilis had two kids and apparently had a steady marriage until it was rocked by news that Tony made a customer pregnant while fixing her leaking pipes. The customer’s husband wants nothing to do with Tony’s baby and threatens to leave it on Eilis’ doorstep after it is born. Eilis also wants nothing to do with the baby. She refuses to raise it and refuses to go along with Tony’s mother’s plan to raise the child.

After giving Tony an ultimatum, Eilis returns to Ireland to visit her aging mother, who has become no less intolerable during Eilis’ absence. She plans to have her children join her for her mother’s birthday celebration.

Eilis will, of course, encounter Jim. The novel’s drama comes from the choices Eilis must make — return to America and Tony, stay in Ireland with Jim, or return to America with Jim. Jim hasn’t stopped thinking about Eilis since she returned to America, but would he abandon his marriage plans with Nancy to be with Eilis? Would Eilis leave her family in America to be with Jim? The novel builds tension as it seems inevitable that Eilis and/or Nancy will learn that Jim has not been honest with either of them.

This sounds like a soap opera plot, and maybe it is, but Long Island is a character-driven novel that takes a deep dive into personalities that have been shaped by culture and family. Tóibín addresses the restrained emotional turmoil of his characters without resorting to contrivances.

The novel explores the relationship histories of Jim and Nancy as well as their relationship with each other. In a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else, they have been surprisingly successful at keeping their late-night visits a secret. Yet secrets will out. Jim doesn’t want Nancy to know that she is his backup plan if he can’t convince Eilis to leave Tony. Nor does he want Eilis to know that he is sleeping with Nancy. In such a small community, is there any hope that Jim’s secrets will not be discovered?

Jim’s secrecy is motivated in part by the knowledge that Nancy will be subject to gossip if it becomes known that he left her for Eilis. The destructive nature of gossip and the impossibility of keeping secrets in a small Irish village was an important theme in Brooklyn that Tóibín reprises in the sequel.

Tóibín also illustrates how people in relationships attempt to manipulate each other. Nancy, for example, wants to sell the chip shop and become a homemaker after she marries Jim, but she schemes to influence Jim with subtle suggestions until he believes the idea is his own. At the same time, characters are afraid to say what they are thinking, perhaps for fear of another person’s reaction, perhaps because they fear the consequences of speaking their desires into reality. The story ends with a dramatic act of manipulation that different readers might judge in different ways.

The novel’s other key relationship is Eilis’ with her mother. For twenty years, her mother never acknowledged the pictures that Eilis sent of her children. When she arrives in Ireland, her mother doesn’t want to hear anything about her life in America. Yet Eilis’ mother has always nurtured a hidden pride in the grandchildren she never met, even if she has bottled up her emotions and refuses to share them with her daughter. After Eilis’ mother meets her grandchildren, she believes it is her right to turn her daughter’s life upside down.

My first takeaway from Long Island in conjunction with Brooklyn is that every choice we make gives birth to a potential regret about the choice we didn’t make. Or if not regret, at least curiosity about the path life might have taken if we had chosen differently.

My second takeaway is that no matter how we try to make choices that shape our lives, other people make their own choices that alter the course we have planned. We may or may not have the courage or strength to resist those choices. The choices made by others may take on an irresistible force. The inability to take complete control of our destiny might turn out to be a surprising joy or a dreadful peril, but either way, Long Island makes clear that it is a reality of life. As always, Tóibín’s powerful illustration of great truths makes Long Island a captivating novel.

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Time Out by Michael Marshall Smith

Published by Subterranean Press on April 1, 2024

Time Out begins as a typical Last Man on Earth Story. It evolves into the story of a man who is forced to reflect on the content of his character.

The narrator wakes up on the morning after Christmas to discover that his wife and daughter are missing. He assumes they went for a walk. Then he notices that the internet isn’t working. Neither is the television. When he decides to look for his wife, he sees no other people. No cars are in motion. There are no airplanes in the sky. When he knocks on doors, nobody answers.

Within a day, animals have also disappeared. Yet things are different from day to day. When he breaks the glass in a door so he can enter a hardware store, the broken glass has been replaced when he visits the store on the following day.

Perhaps there has been a biblical rapture, but surely people exist who are less worthy of salvation than the narrator. Where are they? The narrator can’t understand why the electricity is still on and the water is still flowing, but cellphone service and the internet aren’t working. I was wondering that myself, but it turns out not to matter. This isn’t the kind of science fiction that’s supported by science, which makes it more of a fantasy, or perhaps a thought experiment.

As the narrator contemplates the new present, his thoughts turn to the past. He wonders whether he has been a selfish a-hole, too often absorbed in his own thoughts, too often unwilling to compromise with his wife and daughter. He knows he did something that could harm his marriage and, by looking at his wife’s cellphone, he knows his wife learned about it. Maybe none of this matters if he is the only person left on the planet, but it matters to the narrator, as it should. And that is perhaps the novella’s point. A time out — a period during which we are forced to reflect on our lives and consider how the absence of people we care about might make us feel — would benefit us all. The story makes that point in a scenario that is interesting and engaging.

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