Kill the Father by Sandrone Dazieri

First published in Italy in 2014; published in translation by Scribner on January 10, 2017

Kill the Father introduces two notable characters: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre. Both are finding ways to cope with traumatic pasts. They support each other after being thrown together in the search for a serial killer.

Caselli is on leave, recovering from a near-death experience that she secretly refers to as “the Disaster,” but she reluctantly agrees to join an investigation of a missing child, her last official act before submitting her resignation. Her boss wants her to investigate because somebody needs to step on the toes of bureaucrats, and Caselli has nothing to lose, given her plan to retire.

Torre has a talent for determining whether children who make accusations of sexual assault are merely repeating what they’ve been conditioned to believe by the other parent. He earns a living by selling that talent to lawyers. Dante is also an expert on missing persons. He was a kidnapping victim as a child and only gained his freedom after eleven years of captivity. Colomba turns to Torre for help locating the missing child.

Dante is one of the more interesting characters to appear in recent crime fiction. He’s claustrophobic and neurotic, but his quirks are a natural consequence of his horrendous childhood. Dante has developed an expertise at reading people (a more credible expertise than FBI profilers display in any number of bad crime novels), but he only wants to do so from a distance because he has a palpable aversion to emotional displays.

Colomba has issues of her own, stemming from the Disaster that she explains at the novel’s midway point. Colomba has lost her self-confidence and worries that she will make another bad decision that will result in more deaths. Some of her fellow police detectives think she’s come unhinged, which adds to her intrigue. And again, Sandrone Dazieri doesn’t overplay Colomba’s emotional fragility, as do so many modern thriller writers who imbue their protagonists with psychiatric quirks.

The plot is filled with surprises, most of which arrive just after it seems that the story has drawn to a close. I wondered what would fill the last 50 pages. None of the revelations were expected, but none are contrived. They all make sense in light of the previous events. The final pages build tension nicely. The deft plotting and the strong characters make Kill the Father one of the better Italian crime novels I’ve encountered.

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Trojan by Alan McDermott

Published by Thomas & Mercer on January 12, 2017

Trojan reads like a police procedural, although the police are a mix of British intelligence agents, anti-terrorist military specialists, and occasional freelance assistants. Torture, for instance, is subcontracted so that Her Majesty’s government can pretend its hands are clean.

An asset with the code name Hannibal has infiltrated Saif al-Islam in Syria. He learns that Saif al-Islam has a chemical toxin that it plans to unleash on the British but, despite Hannibal’s best efforts, the Brits don’t know what it is or where it will be deployed.

The primary good guys are Andrew Harvey and his lover and co-worker, Sarah Thompson. They play a limited role in the opening chapters, as Alan McDermott develops the plot with a primary focus on the terrorist plan and the desperate efforts of British intelligence to get a handle on it. The plot involves several women and their babies who, posing as refugees, transport the toxin. The only one of those who benefits from any character development is Malika Ali.

About a third of the novel has gone by before Andrew and Sarah, as well as their colleagues, play a more active role in the plot. They are thinkers rather than action heroes. Trojan offers a pleasant alternative to all the thrillers a follow a team of former Special Forces heroes as they chase down terrorists, taking occasional breaks to give the reader loving descriptions of their weapons. It’s refreshing to read a novel about a terrorist threat in which the heroes are driven by intelligent thought rather than testosterone. It’s also refreshing to read a thriller that recognizes a distinction between Muslim terrorists and Muslims who condemn terrorism.

Andrew and Sarah engage in the tedious task of winnowing intelligence from cameras and records, but McDermott describes their efforts without subjecting the reader to the same tedium. Trojan contains an occasional action scene, but most of the story involves a battle of wits as terrorists use various schemes in an effort to evade police surveillance.

McDermott also describes the political infighting that inevitably arises when people charged with protecting a nation’s security care more about career advancement than working together to stifle a threat. That theme is often used to give the reader a chance to cheer for the selfless good guys as they battle the self-serving bureaucrats, but McDermott recognizes that even selfless good guys want credit (and career advancement) for doing a good job.

A bit of melodrama in the relationship between Andrew and Sarah is too obvious to add anything interesting to the story. Fortunately, the story maintains interest in other ways. Tension elevates steadily as the good guys chase down leads, exhausting possibilities and themselves while laboring to find the deadly toxin before it’s released. The plot isn’t innovative and the ending is predictable — perhaps even a bit anticlimactic — but the story is grounded in realistic scenes as intelligence agents move step by step toward a solution to the crisis. Trojan is a good fit for readers who like thrillers about real people doing believable work, rather than superheroes who perform impossible feats.

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Dead Joker by Anne Holt

Published in Norwegian in 1999; published in translation by Scribner on July 26, 2016

The Public Prosecutor’s wife has been decapitated. The Public Prosecutor tells Chief Inspector Hanna Wilhelmson that he witnessed the murder and did nothing to stop it. Unfortunately for his defense, the person he identifies as the killer was seen jumping off a bridge some days before the murder occurred. The Public Prosecutor’s fingerprints are all over the murder weapon and unless the murder was committed by a ghost, it sounds like a slam dunk case for Wilhelmson. It appears, however, that nothing is a slam dunk in Norway.

In fact, unlike American law enforcement officers, those in Norway seem to be incapable of believing that anyone they arrest is actually guilty -- at least, that’s the impression I get from reading Anne Holt’s novels. They bend over backwards to keep an open mind and never stop looking for evidence that might lead to a different suspect. I don’t know if that’s how things really work in Norway, but it’s refreshing to imagine law enforcement officers who are aware of their own fallibility. American cops would be jumping up and down with glee to have such a strong case, but nobody in Dead Joker seems to think there’s enough evidence to convict the man whose fingerprints were on the murder weapon, who waited an hour to report his wife’s death, and who is blaming the crime on a dead man.

A related plot thread involves Evald Bromo, who has a weakness for little girls. Now he’s certain that his crimes are about to be exposed. His story intersects with that of a character who describes himself as an Avenging Angel (he is, in fact, part of a group of angels). Of course, the story threads eventually tie together. They do so in a way that is plausible, that doesn’t overreach, and that leads to a couple of mild surprises at the end.

I applaud thriller authors who take the time to flesh out their characters, but there are too many scenes in Dead Joker that focus on characters’ lives in ways that struck me as superfluous. I’m also not sure we need to know quite as much as we are told about characters’ meals and choices of attire. While the story sets up a dramatic change in Wilhelmson’s life, Dead Joker could have been shortened by 50 to 100 pages without losing meaningful detail, and the result would have been a better novel. I liked the resolution of the plot threads in Dead Joker and I like the way characters develop in this novel and throughout the series, but I would have liked the book more if the writing had been tightened.

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Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch

Published by Doubleday on November 8, 2016

Julia Pastrana has traveled by train from Mexico to New Orleans at the invitation of Matthew Rates, who met Julia when she was singing and playing her guitar at a wedding. Rates is introduced to Julia as being in the “entertainment business.” Actually, he manages a traveling freak show. Julia is expected to be a headliner because of her resemblance to a cuddly ape. Advertised as a “hybrid bear woman,” Julia joins a pinhead, a girl with no limbs, a rubber-skin man, and an albino black. It is 1854 and nobody has given much thought to the offensive nature of freak shows.

Julia feels she has been cursed, punished for the sins of the mother who abandoned her. Sometimes she wonders if she’s really a human. But freak is the last word that should be used to describe Julia. She is bright and funny and talented, possessed of a kind heart and a will to see the world. Despite her courage, Julia doesn’t dare venture out alone, for fear that people of less intelligence will attack her because attacking anyone different is what stupid people do.

Julia goes through another manager before she signs a contract with Theo Lent, who takes her to Europe. Lent is jealous and insecure, everything that Julia is not. Yet even in Europe, people find Julia unnerving. She scares children. Editorials condemn her for being seen in public.

Julia, while sometimes saddened, does not succumb to self-pity. She works hard and, like anyone else, she wants to be appreciated. Sometimes she is revered and other times she is condemned. The public tends to like her (their appetite for freaks is insatiable) but the guardians of decency scorn her. The novel demonstrates how little things change -- even today, the guardians of decency scorn everyone who doesn’t look, speak, and think just like they do.

Carol Birch based Orphans of the Carnival on a true story and presumably stuck closely to events that actually occurred in Julia’s life. The novel eventually gives Julia something like a love story involving Theo, whose personality is a complex blend of selfishness and self-hatred and obsessive love. In the end, he’s a bit creepy, while Julia is saintly.

Infrequent but semi-regular interludes reveal the story of Rose, a hoarder who has collected all the eyelashes that ever fell from her eyes. Rose lives in the present with Adam and their love story, like Julia’s, is unconventional. The brief interludes lead to a longer conclusion that tie the stories together. Adding the modern story is an interesting plot device, but I’m not sure its inclusion in the novel accomplishes its intended purpose.

The characters in Orphans of the Carnival are fully realized and that’s the novel’s strength. Its weakness is that the story hews closely to the facts of Julia’s life, which leaves little room for imaginative plotting. Birch let her imagination soar in Jamrach’s Menagerie, but here she reins it in a bit too much. Still, she brings the characters to life with emotional honesty that makes Orphans of the Carnival an easy novel to admire.

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The Winter in Anna by Reed Karaim

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on January 17, 2017

We are told in the first paragraph of The Winter in Anna that Anna died a gruesome, self-inflicted death. The next paragraphs reveal that Eric, the narrator, will tell us Anna’s story, letting us decide for ourselves whether it is a tragedy. I’d vote yes, because even self-made disasters can be tragic and because the real tragedy is that, for some people, both life and death require unimaginable courage.

Eric met Anna while he was a young man covering high school athletic events for a weekly newspaper in Shannon, a small North Dakota town. He is quickly elevated to the position of editor (which also requires him to be a news reporter), a position he doesn’t want because it forces him to deal with the reality of life. Anna writes the middle page stories “that pretend to be news,” and Eric admires her ability to observe and describe without intruding, a skill he believes has vanished from modern journalism.

Eric’s story of meeting Anna segues into the story of Anna’s life, as Eric pieced it together from Anna’s memories and those of her acquaintances and co-workers. Something is a bit off about Anna, and as Eric learns more about her life, it is clear that essential facts are being withheld or misstated. All we know at first is that Anna (as she frequently tells Eric) is “done with men.” Eventually we learn why.

We also learn about Eric’s past and present, including the fallback college girlfriend who reenters his life in North Dakota. But while so much of the story is about the past, it is really about letting go of the past. Anna’s advice to Eric is: “Just let everything heal. Don’t turn it into a badge.” Having turned her own scars into a badge, Anna speaks from experience. As the novel unfolds, both Eric and Anna struggle to find a path to move forward, to find a way to live a bearable life.

And we learn about other characters, their surfaces and depths, their superficial smiles and hidden pain. Eric lives in a small town that holds small town secrets, indiscretions that urban dwellers wouldn’t notice or care about. One of the novel’s lessons is “Don’t judge what you don’t understand” -- a timely and sorely needed lesson about staying out of other people’s business.

Some of the characters actually find happiness, and perhaps a chance at lasting happiness. Good for them. Yet the fundamental question that The Winter in Anna asks is “how the gentle, sustaining light leaks out of life.” Anna is like millions of other single mothers. She doesn’t have much but she has her children and she loves them fiercely. Why, then, is her story tragic? Read the book to learn the answer.

Tragedy aside, The Winter in Anna is ultimately about a sliver of time, unplanned circumstances that bring two people together for less than an eyeblink in the history of humanity. We’re here and then we’re gone, the novel seems to say, and what we do when we’re here really doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. Unless it does. One human can touch another in ways we never appreciate until years have passed. The questions Reed Karaim raises in elegant prose have many possible answers, and the beauty of this surprising and touching novel lies in the opportunity it gives readers to choose among them.

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