The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock

Published by Doubleday on July 12, 2016

Readers who are familiar with Donald Ray Pollock expect his characters to be defined by a combination of hardship, violence, and ignorance, softened by occasional moments of compassion and wisdom. In The Heavenly Table, Pollock focuses on impoverished characters in the World War I era who are struggling with life’s unfairness as they search for self-worth or redemption or something that will give purpose to their lives.

Pearl Jewett has three sons: Cob, Cane, and Chimney, all named in fits of drunkenness. He loses his farm in a futile effort to keep his wife alive and confronts a crisis of faith as he struggles to feed his children. He tells them that good fortune awaits -- they will all dine at the heavenly table when they go to meet their maker. Their more immediate fortune is uncertain as they try to make their way in the world, guided by a pulp western that chronicles the adventures of an outlaw named Bloody Bill.

Other characters play out their own dramas as the Jewetts emulate Bloody Bill. Vincent Bovard, in despair after his fiancé leaves him, decides to join the Army and die on the Western Front. Serving as a lieutenant in Ohio who is still far from the front, he struggles with his sexual identity.

Ellsworth Fiddler, a farmer, has been swindled out of his life’s savings. Jasper Cone inspects outhouses in a town where indoor plumbing is considered a Socialist threat. Sugar Milford is a black man who can’t get ahead in a white world -- although his idea of progress is to find a new woman who will support him.

Pollock stretches his literary legs in The Heavenly Table without departing from this strength -- the ability to make readers understand, and relate to, the troubles of people who are disadvantaged by a lack of education, opportunity, and positive parental role models. Many of the characters are desperate -- for money, for friendship, for a woman’s touch, for a peaceful existence. There is greater depth in Pollock’s characters than in his past work, no small feat for a writer whose characters have always been strong.

Pollock uses chance and geography to tie the story threads together. Although The Heavenly Table story is not entirely bleak, Pollock doesn’t contrive the kind of happy endings that appeal to lovers of cozy mysteries, On the other hand, readers who like gritty stories about desperate characters will find much to admire in The Heavenly Table. Pollock's prose, his plot, and his characters are all exceptional.

RECOMMENDED

The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on June 28, 2016

A biotech company hires a phenomenological inquisitor (a fancy title for a private detective) named Erasmus Keane to help it find a missing sheep. Keane works with the novel’s narrator, Blake Fowler, who is Watson to Keane’s Sherlock. In addition to the sheep (science fiction’s traditional farm animal), a beautiful television star named Priya Mistry wants to hire Keane because she thinks someone is trying to kill her. But soon there seem to be multiple Priya Mistrys and they aren’t all on the same page.

The novel takes place post-Collapse. A portion of Los Angeles exists as an underground, off-the-books community known as the Disincorporated Zone. Yes, Compton is part of it. City officials decided that walling it off would be easier than restoring it to order, which is fine with most of the DZ residents, and with Keane, who had something to do with its creation.

The story is built on the separation of a person from a persona. Owning a person is illegal but owning a persona, at least in the future imagined here, is not. The characters debate the morality of that arrangement; readers can decide for themselves. From the standpoint of Keane and Fowler, the larger question is how a person and her persona can be duplicated with any degree of precision. The solution to that problem is convoluted but clever.

Since the story of chasing a sheep around futuristic Los Angeles is told with tongue-in-cheek, its implausibility didn’t bother me. The story is amusing and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Lively prose, fast-paced action, and quirky characters add to the story’s charm. The Big Sheep isn’t a deep book, but it is a fun book.

RECOMMENDED

The Emerald Lie by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press (Grove/Atlantic) on August 30, 2016

At some point in The Emerald Lie, a character says, “I’m going to write a crime novel channeling David Foster Wallace, blend in the rules of grammar, have a broken-down PI, an enigmatic femme fatale, and oh, for the punters, a lovable scamp, as in the dog, not the PI.” Which pretty well sums up The Emerald Lie.

The Emerald Lie begins not long after Green Hell ends. Jack Taylor has made a lifestyle of devastation. In The Emerald Lie, he is trying to live quietly, taking his new dog for walks, enjoying his whiskey without a chaser of violence.

The father of a young woman who was brutally killed, apparently by someone who films torture porn, wants Jack to help him avenge the death. Jack has had enough of vengeance to know it makes nothing better, but he has a hard time saying no. His troubles continue when Emily, the crazed killer Ken Bruen introduced in Green Hell, returns to his life.

A second plotline involves a serial killer who selects his victims based on their grammatical errors. That’s a killer for whom I can root. The media call him The Grammarian. Making fun of a lethal grammar enforcer is probably Bruen’s way of thumbing his nose at critics who deplore his addiction to sentence fragments and unorthodox paragraph structures. Ridge, a character from past novels whose friendship with Jack often gives way to hatred, is investigating the killings.

Bruen always riddles his work with reference to popular culture. I give him credit for having the courage to say that some of the best American writing in the last couple of decades has come from television writers (Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and even, bless him, Battlestar Galactica), although he also praises some excellent crime novelists. In Green Hell, Bruen said that references to popular culture allow readers to connect to an author’s work. I would connect to Bruen anyway, on the strength of his honest characterizations of troubled people, but I also love the steady flow of song lyrics, movie references, and quotations from gifted genre writers who lack snob appeal.

As for Jack: “Desperation is its own beacon and I seemed to attract the worst and the worthless” pretty much sums up where he is in life. He carries so much guilt it is no surprise that he walks with a limp. Jack spends much of the novel reflecting on his tortured past, so readers who are familiar with the series might have more context in which to appreciate this novel than newcomers. Fortunately, Jack’s biting wit and pointed commentary on the surrounding world provides humor that balances the darkness of his life. Of course, Jack’s understanding of the world helps the reader understand Jack, which makes it possible to sympathize with a guy who has trashed his life and who continues to make sorrowful choices.

The plot in The Emerald Lie might not be as powerful as those Bruen crafted in some other novels in the series, but Bruen is always a joy to read. Clever prose, strong characterizations, and pointed observations more than make up for a meandering story, albeit one that works its way to a surprising finish. This is a book that Jack Taylor fans cannot miss. For others, I would suggest starting at the beginning and reading the novels in sequence, as Jack’s evolution from book to book is what makes this series one of the best in crime fiction.

RECOMMENDED

God's Pocket by Pete Dexter

Published in 1983

God’s Pocket isn’t as strong as Paris Trout. That isn’t surprising, since God’s Pocket was Pete Dexter’s debut novel. It is nevertheless a strong start to Dexter’s career as an award-winning author.

The novel begins with the death of Leon Hubbard. The police are told that the death was accidental but the reader and a handful of witnesses know that to be untrue. Over the next few days, the residents of God’s Pocket, a working class area in South Philadelphia, talk about what a great young man Leon was. Nothing could be less true, but it doesn’t pay to speak ill of the dead -- particularly in God’s Pocket, where everyone sticks together.

Leon’s step-father, Mickey, knows that Leon was a worthless psychopath. Leon must do his best to appease Leon’s mother while figuring out way to pay for the funeral -- gambling on the horses is one possibility, trying to get paid for his most recent truck hijacking is another. Nothing works out very well for Mickey or for his friend Bird, who is in financial trouble of his own due to a misunderstanding with the mob. Things aren’t much better for the undertaker who won’t bury Leon without payment in advance.

The novel’s other key character is a newspaper columnist, the celebrated voice of the common man, who hasn’t believed a word he’s written in at least ten years. He’s supposed to be writing about Leon’s death but he’s more inclined to woo Leon’s mother, who appreciates the attention even if it’s coming during what should be a time of mourning. The columnist and Leon’s mother are both coming unglued in their own ways.

Dexter gives the residents of God’s Pocket a believable group identity. They look out for each other even as they gossip about each other. They are suspicious of outsiders; they rarely leave God’s Pocket except for work; they feel downtrodden and misunderstood as they divide their time between the two neighborhood bars. Attention to local detail adds to the book’s authenticity.

Leon’s death and its true cause weave in and out of the plot, but the story is largely Mickey’s. The plot moves in unexpected directions but it always manages to be convincing. Several moments of dark humor lighten the mood. Perhaps too much attention is given to the columnist (a natural inclination for Dexter, who was himself a columnist) and not enough to the character who is most centrally involved in Leon’s death, but since that story is entertaining from beginning to end, I really can’t fault it.

RECOMMENDED

In the Name of the Queen by John MacRae

Published by Endeavour Press on June 27, 2016

In the Name of the Queen has a 2016 copyright, although it appears to have been first published in Great Britain in 2012. In any event, unlike some of the novels that Endeavour Press has resurrected, this one is of fairly recent vintage.

Mike Farrah is in military intelligence. His father is Lebanese and he speaks Arabic fluently. He is recruited by MI6 to impersonate a Jordanian billionaire, the son of a man who has long been dead.

The mission requires Farrah to seduce a Saudi woman whose father is a banker. In fact, he is suspected of being al Qaeda’s banker. Farrah’s minders hope he can help them locate the banker so that he can be snatched by the CIA, which does the dirty work for MI6.

After a good bit of training (including instruction in the art of seduction), Farrah goes to Cairo where he assumes his undercover identity. The beautiful woman is also living in Cairo because she cannot tolerate the intolerance of Saudi Arabia, and is particularly unwilling to be treated as inferior because of her gender. The woman’s brother, on the other hand, has more extreme views and considers everyone in Cairo -- particularly Farrah -- to be decadent and unworthy of his sister’s attention. That, of course, leads to a clash between Farrah and the brother.

Some aspects of In the Name of the Queen are predictable, but the novel also takes a couple of unexpected twists. Farrah learns that he cannot trust anyone -- particularly Mossad, a devious agency that is as dangerous as the enemy he is trying to battle. All good espionage novels are about betrayal, and the question in this one is whether Farrah will betray the beautiful woman and her father before he is betrayed by the people who are supposedly on his side.

Sex scenes tend to be cheesy (“quivering manhood”) and awkward (“exploded in a hot explosion”) as John MacRae proves himself to be one of those British authors to whom the prose of sex does not come naturally. I’m not quite sure I understood Farrah’s motivation for certain actions he takes as the story reaches its climax, and I was unhappy with a couple of unanswered questions that dangle at the novel’s end.

On the other hand, the story is good, the pace is steady, and action scenes are both credible and exciting. The plot does not overreach, which sets In the Name of the Queen apart from most modern thrillers. Characters have a reasonable amount of depth. In the Name of the Queen isn’t in the top tier of spy fiction, but fans of the genre should enjoy it.

RECOMMENDED