A Time of Torment by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on August 2, 2016

Jerome Burnell’s life was destroyed because he stopped for gas at the wrong place and time. Years later, after being released from prison, Burnell’s first phone call is to Charlie Parker. Burnell is on parole as a registered sex offender who possessed child porn, an offense he has always denied.

Burnell had once been a hero, having saved lives by killing two thugs. He thinks he was set up for the child porn charges for reasons that are related to his killings. Two women whose lives he saved have disappeared and he fears that their fates were also dictated by his act of heroism. Burnell, who never considered himself a hero, hopes that Parker can find the truth. He’s also concerned that a thug who tortured him in prison while speaking of the “Dead King” is also a free man, free to resume the torture.

A related plot thread involves a cultish group of people who live in a part of the Appalachians known as the Cut. The group has a long history of terror. Most county residents outside the Cut find that ignoring that history is the safest way to live.

Can Parker assure Burnell’s safety? Who or what is the Dead King? (Hint: we’re not talking Elvis.) What’s up with the evil residents of the Cut? John Connolly answers some of these questions quickly, but only by giving birth to new questions. Others take longer to resolve. You’ll need to read the book to get the answers.

And I do recommend that you read it, at least if you don’t mind the addition of a supernatural flavor to your thriller stew. The story becomes creepier as it moves along and a few of the scenes are graphically gruesome, so if you are easily disturbed, you will probably want to avoid the book (and most others in the series). On the other hand, if you like thrillers mixed with horror stories that benefit from literary prose style and strong character development, Connolly is the author for you. His prose is so fluid, and his story-telling skills so strong, that it’s difficult to stop reading his books.

Having said that, I will also say that A Time of Torment is less original than some other novels in the series. The plot moves in predictable directions, although Connolly adds rich detail and interpersonal conflicts that add to the story’s interest. Basing the story on an evil cult with a vague connection to the supernatural just seems too easy, given the creative complexity that Connolly brought to earlier Charlie Parker novels. The Dead King is a pedestrian device forced into the plot for the sake of harnessing evil actions to an incarnate evil force. That’s one of Connolly’s recurring themes, but it didn’t work for me here, although I liked the twisted explanation of the Dead King that Connolly saves for the final pages.

What did work are secondary characters, like a local sheriff with a heart condition and two female victims who refuse to behave like victims. And despite the book’s darkness, unexpected one-liners by Louis and Angel (Charlie’s instruments of death) made me laugh. There are always plenty of reasons to recommend a Charlie Parker book, even if the book, like A Time of Torment, is one of the lesser entries in the series.

One final note: The story sets in play what will likely be an ongoing storyline involving Parker’s living daughter. I think there are already enough ongoing storylines in this series (The Collector and the Gray Man and the ghosts of Parker’s wife and daughter all pop up in this novel); I think it might be overkill to add another.

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The Travelers by Chris Pavone

Published by Crown on March 8, 2016

Will Rhodes writes for a travel magazine called Travelers, having been hired by a newly promoted editor after the former editor mysteriously disappeared. Will’s job is to travel to interesting places, eat good food, and stay up late drinking with strangers. Nice work if you can get it, but he’s burdened with debt, his wife is cranky about his unavailability, and his fidelity is tested by a gorgeous Australian he meets on a trip to France.

While in France, Will stumbles across someone who doesn’t want to be found, setting the plot in motion. We also see glimpses of a nondescript office full of nondescript employees who monitor the movements of designated individuals, Will among them. And we see Will’s boss disappearing into a secret room, so we know he’s something more than a travel editor.

In fact, every key character is living with secrets. Even Will, eventually. The fact that so many interrelated characters are not who they appear to be is improbable, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief because the improbable lives all contribute to the story’s entertainment value. Guessing the exact nature of those secrets, and whether various characters are working at cross-purposes, is part of the fun. Distinguishing good guys from bad guys is no easy task, thanks to a well-designed plot that manages to be intricate without becoming convoluted.

Originality is the story’s strongest asset. I can’t recall reading another spy novel that has a plot quite like this one. Will’s personality is developed with reasonable care, and while there is less fullness to the other characters, they at least come across as real people. Chris Pavone’s prose is better-than-average, the story moves with a good pace, and the atmosphere in the story’s various settings is convincing.

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Dodgers by Bill Beverly

Published by Crown on April 5, 2016

Dodgers is marketed with favorable comparisons to Clockers, another book about young black males selling drugs. Both novels are excellent, but they couldn’t be more different. While Clockers is about the drug trade, Dodgers has very little to do with drugs after the story gets moving. While Clockers is largely confined to a single neighborhood, Dodgers is a road novel. While the police play a major role in Clockers, they are largely absent from Dodgers. And while Clockers is the story of a small part of America, Dodgers takes a more sweeping view of the country.

East (for Easton) is 15. He’s working the street for his uncle, supervising a crew of boys who are keeping watch over a drug house. He loses that job when one of his boys fails to report the arrival of the police. East’s uncle has always favored him, but East is held responsible for his crew's lapse, even though he is not to blame.

Given a chance to make amends, East is dispatched on a road trip to Wisconsin with three other boys to kill a man. One of the kids is East’s 13-year-old brother Ty. Tight-lipped and cold-blooded, Ty is the group’s true killer. How he became such a sociopath is a mystery, even to East.

East’s adventure takes unexpected twists and moves in unpredictable directions. At one point, East (who has never been outside of LA) listens to a man in the Midwest talk about what America once was and what it is now. The man knows little of East’s world and East is just starting to discover, and perhaps to embrace, a strange and unfamiliar land.

Characters are credible, dialog is sharp, and the story consistently maintains the illusion of reality. The pace is quick when it needs to be. It slows at appropriate moments to give East a chance to reflect on his life and, in a series of memorable and moving scenes, on the lives of people he could not have imagined while growing up in LA.

I would describe Dodgers as a crime novel mixed with a road novel mixed with a coming-of-age novel. Crime takes a back seat to honesty in the novel’s second half. As the story progresses, East makes a number of choices that test his maturity, his humanity, and his instinct for self-preservation. As a reader would expect from a coming-of-age novel, the story ends with East making the most critical choice of his young life. The circumstances that force East to make that choice are surprising while the choice itself brings the novel to a satisfying conclusion.

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Ghosts of War by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on June 28, 2016

In the wake of the events described in the last Taskforce novel (during which a Taskforce member pursued a personal vendetta), an investigation threatens to reveal and shut down the Taskforce, an organization that has always operated illegally. A government official’s death has made the Oversight Council skittish (none of the members want to go to prison) so Taskforce missions have been placed on hold. What, then, is there for Brad Taylor to write about?

Well, there’s a fabled Nazi ghost train buried in a tunnel in Poland, although that plot thread is just a setup. He also writes about Putin and his plan to take over Belarus with the help of a motorcycle gang known as the Night Wolves. And then he imagines a Russian named Simon who, having been put in charge of orchestrating a coup in Belarus, decides that orchestrating Putin’s removal from office would enhance his life expectancy. To cap it off, the plan involves starting World War III. In other words, just another day for Pike Logan and his Taskforce pals.

Aaron and Shoshana, who have turned into series regulars, play a central role in Ghosts of War. They need Pike and Jennifer to help them recover a Torah that was stolen from the ghost train -- and to grab it before it is stolen again. Of course, the mission doesn’t go as planned, giving Pike and the gang a chance to get mixed up in the competing shenanigans of Putin and Simon.

About a third of the way into the novel, an unlikely world-changing event occurs. I got the impression that Taylor succumbed to the thriller writer’s temptation to make the events in each new novel a little more outrageous than the last one, as if readers won’t continue with the series otherwise. When a series like this one depends on credibility, I think that’s a bad choice. Fortunately, the stories are still fun.

Ghosts of War also seems a bit off. It lacks the consistent narrative voice that characterizes the other Taskforce novels. It also has the feeling of being rushed, which hasn’t been true of Taylor’s past efforts despite the speed with which he churns out new novels. More polishing of the prose would have turned this into a better novel.

As usual, Taylor has a more subtle understanding of world affairs than most authors who write thrillers of this nature. He lampoons military commanders who think that the United States should respond to every provocation with war. He makes clear that even a show of military strength is likely to begin a needless war. Of course, the real world doesn’t have Pike Logan jetting around to solve problems, but Taylor nevertheless makes a persuasive case against saber rattling as a primary instrument of foreign policy.

The crisis resolves more easily than I expect from Taskforce novels. The level of tension that Taylor creates in most of his other books is absent in this one. While I enjoy this series and had fun reading the book, I regard Ghosts of War as a weaker installment than most of the earlier novels in the series.

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Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits by Mark Binelli

Published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books on May 3, 2016

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits is a biography in novel form. The subject is Jalacy Hawkins (1929-2000), a singer/musician whose use of macabre/occult imagery and a “shock rock” style was (he later claimed) either the inspiration for, or ripped off by, performers as diverse as Kiss, Little Richard, Melvin Van Peebles, and the horror film Blackula. “I Put a Spell on You” is his best known song, although many listeners are more familiar with the covers than Hawkins’ original.

Hawkins’ mother left him on an orphanage doorstep in 1929. The priests decided to offer the “colored” child to a Native American couple who wanted to adopt. Growing up in Cleveland, Hawkins attended a music conservatory before enlisting as an underage soldier in 1943. Hawkins reenlisted in the Air Force, did some boxing, drifted to Atlantic City where he worked as a chauffeur for a jazz musician, played the role of Blackula in a jazz band, and had his way with women. Lots of women, including a lady wrestler and a girl who was barely in her teens (he went to prison for that one, unlike Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis). Hawkins had scores of extramarital offspring, making for an interesting family reunion of complete strangers. (News coverage of the reunion is available online.)

All of this and a whole lot more takes place in a short novel that is rich with detail. The last chapter, wrapping up the bulk of Hawkins’ life, reads like a magazine article. How much of the novel is fiction and how much fact I cannot say, but this is a novel so it doesn’t need to be factual. Still, the book might have been better as nonfiction, given the difficulty of discerning which bits are invented and which are straightforward biography.

Mark Binelli depicts racial tension as an integral part of Hawkins’ life, and I suspect that is closer to fact than fiction. Hawkins is portrayed as abrasive and petulant, which he may have had a right to be. Tellingly, in his middle-aged years, Hawkins is quoted as saying “I wish I could be who I was before I became me.”

If there is a difference between Hawkins’ persona and his deeper essence, the novel does not explore it. In that regard, the novel might be criticized as shallow, but it does convey a good sense of the artist’s tumultuous life, if not of the artist himself. I enjoyed reading it, which is about all I ask of any novel, but it left me wanting more.

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