Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie

Published by Doubleday on July 8, 2025

Bring the House Down explores several themes. Infidelity in marriage is one: why it happens and how couples talk about it (or don’t). A related theme is how we become the people we become.

Another theme is the concept of using another person. When is it unethical? When is it not so bad? Does it matter whether the other person agrees to be used? What disclosures should be made before the using commences? Does being used justify revenge?

A less important theme is the artist’s need to be admired. For some artists, there is no other purpose for the creation of art. “Everyone desperate for people to like what they’ve made. We’re all still children, wanting our parents to look at the picture we’ve drawn. We never grow out of that feeling.” To an extent, the theme broadens into the need most people feel to be liked or desired or appreciated. And it branches into a theme about the reviewer’s purpose.

The novel’s two primary characters are reviewers. Alex Lyons is in his early thirties. Alex is a theater reviewer for an esteemed London newspaper. His mother was a prominent actress but his own career in theater ended when his first audition exposed his lack of talent.

Women fall for Alex and he takes advantage of their infatuation to grow his body count. Alex “recently resolved to stop sleeping with women under the age of twenty-four after one of them told him he looked like ‘such a softboi, but old,’ and it was like being insulted in an entirely different language.”

Alex travels to an arts festival in Edenborough with Sophie Rigden, a junior writer on the paper’s culture desk. Sophie reviews art projects that aren’t sufficiently important to be assigned to a senior reviewer. The paper has booked Alex and Sophie into the same multi-bedroom flat it always leases for the festival, inertia explaining why the flat is so large despite the paper having reduced the number of reviewers it sends.

Alex attends a one-person performance by Hayley Sinclair, a self-important performer who thinks that delivering a monolog about global warming is art. Alex writes his usual scathing review. After emailing it to his editor, he goes to a bar, where he encounters Hayley. She’s an attractive woman in her mid-twenties and a bit buzzed from the mix of performance and alcohol, so he takes her back to the flat and shags her.

The next morning, despite Sophie’s attempt to hide it from her, Hayley she sees the review, connects it (with Sophie’s inadvertent help) to Alex, and departs in a state of unhappiness. Alex is untroubled by her angry exit. As Sophie explains, Alex expects this “to become a good war story to tell our colleagues back in the newsroom in London.”

Alex should know it’s rude to shag a person you’ve just condemned in a review, at least without making full disclosure of your identity and what you’ve written before the shagging commences, but allowing the wrong head to do the thinking is a common male fault. In fact, Alex believes that what he did was wrong but not that wrong, given that she wanted to have sex with him and enjoyed the experience.

Karma strikes when Hayley changes the name of her show to The Alex Lyons Experience and turns it into a confessional about, yes, her experience with Alex. She reads the review aloud and inserts her editorial opinions about the reviewer who used her for sex after disrespecting her artistic message.

Hayley’s call upon theatergoers to spread her story goes viral. By coincidence, the last woman Alex dated, another actress, is in Edenborough. Alex didn’t review her show but included it in a year-end listing of the year’s ten worst plays just before he ghosted her. The actress attends Hayley’s performance, tells Hayley about her experience with Alex, and the one-woman show becomes a two-woman gripe session.

Women who are moved by Hayley’s show give her “me too” feedback “about being assaulted, raped, their birth traumas, their childhood abuse,” events are have nothing to do with the poor review that Alex gave Haley. Alex is an insensitive cad, but he didn’t force Haley to do anything against her will. It might have been more ethical to tell her that he had just written an unfavorable review of her performance, but it wouldn’t be fair to say he had sex with her under false pretenses. When they finished and she poured out her insecurities to him, he held her and made comforting noises about how he was sure the show would be a hit. That was a lie, but was he wrong to reassure her? If she didn’t take the time to learn anything about Alex before shagging him, is he to blame that she felt wounded when she read his review? That different readers will answer that question in different ways speaks to Charlotte Runcie’s success in crafting a story that examines misogyny in more depth, with more nuance, and from more perspectives, than novels typically manage.

The irony is that Hayley becomes successful by picking the right man to sleep with — hardly the road to fame that a feminist should want to take. She goes on to make The Alex Lyons Experience a nightly event. Her fifteen minutes of fame earns her interviews that bring her version of art to a wider audience — success she never would have achieved by keeping her pants on.

During her new show, Hayley proclaims “Alex Lyons isn’t just one guy. He’s every guy. He symbolises this whole business, this whole rotten media that keeps us down and stops us from making art that reaches people.” That’s a lot to put on Alex, who didn’t stop Haley from doing anything.

The rest of the novel follows Alex’s decline (the paper isn’t entirely pleased with the adverse publicity) and Sophie’s commensurate rise. As pennance, Alex is assigned to interview Hayley (the paper undoubtedly hopes he might bring himself to apologize during the interview) but he can’t bring herself to do it, so the task falls to Sophie. This leads to a climactic scene in which Sophie finally confronts Alex, who weakly defends himself before dramatic circumstances bring their very public discussion to a halt.

The novel fills in details of Sophie’s backstory, including her troubled relationship with her husband, who is caring for their son (a job that seems to make Sophie envious) while she is in Edenborough. I give Runcie credit for making clear that Sophie and her husband each have legitimate grievances about the other. Their largest problem is that they haven’t taken the time to listen to each other. Alex also has a recent ex who, although one of many, surfaces to play a role in Sophie’s revenge tour.

Portraying complex issues from multiple perspectives while reserving judgment is the novel’s strength. Hayley seems a bit artificial to me, although I admit that I don’t know any twenty-something artists who take themselves too seriously, so perhaps the novel is an accurate portrayal of the type. In any event, Bring the House Down tells an engaging story and raises interesting questions about interpersonal relations, including gendered differences in attitudes about mindless shagging, that are worth pondering.

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Happy Independence Day!

French Windows by Antoine Laurain

First published in France in 2023; published in translation by Pushkin Press on July 1, 2025

French Windows is a different take on the murder mystery genre. Dr. J. Faber is a psychoanalyst. His new client, Nathalia Guitry, tells him that she thinks she has screwed up her life. She feels “not fully alive” and characterizes her professional life as a failure.

Nathalia is a photographer but she no longer takes photographs. “‘When you can no longer do the job you love,” she explains, “you lose interest, and you don’t love it any more.” Faber asks her about the last photograph she took and she answers that it was a photograph of a murder. The topic of murder is not raised again until the story is about to end, leaving the reader to wonder how this could be a murder mystery. The answer: it mostly isn't.

Nathalia tells Faber that she spends much of her time looking out her window. She watches the people who live in the five floors of the wing across from her. She describes what she sees as “Stories. Lives. Life.”

Faber instructs Nathalia to write a story about the occupant of the ground floor and bring it with her to their next therapy session. “A true story, or one you’ve made up, it doesn’t matter which.” They will then repeat the process for the remaining floors until she has given Faber five stories. Faber hopes that she will reveal something about herself through the stories she tells of other people.

The bulk of the novel consists of Nathalia’s stories. One explains how the occupant of a flat adopted a new identity and became a YouTube influencer, a lifestyle coach who gives relationship advice, having achieved fame with the video If All Men Are Idiots then All Women Are Fools. After the session in which Nathalia discusses that story, Faber does some research and discovers that the story is apparently true.

The next story is about a successful, overweight cartoonist who buffs up to impress a woman who ignored him in high school. The third is about a man who must choose between his cat and a child who has a cat allergy. Another is the story of a man who had a near-death experience, sold all his goods, and traveled to Scotland to visit a tower that became his obsession. The last one, about a hypnotist, finally works its way back to the photograph of a murder.

Faber’s investigations of each story glue them together. The reader learns about Faber and his relationships with his wife and daughter, as well as his interest in old skeleton (passepartout) keys. It makes sense that a psychoanalyst would have a passion for keys, given his desire to unlock the hidden thoughts of his patients.

The story might be about the destiny we unconsciously shape. In the words of Jung: “Our destiny is the external manifestation of our internal subconscious conflicts.” Faber comes to understand Jung’s meaning through his interaction with Nathalia. Perhaps the reader will, as well.

Given its almost tangential nature, the mystery would be easily spoiled by discussing the murder that Nathalia photographed. The murderer’s identity necessarily comes as a surprise, given that the reader knows nothing about the murder until late in the story. While neither the murder nor the reveal are shocking, the story’s structure is quite clever.

French Windows might not appeal to mystery fans who want their mysteries to follow a familiar formula. The novel barely qualifies as a murder mystery, but the stories of the various apartment dwellers, while not particularly mysterious, are all engaging. As is Nathalia, a beautiful woman whose features Faber cannot recall after she departs. Faber’s wife wonders whether she is real or a figment of Faber’s imagination. Whether Faber’s wife is on the right track is a question for the reader to decide.

Although French Windows is a murder mystery in name only, it succeeds as a captivating glimpse of a psychoanalyst who needs to unlock his inner self before he can understand his relationships with his family and patients. Unpeeling the story’s deceptively complex layers might be a greater challenge than solving a murder.

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The White Crow by Michael Robotham

Published by Scribner on July 1, 2025

American crime novels that tell stories from the perspective of a police-affiliated character (detective or beat cop, coroner, forensic investigator) tend to be less interesting than their British counterparts. American characters are too often self-righteous, annoyingly so when they deliver predictable lectures about how nobody else cares about victims as much as they care. British characters are more self-effacing, while British authors tend to focus on good storytelling rather than tedious lectures about their advocacy for crime victims.

The apparent victims in The White Crow are a jeweler and his family. Masked men force Russell Kemp-Lowe into his house just as he’s arriving home. They tie up Caitlin, his wife, before making off with Russell. One of the robbers is kind enough to tuck their daughter into bed when she wakes up and wonders about the masked strangers in her kitchen. The robbers leave a man behind to watch Caitlin. They tell Russell that the man will kill Caitlin if Russell doesn’t let them into his jewelry store and shut off the alarms. When the robbers leave the store, they tie Russell to a chair with a bomb that will explode if he moves.

Philomena McCarthy is a police constable. She’s driving with her partner when she sees a little girl in pajamas near the road. Just as they stop to investigate, they are called to the scene of the jewelry store robbery. Phil’s partner responds but Phil stays behind to search for the girl. The little girl is, naturally enough, the child of Russell and Caitlyn.

The girl, Daisy, tells Phil that her mother has a bag over her head and won’t wake up. Daisy leads Phil to her home, where Phil discovers Caitlyn’s dead body, still tied to the chair. While it quickly becomes apparent that Caitlyn was suffocated, there is no bag over her head when Phil arrives.

Philomena isn’t a detective but she worms her way into the investigation because she’s formed a rapport with Daisy. Surveillance cameras reveal that Phil’s father and uncles have some sort of connection to Russell. Phil becomes a suspect because her father is a semi-retired criminal who now operates a construction company. Philomena is the “white crow” of the family (the Bulgarian equivalent of “black sheep”), a misfit who doesn’t conform to her family’s lawlessness.

The White Crow is fundamentally a whodunit. Someone killed Caitlyn, but the robbers left the home before Daisy. The murderer must have removed the bag from Caitlyn’s head after Daisy left and before she returned with Phil. It isn’t clear why one of the robbers would have done so. Who committed the foul deed?

Michael Robotham offers an array of suspects for Philomena and the reader to consider. Russell was having serious money issues and might have benefitted from his wife’s insurance. Philomena’s father is having money issues of his own, thanks to a gang of Bulgarian criminals who want to take over his construction business so they can use it to launder their criminal proceeds.

The notion of a cop turned suspect — a cop who then goes rogue to prove his or her innocence — is a frequent plot driver in police thrillers, but Robotham can be forgiven for borrowing that familiar device. The rest of the story seems fresh.

Robotham builds depth into Philomena’s character through her troubled relationship with her father. While it is common for fictional (and real) cops to have troubled relationships with spouses, Robotham avoids the “I’m married to my job” cliché. Phil’s strong relationship with her firefighter husband becomes central to the story when bad guys kidnap her as the story approaches its climax.

The scenes following the kidnapping move at a frenzied pace, justifying the novel’s “thriller” label. While the story ends with exciting action, The White Crow isn’t a typical action novel, filled with shootouts and fistfights. Phil occasionally demonstrates her ability to defend herself, but the novel sustains interest by blending detection with suspense.

The killer’s identity, revealed in the final pages, might not come as a shock, but it isn’t such a foregone conclusion that the reader will be tempted to skip to the end before moving on to another book. Like many British crime novels, The White Crow avoids most crime novel clichés while placing complex characters into an engaging (and sometimes exciting) story.

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How to Dodge a Cannonball by Dennard Dayle

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on June 17, 2025

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a Civil War comedy that morphs into an alternate history. The protagonist, a 15-year-old named Anders, participates in “the second-craziest American rebellion” he’s seen. It comes in the midst of the craziest rebellion, the Civil War.

Anders comes from a long line of soldiers who specialized in flag twirling. When he’s seven, his mother tells him that, if their family “had gotten their due, we’d still be down south” with land and slaves and a future. She blames high-interest lenders for chasing them to Illinois. Anders’ mother instructs him to “pursue an education and avoid asking for hugs,” but when he’s fourteen, Anders joins the Union Army. He twirls flags for ten months before switching his allegiance to the Confederacy.

Confederate General Longstreet assures his soldiers that they are fighting for freedom because “every man, save a few simians, deserves freedom.” Shortly after Longstreet orders his men to charge across a field to engage a large assembly of Union soldiers, Anders drops his flag and sprints “in the exact opposite direction, away from the cannons and rifles and bayonets and fists and other tools for ending his life before he was good and ready to go.” When the Union soldiers begin to advance, Anders removes the blue uniform from a fallen body and again becomes a Union soldier.

Anders is in a pickle when he discovers that the regiment he’s joining consists of black soldiers. To explain his presence, Anders claims to be an octoroon, an explanation that satisfies white officers who believe that “one-eighth [N-word] rounds up to [N-word].” A black corporal named Gleason takes Anders under his wing, giving Anders an opportunity to prove his worth as a flag twirler.

The story that follows is peppered with humor. Some is drawn from the number of black soldiers named Jefferson (including the corpse that once wore Anders’ uniform) who contend that they descended from the nation’s third president. When Anders asks a white Jefferson whether he is related to the former president, the man asks, “Do I look black?”

Other laughs come from discussions of religion. When Anders tells Gleason “All I know is that God isn’t paying much attention,” Gleason replies, “Then you’re a Deist!” and proudly proclaims the “legacy of reason” that Deists have shared, “stretching back to the Founders.” General Harrow cautions his black soldiers not to bother him with “Baptist nonsense” and assures them that if prayer worked, none of them would have been slaves.

Without intending a pun, I would characterize the racial comedy as dark. Anders knows some Confederate codes but can’t get white officers to believe him without revealing that he’s white and a Confederate deserter. When Gleason tells Harrow that Anders is a codebreaker, Harrow responds: “We can’t stake battles on black intelligence. Even if it’s reliable, it perverts the character of the army.”

To Anders’ surprise, a soldier named Petey turns out to be a woman named Patricia. She wanted to be a soldier instead of a nurse because nurses “just saw important bits off people all day.” Using makeup, Patricia becomes a white woman named Polly.

Dennard Dayle also finds disturbing humor in the hypocrisy of war. Apart from the Confederacy's bizarre claim that fighting to preserve slavery is actually a battle for freedom, the Union's claim of moral superiority is undone when Harrow’s regiment is ordered to loot the local community because the Union Army “saved the men and women of this region from pillaging by Lee’s barbarians. Now we’ll help them contribute what they can for our trouble. The patriots among them will appreciate it.” Gleason devises his own looting plan, focusing on an arms factory owned by Slade Jefferson, a white manufacturer of weapons who sells his wares to both sides of the conflict.

While the undercurrent of comedy keeps the story flowing, Dayle’s novel addresses serious themes, including the occasionally confusing nature of racial and gender identity. Slade advances another of the novel’s themes: the futility of war. “When the last shot is fired,” he proclaims, “this will be the same country it was in 1861. Just less crowded.”

The story holds the reader's attention by moving in unlikely directions. Practicing “speculative dramaturgy,” Gleason writes a play about a version of Frankenstein’s monster that serves as a human computer called Clotho. Anders delivers a letter from Slade to his female business partner in Manhattan, a mission that proves to be deadly. The last several chapters take place in New Mexico, where a new monarchy is taking hold — the “second-craziest rebellion” in Anders’ young life.

I found the New Mexico portion of the story to be less biting (and less interesting) than the rest, but How to Dodge a Cannonball succeeds as a satire of American history. Clotho puts a fine point on that history when he explains that, despite all its computational talents, it “can’t make a culture sane. United Americana inherited a single, insane lie. Freedom built on bondage. A structure demanding servitude and celebrating its absence.” Hypocrisy is indeed one of the nation’s defining characteristics, which might be why many people believe that schools should either rewrite history or ignore it.

The novel asks big questions — What is freedom? What is art? What is race? — and delivers non-answers that both inform and amuse.

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