Dead Girl Walking by Christopher Brookmyre

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on April 21, 2015

On the strength of his Jasmine Sharp/Catherine McLeod novels, Christopher Brookmyre is near the top of my growing list of Scottish writers whose crime fiction I admire (only in part due to the joyfully creative swearing that seems to characterize Scottish crime fiction). I particularly enjoy Brookmyre's ability to craft clever sentences. In Dead Girl Walking, he describes one of the bad guys as having "a domed head you could smack with a fence post for hours before you got bored." Gotta love that.

Unfortunately, I did not love Dead Girl Walking as much as I enjoy the Sharp/McLeod books. Dead Girl Walking stars beleaguered journalist Jack Parlabane. DS Catherine McLeod makes a cameo appearance but not until 300 pages have gone by. I have not read the earlier Parlabane novels so that might explain my reaction to this one, although Dead Girl Walking works well as a stand-alone novel.

Heike Gunn is the temperemental lead singer for Savage Earth Heart, a Scottish band that achieved fame on the basis of a song that became a hit after it was played on an American TV show. When Heike failed to appear at the last show of their most recent tour, the band's publicist, Mairi Lafferty, covered her absence by making an excuse about a throat infection. In truth, Mairi has no idea why Heike disappeared. It quickly becomes apparent to the reader (from her unpublished blog entries) that the band's new fiddler, Monica Halcrow, knows something about Heike's disappearance, but Monica has also made herself scarce.

Mairi hires Parlabane to find Heike. Parlabane is an investigative journalist who has been unemployed since he upset the government by refusing to divulge his sources. His history of resorting to burglary and hacking also makes him unpopular with certain police officers. Since Parlabane once covered the music industry, Mairi figures he will be the perfect undercover investigator.

Chapters alternate between the perspectives of Parlabane as he investigates Heike's disappearance and those of Monica, who blogs her experiences in the band. Both characters learn that Heike was widely seen as a self-absorbed user who gets what she can from people and abandons them. Heike has the ability to make both women and men desire her, an ability that might provoke jealousy or worse. While waiting for the two stories to converge, the reader will assemble a list of characters who might have a motive for doing something bad to Heike.

The plot is full of complications. Some women who join the Savage Earth Heart tour bus, allegedly part of a marketing scheme for a promoter, are not what they appear to be. Monica's deteriorating relationship with her fiancé, Heike's busted relationship with the band's former fiddler, and the dissatisfaction of current band members with Heike may or may not have something to do with Heike's disappearance.

The plot is solid, the characters are engaging, the prose is fine. So why didn't I love Dead Girl Walking? It lacks energy. I am surprised the story was not told with greater urgency and intensity. The pace is never plodding, but it is too deliberate. While I enjoyed Dead Girl Walking, Brookmyre didn't excite me in the way that he has in the Sharp/McLeod novels. Dead Girl Walking still earns my recommendation, and an intriguing ending sets up the next book in the series, which I'll probably read. I just hope it is a bit more energetic than this one.

RECOMMENDED

Colossus by Colin Falconer

Published by St. Martin's Press on May 26, 2015

To an extent, Colossus reads like a Disney animated film, except that the elephants defecate. There are elements of a fairy tale romance (will the elephant whisperer win the princess?) although the story is more R-rated (for both sex and violence) than a Disney film would be.

Gajendra is a mahavat, an elephant handler in Alexander's army. He is the only mahavat who can control Colossus, the largest of Alexander's elephants. Alexander is pleased with Gajendra, less so with his elephant captain, whose cruelty toward Colossus would lead to his death by trampling but for Gajendra's repeated interventions to calm the elephant's rage.

The novel begins in Babylon as Alexander's army trains for an attack upon Carthage. Gajendra deals with a case of elephant rivalry, uncovers a plot, and chastely pursues the woman of his dreams before marching Colossus off to war. Gajendra naturally proves to be a brilliant tactician as well a wizard with elephants.

Another part of the story begins in Carthage, where Mara has just lost her baby. Her father, Hanno, is charged with defending Carthage from Alexander's army. Knowing he cannot stand up to Alexander, Hanno is more interested in the defense of his daughter. The two storylines mate about a third of the way into the novel.

The battle imagery is vivid. I had never given much thought to fighting a war with elephants but Colin Falconer clearly has. The tactical discussions are lucid and the descriptions of elephants in combat are exciting. If nothing else, Colossus inspires an appreciation of elephants. It is easy to understand why Alexander found them to be fearsome instruments of war, but using them in that way was a cruel exploitation of such remarkable creatures.

Colossus is not a deep novel and the plot is not particularly surprising. The story is not historically accurate (at least according to Plutarch) but this is a work of fiction -- a "what might have happened" view of history -- so that didn't matter to me. Given the clear intent to manipulate the reader in obvious ways, I was surprised by my willingness to be manipulated. Colossus is a "feel good" novel that pushes all the right buttons.

RECOMMENDED

SignWave by Andrew Vachss

Published by Pantheon on June 9, 2015

SignWave opens with an assassin named Olaf giving Dell a ridiculously long-winded lecture on his philosophy of assassination while he's bleeding to death. The lecture is Olaf's legacy, bequeathed to Dell along with the claws that he uses as a weapon of self-defense. Dell later lectures his wife Dolly about his philosophy of being a mercenary. Then Dell lectures the reader on a variety of subjects, including the dangers of Facebook, the ineffectiveness of domestic violence laws, woodpeckers, the harmonious balance of nature, left wing causes that he doesn't like, right wing causes that he doesn't like, lies on the internet, sex on the internet, women, homosexuality, cyberbullying, and more. Dell's rants make him sound like a cranky old man.

Dell also comes across as excessively paranoid and more than a little whacky. He's constantly running down to the basement to assemble a little computer that snaps together with Legos. He uses it to send absurdly abbreviated messages to a hacker he knows as "the ghost" before he disassembles it and hides it again. Dell is constantly running up and down the basement steps, repeating the process every time a nutty research project occurs to him that only the ghost can handle.

Meanwhile, Dolly lectures the group of teenage girls (who inexplicably drop by daily to hang out with her) about sex, love, virginity, and community activism. By the time a plot begins to develop, at least half the novel has gone by.

Throughout the novel, I was asking myself "Did Andrew Vachss really write this?" One of my favorite crime novels is Shella, a tight novel written in spare prose that offers a chilling psychological profile of a killer. The early Burke novels are written in a similar style, without an extra word. There has always been an element of philosophy in Vachss' writing but it has never gotten in the way of storytelling. Until now.

The plot involves a land trust that is buying up property, including a strip that Dolly wants to use as a dog park. When someone involved in the trust makes a concealed threat against Dolly (so concealed -- "don't go off half-cocked" -- that only Dell perceives it as a threat), Dell uses all of his formidable resources to investigate. Which basically means running up and down the basement steps to send cryptic messages to the ghost and occasionally sneaking around in the dark. Since Dell is the one who goes off half-cocked for no apparent reason, I found it difficult to get behind him. He's a paranoid lunatic but he isn't an interesting lunatic.

The plot also involves an investigative journalism blog operated by another paranoid lunatic (albeit a nonviolent lunatic) who stays hidden in the woods -- in other words, just Dell's kind of person. The plot as a whole is barely comprehensible. It is also the first Vacchs plot that I would classify as dull. While I have taken a great deal of pleasure over the years from reading Andrew Vachss, this is also the first Vachss novel I would not recommend, even with reservations. If you want to know Vachss at his best, give Shella a try.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Shadow Ritual by Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne

Published in France in 2005; published in translation by Le French Book on March 25, 2015

The connection between the Nazi party and the occult is one that fiction writers continue to exploit, although rarely in a way that might be considered fresh. Freemasons, their predecessors in the Knights Templar, and Nazis are standard ingredients in these stories. So are ritual killings, plenty of which occur in Shadow Ritual.

Francois Le Guermand, having fled France in 1940 with other refugees of the German invasion, by 1945 has become a trusted SS officer. Together with Nazi officers, Le Guermand is selected to membership in an ancient Aryan secret society, Thule-Gesellshaft. To carry on Hitler's work, he is charged with burying some crates and disappearing into a clandestine life. That plan is foiled by the Russian advance, which causes Le Guermand to disappear in a way he had not planned.

In 2005, a concentration camp survivor, now pursuing archeology in Jerusalem, is asked to authenticate a fragment from a stone tablet called the Tebah Stone. Bashir Al Khansa (a/k/a "the Emir") wants to gain possession of the stone on behalf of a mysterious client. A couple of other professional killers join the fun -- a Palestinian and a Croatian -- and of course there is a character whose hobbies are gardening and torture. Ritual killings in Jerusalem and Rome fuel investigations by the police and others, including both Freemasons and, um, non-Freemasons. Our primary good guys are a male and female who are so forgettable I can't recall much about them. The killings and Stone stealing have something to do with a ritual and "a secret lost in antiquity" that will lead to "the power of the gods," all of which is even sillier than most novels about Freemasons and Nazis.

History lessons that readers of similar novels will have encountered before dominate the book's first half. Much of the history is so well known (not just to thriller readers) that it acts as a drag on the story while adding little of value. At times, Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne seem to have been attempting a philosophical novel, but they are no Camus.

Unfortunately, the novel just doesn't work at any level. The clichéd plot is carried by trite characters. The prose sometimes relies on phrases like "It's us against them. Evil is lurking ..." but most of it time it's fine. Sadly, the story isn't. I've read the story before and this novel provided no reason for me to want to read it yet again.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Killer, Come Hither by Louis Begley

Published by Doubleday/Nan A. Talese on April 7, 2015

Killer, Come Hither appears to be an attempt to craft a literary thriller. The prose is of reasonably high quality but the key element of a thriller -- suspense -- is lacking while the prime ingredient of literary fiction -- characterization -- is neglected.

In the wake of 9/11, Jack Dana leaves behind the call of academia to follow in the military tradition of his father and grandfather. He later leaves the Marines to become a novelist. Dana is working on his third book as the story unfolds.

The story involves the apparent suicide of Dana's beloved Uncle Harry. Harry was a lawyer whose principle client meddled in politics and likely engaged in widespread fraud and corrupt practices. Dana and one of the associates in Harry's firm believe that Harry's death was orchestrated to prevent Harry from exposing some ongoing crime in which his wealthy client was engaging. The coincidental death of the lawyer's secretary fuels their suspicion.

Against that background, Dana decides to make it his mission to identify the killer and to engage in a revenge killing. The novel takes Dana on a straightforward path to uncover a motive and spot a killer. It is too straightforward to create tension or a sense of mystery. Since Dana has the help of a CIA agent, finding the truth is easy. The CIA agent gives Dana some ridiculous gadgetry that turns up in a climactic scene for no apparent reason other than Dana's desire to use the kind of gadgetry Q would have furnished to James Bond. That bit of silliness at least enlivens a story that is mostly dull and predictable.

The police, who apparently saw nothing odd about Harry's unlikely suicide or his secretary's coincidental death, are just as indifferent to the mayhem Dana causes. I was equally indifferent to Dana. He has a typical "thriller hero on a vendetta" personality -- that is, almost none at all. He gets involved in a romance because that's what thriller heroes do. He seeks vengeance because that's what thriller heroes do. He has apparently never had an original thought in his life, making Dana a dull boy. Worse, he is a dull boy telling a dull, predictable, unimaginative story -- although he does so in prose that is the novel's only saving grace.

NOT RECOMMENDED