The Fall by John Lescroart

Published by Atria Books on May 5, 2015

The Fall isn't my favorite Dismas Hardy novel, in part because it lacks the emotional heft of John Lescroart's best work, but it nevertheless tells a good story. While courtroom scenes are strong, they are not as dramatic as those in some earlier novels, perhaps because they focus on Dismas' daughter while Dismas paces around like a worried old dog. It is, however, interesting to see Dismas play the role of father-mentor-coach as he dissects the trial and gives his daughter pointers.

A 17-year-old girl falls to her death from a bridge. Did she jump or was she pushed? A murder investigation ensues and the police, under fire for their failure to solve homicides with African American victims, feel pressured to make an arrest. The District Attorney, criticized for failing to get convictions in homicides against black victims, is under the gun to convict someone. Too often, when the need to secure a conviction has political consequences, the government doesn't care much about whether the right person is being arrested or prosecuted. In this case, the suspect is a volunteer advocate for troubled kids who may or may not have been having an affair with the dead girl.

Having recently met Dismas Hardy's daughter, Rebecca ("the Beck"), the suspect knows where to go for legal help. The Beck is a bit unseasoned to be handling a murder case, but since Dismas is backing her up I didn't view that as a huge stretch. The trial begins only about a third of the way into the novel. Inexplicably, the Beck waits until the trial begins before she sends an investigator out to look for evidence of her client's innocence. Granted, that always worked for Perry Mason, but one might have expected the Beck to give the case more thought before the trial started.

The Fall deftly explores the ugly intersection between race and the criminal justice system. It is spot on in its condemnation of the "rush to justice" (which is too often a rush to injustice) that leads to inadequate investigations, sloppy police work, and questionable accusations, all based on the unstated understanding that quieting the public requires someone to be arrested, even if it might not be the guilty party. Of course, as is common in a Dismas Hardy novel, whether the client is or isn't guilty is ambiguous throughout much of the novel.

The plot turns on an improbable coincidence, but that's true of most modern crime novels. Since life is full of improbable coincidences, they only bother me when they are outlandish, and Lescroart sold me on the possibility that this one could have happened. A bit of drama at the end is too predictable but, on the whole, The Fall is a solid entry in the Dismas Hardy series.

RECOMMENDED

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

Schismatrix first published in 1985; Schismatrix Plus first published in 1995; published digitally by Open Road Media on December 30, 2014

Remarkable in many ways, Schismatrix is a brilliantly imaginative future history. The multi-faceted story considers the political, cultural, and social impact of trans-human and post-human existence. It is a difficult novel -- Bruce Sterling gives no shortcuts to the lazy reader -- but that makes it all the more rewarding. I read and admired it years ago but reading it a second time, after its rerelease in digital form, I got more out of it. I suspect I would have an even better understanding of Sterling's insights if I were to read it a third and fourth time. The story is a bit disjointed and I can't say that I felt an emotional connection to it, but the novel provides ample food for the intellect even if it fails to nourish the soul.

The solar system has been colonized. Most colonists live on space stations or asteroids, each operating as an independent government, some consisting of a handful of people. The colonies collectively comprise the Schismatrix. Deeper space travel is possible only with the help of the Investors, a spacefaring alien race of a decidedly capitalist bent that has no intention of sharing the secret of interstellar travel (although they are happy to act as bus drivers for the right price). The Investors are the most accessible of the various alien races, most of which stay in the background during the course of the novel, apart from one that becomes significant near the novel's end.

The novel follows Abelard Lindsay through an eventful life, sometimes lived under other identities, often changing alliances as friends become enemies and (sometimes) friends again. Lindsay begins as a diplomat, having been trained and genetically modified by Shapers, giving him an exceptional talent for manipulating others. The counterpart to (and enemy of) the Shapers are the Mechanists, who rely on mechanical enhancements (rather than genetics) to transform the human body. Having been born to a Mechanist family but serving the Shapers, Abelard is in an ideal position to encourage détente, which would benefit the human race by presenting a united front against competing alien races.

Détente, like most everything in Abelard's life, falls by the wayside as events overtake ideals. It is all Abelard can do to keep up or, failing that, avoid death. He is at times a revolutionary, at times an entrepreneur, at times a leader, at times a criminal, but usually a combination of many different roles. He falls in and out of relationships with women. He experiences ups and downs on his way to his final stage of life. Abelard experiences and sees so many changes that this review would be as long as the book if I tried to mention them.

As I indicated, I love the story for its rich imagination and its insight into how genetic, mechanical, or digital changes in humans might affect both the human race and the political, social, and economic institutions they create. At the same time, the story is so episodic, cramming so much into a mid-length novel, that I felt little emotional connection to Abelard, even when he is forced to do some soul-searching about the kind of human, trans-human, or post-human he wants to be. Schizmatrix is more like a documentary than a novel that touches the inner core. Still, but I would not discourage any sf fan who relishes a challenge from reading the novel.

Schizmatrix Plus includes the short stories that Sterling wrote within the same universe. They are quite strong and, in some ways, compensate for the novel's weaknesses.

RECOMMENDED

The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 27, 2015

"It is harder to think good thoughts in the dark." Sealed inside a tanker with thirteen other Mexicans who are trying to cross the border without documents, Tito (the name by which most people address young Hector) has few reasons to think good thoughts. The truck has a broken axle, the coyotes driving the truck have apparently abandoned them, and the battery on Tito's phone is nearly dead. Soon the people welded inside the tank will be in the same condition as the truck and the battery: broken down and dying. Tito nevertheless narrates his plight (along with a variety of rants about corruption, poverty, crime, and the misery of life for an indio in Oaxaca), recording sound files on his friend's phone that he hopes will reach someone when he presses "send."

Also in the truck, although unconscious, is Tito's friend Cesar. Tito once borrowed a copy of The Savage Detectives from Cesar but they otherwise had little contact before a coincidental sets of circumstances caused Tito to join Cesar on his journey from Oaxaca to the border. Cesar is running to the border for reasons that have to do with corn (more than that I will not reveal).

The meandering stories that Tito narrates (the central story, told to him by the man he calls his grandfather, is a love story that tangentially relates to an ancient Jaguar Man carved from jade) are a mixture of reality and folklore. Tito talks about the power of icons, the power (or indifference) of saints, the history of Mexico, the desperation of Mexican life, the differences between the United States and Mexico, and the fundamental similarities of people everywhere. The story is a reminder of the things that are most important in life, the things we never think about until we are deprived of them.

The Jaguar's Children offers a heady mix of humor and sorrow. Death, Tito tells us, is the national drug of Mexico, "the god everyone worships but no one will name." Tito's ordeal would be a test of faith if he had any, but faith is more the province of his grandmother and his friend Cesar. But even as Tito faces the prospect of a horrifying death by dehydration inside a steel coffin, surrounded by others who share his misery, his story is life-affirming. It is the story of struggle, of the search for a purpose, of how different people find different purposes in different ways. It is moving, haunting, and illuminating.

RECOMMENDED

Memory Man by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 21, 2015

Amos Decker comes home to find that his mother, wife, and son have been murdered. Decker is a cop and the beginning of his story is too familiar to be promising. He also sees numbers and colors in ways that have become too familiar among fictional characters who suffer from brain abnormalities. As if that's not enough, Decker has the memory (and empathy) of a supercomputer.

When writers decide to use a prop to make a character interesting, they usually pick one. Baldacci's decision to use four (numbers, colors, memory, and loss of family to a killer) gives Amos an overdone quality that permeates the novel. Yes, it's fun to give a character some quirky traits, but Decker is quirkiness on steroids. The numbers and colors and DVD-like memory all come across as gimmicks, not as humanizing traits. Primarily because I disliked the gimmicks upon which the central character is founded, I don't regard Memory Man as one of David Baldacci's better efforts. All of the autistic-savant stuff is just too trite. And really, the fact that he's chased by menacing 3s is just silly.

The bad guys in Memory Man might as well be supervillains -- the unpowered kind, like Lex Luthor or the Joker -- given their astonishing ability to foresee Decker's every act and to greet his appearances by leaving threatening scrawls on walls for him to read. Other things I didn't believe: Why is the top cop inviting a reporter to tag along with Decker on a police investigation? Why does the FBI agree to let her fly on its government jet? Why, when time is of the essence, do Decker and the reporter drive from Burlington to Chicago when they could fly there in a couple of hours? I'll go pretty far to suspend disbelief when I read a thriller, but I just couldn't buy much of anything in this one.

The plot of Memory Man is almost as silly as the Memory Man character. Fifteen months after the killings, Decker is a private investigator. The person who killed his family remains at large. After a school shooting, the Burlington Police improbably hire Decker as a consultant (the entire police force plus the FBI not being enough), giving Baldacci a chance to prove that Memory Man is a supercop, sort of a linebacker version of Sherlock Holmes, or at least he would be if he were still a cop. Naturally, although I won't discuss how, the mystery of the school shooting (who did it, why, and how did the shooter escape undetected) quickly ties in to the murders of Decker's wife and children.

I enjoyed following Decker as he investigated the school shooting. Baldacci is a seasoned writer who knows how to move a story at a good pace. Dialog is authentic and the quality of Baldacci's prose is never a problem. It is always easy to read Baldacci to the end, but this is the first Baldacci novel I've read that I would not recommend, even with reservations. The killer's motivation (as least with regard to Decker and particularly Decker's family) struck me as preposterous. The last chapters are predictable. Since I didn't buy either the plot or the reality of the central characters, all that remains is snappy prose, and that doesn't overcome the silliness.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Bodyguard by Leena Lehtolainen

First published in Finland in 2009; published by AmazonCrossing on December 9, 2014

Finnish bodyguard Hilja Ilveskero threatens to resign in protest if her client buys a fur coat made of lynx (an animal with which she had a childhood affinity). The client quite properly responds by firing Hilja. Soon thereafter, the client is killed in Moscow and Hilja, back in Finland, spends the next couple of chapters telling the reader "I couldn't remember what happened that night" and "I wish I could remember what happened that night."

Unfortunately, Hilja can recall her childhood, the uncle who raised her, and their pet lynx. Hilja devotes countless pages to those memories, the lynx in particular. They act as a drag on a plot that would be slow-moving even without the flashbacks. Eventually she tells us about the defining moment in her childhood. It is predictable and trite, as is a plot that revolves around the missing hours in a life during which a murder was committed.

Later Hilja is hired by a politician and begins to unravel the mystery of her former client's death. The first reveal, an information dump from an interrogated character, is more tedious than surprising. The rest of the convoluted novel leads to a final reveal that is both dull and contrived.

Throughout the novel, Hilja tells us what's on the news and the content of her dreams and what she had for breakfast and many other things that are of absolutely no interest. I'm all for setting a scene and creating a realistic background but it's possible to do that in a way that engages the reader. Leena Lehtolainen hasn't learned that trick. Lehtolainen's writing style is serviceable but uninspired. Characters tend to be caricatures while descriptions are too dependent upon clichés. The implications of Finland's dependence on Russian energy is the novel's best theme but that isn't enough to carry a thriller.

Hilja spends a good bit of the book lusting after and fantasizing about and bedding a guy while worrying that he's trying to kill her. I've heard of desperate, but seriously? This leads to cheesy sentences like "Finally he read my mind, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled me to him, smelling like a man should. His lips were hungry, his tongue searching his way into my mouth." I'm still wondering what a man with a searching tongue is supposed to smell like -- Armani Gio or axle grease? By the end, The Bodyguard just smelled cheesy.

NOT RECOMMENDED