Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Published by Minotaur Books on March 10, 2015

This is the second novel I've read that focuses on the horror story of Quebec's Duplessis orphanage, which was turned into an asylum because the church could collect more government funds by pretending that the orphans were mentally ill. Orphans were given experimental drug treatments and were abused in other ways. Building upon that real-life tragedy, Jeanette De Beauvoir concocts a plot involving a CIA-backed program to conduct experiments of a different nature. The nature of the CIA's nefarious dealings are the ordinary stuff of thrillers, plowing ground that is no longer fertile, but other aspects of De Beauvoir's story have greater value.

Martine LeDuc works for Montreal's mayor, running the city's public relations department. Montreal is in need of some good PR, given the four women have been killed in the city, apparently at random. LeDuc is assigned to act as liaison between the mayor and the chief of police, neither of whom like her. A detective, unpopular because he is Anglo rather than Franco, is assigned to babysit LeDuc. Naturally they work together to find the killer despite the absence of the words "criminal investigation" in Martine's job description.

The murder victims were all raped and mutilated, their bodies left left sitting upright on park benches. Their ages, appearances, and occupations are varied. Fans of serial killer novels know that discovering the connection between the victims is the key to catching the killer. That's a reliable crime novel formula but it is not put to good use here. The motivation for the murders is far-fetched and contrived. I didn't buy it.

LeDuc is given a stepmother's hectic home life that helps establish her personality, but some of the domestic scenes are mundane. The Montreal setting is used to nice effect as the reader is taken on a tour of the neighborhoods where the victims lived and the parks where their bodies were discovered. Simple French words like bon and alors constantly crop up in an apparent reminder that people speak French in Montreal, but since the rest of their dialog is in English, the frequent appearances of "first year French" are silly.

Italicized sections of the novel are told in the first person by Gabrielle, who was abandoned in an orphanage after being born to an unmarried woman who experienced a "moral lapse." The nuns who raised her later transferred her to Duplessis. Gabrielle's story is not as emotionally affecting as it was probably meant to be.

LeDuc finds herself threated by the killer toward the novel's end but (1) that section of the novel is too predictable to generate suspense and (2) since the killer should know that LeDuc has blabbed her suspicions about him to pretty much the whole world, killing LeDuc would be an act of supreme idiocy. The lengthy talkfest that follows, as the killer explains himself, is just dull.

I liked De Beauvoir's prose style. There are aspects of the novel that make for enjoyable reading, but the predictable ending, the failure to generate tension, and the far-fetched plot lead to disappointment by the novel's end.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Whale Chaser by Tony Ardizzone

First published in 2010; published by Chicago Review Press on May 1, 2015

Vince Sansone lives in Tofino, a fishing village near Vancouver. It is 1974 and Vince has lived in Canada for seven years, having left behind a less than idyllic life in America. Vince's father was a fish monger and Vince, despite his intense need to rebel against his childhood, is gutting fish for a living. Fortunately, his thoughts are frequently diverted by drugs and sex and his career eventually follows a different path.

Like many guys (especially those who alphabetize their jazz albums), Vince has a knack for picking women who leave him. He is befriended by a Native named Ignatius who has a Catholic education like his own, giving Tony Ardizzone a primary vehicle for discussions of philosophy and human nature. Ignatius and other characters are more widely read than Vince, who spends many of his self-pitying moments drinking beer, smoking weed, and feeling stupid.

In alternating sections of the novel we see Vince's childhood in Chicago, where nuns taught him how to bear the suffering inflicted by his father and the world in general. He tells a typical but occasionally engaging story of life in an ethnic (Italian) neighborhood where people maintain closer ties to the old country than to their current home. He spends his time fretting about girls, wondering whether he should become a butcher, and fretting about the butcher's daughter when he's not fretting about a different girl. He also describes sex in tedious detail (it is quite an accomplishment to make me view descriptions of sex as tedious). Much of the Chicago story (and even the Canada story) is "boy meets girls, boy loses girls, boy wallows in self-pity until he meets more girls." It is well written but unoriginal.

Many of the events that Vince describes are probably of greater interest to Vince than they were to me, although the ill-treatment of Italians in Monterey during World War II (one of many factors that might contribute to Vince's father's anger) is one of the novel's strong points. The Whale Chaser also makes it clear that there are more people in the world than those we encounter in our own tiny existence and that all those people have value equal to our own even if we never think about them.

It takes some time for the story to reach the dramatic moment (Chicago 1967) that explains why Vince moved to Canada. By that time, I had trouble caring. In any event, Vince's coming-of-age moment, like the rest of the Chicago story, is unoriginal. His second coming of age (or coming to maturity) moment (Canada 1980) is hokey.

At some point young Vince discusses Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of stories about characters who (depending on your perspective) have no choice about their fates or make unhappy choices or lack the courage to make choices that might make them happy. That seems to be the point of The Whale Chaser. Vince makes a choice or he responds to events in his life in the only way he can or he simply lacks the courage to face the reality of his life. I liked some of the book, primarily the Canadian setting and the prose, but nothing in the story generated a strong emotional impact. On the whole, I can only give this novel a guarded recommendation, more for its prose than for its intermittently intriguing content.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on May 12, 2015

Walter Mosley has a unique ability to see the uncommon in common people, to perceive the humanity to which inhuman circumstances give birth. His characters are damaged and betrayed. They have been abused and they have been abusive. They often live on the fringes of society, yet they retain their dignity, their wisdom, and their strength. They reinvent themselves every day because that's what life is -- a process of reinvention. Few writers convey that as well as Mosley.

When a beautiful woman walks into Leonid McGill's life (or, at any rate, sits next to him on the train), he knows he is in for trouble. Five minutes later, Marella Herzog owes him $1,500, his fee for protecting her from an attacker who was supposedly sent by her former fiancé. Throughout And Sometimes I Wonder About You, McGill ruminates about the powerful women who dominate his life, including the wife who is receiving convalescent care, the dissatisfied part-time lover, the secretary who is finding ways to recover from a horrific childhood, and now Marella.

Also playing a vital role in the story is McGill's son Twill, who has taken on a private investigation of his own. Of course, his activities cause problems for McGill. And then there's Hiram Stent, a vagrant whose case McGill turns down until, inevitably, his sense of justice compels him to look into Hiram's problem by finding a missing woman. In the time-honored tradition of PI fiction, McGill is soon working for free, because helping those in need is the right thing to do. Before the end of the novel, McGill's sense of justice has made him the target of three groups of people who want to kill him. In other words, a typical day in McGill's life.

The family element -- not just with Twill, but also with McGill's absent father, whose absence ends in this novel -- is just as strong as the larger plot threads. As he so often does with consummate skill, Mosley weaves it all together to create a tight, fast-moving story that works as a thriller, as a family drama, as an unconventional love story, and as a psychological portrait of a man who is struggling to come to terms with his past and to invent a better future.

RECOMMENDED

Barefoot Dogs by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Published by Scribner on March 10, 2015

The linked stories in Barefoot Dogs provide a different perspective on immigration. Many of the characters left Mexico to escape the country's problems, but they are not the impoverished workers sneaking over the border who dominate the news. Rather, the characters were doing well in Mexico -- some family members brought their servants with them when they came to the United States -- and they miss the relatives and friends and culture they left behind.

Having emigrated, the characters are generally not doing well. "Deer" is about two Mexican women who work at a McDonald's in Austin -- or they would be working, but for the bear that wandered in at breakfast time and began eating all the McMuffins. The woman narrating the story fears losing her job (and her ability to send money home to support her children) more than she fears the bear.

Two stories in the collection are excellent. "Origami Prunes" tells of two displaced Mexicans who begin an affair in an Austin laundromat. It is a story about the desire to escape, the pain of escaping, and the impossibility of escaping the past or the forward movement of time. Confrontation (or not) of fear and anxiety, by both children and adults, is the theme of "Okie." Bernardo feels isolated and out-of-place in his new home in California, but leaving Mexico was the only choice his parents could make.

The title story provides the connecting thread. It tells of Mexicans, now living in crowded quarters in Madrid, who moved after body parts of a kidnapping victim kept arriving in the mail. The narrator is challenged by caring for a baby and a vomiting dog in a strange land. Other stories also involve or touch upon the kidnapping, including one in which a woman needs to explain (or avoids explaining) to her son why her father has been absent for weeks. Another, "It Will Be Awesome Before Spring," is sort of a crime story, or a potential crime story, or a fear of crime story, told by a young woman who anticipates a visit to Italy without realizing that Mexico is no longer a place she can live. Much of the story is told with a curious detachment that causes it to lose its punch when it finally works its way around to a dramatic moment.

Some stories experiment with form, but not in a way that makes them inaccessible. One story, told entirely in dialog between a brother and sister staying in a shabby New York apartment, didn't work for me at all. Another story is a large block of text with no paragraphs. One is interrupted by single lines with phrases like WOW and WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME. One that I didn't particularly like is written from the perspective of a ghost. A key sequence in the title story might be a dream, but that isn't clear.

While the stories in Barefoot Dogs are uneven, they join together to form a larger story that exceeds the sum of its parts. The collection is worth reading for that reason, and for the unusual perspective it provides on expatriate Mexican life.

RECOMMENDED

Dry Bones by Craig Johnson

Published by Viking on May 12, 2015

A dispute over ownership rights to the bones of a T-Rex is complicated by the death of the landowner who accepted money from the High Plains Dinosaur Museum for the right to dig them up. The mess gets messier when the FBI intervenes, claiming that the bones are on public land and therefore belong to the United States government. The Cheyenne are also asserting a claim to the dinosaur remains. Walt Longmire would like the whole mess to go away but first he needs to solve the suspicious death of the landowner, which leads to a murder mystery with a half dozen suspects for the reader (and Walt, together with series regulars Lucian and Henry) to ponder.

Longmire is still having visions which, in the hands of most other writers, I would consider a cheesy gimmick, but the visions play only a minor role and they suit the offbeat stories that Craig Johnson tells. Longmire novels are always fun and this one is no exception. Walt's laconic wit and Craig Johnson's breezy style make the novels a joy to read. But, fun as it is, this Longmire novel is more moving than most. There is often family drama in a Longmire novel but Dry Bones introduces a family crisis that is sure to form the central plot in one of the upcoming novels. As always, I look forward to reading it.

RECOMMENDED