The Hangman's Song by James Oswald

Published by Mariner Books on January 6, 2015

DI Tony McLean has been assigned to the Sex Crimes Unit by the new boss he loathes, but he can't stay away from his old job at Homicide. The two jobs intersect when, after Tony stumbles upon a group of prostitutes who were being trafficked out of Scotland (a reverse of the usual route), the man one of the women identified as her pimp is found dead in an alley. McLean is unhappy with the way the Sex Crimes Unit responds to pimps and prostitutes. As usual, McLean's bosses are unhappy that he won't shut up and go along with the program.

Also to the displeasure of his superiors, McLean investigates two suicides by hanging that appear to be coincidentally similar -- too coincidental, his instincts tell him. McLean's boss doesn't want to add two more corpses to the homicide unit's list of unsolved crimes and is infuriated by McLean's refusal to report the deaths as suicides, even after more hangings are discovered.

McLean's life is complicated by his former lover Emma Baird, who was in a coma at the end of The Book of Souls. Emma is awake but far from recovered, prompting McLean to hire a caretaker and install them both in his house. Emma remembers nothing of her life after her teenage years. One theory that accounts for Emma's memory loss has to do with her soul, a part of which may have been taken from her. That's a bit too supernatural for the rational McLean, who finds it difficult to accept the information he is given by a transvestite medium, despite their friendship.

The supernatural taint to the Emma Baird plot thread didn't sit well with me. It seems out of place and unnecessary in what is essentially a police procedural. The "suicide murders" thread is better but the culprit is surprisingly obvious and no satisfying explanation of the culprit's method or motive is ever provided. The remaining thread, involving the prostitutes and a crooked cop, is the strongest. All three threads weave together in a way that is improbable, but that has become the convention in modern thrillers. As always, I enjoyed the quality of James Oswald's writing and the depth of his characters. The story Oswald tells, however, is weaker than earlier installments in the series.

RECOMMENDED

Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess

Published by Doubleday on January 6, 2015

Uncle Janice has been favorably compared to Clockers, at least by blurb writers. While Clockers is a better novel, I understand the comparison. The subject matter is similar, although Uncle Janice eventually travels in a different direction. More importantly, both books are overflowing with attitude. The dialog is often hilarious but it always rings true. The characters are multifaceted (although, unlike Clockers, the focus in Uncle Janice is almost exclusively on the cops rather than the drug dealers). The prose is vigorous and smart.

Undercover narcs in NYPD call themselves uncles. Janice Itwaru has been an uncle for 17 months but the drug buys she has been able to make are on a "downward slope," a trend that does not endear her to a supervisor who is all about numbers. Janice attributes her decline in productivity to the arrests that are made immediately after she makes a buy, exposing her undercover identity to the seller and eventually to the neighborhood. She is a month away from promotion to detective unless her declining statistics are used as an excuse to send her back where she started, wearing a uniform on patrol. Arrest quotas are illegal but Janice clearly needs to meet her quota. To do that, she may need to poach buys that should be made by other uncles. She may also need to charm young men into committing crimes that they never would never have committed without her persuasion. In that sense, Uncle Janice is a more realistic and insightful look at undercover drug cops than the heroic images that are served up on television.

Readers who do not like a book unless they like the protagonist may find little value here. Janice sees her undercover work as a stepping stone to a higher rank and a better life. She is not particularly admirable but neither is her job, which is based on using deceit to make pointless arrests. She behaves badly and protects her career by covering up her misconduct. I think that makes her realistic but others might find it difficult to warm up to her character. On the other hand, the time Janice spends dealing with her mother's dementia is a source of sympathy.

While Janice is far from perfect, she recognizes her failings. The novel gets its weight from a moral dilemma Janice faces when her failings force her to decide whether she will use the same tactics against dishonest cops that she employs to harass low-level drug dealers. Her resolution of that dilemma is clever if abrupt.

I admired the Matt Burgess' writing style here as much as I did in Dogfight, A Love Story, another novel that reminded me of Clockers. Even if Uncle Janice doesn't quite reach the admirable heights of Clockers (or, for that matter, Dogfight), I do not hesitate to recommend it to fans of crime fiction.

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Undercity by Catherine Asaro

Published by Baen on December 2, 2014

Six thousand years ago, aliens kidnapped some humans, plunked them down on a planet called Raylicon, and left them to fend for themselves. We learn about Raylicon history in the kind of information dump you would expect to see scrolling across the screen at the beginning of a Star Wars movie. I assume much of this is developed in the novels that form The Saga of the Skolian Empire, none of which I have read. Fans of this universe might like Undercity more than I did.

Book I of Undercity sets an ordinary PI action story in a matriarchal society. Bhaajan, formerly a major in the Pharaoh's Army of the Skolian Imperialate and now a PI, returns to her homeworld of Raylicon where she has been hired by the House of Majda to find a missing prince. He is presumed to have run away but has no experience living outside the palace and, per tradition, has rarely been seen by a woman outside the House of Majda.

"Bhaaj" is picked for the job because of her training, discretion, and augmented strength and speed, but also because she grew up in the undercity below the City of Cries. The plot involves murder and betrayal and shootouts with the addition of flirtation and romantic undertones and swoony reactions to dreamy men that do not quite fit within the tone of the story Catherine Asaro is trying tell. The "if you love him, set him free" theme is also a little cheesy.

The end of Book I (originally written as a stand-alone) segues into Book II. Bhaaj stays on Raylicon not to advance her sexual opportunities with dreamy men but because she is hired to help the military stop smugglers who are stealing Skolian technology and selling it to slave traders. Bhaaj is charged with tracking down the traitors by using her undercity contacts. Telepaths make an appearance (they access a half-explained version of hyperspace called "the Kyle, a universe where physics as we knew it had no meaning") setting up a plot thread that develops more fully in Book III. Bhaaj no longer has the opportunity to get swoony with the prince but she does get it on with a rogue from the undercity who she knew in the old days.

The plot requires Bhaaj to assemble a little army of undercity children and to give them a silly name (the Dust Knights of Cries). Much of what happens after that is predictable but, with the addition of a stirring soundtrack, it might make a successful movie.

Asaro explains that the undercity is under the city and that it exists on different levels, but doesn't paint a detailed picture of it. That's disappointing. The politics of the world could have been brought into sharper focus. Character development, particularly of secondary characters, could have been stronger. The undercity dialect could have been more imaginative; to my ear, the undercity inhabitants sound like Canadians, yah.

Bhaaj gives the Dust Knights a moral code worthy of the Boy Scouts. That might make Undercity a good choice for juveniles. It also has a strong message about taking pride in who you are even if you grew up filthy. Undercity lacks the depth of strong adult sf but some of the story is entertaining. I mightrecommend it for younger readers and, as I said, fans of the Skolian Empire series might appreciate this new addition. I did not find sufficient merit to recommend it to other sf fans.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Human Body by Paolo Giordano

Published in Italy in 2012; published in translation by Pamela Dorman Books on October 2, 2014. As you can see in the comment section of this post, the book was translated by Anne Milano Appel.

The Human Body follows several Italian soldiers, beginning on the day before they leave on a mission to Afghanistan and ending after they return home. The Italians are charged with maintaining a "security bubble" after American soldiers have cleansed the area of people they identify as insurgents. "Security" includes such tasks as protecting the military's washing machines from sandstorms. We know from the prolog that Lt. Alessandro Egitto (the only doctor at the Italians' Forward Operating Base) will receive a four month suspension for an "incident" that occurs during the mission. We do not learn the nature of the accusation, however, until the final chapter.

The reader spends most of the novel's first half becoming acquainted with the characters, including Egitto, who is dealing (not particularly well) with a dying father and an indifferent sister back home. Only a couple of the Italians in uniform are female. One of those is an intelligence officer who has a history with Egitto. Again, we do not understand her full importance to the story until the novel is nearly finished.

War provides the background, leading to a pivotal moment of lethal violence in an eventful second half, but most of the drama in the first half comes from internal battles. A male stripper/prostitute who left behind an unplanned pregnancy wrestles with the contents of an email that will say yes or no to an abortion. A virgin wants to stay alive so his mother (the only woman in his life) will not feel the pain of his loss. A soldier worries that his internet chatmate might be a guy pretending to be a female. Some characters worry about their inhumane treatment of innocent Afghan families while others loath every Afghan as if they were all Taliban.

In the end, the novel is about the impact of the war on the soldiers. The men cope (or fail to cope) with fear, with guilt, with anger, with loneliness, with worry that they will be just as lonely when they make it home. Egitto describes himself as turning into "something abstract," something that is no longer a human being. Another soldier, facing death, regrets all the squabbles he had with a woman when (he realizes) he should simply have been satisfied to receive her love and understanding. Another is haunted by a small act of selfishness that leads to a tragic consequence. A colonel reflects upon his inability to remember the faces of the men who die under his command. One of the men, after returning home, is assured that he will soon become "the man he was before," but he knows that is neither possible nor desirable.

War changes people but, as key characters realize, so does the act of living. We cannot control all the events that change us, the novel suggests, but how we respond to those events is what matters. Paolo Giordano's keen illustration of that lesson earns The Human Body my strong recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

Published by Simon & Schuster on December 30, 2014

Considering that I laughed all the way through The Rosie Project, it didn't surprise me that I started laughing on the first page of The Rosie Effect. Don Tillman, the narrator of the Rosie novels, is now a familiar character. In this case, familiarity breeds glee. This novel might not be quite as funny as the first, if only because the character of Don is less startling in this second encounter, but I still enjoyed it.

The Rosie Effect begins after Don and Rosie have been married for ten months. They are living in New York. Don is teaching at Columbia and Rosie is pursuing her doctorate. Don has managed to make new friends (he now has six), has abandoned the Standardized Meal System, and has agreed that sex should not occur on a fixed schedule. His otherwise orderly life is nevertheless unsettled by an unscheduled pregnancy that makes Rosie's emotions even more impossible for Don to predict.

The pregnancy also raises yet another problem that Don finds perplexing: Is Don fit to reproduce? Opinions are mixed. To address the issue, Don embarks on The Baby Project (i.e., he prepares for "baby production and maintenance"). His efforts are hampered by an interfering social worker who is offended by Don's lack of social skills. His life is further complicated by Gene, one of his six friends, a philandering psychology professor who comes to live with Don after his wife boots him out of the house.

As readers of The Rosie Project know, Don possesses the intellectual rigor of a dedicated scientist but has a shortage of empathy. Rosie has plenty of intellect but usually balances her left brain with her right. In pregnancy, however, Rosie is all about emotion despite her unwillingness to concede that the pregnancy might challenge her. Don's desire to understand Rosie's behavior in terms of its evolutionary origins and to offer "helpful" solutions is, like the rest of the novel, hilarious -- to the reader, but not to Rosie.

Much of Don's thinking makes perfect sense (to me, at least). For instance, having told Rosie that he loves her, why should he ever need to tell her again? After all, love is a "continuous state" and only a change in that state would produce relevant information that needs to be conveyed. The Rosie Effect has some insightful things to say about relationships (and some good advice for men), particularly relationships that might lead to reproduction.

While the novel makes a number of serious points about relationships and the value of truth versus deception, its most important lesson concerns the need to be true to oneself -- even if you are socially maladapted. I value The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Project for the lighthearted approach they use to make serious points, but I value them more for the consistent laughter they provoke.

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