Horizon by Keith Stevenson

First published in Australia in 2014; published by Voyager Impulse (HarperCollins) on November 1, 2014

A crew on a deep space mission to a planet called Horizon is awakened early -- except for the dead one and the one who is in a coma. The ship's Artificial Intelligence is offline. The woman in a coma is actually a transhuman who, upon awakening, is aware that a dangerous message, purportedly from launch control, is awaiting delivery to the AI. The political situation on Earth has changed while the crew has slept, leading to a change in the mission -- assuming the crew is willing to follow the new orders.

Some of Horizon is a traditional murder mystery. After another death, the reader is asked to join the captain in guessing who is at fault. Is the transhuman sabotaging the mission? Is the AI at fault, and if so, did the AI (which seems to have some serious mental health issues) become malicious on its own or has someone tampered with its programming? Is one of the other feisty crew members sabotaging the mission or just killing for sport? It is difficult for the captain to know which crew members to trust, but it is even more difficult to understand the true agenda of the people who now run Launch Command.

As I was reading Horizon, I kept thinking "this would make a good movie," probably because the plot is similar to hybrid sf/mystery movies I've seen. The novel's elements are all familiar but they are arranged cleverly. Keith Stevenson's integration of transhumans, posthumans, and aliens -- all of whom might or might not be in conflict with plain old humans -- pushed the right buttons for me. Alliances are constantly shifting as characters reevaluate the agendas and trustworthiness of other individuals. The story is smart, the characters are well-drawn, and the plot is engaging despite its familiar background.

Horizon has no padding or wasted words. The pace is brisk and while the ending seems hurried, it satisfied me. This is a small story that tries to be a big story and doesn't quite reach those heights, but it works well as the story of a small group of people encountering the unknown while dealing with political forces that they know too well. As a debut novel, Horizon is a solid effort.

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1988: I Want to Talk to the World by Han Han

Published in China in 1988; published in translation by AmazonCrossing on January 13, 2015

As Lu Ziye sees it, life is like a TV drama, "hastily made and poorly produced, illogical, moving ahead in dreadful fashion, protracted but impossible to give up." Lu Ziye wants to have roots but he is rooted in quicksand and blown in random directions. As he moves from place to place in a vast country "where constant moves are a necessity," he feels he has "faced extinction again and again with each new and foreign environment." Lu Ziye is endlessly starting over, trying to reinvent his life. At the same time, he is endlessly running away from his life.

On one of his journeys, Lu Ziye takes a room for the night and is joined by Nana, a pregnant sex worker. He's later joined by police officers who break down the door, kick him into oblivion, and transport him to an interrogation room. He is released with a warning but Nana has to bribe the police to avoid a reeducation camp. The bribe leaves her penniless and, for reasons that are not quite clear to either of them, Nana accompanies Lu Ziye as a platonic passenger in the station wagon he has named 1988.

Lu Ziye takes occasional breaks from his narrative to share childhood memories of friends and marbles and bullies and pirate radio stations and a girl in a blue skirt he glimpsed before falling from a flagpole. He also recounts his unhappy career as a journalist in a truth-challenged society. During his road trip with Nana, we hear the story of Nana's life. Neither Lu Ziye nor Nana have been particularly lucky at love.

The journey Lu Ziye takes with Nana has a purpose but the reader only learns of it near the end of the novel. It is at that point that we discover how Lu Ziye came to possess 1988. The story in its entirety is less than compelling but some of its component parts are moving and many are amusing.

Much of the novel is light but there is always a sense of dread lurking in the background. While the narrative hints at the omnipresent fear that comes from living in an authoritarian culture, the text is not overtly political. Given the reality of censorship in China, an understated approach is probably the only one Han Han can take. Still, he manages to convey a sense of pervasive oppression. Lu Ziye is not exactly a rebel but he has a rebellious heart. Perhaps he is following his heart as he wanders; perhaps he lacks the courage to follow it to its true destination. At the same time, he admires the courage displayed by friends who are no longer alive.

As is often the case in road trip novels, Lu Ziye's journey seems to represent his journey through life. The novel suggests that friendships are one secret to enduring that life, but for Lu Ziye, friends are just as transient as the rest of his existence. The ending is surprising, cautiously hopeful but far from optimistic. The novel's subtitle -- "I Want to Talk to the World" -- suggests both a sense of futility and the possibility of making a contribution to the ongoing dialog of life, even if that conversation is not the mark we might intend to leave. Then again, given that Han Han is known for his blogging, perhaps the subtitle is meant as a shout from behind a wall that still muffles much of the sound that reaches the western world.

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The Big Finish by James W. Hall

Published by Minotaur Books on December 2, 2014

As readers learned in Going Dark, Thorn Moss' son Flynn belongs to the Earth Liberation Force. One of ELF's missions takes Flynn and some other activists to a hog farm in Kentucky where they hope to expose animal cruelty. What Flynn and his companions discover leads to their disappearance.

Thorn and his friend Sugarman set out to find Flynn. A woman who has befriended Sugarman comes along for the ride. They are eventually joined by a woman named Madeline Cruz who flashes her FBI credentials and insists on joining the party, much to the dismay of Sugarman's friend.

The novel's bad guys include a brother-sister team who own North Carolina's biggest hog farm but make their real money in an illicit sideline. Even more nefarious is a "Straight Edge" character named X-88 who has the olfactory sense of a bloodhound. That seems silly but James W. Hall surprised me by making it work.

In fact, the entire novel works surprisingly well. Thorn admits that he is not equipped for subtle thinking (he solves problems by "kicking down doors, a monkey wrench in each hand") but he is a solid character with a reasonable amount of depth. The plot unfolds in ways that are never obvious and, if the twists are often unlikely, Hall managed to convince me of their plausibility. Chase scenes, escape scenes, and fight scenes all seem too easy for Thorn, but on the whole, the novel is no more farfetched than the typical modern thriller.

The Big Finish conveys an intelligent message about ill-considered laws that treat people as "terrorists" who commit property crimes but it avoids taking political positions. The pace is steady. The ending, building on the estrangement between father and son, is powerful and touching. In short, The Big Finish is a solid thriller -- unspectacular but significantly better than average.

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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.

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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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