The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid

First published in the UK by Little, Brown in 2014; published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 2, 2014

I tend to like Val McDermid's plots while disliking her characters. That pattern held true with The Skeleton Road, which is either a stand-alone novel or (more likely) the first in a series.

As has become common in a certain kind of crime novel, DCI Karen Pirie is quick to tell everyone that she cares about crime victims and their grieving families more than anyone else in the police, or possibly the world. Pirie is a self-righteous, judgmental, self-important bully, which makes her a realistic police detective but an annoying character. Pirie is a clone of Paula McIntyre from McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, another character I find it difficult to stomach. Fortunately, while Pirie's personality never improves, it becomes more tolerable late in the novel as she encounters the kind of misfortune that builds sympathy for even an unsympathetic character.

McDermid follows the fashion trend of adding a forensic anthropologist to the story. The third woman who takes a leading role is Oxford Professor Maggie Blake, who is haunted by memories of the Balkans and is pining for Mitja Petrovic, a Croatian who disappeared from her life eight years earlier. The fourth central female character is a human rights lawyer who is Blake's best friend. In contrast to the brilliant women who carry the story, most male characters are lazy dullards, officious a-holes, or murderers.

While I wasn't fond of the characters, I enjoyed the two intersecting plotlines. The first requires Pirie to solve the mystery of a skeleton with a bullet hole in its skull, found on the roof of an abandoned building. The second involves Balkan war criminals who are being assassinated before they can be hauled into international court, leading some to suspect that there is a leak in the office that investigates and prosecutes the crimes. They also suspect that Petrovic might be the assassin. Two bumbling and bickering Foreign Office lawyers are assigned to track down the leak.

Early chapters generally alternate the development of the separate plotlines, with interludes narrated by Blake as she recalls the romance with Petrovic that began while she was teaching feminist geopolitics in Croatia. The romance (which leaves Blake "weak in the knees") is too predictable and cheesy to be interesting. On the other hand, various scenes that take place in the Balkans give McDermid the opportunity to showcase the power with which she is capable of writing.

Substantial parts of The Skeleton Road are slow moving. That doesn't bother me when a book's setting, characters, or prose capture my attention, but some stretches of the novel struck me as being dull and unnecessary. Had this been a tighter novel, I would have been a happier reader.

Despite its flaws, The Skeleton Road's plot threads eventually cohere into a strong, engaging story. Some aspects -- particularly the willingness of Police Scotland to send Pirie to Croatia in pursuit of a cold case that has generated no particular suspect -- struck me as wildly implausible, but that's common in modern thrillers. The resolution to the novel's key mystery is telegraphed early and I didn't quite believe the killer's motivation for the killings (much less the killer's ability to commit them, a detail that McDermid ignores). Still, I got caught up in the story during the final chapters and that, together with McDermid's fluid prose, is enough to earn my recommendation.

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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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