The Untold by Courtney Collins

First published in Australia in 2012; published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam on May 29, 2014

A mother named Jessie slices the throat of her prematurely born baby in what she regards as an act of mercy. From his grave, the baby narrates The Untold. The baby is surprisingly aware of events that occur before and after his death. He knows, for instance, that his mother bludgeoned his father to death on the eve of his birth, and that Fitz, his father, deserved it. He knows that his mother met Fitz after being released from a Sydney prison into Fitz' custody. He knows why his mother was sent to prison and he knows the unpleasant story of her childhood and of her difficult married life.

Jessie is the most important of three key characters. The second is a horse-and-cattle thief named Jack Brown, an Aborigine who, like Jessie, must serve Fitz to avoid imprisonment. After Jessie flees from the scene of her crime, Brown helps Andrew Barlow, a police sergeant who has taken an isolated rural posting to overcome his drug addiction, search for her. The story occasionally flashes back to 1903 and later years during Jessie's childhood (still narrated by her yet-to-be-conceived baby). The third key character and several others appear along the way, including circus performers and a gang of boys who rustle cattle. Jessie's past connects to her present in surprising ways.

The intersecting lives of Jessie and Jack set the stage for much of the novel's drama. Death is a pervasive theme, as is hope. The people who live in the valley in which The Untold is set live hard, violent lives. Life is even harder for women. They mitigate their suffering by helping each other. Jessie's life is extraordinarily hard but her spirit endures, buoyed by the fleeting connections she makes with the people she meets as she struggles to retain her freedom. "She imagines herself to be one of those creatures whose nature is not to run from death, but to run alongside it."

Sympathetic characters and a strong story contribute to an engrossing reading experience despite the novel's slow start. Courtney Collins' evocative prose captures the rugged landscape and the desolate hearts of the land's inhabitants. Each key character changes as a result of their coming together, not always for the better but in ways that seem inevitable. The ending satisfies. The only false note is the dead baby's narration. As literary devices go, this one was a poor and puzzling choice. Fortunately the baby's intrusive commentary does not appear often, making the flaw easy to overlook.

RECOMMENDED

The Travel Writer by Jeff Soloway

Published digitallly by Random House/Alibi on June 3, 2014

Travel editor Hilary Pearson has gone missing during a trip to Bolivia and travel writers are blaming the resort that hosted her trip (which is like blaming Donald Trump if a guest at Trump Towers wanders off and never returns). Hotel publicist Pilar Rojas wants her former lover, travel writer Jacob Smalls, to come to Bolivia to search for Pearson. Smalls, who happily writes puff pieces about hotels and resorts in exchange for a few free nights of lodging and a complimentary bottle of wine, accepts the challenge.

Accompanied (for comic relief, apparently) by a guy named Kenny who had a strong crush on Hillary, Smalls anticipates spending an expense-paid week at a top resort with sexy Pilar. Instead he finds himself accosted by a variety of tough guys with divergent political leanings who question his agenda. Kenny's approach is to blurt out questions about Hillary at random, causing more trouble for Smalls, who becomes Kenny's protector.

Smalls' ability to get comped on hotel rooms and (less often) air fare is the most interesting part of The Travel Writer. Almost as interesting is the novel's exploration of politics and poverty in Bolivia. Whether the novel's political viewpoint (which seems rather one-sided) is accurate I can't say, but the political motivation for some of the novel's occurrences adds flavor to the story. I also liked the travel writing as Jeff Soloway describes the various hotels, markets, and sights that Smalls visits in La Paz before making his way to the mountain resort. Less interesting is a plodding set-up, including a long-winded account of Smalls' relationship with Pilar. Smalls' romantic pursuit of Pilar later in the novel is a banal addition to the story, although I give Soloway credit for not allowing it to follow a predictable path.

The Travel Writer is meant to be a suspense novel but the suspense is lacking. I enjoyed reading some of it because there is a good measure of cleverness and wit in Smalls' first-person narration of the tale. The mystery of Hillary's disappearance turns out to be something less than a nail-biter but it is at least plausible. A bit of action at the end enlivens a story that is often more dull than a crime novel should be. On the whole, I'm not sure I liked this enough to read the next novel in the series, whenever that might appear.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Papers in the Wind by Eduardo Sacheri

Published in Argentina in 2011; published in translation by Other Press on May 20, 2014

As Papers in the Wind opens, Mono Raguzzi has just been buried in a cemetery in Castelar, a city in Buenos Aires Province. His death is being mourned by his brother Fernando and his friends Mauricio and Ruso. Mono had a short-lived career in professional soccer before joining a Swiss technology firm. After leaving that job to spend more time his daughter, he used his severance pay to buy the transfer rights to a soccer player, Mario Pittilanga. Now his brother and friends are wondering what to do with Pittiglana, who (to put it mildly) has not lived up to his potential.

Papers in the Wind slides around in time. Some chapters show us Mono before his death, struggling to find himself after his soccer career ended, dealing with the shaky relationship with his girlfriend Lourdes that produced Guadalupe, his daughter, or coming to terms with the end of his life and of his lifelong friendships. Other chapters take place in the present as Mono's friends and brother try to work out a scheme to save Mono's investment in Pittiglana while convincing Lourdes to give them time with Guadalupe.

The four key characters have well-defined, consistent personalities. Facing death, Mono focuses on what has always been important in life -- friends, family, and soccer. Mauricio is a driven, self-centered lawyer who cheats on his wife and does his best to avoid the obligations of friendship. Ruso's marital strife is caused by his failure at every business he starts, but he is affable and a master at avoiding conflict. Fernando, a teacher, is so honorable that he drives his friends crazy. Whether the friendships will survive Mono's death is a question that becomes more urgent as divided loyalties begin to divide the friends. Each character will learn something about himself and about the nature of friendship before the novel concludes.

The politics of soccer in South America (and worldwide) are fascinating, even to a reader (like me) who doesn't give two hoots about the game itself. Oddly enough, while I'm not a soccer fan, I tend to enjoy soccer novels, in part because the writers usually convey their passion for the game, in part because they are often populated by passionate characters. As Mono approaches death, for instance, the one thing he wants to leave his daughter is his love for the local soccer team. That's a true fan. He also draws parallels between his life and the performance of that team -- a team of championship caliber before it began a steady decline. Like dying, supporting a losing team (and hoping for unlikely victories) gives you a better sense of what's important in life. It isn't winning championships. It's love of the game that counts -- and "the game" is everything in your life that matters to you.

With its discussions of death and theology, friendship and betrayal, love and romance, there is chewy meat on the bones of a novel that is also light-hearted and funny. The plot follows a curvy path that leaves the reader wondering whether the journey will terminate at a pleasant destination. I won't comment on that, but I will say that Papers in the Wind is a sad, funny, and meaningful book that I enjoyed from beginning to end.

RECOMMENDED

The Plover by Brian Doyle

Published by Thomas Dunne Books April 8, 2014

The Plover is a converted trawler skippered by Declan O'Donnell, who departs from Oregon with ample supplies of rice and limes, spare parts and the speeches of Edmund Burke. "Destination? Unknown. Agenda? Don't sink." Declan wants to pursue an "aimless amble on the glee of the sea" but events keep interfering with his lack of ambition. Perhaps Declan will find a reason to chart a course after all.

The Plover is a playful voyage through the seas of language. Brian Doyle's inventive prose drifts and floats like Declan's boat, riding the peaks of swells, surging ahead and then meandering as if driven by fickle winds and hidden currents. Owing to Declan's quirky commentary, the story is very funny, but the novel is also a celebration of everything that is natural and glorious: birds, stars, fish, air, islands, sounds, almonds, leaves, storms, scents, dogs, the vast Pacific ... and even people, who always have the potential to be glorious when they stop thinking of themselves "as kings and conquerors" and instead think of themselves as a single link in a vast network of people.

As for the plot ... well, there is one, but, like Doyle's prose, it's meandering and full of detours. Declan picks up a crew of sorts -- an old friend wrestling with his own demons, the friend's disabled daughter, other strays -- and every now and then a mysterious Russian ship makes an appearance, skippered by a man named Enrique who kidnaps his crew members from other ships. In addition to occasional encounters with Enrique, the story follows a couple of other lives that intersect in ways that show us that, for all its size, this is indeed a small world, at least for those who choose to explore it. There are occasional mystical elements to the story that emphasize one of the novel's themes -- there is much in the world that we do not understand and it is arrogant to pretend that we have more knowledge than ignorance.

Road novels and their nautical equivalents are usually journeys of self-discovery. The Plover is that, but it is also a journey of other-discovery, as Declan learns that the isolation he craves might not be what he needs. Approaching thirty, Declan is trying to abandon control of his life, to let the sea chart his destiny. Yet as he tries to escape responsibility, he repeatedly finds himself forced into responsible positions. Despite his desire for isolation, he is reminded of the value of others, even those who seem at first blush to have little value, and so comes to recognize his own value. He rescues people and, in the process, is rescued. The Plover is light-hearted but the story, like the Pacific, has remarkable depth.

RECOMMENDED

Don't Talk to Strangers by Amanda Kyle Williams

Published by Bantam on July 1, 2014

A sheriff in rural Georgia hires Keye Street to consult regarding two abductions and murders of 13-year-old girls that occurred about ten years apart. Of course, the detectives and deputies who work for the sheriff resent her presence. Sadly, that's not the only plot thread in this novel that has been done before.

A surprising amount of the story is unoriginal. There is too little to distinguish this novel from the growing stacks of novels about detectives who search for serial killers. Amanda Kyle Williams sets up the usual array of innocent suspects in an effort to keep the reader from guessing the killer's identity. The killer is nevertheless all too easy to identify despite a final desperate attempt at misdirection. While the contrived ending is meant to shock the reader, I suspect most seasoned readers will roll their eyes and say "whatever."

As do many novels that feature profilers, Williams substitutes simplistic stereotypes of sex offenders for authentic character portrayals. The pop psychology analysis of serial killers that Keye provides -- emphasized here considerably more than in the first two novels -- is the familiar nonsense of fictional profilers. Her serial killer (like nearly every other fictional serial killer) can't resist taunting Keye by sending her messages. Another girl is abducted while Keye is on the case and it's a race against time as Keye tries to find the girl before she's killed. This has all been done so many times that, in the absence of a truly unexpected development, it became tiresome to read. The plot struck me as the work of a writer going through the motions who was unable to come up with anything new to write about.

Williams developed Keye Street as an engaging character in The Stranger You Seek. I liked the second novel in the series a bit less, but still enjoyed Keye's ongoing character development. In Don't Talk to Strangers, Williams abandons the complex character she created. The new Keye Street has become unbearably judgmental and self-righteous -- only she can solve the crime because only she really really really cares about the victims, and nobody else is working hard enough because they just don't care as much as she does. This is an unfortunate trend in modern police/detective novels and I'm sorry to see Williams succumb to it. I liked Keye better when she was too conscious of her own faults to be self-righteous. Of course, she's not quite so hard on the dreamy sheriff who wants to take her to bed. The "will she or won't she" story angle, like the rest of the plot, is predictable and unimaginative.

The supporting characters who helped make the first two books enjoyable are all but abandoned in this one. It seems as if Williams is also abandoning the sympathetic Keye Street she created in the first book in order to reposition Keye as yet another anger-consumed detective with profiling skills that border on the supernatural. Novels based on that character sketch are apparently successful so maybe Williams made the change to boost sales. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Williams talks about all the people who advised her so that she could finally "get it right." It that explains the decline of this series, Williams should trust her own instincts and stop listening to advisors who want her to write formula fiction. They are guiding a once-promising writer into a wasteland of mediocrity.

NOT RECOMMENDED