Suspicion by Joseph Finder

Published by Dutton on May 27, 2014

Dan Goodman is a blocked writer who long ago spent the advance on a new book that has just been cancelled. A step away from financial ruin, Goodman can't pay his daughter's private school tuition, much less the cost of the class trip to Italy. His divorced wife (Abby's mother) died from cancer, Abby's step-father has no interest in her, and Goodman feels too guilty to deny Abby the only thing in months that has made her smile. When Tom Galvin, the wealthy father of Abby's new friend, offers to front the cost of the trip, Goodman grudgingly accepts. Later, he accepts a loan from Galvin to keep Abby in school. Soon after that, Goodman is told that he is a suspect in a federal drug investigation. He has accepted money from Galvin who (Goodman is told) is suspected by the DEA of managing money for a Mexican drug cartel. Goodman protests his innocence, but his pleas are meet with threats to lock him up for 30 years if he does not cooperate by getting the goods on Galvin.

A number of plot twists ensue after the premise is established. The twists are not entirely unexpected, which is a bit disappointing, but they are well executed. Unlike so many modern thriller writers, Joseph Finder tells a plausible story. Galvin and Goodman are both likable characters. Finder manages to make the reader root for both of them, even though they are often at odds and despite Goodman's less than admirable employment. If you're looking or villains to dislike, Finder provides plenty of ruthless characters to fill that role. One of them (the "angel of death") is a stereotype of sinister villains, although Finder does make an effort to make him an interesting killer.

Suspicion incorporates the usual tricks of suspense creation. Spying on Galvin, Goodman nearly gets caught, each time creating a new reason for Galvin to suspect him. The tricks are too predictable but, again, they are capably executed. Finder writes in a "reader friendly" style, using short chapters and maintaining a brisk pace. The resolution is a little too tidy but it is nonetheless satisfying. Finder knows his craft, and while Suspicion is simpler and less surprising than the thrillers upon which his reputation is based, it is enjoyable in many ways.

RECOMMENDED

The Poets' Wives by David Park

Published by Bloomsbury USA on April 1, 2014

The Poets' Wives examines the lives of three women whose husbands have died. The husbands were poets, two of them real. Had the novel offered more meaningful insight into the literary husbands, or had it revealed something more meaningful about the wives, I would have been more taken with it. If there is an organizing theme here, it is that living with a poet guarantees an oppressive existence.

The first poet is William Blake. His wife is Kate, who begins the novel with a visit from her dead husband. Sometimes a ghost works well as a literary device but here it feels contrived. The visit prompts Kate to recall the events of her life. She spends much of that life resting in bed as she responds to domestic and external disasters with bouts of ill health. After Kate suffers a miscarriage, William takes on a domestic helper of ill-repute named Lizzie who inspires Kate's jealousy. William's poem about the pointless nature of Kate's jealousy does nothing to ward off her despair, but the context that the story provides to Blake's poem is a highlight of the novel; I wish there had been more of that. When William is accused of seditious utterings and placed on trial, Kate goes back to bed. Perhaps William would have been better suited for harlot Lizzie, who shocks Kate by advising her to perform the services depicted in the engravings that William has carefully hidden in his desk. That scene is another of the novel's highlights but it leads only to Kate's declaration that there are "two creatures living inside" her husband's brain, representatives of both heaven and hell. Chatting with his ghost gives her a clue about the direction in which his postmortem travel took him.

Quite suddenly, given the novel's languorous pace, William is old and then a ghost. The novel then moves to 1939 and to the difficult life of the wife of dissident Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who keeps her imprisoned husband's poems alive in her memory (the best touch in this section of the novel). The story backs up to 1935 as we see Mandelstam and his wife at the end of his exile (before he again offended Stalin), but we learn surprisingly little about Mandelstam's poetry, apart from its anti-Stalinist slant. We then flash to 1947, many years after Mandelstam's death in a prison camp, only to track Nadezhda Mandelstam's memories of Osip's arrest in 1938. The story resumes in 1952 as Nadezhda contemplates "the true nature of love" and recalls (with some resentment) the love poems that Osip wrote to his mistress. Then we're back in 1934, then 1950, then 1939, then 1956. Sometimes the "jump forward, flash back" structure to a novel works well but here I'm not sure what purpose it was meant to serve. This is the lengthiest section of the novel and, I thought, the least interesting.

The final section belongs to Lydia in Belfast, the wife of an imaginary poet named Don who has just died of a heart attack. Lydia has lived a financially insecure life because poetry doesn't sell and Don, while a notable poet, was overshadowed by his betters. Lydia spends the day after his funeral cataloging Don's failings as a husband, father, and poet. Eventually her daughters join her in that task. Don has left behind an unfinished book of poems from which occasional lines are quoted, but not enough for the reader to evaluate Don's style or ability to construct a complete poem. This seems like cheating to me, simply because it is easier to write fragments of poetry than it is to write poetry. Apart from the fact that Lydia stayed with her philandering husband out of respect for his poetry, we learn very little of interest about Lydia.

David Park's prose is lush but it is also dense. Poets express ideas with an economy of language; Park bombards the reader with words, which seems like the wrong way to write about poets. Park writes beautifully crafted sentences but a third of them could have been omitted without harming the novel. All three sections contain lengthy descriptions of brooding that struck me as tedious. Park made me understand the poets' wives, and that's too his credit, but he didn't make me empathize with their self-absorbed frustration.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Bred in the Bone by Christopher Brookmyre

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Atlantic Monthly Press on May 6, 2014

When one of Glasgow's most notorious crime figures is gunned down in a car wash, DS Catherine McLeod is anxious to pin the crime on Glen Fallon, toward whom the evidence convincingly points. As readers of the series know, Catherine hates Fallon. Series readers also know that Fallon, apparently seeking absolution for killing Jasmine Sharp's father, has devoted his recent life to looking after Jasmine, who is now a private investigator in Glasgow and no great fan of Catherine.

The first quarter of Bred in the Bone sets up the novel's premise and reminds readers of (or acquaints new readers with) the complicated relationships among the characters. Much of the next quarter develops Fallon's backstory. Fallon is a killer, a loner, and a survivor, the abused son of a crooked cop, but there is a fundamental decency to him that makes him a compelling character (and easier to stomach than self-righteous Catherine). The novel works its way through the various grudges that people hold against Fallon and that Fallon might have reason to hold against others. It eventually develops Fallon's relationship with the gangster who was murdered in the carwash. At the same time, Jasmine delves more deeply into her own family history, much of which was hidden from her while her mother was alive.

The story eventually turns back to the parallel investigations that Jasmine and Catherine have undertaken into the carwash murder. The plot is complex -- you might need to take notes to keep track of the relationships between the various characters -- but it is entirely believable and all the threads come together without a missed stitch. The animosity between Catherine and Jasmine adds an additional undercurrent of drama to the story, as does Catherine's frustration that her superiors (as was true in earlier novels) are more interested in making deals with killers than arresting them. Catherine and Jasmine must both deal with uncomfortable truths about their fathers that add another layer of depth to the story. Toward the end of the novel, Catherine flashes back to a time when she behaved in a surprising, life-changing, and much more interesting way than she has at any other point in the series. The key scene is just a bit over the top but kudos to Christopher Brookmyre for keeping Catherine's character fresh.

In fact, all the characters are given a makeover in Bred in the Bone. The primary characters undergo dramatic changes during the course of the novel, as does the reader's understanding of the characters. The plot has plenty of twists but the story's strength lies in the evolution of its characters. The ending brings to a close a story arc that began in the first novel while charting a new direction for future books.

Brookmyre laces the story with welcome touches of humor but he also introduces relationship drama among secondary characters that lengthens the novel without adding much to it. Some parts of the story are told out of sequence, causing unnecessary confusion to no obvious purpose. Those are quibbles about a book that consistently surprised me, absorbed me, moved me, and made me think. It is the best entry to date in this strong series.

RECOMMENDED

The Boost by Stephen Baker

Published by Tor Books on May 20, 2014

If you have a processor in your head, you don't need a watch or a cellphone or a DVD player or a GPS device. Of course, you don't need a computer because you are hardwired to one, and you don't need all the complications of real sex because virtual sex is almost as good. You can eat vile-tasting vegetable cubes and fool your brain into believing you are having a delicious meal. If you do not have a processor giving you all these benefits, you are "in the wild."

In the future envisioned in The Boost, annual processor updates come from China which, having established itself as the world leader in uniformity of thought, has become the world leader in the technology that integrates computer chips and brains. The Chinese chips permit the government to download the user's memory from every chip, but privacy laws require those gates to be closed on the chips sold in the United States. Of course, you know where this is going, as does the reader after a few early chapters. You also know that allowing the government to control the content of the update isn't a good thing, at least if you prefer freedom of information to censorship and propaganda. There is, however, another nefarious scheme embedded in the chip update that is less obvious and even more intriguing than the chip's surveillance capability.

Ralf Alvare, a character in The Boost who was involved in the processors' annual update, is in the wild for the first time since his first birthday. Ralf's processor was removed after he discovered something he wasn't supposed to know. Ralf makes his way to Juarez (where the wild people go) along with his brother, who isn't wild but would like to be. Their parents, revolutionaries in their own ways, also play significant roles the story. You can pretty much guess the rest of the story.

The day will probably come when everyone has a boost, or something like it. I'd love to have one. But The Boost illustrates a plausible downside to welding dry technology into a wet brain. The cautionary aspect of the novel is more interesting than the lifeless plot, which too often features characters sitting around and talking to each other. The Boost is more a novel of interesting ideas than it is an interesting novel. Some parts of the novel suffer from an excess of expository writing and other parts seem to drift aimlessly. A number of aspects of living with the boost go unexplained, which is surprising given all the expository content.

More disturbing is the novel's absence of dramatic tension. Attempts at humor work reasonably well, but on the whole, the tone is incongruously light given the dark subject matter. Imagine the result if Orwell had added jokes and funny characters to Nineteen Eighty-Four so it would appeal to readers who are turned off by gloomy stories. There's nothing wrong with humor but I got the sense that Stephen Baker couldn't decide whether to write a funny novel or a serious one and didn't quite manage to succeed on either front.

Still, The Boost has entertainment value. It isn't dull and it moves quickly. Secondary characters have an appealing quirkiness. The ideas that are expounded are always interesting. Had the story proceeded with greater zest I would be more enthusiastic about it, but The Boost tells a fun story, even if it doesn't live up to its potential.

RECOMMENDED

Bread and Butter by Michelle Wildgen

Published by Doubleday on February 11, 2014

I enjoyed reading Bread and Butter, in part because I enjoy a good meal as much as I enjoy a good book. There's also something romantic about the restaurant business. Like many people, I love the idea of owning/managing a restaurant even though I know nothing about food preparation. I do know that most restaurants fail and that I'm much too lazy to put in the hours that a successful restaurant demands. Reading a book that's set in the world of fine dining is therefore a vicarious pleasure that appeals to my culinary fantasies.

Two brothers, Leo and Britt, have been in the restaurant business for ten years, having grown a successful upscale restaurant in the economically deprived soil of Linden, Pennsylvania. Britt is the restaurant's handsome face; Leo the brains. Britt knows how to manage people while Theo is adept at managing finances. Their younger brother Harry, long absent from Linden, has returned to start a restaurant of his own. Britt is bugged that his little brother would have the audacity to compete, particularly without paying his dues in the business. Britt is also bugged when Harry turns up for dinner with Camille, a beautiful regular at Britt's restaurant who nonetheless remains a mystery to him.

While always written in the third person, the novel shifts point of view among the three brothers. They have very different personalities, all brought into sharp focus during the course of the novel. Their outward personalities -- Leo is withdrawn but ultra-competent, Britt is outgoing and relaxed, Harry is charming but high strung -- often mask their true selves. Each is doing his best to conceal his insecurities from the others and the brothers' perceptions of each other (like the reader's perceptions of each) are constantly evolving. Getting a better understanding of the characters as their depths are gradually revealed is a highlight of reading the novel.

Still, the best part of Bread and Butter is its fascinating behind-the-scenes look at restaurant management (in the case of Britt and Leo's established venue) and restaurant development (in the case of Harry's startup). The drama of the restaurant business is complemented by family conflict -- sibling rivalry combined with personal and professional jealousies. To make an innovative high quality restaurant work, you might need to be a little obsessed. All three brothers are obsessed in their own ways. Bread and Butter drives home the point that obsessions might help you succeed professionally while destroying you personally, particularly when obsessions begin to clash.

Some portions of the narrative are too expository and some of the relationship drama is too predictable to be dramatic, but those flaws are overshadowed by the lush descriptions of food and the quirkiness with which line cooks, dessert chefs, and other members of the gossipy and insular restaurant community are portrayed. This isn't a perfect novel but it is one that I imagine most food fans will enjoy.

RECOMMENDED