The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan

Published by Henry Holt on September 30, 2014

The Ploughmen will never be mistaken for a thriller or a typical crime novel. To a lesser and a greater extent, it is a discerning psychological study of two men. The lesser character is John Gload, a gristly man in his seventh decade of life who finds himself on trial for murder, one of the several he has committed, usually with greater success at concealing the victim's identity. Most law enforcement officers would prefer to keep their distance from Gload -- solving crimes isn't worth the risk of trying to deal with him -- and the animosity is mutual, but Gload seems willing to talk to Deputy Valentine Millimaki, who shares his interest in farming. They chat in the evening, after Gload finishes his days in court. Feeling a kinship with Millimaki, Gload discusses the origins of his antisocial life and confesses his sins (albeit without remorse for the blood he has spilled).

Millimaki is the more complex character and the one whose psychological profile is most finely tuned. When Millimaki isn't listening to Gload's confessions, he is using a dog to track missing persons in the woods. He usually finds them dead, a burden that adds to his mental deterioration during the course of the novel. Whether that deterioration is a cause or a result of his separation from his wife is difficult to say. Millimaki's inability to sleep, his growing depression, and his marital difficulties lead to some erratic behavior. He is nevertheless a likable character. Oddly, he finds Gload to be likable (or at least tolerable) although he would never admit it, even to himself.

In a strange competition with Millimaki are a couple of other deputies while the easy-going sheriff is on Millimaki's side. All of these characters are given believable personalities without wasting words. The novel is written with enormous sensitivity to the pain that people endure, pain that manifests itself in multiple ways -- emotional outbursts, suicide, and serial killing among them. Kim Zupan makes it possible to see beyond stereotypes, to understand that people who do good things and those who do evil all share the most common traits of humanity.

Understanding the affinity between Gload and Millimaki is the challenge that Zupan offers the reader. Do they have a friendship based on the fact that Millimaki is one of the few people Gload doesn't want to kill? "It doesn't get any truer than that," Gload says.

Zupan offers some excellent prose to the reader who follows the two men on their respective journeys. Here's a description of a prison: "He went slowly along a long gray corridor, the redoubtable masonry of clammy stone on either side stacked and mortared against the penetration of hope." Zupan also offers a truly chilling ending to the reader who follows the men to the final chapter.

RECOMMENDED

Chaos Quarter by David Welch

Published by 47North on December 9, 2014

Chaos Quarter is a surprisingly enjoyable space opera. The parts that are meant to be exciting serve their purpose fairly well. The parts that are meant to be funny made me chuckle. Characters have reasonably well developed personalities. As a classic space opera that doesn't require much thought, Chaos Quarter gets high marks for fun despite its adherence to genre conventions.

Rex Vahn is a Terran officer in the Commonwealth fleet who, having been "loaned" to the intelligence division, is sent to nose around the Chaos Quarter. Rex has cheesed off his superiors and their hope is that the mission will end with his death. Taking a souped-up freighter into the Chaos Quarter, Rex hires a Europan mercenary named Lucias to handle the ship's weapons, despite an ongoing war between the Free Terran Commonwealth and the Empire of Europa. Two unintended additions to the crew are a sympathetic hooker named Chakrika (who was still in Rex's bed when he made a sudden departure from a planet) and Lucias' illegitimate baby, whose unfortunate parentage explains the sudden departure. With that spirited start, Rex and his crew begin their trip through the Chaos Quarter.

Rex's adventure brings him into contact with the Perfected Hegemony, the rumored alien civilization he has been sent to spy upon. The aliens don't seem all that alien despite their aversion to technology (an aversion that explains their reliance on organic spaceships). The aliens nevertheless give David Welch an excuse to write some interstellar chase scenes and ship-to-ship battle scenes that are familiar but nevertheless lively and entertaining.

Chaos Quarter takes an occasional stab at deeper thought as characters discuss the Bible and whether Artificial Intelligence has a soul and free will and the nature of evolution, but the discussions are more distracting than enlightening. Depth is not the novel's strength. Themes like "slavery is bad" are not particularly profound but they give Rex an excuse for behaving heroically. The novel's strengths are its energy, the characters' likability, and a fun factor that comes from good storytelling. While Chaos Quarter didn't wow me, those factors might encourage me to read another novel with these characters if one comes along.

RECOMMENDED

Until the Debt is Paid by Alexander Hartung

Published in Germany in 2013; published in translation by Amazon Crossing on November 4, 2014

Until the Debt is Paid opens with the brutal death of a judge in Berlin named George Holoch. We then cut to homicide detective Jan Tommen who wakes up with a hangover to find that he's lost a day and is a suspect in the investigation of Holoch's murder. Of course, Jan's blood is found at the crime scene, the judge's blood is found on his shirt, and Jan's fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. And, of course, his only alibi is a girlfriend who dies of an apparent suicide before she can clear his name. Another death follows and Jan is a suspect in that one, as well.

As is the convention in this well-traveled plot, Jan evades the police while trying to find the killer who framed him. Jan is assisted by capably crafted secondary characters, including a Rwandan bouncer named Chandu, a priest named Father Anberger, a computer hacker named Max, and a forensic scientist named Zoe.

Alexander Hartung moves the novel quickly but much of the ground it covers will be familiar to mystery readers. The framed detective relies on the computer hacker who is a social misfit and the medical examiner who believes in his innocence despite all the evidence to the contrary. Jan indulges in the obligatory prayer despite his questionable faith (although, to his credit, he doesn't pray for himself). Red herring suspects are planted to misdirect the reader. Seasoned readers will recognize them as red herrings because they are too obvious to be shocking.

Despite the novel's formulaic nature, the reveal surprised me. Surprising reveals are often forced but this one follows the logic of the story. That's the key to success in this formula and so, to that extent, the novel works. Characters are reasonably well developed and the Berlin setting, while less than vivid, gives the novel some added appeal. The ending sets up additional novels with some of the same characters. On the strength of this one, I'm willing to give the next one a shot, but I would hope that it is less formulaic and makes greater use of Berlin's noir atmosphere.

RECOMMENDED

The Ice Cream Man by Katri Lipson

Published in Finland in 2012; published in translation by AmazonCrossing on October 7, 2014

The Ice Cream Man won the European Prize for Literature. I assume it is a stunning novel that simply went over my head since I often found myself trying to understand it. Nearly every character seems to be living someone else's life. The novel is a brief generational saga of sorts, beginning shortly after World War II and continuing until shortly after Jan Palach, a Czech student, set fire to himself in 1969 as an act of political protest. That act motivates a character in the novel named Jan Vorszda to buy a jerry can ... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The novel begins with a director filming a movie called The Ice Cream Man. He has no script. He tells the actors almost nothing except the names, ages, and nationalities (Czech) of the characters they will be playing. The movie is largely improvised as it is filmed. To an extent, the novel has the same feel, but I assume that is deliberate. Part of the novel's early intrigue is the difficulty of separating what happens in the movie from what "really" happens while sorting out the "true" lives of the actors from the fictional roles they play.

The lead actor and actress take a furtive journey together, pretending to be a married couple. A bridge is blown up, Germans are everywhere, and the travelers are forced to take a room in a boarding house. The man goes away and something eventful happens to him that requires him to be portrayed by another actor. Whether the characters are living their real lives or their shadow lives, whether there is a meaningful difference between the two, is a question they discuss but do not resolve.

The story that the director films is, he claims, so common that people identify with it, particularly women who see themselves as the woman in the film. One such woman is, according to the director, part of a "shadow theater." Whether the woman is a shadow of a character in the film or whether the film is a shadow of real life is never quite clear. Thus we have actors playing the roles of characters who are playing invented roles, and in one case an actor being replaced by a different actor, raising all sorts of identity questions that would probably be profound and meaningful if I understood the point.

Later (and abruptly) the story shifts to a young man named Jan whose mother once took him to see The Ice Cream Man, a movie that he barely recalls and that relates to his father in a way he does not understand (although the reader does, eventually). The student is self-absorbed, rude, and dull. He's apparently a political dissident although he's more of a nothing. He eventually makes his way to Sweden where he becomes the plaything of a group of young women who like the fact that he's from Prague. Jan Vorszda evidently identifies with Jan Palach in another of the novel's many confusions of identity. His daughter completes the circle by visiting Poland, where she pretends to be the woman whose former apartment she is occupying.

The accolades for this prize-winning story call it "playful and charming." I thought it was puzzling and obscure. It isn't dull and it has the virtue of brevity. The prose is commendable. The Ice Cream Man might appeal to a more intellectually gifted reader. I just didn't get it.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Published by Doubleday on September 16, 2014

Love Me Back, title notwithstanding, is not a trashy romance novel. It is quite the opposite. The narrator is Marie Young. When the novel begins, Marie is a 22-year-old waitress who has frequent unsatisfying sex with the doctors who visit her upscale steakhouse ... and with the owners, managers, cooks, busboys, and other servers who work with her. She has "that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left" instead of continuing on a straight and narrow path. She has always known that a "normal" life of wife and mother could never be her reality.

Marie is clearly smarter than the life she is living, although it is late in the novel before we learn just how smart she is and how much potential she has wasted. She takes us through her history -- a teenage pregnancy followed by marriage, uncertain parenting skills, lousy temp and waitressing jobs, serial infidelity, drug abuse -- before the story returns to the present. Now she's scarred and living in Dallas, working at the most lucrative waitressing job she's ever had. She has changed her location but little has changed about her life. She loves her five-year-old daughter but rarely sees her. The men she stays with tend to be hateful but they don't stay long since she always cheats on them.

Merritt Tierce's prose is fiercely eloquent, well suited to a story that is raw in its honesty. Readers who dislike explicit language or promiscuous characters would probably want to avoid this book. None of the language is gratuitous, however; its use is consistent with the characters who use it. Nor are the sex scenes unnecessary, given the nature of Marie's life. Certainly they are not meant to titillate.

For all its familiarity, Love Me Back is a compelling account of a young woman's pain. As Marie struggles to understand her behavior, the reader gains insight into how she (and others in her position) uses sex as a shield against grief and loss, or degradation as the punishment they feel they deserve. The question is whether it is possible to kill the pain without killing yourself. Tierce gives the reader no answer to that question, which is the novel's only flaw. The story has an unfinished feel because Marie's life is unfinished, but it is disappointing that this snapshot of her life offers few clues as to where her life will take her.

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