Original Skin by David Mark

Published by Blue Rider Press on May 16, 2013

Like the first novel featuring Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, Original Skin tells a story that is more interesting than suspenseful. Its focus is on the political ramifications of crime and on the relationships that continue to develop among the series' characters. This isn't a novel of shootouts and chase scenes, although enough action and humor are mixed into the story to keep it from becoming dry.

Suzie is into anonymous hook-ups (formerly known as swinging) and uses a website to find them. Her best friend, a gay man named Simon Appleyard, does the same. After Simon dies, having apparently hung himself, repeated attempts are made on Suzie's life. McAvoy gets involved after he finds a cell phone in a stream, brings it home, dries it out, and discovers it belonged to Simon. The methodical McAvoy follows a rare hunch and comes to believe that Simon was murdered. His investigation leads him to a number of political figures who, like Suzie, have been playing sordid games. The story turns into a whodunit with all the plot twists, distractions, and red herrings that keep a reader guessing about the killer's identity. It's a bit convoluted but not outrageously so. The mystery isn't captivating -- its resolution has an anticlimactic feel -- but it held my attention.

That plotline develops alongside another as a relatively benign Vietnamese gang that has controlled Hull's cannabis supply is being muscled out by a more violent group of criminals. McAvoy's boss, Trish Pharaoh, is attacked by dogs and singed by a petrol bomb as she tries to get a handle on the situation. McAvoy, in the meantime, finds himself challenged to a bare-knuckle brawl in the name of honor. The plot thread involving the gangsters is largely used for character development, although it has some entertaining moments.

The characters are actually better than the story they inhabit. Aector is a good man who wants people to be good to each other. He doesn't care about arrest statistics or office politics. He's embarrassed, even angered, when his colleagues disparage people because of their ancestry. He's even more embarrassed when the topic turns to sex -- particularly the kinkier versions that he encounters during the course of the story. He's devoted to his wife and blushes with shame when he finds himself thinking, even momentarily, about another woman's body. His Old World prudishness is charming, but it's his essential decency that makes him such a likable character. Secondary characters are taking shape (particularly Aector's wife, who comes from a dubious background, and Pharaoh, who has a knack for making Aector uncomfortable); I expect they'll continue to be fleshed out in future installments.

Sensitive readers should know that the narrative describes scenes of torture. They aren't gratuitous or overly graphic, but some might find them disturbing. There are also some discussions of sex clubs and related diversions that didn't strike me as graphic at all, but the strong sexual content might offend some readers.

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Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

Published by Orbit on June 4, 2013 

The protomolecule, once confined to Venus, has managed to launch a self-assembling Ring that sits outside the orbit of Uranus. Anything that tries to fly through the middle of the Ring comes to an immediate stop before it begins a slow motion trip in a different direction, leading to the conclusion that the Ring is some sort of gate. Representatives of Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets all converge on the Ring, as do Jim Holden and his crew. Although Holden would prefer not to investigate the protomolecule's latest actions, he's given no choice. Of course, from the moment the Ring is introduced, the reader knows that Holden will fly through it.

As you would expect, Holden and his crew (Naomi, Alex, and Amos) return in this third novel of The Expanse. As you might not expect, so does Josephus Miller, who is back from the dead. Or maybe it's not Miller, but something Miller-like is a key character again. Also returning is Julie Mao's sister Clarissa, now known as Melba Koh. She blames Holden for Julie's death (or transformation) and she's devised a cunning plan to obtain revenge. None of this will make the slightest bit of sense unless you've read Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War, which I would urge any fun-seeking fan of science fiction to do. You could probably understand and enjoy Abaddon's Gate without reading the first two novels, but you'd be missing sooooo much context that it would be a mistake.

Other significant characters (some new, some returning from earlier books) include: Anna Volovodov, a member of the clergy who joins a UN advisory group on a mission to the Ring; Carlos Baca, a/k/a Bull, the untrusted security chief from Earth on a converted generation ship named Behemoth that belongs to the Outer Planets; Sam Rosenberg, Behemoth's chief engineer; Clarissa's wealthy aunt, Tilly Fagan; and Monica Stuart, a journalist who accompanies Holden and his crew, documenting their response to the Ring.

As they proved in the first two books, the writing team known as James S.A. Corey knows how to tell a fast-moving story that mixes humor with drama. This time, Holden is up against a space station that makes the Death Star look like a slingshot, as well as the usual array of humans who would like to jettison him out an airlock. While the action is never shortchanged (there's enough to satisfy the most ardent space opera fan), the novels are so good because the writers bring the story back to the people who are affected by it. The writers have a keen understanding of human nature and a remarkable ability to translate that understanding into emotionally complex, fully formed characters. Holden, in particular, changes a bit in every novel. This time, having lost his self-righteousness, he struggles against "creeping nihilism" and tries to recapture a sense of purpose.

Heroism and self-sacrifice have been consistent themes in The Expanse, and that remains true in Abaddon's Gate. Unlikely heroes have always emerged in these novels, and one of the new characters might be the unlikeliest of them all. As one of the minor characters notes, heroism is what happens when people don't think about the consequences of their actions. As another character demonstrates, the same is true of people who commit evil acts. Circumstances often dictate heroism, just as they dictate villainy, a subtle point that Abaddon's Gate illustrates brilliantly.

The writing is strikingly visual. Reading the Corey novels is like watching an extraordinarily detailed movie. Like the other novels in The Expanse, Abaddon's Gate delivers what fans want from space opera -- furious interstellar action, a sense of wonder and awe -- but it does more than that. The addition of a clergy member to the story invites discussions of philosophy -- not dry sermons or religious musings, but meaningful thought about forgiveness and the possibility of redemption and the benefit of using persuasion, rather than violence, to achieve just ends (themes that are present in each novel, but sharpened in focus in Abaddon's Gate). The novel is funny and exciting and moving and, on occasion, it comes close enough to being profound to set it apart from the vast majority of space opera.

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Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on June 4, 2013 

"More concept than substance, food is the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than satisfaction itself, which is why diet can exert the sway of religion or political zealotry." But as Pandora Halfdanarson learns, weight loss is a shabby religion: "you could only continue to worship at the altar of comestible restraint if you chronically failed your vows." Pandora has gained more than twenty pounds in the last three years, but she doesn't stand out in a generation of people who are battling (or surrendering to) obesity, who are marked as members of an underclass because of their weight. Many participate in "the national sport" of dieting, but few succeed. Pandora's obsession with her weight and that of her brother -- and, by extension, our national obsession with our own appearance and that of others -- is at the heart of Big Brother.

Quietly subversive, studiously non-opinionated, confidently dull, and intensely self-critical, Pandora is the epitome of a Lionel Shriver protagonist. The daughter of a former television star who has faded from the national memory, Pandora is a married loner, comfortably living within her own mind. Not wanting to be "a hyperlink to someone else's Wikipedia page," she shuns the derivative fame that her father's stage name brings. She would prefer anonymity to the celebrity she attained when her successful business, Baby Monotonous, landed her on magazine covers.

Pandora's brother, Edison, does not share her insular nature. He can talk all day, "at the end of which no one knew him any better than before," and he has adopted their father's stage name as his own. Edison's career as a jazz pianist isn't going well. Needing a place to live, he travels to Iowa to stay with Pandora. Seeing Edison for the first time in several years, Pandora is shocked to discover that he is huge, a very big brother indeed. At first, Pandora doesn't know how to broach the subject tactfully and so ignores it, but: "The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit."

To the extent that Big Brother is (as Shriver's novels so often are) an exploration of a social problem by illustrating its impact on a single family, Pandora's attempt to understand and explain Edison's obesity can be taken as Shriver's effort to understand why so many people gobble down Cinnabons and Big Macs, knowing they are putting their health at risk. Does Edison overeat because he's depressed or is he depressed because he's fat? Perhaps he binges to showcase his sense of failure on a grand scale. While Pandora's puzzlement about her brother approaches judgment -- something that is contrary to her nature and that leads her to question the stereotypes associated with size -- she also wonders why obesity's status as a social issue should make Edison's diet and lethargy anyone's business but Edison's. Or is eating oneself to death the business of everyone who cares about the eater?

Just as Shriver frequently draws literary themes from social issues, she is a tireless explorer of marital and family issues. Pandora has an inflexible husband, a rebellious teenage stepson, and a needy brother. She wonders how much support a sibling can expect when the sibling's demands are a source of marital stress. Fletcher Feuerbach, Pandora's husband, represents Edison's opposite extreme: he bicycles fifty miles a day and refuses to eat anything made from white flour. Edison's oversized presence drives a wedge between Pandora and Fletcher. Fletcher wants to escape Edison's "miasma of sloth," but Fletcher's rigid diet is just as maddening as Edison's unwillingness to diet. When Pandora accuses Fletcher of being on "a moral crusade" against fat, she exposes his true motivation for complaining about Edison: the complaints stoke his own sense of superiority.

To avoid spoilers, I won't discuss the meat of the story. Suffice it to say that diets have their downsides and that the honest portrayal of family drama is Shriver's greatest skill. The wry humor that often seeds Shriver's work is abundant here, but she remains one of the most serious, insightful, and penetrating chroniclers of the human condition to be found in current American literature. She writes with sensitivity and compassion, from a variety of perspectives, without ever becoming preachy. An ending that recasts the story in a different light initially disappointed me, but after I thought about it, I came to understand and appreciate it. This isn't Shriver's best work, but it's awfully good.

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The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Published by Crown on June 4, 2013

You don't want to mess with Vanessa Michael Munroe. She has serious anger management issues. When she's mad, she becomes feral, blindly psychopathic in her rage, behaving like the Incredible Hulk without the green skin or the growth spurt. When she's calm, her calculating intelligence shines. The winning combination -- intelligent fury -- makes Munroe one of my favorite thriller protagonists.

The Doll begins with Munroe's fall from her motorcycle. An ambulance whisks her away, but the patient who is admitted to the hospital isn't our heroine. Munroe's closest friend, Sherebiah Logan, has also been snatched, leaving Miles Bradford (Munroe's lover and occasional employer) and his team of mercenaries to search for them. Munroe and Logan have been taken by the Doll Man, who is keeping Logan as a hostage to assure that Munroe will use her talents to undertake a mission on his behalf. It's not entirely convincing that the Doll Man couldn't have used his own people rather than the troublesome Munroe to get the job done, but that's the set-up and I was able to roll with it.

Not coincidentally, Neeva Eckridge, an actress and the child of prominent parents, has been missing for two weeks. Munroe had been trying to find her before the Doll Man intervened. The connection between these stories becomes apparent in the early chapters. During the first half of the novel, the focus shifts between Munroe and Bradford, with Munroe becoming the dominant character in the second half.

Is the story entirely believable? I'm not sure any of the Munroe stories are entirely believable, but they are told with such speed and intensity that Taylor Stevens always hooks me. She makes me suspend my disbelief for the sake of enjoying the experience.

Munroe is a complex character, often a dangerous, amoral sociopath, yet motivated by compassion for the innocent.  She often plays the role of vigilante.  Unlike other thriller heroes who are driven by vigilantism, however, Munroe makes no pretense of adhering to a higher moral code. When she kills, she is a creature of instinct. For that reason, I find her easier to accept than the more sanctimonious vigilantes in thrillerdom. Not just in Munroe, but in at least one other central character, Stevens blurs the line between villain and victim, creating moral ambiguity that is both realistic and refreshing. Of course, some readers dislike moral ambiguity, and they might be put off by Munroe and by the novel for the very reasons I admire it.

Although The Doll makes frequent references to (and reintroduces some characters from) the first two novels in the series, it would be easy to read this as a stand-alone novel without becoming lost. Stevens fills in enough of the backstory to make Munroe's life understandable. If anything, she repeats herself unnecessarily while explaining the events that shaped Munroe's life. Fortunately, the narrative never bogs down; the story is always in motion.

As much as I enjoyed the characters in The Doll (one of the bad guys is particularly well drawn), the first two novels had stronger plots. This story amounts to a series of extended chase scenes, with Munroe sometimes acting as pursuer, sometimes as the pursued. It delivers thrills, and that's what a thriller should do, but it isn't as memorable as the earlier books. On the other hand, Munroe's final confrontation with the Doll Man is as powerful and surprising as anything in the previous novels.

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The Alteration by Kingsley Amis

First published in Great Britain in 1976; republished with an introduction by William Gibson by NYRB Classics on May 7, 2013

Kingsley Amis was a science fiction fan, so it shouldn't be surprising that he tried his hand at a science fiction theme. The Alteration is an alternate history with the merest whiff of steampunk. It pays tribute to one of the finest alternate histories, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, secretly admired by some of The Alteration's characters as a forbidden book about a forbidden book. Cleverly, Amis describes an alternate version of Dick's novel, a device that acquaints the reader with the alternate world that Amis imagines, in which the Vatican controls all of Christendom (except for the small, relatively powerless nation of New England), science has been suppressed, and electricity is regarded as sinful.

In 1976, the highlight of a Requiem Mass for a recently deceased King is the beautiful voice of ten-year-old Hubert Anvil, a prodigy both as a singer and as a composer. The occasion brings to England the director of the Sistine Choir and the leading singer in the secular opero, both of whom are eunuchs, as well as Cornelius van den Haag, the Ambassador from New England. They debate Hubert's future: he can be either a great soprano or a great composer, but history has shown the impossibility of succeeding at both. If his calling is to remain a soprano, of course, he will need to visit a surgeon before he reaches puberty. The influential Italians believe that is the course Hubert's life must take.

Before Hubert can be altered, the church needs the permission of Hubert's father, Tobias, and of his confessor, Father Lyall, who voices reservations about the procedure. The opinion of Hubert's mother, Margaret, is irrelevant to everyone except Father Lyall, who has a sinful desire for Tobias' wife. Hubert's own opinion is equally irrelevant, and he probably would not have one but for his curiosity about sex. On the other hand, it's hard to say no to the Pope. When Hubert eventually makes his decision (although, technically, it is not his to make), intrigue ensues. Fate (which some will see as divine intervention) also seems to play an ironic role, but sometimes fate is guided by the hand of man.

And so, as fans of Kingsley Amis would expect, we have a book full of adulterers, hypocrites, sycophants, scoundrels, back-stabbers, manipulators, worriers, and the merely confused. Although filled with the wry humor that typifies a Kingsley Amis novel, The Alteration also explores philosophical issues. Does foregoing the possibility of physical love truly serve God, or does it serve only the earthbound interests of the church? Why is the suppression of pleasure so often the mission of religion? Does the celibacy of the priesthood make it impossible for the church hierarchy to understand the importance of family and the desire to procreate? When praying for God's protection, is it wrong to pray for protection from the church?

While The Alteration is a book of large themes -- the relationship between church and state, the conflict between freedom and duty, the inherent right to defy corrupt authority -- it succeeds on a more intimate level because Hubert, in contrast to the members of the church hierarchy, is such an innocent, appealing figure. In addition, the novel works because the alternate world in which Hubert lives is artfully constructed. It is a dystopian world, but one that is vastly different from the worlds imagined in most dystopian literature. The ruthless and unyielding exercise of theocratic power in a western world dominated by a single religion is every bit as frightening as the totalitarian dictatorship of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Despite the church's pretensions to the contrary, it is not a world that is kind to the innocent.

Amis' prose is (as always) both fluid and precise. His ability to write about serious matters with a light touch is remarkable. Still, this is not light reading. Some passages are dense. The novel therefore requires the reader's effort, but the effort is well-rewarded.

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