Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

First published in Great Britain in 2005

Cold Granite takes place in the cold, wet, Granite City of Aberdeen. Logan McRae is returning to duty as a detective sergeant with the Grampian Police after spending a year recovering from knife wounds. His first day back greets him with the corpse of a three-year-old child who has been missing for months, a punch in the stomach from the murdered child's distraught grandfather, a scolding from his new boss, and an awkward encounter with his former girlfriend, who is also the medical examiner. McRae's life goes downhill from there. When another child soon turns up missing -- and then dead -- McRae suspects he has a serial killer on his hands.

McRae and his colleagues have a talent for arresting the wrong person, just as Stuart MacBride has a talent for misdirection. The seasoned reader will know that a couple of early suspects must be innocent, simply because too many pages remain when they are arrested. As McRae works his way through the evidence, the usual foes turn up to make his life miserable: a crafty defense attorney, a sneaky reporter, even some ordinary criminals. To sweeten the story, a couple of adults turn up dead, giving the beleaguered McRae even more murders to solve.

Cold Granite is a conventional police procedural, written in a conventional style. The pace is steady and the plot takes a couple of interesting twists, building suspense in fairly predictable ways. Detailed and grizzly descriptions of post-mortem examinations add to the novel's realism, although readers with weak stomachs might want to skip those scenes. The influence of the press on criminal investigations and the ability of reporters to stir a public thirst for vengeance against any possible suspect, regardless of the suspect's guilt or innocence, is the story's strongest theme.

I might have been more enthused about Cold Granite if I had read it before reading the most recent Logan McRae novel,  Close to the Bone. Cold Granite lacks the humor that makes Close to the Bone so enjoyable and therefore suffers by comparison. Granted, the plot's focus on child abduction doesn't lend itself to humor, but MacBride's eventual decision to write a lighter sort of novel was wise. Humor is really his forte.

Cold Granite establishes McRae as a detective who has the misfortunate to be competent, a quality that assures his workload will always be heavier than that of detectives who can't be trusted to catch a criminal if they witness the crime themselves. His personal life is in shambles, in part due to a failed relationship with the medical examiner. There isn't much more to McRae's personality in the first novel of the series, but it's a good starting point.

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The Spear of Destiny by Trey Garrison

Published digitally by Harper Voyager in December 2012 and January 2013 

The Spear of Destiny is a novel published as a three-part serial, each with its own title.  Part one is Black Sun Reich, part two is Death's Head Legion, and part three is Shadows Will Fall.

Given the influence of The Thule Society on the development of the Nazi Party, the pairing of demons and Nazis is natural but predictable. It's been done before. As an alternate history, however, The Spear of Destiny adds inventive elements to the story: Hitler came to power in Germany in 1922 as the result of a revolution; the Confederate States (CSA) still prohibit black citizens from voting while the Union States (USA) are mired in an economic depression; the USA fought alongside Germany in the Great War while the CSA sided with France and England (the Texas Freehold was studiously neutral). The alternate version of 1928 has some steampunk elements, including a flying city and "the largest Difference Engine ever built." Apart from its reference to a long-standing image of darkness, the Black Sun in the title refers both to the Black Sun rune in Wewelsburg Castle and to the dozen senior leaders of the Third Reich (one of whom was rebuilt as a "clockwork cyborg"), known collectively as The Black Sun.

Dr. Kurt von Dietel is on a secret mission. He and the people he represents have discovered that the powers behind the Reich are creating a group of "indestructible, unwavering soldiers" inspired by the mutated creatures that are arising in the Damned Lands, a transgenic abomination that, fancy terminology aside, can best be described as a cross between a demon and a zombie.  The formula for manufacturing zombies is glossed over with some mutterings about alchemy and radiation and mystical chants and the war opening a portal to another dimension, but in a novel that relies upon the supernatural -- not to mention zombies -- you don't really expect hard science.  Of course, the zombies  threaten the survival of the human race and must be stopped. The improbable key to victory (for both the Nazis and the good guys) is the Spear of Destiny, last known to be in the possession of the Jesuits. Reluctantly joining Dietel in search of the Spear is a Texan aviator named Fox Rucker. He's reluctant because another member of the team is his ex-wife. Technological help is supplied by Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla.

Once the Nazis have the Spear of Destiny, they will be able to make the zombies follow orders instead of eating everyone in sight.  Zombies can be made from both the living and the dead and, of course, anyone who is bitten by a zombie becomes infected and turns into a zombie. Rucker and his helpers try to find the Spear before the Nazis can get it, a quest that leads them to Romania, homeland of vampires. You just knew that vampires would sneak into this story, didn't you? Heck, there's even a golem.

Otto Skorzeny (the legendary SS officer who rescued Mussolini from captivity) plays a critical role in the novel. So does Hitler's favorite interrogator, the Skull, who somehow has developed psychic powers. The descriptions of the Skull's depravity seem gratuitous, although an extended encounter with the Skull does develop Rucker's psychological profile.

In the best tradition of heroic adventure novels, Trey Garrison establishes Rucker as a courageous man who refuses to accept defeat, the sort of leader who inspires others to give their best. That, of course, is what happens in a series of high energy action sequences that propel the story to its predictable conclusion.  Rucker being chased across rooftops in Rome seems like a scene cribbed from action movies but rappelling from one dirigible to another is more original. Given the setting, it's logical that the Romani would enter the story, leading to an interesting discussion of Romani legends. I appreciated that Garrison uses the story to remind readers that the Romani are the largely forgotten victims of Nazi genocide.

The most interesting aspect of The Spear of Destiny is not the plot so much as the background. The splintering of North America into several nations could have happened, and Garrison's construction of his alternate history reflects careful research and nuanced thought. There is a decided bias in favor of libertarian philosophy -- the Texas Freehold does so well because people are left alone, while the USA has gone to rot because of big government -- that would have made Robert Heinlein proud. The characters' discussions of political philosophy are simplistic and, in my view, not particularly accurate, but disagreement with a political point of view is no reason not to enjoy a novel.

I don't know that the steampunk elements add anything (they seem to have been inserted to make the novel appeal to steampunk fans) and I'm certain that a better novel could be fashioned out this background without resorting to demonic zombies. I'm not suggesting that every alternate history addressing Nazis needs to be as brilliant as The Man in the High Castle, but does the world really need another zombie novel?  The zombies themselves are rather dull, and an early phase of the final battle -- pitting werewolves and other monsters against the zombies -- doesn't have much spark. The zombies are ridiculously incompetent -- they can't penetrate a barrier of piled junk that the good guys are able to assemble and disassemble in seconds -- but I suppose death takes its toll on a zombie's brainpower. Still, the ability of thirty people to hold off several hundred zombies long enough to engage in hours of chit-chat weakens the story. I never had the sense that the zombies posed much of a threat at all.

Despite its weak ending, the non-zombie characters and the story's tongue-in-cheek attitude make the novel as a whole worth reading, at least for fans of the ever-growing category of zombie literature.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

First published in the UK in 2011; published by Europa on February 5, 2013 

Initially, two stories proceed on parallel paths in The Rage. The first focuses on Bob Tidey, a detective sergeant with the Dublin garda, as he investigates a murder. The other follows Vincent Naylor's robbery of a cash delivery service. By jumping frequently from one story to the other, Gene Kerrigan assures that something is always happening to hold the reader's interest. When Tidey's work is in its plodding stages, Naylor's crime is whizzing along, while the murder investigation gains steam after the robbery ends. The energy continues to shift from one story to the other throughout the course of the novel.

The murder: Emmet Sweetman, a corrupt banker, takes two bullets to the head and a shotgun blast to the chest. One of the bullets recovered from his corpse is tied to a gun used in the unsolved murder of Oliver Snead, a case Tidey investigated. Tidey is thus assigned to the team investigating Sweetman's murder. His investigation is hampered when his superiors seem content with a convenient solution, one that overlooks leads Tidey wants to pursue.

The robbery: Vincent Naylor, freshly released from prison, recruits his brother and two other men to steal cash from the equivalent of an armored car service. The heist is carefully planned but it goes wrong, making Naylor an angry man. During much of the novel's second half, Naylor is trying to channel his anger toward revenge without knowing who should be targeted.

Kerrigan takes care to establish his characters and set up his plot in the early chapters. Once the robbery commences and the murder investigation is underway, the pace quickens. The two storylines intersect at the novel's midway point, thanks to Tidey's friendship with a nun who witnessed the robbery's violent aftermath. The story is filled with mayhem (the novel lives up to its title), but violence never becomes a substitute for intelligent plotting and effective characterization. The final chapters pull everything together in a tense, refreshingly smart burst of storytelling.

Kerrigan has a realistic attitude about people who ordinarily occupy a position of respect. Tidey is critical of the garda officers he calls "little corporals," who live for the joy of forcing others to obey their petty commands, but he isn't eager to oppose them. Tidey isn't exactly Dirty Harry, but he doesn't always obey the law when it's more expedient to ignore it. One of Kerrigan's characters is a nun who was involved in a child abuse scandal. Yet Kerrigan doesn't demonize his characters, doesn't reduce them to one-dimensional caricatures. As Tidey tells the nun, "What you did, it's not all you are." Making a reader understand and even sympathize with characters who behave badly is a skill that many writers never develop. Kerrigan does it well.

The moral question that Tidey faces -- whether to disobey his superiors, who may be protecting well-placed individuals, in order to achieve a rough measure of justice -- is common in high quality police procedurals. The Rage might in that sense be formulaic, although Kerrigan takes the dilemma a step further, forcing Tidey to choose between two untenable outcomes. The phrases that begin and end the novel -- "There was no right thing to do. But something had to be done" -- encapsulate the novel's theme. Even if The Rage can be branded as formulaic, it couples the formula with tight prose, a steady pace, and a fair amount of suspense.

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Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell

Published by Soho Press on February 5, 2013 

It's difficult to pull off a Grandfather Paradox story, although many have tried. The paradox is often resolved by having the paradox-creating event give birth to a parallel universe, which strikes me as a copout. Kudos to Sean Ferrell for constructing an intricate time travel mystery thriller that puts a fresh spin on a familiar theme. I'm not sure Man in the Empty Suit resolves the paradox (although, to be fair, a true paradox is by definition irresolvable), but Ferrell uses it to advance an interesting, offbeat story.

Ferrell's version of Dr. Who's TARDIS is a raft that floats through time. Every year on his birthday, a time traveler attends a party on April 1, 2017 at the Boltzmann Hotel in a decayed, dystopian Manhattan. He is the only person in the ballroom, but since he does this as a tradition, there are many of him, one from each year in which he has made the birthday trek. He names his different selves -- Yellow, Seventy, the Nose, the Drunk, the Inventor -- although we never learn the traveler's true name. His younger selves ("the Youngsters") mock his older selves ("the Elders") although most of his selves of every age devote the evening to drunkenness. The alcohol fueled fuzz assures that the party will seem fresh every year.

The story begins on the traveler's 39th birthday. The party proceeds as expected until the next oldest version of the traveler dies in an elevator. The Elders don't understand the paradox of their continued life after their obvious death. They do understand that their memories are becoming unreliable. The 39-year-old traveler (known at that age as the Suit) is tasked with investigating. The Elders fear that if the Suit catches up in age with his next older self -- the one who dies -- without solving the puzzle, all his older selves will cease to exist. One paradox triggers another as the Suit tries to discover the truth, and the appearance of a woman named Lily at the party only deepens the mystery.

If the first section of Man in the Empty Suit seems odd, the next section -- with a lie collector and liquid memories and books that know where they want to be shelved -- enters a whole new realm of strangeness. The section largely becomes Lily's story. It isn't conventional science fiction -- nothing about this novel is conventional -- but it contains moments that are emotionally affecting. The last act returns to the party and the paradox, leading to a conclusion that teaches the traveler something about life -- and how to live it.

Apart from telling an entertaining (if labyrinthine) story, the novel's value lies in its larger themes. Ferrell serves up a perceptive take on how we perceive ourselves at different stages of our lives. The Youngsters see the Elders as decrepit; the Elders see the Youngsters as childish. As the traveler transitions from being a Youngster to being an Elder, he appreciates that what he once saw as the slovenly appearance of the Elders is actually a sign of comfort, a version of himself that is no longer concerned with superficial appearance.

Man in the Empty Suit also addresses the need to connect with other people. The traveler attends the party every year so that he can be with himself (literally), but he's always alone, fighting to be heard in a chorus of identical voices. Both the traveler and Lily deal, in their different ways, with the burden of expectations, although the traveler's are self-imposed. How they cope with those burdens and what the traveler learns from his ordeal make this a novel of psychological growth -- almost a coming-of-age-late-in-middle-age novel. I'm not sure the story entirely makes sense, but I liked the way Ferrell played with it.

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Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

Published in Japanese in 1998; published in translation by Picador on January 29, 2013 

The short stories collected in Revenge tend to be snapshots of turmoil, slices of emotion-charged lives. A woman spends an "Afternoon at the Bakery" where she goes to buy strawberry shortcake for her son's birthday, twelve years after he died while trapped inside an abandoned refrigerator. A paranoid woman gathers the tomatoes featured in "Tomatoes and the Full Moon" from an overturned truck at the scene of a fatal accident, then befriends a travel writer who discovers that she has a surprising secret. In "The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger," a woman who is jealous because her husband is having an affair invents games of chance that dictate her behavior. A hospital secretary who has a crush on her boss listens to her boss' shocking confession in "Lab Coats." A bagmaker in "Sewing For the Heart" is asked to make a bag that will hold a woman's heart. A woman examines instruments of torture in "Welcome to the Museum of Torture" and imagines what she might do to her boyfriend. The curator of that museum dies and, while attending his funeral, his niece recalls him as "The Man Who Sold Braces" that might as well have been torture devices.

The stories are related to each other in ways that aren't immediately apparent. A girl asks a boy she doesn't really know to join her at an uncomfortable lunch with her estranged father in "Fruit Juice." During the course of that story, the boy and girl come across an old, abandoned post office that is filled with kiwis. The kiwis are from the orchards of "Old Mrs. J," who also grows carrots shaped like human hands. That story is narrated by a tenant in one of the old woman's apartments. The tenant had been the stepmother of a boy who, in "The Little Dustman," recalls her eccentricities as he travels to her funeral. The aging woman in "Poison Plants" is fascinated by the sound of a young man's voice as he reads her a story about a post office filled with kiwis. And so on.

Yoko Ogawa writes in a minimalist style that is exquisite in its simplicity. Some of the stories seem odd but uneventful until they arrive at twisted, almost ghoulish endings. A sense of the macabre links the stories as much as the characters they share. These aren't horror stories in the traditional sense, but many of the characters are isolated or damaged, living a daily horror that outsiders can't imagine.

The stories come full circle, the last connecting to the first. Often a story's connection to another story becomes clear only at the end, a revelation that shifts the story's context just a bit. The reader gains new insight into Ogawa's characters after realizing that the character played a role in an earlier story. The interlocking nature of the stories builds a depth that is greater than the stories achieve individually. It's tempting for that reason to devour the stories all at once, although it's also rewarding to pause and savor each one, like nibbling from a box of gourmet chocolates.

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