Bear is Broken by Lachlan Smith

Published by Mysterious Press on February 5, 2013 

Bear is Broken opens with Leo Maxwell describing the scene as someone shoots Leo's brother, Teddy, in the back of the head. Teddy is a successful criminal defense attorney in San Francisco and Leo, having recently passed the bar, hopes to follow in his footsteps. True to form, the police make clear their hatred of criminal lawyers -- particularly Teddy, who successfully defended a man who killed a police officer -- and show little sympathy for Leo. Fed up with the police (and wondering whether they have something to do with his shooting) and with self-righteous prosecutors, Leo decides to conduct his own investigation of his brother's death. He also has the chance to step into Teddy's shoes, to be a "real lawyer" for the first time. As much as Bear is Broken is a legal thriller, it is also the story of Leo's evolution, his entry into adulthood, his transition from student to practitioner.

The unexplained shooting of Teddy may or may not be related to Leo's father, who is serving a sentence for killing Leo's mother, a crime that Teddy always insisted their father didn't commit. Leo's reaction to the shooting is further complicated by his feelings about Teddy, a mixture of love and resentment, and by his growing fear that Teddy was a supremely unethical lawyer. Teddy may have wronged a former client, providing a motive for murder. But there's no shortage of suspects, including the mysterious young woman who shoots Leo with a Taser and her mysterious brother and her mysterious father, and Teddy's mysterious investigator and his mysterious secretary, and a mysterious hooker ....

The plot isn't so much complex or convoluted as it is filled with red herrings, multiple suspects who may or may not have had anything to do with Teddy's shooting. Leo changes his mind about who shot his brother more often than most people change their underwear. In the end, although a couple of plot threads are left dangling, the story works its way to a satisfying conclusion.

Leo finds himself with multiple conflicts of interest as he (1) sleeps with a woman who might have shot his brother and (2) represents a man charged with shooting his brother (although only at an arraignment), even though (3) the principle witness against the charged assailant is Leo's father. I'm not sure I bought any of that, and I'm confident I wouldn't want to hire a lawyer who demonstrates such poor judgment, but it makes for a reasonably good story.

Lachlan Smith has a clear understanding of the dynamics of criminal trials and of the psychology of lawyers and juries. The trial scenes (of which there are few) are some of the best in the novel. At times the writing style is a little trashy ("I gave a cry of pain and astonishment. ... This cannot be. This simply cannot be."), indicative of a first time novelist. For the most part, however, Smith is a capable writer. The novel's pace is steady and his characters are believable. Bear is Broken is a reasonably good second-tier legal thriller from a writer who shows promise.

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Dark Tide by Elizabeth Haynes

Published by Harper Paperbacks on March 12, 2013 

Having quit her jobs in software sales and pole dancing, Genevieve Shipley lives on a barge in a marina on the River Medway, a lifestyle that is more sedate than the one she left behind in London. She throws a party on her barge to show off the current stage of its renovation and wonders why her friend Caddy doesn't make it. Later that night, she finds Caddy's body in the water, bumping up against her boat. Genevieve calls her former lover, Dylan, who has been absent for months, leaving Genevieve in charge of a mysterious package that he promised to reclaim. The contents of the package and the reason for Caddy's death supply the twin mysteries that are meant to supply the novel's suspense.

While we're waiting for the main story to advance, Genevieve fills us in on her backstory, her relationships, and her part-time work in the lucrative field of exotic dance. Genevieve's background is constructed carefully and credibly. The buildup is, in fact, the best part of the novel.

Suspense, however, is in short supply. Genevieve is threatened from time to time, but never in a way that suggests her life is actually at risk. She interacts with characters who may be not be what they seem -- a helpful neighbor, a police officer she takes to bed -- but the story lacks the element of surprise.

Although Genevieve is blindingly naïve for a woman who is often described as smart, it's easy to feel sympathy for her predicament. (Some readers might have difficulty feeling sympathy for an exotic dancer; if you're one of those, this probably isn't the book for you.) While it's easy to sympathize with Genevieve, it's less easy to care about her. She spends most of the novel in a gloomy fog, doing nothing to make her situation better. When she's not mooning over Dylan she's mooning over the police officer who becomes bedroom Dylan's substitute. Instead of being proactive, Genevieve makes unanswered phone calls and waits for a man to come along and rescue her.

In the end, a sentence that begins "Eventually his hand between my thighs made me forget everything ..." tells you everything you need to know about Genevieve. She forgets her common sense. She forgets to question obvious lies. She forgets to be smart. She forgets to be resourceful. She spends most of the novel longing for a hand between her thighs. In that sense, Dark Tide tries to be a romance as much as a suspense novel, and doesn't fully succeed at being either one.

The resolution of the mysteries is anticlimactic. There isn't much of a mystery at all, which makes the story, after a strong start, disappointingly dull. Genevieve finally shows some initiative toward the novel's end in a reasonably tense action scene. Unfortunately, a romantic triangle, rather than suspense, remains the novel's focus. Perhaps the triangle is meant to be suspenseful -- will Genevieve end up with Dylan or the cop? -- but I just didn't care. In the end, although I liked the setup, the suspense fizzles out. Fans of chick lit might like it more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Fever by Mary Beth Keane

Published by Scribner on March 12, 2013 

Fever reads like a well-written biography. In fact, had Fever been written as nonfiction rather than a novel, I would be more enthusiastic about it. Despite her fluid prose and her ability to create atmospheric scenes, Mary Beth Keane's attempt to dramatize the life of Typhoid Mary falls flat. Perhaps that's because the novel remains true to the figure upon which it is based, a stubborn woman whose disagreeable personality makes it difficult to summon the empathy that the most memorable novels inspire.

In 1907, a doctor in Manhattan investigating typhoid outbreaks noticed a common link that joined many of the afflicted families: Mary Mallon had been their cook. Although Mary appears to be healthy, she is forced into the typhoid ward of a hospital. She refuses to believe that she could be a carrier of the disease. When doctors try to coerce her into consenting to the removal of her gallbladder, she reacts with understandable hostility. The authorities respond by quarantining Mary in Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island. She eventually seeks her freedom in court, loses, and spends three years on the island, steadfast in her belief that she is not a typhoid carrier.

At its best, Mary's story becomes one of an isolated woman who is on the losing side of class warfare, a headstrong worker who refused to accept the moralistic piety of her employers, who protested the ill-treatment of cooks, who dared to wear a hat identical to one owned by the lady of the house. Certainly, if Mary had been a well-educated daughter of a prosperous family rather than an Irish immigrant who lived with a man to whom she was not married, her treatment by the public health authorities and by the courts would have been less callous. The impact of class and social identity on public health decisions is one of the novel's important themes. Another is the conflict between the need to protect society from disease and the obligation to protect the liberty of American citizens. The evidence that Mary was a typhoid carrier is convincing, but the same evidence suggests that she only transmitted the disease by cooking for others. It clearly wasn't fair to Mary to hold her in quarantine when other carriers were allowed to retain their freedom.

Mary was released in 1910 on the condition that she work in a laundry, a position that Mary regarded as a backward step in her life. Given her denial that she made anyone ill, it isn't surprising that Mary abandoned the laundry for a job in a bakery, a job that she kept until health authorities found her. Fearing arrest, Mary changed her name, stopped checking in with the Department of Health, and found a job as a cook in a maternity hospital. Taken into custody after a typhoid outbreak in the hospital, Mary was quarantined at North Brother Island again in 1915.

Although Keane appears to be meticulous in her devotion to historical accuracy, she tells Mary's story with a curious absence of passion. There are moments of drama in Fever (a devastating fire is one of the best) but they are collateral to Mary's plight. The legal proceedings that took place after Mary had been quarantined for more than two years are reported with the dispassion of a journalist, as are Mary's experiences in quarantine.

The fault undoubtedly lies with the character Keane chose to write about. Mary is stubborn and abrasive, qualities that do not endear her to the reader. Part of the novel involves Mary's on-again/off-again love affair with Alfred, but Alfred is no prize. While it's no surprise that such miserable creatures were drawn together, reading about their relationship is almost painful.

It's difficult to make an emotional investment in such a depressing character. It's equally difficult to generate sympathy for someone who doomed herself by refusing for so long to accept the obvious truth about her condition, and by failing to follow the simple rule that would have assured her continued freedom: don't work as a cook. Still, Keane gave me the sense of knowing Mary, of understanding her as a person, and she makes an effort to humanize Mary in the final chapters. Had the novel been written with less detachment, Keane might have been able to make me care more about Mary. Perhaps understanding her is enough (it would be in a work of nonfiction), but a truly great novel would have made me feel more empathy for Mary, despite her disagreeable nature.

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Solo Pass by Ronald De Feo

Published by Other Press on March 5, 2013

After two months in a psych ward, a patient who identifies himself only as Ott is given a solo pass that will let him spend part of a day outside the hospital. He earned the pass by learning to play the game, to say enough without saying too much, to gain the trust of the doctors and nurses who probe him with questions. "The trick is to be chatty yet discreet."

Although Solo Pass is written in the first person, it's not clear that Ott is a reliable narrator. He believes he once visited "a quaint little village" in the Cotswalds, although he may have constructed that memory from photographs in a magazine. He vaguely recalls looking bruised and haggard before he came to the hospital but he doesn't remember why. He is careful not to tell staff his true feelings about Prodski, the therapist who "ruins lives." He wants revenge against Prodski but he dismisses those urges as "the leftover thoughts of a once sick mind." Does that kind of self-awareness suggest that Ott has largely recovered, or is he fooling himself? He wants to be the person he once was, but he can no longer trust his life. Whether others should trust Ott is doubtful.

Ronald De Feo deftly portrays the inner turmoil of his mentally ill protagonist. Ott is just a little off in his conversations with others, a little inappropriate, always guarded, never quite achieving the relaxed, natural interaction of people who have less troubled minds. One of the novel's best scenes involves a conversation Ott has with his uncle, as he desperately tries to underplay his obsession with Prodski and to pass off as humor a reference to the gun he left in his apartment. On his journey into the city, Ott is disoriented; nothing is quite as he remembers it. He tries to choke down his fears, fights to suppress his ill-tempered impulses, but it is obvious that he is torn between the rational and the compulsive. The realism with which Ott is sketched is impressive.

In contrast to the novel's narrator, the supporting characters might be on loan from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They cover the gamut of mental illnesses. Maria is paranoid. Tommy is delusional and hyperactive. Mandy suffers from schizophrenia. Carl stares at the wall. Staff members are insensitive and self-contradictory (at least from Ott's perspective). None of them add much value to the story.

The drama and humor and poignancy that make Cuckoo's Nest so memorable are muted in Solo Pass. That doesn't make it a bad novel, but it isn't as powerful as it could have been, given its subject matter. The first part of the novel, during which Ott is an enigma, is more interesting that the beginning of the second half, which is largely an information dump about Ott's past. The story regains its momentum in the final quarter, as Ott struggles to make his way through the city.

Given the anticipation that mounts as Ott prepares to leave the ward, his actual taste of freedom is anticlimactic. I did, however, appreciate Ott's keen observation in the concluding pages that most people function too well, that they deserve no respect because their lives are too easy. They are untested, "oblivious to everything that could go wrong." That's an interesting way to look at the difference between people who are fortunate to have good brain chemistry and those whose have become unbalanced. Solo Pass reminds us that what happened to Ott could happen to any of us, and that people shouldn't be judged (as they so often are) for being mentally ill.

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Angel's Gate by p.g. sturges

Published by Scribner on February 26, 2013 

Angel's Gate lampoons Hollywood and parodies crime fiction. If you're looking for a serious thriller, look elsewhere. Angel's Gate is more comedy than thriller. It isn't what you'd call deep literature, but it's funny and fast moving and written with an insightful eye for human foibles.

Any good Hollywood story has its share of obnoxious (and wealthy) producers and directors, as well as aspiring actresses who do their best work on their backs. So it is with Angel's Gate. A producer (Melvin Shea) plays the role of part-time pimp and drug dealer, supplying the roguish studio head (Howard Hogue) with cocaine to snort and actresses to shag, including Rhonda Carling. Badly behaving director Eli Navaria is notorious for abusing women. Devi Stanton, a tattoo-covered ex-Marine and current housemother at Ivanhoe Studios (Howard's place), is a less conventional character. She gets into a bit of trouble involving Melvin, Eli, and Rhonda, and needs the sort of cleanup help that only someone like the Shortcut Man can provide.

The novel's second plotline involves Ellen Arden, whose sister hasn't heard from her in years. The Shortcut Man is hired to find her. That plot thread appears early in the novel and then submerges until it resurfaces at the very end. Naturally, the two stories are connected in an unlikely way. The connection is a little too cute but it's not completely outrageous.

The Shortcut Man is Dick Henry, an ex-cop and "freelance opportunist" who specializes in solving problems in unconventional ways. Henry isn't the sort of morally stalwart hero who struggles to make ethical choices, although he occasionally struggles with just how unethical he wants to be. Should be earn a fee by blackmailing a bad guy? He has to think about that one.

Angel's Gate is a satisfying novel in that the bad guys get what's coming to them (more or less), often in ways that are quite fitting. Karma is in the air.

Some of the characters are sexually adventurous. Some are kinky. Some use foul language. If that sort of thing troubles you, this probably isn't the novel (or writer) for you.

At one point, The Shortcut Man compares Charles Bukowski's direct, minimalist writing style to Malcolm Lowry's erudite prose and announces his preference for the former because Bukowski leaves unspoken content between the lines while Lowry puts everything in the lines. I'm not sure p.g. sturges leaves much content between the lines, but he's adopted the "simple and clear" writing style that he attributes to Bukowski and it works for him. His prose is intelligent without being pretentious. The same can be said for the plot. It's light but smart.

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