The Edge by David Baldacci

 

Published by Grand Central Publishing on November 14, 2023

Small town secrets are at the heart of David Baldacci’s latest Travis Devine thriller. I occasionally roll my eyes at all the tough guy trappings in tough guy thrillers, but I give Baldacci credit for telling a plausible and reasonably exciting story that incorporates thrills without the superhuman stunts that mar so many entries in the tough guy subgenre.

Jenny Silkwell was a CIA agent who recently earned high level access to the CIA’s resources. She returned to her hometown in Maine after explaining to her mother that she needed to take care of “unfinished business.” Her trip ended when she was shot in the head. Her body apparently tumbled over a cliff and landed on the rocky shore. An aging widower with mobility problems told the police that he spotted the body while walking in the rain. The police managed to retrieve it before it was washed out to sea.

The reader quickly learns that Jenny’s sister Alex was assaulted fifteen years earlier. Perhaps Jenny’s unfinished business relates to that assault. Alex suffers from situational amnesia that prevents her from identifying her assailant, although she replays the assault in her dreams. Blocking such critical information for fifteen years (even though the attacker’s name is just on the tip of her tongue) is improbable but convenient to the plot. I suppose every thriller is entitled to have one element that strains credibility.

Jenny’s father is hospitalized. He was a military officer turned senator whose friends include Travis Devine’s boss. Devine works for one of those off-the-books clandestine agencies that thriller writers are always inventing. His boss tasks him with investigating Jenny’s death. Devine immediately determines that (1) the story told by the guy who happened upon the body doesn’t make sense, and (2) the police theory about how Jenny was shot isn’t consistent with the trajectory of the bullet that killed her. That the police didn’t take note of these facts means (1) they are incompetent small town cops or (2) they would prefer that the truth not be revealed or (3) both.

Given her job, Jenny might have been killed by foreign adversaries. Devine begins the novel by killing a foreign hit team (apart from a young woman who escapes) and encounters more foreign assassins as the story unfolds, but he suspects that Jenny was killed by locals because of the “unfinished business” she was trying to resolve.

The story follows Devine as he questions nearly everyone in town, many of whom might have something to do with Alex’s assault and/or Jenny’s death and/or a coverup of one or both of those events. Notable characters (who might also be suspects) include the widower who found Jenny’s body, his plucky granddaughter (whose parents died in a mysterious fire), Jenny’s business-minded brother, a couple of local (and one not-so-local) cops, and members of a family that operates the local funeral home, including the town doctor/coroner. More deaths ensue as Devine onducts his investigation.

As is typical of thrillers in this subgenre, Devine does a lot of tough-guysplaining about guns and ammunition and military training. He also explains how to break yourself free from duct tape and zip ties and the best ways to disable an opponent (going for the throat has been a go-to move for a few years now). All of this has been covered in so many tough guy novels that it would be better for characters just to execute their moves rather than wasting words explaining why they’re doing it, but that might shortchange readers who get excited when they read about guns and fighting. Still, most readers don’t need a textbook that covers the basics of being a tough guy. I was more interested in a lobsterman who lobstermansplained the negative impact that global warming is having on lobsters.

Baldacci boosts the word count by recounting Devine’s memories of West Point (where outstanding men learned to do their very best) and his days helping CID investigate crimes (where most of the rape accusations against soldiers proved to be false because warriors are honorable men). Devine’s military boosterism probably plays well with much of the audience for tough guy thrillers, but it becomes a bit wearing, given its disconnect from the real world.

An artistic character opines that most men are sad because they can’t live up to society’s expectations of man as Rambo. That opinion fits nicely within the subgenre’s theme that tough guys are superior to everyone else and puny little girly men all wish they were tough guys.

The story is complex without becoming confusing, although the reader might be challenged to keep track of characters and their relationship to each other. Fortunately, one of the bad guys lives long enough after being shot at the end of the story to give a long-winded confession that explains all the details Devine hadn’t yet deduced. Thank the gods for long-winded confessions that villains love to make at the end of thrillers. Readers would be so confused if they didn’t save the day.

Setting aside my reservations about Baldacci's tough guy and military tropes, I recommend The Edge to thriller fans. Baldacci maintains a good pace, sets up a couple of interesting mysteries, and delivers the action that thrillers require.

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Dalí vol. 1 - Before Gala by Julie Birmant & Clément Oubrerie

First published in France in 2023; published in translation by Europe Comics on October 25, 2023

Dalí is the first installment of a graphic biography of Salvador Dali. It begins with Dali’s childhood and follows him to age 22. The story depicts Dali as a young man who is tormented by grasshoppers. His father wants him to find an occupation that will produce a reliable income but recognizes that his son is too spacy for the business world and eventually basks in the glory of his son’s success.

Before Dali becomes known in the art world, his father sends him to art school in Madrid, hoping his son will at least earn a living by teaching drawing. Deciding that he looks like a sewer rat and hoping to blend in with his new friends, including Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, Dali gets a Rudolph Valentino haircut, changes his wardrobe, and learns to drink cocktails, including one of his own bizarre invention. He still stands out, in part because he is obsessed with female armpits. I don’t know if the armpit kink is true, but the story gives the sense that the reader is getting to know the real Dali.

Dali is expelled when, after being asked to draw a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, he draws a scale (he admires the balance in the sculpture and is told to draw what he sees). He is accused of being a political revolutionary in a turbulent period of Spain’s history, is tossed into jail, and uses his notoriety to score a show with a gallery in Barcelona. He isn’t gay but he has sex with Lorca by proxy when he shags a woman who Lorca chooses for him.

Dali earns more shows and becomes an artistic hit in Catalonia, although Julie Birmant & Clément Oubrerie do not try to reproduce Dali’s work. The reader will need to look elsewhere to get a sense of Dali’s early style.

Buñuel is introduced to surrealism in Paris. During a visit to Catalonia, Buñuel introduces surrealism to Dali.

When Dali finally visits Paris, he flees from a bordello after seeing the women as praying mantises who want to devour him. I appreciated the graphic renderings of Dali’s nightmares and fantasies. Dali also discovers that random Parisian women will not satisfy his requests to display their armpits.

Dali clearly lived an interesting life. So far, Birmant and Oubrerie appear to be doing it justice in an abbreviated fashion, although I can’t say that I know much about Dali or art in general. The graphic style of Dalí is similar to the style of most graphic stories. When Dali visits an art museum and admires Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the painting is rendered more as a blur than a reproduction of the original, although a greater effort is made to showcase a small portion that captures Dali’s attention. I’m a bit surprised that the first installment of a graphic series about Dali doesn’t focus more on Dali’s early work — it barely gives a sense of the art that earned so much praise — but the volume has value as an introduction to Dali the man, if not Dali the artist.

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Notes on a Murder by B.P. Walter

Published by HarperCollins UK, One More Chapter on November 23, 2023

The reader learns two important facts in the early pages of Notes on a Murder. First, twenty years earlier, Oliver drugged a man, rolled his body into a rug, and dumped him into the sea. Second, the man is alive.

In the present, while Oliver is at a wellness center taking a break from his pill addiction, Oliver sees Aaistair, the man he thought he murdered. Intercut with scenes from the present, Oliver narrates a backstory that explains his relationship with Alastair. Oliver is telling this story to Alastair, which seems odd to me since Alastair doesn’t need to be told things he already knows. “It turned out that you were an orphan,” Oliver says. Alastair knows he’s an orphan. Why is Oliver telling him that? Making Alastair the audience of Oliver’s narration struck me as a poor choice.

Oliver met Alastair in Greece, where Oliver was spending the summer with his parents and brother. Alastair picked up Oliver at a bar and they went off to Alastair’s hostel to have sex. Over the course of the summer, Oliver falls in love with Alastair and begins to plan a life with him. Alastair professes similar feelings in a casual way that suggests Alastair is merely having a summer fling.

Oliver might be into Alastair because they are so much alike — both intelligent, handsome blondes who have similar interests. When Alastair suggests that Oliver is essentially having sex with himself, he may be revealing the truth of Oliver’s narcissistic personality.

Oliver and his brother Douglas were concerned that their father was behaving strangely during their stay in Greece. They happened upon their father while he was having a business lunch with Argento and Nita, Argento’s hired companion. Oliver’s father was always secretive about his business dealings and was unhappy that his sons saw him with Argento. We eventually see a snippet of Argento’s relationship with Oliver’s father, but B.P. Walter frustrates the reader by failing to explain how, and to what extent, Oliver’s father was mixed up with Argento.

Douglas is quite taken with Nita when she brings his family a fruit basket. When Oliver and Alastair run into Argento on the beach, he invites them to visit him for dinner at his villa on a nearby island. They make return visits, sometimes with Douglas in tow, fueling Douglas'desire to shag Nita, a desire that is heightened by her habit of swimming in the nude.

Oliver witnesses a murder during his first visit. On repeated visits, he realizes that Argento is a serial killer who believes his victims deserve to die. As the story progresses, Oliver and Alastair each become witnesses to more deaths. Argento works to transform the young men, to persuade them to kill as he has, to take justice into their own hands.

Notes on a Murder is an interesting story told in fluid prose. My inability to buy into the premise prevents me from giving it a full recommendation. The ease with which Oliver decides that murder is justified, simply because Argento tells him that his victims were horrible people (sometimes supported by video evidence), might explain why Oliver felt justified in making his unsuccessful attempt to kill Alastair, but their prompt bonding after Alastair returns from the dead struck me as unlikely.

Argento’s willingness to let strangers in on his secret hobby is beyond unlikely. Walter offers no satisfactory explanation of Alastair’s ability to get away with serial killings. The novel’s ending is no more probable than the plot that precedes it. And since no significant character has any moral compass, I found it difficult to care about the decisions they made. While well written and interesting, the story has too many weaknesses to earn a full recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Day by Michael Cunningham

Published by Random House on November 14, 2023

Day is a novel of family drama and personal failures. Characters behave selfishly, a common trait that commonly destroys relationships. The story takes place at the height of the pandemic. Ambulances race down Brooklyn streets as sirens interrupt conversations. The children of two key characters live in fear of opening a window. The virus will have a significant impact on their family before the novel ends, for which the kids will blame themselves.

Robbie Byrne can’t find an affordable apartment in New York City on the salary he earns as a sixth-grade teacher. His sister Isabel owns a Brooklyn brownstone and he’s been renting the attic rooms from her. Isabel’s son and daughter are growing too old to share a bedroom, so Robbie needs to find a new place to live. Isabel’s husband Dan will miss his daily presence. Robbie and Dan are attracted to each other, although only Robbie is openly gay.

Robbie and Isabel have invented a fellow named Wolfe who chronicles his life on Instagram, adding life-affirming captions to pictures of nature or cabins that Wolfe might want to buy, to the delight of followers who presumably believe in his corporeal existence. Wolfe sometimes posts pictures that were clearly taken in a different season, but his followers don’t seem to notice or care. Such is Instagram. This is one of the novel’s more interesting inventions, although I think it might have been plumbed in greater depth.

As Robbie packs and discards his belongings, he is reminded of his past. Michael Cunningham uses that device to acquaint the reader with Robbie’s backstory: a photo of a college lover who was going through a “gay phase”; a scarf gifted by an older lover; acceptance letters into medical schools that Robbie decided not to attend. A boarding pass reminds him of a death. Everything reminds him of Adam.

Dan is a musician who had the usual rock star problems without the success of being a rock star. He played in bars but never had much of a following. By going to rehab and becoming a househusband, Dan transformed himself into “an affable, harmless man.” Isabel appreciates the change but no longer finds him interesting. That seems ridiculously unfair to Dan but relationships are often characterized by unfair judgments. When does it become too late to save a marriage that has never been terrible? Isobel isn’t sure of the answer even as she comes to suspect the marriage has already failed.

To his credit, Dan does not allow Isabel’s negativity to prevent him from writing songs again. He posts them online while dreaming of a comeback. Robbie is the only person in the household who listens to his music with approval.

Dan and Isabel have two children. Violet believes she sees ghosts (or shadows representing spirits). Perhaps she does. Perhaps she confuses imagination with reality. Violet acts as a reminder that the deaths of relatives are experienced as a family, not just as individual losses. Ultimately, the presence of a little girl who sees dead people detracts from the story more than it adds insight. And honestly, I’m just annoyed by child characters who say things, even unwittingly, that demonstrate wisdom beyond their years. Still, I appreciated Violet's insistence on wearing a yellow dress that no longer fits, despite her mother's belief that yellow just isn't her color, because it was a gift from a character who is no longer living.

Dan’s brother Garth is a sculptor who can’t get his work into a gallery. Garth has a baby with Chess Mullins. Chess teaches literature to snobby students who argue that classics written by white people aren’t worth reading. Chess doesn’t want a man in her life and regards herself as the baby’s only parent. Chess wants Garth to be “mildly fatherly” two days a week but otherwise to mind his own business. Whether they love each other is a question to which neither can supply a satisfying answer.

Garth is a bit needy and Chess is a bit cruel to him. She believes cruelty is necessary because “Garth, like most men, can only deposit his needs at her feet” and ask what she’s going to do about them. Ouch! She believes Garth means well but isn’t up to the task of being a father. Her judgment seems unfair since she’s given him no chance to be a father. In the novel’s late stages, however, Garth’s greatest need is to be a father. He feels “a low howl of loss,” a sense of being diminished, as Chess’ actions make it increasingly difficult for him to be more meaningful than a visiting uncle in his son’s life.

All of this adds up to a typical domestic drama, albeit one that benefits from unusually strong prose. The story makes abrupt transitions, moving to a different place and time as if Cunningham decided “that’s all you need to know about this chapter in the characters’ lives, now it’s time to move on.” I suppose most novels do that, but the transitions seem unusually jarring in Day. By the middle of the novel, Robbie is suddenly in Iceland while everyone in New York is sheltering in their homes. How or why he ended up there is a bit of a mystery. In the next chapter, off-scene pandemic events have made permanent changes to the Byrne family. The transition has caused an attitudinal change in Isabel’s children and in adult characters who “can’t embrace the world the way we once did.”

As is the custom with family dramas, the novel ends with the characters pondering their futures. Most of them have survived the pandemic and their relationship turmoil. The point seems to be that life goes on for everyone who doesn’t die.

I appreciated the fullness of the characters’ creation. I can’t say that I was all that interested in how their lives might progress or that I was sad to reach the book’s end. Still, the characters and their attempts to cope with failure are interesting and their stories are told in confident prose. That’s enough to earn a mild recommendation, or perhaps a stronger one for devoted fans of domestic drama.

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Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

First published in the UK in 2021; published by Scribner on November 14, 2023

Alan Garner has a long history of incorporating mythology into his stories. Garner draws on those roots and more modern sources, including a World War II era comic book, to conjure a delightful story about an aging man who might be the modern version of a wizard and a young boy who might become his successor.

Treacle sells rags and bones (ragbone) from his pony cart. Joe Coppock trades his old pajamas and a lamb’s shoulder blade for the opportunity to pick anything from Treacle’s treasure chest. He picks an old pot that seems to be the only treasure with no value. Treacle also gives Joe a stone.

Treacle tells Joe that he makes people better: “I heal all things; save jealousy.” Joe wears a patch over his good eye to force his lazy eye to become more industrious. Following Treacle’s directions, Joe dips the stone in water and his name appears in silver letters. Soon he finds that his vision has changed. His lazy eye is still lazy but each eye gives him different view. One perceives the world as Joe believes it to be while the other sees things (and people) Joe cannot otherwise see. The differing views place Joe in a “flustication” (apparently, a state of confused excitement that is similar to intoxication).

When Joe gets lost in a bog, he meets Thin Amren, who needs to live in the bog so he won’t dry out. When he sleeps, Thin Amren dreams existence into reality. Joe is only lost because he hasn’t learned how to separate the realities he sees through each eye. Thin Amren explains that Joe is gifted with the glamourie. When he sees through his good eye, he can easily spot his house; when he uses the lazy eye, the bog is everywhere. Perhaps the lazy eye allows him to see into the distant past or the far future or both at once.

The other notable characters come to life from the 1940s UK comic Knockout, including Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit. The story hints at Wonderland as Joe runs through mirrors. Joe’s adventures also reminded me of Little Nemo in Slumberland in their dependence on dream logic.

The story might be read as a coming-of-age novel, in that Joe comes to realize that his life has changed and that change should be embraced, not feared. When Joe abandons his old life at the novel's end (his parents are never in sight so he gives no thought to missing them), he seems to be riding off to meet his destiny.

Fans of playful language might want to put Treacle Walker on top of their reading lists. Treacle uses words that don’t seem quite real to my American ear, although they mostly are. In British slang, “taradiddle” means a petty lie or pretentious nonsense. “Macaronics” refers to words from one language used in the context of a different language. “Nomines” seems to be a Yorkshire word for “children’s chants.” Garner uses “hurlothrumbo” as a reference to the supernatural (the word derives from a “nonsense play” of the same name that Samuel Johnson published in 1729). Unless you have an unusually extensive vocabulary and knowledge of British culture, you should keep Google handy to enjoy the full meaning of Treacle’s diatribes. I also love his description of a hammock as “a lot of holes tied with string.”

During his long life, Garner has written books for children and adults. Children would probably enjoy Treacle Walker — they might identify with Joe when he sobs “I’m only little, I’m only little” — but this is a novel for grownups who haven’t lost their wonder at the world. The novel is short and, in its brevity, confounds the reader with more ideas than most authors can manage in a trilogy. While I’m not sure the ideas entirely make sense to reality-grounded adults, I’m recommending the book for its inventive prose and for a story that will make perfect sense to children and to adults who recall how the power of imagination helps children make sense of the world around them.

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