Gray Matter by Shirley Kinnett

First published in 1996; published digitally by Open Road Media on October 30, 2012 

Gray Matter was first published in 1996, and like any story more than a couple of years old that depends upon computer technology, it seems dated. More problematic is that the lackluster story is too ordinary to stand out in the field of crime fiction.

The first chapter introduces a deranged killer named Dog -- that, at least, is the name used by one of his multiple personalities -- who believes he can acquire skills by eating the brains of people who possess those skills. The next chapter introduces Penelope "PJ" Gray, a psychologist newly hired by the St. Louis Police Department to lead the Computerized Homicide Investigations Project (which, despite the name, does not investigate computerized homicides). In addition to being a psychologist, PJ designs virtual reality software. She seems to think crimes can be solved by "recreating" them (i.e., speculating about how they occurred) using computer simulations. PJ is thrust into a homicide investigation on her first day on the job, alongside a washed-up detective named Leo Schultz who hasn't had a field assignment in years. Schultz doesn't understand how "all this cartoon stuff" will help solve the crime, making Schultz smarter than PJ. The cartoon stuff doesn't actually help them solve the crime, which made me wonder why it is the primary focus of the novel.

PJ is so busy trying to solve Dog's murders by playing with cartoons on her computer that she ignores obvious clues to the killer's identity. Schultz is just as inept. When PJ isn't playing with her computer, she and Shultz are too busy yammering about their tedious, unfulfilled lives to notice that the killer is right in front of them.

PJ's skill as a computer programmer struck me as unlikely but within the realm of possibility until she boasted of giving her program an "artificial intelligence" component that allowed it to "use its imagination" by filling in unknown events at the crime scene. If she could do that, she'd be teaching at MIT, not dogging away at a low rent job with the St. Louis Police Department.

Shirley Kennett's writing style is capable; it is the content that needs work. Some of the narrative is silly, like her description of a pickup truck as "red and arrogant and threatening, like the engorged penis of a rapist." Kennett seems a bit obsessed with penises; they are frequently in the thoughts of her characters.

The mundane background of PJ's life (divorced from cheating husband, sullen son who blames her for the divorce) shapes her lumpy personality. She spends much of the novel giving herself pity parties that I had no desire to attend. There's a touch of chick lit as PJ ponders the relationship potential of every man who ventures within her radar. PJ and Schultz both have troubled relationships with their sons that add nothing of interest to the story

The relationship between PJ and Schultz is filled with friction, but it all seems forced, in part because their exchange of dialog is so often unrealistic. Much of their bickering is gratuitous, clearly intended to give PJ a chance to show that she's a strong woman in a man's world. There would be nothing wrong with using that as a hook to establish PJ's personality if it were handled in a less contrived manner. Schultz's misogynistic nature is so outsized that he isn't credible. Schultz eventually gives a little speech about how police work sometimes makes him feel like he's lost a piece of his humanity -- a speech that is completely out of character and wholly unbelievable, inserted solely to generate sympathy for a character who is otherwise a bozo.

Notwithstanding the book's many flaws, the story has its virtues. It moves quickly and the concluding scenes create a modest amount of tension. Still, the ending is predictable and the book as a whole never shines.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Debris Dreams by David Colby

Published by Candlemark & Gleam on November 13, 2012 

If you read military science fiction, you've read Debris Dreams many times before. A cadet rather improbably becomes a leader and war hero within a short time, all the while questioning her courage and ability. While Debris Dreams isn't a bad attempt at a science fiction novel, the writing occasionally comes across as amateurish, the plot is formulaic, and the characters are underdeveloped. For the most part, David Colby's writing style is competent and the environment in which the story unfolds is carefully considered, but there is little in Debris Dreams that will engage the imagination of a veteran sf reader.

The Lunar Separatist Movement destroys the space elevator, killing Drusilla Xao's parents, stranding her on a space station, and dampening Dru's relationship with a girl on Earth named Sarah. The Chinese-American Alliance responds with a declaration of war against the LSM. This causes Dru to be conscripted into the Space Marines, which leads to standard scenes of military training led by a bullying drill sergeant, as well as discussions of strategy and tactics that are somewhat reminiscent of (if considerably less compelling than) those in Ender's Game. Training is followed by the first mission, giving Dru a chance to face her fears and be heroic. The war involves CAA forces and LSM forces shooting at each other through a debris field, unless you count Texas, which seems to be at war with the rest of America (as always).

Dru is an inexperienced lipstick lesbian who has a lipstick lesbian girlfriend on Earth, although they have never met in person. This gives Dru an excuse to compose anguished emails that Colby probably hoped would flesh out Dru's personality while creating an opportunity for the kind of expository writing that fills in background. Dru (or perhaps Colby) has a sophomoric obsession with sex, particularly of the lesbian variety. When a team member dies, Dru mentally composes his memorial, beginning with "He never turned down sex." That just makes him a teenage boy, not a hero, but sex seems to be all Dru can think about, perhaps because she never has any. Other than her sex-obsessed thoughts, however, there's nothing interesting or unique about Dru: she's the standard reluctant hero, thrust into a world she never made. The other characters have no personality at all.

The most interesting aspect of the plot focuses on a moral dilemma involving a potential war crime. It didn't strike me as much of a dilemma (or much of a crime), and the likelihood of the General who orders it thinking he could get away with it (and thus actually issuing the order) is nil. Dru's response to the illegal order is ridiculously self-righteous, but she's a teen and teens are always getting self-righteous so that, at least, rang true. Also interesting is the notion of the debris field, based on the Kessler Syndrome. Using the debris field as a backdrop is the story's most original touch. The rest of the novel tends to be standard (and unconvincing) military sf. The battle scenes are all pretty much alike; none are so powerfully written as to convey the adrenalin-rush of true combat. Maybe military sf junkies will get a kick out of Debris Dreams and find value in its carefully developed setting, but the absence of compelling characters and sharper writing prevent me from recommending it to most sf fans.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Political Suicide by Michael Palmer

Published by St. Martin's Press on December 11, 2012 

Michael Palmer writes medical/political thrillers. While the world of medicine offers ample opportunity for drama, Palmer makes the puzzling choice to focus the plot of Political Suicide on secret military missions in which medicine (or, more aptly, chemistry) plays only a tangential role. Since the plot is derivative, far-fetched, and well removed from what Palmer does best, Political Suicide is one of his lesser works.

The prologue describes three marines on a suicide mission in Afghanistan. The main story shifts from 2003 to the present, where marines from the same unit (Mantis) are preparing for something called Operation Talon.

Most of the novel, of course, centers on the hero of the series, Dr. Lou Welcome. Gary McHugh, the favored physician of D.C. celebrities and politicians, has been having an affair with a congressman's wife. The last time he visited the congressman's house, he discovered the congressman's dead body, the victim of an execution. Knowing he is about to be arrested for murder, he asks his friend Welcome for help. The Mantis story connects to McHugh's when we learn that one of the congressman's sons was a marine who died in Afghanistan.

Welcome and McHugh's feisty lawyer, Sarah Cooper, both want to help McHugh, leading to an inevitable clash of personalities and, inevitably if unconvincingly, to romance. Welcome's efforts to uncover the truth about the congressman's death are frustrated by highly placed military and government officials who want to keep it buried -- and who try to assure that Welcome is buried.

For the sake of enjoying the story, I was willing to accept that Welcome repeatedly avoids capture and death when he's being stalked by military commandos, armed desperadoes, and an attack dog. Other aspects of the plot are more troubling. It makes no sense that Welcome and his friends would take it upon themselves to stop Operation Talon, once they know the truth about it, rather than blowing the whistle and letting the authorities deal with it. The pharmaceutical foundation of Operation Talon is familiar ground, well-plowed by other thriller writers. The operational aspect, on the other hand, is just plain silly. I can accept a certain amount of silliness for the sake of a good thriller, but the notion that an elite military unit could plan and train for a mission like Operation Talon without whistles being blown is preposterous. The truth would certainly come out after the fact, if not before, and its career-ending nature would dissuade its creators from ever implementing the scheme.

Dr. Welcome works part-time for the Physicians Wellness Office, helping doctors with alcohol or drug addictions earn reinstatement of their licenses. Readers of Oath of Ofice will be familiar with Welcome's recovery mantra and with his disapproval of his boss' belief that all addicted doctors should engage in extensive psychotherapy. There is little need to cover that ground again, but Michael Palmer seems inclined to use his novels to deliver a message -- over and over -- whether or not it advances the plot. His proselytizing for AA becomes wearisome, and Welcome's frequent mentions of his successful struggle with addiction come across as self-aggrandizing smugness. Fortunately, Palmer set aside the lectures in the novel's second half.

I give Palmer credit for giving the plot an unexpected twist at the end and for keeping the story moving at a brisk pace. He is a capable writer and the novel is an easy read. If he writes another Lou Welcome novel, however, I hope he focuses on the drama of medicine and avoids improbable, overworked thriller plots.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches

Published by Little, Brown and Company on December 4, 2012

Me and the Devil will never be mistaken for Twilight, despite the protagonist's craving for blood. In fact, my impression is that Nick Tosches wrote this as the Twilight antidote. He is (the novel makes clear) anguished that readers prefer fluff to Faulkner, that reading and literacy are dying and that the writing racket is "only a vestigial withering on the much bigger dying racket of conglomerated business itself." Still, writing a transgressive novel that many readers are likely to hate seems an odd way to protest the shelf space that bookstores give to Stephenie Meyer. By creating such an unlikable blood-drinking protagonist (even if it is the author's alter-ego), it is as if Tosches is daring readers not to buy his novel, a protest strategy that seems self-defeating. Of course, Tosches isn't the first writer to express his frustration by howling at the moon, and this is at least an interesting howl.

"We were all monkeys about to die" is the lesson drawn from life by Nick, a writer who has stopped writing, an opium-craving alcoholic who has stopped feeling, haunted by the memories of the dead monkeys he saw while serving in the Korean DMZ. Once consumed by "the combustions of sensuality," he can "no longer bear a human touch without recoiling." Only after he tastes Sandrine's blood is he awakened to the promise of a new life. In this new life, instead of biting women on the neck like a conventional vampire, he bites their thighs. The taste of blood invigorates him, stimulates his appetite for a flavor-filled life. The newly energized Nick meets a much younger woman who is aroused by the biting, even after he severs her femoral artery, and another who prefers to shed blood while being whipped. Nick's sexual encounters are quite graphic, so be warned if you are sensitive to foul language and sexual violence.

Nick believes that his blood consumption is turning him into a god, but "a god most strange." Nick has blackouts and wakes up with blood on his knife and learns that people are dead and wonders whether he killed them, although that plot thread gets lost until the novel nears its conclusion. Eventually Nick meets the devil, a gentleman of refined taste who has a thing for Sea Island cotton, another plot thread that dies a quick death. Or perhaps all of this is in Nick's head, a vehicle for self-exploration. If Nick learns anything from his experiences, it is that denying or seeking escape from his dark nature would be a form of self-betrayal.

Tosches' fine prose seems, oddly enough, too fine to waste on the story of quasi-vampirism that drives much of the novel. The plot comes across as an excuse for Tosches to sharpen his claws by using the world as his scratching post. Tosches writes beautifully about "scurrying submissives" enslaved to the workplace, "the jogging dead" toiling to serve the masters of finance. His (pardon the expression) biting observations of vacuous consumers and their trendy snobbishness reminded me of Brett Easton Ellis with meatier prose. Still, Tosches' meditations on the nature of language and thought and religion and addiction and art and Greek mythology and bookstores and Heraclitus and AA meetings too often seem disconnected from whatever story Tosches is trying to tell. The reader will learn interesting things about the drug baclofen (a potential cure for alcoholism) and word origins and the history of nylon stockings and the novels of Hermann Hesse and Japanese knives, but those informative interludes do nothing to advance the plot. And if it's possible to make kinky sex dull, flowery prose is the way to do it.

When a novelist makes himself the main character (how very modern!) and mentions his friends in the text (Johnny Depp) or even includes them as characters (Keith Richards), there's a self-indulgence at work that I find vexing. I'm also put off by the self-pitying nature of Nick's complaints that writers are tortured by their inability "to say what cannot be said" and are underpaid to boot (this from a character who drops a grand on bottles of champagne he doesn't finish and lives in a million dollar house). In the end, I liked Me and the Devil for its prose and for the jumble of ideas it explores, but the novel is ultimately so bleak and anguished and unbalanced that I don't think I could bring myself to read it twice. "The mind is a lugubrious, malfunctioning instrument of self-torment, fear and ghosts" and "Brilliance and beauty are but the flames of the mind that demolishes itself, the fear of arson in the junkyard" are finely crafted sentences, but they make me want to ask my doctor for an anti-depressant. Nick's eventual realizations that "no one has power over me" and "the day belongs to me" are sunnier (if a bit narcissistic), but they are offset by his conclusion that he is "free but lost." I wouldn't recommend this to readers looking for an upbeat read, but for fans of the transgressive novel, Toshes' often spellbinding prose makes Me and the Devil worthwhile, despite the novel's flaws. 

RECOMMENDED

Dark Passage by David Goodis

First published in 1946

Despite his innocence, a man named Vincent Parry is convicted of murdering his wife. His fate is sealed by Madge Rapf, the woman who scorned him after he rejected her, who testifies that Parry's wife identified Parry as her killer with her dying breath. Parry escapes from San Quentin but only evades the police with the help of a stranger named Irene Janney, a mysterious woman who seems to know all about Parry and who claims to believe in his innocence. Yet much to Parry's consternation, Janney also seems to have a connection to Rapf.  Not knowing who to trust, Parry seeks out the help of his best friend, but nothing comes easily for Parry. Another murder occurs and Parry is blamed. If Parry isn't the killer, who is? Before he can find out, he becomes the victim of a blackmail scheme.

Improbable events are a constant in Parry's life from the moment he leaves San Quentin. His life seems filled with coincidence yet he knows there is a limit to coincidence. "Maybe there's a certain arrangement to things," Parry says as the novel nears its end, just after he pieces the puzzle together, "and even if it takes a long time it finally has to work itself out." Parry is talking about fate but he might as well be talking about the plot. By the end of the novel, the reader realizes that David Goodis has spun an intricate story that, except in some minor respects, isn't dependent upon coincidence. The story passes the credibility test at every turn, and there are plenty of turns. The solution to the whodunit isn't surprising, but neither is it strained, as is so often true of modern mysteries. Was I convinced that the motivations advanced in the novel would have actually resulted in the murders? Not entirely, but people behave in surprising ways, so I'm willing to give Goodis the benefit of the doubt.

Goodis uses straightforward prose and a variety of styles to tell the story. The novel has a seductive rhythm. Words and phrases are repeated throughout the text. Colors swirl through the narrative -- yellow hair, a yellow robe, the hot yellow sun. The color orange becomes an important clue to a killer's identity. At one point Parry has a surrealistic conversation with a corpse. One of the novel's best passages alternates Parry's fantasies about living in Peru with his inescapable thoughts about the murders. During action scenes, particularly life-and-death struggles, Goodis uses run-on sentences to convey the urgency of the situation and Parry's inability to pause for thought. Reading the newspaper triggers stream of consciousness memories of Parry's married life. Other parts of the novel contrast the mundane lives surrounding Parry with Parry's extraordinary life. And every now and then Goodis writes something wonderful, like "She had eyes the color of an old telegraph pole."

The detailed descriptions of the characters and their actions -- a panicky woman squeezes a chocolate candy until "butter cream came gushing out between her fingers," a mess she can't wipe clean without making a bigger mess -- make Dark Passage more notable for its psychological portraits than for its plot. The ending, however, is pure noir, and a fitting conclusion to the dark story.

RECOMMENDED