The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

Published by Unbridled Books on May 1, 2012

Returning to his hometown in Florida to report a story despite his susceptibility to heatstroke, journalist Gavin Sasaki learns from his sister Eileen that a ten-year-old girl, Chloe Montgomery, may be his daughter. Chloe looks like a younger Eileen and has the last name of Gavin's former girlfriend. Gavin hasn't seen Anna Montgomery since she dropped out of high school, when Gavin was in a jazz quartet with Anna's sister, Sasha. Rattled by the discovery and under the gun to produce good stories or perish in the next round of newsroom layoffs, Gavin begins to play roulette with his career by fabricating sources and quotations.

Meanwhile, a third member of Gavin's former jazz combo, Daniel Smith, is in Utah negotiating with a meth dealer to pay a large debt. Daniel is now a Florida cop. The novel's opening scene lets the reader know that the debt is somehow related to Anna, but its exact nature remains a mystery until much of the story has been told. The final member, piano and sax player Jack Baranovsky, is still in Florida, making a contribution to the story as a pill addict who knows more about Anna's situation -- and his own involvement in it -- than he's prepared to tell Gavin.

Why is Anna on the run? Why does everyone but Gavin seem to know that she was pregnant when she left school? Why is her baby turning up in Florida ten years later? How does acclaimed jazz guitarist Liam Deval fit into Anna's plight? These are the absorbing questions that kept me reading. The novel fills in the backstory as it progresses. Eventually the pieces fit together tightly, leaving the reader to worry about the present danger that occupies the last third of the novel.

Unlike many modern stories of suspense, The Lola Quartet doesn't stretch the bounds of credibility with an outlandish plot. Everything that happens seems real, and that credibility heightens the novel's tension. The characters are equally realistic: they gamble, they use drugs, they ignore inconvenient truths, they betray friends. Their well-developed personalities, complete with failings and flaws, add to the story's authenticity.

The novel's fault is that it builds toward a climax that seems anti-climactic. The real action occurs offstage, perhaps because it is too predictable to make it worth describing. A bit of added drama near the end focuses on a character who has played a minor role until that point; it seems oddly out of place. On the other hand, I wouldn't categorize this novel as a traditional thriller. It is more a story of guilty secrets, of relationships that evolved over time, a novel of characters who are overtaken by events they feel powerless to control. Still, the storyline wraps up too neatly. Given the hardships the characters have endured, it is difficult to accept that their lives work out so well by the end of the novel. The characters are not unscarred, their lives do not suddenly become idyllic, but -- despite Gavin's hand-wringing and moralizing at the end -- the characters resolve their problems more easily than I would have expected.

Despite my mild disappointment with the novel's ending, I admired the characterizations and enjoyed Emily St. John Mandel's fluid writing. The Lola Quartet isn't everything it tries to be but it is nonetheless an entertaining, well-written story.

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Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

First serialized in Russian in 1971; published in tarnslation by Chicago Review Press on May 1, 2012

Soviet science fiction tended to be dark and surreal and ironic, a response to the oppressive environment in which it was born. Roadside Picnic, written by the Strugastky brothers in 1971, is no exception.

When aliens visited Earth, stopping briefly for (some speculate) a roadside picnic, they left their detritus behind in an area now known as the Zone. Surrounded by a wall and guarded by police, the Zone is accessible only to scientists and other employees of the Institute, including the explorers for alien artifacts who have been dubbed stalkers. A stalker who enters the Zone looking for alien treasure -- either as an employee of the Institute or to smuggle out items at night -- is always at risk: pockets of accelerated gravity, hell slime, and death lamps pose a constant threat. Apart from causing mutations in stalkers and their children, contact with the Zone leads to other anomalies, including animated corpses and -- for those who move away -- a tendency to attract accidents and natural disasters.

Red Schuhart is a stalker until, having seen enough friends die, he quits. After fathering a furry daughter, Schuhart returns to his old ways, dodging the police outside the Zone and death inside. He knows that stalkers who continue to push their luck end up dead, but when a final prize is dangled before him -- the mythical Golden Sphere that is said to grant wishes -- Schuhart cannot resist one last journey into the Zone.

Why does Schuhart risk his life as a stalker? Because self-reliance is all that has ever saved him from oblivion. He has always wanted to be his own boss, free from the slavery he associates with reporting to an employer. He considers himself an animal, riffraff, but he has never sold his soul, and that is the source of his strength. Perhaps the Zone represents the black market -- the illegal and dangerous entrepreneurship, full of hidden hazards -- that was often the only path to upward mobility in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the Institute that seeks to control the artifacts removed from the Zone represents the Soviet government and its belief that power should reside in a central authority. Or perhaps this is just a good, apolitical story that happens to have been authored by Soviet writers. The novel's last words are unmistakably political, but they can also be read as a manifesto in support of intellectual freedom.

Roadside Picnic contains some interesting (but far from original) conversations about the nature of intelligence. It ends on a similar note, as Schuhart ponders his own intelligence, his own humanity, almost challenging the departed aliens to understand what it means to be human. Roadside Picnic is a philosophical novel as much as it is an action story, and it therefore isn't surprising that the ending is ambiguous, albeit powerful. This is a seminal work of Soviet science fiction, but it has much to offer sf fans the world over.

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Getaway by Lisa Brackmann

Published by Soho Press on May 1, 2012

On vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Michelle has a few margaritas and takes a good-looking guy named Daniel to bed.  Later that night, two men climb through her window and smack Daniel in the head with the butt of a pistol.  When Michelle later tracks down Daniel, she discovers the head of a pig, covered in flies, on his coffee table.  Things go downhill for Michelle from there.  Someone plants drugs in her purse.  Her passport is missing.  And Gary, the charming American who gets her out of jail, seems to know everything about her -- and wants her to keep an eye on Daniel, a request she is in no position to refuse.

Who is Daniel?  Responding to Gary’s threats and inducements, Michelle tries to find out more about the charming but cagey charter pilot.  But who is Gary?  The most interesting aspect of the novel is Michelle’s confusion.  She learns that dangerous people are looking for Daniel -- the kind of people who leave bodies in their wake -- but she doesn’t know whether that makes Daniel a good guy or a bad guy.  Nor does she know whether Gary is one of the dangerous people.  She wants to trust Daniel because he makes her feel good in bed, but all the evidence suggests he’s a drug smuggler or worse.  The inability to decide whether she should trust Daniel or Gary, or neither of them, leaves Michelle feeling helpless, a pawn in a game she doesn’t understand.  Empathy for Michelle sustains the novel’s dramatic tension, although her helplessness eventually becomes Getaway’s most significant problem.

While Getaway is a reasonably effective thriller, it isn’t as strong as it might have been.  Despite the growing body count that surrounds Michelle, I never felt the sense of apprehension that the best thrillers deliver.  I think the problem lies in Lisa Brackmann’s construction of the main character.  Michelle is timid, dependent, remarkably uninformed about world events, and prone to making bad decisions -- the antithesis of characters like Lisbeth Salander or Vanessa Michael Munroe.  I felt a growing sense of annoyance at her inability to take control of her situation.  The wait for Michelle to show some initiative and exhibit her resourcefulness is a long one.  I was also disappointed by an ending that holds no real surprises.

Brackmann writes punchy sentences and short paragraphs, a technique that contributes to the novel’s quick pace.  Her prose style is plain but effective.  Getaway isn’t a bad reading experience -- it’s the sort of book that would make time pass quickly on an airplane -- but I wouldn’t expect it to make anyone’s list of the year’s best thrillers. 

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Midnight in Peking by Paul French

Published by Penguin on April 24, 2012

The mutilated corpse of a foreigner found at the base of Fox Tower on January 8, 1937 posed a special problem for Peking police. The victim was a free-spirited young woman named Pamela Werner. When Pamela wasn't attending school in Tientsin, she lived in Peking with her adoptive father, Edward Werner, a scholar and former British consul. She had been beaten to death and then dumped at Fox Tower. Multiple wounds were inflicted post-mortem in an apparent attempt to dismember the body. Sections of her skin and some of her organs had been removed.

The task of investigating the crime fell to Han Shih-ching, with the assistance of Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, who headed the police in the British Concession in Tientsin. Dennis delved into Edward Werner's troubled past, learning of the problems he caused in his various diplomatic postings before he got sacked, a history suggestive of mental instability. Gossip -- the favorite sport of the expat community -- suggested that death and tragedy were Werner's constant companions, including the suspicious death of his wife.

A little more than a third of the narrative has passed by before a promising suspect emerges, but if solving the crime were that easy there would be no story to tell -- at least not a story filled with drama and intrigue. Fortunately for the reader (less so for Han and Dennis), the British government increased its efforts to impede Dennis' investigation, suggesting that a cover-up, if not a full-blown conspiracy, was afoot. Brits Behaving Badly becomes a subtext, as does the concept of "saving face," a characteristic often associated with Asians but quite applicable to the British living and working in China. Racial bigotry also played a role in the British government's insistence that the investigation should focus on Chinese rather than foreign residents.

The investigation took place as Peking prepared for invasion by the Japanese. As in any complex investigation, Dennis and Han pursued a number of false leads. The investigation brought them into contact with foreign residents of Peking who indulged in (to put it delicately) unusual recreational activities, suspicious but not necessarily related to Pamela's murder.

A little more than halfway through the narrative, Dennis finally receives information that provides a credible solution to the mystery while pointing to a suspect who is beyond the law's reach. At that point, however, Peking is virtually under siege by the Japanese and Pamela's disappearance is all but forgotten. Dennis is recalled to Tientsin, the official investigation is closed, and it falls to Werner to use his own resources to discover the truth about his daughter's death. He pursues that goal relentlessly over the course of several years.

Midnight in Peking reads like a well-paced murder mystery, but it is ultimately a tale of corruption, not just within the Peking police but, more startlingly, within the British government, whose officials valued the façade of British civility more than the truth. The narrative proceeds at a steady pace and is enlivened by insightful examinations of the principle players. Paul French provides the reader with enough background facts to add flavor but not so many as to bog down the narrative in needless detail. The text is well-documented in a series of endnotes. It seems likely that, for the sake of good story telling, French re-creates some scenes and conversations in greater detail than the historical record allows, but the book suggests no reason to believe that he has plays fast and loose with historical fact. His attempt to tie the "fox spirit" into the story -- representing a woman who beguiles and betrays -- is colorful but a bit weak. Still, Midnight in Peking is a fascinating look at a forgotten moment in a distant land, an unsolved murder that "slipped from history" despite the compelling evidence of guilt that Werner finally assembled, and that French faithfully reproduces.

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Westlake Soul by Rio Youers

Published by ChiZine Publications on April 10, 2012

After a surfing accident, Westlake Soul woke up with "the most powerful mind on the planet, but a body like a wet paper bag." According to his doctor, Wes is in a persistent vegetative state. Wes' parents take him home, resisting his doctor's suggestion that it might be better to let him die. Yet Wes is cognizant, aware of his surroundings; he just can't express his awareness or interact with those around him. At least he can't interact in a conventional sense. West has some new abilities: astral projection, telepathic communication with animals, fluency in all languages, but not the ability to communicate with or control humans (although he can read their thoughts, something he rarely does). He can watch Angelina Jolie take a shower, he can hover in the background while Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello jam at a party, but he can't tell anyone that his brain is still alive. He struggles frequently with death, in the form of Dr. Quietus, while his parents cope with the pain of living with an apparently brain-dead child. You know where this is going, right?

Wes is convinced that he will eventually overcome his disabling condition, that he will speak and surf again, while the reader suspects that Wes is unable to accept his fate, to process the knowledge that his consciousness will always be trapped inside a dysfunctional shell. When things get tough for Wes, he projects himself to a calmer place: a rainforest, a waterfall, the moon. Of course, the reader wonders whether this is a defense mechanism, blissful imagination replacing horrid reality.

There are moments when Westlake Soul strives to be literary but most of the time the prose is active and edgy, conveying the story's emotion rather than the beauty of language. Emotions pervade the story. Love is at its center, but sorrow and loss and anger and fear provide the context. Wes remembers the love of a girlfriend who, understandably, is now gone from his life. He experiences a new love for his second caregiver. He loves his family and, of course, the dog whose mind he can now read. These people (and the dog) love Wes in return, making the decision they must reach all the more difficult. It is a testament to Rio Youers' skill that the emotions he evokes are sometimes so powerful that story becomes difficult to read.

Although the novel is driven by love, it's more fundamentally about life and death, with life at the forefront. Learning to live, according to Wes, means learning to conquer fear. As I was reading Westlake Soul, I had some concern that it would turn into a polemic, fuel for the wrongheaded politicians who condemned Terri Schiavo's husband for discontinuing her life support, who thought they knew more about her cognitive ability than her doctors did. That concern was unwarranted. The novel doesn't advocate for the religious right. Quite the opposite, given Wes' nonjudgmental nature and his realization that as important as it is to fight for life, it is equally important not to fear death.

There are times when Westlake Soul dances on the edge of melodrama. There are times when Wes is so unselfish and forgiving as to strain credulity -- at least until he does something, late in the novel, that reveals a minor but all-too-human flaw. Despite its faults, Westlake Soul did what good literature should do: it moved me. From the beginning to the end, Westlake Soul touched me emotionally in a way that cheesy melodrama never does. I tip my hat to Youers for writing such a powerful and convincing story.

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