The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

Published by Atria Books on September 5, 2023

The River We Remember offers crime fiction fans a balanced blend of plot and characterization. Rooted in dysfunctional families, the story is a murder mystery that sets up suspects who might have committed a murder that caused no great loss to the community. Set in rural Minnesota in the 1950s, the action takes place against a background of post-war hatred of the Japanese and ongoing hatred of Native Americans.

Brody Dern is the sheriff of Black Earth County. Brody saw too much death in the war. He holds himself responsible for a friend’s death and cannot forgive himself for his actions. He later escaped from a Japanese POW camp and regards himself as a coward for seizing the opportunity to escape. Brody is unmarried but is involved in a relationship that does not reflect well upon his character.

Jimmy Quinn is an abusive drunk. He is the county’s largest landowner and is wealthy and powerful for that reason, although he is almost universally despised. He is on his second wife, a relative of his first wife. A hereditary condition caused the death of his first wife and will soon kill the second. Quinn’s conduct with his other family members is appalling. It isn’t surprising that someone finally killed him.

A man comes across Quinn’s dead body in the Alabaster River. A shotgun blast opened holes Quinn’s body that made his innards accessible to hungry catfish. Surmising that the body floated downriver, Brody leads a search for the location at which Quinn entered the river. He finds Quinn’s shotgun in a large pool of blood near the river. Did he shoot himself, either accidentally or in the commission of suicide? In the absence of an explanation for how a man who lost so much blood could have entered the river under his own power, it seems likely that he was murdered.

Brody does his best to avoid drawing that conclusion. He doesn’t think it will be good for the county to search for a murderer who did the community a favor by dispatching Quinn. Circumstances (and the former sheriff’s persistent reminders that Brody has a job to do) nevertheless force Brody to undertake a murder investigation.

Community suspicion quicky focuses on Noah Bluestone, a Dakota Sioux who returned from the war married to a Japanese woman. His race and the race of his wife are two strikes against him in a community that doesn’t see the need for a third strike. Only the courageous publisher of the local paper stands up for Noah’s right to a fair trial. When ambiguous evidence seems to point to Noah’s guilt, he refuses to take any action to defend himself for reasons that become part of the underlying mystery.

Tyler Creasy is another abusive drunk. He’s certain that Noah killed Quinn because Quinn fired Noah and his wife from their jobs as farmhand and housekeeper. Creasy has a son named Del who is a good friend of a boy named Sam. The boys’ mischief forms a subplot that eventually merges with the main story. While subplots pile on other subplots, it is a credit to William Kent Krueger that the story never becomes confusing.

Romance provides additional subplots. Unaware of Brody’s messy romantic entanglement, Sam’s mother Angie would like to have a go at Brody. Like Brody, she has a dark backstory. Whether Brody will (or can) return her affection is a subplot that adds interest to Brody’s life. He’s a troubled man who, despite being haunted by regrettable decisions, is a reasonably decent individual. It is easy for a reader to want Brody’s participation in the story to end well.

The plot is complicated by the drama that infects multiple families who are important to the story. The reader will need to sort through a good bit of dirty laundry to learn whether Noah or someone else killed Quinn.

By the end of the story, other lives are placed in peril, giving rise to a couple of credible action scenes. The conclusion is not entirely happy. I respect Krueger’s willingness to write an honest story that doesn’t pander to readers who want their fictional worlds to be better than the real world. At the same time, the unhappy aspect of the novel is convenient in its creation of an ending that will improve the lives of other characters who will have earned the reader’s sympathy.

Quinn’s complexity is at war with his desire for simplicity. That conflict makes him interesting. The key women in the novel have all lived difficult lives but have all persevered. One became a lawyer who is appointed to defend Noah. The women of greatest importance to the story have managed to retain a sense of decency and compassion. They have a strength that the evil men who surround them lack.

That so many people with such tragic lives have all collected in a rural county in Minnesota might be hard to believe, but who knows the secrets harbored by people who live in remote locations? People do what they want to do, uninhabited by their violation of the values that their community professes to follow. I easily set aside my skepticism about the onrush of subplots so that I could enjoy a strong mystery that is populated by an abundance of well-developed characters.

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The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins

 

Published by Atria Books on August 15, 2023

This will be a mixed review, but the positives outweigh the negatives. At its best, the novel illustrates the desperate measures that Americans will need to take to survive global warming after the climate reaches a tipping point.

The story’s most interesting and dramatic moments come from flashbacks to the way communities responded to the Crisis. Coastal cities are flooded, the Everglades are underwater, hurricanes have devastated the Gulf states, forests are constantly burning, the South is too hot to inhabit. Voters who have had enough elect politicians who begin the Great Transition. Serious efforts are finally made to eliminate carbon emissions after workers are organized into Corps that labor to protect the nation from fires and flooding while cleaning up the mess. Presumably the climate change deniers decided to stop fighting progress at some point along the way.

The new politicians, like the old, favor the interests of the wealthy — the people whose greed caused the Crisis — by assuring that they receive more protection and benefits than everyone else. A people’s revolution ultimately causes the Transition workers, spurred by Phoenix Company, to go on strike and then to organize self-governing worker cooperatives, making decisions that are best for everyone, not just for the ruling class. All of this is more interesting than the story that unfolds in the present.

As the novel begins, the Crisis is abating. The Transition ended sixteen years earlier. The new challenge is to restore prairies, rivers, woodlands, and other ecosystems so that wildlife will have habitats that will allow species to multiply.

Those who knowingly profited from carbon emissions have been branded as “climate criminals” but they have never been punished. Members of a group known as the Furies, an apparent offshoot of Phoenix Company, are hunting and assassinating climate criminals. There are obvious parallels between the American ruling class after the Crisis and the aristocracy after the French Revolution. The novel’s moral theme asks whether retributive justice — assassination as vengeance, with no formal charges or opportunity to present a defense — is actually justice. Apart from moral issues, the characters learn that, in practice, vengeance triggers retaliation.

The protagonists are a husband and wife (Larch and Kristina) and their daughter Emi. Kristina and Larch worked to facilitate the Great Transition. They met while fighting a fire to save at least some of Yosemite. Kristina became the face of Phoenix Company. Larch was in a reality TV show featuring members of the Forest Corps. Now he works for a WNBA team.

Emi views her mother as a hero while others view her as a criminal. A terrorist attack on Zero Day (celebrating the net-zero emissions anniversary) nearly kills Larch and Emi. Why the Furies would want to place people at risk who are celebrating environmentalism is unclear.

Kristina calls to warn Larch just before the attack, but how did Kristina (who is supposedly in a different state on a volunteer mission) know the attack was coming? Two agents from Public Security soon arrive to question Larch and Emi, but are they really from Public Security? Is Kristina innocent or a terrorist? Clearly she isn’t anywhere in between, because the characters have little nuance.

When Kristina doesn’t respond to messages, Larch and Emi go looking for her. Most of the adventure/action in the plot concerns the attempt Larch and Emi make to locate Kristina while evading the authorities (or whomever). Nick Fuller Googins mixes in a large dose of domestic drama as Kristina and Larch argue about the impact their political/lifestyle beliefs have upon their family obligations. Both characters are a bit self-righteous, as people tend to be when they quarrel about domestic or political issues. Unfortunately, the arguments seem like constructs to advance the plot rather than actual disputes between marital partners. Their parenting quarrels (“I taught her to be strong” vs “I let her be a normal kid”) become tedious. I suppose readers can decide which parent they like better, or which parenting philosophy they would follow, but neither parent is a great role model.

Emi is a convincing teenager, in that she is smug in her beliefs, doesn’t listen to adults, and is certain of her entitlement. Despite her questionable taste, she considers herself the goddess of rock (mostly pop) history, which she apparently regards as having started in the 90s.

Tearful moments of family reconciliation/resolution are artificial. Call me unsentimental, but some of the “we all still love each other” scenes are just too gooey for my taste. The final resolution of the family dynamic and Kristina’s precarious situation is a cop-out.

Firefighting scenes are exciting. The revolutionary solution to the Crisis is intriguing. The rest of the novel is best seen as a forgettable excuse to delve into a fascinating backstory.

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Carole by Clément C. Fabre

First published in France in 2023; published in translation by Europe Comics on August 30, 2023

For reasons he never explains, Clément’s life fell apart at the age of 27. His therapist suggested he learn more about his grandparents’ experience in Turkey. They were children during the Armenian genocide and fled after nationalists became violent in the mid-1950s. Perhaps Clement is suffering from intergenerational trauma. Perhaps his crisis is one of identity. He doesn’t feel like an Armenian. He doesn’t feel like a Turk. France is the country of his birth but he doesn’t seem to feel French.

Before his grandparents moved from Istanbul to France, they had a child named Carole who died in infancy. Clément’s grandmother later tried to locate Carole’s grave but discovered that the grave is missing. In need of a vacation and perhaps for its therapeutic value, Clément and his brother Robin decide to find Carole’s grave. Robin also wants to make the trip to further his study of history.

The brothers arrive in Istanbul during the Gezi Park protests. They search a cemetery, and then several more, taking pictures of headstones that are represented as drawings in the graphic novel. They can’t find Carole in any death registry. They visit and photograph places that were important to their grandparents: the church where they married; a court where their grandfather played basketball; an apartment building where their grandmother lived; their grandfather’s school and the place where he had his shop.

The brothers discover that Turkey is divided between nationalists who support Erdoğan and those who want the country to accommodate Kurds and Islam. Clément plans to create a graphic novel about their journey. To that end, he draws the scenery: beautiful old buildings, lovely landscapes, but also the aftermath of riots and buildings covered with graffiti. The brothers are also a bit divided, both in their willingness to try local foods (Clément finally relents and enjoys his brother’s culinary suggestions) and in their dedication to solving the mystery of Carole’s missing grave.

When the trip seems incapable of solving the mystery of the missing grave, the brothers wonder whether the trip was worthwhile. Perhaps the journey was more important than the destination. Traveling to Istanbul gives them a reason to think more carefully about their grandparents’ stories and their own ancestral identities. They don’t understand why their grandfather has nothing but fond memories about a country that slaughtered his ancestors, forced him to forget his language, and made him change his name so he would fit in with Turks. Their fascination with their grandfather’s story shortchanges their grandmother’s history. Their mother, on the other hand, seems wary of disturbing her parents with new discoveries about their past.

The story is mildly frustrating in that the facts that the brothers learn, both before and during their trip, don’t quite match the details of their grandfather’s explanation for leaving Turkey. Those discrepancies cry out for an explanation but none is forthcoming. I suppose the story is autobiographical and the author can’t explain what he doesn’t know.

Otherwise, the story is informative. Using narratives, headlines, and drawings of old photographs, the book provides a history lesson of Turkish nationalism and its impact on Armenians and Greeks. At times, the story seems like it is told by a relative who is showing slides of a family vacation (although these days, I suppose slides have been replaced by digital photos or videos that are displayed on the family’s widescreen TV). The travelogue might be more meaningful to the person telling it than to the audience.

The art and coloring are effective but familiar. Had Carole followed a mystery to a solution, it would have been a more gripping story. On the other hand, it is packed with important information about a part of the world that is probably a mystery to most Americans. For that reason, Carole is worth an inquisitive reader’s time.

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Hangman by Maya Minyam

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 8, 2023

In its prose style and surrealistic plot, Hangman reminds me of José Saramago’s novels. Maya Binyam didn’t make my belly jiggle with laughter or my mind explode from an excess of awe, so she isn’t quite Saramago, but the comparison is nevertheless meant as a high compliment.

Saramago wrote some amazing riffs. Like Saramago, Binyam delights the reader with an abundance of startling observations. At a funeral, the narrator concludes that most people have felt greater sadness in their lives from less consequential causes than a friend’s death, but “the job of the funeral was to make everyone forget about that prior sadness and pretend that the death at hand was the most devastating event of their lives.”

And: “Her parents didn’t have any customs, so she learned values from people she saw on TV, who taught her to buy random objects, discard them, and buy some more. That was her life goal.”

And: “Elected officials were relevant to their lives only insofar as they made them feel cared for or alerted them to the fact that that care was being threatened by an outside force. People could be mobilized to rally against that outside force because it infringed upon the legacy of their elders, who they were certain had died so that their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, might never be forced to contend with the past. Elected officials encouraged the people’s forgetfulness and told them that their lack of history was their greatest asset.”

Apart from being a vehicle for delivering riffs, what is the story about? At the age of 55, the unnamed narrator returns to his unnamed home country to visit his seriously ill brother. He is a citizen of the country where he has lived for the last 26 years, a place where he hoped he would never be killed, having initially been granted refugee status after fleeing his home country with forged documents following his release from prison. The country where he is now a citizen is also unnamed, but clues in the text (the president is black; a celebrity has just died who claimed to have a skin condition that affected his perceived race) make clear that the narrator was naturalized in the US and that he is telling his story in 2009.

The country of the narrator’s birth seems to be somewhere in Africa. The specific country is probably left unidentified because Hangman is meant to be a bigger story than the one the narrator tells. Faces sometimes lose their characteristics when the narrator examines them closely. One country might be similar to another country; one person might just as well be another person. Details are often fuzzy, perhaps as a reminder that details aren’t important to larger stories.

In the country of his current citizenship, the narrator recalls having a wife, although his attempts to send her emails always fail. In his birth country, he might have a son. He hasn’t had contact with his son in so long that he’s not sure whether he still has a son.

The country of the narrator’s birth is a place where a kitchen might have a dirt floor, where a bus depot is simply a roped off area, where churches have been taken over by the government and charge admission fees. Arriving at the airport, the narrator begins a dreamlike journey that forms the plot. He loses his cash to scammers. He acquires more cash so he can scammed by a cousin who has scammed all his relatives. The cousin sends him on a bus trip to a place where his brother might or might not live. The narrator loses his luggage. At the insistence of an aide worker, he trades the clothing on his back for an inferior shirt and pants that have been donated to a charity by Americans who feel good about sending their ugly and unwanted clothing to foreign countries.

None of these events seem to disturb the narrator. In fact, when he tries to make a deposit in a bank where he has no account, he simply hands his wallet and all its contents to a bank teller and leaves without any concern that he no longer has access to money. Eventually he parts with his passport, the last remaining proof of his existence. He takes it all in stride. The narrator feels he has little control over his actions: “My body continued to stay, so I chose to believe that I had decided to keep it there.” When he assesses the inside of his body, he discovers that the place where his heart is supposed to be is empty. At that point, he is a bit disturbed but feels powerless to heal himself.

Nothing much matters to the narrator because life is a series of choices and consequences and regardless of his particular choices and their consequences, “in the end, I would live or die, just like anyone else.” When he happens upon his son’s mother, he thinks they have become “just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might have been any country in the world. That’s how insignificant our personal experience was, even if that personal experience had derailed the events of everyday life.”

Finding his family members is largely a matter of luck, coincidence, or destiny (the narrator isn’t sure whether he believes in any of those). He has repeat encounters with the same strangers, or perhaps they aren’t strangers at all. The narrator doesn’t always understand the language in which he is addressed, or he understands it for a while and then doesn’t, just as people abruptly change languages when they speak to him, perhaps to avoid answering his questions.

The narrator talks to a yoghurt vendor and a bank teller and a bus passenger who all share life stories of no great significance that he would rather not hear. The narrator eavesdrops on other conversations before deciding that they are not worthy of his attention. “People like to talk, because talking makes them feel like their experiences amounted to something, but usually the talking turned those experiences into lies.” He believes that people talk about their lives because they are trying to find an explanation for their existence, but their experiences are pretty much everyone’s experiences and aren’t worth discussing. He concludes that “even abhorrent people reminded us of ourselves and all the things we had gone through or assumed we one day would.”

The narrator doesn’t care about the stories or anything else. Asked if he wants tea, he tells us “I didn’t want it or not want it” but accepts a cup to be polite. Asked if he has decided to pursue salvation, he answers “that I hadn’t decided for it or against it.” Similar responses of indifference permeate the novel.

So the plot is not just a physical journey, but an observational journey that forces the narrator to consider his life in the context of all other lives. The narrator becomes less substantial, less likely to be noticed, as the story unfolds. His sense of being just another insignificant person in a world of insignificant people seems to be physically manifested, as his internal organs (not just his heart) feel like they have vanished, which might explain his feeling of constipation, although his skin remains intact. Perhaps he is fading away; perhaps he has taken the identity of another person. Given the novel’s surreal nature, the narrator’s fate is open to interpretation. Readers might find the narrator’s perspective to be depressing and maybe it is, but it’s also a reasonable if unsettling way to view life.

Putting aside the plot and its suggestion of life’s futility, the novel is worth reading for the narrator’s relentlessly amusing commentary. Apart from the passages quoted above, Hangman touches upon the history of human relations, the merits of different political and social structures, predestination versus coincidence, international charity, religion, suffering, American news broadcasts, and the difference between value and price, in addition to less serious topics like body odor and lousy food. This is a novel of big ideas and a small life. It might be too downbeat for some readers, but it scores points for making deep thoughts entertaining.

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The Wolf Hunt by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

First published in Israel in 2021; published by Little, Brown and Company on August 15, 2023

Adam Schuster is a reserved, friendless boy who has been bullied at school. Although his mother is unaware of the extent of the bullying, her fear for Adam has been heightened by antisemitic graffiti and a recent shooting in a synagogue. She wants Adam to take a class in Krav Maga. While she thinks it would be beneficial for Adam to learn self-defense, she regards the lessons as less important than the benefit of socializing with other kids.

Adam’s mother is Leela, a version of her real name (Lilach) that is easier for Americans to pronounce. Adam’s father is Mikhael, although he goes by Michael. Leela and Michael were born in Israel but Michael’s employer, a military-industrial weapons designer, transferred him to the United States. Adam’s self-defense instructor is Uri. Like Michael, Uri served in the Israel Defense Force. Adam has heard rumors that Uri worked for Mossad.

Leela was defeated by the chase for academic credentials in Israel and welcomed the chance to be an unemployed housewife in America. Leela easily became the kind of woman she once detested, although she found a job organizing cultural activities at a retirement home so she could feel good about having a Latina cleaner instead of doing her own housework.

Leela and Michael grew used to the idea of raising Adam as an American. Leela thought it would be best for Adam because she loved Israel “the way a woman loves her abusive husband.” By the age of six, Adam didn’t want to speak Hebrew outside the home — he wanted to fit in — but his attitude changed at sixteen, when he started to study Krav Maga under Uri’s tutelage. His attitude about his primary tormenter, Jamal Jones, also changed. He talked to another kid about killing Jamal and had “disturbing searches” on his phone.

Adam attended a party with nearly everyone from his class. Jamal died at the party, apparently from a drug overdose. As the novel begins, the police suspect that Adam murdered him. Leela is certain that her son is a good boy, even as the evidence begins to suggest that he might be an antisocial nutcase. Whether Adam murdered Jamal is the question that supplies the novel’s dramatic tension.

When the police search Adam’s home, some members of the community regard him as a murderer. He deals with antisemitic graffiti at his school and vandalism of his home. Uri tries to help with security, but Leela is conflicted by her fear that Uri is a negative influence on Adam and her feelings of lust.

The story is told from Leela’s point of view. She has an understandable aversion to believing anything bad about her son, but she has apparently spent her life hiding from reality. In Israel, when she inadvertently clicked on a news channel that showed a Palestinian woman with a dead baby in her arms, Leela promptly turned on an episode of Friends, where Phoebe “appeared like a blond good fairy to take me away from there.”

As the novel progresses, Leela connects with Jamal’s mother (before Adam becomes a known suspect), learns a secret that Jamal concealed from his family, and wonders about Adam’s secrets. Because of her own unacknowledged prejudice, she blames the Nation of Islam for vandalizing her house. She likens a rock thrown through her window to an intifada. Because Jamal was Black, she begins to fear that every Black man she sees will seek revenge.

I suspect that the reader is not meant to like Leela. She has a sense of entitlement that combines with irrational anger to make her disagreeable. She thinks the worst of her husband and responds in kind. She once suffered a few days of paranoid delusion. Her therapist suggested that she feels like an outsider everywhere, not just in America. Perhaps Leela is suffering from a mental health condition. If so, she can’t be blamed for being unwell. While some readers might have sympathy for Leela, her emotional issues do not make her any more likable. I don’t believe interesting characters necessarily need to be likable, but many readers disagree.

The novel addresses familiar themes of persecution and discrimination from the unusual perspective of a woman caught between two worlds who might be a little bit crazy. I appreciated a brief but interesting discussion of whether money should supplant ideology — whether performance ratings should be more important than race and religion — or whether money is the most dangerous ideology because “it holds nothing sacred and allows you to do anything.”

Much of the story seems to plod along as a domestic drama that treats the central question — is Adam a murderer? — as secondary to all the other issues that provoke Leela’s anxiety. Yet a potential answer to that question, when it finally comes, is truly surprising. At the moment of its arrival, it becomes clear that the novel is a clever mystery. Jamal’s death is only part of a larger story that is carefully hidden until the story’s climax.

The reveal does not entirely resolve the mystery. Some readers might dislike the uncertainty, but in a novel told from a mother’s point of view, uncertainty might be more horrifying than knowledge of the truth. Until I reached the final page, I wasn’t quite sure whether I would recommend The Wolf Hunt, but the prose is graceful and, in the end, I appreciated the story’s ability to tantalize with so many unanswered questions.

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