The Sublet by Greer Hendricks

Published by Amazon Original Stories on April 1, 2025

“The Sublet” is a short story. Amazon makes it available to Kindle users for a couple of dollars. It’s also available in print on a self-publishing platform.

Anne is a ghostwriter. She agrees to help Melody Wells finish a self-help book. Melody is filled with New Age attitudes about self-improvement. In addition to teaching overpriced wellness classes and writing books, Melody is hawking supplements and crystals. Anne notices that Melody’s lifestyle advice is either simplistic or contradictory, but she needs the money so she starts grinding out the pages.

Anne is married to Paul. The story’s setup depicts the turmoil of a couple living in Manhattan with two kids. Melody tells Anne that she knows of an affordable sublet that would give them more space and a better view. Anne and Paul visit the apartment and, despite their inability to enter a locked closet, make a quick decision to move in. It apparently doesn’t occur to Anne that affordable rent in a Manhattan apartment with a view is going to come with a catch.

A batty neighbor tells Anne that the previous tenant drowned in the apartment’s jacuzzi. Since the apartment doesn’t have a jacuzzi, Anne chalks up the puzzling statement to age-related confusion.

After they have lived in the apartment a bit, Anne notices that there is no door in the hallway to their neighboring apartment. She also realizes that there are scratch marks on an interior wall that appear to have been made by a cat with six toes. Oh, and the supplements that Melody gave her seem to be upsetting her stomach.

This sounds like the setup to a horror story — what evil six-fingered monster lurks behind the locked door? — but the reader is not so lucky. A monster would have been a more credible answer to the mystery than the one that Greer Hendricks contrives.

Anne’s investigation of strange facts leads to a confrontation with Melody and a solution to the puzzle. The solution is both unbelievable and unbelievably dull. By the time Anne turns the tables on Melody, using a ploy she must have gleaned from movies in the 1940s — a ploy that depends on Melody being remarkably inattentive — I no longer cared what happened to Anne. Her Manhattan problems are unlikely to be of interest to anyone who doesn’t live in Manhattan, while Melody is a parody of a villain. New York City residents might relate to the story, but for me, the thrills and chills fell flat.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

Published by Scribner on April 1, 2025

The Usual Desire to Kill is a domestic comedy with five characters: Mum and Dad, their daughters Miranda and Charlotte, and Miranda’s daughter Alice. The story is told in a variety of styles. A series of letters from the mid-1960s explain how Mum and Dad came to meet and marry. Emails exchanged by the daughters in 2019 share their exasperation with their parents. Snatches of life are dramatized as scenes from a play. Parts of the story are narrated by Miranda, although Charlotte occasionally finds her voice. The scripted scenes add little to the story, but the storytelling techniques are mixed with a director’s desire to keep the story moving.

In a series of letters from 1963, “Your Loving Sister” tells Kitty about her dating life, including unsatisfactory sex with DK (for Dog Killer) and no sex with a more appealing American named Looey. YLS gets pregnant by DK and marries him, not because he wants her baby or even because he wants her, but because he has a sense of duty. As YLS relates, “I didn’t love him, but we did have a sort of understanding. I thought we would grow into each other.” They adapted to married life because “he changed all on his own — he mellowed; he taught himself how to pretend, how to deal with other people. He has learned to act.”

DK agrees that he has learned to act. During his marriage to YLS, DK internalized the lesson that all married men joke about: the secret to a happy marriage is to tell your wife that she’s right about everything. Later in life, DK will say that he used to hate liver. What he means is that YLS served him liver while assuring him that he likes it and, for the sake of marital harmony, he agreed with her. “Wives dominate while husbands submit” seems to be the theme of their marriage until the reader discovers that DK finds subversive ways to maintain his independence.

The story begins in France, where Mum and Dad have lived for the last thirty of their fifty married years. In France, nobody ever refers to Mum and Dad by their actual names, a choice that reflects the way they have cemented themselves into familial roles. Miranda describes her Dad as “a retired philosophy professor who never loses an argument.” Dad describes philosophy as “a mix of pedantry and common sense.” He challenges his family with amusing pedantry throughout the novel, but he also offers good advice to Miranda about dealing with her mother and with her own future.

Miranda’s description of her childhood captures her parents and their marriage:

“Over the years they had evolved a well-rehearsed technique for living together. It was a two-hander play, but there was also a bit part for me. Like two pieces of a broken plate that didn’t in fact fit together and never had, they used me not as glue but more as a translator; I often found myself communicating the desires or complaints of one to the other.”

Dad often fails to turn on his hearing aids, the better to ignore Mum’s opinions, advice, and instructions. He seems more comfortable communicating with the ducks and llamas on their property. “He didn’t interfere in their lives, in the same way he didn’t interfere in his daughters’ lives. He was just not very good at being interested in other living creatures, particularly if they only had two legs.”

Miranda and Charlotte endure their aging parents for short periods. Miranda is nearly fifty and Charlotte has passed that landmark. Their visits are more than obligatory — the women want to keep in touch with their parents — but they are always stressful. Mum has strong opinions about placing knives in the dishwasher.

Mum needs hip surgery but she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Not that she complains; she doesn’t. It’s more like spectator martyrdom— moving in a certain way to make sure that I notice and feel sorry for her and then, if I ask, denying that there is anything wrong and doing sod all about it.”

If Mum spends a few days in the hospital, perhaps Dad can unwind. And perhaps the daughters can use the time to get to the bottom of an event in their childhood that they never understood. The true identity of “Kitty” is another of the story’s surprising reveals.

The hidden family secret is tame by modern American standards. I suppose things were different in England a few decades ago. In any event, the novel doesn’t position the reveal of the family secret as the story’s climax. It’s just one of several moments that merit a soft chuckle. I’m a bit weary of sedate family comedies, but Barnes’ pointed prose made me chuckle so often that I have to recommend The Usual Desire to Kill.

RECOMMENDED

A Spy at War by Charles Beaumont

Published by Canelo on March 27, 2025

My favorite spy stories pit British or American spies against Russians. For an obvious reason (his name is Putin), Russians are making a comeback as the favored spy novel villains. The titular war in A Spy at War is between Russia and Ukraine, making this the first spy novel I’ve read that focuses on that conflict.

My favorite spy stories challenge the reader to guess the identity of a double agent or mole. A Spy at War follows that tradition.

Former British spy Simon Sharman now works in the private sector. He fled the UK after a series of “suspicious events” involving a hedge fund manager. Those events were the subject of A Spy Alone, in which Simon investigated Oxford graduates who went on to be influenced by Russian money. Simon has traveled to Ukraine on a fake Italian passport and is posing as a journalist using a fake Polish press card.

Simon is pursuing Chovka Buchayev, the Chechen assassin who killed his business partner, Evie Howard. Simon intends to kill Chovka but other interested parties want Chovka to defect. They regard Simon as the perfect person to recruit him. The story builds tension as Simon approaches the front line with the belief that Chovka wants to meet him. When the mission goes awry, Simon needs to identify the insider who betrayed him.

The plot leads to a tense if predictable scene that forces Simon to choose between using Chovka for his intelligence value or surrendering to his rage and putting an end to Chovka’s life. In a typical American thriller, the protagonist would pull the trigger and be done with it. I always appreciate a good moral dilemma in a spy novel, particularly when characters actually care about morality.

Chovka receives more characterization than is common for a thriller villain. “Chovka was a survivor, not a hero. Survivors figure out which people have power and make themselves useful to those people.” At several moments in the story, Charles Beaumont demonstrates how that attitude shapes Chovka’s life and decisions.

Unlike Chovka, Simon’s decisions are influenced by values other than greed and convenience. Simon is portrayed as a man suffering from burnout, a weariness with the life he has chosen, who nevertheless uses his experience and intellect to assemble clues as he learns more about his former colleagues from Oxford.

When his story isn’t focused on Simon or Chovka, Beaumont treats the reader to dry British humor in his descriptions of bureaucratic meetings where decisions are made or manipulated. Russian assets are working to undermine British support for Ukraine. It takes a couple of sharp women — including Sarah du Cane, an Oxford professor who serves as an advisor to the British government — to thwart him.

The focus on Russia’s attempts to manipulate public and political opinion about Ukraine gives the novel some currency. The novel takes place in 2022, before the recent change of administration in the US, but its reminder that Russian propaganda is a potent tool of war might be even more relevant in 2025. The argument for selling out Ukraine — “Ukraine can’t win so we should let Russia keep the bits it’s already taken” — sounds depressingly familiar. "You don't have the cards" is how Trump put it.

In the novel, Russian propaganda includes a claim that western contributions of money for the war are being skimmed by Ukrainian oligarchs. The rumor is picked up by bloggers and bots, then amplified until it becomes the basis for policy at the hands of the Russian asset in the British government. Again, the discussions seem spot on. Espionage has always relied on disinformation, but social media provides perfect networks to spread lies until they are mistaken for reality. We all know that, but this is one of the best treatments of the subject I’ve seen in a spy novel.

While A Spy at War isn’t an action novel, characters are often imperiled. The plot moves quickly. The ending is something of a cliffhanger, although it isn’t difficult to guess how the next novel in the trilogy will begin. I could be wrong, but the ambiguous outcome of Simon’s confrontation with Chovka can only go in one direction if Simon still has a story to tell in the last novel of the trilogy.

It might be helpful to read A Spy Alone before reading its sequel. I didn’t. While A Spy at War explains critical events that took place in the earlier novel, I had the sense that I was missing context. Fortunately, any gaps in my understanding of earlier events in Simon’s life did not impair my ability to enjoy this bridge novel in the trilogy.

RECOMMENDED

Twist by Colum McCann

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by ‎ Random House on March 25, 2025

My favorite writers are disproportionately Irish. Colum McCann is high on that list. His prose blends power and lyricism. His books capture larger truths than the small stories he tells.

The character who narrates Twist is a writer. Anthony Fennell tells the reader that after writing two novels he deems “minor successes,” he fell into “a clean, plain silence.” Fennell has become dissatisfied with his life in Dublin. “So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires.”

Feeling the need to get away, Fennell accepts an assignment to write an article about broken undersea cables. To that end, his editor arranges for him to accompany the crew of a cable repair ship. He travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, who leads cable repair missions. Members of Conway’s repair crew tell him that Conway’s biography has unexplained gaps. Intrigued, Fennell wants to learn more about Conway, but Conway is reticent when asked about his past. Fennell uses a phrase from Leonard Cohen to describe him: “Conway had that secret chord — the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.”

While waiting for a cable to break, Fennell meets Conway’s beautiful partner Zanele, a South African woman who escaped the slums and was educated in the United States. Fennell regards Conway and Zanele as “the South Africa I had wanted to see, a couple crossing the lines, Black and white, the proof of the times, the ancient conventions dissolving.” Before the ship leaves harbor, Zanele departs for London, where she has a part in Waiting for Godot (much to the chagrin of Beckett’s estate, which is enforcing Beckett’s insistence that “the roles in the play were specifically not for women”). Fennell has the sense that something in Conway’s relationship with Zanele is broken but Conway will not speak to Fennell about his personal life until they have been at sea for weeks, when he finally loses patience with Conway's inquisitive nature.

Fennell’s interior voice also frets about his inability to establish a relationship with his “sloe-eyed son.” Fennell hasn’t seen his son, who now lives in Santiago, for five years. For reasons he can’t explain, Fennell denies that he has any children when Zanele asks him about his family. Conway fears that his son feels abandoned, although “his mother had been the one to actually leave, but it certainly felt that I had propelled her.”

Most of the story consists of Fennell’s observation of Conway and speculation about Zanele, mixed with fascinating descriptions of men at work. In addition to learning how undersea cables are repaired, Fennell ponders the international dependence on cables for news and all manner of information, “all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations” — the list of things that travel under the sea continues for most of a page. Fennell develops a sense of wonder about cables and their traffic that a reader might find infectious.

After the groundwork has been laid, Twist takes a twist. All I will say is that Conway disappears, unexpectedly and without warning. Fennell foreshadows an eventful change in Conway’s life when, early in the novel, he explains that he is telling what he knows of Conway’s story to counter the impressions left by “the websites and platforms and rumor mills” that “will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts.” Fennell wants to set the record straight, although he can only speculate about Conway’s motivation for actions that earned him a degree of notoriety.

The primary theme of Twist is repair. The story sends its protagonist on a ship that repairs undersea cables, but the journey gives Fennell an opportunity to repair his life. But who is he kidding, he asks himself. “The idea of an actual repair was the sort of soul-destroying bullshit that I needed to strenuously avoid.” At sea, free from the alcohol that usually protects him from the pain of clear thought, Fennell has a chance to consider repairing his own life. What steps he will take, if any, are left for the closing pages.

Conway has a different take on repair. He has come to view repairs as temporary, perhaps pointless. He fixes one cable and another breaks. What good comes from repairing them? He doesn’t feel responsible for the evil that the internet enables, yet he acknowledges that “we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another.”

Conway questions the value of repair when he learns that Zanele has been attacked but is on the mend in England. “Everything gets fixed,” he says, “and we all stay broken.” As Fennell describes Conway’s relationship with Zanele: “They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”

The novel’s secondary theme is turbulence. Heisenberg tried “to mathematically determine the precise transition of a smoothly flowing liquid into a turbulent flow” without much success. The turbulence of life is no more easily explained. “Down below, the turbulence gathered. The Congo had unrecognized depths. All the things we didn’t know. All the things we were doing to ourselves. The manner in which we broke one another.” Conway’s turbulent relationship with Zanele may have been his undoing, the one thing Conway lacked the skill to repair.

Much like Moby-Dick, to which McCann pays tribute, Twist is built upon an ode to the sea. Life originated in hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean, but when Fennell comments upon our evolutionary ancestors crawling out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, he does so with humility. The sea is our birthplace yet we understand little of its depths. Zanele laments its use as a dumping ground — more destruction that we may never be able to repair.

Apart from its full characters and thought-provoking story, Twist earns my admiration for McCann’s ability to craft honest sentences with the sharpness of daggers. A few of my favorites:

“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”

“Just because the truth is ignored,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be.”

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”

“The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while.”

“Few of the stories we have inside ourselves ever get properly spoken.”

I can spend all day reading McCann and never feel that I’ve wasted a moment. Twist is a strong addition to his oeuvre.

RECOMMENDED

"Trap Line" by Timothy Zahn

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025

“Trap Line” is a short science fiction story. Nearly every sf story of any merit is eventually anthologized, so readers might soon find it in a larger volume if they decide not to invest their money in a relatively short story.

Toby Collier is an engineer. He is employed to send his consciousness (or “astral”) from his body to a clone (or “replicate”) of his body. His current mission is to send his astral to a replicate on a ship that is many light years from Earth. The ship’s transmitter isn’t working. Toby’s job is to fix it, using the replicate’s body, before sending his astral home.

Toby’s astral is captured on his way to the ship. He joins captives belonging to an alien race who call themselves Hyfisk. Despite being nothing more than a disembodied consciousness, Toby can see the alien astrals if he squints just right. They communicate in a common language, or perhaps Toby somehow translates their thoughts into English. Timothy Zahn offers no real explanations for these convenient facts but at least makes clear that they puzzle Toby. In any event, there would be no story if Toby couldn’t chat with the Hyfisk.

Toby learns that members of a third alien species — a family that includes a young daughter — work for the Overmasters. They set trap lines to capture astrals. Their best pay comes from catching Hyfisk. Why the Overmasters want to capture astrals is far from clear (they’ve already learned all they want to know about the Hyfisk), but the family is worried that their standard of living is in decline because they are capturing fewer astrals. The family also worries that a human astral might not be worth much of anything to anyone. Toby sympathizes with his captors, perhaps because worrying about money and trying to shield children from that concern is a very human trait — at least for humans who aren’t born into wealth.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, humans (especially human engineers) are smarter than aliens, so when Toby sets out to escape, the reader knows he has a pretty good chance of success. He does so in a reasonably entertaining way that involves an alien version of a cat. He even takes into account his desire to keep his captors from filing bankruptcy (or whatever aliens do when they go broke).

The story sets up a moral dilemma when Toby has to decide whether to free the Hyfisk. He sets up a test to decide whether they are morally worthy of being rescued. I didn’t buy the test. Neither did I buy Toby’s sympathy for a family that, like human slave traders, think it is okay to earn an income by capturing and imprisoning astrals, but perhaps I am less forgiving than Toby.

The story earns points for its originality. It moves quickly but raises more questions than it answers. Still, it does just enough to provide a measure of entertainment.

RECOMMENDED