Deadlock by James Byrne

Published by Minotaur Books on August 8, 2023

It would be difficult to find a more likeable tough guy protagonist than Desmond Limerick. He isn’t a pacifist, but he prefers to avoid violence when he can. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to make enemies who want to kill him. He might kill to solve a problem on occasion, but he has a moral compass that limits his use of violence for retribution. He can be creatively nonviolent when people need to be punished. There are nevertheless times when he concludes that threats must be eliminated to protect people he cares about.

Deadlock is the second novel about Dez, a former soldier from the UK who attained the legendary status of gatekeeper. He opens locks and gates and holds them open until the mission is complete. He’s retired from a military life and isn’t seeking similar work in the private sector. Rather, he’s moved to the US where he plays his guitar and enjoys his life. At least, that’s the goal.

A young woman named Raziah, whose band Dez occasionally joins, asks him to help her sister, who has been facing threats in Portland. Laleh was writing a profile of a forensic auditor who was looking into Clockwork, a Portland tech firm that does all sorts of good around the world. After the auditor died, someone apparently worried that Laleh learned something from him that she shouldn’t know.

Dez goes to Portland, thwarts thugs who plan to kill Laleh in her hospital room, then makes a plan to keep the sisters safe. In the long term, that plan requires him to learn why Laleh has been targeted so he can eliminate the threat. As he unlocks various doors, he learns that Clockwork has been infiltrated by criminals who have a clever scheme to gain and shelter ill-gotten wealth. I won’t discuss the details but I will say that, while some of their criminal tactics are familiar, the ultimate criminal goal it’s a surprisingly original. Kudos to James Byrne for coming up with something new.

Dez endeavors not only to keep the sisters alive, but to help the older sister understand her younger sibling. He makes a new female friend (a Russian bar owner named Veronika) and patches up a relationship with a British SIS agent whose career he might have destroyed during his gatekeeping days. The novel’s plot and subplots arrive at tidy resolutions. Is there anyone who doesn’t enjoy a well-crafted thriller?

Dez’s attitude, reflected in snappy and very funny dialog, contributes to his likeability. He has other traits that make him a terrific thriller hero, including humility, a sense of fair play, and fierce loyalty to his friends. Laleh is astonished that Dez hasn’t tried to sleep with Raziah, but she’s only nineteen and Dez sees her as a talented singer/songwriter, not as a conquest. He isn’t sanctimonious about right and wrong — he’s able to make flexible moral choices — but he always does the right thing, even when that he does morally questionable things for the right reason. There’s enough nuance in his character to make him interesting and enough integrity to make him admirable.

Byrne keeps the story in constant motion. Action scenes are more inventive than readers encounter in standard thrillers. Dez is often the target of shootings but he tends not to use guns. He prefers to settle disputes by outthinking his enemy but he has no problem using his fists. One powerful punch is typically all he needs to subdue a foe. He improvises weapons as needed to win battles. Dez's ability to think and plan sets him apart from action heroes whose idea of thinking is to decide which gun to use next.

Deadlock is every bit as good as The Gatekeeper. At a time when most tough guy series have gone stale, it’s good for action novel fans to have a new thriller hero keeping the genre fresh.

RECOMMENDED

Walk the Darkness Down by Daniel Magariel

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on August 1, 2023

In the heat of an argument, Les hates Marlene, knowing that he will wake up the next day and “see his wife through the wound and rot of loss.” Their marriage has had many reasons to fall apart, not the least Les’ insistence on working on a trawler as a scalloper, a job that keeps him away from home weeks at a time during the summer. Yet they remain together.

Understandably, Les and Marlene aren’t dealing well with the loss of their daughter. Most marriages are torn apart when a child dies. Walk the Darkness Down suggests why that might happen and how it might not.

On the trawler, Les is self-loathing. He enjoys the pain when he opens scallops by digging the sharp shells into his stomach. When Marlene interacts with his crew members at a party, she can’t understand why Les prefers their company to hers. Working on the trawler after the party, Les can’t understand why he became the kind of man who would frighten his godson, the child of another crew member.

When Les is at sea, Marlene brings hookers home to her apartment, cleans them up, feeds them, and lets them enjoy an evening of comfort. The hookers are managed (pimped) by a man named Bill. He knows about Marlene but she pays for their time so he’s content, provided the hookers return to him.

Marlene thinks she uses the hooker visits as a distraction from pain. Perhaps she is trying to replace the daughter she lost. Perhaps she wants someone to rely on her. Perhaps she wants to save someone because she couldn't save her daughter. At the novel’s end, Daniel Magariel violates the rule against showing rather than telling by explaining Marlene’s true motivation, or at least the one she has settled upon to explain her unlikely behavior.

The novel’s first turning point arrives when Marlene realizes that a hooker named Josie needs her help and that helping Josie will be impossible unless she changes her own life. Only later does Marlene learn that Les has knowledge of Josie that Marlene has not discovered. Will helping Josie save or destroy their marriage?

Despite its concluding sense of optimism, Walk the Darkness Down is grittier than most domestic dramas. The death of their child has isolated Marlene and Les from each other, forcing them into their separate realities when they need each other the most. “You’ve got to abide with your darkness” a character learned from her grandmother. Les and Marlene are living in dark places and struggling to fight their way toward a dim light. Marlene is “a fitful puppet of her own petulance.” Les takes out his anger on members of his crew. The death of their child caused not just heartache but unwarranted blame and resentment. Why and how the daughter died — why Les and Marlene refuse to drive on the driveway of their former home — is tragic.

Magariel’s detailed descriptions of scalloping on a trawler add interest and realism to the story as well as tension when a storm threatens. The crew members are like a second family to Les, maybe a more important family than the one he has. They contribute family drama of their own to the plot. That drama grows with each trip to the sea, eventually giving the story its most vivid moments.

Magariel’s prose is precise and expressive, but there are times when his dialog doesn’t ring true. Characters who deliver significant monologs all speak in the same voice. People in Bill’s line of work can be surprisingly lyrical, but Bill’s prose doesn’t capture the language of the street. Les gives a lengthy, rather eloquent speech to his wife about his feelings as their marriage nears a breaking point. Nothing in the description of Les prior to that point suggests he’s capable of expressing those thoughts with such nuance, even if he suddenly learned to gain insight from introspection. An interior monologue near the end also gives the impression of having been written for Les rather than being the product of his own mind.

Still, it’s nice to imagine that a brooding man might have an epiphany that opens him to insightful and healing discussions. The story’s grittiness complements its softness. Les and Marlene each recognize their harshness. They want to be more caring toward each other, if only they can figure out how. Walk the Darkness Down has more than a few genuinely moving moments. The ending suggests that marriages on their way to destruction might be saved. Les and Marlene debate whether love is enough. That’s an unanswerable question, but the novel confronts it without flinching. Readers might debate whether the story and its ending are credible, but any doubts about the plot are easily overcome by the depth of Magariel’s troubled characters and his robust prose.

RECOMMENDED

Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden

Published by Tor.com on July 25, 2023

Scorn’s big brother is a weather station mounted to the top of a tall building. Scorn’s mother is human, a bigwig behind CometCorp, one of the corporations that compete for supremacy as the passive world government does nothing to stop them. Scorn is not his mother’s biological offspring; like his brother, he is an AI that she created. The construct of family is changing; Emergent Properties suggests an additional way in which it might change in the near future.

Scorn has chosen to be a journalist. As the story begins, he realizes he must have come upon a big scoop. He doesn’t know what it was, as the recent past is missing from his memory. He evidently didn’t get a chance to make a backup before his chassis was destroyed. The death of his body might have been accidental but Scorn doubts it.

Note: I’m using the male pronoun to make this review easier to read. Scorn has no gender because what use does an AI have for gender? His preferred pronoun is ze. His becomes zir and so on. Gender-neutral or gender-inclusive pronouns have become common in science fiction, to the dismay of the pronoun police. It makes sense to me that a genderless AI would have a genderless pronoun. It doesn’t take long to get used to it, although the pronoun will likely trigger the state of outrage in which some sf fans (among others) prefer to live.

The journalistic investigation Scorn was conducting apparently took him to the moon, where his chassis came to an end. He plans to return but he’s running out of robots to carry his consciousness. Asking his mother to help is out of the question. His little spider robot is hard to kill but it doesn’t function well in the human world, where hands and height are useful.

Scorn dodges creative attempts to assassinate him as he makes his way back to the moon in search of a story that someone wants to keep him from telling. The nature of that story is the mystery that underlies the plot.

Emergent Properties combines action and politics in a future that will be recognizable to science fiction fans. Corporations are essentially nation states. Corporations have power while what passes for government has none.

The details of robotic communication and AI interaction with humans are familiar but entertaining. The reveal — the truth that Scorn uncovers — might be a bit farfetched, but farfetched is easily forgiven in science fiction. The present is crazy; why shouldn’t the future be crazier?

Scorn is undergoing a sort of evolution. His software allows him to simulate emotional responses, but authentic emotions might be emerging on their own. Although not a focal point, the story touches upon freedom and autonomy for sentient beings.

The inclusion of AIs in a family and their impact upon the family dynamic is more original than the novel's other sf concepts. The novel’s other animating ideas have been explored repeatedly, but a lack of freshness does not impair the reader’s ability to enjoy the thriller that leaks out from the background facts.

While this novella-length work is fun, it might have been better as a longer book set in a more detailed, carefully-imagined future. Emergent Properties reads like the start of a work that needs greater depth and an original spin on its borrowed ideas. At the same time, if Aimee Ogden decides to write more stories about her adventurous AI journalist, I would welcome them.

RECOMMENDED

Those We Thought We Knew by David Joy

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on August 1, 2023

Detective Leah Green works for a small Sheriff’s Office in a mountain community. She’s investigating the murder of Toya Gardner. Toya was a black civil rights activist. She returned to her home to protest a statue honoring a Confederate officer. Green believes Toya’s murder is related to the beating of a sheriff’s deputy who was unofficially investigating the Klan.

Sheriff John Coggins is focused on the beating of his deputy and wants Green to handle Toya’s murder on her own. He says he views the beating and the murder as unrelated crimes. In truth, when Toya’s father was still alive, he was Coggins’ best friend. Coggins quarreled with Toya about her activism before she died and, now that she’s been murdered, he seems to be troubled by his emotions. Toya all but calls him a racist. Coggins doesn't believe her father saw him that way, although they never had a meaningful discussion about race. Staying sober has been a challenge during Coggins' forty years as Sheriff. After Toya’s death, it’s a challenge he’s losing.

Ernie Allison is the deputy who takes a beating. He arrested William Dean Cawthorne for public drunkenness. By the time Ernie arrived, Cawthorne had passed out in his car. Ernie searched the car and found a Klan robe. He also found a notebook that appeared to list Klan members. Some are in politics, some in law enforcement. Ernie didn’t seize the notebook, but when he went back to take another look at it, the notebook was gone. His awareness of the names in the notebook might explain why he was left for dead under a giant illuminated cross.

Figuring out who attacked Ernie isn’t difficult after Ernie regains consciousness and, despite his limited memory, provides a few clues. Cawthorne is the obvious suspect for Toya’s murder but crime fiction fans know that the obvious suspect rarely proves to be the killer. Other suspects include a college kid, an eccentric man who saw a snake in his house and won’t set foot inside it at night, a gun dealer who trades in unlawful firearms, and a “grumpy old cuss.” None of those suspects seem particularly promising, but who knows?

Much of the novel addresses the complexity of race relations. White characters who are not overtly racist nevertheless make familiar arguments about how Confederate statues reflect heritage. They claim (usually without actual knowledge) that their ancestors owned no slaves. They don’t feel responsible for the lingering impact of slavery and don’t recognize the racist symbolism that is inherent in Confederate memorials. They complain that activists “stir things up” and deny that they personally benefitted from slavery.

Toya and some other characters argue that many white people in modern America enjoy a privilege that has been denied to many black people, a privilege that represents the vestiges of slavery. They argue that their voices are not heard and that whites who defend Confederate memorials on the ground of tradition deliberately ignore the intent to perpetuate black subjugation that drove southern states to insurrection.

It’s heartening when a white character explains how he transcended the white supremacist atmosphere in which he was raised. He has learned that being proud of your heritage doesn’t mean embracing everything the heritage entails. The character argues that most of his peers never opened a book after they dropped out of school. They base their knowledge of history on an uncritical acceptance of whatever their fathers told them.

Characters on both sides of the debate feel that the other side isn’t listening, but the reality is that black people have had no choice but to listen to white perspectives since the Civil War ended. It is the “traditionalists” who have closed their minds to the truth about the tradition they defend. That some white people are awakening to the impact of racism on American society has caused frantic condemnations of by the likes of Fon DeSantis about people who are "woke,” as if listening to people with an open mind and learning from them is a bad thing. (I should make clear that this paragraph represents my editorializing. The novel doesn't mention DeSantis or even the word "woke.")

Notwithstanding the importance to society of conversations like those imagined in the novel, long lectures don’t necessarily lend themselves to good fiction. Too much pontification places a drag on crime novels. You either get it or you don’t. Readers who get it don’t need to wade through obvious lectures to reinforce their beliefs. Readers who don’t get it — well, how many of them actually read a novel that doesn’t have guns on the cover or the word Patriot in the title?

Those We Thought We Knew works best when it captures the pain of Toya’s mother and grandmother, both of whom feel a mix of pride at her bravery and regret that they didn’t talk her out of high-profile activism in a redneck community. A scene involving the grandmother’s response to redneck kids revving the diesel engine of a pickup to pollute a candlelight vigil for Toya is the novel’s high point.

The revelation of the killer’s identity isn’t much of a surprise, if only because it seems intended to further David Joy’s political point at the expense of creating a strong ending. Again, while I agree with the novel’s recognition that people who defend Confederate statues are not basing their opinions on reason or history, Joy’s determination to make the point that they are defending a tradition of racism interferes with his storytelling. The strengths of Those We Thought We Knew nevertheless outweigh my reservations about the way the story is told.

RECOMMENDED

Sun Damage by Sabine Durrant

First published in the UK in 2022; published by Harper Paperbacks on August 1, 2023

A moderately interesting protagonist in Sun Damage never quite overcomes the mediocrity of the plot. The novel sets up a promising thriller but falls short of delivering the promised thrills.

The story is narrated by a young woman named Ali. She has been grifting in a partnership with Sean Wheeler. They had a perfunctory sexual encounter but Sean has those with many women. He’s protective of her and is skilled at the art of the con. Ali stays with him because she wants to learn his tricks and craves his approval.

Before the story starts, Ali and Sean ran cons in Marrakesh and India. Now they’re in France, where they befriend Lulu Davies. Sean introduces Ali as his sister. Lulu is enjoying the Sainte-Cécile beaches before she begins a gig as a private chef for a family that has rented a house in Provence. Lulu has money and is rather improbably taking the chef gig to have something to do, although the house has a pool and the work is far from demanding. She prepared meals for a different family in the same house the year before.

After scamming a meal at Lulu’s expense, Sean decides to make a bigger score. He steals a speedboat so that he and Ali can spend a fun afternoon with Lulu. Sean casually mentions a plan to rent a boat for a trip to Corsica. Lulu wants to join them but Sean vetoes the idea because the boat he is renting would be too small. Lulu naturally offers to contribute to the cost of a bigger boat, opening the door for Sean to steal her money.

Before Sean can implement his scheme, Lulu tumbles to the fact that Ali is not his sister. They scuffle and Lulu hits her head but isn’t quite dead. To Ali’s dismay, Sean suffocates her to prevent her from ratting them out to the police. He tells Ali to go back to their hotel while he finds a good spot to throw her body overboard.

Ali grabs Lulu’s purse and returns to the hotel. Coincidentally, Ali has stolen their stash of cash from under Sean's nose. How she thought she would get away with the theft is unclear, but her indiscretion turns out to be prophetic. Horrified to discover that Sean is a killer, she takes the money and runs.

Since Ali has a strong resemblance to Lulu, she assumes Lulu’s identity. Knowing that Sean will come looking for her, she takes a bus to Provence and presents herself as Lulu the chef. With that setup, the anticipated thrills relate to Ali’s efforts to evade Sean and stay alive.

That Ali looks like Lulu is one coincidence too many. That Ali can pass herself off as a chef by buying and disguising TV dinners is hard to swallow. In any event, Ali spends a week hiding out with the family, learning about their mundane family drama (one of the kids fears she’s pregnant) and meeting their tedious guests.

The home renters work in the publishing industry and have invited an author to stay with them. Naturally, Ali instantly falls for the author, contributing predictable scenes that would be at home in a cheesy romance novel.

It is inevitable that Sean will eventually appear. Durrant does too little to create believable tension before that moment arrives. Most of the story consists of Ali fretting about her problems, some of which stem from a difficult childhood — the kind of childhood that is common to thriller protagonists who have followed a scofflaw's path.

While Ali is a passably interesting character, the supporting cast is assembled from stereotypes. The novel’s atmosphere focuses on tourist destinations. Location details read like they were gleaned from travel websites.

The plot benefits from a careful structure but the final act is underwhelming. Ali cleverly resolves her Sean problem with surprising ease. Will she be able to keep the author as her lover? I won’t tell but I really don’t need to. Most readers will predict the ending.

Sun Damage held my interest and generated occasional moments of mild dramatic tension. Those moments encouraged me to hope the plot might lead to a strong ending, but the novel is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS