Mrs. Plansky's Revenge by Spencer Quinn

Published by Forge Books on July 25, 2023

When Peter Abrahams writes as Spencer Quinn, he’s usually writing in the voice of Chet, the large dog who stars in his Chet and Bernie detective novels. Readers who are familiar with that voice will recognize it in Quinn’s new novel about Loretta Plansky, a woman of 71 who doesn’t let age get in the way of accomplishing her goals. Unlike Chet, Loretta is not distracted by squirrels, but she often expresses her thoughts in the kind of language that Chet might use.

Loretta lives in Florida. She has enough money to overcome the downside of living in Florida, having retired after selling a successful company she operated with her husband. She is now a widow. While missing the man to whom she was entirely devoted, Loretta maintains a positive outlook by playing tennis at her club and staying in touch with her children.

Dinu Tiriac lives in Romania. At the direction of his Uncle Dragomir, Dinu is learning English so that he can scam Americans. Dinu calls American seniors, pretending to be a grandson. He spoofs the grandson’s phone number so the call seems legitimate on caller ID. He claims he was arrested for DUI and needs $9,000 to make bail and get his car back. He promises to repay the money when his bail is refunded at his court appearance, but the reality is that he gets the victim’s bank information and empties their account using a cash transfer app that can’t be traced. This is, by the way, an actual scam that (according to the FTC) all too often succeeds in defrauding seniors.

It works on Loretta, who is a soft touch when it comes to her children and grandkids. She gives her bank account number and password to Dinu (posing as her grandson Will). Since she uses the same password for everything, she soon finds that her bank account and investment account have both been drained of funds. Altogether, she loses more than $8 million.

Loretta might be in the early stages of dementia; she’s easily confused, her memory comes and goes. Perhaps these are just the usual outcomes of aging, given that Loretta is often quite sharp. She is sufficiently lucid to explain what happened to her banker and investment manager, and then to the FBI, none of whom offer much hope that she will get her money back. Mild dementia or not, once Loretta learns that her money was transferred to Romania, Loretta decides to travel there and get it back. Perhaps that decision is itself a symptom of irrationality, but Loretta is plucky.

Loretta’s fortitude makes her a wonderful character. She is old fashioned in the sense that she places a high value on good manners and kind behavior. She doesn’t want to bother her kids with her problems. Realizing she has lost everything, she quickly resolves to sell her jewelry and condo. To save money, she takes her father out of the expensive care facility he hates and has him live with her. She thinks she might take a job driving for Uber, since the CEO of the company she founded with her husband won’t employ anyone older than 65.

Dinu is less admirable but still likeable. At 16, he’s controlled by his bullying uncle and by his hormones. He hopes to impress a girl with his success but she is decidedly unimpressed that he is making money by scamming elderly victims. Unlike his uncle, Dinu has a conscience.

Events that drive the novel’s second half might be a bit too coincidental, but that contributes to the fun. Implausible plots don’t detract from novels that aren’t meant to be taken seriously. When the US Embassy’s cybercrime specialist offers little hope, Loretta conducts her own investigation with the help of a journalist. She isn’t quite an action hero, but she is remarkably spry and fearless as she wanders through hidden hallways, makes a dangerous descent from a window, and shows off the ability to operate a motorcycle — a skill that she learned when she was 19. It’s tough not to root for a kindly aging lady, especially when she is revitalized by romance.

I always enjoy the Chet and Bernie series. If Quinn writes more novels about Loretta, I suspect I will enjoy them almost as much.

RECOMMENDED

Urgent Matters by Paula Rodriguez

First published in Spain in 2021; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on July 25, 2023

Urgent Matters is Argentinian noir spiced with dark humor. Its focus is on the reaction of characters to urgent events that always seem to surprise them.

Hugo Lamadrid is a passenger on a train that crashes. He survives, although he wakes up surrounded by corpses. He’s holding a prayer card for the patron saint of urgent matters when rescuers arrive to cut open his carriage and hoist him to freedom.

The rescuers take Hugo to a hospital. He lost his phone and wallet in the crash so he’s relieved when he isn’t quickly identified. Hugo seizes an opportunity to escape from the hospital. He’s worried that his friend Beto might have talked to the police. Beto is worried that the police are coming for him.

Hugo committed a small, unintended crime. Small in Hugo’s eyes, but the police might have a different view, even in Argentina. Beto helped him clean up the mess. Hugo wants to protect Beto but Hugo is not a deep thinker. “He’s pure intuition and argumentative noise.”

At the crash scene, Detective Osvaldo Domínguez finds Hugo’s phone and reads a text from Marta Lacase asking if Hugo is okay. After Domínguez visits Marta, she and her daughter Evelyn pack their bags with cash and leave Buenos Aires. They make an unexpected visit to Marta’s sister Mónica and their mother Olga in Colon, where Mónica works as the slot manager at a casino. Each family member seems to view crime as a useful sideline, although they often keep the details of their criminal enterprises hidden from each other.

Different characters have different opinions about whether Hugo is alive or dead. Only a couple of characters have opinions that are based on facts. El Rifle is a television journalist who knows Hugo. He makes a national news story out of the authorities’ inability to say whether Hugo died in the train accident. Evelyn would also like to know whether her father is alive or dead. Olga is unhappy when she learns that Hugo didn’t die in the crash, but she doesn’t share that knowledge with Evelyn or with reporters who are camped on her doorstep, covering the prayer vigil for Hugo.

Third-person point of view jumps from character to character to tell the unfolding story. The plot loosely follows Domínguez as he tries to learn the truth about Hugo’s fate (a truth that doesn’t concern his superiors, who believe the publicity will be more favorable to them if they simply report that Hugo is dead). To the extent that the story resolves, it does so shortly after a roller coaster ride that Hugo and Beto share.

Roller coasters are a popular metaphor for life, one that Hugo cannot help but notice. “The momentum comes from the first fall. It’s the only one that matters. Everything that comes after it is downhill, even if you’re going up. If you go up a little, it’s so you fall with more force. You’re falling from the start.” Such is life, or at least Hugo’s life.

Olga’s bitterness adds comic relief, as do arguments about which prayers for Hugo will play well with the television audience. The prayer-givers are fickle; when neither Hugo nor his corpse turn up after a couple of days, they lose interest. If prayers go unanswered, maybe it’s time to pray for something else. The media’s fixation on a story about which they know nothing is another source of humor.

My favorite comic moments involve Mónica’s impressive collection of vibrators. Evelyn panics when she steals a cellphone that she hides in a vibrator box. Getting caught with the vibrator is somewhat preferable to getting caught with the stolen phone, despite the lectures she must endure about the damage a vibrator can cause to a virgin.

Urgent Matters is not the kind of crime story that builds tension with each plot twist. The plot is simple and linear; nearly all violence occurs offstage. Like prayer, crime and corruption are simply part of Argentinian life. Characters write their own fates and (like Donnie Brasco in the movie of the same name) they understand and accept without argument that their actions have inevitable consequences. The novel uses a crime plot to deliver grins and soft laughter rather than thrills. Because it does so effectively with sympathetic characters, Urgent Matters is a refreshing change from heavier fare.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Ranger by Peter Heller

Published by ‎ Knopf on July 25, 2023

Crime novels are usually set in urban environments, although there is no shortage of crime stories that take place in small towns and rural areas. The Last Ranger is set in a national park. It is more thriller than wilderness adventure, but the forest setting is just as important to the novel as its plot and characters. The novel is an homage to the outdoors, to predator and prey in the animal kingdom, a drama in which humans play an outsized role.

Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger at Yellowstone. He’s a loner who enjoys nature, so the job is perfect for him. He has a handful of close friends and checks in with at least one of them on most days, but his days off are largely devoted to trout fishing. When he’s working, his job requires him to deal with idiots because idiots are everywhere, including idiots who get angry and point their guns at each other. America on vacation, Ren thinks.

Speaking of idiots, a subplot involves members of a social group/militia who (like too many people) believe public land should not be managed for the public benefit but should be available to every selfish person who wants to hunt or cut down trees or otherwise improve his own life to the detriment of everyone else. People who yak about freedom and imagined rights are often antisocial and irresponsible. The novel reflects that reality, but the militia subplot eventually fizzles out, perhaps because Peter Heller found no reason to clutter a straightforward novel with another storyline after he made his point. Or perhaps the subplot is setting up a sequel.

The main story concerns a biologist named Hilly. She is Ren’s neighbor (meaning her cabin in Yellowstone isn’t far from his) but, like Ren, she lives an isolated life. Wolves are her family. She studies them as a biologist, loves and protects them with the instincts of a mother.

Les Ingraham traps and kills wolves. He claims to limit his hunting and trapping to areas beyond the Yellowstone boundaries, but he’s clearly setting illegal wolf traps inside the park. Much of The Last Ranger reminds readers of the important role that wolves play in the ecosystem and why they deserve protection. Yes, wolves can be a nuisance to livestock owners who don’t build strong fences, but in an environment like Yellowstone, wolves contribute to forest management in ways that most of us never think about, indirectly affecting the course of rivers and the creation of wetlands.

Is Ingraham a bad man? Heller refuses to portray him as a stereotype. The novel presents a surprisingly balanced view of the character, leaving it to the reader to decide. When a conflict develops between Hilly and Ingraham, neither is unblemished. The difference between good and evil is often a question of how well people can manage their anger. Sometimes it’s a question of luck.

The conflict between Ingraham and Hilly drives the story, leading to a couple of low-key, high-tension scenes that are all the more powerful because Heller never tries to take the action over the top. While that conflict gives the novel its bones, Ren gives the story its heart. Heller develops the essential details of Ren’s life, allowing the reader to understand the torment that drives his isolation. Ren’s mother taught him to love fishing but Ren has ambiguous emotions about the role she played in a man’s death before she abandoned her family. Ren married a woman who had an incurable illness, a woman who died young and could not bear children. It’s easy to understand why Ren might be minimizing the risk of further pain.

Ren might be too complex for a job in law enforcement. On more than one occasion, Ren tells a wrongdoer how to avoid arrest. When Ren becomes the target of vague death threats, he feels guilty about having made an arrest that might have ruined a young man’s life. Given a chance to make amends for that arrest, he seizes the opportunity, subordinating his law enforcement role to compassion and understanding. Ren’s personality and his struggle to find and stay upon the path of decency make him a fascinating character. I hope he returns.

RECOMMENDED

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

Published by Scribner on July 11, 2023

An insecure young woman named Cassie moves to San Francisco, gets a job in the tech world, rents an apartment she can’t afford, uses coke to keep up with work that doesn’t seem terribly demanding, is disparaged by co-workers because she doesn’t possess skills that her job doesn’t require, and spends most of her time thinking about the black hole that hovers over her existence. She stresses about wildfires and Covid-19 and a missed period. She stresses about whether to have an abortion. Maybe some readers will relate to Cassie and appreciate Ripe for that reason. I enjoyed Sarah Rose Etter’s writing style despite its forced cleverness but found little about the story to be fresh or engaging.

Cassie was essentially booted out of her house by parents who likely grew weary of her moodiness. She moved to San Francisco and took a job as the head writer for a marketing team at a “unicorn startup” that gathers data “to target users and drive them to make purchases online.” She is working in that position when the novel starts, although Etter supplies flashbacks to her backstory.

Cassie’s CEO wants to destroy their largest competitor. To that end, he gleefully accepts Cassie’s proposal to hire a hacker to cause a massive data breach that will irreparably injure the competitor’s reputation. Cassie doesn’t seem to have any ethical standard that would drive her away from such sleazy business tactics, much less prevent her from suggesting them. Nor does she have a sufficient sense of self-worth to stand up to co-workers who undermine her to promote their own advancement.

None of this makes Cassie an attractive character. Had she found motivation to change her life for the better, the novel might have had merit as a story of redemption. The bleak ending reflects the reality of a bleak life, but it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a young woman with a six figure salary whose problems don’t compare to those of the homeless people she steps over on her way to her overpriced apartment. (She refuses to share with roommates to cut her expenses, another example of her unwillingness to implement simple solutions to problems that would be easy to address if she focused first on overcoming her depression.)

Etter begins chapters with definitions of words (black hole, family, intimacy, betrayal) and offers examples of how the words define her life. That’s modestly clever, even if Etter’s reliance on the gimmick seems a bit forced by the novel’s end. Etter’s dark humor, including her depiction of the unethical startup, is inconsistently amusing but unconvincing. Cassie’s CEO is a stereotype and therefore unworthy of mockery. Her co-workers are stereotypes of backbiters climbing the ladder of success. Cassie’s lover is a stereotype of a guy in an open relationship who just uses women for sex (although he actually seems like a nicer guy than the stereotype would suggest). None of the characters, apart from Cassie, feel authentic.

Cassie regularly reports about the status of her black hole. When she’s having a pleasant (usually sexual) experience, it shrinks. When she’s stressed, it expands. Usually it’s expanding. It would be difficult to find a more obvious metaphor for depression than a black hole. From time to time, Cassie explains superficial facts about black holes that she has discovered in her research. Maybe those facts advance the metaphor but they add little to the story. Etter’s repeated use of a pomegranate as a metaphor is at least more interesting than the black hole, although I never quite understood what a pomegranate is supposed to represent.

Images of pain and death pervade the story. Cassie sees someone set himself on fire. Homeless people are howling. Men are “split open on the train tracks.” All of this foreshadows a dark ending — literally dark, given the presence of a black hole that swallows all light and hope.

Etter makes shallow observations like “Love is just as painful as its absence” but we’ve heard that before, haven’t we? Cassie has a real self and a fake self (maybe a riff on T.S. Eliot). She has issues with her parents. She’s undermined at work by co-workers seeking to pull themselves up by pulling her down. Abortion protestors try to shame her. All of these scenes have been done to death in fiction. There is nothing new or fresh in Ripe.

It’s important to understand that depression is a serious disease that overcomes the ability to find a reason to live. I get it. At the same time, it is difficult to find value in the bleak story of a woman who is capable of functioning in the world but incapable of making even a rudimentary effort to overcome her depression. In the absence of original storytelling, I can’t recommend the novel, even for its sharp prose.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on July 18, 2023

Crook Manifesto is a sequel to Harlem Shuffle. The combined novels tell the story of Ray Carney, but in doing so they tell the story of Harlem. While Crook Manifesto takes the form of three solid crime stories — they often read like literary thrillers — the two books combine to trace changes in culture, race relations, and urban politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is also a story of resilience and fortitude, showcased in one character but present in an entire community, an entire race.

Carney’s father was killed by the police while committing a robbery. Carney both followed in his father’s footsteps by turning to crime when he needed cash and surpassed his father by getting a business degree and opening his own furniture store. The business allowed him to prosper, but during desperate times he paid the bills by developing a side business as a fence. That criminal career drives the plot in Harlem Shuffle.

By the end of Harlem Shuffle and at the beginning of Crook Manifesto, Carney thinks he has gone straight. He misses the excitement or glamor of fencing stolen property, but he has a family to raise and doesn’t miss the risk of imprisonment. Unfortunately, a return to crime is inevitable. “Crooked stays crooked.”

The first of three criminal episodes involves a bent cop named Munson. Like all New York cops, Munson has been shaking down criminals and legitimate businesses (including Carney’s). The police are out of sorts because the Black Liberation Army is committing crimes to raise cash and may have killed a cop. Munson tries to frame the BLA when he commits a serious theft from an underworld boss. The scheme goes sideways when Munson tries to screw his partner out of the partner’s share. He wants Carney to fence some hot jewelry because Carney’s no longer in the business and will not be an immediate suspect. Carney becomes Munson’s de facto partner in a criminal escapade that puts them both at risk. Carney doubts that Munson will allow him to live when the day comes to an end.

The second part takes its theme from the blaxploitation movies that were popular in the 1970s. A Harlem filmmaker wants to make a movie featuring a black actress who has had small roles in Hollywood movies. She’ll be a “black lady secret agent in the cracker-killing business.” The filmmaker is shooting a scene in Carney’s store and has hired Carney’s friend Pepper to provide security. When the actress disappears, Pepper goes on a Harlem adventure to find her, eventually tangling with one of the underworld bosses.

The novel’s last act takes place at the intersection of arson and political corruption. The media blame black activists for fires in Harlem that are actually caused by poor wiring or arson-for-profit schemes. A Harlem politician is behind many of the schemes. Tenements burn down, the owners cash in on insurance, the city acquires the deeds, the property gets sold for redevelopment, and various politicians and bureaucrats get a slice of the profits. When a boy is hospitalized in one of the fires, Carney decides to find out who is responsible. He hires Pepper to help him investigate. Both men pay a price for noticing entrenched corruption.

All three stories are classic crime dramas, complete with fistfights, death threats, and an occasional chase scene. Without slowing the action, Whitehead tells a bigger story about race and changing times in Harlem. It is a story of violent cops, political corruption, entrenched racism, and accepted sexism (particularly concerning black women). Yet Whitehead doesn’t beat the reader over the head with polemic. Carney is something of an everyman (or more specifically, an every black man) who faces the same family and business issues as everyone else who strives for success, but takes it as a given, hardly worth noticing, that he must overcome additional barriers because of his race.

Carney uses music (a Jackson 5 concert), movies (Superfly), black standup comedians (edgier than Bill Cosby), and headlines (Vietnam, white fear of a race war) to take the reader back in time. They also set the scene for Carney’s journey. He realizes that kids hear songs of heartbreak at a young age to prepare them for the reality of adult life. “You sing the sad songs first, then you act them out.” He understands that black entertainers are looking for a way out of lives that offer fewer opportunities than white people expect. Expressions that are popular in the 1970s add to the atmosphere. Pepper likes the phrase “getting over” as an expression of black people finding “a way to outwit white people’s rules.”

Pepper has lived a rougher life than Carney, although Carney and his wife have reserved a room for “Uncle Pepper” in their home. Pepper grew up wondering what it would be like to live in a home like Carney’s. He values the acceptance he feels in Carney’s home, but he never feels entirely comfortable. His is a life of the street, albeit a life that is governed by a moral code. Pepper is a powerful character and an interesting contrast to Carney.

The book highlights changes in society that are reflected in Harlem. The city is burning, “not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it.” Thanks to arson, urban renewal is gentrifying the neighborhoods. Bars that cater to criminals are harder to find. “They are dying off, the old crooks and hustlers and flimflam artists, or upstate after an ill-advised scheme to cover medical bills or six months’ back rent or new teeth.” The city is breaking down. Blue collar jobs are gone and white collar jobs are reserved for white skin. “The blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods.”

Still, by the third story, Carney has made a comparatively good life for himself. He belongs to a Harlem social club and associates with high rollers, although he no longer remembers why he wanted to keep their company. When he faces another catastrophe, he takes it is stride because catastrophe is all he can expect from life. He might still find a way to get over.

Resilience is the book’s overriding theme. Black men came to New York from Alabama because in Harlem, they could be men. Black musicians are “beat down, their skulls full of dead-end thoughts,” but “they keep playing.” Carney won’t stop striving until he’s dead. “The city tried to break him. It didn’t work. He was genuine Manhattan schist and that don’t break easy.” The story is inspirational in its message that endurance is a way to win a battle, that progress may be incremental but it can never be stopped.

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