City Walls by Loren D. Estleman

Published by ‎ Forge Books on April 4, 2023

Amos Walker novels are a throwback to the days when detective stories were tight, plots were smart, and snappy dialog made readers think “wish I’d said that.” Loren D. Estleman turns them out at a steady rate and never misses.

Emmett Yale made himself rich by building electric self-driving cars, although he’s still working the bugs out of the self-driving part. His stepson, Lloyd Lipton, was shot by a sniper from a highway overpass while driving a classic Stingray. The shooter, Melvin Weatherall, was arrested. Disagreeing with the theory of the judge who granted bail to Weatherall, Yale believes his son wasn’t the random victim of a disgruntled gun owner who was taking out his animosity toward wealthy people by shooting sports car enthusiasts.

Lipton knew that Yale added to his fortune by using his inside knowledge of his own financial shenanigans to make a killing in the stock market. Yale believes that Lipton sold his knowledge of Yale’s unlawful behavior to Clare Strickling. Yale’s head of security, Gabe Parrish, caught Strickling stealing trade secrets while Strickling was still employed by Yale’s car company. Yale wants Amos to prove that Strickling hired Weatherall to kill Lipton.

As is common in novels of noir, the first murder is not the last. The most dramatic killing occurs after Walker tails Strickland to a private airfield. Walker assumes that a portfolio Strickland is carrying is stuffed with cash that Strickland intends to take on a clandestine flight to Canada. Before Strickland can leave the ground, however, someone points a prop plane at him and lets it taxi. Walker watches the prop tear Strickland to shreds.

Walker’s investigation should probably end at that point, but Walker lets no mystery go unsolved. Why did Weatherall kill Lipton? Who killed Strickland and why? Walker’s investigation includes an interview with the beautiful Palm Volker, a pilot and partner in the private airfield where Strickland died. Palm is making an investment in a historic biplane that will play a key role in the story.

Other murders ensue before Walker gets his answers, including a sniper shot into Walker’s office from a roof on the other side of his street. One mystery gives birth to another as Yale’s theory about Lipton’s killing becomes secondary to the events that follow. The final action scene had me wondering “Didn’t Walker realize he was putting himself in danger?” but the scene is so much fun that I forgave Walker for being a bonehead.

Estleman describes cars on a freeway, viewed from the vantage point of an overpass, as “aerodynamically approved cough drops on wheels.” He describes “a chain-link fence topped by coils of razor wire” as “Detroit’s official flower.” That’s the kind of writing that made detective fiction great in its golden age. Kudos to Estleman for keeping the tradition alive with classic stories about an old-school gumshoe.

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Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen

Published by Minotaur Books on April 4, 2023

Most of us depend on vision more than any other sense to perceive the world. As a character in Blind Spots explains, visual perceptions are often faulty. Eyewitness evidence in criminal prosecutions is among the least reliable forms of evidence because perceptions and memory are subject to error and bias. Blind Spots builds on that knowledge to imagine a world in which the questionable data we receive from our eyes gives way to a new form of “seeing” that is subject to manipulation.

Blind Spots imagines a near future in which everyone in the world lost their vision for a reason that scientists have not discovered. The disability spread like a pandemic. During a period known as The Blinding, chaos ensued. Scientists who had been working on a form of artificial vision developed an implant that allows a form of vision. How the implant works is a bit blurry (it purports to combine radar and GPS to transmit images to the brain) but the device (known as a vidder) also gives companies a chance to beam advertisements directly to the user’s consciousness. Naturally, the company that developed and markets vidders is making a fortune.

I’d rather be blind than forced to watch ads, and that’s a choice some people have made. Some of those people have joined a religion or cult called Inner Sight based on their rejection of vidders. Inner Sight encourages people to accept blindness as a means of stepping back from the “deceitful, materialist, immoral world.” A nefarious company is building on vidder technology to create an improved experience that allows users to change how their appearance is perceived. Okay, I might put up with advertising if a gadget can make women mistake me for George Clooney.

Before The Blinding, while he was a teen, Mark Owens visited a monastery for a couple of days. He was impressed by the stress relief associated with silence. When Owens removes his vidder and spends time with Inner Sight, he experiences a similar epiphany. Eyesight is wonderful but it might also cause the sighted to miss perceptions that come from other senses; the whistles of birds, the gentle caress of a breeze. Not to mention the ability to fight with sticks like the old blind guy on the television show Kung Fu. Thomas Mullen borrows the blind stick fighting for an action scene near the novel’s conclusion.

Owens is a cop. He was married to Jeannie. He’s been a mess since she killed herself. He blames himself for her death because he was less than a supportive husband. Some of his colleagues, including the one he’s sleeping with, wonder whether he might have killed Jeannie. Owens’ partner, Jimmy Peterson, seems to be the only person who will stand up for him. Owens is under investigation by the Truth Commission for wild and violent actions by people in positions of authority during The Blinding, but the investigation seems to be a pretext to cover up something more sinister. The plot involves a conspiracy that will be furthered by an assassination, presumably shielding conspirators from the light that the Truth Commission hopes to shine on their misdeeds.

Nobody believes Owens when he claims that crimes are being committed by people he only perceives as black blurs. Is a glitch in his vidder preventing him from identifying suspects or is he lying? Owens has little help as he works to answer the question and solve the novel’s several connected murders.

Futuristic cop fiction is a subgenre at the intersection of science fiction and crime fiction. Blind Spots is a bit weak on the science (The Blinding is never explained and the attempt to explain vidders is unconvincing, particularly when they start making holograms) but science aside, the story works as a crime novel. While the many-branched plot is a bit convoluted, it all comes together in the end. Owens is sympathetic in the traditional role of troubled cop under suspicion. Action scenes give the plot some pep. Despite a determined effort, Mullen falls a bit short of making a meaningful statement with the blindness theme, but Blind Spots does manage to tell an entertaining story.

RECOMMENDED

A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfař

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on March 28, 2023

Much of A Brief History of Living Forever is narrated by a dead woman. So much for living forever, although death is not the abyss that the narrator expected and desired. While I’m not a fan of the dead serving as characters, Jaroslav Kalfař makes the device work by supplying a non-supernatural explanation for the survival of the character’s consciousness.

The story is set in the near future. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a white nationalist, isolationist political party took control of American government. The new rulers are more interested in stoking online conspiracies than in governing. They focus on oppressing people who are not white nationalists while ignoring structural decay. The nation has closed its borders, although tourist visas are available to white Europeans, provided the tourists wear tracking devices so their location can be monitored. Most of Florida, having been destroyed by tsunamis, is populated by survivalists.

The Czech Republic briefly became a haven for refugees around the world, including Americans who fear civil war and climate destruction. The country’s openness gives birth to a countervailing nationalist movement that emulates America’s, prompting non-Czech residents to flee as refugees from the tattered country.

Adéla Slavíková lives in the Czech Republic, although her backstory as a dissident took her to the United States in 1982 on a forged passport. In 2029, at about the time she loses her job as a supermarket cashier to automation, she learns that she has less than a year to live. She resolves to make good on her promise to meet her daughter Tereza before she finishes “the final winter of my mortal toil.” Although Tereza was conceived in the US, Adéla returned to the Czech Republic and surrendered her to a Danish-American couple for adoption as soon as she was born.

Tereza now lives in the US and works as a bioengineer for VITA. She researches methods of life extension that include a “God pill” to prolong life indefinitely. Before she joined VITA, she debated the merits of uploading consciousness to the cloud, freeing the mind from a body that is “nothing more than a disgusting, malfunctioning sack of raw fluids, always broken, always sick, tiresome with its needs to be fed, to expel, beholden to primitive stimuli, to pleasures and joys whose allure was bound to limit the potential of our species.” Tereza believes the opposite to be true. Without a body, life cannot be experienced. To lose physical sensation is to lose the distinction between being a human and a simulation. She has chosen to concentrate her research on telomeres to find ways to prevent or delay death.

Adéla, on the other hand, wonders “what kind of maniac would want to live forever.” The novel makes clear that she has a point. Adéla only hopes to live long enough to meet, even briefly, with her daughter.

After Adéla and Tereza reunite, Tereza makes a deal with the devil (in the form of VITA), essentially signing over control of her life to her employer for the chance to use the company’s technology to save her mother’s life. When her mother disappears, presumably disposed of by the government after her death as a non-citizen, Tereza embarks on a mission to find her body. She meets her half-brother in the Czech Republic and they travel to the remnants of Florida, where Tereza learns VITA’s true plan for her mother.

The guts of the novel are found in the backstories of the mother and daughter. Adéla’s is the more eventful life. She resists her father’s plan to marry her to the village priest, gets in trouble for working on an “illegal literary review,” is torn apart by the editor’s decision to betray their cause for “the religion of self-interest,” is smuggled to the US, falls in love with Michael despite her best intentions, helps him make a movie, conceives Tereza, runs away to the Czech Republic in search of simpler times before realizing that no times are simple, gives up her baby and eventually makes another one in a failed relationship. It is a fascinating life, although the sketch I’ve provided gives no sense of the rich details and poignant moments from which Kalfař shapes Adéla’s essence. As Adéla observes, her story (like America’s) is one of “endless beginnings.”

A significant part of Adéla’s story revolves around Michael’s movie about an unnatural friendship between human and salamanders, a story that takes place prior to the beginning of Karel Čapek’s classic War with the Newts. As Michael’s movie ends, salamanders from one sea oppress salamanders from a different sea — their hatred of humans as a race narrowing to a hatred of their own kind based on the smallest of differences.

Michael’s movie is a response to rising nationalism as is, in many ways, A Brief History of Living Forever. Adéla recognizes that America, like other countries that persist in playing at empire, is the “victim to every one of its carefully crafted  stories and delusions.” Those delusions allow nationalists to crow about American exceptionalism, as if other countries and other people are not equally exceptional.

The point of the novel, like Michael’s movie, is that the capacity to care about people who are not like us is what makes a human truly exceptional. Yet nationalism is not a uniquely American problem. Kalfař illustrates that point near the novel's end, when a false flag planted by Czech nationalists causes armed extremists to flood into the home village of Adéla’s 109-year-old mother in search of fictional Islamic terrorists. European nationalism leads to the same desire to oppress as its American counterpart.

Tereza tells her brother that most nationalists are drawn to the movement because their lives are boring and meaningless. They find their self-worth in loyalty to a tribe, “adherence to tradition,” and “rejection of anything outside so-called patriotism.” Perversely, they “call such a life ‘freedom’.” They want to “feel like a paladin, protecting whatever it is you consider pure. There’s no war to fight, so you start one, because believing you’re a soldier is easier than accepting that life is mundane and ordinary and mad, a series of chores.” The world is filled with “young men claiming they struggle to feel purpose” while avoiding purposeful work that would help their fellow humans. Volunteering to “pour soup in a shelter isn’t nearly as sexy as starting a race war.” Nailed it.

Perhaps I am making the novel sound preachy, but Kalfař never sacrifices good storytelling for the sake of delivering political insights. I was touched by Adéla’s appreciation of the efforts her children make to recover her body, “to gift me a final act of dignity.” I admired Tereza’s evolution as a character, the development of her empathy, her understanding that failure is “the most natural thing in the world” and her bewilderment that people “worshipped the statistical minority” who succeed (often through luck) while despising those who chase their dreams and fail, “which was the far likelier version of life, the truth unembellished.” And I appreciated the steadiness of Adéla’s conviction that death is not defeat.

Kalfař seems to be following in Karel Čapek’s footsteps as a writer who mines the possibilities of science fiction to expose the ugly realities of human behavior. From characterization to meaningful messages, from an engaging plot to graceful prose, A Brief History of Living Forever is a truly impressive novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2023

Rose/House is a science fiction horror story. Fortunately, it’s not the common version of science fiction horror that imagines alien lizard people laying eggs in humans or mad scientists releasing zombie viruses. The horror in this story is a haunted house — haunted by an Artificial Intelligence with a twisted sense of purpose.

The architect Basit Deniau is dead. His remains, compressed into the form of a diamond, are archived with all his architectural plans in Rose House, a building he designed. He also created the AI that controls and guards Rose House. The AI is inseparable from the house, a thinking, non-human creature “infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile.”

Basit has been dead for a year and the house has been sealed since his death. The only person allowed entrance is Deniau’s former student, Dr. Selene Gisel. She is allowed to visit for seven days each year, to inspect Deniau’s drawings and notes, admire his art collection, although the terms of Deniau’s Will do not allow her to remove anything or take pictures. Envious architects and groupies would love to have similar or greater access. Selene regards her special status as a curse.

The AI has a duty to report any death on the premises. It reports a death to the China Lake police but won’t open the door so they can identify the corpse. Detective Maritza Smith summons Gisil to let her into the house. It takes a bit of shallow trickery to get Maritza inside with Gisil. The house plays along with the trickery to suit its own ends, a fact that Maritza realizes too late.

Maritza’s partner, Detective Oliver Torres, doesn’t want to enter a haunted house and doesn’t try to accompany Gisel. He investigates on his own and returns when he learns that another architect has a plan to enter Rose House for a purpose that might be nefarious or benign, depending on your point of view. Torres is accompanied on his return visit by Alanna Ott, who might or might not be a journalist. While Torres is gone, Maritza has spooky adventures inside the house with Selene and the corpse, whose mouth she finds stuffed with fresh rose petals.

Rose/House tells a creative story. At least, the concept of a haunted AI house that is worshipped by architectural groupies is creative. Having established that background, Arkady Martine seemed to search for a plot that would do it justice. Martine came up with a standard story of a character who runs around in fear as the house threatens her while her partner investigates leads that add little to the plot. The explanation for the dead guy with the rose-filled mouth and the subplot involving the character who wants to break into the house is muddled. As a novella-length work, Rose/House supplies the reader with sufficient creepiness to earn a recommendation, but the story lacks the kind of characterization or meaningful threats that provide the chill a successful horror story should induce.

RECOMMENDED

A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

Published by Random House on March 21, 2023

Some of the most intriguing crime novels are built on ambiguity. Who is the criminal? Was there even a crime? Is a seemingly villainous character the innocent victim of a false accusation? Is the accuser mistaken or malicious? Ambiguity is a page-turning force in A Flaw in the Design.

Matthew Westfallen became an orphan at 17 when his wealthy parents died in a hit-and-run accident. Their will nominated Gil and Molly Duggan to be Matthew’s guardian. Matthew’s mother, Sharon, was Gil’s sister. Gil and Molly already have two kids, Ingrid and Chloe.

Sharon married into money and, in Gil’s view, became a “vacuous shell” of her former self. Gil does not understand why she would give up the mediocre income of academia to live a “life among unctuous braggarts.” Sharon always wanted money and Gil always looked down on people who had it.

Gil and Molly haven’t had contact with Matthew’s parents in many years. Gil is less than pleased to have Matthew move from his Manhattan residence to the Duggans’ Vermont home. Six years earlier, when Matthew was a troubled child, he threw Ingrid into a swimming pool, nearly causing her to drown. Or at least that’s what Gil believes. He told Ingrid to stay away from the pool, fell asleep on a lounge chair, and was awakened by the splash. Matthew’s parents refused to believe that Matthew did anything wrong. Ingrid had no reason to lie and Matthew admitted he threw her into the pool, but his confession was sufficiently sarcastic that its accuracy was ambiguous. In Gil’s view, Matthew is a force of evil, the kind of kid who is looked upon with suspicion when the cat disappears.

Gil is a one-book writer who earns a modest living as a professor at a small college. While Gil and Molly are worried about living with Matthew, they’re also happy to have the monthly $10,000 payment that Matthew’s parents provided as a gratuity for their efforts. Matthew has his own money in a trust that comes with a generous allowance, so Gil is free to use the money to pay down the family’s debt. Declining the guardianship would cause the family to lose a welcome windfall.

Gil’s reservations seem to be misplaced. When Matthew arrives, he’s polite, engaging, quite the opposite of the arrogant brat they expected, although Gil believes that snarky judgment accompanies Matthew’s “cool New York irony.” Chloe is about Gil’s age and views him as an exciting and generous companion. At the same time, Matthew doesn’t seem to be grieving the loss of his parents. Of course, “orphan goes to live with parents and turns out to be nice” wouldn’t be much of a story, so later events give the reader (and Gil) new reasons to question Matthew’s character.

Matthew gets an advanced placement at the college where Gil teaches. He takes Gil’s fiction writing class and writes a story that suggests ways that children might die, including death by drowning. Gil is convinced that Matthew is writing about Gil’s daughters. Gil understandably loses his mind, perhaps literally. Bad things are going to happen, but will they happen to Matthew, Gil, or one of Gil’s daughters?

A Flaw in the Design is a sneaky novel. For most of the story, Matthew seems to be a prototypical kid who was “born evil,” the kind of horror novel character who will burn down his parents’ house before graduating from high school. But no bad deeds are explicitly narrated, leaving room for doubt. Did he really throw Ingrid into the pool? Was he involved in his parents’ death? Did he get Chloe drunk at a party? Is he poisoning the minds of other students against Gil? Or are Gil’s suspicions the product of an increasingly addled mind?

Perhaps Matthew is taunting Gil, revealing truths about his actions in the stories he writes for Gil’s class. Or perhaps he’s just pulling Gil’s chain. Gil seems to be the only one who recognizes that Matthew is a monster, but Gil might not be entirely stable. He follows Gil for no apparent reason. He eavesdrops on Matthew’s telephone conversations. He bases accusations on skinny evidence. He frightens students by screaming at Matthew in class. In his mind, his irrational behavior is justified. Is Matthew the bad guy or are his evil deeds a product of Gil’s imagination, compounded by Gil’s resentment of wealth? The ambiguity grows as the novel progresses.

Gil is developed in more depth than the other characters. We learn about his MFA years and failed writing career, his reactions to 9/11 and his parents’ death, his ambiguous suicide attempt, his hatred of New York and of horses (because they belong to the world of “the dilettante rich”), his love of Vermont. That character development makes it possible for a reader who will instinctively dislike Matthew to wonder if faith in Gil’s judgment is misplaced.

The story builds to a surprising ending. It is dramatic, but the drama is not overplayed. Ambiguity is not entirely resolved with evidence, but firmly planted clues will allow the reader to form conclusions about Matthew and Gil. That the reader will never know whether those conclusions are correct is a reflection of life. Nathan Oates’ reliance on ambiguity and characterization to build a clever story makes A Flaw in the Design a good choice for fans of cerebral crime fiction.

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