A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin

Published by Little, Brown and Company on October 18, 2022

John Rebus is one of the more interesting cops in crime fiction. He was never a dirty cop, but he had a bit of Dirty Harry in this approach to law enforcement. He played the game by his own rules. He used his fists to encourage confessions. He framed suspects for crimes they didn’t commit when he couldn’t prove their involvement in the crimes they did commit. No longer enforcing the law, Rebus still defies the rules when they get in the way of solving mysteries. Now there’s a risk that his history of defiant behavior will catch up to him.

Rebus always kept one foot in the underworld, the better to keep track of dirty deeds. He did not join “the Crew” at Tynesdale police station in their corrupt activities, but he once accepted a payment to introduce some bent cops to Big Ger Cafferty, Rebus’ primary underworld connection. Rebus never knew the purpose of the meeting. When he learns its purpose, he realizes the magnitude of his error.

Years later, Rebus is retired, the Crew is under investigation, and Cafferty is in a wheelchair. Cafferty hires Rebus to find Jack Oram. Popular opinion holds that Jack is dead, but Cafferty tells Rebus that he’s been sighted. Jack’s son Tommy is associated with a criminal who fronts his share of the local crime market from a bar. Rebus is always happy to carry an investigation into a bar. Rebus takes the job, not because he wants to help Cafferty but because he wants to learn what Cafferty is really trying to accomplish.

Readers can count on a Rebus novel to have an abundance of moving parts. Much of the plot revolves around Francis Haggard, a cop at Tynecastle station who has been abusing his wife Cheryl. Cheryl’s sister, Stephanie Pelham, is married to a developer who buys up land and develops expensive flats, including one that seems to be tied to both Haggard and Jack Oram. Haggard may want to rat out members of the Crew to save his own skin. It isn’t surprising that Haggard goes missing.

Cafferty is in a turf war with Fraser Mackenzie, who married Cafferty’s old flame Beth. The Mackenzies’ daughter DJs at a nightclub and might know more about crime than all the adults put together.

Ongoing subplots include Siobhan Clarke’s love/hate relationship with Rebus and Malcolm Fox’s determination to prove that Rebus broke the rules of policing. Rebus thinks of Fox as the Brown Nose Cowboy. Fox is no longer with Complaints (Police Scotland version of Internal Affairs) but he assumes Haggard’s murder is connected to bad deeds done by the crew.

Rebus is a character of satisfying complexity. Rebus cares about his daughter and is a good parent to his dog Brillo, making it clear that he has a good heart even if his mind is sometimes enveloped by dark clouds. He isn’t a tough guy (at least in his old age, when walking up a flight of stairs threatens his life). He nevertheless delivers a fair amount of snark while poking his nose in where it isn’t wanted. He occasionally suffers a broken nose for his trouble. His snooping is compulsive; if someone has a secret, Rebus wants to know it. Rebus eventually learns the truth about Jack and Tommy Oram, Haggard, the Pelhams, the Mackenzies, the Crew, the dirty bar owner, and the real reason he was hired by Cafferty.

The novel’s ending is surprising. While it isn’t quite a cliffhanger, the story leaves Rebus in a precarious position. It is a situation he brought on himself, but it is easy to feel sympathy for a guy who can barely breathe yet plods along anyway, a guy who is fed up with crime and with himself. “He’d spent his whole life in that world, a city perpetually dark, feeling increasingly weighed down, his heart full of headstones.”

This isn’t much of a review, but Rebus fans understand the importance of characterization to the series and the general sense of noir that pervades the books. I can only tell those fans that A Heart Full of Headstones meets the standard that the series has established. It is perhaps a bit darker than most and the ending is concerning, as it signals the possibility of a very dark period in Rebus’ declining years. That concern, of course, is reason enough for a fan to wait in agony until the next Rebus novel arrives.

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The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on October 18, 2022

The Boys from Biloxi reads like a true crime story that is strong on exposition but weak on drama. Characters are stereotypes of crusading prosecutors and the criminals they put behind bars. John Grisham writes at least one dud for every good novel he pens. Despite some interesting moments, The Boys from Biloxi resides in the dud column.

The novel begins with a brief history of Biloxi in the twentieth century, a city with a prosperous seafood industry that ignored Prohibition, welcomed gamblers, and turned a blind eye to prostitution. The history focuses on Croatian immigrants and their contributions to Biloxi, primarily with good deeds and hard work, later supplemented by vice.

Hugh Malco and Keith Rudy enter the story in the late 1950s as Little League players. Hugh’s father, Lance Malco, is a rising star in Croatian crime, assisted by the muscle and violence of Nevin Noll. Lance becomes known as the Boss of the Dixie Mafia.

Keith’s father, Jesse Rudy, is a World War II veteran who marries a nurse, has four kids while teaching high school, and earns a law degree at night. He eventually gets fed up with corruption, particularly the DA’s failure to go after the sheriff, Fats Bowman, who is paid to ignore the gambling and prostitution that has made Biloxi famous.

Noll teaches Hugh to box. Keith sticks with baseball until he decides that helping his father run for DA would be a more productive use of his time. The criminal forces that run Biloxi paint Jesse as “soft on crime” because he defended criminals as a lawyer, while proclaiming the incumbent DA as “tough on crime” despite his failure to challenge corruption. The public buys it because ignorance and slogans are the driving force of politics. Graveyard votes seal the deal for the incumbent. And then a hurricane and unscrupulous insurance companies turn Jesse into a community hero.

The story follows Jesse has he moves from a civil practice to a career as a crusading prosecutor who promises to clean up corruption in Biloxi. Eventually the story focuses on Keith as he follows in his father’s footsteps. Their targets are the Malcos, Noll, and Bowman. The book plods along at a steady pace, occasionally enlivened by a murder. A story with so many prostitutes and gamblers should be more interesting, but Grisham plays the role of neutral reporter more than storyteller.

The Boys from Biloxi develops a fuel leak as it enters its third act. It doesn’t quite run out of gas, but it starts coasting as it nears the finish line. Legal thrillers typically depend on the drama of trials, but the trial at the end of the novel is far from riveting and leads to a foregone conclusion. The rest of the story reads like a prolonged epilogue, recapping the lives of central characters following the trial.

The novel’s later chapters focus on the death penalty, a topic about which Grisham has written with passion. The Boys from Biloxi is pretty much the opposite of The Chamber. It alludes to the troubling issues that surround capital punishment but fails to explore them.

Without spoiling a major plot point, I can say that one of the most interesting issues involves a prosecutor’s potential conflict of interest in pursuing the death penalty against a criminal who killed a family member of the prosecutor. Grisham handles the conflict in a scholarly way but deprives the issue of its emotional force.

Grisham could also have done more with the personal conflict between Hugh and Keith, close childhood friends who become enemies in adulthood. The story fails to milk the inherent drama of that changing relationship. The relationship arises as a troubling memory at the novel’s end, but the absence of any buildup robs the conflict of its power. It nevertheless furnishes the novel’s most compelling moment. This is another consequence of telling the story from the standpoint of a dispassionate and slightly bored third person observer. I have no problem with novelists telling stories in the third person, but I have a problem with novels that read like dry history texts.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro

Published by Knopf on October 18, 2022

The broken members of two neighboring families occasionally intersect in Signal Fires. The Wilfs seemed like a typical suburban family until, in 1985, their two children went for a drive. Sarah was 17. She didn’t think she should drive after drinking three beers so she gave the keys to her brother. Theo was 15 and unlicensed. Sarah claimed she was driving after Theo crashed the car into a tree near their home. The Wilf kids were fine but the car’s third passenger appeared to be bleeding to death. Ben Wilf, their father, ran to the car and made the mistake of moving the girl, not realizing that her neck was broken. Ben is a doctor who should knew better but, because he acted in a state of panic, he lives the rest of his life with the knowledge that he might have caused serious harm.

Years later, the Wilf family has changed. Sarah is in Los Angeles with two kids of her own. She works in the film industry and supports her family because her husband, a screenwriter who is better at writing than networking, can’t get a break. Theo has gone to Patagonia to escape his tormented life. Ben suffers a panic attack when, in an emergency, he delivers a neighbor’s baby. Ben’s wife Mimi will later be placed in a care center for dementia patients. The family will reunite when Mimi wanders off the premises and disappears.

The baby Ben delivers is Waldo Shenkman. Waldo’s parents are ill-equipped for parenting. His father lives in a permanent state of rage; his mother drinks. We see less of the Shenkmans than the Wilfs as the story is told, but Waldo becomes a central character. Waldo is an exceptionally bright kid who needs to survive childhood before he will thrive.

Although the story bounces around in time, the key members of the two families come together in the novel’s third act. They are driven to each other in a moment of crisis. Families in crisis have an opportunity to change, to improve. Sometimes they recognize that opportunity; sometimes their personalities are too entrenched. Sometimes the youngest members of a family, not yet irrevocably damaged, have the most clarity. How the family members will respond is the question that readers will ponder until the story reaches its end.

“Everything is connected” is a common theme of literary fiction. All moments, all people, are connected in obvious and unrecognized ways. People are connected by living on the same planet in the same galaxy, surrounded by the same stars, but we are often connected by small events that we fail to appreciate. Connections in Signal Fire lead to surprising bonds that arise from tragic events.

The stronger theme in Signal Fires is the challenge of surviving the harm caused by a festering family secret.  Every member of the Wilf family is touched by the car accident, the lie that was told, the failure to take responsibility and the lack of legal consequence. The family pointedly buries the truth, never speaking of it, even to each other. Ben comes to believe that “they shared a terror that if they spoke of what happened that night, their words would form a complete narrative more terrible than the shattered part each of them carried alone.” Theo is the most damaged, but Sarah uses alcohol to quiet her mind and Ben loses confidence in his ability to practice medicine. Sarah learns from AA that “you are only as sick as your secrets” and realizes that she is very sick indeed. How the family will overcome its secrets is the plot driver that gives the novel its tension.

Dani Shapiro’s descriptive prose sets the scene without burying it in words. I enjoyed Waldo’s description of exploding stars and the creation of new planets from stardust. I appreciated Ben’s memories of the “bang of a truck going over a manhole cover. The feel of a paper bag filled with hot chestnuts in his hands. The gush of an open hydrant in summertime.” The recipe ingredients Theo uses in the restaurants he eventually opens made my mouth water.

While Shapiro gives the reader moments of drama, Signal Fires ultimately succeeds as a character-driven novel. Shapiro details the lives of her characters, their growth and setbacks, the disconnect between their behavior and the way they want to behave. She gives her characters room to heal, a process that requires decades and the power of honest communication. She illustrates resilience in the face of plans that, like all plans, fail to survive contact with life. She acknowledges the importance of being recognized, even by just one or two people, for who you are, not for who you are expected to be. All of that occurs without excessive exposition, without melodrama, with an honest and steady look at how connections break and mend. This is an impressive novel.

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Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 11, 2022

After Lane left Gil, he sold his apartment in New York City, purchased a house in Phoenix that he found online, and walked to Phoenix from New York. The stroll took five months. Years later, when he returned to New York to visit the death bed of his friend Van Alsten, he told Lane about the walk. “You finally did something,” she responded.

The walk was apparently the first and last noteworthy act in Gil’s meek life. He’s a fine person in his own way, but colorless. We learn almost nothing about the walk. If Gil has any other story worth telling, the story is never told.

Gil has the kind of background that might shape an interesting person. His parents were killed by a drunk driver. He later inherited his grandparents’ ill-gotten wealth and wore the money like “a coat of shame.” He might have given the money away but for meeting and falling in love with Lane. When she disappeared from his life, she left behind a note that said, “I met someone.” That all happens before the story begins.

In Phoenix, Gil befriends Tom, the son of his neighbors (Ted and Ardis), because Tom needs a playmate and Gil is available. Gil befriends (but initially refuses to date) a surgeon named Sarah. He befriends a man who is obsessed with birds. None of these friendships have an obvious impact on Gil, who drifts through the novel with the substance of a ghost.

Gil nevertheless finds ways to fill his days. His focus is on being helpful. He volunteers for a battered women’s shelter, where his gender causes him to be viewed with suspicion. He intervenes on Tom’s behalf when Tom is bullied and later offers to help the bully. He helps the drunk driver who killed his parents. He learns that a friend is cheating on another friend but keeps the information to himself. He buys night vision goggles so he can search for someone who is shooting birds at night.

Otherwise, Gil takes note of the world he inhabits without making much effort to interact with it. He notices birds, the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, and learns how climate change has reduced the number of avian species. Handing out Halloween candy, he feels like a dinosaur himself.

Gil is far from interesting. When Gil wonders how he would behave if he had unrestrained freedom, he thinks he would tear down all the No Parking signs. Gil is unhappy with the direction of the country after Trump’s election and wishes the birds would help. Yes, that’s strange, but it is no less strange that someone with wealth and unlimited time on his hands cannot envision doing anything more revolutionary than removing No Parking signs. Why should a reader care about Gil? I can’t find a reason.

Gil learns another secret at the novel’s end but, like everything Gil learns, he does nothing with it. Gil is among the most passive protagonists I’ve encountered. He does manage a nonviolent confrontation with a sketchy character as the story winds down, but the momentary hint of drama merely highlights the story’s failure to manufacture tension.

The novel’s lesson seems to be that being alone can be good but being with other people is better. How Gil manages to internalize that lesson by drifting into the lives of people with whom he never fully engages is far from clear. Nor is the expression of the lesson particularly meaningful. To assure the reader gets the point — I admit I might otherwise have missed it — Lydia Millet explains that being alone is a “closed loop” but opening the loop brings the world inside you. And we’re all linked to each other by evolution and dinosaurs. And only fear and loneliness prevent us from becoming one with the world. Or something like that. I might have been yawning so much when this anticlimactic explanation arrived that I failed to bring it inside me and become one with the novel. Maybe the final observation, that we all have no beginning and no end, is a little too zen for me.

Lydia Millet’s prose is graceful. Some of her characters skate on the edge of being interesting. Those attributes save the novel from a “not recommended” rating, but Dinosaurs doesn’t earn an enthusiastic recommendation because Millet fails to deliver the wisdom that she must have intended.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

First published in 1940

“The lower classes have a way of making one ashamed of one’s sex,” Alex tells her friend Alwyn, although the people who should be ashamed in The Pilgram Hawk are those who have been born to money. Alwyn Tower is vaguely embarrassed or vaguely bored or just vague as he narrates an afternoon spent visiting Alexandra Henry in her impressive home near Paris. Like Alwyn, Alex is an American. The afternoon is marked by an unexpected visit from Larry and Madeleine Cullen, a wealthy couple from Ireland.

Larry would prefer to be drinking at home, which is why Madeleine makes him travel. Madeleine is accompanied by a hawk she acquired while trotting the globe. She named the hawk Lucy. Larry detests Lucy. Larry might also detest Madeleine, although he sees her (through an alcoholic haze) as the object of his devotion, albeit an object he threatens to leave, and who threatens to leave him, during the afternoon’s course. During a moment when the women have gone off together, Larry delivers a self-indulgent lecture on love that manages to be both naïve and jaded.

Lucy is the most likable character. She wears a hood and is kept on a leash, but now and then protests captivity until Madeleine hangs the poor hawk upside down, an indignity Lucy suffers until she becomes exhausted and resumes her subjugated status. Lucy makes clear that she will never be owned, unlike Madeleine (who depends on Larry to support her frivolous lifestyle) and Larry (who would probably have no one if not for Madeleine’s willingness to tolerate him). The Cullens’ relationship has left them just as frustrated as Lucy and for similar reasons. Like all trained raptors, Lucy is trading the security of a satisfied appetite for freedom. Lucy might, at any moment, make a different choice. So it is with the Cullens.

In keeping with the themes of privilege and class, Alex has two servants (Eva and Jean) who are less stuffy than Alex and her guests. The Cullens brought along their chauffeur, a man named Ricketts who is driving them to Hungary. Ricketts provokes Jean by flirting with Eva. Larry believes the chauffeur might have behaved improperly with Madeleine but good drivers are hard to find.

The novel takes place in the 1920s, after the dust of the First World War has settled but before the Great Depression has unsettled those who are less fortunate than Alex and Alwyn. Although he is the narrator, we learn little about Alwyn beyond his occupation as a writer, nor would we be wise to believe anything he reveals. Alex is a novelist who tells the story from memory. Writers embellish and tell the truth as they see it, if at all. As Alwyn describes the Cullens throughout the afternoon, he revises his impressions of them as a writer might revise a story. Alex confesses his unreliability when he realizes that he has been reading his own meaning into events others might understand quite differently. He doubts his own judgment, a confession that invites the reader to doubt the subtle details of his narrative as well as his conclusions.

The story is subdued in tone; Alwyn’s voice is imperturbable. Larry drinks his way through the afternoon, providing a moment of tension as he approaches Lucy with nefarious intent. Another tense moment involves a confrontation in the kitchen between the servants and chauffeur. A third occurs when a gun appears. Alex and Alwyn have different perspectives on the intended use of the gun.

Glenway Wescott’s prose is elegant and precise. This is a novel of hidden power, its apparent simplicity masking its depth. The novel has drifted off the radar of most readers, but it deserves to be remembered.

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