Jackal by Erin E. Adams

Published by Bantam on October 4, 2022

Alice Walker was ten before she realized that her skin color differed from her peers. Alice was killed in 1986, soon after she made that discovery. Her death in the woods was deemed accidental. Alice’s heart had been removed from her chest, an inconvenient fact that authorities attributed to “animal activity.” Keisha Woodson suffered a similar death in the same woods in 2002. Morgan Daniels disappeared in 1994. They aren’t the only black girls who lost their hearts in the woods, but the police in Johnstown fail to notice a pattern.

Liz Rocher’s mother is Haitian. Liz was born in 1985, the year the first black girl disappeared in the woods. Liz had a bad experience of her own in the woods on the day Keisha disappeared. Liz remembers an encounter with a monster in a shadow (or maybe it was a dog), but her mind might have constructed a false memory to protect her from the truth. Melissa Parker helped Liz find her way out of the woods that day.

Liz returns to Johnstown in 2017. She has bad memories of the school where she was labeled an oreo, too white in her manner of speech for the black kids, too black in appearance for the white kids. Her teachers believed black people were “an alien anomaly in white suburban perfection.” Her only friend was Melissa, a white girl who didn’t have the looks or money to fit in with the other white girls. Liz left Johnstown because too many people in town could only look at her “in a way that makes themselves feel superior.”

Liz only returns because Melissa is finally getting married to her boyfriend, Garrett Washington. They have a daughter named Caroline. Melissa’s father was skeptical of his daughter’s decision to have a baby with a black man, but he finally decided to meet his granddaughter after he bonded with Garrett while hunting for deer.

The wedding reception is at the edge of the woods. Liz is supposed to be keeping an eye on Caroline, but Caroline disappears while Liz is getting drinks. Liz looks in the woods when she can’t find Caroline and finds a bloody piece of Caroline’s party dress.

With that setup, the story addresses “missing child” themes that are common to crime novels. The story adds a reasonably creative mix of horror themes (don’t peer into shadows; Liz has bright eyes that signal someone who has been touched by the woods). Racial and historical themes add powerful context to the plot. In 1923, the mayor of Johnstown ordered more than 2,000 African Americans and Mexican immigrants to leave the city. Liz wonders how she could have grown up in the city without learning that fact. It’s the side of American history that white supremacists don’t want schools to teach, but it belongs with the St. Louis race riots and the Tulsa race massacre as a moment in American history that every child should study. Jackal is in part a horror novel, but what happened in those cities is the true horror.

The story offers several suspects who may be involved in the disappearance of Caroline and/or all the other missing black girls, assuming they are missing and the disappearing girls aren’t just an urban lesson. Suspects include Melissa’s father and husband, Keisha’s mother, a cop named Doug who helps Liz develop a map of missing girls, and a guy named Chris who encountered Liz in the woods on the night that Keisha disappeared. Not to mention a shadowy dog monster that might be lurking in the woods. Maybe the killer is supernatural. Maybe the killer belongs to a satanic cult performing one of those annual solstice sacrifices that thriller writers love to imagine.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s fair to say that the resolution combines a murder mystery with the supernatural. The explanation for the unsolved (perhaps unnoticed) killings is a stretch. So is the motivation that drives the supernatural entity.

Stories of the supernatural merit the suspension of disbelief only if they are frightening; Jackal fails to meet that test. Liz’s important learning moment at the novel’s end is a bit contrived, although I liked the use of a supernatural entity as an allegory for the racial hatred that divides the nation. I’m recommending the novel for the mild suspense it generates, for Erin E. Adams’ effort to build Liz into a fully realized character, and for the important themes that hold the story together.

RECOMMENDED

The Singularities by John Banville

Published by Knopf on October 25, 2022

John Banville (at least when he writes under his own name) is among the greatest of the Irish prose stylists. He’s also a thinker who brings an element of playfulness to deep thought. Banville’s thoughts in The Singularities turn to the nature of reality, a question that joins philosophy and science. The novel seems to suggest that reality is what we make it. If that’s true, we should make it carefully.

Two narrative voices in The Singularities alternate and sometimes merge. One voice belongs to Professor Jaybee, who has been engaged to write a biography of the mathematician Adam Godley, creator of the Brahma Theory, a “dazzling re-statement of the fundamental nature of reality.” One component of the theory holds that any attempt to understand the universe contributes to its destruction. People literally deconstruct the universe by trying to comprehend its reality. That discovery gave birth to a ban on scientific inquiry, a shuttering of the science and math departments in universities. The theory also seems to have affected reality in an undefined way. New York is again New Amsterdam. The plague may have returned to Venice. A Manhattan and an Old Fashioned are now the same drink.

The other narrative voice tells the story in the third person. That narrator describes itself as a minor god or godlet, a child of Zeus. An omniscient entity is well positioned to follow a murderer once known as Freddie who took the name Felix Mordaunt after his release from prison. Yet the two narrators are not so different; when characters speak to the godlet, they seem to be looking at Jaybee. The only character who can see the godlet is a dog.

In postmodern fiction, anything goes — the more confusing, the better. One might assume that the godlet is John Banville, but who knows? Given the initials that combine in Jaybee’s name, a reader might also conclude that Jaybee is Banville. Perhaps the point is that every character in a novel is really the author, for characters do not exist until the author creates them. Or perhaps the nature of reality is that, at some level, we are all the same person traveling the same course we have traveled throughout the infinity of time, even if we believe ourselves to be individuals with free will and uncertain futures. “For nothing exists by itself, in isolation; there is only the continuum, in which everything presses into, bites into and extends from, everything else.”

Speaking of confusion, the novel warps the literary illusion of reality by bringing together characters and settings from Banville’s earlier work. Freddie murdered a maid in The Book of Evidence. He visits a resort that was featured in The Sea. The Godleys, Ivy Blount, and Duffy the cowman appeared in The Infinities. I’m sure there are other examples (I haven’t read everything Banville has written); those were the easiest for me to spot.

The confusion of reality and illusion is evident when Jaybee believes he sees Godley’s dead daughter Petra, or her ghost, and when Godley in his old age travels to Venice and wonders whether a woman named Cissy actually exists, whether Cissy is a projection of Petra, whether he is actually in Venice or inhabiting a dream. When Godley wakes from dreams, the real world he encounters seems like another dream. Perhaps the reality we all believe we experience is nothing but a dream. Perhaps being awake is just “another kind of sleep.” On the other hand, another character tells Jaybee that the letter in which Godley expressed those thoughts is just another of his lies. Reality, illusion, fiction, truth, lie — all inseparable and indistinguishable. Or not.

The Singularities is more a challenging work of philosophy than a traditional novel. Before letting it go, Banville begins to construct a plot with Felix’s release from prison and his travel to the house where he lived while growing up, in a place that is now unrecognizable to him because time has passed and reality has changed. Jaybee’s agreement to investigate and write about Godley’s life seems to furnish the second plot element. He meets characters who knew Godley, including his widow, whose dementia has altered her reality.

Jaybee apparently finishes a chapter of the biography; Banville sticks it into the middle of The Singularities. After that, any attempt at plotting is all but abandoned, as the story follows tangents related to Godley, all but forgetting Felix’s role in the novel.

So what’s left? Astonishing prose is the reward for sticking with the novel. One of the narrators of The Singularities describes an evening in New Amsterdam: “We had booze, broads, a barroom fight and a night in the cells, and in the morning a crapulous and shamefaced court appearance, followed by summary deportation and a thunderous warning never to show our faces in town again. No, of course we didn’t; honestly, you’d believe anything.” It is worth suffering the confusion of reading The Singularities just to encounter such passages. Some readers might find it worth reading twice to gain a more nuanced understanding of the points Banville is making, although it might be necessary to read or reread everything Banville has written to appreciate the novel in full. Lacking that kind of ambition, once was enough for me, coupled with my dim memories of the other Banville novels I’ve read. I wouldn’t rate The Singularities as my favorite of those (The Book of Evidence probably earns that honor), but I enjoyed nearly every page.

RECOMMENDED

No Plan B by Lee Child and Andrew Child

Published by Delacorte Press on October 25, 2022

How do you know a Reacher novel was written by the son rather than the father? The sentence “That was for sure” appears multiple times when Andrew Child writes the novel. I doubt that’s a sentence his father would ever use. And while Andrew tries to emulate his father’s style — sentence fragments, lots of “Maybe this. Maybe that.” — Lee Child builds a natural rhythm into the prose that his son fails to capture.

No Plan B gives the reader a main plot and two subplots. The main plot involves a private prison in Mississippi and a ship that mysteriously lurks just out outside US territorial waters. The prison is about to release an innocent inmate with great fanfare as proof of its respect for justice and civil rights. The corporate executives who run the prison are worried that Reacher will disturb the ceremony after they learn that Reacher witnessed a murder in Colorado. Before the murderers made their escape, Reacher glimpsed the contents of an envelope that relate to the mysterious crimes for which the prison is a front.

Reacher decides he will travel to Mississippi to right whatever murder-related wrongs he can uncover. A woman who was close to the vicim of a second, seemingly related murder decides to drive Reacher to Mississippi. Watchful prison employees are staged along likely travel routes in anticipation of Reacher’s arrival, but the reader knows that Reacher will defeat them all, usually with a single punch.

The first subplot involves a kid whose evil foster parents neglect him. He runs away. Naturally, his destination is the prison. Naturally, he will encounter Reacher as he travels, but only after proving that he’s a plucky kid who can survive the theft of his backpack and money. No novel featuring a kid at a bus terminal would be complete without an attempt to kidnap the kid and sell him into slavery. Trite much?

The second subplot features a guy named Emerson who is seeking revenge for his son’s death. The death connects to the prison, although Emerson isn’t aware of that connection until he burns a couple of people alive while searching for someone to hold responsible for his son’s fate. The subplot feels like filler, added only to satisfy the need for a second subplot and gratuitous gore. The reader is evidently not meant to feel sympathy for Emerson because his methods are too extreme. Reacher comes close to crossing the extremist line, although he can usually claim he’s acting in self-defense when he maims or kills the bad guys. Well, except for the bad guy he kills for no good reason near the end of the novel. This is shortly before he tells another character, “I’m not going to kill anyone in cold blood.” Yeah, not unless he’s in a killing mood, anyway.

The message of certain tough guy novels is that size and strength are more important than moral courage. Reacher novels have always flirted with that message, but Andrew brings it to the forefront.

The mysterious criminal scheme operated from the prison is common in thrillers but almost never occurs in the real world. It’s a fallback for writers who can’t devise an original crime. The notion that a major corporation would operate the scheme undetected, even in the cesspool of corruption that is Mississippi, is just too nonsensical to work as a credible thriller plot.

Reacher needs to break into and out of a prison as the story winds down. His ability to do so is implausible, but such is the nature of the modern thriller. Implausibility is one thing; the complete absence of credibility is another. There is nothing credible about Reacher’s consistent ability to knock out his opponents with a single blow, sometimes with a mere twitch of his body. Yet it is the ridiculous criminal scheme operated in the prison that cheats thriller fans out of the opportunity to suspend disbelief. A close second on the credibility scale is the corporation’s fear of Reacher who, as far as its executives know, is a drifter with no reason in the world to look for trouble in Mississippi.

Fans of tough guy fiction who value toughness more than strong plotting might enjoy No Plan B. Fans of Lee Child might be frustrated that books “co-written” with Andrew Child come across as factory fiction. The book has good pace and a fair amount of action, but little else of merit.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

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.

RECOMMENDED

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