Suspect by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 27, 2022

Scott Turow’s latest legal thriller is set, as usual, in fictional Kindle County, Illinois. Suspect differs from many of Turow’s novels in that the narrator/protagonist is not a lawyer. Clarice Granum, known to her boss as Pinky, is a bisexual nonconformist who dropped out of the police academy and took a job as an investigator for Rik Dudek, a 52-year-old lawyer in Highland Isle.

Rik is representing Lucia Gomez-Barrera, the chief of police in Highland Isle, in a hearing before a commission that will decide whether she should keep her job. Three male police officers have accused her of demanding sexual favors in exchange for promotions. One of the officers has retired and taken a position with Moritz Vojczek, a former cop turned property developer who is known locally as the Ritz. Lucia encouraged the Ritz’s resignation from the force and he has long resented the loss of his pension, although he has achieved enormous wealth and doesn’t need it.

Lucia suspects the Ritz of orchestrating the accusations. While two of the accusers are sleazy, one is squeaky clean. Rik proves his ability as a trial lawyer when he cross-examines the accusers, assisted by evidence that Pinky has uncovered. The hearing seems to be going sideways, however, when a photo turns up that appears to show one of the cops going down on Lucia while she’s sitting in her office. Lucia’s life might go sideways when one of her accusers dies under suspicious circumstances.

In a subplot that eventually merges with the main plot, Pinky becomes curious about a guy in a neighboring apartment who is keeping odd hours. Pinky gets close to the guy because he’s intriguing — maybe he’s a spy? — creating the possibility of a dangerous liaison. Pinky also needs to work out her relationship with a cop she once dated, a woman who seems to be carrying a torch for her. Since the cop is involved in a death investigation and since Lucia is a suspect, Pinky can’t serve Lucia’s needs without addressing the cop’s feeling of abandonment or rejection.

Suspect lacks the suspense and intricate plotting of Turow’s best work, but the cross-examinations are fun. The initial focus on sexual harassment rather than criminal defense makes the story fresh. Rik doesn’t have much personality but Pinky has plenty, at least if an unwillingness to settle down and an unquenchable willingness to have sex count as a personality. The story proceeds steadily to an unsurprising conclusion, but the path is sufficiently twisty to hold a reader’s interest.

RECOMMENDED

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

Published by Random House on September 20, 2022

References to the pandemic have been sneaking into recent novels, usually adding color to the background. Lucy by the Sea is the first novel I’ve read that both makes the pandemic central to the plot and takes the viral spread of death seriously. Since the novel begins in New York, the US epicenter of the pandemic in its early days, the fear of death that the characters experience rings true. Because they rapidly scamper from New York, however, their fear is largely animated by news reports rather than firsthand experience. The pandemic is therefore central to the plot while still remaining in the background. In most respects, Lucy by the Sea is a typical New York domestic drama, complete with infidelity and family crises and a protagonist who writes novels.

Lucy Barton narrates the story from her privileged perspective. Lucy is a novelist who lives in New York. She has appeared in a couple of novels that the New York literary establishment holds in high regard, but I haven't read them so Lucy is new to me. She is an older white woman who feels insulted when her daughter’s boyfriend mentions that she only writes books about older white women. Not that it’s wrong to do so, but Lucy by the Sea is very much a novel about an older white woman.

Lucy has been a widow for more than a year. Although her age and location enhance her vulnerability to the virus, she doesn’t watch the news and is surprised when William, her first husband, insists that she accompany him to Maine until it is safe to return to the city. She tries not to be angry with her dead husband for leaving her to cope with a pandemic but seems to be grateful that a former husband came along to protect her.

Lucy is surprised that people in Maine assume New Yorkers feel superior to them. Lucy shouldn’t be surprised because she does, in fact, feel superior. Avoiding contact with people in Maine is not difficult for her because she doesn’t want to know them, apart from a man who gives her his undivided attention when they’re together.

Quarantined in Maine, Lucy starts watching the news. She congratulates herself for being angry about George Floyd. It reminds her of her “deep response” to the brutality inflicted on Abner Luima. I suppose belated wokeness is better than none, but I suspect that Lucy is more concerned about the impact of police violence on her emotions than the harm it causes to the victims. She recalls that a black writer at a conference told her about being afraid of driving alone on an empty Indiana road and says “I thought about that for a long time” without revealing what she thought. Why Lucy so frequently tells the reader that she thinks unspecified thoughts about various topics was a mystery to me.

On the other hand, when Lucy describes her thoughts, they are so uninteresing that she should have kept them to herself. When William gets excited about potato parasites (a topic within his field of scientific expertise), Lucy takes note of her own (fleeting) interest: “I thought about how when a person is really excited about something, it can be contagious.” Usually she’s thinking about how something makes her feel. Much of the novel consists of Lucy telling the reader “this made me happy” or “this made me sad” which, as plots go, isn’t much of one.

Lucy admonishes herself for being selfish (not giving up a place in a long line for an older man) and, again, seems pleased with her self-awareness, her recognition that she is selfish, while making no effort to change. She does not recognize (although the reader will) her talent for sucking the pleasure out of every moment. Standing near the water and admiring the view, she begins to fret about what might happen if she falls, so she goes inside again where she can feel safe in her isolation. Lucy enjoys talking with William but hates him when he doesn’t give her his undivided attention.

Lucy frets about growing old and the risk of dementia. She frets about losing her ex-husband the way she lost her husband. She frets about her childhood. She frets about her children. She frets about college students not respecting her work. She frets about whether people have free will. She frets about her hair. She frets about cultural divisions in the country (something she apparently failed to notice until she left New York). She is “petrified” about her lack of connection to her New York apartment. She feels “great anguish” that her adult children do not contact her as often as they did when they were younger, which makes her fret about whether she was “the mother I thought I had been.” Late in the novel, she writes “In December, I noticed a drop in my mood,” In February, she reports “I often felt sad.” Some months later, “An emptiness had come into me.” She might be the dreariest person alive.

William is also depressed — not because he is living with Lucy, although that would be a depressing experience for most men. William is lonely and Lucy provides relief, although they can’t resume their marital intimacy because William has a medical problem. That might be why he’s depressed and lonely, but Lucy is too self-absorbed to see William’s depression as anything other than reflection of her own unhappiness. Lucy’s friend Charlene appears to be lonely, which only makes Lucy frightened that she might appear to others to be lonely.

Part of the story revolves around Lucy’s family. Lucy worries that one of her daughters is demonizing her husband because (as she knows from personal experience) women sometimes do that to justify their desire to have an affair. According to William, Lucy’s mother is a “whack job,” but Lucy has unresolved feelings about her (she imagines receiving daily guidance from a nice mother). Lucy’s daughter refuses to abandon a husband who refuses to leave Brooklyn, but she’s frightened by refrigerated trucks collecting people who have died. Lucy’s sister joins a far-right church that finds masks during a pandemic to be ungodly (she trusts God to protect her) and admonishes Lucy for believing that germs can kill people. People in Lucy’s family eventually get sick with COVID; a daughter has a difficult pregnancy; her daughters’ marriages are troubled through no fault of their adoring husbands, perhaps because the daughters are emulating their mother. Lucy has some good advice for one of her daughters, although she’s largely repeating the unheeded advice she got from her psychiatrist.

Lucy by the Sea might be a good book for women who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are in bad marriages. It might be a good book for older, sheltered women of means who live in New York. It wasn’t a good book for me but I’m probably the wrong reader for it. I’m tired of reading mundane observations like “we do the best we can.”

Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer and her writing style is fluid, so who am I to complain about her work? I can only say that I found the book more annoying than appealing.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I Walk Between the Raindrops by T.C. Boyle

Published by Ecco on September 13, 2022

Many of the T.C. Boyle stories collected in this volume were published in Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy, or literary reviews. They vary in style and subject matter but not in quality. The title story didn’t speak to me, but the others include some of the best short fiction I’ve read in recent memory.

My favorites:

The narrator of “The Thirteenth Day” is quarantined on a cruise ship with a passenger from Wuhan who has COVID-19. Fear, privation, domestic discord, and culture war lunacy ensue. The story is so realistic it reads as if Boyle was actually a passenger on the ship.

“Big Mary” is a large woman who beats every man she arm-wrestles. She slowly becomes the lead vocalist for a bar band before jealousy (largely the narrator’s) leads to the kind of drama that breaks up bands.

“The Shape of a Teardrop” - Parents evict their loser son because he refuses to work, knowing his wages will be garnished for child support. The mother insists she loves her son but her brand of tough love suggests her primary loyalty is to herself. This is the kind of story that makes me even more grateful to have been raised in a functional family.

A medical student practices surgery on dogs in a hospital's “Dog Lab.” The story highlights the ethical issues surrounding the use of dogs that would otherwise have been euthanized (a fate that is only delayed by the surgeries). The issues cause a rift between the student and his girlfriend. No spoiler intended, but if you want to know whether a dog lover will appreciate the ending, the answer is yes.

The narrator of “Not Me” is an unhappy high school teacher who, unlike some of his unhappy colleagues, is not sleeping with a student. Sleeping with students is against the rules but sleeping with other teachers turns out to be just as problematic.

“The Apartment” - A man agrees to pay a monthly sum to an old woman for the duration of her life in exchange for ownership of her apartment when she dies. The man and the old woman both are wagering on the duration of her life. “We all make bargains in this life,” the woman later says. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.”

Other stories I enjoyed:

“These Are the Circumstances” - Nick’s wife Laurel persuades him to go on a nature walk/bath ($25 per hour per person) so they can gain the meditative and calming benefit of communing with leaves and dirt. Nick is bored after three minutes of watching twigs float downstream. He misses his phone. Laurel sees beauty where Nick sees danger. They might both be right, but nature later has an adverse impact on Nick’s life. This is a good story for husbands who oppose their wives’ insistence that they get off the couch.

“Key to the Kingdom” - A stranger knocks on a writer’s door and raises the possibility that he’s the writer’s son, triggering memories of a return to the writer’s alma mater after the publication of his first novel and an unexpected sexual encounter. The knowledge is one more in a series of burdens that the writer has never been able to carry.

“SCS 750” - The ability to get a good job or medical treatment or decent seating on the train is dependent on a Social Credit Score that defines trustworthiness. The score is shaped by conformity to rigid rules (not avoiding surveillance cameras, not buying more than one bottle of gin at a time, not watching porn or playing video games all day, not expressing antisocial thoughts). The narrator chooses friends and relationships based on their impact on his score, a clever twist on the common dystopian theme of government-enforced limits on individuality.

“Asleep at the Wheel” takes place in the future of self-driving cars, including Ubers that want to take their passengers on a shopping trip to stores that have purchased advertising from Uber. The story describes two events. One is a mother’s evening with a man her car told her to avoid. The other follows drunken kids who, inspired by Rebel Without a Cause, decide to disable the self-driving capability of stolen cars and drive them off a cliff. Meanwhile, gentle robotic police make the reader wonder whether society might get something right in the future.

I was indifferent to these three:

The title story tells five interlocking mini-stories. The first and last address a man’s feeling of powerlessness when he is harassed by a woman while waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine’s Day. One follows a man who deals with the aftermath of a mudslide. One is about a suicide prevention worker’s relationship with a woman who threatens suicide. The only interesting segment involves a matchmaking dinner party. The hosts try to bring two obese people together, a plan that alienates a fat man who wonders why the hosts would assume he is attracted to fat women. All the segments are all meant to address the theme of “fathomless, inexpressible, heartbreaking loneliness,” but the dinner party segment is the only one that touched my heart.

“The Hyena” - The residents of a village go mad. Perhaps there was something in the bread.

“What’s Love Got to Do with It?” tells of a conversation an older woman has with a college student during a train ride. The student is an incel who describes with sympathy another incel who went on a killing spree at a sorority house. The incel wants to be seen but doesn’t understand that the woman only sees him for what he is. I don’t see a college virgin opening up to a woman who is likely oler than his mother about his sexual insecurities, but Boyle’s description of those insecurities seems spot on.

RECOMMENDED

Bad Day Breaking by John Galligan

Published by Atria Books on September 13, 2022

Cults, killers, human trafficking, prison pen pals, corrupt cops, and sexual assaults are among the themes that John Galligan shoehorns into Bad Day Breaking. Galligan also mixed multiple crime story elements in Bad Moon Rising; perhaps the leftovers made it into Bad Day Breaking, the fourth novel in the Bad Axe County series.

Bad Axe is a rural county in Wisconsin. The county sheriff is Heidi Kick. When Heidi and Melissa Grooms were teens, they did a lot of drugs. Heidi got clean and told the truth about their supplier, Roman Vanderhoof, a truth that sent him to prison for 14 years. After his release, he contacted Melissa (who never got clean for long) and came after Heidi.

The story begins with Deputy Mikayla Stonebreaker roughing up Jerome Pearl in a Walmart parking lot. Jerome and his wife Ruth are the leaders of the House of Shalah. County residents view the House of Shalah as a cult and want its members gone. Heidi makes herself unpopular by suspending Stonebreaker because even cult leaders have civil rights. Unfortunately, the Police and Fire Commission has little use for legal niceties. It agrees with the community about the cult and reinstates Stonebreaker. She makes it her mission to force Heidi out of office.

Vanderhoof and Stonebreaker each thirst for revenge, setting up two subplots. A third involves Duke Hashimoto, an ATF agent during the ATF’s disastrous response to violations of gun laws by Branch Davidians in Waco. As older readers might recall, the ATF attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian compound despite knowing that cult members were aware that ATF was coming. Four ATF agents were killed in a failed attempt to search the compound. The ATF later embarked on a full-scale retaliatory siege that ended with the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including 20 children. Hashimoto was devastated by those losses and by the government’s later attempt to excuse its incompetent decision-making and to rewrite history in its favor.

Hashimoto was running an informant in the House of Shalah cult. Before he could get a warrant to search the Bad Axe County storage units that cult members have occupied, ATF lost interest. Hashimoto retired and his informant was killed. He returned to Wisconsin when Fernanda Carpenter called him about pornographic pictures that cult members had taken of her daughter.

The subplots swirl around like snow on a windy Wisconsin winter afternoon. Two of Heidi’s deputies seem to have ambiguous (possibly improper) relationships with prison pen pals. Released prisoners seem to have a relationship with the cult, which seems to be engaged in the kind of crimes involving women and children that keep Hashimoto from sleeping peacefully. Somebody with embalming skills seems to have disguised a corpse while a different dead body is implicated in a crime to mislead the police about the reason for the murder. Like any good cult, there also seems to be a plan to have members drink the kind of Kool-Aid that induces a permanent sleep. More murders ensue, as well as an attempt to murder Heidi that might cause Heidi to face a murder charge of her own.

The subplots all link together but the sheer number of stories makes it difficult to invest in any of them. It’s all a bit much. At some point, crime plots can become so complex that they lose any semblance of plausibility. I think that happened here. I kept hoping that Galligan would pick a plot and give it some flesh instead of throwing multiple plots against the wall to see if any would stick. Still, the story remains coherent.

Action scenes are creative (diving into a pond of pig manure is an image I won’t soon forget) and Heidi’s character development suggests a real person who has made some mistakes and is doing her best to overcome obstacles and live selflessly. Whether she has a future in law enforcement after this novel is unclear (and perhaps unlikely). I don’t know what that means for the Bad Axe County series, but I hope Galligan’s next novel (whether or not it is in this series) involves a less robust mixture of plot elements.

RECOMMENDED

Two Nurses, Smoking by David Means

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 13, 2022

The stories collected in Two Nurses, Smoking depict the rawness of life, a savagery of experience that is occasionally tempered by love. Many of the stories involve characters who respond to circumstances beyond their control. Some make choices they will regret, but the future holds open the hope for better choices as the characters isolate what has gone wrong in their lives. The stories can be hard to read but a spark of hope or redemption or love softens most of them.

What do “Two Nurses, Smoking” talk about on a smoke break? A nurse who serially kills patients. Patients they expect to die. Medical equipment and the pain of kidney stones. Patients who are junkies. The scar a nurse earned in Iraq. Lonely roads and lonely people. Eventually, they talk about each other. All those topics, the reader realizes, are connected. Perhaps the smoking nurses aren’t all that different from the serial killer or junkies or doomed patients. Perhaps they can connect in ways that go beyond stories, beyond their common pain, to set their lives on a different path.

Grief and coping with loss, often manifesting in bitterness and incivility, are the subjects of “Stopping Distance.”  The reader might wonder how support groups that encourage parents to be stuck in a loop of loss, telling the same stories again and again, help anyone, yet a bereavement group allows two people to make a connection through mirrored pain. The story’s value lies in its insight about living with loss.

“The Red Dot” is a kayak in the distance that, as it nears shore, resolves into a kayak paddled by a Karl’s former wife, Debbie, who before she became an ex was afraid of the water. Karl talks about the argument they had when he saw her in the kayak. A character who knows Debbie wonders if the story is true because Debbie is an excellent swimmer. Did Karl make up the kayaking story or did Debbie tell Karl, for reasons of her own, that she was afraid of water? The narrator tries to unpack the truth as he considers the mystery of Karl’s life while attending his funeral and again years later. The story explores the concepts of trustworthiness and image as they apply to people we don’t really know.

“First Encounter” A man whose daughter saw him kissing another woman in a hospital parking lot is saved from exposure by the side effects of his daughter’s medication. The reprieve does not last because the truth never really goes away.

“Are You Experienced?” While cleaning their dope on the cover of a Hendrix album, Billy explains to Meg why he is justified stealing money from his uncle. Keeping money in the family isn’t really a crime and the money itself came from many years of farming, honest “money that came from sunlight and air and dirt, nothing else.” As they discuss the crime, Meg sees parallels between Billy and his uncle in their tendency to ramble about the past, traits that will one day make Billy just as vulnerable as his uncle. David Means illustrates the “what goes around, comes around” principle in a way that suggests the inevitability of karma.

“I am Andrew Wyeth!” is narrated by an artist who tries to become Andrew Wyeth. He requests a nondisclosure agreement from an assistant whose duty is to watch him work, record her observations in her head, and never tell anyone what she saw, all to create “the implicit secretiveness” of the artist’s endeavor. The agreement creates a sense of glamor and the impression that something interesting has been kept at bay, but it also shields the artist against his impulse to confess and the rumors that impulse might inspire.

The narrator of “Vows” looks back on his life and marriage and the lives and marriages of his friends through conversations and observations preserved in memory, “singular moments of astonishingly framed light.” “Lightning Speaks” is written as a series of fragmented paragraphs. The fragmentation might reflect the mental illness of characters who form connections and share memories or visions in an institution.

Nearly every paragraph of “Depletion Prompts” begins with the phrase “Write about,” followed a scenario — a kid confronted by a bully; wandering the woods to escape family drama; a baby born in a closet to a teenage girl afraid to disclose her pregnancy; your mother sneaking into a mental hospital to visit your sister — or a topic: toxic masculinity; the rage of feeling isolated during the pandemic. The paragraphs include notes about how the scene should be written, suggestions for happy and sad endings, how to connect the scene to others or “Use just the whispers, fragments of tense language, to build the fuzzy narrative that you carried.” The scenarios have whatever literary value a writer’s notebook might have, but the story works as a window into a writer’s mind.

My favorite story addresses the sadness of human existence through the eyes of a dog. Norman goes into the woods with a gun after his wife dies. He lets his dachshund off her leash and the dachshund gets lost chasing a rabbit. After a long adventure that includes a new family, we learn how losing his dog changed Norman’s life. The point of view is amazing and the story is heartening. “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” is one of the coolest dog stories I’ve ever read. It’s worth the price of the volume.

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