Overboard by Sara Paretsky

Published by William Morrow on May 10, 2022

I always enjoy the plot complexity of V.I. Warshawski novels, but there’s a little too much going on in Overboard. The primary story involves the mystery of a young woman who is running from a danger she won’t articulate. Subplots involve art theft, blackmail, Chicago land development shenanigans, elder abuse, vandalism of a synagogue, a drone that supposedly sucks everyone’s data from the air, and a kid who is trying to survive bad parenting. Sara Paretsky depends on unconvincing coincidences to bind the subplots together. Trimming a subplot or two might have added some urgency to an uncharacteristically slow story. Still, any Warshawski novel is worth a reader’s time, if only for the rich Chicago atmosphere.

Overboard begins with Warshawski’s dogs finding an injured teenage girl near the river. Of all the millions who inhabit Chicago, it’s an amazing coincidence that Warshawski finds the girl, but that’s a forgivable contrivance because it sets the story in motion. The girl (Julia) speaks only one word to Warshawski, a word that might be Hungarian. Warshawski takes her to a hospital that she trusts. A janitor who speaks some Hungarian makes an unsuccessful attempt to communicate with Julia. The police visit and soon the janitor is dead, Julia disappears, and the woman sharing Julia’s hospital room suffers misfortune.

Warshawski spends most of the novel eluding a corrupt police officer who is convinced that the girl gave something to Warshawski. After Warshawski is in the news for finding Julia, a teenage boy (Brad) wants her to help him discover whether his father is in trouble. Warshawski has a history with Brad’s family that does not endear his quarreling parents to Warshawski. Eventually Warshawski will need to hide Brad and Julia, both of whom possess knowledge that might endanger their lives. Part of Warshawski’s quest involves learning what the two kids have that the cops and their gangster pals are trying to make them surrender.

The story follows Warshawski as she pounds the pavement to find Julia (although the manner in which they reconnect depends on another unlikely coincidence) and pounds it some more to figure out why Julia and Brad and an elderly woman are in so much danger. Warshawski is twice taken to the Chicago Police Department’s version of Gitmo, from which she makes an extraordinarily unlikely escape. A final action scene has Warshawski playing a daring but stupidly dangerous role. None of this quite added up to a believable story.

Key plot points hinge on a small drone doing impossible things, like causing a blackout and blocking all cellphone coverage in a building. (The drone also magically absorbs all digital data contained within a building, but the plot doesn’t depend on that remarkable feature to save the heroine.) The drone’s conventional ability to take pictures is a more believable plot driver, although the picture it happened to take is — yes, once more — an unlikely coincidence.

The corruption and brutality of the Chicago Police Department is legendary. Paretsky makes it central to the plot. It is also part of the novel’s Chicago atmosphere, along with crooked real estate deals, a polluted river, and the city’s ethnic diversity. Paretsky’s novels are a joy to read for anyone who has explored Chicago. Paretsky’s prose and atmospheric writing give the novel its value, but the story is a bit ho-hum compared to other books in the series.

RECOMMENDED

With Prejudice by Robin Peguero

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 17, 2022

It isn’t unusual for a courtroom drama to explore the private lives of the lawyers and the defendant who are the novel’s key characters. With Prejudice, set in Miami in 2011, moves beyond the usual. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at the judge and at the jurors who are deciding guilt in a sexual assault case. On occasion, the novel tracks the truth after a witness lies on the stand (such as the cop who recalls the truth as he denies ever using a pejorative term to describe a gay man).

Nor is it unusual for a courtroom drama to offer the “Inside Baseball” of criminal trials — the strategies employed by prosecutors and defense attorneys to work the angles and sway juries. With Prejudice does that, but it also takes a deep, honest dive into the dependence of prosecutors and defense attorneys on prejudice as they try to influence outcomes. The lead prosecutor in the trial, for example, while thinking of herself as a liberal feminist, wants a jury of white conservative males because they are demographically more likely to judge a nonwhite defendant harshly in a sexual assault case. The novel portrays, albeit superficially, the impact of race and ethnicity on trials and jury deliberations, from the impact of race on witness identifications to the interaction of jurors of different races.

The inner workings of the system are exposed in other ways. The novel features a medical examiner who is willing to slant ambiguous results to favor law enforcement when honesty would require ambiguity to remain unresolved. It recognizes that judges consider reelection when they think about making a legally correct ruling that the public might view as “soft on crime.” And it reminds readers that the rules governing police conduct — rules that allow the police to induce confessions by lying about nonexistent evidence and by claiming they are on the defendant’s side — make it easy to convict the innocent.

The crime involves the disappearance, alleged rape, and death of Melina Morris. Her body was evidently cremated in the medical examiner’s morgue. An anonymous tip alerts the authorities to look for bone fragments that the police eventually match to Melina’s DNA. Skull fragments suggest Melina sustained a blow to the head. Hairline fractures to the pelvis suggest she was “possibly maybe” the victim of a sexual assault. Oddly, while the body’s other bones were pulverized after cremation, the bones with evidentiary value were left intact.

Suspicion falls on Gabriel Soto, once of the body handlers in the morgue. He’s a quiet loner and regarded as a bit odd, so he’s immediately pegged as the culprit. After the police decide he’s guilty, they focus their investigation on proving that they are right. Is Soto guilty? Well, the question is answered at the story’s end, but that’s not really the point, is it? The question is whether guilt can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. The question is whether Soto can receive a fair trial. As the novel points out, defense lawyers are willfully ignorant of their client’s guilt or innocence, and rightly so; their focus is on the evidence and the process, not the truth.

But even those questions are not the point of With Prejudice. “With prejudice” is a legal term that refers to finality. A decision made “with prejudice” means a party won’t be given a do-over. The double meaning in the title refers to prejudice that pervades the legal system. That’s what the novel is about. The clever story Robin Peguero tells simply frames the larger issues.

The jurors violate the court’s instructions (as jurors commonly do) by chatting about the case during breaks, many having made up their minds before they hear any evidence at all. But as soon as it appears that they are ready to reach a verdict, the story upends. For a moment I thought the narrative traveled through a portal that transformed the roles of key characters. It soon becomes apparent that a flashback changes the perspective of everything that happened before. Characters, both living and dead, turn out to be connected to each other in surprising ways. I admire novels that can turn the story upside down in an instant and dislike novels that attempt that trick but fail. With Prejudice earned my admiration for pulling off the magic trick, for confronting timely issues of prejudice within and outside the criminal justice system, and for keeping me engaged in a smart story that disguises its intricacy with apparent simplicity.

RECOMMENDED

Storm Rising by Chris Hauty

Published by ‎ Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 3, 2022

The “storm” in Storm Rising is a white separatist conspiracy to carve a whites-only nation out of Texas and other states that fall within the Permian Basin. The conspirators expect to gain power by controlling the nation’s largest oil deposits. A congressman, local politicians, a few military leaders, and some cops are orchestrating the scheme. The Storm movement blends white supremacy, nationalism, and hatred of government, the three pillars of far-right extremism. The congressman doesn’t care about hatred or ideology, but he does care about power. He wants to see his face on the dollars minted by the Free States of America.

The story begins with exploding oil storage tanks near Texas oil wells. The bodies of two Spanish-speaking migrants are found at each site. Ignoring the improbability that terrorists would be so inept, the far right immediately claims that drug cartels, or maybe just migrants in general, have declared war on the US. The Texas governor dispatches the Texas Army National Guard to help score a political victory from the mayhem. The real victory that the conspirators hope to achieve is more sinister, although only as a matter of degree. Stoking racial and ethnic hatred hurts the country even if it is not meant to further a civil war.

Hayley Chill is an operative of the “deeper state.” Trained by the military and a proficient mixed martial arts fighter, Chill works for an ambiguously defined entity called Publius. The organization is tasked with “preserving the nation’s constitutional democracy.” These days, that’s a tall order.

This is the third Hayley Chill novel but the first I’ve read. The story mentions that Hayley saved the nation from a president who was a Russian spy, presumably in one of the earlier novels. I can’t imagine where he got that idea (said the reviewer in a comment that drips sarcasm).

Hayley catches wind of the white supremacist conspiracy while digging into the mystery of her father’s death. Hayley is haunted by the memory of finding her father swinging at the end of a rope. She thought he died in Iraq, but she found him dead in the home of his old buddy Charlie Hicks. Did he come back to the US in secrecy and assume Hicks’ identity? Why did he abandon his family? Her only clues suggest that her father (and/or Charlie Hicks) were involved with something called the Storm that will not be good for democracy. She convinces Publius to send her to Texas to investigate.

The thought that insurrectionists could hold their newly acquired nation is far-fetched, but their “ace in the hole” plan to do so is the final component of the conspiracy that Hayley discovers in her investigation. It is the nature of conspiracy plots to be far-fetched but this one has currency, given the number of Americans who supported the overthrow of democracy by overturning a fair election. I give Chris Hauty credit for plugging obvious plot holes, making the conspiracy sufficiently plausible to encourage my willing suspension of disbelief.

Hauty’s prose gives the story a sense of urgency, making this a “just one more chapter before I sleep” book. The action is relentless, but Hauty does not sacrifice characterization as he speeds the novel to a satisfying conclusion. Hauty adds interest to the story by giving capsule descriptions of the lives that minor characters led before they played a role in the novel and/or the lives they will live after the novel ends. He gives heroic roles to people who, like most Americans, care about democracy and resent the idea that a “civil war” would suddenly make them residents of a new country they neither want nor support. White supremacists won’t like this novel, but the majority of thriller fans should find that its combination of action and characterization pushes all the right buttons.

RECOMMENDED

Hostile Intent by Don Bentley

Published by Berkley on May 3, 2022

After someone tells Matt Drake’s wife to grow a pair, Drake decides to confront him when (as Will Smith learned) he should just let it go. But Drake is a tough guy who loves guns (the insult comes at a gun range while Drake is helping the little woman improve her shooting technique) so he needs to show the world, or at least the reader, that tough guys never bypass an opportunity to be tough. Looking for toxic masculinity? Call Matt Drake.

Drake is a case officer for the DIA. He’s all man, as he proves by telling us how turned on his lovely wife makes him and by making sure the reader knows that he really enjoys shagging her. He tells puny weak men to turn in their “man card” when they fail to meet his standards of masculine behavior. He can’t look at a woman without rating her sex appeal. All standard fare for tough guy heroes, even more so for insecure wannabes who love tough guy novels like this one.

Tough guy heroes spend a lot of time assuring the reader of their competence and overall superiority at all things requiring toughness and even things that don’t. They are apparently too insecure to let readers judge for themselves. Too much of this novel is dedicated to a tough guy’s worship of himself.

Drake works for and with tough guys who have all the Ranger and Delta and Green Beret credentials that make tough guys so darn special. They speak to each other in tough guy dialog to reassure each other that they aren’t secretly pansies. Don Bentley makes sure the readers know exactly what guns they are carrying and what scopes they’ve affixed to their rifles so that gun porn addicts can get their fix.

A good chunk of the novel is spent summarizing earlier novels. The summaries are unnecessary, as Hostile Intent would work as a stand-alone even without the summaries. They seem to have been included to boost the page count in a novel that fails to develop subplots or anything else beyond tough guy rhetoric. Bentley also ups the wordcount with obsessive data dumps. Want to know the horsepower of a V-8 engine in a Range Rover? Or the candlepower of its LED headlights? But what about the high beams? The speed at which a paratrooper’s boots hit the ground? Useless data substitutes for useful characterization. I guess all a reader needs to know about tough guys is that they’re tough. And they love their sexy wives, or at least they love having sex with them.

The plot anticipates a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Be prepared to endure President Zelenskyy being belittled as a coward. Apart from Bentley’s lack of prescience about how the invasion would take place, his belief that Europe would be indifferent to the invasion, and his wild miss on the character of Ukraine’s president (it turns out that in the real world, you don’t need to be a tough guy to be brave), the story has little to do with that war as it focuses on the tired theme of a loose nuke entering the marketplace and creating the threat of World War III. Drake and a team of tough guys are dispatched to recover the nuke, taking on the Russian Army in the process. The plot is just an excuse for Drake and his band of tough guys to be tough in combat, and for some Russian tough guys to be tough (but not as tough as the Americans), and for a Mossad agent to be extra tough because tough guy writers worship Mossad.

Bentley’s writing style is pedestrian when it’s not ridiculously clichéd (“failure wasn’t an option”; “swaying like a drunken sailor”). The novel offers plenty of action to fans of tough guy action novels, but the absence of characterization or an interesting plot makes Hostile Intent a less interesting choice than tough guy novels that offer more substance, better characters, and snappier prose.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Liarmouth by John Waters

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 3, 2022

Readers who want a book that mentions the male sex organ on nearly every page will fulfill their desire with Liarmouth. Daryl Hotchkins is obsessed with his penis. True, all guys share that obsession, but Daryl’s has a mind of its own. Again, that’s true of every guy’s, but Daryl’s talks. Now guys do talk to their units on occasion (usually to say something like “Calm down, buddy”) but Daryl’s talks back. Out loud, sometimes sounding like a car’s GPS.

Daryl is a petty criminal. His principal occupation is stealing luggage from airports. Daryl’s partner in crime, Marsha Sprinkle, is a more substantial sociopath. Marsha makes children cry because children annoy her. She also steals vehicles and causes general mayhem while fleeing arrest. She promised to shag Daryl to reward a year of productive work, but she has no intention of allowing Daryl, or anyone else, inside her.

The third key character is Marsha’s daughter Poppy, who operates an unlawful trampoline business, her lawful trampoline business having been shut down for violating safety protocols. Poppy has a dedicated band of followers who bounce their way through life. Poppy has replaced the seats in her van with trampolines to better transport her cultists. Marsha thinks of Poppy as “the womb-ravager.” Poppy’s attitude toward Marsha is no kinder, in part because Poppy is one of the many victims of Marsha’s thievery.

Liarmouth is, in a word, strange. In two words, strangely amusing. That won’t come as a surprise to readers who have seen John Waters’ films. Nor will the obsession with sex organs, sexuality in all of its forms, and particularly drag queens. Waters gained fame for transgressive films. His first attempt at a novel is mildly transgressive, although the boundaries have been pushed so far since Waters was in his prime that Liarmouth is fairly tame by contemporary standards of transgression.

Liarmouth has a plot, in that events follow each other in a logical cause-and-effect order. About half the plot is an extended chase scene after Daryl and Marsha are interrupted in a luggage theft at Baltimore’s airport. They go their separate ways for a time (Daryl hides out with a tickle fetishist, Marsha steals purses in a hospital after a collision that brings all the characters together), only to separate before Daryl and his talking penis can claim their reward.

The plot is freewheeling and easily sidetracked. Characters are always on the move, as Waters mocks air travel, Amtrack, and discount bus rides. Daryl’s search for his sexual payment is interrupted by his fear that his penis has turned gay. (If a man is straight but his penis is gay, the man and his penis are bisexual … or so the penis concludes.) When Marsha meets a man who is her sociopathic equal, will she finally kindle a lust for men? The reader never knows what might happen next. That’s sort of a virtue, although it gives the plot a sense of randomness. Then again, life often feels random when plans go awry.

Waters’ social commentary can be amusing, from skewering the upper class by imagining cheek lifts for dogs (maybe that’s a real thing) to using motel Magic Fingers devices as full-body vibrators. I could have done without the trampoline humor and the dick jokes get old after a hundred pages or so. My response to Liarmouth alternated between “this is sort of funny” and “this is really stupid.” The balance point is somewhere in the middle. This might have been a more effective novel if Waters had written it thirty or forty years ago, when it was still possible to shock readers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS