Defenestrate by Renée Branum

Published by ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing on January 25, 2022

A family superstition underlies Marta’s obsession with falling. She thinks about people who have fallen from great heights and survived. She thinks about Buster Keaton, the undisputed master of falling. She ponders statistics about falls. She might see falling as a metaphor for her own life.

Marta and Nick are twins. Marta’s mother tells Marta that she has always had trouble being close to anyone other than Nick but cautions Marta that she cannot always be her brother’s keeper. Marta and Nick have much in common, including depression and possibly a suicidal ideation. Their mother is steeped in religion, the kind of religion that forces her to disown Nick when he comes out as gay. Their nonconfrontational father devoted most of his time to constructing a village for his model trains. Marta always wondered how that hobby was meant to keep them safe, but Marta is a bit obsessed with safety.

The family superstition — they avoid calling it a curse — began with Jiří, who in 1895 pushed a stonemason out a window in a cathedral tower that was under renovation in Prague. The stonemason may have seduced Jiří’s daughter, although the truth of the story might be quite different. Since Jiří defenestrated the stonemason, family members have fallen from railings or ladders or roofs, as if they cannot resist falling, their “bodies magnetized to the pavement.” Perhaps the family is being held accountable for the stonemason’s death, or perhaps the family curse has more to do with mental illness.

Marta and Nick visit Prague, a city that is famous for throwing men from windows, as if returning to the scene of their ancestor’s crime will help them “make sense of the shape our lives had taken.” Inevitably, Nick falls from a balcony in Prague, saved by the branches of a tree but nevertheless hospitalized. Whether his fall was accidental is ambiguous, although it gives Marta a chance to discuss a famous photograph with a man she meets in a bar. The photo, later made into art by Andy Warhol, is of a woman who landed on a car after jumping to her death from the Empire State Building. As conversations of seduction go, Marta’s needs some work.

The plot concerns Marta’s journey toward health and forgiveness. She drinks too much. She behaves carelessly. She blames (with a certain amount of good cause) her mother for poor parenting. After Nick promises her that he will try to be careful so that he doesn’t fall again, she comes to realize that trying to be careful might be the only promise she can make to anyone, including herself. Careful with herself, careful with her family, careful with her relationships.

The elegant voice that narrates Defenestrate is well suited to the story. The voice is calm and quiet, never reaching toward melodrama, always keeping the story grounded in Marta’s introspective melancholy. Sometimes Renée Branum reaches for descriptions that fail to resonate, but her prose is usually an appealing blend of the evocative and the precise. The falling metaphor is a bit overused; the examples of fall survivalists become redundant. The tales of Buster Keaton are interesting but ultimately add little of substance to the narrative. Small flaws aside, Branum’s confident and controlled narrative offers an intriguing view of a family learning to manage, and perhaps overcome, a perpetual state of self-inflicted crisis.

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Devil House by John Darnielle

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD) on January 25, 2022

Like all writers, true crime writers must make choices about the stories they tell. Maybe they make the wrong choices. Maybe they tell the wrong stories. Maybe they shade truth with fiction. Those thoughts underlie Devil House, a novel about a true crime writer who comes to question his craft.

The novel imagines that two significant crimes occurred in Milpitas. A teen strangled his girlfriend in 1981. Some of his friends were aware of the crime, saw the girl’s body, but said nothing about it. A movie called River’s Edge publicized the crime, raising predictable questions about the apathy of youth and suggesting the decline of civilization. Five years later, a realtor and a potential property buyer were slashed to death with a sword inside an abandoned porn shop. Teens who used the porn shop as a clubhouse may been involved. The people of Milpitas refused to talk about the crime, having suffered enough reputational damage from River’s Edge.

An editor finds the story of the porn shop murders and sends it to true crime writer Gage Chandler, whose first book — The White Witch of Morro Bay — recounted the story of two unarmed students, Jesse and Gene, who broke into the home of a female teacher with the intent to steal her property. The teacher was in the kitchen. She happened to be holding a knife when the boys entered her home. When Gene touched her breast while trying to ease the knife out of her hand, she snapped. After she finished stabbing both kids to death — while they are retreating from the home — she dismembered them in an effort to conceal the crime. The media portrayed the teacher as having groomed the kids with the intent to turn them into a human sacrifice. Chandler’s version of the truth was less sensational.

Chandler is reluctant to take on another book about teens, but he admits that the story of the porn shop murders is intriguing. He moves to Milpitas in 2001, buys the building, and recreates the murder scene because that’s the immersive method that he uses to write his books. Chandler decides to call the murder scene the Devil House. The killer was never charged; his identity remains the subject of conjecture. Or so Chandler tells the reader from time to time. The truth is obscure because, at the end of the first chapter, Chandler reveals that he has decided not to tell the story that he came to Milpitas to tell. In fact, Chandler starts the book by telling the reader that Devil House is not the true crime book he had contracted to write. It is instead “about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates.”

Chandler's reconstruction of the crime follows the owner of the porn shop, a man who is trying to remake his life in the small town, having failed in San Jose. After repeated rent increases, the owner decides to walk away from the store, leaving everything behind, knowing he’ll never get his cleaning deposit back from the landlord he despises.

Chandler then follows the teen who works in the porn shop, a seemingly ordinary kid named Derek who is finding a late high school balance between slacking and planning for an adult life. Derek keeps a key when the owner walks away from the shop. Chandler follows Derek’s friend Seth, an artistic loner who begins the project of remaking the porn shop, repurposing magazine and video covers as the tools of an art project that transforms the store into a haunted house. Chandler follows a homeless kid named Alex who begins to live in the shop, a kid who has some mental health issues and, like so many homeless people, has fallen through the cracks. Derek lets Alex stay in the shop because Derek is a decent kid.

After building a picture of the abandoned porn shop's occupants, Chandler follows his own efforts to turn his new dwelling into a crime scene. He tells of his investigation, his interviews, the documents and pictures he finds on eBay. Eventually he sorts the details into the story of two deaths. But is the story accurate? Can the truth ever be known? Do readers even want to know the truth?

The narrative pulls together several themes. More than once, we see how society throws away people who are homeless or mentally ill or poor or obviously troubled, creating a recipe for violence or despair that could be avoided by recognizing people who need help and helping them.

One chapter consists of Chandler reading a letter from Jesse’s mother, a letter that takes him to task for not telling her story, for leaving the impression that Jesse was a bad kid of her creation. That chapter could be read as an indictment of true crime writing. Even when true crime avoids sensationalism — a rare feat — even when it tunnels down to true causes of crime, it will only tell part of the story, perhaps the least important part. The mother’s lengthy letter is a controlled howl of pain from a parent who did her best and whose worthiness as a mother Chandler chose to ignore.

The final chapter, as Chandler meets up with a childhood friend who briefly lived in Milpitas, explores the malleability of memory and the dubious process of recreating the past. In that chapter, we learn that the story Chandler appears to be telling (we never see the final version) omits important facts about the crime and the killer and changes names while inventing at least one character who never existed. It seems that Chandler took liberties with the “true” part of “true crime” in the service of protecting the innocent. In any event, truth in the modern world is simply what someone chooses to believe. Truth has become the story that best fits our belief system, not the story that is best supported by verifiable facts.

The final chapter also invites discussion of “stand your ground” laws and whether they apply to squatters (they don’t, but some “stand your ground” advocates believe it’s appropriate to use violence against anyone in any location who is perceived as an intruder). The Devil House killer may have seen himself as protecting his castle from intruders. The teacher had a stronger “stand your ground” defense until she went after Jesse, who was trying to get out of the home when she killed him. If she hadn’t hacked him into pieces, she might have been acquitted.

An odd chapter called The Song of Gorbonian is the novel’s only misstep. Retelling a medieval Welsh legend, the fantasy about avenging a father’s death might have been intended to speak to issues raised by the larger narrative, but its attempt to capture an early version of English is a stylistic fail.

Fortunately, the rest of the novel is riveting and unpredictable. Its attention to detail, its focus on characters at the margin, and its philosophical exploration of truth make Devil House an impressive work.

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The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Published in the UK in 2021; published by Atria Books on January 25, 2022

A character in The Appeal knows a secret. That character is murdered to keep the secret from coming out. What is the secret? Which character will die? Who is the murderer? Those questions propel this delightfully unconventional epistolary novel.

A barrister gives a collection of documents — primarily texts, WhatsApp messages, and emails, although police interview transcripts, memos, and a few other documents are later added to the pile — to two law students. He asks them to read the documents without context and to answer some questions: Who committed the murder? Who knew it was going to happen? What three things did the victim tell people before the murder?  Who knew about the murder before the body was discovered? Who has been wrongly imprisoned for the crime? Who of the named people are not who they say they are?

The action surrounds an amateur theater group called The Fairway Players. Martin Hayward, a respected local businessman, chooses and directs the plays. His talented wife Helen plays the female lead. His daughter Paige usually plays a role. His son James is his assistant director. James’ wife Olivia is pregnant with twins so James’ time is limited. When the document dump begins, they are casting for All My Sons.

This production differs from others because Martin must devote his time to raising funds for his granddaughter Poppy, who is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor. Dr. Tish Bhatoa is sourcing experimental drugs from the US, but Martin will need a large sum of money (the total changes from time to time) to acquire them. He eventually does a fundraising appeal with other members of The Fairway Players. The appeal is managed by Sarah-Jane MacDonald, who has fundraising experience.

Samantha Greenwood and her husband Kel are newcomers to the group. They just returned to England from Africa, where they were relief workers. Samantha has some history in Africa with Dr. Bhatoa, who warns Martin that she is not to be trusted. Samantha meets Isabel (Issy) Beck at the hospital where they are both employed as nurses. Issy latches onto Samantha and recruits her (and Kel) to The Fairway Players. Issy desperately wants attention and is slavishly devoted to anyone who gives it to her, but most members of the group have a low opinion of her. Issy lives in a fantasy world and soon imagines that Samantha is her new best friend.

The fundraising takes unexpected turns as a potential donor disappears after asking questions about the miracle drugs that Dr. Bhatoa refuses to answer. An investment manager who promises to multiply the donations apparently disappears with the money. Sarah-Jane and others tell fibs (“Poppy is going blind!”) to encourage others to help with the appeal. Suspicions are formed, accusations are made, and eventually someone dies. The reader soon begins to question every fact related to the fundraiser and later to the murder.

Janice Hallett brings out the personalities of characters through their texts — Dr. Bhatoa is brusque, Issy is clingy, Martin is evasive, Samantha is principled. Each question that the barrister poses might have various plausible answers. The law students change their view of the evidence as they review the documents and acquire more information. The reader will do the same.

The novel is a true mystery, a whodunit mixed with uncertainty about what actually happened that led to the death. The novel’s construction, inviting the reader to tease the truth out of primary source documents, engages the reader’s attention and challenges the reader’s detective skills. Simply because of its structure, The Appeal is among the most innovative and entertaining crime novels I’ve read in recent years.

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Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala

First published in Argentina in 2019; published in translation by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on January 11, 2022

Had Raúl Iriarte been a half inch shorter, he would have avoided military service. Raúl’s father is short but muscular. He laments that Raúl, frail and physically weak, is just a little too tall to remain in Cuba. As soon as Raúl turns 18, Cuba sends him to Angola to support liberation forces in the Angolan Civil War.

Raúl goes willingly because he wants his mother to view him as a man. Yet his mother has long dressed Raúl as a woman so she can pretend that Raúl is her long-dead sister. Raúl has always preferred to dress like a woman. He is small, blonde and blue-eyed, not a typical Cuban. He doesn’t dress as a woman in his military unit, where he feels like a pretend soldier, but other soldiers still call him Marilyn Monroe or Olivia Newton-John. His captain regularly rapes him, supposedly because Raúl reminds the captain of his wife in Cuba. The captain depends on Raúl’s silence, as opposed to his own conduct, to preserve his good name.

Most people in Raúl’s life, including his brother and father, assume that he is gay, but Raúl feels no particular attraction to either gender. Raúl believes he has a gift of prophecy, like Cassandra from Greek mythology. He introduces himself as Cassandra when, before entering the military, he dresses as a woman and goes clubbing. Raúl likes being in the company of women — he gets along with his father’s Russian lover and feels some sympathy for his mother’s devotion to her lost sister — but only while partying with a transvestite friend who accompanies him to clubs does Raúl feel open to express himself.

In Angola, Raúl carries on an internal dialog with the mythical Cassandra. He seems to believe that he once existed as Cassandra, although he understands that others will assume he was influenced by reading The Iliad when he was still “a hypersensitive boy.” He believes he can sense the dead and the ancient gods. He believes he can foresee death, including his own, and his family’s reaction to it.

For such a powerful story, Call Me Cassandra is written in a remarkably gentle voice, Raúl’s first-person voice. Raúl spends his young life thinking about mythology, ultimately constructing one of his own. Given that Raúl’s death is foretold, the story is bleak. It is a story of a young man who cannot live as he chooses, whose gender choices are made in defiance of Cuban society, whose desire to study literature in a university is denied by a Cuban government that sends him to war, and whose freedom to live even a pleasureless life is taken away by a brutal military captain. Raúl accepts his fate but, as the last pages make clear, does not welcome it. Call Me Cassandra illustrates how repressive societies (and even subcultures of toxic masculinity within liberal democracies) destroy the concept of freedom that they claim to hold so dear.

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Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 18, 2022

Way too many thrillers have taken strip clubs as their themes. Usually, they are written from a male perspective. Sometimes, the writing is voyeuristic. Sometimes, the strip clubs exist for atmosphere, as Bada Bing! did in The Sopranos. Often, the stories take as a given that the strippers are performing for crude men as the natural outcome of a harsh life that presents few options. They remind me of Howard Stern interviewing sex workers (“So did your father molest you?”). The stripper-with-a-rough-life-but-a-heart-of-gold is often the extent of character development in strip club thrillers, particularly when (as is usually true) the strippers are collateral or secondary characters. Real Easy departs from the norm by making dancers the central characters and by exploring their lives in realistic detail, avoiding cliches and stereotypes of victimization.

The strip club is apparently in a suburb of Chicago. The first central character is Samantha Lind (stage name Ruby), whose boyfriend Nick reminds her that she is “part boy” when he wants to be mean. She has a boyish body thanks to a misplaced chromosome, but her new breasts make her feel more like a woman. Samantha is the club’s top earner but she’s always willing to give advice to the other dancers when she sees them making stupid mistakes (like drinking with a customer at the bar when she could be selling him dances in the champagne room).

Samantha lives with Nick. She disappears after giving Kimberly (stage name Lady Jade) a ride home, although Kimberly’s body is soon discovered. The killer ran their car off the road, leaving Kimberly’s body in a field and apparently abducting Samantha.

Detective Holly Meylin and her partner Victor investigate Nick and the club regulars who recently had contact with Samantha or Kimberly. Embarrassingly, one of the regulars, Tony Rabideaux, is a cop. Tony seems to have an alibi, as does Dale, the club owner. The dancers regard Dale as strict but reasonably fair. He keeps his hands to himself and is protective of his strippers, provided they earn their keep.

The other central character is a racially mixed dancer named Georgia (stage name Gigi). Georgia wants the club owner to believe that she’s taking care of her sick mother, which was true until her mother died. Now she has a built-in excuse for tardiness or missing shifts. Georgia knows she needs to find a new gig because “you have to be something more than beautiful to make a life for yourself that won’t end in despair.” Echoing that thought, another dancer observes that “women are allowed to feel powerful for ten years, and then they turn thirty and men barely look at them again.”

Like all workplaces, alliances are formed, backs are bitten. Employees help or undermine each other according to their natures. While the dancers have varying degrees of damage in their lives, Marie Rutkoski makes clear that damage does not dictate a profession. Holly, whose husband accidentally left their child in an overheated car and caused his death, has more damage than any of the novel’s strippers.

Real Easy works on multiple levels. Rutkoski’s prose is vivid and graceful. The setting and atmosphere are remarkable. The characters are crafted with a blend of realism and compassion. The plot is almost secondary, given the novel’s other merits, but the whodunit is far from obvious. The solution doesn’t come from out of the blue — a reader who pays attention might guess the killer’s identity before the reveal — but the story is plausible. Tension builds effectively as the plot nears its climax. Real Easy is an excellent novel and the best I’ve read in the strip club subgenre of crime fiction.

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