Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne

Published in Great Britain in 2015; published by Crown Publishing/Hogarth on January 12, 2016

Hunters in the dark are hunting for happiness or advantage. They are in the dark because they don’t know exactly what they are hunting.

Robert Grieve, a British teacher on his summer vacation, crosses the border from Thailand to Cambodia and has a run of luck in a casino. His luck changes when he meets an American named Simon Beauchamp. Robert ignores his driver’s warning to decline Simon’s invitation to stay at his home. Suffice it to say that Robert experiences a life-changing event, or at least he chooses to respond to the event by changing his life.

After making his way to Phnom Penh, Robert takes a job tutoring a physician’s daughter in English. To get the gig, he adopts a new identity and tells a series of elaborate lies. The temptation to disappear into a new life, at least for a while, seems impossible to resist. Thus Robert becomes a hunter in the dark.

People who drift through life often drift into trouble, or at least that’s a standard message that thrillers deliver. The plot follows Robert as he drifts from one problem to another, ultimately caused by identity confusion that he brings upon himself. Unlike the reader, he usually seems oblivious to lurking dangers. His only goal is to live an unexamined life. The reader experiences tension on Robert’s behalf as events begin to shape a future that looks bleak for the aimless teacher.

Additional characters are slowly introduced during the first half, each experiencing or contributing to the novel’s undercurrent of misfortune. Acts of violence and corruption tie the story threads together. Characters generally have a believable balance of good and bad. Like real people, some are mostly good, others are mostly bad, but none are purely one or the other.

The descriptions of Phnom Penh, with its varied Asian foods, motodops and tuk tuks, give the novel a rich atmosphere. Cambodian characters provide the reader with snippets of the country’s history which, like all histories, has its share of ugly moments. I love the perspectives of the Cambodian characters who have little use for crusading westerners (particularly Hollywood actresses who pose for the cameras while making impassioned speeches about child slavery before returning to their yachts). However well-intentioned they might be, they have little understanding of the culture and zero opportunity to influence it by a few days of posturing, a comfortable break from the extravagance of their western lives.

Hunters in the Dark is ultimately a story of karma. Although “what goes around, comes around” for many of the characters, the plot is not predictable. It is easy to believe despite its improbability, and Robert, although clueless, is easy to care about.

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The Shut Eye by Belinda Bauer

Published in Great Britian in 2015; published by Grove Press on January 12, 2016

DCI John Marvel might not live up to his name in all respects but he has an impressive ability to solve murders, thanks to hard work, determination, intuition, and attention to detail. On the other hand, even the colleagues who admire Marvel -- and there are only a handful -- agree that he is abrasive, rude, and generally unsuited to human interaction. That makes him a fun character, although a bad husband.

Marvel begins The Shut Eye by fretting about a cold case, a girl named Edie who went missing and is presumed dead. Soon he’s assigned to look for a missing dog, a project that does not make him happy.

In a closely related plotline, a boy named Danny has been missing for four months. The boy’s mother, Anna Buck, blames her husband for leaving the door unlocked and blames herself for not immediately noticing his absence. In Anna’s desperate desire to be reunited with Danny, she turns to a psychic, who made fruitless attempts to help the police recover Edie. The psychic purports to be a shut eye (a true psychic) as opposed to an open eye (a fraud) -- hence the novel’s title. Did I mention that the psychic specializes in communicating with lost dogs?

When Anna begins to have visions, Marvel isn’t sure what to believe. Anna’s mental health is shaky -- she is, in Marvel’s words, “mad as a bucket of frogs.” Can Marvel bring himself to rely on the paranormal instead of the real-world evidence that usually drives his investigations? Should the reader accept psychic phenomena at face value, or is there more to the story?

A couple of well-developed minor characters add depth to the story, including a Cambodian who fled his country to avoid shame and is living in England illegally. Also playing a significant role is a black female police officer who has been given a prominent position at the front desk so the police can show her off to the public, a decided waste of her intelligence and talent.

Belinda Bauer milks humor from the psychic and the missing dog, but also from Marvel, who suspects that his computer is being lazy when it can’t answer a question. Marvel has zero insight into why his wife is upset when he spreads autopsy photographs across the table during dinner. He’s the kind of guy who is likable in fiction even though you would dread knowing him in the real world.

Despite its undertones of humor, however, The Shut Eye is a serious crime novel. I don’t usually like stories that end as this one does -- I’m not sure it even makes sense -- but I’m giving The Shut Eye’s resolution a pass because it was, in a key respect, unexpectedly clever. I’m also recommending the novel because I enjoyed its suspense and liked the characters.

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Even the Dead by Benjamin Black

Published in Great Britain in 2015; published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 12, 2016

Quirke begins Even the Dead on extended sick leave, suffering from hallucinations and forgetfulness that, according to his brain specialist, are caused by stress and boredom, as well as an old scar on his temporal lobe. Quirke is a composite of old scars; that a scar explains his current predicament is no surprise to him. Yet Quirke’s lethargy, his indifference to life, seems to him not to be caused by brain damage but by life damage -- he has the sense that something has “gone out,” that his life is over and done, or never began.

Quirke’s assistant, David Sinclair, who happens to be dating Quirke’s daughter, solicits Quirke’s opinion concerning a suspicious bruise on the corpse of a man who is believed to have committed suicide. The suspected murder victim is the son of a well-known scofflaw, the kind of man who “makes a point of being awkward.” Eventually Quirke takes an interest and tags along with his friend, Inspector Hackett, as the death is investigated.

Meanwhile, Quirke’s daughter is asked to help a former classmate who is fleeing from a menace she refuses to identify. The menace, of course, is related to the death that Quirke is investigating. That might seem like an unlikely coincidence but Dublin isn’t huge and the coincidence is therefore not so improbable as to hurt the story’s credibility.

The deceased is a young civil servant, an unlikely candidate for murder. Benjamin Black develops the mystery slowly, dangling potential motives for the reader to consider. The novel features a return to Mother of Mercy Laundry, which played a key role in a couple of earlier novels in the series.

While the story is built upon a murder mystery, the plot is secondary to Quirke’s plotless, aimless life. Although “a stranger to himself,” Quirke is an introspective man, a thinker who can’t quite make sense of his existence. To say Quirke has been a disappointing father would be to understate, but Black does not cheat the father-daughter relationship of its complexity. All of Quirke’s relationships are ambiguous and complex, despite Quirke’s efforts to keep them at a comfortably superficial level.

As a pathologist, Quirke is used to confronting death, but in these novels, he often confronts the deaths (or impending death) of people he knows. Even the Dead is no exception. Yet for all his melancholy and sense of mortality, there are glimmers of happiness and hope in Quirke’s life during the course of the novel. Rebirth or a fresh start would be unrealistic in Quirke’s gloomy world, but Black seems to suggest that even the gravely burdened might find a sort of renewal as their lives progress.

Quirke lives in a world where the rich and powerful can do as they please, without consequence. In other words, he lives in the real world, rather than a fictional world where justice always prevails. The murder mystery and its byproducts resolve in a straightforward way; whether the resolution represents justice must be left to the reader’s judgment.

Black’s prose is, as always, elegant. The lives of Quirke and other characters evolve in Even the Dead -- Quirke most of all -- as lives should in the hands of a capable writer. I don’t know if this is meant to be the last Quirke novel, but it ties up story threads so deftly that it reads as if it might be.

This isn’t an action novel or a suspenseful thriller, but the story moves quickly. Even the Dead doesn’t feature the best plot in the Quirke series but it is sufficiently sturdy to carry a work of character-driven fiction.

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Tenacity by J.S. Law

First published in Great Britain in 2015; published by Henry Holt and Co. on November 3, 2015

Tenacity is a first novel that reads like a sequel. Danielle “Dan” Lewis was captured by a serial killer four years before the novel begins. The novel frequently refers to that traumatic time in Dan’s life. In fact, so much reliance is placed on the past that I wondered if Tenacity was recounting events that took place in an earlier novel, but that isn’t the case.

Dan now works as a naval investigator for Crimes Involving Loss of Life (known as “Kill”), a division of the Special Investigation Branch. She starts the novel damaged -- both by the serial killer and by another violent incident in her life -- and she isn’t handling her damage very well.

Dan is assigned to look into an apparent suicide of Stewart Walker on the HMS Tenacity, a nuclear submarine. Dan feels pressure from certain naval officers to determine that the death was, in fact, a suicide. She also feels pressure to keep her nose out of a related police investigation into the murder of Walker’s wife. Of course, following a formula familiar to thriller readers, Dan decides that pursuing justice is more important than following orders.

Dan is teamed with John Granger, who assisted her in the Hamilton investigation. That unhappy relationship creates a source of tension that gives the story an added kick.

The story milks some drama from the fact that the submarine sets sail with Dan as the only female on board. The captain and most of his company are offensively sexist. Her investigation is obstructed at every turn. Her naval career is threatened. Can she find a way to make justice prevail?

The book does not paint a flattering portrait of submariners in the British navy but, given the author’s credentials, I suspect it is accurate. In any event, the detailed submarine setting adds a sense of authenticity to the story.

The story is a bit too heavily dependent upon coincidence, but that’s common in modern thrillers. Dan is a sympathetic character. Supporting characters are one-dimensional but that is also common in thrillers. The story develops a reasonable amount of suspense and moves at a reasonable pace. The ending holds some surprises. The story does not resolve every loose end, apparently setting up a sequel, but it does resolve the main storyline in a satisfying way. In short, Tenacity is a reasonably strong and enjoyable debut novel.

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The Incarnations by Susan Barker

Published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Touchstone on August 18, 2015

Wang Jun’s mother tells him that “being born into this world is hell” and that he will be “crushed with countless millions all your life long.” His father tells him, “Like mother, like son.” Who is Wang Jun? Even Wang Jun doesn’t know the answer. He is the product of a horrific childhood and, perhaps, of difficult lives that he experienced in earlier incarnations.

When taxi driver Wang Jun finds a letter above the visor in his taxi from a person who claims to be his soulmate, he complains to the police about a stalker. Subsequent letters tell Wang about the soulmate’s past incarnations, all involving relationships with someone who is presumably Wang, although in past lives Wang was not always a male. In between letters, we learn about Wang’s marriage, his child and his childhood, his confinement in a mental health institution and the friend who caused him to question his sexual identity. We later watch Wang confront a moral crisis as he tries to understand his needs and desires.

The background is China just before the Olympic Games, when the longstanding practice of spitting on the sidewalk drew government fines and meager efforts were made to quash obvious corruption. The clash between a controlling government and out-of-control free enterprise is depicted in small details that create a convincing setting.

The stories from the past draw upon key moments in Chinese history from the seventh century to the twentieth. Some are the stuff of myth and legend. Others have a more realistic feel, although even those are infused with spirits and visions. They are all fascinating, but the segment that takes place during Mao’s Cultural Revolution is the most affecting. It is a captivating piece of writing.

Back in the present, much of the story is driven by Wang’s assumptions about the identity of the letter writer, the impact of the letters on Wang, and the unfortunate actions he takes in response to them. That gives the novel the flavor of a mystery or a story of psychological suspense. There are also stories of unconventional relationships scattered through the novel, although they involve tragic love more than giddy romance.

The letter writer’s actual identity (at least, the most recent one) is surprising to both the reader and to Wang. Its revelation forces a reinterpretation of the earlier letters. The novel’s ending is powerful and unexpected. The Incarnations is, in short, a skillful tale that combines tragedy and humor, history and modernity, revealing the darkness and richness of China and the enduring nature of the human spirit -- even when the human has no desire to endure.

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