New Novel from Paul Theroux, THE BAD ANGEL BROTHERS

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“The book’s suspense rests on whether and when Cal will finally turn to face his lifelong attacker. What will he lose, in what sequence? How humiliated and abased will he become? Is there any moment when he can say enough? As it turns out, there may indeed be such a point. And, as the saying goes, what will happen when the worm turns?”

It’s impossible to read a novel by Paul Theroux without thinking of, and even longing for, his unforgettable books of travel, from The Great Railway Bazaar onward. But although The Bad Angel Brothers opens in a small city somewhere in the cluster between southern New Hampshire and Boston, and Cal Belanger’s parents were middle-class Québecois (French Canadian) immigrants, Cal is outward bound as soon as possible. His reason: to make as much space as he can between his daily life and that of his horrible brother Frank, whom he initially labels (only to himself) “a high-functioning ass****.” Not only does Frank invert and manipulate all the stories of the lives of the two brothers—he does it with malice and intent to degrade Cal in as many ways as possible.

Somewhere along the way, mostly through his gentle father, Cal absorbed the message that he should treat his older brother as, well, a brother. But Frank either missed the message or decided bluntly that it only applied in one direction. He’s out to humiliate. And as he reaches maturity, he spreads his malevolent impact over the impoverished clients of his law practice, too.

Through one episode after another, Cal is battered and belittled. He admits the high school nickname for the two of them, the Bad Angel brothers, pins them together in an odd way. In addition, as long as he’s within Frank’s easy reach, he seems helpless to protect himself. So it’s a huge relief to protagonist and reader alike when Cal takes his geological expertise on the road, makes some quiet gold discoveries and a few very good friends, and develops a pattern of travel that includes half the globe, thus putting Theroux’s other side to work in swiftly and evocatively sketching the people and lifeways with which Cal can readily connect. He is actually a nice person. He just seems captive, like the protypical victim of a cobra, unwilling to run.

When Cal’s lovely and adoring Columbian wife insists on living in the New England neighborhood where Cal grew up, in close proximity to Frank, anyone but Cal can tell what will happen next. At first, his brother’s manipulations only make him more grateful for Vita,  the “beautiful woman, to town, alone, innocent, not knowing that Frank was saying with assurance, ‘Vita,’ summoning her for evaluation. The vision made me love her more and vow to protect her; it made me despise Frank.”

After this, the book’s suspense rests on whether and when Cal will finally turn to face his lifelong attacker. What will he lose, in what sequence? How humiliated and abased will he become? Is there any moment when he can say enough? As it turns out, there may indeed be such a point. And, as the saying goes, what will happen when the worm turns?

That’s when The  Bad Angel Brothers becomes crime fiction. And the reader, having maintained connection with Cal this long, may well be hoping some effective violence finally takes place.

Watch the magician’s hands: Theroux has some powerful twists in his hat, and the language and compelling prose with which to offer them into the spotlight. He may yet pull a coin from your ear. Or from Cal’s.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Unforgettable Crime Novel by Chris Offutt, THE KILLING HILLS

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“The Killing Hills probes the darkness in both land and families, along with the limits of forgiveness. It’s not just a fine and unforgettable crime novel. It’s a heartbreak and a bond.”

ChrisOffutt’s first crime thriller is far from his first book, since he’s already had two award-winning novels. The Killing Hills spins the grit and danger of a murder investigation into a gruffly tender examination of hardscrabble rural life in the hollers of Kentucky. From the challenges of family feuds and payback frictions, to the dangers of grandparents armed with pocket pistols and long guns, Army CID agent Mick Hardin is in almost as much danger as when he was in combat. But he has a lot less assurance on who are the “bad guys” around him.

Mick’s home on leave to see his pregnant wife, a woman who has loved what he loves: this place and its half-crazy people. But nothing’s what he expected on his homecoming. “He loved her. He would always love her. He’d never met a woman he liked as much, or seen one he thought was better looking. During sex, Peggy’s face seemed euphoric, her mouth tiny, eyes wide as if drugged. That’s what bothered him. Not the sex or the child growing in her womb, but the sheer injustice of another man seeing her face that way.”

Stranded among his own emotions toward Peggy and their fracturing marriage, Mick accepts a potent diversion: to seek the murderer of a local woman, as an unofficial deputy to his sister, the local sheriff. Caught in a sexist political bottleneck and without enough staff even for routine work, Mick’s sister Linda really needs him—even if she has to wait for him to kick off his latest hangover.

Mick’s strong understanding of how Kentucky hill life operates draws him into the web of interactions around the dead woman. Even an old ginseng gatherer can be both an informant and a danger to him; someone walking a back road should be offered a ride, for instance, but when Mick does so, delivering the walker—after an exchange of names that lets each man place the other’s family—to the third holler down, he finds a remarkable situation: a live mule with a chair lashed to its back, roped and serving as a support to a front porch roof.

Though the scene is both very funny and very poignant, it’s Mick’s quick assessment of how to resolve it, complete with release of the mule (which of course bites him), that reveals the kind of investigator he is: one who can think several steps ahead and alter plans as results change around him. He explains his reasoning to his passenger after the fact: “If the mule had stayed hooked up to your porch too long … you’d have to do something back … Then my sister would get mixed up and somebody’s setting in the jailhouse. So, no, it ain’t necessarily for [the mule], but for the good of everybody.”

He’ll need all of that forethought and backward looking, to determine who had the motive for the killing, and how it took place.

Loyalty and betrayal slide back and forth in this tightly plotted, immaculately paced novel. What binds them together is Mick’s capacity to care intensely, not just for his estranged wife, but for the landscape and people he’s grown up with. The Killing Hills probes the darkness in both land and families, along with the limits of forgiveness. It’s not just a fine and unforgettable crime novel. It’s a heartbreak and a bond, laid out in precise scenes and careful conversations, with the most painful of choices remaining in the hands of those who live—and love.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Always Knew There'd Be a Mystery for This Massachusetts City -- New, from Liz Rosenberg

Worcester, Massachusetts: Drive into this bigger-than-expected urban enclave, with the second highest population of the Bay State's cities, and new buildings for the arts and commerce shine from the downtown. But the traffic patterns, the neighborhoods, the twists of roads re-made over the years and not quite up to the number of cars on them, even when it's not rush hour ... all these speak most eloquently of the years when manufacturing made up the life energy of Worcester.

In the powerful new novel from Liz Rosenberg, INDIGO HILL, time shifts dramatically backward a lifetime, after Michelle and Louisa's elderly mother dies quickly of pancreatic cancer. For one brief moment, Alma Johansson, hard-working widow of a hard-working good man, considers trying to tell her secrets to her grown daughters. But as usual, 43-year-old Louisa's brusque comment jams up the conversation, and after that, there's no time left to confide anything. Well, what could it have been anyway? Her daughters know all about Alma's life.

But when their mother's will is presented, they discover how wrong they've been. And the shocking process of allowing an unexpected beneficiary to come to their mother's house and sort through its contents spins Louisa, an outwardly bitter woman with a soft core shown only at her workplace (she's a much-valued mental health counselor), back into her own net of secrets, losses, and terrible trade-offs.

She'd known it for a long time. People disappointed you. They let you down, they went away or died. They seldom turned out the way you thought.

But not, whispered the secret voice in her head, not your mother. ...Her mother at least could be counted on; Alma Johansson was rock solid -- or so Louisa had always believed. ... No. No way, She just couldn't do it. Louisa stuck the key into the ignition, and before she knew it she had parked the Chevy in the lot behind the hardware store belonging to her oldest school friend, Flick Bergstrom.

The sight of the old familiar brick building made her breathing a little easier, the pain at the center of her chest less intense.

Flick, it turns out, bears outward scars of a fire they'd experienced as teens. Louisa's are inward. And to make sense of her own past, as well as her mother's, she'll have to open those wounds again.

A fire that changed her teen community is at the heart of what Louisa must exhume. It's a long, painful, yet achingly lovely process, something like peeling away the collapsed roof and walls to rediscover something precious and unburnt within. Rosenberg's pace is steady, relentless as time itself, as she walks Louisa toward the truths that shimmer beyond her matter-of-fact family, her compromising in love, and her community.

Is it a mystery? Hmm. The pace is deceptive; the secrets are deep and burning. I felt as though INDIGO HILL solved something vital, and something that could perhaps only exist in the layered maufacturing city of Worcester. Even when the author's Afterword reveals the "facts" beyond the story (a real fire in 1968; lives lost), there's a magical sense of revelation as well -- as if all the bok-length uncovering had created also somehow the answer to how to live with the past and how to bless it. And that may be the deepest mystery of all.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Diversion: STATION ELEVEN, Emily St. John Mandel -- Not a Mystery, but Mysterious

Mysterious and wonderful. Deeply satisfying. A book to remember and share.

Emily St. John Mandel's much-promoted novel STATION ELEVEN begins in the middle -- not just in the middle of stage, in the middle of a performance of King Lear, where actor Arthur Leander is about to die. But in the middle of the timeline of this dystopian novel. And whether the dystopia is defined by the Hollywood of our century, or the survivalist mode that follows a dramatic plague outburst upon the earth, is open to question.

But there's never a moment in the entire adventure when there's any doubt about the integrity and passion of Kirsten Raymonde, once a child actor, later a performer on the edge of the known world. And for all the desperation and violence of her new world, Kirsten's one of several people well worth liking in this tapestry of rediscovery.

Renewed. Refreshed. Bathed in an unearthly light that sings. That's where my "take a holiday" plunge into this non-mystery landed me. I am so glad.

[PS -- like graphic novels? you may be amazed at how Mandel's fictionalized one takes life in the center of this book.]

THE ARSONIST, Sue Miller

A Boston author, a New Hampshire setting, a crime in progress (serial arson), and potential insight into how communities react to multiple fires -- how could I not read THE ARSONIST by Sue Miller? Plus, I've had the pleasure of listening to Miller in person (her earlier novel The Good Mother may be the most well known of her work). And summer reading should expand to more than one genre, right?

Best to say it right away: THE ARSONIST is not, in spite of its name, crime fiction. Nor does it provide insight into the criminal mind, or even the crime. The title is a masterpiece of misdirection. Still, the novel is vivid and intriguing, and I enjoyed all of it except the ending (if you find you like the ending, please DO place a comment here and explain your reaction, would you?).

Frankie Rowley is home from her aid work in East Africa, for what her family expects is her usual short breathing-space visit -- in this case, to the family summer home in a small New Hampshire village, where her aging parents have just settled to become year-round residents. But Frankie already knows she may never return to Africa. In the midst of an early midlife crisis, questioning her easy-loving lifestyle, her relationship with the ex-pat community abroad, and even the value of her humanitarian efforts, Frankie is more than jet-lagged. She's life-lagged.

On her first, mostly sleepless, night "home," Frankie's out walking when a whiff of smoke hints at the first of the summer housefires. She tunes in gradually to what's going on, as she simultaneously (and with many levels of doubt) begins an affair with the editor of the local paper. And the final strand of tension comes from what's happening to her parents, as her father's "forgetfulness" races toward an inability to recognize his family and himself. Is Frankie supposed to walk away from her own complicated life to become the family caregiver?

I loved the questions raised in THE ARSONIST, about self, about our parents and our communities, about the symbiosis and sometimes the painful clash of "summer people" and year-rounders. (It's not really an issue where I live in Vermont, but there are similar frictions that root in social status and education and power and other life choices.) And the writing kept me enraptured until, as I mentioned, the final few pages, when I felt that Miller tossed out the "show don't tell" rule and hurried to complete the book in a "glimpse of the future" that felt awkward as well as sad.

I'm really interested in other opinions on this one. Yes, get the book -- but don't expect a mystery, right? I can't say much more than that without throwing spoilers into this write-up. Let me know what you think, and whether you've enjoyed this. I certainly did.

The Law Versus Love, Life: Liz Rosenberg, THE LAWS OF GRAVITY

In a perfect world, the law of the land would echo what our hearts tell us: Love and peace, and friendship above all, would determine what's right to do and how to give.

But as Liz Rosenberg makes clear in THE LAWS OF GRAVITY, even the most caring and tender judge must wrestle with what's been written down. And for Nicole and her adored older cousin Ari Wiesenthal, the weight of the law may fracture the family bonds that have kept them close into adulthood, into the years when each is a parent.

Nicole, worrying about a lump in her neck as she talks with her best friend Mimi (very pregnant), is already having a tough time seeing her daughter Daisy enter kindergarten. She mentions to Mimi an overheard conversation about yet another woman who'd received a cancer diagnosis when her child entered school:

She knit faster, as if she could push the story away with the clicking speed of the needles. "That mother died before her daughter even reached third grade."

"There's nothing scarier than having kids," Mimi said, her dark eyes wide. "Halloween can't touch it."

"I know. But just think --," Nicole began.

"I can't," Mimi said. "I won't. And you shouldn't either. Everything to do with having children is terrifying. You can't afford to sweat the details."

But for Nicole, the details are suddenly front and center, as the lump turns out to be an aggressive cancer, and treatments don't work well. Luckily, her cousin Ari stored the cord blood -- that special blend of magically fertile stem cells that hesitates in the umbilical cord at birth -- of one of his children, deep frozen for emergencies, should that kind of crisis ever arrive. And the cord blood could help Mimi survive after all.

But Ari, at first glad to contribute, confronts an emergency for one of his own children and suddenly realizes he needs to keep that cord blood for them, just in case.

Mimi actually has a contract of sorts that Ari provided, saying he'd donate the blood. What will it cost her at the level of her soul, if she takes that document to court to sue for the cord blood?

Liz Rosenberg is known as a poet and a thoughtful reviewer of young-adult novels. Here she spins a lush novel of women's friendships that tackles the legal and medical issues usually found in the high-stakes thrillers written by, say, Jodi Picoult. But Rosenberg shifts the pace as well as the setting -- to Long Island, where she grew up, and to the cultural frame of modern Jewish life -- in order to deepen the issues and test their costs.

Readers with some experience in terms of Jewish thought will already have pricked up their ears at the surname Wiesenthal for Nicole's cousin Ari. Even more pressing is the name of the judge who accepts the case that Nicole brings: Judge Solomon Richter. "Richter" is German for judge, based on the word that means what is right; Solomon, of course, is often remembered for his wisdom in deciding which of two claimants was actually the mother of a baby being fought over. And Rosenberg is a poet -- not only the names, but each word in this powerful novel has been selected by eye and ear. To reach the eventual resolution, not only the characters but also the reader will test what justice means -- and also love.