The Rule of Threes by Jeffery Deaver

Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 1, 2024

The Rule of Threes is a serial killer novella that challenges the reader to identify the killer. To solve the puzzle, the reader will need to identify the killer’s motivation. Jeffery Deaver adds so many plot twists that the reader will be challenged to keep up with the novella’s changing landscape. Solving the mystery is out of the question.

Constant Marlowe is the protagonist in one of Deaver’s ongoing series. Constant is the kind of police detective who makes her own rules. Those rules aren’t always consistent with the law. Fictional cops who go Dirty Harry on criminals are popular with consumers of crime fiction even if, in the real world, cops who don’t obey the law have no business being cops.

Constant makes her way to Clark Valley, Illinois to investigate a serial killer. Only two women have been killed, so it might be more accurate to say that she is concerned about a budding serial killer. The killer earns the name BRK (for Bludgeon, Rape, and Kill) because that’s what he does to his victims and the media like to identify serial killers by cool names or initials.

The first victim was killed three days before the second. Both are young women of similar size who have short dark hair. As Constant examines the crime scene, Joseph Ray Whelan is hiding in the woods, watching her work. Is he the killer? That would be telling.

A Native American Deputy Sheriff is assigned as Constant’s local contact. They use a gas station security camera to identify license plates of cars that drove past the park where the second killing occurred, hoping one of the drivers might have witnessed something. That strategy brings them into contact with Glen Hope, who was driving his daughter Tamara to her college residence in a nearby town. They stopped to eat lunch in the park, but they give Constant no useful information. Tamara will later become an attempted murder victim, perhaps because BRK believes she is a witness who needs to be removed.

Although her investigation doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, a couple of big dumb guys attack Constant. In the story’s background is a newly discovered treaty that may grant an indigenous tribe the rights to certain land. The attempted thrashing may have been inspired by white supremacists in the Eagle Brotherhood who think that Constant’s presence in the area has something to do with the treaty. They don’t realize that Constant used to be a professional boxer. She likes nothing more than punching big dumb guys. She thinks the guys have been hired to attack her but someone with a rifle foils her plan to beat the truth out of them.

Other key characters are in the business of fencing stolen goods or money laundering. The disparate parts of the story — probably too many for a novella — come together when Constant, using her brain rather than her fists, pieces together clues that reveal an explanation for the killings. She exposes the killer, or thinks she does, but the story continues.

Like most modern crime novels that depend on plot twists, the reader must accept implausible developments for the sake of enjoying the story. What seems to be a final twist at the end is soon followed by another. And another. And one for good measure at the very end. All the twisting struck me as overkill, but such is the way of the modern crime novel. The ending is a bit abrupt, but at least it puts an end to all the twists.

The Rule of Threes is better than the last serial killer story that Deaver wrote for Amazon Original Stories. It might be criticized as formulaic if the formula is “stuff as many surprises into the story as possible.” That is, in fact, an approach that Deaver often takes.

The notion that a character is obsessed with “threes” is gimmicky but contributes nothing to the story. Constant is a fairly one-dimensional character so plot is everything. While I wasn’t entirely sold on the plot, it moves quickly and is reasonably entertaining. The word count is sufficiently high that the novella offers a meatier reading experience than many Amazon Short Originals, including others that Deaver has written, so the story earns an unenthusiastic recommendation.

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Victim by Andrew Boryga

Published by Doubleday on March 12, 2024

Victim is a novel that takes the form of a memoir. Javier Perez admits that he was a slacker who learned to game the system by portraying himself as a victim until his dishonesty was discovered. By telling his story in Victim, Javier is attempting to atone by being honest with himself and with the world. The novel is a nuanced look at the risks people take when they abandon intellectual honesty under the pretense of telling a larger truth.

Javier has had a tough life, but he is used to his life so he doesn’t regard it as particularly difficult. He grew up in the Bronx with a mother who worked hard and made sure he had enough to eat. He lived in a sketchy neighborhood but he learned to read the warning signs and knew when crossing the street (or running) would keep him safe. His dad was a drug dealer who was gunned down in front of Javier on one of Javier’s visits to Puerto Rico, but Javier wasn’t surprised by his father’s fate. To Javier, his life is just the way life is. He has nothing to complain about.

Unlike his friend Gio Meija, Javier is a reasonably good student. Gio clowns around in classes, insults teachers, hangs with drug dealers, drops out, and ends up in prison. Javier has a nerdish reputation because he enjoys reading. He does enough in classes to stand out in comparison to students who don’t try at all. He wants to become a famous writer and “make bank” although he hasn’t tried to write anything.

Javier attracts the attention of a roving guidance counselor who tells him how to exploit his background in an a college admissions essay. On the strength of an essay that exaggerates the hardships he has endured, Javier is given a free ride to a prestigious university in upstate New York.

Javier takes advantage of his ethnicity in college. He scores points with professors for having an authentic underprivileged experience. He milks the fact that his best friend is in prison. He meets a Latina student who is a year ahead of him. She introduces him to a campus organization for students of Latin heritage. Javier relies on his “street” experience to make it seem that he has overcome more barriers than his peers. His Latina friend begins to supplement his college education with information about systemic racism, white privilege, and America’s oppressive power structure. Javier doesn’t know many white people and those he knows have been good to him, but he parrots her teachings because he wants to get in her pants. After he also accepts her lessons about feminism, she sleeps with him and they become a couple.

Javier begins to write a column for the student newspaper. His classes have taught him about the importance of research and discipline, but that seems like too much work to Javier. His columns are superficial but are published in the interest of allowing diverse voices to be heard. To publish more, Javier begins to embellish his personal experiences. He claims that instructors have confronted him with racist attitudes. He describes a benign encounter with the police as if it were threatening.

Javier’s columns play well with his white liberal audience. He justifies his lies by telling himself he’s exposing injustices that actually exist, even if they aren’t part of his own experience. Javier thinks of himself as taking shortcuts rather than telling lies. He thinks he is exercising an artistic license to tell greater truths.

After graduation, Javier gets a job writing for a magazine. He again faces criticism for producing superficial work until he again embellishes his experiences. After Gio is released from prison, Gio calls out Javier for the lies he tells. Gio knows that Javier didn’t grow up eating unhealthy fast food that capitalists sell to exploit the poor — an article Javier’s editor assigned after a story broke that portrayed the Bronx as a third-world community where healthy food was unavailable. Gio knows that Javier’s mother served rice and beans with fresh food — her meals were “the bomb.”

Javier ultimately alienates both Gio and his college girlfriend by portraying them in articles with half-truths. Gio knows that Javier was never recruited to join a gang — Javier is too soft. Gio knows that he did not have an epiphany about being a victim because of his post-prison talks with Javier. Gio has never seen himself as a victim. He knows that people who define themselves as victims make their whole life about victimization. Gio doesn’t want any part of such a confining identity. He regards it as “just another trap,” no better than prison.

Yet Javier doesn’t want to embrace Gio’s demand for honesty. Unsurprisingly, Javier eventually learns a lesson when his dishonesty blows up his life.

There have been well-publicized incidents of journalists falsifying sources or fabricating facts to make a larger point. While the point may have merit, supporting it with lies only undermines the truth the journalist is trying to prove. The social justice issues that Javier writes about have merit, but his lack of intellectual rigor and his reliance on fabrications only harms his cause. Victim makes that point effectively.

An equally important point is that people gain attention and sympathy by portraying themselves as victims or by exaggerating their victimization. This is true across the spectrum of race and political beliefs. That the media crave stories about victims only encourages people to self-identify as victims rather than working to overcome any harm they experienced. People too often use the label “victim” as an excuse for their failure to do their best — at work, in school, in relationships. Javier’s life might have been difficult compared to more affluent students at his university, but he never thinks of himself as a victim until he realizes that playing the victim card attracts attention, sympathy, and opportunities he hasn’t earned.

Even if Victim is viewed as satire, Javier’s story might be a bit simplistic or heavy-handed. Still, fiction can use exaggeration to expose truth even if journalism can’t. The novel is not written in an elegant style, although that might be a function of Javier's voice. Javier doesn't come across as a writer who would take the time to polish his prose. Victim is engaging and it addresses issues surrounding the exploitation of victimization that are too rarely explored. Those are good reasons to read the novel.

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Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux

Published by Mariner Books on February 6, 2024

One pleasure of reading lies in the vicarious opportunity to live a different life, if only for a few hours. One pleasure of reading Paul Theroux is that he transports the reader to unfamiliar places, to lives unlike our own. Burma Sahib takes the reader into the life of young Eric Blair as a supervising officer in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma during the 1920s, before Blair began to publish novels under the name George Orwell.

Blair hates the nickname “Lofty,” a reference to his height. He attended Eton, suffered the beatings by faculty and older boys, passed up the usual path of an Oxford education and a life of privilege, and is now taking a probationary position as assistant district superintendent of police in Burma. At the age of 19 (he will turn 20 in 1923), Blair has accepted a three-year contract and will need to repay the cost of his passage (and incur his father’s wrath) if he quits. The novel’s initial chapters begin with Blair’s travel on a ship that is sailing to Mandalay and follow him to his first posting.

Great Britain is administering Burma as a colony, taking its resources and offering a dubious path to “civilization” in return. The constables Blair supervises are Burmese and Indian. Natives automatically refer to Blair as Sahib, but he is expected to become a Pukka Sahib, a title that suggests both authority and an exemplar of gentlemanly behavior. Unfortunately, most Pukka Sahibs are gentlemanly only toward other white Europeans. They belittle, berate, and beat Burmese and Indians without giving their ungentlemanly behavior a second thought.

The novel follows Blair through various postings in Burma, most of which don’t end well. He has unfortunate encounters with a rogue elephant (Blair is too violent in the opinion of his superior) and with a crazy man (Blair is not violent enough). To his colonial bosses, elephants are more important than Asians because elephants help the timber industry make money and are less easily replaced than native workers.

Blair was raised to believe in the correctness of British colonialism and in the superiority of white men, the British foremost among them. His views are both reinforced and challenged as he performs the duties of a police superintendent. Blair has a grandmother and a few other relatives near Mandalay, but he is distressed to learn that his uncle Frank married a Burmese woman who gave birth to Kathleen, Frank’s “half caste” daughter. Blair is afraid that his superiors will learn about the relationship and will make disparaging comments about him behind his back. His disgust with people of mixed races eventually causes him to feel disgusted with himself for not judging people on their merits rather than their parentage.

Blair is pleased to encounter a friend from Eton in Burma and is equally distressed when he learns that the man is engaged to a Burmese woman. His concerns are defined less by his own prejudices against Asians than by his fear that he will be judged for having friends and relatives who are willing to mix with natives. At the same time, Blair enjoys the sexual company of Asian women. Sometimes he has to pay for it, but a couple of his postings come with a young Burmese woman who is expected to keep him happy at night.

Blair eventually agrees to sponsor an Indian — one of his few friends in Burma — as a member of his social club, knowing that he will be criticized and even ostracized for daring to bring a nonwhite through the club doors. Placing friendship above social position is a transformative decision, similar to Huck Finn’s moral decision to risk God’s wrath by helping Jim gain his freedom.

Theroux pays close attention to the minor characters in Burma Sahib, including Blair’s police colleagues and his relatives. He gives each of Blair’s lovers a distinct personality, but none of them (apart from the white woman with whom he has an affair) are happy with Blair’s unwillingness to make their relationship permanent. One of those women contributes to Blair’s undoing. The married white woman who occasionally shares his bed has a dirty mouth (by the standards of her time) and Blair finds it exciting to encounter naughty words and ideas that he never seen in books.

Blair's fullness as a character is impressive. Theroux paints Blair as an isolated man who prefers his own company to that of others. He holds his secrets dear, even when the secrets are not worth holding. He gives the impression of being a blank slate and avoids spreading clues about who he might really be. He hates the assumptions that the British make about him when they learn he attended Eton. Blair despises most people, whether they are white Europeans or Indians and Burmese who have darker skin. He only seems content when he is reading or struggling to write poetry. Jack London, Kipling, and Somerset Maugham have the most impact on his literary sensibility, while E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India fails to speak to his own experience.

Theroux is a masterful storyteller. His descriptions of 1920s Burma make the reader scratch mosquito bites, gag at the odor of open sewage, and feel disgust at white colonists who feel privileged to treat everyone with dark skin as a servant. If Theroux occasionally makes points a bit redundantly, those points are always important to the story. The primary point he makes in Burma Sahib relates to Blair’s ability to change his thinking (to become "woke" in current parlance) after observing the unfairness both of British colonialism and of racial or ethnic prejudice in all parts of the world. Blair’s formative experiences have a liberalizing (and thus humanizing) impact on Blair, turning him into the author who will later question authoritarian rule in 1984 and Animal Farm. Burma Sahib is a fascinating portrait of Blair’s intellectual and empathic development. At the same time, it is a fascinating story of a young man who comes of age in an unfamiliar and challenging world.

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Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe

First published in Japan in 2012; published in translation by Pushkin Press on March 5, 2024

Harlequin Butterfly seems more like a series of thought experiments than a novel. It might best be viewed as a meditation on language. Make of it what you will. Most of the Japanese fiction I’ve read has been accessible to my western sensibility, but Harlequin Butterfly is a bit of a puzzle. I don’t know if that’s because of a difference in culture or if my mind is simply too dull to appreciate Toh EnJoe’s story.

A. A. Abrams is a frequent flyer. In fact, flying is about all he does. When the plane is in the air, Abrams removes a small net made of silver thread that he uses to capture fresh ideas. In no other location are ideas as plentiful as those that come loose in the cabin of a jumbo jet. The net is later said to catch luck or opportunity, but in the beginning the net captures ideas that only exist mid-journey, ideas that are left behind as the body moves forward.

A passenger sitting next to Abrams (in coach, where all the best ideas are found) apparently narrates the first chapter. The narrator can’t read on a plane (or any other form of transportation), perhaps because her thoughts can’t keep up with the speed of the vehicle. Thoughts flitting out of heads moving at a high speed may explain why ideas are most easily captured on an airplane. Speaking to the passenger, Abrams conceives the idea of a book that can only be understood when the reader is flying. Abrams writes To Be Read Only on an Airplane, a book that oddly gains traction among readers who are traveling by sea on luxury liners.

Abrams reappears later in the novel, sometimes in a different gender, once at an earlier time. At some points Abrams is alive and at others is remembered in death. And then we learn that someone else (probably) wrote To Be Read Only on an Airplane — unless the alternate author is actually Abrams in a different guise.

In the second chapter, the focus shifts to Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, an author who has written books that are meant to be read only under specific circumstances, including (you guessed it) while traveling. Most have gone unpublished. They are written in multiple languages including a simplified version of Latin — invented by a mathematician — that nobody speaks. To Be Read Only Under a Cat achieved some success after reading it became the trendy thing to so.

In this chapter, it seems that Abrams is a fictional character who appears in To Be Read Only Under a Cat. Yet there seems to be an Abrams Institute that is tracking down and collecting (and maybe stealing) Tomoyuki’s work. Whether Abrams is real or imagined, whether Abrams or Tomoyuki writes the books (or each writes them independently), doesn’t seem to matter as Tomoyuki understands reality to be relative and fluid.

One of Tomoyuki’s works seems to be a meditation on writing. He explains that he writes because he likes the sound of certain words linked together, a sound “that makes me write things I wasn’t even thinking.” Harlequin Butterfly often comes across as a stream of strangely connected thoughts. Perhaps Toh Enjoe didn’t realize he was having those thoughts as he composed the novel.

Another chapter analogizes kitchens to dictionaries. Both are full of ingredients. When you don’t have the right ingredient, you can make do with another. Ingredients can be combined in various ways and some combinations are preferable to others. The sound of an ingredient (coriander) sparks memories of many things all at once: smells and colors and people and the “bustle of life.”

Language is also analogized to needlework, stitches creating something new, expanding like a conversation, “twisting and turning until the day is over.” Stitching with an old woman helps the narrator learn the woman’s language. Like needlepoint or any craft, writing is an act of creation that might be finished or unfinished, its form “constantly changing, cycling through the stages of transformation, setting new life in motion.” The narrator wonders whether a story written in one language might be incoherent but make perfect sense when translated into another.

These are interesting ideas. I’m not sure they add up to a coherent story but the ideas themselves call the notion of coherence into question. Each chapter of Harlequin Butterfly seems to have a different narrator, although it also seems that they are different forms of the same narrator. At some points, it seems that the story’s narrator is searching for Tomoyuki. At some points (sometimes the same points), it seems the narrator might be Tomoyuki. The final chapter suggests that the narrator is someone (more precisely, something) entirely unexpected.

I’m recommending Harlequin Butterly for its strangeness. Readers who expect stories to have straightforward narratives that are easily understood will want to steer clear of the novel. Readers who appreciate the power of language might be entertained by the EnJoe’s invitation to perceive that power in new ways. Readers with time on their hands might want to read it twice, as I suspect a second reading would contribute to the reader’s understanding or appreciation of the novel’s narrative structure.

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Galway Confidential by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2024

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma after 18 months and, within minutes, has his first taste of Jameson. It makes him feel much better.

Jack entered the coma after being stabbed multiple times at the end of A Galway Epiphany. Upon awakening, Jack learns that his life was saved by a man named Rafferty. Rafferty has been visiting Jack after convincing the hospital nurses that he is Jack’s brother. Rafferty has taken an interest in Jack’s life — he explains that he produces a true crime podcast that often features Jack’s cases — and, after Jack's discharge, Rafferty tries to partner with him on a couple of investigations. This will prove to be bad both for Jack and Rafferty, although series fans know that having any sort of friendship with Jack is likely to invite danger.

The plot of Galway Confidential is fairly typical for a Jack Taylor novel, although it might be less shockingly violent than most. A former nun, Shiela Winston, wants to hire Jack to find the rogue who has been killing nuns in Galway. The Guards are doing little to solve the crime spree, as they are overwhelmed with protestors against lockdowns and vaccination policies.

In addition to investigating attacks on nuns, Jack searches out a couple of affluent youngsters who are setting fire to the homeless. Jack also meets up with Quinlan, an associate of Rafferty whose violent approach to problem solving is not as compatible with Jack’s as Quinlan believes.

During his investigations, Jack is contacted by an alcoholic priest. Jack forces the priest to dry out — perhaps an act of hypocrisy for someone who drinks as much as Jack — but again, any association with Jack isn’t likely to end well. The plot threads weave together in ways that readers have come to expect from Ken Bruen.

Bruen has a history of referencing books, television shows, and movies in the Jack Taylor novels. A character in Green Hell explains that the references ground the novels in “stuff” that the reader knows. Bruen makes fewer cultural references than usual in Galway Confidential (perhaps because Taylor has been in a coma and thus unable to consume culture), but he grounds the novel in current events, as well as events Jack missed while he was sleeping: the Brexit disaster, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the Queen’s death, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the influx of refugees into Ireland, inflation and other consequences of the pandemic. The implication is that Jack has good reason to drink.

Jack Taylor novels are quick reads. Bruen’s minimalist writing style tells the story in short paragraphs that surround dramatic moments with quirkiness. Bruen’s notion of a long sentence is: “He had the kind of face that you know has never really been walloped properly but I could amend that.” Dialog is crisp, in part because Taylor rarely speaks unless he can’t prevent himself from responding to idiocy with sarcasm. Galway Confidential is an unremarkable entry in a remarkable series but since every Jack Taylor novel is darkly entertaining, my recommendation is nearly automatic.

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