The Good Killer by Harry Dolan

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on February 4, 2020

The Good Killer is worth reading just for the epilogue. It balances a dark story with a message of healing, a suggestion that there is a path out of the darkness.

Sean Tennant joined the military with his best friend, Cole Harper. Cole’s brother Jimmy was disappointed that Sean didn’t talk Cole out of the military adventure. Cole lost a foot in the war, for which Jimmy blamed Sean. Later, Sean decided to pursue a theft that went sideways. Jimmy blames Sean for bringing Cole along. Now Sean is on the run from Jimmy. Accompanying Sean are Molly Winter and Cole’s ghost. At least, Sean carries on conversations with Cole, although to others, he seems to be talking to himself.

The victim of the theft, Adam Khadduri, lost cylinder seals valued at a few million dollars. He also lost Molly, or she lost him before telling Sean where to find his valuables. Like Jimmy, Khadduri is trying to track down Sean.

Sean and Molly have new identities and feel reasonably safe until Sean stumbles across an angry man in a mall who is shooting random customers to impress Rose, the woman who rejected him. Sean shoots the killer, saving Rose and earning the status of a folk hero. But since his picture, captured on security cameras, is now on cable news, Sean and Molly need to flee before Khadduri or Jimmy Cole find them.

After the shooting, law enforcement agents who know about his theft are also looking for Sean. He is occasionally recognized by people in small towns, but since Sean and Molly have attained the status of cult heroes, there isn’t much risk that anyone will turn them in. America loves its celebrities.

Some of this seems improbable and forced. In particular, I didn’t buy Jimmy’s vendetta. Khadduri has a stronger motivation to chase down Sean, so the story is at last partially believable. In the end, if a reader can buy into the premise, The Good Killer delivers a satisfying action story.

The law enforcement characters have standard law enforcement personalities. Sean isn’t necessarily an admirable guy, but he at least feels remorse about his reckless behavior, which accounts for the ghost of Cole that he carries in his head. While taking out a mall killer might be seen as an act of redemption, I never entirely warmed to Sean. While I prefer conflicted bad guys to stalwart good guys, Sean seems more like an artificial construct whose job is keep the plot moving than a flesh-and-blood character. The “dead best friend in my head” theme has been done so many times that it comes across as a shopworn tool of the writing trade.

Although I didn’t entirely buy the story and wasn’t in love with Sean, Harry Dolan scores points by underplaying Sean’s ability. He is far from a typical thriller superhero. I was more intrigued by the characters of Molly and Rose, although they both play much smaller roles. In fact, Rose is a negligible character until the epilogue, when she reappears to give the story an emotional power that is absent until that point. The Good Killer is an uneven performance, but it does maintain an escalating level of tension, and its touching epilogue earned it a recommendation.

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Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Del Rey on April 21, 2020

My objection to most fantasy novels is that writers too easily resort to magic (or godlike powers) to make things happen for the convenient purpose of advancing the plot. Robert Jackson Bennett, on the other hand, is scrupulous about creating rules that govern the universes he creates. Bennett's rules are the analog of the laws of physics in our universe.

In the Founders trilogy (of which Shorefall is the second installment), reality is affected by scrivings that trick objects into believing that the rules are something other than they would otherwise be. Objects float because they are told that gravity makes them rise rather than fall. Wheels turn without propulsion because scrivings convince them that turning is what wheels do. The instructions that give definitions to scrivings are stored in large devices known as lexicons. How mere humans came to learn about scriving is not entirely clear at this point, but the explanation appears to be unfolding.

Foundryside ended with its protagonist, Sansia Grado, facing a perilous future. The peril heightens in Shorefall as Crasedes Magnus — perhaps the first of the long-vanished hierophants and known to some as the Maker — travels to Tevanne, the city-state in which the Foundries operate. Crasedes plans to take control of the lexicons to restore his ability to remake reality to suit his purposes. To do that, he must overcome another godlike being, a powerful “construct” known as Valeria whose scrived permissions restrain her from confronting Crasedes directly. Crasedes gets an initial assist from Ofelia Dondalo, Gregor's conflicted mother.

Gregor's heroism in Foundryside finds new expression in Shorefall. Gregor’s mommy issues are reflected in other characters who have difficult parents, although the novel’s biggest surprise involves a key character from Foundryside who is dismayed to discover that he has a troublesome child. (You need to read Foundryside to catch the pun in the last sentence.)

Sansia, Berenice Grimaldi, Orso Ignacio, and Gregor Dandalo are the primary returning characters from Foundryside. Each grows in his or her own way. Each confronts adversity, gains strength, and finds a way to cope. The heroes in Bennett’s novels always remind readers of the need to place the common good ahead of their own desires — a message that resonates in these troubled times. While all the heroes in Shorefall risk their lives repeatedly for the welfare of the world they know, a couple of characters engage in acts of self-sacrifice that will change them, or end them, because they see no other choice. One reason I keep coming back to Bennett is that he makes me feel good about the human race, even if his humans live in a different universe.

There is usually a moral conflict in a Jackson novel. Shorefall presents two views of how power might be used. One powerful character wants to make the world a better place by taking control of humans and directing them toward pursuits that do not involve violence or corruption, a sort of benevolent enslavement. A competing powerful character wants to make the world a better place by taking away scriving, which would prevent the owners of lexicons from exploiting everyone else, although a few million people would die when everything collapses. Both powerful beings believe they have good intentions, but their laudable ends may not justify such destructive means.

Despite its philosophical underpinnings, Shorefall offers abundant action. I admire Jackson’s ability to create imaginative problems that can only be overcome by devising clever but dangerous solutions. Shorefall doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but the resolution creates a temporary lull in a larger story that will continue in the final novel. Jackson and his publisher made me wait twenty agonizing months for the second novel after the first one was published. I hope we don’t have to wait as long for the last one.

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Braised Pork by An Yu

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Press on April 14, 2020

Braised Pork tells the story of a woman who is struggling to cope with the demands of a changing life. Wu Jia Jia’s husband, Chen Hang, killed himself while kneeling over their bathtub, leaving her with an expensive apartment and little money with which to maintain it. She wants to sell the Beijing apartment, but rumors of her husband’s suicide have made buyers view the apartment as a place of misfortune.

Jia Jia thinks about moving in with her father, but is shocked to learn that he remarried while she was grieving her husband’s loss. Her other option, living with her grandmother and aunt, is difficult because they have settled into a way of life that makes her feel like an outsider. Finding a new husband might solve her problems, but the parents of the only man she has dated — the bartender at the tavern where she spends her evenings — believe it would be bad luck for their son to marry a widow.

Jia Jia attended art school and has some talent, but Chen Hang thought it would be inappropriate for her to sell her paintings. Now that he is gone, she contemplates a sketch he made of a fish with a man’s head. She obsessively paints her own version of the fish man but can never visualize the face that belongs on the fish’s body. In the meantime, she has been commissioned to paint a scene with Buddha on the wall of a friend’s home.

All of this is background for the true story, which involves visions or dreams or shared experiences in which Jia Jia and others encounter the fish man in a world made of water — a world that, in their view, represents true reality. Jia Jia feels compelled to take a trip to Tibet, where she finds a crude sculpture of the fish man in a small village and later discovers a connection between an old villager and her own family.

The recurring appearance of the fish man is something that might be found in a fable, but most of Braised Pork is grounded in a more recognizable reality. Exactly what the fish man represents or symbolizes — whether the fish man even exists, or is the product of mental illness — is ambiguous. In at least one case, the belief that we live in a world made of water seems to drive someone mad, perhaps because that person believes the world of water took everything from her. That person’s husband comes to believe that there are “two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them.” Whether the body can be separated from the rest of human experience is one of the philosophical questions that An Yu poses to her readers.

I’m not sure quite what to make of the fish man. Despite its central importance to the story, I was drawn more to the life that Jia Jia is trying to make after the death of her husband — her uncertain relationship with the bartender, her reconnection with her father, her decision to start making art again. Jia Jia has an appealing resilience. Whether she has experienced visions that open a gateway to a different concept of reality or is suffering from a mental illness, her determination to place the best interpretation on her encounter with the water world, and to take something positive from its darkness, offers a ray of light in an otherwise dark story.

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The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts

First published in 1920; republished by Dover on May 15, 2019

This hundred-year-old classic was mystery writer Freeman Wills Crofts’ first published novel. Notable for its detail, the novel is both a police procedural and a detective story that challenges the reader to guess both whodunit and how’d he do it.

While supervising the unloading of casks from a steamship, a young clerk discovers gold sovereigns and a woman’s body in a broken cask. He and the manager of the shipping company report the discovery to Inspector Burnley at Scotland Yard. By the time Burnley arrives at the ship, however, the cask has disappeared.

Burnley’s investigation is methodical. He first tracks down Léon Felix, to whom the cask was shipped from France, and gets an elaborate account of the circumstances that led the shipment. Felix produces a typewritten letter from the sender, Alphonse Le Gautier. Felix assumes the cask contains a statute and some money. Burnley then tracks down the cask and opens it in the presence of Felix, who is distressed to find the body of Annette Boirac, the wife of Raoul Boirac. On her body is a typewritten note that refers to the repayment of a loan.

Burnley works with the chief of a Paris police, Chauvet, to investigate the crime from the French side. Chauvet assigns a detective named Lefarge, with whom Burnley has worked before. The two police detectives learn that Annette had taken leave of Raoul, who seems genuinely sorrowed to learn of her strangulation. The detectives assemble a case that points not to Raoul as the killer (he has an alibi) or to Gautier, who denies writing the letter or note, but to Felix, who was once infatuated with Annette, although he claims that the infatuation died before she married Raoul, a fellow art collector with whom Felix became friends.

The meticulous investigation involves multiple witness interviews, inspections of typewriters, and the discovery of incriminating evidence in Felix’s home. The police take care to make no assumptions and to look for all possible evidence of innocence as well as guilt, providing a model that modern American police detectives should emulate. Although they work long but civilized hours, Burnley and Lefarge never miss a meal, often dining together and enjoying a bottle of wine before resuming their investigation.

The case seems airtight, but in the exercise of due diligence, Felix’s solicitor hires a private detective named Georges La Touche. The detective admires the strong work done by Burnley and Lefarge, retraces every step of the investigation, and cannot spot a flaw. There seems no hope for Felix until, inspired by the sight of a beautiful woman in Paris (and who wouldn’t be?), he moves the investigation in a different direction and solves the crime.

Will the reader solve it? The whodunit offers only a few suspects, so guesswork might lead to a happy result, but the “how” is so intricate that the reader will need to be a more skilled armchair detective than most to figure it out before La Touch explains it all.

Crofts’ characters all display old world charm. The plot is enjoyable, although the wealth of detail requires patience and a good memory. No stone is left unturned, and then La Touche turns them all over a second time. This is a police procedural on steroids, although one that relies on plodding attention to detail rather than Sherlockian insight. Fans of fast-moving modern thrillers who can’t abide sentences of more than six words will probably find The Cask to be a poor choice. Readers who prefer cerebral fiction to shootouts will find pleasure in this ground-breaking novel.

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Surrender by Ray Loriga

Published in Spain in 2017; published in translation by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on February 25, 2020

In spirit and tone, Surrender brings to mind José Saramago. Ray Loriga’s style is less delightfully rambling than Saramago’s, but it is chatty and intimate, as if the author were telling a meandering story to a good friend. The story combines surrealism with the realistic fears of war-torn people who are willing to surrender their individuality for the sake of gaining security through conformity.

The place where the war occurs is unspoken, as are its participants. We know only that the war is not going well for the place where the narrator resides. His two sons went to war, but the narrator does not know if they are still alive. The bombs are coming closer. The only good news, from the narrator’s perspective, is the appearance of Julio, a mute boy who wandered into the narrator’s life. The narrator and his wife keep Julio hidden in their basement. “If all goes well and he behaves himself, maybe we’ll move him upstairs one day, to our sons’ room.”

The zone agent tells the narrator that the decade-long war is being lost, that everyone must evacuate to the transparent city. The narrator has no choice but to trust the government, provisional though it may be, because the alternative is anarchy or death. After all, the government protected them from their wet nurse who cared so tenderly for their children. They made no protest when the government took her because they were grateful for its vigilance.

The story follows the narrator, his wife, and Julio as they make a difficult journey to the transparent city, where everything is indeed transparent. Walls are made of a transparent crystal; everyone is visible to everyone else as they shower, shit, shag, and sleep. The experience leads the narrator to understand that “although some of us have more flesh in this or that place and others have less, we’re basically all the same.”

Everyone in the transparent city is required to take three showers a day, but the water has properties that go beyond washing away dirt. The narrator soon finds himself unreasonably happy, so happy he doesn’t object when Julio’s tutor takes the narrator’s wife to bed. “My perennial happiness stuck to me the way goat poop sticks to your hunting boots.” Yet the narrator has a premonition that his happiness will come undone. “Sometimes you have to wait for things to unfold, even though you already sense what’s going to happen, because if you don’t, people will call you crazy.”

People in the transparent city must do what they are told, lest their heads be posted at the front gate. At first, surrendering control of his life seems fine to the narrator, because contentment has always been his goal. “Once you admit that god hasn’t chosen you to do anything extraordinary, you start to really live the way you should, with your head and feet inside a circle marked in the sand, not stepping out beyond your terrain or hankering for what isn’t yours.” When he recalls his past, the narrator occasionally searches his soul “for some shred of my old self, but it was useless, I couldn’t find it.”

“What malice lurks in the soul of a man who doesn’t recognize himself as one among many?” the narrator asks. The question is poignant in a time when selfish people eschew social distancing, but Loriga turns the question on its head. The narrator feels that the “tiny circle of my affections and concerns” helped him understand what matters, while being “part of something functional that assures my well-being and calls for my participation” makes him “feel inexorably excluded from the common good.” The resolution of that conflict, Surrender suggests, requires individuals within a society to retain their individuality even if they are necessarily part of something bigger.

The novel is also an argument against contentment as an ultimate goal. Nobody in the transparent city is hungry or sick, everyone is forced to feel protected and happy, “but was that enough to live?” The narrator misses doing things that cause pain, simply because the pain resulted from his free will. And in “the strange peace of the transparent city,” he and his wife have stopped loving each other, perhaps because they have stopped struggling together to attain the things that the transparent city gives them. Or perhaps it has something to do with the wife shagging the tutor.

At some point the reader will wonder whether the narrator is reliable. Is it true that nothing smells bad in the city, including the excrement that the narrator hauls away on a tractor every day? Is Julio really a savant, as the narrator believes, capable of speech but wisely remaining silent? In the end it doesn’t matter. The story is strange and wonderful, and even if the narrator can’t be trusted to tell us the truth, Loriga conveys many truths about the conflict between the demands of society and the needs of the individual.

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