The Boatman's Daughter by Andy Davidson

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on February 11, 2020

The Boatman’s Daughter is marketed as a supernatural thriller. While supernatural forces contribute to the thrills, horror novels like this one remind us that humans at their worst are more horrific than the imagined entities that haunt human lives. The supernatural entity who lurks in The Boatman’s Daughter might be less evil than a couple of the human characters.

The boatman is Hiram Crabtree. His daughter is Miranda. The novel opens with the boatman’s disappearance in the bayou when Miranda is eleven. Accompanied by a witch, Hiram embarks on a mission after telling Miranda to wait in the boat. In the horror story tradition, Miranda ignores sensible advice and plunges into the darkness when she hears disturbing sounds. Instead of finding her father that night, she finds a baby, or perhaps an abomination, that she calls Littlefish. She raises Littlefish as an orphaned younger brother.

The witch is an old woman named Iskra who was once scolded by the leshii for having a loveless heart. She is too selfish, the leshii told her, to have children of her own. The leshii, according to various wikis, is a mischievous deity that inhabits forests in Slavic mythology. Apparently one of them made it to Arkansas.

Most of the novel’s action occurs a few years after Miranda finds Littlefish. Miranda has been bedeviled by a one-eyed constable named Charlie Riddle who paid a price for trying to have his way with her. At Riddle’s direction, Miranda uses her boat to deliver drugs through the bayou. A “mad, lost preacher” named Billy Cotton, widower of a woman named Lena who had a gift for perceiving the supernatural, is also involved in the distribution scheme. Cotton was present at Littlefish’s birth, a seriously warped scene that the novel revisits more than once, each time imparting new revelations that tie the past to the present.

Miranda eventually learns the truth about her father’s disappearance and the mysterious origin of Littlefish. The other key character who contributes to the story is the dwarf John Avery, a dissatisfied employee in Riddle’s drug dealing enterprise. And then there’s the girl in the forest who haunts Cotton’s dreams, much as Littlefish does and for a similar reason.

The Boatman’s Daughter tells a creepy story that delivers a regular dose of chills. That’s what horror novels should do, so I rate this one as a success. The supernatural elements are a bit muddled. As they deliver murder and gory mayhem, Riddle and Cotton are sufficiently evil to supply a full quotient of horror, even in the absence of the leshii and mysterious monsters lurking in the depths of the earth. Littlefish and the girl in the forest nevertheless add to the story’s eerie atmosphere.

Andy Davidson’s vivid prose gives the story a cinematic quality. His explanation of characters’ motivations, good or evil, makes it possible to believe in their existence. Miranda’s ability to cope and to redefine herself at the novel’s end is appealing. The novel does not depend on gore, despite the occasional severed head, to instill fear. The story might not persuade the reader to believe in the supernatural, but it will reinforce the belief that horror is a force personified in the lives of horrible people, and that darkness is never so dark that it cannot be overcome by light.

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Eden Mine by S.M. Hulse

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 11, 2020

Eden Mine is the story of two siblings, troubled in their separate ways, who are bound by a traumatic childhood event and the secrets they keep. Samuel planned to leave Prospect, his childhood home in Montana, to join the military with his friend Kev, and then to pursue a career as a veterinarian. After the traumatic event left Jo in a wheelchair, he abandoned his dreams so he could drive her to school and keep her safe. Apart from Jo, his only real attachment is to their inherited land, but the government is about to take their house so a highway can run through the property.

Samuel is seduced by militia groups that preach the sovereignty of haters rather than the unity of all, and by fringe websites that spew senseless conspiracy theories. He hates the government. He hates Jews. He believes people are better off “keeping to their own kind.” Jo reminds him that all the people responsible for their losses are, in fact, “their own kind.” Clouded by hatred and helplessness, Samuel plants an explosive in a courthouse, hoping to make a political statement but critically injuring a little girl in a storefront church across the street.

Jo never wanted to leave Prospect because she loves “the way the mountains cleave the sky, and the valley cradles its people.” She knows the land is poisoned and businesses are failing, but the beauty keeps her rooted. The losing fight against eminent domain is the force that threatens to uproot her. Jo blames herself for loving Prospect so much that she gave Samuel a reason to destroy the courthouse, and for loving Samuel so much that she didn’t realize he was “the kind of man who would.”

After the bomb explodes, Samuel hides in the mountains, not realizing that that a video camera had captured his image. Sheriff Hawkins has known Samuel and Jo forever. He knows that Jo knows where Samuel is hiding. It would be easier for Jo to tell him, particularly after the FBI comes calling, but her loyalty to Samuel compels her silence.

Ambiguous relationships dominate Eden Mine. The father of the injured girl is a preacher named Asa Truth who seems drawn to Jo, torn between his Christian desire to forgive and his fatherly hope that Jo will reveal Samuel’s location so that he can be punished. Hawkins has long been Jo’s friend, but he may need to exploit that friendship to find Samuel. A gallery owner admires Jo’s use of mud from the landscapes she paints as a pigment, incorporating the place into her image of the place, but in truth, the owner wants to market Jo’s status as the sister of the bomber to improve sales.

And then there are Jo and Samuel. Is the bond between them stronger than Jo’s belief that justice must be done? Is it stronger than Samuel’s instinct for self-preservation? Can Jo live with what Samuel did? Would it be a betrayal if she tells Hawkins where to find him? Would Samuel forgive his sister for betraying him? Can anyone forgive Samuel for what he did? Would Asa, a pastor, think the man who killed his daughter deserve forgiveness?

The struggle with faith is another key theme. Asa ponders familiar questions about believing in a god who brings so much suffering to his worshippers. Asa believes that, as a child, he healed a bicyclist who was struck by his father’s car, but he has never advertised himself as a faith healer. Asa is tormented because his daughter remains in a coma despite his faith, or perhaps because his shaken faith is insufficiently strong. He doesn’t understand why he had been given the ability to heal when he cannot use it to heal the person he loves.

Brief sections of the novel are told from Samuel’s point of view, but the narrative primarily belongs to Jo. Neither Jo nor Asa understand why they are drawn to each other, but the reader understands that they each need something that only the other can provide. S.M. Hulse makes it easy to empathize with both characters. Perhaps Samuel deserves no empathy, but Hulse makes it easy to understand why he became the kind of person he never intended to be. Too many people, the novel suggests, have been shaped by forces they do not understand; websites that preach division and paranoid hatred, militias that offer violence as a solution to nonexistent problems.

Eden Mine builds to a dramatic conclusion. The ending is guardedly hopeful, suggesting that it is never too late to find the will to change. The novel illustrates a growing disconnect between reality-based Americans and those whose fringe beliefs are a danger to themselves and to society, but it does so in a story that is personal and moving.

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The Wife and the Widow by Christian White

First published in Australia in 2019; published by St. Martin’s Publishing/Minotaur Books on January 21, 2020

The wife in the novel’s title is Abby Gilpin; her husband is Ray. The widow is Kate Keddie, who was married to John before he disappeared. Their stories are told in alternating chapters. Christian White invites the reader to fit the two stories together in an effort to understand how they relate to each other, both temporally and in the overlap of their characters.

John Keddie was a doctor. He disagreed with Kate about the need to activate parental controls on the internet. In John’s view, if parents don’t talk about the monsters in the world, their children won’t be ready to handle them when they appear.

John has monsters of his own, as Kate eventually discovers. Her mission of discovery begins when John doesn’t come home from a two-week research colloquium. She learns that he didn’t show up at the colloquium. She is even more perplexed when she learns that John stopped working at the Center for Palliative Care three months earlier, after the death of an elderly patient to whom he seemed drawn.

Kate believes John appreciates the fact that she is “passive to the point of invisible,” but passivity won’t serve her well if she is to learn what happened to John. She gets her first clue when an alarm is triggered at their holiday house on Belport Island, a place Kate would never expect John to go. According to John’s father, John spent his teen years on the island in a state of spiritual distress. Kate and her father-in-law travel to the island to look for John. His fate is telegraphed in the novel’s title.

Belport Island is the home of Abby, Ray, and their son Ed. Abby is troubled because Ray has been acting strangely. He seems to have lied to Abby about the places where he claims to have been when he was supposedly working. The pile of gay porn magazines hidden in the basement fuels her suspicion that Ray is concealing more than the magazines.

The reader is asked to consider how John’s disappearance relates to the Gilpin family. Like Kate, the reader will ask why John kept an obituary of a murdered man named David Stemple in the holiday home’s attic. Who killed Stemple and why? As in any good mystery, the obvious answers to the questions that the novel poses turn out to be false.

Kate is a sympathetic character. She must overcome her passivity to survive the story. a transition that enhances her likability. Abby is less sympathetic, although her desire to protect her family might cause some readers to empathize with her. John and Ray are developed in enough detail to explain their actions, but the novel’s focus is on Kate and Abby. Neither husband is likely to earn the reader’s sympathy or empathy.

White tells a plausible, well-paced story. Its clever structure helps conceal the relationship between the wife’s story and the widow’s until the reader has an “ah-ha” epiphany. The ending brings the titular characters together for a satisfying conclusion, making The Wife and the Widow a good bet for mystery fans.

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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Published by Random House on February 4, 2020

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a grim novel, but it uses humor to ease the pain that readers who empathize with the main characters will necessarily feel. Life is a mix of joy and sorrow; both are represented here.

Two boys and a girl have disappeared from a slum. The police, having no incentive to look for them, label them as runaways. Parents fear that they have been snatched and sold into slave labor or to harvesters of kidneys. Jai’s friend Faiz believes they have been stolen by a djinn. At age nine, Jai is prepared to believe all those theories. He also knows one of the missing boys.

Having watched countless episodes of Police Patrol, Jai decides to solve the case. He expects success to be rewarded with a career as a detective (jasoos). His house is the present headquarters of the Jasoos Jai Agency, but only when Runu, his elder sister, is not present to break up the meetings he holds with his assistants, Faiz and Pari. Runu is a track star, although running track is her own version of running away. Eventually other children go missing, including two Muslim kids, sending the basti residents into a justified panic.

While calling attention to trafficking and forced labor of children in India, Deepa Anappara also focuses on other problems: divisions of religion and caste, nationalism, sexism, corruption, poverty, and judgmental gossip. The first girl who went missing is rumored to have worked in a brothel. Cheating wives and abusive husbands are among those who “disassemble her character with the viciousness of starved dogs chancing upon a scrawny bird.” They condemn her because her skirts are too short and she has been seen chatting with a Muslim boy, proof of her “utter moral failure.” The absence of evidence that she is a brothel worker does not discourage the gossip. Some people, Anappara suggests, enjoy the misfortune of others if it gives them an opportunity to gossip and condemn.

Other examples of hypocrisy fuel Anappara’s humor. It is widely believed that djinns have taken over an abandoned palace, but Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and “maybe even Buddhists” join Muslims in leaving letters at the palace, filled with wishes they hope the djinns will grant. Some of the politicians “who became Union ministers only because they called us Muslims foreigners,” who “holler during rallies that Hindustan is only for Hindus, and that [Muslims] should go to Pakistan” sneak into the palace to leave their entreaties, first making sure no cameras can take pictures of them bowing to the djinns. Superstition has created the only place where all people are equal.

Jai’s family and other residents of the basti live in fear that the police will bring bulldozers and knock down their homes. They make regular payments to the police to keep their homes intact, but any trouble might provoke unwanted attention, spurring the government to demolish the slum. The police accept bribes to look for missing children but their only interest lies in protecting their own jobs, which means protecting the powerful. Jai’s father pretends not to worry because “Our basti has been here for years. We have identity cards, we have rights. We’re not Bangladeshis.” His mother argues that they only have rights two weeks before an election, the only time politicians pay attention to them.

The plot invites fear that Jai’s sister has been snatched, perhaps to avenge the beheading of a revered buffalo that lived in an alley near their home. Uncertainty about the fate of a missing child might be worse than certainty that the child is lost forever. Suspects are plentiful, as suspicion falls on anyone who has earned resentment, from bullies in the basti to prosperous hi-fi people who live in high-rise buildings, employing basti residents as servants.

In a sense, Djinn Patrol is a coming-of-age-early novel. Jai plays at being a detective, imagining he can use the skills he gleans from Police Patrol, but his imagination gives way to the harshness of reality by the time the story ends. He recognizes that crime reenactments are not stories, that losses viewed on television are not the same as losses experienced. He is not old enough to understand the words he hears from an older resident — the lucky are those who “grow old pretending they have some control over their lives, but even they will realize at some point that everything is uncertain, bound to disappear forever” — but it seems certain he will internalize the lesson.

Jai is a memorable character at the heart of a powerful story. The slow transition from humor to grim realism reminds readers that life is never as simple as we might wish it to be, and that it is wrong to turn away from the misfortune of others because they live in a different place, belong to a different religion, or live an impoverished life that they did not choose.

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Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

Published by Viking on October 22, 2019

No writer gives espionage a more human face than John Le Carré. His protagonists have regrets, but they make up for their mistakes with competence and an unfailing sense that doing the right thing is more important than doing what their bosses expect.

Nat is married to Prue. In their prime, they were both stationed in Russia, where they spied for the Secret Intelligence Service. Now Nat has an SIS desk job and Prue is a human rights lawyer. They live quietly in Battersea, have a daughter, and are generally happy. Events in this tight novel will test their contentment.

Nat is a badminton champ at Battersea’s Athleticus club. A young man named Ed Shannon has recently joined the club. He challenges Nat to a match because Nat is the best. They begin a sort of friendship, although Nat and Ed are both vague about their employment. Nat even brings a co-worker named Florence to a mixed doubles match, pretending that he doesn’t really know her. When Florence abruptly quits her job, the reader will suspect that the relationship between Nat and Ed and Florence will turn out to be bad for Nat’s career. That suspicion will be warranted, but the plot follows a surprising path.

Bryn Jordan, Nat’s former station chief in Moscow and currently “ruler-for-life of Russia department,” decides it is time to put Nat out to pasture. Nat doesn’t fit the new image of SIS, meaning he isn’t a young man with advanced computer skills. Rather than kicking Nat to the curb, Jordan sends him to London General. Its current head is Dominic Trench, who was station chief in Budapest when Nat was posted there. Dom is the kind of man “who takes you aside, anoints you his only friend in the world, regales you with the details of his private life you’d rather not hear, begs your advice, you give him none, he swears to follow it and next morning cuts you dead.”

Dom puts Nat in charge of the Haven, an all-but-defunct substation of London General, “a dumping ground for resettled defectors of nil value and fifth-rate informants on the skids.” Although it is a dead-end job, Nat endeavors to undermine Dom and Bryn by actually accomplishing something. He begins with a sleeper agent, a defector who is suddenly called to service by his Russian masters.

That story unfolds in the entertaining style a reader would expect of Le Carré, but it takes off when it circles back to Nat’s relationship with Ed. Naturally, Ed falls under suspicion and naturally, given the suspicious minds at work in SIS, Nat is regarded as a potentially culpable partner in crime. And naturally, everyone at SIS has it wrong, but it will take some quick thinking and astute tradecraft for Nat resolve the problem as best he can.

Nat, Prue, Ed, and Florence are in the vein of Le Carré’s most likeable characters. The “enemy” is kept backstage — for a time, it isn’t even clear which country is using its intelligence efforts against Britain — but Nat’s real enemies, as is often the case in a Le Carré novel, are the bureaucrats and politicians who have risen to the level of their incompetence. Brexit lurks in the background, as does Donald Trump, both mucking up the ability of Britain and America to work together to achieve common goals.

Even if his best work is behind him — and his best is the best — Le Carré remains the reigning champion of the espionage novel. He is still an astute observer of the human capacity for deception as well as the human fallibility that allows deceivers to triumph. He wrote this novel at the age of 88, but he has not forgotten, and refuses to condemn, the virtues of youthful idealism. Agent Running in the Field suggests that aging people can use their own brand of idealism to thwart, in some small way, a system that rewards duplicity and that confuses patriotism with blind obedience to rules that serve leaders, not the country.

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[Note: If you believe the reviewers (and I use the term loosely) who gave this novel one star on Amazon because it does not glorify Trump, you might conclude that the book is an anti-Trump diatribe. In fact, Trump barely rates a mention, although CIA machinations do play a role in concert with Brexit. The book is a best seller because it deserves to be, regardless of the mindless attacks launched by the right wing extremists who feel duty bound to attack anything they perceive as being even vaguely liberal.]