Impossible Causes by Julie Mayhew

Published by Bloomsbury on November 19, 2019

Impossible Causes is a Me Too novel, telling a story that demonstrates the collective power of women who finally reveal their stories of abuse. It is also a novel about the corruption of power, a story of men who seek or hold power so that they can abuse it. The framework of the story, involving a remote British island whose religious inhabitants fear witchcraft, is so farfetched that it robs the story of its drama, and the story is so contrived that the title might more accurately have been Impossible Plot. There is much to like about Impossible Causes but the novel’s flaws nearly outweigh its merits.

Leah Cedars is a virgin when Impossible Causes begins. She has a teaching post on the forgotten British island of Lark, an island populated by a religious community that does not welcome the outside world. People not born on the island are known by the derisive term coycrock. Women with black hair, like Leah, are revered as bearers of good luck, but Leah —known to all as “Miss Cedars” after taking a teaching position — feels she has no luck at all. Her brother has fled the island as have many others. Some have chosen to run from evil rather than confront it.

In addition to Leah, the islanders who are most significant to the story are Viola Kendrick and three girls who are approaching adulthood, known collectively as the Eldest Girls of St. Rita, the name their school shares with the patron saint of impossible causes (as well as abused wives and heartbroken women). We learn in the first pages that Viola has found a body, but it is only in the last pages that we learn the body’s identity. The novel jumps around in time to build a backstory of events in 2017 and 2018 that lead to Viola’s discovery.

Viola is a coycrock who craves the acceptance of the Eldest Girls. She is also a drama queen and an attention-seeking liar with a history of making false accusations. She would have been a more interesting character if her lies had not been so obvious.

Other significant characters are Saul Cooper and Ben Hailey. Saul is the island’s Customs Officer, not quite twice Leah’s age but nevertheless smitten with Leah, an attraction that Viola encourages and that Leah does not shun. Saul’s competition is Ben, a young teacher (the first male in that role, apart from the headmaster) who is newly arrived from the mainland. Leah feels destined to fall in love with Ben thanks to a reading of Tarot cards.

Ben also befriends the Eldest Girls, who seem to be monkeying around with witchcraft or summoning the dead while prancing about in the nude at one of those a mystical circles of stones that seem to be everywhere in British fiction. Ben is suspected of playing a role in the slaying of a goat and in the Eldest Girl’s suspected use of the goat’s heart as an effigy to cause a death. Whether Ben has monkeyed around with the girls and/or the goat, whether he is a good or bad guy, is one of the novel’s suspense-building questions.

All of this is background to a plot that leads up to the Me Too moment. While the story attempts to illustrate how women (and men) might remain silent when confronted with sexual harassment and other forms of sexual abuse, the odd setting robs the story of its power. The women on Lark apparently remain silent because they are on Lark and thus unaware that women are no longer putting up with subjugation by men. The fact that women in the real world remain silent is a more compelling story than the one told in Impossible Causes. The behavior of women on a male-dominated religious community doesn’t tell the reader much about the behavior of women in a less artificial and more modern setting.

When the Me Too moment finally arrives, it feels too contrived to be meaningful. The novel’s other key dramatic moment, involving the body Viola discovers, also comes across as a contrivance, an unlikely event involving mistaken identity that exists solely to create drama without regard to its improbability.

While the events of the novel take place in the very recent past, the story seems like an attempt to engraft modern themes (including Me Too) onto a time when people still believed in witchcraft. I suppose an isolated religious community (its leaders refuse to allow the construction of a cellphone tower) might be reality challenged, but I wasn’t convinced

I admired the novel’s character development (apart from the Elder Girls, who have no obvious motivation to monkey about with witchcraft) and I enjoyed Julie Mayhew’s prose. Some of her provocative passages (“Women are the true masters of deception, have always had to be. They don’t get to decide which of their behaviours are virtues.”) might spark interesting book club discussions. The story’s suggestion that religious intolerance and power are destructive forces, while not an original thought, gives the novel some weight. Balancing the positives against the negatives, I can only say that readers who are drawn to the message or the prose without concern for the story’s plausibility will probably like the book more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

When Old Midnight Comes Along by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Macmillan/Forge Books on December 3, 2019

When Old Midnight Comes Along is the kind of detective novel that should be a model for the genre. Loren D. Estleman’s plot is tight and credible. He conveys the depth of his characters without exploring their backgrounds in unnecessary detail. His prose style is clear and uncluttered while retaining a literary flair. Estelman has distilled, in this 28th Amos Walker mystery, the essence of what a detective novel should be.

Francis Xavier Lawes, a prominent Detroit businessman, hires Amos to find his wife. That could be tricky since Paula Lawes has been missing for more than six years and in less than a year will be presumed dead. Lawes tells Amos he wants to know his wife’s fate because he plans to remarry and would like to get the declaration of death out of the way without delay. Lawes’ intended is Holly Pride, who began working for him as a receptionist before (in my uncharitable interpretation of her intent) she decided to become a gold digger.

Amos starts by charming Deborah Stonesmith at the Detroit Police Department to let him review the file regarding Paula’s disappearance (in other words, she wants Amos to get out of her hair). He learns that Lawes and his wife were overextended on vacation home mortgages and credit card debt. That brings Amos to the police detective who ran the investigation. John Alderdyce has moved on to private security, but he's convinced Lawes murdered Paula and regrets his inability to prove it.

A complicating fact involves Paula’s car, found abandoned near the site where a cop named Marcus Root was killed. A retired police commander, Albert White, tells Amos that Root was shot while he was following Paula’s car. Root’s notebook was missing from his patrol car, suggesting that Root was killed because he had information about Paula that his notebook (or Root) would have revealed.

Other key characters include Oakes Steadman, a former gang member who now works for the police as a gang consultant, George Hoyle, who was having an affair with Paula, and Andrea Dawson, a publicist who was working with Paula when she dropped off the grid. As Amos wears down his shoe leather, the information he gathers about Paula from each character becomes even more confusing. The confusion is compounded when he discovers that a ring — probably but not certainly Paula’s engagement ring — might be connected to a crime.

The various characters provide conflicting clues that Amos and the reader will need to sort out to discover Paula’s fate. The characters have the fullness of unique individuals, unlike the stock characters that so many genre writers recycle. Estleman creates atmosphere without dwelling on needless lessons in Detroit's architecture or political history. The solution to the mystery is clever and not easily guessed (at least not by me). Unlike many modern crime novelists, Estleman finds a plausible way to bring all the characters and clues together and leaves no loose ends dangling. When Old Midnight Comes Along is exactly what an old-school detective novel should be: entertaining, challenging, and satisfying.

RECOMMENDED

Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

First published in 1965; published by Vintage on November 20, 2018

Night of Camp David is a prescient novel; its foreshadowing of today’s political landscape is eerie. It is easy to understand why Vintage decided last year that it was time to rerelease this 1965 book to a new audience. Its author, Fletcher Knebel, was a journalist turned novelist who is best known for the political thriller Seven Days in May.

President Mark Hollenbach invites Senator Jim MacVeagh to Camp David in the middle of the night. The president wants to discuss his plan to wiretap every phone in the nation. Now this is 1965, back when the notion that the government would invade our privacy and use computers to store millions of telephone calls was still shocking. The novel also imagines that people are shocked to learn that the vice president steered a construction contract to his friends. What would the public in 1965 have thought about a president who profits when foreign officials book rooms in his hotels? Nothing shocks any more.

At any rate, Hollenbach sees his vice president as an enemy (the mild corruption scandal in any event means the veep has to go) and is considering MacVeagh as his candidate for vice president in his second term. Hollenbach doesn’t know that MacVeagh is having an affair with a woman named Rita. MacVeagh knows he should break it off (again, the novel was written in an era when having an affair might have been a liability for a politician) while Rita knows that MacVeagh is a lovable, good-natured, lazy bum who has no business being VP.

The novel recalls a simpler time when affairs by politicians were not often publicized because voters would have held them against the candidate. Today a president can brag about grabbing women by the pussy and be accused of multiple sexual assaults without losing the loyalty of his base. The times they have a-changed.

Hollenbach turns out to be creepily authoritarian. He wants to cut off White House access to a journalist who portrays him in an unfavorable light. Why does that sound familiar? He views himself as the victim of vast conspiracies, complaining of “an obvious conspiracy afoot to sully and demean me, even to destroy me.” He doesn’t use the phrase “witch hunt,” but the president’s paranoia is otherwise familiar to current consumers of the news. The Secretary of Defense, justly worried about the man who has his finger on the button, notes that Hollenbach “thinks he’s the victim of conspiracies who are plotting to destroy him, and he has obvious delusions of grandeur.” Yet Hollenbach is, for the most part, a competent president, unlike the “very stable genius” who currently occupies the office.

Hollenbach wants the United States to add Canada and the Scandinavian countries to its territory (presumably adding to the nation’s whiteness). He doesn’t mention buying Greenland, but again the similarity between fiction and fact is uncanny.

Relatively early in the novel, MacVeagh begins to fear that the president is insane. The president’s supporters, on the other hand, make it seem that MacVeagh is the crazy one. Perhaps they have alternative facts at hand. In any event, treating bearers of unwelcome news as the enemy is another way in which the novel foreshadows the current political landscape.

Leaders of the president’s party (he happens to be a Democrat) are reluctant to interfere with the presidency, but to their credit, they eventually realize that something needs to be done. Knebel probably would never have imagined a political party acting as a cheerleader for a corrupt, morally bankrupt president who suffers from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. He did, however, understand that “millions of ordinary people like to imagine there’s a conspiracy behind everything.” That problem, exacerbated by the ability of conspiracy theories to go viral on the internet, has only grown worse.

Hollenbach at least is capable of recognizing when he goes over the top and apologizing for his paranoid attacks on loyal citizens. He apparently hasn’t learned that never admitting error and doubling down on obnoxious behavior is the best way to excite a bloodthirsty base.

If not for its remarkable parallel of a president who came to power more than 50 years after the novel was published, Night of Camp David would be too dated to recommend. Women are treated as silly creatures whose job is to serve men. As a political thriller, the novel is tame by modern standards. The crisis resolves too easily and the resolution isn’t particularly believable. But given Knebel’s ability to imagine a future that has come to pass, the novel is of more than historical interest.

RECOMMENDED

Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo

First published in 1992; published by Dover Publications on April 17, 2019

Destroying Angel is a better-than-average example of science fiction noir. The story is set in the near future. Society has taken a dystopian turn that provides the background for a crime story involving a gruesome serial killer. The novel tells a self-contained story, but it is also the first book in a trilogy.

Louis Tanner is a former cop. He became a cop to help people with drug problems because his girlfriend, Carla, died from an overdose, a death that still obsesses him. Tanner quit his job after he and his partner were shot. His partner died, leaving Tanner with the brooding sense of guilt that is common among ex-cops who star in crime thrillers.

As Tanner watches the bodies of a man and woman, chained together, being pulled from the water, he remembers when he pulled two chained bodies out of the water. There have been more than three dozen victims of the Chain Killer, but none in the last two-and-a-half years. The chains are fused to the bones of the victims and angel wings are tattooed inside their nostrils.

Tanner engages with Homicide Detective Frank Carlucci, who is supervising the extraction of the bodies. Notwithstanding his retirement, Tanner wants to know whether and why the chain killer has returned. Tanner and Carlucci work together to track down the killer.

Tanner lives in San Francisco, outside of the walled-off Financial District that houses the city’s wealthiest inhabitants. Chinatown has absorbed the former Italian enclave of North Beach. The Tenderloin is still dicey. Street soldiers keep order in the rest of the city, except for an area called the Core that is at least partially underground.

The street soldiers can’t stop a girl named Sookie from stealing motorized skateboards. But while Sookie is trying to hide in the underground tunnels, she comes across a room with chains that are very like the chains she has seen on the murder victims.

The science fiction elements give the novel an offbeat spin without overpowering what is essentially a detective story involving a serial killer story. For example, Tanner is asked to arrange a trip to the New Hong Kong satellite for a criminal who wants to regenerate his damaged body. There’s also a cyborg angle to the story that readers won’t encounter in a typical crime novel.

While Tanner is a typically tortured noir character, he is a sympathetic protagonist who has enough depth to carry the novel. Carlucci and Sookie are developed in less detail, but they probably have all the characterization they need. The Chain Killer is suitably creepy and his motivation to be evil is credible, at least in the context of a science fiction novel.

The story is gritty. It moves at a steady pace, not so fast that the dark atmosphere is lost but not so slowly that tension dissipates. The ending is true to the novel’s noir nature. Crossovers of the science fiction and crime genres don’t always work, but this one works better than most.

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Happy Thanksgiving!