The Solstice by Matt Brolly

Published by Thomas & Mercer on September 17, 2024

Some law enforcement agencies devote more energy to jurisdictional squabbles than to solving crimes. A squabble about whether a murder investigation should take precedence over the years-long financial crimes investigation of a cult is the only interesting aspect of The Solstice.

This is the seventh entry in a series that features Detective Inspector Louise Blackwell. Like all good fictional cops, she has a checkered work history, but she’s being considered for promotion to Detective Chief Inspector. The job might be a good alternative to quitting, an option that seems tempting as she returns to work from her maternity leave.

On her first day back, Louise is assigned to investigate the discovery of a child’s bones in a cave. The bones have been there for a decade. Ambiguous forensic evidence convinces Louise that the child was held in restraints, tortured, and sealed in the cave where he starved to death. Fortunately, the novel describes none of that in real time.

Comparing missing persons reports to dental records helps Louise identify the child. Her parents gave him up for foster care and eventual adoption, although he disappeared in the woods while living with his foster family. His biological parents, Jeremy and Valerie Latchford, moved to a commune/cult/gathering-of-Gaia-worshippers called Verdant Circle. Members live in the woods that happen to be near the cave where the Latchford boy’s bones are found.

Verdant Circle has been around for generations. As is the custom in such novels, it has links to bankers and other powerful people, including one who runs a charitable foundation. Wealthy old people who gather for rituals while wearing masks, as if they were extras in Eyes Wide Shut, give the story a familiar feel — so familiar as to be stale.

The plot involves rumors of human sacrifice. A woman who worries that her young son will soon be sealed in a cave would like to leave the cult, but will she be allowed to escape? Louise feels pressure to solve the child’s murder and (if rumors and fears are to be credited) prevent other children from being killed. She is stifled in that effort by a Detective Inspector who doesn’t want her concerns to interfere with his complex and long-running financial investigation of the cult. (In the US, the financial crimes investigator would be an FBI agent stomping on local agencies so he can pursue a long-term investigation rather than solving or preventing current crimes.)

Sacrifices in thrillers are traditionally made on a solstice. One is upcoming, creating a “race against the clock” deadline for solving the crime, assuming it has anything to do with human sacrifice. The ending is meant to be nail-biting, but the novel’s premise is so silly that I couldn’t get excited by the drama that unfolds at the novel’s end.

Since human sacrifice and ritual murders happen in novels way more often than in real life (even in England), a novel that entertains the possibility of a cult making human sacrifices needs a plot twist to be entertaining. Matt Brolly makes efforts at misdirection, but identifying the bad guys turns out to be easy. The plot turns out to be just as predictable as the reader might expect.

Brolly’s polished prose is a plus, as is Louise’s characterization as a cop who might prefer to be a full-time mommy. Louise’s conflict with the financial crimes investigator adds some interest to a story that is otherwise pedestrian. If the plot had contained more original elements, I would be more enthused about recommending the novel. Fans of novels about cults and their unlikely rituals might form a better opinion of The Solstice than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Doll's House by Lisa Unger

Published by Amazon Original Stories on September 12, 2024

Doug killed himself, leaving behind Jules, a widow in her 30s, and Scout, a girl in her teens. Who gives a dog’s name to a kid? Jules and Doug, apparently. Doug was a famous writer with a “rabid cult following” and the bad habit of spending more money than he earned. He left his family with no significant assets other than their NYC apartment.

Now Jules is 37, has unburdened herself from debt by selling the apartment, and is moving in with perfect fiancé Kirin. Her “fresh new love” took her “completely by surprise.” Jules loves Kirin because he is “solid,” meaning that, unlike Doug, he has enough money to take care of her. The idea of taking care of herself has apparently never entered her head. Maybe that’s the point of the story — Jules evolves by becoming (spoiler alert) a self-sufficient writer before the story’s end — but my impression is that Lisa Unger wants the reader to sympathize with Jules’ plight rather than faulting her for making bad choices.

Scout is 17 and moving into Kirin’s house as the story opens. She is unhappy with everything, including her mother and her stepfather-to-be, notwithstanding his wealth. Scout’s therapist says she doesn’t want to move on because that would mean leaving her father behind. That makes sense but, let' face it, Scout is 17 and therefore programmed to be unhappy with her life regardless oer her circumstances.

Scout is more bonded to Kirin’s 20-something assistant, Jessie, than she is to Kirin. She also seems to be bonded with DD, her texting partner. But she gets a “flutter in her stomach” when a boy named Racer pays attention to her on her first day in the exclusive private school she will now be attending.

What begins as a boring family drama takes a thriller/horror twist when Scout hears singing coming from Emma’s room. Emma is Kirin’s troubled sister, who maybe had something going with Racer’s dad. Emma is missing and presumed dead, but could she be in her room, singing? Emma finds the room empty but discovers a doll with a slim black dress and ruby shoes. Was the doll singing? The answer is never clear. Like other unlikely plot elements, Unger seems happy to attribute anything she can’t explain to the supernatural.

Kirin made the doll’s dress and shoes from clothing that the missing Emma left behind, which strikes me as a disturbing thing to do despite Kirin’s status as a “world renowned puppet and doll maker.” Scout is impressed that the doll is so realistic it seems to be alive. Readers have seen this before.

Jules believes she caught a glimpse of a woman outside the house, a slim figure dressed all in black. Kirin dismisses her inquiry. You see where this is going, right? Well, maybe not. Unger tries to spice up the plot with a hidden map and a mysterious key, although the location of those items makes no sense at all.

Kirin will obviously turn out to be a bad guy but his motivation for being bad is unconvincing, in part because he is a paper-thin character. Scout lives up to all teenage girl stereotypes but has no personality of her own. Jules is too full of self-pity to be a worthy character, even if she comes through at the end.

A chapter that offers the hope of actual thrills turns out to be a dream. Why do writers annoy readers with dream sequences?

The story ends as stories like this usually end. The resolution is unimaginative. While the identity of Scout’s texting partner is meant to be surprising, it is entirely predictable. The identity of the mysterious girl is so obvious that the attempt to conceal it while foreshadowing the reveal is a waste of words. Making her true identity possible requires a belief in the supernatural that seems to be Lisa Unger’s go-to move, but readers who hope that mysteries will be solved by rational thought will be disappointed.

Fans of Christian Lit soap operas who believe that guardian angels watch over us might like this story. Perhaps because I am not part of that market, I thought it was sillly.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Published by ‎ Scribner on September 3, 2024

Rachel Kushner devoted Creation Lake to the creation of a female character who refuses to regret the dubious path she has chosen. The character uses the name Sadie Smith, a name she will discard by the novel’s end. Sadie has made a career of working undercover. While she is schooled in deceit, she is reasonably honest with the reader about her checkered life. Sadie isn’t someone who much cares what you think of her.

Sadie’s backstory includes an aborted career working for the FBI. She infiltrated organizations of drug dealers but her later focus was on environmental/political activists. Federal authorities brand activists as “terrorists” if they do anything to disrupt business or government operations. Sadie understands but is indifferent to the reality that her job is more about generating good press for the FBI than about fighting actual terrorism.

To the extent that Sadie fights crime, she does so by using her looks and breasts to win the trust of men. During her final mission as a government agent, her supervisor pressured her to find (or, saying the silent part out loud, to manufacture) evidence that an animal rights group was planning to commit violent acts of sabotage. Sadie convinced a young man that he would have a chance with her if he proved his commitment by taking direct action in support of their cause. Following Sadie's instructions, he purchased fertilizer to make a bomb and delivered it to a woman who was the FBI’s real target.

To the surprise of everyone, a jury accepted the boy’s entrapment defense. His embarrassing acquittal deprived the FBI of a chance to claim a victory in the war against terrorism. Professing to be shocked that one of their agents would entrap an innocent person, the FBI fired Sadie, sending her into the more lucrative world of private clandestine employment.

The entrapped activists would like to sue Sadie but haven’t yet discovered her true identity. Near the novel’s end, Sadie becomes concerned that the FBI might reveal that information to make her a scapegoat. If she regrets setting up an innocent boy for a potentially lengthy prison sentence, her regret is based on her loss of employment and future consequences that she might face. She appears to feel no guilt, having convinced herself that she had “no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.”

Now Sadie is pretending to be the girlfriend of Lucien Dubois. She is staying in his (otherwise empty) family house in the Guyenne Valley, a rural area in southwestern France where the commune of Le Moulin is located. The Moulinards are environmental activists who, like most activists, are well-meaning but generally ineffectual. Their most urgent concern is that industry wants to divert water for its own uses without regard to the impact that loss of water will have on local farmers.

Sadie has been hired to keep tabs on the Moulinards by unseen interests with a hidden agenda. She soon manages to insinuate herself into the organization.

Some of the novel’s interest lies in its depiction of squabbling activists who might agree about broad goals while disagreeing about the means of achieving them. Some activists view violence as a tool while others reject it. Some believe capitalism will collapse on its own while others want to precipitate a worker’s revolution. Whether their actions advance or undermine their cause is unclear, although taking action seems to be less important to most of them than the intellectual exercise of debating the purpose and methodology of activism.

Sadie’s employers have outfitted her with technology that allows her to read email exchanges between Bruno Lacombe and Le Moulin’s leader, Pascal Balmy. Sadie believes that Bruno, as Pascal’s mentor, would want to guide Pascal’s strategy for hindering industrial development in the valley, but most of Bruno’s emails discuss his theories about Neanderthals, theories he developed while living in a cave. Bruno is “anti-civ,” or against civilization in the parlance of French activism, although he might best be seen as a tragic figure who responded to the death of his daughter (run over by Bruno’s own tractor) by rejecting farming and most human interaction. Lacombe now believes it is time for mankind to return to the caves, to live in “tiny clans,” a recipe for a future that seems more post-apocalyptic than visionary.

Bruno’s obsession with Neanderthals opens the door for informative discussions of archeology and evolution, language and war. For example, Bruno distinguishes his preference for cave dwelling from living in a bunker to avoid nuclear annihilation. “In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.” In the cave, Bruno can hear everything, including languages he doesn’t understand, prompting him to comment upon the development of language.

Kushner seems to use Neanderthals and environmental activism and even the choice of sex partners to develop a deeper theme about human progress, but the precise definition of that theme is open to debate. Perhaps book clubs will be able to ferret it out.

The novel explores several other topics, including the French Revolution, map making in the time of Captain Cook, and the tendency to mistake random luck for fate. These are interesting discussions even if they do not obviously advance the plot. Repeated references to Guy Debord, a Marxist theorist who influenced Pascal, fit more comfortably into the story, although the characters are primarily interested in whether Debord is worthy of a place in the activist pantheon, given his incestuous relationship with his sister. 

Speaking of the plot, Sadie manipulates Lucien to connect her with Le Moulin. Believing Sadie to be an unemployed American grad student, Lucien arranges for Sadie to translate into English a book that Pascal and the other Moulinards are writing. She dutifully spies on the activists and takes the opportunity to shag one because “even as I maintained a fraudulent persona, within that persona I found methods to meet real needs.”

As Sadie discharges her duties to her employer, she is again asked to set up an act of violence that would not occur without her intervention. The reader will wonder whether Sadie learned anything from her earlier experience with entrapment and whether that experience will shape her response to her employer’s deadly demand.

While I wouldn’t categorize Creation Lake as a thriller, the story does build tension by raising concern about Sarah’s fate as an undercover operative. Perhaps because Kushner focuses on ideas and characterization, the novel’s pace is uneven. Few novels can be everything to every reader; those looking for an action novel might be disappointed by Creation Lake. Still, a fast-moving scene near the end provides a satisfying, if anti-climactic, answer to whether Sadie's effort to set up the Moulinards will succeed.

Sadie is an interesting character but isn’t particularly sympathetic. Some readers might find Kushner’s digressions into the purpose of Neanderthal cave paintings to be distracting. I would agree that, while the novel's various asides are interesting, they add unnecessary words to the book. The words are nevertheless wielded with great skill and the novel is a welcome departure from formulaic spy/undercover cop stories.

RECOMMENDED

Happy Labor Day

Safe Enough by Lee Child

Published by Mysterious Press on September 3, 2024

Safe Enough is a collection of Lee Child’s short fiction, excluding Reacher stories. In a forward, Child admits that he is a novelist who hasn’t mastered the art of writing a short story. I would agree that he often swings and misses, but enough stories in this collection count as base hits that Child has a decent batting average.

Many of the stories collected in Safe Enough set up a mildly interesting scenario before Child tries to deliver an O. Henry ending. The assassin in “The .50 Solution” is hired to kill a racehorse but makes a predictable departure from the plan. The journalist who narrates “Public Transportation” talks to a cop about a murder case that was closed for the sake of convenience, not because the crime was solved correctly. The true killer’s identity is predictable.

In other stories, Lee makes the formula work. “Ten Keys,” about a man who stole money and product from a drug distribution organization, telegraphs part of the surprise in its ending but manages a final unexpected twist. “Me & Mr. Rafferty” is narrated by a killer who leaves clues for Mr. Rafferty to find. The ending is genuinely surprising.

“My First Drug Trial” benefits from an ending that surprised me, but I’m ranking it as one of my favorites because of a weed smoker’s internal monologue as he talks himself into getting high before court.

A snobby FBI agent tells a Metropolitan Police inspector to read a Sherlock Holmes story as the source of clues to a murder. The murder turns out to be a misdirection. The element of surprise makes “The Bone-Headed League” a fun story.

I enjoyed a few others, as well:

For an assassin, “The Greatest Trick of All” is getting paid by a husband to kill his wife and getting paid by the wife to kill her husband — a trick that has disastrous consequences when it doesn’t work as intended. “Pierre, Lucien & Me” is an interesting take on an art forgery story that begins immediately after Renoir’s death.

One of my favorites, “Normal in Every Way,” is about an autistic file clerk in San Francisco in the 1950s who solves crimes by reading files and seeing connections that others miss. In “New Blank Document,” a reporter tells the story of a Black jazz musician who stayed in France after World War II, a place that allowed him to escape the racist place where his brother was murdered.

“The Snake Eater by the Numbers” is narrated by a rookie London cop who is tutored by a corrupt cop in the importance of clearance rates. When the corrupt cop fits up a mentally unwell Londoner who believes himself to be an American Marine, the rookie learns the meaning of street justice.

“Safe Enough” is written in a more literary style than is common for Child. The story of a disintegrating marriage, after the wife apparently killed her last husband, has some insightful thoughts about marriage but ends predictably.

“Addicted to Sweetness” benefits from interesting dialog about punishment inflicted in the West Indies upon people who stole sugar from their employers. The dialog enhances this story about the leader of a criminal organization who learns the downside of imposing tough punishments.

And I was unimpressed by several:

“The Bodyguard” is interesting only because the bodyguard fails at his job. “Section 7(A) Operational” begins with an intriguing story of an operative assembling a team for a dangerous covert operation. The story’s ending renders the setup pointless.

Another five or six stories don’t merit comment. Since I enjoyed more than half, I regard the good stories as outweighing their forgettable companions, but it’s a close balance.

RECOMMENDED