Nothing But the Bones by Brian Panowich

Published by Minotaur Books on April 16, 2024

Nothing But the Bones builds its plot from a diverse range of crimes and criminals. A central character controls the crime in a mountainous Georgia county but extends his reach into other parts of the country. A more sophisticated criminal, complete with a British accent and a proper education, is based in Jacksonville. Also in Jacksonville is a criminal who traffics in young people. A wealthy televangelist (again from Georgia) is a criminal by definition.

Embedded in the crime plot is a love story. Whether the love story will appeal to readers depends on how they will react to a plot twist. How they will react likely depends upon which side of a cultural divide they inhabit. Since the love story depends on a surprise that shouldn’t be spoiled, I’ll focus on the crime story.

Before he acquired the name Nails, Nelson McKenna was a large, shy kid with a deformed hand. Bullies thought Nelson was mentally challenged (although that wasn’t the phrase they used to describe him), but he suffers from a disability that makes it difficult for him to place his thoughts into words. Two girls intervened when Nelson was being bullied because they knew Nelson to be a nice guy. When the bully turned on one of the girls, Nelson decided it was time to fight back. Unfortunately, he didn’t know when to stop fighting.

Clayton Burroughs watched it all happen. He regarded Nelson as a friend so he called his Deddy to clean up the mess. That turned out to be a bad decision. Nelson acquired the name Nails from Gareth Burroughs and became Gareth’s enforcer. Gareth controls everything in the mountains and local law enforcement knows not to mess with him.

At a later point in his life, Nails has acquired a reputation for violence. He’s hanging out in a bar when a girl named Dallas flirts with him. A couple of tough guys assault Dallas and Nails intervenes to protect her. Again, Nails doesn’t know when to stop and again, Gareth Burroughs needs to clean up a mess. He sends Nails to Jacksonville but the likelihood is that he’s heading to his own funeral. Without being invited, Dallas joins him for the trip.

Nails bonds with Dallas as they make their way to Jacksonville. More crimes follow, including a theft of money from Nails, a gas station robbery, and the kidnapping of Dallas. Clayton defies his father by traveling to Jacksonville to rescue his friend. Violence ensues.

We’re told that Nails is a fan of old pulp novels, the kind that can be read quickly: “Short bursts of simple words. Short chapters that got to the point.” Brian Panowich adopts that style for Nothing But the Bones. He doesn’t try to write with self-conscious literary flair. He doesn’t mess around with devices like time shifts or changing points of view. He tells a straightforward, linear story with carefully chosen but unassuming prose. He writes with the gritty darkness of the best pulp writers. Unlike most pulp fiction, however, Panowich obviously took his time, editing and rewriting to avoid the clunkiness of pulp writers who had to churn out a high volume of words each month to pay the rent.

Nails and Clayton have a moral center that makes them likable. Clayton’s confrontation with his father adds tension to the story, as do Nails’ efforts to rescue people in distress. A section of the novel that functions as an epilogue forces a happy ending that seems out of place and isn’t nearly as believable as the rest of the story. Fans of happy endings will want to read the whole book; fans of realism might want to skip the ending.

RECOMMENDED

Our House in the Last World by Oscar Hijuelos

First published in 1983; published by Grand Central Publishing on April 9, 2024

Our House in the Last World is the story of an immigrant family that struggles to find its identity in America. The story of the Santinio family begins with Mercedes Sorrea. Her father was a poet but he made a living in the timber business in Cuba after emigrating from Spain. Mercedes had a good life until her father misjudged the reliability of Cuban politicians and suffered a financial downfall.

In 1937, while working as a ticket seller in a movie theater in Holguin, Mercedes meets Alejo Santinio. He woos her and, over the objections of his possessive sister Buita, marries her. Alejo’s sister Margarita is married to a cigar salesman in New York. She convinced Alejo to move to America.

Mercedes views the relocation as a chance to get away from Buita. Margarita has a baby (Ki-ki) and Mercedes soon has one of her own (Horacio). Unfortunately for Mercedes, Buita travels to New York when her husband’s band is booked to perform at a club. Buita once again makes Mercedes’ life miserable — a recurring theme in the story.

Although the plot is eventful — it covers almost four decades in the family’s life — the story is character driven. Alejo is a large, affable man with an ability to charm women that he will never lose. He works in a hotel kitchen. He dreams of owning a small store but he lacks the courage or drive to abandon the security of a union job. His willingness to work for low wages assures that he will never be fired, despite drinking on the job with his Cuban co-workers and stealing frozen steaks for his family.

Alejo is a product of his culture — a believer in the supremacy of men and of their entitlement to force their wives to submit to their will — but, despite his futile efforts to win the affection of his sons, he is only comfortable while drinking with his Cuban friends or seducing Cuban women. When Castro comes into power, he is pro-Castro until he becomes anti-Castro, but he’s happy to agree with any political sentiment expressed by a friend over a glass of whiskey.

Horacio is embarrassed by his father and escapes to a more promising life by joining the military. Horacio’s younger brother Hector contracts a serious illness while visiting Cuba with his parents. Mercedes treats Hector as an invalid from that point forward. As he grows up, Hector always feels “as if he were in costume, his true nature unknown to others and perhaps even to himself. He was part ‘Pop,’ part Mercedes; part Cuban, part American — all wrapped tightly inside a skin which he sometimes could not move.” The childless Buita’s scheming to lure Hector away from his mother never ends, and her residence in Miami — a cleaner, more Cuban-friendly city than New York, where she lives in an air-conditioned house with a pool — might assure that she prevails.

Mercedes has justifiable grievances about Alejo’s unwillingness to find a better job, his drinking and violence, and Buita’s constant criticism, but she’s allowed her grievances to overtake her personality. She is defined by her anger and fits of hysteria but — again, perhaps because she is a product of her culture — she would rather complain about Alejo than leave him.

Many novels about dysfunctional families never distinguish themselves from soap operas, but Our House in the Last World offers insights into why families might become dysfunctional. Alcohol is an obvious factor, but meddling by relatives, the difficulty of adjusting to a new life, and the clash of cultural values all play disruptive roles in the Santinio family. There are no monsters in the family. Alejo has been taught to control his wife and sons with violence but he restrains himself and looks for ways to express his love of his sons. Mercedes doesn’t mean to be a bad mother, but she does not have the tools to overcome her helplessness. She instead develops the kind of self-pitying personality that exhausts people. Horacio understands that Buita has poisoned Hector against his mother but he can do little to overcome his younger brother’s resentments.

The novel’s final section is a bit strange, as characters converse with ghosts and debate the reality of their memories and perceptions. One character exists briefly as an orchid. Too much attention is paid to dreams for my reality-based taste. As Oscar Hijuelos’ first novel, Our House in the Last World doesn’t quite have the reach or depth of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, but it explores similar themes. The book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the immigrant experience of American life.

This edition features an introduction by Junot Díaz.

RECOMMENDED  

The Darkest Water by Mark Edwards

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 16, 2024

In the small village of Drigg, someone buried local resident Leo James in a hole on the beach, leaving only his head above the sand. He drowned when the tide came in. DI Imogen Evans is charged with solving the crime. Evans was first and last seen in Mark Edwards’ 2017 novel, The Lucky Ones.

As Evans is searching Leo James’ home, she sees a young woman snooping around the back yard. The woman flees but later appears at Leo’s funeral, where she tries to flee again. The woman (Billie Whitehead) and her mother (Michelle) have more knowledge of the reclusive Leo than most people, but even they don’t know much about him.

In the same village, Calvin Matheson has started a coffee shop and bakery, but the shop is losing money. Calvin has no interest in social media, but with his wife’s help, he posts some videos to Instagram, including one that features an elderly woman proclaiming his cakes to be better than sex. The video goes viral (young people, it seems, love old people who talk about sex, how cute!) and triggers a wave of new business.

Many people respond to Calvin’s video, including a woman named Mel. Calvin answers each comment because he’s polite and assumes it will be good for business to interact with potential customers. Calvin’s wife Vicky thinks Calvin’s responses to Mel’s messages are a bit too flirtatious, although Calvin thinks he’s just being kind.

Mel ends up working at the shop when Calvin’s only employee is injured by an unidentified burglar. Vicky trusts Calvin but she’s displeased, primarily because she believes something is off about Mel. While there is good reason to suspect that Mel is obsessive to the point of derangement, Calvin tries to help her out with some young hooligans who harass her. When Calvin goes home after he’s unexpectedly delayed at Mel’s home, he finds that Vicky has disappeared. Did she get fed up and leave him or is she the victim of foul play?

All of this is a bit too much for DI Evans, who must deal with Leo’s murder, Vicky’s disappearance, Michelle’s violent husband, and eventually another murder. It’s also a bit much for Calvin, who is being accused on social media of doing away with Vicky. The lesson he learns is that social media might help you build your business but it houses a subset of lunatics who will eventually make your life hell.

Intermittent flashbacks tease out the story of Calvin’s sister Freya and her involvement with a drug-addled musician. Freya’s death devastated Calvin — he blames himself for not forcing her to make better choices — but it seems to have been equally traumatic for Calvin’s best friend James. Freya’s death is tangentially related to a dark secret that Calvin and James have kept hidden for thirty years. (It isn’t entirely dark, because the reader is meant to like Calvin, but their behavior is considerably less than exemplary.) Calvin lost touch with James after their unfortunate moment.

Is there one killer or more than one? Is Vicky still alive? Is Mel deranged? The story’s reveals are followed by a final gratuitous twist that, like many ultimate plot twists, serves no real purpose and detracts from the story’s credibility. Fortunately, the twist is not particularly important to the story and can be safely ignored. The nick-of-time appearance of a life-saving character doesn’t make much sense, but such is the nature of modern thrillers. An epilogue ties up loose ends and if the knots are difficult to believe, that’s better than leaving the threads dangling.

On the whole, The Darkest Water is nicely constructed. The reader will need to depend more on guesswork rather than clues to solve the mysteries, but the story moves quickly and the plot is always coherent.

RECOMMENDED

Toxic Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 9, 2024

Readers never know what they’ll get from John Sandford, but they know it will be good. Some of his crime novels are light and a little goofy. Some of his books are dark, although he often lightens the mood with humor. All of his books are quick reads, but some depend on action more than others. I’ve read a lot of Sandford’s novels, enjoyed them all, but I can’t think of one that hit me as hard as Toxic Prey. It might be his best work.

Other people have written thrillers about terrorists weaponizing viruses. They became particularly popular after COVID. Before that, novels like The Andromeda Strain (still the classic in the subgenre of outbreak novels) imagined heroic efforts to contain the natural spread of viral infections (although the virus in that novel had an extraterrestrial origin). Toxic Prey is a variation on the theme.

The virus has been engineered — the Marburg virus is married to a measles virus so that one of the world’s deadliest diseases will become much more infectious — and the person who plans to spread it isn’t a conventional terrorist. Lionel Scott is a British doctor who wants to save the world by killing most of the people who are destroying it — people who drive or use air conditioning. Yeah, I know we’re bad, but killing 80% of us seems a bit extreme.

Scott subscribes to the Gaia hypothesis (some aspects of which have a certain appeal), but his work with Doctors Without Borders has left him depressed and traumatized. Scott has been working with the US military to devise ways to make viruses more deadly. The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (the place where Oppenheimer worked) both research deadly diseases, supposedly to protect public health. Whether they also try to weaponize viruses is, not surprisingly, a military secret.

Letty Davenport (who sort of works for Homeland Security) is sent to England to interview people who know Scott after Scott goes missing. She liaisons with Alec Hawkins of MI5. Before long they are liaising in bed. What they learn about Scott is concerning, so Letty returns to the US, where she is assigned to find him. When she acquires evidence that Scott has been experimenting with a weaponized virus, she gets Hawkins to join her and enlists the help of her father (Lucas Davenport, who stars in a series of his own), another federal Marshal who works with Lucas, and a sniper who has appeared in recent novels when people need to be killed from a distance.

Most bioterrorism novels (as opposed to natural outbreak novels) aren’t convincing. This one is both plausible and chilling. The story moves quickly from start to finish, building suspense as the good guys work out realistic strategies to find Scott and the handful of people he has recruited to his cause. All the good guys are at risk of dying from exposure to the virus. Sandford creates credible fear that they might need to sacrifice themselves to save the world.

I don’t like to use review clichés like “gripping” or “riveting,” but those are the best words to describe the emotional investment that I made in the story. The “wow” factor is undeniable. Kudos to Sandford for producing such a powerful thriller after writing more than fifty novels. Some successful writers are just coasting late in their careers. Sandford just seems to get better.

RECOMMENDED

Don't Turn Around by Harry Dolan

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on April 2, 2024

Eleven-year-old Kate Summerlin snuck out of her bedroom window at night, took a stroll in the woods, and came upon the body of a young woman named Melissa. Her killer had written the work Merkury on her body. The killer had planned to hang Melissa's body in a tree, but Kate came along while he was retrieving the rope. He told her not to turn around. Then they had a little chat that Kate has always kept to herself. The reader won’t learn the full details of that encounter until the final pages. I’m not sure it is worth the wait.

Kate is now in her late 20s. She supports herself by writing true crime stories. Merkury went on to become a serial killer. He has racked up nearly a dozen victims when the story resumes.

As an adult, Kate’s a bit of a mess. She likes to have rough sex, but only when she is the rough one. The guy needs to be gentle and follow her instructions. Unfortunately, that’s the only character trait that makes Kate interesting, and she doesn’t have enough sex to sustain a reader’s interest in her kinkiness.

Kate is now living rent-free at a relative’s home in rural Ohio. She receives a visit from Vera Landen from Alexander, New York, where Kate lived with her father when she found the body. Vera bothers Kate periodically, hoping she will reveal a new detail that will help her catch Merkury. This time she tells Kate that Merkury, who has killed people across the country, has returned to Alexander.

Bryan Cayhill’s body was found by a film student, Lavana Khatri, as well as two other students who were helping her make an extremely low-budget horror film. Kate’s agent convinces her that her career as a true-crime writer isn’t going anywhere and that she can only give it a boost by writing about Merkury. Kate returns to Alexander, where she plans to interview the students who found Bryan’s body. Lee Tennick, who has a true-crime podcast, is there ahead of her.

Clay McKellar, one of the actors who found the body, seems to be freaked out by the experience. Tennick befriends Clay, perhaps to induce Clay to appear on his podcast, but becomes concerned when Clay disappears. Did Merkury do away with him?

Shortly after Kate arrives in town, Sam Wyler asks her to look into the disappearance of his 19-year-old daughter Jenny. Since Kate isn’t a detective, the request makes little sense (neither does Kate’s agreement to investigate), but Harry Dolan needed to send the story in a new direction so there you have it. Perhaps Jenny ran away from her controlling father and, if so, she should have done it when she turned 18, but perhaps she’s been abducted, car and all. Naturally, Jenny’s disappearance will connect with one of the murders because that’s how crime novels work.

Who is Merkury? Could it be Sam Wyler? Could it be Devin Falko, a therapist who turned up at Kate’s book signing and became her on-again, off-again lover? Could it be Lee Tennick?  Could it be Travis Pollard, a seemingly creepy guy who played the killer in Lavana’s movie? Could it be Kate’s father? More death ensues before the reader’s questions are answered. A bit more than midway into the novel, Kate kills someone, more or less in self-defense, and learns how it feels to form the intent to take a human life. It doesn’t seem to bother her much.

When the puzzle seems to be solved with a hundred pages remaining, the reader knows that the solution is either partial or false. The unfolding truth becomes a bit convoluted and is not remotely credible — Kate knows a shocking number of people who harbor a murderous intent — but such is the way of the modern thriller. Implausible stories might still be enjoyable, but I never warmed up to Kate and the other characters tend to be lifeless, even before they’re murdered.

Most of the story proceeds at a steady pace, although it drags a bit as it nears its final revelation. The story ends with some decent action scenes. They aren’t particularly suspenseful, but Dolan at least makes an effort to satisfy the thriller reader’s appetite for thrills. A couple of suspense-building tricks are cheesy — someone we think is dead miraculously turns out to be not dead — but some readers find dramatic cheese to be tasty. The story hinges on a final reveal, the big mystery that defines Kate’s life. That plot detail is too contrived for my taste but again, some mystery fans might think it is sufficiently shocking to make it worth the wait.

I’ve enjoyed other Dolan novels more than this one, but the story does just enough to earn a recommendation for mystery fans who have finished all the top-shelf novels on their reading list. On a five-star system, I would give it 3.5, a half star above a Recommended with Reservations rating.

RECOMMENDED