Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Published by ‎ Tor Books on February 18, 2025

Marty Hench, a character I love from Cory Doctorow’s first two novels in this series, tells his coming-of-age story in Picks and Shovels. It is both the story of a young man finding his purpose and the story of a political awakening. And it’s a story of people he met along the way who came to terms with their identities and beliefs — and those who never overcame their innate greed. While the first two books in the series are mysteries solved by a forensic accountant, this one explains how Hench solved the mystery of himself.

Marty’s father was an engineer. He sent Marty to MIT to earn an engineering degree, but Marty was unenthusiastic about his studies. He proved to be more enthused about the emergence of personal computers. He taught himself to program and fell in with a group of students who loved computers as much as he did. Marty was dumpster diving for computer paper (the kind that comes with perforated edges and holes that line up with the printer’s sprockets) when he met Arthur Hellman, an even more committed computer geek who was dumpster diving for anything he could find.

Marty and Art become roommates. To appease his father after dropping out of MIT, Marty gets an associate’s degree in accounting. Marty and Art eventually move to San Francisco, where Silicon Valley is becoming the hotspot for tech innovation, in large part because California law does not allow noncompete agreements to stifle competition. A good many people in the business world extoll the virtues of competition until they have to deal with it.

Marty starts doing freelance accounting work. He contracts with a company called Fidelity Computing, a gig that lets him merge his interest in computers with his knowledge of spreadsheets. Fidelity was founded by a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop (no, they don’t walk into a bar together). Fidelity’s scam is to sell computer systems to religious schools and businesses. The systems have been designed so that only products (such as floppy disks and printers) purchased from Fidelity are compatible. They’re also designed to fail (the printers jam frequently), forcing customers to turn to Fidelity for expensive repairs.

Three women who worked for Fidelity in tech positions left to start their own company. They reverse engineered Fidelity products to create floppy disks and printers that will work with Fidelity systems. Fidelity is out to get the three women. The company hires Marty to help them. When the women persuade Marty that the company is a scam, Marty breaks his contract with Fidelity and makes a new one with the women.

The story follows the conflicts between the women and Fidelity. Some of the conflicts are violent, as the gangsters who financed Fidelity’s startup don’t take kindly to the lost profits that the women are causing. Marty isn’t much of a fighter, but a badass woman named Pat isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with thugs. She also teaches Marty to be a capable lover. The conflicts keep the story moving and provide a satisfying amount of action.

Marty learns other lessons in his young life. On his way to San Francisco, he meets and shags a woman named Lucille who teaches him how to get outside of his own head and listen — truly listen, even to the silences between words — when he has a conversation. Art comes out as a gay man and teaches Marty the pain of not being allowed to live the life that defines you. One of the three women who compete against Fidelity is a lesbian who teaches him a similar lesson when her religious family disowns her. She’s one of several characters who teach him about the hypocrisy practiced by certain religious folk. A few women teach him that fundamental feminist values — the importance of treating women as the equals of men — are really human values. People with money teach him that people who lust for money often place their acquisition of wealth above moral action.

The lessons are valuable, although they are repeated so frequently that the novel sometimes feels like Doctorow is hammering home the things he wants his readers to learn. Readers who think it’s bad to be “woke” — and a disappointing number of science fiction fans feel that way, despite sf’s reputation for encouraging free thinking — might dislike the novel’s emphasis on the value of tolerance, compassion, and decency. Open-minded readers, on the other hand, should appreciate it.

The plot is interesting. Doctorow avoids an artificially happy ending. He makes it easy to sympathize with the women who give the story its heart. The novel’s atmosphere, rooted in San Francisco during the earliest days of the tech boom, will probably evoke nostalgia in readers who are old enough to remember when early versions of personal computers were just arriving on the market. I’m not as high on Picks and Shovels as I was on the first two novels — the preachiness got to me after a bit, even if Doctorow was preaching to the choir — but I nevertheless enjoyed it.

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Beartooth by Callan Wink

Published by Spiegel & Grau on February 11, 2025

Combine a crime novel with a wilderness adventure and you get a different kind of thriller. Beartooth also differs from most in its emphasis on characterization without sacrificing plot.

Thad and Hazen are brothers who live in Montana. Their grandfather purchased land adjacent to Yellowstone National Park. Their father recently died, leaving behind hospital bills that his sons can’t pay. They also haven’t paid property taxes in several years and are facing foreclosure.

Thad and Hazen earn income by cutting down trees on their property and chopping them into firewood. They supplement their legal income with the illegal practice of hunting bears and selling their gallbladders to a man they know as the Scot. The Scot refers to a young girl who travels with him as his daughter, but there is clearly something off about their relationship. The Scot is known as a dangerous man, having shot a sixteen-year-old boy who may or may not have been trying to break into his gun safe.

The Scot tells the brothers that he has a market for Elk antlers. Elk shed their antlers and Yellowstone is full of them, but it’s illegal to remove them. Thad worries that it isn’t possible to haul large numbers out of the park without Park Rangers noticing. There is a limit, after all, to the number they can carry on their backs, and the Scot wants a mountain of them.

When Thad learns that the brothers are about to lose their land to satisfy their tax debt, he makes a plan to retrieve a hundred sheds and float them out of the park on rafts at night. Navigating rapids in the dark is harrowing, adding tension to a fast-moving story. Beartooth turns into a crime novel of sorts when, shortly after Hazen disappears, the girl the Scot calls his daughter disappears.

Thad and Hazen were homeschooled until high school. Thad is the smarter brother. He “wished his brother was a different way. Someone he could talk with. Formulate a plan with.” He’s always been protective of the simpler Hazen. Thad keeps Hazen from drinking too much and getting into barfights.  With Hazen, what you see is what you get. “Some people can behave in certain ways that are against the grain of their actual makeup. Hazen is incapable of doing that,” says Thad.

Their “sporadic mother,” Sacajawea, left after teaching them to read Where the Wild Things Are out loud. “In her absences their father picked up where she’d left off. He taught them as best he could, emphasizing areas in which he had some level of expertise, glossing over subjects that had never interested him.” Sacajawea resurfaces and makes herself comfortable in the home her father built. Her backstory and wisdom make an important contribution to the story.

Beartooth spotlights the kind of lives that most novels overlook. The brothers live backbreaking lives of labor, but they feel a fundamental connection to the land and its resources. Their parents haven’t given them much of a foundation, although they occasionally wonder how their father would feel about gutting bear for their gallbladders. The boys don’t have any use for the politics of environmentalism — they don’t understand why sheds should be left to rot on the ground where they fall when they can be turned into chandeliers and sold to people who have more money than they need — and they’re willing to transgress the law for the sake of survival, but they care about each other and have no desire to harm others. Their shared desire is to be left alone.

The story’s strength lies in the growing conflict between the brothers. Thad becomes frustrated with Hazen and with his role as Hazen’s protector. Yet when Thad is injured, he comes to understand that he has always underestimated his brother. Hazen’s disappearance motivates Thad to reconsider his own life. The reader will get a sense of where Hazen might have gone after Thad discovers a clue that Hazen left behind — a clue that will change Thad’s life.

It's rare to find a novel that proceeds with the pace of a thriller but finds ways to excite the reader’s interest without falling back on the tired themes of action novels. Two strong characters in conflict with each other despite their mutual love give Beartooth its heart, while the Montana wilderness contributes an atmosphere that anchors the story in a memorable setting.

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Smoke on the Water by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on February 11, 2025

“For weeks the air smelled like a wet dog dipped in lip wax.” I love sentences like that one. I love Loren D. Estleman because he produces them so regularly.

Smoke on the Water is the prolific Estleman’s latest Amos Walker mystery. Walker is retained by Hermano Suerte, a lawyer in a hotshot firm, to recover a file. The firm got the bright idea to send files home with its associates while its offices were being scrubbed free of mold. A box of files went missing when Spencer Bennett, the lawyer who had custody of it, was killed by a hit-and-run driver as he was walking to a bus. The story makes little sense to Walker because Bennett lived in Detroit and owned a car. Traveling by bus violates the principles of car owners in Detroit.

One file is more important than the others. A whistleblowing accountant named Francis Birdseye retained the firm after he discovered discrepancies in his employer’s books. Rather than explaining the missing money, his employer fired Birdseye. The employer is a construction company that doesn’t do any construction but appears to be shaking down companies with threats to destroy their property if they don’t pay up.

The police searched Bennett’s home as part of their death investigation but couldn’t find the files. Walker visits Bennett’s live-in partner, an artist named Evan Morse, who denies knowledge of the files. Walker knows he’s lying but doesn’t know why.

Birdseye appears to have been murdered by a car thief who ran him down with his own car. That's another fact that makes no sense to Walker. Nor does the eventual discovery of the car in an airport parking lot, along with a body in the driver's seat that died from two gunshots to the head.

Walker is a traditional gumshoe who makes a nuisance of himself until he pieces together the puzzle. He uncovers an erudite but homeless witness who sets him on the right track, but not in time to prevent more killings. A subplot involves series regular John Alderdyce, a homicide detective who may or may not have tried to commit suicide.

As is customary of Amos Walker novels, the plot is credible and the ending is surprising. Smoke drifting into Detroit from Canadian wildfires contribute to the novel’s atmosphere (and to the novel’s title). Characters are colorful and dialog is snappy. Since Estleman never wastes words, the story moves quickly. The plot has enough action (including a traditional shootout) to qualify as a thriller, but Estleman keeps the story in motion even when Walker isn’t enduring a beating. I’m not sure that Estleman is as popular as some best-selling thriller writers, but he should be. The man just flat out knows how to write.

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Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

Published by ‎ Soho Crime on February 4, 2025

Saint of the Narrows Street is a story of people who are searching for identities to replace their lost lives. What happens to people who lose their dreams, or who never have dreams to chase? Near the novel’s end, Fab ponders that question when he walks into a seedy bar: “The joint’s a real den for degenerate drunks. All he can think is they were once little kids. Stood in schoolyards and mouthed the Pledge of Allegiance. Ate their sack lunches. Said their prayers.”

Fab is only eight months old when the story begins. Risa, his 28-year-old mother, has already made a life-defining mistake by dropping out of Staten Island College and marrying Sav Franzone. Sav thinks Risa is boring. In an abstract way, he’s proud that she gave birth to his son, but he’s already itching to split. Sav is out most nights, drinking and cheating on Risa with Sandra Carbonari.

One night Sav comes home drunk with a gun and a plan to travel to Florida with Sandra. He waves the gun around, points it at Risa and Sav, packs a bag, and gets into a fight with Risa’s sister Giulia. As he’s choking Giulia, Risa hits him with a cast iron pan. Sav hits his head on the corner of a table as he falls. Risa calls Sav’s childhood friend, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, who comes over in time to watch Sav die. They haul the body away and bury it on rural land that belongs to Chooch’s mother.

The story follows the main characters as they live troubled lives for the next eighteen years. Risa lives with her guilt by telling herself that Sav would have killed her or her son if she hadn’t killed him. Chooch lives with his unrequited love for Risa and his feeling that, unlike his father, who “had an identity as a New Yorker and as an Italian American,” he has nothing but the property he inherited from his parents. Giulia lives a life of dissatisfaction, broken only by a drunken yet memorable sexual encounter with a woman.

Collateral characters contribute to the theme of broken lives that end in violence. Sav’s brother Roberto returns a few years after stealing money from a vengeful man and running away with his wife. A drunken priest with a gambling addiction tries to blackmail Risa with his half-formed hunches about her role in Sav’s disappearance. When he’s ten, a young troublemaking friend of Fab goads him into “living on the edge” until the friend pays a price. Optimistic people believe it's never too late to start over, but some people are perpetually “pinned forever to the void of this moment, the terror of regret.”

Saint of the Narrows Street gives the impression that some people were born to lose. Sav and Fab, Roberto and the gambling priest, fit that profile. Other people might be able to live fulfilling lives but, for reasons of their own, go in the wrong direction. Risa, Giulia, and Chooch never took the risk of looking for a better life. By the novel’s end, they’re in their forties and wondering what’s left.

The story culminates with Fab’s search for his absent father. Conversations with Sandra and other people who knew Sav offer clues about his father’s fate. Tension mounts as Risa realizes she can no longer hide the truth about her father’s death from Fab. But how will he react to the truth? Will all the central characters come to a violent end?

The story is bleak, but only because it takes an honest, unflinching look at certain kinds of lives — the lives of people who are stuck, who have abandoned hope or never had any. Poignant takes on characters (Risa thinks her father’s “version of God seems to have nothing to do with love and everything to do with shutting the door”) sharpen their personalities. Sharp prose and full characterizations contribute to one of the strongest novels I expect to read this year.

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"Eleven Numbers" by Lee Child

Published by Amazon Original Stories on February 1, 2025

Reacher novels have become predictable. Some seem like parodies of the first novels in the series. I was happy to see Lee Child write something that wasn’t about a tough guy whose violent adventures are narrated in clipped sentences.

The premise of “Eleven Numbers” is simple. Nathan Tyler is a math professor. Tyler is among a handful of respected academics who have given intense thought to Kindansky numbers, a special subset of prime numbers that Child appears to have conjured from his imagination. At least, a quick Google search returned only this story and some references to Wassily Kindansky, a Russian artist whose abstract drawings were based on geometric patterns. My apologies to Kindansky and to Child if Kindansky numbers are real.

Tyler is invited to attend a math conference in Moscow at a time when Americans are being urged not to travel to Russia. He accepts the invitation at the urging of the president, who — with the help of a more renowned mathematician — explains that certain nine-digit Kindansky numbers were used by Russian mathematician Arkady Suslov when he designed a computer security algorithm. Enter the wrong password — a nine-digit Kindansky number — and the system will lock out the user and trigger a password reset. The algorithm is protecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal. America would love to get inside and monkey around with it.

The problem is that Suslov is the only person who knows which of the eleven potential numbers is the correct password. The president wants Tyler to travel to Russia, meet with Suslov, and get a sense of which number he used.

Things go south for Tyler when he rents a car at the airport in Moscow, drives toward his hotel, and gets T-boned by a police car. He’s arrested and tossed into jail, making his mission look like a failure. In fact, his mission has only started.

The story is simple but interesting and at least modestly suspenseful. I liked it because Tyler isn’t a tough guy. He relies on his intelligence to perform his mission and on his instincts to smell a double-cross that the American government has probably planned for him.

I also liked Child’s resort to a conventional writing style. The short sentences and “Maybe this. Maybe that.” style of the Reacher novels has become iconic, but it doesn’t work well outside of the Reacher universe. It’s nice to know that Child can tell an engaging story that doesn’t rely on fistfights, shootouts, and two-word sentences that have grown a bit tired in the Reacher series.

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