The Rock Hole by Reavis Z. Wortham

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on June 7, 2011

This deftly plotted, fast moving novel is Reavis Wortham's second. His first (a comedy) was published in 1999. I hope he doesn't wait a dozen years to write another thriller. I don't want to wait that long to read it, and read it I will.

The Rock Hole is set in 1964. About half the chapters are written in the third person. The rest are written from the first person perspective of Top, a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandparents on the Texas side of the Red River, where they have a cotton farm. Top has nightly nightmares about drowning in the river's Rock Hole.

In addition to farming, Top's grandfather, Ned Parker, is a part-time constable, a job that usually involves busting up stills and arresting disorderly drunks. When he's called to a farmer's field where a dog has been tortured and killed (one of a series of similar crimes), he finds an advertisement torn from the local newspaper that makes him wonder whether the animal predator is about to move on to human prey. Ned's investigation becomes muddled when several members of a family are killed and a baby goes missing. Later murders make it apparent that the animal killer's appetite for gruesome death has progressed to human victims, most of whom are related to Ned. Of course, it's inevitable that the killer's path and Top's will eventually cross.

Top spends much of his time with his cousin, an amusingly foul-mouthed girl named Pepper. The chapters that tell the story from Top's point of view capture the horror that a child would experience when encountering the sort of violence that would disturb even the most jaded adult. While all of the characters are well-developed, the reader forms an empathic bond with Top, whose innocence erodes as the story progresses. Wortham balances the growing tension surrounding the killings with atmospheric scenes of rural life (farming and hunting and community gatherings) and the routine of Ned's law enforcement duties as well as a subplot involving Ned's nephew, who takes up with a woman after she separates from her mean-spirited husband, much to the husband's consternation. Comic moments are carefully placed to create respites from the increasing sense of dread (my favorite involves Ned's response to a fire-and-brimstone preacher who accuses Ned's devoutly Christian wife of living a sinful life).

In many respects, The Rock Hole reminded me of another well-conceived thriller: The Bottoms. Like Joe Lansdale's novel, The Rock Hole takes place in Texas, sets up a story involving mutilated bodies, places a child at the story's center, and features a white protagonist who doesn't share the racist tendencies of his neighbors. Ned, a white man married to a Native American, depends on nonwhite labor to pick his cotton but treats every law-abiding member of the community with respect regardless of race. The town is literally divided by railroad tracks, whites living on one side and blacks on the other. Ned's black deputy enforces his own version of the law in the black community as an alternative to the vicious "justice" dispensed by the racist Sheriff, a man Ned despises. The differing attitudes of the characters on questions of race add realism to the story without becoming sanctimonious (even Ned, who pays low wages to the laborers who pick his cotton while worrying that civil rights protests will spread to their community, has a ways to go).

The Rock Hole isn't quite as chilling as The Bottoms, but the quality of the writing is nearly as good. I loved the way it ended.  This is a novel I can entusiastically recommend to thriller fans.

RECOMMENDED

Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 25, 2011

Mickey Spillane was a master of the noir title:  My Gun is Quick remains my favorite, but almost equally high on my list of stellar titles are I, the Jury; The Big Kill; and Kiss Me, Deadly.  Kiss Her Goodbye just doesn’t have the same danger-laden pizzazz.  Its subdued title notwithstanding, the novel feels very much like a Mike Hammer story:  edgy, violent, fast-paced and action-filled. 

Hammer was always a bit too self-righteous for my taste, too given to seeing himself as an avenging instrument of justice and too frequently indulging in rants against the many categories of people he believes the world would be better off without.  Although it’s been years since I last read a Hammer novel, the latest installment depicts a somewhat more introspective Mike Hammer than the one I remember.  I wouldn’t say he’s mellowed; he doesn’t kill anyone until about two-thirds of the way through the novel but the body count rises dramatically as the novel nears its end (particularly when Hammer tells us he “passed the grease gun across a sea of faces and turned them scarlet and screaming”).  Still, Hammer engages in less moralizing as he did in some of the earlier novels and his misogynistic opinions are a bit more muted (both of those changes are improvements, in my view).  Plots in a few Hammer novels seem like an excuse for Hammer to go on a rampage, dispensing street justice with his .44.  Kiss Her Goodbye gives the reader a taste of the rampaging Hammer but also delivers a relatively nuanced plot that is both coherent and engaging.

After a year of retirement in Florida while recovering from a wound he received in a shootout with the Bonetti family, Hammer returns to New York to attend the funeral of his mentor, Bill Doolan.  Hammer can’t believe Doolan would commit suicide, despite the terminal cancer that promised him only three more months of pain-filled life.  After leaving the funeral, while riding with the captain of the homicide division, Hammer spots a murder victim, Virginia Mathes, lying dead on a city sidewalk.  Hammer improbably intuits that Mathes was not killed in a random mugging and that her murder is somehow related to Doolan’s death.  Adding to the mystery are a dead hooker, an uncut diamond that was smuggled out of Russia before the Second World War, a stunning Brazilian singer named Chrome, and Doolan’s unlikely membership in a trendy NYC disco called Club 52.  It all adds up to an entertaining, plausibly-plotted story that leads to a satisfying (although not entirely surprising) resolution.

Despite being an enormously popular writer in his day, Spillane was never in the same league as the best writers of crime fiction who preceded him:  Chandler, Cain, and Hammett.  Compared to most other pulp fiction authors, however, Spillane stood out.  Spillane nourished the reading public’s desire for sex and violence using a spare, undemanding prose style that was perfect for the gritty stories he wrote.  We don’t know how much of the writing in Kiss Her Goodbye is Spillane’s and how much is Allan Collins’ -- the introduction tells us only that Collins was working from Spillane’s plot notes, character sketches, and a “false start” -- but it doesn’t really matter.  Kiss Her Goodbye is unmistakably a Mike Hammer novel:  a little trashy, sometimes childish, but always entertaining.

Although set in the 1970’s, the novel is written in the less-than-PC language of the 1950’s:  women are either dolls or broads and nearly every description of a female includes a commentary on her breasts.  Offensive though that might be, ‘twere it otherwise it wouldn’t be a Mike Hammer novel.  It is what it is.  Kiss Her Goodbye is the kind of throwback novel that most fans of old-school, hard-boiled detective fiction should enjoy.  I thought it was well done.

RECOMMENDED

Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism by David Nickle

Published by ChiZine Publications on April 15, 2011

Eutopia is divided into two parts: nurture and nature. The first section (nurture) sets up what appears to be a terrific horror story, one with dynamic characters, a strong sense of place, and a variety of interesting but disquieting conflicts. The second section veers a bit off track with plot developments that are more silly than horrific, yet the story held my attention even when I was questioning its premise.

The setup creates the perfect atmosphere for a horror novel. Set in the fictional town of Eliada, Idaho, Eutopia begins in 1911 with the attempted hanging of Juke, a person (or perhaps a thing) with intensely black eyes. Juke survives the noose and Eliada's private police arrive in time to save Dr. Andrew Waggoner, the only black physician at Eliada Hospital, from the second half of the intended double lynching. The hangmen are wearing KKK garb and at least one is the brother of Maryanne Leonard, a seemingly deranged patient who died while Waggoner was trying to save her from injuries that apparently resulted from a botched outhouse abortion.

Joining the population of Eliada are Jason Thistledown, the only survivor of a mysterious epidemic that wiped out the town of Cracked Wheel, and Germaine Frost, a gatherer of information for the Eugenics Records Office. Jason and Waggoner soon discover that Maryanne isn't the only woman who suffered a grizzly death in the vicinity of Eliada. The other victims had similar injuries, but not all of them were pregnant.

Eliada's founder is Garrison Harper. His intent was to create a "stern Paradise," a "community devoid of strife and class warfare where men happily lifted their tools at sunrise and set them down again at sunset, not once tempted by Bolshevism or bad morals" -- in short, a 1911 version of Utopia. All the residents share common traits: the men are tall and strong, the women are "lean and comely," and none seem to suffer from a physical or mental infirmity. In contrast to Eliada's residents, many of those who live in the nearby woods are far from prime specimens of humanity. Neither is Juke, who lives in the hospital's quarantine building. Juke is a project of Dr. Bergstrom, who claims Juke is "beset by idiocy and infirmity. And certain -- irregularities in his anatomy." And then there are the mysterious Feegers, who seem to linger in the woods while worshipping ... something.

David Nickle's weaving of two real world horrors -- eugenics and racism -- into the novel's twin mysteries (the deaths near Eliada and the epidemic in Cracked Wheel) is ingenious. Nickle's writing style is at least a step above the ordinary. His prose is efficient; Nickle uses a few carefully selected words to set scenes that some writers would have wasted pages developing, a skill that allows the story to develop at a brisk pace. The mood and atmosphere are perfect for a tale of the supernatural. Nickle's writing, and particularly the sense of characters rooted to a particular place and time, reminded me of Joe Lansdale.

Much of the time, Eutopia has the feel of a conspiracy thriller: characters don't immediately realize they are in danger, and when they do, they don't understand why; puzzling out the "why" is the key to their survival. The nature of the threat is revealed about halfway through the novel, and (unfortunately) the story loses some of its zest at that point. The explanation (and the abilities manifested by Juke and his ilk) struck me as a little too silly to be truly chilling. In fact, the book might have been better without the supernatural element, although it probably wouldn't qualify as a horror novel at that point. Still, my dissatisfaction with the Juke/Feeger aspect of the plot didn't stop me from following the story to its surprising (and satisfying) conclusion. Nickle's strong writing and the carefully fashioned characters are reason enough to read and enjoy this novel.

RECOMMENDED

A Thousand Times More Fair by Kenji Yoshino

Published by Ecco on April 12, 2011

Law Professor Kenji Yoshino majored in English at Harvard before attending Yale Law School. Unsurprisingly, he never lost his love of Shakespeare. In A Thousand Times More Fair, Yoshino explores the oft-considered relationship between beauty and justice -- specifically, what Shakespeare's beautifully written plays can teach us about justice.

Reading Shakespeare is like reading the Bible (or, for that matter, the Constitution): there is much of value to be mined, but the reader must be wary of fanciful interpretations. Fortunately, Yoshino's legal scholarship compels him to base his conclusions on evidence. Yoshino engages in a careful reading of the plays, liberally quoting lines and citing a variety of external sources to divine their meaning. Readers who are more interested in the plays than the law will appreciate this book for its nuanced understanding of Shakespeare. Indeed, this is not a book just (or even primarily) for legal scholars. Although Yoshino's discussion of the plays is informed by a lawyer's perspective, the legal principles that he elucidates almost become secondary to his broader reading of the plays. Nearly everyone should learn something new, or see a play or two in a different way, after reading this book.

Yoshino argues that Titus Andronicus teaches audiences that the rule of law is preferable to vengeance; that retribution must be left to the public (i.e., government) rather than the private individual because, as the play demonstrates, private revenge "necessarily dooms the avenger and his society." Although Hamlet also centers upon a desire for vengeance, Yoshino uses it to discuss the concept of perfect (or poetic) justice.

The Merchant of Venice would be an ideal vehicle for addressing the difference between law and justice; contract law entitles Shylock to a pound of Antonio's flesh, but mercy (the quality of which "is not strain'd") would produce a more just result. Yoshino instead uses the play to discuss a more subtle point: how the language of the law is manipulated (the daily task of lawyers), as exemplified by Portia's skillful use of rhetoric to deny enforcement of Shylock's contract.

In Measure for Measure, Yoshino finds support the argument that good judging is not solely about "empathy" (to use President Obama's term) or a "strict construction" of the law (to use a phrase favored by conservatives). Rather, the phrases represent "competing values that must each be honored." Shakespeare agreed, according to Yoshino, as demonstrated by the ability of Escalus finds a middle ground between ignoring a bad law and enforcing it unjustly.

Yoshino turns to four historical dramas to explore the legitimacy of a ruler's authority and to ask whether "just rule is nothing more than what power calls itself." In a related discussion of political authority, Yoshino argues that The Tempest champions the notion that wise rulers eventually relinquish their power voluntarily (just as Prospero puts aside his magic at the play's end). Of course, the notion of a political leader giving up power in the absence of scandal is virtually unknown to modern politics; perhaps our political leaders should spend more time studying Shakespeare.

Yoshino's take on King Lear is insightful but his argument that Lear's madness allows him to see beyond the law to a higher form of "immortal justice" and then to surrender justice for love is interesting but a bit of a stretch. While well argued, Yoshino's least interesting point (to me) concerns one of Shakespeare's most interesting plays: Yoshino uses Macbeth to exemplify the concept of "natural justice," an antiquated notion that is widely rejected in the modern world.

Yoshino is least convincing in his discussion of Othello, both in his assertion that the play tells us much about the legal art of factfinding and in his comparison of Desdemona's handkerchief to O.J. Simpson's glove. Just as Othello was misled by the handkerchief, Yoshino says, Simpson's jury was misled by the glove. But Othello was misled by Iago's lies about the handkerchief, not by the handkerchief itself, and the Simpson jury based its acquittal on a host of evidence suggesting that prosecution witnesses had planted evidence and had perjured themselves while testifying -- all of which presumably created (in their minds) a reasonable doubt: the critical legal standard that Yoshino neglects to mention and that played no role in Othello.

In addition to discussing the Simpson trial, Yoshino relies on recent political history to illustrate certain legal principles, including the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 and Bill Clinton's unsuccessful attempt to manipulate language by positing multiple definitions of the word "is." Readers with strong political opinions who are unwilling to entertain ideas that disagree with their own might be put off by those discussions. I emphasize again, however, that there is much to learn about Shakespeare's plays from this engaging book -- politics notwithstanding.

Yoshino doesn't bog down his lively writing with legal jargon; most of the legal concepts he discusses are familiar to nonlawyers and he carefully explains those that are not. If you like Shakespeare (and who doesn't?), you will likely enjoy (and benefit from reading) A Thousand Times More Fair.

RECOMMENDED

The Fund by H.T. Narea

Published by Forge Books on May 10, 2011

Although The Fund seems to be marketed as a financial thriller, the plot is driven by terrorist bombings. The Shari'ah-complaint fund that gives the novel its title is less important to the story than the terrorist attacks. Narea serves up a smorgasbord of culprits, including the Venezuelan and Cuban governments, al-Qaeda terrorists, Basque separatists, and suicide bombers who are energized by a secret serum that makes cats chase dogs. The chief bad guy, Nebibi Hasehm, controls the fund. Its structure assures that it will do well if certain sectors of the economy are distressed -- the kind of distress that might follow a significant terrorist attack directed at Wall Street. The chief good guy, Kate Molares, an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, happens to have been Hasehm's lover six years earlier -- one of several coincidences (including Kate's father's involvement with the fund) that are a bit difficult to accept.

Narea deserves credit for weaving these threads into a coherent whole. Still, there is at least one plot thread too many. The storyline involving the serum that makes cats chase dogs is both central to the plot and unnecessary. It is too James Bond-ish to integrate well with the sophisticated financial thriller that the book sometimes tries to be. For all the emphasis Narea places on the serum, its existence does little to advance the story. My sense is that Narea intends this novel as a warning; if so, the threat of dirty bombs accomplishes that task without trying to make the reader fret about drug-fueled suicide bombers. (Frankly, if terrorists were given the serum, we'd all be better off. The serum seems to have the same effects as meth. How many meth addicts are capable of following instructions?)

Putting aside the serum and the financing (neither of which make a substantial contribution to the plot) and viewing The Fund as a conventional thriller about terrorists and dirty bombs and the like, the novel is entertaining, although it rarely achieves and never sustains the level of tension that the best thrillers produce. It's important to create a sense of atmosphere but at times The Fund reads more like a travelogue than a thriller. Narea's writing style is what a reader might expect to encounter in a first novel: sometimes stilted or awkward, a bit wordy, but for the most part serviceable. Dialog is too frequently used to explain things for the reader's benefit that the characters would already know. And while it might be beneficial to translate the phrases "Allahu Akbar" and "insha'allah" once for the benefit of readers who haven't encountered them before, it isn't necessary to repeat the translation every single time one of the phrases appears in the text.

On the positive side, The Fund tells its story with vigor and the characters are likable if not particularly deep. To his credit, Narea didn't create a superhero to rush in like Jack Ryan and save the world from evil.  On the other hand, Molares waltzes through the novel without doing much of anything other than (too predictably) renewing her romantic entanglement with Hasehm. By the novel's end, the primary characters are all but forgotten in a rush to finalize the story. Narea ends the novel with an excess of exposition: this happened here, then that happened there, and it all changed the world. Like much of the rest of the novel, the ending lacks punch.

The Fund is in many respects a worthy effort that suffers from too little originality and an insufficiently tight plot. Had the focus been more on the funding mechanism for terrorism and less on the terrorist plot itself, this would have been a better novel.  Hardcore fans of novels about terrorism will enjoy it; for others the novel is a mixed bag.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS