Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 13, 2024

The stories in Highway Thirteen are linked by Paul Biga, a (fictional) serial killer who abducted and kidnapped a dozen girls he found walking on an Australian highway between 1990 and 1997. The stories take place at different times over the last fifty years, apart from one set in 1950 and another in 2028. Taken together, they examine the impact that a single criminal had on multiple lives across time and continents.

I was impressed by nine of the twelve stories, a higher average than is typical for a short story collection. A couple of stories are about secret thoughts. In “Tourists,” a walk in a forest where a serial killer buried his victims might spark an office romance — or a rejection. During the walk, the woman senses evil, while the man envisions himself killing his walking companion.

Also based on hidden thoughts, “Hunter on the Highway” (my favorite story in the book) takes place after a female hitchhiker is attacked. The victim’s description of her attacker matches May’s boyfriend. He’s an uncomplicated, likable bar band musician but does she really know him? Will she talk herself into believing that he’s a killer and calling a hotline to report her suspicion? The story has something important to say about how media hype associated with crime pollutes the heads of people who begin to see criminals everywhere.

“Demolition” builds on familiar news interviews of neighbors who say that the serial killer next door kept to himself and was “just a little off.” Paul Biga lived across the street from Eva. When he was a child, he helped her with gardening. As a retired teacher who taught Biga, she knows that all adolescents are strange and bewildered. Paul did not seem unusually strange, although she didn’t tell the journalist who interviewed her (for the second time, on the occasion of Biga’s home’s demolition) about the disturbing letter he wrote her.

A couple of other stories are also based on memories. The Englishman in “Abroad” attempts to cope with Halloween in America, a celebration of the supernatural that forces him to acknowledge memories of his sister’s unexplained disappearance in Australia when he was a child and how it changed his father’s life. In “Hostess,” a retired flight attendant reflects with melancholy upon the time he shared a home, and sometimes a bed, with another retired flight attendant and her faithful dog. The connection to Biga comes from the female flight attendant’s attempt to persuade her sister to end her engagement to an older man who (in the flight attendant’s opinion) is creepy.

“Fat Suit” is about an Australian actor whose Hollywood marriage is breaking up just as he begins filming a movie in which he plays the famous serial killer (he got fat after years in jail). The story illustrates how one thought sparks another as the actor contemplates his father’s death, his failed marriage, his relationship with his stepchildren, and whales.

While a majority of the stories are serious, some are infused with dark humor. The narrator of “Hostel” tells the story of Mandy and Roy, who like to tell the story of the Swiss backpacker they found weeping outside a hostel — a girl who later was murdered. The narrator imagines herself in the Swiss girl’s position as she entertains fantasies about Roy. “Hostel” uses humor to capture the truth of its characters: “It’s not that Mandy was vain; she just liked to be good at everything she did. So she liked to be good at having a body.”

Fiona McFarlane’s humor is fully displayed in “Democracy Sausage.” A political candidate named Biga isn’t sure whether he is related to the infamous serial killer, but he questions whether voters will disassociate him from his “blackened” name. While Biga is hosting a backyard barbeque, a dog “came springing out from the underbrush of a local riverside path with, between his teeth, a large rubber dildo, the colour of fair flesh but streaked with silty mud, resembling nothing so much as a poorly barbequed sausage.”

Set in 2028, “Podcast” is written in the form of a transcript of a very funny true crime podcast. A recently discovered body that might be linked to Biga (now eight years dead) is the podcast’s subject, although the discussion is quickly diverted to a gossipy account of a podcaster’s gay marriage (his husband doesn’t understand the true crime obsession) and speculation about life in Australia, a country the podcasters have never visited. The podcast tangentially addresses the concept of murder as entertainment, which is an apt description of true crime books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts.

The way in which McFarlane links such diverse stories is dazzling. Biga is in the background of each story, sometimes so tangentially that it takes a bit of effort to understand how he relates to the story’s characters, yet the stories shy away from the gruesome details of murder. They touch instead on the lives of people who feel the impact of Biga’s crimes, sometimes without even knowing that a crime occurred. Many of the individual stories are memorable. Collectively, they gain additional power. Highway Thirteen might be a good choice for a crime fiction book club in search of an offbeat offering that moves beyond the genre's cliches.

RECOMMENDED

Spirit Crossing by William Kent Krueger

Published by Atria Books on August 20, 2024

Spirit Crossing is the latest entry in William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series. Cork is a former county sheriff. Now he lends an unofficial hand to friends who work for local police agencies, including tribal officer Daniel English. In Spirit Crossing, Cork shares the spotlight with English and several other characters, including Waaboo, who Daniel's wife found under a rock.

Waaboo sees dead people. We know from earlier novels that some Native characters have visions and can chat with spirits. Waaboo sees a young woman standing in a blueberry patch where her body is buried. It could be the body of Olivia Hamilton or Crystal Two Knives, two women who have recently gone missing. State authorities have been steering the tribal police away from Olivia’s case because her parents have influence and higher authorities need to coddle them.

After Daniel digs up the body, he realizes the victim was a Native. Since Olivia is white, outside law enforcement agencies quickly lose interest. Daniel doesn’t know whether the body is Crystal’s, but he hopes that investigating Crystal’s disappearance might shed light on Olivia’s fate.

Cork and Daniel (sometimes with Waaboo’s help over his protective mother’s objections) join with local cops to solve the mystery. The characters often discuss the reality that a missing white girl leads to obsessive reporting while the media ignore missing Native girls. Krueger tried to make a good point, but he couldn't resist the urge to add human trafficking to the story. Little originality is on display in Spirit Crossing.

Mild action scenes (meaning that characters actually move around) arrive at expected intervals, but this isn’t a pulse-pounding thriller. A bad guy occasionally takes a shot at groups of good guys but never manages to hit one, despite using a deer rifle. It’s hard to believe that Minnesota deer hunters would be such poor shots.

Series fans might appreciate the wrinkle thrown into the characters’ lives when they learn that Cork’s daughter Annie has an inoperable brain tumor. Only Maria, Annie’s lover from Guatemala, knows about Annie’s health condition. If this sounds to you like Telemundo content, I had that same thought.

The characters have folksy, familial, serious conversations about each other’s lives. The accumulated dialog seems like little more than a modernized version of soap opera gossip. Redundant discussions about health and family issues slow the pace of a novel that it is no hurry to reach a destination.

Several asides in the narrative address the fear and anger that accompany an anticipated death, culminating in Henry Meloux’s advice about returning to the Creator with an open heart. Henry, the wise old Native who offers spiritual guidance to anyone who listens, is a stereotype. Unfortunately, redundant conversations about “crossing over” and “walking the path of souls” contribute to the story’s languid pace.

At times, Spirit Crossing reads like Christian lit with Native American religions substituting for Christianity. The characters spend a good bit of time discussing “the Great Mystery” and God and their anger at God and their strained belief in a deity’s existence. Waaboo seems to be plugged into the spirit world and is positioned to reassure everyone that there really is an afterlife, an assurance that comforts the characters and might do the same for some readers.

The characters also spend a good amount of time preaching the value of forgiveness and of understanding the forces that shape people who perform evil acts. I am in favor of forgiveness and understanding but the characters’ repeated discussions of spiritual values impede a story that already proceeds at a slow pace.

The plot is straightforward but less than scintillating. The notion that a bad guy would want to kill Waaboo to stop him from gathering more evidence from dead people seems farfetched to me, but these criminals aren’t the brightest villains. The crime solvers interview people to gather information, but they rely more on Waaboo’s connection with the spirit world than on deduction. This isn’t the kind of mystery that will impress Sherlock Holmes fans, but it might engage series fans.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Spy Who Vanished by Alma Katsu

Published by Amazon Original Stories on July 18, 2024

The Spy Who Vanished is the name given to its three parts collectively. Each part is available individually from Amazon as part of its Original Stories series. The cover shown above belongs to the first story. Kindle users who don’t belong to Kindle Unlimited must purchase and download all three if they want to have a meaningful reading experience, as none of the three parts stand alone. Together they are a novella (and also a marketing tool for Kindle Unlimited).

Yuri Kozlov is a Russian agent. Putin assigned him to pose as a defector to gain access to the CIA. He’s supposed to report everything he learns to the Kremlin if he manages to worm secrets out of the agents who are subjecting him to a friendly interrogation. Putin is particularly eager to learn the identity of a CIA mole who is suspected of having infiltrated Russian intelligence. If not for the CIA’s track record of indiscretion, it would be difficult to swallow Yuri's almost immediate acquisition of that information,

In addition to gathering intelligence, Yuri is told to find and kill a Russian defector, Maxim Sokolov. Putin wants him eliminated because he knows something embarrassing about Putin that he apparently hasn’t revealed. There is hardly reason to fear that Sokolov will spill the beans after all these years, but Putin is paranoid. It seems unlikely that Yuri can accomplish all these tasks without being killed or captured, but Putin probably thinks that's Yuri's problem to worry about.

Yuri learns that Sokolov died in a car accident but that he married and had a daughter. Yuri’s handler conveys that intelligence, then tells Yuri that Putin wants the wife and daughter eliminated. Yuri comes to learn that Sokolov’s daughter is someone he has met, someone he likes.

Yuri is not nuanced. He doesn't do moral dilemmas. You point him at a target, he destroys it, that's his life. Yet he killed an innocent girl once and has been at least mildly haunted by it. He wonders how he will feel if he kills an innocent girl he knows. I give Alma Katsu credit for giving Yuri even this modest amount of depth.

Setting aside the improbable plot, the story works best as a psychological profile of a Russian agent who (1) feels disrespected by handlers who view him as an uneducated thug with a talent for assassination, and (2) kind of enjoys the benefits of western life, but (3) only feels at home in Russia and worries that he’ll always be looking over his shoulder for a Russian assassin if he actually defects and stays in the US. The story’s mild dramatic tension derives from that dilemma: should be stay (in the US as a defector) or should he go (back to Russia after succeeding or failing in his mission)?

While the story is nicely executed, it lacks substance and credibility. Alma Katsu’s character sketch of Yuri is convincing but the plot is not. Nor is the story sufficiently eventful or surprising to pay a strong reward to a reader who consumes all three parts. Maybe Katsu will eventually expand it into a more satisfying novel, although it’s difficult to see where else the story could go.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Angel of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 13, 2024

Each new Pendergast novel is sillier than the last, but I keep reading them. The series was more enjoyable when Aloysius Pendergast was an obnoxious, self-satisfied crime solver. I didn’t care much for Pendergast but I appreciated his acumen as a detective. Even after the appearance of Constance Greene — a woman who stopped aging in the nineteenth century and who might be even more annoying than Pendergast — I enjoyed the novels to the extent that they focused on a recognizable reality — i.e., a world without magic, supernatural apparitions, time travel, or similar silliness.

Silliness has now overtaken the series. I had hoped that her unrequited yearning for Pendergast would cause Constance to flee from his life, but Pendergast’s forbidden yearning for Constance keeps bringing them together. Constance’s latest effort to flee took her to the nineteenth century in a dimension nearly identical to the one that Pendergast inhabits (the one that seems to host the supernatural). The latest stories have replaced magic with time travel, which might be the same thing. So now Pendergast is chasing Constance through time. Really, can’t Pendergast go back to solving crimes in the present and do away with all these quasi-science fiction themes?

Pendergast has an evil brother named Diogenes and a law enforcement friend named Vincent D’Agosta. Both are trapped in the past with Pendergast, who chose not to heed Constance’s plea that he remain in his own century after she returned to the nineteenth — albeit in another dimension — to save her sister Mary from the evil Enoch Leng, another member of the Pendergast family. She might even save her alter-self (or Binky, as the childhood version of Constance is known in this dimension and perhaps in infinite others).

Leng is a doctor whose experiments in life extension resulted in the deaths of dozens of test subjects. In Constance’s timeline, Leng killed Mary by dissecting her while she was still alive. Constance’s plan is to save this version of Mary (and this version of her brother Joe, not to mention Binky) while obtaining vengeance. The story essentially continues the plot that began in The Cabinet of Dr. Leng.

Angel of Vengeance is more an action/adventure story than a crime mystery. I suspect that’s what many series fans want. I suspect those fans will be satisfied with the story. Its 19th century atmosphere echoes Dickens. Pendergast wears various disguises, characters are captured and rescued, fights break out from time to time (occasionally with knives because nineteenth century), buildings explode, people are poisoned, and so forth. The story is fun and moderately exciting but not surprising. Readers who enjoy the series will know what to expect. New readers might want to start with an earlier novel because Angel of Vengeance won’t be easy to digest for those who aren’t familiar with the backstory.

The novel’s ending might leave the door open for another time travel story. Why can’t the brilliant detective go back to solving bizarre crimes instead of hopping around the multiverse? Maybe he will. For now, I can confidently recommend Angel of Vengeance to Pendergast fans, although less enthusiastically than I would recommend books that are more tightly attached to the same part of the multiverse that I inhabit.

RECOMMENDED

Worst Case Scenario by T.J. Newman

Published by Little, Brown and Company on August 13, 2024

Worst Case Scenario is the latest offering from disaster novelist T.J. Newman. The disastrous series of events begins with a commercial jet pilot’s heart attack. Unfortunate coincidences (like the co-pilot getting stuck in a bathroom) cause the plane to crash. T.J. Newman once worked as a flight attendant so it isn’t surprising that a flight attendant makes heroic but futile efforts to save the day.

The jet crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota. The reactors are undamaged but the crash leads to a series of problems, including a ruptured dry cask that is storing nuclear waste and a severed distribution line that has left the plant without power. Cracks are causing water to leak from a pool that holds spent fuel rods.  Diesel generators keep cooling pumps in operation, but the generators will soon be underwater. The plant is on its way to becoming Minnesota’s Chernobyl.

The formula for a disaster novel is to pair the large catastrophe with a smaller one. A wing from the jet smashed into a bridge. Apart from messing up traffic on I-35, the wing destroyed a van, killing the parents of a kid named Connor who remains strapped to his car seat as the van teeters on the edge of the bridge. Firefights try to rescue Connor but burning jet fuel hampers their rescue attempts.

Heroism and self-sacrifice are the novel’s themes. On the bridge, a firefighter named Dani Allen defies orders to get her fire truck to the nuclear plant and risks her life to rescue Connor. Back at the plant, Fire Chief Steve Tostig joins with nuclear-incident first responder Jocelyn “Joss” Vance and plant manager Ethan Rosen to fix the cascading problems, some of which will require one or more characters to perform dangerous stunts, including a swim in radioactive water.

While it is always inspiring to read about self-sacrifice, the theme is a bit overdone in Worst Case Scenario. As characters make choices that will lead to their injury or death for the good of others, they think about the things they’ll be missing when they are no longer walking among the living. All fiction is intended to manipulate the reader, but the best fiction does so with subtlety. Some of the weepy scenes in Worst Case Scenario are so obviously intended to manipulate the reader’s emotions that they lose their effectiveness.

On the other hand, the descriptions of the unfolding disasters are undeniably compelling. Newman takes time to walk the reader through the safety procedures at nuclear plants and creates what seems to be a plausible worst case scenario that might make a plant melt down. Her research is impressive. (Understand that while the story seemed plausible to me, I'm not a nuclear physicist. I lack the knowledge to spot possible errors in her description of nuclear plant operations.)

Newman keeps the story moving at a brisk pace. She builds excitement as the characters race against time. The disaster novel formula is predictable but the obvious attempt to manipulate the emotions of readers is reasonably successful. I willingly surrendered to the manipulation for the sake of learning what would happen next.

Character development is adequate, although none of the characters are memorable. Two characters are in conflict about the decision to have children — one wants to change the world, the other wants to have a family. The realization that it’s possible to do both is another predictable aspect of the story. More insightful is a character’s realization that in the grand scheme of things, his life doesn’t matter much. Freeing ourselves from the illusion that we’re important creates the opportunity to enjoy the brief time we have. That lesson is convincing.

Disaster novels often morph into disaster movies. Newman makes it easy to visualize the plane crash and teetering van, scenes that might be even more attention grabbing on a big screen. The ending emphasizes self-sacrifice that might have moviegoers shedding a few tears. Disaster fans who don’t want to wait for the movie will likely enjoy the exciting story if they set aside their reservations about Newman’s attempt to trigger their emotions with weepy scenes of heroism.

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