Crucifixion Creek by Barry Maitland

Published in Australia in 2014; published by Minotaur Books on November 10, 2015

This 2014 Australian novel, recently published in the United States, is my first exposure to Barry Maitland. I like the book’s atmosphere. The characters have plausible depth for a fast-moving thriller. The plot has a satisfying number of twists, but the novel doesn’t stand out as an original or exceptional contribution to the “cop turns avenger” genre.

Harry Belltree’s father was the first Aboriginal judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court. Harry is a police detective. His parents died in a traffic accident and Harry is obsessed with the belief that they were the victims of a murder or, at least, a hit-and-run. Part of the novel concerns Harry’s pursuit of those suspicions.

For a time, Harry is investigating murders in a Sydney neighborhood with an unfortunate history that is known as Crucifixion Creek. He is a witness to the first murder. The second victim is his brother-in-law. Also dead are an elderly husband and wife who committed suicide together for reasons that reporter Kelly Pool finds mysterious.

It soon becomes apparent that related, nefarious activity by a biker gang has a political connection. More brutality follows, the body count rises, and Harry, assisted by his blind wife, finds the violence coming uncomfortably close to home -- as does Kelly Pool.

Much of the story will be familiar to thriller readers. As a cop, Harry is told to back off, and so of course he doesn’t. As a man with a sense of justice, Harry doesn’t always play by the rules that the police should follow. Harry isn’t quite Dirty Harry but he does take the law into his own hands, making him about the billionth law enforcement officer in crime fiction to do so. Kelly is the typical intrepid reporter who puts herself at risk while following her nose for a story. The reason underlying the murder turns out to be a crime scheme that thriller writers rely upon too often. None of that is particularly imaginative. The ending, on the other hand, comes as something of a shock, although the shock is weakened in the final paragraphs.

Still, the Sydney setting is a nice departure for American readers who are looking for something different, and there are enough twists here to add intrigue to a familiar plot. Maitland’s prose is crisp and the pace is appropriate for a crime thriller. Unanswered questions set up the next book. While I might hope for more creativity in the second novel, this one made me want to read it.

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Quicksand by Steve Toltz

First published in Australia in 2015; published by Simon & Schuster on September 15, 2015

Liam Wilder is a writer. At least, that’s his ambition. Aldo Benjamin, fresh out of prison, is Liam’s unwilling muse. Liam thinks that a book about Aldo will be a best-seller as well as a needed eye-opener for Aldo.

To help the reader understand all of this, Liam flashes back to discuss his life, his marriage, his failures, his career in law enforcement, Aldo’s life, Aldo’s failures (which are many), Aldo’s mental health issues (also many), Aldo’s ideas and opinions and theories (which spew forth in energetic bursts), Aldo’s marriage to Stella, Aldo’s unfortunate reaction to an unfortunate situation involving Stella, Aldo’s relationship with his mother Leila (who suffers the sins of her son), and more. Much more.

Aldo has a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, a gift he exercises throughout the course of the novel, inevitably leading to misfortunes of his own making. He might be better off dead but that, too, is something he can’t quite manage to get right. At the same time, the novel is a testament to perseverance, most clearly expressed in Aldo’s attempts to surf when he is physically incapable of doing so.

I would complain that the plot goes off track early and often if the plot actually followed a track. This is an episodic novel, each episode representing a highlight (or lowlight) of Aldo’s life. One portion of the novel is presented in the form of a police interrogation, with Liam questioning Aldo about a crime he possibly committed. Another portion consists of a transcript of Aldo’s trial. The story is engaging but overwhelming, to the extent that I was only able to absorb it in small doses.

Readers looking for likable characters might be put off by Quicksand. Aldo isn’t necessarily unlikable, but he’s far from admirable. Liam has identified himself as a tragic failure (certainly a failure as a novelist and not much of a cop) which isn’t an attractive quality. Startling prose, offbeat humor, and meaningful (if underdeveloped) themes are reasons to spend time with fictional characters you wouldn’t invite to a party.

The comedy is dark but amusing. I’m not sure why anyone would put up with Aldo (and most people don’t), but his enduring and unlikely friendship with Liam is probably the story’s point. Liam sees something of value in Aldo that the reader occasionally glimpses -- something more than sharp wit -- that allows their friendship to survive. Aldo might be a walking catastrophe, but even a catastrophe deserves a friend. Anyone who has maintained a friendship with someone who has been rejected by the vast bulk of humanity will likely appreciate Quicksand.

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Horizon by Keith Stevenson

First published in Australia in 2014; published by Voyager Impulse (HarperCollins) on November 1, 2014

A crew on a deep space mission to a planet called Horizon is awakened early -- except for the dead one and the one who is in a coma. The ship's Artificial Intelligence is offline. The woman in a coma is actually a transhuman who, upon awakening, is aware that a dangerous message, purportedly from launch control, is awaiting delivery to the AI. The political situation on Earth has changed while the crew has slept, leading to a change in the mission -- assuming the crew is willing to follow the new orders.

Some of Horizon is a traditional murder mystery. After another death, the reader is asked to join the captain in guessing who is at fault. Is the transhuman sabotaging the mission? Is the AI at fault, and if so, did the AI (which seems to have some serious mental health issues) become malicious on its own or has someone tampered with its programming? Is one of the other feisty crew members sabotaging the mission or just killing for sport? It is difficult for the captain to know which crew members to trust, but it is even more difficult to understand the true agenda of the people who now run Launch Command.

As I was reading Horizon, I kept thinking "this would make a good movie," probably because the plot is similar to hybrid sf/mystery movies I've seen. The novel's elements are all familiar but they are arranged cleverly. Keith Stevenson's integration of transhumans, posthumans, and aliens -- all of whom might or might not be in conflict with plain old humans -- pushed the right buttons for me. Alliances are constantly shifting as characters reevaluate the agendas and trustworthiness of other individuals. The story is smart, the characters are well-drawn, and the plot is engaging despite its familiar background.

Horizon has no padding or wasted words. The pace is brisk and while the ending seems hurried, it satisfied me. This is a small story that tries to be a big story and doesn't quite reach those heights, but it works well as the story of a small group of people encountering the unknown while dealing with political forces that they know too well. As a debut novel, Horizon is a solid effort.

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The Untold by Courtney Collins

First published in Australia in 2012; published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam on May 29, 2014

A mother named Jessie slices the throat of her prematurely born baby in what she regards as an act of mercy. From his grave, the baby narrates The Untold. The baby is surprisingly aware of events that occur before and after his death. He knows, for instance, that his mother bludgeoned his father to death on the eve of his birth, and that Fitz, his father, deserved it. He knows that his mother met Fitz after being released from a Sydney prison into Fitz' custody. He knows why his mother was sent to prison and he knows the unpleasant story of her childhood and of her difficult married life.

Jessie is the most important of three key characters. The second is a horse-and-cattle thief named Jack Brown, an Aborigine who, like Jessie, must serve Fitz to avoid imprisonment. After Jessie flees from the scene of her crime, Brown helps Andrew Barlow, a police sergeant who has taken an isolated rural posting to overcome his drug addiction, search for her. The story occasionally flashes back to 1903 and later years during Jessie's childhood (still narrated by her yet-to-be-conceived baby). The third key character and several others appear along the way, including circus performers and a gang of boys who rustle cattle. Jessie's past connects to her present in surprising ways.

The intersecting lives of Jessie and Jack set the stage for much of the novel's drama. Death is a pervasive theme, as is hope. The people who live in the valley in which The Untold is set live hard, violent lives. Life is even harder for women. They mitigate their suffering by helping each other. Jessie's life is extraordinarily hard but her spirit endures, buoyed by the fleeting connections she makes with the people she meets as she struggles to retain her freedom. "She imagines herself to be one of those creatures whose nature is not to run from death, but to run alongside it."

Sympathetic characters and a strong story contribute to an engrossing reading experience despite the novel's slow start. Courtney Collins' evocative prose captures the rugged landscape and the desolate hearts of the land's inhabitants. Each key character changes as a result of their coming together, not always for the better but in ways that seem inevitable. The ending satisfies. The only false note is the dead baby's narration. As literary devices go, this one was a poor and puzzling choice. Fortunately the baby's intrusive commentary does not appear often, making the flaw easy to overlook.

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The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

First published in Australia in 2013; published by Simon & Schuster in hardcover on October 1, 2013 and in paperback on June 3, 2014

The Rosie Project is written in the first person using a stuffy, intellectualized voice that is perfectly consistent with the stuffy, intellectualized narrator, Don Tillman. If you've seen Doc Martin, you have an idea of what Tillman is like. Not many novels make me laugh out loud, but the Tillman character in The Rosie Project managed to do that repeatedly.

A professor of genetics, Tillman is insensitive, obsessive, inflexible about his daily schedule, socially awkward, extremely bright, and unable to solve the Wife Problem (i.e., he has no chance of finding one). He regards emotion as an annoying distraction and admires people with Asperger's because they they lack emotional connections that impair the ability to focus. At romance, Tillman is hopeless. Almost all women consider him an unsuitable partner (blunt rudeness is not charming) and he considers almost all women unsuitable, particularly if they waste his time with small talk, horoscopes, fashion, religion, homeopathy, or pretty much anything else that isn't related to a stirring discussion of science.

A systematic effort to find a wife using questionnaires affirms that no women meet his standards. The Wife Project is a flop until his friend (he has only two, the other being his friend's wife) fixes him up with Rosie. She is, Tillman concludes, completely unsuitable as a wife -- she's a vegetarian, a smoker, bad at math, and habitually late -- but as he helps her with a project of her own (determining the identity of her biological father), Tillman is perplexed to find that he enjoys her company. But is he equipped to love her?

The Rosie Project follows the course that is expected of a romantic comedy, but the course is not entirely predictable despite leading to the kind of ending that the genre demands. The plot thread involving the mystery of Rosie's father adds an additional layer of interest to the novel. If the moral of the story -- nobody's perfect -- is obvious, that makes it no less true. The corollary to that moral -- love is expressed by a willingness to accept people as they are -- is also well illustrated. It might be possible to change your behavior, the novel suggests, but making a fundamental change of personality is a more doubtful task.

Although The Rosie Project is very funny, it also makes a serious point about using simplistic labels like "obsessive-compulsive" and "bipolar" and "Asperger's" to categorize people because their brains are "configured differently from those of the majority of humans." Regarding functional people as having a "disorder" because of the way they process information often does them a disservice. A lot of people would dislike Tillman because of his nonexistent social skills (his Dean is anxious to find an excuse to fire him despite his intellect) but others (and I am among them) would find him to be a refreshingly honest, "no BS" kind of guy. Anyway, social skills are overrated, particularly by those who have them.

In the end, the serious points the book makes are overshadowed by the laughter it inspires. The good humor that pervades The Rosie Project makes it an easy book to love.

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