The House Hunt by C.M. Ewan

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 27, 2024

Lucy is claustrophobic. She also lives with a constant fear of being attacked. Her husband, Sam, is a psychology professor who runs support groups to meet his university’s community involvement guideline. Sam hasn’t managed to cure Lucy of her phobias, although one of his support groups is devoted to people with debilitating fears.

Sam inherited a house that he and Lucy can’t afford. They went into debt to fix it up before putting it on the market. A potential buyer named Donovan arrives to look at the house, but the estate agent is running late. Sam is working and Donovan has another appointment later so Lucy sets aside her fear and agrees to show him the house. Since this is a thriller, you know that Lucy made a brave but bad decision.

Intercut with scenes that set up events inside the house are scenes of Sam running his support group. A couple of its members seem unbalanced, particularly one who fears that he won’t be able to control his homicidal impulses. Will Sam be harmed?

The separate Lucy and Sam storylines eventually intersect, leading to multiple nongraphic scenes of violence. Characters find themselves under attack for reasons that most of them can’t comprehend. The reader is challenged to decide which characters are innocent and which are villainous. The reader will suspect nearly every character of living a hidden life.

Speed, intensity, and cinematic action are the novel’s strengths. C.M. Ewan accomplishes this by using the traditional tricks of the thriller writer’s trade:  short chapters (116 of them) populated by short (often single-sentence) paragraphs. He invites the reader to experience the novel as a movie by making frequent cuts between the main action and distant action. Ewan needn’t have used techniques that create the illusion of a page-turner; he speeds the story along by keeping it in motion at all times. He judiciously mixes in distractions — unexplained thumps, a character’s failure to respond after venturing into the basement — to ratchet up the suspense. His use of the genre’s writing techniques is masterful, even if they make the book seem a bit formulaic.

When it seems that the plot has been resolved, Ewan wheels in a new ending. He does this multiple times before the story finally runs out of gas. It’s fun to be surprised but when surprise follows surprise follows surprise, I feel like I’m being played. Given that the plot as a whole is unrealistic, I don’t suppose an unrealistic series of surprises at the end can do any harm.

It’s difficult to say whether Lucy is a likable character. She’s so frenzied that the reader gets little chance to know her. Lucy is the kind of protagonist who places herself in a dangerous position rather than waiting for the police to arrive, as if she knows that the story will be better if she does one more brave deed. Characters making stupid decisions is the foundation for every slasher movie, but I always hope that thriller writers will invest their characters with a bit of common sense.

My most significant complaint about The House Hunt does not relate to how the story is told, but whether the story makes sense. To avoid spoiling it, I won’t discuss why characters behave as they do. I will say that the topics of altered or lost memories and brainwashing make their way into the plot. As is often true in thrillers, Ewan’s vague explanations of how those concepts drive a character are unconvincing.

The obligatory upbeat ending will please many readers. Setting aside a plot that a less charitable reviewer might describe as preposterous, The House Hunt merits a firm recommendation for accomplishing the ultimate goal of thrillers: creating suspense, a puzzling mystery, and exciting moments. I set aside my concerns about the plot for the sake of enjoying a book that, despite its flaws, tells an engaging story.

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The Rising Tide by Sam Lloyd

First published in Great Britain in 2021; published by Penzler Publications/Scarlet on March 15, 2022

Relationship drama bubbles through the backstory in The Rising Tide. Lucy and Daniel Locke are married. At the 18th birthday party of their daughter Billie, Daniel’s friend Nick Povey made a pass at Lucy. That same day, Daniel learned that Nick betrayed him in a way that will jeopardize the continuing existence of Daniel’s business. By the time the story begins, Daniel and Lucy are about to lose their home in Skentel, a village on England’s North Devon Coast.

In the present, Daniel takes their boat into the sea despite storm warnings. The boat is found adrift but sinking as the storm is building. Nobody is aboard. Lucy soon learns about the boat and realizes that Daniel and their two kids are missing. She joins the local boat owners as they perform a search-and-rescue operation.

As Lucy is searching for her husband and children on a violent sea, all she can think about is yelling at Daniel. At least that gives her a break from thinking about Jake Farrell, who agreed to take her on his boat to search for her family. Jake is Lucy’s ex.

At another point in the story, Lucy runs into the ocean and nearly drowns just to “see what it was like.” This is just hours after she was drenched in seawater after the boat in which she was searching for her family nearly capsized. Fear that a parent’s children are dead (although Lucy never believes that because “mother’s instinct”) might well motivate a parent to engage in bizarre behavior, but Sam Lloyd never managed to make me sympathize with Lucy’s hysteria.

On the other hand, perhaps the reader is not meant to like Lucy, at least not while the plot is taking shape. As the mystery of the missing kids deepens, collateral characters make unflattering statements suggesting Lucy might not be likable at all. Lucy has ambiguous thoughts about “what happened in Portugal.” Those moments add a layer of intrigue as the reader begins to wonder whether Daniel, who seems to be the villain, might have acted in response to something Lucy did.

Detective Inspector Abraham Rose investigates the suspicion that Daniel scuttled the boat, drowned his kids, and threw himself overboard. The evidence all points in that direction, which is enough to make the reader believe it isn’t true.

Rose has lung cancer. He’s also having a crisis of faith that leads him to believe in Satan but not so much in God. He nevertheless believes his investigation is compelled by “a higher authority” than the law. Since he isn’t delusional, it isn’t clear why he harbors that belief. Rose’s thoughts often turn to a mother who suffers from dementia and a girlfriend he lost long ago. Those thoughts inspire him to feel sorry for himself, particularly when prayer doesn’t make him feel any better.

Lloyd follows the common convention of adding first-person narratives to the story without identifying the narrator. Since it is clear that the narrator dislikes Lucy, and given the positioning of the narratives within the story, the reader is encouraged to assume that the narrator is Daniel. Seasoned readers will suspect that they are being played.

Part of the truth is revealed somewhere around page 250 (of 350). Another part (perhaps derived from a famous book that became a famous movie) is revealed a dozen pages later. If the truth seems a bit contrived, that’s the way the modern thriller goes. The story then becomes a whodunit that challenges the reader to guess the identity of a villain who has contributed to Lucy’s mess. The villain’s motivation is thriller-standard and not particularly imaginative or credible. On the other hand, the villain’s identity is not easily guessed (at least not by me). But on my third hand, I didn’t buy the ending because the villain’s actions are cartoonish. On my final hand, those are common flaws in modern thrillers and not sufficient reason to advise against reading the book.

The “mother’s fierce love for her daughter” theme is overdone, although I give Lloyd credit for writing an intensely moving scene at the end of Part I. The long walk to the ending feels padded, as though Lloyd wanted to avoid rushing to a climax and instead dragged the story to its conclusion. Characters share thoughts they had shared several times already. Regrets and loss of faith and memories of “a life that no longer exists” and just get on with it, can’t you? Even after the climactic moment arrives, another 50 pages await. A tightening edit could have enhanced this thriller’s sense of urgency and kept tension from dissipating.

Still, the novel places interesting characters in difficult situations, keeps the reader guessing about whether protagonists are good or evil, and creates a reasonable amount of suspense. The suspense wanes and the characters are problematic, but Lloyd’s prose is vivid and the story has enough strong moments to make it worth reading.

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Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds

First published in Great Britain in 2021; published by Orbit on October 12, 2021

Over the last 20-plus years, Alastair Reynolds has set several books and stories in the Revelation Space Universe, a troubled place where humanity is always at risk of extinction. Inhibitor Phase is the most recent of four novels, beginning with Revelation Space, that tell an ongoing story within that universe. Reynolds claims that Inhibitor Phase can be read as a standalone, but I think a reader who at least reads Revelation Space will find more meaning in Inhibitor Phase. For example, the significance of Conjoiners (humans with neural implants) and the role that Nevil Clavain played in a war between Conjoiners and non-enhanced humans might be puzzling to someone who isn’t familiar with at least some of the novels. For readers who want to begin at the end and don’t mind spoilers, Reynolds includes a chronology at the end of the book that will catch the reader up on Reynolds’ future history of humankind, including events that occur novels outside of this sequence.

Inhibitor Phase begins in the late 28th century with a fellow named Miguel who doesn’t realize he was once a different man, a man named Warren. Now he’s leading a community of humans living beneath the surface of a planet, trying to protect them from Inhibitors by keeping the humans hidden and quiet. Inhibitors, a/k/a Wolves, are machines that want to destroy and assimilate raw materials used by organic races, very much like the Borg of Star Trek fame. Miguel faces an early moral dilemma (is it acceptable to kill more than 5,000 people to keep 5,000 people hidden and safe?) before he’s taken against his will by a formidable woman named Glass. After Glass tweaks Miguel’s brain, he begins to recall that he was once a soldier (a Sky Marshal, actually) who took on the Conjoiners before he battled his brother. That part of the plot isn’t exactly Antigone, but if a writer is going to borrow ideas, borrowing from the classics is usually smart.

Glass has a plan to take the fight to the Wolves. The plan requires traveling to one planet to gather some stones, to another planet to acquire information, and to another planet in search of a ship that carries a secret weapon. Like much space opera, Inhibitor Phase is sort of a Homeric Odyssey (borrowing from the classics again) as each segment of the journey introduces new perils that the hero must overcome.

Some chapters flash back to Warren’s time as a soldier, when he participated in a clandestine invasion of Mars to free his brother, back when they seemed to be on the same side, before Warren became someone else. Later in the novel Warren becomes someone else still before making a final transformation. Identity is a fluid thing in the Revelation Space universe.

Reynolds gives space opera fans the kind of futuristic action they enjoy while adding enough science to make the action plausible. When a ship flies into the “molten shallows” of a star, Reynolds explains how manipulating “the basic informational granularity of local spacetime” to “swindle the incorruptible bookkeeping of classical and quantum thermodynamics” prevents the ship from melting. For all I know (and I don’t know much), this is gibberish, but gibberish is better than ignoring the unendurable heat of even a star’s photosphere. Other imaginative moments include a weapon concealed in blood that the heroes release by bleeding; a water planet inhabited by entities that function collectively as information storage devices; biologically engineered weapons called ninecats (just as fast and even more fierce than regular cats but a lot less cuddly); and a variety of alien races, the most interesting of which builds nests.

The universe is a big place and it’s been around a long time, even if humankind has not (relatively speaking). Inhibitor Phase is a long book, but a small part of a larger story. It doesn’t complete the story of humanity’s clash with the Wolves, or even advance it much. It does provide the surviving characters with an opportunity to take the fight to the Wolves, something that might happen in the next installment.

Still, Inhibitor Phase does the things that space opera should do. Reynolds offers the usual space opera menu of courage, sacrifice, perseverance, and fighting against long odds because that’s what it means to be human. Perhaps because the themes are so familiar in classic science fiction, the story does not seem particularly fresh. Yet Reynolds occasionally makes the story relevant to the reader’s life, as when he describes an alien race that justifies its atrocities by pretending they never happened (or, in the jargon of modern America, by dismissing their transgressions as “fake news”).

Characters are inclined to give inspirational speeches, as is the custom of space opera heroes. The speeches themselves are too predictable to be meaningful, but I did appreciate the development and evolution of Warren’s character. Before or soon after he became Miguel, he blocked his memories of the horrors of war that he endured and inflicted. When he returns to himself, he must confront moral judgments that he made and ask whether they were correct, whether he can find a path to redemption. That’s the kind of dilemma that science fiction, by stripping away the constraints of realism, can confront more directly than most literary fiction. The story works as an action novel, but it also builds depth from the arc of Warren’s life.

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Dark Water by Robert Bryndza

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Grand Central Publishing on October 1, 2019

Dark Water is the third novel in the Erika Foster series that began with The Girl in the Ice. DCI Erika Foster is now assigned to a unit that handles drug cases and other big investigations. As she leads a team that pulls a chest of heroin from the bottom of a flooded quarry, the divers also find the skeletal remains of a 7-year-old girl who went missing in 1990, 26 years earlier. While Erika’s until does not handle homicides, she was a murder investigator before her current assignment. Risking the wrath of her supervisor, she pulls some strings and is assigned to lead the investigation into Jessica Collins’ murder.

The original investigation was a mess that resulted in a successful lawsuit by one of the suspects. DCI Amanda Baker, who was part of that investigation, became the scapegoat for what was seen as a botched investigation. She was fired and is now a hard-drinking retiree. To be fair, Amanda deserved her fate. She arrested Trevor Marksman because he had a sex offender conviction and appeared to have an interest in Jessica (or girls who resembled Jessica). He had a solid alibi and had to be released, but Amanda tipped off local vigilantes who burned down Marksman’s house with Marksman inside, leaving him with permanent scars. She also shagged Jessica’s father, much to the displeasure of Jessica’s mother. While it isn’t surprising that Amanda is drowning her sorrows during her declining years, the sorrows are largely self-inflicted.

DC Crawford, a part of Erika’s team, was also a part of Amanda’s team. He seems to be less than forthcoming about his knowledge of the original investigation. Another thorn in Erika’s foot is a high-powered barrister named Oscar Browne, who was camping with Jessica’s sister Laura when Jessica disappeared. Oscar seems to feel the need to intervene in the reopened investigation to protect the feelings of Jessica’s mother.

Amanda had the quarry searched a few weeks after Jessica went missing and doesn’t understand why the body wasn’t discovered at the time. That’s one of many mysteries that the intricate plot challenges the reader to solve. Another is whether Marksman was innocent or guilty. Erika regards Bob Jennings, a mentally impaired man who lived in a shack near the quarry, as another good suspect, but he hung himself and is unavailable for questioning. Another sex offender eventually enters the plot to add to a growing list of suspects. New murders ensue, adding fresh meat to the mystery.

Erika is assembled from the small details that give a character credibility. Her Slovakian sister Lenka comes for a visit, adding a bit of family tension, given her husband’s connection to the Mafia. Erika is a bit cold and standoffish — in other words, she’s British — but characters don’t need to be huggable to drive a mystery, and she serves well as the kind of protagonist who, with plodding determination, is able to solve a whodunit. Amanda, for all her faults, finds momentary redemption by taking a break from the bottle to offer some help that contributes to the mystery's resolution.

My knock on Robert Bryndza is that his style is just as plodding as his detectives. He doesn't bring much zest to his prose, resulting in a story that bogs down at times. The reader's persistence is nevertheless rewarded with a clever payoff in the form of an unexpected but credible resolution to the mystery.

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A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris

First published in Great Britain in 2019; published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 14, 2020

Not many novels are set in Kazakhstan. A Shadow Intelligence earned my interest just by sending characters to a country that is difficult to spell. Add a campaign to spread disinformation on social media, private militaries controlled by oil companies, and Afghan smugglers to a mix that includes British and Russian spies and you’ve got an unusually intriguing story.

A Shadow Intelligence doesn’t feature a superhero who fights and shoots his way out of every problem. Nor does he wear an exploding watch. Elliot Kane employs tradecraft, but he basically blunders into situations and hopes for the best. Elliot’s fallibility is another aspect of the novel that appealed to me.

Elliot begins the novel in a funk, having been recalled to London from an undercover assignment in Saudi Arabia that ended with the arrest of his agent. When he checks his email, he finds a coded message telling him that either he or the sender is in danger. Hidden in the message is a digital picture. He’s in the picture, talking to a person he doesn’t know in a room he’s never seen.

The message is from Joanna Lake, an MI6 field officer for whom Elliot has feelings. He asks colleagues about her status, only to learn that she’s no longer employed. She was last working with the Psychological Operations Group, a combined effort of MI6, the British military, and GCHQ, the British version of the NSA. Elliot doesn’t know what project occupied her time, but he learns that her unit was shut down, that she was escorted from the premises, and that security officials have been asking questions about both Lake and Elliot.

Elliot’s effort to find Joanna leads him to a dead body, an oil company called Saracen that is buying land in Kazakhstan, and a firm of private intelligence analysts (including many who recently jumped ship from MI6) called Vectis. Elliot travels to Kazakhstan, where his presence is noted by Sergei Cherenkov, who tries to recruit Elliot to spy for the Russians. Eliot begins to wonder whether the same pitch was made to Joanna and whether she accepted.

The web of intrigue convinces Elliot that previously unknown oil fields in Kazakhstan may lead to a Russian invasion and a war in which China will intervene. The international stakes are high, but from a personal standpoint, Eliot wants to know whether Lake is still secretly working for MI6, whether she was hired by Vectis to do sketchy work, or whether she is working for the Russians. A social media influencer in Kazakhstan named Aliya, the pro-western daughter of Kazakhstan’s president, and an Afghan smuggler who has a history with Elliot also feature in the mix.

The novel is an effective blend of mystery, suspense, and action. As an international conflict looms, the plot encourages the reader to join Elliot in speculating about Joanna’s role and why she messaged Elliot. Events have been shaped in a way that mislead Elliot (and thus the reader) before the dots connect in a way that makes sense. The story’s focus on the recruitment and deception of social media influencers to drive public opinion in directions dictated by governments or private businesses gives the story some currency.

Near the end of the novel, when Elliot has been identified as someone who should either be arrested or shot on sight, it seems unlikely that he can make it to the end of the book without being tracked and apprehended. That he does so is a mild stretch. Elliot’s fairly standard spy persona would have benefitted from a bit more character development. Those are relatively minor complaints in a plot-focused novel that delivers the kind of byzantine international jousting that makes spy novels so entertaining.

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