Bones of the Lost by Kathy Reichs

Published by Scribner on August 27, 2013

Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who becomes curious about the hit-and-run death of an unidentified teenage girl. Although the case does not require the services of a forensic anthropologist, Brennan is certain that she's more capable of solving it than the assigned homicide detective. Remarkably, the detective takes her along as he investigates, even letting her interview a witness while he sits in the car and broods. In the real world, no homicide detective would tolerate Brennan's condescending attitude or her meddling, much less follow her around like a puppy while she does all the work. Nor would he bring her along while executing a search warrant at a potentially dangerous location -- dressing her in Kevlar, no less -- particularly when he has no reason to believe the search will uncover evidence that requires inspection by a forensic anthropologist.

Even more improbable is a subplot that sends Brennan to Afghanistan, where she is tasked with determining whether a soldier shot a villager in the back a year earlier by examining the villager's skeletal remains. Brennan's daughter happens to be in the military, serving in Afghanistan. This happy circumstance allows Brennan to go shopping with her daughter in a bazaar while dodging mortar rounds. The trip to Afghanistan eventually ties into the primary plot in a way that requires the reader to swallow a series of extraordinary coincidences. I didn't. The Afghanistan interlude is utterly predictable, completely unbelievable, and much of it comes across as filler designed to pad a thin story.

On the plus side, Kathy Reichs writes the kind of clever prose that encourages readers to set aside reservations about the story and characters. Fortunately for the reader, a good bit of medical jargon is translated into simple English, but it's unlikely that the seasoned detective who demands the translation would actually need it. What homicide detective doesn't know the meaning of "lividity"?

Unless you count an unfailing sense of superiority as a personality, Brennan has none. She's a one-note character and the note is irritating. The other characters are bland and boring. Brennan has a stereotypically shallow ex-husband. That relationship, and another failed relationship, like her scattered sister and her daughter in Afghanistan, are presumably meant to add human interest. They are of no interest at all. Brennan's "passion" for issues like "justice for the dead" (as if the dead care), and her frequent climbs onto soapboxes to tell us just how passionate she is (she often feels like screaming at people who care less than she does because she cares sooooo much), come across as narcissistic posturing.

Once Brennan returns from Afghanistan and refocuses on the murdered girl, the story follows a mundane, overused plot, taking a couple of obvious twists before racing to an eye-rolling ending. Despite receiving a series of graphic warnings telling her to mind her own business, Brennan goes charging into danger at midnight, pausing only to leave a voicemail for the detective assigned to the case (but inexplicably forgetting to take her phone with her), when any sane person would have called 911 and left the risky work to people who carry guns. Reichs understands the mechanics of thriller writing, as demonstrated by her snappy (although sometimes overwrought) prose style, but the novel's brighter moments are overshadowed by the story's silliness.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Days in the History of Silence by Merethe Lindstrøm

First published in Norway in 2011.  Published in translation by Other Press on August 27, 2013.

Days in the History of Silence is an unflinching examination of a woman's colorless, regret-filled life, her adoption or acceptance of shared solitude as a shield against pain. As she tells her story, it becomes apparent that the shield is a poor barrier. Other choices might serve her better, but ingrained habits are difficult to unlearn.

Eva has retired from her job as a high school teacher of Norwegian. Her husband Simon is surrendering to a form of dementia characterized by a disturbing silence. "It is not the feeling that he is no longer there," Eva thinks. "It is the feeling that you are not either." Eva has always been afraid that Simon would one day disappear; now she wonders if this is Simon's way of doing just that. Years earlier, Simon suffered from depression, a byproduct of surviving the war as a child by hiding in a concealed room (a time when silence protected him from discovery) and of bearing the guilt of his survival when so many of his friends and family "were crossed out of history." Now he goes days before articulating a random word, as if he is challenging Eva to find its meaning, perhaps to explain to him the meaning of his life.

If Eva is not as deeply depressed as Simon was, she is at least full of woe. She tells us about unsettling childhood and marital experiences. She thinks about the son she gave away. She makes gloomy observations of the life that surrounds her. Although she believes herself to be different from her husband, the reader comes to question the accuracy of that belief. Eva thinks she talks "all the time," but as her daughter points out, she never reveals her thoughts. She might be loquacious but she is isolated, even from her children.

The novel's central conflict arises from Eva's need to decide whether to place Simon in a home for the elderly, to "give him away" as she gave away her son. Eva is clearly capable of acting as Simon's caretaker, but she thinks "our solidarity has something suspect about it now." As the novel unfolds, a secondary conflict develops as Eva tells us about Marija, the undocumented Latvian they hired to help with household chores, a woman whose companionship substituted for friendship in Eva's friendless life. The decision to fire Marija after three years of employment, and the anger it instilled in her three daughters, weighs heavily on Eva's mind. Eva refuses to explain the decision to her daughters, and while that refusal seems inexplicable to the reader, it is consistent with Eva's inability to reveal herself to them.

The reason for Marija's termination goes unexplained until near the novel's end. Given the buildup and the event's centrality to the story, Merethe Lindstrøm must have intended the explanation to have more force than it delivers. Still, this is a novel of striking images and metaphors, particularly Eva's memory of a young intruder who, despite Eva's perception of a threat, may have only been "seeking refuge" or "searching for someone, or something" -- just as Eva and Simon have spent (or wasted) their lives doing. Some moments in the story are exceptionally poignant (as when Eva checks her husband for a pulse even though she can see him breathing). Yet there is no balance here, no spark of happiness or hope to offset the unremitting melancholy, and while some lives are like that, reading about them can be an emotionally oppressive (albeit intellectually rewarding) chore. For that reason Days in the History of Silence is a novel I admire rather than love, but there is much here to admire.

RECOMMENDED

Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani

Published by Atria Books on June 18, 2013

Children of the Jacaranda Tree spotlights characters who endure serious hardships in Iran as the direct or indirect victims of political oppression. The novel begins in 1983 with Azar, who is being transported from a prison in Tehran to a hospital where, with little assistance, she gives birth to Neda. The weeks that follow childbirth reveal the misery of caring for a baby in an uncaring environment and highlight a mother's fear of separation from her child.

As the novel jumps around in time, covering a period from 1983 to 2011, we meet other victims and survivors of tyranny. The time span gives Neda a chance to grow up and, not surprisingly, she reappears near the end of the novel. Neda has heard tales of horror recounted by her mother, relatives, and political refugees, and she seems destined (as is likely true of Sahar Delijani, who was born in the same Tehran prison as Neda) to become a bearer of their stories.

The changing time frames and characters give rise to one of the novel's central weaknesses. Character development suffers, and it becomes difficult to make a connection with the characters, because they are introduced, usually under traumatic circumstances, and then disappear as the story shifts to someone else. Their stories do not interconnect as seamlessly as they should. We learn a good bit about the brutality the characters witnessed or endured but we learn too little about the characters themselves.

Delijani's writing style is not as powerful as her subject matter. Compelling scenes are not matched by compelling prose. She strives for a literary flair that she doesn't quite attain. Some of her well-intentioned sentences come across as trite or heavy-handed. Other sentences belong in a cheesy romance novel. The picture she paints of life in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution -- the oppression of women, fear of the Revolutionary Guard -- is a familiar one, and Delijani fails to do it justice. Additional drama provided by the background of the Iran-Iraq War is too colorless to generate a strong emotional response.

There are times when Delijani's writing shows promise -- she isn't completely unskilled -- and I give her credit for telling an important story. She just doesn't tell it with the authority and power that it deserves.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Darwin Elevator by Jason M. Hough

Published by Del Rey on July 30, 2013

An alien disease has laid waste to Earth. The disease killed most people, but about 10 percent of its victims survive in a devolved, subhuman state. They are not zombies in name, but they act like zombies. It seems to be an unwritten law of the decade that no science fiction novel is complete without zombies. In any event, the only safe place on Earth is within the protective field that extends nine kilometers from the space elevator in Darwin, Australia. The elevator is a gift from aliens who never introduced themselves. The disease is also an alien gift. Why did the aliens deliver a gift that is both wondrous and destructive? More importantly, are they coming back? Unfortunately, most of the readers' questions go unanswered. Fortunately, The Darwin Elevator (book one of The Dire Earth cycle) is a promising start to a series that presumably will provide the answers before it ends.

Skyler Luiken and his crew are among the few who are immune to the disease. They are scavengers who travel outside the protective field to find goods they can sell to inhabitants of the Orbitals. The Orbitals can only be reached by the space elevator, but unexplained power fluctuations have shut it down. The man who decides whether to restart the elevator is Russell Blackfield, the evil administrator in charge of Nightcliff, the Darwin-based station that handles elevator transit. A good bit of political drama comes from the tension between the residents of Darwin, who depend on Orbital farms for food, and the residents of the Orbitals, who depend on Darwin for water and oxygen. Blackfield's position gives him a great deal of power, but like all evil administrators, he wants more.

Tania Sharma, an Orbital scientist, and her boss, Neil Platz (who, like Blackfield, is driven by an agenda of his own), have a theory about the aliens. To test the theory (based in part on knowledge of the aliens that Platz is keeping to himself), Tania needs data that can only be acquired outside the protective field. Skyler and his crew are called upon to undertake a dangerous mission to Japan to recover the data. The plot moves forward from there.

Two things make this story work. First, the characters are fun. They aren't deep, but they have enough personality to make it easy for a reader to cheer for, or root against, them. Russell is a power-hungry, nightmare bureaucrat, while Skyler is an insecure but basically decent adventurer. Second, while the story isn't entirely original and certainly isn't ground-breaking, it moves quickly enough to maintain interest. The story is more action-dependent than idea-dependent, but the mystery of the aliens' purpose in constructing the elevator and contaminating the Earth holds sufficient intrigue to feed the reader's imagination.

Jason Hough's writing style tends to be uninspired ("Skyler led the way, moving as fast as his legs would carry him") but it's serviceable. I could have lived without all the chase scenes involving zombies (excuse me, subhumans). They detract from the mild intelligence that otherwise characterizes the story, and the conflict between Russell and Platz generates enough action without tossing subhumans into the mix. Readers who can't get enough zombies will probably disagree. In any event, it's too soon to judge the subhuman plot element. Perhaps the next book will provide a more credible explanation for the subhumans than "readers really dig zombies." In any event, I look forward to reading it.

RECOMMENDED

Creation by Adam Rutherford

Published by Current (Penguin) on June 13, 2013

Creation is brief and not overly academic, which is the way I like my science books. Part One provides an overview of current scientific thought about the origin of life. Part Two (to me, the more interesting part), subtitled "The Future of Life," discusses the creation of new, human-engineered life forms, a branch of science broadly known as synthetic biology.

Creation begins with a brief history of biological science as it pertains to the discovery of cells as the basic component of living things. Cell theory and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection both speak to the fundamental truth that "life is the adapted continuation of what came before." Does this mean that all life -- spiders and turnips and bacteria -- can be traced to a common origin, even to a single cell? To answer to that question, Adam Rutherford discusses the history of genetics, explains how DNA works, and argues that the merger of two single cell organisms (an archaea swallowing a bacteria) began the creation of complex life two billion years ago. Rutherford proffers the "left-handed" nature of the proteins that make up life as forceful evidence that "life is of a single origin." That originating entity, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (nicknamed "Luca"), is where you, as a living being, began, existing in your present form "via a colossal series of iterations." But if Luca started it all, how was Luca created?

The question takes Rutherford back 4.5 billion years, to the Earth's creation. The influence of geology on biology takes up a good chunk of the ensuing narrative, culminating in a dissection (and rejection) of Darwin's concept of a "primordial soup" as the origin of life. This leads to an even more fundamental question: "What is life?" Rutherford argues that life is not just the checklist of characteristics (like movement and reproduction) that we learned in school. His alternative answer (life is something that is capable of evolving) strikes me as just another characteristic, as do the additional "behaviors" of life (such as "the continual maintenance of energy imbalance" or "a process that stops your molecules from decaying") that Rutherford identifies, but that's probably a semantic issue. In any event, Rutherford next explores (and largely rejects) the possibility that life has an extraterrestrial origin. All of this leads Rutherford to research suggesting that Luca, unlike its progeny, may not have been a membrane-bound cell at all, but existed "inside the rocky shell" of alkaline underwater vents. I think I'll have to wait for the movie before I can grasp that picture.

So much of part one seemed like a refresher in freshman biology that a more sophisticated audience will probably decry Rutherford's book as unworthy of attention. It's clearly geared to people (like me) who don't have a doctorate in biochemistry. And while some of part one was familiar, enough was new (to me) to keep the discussion interesting. In that regard, Rutherford's lively writing style is a plus.

Still, I was more engaged by part two, which introduces a goat that produces spider silk in its milk (an example of a transgenic organism), synthetic yeast cells that leak a relatively clean version of diesel fuel, and vitamin-enhanced rice (modified with genes from a daffodil). These examples of genetic engineering are the early efforts of synthetic biology, the means by which scientists hope to create "new life forms whose circuitry and programming is clear, simple, and, crucially, built not for survival but for purpose." DNA might be programmed, for instance, to make a protein that kills cancer cells while leaving noncancerous cells untouched. For diabetics, a "synthetic cellular circuit" might produce insulin as the body needs it.

While the potential applications of synthetic biology are among the most interesting discussions in Creation, the least interesting are Rutherford's observations about the difficulty of applying intellectual property laws (patents) to living organisms. The discussion doesn't begin to capture the complexity of the issues involved. On the other hand, the policy debates stimulated by synthetic biology are fascinating, even if Rutherford doesn't quite do them justice. For instance, Rutherford's examination of the controversy surrounding genetically modified food products (which he tends to characterize as PR-driven hysteria) is too dismissive to be useful.

Rutherford's conclusion about the perils of synthetic biology, which amounts to "don't stand in the way of progress," is unduly optimistic given his recognition in an earlier chapter that "progress" -- as in the case of thalidomide -- can have devastating consequences. I can't agree with Rutherford that it is always wrong to "fixate on a threat" and I'm confident that the thalidomide debacle effectively refutes his suggestion that "market forces" can provide effective scrutiny of new technologies. He also seems to suggest that regulation is only appropriate after the damage has been done (as was the case with thalidomide) rather than "preemptively in a way that could prohibit progress." If prohibiting progress means thwarting catastrophe, I can't agree that preemptive regulation is undesirable. If, as Rutherford acknowledges, "synthetic biology is moving at such a fast pace that many scientists are bewildered by its progress," slowing that pace with more regulatory oversight might be the correct response.

These are not easy issues and, to be fair, I'm oversimplifying Rutherford's position, but Rutherford oversimplifies a serious debate. I appreciated his recognition that the science he lauds can be used to create weapons of bioterror, but I was only mildly comforted by his assurance that it would be very difficult for terrorists to create a pandemic by weaponizing a flu strain. At one point it would have been thought difficult to fly hijacked jets into the World Trade Center, but that didn't stop it from happening. In any event, I'm more concerned about the unforeseen consequences of developing new life forms than the potential consequences that scientists are able to recognize and minimize. While I sympathize and largely agree with the view that the potential benefits of synthetic biology (including the eradication of certain diseases and even of famine) will often outweigh its risks, I wonder if there is reason to tread more carefully, and with greater oversight, than Rutherford would like.

Kudos to Rutherford, however, for calling attention to those issues. I might not entirely agree with his policy analyses, but I'm not denying Creation's value. It's readable, informative, and stimulating, and it contributes to a debate that needs to be robust.

RECOMMENDED