The Killing Hour by Paul Cleave

Published by Atria Books on April 23, 2013 

The Killing Hour takes place in Christchurch, New Zealand. An author's note tells us that the novel was originally written as a horror story. It didn't sell and, to make it marketable, Paul Cleave rewrote it as a crime novel. The Killing Hour retains the creepy feel of a horror story, which is good and bad. Good because creepy is fun, bad because the creepy events that transpire in horror stories tend to be predictable.

Charlie Feldman's story -- the confusing story he tells Jo, the wife who separated from him six months earlier when he beat up a man in a bar -- is that he met a blood-covered woman on the road who told him her friend was being held by a lunatic. He went into the forest at night and found a woman tied to a tree being threatened with a metal stake by a guy named Cyris. He thought he killed Cyris but now Cyris is after him. The rest of Charlie's improbable story is unveiled, bit-by-bit, as the novel progresses. Having watched the news, both Charlie and Jo know that two women were recently found dead. Charlie, with good reason, worries that he'll be the prime suspect in their murders. Jo becomes embroiled in his ordeal as she -- like the reader -- wonders whether Charlie is a delusional murderer or an improbable victim.

The case is assigned to Detective Inspector Bill Landry who, with six months to live, has no incentive to follow the rules of criminal investigation. He's becoming a guy who is willing to do bad things for good reasons, a trait he despises in others. Mistaking vigilantism for justice, Landry makes it his mission to rid the world of Charlie. As a Dirty Harry wannabe, Landry is a stereotype, but he's more interesting than most stereotypical vigilante cops.

The first half of The Killing Hour, with all its unanswered questions, engages the reader's mind. The second half requires little thought, including a final chapter in which Charlie struggles (but not for long) with a moral decision. The plot isn't particularly believable, given its dependence on an evil character who has an almost superhuman ability to endure pain and survive injuries that would kill most people, but that's become standard thriller fare. The vestiges of the horror novel this once was, including a couple of ghosts, could have been eliminated entirely without doing harm to the story.

The Killing Hour is predictable and formulaic, but it's also fast moving and enjoyable (at least for fans of mayhem). The action scenes in The Killing Hour are vivid, particularly the gruesome ones. The excitement factor is high even if the story holds no surprises. Predictable endings can still be satisfying, and that holds true as The Killing Hour's relentless violence finally reaches a climax. Had The Killing Hour maintained the suspense it generates in the first half, it would have been a better novel, but as it stands, it isn't bad.

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The Slippage by Ben Greenman

Published by Harper Perennial on April 23, 2013

In its penetrating exploration of a suburban couple in an aging marriage, The Slippage seems like a book Jim Harrison would write if Harrison used commas.  Like Harrison, Ben Greenman laces his novel with wry humor and editorial observations.  For instance:  “Mystery was for people whose desire to make life better outweighed their fear that it might become worse.”

The Slippage opens with a party, hosted by William and Louisa for Louisa’s brother Tom, who becomes embarrassingly drunk while Louisa hides from her guests.  William and Louisa are both suffocating in their marriage.  Louisa deals with it by buying real estate and lobbying William to build a new house.  William “had put the paddles to his slowly dying heart” a year earlier in the usual way, but now the object of his infidelity is moving into his neighborhood, making neighborhood parties even more awkward than usual.

Tom makes art from graphs (some of which end in a fiery crash).  He’s the novel’s philosopher.  When William confesses about a dramatic moment at work that he’s keeping hidden from Louisa, Tom tells him that people “receive one stimulus and produce another, and eventually it all adds up to life, or what people call life.”  Nothing can be planned; it just happens.  The slippage, according to Tom, is “the moment when you start to lose your footing.”  Nearly every character in the novel seems to be on the verge of experiencing the slippage.  When William has a philosophical moment of his own, he realizes that there’s too much to existence; William can’t get a grasp on even “a miniscule portion” of it.  He’d like to exist as unconscious matter, like a sidewalk.  William isn’t really participating in life; things happen and he goes with the flow, but seems powerless to direct it.

Greenman captures his characters with a few choice words.  Louisa is “a thick gray brush overpainting all other colors.”  A new salesman in William’s office is “the kind of man who looked at a spot before he sat down in it.”  The Slippage is written without wasted words, but Greenman fills it with images that manage to be understated and powerful at the same time.

In part, The Slippage is about male bonding (Tom and William) and the erosion of the bond between a man and his wife.  To a greater extent, The Slippage is about the question “Why?”  Why do people act behave they do -- irrationally, impulsively, destructively?  As Louisa asks, “Are there ever real reasons?”  The novel ends shortly after a startling, disturbing moment in their lives -- another dramatic event that is beyond William’s control -- quickly followed by still another revelation that alters William’s perspective of his life.  Maybe Greenman's point in this thought-provoking novel -- as Louisa speculates -- is that we do the unexpected to prove we’re alive, to convince ourselves that we’re casting a shadow.

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Code White by Scott Britz-Cunningham

Published by Forge Books on April 9, 2013 

I winced a few times as I read Code White. It's a reasonably good thriller with some serious flaws.

Dr. Ali O'Day is pregnant and she's not quite sure whether that condition was caused by her husband Kevin or her head of neurosurgery, Richard Helvelius. Kevin, a software geek, has been working with Helvelius to develop an artificially intelligent gadget called SIPNI that, when implanted into the brain, will enhance or replace designated neurological functions. Kevin (who shares his lab with a lock-picking monkey) has also created a chatty, argumentative Artificial Intelligence he calls Odin. It's obvious from the opening pages that Kevin and Odin are up to something nefarious.

Helvelius and Ali hope that the first implantation of SIPNI will restore eyesight to a young boy named Jamie. Harry Lewton, in charge of hospital security, deals with a bomb threat during Jamie's surgery that was allegedly made by a Muslim terrorist group. Ali's Muslim brother is a suspect in the bomb threat, making Ali the unluckiest doctor to ever star in a thriller, with both a husband and a brother who seem to be involved in evil schemes.

I give Scott Britz-Cunningham credit for imagining a clever (if not entirely believable) scheme that involves greed and revenge. As you might expect from a medical thriller, the best scenes, those with the most tension, take place in the operating room. Many other aspects of Code White are well done. When it focuses on the present, the story moves at a crisp pace and generates the kind of tension that readers hope to find in a thriller. The interaction between the bullying FBI agents and Ali is convincing, as are the scenes involving security teams responding to the bomb threat.

Although Britz-Cunningham's prose style is competent, it occasionally betrays an amateurishness that marks this as the work of a first time author. Stilted dialog reads as if it were borrowed from a 1940s movie. Characters who lack a medical school education tend to speak as if they were hillbillies. Harry tells a story about his life as a cop that's intended to humanize him, but it's too ridiculous to believe. Harry's mother is a patient in the hospital, a heavy-handed attempt to create sympathy for Harry. Too many expository paragraphs, often telling us about a character's past, interrupt the story's flow. Britz-Cunningham's characters have summative conversations for the benefit of the reader when, in real life, they would have no reason to tell each other things they already know. Doctors deliver lectures (as doctors tend to do) which also impede the drama. At some point the bad guy explains the scheme in an improbable flood of words -- improbable because the confession imperils the scheme. Conversations about romance tend to be cheesy and Ali's discussion of her motherly feelings about Jamie is completely over the top, as are the mishmashed love stories, all centered on Ali.

In the end, although the out-of-control-computer scenario has been done to death, my enjoyment of large parts of the story outweighs those parts that made me cringe. Code White is a capable effort and a promising start for a thriller writer. Britz-Cunningham knows how to generate excitement, but he needs to learn how to sustain it as he develops his characters. If he sticks to medical themes, stays away from overdone plots, and learns to polish his prose a bit, he'll become a noteworthy writer.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Published in translation by Penguin Books on January 29, 2013 

"There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn't stop." That sentence, from Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "A Murky Fate," encapsulates the desperately conflicted women who haunt her bittersweet stories. A woman in Moscow dresses up for New Year's Eve but has nowhere to go. A woman tries to commit suicide after a man she picks up in a bar pees the bed. A woman grows up in such a tormented household that, after leaving, no amount of adversity can cast a shadow upon her happiness. A girl walks like a soldier with her arms down at her sides to hide the sweat stains in the armpits of her mother's hand-me-down dress. A few minutes of "half-naked passion on the cramped kitchen sofa" lead to childbirth and a "grim foreboding" about a "softhearted boy without will or ambition."

Nearly all the stories in this volume are about women. A few of the women (usually friends or relatives of the main character) are shrews. Some are emotionally or mentally stunted. Most are victims -- of abuse or poverty or incest or unfaithful lovers. Nearly all of them persevere; they have no choice. Some of the stories are dark comedies, others are just dark. Occasionally the stories are about women in full but, in many cases, we see only small, eventful slices of their lives. Some of the stories left me wanting more, some are more insightful than others, a couple seem pointless, but the best ones are a powerful indictment of a society that places little value on impoverished women, and a wry examination of women who do not adequately value themselves. If the stories have a shared message, it isn't "love conquers all" -- for Petrushevskaya's women, love simply conquers.  It defeats them.

My favorite story, "Tamara's Baby," is about an arrogant, parasitic man and the elderly woman who treats him like a child. Two other standouts are "Young Berries," which tells of a girl who survives the cruelty of her fellow students and gains the appreciation of a boy, and the ironically titled "A Happy Ending," about a woman who has a plan to leave the husband (she calls him "Clapper") who gave her gonorrhea.

Petrushevskaya tells her stories in prose that derives power from its simplicity and shrewdness. She is an eloquent spokeswoman for the Russian women who suffered the horrors of totalitarian oppression, drunken husbands, indifferent employers, and uncaring families.

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Follow Her Home by Steph Cha

Published by Minotaur Books on April 16, 2013

Lucas Cook suspects his wealthy father is having an affair with a young Korean woman named Lori. Lucas' best friend, Juniper Song, agrees to snoop around. She's a long-time Philip Marlowe fan and relishes the chance to play detective. Before long there's a corpse in her trunk and she's receiving death threats. All in a day's work for Marlowe, but not much fun for Juniper. A new complication arises when Juniper meets a real private investigator whose sister suspects that her husband is sleeping with Lori. The dead guy in the trunk also had a thing for Lori. Is Lori a butterfly who flits from man to man, or does she play a more sinister role in the killings that occur as the story unfolds?

A subplot, told in flashbacks, concerns Juniper's sister Iris, who became involved with an older teacher with a fetish for young Asian girls. Its primary interest lies in the way Juniper's experience with Iris shapes her response to Lori's suspected affair with Lucas' father.

Steph Cha is no Raymond Chandler -- she doesn't achieve the level of suspense for which she was striving -- but she tells a good story. I didn't get the impression that Juniper ever felt endangered or disturbed, although she tells us about feeling rattled and afraid. She's just too glib, too nonchalant, to convey the sense that she's really fearful. Even when Cha darkens the story with unexpected death, Follow Her Home is missing the grittiness and fatalism of true noir.

It may be that, Raymond Chandler references notwithstanding, Cha wasn't aiming for noir. As Juniper notes, Philip Marlowe lived in a world that broke his heart every day. Juniper is (and wants to be) a sunnier person than Marlowe. Tellingly, Juniper comments that the mystery genre is "too shiny, fake, and cardboard, with implausible plots and ciphers for people." I suspect Cha set out to write a mystery that would defy that description, and she largely succeeded. Cha doesn't overreach. The plot stays within the boundaries of credibility and (except for Juniper's bland reaction whenever she's facing death), the characters react in believable ways. Mildly surprising revelations toward the novel's end bring the story to a satisfying resolution. While I would like to experience a greater sense of urgency in a novel entitled Follow Her Home, the story accomplishes Cha's goal, despite the muted suspense: the plot is clever without becoming shiny, fake, or cardboard, and the characters are easy to understand.

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