The Inner City by Karen Heuler

Published by ChiZine Publications on February 26, 2013

A woman finds trouble when she sneaks into a business in New York City that vexes residents by stealing their parking spaces, trimming space from their apartments, and messing up their utility bills. Girls who have been manufactured with genes taken from dogs are playful and have limited attention spans, but they can be trained to do simple tasks if rewarded with treats. A tightrope walker meets an angel on her tightrope. A woman falls in love with a fish that grants her a wish. A girl sews pieces of meat together to reassemble an ungrateful cow. A man begins to walk lightly -- so lightly that he worries about floating away.

Strange stories? Yes. Yet the stories are told with wit and imagination. Some are dark, but even when things don't work out for the characters (really, if a fish wants to grant your wish, just walk away), the stories often reveal an underlying optimism.

Three stories stand out:

"The Great Spin" - When the Rapture comes, can the people who get left behind lay claim to all the stuff that belonged to the newly departed? And who will take care of their dogs? The irreverent kid who asks those questions (my kind of kid) may have been chosen for the Rapture -- or he may be a random victim of misfortune -- forcing his religious buddy to face a crisis of faith.

"Thick Water" - Explorers "go native" on an alien world, eating the thick water. A scientist left inside the dome, the only one left unchanged, wonders what to do.

"Beds" - Every day a bed disappears from a hospital ward, taken away on a truck, selected by doctors using unknown criteria. None of the patients want to be in that bed.

Some of the stories, including one about environmentalists dressed in business attire who grow out of the ground like cornstalks and eat salads made of cash, are a bit fanciful for my taste. Some are cute but insubstantial. A couple just didn't work for me. But every story is well-written, most are amusing, and the best are infused with meaning that belies their lightness.

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The Money Kill by Katia Lief

Published by Harper on March 26, 2013

The Money Kill is the fourth in a series of novels featuring ex-cop Karin Schaeffer, who is married to ex-cop Seamus "Mac" MacLeary.  Karin and Mac are private detectives in Brooklyn. They need money and, unexpectedly, two cases come along that give them a lift. The wife of a wealthy man in Greenwich, Connecticut hires Mac to find evidence of her husband's affair. Shortly after he takes the case, a large detective agency approaches Mac with an offer to send him to London for a quick bit of investigative work. The offer includes the opportunity to do a house swap in Italy, an inducement that sells Karin on the idea, particularly when their office mate Mary agrees to join them on their family vacation. Mac's "too good to be true" radar should have beeped, but people in need of cash tend to ignore their common sense, so I suppose it's credible that Mac accepts the assignment without question.

As is the convention in thrillers, intrigue in London and Sardinia arises that is related to the intrigue in Greenwich, prompting the reader to guess at what the connection will be. The connection struck me as farfetched, even by thriller standards. It also struck me as odd (given her law enforcement background) that Karin's idea of investigating a crime that threatened her family included drinking wine and reading a Lonely Planet guidebook. At times I had the impression that Katia Lief was drinking wine and consulting Lonely Planet as she wrote the novel. Her colorless descriptions of Sardinia fail to evoke a sense of being present in a foreign land.

As the novel enters its second half, unlikely events continue to mount. Without spoiling any plot developments, I'll just say that a person who clearly could not have committed a crime is charged with the crime for no reason other than to advance the plot. Making that happen requires the conspiracy to move in increasingly improbable directions, with no explanation of the benefit the conspirators gain from their participation. Someone obtains information about Mac's investigation and takes action to thwart it with no explanation of the information's discovery, beyond the vague speculation that "people in high places" must be in on the coverup. The conspiracy that eventually unfolds, involving a number of (mostly unidentified) public officials in two countries, isn't as pervasive (or as carefully detailed) as a Ludlum conspiracy, but it is sufficiently vast to stretch the boundaries of credibility. Still, I'm willing to swallow my doubt for the sake of a good story, and this story is at least passably good.

Point of view frequently shifts between Mac and Karin. While this tends to cause momentary confusion (their narrative voices are not distinctive), it also highlights the gender-based differences in the way those characters react to each other, to their situation, and to the people around them. Mac, Karin, and Mary bring an international cast of children to the novel, but they add little of interest to the story despite the central role they play in it. Given their underdeveloped personalities, they seem more like literary decorations than actual children.

Lief's writing style is competent, although a number of characters engage in banal chatter that comes across as filler. The story has the elements of a good thriller but it lacks pizzazz. The excitement factor is muted. Apart from one innovative scene involving Mac and a later scene involving Mary, I never had the sense that any character I cared about was truly at risk. Still, Lief develops a modest level of tension as the novel winds to its conclusion. The Money Kill isn't as absorbing as I would like a thriller to be, but it's a quick read and the last chapters add a couple of surprise twists that redeem the novel by bringing the story to a satisfying and unexpected conclusion.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Doughnut by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on March 5, 2013 

Doughnut is a playful take on the multiverse hypothesis. If you can travel between universes, does that make you a god?

Theo Bernstein is an unlikely god. Theo put a decimal point in the wrong place and the Very Very Large Hadron Collider blew up, along with some of Switzerland, so now Theo is looking for a job. That the accident left his right arm invisible only makes it more difficult for him to secure employment. Theo eventually returns to Switzerland to pick up a mysterious bottle bequeathed to him by Pieter van Goyen, a recently deceased colleague. The trip becomes more interesting when he meets a girl on a train who shows him some equations before she vanishes. Theo soon finds himself in YouSpace, sort of like Second Life combined with Westworld except that his destinations all seem to be random (and dangerous) points in the multiverse. A note left by Pieter tells Theo to have fun with it. Fun is pretty much out of the question.

Pieter's note also directs Theo to a job at a hotel that has only two (odd, mysterious) guests, where he works alongside (odd, mysterious) Matasuntha and her (odd, mysterious) boss. As Theo explores the multiverse, barely escaping multiple deaths (or not), he finds himself interacting with his a-hole brother and mentally ill sister, further enhancing his misery.

Theo is a likable if somewhat hapless protagonist, stuck with a dysfunctional family and used as a pawn by people he thought were his friends, making it easy to root for his success. As is often true of science fiction stories, whether Theo will prevail depends upon his ability to outwit everyone else.

Some aspects of Doughnut are hilarious, particularly when Tom Holt pokes fun at Microsoft. The overall story is clever, funny, and deep enough to provoke thought about the multiverse hypothesis without bogging down in discussions of science that may or may not be sound. I'm not sure the science (as Holt explains it) entirely makes sense (I'm skeptical about the invisible arm) but I am sure it doesn't matter. The point of comedy is to be funny, and Doughnut consistently made me smile.

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All the Light There Was by Nancy Kricorian

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 12, 2013 

The best stories illustrating the hardship and suffering of war are personal, and that's how All the Light There Was begins. For Maral Pegorian's family in occupied Paris, the war is about hunger, curfews and boredom. When Maral's Jewish neighbors are being rounded up by Germans, Maral's family -- survivors of the Armenian Genocide -- hide a neighbor's baby. Similar scenes have been written many times before, and this one highlights the problem with the Nancy Kricorian's novel: for the most part, Maral is nothing more than an observer describing events from which she often seems distant. When the war finally has a predictable impact on Maral's life, it does so in a way that seems forced.

The members of Maral's family are familiar: the sullen, proverb-spouting father, the tearful/fearful mother, the spinster aunt, the reckless brother. In her desire to illustrate the importance of family in Armenian culture, Kricorian gives scant attention to the individuality of family members. Each member plays a defined role but no member behaves in a surprising or unexpected way. They give each other hope, and Kricorian's point seems to be that families exist for that purpose. It's a valid point, but again, a point that has been made many times in similar ways.

What Maral knows of the war, or for that matter of her boyfriend's fate when he is captured after playing a murky role in the French Resistance, comes from her brother Missak, whose role in the novel is to disappear for awhile and then reappear with a news bulletin. The novel might have been more engrossing if it had been built around Missak, who at least seems to know what's going on around him. Maral spends quite a bit of the novel worrying about her hairstyle which, regardless of the importance of her hair to her heritage, makes for less than riveting fiction.

The romance between Maral and her boyfriend is based on predictable scenes: walks in the park, initials carved into a tree, the tentative first kiss, Maral writing variations of her (anticipated) married name in her notebook. The scenes are written in fine prose but they're unimaginative.

Of greater interest is the response in the Armenian community to Armenians who play different roles in the war. Some join the French Resistance; some of those are apprehended and executed. Some, formerly in the Soviet Army and captured by the Germans, join the Wehrmacht (at the urging of an Armenian war hero) as an alternative to the starvation of POW camps. For their families, the question that arises is not easily answered: Is it better to die as a martyr or to survive as a coward? And then, when Paris is finally liberated, Armenian-American soldiers appear and everyone eats lamb and drinks raki in celebration. I expected more to be made of the theme of conflicting Armenian roles in the war -- the most interesting in the novel, I thought -- but it isn't well developed.

Instead, the novel's drama (such as it is) stems from the various Armenian suitors who woo Maral and the choice she must make among them. Once again, the novel follows a plotline that is all too familiar. Since the suitors are virtually indistinguishable from one another, Kricorian gave me no reason to cheer for any of them or to care about the choice that Maral ultimately makes. Her disappointingly banal insights about the need to sacrifice "true love" for "duty" are just as unoriginal as the story, which ends with chapters that are both contrived and dull.

Kricorian is a capable writer. Her prose is graceful and occasionally she crafts a scene that's quite touching. Her insights into Armenian culture are interesting. Unfortunately, much of the story she tells is not.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 5, 2013

Both history and biography, The Black Russian is sort of a Horatio Alger story with a twist. Hard work and perseverance are the formula for success, but in this case success was possible for a black American only because he became an entrepreneur in Russia, where his race was not an obstacle to achievement.

Born in the Mississippi Delta to recently freed slaves, Frederick Thomas was raised in a successful farm family. Unlike many Delta blacks, Thomas was given the opportunity to discover that there was more to life than "an endless cycle of labor, food, and sleep." When his father and stepmother lost their property to an unscrupulous white landowner -- a swindle that was partially rectified after a protracted legal battle -- Thomas learned how quickly the course of a life can change. More than once, his own life followed a similar "rags-to-riches-to-rags" pattern.

Supporting himself with service jobs in restaurants and hotels, Thomas made his way to Chicago and then to Brooklyn. He escaped American racism by moving to London and then to Paris. Thomas worked his way through Europe, refining his skills in the restaurant and hotel trades, and in 1899 made his way to Russia. Thomas eventually settled in Moscow, an ethnically diverse city that drew no color lines. In 1912 he entered into a partnership to turn an old Moscow theater into a classy establishment that offered fine dining, dancing, and stage entertainment. By the end of its first season, Thomas was a rich man. His success encouraged him to make new investments.

To protect himself (and his businesses) from the consequences of war, Thomas became a Russian citizen in 1915. Just two years later, in a time of revolution, his status as a "prosperous bourgeois capitalist" worked against him. To avoid arrest, he made a perilous journey from Moscow to Odessa, but he was still at risk. Fortunately, Thomas never informed the United States of his new citizenship and neither did Russia, omissions that benefited Thomas when, in 1919, having lost the wealth he accumulated over twenty years to the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled Odessa with the help of the American consul.

At the age of forty-seven, virtually penniless, Thomas arrived in Constantinople determined to reinvent himself. An influx of Westerners created opportunities that Thomas was positioned to exploit. Thomas knew how to provide the elegant and sophisticated food and entertainment that wealthy foreigners craved and that conservative Turks condemned. Despite complications caused by an ex-wife and a racist American bureaucrat, Thomas was able to replicate (at least to some degree) his success in the entertainment industry. After a few years, however, it became clear that Thomas had escaped from one volatile political situation only to find himself in the midst of another. Denied the benefits of an American passport, apparently due to a combination of racism and incompetence in a State Department that refused to acknowledge his American birth, Thomas was stuck in Constantinople. He ended his days in prison, unable to pay the debts that accumulated after the Turkish government made a point of sabotaging foreign enterprises.

The Black Russian makes clear that Thomas was a remarkable man. He had as many successes and failures as Donald Trump (although, unlike Trump, he couldn't rely on bankruptcy courts to rescue him from hard times). His successful introduction of jazz to his clientele in both Moscow and Constantinople seems both visionary and quixotic. Yet as a biography, The Black Russian is curiously detached from its subject. We see hints of Thomas' personality from time to time (sometimes boastful, sometimes devious, and oddly unattached to his children), but I never got the sense of knowing Thomas as a person.

The Black Russian is clearly the product of meticulous research. History is often based on inference, but Vladimir Alexandrov is careful to distinguish between known and assumed facts. There are times when the book threatens to bog down with detail, and several collateral passages come across as filler that have little to do with Thomas' life. Still, the book isn't dull. While Alexandrov's writing style isn't always lively, it is neither dry nor overly academic. Although The Black Russian is filled with census data and other statistics, Alexandrov gives careful attention to the cultural atmosphere that surrounded Thomas, both in the United States and abroad. Alexandrov paints a descriptive picture of the entertainment business in both Moscow and Constantinople, underscoring the contrast between their repressive governance and the public's lust for the things their leaders condemned as decadent. In short, The Black Russian tells an interesting and informative -- but not particularly captivating -- story of a largely unknown American entrepreneur who found success in surprising environments. 

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