The Scent of Pine by Lara Vapnyar

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 7, 2014

The Scent of Pine offers the reader a slice from a woman's life. Lena (an academic who teaches at a community college) might be too dreary for some readers, but the novel offers a valuable glance at her (dreary) life. Fortunately, the novel is brief and the dreariness is partially offset by Lena's lively stories about her job in a Soviet Union summer camp.

The novel takes place over the course of a few days as Lena tries to "solve the mystery of her present unhappiness." Twenty years earlier, when Lena was a student in the Soviet Union who just met her friend Inka, happiness seemed inevitable. Now, having lived with her husband Vadim in the United States for ten years, happiness seems impossible, particularly when she attends a conference to give a talk on Sex Education in Soviet Russia that nobody attends.

Lena meets Ben at the conference. Ben offers to drive Lena back to Boston and then to his leaky cabin in Maine. Along the way, Lena tells Ben (and thus the reader) the stories of her life. In the process, she explores the nature of happiness, questions why the men in her life (including Vadim) have never made her happy and, as she starts to see her stories from Ben's perspective, begins to reinterpret her past. In turn, Ben tells his stories to Lena. But all stories come to an end and, when a comfortable intimacy begins to connect them, Lena wonders about the ending of the story of Ben and Lena.

Late in the novel, Lena learns the truth (or at least a different perspective of truth) behind some of the stories she's been telling Ben about the Soviet camp. Lena is forced again to reinterpret her own stories while the reader learns how the stories connect to her present life. The connection is meant to be surprising and it probably is, but only because Laura Vapnyar conceals a fact from the reader (and Ben) for the sole purpose of creating a surprise near the novel's end.

To some extent, The Scent of Pine is a familiar love story as Ben awakens feelings in Lena that she can't recall experiencing with Vadim. The story is slight but it has the virtue of honesty. Fear of love is the novel's best theme. Lena fears love, not only because love hurts, but because it gives her the power to hurt someone else. Ben says: "practically every single thing that we do is either to distract ourselves from what is wrong with our lives, or to please somebody else, or to shield ourselves from reproaches and guilt" which causes us to live in cocoons, but emerging from the cocoon inevitably hurts someone, so we retreat to its safety and loneliness. It's a sad but not uncommon way of living and Vapnyar depicts it convincingly.

As a slice of life, The Scent of Pine lacks the heft of a more substantial novel. Despite its limitations and the rather colorless scenes that take place in the present, Vapnyar's prose style is graceful and the novel offers significant insight into its characters without overreaching. Those benefits make The Scent of Pine worth reading.

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The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani

Published by Penguin Books on January 7, 2014

Las Vegas is a city of fantasy, making it a fitting setting for a novel that uses elements of myth and fantasy to illuminate truth and reality. With casinos that replicate Paris and Venice and ancient Egypt, Las Vegas (Chris Abani theorizes) is searching for a myth that will validate its existence, a link to a place with deeper and more substantial roots. Abani posits that Las Vegas has given birth to "submerged and subterranean cultures" filled with "the fevered men who so desperately wanted those myths to be true." It is also a city that attracts lost souls. Myths and lost souls provide the background for The Secret History of Las Vegas, an original and perceptive blend of humor and drama, fantasy and reality.

In one of the most interesting openings to a novel I've recently encountered, fused twin sons are born in the Nevada desert, two miles from an exploding nuclear bomb. Their mother names them Fire and Water. Years later, Water is a handsome adult, physically normal except for the head and partial body of Fire that sprouts from his side.

Meeting Fire and Water unnerves Detective Salazar. He wants to detain them as suspects in a series of unsolved killings but, lacking good cause, decides to hold them for observation by a mental health expert. He calls upon the novel's central character, Sunil Singh, a researcher at a private Las Vegas institute who is studying psychopathic behavior. Half Zulu, half Indian, and displaced from South Africa, Sunil thinks of Las Vegas as home. It is, at least, fertile ground for his study of psychopaths.

Beyond its beginning, I won't describe the plot, lest its craziness put you off (and also to avoid spoiling the pleasure of the surprises it holds). Suffice it to say that it involves past and present loves stories and a hit man who has a grudge against Sunil. At times it seems like a parody of a thriller. At other times it becomes a serious novel about race and injustice. The characters are just as unpredictable as the plot. No matter how familiar they are (the hooker with the heart of gold, the police detective on the verge of retirement who is frustrated by an unsolved crime), Abani twists them into less recognizable (but strangely believable) shapes. Fire and Water are hilarious, at least if you appreciate humor that is offbeat, slightly absurdist, and somewhat dark. Water responds to questions with not-quite-relevant trivia while Fire responds with sarcasm.

Yet for all the humor, The Secret History of Las Vegas is a serious commentary on the impact of apartheid on its victims. While races around the world are slowly blending together into a "sepia of tolerance," Sunil's life in South Africa was shaped by the racial classifications marked on South African identity documents carried by nonwhites, "the backbone of apartheid." The dangers and indignities of Soweto, the evils that he saw and that he perpetrated, are never far removed from Sunil's memories. At the same time, he has grown weary of people who wear trauma like a badge, vying for the distinction of belonging to the group that suffered the most, as if "tallying an impossible math" will arrive at a meaningful result.

In addition to the myths of Las Vegas, Sunil recalls the myths of South Africa, particularly the Sorrow Tree, which "could bear everyone's pain for a short while." All the novel's characters are bearing pain but they manage to find respites from pain, often by coming together, as people do when they gather at the Sorrow Tree. Sunil is searching for his own myth, the fictional story that will explain the truth of his life. Abani furthers that theme by incorporating a fairy tale from Sunil's childhood that is a thinly veiled version of a true story. Myth, illusion, fantasy, and varying versions of reality all stir together in Abani's fresh, eccentric, funny, moving, and thoroughly entertaining novel.

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Game by Anders de la Motte

Published in Sweden in 2010; published in translation by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 3, 2013

The concept of using a game to manipulate human behavior isn't new, but Game creates a more carefully-conceived purpose for the game than is common in thrillers that make use of that theme. Mix that with another well-used theme (global conspiracy) and you have a novel that entertains if you're prepared to abandon all reason and enjoy the action. By that measure, Game works reasonably well.

Henrik Pettersson (known to his few friends as HP) is over thirty but still a kid. When finds a cellphone that asks him if he wants to play a game, he agrees. There's money in it and even a modest measure of fame. Besides, HP is a sociopath who enjoys causing mayhem and that's what the game is about. As the reader would expect, the tasks he is assigned to perform escalate from pranks to serious crime and HP soon finds that treating life as a game has consequences, particularly when you're only a pawn.

The novel's other primary character, Rebecca Normén, is glad that her ex is dead, but she isn't happy that her little brother was convicted of causing the death for which she holds herself accountable. Ironically, Rebecca joined the Police Academy shortly after her ex died. Now she's with the Sweden's Security Police, assigned to guard political officials. Her life quickly and repeatedly intersects with the game that HP is playing.

HP compares his situation to the plots of a couple of conspiracy movies as well as Mission Impossible. He also recalls the famous airplane scene in North by Northwest when an airplane chases him. I think those references are Anders de la Motte's way of reminding us not to take the story too seriously. It's meant to be a fun diversion and on that level, it succeeds. HP is an anti-social jerk but he has just enough of a conscience to earn the reader's grudging sympathy. In a predictable but satisfying way, he becomes more likable as the novel progresses. I like the idea of making the central character a sociopath even if (to assure that the reader cheers for him) he's a sociopath who develops empathy. Rebecca is likable from the start, and the cause of her remorse -- the role she actually played in her ex's death -- gives the reader something to ponder until the unsurprising truth is finally revealed.

Nothing about Game takes it into the top tier of thrillers -- the prose is ordinary, the plot is a retread, the characters are familiar -- but the story moves quickly, maintains interest, and entertains. Game isn't a book I would read twice, but it made me look forward to the next installment in the trilogy.

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The Purity of Vengeance by Jussi Adler-Olsen

First published in Denmark in 2010; published in translation by Dutton on December 31, 2013

The difficulty with revenge, particularly when served cold, is that people change. What seems like just retribution may turn out to be a harsh judgment visited upon a repentant transgressor who seeks (and deserves) forgiveness. The lesson of The Purity of Vengeance is that revenge is a dish best not served.

Between 1923 and 1961, a number of women in Denmark who were deemed genetically inferior -- ostensibly "feeble-minded," the women were often regarded as dangerously promiscuous, particularly if they became pregnant -- were institutionalized on an island called Sprogø. There they were subjected to forced abortions and sterilizations. This dark history provides the foundation for The Purity of Vengeance.

The woman seeking revenge is Nete Hermansen, who (with good reason) blames six people for the various misfortunes she has suffered throughout her life. In 1987, a couple of years after her angry husband dies in an accident that she survives, Nete writes a letter to each of the six with a promise to make them wealthy. During the course of the novel, we learn what those individuals did to Nete and what Nete did to them.

Interwoven with Nete's story is a missing persons investigation that takes place in 2010, undertaken by Carl Mørck, who is still stuck in the basement with Assad and schizophrenic Rose, his underlings in Department Q. And interwoven with the story of the investigation is the story of Curt Wad, who is still practicing medicine at 88, talking Nordic women out of having abortions while doing quite the opposite with women he regards as coming from an undesirable heritage. Wad is the driving force behind Denmark's Purity Party, a political movement of calcified ideas that is gaining ground in 2010.

The Purity of Vengeance does the things a good crime novel needs to do, and a little more. The plot is engaging although, until the very end, not particularly surprising. It nevertheless has a degree of depth that most thrillers lack. Building upon personalities established in the earlier Department Q novels, the characters have substance. Carl revisits (and continues to be haunted by) the moment of cowardice that branded him in The Keeper of Lost Causes, and we learn a bit more about the mysterious Assad (although just enough to make him even more enigmatic). Carl is going through some domestic drama (involving both his ex-wife and current girlfriend) that Jussi Adler-Olsen approaches with a light touch, preventing the novel from getting bogged down in maudlin issues of domestic strife. Even the vilest criminals have sympathetic moments, making them believable characters rather than caricatures of evil. Nete's motivation for her appalling behavior is especially easy to understand.

The downside to this novel is that it's longer than it needs to be, and the second half starts to drag a bit, but the pace picks up as the story nears its chilling conclusion. The Purity of Vengeance is a worthy addition to the ever-growing collection of Scandanavian crime fiction.

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The Tenth Circle by Jon Land

Published by Open Road Media on December 17, 2013

Beginning with a missing colony on Roanoke Island in 1590 (which left behind the word Croatoan) and continuing to the missing crew of the Mary Celeste in 1872 -- as well as Napoléon, who was counting on the cargo that the Mary Celeste was carrying, disguised as barrels of alcohol, to help him reclaim his empire -- it's clear that a new world-threatening danger is being unleashed, and that only Blaine McCracken can save the day.

Turning from the prologue the present: Israel's defense minister wants to destroy an Iranian nuclear complex but the Israeli military isn't up to the task of penetrating the heavily guarded underground facility. To whom does the defense minister turn? Blaine McCracken, of course. Following the formula of his earlier novels, Jon Land starts The Tenth Circle by having McCracken do something outlandish and, having lulled the reader into abandoning any sense of disbelief, moves on from there to the truly strange.

The new threat to America is, in some sense, the typical thriller threat -- Islamic terrorists are blowing up bridges and buildings all over the country -- but Land makes it interesting by giving the terrorists a new motive: a crazy Christian preacher with a murderous past who is stirring up religious bigotry and hatred against Muslims. Yet the true villains are not so easy to identify and the weapon they wield -- well, it isn't a dirty bomb or a deadly virus or other conventional thriller fare. Conventional isn't a word that comes to mind while reading a McCracken novel.

Land writes pure escapist fiction. This isn't the kind of story you want to think about too deeply. Very little in The Tenth Circle is believable. McCracken and his sidekick Johnny Wareagle are so close to being comic book superheroes that they should be wearing capes and masks. Does it make sense that Captain Seven, McCracken's mad scientist friend (who is more of a stoned scientist friend), just happens to have the Roanoke Island governor's journal from 1590 sitting on his desk when McCracken comes calling? No, but Land is one of the few writers who can craft a completely implausible plot that I completely enjoy.

The Tenth Circle moves like lightning on crack. Action scenes are vivid and original. Land never relies on clichéd phrases to tell his story. Dialog is amusing, particularly when McCracken is talking to Captain Seven. Although Land always plays it straight, he brings a tongue-in-cheek attitude to certain scenes (a group of senior citizens taking on armed commandos with bocce balls was one of my favorites). The Tenth Circle isn't serious literature or even a serious thriller, but it's seriously fun to read.

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