SEVEN DEMONS
Truhen, Aidan Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 4, 2021 978-0-593-31162-2 At a moment of great inconvenience for international coke dealer and allaround scourge Jack Price—he and his gang of irregulars, the Seven Demons, have united to rob a high-security bank on a Swiss mountaintop—people are out
to kill him. The novel, narrated by Price, opens with a psychopathic 9-year-old boy named Evil Hansel stabbing him in the thigh with an oyster knife. Even after the kid—“a little Sound of Music–looking motherfucker in actual lederhosen”—is literally thrown under a car, he remains one of an array of cutthroats the Demons must deal with. One of Price’s tactics is to fake his death and assume the identity of Banjo Telemark, an artist and “ambiguitionist” who specializes in “tearing down the world’s certainty.” Under his own assumed name, Truhen is consumed with tearing down the language of genre fiction. There is a bit of plot and mayhem (“Please don’t explode my balls,” pleads one sad case). And a trickle of honest emotion leaks from Price and Doc, a scary woman with whom he has a “Nietzschean and highly charged sexual relationship.” But spritzed à la Lenny Bruce by the motor-mouthed Price, the book is mostly an epic word bath roiled by badass attitude, wild digressions, pitying self-analysis, and colorful sound effects (including a pig’s scream). While the rampaging verbiage can be highly entertaining—think of John Kennedy Toole colliding with James Ellroy on TikTok—good luck trying to keep up. By the time you reach this mountaintop, you may well want to spend some quiet time with a book of haiku. A postmodern heist novel with charged wordplay but flickering narrative.
THE HIDDEN PALACE
Wecker, Helene Harper/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $28.99 | Jun. 8, 2021 978-0-06-246871-0 Wecker returns, eight years after The Golem and the Jinni, with a sequel that brings the saga into the 20th century. In a blend of romance, Mary Shelley–esque horror, and folklore, Wecker recounts the continuing adventures of Chava, the Jewish golem, and Ahmad, the Arabian jinni. Bound to each other by love, they have nonetheless parted long enough for Ahmad to have had a brief affair with a human. “I wasn’t careful enough. I made her ill, permanently. I’m not certain how it happened, I only know that I was the cause,” he confesses to Chava. And now, Sophia Winston, known as Saffiyah 40
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among the Bedouins she visits—“Saffiyah the stranger, Saffiyah the afflicted”—has a big problem: Having been touched by the jinni, the spirit of pure fire, she can’t get warm, even in the blast furnace of the desert, where, among other historical characters, she runs into a certain Thomas E. Lawrence— soon to be known as Lawrence of Arabia—and Gertrude Bell. Meanwhile, back in New York, Chava, now known as Chava Levy, and Ahmad find each other again, performing miraculous labors, she as a champion baker who, of course, doesn’t need to sleep and he as an “iron-bound” figure in human form who works diligently, in self-imposed exile, for a Syrian immigrant tinsmith. Not far away, a rabbi happens upon a secret book that contains the recipe for making a golem—a project fraught with peril but one that turns out to be helpful to his daughter, Kreindel, after bad fortune lands her in an orphanage. Kreindel is the most resourceful of the characters Wecker sets into motion in this tale, and she knows a golem when she sees one, including the one who teaches her home ec. Wecker skillfully combines the storylines of these and numerous other players, good and evil, in a story that, while self-contained, gives every promise of being continued. An enchanting tale that, though demanding lots of suspended disbelief, pleases on every page.
JACKPOT
Woods, Stuart & Quertermous, Bryon Putnam (320 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 1, 2021 978-0-593-18845-3 CIA operative–turned-killer Teddy Fay, aka Hollywood producer Billy Barnett, gets his fifth sort-of-starring role in a splashy, muddled thriller set in Macau. Centurion Studios president Ben Bacchetti and his partner, director Peter Barrington, see no reason why their visit to the Macau Film Festival should be all business. They’re dismayed when their visit to a baccarat table at the Golden Desert Casino and Resort is used as material for a deep-fake video that seems to show them cheating. The video, which has evidently been engineered by Bing-Wen “Bingo” Jo, bids fair drag them into the iron grip of fearsome media/casino mogul Arrow Donaldson, for whom Bingo works off the books on matters concerning digital technology and violence. But Centurion producer Teddy, who’s every bit the equal of Bingo and Donaldson fixer Zhou “Ziggy” Peng put together, is on the case. His improbable sometime partners are Li Feng, the heiress and CFO of QuiTel who’s fighting to keep her company exempt from the U.S. blacklist of competing Chinese telecom corporations suspected of spying, and Millie Martindale, a CIA administrator who’s a lot more resourceful than most administrators you’ll ever meet. The first partnership between Woods and Quertermous is full of casino underlings, biddable cops, fake shootings, and doubles living and dead. But the plot never thickens, and readers confident that Teddy will live to fight, pressure, cheat, and kill another day may be
