9 minute read
THE LIGHTNING ROD by Brad Meltzer
the lightning rod
with Alcott’s section memorably beginning with her calling Whitman “a shameless ass” and Whitman himself prone to more poetic reveries, as when he ponders the human cost of war: “I think there is a grand regiment of the dead, which is enlisting men and boys, white and black, from every corner of the nation.”
A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.
LITTLE NOTHINGS
Mayhew, Julie Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $26.00 | June 28, 2022 978-1-52660-634-1
A friendship is exposed as toxic during a luxury trip that ends in violence. Growing up, Liv had few friends, a fact that upset her mother, whose advice to her daughter was to “eat the fucking cake” and stop being so sensitive. So when she meets fellow mothers Binnie and Beth, she’s thrilled to finally be inducted into the seemingly mythic world of female friendship. Through play dates and book clubs, dinners and the occasional trip, the three are supportive of each other’s highs and lows as only true friends can be. When Beth introduces Ange to the group, she immediately finds a core role as listener and organizer. When Ange wants to plan a trip for all four of them and their families to Corfu, everything seems perfect. They can lounge and drink, get dressed up for dinner and comment cattily on the other guests. An accidental revelation about another trip that didn’t include Liv leads her to realize that Ange, who once seemed like the glue of the foursome, has actually wormed her way into their group in service of her own narcissistic personality. Estranged from the other women, Liv strikes up a friendship with a wealthy socialite who has a wicked sense of humor—and the willingness to help Liv rid herself of Ange once and for all. Mayhew explores both the affirming side of female friendships and the darker currents of judgmental talk, financial peer pressure, and neediness. The most interesting part of the book is Liv, who’s the narrator, for she is often not a terribly sympathetic character. Yet there is something admirable in how she fights to recognize and celebrate her true, autonomous self, even if that person is inherently selfish and grudging.
Driven by an honest, authentic main character who is imperfect and damaged.
DEATH AND THE CONJUROR
Mead, Tom Mysterious Press (288 pp.) $25.95 | July 12, 2022 978-1-61316-318-4
Mead’s debut novel is a valentine to the locked-room puzzles of John Dickson Carr, to whom it is dedicated. London, 1936. Shortly after a mysterious and unexpected late-night visitor leaves the home of Dr. Anselm Rees in Dollis Hill, the uneasy members of his household contrive to enter his locked study and find the Viennese-born psychologist with his throat cut. Suspicion immediately falls on his daughter, psychologist Dr. Lidia Rees, and her all-but-fiance, playboy financier Marcus Bowman, but it isn’t long before Inspector George Flint, still baffled by the killer’s ability to escape a room locked from the inside, turns instead to the three patients the dead man had taken on since arriving in London. Floyd Stenhouse, Patient A, is a Philharmonic violinist tormented by dreams of snakes. Della Cookson, Patient B, is a kleptomaniac actress currently starring in Miss Death, which has just opened at the Pomegranate Theatre. Claude Weaver, Patient C, is a suspense novelist subject to blackouts. The waters are further muddied by the equally miraculous theft of a valuable painting from the home of theatrical impresario Benjamin Teasel and a murder at Dufresne Court, where Stenhouse lives. Luckily, Flint’s friend Joseph Spector is a professional magician whose eyes are alert to every deception and whose experience with illusions of every kind allows him to pierce the veil at Dollis Hill with a panache that would make Carr proud.
Mead faithfully replicates all the loving artifice and teasing engagement of golden-age puzzlers in this superior pastiche.
THE LIGHTNING ROD
Meltzer, Brad Morrow/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $18.42 | March 8, 2022 978-0-06-289240-9
Zig and Nola are back in this fastmoving thriller laced with blood and wit. In “the last fourteen minutes of his life,” Wojo the valet steals Archie Mint’s BMW and drives it to the Mint family home, led there by the car’s GPS. It’s a robbery scheme that’s worked before, but this time both the valet and Mint—who followed him—end up dead, shot by someone waiting in the house. Jim “Zig” Zigarowski works at Calta’s Funeral Home and is an artist in making the dead look their very best. One woman “hasn’t looked this good since Reagan was President,” he’s told. Before Calta’s, he’d been a mortician at Dover Air Force Base, which houses “America’s most secretive funeral home,” for two decades. Zig’s gift is to be able to repair any body, no matter
how badly damaged. Now he’s called back to Dover to take care of murdered veteran Lt. Col. Archie Mint. He has no idea what the government is up to, and he just wants to show the greatest respect for the dead. As he works, he always talks to the deceased as though to comfort them—he’s odd but obviously decent. He’s also a beekeeper who converses with the hive. Then, at the funeral home in Dover, he sees the Army’s Artistin-Residence, Sgt. Nola Brown, the lightning rod who attracts so much trouble. She’d not only saved Zig’s daughter’s life when they were Girl Scouts, but two years ago she’d shot her own foster father in the head to save Zig’s life. “Nola didn’t walk; she lurked,” and her “sheer intensity…radiated off her, like plutonium.” Zig and Nola discover something “fishy” about Mint’s death. He’d been about to take secrets of criminal activity to his grave, and Zig and Nola might get killed trying to uncover them. The plot carries the story to a government facility called Grandma’s Pantry, apparently a real place where the feds once stored supplies for the aftermath of nuclear war. The characters are mostly delightful, including Nola’s cop brother, Roddy, who is trying not to be the monster he’d apparently been as a kid. “We each have a little monster inside us,” as he was told. Not so delightful are the Reds, two redheaded killers who aren’t above sawing tracheas. There’s plenty of clever dialogue and details like the woman with the rhinestoned oxygen tank.
A smart crime package, both funny and serious.
THE SECRET WITNESS
Methos, Victor Thomas & Mercer (304 pp.) $15.95 paper | July 1, 2022 978-1-54203-818-8
A former Utah prosecutor who’s been idling since a defendant he was trying stabbed him in open court comes back to take on one more case that’s gotten well and truly under his skin. In the eight years since a killer calling himself the Reaper stabbed and shot three victims before
murdering a family of five and then going quiet, pretty much everyone in Tooele County has moved on. But not, evidently, the Reaper, who takes three new victims on the anniversaries of the original murders and sends notes bragging about it. Or maybe not, thinks Tooele County Sheriff Billie Gray, who arrests Braden Toby on the strength of powerful evidence. There’s no possibility that Braden, a high school student of 16, was the original Reaper; Billie thinks he’s a narcissistic copycat who’s sought to enlarge his reputation by imitating the Reaper and adding the abduction of Kelly Greer to his idol’s pattern. Billie urges Solomon Shepard, a neighbor of Kelly’s who’s also a homicide prosecutor sidelined ever since his courtroom shanking, to seize the day, and Solomon pressures County Attorney Knox Scott to turn the case over to him. The judge has it in for Solomon. So does one of his own witnesses. And questioning Braden is like throwing pennies into a dark well. So readers will wait with bated breath to see if Solomon will succeed in getting Braden tried as an adult and put away for good. In the end, the recent killings are smartly wound up, the older ones not so much.
A red-hot suspenser aimed at readers for whom a single serial killer just isn’t enough.
TAKE NO NAMES
Nieh, Daniel Ecco/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $26.99 | July 5, 2022 978-0-06-288667-5
The continuing saga of Victor Li, California-raised son of a murdered Chinese crime syndicate member, here enmeshed in a deadly scheme involving a Chinese conglomerate, American Black Ops, and other corrupt forces tied to the building of a new airport in Mexico.
Now hiding out in Seattle, wanted for a murder he didn’t commit, Victor has a job as a deluxe dumpster diver, breaking into a security’s firms storage bins to find sellable items left behind by the deported. His big find is a painite, “the world’s rarest gem,” worth $65,000 per karat. With his nominal boss, Mark, a boisterous, uneven-tempered hustler, he heads to Mexico to fence the gemstone—mined by the Chinese in Burma and banned in the U.S.—using contact information found in its former owner’s intricately coded notebook. Shot by bad guys, imprisoned, and played by supposed American agents, Victor has insult added to those woes when his estranged sister, Jules, shows up with Sun Jianshui, his father Vincent’s lethal protégé and, Victor recently learned, Vincent’s killer. Can he really be Jules’ lover? The good news is that Sun, who apologizes for slashing the elder Li’s throat, is an ace in the hole in fighting off bad guys from both sides of the border. And he knows his way around security systems. A big improvement over Nieh’s debut, Beijing Payback (2019), the new book combines biting humor, breathless action scenes, a clever presentation of mixed languages, and dark geopolitical commentary, including an indictment of America’s own duplicity. It’s a lot of fun.
A cutting thriller with nonstop action and twisty consequences.
THE MAKER OF SWANS
O’Donnell, Paraic Tin House (370 pp.) $27.95 | June 7, 2022 978-1-953534-20-0
A labyrinthine journey from a master craftsman of language and storytelling. Like O’Donnell’s previous book, The House on Vesper Sands, this novel is determined to unfold at its own pace. There are layers of narrative within the framework of gothic suspense, with a limited but rich cast of characters whose backgrounds and motivations are revealed only slowly. One of the pleasures of this genre is seeing how the disparate threads of the novel come together, and O’Donnell weaves a careful tapestry. Central to the story is Eustace, butler—although really much more—to the mysterious Mr. Crowe, who possesses supernatural powers that are never really explained. An act of random violence (which turns out to be not so random) sparks a chain of events which draws Clara, a young mute girl who lives in Mr. Crowe’s sprawling mansion, into the clutches of some shadowy villains and, ultimately, to the revelation of her own abilities. Significantly, those powers connect to the act of writing, of imagination, of creation. So it is fitting that the story is reflected by O’Donnell’s use of language, which is unfailingly evocative and beautiful. He is able to find poetry in dowdy, simple things, even an arrangement of cutlery or a piece of fabric. The action, when it comes, has an edge like a razor, and even a knife fight is described like a dance. Readers who are looking for a sorcery-driven blockbuster of rollicking heroes will not find it here. This novel is more like a maze that has to be negotiated step by step, with paths that sometimes bend back on themselves or lead to unexpected turns. The conclusion, when it is reached, is strange but satisfying, with a sense of inevitability that is appropriate to the tone of the book. Not a happy ending, perhaps, but the right one.
