HARROW by Joy Williams

“An enigmatic, elegant meditation on the end of civilization—if end it truly is.”

harrow

1950s to the Harlem riots of 1964. Throughout, readers will be captivated by a Dickensian array of colorful, idiosyncratic characters, from itchy-fingered gangsters to working-class women with a low threshold for male folly. What’s even more impressive is Whitehead’s densely layered, intricately woven rendering of New York City in the Kennedy era, a time filled with both the bright promise of greater economic opportunity and looming despair due to the growing heroin plague. It’s a city in which, as one character observes, “everybody’s kicking back or kicking up. Unless you’re on top.”

As one of Whitehead’s characters might say of their creator, When you’re hot, you’re hot.

HARROW

Williams, Joy Knopf (224 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-0-525-65756-9

A memorable return for renowned storyteller Williams after a lengthy absence from long-form fiction. “Something definitely had gone wrong. Even the dead were dismayed.” Something has gone wrong indeed, but in her first novel in 20 years, Williams doesn’t reveal the precise contours of what that something is. There are portents at the outset as the young girl known first as Lamb, then as Khristen, contemplates a bit of family lore recounting that as a newborn she was resuscitated after having stopped breathing and, thus reborn, “was destined for something extraordinary.” So Khristen’s mother believes, in any event, sending her to a boarding school where, Khristen says, “my situation would be appreciated and the alarming gift I had been given properly acknowledged.” Instead, the school dries up, for by Khristen’s third year there are no incoming students. Why? There’s no resolution in sight anywhere in Williams’ deliberately paced pre–post-apocalyptic novel: All the reader knows is that something is definitely off, signaled by such moments as when a fellow student, asked to contemplate an orange while pondering creativity, protests, “I haven’t tasted an orange in years.” Khristen takes her place in an odd community on a “razed resort” alongside a dying lake known as Big Girl, populated by the likes of a gifted, spooky 10-year-old and a Vicodin-swilling matriarch named Lola. If nothing else, the place has a working bowling alley, one good place to await doomsday. As the clock ticks away, Williams seeds her story with allusions to Kafka, bits of Greek mythology, philosophical notes on the nature of tragedy, and gemlike description (“He was in excellent physical condition, lean with rage”), and all along with subtly sardonic humor: Williams’ imagined world of the near future is so thoroughly corporatized that even the blades of wind turbines have advertisements on them, and she offers a useful phrase for obituaries to come: “What did he die of?” one character asks, meeting the reply: “Environmental issues.”

An enigmatic, elegant meditation on the end of civilization—if end it truly is.

mystery

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

Adams, Jane A. Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-0-7278-5013-3

DCI Henry Johnstone returns to active duty to probe the murder of a socialite who seems to have died twice. It’s strange enough for terrified tourists to see a large, silent man carrying a dead body in his arms lumber down Bournemouth’s beach to deposit his burden at the water’s edge. But it’s stranger still when the local police discover papers in a purse lashed to the victim’s arm that identify her as Faun Moran, a bright young thing who was killed and buried over a year ago after she and fellow partygoer Malcolm Everson drove off from a bash at the Belmonts’ posh estate and plummeted headlong into a nearby ravine. DI Harold Shelton, who investigated the crash, did such a slapdash job that DS Mickey Hitchens implores Johnstone to head up the newly opened inquiry. Though he’s still healing from his assault by the villain who kidnapped his niece in Old Sins (2021), Johnstone’s too intrigued by the case to turn it down. As Johnstone reinterviews witnesses who already gave testimony in the Everson crash, Adams opens another window into the backstory through an account by Vic, a shadowy character who traces Faun’s flight from her overbearing father into the arms of a man who’s far more dangerous. When Faun’s captor at last unveils himself, the question moves from who’s responsible for her death to whether and how Johnstone and Hitchens can bring the criminal to justice.

A cautionary tale, more thriller than mystery, about the perils of getting what you wish for.

CHINA ROSES

Bannister, Jo Severn House (240 pp.) $28.99 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-0-7278-5065-2

The latest round of unrest in the English Midlands town of Norbold revolves around two women. One of them is dead, and the other just won’t go away. DC Hazel Best, a friend of Peregrine, the 28th Earl of Byrfield, recognizes the man PC Wayne Budgen has found beaten unconscious as archaeologist David Sperrin, the illegitimate son of the 27th Earl. Sperrin’s injuries have inconveniently shut down his memory, but unbidden and unnerving snapshots return to him as he lies in the hospital. A woman had been running toward him. She was crying that she wouldn’t become a China Rose because she was

a Vietnamese citizen. She was shot in the back and died in his arms. But he can’t remember her name or explain what brought them together in the first place or why no one can find her body. As Hazel and her mates at the Meadowvale Police Station labor to fill in the blanks in Sperrin’s story, her quirky bookseller friend, Gabriel Ash, must deal with an equally troublesome woman: his estranged wife, Cathy, who’s popped up out of nowhere in defiance of a warrant for her arrest for murder, ostensibly to spend some time with the children Ash wants sole custody of, but almost certainly bent on some more sinister errand. Emerging hints that Rose Doe, as the police dub the victim pulled from the Clover Hill Dam—the woman David remembered—had been smuggled into the country by human traffickers deepens both the mystery and the menace for Hazel and makes it even more imperative that Ash send Cathy on her way regardless of every threat she makes to his family’s quiet life.

Fueled more by sadness and moral outrage than mystery— but fans won’t mind that a bit.

THE PORT OF LONDON MURDERS

Bell, Josephine Poisoned Pen (272 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-4642-1540-7

A steamship docking on the Thames after a voyage its crew members never expected to survive brings nothing but trouble—or rather reveals and heightens the trouble already running through London’s docklands in this reprint of Bell’s 1938 tale.

The arrival of the San Angelo brings no joy to Leslie Harvey, a boy who celebrates the event by nearly drowning, or to his sister, June, a worker at Lulu, a neighborhood lingerie shop, or to Harry Reed, who saves Leslie’s life and gets his hand mangled as a reward. A dozen of the containers in the San Angelo’s cargo hold have been cast into the river, and the police officers who recover one of them find, along with its shipment of raw rubber destined for Listons’ rubber works, a woman’s nightgown. The garment arouses suspicions about Lulu, whose owner Martha Kemp’s relation (wife? mistress?) to Gordon Longford, the agent for the Cynthia product line, isn’t strong enough to keep him away from heiress Pamela Merston. The plot thickens when Mary Holland, who’s recently come to lodge with the local Dunwoody family, is found dead from a lethal dose of Lysol shortly after consulting Dr. Ellis, a questionable medico who’s playing an angle of his own. The Scotland Yard detective sent to investigate soon disappears and is found dead. There’s never much doubt whodunit, but the evocation by the pseudonymous Bell (1897-1987) of a working-class neighborhood where spouses bicker, the lucky find rough work, attractive young women fend off unwelcome advances, and the elderly suffer wasting illnesses is strikingly ahead of its time.

Come for the mystery, stay for the dankly atmospheric portrait of prewar South London.

ROAD OF BONES

Benn, James R. Soho Crime (312 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-641-29200-9

A World War II supersleuth, deprived of his usual backup, unravels a tangled web of criminality in Russia. September 1944 finds Capt. Billy Boyle enjoying a short respite with his closest pals, Lt. Piotr “Kaz” Kazimierz and Big Mike Miecznikowski, between cracking tough cases. The plan is to visit Billy’s love interest, Diana Seaton, a British agent recuperating in the nearby countryside after having been held by the Gestapo. But Col. Bull Dawson, who has different ideas, summons Billy to an air base in Russia to solve a baffling crime: two murdered soldiers, one American, one Russian. Billy brings Big Mike but lets Kaz sit this assignment out. The flight east is an adventure in itself: Aboard the Banshee Bandit, Billy has a front row seat for an air battle with the Luftwaffe, and he sees Sweet Lorraine, the plane carrying Big Mike, go down. A handful of colleagues greet him in Russia, where he learns that Big Mike has survived and been taken to the hospital. Billy faces numerous obstacles in his probe. The bodies of Lt. Ivan Kopelev and Sgt. Jack Morris have already been taken away. Both men were wearing their guns when they were killed, and neither seems to have any enemies. Without his wingman, Billy must decide on his own whom he can trust. His Russian counterpart, Sidorov, warns him against his translator, Maiya Akilina, and there’s an additional layer of odd Russian characters, led by Tatyana, the “Night Witch.” In a welcome change of pace, Billy’s 16th adventure has more action and history than his previous cases. Sturdy Kaz enters the story at a crucial moment to help capture the guilty.

Benn’s well-crafted series deepens with every installment.

MURDER AT STANDING STONE MANOR

Brown, Eric Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-0-7278-5056-0

A detecting couple’s move to new digs doesn’t prevent them from being involved in yet another murder. Mystery writer and private detective Donald Langham and his equally talented wife, Maria Dupré, have left London for the peace and quiet of Yew Tree Cottage. Accepting a dinner invitation gives them the opportunity to meet many of their new neighbors, and a diverse and interesting bunch they are. A cryptic note from professor Edwin Robertshaw soon entangles them in blackmail and murder. Maria takes a liking to Robertshaw’s niece, Nancy, who’s been living with him since the deaths of her parents and