• You Like It Darker, by Stephen King (Scribner):
It’s only right that the title of King’s latest short-story collection should be a tip of the hat to Leonard Cohen’s last studio album. The abbreviated yarns filling this book, like
Cohen’s songs, explore age and aging. Longtime King readers—especially those who are cognizant of their approaching mortality—will find these stories not just unsettling, but elegiac as well.However, the contents here vary greatly in quality, with the shorter stories being far less engaging than the longer ones. “The Fifth Step” is rather unpleasant, and “Red Screen” is little more than a shrug, while “Two Talented Bastids” and “On Slide Inn Road” are eventful tales that, despite their meandering pace, are delightfully throw-away ditties.
You Like It Darker’s four novellas are what make this book unmissable. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is truly extraordinary. Ostensibly a brief crime novel, it begins with the eponymous character reporting the presence of a dead body from the fragments of a dream, only to soon become a frantic thriller. “Rattlesnakes” is a coda to Cujo (1981) and Duma Key (2008), featuring the themes of loss and reflection in the context of how past griefs can become the horrors of today.
“The Dreamers” is a superbly realized cosmic horror piece (with debts owed to H.P. Lovecraft) that weaves memories of the Vietnam War into a vision of what may lie beneath the veneer of our reality. And the final offering, “The Answer Man,” is a dark morality tale, told in a beguiling style that starts with whimsy, but soon turns nasty. It’s an EC Comics-like horror narrative that is both keen and thought-provoking.
Even half a century after he published his first novel, King continues to surprise. And he shows here that his enthusiasm for short fiction writing is just as vibrant as it has ever been.
• A Talent for Murder, by Peter Swanson (Morrow):
Peter Swanson has a genuine talent for taking a crime-fiction cliché and turning it on its head, making you question the darkness (or horror) of human nature as well as its entwined beauty.
In A Talent for Murder, he introduces us to Martha Ratcliff, a middle-aged, mild-mannered, wallflower librarian in Maine who’s newly wed to an equally unimpressive but ostensibly sweet traveling salesman, Alan Peralta. How well, though, does she really know or understand her husband? After watching him (covertly) from her bedroom window as he returns from one of his business trips to a teaching conference—an event during which a young female art instructor reportedly committed suicide by jumping, naked, from her sixth-floor hotel balcony—Martha begins to wonder
if he’s up to more at those conventions than peddling merch to stressed-out schoolteachers. As this suspicion turns into an existential crisis for the librarian, she starts digging into whether similar tragedies have occurred elsewhere during Alan’s travels.Soon overcome by her disturbing discoveries, Martha contacts an old graduate school friend, the irascible Lily Kitner, who had helped Martha escape a previous relationship. Now bored and living at home with her elderly parents, Lily is ready to provide assistance to Martha once more. She agrees to shadow Alan at his next conference, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and try to bait him into a flirtation, maybe learn whether he has any tendency toward violence. And she further enlists the support of private investigator Henry Kimball. (Those two were also featured in Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing and The Kind Worth Saving).
What Lily hadn’t expected to find was that she’s not the only one dogging Alan’s footsteps. So is Martha’s abusive former boyfriend from college. As this dark adventure proceeds, and mysteries unravel, Kitner and Kimball both reveal the truth beneath the veneer of normal lives and turn up a trail of dead bodies.
Told in a beguiling style, and alternating between third-person and first-person points of view, Swanson delivers a sophisticated psychological thriller. One that might make you think twice before diving into other stories, like those of John Cheever, that take place in purportedly peaceful suburban environments.
• Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton UK):
Following on from Meyer’s last novel, The Dark Flood (2021), Leo finds South African detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido still exiled—as a result of past misbehavior—to the historic tourist town of Stellenbosch, located about 31 miles east of their customary stomping
grounds in Cape Town. There, recovering alcoholic Benny is preparing for his upcoming nuptials, while Cupido finds himself restless dealing with unremarkable police work.Their attention is soon drawn away, though, to the demise of a female student cyclist, whose body is found on a desolate mountain road. Not long afterward, the principal suspect in that incident, one Basie Small, turns up murdered amid all the trappings of a professional assassination. Griessel and Cupido are keen to investigate further, but their superiors are determined to dismiss these crimes as simple robberies gone terribly wrong. Not surprisingly, the two detectives keep working the case, a choice that may lead them into dangerous intrigues and conspiracies that lie at the heart of the African continent—or do they?
If you think that’s all this book has to attract the reader, you’re wrong. Meyer, an expert at narrative gear shifts, parallels the cyclist’s story with one involving professional thieves, including the beautiful Christina Jaeger (from The Trackers), who are intent on executing a sequence of multimillion-dollar heists. In the mix, too, is a tense subplot involving an ex-member of the South African Special Forces Brigade, a man on a mission of revenge. That combination keeps the novel’s storytelling pace sprightly, and leaves one wondering who among these players might survive all the action.
Written in a terse journalistic style, and benefiting from blistering set-pieces as well as Meyer’s on-target dialogue, Leo is a powerful, dramatic tale that it would be a crime to miss. It was published in Great Britain last fall, but will be released in the States in February.
• The Rumor Game, by Thomas Mullen (Minotaur):
This timely thriller, set in 1943, is relayed from two perspectives. First, that of Anne Lemire, an earnest young reporter who writes a regular column, “The Rumor Game,” for the fictional Boston Star newspaper. Second is Devon Mulvey, a blithely philandering FBI special agent and one of the few Irish Catholics in the Bureau’s ranks.
Lemire’s assignment is to dispel hearsay and propaganda, both of which are being wielded by American right-wing groups sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and are designed to undermine U.S. support for Great Britain (and its allies) in defending Europe from the ugly, expansionist desires of Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, Mulvey—whose own
father is an unrepentant isolationist—is tasked with investigating industrial espionage that may or may not hurt the nation’s war efforts.It could rightly be said that anti-Semitism brings this seemingly mismatched pair together. Anne intends to write about that subject after her 17-year-old brother, Sammy, is bloodily thrashed by a pack of youths targeting him for being half-Jewish. Yet she meets with resolute resistance from both her bosses and from a source for the story, who wants to keep his name out of print. Does Sammy’s beating signal a rift opening up between the city’s Irish Americans and more recently immigrated Jews fleeing the carnage of World War II in Europe? At the same time, Devon and his partner, Lou Loomis, probe the killing of Abraham Wolf, a Jewish worker at a federal munitions factory in Boston. Can a connection be established between that crime and a crate of machine guns that has gone missing from the factory? And why aren’t the Boston Police—and Devon’s cousin on the force, Officer Brian Dennigan—more concerned about these events?
Once they’ve met and found common purpose in their endeavors, Anne and Devon go after the Christian Legion, a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic group that is printing up fascist leaflets and phony ration stamps, the latter of which are being peddled to Jewish families the Legion intends to frame later as fraudsters and traitors. Not surprisingly, all of these shared pursuits eventually lead our two protagonists into romance. But the pressures of their respective jobs, hidden family secrets, and the era’s politics of hate conspire to separate them and have them questioning each other’s allegiances and faith.
Author Mullen, who earned our respect with his earlier novels about struggling Black policemen in 1950s Atlanta, Georgia (Darktown, Lightning Men, and Midnight Atlanta), does a particularly deft job in these pages of making Boston—with its definably ethnic neighborhoods, acrid dockyards, and class divisions—a character in its own right. He also employs religion, racial animus, and isolationist perspectives to bring contemporary resonance to what might otherwise have been dismissed as only a tale about America’s past.
Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves ...
• Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey (Doubleday):
It’s hardly unexpected that when John Grisham (The Firm, The Exchange, etc.) sits down to compose a non-fiction book, it should eventually read like a thriller. And this one does. It examines 10 American cases of wrongful convictions overturned by dogged determination and an admirable level of tenacity from the advocates of the accused. Five of the cases are detailed by Grisham, while the others are laid out by Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, a non-profit
organization, based in New Jersey, that is dedicated to exonerating people who have been improperly convicted and sentenced to either lengthy incarceration or capital punishment. A shared preface adds useful context to everything that follows.The explanations of these cases are restricted by the writers’ self-imposed 10,000-word limit. Framed comes off as an angry work, and not simply because of how Grisham and McCloskey approach their subjects; readers will likewise become progressively more enraged as each prosecution is scrupulously detailed. There is incompetence aplenty here, along with abusive motives and a sometimes unfortunate determination that police investigators should close their cases quickly. In some of these investigations, had it not been for the work of the advocates, innocent men might have been forced to pay unjustifiably high prices for the crimes they were falsely charged with perpetrating.
Within these 10 stories, we are given DNA, skewed evidence, unreliable witnesses, and a good deal more, all validating the book’s subtitle: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. Readers will wind up incredulous that such injustices came to pass, and that only through unwavering efforts were they finally corrected.
Other 2024 Favorites: One of Us Is Dead, by Peter James (Macmillan UK); Kill For Me, Kill For You, by Steve Cavanagh (Atria); Crampton, by Thomas Ligotti and Barndon Trenz (Chiroptera Press); The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Penguin, 2023); and A Short Stay in Hell, by Steven L. Peck (Strange Violin Editions, 2012).
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