• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper):
This combustible crime thriller is set in the Irish working-class neighborhood of South Boston during the heatwave-bedeviled summer of 1974. That was a period of court-ordered desegregation in the local public schools, when high school students from low-income Black areas were bused into poor white neighborhoods, and vice versa. The goal was to improve the quality of education system-wide, to force a better balance between the funding given to white schools (which were sometimes under-populated)
and that going to struggling, under-equipped Black facilities. But the actual result was scattered protests and eruptions of violence.Lehane’s story is propelled by the vividly realized Mary Pat Fennessy. A tough, middle-aged, and single working-class Irish woman, she’s a basically good person, but has been inculcated with the prejudices and hatreds of her time and environment. She’s also without a husband after being married twice, has lost one son (the victim of a drug overdose after he returned from military service in Vietnam), and manages to hold down two jobs—neither of which keeps her head much above water. The only thing that makes her care anymore is her teenage daughter, Jules, who is set to become part of Boston’s new social-engineering experiment, and with whom Mary Pat maintains a strained relationship.
Not long after Mary Pat gets involved in the anti-busing movement, Jules doesn’t come home one night. Her vanishing coincides with the death of Augustus Williamson, a Black youth whose corpse is found at a subway station on the white side of town. Could there be some connection between those two mysteries? Mary Pat is panicked over her daughter’s fate, but the people in her community—the only people she thought she could rely on in times of trouble—shy away from helping. Which causes her to question how much she really knows about her neighbors and her daughter’s life, and also makes her doubt the motives of local mobsters claiming to side with anyone who will pledge them loyalty. Mary Pat’s determination to get to the bottom of Jules’ disappearance leads her to risk all of what little she has left.
Small Mercies presents a tangled web of tribalism, inherited ignorance, and a hunger for belonging. It serves up historical detail of an uncommon vibrancy. Short, clipped chapters are not so much written as carved, leaving nary a superfluous word in evidence. As the story leaps along, the reader’s moral compass is tested right along with Mary Pat’s. This fast-paced, highly literate novel shows Dennis Lehane at the height of his storytelling powers.
• Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka (Phoenix UK):
The best crime novels engage deep thought by mirroring the yin and yang of the human condition, displaying the very worst but also the very best aspects of our existence. Kukafka’s second novel (after 2018’s Girl in Snow) is structured like a prism, its central motif
diffracted into narrative chunks. Shifting timelines supply multiple perspectives on a serial killer, Ansel Packer, who has been condemned to death row.Packer now has only 12 hours left before he gets the needle for having strangled three innocent women. Rather than dwell upon his young victims, though, or lament his fate, Packer concentrates on a desperate escape plan he’s cooked up with one of the female prison guards. He’s also focused on a manifesto he intends to leave behind, which theorizes on the conflict between human capacities for both good and evil. Meanwhile, Kukafka thrusts the reader back into the past, into the depths of Packer’s troubled history as seen through the eyes of three defiant and complex women destined to survive him—none of whom passed through that man-monster’s life unaffected by their contact. Those witnesses are his forlorn, mistreated mother, Lavender, who abandoned him as a child; Hazel, the twin sister of his ex-wife, who he may also have been murdered; and Saffron “Saffy” Singh, who was harrowed by Packer as a child, but who grew up the become the homicide detective responsible for finally bringing him to justice. It’s Saffy who plays principal antagonist in this novel to Packer, the antagonist. Together they traverse time, territories, families, colleagues, and their friends—as well as delving into their own inner motivations and the demons that hover as one pages succeeds another.
This is not a traditional serial-killer tale, rampant with the pornography of violence. Instead, it focuses on the women in Packer’s life and on how we can never truly comprehend what goes on inside another person’s mind. There’s masculinity on display here, waiting to evolve into something potentially toxic. Circumstances and the choices that determine who we’ll become are explored in a powerful but dispassionate manner. Kukafka even teases out a bit of uneasy sympathy for her slayer (who, among her characters, is never allowed to offer first-person narration), but amalgamates it with a sense of imminent dread. It is easy to understand why the American edition of Notes on an Execution won the Edgar Award for best novel.
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):
Written in a terse staccato style that brings to mind James Ellroy’s work, Everybody Knows plays like a knowingly real thriller—a Hollywood Babylon exposé that mixes the excesses of Los Angeles with the darkest edges of human nature.
Mae Pruett is a “black-bag publicist” with Mitnick and Mitnick Associates, the specialist dispatched to clean up messes caused by film celebrities, studio execs, and heedless politicians, and to keep their indiscretions from the attention of traditional media as well as “citizen journalists” attached to TikTok, Instagram, and their electronic brethren. When we first encounter Mae in this hard-boiled yarn, she’s called out to L.A.’s notorious Chateau Marmont, there to find a 20-something
actress already on her way down who’s nursing a black eye given her by a silk-stockinged scumbag; it seems he objected to her objections that they be filmed in the course of sexual relations. Mae’s cover-up of that affair is both crafty and comical.However, her next undertaking proves to be more challenging. And considerably riskier. Her boss and mentor, Dan Hennigan, is murdered in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel during what appeared to have been a carjacking. Mae sees the circumstances as suspicious—especially since Hennigan was preparing to clue her in on some mysterious money-making scheme. She’s further bothered by the fact that others at her firm aren’t equally disconcerted by it all. Adding to her concerns is that she’s been tasked with taking over Hennigan’s workload—which Mae fears precipitated his premature demise.
At the same time, her old friend Chris Tamburro, a cop turned private enforcer with BlackGuard Security, is assigned to investigate Hennigan’s death on behalf of an unidentified client. That’s only the first of many secrets that will bring Mae and Tamburro together again, and convince them to pursue leads involving murder, sexual offenses, and powerful men who believe themselves immune from legal penalties. Could Mitnick and Mitnick be working in-concert with Blackguard to conceal the unthinkable? A bumped-off star, a pregnant 14-year-old, drugs, brutality, the draw of fame—they’re all tossed into Harper’s storytelling mix, as Mae starts to question her values system and ask herself what ethical limits she is unwilling to violate.
Harper, who won an Edgar for his first novel, She Rides Shotgun, here delivers the most energetic and most unsettling novel I’ve read this year. Prescient and unmissable in a #MeToo world.
• The Turnglass, by Gareth Rubin (Simon & Schuster UK):
For those readers—many, I’ll wager—who are unfamiliar with the term, tête-bêche (or head-to-tail book) generally refers to a volume comprising two different works by two different authors, published back-to-back with one of them upside down to the other, offering two separate front covers (not unlike the old Ace Double Novels). The Turnglass is just such a production, though in this case its
mystery novellas were both penned by UK journalist-author Gareth Rubin, and the stories are self-referential: reading one affects your understanding of its opposite.Got all that? There will be a test later on. Just kidding …
Rubin’s yarns take place during two periods of time, upon two continents, and are composed in two very different styles. First we are taken back to the 1880s, on the Essex Coast in England, where Dr. Simeon Lee of London investigates a puzzling illness that has befallen his relative, soldier-turned-clergyman Oliver Hawes. Hawes resides in Turnglass House, the sole abode on the island of Ray, cut off from the mainland at high tide. Smuggling operations by local fisherman and ne’er-do-wells provide a dangerous backdrop to the plot as do the mysterious “Florence,” a murderess firmly imprisoned in a glass-walled cell within Turnglass House, and a chapbook/novelette titled The Gold Field, by O. Tooke, about a journey to America set several decades in the future.
The second novella is less of a Victorian Gothic mystery, more of an American noir narrative set in L.A. during the late 1930s. Ken Kourian is a struggling actor who befriends the enigmatic Gloria. As success in “Hollywoodland” (Hollywood’s original name) is all about connections, Gloria introduces Ken to successful author Oliver Tooke, who lives with his sister in a glass-walled home, The Turnglass, situated on the Californian beachfront. Ken and Oliver become friends, and after Oliver is found dead from an apparent suicide, Ken—distrusting that explanation—starts making inquiries. Revelations in Oliver’s abbreviated novel The Turnglass, about a certain Dr. Simeon Lee, prove to be most enlightening, both to Kourian and the reader.
It’s a unique and ambitious reading experience offered between these covers, with each of Rubin’s stories in conversation with the other, and nothing in either quite as it seems to be.
Last but not least, one work from the memoirs shelves …
• Word Monkey, by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday UK):
Although he was best known for composing the Bryant and May/Peculiar Crimes Unit tales, Christopher Fowler was also a bibliophile who co-managed a London-based film-marketing business, wrote horror yarns and weird fiction, reviewed books and was basically a wonderful rampart in London’s lively literary scene.
This makes his diagnosis of terminal cancer in early 2020 troubling. Yet instead of becoming angry and resentful of the cards dealt him, he used the time he had left to do what he’d always done: celebrate books.The title Word Monkey alludes to how one of his early bosses unkindly referred to his career choice, in lieu of the term “writer.” His final narrative barely touches upon the assorted awards and other plaudits he received during his 40-year career; nor does it reflect upon life’s great injustices. Instead, it focuses on gratitude and modesty.
The magic of Word Monkey is that it can make you roar with laughter, smile in agreement, and turned your eyes wet, all within the space of a single chapter. Fowler’s recollections and the absurdity of his observations are life-affirming, as well as reflective. They also present valuable context and comfort not only to his many appreciative readers, but to bibliophiles in general. One of his non-fiction contributions was to suss out, originally on behalf of The Independent, “forgotten authors,” a term that will never apply to him.
Other 2023 Favorites: Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner); Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown); Kill For Me Kill For You, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline UK); The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph); and The Secret, by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Delacorte Press).
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