Arctic Light

This mystery/thriller has an excellent premise - an elderly writer, Julianna, suffering from dementia, loses her husband in an apparent home invasion. But she doesn't remember the night of his death, or much else surrounding that time, and has to piece together the sequence of events and try to determine whether one or more of the people around her is lying and whether one of them is a murderer.

How do you mess up a premise like that? In multiple ways, it turns out! Most egregiously,

Major spoiler

by killing off Julianna (in a particularly frustrating way, too) halfway through the book when she gets too close to the killer, and switching to her much less interesting daughter as the sole viewpoint character.

It's pretty much all spoilery complaining under the cut.

( Complaining )

Oh well, it was an entertaining read, even though it took me a while to finish it, and now I can amuse myself by thinking about how I'd do different things with the same premise. I really love unreliable narrators who are unreliable because they've had their memories messed with. Actually, if you have any recs for non-terrible books along those lines, I'd love to hear them!

I really loved the first two of his books I've read (Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears - especially the first one, which is a really killer crime/heist/noir). This one, though ... it was just mediocre. Mostly it felt like he had a lot that he wanted to say - about race and law enforcement and the modern South - and the book was a vehicle for that, but the actual plot kinda ... wasn't what it should have been, I guess?

The basic plot: the first Black sheriff in a small, economically depressed, oppressively racist Virginia town and his crew respond to a school shooting that turns out to be a cover for something worse. (TBH, any trigger warning you can imagine for this book probably applies. The school shooting is the least of it.) It was a slow-paced book that meandered a lot, and spent a *lot* of time dwelling on the everyday minutiae of a murder investigation in a small town and the everyday life of the protagonist, and the problem is, a lot of this just wasn't that interesting. A book like that needs to be carried by the characters, and I did like the protagonist and his dad, but apart from them, there were a tremendous number of mostly interchangeable characters. Which isn't a problem Crosby normally has! The characters in his previous books were very sharply drawn and very there, and I just wasn't feeling that here. I couldn't even tell most of the deputies apart, aside from the lone woman and one with a particularly distinctive name and backstory. And the mystery just kind of - wasn't very good. The first half of the book is absolutely glacial, and once it starts to develop the murder mystery in the back half, clues are resolved almost as soon as they arrive, or else (my least favorite mystery trick of all time) the author just doesn't tell us; we know he read an email, we know there was something important in it that he reacted to, but we don't find out 'til later what it was.

( Mild spoilers and more about that )

This was one of my acquisitions during a spree earlier this year of buying a number of cheap, self-pub thrillers in various subgenres that I know I like, for research purposes. Some were insta-DNFs, but this one, which I finally got around to reading, is crime/noir(ish), very fast-paced, hard to put down, and enjoyable.

Two longtime hunting buddies (former childhood friends) and their guide, all of them with serious money problems for various reasons, find a crashed plane full of cocaine while elk-hunting in the mountains. This trips off a cocaine-fueled cascade of incredibly bad ideas as two of the three (after snorting a lot of high-quality coke) decide that the answer to their problems is heading off to Vegas to sell the couple hundred kilos of a Mexican drug cartel's cocaine that has fallen into their laps. The other guy wants nothing to do with it but gets drawn into it anyway when Idiots 1 and 2 steal his truck and otherwise screw him over. Eventually the Montana state police, DEA, and a drug cartel hitman are all after them too. (One of the guys breaks his arm and spends the rest of the book on a cocktail of morphine, cocaine, and booze, which doesn't improve his decision-making any.)

This book is full of really good action set-pieces, vivid descriptions of scenery, and also escalates so fast that I spent a lot of the book being amazed that we had gone from 0 to 100 on bad ideas so quickly and clearly had a very long way to go. Part of what made it so enjoyable is that the guys, for all their epically poor decision-making and often amorality where money and drugs are concerned, are actually very likable and you end up empathizing with them as they get sucked deeper and deeper into a whirlpool made up of their own bad decisions. The main three characters all really care about each other, which makes the cocaine ripping their lives apart and driving them to the point where they're hiding bodies and literally trying to kill each other even more tragic. You can see how they could all have taken a few different turns and ended up with the devoted, loving, happy family lives that they were one step away from having and think the coke money will give them.

It also has something I'm not really used to seeing in a book of this type, a conscience that shows throughout the book in various ways, in the characters' recurring affection for each other and near misses with doing the right thing, as well as musings on (among other things) the environmental destruction of the West, the contributions of US foreign policy to the drug epidemic they're caught up in, the rapacious capitalism that led them to their disastrous financial situation, and so forth. The characters aren't let off the hook for their bad decision-making and destructiveness to the people around them, but they're also products of a culture, time and place where being eaten alive by greed is something they've both learned from the society they grew up in.

This is heavy for a fast-moving noirish thriller but in general it makes this book feel a bit different from others of its type and is generally not too moralizing, as it's mostly in character for the protagonists to think about it in the way that they do; I think the only problem I had to some extent was that the two childhood buddies were fairly hard to tell apart and tended to muse on the same topics, which weren't necessarily things that a stockbroker and a sports star, respectively, would spend a lot of time thinking about. Their POV was so hard to tell apart that I spent the first half of the book having trouble remembering which was which. The other characters' POV and general social concerns were a bit more organic to them as characters, I felt. Even the hitman hunting them has moments of conscience and a fairly sympathetic backstory.

As well as a lot of tense action along the way, it all ends up in an excellent action climax. I had just two quibbles with the way things were tied up: ( Major ending spoilers )

Getting back to catching up on books I've read lately and never wrote about ... back in December I reread several of Ian Fleming's Bond books, at least the ones I have on hand, because I was thinking about writing a Yuletide treat for a Bond request (for the MI-6 office staff).

I didn't end up writing it, but it did remind me that while the books have their ups and downs, and the downs are DOWN, I do genuinely enjoy them. I first read these in college and, on subsequent rereads, I thought I would probably just continue being more and more put off by the racism/sexism/etc until I gave up, but I guess I've hit a sort of steady state with it, where the "ugh" parts are very ugh, but I know they're coming and the parts I like, I really do like.

For one thing, they're good action books, and good spy novels. In spite of the OTT-ness of the books at times, which gets worse as the series goes on, Fleming did know espionage, and a lot of the espionage aspects are both enjoyable and emotionally true. There's a chapter of one of the books in which Bond has to take his part of a rota covering the office phones at night, terrorizes the canteen girls for sending him tea (which he hates) instead of coffee, and generally wanders around the empty building having existential thoughts about his life. There's another book that opens with Bond coming off a two-day bender thinking about the emptiness of his existence. He's not supposed to be nice, the books are clear that he's cruel and terribly damaged, and both he and his author know it.

( I continue to ramble about these books with no particular point in sight, mostly about the early books in the series. Some spoilers, though not really book-ruining. )

Somehow Smokescreen had never gotten on my radar at all, even though I've read quite a bit of Dick Francis and had others recommended to me. In this case it came up on my Kindle screen as a recommendation, and I ended up absolutely loving it. In fact, this is probably one of my favorite Francis books ever. I finished it and immediately went back to reread it from the beginning.

This is especially impressive because this book begins with a narrative trope I absolutely hate, a bait-and-switch opening. And this one annoyed me in particular because I had bought the book on the basis of it - in the opening pages, the hero is handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car in the desert, struggling to free himself. I was intrigued. I bought the book. Two paragraphs later, the director yells "Cut!" So it started off with one strike against it. Having read the whole book, however, I'm really impressed at how thoroughly the seemingly bait-and-switch opening ends up being tied to the rest of the book - thematically, plotwise, and in terms of character relationships.

Like all(?) of Dick Francis's books, horse racing is involved, but the book takes the protagonist out of Francis's usual English setting into South Africa. The protagonist - Edward Lincoln, Link to his friends - is an actor whose honorary aunt/godmother has asked him to look into the unusually bad performance of her South African racehorse stable. He travels to investigate under the cover of a press tour, and soon begins to experience mysterious accidents that may or may not be attempts on his life. But with the entire stable acting suspicious, as well as being embroiled in the snakes' nest of the press tour (which includes a sleazy promotor, a director who hates him, and a variety of other suspects) there's no shortage of not just suspects but motives as well. Are the murder attempts trying to stop the stable investigation, a series of publicity stunts gone wrong, someone trying to settle a personal grudge, or something else entirely?

This is actually one of the more genuinely mysterious Francis whodunnits that I've read. I spent most of the book with absolutely no idea who among the relatively large cast were trustworthy - and in fact a lot of them aren't, but in very different ways, which makes the entire thing very tense. And yet there's a lot of genuine camaraderie, often with unexpected people, and an absolutely spectacular hurt/comfort-heavy climax that I thoroughly loved. Francis's books tend to go heavy on the "h" rather than the "c" - his characters go through hell, but don't often have a lot of aftermath for it other than just ending up in the hospital. But this one has a lot more than usual, necessarily due to the timing/location/nature of what happened to the protagonist, and it is entertainingly awkward and clumsy while also very sweet. This book is the very definition of the Hurt/Comfort Exchange tag "Awkward attempts at comforting are actually very comforting."

Good use is also made of the setting, with vivid descriptions of, among other places, a gold mine and a game preserve. The political aspects are there in the background; the book definitely isn't about that, probably for the best as it's written by a middle-aged white British guy, but the way it was touched on felt natural to me. (This was written in the early 1970s, so some of the descriptions are a bit dated, but not - imho, for whatever it's worth - too badly.)

I would totally nominate this book for Yuletide if I hadn't missed the deadline, WOE. Maybe next year! Anyway, I loved it, and there's a lot I want to talk about that I can't talk about without spoiling the entire plot, so I'll do another post for that a bit later. Or maybe in the comments.

EDIT: There are now considerably more detailed spoilers in comments!

I'm going to Bouchercon in Minneapolis with rachelmanija and scioscribe in September! This is a mystery con, and as I have done very little reading of current mystery/thriller in the last decade or two (I definitely read it, in fact I love it, but it's considerably more based around "Ooh, that looks good" than trying to keep up with what's current in the genre), the three of us are doing a sort of informal "book club" of books by the convention's guests - see guests of honor here and all attending authors here.

The first two:

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby - This had been on my radar to read for a while, so I'm glad this was finally the kick that got me to read it! This is a really excellent, noir-flavored heist novel set in a small town in the South. Retired getaway driver Beauregard "Bug" Montage gets pulled back in for one last job, and we all know how that goes. But the book is a lot more than a heist novel, although it's a good one. It's also a vivid, literary-flavored snapshot of a particular place and lifestyle - working poor in the small-town South - with dialogue and characters as sharp as Elmore Leonard's best, and a general sense of humanity and empathy with its characters throughout the book that makes even the worst of them compelling and most of them are somewhere on a shades-of-gray sympathy spectrum. The book has spectacular action sequences (seriously, this would make a fantastic movie; please take my money) and a series of escalating twists that sometimes made me gasp out loud. I can see why it's gotten all the buzz that it's gotten. It's very dark and a lot of people die, but it never feels bleak; it's engaging, vivid, and darkly funny enough to keep it moving along briskly.

Money Shot by Christa Faust - Also on my general to-read list because of Rachel's review here from a few years ago. This is a dark, bloody, classic-style noir set in the L.A. porn industry. Aging porn actress Angel Dare wakes up in the trunk of a car after someone tries to kill her - and things only get worse from there. The world that she carefully built around herself with the proceeds from her porn career is collapsing like a house of cards, she can't trust anyone, and all she can do is struggle her way from moment to moment, constantly on the run, trying to unravel the mystery of who's trying to kill her and why before the next betrayal turns out to be her last. She's an extremely engaging and scrappy heroine, with no more fighting skills than any ordinary person would have, driven by determination, raw will to live, and a willingness to tap into increasingly dark parts of herself to survive as her world goes to pieces around her.

These two books made an excellent paired set, because they are spectacularly different in almost every way except the broad strokes of the noir genre, but they are also both incredibly vivid portraits of a place, a time, and a subculture, and both are very well structured and fast-paced with a high body count. Would definitely pick up more books by either of these authors.

Next up in our mini book club: Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, a noirish thriller set on a South Dakota rez.