MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD, Pushkin Vertigo brings prize-winning debut Japanese mystery to Anglophones

MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
AKANE ARAKI (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An unlikely duo embarks on a road trip to find a serial killer before the apocalypse in this prize-winning Japanese murder mystery.

Perfectly blends the dystopian humor of Zombieland and the thrills of My Sister the Serial Killer!

From Japan’s most exciting new crime writer Akane Araki, this thrillingly funny, high-concept murder mystery follows a young woman and her driving instructor as they face a compelling moral dilemma: should they work to stop a serial killer before the end of the world? A meteor is on a collision course with Earth. The entire human race has 3 months to live. Uncontrollable panic has set in across the globe, but 23-year-old Haru is still determined to finally get her driver’s license.

When Haru and her ex-cop driving instructor Isagawa open their car trunk one day to find the corpse of a murder victim inside, they feel duty-bound to investigate. Together, they set off on a road trip through the crumbling landscape around them to hunt for the killer. As more bodies start appearing, more questions surge. Why would a serial killer begin work three months before the end of the world? And does justice lose its meaning with humanity on the brink of extinction?

And it turns out that Haru's driving instructor is not just an ex-cop but one with a manic devotion to justice. So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the pair team up to catch the culprit, no matter where it takes them. After all, the world's not quite over yet...

Quirky, fast-paced, and packed full of surprising heart, Murder at the End of the World will delight fans of Stuart Turton’s audacious plots and the humorous, life-affirming bent of dystopian favorites like Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead.

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My Review: I really liked The Last Policeman when it came out. I'm still salty that it never made it onto the screens of the world where I really felt it deserved to be. So I was all ready to be this book's fanboy.

I'm on record as not wanting to read about women being sexually abused and murdered for plot purposes. This story, led by an amateur sleuth who's female, does indeed have a woman abused and murdered in it, so why am I breaking my strong preference not to read that plot?

Because it's not the first death (that's her father's suicide), and it's not the glorified, prurient point of the victim's death, but is instead an indictment of a patriarchal system I found myself willing to spend my entertainment eyeblinks on this topic. It's a sleuthing excursion led by two women who found a shared compass in bringing justice to the victim. In spite of flaming death for the whole human race racing towards the planet.

That, mes vieux, is a moral compass. We're going to die. And that's still no reason not to bring justice to a terribly abused woman by making her abuser pay for his crime. Haru greets us, so to speak, by discovering her father has hanged himself; her response is to arrange his body respectfully and goes to finish her driving lessons. Her instructor Isagawa is a retired cop, determined like Haru to keep her world in balance and thus cope with the existential crisis of certain doom.

I'm quite taken by the nature of these end-is-nigh narratives; they add a weird frisson to the most quotidian conversations. Haru and Isagawa discover the horribly mutilated body of a young woman in the trunk of their randomly selected driver-training car, which would occasion much screaming and dialing of 911 if I happened to be there; the women are incensed, repulsed, but the police are not inclined to do anything as no one else is fussed about all the dead girls piling up around town...the world is ending, and Isagawa already knows the local police well so tells Haru this victim will receive no attention to speak of (nor would she ever have).

They discuss what to do. They really get into it. They have powerful feelings about it even as extinction faces them; ultimately they decide to investigate this murder for themselves. And it takes paragraphs (reported by Haru in first person) to do it. There is deeply important stuff at stake for Isagawa that might help her process her decisions leading up to her leaving the police in the first place. I'm all for redemption arcs.

Seriously y'all...there's a mutilated dead person in the trunk. These women stand there and talk. My hysterical, overemotional male self would be retching, screaming, generally freaking out at the top of my lungs as I speed-dialed the cops skatey-eight skabillion times to tell them to come get this corpse RIGHT NOW. Haru and Isagawa discuss, calmly, how to approach the process of identifying who killed her and why. While an asteroid's speeding towards Earth to end life as we know it. So, no...not ordinary circumstances, therefore not ordinary responses, and honestly the chats they're having would be fascinating no matter what but the existential stakes make them so deeply, touchingly human. These two very different people, Haru cheated out of a full life by the asteroid and Isagawa processing her much-closer end as a chance to do the right thing with her last actions on Earth, confront a serial killer...a thing I never want to do yet they're just doing it...and, in the least effective narrative choice made by Author Araki, that scumbag goes into the cliched villain monologue. More infuriatingly, Haru reveals she's known something central to the case, something coincidentally itportant, since the beginning. Fifth star sliding under the waves in 3...2...1....

I'm recommending this read to you because it is, for its structural flaws, a fascinating meditative tale. It delves into serious, interesting, well-thought-out moral discussions; it gives these two oddly assorted road-trippers ample scope to let their thoughts stew, serve them up, and discuss together and in company with odds-and-sods they collect along the road. It's often funny stuff, occasionally maudlin, usually prolix as anything.

As much as I really got annoyed I'm even more pleased that Haru and Isagawa brought me along with them as they maintained ma'at in extremis.

THE UNTOUCHED CRIME, what's a Chinese mystery novel like?

THE UNTOUCHED CRIME
ZIJIN CHEN (tr. Michelle Deeter)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For three years, a serial killer has walked among the citizens of Hangzhou, China. With each new body come the same a jump rope, a cigarette, and a slip of paper that says, “Come and get me.”

In the same city, Luo Wen wanders into a park just as a young woman stabs a local thug to death in a desperate act of self-defense. A former criminal investigator who lost his own family in an unsolved case, Luo Wen is familiar with the slippery nature of justice. So he makes the split-second decision to help the terrified woman cover up her crime, leaving behind no trace of evidence.

Luo Wen’s friend Yan Liang, a criminologist and professor known for solving each case like a mathematical equation, is called in to help the police on the recent homicides. As he digs deeper, he discovers more questions than answers―and variables that simply don’t add up. While Yan Liang follows his suspicion and Luo Wen covers his tracks, a battle of wits plays out―with the winner’s version of justice as the ultimate prize.

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My Review: Not really any great shakes in the whodunit genre, more a howsolvedit...the solution to the mystery is uncovered in bits by Luo Wen and Yan Liang; honestly, why did they choose this case to invest in isn't clear to me. There are other cases as urgent...but it's not really a fruitful speculation. It's also interestung that these two are pretty critical of their lazier colleagues. Cutting corners seems offensive to these quixotic crime-solvers. Wuxia deeply influenced this story.

I'm really interested in other cultures' attitudes to crime fiction. US crime writing is pretty solidly copaganda; I'm wondering if other country's crime solvers are the same. These two, well, they're motivated by ma'at but also seem not to have institutional investment. They're really influenced by the Rightness of crime solving. It's deeply refreshing.

I'm not hugely excited by the prose; it does its job, but it's not very energetic. I'm not that interested in superintelligent cat-and-mouse battles of wits. I've seen and read the Sherlock Holmes œuvre. Do something unusual with it and I'll get more intrigued.

So that's why we're at a quarter-star less than four. I'm not trying to be discouraging, I am not a bit sorry I read the story. I'm not going to shove it at you but I definitely think its ebook is very good value for money spent.

THE CLARE CARLSON SERIES: THE LAST SCOOP & BEYOND THE HEADLINES

THE LAST SCOOP
R.G. BELSKY
Oceanview Publishing
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Martin Barlow was Clare Carlson’s first newspaper editor, a beloved mentor who inspired her career as a journalist. But, since retiring from his newspaper job, he had become a kind of pathetic figure—railing on about conspiracies, cover-ups, and other imaginary stories he was still working on. Clare had been too busy with her own career to pay much attention to him.

When Martin Barlow is killed on the street one night during an apparent mugging attempt gone bad, it seems like he was just an old man whose time had come. But Clare—initially out of a sense of guilt for ignoring her old friend and then because of her own journalistic instincts—begins looking into his last story idea. As she digs deeper and deeper into his secret files, she uncovers shocking evidence of a serial killer worse than Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, or any of the other infamous names in history. This really is the biggest story of Martin Barlow’s career—and Clare’s, too—as she uncovers the path leading to the decades-long killer of at least twenty young women.

All is not as it seems during Clare’s relentless search for this serial killer. Is she setting herself up to be his next victim?

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My Review: Terrific first read in a series. It's book three in order, but it is my introduction to Clare and her media-centered world. Since I lived in Manhattan during the 1980s and all the 1990s, I love reading about that uniquely different world.

There are two strands to this story. Clare's early-days mentor, when she was cutting her jounalistic teeth in the newspaper business (making this kind of an historical novel, since that was rendered impossible early this century), has declined in mental health of late. She thinks, in common with others, that he's lost part of his mind because he's going on about conspiracies and cover-ups at great length...so Clare's done what she can to avoid him. It's not as cruel as it sounds, her job in the TV-news world of New York City really is consuming. She just...stops making time to see Marty.

This definitely rings true...happens all the time when someone has a high-powered position.

Thus we get that high-quality evergreen inciting event: Guilt and remorse over past behavior after someone dies. The senselessness of an older man of apparently diminishing capacities dying in a violent mugging is so utterly believable that I was pretty sure it would end up being a red herring.

Not at all. Author Belsky does a darn fine job of using it to motivate Clare to look into the wild and woolly world of Marty's carryings-on about the web of evildoing he's discovered. As she gets deeper and deeper into the material Marty's been trying to interest her in, she realizes...believably slowly and frustratingly incompletely...that he wasn't ranting about nothing but fantasies loosely based on coincidences. I admit I wanted to shout at her as she continued in her doubts. That, to me, means Author Belsky's doing a fine job of making me care about and invest in the story. For this reader, the fact that we're in first-person narration by Clare helps this investment.

The deeper Clare gets into this topsy-turvy world of power and corruption making devil's bargains, though, the more I came to think that I was missing something big about her character. When she uses a quid pro quo that, while I'm sure it's been tried before, would get a news director AND an FBI agent fired right quick by their respective employers, I realized that I wasn't buying in to Clare as a professional as fully as I would need to for this to be the next-level read it started out to be. Clare's deep personal issues aren't overly emphasized, but they're rather too neatly dovetailed into the dark, evil doings of some truly horrifying people.

The stakes ratchet up steadily as Marty's research unfolds in Clare's hands. Her skills as an investigative reporter are pretty well delineated. There are, I think inevitably given the problem I have outlined above, some credulity-straining convenient hurdle-collapsing events and coincidences. It's not the main thing I took away from the story, but I was aware that this was happening.

In the end, the *astoundingly* (but believably) heightened stakes of this investigation would have resulted in dire and condign consequences that don't happen here. I was glad to forget about that lapse, as I saw it, in authorial credibility because I really, really liked the way the story ended.

So on to the next one!

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BEYOND THE HEADLINES
R.G. BELSKY
Oceanview Publishing
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: She was a mega-celebrity—he was a billionaire businessman—now he’s dead—she’s in jail

Laurie Bateman was living the American dream. Since her arrival as an infant in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon, the pretty Vietnamese girl had gone on to become a supermodel, a successful actress, and, finally, the wife of one of the country’s top corporate dealmakers. That dream has now turned into a nightmare when she is arrested for the murder of her wealthy husband.

New York City TV journalist Clare Carlson does an emotional jailhouse interview in which Bateman proclaims her innocence—and becomes a cause celebre for women’s rights groups around the country. At first sympathetic, then increasingly suspicious of Laurie Bateman and her story, Clare delves into a baffling mystery which has roots extending back nearly fifty years to the height of the Vietnam War.

Soon, there are more murders, more victims, and more questions as Clare struggles against dire evil forces to break the biggest story of her life. Beyond the Headlines is perfect for fans of Robert Crais and Harlan Coben.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The witty, sarcastic, self-destructive Clare Carlson is back. This time she's looking into a dead rich guy who, frankly, just needed killin' and no matter who did it they should get a severe chastisement and a ride home from the police. That would, however, make a boring story.

As with The Last Scoop (above) Clare is in no way reluctant to spread her...charms...far and wide to get dirt and details and help that she wouldn't otherwise come across. This was more of a problem for me on this second outing because it felt reductive to me. A woman in a powerful position, coming to the aid of a woman who seems to be wrongly accused of her dirtbag husband's murder, and using sex to accomplish lots of things she shouldn't be able to do, is problematic for me. Why make her out to be good at her job, show her being possessed of professional skills, then set her out as a serial sex-hound?

So there went that quarter star.

What *did* work for me was the investigation into accused husband-killer's past that resulted from a seeming slip of the tongue on her part. The way this book took on dark and ugly stuff from the US's past was very well-handled and integrated into the crime story. I was so involved in the whys and hows of the story that I could put aside my unhappy response to the overuse of Clare's sexuality.

I'm not so sure that will last, I must say...I hope Author Belsky will dial this back before the next book. Which I will definitely read.

KILL FOR LOVE, is Tiffany the new Patrick Bateman?

KILL FOR LOVE
LAURA PICKLESIMER
The Unnamed Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The boys on the row are only after one thing, but that bullshit’s for pledges. Tiffany’s on the hunt for something more.

Kill for Love is a searing satirical thriller about Tiffany, a privileged Los Angeles sorority sister who is struggling to keep her sadistic impulses—and haunting nightmares of fire and destruction—at bay. After a frat party hookup devolves into a bloody, fatal affair, Tiffany realizes something within her has awoken: the insatiable desire to kill attractive young men.

As Tiffany’s bloodlust deepens and the bodies pile up, she must contend with mounting legal scrutiny, social media-fueled competing murders, and her growing relationship with Weston, who she thinks could be the perfect boyfriend. A female-driven, modern-day American Psycho, Kill for Love exposes modern toxic plasticity with dark comedy and propulsive plot.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you have a trigger, this book will trip it. Shop elsewhere.

Is the best way to satirize something to stand it on its head, replicating beat-for-beat its abuses on those usually perpetrating them?

By my definition of "best," this time the answer's yes. Like the 2019 delight that was Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer, this book posits a vicious and cruel woman enacting sexual violence on the men...pretty, vapid young men in this case...who irritate her. We're in Tiffany's head this time, unlike Braithwaite's story of an appalled sister's responses to the aftermath of violence. It's a much more awful place to be. Not that she's unjusified in targeting her victims, you understand. It's just the glorious release and the bloody reveling in her newfound freedom to be the perpetrator, not the victim, of violence is...a bit unpleasant. A lot like the experience of reading the very accurate publisher's comp title American Psycho is. Being inside an unhinged person's head as they perpetrate unspeakable sexualized violence for their own gratification is very, very unsettling...to me at least. Thank goodness it is, or I'd be worried about myself.

What Author Picklesimer does that wasn't done in American Psycho is leave her character on the surfaces of things, people, thoughts...she has, and sees, and needs no depth in, to, of anything. Her world is flat and glossy with a few stark shadows and fewer ideas. Patrick Bateman reveled in what he was doing but had pseudoprofound thoughts about it. Tiffany is utterly without nuance. It works much better than some out-of-character philosophizing would have done to poke a satirical finger in the chest of the rampant blatant ever-uglier misogyny in the use of sexualized violence against women as entertainment. Women are victims and foils, you say? asks Author Picklesimer. What drove this man to do all these awful things to women, as though that was the important part because, one is led to understand, *HE* is then the main character, not his victim.

Her response to this sexist, misogynistic bullshit is to give the world Tiffany, pretty, shallow, privileged Tiffany. She revels in her bloody dispatchings of men because it feels good...no woman on a mission, no abused-become-abuser mealymouthing. She gets off on it.

It's probably more unsettling to me that she finds Weston so lovable than that she commits the awful acts she does. The randomness of her choice, the indistinguishability of Weston from the victims, is so completely arbitrary that it gives me the heebie-jeebies when I contemplate how much of my own continued existence is down to not meeting a Tiffany when their bloodlust was up.

There were problems in the read for me. One was Tiffany's peculiarly empathetic response to her roommate, whom she professes to dislike, experiencing rape. Why would Tiffany care? She's got no empathy in her or the oceans of awfulness wouldn't happen. I wasn't entirely sure that California, where we set our scene, was meant to be satirical or reportorial. Its wasteland-of-violence presentation was deadpan enough that it didn't read as exaggerated for effect to me. That meant I was left wondering how this has only now created a Tiffany...and how it is that Authority in such a hellscape overlooked her as a potential perpetrator without her using a whole lot of effort to mislead them. I suppose that's a commentary on sexism's immensely stupidifying effect on men.

Even Tiffany has a family, though you'd barely know it. Her sister is window-dressed into one scene I can remember, which means there was either no need for her at all or there's a missed opportunity here. Weston's bestie, Dean, had a tiny role that I'd've liked more of, but the bit he was in certainly ramped up the tension so read that as a bleat of dissatisfaction not a criticism.

I've got this to say about the read: It suited me down to the ground for what I wanted it to do. It entertained me as I thought of the thousands of hours of girls (term used advisedly) breasting boobily across stage, page, and screen to titillate with their sexuality before being punished in violent awful ways for it.

How's it feel when the tables are turned, gents?

MY MEN, #WITMonth translation of Norwegian novel about first known US female serial killer

MY MEN
VICTORIA KIELLAND (tr. Damion Searls)
Astra House
$25.00 hardcover, available now
Trade paper AVAILABLE 13 AUGUST 2024 for $16.00
Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Based on the true story of Norwegian maid turned Midwestern farmwife Belle Gunness, the first female serial killer in American history. My Men is a fictional account of one broken woman's descent into inescapable madness.

Among thousands of other Norwegian immigrants seeking freedom, Brynhild Størset emigrated to the American Upper Midwest in the late nineteenth century, changing her name and her life. As Bella, later Belle Gunness, she came in search of not only fortune and true faith but, most of all, love.

From Victoria Kielland, a rising star of Norwegian literature, comes My Men , a literary reimagining of the harrowing true story of Belle Gunness, who slowly but irreversibly turned to senseless murder for release from her pain, becoming America’s first known female serial killer. In pursuit of her American Dream, Kielland’s Belle grows increasingly alienated, ruthless, and perversely compelling.

Raw, visceral, and altogether hypnotic, My Men is a brutal yet radically empathetic glimpse into the world of a woman consumed by desire.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When a writer sets their talent to the task of fictionalizing evil, there are choices to make that will determine the level of suspension of disbelief the reader's being asked to invest. Is the evil inherent (readily believable), evoked (sympathetically believable), or situational (tough to justify or invest in)? Is the perpetrator the victim lashing out, taking power back, or simply looking to survive in hard conditions? All of these ask us, as readers, to put aside our judgments of the bad actor to some extent and to come to a fuller understanding of what really happened (in the cases where evil is factually based, as this one is).

I'll say that I understood Belle Gunness a lot differently after this read than before it.

A more-or-less stream of consciousness, loosely structured narrative style suits the apparent purpose of humanizing a murdering, remorseless killer of many people. What the author seems to want me to do is to think of Belle as a person, in hard circumstances, not as just a killing machine. That didn't happen. As I followed her increasingly disordered thoughts and feelings, as I saw what she saw and worked back from there to her probable outside stimulus, I felt sympathy drain away from me. This is the situationally evil character, one who just does what she (in this case) does because she can. This person was a killer who liked killing for the power it conferred on her. The inner thoughts of such a person, as ficionalized, left me thinking how very easy it seemed to be for her to untether her blunted, stunted moral sense from anything that was outside her own mind. I'd assumed Gunness was existentially threatened herself and then enacted that on others. Before this read, what I saw was a need to redress her powerless victim state. After, she came through these pages as a narcissistic bundle of insecurities with a grossly overblown sense of what the world owed her.

If, like me, you thought we'd get a retelling of the life Belle Gunness led that made her what she was, get that out of your head. We're inside Belle's mind, arguably a more interesting place to be. It's going to put some readers off, because it's 100% conjecture. You're not tethered to the facts of Belle's life. You're asked to put aside that readerly need. Your disbelief buys you, however, the strange and deeply interesting view of a murdering sociopath's thought processes.

I hope like hell someone at the publisher's end made more than a cursory check on the author's background because she's very, very good...chillingly good...at making this horrifying person's inner life accessible to a casual reader.

I don't think everyone will appreciate this read. I know I expected something other than what I got. I liked the actual book better than the one I thought I'd be reading in the end.

UNDERNEATH, brutal yet concise true-crime novel about Mother & SHELTER, psychological horror in Australia

UNDERNEATH
LILY HOANG
Red Hen Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Martha Johnson wants to be a good mother and a devoted wife. It’s all she’s ever wanted in life, and she tries her very best, but when her husband threatens to leave her, her desperation reveals only one strategy that can save her family, punish her ungrateful husband, and earn power: murder.

Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Disturbing story of disempowerment's most extreme and appalling cost. That it is based on a true story made me feel ill.

...I'm pretty sure this isn't purgatory, either. It's more just like, extension. Continuation. We the murdered continue on, right underneath the living, but we aren't alive anymore. We're just here: bodies, but not bodies, too. So far as I can tell, the living can't see or hear or feel or smell us, but sometimes, if I get close enough to Martha, I swear she can taste me. ... Because we were murdered, this is our punishment.

As one expects from stories published by Red Hen Press's Kate Gale, monadnock of the LA literary publishing scene for {undisclosed} years now, there is a weird and unsettling tension between the lovely language and the sheer awfulness unfolding inside those pretty phrases and unnerving images. Why should the murdered, especially these child-victims, be made to suffer punishment? Discuss amongst yourselves after reading this intensely book-clubbable book.

Incest...prostitution...child-murder...maternal child abuse...domestic violence...and told through a dead child's point of view. "Is this old man round the bend for good?" I hear y'all thinking, as you read my sentence above about the book being "intensely book-clubbable." No: I'm hoping to make it plain to you that this story is so viscerally real, so eye-wateringly honest about the actual experience of mothering for a not insignificant segment of women, that y'all bougie book clubbers could do with a corrective lens to all the saintly, rise-above-it-all, succeed succeed succeed "women's fiction" guff that gets Oprah'd and Reese'd. Please note that I am not attempting a knock on these book clubs, they are hugely popular for a reason and their choices are not all in one and only one vein...but they are very fond of a certain type of story (described above) and return to books telling it quite often. Don't fix what ain't broken.

I want people to look past the usual and see the raw edges where things have failed and fragmented in different ways. Where the fault lines that exist in much of the world go at a different angle. I include myself in this, as my periodic reviews of *shudder* poetry and *urp* YA stories demonstrate. Successful for me or not, these reads are in areas I'm hell-bent-for-leather not to ignore simply because I so very often find them...unpleasant...to read. As I've said many times, I do not want to die above the neck before I die below it. So I'm out there sayin' "yes" when people offer me the damn things instead of running away like I want to...challenging my prejudices is the only way I know to prevent them from becoming part of the bone structure.

With Underneath, Author Hoang very much did that kind of challenging. We're not innocents, readers all, we've read The Lovely Bones and/or seen its movie. Dead narrators in fiction go a long, long way farther back in time than that. I'm not sure this take on the story she's telling here, a sort of slo-mo In Cold Blood, is one I'd've recommended to her. (I sure as hell wouldn't've recommended using w-bombs.) But when you're fully in the flow of the story you can see why this choice was exactly right, and possibly the only one she could have made. There was no other structure which would've enabled the Bernice-to-Martha-to-Arlene transmission of woman-violence to come clear. It needed an eyewitness whose eyes weren't in the same place they used to be. Like, Earth.

The pace of storytelling...well...I don't exactly know what to tell you. This isn't a novella, but it's not a long book. It doesn't linger on any scene. It simply is Arlene...talking to you. The story seems, in my experience of reading it, to tell itself to you in some peculiar way. Maybe the narrator being a child, who specifically says she's a child but one whose, um, existence after death keeps her learning, is so disorienting that the story becomes more of presence than she is? I can't be sure...but to me, the story was its own narrator, and it called itself Arlene. (If that makes any sense to you, could you explain it to me?) It doesn't repeat itself. It doesn't leave stuff out (for long). It's got a pull like a river's current, not dramatic but inexorable and powerful, like it won't let you go once you're there.

So go with it.

The structural facts of a novel told in vignettes...in discrete story-slices, layered with the sadness that floats under the surface of the ever-expanding skin of mother eating, of child growing, of marriage to a man who loves only what he needs and not what he wants bloating as its death-gases seek escape...is irregular, like the crumb structure of the best bread is. Not for Author Hoang, writing about cake...endless cakes made and eaten, made and eaten, never ever shared...the dense, regular, sweet crumbs left on an unused party-plate. The coarse and unappealing crumbs, food for scavenging ants, of hollow-sounding adulterated loafs of dollar-store bread; these make Martha's and Arlene's lines as they slip and catch and form shapes no one wants to see, just sweep into a trash can or, at best, into a crumb-catcher for possible crushing and reuse after they're fully hardened and useless as food in themselves.

There is a crisis in this world. It's a crisis of unlove. There are so many, many people in the world who are unloved. Who can't love or return love or even conceptualize it. They're incapable of it; they need it the more desperately because of that. But they don't and can't and won't get love. They are love-less. Bernice? Martha? Even, in the end, Arlene...love-less. Love, you see, isn't a word or a fancy chocolate bar, or a birthday card. It's action, investment of time and emotion. And the tragedy, in the ancient sense as well as the modern, of this story is that It. Is. True.

Beautiful sentences telling a dreadful, tragic tale of love, in its absence and its perverse, incomprehensible to normies, twisted shapes. Read this and be very, very glad you are none of these people.

Read this and shudder to your bones: You are all of these people. Happy Spooktober.

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SHELTER
CATHERINE JINKS
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Meg lives alone. Her little house in the bush outside town is the perfect place to hide. This seclusion is one of the reasons she offers to shelter Nerine, a young women escaping an abusive ex-partner. The other is that Meg knows what it’s like to live with the looming threat of a violence at the hands of someone you love.... Nerine is jumpy and her two little girls are frightened. This tells Meg all she needs to know about where they’ve come from, and she’s not all that surprised when Nerine asks her to get hold of a gun. But she knows it’s unnecessary. They’re safe now. Or so Meg thinks… Then she starts to wonder about some little things. A disturbed flyscreen. A tune playing on her windchimes. Has Nerine’s ex tracked them down? Has Meg’s husband turned up to torment her some more? By the time she finds out, it’ll be too late to do anything but run for her life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember the first time the old aphorism, "No good deed goes unpunished," held real, tangible, awful Truth for you? Strap in....

Meg is the kind of friend you hope you'll have in an emergency or crisis. She's been there, she's done what she could, realizes how important the mere fact of showing up is. She'll give you shelter, she'll offer support, she will feed you and listen to you and Be There in the psychological, supportive sense of the words.

That's because she did not get those things when she so badly needed them during her devastatingly abusive marriage.

Nerine and her two daughters are, as we're shown, in a situation where Meg, her home (which she's ever so aptly named "Bolt Hole"), and her way with others are just exactly what they need. In they come; settle they do not. Nerine is in constant motion, constantly talking taking talking about how horrible the girls' father is (right in front of their scared little faces), how bad their lives were, how the courts have...insanely, incomprehensibly...given this vile predatory abuser visitation rights! Can you even imagine! she asks Meg, never waiting for an answer.

Then the nightmare turns real...awful things having been said, there are suddenly weird and unnerving things happening...frightening but, as yet, not violent things...footprints and noises where and when they shouldn't be, and all the time Nerine's talk talk talk about the horrors of the past makes little Analiese and Collette, her very young daughters, scared and jumpy. Meg, a grown woman with an estranged daughter living in England (can't forgive Mum for staying with the awful narcissistic personality disorder-having Dad), empathizes with all three, tries her best to distract and entertain the girls with rural life's many pleasures. Nerine? Nothing changes her focus. She is wound way too tight, experiences all things as threats and blames everything on the violent, awful ex who will, it comes to seem, jump down from a tree onto them with a machete!

As the unnerving stuff escalates into actual violence (CONTENT WARNING: ANIMAL CRUELTY), Meg begins to piece together some very, very strange facts and comes up with a truly frightening picture.

As I read the story, I was genuinely unsettled and disturbed. I can't say I expected the twist, having thought from the get-go there was going to be one. What it was, however, surprised me. Author Jinks deserves big ups for her unnerving choice of an ending. It was not what I'd thought it would be, and made the story that much more appealing to me.

Animal cruelty cost the book a star. I understood why Author Jinks made that choice, and I wasn't inclined to put the book down for good because of it, but it was dreadful and I warn my more sensitive readers (Kathy!) not to consider this tale for their own shelves.

The topic of incest and the crime of rape are factors in this story. They are hot buttons for many. I will say that Auhtor Jinks does not sensationalize them. They aren't dwelt on with ghoulish and repugnant "look! LOOK at how AWFUL men are!" glee. They are presented as facts, and as crimes; they are part of the women's experiences, and are told to us, the readers, as such.

I quite liked the pace set by Author Jinks. We're not in a hurry to get where we're going; there are interesting side characters and the land itself is a character of a sort. That, from my point of view, set the stakes effectively high for Meg, and for the reader. Anything that disrupts this lovely woman's Bolt Hole is a Bad Thing. And boy oh boy, the bad thing is very, very bad indeed. As Spooktober reads go, I think this one is as scary and as nightmarish as they come. Perfect for y'all ghoulies looking for a safe place to be wound up and scared witless!

THE WHISPER MAN, Alex North's debut thriller, has so much more to say than "BOO!"

THE WHISPER MAN
ALEX NORTH
Celadon Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this dark, suspenseful thriller, Alex North weaves a multi-generational tale of a father and son caught in the crosshairs of an investigation to catch a serial killer preying on a small town.

After the sudden death of his wife, Tom Kennedy believes a fresh start will help him and his young son Jake heal. A new beginning, a new house, a new town. Featherbank.

But the town has a dark past. Twenty years ago, a serial killer abducted and murdered five residents. Until Frank Carter was finally caught, he was nicknamed "The Whisper Man," for he would lure his victims out by whispering at their windows at night.

Just as Tom and Jake settle into their new home, a young boy vanishes. His disappearance bears an unnerving resemblance to Frank Carter's crimes, reigniting old rumors that he preyed with an accomplice. Now, detectives Amanda Beck and Pete Willis must find the boy before it is too late, even if that means Pete has to revisit his great foe in prison: The Whisper Man.

And then Jake begins acting strangely. He hears a whispering at his window...

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY OF THIS TITLE. THANK YOU.

My Review: The town of Featherbank has this as its primary claim to fame:

If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.
If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.
If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.

You're the young single dad of a weirdo son. You know this town's had five young boys kidnapped, interfered with, and murdered. So what do you do, give the place a three-hundred-mile berth as you decide where to run away from your grief and your complete inability to grok your sweet, sensitive son?

Not if you're Tom Kennedy! You *move*there*to*write*! TSTL, anyone? Exacerbated by the fact your spawn is prime meat for this lunatic?

But he's in jail, the perp's been caught, so there's no risk.

Horseshit, says I, my son and I will be moving to Mallorca or Auckland, NOT FEATHERBANK. However, I possess a strong streak of risk-averse-ness that Pa Kennedy doesn't.

Why'd you read it, I hear the review-readers asking. Knowing what was gonna happen, why put yourself through it, the crowd snorts inwardly.

That was the thing about going to sleep. It kind of scrubbed things. Arguments, worries, whatever. You could be scared or upset about something, and you might think sleep was impossible, but at some point it happened, and when you woke up in the morning the feeling was gone for awhile, like a storm passed during the night.
–and–
Guilt. Fear. Anger. Once loose, any one of them would charge off, dragging the others along like dogs chained in a pack. And that was no good at all.
–and–
It was a daunting prospect, because it was all such a jumble, and there was also so much I didn't know and perhaps never would. But then again, I wasn't sure that in itself was a problem. The truth of something can be in the feeling of it as much as the fact.
–and–
But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been. He had only ever needed to be himself, and it had just taken time—too much time—to understand that.

This is not ground-breaking prose, jaw-dropping insight, beauteous lapidary phrase-making of a high order; it is, instead, the commonplace recognition of Life's Little Thumps said in ways that any one of us can feel, really and viscerally, instead of the more rarefied and intellectual pleasures of Writing for the Critics.

Tom and Jake, and ultimately the male reader whose relationship with his maleness is built on a partial vacuum, are males groping for a point of commonality that is uniquely theirs. The normal female intermediary is gone. Most men don't try very hard to reach around Ma to get to their sons. Tom has no choice. And, haltingly and awkwardly, he makes connections to and bridges with Jake.

That, theydies and gentlethem, is worth reading average-to-good prose and forgiving the *sheer*boggling*idiocy* of moving your son to a town of known serial-killing-boys past. This is a rare thing. This is a love story about a man who works his brain into a frenzy to find a way to let his son know what all sons most want to know:

Daddy loves you.

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER delivers appalled laughs, existential shivers, and great hopes for her next work

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER
OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE
Doubleday (non-affiliate Amazon link
$11.99 ebooks, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: My Sister, the Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker—and more difficult to get out of the carpet—than water...

When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other...

AUGUST 2019 UPDATE Oyinkan Braithwaite talks about How to Make Multiple Stabbings Funny! Interesting podcast.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. THANK YOU!

My Review:

It takes a lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul, especially if you don't want to leave any evidence of foul play.

And just like *that* I'm totally hooked. Second book this month set in Lagos; and second informed by a special Nigerian magical realism. (The other is David Mogo, Godhunter. Excellent as well.) This is a light entertainment, a shiny pretty costume-jewelry of a story that sets your readerly mood in its most attractive and colorful light. It's fun. It's got the Double Indemnityesque delight of a love triangle detonated by jealousy, the In Cold Bloodness of a crime spree done for the sheer hell of it, and that utterly madcap Thelma and Louisely sanitized violence and death.

Yes, sanitized. Korede reports, doesn't narrate, the aftermath of Ayoola's kills. She keeps the details sparse enough to inform but not nauseate. Korede stands between us and Ayoola the serial killer. (Thank goodness. I don't think I could've read a whole novel from Ayoola's PoV!) So we're safe, we're not going to the places Korede has seen, we needn't do what Korede does.

Those things that she must do in the name of Family, of keeping her sister from suffering the consequences of her actions, weigh on Korede. Naturally, I hear you snort, they would on anyone! It's a lot to carry. Korede needs a confessor and, since she's a hospital nurse, she is in the path of the perfect confessor-cum-confidant: Muhtar, a comatose patient with a neglectful family. She tells him Everything: details of the killings, the things she's had to do to cover them up, the awful sick feeling of being accessory to a serial killer...she talks it out to his vacant-but-breathing ears. How good it feels! Confession truly is good for the soul.

Not so much for the body...Muhtar wakes up. He's delighted to meet the nurse whose voice, in its daily presence, gave him the will to live and return. And yes, he remembers all. He's quite sure of what he heard Korede say. And do you know, he simply doesn't care because:

"...we are hardwired to protect and remain loyal to the people we love. Besides, no one is innocent in this world. Why, go up to your maternity ward! All those smiling parents and their newborns? Murderers and victims. Every one of them. 'The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.'"

"That's quite..." I can't complete the sentence. The words trouble me.

"It's a quote by Jim Morrison. I cannot lay claim to such wisdom."

Again, Author Braithwaite sweeps me away on her word-tide. She quotes Jim Morrison and does it well. She creates a full-fledged memorable character out of a comatose guy. This is a writer with chops. (You should forgive.) She has done the best for Korede that she can in giving her a sage and caring counselor, especially as the hospital is well-stocked with people she must not and cannot trust:

She smiles, hoping to put me at ease, but the expression does not sit comfortably on her face. ... I would be more at ease if the Joker were to smile at me.

Korede is, in that moment, trying to keep her cool as the Lagos police are returning her car to her possession after running tests for Ayoola's latest victim's blood on it. Her nosy colleague, trying to get the dirt, is doomed to failure as Korede does what she's best at: Stays mum. Protects Ayoola. Pretends she is doing a good thing, being loyal to and as always protecting her younger sister. Family first!

Besides, it's what Korede doesn't do...what in the end she chooses to allow to occur to someone over whom she rhapsodizes, "Is there anything more beautiful than a man with a voice like an ocean?"...that defines her as a moral actor. I disagree with her choice, and I would've liked a chance to convince her to change her mind. With a two-by-four to the knees if necessary. But Korede, as written, really couldn't have made a different choice, so here we are.

Overall, the story's pluses...new-to-me setting, cultural differences that kept me on my Google-fu, and an authorial style I found engaging...got me to a shade over four stars. It wasn't hard to get there. Where I just can't get to, though, is the place where this entertainment got itself onto the Booker Prize 2019 longlist! That makes no sense to me, because there are wonderful and delicious moments in this book to savor but it does nothing that's particularly innovative. At least not in my eyes. Many will disagree, I don't doubt.

As a read, this is a superior summer entertainment. It won, deservedly, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Mystery/Thriller in 2018. But it isn't High Art, and I don't think it set out to be. It is a first novel of great promise and I want to see Oyinkan Braithwaite's second one with great anticipatory glee.

Book-A-Day #18: Favorite Crime Novel, BLACK IRISH

BLACK IRISH
STEPHAN TALTY
Ballantine Books
$6.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this explosive debut thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Blue Water, a brilliant homicide detective returns home, where she confronts a city’s dark demons and her own past while pursuing a brutal serial killer on a vengeful rampage.

Absalom “Abbie” Kearney grew up an outsider in her own hometown. Even being the adopted daughter of a revered cop couldn’t keep Abbie’s troubled past from making her a misfit in the working-class Irish American enclave of South Buffalo. And now, despite a Harvard degree and a police detective’s badge, she still struggles to earn the respect and trust of those she’s sworn to protect. But all that may change, once the killing starts.

When Jimmy Ryan’s mangled corpse is found in a local church basement, this sadistic sacrilege sends a bone-deep chill through the winter-whipped city. It also seems to send a message—one that Abbie believes only the fiercely secretive citizens of the neighborhood known as “the County” understand. But in a town ruled by an old-world code of silence and secrecy, her search for answers is stonewalled at every turn, even by fellow cops. Only when Abbie finds a lead at the Gaelic Club, where war stories, gossip, and confidences flow as freely as the drink, do tongues begin to wag—with desperate warnings and dire threats. And when the killer’s mysterious calling card appears on her own doorstep, the hunt takes a shocking twist into her own family’s past. As the grisly murders and grim revelations multiply, Abbie wages a chilling battle of wits with a maniac who sees into her soul, and she swears to expose the County’s hidden history—one bloody body at a time.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to discuss one's favorite crime novel, in honor of some British crime-novel beano.

Despite there being naggingly annoying lapses in continuity at three or four points, I was sucked into the violent and rage-filled vortex of this book from the get-go. The story, a standard one, is told at a breathless pace in direct, unpretentious language. The setting is seared into my memory. I feel as if I could find the park, drive the streets, point to the places I'd read about. I'm sure as hell not stopping for the cops there, Absalom/Abbie excepted.

The family secrets, the community guilt, the larger and wider implications of the vicious and bloody killings, make this procedural far more than an afternoon's entertainment. It's not Art, it's excitement! It's brutal and tough and doesn't give a flying fuck if your girlie-girl feelies are all bent. It's too busy setting you up for the next bashing!

I liked the hell out of it. It's good, every now and then, to sluice the nicey-nice from one's brain with a bracing dose of mean as fuck because I wanna be. There is NO oxytocin released in the reading of this book. Adrenaline, yes; androgen, oh my yes. We won't go into the testosterone release figures. Post-menopausal women are cautioned that they might find themselves assuming male secondary characteristics.

The sensitive members of the party are STRONGLY cautioned not to so much as handle this book. Don't do it, don't even contemplate it. Not for yinz.

Fans of the 87th Precinct, we found you a new writer to follow!