Monday, July 30, 2012

Broken Harbor, by Tana French (Viking; $27.95)


Patrick and Jenny Spain were the perfect couple. High school sweethearts, they had eyes only for each other. They married, had two perfect kids, and decided it was time to jump on the real estate band wagon. They paid too much for a house being built in Brianstown, a housing development on the Irish Sea. It was far from family and friends, but they figured they could turn it around in a few years.

Then came the recession. Pat lost his job, the builder took off, Brianstown became a ghost town. And then things went from terrible to devastating.

When Jenny’s sister found the bodies, the super assigned the case to Detective Mike Kennedy and rookie Richie Curran. Brianstown holds special meaning for Mike Kennedy. When he was young, his family used to vacation there, back when it was called Broken Harbor. But the Kennedys never returned after the summer his mother died.

Kennedy and Curran are puzzled by the Spain’s house. Despite the two kids, it is pristine, with nothing out of place. But someone—or something—has knocked holes in the walls, there are baby monitors everywhere, and there is a huge, lethal trap in the attic capable of ensnaring a bear.

In no time, the detectives catch a guy who quickly admits to killing Pat and the two kids, and critically wounding Jenny. But there’s something not quite right about his confession. The detectives continue investigating, trying to tie up the loose ends. What they learn is the sad story of a family’s dreams ripped apart by forces they never saw coming.

Tana French’s Broken Harbor is a tense, well-plotted police procedural.  The characters are memorable--each is struggling with loneliness, disappointment, and all the other emotions that come with realizing that life hasn’t worked out according to plan. This is a great summer read.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Lake Country, by Sean Doolittle (Bantam Books; $15.00)


Boy, I like Sean Doolittle. This guy is terrific. His latest, Lake Country, resulted in two back-to-back nearly sleepless nights for me. Reading the book before bed got me so tense that although I forced myself to turn out the light, I was too wound up to sleep.

So here’s the plot: a young woman is hit head-on by a wealthy architect who fell asleep at the wheel. The woman’s brother is serving in Iraq; two Marines, Darryl Potter and Mike Barlowe, accompany him to headquarters where he gets the news that his sister has died. As the brother prepares to leave for the funeral, his truck is hit by an IED and he’s killed.  

Potter and Barlowe eventually leave the military, but their adjustment to civilian life is rocky at best. Potter has had the most trouble: instigating bar fights, drinking himself unconscious, and working sporadically as a collector for a bookie. As they sit in their favorite bar watching a TV. news reporter talk about the fifth anniversary of the death of their buddy’s sister, Potter rails against the injustice of the architect’s light sentence. Secretly, he hatches a plan to even the score.

The next day, some goons show up at Potter and Barlowe’s apartment, looking for Potter and the $11,000 he stole from a restaurant. Barlowe goes back the bar where they’d been the night before and learns that the bartender innocently gave Potter permission to use his lake house. When the same TV reporter from the night before reports that the architect’s 20-year-old daughter is missing, Barlowe realizes his friend is spiraling out of control. He sets out to rescue the girl by finding Potter, with the the goons, cops, and TV reporter hot on his trail. 
 
Doolittle draws memorable, complex characters, all of whom have been beaten down by life.  Even better than his characters, however, is his superb plotting. My description of the plot doesn’t do it justice—it flows with a terrific combination of unexpected twists and bleak inevitability.  I can’t say enough about this author: I like every book of his that’s I’ve read. Lake Country is one of best books I’ve read in long, long time. 


Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Jack 1939, by Francine Mathews (Riverhead Books; $26.95)


I will be the first to admit that I frequently judge a book by its cover. Sure, I’ll read something with a plain cover, as long as it’s by an author I already like. But I’m a bit of a sucker for great creative cover art. So it was no surprise that I was drawn in by the cover of Francine Mathew’s Jack 1939.  The cover photograph, of a very young JFK in a fedora, with the Eiffel Tower over his right shoulder, was one of the best covers I’ve seen in a long while.

The plot of the book is simple: Hitler wants to buy the 1940 US presidential election in order to put an isolationist in the White House.  FDR needs to know who is running Hitler’s financial network and how the money—some $150 million so far—is
being brought in. He asks Harvard student Jack Kennedy, about to travel to Europe to research his senior thesis, to serve as his eyes and ears in Europe. JFK’s cover is enhanced due to the widely-known enmity between FDR and Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to England and an avowed isolationist himself.

The book has all the trappings of a great spy thriller: cruel Nazis, disappearing ink, beautiful women, rich boys in formal wear, and Europe on the brink of war. The characters are, of course, familiar, since most are historical figures. Those that aren’t however, are also familiar, due to Mathews’ reliance on clichés. (Femme fatale who just might be a German spy; ugly German assassin.)  

Mathews’ depiction of JFK, however, is novel. Here he is nearly incapacitated by a debilitating illness that renders him gaunt and weak.  And he’s not the rake we have come to know; instead, he loses his heart easily and frequently. He seems to have no political aspirations of his own, while despising his father’s amoral ambition. Most fun of all, we see the famous Kennedy family members in a very human light, such as Rose as a cold social climber and Teddy as an annoying younger brother.

In the author’s notes, Mathews discusses her research and says that she put her JFK character in various countries and meeting with actual figures (such as George Kennan) at the same time that the real JFK visited those places and people. I can’t begin to know how much of the story is real and how much is fiction. In the end, it doesn’t really matter: the book is an exciting thriller in any case.

In her notes, Mathews said that she was drawn to write the story when she saw a photo of a 22-year-old JFK juggling while at Harvard. If a photo is enough to persuade her to write a whole novel this fun, I think I was justified for reading it based solely on the cover!   




Monday, July 9, 2012

Niceville, by Carsten Stroud (Knopf; $26.95)


Something is definitely not nice in Niceville. Ten-year-old Rainey Teague disappeared while walking home from school one day. It’s not the first missing persons case the town has known. In fact, the town has a stranger-abduction rate more than five times that of the rest of the country. Two per year since 1928, to be exact.

Rainey’s disappearance is only one of many, many ugly occurrences in the pretty little town. The local bank gets robbed, and a sniper picks off each of the cops chasing the escape car.  Along with the bank’s $2.5 million, the robbers swiped a top-secret piece of equipment previously stolen from a local Raytheon subsidiary. A prominent citizen films his adolescent daughters in the shower.   And mirrors and windows reflect something evil.

The sleepy southern town was built against Tallulah’s Wall, a forbidding-looking cliff that serves as the northern border. Locals think that the town’s problems might stem from Crater Sink, an ominous, bottomless sinkhole at the top of the wall. Readers realize early on—far, far earlier than the characters do, that the true source of the problem is time travel gone seriously awry.

Carsten Stroud is an amazing talent.  His writing is elegant, his setting fabulously ominous, and his characters refreshingly unique.  He describes one couple as being “as frigidly unappealing as banana-flavored Popsicles.”  About Tin Town, Niceville’s slum, Stroud said, “the main industry ruling the place was a lethal combination of grinding hard times, blood-simple gunsels, pointless death, and blue ruin.” (I’m not sure what “blue ruin” is, but I liked the phrase.) Despite his skill—or rather, because of it—I ultimately found Niceville infuriating.  The problem? The plot is a hot mess. There are too many story lines, and Stroud does not bother to weave them together.  Characters are thrown in the mix in a way that implies they’ll somehow impact the plot; too often, they have no effect at all. When one character takes action to destroy another, Stroud writes, “the fact that he was, in effect, about to commit a kind of suicide was not clear to him at the time.”  Set-ups of that sort deserve resolution equal to the drama of the language; the fact that the character was alive and well at the end of the book left me scratching my head.  The supernatural aspect of the plot is not compelling and the climax of that story line incomprehensible. Stroud is careless and sloppy.  In the mystery world, those are capital crimes.

I couldn’t put this book down, but when it was done, I wanted to stomp it into dust.  It’s a great read with an outstandingly unsatisfying ending.