Charlotte Elkins and Aaron Elkins write an amusing art-historical mystery.

This novel sounded like it would be amusing, especially since it was set in Santa Fe and concerned Georgia O’Keefe.  I had not encountered this writing couple before, but I will keep a look out from now on.

A Dangerous Talent

Alix London, the heroine of Charlotte Elkins’ and Aaron Elkins’ novel A Dangerous Talent (270 pages, Thomas & Mercer, $14.95) is trying to make her way as an art restorer and advisor to collectors.  She is struggling in her career, largely because she is not well known.  And what people do know about her, they know because of her father.  And that is really no help at all.

Geoff, her well-meaning but utterly frustrating father, has himself just come out of prison for his major role in a huge art forgery ring.  The well-heeled and extraordinarily easy life to which he had introduced his daughter has simply disappeared, and she feels that if she were never to hear from him, it would be too soon.

He has helped her behind the scenes, though, with his long-standing and not so terribly tarnished connections, and in addition he has helped her find a great restoration gig—she is cleaning and restoring the works of a wonderful collector, who has also left the country for a while and allowed Alix to stay in her apartment while she works.  In the middle of this work, she is approached by a different collector who would like to take her on as an advisor to search for art and to help develop her taste.  Alix responds warily; but when this woman, Chris Lemay, proposes a quick trip to Santa Fe in her private jet to look at a Georgia O’Keefe landscape she is hoping to buy, Alix jumps at the chance to leave rainy Seattle for the desert sun.

Things start to go wrong, however, as soon as the pair arrive in Santa Fe.  Alix is scheduled to stay in a casita at the inn where they have reserved.  But no sooner does she enter with her bags, then she smells gas.  And in minutes the whole place has exploded.  Everyone apologizes for the accident, but she senses that there is more to it.

These feelings intensify when the art dealer they have arrived to meet is murdered before they have had much time to do more than say hello to the woman.  This cannot be coincidental, and they are terribly confused about what it all means.

Shuffling around and trying to make sense of it himself, is the handsome and deceptive FBI agent, Ted Ellesworth, who first presents himself as a wealthy Boston collector in town to see some of the same paintings Alix and Chris have come to see.  He is suspicious of the young and attractive Alix, however, because he knows about her father and he cannot imagine that she is not involved in the art scams that he has come to Santa Fe to investigate.

There are many more complications, a few more murders and attempted murders before things start to become clear.  The big issue for Alix, aside from staying alive, is whether or not she can ever forgive her father.  Let’s just say that the novelists make it so that she really has very little choice.

This is an engaging novel, well-paced and carefully plotted, with likable characters and a very satisfying ending.  I will definitely watch for more mysteries by this interesting couple.

Charlotte and Aaron Elkins

A Dangerous Talent is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Matt Cairone tells a chilling tale of gambling and murder.

This novel sounded intriguing, not least because it was called “an existential work of literary fiction” in the publishers blurb.

The Brit

The Brit (346 pages, CreateSpace Publishing, $10.50) tells the story of the professional gambler, T.S. Fowler, and various people who encounter him during his short time in Las Vegas, Nevada.

T.S., who is mostly called The Brit in the novel, has come to Las Vegas to improve his earnings at poker, which he plays for high stakes, as does his wife, and they both support themselves in this way.  The Brit is not cheating or working any system besides luck and his knowledge of the game.  But he gets so into playing that he hardly eats, pops amphetamines to stay awake, and drinks, with coffee or gin, depending on whether he wants to keep playing or to crash.

On this particular visit to Las Vegas, he seems to be doing well in reconstructing his fortunes.  He is strung out, but he still manages to keep up decent conversational patter, and when he does chat late one night with an attractive corporate lawyer, she is on her guard, but she likes him enough to give him her card.

Meanwhile, in London, his wife Edith is trying to cope with a sense that her life has become meaningless.  She visits a counselor and feels for the first time in a long time happy about her prospects and the chance of working things out with the husband, whom she realizes she hardly knows.

During his second day, the Brit’s luck turns sour, and he almost instantly loses not only all his gains but everything he bought with him to Las Vegas.  This sends him into a crazed spell in which he does some horrendous things, and the next thing Edith hears is that he is being held in a Las Vegas jail on an indictment for murder.

Edith responds to his call and heads to Las Vegas with the little cash she has and no idea where to turn.  In the meantime, the Brit has phoned the lawyer, Mary, explaining his plight and asking for her help.  She says she will try to help him find an attorney, but she does nothing and he is appointed a public defender.  That turns out to be an overworked but very competent and concerned young man, who helps the Brit to shape a defense.  He calls Mary again, however, and asks her to help with his wife.

Feeling guilty, Mary agrees to contact Edith and offer her a place to stay when she arrives in Las Vegas.  The two women hit it off immediately, and the intensity of their feelings help them both deal with the crises surrounding them.  I say “crises” because everything seems to go wrong.  The judge rejects a plea—because he is upset that a Lockerbie defendant has been set free in Britain; there is an explosion at the jail; and Edith ends up returning to London alone.

It is a simple tale, almost a long short story or a novella, but it is powerful and thought provoking in lots of ways.  I am not sure I would call it existential, but I would recommend it nonetheless.

Matt Cairone

The Brit: Drawing Dead is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

John Boyne writes a powerful novel about friendship and war.

The Absolutist

John Boyne’s The Absolutist (320 pages, Other Press, $16.95) tells a riveting story about the friendship between two teenage soldiers during the First World War.  Tristan Sadler and Will Bancroft meet during training in Aldershot in England before being sent to France to engage in fighting.

The novel is told in retrospect by Tristan, and it quickly becomes clear that of the two, he is the one who survived the war.  Clearly he is shaken by the experience, and as the details emerge, through both his recounting of the experiences themselves and his story as he tells it to Will’s older sister after the war, we come to realize a wrenching and devastating experience whose enormity we only gradually understand.

In training, Tristan and Will become friends, even though they come from different backgrounds—Will’s father is a vicar in a prosperous town, and Tristan’s father is a butcher in grimy North London.  Be that as it may, these two good looking and intelligent young men become soul mates and they find a way of facing the horror of training and what will come after with a certain degree of equanimity.

Their intimacy intensifies, in a way, as they, but especially Will, befriend a conscientious objector among the twenty young men in their regiment.  Wolf, this friend, is outspoken and insistent on his objections to the war.  At first Tristan is simply jealous of Wolf.  He is spending considerable time with Will, and Tristan resents any time that he spends away from the man he has come to love.  When, still in Aldeshot, Wolf is murdered, after it is made to look like he is trying to escape, Will is knocked for a loop.  Tristan is not so quick to imagine a conspiracy, but Will is sure.  He is devastated by Wolf’s loss and what it implies, but he does not discover until later how much it means to him.

Meanwhile Tristan is mooning over Will, and before they leave England, Will initiates a sexual encounter that thrills and confuses Tristan.  He is thrilled for obvious reasons, but he is confused because Will ignores him and refuses to talk about their experience afterward.  He is becoming more and more concerned about the political situation and has no interest in talking about their personal affairs.  

Once in France, the experience of the trenches is told in vivid and grueling detail.  In the midst of the mud and the lice and the constant death all around them, Tristan is still obsessed with Will, and almost to increase the torment, Will drags him off for another encounter, even as he treats him more sternly and almost hostilely.

When Tristan is trying to tell Will's sister what happened to her brother, she knows he is hiding something, and he is hiding it from us as well.  What finally emerges is that when Will sees a brutal atrocity that seems to him to be against any conventions of war or humanity, he turns against the war.  Tristan tries to calm him down, but Will, motivated by an abiding principle, challenges the powers that be and finds himself in opposition to his commanding officers.

Needless to say, this is an uncomfortable position, but what makes it even more difficult in these extreme conditions is the drama that is played out between these two men as the life and death intensity of the war is played out all around them.

Boyne tells this story beautifully, and I don’t want to reduce any of the impact of what happens in the end.  I will say, though, that this is a beautifully crafted novel that will cause you to keep thinking about it for a long time to come.
 
















John Boyne

The Absolutist is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Nicholas Sparks has another hit on his hands.

I always feel a little funny reading Nicholas Sparks novels.  They are deeply sentimental and almost a little cheap.  But they are told well, and they seem to make fine films.  This one is no exception.

 

The Lucky One

Most Nicholas Sparks novels feature a handsome but misunderstood young drifter and a gorgeous, but lost or grieving, young heroine, and this one is no exception.  The Lucky One (416 pages, Grand Central Publishing, $7.99) tells the story of Logan Thibault, a Marine veteran who had extensive experience in Iraq, and Beth, or Elizabeth, a young divorcee with a ten-year-old son, Ben.

While on tour in Iraq, Logan found a photo in the sand, and while he tried to find its owner, he also carried it with him and began to think of it as his lucky charm.  After returning to the States, his best friend from the Marines persuaded him that this photo had saved his life in a number of situations and that he owed the woman in the picture at least his thanks.

With this advice and because of a gnawing emptiness he was feeling, Logan walked however many thousands of miles it is from Colorado to North Carolina, for in a small North Carolina town was where he believed he would find the young woman in the picture. 

When he gets to the town, though, he first encounters a sleazy deputy sheriff, whom he catches ogling and photoing naked coeds at a local river.  After an encounter with this deputy persuades him that he should keep his distance, we readers are discovering that he is actually the adolescent-seeming ex-husband of the heroine, Beth.

Keith Clayton, this deputy, is from the first family of this small town, and he is obviously as foolishly conceited as they come.  The first sign of his badness comes from his interactions with his son.  Ben is a bookish and musically-inclined young kid, and Clayton really wanted an athlete for a son.  He is brutal with the kid, and poor Ben reacts as one might expect.  He is miserable when he has to spend time with his father, and he dreads the grueling games of catch his father inflicts on him.

Clayton is even worse than this, though.  We discover that he has been trailing and then chasing off—with the force of the “law”—anyone Beth has dated since their divorce.  This makes it particularly galling to him that Logan has turned up as a worker at the kennel that Beth and her grandmother run and that the two seem to be hitting it off.  Ben has come to idolize Logan too, not only because he seems willing to spend time with him, but because he takes so much pleasure in doing so.

These three adults—Logan, Beth, and Clayton—are on a collision course, and for a while it seems as if Clayton may have the upper hand, but Beth and Logan are ready to fight back, and finally they do so with all they are worth.

Nicholas Sparks can tell a good story, and as always his Southern settings have a particular charm.  His plotting is strong, and although he is not above a cheap trick or two at the end, he writes a story that is compelling and in many ways true.

Nicholas Sparks

The Lucky One is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Alan Furst writes another wonderful thriller.

Who can resist a new novel by Alan Furst?  This one is as good as any.

Mission to Paris

True to form as the novelist-historian of World War II, Alan Furst approaches the war from a new perspective in Mission to Paris (272 pages, Random House, $27).  The story focuses on a Hollywood actor, of Austrian extraction, who is sent to Paris just before the outbreak of the war.  It seems that the powers that be in Hollywood thought an anti-war film would be a good idea.  The Nazi spies, or one can hardly call them spies, the Nazi officials in Paris at this time thought that an Austrian actor could be very useful to their purposes and they decided to use him and dispose of him, as they were already doing to so many.

Frederic Stahl is suspicious about the Germans who are wining and dining him, however, and he finds their political pronouncements increasingly distasteful.  So much so that he approaches the American embassy and talks to someone of considerable importance there.  When it seems that he is dissatisfied with the advice that he not worry, he is asked whether he would like to serve a more important function.  When he jumps to that offer, his role as a spy is initiated.

Furst makes all the details of this tale bristle with life.  When Stahl is dealing with the smarmy and self-assured Germans, it is easy to feel his disgust; and as he carries out simple, but exceedingly dangerous activities, his excitement is palpable.  Furst is clearly having fun with his subject here, and there is every reason that he should.

When it turns out that Stahl, the vague and under impressive actor, has outsmarted the Nazis, even after they have had him in the German capitol and have (they thought) nearly persuaded him to return to Germany,  they refuse to believe that they have been outsmarted. But Stahl and his American supporters have the last laugh.  The ending is almost funny.

Furst is at his best here, and this is a novel to enjoy.  Like his other successes, this one places him easily in the company of the great thriller novelists of the twentieth century, like John Le Carré and Graham Greene.  He is quickly earning his own place as one of the great novelists of the twenty-first century.

Alan Furst

Mission to Paris is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Stephen Chbosky looks on from the sidelines in this provocative novel.

I was intrigued with the premise of this novel—the story of a character who feels alienated from his experiences—and I was pleased to see what this talented novelist could make of it.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (213 pages, MTV Books, $14) is told from the perspective of Charlie, a precocious young school kid, just coming into puberty, who has a checklist of neuroses and hospitalizations, but who writes beautifully and has an astonishing imagination.

The story he tells is of budding sexuality and the even more difficult ins and outs of emotional experience for any early teen.  The novel is written in the form of letters to an unspecified friend.  As the novel proceeds, it almost seems as this letter-writing might be a form a therapy.  What is really great about it, though, is the way we get Charlie’s own responses to things.  Sometimes, we feel that we understand more than he does about what’s going on, but at other times, he really surprises us.

Early on, we see Charlie in his family—the youngest of three children—and with his attentive, but hardly overly doting parents. We also hear of an aunt, a sister of his mother, who was wonderful to the boy but who died young in an automobile accident.

Charlie’s depression at his aunt’s death is enough to send him to the hospital for treatment, and as the novel opens, he is coping with another death, this time his best friend at school, who ended his own life.

With the cards stacked against him in this way, Charlie tries to become friendly with some older kids at school.  At first it seems like they are ready to brush him away, but because he is so smart and articulate, they seem ready to take him up.  The brother and sister, Patrick and Sam, befriend Charlie and he is over the moon with the idea that these kids are his friends, and when he is honest with himself he admits that he finds himself deeply attracted to Sam.

As Charlie gets pulled into the lives of these older students—with their smoking, drinking, and drugs, as well as their more mature approach to relationships and experience—he starts to feel that there is more to life than he realized.  As he tries to cope with the sexual realities around him—friend are having sex, some are gay, some are violent—he feels that he is watching from the sidelines and seems afraid of having experiences of his own.  Everyone else seems to know how to do it, and he’s just confused.

The pleasure of the novel is listening to Charlie as he reacts to the special reading that his English teacher is giving him—he is way beyond his grade in reading and writing—and watching him react to all the events that make up high school life.  But what is really wonderful is watching him grow, as he does, from a child to a bona fide adolescent.

This book is listed for “young readers,” but I think anyone could benefit from its insights.  It’s a coming-of-age novel to put with the best of them.

Stephan Chbosky

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Ryan Quinn writes a college novel like no other.

I am not sure where I read a review of this wonderful novel, but I remember hesitating before I opened it.  Was I sure I wanted to read a novel about college.  Well, I should never have hesitated.  This is a great book.

The Fall

Ryan Quinn’s debut novel The Fall  (336 pages, Amazon Encore, $14.95) tells the story of half a dozen undergraduates in a distinguished liberal arts college in the East.  It doesn’t take Ryan Quinn long to engage us in the fate of his characters, and in fact, their crises are neither unusual nor unexpected.  But he tells the tale in such a way that even the simplest events take on unexpected significance.

Quinn uses a specific technique of presentation for each of the three major characters.  Casey, a star of the football team and a pre-med student, keeps a running account of his activities on Facebook, and these are used to introduce the chapters that are told from Casey’s point of view.  His friend Ian, who was on the high school football team with him but has now moved to tennis as a sport, has aspirations to go to film school, and his chapters are introduced with the kinds of scene descriptions used in screenplays.

The third central character is Haile, who has come to this college to escape from the life of demanding achievement, at Julliard, and crushing concerts, with a string quartet—she plays the violin—and now she hopes to find her own voice as a songwriter and performer.  Her chapters start off with review-like headlines, right from the world in which she hopes to project herself.

But these characters are all twenty years old, and their confused aspirations, their pulsing hormones, and the awkward attempts at social interaction mean that they all have a lot to learn.  For Casey, that means moving on past his sorority-cum-cheerleader type girlfriend and also facing squarely his aspiration for playing professional football.

Ian's challenge is more complicated, not only because he is dealing with questions of sexuality and recognizing that he needs to accept himself as gay, but also because his famous football coach father has moved to the college to save the season when a coach leaves mid-season.  This means that Ian has to work out issues with his father right when he is trying simply to discover himself.

Haile confronts her own demons in the practice rooms and attempts to be creative as she suppresses everything she knows as a performer.  Her challenge is to step out from the shadow of her domineering mother, who has managed her performance career and now disapproves vehemently to her escape from the bight lights.

In addition, these characters are coping with their own desires as friends and lovers, to each other but also to a rich cast of characters who take the same classes, play on the same teams, or work at the same campus jobs.

Two faculty members also emerge from the crowd: a charismatic art teacher who moves the students to confront whatever is most meaningful to them; and a music teacher, who knows talent when she sees it and allows students to discover for themselves where their talent lies.  These professors are played off again each other as the crisis of the story builds, but it is really the students and their rich process of self discovery that makes this novel so powerful.

I recommend it without reservation.

Ryan Quinn

The Fall is available at Powell's and Amazon.