Thomas Perry writes another fascinating thriller.

 





The Boyfriend

In Thomas Perry’s new novel, The Boyfriend (228 pages, Mysterious Press, $25), a handsome young-looking guy in his later twenties is murdering young female escorts in various cities around the country.  When the parents of one victim approach the private detective Jack Till, a former police detective, they seem willing to pay whatever it will take to find their daughter’s killer.

Jack takes on the case unwillingly: he’s not sure he can discover anything beyond what the police have already found.  But when he finds that the police have been slipshod in various ways, he gets more and more intrigued with the details of this case.  When he discovers that several girls look almost the same—thin strawberry blonds with blue eyes and distinguishing jewelry—he thinks he is on the trail of the killer, but still he cannot make any sense of the meaning of the victims.

After some close calls in various cities, Jack starts to notice that other murders, often political or business-oriented, and usually very major murders that are like gang hits, are happening in the same cities as the escorts' murders and he starts to connect them.

He figures out that the murderer somehow hooks up with girls, probably online, and then stays with them as long as it takes to carry out his real job.  And then, before leaving, he kills the girls who have hosted him so that there is no real record of his even having been in the city.

As the novel progresses, we get the back story and some of the emotional involvement of the boyfriend himself and some of his victims.  Perry is great at following out the implications of his tale, and at a certain point Jack knows he has the murderer cornered, perhaps with a victim about to be executed, and he is without police back up.  That’s when things get really exciting.

Perry is an imaginative novelist with a hard-bitten style that is hard to resist.  I was pleased to happen upon this novel, and I look forward to reading some of his other nineteen novels.

Thomas Perry

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

Ann Leary looks deeply into a New England past

 





The Good House

In her latest novel, The Good House (304 pages, Picador, $15), Ann Leary tells the story of Hildy Good, a middle-aged realtor in a coastal town north of Boston.  Hildy takes pride that her family can trace its origins back to the early witch trials in Massachusetts Colony, and as she tells her story, she seems more and more like some kind of witch herself.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair.  We have the story from her perspective, and we learn a lot of her secrets along the way.  One secret is that she keeps a case of wine in the trunk of an MG in the garage.  She stashed it out there because she’s been in rehab—after a family intervention—and she doesn’t want anyone, but especially her daughters or her now-gay ex-husband, to find out that she’s drinking again.  Of course, she feels that there is no harm to having a glass or two of wine, but that’s utterly self-deceptive as we quickly realize.  The more Hildy drinks, the less likely she is to remember anything she has done.

Her position as realtor in the small town is threatened by the expansion of one of the national chains, and she is struggling to stay afloat.  She can’t let anyone know that either, and in her buttoned up New England way, she tries to do what she can to get whatever clients seem likely to come her way.

And otherwise she watches her friends and acquaintances in the town careen into wild misbehaviors that she both chuckles over and condemns.  At times, in fact, in her inebriated states, she sometimes could be said to cause the crises herself.

All along she is being courted by the local garbage man, whom she has known all her life.  She finds the man attractive in his way, but she can approach him only when she is drunk and able to silence the voices in her head that tell her he’s beneath her.

All this makes wonderful reading.  Leary is great at making the town so vivid that it is almost another character itself, with its embarrassing past and brooding secrets in the present.

Many of the events of the plot are merely of soap opera quality, but the way Hildy takes them in and the manner in which they unfold here make them far more than that.  This is a great novel about a small town, and about the people that manage to be larger than the town seems to be shaping them to be.

Ann Leary

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

Mohsin Hamid tells a parable about richness and poverty in Asia

 











How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (240 pages, Riverhead, $25.95), is something of a tour de force.  At a time when life stories from Asia are overwhelming in their length and breadth, Hamid tells a very simple tale about how a poor Asian, in an unnamed country, with a little bit of talent and know-how, can profit in a system that is corrupt and make the most out of the ignorance of his countrymen.

The narrator talks to the hero, who is never named, in the second person, which adds an intimacy, and he often uses the language of self-help books to suggest the path form obscure poverty to corporate power.  The chapters move quickly and each takes us through an important stage of development of our hero.

What goes up must also come down, and it is not ruining the story to say that the greed and self-satisfaction that brings about ascendency can also undermine it in the end.

What marks the growth and development of the hero, as much as the schemes he develops or the money he saves, is the love he feels for a girl, who is known throughout as “the pretty girl.”  At first it seems that she is out of his league, but he is handsome and powerful in his way, and it seems that she is attracted to him as well.

They are both on the make, however, and she can’t stop with a young nobody: she has too much to achieve.  And with her good looks and her moxie, she more than succeeds to fulfill her dreams.  As the hero grows in power, every so often he runs into her again, and their brief encounters serve to punctuate the degree to which they have fulfilled their dreams and how much that can mean to them.

As short as the novel is, it is very powerful. I called it a parable above, and I think it does work that way.  The hero is an Asian everyman, and this is the progress he is meant to pursue.  The implications of the story are deeply moving, and even as we see the hero making bad choices, there is little we can imagine as an alternative to the choices he makes.

I have not read Hamid’s novels before this—this one is his third—but I will certainly watch for any new ones.  His talent is considerable.

Muhsin Hamid

How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

B. A. Shapiro leads us into art theft and forgery in this thriller.

Art thrillers are in a class of their own, and this is a good one.  In The Art Forger (368 pages, Algonquin Books, $23.95), we meet Claire Roth, a frustrated Boston artist who supports herself by doing truly wonderful copies of great paintings, for which folks pay enough to her employer Reproductions.com that she can keep a roof over her head and a meal or two on the table every day. 

Most of the time she nurses a loss and a grievance, which are so intertwined that it is almost maddening.  Her former lover, also a painter, took credit for a work that she created, and when it became the toast of the art world, he refused to even speak to her.  When she tried to claim her rightful place, she was rebuffed and before she could even challenge this guy, he took his own life and left her with guilt and blame galore.

So she is surprised when she is approached by a handsome and suave gallery owner, Aiden Markel, who has a proposition.  Her reproduction specialty is Edgar Degas, and Aiden asks her to make a copy of one of the great Degas paintings that was stolen some years before from the Isabelle Stuart Gardner Museum.  He says that he has gained access to the painting, and he wants to swap her copy for the real one with his buyer, and then return the original to the Museum.  He offers her a tidy sum and a show in his gallery.  She can not talk herself into refusing.

As the novel proceeds, we watch her carefully as she sets about creating this copy, and all the steps of recreation are outlined carefully.   It is a fascinating process, but in the middle of it, Claire begins to think that the original that she is copying from is not really original at all.

Be that as it may, she proceeds with her project, even as she explores possible alternative outcomes; and while doing so, she also starts to get her own painting back on track.

Everything explodes before she gets to have the show she was anticipating, but her hard work pays off in the end.  I won’t ruin the thrill of the ending, but I can say that it is very satisfying.

If you like thinking about French art of the late-nineteenth century or have a thing for the Gardner Museum, this novel is for you.  If you don’t know about those things, you will learn a lot about them here.

B. A. Shapiro

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

Matthew Quick takes on bi-polar disorder in this fine novel.

The Silver Linings Playbook (304 pages, Sarah Crichton Books, $15), a film version of which was recently celebrated at the Academy Awards, is Matthew Quick’s attempt to tell, in a humorous way, the horror of dealing with bi-polar disorder in a tightly-knit family.

Pat Peoples comes out of the psychiatric hospital with a hazy memory of the last several years.  He does not remember why he was in the hospital or what happened between himself and his wife Nikki.  He just knows that he and she are spending some time apart—“apart time”—and that he has to make himself the best person he can be in order to be worthy of getting back together with her.

It becomes clear to the reader right away that this will never be.  His mother has hidden pictures of Nikki and any wedding pictures she had, and she refuses to talk about Nikki when Pat brings her up.  His therapist Cliff, too, at least until he builds trust, seems to want to shift his attention away from Nikki.

But the novel shows us that Pat can think of barely anything else.  When he meets the sister of his best friend’s wife, herself recently bereaved, he does not know how to deal with her, and when she starts to come on to him, he thinks she must not understand about his marriage.  In these first attempts at seduction, the two characters dissolve in tears together, and that should be a sign of how much they could share.

Tiffany does not give up: she jogs alongside Pat and she shows up at his house form time to time.  He enjoys talking to her, but he never imagines that they are anything but friends.

He builds intimacy with his family, especially with his brother, by getting back into the Philadelphia football team, the Eagles, and by trying to help his mother deal with his impossible father.  Pat’s father’s moods are run by the developments in football, and nobody can deal with him when the Eagles lose.

Another great football fan turns out to be Cliff, the therapist, and the bond they establish because of the game enables Pat to make some progress toward recovery.

Tiffany also helps.  In the first place, she promises to bring Pat letters from Nikki.  In exchange she asks him to dance with her in a local dance competition.  Pat resists, but he finally agrees, and every step he thinks is bringing him close to Niiki, is really bringing him closer to Tiffany.

The Silver Linings Playbook is a wonderful portrayal of the struggle for mental health.  It is also a vivid account of family love and family responsibility.  It has been made into a powerful film, but that’s because the novel is so wonderful to being with.

Matthew Quick

The Silver Linings Playbook is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Barbara Vine unfolds another lurid mystery

Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell, the renowned mystery writer.  She uses Barbara Vine for her racier tales, and this is certainly one.

 

The Child’s Child

Under the pen-name Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell writes a compelling mystery.  The Child’s Child  (320 pages, Scribner, $26) has a simple thesis: a gay man and his sister—Andrew and Grace Easton—argue about whether gay men had it worse when they were persecuted for sodomy, as was Oscar Wilde, than did unwed mothers, of countless number, who lost much else beyond respectability when they transgressed or were led astray.  Vicitmization in both cases is severe, and the disagreement cannot be won.  But since we are reading Ruth Rendell, the situation will replicate itself in fiction, and it does in spades.

For one thing, Andrew, who is gay, brings a lover into the house which he shares with his sister.  Grace does not like a thing about Andrew’s lover James, but she does acknowledge that he is handsome.  When Andrew and James witness a brutal gay bashing near a London pub, they are shattered.  The idea that they may have to testify in court sends James nearly bonkers, and he worries himself into a state of hysteria.

Meanwhile, Grace has started reading a manuscript of a recently deceased gay novelist that the publisher is unsure about whether to publish.  Set in the later 1920s, it concerns a case of a closeted homosexual and his tormented unwed but pregnant sister.  Because John, the brother, knows he will never marry, he agrees to pose as Maud, his sister’s husband, and protect her when the family has turned its back on her.  She takes John’s help, but she cannot brook his tentative attempts to express his sexuality with a friend.  This story ends tragically, as indeed it must, but then it also reflects back onto Grace and Andrew and their confusing lives together.

It is almost as if the earlier tale—the story within a story—haunts the later tale with its fatalism and brutality.  The contemporary figures have to decide whether they have any more clarity about experience than those earlier ones did.  It is frightening when they have to confront similar limitations, but it is even more harrowing when they actually manage to confront them.

Rendell has written a fine and deeply complex novel that will keep you thinking for long time after reading it.

Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)

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

Sadie Jones captures life in 1912

This new novel builds on Sadie Jones’s reputation as a deft historical novelist.

 

The Uninvited Guests

Sadie Jones’s engaging tale of life before the First World War is intriguing on a number of levels.  The Uninvited Guests (288 pages, Harper, $14.99) tells the story of an almost well-heeled family struggling to keep Sterne, the country house they love.  As Edward Swift, step-father and husband, goes to the city to attempt to secure a loan, the remaining family members try to put a fine face on the situation and celebrate the birthday of Emerald, the oldest daughter.

There are three children in the family, Horace Torrington’s children, it seems: Emerald is a girl just poised on becoming a beautiful young woman; her older brother Clovis is twenty and utterly bored with his life, and especially with his new step-father who seems unable to connect with the boy; finally, there is Isabel, or Smudge, who is the creative child who spends her time drawing her animals and walking on the roof.

Emerald and Clovis understand each other, and when they go off together riding their favorite horses, they break through the tensions of family life and seem to connect.  Often, though, they are at cross-purposes because Clovis simply does not care.

Charlotte Torrington Swift is a nervous woman who loves the house and dreads its loss.  She has little faith in her husband’s ability to save the place. She spends a lot of the novel locked away in her room, letting the servants Florence and Myrtle keep the family fed and protected.

The shaky equilibrium of the family is shaken further when old friends—Patience and Ernest Sutton—visit to help celebrate Emerald’s birthday. These visitors both challenge the Torringtons with memories of the people they used to be and awake in them a kind of sexual desire they have not experienced before.  Emerald finds herself gazing into the bespectacled eyes of Ernest in hopes of finding the boy she knew, and in doing so, she falls deeply in love.  Clovis finds he wants to spend every minute with Patience, but he is not quite sure why.

As party preparations get under way, an odd assortment of people arrive at the house, with the story that there has been a train crash and a number of people will have to be accommodated.  The family shunts the group into a back room and tries to figure out what to do; but one of the group singles himself out as a special friend of the family.

Things go from bad to worse when the number of uninvited guests increases and the family begins to feel embattled.  Even worse, the guest who had seemed to single himself out as a friend becomes a terror, introducing the kind of drinking game that leaves everyone devastated, but not before he has attacked Charlotte and accused her of being unfaithful to her husband.

After they come out of this drunken haze, they manage to find beds for all the guests and even to cope with Smudge’s brilliant idea of getting her pony into the upper floors of the house.  Getting the horse down becomes a family enterprise that brings all the young people together.

In the morning the guests are gone and they begin to put the house back together.  Edward Swift comes home with a shocking tale of a train crash, and everyone has to wonder where those quests actually came from.  The real question, though, is whether Edward has found the money to save the house.

Sadie Jones

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