Descent
by Tim Johnston
Descent by Tim Johnston: a Review (11/5/2014)
To employ the term "lyrical thriller" might seem an oxymoron, but not after you have begun reading this extraordinary novel. The lyricism comes from Johnston's poetic descriptions of the natural world. The story, set in the rugged Colorado Rockies, radiates the harsh beauty of the seasons, time of day, and ongoing weather conditions. He will remind readers of Nevada Barr at her best, and his long, elegiac sentences and shifting points of view suggest Cormac McCarthy.
The standard materials for a thriller--young woman mysteriously disappears, the resultant family fears, the seeming insolubility of the case--may ring distantly familiar, but Johnston adds elements of love and concern not often found in popular thrillers. His careful descriptions of individuals and their reactions to events lift this novel out of the ordinary.
Strongly recommended, but beware: it's a page--turner you won't want to put down.
The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
by Doug Most
Review: The Race Underground (12/27/2013)
As is the case with virtually all modern urban areas, their downtowns choke on traffic as cars, buses, trucks, and an array of other vehicles fight the gridlock that expanding populations of both people and their conveyances have created on city streets. The problem is hardly a new one and was in many ways worse before the advent of motorized traffic. By the second half of the 19th century, countless horses, mules, and donkeys pulled carriages, wagons, buggies, and coaches. With few regulations in force, they had long since begun to crowd unwary pedestrians and hinder the smooth flow of business; in addition, the omnipresent animals created unhealthy hygienic problems everywhere.
City governments recognized that something had to be done to alleviate the situation, but politics, tradition, and strained budgets blocked most proposals. In England, London unveiled the first subway in 1863, and despite many engineering problems, it would prove successful and lead other metropolises to think seriously about taking traffic off their jammed streets, but the changes came slowly.
Doug Most's fascinating The Race Underground chronicles how two American cities, Boston and New York, led the way in tackling the challenge of creating subways of their own. Decades after the debut of London's system, Boston in 1897 opened the first limited sections of its own metropolitan subway, and New York followed in 1904.
For those interested in social history, this book covers all the bases, from new technologies to popular journalism. Most provides numerous asides about the personalities involved in these massive undertakings and the myriad difficulties they faced, as well as detailing the inconveniences suffered by Bostonians and New Yorkers as their downtowns were first torn up and then ultimately improved with this new form of mass transportation. Writing in an appealing style that does not burden the reader with needless technical detail but entertains with vignettes of everyday urban life, The Race Underground quickly becomes a non-fiction page-turner of the best kind.
The Edge of Normal
by Carla Norton
The Edge of Normal, by Carla Norton (6/30/2013)
Predators and their prey, villains and victims. By now a major genre in the area of thrillers and mysteries, the recounting of serial crimes and multiple targets—more often than not women—has captured a large audience. The Edge of Normal fits the bill nicely.
The main character, twenty-something Reeve LeClaire, had been such a victim as an adolescent and falls into an investigation years later of new crimes against young women that appears to replicate her suffering in the past. LeClaire still bears the scars, both figurative and literal, of her ordeal and it becomes increasingly difficult for her to retain any objectivity about the case.
A psychological thriller, sex and sadism characterize the villain's MO, and he covers his tracks with insidious ingenuity. A word of caution: parts of this page-turner may be too explicit for some readers, so be forewarned. For others, however, The Edge of Normal will provide the requisite chills and thrills, a book hard to put down. And let it be said that Carla Norton writes extremely well. A wide-ranging vocabulary and active verbs sustain her style effectively so there exists little chance of getting bogged down or dozing off.
The Caretaker
by A .X. Ahmad
A.X. Ahmad's The Caretaker, a review (4/13/2013)
As with most debut novels, "The Caretaker" exhibits both the promise and the blemishes of much new fiction. A character-driven mystery, it features Ranjit Singh, a disgraced former officer in the Indian army. That Singh happens to be a Sikh makes him unique in today's crowded crime market, and allows Ahmed to explore cultural differences in both India and the United States. A rather pedestrian plot, mainly set in Martha's Vineyard, finally gets resolved (while allowing for a continuation of what might become a series for Singh), but with few twists or surprises.
Ahmad's writing lacks much flair, and he is at his best in set pieces rather than continued narrative. An adequate mystery, but hardly a page-turner, The Caretaker nonetheless shows considerable potential and a sequel could easily expand on the groundwork laid out in this introductory effort.
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World
by Matthew Goodman
Matthew Goodman, Eighty Days: a review (1/16/2013)
In 1873, the French Writer Jules Verne penned Around the World in Eighty Days. One of his most popular novels, it did well in the United States and imposed, in many people's minds, a physical time limit on world travel. Thus the title for Matthew Goodman's engrossing new history about that colorful period.
New York City serves as the opening setting of a contest that would quickly capture the imagination of millions everywhere. Home to numerous newspapers, New York editors and publishers vied endlessly to attract more readers with lurid headlines, scandalous stories, and a variety of features. The New York World had the good fortune to have the spirited Nellie Bly as one of its reporters, a rarity in a male-dominated profession. Anxious to make her name, Bly proposed to the World a daring plan: a solo trip around the world in under 80 days, heading east from New York and returning there from the west in, she hoped, 75 days, thereby eclipsing Verne's fictional record.
Many scoffed, but the World knew a good publicity stunt, and at last Bly embarked on her journey in the fall of 1889. Word of her plans had made the rounds, and The Cosmopolitan, a woman's magazine, decided, the same day of Bly's departure, to sponsor one of its writers in a similar venture, but west-to-east. After considerable urging by her editors, Elizabeth Bisland, who until then had quietly written literary pieces for The Cosmopolitan, reluctantly packed her bags and took a west-bound train that evening, just hours behind Bly.
The remainder of Eighty Days chronicles the adventures of the two women, usually in alternating chapters. Goodman writes in a consistently engaging style, not unlike his contemporaries David McCullough and Paul Theroux. He brings in all manner of fascinating details about the cultures and environments the two intrepid travelers experience, but never in a dry or academic way, making it a page-turner from beginning to end. He also pursues a thread throughout his narrative that describes changing American attitudes toward women, especially in the character of Nellie Bly. In the course of the book, a portrait of the All-American Girl—as popularized in the late 19th century—emerges, a plucky, attractive, independent spirit, ready to take on new challenges, but always careful to retain a strong aura of femininity.
Today, Bly and Bisland are mainly forgotten, footnotes in American popular history. But in late 1889 and on into 1890, they were true celebrities. I won't drop in a spoiler here and say who won the race, but millions waited anxiously to read their latest telegraph dispatches from around the world.
A great choice for book clubs that enjoy non-fiction, or for those individual readers that just like a good book, I cannot recommend Eighty Days highly enough.
Live by Night
by Dennis Lehane
Live by Night, Dennis Lehane (8/11/2012)
Coming four years after the success of his 2008 novel Unto This Day, Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night continues his saga of Boston’s Coughlin family. Set in the late 1920s and on into the Great Depression, the book follows the up-and-down career of Joe Coughlin, the youngest son in this star-crossed dynasty.
Although he built his initial fame on mysteries (Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; others), Lehane has proved himself a fine recorder of social history and has been compared to John Dos Passos and E.L. Doctorow in this genre. He exposes the grimy underside of Boston during the early years of the 20th century, an era that witnessed the rise of lawlessness between Italian and Irish gangs during Prohibition.
Not so much a mystery as a detailed chronicle of Joe’s life, from small-time Boston bootlegger to king of the illicit rum trade in Tampa, Florida, Live by Night is a genuine page-turner, a compulsive read that presents Lehane’s colorful style in all its richness. Filled with period details and a cast of gangster characters hard to forget, the novel should appeal to a large and varied audience.
William H. Young, August 2012
15 Seconds
by Andrew Gross
Review: 15 Seconds, Andrew Gross (5/13/2012)
The thriller genre has a long history in popular fiction. The Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls of the 19th century thrived on action, cliffhanger situations, and minimal character development, eventually evolving into pulp novels and countless paperbacks. In that respect Andrew Gross’s 15 Seconds fits the criteria for a thriller. His erstwhile hero, a naïve doctor named Henry Steadman, finds himself in over his head as seemingly incriminating evidence accrues, linking him to murder and more. How can he establish his innocence before the police catch and imprison him?
Any self-respecting thriller should also be a page-turner, and the first half of the book will keep readers guessing right alongside Steadman. But author Gross, in an unusual turnaround, reveals the mystery—at least to his reading audience—and what remains devolves into a more conventional tale as Steadman also figures out who’s out to get him, and in a series of cat-and-mouse chases it all finally climaxes in a scene out of early movie serials (think The Perils of Pauline) with a deserted shack, whirling saw blades, and the menacing villain face-to-face with the good doctor.
Unfortunately, Gross has Steadman thinking in exclamatory sentences—“and I didn’t care!” “I’m pretty sure I can prove it!” “the only chance I have!” and so on throughout the novel. Set in Florida and Georgia, the frazzled Steadman races back and forth, racking up hundreds of miles in travel, but at the expense of much plot plausibility and characterization.
15 Seconds stands as an adequate thriller, but with better writers plowing the same ground and equipped with better plots, the discerning fan of the genre will probably find this effort disappointing.
Half-Blood Blues: A Novel
by Esi Edugyan
Half-Blood Blues: A Review (2/11/2012)
American novels about jazz are few and far between, and even fewer have endured or achieved significant popularity. Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues may never climb to the top of best-seller lists, but her novel might well claim a lasting place among books that deal with jazz, both the music and its players.
Sid Griffiths, bassist with the Hot-Time Swingers, an American group performing in Europe on the eve of World War II, narrates this elegiac tale of lost love and the search for redemption. Spanning the years a 1939 to 1940, and occasionally moving to 1992 for a retrospective look backward, Edugyan sets the novel in Berlin, Paris, and rural Poland. She has Griffiths speak in the black jazz argot of the late 1930s, and although purists might quibble at the accuracy of his dialect, he serves as an engrossing storyteller, sensitive, regretful, and insecure.
In the course of his narration, Griffiths introduces numerous characters, both men (“Jacks” or “gates,” the latter a term for male musicians), and women (“Janes”), but he avoids the racial and gender stereotyping too often found in writing about jazz artists and their lifestyles. Much of the story revolves around Hieronymus Falk, a brilliant young trumpeter who becomes almost legendary thanks to his playing on a recording, seemingly lost, of Half-Blood Blues, cut while Europe collapsed into the flames of war. In fact, some of Edugyan’s best prose occurs in a set piece covering the fall of France in 1940 with its ensuing chaos and the resultant German occupation. Narrator Griffiths never refers to the Germans troops as Nazis, but instead refers to them as “the Boots,” a uniquely accurate term as they march from conquest to conquest.
A fine novel, Half-Blood Blues deserves a wide audience.
Low Town: A Novel
by Daniel Polansky
Review: Low Town -- Daniel Polansky (6/9/2011)
Tales about apocalyptic futures, parallel universes, and alternative histories, have gained considerable popularity over the last several years. Some come across as imaginative and well-written, others appeal to adolescent fantasies, and still others clutter up book racks. Unfortunately, Low Town leans strongly to the last category. A loner named Warden lives in this dark, dreary place, a setting straight out of the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, except that it bears only superficial resemblances to anything recognizable.
A rambling, shambling plot that quickly grows tiresome, along with awkward constructions, neologisms, and transitions that will try even a patient reader, reveal a lack of consistency and craft in Polansky's writing.
Given the usual high quality of Brookbrowse selections, this title served as a letdown. Since Low Town is presented as a debut novel, perhaps Polansky will redeem himself in future efforts.
The Trinity Six
by Charles Cumming
The Trinity Six, Charles Cumming, A Review (2/6/2011)
Over many years, the novel of espionage and spycraft has enjoyed a large, steady readership. With the 2011 publication of Charles Cumming's "The Trinity Six," fans of the genre will discover they need have no worries about its decline.
The author introduces Sam Gaddis, a naive English academic who finds himself unexpectedly thrust into old Cold War intrigues. An atmospheric page-turner, Cumming avoids the gadgets and devices so often present in techno-thrillers and opts for characterization instead.
A good, brisk read and recommended for anyone with an interest in the political twists and turns between East and West in the recent past.
Adam & Eve: A Novel
by Sena Jeter Naslund
Adam and Eve, a novel by Sena Jeter Naslund (10/1/2010)
"Audacious" might well serve as a descriptive word for Sena Jeter Naslund's latest novel, "Adam and Eve". Author of 1999's celebrated "Ahab's Wife", Naslund goes far afield in this effort, setting it in the near future, a time of conflict between followers of science and believers in biblical inerrancy. As the title suggests, the tale provides a challenging contemporary spin on Genesis, with Adam and Eve (now called Lucy Bergmann--a play on "Lucy" of archaeological fame) dwelling in an Eden somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Rich prose and several excellent set pieces make the book a page-turner, and the theological and political implications are cause for reflection. It may be difficult for some readers to suspend disbelief, but book clubs will find much to discuss about both the characters and what they represent in today's world of religious rivalry and discord.
[Editor's note: Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that the Bible is considered accurate and totally free of error.]
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