John Atkinson, who brought us the unforgettable Johnnyboy in his powerful debut novel Timekeeper (2007), returns with three, rough-cut, equally memorable characters in the first book to be published under Fisher King’s new il piccolo imprint.
Coles Bleu, Bennett Morgan and Francis Lovain grew up together in a small town in the delta country around Lake Pontchartrain. Coles grew into a 300-pound, brute-force sheriff who rules his county with an iron hand; he’s both loved and feared, and he likes the South because that’s where people know how to work together and get stuff done. Bennett’s family had money, and as a stockbroker, Bennett still has it, along with his Rolex, large house, analyst and a powerful new convertible. The troll-like Francis, who lives in the swamp, sports platinum-capped teeth and a face not even a mother could love.
The swamp, and its Put-In-Ditch channel where the bodies are being found, live and breathe through Atkinson’s haunting word pictures as a wonderfully chilling location for this tightly written thriller. Francis loves the swamp, Bennett fears it, and Coles views it pragmatically as the place he went fishing as a kid and the place the murder investigation is luring him now.
“As adults, Coles, Ben, and Francis knew the catch basin held no prejudices when it came to nature’s rules. A wrong move could cost a life. Gambling with death was fun when they were boys with boundless courage. But as Ben grew older he was less inclined to do reckless things.”
Bennett thinks Francis knows something about the murders because Francis knows everything about the bayou. While Coles is inclined to give their strange childhood friend a little more slack, he concedes that Francis’ friendship with the Goocha, the shaman of the swamp, is disturbing. Plus, there aren’t a lot of leads and the last thing Coles needs is either New Orleans reporters or the Feds sniffing around his domain asking questions and causing trouble.
The killer believes he is doing the Lord’s work, showing wayward women the error of their profession. Like the other predators in the bayou, he kills with cold efficiency because the injunction is built in to his psyche. Then, too, there’s the voice inside his head urging him to move ahead with the Holy task, but without his disparaging, profane language:
“Speak kindly, boy, you hear?”
“I hear. Ready or not, I’ll teach her a thing or two.”
“My child, that’s much better. Now mind your mouth.”
When, or if, this killer is stopped, depends greatly on the strengths and weaknesses of three characters whose lives are more obstinately tangled together than the vines in Red Bayou. These men, the novel’s rich location and non-stop action, and the liberal doses of off-beat humor make this dark mystery a satisfying experience.
More Deaths Than One by Pat Bertram
Picture this: You return to the U.S. after an extended overseas trip and who do you see? You. Not in the mirror, but out there in the world. And bad guys are looking for you, the you in the mirror while the other you goes about his life with the past you remember.
Welcome to the world of Robert Stark, who goes by the name "Bob," the starkly mannered, dream-haunted protagonist of Pat Bertram's intricate novel about a man who returns to the United States after 18 years in southeast Asia only to find that he appears to be under investigation by a shadowy government or quasi-government agency.
Welcome to the world of Kerry Casillas, the good natured and intuitive-reader-of-people waitress who works the graveyard shift at the Rimrock Coffee Shop in Denver where Bob Stark comes to escape from his nightmares.
It will not take you long to guess that Bob and Kerry are likely to become increasingly significant in each other's lives. In this matter, your guess will be correct. You will be tempted to guess again, primarily about where this mystery is heading and how, logically, there can be more than one Bob Stark, and just what it is that the man sitting there in the Rimrock Coffee Shop reading his mother's obituary in the newspaper has or has done that might place him within the cross-hairs of increasingly rough operatives.
The obituary is problematic, for Bob Stark's mother died and was buried years ago. Keeping himself well hidden within lilac bushes, Bob attends the burial service at Mountain View Cemetary. His brother Jackson is there. Robert Stark is also there, married to Bob's former girlfriend Lorena. "Bob stared," writes Bertram. "The other Robert Stark seemed to have aged a bit faster than he, seemed more used, but the resemblance could not be denied. He was looking at himself."
Also there, just past the casket is a new headstone for Bob's long-dead mother. Bob wonders "What the hell is going on?"
When you reach the end of the book, you will see just how perfectly the puzzle pieces of Bob Stark's dangerous and shattered world fit together. Until then, you will ask the same questions Bob Stark is asking, and you will experience the same limbo he feels as the answers elude him. All of this will happen because Bertram has crafted a suspenseful story where everything that's real isn't what it seems.
So Good in Black by Sunetra Gupta
When American travel writer Max Gate returns to India after a 15-year absence to attend the funeral of a prominent advocacy journalist and activist named Damini who died in a mountain cycling accident, he stays at the seaside villa of long-time friend Byron Mallick. A high-profile industrialist and a student a student of history with a near-anachronistic fondness for the pursuits and mannerisms of the days of British colonial rule, Byron is rich, expediently amoral, utterly charming, and likely to be charged with murder.
I think I know why you are here, says Byron.
I was afraid you would say that, I reply.
It’s not what you think it is, Max, he says.
I haven’t had time to form an opinion yet about any of this, I confess to him miserably.
You never were a man for having opinions, were you? says Byron Mallick.
“So Good in Black,” Sunetra Gupta’s first novel in ten years, is character-driven literary fiction, featuring a non-linear plot, Spartan passages of stylized and pointed verbal jousting between characters, and highly evocative descriptive passages. While “So Good in Black” relies much less on a stream of consciousness approach than Gupta’s debut in “Memories of Rain” (1992), the characters’ interior landscapes nonetheless take center stage in this novel.
As the characters assemble at the villa on the Bay of Bengal on the eve of the transit of Venus in June, 2004 (the first such transit since 1882) and as information about Byron’s prospective complicity in Damini’s death slowly comes to light, the primary focus of the novel is on the all-consuming and compelling past, as narrator Max Gate tries to understand what happened to him in Calcutta and what it might signify.
Max and those who are important to him have been rather like planets circling the dark sun that is Byron Mallick, their orbits and seasons eternally under his influence: Piers O’Reilly, Max’s caustic friend and former brother in law; Ela, with whom Max remains obsessed years after their affair; Ela’s father Nikhilesh, whom Byron has known since their school days; Max’s former wife Barbara, still in his life; and Ela’s cousin Damini whose death will forever alter the Mallick solar system whether or not Byron is charged with murder. In some traditions, a transit of Venus occurs with a momentous break-through of consciousness.
The novel’s title is taken from “There Goes God,” by Neil and Tim Finn on the 1991 “Woodface” album released by Crowded House. According to the lyrics, God doesn’t like “Beelzebub because he looks so good in black.”
Byron views India’s first Governor General Warren Hastings (1732-1818) as his role model in terms of philosophy and temperament. As Byron asserts his innocence, those at the villa see, with and without cynicism, a parallel to Hastings’ impeachment, trial and exoneration. They’ve heard the story to often,
“So Good in Black’s” complex back-story of interrelationships is told in snippets of conversation and alternately clear and ambiguous fragments of memory. The resulting history of Max, Byron, Piers, Ela, Nikhilesh, Barbara and Damini is impressionistic and dreamlike in affect—an archetype of obsession and regret. Gupta’s most powerful work to date challenges the reader with the dynamic and often contradictory shadows cast by friendship across the illusory counterpane of certainty and time.
Professor Angelicus Visits The Big Blue Ball
by L. B. B. Ward
"It was the first day of spring, and it was Saturday. Zak didn't have to go to school. From his bedroom window he could see two robins poking at the wet spring grass. The trees were beginning to bud and he couldn't get dressed fast enough! This was the perfect day to head down to the river and go fishing."
So begins a fishing trip for Zak, his friend Ivy, and his dog Ziggy that becomes a journey around the world and into deep space in L. B. B. Ward's extraordinary middle readers novel "Professor Angelicus Visits The Big Blue Ball." The plan of the day changes when Professor Angelicus arrives in a large bubble from the planet Quantia in search of pure water.
When Zak says there's plenty of water in the river, the professor asks, "Do you children call that river clean?" Zak responds, "Well, it's cleaner than it was."
But the professor's pipe, from which he blows bubbles that can whisk a person anywhere in the universe, requires pure water. And so the quest begins. Even though Zak promised his mother he'd be home for dinner at 6 p.m., he and Ivy and Ziggy fly around the world with a lot of help from birds, fish, and other "Sharelings" on a quest as vital as a quest for the Holy Grail. Without the kind of water the earth was once known for throughout the universe, the professor's pipe cannot create a bubble powerful enough to take him all the way home in time for a Rainbow Festival that's held only once every billion years.
This book works well on multiple levels. The story itself sparkles with life and mystery and dangerous moments. Middle readers will enjoy reading this book just for the adventure. Parents will find in Ward's work, a wonderful read-aloud story for their children (starting at age three) at bedtime.
The magic of Professor Angelicus' bubble ship allows Zak and Ivy to understand the speech of animals who welcome the travelers into their habitats. In the process, two everyday kids (along with the book's young readers) learn what the dog already knows, that these habitats and the creatures who call them home are inextricably linked together and that humans, the Earth's "Guardian Residents," have let things slip in the blue ball's cleanliness department. Those who want to work together to clean it up are called "Sharelings."
There's a gentle but clear environmental message in this book that lives and breathes dynamically within the storyline. Ward's prose flows like sweet water from a deep well, creating an exciting and memorable story. This is a book that you and your children will read many times. It will be shared with friends and their friends and then the dust jacket will be lost, the cover will get dirty, and some of the pages will become frayed--just like the other classics on the household's shelf of treasures.
Within the Law by Chelle Cordero
"The woman, an attractive blonde, seemed scared when she first saw him approaching out of the shadows. She tried to stand again and he watched as her ankle turned in and she groaned. Her knee-length tan skirt showed dark smudges from the dirty sidewalk."
When Tom Hughes helps Alli Davis on a dark street in the bad part of town, he definitely wants to know more about her even though they're like ships passing in the night. But, the following day, he finds her in a courtroom. She's part of the team defending the man who killed his fiance Joyce eight years ago. What manner of cruel fate is this?
A state trooper, Tom is in Rome, New York to identify his high school class ring for the district attorney, the ring Joyce was wearing when she was murdered. When police arrested Roy Dunlop on another charge, they found the ring and tied it to the unsolved crime.
Readers of Chelle Cordero's "Forgotten" will remember the supporting role Tom Hughes played in the lives of his cousin Caitlyn Smythe and her lover Brandon Price. This time out, all three characters are back, but Tom's the one standing at the center of another Cordero whirlwind of gut-wrenching danger and prospective star-crossed love.
We know from the back-cover blurb that Tom falls in love with Alli and that he "pursues her despite a false arrest, kidnapping and attempt on his life." The plot of "Within the Law" is intricate, the twists and turns are unexpected, and the writing is compelling.
The needle on this novel's tachometer remains in the red zone throughout a high-speed, 288-page ride.
