The Trespasser

In spite of owning several of Tana French's books, I have never actually read one until now and it was a good read. Really interesting characters and tricky plot twists. As the New York Times says in its review, "When you read Ms. French ... make only one assumption: All of your initial assumptions are wrong." In this book, set in the Dublin Garda's "Murder Squad," the two newest detectives on the night shift get handed another apparent domestic dispute, just as they are going off duty. Antoinette Conway and her partner Steve Moran will be assigned a more senior detective from day shift, golden boy Breslin, to work with them on the case. A beautiful young woman, who Conway disparagingly compares to a Barbie doll look-alike, has been punched in the jaw hard enough to break teeth, and hit her head on the brick fireplace when she fell, dying from a brain bleed. Based on texts on the victim's phone, it happened sometime around 8 pm although the call didn't come into the local garda station until 5 am. The obvious suspect is the current boyfriend, timid bookstore owner Rory Fallon, who was scheduled to come to dinner at her house that night, but Conway isn't convinced and the evidence they has is only circumstantial. Breslin pushes for a hard press to extract a confession and a quick arrest. Steve and Conway begin to feel Breslin is pushing this down their throats and trying to set them up for a fall. Conway has already got a major chip on her shoulder about being persecuted by the other squad members. She comes from Missing Persons where she had good collegial relationships and a high solve rate. But ever since coming to the Murder Squad, someone, or several someones, have been playing nasty pranks on her and she has come to trust no one except her partner. The victim's best friend, Lucy, hints that victim Aislinn was seeing somebody else secretly. She had sent Aislinn a text the night of her dinner date warning her to be careful. We don't find out who this was or why she was worried until very near the end of the book, but it was so worth waiting for.
There is a fair amount of Irish and cop slang to wade through, but it also adds color to the dialog. If you are a fan of police procedurals, this is definitely a good one.
Reviews from The New York Times, the Washington Post (which calls her books "unfailingly intelligent and beautifully written"), the Guardian (which asserts this book "contains the most tense and serpentine interrogation scenes outside of John le Carré"), Kirkus, and too many more to link here.

Call Down the Hawk

I found this newest fantasy novel by Maggie Stiefvater something of a disappointment. I had read one of her earlier books (Scorpio Races) and really liked it so was very excited to win this book in a Kirkus drawing. The premise is intriguing. There are people, Dreamers, who can bring back into the real world anything they can dream about, including people. There are other people, Visionaries, who can foresee the future; they can be highly destructive and deteriorate psychologically pretty quickly so they have to be handled with care. Several have now seen the end of the world, brought about by a Dreamer who wants to set fire to everything. This has resulted in a campaign to kill all the Dreamers. Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter assigned to work with a string of visionaries to destroy all the Dreamers before this happens, regardless of whether or not the particular Dreamer is the one responsible for the future destruction of the world. Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. His younger brother is one of Ronan's dreams, although he doesn't know that at the outset of the story. When a Dreamer dies, all of his/her creations go to sleep--permanently. Older brother Declan Lynch has been trying to protect his two brothers from that event ever since their Dreamer father died and his dreamed wife and their mother went to sleep. Hennessey is also a Dreamer who seems doomed to creating copies of herself that she believes are killing her. As I said, interesting premise, but the first 300 some pages of this book felt like a slog; it seemed that way too much time was spent on talking about the creations of the Dreamers. Perhaps Stiefvater was just doing a thorough job of world building since this is intended to be the first in the "Dreamer Trilogy." This is a spinoff from an earlier series, the "Raven Cycle." It wasn't until the last 150 pages that I cared very much about the characters and that the action ratcheted up to engage me.
However, Kirkus called the book "exceptional," and Publishers Weekly gushes that this book offers "Exquisitely drawn characters and witty, graceful prose complement the artfully crafted plot." The Washington Post included it in their list of best YA fantasy to read now.

Black Out

This debut novel (published in 1995; there have been many sequels in this series as well as other novels) by TV documentary producer John Lawton is richly atmospheric, evoking a structurally and morally torn and tattered London during the final days of the Nazi Blitz. In the midst of the destruction and chaos, who would expect to find a human arm in the remains of a bomb site, but a group of street urchins do and this launches an investigation by Detective Sargeant Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard. He offers a reward to anyone in the mob of youngsters who can finds more of the victim and is eventually led to a basement and more human remains in an old furnace. The victim was shot and then dismembered and burned--all except for that stray arm. It belonged to a German scientist who may or may not have been working for British Intelligence. When this case seems to share ties with a missing persons report about another east European immigrant, Troy begins to feel there has been a systematic effort to protect someone fairly high up in the food chain.

Troy, the son of a titled Russian émigré who eschews riding on the coat tails of his now wealthy father, gets involved with two different women. One is an  American WAC sargeant, Larissa Tosca, who serves as secretary to an American liaison with MI5. The other, Diana Brack, is a disaffected member of the upper classes who is involved with Troy's primary suspect, Jimmy Wayne. She and Troy develop a very complicated relationship. He is alternately cruel and lustful towards her, and she eventually tries to kill him. Given an unassailable alibi by American high command, it appears that Wayne will get away, but Troy is nothing if not persistent.  Four years later, in post-war Berlin, he tracks down the man he believed killed at least three people and pulls every string to get him back on British soil so he can be arrested. 

There is a lukewarm review from Publishers Weekly, while a review from Kirkus calls this thriller "beautifully paced."

Dark Sacred Night

I have been a long-time fan of Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" and "Lincoln Lawyer" books (see several posts in my blog); although I haven't come close to reading all 34 of his novels. This is the 21st book in the Harry Bosch series and the 2nd to feature Renée Ballard. In this book, Harry Bosch, to Renée Ballard, a detective who has been banished to the "Late Show" (night shift) at the Hollywood station after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a commanding officer. Harry is investigating a very cold case on his own dime--the murder of a 15-year-old street prostitute, Daisy Clayton, nine years ago. Harry is semi-retired but "consulting" for San Fernando police department on their cold cases. This one is personal for Harry who has helped Daisy's mother, Elizabeth, get off drugs and is currently letting her live in his spare room to support her in staying clean. She is tormented by her failure as a mother and Harry hopes to solve the murder and give her some closure.
Renée comes back from supervising a death scene one night and finds Harry going through old files in the squad room. After he leaves, she realizes he has broken into the file cabinet containing the murder book for Daisy, and begins to investigate on her own. They eventually combine forces after some lengthy dancing around over whether or not to trust one another. They are both loners with a strong sense of justice and a particular investment in abused women. We get a fair amount of what seems to be peripheral digression into other cases that each of the detectives are working on, although some of them do eventually tie back into the main case. 
A review from NPR's Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post calls the book "darkly brilliant" because neither Harry nor Renée are ever going to win "the glass half-full" contest, but they make a really good team. A favorable review from Kirkus,  and the New York Journal of Books says, "Michael Connelly remains the reigning heavyweight champion of police procedurals, and Dark Sacred Night is another knockout victory."We are currently watching Amazon Prime's TV version of the Harry Bosch novels (called just "Bosch") and they are well cast and well done.

Recursion

Blake Crouch is the prodigious author of speculative fiction books and this is the 2nd book of his I have read (see my post on Dark Matter). He offers up another example of a mind bending proposition, in this case, what if memory creates reality. And what if you could change people's memories or let them go back into a remembered event and start life over from that point. There would be a new timeline to accompany that life. Only it turns out that the previous timeline/ set of memories, would also still be present. It might be enough to make people crazy. And that is what happens. As more and more people are affected by "False Memory Syndrome" mass insanity follows.
It started out with the best of intentions by scientist Helena Smith--what's that saying about paving the road to hell--as she tries to find a way to map and recreate memories  to alleviate the losses associated with Alzheimer's Disease. But this research, prompted by her mother's own descent into disconnection through forgetting, gets hijacked by a lab tech, Marcus Slade, who first uses the technology to make a personal fortune, and then to sell the technology to those who regret the roads not taken. Unfortunately, the ultimate outcome is that the plans for building the "memory chair"--which basically allows the altering of reality--is hacked from Slade's lab and people begin to use it for bad purposes and nuclear war on a massive scale ensues. So the creative genius behind the chair, Helena, goes back and lives life over, time and time and time again, trying to make things turn out differently.
It was compelling but also somewhat mentally exhausting to read this and to stretch my mind around how this can happen. Recommended for hard core sci-fi readers only.
Laudatory reviews on NPR, from the New York Times, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and from Kirkus which accurately calls this book "An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender."