New Books, 2011 (All soon to be reviewed in Noir Journal)
To begin, four from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--thanks to Michelle Bonanno.
Mickey Spillane; Max Allan Collins
Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Détection — the only book published by the late, great, and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette.
The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she’s avoided since her mentor, Silette’s student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide- plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as a means to disappear? Claire follows the clues, finding old friends and making new enemies — foremost among them Andray Fairview, a young gang member who just might hold the key to the mystery.
Thomas H. Cook
As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world. Danforth is to provide a place where a “brilliant woman” can receive training in firearms and explosives. This is to be the beginning of an international plot carried out by the mysterious Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Danforth in more ways than one.
Here's one from New Pulp Press, one of our favorite independent publishers. (See Noir Journal 39, April 17 of this year, for more about New Pulp.) And thanks to Jon Bassoff of New Pulp.
badbadbad by Jesús Ángel García
When his wife inexplicably flees from home with their infant son, Jesús Ángel García struggles to redefine himself by being of service on both sides of the Southern cultural divide. By day, he works as the humble, God-fearing webmaster for First Church of the Church Before Church. At night, he plays the part of sexual messiah on fallenangels, an online social network for extreme desires. Blinded by righteousness, obsession and identity confusion, Jesús refuses to change his path even as it leads to the greatest of sins.
Raves for badbadbad
“badbadbad is a strange, off-trail romp through a Deep South inhabited by Born Again preachers and twisted badbadbad girls. The ghosts of Elmer Gantry and Chester Himes haunt this hip-hop vision of the new South.”
— Jonathan Woods, author of Bad Juju and Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem
Click here for more raves, purchase information, and a sample chapter.
Click here for a 5-star review.
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One more new book, this one reviewed by noir author Nick Korpon as part of Noir Journal's "Crime Writers Reading Crime Fiction" series.
The Night Season, by Chelsea Cain (Minotaur Books, March 2011)
Reviewed by Nik Korpon
The Night Season, the new Archie Sheridan thriller, brings us back to Chelsea Cain’s Portland with a killer on the loose. Killers, rather. Don’t worry: Gretchen Lowell is still safely locked away. These new killers might be all the more terrifying, though.
When a dead girl is found on the merry-go-round, perched on the ostrich station, it’s assumed that she drowned. After all, weeks of torrential rains have caused the Willamette River to flood, repossessing half of Portland. Several other bodies have shown up, all chalked up as drowning victims. Then Archie notices a puncture mark on the latest vic’s palms. Then Henry Sobol, his long-suffering partner, ends up in the hospital with an unidentified toxin in his blood and an identical mark in his palm. Then Archie saves a child from drowning in the river and finds a tiny black key under the child’s hospital bed. We know the signs of a serial killer well enough to know where we’re going with this.
Cain does something interesting with the plot here, the murders specifically. Throughout the Gretchen Lowell trilogy, the gore is abundant and goddamn is it intense. She creates terror not just through atmosphere, but the detailed and visceral nature of Gretchen’s morbid obsessions. The Night Season, however, is pretty tame by Cain’s standards. Without ruining too much of the story, the tools of the killer’s trade pale in comparison to anything Gretchen might keep in her purse. But it’s not the uniqueness that terrifies us so much as the mundane circumstances in which the killer works. Don’t get me wrong: The flood of the century isn’t just a normal Wednesday thing, but strip away the beautiful and sadistic demon we’re used to dealing with, and a quirky serial killer is almost downright comforting. By dialing down the intensity of the violence, though, Cain sets us up to really attach ourselves to the characters. We’ve seen the weird connection that Archie and Susan have, the fraternal love between Archie and Henry, the contentious respect between Susan and Anne. Immersing ourselves in the minutiae of their lives makes it all the more terrifying when Henry goes down, and we can feel the anxiety burning through their bodies. Although the killer isn’t as intense as Gretchen, the context more than makes up.
In the first three books, we see Cain’s knack for atmosphere develop into something formidable, but it came a tight second to the expertly drawn characters. In The Night Season, though, the pervading sense of doom is almost tactile. Between the sting of cold rain and rushing river water and squeaking rain jackets, your skin begins to feel damp by the fourth chapter. It feels as though she’s really hit her stride with personifying the weather into something more malevolent than any mere person could be. This is one of those books that takes a few days to settle, before you realize the real genius behind it. Our guard is lowered automatically because we aren’t watching for Gretchen, and we start to bond with the characters. The killer is bad, obviously, but not tremendously so. This is when the weather creeps in. Like Gretchen, it is a force to be reckoned with. However, there is no driving motivation to its carnage nor is there any hope of containing it. It destroys with no remorse or direction or impunity. In a way, it almost mirrors the unbridled impulses all the characters possess, but are unwilling to release.
I could argue that The Night Season is the most mature of the Archie Sheridan books. It does strip away a lot of the layers from the previous ones, leaving the core of the overall story. We see many techniques and themes pushed farther in this book than earlier, some of them quite impressively. But, if I’m being honest, though this might be the best book “intellectually,” it’s not quite the same without Gretchen. That’s maybe the only criticism I could level against Cain, that she’s created a dynamic between characters so damn exhilarating that I only want to see them pushed to their snapping point over and over. Then again, in the grand scheme, maybe that’s how it was supposed to be. In the same way that the toned-down gory violence exposes us to more emotional violence, maybe Chelsea Cain is just lulling us into complacence, letting us hang out with Archie, Henry and Susan for a bit, distracting us from that lithe, deadly form, traipsing around in the shadow. Waiting. Waiting.
Nik Korpon is the author of noir thriller, Stay Go_d (Hint, the title refers to a burned out neon letter on a junk shop sign)
Click to read more about Stay Go_d.
And click here to read a chapter from Nik's book.
That's it for now. More to come soon.
Take care,
ML
