Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  The arc of character change is not just for Mary, but also for her pursuers, who are now “addled and alarmed, exhausted.” The twin brothers have spent months chasing Mary through freezing nights, torrential rain, and snow. They are not the same men that they were at the beginning of the story.

  I loved every bit of this book. Dramatic, richly atmospheric, and full of unexpected twists, The Outlander is a gripping page-turner, and a classic thriller. But, best of all, this story has been extremely well crafted. Craft is rarely mentioned when people rave about a book, but without craft even the most profound material can appear shallow. The Outlander’s structure, setting, character, and genre are perfectly blended to give you that rare delight: a fabulous story, beautifully told.

  Caroline (C. J.) Carver was born and brought up in the U.K. before moving to Australia, where she lived for ten years. She has been a travel writer and long-distance rally driver, heading an all-female crew driving from London to Saigon and London to Cape Town. Her first novel, Blood Junction, won the CWA Debut Dagger. Since then she has written six more novels, published in the U.K., the United States, and translated into over twenty languages. She lives with her husband—a fighter pilot—near Bath, England. Visit her online at www.carolinecarver.com.

  The Tin Roof Blowdown

  by James Lee Burke (2007)

  KATHERINE HOWELL

  * * *

  James Lee Burke (b. 1936) is one of America’s greatest living novelists. His first novel, Half of Paradise, was published in 1965; it was followed by To the Bright and Shining Sun (1970) and Lay Down My Sword and Shield (1971). The first offering in the Dave Robicheaux series, The Neon Rain, appeared in 1987; Burke has published nineteen Robicheaux titles in total, the most recent being Creole Belle (2012). The author of thirty-one novels in total, Burke has also published two collections of short stories, The Convict (1985) and Jesus Out to Sea (2007). James Lee Burke has twice received the Edgar for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, first for Black Cherry Blues in 1990, and again in 1998 for Cimarron Rose. In 2009, James Lee Burke received the MWA’s Grand Master Award.

  * * *

  James Lee Burke is a North American crime writer, Pulitzer nominee, winner of two Edgar Awards, and, to date, the author of thirty-one novels. These include stand-alones, a series set in Texas and Montana about former cop and Texas Ranger–turned–lawyer Billy Bob Holland, and another about Billy Bob’s cousin Hackberry Holland, ex-ACLU attorney and now sheriff of a tiny Tex-Mex border town. While both series have topped best-seller lists and won wide critical and popular acclaim, there is no doubt that Burke is best known for his long-running and equally successful series about recovering alcoholic, ex-cop, Vietnam vet, and sometime bait-shop owner Dave Robicheaux.

  The first book in the series, The Neon Rain, was published in 1987 and has Robicheaux working as a homicide investigator in New Orleans. In later novels he is a detective in the sheriff ’s department in the town of New Iberia, two hours’ drive west of the city. With this region featuring in so much of Burke’s work, and with him being a resident himself, it’s natural that he would have written about the effect of Hurricane Katrina, which so devastated the area in August 2005. In the sixteenth novel in the series, The Tin Roof Blowdown, Burke presents us with characteristically masterful descriptions of these events combined with a trademark well-plotted, and well-peopled, crime story.

  The book opens with Robicheaux dreaming about a time in Vietnam when he lay wounded and waiting for medevac, knowing the North Vietnamese army could be coming through the waving elephant grass at any moment, and seeing a medical chopper loaded with his wounded comrades blown up by an RPG. He wakes to tell himself that he will “never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent citizens, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most,” but then tells us “that was before Katrina.”

  Turn the page and we meet priest and addict Jude LeBlanc on a rainy New Orleans morning. It is August 26, three days before Hurricane Katrina hits. With his distinctive and lyrical prose Burke describes the water pouring down the buildings into the gardens, and the way LeBlanc’s prostate cancer causes him intractable pain. LeBlanc doesn’t talk about the misdiagnosis that put him in this state because he “doesn’t wish to rob others of their faith in the exactitude of medical science. To do so is, in a way, the same as robbing them of the only belief system they have.” Faith and belief systems, and the loss thereof, are powerful themes in many of Burke’s novels, and in this one more than most. LeBlanc’s awareness of their importance is matched by the conviction of the next character we encounter, insurance salesman Otis Baylor, that proper preparation is all it takes to get through the worst of calamities. The hope and determination of these characters in the face of despair and trouble—another common theme in Burke’s work—are made more poignant by the reader’s preexisting knowledge of the destruction Katrina is destined to wreak, and intensify the usual feelings of unease and anxiety aroused by a potential threat to Burke’s characters.

  Burke’s use of multiple points of view, and the insight and empathy with which he builds his characters, help develop strong connections between them and the reader. Whether criminals, police, or ordinary people, his characters are often portrayed as lost and looking for redemption: here we see bail-skip, looter, and rapist Bertrand Melancon try to make amends for his past sins, and despite all that he’s done we can’t help but cheer him on in his struggle. The theme of redemption is also played out through the characters of Robicheaux and his friend and fellow ex-cop Clete Purcel. Robicheaux believes that Purcel is working hard to recapture Melancon and his brother because doing so might somehow undo the damage caused by Katrina and restore the devastated New Orleans. The impossibility of this, and the fact that Purcel keeps trying, as does Robicheaux himself, in this book and others, to fight against an unending tide of crime, emphasizes their courage in the face of failure: they can never win, but they struggle on regardless.

  The best writing makes you feel as if you’re right there with the characters, and for me Burke never fails. The descriptions by Robicheaux and Purcel of experiencing apprehension comparable to the last days of the Vietnam War as Katrina descends, that they are “witness to a holocaust in the making,” caused this reader at least to feel a similar dread. Burke describes the changes in air and sea as the hurricane approaches, the damage Robicheaux sees when he and his boss drive into New Orleans, the bodies floating in the flood, and the plight of so many people stranded by rising water on the roofs of houses and cars with a detail and intensity that made me shiver. Even the things he leaves out strike right at the heart: referring to the people who drowned when trapped in their attics, he writes, “If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life.”

  The Tin Roof Blowdown is, at times, a difficult and heartbreaking book to read. Like all Burke’s novels, it is full of truth about people and their relationships: we see that everyone is doing the best they can, trying to understand themselves and each other better, and seeking a connection with their fellow human beings. Great writing not only puts us right in the story but shows us something of ourselves: again, for me, in this Burke never fails.

  Katherine Howell is a former paramedic and the best-selling author of five crime novels featuring paramedics alongside Sydney police detective Ella Marconi. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work is published in multiple countries and languages, in print, ebook, and audio form. She holds two degrees in writing, is studying female doctor investigators in crime fiction for her PhD at the University of Queensland, and teaches writing and editing. She lives in Queensland with her partner, who owns a bookshop. Her latest book is Silent Fear. Visit her online at www.katherinehowell.com.

  What the Dead Know

  by Laura Lippman (2007)

  BILL LOE
HFELM

  * * *

  Laura Lippman (b. 1959) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but raised in Baltimore, the city that has become the setting for much of her work, including the series of mysteries featuring Tess Monaghan, a journalist (as was Lippman)-turned-PI, with which Lippman began her career in 1997. She had already won every major mystery award before the publication of the stand-alone novel What the Dead Know in 2007. It brought her even greater levels of critical acclaim, and confirmed her as one of the leading mystery novelists of her generation.

  * * *

  Laura Lippman’s 2007 stand-alone stunner, What the Dead Know, begins with a collision. Two cars crash on a highway outside suburban Baltimore. One of the drivers, a middle-aged woman, leaves the scene, only to be picked up by police not far away. She offers no coherent reason for fleeing. She has no ID. She tells police that she’s Heather Bethany, one of two sisters who disappeared from a popular Baltimore mall thirty years previously, never to be seen or heard from again. Questions ignite: Where has she been? Where is her sister? Is this woman really who she claims to be? There are reasons to believe her, and reasons not to. Can any of the questions be answered? Can the answers be proven? Police, lawyers, and social workers compete for Heather’s capricious attention, and for scraps of truth about the present and the past.

  As the accident happens on the highway, Heather catches a glimpse of a child, a young girl, riding in the other car. She later learns, in an almost throwaway scene, that the young girl she swore that she saw is in fact a young boy—a boy who is not only not a girl, but whose appearance differs in other significant ways from what Heather recollects. She learns that something that she could have sworn was true is, in fact, false.

  The traffic accident, its depiction of lives colliding and sent careening out of control, functions as a simple but brilliant metaphor with which to launch the story. The accident forces the mystery woman into contact with curious law enforcement officials, setting the plot in motion, but the idea of what we think we see and know smashing to pieces against cold hard reality is the collision that truly drives the book.

  The boy in the other car suffers minor injuries and we’re left believing that he makes a full recovery. We never learn his name and, at least in terms of plot, he turns out to be of negligible importance. We never see him except for that single unreliable glimpse through Heather’s eyes. His importance lies in the fact that he was never who we thought he was. He introduces another crucial concept that lies at the heart of What the Dead Know.

  Don’t believe what you see.

  Deception energizes the novel, and not only the typical deceptions of a crime novel but the realistic everyday human deceptions that children practice on adults, that siblings practice on one another and their parents, that couples use to manipulate and protect each other, that law enforcement practices on the guilty and the innocent alike, and ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, the deceptions we practice on ourselves in the mirror and the tricks our own memories play on us. These deceptions have a thousand stimuli in the book, both mundane and profound, including the greatest motivator of them all: the need not to get caught, the need to protect lies already told in order to keep the whole house of cards standing.

  What happens to us, the novel asks, when we’re confronted with realities that contradict what we recall, that undermine what, to us, are essential, inarguable truths? Are we liars whether we like it or not? Are we inherently false and dishonest? Are we sometimes better off with lies than we are with the truth? Who are we really when what we think makes us ourselves is revealed to be untrue? Maybe that’s the knowledge that the titular dead possess: the debatable value of the truth, because the truth is usually very bad news. In Lippman’s suburban Baltimore, the truth is not revealed in a seductive act of peeling away, like the dropping of Salome’s veils. Instead, the truth needs to be dug out with sharp instruments like a rotten tooth rooted deep in an aching jaw. In this book, as in Lippman’s others, she probes and pokes at deep psychological and emotional infections. By the end, we know more, and we feel better, but we’re left with an open wound and an extended recovery.

  One of my favorite aspects of What the Dead Know is that it does all kinds of things that novelists in training (especially “genre” novelists) are told not to do. The novel shifts points of view, climbing inside the heads of over half a dozen characters. It moves in time from 2005 to 1975, and various points in between. Names are stolen, borrowed, turned around, and abandoned, as are entire identities. Histories delivered through one set of eyes morph into something else entirely when seen through another set of eyes, and usually something sadder. Family members miles and years apart enact similar responses to tragedy, offering questions about human nature. The narrative spends extended time with the eventual victims of the central crime, and even more with those left behind. One person’s set of defensive lies is another person’s self-reinvention. Reader empathy is strained. Judgments are difficult to make. We linger in the brutal emotional aftermath of a crime, not just the legal ramifications of it. We get more broken hearts than we do pools of blood.

  While one answer to the central crime story strikes with a wallop, in a late-arriving twist worthy of Hitchcock or The Twilight Zone, another critical answer lands with a pathetic and mundane thud, and is all the more heartbreaking for its banality.

  Yet, for all its acts of misdirection, the book is never unwieldy, never confusing. The story never stumbles, which makes it impressive not just as a thriller, but also as a technical achievement of complex architecture. The reader never feels duped or lied to, the victim of parlor tricks, even as the characters deceive and manipulate one another in every area from marriage to murder. Instead of low-rent cleverness, Lippman roots her convolutions in human frailties like fear, denial, and faulty memory, which is what makes them believable. Things change from true to false and back again, facts go from there to gone because of what the characters hope and fear and believe and desire, and we never see Lippman’s hand in the process. We’re so busy watching the moving cups to see which one hides the little red ball that we not only never see the magician’s hands, we forget she’s even there.

  The events that comprise the plot of What the Dead Know are not the essential puzzle. The people who comprise the story are the real mystery.

  Bill Loehfelm is the author of three novels, most recently The Devil She Knows, as well as Fresh Kills (2008) and Bloodroot (2009). All three novels are set in Bill’s hometown of Staten Island, NYC. Bill moved to New Orleans in 1997. He currently lives in New Orleans with his wife, A.C. Lambeth, who is a writer and yoga instructor, and their two dogs. When not writing, Bill practices yoga, plays the drums, cheers the Saints, eats oysters, and gets tattoos, all with varying frequency and success. Visit him online at www.billloehfelm.tumblr.com.

  Escape

  by Perihan Mağden (2007)

  MEHMET MURAT SOMER

  (essay translated from the Turkish by Amy Marie Spangler)

  * * *

  Perihan Mağden (b. 1960) has written novels, poetry, and columns in Turkey’s national daily newspapers, first in Radikal and later in Taraf. She is the author of four novels currently available in English: The Messenger Boy Murders, 2 Girls, Ali and Ramazan, and Escape, as well as one title not yet translated, The Companion. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages. She is an honorary member of British PEN and winner of the Grand Award for Freedom of Speech by the Turkish Publishers Association.

  * * *

  “So simple, however it hurts so deep and is hard to digest.”

  —Perihan Mağden, Escape

  Some crime novels drive me mad with curiosity; they leave me breathless as I tear through the pages in a frenzied rush to get to the end. If I’m deriving genuine pleasure from what I’m reading, though, I rein in my desire; I resist the temptation to race to the conclusion and instead proceed slowly, savoring the details. That way, both my curiosity and my pleasure last longer. How delightful! />
  But then the time comes when the number of pages remaining grows fewer and fewer, dwindling down to zero. When books by authors with whose works I’m well acquainted, or of whom I’m especially fond, come to an end, it’s not shock or surprise that I feel, regardless of the increasing number of twists as the finale draws closer. Rather, I’m enveloped by warm, fuzzy feelings: the relaxation that comes with release, the afterglow in the wake of satisfaction. I feel good.

  Only rarely does the opposite occur. In those cases, when I finish the book, I feel completely out of whack, utterly incapable of describing my thoughts and my feelings. Sometimes it’s anxiety that overwhelms me, and sometimes it’s anger. In the latter case, my disappointment is not connected to the conclusion, for I will have forgotten the book somewhere at home before I’ve even made it a third of the way through.

  Perihan Mağden’s novel Escape is the most recent book to have thoroughly rocked my sensibilities and thrown me for a complete loop. (Note to the curious: others include Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series and Those Who Walk Away, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans . . . The list goes on and on, but I think you get the picture.)

  Escape or, by its Turkish title, Biz Kimden Kaçιyorduk, Anne? (Who Were We Running From, Mother?), is a slim volume of less than two hundred pages. You think you’ll be able to coast right through it and then move on to the next book on your list, but no, that is a misconception. It’s not what happens, because the book is not easy to digest. It’s a very challenging read, Escape.