MEGAN ABBOTT, YOU GUYS.

This is less a review than a fan letter. And less a fan letter than the text equivalent of an animated gif of Kermit waving his arms. This one:

Because seriously, she is so good. I sought her out finally after Sarah Weinman, in the introduction of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, mentioned her in the same breath as Tana French and Gillian Flynn. Indeed, they form a transatlantic trifecta of badass crime fiction queens (and in my headcanon they are also a team of sensibly dressed superheroines).

The two novels I read recently, Dare Me and Bury Me Deep, are set 70 years apart--the former, among the loyalties and betrayals of a high school cheerleading squad, torn between their ruthless ex-captain and their charismatic new coach; the latter, in 1930s Phoenix, in a fictionalized account of a then-notorious murder case. Both focus on the lives of women, where men serve largely as complicating factors, and female friendships are fierce and toxic by turns.

And the prose, my God. I want to just stuff her sentences in my mouth, every one of 'em. Here's an example I've been quoting nonstop, from Dare Me:

[He] makes us dizzy, that mix of hard and soft, the riven-granite profile blurred by the most delicate of mouths, the creasy warmth around his eyes—eyes that seem to catch far-off things blinking in the fluorescent lights. He seems to see things we can’t, and to be thinking about them with great care.

(Admission: this description made me picture the character as looking just like Dean Winchester. I think about Dean Winchester a lot, OK?!? LAY OFF I CAN QUIT ANYTIME)

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (ed. Sarah Weinman)

(I know: that cover! That title! How perfect.)

Editor Sarah Weinman embarked on Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives as a response to "the current crop of crime writers who excite and inspire me the most"--women like Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Laura Lippman (fun fact: I once sold a Lippman novel to Kyra Sedgwick! Mr. Bacon was also present.) Many of these authors work in what's known as "domestic suspense," crime fiction that takes place in ordinary spaces and lives, splitting the difference between hard-boiled and cozy--and very often centering on the ambitions and frustrations of women.

Yet while these modern authors sell like lovely bloodthirsty hotcakes, their predecessors--women writers working at mid-century who invented domestic suspense--have been largely forgotten. Weinman sets out to right this wrong, selecting fourteen stories by as many authors, written between the 1940s and mid-1970s. I'd only heard of Patricia Highsmith, whose inclusion here is surprising, as she made a name for herself writing about men, and (of course) Shirley Jackson, whose "Louisa, Please Come Home" deserves to be read as much as "The Lottery." Some of the others were critically acclaimed bestsellers in their day, such as Vera Caspary--"Sugar and Spice" is a skillful portrait of toxic friendship, though I wish it had a more ambiguous ending--and Edgar-winning Charlotte Armstrong. The latter's "The Splintered Monday" contains my favorite line in the collection: "Bobby [got] into his chair in a young way that was far more difficult a physical feat than simply sitting down." I loved Elizabeth Saxby Holding's "The Stranger in the Car," where all the women know more than they let on, and the male protagonist knows far less than he thinks he does, and Miriam Allen Deford's "Mortmain" is deliciously malicious and unexpected.

Weinman's introduction is a bit simplistic in its history for me, mostly adhering to the tired narrative that feminism was an invention of the 1960s, and twice her notes on the individual stories have small but crucial errors in her plot summaries. Despite these small quibbles, her analysis of the subgenre is excellent, and she can certainly sling a sentence herself, as here: "The bombast of global catastrophe, the knight-errant detective's overweening nobility, of the gaping maw of total self-annihilation has no place in these stories." In lifting these writers from obscurity, she's done a great service to mystery readers, and to the writers themselves.

(FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Penguin, in exchange for an honest review.)

The Next Time You See Me (Holly Goddard Jones)

Holly Goddard Jones's debut novel The Next Time You See Me is the book Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl wishes it was: more compassionate, more believable, just as beautifully written.

(Yeah, I know, I'm the only one who found Gone Girl ultimately kinda . . . silly? That plot twist halfway through is just not good; were it framed in less assured prose, no one would've given the novel a second thought.)

It's a shame, really, that my first impulse is comparative, because while Jones is working in the same character-driven crime-fiction milieu as Flynn and Tana French, the sheer range of The Next Time You See Me sets it apart. Though it's written in third person, Jones's narrative inhabits several different psyches, centering around the erratic, doomed figure of Ronnie Eastman: Emily, a pudgy and persecuted middle schooler who finds her body in the first chapter; Susanna, Ronnie's younger sister, desperately trying to convince those around her that Ronnie has really disappeared; Wyatt, a factory worker and bachelor whose quiet, unchanging life is upended by a heart attack; Tony, an African-American baseball star now a detective in his small Kentucky hometown. Even minor characters--Christopher, Emily's unattainable crush; Sarah, a nurse who, with Wyatt, is shocked into love--are full and real, keeping their own sadnesses, shames, and small joys. While Flynn's protagonists are (deliciously) horrible people, Jones's diverse cast are all sympathetic, and she pulls off the astounding feat of making your heart break as much for the murderer as the victim.

And she does this all with such lovely words, too, from brief images--"his jaws, while not chattering, exactly, were shivering against one another like plates in a dishwasher"--to long, well-wrought passages of insight:

[Susanna had] taken to [motherhood] like she'd taken to cooking: with intelligence and determination but no confidence, consulting books and her own mother's counsel the way she checked, every time she made a white sauce for macaroni and cheese, to make sure that the recipe called for two tablespoons of flour and not three. She wasn't the kind of woman who could throw three or four ingredients into a pot, willy-nilly, and create a meal. She wasn't the kind of woman who could give discipline or life instruction or even an allowance, willy-nilly, and create a daughter.

I strongly suspect I'll be the same way upon acquiring offspring. I am certainly that kind of cook.

Really can't recommend this one highly enough.

The Looking Glass War (John LeCarre)

This is, I believe, the third John LeCarré I've read, after The Spy Who Came In From the Cold in high school and The Little Drummer Girl in college. The Looking Glass War can be considered "minor" next to those giants of the genre--but like his literary forebear, Graham Greene, even LeCarré's lesser novels are worth reading.

What I liked best about Looking Glass War was its perspective--it's set among the agents of Britain's military intelligence, the Department, rather than the cover-but-civilian peacetime operators of "the Circus." Twenty years after WWII, the Department finds itself lowest on the totem pole--marginalized and unsupported. They don't even have a motor pool. So when an East German comes to them in Hamburg claiming a Soviet missile installation nearby, Department head LeClerc jumped at the chance to recapture old glories, despite the information being's less than convincing. They recruit a naturalized Pole, Fred Leiser, to cross the border and confirm the story.

Like the other books of his I've read, Looking Glass War is less a collection of action setpieces--you know, like every spy movie ever--than it is an examination of the relationships between spies, the pressures of bureaucracy, and the toll on the human psyche of constant deception. And while this is why he (and Greene) tend to get shelved in Serious Literature, these are traits that should be found in all thrillers. Emotional investment, no matter what the genre, elevates an OK book to a great one.

Rogue Male (Geoffrey Household)

At the end of every WORD Classics book club meeting, the esteemed Bookavore asks us: "To whom would you recommend this book?" (Albeit sometimes less grammatically, because for goodness' sake, it's Saturday. Also this time there was beer.) For me, the question's the best way into Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which is both a thriller for people who don't read thrillers and a thriller for people who only read thrillers, but are willing to delve into some explorations of social class (because it is, after all, British) along with the chase.

In the opening pages of Rogue Male, the unnamed narrator, a wealthy English sportsman of some note, decides on a hunterly whim to see how close he can get to the Central European stronghold of an up-and-coming dictator (it was written in '39, so yeah, Hitler, but that's really beside the point). He has the man in his sights when he's captured by bodyguards and brutally interrogated; but he manages to escape, and from there the book divides its time between furious flight and the tedium of hiding as, pursued to his home country by the dictator's minions, the narrator goes to ground in a literal burrow in Dorset, his only companion a similarly feral cat he calls Asmodeus.

What I loved about this book is the mix of skills required for the narrator's survival--both the primal knowledge that provides him with food and shelter and the social aptitude he uses on his rare forays from his den. For he belongs to what he calls "Class X," a rank he struggles to define but which is immediately identifiable to any Englishman, who treat him accordingly. Even more so than his limitless wealth (though it certainly helps), it's this vague but unmistakable membership that allows him to navigate through the world of men. Being Class X isn't enough, of course; he needs his Bear Grylls-esque ability to eke existence from his environment, but the latter skill set also isn't sufficient to keep him out of harm's way. Watching these two very different areas of expertise complement and support each other is a joy to read, and makes Rogue Male uniquely pleasurable for the mutually exclusive sets of readers I've mentioned above. Highly recommended!

Vertical reads: Pro Bono (Seicho Matsumoto), Naoko (Keigo Higashino), Flowers of Evil Vol. 3 (Shuzo Oshimi)

I've mentioned before that my friend Ed at Vertical hooks me up with a steady string of awesome Japanese works in translation--the small publisher's stock in trade. I always wanna be up front with personal connections to the books I write about, back-scratchin' in book-reviewin' being what it is . . . but c'mon, I'm not gonna not write about books I like! Here are three.

Pro Bono, Seicho Matsumoto: While I think I'd shelve this 1961 novel (filmed multiple times in Japan, most recently in 2010) in Mystery, it's not a whodunit or even a procedural--the story really starts where most mysteries end, and spirals out from there into deep, dark, uncomfortable greatness. It begins when a young woman from the provinces arrives at hotshot Tokyo lawyer Keiichi Abe's office, pleading with him to take the case of her older brother, arrested for murder, whom she believes is innocent. But she can't pay his fees, and he's preoccupied anyway about meeting up with his lover for a round of golf and adultery, so he turns her down. Her brother is convicted, and dies in prison waiting for his appeal; Abe finds himself drawn back to the case after it's too late. Pro Bono is about injustice, inaction, and the uselessness of remorse--and eventually, about revenge. First-rate!

Naoko, Keigo Higashino: And then there's this novel, which I'd shelve under . . . uh, is Unsettling Body-Switching Gender-Role-Exploring Coming-of-Age a genre? No? Can we not make it one, because Naoko simultaneously creates and perfects the concept? Great! Anyway, to elaborate: after Heisuke's wife, Naoko, and 11-year-old daughter, Monami, are in a terrible bus accident, the latter wakes from a coma claiming--convincingly--to be the former. When they return home, Naoko/Monami finds herself living two lives, the junior high student and the dutiful housewife (because it doesn't even occur to Heisuke that maybe he should lend a hand with dinner while she does her homework, argh): until she realizes she wants more from her daughter's life than she achieved in her own. Heisuke, used to taking his authority as father and husband for granted, is baffled and outraged by her struggle for independence, and the conflict heightens as she matures in body as in mind. So creepy and weird in all the right ways!

Speaking of which . . . Flowers of Evil, Volume 3, Shuzo Oshimi (out October 23): OH MAN. This terrific manga series just keeps ramping up the queasy-making adolescent sexuality and psychological manipulation and small-town boredom and decadent-author-worship to new heights, and I'm totally in love with it. But I would not let it date my son.

Broken Harbor (Tana French)

NEW TANA FRENCH YOU GUYS GAH

Broken Harbor is now called Brianstown, but Mike "Scorcher" Kennedy remembers it as it used to be, from childhood holidays camping by the sea with his parents and sisters. Now, it's a ghost town, a planned development abandoned when the recession struck, littered with half-built houses sliding into ruin. In one of the few occupied units, Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie Curran, report to the scene of a devastating crime: two small children dead in their beds, their parents stabbed on the kitchen floor. Patrick Spain, the recently laid-off father, is dead; his wife and high school sweetheart Jenny is barely alive.

While Pat himself is the obvious prime suspec, family annihilation being an all-too-common scenario when a breadwinner goes broke, disturbing details suggest there's more to the story: the investigating team finds multiple holes in the walls, with the camera halves of video baby monitors trained on the openings. And Jenny's sister tells the detectives that she was terrified by a series of bizarre break-ins, which left all doors locked and strange, tiny things missing: half a packet of ham, some rubber bands. As the case unfolds, Kennedy finds himself juggling his memories of Broken Harbor, the possibility that Richie may be the first partner he wants to stick with, and his mentally ill sister, Dina, whose mind is once again going off the rails.

Honestly, what can I say about this book, besides the premise, that I haven't said already? French is just so good at picking up the thread of a new first-person narrator and diving Marianas-Trench-deep into their psyche, it would be repetitive it weren't such a joy to inhabit these detectives--the kind of joy that is sometimes a burden, because you hurt for them, and the victims, and sometimes even the murderers. She's so good with character that the plot could be an afterthought if she wanted it to be, and these would still be first-rate mysteries. But since they're also (as they say) meticulously plotted? I'm happy as Maru in a big ol' stack o' boxes.

Sharp Objects (Gillian Flynn)

How Great Sharp Objects Is, Part 1: had to dose myself with Nyquil after reading it all evening, to keep myself from staying up till 4 a.m. to finish.

How Great Sharp Objects Is, Part 2: fifteen pages from the end the next day, I took the local rather than the express on my commute home so's not to be interrupted. And luckily I finished while still on the train, or I'd have taken a page from my constantly-bruised childhood and read it while walking.

Camille Preaker, a reporter at a second-rate Chicago newspaper, reluctantly returns to her Missouri hometown to scoop the story of two dead little girls, found strangled a year apart, all their teeth removed. It becomes quickly obvious why she's stayed away: her cold and passive-aggressive mother, Adora, is the proverbial piece of work, and Camille's thirteen-year-old half-sister, Amma, walks the line between pampered child and drugged-up Lolita with glee. Camille herself is far from unscathed, but she wears her scars on the outside as well--for over a decade she carved words into her flesh, an obsessive chronicle of pain and self-loathing.

Sharp Objects is best read in a few gulps, but you'll need a strong stomach: though there's no supernatural element, it shades into sheer horror, as Flynn dials up the dysfunction and malignancy possible in relationships between women--mothers, daughters, sisters, friends--to a fever pitch. This is part of why I loved it, I think, that's it's such a deliberate, unusual exploration of uniquely feminine damage, both suffered and inflicted. My favorite lines sum it up better than I can:

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.

Mystery May fourfer!

The City & the City, China Miéville: First read this as an ARC back in '09, my first exposure to Miéville's work, and I felt lukewarm towards it at the time. While it's still not my favorite (I think Perdido Street Station and Kraken tie for that honor), I did better appreciate it this time around. It's a police procedural with a spec-fic premise that's way harder to explain than it is to read in his capable narrative: it's set in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma (in the same nebulous part of the world as Jan Morris's Hav), which occupy the same physical space but have wholly separate governments, languages, and history--an inhabitant of either city grows up learning the art of seeing and unseeing, realizing in an instant whether a given passersby or building or vehicle is in his own city, able to be acknowledged and interacted with, or the other, whereupon it officially does not exist to them. Looking over the border is the direst of crimes, calling out the mysterious force called Breach. In this singular environment, Beszel policeman Tyador Borlu finds himself investigating a unique and complicated murder: the victim, American archaeology student Mahalia Geary, was found in Beszel . . . but killed in Ul Qoma. And when he finds out that she was obsessed with legendary third city Orciny, the mystery deepens. Miéville doesn't so much blend genres here as snort derisively as the very notion that blending is even necessary; like his cities, they're already part of each other, no matter how fiercely we to keep them separate.

The Guards, Ken Bruen: First in a series narrated by Jack Taylor, alcoholic ex-Garda (i.e., member of the Garda Síochána na hÉireann, Ireland's police force), now picking up private-eye work in between blackout benders. What makes this fast-moving Irish noir work for me, despite its pretty standard setup, is the lyricism of its writing--almost a prose poem in places. Bruen's habit of dropping the beginning of a quote to the paragraph after its tag provides a literal rise and fall to his characters' speech that I found especially effective.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith: This classic thriller hardly requires my praise, but I'm givin' it anyway. Tom Ripley is a small-time con artist sent to Europe by a college acquaintance Dickie Greenleaf's father, who pays his way hoping that Tom can persuade Dickie to leave his idle life painting in Italy to come home and join the family shipbuilding business. Instead, Tom decides to not just emulate Dickie, but become him, killing him and stealing his identity and the money that goes with it. Ripley's often referred to as a sociopath, but I think he's an even more chilling creature--completely blank, a malleable substance that reconfigures itself to the specifications of what those around him expect or want, not so much a personality as a gallery of masks.

And speaking of sociopaths, there's no other way to describe Wayne Ogden, the cheerfully amoral narrator of Scott Phillips pitch-black Midwestern noir The Adjustment. He's just returned to 1946 Wichita from years as a supply sergeant in Europe, a job he used as front for a black-market gamut of drug dealing, pimping, and thievery. Now he's back to work in "public relations" for Collins aircraft, his primary duties being to keep the company's head in booze and hookers, and cover up the consequences. This is not a book for anyone who needs a protagonist with any glimmer of redeeming qualities--being in Ogden's head is a harrowing and repugnant experience--but apparently I've no such requirement, because I loved it. Been meaning to read Phillips for ages--though he lives in St. Louis now, he's a Wichita boy, with a native's nonchalant knowledge of the city, and he's a Watermark Books favorite (I grinned goofily when Ogden makes a phone call "in the back of Gessler's drugstore on Douglas," said storefront now being occupied by Watermark). On the wall of their basement autograph galley, he's drawn himself looking chagrined at a podium, thinking to himself, "Dear God, there's not a single paragraph in here appropriate for a mixed audience. Next time I'm writing a NICE book." I, for one, am glad he hasn't.

Brighton Rock (Graham Greene)

So the first thing I want to say about Brighton Rock, because I wish I had known this before starting (although boy will my face be red if everyone's like, "Yeah, I knew that"), is that the title's not  referring to a geological formation. For years I'd pictured it on a postcard--Brighton Rock, jutting over the sea, scenic but rendered ominous by its appearance in a Graham Greene novel (would someone fall off of it? Or be pushed?). NOPE! Turns out it's a kind of candy, the Wikipedia entry for which calls it "traditional British seaside tubular boiled sweets," a charming chain of modifiers. "Rock" is chunky and cylindrical, kind of like a large straight candy cane, and generally made with a pattern running through it--such as the name of the resort where it's sold--visible all the way through the stick. Hence its fitness for metaphor:

"People change," she said.
"Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature."

(It's also possibly a murder weapon? But Greene being Greene, this catalyzing act takes place offstage, and is never fully described.

The shes above are discussing Pinkie Brown, a yawning void disguised as a teenage boy--the scariest character I've read recently, and I just read a book with Hitler in it. At 17, Pinkie is the leader of a gang, small-time but vicious, part of the racetrack-centered underworld of coastal Brighton. He masterminds the murder of Fred Hale, a former reporter now traveling for a newspaper as "Kolley Kibber"--find him and win a prize! (The killing is revenge for events that take place in an earlier novel, A Gun for Sale, which I haven't read.) Because of his semi-fame, his death makes the papers, though it's ruled a heart attack. Two very different women realize something's fishy: Ida Arnold, a big-hearted, big-breasted lady of indifferent virtue, who Kibber/Hale picked up on his last afternoon, and who becomes the unlikeliest of detectives in pursuit of the truth; and Rose, a mousy teenaged waitress from the Brighton slums who knows that the man she served wasn't the one who died. To protect himself from Rose's possible testimony, Pinkie resolves to marry her, despite his lack of feeling and gut-level revulsion at sexuality.

But while it has the bones of a crime novel, the themes of Brighton Rock are no less than salvation, redemption, and damnation. Both Pinkie and Rose are "Romans"--Catholics--while Ida is cheerfully irreligious: her concerns are with Right and Wrong, whereas theirs are Good and Evil. Greene writes about the central experience of Catholicism, i.e. the consciousness of sin and of oneself as sinner, with borderline obsessiveness--and for my money, better than any theologian. If you want to understand why and how I'm Catholic, read Graham Greene, particularly this book, The Heart of the Matter, The Power & the Glory, The End of the Affair . . . they're his best anyway. (And what the heck, add Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to the mix.) To me, and I shall flatter myself to Greene, there is deep comfort in the idea that everyone is flawed and fallible, that we are all capable of acts both good and evil: because it means I'm not alone when I fall short of my own standards. And, still more important, that forgiveness is possible--that I, too, can be relieved by what's called in Brighton Rock's final pages "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."

And there's nothing I can write after that amazing line that won't be anticlimax, is there?

The Likeness (Tana French)

In The Likeness, the second of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad novels, our narrator is Cassie Maddox, who transferred out of Murder in the emotional aftermath of In the Woods. She's working in Domestic Violence when she's called to a crime scene by her boyfriend, Detective Sam O'Neill, and is shocked to discover her old boss from Undercover, Frank Mackey, is also there. But it soon becomes clear why: the dead woman is Cassie's physical double, and her Trinity College ID bears the name Alexandra Madison--a persona Cassie and Mackey invented years ago when Cassie infiltrated a drug ring at the University of Dublin. And Mackey views this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance for any detective--he's convinced that they should pass the incident off as a non-fatal stabbing and install Cassie in Lexie's life, to investigate her murder from the inside. After initial resistance, Cassie realizes she can't pass up the chance either; she's bored in DV, and she feels responsible for this woman who died bearing her face and a name she created. (And, the autopsy shows, a child.)

Whoever Lexie originally was, when she stole the identity of someone who never existed, she used it to--of all things--pursue a Ph.D. in literature. She lived near the abandoned cottage where she was found in the former manor house of Glenskehy, with four other grad students, so it's to Whitethorn House that Cassie is sent, armed with a mental dossier of all the information she and Mackey could glean regarding this incarnation of Lexie Madison, as well as a wireless mike hidden by bandages. Her roommates--Daniel, Justin, Abby, and Rafe--are fiercely loyal, a little odd, and clearly hiding something. Or somethings. (In this, there are echoes of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, though I find found French's foursome more likeable). But the more Cassie lives with them, inhabiting their intertwined lives, the more she finds herself half in love with the whole thing: the house, the countryside, the improvised family the five have formed. Gradually, her objectivity starts to wane; she hides vital clues from Frank and Sam; she starts to imagine just taking this life that's been given her, living out her years in Whitethorn House.

The Likeness is somehow even better than In the Woods--and I loved In the Woods. This despite having a frankly implausible premise; I can see how it might be a dealbreaker for some readers, but I just shrugged and moved past it--after all, there's no such thing as the Dublin Murder Squad, and that doesn't bother me. Once again, she takes a familiar trope--Undercover Gets Too Close to Her Case--and makes it much more. Once again, it's a deep study in character, identity, and friendship--beautifully written, well plotted, and often heartbreaking.

Storm Front (Jim Butcher)

Storm Front is the first book in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, currently at 13 books and assorted short stories, all starring Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, the only professional wizard on the Chicago PD's payroll. In other words, borrowing a phrase used by Salon to describe Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, it's a mix of Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer--and as such, pretty darn irresistible.

I will say this: Butcher doesn't have the writing chops of Link by a long shot. I'm told he gets better as the series wears on, which is good to hear--it's not so much that Storm Front is badly written, but it doesn't always know when to stop, particularly when it comes to punchlines. And the female characters are not great.  Me, I'm willing to forgive these authorial flaws for a premise like "wizard detective," because COME ON WIZARD DETECTIVE.

It's also necessary in a Book One to unfurl a lot of exposition. Thus, we learn how magic works in this context: largely by harnessing emotional energy, though natural phenomena like thunderstorms can also provide power. Harry's got fraught relationships with law enforcement both municipal--obviously, not everyone at the CPD likes having a mage hanging out at crime scenes--and magical, as he's shadowed by a gruff representative of the White Council, who enforce the Laws of Magic. The first of which, of course, is not to use it to kill; when Harry's called to investigate a couple murdered in flagrante via their hearts literally exploding out of their chests, he's sickened by this perversion of profession, and shocked to learn that the White Council suspects him. We also meet other recurring characters: two possible love interests, a cop and a reporter; the barkeep at the local wizard watering hole; Harry's air-elemental lab assistant,Bob, who lives in a skull in his basement; his giant gray kittycat, Mister.

Really, Storm Front feels a lot like the pilot of a pulpy sci-fi TV show--again, Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind, particularly that clunky first season. I'm willing to bet the series gets better in some ways (like Buffy's special effects) and doesn't in others (like Buffy's costumes), but that it always stays fun. Sometimes, that's all entertainment needs to be.

Paper Towns (John Green)

I wanted Mystery May to include a YA example, and I've been meaning to read John Green for a while, as he's both consistently well-reviewed and bestselling, a rarity for any author, but particularly one who writes books narrated by teenage boys (and he's got a wonderful ear for their dialogue, a rapid-fire mix of vulgarity and in-jokes). Paper Towns won an Edgar (the award named for Mr. Poe), so it was the natural choice.

The mystery here is the disappearance of Margo Roth Spiegelman, who's lived next door to Quentin Jacobsen their whole lives. When they were nine, they found a dead body together. Now that they're high school seniors, their paths rarely cross--he's a band nerd, she's a living legend, hatcher of schemes and haver of unbelievable-but-true adventures like joining the circus or hanging out with rock stars. But one night she shows up at his window, like she used to when they were kids, and talks him into "borrowing" his mom's minivan for an all-nighter of elaborate revenge (capped off by breaking into Sea World in the wee hours). The next Monday, she doesn't show up at school. And when she keeps not showing up, Quentin discovers a series of clues she's left, seemingly only for him, and decides he's the one meant to find her.

I'll admit I spent the first chunk of the book a little miffed by Margo, because boy is she ever a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, all wild and quirky and bringing timid Quentin out of his shell . . . and yeah, there are implausibilities to her character. Really, she ran away to Mississippi one summer and left behind an M, an I, an S, and a P in a bowl of alphabet soup? Ugh. But it's this very convention Green is playing with, it turns out. The more Quentin delves into Margo's life, the hazier she becomes, until he understands that not only is his conception of her flawed, it's only one of several layers of persona she's built up around her, wrapping herself defensively in audacity and riddles. The real mystery Paper Towns considers, then, is subjective existence--how well can we ever, even with the best of intentions, know another human being? Margo's true self, Quentin realizes, is both simpler and more complex than he'd thought: "[t]he fundamental mistake I had always made," he says, "and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make--was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

Gaudy Night (Dorothy Sayers)

So this review was going to start with a rant about how Dorothy Sayers's tour de force Gaudy Night was out of print and what is WRONG with people, but I've learned that Harper is reissuing it in October with a swank new cover, which has simmered me back down. This is a book which should not be lost: partly because it contains a crucial chunk of her twenty-year Lord Peter Wimsey narrative, in the form of the BEST PROPOSAL EVER (fictional division, of course; don't get het up there, Andersen). Still more vital, it portrays the lives and travails of educated women in the first decades of the twentieth century, from their own perspectives--an experience that must not be forgotten. I hesitate to call it the first feminist detective novel, not being an expert on either category, but it is certainly early, and important.

If you're not familiar with Lord Peter Wimsey, you are in for a treat come October. The short version is: Bertie Wooster but fiercely bright, and a detective. With a monocle! As charming a character as he is, though, he appears in Gaudy Night for maybe a tenth of its pages--and detecting proper takes up maybe a fourth. Most of the book centers on Harriet Vane, a mystery writer Peter saved from the gallows when she was accused of murdering her lover in Strong Poison. He fell madly in love with her, and had been proposing to her on a regular basis--and being refused--for years since. He does nothing so unpleasant as stalk, never fear, merely sending a polite letter every month or so; she continues to demur not from antipathy, but from resentment over being indebted to him for her life, and an unwillingness to award herself as recompense for said debt.

The book takes place in 1935, as Harriet returns to Shrewsbury College, Oxford, for her class reunion, dubbed the "Gaudy." After a weekend of friendships rekindled (and regretfully outgrown) with former classmates and dons alike, she's drawn back to the city of dreaming spires by a pleading letter from the Dean, who knows her dabbling in detection and needs discreet help. There's been a rash of nasty happenings on Shrewsbury campus: poison-pen letters, obscene drawings, vandalism, including a bonfire of students' gowns in the quad and the wanton destruction of Miss Ludgate's long-in-the-making manuscript on her new theory of prosody. The culprit seems bitterly hostile towards unmarried academic women, branding them as harpies and man-eaters . . . and timing and circumstances point to one of Shrewsbury's own.

So why not call in the police, or at least alert the highers-up at Oxford? Well, the very nature of the pranks--their pointedness at the collegiate woman--begs for as little publicity as possible. Women were only granted the right to receive degrees from Oxford in 1920 (Sayers, like Harriet, was one of the first women to do so), and they're still regarded as at best unusual and at worst unnatural. Harriet fumes when the gown-burning incident is reported by a London paper as an "Undergraduettes' Rag" investigated by the "Lady Head":

Women, of course, were always news. Harriet wrote a tart letter to the paper, pointing out that either "undergraduate" or "woman student" would be seemlier English than "undergraduette," and that the correct method of describing Dr. Baring was "the Warden." The only result of this was to provoke a correspondence headed "Lady Undergrads," and a reference to "sweet girl-graduates."

This sort of sniggering is exactly why Shrewsbury's academics want an investigation on the quiet. And while Harriet protests she's hardly a professional, she's happy to oblige by moving back onto campus, ostensibly to research a biography of Gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu. And she's fallen back in love with the intellectual life, after years away in unlucky love and literary society. In between incidents with Shrewsbury's mad prankster, Sayers luxuriates in conversation, between smart and opinionated women, about who they are, who they could be, what society demands of them and what it should. It's wonderful to read, both as artifact and as sad testimony to what hasn't changed.

For a mystery novel, Gaudy Night seems to have little at stake--no murder, no theft of material property (beyond those academic gowns, weighty with their symbolic value). But what's threatened is far more precious: the right of women to pursue the examined life, to find paths other than marriage and family. Though Harriet finally accepts Peter's suit at novel's end, it's from a realization that he does, indeed, view her as an equal, a mind to rival his own. His successful proposal demonstrates this--he addresses her not only in Latin, but in a snippet from an Oxonian degree-granting ceremony, calling her magistra, literally, a woman with a master's degree. It's, uhm, really, really romantic. Almost as romantic as having my attention distracted from a book of Onion sports reporting to be proposed to in front of my whole family on Christmas morning . . .

Now You're One of Us (Asa Nonami)

I realized, while writing up In the Woods, the peril of reviewing mysteries: for me, the effectiveness of these stories depends on their gradual, methodical nature. I.e., the (good) mystery is a mechanism, the function of which is unknown at first--my enjoyment comes during the process of watching smoothly fitted gears turn, sudden switches flip, hidden panels open . . . and finally feeling the pieces click into place. It's deeply satisfying to some piece of my problem-solving brain.

But since I want to preserve that experience for other readers, I end up having little to say. Premise. Other thing I liked. It's good! (Or, it's not.) And I suppose, if you know me, and/or trust my taste, that's enough. I'm not sure whether it's really reviewing.

So let's call this less a review than an endorsement, namely of Asa Nonami's supremely creepy tale of familial horror, Now You're One of Us. That wonderfully unsettling cover taunted me across the room for months back when our D&D nights took place at Vertical's offices--and this is a case wherein judging a book by its cover is a smart decision. That single personal hair on the soap perfectly encapsulates the domestic disquiet in the story of Noriko, who marries into the wealthy Shito family and moves into their compound, where four generations of just the nicest people live in perfect harmony.

Except, OK, maybe her sister-in-law is a little old to be bathing with her developmentally disabled teenage brother. And if Great-Granny can't walk, what was she doing in the hallway in the middle of the night? And why on earth are there hallucinogenic plants in the front garden?

At this point I run into the peril and have to say WHY INDEED? But I must say, despite the common trope of the bride surrounded by a new family who are not what they seem, Nonami's take is unique, especially the ending. And her sense of menace, aided by dispassionate and slowly paced prose, is top-notch. It's a fun, eerie little novel.

In the Woods (Tana French)

Confession: my primary reason for instituting Mystery May was as an excuse to read more Tana French--I'd enjoyed Faithful Place in 2010, and wanted more. So I started at the very beginning, as per Julie Andrews, with the multiple-award-winning In the Woods.

Had not quite realized how her books fit together (the two mentioned above, with The Likeness in between; Broken Harbor comes out in July); they're a series chronologically, all related to the fictitious Dublin Murder Squad, but each has a different first-person narrator. Cool, right? Here, it's Detective Rob Ryan. Born Adam, he's abandoned the name in an effort to shuck the notoriety he earned as a twelve-year-old after his two best friends disappeared from the woods where the three often played, near their suburb of Knocknaree. He was discovered with his shoes dyed black and stiff with blood, parallel tears in the back of his T-shirt--and no memory whatsoever of what had happened. There has been no trace of the others, living or dead, since.

Twenty years later, Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are assigned to a murder in the same woods; twelve-year-old Katy Devlin has been bludgeoned and then carefully laid out an a stone altar at a nearby archaeological dig. Two tiny pieces of forensic evidence--a girl's hair clip and a drop of blood--seem to link it to the old case. Ryan knows he should stay away from this case, for the very same reasons he can't leave it behind. It's a recipe for bad decisions, and he makes an irreparable one.

Tormented detectives are a dime a dozen (or, this being an Irish novel, ten-a-penny, or ooh! Let's go with "bog-standard"). But what sets ItW apart is the depth of character. French is astonishingly adept at writing both Ryan's inner and outer lives: his frustration at not being able to remember the most important day of his life, his tiny, resurfacing memories of the moments he spent with Jamie and Peter, and especially the well-observed dialogue between him and Maddox, the easy rhythms and constant teasing of close friendship.

Loved this book. Can't wait to read the rest.

The Lola Quartet (Emily St. John Mandel)

I read Emily St. John Mandel's third novel, The Lola Quartet, in one go on a February sick day, with big, sweet recent-addition-kitty Benny by my side. I'm almost glad for the cold that'd stomped me flat, as I would have been decidedly irked to put it aside (and the next day, I read Zone One! Best cold ever).

While I cannot remember the context in which I heard Mandel referred to as a "stealth mystery writer," it's the perfect description. Like Margaret Atwood's sci-fi or Joyce Carol Oates's horror, her novels escape the mass-market paperback racks to be shelved in Literary Fiction, but they're structured like white-knuckle thrillers, full of secrets, dangers, and page-turning revelations. (Really, I dare you to stop reading this book after the first short chapter.) They've just got the value-add of first-rate prose and believable, technical-sense-of-pathetic characters.

She's also adept at driving a narrative from multiple, intertwined points of view. In Quartet, these follow the members of the title jazz combo, whose lives diverged after high school graduation but who find themselves coming back together a decade later. It's a chance meeting and a cell-phone photograph that spurs the action. Gavin Sasaki, now a New York City journalist, is shocked to learn he may have a daughter by his then-girlfriend, Anna, who disappeared one night without saying goodbye. And when he thinks about it, maybe he knew she was pregnant--maybe his  younger self just chose to disregard the knowledge. Disturbed by his sin of omission, he's soon torpedoed his career, and crawls back to his Florida hometown during the foreclosure-ridden summer of 2008. There he reconnects in tense and tentative ways with his fellow performers: haunted addict Jack, bitter cop Daniel, and Anna's half-sister, late-shift waitress Sasha. The question of what happened to Anna and her child is answered early on, but the implications play out slowly and suspensefully.

Like the wandering compositions of the music they shared, the Lola Quartet's individual stories alternate in prominence, sometimes sharply apparent, sometimes just serving as background. And the ending--appropriate to the genre--is like a major seventh chord, a partial and unsettling resolution.