It’s a sizzling midwinter for book releases

Midwinter used to be a dead zone for books – the hot titles all wanted to be out in fall to capitalize on the Christmas rush and the beach books would wait to publish in late spring. COVID seems to have changed the timing of all that with February and March having so many new and exciting books that it was difficult to settle on these six.

Deep House

By Thomas King, HarperCollins, 385 pages

The pandemic is over, business is picking up, restaurants are open and our lives can start again. That’s how Thomas King’s fifth crime novel featuring Thumps DreadfulWater starts. In the most recent book, the reluctant deputy sheriff of the prairie town of Chinook was after the serial killer who murdered his partner and his daughter. Now, he’s focusing on his photography and musing on his on-again-off-again (currently, very off) relationship with Claire. The last thing he wants to do is get dragged into anything resembling a murder investigation but his buddy, the sheriff, relies on Thumps’s talents and asks him to look into a strange event – a burnt-out van at a paint factory.

We all know that that van will lead to a body, which will drag Thumps back into the crime-solving world. But as with all King’s books, the plot is the least important aspect of the novel. This book is funny, smart and full of asides that make it a pleasure to read. The secondary and even the fleeting characters are so well developed that we want them to stay. The small-town ambiance, with its focus on the local gossip taking place in the local diner is full of colour and never slides toward twee. We want to visit Chinook, even if we prefer to live in Toronto.

My only cavil with this book, and it’s a minor one, is that it feels rushed. One last tweaking of the manuscript would have cleaned up some overwrites (words to live by from Elmore Leonard: “Cut and rewrite. Cut and rewrite again”) However, to get the book out in the month that Canada starts to reopen from COVID is a masterful stroke. Celebrate by reading!

Notes On An Execution

By Danya Kukafka, William Morrow, 320 page

My first reaction to this book was: “Not another inside tale about a serial killer.” But this killer, Ansel Packer, is already caught, tried, convicted and about to be executed in 12 hours. What Kukafka does is use that timeline to explore the lives of three of the women whose lives were upended by his crimes. In short, this is a psychological suspense novel from a different point of view and Kukafka does it brilliantly.

We meet Ansel full of himself. He wants things. And, as the clock on his life ticks down, we meet his mother, his sister-in-law and the female detective who was once his victim and, later, the cop who caught him. All have their own stories to tell and so we go back into time and meet the Ansel in each of their lives. This is a clever way of telling a backstory that is rich with insights, none of which fill in the cliché profile of the classic serial killer. I found this novel fascinating and, for once, it’s not a page too long. I read it straight through.

The Goodbye Coast

By Joe Ide, Little Brown, 320 page

The subtitle here says it all: A Philip Marlowe Novel. Ide gives novelist Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe a contemporary spin here, taking him from L.A. in the forties to L.A. today. Much has changed and much hasn’t. He also drops Chandler’s voiceover style, which allows us more flexibility of character. He sticks to the classic plotline. A B movie star calls him in to locate her missing teenaged daughter. Then there’s another missing kid to be found. So far, so predictable.

Where Ide departs is by giving Marlowe a father, Emmet, an ex-cop who’s also an alcoholic and not particularly impressed with his offspring’s choice of profession or his sleuthing skills. So we now have Marlowe with father-son issues, which offer a lot of clever repartee that bleeds into the plotline of children and parent conflicts. Meanwhile, the actual plotline drifts and wanders and, eventually, ends abruptly, like a quick thought.

I wanted to like this book. I’m a Philip Marlowe devotee and I love Joe Ide’s IQ series. This book looks and feels like the beginning of a new Marlowe series but, in the end, I was left feeling like the world doesn’t really need a “reinvented” Marlowe. Let Marlowe RIP.

The Appeal

By Janice Hallett, Atria, 418 pages

What does a sophisticated legal appeal have to do with a dying child? That’s just one twist in this astonishing debut by London journalist Janice Hallett, a writer with talent to burn.

The story begins with two lawyers faced with years of briefs, e-mails, texts and messages. They are preparing a brief for an appeal and it’s due in two days. No scrap is too useless and the task is Herculean. The files are the detritus of an unremarkable London theatre company. But then the company’s director, Martin Hayward, learns that his two-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has a rare brain tumour. There is one drug that may offer hope but the cost is astronomical. The troupe’s play continues but it’s subsumed in an appeal to raise funds for Poppy’s treatment. Then someone ends up dead.

That’s all I’m willing to reveal from this terrific plot. All of it emerging from pounds of paper, complete with character development from a most unlikely source and several twists you will not see coming. There is no narrator aside from the documents themselves, a ruse that could have been horrible and, in Hallett’s hands, works a treat. Janice Hallett is a name to remember and a writer to watch.

Edge Of The Grave

By Robbie Morrison, Pan Macmillan, 416 pages

This terrific debut comes to North America with awards already won. Set in Glasgow in 1932, it’s a historical tour de force along with a brilliant plot. Robbie Morrison got his start in graphic novels so it should come as no surprise that this tale is as visual as crime fiction gets.

Glasgow is as hard hit as anywhere in the Dirty Thirties but thanks to the shipbuilding industry, there’s still work. The city is riven by sectarian violence and crime and poverty rubs up against the plutocracy. Enter detective James Dreghorn and his sidekick Archie McDaid. Dreghorn is a burnt out veteran of the Great War. He’s part of a police force that is changing and, under the command of an English chief, inching toward more modern methods of dealing with gangs and violence.

All the background is essential to the story, which really takes off when a solicitor named Charles Geddes is pulled from the River Clyde with his throat sliced from ear to ear. Geddes is also the son-in-law of Sir Iain Lockhart, whose shipbuilding empire has built Glasgow. Lockhart also funded programs that Dreghorn benefitted from. There is history here. Naturally, the case is a big one and everyone including the chief wants results immediately.

Morrison takes his time weaving in the history and unravelling the complex relationships of all the characters and, ultimately, readers will appreciate the slow pace. I liked putting this book down and returning a day later but I didn’t stop reading and I didn’t rush to the end. Robbie Morrison plans a series and Dreghorn is character worthy of one.

The Heretic

By Liam McIlvanney, Europa Editions, 528 pages

The first thing to remember about classic tartan noir, as it’s now being dubbed, is that violence and gore are at the front and all politicians are corrupt to the core. If you can stand the violence, you get a terrific story and, in the case of The Heretic, it’s all worth it. This is Liam McIlvanney’s follow-up to his debut novel, The Quaker, and it proves, definitively, that he’s a writer moving up.

We are in Glasgow in 1975. The city is in a ferment of change. The old Victorian terraces are falling to freeways, jobs are retreating as factories close, new money is coming in and supplanting old habits but the gangs who rule the slums are still in charge. Detective Duncan McCormack has returned to Glasgow after six years with the Metropolitan Police in London. That makes him a stranger to the scene. He’s also a Catholic, which makes him a stranger to his own countrymen and he’s not a Glaswegian. He’s a Gaelic highlander. All this is essential to the plot, which meanders across 500 pages (at least 150 of which could have been trimmed).

The plot is convoluted and good but what’s really on stage here is the time and the place. I have never set foot in Glasgow but I feel, after reading this book, that I could walk the streets of the city. There’s every indication that DI McCormack will return again. I’ll be waiting.

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