The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe

Published by Orbit on ‎ June 3, 2025

The protagonists of The Two Lies of Faven Sythe are strong women. Whether they are entirely human is a separate question.

Bitter Amandine sounds like the name of an herb, but it is actually the name of a pirate. Bitter’s ship, Marquette, is unlike most other vessels for reasons that are only revealed late in the story. Like other spacefaring ships, it is powered by a lightdrive. A breach in the drive’s shielding can lead to lightsickness, a condition that makes the mind fuzzy and might lead to delusional thought.

The other protagonist is a navigator, Faven Sythe. Navigators are able to map the pathways through space that make interstellar travel possible. Every time they use that power, they add new scales to their body and shorten their lives. Sixteen starpaths are available for everyone’s use, but other starpaths must be custom ordered from navigators at significant expense.

The scales that grow on navigators are known as cryst, as is the glasslike shielding that surrounds drives. Hulls are also plated with cryst to protect people in a ship from radiation. The “ancient species” known as the cryst left behind technology that enables navigators to map starpaths. Navigators appear to be the descendants of humans who used that technology to merge with the ancient cryst.

When the cryst want to reproduce, they meditate. Sometimes they are rewarded with a growth beneath their skin that is “plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman.” Reproduction doesn’t seem to be happening in recent years, one of several mysteries that will be resolved by the novel’s end.

Shortly before they are entirely covered in scale, navigators pose themselves in the posture they will assume for eternity. As the story begins, Faven’s mother has become fully crystalized and deposited in a location where she will have a nice view, like a statue in a park.

As she is coping with her mother’s crystallization, Faven learns that her mentor, Ulana Valset, has been reassigned to a distant space station. Navigators (and by extension, space travel) are controlled by the Choir of Stars, sort of a council of elder navigators. Ulana is one of several navigators who have recently been sent to inconvenient locations, never to be seen again.

After engaging in a clandestine and forbidden investigation, Faven learns that Ulana’s starpath actually took her to the Clutch, a “dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star” that has become “the graveyard of their predecessors.” The Clutch is also the location of a “derelict ship called the Black Celeste.”

Faven wants to follow Ulana in the hope of discovering the truth underlying her fictitious reassignment. To that end, she engages with a pirate named Tagert Red without realizing that he plans to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Bitter foils that plan but can’t prevent the Choir and its army of enforcers (known as Blades) from capturing her and taking her to the Clutch.

The space opera plot follows Bitter and her crew through a series of action scenes as they attempt to reclaim possession of Faven and learn why navigators are disappearing in the Clutch. Their discoveries lead them to a new understanding of the ancient cryst and the true nature of navigators. Bitter also discovers the true nature of the Marquette and its crew.

While navigators don’t reproduce sexually, their sexual desire becomes apparent when Bitter and Faven develop the hots for each other. Their personalities in other respects are developed in as much detail as space opera requires. Bitter doesn’t say “arrr” or wear an eyepatch, but she has the swashbuckling fearlessness a reader would expect of a pirate, as well as a moral sense and willingness to make sacrifices that traditional pirates lack. Her dialog suggests that pirates of the future have adopted the grammar of high school dropouts from the 1950s, although Bitter seems to be brighter than her crew. Faven has a bit less personality but is nevertheless a sympathetic character.

Science fiction writers often put all their energy into worldbuilding and pay insufficient attention to plot construction. Megan O’Keefe creates an interesting universe while building an intriguing mystery about the Clutch and the Choir of Stars. In the grand tradition of science fiction, the mystery holds a threat to the continued existence of humanity, the kind of threat that only a plucky pirate and her scaley lover can prevent. The story moves quickly and gives the reader a fun ride on its way to a resolution that, if a little too neat, is nevertheless satisfying.

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Don't Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 3, 2025

James Lee Burke earned a laminated spot on my list of top three crime fiction authors with his Robicheaux novels. He blends elements of westerns and crime thrillers in his Holland family novels. I’ve enjoyed every Burke novel I’ve read, although Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie — a Holland family novel that focuses on Bessie Holland when she was in her early teens — is a notch below my favorites.

Bessie lives in Texas with her father, Hackberry Holland. Most of the story takes place in 1916, when Bessie is fifteen. Hackberry is a former Texas Ranger. Bessie tells us that “Mama used to say he was the best and bravest man on the Rio Grande, if only he didn’t drink.” When he isn’t drinking, gambling, or working his ranch, Hackberry is in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa, who has been leading his revolutionary army in attacks across the US border, much to the delight of Germany.

Soon after the story opens, Jubal Fowler peeps at Bessie Holland “through the slats of the schoolyard outhouse.” When Bessie’s brother Cody confronts him, Jubal uses a slingshot to shoot a marble into Cody’s eye. Cody will eventually leave to find a life in New York. Middle chapters of the novel follow Bessie to New York, where she has adventures in the city’s slums before returning to her father in Texas.

When Hackberry  confronts Winthrop Fowler, Jubal’s father, about the marble incident, Bessie reacts to a perceived threat against her father in a way that leaves Winthrop disabled. Only a fib told by a man named Mr. Slick saves Bessie from prison.

Hackberry has a friend named Bertha Lafleur, whose life he saved when he was a Ranger. Bertha is now a madam who manages a brothel. Bessie is a Baptist who condemns Bertha and doesn’t believe her father should associate with her. That’s probably true, not because Bertha manages prostitutes but because she is willing to assist a heroin dealer in a way that betrays her friendship with Hackberry.

Bessie is more than a bit judgmental and something of a hypocrite, given the number of times she threatens to kill characters, all the while telling them not to swear in her presence. She’s also intolerably bossy, which I suppose captures the spirit of fifteen-year-old girls throughout history.

Bessie has few friends. One is Mr. Slick, although Bessie believes him to be a spirit, notwithstanding his eagerness to join her for meals whenever she invites him. Thriller authors can’t seem to resist the opportunity to introduce the supernatural into their fiction. Mr. Slick seemed like a pointless character to me.

Jubal Fowler is not exactly Bessie’s friend, although she finds herself attracted to him. While the Holland and Fowler families are in something of a feud, the attraction seems to be mutual when Fowler shields Bessie from being raped. He does nothing to prevent the rape of Bessie’s friend and English teacher, Ida Banks, in Bessie’s presence.

The supernatural also intrudes in the form of a little girl who was raped and killed but makes herself visible to Bessie when her grave is disturbed by oil drilling. Bessie seems to be living the little girl’s life, although we know from the start that Bessie is narrating this story many years after it occurred and thus is not killed like the little girl. Bessie will nevertheless experience another incident of sexual violence before the story ends. The novel’s rape scenes are not graphic but sensitive readers might find them disturbing.

During Hackberry’s absence, Bessie makes a deal with an oil company to allow drilling on the Holland ranch in an effort to save the family home from her father’s gambling debts. Bessie’s alliance with an oil company employee gives her another man to set her raging hormones afire, although her Baptist morals (and perhaps her own victimization) cool her desire. The oil man is too honorable to be working in the oil industry, which naturally does it best to cheat the Hollands as it goes about its business of decimating the Texas landscape. “There was a stench in the air like rotten eggs, a monotonous clanking of oil derricks, and a sky dark with soot, the fields lit with thousands of tiny tin flames that resembled rose petals.”

As is always true of a Burke novel, the story moves quickly. Uneventful scenes are punctuated with moments that generate tension. As is always true of a Holland novel, the story is filled with historical insights. I wasn’t as taken with the plot, or with Bessie as a protagonist, as I have been with the stories and characters in other Holland novels, but Burke is one of the best prose stylists in American crime fiction. I enjoyed the novel more for the pleasure of Burke’s language than for the story he tells, despite its regular moments of excitement and dread.

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Lay Your Armor Down by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 27, 2025

Lay Your Armor Down is a spooky story about three people who have survived hard lives and a little girl whose survival skills are even stronger. The story is as much about lives gone wrong as it is about a crime gone wrong.

The novel begins with an elderly woman lost to dementia who fills a shopping bag with cash she has been hiding and wanders into the woods, apparently guided by an inner sight. The woman’s name is Wanetah. The only person who ever checks on Wanetah is a woman named Cara. While Cara was the victim of abuse in an incident that taught her the risk of trusting people we don’t know well, she has not allowed her history to darken her heart.

Burdean and Keal make a living doing dirty deeds for anyone who will pay. They usually deliver duffels filled with contraband or rough up someone who owes a debt, but Burdean has been hired to retrieve something from the basement of a church. Burdean enlists Keal’s help. Burdean doesn’t know what they will find but he was told he’ll know it when he sees it.

The men delay the job when they notice a light in the church. They wait in the nearby woods to consider their options when Wanetah stumbles upon them. They relieve Wanetah of her cash before returning to their motel room.

Keal feels guilty about leaving Wanetah alone in the woods. He pictures her as prey for a wolf he saw. Keal returns without Burdean’s knowledge and, not knowing where to look for her, decides to check out the church again.

Outside the church, Keal finds a car riddled with bullet holes. He sees dead bodies inside and outside of the car. Venturing into the basement, he finds more dead bodies as well as Wanetah and a little girl. Keal finds Wanetah’s address on an envelope in her bag and takes her home, leaving her with his share of the cash he stole from her, before returning to the motel with the little girl.

The plot concerns the efforts of Keal, Burdean, and Cara to decide what to do about the little girl. She’ll only speak to Cara and doesn’t know why the bad guys want her, although Cara comes to understand that the bad guys (who may have watched too many X-Men movies) believe she has a superpower (or perhaps a supernatural power). Whether that’s true remains ambiguous throughout the novel. As is often true, evidence to support an unlikely theory may simply be a matter of coincidence.

Conflict arises between Burdean and Keal about whether they should sell the girl to the man who hired them. Burdean isn’t much of a thinker and few of his thoughts are dedicated to making moral choices. Burdean believes he is good at only three things — drinking, fighting, and fucking — and has little interest in expanding his horizons.

Keal, on the other hand, has spent his life being haunted by nightmares. He spent much of his life avoiding sleep, but the nightmares returned — dreams of storms and lightning — after meeting Cara and the girl. Whether his bad dreams are coming true is again ambiguous.

Cara is something like Keal in that, like Wanetah, she senses a reality that most people cannot perceive. Cara is also given to speeches that sound more like the product a literary crime fiction writer than the sort of prose a real person raised in unfortunate circumstances would employ — although, to be fair, eloquence is sometimes heard in unlikely voices.

Keal’s defining moment comes when he chooses his future, a choice that forces him to confront his role in the lives of Cara and the girl. “He closed his eyes and he could see the three of them hundreds of miles away in a stopsign town where little moved and little was questioned and he could sense a time when he would end up loving one or both of them and that was the last fucking thing he wanted.”

The story’s violent moments contribute to its unyielding tension as the plot advances. The quasi-supernatural elements didn’t work for me and too many questions (primarily about the dead bad guys and what the surviving bad guy intends to do with the child) are left unanswered, but the quality of Michael Farris Smith’s prose and his strong characterizations counterbalance an unconvincing plot. The ending is satisfying even if it fails to offer complete closure.

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The Doorman by Chris Pavone

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on May 20, 2025

The Doorman is a crime novel in the sense that Colson Whitehead’s recent novels have been crime novels; that is, they use crime to give the story a structure while the real story is about New York City and the division between working class and the wealthy, the clusters of racial groups and ethnicities competing for a slice of the pie. The novels differ in that race and its place in New York City’s history is the dominant theme of Whitehead’s work, while Chris Pavone uses it to provide atmosphere to a crime story.

Most of the story takes place at the Bohemian, an exclusive cooperative building where even a two-bedroom unit on a lower floor sells for millions. Key characters either live or work in the building. Julian Sonnenberg is an art dealer who earned modest wealth during the Obama years by opening a gallery with a Black partner that specialized in artists who were not straight white males. Tides eventually shifted, as tides must, and Julian is having money trouble. He’s undergoing an IRS audit, sold a Rothko of questionable origin to one of the Bohemian’s wealthiest residents, and is feeling his mortality as he prepares for surgery to correct a heart condition.

Chicky Diaz is a doorman at the Bohemian. He also has money problems, mostly medical debt related to unsuccessful treatment to save his wife from cancer. Unrelated to his work, Chicky gets into an altercation with a serious thug who now has leverage over Chicky. That leverage may induce Chicky to facilitate a crime.

Emily Longworth lives in a double-sized unit on the eleventh floor. Most of the school moms in Emily’s social group work for charities or have “careers” as feng shui consultants or interior designers. Emily uses her middle name (Grace) to hide from her friends when she volunteers at a soup kitchen but spends $4 million a year managing her household. Emily is married to Whitaker, whose wealth derives from selling body armor to militaries and terrorists alike. Emily is having an affair and would like a divorce but is stuck with a prenup that would leave her a bit less than a million dollars a year, an amount insufficient to keep her in the world of high society.

Whit has a habit of putting a hand around Emily’s neck during sex. He also pays prostitutes to disguise themselves as Emily so he can choke them more forcefully. In the view of the doorman, who encounters one of Whit’s abused prostitute during his part-time job at a hotel, Whit is rehearsing his wife’s murder. Apart from the unsavory way in which Whit built his wealth, decent readers will dislike Whit for his unrepentant racism and sexism. Emily is rather fed up with one of Whit’s business associates, a disgusting guy who is even more brazenly racist than Whit.

In the background are two police shootings of young Black men. Protestors are swarming the city. They’re also protesting outside Whitaker’s company after news “leaks” about its sales of body armor to countries that support terrorism. The identity of the leaker will probably come as a surprise to most readers.

More than three-quarters of the novel sets the stage for the crime that occurs near the novel’s end. The reader might guess what that crime will be, but the guess will likely be wrong, thanks to Pavone’s skillful misdirection. In a series of frenzied but controlled scenes, the way the crime unfolds comes as a genuine surprise (at least it did to me). That makes The Doorman one of the smartest crime novels I’ve read this year.

Underlying themes of race and class keep the reader engaged as they wait for the criminal climax. Various points of view are represented along the right-left spectrum. The wealth of the Bohemian’s residents contrasts with the working class people who serve them, both in the building and elsewhere in New York City. Chicky frequently comments upon ethnic changes in the city. His first superintendent was Irish, as were all the supers Chicky knew when he started working. The superintendent hired Chicky but didn’t want him to look “ethnic,” prompting Chicky to comment to himself “as if Irish wasn’t an ethnicity.” The super’s successors were Eastern Europeans. “But they were also one white guy after another. Different types of white guys but still.” The building’s residents are almost entirely white and its governing board (on which Julian sits) intends to keep it that way, notwithstanding Julian’s warnings about legal liability.

The building’s staff are now Hispanic (Chicky doesn’t have much use for the term Latinx) thanks to Chicky, who alerted friends to job openings. Chicky notes that other buildings fill their staff with other ethnicities in the same way, word of mouth steering neighborhoods of manual workers into available jobs.

The mix of NYC’s people and criminals (from white collar to violent) add flavor to the novel and give the reader something to chew on while waiting for the crime to occur. It’s a long wait but the story is so entertaining that I wouldn’t expect most readers to grow impatient. And when the crime finally arrives, the story becomes tense as characters the reader will probably like are placed at risk. Some are unexpectedly heroic, others are true to character, and one will behave in a way that few readers will expect. The shock value of the final pages, combined with the engaging look at urban life that precedes them, makes The Doorman an essential read for fans of crime novels who are looking for a break from stories of tough guys enforcing morality with their fists.

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The Palace of Saints and Sinners by Ammar Merchant

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 20, 2025

Tough guy thrillers are too often clones of Reacher novels. Some recent Reacher novels have been clones of earlier Reacher novels. Fortunately, a few tough guy novelists have managed to bring something fresh to the genre. Newcomer Ammar Merchant managed that feat with The Palace of Saints and Sinners.

While the novel’s plot is familiar, Irfan Mirza differs from other thriller tough guys. He’s the first fictional Muslim tough guy I can recall encountering. Beyond that, he isn’t an American or a Western European. He spent his early childhood “as an urchin in Karachi, begging, stealing, fighting, and hustling to survive.” Then he was taken to Turkey, where a general trained children for his private army. The concept of children raised to be fighters has been done before, but the setting makes it seem new.

Mirza is now a mercenary who solves problems with brute force because he’s not a heavy thinker. His approach to a problem is to charge at it and smash it with his shoulder. He manages to knock down a wall using that tactic. I appreciate Amar Merchant’s decision to make Mirza a tough guy who makes no pretense of being anything else. Mirza’s simplicity is appealing.

Mirza sometimes teams with a talented thief named Omen Ferris. Omen would like to sleep with Mirza and he shares that desire, but Mirza’s divorce has not been finalized and he has a thing about keeping his oaths.

Mirza is still in touch with some of the other weaponized orphans, thanks to the efforts of Finn Thompson, who treats them as siblings and tries to keep track of them. One of the orphans, Renata Bardales, is the closest thing to a sister that Mirza has. Ren is engaged to a prince from Aldatan whose father is a cousin of the country’s king.

Mirza begins the novel by taking revenge on terrorists in Malaysia who killed a travel vlogger, having been hired for that task by the vlogger’s father. After establishing Mirza’s tough guy bona fides, Merchant sends Mirza on the kind of fast-action plot that makes a well-crafted tough guy novel enjoyable.

Ren’s fiancé and his father have made an enemy of the king by criticizing his undemocratic tendencies. The king pretends he has reformed Aldatan to encourage investment from western nations, but he permits no dissent while allowing powerless citizens of the country to exercise little personal freedom. Merchant situated the fictional country of Aldatan to the north of Yemen.

The prince, his father, and Ren are being held in a secret prison to which the king makes his enemies disappear. The prison is in a castle that is managed by the head of a private security company who has been instructed to extract confessions that can be used to discredit the prince and his father.

When Finn tells Mirza of Ren’s predicament, he and Omen travel to Aldatan. While the reader suspects that Mirza might try to knock down the prison castle by charging into it, they embark on a traditional thriller assault. Finn runs into some trouble that sidelines him (he needs to be hidden and tended by nuns who mend his wounds), so Mirza and Omen carry the load. Pitting a lightly armed tough guy and a thief against thirty heavily armed security guards might seem like poor odds, but modern thriller writers like to turn tough guys into unkillable superheroes who can wipe out bad guys a dozen at a time.

Merchant sprinkles human interest into the story through Mirza’s relationship with his daughter. She isn’t a character in the novel, but Mirza needs to decide whether he’s doing the right thing by calling her every time he starts a mission to let her know that it might be his last. He does that because his father promised to return after walking away while carrying a suitcase but never did. Mirza thinks it’s more honest to let his daughter know that he might not return, but as others tell him, he’s only freaking his daughter out with his calls. That plot thread leads to a touching moment when he calls his daughter for what he assumes will be the last time after sustaining one of the many wounds he absorbs during the novel.

The novel has more graphic violence than most. Women are raped but Merchant spares the reader a description of those assaults. Readers who are sensitive to torture scenes might want to give The Palace of Sinners and Saints a pass. I recommend it to other thriller fans because Merchant’s prose is energetic, Mirza is an appealing tough guy protagonist, and the fast-moving plot is so fun that the reader has little reason to consider its improbability.

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