Disturbing the Bones by Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers

Published by Melville House on October 22, 2024

Disturbing the Bones is a novel of racial injustice and an unsolved crime combined with a political thriller. The blend is interesting but it doesn’t quite work. The over-the-top plot is too unconvincing to generate suspense while the bland characters lack originality.

The story is set in Cairo, Illinois. Southern Illinois is south of the Mason-Dixon line and closer in spirit to Arkansas than northern Illinois. White business owners abandoned Cairo during the 1960s rather than obeying the law by hiring Black employees and serving Black customers. There isn’t much left of the place today. If the point of Disturbing the Bones is to remind readers of a racist history that racists would like to deny or conveniently forget, the point has merit. Maybe a novel will teach a history lesson that racists don't want their kids to learn in school. Still, a thriller needs to deliver thrills to earn a full recommendation.

The novel’s female protagonist is an archeologist named Mandy Moore. She’s been working in Vietnam (where she acquired an impressive knowledge of botany that turns out to be important for reasons that are too coincidental to be credible). Moore is called back to supervise a dig near Cairo, where plans to build a highway are temporarily halted by the discovery of ancient hunting sites. Moore has been hand selected by retired general Will Alexander, who has been a mentor and unofficial godfather to her. Both grew up in Southern Illinois. Alexander now runs a construction company that has built its wealth on government contracts for the military.

Moore discovers that the site contains the remains of villages from the Early Archaic Period. The dig unearths some human bones. The bones aren’t new, but they are far from prehistoric. Following protocol, she alerts federal officials who conduct DNA tests and identify the bones as those of Florence Jenkins, a Black civil rights reporter who went missing in 1978.

The novel’s male protagonist is Florence’s son. Randall Jenkins is now a Chicago police detective who has a troubled relationship with his adult daughter. Jenkins has always been obsessed with his mother’s disappearance and his obsession only grows when he is notified that his mother’s remains have been discovered in Cairo. The attempt to give Jenkins a personality fails to distinguish Jenkins from all the other fictional cops who give less attention to their family problems than the crime that obsesses them — in this case, a crime committed while Jenkins was still a child. Jenkins seems to hate everyone, including Moore, making him a decidedly unlikable protagonist.

The mystery of Florence’s death often moves to the background of a muddled plot that casts General Alexander as a parody of a melodramatic Bond villain. When he releases attack drones, he says “Go get them, my little darlings.” Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame couldn’t have said it better. Alexander’s goal is to untrack worldwide arms treaty negotiations that would eliminate nuclear weapons after a little snafu in Russia turns yet another Russian city into a radioactive memory.

The authors earn credit for shrouding some supporting characters in mystery. An archeologist named Sandeep might or might not be a terrorist, given that he might or might not be flying drones over a military base, although why anyone believes a terrorist from Canada would be working on an archeological dig in Illinois is never made clear. A woman named Alison Foreman might or might not be a government agent and might or might not be a good guy or a bad guy. A clumsy reveal at the end brings her into better focus.

As an archeologist, Moore is positioned to play Indiana Jones. She must contend with evil people who want to cover up their role in Florence’s death by destroying the dig site and all the recovered artifacts. Given the unlikelihood that any evidence will be discovered that points to the truth, the coverup seems more likely to lead to imprisonment than the initial crime. The motivations of key characters just aren’t rational, even if they are necessary to keep the plot moving. Because it isn’t believable, the plot as a whole fails to build credible suspense, despite intermittent injections of mundane action scenes.

The ending is frankly depressing, although I suppose the authors deserve credit for avoiding an ending that is artificially happy. I’m not sure that substituting an ending that is artificially tragic is better, although the tragic aspect is likely meant to serve as a warning of where the nation might be heading. Really, if reading the news every morning isn’t a sufficient warning, I don’t know that a novel is going to reach you.

The story is marred by pedestrian prose. While I agree with the novel’s political viewpoint — racism is bad, the military-industrial complex is too powerful — there is little in the way of subtlety or nuance in a plot that sacrifices careful development of events and characters in favor of a story that I would expect from a bad made-for-TV movie. While the novel held my attention, it has too many flaws to earn a reservation-free recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2024

Mark Haddon has to be my favorite living writer of short non-genre fiction. The eight stories gathered in this collection are nearly all gems.

Haddon often grounds stories in ancient history or mythology, finding new ways to make them relevant to a modern reader. The longest and — to me — the most interesting story is “The Quiet Limit of the World.” This story follows Tithonus who has been granted eternal life but not eternal youth by Eos. He ages slowly and discovers the curse of immortality; “what might have begun as grounds for envy or congratulations is tipping into something more sinister.” He leaves home because he does not want to endure the guilt of living when he will eventually bury his wives and children. Tithonus fights wars in the ancient world, survives the plague in the Middle Ages, is astonished by the destructive power of the twentieth century. Only Eos keeps him tethered to the world after he can no longer read or hear. The story is sad and touching.

Another favorite, “The Mother’s Story,” is the oddest entry, if only because it contains the sentence “My wife has given birth to a mooncalf.” Haddon explains that the story is “a reworking of the myth of Pasiphaë and her son Asterion, otherwise known as the Minotaur.” The woman must pretend to have been made pregnant by a bull to spare her husband the shame of fathering a repellant child. A scheme to use the child to terrorize (and thus control) the kingdom depends on a simple truth: “There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open.” Followed years later by another truth that explains why people allow themselves to be ruled by leaders who hold power by making them afraid of others: “I sometimes think people get a great deal of unaccountable pleasure from being absolute fools.”

“D.O.G.Z.” retells Ovid’s version of the ancient myth of Actaeon. To punish him for viewing her mysteries as she was frolicking with other naked women in the woods, Diana turns Actaeon into a stag. The scene in which Actaeon is ripped apart by his hunting dogs is fittingly gruesome. The story has barely ended before the narrator begins to dissect it, comparing it to Acusilaus’s version and asking whether the story isn’t really about the dogs before exploring other dogs of literary fame as well as offering a poignant salute to Russian doggy astronauts. This is the only story in which it seemed to me that Haddon lost the plot.

“The Wilderness” is a tense story with the feel of a thriller. A woman is bicycling around the world to avoid coping with the loss of her brother. She has an accident while riding her bike in a remote area. Her rescuer saves her from death but brings her to a fenced-in place where she stumbles upon scientists experimenting with genetic editing. After a time, she wonders whether the scientists are turning her into an animal or whether she has she always been one. A daring escape leads to an encounter with other escaped women who are primed for revenge.

“The Bunker” might be an allegorical story. The protagonist is a nurse who finds herself from time to time transported to a bunker (a repurposed Cold War fallout shelter) in a postapocalyptic world. Is she losing her mind? The answer is unclear, although an exorcist who promises to lead her home apparently leads her to a terrifying new reality.

Also high on the strangeness scale is “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The saint resists all the usual temptations that the devil puts in front of him before abandoning his solitary life to preach, only to realize that the devil is tempting him with a new trap.

“My Old School” is a boarding school story. The protagonist saves himself from bullying by betraying a school chum’s secret. Years later, the protagonist realizes how the betrayal affected the other student’s life.

Haddon explains that the shortest entry, “St. Brides Bay,” is written to accompany Virginia Woolf’s story, “The Mark on the Wall.” I probably should have read Woolf’s story to get more out of this one, which consists of an aging woman’s rambling thoughts as she attends a lesbian wedding. She contemplates progress and her mother and a woman named Lucy with whom she had a three-month fling when same-sex love was forbidden.

Haddon is a gifted storyteller and a prose master. Readers who love a carefully constructed sentence that is driven by original thought are a good audience for Haddon’s short stories.

RECOMMENDED

The Book of George by Kate Greathead

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. by October 8, 2024

Domestic comedies appeal to me more than domestic dramas, if only because I would rather smile than cringe. The Book of George is an appealing blend of comedy and drama, although the emphasis is clearly on comedy.

As the title implies, the book follows a man named George. The story starts when George is 12 and ends when he’s 38. In George, Kate Greathead created a harmless and hapless character, one who is sullen, inconsiderate, and self-indulgent, an ideal protagonist for a domestic comedy. He isn’t as outrageous as Ignatius J. Reilly, but he shares some of that iconic character’s laziness, indifference to appearance, and ill-timed farting.

Like Ignatius, George lives at home with his mother, although only for parts of the story. George’s mother Ellen kicked his father Denis out of their Manhattan home when George was fourteen (Denis was dipping into Ellen’s trust fund to feed his shopping addiction). George does not see him often because, like most things, paternal visits feed the anxiety and depression that will characterize George’s life.

George attends college in Connecticut. He writes poems in a half-hearted effort to find an identity, but (despite having one published in a campus literary journal) abandons writing after concluding that’s he’s aping the style of David Berman. At a party to celebrate his poem’s publication, he realizes that “his own cohort’s lack of a group identity suddenly seemed pathetic. What did George and his friends have in common beyond being lumped together in the same dorm when they were eighteen?”

Random chance can produce friendships as strong as any other, but it doesn’t occur to George that he would need to develop a passion for something and join with people who share that passion if he wants to share a group identity. George’s search for an identity, as an individual or part of a cohort, becomes the novel’s continuing theme.

When a mysterious mass moves over his head one night, George views it as a celestial sign and decides to major in philosophy. He’s drawn to Schopenhauer, whose mother regarded him as “irritating and unbearable” despite his good heart. George is much the same. Perhaps for that reason, he believes that Schopenhauer wasn’t the “deeply cynical pessimist” that history has judged him to be. George recognizes his own cynical pessimism and sometimes makes an effort to change, but he also feels a need to be true to himself, even if his self isn’t someone he likes.

Having a degree in philosophy qualifies George to get a job as a waiter. He isn’t competent but he meets a waitress named Jenny who plans to attend law school. While they are dating, George begins working for his uncle in the financial industry, a brief career that gives George further opportunity to sit in judgment of the rest of the human race. The other traders focus on getting rich during the week and partying on weekends. George concludes (perhaps wisely) that they are not his people, but what group of people would claim Geoge as one of their own?

George maintains and on-and-off relationship with Jenny for more than a decade after college. More than once they break up and reunite. George’s inability to commit remains a barrier to a lasting relationship. In Jenny’s view, George’s greatest character flaw is “his absentminded disregard for others, his resistance to doing anything that posed the slightest inconvenience to him.”

When she eviscerates George’s character, Jenny hopes he will defend himself, but he tells her she’s right and that she deserves better. That George won’t stand up for himself makes him even less appealing to women, a fact that will be apparent to the reader even if George remains indifferent to how others perceive him.

The turning point in their relationship occurs when George and Jenny go on a road trip. They spend some unplanned weeks with a fellow named Dizart who lived with George’s parents for a time during his childhood and may have been having an affair with his mother. Dizart encourages George to take up writing. When George heeds his advice, the reader wonders whether he has finally found a passion that will motivate him to get out of bed (as opposed to antidepressants that don’t change his mood but rob him of erections).

George believes Jenny takes his depression personally, but there are many other aspects of George’s personality that trouble Jenny. She scolds him for poking holes in people rather than building them up. “It makes you feel better about yourself,” she tells him. “George couldn’t dispute this. He did not want to be such a person.” Yet change doesn’t come easily. It isn’t clear whether George will be a better person by the novel’s end.

None of this seems funny, but Greathead finds humor in George’s droll reactions to the world he inhabits. He attends a pre-wedding celebration and considers “this idiotic aspect of American culture: the aggressively self-celebratory nature of marking ordinary milestones as if they were some kind of hard-won victory or unique life accomplishment.” He returns to live with his mother, where he is soon joined by a pregnant sister who can’t handle her husband’s presence in her home. Asked to watch over a woman’s baby for a short time, George finds after a trip to the hospital that he is ill-equipped for parenting.

George stumbles through life, finding and quitting jobs but never finding one he likes. His best moment comes when he is cast in a Superbowl commercial that takes advantage of his grumpy face. If failed relationships and family deaths are excluded, his worst moment comes when he is bombarded with judgmental emails from strangers who mistake him for his namesake uncle, an English professor who lost his job due to relatively minor incidents of sexual harassment. Judging and condemning strangers is a widespread hobby in the age of the internet.

The novel ends as postmodern domestic novels do, abandoning their characters mid-life without resolving their issues. The novel’s interest lies in its characterization of George of a man without direction who suffers from deficient introspection. Notwithstanding George’s degree in philosophy, he seems uninterested in examining his life and finding ways to change. He has a fairly easy life but can’t appreciate his good fortune. He doesn’t realize that women regard him as handsome, that he might be able to exploit the acting gig he lucked into, or that he has benefitted from at least modest privilege associated with white New Yorkers who get carried through life by friends and family members.

Making fun of people might be mean, but readers can take a guilty pleasure in laughing at George as he drifts from one circumstance to another. George might be right when he says that he doesn’t deserve Jenny, a woman who is light years more advanced in the art of social interaction. Yet George is far from evil. Like Schopenhauer, he has a kind heart even if his attitude is insufferable. When George commits an unexpected act of kindness near the novel’s end, it does not signal a change but a moment in which George reveals a part of himself that he usually conceals. George’s character traits make him an interesting and sympathetic person, one whose life is worth a visit by readers who are looking for a chuckle.

RECOMMENDED

Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Published by ‎ Pantheon on October 15, 2024

The quality of being ordinary might seem like a curse to ordinary people. We are often told that none of us are ordinary, that everyone is special. When a Sunday school student tells Brock Hobson that he’s special, not ordinary at all, he rejects the premise. He knows he has no superpower. He thinks of himself as just one of God’s creatures, a boring one at that. Blood Test suggests that living an ordinary life with decency, charity, and forgiveness might be a superpower that anyone can develop.

Brock sells insurance in a small Ohio city. He has teenage kids — a son and a daughter — with his ex-wife Cheryl. His wife left him for Burt because Burt, while a complete idiot, is unpredictable (meaning impulsive), while Brock is “predictable as a clock.” Burt is also good looking and great in bed, qualities that offset his idiocy in Cheryl’s mind.

Burt belongs to a cult that believes particles in plastic bottles have “wormed their way into your bloodstream and your brain. The plastic promotes indifference and apathy and online shopping.” I knew there was an explanation!

The kids spend most of their time with Brock, even when they’re supposed to be with their mother. Burt belittles Brock’s son Joe because Joe is gay. Cheryl assures Joe that she loves him “even though you’re queer.” Brock’s daughter Lena is in love with her boyfriend and plans an idyllic lifetime with him, beginning by attending the same college. But when does the future ever follow a teenager’s plan?

Brock is a decent, conventionally religious midwestern guy. He feels sorry for the dead animal when he sees roadkill and imagines their last frightened moments of life, “though my grief is not excessive.” Brock is dating a woman he calls Trey. Her superpower is standing very still until deer and birds will take food from her hand. They make a good couple.

The novel’s amusing plot follows Brock’s response to a shady sales pitch for a product that can, by testing his blood and analyzing his answers to bizarre questions, predict his future. Brock would like to know whether he will do anything interesting with his life, so he pays the fee and takes the tests. The company predicts that he is “about to embark on a major crime wave. It’s all down on paper. I wish you luck and Godspeed.” He later learns that the crime spree will include a murder. Fortunately, the shady company can sell him insurance that will pay for his legal defense. The company even sells him the gun he will use to commit the crime.

It occurs to Brock that he now has complete freedom, including a license to kill. If bad acts are destined, we can hardly be blamed for committing them. “I can go wild,” Brock thinks. “I have a perfect alibi. The mainframe has said so.”

Apart from struggling with the ramifications of losing free will, Brock needs to decide how to address his son’s dark writings and drawings, the kind of things that parents should see as red flags. An apparent lunatic gives Brock some simple advice for dealing with his son: “Ask him what he wants.”

It’s probably not a spoiler to say that Brock (who occasionally speaks directly to the reader) reveals that the book isn’t about a blood test at all, but is actually a love story. I’m not sure I see it that way, although it might be a bunch of love stories, a romcom with an ensemble cast. Brock’s daughter is in love or in lust with her boyfriend. Brock’s love for Cheryl still motivates him to help her despite his betrayal. Cheryl’s love for Burt — even after Burt suffers a disability for which he blames Brock — is inexplicable. Brock’s love for Trey and for his son are integral parts of the story.

Brock might be predictable, but the plot is not. It leads to a duel, but only after Brock nearly shoots someone by accident. Gun violence is a problem in society that only becomes larger when someone as inept as Brock is armed. One of the novel’s lessons is that ordinary people don’t need guns.

Another lesson — at least in Brock’s view — is that being handsome makes life too easy. For losers like Burt, “having any woman you want degrades your character. The whole idea of monogamy stops making sense.” No sensible woman would want Burt for anything but his body. “Except for the gym and the hunting, Burt is lazy and empty-headed. He’s quite at home here in America, if I could generalize for a moment.”

There are also lessons in tolerance and forgiveness, on top of the question of free will. Fortunately, the lessons blend nicely with the plot’s goofiness. They don’t come across as lectures and never get in the way of the genuine laughs that the story inspires.

RECOMMENDED

The President's Lawyer by Lawrence Robbins

Published by ‎ Atria Books on October 8, 2024

The male characters in The President’s Lawyer have trouble keeping it in their pants while the female characters have trouble keeping their pants on. Well, the story is set in D.C. and most of the characters are politicians or lawyers, so that’s believable.

The novel is set in a time similar to ours, except D.C. is a state. Two elections ago, Jack Cutler defeated President Smith, who promptly founded a far-right TV network and began a campaign to convince voters that Cutler stole the election. Smith’s network blamed Cutler after a murder was committed by a migrant who Cutler pardoned for a minor drug conviction. Having been Willy Hortoned, Cutler was soundly defeated in the next election.

During his last year in office, Cutler had an affair with Amanda Harper, a White House lawyer who handled subpoenas directed at the Executive Branch. When Amanda’s body is found in a park, Cutler is accused of killing her. The accusation is supported by the presence of his DNA and fingerprints on her clothing. Amanda’s body had rope burns on her wrists, a fact that Cutler attributes to rough but consensual sex. It turns out that Cutler has had rough sex but consensual sex with other women, including his wife Jess.

Cutler wants his old friend Rob Jacobson to defend him. Rob has a rich sexual history of his own, a history that includes shagging Jess before she married Cutler and doing the same with Amanda before she dumped him for Jack. It is foolish for Rob to even consider representing Cutler given his personal connections to the victim, to Cutler, and to Cutler’s wife (who might be a suspect in the murder of his extramarital lover, after all), but the chance to represent a former president in a murder case is too tempting to resist. Besides, Cutler probably pays his legal bills, unlike some former presidents. Cutler’s trial constitutes the bulk of the plot.

Most of the novel’s characterization is devoted to Rob. He was an abused child. Perhaps for that reason, he manifests twitches and facial tics when he’s stressed. He also blames himself for a childhood friend’s drowning when she fell through thin ice. Rob revisits his past when his violent brother (very much an anti-Culter voter) shows up during the trial after making himself unreachable for years. Cutler’s family has a history of mental illness that extends to his own schizophrenic son, who may have had a grudge against Amanda for (in his view) breaking up his parents’ marriage. In the logic of the plot, any of these might be the true killer, assuming that Cutler isn't.

Legal thrillers depend on engaging trials and on characters who teach readers the “inside baseball” of criminal defense. Those are the strengths of Lawrence Robbins’ novel. A reader might quibble that experienced prosecutors would understand the theory that mitochondrial DNA can be recovered from a hair that doesn’t have a follicle, but the prosecutors in the story seem blindsided by a defense expert’s testimony to that effect. A reader might wonder why prosecutors failed to notice that a critical note on a key exhibit was written in a different color ink than the other notes on the same document. Prosecutors blunder on occasion, but these blunders only occurred because they were needed to advance the plot. In most other respects, the story is credible.

The reveal — the killer’s unmasking — brings a final twist to the story. I award points for its surprising nature and deduct nearly the same number of points for its unconvincing nature. Yet Robbins plays fair by planting subtle clues that might predict the ending. Although I was mildly disappointed with the reveal, The President’s Lawyer excels at the best part of any legal thriller: balancing drama and realism when crafting cross-examinations worthy of Perry Mason.

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