The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 7, 2024

Like most crime novels, The Return of Ellie Black fails to live up to its marketing hype. This is nevertheless the kind of novel that certain readers seem to crave. It is the story of a serial kidnapper of teenage (or younger) girls. The villain brutalizes, brainwashes, rapes, and eventually kills his victims — apart from Ellie Black. Serial kidnappers, like serial killers, are far more prevalent in the world of crime fiction than they are in the real world, but the market for child snatching stories never seems to be saturated.

Michael and David apparently work together to kidnap teenage girls (and at least one preteen). Assisted by a woman named Serenity, they hold the girls in a buried bus for two weeks to break down their sense of identity. Some of the girls apparently starve to death before they forget who they are. The men give the survivors names like Faith and Hope. They hold the girls captive, using them as their sex slaves with the apparent aim to make them pregnant.

The story departs from the formula when a kidnap victim is found alive. Ellie Black has been missing for two years. She turns up in the woods in a shattered emotional state. Ellie is not cooperative with the police, a fact that the police attribute to her unwillingness to revisit her trauma. Yet there may be another cause of her reticence, which proves to be the only interesting aspect of a novel that is otherwise formulaic.

Most of the story is told in the third person as it follows Detective Chelsey Calhoun and her investigation of Ellie’s kidnapping. An article of clothing Ellie is wearing links her to a couple of other missing females. A few scattered chapters are told in the first person as Ellie recalls her ordeal.

Emiko Jean gives us the usual theme of a police detective who thinks “If only these [missing] girls could talk” and imagines them whispering “Find us, please.” Some readers seem to have an appetite for obvious efforts to manipulate their sympathies. Sometimes the mention of the word “victim” is enough to draw them into the story.

Fictional female detectives like Calhoun — dedicated to victims, unable to sleep because they are haunted by the victims’ voices, who “will do anything to save a life” — are ubiquitous in crime fiction. They are usually one dimensional. “Just think of the victims” becomes a substitute for a writer’s inability to think of interesting characters. Jean is no exception in that flawed approach to crime fiction writing. I usually avoid stories of that nature but the marketing hype made me think this one might be different. It isn’t.

Calhoun’s insecurity, followed by her eventual triumph, is another part of the formula. Also formulaic is Calhoun’s motivation for becoming a cop — a missing and murdered sister — and Calhoun’s self-recrimination because she didn’t prevent her sister from dating the wrong guy. Have you heard this story before? If you read enough crime fiction, you’ve encountered it over and over.

Another tired cliché of thriller writing is Calhoun’s boss, who takes credit for her successes and blames her for failures that weren’t entirely her fault. And, of course, Calhoun makes predictable decisions to defy authority and do what’s necessary because she just cares so much about victims. Victims are more important than her job or her relationships or anything else because victims.

Ellie has a dark secret that makes her feel guilty. It can’t be too dark because the reader is meant to sympathize with Ellie, even when she does something awful. The true reason for Ellie’s failure to cooperate with the investigation ties into the secret. It isn’t at all credible, but it is at least a departure from the formula.

Jean’s prose style is acceptable and she tells the story with good pace. The reveal of a kidnapper’s true identity is standard thriller fare — contrived and unsurprising. The villains are caricatures of evil men with mommy issues. The story’s positive qualities permit a tepid recommendation, but its familiarity prevents me from recommending it to anyone who doesn’t crave stories that feature detectives who can’t stop talking about how much they care about victims.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on May 7, 2024

I’m not always a fan of domestic drama, but I’m a huge fan of Colm Tóibín. He writes about couples in crisis with honesty rather than melodrama. Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn, a continuation of that story of relationship uncertainty in the context of cultural clashes.

Readers of Brooklyn (or viewers of the movie) will recall that Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland to America, found a job, endured homesickness, met and married a young Italian man named Tony who was working as a plumber, returned to Ireland to attend her sister’s funeral, and found herself torn between remaining in Ireland (where both familiarity and a young Irishman named Jim Farrell appealed to her) and returning to her husband in Brooklyn. She decides in favor of her marriage, prompted in part by local gossip that makes it impossible to pretend she is single.

Twenty years later, Jim owns a pub in Enniscorthy. He is having a clandestine dalliance with Nancy Sheridan, a widow who owns a nearby chip shop. He has finally worked his way around to proposing, more or less, when Eilis comes back to visit her mother. Notwithstanding his relationship with Nancy, Jim cannot help revisiting the sense of loss he felt when Eilis left for America twenty years earlier.

During those twenty years, Tony and Eilis accomplished Tony’s dream of moving to Long Island. They built a home that was surrounded by the homes of Tony’s siblings and parents. Tony and Eilis had two kids and apparently had a steady marriage until it was rocked by news that Tony made a customer pregnant while fixing her leaking pipes. The customer’s husband wants nothing to do with Tony’s baby and threatens to leave it on Eilis’ doorstep after it is born. Eilis also wants nothing to do with the baby. She refuses to raise it and refuses to go along with Tony’s mother’s plan to raise the child.

After giving Tony an ultimatum, Eilis returns to Ireland to visit her aging mother, who has become no less intolerable during Eilis’ absence. She plans to have her children join her for her mother’s birthday celebration.

Eilis will, of course, encounter Jim. The novel’s drama comes from the choices Eilis must make — return to America and Tony, stay in Ireland with Jim, or return to America with Jim. Jim hasn’t stopped thinking about Eilis since she returned to America, but would he abandon his marriage plans with Nancy to be with Eilis? Would Eilis leave her family in America to be with Jim? The novel builds tension as it seems inevitable that Eilis and/or Nancy will learn that Jim has not been honest with either of them.

This sounds like a soap opera plot, and maybe it is, but Long Island is a character-driven novel that takes a deep dive into personalities that have been shaped by culture and family. Tóibín addresses the restrained emotional turmoil of his characters without resorting to contrivances.

The novel explores the relationship histories of Jim and Nancy as well as their relationship with each other. In a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else, they have been surprisingly successful at keeping their late-night visits a secret. Yet secrets will out. Jim doesn’t want Nancy to know that she is his backup plan if he can’t convince Eilis to leave Tony. Nor does he want Eilis to know that he is sleeping with Nancy. In such a small community, is there any hope that Jim’s secrets will not be discovered?

Jim’s secrecy is motivated in part by the knowledge that Nancy will be subject to gossip if it becomes known that he left her for Eilis. The destructive nature of gossip and the impossibility of keeping secrets in a small Irish village was an important theme in Brooklyn that Tóibín reprises in the sequel.

Tóibín also illustrates how people in relationships attempt to manipulate each other. Nancy, for example, wants to sell the chip shop and become a homemaker after she marries Jim, but she schemes to influence Jim with subtle suggestions until he believes the idea is his own. At the same time, characters are afraid to say what they are thinking, perhaps for fear of another person’s reaction, perhaps because they fear the consequences of speaking their desires into reality. The story ends with a dramatic act of manipulation that different readers might judge in different ways.

The novel’s other key relationship is Eilis’ with her mother. For twenty years, her mother never acknowledged the pictures that Eilis sent of her children. When she arrives in Ireland, her mother doesn’t want to hear anything about her life in America. Yet Eilis’ mother has always nurtured a hidden pride in the grandchildren she never met, even if she has bottled up her emotions and refuses to share them with her daughter. After Eilis’ mother meets her grandchildren, she believes it is her right to turn her daughter’s life upside down.

My first takeaway from Long Island in conjunction with Brooklyn is that every choice we make gives birth to a potential regret about the choice we didn’t make. Or if not regret, at least curiosity about the path life might have taken if we had chosen differently.

My second takeaway is that no matter how we try to make choices that shape our lives, other people make their own choices that alter the course we have planned. We may or may not have the courage or strength to resist those choices. The choices made by others may take on an irresistible force. The inability to take complete control of our destiny might turn out to be a surprising joy or a dreadful peril, but either way, Long Island makes clear that it is a reality of life. As always, Tóibín’s powerful illustration of great truths makes Long Island a captivating novel.

RECOMMENDED

Time Out by Michael Marshall Smith

Published by Subterranean Press on April 1, 2024

Time Out begins as a typical Last Man on Earth Story. It evolves into the story of a man who is forced to reflect on the content of his character.

The narrator wakes up on the morning after Christmas to discover that his wife and daughter are missing. He assumes they went for a walk. Then he notices that the internet isn’t working. Neither is the television. When he decides to look for his wife, he sees no other people. No cars are in motion. There are no airplanes in the sky. When he knocks on doors, nobody answers.

Within a day, animals have also disappeared. Yet things are different from day to day. When he breaks the glass in a door so he can enter a hardware store, the broken glass has been replaced when he visits the store on the following day.

Perhaps there has been a biblical rapture, but surely people exist who are less worthy of salvation than the narrator. Where are they? The narrator can’t understand why the electricity is still on and the water is still flowing, but cellphone service and the internet aren’t working. I was wondering that myself, but it turns out not to matter. This isn’t the kind of science fiction that’s supported by science, which makes it more of a fantasy, or perhaps a thought experiment.

As the narrator contemplates the new present, his thoughts turn to the past. He wonders whether he has been a selfish a-hole, too often absorbed in his own thoughts, too often unwilling to compromise with his wife and daughter. He knows he did something that could harm his marriage and, by looking at his wife’s cellphone, he knows his wife learned about it. Maybe none of this matters if he is the only person left on the planet, but it matters to the narrator, as it should. And that is perhaps the novella’s point. A time out — a period during which we are forced to reflect on our lives and consider how the absence of people we care about might make us feel — would benefit us all. The story makes that point in a scenario that is interesting and engaging.

RECOMMENDED

Extinction by Douglas Preston

Published by Forge Books on April 23, 2024

The Jurassic Park franchise suggests that the public has an insatiable appetite for stories centered around the revival of extinct species. Extinction imagines a Colorado park called Erebus that differs from Jurassic Park — as the reader is frequently reminded — because the mammoths and other de-extincted species have been genetically modified to eliminate aggressive tendencies. Yeah, what could go wrong?

Rather than giving the reader a Jurassic Park rip-off, Douglas Preston takes the story in a different direction. A newlywed couple is camping in the park at a discrete distance from their wilderness guide. The guide investigates a noise and discovers a large pool of blood where the couple had been camping. The volume of blood and the short time that elapsed before the bodies disappeared suggests that the bodies were decapitated.

Frankie Cash is a senior detective with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. She’s charged with leading the CSI team to investigate the disappearance and presumed murder of the honeymooning couple. The newlywed husband’s father is a rich old guy who harasses Cash about finding his son (or his son’s killer) while engaging in boneheaded acts that only obstruct her progress.

Cash conducts a murder investigation that overlaps a wilderness adventure. She suspects that the killers are members of a cannibalistic cult, while Erebus wants to blame the crime on environmentalists. That the killers are armed with spears and knives does suggest a cult, perhaps one that is headed by the QAnon Shaman.

The head of security at Erebus seems to be misdirecting Cash, steering her away from an abandoned mine that might be at the heart of the mystery. What is he trying to hide? The answer is farfetched (as is the way of the modern thriller) but nevertheless entertaining.

Cash is in conflict with a boss who wants all the glory if she succeeds and none of the blame if she fails to catch the bad guys. This is a standard storyline, but it at least invites the reader to warm up to Cash, who is otherwise a bit bland. The story’s action scenes are suitable to a thriller.

Preston is a seasoned author (he takes the opportunity to have a character praise the Preston & Childs novel he’s reading) who can probably construct a novel like this one while he’s clipping his toenails. Extinction isn’t special but it isn’t a waste of the reader’s time. Frankie Cash is not a memorable protagonist and the story didn’t excite me, but the plot moves quickly and the key revelation (what is Erebus trying to hide from the public?) is genuinely surprising, although the surprise is largely dictated by its implausibility.

RECOMMENDED

The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on April 1, 2024

Edgar Allen Poe is credited with creating the first fictional detective. Some years ago, Joe Lansdale contributed to a collection of new stories about Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Lansdale brings Dupin back in the novella-length The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor.

A young man named Julien has been investigating the catacombs in Paris. A series of gruesome murders has coincided with his investigation. Pieces of one victim’s body were scattered in the catacombs. A disemboweled victim was found on the doorstep of Julien’s sister Aline. Fortunately for Aline, Julien has paid a tavern owner to lock her inside her room at night. Unfortunately for Aline, Julien has disappeared. She visits Dupin in the hope that the famous solver of mysteries can find her brother.

The story takes on an air of the macabre when the tavern owner explains how he was chased by a demonic entity on his last visit to lock Aline’s door. Julien has a collection of books that describe portals to supernatural dimensions. He seems to have made a particular study of the Lord of the Razor (who happens to be an early Lansdale creation). If one of the Razor’s sharp instruments causes someone to bleed, the Lord of the Razor enters that person’s soul.

Dupin and his assistant (the story’s nameless narrator) embark on a search for Julien that takes them on a couple of trips to the catacombs. Bones and skulls and rats provide an appropriate setting for a confrontation with a demon.

Lansdale is a versatile writer. He dabbles in crime, humor, science fiction, and westerns, often mixing genres in original ways, but he is also one of the better horror storytellers in the business. The Bottoms is one of the most frightening books I’ve read. This novella is a bit too conventional to be truly scary, but the Lord of the Razor is sufficiently creepy to inspire a few chills.

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