The Forger's Requiem by Bradford Morrow

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 14, 2025

The Forger’s Requiem is the third (and presumably final) book in a series that began with The Forger and continued with The Forger’s Daughter. The forger is Will Gardener. His daughter, Nicole Diehl, is also a forger, or at least she became one in The Forger’s Daughter due to the machinations of Will’s enemy, Henry Slader. The Forger’s Requiem recounts the essentials of the backstory so a reader can enjoy the final novel without reading the first two.

The rest of this review might contain a spoiler for readers who haven’t read the first two novels but plan to do so. Govern yourself accordingly.

Slader is a rival forger who, in the first novel, “cleaved off several of Will’s fingers in a mad assault that landed the man behind bars for a good long stretch.” The second novel follows Slader’s scheme to enlist Will’s cooperation in plan to sell a first edition of an Edgar Allen Poe book with the author’s forged signature. Slader uses blackmail to induce Will’s cooperation. At the novel’s end, Nicole liberates her father by smacking Slader on the head with a shovel that they then use to dig his grave.

The Forger’s Requiem begins with Slader rising from the dead. Of course, Slader isn’t dead, but was mistaken for a corpse when Will and Nicole interred him. This seems appropriate, as Will is obsessed with Poe, who “buried his characters alive with impressive regularity.”

Slader realizes that his life has “amounted to little more than a wasteland of mistakes,” but he needs money to disappear and live out his days as a hermit. He again resorts to blackmail — this time choosing Nicole as his victim — by threatening to release the blackmail material that he has been holding against Will.

Nicole wants to protect her father but is even more interested in learning whether the material is authentic. If so, her father might be something of a monster. Nicole is morally flexible about forgery but brutal murder is on another level. She ponders this dilemma while finding a girlfriend with whom she can share clever banter.

Slader needs Nicole to fabricate a series of letters written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. To get into the spirit, Nicole visits England, learns all she can about Shelley, speculates about Shelley’s life, and shares her literary insights with her new lover. Fans of Frankenstein or its author should enjoy the deep dive into Shelley’s life, just as fans of Poe might enjoy the earlier novels.

Nicole develops a measure of sympathy for Slader as they chat over tea. Their erudite conversations, like Nicole’s banter with her lover and the story’s literary asides, make the book seem very civilized. That makes a savage ending an interesting contrast, albeit one that seems unlikely and a bit forced. I nevertheless recommend the trilogy to fans of literary crime fiction. Readers who don’t have time to read them all can get the flavor of the series by reading The Forger’s Requiem.

RECOMMENDED

Downstate by Jeffery Deaver

Published by Amazon Original Stories on January 14, 2025

Jeffery Deaver has written a few novellas for the Amazon Original Stories series. The story “Dodge” in his Broken Doll series introduced Special Agent Constant Marlowe. Constant’s own series of stories began with “The Rule of Threes” and continues in “Downstate.”

Constant is a boxer. That isn’t quite enough to sustain interest in her character over the course of a novel, a problem that Deaver accommodates by featuring her in shorter works where her absent personality might be less noticeable.

Constant works for the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations. She starts the story by being shipped downstate to Plains County, a place that has more in common with the deep South than the progressive North. Her mission is to identify and find Mr. X, take him into custody, and persuade him to testify against Tyson Barth, a mobster in the Chicago suburbs.

Mr. X specializes in finding information. How he does this is a detail Deaver doesn't bother to explain. Barth hired Mr. X to identify two witnesses who have agreed to testify against him. Barth presumably intends to kill the snitches when he learns their identities. Since Mr. X takes as much pride in keeping his secrets as he does in learning the secrets of others, his true identity is a mystery. Although he feels no guilt about laying the groundwork for murder until he meets Constant, he feels embarrassed when she guides him on a path toward reform. I felt a bit embarrassed at my attempt to swallow any of this.

Constant enlists the help of Plains County Sheriff William Dodd and of Deputy Trenton Carr. Because someone in law enforcement has likely been leaking information to Barth, the reader will know that at least one of the cops is untrustworthy.

In an episode that appears to be unrelated to the central story (so, of course, it isn’t), a young man named Felipe Vargas steals some gift cards from a convenience store. A man in the store gives chase. Constant, who is visiting the store to buy milk and cookies (how wholesome can a woman get?), chases the man to keep him from beating the teen too badly. This encounter branches into a story about sex trafficking, the default option of thriller writers who want to shock readers but can’t come up with an original idea.

In another episode, two tough guys try to intimidate Constant. As other stories in the series have demonstrated, Constant likes to resolve such problems by securing her gun before challenging the tough guys to a boxing match. After knocking them to the ground, she arrests them or decides that a good beating was punishment enough for acting like a tough guy. Her behavior is more than a little ridiculous — I can’t imagine her not facing discipline for challenging perps to fistfights — but it seems to be her signature.

Constant devises a scheme to find Mr. X, which leads her to some dirty cops, which leads her to fear that a cop is endangering Vargas, which causes her to snatch Vargas as she devises a way to turn Mr. X against Barth and save Illinois from another of those dreaded sex trafficking rings. The plot fails to convey a sense of reality but I was almost willing to suspend my disbelief until the final scenes bestow an out-of-the-blue happy ending on one of the characters. Unable to overcome my gag reflex, I downgraded a tepid but full recommendation to a limited recommendation for diehard Deaver fans and readers who love happy endings, no matter how forced they might be.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Happy New Year!

My Darling Boy by John Dufresne

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on January 14, 2025

The protagonist of the novel I’ll review after My Darling Boy describes his life as “a long domestic novel’s worth of childhood trauma too common and boring to dwell upon.” While My Darling Boy is a domestic novel, and while its childhood trauma (daddy didn’t pay enough attention to me) is common, the story is too engaging to be boring.

My Darling Boy is a story of hope and death that unfolds in the context of a father-son relationship. The son is an adult and has left home, but he’s addicted to pills. The father wants to help but doesn’t know how. The father gives the son well-intentioned advice, some good, some mundane, mostly unwanted. Because it avoids sentiment, the story rings true.

Olney Kartheizer was a staff writer for a Florida newspaper who was relegated to writing obits after the paper killed its book section, and then its travel section, and then its Sunday supplement. Olney retired and now passes his time by working at a miniature golf course.

Early in the novel, Olney is a bit adrift. Apart from his miniature golf gig, he enjoys watching a cable access show about a reverend and his family. “Olney is aware that what attracts him to the show is this loving family in a cozy home, all smiles and comfort, and the boy who will not grow up and will never leave.” Olney has given up believing in God but he “enjoys watching religious programs on TV, especially those that tend toward spectacle and ostentation, and he does wish he could believe in something that transcends our mortal lives, but he just can’t.”

Olney believes he spent 29 years as a devoted husband to Kat and a doting father to Cully. His perception is not shared by Cully, whose childhood seems to have been shaped by sorrow that his only friend moved away. As an adult, Cully eventually makes a familiar complaint about Olney as a father who judged him rather than accepting him without reservation.

By the time he is 18, Cully is injuring himself in feigned accidents to obtain pain medication. Doctors prescribe anti-depressants that make him “ill or impotent or confused or anxious or suicidal” without easing his pain. He borrows money from his dad to begin a new life but he always spends the money on pills. When Olney rescues Cully from a suicide attempt (thereby earning his son’s wrath), Kat decides she has had enough and moves out.

Olney has fond memories of pulling his son on a wagon, memories that Cully lost or never formed. Olney is angry that the adult Cully has deprived him of the loving son he wants to remember. Both characters have understandable perspectives, leaving the reader to wonder whether it will ever be possible for them to bridge their resentments. Cully certainly doesn’t make it easy but, to his credit, Olney never stops trying. That makes him likable, or at least sympathetic.

Olney will eventually begin a relationship with Mireille Tighe, although he quickly learns that Mireille has a disorder that impairs her ability to swallow. She is well along the road to death.

My Darling Boy could be seen as a reminder that death is ever present (Olney knows that from writing obituaries), making it important to treasure the days we have. But neither life nor the novel are that simple. Mireille represents hope, even if it is only the hope of having another good day before she can no longer breathe. Cully, on the other hand, never has a good day and, although he tells himself that he’ll get clean, he has no real hope of achieving a better state than oblivion.

Olney thinks: “You can’t live without hope, and you wouldn’t want to.” But when that thought resurfaces later in the novel, “he thinks hope contradicts the future, doesn’t it? He thinks of all the people who have come and gone in his life, and how once they start going, they don’t stop.” Hope and death are antagonists in a competition that death will always win.

The story also explores fear of abandonment, a fear that has been an important part of Olney’s life. “He can’t be the last person to leave a meeting or a social gathering. He doesn’t mind solitude. He minds being left behind.” Cully feels he was abandoned by his father, although Cully is the one who ran away from home — and who repeatedly runs away from Olney, rehab, and life. His sense of abandonment might be irrational, or it might be a convenient excuse to find oblivion with oxy, but how people feel is how they feel.

Novels about addiction often reinforce the truism that it is impossible to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Cully’s AA sponsor understands that even if Cully doesn’t want to be helped (and thus will not fundamentally change), people need to be there for him so he can at least survive. Olney repeatedly urges Cully to get into rehab but Cully has a cynical view of the industry: “They aren’t in the recovery business. They’re in the moneymaking business. And there’s more money in relapse than in recovery.” Is this a valid criticism or an excuse delivered by an addict who isn’t ready to live without drugs? Perhaps both are true.

These are insightful themes, delivered in a plot that meanders a bit. My Darling Boy fits the definition of a novel as a messy house, but the mess is carefully controlled, each new diversion — from an unexpected gunshot to Olney’s waking visions of a future in which Cully is healthy and productive — adds something noteworthy to the story. The novel does a good bit of truth telling without becoming preachy. As a story of difficult lives spent navigating a complex world, My Darling Boy is the best kind of domestic drama.

RECOMMENDED

Pro Bono by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 14, 2025

When Charlie Warren was a teen, his mother Linda started dating Mack Stone. Perhaps put off by a name that sounds like the invention of a bottom shelf thriller writer, Charlie never got along with Mack, even after he married his mom. Then he discovered that Mack was stealing money from his mother’s accounts. Mack nearly burned down the family home as he made his escape, but Charlie miraculously put out the fire, used a borrowed car to chase down Mack, and ran him off the road where he crashed into a tree.

As Charlie is driving away from the scene of the crash, he passes an oncoming bus full of prisoners who are fighting fires. The bus stops at the crash scene and two of the prisoners — Andy Minkeagan and Alvin Copes — recover Mack’s documents from the truck, including records of his stolen investments and convenient proof of his actual identity. The prisoners see Charlie’s face as he speeds past and deduce that he caused the crash, a deduction of Sherlockian power. That coincidental encounter sets the scene for the rest of the story.

In the present, Charlie is a lawyer who specializes in recovering hidden funds, usually in the context of divorce. Vesper Ellis retains him after noticing that three years after her husband’s death, someone using his identity has been withdrawing funds from his investment accounts. Charlie is a CPA as well as a lawyer, so he quickly confirms that there is something fishy about the accounts held by two different firms.

The financial thieves who stole from Vesper are married to two sisters — May and Rose — who enjoy the lifestyles their crooked husbands provide. Thomas Perry provides no convincing reason to believe that the sisters would be murderous, yet they need to be to keep the plot in motion. The sisters have a brother named Peter who turns up from time to time without adding anything of significance to the story.

Most of the story is dedicated to Charlie’s efforts to recover Vesper’s stolen money, as well as additional sums to keep the firms’ wrongdoing confidential. For reasons that only make sense to Charlie, he does this pro bono rather than taking a third of the millions he manages to recover for Vesper. A lawyer can’t shag a current client so he isn’t motivated by sex, although Vesper clearly wants to give him a naked reward for his efforts.

The rest of the plot relates to the money stolen from Charlie’s mother. As Charlie chases the crooked husbands, he enlists the help of Andy and Alvin, who have been released from prison and plan to force Charlie to help them access his mother’s stolen funds. To foil their scheme, Charlie has to become a tough guy superhero. He just doesn’t seem the type, creating yet another plot point that I couldn’t accept.

Even less probable is Charlie’s plan to reform the criminals by putting them on his payroll with the promise that they’ll get a fair share of the money after Charlie recovers it. Now I'm all in favor of reforming criminals, but I'm not willing to employ two ex-cons after they point their guns at me. Charlie's saintly qualities are a bit much in a guy who murdered a man for swindling his mother.

Obligatory action scenes justify the novel’s marketing as a thriller, culminating in a plan by the sisters to protect their husbands by befriending Charlie’s mother and then doing away with her. Like Charlie, Linda has an improbable knack for avoiding death. A final improbability involves Charlie’s uncanny knowledge that his mother will need rescuing despite the absence of any reason to fear for her safety.

The plot of Pro Bono is mildly interesting because it focuses on financial crime rather than the typical thriller obsession with serial killers. The coincidences and strains in logic that drive the plot are the novel’s most serious flaw, but the flaw is so often repeated that it detracts from Perry’s effort to build suspense.

Perry always writes in a plodding style, making the success of his novels turn on whether he tells an intriguing story. Pro Bono is sufficiently intriguing to earn a guarded recommendation, but I won’t be putting it high on my list of 2025 thriller recommendations.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS