End-of-summer whodunits bring chills and thrills.
Crime novels incorporating the pandemic into their plots are starting to appear. The verdicts vary, but I admired Louise Penny’s approach in her 17th Inspector Gamache novel, THE MADNESS OF CROWDS (Minotaur, 448 pp., $28.99): She sets the action in the aftermath, with vaccines in plentiful supply and society opening up. “There was loss, but vivid new life had also emerged from the ash,” Gamache thinks, feeling a wave of relief.
It is, however, short-lived. After all, lockdown suppresses some base desires and exacerbates others. A visiting professor who promotes theories that elevate morally repugnant ideas through the slogan “all will be well” tests Gamache’s resolve, especially when her life is threatened. Murder eventually strikes and the Quebec village of Three Pines is, once more, transformed from a safe haven into a nest of vipers.
The series has always excelled when Penny takes time to think through the ramifications of human behavior at its best and its worst, as filtered through Three Pines’ idiosyncratic characters. This new novel grapples successfully with the moral weight of its narrative, even if the plotting falters somewhat in the last third. “All will be well” never sounded so menacing.
The Irish crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard opts for a more direct approach to the pandemic, setting her latest novel, 56 DAYS (Blackstone, 450 pp., $24.99), in the thick of lockdown. She takes the not-uncommon concept of a newly dating couple deciding to hunker down together in mid-March 2020 and mines it for a twisty tale of suspense.
Early on, readers realize that Ciara and Oliver aren’t going to make it as a pair, because a decomposing body turns up in the bathtub of the apartment where they once lived. Through flashbacks and flash-forwards, Howard reveals how the two met (in the self-service checkout line at a Dublin supermarket), what secrets each is keeping from the other (and from themselves) and how trust in a new partner — especially at a time of intense isolation — can go wrong in the worst possible way.
Howard also astutely conveys the vertiginous and abrupt changes that happened all those months ago. The novel is not, however, meant to be some kind of grand commentary on the pandemic, about the millions of lives lost and countries and societies upended. It’s a thriller, a bloody good one, that kept me guessing as I turned the pages at a furious clip.
With her third novel, Megan Collins may have unlocked a new level of fictional discourse on the true-crime industrial complex. THE FAMILY PLOT (Atria, 320 pp., $27) is dedicated to “the murderinos,” people who are borderline obsessed with true crime and have created a rich fandom surrounding the many podcasts, documentaries and books that slake true-crime appetites.
Dahlia Lighthouse, the novel’s narrator, has spent her whole life marinating in crime. She and her siblings were all named for murder victims — Sharon Tate, Lizzie Borden’s father, the Lindbergh baby — and home-schooled in crime stories by their singularly obsessed parents. All but one reunite at the family home for their father’s burial, but before it can take place, the family’s groundskeeper, Fritz, rushes in with some unpleasant news: “Somebody’s already buried in Mr. Lighthouse’s plot,” he blurts out. “I think it’s Andy,” Dahlia’s twin, thought to have fled the “Murder Mansion” a decade earlier.
What follows is a distillation of sibling discontent, unresolved serial murder, excessive baking (yes, really) and, at the novel’s core, an examination of how flattening people into stories and churning them through the true-crime mill creates lasting, intergenerational damage. If the plot careens off the rails at times, it is also an exceedingly entertaining look at how corrosive family bonds can become.
Let me close this column with unqualified praise for Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s VELVET WAS THE NIGHT (Del Rey, 284 pp., $28), a novel that is immensely satisfying, refreshingly new and gloriously written. Here Moreno-Garcia mashes up Anglocentric genres with midcentury Mexican history, resulting in a brew flavored with love, heartbreak, violence, music and unsettling dread.
Maite, a dowdy secretary on the cusp of 30 in early 1970s Mexico City, is about to embark on quite a hero’s journey. Lonely, at times passive, she indulges in romance magazines to escape from her present drudgery. The appearance of a beautiful new neighbor, Leonora — who “looked like the girls in the comic books, with her green eyes and her chestnut hair” — marks the beginning of Maite’s awakening, as she plunges into underground activism, political dissidence and sexual desires that explode her idea of what’s possible, and with whom.
Others lurk on the periphery, most notably a movies-and-music-obsessed young man named Elvis who knows no other life than the criminal one. That matters won’t end well is a foregone conclusion — this is noir, after all. But the gift of this book, and Moreno-Garcia’s storytelling, is how it imbues this well-worn genre with added strength, grace and even musicality.
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August 20, 2021 at 12:29AM
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