BOOK REVIEW: The Searcher by Tana French

Tana French is on my short list of must-buy authors. These are the authors who when you hear they have a new book coming out you think, “I must buy that!” It is a rather short list: French, Peter F. Hamilton, James S.A. Corey and Richard K. Morgan. My must-read list of authors is much longer. The reason why Tana French is one of the authors that I am willing to put down my hard-earned cash to pre-order their latest book is because she always produces reading experiences for me that are engrossing, exciting and extraordinary. All of this is to say, I’m very happy to have a new Tana French novel to read and review. You’re in for a treat!

In her new book, The Searcher, French again eschews producing an entry in her Dublin Murder Squad series; instead she has written what is presumably a stand-alone mystery novel with a new protagonist in a new setting. In fact, she’s moved even further away from the series that brought her fame, fans and fortune in The Searcher than she did in The Witch Elm, which at least was set in Dublin, even though that book didn’t contain any characters from earlier novels, which had been French’s signature story element prior to its publication in 2018. The Searcher, however, is set in a tiny fictional Irish village (named Ardnakelty) and the main character is not Irish but American: Cal Hooper, an ex-Chicago P.D. detective who, following a bewildering divorce and sudden retirement, has bought a pile of land and decrepit fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere Ireland.

Just like The Witch Elm was very different from any of French’s previously published books (by not using a previously introduced secondary character as the primary character in a subsequent book) so is The Searcher different from all her previous books. One of the constitutive elements of her stories has been a view of the interplay between the police protagonist and their fellow detectives as well as between the protagonist and their profession. Plus all of French’s previous books were set in Dublin or its suburbs, with urbanized living as a feature of her characters’ lives. In French’s new book she throws out all these familiar aspects of her previous work and strikes out in a new, unfamiliar direction. It’s a brave (and rewarding) move.

The Searcher is set in a remote, rural village that has at its core a pub cum general store and one gas station and a police station with one cop. Most of the inhabitants earn their meager living from the land as farmers. Ardnakelty is the kind of place where all the kids who graduate from school are expected to leave for better opportunities elsewhere, with only the unsuccessful trapped behind, with only distant (or not so distant) relatives. Cal has moved here precisely because it is remote and sparsely populated. He was also interested in Western Ireland when he was looking for places to retire to on the Internet because the weather doesn’t get too cold or too hot. French is clearly enamored by such places, and her typically lyrical prose waxes poetic as she describes the weather, landscape and scenery.

The book starts with Cal making friends with a local tween boy named Trey Reddy who has learned that the new American neighbor is some kind of cop and wants him to find out what happened to his older brother Brendan, 19. Trey last saw his brother nearly six months ago when Brendan left their house in a hurry with a backpack and a worried expression. Cal really doesn’t want to take the case, because as a cop he is pretty sure what a 6-month-old missing persons case means (Brendan’s dead, right? Or run away to the big city to seek his fortune). He’s also unfamiliar with the terrain (literally) and because he’s new to the area, he doesn’t know where the bodies are buried or what the criminal undercurrents in the village are. Cal’s neighbor Mart has generally been his guide to acclimating to life in Ardnakelty but he is definitely not in favor of Cal sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. He doesn’t even want Cal to look into what or who is going around killing local farmer’s sheep in strange and disgusting ways. Are these cases related? As an experienced mystery reader, I was pretty sure they would be.

As others have noticed, basically, what French is doing in The Searcher is that she is writing a Western disguised as a mystery novel! Cal is the taciturn stranger new to town who is convinced to try to resolve an injustice that the townspeople have been living with for a longtime. Trey is the sympathetic local resident who convinces the outsider to act. And the current powerbrokers don’t react well to the newcomer trying to disrupt the status quo. It’s a brilliant move, and French puts a fresh twist on a familiar tale. As the plot unwinds, she slowly ratchets up the tension higher and higher, while simultaneously revealing secrets about the quiet, remote village and its inhabitants who shows themselves to be as potentially dangerous as those in Cal’s old stomping grounds on the South Side of Chicago.

Overall, I though The Searcher was very good, but not as good as French’s two previous books, The Witch Elm and The Trespasser, which I think are two of her very best. Of course, French at her very best means these are some of the best mystery novels in the entire genre and obviously no one can reach that level all the time. Even merely sublime Tana French is extremely satisfying, and The Searcher is one of the best books I read all year. (I still hope that her next book is Dublin Murder Squad mystery, or perhaps follows one of the minor characters from The Searcher or The Witch Elm!)

Title: The Searcher.
Author: Tana French.
Format: Hardcover.
Page Length: 451 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 6, 2020.
Date Read: December 27, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A+/A (4.16/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A+.

BOOK REVIEW: Every Dead Thing Charlie Parker, #1) by John Connolly

Every Dead Thing is the first book by John Connolly that I have read, and the first book in his apparently very popular Charlie Parker series. I am always looking for new series and so I was interested in reading this book and checking out Connolly's work, which has relatively high ratings on Goodreads and is well-established. However, I am not completely sure how many more in the series I will read (for reasons I detail below).

One thing I am learning as I read more books in the mystery/thriller/suspense/crime genre is how many different kinds of books there are, and thus I can be more discerning (read: picky!) in the books and series I decide to invest my time in consuming. My sweet spot is generally well-paced police procedurals (often set in Britain) where the plot (often suspenseful) revolves around intriguing mysteries or crimes (not always murders) being investigated by complex, well-developed characters (with diverse and interesting supporting characters). Authors whose work I have generally liked include Peter Robinson's DCI Alan Banks, Ian Rankin's DI John Rebus, Karin Slaughter's Will Trent, Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, Stuart MacBride's Logan McRae and (of course) Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad and Louise Penny's Henri Gamache series.

 I was a little upset to discover that the Charlie Parker series is in a sub-genre known as a supernatural crime thriller. The first book doesn't go too far in that direction. Generally I am not a fan of supernatural elements, which is why I haven't usually been a fan of Stephen King, but the books I have read of his (The Institute, The Outsider, the Mr. Mercedes trilogy) have all been excellent. However I have heard things get spookier as the series goes on (Book 17 has been published). Book 1, Every Dead Thing, has an extremely high body count and is suffused with violence throughout. It begins with the ritualistic murder of Parker's wife and kids and ends with... (just kidding I don't want to spoil it!).

Parker is an interestingly flawed character (a former police officer whose family was murdered who is willing and able to use his network of contacts to take the law into his own hands) and the setting is New York City, which is also a plus. However one of the main reasons I did not summarily DNF the book about 40% in (after Parker basically solves the initial mystery of a missing girl he was hired to find) was the surprising inclusion of an openly gay, interracial criminal couple named Angel (burglar/thief) and Louis (assassin/hit man). If they play a significant role in the later books I wil probably give the Charlie Parker series a closer look. It's a huge plus to me that the supporting characters are diverse and interesting. And Connolly's prose is definitely well above average for your regular mystery writer. However, most of the mystery/thrillers that I really enjoy either have major characters who are female (Maeve Kerrigan, Sara Linton, Carol Jordan, Siobhan Clarke, Roberta Steel) are written by female authors (Tana French, Karin Slaughter, Val Mcdermid, Jane Casey, etc) but I'm definitely not a fan of romance (Karin Slaughter's Will Trent series gets the balance perfectly). My ultimate series would be a series with a female lead detective with a gay male sidekick (which is exactly what the DI Marnie Rome series by Sarah Hillary is but so far I haven't been impressed by the first two book in the series, Someone Else's Skin and No Other Darkness.

 I realize most of this review of Every Dead Thing has been my musing about the mystery/crime/thriller genre in general. That tends to happen when I get introduced to a new author and I try to compare the new work into my past experiences with the genre. My overall view of Every Dead Thing is that I would say it is a well-written, extremely violent and action-packed story led by a troubled main character and peopled with interesting supporting characters whom I suspect I will seek out in the (far) future.

Title: Every Dead Thing.
Author: John Connolly.
Paperback: 467 pages.
Publisher: Pocket Books.
Date Published: July 1, 2000.
Date Read: March 28, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B+/A- (3.5/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8) by James S.A. Corey

Tiamat's Wrath is the eighth and penultimate book in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey.
I have eagerly bought and quickly devoured each of the previous books in this fast-paced, high-quality space opera after I stumbled into the first one, Leviathan Wakes, giving it a chance because of  the recommendation from George R.R. Martin. This series (and the author) are at the very top of the short list of my favorite reads and authors. (Others on this list would be anything by Peter F. Hamilton, Tana French, and Richard K. Morgan.)

Tiamat's Wrath takes place a few years after the events depicted in Persepolis Rising. The main characters of the series (James Holden, Alex Kamal, Naomi Nagata, and Amos Burton) are scattered across multiple star systems while more recent additions to the crew/family like Clarissa and Bobbie have also experienced big changes since they were added to the original inner circle. 

Tiamat's Wrath begins with the news of the death of Chrisjen Avasarala, one of the most popular characters in the series (played irrepressibly by Shohreh Aghdashloo in the television adaptation of the books) and probably my favorite character in The Expanse overall. That devastating news basically sets the tone for Tiamat's Wrath, because since it is the penultimate book it is becoming more likely that not all characters will survive each installment, and clearly not everyone is going to make it to the conclusion of the story. In fact, Tiamat's Wrath has the biggest body count of significant characters who die in any of the previous books in the series. In addition to Avasarala, there are other significant deaths in Tiamat's Wrath as well, which I won't mention here but are shocking and saddening when they occur.

The situation in Tiamat's Wrath  is definitely not good for our heroes and for most of humanity in the solar system and the nearly 1300 other star systems that can be accessed by the alien gates discovered at the end of Book 3, Abaddon's Gate. By dint of superior technological and military firepower (fueled by the mysterious alien entity called "the protomolecule" discovered in Book 2, Caliban's War), High Consul Winston Duarte of Laconia is now the de facto Emperor of the known Galaxy and Bobbie, Alex, and Naomi are trying to organize what little resistance there is to Laconian hegemonic rule of humankind. Holden is a prisoner on Laconia, an "honored guest" (read: prisoner/hostage) of Duarte and has been for years since the events at the end of Persepolis Rising. Amos is missing and assumed dead after not being heard of for years after volunteering for a special ops mission on Laconia several years before. Naomi has put herself into a self-imposed isolation as she works as the chief strategist for the Laconian resistance. Alex is piloting the Resistance's biggest ship under Bobbie's command.

The POV characters we get in Tiamat's Wrath are Elvi Okoge (an exobiologist who we first met in Book 4, Cibola Burn, who is now an important scientist in the Laconian Science Directorate), Alex, Bobbie, Naomi, Holden and a surprising new one: Teresa Duarte, the 14-year-old daughter of the most powerful man in the known Universe, Winston Duarte.

While the main storyline is how our main characters fight (and die!) to resist (and successfully!) end Laconian domination of the Sol system and others, another even more important story is how the aliens who destroyed the other aliens who developed the ring gates are apparently trying to figure out a way to eliminate the consciousness of every human in every system where humans live. It is clear those aliens know how to affect the consciousness, because during the course of Tiamat's Wrath there are multiple times that the entire human race (on all planets) simultaneously loses consciousness for a brief (but not insignificant) time. Only Elvi seems to realize how serious the threat to all human life is; all the other main characters are focused on the Laconian threat.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the plot in Tiamat's Wrath is the inside look at the putative Laconian Empire, as seen from the perspective of the 14-year-old Teresa. The way that everyone defers to Winston Duarte, and  by extension his daughter is fascinating (and frightening). The warping of the social fabric of an entire society is clearly depicted and manifests in unusual ways. For example, crushes and friendships between teenagers are nonsensical when one member of the group has the ultimate power to have anyone expelled, vanished or worse. We also get the perspective of Naomi Nagata as she becomes the head of the underground resistance and finds a way to undermine the seemingly omnipotent Laconian empire, even as the attacks by the evil aliens become more disruptive.

For me, an incredibly attractive aspect of Tiamat's Wrath and The Expanse series as a whole is the diversity of the characters. This is (obviously)  easier to see in the television adaptation but the authors make it explicit in the book as well. Non-white characters (such as Naomi, Elvi, the Duartes, Cortázar and Bobbie, to name a few) have incredibly significant parts to play in the story. The inclusion of non-heterosexuality happens casually but intentionally among various secondary characters which for an LGBT reader like myself is quite affirming. The effort to be consciously inclusive is a clear feature of the book (and show).

SPOILER ALERT!!

By the end of Tiamat's Wrath  our four main characters are actually back together (on the Rocinante no less!) which was incredibly satisfying (if a little improbable). It brought back nostalgic memories of where the entire story began, way back in Book 1. It’s nice that Book 8 basically has a “happy ending” but this does make me suspicious that Book 9 may not....

Regardless, things are teed up perfectly for an exciting conclusion to the entire 9-book series in the final book. I can't wait!

OVERALL RATING: FIVE STARS

Title: Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)
Author: James S.A. Corey.
Paperback: 534 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: March 29, 2013.
Date Read: May 24, 2019.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Witch Elm by Tana French

Wow! Tana French proves yet again why and how she is the Queen of Literary Mystery Fiction. After writing six (ok, maybe five) exquisite entries in what is now known as the Dublin Murder Squad series, French decided to release a standalone mystery The Witch Elm (or The Wych Elm) which is not even indirectly connected to her much-celebrated prior works. When I discovered in late September that Tana French had a new book coming out soon, I pre-ordered the hardcover from Amazon instantaneously. There are a handful of authors for whom I do that for (Peter F. Hamilton, James S.A. Corey, Richard K. Morgan come immediately to mind) and there are none others in the mystery fiction area (although new books by Ian Rankin, Louise Penny, Adrian McKinty and, more recently, Val McDermid are all on my must-read-as-soon-as-I-can list).

The Witch Elm  is very different from French’s other books, which are generally police procedurals set in the context of murder mysteries and generally have police detectives on the Dublin Murder Squad as the main character for whom we get first-person perspectives.

Instead, The Witch Elm has Toby Hennessy as the main character, and for an extraordinarily long period of time (well over 100 pages, possibly close to 200) there is no sign of a dead body and no sign of anyone from the Dublin Murder Squad. There goes Tana again, breaking those genre rules and upending her readers expectations!

Toby is a very odd choice for a main character of a book that ends up being an intricately plotted murder mystery, since he’s a 20-something, blonde, attractive, upper class white guy who begins the book basically bragging about how lucky he is. His charmed life is shattered by a scene that happens very early in the book, where sudden violence befalls Toby, leaving him injured and potentially permanently incapacitated (due to a vicious blow to the head).

French is deploying and deconstructing the literary device of the unreliable narrator as a central trope of the book. Toby potentially has permanent brain damage which affects his perception of events around him as well as his memory. We the reader literally can not believe what Toby perceives to hear and see. But it also becomes clear that Toby has always been oblivious to what goes on around him due to his inability to perceive the effects of marginalization on people who do not share his class and gender.

As the plot develops (and the dead body finally arrives) we are engulfed by a complicated and multifaceted network of familial relationships that involve jealousies, slights and resentments which are sourced from events in the characters’ pasts. Toby is the only child of a pair of well-to-do parents (mom is a professor and dad is a barrister) and has grown up with two other similarly situated cousins, Susanna and Leon, who are about the same age and attended the same secondary schools as Toby. They have literally known each other their entire lives and in some sense are closer than some siblings. Their parents all vacationed together and  would regularly leave the 3 kids for weeks at a time during holidays at the home of their parents unmarried brother Hugo, at a grand old house called The Ivy House. Even now, when Toby, Susanna and Leon are nearly 30 and their grand-uncle Hugo is nearly 70 the extended family (Susanna is married and has 2 kids of her own, Toby has a longtime girlfriend named Melissa) attend weekly Sunday dinner at The Ivy House, which  almost serves as another character in the book. French delights in using her command of the language to describe its coziness and provides the reader with a real sense of place. It’s during one of these Hennessy family gatherings that a human skull is discovered in the wych elm on the grounds of the Ivy House, leading to multidirectional finger pointing and eventually actual suspicion between various pairings in the trio of cousins about how much and what each of them knows or remembers about the past and the supposed suicide of a teenaged classmate 10 years before. The notion of suspecting and being an object of suspicion of the people whom you have literally grown up with animates the emotional resonance of the book.

French uses the evanescence and plasticity of memory as another trope with which to redirect the suspicions of Toby, our unreliable narrator and the reader towards various possible suspects. She also (somewhat rashly) seizes the opportunity to conduct another anthropological survey of the social lives and mores of Dublin teenagers. This was at the heart of what I think of as her worst book, The Secret Place, which revolves around the discovery of the body of a teenage boy on the grounds of a posh private girls school. Happily, I think she’s more successful and insightful at the portrayal of modern-day teenage life in The Witch Elm. I am curious as to why French wanted to return to depicting that particular milieu when there are so many others to choose from.

Typically, for me, the joy of reading a Tana French novel has been sourced in her mellifluous, oftentimes  surprisingly piquant prose as she describes conversations between characters who are usually experiencing the worst times of their lives, either during a police investigation into the death of a loved one or recalling situations that dredge up the emotions and feelings that led someone they knew to commit (and/or conceal) a murder. Happily, that Tana French is well represented in The Witch Elm. What is missing this time is the voyeuristic perspective she usually provides the reader by allowing us to see the discovery, detection and resolution of crime(s) through the eyes of a member of the Dublin Murder Squad. Surprisingly, this is a minor loss.

Another feature of a French novel is her penchant for breaking the rules of the detective mystery form she is writing in. From the unresolved issues in her brilliant debut novel In the Woods and the stunning audacity of The Likeness to her clever refusal to center multiple books on the same detective(s) in her ongoing mystery series, to the disastrous dabble with the supernatural in The Secret Place, French has blazed her own trail in the British police procedural genre. In The Witch Elm she goes even further, by centering the book around Toby, a self-centered, entitled “git” who is oblivious to his own privilege (and prejudices). French is (I think) trying to reveal and skewer the perspective of the Tobys of the world, while she simultaneously uses his lack of awareness to misdirect the reader to the central mystery at the heart of the novel. 

In the final chapter of the book, after the major reveal of “whodunnit,” she breaks the rules of the genre again (multiple times!) so successfully that I was forced to give her my top rating and applaud her daring. This is the case, even though early in my reading of the book I had harbored disappointed misgivings about The Witch Elm’s eventual place in French’s oeuvre (“uh-oh, I think this may be another misfire like The Secret Place!” to “Oh my goodness what just happened? I have to re-read that entire section!”). By the end I felt she had surpassed the cool, precise excellence of The Trespasser, which up to that point was in a statistical tie in my heart with Broken Harbor for my designation as her best book. The Witch Elm, in my opinion, is another example of French operating at the top of her game, expanding and demonstrating what a literary genre novel can and should be. Another triumph.

Title: The Witch Elm.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 509 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 9, 2018.
Date Read: December 18, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A+/A (4.16/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2) by Jane Harper

Force of Nature is an interesting psychological thriller based around familial and work relationships and the feelings, slights and resentments that can result. The basic facts are that five women (2 of whom are sisters, 2 of whom went to school together and all of whom work together at a private financial services firm) go on a 3-day hike in a remote national park and one of them (the pretty, obnoxious, “most successful” one) doesn’t make it out (alive). Overall rating: 3.5 Stars.

Force of Nature is the second book by Australian author Jane Harper featuring Aaron Falk, an officer of the Australian Federal Police (I guess the Aussie version of the United States’ FBI) specializing in financial crimes. Harper's first book, The Dry, was a sensation, and ended up winning the prestigious Gold Dagger award from the Crime Writers of America. It tells the story of what happens when Aaron goes back to his hometown after his childhood best friend’s entire family is gunned down in a deserted town in the middle of nowhere.

In my opinion, Force of Nature is a more interesting book than The Dry, but that’s not because of Aaron Falk, it’s due to the power of the mystery and suspense of the central question of “what happened between these women in the park?” It turns out that Alice Russell, the woman who does not make it out of the park with her co-workers, was acting as a confidential informer to Aaron and the AFP as they tried to build a substantial money laundering case against the employer of the women on the hike. Aaron and his partner go up to the park when news reaches them that Alice is missing to try and see if they can discover if her disappearance is linked to their investigation of her bosses. It turns out that the reason for her death is something much closer to home.

To me, there’s a fundamental flaw in Harper’s choice of protagonist for her mystery series. Falk is simply not that interesting a character. He’s almost nondescript. It’s really a testament to Harper’s writing and plotting that both books she has written so far, especially the second one, are captivating thrillers. Part of this is the exotic nature of their setting (Down Under) where in both books Harper takes full advantage of the lay of the land to enthrall the reader. I hope that the author takes a page out of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad books and considers having other main characters in subsequent books. Or she could keep on using Falk as the ostensible protagonist of the books but then also depict the other characters in a more compelling and complex way as she does in Force of Nature.

Title: Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2).
Author: Jane Harper.
Paperback: 272 pages.
Publisher: Flatiron Books.
Date Published: February 26, 2018.
Date Read: June 29, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Dry by Jane Harper

The Dry is the celebrated debut mystery novel by Jane Harper which won the Gold Dagger Award for best mystery novel of 2016 recently. This puts Harper in territory with other impressive writers in this genre whose work I have enjoyed (Val McDermid, Henning Mankell and Patricia Cornwell). Sadly, other favorites like Tana French, Stuart MacBride, Ian Rankin and Adrian McKinty have not done so (yet!)

I think The Dry is quite good, and somewhat reminiscent of another widely celebrated debut mystery, In The Woods (2010) by Tana French. The writing is similarly sumptuous and the story is bolstered by the strength of the characters and the description of the deep emotional ties that link them and strengthen the impact of the book on the reader.

In The Dry, there are two mysteries at the heart of the plot. Who brutally shot and killed Aaron Falk's former childhood best friend Luke Hadler along with Hadler's wife and son with a shotgun at close range? Does it have to do with the fact that 20-something years ago Luke lied to give his best friend an alibi for the mysterious death of their common friend Ellie Deacon who was at the apex of a complicated teen love triangle involving the two friends? Again this plot is reminiscent of French's debut where the main character is trying to solve a disappearance/murder of a child decades after he survived the murder/abduction of himself and his best friends. In Aaron's case, despite Luke's alibi the suspicion about his involvement in Ellie's death has hung over his head for years, especially since soon afterwards he and his dad were essentially run out of their small town by Ellie's dad, the town's most prominent citizen.

Despite winning the Gold Dagger I disagree that Harper's The Dry, is as devastatingly good a work of fiction as French's In The Woods. This doesn't mean Harper shouldn't have won the Gold Dagger, it is really a complaint that French has not won yet, and that she should have won for her debut as well. 

Anyway one reason I think Harper's debut is inferior to French's is that there are definitely flaws in The Dry. For example, there are several aspects of the story which are easy to figure out, and the revelation of the killer of Luke and his family is presented in an almost matter-of-fact fashion after spending a few hundred pages misdirecting the reader with other clues and red herrings. 

Despite its flaws, the book has very strong features as well. First among these is the sense of place in The Dry. It is set in Kiewarra, a very small town in the middle of nowhere in Australia which has been greatly impacted by a long-running drought. Secondly, the main character of Aaron Falk is interesting, and the back story of his life in Kiewarra and the connections he has to almost all the suspects and residents of the town add a frisson to the work.

Overall, I would agree that The Dry is an impressive debut but I would hesitate to declare this the best mystery I have read this year. However, I will definitely look forward to spending time with Aaron Falk, wherever his next (mis)adventure takes him. The second book, Force of Nature, should be out early in 2018.

Title: The Dry.
Author: Jane Harper.
Paperback: 336 pages.
Publisher: Flatiron Books.
Date Published: January 10, 2017.
Date Read: October 28, 2017.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★ (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: B.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

My Favorite Books Read In 2016 (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery and Thriller)

In 2016 I read 60 books; as usual almost all of these were novels, primarily in the genres of mystery/thriller and fantasy/science fiction. Interestingly, the books that I read the in 2016 were  pretty evenly split between the genres of science fiction (19), fantasy (17), and mystery (19) with a few books falling into both categories or neither. (In 2014 mystery/thriller predominated my reading list while in 2015 more than half the books I read that year were science fiction. In 2016, surprisingly no particular genre dominated.

I was introduced to some new authors in 2016 (Adrian McKinty, Michael J. Sullivan, Deborah Crombie, Ramez Naam, Elizabeth George and Adrian Tchaikovsky) whom I look forward to reading more of their books in the future. In 2016 I read my first book by Stephen King  as an adult and was pleasantly surprised by how good the alternative-history/time-travel book 11/22/63 is. I will definitely try to read more of his non-horror work which falls into my favorite genres in the future.

Happily in 2016 lots of authors whose work has previously been some of my favorite reads released books that I read (Ben Winters, Tana French, Peter Hamilton, Daniel Abraham, Ian Rankin, Brian Staveley, Michael Connelly, Patrick Tomlinson, Peter Robinson and Alastair Reynolds). There's a notable absence from this list: for the first time in 6 years I did not read a book from The Expanse by James S.A. Corey. The sixth book, Babylon's Ashes, was released in December 2016 but I didn't read it until my Hawaii vacation in January 2017. Another favorite author, Brent Weeks published The Black Mirror (Lightbringer, #4) in 2016 but I am sav(or)ing this to be read later in 2017.

I'm always looking for more good books and authors to add to my "To Be Read (TBR)" pile! Feel free to make suggestions of books or authors you think I would like in the comments after seeing what books have resonated with me previously.

Below are my favorite reads for 2016 in the genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery and Thriller.

Favorite Science Fiction Novel Read In 2016: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Reading Children of Time was one of the most exciting reading  experiences I had in 2016. Part of the emotional impact that the book had on me is that it was so unexpected. Although I had heard of the author's work before, I thought that Tchaikovsky was known for his epic fantasy works. I list space opera as my favorite genre, and usually it ends up being my favorite sub-genre in science fiction (and quite often it is a book by either Peter Hamilton or James S.A. Corey  in 2015 and 2014) but this year Children of Time just stole my heart and blew my mind.  It is an unusual story that combines two classic elements of science fiction: the depiction of the social dynamics of an arkship which presumably contains all that remains of humanity and the development of an alien civilization with quite unique cultural characteristics and social structure. What both of these plots have in common is that the book goes over multiple generations of each, so the passage of time is an important ingredient of the salience of the story's impact. Although I would love to spend more time with the characters and the setting of Children of Time it was also nice to read a completely self-contained story that does not depend on any sequels to advance or complete the story.

Runner-Up in Favorite Science Fiction Novel Read In 2016: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters.

I have previously discussed how since I love science fiction/fantasy and mystery/thriller that I am always looking for books that combine these two genres. In fact last year, my two favorite mysteries were also science fiction books. The first of these was the Last Policeman trilogy written by Ben Winters. This year Winters is on my list of favorites in the science fiction category even though Underground Airlines is also a police procedural and mystery-thriller. What makes it science fiction is that it is written in an alternate time line where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated soon after his election in 1861 and the enactment of five "compromise" constitutional amendments result in slavery being maintained until the 21st century in a few stubborn states in the Union (Carolinas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama). The setting is so compelling that it was easily the book that I thought about the most long after I finished it. What the premise does is allow the reader to clearly see the horrifying possibility that slavery could have been maintained for another century and a half in our world and how similar to our actual world that warped universe is. This is mordant social commentary with an exciting  plot wrapped around it.

Honorable Mention (Science Fiction):  A Night Without Stars (The Chronicle of the Fallers, #2) by Peter Hamilton.
My favorite science fiction author is Peter Hamilton so it should not be a surprise that his sequel to The Abyss Beyond Dreams, the concluding novel in another exciting duology written in the Commonwealth Universe would be on my list of favorite books read in 2016. A Night Without Stars was not as good as the first book in the series but even midrange Hamilton is a lot better than the vast majority of science fiction out there. Again, although Hamilton is known for his space opera and military science fiction a key aspect of the story in The Chronicle of the Fallers is a detailed depiction of a social revolution against a totalitarian regime where some people have telepathic and telekinetic powers and there are deadly shape-shifting aliens attempting to subsume human civilization. Lots of fun!

Favorite Fantasy Novel Read Novel In 2016: The Last Mortal Bond (The Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, #3) by Brian Staveley

In 2015 my favorite read in the category of fantasy was the first book in Brian Staveley's The Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, The Emperor's New Blades so I am quite pleased that the concluding work in the same series, The Last Mortal Bond, ended up being my favorite read in the same category in 2016. And this was a tough category to repeat in because I read quite a few fantasy books this year. However Staveley is the real deal and I totally expect him to join the (rather short) list of my favorite fantasy authors: Brent Weeks, Peter Brett, Daniel Abraham and Michael Sullivan. The reason why Staveley is on this list at the top spit is that The Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne is simply the best. The story generally revolves around three main characters: Kaden, Adare and Valyn, who are the surviving children of an assassinated emperor. However, as the story develops we see that it is really an existential battle between humanity and god-like, immortal beings. There are giant flying birds, armies of thousands fighting against each other and devotees of various gods and goddesses all fighting for power and control over the Empire. Oh and of course there is some love and betrayal as well, for good measure. And all of it is told at a thrilling pace with humor and wit which is incredibly engaging.

Runner-Up Favorite Fantasy Read in 2016:  Heir of Novron (The Riyria Chronicles, #3) by Michael J. Sullivan 

Speaking of wit and humor immediately brings us to the work of Michael J. Sullivan, who I first read in 2016. He started as a self-published author and although there's nothing wrong with that, I believe that was one of the reasons why I never picked up any of his books. But eventually, the tens of thousands of ratings on Goodreads (with an average well above 4.0 on a 5-point scale) were convincing enough to me that I decided to try the first book, Theft of Swords, in one of his series, The Riyria Chronicles. I was amazed at how funny and thrilling the books are, even if they do have wizards and princesses and swords. They simply are great books, built around two amazing characters Hadrian Blackwater and  Royce Melborn. What is so impressive about what Sullivan does is that even as he is repeating all the classical fantasy tropes he is simultaneously reinventing and disrupting them. (For example, in Heir of Novron there's a quest by a motley collection of travelers who have multiple reasons to betray each other, there's an orphaned waif who becomes the leader of the Empire, and of course there are several sets of star-crossed lovers.)  But the core of the books is the relationship between two (straight) guys who are very different but manage to forge a bond that has them surviving some quite harrowing (and sometimes hilarious) situations. Honestly, it was hard to know which of the books in the Riyria Chronicles to put on this list, but because Heir of Novron also has the added benefit of providing a pay off to thousands of pages of text I selected it to represent the runner-up best fantasy book I read in 2016. Don't make the mistake I made, read the Riyria books by Michael J. Sullivan as soon as you can--you won't regret it!

Honorable Mention (Fantasy): The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin, #5) by Daniel Abrahams
Earlier entries in Daniel Abraham's fantastic series about fanaticism, banking and war, The Dagger and the Coin, have made it into my list of Favorite Fantasy books of the year. (Book 4, The Widow's House, was the runner-up in this category in 2014.)  Of course Abrahams is one-half of the duo who writes The Expanse series as James S.A. Corey so it is incredible that while they were churning out a book a year in that series, Abraham has been churning out a book a year in this series as well. Both of those schedules slipped this year, but The Spider's War was released early enough that I was able to complete it in 2016. Although it is not as consistently a high-quality read as some of the earlier entries in the series, it still manages to stick the landing quite well and resolve all the myriad plot points and various story threads that have developed over the course of five books, and for doing a good job at a hard task, The Spider's War deserves an Honorable Mention.

Favorite Mystery Novel Read In 2016: The Trespasser (Dublin Murder Squad, #6) by Tana French

After a somewhat disappointing fifth entry into her Dublin Murder Squad Series with The Secret Place, Tana French restored her place as my favorite mystery author with The Trespasser. There are books that you look forward to and are willing to wait for at the library, and there are books that you immediately order on Amazon once you know they are available (and there are even books that you pre-order on Amazon once you hear a rumor that they may be coming out soon.) Needless to say, The Trespasser showed up on my doorstep on its day of release and although I denied myself the pleasure of starting to read it right away, it was totally worth the wait. For the first time, French deviates from using her unique method of selecting the detectives who will be protagonists in her latest book from secondary characters from previous entries in the series. The detectives that appeared in The Secret Place, Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway, also appear in The Trespasser. What makes French's mysteries so good is that the questions raised are not only about who did the crime and why did they do it, but they often involve questions about the people trying to solve the crime as well. Conway is the only female member of the Dublin Murder Squad and Moran is the most junior member, and the fact that they are paired together as partners reflect the marginality of both on the squad.  One of the key mysteries in The Trespasser is not only will Conway and Moran find out who killed Aislinn Murray, but also will Conway and Moran continue to be working together as police detectives and will both of them actually be on the police force by the end? The result is that The Trespasser rivals her Broken Harbour as the best of Ms. French's superlative mysteries.

Runner-Up Favorite Mystery Novel Read in 2016: Rain Dogs (Sean Duffy, #5) by Adrian McKinty

One of the key discoveries I made in 2016 were the Inspector Sean Duffy  books by Adrian McKinty. These are a series of police procedurals set in the suburbs of Belfast, Northern Ireland at the height of the "Troubles" in the mid-1980s. I'm already a sucker for police procedurals, having consumed several books of this type written by Ian Rankin (DI John Rebus in Edinburgh), Peter Robinson (DCI Alan Banks in Yorkshire), Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch in Los Angeles), Jo Nesbø (Harry Hole in Oslo, Norway), Jussi Adler-Olsen (Department Q series in Copenhagen), Tana French (Dublin Murder Squad) and Henning Mankell (Kurt Wallander in Ystad, Sweden). McKinty's Sean Duffy series is familiar because it is a police procedural but the setting of an all-consuming, civil war between two religious factions. Of course, Duffy is a nice Catholic boy who is a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer in Carrickfergus, a predominantly Protestant section of Northern Ireland (which also just happens to be the name of the real town that McKinty grew up in.) The Duffy books are complicated by the fact that not only is Duffy trying to solve murders in a time and place when people are getting blown up and killed horribly by faithful adherents from both sides, is that he also somehow gets involved in cases that attract the attention of M.I.5 (the British domestic counter-intelligence agency equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation). The Duffy books are bit more than your everyday police-procedural murder-mystery; they have significant elements of spy thriller components, all embedded in oft-amusing commentary on the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, Rain Dogs is particularly good. I devoured all five of the available entries in the Duffy series in about a month, with each one even more enjoyable (and compelling) than the one before.

Honorable Mention (Mystery):  Even Dogs in the Wild (Inspector John Rebus, #20) by Ian Rankin and In The Dark Places (Chief Inspector Alan Banks, #22) by Peter Robinson.
I realized when I wrote this post that I have never acknowledged the mysteries of Ian Rankin or Peter Robinson as one my year-end favorites, but between the two of them I have read nearly four dozen of their books. They are somewhat similar, in that they are both police procedurals built around male detectives in Great Britain. Rankin's John Rebus is located in Edinburgh and its environs while Robinson's Alan Banks is located in Northern England (Yorkshire). The two have complicated relationships with both their underlings and superior officers. After reading so many of these stories, they are familiar, comforting and highly recommended. (Please note, each of the series gets better as they go along. If you start from Book 1, hang in there because they get really good later on. For Rebus, I would say it is the award-winning Resurresction Men and for Banks is In A Dry Season.)

Favorite Thriller Novel Read In 2016: Apex (Nexus, #3) by Ramez Naam.

I had heard of Ramez Naam's Nexus trilogy for years (at least as long as I had heard of Marcus Sakey's Brilliamce saga). The two are somewhat similar, since they are both techno-thrillers in a sense. Both depict the development of technology which tends to upend the natural balance of our world and then depicts the aftermath by following its effect on the main characters. In the Nexus trilogy, Naam's killer idea is the development of a drug called Nexus which allows one to code the human brain like an operating system, and also eventually connect to (and possibly control) these Nexus-enhanced brains remotely through a network. Naam's work is even more political than Sakey's because he raises a lot of nuanced issues about the nature of technology and the questions that the creator of a paradigm-shifting technology faces. For me, Naam's work resonates even more than Sakey's because his main character is a graduate student who has this amazing idea and dreams of academic success. Naam depicts the protocols, beliefs and cultural touchstones of the academic scientific world in a way that I immediately identified. However, additionally, the Nexus books are also action-packed, as another question that they raise is the time-honored dilemma of when (or if) the ends justify the means of achieving one's aims. The books are set about 25 years in the future, so technically they are science fiction as well as techno-thrillers which could be another reason I liked them so much. I read all three books in the trilogy, Nexus, Crux and Apex in about a week and they were an extremely fun ride, they most exhilarating reads I had in 2016.

Runner-Up Favorite Thriller Read in 2016: Beyond Reach (Grant County, #6)  by Karin Slaughter

I discovered Karin Slaughter last year, and Blindsighted the first book in her Grant County series made an immediate impression on me, grabbing an Honorable Mention for Favorite Thriller Read in 2015. I basically devoured the rest of the six books in the Grant County series in 2016 and am currently working my way through her 9-book Will Trent series in 2017. Slaughter is a crime thriller writer who also combines romantic tension between her main characters. The Grant County series is built around a trio of characters: Sara Linton, Jeffrey Tolliver and Lena Adams. Adams and Tolliver are police officers and Linton is Tolliver's ex-wife and the coroner in a very small South Georgia town. Through intricate plotting and clever deployment of point-of-view chapters, Slaughter weaves a compelling tale where the lives and loves of these main characters are intertwined with each other in increasingly complex ways. This is done while they solve always-heinous crimes (which almost always involve extremely sexualized and brutal violence against women) that often result in one or more of our main characters being placed into extreme peril (thus the thriller aspect). Beyond Reach is the most devastating of the books in this regard, with an ending which is absolutely devastating to the reader.

Honorable Mention (Thriller): World in Fire (Brilliance, #3) by Marcus Sakey.
The Brilliance series by Marcus Sakey is a very fun trilogy of science-fiction thrillers set in the near-future where 1% of the children being born are "special"--they have extraordinary mental and physical powers which could lead them to take over the world if allowed to develop unchecked. Sakey imagines how our world would react to this change and follows the story to a logical conclusion (which he provides in the third book) as time moves forward and the Brilliants and the Normals struggle for power and control. The main attractive feature of the books (besides its exciting, premise, which is admittedly derivative or reminiscent of Marvel's X-men) is Sakey's propulsive writing. The books simply zip along at a breakneck pace. Additionally, he does quite a good job of giving a realistic depiction of how the U.S. government and society would react to the presence of "Brilliants" among us. This sense of verisimilitude and the quality of the writing make the Brilliance saga one of my highlighted reads of the year.

BOOK REVIEW: The Trespasser by Tana French

Tana French has been one of my favorite authors since her stunning (and genre busting) debut novel In the Woods. She is one of the few authors I will purchase in hardback immediately upon release. In The Trespasser, Ms. French continues her series of murder-mysteries set in the milieu of Dublin, with a different primary protagonist in every subsequent novel. In The Secret Place (the fifth book in what is now commonly known as the Dublin Murder Squad series), Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran worked together to find out who had killed a teenaged boy in the posh private school attended by  Holly Mackey, one of their colleague's daughters. That colleague (Frank Mackey) had previously appeared in The Likeness and Faithful Place. It is this apparently haphazard recycling of seemingly minor characters from previous books into primary characters in subsequent books which sets French's Dublin Murder Squad apart from other series in the genre.

However, in the latest (and sixth) entry in the Dublin Murder Squad series, The Trespasser, French has repeated herself for the first time, by using Conway and Moran as the primary characters again. Actually, for all intents and purposes this is an Antoinette Conway mystery--she's the only character who gets a first-person narrative, although we get a lot of what Moran is thinking mediated through Conway's perceptions and interretations of his words, actions and signals. Regardless, for the second book in a row, the two work together to try and solve the mystery of who killed Aislinn Murray, a pretty young lass who was found with part of her head bashed in while wearing a sexy dress and a potentially romantic dinner for two burnt to a crisp in her well-appointed apartment after a curious anonymous tip was called into the police. Was the killer her date or a trespasser?

We had previously known from her appearance in The Secret Place  that Conway was an embittered (but excellent) detective but we didn't really know exactly how paranoid (and self-destructive) she can be until we are exposed to her neuroses full-time in the internal monologues the reader is given access to in The Trespasser. Antoinette is being subject to a hostile work environment as the only female in a squad of two dozen males, with important files disappearing from her desk, disdainful look and cheeky remarks directed her way and absolutely no acknowledgement that anything is amiss from anyone else. For the first time in the series (I think), French dabbles with the trope of the unreliable narrator. 

That being said, to me The Trespasser is French's best book of the series so far, replacing the emotionally shattering Broken Harbor at the top of the heap. This is a welcome return to the form after some of excesses and errors displayed in The Secret Place. This time the stakes are raised so high for our protagonists (either Conway solves the mystery of whodunit or she will need to resign from Murder and take a spirit-crushing but lucrative private security job, abandoning Moran to his own devices). In fact, at one critical juncture in the investigation, Conway basically decides she's going to leave Murder regardless of whether she gets a solve or not (this is just one reason I would say that she's an unreliable narrator). One of the last key scenes in the book is near the end when she finally reveals her decision about her future to her partner Stephen.

A major feature of French's novels are her depictions of police interrogations and other conversations in general. As an American reader, some of the dialogue can be impenetrable ("gaff" for home, "gaffer" for boss, "jacks" for bathroom and many, many more) but it is the running dialogue of the observations and intentions of the speakers that French includes as the investigator and the suspect duel in the interview room that animates and elevates her books above other mysteries, and this book above the others in the series. Although it is at its heart another police procedural, all of French books subvert and transcend the narrow binds of genre. What French does is make it clear that the necessary job qualifications to be a successful Murder detective, namely being able to tell whether someone is lying, always wondering whether someone is telling you the truth or trying to determine someone's motives from their body language and words are things detectives do incessantly and seemingly reflexively). It seems exhausting and absolutely inimical to healthy relationships with other human beings, and we see that play out in different ways in basically all the members of the Dublin Murder Squad that appear in the book (Conway, Moran, McCann, Roche, O'Kelly and Breslin). 

But this truth about the toll her characters pay does not lessen the reader's respect or admiration for the difficult job detectives do and the pleasure we can take from seeing them do it in The Trespasser.

Title: The Trespasser.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 456 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 4, 2016.
Date Read: December 24 to 27, 2016.

GOODREADS RATING: *****.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).


PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.