Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li is an enticing and stimulating escape: a heist novel that follows a group of young Chinese Americans in their quest to return stolen pieces of art to China. With a caper at its center and rebellion in its heart, Li’s debut is like Ocean’s Eleven meets Olga Dies Dreaming, a diaspora story wrapped up in a thriller.
When art history student Will Chen witnesses the theft of precious Chinese artifacts from the Harvard museum, it upends his life. Instead of revealing everything he knows to the authorities, he grabs a priceless carving for himself, and one of the thieves hands him a business card. He’s soon enlisting his sister and friends as his crew and flying first class to Beijing to meet the visionary behind a scheme to reclaim art plundered by Western governments. Chinese billionaire Wang Yuling offers Will $50 million to liberate five sculptures from museums across Europe and America.
A cinematic heist thriller with a social conscience, Portrait of a Thief is immediately appealing. But as this vivid and precisely crafted novel goes on, readers will be fascinated with the characters and their relationships as well as impressed by Li’s multifaceted exploration of Chinese American identity. The close third-person narration centers one of five characters in each chapter: Will; his tightly wound but charismatic sister, Irene; Daniel, a longtime family friend; Lily, a mechanical engineer and occasional street racer; and Alex, a software engineer who dropped out of MIT after her parents’ rent doubled. In addition to unique skills, each character has a distinct personality, motivations and perspective on being a child of the Chinese diaspora.
Though they don’t overshadow Portrait of a Thief’s strengths, some weaknesses are also evident. The gang often contemplates their Chinese heritage, but the content of their contemplations rarely evolves, which can make these reflections feel repetitive. More importantly, for such smart people, their approach to the heist is a bit thick. Watching Ocean’s Eleven for tips is ironic and funny, but a Google Doc for planning? Fortunately, rooting for these underdogs is tremendous fun, and the novel has a great sense of humor. While debating whether to move forward, the would-be thieves break out the whiteboard and do a quick pros and cons analysis: “There were just three bullet points. Making history, it read. China gets its art back. A shit ton of money.”
Portrait of a Thief is an unlikely heist story made even richer through excellent writing, indelible characters and an engaging anti-colonialist message.
With a heist at its center and rebellion in its heart, Grace D. Li’s debut is like Ocean’s Eleven meets Olga Dies Dreaming.
his wide-ranging knowledge of the country’s military establishment, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has created an entirely credible, and disturbing, fictional tale of conspiracy among our highest-ranking military officials.
After observing the culture wars that dominated military-civilian interactions during the Clinton administration, Ricks reportedly felt that a novel, rather than a nonfiction book, was the best way to reveal the strains and conflicts that affect today’s soldiers.
At the center of his novel are two talented young officers who arrive at the Pentagon and conveniently fall in love. Majors Bud Lewis and Cindy Sherman are among the Army’s best, and they’ve both been tapped for prime positions as aides-de-camp for two of the Pentagon’s most senior generals. After Sherman and Lewis begin their tours of duty, they soon discover that a secret group of military officers who call themselves the Sons of Liberty is conducting covert protests against White House policy.
Failed missions in Algeria and a looming debacle in Afghanistan, coupled with a civilian leadership that’s out of touch, provide the backdrop for a gripping thriller and an excellent portrait of the American military. As the administration keeps the Army grinding through a miserable third-world brushfire war, the Sons of Liberty’s activities grow more treasonous, and their efforts to avoid detection more ruthless. Majors Sherman and Lewis find themselves in a vicious game with life-and-death stakes and the future of the American military hanging in the balance.
The subversive campaign gains more support as the Afghanistan mission worsens. In the end, the young officers are challenged to choose between their duties to a nation and its civilian leadership and their personal honor as officers expected to follow the orders of their superiors.
A Soldier’s Duty offers a provocative look at the post-Cold War generation of soldiers. A Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting at the Washington Post and the author of a nonfiction bestseller (Making the Corps), Rick has demonstrated with his first novel that fiction can be an effective tool for reporting a story.
Dominic Caraccilo is a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning, Georgia.
his wide-ranging knowledge of the country's military establishment, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has created an entirely credible, and disturbing, fictional tale of conspiracy among our highest-ranking military officials.
After observing the culture wars that dominated military-civilian interactions during the Clinton…
s Blunt’s Forty Words for Sorrow takes place during a dreary February on the Chippewa Reserve in northern Ontario, Canada. Blunt’s bone-chilling description of the snowbound and desolate area is so crisp and concise that you practically need mittens to turn the pages: “All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal gray and even in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks deep mauve.” In this frigid setting, a serial killer is on the loose, and Blunt depicts the crime scenes in particularly graphic, and frightening, detail.
John Cardinal, a homicide detective with the Algonquin Bay Police Department in Ontario, has a lot on his mind. He’s obsessed with solving the case of several missing teenagers. In addition, he must simultaneously deal with a new partner, departmental politics, his wife’s ongoing illness and the financing of his daughter’s expensive education. While on the trail of the serial killer, Cardinal is a man with his own secrets. As a result, he himself becomes the target of an investigation. Who is investigating the investigator and why? Can Lise Delorme, his new partner, be trusted? More importantly, can Cardinal and Delorme stop the murderer from claiming another victim? Creating credible characters can be a challenge for some suspense writers. Not so for Blunt; he populates his novel with vivid and complex characters. The meticulous police work they employ is both plausible and convincing. Secondary figures, such as Jerry Commanda, the Ontario Provincial Policeman, come alive with the author’s precise and energetic writing style.
Blunt skillfully alternates the action and viewpoint between the hunter and the hunted, all the while maintaining the momentum and emotional impact of the story. This technique gives us a terrifying glimpse into the sinister minds of sociopaths. And, as far as villains go, they don’t come much more evil than this.
Forty Words for Sorrow is a gripping tale that delivers escalating tension as the detective and the killer speed toward each other on a harrowing collision course. C. L. Ross writes from Pismo Beach, California.
s Blunt's Forty Words for Sorrow takes place during a dreary February on the Chippewa Reserve in northern Ontario, Canada. Blunt's bone-chilling description of the snowbound and desolate area is so crisp and concise that you practically need mittens to turn the pages: "All around…
iles Blunt’s Forty Words for Sorrow takes place during a dreary February on the Chippewa Reserve in northern Ontario, Canada. Blunt’s bone-chilling description of the snowbound and desolate area is so crisp and concise that you practically need mittens to turn the pages: “All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal gray and even in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks deep mauve.” In this frigid setting, a serial killer is on the loose, and Blunt depicts the crime scenes in particularly graphic, and frightening, detail.
John Cardinal, a homicide detective with the Algonquin Bay Police Department in Ontario, has a lot on his mind. He’s obsessed with solving the case of several missing teenagers. In addition, he must simultaneously deal with a new partner, departmental politics, his wife’s ongoing illness and the financing of his daughter’s expensive education. While on the trail of the serial killer, Cardinal is a man with his own secrets. As a result, he himself becomes the target of an investigation. Who is investigating the investigator and why? Can Lise Delorme, his new partner, be trusted? More importantly, can Cardinal and Delorme stop the murderer from claiming another victim? Creating credible characters can be a challenge for some suspense writers. Not so for Blunt; he populates his novel with vivid and complex characters. The meticulous police work they employ is both plausible and convincing. Secondary figures, such as Jerry Commanda, the Ontario Provincial Policeman, come alive with the author’s precise and energetic writing style.
Blunt skillfully alternates the action and viewpoint between the hunter and the hunted, all the while maintaining the momentum and emotional impact of the story. This technique gives us a terrifying glimpse into the sinister minds of sociopaths. And, as far as villains go, they don’t come much more evil than this.
Forty Words for Sorrow is a gripping tale that delivers escalating tension as the detective and the killer speed toward each other on a harrowing collision course. C. L. Ross writes from Pismo Beach, California.
iles Blunt's Forty Words for Sorrow takes place during a dreary February on the Chippewa Reserve in northern Ontario, Canada. Blunt's bone-chilling description of the snowbound and desolate area is so crisp and concise that you practically need mittens to turn the pages: "All around…
Do we ever really know those close to us? Author Kieran Scott probes this question deeply in the sharp and stylish Wish You Were Gone. A bump in the night leads to the horrific discovery of a loved one’s body, and the secrets just keep spilling out as suburban wife and mom Emma Walsh tries to unravel the complex web of lies that made up her “perfect” life.
When a noise jolts Emma awake in the wee hours, she doesn’t expect to find her husband James’ car crashed into the garage—and James deceased inside it. Though Emma’s life appears ideal, with a beautiful house in a tony New Jersey suburb, a spouse who runs a successful sports PR firm in Manhattan and two beautiful teens in private school, only Emma and her kids know it’s all a facade. James had alcoholism and was prone to fits of rage, getting into a physical altercation with his own children mere hours before smashing his prized BMW. But is his demise more than a simple case of drunk driving? Meanwhile, one of Emma’s best pals, single mom Lizzie, is struggling with her finances, while Emma’s other close friend, successful lawyer Gray, is dealing with a suddenly scarily unpredictable spouse. Are their problems intertwined, tied up in James’ complicated legacy?
In her debut thriller, Scott, who has previously published romance and YA, displays a whole new talent for complex adult suspense. Though Wish You Were Gone is a quick read, it’s also thought provoking and relatable. Emma’s not the only one hiding things; everyone has secrets behind closed doors, whether it’s a pile of unpaid bills, trouble with a peer group or a partner struggling with unexpected mood swings and irrational actions. Through bite-size chapters from the perspectives of her teenage children and her two closest friends, we learn the personal issues they all fight to cover up until it’s almost too late.
Each of Scott’s characters is multifaceted and realistic, from inquisitive Emma to relentless, Type A Gray, to Emma’s children: Gifted athlete Hunter is traumatized by his final encounter with his dad, and artistic Kelsey longs to escape a school she doesn’t fit into and harbors her own guilt over her father’s last day. Though we don’t get her perspective, Lizzie’s youngest daughter, Willow, a proud outsider and gifted magician with a penchant for taking what doesn’t belong to her, shines as well.
Wish You Were Gone has a fascinating mystery at its center, but it’s ultimately a character-driven story featuring real people with real problems.
Wish You Were Gone has a fascinating mystery at its center, but it’s ultimately a character-driven story featuring real people with real problems.
ne of the most remarkable things about the latest entry in John Lescroart’s series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy is the utter freshness of the material. Through a half dozen outings (The 13th Juror, The Mercy Rule), Lescroart has managed to keep his regular characters three-dimensional and consistently interesting. In The Hearing, the characters that have populated Lescroart’s previous novels find new intrigue in the political and social worlds of San Francisco.
When a prominent black San Francisco attorney is found murdered, the key suspect is a homeless heroin addict found at the scene holding the gun and her jewelry. Because it is an election year, the politically ambitious and ruthless District Attorney Sharron Pratt decides to press for the death penalty to reverse her soft-on-crime image. The suspect’s brother is a close friend of Lescroart’s suave Irish lawyer, and against his better judgment, Dismas Hardy is persuaded to take the case.
As he digs into the evidence, trying to find a way to spare his client’s life, Hardy finds the case has strange ties to other political and legal goings-on in the city. An almost incestuous relationship between business, the prosecutor’s office and the murder victim has Hardy wondering, in spite of damning physical evidence, if his client actually had anything to do with the murder. The cop on the case, the black Jewish detective Abe Glitsky, who has reasons of his own for seeing the killer receive ultimate justice, also begins to have doubts about the guilt of the accused. Together, he and Hardy try to unravel the truth from a thicket of corruption and venality. Lescroart’s story is enriched by a careful rendering of the city that gives his legal thrillers a special flair. Even with a sharply disapproving portrait of corruption in city politics, Lescroart’s love of San Francisco comes through on every page.
With plenty of legal twists and turns, The Hearing will be an irresistible read for Lescroart’s legion of fans and all those who appreciate a well-crafted courtroom drama.
Michael Grollman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.
ne of the most remarkable things about the latest entry in John Lescroart's series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy is the utter freshness of the material. Through a half dozen outings (The 13th Juror, The Mercy Rule), Lescroart has managed to…
Lena Gereghty had a rough go of it in medical school, where burnout and mounting debt drained her motivation. When her Aunt Clare, a renowned specialist in medieval botany, offered her an internship in Italy, Lena pounced on the chance to escape and heal. For two glorious years she felt purpose, joy and even a flickering of renewed passion for medicine.
Alas, those halcyon days suffer an abrupt end at the beginning of debut author Kit Mayquist’s Tripping Arcadia when floundering family finances draw Lena back to Boston. Her father was injured at and fired from work, and her parents desperately need her help. She’s primed to take the first position offered, despite a parade’s worth of red flags at the weirdest job interview ever—assistant to Dr. Prosenko, family physician for the powerful Verdeau family..
Lena soon realizes the Verdeau family secrets go far beyond rich people-eccentric into the realm of downright depraved. While she’s ostensibly meant to help the doctor tend to Jonathan, heir to patriarch Martin’s massive fortune, Lena is soon on duty for debauched parties at the family’s Berkshires mansion. The outfits are stunning, the food plentiful, the drugs slipped into attendees’ drinks so liberally that there’s a room just for treating overdoses.
Lena struggles with culture shock heavily tinged with disgust and frustration: Martin is often cruel yet never challenged; Jonathan is quite ill yet drinks heavily; and his sister, Audrey, is magnetically appealing yet aloof. But Lena’s well paid so she goes along, despite becoming increasingly horrified at what she learns about the Verdeaus.
As Lena plots poisonous revenge (who says internships aren’t useful?), Mayquist embraces the gothic genre with delicious glee, peeling back a shimmery overlay of glamour to expose the rot beneath. With Tripping Arcadia, he has crafted a tale that thrums with eat-the-rich vibes and the exhilarating prospect of a have-not prevailing over the have-everythings. Its reckoning with the state of work in a capitalist society will energize readers, and they’ll be rooting for the flawed yet captivating Lena through every creative twist and dark detail.
Kit Mayquist’s debut is a gothic thriller that thrums with eat-the-rich vibes and the exhilarating prospect of a have-not prevailing over the have-everythings.
I have been a fan of C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett mysteries since the outset of the series. The 22nd offering, Shadows Reel, narrows in on Pickett’s pal, outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski, as he hunts down the thieves who killed some of his prized raptors and stole the rest of them. Romanowski is a sidekick in the mold of Spenser’s Hawk or Elvis Cole’s Joe Pike: hardboiled, loyal to a fault and probably tougher than the nominal hero of the tale. That said, Romanowski’s quarry is easily as well trained as he, and younger and stronger to boot, which is a potentially lethal combination for the aging warrior. Meanwhile, a Nazi relic creates quite a buzz in the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming—especially after its owner, a crusty old fishing guide, gets murdered most gruesomely. It will not be the last relic-related murder, as the killer has instructions to let nothing stand in his way, and he takes these instructions very literally. A recurring theme in these books is Pickett’s struggle with his deep-seated “cowboy code” morality, which is juxtaposed against the often frustrating legalities of the situations he comes up against. This time out, that conflict will give Pickett’s conscience a world-class workout.
★ The Harbor
Katrine Engberg’s third mystery featuring Copenhagen cops Anette Werner and Jeppe Kørner perfectly balances a mysterious disappearance with the no less intriguing domestic concerns of its two investigators. At the start of The Harbor, Oscar Dreyer-Hoff, the teenage son of a wealthy family, has gone missing, perhaps kidnapped, and clues are thin on the ground. The family boat is missing, and Oscar’s backpack has turned up near the vessel’s harbor mooring. His girlfriend says she has no idea where he is and in general acts very unconcerned about the whole thing. Some time back, scandal rocked the Dreyer-Hoff family, triggering some threatening letters that must be reconsidered in light of Oscar’s disappearance. In the background, home life in the Werner and Kørner households has become less than optimal. Anette is considering an affair with a person of interest in the case, and Jeppe struggles to balance the demands of work and his new lover, whose children are none too happy about their mom’s beau. Engberg is a must read for fans of Nordic noir, and two more books starring Anette and Jeppe will soon be translated into English.
★ Girl in Ice
Erica Ferencik’s Girl in Ice is an excellent, thrilling mystery set against a quasi-science fiction backdrop.Linguist Valerie “Val” Chesterfield has accepted an unusual assignment: She’s traveling to Greenland to meet a girl rescued from an ice field who initially appeared to have frozen to death but has somehow survived. The girl speaks no known language, and Chesterfield is one of only a few scholars with sufficient knowledge of archaic Northern European languages to try and communicate with her. But there is a more pressing connection for Val: Her twin brother, Andy, died at the same Arctic outpost not so long ago, and try as she might, she cannot make any sense of his death. The novel veers into speculative territory as Wyatt, the team leader, begins to entertain the idea that the girl is not a recent freezing victim but rather is from another epoch entirely, having been cryogenically preserved using technology lost to the ages. With its fascinating science and compelling characters (one or more of whom may be a murderer), Girl in Ice demands to be read in one sitting.
★ The Berlin Exchange
It’s rare for an espionage novel’s protagonist to be a traitor, but author Joseph Kanon quite successfully breaks that unwritten rule in his 10th novel, The Berlin Exchange. As a physicist on the controversial Manhattan Project, the U.S. military program that introduced the world to atomic warfare, Martin Keller was privy to top-secret design and implementation information. Motivated by dubious idealism, Keller shared some intelligence with the opposing team and received a lengthy sentence when his subterfuge was found out. Fast forward to 1963: A prisoner exchange has been arranged, and Keller finds himself set free in East Berlin. It is a freedom that is fraught with terror from the get-go. As he passes the checkpoint, he narrowly escapes being killed by a sniper, and it will take all the resources at his disposal to stay one step ahead of whoever is trying to kill him in this chilly, elegant and consistently excellent espionage thriller.
It’s a great month for mysteries: All four of the books in our Whodunit column received a starred review!
British author Janice Hallett’s The Appeal is a cleverly constructed, meticulously detailed, often hilarious epistolary novel that kicks off with an intriguing premise. Senior law partner Roderick Tanner gives young lawyers Charlotte and Femi an important new project. In just a few days, they must work their way through a mountain of correspondence (texts, emails, instant messages) and other materials (newspaper clippings, flyers, receipts) crucial to the appeal he’ll soon be filing. But he doesn’t tell them who’s done what; he wants them to immerse themselves, to come to their own conclusions about the people in question. And quickly!
Hallett deputizes the reader right along with the lawyers with this approach, which gradually engenders an understanding of—and fascination with—a family-led amateur theater group. The close-knit Fairway Players, who are based in a small town outside London, are led by director Martin Hayward and his wife (and leading lady), Helen. They’re one big happy theatrical family, ready to mount a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, until tragedy strikes. Martin and Helen’s granddaughter, Poppy, is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and enormously pricey experimental treatments are the only possible cure. Fundraising appeals begin in earnest alongside preparations for the play, and the stress soon begins to show in snippy text threads, contentious group chats and lots and lots of duplicitous emails.
It’s mightily impressive how skillfully Hallett shades in her characters’ personalities and ulterior motives, especially since so many of them are actors and thus adept at emotional manipulation. The layers of revelation are plentiful and pleasing—as is the feeling that, as the pages turn, the culprits and their intentions are becoming increasingly clear. Or are they? A long list of suspects (15 by this reviewer’s count!) and an endlessly shifting mass of clues add up to twists and misdirects that will keep readers a captive audience until the very end of this thought-provoking and deliciously dramatic debut.
Janice Hallett’s The Appeal is a cleverly constructed, meticulously detailed, often hilarious epistolary novel of suspense.
A speculative spy thriller Tim Powers is a masterful melder of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. This foremost North American magic realist (author of The Anubis Gates, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Earthquake Weather and many others) mesmerizes readers with hidden layers of plots and conspiracies. His latest novel, Declare, is vintage Powers speculative fiction based on documented facts. Fact: Kim Philby was a British intelligence operative who defected to the Soviet Union. Fact: Philby worked for both sides and precipitated the greatest British cold war spy scandal. Fact: Philby spent years in the Middle East with his father, a noted Arabist. Powers excels at connecting historical dots his own way, placing Philby precisely where he was at any given time, but with different and far more fanciful motivations. In Nazi-occupied Paris, British double agent Andrew Hale proves a worthy nemesis for Philby, though his connection to the stuttering spy remains mysterious until a chilling climax on Mount Ararat’s frozen peak. In the early 1960s, Hale is called back to atone for his failure on Mount Ararat years before, when the men he led were either killed or driven insane. Hale’s journey is a mind-blowing trip through the cold war.
Blending his Le CarrŽ-style plot with history, theology, the Arabian Nights and the true nature of the ankh (anchor), Powers proves how vibrant fantasy can be. If you yearn for an original, innovative author, you can’t miss with Tim Powers.
A speculative spy thriller Tim Powers is a masterful melder of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. This foremost North American magic realist (author of The Anubis Gates, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Earthquake Weather and many others) mesmerizes readers with hidden…
Janice Hallett has worked as a journalist, magazine editor and government speechwriter in her native England. Now she’s adding novelist to her CV with The Appeal, an inventive and darkly funny epistolary mystery set in the drama-filled world of amateur theater. In this Q&A, Hallett revisits her own theatrical experiences and reveals what it was like to construct a story with no fewer than 15 viable suspects.
The many plausible suspects in The Appeal make it great fun to play amateur sleuth while reading. Was it fun to write? Did you change your mind as you went along, in terms of who you wanted the murderer to be, or did you always know whodunit? It was huge fun, not least because I wrote it entirely on spec, with no deadline except a vague feeling I didn’t want to spend longer than a year working on it. At the start, I had no idea who the victim or murderer was going to be. I let the story evolve as it went along, then did some intricate reverse engineering to make what I wrote in the end fit the beginning.
Before writing this book, you’ve written and directed plays. Did that give you the confidence to dive right into an epistolary novel with lots of layers and complexities and characters? My scriptwriting background played into The Appeal for sure. A stage play is a bunch of characters interacting before your eyes. An epistolary novel is the exact same, but in your mind’s eye. I have to say the greatest confidence-building aspect of playwriting is its immediacy. The performance is live—you have actors giving their skill and energy to bring your characters to life—and the audience is live—watching and listening to the story you wrote. There is no hiding place. If it doesn’t work, you and everyone else in the room will know it. If it does work . . . let’s just say nothing will ever beat the moment that first audience laughed at the first joke in my first play. I was hooked from that day on.
“At the start, I had no idea who the victim or murderer was going to be.”
How did you keep track of all of the messages, notes, transcripts, etc., that you created? Were there pushpins, sticky notes, whiteboards and/or spreadsheets involved? Did you harken back to any of your own correspondence as you created your characters’ varied communication styles? Strangely, I made very few notes. I did a lot of scrolling back and forth though, and paid particular attention to how each character opened and signed off, so I had a lot of information to keep in my head. I most certainly took inspiration from 20 years of email correspondence, both professional and personal. Email communication is a great leveler. What we don’t write speaks just as loudly as anything we do. What’s exposed are aspects of your true self, such as your empathy, your attention to detail and how you really feel about the person you’re “speaking” to. I’m quite sad to see texting and messaging take over from good old-fashioned email.
You chose to not include correspondence from certain characters, such as enigmatic newcomers Sam and Kel. Instead, we learn about them through others’ impressions and opinions. What motivated you to reveal versus conceal particular characters or events in your story? This was a happy accident, but it ended up being the aspect of The Appeal I am most proud of. When I first decided to write a novel, I’d had a vague idea for a TV series (I was working as a TV writer at the time) about a couple who return from overseas volunteering and whose experiences there inform their suspicions about a local fundraising campaign. When I started the novel, I thought why not take the same story but present it as emails that fly back and forth—“offstage” so to speak—between minor players. That’s why we don’t hear from the three main characters, and I think it’s one of the most effective devices in the book.
The Fairway Players is a close-knit theater troupe presided over by Martin and Helen Hayward. When the power couple shares that their granddaughter has been stricken with a rare cancer, the group fundraises like mad in hopes of paying for pricey experimental treatments. What made you want to explore crowdfunding? When I started the novel in 2018, I’d noticed a proliferation of crowdfunding campaigns on Facebook raising money for drugs or medical treatments abroad. It struck me how enthusiastically people pull together and how fast money can be raised that way. But at the same time, money is like blood: It attracts sharks, like drug companies who capitalize on families’ desperation, or even ordinary people who have debts to pay or simple terminal greed and a complete lack of morals. Cases in which someone has blatantly lied about their child’s (or their own) illness to raise money from friends and family have appalled and fascinated me in equal measure.
“What we don’t write speaks just as loudly as anything we do.”
Tight bonds are formed in theater troupes, whether via growing into roles together, shared nervousness as the premiere approaches or camaraderie after a show well done. What drew you to exploring what happens when such a strong bond begins to fray? A drama group becomes like a family, with emotional bonds among the members—and just like in a family, the stakes can suddenly become much higher. Even when things are falling apart, you can’t just walk away: The show must go on.
There are insiders and outsiders in The Appeal, which makes for lots of tension bubbling under the surface as the players jockey for social dominance. What about that sort of group dynamic fascinates you most? Like most writers, I’m a natural outsider. In fact, when I attend writerly events, and I’m in a room full of outsiders, I’m still the outsider, so that dynamic is very familiar to me. But I’m truly fascinated by people who are the opposite: natural socializers, witty and funny, able to hold the attention of a crowd and get them onside. Charisma is magical. It can elevate someone through the social hierarchy by osmosis.
In The Appeal, there are characters whose social standing is earned by their proximity to the alpha family. When you arrive in a strong, tightknit community like that, it can be hard to find your place in it. Sam and Kel slowly work their way in, but Issy, who has been there much longer, struggles to be accepted by anyone. The social hierarchy can be horribly unfair, as can individuals, who might choose to ally themselves with the strongest character, rather than the nicest or most deserving person in the group.
The Appeal is often very funny, with sharp insights into the ways in which certain types of people ingratiate themselves, manipulate a situation or gleefully gossip. Does writing humor come naturally to you? Do you consider yourself a funny person? If you want to empty a room in double-quick time, get me to tell a joke. While I wouldn’t say I’m funny in person, I gravitate toward comedy when I’m writing. Making people laugh is a powerful tool to help you engage them with your story. Having said that, if you’re writing a thriller in which the aim is to build tension, you have to be very careful how you use humor, because laughter in that instance will disperse the tension immediately. It’s a tricky balance!
Can you share with us a bit about the significance of having your fictional Fairway Players stage a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons? The Raglan Players staged All My Sons in 2010. It was one of the more serious, grittier plays we did over the years, among many light comedies and farces. It was a huge challenge I’m proud to say we rose to. I think if you’re familiar with the play, there will be an added layer of intrigue. It’s about the death of a couple’s son, which the audience grows to suspect is either directly or tangentially their fault. It has a very strong female lead role, that of a woman who lives in a world of her own. I’ll say no more!
What’s next for you? Any upcoming books or other projects you’d like to tell us about? My second novel, The Twyford Code, launched in the U.K. in January 2022. It’s about a former prisoner who, at the suggestion of his probation officer, sets out to investigate the disappearance of his teacher on a school trip in 1983. It will be published by Atria in the U.S. in 2023. I’m currently writing my third novel, and there’s a fourth percolating in my mind at this very moment.
Author photo by Gaia Banks.
Author Janice Hallett revisits her theatrical experiences and shows how they helped her construct her darkly funny epistolary mystery, The Appeal.
ÊDeep South, the latest installment in the wildly popular Anna Pigeon series, finds our intrepid park ranger assigned to the Natchez Trace Parkway in rural Mississippi. In the wee hours of the morning, as she pilots her Rambler (can she be the only heroine in history who drives a Rambler?) through the pre-dawn gloom, she spies a hand painted sign nailed to a tree: REPENT. Then another, this one riddled with bullet holes: REPENT; FINAL WARNING. Anna has been on the road for 22 hours straight, surely a record for a Rambler, en route from her last posting at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, and she is beginning to have the unsettling feeling that she has made a mistake.
Her meager possessions unloaded from a small U-Haul trailer, Anna settles in to her role as district ranger. As is usually the case in Barr’s novels (and Anna’s life), things don’t stay quiet for long. It seems a local high school girl has gone missing on prom night. When Anna’s black lab, Taco, unearths a bloody scarf near the site of a recent disturbance, Anna suspects the worst. Her fears are borne out with the discovery of a girl’s body, hastily disposed of in the deep woods. The bloody sheet over the girl’s head, Ku Klux Klan style, has the earmarks of a political bombshell.
The plot thickens as Anna discovers that the Caucasian victim was carrying on a secret (well, not entirely) relationship with a black college football hero. Add to that the fact that her prom date, an obnoxious white jock, is withholding information on the crime, and you have the beginnings of a case that could have racial implications far beyond the boundaries of Mississippi.
Several of the persistent regional stereotypes are addressed in Deep South, including Civil War reenactments, old time religion, the lingering racial prejudices on both sides of the color line, and even the high school girls’ predilection for wearing copious quantities of cosmetics. As with the previous Anna Pigeon novels, Deep South is fast-paced and well-crafted. Ms. Barr is on familiar ground here, as she makes her home in Mississippi, and has served as a park ranger in the Natchez Trace Parkway area.
Bruce Tierney is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.
ÊDeep South, the latest installment in the wildly popular Anna Pigeon series, finds our intrepid park ranger assigned to the Natchez Trace Parkway in rural Mississippi. In the wee hours of the morning, as she pilots her Rambler (can she be the only heroine in…
All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack. True North supplies a satisfactory one, and throws in a scary human one as well, so nothing else is required for the reader here but a comfortable sofa and the off switch on the television remote control.
Don’t let the author’s formidable name spook you into saving her first novel for your more literary moments. True, this book is thoughtful, and will raise your consciousness about the anomalous position of Native Americans in the state of Alaska. Mainly though, it wants to alert you to the extraordinary ambiance of the place and give you a thrill along the way.
Bailey Lockhart carries baggage from a traumatic New England past when she becomes a bush pilot in the wilds of Alaska. She keeps the past at bay by buying a piece of wilderness land and burying herself in the routine of sheer survival. For six years it works, but suddenly the arrival of a naively arrogant young couple forces her out of her protected isolation and reopens her cache of hurt. What’s more, this painful episode comes at a time when the local native population has begun to splinter in its varying reactions to U.
S. government policies, and she is caught between renewed discomfort as a white outsider and her affection for the people, especially Kash, the leader of the more peaceful local political movement.
Eventually she is forced by circumstance and coincidence to come to terms with her wounded and wounding memories though not before death and a clarified love intervene.
Kafka is a certified wilderness emergency medical technician, comfortable in the wilds of both Alaska and Wisconsin, and has taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. Her early brashly driven prose softens into a lover’s appreciation of a familiar country, where the human beings do not always live up to the land. As first novels so often do, this one improves before your eyes, gaining skill and grace with each succeeding page.
Alaska will always steal the show, of course, but read this one for the traditional thriller values of suspense and a good story. Popcorn is optional.
Maude McDaniel is a reviewer in Cumberland, Maryland.
All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack. True North supplies a satisfactory one, and throws in a scary human one as well, so nothing else is required for the reader here but a comfortable sofa and the off…
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