In this latest collection of short book reviews, I continue my journey through Mick Herron’s Slough House & Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, chill to a soon-to-be-banned-in-Florida horror novel with an LGBTQ theme, eagerly devour a new & long-awaited space opera by the authors of The Expanse, travel through time with Lieutenant Graham Gore of the lost Franklin Expedition, and savor a hot dose of Finnish Weird.
Slough House (Slough House #7)
Mick Herron
I have arrived at the most recent Slough House installments, the seventh and eighth novels in the series. I finished Slough House yesterday and will start Bad Actors next, wrapping up the novels (for now) in a rush. Which is not like me at all, but these are so good I can’t stop, never mind that my copy of Bad Actors has a due date.
Slough House re-introduces a couple of characters from the first novel, Slow Horses. One I remembered but one I didn’t, so I brushed up by rewatching Apple TV’s Slow Horses, season one, episode one, the televised adaptation being so faithful to the books I figured I wouldn’t miss anything. Now, in addition to reading the most recent novels, I’ve started a complete rewatch of the TV series.
The action in this seventh novel is set in the time of Brexit and the divisions it created in British society and government. Herron explains in an afterword that it’s also set in the immediate pre-Covid period, and I expect the pandemic will provide part of the backdrop for the eighth novel, Bad Actors. I haven’t decided whether the topicality Herron introduces into Slough House novels is important or not, but with this novel it’s beginning to seem more central to the plot and I’ll pay closer attention when reading the next novel. Beyond which, I pray there will be more.
I regularly comment on the opening and ending of every Slough House novel, a solo journey through Slough House itself, sometimes guided by a wandering cat, a mouse, a tendril of London fog, etc. In this novel a real estate agent, an exemplar of the breed, takes us by the hand. That everything is for sale is a recurring thread of Herron’s, and here, as with the earlier novels, the requisite cliffhanger ending.
Bury Your Gays
Chuck Tingle
Since my birthday falls on Halloween, I traditionally host our October book club meeting. The selection, no surprise, is horror. IAW our club’s methodology, whereby the host selects the genre and proposes titles for the group to vote on, I put out a list of five recent horror novels, all available through our public library system (oh, if only other monthly hosts would apply this criterion!) then broke a tie vote in favor of Bury Your Gays.
A happy tie-breaker, it turns out. Initially a breezy and entertaining look at the Hollywood movie and television business through the eyes of Misha, a screenwriter and show runner, the horror begins to build as evil characters from past movies begin to appear and threaten him. Some of these creations are genuinely chill-inducing, even to a jaded reader like me: The Smoker, Mrs. Why, The Lamb (I wish those movies weren’t fictional — I would totally watch them alone in the house some dark and stormy night). Adding to the creepiness, Misha isn’t the only one to see these apparitions: his friend Tara and lover Zeke are threatened by them as well. They’re not phantasms. They’re real: witnesses post viral videos of them, and innocent bystanders lose minds and even lives at their hands.
The horror behind the horror (and if this isn’t topical I don’t know what is) is the Algorithm, which makes profit-based decisions for Harold Brothers Studios, the entertainment juggernaut Misha works for. Without edging into spoiler territory, I can’t say more.
Equally topical is the trope referred to in the books’s title: Bury Your Gays, whereby LGBTQ characters never live happily ever after. Misha himself is a semi-closeted gay man, and reflective chapters reveal pivotal moments in his childhood that help us understand why he says to his friend Tara, “I’m Hollywood out, but not Montana out.” Misha’s closet is a central conflict (again: spoiler territory!), resolved in dramatic fashion, with quite comic fallout as the Algorithm realizes letting gay characters live might make the studio more money than killing them.
Misha resolves his inner conflicts and almost undoes the harm done by the Algorithm, but needs a bit of help from his friend Mary Sue, er, Tara, right at the end … a bit of a hat trick IMO, but one which did not interfere with my enjoyment of this fine, entertaining, often horrifying read.
And now for something completely different …
I peg this as a potential banned book, once the torch & pitchfork brigade catches some middle- or high-schooler reading it, based on the main character’s sexuality and the message that gay people deserve happy endings as much as anyone else. So far the book itself hasn’t been banned, but I note with amusement the author has been: Chuck Tingle was recently disinvited from a scheduled appearance at a Texas Library Association event, based not on what he’s written but because he only appears in public wearing a pink mask. Link: https://kfmx.com/controversial-author-banned-from-texas-library-event-for-an-unusual-reason/.
The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War #1)
James S.A. Corey
I pre-ordered The Mercy of Gods the day I heard about it, and read as soon as it appeared on my Kindle. Quite a different story from that of The Expanse, but like it, one that follows the adventures of a small and relatable group of humans. This group, though, has a spy in its midst — not there to spy on them, but through them, their enslavers — the spy is part of a larger, galaxy-encompassing war the humans are initially unaware of.
In The Mercy of Gods we see only a tiny slice of that larger war. The humans experience an even tinier slice of that, as the Carryx capture Anjiin, their home planet, and haul them on an interstellar slave ship to their own planet to work on various scientific projects. The story centers on the humans and their experiences there. Bigger things are brewing, and I hope some of the follow-on novels will give us a greater understanding of the Carryx and some of its captive species, not just the humans we meet in this first installment. Speaking of which — humans forced to live in confined quarters with other captive species — will anyone else be reminded of Clarke’s Rama novels? Oh, and isn’t it convenient that they all breathe the same air?
We’re left to speculate how humans came to populate Anjin in the first place, a planet with an entirely different tree of life than Earth’s, somehow transformed to be hospitable to our biome as well. Perhaps in the dim recesses of time, Anjin was a planet in one of the Gate systems humans colonized in The Expanse?
Rather unlike the plucky group we quickly came to love in The Expanse series of novels, the humans of The Captive’s War, while equally plucky, are a generally dislikable lot, and I imagine some readers will be put off by that. Not me: Jim and Naomi and Alex and Amos were too good to be true anyway.
I eagerly look forward to what Ty & That Guy have in store for us.
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley
The Ministry of Time is equal parts entertaining and profound. I saw the inevitable romantic sub-plot coming from page one, but the time-travel angle was different enough to engage my attention. Who among us has not imagined trying to explain our world to a visitor from some distant past (or am I just weird)?
The lost Franklin Expedition, about which I’ve read fictional and historical accounts, was another draw, as was, later in the novel, a tale of espionage, but what really kept me going was the friendship of Maggie, Arthur, and Graham, three well-developed characters from different historical eras (Graham Gore, for example, is a Royal Navy officer from 1845, a member of the Franklin Expedition). Least favorite moments? The big reveal about Adele, and the beginnings of war with the future.
More than enough about this time-travel story is fresh and different, and readers inured to the genre will not be bored. I would love to see this story televised!
Speaking of which, Netflix is currently streaming The Terror, an AMC series based on the Franklin Expedition, and Graham Gore indeed makes an appearance in it — in fact, I almost expected an eerie portal opening up on the ice before him, and for him to walk through and vanish.
The Core of the Sun
Johanna Sinisalo
This is my book club read for September 2024. It’ll be interesting to hear what other members thought … I quite enjoyed it.
Vanna (nee Vera) is a morlock passing as an eloi, and yes, Johanna Sinisalo had her work cut out to coax my mind past those scary underground scenes from the 1960 film The Time Machine, but never fear, she succeeded, while also helping me look beyond 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Stepford Wives, and North Korea. In the end, I found it possible to believe a small and isolated nation, high up near the Arctic, could cut itself off from the rest of the heathen world and breed a sub-race of gorgeous, submissive tradwives. She failed to convince me that chili peppers have anything near the powers she ascribes to them, however, or that even a nation as repressive as her fictional Finland would outlaw them … but I was along for the ride by that point, thoroughly beguiled, so why not?
It helps that Vanna is a synesthete, one of those rare people who see colors in numbers and taste shapes in food. She has an additional gift, which she uses to her advantage (and is apparently unaware others cannot do the same): she can smell another person’s anxiety, fear, confidence, contentment, avarice, or ill intent, and alter her behavior to quell their suspicions and gain their trust. Vanna, in other words, is a piece of work, and I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff.
It’s a fine story, with subplots, mysteries, and suspense, more than enough to keep you turning pages. I really shall have to read more by this author.
A Darkness More Than Night (Harry Bosch #7)
Michael Connelly
I started my Harry Bosch journey with a few early and late titles, along with the newest ones featuring Renee Ballard. I’m now working my way through the unread titles, this time in order, the better to track his character development. Lately I’ve discovered there are “Harry Bosch Universe” novels as well, two of them featuring major players in this, the seventh Bosch novel, A Darkness More than Night.
Oh, and then there are the Lincoln Lawyer novels. Good god, enough already. I’ll finish the Bosch & Ballard novels in order now that I’ve started, but the secondary and tertiary stories featuring related characters are going on the back burner for now.
In this one, parts of which were incorporated into a season of the streaming TV series Bosch on Amazon, Harry narrowly escapes a complicated setup masterminded by a sociopathic movie producer and a former cop with a grudge. Pretty easily, too, now that I reflect on it. Harry is able to almost instantly convince the former FBI profiler he’s not the guilty party all the evidence indicates, then almost supernaturally shows up on his former accuser’s boat in the nick of time to save him from being murdered by the former cop, and the whole elaborate setup collapses in an instant. Too easy? That’s how it hit me, as if Connelly was in a rush to finish the novel.
Still, it’s a Bosch novel. Which means it’s a great read, flaws and all.
Thanks for some fun reviews, I’ll be going with Slough House next. Slow Horses is a popular tv series around here, season 4 coming.
Re your Air Minded oeuvre, I just read an interesting non-fiction written by a WW 2 submarine skipper “Salt And Steel” by Edward Beach; not overwhelmed by details of stalking Japanese warships and merchantmen, more attuned to the process of the author becoming a naval officer, in the end fighting to save the US Navy from the post war budget and mission axes.
First I found something I had never heard of: the Revolt of the Admirals, 1949. They believed the US Navy should play the leading role in the Cold War and fought to keep the US Air Force from being the sole delivery platform of nukes. Add to that Rickover and the introduction of nuclear power to navy vessels and force projection. Once the problems with faulty torpedoes and ships tethered to fuel supply bases was solved, the USN figured submarines and aircraft carriers could vector nukes as well as or better than the Air Force. Schism happened.
Aslo, just enough policy discussion comparing naval vessels and the B-36’s nuclear capabilities. I knew of the Convair B-36 but never grasped the size (Wikipedia shows the -36 and -29 side-by-side) and details of that new aircraft, a-fricking-mazing. Oh, and how turf-hungry the new US Air Force was.; it was too early for USAF to really consider a viable missile force, so I think if the B-52 were proposed instead of the -36 we’d have seen a very different cold war.
Robert
Thanks for the tip on Salt and Steel, Robert. Every service wanted a piece of the nuclear deterrent pie, for sure. The “Triad” concept is the result of that. BTW, one of the four surviving B-36s is at Pima Air & Space Museum, where I was once a docent. Truly a marvel, but then again so is the B-52, though it pains a fighter pilot to say so.