This week: hired assassins chasing Hemingway's papers, plus Alejandro Zambra's book of fiction disguised as a standardized test.
The Branson Beauty
Touches of sly humor add appeal to Booth’s standout debut, a mystery set in Branson, Mo. Hank Worth, the new sheriff in town, faces his first real case after leaving the Kansas City police when a showboat owned by powerful businessman Henry Gallagher, the Branson Beauty, runs aground in an Ozark lake. Hank spearheads the resources needed to get more than a hundred stranded people off the boat safely. What he wasn’t expecting to find was an incoherent captain, Albert Eberhardt, at the wheel and a murdered teenager, Mandy Bryson, in a locked room, and this is just the beginning of a tangle of surprises and deceit. Hank and his highly competent deputies search for answers, especially when more crimes come to light. The pieces come together slowly, but, when they do, there’s more than one aha moment for Hank and the reader. Betrayals from within the sheriff’s department and issues left unresolved hint at much more to come in what promises to be a most engaging regional police series.
The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
Cooper (The Oil Kings), a scholar of oil markets and U.S.-Iran relations, recounts the rise and fall of Iran’s glamorous Pahlavi dynasty, challenging common characterizations of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as a brutal dictator. Focusing on the last Shah’s rule, Cooper explains the founding of the Pahlavi monarchy and details the various achievements of the White Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, “one of the 20th century’s great experiments in liberal social and economic reform.” These transformed Iran “from a semifeudal baron state into a modern industrial powerhouse” while also encompassing various social advances in women’s rights, education, health care, and more. Such reforms, Cooper argues, qualify the Western-oriented Shah as more of a benevolent autocrat than a tyrant. The first part of the book is a sweeping survey of the Shah’s time in power; the second is a riveting day-by-day account of the 1978–1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy. Based on various documentary sources as well as impressive access to royalists, revolutionaries, Queen Farah Pahlavi, and various U.S. officials, this thorough work is immensely detailed yet readable and continuously engaging.
The Hemingway Thief
Henry “Coop” Cooper, the narrator of Harris’s stellar debut, is thinking about murder—of his own pseudonym. When his first literary novel is widely panned, he turns to writing vampire romance novels under an assumed name—which are immediate bestsellers, to his unending shame and his agent’s glee. In remote Pendira, Mexico, Coop is taking a break on his agent’s orders, when he and Grady Doyle—the new owner of the dive hotel and bar Coop inhabits—interrupt the beating of a grifter, Ebenezer Milch, who has quite the story to tell. In Paris of 1922, an uncle of Milch’s stole the legendary suitcase containing Ernest Hemingway’s papers, and now a book collector with nefarious ties and hired assassins is after the suitcase. Coop winds up traveling across cartel-laden Mexico in a battered RV with an ex-DEA agent, a former hit man, and Milch in search of the suitcase, finding himself out of his depth at every turn. Filled with charming pop-culture references, this deft caper novel is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignant.
The Inseparables
Nadler’s (Wise Men) perceptive novel of a modern family unraveling revolves around three generations of women. Henrietta Olyphant is a recently widowed women’s studies professor, and the author of a decades-old trashy, sexy novel called The Inseparables, which is set to be reissued. Oona, Henrietta’s daughter, is divorcing her husband. And Oona’s daughter, Lydia, has suffered the misfortune of having a topless photo of her spread like wildfire around her private school. Without her husband, Henrietta struggles to keep up appearances and is forced to sell her home and possessions to pay the bills. Lydia worries that the boy who stole the photo from her phone will continue to release scandalous photos of her. Oona complicates her sad divorce—and her relationship with her daughter—by getting romantically involved with her couples counselor. Throughout each scene, Nadler captures the awkwardness of growing older during all phases of life. The characters share humiliations, yet also find the resilience to move on. This novel contains plenty of romance, tension, and tenderness to make for a rich and compelling read.
This Must Be the Place
O'Farrell (The Vainishing Act of Esme Lennox) spins a magical story in her new novel. On the surface, the story is about the unlikely meeting of Daniel, an American, and Claudette, a French-English former actress; the life they make together; the lives they lived before that. and their struggle to hold things together in the face of a secret from Daniel's past. But this description, though accurate, doesn't convey the depth of perception and detail. O'Farrell offers not just backstory, but surround-story, using first-, second- and third-person points of view to depict Daniel and Claudette's children, Daniel's mother, Claudette's brother and his wife, an ex-lover or two, a former friend, a bewildered assistant, and a woman Daniel meets by chance in the Bolivian high plains (who has her own story of betrayal). Across the present and the recent and more distant pasts, in Donegal, Ireland; Brooklyn; London; Sussex, England; and points south and east, relationships start, end, and last. There is enough possibility and randomness for three books, yet the story never feels overstuffed, and when it ends, the reader is stunned and grateful, relieved that in the face of all that can go (and have gone) wrong, some things have come right.
A World Without You
Through two gripping and very different narrative voices, Revis (the Across the Universe trilogy) examines a family struggling with a child’s severe mental illness. Bo, whose omnipresent visual delusions have left him believing that he can manipulate time, attends a boarding school for children with “exceptional needs” while his sister, Phoebe, excels socially and academically back at home. “I don’t have the luxury of allowing myself to break,” she reflects, thinking of her parents. “Because if I break, they’ll break too.” Unable to accept that his girlfriend, Sofía, committed suicide, Bo blames himself for trapping her in 1692 Puritan Massachusetts, and focuses relentlessly on saving her. Though striking imagery, Revis conveys the vitality and terror of Bo’s reality: “I stare down at the chaotic, beautiful timestream spreading out in front of me.... Any chance I had of pulling the end of Sofía’s string from the vortex disappears before my eyes.” The siblings’ perspectives capture the family’s daunting emotional, financial, and clinical challenges, conflicted feelings, and growing mutual compassion, creating a story that’s both heartbreaking and hopeful.
Multiple Choice
In this short, experimental book of fiction, Zambra (My Documents) skillfully adopts the form of a standardized test to spin off dozens of micro-tales. The form of the test, which is based on the actual Chilean Aptitude Test Zambra took as a youth, is composed of five numbered sections, totaling 90 questions. The book opens with questions and possible answers that are simply lists of words, not giving Zambra much room to stretch his storytelling wings. The following sections, composed of short sentences, read like flash fiction or prose poems and are frequently amusing and unexpected. Far more compelling are the longer “sentence elimination” sections wherein Zambra is able to deliver a self-contained short story in a handful of pages. In one story, a student convinces his smarter twin brother to take his exam for him. Another story presents a tricky problem for a couple getting married in Chile, when divorce was still illegal there. The final story is a touching message from a remorseful father to his son. Zambra’s writing is intensely tied to his Chilean identity, and nearly every story or text references Chile in some way. In just a few pages he manages to be repeatedly engaging, smart, funny, and sad.
