Deer Season by Erin Flanagan

University of Nebraska Press, 320 pages, $21.95 (c2021)

This is a special book and it is a mystery, but the emphasis is on character development. And on setting. And on plot. It’s everything done well.

It won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.

If you have grown up in a small town, maybe this book will strike a particular resonance with you. Everybody is up in everybody else’s business. Everybody, it seems, gossips, even the most saintly sometimes. Not that Alma Costagan is saintly and she hates gossip.

Alma still sees herself as a Chicago girl. So what is this middle-aged woman with wrecked dreams of a large family doing in rural Nebraska, helping to run a farm? She married Clyle — that’s not a typo of “Clyde” — who wooed Alma at college and worked for IBM in Chicago. When Clyle’s widowed mother became ill, he and Alma shut down their lives in Chicago, temporarily they thought, to help with the family farm in Nebraska. Even after his mother died, Clyle was still drawn to the small-town life he had always treasured and the hard farm work in which he found satisfaction. Alma thought she could adjust. Fifteen years later, she is pretty tired of trying to adjust. Alma speaks her mind and, as an ex-social worker, tries to help others. Blunt and in-your-face.

Hal is the person Alma has silently chosen for her project. Because of a swimming accident that occurred when he was two — due to the negligence of his careless mother — Hal has a diminished intellect. Clyle and Alma have taken him under their wing. He helps with chores around their farm and when he was younger he slept in their house. They’ve been helping him mainstream, but that has its limits. On the outside, Hal seems normal, even somewhat attractive. Many a woman has flirted with him, only to be dismayed at his inability to maintain a social interaction. 

Peggy Ahern is a 17-year-old next-door neighbor of the Costagans. She is smart, pretty, popular, and testing life on the wild side in Gunthrum, Nebraska, the latter on the sly, of course. Her 12-year-old brother Milo, also smart, knows she sometimes disappears late at night to meet up with her friends to party. In contrast, Milo follows the rules, is a good friend, tries to fly beneath the radar. He is the quiet to his sister’s loud. Surprisingly, they are mostly friends. Here’s a snippet about them:

For a twelve-year-old nerd and a volleyball-playing cheerleader, they had more in common than others might expect, and a lot of their time was spent talking about the days they’d leave for college, their Podunk years in Gunthrum behind them.

We mostly view the book by hanging out with Alma and Milo, although sometimes we follow Clyle. it is through their interactions with each other and the town that we view the disappearance of teenage Peggy one cold night.

At first, no one can find Peggy. Her parents pretend she has run away in a youthful escapade. Milo half believes she has done just that, to begin her life in the bigger world, but she wouldn’t have left without telling him. It is Milo who first reckons with the fact that she is probably dead. To her family, other people mouth platitudes and wildly optimistic predictions for Peggy’s return.

Sheriff Peck Randolph has never had to deal with this kind of case before. He is a big and stolid presence in Gunthrum, and knows when to pull back and when to push the locals with their wrongdoing. It doesn’t help that Peggy’s family doesn’t alert his office until she has been gone awhile. 

Mistaking a flirty move by Peggy one day at a picnic, Hal develops a crush on Peggy. He is twenty but does not understand adult interactions. He is besotted, and this is what eventually gets him into trouble. Peggy is gone; Hal must be responsible. The town’s focus has almost unanimously focused on Hal. Big, hot-tempered (because he can’t understand some situations), and with a dimming bulb, Hal cannot understand why people suspect him. He doesn’t even understand that people suspect him! It doesn’t help that when asked what he was doing the night of Peggy’s disappearance, it turns out he was in the vicinity of where she was last seen. When Alma and Clyle ask if he hit Peggy with his truck, Hal hems and haws and says he doesn’t think so.

That is the mystery in a nutshell. But the book is about so much more.

Using Peggy’s disappearance as a vehicle, author Erin Flanagan explores the dynamics of small town justice. People are guilty until proven innocent. Past behavior haunts families for generations. Alma now despises the people she once fraternized with when she first arrived. She no longer wants to bake “the best” brownies, drink herself into a lost weekend at other people’s homes, play kissy-face with other men, or attend their sanctimonious churches. Everything would be more tolerable if she had been able to bring any one of her miscarried babies to birth. As we meet her, she is filling in this void with driving the school bus and mother-henning Hal. But her sharp tongue has turned people away from her and even her husband, once loyal, kind, and loving to her, has gone silent around her. What has she lost and does she want it back? Here’s a bit about their disintegrating marriage, “The list of what one person would never understand about another went on and on.” As Alma becomes more frantic in her desire to protect Hal, and then Milo, she draws her emotions in tight and trusts no one.

Poor Milo, who has not done anything wrong, is caught up in his family’s storm. With difficult parents and unwanted sympathy from the community, Milo feels under siege. Another kid says, 

‘You don’t know-know because you’re twelve.’

Milo hated when people used that as an excuse. it was like people saying you’re a boy or from rural Nebraska. What did that have to do with anything?

Peggy’s disappearance coincides with the important family event of Milo’s confirmation at the Lutheran Church:

[Milo] thought about all the words he’d memorized for his confirmation, the oath he’d taken to God. Was that just another lie everyone told so they could get up in the morning? Were all these people who thought nothing bad could happen just fooling themselves?

What a fraught picture Flanagan paints of a community in crisis! There is a lot of finger-pointing and ill-based anger as the community fractures. Flanagan paints this so well. She tackles the thoughts of a 12-year-old and a middle-aged woman equally well. I almost thought Flanagan wasn’t going to solve the mystery. Other books have left things hanging, because, well, sometimes that’s real life.

MBTB star!

Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby

Flatiron Books, 336 pages, $17.99 (c2021)

This has been nominated for an Edgar Award.

S. A. Cosby’s most widely known books, “Blacktop Wasteland” and this book, “Razorblade Tears,” weren’t published until the author was in his 40s. His success is due to his perseverance and his outstanding writing.

“Razorblade Tears” is grim and compelling. After each chapter was finished, I gulped and gasped as if there weren’t enough air. I don’t find the word “propulsive” attractive except when referring to jet fuel, but were I to use that word I would use it for this book. Cosby knows how to keep his audience reading.

What Buddy Lee and Ike have in common: They are both fathers and grandfathers. They have both served time in prison. Life pitched them down and it has been hard to claw their way up. They are disgusted that their sons were gay. Their sons are dead.

What Buddy Lee and Ike don’t have in common: Buddy Lee is white and Ike is Black. Buddy Lee is unemployed, lives in a trailer, and consumes a lot of beer. Ike has built up a successful lawn care business during the fifteen years he has been out of prison.

Derek, Buddy Lee’s son, was married to Isiah, Ike’s son. Neither of their fathers attended the wedding or would talk to their sons in any meaningful way. Derek and Isiah’s daughter, Arriana, is three. After Derek and Isiah were recently murdered, Ike and his wife, Mya, took over raising her. 

Too late, Ike is trying to come to terms with his son's homosexuality and the fact that he no longer has an opportunity to tell him he loves him, something that went unsaid for a long time. Buddy Lee and his wife parted ways years ago. She remarried someone who is racist and homophobic. She’s no great shakes herself in the area of tolerance. Buddy Lee is no saint and despised his son's “choice,” but between Ike and Buddy Lee, Buddy Lee is the one who is opening his heart.

Buddy Lee thinks he needs to atone for his past thinking by finding his son’s killer. He goads Ike into helping. It is a partnership forged in hell. Buddy Lee is racist and keeps putting his foot into his mouth around Ike. Ike hates Buddy Lee. The partnership starts off rocky and for every step forward, there are a couple of steps back. Of the two of them, Ike is the one who is built to intimidate. His old street name was “Riot.” He has killed before and is fighting with his better self to bring himself to kill again. It’s a short battle.

It’s a lesson in cutting to the chase when Buddy Lee and Ike begin to do some investigation. Grrr. Crack. Smash. Shake, shake, shake. They slowly build on the information they “acquire.” One clue is getting to a woman, Tangerine, who may be the reason the young men were killed. More grr-ing, cracking, smashing, and shaking ensue.

While grim and violent, the book is not without some dark humor, mostly provided by Buddy Lee. Here’s Buddy when two men are giving him a beating:

The first monster that approached him had a mustache so full it was like a cat had taken up residence on his upper lip. The other grizzly bear was so cockeyed Buddy Lee figured he could see around a corner without turning his damn head.

Buddy Lee went at them like a windmill on legs. He swung on Cockeyed while he kicked a Cat Stache. 

 

Even though it is 2021 book, here is an MBTB star! I think it counts that I’ve had the book since 2021!

Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages, $27 (c2021)

According to the author’s bio on the back flap of the book, Fabian Nicieza “is an Argentine American comic book writer and editor who is best known as the co-creator of Marvel’s Deadpool and for his work on titles such as X-Men, X-Force, New Warriors, Cable, and Thunderbolts.”

So you know the book is going to be funny, right.

One of Nicieza’s main characters is Andrea Stern, who spends most of the book looking like a beach ball with feet, i.e., she’s pregnant, with her fifth child. The other main character is Kenneth Lee, a reporter who ran afoul of ethics considerations, i.e., he crossed the line and made up a quote on a major story. This book is about coming back from being knocked back for the protagonists and about being haunted and shackled by the past for the antagonists.

Andrea had a bright future ahead of her. She was gearing up to become an FBI profiler after helping to solve a major case while still in college. Then she got pregnant. The father of her child was set to make oodles of money on Wall Street, so Andrea put her dreams on hold. She married Jeff and they proceeded to bounce out a bunch of children. Some of them might be named Sadie and Sarah, and Eli, and … um, there’s another one. I’ll think on it. Another is definitely on the way. At the beginning of the book, Andrea is seven months pregnant, but maybe she miscounted the months because she looks as though she might burst. (Insert your own ripe fruit simile here.)

Unfortunately, Jeff cheats, not with other women but from his clients. He “appropriated” funds, got caught, and is on probation. The family has downsized from a McMansion to (still a pretty big) house. They live in the suburbs. Jeff commutes by train. There is only one car. At 6:30 or so every morning the whole family drives him to the train station. Then, because it is summer, there are activities, friends, pool time, kids running wild. Not so secretly, Andrea is bored and disgruntled. 

Here’s an excerpt about Jeff:

They had brought their furniture over from the old house even though Jeff had wanted to buy all-new stuff. He continued to act like the money would last forever even when so much of it had been lost.

Not lost, since that implied an accidental misplacement. Squandered. Stolen, Litigated. Adjudicated. Reimbursed to the clients he had cheated. Paid to the IRS to avoid going to prison. Any and all of those better defined where the money had gone as a result of Jeff’s transgressions.

Kenneth Lee is a couple of years younger than Andrea and knew her in high school. He had a crush on her. She had a crush on his older brother. Kenneth is living out his disgrace at a small town paper in New Jersey and hoping for a big story that will send him back to the big leagues. However, he still carries the character defects that landed him in purgatory to begin with: arrogance and the ability to piss off just about anyone, especially his mother, Blaine (aka Huiquing, but “Blaine” looked better for the purposes of selling real estate). Huiquing lives in a retirement facility, where she is one of the youngest residents. This fact proves useful later in the book. Meanwhile, it provides great fodder for humor and a touch of humanity.

What brings Andrea and Kenneth together again after many years is the murder of a gas station attendant. As the story begins, Andrea stumbles across the crime scene shortly after two patrol officers arrive. Her youngest child needs to pee. One of the officers will not let Andrea use the restroom, so the toddler, unable to hold it, pees all over the crime scene. While, ahem, events are unraveling, Andrea gets a good look at the scene. In rapid fire language, Andrea tells Officer Wu (daughter of the mayor) how she and the other officer mishandled the crime scene. Them she drives off.

The official line is that the victim, Satkunananthan Sasmal, was killed in a robbery. Andrea knows that couldn’t possibly be true. She can’t help it; she’s hooked. She starts her own investigation, sometimes dragging one or more children with her, . When she combines forces with Kenneth, they make the most of their irregular resources: retired people, housewives, the tight-knit Indian community, a friend at the FBI. The FBI friend is Ramon. If Andrea hadn’t gotten pregnant, she would have broken up with Jeff and run off with Ramon. They met during the case that made Andrea famous. But that was then and this is now, and she hasn't seen Ramon since then. Neither she nor Kenneth have very weighty credentials to be investigating the crime and trying to uncover malfeasance in the community government. But they persevere.

“Suburban Dicks” is a worthy tale. The plot line becomes more serious as the investigation digs deeper. Might be worth a hankie or two. It certainly is worth an MBTB star or two!

MBTB star!

Ah, Ruth — that’s the name of Andrea’s judgmental oldest child. I think she’s a rising star at the age of nine.

The Maid by Nita Prose

Ballantine Books, 304 pages, $27

“The Maid” sets an impossible level of cleanliness and joy for hotel and motel cleaning people to reach. Molly Gray, the maid in this book by Canadian Nita Prose, aspires to perfection in cleaning the rooms in the Regency Grand Hotel. The city which is home for the hotel is never named. That’s too bad because I’d stay there — except for the murder and criminal shenanigans, that is. Right, it’s fiction anyway.

In many ways, except for a puzzling bit at the end — I’ll get to that as a spoiler — it was a perfect, soothing book. Molly is someone to love and admire. She has social problems. She can’t read people’s expressions and cannot judge the intention of people speaking to her. She pretty much takes everything at face value, insofar as she can figure out what the face is doing. Before her grandmother died, Molly could bring the questions from her day’s activities home and have her grandmother explain the cues Molly missed. It looks as though Molly is on the autism spectrum, although author Prose doesn’t say that explicitly.

Molly’s grandmother was a  housekeeper for rich people, and she taught Molly the right way to clean. Taking the job at the Regency is a no-brainer, especially since one of her grandmother’s dear friends is Mr. Preston, the doorman, and he can help look after Molly, not that there’s anything wrong with Molly’s brain, just her understanding of social interactions and her anxiety issues.

The story begins after Molly’s grandmother has been dead for a few months. Having been swindled out of her grandmother’s savings and no longer having her grandmother’s paycheck, Molly has found herself in a financial quandary. She can no longer afford to live in her apartment, run down and overpriced though it is. The bright spot in her life is cleaning rooms at her second home: the Regency.

A lot of the staff dismiss Molly. She is invisible to most of the rest of the world, but that’s the way she likes it. She gets along with a couple of the other maids, but her supervisor is conniving, unkind, and a cheat. Molly just keeps her head down and takes pride in what she does, even when she knows her boss is stealing the tip money from her and the other maids.

One of the bright spots in Molly’s cleaning day is doing the Blacks’ suite. Mr. Black is rich, an important man, by his own lights, and has a beautiful, much younger wife. They stay at the hotel often while Mr. Black transacts business. His wife, Giselle, relies on the company of Molly when she comes to clean. Molly considers her a friend. But how much of a friend can a rich woman be to a hotel maid?

One day, when Molly has to return to the Blacks’ suite to finish cleaning, she finds the body of Mr. Black sprawled across the bed and Mrs. Black nowhere in sight. He is dead. When she calls the “penguins” at the front desk in a panic, they ignore her. She faints. When she recovers, Mr. Black is still dead. This time, Molly asks for the manager, Mr. Snow, and finally, the police and ambulance arrive. Eventually, it is determined Mr. Black was murdered.

A severe, no-nonsense police detective interviews Molly. She doesn’t catch on that Molly’s perspective is different than most people’s and decides that Molly is a suspicious person. Readers know Molly is the most innocent, naive, truthful, loyal person around. Maybe. The book is told in her voice, so just how reliable is she?

The other hotel characters are Juan Manuel, the dishwasher, and Rodney, the bartender. Molly has a crush on Rodney and has misinterpreted what he has said to her in the past. Other than when she is in the hotel, Molly now leads a lonely, isolated life. At one point, someone hugs Molly and she reflects on how long it has been since someone has touched her. Heartbreaking.

This is not a sad book, however. Yes, Molly gets into jams because of how she misunderstands people and situations, and she is sad when she finds out something is not what it seemed. But she is resilient. She hears her grandmother’s voice in her head, full of grandmotherly advice, when the going gets rocky. She takes great comfort in structure and cleanliness. For instance, she takes off her shoes every night when she gets back to her apartment, wipes the soles, and puts them in her closet. That sort of detail is endearing to me.

As expected, Molly gets into hot water over Mr. Black’s death and it is no surprise to mystery readers when she becomes the prime suspect. At her lowest point, she wonders who she can turn to for help in her restricted world. Surprises await. The best surprise is how deep the book bores into Molly's life without over-narrating those parts.

I highly recommend “The Maid.” I thought it was charming. I like to read about characters cleaning things. I love Marie Kondo (although I must say, desire and practice may have a wide chasm between them in my real world). A shiny, dustless MBTB star for “The Maid,” the first of 2022! (Plus, what a great cover!)

Kind of a SPOILER:

Towards the end, Molly is in court. One of the attorneys is Charlotte. Why? Is Canadian law different from U.S. law? If the story takes place in a fictional country, are their trials held in a different fashion? Is dispensation given to Molly to have Charlotte question her? Huh?

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

Hard Case Crime, 432 pages, $22.99

What an appropriate book to review in December!

At first glance, "Five Decembers" appears as though it is going to be a traditional noir book. Then, surprise! World War II intrudes and it becomes a spy book. A history book? A lesson in integrity and honor? Whatever else it is, at its very heart, it is noir at its best.

Joe McGrady was a soldier and when he mustered out, he became a cop. The draw for me is that Joe is a cop in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His story begins days before the Pearl Harbor attack and the commencement of the United States’ official involvement in World War II. Joe is a regular guy who has a smart girlfriend, a ball-busting cop partner, a hope for a better life. Fate intervenes to do its damndest to see that he doesn’t get to keep any of that.

On a certain day in November 1941, Joe is sent out by his boss to investigate a hanging in a small shack on a dairy farm on the other side of the island of O’ahu. What Joe finds is horrible. A man is hanging in the shack, but also, a woman is found covered by a pile of stuff on a cot. Both have been brutally murdered. The man is Caucasian and the woman is Asian. Does racial intolerance have anything to do with their deaths?

Upon returning to the shack after phoning his boss, Joe encounters a man who looks as though he intends to torch the shack. In a firefight, Joe is forced to kill the man, thus eliminating a chance at getting information the easy way. Joe has had enough experience with crime, and with a little help from well-honed intuition, he guesses that there is another person who also committed the crimes. His new mission in life is to track down who the victims are and who the killer in the shadows is.

Author James Kestrel does a wonderful job of re-creating Honolulu in the 1940s. There are the bawdy streets of Chinatown in downtown Honolulu, there are the drive-in restaurants that serve local fare, there are the old buildings, including the Hawai’i Theater and Alexander and Baldwin building, which marked downtown. It’s all wonderfully nostalgic. It’s also a very white version of O’ahu. There are no pidgin English-speaking locals, no tenements. At one point, Joe drives out to a plantation town of Okinawan immigrants —immigrants were used for manual labor in the pineapple and sugar cane fields — to see if the dead woman was their missing daughter. That’s as close as we get to seeing the other view of Hawai’ian society.

It turns out the man in the shack was the nephew of an Admiral of the Pacific fleet. All of a sudden, Joe has a lot of support and resources to find the remaining killer. That’s good because he certainly doesn’t have much in the way of either from his chain-smoking, prune-faced boss at headquarters.

Because of this, that and the other thing, Grady soon finds himself on a marathon trip across the Pacific to find the killer, whom he believes fled on an earlier flight. His first point of investigation is Wake Island, a small, flat island holding no more than a military staging base. There was another death there, with a similar MO to the one in Hawai’i. And that death leads him ever further westward until Joe is caught in the dual nets of fate and time in the adventure of a lifetime. Joe hopes he will have more of a lifetime to tell his tale.

This book has so much to offer. The details of old Hawai’i might appeal to only me, but the character of Joe, his history, his hurts, his hopes, his tough-guy demeanor should pull any reader to read one more page, and then yet one more. Although credulity must be accommodated at some points, it is a well-balanced story: gunfights and gentleness, brutality and beauty.

For Charlie Chan fans — who must know that Charlie was based in Honolulu — there is a reference by Grady’s prune-faced captain to Apana Chang, the legendary, real-life police detective upon whom Earl Derr Biggers based his fictional character. That reference sold me on this book. Then so did almost everything else.

Congratulations to James Kestrel and Hard Case Crime for a sensational book. MBTB star!

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Telllier

Other Press, 400 pages, $16.99

Wow! What a roller coaster ride!

I’ve noticed that other reviews reveal quite a bit of the plot of “The Anomaly.” Forgive me, but I am choosing not to reveal so much. If you’ve come here for spoilers, seek elsewhere, wayfarer.

Author Hervé Le Tellier begins his book with short chapters, each dealing with a different character. There are about a dozen of them. At first, it is not obvious what they have in common. You begin to guess after a few chapters, but when that commonality is baldly stated, it is bizarre and so very intriguing. This is both a book I’ve read before and also one no one has ever written before. Le Tellier puts together pieces of plot which are like plot lines in others’ books. It is not plagiarism; it is a unique re-assembling of writing blocks.

The first chapter is about an assassin. He has an identity as a “normal” French man. He has a family and a bland job. The assassin part of him is all business. Got a problem, contact “Blake.” Pfft. Problem gone.

Blake was the character who was different from the other characters in a couple of huge respects. When you read this book, you will know what I am talking about when you reach those elements. I decided at first that he was going to assassinate all the other characters. I will break my own rule and tell you that no, that is not it. The resolution to his story is unusual. It is hard to find enough synonyms for bizarre, unique, unexpected, unusual, different, but that is what a review of this book needs. 

Even when the book veers off into philosophy, Le Tellier keeps the tension high. I also will say this, his characters are very human, knowable, you and me in many respects. (Except the assassin.)

“The Anomaly” was just released in English. Le Tellier, a French resident, has sold a million copies in Europe. 

Here’s an MBTB star for a book I cannot explain.

In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 368 pages, $27

There’s a big hint about what the book contains in the “About the Author” section: “Bryan Christy is the former head of Special Investigations at National Geographic ….” It’s not very strange, then, that Christy’s main character, Tom Klay, is an investigative writer for “The Sovereign,” a clone of “National Geographic.” With those elements providing the skeleton for his story,  Christy has created a ripping good thriller and an exposition on the morality of world politics and globalization.

Klay first appears in our sights as he accompanies an old friend, Bernard Lolosoli, on a mission to catch elephant poachers on a protected reserve in Kenya. Tragedy follows and Klay has his next mission in life: to catch Ras Botha, a South African and the king of poaching and other illicit activities. Klay knows no bounds in his desire to see justice visited heavily on Botha’s head.

Klay has gotten permission and a cover story from his boss at The Sovereign to investigate Botha further in South Africa. It helps his boss is also his handler and recruiter into the CIA’s shadowy world of intelligence. Klay’s got resources behind him in his task.

In addition to what is going on on the world stage, Tom Klay is a complex character with a lot of past tragedies and worries shaken up into a ticking psychological bomb. Only, Klay won’t let the problems own him; he will own his life and will use the past to harden him into what he needs to be for his assignments. Before I mislead you further, let me say that Tom Klay is not a hired killer. His best weapons are his words and his work for the magazine.

The joy of reading “In the Company of Killers” is the trip from what you think you know to what is actually going on. On the way to the ending, there is a trail of sadness, enlightenment, satisfaction, a big case of the uglies, and enough hate and love to go around.

MBTB star!

The Windsor Knot by S. J. Bennett

William Morrow, 288 pages, $27.99

Long live Queen Elizabeth II! (Especially if she solves mysteries.)

Did you love the television series “The Crown”? Under the influence of that series, by the end of this book, I was thinking, “Yeah, this could so happen. Lilibet would be a crackerjack detective. And, ooo, the palaces!”

Who is S. J. Bennett and how does she paint such a credible sounding description of the inner workings of The Palace? (Not that I would know what is credible palace behavior.) Other than an active imagination and having “once interviewed for a job working for the Queen,” it doesn’t look as though she has any secret source. Nevertheless, Bennett has crafted an entertaining novel, high on detail, low on silliness.

Imagine a day in the life of the queen. It is chock-a-block with rituals, advisory meetings, and social gatherings. It’s a good thing Bennett set this in the year 2016 when Elizabeth was on the verge of celebrating her 90th birthday. One could imagine the spry 90-year-old putting in a full day as The Queen and later burrowing in to solve a murder mystery.

Although Elizabeth would rather spend time with corgis and horses, she finds herself saddled with the disruption caused by the murder of a palace guest. He was a young pianist who played Rachmaninoff and danced beautifully at a party afterwards. The guests were enchanted. Except for the one who strangled him and made it look as though he had asphyxiated himself in an auto-erotic misadventure. But the murderer’s set-up was clumsily done, leading to a police investigation. Police start combing through the histories of the other guests and staff, thus upsetting the well-run palace apple cart. The last straw for Elizabeth is when two long-term members of the staff are put on leave while their bona fides are checked. Elizabeth can only imagine their embarrassment.

The victim was Russian, so there’s that whole thing. Was he another Russian murdered on British soil because he had displeased Putin? Will this be a diplomatic kerfuffle? 

The queen has only one recourse after she figures out what the murder ISN’T. With the help of her young Assistant Private Secretary, Rozie Oshodi — who just began her job — she will use discreet means to ferret out the truth. Rozie cannot let her boss, the Private Secretary, know what she and the queen are up to. The plot seems ideal for a great deal of royal silliness, but Bennett deftly sidesteps that literary quagmire. If one ignores the unlikelihood that the Queen could be or would be an investigator, however private, everything hangs together. The queen, being the queen, has a lot of contacts who could help: academics, ex-police, specialists. Never underestimate The Queen!

Although the ending races through a mass of information to let us know whodunnit, I didn’t mind because I loved the leisurely inside look (however fictional) at royal shenanigans. The book wasn’t perfect, but it was the right book at the right time. Here’s my version of the OBE: an MBTB star!

The Wonder Test by Michelle Richmond

Atlantic Monthly Press, 448 pages, $25.99

In so many ways “The Wonder Test” was my idea of a perfect book. It had a propulsive main story, it had quirky asides, it had a strong lead character, it had little and big stories. I’ll let you in on the bottom line early: I’ve awarded this book an MBTB star!

Lina Connerly is on leave from the FBI as a spy/profiler. (Maybe not the FBI per se, but a shadowy organization with international interests Richmond calls the FBI.) Her husband died not long before the book starts. She pulled up roots from New York City and moved herself and her 15-year-old son, Rory, to Greenfield, California, south of San Francisco, in the valley of the tech industry. Lina grew up in a town close by but a few median pay levels down. She resisted the urge to move back to where her father eventually dropped anchor, in an area of Greenfield full of the rich and the very rich. (Lina’s father bought early, did his own renovation, and hung on to his property.) He and Lina’s husband died within a three-month period, leaving Lina and Rory unable to process their loss.

Lina had a civil servant’s salary and without her husband’s income, she realized NYC would not have been an easy choice anyway. The economy was not easier in California, however, since the thirst for land felt by people made rich by the tech industry pushed up home values. As Lina weeds out her father’s stuff, she must consider the feasibility of selling his home.

Rory is enrolled in the local public school and immediately becomes slotted into the school’s only curriculum for sophomores, a teaching to the test in extremis. The Wonder Test is held nationwide for high school sophomores. It is especially a BFD for the aggressive and assertive school community. They have had the best tests scores, the best students, the best families, the best results over the past few years, especially thanks to the new school board superintendent, Kobayashi. (Just Kobayashi.) There is a “Stepford Wives” vibe.

Rory has no trouble with the intense studying. Sophomores must practice answering profound, intellectually provocative questions that delve deeply into science, history, philosophy, dialectics, and ethics. The start of each chapter of Richmond’s book has what appears to be a sample question. For instance:

Assuming the universe is always expanding, at what point does it become less likely that you will find your lost keys by continuing to look for them? Diagram and discuss.

Or:

Ranchers in Wyoming, tired of losing sheep to wild coyotes, implemented an aggressive plan to cull the coyote population. Ten years later, after dozens of successful hunts and hundreds of kills, the coyote population is more than an order of magnitude larger than before the slaughter. In a 750-word essay, discuss the folly of conventional wisdom and the power of expecting the unexpected.

Almost every question had me trolling through Google to see what the heck the question was even asking.

Then there is the central mystery. Soon Lina is aware that last year a boy from the school disappeared for a few days. He was found naked, confused, and emaciated on a nearby beach. The year before, twins similarly disappeared. They, too, re-appeared after a few days. Although she is on hiatus — not just because her husband and father died, but also because “something” happened at work that shook her up — Lina cannot help but try to discover what happened to the boy, Gray Stafford. Even though he returned alive, he has become subdued and disinclined to socialize, and does not want to talk about what happened to him. 

Almost immediately upon arriving in the area, Lina notices a distinguished man with a French accent and manner. He turns out to be a diplomat. Lina’s antenna quivers and she asks Rory to see if there is a French student at school. Rory goes above and beyond and before long, Caroline, the diplomat’s daughter, is Rory’s girlfriend. 

Lina receives more input that all is not as it seems in her new community. There are strange people, strange events, undercurrents. What is going on? Why does it make people uncomfortable when she seeks information about Gray?

At the same time her investigative nose begins to twitch, Lina realizes she must face how she feels about the work she left abruptly behind. Inevitably, she needs the tradecraft and assets of her old life, and her two worlds begin to collide.

What annoyed me in reading Caroline B. Cooney’s book, “The Grandmother Plot” — too much going on, too many people, too many little plots, not enough synthesis — has the opposite effect on me here. In “The Wonder Test,” there are many characters, many little stories, many sidebars without obvious relevance, but they head in the same direction, with the goal of uncovering the mystery of Greenfield, California, and it was grand.

There is much to see and do in “The Wonder Test.” MBTB star!

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Ballantine Books, 496 pages, $28.99

Years ago I chose “The Martian” for the MBTB book group to read. It proved to be a controversial pick. First, it was argued, the book was not a mystery. I said space is a mystery, but in essence, I agreed with them. But I enjoyed the heck out of that book and, to this day, cannot look at a potato without thinking of “The Martian.” Some members of the book group enjoyed the book and others didn’t. One really, really, really didn’t!

Now we have “The Martian” on steroids: “Project Hail Mary.” Here is the last line of my review: I love this book. Now you only have to read the review if you want a few particulars.

Half the book is the adventure of Ryland Grace in space, racing to Tau Ceti to solve the problem of why the Earth’s sun is dimming, thus imperiling life on Earth. The other half of the book is about how scientists figured out what was causing the diminution and how Ryland Grace, failed Ph.D. candidate and popular middle school science teacher, became the last hope of earthkind.

The book begins with the awakening of Ryland Grace after he has been in a coma. He does not remember his name. He does not know where he is. He has no idea what is going on. There are two mummified bodies in his room. He has all his scientific and reasoning faculties intact, however. He does not find out his name for several chapters, but using logic, he does cotton on to the fact that he is on a spaceship and he has been in an induced coma because the flight must have been a long one. Obviously, he reasons, his crew mates did not survive. (We later find out the flight has been thirteen Earth years so far but only four years in Grace’s world, relativity being what it is. Thank you, Einstein.)

As memory slowly returns to Grace, he realizes he is on a mission to save Earth. Its sun has been slowly dimming. Grace has named the culprit “astrophage.” The little critter is like a souped-up firefly. It can gulp and hold an incredible amount of energy in its little form. All sorts of catastrophic climate events are occurring on Earth as a result. In a “hail Mary” attempt the world comes together to invest in a million-to-one shot at figuring out how to stop the sun’s destruction.

Tau Ceti, a star 11.9 light years from Earth, has something unusual going on. Tau Ceti is infected by the astrophage, too, but it is not dimming the way Earth’s sun is. Why not? The only way to find out is to launch the improbable ship and give it the impossible task. For the people on board the Hail Mary, it will be a one-way trip. The information they glean will be sent back to Earth in four separate beetle-shaped rockets, for the sake of redundancy. They are named George, Paul, Ringo, and John. (Get it? the beetles=The Beatles.)

Grace’s returning memories are revealed in chapters sprinkled throughout the book. His unexpected path from middle school teacher to astronaut is slowly explained. 

I’m going to put a “spoiler alert” here. I don’t know why I feel the need to do that, since every other review tells you what the “surprise” twist is, but let that be on their heads, I say. (Just kidding.) Sometimes a surprise needs to be as much of a surprise as possible. I read this book without having read any reviews, so I met each twist and turn with much joy and wonderment.

SPOILER ALERT

Earth is not the only planet suffering from the effects of a dimming sun. From a planet far, far away, another space traveler has journeyed to Tau Ceti to find out how to combat those pesky astrophage. To Grace, “Rocky” is an alien. To Rocky, “Grace” is an exotic creature. Remember “Enemy Mine,” the 1985 movie with Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr.? This is sort of like that, except for the enemies part. Their cooperative venture to solve their mutual problem involves a lot of science — and Weir does his best to put what happens in layman’s terms — and sweetness, brilliance, toleration, and a touch of bittersweet.

I love how human, awkward, sad, and smart Ryland Grace sounds. I love his ability to be funny, despite looming disaster.

I love this book.

MBTB star!

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Celadon Books, 336 pages, $28

The ultimate meta-novel has been written. Author Jean Hanff Korelitz has pulled off a thrilling mystery, rich with plot and character and twisty insides. And it should also satisfy readers with a literal yearning for literate literature by the literary.

“The Plot” begins with a poor schmuck who unfortunately hit it big with his first novel when he was in his twenties. It is unfortunate because the schmuck, Jacob “Finch” Bonner, couldn’t manage an adequate successor book. He drifted further down the writing chain, from a few weeks of running a writing class at a low-profile school to eventually editing other people’s stuff, trolling online for new clients. (Let me pause and say I consider the work of editors and writing teachers to be sainted positions.) 

However, before Jacob hit his version of rock bottom, one day an arrogant, self-promoting “student” appeared in one of his last years of teaching a writing class in person. Although Evan Parker (nom de plume: “Parker Evan”) had never written a book before, he had written one now, which he claimed was a sure-fire bestseller, guaranteed to be on the New York Times best seller list. He didn’t want to share his writing, which sort of defeated the purpose of a writing class, Jacob informed him. Hahaha, Evan Parker/Parker Evan replied and basked in his high self-regard. But eventually Evan Parker revealed the plot to Jacob. Then several years passed, in which Jacob’s life fell into disrepair.

By chance, Jacob comes across some information which leads to his renaissance. But nothing good ever happens without A Price to Be Paid. Korelitz perfectly plots her book. The second half explores the mystery and a reckoning. “The Plot” has so many aha! moments, I am loathe to describe more about the book. I will say I was enthralled, I raced to the end, I was deeply satisfied.

MBTB star!

(P.S. You only have to pay half-price for this review.)