The Land of Dreams by Vidar Sundstøl

University of Minnesota, 344 pages, $24.95
Translated by Tiina Nunnally

Lance Hansen is a "forest cop." He's a real policeman but his normal beat is the woods of northern Minnesota, chasing illegal campers, for instance, like a park ranger. His personal passion is the historical material of the area's Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish population. Sometimes it appears that he knows more about everyone's ancestral past than their present.

It is Lance who discovers the body of a naked man, murdered in the woods. It turns out that he was a Norwegian tourist. He and his friend had been canoeing and camping in the woods on vacation.

In a slow-moving fashion, Norwegian author Vidar Sundstøl lets Lance wander between past and present, drawing comparisons between the current murder and one he concludes happened during his great-grandmother's time. Drawing on slim information, Lance tries to solve the disappearance about a hundred and fifty years ago of an Ojibway medicine man. And although he's not directly involved in the Norwegian man's murder case, Lance nevertheless provokes others in the investigation to consider his involvement.

One of the men who definitely is involved in the murder case is a Norwegian detective, Eirik Nyland, flown over to help interrogate the remaining camper. He intuits Lance's basic goodness. Lance recognizes he must seem provincial to Nyland, whom he respects. The two form a firm but distant bond. What, thinks Nyland, is Lance hiding?

And that's the main question of the book. What is Lance hiding? What has Lance discovered in the past that would shed light on the crime in the present? What is Lance's moral dilemma?

Sundstøl has won an award in Norway for his "Minnesota trilogy," of which The Land of Dreams is the first volume. Maybe because this is the first book of a trilogy, I felt there was an unfinished edge to it. Lance's reluctance, vulnerability, and tenuous conclusions swallow up the story. I was left with a sense of anticipation and hope that there's something with a more concrete conclusion to come.

In many ways, The Land of Dreams reminds me of Craig Johnson's and William Kent Krueger's stories because of their use of Indian legend and mysticism. Many years ago, Lance had a dream of standing at the bottom of ice-cold Lake Superior and has not had a remembered dream since. He feels it's as though a dreamcatcher has bound up his dreams, dammed them, and he's waiting for the day they will be released. Perhaps the other books will be about those dreams.

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes; The Dead Run by Adam Mansbach; Outlaw by Mark Sullivan

Here's today's bonus pack.

I moderated a panel at Portland's Wordstock (www.wordstockfestival.com) festival on Saturday. Chelsea Cain, A. M. Homes, Adam Mansbach (pronounced man's-back), and Mark Sullivan discussed "The Dark Side." I was called in at the last minute to replace the scheduled moderator, so I spent an intense week trying to read everyone's latest novel. It was a pleasant revelation to have such disparate takes on "the dark side."

Let Me Go by Chelsea Cain

Minotaur, 368 pages, $25.99

I'll review Chelsea Cain's book Let Me Go later. For now, what you should know is that I am a big fan of her work. I enjoy hearing her speak. I think she is the cat's pajamas, and (almost) everyone should read her Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell series, beginning, of course, with the first book, Heartsick. Her books are hysterically funny and hysterically gory and sexy. Chelsea is a lovely person who is known for her signing antics. At Wordstock, she threw (plastic) hands and noses into the audience, and gave said parts to her fellow panelists to use as talismans while they spoke.

May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

Penguin, 496 pages, $16

A. M. Homes won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for this book, now out in paperback. She told me she was surprised to win it, because at that point Hilary Mantel was winning all the awards for Bring Up the Bodies. Besides Mantel, the other authors whose works were shortlisted were Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson, and Barbara Kingsolver. A. M. Homes is obviously no slouch.

May We Be Forgiven starts off describing regular, but colorless, people. Harry Silver is a professor of "Nixonology." He knows all things common and arcane about the 37th president. He is married to a smart, rigid Chinese woman who travels a lot. They share an apartment in NYC. They are stuck in their ruts and don't know enough to be actively discouraged.

When Harry's sister-in-law Jane makes a pass at him at a family Thanksgiving dinner, it throws Harry off his well-worn life's path. Harry's brother (and Jane's husband) is George. Although George is younger, he insists on telling people that he is Harry's older brother. George is a bully and has anger management problems. That becomes evident when he crashes into an SUV, kills the adults in the car, and orphans the surviving child. Then George murders his wife after he finds her in bed with Harry.

It's downhill for George and Harry for quite a while after that. Homes visits Job-like torments onto Harry's head: Harry's wife leaves him, he has to take care of George and Jane's two children, and strangers with dementia settle into his house, with the notion that Harry will take care of them. In his growing lunacy, Harry tries online sex hook-ups, editing some newly discovered Nixon short stories, fostering the orphaned boy from George's accident, and finding his lost Jewish religion.

Strangely, as the catastrophes and challenges mount, Harry becomes less colorless and more interesting. Harry struggles to find his heart and passion again and to do the right thing for everyone. (Even if that means learning to fake a special recipe for chocolate chip cookies to catch an Israeli arms dealer.)

Side note: Instead of simply mentioning the Nixon short stories, Homes actually manufactured one. Surprisingly, it has a Raymond Carver sensibility. Homes said that she enjoyed doing the research on Nixon and especially enjoyed crafting the story.

The Dead Run by Adam Mansbach

Harper Voyager, 304 pages, $25.99

Adam Mansbach plays with conventions.

In The Dead Run, U. S. citizen Jess Galvan must cross the desert at the border of Mexico and the United States like an illegal immigrant. He struggles with heat and thirst and aching muscles. He also struggles with the still-beating heart recently torn out of the body of a young virgin, given to him by an Aztec god incarnate to take to his demi-god son in Texas, thus igniting the end of the world as we know it.

Meanwhile …

Sheriff Bob Nichols is ill-equipped to help a sixteen-year-old girl that the demi-god in Texas needs as part of his cult.

The scene gets wilder and wilder. Galvan has a moral dilemma and a physical threat hanging over his head. The emphasis in the title is on the word "run."

Mansbach must have had a good time combining these over-the-top elements!

Side note: Mansbach jokingly said that he heard Bruce Willis doing a voice-over to the action in the desert.

Outlaw by Mark Sullivan

Minotaur, 336 pages, $25.99

Outlaw was a page-turner. Mark Sullivan does a good job of speeding his international intrigue thriller along.

Robin Monarch is a thief, an ex-black ops, ex-CIA operative, and currently a man for hire. The U.S. President wants him to find the U.S. Secretary of State and the foreign ministers of China and India, all of whom have been kidnapped. In addition to kidnapping, a heretofore unknown, well-organized, well-funded terrorist organization is creating havoc around the globe. Monarch and his well-chosen team have mere days to locate the dignitaries before they are killed.

Long Chan-Juan is the head of the most powerful Chinese triad. He is somehow involved in creating the chaos. His wife is a fortuneteller. She casts his fortune, but Long does not know if the fortune bodes well for him or not. Is he the good guy or the bad guy in the cryptic I-Ching messages?

The first book in this series is Rogue.

Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday, 336 pages, $24.95 (release date 10/8/13)

Ye, Gods! (To borrow Zaneeta Shinn's favorite saying in "The Music Man" and one that this Doom's heroine echoes.) Chuck Palahniuk is an innovative, excrementally lyrical, warped son-of-a-gun.

Doomed is the follow-up to Damned and continues the story of Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer, who died at the age of 13. Her hip-to-the-tip parents, Antonio and Camille, soon after her death make it their life's mission to proselytize the gospel according to Madison. According to Madison (contacted psychically in the hereafter), they say, you will only get to heaven if you slough off conventional civility and swear a lot, fart a lot, and make rude gestures. Their many followers gleefully do just that. Everyone is happy to know that heaven does exist and that the key to the pearly gates is so easily obtained.

It's a world gone mad. Or a world gone Maddy, actually.

Most of Doomed is told in blog form by the ghost of Madison Spencer, interrupted occasionally by the oracular pronouncements of someone else blogging from hell. Madison reminisces mostly about the significant events that occurred when she was 11, especially the unsavory death of her mother's father, Papadaddy Ben, who is presented as a rural hayseed, in contrast to his daughter, a famous actress and serial adopter of cultural trends.

Madison refers to the living as predead, future dead, predecomposed. She, of course, is postlife. Although she is the object of adoration and the putative key to heaven, she actually has gone to hell. (It's an updated version of Dante's inferno, with contemporary cultural references.) Now she has been exiled to wander as a ghost in the world of the living. Her afterlife digestion of the world is this: "My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words."

She is doomed to helplessly experience a world she inadvertently created among the "Boors," the acolytes of the new Madison-based religion. The contradictory side-effect of all this boorishness and rising methane level is that there is no longer hate. "'You created world peace!'" ecstatically shouts Crescent City, a physically vile, drug-addled medium, who is sworn to bring Maddy to her predead parents for more postdead heavenly revelations. On the other hand, the Devil, mostly depicted as a limousine chauffeur, is counting on her to "trigger the end of days."

There's no easy way to explain this book. It's an absurdist's mythological romp through our pop culture. It's a far-out, far-flung satirization of both the right and the left. It's the beginning of the end of the world that certainly is determined to go out with a bang, not a whimper.

Palahniuk deals out both these sentences with equal zest: "Hydrolysis causes the scission of polymer chains," and "'Did we bury you … not wearing underpants?'" He grabs every cause, religion, fad, agitprop, god (musical or otherwise) and flays them open, offers them at the altar of Ctrl+Alt+In-Your-Face, and tears the universe a new hole. (Also, he probably owes about $3 in royalties to Joss Whedon for a Buffy Summers-type ending.)

And what's the next book going to be called? Destiny? Deviled? Ditsy?

The Double by George Pelecanos

Little, Brown and Company, 304 pages, $26 (release date 10/8/13)

George Pelecanos doesn't want you to make any mistakes about the scenes he sets. His characters are defined in detail: what clothes they wear, what food they eat, and especially what sports they watch and music they hear. Pelecanos describes where his characters sit, meet, and confront if it will give your mind's eye a three-dimensional sense of his story. (Also, he's helpfully blocking out his story in case someone wants to film it.)

The Double is a follow-up to The Cut, in which we first met Spero Lucas, a private investigator in D.C.  Spero comes from a colorful family. He was adopted, as were two of his three siblings, by a Greek couple. One of his brothers-by-another-mother is black. Another brother is a criminal. His only sister, and the sole biological child of the Greek couple, has moved far away and doesn't relate to anyone in the family. Spero is 31 years old, ex-military, and finds a lot of women to keep him warm but hasn't had a steady relationship with any of them.

Tom Petersen is a criminal defense attorney who routinely hires Lucas. He is trying to get a client free of a charge of murdering his ex-girlfriend. Lucas must find some sort of hole in the prosecution's story.  But this is not Pelecanos's main storyline. On the side, Lucas has taken on the recovery of a stolen painting.

For a 40% recovery fee, Lucas will find what is lost. This is how he supplements his income from Peterson. Grace Kincaid's ex-lover left her and took a valuable painting with him. Lucas soon learns that her boyfriend, Billy Hunter, was really a man named Billy King and he was part of a gang of hustlers. Lucas has his own gang of ex-military men he uses when he needs an assist.

Pelecanos's books are very much "man books." Women show up, sometimes in major parts, as does Charlotte Rivers, Lucas's love/lust interest in this book, but Pelecanos's brush doesn't paint them with the same depth of understanding as his male characters.

Pelecanos also has a "manly style." This passage, written about how Spero Lucas gives his used books to injured vets, applies to Pelecanos's writing as well:

…recovering vets enjoyed a good story told with clean, efficient writing, a plot involving a problem to be solved or surmounted, and everyday characters the reader could relate to. Today Lucas had crime novels by Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, and James Crumley…

Although Pelecanos's books are gritty and tough, he takes time for a little humor. The man Lucas finds who might cast doubt on Petersen's client's guilt is an auto mechanic who is also a killer for hire. A mechanic, get it, "'As in The Mechanic, with Charles Bronson,'" a character says.

The Double is the name of the painting that Grace has lost. Not to be a spoilsport or anything, but Grace eventually explains that The Double is two pictures of the same man, portraying "man's complex nature." Lucas's complex nature is the real subject of The Double. He has his own code of honor, his own morality. War has taught him how to kill. Men come away from war fractured in different ways. Has Lucas come away fairly intact, or are the cracks finally starting to show? That's the take-away from The Double.

As with most of George Pelecanos's books, the reward for the reader is in how he tells his story. He has Style. He asks big questions, hidden among the scenes of realistic bang-bang, blood, and ka-pow. It's also about seeing the grit of men who want to "stay in the game, " who have enough "steel." In The Double, Pelecanos has distilled his story to its essence.*

* At the same time, let me quietly give a hand clap to what appears to be an extraneous detail. Various characters in The Double ask the people they are interviewing how to spell names. Yay! It bugs me to no end when a TV or movie detective takes notes and never asks for the spelling of a name. How does he or she know whether it's Chumley, Chomley, or Cholmondeley? Right?