Mañana by William Hjorstberg

Open Road Media, 242 pages, $13.99 (release date - 5/12/15)

William Hjorstberg’s prose crashes through the pages with deep, dark slashes. “Falling Angel,” a book with an MBTB star, proved Hjorstberg’s ability to twist and turn through a story. “Mañana” is as black as noir.

Set in Mexico in 1967, Hjorstberg depicts two gringos, Tod and Linda, who are surfing and toking their way through paradise. When Tod wakes up one sunny morning next to a dead hooker, splashed with her blood, he is disoriented and quite alone. Where are his wife and the lowlifes they met? They gave him heroin, and that’s the last he remembers. All of Linda’s stuff is gone. And all their money.

Did the lowlifes kidnap Linda? How will he explain the dead body? Safer to run and try to find Linda’s trail, Tod decides. Ingeniously, throughout the next few days, he manages to scrape up enough to buy food and gas. He begins to slowly track his former buddies and his wife.

Nick, Doc and Shank are ex-cons and always had a trick planned. While Tod was never an all-American boy, he had never anticipated a life of crime, but that is where he is headed as he searches for the men and Linda.

Hjorstberg has style. It’s not just the fast-paced story, it’s also how it is told. His writing ranges from poetic:

“I’d searched for the heart and soul of midnight all my life, a quest as ephemeral as the brief trajectory of the discarded ember. I never found what I was looking for on my nocturnal pilgrimages, always the outsider, yearning to be hip.”

to wry:

“Tequila crashed inside my skull like a Lower Slobovian demolition derby.”

Tod’s quest is our quest. Did he unwittingly kill the prostitute? Is Linda dead? What is he willing to do to exact revenge? 

“Mañana” is muy macho.

Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates

Mysterious Press, 208 pages, $24 (release date - 5/5/15)

It is difficult to review a book you can’t really talk about without tripping over a spoiler with every sentence. 

Joyce Carol Oates has built a refined and dark novel about murder, conscience, and insanity. Oates builds the story up slowly and meticulously. She leaves hints of things to come like leaves blown into a house by the wind. The closer you get to the front door, the more leaves you discover. But, at first, it’s just the tiniest of leaves that has blown the farthest in, so little you might not notice it at first. You might not wonder how it got into your house or whether it has playfellows who have also dampened your hallway. Finally you see more and more leaves, and before you know it, it’s obvious someone has opened the door and let the leaves in. But you live alone and there should be no one there but you.

Wait, that’s crazy talk.

Exactly.

Joyce Carol Oates used to write her dark, psychologically twisted novels under the pen name of Rosamond Smith. The irony of Oates using her own name for “Jack of Spades” should not be lost on readers of this book.

I will say this about the plot: The narrator is a successful writer of mysteries. He plots his books the way a general plots his battles.

And I will say this about “Jack of Spades”: It’s stylish, macabre, and compelling. Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe are mentioned frequently. They are good company for this wicked tale.

All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer

Minotaur Books, 304 pages, $23.99

Olen Steinhauer is known for his two series about a) apparatchiks in an unnamed Balkan country and b) an American CIA agent, both of which have received numerous nominations and awards. Before “All the Old Knives,” I most enjoyed another standalone spy book, “The Cairo Affair.” “All the Old Knives” has beaten the others into the dust. This is a sophisticated, twisted, intelligent spy novel.

What is most surprising about this book is that a lot of the “action” takes place in a conversation between two people in an upscale restaurant in Carmel, California. (Is anything not upscale there?) The two people were both American spies in Vienna. Henry has asked to see his former lover and teammate, Celia, because of a tragedy involving terrorists that occurred five years ago, right before Celia got out of the biz.

Was there a mole in their office in Vienna who precipitated the tragedy? Was the mole Celia? Or Henry? Why did Celia leave both their relationship and her job? She is now a plump mother of two young children, living a staid and boring (in comparison to her spying in Vienna) life in Carmel with her much older ex-business executive husband. She thought and had hoped that she had left all the subterfuge and drama behind her.

Sometimes the narration is by Celia, and other times by Henry. We hear one person’s version of what happened, then we hear how the other really felt. Steinhauer’s back-and-forth is ingenious. The denouement is surprising and unexpected. Steinhauer’s writing is elegant and his characterizations necessarily sparse but thorough.

MBTB star!

The Devil She Knows by Bill Loehfelm

Picador, 336 pages, $16 (c2012)

Maureen Coughlin is a waitress at a dive bar on Staten Island. She is only 26 years old, but she is old before her time, having frittered away her youth, partially because of alcohol and drug abuse, but also because of her lack of ambition and bad family relationships. She is a mess. One night she figures she can’t sink any lower when, drunk and disoriented, she spies an intimate sexual act between her boss and a man running for political office. Of course the political figure, Frank Sebastian, is not a man to cross, having buried — one suspects actually as well as figuratively — some bodies. What’s a girl to do? Not what Maureen does, that’s for certain.

Maureen does the equivalent of pulling her hair, screaming, and running around in circles for the entire book. If you told her not to go into the dark basement, she would set her mouth in a determined line and do it anyway. If you told her to go into hiding, she would take out an ad announcing her location and point a neon sign at herself. If she had been a regular person with “normal” reactions, the book would have ended at page twenty.

She does find a protector (maybe) in lugubrious, weary Detective Nat Waters. He never deems it necessary to let Maureen know what’s going on — nor should he — but she acts on half-suspected, no-basis-for-thinking-this scenarios. Detective Waters probably should have filled her in because he spends way more time bailing her out of fixes than he would have explaining things.

Maureen, for her part, is becoming savvy in the dark ways of the world, and her righteous indignation flows like water. She is determined to root out evil and take herself out of danger. But first she must look danger in the eye. (There is an overabundance of talk about looking people in the eye, not looking people in the eye, looking at feet while avoiding same.)

To enjoy a book I like to like a main character, but it’s not necessary. Especially in noir books, the main characters have moral defects, but they and their stories still carry literary punch. I couldn’t wrap any warm fuzzy feelings around Maureen, but I also didn’t find her interesting. This book is carried by a look at a dark night world affected by the criminality of one creepy, powerful guy.

While I enjoyed “The Devil She Knows” overall, I can’t say I was as blown away.

(And would someone tell me, please, why there is a picture of a man on the cover of this book, when it is clearly Maureen's story.)