American War by Omar El Akkad

Vintage, 432 pages, $16.95 (c2017, Vintage c2018)

Yes, author Omar El Akkad has given us another American Civil War, this time because of the Free Southern States’ desire to keep using fossil fuels, despite an environmental disaster created by global warming. Yes, the war is between the Blues and the Reds, beginning in the year 2075. Yes, there is a plague that has forever sealed off South Carolina from the rest of the country. Yes, the United States of America is no longer the world’s leading power; that role is fulfilled by both China and the Bouazizi Empire (Egypt with parts of former Arabian and African countries). Yes, large portions of the coastal areas have been lost to the invading seas and rivers, so much so that the Capitol has been relocated to Columbus, Ohio. But this is all background noise.

The real story is about Sara T. Chestnut, who at an early age renamed herself Sarat. The willfulness and determination behind that act follows her for the rest of her days.

Sarat’s story begins at the age of six in a metal container where she lives with her twin sister, older brother, and parents. The war is getting closer, so the container’s useful days are numbered. After Sarat’s father disappears, she and the rest of her family struggle to get to a refugee camp. There Sarat learns survival and self-reliance. There she becomes a potential resistance fighter.

The crux to any story about war and a land under siege is how people are dislocated, both physically and mentally. Each time Sarat becomes acclimated to a place, she is then torn away. What can she believe in when there are only sham legal venues for aid and restitution? When there is much in-fighting among the “leaders” of the cause? When friends can turn out to be enemies? When the family center cannot hold?

I think this book is more about what war, any war, does to people and their motivations rather than it is a political statement about our current times or even an environmental warning. People can war about many things. If there are bloodshed and lines drawn in the sand, then there is trauma, and people must look deep to see what is inside themselves and what has importance to them.

“American War” is disorienting because Sarat doesn’t really fight against the Blues; she fights against the faceless people who have slowly taken away what she loves. Then she fights faces she knows, and victory seems an empty promise. Nevertheless, the book is situated in a Blue versus Red arena, and the geography — however misshapen by environmental forces — is familiar. That adds a dimension to “American War” that wouldn’t be there if it were a dystopian novel set in the far future or on another planet. Most of us will have a visceral reaction to El Akkad’s setup.

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and was a war correspondent for Canadian media. I don’t know how much time he spent in the U.S. South, but I like the flavor of his setting. Coincidentally, he now lives not too far from where I am in Oregon. Obviously, he has moved through very different environments, just as his story moves from the South and ends in Anchorage, of all places. His experience with war in the Middle East must have greatly informed the details of Sarat’s tale. The terror, anger, and deprivation seem so authentic.

Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates

Picador, 352 pages, $26 (c2017)

Ah, success begets imitation. It’s only flattery if the imitation is successful, so say I, and this is successful on many levels. “Grist Mill Road” runs on the road paved by “Gone Girl” and “The Girl on the Train.” This, along with the recent “The Woman in the Window,” deals with narrative sleight-of-hand. You think you know where the trick is leading, but you don’t even understand how the game is being played.

Middle school children made the news the summer of 1982 in a small town in New York. Fourteen-year-old Matthew tied thirteen-year-old Hannah to a tree and shot her thirty-nine times with a BB gun. Twelve-year-old Patch witnessed some of it but didn’t do anything to stop it. Patch later untied Hannah from the tree and Matthew, his best friend, was sent to wherever fourteen-year-olds go who break the law.

Twenty-six years later, in a way only books of fiction can ironically devise, Patrick is married to Hannah. Patrick has had many nicknames in his lifetime, including “Tricky,” a name given him by his best friend, and “Patch.” Yes, that Patch. Hannah, one-eyed Hannah, having lost an eye in a BB gun incident in 1982, is a crime reporter for a New York newspaper. She knows a lot of cops. Patrick, because this later story is set in 2008, has lost his job in the financial downturn of the time. A lot of the first part of the book is eavesdropping on Patrick’s thoughts as he tries to re-make his life in light of his sudden unemployment. Hannah tries to entertain him, and unburden herself in the process, by describing the lurid details of the stories she covers in The Naked City.

Hannah often wakes up screaming from the nightmares she has. Patrick drifts more and more into a fantasy cooking world he has developed: a virtual The Red Barn Restaurant, where his innovative and delicious recipes can come to life. Both have not seen Matthew in decades.

Soon Hannah has some sections of the book to herself. Her friend, Detective McCluskey, eventually reveals the details of a disturbance that bears directly on Hannah. The shocking revelation propels a lot of the secrets that have been stored inside people for twenty-six years to come pouring forth.

Finally — and I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, since if you look at the table of contents, you will see Matthew’s name heading a lot of the chapters — Matthew’s story is in the driver’s seat for much of the last part of the book.

Who do you, poor befuddled reader, trust? Suffice it to say there are no straightforward paths here. And while tragedy piles upon tragedy, you should know that Christopher J. Yates infuses his book with humor. If you can’t know the joy of life without also knowing pain and suffering, apparently you cannot know tragedy without comedy. Yates uses his humor sparingly and to great effect. For instance, when Patch is getting ready to shop at the market, Hannah will add some sort of punny farewell, like “Don’t forget the cabbage, Patch.”

Then when Patch is hit by the lightning bolt that is his parents’ divorce, “The information was all there being fed into me like data, only what came out the other end wasn’t just the wrong conclusion, it was a table lamp. A swordfish.”

In describing being bored by talks by the local naturalist, “… while glaciers left me cold and pine needles didn’t spike my interest, there was something about the topic of cement that lit me up like gunpowder.”

Yates writes well and has created an intriguing, if somewhat convoluted, storyline. I had trouble with the final reveal of Matthew’s story, and that is the main reason I am not giving it an MBTB star. But that’s just me. Bet this book is a major hit and you’ll see it on the big screen shortly.

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

Soho Crime, 400 pages, $26.95

Sujata Massey created the Rei Shimura series, beginning with 1997’s “The Salaryman’s Wife,” a novel nominated for most of the big mystery awards. Keeping to her mission to introduce us to other cultures, her latest book, “The Widows of Malabar Hill,” is set mostly in 1921 Bombay, India. Massey “was born in England to parents from India and Germany, and was raised mostly in St. Paul, Minnesota, although her home for more than a quarter century has been Baltimore, Maryland.” She brings a believable sensibility to what it means to live at the crossroads of different cultures. She also brings an American perspective to it, in that she knows what most of us don’t know. What exactly does it mean to be designated “Indian”? She guides us through the complexity of a little part of India at a time when British rule was still in place.

Perveen Mistry has had a long and rocky road to becoming the first female solicitor in Bombay. She is a Parsi and her family lives a progressive Parsi life. What does that mean? We find out as Perveen navigates the legal shoals of helping a Muslim family, befriending a British woman, and dealing with a religiously conservative Parsi family. 

Massey actually has given us two stories, beginning with a nineteen-year-old Perveen in 1916 struggling to take classes at a Bombay law school, and suffering the bullying and vicious pranks of her male classmates. Should she succeed in graduating, she will not be able to take the bar. Because she is a woman. But her progressive father, Jamshedji, has a law practice and wants her to join his firm, even without bar credentials. When the action shifts to 1921, we are missing some of the crucial pieces of the 1916 story. How did Perveen meet her British friend, Alice, at Oxford in England? Who is this Cyrus of whom she is so afraid? Massey believes in tension held for as long as possible, as she gradually reveals what happened in 1916.

The 1921 story has to do with one of Perveen’s father’s clients who recently died. He left three widows and four young children. The women are in mourning seclusion and only a woman can talk to them about settling the estate. Enter Perveen. There appear to be some problems with how the women want the estate to be handled. In dealing with the brutish, dismissive male house manager, Mukri, to resolve the financial concerns, Perveen's simple task becomes onerous.

After someone is murdered, Perveen then has to deal with the dismissive police, most of whom are white. She manages with the help of her friend Alice and, better yet, the influence of her father, Sir David Hobson-Jones, a councillor to Bombay’s governor. Alice and her father exist mostly to show how difficult it would be to deal with the colonizing authorities otherwise. In the end, Alice proves to be a delightful sidekick. (If you watched the Melissa McCarthy movie, “Spy,” think of the character of Nancy, played by actress Miranda Hart. Alice is a less goofy but just as exuberant Nancy.)

Perveen’s past story is heartbreaking and her present story is a triumph of stubbornness.

MBTB star!

Black Fall by Andrew Mayne

Harper Paperbacks, 384 pages, $15.99 (c2017)

Apparently “Black Fall” is the third “Jessica Blackwood” novel. I admit to missing the first two. Shame on me. “Black Fall” is entertaining with the strong, endearing first-person voice of Jessica Blackwood, a magician’s assistant — by way of her magician father and grandfather — and now FBI agent.

Jessica’s strength is her ability to see past the “illusion” high-level criminals create because of her background. When a village in Bolivia is flooded out and many lives are lost, Jessica works her logic to figure out why the flood occurred. Was it really because of the big storm that hunkered over the village? Or was it something far more nefarious? Here’s a hint: It was something far more nefarious.

Strangely, Jessica’s charm comes from her admitted awkwardness and bluntness. But she’s far less blunt than one of her FBI cohorts, Jennifer, a computer nerd. Other members of Jessica’s team are Gerald, another computer nerd, and Dr. Ailes, Jessica’s mentor. They comprise the “X-Files” wannabe team. Actually, this book reminded me somewhat of Preston and Child’s Aloysius Pendergast series. Over-the-top situations occur and peculiar FBI agents must save the world.

Jessica is much more vulnerable and human than her woo-woo FBI predecessors. She is affected by her trickster childhood and the valuable lessons she learned at her family’s collective knee, but it is that background that she now attempts to flee.

As an FBI agent, she has racked up impressive wins and acquired impressive enemies, one reminiscent of the creepy and brilliant Hannibal Lecter, star of several of Thomas Harris’ books. But he’s in prison. So Jessica visits another creepy and some say brilliant criminal, Ezra Winter, a radical environmentalist. He, too, is in prison. Apparently, “prison” might be a relative term.

Let me back up a bit. In the beginning was an attempt on her life by a stranger. Then an earthquake hit the East Coast. Then came an old videotape of an eight-years-dead physicist predicting the present day quake. Then came the flood and another old videotape of the dead guy predicting that. Jessica, because of her background, is more likely to sniff a con than her fellow agents. And that is what happens. But who or what is pulling the con? And why did that woman attack her?

The situation becomes pretty outlandish and will probably make a visually thrilling movie until it sort of abruptly thuds to earth at the end. But this appears to be a setup for the next book.

"Black Fall" has been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Mystery.