Jessa Maxwell, I Need You to Read This

I Need You to Read This, Jessa Maxwell's new novel,  combines several threads of plot, swirling around an advice column in a fictional New York newspaper. One thread concerns a woman who has applied for the job of advice columnist upon the murder of the long-standing incumbent in the job. She has relied on the column in her own life's tumultuous course, but that is her primary qualification, , and is surprised when she is hired for the job. This thread follows her insecurity and imposter symdrome about doing the job, as well as her contacts with a possible suitor and her relationship with a couple of sort-of friends. Another thread follows that tumultuous past, as she becomes involved in an abusive relationship. Another thread follows her own investigation of her predecessors murder, a pursuit that will bring all th thread together in a violent resolution. But there is one more thread, as we follow her in her choice of letters to answer in her column, as well as her heartfelt advice to this correspondents (in the shadow, of course, of her predecessor, her own personal hero).

     The result of all these themes is involving and propulsive, with several major twists that move the whole story forward and keep the reader involved.

Flowers over the Inferno TV series plus Daughter of Ashes (A Teresa Battaglia Novel) by Ilaria Tuti Ekin Oklap (Translator)

 Daughter of Ashes is the third volume of a trilogy by Italian crime \writer Ilaria Tuti, featuring detective Teresa Battaglia, who is suffering from bokth diabetes and the early stages of age-related dementia. The novels are set in and arouond Udine in the far north of Italy, frequently in mountainous areas, and her young and devoted assistant is a prominent feature, along with her other detectives, also devoted to herm and an increasingly hostile boss (I won't go into any details about the boss,m since their back \story is a big part of the novels' development. All the Battaglia books are concerned with both murder and with history, culture, and even folklore of the region. This last in the trilogy is also concerned with some extensive dips into the past of both Battaglia and the Roman history of the area.

The books are compelling and distictive, and the first of them, Flowers over the Inferno, has been made into a TV series by RAI, the Italian national network and it's available with English subtitles (so far onlly on the Australian SBS streaming network, accessible outside Australia with a VPN). The series is very effective in translating the human interactions, especially among the schoolchildren who are a big part of the first novel, and betweenn Battaglia and her young and very attractive assistant Marini (a young Sicilian whose adjustment to the snowy north is a source of some comedy, especially at the beginning).

The crime plots of all three novels are original in concept and in resolution, with the intelligence and wit of Battaglia and the growing confidence of Marini.
It's difficult to describe either version of the series without giving too much away, but I can say that the stories are compellingly told in both media, the novel and the series, and offer an unusual, distinctive experience to both reader and viewer.

John McFetridge, Every City is Every Other City

 John McFetridge is  a Canadian crime fiction writer who published a couple of excellent series set in Toronto (more noir) and Montreal (more police procedural) a few years ago. Quite by accident I recently discovered that since then he has published a stand-alone (maybe?)novel, Every City is Every Other City, set in contemporary Toronto. The title comes from the main character's everyday profession as a scout for locations for movies and TV shows filmed in Toronto (in which the Canadian city and surroundings serves as whatever city or town that the given project is supposed to take place in. His part-tine job though, is private detective, licensed but not too serious about it, usually just taking freelance jobs handed out by the more serious detective agencies around town. But when a colleague asks him to find her missing uncle, he steps into a dangerous morass involving both the missing uncle and a Weinstei-like important man being accused of multiple sexual assaults. 

    The story flips back and forth between the two jobs, offering interesting views inside the film world's not-so-glamorous realities and the gritty real world of police corruption, the power of money, the  lives of ordinary people and one who hopes to rise above the ordinary, a bit-part actress who hopes for the big time but also teaches improv classes at the famous Second City.

    McFetridge's characters talk like real people, and a lot of the story unfolds in dialogue plus the also very natural inner monologue of the main character. Every City is Every Other City is the most enjoyable novel I've read in a long time and I can only hope that the author revisits these characters or introduces us to new ones in the near future.

Elizabeth Heider, May the Wolf Die

 In Italy, if you want to wish someone luck before an exam or other stressful event, you might use a phrase that translates literally as "in the mouth of the wolf." The appropriate response translates literally as "may the wolf die." In Elizabeth Heider's new crime novel May the Wolf Die, she makes no reference to this common use of the phrase. Instead, she portrays a number of more literal, but human, wolves: predators who attack women, ordinary citizens, and anyone who gets in their way. The novel is set in contamporary Naples, so some (but not all) of the wolves are associated with the Camorra (the Neapolitan Mafia) or the crime families that are attempting to take its place. But the main line of the narrative pursues wolves in the  upper ranks of the U.S. Navy, who prey on young naval officers. Heider's two main characters are Nikki and Valerio, who are not a romantic couple bt share the ownership of a sailboat. Valerio is a detective in the Neapolitan police and Nikki is employed in a special office tasked with mediating between U.S. military personnel stationed in Naples and the police or any other government offices with which they might come into contact. Heider was herself employed in such a role in Naples at one time.

    The novel centers on two corpses, both discovered by Nikki in the first chapters. Both turn out to have links to the U.S. Navy, so the local police collaborate with both an NCIS agentm representing the Nav, and Nikki, as a go-between overseeing the interests of everyone concerned. Ths line of the story is very interestingm reflecting the conflicting interests. of all the parties involved in a straightforward police procedural ultimately involving Valerio and otehr cops. But there are several side plots having to do with various \wolves that impact the pribatye lives of Nikki and Valerio. For these side plots to make sense, Heider spends considerable time on the back stories and current lives of these two characters, but mostly o Nikki and her lovers and family members.For me these storylines were distracting, at least up to the end when everything converges in a propulsive and involving manner.

    Nikki is an interesting character, determined to be self-reliant and not dependent on male protectors, a character trait that is much tested, right up to the ending. Along the way, there is a lot of action: more murders, intimidation, violence against women, poisonous office politics, arrogant Naval officers, ruthless gangsters, and multiple views of Naples and surroundings, not to mention an overlay of references to Dante's Inferno. By the end, my frustration with some of the subplots was forgotten in the rapidly mounting threats and violence. xzx

Someone's in the Attic, by Andrea Mara

 Andrea Mara works in the eerie space between the ordinary and the creepy. In Someone's in the Attic, these two realms intertwine, sometimes in alternation sometimes all at once. The ordinary life of a family recently returned to Dublin after abandoning a life in California,  is fraught with reestablishing old friendships (a frequently funny, sometimes suspenseful part of the narrative) plus a series of TikTok videos showing their house being invaded through an attic hatch by a stranger dressed like a ninja. We the reader know more about the threat this figure poses than the characters do, but they are pretty freaked out themselves. At some points, as a reader I wanted the creepy part of the story to progress a little faster, but the ordinary life of the family is also entertaining: So I would highly recommend this not-quite-a-horror story and social comedy.

Arms & Legs, byy Chloe Lane

 Chloe Lane's narrator, Georgie, tells a dark and frequently funny story that progresses in a spiral rather than a straight line. Her language, in Lane's novel Arms & Legs, gathers together a corpse in the Florida forest, exploding eggs, cops and creepy neighbors, controlled burns, and love and desire (not. necessarily at the same time), difficult relationships, and most of all the voice of Georgie, brutally honest with herself and yet open to hose strange creatures, other people.  Georgie is an instructor in a north-central Florida university that sounds a lot like the University of Florida, but this is not a college novel, and though sometimes satirical it is not cerebral: Georgie's language is very physical as well as metaphorical: her own body and its relation to her husband and. her lover is specific and concrete. Lane's novel is dark enokugh to be thought of as "noir," and includes a disturbing, grisly (to use Georgie's word) corpse, a police investigation (th0okugh conducted in the shadows of the narrative. So not a conventional crime novel, but a lyrical, honest portrayal of Georgie's mental, physical, and emotional struggles: as well as being highly entertaining, since Georgie's voice is always elliptical as well as entertaining.

Stuart Neville, Blood Like Mine

Stuart Neville's writing career began with a sort of political ghost story, Te Ghosts of Belfast, and since then his work has gone from crime fiction to horror, sometimes emphasizing one genre's conventions and sometimes another. In his new Blood Like Mine, he lures a reader in with a character-driven crime story, a mother and daughter on the run, and then shifts suddenly into a high energy horror story still character driven, making the conventions of (spoiler alert) the vampire and zombie tale toward something new. His monster is an original take on the monster as icon, increasing in intensity as the story goes along. From the point where the horror tale bursts into full bloom, the book is relentless, striking, and impossible to put down. Highly recommended, even if you don't usually go for any of the horror genres that Neville touches upon (and stretches to his own ends) here.