Hello friends and readers — a belated Happy St. Patty’s Day.
I’m just back from a ski trip with buddy Blaise, capped by a 4-hour train ride (PDX>SEA) devouring Tana French’s latest. I read my face off this past month, with half an eye on Irish themes. The best of the bunch was French’s The Hunter.
There’s something compelling about the slower pace and deliberate “don’t rush me” table setting of her books. She doesn’t give you a mutilated body on page 4, or 40, or maybe ever. Like Louise Penny, she carefully introduces place and character, then lets the menace and dread unfold slowly. I’ll admit, for an impatient reader, this can take some breath work. In fact, I didn’t love The Witch Elm (2018), which kept me from reading The Searcher (2020). This new one is a sequel of sorts to The Searcher, though you don’t need to have read one to enjoy the other. All that throat-clearing aside: The Hunter is a blast.
It continues the story of ex-Chicago cop Cal Hooper, who’s settled in a rural west-Ireland village where he nurses a romance with neighbor Lena and repairs furniture with teen protégé Trey, who has “the general air of being raised by wolves.” Trey (short for Theresa, whose brother Brendan went missing in The Searcher) is a wonderfully intolerant and twitchy character, someone who’d “rather pull out her own fingernails with pliers than do anyone here a favor.” When Trey’s shitty dad returns home from four years in London, the charismatic and conniving Johnny Reddy sets the story into lurching motion with a scheme to find gold in the hills and farms of peaceful Ardnakelty.
Though US-born, French has lived in Ireland for decades and she has a great ear for dialogue and the subtleties of Irish wit and snark. Hilarious conversations — at a pub, beside a fence post — can last for pages. Once I settled into the pace and let the story take me, I gained a new appreciation for French’s brilliance.
Galway Confidential, by Ken Bruen
Unlike French, Bruen gives you a body on page one. It’s a nun. And it’s not pretty. I’d read a few earlier books in the Jack Taylor series. This one (#17) catches up with Jack as he’s waking in the hospital from two years in a coma (insert eye roll) and picks up where he left off: smoking and drinking too much “Jay” (Jameson). Jack’s coma was the result of a near-fatal attack in the last book. Sitting by Jack’s side is a strange man named Raftery, who claims he was there the night of the attack and saved him. Jack’s recovery introduces him to a post-pandemic world that he must navigate on shaky legs and a constant thirst for the Jay. He’s hired to find the villain who’s attacking Galway nuns, but Jack is weak and world-weary; he’s a wreck and he knows it. Bruen’s style is stark, brisk, darkly funny, with glimmers of hope and light. It’s fast paced and a bit herky-jerky, with short chapters — some just a page, some just a poem. The book’s title refers to a crime blog that doesn’t exist. Also to Ireland’s hidden secrets. (You can read a great interview with Bruen at CrimeReads.)
Lost Man’s Lane, by Scott Carson (Michael Koryta)
I’ve been reading Koryta’s smart, deeply researched mysteries and thrillers for years, but this is the first of his “Scott Carson” books I’ve tried. I’ve mentioned I can be an impatient reader, like a crabby casting director, arms folded: “Show me what you got, kid.” I’m especially skeptical with a 500-page book. But this one? It shut the casting director right up. Marshall Miller is a 16-year-old in Bloomington, Indiana (Koryta’s hometown) who’s testing out his new driver’s license when a cop pulls him over. But there’s something strange about the cop, and there’s a young woman in the back seat of his cruiser, crying. We soon learn the woman has been reported missing, and Marshall ends up interning for a private investigator on the case. Together, they uncover all sorts of small-town strangeness. At times it felt like Carson had 20 plates spinning, but it all holds together nicely. I loved this book. It had the sweep and sweetness of John Irving and the spooky-ghostly grit of Stephen King. But wholly original, too, with vivid and loveable and heartbreaking characters. It’s a coming-of-age story (clearly based on Koryta’s younger days: he was once a PI), plus a mother-son story and a love story. It’s also a love letter to the college town of Bloomington — and to the late 1990s and high school keggers and English teachers and Dashiell Hammett and friendship and young love and family. Also snakes and ghosts.
The Havana Run, an Amazon Original short story by Ace Atkins
Ace has a new novel, Don’t Let the Devil Ride, coming in May. In the meantime, I tore through this fast-paced short, a riff of an adventure story featuring two smart-ass/dumb-ass ex-journalists (both laid off from the Tampa Tribune, where Ace once worked, competitor to the St. Pete Times, where I once worked), who fly to Cuba to find a treasure. George and Jay are sent there, all expenses paid, by a mysterious old man Jay met over cafés con leche in Ybor City, who may or may not be some kind of Cuban royalty. In Cuba, they meet a beautiful translator/fixer whose warnings — “trust no one” — go unheeded. Bullets fly and the two chatty pals sink deeper in over their heads. It’s a hoot. (Another Amazon Original Short I’m looking forward to is Ivy Pochoda’s just released Jackrabbit Skin.)
Panic, by Luke Jennings
Jennings is a London-based author and journalist who wrote the novel Codename Villanelle (followed by two more in the series) that became the TV series Killing Eve. Panic is a catchy, clever page-turner that tackles some of today’s nastiness around hate, nationalism, and intolerance for gender and identity politics. It’s the story of four super-fans of the TV show City of Night. They all bristle against the narrow mindedness of their far-flung small towns (two of them are trans), but they find each other in an online fan chatroom. The show’s fans want love to bloom between the two main characters, Pandora and Lyric, and the mashed-up name of that hoped-for affair — #Panic — gives the chatroom (and book) its name. (I read that Jennings got the idea after being invited to a fan chatroom for Killing Eve.) The foursome soon learns from the show’s make-up artist that it's star, Alice Temple, is in trouble. They meet in L.A. to try and save Alice, but they’re soon on the run from a violent, far-right hate group called Legion. It’s all wacky and feels clearly written for TV (it’s already in development), but it’s a fun, fast read and the characters, all marginalized in their own way, are a funny and chaotic crew. (Jennings is writing a serialized new Villanelle novel here on Substack: KILLING EVE: RESURRECTION)
Two set in New Orleans:
The American Daughters, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin — Antebellum New Orleans is a city “at war with itself … in love with its own beauty.” That’s the setting for Ruffin’s hauntingly beautiful story of Ady and her mother, Sanite, enslaved by a prick named du Marche, from whom they escape into the bayou. Ady later joins up with a society of spies and resistance fighters called The Daughters, where she thrives thanks to the survival lessons from her resilient mother. Part spy story, part revenge story, part mother-daughter story, The American Daughters reminds readers of the horrors and brutality of this dark period in U.S. history. In a jarring but effective conceit, Ruffin regularly refers to “slave labor camps, also called a plantation,” to remind us that enslaved women like Ady and Sanite lived not on moss-covered estates but in forced and violent captivity — an American gulag. Still, there’s poetry and vivid imagery throughout (“The Mississippi churned by, a rippling walnut-brown sheet…”) and Ady is memorably spirited, funny, creative, defiant and courageous. Ruffin wrote much of the book as a John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence (an amazing program, whose alums include Megan Abbott and Jesmyn Ward) in the boozy and bookish town of Oxford, Mississippi. (Ruffin discusses that and more in this great interview with Barnes & Noble’s amazing Miwa Messer.)
Blessed Water, by Margot Douaihy — This is the follow-up to Douaihy’s debut, Scorched Grace, which I reviewed last year (and interviewed Douaihy: here). Blessed Water catches up with Sister Holiday, the tattooed punk rocker who’s joined the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and, at the same time, become an apprentice PI with the Redemption Detective Agency, run by ex-fire inspector Magnolia Riveaux, whom Sister Holiday befriended in the first book. As the good-bad nun begins her first case (in a spooky echo to Ken Bruen’s murdered nuns), we soon see a murdered priest floating down the Mississippi. Sister Holiday pulls the swollen “manatee of a person” from the river and realizes it’s “clad in all black, like me.” Like Ruffin, she makes much of the weather, the history and the water, water, water of New Orleans. Douaihy’s background as a poet glimmers on every punkish page.
Books I haven’t read yet, but will, and you should too, and other stuff…
Atop my TBR pile is James, the latest from Percival Everett, who has become one of my favorite writers. (I reviewed Trees in 2021 and Dr. No in 2022; and So Much Blue reigns among my all-time faves). If you haven’t seen Jeffery Wright in American Fiction (based on Everett’s 2001 book Erasure), do it. (And I mentioned B&N’s Miwa Messer above: she also interviewed Everett.)
Lisa Unger’s The New Couple in 5B is just out. Collette Bancroft, the great book critic at the Tampa Bay Times (my former employer, when it was the St. Pete Times - RIP), called it a classic, with echoes of Rosemary’s Baby. (You can find Lisa’s newsletter here: Notes From the Margin)
This one I did read, but it’s not out till July, so I’m saving my review for later: Like Mother, Like Daughter, by Kimberly McCreight — it’s realllllly good.
What my current wife is currently reading: Kate Atkinson’s Transcription. Says wifey: “Smart!” I read it years ago but might try it again soon.
I’d mentioned that I wrote a podcast episode on James Baldwin (listen here). So here’s a great NY Times roundup on “The Essential James Baldwin.”
Also up next: Wandering Stars, the new novel from Tommy Orange.
Cocktail of the Month
A traditional Stone Fence is made with rum or brandy, but I came across this one — from New Orleans bartender J’Nai Angelle — in Imbibe magazine. (I also liked that Stone Fence felt very rural Irish). You can also get away with using the Jay (Jameson), but I found this version to be simple, tasty, crisp, and elegant…
1.5 oz. rye whiskey
2–3 oz. apple cider
2 dashes angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
1 dash orange bitters
Mix all ingredients in a cocktail shaker, then pour over rocks. Or just mix it up right in an ice-filled glass. Garnish optional.
Unboxed… As someone who follows many authors on social media, I’ve seen lots of unboxing videos. That’s when an author eagerly knifes open a box of galleys or hardcovers they’ve just received from their publisher. Some are better than others. Here’s mine from two years ago — featuring a Guinness cameo.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.
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Till next month,
Sláinte! (that’s Irish for “the Jay”)
-Neal
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The Stone Fence sounds incredible!
Always enjoy reading your newsletter! Thanks so much for the shout out of THE NEW COUPLE IN 5B!