Review: Deep Freeze

Deep Freeze by John Sandford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.

I got sneak preview of this one last spring when I made a long drive to attend a John Sandford signing, and he told us about the current book he was fighting a deadline on that he was going to have to spend the evening working on when he got back to the hotel. All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, but it makes John one of the best and most productive thriller writers on the bestseller list.

It’s another hard Minnesota winter in the small town of Trippton, but there’s spot near the sewage treatment plant where the river doesn’t freeze. That’s where the body of the lady who owned the local bank pops up, and soon state cop Virgil Flowers is on the job. Virgil is familiar with Trippton because his fishing buddy Johnson Johnson lives there, and he also worked another case there just a few books back.

Complicating the murder investigation is the side gig his bosses want Virgil to help with that involves a ring of the locals adding sound chips to Barbie dolls that make it sound as if their having orgasms and selling them on the web. The Mattel corporation has no sense of humor about these aptly named Barbie-Ohs and has dispatched a private detective to serve cease-and-desist orders, but the hard boiled lady gumshoe is having no luck tracking down the people involved. Virgil isn’t happy about such a silly distraction, but he finds out the hard way that times are so tough in this struggling small town that the people involved are desperate to keep anyone from interfering with the income they make from selling the dolls.

This is pretty typical Sandford in a lot of ways. Virgil gets a case in a rural Minnesota town, and he tries to solve it using his sneakily low key way of chatting up people and tapping into local gossip. Like most of his books we know right from the start who the killer is, and the tension comes from the cat-and-mouse game between the cop and criminal. Sandford often holds back some info from the reader that is a critical part of how the bad guy will be found and figuring that out provides the mystery element to his books rather than a straight-up whodunit. He adds a new wrinkle to that in this one because while we know who killed the woman we also know that he left he body in her house after trying to make it look like an accident. One of the interesting aspects in this one is that the killer is as confused as we are as to how her body wound up in the river.

There is also all the typical Sandford stuff about Virgil having funny conversations with people, and one of the better running gags in this one is that everyone he asks about the leader of the Barbie-Oh gang acts as if they’ve never heard of her though he knows damn good and well that every one of them knows exactly who she is.

There’s one potential problem here with a huge unresolved plot thread. Sandford doesn’t always wrap everything up neatly, but even if the cops don’t know everything by the conclusion the reader always does. It’s also possible that he’s leaving a loose thread for a future book, but that's not really his style so it’s odd that it isn’t even mentioned in the wrap-up as a loose end. It really does seem like something that Sandford just forgot to address, but I’m also reading an advanced copy so it’s possible that it might get fixed in the final published version. But Sandford’s plotting is usually air tight so it really made me scratch my head at the oversight.

Overall, it’s still another satisfying thriller from a writer whose casual readability masks how well conceived and executed his books really are.

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Review: The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Johnny Smith is one bad-luck bastard.

He starts off well enough as a nice guy with a talent for teaching and is in the early stages of what looks to be a very promising relationship with Sarah. However, a car accident leaves Johnny in a coma which nobody thinks he’ll recover from. Miraculously, he wakes up 4 years later, but he finds that Sarah has married someone else, his mother has turned into a religious lunatic, he’s got a long and painful rehab to endure, and he faces a mountain of debt from his hospital bills. Oh, and he now has psychic ability to learn details about a person by touching them or personal objects as well as sometimes seeing their futures. This might seem like a gift, but as Johnny quickly learns it’s really a curse that eventually puts him on a collision course with a dangerous politician named Greg Stillson.

I’ve always thought this was one of King’s better books but hadn’t read it for years. A new audio version with James Franco narrating and doing a pretty good job of it got me motivated, and I’m pleased to find that it mostly lives up to my memory of it.

The elephant in the room on this one is that even thought it was published in 1979 the Stillson plot is about a populist demagogue who manages to rise in politics despite being a crazy and corrupt piece of shit just because he has talent for making rubes think that he’s a maverick who tells it like it is even as they willfully ignore the obvious warning signs. So it’d be easy to say that King is a prophet these days. Yeah, he hit the mark with that one, but on the other hand there’s plenty of writers who have done stories about shady politicians.

What I found more interesting here is what King did with Johnny’s mother, Vera. She starts out as someone with strong fundamental religious beliefs, but Johnny’s accident sends her over the high side and into the realm where she starts believing tabloid stories about Jesus living underground at the South Pole. She’s completely immune to facts and logic, and she’d rather rely on prayer than medication to handle her high blood pressure.

It’s fascinating to read a character like this in the ‘70s setting where tabloids and poorly printed tracts are how Vera gets her crackpot theories, and how even then she uses them to create her own view of the world because reality doesn’t suit her. Fast forward to the 21st century where some people pick their news web sites based on how it conforms to what they want to believe as they spread rumors on Facebook about child sex rings in the basement of pizza restaurants that don’t even have a basement, and you realize that King had tapped into something that was on the rise even then.

Leaving aside the eerie similarities to America today, what sets this apart from his other novels is the way that King focused on John Smith and made his story a genuine tragedy. Johnny just wanting to try and resume some kind of normal life, but unable to stop himself from using his power to help people and put himself in a media spotlight is incredibly compelling.

Uncle Stevie takes his sweet time with this so that it comes across as more a slow burn, and it’s not really a horror novel although it can be creepy at times. You can see where the bigger plot involving Johnny and Stillson is headed for a good long while although King still makes the journey there worth the trip, and Johnny is one of his characters who haunts me the most.

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Review: The Blinds

The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Somewhere out in the vastness of west Texas is an entire town with amnesia.

Officially it’s called Caesura, but the locals refer to it as The Blinds. The residents are either criminals or witnesses in hiding because all have undergone a process which removed their personal memories, and none remember which they are. The entire town is kept secure and hidden from the world, and most inhabitants go about their business quietly wondering what might have put them in a position to completely surrender their identities, and whether they were guilty of horrible crimes or an innocent who got caught up in something. However, two violent deaths shatter the quiet routine and set the entire town on edge. While Sheriff Calvin Cooper is technically a guard and not a resident, he’s got his own secrets even as he investigates and tries to keep everyone calm.

Author Megan Abbott brought this one to my attention by praising it on what the kids these days call social media, and when Mighty Megan talks, I listen. That policy paid off nicely with this one.

Aside from a humdinger of a set-up the writing is a cut above what you’d normally get in a crime/sci-fi thriller. There’s a lot top notch characterization, and the imagery of this small town out in the middle of the barren Texas landscape gives the whole thing an excellent tone of isolation. The plot has plenty of solid twists and turns, and the ultimate revelations are satisfying. However, what the novel really excels at is how it weaves together all these characters with pasts hidden even from themselves.

It combines the elements of a great page-turner with some deeper thoughts on identity and memory with a unique setting. Overall, it’s one of the better books I’ve read this year.

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