Review: Three-Fifths

Three-Fifths by John Vercher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Pittsburgh during the winter of 1995 Bobby is a young biracial man passing for white who has never told anyone that his father was black. So when Bobby’s old buddy Aaron gets out of prison and shows up looking like a ‘roid monster with neo-Nazi tattoos, it’s not a great situation. It gets even worse when Aaron viciously beats a young black man, and Bobby unwittingly acts as his getaway driver. Terrified both of being arrested and of Aaron finding out his true heritage, Bobby also has to deal with his alcoholic mother who has a starling encounter of her own with a doctor who is struggling through a divorce.

When I attended the 2019 Bouchercon everyone was raving about this book, and I saw John Vercher a couple of times. After reading this now I’m kicking myself for not taking the opportunity to meet him.

I’m not sure if this is social commentary as crime fiction or crime fiction as social commentary, but whatever you call it, it’s a great book. In an incredibly tight 200 pages Vercher not only creates several vivid characters, but he also manages to make all of their backstory part of a personal mystery that revolves around exactly why Bobby is so committed to hiding the fact that he’s biracial.


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Review: The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Even back in the days before Amazon it was tough to turn a profit running a used bookstore so Bernie Rhodenbarr supplements his income by the occasional burglary job. When his best friend Carolyn has a hot tip about an easy score about some wealthy people being on an overnight trip it seems like easy money, but after breaking into their home Bernie finds that some other thieves have already hit the place. Still, he manages to find an uncracked safe with some loot inside so it seems like a successful heist with a potentially big payday thanks to a rare coin. However, the police soon pick up Bernie on suspicion of murder. How can a honest thief prove his innocence?

As I’ve noted in other reviews, this isn’t my favorite Lawrence Block series, and I wasn’t all that interested before because the stories aren’t actually about Bernie being a thief. Instead, his burglaries end up with him in trouble in with the cops for crimes he hasn’t committed, and he has to use his skills to solve a mystery. So this is actually an amateur detective series in disguise, and for a long time that didn’t work for me because I prefer my stories about thieves to be about stealing and not finding murderers.

However, after trying several of them I finally fell for Bernie’s charms, and that’s entirely due to Block’s talent. While these aren’t outright comedies they are meant to be funnier and lighter than Block’s other work, and Bernie does work as a likable guy who does have a certain code of honor even as he dearly loves stealing stuff. That’s all on display here with a solid whodunit plot for Bernie to unravel as he goes around breaking into places and having funny conversations with people.


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Review: Jar of Hearts

Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Georgina Shaw, Angela Wong, and Kaiser Brody were best friends as teenagers in the ‘90s . Then Angela vanished without a trace. Years later Geo is a rising executive engaged to be married to a wealthy man, and Kaiser is a homicide detective. When Angela’s body is discovered the police find evidence proving that Geo’s old boyfriend, Calvin James, killed her. Worse yet, Geo knew that he’d done it yet didn't turn him in for it, and he’d gone on to murder several other women after that. Kaiser is the one who arrests Geo for being an accessory to Angela’s murder.

And you thought your high school reunion was awkward...

Geo testifies against Calvin and gets five years in prison for her part in the crime. Shortly after she begins serving her sentence, Calvin breaks out of jail, and Kaiser is sure that Geo is still holding things back. Five years later as Geo is about to be released, fugitive Calvin kills more people in such a way that is designed to draw Geo’s attention. Geo just wants to try to rebuild her life, but Kaiser is still sure she’s keeping secrets even as he finds it increasingly hard to deny the attraction he feels towards her.

When you summarize the plot it sounds like the set-up to TV movie you might see on Lifetime that would have a title like My Lover Killed My Best Friend. One of the great things about this book is that it doesn’t play out that way at all. Jennifer Hillier has written both Geo and Kaiser in such a way that they seem like real people. We know that despite moving on with her life that Geo was filled with shame and regret, and we also see from her time in prison that she’s both tough and intelligent. Kaiser has his own issues, and it’s clear that he never entirely got over his feelings for Geo even as he’s shocked and angry when he realizes why she distanced herself from him back then.

The clever thing here is the structure which manages to start the story at one point in time, flashback to their high school days repeatedly, and then still move forward five years as well. So we see Geo and Kaiser at various stages in their lives, all of which turns out to be important to the plot.The book also seems to lay out the whole sordid tale right up front, and then manages to somehow make us feel like we know Geo’s story completely even as there are nagging clues indicating, just as Kaiser suspects, that there’s more to this then she’s told everyone.

When the answers come at the end, it’s done in a way that provides shocking revelations and surprises, and the story doesn’t play out in the way I expected at all. Yet Hillier plays fair, and doesn’t pull any tricks to make this work. It’s all been built up via excellent character work to make it all pay in the end.

I picked this one up at Bouchercon 2019 in Dallas after seeing Hillier on a couple of panels where she talked a bit about this novel, and she seemed very sharp and funny. The book lived up to what I hoped for and then some.

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Review: Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you ever thought that writers like James Ellroy exaggerate the corruption of old Hollywood, try reading this.

The murder of influential film director William Desmond Taylor has so many viable suspects and motives that it could be the plot for a sequel to Knives Out. For starters, despite being a well-respected figure in the movie industry Taylor was a man who had secrets like a wife and daughter that he had abandoned years before coming to Hollywood and changing his name. He may have also been gay or bisexual, and there were rumors that he had frequented opium dens.

Taylor had already been burned by one man who found out who he really was. His former butler had learned about his former life before stealing from Taylor and vanishing. He was a prime suspect in the murder, but the press latched on to theories that said that Taylor had been killed by a woman as a result of some kind of romantic entanglement. Mary Miles Minter was a young starlet infatuated with Taylor which made her domineering mother furious even as Taylor didn’t return her affections. Another actress, Mabel Norman, was trying to put her life and career back together with Taylor’s help after breaking a drug addiction, and there was wild speculation that Mabel or one of her former dealers angry at Taylor’s efforts to keep her clean might have done it. Another small-time actress named Margaret ‘Gibby’ Gibson wasn’t implicated at the time, but her deathbed confession to killing Taylor decades later would lead many to believe that it was a blackmail attempt by Gibson and some friends of hers that led to murder.

This book leans into the idea that the crime might have been solved back in 1922 if it wasn’t the studio using its influence to steer the police and the press in certain directions. Powerful executive Adolph Zukor already had his hands full holding off reformers and government regulations in the face of scandal, and his minions took all of Taylor’s papers from his house before the police could read them. Later, the papers they gave to investigators may have been cherry picked to lead the police towards Minter and Norman since letting one or two actresses get pummeled in the press and by ‘moralists’ across the country was preferable to having all of Hollywood’s dirty laundry come out at that critical time.

Overall, this is an interesting look at an unsolved mystery. and Mann seems to do a credible job of sticking to the known facts. The backdrop of Zukor trying to hold onto power as he battled reformers is interesting in itself. I particularly found the story of Will Hays fascinating. It’s weird how things evolved so that he’d eventually have to found the infamous Hays Code which would stifle movies for decades even as he was not a moralizing reformer himself, and he was deeply uncomfortable with the idea that he should be a censor or in charge of doing things like banning Arbuckle from making movies.

Unfortunately, Mann falls into the true-crime trap of falling in love with a theory and presenting it as the only possible solution when that’s not the case. Here, he spends a lot of time following Margaret Gibson and her blackmail accomplices to establish how he thinks they were involved later and how their activities indicate a pattern that might have been used on Taylor. And that’s certainly possible, but there’s no new evidence to prove that. Yet, Mann presents this as the obvious solution while blowing by the parts that don’t fit or point to other people. His ideas about how a conspiracy within the studio to steer the cops wrong and throwing their own people like Minter and Norman under the bus while protecting someone like Gibson seems especially shaky.

So if you’re interested it’s good for understanding the basic facts and context of what happened, but wary of the places where Mann speculates without considering alternatives.

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Review: The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man

The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man by Tom King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

They say that good fences make good neighbors, but what if your neighbor was an android with the ability to manipulate the density of his body so that he could simply phase through the fence?

Vision decides he wants a family so he creates some more synthezoids to function as his wife and two children and moves to the suburbs of DC to lead a more ‘normal’ life. However, some of the neighbors are worried about what a family of robots will do the property values, and it turns out that his family have personalities and problems that don’t fit into Vision’s narrow idea of the American nuclear family.

I’d heard about this title for a while, and I wish I’d gotten to it sooner. There’s a dark, almost Megan Abbott-esque kind of surban noir going on here, and it’s kinda crazy that we’re getting this kind of story centered on Vision.

It reminds me a bit of Matt Fraction’s run on Hawkeye because that was another comic about an Avenger trying to have a normal life, but Clint Barton is just a regular guy who couldn’t ever keep his superhero stuff from leaking into his attempts at an everyday routine. Here, we see that it’s Vision’s family that may be the main problem even as he tries to make the people around them conform to his idea of normalcy. It’s intriguing stuff.


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Review: The Mighty Thor, Volume 1: Thunder in Her Veins

The Mighty Thor, Volume 1: Thunder in Her Veins by Jason Aaron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As Thor, Dr. Jane Foster is the Goddess of Thunder. However, when she puts the hammer down and returns to her mortal form she’s dying of cancer, and becoming Thor prevents her chemo from working. Being a hero is literally killing her, and yet Jane refuses to stop because the 10 realms need a Thor, especially now that the Dark Elves have teamed up with the evil Roxxon Corporation to wage ware on the light elves, Loki has returned, and Odin is being a real dick.

Great stuff here with Jason Aaron rolling out an epic story with an all-too human character at the heart of it all. Jane as Thor is now one of my all time favorite Marvel heroes, and the plot is cooking with gas on several levels. The art fits the story perfectly with great action, and the perfectly drawn settings take us from fantastic realms like Asgard to the hospital where Jane gets her chemo treatments to moons of Saturn. It all works.


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Review: The Vital Abyss

The Vital Abyss by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sociopaths doing scientific research? Why not? We already put them in charge of the government.

Another one of the The Expanse short stories tie-ins gives us the scoop on another piece of the story that wasn’t explored in the main novels. This time out we learn about the research team that unleashed the protomolecule from one of the people involved. His backstory as one of the regular folks desperately trying to escape the level of Basic assistance on Earth gives us some more detail on another aspect of society. His account of willingly being turned into a member of a team of sociopaths so that they’ll be willing to break many an egg to make the perfect omelette his chilling, and the story of what happened to them after the events of the earlier books also leads into some of the later story threads.

As usual, it’s not critical to the overall Expanse story, but as bonus material it’s pretty interesting. It’s also worth noting that they used this story as part of the TV series.

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