CAPTURE and DUST DEVILS by Roger Smith

I'm excited because February 20, marks New Pulp Press's release in PRINT, in the USA, for the first time of Roger Smith's novels, CAPTURE and DUST DEVILS. I highly recommend both of these books, or any book written by Roger Smith, really. I'm so happy that these books finally going to be available here in print format. Here are The Drowning Machine's previous reviews of both books:

DUST DEVILS

South African journalist Robert Dell, his wife and two children are all headed off on a holiday, when a black pickup truck runs them off the road. Dell's family is killed and he is framed for their murders.

If that sounds anything like a typical thriller, please, just hold the phone a sec. Because you haven't read anything like this book. No, you haven't. No, it's not like that book or that one or any of the thrillers you'll recall right offhand, and that's because Roger Smith isn't just any writer. In the span of just three books, his prose has gone from spare and evocative to darkly lyrical. His characterizations are masterful, his POV treatment is impeccable. And thematically, where once he was just pretty damned good, he now soars.

DUST DEVILS is a brilliant work, revolving around five major characters: Dell, a pacifist wrought by his grief and also by his sense of justice in a world that has none, into waging personal war on the men who killed his family; Inja, a corrupt, murderous cop and Zulu chief, a man dying of AIDS and looking to superstition instead of science for help, he will kill anyone who gets between him and his 16-year-old bride-to-be, Sunday, because he believes that sex with her will cure him. Sunday wants only not to have to marry Inja. She, as much as anyone, knows him for the cold killer he is. And then there is Disaster Zondi, an ex-cop as a result of having principles in a time and place where those things have no cash value. The author spins these characters and more through a space-time continuum where personal interactions go repeatedly nuclear. Oops, I said five characters, didn't I? South Africa is the fifth one. The varying cultures, the extremes of power and wealth matched again helplessness and poverty, places where AIDS harvests one out of three people thanks to neglect, superstition, and ignorance. Where news events don't begin to tell the depth of the stories.

Along the way, the reader gets a mini-education in the behind-the-scenes politics of South Africa as that country moved from apartheid to... whatever one calls it today, because freedom hardly seems the right word. Unless one is remembering the old song lyric from Me and Bobby McGee: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

Thematically, where other authors would simply push the characters examining their past sins toward a search for redemption or atonement, Smith takes his characters beyond and into a stark cultural landscape where the wages of sin don't include the possibility of redemption, and where careful preservation of innocence is futile because innocence was long ago the first victim of sin. Harshly violent, the book is a broken window onto the cultural indifference to massive suffering, but more pointedly -- and poignantly -- Smith highlights the effect of the neglect by those powerful enough to relieve such suffering, who make such suffering more intense and widespread through corruption and indifference. The story's end is a sorrowful angel, breathtakingly cinematic on one level, and on another so personal that the reader's heart bleeds. A brilliant work.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

CAPTURE

Somewhere on the Internet recently I came across a discussion about what constituted or defined neo-noir. This book is my idea of what neo-noir is all about: the same sick, twisted, desperate, going-down-the-tubes characters found in original noir plus the faster pace and action usually found in thrillers. In this latest release, Smith somehow manages to conjure up a character, Vernon Saul, who is evil incarnate. What kind of man can sit back and watch a child drown, his inaction solely for the thought that he might find an angle to gain some kind of power over the grieving parents? And yet the reader cannot help but sympathize with the abused child that preceded the man Vernon became. There is a line delivered by William Peterson in the 1986 Michael Mann film, MANHUNTER, that perfectly sums up my feelings toward Vernon Saul:

My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, he's irredeemable... As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.

CAPTURE is bit more of a psychological character study than Smith's previous novels, but the tension ratchets up, chapter by chapter, to a shattering and satisfying denouement.  

RECOMMENDED.

Note: Okay, then. The publisher told me the print editions were due out the 20th, but apparently amazon has had both books available for the past week. Doesn't matter. Do yourself a favor and read a Roger Smith book.

COLD STORAGE, ALASKA by John Straley

Clive McCahon is a drug dealer fresh out of a Washington state prison after seven years, the last three of which he was in "protective segregation." Nobody was actively targeting Clive, but he'd reached a point where he was ready for a do-over. He wanted peace, law-abiding peace. No guns, no drugs, no retaliation. But on the way back to his hometown of Cold Storage, Alaska, Clive picks up two things: a big pile of money which might be his or might belong to his former business partner in the drug business, and an ugly, ill-mannered brute of a dog called Little Brother. Questions: What in the world can Clive do with all that money in a place as small and remote as Cold Storage? What happens when the business partner decides he needs the money more than Clive? Why is Clive hearing animals talk to him? And why is he listening to their advice? Waiting for Clive in Cold Storage is his older brother, Miles, the town's medic, war hero, and a pragmatic man who yet prays to his outboard motor.

Wherever you think John Straley's newest novel will go, trust me on this: it won't. But where it does go is never less than delightful, turning the crime genre's tropes inside out. Straley writes in prose that is closer to poetry - but never pretentious and not strictly lyrical poetry. Call it prose with a poetic resonance. Cold Storage is populated with characters at once memorable, affable, pathetic, real, and sometimes maddening. No doubt there are readers who will draw parallels to the populace of Northern Exposure, though that show held little appeal for me as the quirkiness of its residents seemed to me to be more affectation for the sake of audience than that of three-dimensional characters. Quirky the people of Straley's Cold Storage may occasionally be, but they are never less than real, with their struggles, their dreams, their failures and modest successes, and their binding sense of community that lightly overlays their fierce if sometimes false self-reliance.

The author overtly yet subtly (how does he do that?) works varying religious viewpoints into a cohesive but elusive blend that both humbles and amuses the reader. While the overriding quality of this book is a rare kind of Zen charm, Straley is far too good a writer not to ensure that depth of setting (think Shangri-la without the humbuggery), character, and plot are all present and in abundance.

COLD STORAGE, ALASKA is a gem of story, marvelously told, that repays the reader many times over for the reading. Only February, I know, but this book will certainly be on my year-end favorites list.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty

May, 1981. Northern Ireland. Bombs, assassinations, torture, hunger strikes, riots. Sectarian violence is the clean label the journalists slap over the ugly and complex brutality known gently and woefully as The Troubles. If you're present, you're involved. There's no escape short of emigration. And it's not as simple as Catholic vs. Protestant, or Irish vs. English, or police vs citizens. Because it's all of that and more. It's rich vs. poor, man vs. woman, gays vs. straights, expectations vs. reality, loyalty vs. betrayal. It's duality in everything, every person, every situation. And author Adrian McKinty captures it all, in a luxurious clarity of language and reasoning that are both intelligent and easily followed.

In Sean Duffy, a  young detective sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, McKinty has created a fascinating character: Duffy is Catholic, a rarity in the 1981 RUC (and perhaps still today for all I know), who buys a house in a Protestant district because that's the house he wants and can afford. Clearly the Protestants aren't going to be happy with him, but the IRA condemn Catholics in the RUC as traitors - in other words, it's open season on Catholic cops, from either side. One would think these facts alone would be enough to keep Duffy on his toes 24/7. But no, he occasionally forgets to check under his car for bombs. Duffy's a trifle laid back, yet he can also be described as an excitable boy, one who does not readily cope with frustration created by those who ought to know better.

When a murder case, and then a second one, land in Duffy's lap and those killings have nothing to do with The Troubles, but appear to be the work of a serial killer, our lad has to ask himself: If you want to be a serial killer in Belfast, why not join one of the paramilitary groups that encourage murder? That way, you get your killing done and get it approved as well, with lots of people willing to cover for you. Why make yourself stand out? And then a young woman, missing for months, is found dead, an apparent case of suicide, and what had been a complex case for Duffy now becomes positively labyrinthine. Before it's over, this case will reveal to Duffy his own dual nature, one that is just as complex as the world he inhabits.

All praise to McKinty for his depiction of Belfast in the throes of civil war:

There was trouble up in Belfast again. Potassium nitrate flares falling through the darkening sky. A Gazelle helicopter flying low over the lough water. Little kids walking past the police station showing each other the best technique for lobbing Molotov cocktails over the fence. Jesus, what a nightmare.

This was a city crucified under its own blitz.

This was a city poisoning its own wells, salting its own fields, digging its own grave...

Yet the author never sacrifices story, plot or pacing to accomplish the vivid creation of this historical setting. The story is a cracking good whodunnit, leavening the tragedy with wit and humor and fine characterization. Not to mention sticking very close to actual events. THE COLD COLD GROUND is the first in McKinty's trilogy about Sean Duffy and The Troubles. I'll be purchasing the second installment, I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET, very soon. Like today.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

THE WAYS OF EVIL MEN by Leighton Gage

The Awana tribe in the rainforest of Brazil is dying: Only 41 Awana remain, and they know they are the last of their people. A matter of years only, and there will be no more Awana. But some person or persons felt the need to hurry things along. When Amati and his eight-year-old son return from a day of hunting, they find everyone in the village dead. No wounds, no signs of violence at all, but from the youngest child to the oldest citizen, all are dead. Poisoned, perhaps, but how? Amati is convinced that the white men from the nearest town are responsible. The local representative from the government for Indian affairs, Jade Calmon, demands that the deaths be investigated, but the local police chief says that what happens on the reservation is beyond the scope of his authority. The regional delegado de polícia is far too lazy to care what happens hundreds of miles away. But Jade is a tireless crusader, and she knows someone who knows someone who pulls Federal Inspector Mario Silva and his team into investigating. It isn't long before genocide mushrooms into another murder, a lynching, a kidnapping, a missing person, domestic abuse, betrayal, and still more murder. Silva and his team have their hands full just trying to get a racist, elitist, corrupt, and fearful populace to talk to them, never mind trying to exhume bodies and collect evidence (or even make phone calls) in the remote and deadly rainforest where even the most macho of men would never dare to be caught after dark.

The town of Azevedo will perhaps remind the reader of the Old West of the United States, where the nearest law enforcement was often too far away to be of any value, where white people repeatedly stole tribal lands and Native Americans were treated as either juvenile imbeciles or dangerous lunatics. The situations in this book may also bring to mind the premise of the film, Bad Day at Black Rock, in which a stranger in town encounters suspicion and the threat of violence, though no one in town will say why the town is so full of, well, evil. Luckily for Inspector Silva, he is not alone, as Spencer Tracy was in the film. Silva has his trusted team of detectives and medical examiner to help him; he also has the albatross of a very pretty, highly ambitious journalist figuratively draped around his neck. And the determination of that journalist provides an internal threat to the security of Silva's team that he could not have foreseen.

The Mario Silva series comes to a close with this seventh book and the sad, too soon, passing of author Leighton Gage last summer. And what a terrific and complex final story he has given us, condensing into highly readable form five centuries of continuous assaults on the indigenous people of Brazil, and the environmental disasters stemming from toxic mining and the continued decimation of the rainforest.  Gage neatly outlines the vast gulf between the lives of the haves and the have nots, not to mention the bigotry and corruption of both groups, all the while maintaining both an impending sense of danger and a sharp-witted camaraderie between the members of Silva's team. It is the humor, cynical though it may be, that prevents the reader from being crushed under the weight of the evil abounding in the small town of Azevedo. That humor, plus the humanity and unpredictability of Silva, a man whose work may be the law, but whose primary interest is justice, all make for wonderful reading.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

THE WAYS OF EVIL MEN

• Series: Chief Inspector Mario Silva
• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Soho Crime (January 21, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1616952725
• ISBN-13: 978-1616952723