WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
book world
Looking for a diversion from the
pandemic and other midwinter
doldrums and meshugas? Here are five
exceptionally smart, entertaining
mysteries and thrillers that might do the
trick.
‘50 Years of Dave Brandstetter:
Fadeout, Death Claims, Troublemaker,’
by Joseph Hansen
In an auspicious event for mystery
readers, Syndicate is reprinting all 12 of
Joseph Hansen’s pioneering Dave
Brandstetter novels over 12 months.
“Fadeout,” the first in the series featuring
the comfortably gay World War II vet and
L.A. insurance investigator, was
published in 1970. As Michael Nava
points out in his insightful new
introduction, that’s when gay sex was a
criminal act in 49 of the 50 states.
Through grit and sheer talent, Hansen
found a w ide audience. Nava writes, “It is
his art, ultimately, and not simply his
subject matter, that makes Joseph
Hansen one of the great masters of
California noir.” Crime fiction fans who
don’t know Hansen’s work are in for a
treat. (Syndicate/Soho Crime, Jan. 11)
‘Find Me,’ by Alafair Burke
At the center Burke’s latest novel is a
young woman named Hope Miller who
might have murdered a man before
losing her memory in a car accident.
Fifteen years later, Miller disappears,
setting off a wide-ranging search that
involves a s erial killer, a senator’s
campaign and NYPD Detective Ellie
Hatcher. Some readers might find Burke’s
twisty tale a bit too — in the Oscar Wilde
phraseology — “crowded with incident,”
but the novel has a nice Hitchcockian feel
to it as it glides from New Jersey to East
Hampton (where Burke lives) to Wichita.
(HarperCollins, Jan. 11)
‘A Flicker in the Dark,’ by Stacy
Willingham
In Stacy Willingham’s debut thriller,
Chloe Davis is a Baton Rouge
psychologist who is a p sychological mess
herself. Among her worries: Davis thinksshe sees a connection between the
disappearance of several local teens and
her father, who has been in prison for
killing six young girls 20 years earlier.
Already a n ervous wreck from planning
her upcoming wedding with sexy drug
salesman Daniel Briggs — h er brother
Cooper warns her, “He doesn’t know you,
Chloe. And you don’t know him” — Davis
relies on her secret Xanax stash to
function at all. Willingham’s tremulous
narrative voice might have some readers
reaching for a calming agent, too, but her
denouement is both surprising and
plausible. (Minotaur, Jan. 11)
‘One Step Too Far,’ by Lisa Gardner
The appeal of Lisa Gardner’s second
Frankie Elkin mystery lies mainly withthe meticulously researched science and
lore on surviving in the wilderness — and
with the endearingly strange Frankie
herself. Daughter of “the world’s most
affable drunk,” Frankie relies on her own
recovering-alcoholic discipline and focus
to crack missing-persons cold cases.
When she hooks up with a moody group
with murky motives searching for any
trace of a young man who vanished on a
drunken bachelor party camping
weekend five years earlier, the term
“survival skills” takes on multiple dark
meanings. (Dutton, Jan. 18)
‘Something to Hide,’ by Elizabeth
George
It’s a b it of a slog to get through
Elizabeth Georg e’s 68 7-page containership of a p olice procedural, but it ’s worth
it. The 21st Detective Inspector Thomas
Lynley novel has the melancholy
widower struggling with a bumpy
romance as he investigates the
bludgeoning death of a Black female
officer who had been trying to shut down
a secret “clinic” specializing in female
genital mutilation. Too many beside-the-
point subplots don’t detract from
George’s forthright handling of the
novel’s main threads, which involve
incendiary issues of class, culture and
racism. (Viking, Jan. 11)
[email protected]Richard Lipez writes the Donald Strachey PI
novels under the name Richard Stevenson.Literary Calendar
THURSDAY | 7 P .M. Luvvie Ajayi Jones discusses “Professional Tr oublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual” streamed through Solid State Books, solidstatebooksdc.com. $28.99.
THRILLERSby Richard LipezI WILL DIE IN A
FOREIGN LAND
By Kalani
Pickhart
Two Dollar
Radio. 260 pp.
$25BY RON CHARLESThe Book Club newsletter, which critic
Ron Charles sends out each Friday, pro-
vides readers with a rundown of industry
news, historical asides and reading rec-
ommendations. Here is an excerpt from
this past Friday. To subscribe, visit
wapo.st/booknewsletter.
Last fall, Kalani Pickhart published a
debut novel called “I Will Die in a Foreign
Land.” To be honest — unknown author,
tiny press, little publicity — I just set it
aside. But through the intervention of
some literary angel or my own laziness,
the book kept hanging around the living
room. Finally, I noticed it’s about the 20 14
Ukrainian revolution that forced out
President Yanukovych and served as a
pretense for Vladimir Putin to steal
Crimea.
Given the tragic relevance of that
subject, this week I tore through “I Will
Die in a Foreign Land.” It’s terrific. I’ve
been following the alarming news about
Putin’s machinations along the Ukraini-
an border, but nothing has given me such
a profound impression of what Ukraini-
ans have endured as this intensely mov-
ing novel.
The story follows the experiences of
several characters whose lives intersect
as the country’s political situation deteri-
orates. There’s a Ukrainian American
doctor struggling to treat injured pro-
testers, an old KGB spy seeking forgive-
ness, a former mineworker and others —
all of them freighted with grief and trying
to stay alive amid the volatile conditions
of the revolution. These episodes are
frequently interspersed with folk songs,
news reports and historical notes that
flesh out the larger context. The effect —
kaleidoscopic but never confusing —
provides an intimate sense of a nation
mourning, convulsing and somehow sur-
viving.
Pickhart, who works at the Design
School at Arizona State University, tells
me, “I am deeply saddened that since I
started writing this book in 2016, ten-
sions have only escalated in Ukraine.”
She’s alarmed that Putin’s politics reflect
Stalin’s policy of Russification, which
involves the “erasure of the Ukrainian
people, their culture and their language.”
In 2020, during the first impeachment
of Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo reportedly swore at an NPR
reporter and scoffed, “Do you think
Americans care about Ukraine?” Reading
Pickhart’s remarkable novel is one way to
answer that question.
[email protected]
Finding a gem
about a nation
with a knife
a t its throat
an uncanny dramatization of the issues
Kolker explored. Clearly, we live in an age
sweaty with anxiety about authenticity.
The story opens in the middle of every
writer’s dream: Caleb Horowitz has at-
tracted the attention of a big-shot agent
who thinks his manuscript is terrific.
This could be Caleb’s chance to stop
working for a payday loan app he doesn’t
understand. Spanning the high-brow/
low-brow divide with a gymnast’s dexter-
ity, he has produced that most sought-af-
ter treasure: a scandalous literary novel.
His steamy plot revolves around an orgy
on a Greek isle with a dying woman and a
pair of honeymooning Americans.
At an elegant luncheon to seal the
deal, Caleb hears how his debut novel
will be blurbed and feted by everyone
from Terry Gross to Seth Meyers. Soon
enough, New York publishing houses are
bidding $45,000, $85,000, $220,000 and
much, much more, and Caleb is destined
to be crowned “one of the greatest
commercial literary successes of the
year.” Not bad for a 27-year-old writer.
There is, alas, one small impediment
to this life-changing triumph: Caleb lift-
ed the outline of his novel from an old
college friend named Avi, who had writ-
ten a story about his erotic adventures in
Greece. In retrospect, Caleb should have
mentioned to Avi that the story had
inspired him to write a novel. At the very
least, Caleb should have changed the
people’s names...
If you’ve ever wondered where writers
get their idea, “Last Resort” is wicked
fun. If you’re a writer, “Last Resort” isBOOK WORLD FROM C1 heartburn in print. Splayed across these
pages is the dark terror that lurks within
any creative person’s breast: the embar-
rassing facts that might demolish the
glorious claims made in the name of
literary invention.
Caleb narrates this novel in a voice
that braids confession and self-justifica-
tion into tight knots. As Lipstein skewers
the pretensions and delusions of literary
ambition, he reveals the mental tricks
that allow writers to imagine that they
care only for art, not money or fame. And
he exposes the extent to which novelists
will go to ignore, obscure and even deny
their sources.
As the implications of Caleb’s predica-
ment screw down on him, he sounds
more and more like a man trying hard to
remain calm. “This was a work of fiction
the same way historical fiction is fiction,”
he tells himself while pacing around New
York. “The truth is just scaffolding,
something you throw away once the
thing’s been built.” But alas, that meta-
phor is not technically or even metaphor-
ically true.
Imagining Avi picking up a copy of his
novel, Caleb thinks, “I took so many
liberties with his story, how could he
read mine and see anything but the
differences?” There he is, so sure of his
innocence, even as he madly googles
“plagiarism” and runs his novel and Avi’s
story through a computer program that
detects similarities. Good news: “2%
Similarities.”
“I considered this an acquittal,” Caleb
says with a sigh of faux relief.
Yet even in these moments of bluster-
ing confidence, Caleb can’t help grasping
for praise, fantasizing about the glow ofhis victim’s gratitude. “His characters
didn’t have backstories that could illumi-
nate their present selves,” Caleb thinks.
“His plot had no arc. I wondered if he
realized all this, if he recognized the
thought behind my manuscript, the craft
— above all I wondered what he thought
of it as a whole.”
On cue, Avi texts him: “Are you around
to get coffee tomorrow?”
Uh oh.
With that stomach-dropping moment,
“Last Resort” expands into a deliciously
absurd comedy about literary fame. This
is Lipstein’s first novel, but he has
somehow already acquired a bitterly
accurate understanding of the tiny arena
in which reviews, blurbs, book signings,
Good reads comments and puffy author
profiles can coalesce to make a writer
rich — or notorious.
It’s all here: the cute headline in the
New York Times that doesn’t quite track
(“E.L. James, meet E.E. Cummings”), the
cerebral takedown in the New Yorker by
James Wood (“The first third of the
review didn’t even mention the book”),
and the packed reading at Greenlight
Bookstore where the author can “display
self-effacement worthy of the breakdown
stage of a cult.”
But “Last Resort” is ultimately about
the difference between what we say we
want and what we pursue at our own
peril. And that’s a conflict any of us can
relate to, even if we haven’t stolen a
friend’s story — yet.
[email protected]Ron Charles writes about books for The
Washington Post and hosts
TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.A man of letters, l ike p-l-a-g-i-a-r-i-s-m
MARÍA ALCONADA BROOKS/THE WASHINGTON POSTIf you’ve ever
wondered where
writers get their
ideas, “Last Resort”
is wicked fun. If
you’re a writer,
“Last Resort” is
heartburn in print.