July 2025 Recent Releases: Guy Clark, Little Falls Trophy, Jack Barksdale, Lisa Crawley, Paranoid Larry

Late spring and summer are often slow for new releases. Perhaps that explains why compilations and remixes hit the market about this time.

 

I won’t complain if I get a Guy Clark release. Clark (1941-2016) is sometimes considered the granddaddy of outlaw country, not because he was the first, but because his devil-take-care attitude and his propensity for drawing like-minded rebels to his home and tours made him seem like the leader of a Texas gang. And, most importantly, because his songs were covered in trail dust. Dublin Blues is a 30^th anniversary re-release of his 1995 album of the same name. Some have said it was best. I’m not sure about that, but you could make a great case for it. If you don’t know, “Dublin Blues” is not Irish. It’s a staple of country music, a heartbreak song. (There is a Dublin, Texas, so maybe that’s the inspiration, though there’s a reference to the Spanish Steps, which are in Rome.) Clark could fashion a song out of anything. There’s a lesson about growing up and but not appreciating things until it’s too late in the talking blues “Randall Knife” and the (ahem!) longevity of “Black Diamond Strings” (with Emmylou Harris).  I doubt there’s anyone who can’t relate to “Stuff That Works.” My personal favorite is Clark’s “The Cape,” his venture into a Pinocchio-like refusal to grow up if it means a cessation of dreaming.

 

 

New Jersey’s Little Falls Trophy, Doug Albregts’ one-man band, put out LPs in 2021 and 2023, but decided to mine them and release material more in tune with the grunge scene of the 1980s/90s, the driving energy of The Who, and a few other things he liked (The Beatles, B-sides). The result is Rehashed. If you like things layered and plugged in, this one’s for you. You can listen to or scroll through the album here. My favorites are “My Little Sunshine,” “Armstrong Park,” and his cover of “The Weight.”

 

Before he was 12, Jack Barksdale made a huge splash for his guitar/piano/mandolin prowess and mastery of the blues, folks, and country music. He was praised for his maturity, his songwriting, and his deep understanding of multiple genres. He’s 17 now, but maybe growing up fast wasn’t the best thing for this Fort Worth performer. I found his new LB Voices disappointing. It is filled with too many sound-alike tracks and his gravel, smoke, and spit vocals more of an affectation than compelling. I liked “The Man, the Myth, the Legend,” a song about a musician out of place with the now. The problem is that that too many other tracks have the same dolorous tone, vocal style, and slow pacing. Listen, for example, to “Entropy,” eight minutes that could be three; or “God is Dead, I am Dead, and So Are You.” Put simply, the album needs more changes of pace. In each track there are terrific guitar runs and licks, but only a few like “Martyrs” stand out, and it mainly because of the presence of Sarah Jarosz. Barksdale will become a major country music star one of these days, but let’s call this one his sophomore slump.

 

Lisa Crowley is a New Zealand singer/songwriter who labels herself an indie pop performers. Her latest EP, New Girl Syndrome, is infused with pop, but with a bit soul and torch singing mixed in. “Gatekeeper” is a romantic Chicken Little-like track about a man who has come knocking at her door a few times too many and she’s laying down the law. “Call it a Night” has some of the same vibe, though Crawley’s voice is more vulnerable on this one. It’s a heck of a voice, no matter how she casts it. On “Don’t Wanna Be” she also shows she can tickle the ivories.

 

Okay, did you actually expect I’d turn down a chance to review Paranoid Larry and His Imaginary Band? (It really is a band headed by Larry, his friend Sam Kulik, and a bunch of friends.) Larry’s persona is that of a man with a long white beard, and a full mane of snow white curls, though it could be a wig for all I know. He  promises that the music will make you feel a little bit better. “or a little worse.” Did I mention that the new record is titled Wombat Mating Calls? Larry’s voice is best described as robust and unusual. His band consists of expected guitars, keys, and bass, but also clarinet, trombone, sax, tuba, and bongos. (Yes, I said bongos!) “Never Buys Back” is about what buying someone a drink won’t get you. “Water Under the Bridge (Over Troubled Water)” opens with I got a mailbox full of bills overdue/I got an old horse whose name is Glue… He’s got a million of them. How about “Jesus Shaves” or “Breakfast is the Most Important Beer of the Day?” It’s all a lark, of course, but these guys don’t let satire get in the way of laying down skillful grooves. Paranoid Larry invites comparisons to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, though I’m more inclined to say Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. Who says you have to be serious to be a serious musician?

 

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Florida Palms a Gritty New Novel

 

 

 

Florida Palms (July 2025)

By Joe Pan

Simon and Schuster, 480 pages.

★★★★

 

Perhaps you've read gritty Florida crime novels from Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Elmore Leonard, or Randy Wayne White. I'm here to tell you that their work is akin to The Muppets Go to Miami Beach compared to Florida Palms, a new novel from Joe Pan.

 

The Florida Space Coast is easy-viewing for Cape Canaveral launches, but that's about all that's easy about it. You might recognize 2009 as a tough recession year. That's when three young friends–Eddy, “Cueball” (Heath), and Jesse­–graduate from high school. The three of them have part-time work moving furniture, but mostly they fish, smoke pot, and listen to the biker gangs talk smack. It's already been a tough year for best friends Eddy and Cueball; five members of their friends died before graduation. The future doesn't hold much promise. Eddy is smart enough to go to college, but on what? His more realistic dream is to one day open his own tattoo studio.

 

It's not a nice term, but most of the beach crowd qualifies as “poor white trash except that several–notably Jesse and his twin brother Draco–are mixed race. Poor Draco. He was intelligent until he held two sheets of LSD to his face and burned out his brain to the point of being monosyllabic. Another local guy gets his jollies by keeping baby alligators in a septic tank and glass cages of poisonous snakes and frogs in his garage. Even Eddy's job is tenuous; the moving company is a used van owned by Bird, Cueball's father, a former biker whose handle comes from having done time in San Quentin for drug running; he went from jailbird to free bird.

 

You'd think that Bird would be done with drug dealing, but you'd be wrong. Bird took the fall for Seizer, probably a misspelling of Caesar. However you arrange the letters, he's a big-time criminal who shows up in Florida with a scheme: Use young guys to move drugs up and down the East Coast under the pretense of moving furniture. Cueball and Eddy are among the first recruits, though Eddy is reticent. After all, he’s never been north of the Georgia border and realizes the inherent dangers. Plus, he has his eye on Gin, a tough young lady whose AWOL father was a Deadhead and a mother, Colt, who is now the partner of Del Ray, another biker turned hoodlum.

 

Before you can say “palm tattoo,” the bikers and teens are in cahoots. They know who's on the “team” by the inked palm trees on their hands designed by Eddy. Bird, assisted by Del Ray, are Seizer's heads of operation and many of the bikers work in camouflaged “factories” tucked into the swamps. In a warped way, everyone is a capitalist. The drug they are manufacturing–nicknamed shank–is all the rage. It's like crank (crystal meth) in a time- release formula that eventually chills out the user. Never mind that toxic chemicals are used or the fact that it's addictive. Seizer's not wrong, but perhaps you see flaws in the plan.

 

First of all, there's a lot of money involved. If you think young athletes and big money are a bad mix, what about guys barely shaving? Add anarchistic bikers, rival gangs, ethnic tension with Cuban drug runners, too much sampling of the product, old scores to settle, jealousy, and a power vacuum and it's easy for chemical dreams to become chaos, megalomania, suspicion, arson, and murder. 

 

Will either the insightful Eddy or dumb-as-a-rock Cueball break from a life of crime? The novel's ending is simultaneously ambiguous and chilling. Pan’s novel makes your skin crawl and run to the shower. Why read it? If you think the purpose of a good book or movie is to take you places you're not likely to visit, Florida Palms is your ticket. You will enter the minds of some truly dangerous individuals. Social class issues come into play. Who buys the shank being produced by people you'd rather not know? Finally, it implies the answer to the old question of what happens when hope vanishes.

 

A few critiques. Florida Palms is overly wrong and suffers from the difficulty of keeping straight who is on what side in a tale that relies upon shifting alliances. Its moral is clear, though: Crime does pay, but don't wait too long to spend ill-begotten loot!

 

Rob Weir

 

Shy Creatures: Heartwarming (despite tough subjects) and Well-Constructed

 

 

 

 

Shy Creatures (2024)

 By Clare Chambers

Mariner Books, 390 pages.

★★★★★

 

When numerous friends tell you a particular novel is wonderful, the only thing left to do it read it. I’m delighted to report that I too think that Shy Creatures, the latest novel from British writer Clare Chambers, is indeed terrific. Adjectives such as moving and heartwarming spring to mind even though Chambers’ protagonist led what many would consider a sad life.

 

Shy Creatures opens in 1964, when social workers are dispatched to a fusty, decaying Victorian home. Women’s clothing has been hurled from an upstairs window, but the most shocking thing is that the home is occupied by an unwell elderly woman and a naked man with long hair and an even longer scraggly beard. Louisa Tapping insists he is her nephew, who got angry because she disposed of a dead magpie he had placed in the refrigerator. This may be true, but it can’t be verified because Louisa dies and the man is uncommunicative. He is taken to Westbury Park, a psychiatric facility in Croydon.

 

Dr. Gil Rudden, the psychiatrist in charge of the strange case. assumes the man is of low intellect and mute. Helen Hansford, the staff art therapist and Gil’s mistress, suspects Gil is wrong.  After a shave, a haircut, and some detective work they discover that their new patient is William Tapping, age 37, but they need to find someone who can tell them more. Helen also finds out that William is literate and has a talent for drawing. He depicts birds with precise detail in their feathers. Was this why he was upset when his magpie was trashed? Maybe, but what 37-year-old thinks it’s a good idea to stick it in the fridge?

 

Chambers takes us back and forth in time and has several narrative threads at work: the mystery of William Tapping, the problematic affair of Gil and Helen, Gil’s ambition, and those out of synch with changing mores. The novel’s ending date (1964) is significant. It’s roughly the time in which the legendary ”Sixties” began. Think Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, rising hemlines, mod hairstyles, and challenges to authority. But what if you grew up with Sinatra, swing, the Blitz, and post-World War II rebuilding and conformity? And what if, in the case of William, you’ve not been outside of your home since 1938? William’s life was marked by childhood trauma, war (for the UK, World War II began in 1939), and three overly protective aunties who became his custodians when his parents were killed in a car crash.

 

Most book covers for Shy Creatures sport a badger, a beast that can be fierce but is notoriously timid. Young William (“Billy”) was fascinated by the badgers he saw at the vacation cottage owned by Basil and Marion Kenely, the parents of his school friend Harry. Billy was, indeed, a sensitive, shy boy who was easily bullied, upset by the killing of a mouse, and reluctant to make friends, though he was once lauded for his cricket skills. Helen’s efforts to track down the Kenelys leads to the further revelation that William is not mute, though his boyish voice suggests that his social skills were frozen after his single year of private school. Gil doubts William can ever live on his own.

 

Gil and Helen are also out of synch with social changes. Gil prescribes too much medication to his patients, understandable given that chlorpromazine was relatively new. Less understandable is his overbearing ego, overactive libido, and sexism. He and his wife have several children with another on the way, but Gil maintains Helen as his mistress and perhaps her niece as well.

 

If this sounds dire rather than uplifting, rest assured that it’s not. William may be socially ignorant, but he’s totally lovable, indominable, well-read, and talented. As the novel’s major “shy” creature, he is also the character through which other characters come to understand themselves. In good Dickensian style, he even attracts a benefactor.

 

Among the virtues of Chambers’ novel is that it keeps readers on their toes. She does so through delayed revelations that are consistent with her characters, not the random episodic treatments one finds in too many books these days. Shy Creatures is a charmer from start to finish.

 

Rob Weir

 

Footnote: I suspect Chambers snuck in a pun. The Tappings were heirs to a grocery fortune and one of William’s progenitors was named Samsbury. Sainsbury’s is Britain’s second largest grocery chain.

 

 

 

Hang on St. Chrisopher: Adrian McKinty's New Irish Crime Drama

 

 

Hang on Saint Christopher: A Sean Duffy Novel (2025)

By Adrian McKinty

Blackstone publishing, 296 pages.

★★★★

 

Hang on Saint Christopher, with the hammer to the floor

Put a highball on the case, nail across the door...

There's a 750 Norton busting down the door.

 

The new novel from Irish writer Adrain McKinty takes its seemingly odd title from the above lyric from a Tom Waits song. And, yes, 750 Norton motorcycles factor into the mystery. This is another installment in McKinty’s Sean Duffy series, but here's all you need to know to get up to speed. For many people in Northern Ireland the fictional Duffy is a traitor. Not only is he a cop, he’s also a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Sean is a Catholic boy who in the minds of enemies might as well be a Protestant. When in Northern Ireland Duffy maintains a home in Carrickfergus, which is far enough away from the outbursts of violence in Belfast and close to the ferry dock to Cairnryan, Scotland.

 

Duffy is an RUC part timer required to spend just six days a month in Northern Ireland. This will be his life for the next two years for Sean to accumulate enough time to retire and bid adieu to The Troubles. He has built a new life in Scotland with his wife Beth and their daughter Emma. He has no time for the murderous Irish Republican Army (IRA) and is almost as contemptuous of the RUC. To his mind the RUC is filled with screw-ups and careerists, the latter of whom pass the buck when they make a hash of things but grab the glory when something goes right. As if he couldn't be more conspicuous, Duffy drives a flash BMW. His Carrickfergus neighborhood appears to be upscale in the minds of many, though it’s more safe than posh.

 

He and Frank “Crabbie” McCraven are on the same part-time reserve retirement scheme. They generally manage to keep a low profile by doing paperwork; after all, why hand big cases to guys who are six days on and three weeks off? Sean has even groomed his successor, Lawson. As fate would have it, Lawson is on holiday in Spain and Sean and Frank are sucked into investigating the murder of two IRA gunmen. If Duffy had his way, of course, he'd be happy to spit on their graves. But the fragile truce in Northern Ireland doesn't work that way. The two deaths are high-profile cases and the very truce that has reduced violence has made some areas around Belfast even more tense. That’s because not everyone wants peace and even more radical faction of the IRA has arisen. It falls to Sean and Frank to defuse the situation. Or, should I say to Sean? He's a lot like Robert Parker's Spencer with a brogue, a live-wire loner with attitude and filled with wisecracks and disrespect for official/legal procedures. Why play it straight if you can take matters into your own hands?

 

Like Spencer, Duffy tempers violence with big dollops of humor. There is a set up scene in Hang on St. Christopher that will make you chuckle at how Sean deals with troublemakers in his neighborhood. Moral: Don't mess with the Beamer and don't be a bloody fool!

 

If only the two murderers lent themselves to such out-of-the-box solutions. The humor is there, but add bigger dollops of grit, danger, hairy escapes, and bloodshed. This investigation has a bit of everything: carjacking, bugged phones, motorcycles circling like Indians attacking the cavalry, an art forger, and deep looks at the IRA ‘s influence in the United states and beyond. (Cue the CIA!) Even Iceland gets into this drama. Duffy faces the moral dilemma of whether to cut a deal with a known IRA gunman that he despises in order to stop a potentially worse one. Being that it's Ireland, the two creeps are brothers.

 

Duffy is a pain in the arse, but the thing about rule-breakers is that they seldom get hung up on moral qualms if there's a way to keep devils at bay. One of my favorite Duffy traits is that the man is a musical genius. From classical to classic rock by way of punk, folk music, rap, reggae, and beyond you can't stump Duffy in a game of Name that Tune. And maybe you can't stuff stump him at Know Your Art either. Or can you?

 

Rob Weir

 

Kehinde Wiley and the Last of the Lost Cause?

 

 

Rumors of War, 30' tall

 

The Last of the Lost Cause?*

*This essay/review is part of a larger in-progress project on Civil War mythology.

 

If you don’t follow the art world carefully, you might not know the statue above. It is a work that subverts one of the biggest lies of the past 160 years. The sculptor is Kehinde Wiley. If you can’t quite place the name, I’ll bet you know his presidential portrait of Barack Obama, but first things first. 

 

Wiley portrait of Barack Obama

 

 

Wiley’s equestrian statue is titled “Rumors of War” and is meant to shock. Instead of a wig-topped noble or a dashing solider, Wiley’s defiant figure is a black man with his dreadlocks tied back suggestive of a crown or an Indian sachem’s topknot. The figure is also wearing high-top sneakers, blue jeans, and a warm-up jacket. You can find this statue outside the main entrance to Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA).

 

Wiley based “Rumors of War” on a statue of J.E.B. Stuart that once sat atop a similar pedestal on the city’s Monument Avenue where it shared company with other “heroes” of the Confederacy. You might recall that those came down during Black Lives Matter protests in 2017. There is but one statue remaining, that of tennis great Arthur Ashe. CSA president Jeferson Davis was among those that pulled down and defiled. Wiley’s statue suggests that the real “war” was/is that of black freedom. That’s not the way the story is usually told.

 

Jefferson Davis vandalized; Stuart statue in storage

   
 

 

The Confederacy was defeated, but you’d hardly know that from the way the Civil War was retold before all the bodies were put to rest. The so-called “Lost Cause” was the ideological precursor to legal and customary segregation that sought to strip newly emancipated enslaved peoples of their political, economic, and human rights. The so-called “Jim Crow” era was the order of things until most of its vestiges were outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even then, the “war” Wiley wants you to ponder still rages: the one for black equality and dignity.

 

The Lost Cause did as much, perhaps more, to ingrain racism deeply into American culture. It claimed that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and invented a host of specious and nonsensical alt.realities. You name it and it was tried: tariffs, the interference of Northern radicals, states rights, attempts to subvert the Southern agricultural system, a Northern political power grab, Southern honor…. Some of these have validity, but it’s simply impossible to fashion an explanation for the Civil War that doesn’t have black slavery at its core. (Tariffs are rising today, but I don’t detect a serious call to arms!) The Lost Cause created myths: the genteel South vs. the money-grubbing and unkempt North, a war of Northern aggression foisted upon the South, Scarlett O’Hara-like plantations marked by easy-going relations between white and blacks, kindly Southern “massas,” illiterate” slaves better off in bondage, evil abolitionists, etc. Some of that has a kernel of truth as well, but it all rests upon a worldview in which all whites were viewed as better than any black person. 

 

Currently in garden by Valentine Museum. Soon to be reinstalled at the Ironworks. 

 

When this statue was placed in front of the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, howls of protest erupted and white people committed acts of vandalism against it. Ditto the Arthur Ashe monument. Do we presume they did so genteelly?

 

Looking down Scarlet's stair case

 

For the record, Southern charm is not my thing, but parts of the South retain an air of grace. I might have been just as happy to have some barbecue and listen to the blues, but we had lunch one day at the Jefferson Hotel in down Richmond and it’s quite a place. Scarlett O’Hara even sashayed down its staircase in Gone with the Wind. There are tons of plantation homes below the Mason-Dixon Line that ooze with elegance as long as you don’t think about who and what sustained them.

 

As Bob Dylan put it, though, “the times they are a changing...” (Okay, he dropped the final “g.”) A Richmond friend and I visited the “Southern White House,” where Jefferson Davis quartered during the war. In many ways it’s more democratic that the one in Washington DC. It belonged to a bourgeois doctor who made it a home. Davis did all of his serious presidential duties at the state capital building a block away. The dining room picture is about the biggest thing in the house. Make no mistake, though; Davis was a Confederate and a racist. The good news is that guides no longer try to whitewash that. Nor do they fail to tell you that the house “staff” was comprised of wage-earning whites and white indentured servants, but the vast majority of workers were enslaved black folks. 

 

Not exactly the State Dining Room

 

To circle back to art, Kehinde Wiley is far from the first artist of color seeking to put African Americans back in the historical narrative. He is, though, one of the most successful and clever. He’s a lot of things the hardshell right hates: black, gay, has an Ivy Legree degree (Yale), and possess an impressive grasp of art history. If you wonder what’s up with the flowered backdrops of his portraits, know that his role models are precisely those Old Masters (and Mistresses) venerated by white cultural elites. The VMFA has a Wiley painting titled “Willem van Heythusen Posing with a Sword.” Why the Dutch name? It’s based on Frans Hals painting done in 1625. He has done the same with religious paintings and most of his portraits. Things look a bit different when we replace white bodies with black ones and update the drapery, doesn’t it? 

 

Frans Hals

Wiley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joker II Should be Subtitled Folly for Two

 

 

 

Joker: Folie á Deux

Directed by Todd Phillips

Warner Brothers, 138 minutes, R (violence, nudity)

★★

 

Joker (2019) made a billion dollars, garnered 11 Academy Award nominations, and won two: Best Original Score and Best Acting (Joaquin Phoenix). Joker: Folie á Deux (2024) is why many moviegoers hate sequels. It had the same director, Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix returned as Arthur Fleck, many of the secondary actors reupped, and megastar Lady Gaga joined the cast. It cost four times as much to make as the first movie but earned 1/4 of what the first film raked in at the box office. Counting promos for overseas markets, it lost about $150 million. There were no Academy Award nominations, but 7 Golden Raspberries including Worst Remake and Worst Screen Combo (Phoenix and Gaga).

 

Was it bad? Yes, it was. It's again a thriller, but also a musical–if one has an expansive definition of that term that doesn't include staying on key or paying attention to melody. Whose bright idea was it to sign Lady Gaga, a seriously talented vocalist, and direct her to sing badly?

 

The thin plot picks up where the first movie left off. Party clown Arthur Fleck (Phoenix ) is in jail/mental hospital for five murders and that's not counting killing his own mother, which no one knows about. The scenes inside Arkham are depressing, bleak, and chilling. (Arkham is a now-empty isolation hospital in Bellevue, New Jersey.) Each day is like the previous. Prisoners are roused from their sleep and line up to dump their slop buckets, before being sent to a day room where  Arthur, the would-be clown, is badgered into  telling a joke. Dozens of seriously demented prisoners watch TV as guards look on, both to keep the peace and to seize opportunities to practice sadistic discipline. Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) is the worst of the lot, though he feigns sympathy for Arthur. Outside the walls, street anarchists and attention-starved young people chant Joker’s praises.

 

Some of this might have been powerful had not Phillips and co-script writer Scott Silver turn the film into demented musical theatre devoid of logic. For some reason, there are also women in the institution, including self-committed Harley “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga). Well-behaved men can sit in group therapy sessions with the women. Hmm… what could go wrong? Lee sees Arthur as a hero to her outward rebel, poor girl persona. Before you know it, Lee is sneaking into Arthur’s cell where they pledge their love and bodies to each other.

 

How? Beats me. They also sing tuneless songs to each other. Is real or a fantasy?  Show tunes without the show? The central theme is “That's Entertainment.” If only it were. But nothing is quite as strange as the attempt of Arthur's attorney Marianne Stewart (Catherine Keener) to win a new trial for Arthur based on the grounds that he can’t be guilty of murder because he was insane at the time but is now recovering. Huh? Contrary to what most believe, the standard isn’t sanity perse; it’s whether a defendant knows the difference between right and wrong. Oh, Arthur knows! His in-house interview with a TV journalist doesn't go well and neither does his trial.

 

To put it indelicately, this movie stinks. Stop here if you’ve never seen it but still want to. Read on if you're convinced I'm saving you from the pain of doing so. Here come the spoilers!

 

Arthur does exactly what his character would do; he sabotages his trial. He would rightly be locked up for life, except a firebomb blows up the courthouse, and kills numerous people. Arthur stumbles out of the rubble to search for Lee. When he finds Lee and says she's the only one who has ever seen him as he really is, she’s no longer interested. She wants Joker, not pathetic Arthur Fleck. He is recaptured, sent back to Arkham, and is ostracized by guards and prisoners alike. Another psychotic stabs Arthur, who bleeds out.

 

Near the end Lady Gaga sings with power and authority. What a waste! The best that can be said of this misguided project is that the Looney Tunes-like “Me and My Shadow” at the movie’s beginning is beguiling. What was the point of the rest? A lampoon of woke lefty culture? How the young can be led by their nose rings? I hope not. Otherwise this film can add backdoor Trumpism to its list of sins.

 

If Joker Two really hemorrhaged $150 million, it deserved to lose every penny.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

Nobody's Fool a Harlan Coben Thriller

 

 

 

Nobody’s Fool (2025)

By Harlan Coben

Grand Central Publishing, 340 pages.

★★★★

 

A reminder: Book (and movie) titles can legally be reused. I suspect this is because most titles use ordinary words that don’t lend themselves to copyrights. Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool (1993) is one of his best-known books and there are at least two films of that name. It’s also the title of a new thriller from Harlan Coben. I wish he had chosen a different title. His protagonist Sami Kierce is a fool when we first meet him and 22 years later he still makes mistakes. Nonetheless, it's a very good novel, even if there’s a fairly major logic flaw.

 

Sami is of Pakistani descent who, in the present, is 40-something, is recently married to the lovely and supportive Molly, and they have a one-year-old son Henry. Some 20 years earlier Sami was a recent college graduate who partied way too much. In a trip to Spain he meets Anna at a disco and stayed with her for nearly a week. He awoke one morning covered in blood, a knife in his hand, and Anna lifeless beside him. He doesn’t think he killed her, but doesn’t know what to do. In a panic he called his father, who tells him to talk to no one and board the next plane to the United States: “You’re a brown kid in a foreign country.” He violated his father’s command in one respect. Before he scampered he tells the police that a woman had been murdered.

 

Five years later he was a police detective engaged to Nicole, who is murdered. The gunman, one Tad Grayson, was sentenced to life, but Sami had unresolved anger issues that led to mistakes and dismissal. Now he’s an unlicensed gumshoe-for-hire by sleazy divorce lawyers for tasks like taking photographs of unfaithful spouses. He also had a side gig of teaching criminal justice courses to night school adults. On evening Sami is startled to see Anna walk into the classroom, meet his eye, and race out of the room, though not before one of his students dropped a tracking device into her coat.  

 

Was it really Anna? Sami follows a fading signal to a Connecticut estate and gets beaten up by security for his trouble. Sami begins to act like a real detective and enlists his students in real-life lessons in research and surveillance. Sami’s life takes a series of dramatic turns. First, he comes to suspect that Anna is a bigger catch than he imagined: Victoria Belmond, an heiress who has been missing for 22 years. This is confirmed by her parents, wealthy philanthropists Archie and Talia, and eldest son Thomas. In fact, they’d like to pay Sami a $100,000 retainer if he will sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and investigate what happened to Victoria in Spain; there are 11 years for which she has no memory. They offer another half million plus expenses for three months of investigative work. He’s not crazy about signing the NDA, but he and Molly are swimming in debt.

 

His lawyer friend Arthur advises him to sign and lays another shock on him. Because of past irregularities several criminals he investigated have been released; one is Tad Grayson for whom Sami has a hatred bordering on sanguinary. There’s no doubt in his mind, or that of his former partner, that Grayson murdered Nicole. The only solace is that Grayson’s were vacated–meaning he could be retried–not dismissed. Moreover, someone is stalking Molly.

 

First things first. It’s off to Spain with his family. Matters get super twisty. Was Anna/Victoria kidnapped? Used as a sex slave? A scammer? Who was the guy who appeared in the bedroom when Sami screamed 22 years earlier? Back in New York, who is “Scraggly Dude,” the lowlife making Molly’s life uncomfortable? Who was the last person to see Victoria before she disappeared at midnight on Y2K? Why do two more murders take place and why was Sami shot? Was Anna really Victoria? Are the Belmonds as they seem? Was Grayson a wronged man?

 

Coben is a wonderful thriller writer. His plots are dense and well-constructed. He also makes judicious use of humor. Get back to me when you figure out the massive logic hole.

 

Rob Weir

 

Note: I loved this quote from Sherlock Holmes via his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle: It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to fit facts. It’s used by Sami and is also a good way to read Coben’s novel.