Candlish thriller brilliantly bewildering

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2022 (1637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

About two and a half years ago, Ellen Saint killed someone. She’s sure of it. But now the man is alive, right there on the terrace of an apartment building, in plain view. She’s sure of that, too.

How can he be alive? Why did she kill him? Is Ellen confused, seeing things, mentally unstable?

There are a lot of questions in Louise Candlish’s new novel, The Heights (Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $25).

Candlish answers the questions, in her own time, but only after she’s kept us guessing, looking for clues, reading between the lines. This is not a slick, predictable thriller; it’s deliberately bewildering, intentionally a challenge to the reader’s ability to distinguish reality from fabrication. One of her best novels.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

● ● ●

Chuck Wendig follows up his magnificent Wanderers (2019) with a genuinely frightening horror story. In The Book of Accidents (Del Rey, 560 pages, $24), Nate Graves and his family — his wife, Maddie, and their son Oliver — move into Nate’s childhood home in the country. They do it because they think it might help Oliver, who’s been having some troubles in school, but Nate is worried that returning to the place he grew up might trigger memories of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his late father.

And so it does: Nate is soon having visions. Then Maddie, too, starts seeing things that aren’t there. And Oliver brings home a new friend who will, we fear, tear this fragile family apart.

This is Wendig’s first full-on horror novel, and it is breathtakingly good: beautifully written, viscerally scary, deeply haunting.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

● ● ●

C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust (2017) was a brilliant story set after the robot uprising that led to the complete extinction of the human species. Now, in Day Zero (Harper Voyager, 304 pages, $21), he takes us back to the very beginning of the revolution.

The book is narrated by Pounce, a Blue Star Industries Deluxe Zoo Model Au Pair; when robots begin lashing out against their human owners, Pounce takes his eight-year-old friend, Ezra, and goes on the run. His only purpose now: keep this small human boy alive, even as his fellow robots are intent on wiping out all of humanity.

Pounce is one of the great characters in contemporary science fiction: a mechanical creature (tiger, to be precise) who is so real, so compassionate, that we soon stop thinking of him as an artificial thing. And Cargill’s apocalyptic world? Brilliantly imagined. A magnificent novel.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

● ● ●

Colter Shaw is a reward seeker — kind of like a bounty hunter, except he tracks down missing people and collects the rewards put up by their loved ones. Jeffery Deaver introduced him in 2019’s The Never Game; now, in The Final Twist (Putnam, 528 pages, $13), Colter is embarking on an intensely personal investigation.

Years ago, Colter’s father died under mysterious circumstances. Colter believes his father uncovered the secrets of a certain group of people, and now he is willing to risk his own life to find out the truth.

Deaver writes a number of interesting characters; Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist, and California Bureau of Investigation agent Kathryn Dance are his two major series anchors.

After three books, Colter Shaw is beginning to feel as though he could be as strong a character. If you like Deaver’s brand of plot-twist-intensive thriller, you should check out Mr. Shaw.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Twitter at @bookfella.