Crime and Thriller Beach Reads!

photo: klarinette71, creative commons license

Here’s your beachbag packing list: sunscreen, bottled water and Bai drinks (a local product!), organic non-GMO snacks, and, most important, half a dozen books, plus one. From my past year of book reviews, many of which are beachbag-worthy, I’d recommend:

  • I.Q. by Joe Ide – the banter among the characters will keep you laughing all the way to where you parked the car, wherever that may be.
  • Maisie Dobbs – if 21st century mayhem is a bit much for a beach holiday, try one of Jacqueline Winspear’s charming books, set in England between the wars. This is the first.
  • The Never-Open Desert Diner – by James Anderson. Now is where I have to confess a bit of a crush on his half-Indian, half-Jewish protagonist Ben Jones, who drives a hundred-mile route across the high Utah desert, serving his customers, most of whom live far from civilization for a pretty good reason.
  • Kompromat by Stanley Johnson – In real-life an EU official and father of one of the Brexit proponent Boris Johnson, this hilarious roman a clef explains the two baffling political cataclysms of the past two years: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
  • Back Up by Belgian author Paul Colize – a murder mystery that begins in 1967, when all the members of the rock band Pearl Harbor die mysteriously, except for one. Are they still after him?
  • Paper Ghosts – Janet Haeberlin’s novel requires you to believe a young woman would knowingly embark on a cross-Texas road trip with the man she thinks killed her sister. Get past that, and it’s a page-turning cat-and-mouse game.
  • Beside the Syrian Sea – a spy thriller with an unexpected hero. Does this bumbler have a plan to rescue his father from mid-East terrorist or not? No one knows. And you won’t either. Funny and surprising.

****Lullaby Road

Night Sky

photo: U.S., Bureau of Land Management

By James Anderson–In this, as in Anderson’s admirable debut novel, The Never Open Desert Diner, you share the adventures of short-haul truck driver Ben Jones, who drives a hundred-mile stretch between two small towns in the high Utah desert. If the town of Price is next-to-nothing, Rockmuse, at the other end of his route, amounts to even less.

These are literary novels, yet they encompass mysteries and crimes of many kinds, including crimes of the spirit. Anderson sets you down, unmistakably, in the high desert—with its sunrises and sunsets, the brilliance of its stars at night, its smells, the amazing quiet, and its deadly hazards, human and otherwise.

In his new book, half-Jewish, half-Indian Ben and his cast of oddball desert dwellers are as reclusive and tetchy as ever. They live far from ordinary conceptions of civilization for a reason, generally. Ben delivers their groceries, water, auto parts, horse feed—whatever they need. In hot weather, it can be a brutal job. In winter, it may be worse. Blinding snowstorms barrel over the mountains, scouring the land and hitting the mesa to the east, only to ricochet back for another strike on the inhabitants.

Ben is in a tricky situation. On a not very good morning, winter weather-wise, he fuels up at the Stop ‘n’ Gone before starting a run to Rockmuse, and finds a Mexican child and a suspicious dog, sitting by one of the pumps. A child not dressed for the freezing temperatures. The station owner has locked up and won’t respond to Ben’s pounding. Ben has “no choice”—a phrase he particularly loathes—but to take the child inside the warm truck cab and sort things out later. The child doesn’t talk. Eventually, Ben finds out why.

This is bad enough, but his neighbor stops him before he can drive away and hands over her infant daughter. She has “no choice” but to deposit her baby with him for the day. Like it or not, and he definitely does not, he’s left holding the diaper bag. So now you understand the book’s title.

The child, the protective dog, and the infant Belle turn out to be good travelers. That’s lucky, because the day turns dangerous and requires all Ben’s concentration. With the road margins indistinct in the blinding snow, it’s like driving into oblivion. And that’s just the weather.

Author Anderson does a great job describing the difficulties Ben runs up against trying to help the people living in such a remote place—their scant resources and limited access to communications, helicopter airlifts, and other take-for-granted trappings of modern life.

Much as Ben hates it, “no choice” often is the choice, and everything cannot turn out well. The book is generous in acknowledging that good people can make bad decisions, it is sincere in grieving for the innocent, and it leaves open the expectation that bad people may yet get what’s coming to them.

*****The Never-Open Desert Diner

Utah Highway

photo: Bhanu Tadinada, creative commons license

By James Anderson – This debut novel is masterfully travels a remote strip of high desert highway to all the important destinations of the human heart. Recommended by the fine folks at Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen bookshop, it checks a lot of genre boxes. It isn’t typical crime fiction, though there are crimes in it. It has a nice dose of both mystery and romance. It’s inescapably a Western, as it takes place in a desolate section of Utah. The one genre it doesn’t draw from is science fiction, though strange things certainly do happen out there in the back of beyond.

I would put this unforgettable 2015 book on my short list of “must-reads.” Reviewer Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post calls it “outstanding in every regard—writing, plot, dialogue, suspense, humor, a vivid sense of place.” Agreed, whole-heartedly.

Ben Jones owns a business as a short-haul truck driver whose route takes him back and forth along a hundred-mile stretch of Utah highway 117, between Price and the fictional former coal-mining town of Rockmuse. (For purposes of the novel, Anderson has relocated this highway about 40 miles east of its IRL location.) He makes deliveries for FedEx, UPS, and other companies to the scattered residents along the route, and, if they put out a red handkerchief by the road, he stops to get their orders for goods to be delivered from town.

Anderson sets up the isolation and the harsh conditions so effectively that Ben’s description of his clients—“Such folks were a special breed”— is almost superfluous. You anticipate meeting some real characters hidden away out there, and you do. Chief among them is Walt Butterfield, owner-operator of The Well-Known Desert Diner, though locals have amended that to the more accurate “Never-Open Desert Diner.” Walt is an angry geezer who restores old motorcycles. He lost his wife years earlier after an episode with some violent customers, and the extent to which he hasn’t recovered becomes apparent only over time. Each time any of Anderson’s characters wander into a scene, something interesting happens.

Ben happens upon a barely started housing development across the road from the diner, hidden by a rise, and containing only one house. Inhabited. The woman who lives there plays a cello with no strings, except, it transpires, those of Ben’s heart. About their initial prickly contacts, Ben gives one of his typically colorful and insightful comments: “I knew from experience that if you’re about to do something you probably shouldn’t do, the best advice you can give yourself is not to think about it too long. It ruins the surprise when the worst happens.” Soon odd events begin, and the strong plot unfolds like the road in front of Ben, going toward a place not particularly desirable, but barreling toward an ending.

Ben is a likeable and perceptive narrator, with especially acute radar for bullshit. Yet he looks upon the troubled and eccentric people he encounters with a nonjudgmental, compassionate eye. He respects their desire to be left alone. All of them are struggling, him included. When the world starts to open up for him, is it real or just another desert mirage?

This is the kind of story that really couldn’t take place anywhere but in such a remote location. The isolation engenders insights as well as eccentricity. It has those quality of literary genre work that inspire closing the book for a moment for reflection and a head-nod. The lyrical language in talking about such a dusty and forlorn place elevates the story and makes it unforgettable: “The highway ahead lolled in sunlight. It was mine and it made me happy. It didn’t bother me that it was mine because no one else wanted it.”