The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis

I am a sucker for a book about books, authors, and libraries. Throw in a hauntingly eerie home perched on the side of a mountain, a modern structure made of iron and glass that sits above a hard-scrabble town in the Appalachians and I am hooked. The Barrowfields was that and more. A beautifully written story of a man who leaves his home in the Appalachian Mountains to attend college and write the great American novel only to return with a pregnant wife and his unfinished tome. He moves his family into the magnificent house on the hill where he continues to work on his obsession in the extensive library that Phillip Lewis writes as a supporting character in The Barrowfields. This family saga is told to us by his son Henry, who along with his sister Threnody, grows up in this rambling home in awe of their brilliant father and cared for by their beautiful and carefree mother until a family tragedy occurs that changes the trajectory of all their lives. Son Henry leaves home, as his father did, only to return after earning a law degree, as his father did, to solve the mystery of the family and to return to the home and sister he abandoned. This was a beautifully lyrical debut that will leave you wanting more from Phillip Lewis.

DODGERS by Bill Beverly - East LA gang meets Middle America on a caper that goes awry.

On a previous job I had the employees participated in a team building exercise, much like the Myers-Briggs system. This exercise identified what the employee would bring to a team; an organizer, a leader, the member that would get the project off the ground, the mediator, etc.  The object of this exercise is to build teams that would include at least one of each of these strengths, and bring the project to a successful end. Bill Beverly has done something similar in a LA gang setting in DODGERS, published by Penguin Random House.

This is an ensemble piece with characters that represent the best and worst parts of a team. There is East a 15-year-old who has never experienced a childhood, raised in the drug world of East LA. East is the loyal one. He can always be relied upon to follow the rules and do what is expected of him and get the job done. He is the order keeper. Ty, 13, Easts psycho, younger half-brother with the gun. He doesn’t think beyond aiming and pulling the trigger. The trigger-man. The brains of the outfit is Walter, intelligent, always thinking ahead, knowing how to get things done. He is the strategist. Rounding out the crew is Michael Wilson the older college boy from the hood who is to be in-charge. He is a chance taker and never follows the rules. He is the fuck-up.

The story begins in an LA ghetto at The Boxes, the hood where the boys live and work for Fin, the boss, the main supplier of drugs and East’s uncle. Due to a momentary lack of focus, the drug house that East is responsible for is raided by the police. Holding East responsible, Fin sends East with this crew of boys to Wisconsin to take out a murder witness before he has the opportunity to testify against Fin’s organization. Piling into a van the boys head in the compass direction E. “Only once did East turn and look back. Everything he recognized was already past: The Boxes. His gang. His mother.” The further east the boys go the more the mission goes awry. The boys begin to rely on their own selves to get through this task as they become estranged from the comfort of their gang life. East is the one who becomes more independent, realizing there may be something more than the gang life at home even as he finds himself friendless and alone in America’s white Midwest. 

This book has won awards as best crime novel and best debut for a reason. The prose is poetic, many times I jotted down quotes and passages I want to remember. "It took a moment for East's eyes to read the scene. He could see the valley's depth, feel the real wind dipping down it. But he could not convince himself that is was real. Space both vast and unattainable, opening up between the blue walls of stone. The air below was cold, he could feel it, a reservoir, and he could sense something about the chasm, all the time piled up there. Close to forever. More time than he had in a hundred lives like his."It also evokes a sense of place from the LA ghetto The Boxes where the boys live, to a stop on the way east at Las Vegas Casino, to a rest stop in Utah where big-rig truckers and families in SUV’s mingle to take a break from white-line-fever, to the white American Midwest."The farther east they got, the dirtier the toilets. Like every toilet in the country has been cleaned the moment they left LA, and none of them since." Bill Beverly shows us this country can be strange, scary, and unfriendly once we leave the comforts of what we know. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is the best book I read in 2016, and that is really saying something.

Hunters In The Dark - Lawrence Osborne is a noir tale that unfolds like Russian Matryoshka dolls

It all begins when a Robert, an aimless school teacher from Sussex, wins $2,000 at a casino in Cambodia. An introvert, Robert takes his annual school vacations in exotic places but never immerses himself in the local or the people, and always looks at them as someone peering through a telescope from the opposite end. His big win in Cambodia, however, sets off a chain of events that forces him to become involved with his surroundings and others who inhabit it.  Unhappy with this mundane life as a teacher he decides to extend his vacation for at least as long as the $2,000 will last him. However, there are others that have other plans for his winnings.  As the story unfolds like Russian nesting dolls; open one and another is there time after time, the $2,000 winning becomes the main character as the story twists when each Matryoshka doll is revealed. I loved this book and will look forward to reading Lawrence Osborne’s back list.