Booked & Printed
by Laurel Flores Fantouzzo
In any nation, systems of hierarchies and norms endure, exerting expectations upon its citizens. The true test of a country’s health is how those individuals at the bottom of any given hierarchy experience daily life. Do nationwide structures allow for an existence with everyday dignity for those lowermost residents? Or does community cruelty crush them? And what of those who are not, in fact, the most stepped-upon in society, but whose aggrieved rage makes them imagine themselves so? This issue, Booked & Printed examines books whose characters commit crimes in the contexts of their corrosive environments, some sins perhaps more justifiable than others.
V.A. Vazquez’s debut, The Death Row Club, examines the long-lasting stains serial killers leave on victims, on communities, and on their own families. When a television show outs her elderly father as a serial killer on television, making him nationally famous, Nicola Fischer finds herself the target of suspicion and ostracization in their lifelong hometown.
Parents and fellow faculty push her out of her grade school teaching job. Social media speculates about her complicity. Reporters chase her. Nicola turns to alcohol in her isolation, thinking of her past with her loving father. Then she receives a mysterious invitation to the Death Row Club. Reeling, and with little more to go on, Nicola takes it.
During her travels to a remote cabin with other attendees, Nicola learns that the Death Row Club is for people like her: the children of serial killers, attempting to live beyond their parents’ horrific crimes. The adult children meet once a year for fellowship and mutual understanding, which most of American society refuses to offer them.
When a fellow Club member ends up dead, suspicion falls dangerously on Nicola. In a secluded rural setting, she must work to clear her own name—if that’s even possible at all.
The Death Row Club is a surefooted and attention-grabbing debut. Through Nicola’s past memories and present danger, the novel portrays themes of parental violence, survivor psychology, and many forms of exploitation. All the while, the book moves at an exciting clip, providing twists and revelations readers will not anticipate.
The relationships are rich with complications. Allies and enemies form and change. The smallest details of the past return with surprising significance. Reasonable assumptions are overthrown. This engrossing novel rushes toward shocking revelations, and in the process, it makes readers witnesses to what they never could have expected.
The Pickpocket’s Letter, by Anil Nijhawan, styles itself as a missive to the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. By the time the story begins, it is 2017, and Modi has been in power for three years, pushing the world’s largest democracy toward authoritarianism. The letter-writer, Deenu, has rarely experienced power during his teenaged existence. The Indian caste system falls hardest on him, and those like him; he began his life, he tells Modi, as an orphaned child. Early pages find Deenu suffering from appalling physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, all the more horrifying for their routine infliction by orphanage employees. Deenu never learned his own surname; without one, he is the lowest of the low. Fellow orphans gave him the mocking nickname Cobra after he was mesmerized by a snake that entered the orphanage.
Deenu Cobra further reports to Modi: he was kidnapped from the squalor of his orphanage, recruited to petty thievery under the auspices of a vast criminal organization, and soon learned his best friend was murdered while trying to escape the gang’s clutches. Deenu was relieved at the novel material comforts offered to him—a soft bed, clean clothes, regular meals—but, seeing the growing danger in staying under cruel crime bosses, he staged a daring, towheaded escape. In Kolkata, he has struck out on his own as a freelance pickpocket, living independently for the first time in his life. Deenu appeals to Modi’s campaign promises of economic improvement, and reminds the prime minister of the continuing, painful scenes of poverty on the streets for which his leadership is responsible.
The epistolary format and address to Modi fall away as the novel continues, a natural gesture of Deenu’s trajectory. The Pickpocket’s Letter is a coming-of-age journey that offers finely drawn, memorable characters, both allies and villains who help and hinder Deenu Cobra in his journey toward dignity and community. A jolly Romanian priest, fluent in Hindu, has allied with Kolkata crime bosses, and amiably but threateningly surveils Deenu. Deenu’s Kolkata landlord is a grouchy, tightfisted, flatulent man who, along with his wife, grows protective of the young pickpocket. Deenu’s friend Sanju grew up as a servant, but enjoys the largesse of a wealthy woman who sent him to university like her own son; Sanju expounds often now on communism and the nature of democracy.
The novel ends with some abruptness. The narrative explains away a final crime’s loose ends. Other villains still potentially trailing the protagonist disappear from the story, leaving gaps where several more scenes might have been.
Despite the rush toward an ending, Deenu Cobra’s development as a criminal reaching for better, and hungering for justice, is affecting and poignant. The Pickpocket’s Letter will stay in readers’ memories for a long time to come.
Whites immediately announces itself as a provocative short-story collection. The title alone confronts a destructive assumption: that whiteness is the neutral, foremost identity by which all others are measured, and that whiteness which not need be named or studied the way other races are. Mark Doten’s short story collection depicts—uproariously—the cultures, lexicons, and impositions that American whiteness often tries to hide.
The crimes Doten’s short story protagonists commit are gruesome, all too familiar, and often hilarious. The fictional narrators of Whites include real, destructive overlords devastating the US, and much of the world, with their plunder and spite. Elon Musk, for example, climbs atop bodies and barely-alive individuals during a stampede of workers fleeing his company. His own internal monologue is not concerned with the safety of his employees. He spends many of his ghastly steps mocking his own, jaundiced interpretation of liberal thought, averse to any accountability for the horror unfolding around him.
Elsewhere, Doten offers hideously recognizable figures from American news stories and words-of-mouth. A school shooter with his manifesto and easily acquired long gun. A racist corporate leader demanding a Black woman draft a craven press release denying racism. And a “well-meaning” nonprofit leader who frequently upbraids her younger, underpaid employees. Each character takes a shocking turn toward crime, and the destinies of each criminal range from instant, uproarious accountability, to gruesome, gasp-worthy impunity.
One story stands out with its focus on the crimes of a January 6 rioter who wandered the halls of the Capitol, taking video and messing with documents. In second-person point of view, “I’m Wide Awake It’s Jumpman” introduces a queer, nonbinary, sneaker podcaster turned right-wing commentator and January 6-er. They also take care of their affectionate mother suffering from cancer, and they date a caring, nearby mall employee. In flashbacks, they slowly disclose a lifetime history of insidious manipulation and collusion at the hands of the individuals who should have protected them most. In a volume already rich with attention-grabbing intelligence, “I’m Wide Awake It’s Jumpman” rises as a genuinely moving coming-of-age within the context of a fraying United States. The story is a brilliant tonal shift that adds emotional texture to the collection.
The stories in Whites secure author Mark Doten’s status as one of America’s foremost satirists. He is a contemporary interpreter and comedian of our nightmares as a country, and he carries an authorial ethics that remembers who suffers most under contemporary hierarchies invented, and reinvented, by the crimes of white American history.
ALL POINTS BULLETIN: The late James Sallis’s final novel, Backwater (Soho Crime) hits bookstores in September. • The Novel Detective, a new “metafictional” mystery from Cuban American author Teresa Dovalpage draws on the her personal experience growing up in Havana, from Soho Crime. • Crippen & Landru has a new collection of never before published John Dickson Carr stories: The Unexpected Instinct, edited by Dan Napolitano. • Lawrence Light debuts a new thriller series this summer from Severn House, Payback, featuring a business journalist who teams up with the police to figure out who is targeting billionaire hedge fund owners for death. • Crooked Lane Books is publishing M. J. Soni’s new book featuring retired librarian Neeti Shah, The Masala Chai Mystery Club. • Martin Limón is bringing out his first stand-alone novel, Strip Rules (Soho Crime). • S. J. Rozan teams up with John Shen Yen Nee on A Warning to the Curious (Soho Crime). • Also from Soho Crime, the newest US Army Captain Billy Boyle novel, The Ninth Circle, from James R. Benn.