THE HOUSE OF BROKEN ANGELS by Luis Alberto Urrea

Big Angel and Little Angel are half-brothers, and they are together in San Diego for Big Angel’s mother’s funeral.  Big Angel is planning to have a 70^th birthday party the next day while all of his family members are in town for the funeral.  He is dying of cancer and doesn’t expect to live out the week.  His father left Big Angel and the rest of his family to starve in Mexico while he moved to the U.S. to marry an American woman.  Although most of the story takes place over a few days, we become privy to Big Angel’s big secret and meet his siblings, offspring, cousins, etc.  I read this book in electronic format, and finally at the end I discovered a hand-drawn family tree of sorts that would have been really helpful at the beginning.  Not only could I not keep straight the generations, but some characters have nicknames, and I could not keep track of which nickname went with which person, although ultimately I’m not sure that it mattered.  The vast majority of the book seems to be an introduction to this vast array of characters, both living and dead, and the real action takes place mostly in the last quarter of the novel.  It’s one thing to become immersed in a culture that is completely different from mine, and I love having the opportunity to do that, but I still want and expect that story to hold my attention, and this one just didn’t.

SACRED by Dennis Lehane

Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie are back in action as private investigators.   A beautiful woman named Desiree Stone, daughter of mega-wealthy Trevor Stone, has gone missing.  Her father kidnaps our intrepid pair in order to get their attention and is willing to pay a boatload of money for Desiree’s return.  Also missing is the private investigator he had previously hired, who happens to be Patrick’s friend and mentor, Jay Becker.  As Angie remarks, nothing is as it seems.  Angie and Patrick soon find themselves in Tampa, along with a couple of Stone’s goons, as they try to trace the whereabouts of Jay and Desiree. Lots of hair-raising adventures and close calls ensue for our intrepid pair.  I don’t think this novel lives up to the standard of A Drink Before the War, but it’s still pretty good stuff.  Lehane’s dialog and clever banter never disappoint, and this book has enough twists to keep you guessing and whipping through the pages.  What’s sacred is the relationship between our two heroes who realize that no one matters more to them than each other; they have each other’s back even as almost everyone else betrays their trust.  Angie and Patrick are really the reason to read this book, regardless of what shenanigans their clients are up to.

DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND by Dennis Lehane

There is no such thing as a bad Dennis Lehane novel, although I did like its predecessor, ADrink Before the War, better than this one.  Angie and Patrick are called into action again when a psychiatrist receives a photo of her son in the mail.  Recognizing this as a possible mob threat, Angie and Patrick begin surveillance of this young man whose regularly patterned college life yields no clues.  Actually, there is one clue in an event outside the norm, but it is such a blip on their radar that it doesn’t warrant immediate attention.  Soon, though, all hell breaks loose, as people start turning up dead, in very grisly fashion.  Similar murders that took place decades earlier offer a trail back to Patrick’s father, a man who, according to Patrick, was capable of anything, including murder.  (This is also not the first novel with scary clowns, nor is it likely to be the last.)  Lehane just has a way with words, with crisp dialog, and he endows his intrepid duo with traits and emotions that cause us to become attached to them, despite the violence that they can’t seem to shake.  The author doesn’t shy away from really dark stuff and recognizes how it can affect the personal relationships of those who have to face such evil on a regular basis.

EVERYTHING UNDER by Daisy Johnson

If you pay attention to the chapter headings, you can easily keep up with the three timelines in this novel, but I still found the content to be a little hazy.  The three main characters are Sarah, her daughter Gretel, and a runaway transgender adolescent, formerly named Margot but self-identifying as Marcus.  It turns out that Marcus has abandoned his adoptive home after another transgender character, Fiona, informs him that he will have sex with his mother and kill his father.  I figured out before he did what this prediction meant, but that was only one problem that I had with this novel.  Gretel works as a lexicographer, but mostly she searches for her mother, who abandoned her sixteen years earlier.  We know from the first chapter that she finds her but that her mother suffers from dementia and is becoming more and more of a handful.  The novel fails to fill in long time gaps in the lives of all three characters, leaving me puzzled and frustrated.  Mostly, though, nothing in the novel is particularly straightforward, partly because of the three timelines, and partly because the atmosphere leans toward the supernatural, particularly with regard to a river monster known as the Bonak.  When all is said and done, this book was just as muddy and murky as the river that plays a central role in it.  I’m so glad it was short so that I could minimize the amount of time I had to spend being dragged down into the confusion of abandoned and runaway children who are sometimes reunited with their parents without either party even realizing it.

CHANCES ARE... by Richard Russo

This may not be a mystery novel, but the storyline does revolve around Jacy’s disappearance in 1971.  She and three guys, all head-over-heels in love with her—Mickey, Teddy, and Lincoln—had just graduated from an exclusive New England college.  The Vietnam War was raging, and the draft lottery dealt each guy a different hand.  Now the three men, in their late sixties, have reunited for a long weekend, and it was all too obvious to me what happened to Jacy, more or less.  The first half of the novel was much more engrossing than the second half, which is largely Jacy’s story, and, for me, she did not leap off the page as well as the men did in the first half.  I’ll spare you the details that made her whereabouts obvious, and some parts of her story did not make sense to me.  My biggest beef with this book is that Russo failed to make me appreciate Jacy’s charisma.  Why exactly did all three guys adore her?  I understand why none of them made a play for her; they would probably have sacrificed their friendship with the other two.   Plus, she was engaged, but her fiancé attended a different school.  The three guys all worked in the dining hall of Jacy’s sorority house and were not in her same league financially.  (I loved the comment in the book that only the wealthy use the word “summer” as a verb.)  Still, there was certainly more to Jacy than her elevated social standing.  She came across as free-spirited and compassionate and perhaps a bit elusive.  For me, the most intriguing character is Teddy, who struggles with both mental and physical issues, but he is not a particularly appealing character.  That distinction belongs to Lincoln, who is the main character, but I wish his wife Anita, an attorney who passed up an opportunity to attend Stanford law school, had appeared on the page more frequently.  Her wisdom far exceeds that of any of the other characters.

MOHAWK by Richard Russo

Annie is a divorced thirty-something in the small town of Mohawk, NY.  Her son Randall is as smart as a whip but finds that he is more popular if he doesn’t make straight A’s.  In a town where mediocrity is obviously prized, Annie’s father, Mather Grouse, is one of the few denizens who values integrity.  Annie’s ex, Dallas, is a personable guy but totally unreliable, and Annie is in love with her cousin’s husband Dan, who is in a wheelchair.  There are some villains as well, mostly in the person of Rory Gaffney, but a small town novel would not be complete without some school bullies.  This novel is basically a character study of people who wish their lives had taken a different path, except for Dallas, who contentedly wears shirts with someone else’s name that he accidentally retrieves from the laundromat dryer.  A plot finally develops in the last 100 pages or so, but it was almost too little too late.  The writing is superb, and the characters are vivid, but except for a nearly lethal building demolition, nothing much happens for around 300 pages.  I can survive on sparkling dialog for only so long.  The final quarter of the book does make it worth reading, but I think Russo’s more recent stuff may be a better use of my time.