SECRETS OF EDEN by Chris Bohjalian

Stephen Drew is a disillusioned pastor in Vermont, where homicides are rare.  When one of his parishioners, Alice Hayward, and her husband die in an apparent murder-suicide, he decides to take a break from his profession.  His narrative is the first of four sections, in which we learn that Alice was a battered wife who had an affair with the pastor.  The narrator of the second section is the local prosecutor who soon discovers that Alice’s husband’s death was most likely not a suicide, and Stephen himself comes into the crosshairs of her investigation.  The third narrator is Heather Laurent, an author who believes in angels and writes about them.  She is drawn to the Haywards’ deaths, because her father killed her mother and then hanged himself. Other than that, her role in this novel is something of a puzzle, but there is a dichotomy between her belief in magical beings and the pastor’s waning faith.  The final section is narrated by Katie, the Haywards’ 15-year-old daughter, who was spending the night with a friend after a concert when her parents died.  Although the identity of the perpetrator did not surprise me, the juicy plot is full of other twists and turns that make for a gripping read.  This novel may not totally succeed as a whodunit, but the pastor is a fascinating character, as he navigates the suspicion that surrounds him and the doubt that haunts his ministry.

INTIMACIES by Katie Kitamura

This novel has many similarities to A Separation, but I found it to be both less suspenseful and more satisfying.  Again, we have an unnamed narrator who is an interpreter (versus a book translator) for the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands. In her most important case, involving a murderous former president, she interprets for the judge, the attorneys, and a witness for the prosecution.  She also attends private meetings of the former president’s defense team, which includes a distasteful man that she met at a party.  Her job is unsettling, as she finds herself unintentionally taking sides, but then her personal life is unsettled as well.  Her boyfriend has left abruptly for Lisbon, where his wife now lives with their teenage children, presumably to ask her for a divorce.  As his absence grows longer and longer, the narrator begins to doubt his true intentions.  In fact, this book is full of not only intimacies but uncertainties.  Is the narrator’s friend Jana truly a good friend?  Was the mugging of a man in Jana’s neighborhood really a mugging?  Then there is the uncertainty of her job.  She is currently working under a one-year contract and wonders if it will be renewed and, more importantly, whether she even wants it to be.  An assignment to interpret for a terrorist at the detention center in the middle of the night leaves her shaken, when the terrorist demands to speak in Arabic, when our narrator is there to interpret French.  The many incidents in this novel seem unrelated except that they all are experienced by the narrator, and the book really offers no perspective other than hers.  However, this novel is much greater than the sum of its parts, particularly in the way that it creates a mood of ambivalence in which truth is a little fuzzy and often unknowable.  The irony is that all of the intimacies that the narrator experiences only add to her sense of being a stranger in a strange land.

A SEPARATION by Katie Kitamura

What do you do when your mother-in-law calls, asking about the whereabouts of your husband, when you’ve been separated from him for six months?  Our nameless first-person narrator is in this awkward position, but, rather than own up to the fact that she and her husband are no longer living together, she agrees to travel to Greece to track him down.  He is purportedly doing research for a book on mourning in a small village known for having professional weepers.  Ironically, our narrator tells us that he has never had to mourn anyone in his life.  Everything about this book screams, “What is going on here?”  We soon learn that the husband is quite the ladies’ man who has apparently trifled with the affections of a woman who works in his hotel; his mother’s comment on her son’s infidelities is shocking and hilarious, but the rest of the book’s tone is quite somber.  I loved the tantalizing plot and the beautiful writing, but the punctuation drove me bananas.  Sentences are strung together with commas for reasons I don’t understand.  Perhaps they lend the narrator’s voice a sort of breathlessness, but that quality doesn’t really meld with her calm, reserved demeanor.  The ending is not particularly satisfying and gives law enforcement in Greece a black eye, but I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, particularly the manner in which the narrator draws conclusions about conversations in a language she does not understand, primarily from body language and tone of voice.  The fact that the narrator is a literary translator speaks volumes, as she strives to convey in her work an author’s intention as far as how we feel about the characters.  The author of this book does just the opposite.  She give us the freedom to judge the characters by their actions, in the eyes of the narrator, who does not really try to sway our opinion.

THE LAST FLIGHT by Julie Clark

Two women, both running away from dangerous men, swap tickets and identities in an airport.  The implausibility of this occurrence becomes less so, thanks to a revelation late in the book, so don’t let that turn you off.  Claire is the wife of a smarmy politician who beats her regularly.  Eva is a chemist who cooks drugs in her basement and then distributes them to Berkeley students needing some extra wakefulness.  After the ticket/identity swap, Claire moves into Eva’s Berkeley home, and Eva may or may not actually board a flight to Puerto Rico that crashes into the ocean.  Then the author splits the book into two timelines—Eva’s backstory and Claire’s new life, inhabiting a world with an unknown future.  The upside to the plane crash, for Claire, is that everyone, including her husband, assumes she is dead.  Until he finds out otherwise, she has time to settle into the deception regarding her identity.  The unraveling of her ruse is just as suspenseful as Eva’s dilemma as to whether she should cooperate with the authorities or try to disappear.  This is not a perfect thriller by any means, but the disclosure at the end regarding the airport encounter between the two women was a biggie for me.  Along the way, though, we get to know two women who are trying to shed their oppressed past and carve out a life that they define on their own terms.

HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE by Imbolo Mbue

An American oil company called Pexton has polluted the soil, air, and water of the fictional village of Kosawa.  Several Kosawa men, including Thula’s father, travel to the capital to complain, but they never return.  When Pexton’s spokesmen are in the village to deliver their usual platitudes about fixing the problems, one of the villagers steals their car key and takes their driver hostage, along with the spokesmen, in an obvious tit-for-tat.  This thrilling beginning seemed so promising, but the fight between Kosawa and Pexton drags on for decades, with no resolution in sight, so that the pace becomes tedious.  Thula, a young girl whose intelligence lands her a scholarship to study in the U.S., is the main character who recognizes that the problem with Pexton is really a problem with her country’s government, particularly its dictator, who is obviously profiting from Pexton’s presence.  A sense of hopelessness pervades this novel, as each American lawsuit has a miniscule chance of succeeding, according to the lawyer representing Kosawa.  Apart from Kosawa’s plight, several aspects of this novel stood out to me.  One is the pigeon-holing of women in Kosawa as mothers and wives with no real agency of their own; remarrying after a husband dies is frowned upon.  Even as Thula is organizing a resistance movement in her homeland, her lack of a husband sows distrust in the minds of those she is trying to lead.  The other aspect that struck me is Thula’s observation that her country has no Constitution to serve as a foundation on which the country is built.  Ultimately, though, the Constitution is just a piece of paper that holds our own fragile democracy together until those in power decide not to abide by its laws.  Kosawa is a good example of what happens when corporate greed seeps into the government, leaving the people with little recourse.

NOTES ON AN EXECUTION by Danya Kukafka

I have lots of adjectives for this novel—gripping, chilling, creepy, disturbing, to name a few, in a Silence of the Lambs sort of way.  No, Ansel is not a cannibal, but he is a serial killer who is on Death Row and about to be executed.  It is not about the women he murdered, except for the last one, and she was his ex-wife.  The author gives us an imagining of what their lives could have been, but Ansel definitely receives top billing here.  Three other women share the crumbs from the rest of the narrative— the police detective who eventually nabs Ansel, the sister of his ex-wife, and his mother.  Saffy, the detective, was in the same foster home as Ansel for a time and therefore has first-hand knowledge of his sadistic behavior as a child.  Hazel is the twin sister of Ansel’s ex-wife, Jenny, and has always lived in Jenny’s shadow.  Ansel’s mother flees an abusive marriage in order to save herself but leaves four-year-old Ansel and his infant brother behind.  One could hypothesize that this trauma damaged Ansel to the point that he became a psychopath, but, in actuality, Ansel was twisting off the heads of chipmunks before she left.  In many ways, Ansel is the stereotypical Charles Manson type of killer whose magnetism attracts vulnerable women.  He philosophizes about the choices people makes, and he sometimes chooses to be a good person, but he is a monster, nonetheless.  My favorite character was Saffy, but even she disappointed me at times.  This book is not really a thriller, as we know that Ansel is a murderer from the get-go.  The event of his arrest is more a question of how and when, than if he will be arrested.  A bigger question is whether Ansel will actually be executed or if his escape plan will be successful.