A complex plot with an unconvincing villain

I have been thinking about the problems I had with A Carrion Death by Michael Sears and Stanley Raynes, writing under the name "Michael Stanley." If you have not read this mystery and think you might, stop reading this right now because it is going to be filled with spoilers. Okay? Stop.

A Carrion Death is set in Botswana and introduces a Gaborone police detective, Assistant Superintendent David Bengu who is large enough and heavy enough to have the nickname Kubu, which means "rhinoceros." The mystery begins when a park ranger and an anthropologist find the remains of a body the hyenas have feasted on. There's enough left to know it was a white male. A tourist who took a wrong turn? Not likely. All the teeth had been knocked out of the skull and one of the arms was missing. So we know the man was murdered and his body dumped. But no white man has been reported missing.

Before the book ends, the bodies pile up: a geologist who works at a diamond mine and suspects smuggling, another geologist from the mine, a blackmailer, the hitman who killed the blackmailer, the heir to the mine, and maybe more (I didn't keep track). There is sculduggery in high places: the mysterious death years before of the man who founded the mining company, video recordings of important people doing naughty things with women not their wives, a letter that seems to suggest an involvement with "blood diamonds," and a plot so complex that when I closed the book could not make sense of all the twists and turns.

There are many things to like about A Carrion Death. Kubu is an appealing character, a responsible husband and devoted son (there's a scene with Kubu, his wife, and his parents). Sears and Raynes obviously love Botswana and dislike what development does to it: "Despite its relatively small size and attempts to avoid excessive environment damage, the Maboane diamond mine complex interrupted the arid vista like a scar. It was an open-pit mine that corkscrewed down, following the kimberlite host rock into the depths. Nearby the crushing, washing, and sorting plant stood waiting . . . " Their scenes involving corporate types in executive offices ring true.

The story hangs on the villain's ability to imitate voices and accents on the phone so well that the listener does not realize he's not talking to, for example, a school chum, someone he knew well enough to be nicknamed "rhinoceros" by him. A separate killer is willing to do the villain's dirty work—and the work is truly dirty—without every having met the person giving the orders over the phone. At one point the villain has to dispose of an inconvenient confederate who is in a luxury hotel in Portugal. When he opens his door to an attractive (female) stranger, he's set upon and his throat slit. Problem solved for the villain, but some readers will wonder how the mechanics of such an assassination can be set up, especially since the villain is just a garden-variety sociopath, not a head of state who can use the secret service. Nor is it clear what the villain gains from all the slaughter. Finally, one of the henchmen manages to escape which may be realistic—or he's being saved for a future book—but given the blood he'd spilled I found his escape unsatisfactory.

A Carrion Death is the first of seven Detective Kubu mysteries. Readers who would like a version of Botswana different from Alexander McCall Smith's might want to start with one of the later books. On the other hand, just because I found the plot of A Carrion Death overly complicated and the villain preposterous does not mean everyone will find them so. Or they will enjoy the book anyway. That there are six more Kubu mysteries tells me that he has some devoted followers. You might try one of them.

Young men and fighter jets . . . written from the inside

"This novel about flying," writes James Salter in his Forward to Cassada, "is drawn from another earlier one, The Arm of Flesh, published in 1961 and largely a failure. It lay forgotten for a long time until Jack Shoemaker, the editor-in-chief of Counterpoint, suggested that it might be a companion piece to another book he had republished, The Hunters, which was my first novel."

Once Salter reviewed The Arm of Flesh almost 40 years after its publication, he realized it had "serious faults and needed to be rewritten completely" and retitled with the name of one of the principal characters. 

Cassada is a novel about flying. Robert Cassada is a young US Air Force jet fighter pilot, fresh out of flight school, who joins a squadron in Germany in the 1950s. On his checkout flight, Grace, the lead pilot, takes him through such extreme maneuvers, Cassada throws up. But he files the aircraft.

Back on the ground, Grace's superior asks him, "Do you know what I expect of you?"
"Yes."
"No you don't. If you knew, you'd never do a stupid thing like that. What do you know about whether this man can fly or not? You don't. That's what the transition missions are for. If the major found out about this he'd take away your flight."
"Captain, I'm sorry. It wasn't good judgement. He seemed to be doing pretty well and I just got carried away."

Cassada is in fact a terrific pilot.

Cassada is a novel about group dynamics, a group that happens to be fighter pilots. Cassada loves to fly. But for no obvious reason he doesn't fit in to the group. He's teased, and at one point he's provoked into making a bad bet, which he loses. For the most part, we don't know his thoughts, although Salter does give us a sense of the man. Here is an example. The squadron's planes are out on patrol and are told to return immediately because snow showers are closing in their field:

"Cassada, hearing it—the calls, the other formations inbound—still new to it, felt a kind of electric happiness, a surge of excitement. Their speed was building. The air was heavier and more dense as they came down, nearing the cloud tops, then skimming them. He was confident they would get back to the field and at the same time felt a nervousness; it was in his arms and legs. The radio was alive with voices. From all directions planes were coming home."

Because Salter was a US Air Force fighter pilot (he flew more than 100 combat missions in 1952 during the Korean War) and because he was was stationed in Germany and France, promoted to major, became a squadron operations officer, in line to become a squadron commander, he writes about flying and squadron life from the inside. After twelve years in the service, he quit to write full time. I think his descriptions and his dialogue are exceptional. Here are two pilots chatting:

"Looks like it's melting," Godchaux remarked. "Did you hear what Cassada said at lunch?"
"No, what?"
"He said he wanted to pack some up and send it home to his mother in a box."
Cassada had never seen snow.
"Oh, yeah? Where's he from? Alabama?"
"No, he's from Puerto Rico."
"Puerto Rico? You'd never know that from looking at him. Was he born there?"
 "I think so. His father died or they got divorced. He lived with his mother."
"Puerto Rico," Harlan said. "Well, how'd he get in the American Air Force?"
"Puerto Rico's part of the United States."
"Since when?"
"I don't know. A long time."
"I must of missed hearing about it."

Reportedly, Cassada didn't sell well. It was published in 2000. I found my copy in the local library. Salter died in 2015 at age 90. I'm sorry I cannot write him a letter to tell him how much his book moved me. This will have to do.

Why precognition ain't all it's cracked up to be. Until it is.

It's a good thing I wasn't reading Daryl Gregory's Spoonbenders in a public space. My giggles, chortles, and gasps disturbed only my wife. It's rare to find a novel that has sympathetic and plausible characters, a complex and satisfying plot, and is laugh-out-loud funny.

You do need to suspend your disbelief enough to accept that astral projection (traveling outside one's body), precognition (the ability to see future events), psychokinesis (the ability to move objects by mental ability alone), and the ability to truly know if someone is telling the truth (psychoveritas?) are real. Because something like 42 percent of the American public believe in ghosts, this should not be a big stretch for many people.

Spoonbenders is the story of the Amazing Telemachas Family and some impatient readers may be put off by so many names, so many relationship, so quickly in the book. If so, they'll miss a lot: Teddy, a charming con man and card shark; Maureen, his wife who has genuine psychic powers; their three children, Irene, Frankie, and Buddy, who each have a psychic power. Teddy takes his young family on stage—Irene is only ten, Buddy five—and after a year is booked onto the Mike Douglas Show, an opportunity for the family to show its stuff and crack the big time.

The performance is a disaster. The family is discredited on national television. Maureen dies of cancer (a family tragedy Frankie attributes to the public humiliation), the children grow up. Irene has a son, Matty. Frankie marries a single mother, the parent of Mary Alice, and they have twins. And Buddy lives with his father in suburban Chicago. All this and more is essentially backstory. The novel begins in Matty's point of view:

"Matty Telemachus left his body for the first time in the summer of 1995, when he was fourteen years old. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that his body expelled him, sending his consciousness flying on a geyser of lush and shame." He has been looking through a peephole at his sixteen-year-old cousin and her girlfriend as they lay suggestively on a guest bed, struggling to observe one of his own commandments: "Under no circumstances should you touch yourself while having lustful thoughts about your cousin."

We follow Mattie, Teddie, Irene, Frankie, and Buddy into a complex plot involving a secret US government Cold War program, Chicagoland gangsters, a couple of improbable—but convincing—romances, and more.

Aside from the engaging plot, Gregory writes wonderful sentences. Here are a couple examples:

"Buddy sought our Irene's eyes with a classic Buddy look: mystified and sorrowful, like a cocker spaniel who'd finally eviscerated his great enemy, only to find everyone angry and taking the side of the couch pillow."

"Mitzi's Tavern was starting to fill up with the after-work crowd, if you could use the word 'crowd' to describe the dozen wretches who huddled here for a beer and a bump before facing the wife. The décor was Late-Period Dump: ripped-vinyl booths, neon Old Style signs, veneer tabletops, black-speckled linoleum in which 80 percent of the specks weren't. The kind of place that was vastly improved by dim lighting and alcoholic impairment."

And here's how to write dialogue. Irene is talking to her father before she leaves on a trip: "She would not let him forget about the time he babysat Matty when he was two. 'He's a teenager now, not a toddler,' said Teddy. 'This time if he drinks a glass of gin it will be on purpose.'"

All in all, I say Spoonbenders is a delightful novel that deserves to be read by anyone who wants to spend some time with an unusual, but still human, family.