Author visit 2 authors deliver strong stories
If you read this column regularly, you know I don’t do nature. I don’t camp, hike, hang out at bonfires, eat food from a stick or even hang my laundry outside. But local author Nick Petrie’s thrilling “Burning Bright” (Putnam) transported me to the woods of northern California and the wilds of Washington state and I loved every page of this adrenaline-fueled journey. In fact, a beginning chase scene in the redwoods is not only breathtaking, it’s also one of the most original action scenes I’ve read (imagine “The Fast and the Furious” sampling “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”).
Like his creator, Peter Ash is a Wisconsin native, “tall and rangy, muscle and bone, nothing extra.” As his name implies, Ash is solid, a tree, “self-contained and still,” a Marine suffering from PTSD, the “white noise” in his head his souvenir from Afghanistan. After “that mess in Milwaukee” last year, Ash is taking time to silence the static. But it’s not happening because Ash isn’t “just a guy,” he’s that guy, the one who “can’t be a bystander.” It’s a formula Lee Child has driven into the ground. Thankfully, Petrie’s charging it with new life.
Now Ash is great and all, but June (aka Juniper), a journalist whose scientist mother is killed for her “bleeding edge” technology, and whom Ash can’t help helping is more than his match. In the opening pages, June escapes her kidnappers from the back seat of an SUV that races the narrative from 0 to 60 in seconds. The novel ends with a shootout (naturally), an ultimatum, and a promise for the future. And I can’t wait. P.S. If you own a Subaru, you have every reason to pat yourself on the back.
Seventeen-year-old Hattie Hoffman in Minnesota author Mindy Mejia’s evocative and provocative mystery
“Everything You Want Me To Be” (Atria) has taken Shakespeare literally. Her entire world’s a stage. She’s “spent her entire life playing parts.” In her senior high school production of Macbeth, she’s playing Lady Macbeth, but forever she’s been role-playing with everyone: her parents (the good daughter), her young married English teacher (the good student), her friends (the popular girl), and even the sheriff (the good teenager).
The novel opens with Hattie alone “in a ditch in the middle of nowhere” Minnesota, with “everything in the inside” changed. This is her moment of epiphany, but for what? A few pages later, Hattie is found brutally stabbed to death, and the small town reels.
The story unfolds through three distinctive firstperson points of view: the town’s sheriff, Del; Hattie’s English teacher, Peter; and Hattie herself. Early in the investigation the sheriff says he doesn’t place much stock in the “common sense” of teenagers, but who are they when they think no one’s looking, when the masks are off and the costumes put away?
Is it Hattie’s shifting sense of self or her deliberate manipulation that gets her murdered? Is she Lady Macbeth? You need to decide. I won’t spoil Mejia’s clever crafting and her sophisticated setup. Let me just add that Hattie’s narration and Peter’s guide us in flashback while Del’s narration keeps us in the novel’s present, but all three move us forward to the novel’s seductive conclusion. This means that all the other characters cross each of the narrations and this layering makes for a sophisticated and wicked whodunit. Carole E. Barrowman is a professor of English at Alverno College and co-author of several novels, including the “Hollow Earth” trilogy. Info: www.barrowmanbooks.com.