Deep and Probing Novel from Charles Fergus, A STRANGER HERE BELOW

What makes an author choose to write a particular book? It's a topic that can lead to strange new worlds. For Charles Fergus, a Vermont author best known for his natural history, the death of his own mother many years before took him into writing A STRANGER HERE BELOW. Set in Pennsylvania not long after the nation's birth, it fingers both a historical culture and a lingering effect from his own life. I liked it.

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

A slow, rich novel of a distant time and a man who is “Othered” in most aspects of his life.

In A Stranger Here Below, Gideon Stoltz, a Pennsyvania Dutchman (that is, from German settler stock), has become sheriff almost by accident in the growing town of Adamant, in 1835. Though the town is already making its mark economically with an iron foundry, and a range of wealth from ironmaster to thief, it’s only a hard day’s ride from frontier landscape and life. And some days, maybe not that far.

Through Gideon’s naive eyes, the layout of the town’s power structure begins to emerge. It’s based on force and violence as well as profit. And it has little of benefit for the women and children, whose voices mingle with old ways, as well as with the New World’s fresh forms of Christian worship. Gideon’s own marriage is a cross-cultural one, into a family of scoundrels and at least one sorcerous sort of grandmother. But it’s a heart’s truth marriage, and he clings to it as a series of deaths in the town slowly peel back the truth of two earlier deaths: murder for gain.

Underneath this, for Gideon, is the formative event of his young life: seeing his mother dead after an assault that’s never avenged. It haunts him even as he investigates crime for his town, and when he retreats to his much-loved wife to try to regain his footing, he stumbles into what he most fears: “I am thinking about how we are punished for loving,” he admits to her.

‘We fall in love, with life, with other people, with our kin. We love the land, and galloping on a horse, or singing hymns, or watching the clouds pile up in the sky, we love our dear wives and children …We love these things so much,’ he said, ‘that we can’t bear to think of being parted from them. When we see others torn away from life, by disease, or confusion of the mind, or the cruel actions of others …’ He stopped, could not go on.

His wife, named True, assures him that this pain requires belief in God’s plan and promises. She enquires about what’s upsetting him: the death of his friend the judge, who committed suicide, or a murdered boy he’s seen?

‘Both.’ And his memmi. Always his memmi. He saw for the thousandth time her ravaged body lying in its own blood.

Fergus’s first mystery follows more than a dozen books, including many explorations of the natural world. In this rural sheriff’s embrace of the world around him are the goodness and love that won’t allow a wrongful death to be covered up—and that in turn will disturb what peace he’s gained, at the deepest levels.

A slow, rich novel of a distant time and a man who is “Othered” in most aspects of his life, A Stranger Here Below is also an exploration of how a kind person can be drawn toward the dark revelations that crimesolving demands. For some, the book may be a bit too tender in places, yet this patina of affection can readily be crushed and scarred—as the sheriff’s investigation reveals.

Although the book is clearly crime fiction, it is equally an exploration of the soul in the presence of death and wrongdoing. Which is, after all, what a “stranger here below” can expect. 

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

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Anne Perry, DARK TIDE RISING (William Monk #24), Deep, Dark, and Satisfying

There are two components that make many a crime novel memorable over the long haul: the twists of the plot, and the way the crime's investigator stands up as a person—his or her courage, integrity, sense of humor, intelligence, and most of all, capacity to care.

That last aspect may seem a bit out of place at first. But it's what makes Louise Penny's Armand Gamache seem "known" to his legions of fans; it's what carries Carol O'Connell's prickly and dangerous Kathy Mallory into the hearts of her colleagues and readers; it's the part of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, and even Lee Child's feckless Jack Reacher, that pulls us to the next title, and the next.

And it's what makes Anne Perry's police Commander William Monk someone you might want for a neighbor, or on your local police force, in spite of his location in 1881 England.

In DARK TIDE RISING, Monk accepts a mission to protect the life of a wealthy real estate developer racing to ransom his kidnapped younger wife. Harry Exeter has a marriage Monk can connect with, because it's so much like his own: an unexpected and intensely valued relationship discovered against the odds, with a woman whose life is clearly worth sacrificing a fortune to save.

The protection effort and would-be rescue is going to have to take place at Jacob's Island, though. It's a location Monk knows far too well: a desperate slum of 1800s London, permeated by deadly tidal surges and even quicksand. He's witnessed death there: "He could still see the fat man sinking slowly into the tidal ooze, his mouth open, screaming, until the mud cut him off, and inch by inch he disappeared from sight." How can Monk organize his team to prevent such a disaster, while also bringing back the kidnap victim, Kate Exeter? Immaculate organization and planning must take place.

But Monk's efforts, with his men, the River Police, go quickly awry, and he's plunged into a very different and equally disastrous situation:

What he had not said, and what weighed on Monk's mind with further pain, was the thought that the kidnappers had known so much about their plans. There were five or six different ways the River Police could have got in, but the kidnappers had known precisely which ones they were going to use, how many man, and where they were along those tunnels and passages. What he forced himself to wonder was, who had told them?

It hurt even to think the words and yet they were there, whether he said them or not.

Perry's drama takes place in a setting where the gap between wealth and poverty set up extremes that were, in themselves, life-threatening, and the amount of effort for policing as she portrays it is accentuated by the absence of modern crime-solving tools and techniques. What Monk and his friends, including his insightful wife, must depend on is their sense of geography, their probing of human nature, and, in this rapidly developing and often twisting case, the classic threesome of crime: means, motive, opportunity. Here, the motive must somehow involve finances, as more threats and a whistle-blower's death are added to the events. But why?

Watching Monk sort out the motives of both the criminals and his own team members is fascinating, and emotionally compelling. Leadership, the power of friendship among men, struggles for the sake of each other ... these, as much as the sucking force of London's tides, deepen DARK TIDE RISING and make it one of Perry's best books.

No need to read the preceding Monk titles before plunging into this one, although of course they'll enrich the perspective on the characters. But Perry's a pro, laying out her characters and their past anguish with spare, quick details, making this a wicked good read. The publication date is September 18, from Random House. Pick up the hardcover first edition as a treat to yourself, an anchor of hope in humanity in this politically fraught season.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.