Powerful New Crime Novel from David Guterson, THE FINAL CASE

 

[Originally published in New York Journal of Books]

“In The Final Case Guterson clearly denounces the forces of destruction in people who choose a dark and abusive anger over respect. It’s beautiful, profound, and an insistent page-turner.”

When the author of Snow Falling on Cedars steps into crime fiction, there’s every reason to expect an emotionally intense book with powerful and unforgettable imagery. And for The Final Case, those descriptors are exactly on target.

At the same time, the book’s page-turning progress of revelation and answers is less about the results of the upcoming trial—as the nameless narrator accompanies his father Royal through the frail and aging attorney’s defense of a horrible Seattle woman, his father admits that the woman and her husband “abused a girl they adopted from Ethiopia until she died of it.” With a fine understanding that he accepts this case to provide a defense for the indefensible, he outlines the possible reasons to stay out of it: “I guess I could tell myself that what she did just fills me with so much abhorrence that I can’t represent her.”

But Royal’s sense of how a trial should work, of the primacy of law, commits him to the effort: “If you convict someone because they’re abhorrent, and not because they broke the law, you might as well live in a dictatorship. And who wants that? I don’t. And another thing. I play my role according to my lights and I’m at peace with myself.”

In a sense, this moves the novel out of the traditions of crime fiction: Though the details of the case are excruciatingly stacked up, there is no suspense-riddled investigation to retrieve them—they are already available. And the punch to the gut is less in the horrific details of abuse than in the accretion of the beauty, courage, and honor of the short life of Abeba Temesgen, later Abigail Harvey. When her adoptive American parents destroy her, they crush something and someone that should have been a cherished treasure.

Guterson positions the book to take on more than this murder case, through his compact language that never relents in piling up truth. There are long sentences that feel like Proust, summoning all the details of a moment, an environment, an attachment. Unforgettable and most intense is a diatribe from the mother of Royal’s murderous client. For almost five pages, this Mrs. Huber justifies the evil her daughter lives by, beginning with, “You know what? You’re from Seattle. In Seattle, they elect communists to sit on their city council.” Through racism, accusations of brainwashing, predictions of an apocalyptic “next war,” and exalting of righteous and vicious Christians in a battle against “disrespect,” she vomits a diatribe that is frighteningly familiar.

Royal’s discouraged father admits in the car afterward, “I can’t put Betsy’s mother on the stand.” He explains: “She could have told the jurors a lot about Betsy, so they could come to understand her better. But no. She’s full of anger instead. The world’s a terrible place in her head, filled with terrible, horrible people who are one hundred percent wrong about everything.”

Royal’s son knows his father’s time is limited, that life is short now for the elderly man. He receives a blessing into this final case, this commuting and presence with his dad, and even going undercover to learn more about Betsy’s husband, by his wife Allison, a partner in this long-term affectionate and respectful marriage that mirrors the one his father lives in. The plain and sometimes exhausting labors that go into making family worthwhile are part of his chosen life, as they have been for his dad.

So the suspense of the novel becomes a question of how Royal and his family will sustain the enormous pressure of this trial, and its painful and indisputable revelations. In The Final Case Guterson clearly denounces the forces of destruction in people who choose a dark and abusive anger over respect. It’s beautiful, profound, and an insistent page-turner. Which, alas, will not be read by “the dark side.” But perhaps those of us following in Royal’s footsteps will gain courage from this final case that Guterson offers us, and become better able to make sure we do not live in what Royal describes as a dictatorship. We may be better prepared, after Guterson’s story.

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

Rock Music, Suspense, Dark Thriller: HOLD ME DOWN by Clea Simon

Clea Simon's deep dives into the crime, pain, and heroics of Boston's club music world gave a fierce and dark passion to her crime novel World Enough (2017). With HOLD ME  DOWN, Simon goes multiple layers deeper and darker—thanks to the persona of Gal, a scarred and angry woman who has held crowds in the palm of her hand as she belted out the lyrics of her own top songs, mic stand and the strings of the bass as much a part of her as her own vocal cords and rough screams of rage and sexuality.

For Gal, a Boston return, 20 years later, is fraught with potential failure. Taking a cameo role in a club performance, she falters at first, realizing the guitarist is "all metal and speed, still" -- can Gal keep up? But she finds out right away: "The move centers her ... belting out the chorus as well as she knows the tattoo on her wrist—an F clef, faded blue—as the song pours out of her, the words coming easily now. Winding up to the hook. The line with the hiccup. One extra beat that makes the rhyme different." And she's back in charge of the image she's been ready to project, of a woman and a band grown tougher with age, "blooded, in ways they can only imagine." It's about power, sexuality, control.

And then, with one tricky glimpse for a moment of a face in the crowd, she's rubbed raw again, and in danger.

Scenes of touring, of the drug-supported physical challenge of performing for one crowd after another, clawing up the charts, the band becoming a life form of its own: Simon peels these like layers of a sharp onion, tears and rage starting to flow with Gal's slow recognition of the deep punishment she's sustained in her life. Her best songs—including the iconic "Hold Me Down"—root in that festering pain and anger that only her closest friends have even a hint of. 

"That song, 'Hold Me Down,' had been their breakout. Their hit, even in the rough four-track version they'd recorded down at Randy's, burning up the college stations with a waiting list for the single. Fans asking at the record store whenever she dropped back in to pick up a shift. It was why the suits had come calling, taking the shuttle up from New York to hear them at the Rat, the Channel, Taji's."

With the "suits" had come the controllers, the people who shoved the band at a pace beyond human capacity, drugging them as needed, pressing them into alcohol and drug abuse and a demand for performance that's deadly in its effects.

As the 20-years-later brutal murder of one of the team confronts her, so long after the band's success, Gal slowly admits to herself why the killing happened and who has deliberately done damage to her and the others. Then the police get involved, demanding that she reveal information she's barely coming to terms with. "You could come in and speak with us, if you'd like. Or should I send someone to get you?" That's the investigator. And Gal replies that she'll come in, without being dragged—admitting, in that moment, that her choices are "all about control."

But you can't control what brutal crime does to you. You can only cling to your friends and what's left of who you thought you were, and keep going. Or not. 

Simon's pacing in this crime thriller offers more than plot and character: She reincarnates the demanding sexuality of the rock underground with the costs of fame and addiction. Page by page, scene by traumatic scene, there's no guarantee that Gal can even perceive a safe harbor. 

Anyone who's dreamed of the power of being a rock performer will get double the emotional kick from this raw and compelling suspense novel. Simon's particular genius in HOLD ME DOWN is shining her light into the world of tough, struggling, and brilliant women—a side of the rock world rarely acknowledged or envisioned. HOLD ME DOWN is a heartache packed into 248 pages, with the possibility of breaking always just within reach.

After multiple genres of mysteries and crime novels, this Boston-area author has come into her own, so that Gal yells the words so many have had in the back of their throats, an accusation: "You wanna, you wanna hold me down." It's all about how we fight back. Can Gal do it—and survive?

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