Can there ever be reparation for the damage done to generations of Black people in America? Jahmal Mayfield, in his debut novel, SMOKE KINGS (Melville House, 388 pp., paperback, $19.99)takes this question to a provocative extreme.
When cops kill 17-year-old Darius Evers, his older cousin Nate, a political activist, wants real justice, not just “another Twitter hashtag, another candlelight vigil, another graffiti memorial.” He begins reading about past murders – “lynchings, mostly” – and teams up with Darius’ brother Joshua and two close friends to begin kidnapping the descendants of people who had committed racially motivated hate crimes. The four of them don’t release their victims until they agree to deposit hundreds of dollars a week into a secret account. “We like to think of it as a community building fund,” Nate tells one. “But you can consider it reparations.”
Their plan works, until the day it doesn’t catastrophically happen, putting them all in the frame of white defenders and vengeful cops. As everything catches fire, Mayfield leans up to the discomfort zone.
Mercedes Spivey, Teresa Dovalpage’s heroine LAST ENTRANCE TO HAVANA (Soho Crime, 343 pp., $27.95) — the fifth installment in her “Havana Mysteries” series — was a young child in Cuba when her mother disappeared and her soldier father was killed in action. Her paternal grandmother, Mamina, stepped in to raise her, insisting that life go on as normal. Years later, when Mercedes returns to Cuba to care for her aging grandmother, she learns, thanks to the recent death of her husband, that “normal” is often not possible.
But perhaps returning to Cuba means Mercedes can finally find out what happened to her mother, Sarah. Although Mamina continues to be caged in details, family members offer crumbs, leading Mercedes on a path of adventure and intrigue. Dovalpage is less interested in a whodunit (what happened to Sarah becomes pretty obvious) than in exploring how family ties can fray, yet manage to remain intact, over the decades.
Erin Young’s 2022 series debut, “The Fields,” was one I didn’t get around to reviewing at the time, an oversight I can remedy with Young’s follow-up, ORIGINAL SINS (Flatiron, 352 pp., $28.99). Both books, featuring Iowa detective Riley Fisher, convey a strong sense of the Midwest and a deft familiarity with American police investigations—all the more impressive since Young, who previously wrote historical fiction as Robin Young, is British.
Riley, now an FBI rookie, is tasked with investigating threats against Iowa’s newly elected female governor as a serial rapist and killer known as the Sin Eater resurfaces in Des Moines after a long hiatus. Riley believes there is a connection, but the senior agent she reports to doesn’t have much time for her theories. “I work alone. I always have,” he tells her in an intense tone. “Trust me, Riley, you don’t want me as an enemy.”
As Riley wonders who, if anyone, she can trust at the FBI office, she also deals with her messy, complicated family, which has never gotten over the night Riley was raped by her brother’s best friend, a a crime that “triggered a toxic bomb of shame, guilt and rage.” The last thing Riley wants to do is return home, but if she can’t hack it into the FBI, she won’t have a choice.
UNDER THE STORM (Hogarth, 400 pp., paperback, $19) not Christoffer Carlsson’s follow-up to last year’s excellent ‘Blaze Me a Sun’ but its prequel — originally published in Sweden in 2019 and once again beautifully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. I understand why the English language publication order was reversed, though, because this novel, while still very good, feels like a trial run for the later effort.
When a young woman’s body was discovered in a charred farmhouse in 1994, the solution was quick — it was murder, her boyfriend did it, case closed. But about his friend’s nephew, Isak; the arresting officer, Vidar Jörgensson. and the entire community of Marbäck, the closure is a myth that is about to be dispelled.
Isak and Vidar’s character trajectories (and tragedies) carry real narrative weight, but Carlsson also leaves room to explore bigotry, misogyny, and nativism, albeit in ways that aren’t as seamless and organic as in ” Blaze Me a Sun”. That said, my hopes are high for his next book, “The Living and the Dead.”