Quest

The Trackers by Charles Frazier has a dual personality – the story’s beginning is slow as a young, ambivalent protagonist arrives in Dawes, Wyoming, in 1937 to paint a WPA mural for the post office. The artist, Valentine Welch, stays on the expansive ranch of John Long and his wife, Eve. John holds ambitions for a US Senate seat, though soon after Val’s arrival, Eve takes off, presumably to take up her old life of singing with traveling Western bands. John asks Val to pause the mural project and discreetly track Eve to figure out whether she is still married to a previous husband and if she plans to return. 

The search goes from Seattle to Florida to San Francisco. The three major characters are unlikable and impulsive, each oscillating between fascination and disdain for wealth and power while accusing the others of holding similar motives. The men make assumptions that hinder the search. 

Eve relishes her background, having left home as a teen, riding the rails, surviving and keeping old secrets with a network of loose connections. She knows what it's like "Being pushed out of the house as a teenager.... to be a burden to your family, more trouble than they think you're worth." 

Val questions one of her old friends who advises, “On the road one of the things you learn to do without is certainty.” John warns that Eve lies whenever it’s convenient.  “She tells whatever story suits her at that minute. I don’t know whether she convinces herself it’s the truth or not.” Still, the wealthy rancher wants her back. 

John, uncertain if Eve ever married or divorced, does not want embarrassing disclosures disrupting his Senate bid. Val travels to FL to question her threatening and ignorant in-laws. Val worries whether “Estafa County might be the bellwether of the entire country. If the Depression never ends, if everything keeps falling apart, crumbling like watching the geometry of the Pyramids dissolve grain by grain into smooth humps of sand dune, then maybe Estafa is already one step further into the future than the rest of us. Maybe its purpose is to demonstrate how foolish we’ve been to put so much effort into all the [WPA] physical work and the airy ideas of building the nation, all the swat and science and poetry and philosophy gone back to dust and mud.”

Over the course of his travels, Val falls for Eve and loses interest in the mural. “With creative work, surely doubt and disappoint are inevitable. If you have ambitions, the thing you create will always fall short of what you intended.” 

The end of the book picks up pace once Val finds Eve and gradually secures more answers. He readily agrees after Eve asks if Val wants to join her for a brief love story, despite the warning that “Every love story has an end.” 

Still, dialogue throughout is evasive and cryptic, as the characters withhold details and tell outright lies. One ranch hand points out that people regularly make up stuff, expecting others to take their words for truth. 

The characters stoically embrace a tough, lonely form of realism. When an optimistic immigrant cab driver describes his goals in life, Val goes off on a rant. “Part of me wanted to press on, to set him straight about his land of dreams, but the other part of me decided against it. After all, the nation’s big, beautiful strength had always been dreaming forward against the brutal, ugly undertow of reality, the violence in the heart of the human animal, the gluttony and greed.”    

A cowboy who works on Long’s ranch rescues Val and Eve from two violent husbands and helps preserve Eve’s new secrets. During the Depression, many had good reason to doubt whether others told the truth. Even more had no desire to hear the truth.  

Paintings capture a moment while stories shift with time. 

Customs

The Disenchantment by Celia Bell starts off slowly despite the setting of 1680 France and volatile politics. Characters make the mistake of expecting their lives to unfold much as they always did, but a few poisoning cases put spouses, aristocracy, servants and police on edge. Grudges lead to accusations and informants who lie to give police what they want and avoid torture, trials and brutal executions.

Men control households, finances and their children’s destinies. Baronne Marie Catherine de Cardonnoy lives with the shame of holding her deceased mother in low regard throughout her childhood, due to her lower-class background. “She had thought that her mother cared for nothing but money and clothes, but perhaps she had simply looked at her child, destined for the convent school, and known that her daughter would grow up a stranger to her.” 

Trapped in an unhappy marriage to an older man with higher social prestige, Marie Catherine spends freely, too, distracting herself with new dresses, new furniture, vases and perfumes, orange trees and horses – “anything that would remind her that the money was hers, even if her person was not.” 

Throughout marriage, Marie Catherine loves and misses her volatile father, because he controlled her life, mixing kindness with whippings. His advice to her: “You may think whatever you want in private, my dear, but do your duty and keep those beliefs that might upset decorum to yourself. Your spirit is free, but your speech and your conduct must be ruled by custom.”  

She ponders how to “cross that gap, into the mystery of another human,” one who may feel as she does about rejecting social conventions.

A busy social life and popularity with aristocrats who appreciate her storytelling skills shield Marie Catherine from her husband's wrath. She pretends the stories are from her mother rather than inspired by the nursemaid who raised her: “If her mother had never told stories, then she’d simply invent a different mother.”  

The wealthy, including her friend Victoire de Conti, worry less about rules and convention. The two women become lovers after a furtive drunken encounter at a soiree, and Marie Catherine wonders how Victoire had the courage to take the first step, without worrying about another individual’s desires

Victoire occasionally moves around town freely in male attire, visiting Marie Catherine. A servant sees a kiss and blames an artist painting her portrait. Servants beat the man nearly to death, and the husband threatens his wife with the loss of their children and banishment to a convent. 

That same evening the baron is assassinated. Servants and police suspect that the killer sympathized with Marie Catherine for being trapped in an unhappy marriage. Marie Catherine poses questions to learn the truth and concocts a tale to evade questions and prosecution. But others lie, too. 

Before her husband's murder, Marie Catherine meets Mademoiselle de Scudery who writes about a land where women hold power and asks, “Do you ever believe that your life would have been happier if you had not imagined that land and had it to compare with this one?” The woman insists that life would have been much worse without the imaginary land. Imagination is the first step to finding freedom and changing old customs that might hold us back.

Witness protection

In The Lie Maker by Linwood Barclay, Boston journalist and novelist Jack Givins is down on his luck. He’s fired before even starting a new job, his car blows up and his publisher rejects his third novel. So Jack is receptive when his literary agent visits with a burner phone that eventually delivers a lucrative job offer: write histories for people entering the US Witness Protection Program. 

“The Witness Security Program was authorized by the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and amended by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984,” notes the program site. “The U.S. Marshals Service has protected, relocated, and given new identities to more than 19,000 witnesses and their family members, since the program began in 1971.” The program provides witnesses with new identification and documentation, initial support that leads to self-sufficiency.

His new employer, Gwen Kaminsky, tough and demanding, repeatedly reminds him that she has a stable of writers. A condition of the new job is that he keep his employer's identity secret. Their meetings are clandestine, and she runs operations out of an office labeled as an import firm. Jack strives to please. After writing and rewriting a profile, he asks to meet the witness and Gwen makes elaborate arrangements, requiring that Jack wear a blindfold.  On the return trip, he asks how thoroughly she had checked him out and how far back she went. 

She explains that, with no criminal record or inappropriate associations with groups on the US watch list, he checked out. Jack responds, noting he found it “one hell of a coincidence that you’d pick someone like me… Someone with more than a passing acquaintance with the witness protection program.”  

Gwen blows up, assuming that Jack is a witness under protection, but he quickly assures her that the witness is his father- a former hitman who testified against his employer who ordered the hits. Michael Donahue left his wife and child when Jack was nine. The mother remarried and changed their names years earlier. Gwen expresses alarm, fearful of being fired, adding “There’s no way I shouldn’t have known this.” Then she asks why he told her. 

“I wanted to clear the air,” Michael explains. "I wanted to be sure there wasn’t something fishy about you coming to me.” He goes on to ask that Gwen help arrange meeting with his father. “I don’t know how to find him, but I figure you do.” 

At one point, Jack learns the subject of his first profile was murdered. But he should have checked the program website: “No Witness Security Program participant following pro-gram guidelines has ever been harmed or killed.”

Jack is surrounded by deceitful characters – including the woman who hires him, the girlfriend who covertly tries to figure out his new employer, a stepfather who consistently has money problems, an agent who misleads about the novel's rejection, a father who abruptly makes brief appearances over the years, lying to protect his son. More than one dies. 

Jack also withholds information, but with time and trust, eventually releases truth in pieces. 

The characters may have flaws, but are earnest and funny, often doing the right thing at the end. Tone and plot are fast-paced and noir. The writing is witty, sharp, excluding unnecessary details. 

Some lies land characters in more trouble. Others are essential for survival.