Unbelievable

 

The plot of The Black Wolf by Louise Penny describes what was once unthinkable – invasion of Canada by the more powerful, more populated United States as climate change ushers in life-threatening water shortages.  

Survival might depend on sensing such threats are in play, determining when action is required.

“… [I]t was near impossible to believe it could happen. But Armand suspected every country ever invaded had felt the same way. Every group ever targeted, ever rounded up, refused to believe their neighbors could do it. 

“Every people who found themselves under the thumb of a tyrant must wonder where it began, and how they didn’t see it coming. And what moment they missed, when it could have been stopped.” 

The story is unusual for an author so admired by fans of cozy mysteries, and in the acknowledgements, she points out that she began writing the book a year before the start of 2025, and the US president’s chatter about making Canada a 51st state. So instead the book is indeed hauntingly similar to real life as real confrontation emerges between two countries who once enjoyed the world’s closest alliance. 

The unbelievable is now real. 

Warning: Cozy fans are sure to be disappointed. Also, the early pages drag and references to events from previous novels in the series are awkward and distracting. But that should not deter readers from considering this excellent plot.  

Paradise slips away

One person’s paradise is another person’s hell. 

The setting of State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg is bleak – rainy, flood-prone Florida of the future. An unnamed pandemic has struck and people rely on a virtual reality device and cheap novels to distract them from a society on the cusp of slipping into chaos, ignorance, boredom and authoritarianism. 

The story follows an educated couple, unsettled and unfulfilled in their careers. The two live with the wife’s mother, due to the pandemic, after repeatedly moving in pursuit of temporary teaching posts. The academic husband struggles with his goal of writing an account of pilgrimages in medieval Europe and runs regularly, gathering unusual tales from his route in their neighborhood. 

The wife once aspired to a writing career, settling for ghostwriting for a famous thriller author, wo is likewise on a constant prowl for stories. The wife is grateful for her own paid writing position but also feels loss. “When I landed the ghostwriting job, I told myself that becoming a ghost at least got me closer to my goal…,” she notes, expressing regret she participates in “creation of books that did not yet exist, even if they were not stories that I myself had imagined or would ever have chosen to tell.” 

The ghostwritten novels are page-turners, intended for distraction rather than active thought.  The protagonist has strong feelings about storytelling. “When a story is told to another person it takes on a life of its own; it spreads, contagion-like. The more times a story is shared the more powerful it becomes.”

Ghostwriting is not storytelling. “The novels I write are more like a mirage: they appear to be stories, but they are not. They appear to be stories, but are not. They are not stories, because there is no deeper impetus.”  She longs to write such a novel with deep insights, yet struggles in her temporary setting. 

So she visits the headquarters for producing the ghost-written novels and asks a supervisor whether the woman is troubled by producing books that “have nothing real or true to say about the world.” The woman in white replies, “Real and true are overrated, in this line of work. Haven’t you seen what it’s like out there? Real and true are what people read to get away from.” The woman dismisses any notion of the wife setting out to write her “own little books” that would be “far too esoteric for the masses.” 

The plot suggests that people don't mind going through life deluding themselves. As the woman at the ghostwriting command center notes, “We only know what we perceive…. And we perceive so very little.” 

The protagonist offers a partial list of reasons for telling stories: 

“People tell stories to will lies into truth. 

“People tell stories to bend truth into lies. 

“People tell stories to carve for themselves a legible shape out of an inexplicable existence.

“People tell stories to atone for what they have failed to do in life.” 

Of course there are other reasons, including the willingness to connect with others, participating in dialogue that might improve how we lie.  

The book offers hope that the protagonist may find her way, if only because she is fully aware that the apocalyptic society oddly seems normal and mundane. She also recalls an earlier, more civilized world with fondness. “Distant, but not forgotten. No, no…. Now that world is like an old friend who comes to visit on occasion, but who can never stay for too long.” 

There are choices. We can forget what makes us strong as communities and individuals, complying and adjusting to despair. Or, we can work nonstop to remember the good and, change the world. The tools can be as simple as stories, distributed once person at a time, reigniting hope, responsibility and a sense of caring. 

Audition

Individuals play multiple roles from day to day – child and parent, spouse and work colleague, friend and rival. Such exercises are more audition than performance, as the individual seeks approval from friends and strangers alike. Does moving more deliberately, strategizing like actors in a play, make us more content, more capable? 

In Audition by Katie Kitamura, the aging actress protagonist frets about her multiple roles, whether on the stage or during daily life, and she regularly plots her approach, gauging her audience’s assessment. The quest can be for bit parts or roles central to a story. Each role, each encounter, can go “awry, or did not cohere,” the protagonist muses. “I had come to see it as something of a crapshoot, you never knew if this would be the one when everything would come together or if it would fall by the wayside, another disposable performance, the detritus of a soon to be forgotten artistic endeavor.”

She dines with a young man at the start of the book, reflecting on how she cannot completely control  assumptions made by nearby diners. They might assume she is a mother treating a son to lunch or an older woman engaged in an unseemly affair. Theater audiences are generally familiar with the plot they have come to witness. Strangers in any public setting beyond the theater lack scripts or background knowledge. 

Such insights energize her acting but complicate her relationships on and off stage. “Tension grew out of every scene, scenes in which nothing took place and people said very little, and yet the pressure grew and grew so that by the end of the play I realized I had been in a sickening state of unease for some time, and when I emerged from the theater I was simultaneously invigorated and physically exhausted, every nerve in my body still standing on end.” 

The woman regularly muses on losing sight of "the shore," one's center and true self - when one “stumbled deep into the interior... if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.” She is unnerved about not being first to realize that a longtime treasured morning ritual has suddenly become a rut and frets about failures in reading her husband, a son and his girlfriend, her director. Routines and relationships can abruptly shift to some point of no return.

Boundaries between imagination and reality can become vague.  

With her son, she discovers “I no longer knew what he was  to me, or what I was to him. We had been playing parts, and for a period – for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person – the mechanism had held,” Kitamura concludes. “But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse. It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.” 

The compelling narrative is a warning. We constantly audition and re-audition for the parts we play in life, and the connections produced are fragmented, exhausting, tenuous. 

In need of a friend

A bright, talented, loving child lives grows up with a paranoid father who falls for conspiracy theories about politics, The parents neglect him, argue, scream and physically fight. Estranged from the father, the son leaves the miserable family to attend college and find success in an advertising career while struggling with the various extreme identities experienced with family, co-workers and friends. 

Identifying as they and trans in Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom, the protagonist yearns for love and understanding. But the family’s and country’s politics are in upheaval. People are angry and unhappy, and life can quickly move from one extreme to another. The character relies on drugs and alcohol, loses the job and endures a head injury after a violent breakup with a lover. The mother calls to report the father is missing, and they heads off for Arkansas in a stolen BMW with a new young friend in tow. 

The road trip is funny and wild as the odd couple philosophize, argue, drink and meet an assortment of characters on the road in the effort to find out what happened to the father. 

Carlstrom tells the story of two of the many individuals in this world who navigate life without real family support or guidance. They have little choice but to go through life relying on scraps of kindness of others who could otherwise walk away. 

In the end, the protagonist confides their love for Yivi like a little sister. “You might not realize this, but you single-handedly got me through the worst weeks of my life. If you ever need anything, I don’t care what it is, I’m here…. And if I never hear from you again after tomorrow, that’s okay. I’ll still be happy knowing that somewhere out there I have a psychic, communist, knife-wielding, drug-dealing, and huge-hearted garbage-goth friend named Yivi.” 

Good people are out there but for far too many, they are hard to find.

Family memories

We manipulate our memories and they also manipulate our behavior far into the future. Things Don’t Break on Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins is about a wealthy, dysfunctional family with a controlling and abusive father. The youngest daughter rebels against the control, refusing to be complacent like her mother and sister. She sees problems and speaks out in ways that challenge family dynamics.

At age 13, Laika abruptly vanishes on the way to school the day after a difficult birthday party for the mother. The older sister, Willa, while remaining compliant with her father’s wishes, continues the search and cannot forget the bond she had with Laika.

Twenty-five years later, Willa and her husband attend a dinner party hosted by a former lover and her wife, joined by a brother and a memory expert, another brother and a woman from France. Liv, the memory researcher, points out that any group is likely to have “wildly differing memories of a single event, when you’d be right in thinking that everyone experienced the exact same thing.”

Willa’s husband is close to her abusive father and joins the man in suggesting that the sister died years earlier. Willa cannot dismiss the concerns, and asks about factors that influence memory of events and Liv points to good health and sleep as well as “state of mind, wish fulfillment, stress. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt.”

Liv also explains how entire communities and consumers will shade certain memories, collectively attempting to forget and put certain difficult people behind. One character notes, “given we’re constantly bombarded with information, much of which comes with a certain agenda attached. We need to know the extent to which our memories are reliable, and, equally, the extent to which memory itself can be deliberately constructed.

The conversation triggers outbursts from two guests and helps Willa discover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance and the father’s role as he attempted to mask evidence of ugly control and abuse.

Families grow together, heal together, form memories together. Family members can break a cycle of lies, control and abuse by reckoning with the truth. Only then can painful memories be set aside, allowing forgiveness and love to thrive once again.

Interruptions

The tale is a familiar one...

Shares of  a small Canadian metals company skyrocket by 250 percent after the US government agrees to support the company's exploration efforts with a road in remote northwest Alaska.   

"The White House on Monday announced a partnership with Trilogy Metals as part of a push to unlock domestic supplies of copper and other critical minerals in the Ambler mining district in Alaska," reports CNBC. "Opponents of the long-debated Ambler Road project, a 211-mile industrial road through the Alaskan wilderness, have said it will harm landscapes that support local communities and wildlife."

The news story recalls the mystery novel Interruptions, set in Sitka and first published more than two decades ago, later released as an e-book in 2009.  

Two teenaged boys enjoy exploring the wilderness near their homes in Sitka, Alaska, and that includes following a mining engineer who is consulting on an unpopular road project. Gavin convinces his best friend to skip school and follow the engineer, intent on gathering evidence to to stop construction of the road crossing Baranof Island.  

The boys steal the engineer's backpack and trouble soon follows. One child is murdered. The other boy's mother, a leading opponent of the road, abruptly goes missing. Mother and son have no choice but to work separately to find the killer and expose secrets behind an unnecessary road that would forever change the character of an Alaskan community.

Back to the news: "The Ambler Road Project is a proposal for a 211-mile industrial access road and is intended to facilitate the development of at least four large-scale mines and potentially hundreds of smaller mines across the region," reports an opposition website. "It would cross 11 major river systems...."

The two proposed roads, one from a mystery novel and the other from the news, are more than a thousand miles apart and yet both have ties to mining exploration and Alaska Native corporations. 

When Interruptions was first published, Sitka was Alaska's fifth largest city with a population of 8,800. Its rank has since fallen to twelfth with about 8,200 people. On the other hand, Wiseman, near the Ambler road project, has about 24 people. 

End justifies the means?

 

In This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead, Jane Sharp, a senior in college, is at a loss after her middle-aged father stops taking his blood pressure medication and effectively kills himself with a heart attack. Soon afterward, she watches a news story about a women’s body found in a Florida lake and a detective imploring the public for their help. “A sense of purpose struck me, so intense it caused a searing heat in my chest, as if I were being shocked back to life.” 

Jane becomes obsessed about solving who killed Indira Babatunde and why her father decided to stop taking his medication – and she joins an online true-crime forum, a mix of amateur and experienced investigators who pose questions, examine clues. develop theories – not to mention accessing bank records and hacking computer accounts. The site is open to true crime followers of all levels, and anything goes as members compete to find answers - unlike police who must follow  the law, preserve evidence and meet a high standard of proof. And what's stopping a savvy murderer from also logging on to the site to study techniques or follow the progress of any particular investigation?  

Jane is sensitive, observant, when examining photograph and documents – and she also reads people well, asking astute questions and pinpointing leads from the start. The obsession leads Jane to drop out of college and lose her job at Starbucks, but she also attracts the attention of a private subgroup, an exclusive group of true crime aficionados who soon focus on the murder of three college students in Idaho. With little money and fewer friends, Jane is astonished by the sudden twist in her life: “I’ve come to think fate is a trap we set for ourselves.” 

More than halfway through the book, soon after a second set of women are murdered, Jane travels to Idaho to examine the scene of the crime and meet her fellow sleuths in person. Early encounters are awkward: “My world was one of flat, 2D text, where people wearing anime avatar masks ruled comment threads with pithy quips and takedowns, and you weren’t forced to be present, three-dimensional, accountable to the face and body to which you’d been born. Mine was the brave new frontier, and this world, where people were beautiful and charming and it still mattered, was the old and antiquated. I’d never fit in here. Long live the internet, the revenge of the nerds.”

Two of the sleuths are older and parental figures. Former detective George Lightly notices a plastic bag of ashes on her desk, knows her father recently died and gives her an urn with the words, “It’s what we will never know about the ones we love that binds us to them.”

Along the way, the group resolves the murders in Idaho despite some misdirection from the murderer. Authorities prefer their theory about the first and reject Jane’s theory about different killers for each set of murders. And she remains persistent in trying to find out why her father stopped taking his medication and why he refused to lose weight, Jane gathers a few answers about an abusive childhood and a secret hobby – but not enough to understand his motivation. Still, the father's writing triggers an idea on how to resolve the two Idaho cases with one proverbial stone.

Jane evolves and matures over the course of 432 pages, sometimes rationalizing and other times feeling a measure of a guilt about investigation shortcuts. Securing justice for the murder victims is enough for Jane and the fast-paced novel – and it doesn’t matter if the public doesn’t have a clue about what really happened in Idaho.