“I shall return.” But now The Fiction Fortune Hunter blog is officially on hiatus for the next few months as I go into intensive hibernation while working on a second novel. Contractual obligations and due dates tend to focus one. So, no new reviews until the end of Spring. But feel free to peruse past pages and posts and whatever you do…keep reading. The Fiction Fortune Hunter will return with the warmth of Summer.

If you’re down for (key word, down) a slog through the sub-strata of East Texas culture (using the term extremely loosely), then a hike through the pages of Joe R. Lansdale’s 1997 Bad Chili may be for you. You’ll definitely find all the good old boys, bad babes, miscreants, and malcontents you can handle. Assuming you can also handle the nonstop colloquialisms, homespun profanity, bawdy metaphors, scatological humor, and a tendency to do everything possible to turn off anyone expecting to find anything of lasting value.

Crime novels are crime novels, you might counter. And woe to the reader who thinks he’ll find traces of poetry amid the pulse pounding prose of murder, mayhem, and misery that make up most pulp fiction. But one can dream, can’t one? More than dream, one can actually find arias of adjectives and violently vivisected verbs in the tales of masters such as Andrew Vachss, to whom this novel is actually dedicated. But there’s a vast desert of difference between Mr. Lansdale’s unrelenting overkill and Mr. Vachss’s expert economy.

Bad Chili is one of a series of novels featuring two friends named Hap and Leonard. Hap is a middle-aged white guy who drifts from job to job (offshore oil rig worker, nightclub bouncer, would-be night watchman) and Leonard, a black homosexual who apparently drifts from one lover to another while maintaining his platonic relationship with Hap. They are both (as the genre requires) extremely skilled at firing guns and busting heads. And each, in his own way, has redeeming qualities. Providing at least the pretense of someone worth rooting for.

The plot is replete with gruesome murders, sexual torture, mangled bodies, embarrassment, humiliation, and treachery. All played more or less for laughs. There’s a bit of a love (make that lust) story embedded in the antics, but it concentrates more on the rutting than the romance and reinforces the author’s proposition (probably unfortunately true) that the heart’s desire is always ignited by the organ south of it.

Joe R. Lansdale is certainly accomplished at his trade. He’s written multiple novels, won prestigious awards, culminated a devoted cult following and made money at something he no doubt enjoys doing. One can be envious of his success without being drawn to the product of it. Such is the case with The Fiction Fortune Hunter. Of course, you may be different. And if you know what you’re getting into, by all means give it a go. But for me, a little Bad Chili goes a long way.

A Very Simple Crime isn’t. It’s rather complicated really. Once you find how who did what to whom and why. But that’s all for the end, isn’t it. The beginning starts simple and stays that way for a while. Or, at least it’s meant to make you think it’s simple. But as the brilliant crime author, Jim Thompson, once reminded us. Nothing is as it seems.

Adam is on trial for the murder of his wife. He’s being defended by his brother, Monty. The brothers are polar opposites. Adam is quiet, reserved, appealing in an intelligent way. Monty is brash, good looking, appealing in a visceral way. Adam is the younger brother who’s always looked up to his older sibling, Now he’s depending on him to literally save his life. But maybe he always has. Maybe.

It’s really Adam’s story. The story of a good man in a bad situation. His wife is a certifiable nut job. Intense, relentless, clinging as one of those malevolent vines that stab you with its thorns every time you try to rest free from it. She loves her husband. But it’s a love that smothers him. A love that imprisons him. And to make matters worse, as if they needed to be, a son is born to them who is found to be insane. Criminally so. A danger to himself and others. He’s committed to an institution. His incarceration only exacerbates his mother’s mental problems. Adam’s situation worsens.

Eventually, Adam’s wife is found dead. Her scull crushed by a heavy crystal ashtray. The plot has been constructed effectively enough so that the reader is not exactly sure who did it. The deranged son? The cheating husband? Yes, Adam seeks respite in the arms of another, and eventually wishes he hadn’t. Someone else? There’s always the specter of someone else, isn’t there? It seems unlikely based on what we’ve been told. You see, Adam is telling the story. Yes, it seems unlikely. But as noted earlier, nothing is as it seems.

Midway into the novel we’re introduced to Leo, a disgraced ex-public prosecutor who will become the thorn in the side of both brothers. Attempting to get back in the good graces of the department he embarrassed years before (though for all the right reasons, we learn) he “Colombo’s” his way through the facts of the case in a way that would make Peter Falk proud. And in the best tradition of the genre, he plays a key role in the novel’s surprise ending.

Grant Jerkins, the author, has fashioned a compelling page turner. Made more so by the fact that most chapters are under five pages. A technique many writers and editors have adopted for pace purposes, I assume. It makes the reader feel like he’s flying through the story. That’s why it’s a bit disconcerting then, when Jerkins interrupts the tale to fill in “back-story” on characters who are only marginally involved in the tale. Such diversions feel like padding. Perhaps because they are.

Still, A Very Simple Crime makes for a very fast and entertaining read. It’s Jerkings first published novel and it gives promise as well as pleasure. The Fiction Fortune Hunter suggests you seek it out. If for no other reason than to find out if the husband, who continually professes his love for his wife, actually killed her.

One of my short stories you might like. But you’ll be the judge of that.

SIN AND SOMBREROS

The bulbous toes spilling over the flip-flops looked like over-cooked sausages frying in the sun. Beads of sweat glistened from each as they burrowed into the sand, straining not only to support the weight atop them, but also to guide it toward the beach chair which was in imminent danger of total destruction.

There were beautiful, bronzed bodies scattered along the wave-caressed beach, but Ernesto Abrigon’s was not one of them. At three hundred sixty-two pounds, covered only in a Speedo and straw sombrero, the heads he turned were more in disbelief than envy. People were not used to seeing that much leathery flesh trudging seaward on only two legs.

Ernesto however, was oblivious to the smirking glances of the sun seekers and the creaking moans of the wood and canvas chair he lowered himself into near the water’s edge. He had other things on his mind. Not the least of which was the gluttonous pleasure he had enjoyed the night before. Specifically, the dark bronze breasts he had licked guacamole from. The round, bare buttocks he had balanced his Margaritas on. The soft, supple hands that had cupped his manhood while lilting voices spoke in awe of his prowess. And why shouldn’t they? They were paid handsomely to do so. But hang the cost. What difference did that make? What was money to a man like Ernesto Abrigon. Especially now.

The doctor had been clinically dispassionate. He used no euphemisms. Gave no sympathy. He simply laid out the sobering, unvarnished truth. Ernesto had pancreatic cancer. It was inoperable. He would suffer a particularly ignoble and excruciating death unless he was willing to spend his last days in the hospital, virtually comatose, adrift in a sea of drugs that would blunt his pain but blacken his consciousness.

Without a word to anyone, Ernesto left for the coast the next day. There were no relatives to inform. They had long since stopped trying to keep in touch with one who made it plain he had no interest in familial obligations. There was no one he wanted to leave anything to. Ernesto looked at it this way. If the penance for his sins was to rot from the inside, he was more than happy to let everything he had rot along with him. Such as the hacienda he had acquired by ruthlessly foreclosing on the hapless rancher who couldn’t pay his debts. The livestock he drove relentlessly, underfed, then fattened with water and grain just prior to selling. The poverty-stricken peasants who barely scratched out a living, toiling day and night in Ernesto’s fields with little appreciation and even less compensation. Let the ungrateful rabble fend for themselves, he thought. Let the people and the cattle and the land itself go back to the dust and desolation from whence it came.

Ernesto, while never an ardent reader, had read somewhere that drowning was actually a kinder end that most people imagined. And there seemed a romanticism to it that had been sorely lacking in his days as rancher, land owner or jeffe, as his frightened
underlings called him. Drowning seemed noble, Ernesto thought. Drowning was worthyof his character and station in life. It would be obvious to all that the great man had decided to leave this life as he lived it. Under his own terms.

Ernesto had spent the last three days drinking and whoring. Now his libido was gone and he knew it was time for him to go too. As he sat in the chair, now perilously close to collapsing, he heard two young boys laughing as they rolled a huge inner tube along
the shore line. Planting his massive fists in the sand, he pushed his prodigious bulk out of the chair and stood square in their path. The boys froze as their inner tube rolled ahead of them, bumped into Ernesto and spiraled to a stop at his feet. He kept his eyes fixed on theirs as he reached down with his left hand and picked up the inner tube. Then, still staring at them, his right hand reached inside his tiny swimsuit and retrieved a fistful of bills. The boys were more than happy to sell their inner tube for so many
pesos. They giggled and ran away laughing, holding the soggy bills with the fingertips of one hand and their noses with the other.

Ernesto realized the tide was going out. And he knew it was time to go with it. Leaving his flip-flops in the sand, he waddled into the surf until he was knee deep. Then he began to wedge his enormous derrière into the center of the tube, letting his meaty arms
and legs dangle outside. Paddling slowly, rising and falling, he traversed the incoming waves again and again. Others, frolicking in the foamy waters, paid no attention to the formerly beached whale as he drifted farther and farther from shore.

The warmth of the setting sun and the gently rocking motion of the sea soon lulled Ernesto into a deep sleep. Swift currents did the rest. And as he snored, the sea continued to separate him from the last vestiges of human contact.

The sun had set before Ernesto’s eyelids rose and revealed a world of darkness. No horizon. Only the lift and fall of the waves. The end has begun he thought. I need a nip to take away the chill. Lifting his gigantic belly with his left hand, his right pulled
out a half-pint of Cuervo Gold he had wedged into his lap before embarking on this final voyage. The tequila took the edge off. So he had another, and another as he floated and listened to the gentle rolling of the waves.

An hour, and most of the bottle later, Ernesto was ready. He knew that all he had to do was leave the inner tube. Eventually his arms and legs would tire and he could slipinto the deepest sleep he had ever known. It would be the sleep he himself had chosen.
As he was about to squeeze out of his bobbing rubber float, something made him stop. A sound. A kind of beeping. He looked around. Nothing. No boat. No ship. No buoy. Nothing. But still the beeping continued. Almost in his ear. Then he remembered. Reaching up, he pulled his tiny cell phone from the headband of his sombrero, put therebefore walking to the beach.

“Hello,” Ernesto said.
“Mr. Abrigon?”
“Yes.”
“Thank heaven we’ve found you. We’ve been trying to reach you for days. This is nurse Ramirez. From Doctor Esparza’s office.”
“Yes.”
“There was a terrible mistake. Somehow your records got mixed up with another patient’s. You don’t have cancer.”
“I don’t?”
“No.”
“I’m not going to die?”
“No. It was a big mis-“

Silence. Ernesto looked at his phone. There was no signal. The battery was dead.

“I’m not going to die,” he said to himself. “I’m not going to die.” Laughter chased the words from his mouth as he grabbed the brim of his hat and tossed it joyously into the air. “I’m not going to die!” he cackled. “I’m not.” The hat landed in the valley between the waves where he floated. Ernesto put his head back and gazed at the clouds moving across the sky. They revealed a hidden moon, shining now just for him, he thought. He took another swig from his Cuervo, draining the bottle.

When he looked back where his hat had landed, something seemed odd. It was still floating, but it wasn’t alone. Something was floating beside it. Something that rose from the water like the crown of his hat. Could it be another sombrero, Ernesto wondered.
Another hat in the water so close to his own? It looked like the crown of a hat. But shapes in the moonlight are deceiving. Shapes silhouetted by passing clouds and expensive tequila.

Ernesto brought the Cuervo to his lips, then realizing it was empty, tossed the bottle at what he thought was the second sombrero. It jerked and slithered away.

His mind and mouth not quite in sync, he began to speak again, “I’m not…” But he left his sentence unfinished as the movement of the water turned him round and he realized he was now encircled by sombreros. Sombreros that were closing in.

A chill ran through Ernesto Abrigon. A chill that shivered him to the bone. His mind began to leap about. He saw himself back in the doctor’s office and remembered the feeling of hopelessness he had when he was told his disease would be fatal. His thoughts then catapulted to the defiance he mustered when he decided to escape his fate and die in a manner of his own choosing. His brain then racedto how he had felt only moments ago when he learned he wasn’t going to die after all. But then reality gripped him like the jaws of a primordial predator. The bluster and bravado and the belief he always had in himself sank to the center of his soul as he looked upon the vast, black emptiness. Empty, save for the circle tightening around him.

It was now all too chillingly clear. This time there would be no mistake. There would be no reprieve. El jeffe was no longer in charge. Ernesto Abrigon would not decide for himself how he was to leave the world. This diagnosis…this penance, came from a higher authority.

“Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” So says William Shakespeare. And since then a number of novels have been written by authors who have chosen to tell their tales through the mouths of individuals who would be considered something less than normal. Of course, just who is and who isn’t normal is getting harder and harder to quantify these days, but that’s another story.

William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury is probably the most famous novel that uses a “mentally challenged” narrator. And more recently, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time became a national bestseller by spinning a compelling narrative through the mind and voice of a child savant.

But the purpose of this post is not to bring your attention to either of those worthy tomes. Rather, it is to make you aware of The Getaway Man penned by Andrew Vachss and published in 2003. The narrator and protagonist is Eddie. To be sure, he is what the title implies, a wheel jockey who deals in burning rubber, escape and evasion. But he’s also what we used to call (in pre politically correct times) a little “slow.” Or is he? Near the end you think you know the answer. Then all of a sudden, you don’t.

Andrew Vachss is one of the premier crime fiction writers working today. His gut-crunching, eye-bleeding prose slaps you in the face and makes you like it. It slices you so deftly you don’t even know you’ve been cut, until the blood starts to trickle and air hits the wound like an incoming round. While the native New Yorker is best known for his Burke series, some of his other novels like Shella, The Getaway Man and Two Trains Running (where he tells the entire 450 page story in chronological running-time) are just as tight, tough and menacing as any hard-edged police procedural you’re likely to find.

If, like The Fiction Fortune Hunter, you like your noir with dirty double crosses, hard charging plots, hairpin turns, and hot pages you hate to put down, then pick up The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss. And you can decide for yourself if it’s the storyteller who’s the dim wit, or the reader.

If you’re a fan of dark, wet streets, foggy nights, lamp post shadows that outline tall, mysterious figures in Fedoras and raincoats, women who are almost always tougher than men, and worlds where fatalistic gloom hangs overhead, omnipresent and unavoidable, then you should seek out the work of Cornell Woolrich.

Perhaps lesser known than other crime writers of his day, such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Woolrich ripped through the 1940′s with noir hit after noir hit. His sad detectives, vengeful wives and doomed heroes actually got turned into more movies than either of his more famous counterparts.

Cornell Woolrich lived a tormented life that equaled the sordid stories of many of his characters. A relatively promiscuous homosexual, Woolrich married the daughter of a silent film producer, never consummated the marriage and had it subsequently annulled. He spent the majority of his adult life living with his mother in the Hotel Marseille in New York. After her death he moved to another hotel where he lived and wrote and drank.

An ill-fitting shoe, that he refused to replace, eventually gave him an infection that led to an amputated leg. He remained an alcoholic recluse for the remainder of his life and died at the age of 65 weighing approximately 89 pounds.

One shouldn’t read Woolrich expecting finely tuned tales that intertwine as precisely as a Swiss watch. He was much more interested in mood, character and inescapable fate. Therefore you have to take his plots with immense reliance on coincidence and contrivance as mere scaffolding for the unlucky characters that inhabit them. Do that, and you’ll find some of the most rewarding and suspenseful page turning you can imagine.

Take for example Rendezvous In Black. The story of Johnny Marr who loses his fiancee on the eve of their wedding to a horrible (and quite unlikely) accident. Johnny is so scarred by his loss that he sets out on a quest to revenge the perpetrators of the aforementioned accident. Then, every year, on the anniversary of his love’s demise, one of the involved-perpetrators looses a wife, lover or daughter. And a good part of the fun is the way Johnny does them in while the cops are hot on his trail. Will they catch him before he gets them all. Will he get them all? And just what was the cause of Johnny’s fiancee’s weird accident? Set aside your inherent suspension of disbelief and you’re in for both a who- done-it and “how” that will have you hanging on to the very last page.

You probably won’t find Rendezvous In Black in bookstores, unless they really handle the hard-to-find. But you can run it down through Amazon or at www.modernlibrary.com If, like the Fiction Fortune Hunter, you’re into nostalgic noir, get on the trail of Cornell Woolrich and enjoy a great writer who’s work was turned into classic’s like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, 1984′s Cloak & Dagger, and the Antonio Banderas /Angelina Jolie flick, Original Sin. You’ll be in for some serious and highly entertaining downers.

First published here October 19, 2010. Repeated because it’s worth discussing again.

Sooner or later, if you have anything to say about literature and/or novels, you have to say something about Under The Volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s magnum opus to alcohol. I tend to fall decidedly on the side of pretty damn fabulous. It doesn’t really matter that it took Lowry over eleven years to write it and get it published. It doesn’t matter that there were multiple versions of the novel over those years finally culminating in publication in 1947. Coincidentally, or perhaps profoundly, the year of the Fiction Fortune Hunter’s birth. What matters is that it exists and continues to intrigue and inspire writers and readers to this day.

On a visit to Mexico by Lowry and his first wife in 1936, an incident occurs. While riding on a bus through remote areas, the bus comes upon a man on the side of the road. He is apparently dying. Even as they were advised by the driver not to get involved, they witness another man stealing the dying man’s money. This was to be the event that took root in Lowry’s mind and found full flower eleven years later as Under The Volcano.

On the surface, the novel is simply twenty-four hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a British Consul living in Mexico who has resigned his position to devote himself full time to drinking. While a plot does ensue, involving his divorced wife who returns to Mexico to try to rekindle their relationship, and a visit by Firmin’s brother who’s at odds with himself about not being in Spain and fighting for the Loyalists, the real struggle for the life and death and sole of Geoffrey Firmin goes on inside his own mind and voluminous bottles of liquor. There are those who would have you believe that the entire novel is simply one of Firmin’s alcohol-soaked hallucinations and that his wife, his brother and everything that goes on are simply figments of his imagination. Still others insist that though the story is rife with hallucinatory episodes, what happens actually happens. It is perhaps one of the hallmarks of great literature that it can still spark such debate some sixty plus years after its debut.

Malcolm Lowry knew of what he wrote. He was certainly no stranger to strong drink. In the mid thirties he entered Bellevue Hospital in New York after an alcohol induced breakdown. He was also a world traveller, serving as a deck hand, he voyaged to the Far East and also made visits to America and Germany. English by birth, after stints to Hollywood to try a bit of screenwriting, Mexico to engage in other pursuits, and British Columbia where Volcano was actually finished, he eventually returned to England and died at the age of 48 due to what the coroner recorded as “death by misadventure.” Alcohol and sleeping pills being intricately involved.

While he managed to produce a few other books during his lifetime, none came close to the majesty of Under The Volcano. Many consider it one of the foremost novels of the 20th century. And yes, I would have to be counted among those. The legendary director, John Huston, made a film of Under The Volcano in 1984. Not surprisingly, it spurred similar polarity of opinion as to its worth. Some proclaiming it one of Huston’s best and certainly a tour-de-force performance by Albert Finney as Geoffrey Firmin. Still others deemed it unwatchable.

With a vocabulary the size of the Volcano and the country that Lowry lovingly evokes, he certainly created something unforgettable. Do yourself a favor and set aside some time to walk where Lowry walked (perhaps without the Mescal). The journey will stay with you forever. As it has with The Fiction Fortune Hunter.

“Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” So said the Bard Of Avon, William Shakespeare. And since then a number of novels have been written by authors who have chosen to tell their tales through the mouths of those who most would consider something less than normal.

William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury is probably the most famous of these. And more recently, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time became a national bestseller by spinning a compelling narrative through the mind and voice of a child savant.

But the purpose of this post is not to bring your attention to either of those worthy tomes. Rather, it is to make you aware of The Getaway Man penned by Andrew Vachss and published in 2003. The narrator and protagonist is Eddie. To be sure, he is what the title implies, a wheel jockey who deals in burning rubber, escape and evasion. But he’s also what we used to call (in pre politically correct times) a “little slow.” Or is he? Near the end you think you know the answer. Then all of a sudden, you don’t.

Andrew Vachss is one of the premier crime fiction writers working today. His prose slaps you in the face and makes you like it. It slices you so expertly you don’t even know you’ve been cut until the blood starts to trickle. While the native New Yorker is best known for his Burke series, his other novels like The Getaway Man and Two Trains Running (where he tells the entire 450 page story in chronological running-time) are just as tight, tough and menacing.

If, like The Fiction Fortune Hunter, you like your noir with dirty double crosses, hairpin turns and hot pages you hate to put down…dash to Vachss’s website or scour the independent bookstores and pick up The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss. And decide for yourself if it’s the storyteller who’s the dim wit, or the reader.

The Fiction Fortune Hunter highly recommends it. For what that’s worth.

Here’s a review I did of Pete Dexter’s novel Spooner about a year ago. The paperback edition has recently been published. If you missed the hardcover, get the paperback. Any thing Pete Dexter writes is worth reading. And believe me, Spooner is a trip you’ll be glad you’ve taken.

Spooner, the most recent novel from Pete Dexter, is about life. Okay, I know what you’re saying, all novels are about life in one way or another. But Spooner is so full of life that it may well redefine what most readers think, when they think about novels about life. If that doesn’t seem to make sense, keep in mind that life often doesn’t make sense either. The author freely admits that a number of incidents in his life are used as jumping-off points for this novel’s collected incidents. If you’re a reader of Dexter’s work, you, like me, will realize that before he tells you so in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. But believe me, it doesn’t make any difference one way or the other. You’ll be enthralled with Spooner.

On the surface, its a story about one boy’s lifelong quest to understand and appreciate his stepfather. And perhaps more importantly, to be understood and appreciated by him. From a rural upbringing in the South to a suburban adolescence in the midwest to young adulthood in Philadelphia to middle-age and beyond in the Northwest, its a story that, like life, winds its way slowly and meanderingly through family ties from which none of us are immune.

Dexter’s easy way with words (easy to read, not to write) convince you that he’s in the room spinning his yarn with a pitch perfect down-home accent. His ability to take you from a quiet bucolic setting one moment, followed by a horrific incident the next, followed by a sense of love and warmth and understanding after that, is a high-wire walk not to be missed.

The protagonist of Spooner, a lad by the same name who seems a few cards shy of a deck, is an unpredictable bundle of trouble. He doesn’t try to be. It just seems to come naturally. His long-suffering mother, smarter sister and (eventually) smarter brothers all seem to live their lives more or less successfully, without anywhere near the mayhem that follows Spooner around like an unshakable storm cloud. Luckily, Spooner has Calmer, a stepfather on which all male parents should be modeled after. Not perfect to be sure. As in life, none of us are. But the kind of rock even the stormiest sea can’t seem to shake. Through each phase of his life, Spooner seems to find a unique way to screw up. And Calmer is always there, whether physically present or not, to help set Spooner straight and get him back on whatever bizarre path he’s set for himself.

It would be buzz-killing to go into any detail about the many wondrous things that happen to Spooner, and for that matter, Calmer, in Dexter’s 459 pages. It is in fact, a bit like a slow high turning page after page and being surprised, shocked, saddened, brought to tears in one chapter and giggling like a schoolgirl in others. The wonder of Pete Dexter’s mind, his eye for detail and insight into the workings of the human heart are about as pleasurable as reading can possibly be.

No one turns a phrase quite as surgically as Dexter. Charming one moment, jarring as a left hook the next. And no one else could have lived the life (even though it’s fiction of course) or written so lovingly about it, as Pete Dexter does in Spooner. Get it. Read it. Don’t worry about how long it takes. It’s the kind of treat you can put down and come back to again and again and still get the feeling you’re tasting it for the first time. The Fiction Fortune Hunter recommends anything you can find by this exceptional novelist. I plan to keep reading him until he quits writing. Lets hope that won’t be for a long, long time.

Most of us have our morals. This is good. That is bad. This is right. That is wrong. Hemingway said something like, “When it feels good, we know it’s right. When it feels bad, we know it’s wrong.” But what happens when it feels good and bad? When it seems right and wrong? When it brings sunshine to your heart and sorrow to your soul at the same time?

Such is the crux of James W. Nichol’s brilliant novel of love and war, Transgression. In war, everything changes. Day is night and nights are endless. Killing is honorable and pacifism is cowardly. Hate becomes the coin of the realm. Survival is still acceptable, but at what cost? In war, things that are important in peace, things like friendship and love and longing, become petty and small and without meaning when compared to the bigger picture, the grander stage, the ultimate outcome. Unimportant to most, perhaps. But not to all.

In Transgression, a sixteen year old French seamstress, falls madly in love with a nineteen year old German soldier. She’s the occupied. He’s the occupier. But events conspire (as they often do in novels) to bring them together. He helps her when he shouldn’t. She’s thankful when she should’t be. Life progresses in our hearts and minds and loins on it’s own, whether there’s a war or not. They fall in love.

And she becomes (to her co-workers, her friends, even her family) the lowest thing a person can be in war, a collaborator. One who sleeps with the enemy. Even she is diminished in her own eyes. She knows it’s wrong, but she can’t keep herself from reaching for some kind of happiness when everywhere there is only despair.

They are lovers doomed to be apart. Yet even in the height of falling bombs, vengeful mobs, and invading liberators, they both risk everything and more for each other. This story, in itself, is an avalanche that barrels down a mountainside of emotion. One that keeps you turning page after page to run alongside them. But James W. Nichol is not content to put all his literary eggs in one basket. He parallels this story of France in 1941 with a story that takes place in Canada in 1946. A murder mystery that you, the reader, knows must somehow be related to the World War II tale, but how?

Eventually the two tales intertwine as they must. And the fate of the two lovers and more is played out on a muddy riverbank where love and hate and revenge and an inability to forgive collide. The ending is riveting, surprising, yet infinitely believable. As the very best endings are.

Prior to writing Transgression, James W. Nichol won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel, with his penning of The Midnight Cab. The Fiction Fortune Hunter believes he didn’t miss a beat with his follow-up. Seek out and read Transgression. You’ll be the better for it.