PECKERWOOD BOOK CLUB: With Delicious Book Snacks, Tricksy Trends In Mysteries! Plus Scary Schemers In "Look Closer!"

Welcome, fellow book hors, to another edition of The Peckerwood Book Club, where we all share what we're reading, what we like, and yes, what you eat when we read. Lately, I've been noshing on baby carrot sticks while I read, which is certainly an improvement from my usual potato chips (my hands get greasy, making it hard to turn the page without making nasty greasy pages). Do you nibble any snicky-snacks when you're reading? What are your favorites?

And let's talk about mysteries, or more specifically, trends in mystery novels. In classical terms, a mystery, for example, starts like this: a young couple are eating at a nice restaurant when a bomb suddenly explodes beneath the table, killing them both. "Who planted the bomb and why?" becomes the mystery. Mystery is different from suspense, because in suspense, we're explicitly told that a bomb is ticking beneath the couple's table, sometimes even by who, the suspense arising from whether or not they'll notice it in time and escape death.

Mystery and suspense can be mixed and matched at will, of course, and in the last decade or so, the line between them has become a blurry mess. They're especially creaky at their cliffhanging chapter breaks, each one all but screaming, "Oh, my God, you've got to keep going!" Cliffhangers are nothing new, but the cheap and easy ways in which authors arrive at them nowadays is reaching a point of absurdity. A primary practitioner of this is author Harlan Coben, who not only mixes suspense and mystery, but flips repeatedly and aggressively from present to past and back again, hoping to enhance the suspense at all costs. I stopped reading Coben after his 2011 novel, "The Final Detail," which almost seemed to be making itself up as it went along, its herky-jerky past and present structure utilized repeatedly to insert "shocking revelations and twists" willy-nilly, one after another. For me, at least, Coben's work had become calcified and machine-tooled. The gotcha plot maneuvers became all.

Coben's not alone in dumping fairly ordinary mystery plots into a Cuisinart and hitting mix, chop, dice and slice. But he is the most successful and arguably the most influential as of late. Television episodics have gone this way as well, an early modern example being the 2007, time-flipping, past-and-present, cliffhangers-at-all-cost mystery series, "Damages," which, despite the glossy look and a powerhouse performance by Glenn Close, couldn't sustain believability for even one season. When the creators later admitted in an interview that they'd no idea who the killer was as late as halfway into this first season, I believed them. By the time the last episode unfurled, the series had already become a fiasco. Same with "How To Get Away With Murder," which, season after season, became increasingly ridiculous. 

Yet not all Cuisinart mysteries are a wash. Some of them are even better than Corben in his prime. No, really. 

Case in point is "Look Closer" by David Ellis, a heart-stopping mystery/suspense opus in which a middle-aged woman is found murdered in a Chicago suburb and police investigate. At the same time, her life and the lives of those around her - along with all of their secrets - are revealed in the months prior to her slaying. So far so very Corben, right? Yet this author has the edge, specifically with his dimensional and mercenary characters, including the scheming suburbanite, Lauren - both before and after her murder - along with those in her orbit, including Simon, her secret lover with a very shady past; Vicki, Simon’s wife, who’s planning to swindle him out of millions; and Christian, a conman who’s plotting to snatch Simon’s millions from Vicki.

In terns of its characters, "Look Closer" has much more in common with classic film noir. All are compromised, all are desperate to screw over anyone within reach lest they be screwed. This is especially the case with Simon, who’s angling for a full professorship in a competitive university atmosphere and determined to keep his affair with Lauren, and his plans for divorce, a secret from Vicki, who’ll earn major bank if she stays married to him for exactly ten years. Christian, a pretty-boy grifter, is amusingly in way over his head, while Gavin, Christian’s scammer helpmate, is thrown for a major, jaw-dropping loop when he realizes that Simon and Vicki have left him with no choice but to run or to die. Twist follows twist, past turns to present and back again, but none of it feels forced or automated or reachy in this sometimes breathless kill-or-be-killed thrill ride. 

Have you grown weary of the Cuisinart genre of mystery/suspense novels? Or are you still up for them depending on the author? And which are your favorites? Oh, and please, don't leave your happy-go-lucky Bibliophile Boy™ wanting. He's eager to know what to dive into next, so don't you dare leave him hanging. 

Photo Credits: G.P. Putnam