Book Review: The Black Hour

The Black HourBy Lori Rader-DaySeventh Street Books, 2014  Lori Rader-Day's thrillingly good debut mystery novel, The Black Hour, turns on a dolefully touchstone issue in the 21st century: school shootings. The school in question is Chicago's Rothbert University, and the shooting in question had only one casualty (besides the shooter, who killed himself): sociology professor Amelia Emmet, who was critically injured by this student she'd didn't know and had never seen before.As the book opens, it's been almost a year since the shooting, and Emmet has taken that time to recover, going through extensive physical therapy in a grueling process that finds her back on campus still using painkillers to get through the day. Emmet is a wonderful creation on Rader-Day's part, easily the most memorably-realized character in the book, and when she finally does return to her old job at the university, she's naturally full of bitter curiosity about the tragedy that struck her out of nowhere, as she expresses with typical bluntness while having a beer with her friend and colleague Joss:

"From everyone else's perspective, I'm back, so it's over," I said. "But that's not how it feels.”She nodded long and slow, and reached for my beer. "I'll drink this, so you can keep your promise to Corinne.”"I feel like I did die, like I was dead and you all forgot to tell me. And when I came back today, you clapped and smiled, but you looked like – like you'd seen a ghost." I grabbed the beer out of her hand and sat back in the booth. The pain meds had begun to ebb a bit. I felt sharp, poised. Ready. I wasn't quite sure what I was ready for.“Ten months lost, Joss. I have a few questions.”

Her questions start out as simple as universal as those of any violence-survivor: why did this happen? Who was my attacker? Why me? And the stroke of genius in Rader-Day's book is that Amelia Emmet isn't the only person asking those questions; she has a new teaching assistant, a graduate student named Nathaniel Barber who's decided, for reasons of his own, to make Professor Emmet's shooting the subject of his dissertation. Barber has been abjured to channel his naturally aggressive curiosity, to shape and guide it:

"Dear Mr. Barber. The point isn't necessarily to choose what you're looking for, but to choose to look. If you choose to in a way that is serious, consistent, methodological and scientific, you will find. If you look with open eyes and open mind, Mr. Barber, you will find a line of questioning that you can expand and explore.”

Barber decides to put these methodological techniques to use in deciphering what happened to Emmet, and being the object of such obviously multi-motivated study naturally doesn't sit well with her; Rader-Day does a brilliant job of conveying the prickly tension between these two. Emmet hasn't done the best job of dealing with her own trauma or the irritating holes that still remain in her memory of what happened to her:

I reached into my memory, pushed past the white room, the warm hand resting on me, the ambulance, the red carpet rushing toward my face, the dark outline of the student, the gun rising out of the shadow – past that, past that. Past the stuff I couldn't quite remember into the stuff I didn't want to.The book's ingenious premise makes it inevitable that the second and third acts will be veritably teeming with suspense (who knows more than they're saying? What, beyond random chance, was behind the shooting, and the shooter?), and Rader-Day manipulates and sharpens the suspense like she's been doing this for forty years. Which makes it delightful to contemplate what she'll be writing in forty years.

Book Review: Hour of the Red God

Hour of the Red God: A Detective Mollel NovelBy Richard ComptonSarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013Journalist Richard Crompton's dazzlingly good debut mystery novel Hour of the Red God is set in 2007 against the backdrop of Nairobi's chaotic and violent presidential elections, and it features one of the most interesting detectives to appear in mystery fiction in years: Detective Mollel, a Massai warrior who's both part of the Nairobi police force and part of the traditional Massai world (a world Crompton knows as few outsiders do, and that knowledge shines on virtually every page of the book). Mollel has the customary set of personal demons that are now de rigueur for police procedurals, but with some fascinating twists, and he brings to his job a combination of rueful dispassion and tireless physical competence that's quintessential Massai but that will also be familiar to mystery readers from a whole host of recent avatars, from Ian Rankin's John Rebus to "Michael Stanley"'s Detective Kubu. Hour of the Red God starts with a gripping scene in which we see Mollel in action, and the gripping scenes just keep coming. This is an utterly masterful debut.Detective Mollel's split nature isn't the only glaring dichotomy here, of course. Nairobi itself presents just such a dichotomy and likely always will. The modern city has Internet cafes, glass-fronted shops, and state-of-the-art political corruption, and yet grinding, dusty poverty is everywhere – including, as Crompton cannily does nothing to hide, in the police department, which operates with bare-bones infrastructure and virtually no 20th century crime-solving technology.Fortunately for the case of the murdered prostitute that kicks off the novel, Crompton's Nairobi police force has the most crucial piece of crime-solving technology: a good, brave man who's willing to fight evil and who knows how to really see what he's looking at:

As ever, it's the details that fascinate him. The Indian man who pulls up in an SUV, child seats in the back. The fat, bald African who seems to consider – then reject – at least ten girls before choosing two to disappear with. And the way in which the girls carry on their trade: the teamwork, the way they look out for one another, the surreptitious glances at licence plates and monitoring of suspicious activity, the scrutiny of the johns by the ones left behind.Mollel is becoming convinced of a few basic truths. One, only junkies work alone. All the other girls maintain a network of friendships and alliances for their own convenience and protection. Two, if his victim had been working this street, she'd have been known about, at least by someone. And three, if she is known here, it is likely that these girls know her killer too.

A satisfyingly elaborate plot spins steadily outward from the initial crime in Hour of the Red God, and Crompton is extremely skilled at playing with his readers’expectations. He also exhibits the classic journalist's verve for scene-setting – everywhere we follow Detective Mollel, we feel actively present on the scene:

Uhuru Park: Nairobi's playground. Named after freedom, but also granting it, a little freedom from the sprawl and the spread and the spleen of the city.

More books are promised in the adventures of Detective Mollel and his Nairobi colleagues – which is about as happy an outcome as those 2007 elections could possibly have.