The Undercurrent
By Sarah Sawyer
Hoping to catch the eye of the boy she likes, 13-year-old Deecie Jeffries sneaks out of the house in Austin, Texas, in 1987 and is never heard from again. The case remains cold for more than 20 years, when Bee Rowan, a neighbor who was 15 at the time, returns to Austin to face up to the past — Deecie’s, and her own family’s.
“It has never occurred to Bee to count Deecie’s disappearance as the third tragedy that summer, the final stick to be pulled out of the dam that was holding the Rowan family together,” Sarah Sawyer writes in THE UNDERCURRENT (Zibby Books, 276 pp., $27.99). “But maybe, somehow, it was.”
On the surface, the book follows the well-worn fictional path along which troubled young adults return to their hometowns to look anew at mysteries from their childhoods. But this is less a criminal investigation than a layered excavation of family secrets, misconceptions and the extreme measures mothers will take to protect their children.
What really happened that fateful night, and what — if anything — did Bee’s twin brother, Gus, and his friend Leo have to do with it? Who’s covering up for whom? And why can’t any of these people speak honestly to one another?
The novel features big emotions and incorrect assumptions on the parts of nearly all the characters. Fittingly, it begins and ends with Deecie, who is full of naïve wonder and innocent longing on what turns out to be her last night alive. The final, shocking twist comes at the very end.
The Seventh Floor
By David McCloskey
Readers of THE SEVENTH FLOOR (Norton, 387 pp., $29.99), the third book in David McCloskey’s terrific espionage series, will recognize his debt to “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” John le Carré’s classic novel about the unmasking of a mole deep within Britain’s spy services. Here the traitor is a top-level C.I.A. agent recruited by the Russians to destroy the C.I.A. from within, part of a plan to destabilize the United States itself.
“Americans are increasingly soulless and decadent and self-referential,” the unnamed traitor’s handler declares, spouting a familiar Kremlin talking point. “This rot is happening both bottom-up and top-down. And it’s happening independent of us, but we can help speed things along, can’t we?”
McCloskey, a former C.I.A. analyst who brings an impressive knowledge of spycraft to the proceedings, moves the action around. In Singapore, a double agent’s cover is blown. In Russia, an American spy is imprisoned and tortured. In Dallas, a pair of incompetent Russian sleeper agents are suddenly called into action. Then there’s C.I.A. headquarters. (The “seventh floor” refers to the place where the top officials have their offices.)
The elaborate plan to ferret out the mole is masterminded by Artemis Procter, a gonzo agent who made a name for herself in the earlier books and who begins this one by losing her job in a gross scene that conjures shades of Jackson Lamb in Mick Herron’s “Slow Horses” series. Slovenly, profane and drunken, Artemis has burned an impressive array of bridges.
The agents are inclined to wear their hatreds on their sleeves. “Our worst nightmare is upon us,” one of Procter’s C.I.A. rivals tells her. “We are going to have a nice long chat.”
Death at the Sanatorium
By Ragnar Jónasson; translated by Victoria Cribb
Ragnar Jónasson, one of Iceland’s most popular crime novelists, is an Agatha Christie aficionado who has translated many of Christie’s novels into his native language. So it seems fitting that his most recent book, about the 21st-century investigation of a 20th-century mystery, is a homage of sorts to Christie and the golden age of detective fiction.
DEATH AT THE SANATORIUM (Minotaur, 304 pp., $29) is set in 2012, when a graduate student named Helgi Reykdal, a lover of old mysteries, is working on a dissertation about the 1983 deaths of two people at a creepy old hospital in northern Iceland.
The question of who killed the first, a nurse, appeared to be answered when another staff member plunged to his death, his presumed suicide seen as a clear admission of guilt. But the deeper Helgi digs into the past, the less sure he is of the truth.
Most of the staff members at the facility, as well as the officers who investigated the case, are still around. Not that they’re thrilled to answer Helgi’s questions. “There were no clues then and there certainly aren’t any now, all these years later,” says one former employee, obviously hiding something.
The book ricochets between the two eras. We follow Helgi in the modern day as he fights with his volatile girlfriend, uncovers new information and tries to make time to read his beloved mysteries. The scenes set in the past, in the nearly deserted hospital when the deaths took place, show Jónasson at his atmospheric best.
One young nurse, thinking of the tuberculosis patients who used to fill the sanatorium’s wards back in the 1950s, “sometimes had the fancy that the ghosts of the departed still roamed the empty corridors.” Indeed they do.
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