The Shock of the Light
by Lori Inglis Hall
In her impressive debut, THE SHOCK OF THE LIGHT (Pamela Dorman Books, 405 pp., $30), Hall merges the familiar high-stakes drama of World War II fiction with a less familiar sort of personal drama, turning heroic conventions inside out. Fittingly, her central characters are fraternal twins, the children of a pacifist British don, whose fates will irrevocably diverge when they volunteer to serve their country.
Theo Armstrong becomes a pilot in the Royal Air Force while his sister, Tessa, is recruited for a clandestine special ops mission behind enemy lines in France. Theo — although scarred by “the pain, the deaths, the absence of hope” — will return to an agonizingly created semblance of normal life. But Tessa, whose exploits will have readers racing through the first half of the novel, disappears into the void. Despite Theo’s postwar detective work, only the outlines of her final days survive, buried amid rumors of traitorous activity.
Why were Tessa’s messages from the field ignored? Why was she held so long by the Germans in Paris, only to die in a concentration camp? Was she betrayed or was she “your rat,” as one man angrily tells Theo, “as guilty of murder as any Nazi”? It’s only decades later, when a young doctoral student’s curiosity is piqued by Tessa’s scant personnel file, that the truth emerges. And with it, a much more intimate secret is laid bare.
Ruby Falls
by Gin Phillips
RUBY FALLS (Atlantic Crime, 368 pp., $28) takes place in the caves that still attract tourists to Lookout Mountain, Tenn. But Phillips sets the action back in the Depression-ravaged early 1930s, when the Ruby Falls tour operator tries a desperate publicity stunt to keep his business afloat: A professional mind reader will lead a small group of witnesses into the miles of passages beneath the falls to locate a hidden hatpin using only his “psychic energy.” Unfortunately, one member of the party won’t emerge from the clammy, labyrinthine depths. And it’s certain this death in the dark wasn’t accidental: The murder weapon is a stalactite rammed “right through the Adam’s apple.”
Although Phillips’s publisher is billing this as a twist on the locked-room mystery, it’s also a clever exploration of the aboveground insecurities that infect these justifiably paranoid spelunkers, who can’t escape the fact that “the whole world is a row of dominoes.” Survival will require a delicate mix of trust and wariness, not to mention an ability to navigate a torturous route back to the surface. This is not a novel for the claustrophobic.
Centroeuropa
by Vicente Luis Mora
Mora calls CENTROEUROPA (Bellevue Literary Press, 185 pp., paperback, $17.99) “stratigraphic” because, although the action takes place in early-19th-century Prussia, it’s concerned with the way history and culture accumulate in layers, shaping our consideration of both past and present. The hapless exemplar of this process is a Viennese accountant called Redo Hauptshammer, who has acquired a plot of land where he proposes to (a) bury his recently deceased wife and (b) settle into a quiet life as the first freeholder in a formerly feudal society. Yet every time he puts spade to earth he discovers the frozen, perfectly preserved corpse of a soldier. Some appear to be Napoleonic, some Roman. None are decomposing, giving his farm the look of a permanent battlefield.
Translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery, Mora’s account of Redo’s tribulations is an appealing mix of traditional storytelling and literary gamesmanship, featuring realistic characters confronted with a deeply unreal scenario. At times the narrative is darkly humorous (Redo tries using the soldiers as scarecrows), at others quite serious (his bizarre little farm attracts bureaucratic scrutiny, with its inevitable complications). More serious, though, is the shiver that comes when Redo digs up another cache of bodies, men who carry “guns made using technology far superior to ours” and whose uniforms bear “a variation on an old meso-oriental cross with bent arms.”
Wild People Quiet
by Tara Gereaux
It’s 1946 and Torduvalle, Saskatchewan, is “a small square town with rows of straight, square streets. A game board with houses and cars for pieces and easy to understand rules.” The sort of place where Florence Banks, the heroine of WILD PEOPLE QUIET (Scribner Canada, 304 pp., paper, $18.99) hopes to lead a safely invisible existence, putting in long hours as a secretary and keeping very much to herself.
In alternating chapters, Gereaux reveals the childhood among poverty-stricken members of the Métis tribe that Florence fled more than 30 years earlier. We’re shown the only store the “half-breeds” are allowed to enter, the shacks they call home, the barren land they can be evicted from at any time. And we witness the exhilaration the young woman feels when she realizes she can pass for white, that Florence Campeau can turn herself into Florence Banks.
But only for a time. Even in a small town, a single accidental encounter can tear away the facade. Florence thought a decade among these people would earn their loyalty. She will learn otherwise in swift, heartbreaking fashion.
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