Three Great Books #14

A not-so-classic mystery, American dystopia, and midlife power surges.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson

I’ve been a fan of murder mysteries since I read The ABC Murders in third grade and mispronounced the author’s name as a-GATH-a Christie until my mother kindly corrected me. So when I heard the buzz about this Australian mystery, I got my hands on a copy ahead of its January 2023 U.S. publication date (all credit to Amazon.co.uk). Whether you enjoy it as much as I did will depend on your tolerance for constant breaking of the fourth wall and a tone The Guardian called “irksomely quirky” and I call “totally entertaining”. The narrator, Ernie Cunningham — an author of how-to guides for writing crime fiction — says up front that yes, everyone in his branch of the family did kill someone, and that he promises to “play fair” and to be a reliable narrator. Then he launches into a classic locked room mystery, only instead of a locked room it’s an out-of-the-way mountain resort, further isolated by a snowstorm. That’s where the criminally inclined Cunningham family is having a reunion, organized by Ernie’s Aunt Katherine with military-like precision. Among the other attendees: Ernie’s brother Michael, newly done with a prison sentence for, yep, killing someone; Michael’s ex-wife Lucy, who won’t stop pushing her line of MLM products; and Ernie’s estranged wife Erin, whose new boyfriend hits uncomfortably close to home. A body turns up on a snowy slope, and a very twisty mystery ensues. The marketing material compares this to “Knives Out” and I think that’s pretty accurate; if you loved that movie, you will likely have a lot of fun with this.

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Name a dystopian novel and I’ve probably read it. (But please tell me your suggestions in case I haven’t!) This is now one of my favorites. The fictional America in which Noah Gardner — who went by Bird when his mother was around — lives with his librarian father is just similar enough to ours to make the differences chilling. After the U.S. falls into the Crisis, a total economic meltdown that made the Depression look mild, its leaders scapegoat China — and really anyone and anything of Asian origin — and pass PACT: the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. It outlaws the promotion of “un-American” values, encourages citizens to rat out their neighbors to the authorities, and protects children from “harmful” environments — including taking some of them from their politically unacceptable families and placing them for adoption or in foster care. Margaret Miu, Bird’s mother and a little-known poet, is thrust into the national conversation when a line from one of her poems is adopted by groups protesting the child removals. Her book is pulped, she becomes a target of the government, and Bird is about to be removed from his family when she vanishes. Three years later, Bird gets a letter that only he can tell is from his mother and sets off to New York to find her, despite his complicated feelings about her disappearance and her work. The book explores the tension between the duty we have to our own children and the duty we have to everyone else’s children. Its climax is beautiful, devastating, and, to me, ultimately hopeful about what regular people can do in the face of authoritarianism.

The Change, by Kirsten Miller

As a woman of a certain age, I am the target audience for this book, which features women of a certain age coming into their midlife power and banding together to solve a mystery and attack the patriarchal institutions that have failed them. (Sign me up for that street gang, please!) Harriet Osborne’s advertising career and marriage have blown up, though her garden is flourishing in seriously weird ways — to the endless displeasure of the homeowners’ association president. Jo Levison owns a gym for women called Furious Fitness, and her hot flashes are accompanied by superhuman power. And after menopause, Nessa James — still mourning the death of her police officer husband — starts to hear and see the dead, like her grandmother before her. When the voice of a dead girl calls Nessa to a beach in their Long Island town, the trio investigates and finds the girl’s body in a trash bag. Nessa sees the ghosts of other girls, too, and the three attempt to find out who they were, why they died, and what their connection is to an exclusive gated community. The police don’t seem to have much interest in tracking down the answers, and if you’ve followed the Jeffrey Epstein case you may have some inkling why. While the subject matter is grim, the book isn’t — it’s fun and witty and inspiring for anyone worried that the best is behind them.