Three Great Books #23
Another serial killer in Norway, a foster care tragedy, and a dystopian depression plague.
The Harry Hole series, by Jo Nesbø
I’ve read every installment in this crime series, which features the melancholy Norwegian detective Harry Hole falling off the wagon, making poor life choices, and solving brutal murders amid a sea of plot twists and red herrings. About seven books into the series, the killers become more twisted and the murders more graphic. Ordinarily that might prompt me to call it a day — I’ve quit many crime series (as well as “Law & Order: SVU”) because twisted murders (often of women) are not something I need to have living in my head. But there’s something about Harry and his universe that keeps me coming back, and I tore through the latest installment in the series, “Killing Moon.” In it, Harry is motivated by outside forces to return from an ongoing bender in Los Angeles and try, with his old friends, to help clear the name of the rich man who is connected to two murdered women. We get glimpses of the killer’s point of view, and it’s no spoiler to say he is not a well man, with a stomach-turning way of attracting his victims. I was both grossed out and thoroughly entertained. If you want to dip into the series at a less gory, more intellectual point, I recommend “The Redbreast.”
We Were Once a Family, by Roxanna Asgarian
You may remember the 2018 news story of a white married couple and their six adopted Black kids who plunged over a cliff in their S.U.V. The police investigation found pretty quickly that is was murder-suicide. Asgarian, a journalist, is not so much interested in why Jennifer and Sarah Hart did what they did; instead, she uses their story as a window into the child welfare system. How were these six kids — Markis, Hannah, Devonte, Jeremiah, Abigail, and Ciera — taken from their families of origin in the first place? How was the couple permitted to adopt more kids even as there were complaints to child services about their care of the ones they already had? Why was the government so quick to dissolve parental rights and permanently separate families? (Three of the children, for example, were living with their aunt, who wanted to adopt them. The mother, who had a drug problem, was told to terminate her parental rights to permit the aunt to adopt, but while that was happening, they were adopted by the Harts from a completely different state.) Asgarian, whose perspective is informed by her own traumatic childhood, does a masterful job of explaining the particulars of the children’s stories and zooming out to explain the context of a child welfare system where, she says, caseworkers and courts are often divorced from the consequences of their actions. This will enrage you.
The Endless Vessel, by Charles Soule
In this dystopian novel, the world is ending both with a whimper and a bang. A kind of mass, contagious depression known as “the Grey” has afflicted more than a quarter of humans. It’s “a creeping, relentless malaise, a dark growth on the soul, and once it took you, you were lost.” When so many humans stop caring about the world, things slowly begin to grind to a halt. On the bang side of things, a group of activists known as Team Joy Joy wants to accelerate the end times by destroying literature, historical records, art, internet connections, and anything else that might provide people with enough meaning to resist humanity’s inevitable demise. Trying to navigate her way through this landscape is Lily, who is working in Hong Kong when her boss shows her a mysterious device with the potential to solve climate change. She sees something familiar in its inner workings, and tries to track it to its source. The book leaps back in time to a 1789 textile mill, where its successful proprietor wants nothing more than to resurrect her deceased husband, and devotes herself to that project in an unusual way. This is action-packed, thought-provoking (if a little preachy at the end), and really fun to read.