I spent April and part of May feeling like occupied France, a Hun-like bacterial force having invaded my ears and sinuses. I couldn’t do much besides imagine the antibiotics I was taking as tiny biplanes strafing tiny cornfields through which tiny Cary Grants fled; mix my tiny metaphors; and read thrillers. I read at least a dozen. Max Barry’s “Lexicon” and Megan Abbott’s “Dare Me” provided unfiltered geeky transcendence. Joel Dicker’s “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair” tells a hell of a tale, but the prose is so freaking god-awful that I began to suspect my sinus-squatting bacteria had written it. The rest, including the two new thrillers below, fell somewhere in between — neither transcendent nor likely to fill your head with green snot, just good, unsettling brain candy.
If you have to get sick, I recommend timing it to coincide with the release of a new Joseph Finder novel. I gobble them up like glowing Pac-Man pellets. Like many of its predecessors, Finder’s 11th outing, “Suspicion,” is about what happens when the financial anxieties of the middle class crash into the gilded topsyturveydom of high finance. Danny Goodman, a historian who’s blown the advance for his book on the robber baron Jay Gould, is raising his teenage daughter, Abby, after her mother’s death. Danny is desperate when he can’t pay the tuition bill for Abby’s adored private school. Enter Jay Gatsby, I mean Thomas Galvin, father of Abby’s best friend, who owns his own jet, smokes $400 cigars and thinks nothing of writing Danny a check for fifty grand. Then enter the D.E.A., who inform Danny that he’s just accepted a loan from a money-launderer for the Sinaloa drug cartel. They give Danny not much of a choice: Work undercover for them or be indicted. The latter would most likely mean not prison but dismemberment at the bloody hands of the cartel’s enforcers, so Danny straps on a wire.
Well, the best-laid plans of mice and snitches go haywire, as a bard once sang. Danny spends much of the novel as a kind of personified panic attack, until a late-act smoothness somewhat implausibly settles over him and he pulls a double-oh-seven on the [redacted to avoid spoilers] who turn out to be [redacted to avoid spoilers]. Meanwhile, assassins are slicing off people’s nipples, and boats are exploding. “Suspicion” isn’t Finder’s best, but it’s not his worst, so it’s better than most people’s best.
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There are times that I wish Gillian Flynn had never written “Gone Girl,” including when I was reading “Gone Girl.” But my taste for glittering trash will out. Still, just as the execrable “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy’s Xeroxed hordes sporting “will appeal to fans of” jacket copy were beginning to taper off, Flynn’s novel came along to inspire a new generation of facsimiles. Flattering if you’re Flynn, I guess, but frustrating if you enjoy suspense novels that aim higher than cashing in on someone else’s buzz.
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Claire Kendal’s debut, “The Book of You,” is a harrowing portrait of a creepy manipulator that takes the form of journal entries, so Kendal’s publisher and several reviewers have played up the resemblances to Flynn’s more complex beach-burner. But this is one mean nightmare ride that deserves not to get lost in another book’s hype.
Clarissa — as in Richardson’s — winds up in bed with her academic colleague Rafe after his book party. She remembers nothing the next morning. Did he drug her wine and rape her? Suddenly he is everywhere, her stalker, barraging her with text messages and gifts, refusing to hear her refusals, escalating, becoming more aggressive. His relentlessness makes Clarissa so anxious and miserable that a summons for jury duty seems a reprieve. Her notes on the trial shade into her meticulous record of Rafe’s harassment.
Familiar terrain, but the plot’s predictability is its strength. We know that Rafe will become more and more obsessed, more and more dangerous, and Kendal ratchets the tension a notch at a time, slowly unveiling the artifacts of his fixation: letters, photographs, pornography, underwear, black roses, bruises, ropes and knives.
The novel is, like too many thrillers, overdetermined. Rafe wants a Sleeping Beauty, and folktales are often dark and sadistic — of course Kendal has made him an academic expert on fairy tales. The parallels between the trial Clarissa juries and the stalking she suffers are ridiculously forced. Kendal’s story, whose drama turns on a longing for ordinariness, hardly requires such a heavy hand.
For the real horror of Clarissa’s ordeal is self-inflicted, and Kendal is adept at portraying the paring-down of a life when it has been invaded. Clarissa limits her movements, appearing only at certain public places, always watching for Rafe, always aware of the threat. She “censors” her garbage bags when she learns he has been sifting through them, disposing of intimate items — sanitary napkins, wax strips “speckled with the fine hairs [torn] from [her] calves and underarms”—in public bins. She grows wan from staying indoors and reedy from not eating and groggy from slamming sleeping pills. What Rafe steals from her (before the final, somewhat predictable violence of the conclusion) is what she has always taken for granted, the space between herself and others.
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The thriller is a genre in which disturbing and outlandish things occur upon the disquieting foundations of the quotidian. In Finder’s novel, we aren’t sure who has done what or how to find our bearings; in Kendal’s, we know exactly who victim and villain are. But both are terrifying — thrilling — because they remind us how easily everything can be upended.
Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections “Alien vs. Predator” and “The Second Sex” as well as a forthcoming book of criticism, “Equipment for Living.”
“Suspicion”
By Joseph Finder, Dutton, 390 pages, $27.95
“The Book of You”
By Claire Kendal, Harper, 349 pages, $25.99