Books: 755

Going Zero
Anthony McCarten
Harper Collins
$30

A terrific summer read–but save for the beach; once in hand, you’ll read straight through. A billion-billionaire wants to protect the people by knowing everything about them. Everything. So, the “Going Zero” Beta test is touted with a billion-billionaire’s fanaticism. Ten “randomly” selected individuals, at the stoke of a mega-clock, have two hours to disappear from the grid, then are tracked. Whoever lasts a month gets $3 million. From the get-go, a dowdy librarian stays ahead of pursuers. She, of course, has an agenda and will move heaven and earth to rescue her husband, held captive in Iran­–or, perhaps not. An ingenious tangle that has subplots to challenge Ptolemy’s epicycles. We can quibble about the end, but it probably indicates a sequel.

Missing Clarissa
Ripley Jones
Wednesday Books
$16

Cheerleader Clarissa Campbell, partying in the woods with Oreville High classmates one night, celebrating the end of classes and beginning of summer, disappears and is never seen again. No trace; no clues; nada. That was 1999, and now, current Oreville juniors and pals are looking for a journalism project class. Let’s solve the Clarissa mystery, “Everybody loves a dead girl,” says Cam. “Not everybody”, replies Blair, knowing once Cameron is enthused, she’ll be sucked into the vortex. A true-crime podcast is created, Blair, the “pretty one” will be on camera, and off they go. Into more trouble than they ever dreamed. Well crafted, with enough leaps and potential precipices to satisfy a mountain goat, they settle on a likely suspect–whose life they’ll ruin if wrong.

James
Percival Everett
Doubleday
$28

Retellings classics frequently loses much in the rendering; pale shadows, overwrought fan-fic.  Everett’s James breathes life into Mark Twain’s Jim–not superior but fully three-dimensional, narrated in first-person and enlarging upon the runaway’s “secret power” – his mastery of White English that must be concealed. Enslaved, Jim has nonetheless learned to read and write. Skills forbidden to a Black man in 1865 Hannibal, Missouri, where stealing a pencil becomes a hanging offense. Huck takes their flight for an adventure not his companion’s life-or-death flight, but begins to have questions and glimmerings of the existence of the vast chasm between his rights as a white boy, rights Jim will never possess,  beginning to wrap his mind around “injustice.” The path from Jim to James is fraught; enthralling.

Rough Trade
Katarina Carrasco
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 
$28

Washington Territory, 1888. Ex-Pinkerton Alma Rosales, who debuted in The Best Bad Things, now, known only as “Camp,” runs a complicated network of railroads and docks connected via telegraph to smuggle in loads of contraband opium. She, and crew, are getting rich. At end of day, they crowd the Monte Carlo, where liquor flows freely and clothing isn’t always a gender reveal. Then, two unexplained deaths point to opium; Bess, Alma’s first love, also ex-Pinkerton appears, and a newspaperman in disguise infiltrates seeking an opium scoop. Alma, donned always in male attire, pulls out all the stops to protect her boys, their trade, and her identity. Not pretty but brutally effective. Carrasco’s characters are not always likeable, or law-abiding, but they’re understandable. Watch this space.