April Smith, “North of Montana”

Evidently I have read April Smith’s series of Ana Grey murder mysteries in reverse order. The drawback to this is that I am piecing together Ana’s psychology in the wrong direction, along with the dynamics of some of her office relationships. (Thus missing out on some hot stuff until now, I have to say.) The advantage, though, of saving North of Montana until now is that it’s a crackerjack mystery, satisfying on almost every front.

My one hesitation has to do with Ana herself, and it holds true throughout the series. (See Good Morning, Killer.) She may be an FBI agent but she is a real hothead, and North of Montana was full of moments when I mentally urged her not to take the rash action she seemed intent on. But despite my silent pleading, she keeps on accosting the bank robber, entering the burning building, etc.; that’s who Ana is. And we are, after all, in the market for drama when we pick up this kind of novel.

Malibu is also a setting; the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway isn't always this bad.

Ana is confronted by a series of puzzles in North of Montana. First is the death of a young Latina woman named Violeta Alvarado, who may be Ana’s cousin. Second is a drug investigation: movie star Jayne Mason (read Elizabeth Taylor/Judy Garland) claims an orthopedist has gotten her addicted to drugs. Third is the puzzle of how young female Ana can assert herself professionally in the mostly-male FBI office. And finally, as she investigates the drug case and Violeta’s death — which turn out to interlock: this is fiction, after all — suppressed memories from her childhood begin to surface and answer a number of unasked questions.

The book rockets along, taking you from one setting to another, twisting and turning unpredictably. One of Smith’s great gifts is her ability to sketch the minor character — does this come from screenwriting? She gives a limousine driver, a doctor, a potential witness just enough quirky details to be memorable, then drops them when they’re no longer useful, as a writer must. Best of all, the setting is brilliantly observed. Silly me, I thought I was picking up a mystery/cowboy tale (not so dumb, considering Smith’s Judas Horse) but “north of Montana” is a geographical term, referring to the posh nouveau riche part of Santa Monica, CA, where part of the novel takes place. Good Morning, Killer shares this SoCal setting but it feels as if Smith has piled years of observation into North of Montana, which gives this novel a special richness. In one little vignette, Ana visits the tiny house in Santa Monica where she grew up, and the real estate agent’s monologue combined with the sense memories of her childhood home create a sense of melancholy worthy of Joan Didion. Which is saying a heck of a lot, for a murder mystery.

April Smith, “Good Morning, Killer”

April Smith’s Good Morning, Killer has made me think hard about the creepiness factor in crime novels. Actually, it might have been reading Smith back to back with Lee Child — I have just experienced a lot of mayhem at second hand.  But the issue lingers for all of us who turn to mysteries or thrillers for escape reading — bad, violent things happen to characters. And the better the writer, the more convincing the badness is. For instance, Ruth Rendell is fabulous, and at her most sinister, she is really disturbing. Some of her writing on family structures, and especially motherhood, is downright chilling. And, sure, it’s fiction, but while reading you experience it as real — don’t you?

Maybe not. Somewhere in my reading mind, there’s a constant awareness that these books are artificial, and that’s what makes it possible not to grieve or be terrified by the stories they tell. It’s a fine line, the distinction between the artificial and the naturalistic, and where the writer positions that line is going to be different for every book. Of course this theme of artificiality vs. naturalism rewards discussion when applied to all kinds of literature, but I’m sticking to my point here: escape fiction.

Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, important setting in "Good Morning, Killer"

Which brings me back to April Smith. She’s a wonderful writer. Elegant, humorous, evocative, clever, vivid. Good Morning, Killer opens with a description of swimming laps in a California rain storm that was, all by itself, worth the price of the book. But Smith’s heroine, FBI Agent Ana Grey — wow. I’m beginning to think Ana is seriously nuts. Good Morning, Killer is full of very poor emotional choices. For instance, imagine you are the lead agent on a case involving a kidnapping. Pretty good odds you should not be taking 3 a.m. phone calls from the kidnap victim when she’s released. Or, let’s say you’re dating your opposite number in the Santa Monica police department. And you’re his boss on this kidnapping case. Think that could get awkward? Then what if you get taken off the same case after a really unfortunate incident involving gunfire; was it really a good idea to keep pursuing leads on your own?

Despite my qualms I kept reading, because Smith is a good story-teller, and maybe I have more tolerance for this stuff — or did yesterday, anyway — than I thought. The thing is, Smith can’t let Ana become so crazy that she’s annoying. Strangely enough, that’s the quality that would be truly off-putting.

April Smith, “Judas Horse”

It’s very clear from April Smith’s White Shotgun that she’s a talented writer with a gift for plot, setting, and character. It was thus interesting – and a little disappointing – to learn from her preceding novel Judas Horse that these gifts alone aren’t quite enough to build a satisfying suspense novel. The two missing elements were organization and narrative voice. (Happily, White Shotgun puts these essentials in place.)

Not a Judas horse but a wild mustang

Judas Horse introduces us to Ana Grey, an FBI agent whose half-Salvadoran, half-Anglo heritage makes her a misfit in any setting and thus, in a twisted way, an ideal candidate for undercover work. Judas Horse is deeply concerned with questions of loyalty – guess you can tell from the title, huh? A Judas horse is actually a tame mare who is used as a decoy to lure herds of wild mustangs into corrals to be culled. In Smith’s novel, Ana Grey goes undercover to join a group of eco-terrorists who turn out to be … well, read it and see.

The problem is that Smith has enough material here for a novel and a half. I had a hard time keeping track of all  the characters, let alone keeping track of which side they were on. (Sometimes I had that woozy, baffled feeling you get in John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor series – but Smith isn’t quite in that league.) What’s more, Ana Grey dives into her cover character before we really grasp who she is as Ana, and the flashbacks to her unhappy youthful relationships feel cursory. If you can’t follow the characters you can’t follow the plot, though it was always clear something was going to blow up.

And then there’s the aforesaid voice. Judas Horse is narrated by Ana, in the present tense. But from time to time, Smith shifts away from Ana, and even into the past. This may be a conscious attempt to break away from the conventions of the thriller. But Smith, according to her website, is a screen writer and I wonder if she isn’t more accustomed to a narrative form that relies heavily on images to convey information. Her visual imagination means that the settings in rural Oregon are vividly described, but I’m literal-minded enough to feel unmoored when a first-person narrative leaves the reliable and familiar “I” to visit another character’s experience and thoughts. Of course it’s sometimes difficult to provide your readers with essential information when you’re writing in the first person – but isn’t that why they pay us the big bucks? (Joke, OK?)

And while I’m griping, I agree with Chelsea who pointed out on the White Shotgun post that “Sterling McCord” is a terrible name for Ana’s  fellow spy/love interest (is that the name of a car? perfume? preppy clothing brand?). But this is just nitpicking. I’m certainly going to keep my eye on Ana Grey.

April Smith, “White Shotgun”

It’s a great title, isn’t it? “White shotgun” is apparently the term used in Italy when someone vanishes and no trace remains, no body, no documents…. nothing. As we are told in the first chapter, this is the result when a body is tipped into a massive, pink-frothed vat of lye, somewhere in the woods.

preparation for the Palio in Siena

I hadn’t read April Smith before, but she’s good at her job. White Shotgun is a taut, nasty thriller. A leeetle bit too nasty for me, seeing as how I’m terribly squeamish. But Smith certainly knows how to keep the pages turning. The protagonist is FBI Agent Ana Grey, a tough professional who finds herself all unsettled by her assignment in Italy. Seems she has a half-sister named Cecilia Nicosa whom she didn’t even know about. Seems Cecilia is married to an Italian coffee baron with ties to Italy’s mafias. So when the FBI receives letters for Ana, begging that she visit Cecilia in her “house on a hillside” outside of Siena, that becomes an assignment.

But of course nothing is as it seems in Italy. Ana’s charming teenage nephew? A drug addict. The handsome Nicoli Nicosa, Cecilia’s husband? You don’t Even Want To Know. Even Ana’s boyfriend Sterling McCord, an operative with a shadowy private security company, seems suddenly unreliable. Smith ramps up the drama by setting the story in summer-time Siena, during Palio. You know, the crazy horse race run in beautiful Piazza del Campo, when the various contrade of the town compete. Lots of local color. Smith’s gift for that is also applied to a crack house in Calabria, though, where an arch-villain known as “The Puppet” (for his wooden hands) presides over the cutting of heroin. Very vivid, very disturbing. There’s kidnapping, assassination, and another visit to the grisly vat of lye.

As a thriller-writer, Smith has a pretty dark view of the world. For much of the novel, Ana is operating on false assumptions, kept in the dark either by her incomprehension of Italian language and culture, by the procedures of the FBI, or by her free-lancing colleagues. In this novel she does not actually get physically mauled beyond a superficial knife wound to her hand, but the psychic wounds are pretty serious. Since I instantly downloaded the three previous Ana Grey novels I’ll keep you posted on the rest of her story. I’m sure it’s going to be hard to put down.