Straight to the Head

April 25, 2016
Nixon (The Man Who Killed) takes readers back to 1983, when Vancouver, B.C., was a city in flux, with Expo ’86 and its international attention looming. Among the New Wave art galleries and high-end sushi bars, two corrupt cops hunt for Irina Lermontova, who vanished carrying a shipment of cocaine and $300,000. But the cops aren’t the only ones searching for Irina; an American hit man has been brought in to “fix” the situation and deal with those involved. Caught in the middle of this whirlwind are Irina’s estranged husband, Ted, and her landlady, Dorothy Kwan. This neon noir plants its feet firmly in traditional noir aesthetics, right down to the insistent sexualization of “bad” women, aggressive hypermasculinity, and even a Chekhov’s gun. The ’80s West Coast setting helps the book stand out from other noir titles, but time and place details are sometimes shoehorned into conversations in heavy-handed, inorganic ways. More aggravating is the novel’s depiction of intimacy, with erotic moments written in an over-the-top manner that is unintentionally hilarious. The ending, too, disappoints, as the narrative seems to run out of gas five steps from the finish line. Overall, this is an exciting setup marred by lackluster characters and plotting.

April 15, 2016
A stripper on the lam with a cache of cocaine and a pile of money serves as the ready-set-go signal in this Vancouver-set comic thriller. The absconding peeler is the tenant of Dorothy Kwan, a young woman living in the house left her by her immigrant parents. Only in her mid-20s, Dorothy is living a placid and settled life, enlivened only by high-end shoplifting, an art she has mastered and which she performs in Vancouver's better department stores. When the tenant disappears, owing her rent, and two unpleasant cops turn up on her doorstep, her life becomes increasingly less predictable. The book alternates between the various characters entangled in this caper. Among them are the missing woman's estranged husband, a professional muscleman sent in to discover what happened to the missing money and coke, and the two crooked cops who were the stripper's partners in a drug-distribution scheme. They are all looking for payback of one kind or another, and though the plot bounces among these people in the manner favored by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen, all the cutting from one to another has the unfortunate effect of dissipating any tension that builds up. And while there is much talk about how Vancouver is changing, the milieu is simply not pungent enough to be memorable. This multithread thriller would have needed a far more graceful tailor to keep the seams from showing.

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