Lee Child's Make Me; John Connolly's A Song of Shadows

"I leave people alone if they leave me alone.  Their risk, not mine."
--Jack Reacher in Make Me (Delacorte Press, 2015)

To eradicate a little of the evil from the world, did you have to sacrifice something of your own goodness?
--A Song of Shadows (Atria, 2015)

Child and Connolly are two of my favorite genre writers these days.  "Genre" is a word I am somewhat reluctant to use, since it is considered by some to denote a lower quality of writing.  I do not lower my standards, however, and "genre" indicates to me, among other things, the use of a continuing character.  But the writing in these two novels is of a higher quality than that of most "literary" novels these days:  the use of a continuing character can be liberating.  Robert Silverberg once complained to me that just because his (great) novel Dying Inside was about someone who could read minds it was confined to the science fiction section, which to him understandably made no sense. 

The continuing character in Lee Child's novels is Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who travels the country with little more than a toothbrush and, though he deliberately does not court trouble, trouble often finds him.  He doesn't like to be pushed around and doesn't like to see others pushed around.  In Make Me he ends up in the Midwest town of Mother's Rest in the middle of nowhere and is met at the train by a private investigator, Michelle Chang, who is searching for a missing colleague.  As soon as the locals try to run Reacher out of town he becomes suspicious and teams up with Chang to find out what's going on.  Chang's search for her missing operative sends her and Reacher to Oklahoma and Chicago and eventually back to Mother's Rest, where they find a particularly horrible internet scam in which most of the small town is involved.  The detailed research Child portrays is fascinating and the insularity of small-town America is beautifully evoked.  With each Reacher novel we learn more about him and in Make Me he is beginning to show genuine feeling for others.  The only quibble I have with this novel is that we are only given pieces of what the townspeople are up to.  It's good that we don't find out the details of the scheme until Reacher and Chang do but the menace seems only partly clear because of the selectivity.  Generally with this kind of novel I find that the first-person is a more effective voice, as in Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald.

Charlie Parker is the continuing character in John Connolly's book (yes, Parker does like jazz).  Parker doesn't seek out evil but evil seeks out him and there is an element of the supernatural in Connolly's books, as the shade of his murdered daughter haunts him.  In A Song of Shadows Parker, recovering from a shooting, stumbles on a Nazi plot in Maine.  Many of the best detective novels are strongly rooted in a particular place and Connolly's uses the details of Maine geography and history to convey a palpable sense of dread; the ocean is always nearby. As descendants of Holocaust victims try to bring the last living Nazis to justice, there are still many Nazi sympathizers who are willing to protect those Nazis who still survive by killing those who hunt them.  Parker has a second wife and daughter who also live in New England but separately:  his wife has left him because of the aura of violence that surrounds him, even though she remains sympathetic to what he does. Some of Connolly's previous Parker novels alternated first-person and third-person chapters, but this one is third-person throughout, giving us some needed objectivity.