Summer reads
Killer thrillers: From the pursuit of a lost Shakespeare manuscript to a chilling tale of missing sisters, these recommendations will add sizzle to your beach book list.
Editor's note: This is the first of a four-part weekly series of summer reading recommendations.
By Salon staff
Read more: Books, Books Features
June 4, 2007 | Every June brings the tantalizing conundrum: what books to drip lemonade on this summer? At the start of the season, we imagine the weeks stretching languorously in front of us, and what could be better than to pass our days lounging at the beach, in the yard or at the pool with the perfect page-turner?
But what constitutes a great summer read? Every airport newsstand is teeming with generic potboilers and steamy tales of love lost and found. The real trick is scoring a book that engages your imagination just enough, but not so much that your brain's gears start to grind.
Over the next four weeks, Salon's staff will recommend a list of summer reads that won't make you feel cheap and empty. (Or maybe they will, in the best possible way.) In the coming weeks we'll spotlight a choice selection of mysteries, ch**k lit, fantasy, sports and memoirs.
This week's list is killer thrillers: the quest for a lost Shakespeare manuscript, the case of a missing girl's mysterious return, a dying man's search for the truth about his ex-wife, an Australian detective whose time off turns grisly, and the mystery of a tattooed corpse. We hope these add sizzle to your long, sultry summer.
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"The Book of Air and Shadows"
By Michael Gruber
HarperCollins, $24.95
"The Da Vinci Code" may not be a very good book, but it has whetted the public's appetite for literary thrillers, some of which, like Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 novel, "The Historian," actually manage to be genuinely literary. Add Michael Gruber's "The Book of Air and Shadows" to that list. It has car (and boat) chases, gunplay, femmes fatales, secret codes and Russian gangsters, not to mention the search for a long-lost manuscript by the greatest writer of all time. And it also has quirky, flawed characters, tricksy first-person narration, some knowing references to the cinematic nature of its own plot, and nimble, witty prose -- a dash of Nabokov and a dollop of Amis. For all the faux-learning that often festoons this genre, Gruber is the real deal, but you'll probably figure that out even before he name-checks the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski on Page 250.
Part of the story is told by Jake Mishkin, a Manhattan intellectual property attorney who, despite being "loaded" (his own term for it), is a mess. His job bores him and his compulsive womanizing has ruined his marriage. Although he claims to be no great shakes as a writer, his readers will instantly know otherwise from sentences like "Villains are just there, like rust, dull and almost chemical in the stupid simplicity of their greed or pride." When his best friend, a Shakespeare expert, refers a professorial colleague to his office and the man turns up petrified and babbling about discovering a 17th-century letter alluding to the hiding place of a previously unknown Shakespeare play about Mary Queen of Scots, Jake naturally dives right in. (It doesn't hurt that there's also a pretty woman involved.)
The other strand of the novel's complex plot concerns movie geek Albert Crosetti, son of a cop, living with his mother in Queens and trying to scrape together enough money from his job at a rare book dealer to pay for the tuition at NYU film school. His crush on a frosty co-worker involves him in the discovery of the manuscript -- the deathbed confession of a Jacobean spy who investigated Shakespeare and a sheaf of his encoded reports on the Bard. (Here Gruber's fictional plot meshes with the real ongoing debate over the possibility that the Bard was a closet Catholic.) The writings of the spy, Richard Bracegirdle, make for the book's third narrative strand, and while most contemporary novelists' attempts to simulate antique writing tend to be painfully lame, Gruber's Bracegirdle is so convincing I was tempted to Google the guy.
Little disquisitions on Shakespeare scholarship, bookbinding, cryptography and the deadly religious and political feuds of 17th-century England enrich "The Book of Air and Shadows" without weighing down the plot. And the minor characters in Gruber's novel (Jake's thug-turned-priest brother and his dissolute model sister; Crosetti's Irish mom and her boyfriend, a saturnine Polish immigrant) have more life in them than the leads in most thrillers. This is a top-drawer romp for bookish (and filmish) readers by a talented writer (with a backlist!) who might not have come to our attention otherwise, and for that alone, we owe Dan Brown a vote of thanks.
-- Laura Miller