Summer Thrillers: Daring Escapes and Other Acts of Derring-Do

The 2000s were thrilling here in America, in the most strictly neutral sense of the word — sensation after sensation, the fall of the towers, two wars, financial collapse, natural disaster, fear. Adults responded, very sanely one could argue, by devoting the period to reading about teenage vampires. (Or waiting on Platform 9¾ for the next train to Hogwarts.) Then things slowly stabilized, and perhaps our mood shifted too. The immense success of “Gone Girl” in 2012 seemed to consolidate that sense: The most popular novels could be about grown-ups again. Less frightened that our houses might be taken, we began to wonder instead who might hurt us while we were inside them.

But this summer and fall will bring, depending on the vicissitudes of publishing industry timing, the last of those Obama-era thrillers. What are people going to read during a Donald Trump administration? Precisely how thrilling will these years prove? And just how much will we long to escape them?

What a shame it would be to revert to the reading habits of the “Twilight” age, if it meant missing out on books as subtle, brilliant and mature as Karen Dionne’s newest novel, THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER (Putnam, $26). It’s the narrative of Helena, the child of a teenager and her abductor, who kept them hidden for years in a beautiful lost corner of Michigan. “I didn’t know we were captives until we were not,” Helena says. Her understanding of the world during that time comes largely from a stack of old National Geographic magazines and what her father — a master tracker and hunter named Jacob, part Ojibwa, charismatic, domineering, loving and cruel — teaches her to believe.

The novel begins 15 years after her escape, Helena having made a life for herself, with a family and a small business selling jam made with cattails, a wisp of wilderness knowledge obscure enough to appeal to hipsters, a nice metaphor for the chasm between her childhood and theirs.

Then her father escapes from prison, killing two guards. Helena immediately thinks of her daughters. She knows which one he would take, she realizes, and this horrifying unbidden thought decides her. “If anyone is going to catch my father and return him to prison, it’s me. No one is my father’s equal when it comes to navigating the wilderness, but I’m close.” The book adopts a plaited structure, with alternating chapters set in the past and the present, the former relating the tale of Helena’s flight from the marsh where she grew up, the latter her return to it to search for the man who raised her.

Two elements make Dionne’s book so superb. The first is its authenticity. There’s a strain in the contemporary American novel (“Maud’s Line,” by Margaret Verble, and “The Snow Child,” by Eowyn Ivey, are recent examples) defined by a knowledge of nature that feels intimate, real and longitudinal, connected to our country’s past. When Dionne describes the swamp maples that make a cabin invisible from the air, or the way one digs chicory taproots, then washes, dries and grinds them to make a coffee substitute, it seems effortless, plain that her fluency has a deeper source than Wikipedia.

The second is the corresponding authenticity of Helena’s emotions about her father, painfully revisited and refined as she tracks him. She has no doubt whatsoever that he belongs in prison, but she doesn’t hate him — or at least, part of her hatred is love. She recalls him putting on his waders every spring, going into the marsh and digging up a marigold for their porch. “It glowed like he’d brought us the sun,” she says. One of her daughters is named Marigold.

In its balance of emotional patience and chapter-by-chapter suspense, “The Marsh King’s Daughter” is about as good as a thriller can be, I think. Take Dionne’s ending, usually the moment when, as E. M. Forster said, a novel’s plot exacts its cowardly revenge. In most such books, Helena’s daughters would come into jeopardy. But this author isn’t interested in feeding us those cheap calories. Nor does she quite grant us the confessional reckoning we wish Jacob would finally give his daughter. Then again, how many terrible fathers — terrible, precious — ever have? Like everything else in “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” the choice feels right.

The title character of LOLA (Crown, $26), by Melissa Scrivner Love, is also in a race to preserve her life, but in a location as different from the cold, unyielding woods of Michigan as possible: gangland Los Angeles at the height of summer.

The book’s plot, which involves a botched money handoff, is thorny — at one point Lola thinks of her choice of which drug kingpin to betray as belonging to some “awful romantic comedy” — but makes the usual basic urgent sense: We want Lola (tough, resourceful, tender whenever her circumstances on the periphery of the drug trade allow her to be) to keep being alive, and not start being dead.

I blazed through “Lola,” a debut as fast, flexible and poised as a chef’s knife. At its best it has the lithe energy of a Lee Child novel, combined with Dennis Lehane’s — or, to step outside of the genre, Stuart Dybek’s — sense of the exhausting intimacy of poor neighborhoods. “What would she have done,” Lola wonders, “if she’d grown up in a two-story ranch house far from South Central? What would she have done if she’d had a mother who defrosted vegetables every night for dinner?” Crime fiction, because its exigencies feel natural, has been our country’s best way of thinking about class for more than a century now.

In its weaker moments “Lola” suffers from a certain teleplay sleekness, picked up, perhaps, during its author’s stints at “CSI: Miami” and “Person of Interest.” To take one instance, Lola, who was the victim of sexual abuse in service to her mother’s drug addiction, spends a lot of her scarce free time trying to protect a girl in an exactly identical situation, a symmetry that feels executive-filtered, false to life.

The book’s ventures into philosophy are similarly inert. (“All people everywhere, rich or poor, skinny or fat, are animals,” we learn. “Looking for a fight. Looking to turn everyone against the weakest.” Blurgh.) But it’s still an unshakably engrossing read, and in Lola and her allies, who trace their connection to the familiar blocks they’ve loved and loathed their whole lives, Love is vibrant and cleareyed, an exciting new West Coast observer.

Like Love, Peter Blauner has taken his turn in the Hollywood churn, writing for the television drama “Blue Bloods,” but somehow, perhaps because he first spent a long career in journalism and fiction, he remains obstinately idiosyncratic in PROVING GROUND (Minotaur, $25.99), his first novel in 10 years. His garrulousness salvages a story that’s only intermittently engaging.

Blauner’s tale involves the murder of David Dresden, an idealistic lawyer with a significant case pending against the F.B.I. He’s shot in Prospect Park, and immediately two people sense deeper machinations — Dresden’s son, Natty, a veteran with PTSD, and a zaftig, astute young police detective named Lourdes, fighting to make it in a department designed without her interests particularly close to its heart.

They converge from different angles on the same possible perp, who is, alas, catastrophically easy to spot. Luckily the people who fall for “Proving Ground” will care far more about its voice, filled with moments of surprising New York stoop-sitting joy. Blauner is a bad-ball hitter — he’ll miss on an easy description, overwriting Dresden’s widow for instance (“a long-backed Park Slope lioness with vaguely Eurasian-looking features”?), but then capture with beautiful easy precision, for instance, a flash of dialogue between cops, who talk skells and Rockefeller time, “flip tin,” banter at each other to signal that they care.

The cynosure of this style is Richard Price, and Blauner shares his intricate gabbiness. But Price’s gift (particularly in “Clockers,” his masterpiece) is partially for invisibility, for the lurk; Blauner is always there, writing his way into every line. It slows the book down. “Lola” is a better widget than “Proving Ground,” better paced, clearer in its stakes. But Blauner’s fable seems truer to its emotional beats, Natty and Lourdes powerfully real in their lucid, disillusioned idealism. In both characters, Blauner returns repeatedly to the book’s truest subject, the inescapability of the past. “Why keep looking back?” Natty asks his therapist, irritated, when he’s on the verge of solving his father’s murder. “Because that’s probably where the answers are,” she replies.

New York, drawn so lovingly in “Proving Ground,” has always been the city closest to matching Baudelaire’s definition of beauty: the infinite within the finite. IF WE WERE VILLAINS (Flatiron, $25.99), a melodramatic but satisfying debut by M. L. Rio, takes as its subject the only infinite writer we’ve had yet, no matter how hard Karl Ove Knausgaard pushes — Shakespeare, of course.

The book is set across a school year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a Midwestern analogue to Juilliard, “less an academic institution than a cult,” where seven senior actors immerse themselves with radical intensity in both one another and the works of the glovemaker’s son from Stratford-on-Avon. One of their passionately close-knit number, Oliver, narrates their tale, years later. The twist is that he does it just as he’s getting out of prison.

The novel’s first third is plotted ingeniously, as we wonder who might die. The bully during “Julius Caesar”? The seductress during “Macbeth”? At last a body falls. The rest of the novel is a whodunit, occasionally clumsy but entertaining. The solution, when we learn it at last, proves clever, and as the book ends the six remaining students, older and scattered now, move tentatively toward the idea of reunion.

Rio’s model couldn’t be clearer: “The Secret History,” by Donna Tartt. But this is not that eerie, half-mad novel; it’s too nerdily good-natured, and too nerdily (and winningly) in love with Shakespeare. Every page is scattered with his words, which the students toss at one another as easily and endlessly as a shared second language. There’s a kind of elation in seeing both famous and obscure phrases from the plays plucked and resituated, the effect first-rate — distancing, salutary.

“If We Were Villains” is, then, a readable, smart, pretentious, youthful book, at once charming and insufferable, at once good and bad. It’s steeped in the hysterical significance the young ascribe to their own lives. Middle-aged readers often tend to scorn this sort of hothouse fictional narcissism. (I know, having written a novel about an American at Oxford that everyone younger than 31 seemed to love, and everyone older than 31 seemed to loathe.)

But perhaps there’s something forgetful in that rejection. “We … looked at each other with wide, unguarded eyes,” Oliver says in the hovering moment before a kiss, and this is a book with wide, unguarded eyes. Most of us looked at the world that way once: not so happy, yet much happier.

Rio, however clunky her book’s characters and plotting can sometimes be, captures that, the exhilarating dummy immortality of youth. She may become a more adroit writer, but she won’t become a younger one. That’s a trade that people with more experience can be too sure is in their favor. As Joan Didion observed, it’s best “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

The protagonist of William Christie’s panoramic, smart, hugely enjoyable thriller A SINGLE SPY (Minotaur, $25.99) does nothing but keep on nodding terms with who he used to be, because he knows that keeping a careful genealogy of his identities is his only chance of staying alive. His name is (sometimes) Alexsi and he stands out in his orphanage for his resourcefulness and instinct for escape; these gifts, after a brief interlude running guns in Iran, lead to his recruitment as a Russian spy, just in time for World War II. Hurray.

That recruitment is the fulcrum of “A Single Spy,” but despite being a war novel it’s more “Odyssey” than “Iliad,” with its hero on the perpetual run. Alexsi twists out of countless dead ends, and Christie does, too; each time his tale seems to be drawing into a cul-de-sac, he pulls it sharply and headily in some new direction, from Azerbaijan to Moscow to Germany, Alexsi shifting between passports, killing easily when he must, trying to balance the ruthless spymasters who would be delighted to sacrifice his disloyalty to the state. “Ugadat, ugodit, utselet,” Alexsi tells himself. “Sniff out, suck up, survive.”

This is a subject too little acknowledged in thrillers, the gift that some people have for life, for going on living. Because of his (marvelously credible) character, Alexsi’s survival seems both impossible and inevitable. The spy novel keeps trying to save the world, but the beauty of “A Single Spy,” what makes it a truly great example of a genre that has not lately been very good at all, is how closely it sticks to Alexsi’s crucial, statistically meaningless survival, the slight cant of his personhood.

It reminded me in this sense of “The Orphan Master’s Son,” by Adam Johnson, another novel about a state’s unrelenting effort to deindividualize its members. Of course, the problem with humans is that the largest unit they come in is one; otherwise, totalitarianism would be a breeze. Alexsi’s stubborn defiance of any state’s rules — he betrays Russia to Germany to England to Russia to England, betrays everyone but himself — captures a thread that runs through all five of these worthwhile novels, the idea of holding out against dishonesty, slipping through its maze to remain true to one’s self. Who knows how relevant that example may become in the next 1,250 days?

♦

What are your favorite thrillers for the beach?

“At the top of my list is John Grisham’s ‘Camino Island,’ a ‘trouble in paradise’ tale in which a central character is a bookseller. Noah Hawley’s ‘Before the Fall’ takes off after a mysterious plane crash. I’m also a fan of Y.A. — E. Lockhart’s ‘We Were Liars’ has a twist most readers won’t see coming.” — James Patterson