Review: Two short reviews of dark roads thrillers

Review of: The Highway

Author: C.J. Box

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: A

I’d just finished a memoir of the life of a long-haul trucker when The Highway, a thriller by C.J. Box, caught my eye. The memoir lifted my spirits; Box’s book sent the into the darkest, twistiest of tailspins, as his brilliantly-flawed, recovering alcoholic detective, Cody Hoyt, set out on the trail of two missing girls.

image: Pixabay

What bad stuff can possibly happen to a teen driving all night on some of America’s loneliest highways in hopes of surprising a former boyfriend? 

Especially when she’s dragging her younger sister along, in the teeth of a coming winter, in a badly in a car badly in need of maintenance?

What does happen is worse than anyone, even Hoyt, who’s seen some of humanity’s worst during his years of law enforcement experience in the lonely open spaces of the Far West.

Between a corrupt boss who’s afraid Hoyt is too close to uncovering his own secrets, a psychotic serial killer, and an uneasy truce with his lately estranged wife and son, Hoyt has more than enough trouble on his hands. Now Hoyt’s unorthodox investigative methods have got him fired, just as his son’s feckless out of state girlfriend announces she’s on her way for Thanksgiving dinner, only to drop off the grid somewhere in the sprawling reaches of closed for the season Yellowstone Park. 

Hoyt’s rookie former partner, Cassandra “Cassie” Dewell, is willing to back him up, even at the risk of her own job. But Cassie’s investigations reveal that the two sisters aren’t the only females who have disappeared along that stretch of highway. Someone has been systemically stalking women – from hitchhikers to stranded motorists to truck stop prostitutes – for years. 

Hoyt is faced with the most cunning and vicious killer of his career, while every hour brings young sisters Danielle and Gracie closer within the killer’s grasp. Can Hoyt shake off his own self-destructive urges in time to save them?

The Highway had me too engrossed to turn out the lights, even as it wakened all latent fears of darkness. And big trucks. And long, lonely roads, driven late at night.

***

Review of: Paradise Valley

Author: C.J. Box

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: B

Does anybody do kids in peril as well (and brutally) as C.J. Box? Paradise Valley, the latest in Box’s Highway Quartet, features a pair teen runaways determined to emulate Huckleberry Finn’s exploits by canoeing/rafting down the Missouri River. Unluckily for the boys, they hit the river just as sheriff’s investigator Cassie Dewell is closing in on her nemesis, a serial killer known as the Lizard King.

A long-haul trucker believed to have tortured and killed dozens of women along the country’s highways, the Lizard King has long eluded Cassie and her former mentor, Cody Hoyt. She’s spent years setting a trap for him. But when the bust goes horribly wrong, a county attorney with sights set on higher political goals, makes Cassie the scapegoat. Like Cody Hoyt before her, Cassie is out of a job just when scantily-populated Bakken County, North Dakota, is most in need of competent (and incorruptible) law enforcement.

Cassie could wash her hands of the whole business, but her young son Ben’s best friend, a developmentally disabled teen named Kyle Westergard, has just disappeared. So has one of Kyle’s classmates. And a housewife living in a housing development that went bust when Bakken County’s oil boom dried up. How many people can disappear from the same area in a single day? That just happens to be the day all law enforcement was focused on the disastrous trap set for the Lizard King.

As he has shown in earlier Highway Quartet books, the Lizard King is smarter than the average rural lawmen of the Far West. But even a canny serial killer has his weaknesses. The question is, can Cassie Dewell discover those before it’s too late to save his latest victims?

A previous book in Box’s Highway Quartet hooked me on his lonely Western landscapes where unspeakable human evil mingles with natural beauty. But despite hints that the quartet may extend into further books, this one hits the clichés a little too often for my taste -- a few too many corrupt or incompetent fellow law enforcement officials standing in the way of the loner protagonist; a few too many appearances of stock characters. It's been a good ride, but this highway has run its course.

Adventure classics -- Look to the femme, not the chien

The Hound of the Baskervilles

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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“From the chamber where she has been locked for hours, the young woman hears shouts and laughter rising from the great dining hall below. . . Her anxiety mounts at the thought of the fate intended for her,” Pierre Bayard writes in his retelling of the legend underlying Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 gothic detective tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

In desperation, the woman climbs out the window of her prison and flees across the moor. Her attacker, Hugo Baskerville, sets his hounds on her track. As she lies dying of fear and exhaustion, her attacker reaches her. Now he becomes the prey, his throat torn out by “a great black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.”

“The thoughts of characters in literature are not forever locked up inside their creators. More alive than many living people, these characters spread themselves through those who read their authors’ work,” Bayard writes.

image: Wikimedia commons

So, with moxie worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself, University of Paris literature professor and psychoanalyst Bayard undertakes to reconstruct the dying woman’s thoughts and trace their influence through Doyle’s book. “There is every reason to suppose that the generally acknowledged solution of the atrocious crimes that bloodied the Devonshire moors simply does not hold up, and that the real murderer escaped justice,” he writes in Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong.

Every Holmes fan knows Doyle killed Holmes in 1893, plunging him over the Reichenbach Falls. But when a friend of Doyle’s told him a corking good story about the legendary Devonshire hound, he realized Holmes was the perfect vehicle for the story. Except that he was dead. Doyle’s solution: set the story in 1888, before Holmes’ death. The idea worked so well Doyle resurrected his legendary detective for real in 1903, when Holmes explained away his supposed suicidal plunge to old pal Dr. Watson.

In the canonical version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the heir to the Baskerville
estate and baronetcy has died under mysterious circumstances. A friend enlists Sherlock Holmes to prevent a similar fate from befalling the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville. Claiming a previous engagement, Holmes sends Watson, who hits on resident lepidopterist, i.e. butterfly chaser, Jack Stapleton--or rather, Stapleton’s mysterious dog--as the murderer. Along the way, Watson notes Stapleton’s alleged sister, the luscious Beryl “a very fascinating and beautiful woman,” but never considers her a suspect. Of course, Holmes fans also know that as a detective, Dr. Watson is a pretty darned good ophthalmologist.

To our surprise as well as professor Bayard’s, when Holmes reappears in the story, he swallows Watson’s theory whole. Like Hercule Poirot to Caroline Sheppard in last week’s post, the usually misogynistic Holmes accords Beryl Stapleton every courtesy. He never checks her alibis, taking all her statements at face value. What gives?

In last week’s post, Bayard offered a reason for Poirot’s atypical behavior. He offers no concrete reason for Holmes’ refusal to consider Beryl, who is actually Stapleton’s wife, as a suspect. But every fan of Doyle
’s can suggest an answer. Since 1897 at the latest, Doyle had been romantically, if not physically, involved with family friend Jean Leckie.

Doyle’s wife Louise was dying of tuberculosis. He was too sensitive to his wife’s
feelings--and to Victorian morality--to parade Leckie openly, his hidden relationship haunted him. Did he realize that Leckie, who became the second Mrs. Doyle, had as much of an agenda as Beryl Stapleton (who we, as well as Bayard, know has designs on Sir Henry)? Was it possible Doyle didn’t want to admit either woman’s agenda, even to himself?

In the end, Bayard ingeniously ties his solution the hope for justice that must have passed through the mind of the dying young woman who started the whole business. But I won’t spoil your enjoyment, either of the original Hound or Bayard’s revisionist version. Get to a library, bookstore or Amazon and weigh the evidence for yourself.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a May of historical fiction with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And argue about what constitutes historical fiction.)