Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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The sight of a human head floating in my local lake—the top few inches of the brown-haired skull, the body submerged vertically beneath—was the moment when my career as a writer of fly-fishing-related crime novels began. It made perfect sense that a dead body would be in the weedy shallows of a busy urban lake where I was fly-rodding from my canoe for spawning bluegill. Why not? People drown in Lake Monona all the time, and the nearest properties were ominous-looking, high-security trophy houses perhaps acquired through obscene business practices, inhabited by mistresses, and on the disputed-asset lists in ugly divorces. It made perfect sense that I would find the bod…
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He would remember that day, always. He was with his mother. They were outside the New York Institute for Special Education, or as the people in the Bronx neighborhood called it——The School for the Blind. There was a small building on the property at the corner of Williamsbridge and Astor where the Institute sold brooms and mops that the blind made there. His mother always bought extras and gave them to friends and neighbors in the apartment building. She was that kind of person. They were standing in the shade of the Institute trees waiting for the streetlight to change when out of the clear blue the boy’s mother said, “Dean…I want you to remember…God is always working …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Riley Sager, Survive the Night (Dutton) “Sager excels at playing with reader expectations and in concocting plausible, gut-wrenching twists.” –Publishers Weekly John Galligan, Bad Moon Rising (Atria) “As the pages turn, the author prompts readers to consider a range of timely issues (climate change, homelessness, corrosive wealth) via masterfully executed and action-packed storylines that coalesce in a shockingly memorable final act sure to leave readers eager for the next Bad Axe County thriller.” –BookPage Tracy Clark, Runner (Kensington) “Exceptional…The action b…
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There comes a moment in every long-running series character’s journey to step out of time to join the pantheon of the greats and live forever. So why has author Lee Child denied Jack Reacher—the current King of Crime Fiction—immortality? Like everyone else in the free world, I’m a fan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. Reacher is a modern-day Conan, roaming the land without attachment or possessions, stumbling into trouble then moving on the second he’s crushed it into dust. Child injects just enough hard-boiled metaphor into his lean, mean prose to keep us aware that while the author has chops, he’s sparing with the hatchet. Before the Jack Reacher series became the j…
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The last couple of years have kept Barry Gifford as busy as ever. Since 2019, the prolific novelist, poet and screenwriter has had three new collections of his prior work come out—Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, an expanded edition of his most iconic series; Southern Nights, as an omnibus volume containing three early novels; and Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, which collects, for the first time, all of his loosely autobiographical tales of misspent youth in Chicago—as well as a newly released Western novella, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada. Supplementing this literary bounty are two films: the new documentary Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago, which combin…
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I love to garden. I always have. But there came a time when my shoulders wouldn’t let me do the heavy lifting. Planting planters was about as difficult as I could manage without injuring myself. But one day when I was at a Renaissance Faire, I came upon a woman who was selling fairy gardens, and my eyes lit up. Instantly, I became enamored with the art. I’m not a crafty person—I can sew and bake and color inside the lines—but until now, I had rarely used a glue gun, so designing adorable cards or making jewelry or furniture were out. However, fairy gardening was right up my alley. There were twinkling lights and pretty plants and the most adorable fairy figurines in eac…
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It’s been years since our protagonist gave up his life of crime. He’s gone straight now. He just wants to be left alone to live the quiet life. He’s served his time, paid his debt to society and is ready to reconcile with his estranged daughter. Then, with a knock on the door, the past walks in. It’s Old Partner and Old Partner is in way too deep with some bad people. He needs Protagonist to help him. He needs to steal the thing in a heist no one thinks is possible. Also, if Protagonist ever wants to see his estranged daughter again, he’s only got 72 hours to pull it off. It’s time for one last job… There is something inherently lovable about the heist story. They have b…
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“Life doesn’t have a narrator – it’s full of lies and half-truths – so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that.” “So fiction really is fiction,” Brunetti asked. Paola looked across at him open-mouthed in surprise. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came. –The Temptation of Forgiveness (2018) \Guido and Paola Brunetti know a great deal about lies and half-truths, and all the other human failings, he as a commissario (detective superintendent) in the Venice police, she as a professor of English literature beset by lazy students and self-important colleagues – but still, after more than twenty years of marriage, they make each other l…
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This month’s best international releases for crime readers aren’t all strictly crime novels, but they all capture that peculiar blend of misery and beauty that drives the best works of noir fiction. This month’s selections include: a doomed romance in a refugee camp in Turkey, a Maltese Falcon-esque search for a statue in Cuba, a bizarre novel of behind-the-scenes manipulation and comical doubling out of Japan, and a bleak novel of intrigue and desperation set in Mexico City. As we all head out to finally travel, these novels serve as both guides and warnings, reminding us that there is much below the glossy surface wherever we may be. Dolores Redondo, The North Face o…
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During long stretches of the war against Hitler, German bombs were a part of day-to-day life in British cities. The Führer’s first air campaign against British civilians, known to Britons as the Blitz, lasted from September 1940 to May 1941 and led to the dropping of tens of thousands of tons of explosives across the country. London alone was hit by seventy-one major Luftwaffe raids. The bombers were back over Britain in February through May 1944 with Operation Steinbock, the so-called Baby Blitz. The following month brought the V-1s—winged drone aircraft, of which the Germans launched more than ten thousand across the English Channel. The deep growl of a V-1’s engine in …
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Last week, in our Summertime Crime Movies series, we spotlighted urban summer crime films: movies where the heat is so hot, your ice cream cone won’t stand a chance. But this week, we’re spotlighting summer crime movies set in small towns, where things may not be as bustling, but the atmosphere will be just as tense. The thing about crime movies set in small towns is that so many of them are set in the wintertime. Fargo! Winter’s Bone! The Burned Barns! Wind River! A Simple Plan! Blow the Man Down! Alas. ALAS. I wish we could include them, but who wants to watch a film about the cold, right now? Maybe me, actually, because it’s really in New York. In the Heat of the Nig…
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It’s been a little more than a year since George Floyd Jr. was killed by police in Minneapolis. His death—at the time the latest in a string of high-profile deaths of men and women at the hands of police—galvanized a nation and a movement and caused many people to reconsider how they feel about policing and some police officers. It’s also been a little more than a year since “Bosch,” an outstanding police series streaming on Amazon Prime Video, aired its most recent episode, the sixth season finale. When the seventh and final season of “Bosch”—based on the popular and long-running series of crime novels by Michael Connelly—debuts on June 25, will the series reflect the …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History (Random House) Margalit Fox crafts a rollicking good tale of spiritualism, deception, and escapades in her latest foray into narrative history. In 1917, two prisoners of war in a remote Turkish POW camp during WWI—Harry Jones, the son of a gentleman, and Cedric Hill, an working-class Aussie—managed to dupe their captors into letting them escape, using only a ouija board, rumors of treasure, and their own skills at sleight-of-hand. Read here about the construction of the prisoners’ ouija…
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What’s it like to see your debut novel, Suburban Dicks, come out the same year you turn sixty? Pretty cool. What’s it like to wonder why you waited thirty-five years to write it? Pretty vexing, I’ll admit. But the source of that vexation is complicated. I am a comic book writer. I have written lots of other things, but I am best-known (where I am known at all) and have had my greatest success on that platform. I made my bones in the late `80s through the mid-90s, during a time of tremendous quantitative success and questionable qualitative output. I was party to quite a bit of both of those categories. I came of age in an industry that had just begun to fight back again…
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Historical settings can give mystery and crime novels added depth and texture. In this list, set everywhere from a post-WWI Welsch village to the freezing Arctic, our protagonists have to navigate the threats of clever murderers. But they do so on frozen tundra or in an early Plymouth colony already on life support from disease and scarcity of food, and it raises the stakes in such a dramatic way. I’ve always been drawn historical fiction with a mystery or suspense undertow, ever since my gateway book back in 2001, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. Set in 17th century England in a village that quarantines itself to stop the spread of the disease…
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When Petrina arrived at Coney Island, she headed straight for the Cyclone roller coaster. You couldn’t miss it, looming above the other rides, roaring like thunder. It was made of wood, and its elegant curves had a certain beauty, if you liked that sort of thing. She felt a bit guilty; Mario had peppered her with eager questions about it when she was home for Easter, only a scant ten days ago. She’d put him off with vague promises. “You’re too young for that,” Petrina had said. “Wait until you get a bit older.” The truth was, she found amusement parks slightly silly. They were always noisy and filled with riffraff. She couldn’t see the point of eating a lot of terrible …
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“[Humans] cannot tolerate not knowing the cause of things that effect our lives.” —Lewis Wolpert, British developmental biologist. In November of 1970, a pair of young brothers discovered 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling’s body just beyond the mouth of a culvert adjacent the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s been more than 50 years, and her homicide has never been solved. The first time I read through Paula’s investigation file, I—balanced on a too-small chair in a subterranean Brooklyn coffee shop—unintentionally engaged in a sort of biased digestion of the material. Specifically, I was doing all I could to force each clue I encountered into supporting my o…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron) “A roaring, full-throttle thriller, crackling with tension and charm.” –The New York Times Book Review Lisa Jewell, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “A masterpiece of post-modern noir….A riveting stunner of a tale where the rare appearance of the sun shines down on what is certain to be one of the best thrillers of 2021.”—Providence Journal Shari Lapena, The End of Her (Penguin Books) “Shari Lapena’s latest thriller The End of Her will keep you guessing right up to the end . . . And so begins a nonstop page-turning that has become a hallma…
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Apart from love, one of the largest emotions in any of our lives is grief. In the natural course of events, we will grieve for our grandparents and our parents and perhaps for friends as well. It is something we have to learn how to do, learn how to live with. There is so much death in thrillers. To take the most flagrant examples, there are far more murders in Norwegian thrillers than there are actual murders in Norway. (In 2018 there were only twenty-five homicides.) But where is the grief? Obviously there is plenty of grieving in the margins of stories. We witness the distress of victims’ families. But what about the main characters? There is trauma, anger, bitternes…
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Imagine this scenario: You’re in your home after a long day. Dinner is done, the dishwasher whirring in the kitchen, the children are in bed and finally, you and your partner have time to sit down, put your feet up and watch something on your streaming service of choice. After some discussion, you find a movie about a woman who discovers her husband is secretly a serial killer—you know the kind of movie I’m talking about. An hour and a half flies by and you’re entranced, entertained and then it’s done. Satisfied with the conclusion you click off the television and turn to your partner and say, ‘That would never happen to me. I’d know if you were out killing people while…
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In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle class Dubliner named Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s classic, published in 1922, was brilliant, dense, convoluted, complex, and legally obscene. Ulysses was the “only volume of literary importance still under a ban” in the country, Morris Ernst declared. He set out to “liberate” it, and the celebrated case, resolved by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, was not only a landmark in the law of literary censorship but also a turning point in Ernst’s career. (Featured image: Ernst …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Noel A. Obiora, A Past That Breathes (Rare Bird Books) A Past That Breathes is an urgent and timely addition to the new pantheon of the courtroom novel. Set in 1995, Noel Obiora’s debut begins with the murder of a prominent Los Angeles musician. Her Black ex-boyfriend is quickly arrested and looks to be soon railroaded for the crime, unless two young attorneys can show he’s being framed. Obiora’s decision to set the novel in 1990s LA allows for a nuanced and deeply resonant exploration of racism in the American justice system. –MO Fabian Nicieza, Suburban Dicks (Putnam) Fabien…
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We don’t want to admit it but many of us benefit from a social hierarchy. Look at the people you casually cross paths with day to day. I bet you’ve assigned a story to them based on their level of education, where they were educated, how they dress, their age, their occupation, and if you’re really uptight you might snub your nose at the food choice in their hand as you wait to pay for your lunch. The ego likes labels just as much as it likes stroking. This makes for easy story telling if you’re a storyteller. Your characters can be easily defined and placed based on where they fall in the hierarchy. That one is good and that one is bad. Don’t get me wrong. When I say l…
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The people of Jones County had defied the confederacy during the Civil War, but by 1965, the KKK flourished, drawing its membership from both die-hard racists and those who saw the KKK as merely necessary for success in politics or business. The FBI needed someone ready to infiltrate the Klan, someone who would be accepted by them, but who had enough strength and integrity to resist them. What follows is the story of how Jones County everyman Tom Landrum came to join the FBI’s efforts to take down the Klan. Excerpted from Curtis Wilkie’s new book, When Evil Lived in Laurel (Norton). ___________________________________ Leonard Caves, the Circuit Clerk of Jones County, pr…
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“After the Bentley murder, Rose Hill stood empty two years.” I read the first line of the great Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s 1934 short story The Cat Jumps late one January night almost exactly sixty years after it was written, lying on my stomach on the floor of the University College Dublin library. I was working as a live-in au pair for a family who lived nearby—an American raised on Long Island, I had moved to Dublin somewhat impulsively the previous summer—and many evenings, after I was off duty, I’d walk to the library and pull books at random off the shelves, flopping in a corner to inhale as many words as I could before I had to walk home. I’d just graduated fr…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
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The Usherette (Historical Fiction). Meeting Orson Welles
Scene: Chapter Four. Jo returns to New York from visiting Madeleine in Florida after receiving a telegram from Orson Welles asking to meet. He wants to premiere "Citizen Kane" at the Palace Theater and needs someone to show him around. The scene captures Jo's passions and core decency - and why the movies matter to her. He wanted to meet at midnight.docx -
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Demystifying the Blog Tour: A Powerful Marketing Tool for Your Book Launch and Beyond
A blog tour is a marketing campaign that involves coordinating a series of blog posts and online promotions to create buzz and generate exposure for your book. It typically involves collaborating with bloggers and influencers who have an audience that aligns with your target readership. These bloggers will read your book, write reviews, host author interviews, and feature guest posts or excerpts from your book on their blogs. The goal is to reach a wider audience and generate interest in your book within their established community. The Blog Tour Framework Here's a breakdown of the framework for a typical blog tour: Identify and contact bloggers: Research and compile a list of relevant bloggers who cater to your book's genre or niche. Reach out to them via email or through their website's contact form, expressing interest in collaborating on a blog tour. Provide review copies: Offer a digital or physical copy of your book to the interested bloggers, allowing them time to read and review it before the tour begins. Create tour schedule: Coordinate with the participating bloggers to create a schedule for the tour. Each blogger will have a designated day to feature your book on their blog and share their review, interview, guest post, or any other agreed-upon content. Create content: Prepare author interviews, guest posts, or excerpts that you can provide to the bloggers to publish on their respective blogs. These pieces of content should be engaging and relevant to your book, enticing readers to learn more about it. Promote: As the blog tour progresses, actively promote each blog post across your own social media channels and any other platforms you use. This will help generate more visibility and encourage your existing followers to visit the blogs hosting your content. Engage with readers: Throughout the blog tour, make an effort to engage with readers who leave comments on the blog posts. Responding to their comments and answering their questions will help build a connection and potentially lead to more interest in your book. Blog Tour Benefits The benefits of a blog tour can be significant for your book launch or generating interest long after your book has been released. Some potential advantages include: Increased exposure: By leveraging the established audiences of bloggers and influencers, you can reach a wider audience that may not have been aware of your book otherwise. Social proof: Positive reviews and endorsements from bloggers can lend credibility to your book, encouraging readers to take a chance on it. Networking opportunities: Collaborating with bloggers and influencers can expand your network within the literary community, opening doors to potential future partnerships or opportunities. Enhanced online presence: The blog tour generates online content related to your book, increasing your online presence and searchability, which can have long-term benefits for your author platform. When to Plan a Blog Tour Determining the best time to have a blog tour for your book largely depends on your specific goals, timeline, and the nature of your book. However, there are a few general considerations to keep in mind when planning the timing of your blog tour: Book launch date: Ideally, you'll want to schedule your blog tour around your book's launch date. This ensures that the tour generates maximum buzz and attention during the critical period when your book becomes available to the public; however, a book tour can also help reignite interest in your book long after it’s been published.. Pre-launch promotion: Consider starting your blog tour a few weeks before your book's official launch. This gives bloggers and influencers ample time to read and review your book, and it allows you to generate buzz and anticipation leading up to the release. Pre-launch promotion can help build excitement and generate pre-orders or early sales. Availability of review copies: Ensure that you have review copies of your book available and ready to send out to bloggers well in advance of the blog tour start date. This allows sufficient time for bloggers to read the book and prepare their content for the tour. Consider providing digital copies for ease and quick distribution. Audience availability: Take into account the preferences and availability of your target audience. If your book caters to a specific season, genre, or holiday, it might be beneficial to align your blog tour with that theme or timeframe. For example, a romance novel might benefit from a blog tour around Valentine's Day. Other marketing efforts: Consider coordinating your blog tour with other marketing initiatives you have planned. This could include social media campaigns, advertising, or other promotional activities. A coordinated approach can amplify your book's visibility and impact. Blogger availability: Reach out to bloggers and influencers well in advance to secure their participation and confirm their availability for the tour. Keep in mind that popular bloggers may have busy schedules, so it's beneficial to plan ahead and be flexible with scheduling to accommodate their availability. Ultimately, the best time for a blog tour is when you have everything in place, including review copies, promotional materials, and a solid plan for engaging with bloggers and readers throughout the tour. Take the time to strategically plan and execute your blog tour to maximize its impact on your book launch or relaunch. Did you know WOW! Women on Writing offers blog tours as part of our marketing services? If you're interested in exploring professional assistance for your blog tour and other book marketing endeavors, check out WOW! Women on Writing's book marketing packages. We offer comprehensive and tailored solutions to help authors like you navigate the world of book promotion. Our team of experts can guide you through the process, provide valuable insights, and connect you with influential bloggers and reviewers in your genre. By leveraging the expertise and network of WOW! Women on Writing, you can enhance the effectiveness of your blog tour and ensure your book receives the attention it deserves. Learn more here or contact blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com with questions. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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Whatcha Reading? May 2023, Part Two
It’s time to wrap up May with our second Whatcha Reading! It’s also Memorial Day weekend in the States, which seems like a perfect excuse to get even more reading done before the month is over. Sneezy: I’m reading Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. She takes no prisoners. Sarah: What’s that? The library has the next Veronica Speedwell audiobook? Don’t mind if I do! Currently listening to A Murderous Relation ( A | BN | K | AB ) and having a splendid time. The audiobook performance by Angele Masters is terrific. A | BN | KShana: I just finished a YA romcom that gave me the biggest book hangover, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert. So much banter and sweetness! I’m now reading The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, and liking it so far. Elyse: I just finished The Daydreams. ( A | BN | K ) Some of it was how awful tabloids were to young female stars in the aughts (Lindsay, Britney etc), but each of the main characters does something really shitty to another so it’s hard to really like any of leads. It was meh. Lara: Elyse recommended Loreth Anne White’s The Maid’s Diary ( A | BN ) and I’m hooked. No romance, but the suspense is phenomenal so far. Whatcha reading? Let us know in the comments! View the full article -
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Book Lovers: Know Your Tribe
Another fundamental that makes a whole lot of sense, esp marketing wise. -
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Writing Hot Sex Scenes - Saints Preserve Us!
I've been trained. It works! -
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Crucial Self-Editing Techniques - Don't be Hostage to a Line Editor
If you knew how many writers this has positively impacted, you'd say, it's no wonder. Fundamentals like this are too often neglected. -
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Podcast 564, Your Transcript has Bunny Ears
The transcript for Podcast 564. Bunny Aliens in Space: Cover Design with JL Logosz has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article -
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Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener Doesn’t See the Forest for the Trees
Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is challenged by knowledge of something greater, and tested by a newfound bond with a distressed young person. Via these characters, the films in this trilogy tend to pair and interrogate the relationship between two normally unrelated topics: religion and climate change (First Reformed, 2017), gambling and the War on Terror (The Card Counter, 2021), and horticulture and racism (Master Gardener, 2022). Schrader is an accomplished, highly literary storyteller and his interests (particularly the the masculine-coded concepts of destruction and violence) have produced some of film’s most fascinating inquiries into the ills of modern society, from Taxi Driver to Affliction to American Gigolo, to First Reformed and The Card Counter. First a film critic and then a screenwriter (responsible for classics like Raging Bull and Obsession and famous for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma), Schrader’s later work as a director is epitomized by the triad of films about “God’s Lonely Men,” three anti-social anti-heroes in crisis: a self-loathing pastor, a troubled gambler, and a secretive gardener, all reckoning with the sudden collision of themes, lives, selves once kept at a distance. Many of his protagonists, but especially these three, can be read as homages to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï: cool, reserved, highly-competent professionals whose whose adherence to rituals and observances leaves them unprepared to confront unforeseen cataclysms. It’s almost never useful to compare films in a director’s oeuvre to one another; despite similarities, each is its own discreet contribution. But Schrader’s films are designed to reference each other—or, really, The Card Counter and Master Gardener are designed to reference First Reformed—so please forgive me while I place them all side-by-side for a moment. In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller (no, not that Ernst Toller), a cheerless reverend at a small antique church upstate who keeps a diary of his own stark life the year he happens to encounter a distraught climate activist who opens his eyes to the ravishment of God’s green earth by greedy corporations, as well as the ways God’s own church is influenced by corporatization to the point of disregarding the stewardship of the planet. That film, a simmering hagiography of a soul in turmoil, provides the blueprint for Schrader’s subsequent two films, not only thematically, but also stylistically, in the terms I mentioned in the opening paragraph. The films are dark, lonely meditations into their protagonists’ natures, told via their floridly-written, allusion-rich journal entries, as they finally confront aspects of their lives and their worlds they have kept at bay for so long. The Card Counter inherits the framework of First Reformed, but reworks it enough for it to feel distinct; Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (no, not that William Tell), a former military interrogator and now card-counter, who carpetbags from casino to casino, living out of austere motels, until he meets a young man who informs him that he knows his true identity, as a soldier who served jailtime for his role in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and asks for his help committing an act of revenge against one of Tell’s military superiors. This film slowly explores the human capacity for both empathy and cruelty, teasing out the relationship between “keeping one’s cool” and “losing it.” I don’t have as conclusive a reading of the forces at work Master Gardener, arguably the film in this trilogy with the toughest conceit. Joel Edgerton plays Narval Roth, a taciturn head gardener of Gracewood Gardens, a privately-owned estate with gardens that are open to the public. Narval manages a team of polo-clad young people, overseeing their work but also instructing them in the history, philosophy, and science of horticulture. He answers to no one, except Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), the wealthy owner of the estate, who throws his carefully cultivated world out of order when she demands he take on an apprentice, her grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell). Maya is biracial, the daughter of the “wayward” daughter of Norma’s sister, who left the family and “fell in with a bad crowd,” as Norma purrs. Maya seems to be her only relative left, so she is eager to draw her into the family—but not enough that she doesn’t insist that she work on the family’s land, first. Maya is a curious, intelligent twenty-something, surprisingly accepting of the fact that she’s a minimum wage worker on her great aunt’s estate. Norma wants Narval to educate her, teach her about the maintenance and culture and theories of horticulture, so that she might be able to pursue a career in the field in the future. Maya takes kindly to this earthy finishing school, especially because she appreciates the softspoken and passionate manner of Narval, her teacher. The movie appears to take place in the South (it was filmed in Louisiana), and the house looks like a plantation estate, so it seems like there might be some interesting explorations into contemporary white supremacy, the way Norma insists that Maya be fashioned into a more refined version of herself in order to be welcomed into her family tree, and simultaneously wants this self-improvement to take place as a farm-worker beneath her, and literally in the dirt. But the film wobbles from here on out, mostly because we learn about the haunted, Narval’s past as a soldier of a Neo-Nazi army, before turning state’s evidence against them and going into witness protection. Under his clothes, he is covered in White Pride and Hitler-fandom tattoos, which he looks at disparagingly in the mirror. He likes his current life as a peaceful caretaker of the Gracewood Gardens, is glad to have distanced himself from the silo of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and violence in which (he explains) he was raised. That Maya and Narval form a bond, while he also has flashbacks to things that his proud boy/hillbilly cult leader told him about how his job is to “pull out the weeds,” suggests that Master Gardener will become a thriller about the insidiousness of white supremacy, juxtaposing it with a reading of gardening as a kind of fascism (or at least, a way to disguise it). In other words, perhaps Narval’s solitary salvation in gardening for a racist white lady becomes an outlet for the very impulses that allowed him to thrive in a fascist cult in the first place. Master Gardener doesn’t till this ground, though, which is fine, but it also doesn’t do anything else productive with all of these rich, ripe, and (productively) thorny thematic concerns. What begins as an incredibly fruitful plot soon wilts and shrivels into a wandering love story; and the kind of discipline and restraint that Narvals brings to his gardening becomes, exactly, the element missing from the story itself. Master Gardener quickly forgets its powerful portrayals about white supremacy and racism when it becomes interested in whether or not its protagonist can be redeemed, can be saved, and, in giving him some way to carry this out, represents Maya as needing to be saved by someone, too. If this narrative shoot were to blossom into a meaningful development (unlikely as it is), we would need a clearer understanding of Narval’s life or background, a focused explaining of how he has come to be changed in the first place. But more importantly, this whole angle not only misses out on saying anything thoughtful about race in America, but also robs Maya of the opportunity to be more than a plot device, perhaps (especially in light of Swindell’s elegant performance), the greatest sin of all. What results is a confusing film, overgrown in some areas and under-seeded in others. Instead of becoming as thoughtful and risky an exploration as The Card Counter, Master Gardener becomes like a game of 52-card pickup. It’s as if Schrader has a deck of cards and instead of laying them out strategically, throws them all in the air and lets them come down where they will. Instead of become the focused sermon of First Reformed, Master Gardener becomes one of those themed themed refrigerator poem packs. It has a lot of terms on the table, but shuffles them around until they say almost absolutely nothing. View the full article
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