Category: Pop

Album Reviews 24/02/29

Fire Sale, Albatross ()

Some call it “melodic punk;” I call it neo-emo (or usually just “emo” for short, most of the time), but either way it sounds more or less like Sum 41, Sugarcult and nine billion other bands, including this pop-punk supergroup, which brings together Matt Riddle (No Use For A Name), Chris Swinney (The Ataris), Pedro Aida (Ann Beretta), Matt Morris and perennial second-banana guitarist Brad Edwards. Their M.O. is releasing random singles, like this two-songer, so let’s get this out of the way, shall we. The title track starts out with a dextrous bass, then moves into a multi-voiced holler-along line of the type you’d associate with more roots-punk, which is a good sign, and then lead singer Aida eases his way in, sounding quite a bit like the dude from Living Colour actually (the tune is fast, by the way, in case you’re new to our planet). The other tune, “I Remember Damage,” has an OG emo sound to it that makes it workable. Decent stuff overall. A —Eric W. Saeger

Riot V, Mean Streets (self-released)

Ack, I had no idea these guys were still around. Actually “they” aren’t “still” around; after the death of chief-cook-and-bottle-washer guitarist/bandleader Mark Reale in 2012, various transitory members of this 1975-born heavy metal band (which used to be called Riot, which of course tells us that the “V” has been added owing to legal monkeyshines) got together and decided to make a little hay out of Reale’s legacy, and here we are. In their day, Riot wasn’t a dumb unintentional-joke band like Anvil; their tunes were hard enough, bespeaking the New York City streets from whence they came, and this stuff is actually pretty good. The ridiculously titled “Hail to the Warriors” launches this full-length in surprisingly nice style, evoking King Diamond singing over latter-day Slayer dipped in power-metal sauce. “Love Beyond the Grave” is even more Savatage-ish, but with more epic-metal vocalizing and stuff like that. These fellers did a pretty freaking good job with this. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee-hah, I can’t wait, the next all-in CD release day is tomorrow, March 1! As you know, nothing pleasant ever happens in March, and as for me, I completely hate it. The weather is just a hung-over February vibe; Mother Nature is like, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’ll be warm-ish for an hour, or — wait, a couple of minus-10-degree days would be interesting, wouldn’t they?” There’s March Madness too, of course, which used to result in Sports Illustrated’s publishing a “Special March Madness Issue” that no one ever read and was traditionally the only thing available to read at any dentist’s office, but the good news is that “SI” seems to be just about to go belly-up, so, ipso facto, there’ll be no more March Madness issues, good riddance. Anyway, we’ve got a lot of musical comedy in the works for this week, including a new solo album from Iron Maiden Bruce Dickinson, titled The Mandrake Project! I totally know what you’re thinking, the same thing as I am, something about those little green mandrake plant monsters from Harry Potter, but guess what, fam, it’s not! It’s about something else, something more convoluted and whatnot, something that will be “revealed in time.” I did watch Dickinson’s “What is The Mandrake Project?” video on YouTube, in hopes of finding out, but guess what, it was a rickroll, a giant waste of 63 seconds of my life, because he didn’t answer the question at all, not that I expected him to make any sense. So guess what happens now? Yes, that’s right, it falls on me to go back to YouTube and listen to one of the songs, specifically “Afterglow of Ragnarok,” can you even believe that title, guys? I’m rolling on the floor laughing right now, you know which emoji I’m talking about, but nevertheless, let’s go listen to this silly new nursery rhyme from Mr. D&D Character. Let’s see, it’s obviously inspired by Crowbar, very doomy except for some boring Fates Warning parts. Somewhere, someone in the world will be massively impressed by this. I am not that person.

• Anyone who knows me is aware that I’m a big longtime fan of industrial metal band Ministry and its anarchic frontman, Al Jourgensen, whose nicknames include “The Alien” and “Buck Satan.” Last I heard from the band, there was a kerfuffle going on, because Al wrote a song about antifa, which instantly got him embroiled in all the culture war nonsense that has turned this country into nothing more manageable than a Wacky Racers cartoon. It’s hard to believe that Al’s Slayer-like tune didn’t solve all our problems in 10 seconds flat, but it didn’t, even though he’d come out of “retirement” (which to him means sitting around in his scorpion-infested Texas compound, writing and recording heavy metal songs that all eventually wind up on albums made during periods of “un-retirement,” which usually occur once a year) in order to release it. The new album, HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES, is out tomorrow, spearheaded by teaser single “Just Stop Oil,” a surprisingly clean-sounding speed-metal joint with surfer guitar in it. As always, it’s essential listening, and I think Jello Biafra talks in it.

• Oh stop it, it’s sports-bar-rock phonies Kaiser Chiefs, from England, hawking their eighth album, cleverly titled Kaiser Chiefs’ Easy Eighth Album! The leadoff tune, “Burning In Flames” isn’t rockin’ at all, just some sort of Weeknd-infused lounge-pop. Never understood the appeal of these guys.

• And finally it’s Portland, Oregon-based indie band, STRFKR, with a new LP called Parallel Realms! The opening tune, “Together Forever,” sounds like something MGMT threw in the trash can, unlikely as that sounds. —Eric W. Saeger

Fear Factories, by Matthew Scully and Justice for Animals, by Martha C. Nussbaum

Fear Factories, by Matthew Scully (First Arezzo Books, 273 pages)

Justice for Animals, by Martha C. Nussbaum (Simon and Schuster, 320 pages)

It’s been nearly half a century since the Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, effectively launching the modern animal rights movement. Twenty-seven years later, Matthew Scully — best-known then as a speechwriter for George W. Bush and other GOP politicians — came out with Dominion, which became a sort of Animal Liberation for a new generation (and also for those who couldn’t stomach Singer’s more controversial takes, such as giving parents the right to end the lives of disabled newborns).

Both writers made a compelling case against “factory farming,” the means by which the majority of meat and dairy products in the U.S. are produced, with scale, efficiency and speed that requires animals be treated in ways many people consider horrific. So, how’s it going?

Not so great, despite legal advances made by animal-rights activists and slight declines in recent years in per-capita meat consumption. Vox last year claimed in a headline “You’re more likely to go to prison for exposing animal cruelty than committing it,” which is demonstrably untrue, but the overarching point is valid — legal theory and strategy that aims to reduce animal suffering is still largely left wanting.

Into this void comes the highly regarded University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, whose Justice for Animals proposes a new legal theory, which she calls the “capabilities approach.” Published last year in hardcover, it’s new in paperback, as is Matthew Scully’s followup to Dominion, called Fear Factories. (And last year Singer updated his original work in a volume called Animal Liberation Now.)

Nussbaum, the author or co-author of 24 other philosophy books, is relatively new to the subject of animal rights, having seriously picked up the cause after the death of her daughter, an attorney who specialized in animal-rights cases. In Justice for Animals she expounds on ideas previously applied to standards of human welfare and assigns them to animals. According to Nussbaum, most animals can suffer injustice for which human beings should be held accountable. But not all animals. Nussbaum argues that we should take into account whether the animals are capable of living a certain sort of life — one in which they are striving to flourish in that world in ways accordant with their species. Injustice can be done to animals, therefore, not just by the willful infliction of pain but by thwarting animals from their natural progressions of life.

There are gradations that can make it difficult to identify injustice — she’s still not sold, for example, on whether crustaceans truly have flourishingly lives, and insects don’t seem to process pain. But injustice “centrally involves significant striving blocked by not just harm but also wrongful thwarting, whether negligent or deliberate,” Nussbaum says. If that smacks of legal-ese, well, this is a book that wants to establish a framework for bringing legal cases on behalf of animals, and so it lays out the case soberly, often with stilted language and professor-like repetition. This is for people who want to get into the weeds of animal rights.

Among the questions she tackles: Are we morally obligated to intervene to protect wildlife from misery and disease? (The New Hampshire moose dying of tick infestation come to mind.) Should we intervene when we have a chance to save an individual animal, or many, from predation? Can humans be “friends” with animals in captivity?

While Nussbaum considers the treatment of animals bred for slaughter on factory farms, and the cattle in large-scale dairy operations, a “moral horror,” she does not argue for veganism, saying, “I have no principled objection to the human use of animal products, so long as the animal is able to carry on its characteristic animal life.”

Scully, on the other hand, is a vegan, although in Fear Factories he does not aggressively try to convert meat-eaters; he seems principally concerned with getting people to think about the animals that suffered in order that they may enjoy a bacon cheeseburger. If they change their eating habits, all the better, but you get the sense he’d be satisfied if we could just stop with the wide-scale misery.

Fear Factories is a collection of about 50 articles and essays published between 1992 and 2022; nearly half originally appeared in the conservative journal National Review. Animal rights are typically considered a cause of the political left; as such, Scully was definitely not preaching to the choir, and the photos he chose for the covers of the book go for our emotional jugular. (The front cover shows rows of gestational crates, the kind Proposition 12 banned in California; the back, a close-up of a miserable pig in such a crate.)

While Dominion was deeply reported, with Scully going to a factory farm in North Carolina and a meeting of an international sport hunting club, among other places, the essays in Fear Factories draw more on his personal experience. In an essay titled “Lessons from a Dog,” he writes about how his childhood attachment to a stray dog his family adopted led to a moral awakening that caused him to become a vegetarian as a teen. Many others involve animal cruelty laws that were then being debated and met with resistance even though they proposed, as Scully writes, to extend “the smallest of mercies to the humblest of creatures.”

Scully has the soul of a poet, and it comes across in devastating prose in which he takes on the harvesting of elephants, trophy hunting, seal clubbing and other atrocities, and the derision and contempt often given animal-rights activists trying to make a point in ways as simple as offering water to a pig headed for slaughter. He also includes reviews he has written of other animal-centric books, such as The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth by Edward O. Wilson and The Story of Charlotte’s Web by Michael Sims.

While Scully is more eloquent, and Nussbaum more scholarly, both continue to build out the case against factory farming. Neither is an easy read, however; they are not meant to be enjoyed so much as to be studied. Fear Factories: A; Justice for Animals: B-

Album Reviews 24/02/22

The Writeful Heirs, The Writeful Heirs (self-released)

Big fan of the New Boston, N.H., area, which is where this boy/girl songwriting duo (they’re older, so “boy/girl” is a bit inaccurate, but whatevs) is based. Their trip is undergirded by Americana, and the bio sheet rattles off a few other influences, namely psychedelica, classic rock, ’80s stuff and alt-rock, which I trust is all totally true, but either way, these two have obviously spent a lot of time rehashing and refining these songs. Former Club Iguana songwriter John Montalto handles the guitar and bass here, with newcomer Sunny Barretto, a hippie lady who handles lyrics and background singing. This business starts off with “Jupiter in July,” a Guster-ish thing that’d be more of a Peter Bradley Adams endeavor if it were a bit more mellow, not that it’d hurt a fly as is. Tons of layering enhances the smoothness of the sounds; Amos Lee would certainly be an accurate RIYL name-check for this very well-done record. A

James Brown, We Got to Change (Universal Music)

A little rock ’n’ blues archaeology for you here, kids, an unreleased single from the Godfather of Soul (or, of course, whatever else people like to call him these days, often epithets that aren’t really nice, in line with all the #MeToo business that’s surfaced in recent years). This is an old relic, recorded Aug. 16, 1970, at Criteria Studios in Miami, a pivotal period for Brown in that longtime members of his famed James Brown Orchestra had walked out a few months earlier. The replacement band, called The J.B.’s. (anchored by two young brothers from Cincinnati, Ohio, in the persons of guitarist Phelps “Catfish” Collins and bassist William “Bootsy” Collins), boasted a harder edge, as heard on such singles as “Get Up (I Feel Like Being) a Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” “Soul Power,” and this tune, a typical foreboding, urban grumbler that starts with bongos, then adds some staccato guitar before Brown starts preaching in his signature fashion, which of course prompts the usual Vegas choir-and-brass pomp. Three versions appear here. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OK, look alive everyone, the next all-in CD release day is Friday, Feb. 23, who’s got the remote, I want to fast-forward three months so we can get past all this ridiculous “too cold to go swimming but too warm to make popsicles just by putting a cup of fruit juice outside for 10 seconds” weather. Don’t you hate this? I do too, but I cannot plead insanity and refuse to do my duty by listening to bad albums today, there are just too many bad albums out there in my new-release list, all looking up at me like a laundry-load of kittens, begging me to put aside my deepest-possible hatred for this stupid month and just pay attention to their awful songs, aren’t they so cute? Yikes, I have to tell you, I thought I was going to get to hear and review a new album from Elbow today, but that one doesn’t come out until March, so we’ll begin this week’s exercise with some band called Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose new album, The Past Is Still Alive, is in my ruggedly handsome face right this second! The leadoff single, “Snake Plant,” sounds like a cross between Reba McEntire and Sinead O’Connor, and no, I have no explanation for that, but it isn’t completely horrible.

• A long time ago in a rock ’n’ roll galaxy far, far away, four glam-metal hacks from Los Angeles realized that the fastest way to become famous (despite having no talent for writing songs whatsoever) would be to combine room-temperature Danzig-style faux-punkishness with a few Kiss elements, like face makeup, random explosions, guitar riffs that any 6-year-old could play after one lesson, and — well, OK, everything else, except for catchy choruses, and lo, Mötley Crüe was born. The only thing the band was really good for was giving metal-radio DJs a break from playing Ratt, which was a win for them and in fact all humanity. After a time, no one liked hair metal anymore, which was Nirvana’s fault, so the Crüe’s drummer totally accidentally released the sexytime part of a video he was filming with his Ph.D. physicist wife, Pamela Anderson, a film that was originally intended as an instructional video on nautical navigation for sailors stranded at sea. And then, whatever, the singer left for a while after releasing a sexytime video of his own, and then he came back, to no one’s surprise. Cut to now, where da Crüe’s guitarist, Mick Mars, was all like “I’m sick of this place,” so he has also quit for the moment, and, until he realizes that he’s going to be broke unless he rejoins da Crüe, he will release solo albums, of which his brand new one, The Other Side Of Mars, is the first. See what he did there, with that album title, and the first single from this Loot Crate version of Ace Frehley is called “Loyal to the Lie.” Stop the presses, folks, it’s not a bad song at all if you liked Gravity Kills way back before Ben Franklin invented the VCR. I can deal with it, sure.

• Nadine Shah is a British avant-pop singer who used to be friends with Amy Winehouse. Now that Shah is out of rehab, she is releasing albums, starting with this new one, Filthy Underneath. The single, “Twenty Things,” has a super-cool art-rock edge to it, and her vocals will appeal to Bowie fans for sure. It’s decent enough.

• Lastly we have Aughts-indie cool kids MGMT, whose new LP, Loss Of Life, features a tune called “Mother Nature.” It’s got a ’60s-pop slant to it, a la The Beatles, if you’ve ever heard of those guys. Actually, no, you know what, it sounds like Oasis quite a bit, up to the sad-happy chorus bit. Yes, that’s it, the tune wants to be “Wonderwall,” but, because it’s MGMT, it has to have a nicely shot but utterly pointless cartoon as its video, you know how this goes.

Good Material, by Dolly Alderton

Whether it’s because the holidays were unbearable or Valentine’s Day is even worse, we’re in the time of year that most breakups happen. If you happen to be nursing a broken heart, Good Material, the second novel by British writer Dolly Alderton, will be an excellent companion. And if you’re not, it’s a very good distraction from the post-holiday, mid-winter, my-team’s-wasn’t-in/didn’t-win-the-Super-Bowl blahs.

The novel is centered around the debilitating heartbreak of Andy Dawson, a 35-year-old comedian who just broke up with Jen, his girlfriend of four years. He doesn’t understand what happened — they’d just had a lovely weekend together in Paris, he mournfully tells friends, when Jen tells him that she doesn’t want to be with him anymore. Unfortunately for Andy, that means he’s not only out of a relationship, but out of housing — they’d lived together and Jen’s salary had enabled them to live in much nicer housing than could Andy’s cobbled-together income from comedy gigs and corporate training events.

There is also the not-insignificant problem of their friend group — Jen’s close friend, Jane, is the wife of Andy’s best friend, Avi, and the two couples had been besties for years, leading to all sorts of painful complications in the aftermath of the breakup when Andy moves in with the friends while he’s searching for a place to live and monitoring his newly worrisome bald spot.

But all these problems are secondary to Andy’s heartbreak, which he is desperately and unsuccessfully trying to rid himself of. When he passes a woman wearing Jen’s signature perfume, for example, he goes to the store and buys all they have of that brand and pitches the bottles into a river, saying that’s four fewer times he’ll have to smell Jen again. He obsesses for weeks over whether it’s OK to send her a “happy birthday” text and, if so, what it should say. When that doesn’t go well, he devises a list “of all the other possible events in the coming year that might open the gateway for casual texting,” such as Christmas, his birthday, nuclear disaster and the death of someone they both know.

He tries engaging with other women, and even moving into a houseboat, in order to effect a fresh start. Friends beg him to stop thinking about her. Andy says he wishes he could, but “thinking about her is not a choice … the room inside my mind that has been occupied by her for the last four years still exists. I want to convert it into a home gym or meditation room or get in a new tenant, but I can’t.”

Alderton wrote about love and loss in her 2021 memoir Everything I Know About Love, and she has been called a Nora Ephron (Heartburn) for millennials. Andy the lovelorn is evidence of her experience with the subject matter, as in when she writes of the couple awkwardly meeting to close a joint bank account post-breakup and Andy says it feels like he’s encountering a celebrity: “A couple of months ago, Jen was the woman whose pants I put in the washing machine with mine when I put a load on. Now, she is unfamiliar and untouchable; someone I have a one-way relationship with in photos and memories and in my imagination.”

But it’s going to get even worse a few months later when Andy awakes in the morning to see “one of the worst texts you can wake up to other than being informed of a death” — Hey mate, saw what’s happening online. Hope you’re ok.

As miserable as Andy is throughout much of the story, this is still a very funny book. The protagonist is a comedian, after all, who does things like making mental lists of what he would agree to do in order to have Jen be in love with him again (lose hair at the front of his head, go to her parents’ house every weekend for lunch, never eat ham again) and Alderton’s own comic sense powers even the darkest scenes. There’s also a very funny subplot involving Andy’s eventual landlord, a conspiracy theorist devoted to Julian Assange (there are lots of contemporary references throughout the book) who is trying to get a historical placard for his house because George Harrison once slept there.

In every relationship that fails, Andy reflects four months after the breakup, something called “The Flip” occurs, a change in who wields the most power in the relationship: “The person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.” This is among the relationship wisdom that Good Material imparts, another being that when we move on from one partner, we look for the next to provide in spades the 10 percent of whatever was missing from the last one.

But the greatness of the novel comes not from any of this, but from Alderton’s decision to flip the perspective from Andy to Jen at the end of the book, finally answering Andy’s lament, “Why did she break up with me?” — but only to the reader. It’s a masterful technique, one that adds heft and complexity to a story that was already satisfying. A

Album Reviews 24/02/15

Becky Hill, Believe Me Now? (Astralwerks Records)

As you know, I complain about a lot of things, but to be honest, Astralwerks Records has never sent me something I didn’t like. This zillion-seller British dance-pop queen isn’t a household name here in the States, although chances are good that you’ve heard her 2019 Meduza and Goodboys-guested single “Lose Control” someplace. Like a souped-up Kylie Minogue, she’s all about the sexytime stuff, tinkering with drum ‘n’ bass, anthemic house, techno and atmospheric trance. Liftoff single “Side Effects” features Lewis Thompson, not that there’s much he does to improve on the bouncy club-kitten beat purring underneath. I really like “Disconnect,” with its buzzy, woofer-zapping rinseout noodlings holding Hill’s early-Katy Perry-style voice aloft, and p.s., the absolutely stunning hook should come with a Surgeon General’s warning. “Never Be Alone” is the ballad, spotlighting the Lorde/Adele sort of timbre that puts her voice at the top of her class. If anything, this stuff is too perfect. A+

The Philosophers, Vartamana (self-released)

Here we have a France-based sextet whose deeply mellow style more or less evokes a Weather Report-informed Miami Sound Machine, in other words the ’70s jazz-pop vibe is strong in this one. Replace Chuck Mangione’s trumpet with a sax and you’d be in the ballpark, but it leans more toward Sade in its level of chillness. It’s the latest project from guitarist Mark Bullock, a British transplant who simply wanted to put together a group in which each musician’s abilities were at least mildly tested. The project is ambitious enough, the standout piece being Alain Szpiro’s sax, which tables some fine runs that sound as though they cost a lot more to record than they likely actually did. Bullock’s guitar keeps the tunes centered and balanced when he’s not noodling away with some lead passages; singer Emeline Gouban strives for a mixture of bedroom/lounge ambiance, which she accomplishes sublimely, fitting in well enough with the rest of it. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Feb. 16, is on the way, and new albums are coming with it, so let’s slog forward and get winter over with, shall we, folks? Actually, let’s slog back to the Aughts era, when indie rock was so awful that many albums came stamped with a Surgeon General’s warning that listening to their music would turn you into a toad, remember those days, fam, when college-rock taste was dictated by white Brooklyn scenesters, and it was all a big plot to legitimize Captain Beefheart or whatever the idea was? Ha ha, it was so awful, except for a brief part of the nu-rave scene, but other than that it was artists like El Perro del Mar, which is the stage name of Swedish singer Sarah Assbring, whose new album, Big Anonymous, is out this week! I literally hadn’t heard any of this person’s annoying music since around 2005, when I reviewed her self-titled debut LP in these very pages, so I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. Right, the last thing I heard from her was that album’s minor hit, “Here Comes That Feeling,” a mixture of French ’60s girl-group unlistenability and Assbring’s Betty Boop vocals. Listening to it now, I hope I trashed that stupid album from stem to stern most righteously, but chances are that I didn’t, given that back then I was a relatively new player in the whole “making fun of bad bands in city newspapers” game, so I probably praised it just so that people would like me. Given that I no longer care about people liking me (there will always be haters no matter what, so what’s the point), I shall now head over to the YouTube to see if Assbring still sucks as badly as she did 19 years ago. Oh come on, I’m listening to the new single, “Kiss of Death,” and it’s just a Sigur Ros-ified Lana Del Rey bringdown, slow and mildly shoegazey. The only good thing about it is that it’s musical in its way, I wish she’d just give up. The video is gross and disturbing too, something about someone committing a moidah, and there’s fake blood on the actress. This is what it’s all come down to, folks, mediocrity and fake blood, let me try to forget I paid any attention to this nonsense.

• Lolol, it’s Jennifer Lopez, with a new album, can you believe it, folks? Last I knew she was trying to lead a progressive house resurgence, or was that Britney, or was it all of them? Ha ha, who’s she re-married to now, Ben Affleck or that rotten egomaniacal baseball man, A-Rod? You know she’s just going to get re-divorced to whichever of those cheating alien clowns she’s with, like, there’ll be a spicy story in National Enquirer any minute now, even it’s just completely misconstrued nonsense, a few pix of Affleck paying some Domino’s driver for a pizza so he can “bulk up” in order to play the movie version of Broderick Crawford, get where I’m going with this? No? Well it doesn’t matter, the point is that I have to go listen to something off J-Lo’s new album, This Is Me … Now. Yup, the title track is trance-infused Ke$ha. Whatever.

• Uh-oh, it’s California-based indie-rock band Grandaddy. I never liked anything I heard from them nor understood why they had so many fans. This should be a load of fun, because I forget what they sound like. Their new album, Blu Wav, is on YouTube, yes, the whole thing, so that’s nice of them. I’m listening to the single, “Cabin In My Mind,” and, ah, there we go, nowww I remember, their trip is sort of like a Guster-tinged Spacemen 3. Yesss, that’s why hipsters liked them, because they’re tedious.

• We’ll wrap it up with Adult Contemporary, the new LP from Chromeo, an electro-funk duo from Montreal, Canada; I never liked these guys either. This’ll probably be ’90s garage-house, their new single, “Personal Effects.” Nope, it’s their same old milquetoast trash, Weeknd meets Kool and the Gang. Spoiler alert: I totally hate it.

First Lie Wins, by Ashley Elston

How far will you read into a book if you don’t like the protagonist? With her first novel directed toward adults, Ashley Elston is betting that we will keep reading so long as she provides little surprises around every corner, like Willy Wonka.

The formula seems to be working. The book was the January pick for Reese Witherspoon’s book club and has garnered praise as a suspenseful thriller. To which I say meh. Not that First Lie Wins doesn’t throw out many curve balls — it does. And an author’s ability to craft a didn’t-see-that-coming ending after multiple didn’t-see-that-coming chapters is rightly valued in a day when the storylines of much popular fiction are painfully predictable. That said, it’s nice to genuinely like at least somebody in a 300-page book.

We are supposed to kind-of, sort-of like the protagonist, initially introduced as Evie Porter, although we soon learn that Evie Porter is the latest in a long line of aliases. When we meet Evie she is suffering through a dinner in which she is meeting, for the first time, her boyfriend’s circle of friends — people who grew up much differently than she did.

“They are the ones who started kindergarten together, their circle remaining small until high school graduation. They fled town in groups of twos and threes to attend a handful of colleges all within driving distance of here. They all joined sororities and fraternities with other groups of twos and threes with similar backgrounds, only to gravitate back to this small Louisiana town, the circle closing once again.”

Evie, on the other hand, is a loner with a much different lineage. She’d grown up in a small town in North Carolina, an only child who lived with her single mom in a trailer. It was a wholesome enough environment — lots of love and dreams — until her mom got sick, and Evie started stealing jewelry from rich people at age 17 to help pay for her mother’s cancer treatment. (Which is why we’re supposed to kind-of, sort-of like her.) Her criminal skills landed her even more lucrative work as an operative for a shadowy criminal enterprise run by a mysterious Mr. Smith. She goes from job to job, always assuming a new identity that has been meticulously set up for her, in order to achieve some nefarious goal for her employer. Although she is described at one point as “morally gray,” it’s a dark shade of gray.

Evie’s latest job is to infiltrate the life of Ryan Sumner, an affable frat-boy-turned-businessman who inherited his grandfather’s house and business and is happily living as a bachelor in a a leafy suburb in Louisiana, a place where there’s a lot of money “but it’s the quiet kind.”

An attractive woman, Evie inserts herself into Ryan’s life with remarkable ease, setting up a “chance” meeting by having a flat tire at a gas station that she knows he visits every Thursday. She wears a short skirt, her intelligence having gathered knowledge that “his eyes almost always lingered too long on any female who crossed his path, especially those dressed in short skirts.”

There is much suspension of disbelief required here and throughout the book — that this single encounter leads to Evie’s moving in with Ryan a few months later, that this bachelor with a roving eye is suddenly ready for a long-term relationship — but OK. Again, surprises around every corner, and Elston has elegantly plotted this story, showing us snapshots of Evie’s other lives in flashbacks even as she easily settles into domestic bliss with Ryan. There are shades of the movie Pretty Woman, especially when Evie dons a big hat to wear to a Kentucky Derby party.

But things take a turn when an old friend of Ryan’s shows up at the party with a woman who looks astonishingly similar to Evie on his arm. Soon there’s another big reveal that will be the hook that drags us, however unwillingly, through the rest of the book. Evie, it turns out, is not the only person presenting herself as someone she’s not. And her unscrupulous employer has grown suspicious of her loyalty and has set out to test her, even as she tries to follow through with her “long con” of Ryan, while growing comfortable in the happy-couple-in-the-’burbs life.

Meanwhile, a fatal accident involving people in the couple’s circle leads to a police investigation that calls Evie’s background into question and the story shifts to a murder investigation in another state that one of Evie’s alter egos may or may not have been involved in. And we become aware that Evie is not a helpless pawn entrapped by a criminal mastermind, but that she has developed her own protective network, including an IT genius who’d entered MIT at age 17 but dropped out because he was bored and realized “the most profitable work isn’t always legal.”

Despite Elston’s efforts to paint her as a “good” criminal, there is little reflection — for either Evie or the reader — of the moral issues involved. She’s Walter White-like in this way: if a cancer diagnosis is involved when someone starts to break bad, we’re supposed to look the other way. And as in the Breaking Bad universe, there are plenty of other “morally gray” people in the cast of First Lie Wins. (And there will be a cast: the film rights have already been acquired.)

A little sober reflection of the moral issues involved — some Tony Soprano on the therapist’s couch — would have added complexity to the story, but slowed the pace — the story races to an every-mystery-resolved finish that is both a perfect Hollywood ending and an opportunity for countless sequels. Evie Porter will be with us for a while, I predict. Whether we like her or not.

B- —Jennifer Graham

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