After a strong start, I reeeeaaaalllly slowed down on the summer reading. I’ll review a few more books this week and have another four on the go (I’ve substituted a few shorter ones into the stack already!), so I just need to decide on a final two and should make it by the end of the month.

I earmarked The Singer’s Gun (2010), Emily St. John Mandel’s second novel, for the challenge because I’d heard that her new one coming out in September, Exit Party, was a sequel of sorts – more on that later. You can see signs of the intricate literary suspense she would become known for, but this has a comparatively simple plot. After his Italian honeymoon, Anton Waker makes the baffling choice to stay on Ischia rather than returning to New York with his bride. He’s left behind a corporate job he got under false pretences to live and work in an island hotel. Small-time crime is a family legacy: his parents’ antique business is a front for stolen goods; and with his cousin, Aria, he sold fake passports to immigrants. (His clients included Elena, who was from the Arctic North of Canada and later became his secretary.) He’s promised to do one last job for Aria on Ischia, for a cool $18,000, and then he’s out.

Of course, it’s never going to be that simple. For one thing, the stakes have escalated – Aria is being investigated for people trafficking – and for another, the title object, like Chekhov’s, is bound to cause unforeseen consequences. It’s a compact story with just a handful of major characters. The other is Alex Broden, a State Department detective who rarely makes it home for her little girl’s bedtime because she’s obsessed with solving a couple of people-trafficking cases. I felt Mandel was tempted to turn this into a sort of police procedural, yet Broden gets too little page time for readers to develop much of an interest in her. Anton is a bit of a blank as well; a rare detail that makes him sympathetic is that he misses his one-eyed cat, Jim, so much that he has him catnapped and flown over to Italy.

The shipping industry and a hotel setting prefigure elements of The Glass Hotel (2020), which is Mandel’s finest work. As for the sequel: Exit Party is described as being about one “Ari Waker” in 2031 Los Angeles. It has a postapocalyptic setup (like Station Eleven) and the Moon is a setting (like in Sea of Tranquillity). I’m guessing that Ari is Aria, 20 years later. I’ll find out when I read Exit Party in September! This was an easy and relatively engaging read, but probably not a necessary trip into Mandel’s back catalogue unless you’re a completist. (New purchase – Awesomebooks.com)