Felice Picano's 3 favorite reads in 2023

The Strugatsky brothers’ wrote Solaris—twice a film, though the Russian one is better. Also, Roadside Picnic, which spawned the haunting film, Stalker, territory Jeff Vandermeer has attempted to improve on.

So, I’d naturally be interested in reading DMI. A Russian detective on solo winter mountain vacation to ski and relax, stays at a place named after a famous climber who plunged to his death. At first the staff seems kind of ordinary and the guests who mostly arrive after him, seem a little off-kilter. But...not everything, in fact, almost no one and nothing is who (or what) it first appears to be.

I loved how the authors kept me totally, entertainingly, distracted with red herrings the size of Orcas, until the story spins delightfully out of our rigid narrator’s comprehension and control: for a totally unexpected and fully SF ending. 

I was completely immersed in Yokoyama’s huge and dense police novel Six Four and his detective mystery Seventeen, so why not try Prefecture D?

In this four-part book, brilliant detectives are not only minor characters, they’re not remotely the focus. Instead, we get bureaucrats in middle-high positions in the unnamed Police Department’s administration as protagonists. They are not only individuals in ambition, age, and character, they’re also each trying doggedly to solve problems others – including the detectives – not only don’t see, but interfere with constantly, making an even bigger mess of things.

I loved how the author drew me into the lives and work lives of four characters who I’d never suspected I could possibly be interested in, never mind be heroes and villains. And, how intimately, yet dryly humorous, and always surprising, their stories are. And then Yokoyama’s solutions kept me guessing each time.

This is an unexpected gift from a writer with solid literary credentials for his novels The Museum Guard, and The Birdwatcher.

It’s a young man’s romance that understands and presents love passionately, completely ill-advisedly, yet in the end, successfully. When our hero travels to western Canada he falls for a beauty with a creepy photographer husband hanging about.

She is a professional psychic and communicator with the dead who presents her discoveries to a mostly indifferent public. Meanwhile, her cynical, unloving husband finds and photographs scenes of shocking vehicle accident carnage for a mysterious tycoon in England with surprisingly good luck. Or is it?

I enjoyed this well told yet twisted story first for the characters who were totally one of a kind—even the walk-ons—and for how I never guessed how any of them could possibly succeed in getting what they really want. And then when they do get what they want, exactly what it will cost?