Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge the murder of her father in 1880s Arkansas. She hires the hardened and hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track the murderer, Tom Chaney, through Indian country and bring him to justice. Along the way, they pick up a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is seeking Chaney for crimes committed in Texas.

Mattie is iron-willed, single-minded, guileless and pure in her intentions. She comes from a salt-of-the-earth Christian family, which puts her at odds with the jaded Cogburn who has spent his career hunting down men who have proven themselves immune to ordinary justice. Both characters are practical and unsentimental, though their temperaments have evolved from very different experiences.

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. The author, Humphrey Cobb, fought with the Canadian army on the front lines in France in World War I. While he points out that the events of the novel are fiction, much of what he describes is obviously based on what he witnessed in the trenches, and the core of the book’s horrifying plot comes from actual historical events.

The book opens with two soldiers watching the tired march of a bedraggled infantry unit. Duval is fresh out of school and has not yet seen any action on the front lines. He’s excited to blaze a path to glory. Langlois is a veteran who has already served with this unit, the 181st Infantry. He has no illusions about the nature of the war.

Having just read Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Plot, I found this book to be a difficult slog indeed. The Plot is genre fiction (a thriller), and as such, the author takes care to limit her cast to a manageable number of characters, to delineate those characters clearly, to define where and when scenes take place, to focus the scenes on consequential action and dialog, to build tension and steadily advance a coherent plot.

You’ll find none of that in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and it’s not because he’s a bad writer. It’s by design.

This is an exceedingly clever novel. The inside flap of the dust cover gives three definitions of the word “plot,” and this book is about all three:

1. a sequence of events in a narrative, as in a novel, for example.
2. an immoral or illegal plan
3. a designated section of land for a gravesite

The Tenth Man opens in a German prison near the end of World War II. Thirty or so Frenchmen, civilian prisoners of war from all walks of life, are packed together in a dingy cell. Cut off from the outside world, and with nothing to do, they hang on to an old watch and an alarm clock, reminders of order in a world that has fallen into chaos, while they glumly await the war’s end.

The only information they can glean from the outside world is the noise they can hear through the prison wall. Though they’re in German-occupied territory, behind the lines, every now and then they hear a grenade or a burst of gunfire.

We first meet Norwood Pratt, a red-haired twenty-three-year-old from Ralph, Texas, as he’s being discharged from the Marines on account of family hardship. His father has just passed away, leaving his sister Vernell with no one to care for her. Vernell “was a heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture. She was old enough to look after herself and quite large enough, but in many ways she was a great big baby.”

Norwood leaves his California Marine base in such a rush, he forgets to collect the seventy dollars owed him by his friend, Joe William Reese.

The unnamed narrator of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold pieces together a picture of events that unfolded on an infamous day twenty three years prior. In a small town at the mouth of a river on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, in what appears to be the second decade of the nineteen hundreds, a wealthy young man with no apparent enemies was murdered in broad daylight, in front of a crowd that included most of the town’s citizens.

Meursault, the main character of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, is so passive and indifferent, he simply lets life happen to him, and what happens isn’t good. He tells his story as if he’s an uninterested and slightly befuddled spectator watching things happen to someone else.

Meursault lives in Algiers. The year is around 1942, though the events of the war in Europe don’t impinge on the story. Meursault lives in a simple apartment and, working as a clerk in a shipping company, earns just enough to get by. He doesn’t much care for his job, or anything else.

Ordo, a novella of just 73 pages, is the second work in Hard Case Crime’s Double Feature. Ordo Tupikos, a sailor in the US Navy in the early 1970s, is enjoying some down time with friends during a work break. One of them asks him why he never told them he had been married to movie star Dawn Devayne.

Ordo thinks his friend, a practical joker, is kidding, so he brushes him off. But the friend is serious. He shows Ordo a magazine article about Devayne, in which she describes her life before Hollywood. The article mentions her early marriage to Ordo, and includes a photo of them on the courthouse steps just after they’d taken their vows.

The Plains of Cement is the third and final book in Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky collection, which follows three down-and-out characters through the streets of London in the fall and early winter of 1929.

Book one, The Midnight Bell, follows the waiter, Bob, as he falls in love with prostitute Jenny Maples. Book two, The Siege of Pleasure, picks up with Jennie’s story just days after book one leaves off. Most of it is a flashback to events three years earlier that led Jennie into prostitution.