From Green (Wave Upon Wave, 2009), a collection of short stories about growing older and making life choices in middle age.

Alex Harris is having a midlife crisis. He’s overweight; his job in the construction industry stresses him out; and his wife left him for another woman and has custody of their daughter. Now, Alex can’t find the phone number of a woman whom he met the previous week. His search for it takes him back to his old home, where his ex-wife and daughter still live. Before he knows it, he’s out on the street having a cardiac event. So ends the titular story, but Alex features in four more linked tales, which alternate with four others, unrelated to the central narrative. This separation is well-judged, as readers will likely struggle with spending time with Alex for too long. Green writes Alex’s stories in the first person and is adept at building a sense of character and place. His protagonist, however, is thoroughly unlikable—abrasive, bigoted, selfish, and destructively bullheaded. Granted, his story arc is one of redemption; for all the ways that Alex messes up his relationships, he does grow as a person. Even so, he very rarely engenders sympathy. Of the remaining four tales, the two written in the third person are fairly inconsequential: “Hero of Main Street,” a vignette about the unlikely hero of a bank robbery; and “The Caregiver,” in which all is not as it seems in a nursing home. The remaining two show what Green is capable of with a less-objectionable protagonist: “Guardians of Summar’s Point,” in which a threadbare lawyer finds his sense of purpose during a property dispute; and “The Story Quilt,” about a Baltimore “ad man” dogged by supernatural influence. Green has some off-putting quirks, such as shifting midparagraph between past and present tense and putting ordinary words in quotation marks (“Lucia comes out with a mound of tomato ‘red’ objects”), as if their legitimacy were in question. However, he undoubtedly has a knack for slow-building, descriptive narrative. “Guardians,” in particular, is reminiscent of Bill Pronzini’s work, which by itself is enough to suggest promise.

An engaging and immersive, if not always pleasant, set of tales.

In Green’s water-soaked debut thriller, an investigation into a dam explosion that killed three people in a small Kentucky town ends up revealing as much about the town as the culprits responsible.

At the forefront of activities is Sheriff Sam Johnson Jr., who is not pleased when his investigation is taken over by the FBI. Though he proves useful to the feds, Johnson is nonetheless pushed to the back burner of the operation, where he teams up with Joseph Hamiz. Originally identified as a suspect due to his knowledge of dam engineering and his foreign nationality, Hamiz ends up playing a vital role in the investigation. Without Hamiz, for example, there would be little hope of navigating the maze of lies leading to more explosions and a charismatic suspect with a hatred for the government and an understanding of the deadly capabilities of water. Initially, the clichéd local-government–versus-federal-government tension is enough to turn readers against both. Predictably, Johnson’s local knowledge proves much more valuable to federal agents than their expensive electronic devices. The idea that dams are targeted as a weapon of mass destruction is intriguing; the novel elucidates the targeting of these structures and the difficulty authorities have in protecting them in spot-on prose that doesn’t include too many dull technicalities. More specificity, however, may have been welcome if it were to replace the overabundance of adverbs clouding the narrative, as in “Travis lazily opened his eyes and then proceeded to sit groggily on the edge of the couch.” The dialogue is just as draining, as characters explain things that are already obvious and as tedious to read as they must be to say; one character scrambles to clean up a room, exclaiming, “You don’t need to holler at me, honey. Oh, shit. This place is not ready. Well, he’ll have to make do with things the way they are.” Sentences such as these slow the pace of what ultimately proves to be an inventive plot and surprising conclusion.

Beyond a minefield of cop clichés, adverbs and stilted dialogue lies a compelling thriller.