Beautiful Redemption: Chapter 23
Liis runs into Agent Grove on her way into the office. Grove is the mole with Yakuza connections who’s been botching translations for the FBI, in case you totally forgot. It’s ok, the book’s got you covered: any one of his maybe five lines of dialogue in the book makes it clear that he’s clearly a bad guy. Or, you know, mildly grumpy.
“How are the interviews going?” I asked.
Grove’s wiry mustache twitched. “It’s a little early to engage in chitchat, Agent Lindy.”
How are any of these people real secret agents? Person A is casually asking the person they’re secretly investigating about the thing they’re secretly investigating, and Person B is obviously avoiding questions about the job he’s secretly not doing.
Maybe this is a silly thing to get hung up on. That dialogue is pretty innocuous, all things considered. But the thing about Beautiful Redemption is that it’s hard to read without constantly feeling like something is off about the dialogue:
“We’re not finished,” Marks said with a grimace.
Val instantly switched on a smile and turned around. “For now, we are.”
“No, we’re not,” Marks said, his bright blue eyes flaming. […]
Val took a step backward. “But we are… so we are.”
Val explains that she was fighting with Marks because he wants her to move out of the condo she shares with her estranged husband. Liis points out that maybe this isn’t a particularly unreasonable position. Val does not seem to remember her own subplot.
“Well… I wouldn’t like my boyfriend living with his wife either.”
“Marks is not my boyfriend, and Sawyer is not my husband.”
“Your status with Marks is debatable, but you are definitely still married to Sawyer. He hasn’t signed the papers yet?”
We turned into my office, and Val shut the door before falling into a club chair.
“No! He came home from Cutter’s one night, going on and on about how Davies was a mistake.”
Wait, is this the actual flow of the conversation? “I’m not married!” “Aren’t you literally married?” “One time my husband told me about an affair!”
Just in case this isn’t strange enough, somehow this instantly turns into Liis misunderstanding that Val had slept with Davies. Idk. You tell me how this shit is supposed to make sense:
“Wait— Agent Davies?”
“Yes.”
“But you…”
Val’s nose wrinkled, and when recognition hit, she jumped out of the chair. “No! Ew! Ew! Even if I were a lesbian, I’d much prefer ChapStick to lipstick.”
Can anyone in our lesbian readership explain if this actually means something, because I am super confused.
“So, when you said you experienced both Sawyer and Davies, you meant because he’d cheated on you with her.”
“Yes!” she said, still disgusted. […]
“If you say that to anyone else, you might consider clarifying.”
YOU THINK? Oh my god, once wasn’t enough. I need to go through this whole scene again to process how confounding this was.
So over the course of this dialogue:
- Val says that Sawyer isn’t her husband. Liis points out that Sawyer is literally her husband.
- Liis asks if he ever signed the divorce papers. Val responds by mentioning a time when Sawyer came home and told her about an affair with Davies. Which was… not the question.
- Liis responds to Val’s story about how Sawyer and Davies slept together by concluding that Val and Davies slept together. Classic mix-up?
- Liis clarifies how she got confused by pointing out that Val had said she “experienced both Sawyer and Davies”, which was confusing because that isn’t what those words mean at all.
In all fairness about point #3, I totally forgot that Val had previously said this thing about “experiencing” Davies earlier in the novel. But I think it’s still fair to criticize that the only reason why this dialogue is full of wacky misunderstandings is because people are straight up saying things that are either not true or not how the words are conventionally used. And I think this is a pretty fair criticism to make of a book where the entire plot is people struggling to make their feelings understood.
“I’m dating Marks. Sawyer still thinks I’m hung up on him?”
“You are married to him.”
I mean, seriously.
Liis has to run off to an urgent meeting with Thomas about the novel’s other B-plots, which are all totally resolved now, apparently.
“I can’t make them wait any longer,” Thomas said. “The Office of the Inspector General wants an arrest.”
“Travis?”
He turned. […] “No, no… Grove. Travis will start his training soon.”
Oh. Good. I’m glad that this subplot that the characters were heavily emotionally invested in about a character that two entire books in this series were about has gotten completely, abruptly resolved off-screen. Like when they made a Star Wars sequel and killed off the most beloved original character off-screen and just had a single line of dialogue about it!
“Constance will send everything you have to the US Attorney’s office. They’re going to stage an armed robbery at the gas station he frequents. He’ll be shot. Witnesses will testify that he was killed.”
Well, that doesn’t sound like an arrest. Which is how Thomas described this earlier on this page, so…
“Then, Tarou and Benny will think they’re shit out of luck instead [of] destroying evidence because Grove was busted”
Wow, that’s a bleak picture of the FBI. It’s probably not as wrong as I’d like to think it is, but…
“Sounds like a home run, sir.”
The book tries to save how bad this is, but somehow “write literally anything other than ‘Sounds like a home run’ about a plan to murder a person rather than give him a trial” wasn’t Plan A.
Thomas winced at my cold response
Uh, yeah, it sounds like that whole “we’re gonna murder the mole because that’s easiest” plan was kinda your idea, Judgy McJudgerson
Things get awkward. Not because of the plan to murder a dude. Because of romantic tension.
“Why did you call me in here if you didn’t want to see me? You could have just as easily had Constance take care of it.”
“Because, once in a while, Liis, I just need to see your face. I need to hear your voice. Some days are tougher for me than others.” […]
“You all but asked for this. You wanted your feelings for me to replace your feelings for Camille. You needed someone closer to blame because you couldn’t blame her.”
As you might have assumed from my little spiel at the beginning of this post, very little of this conversation makes any sense.
“I thought, for two wounded people, if we were invested enough, if we felt enough, then we could make it.”
“We’re not wounded, Liis. We’re matching scars.”
Did we somehow skip a chapter where Liis’s previously never-mentioned sister got engaged to Jackson or something?
Liis tells Thomas that that if she’s going to be his future, “I’d need you to move on from the past”. Again. Like it’s her job or something. As soon as she says this, she sees that Thomas has removed pictures of Camille from his desk and has instead put up the photo taken of him with Liis at Travis’s wedding. Because symbolism in the world of Beautiful Redemption usually comes in the heavy-handed variety.
Liis goes back to her office phased by the revelation. Val storms into her office, followed by Marks, who have decided to continue their fight in Liis’s office for some reason. Thomas shows up too. Why the hell not. Liis delivers the best line in the entire book.
“I just need you toddlers to get the fuck out of my office!”
Anyway, there’s one chapter and an epilogue left in the book, so get excited to wrap up this story next week. Somehow.
Val’s nose wrinkled, and when recognition hit, she jumped out of the chair. “No! Ew! Ew! Even if I were a lesbian, I’d much prefer ChapStick to lipstick.”
99% sure this means Val likes the butch look on women. Perhaps I’m being unfairly sensitive, but this also smacks of Zoey’s “I’m totally down with the gays lol” kind of attitude on McGuire’s part. I mean, her characters are all completely hetero, but she’ll sure acknowledge that gay people exist!
You’re kidding me that this is being wrapped up in one chapter. The hell?? This novel has terrible pacing. Did you say that this one was self-published? Because it reeeeeeally shows. Please tell us if she thanks an editor in the acknowledgements.
My favorite (“favorite”) thing about these books is that every conversation is actually between two and four completely unrelated conversations that the characters involved are having with themselves.
Back up. Is Thomas talking about actually murdering the guy, or about faking the guy’s death and taking him to some secret prison? I guess it doesn’t matter in story terms; the latter just seems more likely given the phrasing (“Witnesses will testify” and “Tarou and Benny will think,” not ‘we’re actually going to straight-up murder a dude when we could stick him in a holding cell forever with no legal consequences for us’) and the current political climate.
Ok, THIS time he IS saying “we are 100% killing this person to death”. I like how this is the second week in a row I had to clarify whether the male lead in this cheesy romance novel is or is not planning murder. That’s interesting.
I’m fairly certainly the FBI should not be legally allowed to kill their mole. Like the higher ups should not be like, yeah. Totally knock that guy off. Prison’s are full enough as it is. Like what they hell? This is what McGuire thinks the FBI is? Killing people without due process? I mean I know sometimes America does that but we usually get super upset about it. Not Eh, just another day at work for the FBI without netflixs.