Faceless Killers – Wallander #1 – Henning Mankel

I can’t help but wonder if I would have enjoyed this book without Kenneth Branagh’s careworn face in my mind’s eye.  Faceless Killers is a grim story – you wouldn’t expect a cheery romp to be called Faceless Killers, after all – and the voice (whether the translator’s or Mankel’s) is spare and disengaged.  The murders are particularly horrid, the landscape is bleak and growing colder, and so for that matter is Wallander’s life.  His wife has left him and he doesn’t understand why and wants her back, and his daughter – once adoring – is now an aloof twenty-something, and his father is growing senile, and he is existing on coffee and minutes of sleep.  It doesn’t get much better.  The killer is elusive, and public exposure of the only real clue they have leads directly to another murder and another set of killers to catch.  One unusual effect of this story of the endless slog of hard work and at times near hopelessness of the investigation is that the reader is given almost as great an uplift as the detectives when there is a break in the case.

The Masterpiece Mystery series stuck closely to the book’s plot, trimming and consolidating as needed but otherwise communicating both the mystery and the characterization beautifully.  And I do have to give Branagh a great deal of credit: he was brilliant in the role, and indelible.  The second book, The Dogs of Riga, has not yet been adapted (as far as I know), so I’ll have the chance to see how I do with Wallander without the tv screen in my head.

 

Pirate King: Laurie R. King

I won this book, to my intense delight, from LibraryThing’s Early Readers giveaway – many thanks.

I did a read-through of most of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novels (how funny that Holmes takes second billing) in preparation for reading my shiny, exciting advance readers copy of Pirate King – so it was almost a jolt to open it and find it so very light-hearted. It seems Laurie R. (Arr) King felt that the reader and Mary Russell both needed a break from the wrought, high intensity stories that came before, and went all out to provide one. Pirate King is just this side of farce, anchored on this side by Mary Russell’s incredulous character, some very real danger faced by the main characters, and the knowledge that yes, the silent movie biz in the Roaring 20′s really was kind of that insane (one of the most outrageously outré characters was, in fact, a real person). It’s fast and funny, it’s very different, and it’s a great deal of fun.

The premise – something strange is going on amongst the cast and/or crew of a production company in which the royal family has invested, making he problems of national concern – sends Russell off on her own (after, as usual, about a minute at home) to investigate. Fflyte Films is making a movie about a production company making a movie based on The Pirates of Penzance, and while filming the movie within the movie the film crew within the film will be taken by real pirates. (Savvy?) The logical outcome for the book, of course, is that the real film crew filming the antics of the fictional film crew filming the antics of the actors playing actors will, of course, run into real pirates … And that doesn’t even touch on the issue Mary Russell was sent to investigate.

I think, told from any other point of view than Russell’s first person narrative, this might have suffered. But it is suffused with Russell’s overriding emotion of oh you have got to be joking along with the hurried, harried, harassed state that has her in the middle of situations before she can even recognize them, and it is wonderfully funny. I think in any hands besides Laurie R. King’s this would have been an almighty mess.

The occasional use of silent film title screens is beautiful. Russell is herself, only perhaps moreso as she is kept off-balance through so much of the story. And her reunion with Holmes is a joy. Nothing is as it seems, nothing seems as it is, and it is, it is a pretty glorious thing to read the Pirate King.

 

 

Jockeys and Jewels – Bev Petterson

This was a Member Giveaway on LibraryThing, in ebook form – thank you!

The basic storyline: Kurt was a cop, specializing in undercover work, until he burned out on the deceit and absence of trust and the danger. His new life is as a trainer of racehorses, some of which are his. Then his old boss calls asking – begging – him to come back for one more case: Kurt’s old partner, who was just murdered in circumstances involving the racetrack. Reluctantly, he takes a couple of horses and heads to Calgary to look into it.

One of the “people of interest” in the case is an apprentice jockey, Julie: cute, of course, blonde, of course, and adorable. Dimples. It takes Kurt about four minutes to eliminate her from suspicion – she was the last apart from the murderer to see his ex-partner alive, and that’s it. Her adorableness has nothing whatsoever to do with it, of course.

What it says on the tin for this one is: mystery/romance set in the racing world. And it hits all of those elements pretty equally.  Kurt is looking for the reason the dead cop, Connor, was investigating the track’s stables, why he was murdered, as well as who did it. Naturally enough, he finds himself irresistibly attracted to Julie, and vice versa. And the book is placed in a detailed racing setting. Unfortunately, I think it fell a little bit short on all three components.

The mystery was not terribly successful, to my mind. Kurt has a total of one real suspect once he’s ruled out Julie, a horse-abusing short-tempered bully called Otto. Not to spoil anything, but what are the odds he’s guilty? Karma is big here.  The idea is that Connor helped Otto with a flat tire and saw something that raised his antennae, and looking into that was what got him killed. Is Otto using the horses to smuggle something? Drugs? Wait, what was the title of the book again? Yeah. Having a hugely massive spoiler in the title is just unfortunate.

Which is in addition to the fact that I find the title rather unfortunate for itself. Alliteration for alliteration’s sake – spoiler or not – is not a positive.

The romance is … quick. It begins with Julie distracted in nearly every other paragraph by how attractive Kurt is, and Kurt being distracted in nearly every other other paragraph by Julie’s cheekbones. And it runs fairly predictably from there, and features the least romantic love scenes I have ever read, not that I’m a connoisseur. Kurt is mildly Neanderthal, and it’s always from his point of view. And – not that this is necessarily a complaint, but it is odd – there is not much mention of anything below the waist. It almost seemed as if the author was uncomfortable with writing that part.

The writing, speaking of which, is well done, apart from some questionable punctuation and a considerable amount of head-hopping. This is something I’ve been guilty of, something which lots of books – older books especially – do, and which is generally frowned on now. This is an excellent example of why. There were some passages where point of view switches from one sentence to the next, and it’s flat out confusing.

I’ve loved horses as long as I’ve loved anything, and I enjoy books set in their worlds. It’s been a long time since I’ve read one, actually, possibly since the young adult horse books I used to revel in. Here there is no doubt that Bev Petterson knows what she’s talking about; she talks the talk with authority.  She Gets It Right according to the strictures of Judith Tarr.  The danger of racing is emphasized, which is a great choice to make – although it does also emphasize the fact that Julie’s a young woman.  I have two problems with the horse-world aspect, and they are both a little surprising to me. First is that in a book filled with horses, only one really becomes a character in the story. The rest are just creatures that eat and buck and run, lacking personality.

The other thing I didn’t like about the setting was the use of jargon. The author avoided the classic “As you know, Sarah” fault, so common in CSI, which involves one character telling another something they both should know as well as they know the alphabet, but which the audience needs explained (“Ah – look: petechial hemorrhaging – the blood vessels in the eyes have ruptured, indicating asphyxiation”) … The problem is that the way she avoids this is to not explain half of the jargon. The best way to clue a reader in is to engineer the context. This doesn’t happen here, over and over. I didn’t have any idea what a claims race is, and I still don’t, really; there was frequent mention of tack and equipment with which I was completely unfamiliar, and I have to say: if I don’t know what it is after a lifetime of reading about horses, then I can only imagine a complete newcomer to the environs would be baffled by it plus a lot more.

I can’t say I cared about anyone in the story; some of the minor characters were enjoyable, but the main focus was on people I couldn’t drum up much interest in. Kurt’s lack of finesse as a lover (in the old-fashioned use of “lover” as well as that more commonly used now) is off-putting, and Julie – a driven, ambitious apprentice jockey who wants to ride more than anything else – just made me angry as she proceeded to get comprehensively drunk the night before her first big race. The stupidity blew my mind. “Kurt stepped from Lazer’s stall, his expression inscrutable, and the butterflies in her stomach morphed into giant moths. Was he disgusted with her drinking last night?” If he wasn’t, I was.

It was a quick read, and mostly enjoyable; it could have been better.

 

LTER: The Body in the Gazebo

I received the hardcover of The Body in the Gazebo as a LibraryThing Early Reader book, and I was tickled – I’ve liked Katherine Hall Page’s Faith Fairchild series from the beginning.  It’s one of several “cozy mystery” series about a caterer who keeps finding bodies and solving the attached mysteries, and then after you find out who dunnit you can apply yourself to the recipes in the back of the book.  (I always wonder with these series, though, why characters like Faith Fairchild or Goldy Schulz or [insert cozy hero/ine here] don’t send friends and family screaming away from them; would you really want to be friends with someone who seems to (sometimes literally) stumble over a body every six months?)

The jacket art is very attractive, but odd; I don’t know what the red-and-white-check tablecloth is supposed to represent.  It makes it look as though Faith opens an Italian restaurant, or goes on a picnic.

I like the series … but I don’t like Faith that much.  She is, avowedly and proudly, a snob.  Any food which costs less than one of my hours’ pay, or clothing which costs less than one of my weeks’ pay, is beneath her, and it’s annoying and extremely unattractive.  And she’s *still* stunned that she can bring herself to live in this tiny provincial place.

Besides that snobbery – an irritation that is not unique to Faith among fictional characters – this was a well-done mystery with a very different slant.  There is a body, but Faith isn’t the one to stumble over it here, and in fact it’s a body long gone to dust before she was born.  As Pix frantically prepares for her son’s wedding and the two-week-long gathering his soon-to-be in-laws have arranged for the two families, her mother (Ursula) falls abruptly, alarmingly ill.  Faith promises to help look after her while Pix is gone, which is one of the only reasons Pix goes – and almost as soon as Pix is gone, her mother begins to unfold a story to Faith, looking for her help.  It is a secret, even from Pix and her brother, which has been dormant for decades – and isn’t anymore. Intertwined with the old murder story is a current mystery involving funds missing from a church account to which only Tom has access, along with a smaller but still personally important mystery involving a person from Pix’s past at the wedding.

The storytelling is excellent.  The interludes of Ursula’s story drew me in, and I would honestly have enjoyed staying there for the whole book; Ursula as a girl was engaging, and that story was terrific.  It’s fascinating to see how Katherine Hall Page has grown as a storyteller from the first Faith Fairchild mystery, which was very much in the frothy cozy vein; later books like Gazebo show greater depth and almost, at times, poetry.  (I wonder if KHP has written anything in a different vein under a different name. I’d like to see it.)  However I feel in general about Faith, I love her marriage to Tom.  The problems they have had in past books have been believable and painful, and I like them much better than I do her.  I like Faith’s assistants, and I like Pix, though she carries some cliches with her.  Actually, many of the characters and situations carry along some been-there-done-that baggage, which is one reason I like the Fairchild marriage so much: it feels genuine.

The reason I rate this at three and a half stars instead of higher has quite a bit to do with said cliches, and the tiresome repetition that series like this can’t seem to manage to avoid: in each book there is a certain set of touchstones which have to be included, such as a synopsis of the first book, and the story of how Faith got to where she is as a caterer and as a minister’s wife in Aleford, and brief summaries of any other books that are touched upon in the current story.  Some of these are more necessary than others, and I’m sure I’m wrong when I grumble that the wording is always the same.  There just has to be a better way than this infodump.  The main reason, though, for the less than very high rating has a great deal to do with part of the climax. Melodramatic and over the top, it felt absurd, and as though it had been dropped in from another book (either an earlier one in this series, from which it felt very familiar, or … Robert Ludlum or something).  Pity; I enjoyed most of the rest quite a lot.

 

LTER: One Was a Soldier, Julia Spencer-Fleming

I do get lucky with these LTER’s.  Oh, not all – there was one self-published ESL fantasy that I doubt I’ll ever finish, and the book about writing which was extremely uneven, and Roma was not something I’d ever have bought for myself (and would have been right not to).  But then there were Chesterton and Schell and McKinley – and now, just received last week, another book I might not have bought for myself: One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 

The only reason I read this one so soon after receiving it was that I finished a couple of books, and I do always feel a subtle pressure to hurry with books I’ve received for review.  And – - What a book.  What a superlative book.  (Like how I did that?  I couldn’t decide on a superlative, so I sort of used them all.)  I’m actually a little surprised, in retrospect, that I put my name in for it, and so very glad I did.  But it doesn’t sound like me: the jacket description is interesting, but not my usual cuppa: an Iraq war veteran, Grace Fergusson, comes home after 18 months out, and finds coming home isn’t so simple as stepping off the plane.  And when a fellow vet is found dead, she won’t believe it’s suicide.  By no means does this sound bad or uninteresting – just not usually what I would pick up and spend time with.  Idiot.  

The above is the kernel of the story – but the book is a great deal more.  It *is* a story about coming back from war, and the good and wonderful and bad and ugly and impossible of readapting to being a civilian.  It’s about PTSD, and coping with it (or not), and coping with someone who has it (or not).  It’s a story about a romance, a love.  It’s a story about a murder, perhaps, and a theft, perhaps – or perhaps more than one of each.  It’s a police procedural, with a grain of cozy mixed in as amateurs get in on the detecting – which isn’t because the police are stupid or any of the other clichés.  

That’s one of the main things the book is about: avoiding clichés.  Yeah, one of the amateur detectives is Clare Fergusson, the girlfriend of the town’s chief of police (Russ Van Alstyne) – a trope you’ll find in a good half dozen series I could put my hands on.  But Clare is a helicopter pilot, is just coming home from Iraq at the start of the book, is an Episcopalian priest, with genuine faith in God if not the details of the Episcopalian rites used to honor Him, and is suffering from PTSD and dependency on assorted substances.  And she is deeply in love with Russ, a good man who is 14 years older and a Vietnam vet and an agnostic (or atheist; I don’t know how deep his disbelief runs), and who is deeply in love with her. 

The pattern of disdaining the usual ruts a story with these basic bones might fall into runs true throughout: the setting is real enough that I could call the Realtor who hopes at one point to sell Clare a house and start looking for a home in Millers Kill, New York (great name).  (Heh – there’s a community on Livejournal called “Would you really want to live in Millers Kill?”  Well, maybe not – although some of the danger of the place is effectively offset by a terrific police force…)  And the characters … There are a lot of them, and introduced rapidly enough in the beginning that I had a little trouble processing – there was some flipping back of pages as the people introduced in the first mini-chapter showed up again in the primary timeline, and as I matched Russ and Clare to the main protagonists listed on the cover.  But once I had them, I had them, and never lost track of any of them again – which is an accomplishment for a writer.  And by the end I not only knew who was who, I cared who was who and who was with whom and where and why, from Clare and Russ (on whom I’m developing a healthy crush) to the secondary and tertiary characters.  I was inwardly hopping up and down when one second-tier character was offered a wonderful opportunity.  I muttered a dismayed curse when a character only tangentially involved in the book died off-screen.  I was delighted by the main characters’ delight, and felt a cold, disappointed, sympathetic horror at the terrifically stupid and yet nastily understandable choice a secondary made – one which wounded what may be one of my new heroes.  That scene is going to haunt me – along with several others, but maybe that rejected possibility most of all.  I hate that that happened to characters I truly like – and I love that Julia Spencer-Fleming made the choices she did and made me care.  One of the greatest gifts a reader can receive is a book – or, even better, a series – in which the characters become friends, people I look forward to visiting with in rereads and catching up with in new books.   It’s pretty rare. 

I’d never read Julia Spencer-Fleming before, or heard of Clare and Russ.  I hate starting a series in the middle; it would have been fun to follow the two of them from their first meeting to One Was a Soldier.  I’m absolutely buying the preceding books in the series (possibly new: income tax refund!), but this book was one huge spoiler for the story, and seems to have resolved a lot of plotlines that run through the others.  This is a setting and these are characters which grow and change, and it will be interesting to see what things were like when this all began.  Interesting? I can’t wait. 

There may be flaws in this book, but I can’t think of any.  Any hiccups I had with it were flaws in my reading of it, not in the writing; I didn’t read the first pages with enough attention and felt foolish when I realized I had skipped the second part of a descriptive phrase, proceeding with the belief that Clare was a black woman, not “black-clad woman”.  (That’s part of the peril of starting a series at the end: I would have known Clare if I’d started at the beginning, and been as glad to see her as her parishioners.)  The non-linear story-telling used until real-time catches up with counseling-session-time threw me for a loop until I caught on and started paying close attention to the dates at the head of each section; it was not a frivolous use of time-hopping.  It took a few minutes for me, Roman Catholic born and bred, to adapt to not just a priest who is a woman but a priest who is a woman who sleeps with her boyfriend (and her homecoming both scandalized and tickled me), and also a priest who was an Army officer and helicopter pilot before her ordination and whose function in the Army isn’t as chaplain.  (Come on – is there a more fascinating character anywhere in the genre?)  I loved it.  I absolutely loved it.

 

Pearl: The Poe Shadow

I loved The Dante Club (reviewed in July).  It was intelligent, and pure geeky fun, and I had a lovely time picking my way among the corpses in 19th century Boston.  So I jumped at the chance to take The Poe Shadow on paperbackswap.com.

I should preface this by admitting I haven’t read much Poe.  I have a couple of collections; I’ve just … never gotten around to it.  But I’m familiar with his most famous poems, I knew who C. Auguste Dupin was, and I knew a little about Poe’s life and reputation – about the fact that though he was often condemned for being a drunkard he was not, and in fact had a very low tolerance for alcohol.  And about his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, and his despair at her early death.  But the only work I’ve read about him before this was some dreadful thing I can’t recall the name of and won’t look up which cast him and P.T. Barnum as detectives… This had to be light years better. 

And it was.  Especially in the beginning I had as much fun as I did with The Dante Club.  The story is told in the first person by Quentin Clark, an attorney in Baltimore in 1849 who has long enjoyed reading Poe.  “Enjoyed” is actually an understatement; Clark’s interest in the poet and his work begins to sound like obsession, and that becomes full-blown as the book proceeds – but it begins with his defiance of his family’s opinion that Poe is a dangerous influence.  He reads every scrap that he can find, and enters into a correspondence with Poe, even offering his legal services pro bono if they are needed to defend the magazine Poe dreams of starting. 

Upon Poe’s death, Clark is distressed by the tone of newspaper articles and essays.  Most of them paint him, obliquely or outright, as a drunk, and most take the tone that he didn’t contribute much to the universe and won’t much be missed.  Outraged, Clark begins a campaign to try to gain retractions and corrections, to try to rehabilitate Poe’s reputation, which leads by various paths to his quest to find the real man who was Poe’s inspiration for Dupin, the genius of detection.  Surely the real Dupin can discover the truth about Poe’s death and clear his name. 

The quest leads Clark to Paris, which is in an upheaval of government; it has not been so long since the French Revolution, and now the republic is beginning to give way to a new empire under the Bonapartes.  It’s dangerous, but the obsession is strong, and Clark soon has two possible Dupins on his hands: the attorney Baron Dupin, whom Clark had written earlier, and Duponte, who is the new lead contender.  Baron Dupin is a charlatan and showman, and Clark decides he can’t be the one – especially as he learns more about Duponte, an investigator who fits the descriptions in Poe’s stories perfectly.  He works to bring the latter back to Baltimore, and to complicate matters the former comes too, along with his wife (a beautiful assassin) and a matched set of men who appear to be hunting him for reasons unknown. 

It’s not a spoiler to state that Clark winds up accused of a murder; that’s given on the first page of the book.  And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that that’s about when the book started to lose me.  Halfway through the book, not the first page.  Clark’s need to exonerate Poe grows to a state in which he can do nothing else; he loses his practice, and, through her family, his fiancee, and shortly is in danger of losing the home he inherited from his parents as his aunt brings a case against him stating he has lost his sanity.  Between simply being a little fed up with a man who would sacrifice everything without even a thought – and not even so much the fact of the sacrifice as the pain it caused his family and beloved Hattie – and behaving in a thoroughly unreasonable manner in pursuit of a noble goal; and being more than a little fed up with the prospects of an International Conspiracy (I hate International Conspiracy as Tolkien despised allegory: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence”) – the book started to lose me, and never really got me back.  I finished it – but it was a long slog.  I read a review that referred to Clark as an unreliable narrator: quite right.  While he doesn’t necessarily intentionally lie to the reader, he makes wild assumptions, changes his mind, and becomes somewhat unhinged.  That reviewer had a time of it with the mid-19th century language; I didn’t find that nearly as difficult as I often do (it’s usually harder to read pseudo-19th-century than the real thing, I find).  That was the least of my problems with the book. 

On the whole, I’m glad I read it.  I learned a good deal – for one thing, I’m going to try very hard to avoid referring to Poe as “Edgar Allan Poe”, as he hated it, with good reason.  For another, it took the taste of that other Poe/Barnum book out of my mouth; there’s a certain irony in this book rehabilitating the name of Poe for me as Clark fought to do in Baltimore.  And I’m going to read Poe, soon.  But I don’t think this will come up for a reread very soon.  It felt disjointed in places, and as though Pearl lost the reins for a while and was a passenger in a runaway carriage: as if Pearl’s research into Poe and his death created in him much the same condition as he describes in Clark.  Method writing?  Maybe.  The Poe Shadow both explained and created allure about Poe, and raised Poe in my estimation while, sadly, lowering Pearl a notch or two.  But this didn’t kill my respect; on the contrary.  I did love Dante; I do respect the tremendous amount of work that went into making The Poe Shadow - and his third, latest book is The Last Dickens.  I look forward to it.

 

Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

Over the weekend, unable to put my hands on Dear Theo or To Kill a Mockingbird (there must be a box of books somewhere) and not quite up to committing to Song for Arbonne or Lions of Al-Rassan, I picked up something I received a while back through paperbackswap.com … Why on earth I was yelled at once for sending a book that had a little yellowing of the pages, but it’s perfectly fine for people to send out ex-library books with pages falling out (it’s happened a few times), I don’t get.  Still, the book sounded intriguing, and it fit my requirements.

Except … My strong recommendation is: read this, but do not eat rice at any point directly before, during, or after reading it.  And especially don’t do as I did, which was to put rice on to cook, open the book and start to read the first chapter – about the discovery of a body covered and filled with thousands of blowflies and their maggots – and then sit down to a dinner of said rice and scallops.  Really.  Don’t.  Did I mention the maggots?

(Spoilers follow regarding deaths, but not the killer…)

The book takes place in 1865 Boston.  The Civil War is only months over – Abraham Lincoln is only months dead; the city is filled with returning soldiers in all conditions.  And in the heart of the city, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is translating Dante.  There never has been an American edition of The Divine Comedy, and any British ones have been (for kind of obvious reasons) unavailable.  The translation was something Longfellow worked on periodically – until his wife, Fanny, died in a terrible accident, and it became almost a therapy for him; he has worked on the translations solely for years.  One of his friends speculates that if he were to return to his own poetry, he would not be able to not write about Fanny, and she would become just a word.

- – Pictures taken, with gratitude, from Matthew Pearl’s site. No pictures of Greene are immediately to be found.

As the translation has progressed, Longfellow has formed a Dante Club, along with George Washington Greene, Oliver Wendell Holmes,  James Russell Lowell, and their publisher, James Thomas Fields (also a poet).  At meetings each Wednesday a canto of the piece is discussed, and the translation is perfected, and then dinner.

Holmes, as a professor of medicine at Harvard, is tangentially involved when the body of a murdered man is brought in.  It is that of a chief justice, who was supposed to be away and therefore had not been missed for several days, and was at the last found naked under a blank white flag by a servant out in the house’s grounds – still, if her testimony was to be believed, alive, though barely.  No, say all of the pathologists – impossible, for he was the one who was horrifyingly infested with flies and maggots and wasps – these only eat dead flesh, so therefore he must not have been alive.

Except he was.

The lives of the men of the Dante Club incorporate and move past this murder of a man of their set, but with whom none of them were particularly close.  And then there comes word of a second death – this one of a minister, who was found in the crypt of his church, buried naked upside-down up to his waist … with his feet on fire.

Again Holmes is one of the first to see the body – and it strikes him in a horrible blow that this death, and in fact that first one, bear a very strong resemblance to punishments meted out in Dante’s Inferno.  He flies back to his Dante Club to discuss this, and the first impulse is to take it to the police – but they are stopped by the fact that Longfellow’s translation is already meeting with opposition.  It’s too Catholic a poem, it’s too graphic, it’s not fitting for a Protestant country or state or – most importantly – city or college.  There are those who feel it their duty to fight Dante – along with other heretics like Darwin – tooth and nail.  And any adverse publicity – such as “Dante inspired horrid murders” – would be the end of the project.  This isn’t, to their credit, important because of the potential lost investment (though that’s never so far from Fields’s mind), but for Dante’s sake: they want him to be known.  Shakespeare lets men know themselves; Dante lets men know each other.

At that point it becomes a four-way race – among the Dante Club; the police, who are a new body and not exactly Boston’s Finest at this point; Nicholas Rey, a mulatto police patrolman, the first black cop in Boston (at least), who is not exactly having an easy time of it among much the rest of the police force or the criminal element; and, of course, the killer, whose timeline seems to be connected to the Dante Club’s: the murders seem to be taking place just days before the cantos to which they pay tribute.

I knew little about any of the poets involved; Longfellow’s work, of course, is an old friend, but I knew nothing about the poet.  I  don’t think I knew Oliver Wendell Holmes was a poet; I have his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table on hand (though I have not yet read it), and honestly I think I thought he was a lawyer – which is a little ironic.  I wasn’t at all familiar with Lowell, or with Fields, their publisher – and this was a fascinating look at poetry and publishing in 19th century Boston.  I’ve said before that real persons’ appearances in fiction make me a little uneasy, but in truly well done historical fiction – when the people themselves are gone and hopefully their heirs are on board – isn’t objectionable.  (Although there was one centering on Poe – oh, and P.T. Barnum, I believe? – which I did not enjoy at all … Can’t remember title or author.)  In fact, I enjoyed this a great deal.  I believed the author’s depictions of the characters, both real and fictional, and believed the weaving together of real and fictional.  And the mystery was lurid and intriguing: I guessed the killer, but only by using the old “which named character in the cast could be the one” method; there was no way for the reader to deduce the killer’s identity logically, nor his motivation, not all of it, but this is never a great priority with me.  Also, of course, the chapter which takes us inside his head was powerful – all else is forgiven after that.

This was a rich book, deeply enjoyable on many levels – biography, history – of Boston, of Harvard, of publishing; mystery, thriller, literary pastiche … It was dark chocolate: a bit decadent, but – anti-oxidants!  Good for you!

The end result of a book like this, blending fact and imagination, is always that I want more – I want to know more about the real people involved, and I want to (in this case) read their poetry.  I never knew Longfellow translated Dante, and I want it.  (Also, I find, he translated Michelangelo – I want that too.)  And does it need saying I want the rest of Matthew Pearl’s books – and that I hope he writes many more?

Along with everything else, I love the jacket of the book: an etching of Harvard University, dotted with droplets of blood …

 

Charlaine Harris: Shakespeare’s Landlord

Somewhere in the interim I read Charlaine Harris’s Shakespeare’s Landlord , the first book in the Lily Bard series. Amazon.com’s synopsis – from Publisher’s Weekly! – made me snort; I thought PW was highly regarded, with good reason? I’m not impressed: “While on a late-night job” – no, she wasn’t; Lily sees “a furtive figure placing large plastic garbage bags in the local park” – not really, no. “Realizing, however, that her fingerprints on the body of the dead man might make her a suspect” – I don’t think so, but I’ll double check. The facts are, in fact, these: Lily Bard, living in the small Arkansas town of Shakespeare, is an insomniac, and on this night when she can’t sleep she goes for a walk. It’s not as astoundingly stupid as it would be for most women, this walking about the town in the wee hours: Lily has been studying martial arts for some time, and she’s very, very good – at both self-defense and wandering unnoticed. And she’s highly motivated. Heading home from her ramble, she sees a person in a raincoat going along with a garbage trolley – *her* trolley – and knows something’s up; she follows, lurks while the figure disappears into the little park and returns with the empty trolley, and then goes in to see what was dumped. Who, that is: inside the garbage bags is Lily’s landlord.

She wants nothing to do with it, but now she’s handled the garbage bags – which she disposes of – and is afraid there might be evidence on the trolley, and yes, perhaps she was afraid of having left trace or fingerprints on the body – oh, that’s right: her main concern wasn’t so much self-preservation, but that kids would find the corpse in the morning. After a debate, she makes an anonymous call to the police chief about the location of her landlord.

There are a lot of mysteries out there in which the protagonist, an ordinary(ish) person, decides she has to investigate a murder in order to clear her own name; this one was unique. Yes, Lily is worried that she may be dragged into the investigation – but her primary reason for trying to make this all go away as quickly as possible is that she has had very good reason to start fresh, very good reason to do everything possible to make her past go away, and a murder investigation on her literal doorstep will jeapordize the privacy she needs.

Although she had an excellent college education and was, Before, on a business fast track, she now does full-time what she once did for extra money: she cleans. It’s a satisfying job, with a beginning and middle and end and visible results when it’s complete, and the work is solitary, under the radar. But it also puts her in contact with a good-sized segment of the town population, her clients, all of whom are almost as interested in questioning her about the murder of her landlord as she is in finding out what they can tell her.

As she tries to work this disruption into her well-regulated reconstructed life, it’s as though the one rock dropped into her pond sends ripples out that change everything. The police chief, a nodding-terms neighbor, becomes a figure in her life – exactly what kind of figure is yet to be seen. Her past becomes, if not common knowledge, known to some – including someone who tries to disable her by using it to leave her horrid messages. Lily’s karate instructor, newly separated from his wife, becomes a bigger part of her life – much bigger. The murder investigation knocks everything askew, alters just about everything in her purposely stagnant life – and as the book ends it looks like this, one of her greatest fears, just might turn out to be for the good.

Normally something like the whole Shakespeare/Bard thing would cause traumatic eye-rolling, but this had an excellent explanation: Lily needed a new place to live, opened up a map, and figured Shakespeare was a logical place for her – based on nothing other than the consonance of names. (Only thing is … there may be a flaw of reasoning here, which isn’t so very bad as it can be attributed to the character rather than the author: Lily was trying to leave her past behind, but does not change her name, and goes to a place where her name is more memorable than in other places … )

I like Lily. I don’t love her, or any of the other characters; the reserve she maintains with everyone around her carries over to the reader in the first-person narrative. But despite the horrors of her past the book never becomes a pity party; she has dealt with it all in every way she knew how, and now the best way she can find to cope is to lock it away. She has a personality, and a sense of humor, and she’s a fascinating character to spend some time with; and I like and believe the people around her (though some of her clients suffer from the same PITA From Hell Syndrome that so many of Goldy’s clients have in the Diane Mott Davidson novels I’ve been reading – the seemingly pver-the-top bitchiness or thoughtlessness which I, unfortunately, know is not impossible in a customer. I look forward to the rest of the series, and finding out where all the pieces will fit into her adjusted life.

I like Charlaine Harris. I still haven’t gotten to the True Blood series, but I own several, and I’m looking forward to them – it’s in queue.

 

The Blazing Tree – Opium and Shakers

Don’t ask me exactly when, but I recently I read a find from a school fundraiser book sale: Mary Jo Adamson’s The Blazing Tree (Michael Merrick Mysteries). Now and then going on instinct pays off very well indeed.

The novel is in the first person voice of Michael Merrick, a young man who has been through hell: after suffering terrible losses, he became addicted to opium – which always sounds almost worse than more common modern addictions – more tempting, in a way, and more impossible to shake free.   Someone, he didn’t at the time know who, plucked him out of his opium dreaming, put him in the hands of a surprising man who dragged him back to life, and plunked him down at the beginning of a path to a new life. Not an easy path, and not one Michael is grateful for, for the most part – but new, and positive.

This new life has him working as a police news reporter – not a high-paying or highly respected job, but it’s better than nightmares in an opium den.  The book begins with Michael being summoned to the home of the newspaper’s editor, Jasper Quincey, an eccentric whose foibles – or some of them – are shortly explained by his fascination with the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, more commonly known as the Shakers.  An elder of the society has come to Quincey as a friend, hoping for help finding out what is behind a series of fires that have been started in two communities, in the last of which an elderly man died.  Quincey feels that Michael is the man for the job: he will go undercover in the society and investigate.

Michael is not thrilled.  He decides to refuse.  But … somehow … his refusal doesn’t take, and he finds himself entering into the community.  And in no time at all he has fallen in love.

The main problem with falling in love with a woman of the Shaker community is that upon entering into the life one pledges to lead a life of celibacy … In order to marry, one would have to leave.  And the woman Michael loves is a dedicated member of the community …

The suspects in the arsons seem to be many – including a boy Michael very much fears is the one, which would break his heart as the boy has become dear to him, as have many of the members of the community.  (Others, not so much.)  It’s a race – to figure out who it is before any more fires are lit, before anyone else can die.  It works, very well.

And simply as a novel, it works.  The love story, Michael’s story, the story of the Shakers – which was utterly fascinating, and I’d be tempted, really I would – are all woven into a really lovely book.  It’s now out of print, I believe – pity – and there was only one more about Michael, but I’ll need to seek out everything Mary Jo Adamson wrote.  It was that good.

And in the midst of the story, in the Shakers’ celebrating, they sing, and dance to, a song I learned from Judy Collins’s version:

 

Light fantasy, fluffy mystery

I just finally posted my review of GGK’s Under Heaven; after I read that I really wanted something light and fluffy. I landed on a book I found at Books & Co, Magic to the Bone by Devon Monk.

It’s a unique setting: 21st century Earth, after the scientific discovery of magic. Magic can be collected like oil or electricity, and stored; when they use magic people don’t pull it from within, but from their surroundings, and every city now has cisterns of magic gathered from storms. And every use of magic has an effect on the user, which you can if you try mitigate by setting up a Disbursement. The effects on Allie, the first-person protagonist of the book, range from headaches to severe head-to-toe bruising to a sore throat, etc… And, sometimes, when she’s really lucky, gaps in her memory, to the extent that she’s begun recording everything in a book she carries with her. The effects can also, illegally, be transferred to someone who had nothing to do with the spell, who doesn’t even have to be present.

Allie is called in by a … friend? called Mama to help the victim of just such an illegal move, Mama’s young son “Boy”. Why all her sons are called “Boy” I don’t know, but … whatever.  They don’t seem to have other names.  Allie’s what is called a Hound, which means she can – literally – sniff out details of a spell, like who cast it. And what she finds when she Hounds Boy is … her father. Who is a very rich, very powerful, very manipulative (ordinarily and magically) SOB, from whom she has been estranged for years.

Now, however, she goes to his office to confront him about the spell – about which he claims to know nothing … and the reader knows this is true because in brief third-person chapters it is revealed that someone very evil is using a very gifted, very damaged young man (Cody) to forge the spell “signatures” of others, including Allie’s father on this spell.

Then, the same day Allie goes to see her father for the first time in several years, he is murdered. And she is implicated. (Guess how.)

What follows is a high-energy action-packed story about how Allie investigates her father’s murder, the young man with the strange gifts (who somehow transforms her gifts, which results in some interesting physical markings), and whether or not she can trust Zayvion Jones, the handsome and sexy and seductive man her father had hired to keep tabs on her (my initial instinct was NO – but I could be wrong), dodging assassins and magical rebounds.

I never really warmed to Allie, or anyone else except Nora, Allie’s best friend; I never let myself trust Zayvion, right up to the end, since it seemed to me that Allie threw herself at him a little too quickly, thoroughly, and heedlessly. The writing wasn’t bad at all; it was very much like being in Allie’s head, listening to her ordinary speech patterns. Setting was well painted; I like the concepts the book was based on; while I didn’t enjoy the ending I appreciated the method of it. Not bad at all, and certainly very different from Kay without being a too-drastic comedown; I won’t rush out and buy the other books in the series, but I won’t pass them up if I come across them second-hand. I do still love the cover, and if I were slim and twenty-something might seriously consider a sleeve tattoo like that …

Then, still seeking light and fluffy (because that wasn’t), I opened the latest Diane Mott Davidson, Fatally Flaky, which I found … somewhere. These are most definite “cozies”, those strange murder mysteries where ordinary people (that is, not cops or PI’s or other people with some business investigating murders) keep tripping over bodies, and then end up finding the killer before the police. Davidson’s series has the distinction of being, I *think*, the first to have recipes in the text (because the heroine, Goldy, is a caterer) – so it’s all her fault.

Hey, I can’t criticize these books too hard – one of my favorite recipes of all time came from Dying for Chocolate: Strawberry Super Pie. It’s responsible for a couple of the extra inches I’m carrying – I was making it pretty darned often for a while there. It’s amazing.

But they’re not exactly Literature. They’re fun and undemanding, which is all I was looking for this week, and the recipes are often pretty terrific. And Fatally Flaky was one of the better books in the series, even if it did adhere pretty strictly to the “client is a flipping crazed bitca” formula. It was a cute story, it was interesting to see Goldy’s son suddenly 16 (I missed a couple of books in there somewhere), and, er, et cetera.

One of the ones I’d missed was Dark Tort (about lawyers, and also cake – puns are de rigeur in cozies’ titles), which is what I’m reading now… NOT one of the better ones. I think in the whole of FF DMD managed to avoid one little quirk of hers which appears in nearly every other book, which always makes me roll my eyes so hard I’m afraid they’ll get stuck.  In Dark Tort (Goldy Culinary Mysteries, Book 13), it’s:  “My mouth watered as I placed the potato puff on a plate.  With the first bite, I almost swooned.”  She “almost swoons” a lot.  Don’t get me wrong – I plan on making the potato puffs.  I just gag a little every time she “almost swoons”. 

Limyaael’s rants have made me much more aware of how characters are described. I don’t remember descriptions in Under Heaven; I should go back and take a look. Magic to the Bone did pretty well; the first-person character describes herself in part by comparing her looks to her father’s, I believe when she goes to see him. DMD’s Goldy books are also first-person, and Goldy … looks in mirrors now and then. Oh dear.  The writing in these really does vary wildly in quality.  This one … Um.  Waitaminnit – there’s no recipe for the potato puffs? 

This one sucks.