Book Review: The Girl Who Lived Twice by David Lagercrantz

Photo: The hardcover's cover, from Goodreads

Very, very good book, a bit of an improvement over Lagercrantz's previous in this series, which I didn't like as much. (To be fair, I really loved his first one, taking over for Larsson.) I'm not totally thrilled with the writing of the ending, though the ending itself was fine. But that's probably just my preference. The reader will have to judge for him/herself. I guess it depends on how you mind, or don't, how an author blatantly stops the progress of an action sequence to show characters talking about something important. It's done not to info-dump--though it may come across as that here--but to artificially create cliffhangers that keep the pages turning. That's a device that Nordic Noir takes to an extreme, and it's done here. I dealt with it, but didn't prefer it. Others may be more, or less, bothered.

For beginning novelists, which I still think I am, despite the many (over and over) I've written, take a look at the structure. The Prologue begins like any of the many police procedurals on TV: with the death of a character that starts the plot rolling. I'm really interested about this one because as I read, it became clear fast that this book could've started with any number of scenes, including the deaths during a blizzard on a mountainside, or maybe Salander's attempt on her sister. I think most authors would've started there, even in a prologue. That didn't happen here, because the main plot is that of the murder shown, which leads to Blomkvist's appearance, and not that of Salander's conflict with her sister, which ends up engulfing everyone at the end. It's also up to the reader as to which one he finds more intriguing, but it explains the split-screen writing at the end. This is strange, as the main characters essentially get ensnared in the subplot, and the minor characters end up resolving the main plot. Weird, but interesting, if you're into reading into writer's choices.

I gave this 4 stars, rather than 5, because of this oddity. It wasn't handled badly, just strangely. As for the book itself, there's a lot going on here, maybe too much, and I can't help but feel that the author could've held off the plot-string involving Salander's family, as it seems more tacked-on here. The main mystery is interesting enough, but I also understand why Lagercrantz did it: It ends the second trilogy's plot-string, as if maybe the series itself will end and he felt he had to wrap this up. Maybe he's got a different plot-string for another trilogy already outlined, ready to go. I don't know, but it seemed largely unnecessary, except that each of these books is "A Lisbeth Salander Novel" and not "A Mikael Blomkvist Novel" or anything else. She is the main plot, not whatever mystery is given to us. I get that, and I don't, and I can abide by it, and I don't like it, all at the same time.

The cooly distant tone and writing are staples of Nordic Noir, so I was good with them. A little more disconcerting is how Blomkvist--a writer for a successful news and politics magazine--is treated like a rockstar. Everyone knows who he is, and he's stopped on the street for autographs. I know the Nordic countries have much higher literacy and readership numbers than does the U.S., but this has always struck me as off in this series, in all six books. War correspondents and writers of great importance should be treated like rockstars, but they're not. Nobody knows them. I like to think of large crowds suddenly stopping James Ellroy on the street as he's hailing a cab, clamoring for his autograph, but that doesn't happen. Yet Blomkvist is mentioned by name and image on TV, and he's clearly a celebrity in his own Millennium universe, but more than anything else in this series, that's always been a head-scratcher to me. He's a pale, portly figure who woman trip over to sleep with, too, but...well, you get the idea. You're okay with all that, or you wouldn't be reading the 6th book in the series by now. But it's all an eye-roller for me, and I just had to say so.

Ultimately this one is well worth your money. Salander, despite it being her series, is hardly in it but for the beginning and for the end, and she doesn't say more than 20 words in the whole book, but you're used to that by now, too. Yet I'd be okay with giving her more to say and do in the next one. The last few sentences of this one hint that maybe the author thinks so, too. Read and enjoy. 

Book Review -- Mephisto Waltz by Frank Tallis

Review Mephisto Waltz. Disclaimer: this copy free from Pegasus Books

Another excellent entry into the historical / detective fiction series, this time set in Vienna in 1904. Think: Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware and his cop friend Milo Sturgis, except here it’s the time and place of Freud. The case: there’s a bomb-wielding anarchist on the loose, and nobody knows who he is, including the people who work with him. He goes by one name: Mephistopheles (hence the title; go to YouTube for the actual music), and he’s always hidden. The book starts with a three-member jury sentencing someone to death. His face is melted with acid, so you don’t know who. Other killings (one accidental) follow, and there’s a last-second cipher to figure out, and a bomb to stop.

That’s enough summary. The mystery is handled well, but in a way you may not be familiar with, and I mean that as a very good thing. There’s no CSI-like structure, or procedural. There’s an ME, of course, and he may remind you of one from TV’s procedurals, but that’s it. The coolest things about this book, and done well in the whole series, but really done well here, are:

      A)    you get a slice-of-life (of just under 300 pages) of what it would be like to live in 1904 Vienna, and it’s taken just as seriously—if not more so—than the murders. The crimes are part of this early-20^th Century world, before WWI and, in fact, in the time of early cars (Herr Porsche is a minor character, his car is a push-button, as many of the earliest ones were, and he drives a hybrid!), so these are treated as something that would be an everyday part of this world. No sensationalism; no guns. None of the tropes of the genre. They happen as they would happen in that world, and that world molds them. The world isn’t altered to enhance the crimes. The crimes enhance that world. You really feel like you’re there, tasting all that strudel. And--

B) It’s a treasure trove of cool things to look up, to learn about, to listen to on YouTube. This is the kind of thing that makes Dan Brown books so interesting: I buy those in their Illustrated Editions to see the paintings, to look at the sculptures, to learn about the locations (Good idea to Pegasus Books: Consider publishing Illustrated Editions of this series, going back to the first—and why not include a CD or a link to listen to the constantly-referenced music of the time?). And I do the same with Tallis’s series: I’ve listened on YouTube to all of the (very) many songs and music mentioned. They’re actually very good. (Favorite: “The Elf-King” from a few books ago.) I’ve looked up all the real-life personages (This one does a very good job of listing all of them at the end, and of offering quick bios and glimpses.), from Porsche to Freud, and all of the princes and princesses. So it’s not just a simple mystery and you’re done, a ton of books in a series so alike that they all bleed into each other and you couldn’t explain one to somebody (Are you listening, Kellerman?). This series is different, each one a stand-alone, distinct. Tallis publishes one every five to six years, and maybe for this reason.

And Mephisto Waltz even has a cool, gaslight-noir cover. It’s my first hardcover of the series—thanks to Pegasus Books. (That’s my disclosure. Again.) So grab this one. You may read it in one sitting, like I did. When you’re done, get the other six, and enjoy. And feel free to look up the music, the people, the art, and the inventions of that world.

Darkest Fear by Harlan Coben -- A Quick Book Review

Photo: from google.com/books, at this address

Another very appealing Bolitar novels, again proving the series is better than the stand-alones. In this one, a 13 year-old boy needs a bone marrow transfusion. A donor has been found, but then goes missing. Can Bolitar find him?

He can, and does, of course, and along the way he punches a bloated, soft-in-the-middle lawyer, kidnaps a millionairess, captures a serial killer, gains a great client, annoys the feds, and deals with daddy issues--with himself, and with his own father. The result is another mystery in the series that works well because it deals well with the real problems of its main character, problems we all face, especially guys in our 40s, as both Bolitar and myself happen to be.

One aspect here--the identity of an older man living by himself--was as obvious to me as it will be to you, but that's okay. You want to get some it yourself, right? Umberto Eco and James Joyce are great writers, but they're smarter than we are, too--and who wants to be outsmarted all the time, and condescended to at the end because the writers know they're too smart for us? I'm not calling Harlan Coben a dummy here--and he wouldn't want to be thought of in the snooty vein anyway. I'm saying the opposite: Coben knows his genre, and he knows he can't outclass the reader all the time. You've got to let them in on the fun sometimes.

I've said before that Coben, like Bolitar himself, tries too hard, and he does here as well. It's an okay too hard, like when he always (and I do mean each and every single damn time) admits to the cliche before he springs the cliche upon us. Sometimes he admits the cliche so he doesn't have to spring it upon us--but by doing so, he's springing it upon us, and it's cliche at this point to admit to the cliche in this way, and for this reason, anyway. But he makes it work. If you know the genre, you know the cliche, and you know the admission of the cliche, and when it comes, and you're already expecting it, he's got you in his hands, don't you see? It's all part of the game. Coben knows you're smart enough to know it, and he knows you'll be happy to know that he knows you're smart enough to know it. So in the end he's giving the reader what he wants. And, if you listen closely to the minor characters in this one, he's telling you why you're so happy to be acknowledged and pseudo-complimented.

And how easy it is to just go along with the game all the time. We stay on that path, right?

No Second Chance by Harlan Coben

Photo: from its Goodreads page, here. And can someone write a Wikipedia article for this book, please? The one there now is offensively terrible. Thanks.

This one's got a thesis statement for an opening sentence: "When the first bullet hit my chest, I thought of my daughter." Every single word in the whole book revolves around this first sentence, and it's a doozy.

Very entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking mystery. A man is suddenly shot twice, almost dies, and wakes up in the hospital to hear that his wife also was shot to death and his three month-old daughter was kidnapped. His sister later dies, and his ex-girlfriend--the real love of his life--is heavily involved, as is his safety net best friend. His ex's almost ex-husband also was shot to death, and she's a former FBI agent, as was he, and they were both extremely depressed, and she still is, and there's a gorgeous, psychotic and rather cagey woman involved, and she's a former child star, and she has a man the size of Nevada helping her out, and the day is really saved by a rural yokel with a mullet and a gorgeous mail-order bride who wouldn't be able to enter this country as of today...yeah, in lesser hands, this could've been a God-awful mess, but it's all handled well, and all of these disparate odds and ends all come together, as is Coben's trademark by now. It's very compulsively readable, though you may wonder about the ability of the cops and agents who circle the action but who don't do much of anything. They reminded me of the cops and the agents Johnson ("No, the other one.") from Die Hard.

This is one of those books that makes you wonder how the genre can stand the way these mysteries have all these characters who somehow don't need to eat, sleep, change clothes or go to the bathroom, and yet handle incredible stress and pressure that would've given a coronary to a meditation guru, all while running around each other, driving around (and over) each other, and shooting each other around the state of New Jersey and the City of New York. They all end up at the beginning, literally, which instead of giving the book a bookending feeling, instead gives the reader the feeling that he's been reading in circles for almost 400 pages. But the mystery goes that way, and, what the hell, life pretty much feels that way, so it all somehow works.

It works overall a little less well than Coben's Bolitar series, because he can't infuse the supporting characters with enough life for us to care about them. They're all a little too sharply drawn, a little too extreme, a little too down or a little too out there. We care about the main character, though more for his mystery than for him, if you follow me. I mean, why was he shot, and his wife killed, and his daughter kidnapped? The answers aren't pretty, but then his life wasn't, either. Then again, none of the characters have a good time of it. For a living, he courageously battles the messes to the face that wars make upon its victims throughout the world; his wife (and his ex's almost-husband) are manic-depressives; his sister is a drug addict; his father has Alzheimer's; his wife's mother was in and out of institutions, and abused her; his artsy neighbor was sexually abused and she's a mess; his father-in-law is a rich asshole, and this man's son is his asswipe, and...yeah, it's a mess, and everyone's a mess. And that's kind of the whole idea: Helping each other through this messy life.

And, in these times of Walls and immigrant bans, there's a nice message about helping out our fellow man, and about being there for each other, especially our families and our kids. If any of those folks would care to read anything, this one's got dozens of alternate titles and alternate editions in foreign countries to satisfy those who need alternate facts...

Back Spin by Harlan Coben

Photo: from books.google.com at this address

A slightly better book than The Final Detail, the one I reviewed previous to this, Back Spin is about a golfing family--man, woman and child--that is torn by the kidnapping of said child. There's a large cast of supporting characters for a book of this genre, and by the end all of them figure into the crime in one way or another. There's nary a red herring in the whole thing.

There's nary a Win, either, which is a first for me in this series. Granted, I'm only three books in, but it seems that Bolitar and Coben agree on the same point: For the good of the series, or for Bolitar (which is saying the same thing), a little less of Win may be more. You can't have his safety net for the whole series, or for the main character. Every once in awhile, it's important that he does it alone. Win does come into it, of course, but only for character development. He does nothing to help solve the crime. (He attains a copy of an important VHS--this is the late-90s here--but that's it.)

This book again shows Coben's flair for character development. In these CSI-type mystery novels--I say CSI not because of the forensics, but because of the reliance on the tried and true formula of presentation, as well as the dominance of the case over all else--it's refreshing that Coben remembers and insists on character development and even moral philosophizing, the latter more on the reader's behalf after the reading is done, as opposed to the characters themselves babbling and morally philosophizing, which hampers lesser writers. Robert Parker, for example, who was not exactly a lesser writer, did occasionally get bogged down with Spenser and Susan's and Hawk's philosophizing and moralizing, which Coben seems to purposely stay away from. Not Parker's exclusively, but the habit of this genre's characters to do so.

In fact, Coben's characters go out of their way--even more than Parker's did, which is saying something--to point out cliches and to downplay them. In fact, Coben's characters do it so often, that in of itself is becoming a cliche. He believes, apparently, that pointing out the cliche is better than falling back on it. Though, of course, by mentioning them so often, and panning them so often, he's falling back on his characters doing that. I'm sure Coben has noticed this, but by now it's a staple of his series, and it's therefore way too late to stop doing it now. I can see this after just three books, and violently out of order, at that.

So Coben also is good at the character development, or at least with the characters being aware that they are developing. Bolitar especially realizes this about himself, in every novel so far, and in each he says that he doesn't like what he's learned about himself, either. But Bolitar also goes out of his way to notice the personages of his other friends, each of whom (Win and Esperanza so far) has had his fair share of the limelight. This is better than usual for this genre. For the third time in a row, as well--noticeable because I've read them so out of order--a mother has to go to an extreme to protect her child. (Again, it's a son.) This has become a common motif so far in Coben's work as well.

The case is riveting as well, as it needs to be, or all this character and good writing stuff would be worthless. As Stephen King points out, story, people, story. Leave the theme, development, etc. for later, to enhance the book. But the story--or, in this genre's case, the mystery--must prevail. Here it does. There are so many characters in this one, and each has some bearing on the ending, that it's important to notice that Coben gives each of them a dominating personality trait, so it's easy to tell them apart and to give a damn about them in some way, even in a negative way. (There's a white neo-Nazi with a Hispanic first name, for example.) Coben gets a pass here for getting too generalized with a group of high school girls and their vernacular, each of whom seems to talk like Jimmy Fallon's teenage girl impersonation, a good fifteen or so years before Fallon made it popular.

So this one is also worth a read, and again it's a very fast read, as I finished it in less than a day.

Harlon Coben's Home: How Far Would You Go to Defend Your Child? Is It Ever Too Far?

Photo: from kirkusreviews.com, here.

It's been awhile since I've read a Myron Bolitar novel. I don't remember why, exactly. It's just one of those things: I picked up Nesbo, stopped reading him for awhile...and I've been reading other things since. But when my neighbor, a huge Bolitar / Harlan Coben fan (I'm more a fan of the latter than the former, because Coben was nice enough to buy me lunch once, and talk to me about how he wrote--but that's another story) asked me if I wanted to borrow his latest--in return for my letting him borrow all my Bolitar books--I said sure. (Thanks, Jim Fitz!) As it's a three-day weekend, and my sinuses are again out of control and I feel like crap, I started reading it and didn't put it down except to sleep. I started it yesterday and finished it today. (I read 90% of it yesterday, so there wasn't much to finish.)

It was that good. The mystery is very mysterious, and the pace and tension are so good that you'll be flipping pages, fast, like I did. The gist of the book is the title, though more specifically, it's about who your home is, not as much about the structure. Home is where the heart is, right? So where's your heart? That last question means more to the book than you'd think, and more than I'm letting on. (I'm a little proud of myself for this.) The book is about how far we'd go for our loved ones--specifically, how far a mother will go to protect her child.

The short answer: Very far. I know this. At my job I often see this, parents going to ridiculous lengths to defend their kid, even when the kid doesn't need defending.

This is an important distinction. We all know bad parents, right? Someone who lets the kid get away with everything: talking back, and badly, to them; showing bad manners, like not thanking people for gifts; and, perhaps the worst, defending them about everything, to the extent that nothing's the fault of the kid, so the kid never learns to grow up, to be responsible, to be self-reliant. We all know parents like this. Right now I'm sitting here, counting the ones I know who fit this distinction to a T, and I'm thinking 4, maybe 5--wait, there was a 6th, from a few years ago. It's more often the mother than the father, from my experience, though that last one had both.

So this book is about that question: How far will you go to defend your child? But...does the child need defending? And are you really defending the child, or are you defending, and / or celebrating, yourself? You ever see a parent so out of control with this defending thing that you wonder who, exactly, they're defending? Is it the kid who can never be wrong, or the parent who can never be wrong--so the parent, of course, couldn't raise an imperfect kid. Good God, if that happens, then that means the parent is also imperfect, right? Well--No, but they don't know that. Narcissists are not known for their logic. Watch for that, next time: Is the kid perfect, or is the parent defending the kid perfect, which is why the kid is perfect? From my experience, it's the latter.

This book isn't just about that, of course. It's about Win. In fact, it starts off with him, which threw me for a minute before I figured it out: Win's chapters are 1st-person narration; Bolitar's are third person. Limited or omniscient, you ask? Ah, there's my own caveat. (You knew there'd be one, right?) The third person omniscient narrator is almost a character himself. He hides behind the curtain, but he's there. He breaks the fourth wall to remind you he's there. Sometimes he masquerades as Bolitar's thoughts and voice-overs--and, unfortunately, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference--but he's there, trying very, very hard to be hip and snazzy. This third-person narrator (who reminds me a little uncomfortably of the narrator Snowman in those Christmas cartoons of the 60s) interrupts his own narration to often point out the obvious, or to point out the cliche, or to introduce the cliche, or to...You can either take it or you can't. Most of the time, I could.

I wish overall that Harlan Coben wouldn't do this, but I understand why he does: Something has to set the writing apart, right? Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Harlan Coben and a couple of others--Frankly, they write about the same genre, and the almost-same plots, and something has got to be different, right? I'm thinking now of Robert Parker's last 10 books or so. If you threw a title at me, and asked me to summarize the plot, I wouldn't be able to do it. I suspect that if I'd read all of Lee Childs's, or all of Coben's, I'd say the same about theirs. That's not exactly a drawback, either: One of the odd things about the genre is that a series character is like a pair of comfortable slippers. You slip them on, and you forgive their age, or their holes, or whatever, because they're comfortable. That the genre's books all blend together is actually part of the charm, not a detraction. The way to tell Coben's Bolitar apart from Parker's Spenser (as an example)? Why, Bolitar books have the narrator who frequently breaks the wall and speaks directly to the reader, even going so far as to use the second-person "you." That's no small thing, by the way, and it's a way to ease your feet back into those comfortable slippers. Every mystery writer wants a series cash cow with a main protagonist and his questionable sidekick / partner. Coben has Bolitar and Win as Parker had Spenser and Hawk. And, of course, if it works--which Coben's series obviously has--then you keep going, right? And you don't fix what's not broken.

So read this one, because the tension and plot and mystery are so good that you'll forgive the third-person narrator's trespasses, if that's even necessary for you to begin with. And at the end, you'll have a moral question to answer: Did the character go too far defending the child? (I'm having an image now of the adults who beat the piss out of each other to get the latest Christmas must-have. Remember those videos of grown people beating the snot out of others so their kid could get the store's last Tickle Me Elmo?) I would say Yes, because of the people I explained above, but I'll bet quite a few people will also say No, that you protect your child at all costs.

Even if the child doesn't need defending.

Death and the Maiden -- A Very, Very Short Review

Photo: From the book's Goodreads page. Not my exact edition, but this one has the same number of pages, and the one on Goodreads that looked like mine had more pages. Weird. And I didn't want my stats to show that I've read more pages than I actually have. I take my Goodreads stats very seriously!

Very satisfying 6th--and perhaps final--Max Liebermann mystery, written by Frank Tallis. Published in 2012, and followed by okay horror novels in the last few years, all published as F.R. Tallis, for some reason, this is perhaps Liebermann's last go. If so, it's a shame, as this series is clearly Tallis's best writing, and is what he's known for--if he's known in the U.S. at all; he's more popular, I think, in Europe. At any rate, he said in an interview that he was worried of his characters and plots becoming stale, and that he'd become tired of the series. So be it, I suppose.

This one has all of the good stuff you expect in this series: the locales, the detail of 1903 Vienna; Freud; a beautiful woman murdered (though let the record show that literally every woman worthy of mention in the series has been beautiful, especially the murdered ones); Amelia, who has been underwritten and under-represented; and of course Rheinhardt. The extra touch of this one is the appearance of Gustav Mahler, famous composer and conductor, often referenced in the series but never seen. We see Clara again, too; I have begun to feel quite badly for her now. Not a bad person, and probably deservant of more happiness than she's allowed. Her reason for wanting to be with Liebermann again was a little depressing, as was the reason for her final departure. She'll end up with that soldier, and she'll never be wanting, but you get the feeling she'll never be happy, either.

The book ends on a note that rings true, though not one that will give closure to every reader. Like the characters, you have to sometimes shrug your shoulders in life and accept the path that lays before you. Stray from that path at your peril--or, at the peril of your family. See: No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. The movie lives up to the grueling realism of the book. Overall a very good book, but hopefully not the end to the series. Again, we'll have to shrug and move on if that's the case, but let's hope it's not.

Vienna Blood -- A Very Short Book Review

Photo: The book's paperback cover.

The sequel to Tallis's slightly better A Death in Vienna, this one is still a success. The Washington Post called it "the first great thriller of 2008." I'm not on top of my 2008 thrillers, but this book is very good.

The mystery is less mysterious than the first in the series, and it shouldn't be hard for the reader to guess the killer. Because there are lots of red herrings, both in the plot and in other characters, the book won't be a disappointment if you correctly guessed the killer. The interesting historical fact this time is that the swastika--forever to be associated with evil and the Nazis--was actually a much older symbol that, ironically, stood for peace and unity. Not anymore, and not ever again.

Which brings up one of the interesting things about Tallis and these books: You learn something. Like Dan Brown's thrillers, you get entertained and you get educated at the same time. I used to sometimes stop reading Brown's books and write something down that I wanted to Google. With Tallis, I've written things down that I wanted to hear on YouTube. Some have been hits, and some have been misses (such as Stockhausen, Studie 1, from a horror novel of his I'm reading now), but I've always been curious and interested. Tallis is more interested in music than in images, like Brown is, and Tallis writes historical thrillers, so you learn about the past--in this case, Vienna in 1902. Brown doesn't do that, as he brings things from the past into his thrillers in the present. But it's all good. As long as you're reading and learning, who cares?

You learn that the main character--and, one assumes, more popular Jews in Vienna, like Freud--were daily victims of bias. For example, both men (at different times) have been the recipient of snide, vulgar remarks about being Jewish, from supposedly learned and sophisticated men. Freud ignored it and Liebermann shrugged it off, but both explained it was a daily occurrence. (On a side note, Freud was apparently a teller of funny, but often crude and stereotypical, Jewish jokes. One of them, about how you could tell Jesus was Jewish, I'd heard before.) There may be a bit too much about the Freemasons of Vienna here, but that's okay, too, and you may think, as I did, that you're learning something new, as they don't seem much like the Freemasons of America I've read about.

Poor Clara is treated a little curtly here, but if you've read the first one, you've seen it coming. She immediately (and a little too patly) recovers, but that was okay with me, because she was likable, and not as dim as Liebermann thought (which he often recognized), and you don't want her to be sad. It wouldn't have worked out with me, either, but I would also have been glad that she was happy. Whatever.

So a very quick read, and worthy of your time if you like historical thrillers. I'm taking a break from Tallis's historical thrillers for now; I'm in the middle of a horror novel, written by him as F.R. Tallis. I'll let you know.

P.S.--For the waltz by Strauss that gives the book its title, click this link to YouTube.

A Death in Vienna -- A Very Short Review

Photo: The book's paperback cover, from a review at The View from the Blue House, because how could you not read a blog with that name?

A rare treat: A fantastically written novel that's also a helluva mystery.

A woman shot to death in a locked room--but no bullet. Vienna at the turn of the 20th Century. Sigmund Freud. Anti-Semitism. Gender bias. Another murder. Cultural references. Schubert and Lizst. Philosophy. The beginnings of modern-day detection. And beautiful writing. What else can you ask for?

All of these come together in A Death in Vienna, one of the better books I have read in some time. So good, in fact, that it makes me want to write (more, or consistently) again, after a bit of a bummer summer. This is indispensible for me, and I am grateful.

And did I mention that the book and its writing are intelligent? You won't feel pandered to or talked down to here. Nothing is spelled out for you, and there aren't any cliffhanger chapters that you or Annie Wilkes would have a problem with. (Well, okay, I didn't like one of them, a misunderstanding between a character and his wife. But, what the hell.)

This book is the first in a historical detective series of six books, the last published in 2012. A pity there haven't been more, but Tallis said he was worried about over-saturation and the books blurring together with nothing new to say. I have to admit: Jonathan Kellerman and, yes, maybe Robert B. Parker fell victims to this. Perhaps Tallis was wise to keep his series short. He has written many other things, and good writing is good writing, and the genre is essentially the same, so check them out, under both of his names. I have just written a note to myself to check area bookstores for all of Tallis's books, written under Frank Tallis and under F.R. Tallis.

You should do the same. Read this one first, as apparently reading them in order does matter for this series.

Very highly recommended, so much so that I have unapologetically written a short, gushing review. This one made me excited about getting back home and finishing errands so I could read more. What better compliment is there to give?

Bones by Jan Burke

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years, so maybe there were unrealistic expectations.  I was also impressed with the Edgar Award for best mystery this book won, as well.  But I wasn't overly impressed by the end.  It left me underwhelmed.

The first third or half was solid.  Investigators in the mountains; a serial killer with them.  Bodies turn up and you know the killer will get away.

But there were so many missteps after that.  The dialogue is really, really terrible.  Very stilted, very unrealistic.  It talks down to the reader and overexplains really simple things, as if the author didn't think the readers could follow along.

Some scenes just backfired.  When the killer mails to the main character, a reporter, a pair of her own underwear, she and her co-workers break into inexplicable laughter.  The author tries to say that the hilarity is due to extreme tension, but it never comes across that way.  It's just an awkward scene.  There's a lot of those.

An example that blends both of these: a bomb is set up beneath one of the bodies in the mountains, and the killer gets away (after awhile) in the confusion.  The author/narrator (or the first-person main character) asks: How could have known that was going to happen?  I read that and immediately thought, I did.  You will, too, even if you're not a particularly astute reader.  Awkward.

And the end is unrealistic.  The killer, a genius, suddenly comes to her workplace, where there's an armed guard or two, plus co-workers, plus a helicopter that lands on the roof--and he doesn't know any of this, even though he has stalked all of his other victims to the point of knowing their lives better than they do.  The ending is really unfulfilling.  It hinges on the identity of the killer's helper, but you'll figure that out before too long.  You might even see it right away, not too far into the book.

These could be forgiven if the writing was good enough, but it's not.  It's awkward, the dialogue is just plain bad, and it mellows in a sentimentality and, at times, in suddenly jarring religious-speak (the main character suddenly says out loud to someone that they don't have to work on the Lord's day--even more confusing, since the narrator says she's mostly a non-believer)--and, well, the book's an award-winning mess.  I have nothing against a suddenly and unrealistically religious character, or occasionally bad dialogue, or scene and plot missteps--but not all at once in the same book.

This book is the 7th in the series, but you don't have to read any of the previous ones to read this one.  Unfortunately, I have no desire to do so, nor to read any of the next ones.  I see that I have written more negatively of this book than many have, but I don't see any way around it.  If you wish, someone please let me know if the previous ones, or the latter ones, were any better.  I've never seen the show based on these books, but the clips look good, and the show's been successful for some time now.  If you're watching that, please let me know if it's any better than the books.

The Rule of Four

I really wanted to like this book, and in many ways I did.  But I still finished it somewhat disappointed, and--even worse--I felt that while I was reading it.

I think the problem is that this book tries to do too many things at once.  That is its selling point, its victory and its curse.  It screams "We're not just The Da Vinci Code!" and yet on some levels it is, with much better writing and characterization.

But it lacks Dan Brown's (albeit superficial) tension.  There are no cliffhangers.  There's really no suspense.  You don't really care who the villains are--and the characters don't seem to, either.  There's a nice relationship (in fact, the girl deserves better), but I didn't care, except that I felt bad for the girl.

But while I felt bad for her, I realized that it didn't matter, and for God's sake let's get on with it.

If you liked rich-school hijinks, a la 1983's Class (You remember, with Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Jacqueline Bissett and Cliff Robertson?), then you'll like the Princeton antics described here.

But I didn't care.  Just bring on the book, the mystery, the characters, the murders.

If you liked the almost-homoerotic tension between rich schoolboys, a la A Separate Peace, then you'll enjoy that part.  I hated A Separate Peace, and I hated that part of this book.  C'mon, bring on the book, the mystery, etc.

If you liked good writing, you'll like that part.  I do, and I did. But...Does the writing have to be that good for a book like this?  I guess you can have it both ways.  Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose and Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost come to mind. But...the sometimes great sentence seemed superfluous here.  While I was waiting for it to get back to the mystery, I often read a great sentence that shocked me out of the book.  I actually uttered "Wow" a few times, out loud.  But...

Surprisingly, this book was not quite the page-turner I'd heard about.  The word on the street was so high on this one, that maybe my expectations were unfair.  I don't know, but I'm confident that this book would have been much better with all of the Princeton kijinks taken out, as well as least half of the Separate Peace nonsense, and tighten up the mystery and the murders.

On that last point, another problem here is that you don't have time to wonder (or, to even care) who the murderer is.  I mean, there are only two options, and then one of them turns up dead.  Not much of a mystery, really.

The direction of the writing also doesn't let you think about it.  You just go along with it all and wait for it to be shown to you.  It gets buried behind the other stuff.

And so I have to say I liked it, but with reservations.  It ultimately disappointed me, but I acknowledge that it's well-written, though maybe I needed the more base of writings here.  It tries to be both The Name of the Rose and The Da Vinci Code, but somehow doesn't end up being either one--and doesn't even, somehow, fall between the two.

Another Sherlock Holmes -- The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Photo: Book's front and back cover, from kernelscorner.com.

A good Dan Simmons book, though not one of his best (Drood and The Terror are that), The Fifth Heart has a lot going for it, and not too much against it--depending on the reader's level of patience and tolerance.

It's a lot of things, perhaps too many.  It's a thriller in a potboiler vein--like Conan Doyle's work.  (He's often mentioned but never seen.)  It's a mystery of rich people's manners and mannerisms--a la Henry James, perhaps the book's main character.  It's a mystery of deduction and induction--a la Sherlock Holmes, the book's other main character.  It's a historical adventure, like Simmons' Drood and The Terror.

But--and here's where the reader's patience and tolerance comes in--it's also a pseudo-metaphysical work, one that has the characters very self-aware, and pondering their reality: Are they themselves, or are they characters?  The one failure of all this to me is that the characters remain surprisingly productive and un-neurotic despite these philosophical quandaries.  We know that Holmes is a character, but the conceit of the novel is that he is not: He's a real person, and so is Dr. Watson.  Arthur Conan Doyle is nothing more than the editor of Dr. Watson's unfortunately melodramatic scribblings of Sherlock Holmes's adventures.  (Conan Doyle and Watson--both never seen--get a lot of verbal abuse from the many characters.)  The reader has to swallow this.

The reader is also forced to swallow the occasional interruptions of a first-person I / omniscient-writer narrator who never fully shows himself.  Is it Simmons?  Conan Doyle?  Watson?  Or someone else entirely?  It's never definitively shown; the question, in fact, is shied away from.  But we, the reader, are supposed to wonder about it, which seems to be the purpose: to cause philosophical wonder.  This is a drastic break of the fourth wall / suspension-of-disbelief, and so it needs the reader's tolerance. 

This last bit struck me as unnecessary.  The philosophical ponderings of existence, of character / person, of reality, and of unreality are all over this book, so we don't really need the intrusive first-person narrator break.  It's too much. 

Another unwanted intrusion is the much-more-rare Dan Simmons statements.  This single-handedly ruined Flashback, which was really just one long Dan Simmons diatribe.  He really tones it down here.  But you can catch a few times that he elbows his character aside for a moment so he can speak directly to the reader.  The most blatant of these was when Simmons makes his characters talk about the Pledge of Allegiance that apparently came from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  Simmons actually makes a character ask if anything interesting came of a certain meeting between characters.  That question is answered by bringing up the Pledge.  Another character says how barbaric it is to make students say it, and Holmes himself says that making them do so is something that would happen in Germany.  This is a constant Simmons break: He says something disparaging about the American education system as often as he can, in any book.  And so he does here.

However, at the end, this book is a good distraction--which Simmons himself seems to realize, as he constantly has characters refer to badly-written but entertaining mystery-thrillers, clearly referring to himself and to his own book.  This book, like its characters, is very, very aware of itself.  Dan Simmons is always hovering in the shadows over every page, his tongue in his cheek, pleasantly aware and happy about his own literary magic trick.

If you have the tolerance to handle these breaks--which are not as avant-garde as Simmons seems to think they are--then chances are good you'll enjoy the book.  It is as meticulously researched as Simmons's historical novels always are, often to the point of approaching info-dump.  The characters are amusing, though distinct--so much so that you'll wonder why their married or friendly with each other.  The characters had all been real people, and they all get knocked around a bit verbally by the other characters and by Simmons himself.  Samuel Clemens, John Hay, Conan Doyle, President Cleveland, and especially Henry James all get some chiding, some of it quite heavy.  You'll learn more than you'd probably want about the 1893 Columbian Expedition (read Erik Larson's book about that, too), about the horse-drawn carriages of the time, about Mark Twain's foolish financial disasters, and about train schedules.

It all works somehow, and you'll feel like you're really there.  Whether you're able to get back there after the author intrusions and first-person fourth-wall breaks is a big question.  I was able to again suspend my disbelief, but only mostly, and only barely, while watching for the next unwanted and unappreciated break of that wall.  It didn't ruin it for me, but I could understand how it might for somebody.

I still recommend that you try.

Short Story Sale--"Everything's Connected" to Over My Dead Body! The Mystery Magazine Online

Just a quick self-serving note:

The rights to my short story, "Everything's Connected"--about a detective who catches a cheating spouse in the act, solves a kid's disappearance, and proves a little theoretical quantum physics--all in fewer than 2,000 words!--has been purchased by Over My Dead Body! The Mystery Magazine Online.  There are some pretty cool stories there now--lots and lots of them, in fact.  And they're all free!  So if you like quick and easy (and short) mystery stories, or stories of murder and mayhem, check them out at overmydeadbody.com.

This is awesome for me personally for two reasons.  The first thing is that Brad Foster, the main character of this story, is also the main character of a novel manuscript, Cursing the Darkness (Working Title), that is maybe 90% completed.  So Brad Foster will see the light of day.  Though it should be noted that the short story is very light, while the novel is very, very, very (many more veries) dark, gritty and brutal.  But his character is essentially the same.

The second reason this sale is awesome is because it's a mystery story in a mystery magazine: yet another different genre for me to be published in.  So far, the stories I've published, their location (and link), and their genre:

--"Everything's Connected," in Over My Dead Body! The Mystery Magazine Online.  Mystery.  Publication date TBA.
--"The Zombie's Lament" by Big Pulp.  Anthology due April 2015.  Horror.
--"So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," in onthepremises.com.  March 2012.  Contemporary / literary.
--"An Old Man."  Poem.
--"Someone To Come Home To."  Short nonfiction article about the benefits of adopting a greyhound.
--"Hide the Weird," in Space and Time Magazine, Issue #116 of Fall 2012.

It ain't Stephen King, but it ain't nuthin', either, I guess.

Look for a publication date soon for "Everything's Connected."

Click on the Published Work link above for more details.

As always, thanks for reading my blog, my stories, everything.  I always appreciate (and need) your support. 

Getting My Life Back

I've been sick since Christmas, over a month.  Mostly headaches, light-headedness, sinuses, ear-blockage, and, lately, just for the hell of it, some stomach and intestinal distress.  (Ewwwwww.....)  And, by the way, all at the same time.  To top it all off, I have two small bumps on one of my palms, and today I have a helluva headache.  I had to call out twice last week, plus I left early on Tuesday.  I felt sick on Thursday, but thought I was hiding it well until someone said I looked like I felt bad and that I should go home.  (I didn't.)  And Friday was sort of a blur, as I had to catch up because I'd essentially missed the whole week.  I have another doctor's appointment Monday, but as I'm already on an antibiotic, I don't see what else he can do.

So I had to do something.  And here's what I'll do:

--Decided to lessen my grain intake, in case my body is allergic to it.  Many of the symptoms above can be attributed to gluten.  As a lifelong eater of a bowl of bran cereal or a bagel every morning, maybe something has to give.  Jillian Michaels wrote that the more we eat something, the better the chance we become allergic to it.  Which is certainly my experience as well, though one wonders why we don't become allergic to fruits or vegetables because of this, or water.  And what other way is there to get bran, besides Metamucil, or pills?  Anyway, I'll try this and see what happens.

--Decided to lessen my consumption of allergy pills, ibuprofen and Tylenol.  I'm no doctor, but my cheeks have puffed up and my sinuses and head have hurt a few minutes after I've consumed one of these things lately, for over the past month or so.  But what to do when I have an allergic reaction to the dog, or pollen?

--Decided to vacuum and dust more frequently.  I just swept the hardwoods and was shocked at how quickly it got matted with dog hair and dust.  That's certainly not helping me at all.

--Decided to eat more fish and drink a lot more water.  This has led to an...umm...intestinal issue last night, and a horrendous headache.  Pain behind my cheeks and behind my head, too.  Feels like I have a fever, but the thermometer just now read 98.1 and 98.2.  I don't know, because my temperature has never been below 98.6 before.  In fact, it's almost always 99 when I'm feeling okay.  But I have not been feeling okay.  Maybe my body is purging itself of toxins the past few days?  Or, month?

--Decided to get rid of a few books I haven't been reading, and no longer fall back on the thought that I someday will read them.  This was especially hard for a couple of Hugh Laurie books a former girlfriend gave me, and the first seven alphabet murder mysteries from Sue Grafton, starting with A is for Alibi.  Those are very popular for mystery fans, and fans of series.  I'm both, but for some reason could never get into them, or find the time to try again.  I kept thinking that someday...So I took them, and others, to a used bookstore and got almost $20 of credit there.  I should've just left, but I got other books I want to read, and now they're amongst the many thousands I still have to read.  (I still have $2 credit there.)

--And it's occurred to me that all of these thousands (yes, literally) of books are dust-trappers and are also bad for my allergies.  But I'm doing what I can.

--Finally, I downloaded and signed a contract from 90 Days to Your Novel.  This contract essentially says that I will work on my novel for two hours every day.  Period.  This is good for me, as I haven't been working on my novel much since I've been feeling so crappy, and I've been very upset about that for awhile.  I figure that if I can do all of the things I did today, despite not feeling well, then I can also work on the book--for at least short spurts that total two hours.

--And the contract means that other writing--short stories, blogs, book reviews, poems, essays, etc., all of which I also do--won't count in those two hours.  Just the novel.  This is huge for me.

So, that's it for today.  I'm trying my best to recapture some sense of myself.  Let's see how it goes...

Book Review: Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason

Photo: Cover, from the book's Wikipedia page

Another of the Nordic Noir (this one takes place in Iceland) to become very popular in the last ten years or so, following in the wake of authors like Jo Nesbo, Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and many more.  Not reaping the rewards of this new trend, by the way, are the translators of such novels.  They deserve just as much credit, if not more, than the actual authors.  Or do people think that Stieg Larsson wrote in English?  The style of the English, which has gained such notoriety from these Nordic Noirists, is more the translator than the author.  I'm just sayin'.  The translator for this one is Bernard Scudder.

Anyway, this one is very effective, and not much of a mystery, actually.  A skeletal hand is found (Killer opening sentence: He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it.) and the detectives in charge let an archaeologist unearth the whole skeleton, a long, painstaking process that allows the author to delve into the abusive past of the family who lived nearby the grave, as well as the self-destructive daughter of one of the detectives, and his own relationship problems.  The story unfolds in layers of shifting third-person omniscient narration, and the reader soon finds that the actual mystery is the identity of the skeleton--and of the one found with it later in the book.  There's a further subplot involving the broken relationship of the owner of the place that had once stood on the spot of the grave, and of his fiancee, who left him after she became pregnant with someone else's baby.  That's a running theme of the book: broken relationships, both between a man and a woman and between adults and their children.  In that sense, the book is especially Nordic--the noir comes not just from the writing style, but also from the insinuated hopelessness about relationships.  Nobody's got a good one here, but it ends with a brief but hopeful touch, though that depends on your point of view, I guess.  Less Nordic Noir than Henning Mankell's excessively cold and distant landscapes, and Stieg Larsson's detached characters and their often-xenophobic attitudes, but still noir nonetheless.  Think Raymond Chandler, but without the ditzy dames.

If you like this kind of stuff, as I do, you'll like this one.  I started and finished it in six hours, because I was unable to sleep.  So it's a quick read, and the shifting third-person omniscient narration never confuses.  I guessed the identity of the skeleton pretty quickly, and I think any astute reader would, too.  I get the feeling that the author (and translator) sort of knew this, but the reading enjoyment isn't because of the final answer, but because of the journey it takes to get there.  You let it unfold at its own pace, which is neither too slow nor too fast, and when it gets there, you're satisfied, even though you probably knew it the whole time.

Worthwhile as we enter the Noir winter in these parts.  I wonder if I can start a series of novels that will give rise to other writers doing the same sort of thing, and it'll all be called New England Noir?

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

Photo: Book's cover, from its Wikipedia page.  Great cover!

Very specifically-written account of the murders committed by Dr. Marcel Petoit, of which there may have been 27, or 150, or anything in between, by David King.  In Nazi-occupied Paris, he would advertize his services as a Resistance-fighter, as a man who could get Jews and others out of the country, to Argentina and to freedom.  His orders were to not tell anyone.  To carry as much money as possible, sewn into their clothes.  To remove all identifying tags.  To pack all of their most valuable belongings into two suitcases and to bring them on the day they were to get away.  He'd have them meet him at an address, at an apartment condo affixed with a gas chamber, a scope that allowed him to see the suffering from the gas, or from the poison he might've injected them with.  He became very rich.

The book shows a lot of the Paris of the time, from existentialists Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir (it was cool to hear about them; I studied them while getting my philosophy degree, but I didn't get to learn a lot about their daily lives), to the daily struggles of everyone else at the time, to the way the police department worked in its tug of war with the Nazis in power, to many other things.  Petoit's crimes over so long proved the maxim of the best way to get away with something huge and terrible: To do so in the wide open, because nobody will believe it, and those who do will willfully ignore it.

It covers the trial, which was a farce of the highest order.  In a French trial, the judge, the accused, the prosecution, and any lawyer of any of the other civil defendants can all ask a question, interrupt, and say anything at any time.  So can the judge, and any of the assistant judges he has next to him.  So can any member of the jury.  This, as you may imagine, would create a chaos that I still have trouble understanding.  How anything is proven, or disproven, and judged upon is a mystery.  But Petoit was found guilty, and guillotined.  His last moments exhibit a perhaps-psychotic calm that is also beyond belief.

The subject matter saves the book, in a way, because the author displays a very dry, matter-of-fact writing style that could bore had the subject been more pedestrian.  I had no trouble putting it down, though I did want to continue.  A better job could perhaps be done with all this, though I do understand, perhaps, that the author may have felt such an approach was necessary in order to make sense and order out of all the chaos.  I have not read any of his other work, so I can't say if this is just his style, or not.

Worth a read, though Petoit's manic behavior, and his apparent ability to impress so many very well-educated and otherwise hard to impress people, may turn the reader off a little.  A Jekyll-and-Hyde person, Petoit was both a celebrated and altruistic doctor, and a mass-murderer, serial-killer-for-profit, and perhaps fifty other types of person, all at the same time, and was in and out of institutions frequently.  It was also clear that he worked for the Gestapo, and that he may have started this killing spree getting rid of other Gestapo workers--and then started killing everyone, including Jews desperate to get out of France.

Sickening, yet compulsively readable.

The Rapture of Mystery: Stephen King's The Colorado Kid

Photo: Paperback cover from the book's Wikipedia page.

I read this one in a couple of hours, just after finishing Stephen King's Joyland.  They're both published by Hard Case Crime, and they both have covers of big-breasted, younger dames--covers of a scene you won't find in the story itself.  I don't know why I'm okay with that, and yet why I'm not, at the same time.

This mystery is sort of the idea of this book itself.  An actual mystery that, like most of life, you can't explain.  This is not a Sherlock Holmes locked-room mystery, nor is it an Agatha Christie trapped-on-an-island mystery.  It isn't either of those because this one is unsolvable, and purposely so.  The story isn't the case, or the mystery, but the three characters telling the story.

The story is, in fact, the story itself.  It's about being curious, about always questioning, always asking "Why?"  At my job, my little cohorts are always asking me why I ask "Why?" so much.  And I'm always asking them why they don't ask "Why?" enough.  (I suspect it has something to do with television, gaming and computers, as these things make us do, and watch, but not really think for ourselves.  Or am I getting old?)

But you sort of die when you stop asking "Why?"  And when you stop caring.  The thing is that you can't allow yourself to be put off by the inevitable "I don't know."  Where did we come from before this realm?  "I don't know."  Where are we going?  "I don't know."  You may have a religion that teaches you what to believe, but that's why it's called "belief."  Believing is not knowing.

And so this is the root of this short (especially for King) book.  The story isn't the mystery, per se, but is instead the wonder of "mystery" itself.  It's what keeps life interesting, right?  And a lot of things in life really don't have a clear-cut beginning, middle and end.  Where did we go wrong?  "I don't know."  Why did she change so much?  Maybe she was always like that and I didn't realize it?  "I don't know."  Some mysteries don't have answers, such as why an advertisement artist from Colorado suddenly had to feverishly catch a jet to Bangor, Maine, and drive hell-mell to middle-of-nowhere Maine and to die suddenly and inexplicably on a small beach.  Who knows?  It's cases like this that haunt real-life police detectives, I'm sure.  Drives them crazy.  But that's what life is--a series of inexplicable mysteries that you're wise to consider, but unwise to expect an easy answer--or an answer at all.

Sometimes there just isn't one.  And, if there is, it's often above our comprehension.  (That's what religion's for, I suppose.)  But this short book ends with the essence of all that: a ballfield full of players and umpires, looking up in a fixed rapture of confused wonder.

That's what this life is.  Rapturously confused wonder.

You'll appreciate The Colorado Kid if you get that.  You won't if you don't.

Comments for "So Many Reasons," now published in On the Premises

Photo: Norman Rockwell's "Merry Christmas, Grandma!" at addictinginfo.org (Not my kinda site, but it had a good photo of this painting).  Is Christmas ever this old-fashioned and homey?

"So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," my most recently-purchased story, about how a best-selling author deals with a collapsing marriage on Christmas Eve, was published by On the Premises (Link: www.onthepremises.com) on March 10th, in Issue #19. Use the link above, then click on "Latest Issue (March 2013)" and then click on "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," four stories down on the page. Check out other good stories in that publication as well. It's all free. When you're done, please go to this blog entry and leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

For those who care about such things, this story is especially important to me because it is the first non-genre piece I've sold.  This means that it's not science fiction, or horror, or mystery, or speculative fiction, or a specific genre like that.  It's a more everyday story, very contemporary, very today.  And it's about relationships, about how they end, and about not lying to yourself about them.  It's a tough lesson to learn that your life is crappy, and that you're full of crap as well, but that's what happens here.  But I digress: this is especially rewarding because there aren't any tropes of a genre that the writer can fall back on.  For example, in a horror story, you expect some blood, some terror, some fear.  In a mystery, you expect a puzzle, a whodunit.  In both cases, the writing itself doesn't have to be all that good, in a way, as long as the blood and terror keep coming, or as long as the reader is hooked so much on the whodunit that he doesn't notice how terrible the writing is.

In a non-genre story, it isn't that easy.  There are no bloodletting scenes, no whodunit, no YA romance, nothing that a genre writer can fall back on when nothing else is working.  It's just a real-life guy and his real-life problems.  Characterization is more important here, and so is the conflict and the reality.  So when something like this sells, the writer feels a little more confident because this type of writing can be much harder to create than a genre piece.

So if you've taken the time to read it, thank you; if you haven't, please do.  And please comment below.  Let me know what you think, good or bad.  Let's have a discussion about it.  As long as your comments are politely stated (and a specific example from the story would help), I promise to publish them.  Please, and thank you.

As usual, thanks for reading my stuff.  I appreciate and respect the time you sacrifice to do so.

The Restorer by Amanda Stevens

photo: Book cover from the author's website, www.amandastevens.com

So I'm standing in Stop & Shop, where I buy many of my books these days--which is an issue I'll probably take up with my blog--when I saw this book.  Quick to judge a book by its cover, literally and metaphorically, I saw the image of a seemingly-weeping stone angel, its wings drooped and its face under its right arm, its left arm hanging loosely over a cemetery mausoleum.  The caption reads, "Every cemetery has a story.  Every grave, its secrets."  And Publishers Weekly said it was a "creepy, atmospheric tale."  On the back, Heather Graham (I read this quote because I thought it was the super-sexy actress commenting, but alas...) said that the author "...has managed the difficult feat of combining charms and chills..."  Now, I've been doing research about graveyards and gravestones for my novel, The Gravediggers.  And I admit to a morbid fascination of this stuff.  (For example, I can look at the front of a New England gravestone and tell you the approximate year of construction without looking at the dates.  It's all in the skulls, angels or urns on the front, or the flat or rounded shoulders, or the rock used--thin black slate is much older...I can do the same with the backs of baseball cards, but I digress.)  As this all had some slight bearing on The Gravediggers, I thought I'd see how someone else handled a few things I have to work with.

After buying it, I realized it was a Harlequin book, and I became slightly ashamed of myself.  As I'd already spent the money--and as I've been sniffling with a sore throat and blocked ears the past few days--I thought I'd try it anyway, and I would breeze past the sultry scenes.

Much to my surprise--and bias--I have to say that it was a very good, quick, and, indeed, a chilly and atmospheric read.  Most of it does take place in graveyards, which can get old pretty quick, but the author manages to describe the same things in different ways--or, in some cases, repeating creepy things to good effect.  The doom and gloom never gets old.  There is no actual bodice-ripping to speak of, thank God, and the romance is kept to a minimum--much of it one-sided until the end.  The mysteries are mysterious enough, though the book focuses more on the atmosphere than on the mystery.  It's solved very quickly, and perhaps abruptly, at the end, and the revelation probably won't surprise you.  (I have to admit that I nailed the villain right away.  But that's me.)  The ending was satisfying for me despite this, and the author carefully and wisely ends it with an open door to the sequel--though in an author-intrusion/speaking to the reader way that was consistent throughout the book, and which I could have done without.

The characters are (mostly) believable, as are the plot points and situations.  The main character, also the 1st person narrator, is a graveyard restorer (hence the title).  This is apparently not a well-paying job, though there's obviously plenty of old graveyards in the south and in New England that need tending.  I was always under the impression that local historical societies took care of this sort of thing themselves, but I suppose it's plausible that they may seek contract help.  Since these societies are vastly underfunded with local tax dollars and count heavily on volunteers--even in the administration--I wonder if this part is very plausible, but whatever.  You've got to get her in there.  (I volunteer a tiny bit for a local historical society, and the woman in charge of it is a volunteer who goes into the office only on Mondays.)  Of course, there aren't any symbologists, either, but Dan Brown got away with it.  (And this book mentions that very term, and is heavy, but not dependent, on symbols, and secret societies, etc.)  Anyway, the focus isn't on the main character's job, but is instead on her ability to see spirits--and the dangers they present.  Her father had also had the gift (or curse) and was also a graveyard restorer, and he gave her a set of rules to live by, because otherwise the spirits will latch on to you, forever.  As in, even after death.  The Harlequin focus, if you will, is on how she throws all those rules away when the haunted and brooding police detective enters her life.  The number one rule: Don't acknowledge the ghosts.  Don't even look at them.  If you do, they'll latch on to you.  She never dates, either, because of how often she sees ghosts, and their haunted hosts.  And, besides, who wants to date someone who smells like death all the time?

Of course, why someone who insists she needs to stay away from all these ghosts continues to take jobs working in cemeteries is never addressed.  I mean, where else would you run into more ghosts than a cemetery?  But, whatever, suspension of disbelief, and all that.  The main character is likeable and the minor characters are passable (though not fleshed out and a little interchangeable), so if you're appreciably creeped out by Gothic things, and if you can remember your teenage and college years when you walked alone in graveyards at times, pick this up and read it.  I'm going back to Stop & Shop to pick up the sequel now.

And, about buying books at Stop & Shop now that there's only one bookstore outlet in the state...

The Best American Stories: 1998--Last Few Stories

 photo: front cover, from its Amazon page

All right, everyone, it's been a long while since I posted my review of the stories in this anthology.  I've been sidetracked by various and sundry issues, but here's the concluding blog entry about these stories.  Overall I found this book extremely worthwhile, so track it down and read it.  Follow my critiques as a guide once you have the book, if you wish.  If you have any thoughts about these, or any other works of these authors, please feel free to comment.


The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage by Peter Robinson

Interesting and well-written, sort of a cross between Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Tolkien's Hobbit's land.   And Rose Cottage will always remind me of the hut in Eyam, England, within which so many members of one family died of the Plague.  (I've written an entry about that here.)  There's a little bit of Fried Green Tomatoes, too.  There's a wonderful little mystery involving the two ladies of the title, and some bones found buried in the garden of the former home of one of them, and an abusive husband, and small-town secrets.  And a nice little subtext about death itself, too.  And getting old.  A good read, and pleasantly bittersweet, if you like that kind of thing.  But we do grow old, and things do die away, much as we do.

Twelve Days out of Traction by Dave Shaw

Written in a purposely terse style, too aware of itself for my taste, but anyone who throws in a jab at Newt Gingrich can't be that bad.  The narrator runs injury scams, the kind of guy who slips on a wet floor of a store and sues the owner.  Just okay, not much of a story, really, and written like yeah, okay, whatever.  Not really sure why this one made the cut into this anthology.  Shaw must have pictures.

The Power of Suggestion by Helen Tucker

In this one, a man's normally-boring Holly Homemaker Housewife starts having ESP and devours such books about it.  She "sees" him cheating on her in a hotel, though she's gullible, so believes his lies about it.  Or does she?  A very Ellery Queen kind of story, which is where it was published, like in the old Alfred Hitchcock magazine days.  You know, there's a cheating husband who works too much during the day and even more at night, but not with his wife.  She's supposedly the innocent homemaker, but you know she knows she's being wronged.  Since you know the guy's going to get it, you start thinking how, and this one was then easy to figure out.  Reading it was like watching yourself mentally connect the dots, and then watching yourself being right.  You can see it as a half-hour episode of the Hitchcock TV show as you're reading it.

Take It Away by Donald E. Westlake

Disappointing story from a well-known writer of the genre, who's been writing for over forty years, it seems.  (I have some old paperbacks of his from the fifties.)  Anyway, this one is a forehead-slapper, as it is not conceivable that a member of the FBI would be this dumb.  He and his team on a stakeout use an unsafe walkie-talkie channel; he's in line at a fake Burger King, talking to a guy who's very obviously playing him in the conversation, referring to stakeouts, and his job, and a million other things, and the narrator gets a bad feeling but doesn't do anything about it.  And before you can say The Usual Suspects, the guy in line is of course the guy they were staking out, and the attractive woman in front of him was of course the person the guy in line (a smuggler of paintings) needed to exchange info. with.  And she's holding papers she won't let the FBI guy look at over her shoulder!  Simply not believable, and one of those stories where you want to strangle the narrator, and then the author who shoved him upon us.  A very heavy disappointment, where clearly Westlake's name alone opened the door to this Best of...anthology for him.

The Rest of Her Life by Steve Yarborough

Very effective story about a murder of a young girl's mother, but in fact the murder is the last thing this story is about.  Love, and falling out of love.  Men and women, and relationships.  How and why relationships fail and end.  Lying, and the acceptance of those lies.  Getting old; losing life's fire.  Some quick-changing POV is never a distraction, but is often a revelation.  A juror twenty years later talks again to the girl, it's a flash-forward that takes one sentence.  There are flashbacks, as well, and some back and forth, but if you're paying attention, they're not a problem and can be, as I said, a revelation in the way of this world, of how time works, and of how life and justice often look the other way.  The ending might be a little more subtle than it needs to be, but by then the despair of the writing has forecasted the ending a bit, and it really doesn't matter anyway.  You'll need a shot of whiskey, or something, after the end of this one.  But read it anyway.