Author: whatmeread

Day 344: Tuesday’s Gone

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Cover for Tuesday's GoneTuesday’s Gone is the second mystery/thriller featuring psychotherapist Frieda Klein in a series that is turning out to be quite exciting. A social worker calls on a mentally ill client for a first visit at a grimy, squalid hostel. The client, Michelle Doyce, leads her in to her apartment and introduces her to her guest–a naked man who has been long dead.

The police, embattled with cost-cutting measures, are inclined to close the case even though the victim has not been identified, but DCI Karlsson wants to see what Frieda Klein makes of Michelle, who seems to be talking nonsense. Frieda soon concludes that, rather than having strangled the victim, Michelle suffers from a rare disorder that makes her unable to distinguish the animate from the inanimate and was trying to help him.

When the victim is finally identified, he turns out to be Robert Poole, an apparently charismatic and charming con man and identity thief. He seems to have several potential murderers, but none of them appears to bear him any ill will.

In the meantime, Frieda is slowly beginning to realize that the case from the first book, Blue Monday, is not closed, because the murderer is not dead, as believed. Frieda is sure he is lurking somewhere nearby. She is also involved with troubles with her family and among her friends, as well as the return of her ex-lover Sandy from the US.

Frieda is an interesting character–a loner who likes to walk the streets of London at night and prefers to keep her own counsel yet has several close friendships. The mysteries are involving and complex, and although I figured out who the murderer was before the secret was revealed, it was only a bit earlier. Although the married writing team who calls itself Nicci French builds suspense slowly, the final chapters of the novel are quite thrilling.

Day 343: Poor Caroline

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Cover for Poor CarolinePoor Caroline begins with the death of Caroline Denton-Smyth, a do-good spinster who has dreamed of forming the Christian Cinema Company, which will clean up the film industry. This satire of charitable organizations is a little different from the other Winifred Holtby novels I have read, which are about small town Yorkshire.

Caroline, an elderly eccentric, although virtually penniless, forms the film company and manages to put together a board of directors of dubious character. Basil St. Denis is an elegant dilettante who is hoping to use the charity to make some money. Clifton Johnson is a seedy American scammer. Joseph Isenbaum is a wealthy social climber (and not a Christian) who wants St. Denis to sponsor his son at Eton. Charles Guerdon is a Quaker nonentity, Father Mortimer is carrying scars from World War I, and Hugh Macafee is a film inventor who is obsessed with his work. The makeup of the board alone is an object for satire.

Caroline is in some ways admirable, with a buoyant, energetic personality, who devotes herself to one cause or another, only to have it fail or have the rest of the workers desert her. However, she is totally self-absorbed as she pursues her goals.

There are only two completely sympathetic characters in the novel. Caroline’s young cousin, Eleanor de la Roux, wants to learn to be successful in business and break ground for other women. Roger Mortimer, a young Anglican priest, wants to live a life of poverty and service and falls in love with Eleanor.

I am not sure whether I like this novel or what I think about Caroline herself. She is completely blind about her charities, and from the point of view of her relatives has cadged from them shamelessly for years. Certainly she is a believable type, reminiscent of Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House, who spends all her time on charities for Africa while her children are uncared for and her house falls to pieces.

Day 342: The Tryst

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Cover for The TrystThe Tryst is an odd book by Michael Dibdin, the author of the Aurelio Zen mysteries. Although billed as a crime novel, it takes some time to get around to the crime. In fact, it misleads us into thinking it is one type of novel when it is actually another.

The novel follows the actions of two characters, a homeless boy and the therapist who is trying to figure out why the boy is pretending to be insane. Gary Dunn has come to the psychiatric hospital where Aileen Macklin works as a psychiatrist requesting institutionalization and insisting that someone is trying to kill him.

We find out that Gary, a glue-sniffing boy who lives with a bunch of junkies, has befriended an old man. Although Gary’s mates would like to rob the man, Gary has become involved in the old man’s long, involved story about a former employer who sees a beautiful woman no one else sees. In the story, the employer follows the woman to his death. This story eventually connects the fates of Aileen and Gary.

Ultimately, the novel doesn’t work that well, because it starts out being a crime thriller and turns into more of a gothic novel/ghost story. It is too much one kind of novel to work successfully as the other kind. Although the novel is well written and interesting, it reads almost as if Dibdin started with an idea and changed his mind in midstream. For a better example of a book that combines a crime story with a ghost story, read Johan Theorin’s fantastic The Darkest Room.

Day 341: Nightwoods

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Cover of NightwoodsBest Book of the Week!

Charles Frazier sets his novels in backwoods North Carolina. His first novel, Cold Mountain, was set during the Civil War. His second, Thirteen Moons, went further back to the treatment of the Cherokee in the earlier part of the 19th century. Nightwoods, his third, deals with more recent times, a small mountain town in the early 1960’s.

Luce is a troubled young woman with a traumatized past who has taken up a secluded life as a caretaker for an old disused lodge across the lake from town. She is unprepared when a social worker brings her the young twin children of her murdered sister Lily, an almost feral boy and girl who refuse to speak and like to start fires.

Stubblefield is lazing away his life on the coast of Florida when he learns his grandfather has died and left him, aside from a load of debt, the lodge and a road house and a considerable number of acres on the mountain. When he goes to inspect the lodge, he is immediately smitten by the skittish Luce.

Trouble is on the way, which we know from the beginning of the novel. Bud, the husband and murderer of Luce’s sister Lily has been released from prison because of a hung jury. He is on his way to town in search of the money he stole, which he gave to Lily one night when he was drunk and she refused to give back to him. He beat her to death trying to get her to tell him where it is, and now he thinks the children know.

This novel is at times tender, as Luce blindly copes with the two damaged children in the best way she can, instinctively treating them with delicacy and kindness. At the same time, the violent Bud resembles a character from a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard novel, almost comic at times in his psychopathic ineptitude.

The result is an enthralling novel that is both a love story, not just between its characters but with the beauty of nature, and a thriller with a true feeling of danger. As usual with Frazier, the novel is wonderfully well written, with entrancing descriptions of nature.

Day 340: Death on the Nile

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Cover for Death on the NileIn this classic Agatha Christie mystery, Hercule Poirot observes a young couple at a restaurant in London and thinks their behavior indicates that the woman loves the man too much. A few months later he meets them again in Egypt, but the man, Simon Doyle, has married the woman’s rich friend Linnet. The first woman, Jacqueline de Bellefort, is haunting their every move during their honeymoon. Poirot thinks no good can come of it and tries to tell Jackie to leave the Doyles alone.

The Doyles sign on for the same Nile river cruise as Poirot. To their fury, Jackie appears on board. Also on board is Poirot’s friend Colonel Race. Race is hunting a criminal who has murdered several people. He believes the person is on board, but has not been able to identify him.

On a tour of some ancient ruins, a boulder falls, nearly missing Linnet and Simon. The obvious suspect is Jackie, but she was on the boat the entire time.

That evening, the drunken Jackie makes a scene in the lounge and then shoots Simon in the leg. The next morning Linnet is dead from a gunshot wound, but both Simon and Jackie seem to have solid alibis. The nurse was with Jackie all night, and Simon was incapacitated with his injury. Poirot and Colonel Race begin looking into other enemies that Linnet may have had.

I think Agatha Christie is the best of the “Golden Era” mystery writers at characterization. She quickly sketches convincing and sympathetic characters. Sometimes you even sympathize with the murderer. Her books are also often set in exotic locations and give you a flavor of a certain place and time. I always find Christie’s mysteries to be enjoyable, and they make fun beach reading.

Day 339: A Visit from the Goon Squad

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Cover for A Visit from the Goon SquadBest Book of the Week!

Describing this delightful and quirky novel is going to be difficult, so I hope curious readers will try it even if I am unable to convey a sense of it.

First, I call it a novel, but it can be just as accurately described as linked short stories. Each chapter is written from the point of view of a different character who knows one or more of the other characters. The chapters all center around the subjects of music and public relations.

The book begins in New York with Sasha, who is the assistant to Bennie, a music executive, sometime after 9/11. She is on a desultory date with Alex, but she also has a problem with kleptomania. While in the bathroom, she steals a woman’s wallet and then has to watch while Alex gets involved in helping the woman.

Next is a middle-aged Bennie, who torments himself with feelings of shame about past experiences. He takes his son to visit a sister act in order to fire them for not producing an album in the specified amount of time. He realizes he is beginning to see his legendary taste diverge from that of his younger coworkers.

Then we jump back thirty years to Rhea, a teenager in San Francisco who is a member of a punk rock band called the Flaming Dildoes with her friends Bennie (yes, the same Bennie), Scott, Alison, and Jocelyn. Rhea observes Jocelyn’s budding relationship with a middle-aged record executive named Lou, who will become Bennie’s mentor. Rhea is dismayed as Lou gives Jocelyn drugs and gets her to perform sexual acts in public.

These are just the first of the vignettes, which range forward and backward in time over 40 years and extend in structure to a touching PowerPoint presentation and a parody of a celebrity interview. They make stops in Arizona, Italy, and South America but somehow center on New York. Fans of Egan will already be familiar with a certain type of hip, aware New Yorker that appears in her fiction.

By turns funny, touching, and sharp as a razor, Egan’s observations are always entertaining and her intelligence apparent. An obvious theme of this work is the effect of time on characters but another one is how technology seems to have sped time up, the book ending in a futuristic world where public relations is centered on the tastes of babies. The PowerPoint chapter shows us that another theme is pauses, in music and in life.

One of the things I wanted to do when I finished reading A Visit from the Goon Squad was to read it again so that I could know what I was looking for from the beginning and fully understand all the connections. And that is what I plan to do, having inserted the book into my pile of future reading to enjoy again.

Day 338: Raylan

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Cover for RaylanMy husband and I recently got hooked on the TV show Justified, which is just as surprising to us as to anyone who knows us, because it is fairly violent. One of the things we like about it is the well written, darkly humorous script. After we watched a couple of episodes, I paid more attention to the credits and discovered that the series is based on stories by Elmore Leonard, which explains a lot. It was with interest, therefore, that I discovered this book, titled after the main character in the series, Raylan Givens.

Marijuana growing has become the cash crop for Harlan County, Kentucky. As a deputy US Marshall, Raylan Givens isn’t concerned with drug enforcement. But Dickie and Coover Crowe have decided to expand their drug business by dealing in body parts. When Raylan tries to serve a federal warrant against Angel Arenas, another marijuana dealer with ties to the Mexican Mafia, he finds him bloody in his motel room with his kidneys removed.

Raylan is on to Dickie and Coover very quickly, as they’re not the brightest of bulbs. He is more interested in catching the doctor who is removing the organs, figuring the Crowe boys aren’t smart enough to cook up this scheme themselves.

This case is solved about midway through the novel, and Raylan gets roped into providing security for Carol Conlan, a representative for a coal company that wants to blast the top off the last remaining mountain in the area. Raylan is not sympathetic, but he is more concerned about the old man who was supposedly shot to death by Boyd Crowder after firing his shotgun at Carol. The old timers who knew Otis claim that if he was shooting at Carol, she’d be dead.

The writing is darkly humorous, with the style of the local dialect skillfully recreated. My problem with this novel is it has no focus except perhaps around the character of Raylan. It reads as if it were quickly put together from several short stories rather than plotted out as a novel. I was a little disappointed.

Day 337: A Folly of Princes

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Cover for The Stewart TrilogyIn the sequel to Lords of Misrule, Prince David Stewart is now a young man ready to challenge his ruthless uncle Robert Stewart for the Governorship of Scotland, under the weak rule of David’s father, Robert III. Jamie Stewart, our hero, who has always suspected Robert Stewart of having his lord, the Earl of Douglas, murdered, has declared himself David’s man.

But the Stewarts are an unruly bunch. David’s governorship is more fair and less corrupt than his uncle’s, and he puts in place reforms, but he takes no care in dealing with the proud nobles of Scotland and behaves wildly and promiscuously in his private  life. Although Jamie continues to support him, he is disappointed in his prince and fears that all will not be well.

While this is going on, changes in the Plantagenet monarchy in England threaten the border. At the same time, Donald of the Isles is making his own forays farther north. This northern threat gives Jamie an opportunity of renewing his acquaintance with Alexander Stewart of Badenoch.

Again, Nigel Tranter does a wonderful job of explaining the complicated politics and alliances of early 15th century Scotland, while spinning an absorbing adventure story.

Day 336: 61 Hours

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Cover to 61 HoursEvery once in awhile when I want some purely escapist reading, I pick up a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. I haven’t read these books in order, in fact I’ve only read a few, but they are certainly exciting, to say the least. For those who are not familiar with Reacher, he is an ex-army major who has become a drifter, wandering around the country and taking care of situations that he mostly falls into.

Jack has hitched a ride on a bus full of senior citizens when an accident strands them in the small town of Bolton, South Dakota, in the middle of a snowstorm. With our inside information, we readers know that the car crash is not actually an accident. Outside of town, a Mexican drug cartel has taken over an abandoned military facility. The local police are guarding Janet Salter, an old lady who is  a key witness against the cartel.

It is simply chance that causes Reacher to become acquainted with Janet. But when he learns that the police are expecting a visit from an assassin, he decides to help protect her.

I have seen comments on Amazon from hard-core Jack Reacher fans complaining that this novel is not as action packed as the others and that the series is deteriorating. I don’t really have any complaints, but then I have only read a couple of the novels. I found the book fast paced and exciting.