Category: books

Day 742: Witch of the Glens

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Cover for Witch of the GlensKelpie is about fourteen or fifteen and only remembers a gypsy life traveling with Mina and Bogle. They use her to steal and read the crystal, for she has second sight. Mina keeps promising to teach her witchcraft without actually showing her any. Still, they are often accused of being witches and hounded out of town.

Then one day she pretends to fall in front of a party of young men only to find she has actually injured herself. Although they catch her stealing from them, they are amused by her and take her home with them. The young men are Ian, Cameron, and Alex, returning from Oxford to their home north of Inverlochy.

Kelpie stays at Glenfern with Ian’s family, eventually as a servant, but they treat her kindly. She begins to feel affection for the children, especially little Mairie, and is dismayed when Mina and Bogle reappear. Mina threatens to curse the family if Kelpie refuses to come with them, and since Kelpie believes in Mina’s power, she goes.

The Highlands are in turmoil because Argyll has been commissioned to secure the area for the Calvinist Covenant against King Charles. Argyll’s troops are more prone to burn villages and murder innocents than to fight armies. But Montrose is trying to raise men to fight for the king. Mina sends Kelpie on a perilous task, to steal some hair or a personal possession from Argyll so he can be hexed.

Kelpie’s adventures take her all over the Highlands. When she joins the followers of Montrose’s army, she is happy to meet Ian and Alex again, but she has seen Alex strike Ian down in the crystal, so she is wary of him.

This is an enjoyable novel for tweens and teens full of likable characters and nasty villains, some history, lots of adventure, and another feisty Watson heroine. Kelpie begins re-evaluating her moral choices through the examples of others and the kindnesses she receives during her travels.

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Day 741: Seven for a Secret

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Cover for Seven for a SecretSeven for a Secret is the second fantastic Timothy Wilde historical mystery by Lyndsay Faye. The series is set in 1840’s New York City. Wilde is a member of the newly formed copper stars, the city’s first police force.

It is Valentine’s Day, and Timothy and his colleague Jakob Priest are celebrating having solved an art theft when a beautiful woman of color comes looking for him at the station house. She is Lucy Adams, and she has just returned home from her job at a flower shop to find her son and sister missing. She knows exactly what happened to them. “Blackbirders” have snatched them to sell down south as escaped slaves, even though they are free.

Timothy asks his brother Valentine to go with him to get them back. Although Valentine is a corrupt Democratic party boss and a drug addict, he’s a good man in a fight. Timothy, his African-American friend Julius, and Valentine retrieve the three from the slavers, Varker and Coles, but not without a fight. The two women and little boy need somewhere safe to stay until Lucy’s husband returns, so Valentine offers them the use of his apartment.

Something is going on that is more complex than he understands, for when Timothy goes searching for Lucy’s husband, he finds that Lucy isn’t married to Charles Adams, a white salesman, as she thinks she is. She may or may not be married, but her “husband” is a Democratic senator for New York state.

Coming to see Lucy and her family a couple of days later, Timothy finds Lucy strangled and the room disrupted. Timothy is an honest police officer but he knows a frame job when he sees one. He has just finished removing the body and cleaning up when an enemy, Sean Mulquean, another copper star, arrives to investigate a reported disturbance. Timothy also soon learns that Varker and Coles have kidnapped Julius, so he must hurry to court to try to free him before he can look for Lucy’s sister Delia and son Jonas.

Faye’s historical setting of gritty 1846 New York is absolutely convincing. We like Timothy more the more we see him, and Faye is beginning to build a solid cast of supporting characters. This is a well-written, swift-moving, suspenseful series. At almost 500 pages, the novel is long for a mystery, but it didn’t seem like it for a second. Unfortunately, I have just learned that there is only to be one more in the series, and that one is waiting in my pile to be read.

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Day 740: Richard III: England’s Black Legend

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Cover for Richard IIIHistorian Desmond Seward explains in the introduction of Richard III that there are two views of Richard. He calls them the black legend—the traditional view—and the white legend—the notion that Richard’s reputation was blackened by the Tudors after Bosworth Field. This theory was first put forward by Horace Walpole in the 18th century and is famously supported by Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. The Richard III Society has even claimed that Richard was not a hunchback, which claim was proved false by the recent discovery of his bones.

Seward’s view is that of the black legend, that Richard was a ruthless man who committed many dark deeds, including killing the princes in the Tower. Richard III is an interesting biography of Richard, based on what is known of his life. There are few of his own writings to base it on, unfortunately, because Richard was not much of a writer, a situation common to nobility of his time.

Of course, Richard’s entire life was lived during the turbulent period of the Wars of the Roses. England experienced little peace during this period, and what little there was occurred during the reign of Edward IV, Richard’s older brother. This peace was marred mostly by the rapacious behavior of the Woodvilles, Edward’s in-laws, and that of the Duke of Clarence, his erratic brother. However, that peace was destroyed by Edward’s early death, which plunged the country into another succession crisis because the prince was only 12 or 13 years old. The last time a young prince had become king, Henry VI, was disastrous for the country.

My own impression from reading this book is that Seward invariably looks at the darkest interpretation of events. I guess you could call me of the dark gray school. Certainly, the murders of the princes in the Tower was a shocking event, viewed with horror during its time and since, and there seems little doubt that Richard ordered the murders. Still, the situation for Richard was difficult. In doing his duty by his nephew, he faced the prospect of at least six years of an unstable regime with continual battles for power with the Woodvilles. This is not to excuse his actions, but it is possible to view them as an attempt to maintain stability in the realm, and that’s probably how he explained them to himself. Instead, the result was to almost completely exterminate the Plantagenet family.

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Day 739: Sisters by a River

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Cover for Sisters by a RiverBest Book of the Week!
In trying to characterize the tone and atmosphere of the autobiographical Sisters by a River, I have to say that it reminds me a bit of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, minus the murder. As reported in the introduction by Barbara Trapido, this novel did not fit the 40’s vogue for fond and touching memories of childhood, so it was not published for six years after Comyns began looking for a publisher. Comyns wrote it as a private recollection.

It is difficult to explain just how gripping this novel is. It is an unordered collection of fictionalized memories written by Barbara about the life of her family. Barbara and her sisters suffer a combination of abuse and neglect. Her father, known as Daddy, met her mother, called Mammy, when Mammy was a young child and arranged with her mother to marry her. She began having children when she was eighteen and only stopped after her sixth childbirth made her deaf. She also seems to be insane, periodically rampaging around or talking to invented lovers. Aside from cooking delicious meals, she completely neglects her children.

Granny is a dark and unpleasant presence. She does not allow anyone to clean her room, which is filthy, the floor caked with spilled substances. There she spends most of her time brewing up potions. When Daddy leaves the house, he has to lock up the billiard room to keep her out of the booze.

Daddy is prone to attacks of rage and cruelty. He throws Beatrix downstairs when she is a baby because she is crying. He blackens Mammy’s eye right before they are to host a big party. Yes, both of them are conscious of their social position. Mammy tells her semi-illiterate, poorly dressed, neglected daughters how cultured they are while Daddy takes pride in his hundreds of pairs of polished boots and shoes and takes three hours to prepare for a monthly meeting in town. Meanwhile, the girls’ teeth go bad and one governess after another is fired for some silly infringement or because her feet smell.

The oldest sister Mary has learned bullying from her father. She won’t allow the younger girls to read any of the books she likes, and she chooses what color clothes they may wear. Barbara must always wear brown, which she hates.

I could go on and on about this violent and eccentric family. But what really stands out about the book is its style. All of these events, and many that are worse, are related in a completely matter-of-fact way, no pathos or complaining. The writing style is that of a very young person, including many spelling errors, and this air of innocence and matter-of-face quality give the novel its charm. It’s hard to figure out how old the narrator is. The novel moves back and forth in time, and it seems that at her oldest, she is about sixteen. But there are references to her husband, so it’s hard to tell. My guess is the book was written at different ages.

If you care to try this novel, prepare yourself for something truly unconventional. It sounds dreadfully harrowing, I know, but it actually is not.

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Day 738: The House Gun

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Cover for The House GunWhen Nadine Gordimer died last year, I thought it was about time I read something by her. I’ll say right up front that I did not find The House Gun easy to get into.

Almost the only characters of any depth are Claudia and Harald Lindgard, an older upper-middle-class liberal white couple living, I assume, in Johannesburg, although the city is never mentioned by name. The novel is set in the 1990’s, just after De Clerc has left office and the nation is stumbling to find its way in a new order.

Claudia and Harald are disturbed in their gated complex one night by a friend of their son Duncan who comes to report a horrible event. Duncan has been living in a compound in a separate house from three gay men. One of them has been murdered, and Duncan has been arrested for it.

The story is mostly about the effect this event has on the couple’s marriage. At first very close, they are driven apart almost immediately. They know nothing about what happened, and Duncan isn’t talking. Eventually they learn from Duncan’s advocate, Hamilton Motsamai, that Duncan did indeed shoot Carl Jesperson after finding him having sex with Duncan’s girlfriend Natalie.

There is much more to the story, but it comes out slowly. And Gordimer’s writing style is so abrupt and choppy, her viewpoint so removed and analytical, that the novel seems chilling. This impression is heightened by the tendency to use pronouns or other nouns instead of names for the other characters, especially for Natalie, who is referred to as “the girl,” and the victim, who is referred to as “he” or “him.” Obviously, since the novel is from the point of view of the couple, this naming is a distancing technique to separate the parents from the victim and the person they consider the instigator, but the overall effect is to also distance the reader. I have no frame of reference to know if this writing style is typical of Gordimer or not.

Of course, there are other, more political points to the novel. Although viewing themselves as liberals, Claudia and Harald are shaken to find how biased they are. For example, they wonder at first about the competency of Duncan’s advocate just because of Motsamai’s color. Racial and stereotypical comments permeate the book. It is clearly an issue that is on everyone’s mind.

Then again, the presence of the gun is an important issue. In an article about the novel in The New York Times, a statistic was quoted that after the violent and abusive regime of De Clerc ended and Mandela came into power, official statistics of violence in South Africa increased tenfold. The young men in the compound had bought the gun to protect themselves in case someone broke in. If it hadn’t been sitting there on the table, no one would have been killed. That’s a point that we in the states, with our own issues, should pay attention to.

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Day 737: The Hog’s Back Mystery

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Cover for The Hogs Back MysteryThe Hog’s Back Mystery is another Golden Age mystery featuring Inspector French. This mystery is much more elaborate than Antidote to Venom, the other Crofts mystery I read, featuring four murders, and is set in rural Surrey.

Ursula Stone has arrived at the railroad station in Ash to visit Julia Earle and her sister Marjorie Lawes, her schoolmates from long ago. The first part of the novel is from Ursula’s point of view, and she is surprised to see how distantly Julia treats her husband James, a retired doctor. She is also a little shocked to see how casually Julia behaves with an infatuated neighbor, Reggie Slade.

Ursula is off visiting her friend Alice Campion when James Earle disappears. Both sisters testify that he was settled down in his den for the evening when they last saw him. He was dressed only in thin shoes suitable for inside and did not take his overcoat.

Inspector French is called in when James doesn’t reappear and no one can discover a trace of him. Soon afterwards, French finds that a nurse also went missing around the same time. Her name is Helen Nankivel, and French at first supposes Earle and the nurse have run off together. But the people who know Helen Nankivel insist that she wouldn’t do such a thing. However, she did meet Dr. Earle when they both attended the last illness of Mr. Frazer, a wealthy old man.

French explores many theories, but he is just about to decide that Earle ran off with Nurse Nankivel when Ursula Stone disappears, under remarkably similar circumstances. She was upstairs in her room at the Earles’ while Julia and Marjorie entertained the Campions downstairs. Later, when summoned for dinner, she was nowhere to be found. But Mr. French finds evidence that someone was standing behind a bush outside the den and finds blood in Earle’s den.

link to NetgalleyLike many Golden Age mysteries, The Hog’s Back Mystery a complicated solution. In fact, it is so complicated that it must be explained in a 20-page last chapter, which makes the novel lose quite a bit of impetus. Still, I was able to guess the broad strokes of the solution very early on by simply paying attention to what her friends said about the nurse. It took French a good hundred pages to catch up with me. So, not the best of these reprinted mysteries by Poison Pen Press, but I love the cover.

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Day 736: Circling the Sun

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Cover for Circling the SunPaula McClain’s novel about Beryl Markham begins with her historic flight over the Atlantic from east to west—and then flashes back to cover her life until then. Of course, the story of her life is interesting because she was a fascinating person.

Beryl is raised in Kenya, and after her mother leaves the family to return to England when Beryl is four, Beryl is allowed to run around freely for years. She befriends the local natives and plays with the boys until she is almost a teenager. At that point, her father hires a series of governesses in an attempt to civilize her, an effort not entirely successful.

Beryl’s father is a horse trainer, and she works with him up to the point where her last governess, by then her father’s mistress, decides she should prepare for husband-hunting. She makes a marriage of convenience when her father is forced to sell their farm and take a job in Capetown, but soon she is separated from her husband and seeking a job as a horse trainer. She becomes the first woman licensed horse trainer.

The novel follows Beryl through her introduction to the Happy Valley set, her friendships with Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Denys Finch-Hatton, and her second marriage to Mansfield Markham.

Although this material is certainly interesting, I was never convinced that the character McLain presents us with is the true Beryl. This interpretation of Beryl’s character doesn’t match the one presented by other sources. My feelings made me wish I had read a biography of Markham before reading this novel, so I could be surer of these statements.

link to NetgalleyI feel as if Beryl’s character and other facts are somehow sanitized for our easier acceptance. Although some expression is given to her impatience of convention and yearning for freedom, McLean still portrays her as a woman who wants acceptance and love. I’m guessing, for example, that her abandonment by her mother at a young age left her with few mothering skills and her lifestyle left her with little desire to be a mother. Some sources I consulted said she willingly abandoned her son to her mother-in-law, but in McLain’s book, she is grief-stricken when the child is taken away from her. That tells me that McLain can’t imagine a different reaction to motherhood than the typical one. I think McLean mentions the qualities that made Markham different without really understanding them.

As another example of what I called sanitization, let’s not forget Karen Blixen’s illness, referred to briefly a couple of times, but never explained as syphilis, given to her by her husband Bror.

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Day 735: Free Falling, As If in a Dream

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Cover for Free FallingWith the last book in the series Leif GW Persson calls the Fall of the Welfare State, he finally, as promised, gets to the actual assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. The novel begins in 2007, when Chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation Lars Martin Johansson (whom we have met in the two previous books) decides it is about time someone solved Palme’s murder.

Most Swedes believe the murderer was a madman named Christer Petersson. But Johansson doesn’t believe this, and he has brought together a team of Superintendent Anna Holt and Chief Inspectors Lisa Mattei and Jan Lewin to try to solve the crime before the statute of limitations expires.

This excellent police procedural, like the others in the series, is based on actual events and written by the man considered the foremost expert on crime in Sweden. To see if anything was missed, the detectives laboriously untangle the threads of various “tracks,” or theories of the crime, that were followed during the original investigation. Almost immediately they find evidence of a witness that may indicate the assassin took a different escape route than prevously believed. The witness’ testimony was discounted because she was a drug addict and prostitute. Although struggling with difficulties of an unofficial case and long-dead witnesses, the detectives make impressive strides.

In the meantime, Johansson explores the perilous channels of political intrigue, for Persson’s novel makes an almost perfect combination of political thriller and police procedural. In this novel, we encounter some of the people whose exploits were featured in the previous two, including the ridiculous buffoon Bäckström, who thinks every crime has to do with money or sex, and the dangerous Waltin, long dead but important to the case.

This is an excellent series. Its political ramifications are similiar to those of the works of Stieg Larsson. It is well written, sometimes funny, and also compelling.

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