Day 134: A Red Herring Without Mustard

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Cover for A Red Herring Without MustardBest Book of the Week!
A Red Herring without Mustard is another of Alan Bradley’s delightful, comic mysteries featuring Flavia de Luce, the eleven-year-old detective and chemist.

In this book a mysterious gypsy woman is nearly beaten to death after Flavia allows her to camp on de Luce land. Something odd is going on. After Flavia surprises a neighborhood thug in the de Luce’s drawing room when everyone else is in bed, she finds him dead the next day, hanging from the trident of a fountain of Poseidon.

As usual, Flavia races all over the countryside on her bike Gladys, feuds with her sisters, consorts with her father’s shell-shocked batman, and tumbles into trouble in this novel, set in England just after World War II.

Bradley’s plots are implausibly complex, but it is not for the mysteries that I read these books but for the funny, irrepressible character of Flavia.

Day 133: Without Fail

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Cover for Without FailI heard from several sources that Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books are good, so I tried one. Without Fail is more of an action novel than I would usually read, but it is a page turner. Child’s protagonist is an ex-military policeman.

Jack Reacher is approached by Secret Service agent Froelich, who used to date Jack’s dead brother, because she is in charge of guarding the vice president elect. The Secret Service has received threats that somehow arrived inside the agency, which is very worrisome. Froelich wants to hire Reacher to do an audit of their security procedures.

When the threats escalate to violence, the Secret Service hires Jack to help find the perpetrators. In the meantime, Jack gets romantically involved with Froelich.

The book is well written and very fast moving. If you want a little light summer reading that will keep you pinned to the page, I recommend a Jack Reacher thriller.

Day 132: Life Sentences

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Cover for Life SentencesThis is really my posting for Monday, because I’m traveling and will be without wifi tomorrow.

In Life Sentences, Cassandra, the author of two successful memoirs and a novel that was less successful, is looking for ideas for her next book. She attended a diverse middle school in Baltimore where her friends were all African-American while she is Anglo. In looking for a subject for her next book,  she learns that Calliope Jenkins, who was a quiet satellite to Cassandra’s group in middle school, later served seven years in jail, convicted of murdering her own son.

Cassandra decides to write her book about herself and her middle school friends and how their lives turned out, focusing especially on Calliope. However, she is surprised to find a cold reception from her old friends. As Cassandra investigates the past of all the girls, she begins to learn that things were not as she remembers or believed.

Laura Lippman’s novel kept my interest and was well written. I would rate it as better than average without being terrific.

Day 131: The Dark Lantern

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Cover for The Dark LanternI had mixed feelings about The Dark Lantern, Geri Brightwell’s novel of deception and intrigue set in late 19th century London. Although I found myself interested enough in what happens, I also thought that the odds of this much intrigue going on in one house were very low.

Jane Willred arrives in London for her first job in the city as a housemaid. Although Jane is a relatively blameless girl, she immediately finds herself caught in a web of deceit. In trying to put her past as the illegitimate daughter of a murderess behind, she has forged a letter from her mean, self-righteous former employer to omit the remarks the employer made about Jane’s past. In her first day at work, she is further embroiled when she breaks a dish and comes under the obligation of the blackmailing upper housemaid Sarah.

Upstairs all is not well, either. Mrs. Robert Bentley, Mina, newly arrived from Paris because of her mother-in-law’s illness, is hiding a shameful past. While her husband distractedly goes about his work trying to prove that an innovative system of taking body measurements of criminals is preferable to fingerprinting as a means of identification, she hides in the London house trying to avoid being recognized.

Odd things are certainly happening, as a stranger intrudes into the house on Jane’s second day claiming to be Mr. Robert and looks through his papers. How, Jane wonders later, did he know she would answer the door–as the only person in the house who hadn’t yet met Mr. Robert–since it wasn’t her job to do so?

Robert is waiting for the return of his brother Henry from India, hoping Henry will agree to sell the house after their mother’s death, as he and Mina are almost broke. Instead comes news that Henry’s ship has foundered off the coast of France and only his wife has survived–a wife no one knew existed.

Aside from the number of people hiding secrets in this novel, I also felt that few of the characters are likable. Jane is the most sympathetic, but she seems incredibly stupid at times. Nevertheless, the plot kept me interested.

Day 130: Under the Lemon Trees

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Cover for Under the Lemon TreesIn Under the Lemon Trees a high school girl tries to live her dreams while being held back by tradition and her family’s expectations.

In the beginning of the novel it is 1970’s California and Jeeto’s sister has just been hurried into marriage with a stranger. Jeeto finds out later that this happened because her sister had been pregnant by a local boy and lost the child. As a result, Jeeto’s mother is even more determined to marry her off directly after she graduates high school even though Jeeto has been offered a scholarship at Berkeley. And, in  the meantime, Jeeto develops a relationship with another local  boy.

Jeeto also tells the story of her uncle’s lost love when he first came to America as a Punjabi Sikh and eventually helped found the Sikh settlement in Oak Grove, California.

The plot of the novel was interesting, but I got frustrated with Jeeto. She was too ready to give up her dreams. I realize that there are cultural issues involved in the question of whether Jeeto can go to college, but what I found frustrating was not that Jeeto would give up her dreams but that she would not even fight for them.

Day 129: Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

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Cover for Mad WorldI found Mad World interesting, but I think it would have been very interesting if I was more familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s work. Paula Byrne’s biography seems to be mostly concerned with refuting statements and criticisms that were made about him, of which I was previously unaware.

The book traces Waugh’s life and career especially in terms of his relationship to the family who were partial models for the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited. The book describes just where the parallels lie and where they diverge.

Byrnes is at pains to refute the allegations that Waugh worshipped and toadied to the aristocracy and was ashamed of his own middle-class origins.

The book made me want to reread Brideshead. I found Waugh an interesting figure, although I couldn’t help feeling how boring and pointless the lives of many of his friends, who were hopeless drunks, seemed.

I apologize for my posts, which will be more sporadic than usual the next two weeks, as I am on vacation.

Day 128: Echoes from the Dead

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Cover for Echoes from the DeadEchoes from the Dead is another terrific book by Johan Theorin. It is his first book, and reading it explained a few minor points about The Darkest Room for me.

Julia’s young son Jens disappeared on the island of Öland in 1972, but her father just received a package containing the little boy’s sandal. After Julia’s father takes his friends Ernst and John along to look into what happened to her son, Ernst is found dead.

For years the island’s inhabitants have heard rumors of the return of Nils Kant, a notorious murderer who disappeared just after World War II. We readers know that these two stories are connected, but not how.  Although we also know who took Jens, we don’t understand what really happened to him until the very end of the book.

Julia returns to Oland to try to figure out what happened to Jens, if she can. After years of depression, she begins to take more of an interest in life and maybe to fall in love with Lennart, the island policeman.

This novel is not as atmospheric as The Darkest Room, but it is full of characters that you begin to know. The plot is complex, interleaved with the story of what actually happened to Nils Kant back in the past.

Day 127: Hush

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Cover for HushI have read a few Kate White mysteries, but this one was disappointing. The heroine of Hush, Lake Warren, is a shallow, stupid woman who is so afraid she will lose her children in a custody battle that she lies to everyone all the way through the book, even when it doesn’t seem necessary. She is so stupid that even though she has been told to be careful about her behavior while custody is in question, she can’t resist having a one-night stand with a doctor she’s been flirting with at work. Afterwards, she falls asleep on his terrace, only to return to find he’s been murdered.

Her fears about drawing attention to herself extend to the point of ridiculousness. She doesn’t report that her cat was drugged and all its hair shaved off, that she has been receiving sinister calls, or that a man attacked her with a knife. Even when she finally finds someone she can trust, she never tells him what is really going on.

In the course of investigating the murder herself, she uncovers corruption at the doctor’s fertility clinic. Even an idiot would be about five steps ahead of her all the way. I used to enjoy the TV series “Sex and the City,” but this book reminds me of that sort of vapidity that often appears in chick lit, without the great script. A predictable, even annoying novel.

Day 126: Dombey and Son

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Cover for Dombey and SonI recently re-read Dombey and Son after not having read it in so long that I could not remember its plot. The novel is Charles Dickens’s tale about Paul Dombey, a wealthy, cold, self-important man who cares only about his son, not about his wife or his gentle, loving daughter Florence. His wife dies in childbirth, and his son Paul is weak and often ill, but Paul and Florence have a loving relationship. When Florence is kidnapped as a child, she is rescued by Walter Gay, a young employee of Dombey. Dombey ships him off to Barbados to get him away from Florence, but Walter’s ship is lost and he is presumed drowned.

With Walter gone, Florence has only her brother Paul for her friend. Then Paul dies, and her father even resents Florence for the love his son had for her, which he did not give to his father.

Dombey meets a beautiful widow, Edith Granger. She is a cold, haughty but impoverished woman, and Dombey essentially “buys” her by marrying her. She despises Dombey for his pride and herself for having married him for his money. The only person she is kind to is Florence, which provides more fuel for Dombey’s dislike of his own daughter. His attempts to subdue his wife end in her disgracing him as best she is able by running away to Dijon with Mr. Carker, one of Dombey’s rivals. When Florence attempts to offer sympathy, Dombey strikes her and she leaves the house, friendless and destitute.

Although the novel is not critically accepted as one of Dickens’s major works, it is still enjoyable. It is full of vibrant characters–mostly those of good will but also some villains–and it is gripping to the end. Some critics have noticed a change in the novel that takes place with the death of the young Paul, believing that having the colorless Florence and the unlikable Dombey as the main characters is not enough to carry the story forward. The absence of Walter and his uncle through much of the book is also thought to be a problem. However, the novel has all of the Dickens hallmarks–social commentary, comic absurdity, realism, pathos, and transformation. Dombey and Sons was written before most of Dickens’s real masterpieces like Bleak House or David Copperfield, but it certainly shows the movement from his lighter, shorter works toward the qualities of his more major works.