Day 47: Believing the Lie

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Cover for Believing the LieI have been a fan of Elizabeth George’s Detective Inspector Lynley and Detective Sergeant Havers series ever since I read A Great Deliverance, the first one. However, it seems to have gone astray ever since George killed off Lynley’s wife three or four books ago, and I came close to not picking up this one. With Believing the Lie, however, George is slowly returning to form. (Just as a side note, those of you who think you know the series from Masterpiece Mystery are sadly mistaken. I was thrilled to hear they were doing the series but really upset at how they combined books, changed endings to ones that were less effective, and so on.)

Lynley is asked by Assistant Commissioner (and slimy politician) David Hilliard to do him a favor and investigate whether a wealthy industrialist’s nephew died in an accident or was murdered. Of course, a lot is going on with the Fairclough family below the surface.

Since the investigation is unofficial, Lynley takes along his friends Simon and Deborah St. James, who are recurring characters in the series. Simon St. James is a forensic scientist of some note and Deborah is a world-class photographer. Although the nephew’s death has been ruled an accidental drowning, Simon finds some evidence to suggest otherwise.

In investigating Fairclough’s son Nicholas, Deborah becomes involved with his beautiful Argentinian wife, with whom she feels a sympathetic connection, while Lynley and Simon investigate the rest of the family. As family secrets are revealed, things begin to fall apart.

Meanwhile back at home, Havers gets more involved with her neighbor’s family. She has long cared about the little girl next door, Hadiyyah, and her handsome father Taymullah Azhar. Now Azhar’s estranged partner, Angela Upman, has returned to the family. Barbara wants to dislike her because of the pain she has caused her family, but Angela is nice and helps her improve her professional appearance, as she has been ordered to do by her new boss. However, Barbara thinks that something is going on.

I think what makes George’s books outstanding are her writing skills and her ability to create convincing characters. I have said before that I have dropped many series mystery novels, principally because I get tired of the secondary characters, who keep doing the same things over and over. George does a nice job of developing even the minor characters and making them interesting, instead of just using them as plot devices.

That being said, George seems determined to thrust Lynley into a series of romantic disasters. Maybe she should be following a dictum I have heard attributed to P. D. James that it’s not a good idea to mix the romance and detective genres. In the first book, Lynley was madly in love with Deborah as she was marrying Simon. In the second book, he suddenly realized he loved his old friend Helen. Then he spent several books chasing Helen, whom we all loved, and was happily married for one or two books until she was murdered. Since the last book he has been stupidly pursuing an affair with his alcoholic boss. As I said before, I think killing Helen was a big mistake, and judging from some of the comments on Amazon, others agree.

One more caveat to this book. Deborah is starting to have the secondary character problem I described above. She is so obsessed by her conception problems that she thinks she understands Bernard’s wife based upon finding one copy of a brochure in the house. Because she thinks she knows what’s going on, she ignores all evidence that things may not be as she thinks. This misunderstanding has tragic consequences. Deborah has been obsessing over her inability to have a child since the third or fourth book in a long series. I wish George would have her adopt a child and get it over with.

Day 46: The Winter Thief

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Cover for The Winter ThiefThe Winter Thief is the latest of Jenny White’s mysteries set in late 19th Century Istanbul about the investigations of the honest and hard-working Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha.

It is a freezing cold, wintery holiday in Istanbul when Vera Arti visits an Armenian publisher to try to convince him to publish The Communist Manifesto in Armenian. Disappointed in her attempts, she doesn’t notice when someone follows her home. When her husband Gabriel returns abruptly to their apartment and tells her they must leave immediately, she argues that she must pack her things. He leaves her to get a carriage for them, but while he is gone, she is taken by the Sultan’s new secret police.

In another part of the city there has been a bank robbery and next door a massive explosion at a café followed by a fire where many people are injured or killed. Kamil Pasha is helping out at the scene when he finds evidence that his brother-in-law Huseiyn might be one of the victims.

Gabriel Arti’s mission is to open a socialist commune in Armenia, and to do that he arranged to purchase a shipment of illegal guns and robbed the bank. His fears for his wife lead him to seek the help of an enigmatic but powerful acquaintance of Kamil Pasha’s who helped him arrange the gun shipment. At the man’s suggestion, Gabriel departs for Trabzon and the commune, leaving the other man to try to find his wife.

Although the Ottoman empire has traditionally been one that tolerates people of different religions and race, tensions are rising. Vahid, a vicious, sadistic, conniving commander of the Sultan’s new secret police has a plot to gain more power by making the Sultan believe that the Armenians are a threat to the empire and then providing himself an opportunity to end the threat. Vahid believes that Huseiyn might have been having an affair with the woman he intended to marry, who died in the fire. In his efforts to find Huseiyn and wreak his vengeance, he runs up against Kamil Pasha and his sister, who is frantically trying to find her husband. The next thing he knows, Kamil Pasha has been framed for the murder of a young Armenian girl.

As we follow the adventures of all those people, as well as Gabriel, the members of the commune, and others, the book begins to feel too disorganized and diffuse. My interest flagged a little. However, the threads of the story all come back together when the Sultan dispatches Kamil Pasha to the wilds of Armenia with a small troop of soldiers to find out whether the new settlement is a band of Armenian revolutionaries or a harmless socialist commune.

Day 45: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

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Cover for The PossessedMaybe not many of you would be interested in a book like The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman, but as a previous student of Russian and also a previous literature graduate student, I found it very funny.

Batuman has written a book about her years as a graduate student of Russian language and literature that skewers many things, but particularly academic conferences with their absurd presentation topics and academic thinking, with the oblique reasoning process that sometimes accompanies it. For example, on the way to a conference on Tolstoy’s estate, Batuman loses her luggage and is forced to dress in flip-flops, sweatpants, and a flannel shirt. Some of the scholars attending the conference assume she is a Tolstoyan and that she has taken a vow to walk around in sandals and a peasant shirt for days. When she calls a Russian clerk to find out about her luggage, the clerk replies, “Are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”

While relating her adventures in studying, travelling in Russia, and living in Turkey, where she went because her grant was too small for her to afford a stay in Russia, Batuman muses on ideas from literature and compares the lives of the people she meets with the adventures of characters in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Her observations are colored with her own peculiar view of life, which poses that “the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love appear bound up with Russian.” In Turkey, when she is challenged by scholars to study Turkish literature, particularly because of her Turkish heritage, she concludes that no one reads it, even the Turks.

Batuman expanded articles she wrote for Harper’s and The New Yorker into this book, which is named after one of Doestoevsky’s more enigmatic novels. Although her musings are occasionally a trifle too erudite for me to follow (and perhaps my memories of Russian literature too rusty), I found the book amusing and couldn’t put it down.

Day 44: The Dogs of Riga

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Cover for The Dogs of RigaHenning Mankell was my introduction to Swedish crime fiction. I usually enjoy his mysteries, but have not really liked his “more serious” novels. The Dogs of Riga is another of his mysteries featuring Inspector Kurt Wallender.

In a novel set earlier in time than his previous mysteries, Wallender travels to Latvia in the days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union to discover why Major Liepa, a Latvian police inspector who has been working on a case with him, is murdered as soon as he returns home. Wallender is bewildered by the politics and workings of the deeply depressed country. He soon figures out that the person arrested for the murder is innocent.

Wallender responds to the pleas for help by Liepa’s widow, Baipa Liepa, to continue his investigation further than the Latvian officials want him to. He encounters widespread governmental corruption and the realities of living in this grim regime. Readers of Mankell’s books have heard of Baipa Liepa, because she is the woman he loves in books that take place in a later timeframe.

Wallender is his usual depressed self, eating bad food and getting little sleep. The setting of urban Riga, though, is much more dark than Mankell’s usual setting of rural Sweden.

I enjoyed the book, although I thought that Wallender seemed strikingly naive at times. Mankell’s writing is sometimes a little awkward, although it is usually spare and transparent.

Day 43: A Discovery of Witches

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Cover for A Discovery of WitchesBest Book of Week 9!

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness is like Twilight for adults. A couple of years ago I decided to try the wildly popular Twilight series and found the first book terribly juvenile. But recently, I picked up A Discovery of Witches, also extremely popular and with similar themes. I just finished reading it and had a lot of fun.

Diana Bishop is a Yale science historian visiting at Oxford to study alchemy. She is also a witch, from a long line of witches. But ever since her parents were murdered in Africa when she was seven, she has refused to learn about and tries not to use witchcraft.

She is working in the Bodleian Library when among the manuscripts she calls up is one called Ashmole 782. As soon as she touches it, she can tell it is powerfully enchanted. To keep true to her vow not to use witchcraft, she refers to it as she would any other manuscript and then sends it back.

Not long after, she meets a mysterious vampire named Matthew Clairmont, a well-known but reclusive genetic scientist. He is interested in the book but disturbingly warns her to beware of other witches. As she has been brought up to fear vampires, she is appalled at his warning and tries to avoid him. But she soon figures out he is actually trying to protect her from the other vampires, witches, and daemons who have suddenly appeared in the library, despite the dictum that the three species are not supposed to draw attention to themselves from humans. Matthew explains that they all want Ashmole 782.

Soon Diana and Matthew have formed a strong bond of attraction, but because Diana has neglected her education in her heritage, she is unaware that relationships between the species are strictly forbidden.

This is a lively and engrossing book, sometimes light and comic but other times fraught with romance, danger, action, and suspense. You care about Diana and Matthew and are interested to see where their story is leading. The book also introduces other fascinating characters, such as Diana’s aunts, Matthew’s family, and Diana’s aunt’s house. Yes, it is a character. Matthew–overly protective, quick to anger, not always under control–makes a much more convincing vampire than does the sulky, languishing Edward from Twilight, and Diana is a lot smarter and more interesting than Bella. This book is the first of a series of three, and I’ll be looking forward to the second book.

Day 42: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

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Cover for The Invention of Hugo CabretI got interested in reading the Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick after I saw the marvelous movie Hugo, which is based upon it. The book has been called a masterpiece, and it really is. A combination of graphic novel and children’s book, about two thirds of it is told in beautiful charcoal drawings that drive the narrative forward.

Hugo is a mechanically gifted boy living secretly in the Paris train station. He keeps the clocks in the train station running in the hopes that no one will discover the absence of his uncle, who is supposed to do the work. He supports himself by stealing food from the cafés in the train station. He doesn’t go to school.

In his spare time he works on an automaton that his father brought home from the museum where he worked shortly before he died. The automaton can write a message, and Hugo believes that if he makes it work, he will receive a message from his father. To get parts for the automaton, he steals toy parts from a stern old toy maker. But one day he is caught.

I did not actually try to use the drawings as a series of flip books but understand that you can, to create black and white movies. And that is a suggestive way of hinting at one beauty of this novel. In the beginning you think you are reading a more or less traditional children’s story but then it shifts to tell a story about the history of the movies. The book is inventive–a graphic novel, a children’s story, a flip book, almost a movie, and a real delight.

Day 41: Death Comes to Pemberley

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Cover for Death Comes to PemberleyDeath Comes to Pemberley is an unusual attempt by P.D. James, a mystery with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy and their family and friends as characters. P.D. James is, of course, the queen of the mystery novel, but I had to admit to some disappointment with this effort.

On the night before the Darcy’s annual ball, the Darcys, his sister Georgina, the Binghams, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and a suitor of Georgina’s have just finished dinner when a coach careers into the yard containing Lydia Wickham, who says that someone is trying to murder her husband. As you will remember from Pride and Prejudice, Lydia would have been ruined by Wickham had not Darcy paid him to marry her, so the family has been at outs.

The men all go off to find Wickham bending over the body of his friend Major Denny. Although the evidence seems to suggest that Wickham has murdered Denny, he insists that after an argument he left the coach containing the three of them, on their way to crash the Darcy’s ball, and didn’t know what happened to Denny.

Although James is a little more successful at capturing the style and time of an Austen novel than other modern writers who have used the Darcys as characters, she spends no time on character development at all, leaving this to the readers’ knowledge of Pride and Prejudice. Yet, at the same time, she unnecessarily, considering the novel is supposed to take place six years later, has characters rehash the events of the original. Although I cannot recall the details, I also have a note that the novel was repetitive.

I have generally avoided reading the plethora of new books riffing on the reinterest in Austen, but I was looking forward to this one because James is usually so good. Although not at all a bad book, I feel that this was not one of her better efforts.

Day 40: The Damage Done

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Cover for The Damage DoneIn The Damage Done by Hilary Davidson, Lily Moore comes home to New York from Spain when the police call her to tell her that her sister Claudia was found dead in the bathtub on the anniversary of their mother’s suicide. In an effort to support Claudia, but unable to deal with her lifestyle of drug addiction, Lily has been paying the rent on her own apartment so that her sister would have a place to live. Lily hasn’t seen her sister for three months, since she came home to visit a supposedly drug-free Claudia only to find her strung out. Since then, Claudia has not returned any of her calls.

When Lily goes to the morgue to identify the body, she realizes that the dead woman bears only a superficial resemblance to her sister, which makes the circumstances of her death–the supposed suicide on the date of their mother’s suicide–doubly suspicious. Lily realizes that Claudia has been missing for months, and that the other woman has stolen Claudia’s identity. She is determined to find her sister even as the police decide that Claudia is a suspect in the unknown woman’s death.

Davidson has written a capable, fast-moving mystery that keeps your attention. The characters are interesting, and readers will like Lily and her affectionate gay friend Jesse. I guessed one part of the puzzle fairly early in the book, but the solution was more complicated than I thought. The writing could have used another edit, but I don’t think editors actually edit books anymore. Overall, though, the book was enjoyable and fun to read.

Day 39: Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890

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Cover for Away Off ShoreIn Away Off Shore, Nathaniel Philbrick explores the history of Nantucket Island, from the first boat of British people leaving the restrictions of the mainland to the final death throes of the whaling industry.

This book could probably be called a microhistory because it is the history of one small island. I had a feeling when reading it that it might be one of Philbrick’s earlier books, and sure enough it was written in 1994, well before his other books. It was apparently reprinted on the shirttails of his more recent, very successful histories.

Philbrick explains how different Nantucket was from mainland New England even from its beginnings. It was occupied by Wampanoag Indians when the Pilgrims arrived to find the rest of the coast almost empty of Native Americans. These people were first treated well by the new settlers, who even purchased their land from one of the two groups (the wrong one, however), but this relationship slowly changed. The Indians were eventually enslaved to some of the other islanders by incurring debts they could not pay, for which an exorbitant amount of work was demanded in return. The islanders’ isolation from the mainland, their strong Quaker roots, and their eventual success in the whaling industry as the first men to go after sperm whales singled them out from other New Englanders.

Philbrick relates the history of the island largely by focusing on a few colorful individuals and families, and principally on two antagonistic factions. Although that strategy makes the book interesting, I’m not sure it provides a true reflection of the island through time.

I felt that the book makes assumptions about the readers’ knowledge of Nantucket, as if it was written for the inhabitants or at least those who are frequent visitors. He often makes comments like “the house was located where the post office is now.”

This last comment is a minor criticism, but it relates to a more major one, which is the lack of good maps and pictures. The book has two reproductions of old maps, but they are so small and fuzzy as to be unreadable. I am a  map person, so when Philbrick is describing where things are, I want to see them on the map. That was almost always impossible. In addition, most histories of this type contain reproductions of paintings or old photographs so that we can see what some of the people or the old town looked like, but this book has none. Indeed, Philbrick actually compares photographs of two men, but the photos do not appear in the book. It would have been nice if the book contained pictures of some of the people and places.

Philbrick is known as an expert on Nantucket, and the book certainly shows meticulous research. It is very interesting, but also frustrating at times.

Day 38: The Winter Palace

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Cover for The Winter PalaceBest Book of Week 8!

The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak is an excellent, absorbing historical novel that captures the rise of Catherine the Great.

Barbara (Varvara) Nikoleyeva is the daughter of a Polish bookbinder who takes his family to St. Petersburg hoping for opportunity. It is the years of the reign of Empress Elizabeth, the daugher of Peter the Great, who has wrested the empire from her nephew, the rightful heir, Ivan, and placed him in prison. Years ago, Varvara’s father had bound a badly damaged book owned by Elizabeth, and Varvara’s mother, an artistocrat who has married beneath her, urges him to draw himself to the Empress’s attention. The family’s move is a success until both Varvara’s parents die, and as a young woman she begs a place at court from Elizabeth.

The court is full of secret passages and peepholes. Nothing is private, and many people are paid to listen, poke through others’ belongings, and inform. Varvara finds herself employed as a spy, or nose, for the Chancellor Bestuchev. She does not wish for this position but finds it a way to keep favor, as in the volatile atmosphere of the court, one needs to keep in with the right people. Even the position of princes and princesses can be precarious, and Varvara has no social status.

Varvara is new to court when the Empress imports Sophia Anhalt-Zerst to consider her as a possible bride for her heir, the childish Peter Fyodorovich. Varvara’s sympathies are caught immediately as she watches Sophia navigate the treacherous shoals of the temperamental Empress, Sophia’s own selfish and conniving mother, and the foolish Peter. Despite her mother’s plotting, which almost gets her thrown out of the country, Sophia converts to Russian orthodoxy, taking the name of Catherine, and eventually marries Peter.

Varbara becomes close to Catherine and supports her even as she is ignored and then cruelly treated by her husband and loses her status with the Empress and the court when, because of Peter’s impotence, she fails to conceive.

The life of the Russian court is vividly depicted in this enthralling novel, where Catherine’s rise to power is paralleled by the building of the magnificent Winter Palace.