Tag: New York State

Review 2633: The Pink House

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Some of the best stories of my life begin with an orphaned child. Here is another one.

Norah is a crippled girl, probably from polio, but at seven she is loved and taken care of. Then her mother dies, and her father, who soon will be traveling to South America for business, gets Aunt Rose to take her home. Norah, who doesn’t even understand that her mother is dead, thinks she is going for a visit. And it’s clear right away that no one wants her at her aunt’s home in central New York State.

Aunt Rose is beautiful, but she is cold and aloof. Nevertheless, she makes people love her. She lives a life of barely hidden dislike with Uncle John, yet he loves her. The children are Paul, who tries to please Rose but never does; Mary Anne, who is so beautiful that Norah can’t help staring at her; Jed, who calls Norah “Toad”; and Dosie, who comes right out and tells Norah she doesn’t like her. The children make it clear they aren’t interested in her, and only Paul is kind but removed. Aunt Poll, John’s sister, is so direct that Norah at first hates her, but it is Poll who will help her become strong, independent, and brave. At first, though, she spends most of her time alone crying.

This is a story about how a lonely, neglected orphan slowly becomes an integral and valued member of the family. But it is also about a cold, selfish, beautiful woman who attracts love without effort and without deserving it and does her best to destroy that family. It is about self-determination and growth but also about family secrets.

I absolutely loved this novel and thank the brand new imprint, Quite Literally Books, for sending me the book in exchange for a free and fair review. The first thing I did after I finished this book was look for another one by Nelia Gardner White, a new name to me.

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Review 2339: The Quiet Tenant

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

For five years, the woman in the shed has been captive, padlocked in, handcuffed to a table, subject to repeated rape. Her captor lives in the house with his wife and child. But his wife has recently died, and his in-laws, who own the house, want to sell it. When he tells her he has to move, she knows it means her death. She knows when he has been out killing, but she has managed so far to talk him out of killing her, and now she convinces him to move her.

Emily is the owner of a restaurant and serves as its bartender. She is in love with handsome Adrian Thomas, who comes in regularly for a nonalcoholic drink. His wife has recently died, and she thinks he is showing interest in her.

In between short chapters from the women’s points of view are even shorter ones from the points of view of his victims.

This novel is certainly readable and suspenseful, but I had a few problems with it. First, the tone of the chapters by the victims is all wrong. These chapters make up a very small portion of the novel, however.

I had a bigger problem with the unlikelihood of the captive woman not taking several opportunities to escape. The first time, when Adrian absentmindedly doesn’t lock the handcuffs properly, is explained by her belief that the house has hidden cameras and Adrian’s omission may have even been a test. But I don’t know. I think most people would try. It’s less believable when she decides not to leave without the 13-year-old daughter, Cecilia, especially since as soon as she got to police, Cecilia would not be in danger. I found this really unlikely after Adrian leaves her free in the house during Christmas break while he is at work. She would have had all day to get away. She knows by the end that he has tricked her about the cameras, so she should be able to guess he’s tricking her about the so-called GPS tracker he put on her wrist.

Still, if you want to ignore such details, the novel is certainly a page-turner.

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Review 2332: The Circular Staircase

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Rachel Innes, a 40-some-year-old spinster who has raised her niece Gertrude and nephew Halsey, is persuaded to leave the city and take a house in the country near where they have friends. She leases a large house from the Armstrongs, a banking family who are visiting California for their health.

Miss Innes arrives first with her servants and passes a comfortable night. However, the next night she and her servant see a face at the window and later on hear noises as if someone has broken in, although the windows and doors remain locked.

Gertrude and Halsey arrive with a friend, Jack Bailey, who is a clerk at the Trader’s Bank in town. That night, there is another disturbance. This time, an intruder is shot to death at the bottom of the circular staircase. He is Arnold Armstrong, the estranged son of the house owner, who should not have had a key. If that’s not bad enough, both Halsey and Jack have vanished. Right about this time it becomes known that the Trader’s Bank has failed because someone has stolen millions of dollars of securities. Suspicion has fallen on Paul Armstrong, the bank president, but maybe also on Jack, to whom Gertrude is engaged.

The house now becomes the target of a series of mysterious intrusions. Strangers appear on the grounds, noises are heard in the house, holes appear in the walls of an unfinished ballroom. Miss Innes runs up against someone on the staircase in the dark, and the events continue even with police guarding the house.

It’s not hard to guess why people are trying to break in, especially after Paul Armstrong dies in California, leaving an unexpectedly small estate. But Rinehart keeps the action going with lots of perplexing incidents.

The novel is engagingly written and moves along quickly. There isn’t much character development here, but that’s not to be expected from a thriller from 1908. However, we like Miss Innes and we also like Mr. Jamieson, the police detective who gradually lets Miss Innes in on the investigation.

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Review 2330: Somebody’s Fool

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Somebody’s Fool is the third of Richard Russo’s North Bath novels. The first two (Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool) centered around the character of Donald “Sully” Sullivan. Sully is now dead, but he is certainly not forgotten, and in a way, you could say that this novel also centers around him.

These books of Russo’s are equivalent to ensemble cast programs. There are lots of characters, and the novel moves among them.

Peter Sullivan, Sully’s son, is one of the main characters. He is a college professor who spends his weekends fixing up, first, the house his grandmother left him and now, the one Sully left him. He enjoys this work, but his plan is to leave North Bath as soon as he finishes and sells the second house. On the other hand, he’s always planned to leave but doesn’t seem to do it.

Peter is surprised to receive a visit from his son, Thomas, whom he hasn’t seen since he and his wife split up when Thomas was a boy. Thomas doesn’t seem to mean well, even though he is friendly, and we learn later that he has a plan but not right away what it is. Thomas, we learn from letters to his brother, is eaten up with resentment against Peter for deserting them (even though his mother didn’t want to have anything to do with Peter) and with jealousy against Will, the oldest brother, for getting to go with Peter.

(Just as a side note, I can’t be sure, but I think this is the first time we ever hear that Peter has two other sons besides Will. They are certainly convenient for this plot but make Peter’s lingering resentment against Sully for deserting him and his mother even harder to understand.)

Another important character is Doug Raymer, the ex-Chief of Police of North Bath. North Bath has recently been dissolved as a political entity and absorbed by nearby Schuyler. Raymer was offered the job of Chief of Police there but decided to retire. He is mostly missing Clarice, his girlfriend and ex-officer, who wanted to take a break and has accepted the Chief of Police job. When he meets up with Clarice, he finds she is dealing with a breakdown on the part of her twin brother, Jerome, and the misogyny and bigotry (she is Black) of her new staff, led by Lieutenant Delgado.

Raymer gets involved with a case of identifying a badly decomposed suicide at an abandoned estate when his old officer, Miller, calls him for help. Clarice hires him as a consultant and asks him to take Jerome as a housemate.

Another main character is Janey, a woman with a history of poor choices in men. Although a lot of her space is occupied with her relationships with her mother (whom she resented for years for carrying on with Sully outside her marriage) and her daughter, she ends up being key because of her relationship with Delgado.

Russo’s characters tend to be self-doubting and over-think things. Usually I enjoy him, but in this novel some of these tropes became a little repetitive. And at times they slowed the action to a halt. For example, Peter hears someone moving around in his supposedly vacant house. He grabs a baseball bat but then Russo takes two pages to have him wonder who it is (including Sully’s ghost) before going up to see. Eventually, the plot gets going but before that, there were times that I got impatient.

Russo is a really good writer, though, who creates complicated and mostly likable characters. It seems like he wanted to use this novel to wind up the fates of his sometimes comic North Bath characters. If that was his intent, he succeeded.

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