Category Archives: Reading . . .

***A Tapping at My Door

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The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By David Jackson, narrated by Jonathan Keeble – The early chapters of this police procedural are tremendously intriguing. A woman copper in Liverpool is murdered in her back garden, with a dead raven splayed over her face. Only when the crime scene investigators remove the bird do they learn her eyes have been gouged—pecked?—out. And that the raven has a note attached to its leg saying ‘nevermore.’

Even for people who are not fans of Edgar Allen Poe, that’s spooky. And, it’s a puzzle the police must struggle to work out. Not too long afterward, another police officer is found murdered in his home, again with a dead bird nearby, carrying a new message.

While these crimes are bizarre, at least there’s something to work with. Both murdered officers were implicated in the death in custody of a mentally challenged youth a few years earlier. An investigation cleared the two officers of wrongdoing, but the family and a large segment of the public still blame them for this death. Accordingly, the family is questioned, with all the renewed mutual hostility one might anticipate.

When two more police are killed who seem to have no connection to the earlier tragedy, what are the investigators to think? Are these new deaths merely a diversion? Jackson does a good job portraying the fractured relationships between the community and the coppers, writ small in this family tragedy, and writ large. He presents the action through alternating perspectives, mostly those of DS Nathan Cody and the unknown murderer, whose motives ultimately—well, you can pass judgment on that.

Cody is the principal investigator of the crimes, and to his surprise he’s teamed up with a new murder unit detective, Megan Webley. Unbeknownst to the powers that be, Cody and Webley were once an item, engaged to be married even, until his love of the job put a wedge between them. They dance around each other, not wanting to bring up the past and wanting to get on with their current assignment. There’s a cop-killer out there, after all.

But Cody become unhinged in several run-of-the-mill situations and Webley is starting to doubt his mental stability. His strange outbursts and reckless self-endangerment hearken back to an experience a year earlier in which he was held and tortured by a mysterious group of kidnappers.

About the time of the lengthy flashback in which Cody relives this hostage situation for the sympathetic Webley—an experience he has refused to seek any counseling for—I began to lose interest. The gruesome nature of the torture seemed intended to titillate, not interest me in Cody as a character. From there on out, the plot followed the well-trodden path of escalating craziness and bad decisions, woman-of-interest in danger, and drawn-out final resolution, with a particularly ham-handed, flashinglightsallaround ‘sequel!!’ signaled at the end.

Since this was an audiobook, the narration inevitably affected my reaction. In some passages Jonathan Keeble was terrific, but in others, it was as if he were narrating a silent film (you can listen to a bit through the Amazon link below). They were jarringly melodramatic. In other words, a mixed bag.

****Love & Treasure

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peacock

photo: kansaikate, creative commons license

By Ayelet Waldman – This lovely novel opens with a prologue set in 2013, involving elderly Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter Natalie. Her new husband has abandoned her, and she’s just quit her Manhattan attorney’s job to come stay with Jack in Red Hook, Maine, and her beloved grandfather is dying. It’s questionable which of them needs more tender care.

Searching a drawer, Jack runs across a worn black pouch containing a jeweled peacock dangling on a chain. “Whose was it?” Natalie asks, her curiosity aroused. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.” He charges her with the near-impossible task of returning it to its rightful owner, which will require unraveling its history.

The book then reveals how the pendant came into Jack’s hands at the close of World War II. It had been one item among thousands and thousands on the Hungarian Gold Train, a 42-car freight train the Germans were using to remove valuables—most of them looted from Hungarian Jews—to Berlin. The train was seized by French troops and finally came under U.S. military control and the contents warehoused in Salzburg, Austria. (The U.S. government kept most details about the Hungarian Gold Train secret for 50 years.)

Items were pilfered from the horde by thieves and the soldiers guarding it; U.S. military commanders used the warehouse as a department store for outfitting their quarters with fine china, silverware, crystal, furniture, and oriental rugs. Jack, in charge of the loot, had to comply with his superiors’ orders and was constantly frustrated at his inability to protect and preserve these treasures, much less return them to their rightful owners. His responsibilities as a soldier and as a Jew are at war within him.

Waldman writes compellingly about Jack’s situation and the treatment of the Displaced Persons flooding Salzburg, many of whom were concentration camp survivors. He meets one, a Hungarian with flame-red hair, Ilona Jakab, and falls in love. Jack keeps the peacock pendant in her memory, but never loses the feeling that taking it was dishonorable.

In her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s charge to find the pendant’s rightful present-day owner, Natalie travels to Budapest and finds much more than she expects. That section of the book is a treasure hunt, a mystery story, and a romance.

The last major section of the book dips back in time to 1913. It’s narrated by a libidinous psychiatrist charged with “treating” Nina S., an early suffragist who wears the pendant, and whom he rapidly concludes is quite sane, just at odds with her repressive father.

Natalie, Ilona, and Nina are interesting, compelling characters in challenging situations. Waldman doesn’t tell a good story once, but three times. Descriptions are vivid, characters’ motivations heartfelt, and conversations witty and spirited. Occasionally, she may be a little heavy-handed, and occasionally a verbal anachronism or clunky love scene sneaks in, but overall, the stories have strong narrative power. I don’t quite understand all the carping about this book in the mainstream media—each reviewer seeming to fixate on some different issue. I found it not only an exploration of conflicting loyalties, identity, and the struggle to be honorable, but also a fascinating historical mystery.

Love & Treasure is certainly timely, given recent renewed attention to the issue of Nazi plunder. The peacock pendant, silent witness to the pain and abuse of history, is the treasure in Waldman’s story, but love is the constant.

****Little Sister

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Lake District

photo: Vicki Weisfeld.

By David Hewson – This third police procedural in Hewson’s Netherlands series again features Amsterdam police brigadier Pieter Vos and his misfit Frieslander colleague, Laura Bakker. The story centers on the plight of Mia and Kim Timmers—two from an original set of three. Mia and Kim have been institutionalized for a decade in a remote facility for young female mental patients deemed dangerous.

Ten years earlier, when the girls were 11, their parents and the third triplet, Little Jo, were murdered by parties unknown. That same night lead singer of the local pop band The Cupids was murdered and the girls accused of the crime.

The girls have aged out of their facility, and the psychiatrist in charge says they are no longer a danger. They are released. A male nurse assigned to drive them to an Amsterdam halfway house is found murdered, the girls have disappeared, and before long, another corpse is discovered. Did they do all this? Any of it? Secrets highly placed people have tried to hide for a decade are bursting to come out.

It’s a good study of the kinds and extent of evil that can occur when society judges some people not worth caring about and turns its back. Is what happens to the girls hidden or just not seen? Locating the institution on the island of Marken, connected to land (and reality, normalcy) by only a thin thread of road atop a grassy dyke, is symbolic as well as plot-relevant.

As in the earlier books in the series, Vos lives on his decrepit houseboat with wire-haired terrier Sam. Hewson’s descriptions of Amsterdam when Vos is walking Sam, for example, and of the part of the country where the sisters are from—the Waterland—are created with admirable atmospherics. He ably summons the low flat green country, its dykes and lakes, a land criss-crossed with sparkling channels where “life teemed beneath the emerald surface and nothing was quite what it seemed.”

Hewson provides plenty of interesting suspects, though some of them appear rather intermittently, and I had occasional difficulty recalling their identities. Although I enjoyed this book, it seemed about fifty pages longer than it needed to be, with some motivational untidiness around the climactic scene.

Hewson is an accomplished crime writer and has worked with Shakespeare scholar AJ Hartley on novelizations of Hamlet and Macbeth. I listened to Macbeth: The Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming, and Hewson’s prose—description of the witches, for example—was riveting. He brings that same ability to describe an environment in which difficult choices become inevitable to the story of Mia and Kim Timmers.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

****Made in Detroit

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moon

(photo: halfrain, creative commons license)

This is a review of two books with the same title and of the same re-readable excellence.

Made in Detroit, the memoir by Paul Clemens, is a tale of growing up in the 1970s in one of the Motor City’s last white neighborhoods. It’s fascinating to see the whole “minority status” issue turned on its head, and he comes out of it with decidedly mixed emotions. It’s a struggle, a worthy one, and following his evolving attitudes and understanding of both whites and blacks around him is a thought-provoking journey for readers, as well.

Clemens’s family is Catholic and he gets a Catholic education as parishes and schools close one by one. Meanwhile, the family’s economic stability is increasingly shaky due to the rapidly declining auto industry. Yet, the Church and his father’s love of cars were two constants in his life. He says his family members weren’t readers. “There was enough serious content, enough transcendence, in cars and Catholicism; it wasn’t necessary for them to concern themselves with ideas buried away in books.”

Made in Detroit, the book of Marge Piercy poetry, covers an enormous swath of emotional and physical territory. She uses the simplest language to express the deepest thoughts and makes it “poetic,” without superfluous lily-gilding. I was first drawn to her work by her poem “In Praise of Joe.” As a dedicated caffeine consumer, we recognized each other across the page. Here are the two lines that snared me forever: “It is you who make me human every dawn. All my books are written with your ink.” And here’s a bit from the title poem:

The night I was born the sky burned red
over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives.
The elms made tents of solace over grimy
streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.

Clemens’s book takes place some decades after the night Piercy was born, yet the burning skies (steel mills then), sirens, and desolate streets were only more so in his youth. Despite all the city’s frustrations and conundrums that Clemens describes so well, despite a college education that could have taken him anywhere, he returned to the city. “At times, I feel like a failure in several directions simultaneously,” he writes. “That, with my education and reading, I should be more broad-minded than I am; and that, with the education I received from my father and Sal, I should be angrier about what the broad-minded morons have wrought. . . . Detroit, which drives people to extremes, has left me standing in the middle.”

Clemens’s book makes an interesting counterpoint to Angela Flournoy’s novel, The Turner House, describing the experience of a closeknit black family in Detroit and Susan Messer’s beautiful Grand River and Joy, about a Jewish businessman’s reluctance to flee to the suburbs around the time of the 1967 riots. Perhaps one family story at a time, it might be possible to assemble a picture sufficient to comprehend this fascinating, catastrophe-ridden American city.

***Sunset City

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Houston, flock of birds

photo: Adam Baker, creative commons license

By Melissa Ginsburg — Lots of buzz about poet Melissa Ginsburg’s debut crime novel. In it, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston’s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs – a living paradigm of the income gap – are the kind of noir backdrop against which a multilayered story can play.

Narrated by Charlotte, the story begins in a terrific rainstorm when she encounters a man on the landing outside her apartment and unlocks her door in front of him – the first clue she’s missing a little something in the “ be a little careful” department.

Luckily for her, he’s a Houston police detective named Ash, but unluckily, he’s come to tell her that her oldest friend, the glamorous Danielle Reeves, has been bludgeoned to death. Charlotte and Danielle attended high school and took some drugs together, but Danielle drifted into heroin and didn’t get clean until she got caught. After four years in prison, her friendship with Charlotte had cooled, and she had taken up acting in porn videos.

Charlotte’s back story is handled mostly in a couple of awkward information dumps about her deceased mother, high school years, and growing up relatively poor. Danielle, by contrast, came from money. Her mother, Sally, from whom she is estranged, had a high-powered, high-paying job. What they had in common was that both of them were rather neglected–Charlotte because her mother was a chronic pain patient, and Danielle because of the demands of her work. No dads in the picture.

Work kept Sally so busy during Danielle’s childhood, she didn’t realize her brother was sexually abusing the girl–a plot choice that has become a cliché and, here, is not explored for its specific impact on Danielle. Now Sally wants to be in touch with Danielle and enlists Charlotte to do the outreach. That mission puts the two former best friends in touch again, just two days before Danielle’s murder. Did Charlotte’s visit begin a deadly chain of events?

She starts hanging out with Danielle’s new friends—fellow actress Audrey (another child sexual abuse victim) and video producer Brandon. To Charlotte these people seem exotic, but the first-person point of view limits readers’ access to their thoughts and feelings. Their motivations and experiences are always second-hand, filtered through Charlotte. I’d contrast this approach with John Schulian’s A Better Goodbye, which provides a fully rounded picture of people working in the sex trade.

Ginsburg attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi. In this novel, she mostly avoids literary flourishes, but occasionally her poetic side peeks through. For example, regarding the police station, Charlotte says, “Loud and ugly, the place banged against my eyes.”  Ginsburg does not shrink from discussing the seamier side of life and its difficulties, which is brave for a first novel, and in future perhaps her characters will be strong enough to carry that weight.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover review website.

****The Narrow Road to the Deep North

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Thailand-Burma Death Railway, Pacific Theater

Hellfire Pass (photo: David Diliff, creative commons license, CC BY SA 2.5)

By Richard Flanagan, read by David Atlas – This epic tale from a Tasmanian author won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It centers on the life of Dorrigo Evans, a young surgeon, before, during, and after World War II, when he eventually becomes regarded as an Australian war hero.

A notorious womanizer in later life, Dorrigo can never recapture his early passion for Amy, the young wife of his uncle, and their lost love. Their affair was cut short when he received his orders to ship out and he had no chance to say good-bye to her then, or ever, because of two lies.

During the war, his unit is captured by the Japanese. Its members are forced, despite illness, injury, starvation, and dangerously impossible conditions to work on a railway “for the Emperor,” the infamous Thailand-Burma Death Railway. An estimated 112,000 Asian forced laborers and Allied prisoners of war died during its construction. If you’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, you have an inkling. Flanagan’s own father was a survivor of the Death Railway and died the day Richard told him this novel was finally finished. “He trusted me not to get his story wrong,” Flanagan has said.

Because Dorrigo is a surgeon and an officer, the Japanese don’t require him to work on the construction, but he is plenty busy managing the desperately ill and dying men in his care.

After the war, the narrative takes a detour to tell us the fate of several characters from the camp—its head man, Major Nakamura; the reviled Korean contract guard the prisoners called the Goanna; and a group of ex-prisoners who have an alcohol-fueled rendezvous in memory of one of their fallen.

The climactic (or climatic, given its meteorological link) section of the book involves Dorrigo’s attempts to rescue his wife and children from the devastating fires overtaking a large swath of Tasmania near the capital of Hobart, another real-life event that took place in 1967.

Even though the book is described as “a love story unfolding over half a century,” I thought Flanagan’s best, most moving writing involved the prisoner of war camp. His detailed portrayals of several of the men, especially one named Darky Gardiner, are vivid and compelling. The author did a service in trying to explain the inexplicable when he also probed the character of the camp overlords.

Americans generally know less about World War II’s Pacific Theater than events in Europe, though it was no less horrifying. Some readers may be turned off by the violence of the book, but it’s a war story as well as a romance, and war is not romantic. Stick with it, and you’ll have an indelible picture of the suffering inflicted and endured. Atlas’s narration is straightforward and true.

The book’s title—a metaphor for the railway itself—comes from a famous book by Japanese poet Bashō, which Flanagan’s character Colonel Kota (a beheading expert) says “sums up in one book the genius of the Japanese spirit.” Flanagan explained in an excellent interview in The Telegraph, “I wanted to use what was most beautiful and extraordinary in their culture in writing a book about what was most terrible, because I thought that might liberate me from judgment. And it did help me.”

****American Nations

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American Nations, mapBy Colin Woodard – This 2011 book—a pick of my book club—is a thought-provoking analysis of the different cultural strains, mostly organized along geographic lines, that make up what author Sarah Vowell calls “the (somewhat) United States.” Woodard’s subtitle is “a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America.” Many of those rivalries, which date to our earliest history, well before the Revolutionary War, have been amplified, not erased, by subsequent events, and help to explain some of the political schisms we see today.

The answer to a frustrated electorate’s “Why can’t our politicians (and voters) ever agree on anything?” is partly that they never did. Of course, aggregate data hide a lot of individual differences, and none of the characterizations Woodard has developed for his eleven regions describe every individual living there, just the region’s general cultural tendencies. Some of his regions cross over into Canada and Mexico too.

The regions, which he says “have been hiding in plain sight throughout our history,” are:

  • Yankeedom began as a “religious utopia in the New England wilderness.” Those early colonies emphasized education, local political control, and efforts aimed at the greater good of the community.
  • New Netherland laid down the cultural underpinnings of greater New York City; a trading society that was multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and committed to freedom of inquiry. Its precepts were memorialized in the Bill of Rights.
  • The Midlands, founded by English Quakers and organized around the middle class people predominantly of German background and moderate political opinions who don’t welcome government intrusion.
  • Tidewater catered to conservative aristocratic elites who were gentleman farmers, strong on respect for authority and dependent on slave labor. It was dominant during the colonial period, but lost its standing by dint of its culture’s inability to expand beyond coastal areas.
  • Greater Appalachia was founded by “wave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands” who in their native lands formed a strong independent spirit, suspicious of aristocratic overlords and social reformers alike (think Mel Gibson in Braveheart).
  • The Deep South, founded by Barbados slave lords, became the bastion of white supremacy and aristocratic privilege. It is the least democratic of the 11 regions while being “the wellspring of African American culture.”
  • New France is an amalgam of the Canadian Province of Québec and some other areas of far eastern Canada as well as the Acadian (“Cajun”) territories of southern Louisiana.
  • El Norte dates to the late 16th century, when the Spanish empire founded missions north into California. It includes Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Texas, as well as northern Mexican states that, Woodard says, are more oriented toward the United States than Mexico City.
  • The Left Coast is a narrow strip from Monterey, California, to Juneau, Alaska, and includes San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. The cities were originally developed by Yankee traders who came by ship and the countryside by overland arrivals from the Appalachian region and the culture today is an amalgam of Yankee idealism and Appalachian independence.
  • The Far West is the only area “where environmental factors truly trumped ethnic ones.” The region is unsuited for traditional farming, but its resources have been exploited by companies headquartered in distant cities and they and the federal government own vast tracts of land. Locals largely oppose federal interference (just in the news again lately), even as they depend on federal dollars.
  • First Nation he defines as a large region in the far north, where the indigenous population has never given up its lands and still employs traditional cultural practices.

Like any analysis intended to look at history through a single lens, Woodard may tailor his arguments to support his approach. Nevertheless, he presents an intriguing hypothesis that carries the ring of truth. In this political season, many of the old antagonisms and patterns he describes are newly visible and, frankly, any cogent explanation of why Americans do some of the things we do is welcome!

*****Dodgers

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police car

photo: P.V.O.A., creative commons license

By Bill Beverly – A modern crime classic in the tradition of Richard Price’s Clockers, Dodgers is the story of a youthful soldier in the south Los Angeles drug trade. East, a black 16-year-old, is a yardman for a drug house, which means he runs a team of younger boys who look out for approaching trouble, 24 hours a day.

Somehow, trouble slips past them, and when the police converge on the house, sirens shrieking, East narrowly escapes. But before he flees, the curious younger girl who has approached him is caught in the crossfire and dies before his eyes, an innocent whose death he cannot shake.

After the raid, of course, the house is compromised, and the drug lord gives East a new assignment. He and three others are to drive to Wisconsin and kill a man about to testify in Los Angeles against one of the gang leaders. In the great American tradition of road trips, East heads east on a fateful journey with an ill-assorted group of companions: Michael Wilson, a self-assured, one-time UCLA student who thinks he’s by far the intellectual superior of the other boys; Walter, an overweight age-peer of East’s with an aptitude for electronic crime and a greater understanding of the big picture; and, unexpectedly, East’s younger brother Ty, a stone killer at age 13 whose internal dynamics East cannot begin to comprehend.

The interactions among the four are full of youthful wit and jockeying for position, even though the outcome of the journey is uncertain and potentially catastrophic. The last piece of advice they receive before leaving LA? “Don’t make no friends.”

The book takes its title from the boys’ purchases at the sports apparel store they visit before their departure. There they purchase shirts and caps emblazoned with the logos of the Los Angeles Dodgers, not because East or the others have ever cared about the team personally, but because “White people love baseball. White people love the Dodgers.”

The trip across America and the notice four young black men arouse among the residents of the middle-America states—and the fear of the notice they may arouse—are significant and compelling features of the plot, while he nuanced depiction of East’s mental state makes for a rich and engaging reader experience.

Beverly is a teacher of American literature and writing at Trinity University in Washington, D.C., and the quality of his writing is a great strength of the book. Take this simple description: “There was a gas station. The lights in the cold made the cars gleam like licked suckers.” Any author who can conjure up an image like that deserves to be savored.

A longer version of this review previously appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

*****The Turner House

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Detroit, house

photo: ddatch54, creative commons license

By Angela Flournoy – I deeply admire this book about two generations of an African American family living in Detroit. The parents moved north from Arkansas after World War II and had 13 children whose lives play out against the backdrop of drastically changing economic and social circumstances over six decades.

Newlyweds Viola and Francis Turner spent some of the early months of their marriage separated when he moved to Detroit to find work. Chapters about that era in the family history alternate with stories of the family’s present-day experiences. By and large, their children have many more choices than they did. The parents started out poor, the children are almost all firmly in the middle class.

Principal characters in the narrative are Charles Turner (Cha-Cha to the family), the eldest child, born in 1944, and patriarch of the family since his father’s death and the youngest, Lelah, born in 1967. Lelah has the most difficulties, many of which derive from a bad early marriage and her gambling addiction. She’s near-homelessness and shunned by her daughter Brianna. Cha-Cha is plagued by a haint, which has brought him in contact with a psychotherapist, a much younger African American woman to whom he’s unexpectedly attracted. These are secrets just waiting to burst out. Readers get to know several other family members reasonably well, too, especially brother Troy, the former soldier, now Detroit cop, and Cha-Cha’s wife Tina, who wonders whether her husband is slipping away.

With these two dramas bookending the family’s present-day story, Viola’s large dispersed family is coming together to celebrate her birthday, very probably her last. How they accommodate each other, buck each other up, revisit old wounds—every interaction seems exactly right. They have expectations of each other (“Turner men don’t . . .”) and a strong sense of their shared history. I marveled at Flournoy’s acutely observed assessments of the siblings and their motivations, for example: “The things we do in the name of protecting others are so often attempts to spare some part of ourselves.”

Now that Viola lives with Cha-Cha and Tina, a key issue is whether to sell the house they grew up in, in the largely abandoned heart of the city. Everyone has an opinion, but the long and the short of it is that the house is deep under water. Much more is owed on it than they could ever hope to recover in a sale. Sentimental ties seem hardly to justify the cost of keeping it, yet it will cost thousands to sell it.

You know these people. By remaining so true to its human core, The Turner House is “an engrossing and remarkably mature first novel,” said Matthew Thomas in the New York Times, who points out another of its strengths: “artful without being showy.” No wonder it was a finalist for the National Book Award! In Flournoy’s biography, we read that her father was from Detroit, and many of the tiny touches could only come from someone who knows that city well. It’s a beautiful book deserving of a wide readership.

Read an engaging BuzzFeed interview with Angela Flournoy here.

***Betty Fedora – “Crime Fiction for Kickass Women”

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Betty Fedora

It’s always delightful to find a new publisher of short fiction in the crime genre. I just read Issue Two of Betty Fedora, tagged “Kickass Women in Crime Fiction.” What’s not to like? The nine stories in this issue, selected by editor Kristen Valentine, cover a wide range of criminal activity—preventing it, investigating it, perpetrating it. Five of the nine are by women authors, too.

The first story in Issue 2 is by Montreal-based screenwriter Shane Simmons. His “Heads Will Roll,” is a story about whose title you could say “literally” and be correct. Colleen Quinn’s “Lucifer” takes a look back at an unhappy upbringing, and the difficulty of escaping it. London-based Lara Alonso Carona’s “A Diet Rich in Noir” combines the investigatory talent and family sparring skills of police detective Regan Monroe and her 19-year-old daughter Kat, a licensed private detective (first in a series of news flashes for mom). Clever.

I laughed out loud at John H. Dromey’s “Burden of Proof.” He has a woman judge, prosecutor, and witness running rings around a purse-snatcher and his male defense lawyer. At one point, the judge says to the defense attorney, “(I) wonder if you haven’t already decided you cannot win this case on its merits, so now you’re laying the groundwork for an appeal based on incompetent representation.”

I met New Jersey-based Al Tucher when he served on a panel of authors discussing why they pick faraway and exotic settings for their stories. At the time, he said he was planning a series set in Hawai`i, and here in Betty Fedora is “Luxury to Die For,” one of the results of that plan. An interview with Al is on the Betty Fedora home page.

If you like crime stories—and kickass women—and not necessarily in that order, you may want to snag a copy. I ordered mine from Amazon.