Why I Cried Last Night

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woman writing

(photo: Mike Licht, Creative Commons License)

Earlier this summer, my heart sank. I was reading about yet another manifestation of the gender divide in agenting, publishing, marketing, and reviewing women-written fiction, which, even if unconscious, leads to and promotes a gender divide in the books readers choose, an issue I wrote about in my post, “Will Men Read my Book?” A vicious circle if ever there was one.

Subject Matter Matters

The essay was Nicola Griffith’s “.” She compiled data showing that not only have men won most of the major literary awards over the last 15 years, when women have won them, they’ve mostly won them for books about male characters. Think Hilary Mantel, the only woman to have won two Man Booker prizes, both for books about Thomas Cromwell, or Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winner The Goldfinch and its protagonist Theo Decker. (Rufi Thorpe has written an amusing, but pointed essay on what it’s like to have her first novel published and the tone-deaf reactions she received. Male at pool: “I mean, yours was just a novel about girls.” Author: “Yeah, I know that.” Male at pool: “I just don’t see how anyone could compare it to actual literature.”)

“Everybody kind of knows it’s true, but they don’t want to see it,” Griffith said in the Seattle Review of Books. Later in that essay, she says, “The way we’re brought up is that stories about men are important and stories about women are fluffy and domestic and kind of boring.” This page from a publisher of predominantly women-written mysteries is a revealing display of that preconception in action. It sends a clear marketing message: These are lightweight books. Not that there isn’t a place for such books and the readers who enjoy them. This publisher is just up-front about what they do and, inadvertently I hope, perpetuating a stereotype.

The Evidence Piles Up

In June, I groaned reading Kamila Shamsie’s essay in The Bookseller on another aspect of the gender divide. She, too, turned to statistics, analyzing The Guardian’s end-of-year book recommendations by some 252 cultural figures, mostly writers. The data showed that more men than women get asked to recommend; of those who are asked, more men than women agree to do so; and those men are more likely to recommend yet more men. Says Shamsie:

I’m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there’s a gender bias going on are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics, and that when men recommend books by men that’s fair literary judgement, while when women recommend books by women that’s either a political position or woolly feminine judgement. To these people I have nothing to say, except: go read some Toni Morrison. 

Desperate Responses

I pulled my hair and rolled my eyes as, over the summer, the reaction to this situation became increasingly creative, if quixotic. Shamsie has proposed that in 2018 UK publishers bring out only new titles by women. US writer Amanda Filipacchi tried to “pose like a man” for her book jacket photo when she discovered that in these pictures “The men looked simpler, more straightforward. The women looked dreamy, often gazing off into the distance. Their limbs were sometimes entwined, like vines.”

And white male writers have been urged to acknowledge that “the white male experience has been overexposed, at the expense of other experiences, for centuries.” Or, as American fiction writer John Scalzi has said, in the massive role-playing game of life, “‘Straight White Male’ is the lowest difficulty setting there is.”

Submissions (A Too-Apt Word?)

Right now, I’m in the middle of preparing submission packets for small publishers. It took two days to prepare three packets. I’ve been working on the current packet since Sunday, off and mostly on. Each publisher has different requirements, some puzzling. My novel, three years in the works, has been professionally edited by an award-winning mystery writer, professionally proofread, and the police-related parts reviewed by a former NYPD detective and terrorism expert. It’s in its, oh, eighth? draft.

Then yesterday, I read this the story by Catherine Nichols. Discouraged by the lackluster response (usually a one-line rejection or, commonly, no reply at all) to her agent query letters—you need an agent in order to approach most publishers—she began sending her materials out using a male pseudonym. Over a weekend, she sent six agents the same letter and same book synopsis and sample chapters she’d been sending and received five responses, with three requests for a manuscript. Ultimately, under her own name, 50 queries received two manuscript requests, whereas “George’s” 50 queries generated 17 manuscript requests. George is, she says, “eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.”

The agents’ comments to Catherine (similar to those I have received myself) consistently cited “beautiful writing,” which Nichols points out “is the paint job on top but not the engine of the book,” whereas they said George’s work was “‘clever,’ it’s ‘well-constructed’ and ‘exciting.’” It received lengthy critiques, not the typical form-letter brush-offs.

She points out that the agents she approached were both men and women, “which is not surprising because bias would hardly have a chance to damage people if it weren’t pervasive. It’s not something a few people do to everyone else. It goes through all the ways we think of ourselves and each other.”

I wept.

Resources
VIDA, an organization dedicated to Women in Literary Arts
Sisters in Crime, helping women who write, review, buy, or sell crime fiction
The other side of the coin: Male writers who write as women
Historical Underpinnings of Continual Sexism in Publishing, Emerson College

Fall Books Already Creating Buzz

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The remainder of 2015 is shaping up beautifully for readers of literary fiction. Lists of forthcoming novels by well-known—as well as new—authors promise a rich season ahead and delightful holiday giving.

Flood of Fire, Amitav GhoshThe Millions has a lengthy list of these, and I’ve picked out just few novels, one book of short stories, and one biography:

  • Flood of Fire: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy) by Amitav Ghosh – about the first Opium War. I enjoyed his Sea of Poppies, first in this trilogy and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and The Atlantic Monthly calls him “a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.”
  • Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson – a collection of six stories, which I would definitely read having found his Pulitzer-winning The Orphan Master’s Son so powerful.
  • The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood – winner of the Man Booker in 2000. Her new book is about “a near-future in which the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free.”
  • Fates and Furies, Lauren GroffFates and Furies: A Novel by Lauren Groff – delves into the symbolism of Greek mythology to fully plumb the mysteries of a couple’s marriage. Read the opening sex-on-the-beach scene to find out how it all started. Her story “Ghosts and Empties” appeared in the 7-20-15 issue of The New Yorker.
  • Slade House: A Novel by David Mitchell – I’ve read five of his previous novels and enjoyed them all. Slade House began as a story in tweets.
  • Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. If you know her from public radio’s This American Life, you know how funny and smart her social commentary is.
  • The Daughters: A Novel by Adrienne Celt—this “virtuosic debut” is “a gorgeous, riveting story about family, mythology, and curses,” says Book Riot.
  • The Big Green Tent: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya – Russia’s most popular novelist describes what tThe Big Green Tent, Ludmila Ulitskayahe USSR was like in the 1950s and has become “a voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians,” said Masha Gessen’s review in The New Yorker. Sounds dangerous.

Also coming soon are books by an impressive phalanx of well-known writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, Patti Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Jane Smiley, Umberto Eco, Oscar Hijeulos (posthumously), and Marilynne Robinson.

Feeding your Reading Soul

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Love the premise behind Shari’s Berries Book + Dessert Pairing Guide. Gone Girl? Raspberry crepes. Alice in Wonderland? Tea biscuits and jam. The most inspired mix of gustatory and cultural delight since cinema sips—“A Modern Guide to Film and Cocktail Pairings.”

reading, apple

He must be reading “The Turk Who Loved Apples”! (photo: Greg Myers, creative commons license)

Now, what goes best with the recent books I’ve read and the movies based on them?

  • Seveneves—whatever. In the bleakness of space, when you’re eating algae, even a matzoh would be divine
  • Blue Labyrinth—a Blue Hawaii that’s a really Aloysius Pendergast-worthy one, what else?
  • The Breaks—those folks should be drinking Jack on the rocks and lots of it
  • Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store—lemon mousse, though it need not glow in the dark
  • The Storm Murders—awesome cajun food (no poutine, even though most of the story takes place in Quebec)
  • Inherent Vice—hash brownies, no contest!
  • Mr. Holmes—a honey pie

The extent to which readers link reading and eating is dreadfully apparent to anyone who takes a best-seller out of the library and finds greasy crumb-marks, and often the crumbs themselves squished between its pages.

*****Seveneves

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Perseids, meteor shower, night

(photo: David Kingham, creative commons license)

By Neal Stephenson – All my book-reviewing predelictions are about to be revealed, when I say this is exactly a kind of book I like best! Even readers who ordinarily don’t gravitate to their book store’s science fiction section because of a severe allergy to tired genre tropes—aliens, ray-guns, and domineering robots—cardboard characters, and future visions that strain believability might like this one. It’s science, all right, but it’s all about human beings and their behavior when really put to the test. Why that is, in Stephenson’s own words.

The novel’s premise is that something (we never know what, and it doesn’t matter) penetrates the moon “like a bullet through an apple” and causes it to explode mostly into seven large and innumerable smaller pieces. Watching the fragments of the moon clank about in space becomes an interesting phenomenon until astronomer and science popularizer Dubois Harris—clearly modeled on Neil deGrasse Tyson—stops wondering about the cause of the breakup and starts worrying about its effects. Scientists around the globe quickly agree with his conclusions: the moon’s fragments—bolides—will keep banging into each other making smaller and smaller pieces whose numbers will rise exponentially.

Eventually (in about two years), enough shattered fragments will begin entering the Earth’s atmosphere to create a cloud of debris that will spread out and, as Harris explains to U.S. President Julia Flaherty, “we are going to witness an event that I am calling the White Sky.” A day or two later would begin the next phase, “the Hard Rain,” as a rapidly increasing number of fragments enter the Earth’s atmosphere and their fiery trails “merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it. The entire surface of the Earth is going to be sterilized. Glaciers will boil.” How long will the Hard Rain last? Harris estimates “Somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years.”

The only hope for human survival is to gear up the International Space Station (“Izzy”) to receive many more residents and, somehow, survive long-term, growing plants for food and oxygen, and mining asteroids and even the remaining chunks of the moon for materials. But there’s no way Izzy can take on several billion or even several hundred thousand souls, and a difficult selection process will be required. International politics must be set aside and every creative mind and resource focused on the survival of a few. With Doomsday approaching, technological development must move light-years faster than previously believed possible—or safe. Yet the meat of the book is the mechanics of the human psyche when subjected to such an extreme scenario. Inevitably, some readers will find the balance between mind and emotion not to their taste, and this may not be their kind of book.

There’s a lot of science and engineering here, but it’s wrapped in such an exciting adventure tale, and presented so clearly and plausibly, that I never lost interest for a moment. The 860 [!] pages fly by, faster than you can say Bolide Fragmentation Rate. In fact, there was so much there that a few loose ends escaped me—like, what happened to the mission to Mars? I don’t believe it had more than a passing reference. What happened to the rings Earth was supposed to acquire after the Hard Rain? These are hardly worth a quibble, though, amid all this amazing content.

As Jason Sheehan said in his review of Seveneves for NPR, “The experience of reading a modern Stephenson novel is like going out drinking with 20 or 30 of the smartest people on earth.”

Your Literary Dream Vacation

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road trip, map, travel

(photo: rabi w, creative commons license)

Need an organizing principle for your next vacation? Here are four literary-themed travel ideas, heavy on the mystery element:

See the U.S.A.

I’ve written before about Esotouric’s fun mystery/literary tours of SoCal. They scout out the locations of sites in classic books by Raymond Chandler (and other authors), researching “the mean streets that shaped his fiction” and inspired such lines as “There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream” from The Long Goodbye. Next Raymond Chandler tour: 8-22-15.

Not available that day? The following week the possibly even juicier “Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice” tour covers the history of the “ribald, racy, raunchy old promenade where the better people simply did not travel.” Something always cooking there.

Atlas Obscura has created an “obsessively detailed map of American Literature’s most epic road trips.” Follow in the footsteps (or the oil pan drips) of such non-fiction bushwhackers as William Least Heat Moon (Blue Highways)—I’ve read this book, and it’s great—Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Mark Twain (Roughing It), and nine other classics that describe “this quintessentially American experience.” Literature AND a map. Can’t get much better.

And NYC by neighborhood from the New York Public Library.

Across the Pond

In case you want something a little more, ahem, Continental, the San Francisco Chronicle has created a map that marks literary highlights of Paris’s Left Bank and includes classic book shops as well as author pilgrimage sites. You can spend a day’s worth of shoe-leather on this one, easy.

Prefer a more sedentary mode of travel? By bus, perhaps (the big advantage of which is all that reading time and three beers at the pub, no problem!). The Smithsonian offers “Mystery Lover’s England,” which explores “the lives and settings of famous detective novelists”: Colin Dexter, Andrew Taylor, Simon Brett, Agatha Christie, and the like, plus the haunts of the characters they wrote about in Devon, the Cotswolds, Oxford, and London. But why anyone would want to risk going to Oxford, with its astounding murder rate—which the Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis, and Endeavor have shown on the telly—is beyond me.

Related articles

***The Turk Who Loved Apples

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apples

(photo: shellac)

By Matt Gross – Glowing reviews of this 2013 book by the former “Frugal Traveler” and “Getting Lost” columnist for the New York Times, made me want to read it. As a young man, Gross picked up and moved to Ho Chi Minh City and from there explored more of Southeast Asia, worked for a local Vietnamese newspaper, and eventually got himself various travel writing gigs. In 2006, the Times gave him a budget for a three-month, around-the-world trip, which was to establish his “frugal traveler” identity. This, he says, was the job “everybody called ‘the best job in the world’—and an opportunity ripe for fucking up.” Which he did, at first.

The book is a mix of his travel experiences, which I enjoyed tremendously, and ruminations on the larger meaning of travel, which weren’t as interesting. The requirements for travel have changed for him over the years—from carrying a single bag to traveling with a wife and infant, from the ability to set his own schedule to being part of a family with all its competing needs. Truthfully, staying home has come to have its own satisfactions.

Across his whole travel-writing career, Gross visited “fifty or sixty countries,” ate their food (whole chapter on the resultant digestive laments), learned to cook much of it, and wrote hundreds of articles for the Times and others. He sums up everything he learned about traveling frugally in two pages in the middle of the book, which can be boiled down further to: use the Web to find deals and recommendations on airfare, lodging, and food. Airfare: use local and in-country airlines. Lodging: stay with others where you can, Airbnb, works when you can’t. Food: be adventurous. Social life: find local connections through Facebook friends-of-friends-of-friends.

The book’s full title is The Turk who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World, which refers to his early days, as he was learning how to travel, yes, relatively frugally. Through an organization called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms—a network of farmers who will provide volunteers free food and lodging in exchange for some farmwork—he stayed a few days on a rural apple farm in Turkey. Gross bonded with this farmer, an engineer who’d left his profession to do what he loved, and learned from that encounter that frugality “was not an end unto itself but one of the many traveler’s tools, a means of getting closer to exotic lands and foreign peoples.” And getting closer to people—from fellow expats in Ho Chi Minh City to refugees in Calais to members of his wife’s and even his own family—is what Gross is all about.

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****Blue Labyrinth

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apothecary bottles, poison

(photo: Michael Flick, Creative Commons license)

By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, narrated by René Auberjonois – This fast-paced thriller—book 14 in the wild escapades of FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast—follows the agent on the trail of the killer of his son, and, when he is knocked out of commission by an arcane poison, the action shifts to two women desperately seeking the ingredients for a possible antidote.

Pendergast is an eccentric, so wealthy he accepts an annual $1 salary from the FBI only for form’s sake. He has residences on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, an apartment in The Dakota, and a large Louisiana plantation called Penumbra. His wit and New Orleans courtliness pervades his interactions with everyone, even when he’s aiming his Les Baer .45 at them. His avocations have made him a connoisseur of food, wine, and art, an adept at of various combat disciplines, and the practitioner of a rare form of Eastern mysticism, Chongg Ran, that provides deep insight and, in this novel, allows him to see into the past.

The story opens with an unexpected knock on the door of Pendergast’s Riverside Drive mansion, answered by his ward Constance. A man—a dead man—falls to the ground. Pendergast’s son Alban. Whoever killed Alban is sending a powerful message and appears to have left not a single clue. Is it the perfect crime? Or clever bait to lure the agent into a trap?

Meanwhile, NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta is investigating a different murder, that of a low-ranking employee at Preston and Childs’s favorite crime scene, the American Museum of Natural History. D’Agosta learns the man had been working with a visiting professor who was interested in only one particular human skeleton. D’Agosta enlists the aid of scientist Margo Green to help him figure out what was so special about this particular set of bones.

There’s skeletons in Pendergast’s family closet, too. For some time, Constance has trolled the underground archives of the Riverside Drive house, becoming well acquainted with Pendergast’s shady ancestors and the basement laboratory filled with arcane materials and dangerous chemicals. When Pendergast falls ill, she and Margo team up to concoct an antidote, but if they are to obtain all the ingredients they need, they must go outside the law to do so. And time is running out.

Preston and Child never let up the tension throughout their complex, information-packed narrative, and they have created unique and well-rounded characters. Pendergast and the novel’s action may occasionally become too “shamelessly, gloriously over the top” (Washington Post review) for some readers, including me, but he and it are always interesting.

This was the first book in the series I’ve read, and I had no difficulty following the story or the subtext of the interactions, even though much had taken place prior to the current story.

Noted American actor René Auberjonois has narrated 13 other volumes by Preston and Child, and conveys Pendergast’s Southern gentleman charm quite convincingly.

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

Mr. Holmes

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Ian McKellen, Mr. Holmes, Sherlock

Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes

In Mr. Holmes (trailer), it’s post-war England, and the elderly Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen), lives on a remote property on the Sussex coast. He tends his bees and shuns detecting, ever since the tragic conclusion of his last case some 35 years earlier. But he’s bothered by John Watson’s account of the case and a movie about it, both of which got the wrong end of the stick.

Between stretches of mentoring his housekeeper’s young son Roger in the details of managing an apiary, avoiding his housekeeper (played to a “T” by Laura Linney), who is apprehensive his declining physical state and advancing dementia will soon be too much for her to handle, trying unproven botanical memory aids, and enjoying terrific view of Seven Sisters white cliffs, Holmes has taken pen in hand to write his own record of that final case. Its details are elusive and come back to him only in fits and starts.

The movie is based on a 2005 literary mystery by Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind, which “is not a detective story; it’s a work of literary fiction, and as such it’s much more interested in the mysteries Holmes can never solve,” said Salon reviewer Laura Miller.

Director Bill Condon obtained fine performances by McKellen and Linney, as well as the strong supporting cast, including Roger Allam (who plays Holmes’s doctor), Milo Parker (Roger), Hattie Moraham (as the principal in his last case), and Hiroyuki Sanada (who provides Holmes some of his botanicals, but issues his own challenge to the aging detective). Late in life, that challenge teaches Holmes an important lesson.

For my taste there was too much aging and not enough mystery. Perhaps Monsters and Critics’ Ron Wilkinson captured the problem when he wrote, “A charming but fatally slow exposition.” Too, more should have been done cosmetically to differentiate the 93-year-old Holmes from the flashbacks of him at age 58.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 87%; audiences, 78%.

Weekend Double-Play

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The Guardsman

Jon Barker, Victoria Mack, The Guardsman, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

Jon Barker & Victoria Mack in STNJ’s The Guardsman

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (STNJ) continues its 2015 season—a celebration of Bonnie J. Monte’s 25th season as artistic director—with another play about actors, this one The Guardsman, by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. In it, a young actor begins to suspect his wife is tiring of him and pretends to be a member of the Royal Guard—he can do wigs and costumes after all—to see whether she’ll be tempted. At the end, it seems he’s learned more about himself than he has about her constancy.

The play has many laugh-out-loud moments as the actor struggles to maintain two personas at the same time. Should he be flattered that the actress seems attracted to the dashing guardsman, or offended? He’s both, alternatingly. Talented company regular Jon Barker conveys every bit of this confusion with his expressive body language. Victoria Mack as his wife plays a more opaque character, and in the talk-back at the end, the audience was divided about whether she saw through his disguise. Brent Harris was excellent as the Critic, who is the foil to both actors’ longings.

The play has been mounted several times in English, and is usually played as romantic farce, but Monte believes its frivolous exterior has obscured darker messages at its heart. To pursue this line of thought, she obtained a new literal translation by the playwright’s great-grandson and used that for her adaptation. She found it has “an extraordinary provocative, ground-breaking, heart-breaking, and disturbing inner core” that provokes gales of laughter at the same time it “questions identity, reality, perception and what it takes to validate our existence.”

Love’s Labour’s Lost

On Sunday, we saw Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of his many comedies about romantic confusion, this year’s outdoor stage production by the STNJ. Excellent comedic performances by the entire cast. I had both my sun and rain umbrellas with me, though the threatened rain never materialized. These productions are always a highlight of the summer, and the cast manages not to faint in the heat, despite their elaborate costumes and the play’s lively staging, including running up the stairs of the amphitheater at the College of St. Elizabeth.

outdoor theater, STNJ

Set for the outdoor production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, STNJ

Coming Up Next

Yesterday was the last performance for both these plays, a successful continuance of this anniversary season. Next up: Shaw’s Misalliance, August 5 – 30, in which Shaw “gleefully exposes and dismantles the idiosyncrasies of the British classes and their various ‘family values.’”

Also, some critics believe The Guardsman inspired Harold Pinter’s The Lover, whose similar plot likewise melds comedy and drama and has been played both ways. STNJ will have a reading of The Lover on Monday evening, August 17, to explore those possibilities.

****The Breaks

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streetwalker, San Francisco

(photo: David Selsky, creative commons license)

By Eden Sharp – In the hardboiled thriller The Breaks, readers are introduced to two engaging and memorable characters—private investigator Angela McGlynn and her sometime associate John Knox. McGlynn is self-assured and sassy, a computer hacking whiz and martial arts expert, not above using her attractiveness to lure bad guys into compromising positions. Knox is a recently discharged U.S. Marine with PTSD haunted by his Afghanistan experiences. McGlynn takes on Knox as a favor to a friend, who thinks the man needs something to occupy him, a way to feel useful again, and, as the case she’s embarking on turns darker and more dangerous, she’s damn glad to have him at her side.

This thriller takes place in San Francisco, where you can go from exclusive neighborhood to dangerous gang territory in a few steps. “The worst parts were only blocks away from the tourist traps and not marked on the map. It was easy to stray off track.” All strata of society are compressed on that small peninsula, and McGlynn and Knox stray way off track in this complex story, presented in short scenes from multiple points of view. McGlynn narrates in the first person, keeping her in the center of the action, but the scenes from Knox and others are third-person. There are quite a few characters to keep in your head, and I often had to use the search function to find the first mention of a name to place them.

Trouble begins when a retired suburban high school teacher asks McGlynn to find his teenage daughter. She’s run away from home, missing two weeks, and the police aren’t doing much. About all the father can tell McGlynn about the girl’s disappearance is that she had a serious cocaine habit and threatened to turn to prostitution to support it. Through her contacts in the community of working girls, McGlynn finds who the girl has been running with.

McGlynn suspects the girl was snatched because of an identity mix-up. She was carrying the stolen phone and I.D. of the daughter of a big-time narcotics smuggler. The police are trying to pull off an ambitious sting operation against him. But as they move forward, they keep tripping over McGlynn and Knox, and they aren’t happy.

Meanwhile, apart from her paying work for clients like the distraught dad, McGlynn uses her hacking skills to expose child pornographers. She’s tracked down a big-time seller of these images who lives in the city and is scheming to put him out of business.

These three skeins of criminality and investigation inevitably become tangled, which makes for a challenging guessing game among McGlynn, Knox, the cops, and the reader. Sharp has a talent for energetic prose that keeps this complicated story moving and the ability to put her characters in credible danger. The choreography of the final showdown scene is a little confusing, though the outcome is clear.

Ironically, I learned more about Knox’s character and motivations than McGlynn’s, despite the first-person narration. It makes for an interesting switch in expectations that McGlynn reacts to situations (after sex, in dangerous straits) in a coolly logical way typically associated with male protagonists, whereas Knox, because the trauma of his war experience is just under the skin, has more emotional reactions. One of the most interesting and insightful aspects of the novel is McGlynn’s running analysis of people’s psychology in various situations.

Sharp has a few troublesome writing tics, and the novel would have benefited from copy-editing and proofreading. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging read, and I look forward to more from her and the further exploits of McGlynn and Knox.

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