NETFLIX: Unbelievable

Posted on by

This Friday, September 13, Netflix begins its eight-episode mini-series Unbelievable based on a fascinating true crime story (trailer). Journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong won a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on how different police departments handled the uncertainties and ambiguities that arise in rape cases. And, in the book, they go into the long, sorry history of why women are so readily disbelieved.

Created and executive produced by screenwriter Susannah Grant, with novelists Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, the series stars Toni Collette, Merritt Wever, and Kaitlyn Dever.

Miller and Armstrong found they still had more to say about the contrasting investigative approaches—one, involving a case that takes place near Seattle where a young woman’s story was disbelieved, and others, in the Denver suburbs, where police went to extraordinary lengths to tie together their investigations with those of other local departments. The authors report what they learned in the new book Unbelievable, an excellent, real-life police procedural.

Read my full review on CrimeFictionLover.com, see the mini-series, or read the book!

****The Honorary Jersey Girl

Posted on by
orchid-leis

By Albert Tucher – Al Tucher returns to the Big Island of Hawai`i in this fast-paced adventure that shows how, underneath the tropical paradise veneer, the mai-tais and the surf, you find the same criminal proclivities everywhere.

Criminal defense attorney Agnes Rodrigues has successfully defended her client Hank Alves against a charge of murder, but apparently not everyone accepts the verdict. Now someone is trying to kill him. And because the murder victim was a cop’s wife, it may be the loyal brothers in blue.

Rodrigues is convinced of Alves’s innocence—he’s too lame to commit an actual murder. He needs protection, and she knows where to find it. She flies ten hours across the country to New Jersey to try to persuade Diana Andrews, a former high-end prostitute who now runs a top-notch personal security business, to take the case. But Andrews turns the job down. She’s had dangerous encounters in Hawai`i in the past—two, in fact—and won’t go near the place. But she does offer to send two of her operatives.

The trio arrives at the remote ranch where Rodrigues has stashed Alves and start work. Before long, there’s another attempt to kill him, a long-distance rifle shot that barely misses. The police arrive to investigate, but get nowhere. It’s clear that protecting Alves will depend on identifying who really murdered the woman. Rodrigues suspects her policeman husband.

This would be an entertaining book to take on a Hawaiian vacation, in real life or the armchair variety. The number of towns and locales where this investigation takes Rodrigues and crew is like a travelogue. Tucher’s characters are confronted with significant logistical difficulties and road hazards—smoldering lava, deep gorges, torrential rain that turns unpaved roads to mud fields—but his easygoing writing style moves them along smoothly.

Information that Don Savage has been investigated by internal affairs for shaking down prostitutes starts Rodrigues and crew on the trail of a different motive and reveals a much larger crime in the background. Then the body of a prostitute washes up near the town of Kalapana, and Diana Andrews can help after all, mining her contacts within the relatively small sorority of high-end escorts.

This is a short book (only 129 pages), and I can’t say more about its fast-paced plot without revealing too much. Despite its brevity—another feature that makes for great vacation reading—it’s filled with colorful characters who reflect the diversity of Hawaiians’ ethnic and cultural backgrounds. And how does Rodrigues become an honorary Jersey Girl, itself practically another ethnicity? Like anything else gets done these days: connections.

Photo: Emilia, creative commons license

Instant Replay

Posted on by

I wondered, seeing the cover for The Sleepover, if it was inspired by Adrian McKinty’s new best-seller, The Chain. or an example of the hive mind at work. The chains in McKinty’s book have nothing to do with literal chains, of course, and I didn’t warm to that book’s cover (though the book is great).

Then I saw this pairing. Though the new Through a Daughter’s Eyes is apparently nothing at all like Eimear McBride’s eye-opening The Lesser Bohemians, it sure conjures it. Cover copy for the latter says it “glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.” And lots of sex.

The Music of the Night

Posted on by

Sleeping with the windows open to catch the late-summer breezes is one of life’s pure pleasures. But here lately, we’ve been catching more than cool air—the night noises.

A screech owl has made itself heard several times, and I was able to identify its strange cry from audio clips posted on the excellent website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Apparently they make several sounds, but the one in the trees outside our house went for the whinny. When I heard that in the middle of the night, I wasn’t sure whether it was a bird or some other kind of critter. Very distinctive. We’ve not seen the screech owl. The Cornell Lab photos show the superb camouflage of these robin-sized owls.

For a story I’m writing I wanted to say something about the nighttime insects that keep up that steady late-summer buzz. Like a lot of people, I lumped those nocturnal music-makers in with the cicadas. No. Back in 2015, NPR did a nice piece on “telling crickets, cicadas, and katydids apart.” Cicadas are active in the daytime, I learned. Those night insects are tree crickets and katydids.

I was doubtful, thinking of the dark brown and black crickets that make individual chirps and like to hide in some obscure place and drive you nuts with their ventriloquism. Tree crickets are pale green and look like skinny grasshoppers. I’ve seen them, but I never realized they were serenading me nightly. When there are a lot of them, you get that constant sound. NPR has the sound clips to prove it! Or, listen to this!

And when to expect the steamroller of cicada noise? A few states will have broods of 13- or 17-year locusts next year, but for the eastern third of the country, 2021 will be amazing, when Brood X (ten) emerges. When and where.

Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren Resized and cropped for this use, under this creative commons license.

****Pieces

Posted on by
package, box

By Michael Aloisi and Rebecca Rowland – Serial killer Dennis Sweeney had a really bad idea: kill a young woman, divide her into parts, and mail them to 30 randomly selected, unsuspecting people all across the United States. Who doesn’t like a surprise package? There’s 30 people in this novel who would never open another one.

Sweeney sends an anonymous letter to over-the-hill reporter Jackson Matthews, whom he admires, describing what he’s done and proving it with pictures. He invites Jax to cover the story, “to be the voice of my actions.”

If all the pieces of the girl are found, Sweeney promises to turn himself in. If not? He says, “All the King’s horses and All the King’s men, will force me to start all over again.” Jax calls the police. It seems the letter isn’t a hoax, and reports of the macabre parcels begin to appear in the news media.

Bizarrely and, you may think, predictably, only eighteen of the grisly packages are turned in to the authorities. That’s 12 people who received a body part and did something else with it. The stories of what happened to these dozen packages make up most of the book. The authors treat those twelve chapters as short stories, with quirky back-stories for the recipients—character studies of people who, for wildly varied reasons, are incapable of the correct response. (Apparently none of them listen to the news to know there’s a bigger picture here.)

In between these stories are chapters that let you catch up with Jax and his efforts to identify Sweeney, and what else Sweeney is up to. The stakes increase dramatically when Sweeney threatens Jax’s wife, if the reporter doesn’t start writing about him. Early on Jax is approached by a young man who introduces himself as a police detective. Jax soon unmasks him as the creator of a serial killer website with lagging viewership who hopes the inside scoop on this story can renew its popularity. He claims to have an algorithm that can find the killer, and it certainly unearths some unsavory folk.

Between the chapters about the missing body parts, Jax’s investigations, and Sweeney’s story, past and present, the authors have a lot of balls to keep in the air, yet the tale is never confusing. I liked the diabolically varied missing pieces stories, although perhaps two or three fewer would have worked as well, as the rhythm of the chapters gets a little exhausting. On the whole, Pieces has a clever premise, innovative format, and quite capable writing that kept me engaged. Not for the faint of heart.

Photo: Jonathan, creative commons license.

David Crosby: Remember My Name

Posted on by

This A J Eaton documentary (trailer), released so close in time to Echo in the Canyon, covers some of the same ground and personalities, but in a totally different way. Echo is about the musician-heavy Laurel Canyon area in a brief period of the mid-sixties. This film, by contrast, examines one man’s career and his musical and cultural influence over a lifetime, and it shares a fair amount of that music with you.

As to cultural influences, in a poignant coincidence, the film tells how Dennis Hopper modeled the character of Billy in the film Easy Rider on Crosby. It was bittersweet seeing clips from the film so soon after its star Peter Fonda died (a young Jack Nicholson too).

In the documentary, David Crosby says he’s 76 years old, has eight stents in his heart, diabetes, a liver transplant—in short, a load of health problems. “How is it you’re still alive?” he’s asked, when so many others are not. There’s no answer to that, and he doesn’t attempt one.

Yet he’s still making music, still releasing albums as recently as last year. He’s touring. His life is music. It’s too bad he shot himself in the foot so many times with his band mates in the Byrds, and Crosby Stills Nash, with and without Young. His behavior was terrible, but it was in Echo that he said point-blank that Stills, Nash, and Young dumped him “because I was an a——.” Subsequently, acrimony has repeatedly thwarted the group’s attempts to reassemble.

He doesn’t spare himself or make excuses. What emerges from the many hours of interviews with Cameron Crowe, who’s known the musician for 45 years, is compelling viewing. Jon Bream in the Minneapolis Star Tribune says, “Rarely have we seen such an unvarnished, unflattering and revealingly real portrait of a music star.”

Echo was dinged for not including Joni Mitchell (she came later, the filmmakers said), but you see plenty of her here. Crosby saw her perform in Florida and brought her to Los Angeles, but as with most of his relationships with women, theirs was fraught. He blames himself. In 1969, his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in an auto accident, and Graham Nash (if I remember correctly) said that after Crosby identified her body, he was never the same. Since 1987, he’s been married to Jan Dance.

Asked whether he has regrets, he admitted to big ones, mainly the wasted decade as a junkie, which led to lost music and lost potential. Time, he says, is the ultimate currency. “Be careful how you spend it.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 91%; audiences: 92%.

A Puzzle Puzzle

Posted on by

Don’t ask me why these pictures are upside down. They are correct on my WordPress editing screen! ?

This jigsaw puzzle has been calling me since I received it as a gift last year. It depicts Thomas Moran’s famous painting, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which our family had just seen. Moran’s Yellowstone paintings were so admired, they helped lead to the declaration and preservation of Yellowstone as the first national park in the United States and, probably, the world.

And, here is the completed puzzle. Perhaps you’re struck with how different it is from the painting, how much redder and, in person, how much darker. All those murky reddish blacks on the right, those murky greenish blacks on the left (hidden by the light reflection), those murky blacks, and acres of taupe. Granted it’s weird, but I don’t consult the box when assembling a puzzle, just to make it that little bit harder; in this case, the picture on the box wouldn’t have been much help. But maybe it holds a clue to why the difference between the picture and the pieces. Oh, yes. Here it is: “Printed in China.”

Perhaps it wasn’t merely printed in China. Perhaps it was also cut with a jigsaw in China, its 1000 pieces disassembled, and 1001 of them sealed in their plastic bag. That would go a ways to solving another puzzle. See that extra blue piece? It’s a dupe. If you’re working on this puzzle and missing a bit of sky, I have it.

At the same time, you may have noticed the finished puzzle is missing three pieces. I have three pieces left over. But they don’t fit those spots. Maybe they’re dupes too. In the hundred or so puzzles I’ve assembled in my lifetime, I have never seen this before.

Where was quality control? Did the manufacturer think bagging up any old 1000 (or 1001, in this case) pieces would be good enough? After all, wasn’t that a 99.6% accuracy rate?

I realize that a jigsaw puzzle is not a fate-of-the-world consumer item, but you have to wonder about a mindset that allows the sloppy handling of something so simple, yet precise, and what happens when something critical, yet precise, isn’t quite right. Like a component for your driverless car or nuclear power plant or corporate computer system. I think we know the answer to that.

In the movie Puzzle, the character Agnes says the rewarding thing about doing a jigsaw puzzle is, when you get to the end, you know you’ve made “all the right choices.” The folks involved in the supply chain for this product did just the opposite.

****A Fool’s Journey

Posted on by

By Judy Penz Sheluk – A Fool’s Journey is the third cozy mystery in Canadian author Judy Penz Sheluk’s entertaining Marketville Mystery series. Protagonist Callie Barnstable has assembled an interesting team that works for Past and Present Investigations, to find missing persons.

Genealogical research is the domain of her friend Chantelle Marchand. Former librarian Shirley Harrington conducts online and archival research—if something was ever published, Shirley will track it down. Antique shop owner Arabella Carpenter is occasionally called upon to evaluate a client’s physical evidence, such as old letters, jewelry, and, in this story, tattoo art. Oddest member of the team is Misty Rivers, a tarot reader, who posts surprisingly popular insights drawn from tarot cards on the Past & Present website.

The team’s current case comes to Callie via what a gentle bribe. In her will, Callie’s great-grandmother has asked her to investigate the disappearance of Brandon Colbeck, grandson of great-grandma’s best friend in the nursing home. In 2000, 20-year-old Colbeck left home “to find himself,” taking very little with him and, significantly, leaving behind his identification. If Callie gives her search a good effort, regardless of whether she actually finds Colbeck, she’ll receive her great-grandmother’s legacy.

Over the years, Colbeck’s family has made numerous fruitless attempts to locate him. Nevertheless, they have agreed to cooperate with Callie as she gives it one last try. Their willingness arises in part from a recent telephone call Colbeck’s grandmother received from someone claiming to be the long-lost grandson. Was it Colbeck? Or a scam?

Brandon had a tattoo, which tarot expert Misty recognizes as a portion of the tarot card “The Fool.” Sheluk artfully weaves interesting information about tattooing, tattoo art, and tarot into her story, telling you what you need to know without hindering the action.

In her initial interviews, Callie is convinced each family member is holding out on her. With the help of her team, she determinedly goes about discovering these secrets with determination and considerable savvy and skill. In Callie, author Sheluk has created a competent, conscientious protagonist—the kind of super-responsible person her clients can entrust their secrets to. You learn her likes and dislikes, her strengths and weaknesses, how she spends her day. Sheluk’s clear writing style helps the plot and the discoveries move along briskly, and it’s fun to see how every team member makes her unique and valuable contribution to the investigation.

What Do Book Club Audiences Want?

Posted on by

Author Kathryn Kraft in Writer Unboxed says book clubs have “the potential to serve as a word-of-mouth marketing machine for novelists.” We’re all familiar with the marketing boost books have received thanks to the endorsement of Oprah’s book club and now Reese Witherspoon’s (with more than 800,000 followers), among many others.

Millions of Americans belong to book clubs—the formal kind that have regular meetings in libraries and living rooms—and the loosely organized kind that operate through social media, including GoodReads, with its 90 million members. A 2015 BookBrowse survey of people who read at least one book per month found that over half belong to at least one book club, with the percentage of readers who are book club members rising with age.

Another BookBrowse survey of more than 5000 book club members, conducted last year, found that “overwhelmingly, book club members want to read books that will promote good discussion.” In other words, they’re looking for books whose features intrigue them.

Recognizing a learning opportunity here, Kraft analyzed a number of book club reading guides to discover major topics presumed to promote book club discussions. They relate to issues writers ponder all the time, and it’s encouraging to know they get readers talking too. Here they are:

1. A protagonist with a unique perspective – Think Maggie Gee’s new book Blood, with its unforgettable narrator Monica Ludd or Rice Moore in the Appalachian noir prize-winner Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin. Characters with strong voices like these give book club members “a chance to look at life in a new way,” Kraft says.

2. A character or characters readers can relate to – I have nothing in common with manipulative New Orleans gangster Frank Guidry in Lou Berney’s November Road, but I certainly related to him. A character doesn’t have to be exactly like me (please, no!) for that to happen; the character just needs to be richly portrayed.

3. A story that reflects some larger issue – In this way, the character’s deeply personal experience can become “universal and political,” Kraft says. Gin Phillips’s thriller Fierce Kingdom begins with a mother wanting to take her toddler home, and the rest of the book is about that thwarted journey. Home is always more than an address.

4. A structure that helps set expectations and convey meaning – Denise Mina’s Conviction, with its story-within-a-story format not only engages the reader in two plots, the relevance of the second story gives the protagonist a chance to reflect on her past and motivates her current actions. Think Dov Alfon’s A Long Night in Paris or Chris Pavone’s new The Paris Diversion that puts the time of day at the head of each chapter in this fast-paced thriller that takes place over a jam-packed 11 hours. The ticking clock is one of the thriller genre’s most popular structural devices. It sure sets expectations.

5. Endings that are tidy or open-ended? I’m sure there’s lots of discussion on this point. Kraft comes down on leaving endings looser, which gives readers a chance to think about all the novel’s foregoing elements and, in an act of co-creation, what’s most likely to happen next. “Imaginations are not constrained to what occurred between the covers of the book,” Kraft says. It’s like movies that end with a “where are they now?” feature as the credits roll, which evoke that same feeling of limiting the possibilities I might prefer. I believe Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing would have been stronger without Tate’s final discoveries. Let readers puzzle it out.

Photo: Free-Photos from Pixabay   

The Farewell

Posted on by

This lovely new film written and directed by Lulu Wang starts with that staple of family dramas, assembling the clan (trailer). In this case, a woman’s sons and their wives and children are returning to Changchun, China, from Japan and America on the pretext of a family wedding, but in reality because the family matriarch, Nai Nai, is dying. Though widely dispersed, they are united in a conspiracy to keep that truth from her as long as possible.

All except Billi (Awkwafina). She immigrated to America with her parents at age four and has adopted this country’s attitudes toward personal autonomy. This secret is too big, too consequential, too awful to keep. So, when her young poleaxed-looking cousin moves up his wedding to a Japanese woman as a ploy to get the family together, Billi is discouraged from attending. She doesn’t have the poker face necessary to maintain the deception. She goes anyway.

And what do families do when they get together? They eat! Over a series of meals, including the eerily familiar wedding reception, the food serves as a distraction when discussions become too intense and personal. Grandma Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) is lively and charming, and the mutual love between her and a devastated Billi is beautifully portrayed. They tell her she isn’t sick, and that’s the attitude she adopts. And, really, she manages the family and the wedding minutiae with energy. The family keeps trying to take on various tasks, but she’ll have none of it.

I especially liked the portrayal of Billi’s parents, her stunned father (Tzi Ma) and chilly, no-nonsense mother (Diana Lin), as well as the poor Japanese bride (Aoi Mizuhara), gamely participating in everything without understanding a word.

The movie delves deeply into cultural differences and, by exploring them in such vivid detail, establishes bona fide universals. Given the subject matter, you would not expect this film to have a nice dose of comedy, but it does. Families closely examined almost always do, in the midst of whatever chaos surrounds them—painful wedding toasts eliciting surefire groans.

Christy Lemire for RogerEbert.com, nails it when she says Wang has “made a film about death that’s light on its feet and never mawkish. She’s told a story about cultural clashes without ever leaning on wacky stereotypes or lazy clichés.” See it!, then go out for Chinese food. You will be in the mood.Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating 99%; audiences 88%.