Category Archives: Reading . . .

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

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It’s Not Easy Being a Spy

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While some terrific espionage thrillers have been written in the last couple of years (see list below), spying in the 21st c. is not what it once was. First of all, it’s less Agents Running in the Field, the title of one of John le Carré’s late novels and more Analysts Staring at a Computer Screen. To use the intelligence field jargon, more “communications intelligence” and less “human intelligence,” Comint versus Humint.

Further, it’s almost impossible to stay hidden these days, with the proliferation of cameras, facial recognition, gait analysis (Keyser Söze, I’m looking at you), DNA, and AI document analyses. We watched the new movie Mastermind with Josh O’Connor last weekend, a story about an art heist that takes place in 1970, and I kept noticing all the ways in which a crime like that couldn’t happen today. Yeah, I know, tell it to the Louvre. Let’s just say it couldn’t be carried out in the same way. Of course, even in 1970, the Mastermind DID get caught, but that was through the time-honored technique of getting one of the criminals to rat out the others.

Le Carré made stories set in the old Soviet Union into an art form, and many people, me among them, lamented the loss of that old, familiar fictional antagonism. He had to reach far afield for new topics, as in The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener. Well, the world turns and the Russians are back. But during the 90s, the sense that the familiar enemy had evaporated blinded our leaders to the strengthening Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, they got it. And the professionals realized how deficient their assets were. It was disturbingly parallel to the situation at the beginning of the Cold War. Then we didn’t know much about the Soviets, what they were likely to do and whether they had the capacity to do it. In both instances, desperation for information led to torture. And more recently, to the disembodied terror of drone strikes, with the inevitably inexact targeting.

Most recently, the elimination of DEI programs has been especially calamitous for CIA. After years of trying to recruit Asian Americans, African Americans, and Arab Americans who can blend into countries and population groups where whites simply cannot, we’ve deliberately blinded ourselves. We need to know what’s going on in some of these countries, and now we won’t. If you want to read more about the travails of CIA over the years and its current challenges, try The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. Despite all these complications, authors continue to write award-winning espionage novels.

For great spy fiction, try:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley. A Russian translator must escape Moscow, but she knows too much.
The Protocols of Spying by Merle Nygate. Israeli security forces based in London, reeling after the Hamas attack, walk a tightrope.
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry. An American spy, working in Bahrain, takes on a final mission that goes badly awry.
The Tiger and the Bear by Philip Lazar. Journalists with a potentially explosive story must dig deep to find out if it’s true.
Moscow X or The Seventh Floor or, really, anything by David McCloskey.

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A Bag Full of Stones – by A. Molotkov

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In one of those crime stories that you hope isn’t based on real-life events, but expect it could be, A Molotkov’s new novel explores what might happen when a person whose mental faculties are teetering at the edge of chaos is exposed to an unrelenting stream of vitriol. Especially fear and loathing aimed at people who are perceived to be enemies. Right now, not only in the United States, it seems that the conditions for the kinds of crimes Molotkov has envisioned in fiction simmer barely below the surface in reality.

In this novel, set in Portland, Oregon, in 2019, a volatile mix of identity politics has created an environment where one man feels morally bound to take corrective action. He even refers to himself as The Corrector. He’s a weak vessel to effect social change, however, and on a steeply downward spiral. He drinks too much bourbon. He lives with his mother, who is dying in a hospital bed in their living room, and he’s haunted by the insults his dead father directed at him. He has no friends. His antagonisms cost him his job. What he has been successful at is murder.

As the story opens, police detectives Brenda Smith and Dmitry Volkov are investigating the death of an elderly Yemeni engineer. A plain red business-sized card found on the body indicates that his death may be linked to the murder of a South Asian woman a year earlier. Within days, a third victim—this time an American nurse who is Muslim—is found, bearing the same red calling card. Conditions are ripe for citywide panic.

The detectives are not without complicated, distracting lives themselves. Volkov is deep in gambling debt; Smith is starting a new relationship, which may be doomed when her partner learns she’s a cop. Each character’s story is told in short snippets, sometimes only a page or two, which for me became rather disjointed. Yet, it’s a practical way to handle such a large cast of characters—the two cops, the Corrector, and the victims, living and dead. Yes, in this story, the dead withdraw only gradually from the world of the living and continue for a time to have thoughts and observations. The thoughts of the murdered Yemeni engineer and the nurse focus on bringing their murderer to justice. When Detective Smith has a flash of intuition about the case, now and again, perhaps the dead’s messages are reaching their target. How often must real-life detectives wish the victims in their investigations could talk to them!

Anti-immigrant sentiment, uncontrolled gambling, complicated relationships—that’s a lot to tackle, but Molotkov isn’t through. The mixed emotions and difficulties the Corrector faces in caring for his dying mother are a commentary on a further dysfunctional aspect of American life: the health care system. To the good, the mother is enrolled in hospice, and a nurse comes to check on her every few days, equipment has been brought in, and her pain appears to be managed. At the same time, the deteriorating home environment and the instability of her sole caregiver (her drunken son) should be obvious to any health professional. In one of the most moving scenes in the story, the Corrector tells his mother about his murders, expecting her to be proud of him. Instead, she is clearly horrified, yet helpless to do anything about it. She never speaks to him again.

The depth of character development in this crime story make it a stand-out. Termed a “literary crime story,” A Bag Full of Stones and its unvarnished appraisal of the tragedies latent in the current political moment provide a great deal to think about.

Big Bad Wool by Leonie Swann

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A murder mystery in which the detective-work is done by a flock of sheep? YMBK. And, if you’ve noticed my preference for realistic crime stories and political thrillers, you’ll probably be surprised that Big Bad Wool and its predecessor Three Bags Full were two of my favorite books of the last year—sheepy detectives notwithstanding. As testaments to the books’ appeal, Three Bags Full has been translated into more than thirty languages and is currently being made into a movie starring Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, Bryan Cranston, and others. Big Bad Wool was translated from the original German by Amy Bojang.

Dark doings occur in these books, including murder. The sheep don’t perfectly understand the human world, of course, but they are observant, patient, and one of them—Miss Maple—is quite clever at putting two and two together. Part of their understanding of humankind has developed through their shepherds’ habit of reading to them each night: mysteries, romances, and, in one disturbing interlude, a text on sheep diseases.

In this story, Rebecca, their shepherdess, has taken the sheep on a long-promised trip to Europe. She lives in her caravan along with her Mum, a devotee of the Tarot, though sheep keep eating a card here or there, diminishing the deck and people’s possible fortunes. Shepherdess, Mum, and sheep are overwintering alongside a French chateau. Snow is on the meadow and ominous tracks are everywhere. Animals are being found in the forest, brutally murdered. Is a werewolf on the prowl? Rebecca worries about the safety of her sheep, and they worry about hers. The plot becomes complicated, making the story perhaps somewhat overlong, but it’s refreshing seeing the world through the eyes of the animals, and I didn’t mind.

The sheep bring distinct personalities and skills to this adventure. Aside from Miss Maple’s acknowledged cleverness, Mopple has the best memory, Othello is a born leader and learned a lot in his early days living in a zoo, Lane is the fastest runner, and the fearless winter lamb, born out of sync with the sheep calendar, hasn’t acquired a name yet and longs for one.

The sheep meadow is next to a fenced-in herd of goats. The temperamental and attitudinal differences between the species—as well as what you could call their different “skill sets”—prove most entertaining and useful. Swann (a pen name) must be exceptionally observant to render animal behavior so vividly and convincingly. Some things the sheep get wrong, and others they understand quite differently than the humans do—the value of veterinarians, for example—though they have an enviable ability to tell when a human is lying. They go about their sheepy business (mainly focused on eating) in a charming, sheepy way. I hated for this oddly comforting book to end!

P.S. When the Public Safety Writers Association decided to have a detective-themed costume event at its annual meeting last summer, you can guess mine!

The Lizard by Dominic Stansberry

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Domenic Stansberry’s new noir mystery takes it slow, unraveling in beautiful prose the confounding situation its protagonist, political ghostwriter SE Reynolds. Stansberry—who hasn’t published a novel in almost a decade—has won numerous prizes, including an Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America) and a Hammett Prize for his past books.

The Lizard isn’t a typical thriller that keeps the action pulsing and the pages flying. Instead, Reynolds is caught in a net that ever-so-slowly tightens around him. When the book begins, he’s already on the run in a desolate sector of Southern California. It’s La Bahia, a town worn out and on its last legs. Just like the old Hotel La Bahia, destined for the wrecking ball. Just like Reynolds himself? Why anyone would go to this godforsaken place, willingly, is another mystery, yet someone may have followed him there. Or is his paranoia acting up?

Reynolds’s trouble started when a New York literary agent called to persuade him to help out an old friend—Max Seeghurs, another former investigative reporter—who’s supposed to be writing a book about a defunct New Mexico retreat called Sundial. Sundial was a popular destination for people on the make financially, politically, or in Hollywood. Sex and drugs. Alas, Sundial’s owner and his twenty-something son both died under dubious circumstances, the retreat closed down, and Seeghurs wants to pull the band-aid off. Expose the rot. But Seeghurs is having trouble pulling the book together; maybe Reynolds can be his manuscript doctor.

Reynolds isn’t keen on this potential assignment because Seeghurs is notoriously difficult to work with. And, because the last time they met up a couple of years back in Miscoulga, Nebraska, Reynolds had an affair with Seeghurs’s wife, now his ex-wife. But Reynolds’s latest candidate is not committing to hiring him, the money is attractive, and he finally agrees.

It takes some effort to track Seeghurs down out somewhere near the ocean on Coney Island. It’s not an easy thing finding him, the landlord hasn’t been paid and isn’t happy about it. But Reynolds persists and finds Seeghurs, all right. Dead. Trying to find out what happened takes him back to Miscoulga and eventually to the crumbling Hotel La Bahia—a sad place to make a last stand.

For a person who ends up so alone, he has some good relationships. Some of the spirited conversations with his ailing parents are among the funniest in the book. Not the typical mile-a-minute thriller, but one where you’ll want to savor the prose. And, you may find yourself pondering the possibilities, even after you turn the last page.

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The Murder Show by Matt Goldman

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Author Matt Goldman is part of that tribe of television writers who have made a successful jump into print. These authors have in common their ability to establish steadily rising action with no lulls and visual imaginations that let them describe scenes so that readers can easily picture them. And they aren’t reluctant to deploy a little authentic humor. Goldman’s first book was nominated for a number of awards, and the new one, The Murder Show, will likely garner equal attention.

In this story, Ethan Harris is the fortyish showrunner for a television series called The Murder Show. He’s abandoned New York and arrived tonight in his home town of Minneapolis, in the hope that a different setting and atmosphere will give him a great idea for the show’s next season. It has to be good, because the show is one bad idea away from being cancelled altogether.

To his surprise, his high school best friend and almost-girlfriend Ro Greeman, still lives in the house behind his. She’s on the Minneapolis police force, as is her high school boyfriend Marty Mathis, which brings Ethan into much too much contact with his high school nemesis.

Ro has an idea for The Murder Show. Of course. Everyone does. Ethan’s heard so many of these he’s initially skeptical, but over time, her idea grows on him. She wants him to recreate the mysterious death of their friend Ricky O’Shea, killed in a hit-and-run on a rural road after his car broke down. Maybe the show would prompt someone who knows something to come forward, even after all this time. And, she eventually reveals, his isn’t the only such fatality in the area. If Ro hadn’t noticed a recent case so similar to Ricky’s, she wouldn’t have recognized the pattern.

Although Ro’s idea could reflect wanting to spend time with Ethan or be a way to get help outside official channels—whichever—Ethan proves himself a resourceful partner. And she needs one!

The quick-witted, teasing banter between Ethan and the women in the story deserves mention, because it rings true. That’s another thing television writers can do (the good ones, that is). They can write believable dialog.

Though much of the story takes place in urban Minneapolis, the trips to the rural areas, past and present, are well described. Fast-paced at both the plot and character development levels, this book is one a great many readers will enjoy. I certainly did.

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The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

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Second in this talented team’s genre mashup, The Railway Conspiracy builds on the characters introduced in last year’s The Murder of Mr. Ma. Set in London in 1924, the series’ main characters are Judge Dee Ren Jie, based on a real-life Tang Dynasty jurist and the traditions of Sherlock Holmes; Lao She, a university professor who plays Watson to Dee’s Holmes; Sergeant Hoong, owner of a shop selling Chinese goods, and the man you want with you when there’s a fight brewing; and Jimmy Fingers, whose business tends more to monkey but whose acquaintanceship with the London underworld comes in handy.

In this story, three great powers—Russia, Japan, and a power-hungry Chinese warlord are vying for control of the railways being developed in China. The precarious state of the Chinese Nationalist government and the persistent growth of the Chinese Communist party are ripe for political turmoil. Rumors of a conspiracy to take over the railways swirl about, including at the elegant dinner table of Madam Wu Ze Tian, to whom Dee, uncharacteristically, seems to be forming an attachment.

The next morning, one of the dinner party guests is dead. Bodies begin to pile up, and Dee and Lao must figure out how the deaths are connected and who is responsible. All they seem to have in common is an interest in the railway politics playing out several thousand miles east.

Rozan and Nee’s evocation of 1920s London is charming. Lots of cabs; lots of walking. The authors make especially good use of Dee’s ability to impersonate the Victorian folkloric character, Spring-heeled Jack. Lots of martial arts prowess is on display—perhaps a bit too much near the story’s climax—but it’s easy to follow. Jimmy Fingers always provides some humor, and Lao’s self-deprecating style doesn’t mask his substantial contribution to their investigations. The London constabulary is a source of both help and, as often, shortsighted decisions.

If Nee is well grounded in visualizing superheroes, Rozan is an award-winning writer of detective and crime fiction. Together their books are pure fun—Adventures with a capital A. Cultural insights along the way add spice.

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Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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Virginia Feito’s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It’s graphic. It’s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn’t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she’s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .

It’s also worth saying that much of it is highly comic, poking fun at the aristocracy and its Victorian-era pretensions. The heroine, Winifred Notty (which I invariably read as “naughty”) is posing as a governess and was hired to deal with the two children of the Pound family: Drusilla, an angsty teenager, and the young heir, William, insufferably puffed up with his future importance.

Their mother, a faded woman imprisoned by the constraints of her social situation, is unable to think beyond them. Though she senses something off about Miss Notty, she grabs hold of the wrong end of the stick when she believes the governess is trying to seduce her husband. Mr. Pound may actually be interested in being seduced—something you justknow won’t turn out well.

You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred’s background. She was illegitimate; her father refused to marry her mother. Her mother moved to another town and passed herself off as a widow, marrying a local Reverend who grew to think of his stepdaughter as the incarnation of evil. She was sent to a girls’ school, but after The Incident (which I’ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.

The foods the Pound family is served are described in sometimes lascivious detail, as the governess perceives them. But then she has something of an oral fixation—prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.

I came to think of this story as akin to a gruesome fairy tale, in which all sorts of outlandish and grotesque occurrences are possible. You must decide for yourself how much is literally true and how much is in Miss Notty’s mind. It’s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

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No doubt many crime fiction readers eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow’s new legal thriller. I know I did, having been a fan ever since his debut with Presumed Innocent almost 40 years ago. I looked forward to seeing what his character, Rusty Sabich, is up to, now that he’s in his 70s. And, I relish the clash of wits in a good courtroom drama.

In the current book, Rusty’s tenure as a judge in fictional Kindle County, Minnesota, is finished, and he’s moved about a hundred miles north to rural/small town Skageon County. He’s living on a lake and has found a new live-in love, Bea Housley, a school principal.

Bea is not baggage-free. (Which of us is?) She has an irascible father and an adopted son, Aaron, in his early twenties who spent jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute (the drugs actually belonged to his on-and-off girlfriend, Mae Potter). Out on parole now, Aaron has to abide by certain rules: no driving, no associating with drug addicts, and no leaving the county. He’s in Bea and Rusty’s custody and living with them. Thankfully, he’s pulling his life together.

Mae, the beautiful young woman Aaron’s loved for years, remains a problem. He should not be associating with her, not only because it’s a violation of his parole, but because she’s unstable and manipulative. She’s like a tornado through the lives of her friends and family. But young love is what it is. She and Aaron are secretly considering marriage, and he proposes a weekend camping trip to sort out their future once and for all. No phones, no distractions.

The trip ends with a big argument between them, during which Aaron realizes Mae will never change, that she will always be totally self-absorbed, that people’s advice that she’s not good for him is correct, that he’s done. He hitchhikes home, just as Rusty and Bea were about to report his disappearance to his parole officer.

He makes it home. Mae does not. Two weeks later her decomposed body is found, apparently strangled. Aaron is devastated. Her family is too, and immediately points to Aaron as the probable culprit. That fact that he’s Black and Mae was white hovers over him. Is this why they never approved of Mae and Aaron’s relationship? Mae’s father is the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County and puts a lot of law enforcement pressure on Aaron. Eventually, Aaron comes to trial.

Much of the book is the unfolding courtroom drama. I liked that part a lot. It was fascinating to see how the defense team tries to unravel the prosecutor’s evidence, making what at first sounds devastating at least open to interpretation. If you enjoy courtroom scenes, you’ll find some riveting ones here.

But at 530 pages, the book has lots of other stuff packed in as well. There’s too much backstory about Rusty, Bea, and their families and, for my taste, way too much navel-gazing by Rusty around various issues. I recognized that he loves Bea and didn’t need it rehashed multiple times. He agonizes at great length about whether he should become Aaron’s defense attorney, as Bea pleads with him to. He shouldn’t, for obvious reasons, and you read all of them, many times. But of course he’s going to do it, or else what’s in those 530 pages? To complicate Rusty’s emotional state further, he and Bea have a serious falling out over an issue I found frankly implausible.

To sum up, while the trial scenes were great, much of the rest of the story was, for me, seriously over-written. It’s like eating three Christmas dinners in one evening. You’re so stuffed it’s hard to say you actually enjoyed the experience.