Category Archives: Reading . . .

****Swing Time

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Swing Time, children dancing

photo: cavalier 92, creative commons license

By Zadie Smith – Yes, I do read good books that are not crime fiction, and this is one of them! The term “frenemies” could have been coined to describe the long relationship between the book’s unnamed first-person narrator and Tracey, drawn together by being the only mixed-race children in a dance class. They meet, play, pirouette, and study in council housing in North London.Tracey is the talented one, accepted into a selective performing arts program, her future seemingly assured.

“Unnamed, unsure, neither black nor white, the narrator is fittingly indistinct in this brilliant novel about the illusions of identity,” said Annalisa Quinn in an NPR review. The story swings back and forth between present-day events and flashbacks about the girls’ childhood, their growing up, and their sporadic encounters over the years. Later the narrator sees her in minor roles in classic musicals—Guys and Dolls, Show Boat, ironically—before her career fades from view.

The dance theme is present throughout, a universal uniting characters through time and across cultures: “a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.” Late in the book, dance even becomes a weapon.

The narrator, meanwhile, has landed what seems like a plum job: assistant to Australian pop star Aimee. Aimee and her team divide their time between London and New York. Aimee’s peripatetic lifestyle, kids and nannies in tow, means perpetual rootlessness for the narrator, a disconnect not just from her past—her childhood friend, her parents—but also from a future of her own.

Aimee gets the notion to establish a girls’ school in rural West Africa, and some of the novel’s most heartfelt passages involve the narrator’s yearning to connect with the Africans and the disconnect between the rich pop star and her entourage and the people she wants to help. Aimee’s motives are genuinely kindly, but implementing them on the ground is far more complicated than she imagines.

The narrator certainly is a perceptive observer, but will she grab hold of life and learn to dance to her own tune?

***Know Me Now

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Scottish Highlands

Scottish Highlands photo by Paul Wordingham, creative commons license

By CJ Carver – This is the third in a crime thriller series featuring former MI5 operative Dan Forrester and Yorkshire-area Detective Constable Lucy Davies. It takes place in the Scottish highlands, where, as a youth, Dan spent his summer vacations. His father and three university friends reunited there each year, and their four children, all approximately the same age, grew up together.

The children now have well-established careers of their own. Gustav created a clinic in Isterberg, Germany; Christopher took up genetic engineering of superstrains of rice and has a lab near Duncaid; audacious former-tomboy Sophie does something for the government in London; and Dan joined MI5. Although this rundown suggests a large number of core characters, Carver does a good job of making them distinct enough to avoid confusion.

Though Christopher and his wife are having a rough patch, their situation grows tragically worse when their thirteen-year-old son Connor dies, in what the police seem too hasty in labeling a suicide. Dan persuades his friend Lucy to take a few days off and join him in Duncaid to look into the case. Carver does such a good job describing the damp, oppressive, grey highland atmosphere, you may feel compelled to put on a jumper—or two—while you ponder why a doctor’s patients are dying too young.

Then news arrives that Dan’s father has been murdered in Germany. The unlikely coincidence that two family members of this tight-knit group died within days of each other strikes them all. What is the connection? Someone is determined that Dan not discover it, and his probing soon puts himself, his wife, and his newborn son at risk. In light of the very tangible threats, his motivation for continuing to investigate—and some of the other characters’ motivations as well—aren’t as believable as they might be.

Lucy has a form of synesthesia, and in situations of high emotion sees certain colors. She’s a bit of an oddball, trying to hide what she views as dysfunctions in her personality. Dan also has a quirk, in that his memory has gaping holes from his past work with MI5. Although Carver tends to provide a dump of backstory about characters that becomes a drag on the narrative, I wish she’d more fully explored these two interesting mental conditions, which could bear strongly on Lucy and Dan’s ability to do their work, for good or ill.

This entry into the crowded Scottish crime fiction field (Tartan Noir!) employs a straightforward, clear style, and the plot clicks right along. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for literary flourishes and subtext, which the book lacks, and it includes perhaps a few too many coincidences. However, it raises questions about biomedical technology and its possibilities well worth thoughtful consideration.

****Easy Errors

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Auto Crash

photo: Marcus Sümnick, creative commons license

By Steven F. Havill – This is book 22 in Havill’s Posadas County (New Mexico) mystery series and is a prequel to the  earlier books.

Demonstrating how reader opinion is more than background noise to crime fiction writers, Havill says Easy Errors sprang from a reader’s request for more information about Sheriff Robert Torrez’s early career. It’s a testament to how well Havill knows and understands his characters inside and out that he can reach back in time and conjure their younger selves.

Havill begins this book, narrated in the first person by Undersheriff Bill Gastner, with Gastner relaxing one Wednesday night (with a book!), interrupted in the third paragraph with “the distant shriek of tires tearing rubber and the loud, dull whump that followed.” A motor vehicle has crashed disastrously somewhere nearby, so Gastner alerts the sheriff’s dispatcher and sets out to find the source of the noise.

It isn’t pretty.

What follows over the next few days is the meticulous reconstruction of events that led to this tragedy. You might think an auto crash could not sustain investigative—and reader—attention for an entire novel, but Havill’s skill lies in making this police procedural absolutely riveting. It proves that a crime story doesn’t have to trot out a demented serial killer or imperil the US President and all of Congress in order to have stakes worth caring about.

Each of Havill’s characters is intrinsically interesting, and it’s equally interesting to see how they work together as a team, which includes working around some spotty (and humorous) assistance from the police dispatchers.

The care that Havill takes in reconstructing the crime and establishing the officers’ logic in developing every last bit of evidence holds until near the book’s end, when the author has the prosecutor, speaking before the grand jury, claim a type of evidence the authorities do not actually possess. While the grand jury might reach the same decision with or without this information, its decision is based on a totality of evidence, and the total is flawed. In a novel so thoroughly grounded in the step-by-step accretion of facts, this slip-up is jarring, and the book’s title, Easy Errors, turns ironic.

Still, the rest of the book is so strong, this mistake isn’t enough to discourage me from wanting to read more Posadas County mysteries. As a fan of the Longmire tv series, based on Craig Johnson’s books, I warmed to this one immediately.

****Shots Fired: The Misunderstandings, Misconceptions, and Myths about Police Shootings

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NYCity police officer

photo: scubacopper, creative commons license

By Joseph K. Loughlin and Kate Clark Flora – Laughlin, a former assistant chief of police in Portland, Maine, and Flora, a true crime writer, teamed up to produce this remarkable non-fiction book, which, for all its limitations, is a must-read for people concerned about gun crime and police violence, as well as for those who write about these matters.

The book is based on interviews with dozens of police officers (mostly on the US East Coast) involved in deadly shootings. They recount how and why they reacted as they did during the event and the impact on them afterward.

Citizens often wonder why police don’t just shoot weapons out of suspects’ hands. Or shoot to wound them. Television and movies would suggest that police have plenty of time to make such calculations, take careful aim at their suspect, and are accomplished marksmen. In real life, the compressed timeframe in which police actions typically occur does not allow for a carefully aimed shot. The situation may be confusing, people are moving, and armed suspects may be charging the officers or putting nearby citizens at risk.

The public also wonders why so many shots are fired. They may not realize that suspects high on drugs or adrenaline or both aren’t stopped by a single bullet—even if that bullet would eventually prove fatal—they keep coming. The officers’ goal is to eliminate the hazard, to themselves, to other police, to the public. A single bullet doesn’t achieve this.

No fictional account could be more powerful than the book’s second-by-second reconstruction of the confrontation with the Boston Marathon bombers by Watertown, Massachusetts, police officers. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was hit nine times by bullets from a .40 caliber Glock and still ran toward the police, firing. When his gun was empty, he threw it at an officer and kept coming. The police thought he might have a bomb strapped to him. Nevertheless, they tackled him, and he went down. He was still fighting them when his younger brother ran over him with an SUV, in making his own escape. Tsarnaev was dragged 20 feet down the street and still struggled with the officers.

The interviews with the police officers are truly moving. Killing another person is not something good officers take lightly. Often they are off patrol work for many months afterward. Some can never return to duty.

The book might have been stronger if some of the interviews were with police whose actions were more ambiguous (impossible because of legal liability), or if there were greater acknowledgment that sometimes there are “bad-actor” officers. In the closing chapter’s list of 10 ways the public can support the police, one might have been improving methods for weeding such individuals out of a department.

Reading this book, you’re likely to develop a greater appreciation for the split-second decision-making skills police are routinely called upon to deploy and the inevitability of errors. You also will have greater appreciation of the investigatory process—the news media blasts officers’ actions within hours—even minutes—of a shooting event, whereas a full investigation takes time. While the terrible occurrences in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Staten Island, and elsewhere are high in the public consciousness, how many Americans are aware that in the decade from 2003 to 2012 there were more than 575,000 felonious assaults against police officers, almost 200,000 of which involved a weapon?

Readers will come away with an appreciation of the need for greater police training and education too. Training not just to deal with police issues, but the fallout from drug abuse and alcoholism, poverty and unemployment, homelessness, the underfunding of the mental health system—all of which produce social problems that wind up in the laps of public safety personnel on a daily basis.

While this book tells one side of the story, it’s a side too rarely discussed in inflammatory news stories and a rush to judgment. It’s an exciting read, and one that will give every person who reads crime stories—and the daily newspaper—a new perspective on unfolding events

30-Second Book Reviews – Part 2

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Reading

photo: Carlos Martinez, creative commons license

Recently Published

All the Wicked Girls by Chris Whitaker – An thriller in which real and symbolic dark clouds hover menacingly over a tiny Alabama community. Young girls—young religious girls—are being murdered. When another goes missing, the town’s turned into a tinderbox, and the sheriff is hard put to control the situation. The sheriff, the girl’s twin sister, and a couple of outsider friends are captivating characters. Written from multiple points of view, this is a complex, compelling story.

A Cold Death by Marilyn Meredith – Another in the popular Deputy Tempe Crabtree series. A group of sniping acquaintances is snowbound at a mountain cabin and none too happy about it. Loyalties shift; suspicions rise; accusations cascade. Crabtree also must deal with the ghost of a former resident, and the light touch of paranormal is handled well.

Classics Revisited

Theft: A Love Story by Man Booker prize-winner Peter Carey – In this 2006 novel, a flamboyant Australian artist struggles with a career past its peak, while dealing with his developmentally disabled (but entertainingly astute) younger brother, a conniving girlfriend who is always one step ahead of him, and an unforgiving ex-wife. “Witty, urbane, funny, and profound.”

Our Game by John le Carré – When one of the oldest friends of retired MI6 agent Tim Cranmer goes missing, along with Cranmer’s mistress, he sets out to find them. In this 1995 spy thriller, Cranmer’s bosses try to convince him his Cold War and thus his career are over, but his friend and fellow-spy appears to have identified some new mission, using the £37 million he’s stolen from the Russians to finance it. With this fast-paced, enjoyable read, you’re in the hands of the master.

The Directive by Matthew Quirk – There’s a short window of time between when the U.S. Federal Reserve makes its recommendations and when they’re made public. During that hour or so, they are one of the most closely guarded secrets in the financial world. The Ford brothers want that information, which is worth, well, millions. Clever plotting, persuasive, a fun read from 2014.

Audiobooks

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – Prepare yourself to fall in love with Count Alexander Rostov, confined after the Revolution to Moscow’s famed hotel, The Metropol. The rich life he builds there never strays from elegance and civility, traits that the new Soviet power-brokers lack utterly. It’s a lovely story, and, as Ann Patchett says, “The book is like a salve.” Great narrator too.

The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr – Kerr’s tenth Bernie Gunther novel, this one has the Berlin police detective on a confidential assignment from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels—to track down the father of his favorite actress. Gunther meets the woman, and they begin a risky love affair. He does find her father, knee-deep in a bloodbath in Yugoslavia, but he and Goebbels decide to keep his murderous career a secret and tell her he’s dead. Like all secrets, this one has consequences. Gunther’s sly critiques and disdain for the Nazis is another dangerous activity, and you worry he’ll go too far.

A few more thirty-second book reviews are here. Enjoy!

30-Second Book Reviews

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book gift

photo: pixabay

My book reviews have lagged behind my reading ever since this website was down for a month in September. I’ll never catch up! This week and next you’ll get brief reviews of a few books to inspire your holiday shopping. One good thing about books as gifts—they’re easy to wrap!

P.S. If you click on links here to buy any of these books, as an Amazon affiliate, I receive a penny (or so).

Non-Fiction

Once in a Great City by David Maraniss – For the history-lovers on your list, here’s a fascinating social history of my home town, Detroit, in the pivotal 18 months from fall 1962 to spring 1964, when forces were at work that would shape the city irrevocably. Some were invisible, some were not seen. Pulitzer-Prize-winner Maraniss starts his 2015 book with the conflagration that destroyed the Ford Rotunda—a structure first built for the 1934 Chicago Exposition—where every fall my family and thousands of others went to preview the new Ford models and where every December I sat on Santa’s lap. It was a shocking loss, incomprehensible to me at the time, and a lesson transience. The first of many. His discussions of the auto industry and the stellar success of the Mustang, Detroit’s role in the nascent Civil Rights movement, the rise of Motown, and so much else captures “the precarious balance” of that era, in which the fate of a great American city hung.

The Ford Rotunda

photo: wikimedia

Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life by Sarah Kaminsky – Kaminsky’s daughter has told her father’s story as his first-person account, and it is fascinating (featured on 60 Minutes this past October). An Argentinian Jew in Paris during World War II, a peculiar set of experiences prepared him to help the French Resistance provide identity documents for people on the run from the Nazis. He quickly expanded his skills and, working in secret, prepared forged papers that saved the lives of thousands. After the war, he did similar work for Algerian freedom fighters, then other leftist movements over a thirty-year career. He never took any money for this work, instead supporting himself—hardly making ends meet—through his photography. It’s an nerve-wracking tale, in which every day, every transaction held the risk of betrayal and imprisonment, or worse. If people on your holiday list gravitate to inspirational, heroic stories, Kaminsky’s your man.

Short Crime Stories

Black Cat Mystery Magazine – It’s always exciting to see a new publication, and issue #1 of BCMM suggests this will become a good one. For its debut, the editors played it safe by requesting submissions from some of the country’s leading mystery/crime short story authors. The result is a knockout! I particularly enjoyed the sly humor of many of the authors—including Alan Orloff, Josh Pachter, Meg Opperman, and Barb Goffman, whose story is appropriately titled, “Crazy Cat Lady.”

Just to Watch Them Die – This collection, “inspired by the songs of Johnny Cash,” is grittier than Black Cat, and the connection to the songs is at times somewhat tenuous. Quite a few are set in Cash country, south and west. If you have Cash fans on your list, they’ll appreciate the homage.

Switchblade – This is the collection for anyone on your list who thinks they have it bad. These are stories about people so down on their luck the reader’s situation perceptibly brightens. I couldn’t help but think of Dennis Lehane’s distinction between tragedy and noir. In tragedy, he’s said, the hero falls from a great height (think Macbeth). In noir, he falls from the curb. Lots of curb-falling here. Maybe just the thing for a grousing in-law.

**The Extraditionist

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confiscated drug money

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Todd Merer – A debut thriller that shines a light into a particularly dark corner of the legal world, The Extraditionist is the story of a talented lawyer who’s made his comfortable living representing the leaders of drug cartels at risk of being extradited to the United States. IRL, author Merer is, cover copy would have you believe, a specialist in defending these same high-ranking cartel chiefs. “He gained acquittals in more than 150 trials,” it crows. This seems a dubious business and, as a result, you may have trouble warming up to the book’s protagonist, a first-person narrator who may be no more than the author’s alter-ego.

When three potentially lucrative clients send out feelers—“a trifecta of new clients suddenly emerg(ing) from the free-fire zone of the War against Drugs”—Bluestone whips into action. He knows next-to-nothing about any of these potential clients, except that they are all dangerous men supported by large trigger-happy criminal gangs. You may have trouble keeping all the players straight. I did.

Nevertheless, Bluestone is all in, hoping for the big score that will let him retire. There’s a possibility that one of the three is the elusive Sombra, a mysterious drug lord living high in the Andes among the Logui people who reportedly pays no bribes and extorts no officials. Bluestone is skeptical. “In my experience, tales of the moral principles of drug legendaries are bullshit. On the opposite end of the spectrum, stories of their violence are underestimated.” You wonder how he’s survived.

Throughout the story, Bluestone’s friends and confidants and fixers and what-have-you are murdered by one cartel or the other, yet Bluestone soldiers on, seemingly unaffected by the death and destruction that follows in this wake. Over the course of the narrative, he develops a theory about who Sombra is (one I did not share), and you may figure out rather quickly the true identify of a couple of key characters.

The huge amounts of cash sloshing around and the casual way in which they were handled, the wholesale murder, and the efforts to obtain for drug traffickers the lightest possible sentences exposed a moral vacuum at the heart of this novel that makes it difficult to care about the protagonist or his supposedly clever doings. It’s quite a contrast to the perspective on the destructive wake of the cartels (in Mexico this time) of Don Winslow’s excellent The Cartel.

****Kompromat

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newspaper headlines

CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/caseydavid

By Stanley Johnson – If you’re one of the millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic who look back on the elections of 2016 and say, to yourself or at the top of your lungs, “What just happened?” this satirical new political thriller is for you.

Its characters are such thinly disguised versions of today’s leading political figures, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve inadvertently picked up a recent copy of The Times. Much-needed is the list of its many characters—from the US, Russia, Germany, China, various other countries, four “key animals” and, most numerous of all, leaders of the UK. “Kompromat” is a Russian word—a portmanteau meaning compromising material, and in this novel—as, possibly, in real life—most of these countries hold plenty of it on each other.

As the book opens, a 2016 US presidential candidate is participating in an international wildlife expedition that hopes to radio-collar a tiger. Events go wrong almost immediately. The candidate ends up in a hospital where the Russians plant a bug in his body. The CIA, ever on the ball, figures this out, and replaces it with their own bug. And they’re not the only ones. By the book’s end, America’s new president unwittingly has unwittingly become another “Voice of America.”

Meanwhile, the British have problems of their own. Its Secretary of State for the Environment is approached by the Russians, who have singled him out as a leading light of the “Eurosceptic wing” of the Conservative Party. He learns the Prime Minister agreed to the Referendum on EU membership (the “Brexit” vote) for a reason no more complicated than money. Apparently, the PM believed the vote would never actually occur and, even if it did, it wouldn’t succeed, and the Party would receive money for doing nothing.

Author Johnson devises numerous amusing and convoluted scenarios in which the hapless politicians become entangled. In his scenario, these byzantine schemes are organized and carried out by the Russian Security Service—the FSB, heir to the KGB—“ to change the whole structure of international politics.” The book is not only entertaining, it makes you think “what if?” and, as more news drifts out of world capitals, perhaps “why not?”

Johnson is a former politician and member of the Conservative Party, and a former employee of the World Bank and the European Commission, who has held a number of prominent environmental posts as well as being an environmental activist. In the time preceding the Brexit vote, he co-chaired Environmentalists for Europe. Although he’s on record as opposing the Referendum, his son Boris was a key leader of the “leavers.” The book is in development for a six-part television series too.

*****Beneath the Mountain

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Bletterbach, mountain, the Dolomites, gorge

The Bletterbach – photo: Esther Westerveld

By Luca D’Andrea, translated by Howard Curtis – When a debut thriller appears that sold to thirty countries within a month, became a bestseller in the author’s home country of Italy and in Germany, and was greeted with breathless praise like “can be compared (with no fear of hyperbole) to Stephen King and Jo Nesbø,” you know you’re in for quite a ride.

D’Andrea delivers. Beneath the Mountain is set in the northern Italian province of South Tyrol, in the village of Siebenhoch, whose Italian residents speak German. Siebenhoch is near the end of the eight-kilometer Bletterbach gorge in the jagged Dolomite mountains. Hikers are warned they enter the steep terrain “at their own risk,” because of rockfalls, mudslides, freezing water, and flash floods. The geological characteristics and history of the gorge are essential to D’Andrea’s story, anchoring it to a reality that could not have existed anywhere else.

Thirty years before the novel begins, three experienced hikers—Kurt, Evi, and Marcus—trekked deep into the gorge and were set upon first by an unusually powerful storm, then by one or more unknown assailants who hacked their bodies into pieces. By the time a four-man rescue team arrived, any forensic evidence was washed away or lost in the mud.

The deaths of these three young people reverberated through the community, affecting, disastrously, not only the men who found them but also their families. One time or another suspicion has fallen on a disappeared paleontologist with some bizarre theories that Evi thoroughly discredited, on a wealthy developer who built a visitor center on land her analyses had shown was unstable, on various members of the insular community, even on the rescuers themselves.

Now, American screenwriter Jeremiah Salinger, his wife Annelise, and their five-year-old daughter Clara have relocated to Siebenhoch. The fresh location inspires a new television series about the work of Dolomite Mountain Rescue. As its name implies, the rescue service comes to the aid of stranded tourists, injured hikers, and others in distress among the precipitous peaks. Jeremiah is party to a disastrous helicopter crash that kills four rescuers and a tourist, but his physical injuries are nothing compared to a serious case of PTSD, compounded by guilt and fear, that impairs his judgment. The booze doesn’t help. To distract himself, he starts investigating the 1985 Bletterbach murders, a deeper, more dangerous rabbit hole than the one he’s already in.

D’Andrea frequently introduces new information through the device of a community member offering to tell Jeremiah a story, which is a powerful enticement for the reader as well. Especially engaging is Jeremiah’s relationship with daughter Clara. Their word game—she loves to spell—is a theme throughout, which becomes ironic when, despite his obvious devotion to her, he puts his off-the-books investigation before even her.

****And So It Began (Delaney Book 1)

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Child_beauty_pageant

photo: Lloyd Gallman, creative commons license

By Owen Mullen – Brave of a resident of Scotland and the Greek Islands to write a police procedural set in one of America’s most iconic cities, one with a strong and unique culture, history, and personality. Still, he’s chosen New Orleans for the first in his series featuring protagonist Vincent Delaney—former NOPD detective, now a private investigator.

For the most part the character of the Big Easy comes through in the details Mullen chooses to provide, though the deep trauma of Hurricane Katrina receives only a single mention. There’s maybe too little attention to food and the weather, some nice references to music (Delaney plays in a band), and directly related to the story, a reopening of the old wounds of NOPD corruption that have helped poison race relations in the city.

Delaney has three—make that four—issues on his hands. First is a background hazard in the form of Julian Boutte, a mentally deranged African American man whose brother Delaney killed a decade back when he was still an NOPD detective. Boutte has escaped from prison, and there’s no question that he plans to kill Delaney.

A group of African American small business people from the North Le Moyne area are having to pay protection money they can ill afford and seek Delaney’s help.

The third problem, and the one that takes up most of the book’s plot deals with a bizarre phenomenon of American life, the child beauty/talent pageant. Across the southern states, children who participate in these pageants are being murdered. One of the victims is a five-year-old boy, killed only minutes after winning with a memorable Charlie Chaplin imitation—inspiration for the paperback’s striking cover (below).

The FBI leads the investigation, but there are some 5000 such pageants in the US every year, and they cannot begin to cover them all, so bring in local help. Delaney’s niece is a pageant participant, which gives him an ideal opportunity to meet organizers, participants, obsessed parents, and, possibly, a killer.

While the culprit in Mullen’s tale is more obvious early on than the elusive true-life murderer of JonBenet Ramsey, still at large after twenty-one years, the child beauty pageant world is ripe for exploration. Mullen does a nice job highlighting the different motivations of several sets of parents and their young daughters.

If all these work challenges weren’t sufficient, Delaney has woman troubles, though he has a mostly good relationship with his sister and brother-in-law, as well as several friends still on the force. Mullen describes the interaction between Delaney and his family and friends warmly, and they feel real.

There are more books in the Delaney series to come, and especially if you like the New Orleans setting (I miss Treme!), they may just put the chickory in your coffee.