Category Archives: Reading . . .

****Shadows the Sizes of Cities

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morocco

photo: Carlos ZGZ, creative commons license

By Gregory W. Beaubien – In this tension-filled debut thriller, you get rather quickly to the point where you don’t trust anyone—and that includes first-person narrator Will Clark, who claims to be a travel writer from Chicago. Yet it always seems possible he might be something more. You never really learn how Will acquired his fighting skills or whether there is more to his agenda than appears on the surface. Beaubien takes advantage of using a first-person narrative to let Will tell you exactly what and how much he wants you to know.

The book starts in Madrid, where Will is waiting to hook up with three friends for a trip to Morocco and a writing assignment. He needs money, and he’s preoccupied with “the Dutchman’s offer,” a mysterious phrase invoked a couple of times too many, though when the explanation finally comes, it turns the story on its head.

If you don’t trust Will, you certainly don’t trust his friends. There’s Tammy, the spoiled rich girl accustomed to having the whole world bend to her wishes, and her loser (Will’s opinion) Irish boyfriend Nigel. Nor do you trust Will’s women—the unpleasant Marissa, especially, and Stacy, who’s just arrive on the scene. Stacy keeps turning up, her cool blonde beauty a salve to Will’s overheated spirit, but who is she, really?

Tammy and Nigel and Will and Marissa meet up in Madrid before heading across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier. The couple recklessly embroils Will and Marissa in a small-town drug deal that goes frightfully bad. People are dead, and the escape south to Marrakesh is risky. I really don’t want to say more about the fast-moving plot, to let you discover its surprises for yourself.

Much of the excitement in reading the book is that the story—and Will—are never predictable. You can’t be sure where you’ll end up—geographically, morally, or metaphorically. If there’s a fault in the writing, it is that Beaubien (via Will) tends to name the emotions he’s feeling, rather than trusting the readers to discern them through his Will’s actions.

Beaubien is a journalist and has a reporter’s eye for descriptive detail that takes you right to where you feel the gritty desert, the heat, and the hostile stares of the men in tea shops. If you’ve been to Morocco, you will experience it all again, down to the hair-raising trek over the Atlas mountains. If you haven’t, you’ll believe you have. This dense atmosphere is one of the book’s most compelling aspects.

 

****Ghosts of Havana

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havana, Cuba

photo: Les Haines, creative commons license

By Todd Moss – The long tail of the 1961 U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion  disaster swings around to sting a married couple in this fast-paced political thriller—third in a series by former U.S. State Department diplomat Todd Moss.

With his insider’s background, Moss believably portrays the interdepartmental rivalries inside the Washington Beltway, where high-stakes diplomacy faces off against the less, shall we say, conventional means of asserting American interests deployed by the rival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Moss’s protagonist, in these novels, is former Amherst College professor Judd Ryker. He developed a political theory suggesting that, in times of a country’s destabilization—whether because of natural calamity or military coup or political upheaval—quick U.S. intervention can help mold the new status quo to fit American interests. He’s been brought into the State Department to create a one-man Crisis Reaction Unit. In other words, to put his theory to the test. Not surprisingly, the State Department’s career diplomats are not interested in this outsider’s theories, and do all they can, by foot-dragging and outright sabotage, to assure he fails.

Judd’s wife Jessica has what he has been led to believe is a job in international relief efforts. As this book opens, she has just revealed that she works for the CIA. In fact, she heads a super-secret unit that operates with total independence and is available for various tricky problem-solving tasks around the world.

Now that Jessica’s responsibilities are out in the open, the couple has agreed on three fundamentals going forward: they will assist each other whenever possible; they will avoid working on the same problem whenever they can; and they will admit to each other when a situation arises that they cannot follow through with assist or avoid. Relevant to all three of these is a commitment to always tell each other the truth, even though at times they may need to keep their employers’ secrets. Like so many principles, stating them turns out to be easier than living them.

Within three days, Jessica counts up at least eight lies she’s told Judd already. Yet, at the same time, he’s reassuring her that he’s in his State Department office, when he’s actually headed to Gauntánamo Bay Naval Base to meet with the shadowy director of Cuban intelligence.

Cuba’s top leaders are elderly. Sick too. There’s every reason to believe that a moment of disruption—of the kind Judd believes is ripe for positive intervention—is imminent. His trip to Cuba is the first step, though the stated reason for the meeting is to extricate four Americans caught on a fishing boat in Cuban waters.

Moss gives a sharp, up-to-the-minute feel in terms of crazy politics, self-serving politicos, and mainstream diplomatic strategists trying to keep the lid on. Throughout, he does a great job in showing the discrepancy between the way events are played for the public and the reality of the situation as Judd and Jessica perceive it. It’s enough to make you look at the nightly news with an even more skeptical eye!

***The Art of Forgery

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paint-brushes

photo: Lynn Friedman, creative commons license

By Noah Charney – In this richly illustrated book, author Charney explores many of the most notorious cases of art forgery—a deception that dates to ancient Rome—and the often colorful characters bent on deception. Like all crimes, this one depends on opportunity and motive.

While Old Masters may be a forger’s more likely and lucrative target, what about modern abstract artists? Can you tell the fakes? Take this clever quiz!

Opportunity

Until very recently, the perceived value of artworks and religious objects was solely expert-driven, based on connoisseurship. If a recognized expert asserted that a painting was a heretofore undiscovered Rembrandt, for all intents and purposes (especially sales value), it was.

Today, science provides museums and private collectors with increasing protection. Chemical, radiographic, and other advanced techniques can analyze paper, canvas, pigments, wood, and other intrinsic attributes of a work. A common giveaway is the use of paints that weren’t available at the time the artwork was supposedly created. But science provides protection only if would-be buyers insist tests be performed before they write out their check.

Over the years, forgers have responded by becoming more skilled in reproducing the materials and techniques of the past, so that often their work can pass all but the most detailed examination. Detailed digital replicas pose a new hazard to unwary purchasers.

Those engaged in an art forgery racket also excel in producing false documentation and paper trails. These establish the spurious lineage and history of ownership (called provenance) of a work. Forgers rarely simply copy an existing work—it’s too easily identified as already hanging in a museum or private collection. Instead, they precisely mimic an artist’s style and favored subject matter. This new work is then passed off as a “lost” or previously unknown masterwork, with all the paperwork to prove it.

Motivation

Why do they do it, when the possibility of detection is ever-present? Charney says some simply like the challenge of pitting their skill against that of past masters. A German newspaper said forger Wolfgang Beltracchi “painted the best Campendonk that ever was.” Indeed, some forgers have been artistic geniuses, but underappreciated and undervalued in their own time. For that reason, revenge against an indifferent art establishment contributes to motive. Art forgery is not treated as a particularly serious crime and rarely results in lengthy jail terms (usually for fraud). Many former forgers have gained substantial fame after their misdeeds were exposed.

More rarely, copies of paintings are made and substituted for the real thing, delaying detection of the theft of the originals. At Prague’s Sternberk Palace, thieves skipped the hard part and substituted a poster for the original they stole; in Poland, more ambitious thieves replaced the painting they stole with a painted-over poster bought at the museum gift shop. It took days for anyone to notice.

Unscrupulous dealers—con artists, basically—persuade some artists to create works in a particular style. The excitement and pride collectors feel when they “discover” a lost artwork typically makes the seller’s job easier.

Charney describes numerous examples of fraudulent art from over the centuries, and his comparison photos add much to the book’s enjoyment. (Forgery of religious relics is a cottage industry in Israel and the Middle East, detailed in Nina Burleigh’s excellent Unholy Business, touched on briefly in Charney’s book.)

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur “The world wishes to be deceived,” the book’s cover says, “so let it be deceived.”

***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – August 2016

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chalk outline, body

(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine continues its 75th year celebration with another collection of classic and new stories. Collectively, they demonstrate many of the forms this genre can take. Whether you prefer cozies or police procedurals or amateur detectives or hardboiled, you will find them in EQMM’s pages. From the August issue, which celebrates past EQMM editors, here are four of my favorites:

• In “The Ten-Cent Murder,” the first EQMM editor, Frederic Dannay, teams up with his real-life friend Dashiell Hammett to solve a crime in 1950s Manhattan. Joseph Goodrich, whose play Panic won the 2008 Best Play award from the Mystery Writers of America, adopted a period tone for this amateur sleuth outing.
• I always enjoy Dave Zeltserman’s stories and their sly humor. This month Zeltserman deviates from his Julius Katz private-eye series to present a classic noir tale. In “The Caretaker of Lorne Green,” a man on the run from the mob poses as a home health aide and plans to rob his elderly, wheelchair-bound client, but which of them is more ruthless?
• Jonathan Moore’s compelling police procedural, “A Swimmer from the Dolphin Club,” begins with the discovery of a woman’s backpack, shoes, and neatly folded clothes underneath San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. Suicide? Murder? Disappearance? Will the truth come too late? Moore’s most recent book is 2016’s The Poison Artist, which Stephen King called “an electrifying read . . . I haven’t read anything so terrifying since Red Dragon.” High praise from the master.
• In Ruth Graviros’s psychological tale “Ted Bundy’s Father,” you are gradually overtaken by the same horror that grips the late middle-aged protagonist, Warner Chadason. Chadason has “enjoyed an unthreatened life,” as the author puts it early on, a life about to explode disastrously. His name reveals all. Graviros was a pseudonym used by EQMM’s second editor, Eleanor Sullivan.

EQMM regularly includes reviews of new books, as well as a monthly rundown of mystery/crime blogs and websites worth following up on, as well as additional features, especially in this 75th year. You can subscribe on the website or through Amazon. Or obtain the August issue here:

****You Will Know Me

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You Will Know Me, gymnast

photo: Steven Rasmussen, creative commons license

By Megan Abbott, narrated by Lauren Fortgang – Publication of this new psychological thriller about a family’s sacrifices in producing an elite gymnast was well-timed to coincide with the Olympics and the public’s quadrennial fixation on little girls’ determination to fly. Told almost entirely from the point of view of American gymnast Devon Knox’s mother Katie, this family’s ties only bind tighter when external events threaten.

Thirteen-year-old Devon is on what seems to be a straight path to athletic accomplishment. Katie and her husband Eric have taken a second mortgage to support her training, the competition fees, the $200 leotards. Coach Teddy Belfour is confident, the booster club of BelStar parents pitches in to make expensive upgrades to the practice gym, Coach T brings on his niece Hailey to help with the younger girls. And Devon’s studious younger brother Drew seems willing to put his childhood on permanent hold so that evenings and weekends can be spent at Devon’s practice sessions, driving her to competitions, and participating in booster club events.

In short, Devon’s gymnastics is their life. As Katie says, “When you have an extraordinary child, you’ll do anything for her.” While nothing in the backstory of any of the current crop of elite gymnasts suggests the pathology that overtakes the Knox family, single-minded commitment, extreme sacrifice, and unshakable determination are par for the course.

Abbott, winner of multiple awards in the mystery/thriller domain, convincingly portrays the emotional temperature of the gym, its sounds and smells, the chalk-dust thickness to the air. When Devon practices, you are with her, you feel the adrenaline rush Katie does, watching. You understand the sacrifices, as well as how the family’s fixation is inhibiting the capacity to make moral choices.

For the Knox family, the extent of those sacrifices and choices becomes clear only after Hailey’s handsome boyfriend Ryan Beck comes on the scene. Ryan stirs a stewpot of emotions among girls trained to hold in their feelings, like diminutive adults, and moms who flirt and snipe like adolescents. His presence, then his absence, tests them all when he’s killed in an unexplained hit-and-run accident.

Abbott has divided the novel into parts, each introduced with a quote from Nadia Comaneci’s Letters to a Young Gymnast. This is the epigram for section IV: “But I sometimes wonder, to this day, if courage is just another word for desperation.”

Narrator Lauren Fortgang has recorded some 150 audiobooks and does an excellent job here, especially with the large number of teen girls. I especially admired her wispy Lacey Weaver, Devon’s teammate, whose voice is so light it seems about to float away, taking poor Lacey with it. She gives brother Drew a lisp that never becomes cartoonish, but immediately distinguishes him from the girls.

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

***Skeletons in the Attic: A Marketville Mystery

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Crystal Ball

photo: Jeffrey, creative commons license

By Judy Penz Sheluk – Thirty years ago, Abigail Barnstable disappeared, leaving behind her young husband Jimmy and six-year-old daughter Callie. Raised by her doting father, Callie reaches her mid-thirties oblivious to a mountain of family secrets until Jimmy’s death in an industrial accident starts her on a path of discovery. Callie narrates this present-day cozy mystery by Canadian author Sheluk, set in the fictional town of Marketville, an hour north of Toronto.

The first surprise is in her father’s will. Not only does Callie inherit a house in Marketville, he leaves her $100,000 to fix it up. The catch? She has to quit her dead-end job in a bank call center fraud unit and move into the house for a year. Renovation will be a major undertaking, but her father also left her a connection with the building contractor living next door—a handsome single man named Royce, eager to help Callie develop her fix-up plans.

Oh, and while she’s living there, Jimmy wants her to try to find out what happened to her mother. It seems the police at the time suspected foul play—and Jimmy—but nothing was ever proved. The bequest may be his way of asking her to clear his name. Once Callie takes up residence she encounters a series of intriguing puzzles and clues. I enjoyed muddling along with her as she tried to figure out what they mean and who left them. Though occasionally, Sheluk’s dialog is a little stiff, she moves the plot along briskly, keeping Callie’s ingenuity on high alert.

Callie reaches out for help from a number of colorful characters, including two who claim psychic abilities. (One of them—Callie’s long-time friend and operator of the Glass Dolphin antique shop, Arabella Carpenter—features in Sheluk’s previous mystery, Hanged Man’s Noose, also published this year.) Callie’s never quite sure how much she can trust some of her new confidants, and people keep telling her to “be careful.” While you may never believe Callie is in any physical danger, the risk to her emotional health from mucking around in thirty years’ worth of carefully kept family secrets is significant.

The romantic risk is also real, when Royce’s family turns out to have some pretty big skeletons in its closets too. You’re left to speculate how their budding relationship may play out, because at the end of the book, all possibilities are open. If you like a tidy ending with all questions wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow, this isn’t that. Yet, Sheluk has described her principal characters so well, you may feel, as I did, that you can see into this particular crystal ball.

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

***The Bends

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Woods Hole pier

photo: Andjam 79, creative commons license

By Leah Devlin – This current-day police procedural is the third mystery-thriller in a series that takes place in and around the picturesque village of Woods Hole, located on far southwest Cape Cod. Big water—Nantucket Sound, Cape Cod Bay, Buzzards Bay, the Atlantic—is never far.

The irony that young Detective Bill Bleach, pale as his name suggests, is prone to violent seasickness is not lost on him. Unfortunately, corpses have the same effect on his digestion, and he has to deal with them too.

Devlin effectively conjures up the Woods Hole environment and the preoccupations of several principal characters: Nobel laureates Lindsey Nolan and Sara Kauni, who are inventing a new dive helmet, and marine biologist Jessie McCabe (protagonist of Devlin’s previous book, Ægir’s Curse). Nolan’s adopted daughter, Maggie May, takes the lead in this story. She’s an accomplished diver and a talented student at the nearby Newbury College of Art, as well as a former drug user whom Nolan met in rehab.

When two murders at the College baffle the police, a small group of students is at the top of the list of suspects, Maggie May chief among them. Unfortunately for Detective Bleach, he’s seriously attracted to the chain-smoking, brittle young woman. His partner begins to doubt his objectivity, and Maggie May to doubt his intentions. He desperately wants to clear Maggie May, and protect her too, since it appears to him she may be the killer’s next victim.

Devlin’s characterization of the art college—the faculty politics, the student life, the manipulations and rivalries—struck me as quite believable. Less so was the architectural design of the place, built in the 1970s, with thick interior stone walls. In fact, these walls are so thick they allow a passage down the middle, and slits in the walls (apparently invisible to the users of the various studios and offices) allow every room to be spied upon.

No one knows about this building feature except the architect who designed it, Edward Gripp. As a wealthy benefactor of the college and donor of the campus buildings, Gripp keeps a small office there, which allows him secret access to his “Labyrinth.” He particularly enjoys spying on two married faculty members carrying on a torrid affair.

Devlin’s development of Maggie May as a young woman determined to stay sober, who faithfully attends her NA meetings, and in times of stress turns to the psychological supports they provide, makes her an interesting, unique character. Her roommate and occasional dive-partner Lily is the precious daughter of a fierce mother, determined that her daughter succeed in every endeavor—in other words, one of those delicious characters you love to hate.

While the book could have used a good copy-editing to resolve some grammar and usage problems, Devlin writes in a straightforward, unembellished style. You’ll find a little more plot (physical events) than story (emotional journey) in this novel, but it moves along briskly, with interesting characters, a well-created setting, and a satisfying surprise at the end.

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

***Médicis Daughter

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The young Margaret of Valois, by François Clouet

The young Margaret of Valois, by François Clouet

By Sophie Perinot – This romantic adventure covers the strife-riven period of French history from 1564 to 1572, near the end of the Valois lineage and the rise of the Bourbons. The central character is Princess Marguerite (Margot), whose father is dead and whose brother Charles is now king of France. Only three years older than she, Charles, like everyone else in the household, is guided and ruled by their mother, Queen Catherine de Médicis (yes, those infamous Médicis of Florence).

Ignored by her mother through most of her childhood, Margot is anxious to join her court and gain her favor. When she finally does arrive at court, around age eleven, she finds it a dangerous stew of plots and jealousies, revenge and murder. An uneasy peace between the country’s Catholic majority, to which the aristocracy belongs, and the Protestant Huguenots threatens to dissolve.

Margot falls in love with the handsome young Duc de Guise, but her family is determined she have a royal marriage. She is little more than a pawn on the political chessboard of Europe, but if she refuses to play, it could cost her her life and that of the Duc. The outbreak of war with the Huguenots tosses the fate of her family and her love into the air, and it lands in a most unexpected place. By the time her family finally finds her a suitable and willing marriage partner, it’s clear that political considerations, not love, are uppermost. Age nineteen, and with a reviled husband, she displays considerable (and rather suddenly acquired) political acumen.

Marguerite de Valois is a historical character well known in France for an eventful, sometimes scandalous life, much of which takes place after this book’s conclusion. Margot matures during novel, but none of the other characters much change, despite additional years, challenges, and demands on them. They remain rather two-dimensional in Perinot’s treatment, and I would especially like to have seen more probing of the character of Queen Catherine, for example.

Authors of historical fiction often must go beyond surface events and motives to explore their characters’ actions. Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novels—turned into memorable theatricals—about Thomas Cromwell are a perfect example, as is this treatment of Catherine of Aragon. Occasionally Perinot’s dialog seems too modern, but despite these quibbles (and a few startling grammatical errors—where was the editor?), it is an exciting read about a period I knew too little of. Margot was the subject of a famous novel by Alexandre Dumas, pere, on which a 1994 French movie (La Reine Margot) was based.

The reader would have been well served if the book included a family tree of the Valois clan and their cousins who appear in this story, a list of the principal characters (having three main characters named Henri didn’t make it easy to follow, though Perinot handled this reasonably well), and perhaps a map.

****The Kennedy Connection

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Kennedy half-dollar

photo: Eric Golub, creative commons license

By R.G. Belsky – Author Belsky was most recently managing editor of news for NBCNews.com and is a former managing editor for the New York Daily News, among other journalistic posts. He has ample experience to write authoritatively about his main character and first-person narrator, Gil Malloy, a down-on-his luck Daily News reporter, and about the book’s Manhattan setting. The Kennedy Connection is the first in the Gil Malloy series and takes place in 2013, as the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches.

When we meet Malloy, he’s been disgraced after a serious breach of journalistic ethics. Though he kept his job, he’s assigned to the newsroom dregs, while he watches another young reporter, Carrie Bratten, acquire the mantle of up-and-comer that he once wore. Frustrated with his second-class citizenship, he’s a little too quick to latch onto a story he thinks will redeem him.

Meanwhile, his former agent asks him to help her get publicity for a new book. The hook? The author claims to be Lee Harvey Oswald, Jr., illegitimate son of Kennedy’s assassin. Oswald, Jr.,  believes the book will clear his father’s name.

And a police buddy asks him to investigate the death of a young ex-gang member from the South Bronx, Victor Reyes. Reyes was shot 15 years earlier, left a paraplegic, and finally died when the bullet lodged in his spine worked loose and traveled to his heart. The unknown malefactor who shot him is now a murderer. Malloy’s friend is killed by a drunk driver before the reporter can do more than conduct a few initial interviews with family and cops on that case. Now one is a serious drunk and another’s a deputy police commissioner.

These distractions are soon cut short when a series of murders begins, each with a Kennedy half-dollar left at the scene. These deaths seem too much of a coincidence, taking into account the revelations of the new book by Oswald, Jr., especially when someone sends Malloy a letter promising more mayhem. In the envelope, a Kennedy half-dollar.

Malloy is teamed up with Bratten to cover this high-profile story and again riding high in his journalistic world. Author Belsky does a good job making Malloy a likeable character who could use a little more personal insight. The other newsroom characters are also well drawn, and there’s some engaging banter.

Just like Jake Epping in Stephen King’s 11/22/63, the character of Oswald, Jr., is trying to rewrite the history of JFK’s assassination and, like Jake, ends up having second thoughts about meddling with the past. Efforts to deconstruct what Malloy calls “the greatest murder mystery in history” have a substantial literary pedigree, from King’s work to Don DeLillo’s Libra, to James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, to Tim Baker’s Fever City. Belsky has made an engaging contribution to this lineage.

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

****Blood of the Tiger

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photo: Damian Moore, creative commons license

photo: Damian Moore, creative commons license

By J.A. Mills – Tigers are many people’s joy and woe. Beautiful, intelligent apex predators, their numbers in the wild have diminished to a few thousand, and the forces threatening them seem irredeemably entrenched. This book lays out in stunning, infuriating detail the shortcomings and compromises in international policies toward tigers by both governmental and non-governmental organizations, even presumed good guys like the World Wildlife Fund.

Mills’s arguments are well supported by many other organizations and investigations. The nub of the problem is this:

  • Wildlife protection efforts focus on illegal trade, ignoring the legal Asian “tiger farms”
  • “Tiger farms” provide a totally inappropriate environment (group cages) for solitary animals like tigers, and animals raised in them cannot survive, if released into the wild
  • Proponents say tiger farms reduce pressure for poaching wild tigers, which is completely false
  • The availability of tiger products from farmed animals builds demand for these products, increasing the incentive for poaching
  • It is vastly cheaper to poach a tiger (about $10) than to raise it on a farm ($10 per day in food alone)
  • Consumers view products from farmed tigers as inferior to those from wild-killed ones.

Here is what becomes of farmed tigers in China. They are hunted in fake “big game” shoots, their pelts are made into rugs and clothing, their meat is eaten (yes), their carcasses are deboned and the bones steeped in vats of wine, then sold as “tiger wine.”

All this happens behind the smoke screen of “domestic” versus “international” trade, of China’s 1993 ban on tiger bone products, and fake compliance with international wildlife protection regimes.

While Mills’s book gets these points across effectively, it is not very inspiring reading, as it details one failed attempt after another by international organizations and high-level conferences to “save the tiger” in the face of false cooperation by, primarily, Chinese government officials to do whatever they please.

Luxury tiger goods are big business in Asia. What’s true for tiger-derived products is also true for bear paws, bear bile, rhino horn, and elephant ivory. Indiscriminate killing of the latter two species puts them on the path to extinction as well. Some Chinese investors openly say they are stockpiling these animal parts for the time when the animals are extinct and the “value” of their collections will skyrocket.

We in the United States are part of the problem. Inconsistent policies across states allow private individuals to keep wild animals, and there are more tigers in U.S. back yards than in the wild.  Often the conditions they are maintained in are filthy, too small, and in every respect wholly inadequate. You may recall the notorious and tragic episodes that have resulted in Jackson Township, N.J., and Zanesville, Ohio.

I am a regular supporter of Panthera, an organization dedicated to saving the big cats in the wild. Unfortunately, even their promotional material skirts a fundamental problem, by emphasizing the fight against “illegal trade,” when China’s tiger farms are perfectly legal. Mills supports her text with ample footnotes and a short section on “what you can do,”  including strengthening state laws about private tiger ownership in the United States. Her website provides more ideas.