*****Broken Ground

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Scottish Highlands, thistle

usameredith, creative commons license

By Val McDermid—There’s a reason readers around the world look forward to a new book by the “queen of crime,” and her legions of fans will not be disappointed with this one! Val McDermid’s new police procedural is her fifth crime thriller featuring Edinburgh police cold case detective Karen Pirie, who’s not above putting her faith in the value of her work above the priorities of her superiors.

Pirie and her trusty ally, Detective Constable Jason Murray, and her untrustworthy new detective sergeant, “that utter shitehawk Gerry McCartney”—sent by the new Assistant Chief Constable Ann Markie to spy on Pirie, she’s sure—try to unravel three different cold cases.

They’re tackling the first, a series of brutal 30-year-old rapes, with recently obtained information about a vehicle that may have been involved. In the second, they’re flouting the rules to stay involved in a current-day situation: Pirie has overheard two women in a coffee shop planning to confront a hostile estranged husband. It’s a poor strategy with a strong potential for violence, and Pirie tells them so—advice not received as kindly as it was intended. It’s a testament to McDermid’s narrative skills that the pursuit of these two cases, subplots, really, are every bit as engaging as the team’s biggest and much more tangled investigation.

In an opening scene set in Wester Ross, Scotland, in 1944, two friends bury a pair of large crates in a peat bog. Seventy years later, the granddaughter of one of them returns to the Highlands to claim her inheritance. Using her grandfather’s map to the hiding place, she and her husband approach the local crofter, Hamish Mackenzie, a handsome fellow who might have swaggered out of the pages of Outlander. He agrees to help them dig.

The excavation proceeds smoothly. One crate up: in it, a pristine (I won’t say what; I’ll let you discover this treasure for yourself). They unearth the second crate, but it seems to have been disturbed, perhaps by the dead man lying on top of it. The body is remarkably well preserved, due to the peculiar characteristics of peat bogs. However it came there, it wasn’t recently, which means the investigation is in the remit of Pirie’s Historic Cases Unit.

McDermid is much-praised for her brilliant evocation of the places, mores, and culture of Scotland, as well as the procedures and rivalries within Police Scotland. As a result, the atmosphere she creates is believable down to the last wisp of mist. Introducing Hamish Mackenzie as a potential love interest for Pirie adds a bit of Celtic spice.

Although the cases Pirie works on are old, the investigation methods brought into play are fascinatingly up-to-the-minute. DNA analysis, deployed in the rape case, is only one of them. Rapid reconstruction of the bog corpse’s appearance is another. Analysis and enhancement of cell phone contents is yet a third. McDermid, who has a great interest in forensics, likes to get these technologies right, and she gives Pirie a pair of worthy confederates: her friends River Wilde, a forensic anthropologist, and Tamsin, head of a laboratory in Police Scotland’s Gartcosh Crime Centre. They, like she, believe families should not have to wait one day longer than necessary to learn the fate of their loved one.

Though Pirie occasionally missteps, mostly by treading on the toes of other police officials, and especially ACC Markie, McDermid never puts a foot wrong. Her prose is so clear and engaging, this is a book that will keep you turning pages. Like Pirie, you will be hungry for just that one more bit of evidence.

****The Skeleton Road

Having read the six books I took to Sicily, I raided my last hotel’s shelf of abandoned books and picked up this 2014 thriller by McDermid, which entangles Pirie and Murray in a case of long-ago war crimes, revenge, and distorted justice. The eight-hour airplane ride flew by!

 

Vacation Reading, Italian Style

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chalk outline, body

(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

Seventeen days out of the country, two eight-plus hour air flights, how many books should I pack? Always the burning question. This time, it turns out, not enough. I packed six and had to raid the hotel guest discards shelf for the return flight. Picked a good one too.

Here are quick reviews of five of them:

****Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – The nearly 200 pages of this bi-monthly is like reading an entire book, one where you sometimes meet old literary friends, as in:

  • J.Rozan’s tale about the quick-wittedness of an elderly Chinese woman in “Chin Yong-Un Helps a Fool.” One of Chin’s previous escapades garnered Rozan a 2018 Edgar Award nomination.
  • Doug Allyn’s Dylan LaCrosse from Valhalla, Michigan, P.D. in another entertaining story steeped in the ethos of the Upper Peninsula.
  • Richard Helms’s Pat Gallagher, an unlicensed P.I. who roams New Orleans’s French Quarter, toting his cornet and stumbling into trouble. And
  • Lou Manfredo’s Sgt. Joe Rizzo, dealing with a “Brooklyn playboy murdered.”

**The Third Act, by John Wilson – This book which turned out to be YA, I hadn’t realized, blew an interesting premise. An Ohio drama program director writes a concluding act for an unfinished play by the program’s most illustrious graduate. The play is set in China at the time of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, and the scenes in China create the sense of reading a play—little scene description, a few gestures. But the modern-day framing story is weak, and its grim conclusion sends an unsuitable message for young audiences, in my opinion.

****Faithless Elector by James McCrone – This is a look at one of the ways the U.S. Electoral College might be manipulated to propel a losing candidate into the Oval Office—entertaining and bone-chilling at the same time. Well-written with a bit of a logic stretch here and there. Particularly unnerving (and plausible) is that the conspiracy was discovered only by a fluke.

*****Twice Buried by Steven F. Havill – I love these evocative Posadas County Mysteries, which are fine-grained police procedurals. In this one, Undersheriff Bill Gastner takes great care investigating the apparently accidental death of an unexceptional old woman whose death (and life) law enforcement might tend to write off, and that makes all the difference.

****Half a Chance by John Perrotta – A quick read, this book is steeped in the action and lore of the thoroughbred race track. Someone’s playing fast and loose with big wads of cash, and can he keep all his financial transactions afloat while he rides out of town with the greenbacks? Lots of fun, strong characters, some redemption, and a fine evocation of horse-racing’s arcane world.

Sicily: Beyond (and Before) the Corleones – Travel Tips

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Agrigento - Temple of Concordia

Agrigento – Temple of Concordia, public domain

Our two-week trip to Sicily ended recently, and what an interesting and beautiful region it was. The food was pretty spectacular too. We traveled with a British tour company called Esplora, and if you’re looking for a recommendation, this is one. Esplora and its founder Damian Croft, specialize in small-group tours of several Mediterranean countries, as well as Armenia, Georgia, and, soon, Iran.

There were a dozen of us on the tour, six Brits, an Australian couple, and four Americans. We had two charming guides (Chiara and Simona) and our irreplaceable driver/major domo, Carmelo. Our guides were language and art history specialists. How nice, I thought, in advance. How essential, I’d say now. Here’s why (and before I go on, I’ll tip you that we saw the impressive architectural remnants of all these civilizations.)

The earliest tribes in Sicily, the Sicani, documented to around 8000 BC, were followed by the Sicels and some minor groups. They lived in caves, and some of their caves are still in use for storage, as shelters for goats and chickens, and in extremis, habitation.

Sicily was a crossroads of the ancient world, and for at least some period, Siracusa was the most important city in Europe. This importance began with the arrival of the Greeks, who set up independent colonies in Siracusa, Agrigento, and elsewhere. Domination of the island was passed back and forth in practically nonstop wars between the Greeks, Romans (who established colonies under Roman authority), and barbarians, namely, the Germanic Vandals and Ostrogoths.

The Byzantines annexed Sicily in 535 AD, and were harassed by invading Arabs from Carthage (now Tunisia) in north Africa. Next came the Normans—yes, those same Normans who invaded England in 1066. This was a surprise! They established liberal government, tolerant of the many ethnicities and religions who lived on the island. That couldn’t last, of course.

Swabian Germans took over, followed by an insurrection to remove the French (Normans) and the people turned to the Spanish for aid. The Spanish Inquisition in 1492 resulted in expulsion of all the Jews from Sicily and other depredations. In the next two hundred years, the island also suffered devastating earthquakes, and the plague.

The Bourbons were next, with Sicily fighting on France’s side in the Napoleonic Wars. Guiseppe Garibaldi had a strong presence in Sicily in his successful effort to unite the separate regions of Italy into a united Kingdom of Italy (1861).

In the 20th century, assaulted first by waves of crime from the Mafia then invaded by the Allies in 1943, this little island of less than 10,000 square miles—not much larger than the state of New Jersey—was once again at the crossroads of history.

Historians will shudder at the elisions and probable errors in the above. Whole books have been written about this, of course, and here’s a really good one:

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Read my new short story in Quoth The Raven, an anthology of new works based on the style and sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe. For how to order it, click here.

What Writers Know – Part 1

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red pencil, grammar, comma

Martijn Nijenhuls, creative commons license

Nearly irresistible clickbait for writers are articles like Reedsy founder Ricardo Fayet’s recent reprint of “12 Common Writing Mistakes Even Bestselling Authors Make.”

When I see such lists, I figure that not only will they point out my many writing shortcomings in excruciating detail, but the sum total of no-no’s will be a pretty accurate description of my actual writing style. It’s as if I’ve learned nothing.

And that’s not true, not for me, not for any of us. Surely we’ve learned something.

So what are these pitfalls we may stumble into, even the bestselling among us (though if we are best-selling, do readers actually care about these problems)? And can’t we think of them instead as mountains we’ve climbed and conquered? Show, don’t tell? We’re on it. Head-hopping? Never.

Here’s the first half of Fayet’s list recast as what we’re doing right. Very possibly, more often than not.

  1. Tell, don’t show. Every good novel or story has some of both. It’s a balancing act. Showing takes words, and sometimes we just need to move things along. “Get to the point!” I tell myself. We put the compelling parts of a story in scenes and dialog and summarize the quotidian so that readers reach the good stuff faster. That’s a judgment call and we practice making it every day.
  2. Strong opening narrative. In early drafts, I tend to open a story (or book chapter) with a warm-up. Thankfully, I recognize and delete my engine-revving. Drive, baby, drive!
  3. Manage description in action scenes. While we know to slow down the action in a tense situation, we know not to do so by, say, describing what the antagonists had for breakfast (unless the o.j. contained a mystery ingredient like ground glass). We know to be judicious. Too much detail “slows the pace, lessens tension, and interrupts the flow of the scene,” Fayet says. Very true.
  4. Believable conflicts. Unless our story is set during the Crusades, we create situations that couldn’t be solved if somebody would just pick up the damn phone. We may even make having or using the phone a huge liability (extra credit for you, Gin Phillips). We make sure characters’ external and internal conflicts are powerful enough for readers to invest time and interest in. Thankfully, thrillers are no longer, by definition, about world domination-sized conflicts, and we take advantage of that broader field of play.
  5. Viewpoint. Despite watching movies where the action shifts from the perspective of first one character to another and back again, we recognize such shifts may not work on the page. And agents and editors frown on them. Why give them an excuse to dismiss our work? We avoid head-hopping and stay safe.
  6. Never Assume! Of course our future readers will only know what is on the page (in our current draft). Here’s where my short attention span turns out to be a plus. Every time I read a draft, it’s pretty much all new to me. We know the perils of changing character names or introducing (or deleting) major plot points, etc. At the head of my draft, I maintain an annotated table of contents so that if I do make a change, I can quickly find the other places that mention this character/setting/issue and make everything consistent, or lay the groundwork for later happenings. A book is an ecosystem, and surely we know even a small change may ripple through the entirety. (Wait, was her cat black or white?)

For another pat on the back regarding things you’re doing right, here is Part 2.

P.S. Read my new short story “Tooth and Nail” in Quoth The Raven, an anthology of new works based on the style and sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe. For how to order it, click here.

****Past & Present: A Marketville Mystery

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By Judy Penz Sheluk –This is the second in Judy Penz Sheluk’s Marketville Mystery series, set in a small town outside Toronto, and the series establishes a cozy, warm-hearted atmosphere. As in her earlier book, Skeletons in the Attic, the first-person narrator is Calamity (Callie) Barnstable.

Along for the adventure are Callie’s friends Chantelle Marchand and Arabella Carpenter, owner of a nearby antiques shop (the protagonist in Sheluk’s other series, the Glass Dolphin Mysteries).

In this book, Callie and Chantelle team up in a new business called Past & Present Investigations, in which they hope to use Callie’s research acumen and Chantelle’s genealogical knowledge to help people find missing relatives. Arabella will help if someone brings in an old object related to the missing person, and Callie’s retired librarian friend will do the archive searches.

Callie vacillates between loving the business idea and fearing they will find nothing but dead ends, but Sheluk has written nicely three-dimensional characters that are game to try. Callie also faces an ongoing personal challenge. It seems she cannot escape the hostility of her grandfather. He has never forgiven her mother for marrying Callie’s father who was, her grandfather felt, many ladder-rungs beneath her.

Before long, Arabella sends Callie a potential client. Louisa Frankow’s German grandmother, Anneliese, immigrated from England in 1952 on the ship Canberra. A mystery surrounds her grandmother’s death only a few years after that voyage. Family papers and photos and other clues to the grandmother’s past are few, but Callie locates an ephemera dealer with relevant artifacts from voyages of that era—much more glamorous than modern-day trans-Atlantic air travel, that’s for sure!

Callie and Chantelle capitalize on the growing online availability of genealogical databases, newspaper archives, and the like. You may be familiar with these possibilities, if you’ve done some family research of your own, and Sheluk makes the search for Anneliese’s past full of the thrill of discovering how the pieces fit. They learn that Anneliese was murdered, and her husband convicted of manslaughter (on very flimsy evidence, in Callie’s view). He’d been in prison only a few months when he was stabbed to death in the showers. If he was not guilty, as Callie suspects, the real murderer is responsible for two deaths.

Sheluk includes a couple of features that require a bit of a leap of faith. She relies on a long-ago coincidence, which, granted, might have been more likely in the early 1950s when Toronto’s population was a third its current-day size. And, she’s helped by a psychic who interprets objects, and while Callie remains skeptical of the validity of psychic phenomena, the psychic’s revelations help confirm her hypotheses about the crime.

The murder in this book is many years old, but it has consequences for Louisa and Callie too, which makes it significant even without splattering fresh blood all over the pages. It’s fun to watch Callie and her friends in action, and the book ends with the promise of another interesting case to come.

It’s a quick and satisfying read for those who like cozy mysteries or are fascinated by the long tail of the past.

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***A Noise Downstairs

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typewriter, writing

Steven Depolo, creative commons license

By Linwood Barclay – A professor at a small Connecticut college, living with his second wife on the shore of Long Island Sound, Paul Davis has had a rather unremarkable life until late one October night when he recognizes the broken taillight of his colleague Kenneth’s car and follows it.

Kenneth is driving erratically, and Paul worries the older man might be tipsy. When Kenneth stops his car on a lonely road and pops the trunk, Paul stops too and is shocked to see the bodies of two women inside. Wielding a shovel, Kenneth bangs him on the head and would have murdered him, except for the timely appearance of the police, investigating that car with a broken taillight they noticed a few moments before.

Eight months later, Kenneth has pleaded guilty to the murders and is in prison, but Paul hasn’t fully recovered. The blow to the head has mostly resolved, but he suffers from post-traumatic stress, panic attacks. His wife Charlotte and his psychologist Anna encourage him, but he has headaches, he forgets things, he’s haunted by the murders. Paul knew the dead women slightly and it seems Kenneth was carrying on with both at once. Only his wife was unaware of his reputation for womanizing.

Much of the story takes place within the four walls of Paul’s house, making it another one of those claustrophobic, unreliable narrator domestic thrillers which there are a lot of lately. Unfortunately, for me at least, that took the freshness out of Barclay’s story, though he has a nice red herring woven in.

Paul is determined to regain a grip on his life and decides the best way to try to answer his many lingering questions about the murders would be to review everything about the case and the reasons people commit murder. Charlotte and Anna are initially dubious, but persuaded by his determination.

Charlotte even buys him an old-fashioned Underwood typewriter. It’s a talisman of the case, because in one of its more ghoulish aspects, Kenneth made his victims type a note on such a typewriter, apologizing for their “immoral, licentious, whore-like behavior.” When Paul repeatedly hears the typewriter in the middle of the night, he slips downstairs to see who is using it, but the house is empty. He half-believes the dead women are trying to communicate with him.

On a visit to Anna, he loses his keys and Charlotte has to pick him up. Now here, the author lost me, because if he drove to the office and after their session he doesn’t have his keys, why wasn’t a thorough search made before calling for a ride? Then when Paul believes there’s been an intruder at his home, why does it take many pages for the characters to recall the missing keys? Ultimately, they are “found” in one of the two chairs in Anna’s office, but that unlikely discovery is taken at face value, and no one wonders whether they were there all along.

Odd events continue, and to put the ghostly typewriter issue to rest, his friend Bill suggests that he put a piece of paper in it and see what the women want to say. It’s an absurd idea, except that messages begin to appear. Even if you are skeptical of the paranormal, it’s not easy to see how these tricks are being accomplished, and Paul, not fully of sound mind, is increasingly anxious.

Author Barclay keeps the tension and the possibilities going at a brisk clip, and though you may figure out the direction of the plot early on, he has surprises in store.

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Color is More Than a Shade

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Red Costume

JessicaJohnson, Pixabay

How much worse “The Masque of the Red Death” is than “The Mask of Death”!

Writers are forever trying to encourage their readers to “see” what they see in their heads, to both literally and figuratively “color” their perceptions. Why is that so important? Color is memorable, color can be trendy, and, most important, color incites emotions and connotes layers of meaning.

Crimewriter John D. Macdonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels all contain a color in their titles (The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, The Lonely Silver Rain, etc.). This was done on his publisher’s advice, according to Wikipedia, in the belief that people on the go would be more willing to snap up a book if they were sure they hadn’t read it already, and putting a color in the title would help them remember—itself an interesting insight into the power of color in our visual memory.

Book marketers notice color trends, too, like a rather acidic yellow streaking into prominence in cover art. Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2018 is Ultra Violet, “A dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade,” that Pantone says “communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking that points us toward the future.”

Yes, purple is associated with the Crown Chakra, but that sounds like a heavy burden for one color to carry! However, sure as Plum Mouse mushrooms follow the lonely silver rain, Susanne Matson’s new book, published earlier this month, not only has ultraviolet on the cover, but as its title.

If you don’t understand the Plum Mouse reference, read yesterday’s post here!

These digressions bring me to my infatuation with a fun little book, Fortune-Telling Book of Colors, a compendium of insights into color choices and their meanings. For example, the one-word association for Prussian Blue is “elegant,” whereas sky blue is “selfless” and indigo, “stable.” The book offers many kinds of insights into colors, their associations, and psychology, including insights into people who prefer various colors. The character description for green-lovers like me begins “You cannot abide others telling you what to do . . .” Surely an error.

The book lists the common phrases that include colors. For yellow, they are yellow-bellied, yellow card, yellowdog contract, yellow fever, yellow journalism, and yellow streak. It describes colors’ significance in different cultures. In Japan, my green symbolizes eternal life, but in Indonesia, it is “forbidden,” lest an evil sea goddess swallow you up if you stray too near the shore. A somewhat more scientific approach is embodied in “Blue as Can Be: Treasures from the Color Archive,” by Simon Schama in the September 3 New Yorker.

Kassia St. Clair’s 2017 The Secret Lives of Color describes the fascinating history and significance of 75 colors—a deep dive into the rainbow pool. There are these cultural history components to our attitudes toward color and personal history components beyond an author’s ability to anticipate. People who grow up in a happy home where the kitchen is painted turquoise may ever after feel an affinity toward that color. If the association was negative, just the opposite.

turquoise, silver, jewelry, earrings

(photo: author)

This is where the ability to describe a color accurately helps (see yesterday’s post for more about this). Is your turquoise the coolly inviting shade of a Bahamian swimming pool, is it the heart-piercing turquoise of an Arizona sunset, or the dusty turquoise of your mother’s favorite earrings? What penumbra of meaning are you trying to evoke? Additional descriptors add new associations and richness to your descriptions by making them more precise.

As writers, we don’t pick the color of a room or a coat randomly, even if the connections behind our choices are mostly unconscious. Because our readers also have both conscious and unconscious associations with colors, we owe it to the strength of our vision to describe them with precision.

Name That Color

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DressAuthor Rowan Hisayo Buchanan asks an intriguing question about perception in her recent Catapult article, “Is the Green You See, the Green I See?” The answer to that one is “probably not,” given the 2015 social media uproar over  the question “what color is this dress?” The controversy generated some 10 million tweets, as people variously perceived a washed-out photo of a horizontally striped dress as white with gold lace or, as it really was, blue with black lace. (For the record, I’m a white-and-gold gal).

Buchanan, author of the novel Harmless Like You, describes the challenge of finding the precise term to describe a color, because it makes a great deal of difference whether a “red dress” is described as scarlet (suggesting something about the wearer) or the maroon of dried blood (suggesting something else entirely). My writing coach loves the example of an old, decaying house with shutters of “fungal green.” “Fungal” not only describes the shade of green much more exactly (I see lichen) but conveys something important about the house itself.

In my short story set during the Revolutionary War, an eight-year-old boy sees a frightened woman “go white.” But how to describe that in terms a boy of that age, education, and era would use? “White as chalk” is a cliché, “white as paper” was possibly anachronistic, parchment being ivory. I settled on “white as milk.”

Buchanan’s quest for color enlightenment led her to Sanzo Wada’s A Dictionary of Color Combinations from the 1930s, which describes hues in charmingly evocative Japanese and English. Ivory Buff in English is White Tea in Japanese. Grenadine Pink is Washed Red. And my favorite of her examples, Light Brown Drab is Plum Mouse.

Ballard consulted several other color classification books too, including Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) which, she says, “hoped to bring together science and art.” Out in a new facsimile edition, the publisher calls it “a charming artifact from the golden age of natural history and global exploration.” Darwin took it with him to the Galapagos.

In Werner’s, each color was given an animal, mineral, and vegetative reference. For example, Prussian Blue (one of my favorite colors) was specified as “The Beauty Spot on Wing of Mallard Drake,” “Stamen of Bluish Purple Anemone” (vague in itself), and “Blue Copper Ore,” in case you have any of that lying around. However, it does widen the field of people who can appreciate this blackish-blue color, which included the folks outfitting the Prussian Army and Vincent Van Gogh. He used it predominantly, along with other blues, when painting his “Starry Night.” Philip Kerr’s excellent thriller Prussian Blue was not referring to color, but to the compound’s use as an antidote to heavy metal poisoning. What a truckload of associations!

Tomorrow’s Post: “Color is More Than a Shade” talks about why these allusive color descriptors are important.

Juliet, Naked

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Juliet, Naked Predictably, I overheard a moviegoer say to the ticket-seller, “I’d like to see Juliet, Naked.” You should see it too (trailer)! Nick Hornby’s novel has been turned into a highly entertaining romantic comedy directed by Jesse Peretz. The strong script is by Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor, and Tamara Jenkins.

The story starts with an awkward website video, in which Duncan (played to hilarious effect by Chris O’Dowd) rattles on about obscure American rocker Tucker Crowe, who has not been seen in decades, much less produced any new music. Duncan lives with Annie (the delectable Rose Byrne), who runs a small museum in a seaside British town. The museum’s biggest attraction is a shark’s eyeball, bobbing in formaldehyde.

To the dismay of  megafan Duncan, Annie doesn’t especially appreciate Tucker Crowe, nor how his music has taken over their listening and the mystery of his disappearance their conversation. Like anyone obsessed with in a very small slice of life’s enormous pizza, Duncan is tedious in the extreme. (Juliet, Naked is an album title, I think.)

When Annie posts a few of her less flattering thoughts about Tucker Crowe on Duncan’s website, Crowe himself (Ethan Hawke) responds. To her surprise, he agrees with her, and they begin a secret trans-Atlantic email correspondence. The two have great charm together, playing off each other and admitting their shortcomings. They’re neither one perfect and able to admit it.

Crowe is living in the center of the United States, somewhere, in a garage lent him by his ex-wife, and taking part-time care of their young son Jackson (Azhy Robertson). We soon learn another woman is the mother of his grown daughter, who’s now pregnant, and he has twin boys by yet another. He’s barely in touch with these children and totally out of touch with the daughter of his first love, Juliet.

Perhaps it’s the pseudo-anonymity of email that encourages him to speak to Annie. When he has a trip to London, the face-to-face is awkward. It might be the beginning of a relationship, but there are a lot of kids and partners in the way.

What I loved about this movie, in addition to the fine acting, is that the situation avoids the typical Hollywood relationship clichés (which the movie Puzzle fell prey to, disappointingly), and strives for honesty.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 80%; audiences: 90%.

P.S. I love the crazy job titles that turn up in movie credits. In this one: “Petty cash buyer.”

***Sticks and Stones

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funeral

Herry Lawford, creative commons license

By Jo Jakeman – Phillip Rochester was a man who had everything—an ex-wife who acted more like his mother, a current wife, and his new young lover. When this debut domestic thriller opens, these three women are together at Rochester’s funeral, and each subsequent chapter begins by saying how long before the funeral it takes place.

Although Phillip is a malevolent presence in the lives of all three women, who live somewhere outside London, this is really their story as told by his current, albeit estranged and increasingly frantic wife Imogen. About three weeks before the funeral, Imogen visits Phillip’s home. She’s determined to stop his foot-dragging about signing the divorce papers and his increasing demands for more time with their son Alistair.

Imogen eventually leaves without seeing her ex. But she has seen something: evidence that Phillip is bullying his paramour Naomi in the same way she herself had been bullied for years, leaving more emotional than physical damage, though plenty of that too. But Phillip was a police officer, and the one time Imogen reported the abuse, the cops who arrived were buddies of his, and it was clear her complaint wouldn’t go anywhere. In her experience, ex-wife Ruby always takes Phillip’s part too.

Phillip’s begun insisting that Imogen and Alistair be out of their jointly owned house by the end of the month. Otherwise, he’ll fight her for custody of their son. He’s willing to play dirty, bringing up Imogen’s bouts of depression as evidence she’s unfit. When Phillip appears unexpectedly with new demands, Imogen, in a desperate moment, locks him in the cellar. It’s a small act of revenge that feels good, but now what?

By keeping most of the action in Imogen’s house and, even more constricted, the cellar, author Jo Jakeman creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that adds to the story’s power. The house and its disposition become a metaphor for the intimate relationship that has gone awry. Ruby and Naomi appear on the scene, and, over the next few days, power shifts back and forth as first Phillip and the women hold the upper hand. The relationships among these three women are nicely developed and believable, as is Imogen’s mistrust of them. Phillip is less convincing. It appears he’ll stop at nothing to maintain his control over them.

Starting the book with the information that Phillip is dead and the women are not removes a major source of tension from the story. Nevertheless, you wonder how it happens, and the novel takes pains to tell you why. If you’re a fan of the close-in domestic thriller, this may be a book you’d enjoy.

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