Heists and capers
I am a big fan of heist plots, particularly if they are art-related. When I was a teen librarian I enjoyed the Ally Carter Heist Society books, and really liked the crew and their capers portrayed by Leigh Bardugo in the Six of Crows duology. One of my favorite fantasies is the Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, and I also thoroughly enjoy more mainstream heist books like The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton, or The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton, which includes the ideal combination of safe-cracking and the creation of graphic novels. I also enjoy all the movies in this sub-genre, such as The Italian Job, The Thomas Crown Affair, Tower Heist, Baby Driver, and the Ocean franchise. And I just finished binge-watching the TV series White Collar, which follows a thief and forger who works with the FBI in order to achieve a limited amount of freedom (he’s not in jail, but wears an anklet that limits his radius to two square miles of New York City). So when I saw that one of last week’s Amazon Kindle First Reads was an art forgery mystery, I enthusiastically grabbed Veridian Sterling Fakes It, by Jennifer Gooch Hummer.
I won’t say that I was disappointed; it was sufficiently populated with interesting characters and situations and art-related historical facts that I read it with a certain amount of pleasure. But ultimately the book never really figured out what it wanted to be, and this lack of definitive direction made it a somewhat meandering and diffuse story with a lot of implausible elements and some clichés I could have done without. There are multiple different directions in which the author takes a few steps and then draws back instead of fully committing, which proves to be a frustrating narrative to read.
Veridian Sterling is a recent grad from the Rhode Island School of Design, with the typical hopes of everyone who excels in their art school classes and hopes that will translate into finding a gallery to display their work, interest (and sales) from the world of art aficionados, making a name for themselves…. And, like most art school grads, she quickly discovers that none of that is going to be forthcoming and that if she wants a place to live and food on her plate, she’d better find a “day job” to sustain her while she works on the rest of the dream. Veri has a job in the beginning at a laundromat/dry cleaners, but when she loses that she takes a position as an assistant at an art gallery that has rejected her paintings. The owner happens to be a former friend and roommate of Veri’s mother’s, when her mother was herself at RISD, and she is all too obviously modeled on Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada but without the icy demeanor and impeccable taste or, in fact, any redeeming qualities whatsoever. I found this character to be unnecessarily shrill and unlikeable and wished the author had chosen a different option.
We get a lot of stuff about working in the gallery and living her life, meeting an intriguing guy (the driver for a wealthy art dealer who visits the gallery regularly), discovering things she didn’t know about her mother, and various interactions with her best friend, all of which are overlaid with a level of stress that should be building up to something but takes an awfully long time to do so. By the time we finally get to the crux of the story (the mystery, the art crimes, the revelations), we’re just a teensy bit exhausted by the angst and the minutiae. Said plot point doesn’t even arrive until well past halfway through the book, and turns out not to be much of a mystery. While there was a build-up to what should have been the high drama, it felt like the stress level remained almost constant throughout, which did a big disservice to the revelatory bits.
In fact, while reading this book I was constantly reminded of one with a somewhat similar plot that I read and thoroughly enjoyed a few years back (in fact, I liked it enough to read it three times in six years!), so I’ll put in a plug for that one here. It’s The Art Forger, by Barbara A. Shapiro (see my review by clicking the title link), and that author achieved what I think this one was hoping to accomplish, by smoothly combining the multiple levels of mystery, art, and moral dilemma. One of the mistakes I think Hummer made was in attempting to include the slightly goofy humor and irony of such books as Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, by Elle Cosimano, but in trying to be all things to all readers, she couldn’t successfully pull together all the elements to make it work. So if you want a fairly lightweight version of the art forgery world, read this book; if you’d prefer an in-depth exploration of the same theme, go for Shapiro’s instead.
Finally, Christopher Booker famously made the case in 2004 for there being only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling and, having just finished watching White Collar, I do wonder whether part of this plot was a result of that coincidental symmetry or else this author did some binge-watching of her own….
Books to TV (or movie)
I am usually quite critical of how a favorite book is translated to television or movie form, and in the past I would most likely have favored the book over the visual version almost every time. But in this day of bountiful offerings on a dozen pay channels, the properties are bought and transformed at such a rapid rate that I have found myself getting to know stories and characters on my television screen ahead of reading their origin stories, and in some cases I have to confess that I have enjoyed them far more than I later did the books.
Some for-instances: The writing is sharper and more clever in Shonda Rimes’s Bridgerton than in the books, so much so that I didn’t even finish reading the first book. The racial themes and the character motivations depicted in the Hulu production of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere were less enigmatic and more relateable than in the written version. And although I read it first and gave five stars to Liane Moriarty’s suspenseful and engaging Big Little Lies, I equally loved the HBO version for the sheer star power represented and how well they pulled the whole thing off.
I also have to give exceedingly belated and somewhat awed credit to the team of Denis Villeneuve, John Spaihts, and Eric Roth (co-writers) and Villeneuve again as the director of the new version of Dune. After suffering through David Lynch’s 1984 version and Sci-Fi Channel’s three-part miniseries in 2000, I found myself devoutly hoping that no one else would try to take on the depiction of this classic on film or television, but the new one feels, finally, like the intentions of Frank Herbert have been realized.
This all brings me to my latest book-vs.-television experience, which has been quite a bit bumpier and more jarring than anything I have yet mentioned.
I started watching the ABC TV show Will Trent with its premier episode, and immediately fell in love with the protagonist, his dog, and the rest of the excellent cast. I didn’t even realize, until near the end of Season Two, that the material came from a series of novels by author Karin Slaughter; the minute the season ended I decided I would spend the time until Season Three reading the original stories. And what a shock it was….
First of all, let me say what things are similar about the series. Will Trent and Angie Polaski grew up as lifelong friends in the foster child system. Will now works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), while Angie is a police officer (Vice) for Atlanta PD. Will’s boss is named Amanda, and she knows a lot about him. Her secretary’s name is Caroline. There is a police officer named Michael Ormewood. And there is a cheeky chihuahua named Betty, an adorable but somewhat ludicrous pet for Will. And…that’s pretty much it.
In the TV series, Will is short, compactly built, and Latino. In the books, Will is tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with significant facial scarring. In the TV series, Angie is tough on the surface but exceedingly vulnerable not too far beneath; she is struggling desperately to stay clean from a severe drug habit, and is involved with Will in a sexual relationship that occasionally verges on emotional. In the book, Angie is tough almost through and through, with a tiny bit of her left open to caring for her friend Will; they “broke up” almost two years ago, because Angie knows she’s not good for him and needs to leave him alone if he’s ever to achieve happiness with someone else. On TV, Will is almost immediately paired with Faith Mitchell as his new partner, while in the books she is still on the horizon by the end of book #1. On TV, Michael Ormewood is Angie’s partner on the police force and also works frequently with Will. He’s not entirely likeable, being reckless and kind of a chauvinist, but he’s basically not a bad guy. In the books, well, that would be a spoiler, but Ormewood isn’t who he seems. He’s also short, compact, and dark-complected in the books, while he’s tall, blond, and blue-eyed in the TV show—the exact opposite of the Will-to-Will transition! The only consistent character between the two mediums is Betty.
After having loved the TV show so much, I struggled for the first third of the book with the written versions of these characters. I came to terms most quickly with the character of Will, because despite the physical differences, the inside person is consistent, from the crippling guilt to the dyslexia to the brilliant insights, and the outside Wills both wear three-piece suits as armor. But I mourned the loss of the vulnerable friend/lover Angie, and when I read in the afterword that there is a “legitimate” love interest for Will starting with book #2, I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. As for Ormewood…I don’t know how I can look at TV Michael the same after reading about Book Michael. By the end of Triptych I had subconsciously decided that it was worth continuing with Slaughter’s written version, but I honestly don’t think I’ll ever find these people either as likeable or as engrossing as the TV characters, and that’s a real departure for me!
Someone in my “Friends and Fiction” Facebook group told me that I should go back and read the series Slaughter wrote before she arrived at the first Will Trent book in order to thoroughly understand the back story; perhaps I will do that and see where it gets me.
Back to Ardnakelty
After weeks or months of reading nothing but formulaic genre fiction—some of it quite entertaining but none of it particularly special—I forgot what it’s like to suck up some genuine literary prose. While reading The Hunter, I was reminded that Tana French’s characters are so immediate and solid that they jump off the page at you—their physicality, their mannerisms, their patterns of speech, their inner thoughts, all draw such a finely tuned picture of who they are that you are right there inhabiting the story alongside them. And not just the characters, but the setting, the look and feel of the natural world she portrays, lets you perceive the particular texture of the dirt under your bare feet and the golden-green hills silhouetted against the horizon.
The Hunter is the second of her books set in the village of Ardnakelty in the west of Ireland and centered around the American transplant, Cal Hooper, and the local teenager, Trey Reddy, with whom he has bonded. And as with its predecessor (The Searcher), French is telling a story that, while it has a mystery of sorts at its heart, is more a tale of people, of community, of life-changing choices.
In the first book, Hooper, a former Chicago detective, had recently moved to this small community and started making it his home, although he will always be an outsider to its provincial inhabitants. But it’s now two years on, and Cal has settled more deeply into his role as a citizen of Ardnakelty, in a relationship with local woman Lena and still serving as a foster father of sorts to Trey Reddy. He and Trey have built up a nicely profitable woodworking business, repairing old and building new furniture for the locals, and their future seems like clear sailing until Trey’s wayward father Johnny shows up, bringing along an Englishman whose ostensible purpose is the exploration of his Irish roots. But Johnny Reddy is an opportunist bent on exploiting the easy advantage, and his scheme to find gold in the townland sets everyone at odds and leads Trey astray as she tries to cope with the fallout from her father’s return.
Johnny Reddy has always struck Cal as a type he’s encountered before: the guy who operates by sauntering into a new place, announcing himself as whatever seems likely to come in handy, and seeing how much he can get out of that costume before it wears too thin to cover him up any longer.
Trey, two years older, has neither forgiven nor forgotten the unidentified villagers’ role in the disappearance of her brother, Brendan, and thoughts of revenge smolder close under the surface of her thoughts. Johnny’s scheming and double-dealing with the tourist Englishman and the participation of the men of Ardnakelty give her what she sees as the perfect opportunity to get back at them, but there are events, intentions, and emotional currents she’s too young and too fixated on her goal to suss out for herself. It’s left to Cal and Lena to help her walk a perilously narrow path without falling off an unanticipated cliff.
In my review of the first book, I called it subtle, lovely, and special, and this continuation is no less nuanced and intriguing. But you have to be able to sufficiently immerse yourself in that subtlety in order to appreciate it. French’s books always get radically opposite reviews from readers, with some lauding their slow burn, intricate plots, and gorgeous prose while others liken reading them to watching paint dry! I am obviously of the former opinion, loving every small shift of expression and change of attitude and tone by each character and holding my breath to see which way the wind will blow next. You will have to decide for yourself where you land. But if you enjoy the work of such writers as Donna Tartt, Kate Morton, and Diane Setterfield, give this book (and its predecessor) a try. There are rumors of a third book to round this out into a trilogy, and I say, Bring it on!
Jakarta farce
I just finished reading The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties, the third book in the series by Jesse Q. Sutanto, and I have to say I am glad the trilogy ends here. Again, as in the second book, it wasn’t bad…but it didn’t make it to great either. The book suffers from the droning extended inner dialogue of its main character, Meddy, who is a mass of frets and worries about everything under the sun, with no real ideas of her own for how to combat them. She has been dominated her whole life by her Ma and her four aunties, and while one would hope to see some evolution from the first book to the third—particularly because during that timespan she has reconnected with her long-lost love, gotten married, and killed and disposed of at least two people—she’s essentially the same self-deprecating bundle of nerves we met on page one of the first book.
Similarly, the aunties are characterized each by their one or two distinguishing qualities, and never expand into fully fleshed-out human beings. Big Aunt is dictatorial and imposing, Second Aunt is sly and competitive, Ma is loud and bossy, and Fourth Aunt, the most cosmopolitan of the women, fancies herself as the coolest (she is a singer) and comes across as disdainful and dismissive. They have a few wee moments, here and there, of dropping out of character to become more humanized, but the overall picture hasn’t changed.
Nathan is a nice addition to the family, now that we are past the wedding, but his personality is mainly filtered to us through Meddy’s astonishment at how well he is getting along with her crazy family, and aside from some random observations by Meddy on the excellence of his abs, is likewise kind of faceless
The premise of this one is that Meddy and Nathan, after an extended honeymoon tour around Europe, have met up with the aunties in Jakarta to spend Chinese New Year with the Indonesian side of the family, which is vast and lively and shares many of the qualities we have come to expect from the aunties themselves—overly concerned with things like good manners, saving face, being extravagantly hospitable, and so on. I did enjoy the group scene of them all celebrating together, the cousins and children bonding over food and fun and much eye-rolling over the burden of dealing with the older generation. But this isn’t enough to carry the rather silly plot, and all too soon it’s back to the aunties doing the wrong thing in the clutch and Meddy having to figure out how to save the day despite her crippling anxiety and low self-esteem.
At the big celebration, an old beau of Second Aunt’s shows up to reclaim her affection, bearing extravagant gifts. “Red envelopes” are given out to the children—packets of cash that are traditional gifts for the new year—but there is one packet amongst them that was intended for someone else entirely (a business associate of the beau’s) but got mistakenly gifted to who knows who in the confusion of the celebration. Now those in the know (the beau, the aunties, and Meddy and Nathan) have to figure out who has it, get it back, and give it to the business rival to avoid dire consequences. But, as is usual with this cast of characters, things go typically awry and get ever more complicated.
Maybe I’m just in a weird mood—not the one to sufficiently appreciate this book—since many people gave it four and five stars. I found it more stressful than enjoyably chaotic, and was glad when it was over. I vastly preferred her stand-alone book that I read a few weeks ago, and hope she writes more like that one.
California Bear
I posted on author Duane Swierczynski‘s Facebook page this week that I thought it highly suspect that this “Would you prefer to be lost in the woods with a man or a bear?” online meme took root just as his new book came out. In return, I only received a laughing emoji, so I’m not entirely convinced he didn’t plan the whole thing, LOL.
The male characters in this book would certainly make women tend to choose the real bear over any of them as a preferred companion. We have an opportunistic, venal ex-LAPD cop; another man convicted of murder who is out of prison after just a few years due to a technicality that overthrew his sentence; a dormant but still terrifying serial killer; at least one copycat; and a Hollywood producer; and it’s hard to say in the beginning which of them is the worst!
The book is a send-up of the true-crime franchise, particularly the television biopics that exploit the circumstances of people’s worst days ever by giving a voice to killers, rapists, and the like. The basic, initially somewhat confusing story is that Cato Hightower, a retired cop, has worked hard to get Jack “Killer” Queen out of prison because he wants a piece of the payoff Queen will receive for supposedly being wrongly convicted. But Hightower also has a vision of Jack helping him with ongoing “projects,” one of which is running down the serial killer known as the California Bear and blackmailing him to keep his name out of the spotlight. Ironically, however, the Bear (along with a few other people) is eager to get credit for his past reign of terror, over now for about 40 years, by working with a Hollywood producer named David Peterson to make a true crime feature with a big payoff.
The significant women “actors” are two: Hightower’s wife, Jeanie, who has turned her genealogy research into a business and in the process winkled out the identity of the California Bear; and Jack’s daughter, Mathilda Finnerty, who has just been diagnosed with a debilitating form of leukemia that keeps her hospital-bound but fails to dim her incisive mind as she seeks to prove her father’s innocence and also figure out the whole California Bear conundrum.
There’s plenty of exciting action in this book, although the switches from narrator to narrator prove occasionally confusing, especially when the story of the Bear takes an unexpected turn. But the charismatic characters of Mathilda and her anxious, guilt-ridden father carry the story and keep interest up to the end.
I promised a personal story to go along with this review, so here it is: Duane Swierczynski and his family were patrons at Burbank Public Library when I worked there as teen librarian from 2008 to 2019, and his two children participated in my teen programs. I was introduced to his books by one of my co-workers, who was a big fan, and we read his excellent book Canary in my high school book club. Later on, when I was teaching Readers’ Advisory and Young Adult Literature classes at UCLA in the masters program for librarians, I invited Duane to be a guest speaker, so I got to know him a little.
But the story involves the co-worker who was a major Swierczynski fan; when he was about to retire, I was racking my brain trying to think of a gift I could give him at his going-away party, and lit on the idea of contacting Duane to see if I could get an autographed book or poster or something to give him. Duane didn’t have anything lying around that would work, so instead he generously and surprisingly suggested that he could name a character after my friend in the book he was currently writing, and I enthusiastically accepted. Then I interviewed Duane about significant elements and settings in the book, and I made my co-worker a certificate to announce my gift to him, which was actually a gift from Duane! Here is the certificate:
And that is how the true-crime producer in California Bear was christened David Peterson! He’s a bit younger and better dressed, but talks almost as much as the real David, and it was really fun to read the book, knowing the back story.
There is another, sadder back story that involves Duane’s daughter, Evie, the model for the character of Mathilda, but I’ll let you discover that one for yourself by reading the book (and the afterword).
Weirdly, just a couple of weeks before I started reading this book I saw a notice on Facebook on the “Lost Angeles” page that Patrick’s Roadhouse, a major setting in the book, had closed; reopening is subject to the negotiation of a new lease, which depends on an initiative by a former customer to raise $250K through a GoFundMe to pay back rent (they got behind during Covid) and do some renovations. They have raised more than $70K so far; if you’d like to contribute to bring back this 50-year icon on the Santa Monica coast, here’s a link to the fundraiser:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-patricks-roadhouse-a-california-icon
Mystery?
This weekend I decided to read A Drink Before the War, the first book in Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro mystery series, and I admit my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, the guy can write—I knew this about him from reading a couple of his stand-alones, and in this one he really paints a vivid picture of both characters and environs, with an atmosphere that has all the gritty feel of the streets of Southie in Boston that we have seen in the movies.
On the other hand, the mystery wasn’t much, it was resolved a little too easily, and everybody in this book was so dark and dour that it was hard to fight against the mood seeping into my daily life. It may account for why I haven’t done much of anything during the past couple of days—a depressed mood makes for lethargic behavior.
I don’t want to jump too quickly to the conclusion, however, that this series (and this writer) are not for me; if I had stopped, for instance, with Still Life, the first book in Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache tales, I would have missed out on a lot, but that first volume was among the worst three in the entire series of 19 and counting.
I liked the main characters of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro quite a lot—enough to want to know what happens to them next. But the story of corrupt politicians, depraved drug lords and their street gangs, and the misery and death that both sides bring to almost everyone around them was a little too much for me. You couldn’t call this noir, since that subgenre’s protagonists have nothing of the hero about them, which isn’t true of Kenzie and Gennaro. But the protagonists of noir are victims, suspects, or perpetrators, and the two private detectives featured here also share those aspects in the course of this story. They are gloomy, they are pessimistic, and there isn’t much that’s pretty about their lives. Still, there is definitely a good-guy/bad-guy divide here that has the pair on the right side, mostly.
To compound my mood, the next book on my list (just arrived on my Kindle from the library) is California Bear, the brand-new book from Duane Swierczynski, who is known for his noirish way with a plotline. I do, however, have an upbeat, kind of funny story that goes with that book (I’ll tell you all about it when I write the review), so that may salvage my attitude going into that one.
Silly sequel
I just finished the sequel—Four Aunties and a Wedding—to yesterday’s book by Jesse Sutanto. It was, like the first, full of the antics of Medellin “Meddy” Chan and her idiosyncratic Indo-Chinese aunties, this time on her wedding day, and although it still had the trademark 2nd-language bloopers and irrational beliefs and superstitions of the first, it was even more frenetic.
Perhaps too frenetic. On the one hand, the descriptions of the aunties’ signature wedding-day outfits and their acquisition of vernacular Brit-speak so as to fit in when they go to London and meet Nathan’s family (their most favored expression being “the dog’s bollocks”) was highly entertaining, and the few interactions between Meddy and bridegroom Nathan were sweet and soulful. But these things were overwhelmed by a plot that took the hard-to-believe events of the first book to a whole less plausible level. (What I’m trying to say here is, it was way over the top.)
Meddy and Nathan are getting married at Christ Church, Oxford, which solves several problems: It’s the hometown of Meddy’s uptight new in-laws, which makes them happy (plus being a beautiful venue), but it lets her off the hook regarding inviting everyone in her entire insanely extended Chinese-Indonesian family, cutting the guest list from the thousands to a mere 200+. She and Nathan want the aunties to enjoy being guests at the wedding, so they have decided to find other vendors to supply the wedding with cake, flowers, makeup, photography, etc. But, as is typical in Meddy’s life, the aunts have worked out a “surprise” for her that she can’t be appropriately filial and still turn down: They have found another Chinese-Indonesian family of five who also do weddings, and hired them on the couple’s behalf.
The first meeting and all the planning goes unexpectedly smoothly, but then Meddy overhears her contemporary, the photographer Staphanie (yes, it’s spelled that way), talking about “taking someone out” on her big day and learns, to her horror, that the family of wedding vendors is Mafia and will reveal her family’s secret (from the first book) if she tells anyone. After this the entire book kicks up the adrenaline to a ridiculous degree as the aunties and Meddy scramble to keep anyone from killing anyone else while keeping it all from Nathan and his parents.
The parts with which I had the most trouble were the actual mechanics of the wedding day. First of all, if any bride spent this much time behind the scenes, ignoring her bridegroom and her guests in favor of running around with her aunts, neither the groom nor the guests would remain so sanguine. Second, about those guests: A few of Nathan’s business investors are highlighted as Meddy and the aunts try to figure out the intended target of the Mafia “hit,” but the rest remain a faceless mass, which is a bit antithetical to the whole idea of only close family and friends attending the wedding. Where were they, and what was their response when Meddy kept disappearing and the aunts became increasingly more embarrassing? And after the description of Meddy’s dress as being tightly corseted on the top half and unbelievably tulle-heavy (and too wide to fit in elevators) on the bottom half, it was hard to believe the things she was accomplishing while wearing it, especially without ripping it or getting it dirty. The thing that bothered me the most, though, was the thought of the total ruin of what was supposed to be a joyful and important occasion. It leant an air of melancholy to this slapstick comedy that lessened its potential impact.
But…I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. One thing I liked about both of these books was the highlighting of Indonesian and Chinese cultures, with the contrasts between the lower and upper socioeconomic families and how different they can be despite common descent. The author states that she hoped to create sympathy and understanding without verging on stereotype, and for the most part she pulled it off, although better in the first book than in the second. I’m a little concerned that venturing on volume three may top off my tolerance for quirky mayhem and send me over the edge into annoyance, but I will probably still read it and then complain about it because hey, that’s what I do!
If you enjoyed such reads as the Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano, as I mentioned in my last review, then the Aunties books may be something you would also want to read.
An author new to me
I have somehow gotten through a long life of reading without ever broaching Tess Gerritsen‘s catalogue of novels, even though my genre divisions on Goodreads show that I have read more than twice the number of mysteries than I have read books in any other genre. That’s probably more common than you’d think, if you are a mystery reader, simply because mystery writers are, as a rule, prolific, and also tend to define a character and then stick with him or her, so that if you like continuity, you will probably embrace a series of, say, 18 books featuring the same protagonist.
I decided to start with one of her recent novels, The Spy Coast, which is the “Martini Club” series, book #1. When I began it, though, I didn’t realize just how new it is—the #2 book isn’t even due out until March of next year. So after I finished it and found it good, I went looking at the rest of her backlist, and I’m not sure, even though I enjoyed this one, that I will continue with any of her others. That is because they are divided into one long series—Rizzoli and Isles—and a bunch of stand-alones categorized as medical mysteries, no doubt based on her previous life as a doctor.
Although several readers say that the TV show is quite different from the books, I will probably avoid both the series and the stand-alones, simply because I am not a fan of medical mysteries. I read some of the seminal volumes with that theme by author Robin Cook back when I was a teenager, and also followed Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series for the first 10 books or so. Although I enjoy a pandemic when it’s the kick-off for a good dystopian novel, I discovered that I don’t care for all the other medical details included in this sub-genre. I don’t like the mad scientist vibe, the experimenting, the gory details of unnecessary operations and deliberate dismemberments. I prefer the focus to be on the mystery, the whodunnit, the why and the who, not the (sometimes excruciatingly detailed) how. I don’t mind a good pathologist as one of the team, but I’m not so interested in their work that I want that to be the featured character.
This Tess Gerritsen novel has none of the medical aspects, and initially appealed to me because it’s about retired people! For the same reason that I enjoyed the movies Red and Red II, in which Bruce Willis as Frank Moses “gets the band back together” when he calls up Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren as delightfully quirky retired Black-ops agents to tie up some decades-old loose ends that are threatening all their lives, the description of the Martini Club as a bunch of elderly hyper-talented CIA agents now existing quietly in a small coastal village in Maine piqued my imagination.
Main character Maggie Bird (who could definitely also be played appealingly by Helen Mirren) is happily living in an upscale log cabin and collecting blue eggs every morning from her flock of Araucana chickens until a youthful agent, organization unknown, arrives and asks about a still-secret mission from Maggie’s past, then turns up dead in her driveway a day later. The town’s acting police chief, Jo Thibodeau, is baffled by why Maggie doesn’t seem more emotionally affected by this, and her suspicions grow when she discovers Maggie and four of her neighbors taking potluck the following evening while looking over a topographical map of the area and discussing shoe prints, tire tracks, and firepower rather than having quiet hysterics at the news of murder in their town, as she believes “normal” seniors would. But Jo won’t get much out of these close-mouthed individuals beyond a bland expression and polite agreement with whatever she says.
Gerritsen does a nice job of splitting the book between the main narrator and several temporary ones as she jumps back and forth between past and present, revisiting the events that perpetuated the current crisis. Both the complicated plot and the colorful travelogue are vivid, as are the characterizations, and I didn’t see most of the events or the resolution coming. I’ll definitely read the sequel to this one; I’m just regretful that the discovery of this author won’t lead to a long binge of her back catalogue.
Reliable, still fresh
I just read Michael Connelly’s latest, the seventh in his books featuring Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and I was pleased and satisfied by Resurrection Walk. Those who follow/read this blog will know that I have expressed some degree of dismay about where the Bosch books are heading, with possible successors trying to take over but without either the pizzazz or the character depth that are inherent in Hieronymus “Harry” B. But Connelly has managed to map a new route for Haller, using as a starting point the exoneration of Jorge Ochoa from a previous book. Mickey got such a buzz from reopening that innocent client’s case and freeing him from prison that he has decided this will be a regular feature of his practice, his pro bono contribution to being a defense attorney. He calls the results the “Resurrection Walk,” because the person without hope gets to emerge from prison to walk free again. And he has enlisted veteran police detective and half-brother Harry Bosch to be one of his investigators.
Since Harry has such an aversion to helping the “other side” (defense) after a long and storied career as prosecution’s darling, he and Haller have agreed that he will only serve as a clearing house, and not take an active part in the actual defense process. Even though Harry is retired, he has a care for his reputation as a dogged seeker of justice for the criminals he has apprehended, and he also realizes that his participation for the defense could have repercussions for daughter Maddie, who’s just coming up through the ranks at LAPD. But after sorting through the pile of letters received by Haller from dozens of the incarcerated who maintain their innocence and are looking for his help, Harry finds one that rings true, and is drawn into a more active role.
He looks through the case of Lucinda Sanz, a wife and mother who was convicted of the shooting death of her ex-husband, sheriff’s deputy Roberto Sanz, and realizes that there is a lot of unexplained and unexplored territory in her case. The laser focus on her from the sheriffs’ department as the perfect and only suspect triggers the hairs on the back of Harry’s neck, and he tells Mickey he thinks they have a winner. The fact that they will now be pitted against a bureaucratic entity determined to protect one of its own makes the case a tricky one, ultimately fraught with danger for all involved.
Although the essence of Harry was, once again, a little bit lacking—he was portrayed somewhat woodenly, as has happened before when he is the secondary, rather than the main, character—it was less a problem this time, and the interactions between he and his half-brother and current employer were more characteristic. For instance, Harry agrees that he will be Mickey’s driver while they are investigating a case, but only if Mickey sits up front in the passenger seat, because Harry’s dignity won’t allow him to be cast as chauffeur. As far as the central mystery goes, it is often Harry’s intuition that brings out the facts necessary to make the case, although it is Mickey’s talents as the concocter of labyrinthine defense moves that ultimately wins through. The book has great suspense, with a lot of setbacks and some perilous moments, and ends with the promise of a twist in the future for Mickey. This is a solid and entertaining entry in Connelly’s franchise.
Parenthetically, if you are an Amazon Prime member and a Connelly fan, I can’t stress enough how wonderful is the “Bosch” series starring Titus Welliver in the title role, with fantastic portrayals of all the supporting characters by an array of both well known and relatively unknown actors. The TV series is pretty closely based on Connelly’s books in sequential order, and is every bit as involving. There are seven seasons of Bosch and, just when you sorrowfully get to the end of that binge, you discover that there is a new show, called “Bosch Legacy,” which has a somewhat narrower focus on Harry, his daughter Maddie, and defense attorney Honey Chandler. There are two seasons so far, with one more to come. I understand that there will also be a spinoff series featuring Detective Renée Ballard, hopefully with Welliver etc. still serving as secondary characters.
What I wished for
The Unmaking of June Farrow, by Adrienne Young, is the book I have been wishing to read. It’s both an elegantly written and a beautifully told story that incorporates a curse, a murder, something sort of like time travel but not exactly, and an emotionally complex web of relationships that are a pleasure to try to untangle. If I had to label it, I guess I would call it magical realism.
June Farrow was born into a family in which the women are believed to be cursed, and June intends to be the last member of this family in order to break that curse, resolving never to marry nor have children.
At some point in each of their lives, the Farrow women are overcome by madness—seeing, hearing, and experiencing things that aren’t there as their minds slowly unravel. June’s own mother, Susanna, became increasingly troubled, finally abandoning the infant June to be raised by her grandmother, then disappearing, never to be seen again. In the past year, June, 34, has begun to experience the warning signs that she, too, is beginning to lose touch with reality. She’s hearing phantom wind chimes, seeing a man’s silhouette looming and smelling cigarette smoke on the breeze from the open window, but there’s no one there. And then there is the red door that appears, standing in the middle of a field of tobacco or at the side of the road outside of Jasper, North Carolina, as if waiting for her to walk up, turn the knob, and step across the threshold. This is the story of what happens when she yields to that impulse.
I don’t want to tell much more than this, because you should be allowed, as I was, to unwrap this tale for yourself. I think it will be enough to say that it is immersive, atmospheric, romantic, and mysterious, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to unexpected end.
The Book Adept 