A Bone of Contention

I try to start mystery series with the first book, but 20-odd years ago, I started the Matthew Bartholomew series with the third chronicle, A Bone of Contention. Looking at my reviews of the re-reads of the first two books, I'm glad I did. By the third book, Susanna Gregory had a better feel for Matt's character and his relationships with his colleagues, particularly Brother Michael.  She'd also started to introduce the humor that has kept my interest through the occasional sub-par mysteries.

The mystery in A Bone of Contention is well constructed. Someone is exacerbating the ongoing town/gown disputes of 1352 Cambridge into outright riots, and it somehow ties to both the death of a local man-turned-crusader-turned-villain who's legend has become that of a hero/saint and the family problems of the head of one of the colleges. Interspersed with comic scenes of Matt unconsciously attracting the attention of a pair of competitive sisters and the debauchery of a Michaelhouse feast, the book stands up after 20 years. Gregory's books are hard to find in the US, which is a shame. Local readers are definitely missing out.

Wheel of Fate

I can't believe it's been five years since I last read one of Kate Sedley's Roger the Chapman mysteries.  As I hoped, Wheel of Fate brings Roger out of political intrigue (although the political situation has become very interesting indeed, with the Duke of Gloucester acting as advisor and regent for his young nephew, Edward V) and presents him with a personal mystery.  The novel starts with Roger returning to an empty home and gossipy neighbors hinting as to why his wife and children have left town. He finds his daughter at her grandmother's house, and Margaret Walker tells her former son-in-law that Adela has taken the boys to visit distant relatives in London. Hoping to clear up the misunderstanding that led Adela to leave (and hoping that she will not learn of his actual indiscretion while in service to the Duke), Roger follows with his daughter.

Once in London, Adela easily forgives Roger, and presents him with a mystery.  One of her Godslove cousins recently died mysteriously, and two others have had near misses. She promises them that Roger can solve the mystery, and he does - in a way that makes him look even more intelligent and intuitive than he actually is. With only three more installments in the series, and the Duke of Gloucester's reign as Richard III imminent, I suspect that Roger will be dragged back into the political world. For now, I'm just enjoying his return to civilian life and looking forward to re-reading the series from the beginning.

The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger is technically a Miss Marple mystery, but Jane doesn't show up until the last third of the novel. The main character (and incompetent detective) is Jerry Burton, a pilot who's convalescing after a severe accident. He and his sister have taken a house in a village which is being plagued by poison pen letters. It's the usual Marple-style set-up, only without Aunt Jane. Until, that is, the local solicitor's wife dies suspiciously and suspicion falls upon, well, several people.  Mrs. Dane Calthrop, the vicar's wife, calls her friend Jane who visits, solves the mystery, and leaves with justice served and two couples paired off.  In other words, classic Christie.

Black and Blue

I'm not sure how I feel about Black and Blue. Ian Rankin's 8th mystery featuring John Rebus was a very good novel, but the mystery didn't quite work. Exiled to a particularly downtrodden Edinburgh police station, Rebus gets assigned to the murder of an oil worker. Somehow, this connects to environmental protesters, drug dealing in Aberdeen, and an old case (one of Rebus's first) which has resurfaced, putting Rebus under investigation (again). I never managed to tie the threads together, but I enjoyed my time with John Rebus, depressed - and to be honest, depressing - as he is.

Falling Upwards: How we Took to the Air

I've never been up in a hot air balloon, and should probably do something about that, because Richard Holmes makes ballooning sound exciting and exotic. Falling Upwards seamlessly threads through the history of ballooning from its early, daredevil days (including the horrific death of one of the sport's early stars), through its military applications in the American Civil War and in mid-19th Century France, and into the modern era where pressurized cabins allow balloons to fly high enough to circumnavigate the world. Along the way, there are foiled polar explorers, scientific experiments, mail delivery, and pleasant excursions gone horribly wrong.  The only thing that connects the stories is that they involve balloons, and Holmes's skillful depiction.

A Sight for Sore Eyes

When I first started reading the non-Wexford books Ruth Rendell wrote under her own name rather than as Barbara Vine, I thought that the distinction between the two was that the Vine books were weirder, perhaps a bit creepy.  A Sight for Sore Eyes breaks that theory - it's the strangest of the books I've read so far by her, under either name, and Teddy Brex is possibly the creepiest protagonist I've met.

Teddy's parents married because his mother found a ring. Raised (barely) in squalor by his scrounging, apathetic parents and co-existing with his uncle, his fastidiousness goes unobserved, even by the neighbor who inspires his artistic talents. At a graduation exhibition, he meets Francine Hill who at 7 was the earwitness to her mother's murder and has since come under the control of her father's second wife, a psychologist who'd quit before being struck off. Her stepmother's obsessive protection leads Francine into a relationship with Teddy, and it's not a surprise to find out that this relationship leads to several deaths, including one of the most surprising twists I've read in a long time.

Twilight of the Elites

How did our meritocracy get us into the mess we're in?  Chris Hayes explains it by saying that we're not as much of a meritocracy as we claim to be, and for the most part I agree with him. He starts out with a profile of his selective public high school, which chooses students entirely on a single high-pressure test.  Not completely fair, but one can argue that a test (like the SAT) evens out some of the societal inequities and at the very least cuts out nepotism and outright racial and ethnic discrimination. Unfortunately, there's a closer tie to economic status than to intelligence in standardized test scores, and that's gotten worse with the advent of test prep (required now if you want to get into an Ivy League school, but when I graduated from high school in 1986 only about a third of my private college-prep classmates bothered with the class offered after school, and at least some of them because they'd underperformed, often through nerves, on their first try).

Hayes is on weaker ground when he blames "elites" for systematic failures such as the 2007-08 housing market collapse and corporate corruption such as at Enron. Yes, the "best and the brightest" were in charge, and the conventional wisdom they spread and the standard sources amplified was absolutely, dangerously wrong. I disagree, though, that it was because they were the elite. Those catastrophes weren't created by smart, credentialed people so much as by smart, credentialed crooks. There, and in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, smart people fudged data or outright lied - nothing to do with being elite and everything to do with forcing their view on a system. I have trouble considering these examples of the elite screwing things up when their lies and manipulation, in my opinion, knock them off that tower.

There's another risk to denigrating those we consider elite. If taken too far, we begin to disregard education, experience, and intellectual analysis. We get the President we "want to have a beer with" (or the one who panders to our worst selves) rather than the one who understands that the world is complex and has the education, experience, and wisdom to work through to the best solution. I'd like to discuss Twilight of the Elites with Hayes, particularly in light of what's happened in the six years since it was published, and perhaps also after re-reading Simplexity.