Literary Defarge

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

2011-12-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

Rose George lures us in with tales of high-tech Japanese toilets and then spends the rest of The Big Necessity pointing out that the phrase 'water born disease' is a euphemism for 'shit born disease.' 2.6 billion people have no access to even the most rudimentary toilet, and many of the toileted are relieving themselves into a hole which may seep into the ground or a pipe which may overflow with moderate rain. After the brief discussion of Japanese plumbing (including a crowded bar debating the qualities of the top two toilet brands - basically, one rinses better and the other dries better, leaving the choice of toilet up to the preference of the user), she takes us on a tour of the developing world where the same basic problem of safely eliminating and possibly recycling waste needs to be tailored to scores of environmental and cultural issues. George discusses biogas generators on Chinese farms, the struggle to create enough toilets in India so that the country can be "open defecation free," and addresses the problem of using 'biosolids' as fertilizer (they're nutrient rich, but how much treatment do they need to be made safe). I found George's writing style accessible and the topic fascinating, but she's a bit earnest. Part of me wonders what Mary Roach would do with this subject.

Napoleon's Buttons

2011-12-31T14:58:00.000-08:00

I went a little overboard when the Borders in Center City closed last March, buying anything that looked interesting. I seem to have made mistake with Napoleon's Buttons - I thought it would be a bit like James Burke's Connections, but it's more of a Connections-light. Maybe with my chemistry background I'm not part of the intended audience, but I found it a bit condescending in places, and a few questionable facts make me suspect the rest of the presented historical connections. The specifics of the experiments leading to the discovery of vitamin C deficiency as the cause of scurvy and some of the background on the origins of olive oil were interesting, but I think I might have enjoyed this book more if I knew less about the covered topics. Or maybe not - the authors' tone isn't particularly inviting.

The Birthday Present

2011-11-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

A first person narrator is almost by definition an unreliable character. He or she will always be unaware of some necessary information. The Birthday Present includes two unreliable first person narrators. Rob Delgado, the main narrator, knows he's missing information and is particularly careful to point out what parts of his brother-in-law's life are known and what parts are speculation. The other narrator Jane Atherton the Alibi Lady, is losing her grip on reality.

Rising politician Ivor Tresham meets Hebe Furnal at a fundraiser for a charity her husband manages. They begin a brief affair which ends with her death in a car accident during a faked kidnapping - the titular 'birthday present' being an evening of 'adventure sex.' After an initial media frenzy focused on Hebe's husband, the press and the police decide that the real target of the kidnapping was a millionaire's wife who they hound into a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Joe and Iris Delgado observe while her brother tries to find out who knows that he was the mastermind behind the kidnapping.

Over the next three years, Ivor gradually becomes involved with the kidnapping survivors. A combination of guilt and fear leads him to track down Dermot Lynch, who survived the accident with severe brain injuries, and Juliet Case, the ex-girlfriend of Lloyd Freeman who died in the accident. Juliet's motivation for her affair with Ivor seems clear, but it's not - we see only what Joe Delgado sees and the depths of her feelings remain obscure until the climax. Similarly, we never truly know what Dermot Lynch's mother and brother know or believe, or whether Ivor's fear of blackmail is real or imagined.

Vine intersperses Jane Atherton's diary entries with Delgado's straight narrative. Hebe was Jane's best friend, or rather only friend. She's a lonely, rather mousy woman who was born to be used, first by Hebe and later by Hebe's husband Gerry, in part because she lets herself be used. She drifts through life with a sense of self pity and a bit of self-sabotage, and although she never crosses paths with Ivor, her actions indirectly set up Ivor's final act.

The car crash which was the ultimate end of the 'birthday present' is a good metaphor for the book - it's sort of like watching a slow-motion car crash. The events unfold slowly over 4 years, against the backdrop of the Conservative Party's gradual fall from power and a movement against tabloid sleaze. Ivor's fate was totally unexpected, but completely supported by what went before. I've read most of the books Ruth Rendell has written under the name Barbra Vine, and I'd rank this one second, directly and barely below A Dark Adapted Eye.

Hide and Seek

2011-11-13T12:33:00.000-08:00

A year or so after the events of Knots and Crosses, Edinburgh is booming. It's the late 80s and London transplants are conspicuously consuming. Rebus wants nothing to do with that (it's not in his nature, and he'd rather just solve the murder of a junkie found oddly posed in a squat), but a lunch devised to organize an anti-drug task force brings Rebus into contact with the top level of Edinburgh business society. When one of his dining companions commits suicide a few days later, and the murder victim's girlfriend mentions hidden photographs, Rebus suspects that the two deaths may be connected. He's right, and Hide and Seek is a compelling mystery with plenty of twists, red herrings, and dead ends. Eventually, Rebus solved the mystery (ahead of me - which is fairly rare) although justice is not served. For the most part, Hide and Seek lives up to the standards set by the first Rebus novel, but it does rely a bit too much on coincidence, especially in the final segment of the story.

Necropolis: London and Its Dead

2011-11-13T12:22:00.000-08:00

For every person living in London, how many hundreds have been buried beneath the city? Enough that some of the Underground tunnels curve because the piles of buried, tangled bones were too dense to dig through. Catherine Arnold takes us on a tour of death, from the pre-Roman burial mounds through Roman funeral ceremonies, the mass graves of the Black Death, the scandals of overfilled and seeping cemeteries, the Victorian cult of mourning, and modern day practices. While generally interesting, Necropolis is essentially a survey of funeral practices, mentioning most and giving deep attention to few. I would have liked a little more detail, particularly about the rather morbid Victorians. Arnold has written three books (so far) about less savory aspects of London's history, and I hope her tours of madness and sin are a bit more enlightening.

The Body in the Library

2011-11-06T12:37:00.001-08:00

I don't believe in conspiracy theories. It's not because I'm particularly cynical (or at least I don't think that's the reason), or because I was a scientist before I went to law school, but because I don't think the average person or group of people can pull it off. Most people aren't smart enough to develop the plan and the rest are usually too confident in their plan (or arrogant) to bother with trouble shooting. So the plan fails - some minor detail seems 'off' to an uninterested observer and the elaborate plot comes crashing down.

I'm in the minority, though, and maybe it's because I've read so many Miss Marple books. The fluffy-bunny spinster has one of the most finely tuned BS detectors in fiction. She picks up minor non-verbal cues and inconsistencies, and wraps them in seemingly inconsequential stories of people who've lived in St. Mary Mead. I can see her today, gently pointing out the flaws in some of the crazier theories that bounce around the internet and shocking the younger, more 'aware' people around her when her assertions turn out to be true.

The Body in the Library is Miss Marple's second full length novel and her third appearance (she debuted in the short story collection The Tuesday Club Murders), and while she's a bit softer than she was in those books, she's still a bit of a sharp-tongued gossip rather than the 'sweet aunt Jane' we meet in later volumes. One morning, a maid wakes Miss Marple's friend Mrs. Bantry from an early morning dream to announce, "There's a body in the library!" Naturally, she sends her husband to investigate and yes, there's the body of a heavily made-up girl in a satin dress, lying on the hearthrug. The girl turns out to be a dancer at a near-by resort, not a 'lady' but coincidentally about to be adopted by Conway Jefferson, a wealthy friend of the Bantrys.

Mr. Jefferson's widowed daughter-in-law and son-in-law are the natural suspects, as are a movie studio employee who's recently relocated to St. Mary Mead, a rather stupid young man staying at the resort, and the resort's dance and tennis instructor. Add in a missing Girl Guide, a few careless comments about teeth and nails, and Miss Marple not only solves the crime but points out how and why the criminal tried to frame one suspect who, in a panic, threw suspicion onto the Bantrys. It's simple common sense, something distinctly lacking in today's world.

Flu: A Social History of Influenza

2011-10-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

Flu: A Social History of Influenza wasn't what I expected. The 1918 flu epidemic severely attacked Philadelphia (it was quite possibly the US city most affected by the flu), and killed my maternal grandmother's younger sister and both of my paternal grandmother's parents. Regina was buried in her First Communion dress after the last funeral held in the parish before funerals were banned as a public health measure, and Grandmom and her brother, who had grown up in privilege, were put in an orphanage by two aunts who stole their inherence. Pandemic flu is part of my family history, and even though I wasn't born for another 50 years, probably affected my life and even my experience (my paternal grandparents wouldn't even have met if my great-grandparents hadn't died), and when I bought Flu: A Social History of Influenza, I expect to discuss the societal impact of past and potential future flu pandemics. It touched on them, and on the science of flu, but there was nothing that I hadn't read in John Barry's and Gina Kolata's books on the 1918 epidemic.

Quinn does a good job, though, of tracing the history of influenza from the first well-described outbreak during the Renaissance through the modern day. I was particularly interested in the discussion of 18th and 19th Century outbreaks. Although doctors had little medicine effective against the flu, they were surprisingly sophisticated in their descriptions of the disease and had an idea of contagion. Other than that, there was very little in Flu that I didn't already know. It's well-written and I enjoyed reading it, but I probably would have liked it better as an introduction to the subject than as the 5th or so book I've read about it.

Unnatural Death

2011-10-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Unnatural Death starts with a perfect murder - one that looks natural. Lord Peter Wimsey and his friend Detective Charles Parker are discussing death over dinner when a fellow diner breaks in with the tale of an unsuspected murder. The man, a doctor whose country practice had recently been destroyed by a rumor that he had caused (directly or indirectly) the death of one of his patients. Understandably, the man declines to give his name, but Lord Peter can't let this rest. He gives his assistant, the apparently dithery spinster Alexandra Climpson, the task of finding the doctor's late 'victim' and acting as his agent in the investigation. Miss Climpson finds the victim, Agatha Dawson, and the village and settles herself into its distaff society. Meanwhile, Lord Peter's search for the servants dismissed from the Dawson home leads to the death of one and a near escape for Lord Peter himself. A dropped prayer book, an attempt to frame a distant relative (with the unlikely name of Rev. Hallelujah Dawson), and letters which cross in the mail lead to a much more climatic ending than one would expect when the murder's identity is so clear.

I've already mentioned that I'm re-reading the Lord Peter mysteries, and as with Clouds of Witness, I'm getting much more of the humor this time around. Peter and Charles usually investigate separately, but when they interview a witness together, Charles always tries to rush the witness. This invariably causes the witness to go further off point, leading Peter to kick his friend or whisper sarcastic comments while gently leading the witness back to the topic. Miss Clipson's letters to Peter also made me smile - they're informative but so full of emphasized words and phrases that you read them in the voice of an elderly gossip sharing the latest over coffee and a biscuit.

There's one more aspect of Unnatural Death which I didn't notice in the past. Sayers speaks of 'mannish' career women, and independent women aren't viewed in a totally favorable light. However, Sayers was a career woman - an expert in medieval history with an MA from Oxford, she also worked as an advertising copywriter for a few years. I wonder if she was writing what she thought the public would want to read, or was she reflecting criticism that had been aimed at her?

The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

2011-10-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, Deadalus Books had a buy-four-get-one-free mystery sale. They had the next, hard-to-find book in Sharan Newman's Cathereine LeVendur series so I picked four random titles to justify the shipping and take advantage of the sale. Although I didn't realize it, two of the books were the first two on Peter Lovesey's Sergeant Cribb series, written in the 1970s and recently reprinted.

Set in the 1870s, the series features an analytical but essentially underrated Scotland Yard detective. As Sergeant Cribb is mulling over a pint in his local, a man gives him a tip on a body - a headless corpse that has washed ashore. Upon examination, Cribb discovers that the victim was probably a prizefighter and since that sport had recently been outlawed, believes that the crime is larger than a single murder. The titular detective, though, is not Cribb but Detective Jago, a well-born amateur boxer estranged from his family and stuck in a desk job at Scotland Yard. Jago infiltrates the prizefighting ring while Cribb and the plodding Constable Thackery investigate from London. The headless body is actually a bit of a red herring - the main murder occurs later in the book and while there are only two suspects, both have adequate means and motive to keep the audience guessing until Cribb solves the crime.

And Then There Were None

2011-10-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

I started reading Agatha Christie in my early teens, but And Then There Were None sort of fell through the cracks. It's one of her 'classics' but I didn't read it until I was in my 30s. Granted, I had two separate copies which became soaked beyond repair (one due to an air conditioner compressor leak, the other due to a dorm refrigerator oozing onto that book's replacement copy), but somehow left copy #3 on the shelf for a decade before reading it, and another decade before my first, RAL-based re-read.

And Then There Were None is a classic locked room mystery. Ten people are stranded on an island, and one by one they're murdered. A few days later, the police arrive to find ten murder victims and no murderer. Some time later, the murderer's confession washes ashore as a message in a bottle, and it's truly ingenious. It also brings up the issues of culpability, revenge, and justice.

Each of the ten victims was responsible, in a way, for a death that was not classified as murder, and one person decided to dispense justice. The least culpable and/or most remorseful died quickly, while the guiltier, less remorseful killers spent days dealing with increasing paranoia. Was, however, the killer accurate in assessing guilt? Anthony Marsden, the first victim committed vehicular manslaughter - but was he reckless (a higher degree of guilt) or merely careless (as the murderer decided)? Vera Claythorn felt deeply guilty for her crime, and yet didn't show it and was therefore considered unremorseful by the killer. Emily Brent seemed almost proud that she indirectly caused the death of her pregnant out of wedlock maid but was deemed less guilty - was that because she was a step removed, or because dismissing her employee followed the social norms of the day? And was the murderer dispensing justice or a psychopath rationalizing revenge?

Murder on the Orient Express

2011-10-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've joined an Agatha Christie RAL on Ravelry - every month, we read and discuss one of her novels, and with over 60 to choose from, we won't begin to repeat until at least 2016. I, and many of the other knitters, have already read most if not all of her books, so the discussion is perhaps more important than in most RALs.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of the discussion of Murder on the Orient Express. It's probably because I read the book late in August as the discussion was winding down (yes, I know that my 2010 New Year's resolution was to not let any book sit more than a week without being reviewed - I'm going to keep making that resolution until I keep it), and possibly because I've read it so many times. I know the answer to the puzzle, and I've pondered whether the solution was revenge or justice, so there's very little reason for me to re-read the book other than for lightweight enjoyment. It's literary comfort food - a few hours during which I can enjoy the travelogue and admire how well Dame Agatha plotted what became one of her most famous novels. I can also marvel at how perfectly the producers cast the 1974 movie - or I could, if Patrick would ever watch and return the DVD I loaned him three years ago.

The Malice of Unnatural Death

2011-10-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Jecks,

This is your 22nd novel, and I've read all 22 over the past 13 years. I'd like to say I've enjoyed them all, but somewhere around the 15th volume, your books became a bit of a slog. I think I've figured out what your problem is - you're putting Baldwin and Simon in too broad of a context. For 15 books, you had them solving local mysteries - the external world of the 14th Century might be mentioned but had little if any effect on the matter at hand. Then you sent your detectives on pilgrimage - an interesting plot device, but not one that worked particularly well. Still, it was less distracting than your recent habit of injecting the political intrigue of the 1320s into Dartmoor. Yes, the battles between Isabella and Edward II and his lovers are intriguing, but they feel tacked on when they affect a local baron and his friend the bailiff. Alison Weir's biography of Isabella was fascinating and your series takes place while she was in power, but that doesn't mean you have to tie her into your plots.

It's sad, because there are some good parts to The Malice of Unnatural Death, and the idea of a necromancer attempting to murder long-distance is fascinating. You've tied this quite well to the subplot concerning the order of succession at a local abbey, and Coroner Richard's booming personality is more amusing than distracting this time around. You've finally figured out the right tone for that character, and I now look forward to seeing him again. All you need to do is trim about 50 pages of obfuscation and keep the bulk of your story local. A good editor can help you do this - perhaps it's time to find a new one.

Jane Eyre

2011-10-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

I am not a romantic - forget flowers and candlelight, I'd rather have a guy who will have long conversations with me, quote Monty Python, and play backgammon - so it's no surprise that I don't find Edward Rochester to be a great romantic figure. In fact, I think he's a manipulative jerk. While I do have some sympathy for his being tricked into a marriage with an apparently insane and violent woman, that does not excuse his keeping her prisoner in the attic and pretending that she does not exist. He does not redeem himself by the way he flirts with Blanche Ingram and makes Jane believe he's going to marry Blanche before his improbable proposal to his ward's governess or with he ignores Jane's requests and showers her with unwanted gifts in the days leading up to their planned marriage.

Jane, on the other hand...well Jane's got spunk. She's got a moral compass without being a boring prig like Fanny Price. It gets her in trouble at home, where her refusal to tolerate abuse by her aunt and cousins gets her sent away to a particularly harsh boarding school, but it's also what drives her to escape Thornfield on what would have been her wedding night and eventually find a new life under an assumed name as a teacher in a charity school. The final chapters of the novel, with their Victorian over-reliance on coincidence, felt like a bit of a let down to me, but I enjoyed Jane Eyre more than I thought I would. Charlotte Bronte had a clear, descriptive writing voice, and while parts were a bit dry for my taste (I can just imagine how acidly Jane Austen would have described the benefactors' visit to Lowood), I could both like and admire it.

The Devil's Disciples

2011-10-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

Susannah Gregory's first Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew, A Plague on Both Your Houses, took place during the plague's march through Cambridge. Matthew Bartholomew, the Arab-educated physician and fellow of Michaelhouse College, survived to solve a dozen more mysteries. A decade later, the plague has not returned in The Devil's Disciples, but the fear remains - and Matthew finds himself suspected of being the Sorcerer, a heretic who claims to be able to protect people from the plague. Exhausted from treating patients suffering through an epidemic of the flux (his cure - boiled barley water - seems magical to some, pointless to others, but to modern audiences is simply rehydration with untainted fluids), he's dragged into the investigation by his friend Brother Michael. Michael, in turn, has been dragged into political intrigue involving his patron, the Bishop of Ely, and the Pope living in exile in Avignon. Add in a bidding war over a piece of property left to Michaelhouse and you've got a nice, complex problem to solve.

This is one of the better mysteries I've read this year, but much of the plot depended on knowing the history of the characters. I've read the entire series, but it's been a decade or more since I read the early volumes and some details have faded. While I recommend the book, I do not think it's a good introduction to the series. This is a series that really benefits from sequential reading.

This Body of Death

2011-08-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth George used to be one of my favorite authors. Her Inspector Lynley mysteries are complex and populated by interesting characters, but around 2003 (5 books ago), she hit a serious slump, and I put her 'on probation.' She began to redeem herself with Careless in Red, and while This Body of Death isn't quite up to the level of Playing for the Ashes or In the Presence of the Enemy, I am once again looking forward to her next book.

Meredith Powell fell out with her best friend Jemima Hastings over Jemima's then-new boyfriend. Nearly two years later, Meredith decides on their shared birthday to swallow her pride and restart their friendship, but Jemima had left town a few months earlier, and the corpse found in a London cemetery the previous day turns out to be Jemima's. Acting Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery is the primary on the case, and after a rough initial meeting with her team, she asks Lynley, still on compassionate leave after his wife's death, to work with her. As they investigate from London, DS Barbara Havers and DS Winston Nkata search the New Forrest town where Jemima had lived, and find more questions than answers about Jemima's ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. Just as they're making progress, Ardery calls them back to London where she's slowly losing control of the case. Barbara does, eventually, discover the killer, through a combination of logic, insubordination, and luck, but it's not the tidiest solution. It feels a bit as if George realized that after 950 pages of plot, subplot, 'colorful' side characters, and false leads, she had to find a way to end the book. There's no 'cheating' on the solution, but it doesn't feel totally natural.

I had a few other minor issues with This Body of Death. The first involves timeline - I realize that few mystery series allow characters to age in real time, but with the nearly two year gap between the publication of each novel in the series and how two recent volumes occurred simultaneously, This Body of Death takes place only 14 months after Playing for the Ashes which I read in 1996 and the time compression is a bit jarring. As I said above, some of the characters (particularly Jemima's landlady and a local psychic) were a bit too 'colorful' for my taste and a good editor might have trimmed some of their eccentricities and tightened the character development scenes for Isabelle Ardery.

What I loved about the book was the return of Barbara Havers. Part of George's slump was due to the near (or total) disappearance of her most compelling character. Havers is bright, insecure, intuitive, stubborn, and the character who most clearly comes to life in every novel. In the Havers-light books, I missed her dry sarcasm and her determination to follow her (usually correct) hunches. Most of all, I missed her complicated relationships with Lynley, Deborah, and Simon, and her budding friendship with her neighbors. The highlight of the book for me was when Barbara, at Ardery's order, tries to improve her look and asks 9-year-old Hadiyyah for advice. The passage where the defiantly schlumpy Havers gets the Trinny and Susannah treatment from her young neighbor made the entire book worthwhile.

Remembered Death/Sparkling Cyanide

2011-08-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how many times I've read Sparkling Cyanide since the mid-80s. My copy was in storage for about a decade, but there were years where I read it more than once so this is about the 15th re-read. The cover (yellow, with "Agatha Christie" in large blue letters and "Remembered Death" in slightly smaller reddish-brown print, above a small picture of a man and two women in evening dress superimposed on a skull) began to fall off during this reading and is now held on with packing tape, and the cover price is $2.95 - these, as well as the yellowing pages, are a testament to years of comfort reading.

Christie really is comfort reading. When I take one of the dozen or so I've read multiple times off the shelf, I know I'll get a well-plotted mystery without too much gore, usually populated by attractive, wealthy, and entertaining characters. They're clever, but not too taxing - the perfect antidote to a stressful week.

Sparkling Cyanide is one of Christie's "murder in retrospect" novels, with a present-day murder added to spark the plot. Beautiful, vain, Rosemary Barton apparently committed suicide at her birthday dinner held in an expensive London restaurant. A year later, her husband George holds a dinner at the same restaurant with the same guests - Rosemary's sister Iris who inherited her sister's fortune; Rosemary's two lovers, the mysterious Anthony Browne and rising politician Stephen Farraday, Farraday's wife Sandra; and George's secretary Ruth Lessing. As he's about to announce that Rosemary was murdered, he dies, as his wife did, by drinking champagne laced with cyanide. Five suspects with five strong motives - and yet none of them could have killed either Barton, let alone both. It's a typical Christie plot, solved in 190 pages with just enough coincidence to be believable.

Dame Agatha populated the story with beautiful, wealthy people untouched by the Depression and WWII, dancing in posh frocks and dinner jackets - miles away both physically and emotionally from the Underground station where she undoubtedly worked on the manuscript during the London Blitz. Her 1943 audience read Sparkling Cyanide as a relief from the horrors of the day, but it also works as a teenager's transition into adult literature and a bored project attorney's mental escape from the tedium of her job. It's not a taxing read, but with scattered references to fashion, history, and Shakespeare, also not quite as shallow as it may appear. Sparkling Cyanide is an old friend, and I'm already looking forward to the next time we meet.

The Devil's Feather

2011-07-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

I enjoy finding authors with backlists, because it means I've got a few years before I have to wait for his or her new books to come out. I decided to try Minette Walters after seeing an adaptation of The Scold's Bridle on BBC America a few years ago, and wasn't disappointed. I enjoy her writing style, and particularly like how she inserts police reports, newspaper clippings, and letters or e-mails to handle the exposition, and I'm sorry that I only have two more of her books to read before I'm scouring the new release lists for her name.

The Devil's Feather, unfortunately, is a bit of a disappointment. Walters often takes two or three apparently separate plot threads and unifies them as she approaches page 300, but this time it felt forced. She starts with the brutal murder of women in Sierra Leone. A few years later, Reuters reporter Connie Burns is on assignment in Iraq and sees the man she suspected of the earlier crimes. Soon after she begins investigating him, she's kidnapped and released after three days. Suffering from PTSD and still being stalked by her abductor, she rents a small house in Dorset and falls into another mystery - was the elderly, Alzheimer's stricken owner of the house being mistreated by her London-based daughter? Either plot would have made a thrilling novel, and Walters has expertly tied disparate threads in the past, but this time it doesn't quite work. Overall, I'd rate the book "interesting but unsatisfying" and a bit creepier than her usual work.

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

2011-07-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare never fully captured my attention, but it did make me want to watch and read the four plays mentioned. I think it was because of Shapiro's writing style - clear but not engrossing.

Shapiro divides his book into four seasons, picks a play for each one, and then puts that play into the context of Shakespeare's world. Winter focuses on *Henry V* and how it reflects the English campaign in Ireland. Spring draws parallels between *Julius Caesar* and the highly structured court of the day. Since Shakespeare traveled to Stratford-on-Avon that summer, *As You Like It* plays out against the backdrop of Shakespeare's attainment of a coat of arms. Finally, melancholy *Hamlet* plays out against the backdrop of an aging queen, a looming succession crisis, and the first tentative steps into empire building. Shapiro does a nice job placing Shakespeare in context, but ultimately it's not a particularly memorable book.

The White Garden

2011-07-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

Peter Llewellyn would make the perfect Peter Mayle hero, a dashing book expert with a passion for food and a bewitching ex-wife. Stephanie Barron is not Peter Mayle, but The White Garden could be a Mayle novel written from the female point of view. The point of view is that of Jo Bellamy, a landscape designer from Delaware sent by her client/lover to visit and copy Vita Sackville-West's White Garden. While exploring an outbuilding, Jo discovers a notebook apparently owned by her recently deceased grandfather and which appears to contain unpublished writings by Virginia Woolf.

There's a problem with the notebook - well, more than one if you count Jo's not-quite-authorized trip to Southeby's where Peter is the resident book expert and Jo's boss Gray appearing in London and also developing an interest in the notebook. Jo is only somewhat familiar with Virginia Woolf and doesn't realize that the diary begins the day after Woolf committed suicide. Still, she's convinced that it's real, and Peter begins to believe her - Woolf's body wasn't found until several days after her disappearance - but if it's real, how did she die? At this point, it would have helped if I were more familiar with the Bloomsbury Set than one would be a decade after reading a single book on the group. Barron explains the background clearly enough that it's not necessary to know more than just the basics, and while Peter's and Jo's trip across England chasing the notebook and Peter's ex-wife, Oxford don and Woolf expert Margaux Strand doesn't quite have the lightness of a Mayle caper, it's well plotted and enjoyable. In the end, the notebook ends up where it belongs, and Jo resolves a mystery involving her grandfather.

The Prodigal Son

2011-07-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

The Prodigal Son is the best mystery I've read in quite a while - maybe two years. I've read several very good books that happened to be mysteries in that time, but Sedley's 2006 entry in her Roger the Chapman series is probably the best example of the genre (barring re-reads of books by Christie and Sayers, of course) I've read since I started this blog.

Roger is enjoying an ale in his favorite inn when a young man who looks vaguely familiar strikes up a conversation. A few days later, the young man is identified a fugitive accused of committing a long-ago murder and asks Roger - who, it turns out, is his half-brother, for assistance. Roger agrees to investigate the decade-old murder of Audra Bellknap's housekeeper, a task complicated by the reappearance of the elder Bellknap son, Anthony, who'd disappeared a few years before the crime. Anthony insists that Roger be treated as a guest rather than a peddler, and then dies himself under mysterious circumstances. Using wits and logic, Roger discovers the true murderer, and also some surprising information about his new-found brother.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat

2011-07-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

I missed The Girl in the Green Raincoat when it was serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I haven't read any of the serials, actually - I never seem to get in on the first chapter and I hate starting in the middle. If I had read the serial, though, I might have known before reading Life Sentences that Lippman had decided to stop writing about Tess.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat starts with Tess attempting to adjust to bed rest. When she first discovered she was pregnant, she also discovered that it was a great 'cover' for surveillance. Who's going to expect a pregnant woman to tail a suspect, and if anyone did notice her, well, they'd just ask baby questions. That ends when a celebratory lunch with her friend and sometime accomplice Whitney ends with a dash to the emergency room where Tess is diagnosed with preeclampsia. On bed rest, with little to do but worry about her baby and her business, Tess tries to pass the time by watching the dog walkers pass her house on their way to the path through the woods. She focuses on the most regular walker, a young woman in a green raincoat walking a greyhound in a matching garment.

One day, Tess sees the dog running - alone. What else would an immobilized PI do but investigate the woman's disappearance? She's hampered, of course, by the fact that she can't leave her sofa, but she does have her laptop and her assistant Mrs. Blossom (little old ladies who knit on park benches are even less likely to be identified as detectives than pregnant women are), and Whitney is always willing to play Nancy Drew. They discover that the missing woman's husband has been married twice before - and both wives died suspiciously. Lippman wrote a tightly plotted mystery with an unexpected but well-supported solution, and also fits in several subplots (one per chapter, several involving love stories) in 158 crisply written pages. It's not the typical Tess Monaghan mystery, but it's a nice way to end the series.

Smokin' Seventeen

2011-07-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

I still look forward to the new Stephanie Plum novels, but I wonder if Janet Evanovich does. She's been in a bit of a lull since about 13 or 14 - they're still fun, but a bit more routine. I wonder if she's preparing to wind down the series around #20 or so. That being said, Smokin' Seventeen is a nice diversion for a holiday weekend.

Vinnie Plum is back in business - his father-in-law is once again bankrolling the bail bonds office. Unfortunately, the actual office was fire bombed at the end of Sizzlin' Sixteen so Vinnie, Connie, Steph, and Lula are now working out of Mooner's RV. It's a nice plot device which allows for the proper amount of Mooner content - he's amusing, but a little bit goes a long way. The lack of an actual office is not good for business, but the bodies appearing at the construction site where the office used to be are even worse. The body of Lou Dugan, owner of a local topless bar and all-around shady character appears one morning, pinky-ringed finger reaching out as if signaling from beyond the grave. Soon after, the decaying bodies of several of Dugan's business associates and poker bodies turn up - one of them addressed to Stephanie.

This is not Steph's main problem, though - Morelli's Grandma Bella has put a sex curse on her, she still can't choose between Morelli and Ranger, and her mother has decided to fix her up with an old classmate who's returned to Trenton. Dave Brewer was the captain of the football team back then, but now he's returned home after serving time for financial shenanigans in Atlanta - perhaps not an ideal mate, but he can cook, so Steph at least considers him until he gets creepy.

All of this (as usual) is set against a framework of Lula's outfits, minor FTAs (including an alleged vampire and a capture that involves a fight over a bottle of wine), funerals, car death, and family dinners. The ending seems a bit contrived, and while Smokin' Seventeen is entertaining, it's not particularly memorable. Maybe Evanovich needs a Bella to put a spell on her - a good one that brings back the right balance of wackiness and tight plotting.

Time and Chance

2011-07-03T09:12:00.000-07:00

Trilogies should probably be read in sequence - particularly trilogies where each installment is over 500 pages. That's a lot easier if all three books have already been published when you discover them than if you pick them up as they come out. Time And Chance periodically refers to events in While Christ and His Saints Slept, and after 5 years, my memory of some of the details is somewhat hazy. If I'd read them back-to-back, that wouldn't have been a problem, but since Devil's Brood didn't come out until 2008, I would have just shifted the problem to the third book.

I read Sharon Kay Penman's Welsh trilogy alongside Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and those books started my interest in medieval England. Eleanor was a supporting character in Here Be Dragons (her granddaughter, John's illegitimate daughter Joan, married Llewellyn of Wales), and she's the center of one of the plot threads in Time and Chance. Her marriage to Henry II provides one of the plot threads in this sprawling novel, the compelling and sometimes explosive relationship between two intelligent and strong willed leaders which is eventually destroyed not by Henry's affairs but the fact that he falls in love with one of his mistresses. Losing Eleanor's affection also means that he loses her shrewd political advice (the one time he goes against her counsel is when he nominates Thomas Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury), and eventually leaves Henry alone in the political crisis of his own making.

Penman's usual style is to make a minor (or, in this case, fictional) member of the court a major character through whose eyes we see the plot. In this trilogy, she gave Henry I an extra son (with 20 known illegitimate children, who's going to notice another one) named Ranulf. Raunulf's mother was Welsh and in While Christ and His Saints Slept, he married his cousin and serves and a bridge between the two countries, as well as being the voice of reason to his nephew, Henry II. Penman masterfully twines the two plot threads, but Ranulf's story frequently refers back to the prior novel and at times, I felt that I needed to check While Christ and His Saints Slept to fully understand Time and Chance. Still, I enjoyed the novel and it's evocative descriptions of medieval court life - I just recommend reading the trilogy as more of a unit than three separate entities.

Mildred Pierce

2011-06-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

I bought Mildred Pierce during my early-90s noir period - it's a 'quality' paperback on the Vintage Crime label, and the cover price is $6.95, considerably less than the rapidly disappearing pocket-sized paperbacks I prefer go for today. "Crime" is also a bit of a misnomer - while Cain was best known for his thrillers and the 1944 movie adaptation was reworked as a murder mystery, Mildred Pierce is a straight domestic drama.

At 17, Mildred married Bert Pierce and quickly had two daughters, Veda and Ray. They lived well off the sale of new housing subdivisions until the Depression hit, leaving Bert (who'd never really had a job) essentially unable to cope with his uselessness. Mildred, who'd been making a few odd dollars baking cakes and pies, threw him out, looked for work, and eventually swallowed her pride and became a waitress in a downtown diner. With the help Bert's former business partner, she opens a restaurant, and eventually expands her business to three restaurants with different atmospheres and a commercial baking business supplying pies to other establishments. Then, because of her poor choice in men and inexplicable devotion to her monstrous daughter Veda, loses it all.

I know it sounds like a fairly routine book, but what saves Mildred Pierce is the characters. Bert's a decent guy, just not quite up to the challenges of surviving the Depression, and he stands by Mildred, proud of her success and there for her when she fails. They don't really want to divorce, and maybe Mildred would have been better of staying with him. But she doesn't - as her business takes off, she begins an affair with Monty Bergeron, a wealthy man who sleeps with her and scorns her and take her money when he his family fortune disappears but bonds instead with Mildred's haughty teenage daughter Veda. There's a subtext there that 'polite' novels would have ignored in 1941, but I suspect that pulp readers saw what I saw in Monty's comments about Veda's emerging bust, or in the closeness between the two. Mildred, however, doesn't see anything inappropriate in the relationship between her daughter and her lover, and also doesn't see that her beautiful and musically talented daughter constantly manipulates her. It's Mildred's devotion to Veda's musical career that leads to the loss of her business, and eventually to her loss of Veda.

The other thing I noticed while reading Mildred Pierce was how foreign the novel's setting appeared, even though it takes place in the decade before my parents were born. Not everyone has a telephone, radio was new, and a blood transfusion from a professional donor with no testing or typing is seen as a potential cure for a bacterial infection. Like Knots and Crosses, Mildred Pierce is set in the close enough past to be recognizable, but far enough away to be almost an entirely different world.

The Vintage Caper

2011-06-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine used to have a second job in a movie theater. A few times a year, he'd tell us what lobby posters were available and he'd get them for us - I've got Casino Royale and A Perfect Year hanging in my living room. While it's nice to see Russell Crowe in a sunbeam as soon as I walk in my front door, that's not why I wanted that poster - I'm a big fan of Peter Mayle. 20 years ago, my mom handed me Tojours Provence and I was hooked. Mayle has crisp, descriptive writing style and a dry sense of humor - and he appreciates good food.

Movie producer Danny Roth has a problem. It's not that he's totally repellant (apparently, that's beneficial to his career), but that no one appreciates his sophisticated palate and his multi-million dollar wine collection. Naturally, he arranges for the LA Times to do a puff piece on his collection, and equally naturally, someone steals it while he's skiing in Aspen. Elena Morales, the VP for private claims at Knox Insurance calls her ex-flame, lawyer-turned-criminal-turned-investigator (and all-around connoisseur) Sam Levitt look into the theft. Sam's a typical Mayle hero - charming in a roguish sort of way and attracted to brilliant and witty women who just happen to be incredibly attractive. After a consultation (over a gourmet meal, of course) with a friend in the LAPD, Sam flies to France, meets Sophie Costes from Knox's French office, and Sophie's journalist cousin Phillipe. Together, they conclude that Roth's wine was stolen by a media magnate I can only describe as a French Burlesconi and devise a suitable resolution.

The Vintage Caper isn't Mayle's best novel (that would be Hotel Pastis), because it's much too routine. Sophie is suitably sophisticated and Phillipe is suitably rumpled, and at times the plot seems to be an excuse to string together a series of meals. The meals, though, are fabulous - Mayle may have lightly lifted some dishes from his travel writing, but these meals are worth repeating - the plot holds together, and Mayle's dialogue is (as always) brisk and witty. I read the final few pages on the train one evening, and smiled so broadly that my seat mate asked what I was reading.

Knots and Crosses

2011-06-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

Ian Rankin didn't set out to write mystery novels. How he could have thought that he would not have been listed as a 'mystery novelist' when his first book focused on a police detective hunting a serial killer is even more of a mystery than the plot of Knots and Crosses, but it doesn't detract from this compelling psychological novel.

We first see John Rebus at his father's grave, and that sets the tone for Knots and Crosses. Rebus is chronically depressed and psychologically scarred by his military service. He's recently divorced, on uncertain terms with his brother (a stage hypnotist), not well liked by his colleagues, and he lives in a very grey version of Edinburgh. There's a serial killer stalking pre-teen girls, and Rankin alternates between the investigation in which Rebus is involved and scenes featuring his 12-year-old daughter, Samantha.

Knots and Crosses is a well-written, tightly plotted mystery, and I didn't guess the killer until a few pages before the end. What struck me, though, was how different the world was in 1987. There are no cell phones, few computers, no internet...Samantha looks for a library book in a card catalog and the investigation involves shuffling paper instead of scrolling through screens. There's even a brief passage discussing whether computers will ever replace legwork. 1987 is an almost foreign world, but I lived there - as a college student and a legal adult. How odd will the world depicted in books published today feel in 2025?

Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

2011-05-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

Warning - Mild spoilers

The last two Jane Austen mysteries have had a bit of melancholy air to them, with a pall cast by the loss of Jane's Gentleman Rogue. Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron starts with the death of Jane's beloved cousin Eliza but it's a much more vibrant novel than its immediate predecessors.

Jane and her brother Henry travel to Brighton to recover from Eliza's death. Along the way, they rescue a young woman who has been kidnapped by the dissipated Lord Byron, a young woman who eventually turns up dead, sewn into a shroud made from the sails of Lord Byron's boat. Jane is not exactly part of this social circle, but Lord Harold's niece Desdemona (whom Jane befriended in a prior novel) asks for her help on behalf of one of Lord Byron's acknowledged lovers, Lady Oxford. (Can you imagine how much fun the supermarket tabloids would have with these convoluted relationships?)

Jane, of course, uncovers the truth but the real joy in the novel is in seeing Jane enjoy her new-found fame. Everyone is reading Pride and Prejudice, and we get a little bit of a thrill when Byron tells Jane that he wanted to meet her because one must know the competition. A little bit of money and some undercover fame (according to Barron, if Jane were to admit authorship, she would no longer be able to eavesdrop at the local dinners and balls which serve as her source material) return Jane to the vivacious woman of the earlier novels. She may ruefully acknowledge her out of fashion robes and her greying hair, but in a way this is her second debut into society. Sadly, we know it will be a short-lived social career. Jane has only four more years to live, and only three more years of health.

The Minotaur

2011-05-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

Barbara Vine's mysteries aren't so much 'whodunnit' as 'whydunnit' - she usually frames her books as a present-day retelling of a past event, focusing more on how her characters interact than the actual events. The Minotaur follows that pattern. Cartoonist Kirsten Kvist is on vacation in Riva when she sees Ella Costway, a member of the family with which she lived when she first came to England from Sweden.

As a university student in late 1960s Sweden, Kirsten fell in love with an English student and earned a nursing credential so she could follow him back to England. He helped her find a job as a nurse/companion to John Cosway, a mathematical genius diagnosed with schizophrenia and living in the family home with his domineering mother and three downtrodden sisters. It doesn't take long for us to realize that John is not schizophrenic but autistic, and that he's been drugged into a near trance, but the book isn't really about John. It's about his sisters - resigned housewife-without-being-a-wife Ida, 40ish spinsters Winnifred and Ella, and wealthy widow Zorah who on her periodic visits is the only person who treats John as a sentient being. During Kirsten's year with the Cosways, Winnifred becomes engaged to the local curate and Ella begins an affair with a loutish artist who's moved into the village. It's a novel of small things which have major outcomes, and one in which the central events just couldn't happen in today's world of cell phones and internet research. Miss Marple would enjoy The Minotaur - it's a book for students of human nature.

Burn Out

2011-05-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how much younger characters become over the run of a series. When Marcia Muller introduced Sharon McCone, her detective was 28 and I was 8 and more than a decade from discovering her. 24 years later, we're about the same age, and I suspect that I will be older than she by the time Muller retires the character. Some convenient amnesia comes with the Dorian Gray syndrome - McCone's Berkley days and the 20-odd years it took for her brother-in-law to go from a struggling country musician to a superstar have faded over the past several books - but Muller hasn't totally ignored the passage of time. Once the lone investigator for a legal co-operative, McCone is now the head of a thriving investigative agency with a dozen operatives and little reason to leave her office.

This development (and the particularly nasty case solved in The Ever Running Man), led to the titular Burn Out. Theoretically pondering her next career move (but in reality nearly paralyzed by depression), McCone has a chance encounter with a young Paiute woman who is murdered a few days later. McCone investigates, mainly because the victim's uncle is the caretaker for her husband's ranch, and soon finds herself enmeshed in a web of family secrets and small-town intrigue - which somehow connect to a reclusive billionaire.

Maybe I've become too good at solving mysteries, or maybe it's only a middling detective novel, but I solved this a bit too early for my taste. Where Burn Out succeeds is as a psychological novel. Muller slowly (and I think realistically) draws McCone from her depressive state to 'the old Sharon' as she teases apart the puzzle. I enjoyed watching McCone wake up and begin to solve the day-to-day problems in both her personal and professional life. It's a mystery novel for people who want more than justice for the dead in their mysteries.

Jacquard's Web

2011-04-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Jacquard's Web reminded me of Connections. Not just because James Burke covered several of the same topics, but because James Essinger seamlessly traveled from Prince Albert's inspection of a woven portrait of JM Jacquard, to the history of silk weaving, to the 1890 US Census with stops along the way for the French Revolution and Lord Byron. The bulk of the book, however, discusses Charles Babbage and his two machines, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Babbage never managed to build working models of either machine, but they're considered the precursor to the modern computer, and their description, written and annotated by Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer program. Essenger is an engaging writer, and Jacquard's Web strikes the right balance between a collection of trivia facts and deep thought.

Disordered Minds

2011-03-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

Minette Walters doesn't write straight-forward novels. She drops newspaper clippings, e-mails, and police reports into the narrative, but somehow makes sure they contradict what she's just written. Disordered Minds is a particularly twisty puzzle of a novel, and in my mind her second best (behind Fox Evil).

Disordered Minds opens in 1970 with the particularly brutal gang rape of a 13-year-old girl as her best friend watches. A few weeks later, the girl disappears. Walters then cuts to a chapter in "Disordered Minds," a scholarly book by anthropologist Dr. Jonathan Hughes which argues that Howard Stamp did not murder his grandmother a few weeks after the opening scene. George Gardiner, a 60ish woman who now lives in the neighborhood where both crimes occurred 35 years earlier contacts Dr. Hughes and after a particularly rough first meeting, they begin to unravel the case which is not so much cold as forced into a freezer.

It doesn't take a lot of deduction to realize that the two crimes are somehow connected - two violent crimes separated by a few weeks and a few blocks, involving people who knew each other just can't be coincidental. Walters is a master, though, and she keeps us guessing as to how they are connected, and who committed which crime. Nothing is as it appears, and several characters have so completely hidden their pasts that the revelation of their true natures comes as a shock. Against this dark and violent backdrop, Walters places the present day subplot of a wary academic with few friends and a lot of emotional baggage becoming close to the schlubby, frumpy older woman with whom he tracks down the killer. Like a particularly dark Agatha Christie, Minette Walters serves justice with a happy ending.

Queen Isabella

2011-03-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

Never designate a serious book as bedtime reading if you've also got a Sudoku addiction. I think I've put off reviewing Queen Isabella because I didn't give it the level of attention an Alison Weir biography deserves. Isabella of France, like most medieval princesses, made a political marriage. Unluckily, her husband Edward II was a weak man who had no desire to be king and rejected her for his male lovers. Even worse, he had horrible taste in men, choosing corrupt, social-climbing lovers. Piers Gaveston never really understood court life, and that led to his downfall but the more courtly and manipulative Hugh le Despenser brought England to the brink of civil war. Isabella made a similar mistake, because Roger Mortimer was also manipulative and corrupt, but he was a better tactician than any of Edward's knights. Isabella and Mortimer led the only successful invasion of England, deposed Edward II, and acted as regents to Edward III. Mortimer's greed eventually brought him out of favor and Isabella into disgrace, and she retired from public life and eventually regained some of her reputation - a reputation later ripped apart by early historians.

The book is much better than my review. I need to read Queen Isabella again and give it the attention it deserves.

The Death Ship of Dartmoor

2011-03-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

I think I've figured out what Michael Jecks's problem is - he needs a new editor. I still enjoy reading about Sir Baldwin and Simon Puttock, and Jecks still vibrantly draws 14th Century England. I just wish he'd return to the tight plotting he used in his earlier novels.

The Death Ship of Dartmoor is at least an improvement over the last two installments in the series, and the main mystery is fairly engrossing. Simon is now the Keeper of the Port of Dartmouth and when a ship comes into harbor, burned and with the crew missing but the cargo intact, it's his job to figure out what happened. Baldwin appears not to help him but to try to find Bishop Walter Stapleton's nephew who has disappeared in Dartmoor and may be the man found murdered in a hole in Dartmoor's main road. While Baldwin's mystery is yet another disposable subplot, the fate of the titular death ship was interesting enough to keep Jecks off 'probation' and Sir Andrew de Limpsfield (the coroner and this volume's comic character) was actually amusing and helped advance the plot. Jecks's 20th novel may signal a return to form, and I really hope it is. Mainly because I don't want to think I've wasted money (amazon.co.uk does not offer free trans-Atlantic shipping) and I've got six more volumes on my bookshelf.

A Fatal Waltz

2011-02-20T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty methodical, and I like reading series in order. And when I say "like" I mean "I go to lengths to avoid reading series out of order." Somehow, I bought books 3 and 4 instead of 2 and 3 in the Lady Emily Ashton mysteries while I was Christmas shopping and didn't realize it until I was a few chapters into A Fatal Waltz.

The novel opens at a shooting party hosted by the unbearable Basil, Lord Fortescue and attended by Emily's oldest friend Ivy Brandon, Ivy's husband Robert (Lord Fortescue's political protege), Emily's fiance Colin Hargraves, and Colin's former lover Kristiana von Lange. Because this is a mystery, we need a dead body and Lord Fortescue complies, shortly after a public argument with Robert. As Emily tries to clear her friend's name, Colin tries to stop an anarchist plot that would start WWI 15 years earlier. Both plots lead to Vienna, where Emily (with the help of French grand dame Cecile du Lac and childhood friend Jeremy Sheffield) and Colin (with the help of Kirstiana) piece together the parallel mysteries.

Colin's mystery wasn't as interesting or as tightly written as Emily's, and its main purpose was to provide a few key pieces of information Emily needed to clear Robert's name. They mysteries, though, are really just a background for the fun. Emily experiences Vienna cafe society, Cecile has an understated affair (one of many) with the artist who is painting her portrait, Jeremy plays the useless aristocrat while nursing a crush, and Emily's mother Catherine, Lady Bromley blows in at hurricane force, bragging about finding Prince Eddy a bride and arranging for Emily to marry in the Queen's presence. A slightly better than average mystery folded into a meringue of a smart historical romance.

Girl in a Box

2011-02-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

About 2/3 of the way through Girl in a Box, I realized that even though it was published in 2006, I haven't seen the next Rei Shimura mystery. Have I reached the end of another series? I checked amazon.com and it turns out I haven't - there's one more volume, but that's probably a good thing. I've enjoyed the series, but Massey may have written herself into a box.

Rei Shimura started the series as an English teacher in Tokyo, became an antiques dealer, and as of The Typhoon Lover has become a spy of sorts, working for a shadow intelligence agency which apparently has only one other employee, ex-Navy officer Michael Hendricks. Her mission (which she chooses to accept) is to infiltrate a Tokyo department store with questionable profits and possible links to US businesses. It's an interesting premise, and Massey keeps the plot fairly tight for about 3/4 of the book. Unfortunately, it feels a bit like she rushed the ending, leaving the conclusion somewhat confusing and the evolving relationship between Rei and Michael feeling like it was grafted onto a completed novel. Perhaps Massey realized that she had to start winding up the series - and maybe that's why I got the feeling around page 200 that this might be the last Rei Shimura mystery.

Never Let Me Go

2011-01-30T14:27:00.000-08:00

Warning - some spoilers

I'm not sure why I decided to read Never Let Me Go. I'm generally not a fan of modern 'literary fiction' (too often, the author seems more interested in writing a great novel than a good book), I admired more than I liked The Remains of the Day when I read it 15 years ago. and I'd read a few movie reviews that gave away the plot. Kathy's voice, however, drew me in, and when I was finished, I wanted to know more about the characters - my main yardstick of a good work of fiction.

Never Let Me Go feels a bit like an audio diary, recorded by someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Kathy has been a 'carer' for nearly 12 years, comforting and hand-holding donors as they recover (or don't) from repeated surgeries, and she's recently been told that she will soon become a donor herself. Perhaps that's why she's in a reflective mood, looking back at what she knew and didn't know as a child raised in an insular boarding school. The children at Halisham are clones, bred and raised to eventually donate their organs, a fact that they 'know' from a young age but don't seem to really understand. They live until age 17 or so in total isolation, with an art-centric education and no contact with the outer world except for monthly jumble sales where they can buy (approved) items cast-off by the wider world. They learn about their origins and eventual fate almost through osmosis - no one ever says "you are clones bred for spare parts and will die in your 20s or early 30s" but somehow, the students know. They don't understand, but they know and accept their fate.

In most ways, though, the students at Halisham are regular teenagers, and the Never Let Me Go centers on three of them: Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy. Ruth is the most worldly, a somewhat manipulative girl who seems a bit less resigned to her fate and maybe deep down believes that she might work in an office some day and have an ordinary life. She and Kathy are friends almost because they have no one else - they paired off as 'best friends' when they were 12 or so and with no opportunity for new friends, stay together until an argument leads Kathy to begin her training as a carer. Tommy was in their year at Halisham and although Kathy was his confidant, he starts a relationship with Ruth. Several years later, Kathy becomes Ruth's carer. Ruth believes an old rumor, that a couple who are truly in love can postpone their donations for a few years, and she encourages Kathy to reconnect with Tommy so they can both get deferrals. The deferrals, of course, don't exist, and deep down, Kathy and Tommy know this as well.

I just read what I've written, and to be honest, it doesn't sound like a book I'd like to read. I enjoyed it, though. It's a January book - slightly melancholy, rather lonely, isolated and grey even when a group of children are playing on a sunny field. Sometimes a book or movie just 'grabs' me, and I can't explain why I like it (or doesn't grab me and I can't explain why I don't). I think that's the case here. Never Let Me Go is low-key and reflective, downcast but not quite depressing, sort of like the middle of January when the weather is cold and grey and we're coping with returning to the dullness of normal life after the holidays. If I'd read it at another time of year, maybe I'd admire it more than I liked it, but I finished it a few days after the most depressing day of the year so that's not the case.

Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

2011-01-30T14:03:00.001-08:00

I love bookstores that specialize in remaindered books. I can wander the aisles at a store with a 3-month lease or browse the Daedalus catalog and for a few dollars buy a book that I've never heard of because the description looks interesting. Sometimes that strategy backfires. Talking to the Dead was remaindered for a reason - it's a badly written book, and the story of the Fox sisters isn't quite compelling enough to make the slog through the imprecise grammar and almost random jumps in the timeline which characterize Barbara Weisberg's attempts to tie the sisters' story into the social framework of their era.

One night in 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox heard mysterious 'rappings' which they claimed were produced by the ghost of a peddler killed years before and buried under the house in which they lived. The girls eventually became 'public' mediums who held seances for profit, then fell into ill-fated romances, alcoholism, and ultimately died in poverty. In the hands of a gifted writer, this would be a compelling story, but Weisberg's writing style had me re-reading paragraphs to determine basic facts and her attempts to connect the spiritualist movement to events such as the Civil War and the social changes of the Victorian era die at the hands of her disorganized text. Talking to the Dead, even in its published form, is what my friend Pam would call a "hard edit" - I can only imagine what the original manuscript must have looked like.

The Maters at Mansfield (Or, The Crawford Affair)

2011-01-23T19:32:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure Anne de Bourgh has any dialog in Pride and Prejudice, and I've never given the character much thought. I'd always thought of her as a young girl, but she'd have to be Darcy's age if their mothers planned their marriage from the time they were infants. Anne comes to life in The Matters at Mansfield, Carrie Bebris's fourth (and best) Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mystery. Lizzy is the first to notice the change - Anne seems prettier and less retiring than before her long sojourn in Bath while her mother made an extended visit to Pemberly. While Lady Catherine plots Anne's marriage to the vicious and foul-tampered son of senile Viscount Sennex, Lizzy encourages Anne to dance with her cousin Captain Fitzwilliam or with an attractive stranger, Henry Crawford. Anne misinterprets Lizzy's advice and instead elopes with Henry (who comes across as more spoiled and less caddish than the man who would ruin Fanny Price and break her heart for a bit of fun).

Needless to say, Lady Catherine de Bourgh will not stand for her daughter marrying a nobody with a shady past and sends her nephews to find the couple. An unfortunate accident on the return trip leaves the party in the Ox and Bull Inn in the village of Mansfield where Anne finds herself the unlikely center of two separate love triangles, neither of which amuse her mother who welcomes Henry's death because it would free Anne to marry Neville Sennex. Or Vicount Sennex - anyone but Henry.

As a mystery, The Matters at Mansfield is just a shade above mediocre. I solved the who and how (and guessed at the why) too soon. As a comic novel, though, it's very good, especially for Austen fans. Lady Catherine blusters off the page, Mrs. Norris makes a cameo appearance, and Bebris uses the visitors to the Ox and Bull as a sort of Greek chorus of gossip. Bebris's first two novels leaned a bit too heavily on the supernatural for my taste, and while her third book, North by Northanger, was an improvement, it was largely forgettable. With The Matters at Mansfield, Bebris has found the right tone, more than half-way through the natural life of the series.

The Demon Under the Microscope

2011-01-23T18:24:00.001-08:00

Somehow, despite my chemical background and years reviewing pharmaceutical documents, I managed to know next to nothing about sulfa drugs. I knew they were precursors of a sort to antibiotics, and that they were often (always?) a powder sprinkled on wounds, but that was it. Antibiotics were stronger, less toxic, and effective against a wider range of microbes, totally eclipsing the first family of magic bullets.

More soldiers died from infection and disease during WWI. Epidemics swept through crowded, unsanitary trenches and shrapnel drove mud and filth into the bodies of men who sometimes laid for hours or days in pools of stagnant water. Doctors did what they could, amputating obviously infected limbs and flushing bodies with antiseptics we now know should only be used externally, but patients died at an alarming rate. A generation later, things had changed. Thanks to sulfa drugs, infection killed no one after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As infamous as that day was, it would have been much worse without the work of a German doctor and his chemist colleagues.

Gerhard Domagk enlisted in the German army in 1914 and was wounded shortly before Christmas. While being treated, the army discovered that he had been a medical student and transferred him to the hospital staff where he saw the horrors of battlefield medicine and how little could be done for patients with infected wounds. In France, Sir Almoth Wright encountered the same problem - an expert surgeon and believer in antiseptics, he and the doctors under him were operating in sterile conditions and flushing wounds internally with strong antiseptics and still patients died of gas gangrene.

Domagk returned to medical school after the war, specializing in pathology. Eventually he went to work for Bayer where, following the example of Paul Erlich and his dye-based syphilis cure Salvasan, he worked with a team of chemists adding functional groups to dyes until he found one which cured a handful of common bacterial infections with few side effects other than temporarily dying the patent's skin pink. Once this miracle drug (named Prontosil) was released to the public, French and American scientist worked on improving the drug, eventually discovering that it was the functional group - the sulfa - that killed microbes and that the dye did nothing but temporarily stain the patients' cells. Meanwhile, Leonard Colebrook, one of Sir Almoth's assistants, put sulfa drugs to practical use in maternity wards. A combination of isolating infectious patients and the use of sulfa drugs made the formerly hazardous hospital births safe.

Sulfa drugs didn't just revolutionize wound care. As Thomas Hager points out in the introduction, before sulfa drugs doctors had few effective drugs and most medicines were patent medicines - snake oil which were at best ineffective and often harmful. After the discovery of sulfa drugs, the nascent pharmaceutical industry invested in research and made modern medicine possible. Doctors, too, underwent a transformation, from men who could do little more than check symptoms and comfort patients to scientists who could cure many if not most diseases (although perhaps at the expense of bedside manner). Sulfa drugs even played a supporting role in the regulation of drugs, after over a hundred people died from a patent sulfa medicine which used ethylene glycol as a solvent, and early reports of sulfa-resistant drugs sent a warning (which was largely ignored) about antibiotic resistance. We owe a lot to sulfa drugs, especially when you consider how they were superseded by antibiotics barely a decade after their introduction.

U is for Undertow

2011-01-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

My earliest memory is of catching my fingers in a folding chair. We were down the shore, and my mom said I had to fold up my little green beach chair before I had ice cream. I remember she was wearing a green-and-white gingham sundress (more of a mu-mu, really), and her hair was still long and clasped in a barrette at the nape of her neck. My grandparents were there, and Dick and Frances (my grandmother's siblings). My mom was holding my favorite red bowl - the one I had to have my Cheerios in every morning - and I screamed. She filled the bowl with ice as Dick extracted my fingers from the chair, and I ate my ice cream from another bowl while chilling my sore hand. When I was about 20, I told my mom what I remembered and she was amazed that I got every detail right, except my age. I thought I was 3 1/2 at the time - I was actually 18 months old.

U is for Undertow turns on the 21-year-old memory of a small child. Michael Sutton walked into Kinsey Milhone's office with a memory of seeing two men bury something a day or so after five-year-old Mary Claire Fitzhugh was kidnapped and presumably murdered. His memory is so clear, and the story is so believable that the police dig up the spot - and find the remains of a dog. He was close, though, right? He did see a burial...except it turns out that his faulty (or false) memory has been an issue in the past and upon investigation, his story actually can't be true. There are too many false ends, though, and Kinsey also feels embarrassed that she believed Sutton's story. So she keeps digging, carefully, brushing away bits of inaccurate and irrelevant information like an archaeologist brushing dirt from a half-buried artifact with a paintbrush, until she finds out what happened in July 1967.

Sue Grafton gives us an advantage over Kinsey. She sets a few chapters in the five years leading up to Mary Claire's kidnapping, so we have a pretty good idea 'whodunit' - or do we? I've been reading mysteries for 30 years (longer if you include Encyclopedia Brown), so I'm rarely fooled. Grafton fooled me three or four times in the first half of U is for Undertow, and I solved the mystery for good about the same time Kinsey did.

It's fitting that memory is the theme of U is for Undertow. The once contemporary series is slipping into the historical category, and as I read, I remembered life before the internet or ESPN in every bar. Kinsey's personal memories come into question as well. Ever since her mother's family established contact with her in J is for Judgment, Kinsey has assumed that her wealthy grandmother's scorn for her daughter's elopement meant that she didn't want to know her granddaughter. A cashe of old letters and some long-forgotten photos cast doubts on this assumption, and on Kinsey's perception of the aunt who raised her. Kinsey's personal story plays against the backdrop of her friendship with her 88-year-old landlord Henry, who I am convinced is the true love of her life. Grafton probably has the last chapter of Z is for Z(ero? Zip? Zoo?) ready for the final edit, and I think - hope, really - it has Kinsey and Henry strolling into the sunset.

Clouds of Witness

2010-12-27T18:16:00.000-08:00

Ensconced in a luxurious Parisian hotel, Lord Peter Wimsey finds that his man Bunter has packed their things - Peter's brother, the Duke of Denver, has been arrested for murder of their sister Mary's fiance, Dennis Cathcart, and clearly Peter is the only person who can clear the somewhat dim Duke's name. The Duke refuses to explain why he was wandering the moors at the time of Cathcart's murder and Lady Mary's deception has put the time of death into doubt. Peter and his friend, Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard follow a jeweled trail to Paris, across a boggy moor, and eventually to New York, with Peter arriving at his brother's trial in the House of Lords just in time to give the vital piece of evidence.

I've read Clouds of Witness at least twice, and recently re-watched the BBC mini-series so nothing in the book was even slightly mysterious. Because I could just sit back and enjoy the story, I noticed a somewhat comic subplot. I don't think I'd noticed in previous readings how clear it is that Charles is in love with Mary from the beginning of the book, and Peter doesn't see it either. When he realizes, he's shocked - not, as Charles first thinks, because of the class distinctions but because his sister has shown such terrible taste in men that he's afraid she's going to turn down his best friend in a fit of stupidity.

The Labors of Hercules

2010-12-27T17:46:00.000-08:00

The Labors of Hercules may have been my introduction to Agatha Christie. I remember the copy I took out of the library - a hardback with an aqua cover and a circular logo, apparently part of a series published specifically for libraries, and I remember reading it upstairs at my grandmother's house. My grandmother died in January 1983, and I had the window open so this must have been the summer of 1982. Or maybe I'm remembering incorrectly - maybe I read the book elsewhere (because I don't remember reading Agatha Christie before I started high school) or maybe I read it while my parents were preparing Grandmom's house for sale.

Either way, it's been nearly 30 years since I read The Labors of Hercules, and nearly 30 years since English 9 covered the labors of Hercules as well, and I only dimly remembered both. Bits of plot, and occasional lines of dialog floated through the mist but I'd mostly forgotten "whodunit" so I could sit back and solve the mysteries as if they were new. They're typical Christie, only stripped down to 15 or 20 pages - a clever plot with a single flaw for Hercule Poirot to discover, and a dash of romance or a happy ending here and there. It's a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, but fairly ephemeral - middling, not top-level Christie.

All Around the Town

2010-12-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

I haven't read a new Mary Higgins Clark book in about a decade. I haven't re-read one of her books in quite a while either - after several years 'on probation,' I stopped buying new books and donated my backlist to the Book Corner. She writes good beach books, but she fell into a rut of writing one of the same two books over and over again, and I got tired of them.

Last month, I noticed that the coffee shop where I buy my morning bagel and cocoa had a copy of All Around the Town, so I picked it up and worked my way through it in 5-minute intervals. The story is fairly typical Clark (young, pretty, well-dressed woman from a world of casual affluence - an 8,000 square foot house in the 1970s, and an assistant prosecutor with a designer wardrobe? - finds herself in mortal peril and saves herself seconds before the dashing hero completes the rescue). The book starts with the kidnapping of 4-year-old Laurie Kenyon by an aspiring gospel singer and his wife. When she's returned to her family two years later, her sister can see that she's been abused but their parents can't cope with the idea and shut it down.

Fourteen years later, their parents die in a car accident and this trauma brings out the multiple personalities Laurie developed to protect herself from her abuser. One of these personalities may or may not have been having an affair with a professor married to a gold-digging travel agent. Naturally, when the professor is murdered, Laurie is the prime suspect. Her sister, now a prosecutor, resigns from her office to take up Laurie's defense. In the meantime, Laurie's abuser has become a top televangelist and rekindles his obsession with the girl. It's a delicately balanced plot, with almost as many near-miss meetings as a screwball comedy but it works, and part of why it works is that the televangelists make minor mistakes which aren't caught because they're buried in conversations.

There's another reason why I have a bit of a soft spot for All Around the Town. In the late 80s and early 90s, I frequently ate at the Kenyon Diner in Willow Grove. Sometimes alone, sometimes with my parents, and on Friday nights with my dad. We'd sit in the back room where some older guys talked baseball and one of my proudest moments was when, at about 18 or 19, I got a "good point" response to one of my infrequent comments - a response which was my invitation to the ongoing discussion. One of my solo visits to the Kenyon was on a Sunday morning, with a copy of All Around the Town. An hour and about 75 pages later, I was approaching the quick-cut finale and there was a line forming at the door. My waitress came by and refilled my coffee cup instead of asking if I was ready to leave. That's why the Kenyon is in my personal Diner Hall of Fame.

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

2010-11-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

How will historians learn about 'ordinary' life in 2010? Much of what we know about daily life in earlier eras comes from letters and diaries. We may write more e-mails than our great-grandparents wrote letters and perhaps there are more current bloggers than historical diarists, but will they be useful to 23rd Century historians? Will my hotmail account be readable in 2150, and will anyone be able to sift through the spam and bacon and forwarded jokes to draw an accurate picture of my life?

Martha Ballard kept a diary, and from that we learn a lot more about Federalist New England than merely the business of birth. An 18th Century midwife was part nurse, part doctor, part herbalist, and part mortician, responsible for preparing bodies for burial. Additionally, during the peak years of Martha's career she and her teen aged daughters and niece wove lengths of fabric, supplementing her husband's income from surveying and their son's income as a miller. We think of the 18th Century as a time when men earned income and women stayed home, but the hearth was vitally important to a family's economic survival. The shillings Martha earned from delivering babies and the produce and meat given in exchange for fabric and nursing were vital to the family's economic survival, and when Martha's business declined due to her age and ill-health, her family encountered financial hardships including her husband's imprisonment for debt.

Martha's diary also pokes a hole in the image of insular, self-sufficient, repressed, peaceful Puritans. Hallowell, ME was a tight community as a matter of necessity, and young adults often spent a few months or years living in the home of a relative or family friend, and her diary contains several entries mentioning overnight guests. 38% of first children were conceived out of wedlock, and a midwife's job included questioning a laboring mother (under the assumption that the pain would act as a sort of truth serum). We also learn of ordinary squabbles between neighbors over property and more serious conflicts over religion and politics. Most shockingly, Martha's diary includes a mass murder - one of her neighbors killed his wife and five of his six children before killing himself.

Future historians may have to deal with information overload when they try to reconstruct our society; we're lucky that diaries like Martha's somehow survived. Her daughter Dolly Lambard apparently kept the diary, passing it to her daughters upon her 1861 death. 23 years later, Dolly's great-granddaughter Mary Hobart received the diary from her great-aunts upon her graduation from medical school, later explaining that "as the writer was a practicing physician, it seemed only fitting that the Ballard diary, so crowded with medical interest, should descend to her." Who knows what would have happened to the roughly-bound volumes if the author's great-great-granddaughter had not become one of the first women licensed as a physician in Massachusetts and donated it to the Maine State Library.

Arabella: England's Lost Queen

2010-11-28T14:41:00.000-08:00

I've read several Tudor/Stuart biographies, but I don't think I'd heard of Arabella Stuart until I wandered the aisles at Daedalus and picked up Sarah Gristwood's biography of her. Arabella was the great-granddaughter of Margaret Tudor and the daughter of Lord Darnley's younger brother, making her Elizabeth I's first cousin twice removed and niece-by-marriage to Mary Queen of Scots. (Royal family trees tended not to branch...) Arabella spent most of her life as the centerpiece of various Catholic and Protestant plots to make her Elizabeth's successor and living in the shadow of her formidable grandmother, Bess of Hardwick. Her one act of independence, an attempted escape from virtual house arrest to marry for love ended with her imprisonment in the Tower of London because her lover was William Seymour, great-grandson of Mary Tudor, grand-nephew of Lady Jane Grey, and an equally strong candidate for the throne.

Arabella's life was rather dull and spent mostly in the seclusion of semi-arrest, but Gristwood's book is not. Like Alison Weir and Antonia Frasier, her crisp prose clarifies the convoluted political machinations of the era and enlivens passages of dry diplomatic history. Arabella herself doesn't come across as particularly sparkling character. It's as if the Tudor brilliance diluted over the generations and left each successive woman with a claim to the throne as a slightly blurrier copy. Elizabeth I was a brilliant woman with an incredible education, Mary Stuart was bright and educated to be a Queen Consort. Their younger kinswoman Arabella comes across as bright but nothing special, indifferently educated, and somewhat stunted by her enforced seclusion. She would have made a mediocre monarch at best, but Gristwood's biography is an enjoyable and enlightening read.

A Friar's Bloodfeud

2010-11-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what to do about Michael Jecks. His last few books have been disappointing, but I've got 7 unread installments in his Sir Baldwin de Funshill and Simon Puttock series sitting on my shelf, most of which I bought from amazon.co.uk with the exchange rate and international shipping fees you'd expect. Maybe Jecks needs to slow down a bit (he releases a book every 9 or 10 months, where most authors wait a year or so between books), because the last two books I've read have felt rushed, with poorly integrated subplots.

Yes, it's still the Year of the Subplot in my personal library, and Jecks's editor should have removed the 40 pages or so devoted to Lady Jeanne's maid. If Emma had been mentioned in earlier books, it was only in passing, and her only role here is to exasperate Baldwin.

The main plot is a little tighter. Two years before the novel opens, Simon's servant Hugh had married a young woman who'd been released from her vows as a nun. Their hut is attacked and burned, apparently killing Hugh and his wife and son. Baldwin and Simon travel to investigate the crime, and find that a wealthy young widow has been killed as well. Both crimes turn out to be part of a property dispute which Baldwin and Simon solve while Baldwin's servant Edgar helps insure that justice is served.

I enjoyed A Friar's Bloodfeud more than I enjoyed The Butcher of St. Peter's, because the main plot was clearer and more engrossing and the characters better fleshed out. Maybe Jecks is pulling out of his slump. I hope so because I like Baldwin and Simon and wish Jecks would return to giving them stories worthy of their characters.

And Only to Deceive

2010-11-15T18:53:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at Tasha Alexander's books for the past few years - she's shelved near Stephanie Barron - and they looked interesting. They're also published in 'quality paperback' format, and I'm cheap, so I decided to pass until I found a used copy at The Book Corner. It was a worthwhile investment, and I'll probably pick up the next books in the series the next time I'm in Borders.

Well-born widows had more freedom than most women in late Victorian England, so Emily Ashton almost felt lucky when her husband, Vicount Phillip Ashton, died while on safari a few months after they married. As long as she followed the strict mourning rules of the era by withdrawing from society and wearing black, she (and not her husband or father) had control over her life and her property. 18 months after Philip's death, his best friend Colin Hargraves visits Emily and begins to tell her about Philip's interest in Greek and Roman antiquities. Her interest piqued, Emily begins to study ancient art and, eventually Greek - studies which lead her to wonder if her husband was involved in art forgery.

Emily barely knew Philip when he died, but (against the advice of her friend Cecile, a Parisian grand dame) she's fallen in love with him through reading his journals. This is how Alexander sets up the mystery, because if Emily didn't love Philip, she'd have no motivation to clear his name. With the help of her Bryn Mawr-educated friend Margaret, Emily discovers the extent of the forgery scheme and aided by Cecile and her society friends, brings the forger to justice.

I feel like I've left a lot out of this review, but I don't want to give away the delicately balanced plot. Alexander doesn't rely on coincidence, but she ties together the disparate threads of the plot in such a way that revealing almost any detail risks spoilers. Perhaps the only plot point I can safely reveal is Renoir's presence as part of Cecile's circle of friends. I'd seen an exhibit on Renoir's later period a few weeks before I read And Only to Deceive and was struck by how clearly Renoir loved women and everything about women. Alexander must have seen the same thing because she portrays the artist as a man who appreciates the beauty of all women, and passionately loves his wife. Reading the passages set in his studio felt like stepping into one of the paintings I'd seen at the PMA.

The Three Pound Enigma

2010-10-31T18:37:00.002-07:00

Science books can be a crapshoot. Sometimes, the prose is crisp and clear, and the author's complete grasp of the topic is even clearer. Other times, the author is intimately familiar with the topic, but less so with sentence structure and pacing. When I read the jacket to The Three Pound Enigma and discovered that Shannon Moffett was a medical student when her book was published, I was afraid I'd stumbled onto the latter.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Dr. Moffett is a brilliant writer, and smart enough to start out her book with a profile of Dr. Roberta Glick, a professor of neurosurgery and nothing short of a force of nature. She's one of the first women to make her name in neurosurgery and as an established expert in the field, mixes her technical skill and knowledge with a sense of spirituality and a fascinating personality. This is the chapter in which Moffett lays the basic, physiological groundwork for her book and without Dr. Glick, she wouldn't have had the same hook.

Moffett explores both the "how" and the "what" of the brain - the mechanics of neuroimaging and what it tells us about how we thinks; the roots of multiple personalities and the effect on the patient; the mechanics and the ethics of neuromarketing. Even the potentially dry chapters, like the one discussing the intersection of science and philosophy, were crisp and enjoyable. The Three Pound Enigma belongs to the upper echelon of science books - equally enjoyable to the layman and the scientist.

The Chameleon's Shadow

2010-10-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

The protagonist can't be the killer, can he? The author can make it look like the protagonist is the killer, but when you get to the last page, it's someone else, right? Especially with an author like Minette Walters who somehow manages to find a happy ending to particularly dark thrillers.

The Chameleon's Shadow opens with a tank driving over an IED in Iraq, killing two enlisted men and leaving their lieutenant, Charles Acland, clinging to life with severe burns and head injuries. As Charles recovers, we suspect that his physical injuries are not the only cause of his psychological problems. He exhibits remarkable self-control but rages at women - especially his mother and ex-fiancee - and his problems worsen after he is discharged from inpatient care. Severe, frequent migraines and the loss of his left eye have left him unfit for military duty and he spends his days living ascetically and running as if training for an ultra-marathon. While Charles is running through London with nothing but his rage to accompany him, the police are investigating a series of murders of gay and bisexual men. With his blackouts and rage, Charles is a natural suspect, but is he the killer?

Walters leaves us guessing. She relies on coincidence once - when Charles attracts the attention of the police by attacking a Pakistani man in a pub which happens to be owned by the partner of a doctor who acts as a locum for the neighborhood. Jackson treats him during the migraine that occurs shortly after the fight, and he tells her more in 15 minutes than he told his assigned therapists in months. A few days later, the two women take him in and he and Jackson edge towards the solution to the murders as the police approach the same conclusion from another angle. Justice is served, and while The Chameleon's Shadow doesn't end with Walters' traditional happy ending, it's open-ended enough for the reader to believe that Lt. Acland will find some peace.

As I read The Chameleon's Shadow, I was struck by the contrast between Lt. Charles Acland and Capt. Nancy Smith, the heroine of Fox Evil. Both are army officers from farming families, but Lt. Acland apparently entered the army to escape the failing farm while Capt. Smith looks forward to being the fourth generation to work the same successful concern. Capt. Smith's mother used her experience as a gardener on a large estate to add a successful nursery to her husband's business; Lt. Acland's mother believes herself to be a 'lady of leisure.' Capt. Smith is an engineer, and you get the feeling she entered the army as a way to do some good before joining her father in the family business; Lt. Acland seems to have joined the infantry to escape. The two officers have very different military experiences, but I was fascinated by the contrast between the two characters' personalities. Walters wrote the two books about five years apart (with three novels between them), and I wonder whether the contrast was intentional.

The Beauty of the Beastly

2010-10-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

I usually read and enjoy Natalie Angier's columns in the NY Times, and I think that may have affected my enjoyment of The Beauty of the Beastly. It's a compilation of (mostly) re-worked newspaper columns and as a result, nothing felt fresh. Angier has a crisp, readable prose style, and I enjoyed learning tidbits about snake venom and cheetahs, but as a whole, the book felt slightly disposable. Perhaps it would be more enjoyable as a time filler - an 'emergency book' left in a car so that one could randomly pick an essay to read while waiting for someone or something - than as a cover-to-cover read. Maybe the problem was in the editing. Either way, a few weeks after finishing the book, I remember more about reading it (standing on the platform at Suburban Station waiting for a train that came 25 minutes late, carrying it into a movie theater in case I arrived before the friends I was meeting) than its actual contents. I enjoyed it, but (unusually for me) retained almost nothing.

Blindman's Bluff

2010-09-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

There's something nostalgic about Blindman's Bluff. It's Faye Kellerman's 18th Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus Decker novel, and it finally struck me that it's been more than 15 years since I picked up The Ritual Bath while on a layover in Pittsburgh, devoured it, and quickly read the three other books available at that point.

Back then, Rina was a 20-something widow with two small boys; Peter was a police detective in his late 30s, divorced with a teenage daughter. We've seen them age in approximately real time, marry, and have a daughter who's now sixteen. Rina's sons are nearly grown, one in college and the other engaged to a fellow med student, and Peter's daughter is married and after nearly a decade as a police officer has been promoted to detective. Peter's colleagues are aging too, and the book has a bit of a 'changing of the guard' feel. I suspect that Peter will retire around book 20, and Detective Cindy Decker Kutiel will follow her father's footsteps into homicide.

That's in the future - in the present, we have the particularly brutal murders of a real estate developer, his wife, and a member of their household staff and the serious wounding of one of their sons. While Peter deals with department brass and press attention, Rina is serving on a criminal jury. During a break, one of the court translators (the blind man of the title) asks her to describe two men he's eavesdropping on. It's a bit too coincidental that they're discussing Peter's case, but Kellerman manages to prevent this from sinking the plot. She does this by both traditional methods (multiple suspects with multiple motives) and by making the translator seem a little creepy, and maybe a little too interested in Rina.

Blindman's Bluff is an average entry in the Decker/Lazarus series. That's actually a complement, because I've enjoyed every one I've read to date. Peter (with the help of his former partner Marge Dunn and her partner Scott Oliver) solves the case through a combination of plodding and luck, and using only clues which the reader sees. Maybe Kellerman could have mentioned age a bit less, and I would have liked a phone call from one or both of Rina's sons during the family scenes. Still, it's an enjoyable, well-paced novel which left me ready for book #19.

Sizzling Sixteen

2010-09-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Plum considers herself lucky - she has a job which doesn't require pantyhose, an off-and-on relationship with Joe Morelli, and something inexplicable with Carlos "Ranger" Manoso. And, thanks to her Uncle Pip, she has a lucky bottle - it's red and looks like a handblown beer bottle, and at least Uncle Pip didn't leave her his false teeth. Grandma Mazur got those, of course.

Steph isn't feeling very lucky, despite the bottle, as Sizzling Sixteen starts. Her cousin/boss Vinnie has been kidnapped, and since Vinnie's father-in-law Harry the Hammer has sold the bail bonds business to venture capitalists, if they don't find Vinnie, Steph, Lula, and Connie will all be unemployed. This isn't one of Evanovich's more tightly plotted books, but it's fun. There's the usual minor FTA (in this case an octogenarian polygamist), a crazy Lula diet (thankfully dropped by the middle of the book), Car Death, an encounter with Ranger, and an argument with Joe (over peanut butter) which leads to Steph doing the unthinkable and actually having groceries in her fridge. All this (and cameos by Joyce Barnhardt and Moon Man Dunphy - who's running Trenton's largest HobbitCon out of a decrepit RV) floats around Steph, Lula, and Connie rescuing Vinnie (in his underwear), losing him again, and using illicit means and a garage sale (seriously) to free him again. I'm not sure, really, how to review any books in this series, but how can you not love a book that includes Connie's talent for stink bombs and hundreds of Hobbits storming a mobster's mansion?

Poirot Loses a Client

2010-08-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I realized that I'd somehow missed several Agatha Christie mysteries. I started reading her as a teenager, and by the time I graduated from high school owned copies of all her novels. I've also read several of them (Death on the Nile, Third Girl, Sparkling Cyanide) multiple times, and because I tried to read them in order when I was about 15, I've read the first dozen or so. Still, I've somehow missed a few along the way.

Poirot Loses a Client is one of those missing mysteries. It's been on my shelf since about the time I graduated from high school (the print date for my copy is May 1986), but I've spent nearly 25 years passing it over for a fifth reading of Evil Under the Sun or a third reading of The Pale Horse. Poirot Loses a Client is a middling Christie, entertaining but not overly memorable, so maybe it's best that I left it until I was older.

Elderly Emily Arundell lives in Market Basing with a fluttering paid companion and a dog. While hosting her nieces, nephew, and nephew-in-law (all of whom are hard up for cash), she falls down the stairs. She's not seriously injured, but the incident frightens her enough to rewrite her will and to ask M. Poirot for help. Unfortunately, her letter to Poirot stays in her writing desk for two months, and is mailed only after her death from a liver complaint. Miss Arundell's companion, Miss Lawson, inherits the bulk of her employer's estate, but we never seriously suspect her of murder. No, it's the victim's four relatives we suspect, and Christie uses a clever device to identify the true murder. Other than that, we get pictures of village life, Captain Hastings being veddy English, Poirot being Poirot, and a brief look at the Bright Young Things Christie depicted so well. Poirot Loses a Client is the sort of book that you want to read curled up with a hot drink (and perhaps a cat) on a grey, dreary day, but it's still enjoyable on a commuter train as the hottest summer on record begins to turn the dial from "unbearable" to merely "swelter."

Whose Body?

2010-08-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

Acorn Media has rereleased the early-70s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and I've just finished watching the first two. I love the atmosphere - the clothes, the props, the attitude. I think I could very easily have been the eccentric relative to some wealthy, titled family - for one thing, I think 'eccentric' sounds so much nicer than 'weird.'

Lord Peter is clearly eccentric, and wealthy. He has a fabulous flat, collects rare books, and owns a large private car in the early 1920s. He also investigates crimes - not a gentleman's job at a time when gentlemen were defined by not having jobs. His frightfully conventional brother, the Duke of Denver, abhors his hobby but their mother, the Dowager Duchess, takes a more favorable view. It's the Dowager Duchess who calls Lord Peter when the architect reconstructing the local church finds a naked corpse with a pair of pince-nez glasses in his bath. Lord Peter investigates, and finds that the body is probably not that of the affluent man he's been groomed to appear to be. Also investigating the body is Inspector Charles Parker, who is investigating the case of a missing financier who roughly fits the description of the body in the bathtub. The body is not that of Sir Ruben Levy, but Lord Peter finds too many coincidences to believe that the murders are unlinked.

I've read Whose Body at least twice, so I know who did it, but that didn't diminish my enjoyment of the novel. Sayers deserves her place as one of the grand masters of the golden age of mystery. Her Wimsey novels are cleverly plotted, with memorable characters (and even more memorable names - Inspector Sugg, Sir Julian Freake) and the right balance of clues and obfuscation for the reader to solve the mystery but not feel stupid if stumped.

The Burgundian's Tale

2010-08-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's been more than fifteen years since I picked up the first Roger the Chapman book, and I sometimes lose track of the time between stories. It's been about seven or eight years in his timeline since Roger first helped Prince Richard, and close to two years since he's worked on a royal commission. The request to solve The Burgundian's Tale could not come at a better time for Roger - he can't hide the relief at not having another child to support when his newborn daughter dies, and his former mother-in-law (his current wife's cousin) has taken ill and is staying with his family.

It's the perfect time for Roger to walk through the countryside selling his wares, but Prince Richard has other plans. His sister, the Duchess of Burgundy, has returned for a visit and her beloved servant (the son of another servant raised as her companion) has been murdered and Richard 'asks' Roger to solve the mystery. The Burgundian's Tale is a murder in retrospect, and everyone sees the late Fulk Quantrill differently. To his aunt Judith St. Clair (his mother's identical twin), he's a link to her past and now the heir to her considerable wealth. To her stepdaughter, he's a potential suitor and to her stepson he's a competitor. Edmund Brorder, a cousin of Judith's first husband, has the best motive of all, since he stood to inherit his cousin's shop until she rewrote her will. The real motive turns out to be blackmail, not inheritance, and Sedly has written a tightly plotted mystery which leaves just enough clues to allow us to guess the murderer a few paragraphs before Roger tumbles into a trap.

Life Sentences

2010-08-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

Laura Lippman created Tess Monaghan in the mid 1990s. I was watching Homicide and willing to try a Baltimore based mystery. Homicide has been off the air for a decade, but I've been faithful to Lippman's work, maybe because I see a little of myself in Tess. I don't have the adoring, younger boyfriend, but I'm an only child, have sort of fallen into my current career and have 'long hair' as a central part of my persona. The rowing lessons, though, go the other way - I was inspired by Tess's hobby, and one of these years will simultaneously have the time and the money to join one of the boathouses.

Life Sentences is not a Tess Monaghan mystery - it's part of Lippman's series-that-isn't-a-series. Like Lisa Scottoline's books centered on Bennie Rosato's litigation firm, the four (so far) non-Tess books are stand-alone novels loosely connected by recurring characters. The protagonist is Cassandra Follows, a Baltimore native who wrote a best-selling memoir about her childhood and a less-successful follow-up. While promoting an even less well-received novel, Cassandra hears a news story linking a current murder to an infant's disappearance nearly twenty years ago. That child's mother had been Cassandra's classmate in grade school, and since she's going back to Baltimore to interview her father (a retired classics professor) at a fundraiser for her old high school, she decides to investigate what happened to Calliope Jenkins and her missing baby.

I took a course called "History and Fiction" my sophomore year of college. We read autobiographies in the final third of the course and discussed the difference between "bias" and "focus" and how two people will see the same event differently. As Cassandra meets with old friends, she learns that lesson. Everyone she meets remembers the past differently, and some of them are unhappy with how she's portrayed them. Cassandra's, and everyone else's, bias fuel the mystery, sealing Calliope's fate with a mixture of racial and class prejudice. Lippman unraveled this story with just enough clues for me to solve it along with Cassandra.

This seems to be the Year of the Subplot for me, and there's one in Life Sentences, and unlike most of the other subplots I've encountered recently, I thought this one (involving Cassandra's father and the eventual need to re-evaluate her memoir) was interesting and complementary to the main plot. My one problem with the book was the insertion of Gloria Bustamonte. Gloria has appeared in Lippman's other stand-alone books and while she can be an interesting character, she adds nothing to Life Sentences. Her few scenes could have been rewritten to feature other characters, or someone without baggage created for this book. She's a minor distraction, though, and despite my initial reluctance (memoirs and memoirists don't interest me), I enjoyed Life Sentences. I still prefer Tess Monaghan, but I'll keep looking forward to Lippman's other works.

The Price of Murder

2010-08-22T17:20:00.000-07:00

Bruce Alexander participated in a panel on historical mysteries at Bouchercon in 2003. The Price of Murder, the tenth book in the Sir John Fielding series, had just been published, so I found a new author with a decent sized backlist. What I didn't know was that the series would end with the eleventh book, because Mr. Alexander died in 2004. I think that's why it's been over two years since I last read a Sir John Fielding mystery - I know the series is about to end and I want to stretch it out a little longer. Or maybe I was just a bit disappointed in book #9.

The Price of Murder, like several other books I've read this year, is a dual mystery. The first is the murder of a small child whose body is found floating in the Thames. She's the daughter of a prostitute who sold her, knowingly or not, to a pedophile, and then disappeared. While looking for evidence in the missing woman's room, Sir John's assistant Jeremy Proctor meets the woman's brother, a well-known jockey named Deuteronomy Plummer. He's an interesting character, and I enjoyed Alexander's detour into 18th Century horse racing. He relies a bit too much on coincidence (the child's murderer breeds horses), but the excitement of the racing scenes make up for the predictability.

I was disappointed, however, in the subplot. Jeremy's fiancee Clarissa Roundtree meets an old friend who's now living in London and helping her mother run a boardinghouse. Her brief disappearance and the trial of her alleged kidnappers is entertaining, but serves only to move up the couple's wedding date. Alexander should have either integrated this story line more closely with the main plot or left it out.

The Shape of Snakes

2010-08-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

I have no idea why Minette Walters (or her publisher) decided to call her 2001 thriller The Shape of Snakes. Maybe it's a reference to the untrustworthiness of old friends or the surprisingly manipulative behavior of the heroine, or maybe it was simply an eye-catching title.

M. Ranleigh (we never know her first name) and her husband Sam bought a small house in a soon-to-gentrify neighborhood in London in the mid 1970s. The neighborhood contained a mixture of people - young couples climbing the ladder, families which had spent generations on the dole, the outwardly respectable man carrying on an affair with the prostitute across the street while his wife was dying of cancer, and Annie Butts, a biracial woman whose Tourette's Syndrome made her vulnerable to the neighborhood bullies. One rainy night, Annie was murdered, although the cursory police investigation deemed it an accidental death. Mrs. Ranleigh, who discovered the dying woman, refused to accept the verdict and over the next several months spiraled into depression, anorexia, and agoraphobia, eventually leaving the area to follow her husband to an overseas posting in an attempt to salvage her marriage.

Twenty years lager, the Ranleighs return to England, and at first it looks like a coincidence that their new family doctor treated Miss Butts a quarter century earlier, and that they live within a short drive of several of their old neighbors. As Mrs. Ranleigh casually mentions former acquaintances and as we read the notes of the doctor who treated her for post-partum depression in the early 1980s, we realize that she has spent the past two decades trying to discover who killed Annie. Her most valuable resource are gossipy letters and e-mails from her friend Libby, the ex-wife of her husband's friend Jock, which mix news of her former neighbors with tales of her rising career and Jock's boom-and-bust lifestyle, which has has gone bust by the time the Ranleighs return to England.

I've read several of Walters's books, and in some ways she's a darker, more violent Agatha Christie with deeper characters. Her books center on rather gruesome crimes, and but there's always a happy ending. Here, Walters hides the identity of the killer well enough that even though I solved the mystery with a few pages left, I was shocked to discover 'whodunnit.' The happy ending is Ranliegh's sense of peace, and how some of the supporting characters have happier lives in 2000 than one would have expected twenty years earlier.

Mary, Queen of Scots

2010-08-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

I enjoy books - not just reading, the physical objects. I like seeing how styles have changed over the years, and trying to guess the print date of a particular edition from the typeface illustrations on the cover. My copy of Mary, Queen of Scots is very clearly an old copy. For one thing, it's a pocket sized paperback - non-fiction hasn't been published like that in decades (to the chagrin of those of us who prefer paperbacks because they can be slipped into a pocket). There's also the price ($1.50), the photo of Lady Antonia Fraser on the back (with a bouffant, heavy eye makeup, and large rings, making her look a bit like the character Jo Grant from Doctor Who) and the page advertising Deliverance, which is "Soon to be a major motion picture." There's also my grandmother's name in pencil inside the back cover, with the date "3/18/71." My grandmother died in 1983, so this book has sat on my shelf for more than twice as long as it sat on hers.

Mary, Queen of Scots was Fraser's first book, launching a career which includes an almost equal number of biographies and mystery novels, and she writes more like a novelist than a historian. I mean that as a complement - I've read two of her other biographies and her style is clear and compelling, no matter how dry the details of royal ancestry may be. Here, she vividly portrays Mary Stuart as both a headstrong young woman and a political pawn. Like her cousin Elizabeth, Mary was a symbol of her faith in a time of religious upheaval but maintained a 'live and let live' attitude towards others' beliefs. Mary, however, did not have the luxury of ruling a fairly powerful state or the education and brilliance of the English Queen. Mary was bright and well read, if perhaps not well-taught in the art of statecraft, but Elizabeth was an extraordinary intellect who benefited from a comprehensive education.

Mary also married three times, once as a child and twice due to poor judgment. Crowned Queen of Scotland as a newborn, Mary was betrothed to the French Dauphin and sent to France at age 5 to be raised in the French court. Her fiance, Francis, was a weak, unpleasant boy, probably unequal to the task of ruling one country, let alone two. Two years after they married and after a year as Consort of France, Mary was Queen Dowager and soon returned to her own kingdom.

The Scotland Mary returned to rule in 1561 was not the same country she left. The Protestant Reformation had taken hold in Edinburgh, and the mostly Protestant nobility did not want a Catholic (and to a lesser extent a woman) ruling their country. Mary's attitude was more modern - she considered faith a private matter and was willing to let Scotland remain predominantly Protestant but tolerant of Catholics like herself. As I read these passages, I couldn't understand how she was seen as a threat to the Protestant majority. Maybe her years in France and the expectation that Francis would be the de facto ruler of Scotland left her unable to effectively communicate her temperate views, or maybe John Knox was just too powerful of a personality. Regardless, Mary come across as more of a victim than a perpetrator of interfaith political battles.

Elizabeth I understood the pitfalls of marriage, especially for a queen, and managed to steer clear. Mary, though, impulsively fell in love with and married her pretty-boy cousin, Henry, Lord Darnley. Henry was petty, vain, and promiscuous. The couple essentially separated when Mary was pregnant with the future James VI/I, after he was involved in the murder of her private secretary, David Rizzio. Henry, who showed even less talent for conspiracy than Mary, betrayed the Protestant nobles behind the plot but the marriage was essentially over from that point. Mary and her counsellors explored the possibility of divorce, but Henry was murdered while escaping from a castle which was blown up by political enemies. One of those men, Lord Bothwell, then abducted and raped Mary, and then forced her to marry him. Shortly afterwards, she was forced to abdicate her thrown and tried to escape to England. There she became the tragic figure of history, the Queen locked in a tower until she was deemed too much of a threat to Queen Elizabeth's power and was tried for treason and convicted on the basis of intentionally misinterpreted and mistranslated letters.

Fatally Flaky

2010-07-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

Diane Mott Davidson will never go on probation - her Goldy Schultz series is light enough that even the sub-par entries are pleasant, and the recipes always make me drool. Fatally Flaky, the 15th Goldy novel, is one of the better ones. Goldy is catering a wedding for Bridezilla Billie - a rich and unpleasant young woman who doesn't need reality TV editing to make her into a nightmare. The book doesn't start with Billie's wedding, though - it starts with the wedding of a sweet young woman who has asked a beloved local GP to give her away and make the first toast. Doc Finn is also Goldy's recently relocated godfather's best friend, and when the doctor dies in a suspicious car accident on his way to the catering hall, Jack is understandably distressed. And suspicious - suspicions which lead to his being attacked and Goldy's undercover assignment at a local health spa. For me, the mystery was an 80% solve - I figured out "who" fairly early on, but most of the "how" remained unknown until the final chapters. I really enjoyed my time with Goldy and her family, though, and the recipes include one that my pork-loving parents will absolutely love.

The Triumph of Caesar

2010-07-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

Gordianus, I thought you were dead.

So did I. Saylor's previous novel, The Judgment of Caesar, ended with Gordianus walking into the Nile. Two years later, he is clearly alive and has returned to Rome and his unconventional family with Bethesda. Although his son Eco has taken over his detective business, Gordianus finds that he cannot refuse a commission from Caesar's wife Calpurnia who fears her husband will be assassinated during his triumph celebrating his victories in Gaul, Egypt, and Asia. Nor can he resist solving the mystery of who killed Hieronymus, the former Scapegoat of Massalia who saved Gordianus's life and then followed him to Rome.

Saylor leads Gordanius through meeting with the political elite and walks through the less fashionable suburbs of Rome, and gives us a good seat for the pageantry of Rome at its most excessive. Along the way, we see that Gordianus's daughter Diana is (as we suspected) a natural in the family business and, yes, find the murderer. I've mentioned before that I've read enough mysteries that I usually figure out 'whodunnit' and The Triumph of Caesar was no exception. Saylor sufficiently obscured the murder's identity without cheating, so I was satisfied with the outcome. Most importantly, Saylor transported me into a different world - for a few minutes, I wasn't sitting on a commuter train but watching a mob gasp in awe at shiny armor and exotic animals.

North and South

2010-07-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't read much Victorian fiction, and I haven't particularly enjoyed much of what I have read. It's too sentimental, with neon-outlined lessons on behavior. I prefer something a bit more subtle and less self conscious. North and South both confirms and confounds my prejudices. The rich are so because they're better people, the poor are either vulgar or victims, the 'good' are clearly rewarded, and every action is ponderously presented - at least on the surface. Gaskell places several compelling plots against this backdrop and draws her characters with a nuanced hand.

Margaret Hale has been raised as the 'companion' to a richer and prettier cousin but has an independent mind and inner compass. Shortly after her return to her family, her father, a country vicar, has to give up his post because of his religious doubts, and the family moves from rural southern England to Manchester (renamed Milton-Northern) where he will support the family as a private tutor. Once settled, Margaret begins to adapt to her surroundings and sees that class structures are beginning to change. John Thornton, the mill owner, is not a gentleman in the sense of being a self-supporting member of the gentry, but he's financially well off. The Hales, in contrast, were at least on the fringes of Society but in Milton Northern, their low income puts them down a few rungs on the social ladder. This leads to a number of misunderstandings between Margaret and John and their families of the sort that would fuel the plot of 1930s screwball comedies but here come across just seriously enough to retain the slightly medicinal flavor of a Victorian lesson.

The working class characters aren't quite as fully drawn. Shortly after moving to Milton Northern, Margaret meets Bessy Higgins, a young woman dying from industrial asthma and probably TB, and her father Nicholas. Bessy is a stereotypical young victim - saintly, and despairing over her father's atheism. Nicholas is a bit more complex - he's one of the leaders of a nascent labor movement which Gaskell views with favor - but he still borders on cartoon. The Higgins's neighbors are crude and uneducated, and the strikebreakers are nothing more than faceless, superstitious, Irish thugs.

I generally enjoyed North and South. Margaret is an interesting character who grows over the course of the novel, and the plots tie together neatly but not too neatly. I found the ending to be a bit rushed, and a bit too neat, although that is due at least in part to Gaskell's publisher truncating the final third of the novel.

The Snow Empress

2010-06-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what Laura Joh Rowland has in mind for her characters. Three books ago, she promoted Sano Ichiro to Chamberlain, where he spends less time investigating and more time watching his back in the political shark tank of the Tokagawa Shogunate. This leaves Lady Reiko fewer chances to act as an unofficial detective and his former assistant, Hirata, as the Shogun's chief investigator. Hirata, however, was injured, and as part of his training to recover has become quite mystical. All these changes are believable in the framework of the series, and while I'm not sure where Rowland is taking them, I'm enjoying the journey.

The Snow Empress focuses on a journey to the northern reaches of Japan. Lord Matsudaira has kidnapped Sano's and Reiko's son Masahiro, causing Reiko to withdraw within her sorrow. Matsudaira has hidden Masahiro in Ezogashima, where Lord Matsudaira sends Sano to find out why the local lord has not made his required annual trip to Edo. Once the party arrives, they discover that Lord Matsumae has had a mental breakdown following the murder of his native mistress, Tekare. As Reiko searches for her son, Sano and Hirata try to solve Tekare's murder, a task complicated by how different she appeared to everyone who knew her. (Yes, I know this review is begging for a Rashomon reference, but I've never seen that movie, so I'll refrain.) Logic, legwork, a bit of Hirata's new-found mysticism, and Lord Matsumae's rage avenge Tekare's death, allowing Sano to return to the familiar but uncertain environment of the Shogun's court.

Dirty Blonde

2010-06-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

I miss Rosato & Associates. The last few Lisa Scottoline books I've read haven't been part of her series-that-isn't-a-series involving Philadelphia's only all-female litigation firm. The titular Dirty Blonde is Cate Fante, a newly appointed judge originally from Centralia PA. Cate is reliably smart - and smart-mouthed - as all Scottoline heroines are, but I just couldn't get involved in her story. I think Scottoline might have had the same problem, or maybe she realized that there are only so many times she can make her protagonist the target of a stalker.

Dirty Blonde is full of witty dialogue, well-drawn settings (as a native Philadelphian, I mentally penciled in street names and landmarks as Cate drove around town), and daring escapes. What's missing is a strong central plot. Scottoline has thrown in too many subplots, including Cate's best friend and her autistic toddler, Cate's habit of picking up men in dive bars, and Cate's trip back to her burning, abandoned home town, and they all distract from the intertwined problems of Cate's stalking and the murder of a plaintiff Cate has ruled against.

The Typhoon Lover

2010-06-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

In her early twenties, Japanese-American Rei Shimura fell into two careers - one as an antiques expert and one as a detective. A decade and eight novels later, Rei is now 30 and Sujita Massey has solved the problem of how to explain why a woman in a seemingly genteel job keeps coming across dead bodies. The day after Rei's surprise 30th birthday party (thrown at a hot new club by her on-and-off fiance, Hugh), she drags herself to a 9 am interview at the Smithsonian...except it's at rather than with the museum. Rei's former lover, Takedo, has apparently become involved in smuggling antiquities out of Iraq and the CIA thinks Rei can use him to recover an ancient ewer.

Maybe Rei fell for the bait (she's been barred from traveling to Japan and if she takes this job, the State Department will end that), or maybe she realizes that her relationship with Hugh (described as arguments punctuated by great sex) is falling apart. Either way, she did not expect to find Takeo engaged to a high-strung girl from a political family or that she and Takeo would have a one night stand in the middle of a storm. After some dead ends, Rei finds that the smuggler is much closer than she though.

The Butcher of St. Peter's

2010-06-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

I have mixed feelings about prolific series-bases writers. Michael Jecks produces a mystery about every nine months, which means that I usually have more than one of his titles in my infrequent amazon.co.uk deliveries, and if I were to stop importing paperbacks, I'd still have half a dozen Sir Baldwin mysteries sitting on my shelf.

Unfortunately, The Butcher of St. Peter's is far from the best novel in the series. Jecks seems to be in a bit of a lull, writing less vividly than he did a dozen years and 15 or 16 books ago. The Keeper of the King's Peace, Sir Baldwin Furnshill, has been called to Exeter to solve a dispute over the estate and remains of a wealthy man. As he and Bailiff Simon Puttock try to untangle this complicated and uninvolving problem, they are drawn into the murder of a prominent citizen. We should suspect the titular butcher, but we don't - like the people of Exeter, we know he's a broken but ultimately harmless man. Unfortunately, I didn't care who committed the murder, or the resolution of Sir Henry's estate and burial, or the actions of a medieval crime lord. It's a kitchen sink of a novel, in which these three minor mysteries are mixed with Sir Baldwin's guilt over his brief encounter (while shipwrecked) with another woman, his wife Jeanne's fear that she has lost her husband's love, and the preening of Sir Baldwin's nemesis, Sir Perigrine de Barnstaple. I enjoy spending time with these characters, but I wish Jecks had devised a stronger plot.

Perfect Figures

2010-06-03T18:49:00.001-07:00

I think I bought Perfect Figures because it's about math. In retrospect, I think I pulled it off the shelf at Daedalus because of the author. If someone is willing to be known, not just personally but also professionally as Bunny Crumpacker, well, I just have to buy the book. Crumpacker lives up to her name - Perfect Figures is a fluffy bunny of a book, the first math-related book I've ever read that would be more enjoyable accompanied by a neon-colored drink garnished with an umbrella. A little math, a little history, some folklore, and a bit of rhapsodizing over the shape of 8 makes for an enjoyable but ultimately ephemeral experience.

Dead Air

2010-05-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Just a quick explanation for the nearly two months of silence. My mom was hit by a car a few days after my last post and I've been spending much of my free time with her - at first helping her, and now trying to fend of stir craziness. It hasn't left a lot of time for posting (or reading, for that matter).

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

2010-03-16T19:50:00.001-07:00

I have a confession to make - an embarrassing confession. I've only read three stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and all three were read in school. I aspire to win an Edgar, and yet I've never read his Dupin stories. I'm not quite sure how this happened, because I've enjoyed the Poe works I've read, but somehow he's slipped through the cracks (and then drugged and plastered into the wall). I did read a literary biography for 12th grade English, but somehow, Sr. Maureen Christi (who is both a Poe scholar and a woman with a wicked sense of humor) managed to find a book that made the fascinatingly self-destructive Virginian, well, dull.

Daniel Stashower's The Beautiful Cigar Girl may not be as deep as the biography I read in 1985, but it's much more entertaining. Mary Rogers gained notoriety as a counter girl in a New York tobacconist's shop in the late 1830s. Men lined up to be served by her, and newspapers published bad poetry in her honor - she was a Survivor demi-star for the early industrial era. After a mysterious disappearance, she left her job and, with the help of her former employer, Mary and her mother opened a boarding house. One hot summer day in 1841, Mary disappeared and her battered, strangled body floated ashore three days alter. Stashower alternates between the investigation of Mary's murder and Poe's chaotic life, two threads which meet when Poe proposes a roman a clef (The Murder of Marie-Roget) in which he will solve the crime. Since this involves Poe, there must be a twist, and one that works against the writer. Shortly before the publication of the third and final installment, an accidental death warms up the ice-cold case and makes Poe's solution impossible. He quickly re-writes his story in which he claims that he has been forbidden to reveal the solution and experiences another, brief period of fame and solvency but ultimately spirals back into self-destruction. Poe outlived Mary Rogers by only 8 years, dying in Baltimore of either alcoholism or rabies at age 40.

Red Chrysanthemum

2010-02-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

Red Chrysanthemum is the 11th book in Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series. Three years into his tenure as Chamberlain, Sano and his wife Reiko haven't exactly grown apart, but his new position means they spend less time together, and Sano is often too distracted or tired to really listen to Reiko. Additionally, as a compromise candidate in an unstable political climate, Sano must constantly be vigilant for any plot to depose hiim.

Reiko is an unusual character - a Samurai class woman whose father allowed her to train in marital arts, and a clever detective who helped Sano when he was the Shogun's chief investigator. Now, with few outlets for her mental energy, she has begun helping those who write to her. She's done some good, freeing abused wives from marriages and bringing the killer of a pregnant peasant teen to justice, but she's also made enemies. Did one of those enemies frame her for murder?

Reiko has been found - by Hirata, Sano's former right-hand-man and now successor as chief investigator - in the bed of a murdered and mutilated daimo. Reiko can't explain how she got there, her memories don't make sense, and the daimo's widow claims Reiko was her late husband's lover and killed him in a jealous rage. Rowland interweaves Reiko's mystery with the political machinations of competing factions in the Tokagawa Shogunate which may lead to Sano's execution for treason. Like one of House's patients, everyone Sano, Reiko, and Hirata meets lies, or tells a tale too remarkable to believe.

Red Chrysanthemum is a tightly plotted mystery, with all threads (including the false leads and red herrings) getting neatly tied up in the end. Because I read paperbacks and almost always know that there will be a next book, I was never really concerned that Sano or Reiko would be executed, but I was mostly pleased at how Rowland 'saved' them. I have one minor quibble, though, and it's with Hirata. He seems to bend to the needs to the plot and occasionally against his known character, and his actions in the climactic scene have a hint of deus ex machina. Still, this is a good entry in what has been a remarkably even-quality series.

Revolutionary Road

2010-02-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so the 50s were a recent memory to which the current day was unfavorably compared. It wasn't until later that the general pop culture allowed us to see that, like all eras, the 50s had both positive and negative sides. Still, there was the occasional movie or book, like Revolutionary Road, which cast a jaundiced eye on the contemporary landscape.

Revolutionary Road showed the unpleasant and unhappy people behind the shiny curtain of 1950s suburbia. April and Frank Wheeler married too young, had children before they were ready (if they'd ever be ready), and moved to the suburbs because it was expected. They're miserable - a frustrated actress reluctantly keeping house and an insecure pseudo-intellectual in a do-nothing office job. It's possible that neither would be happy in any life - wealthy April was abandoned by her parents as a toddler and raised by a remote aunt; born to older parents a generation after his brothers, Frank spent his childhood moving constantly as his father's sales career spiraled downward - but they seem to feed on each other's misery.

The book opens with a community theater production that goes poorly. April was the star, and after a few good scenes, gave as wooden a performance as the rest of her cast mates. This starts a multi-day fight with Frank, and you get the idea that the two of them never have a reason for their disputes and yet are rarely on speaking terms with each other. Against this bitter backdrop, they go through the motions of normal life - work, housework, drinks and dinner with a neighborhood couple. Then April decides they should move to Paris - she's worked everything out, government agencies need secretaries and Frank can 'find himself' abroad - and at first this dream brings them back together. They spend long nights discussing their dreams and making love.

And then it falls apart. Maybe he's afraid of change, maybe it's because he's actually engaged at work for the first time, or maybe he just sees the problems in April's plan, but Frank starts to waver. Then April discovers that she's pregnant. Neither really wants a third child, but a baby is a good way to postpone moving to Paris. Maybe Frank really doesn't want to move, but is that a reason to see keeping April from self-aborting as a battle to win? It's an uncomfortable passage. For some, even contemplating abortion is reprehensible; and yet Frank seems concerned only with winning the battle with April, not with the baby. Frank was never a particularly sympathetic character, but when he wins, he seems to let his crueler nature peek through. That mean streak, and a pair of visits from their realtor's disturbed son, leads up to a fight that ends tragically for all.

Revolutionary Road is depressing and compelling. I knew from the start that the characters were doomed, but I wanted to know how. The characters are generally unappealing, but I still wanted to know more about them, maybe find some redeeming characteristics.

My copy of the book is a movie tie-in, so there's a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover. Normally, when I read a book that's been made into a movie I haven't seen, the cast doesn't influence how I see the characters, but for some reason I saw DiCaprio as Frank. I'm not sure why (I haven't seen many of DiCaprio's movies), but I think it's because he looks uncomfortably boyish. In his 30s, he still has a baby face but an adult presence. He's one of those people whose age you can't place because he seems both younger and older than he actually is, and that's Frank - a world-weary but immature 30-year-old manchild.

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

2010-02-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's a Lacroix, darling - Edina Monsoon

I've never really understood the appeal of labels and logos. Part of it is that when you get right down to it, I'm frugal (unless you ask my mom who'll tell you I'm cheap, and back it up with tales of unbroken twenties and moth-filled wallets, some of which may actually be true) and can't get my mind around the idea of paying a 300% premium for the privilege of wearing someone else's name across my butt. I'm a rarity though, as Dana Thomas tells us in Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Thomas traces luxury houses from their early years of hand-crafting beautiful luggage, clothing, and accessories for the very wealthy through their expansion into new markets in the 1980s, to their status as mall stalwarts earning profits on entry level products. Along the way, she stops for factory tours, a ride-along with a detective who specializes in busting counterfeiters, and a gossipy look into the world of celebrity stylists.

Luxury used to belong only to the wealthy - wealthy women ordered couture dresses and custom-made handbags. That was fine for small, family owned houses which took pride in their craftsmanship, but as the luxury companies merged into publicly-held groups, profits became more important. To keep up with the pressure from stockholders, brands initially expanded into emerging markets (especially Japan) and lower cost items such as perfume and accessories. The next step was to cut costs. Thomas mentions the move towards unlined items and one (unnamed) house which shortened the sleeves of their jackets by half an inch, saving thousands of dollars (a move which particularly bothers me, a 5'8" woman with very long arms). She also discusses outsourcing, a practice most houses try to hide, by placing the "made in China" label in an inconspicuous place or by emphasizing the European site at which the Asian-made parts were assembled. These sections poke a hole in the "I'm paying for quality" argument I sometimes hear from women carrying designer bags - the entry level bags are at least sometimes made in sweatshops and from substandard materials, just like the counterfeit versions and the no-name bags found in discount stores.

Thomas's book is more a collection of essays on related topics than a unified work, and the chapter on the rise of the Hollywood stylist was the most fun to read. Old Hollywood was a pretty, escapist, world where everyone wore evening dress and each studio employed stylists who not only designed gorgeous costumes but also dresses for stars to wear when they were nominally off-duty. As the studio system fell, and a more naturalistic style of film came into vogue, movie characters wore off-the-rack clothes and stars were on their own on the red carpet. Dressing movie characters in the sort of clothes their characters would wear in real life (no more picnicking in elaborate silk dresses) makes the movies more realistic, but also freed stars to indulge in tackiness. Stylists stepped in, saving stars from their baser tastes and the public from seeing a repeat of Kim Basinger's self-designed, one-armed 1990 Oscar gown. As stylists became more powerful, they began making demands on the houses, some of which were unreasonable and none of which were substantiated in the book. I understand that Thomas's sources for this chapter probably spoke off the record to preserve their own jobs, but they ring true, perhaps because I've seen so many beautiful stars wearing the wrong dress from a hot designer. The chartreuse dress Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars in 1997 made her look seriously ill, and the dress as seriously ugly as Demi Moore's bicycle shorts from a few years earlier, and the only explanation I can think of for her wearing it was a backroom deal by her stylist.

I enjoyed Deluxe, but for the most part it confirmed what I knew or suspected. Luxury brands are no longer a sign of high quality but a public badge consumers wear to say "I've arrived" or a marketing-driven indulgence. A complex web of advertising and product placement has convinced us that a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes or an Armani dress or a Vuitton bag are necessary indulgences, or at least of higher value than a similar item with a less prestigious name.

Wearing a logo means you've won the economic game when Deluxe was published in 2007, but does that still apply? As I read, I felt the ghost of the Great Recession - are consumers as willing to spend for a name without a clear increase in quality? Is shopping still a hobby, and if not, will it become one again in the future? How many of the women who bought a new 'it' bag every season have had economic setbacks and look at the shelf full of designer accessories with regret? Entertaining and well-written, Deluxe, may have profiled the final days of a label obsessed society.

The Lady Elizabeth

2010-02-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

We know how it ends. Elizabeth R, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen ascended to the throne of a tiny, near-bankrupt island nation set it on the path to empire and cultural domination. Alison Weir's The Lady Elizabeth tells us how it began, with a startlingly intelligent little girl, who before her third birthday asked why she was no longer Lady Princess, but merely Lady Elizabeth. The reason, of course, is that her father has declared her illegitimate after executing her mother on trumped-up charges of adultery and is once again in search of a wife and an heir, leaving Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary in limbo.

The Lady Elizabeth is a novel, so Weir can play a little bit with the historical record. We know the basic facts - Elizabeth was a brilliant scholar but a bit of a little girl lost who never really experienced family life until Katherine Parr married Henry VIII. She remained Elizabeth's guardian after the king died, and seemed to tolerate her fourth husband's early-morning visits to Elizabeth's room. Thomas Seymour's physical improprieties with Elizabeth are part of the historical record (and historical rumor), and the scenes are a bit uncomfortable to read. At 14, Elizabeth was old enough to marry - in fact, Seymour had tried to marry her - and found the Admiral attractive at first, but we're still reading about a teenager being molested by her step-father, with the apparent tacit approval of the only mother she's ever known. Maybe Weir could have skipped this episode, but instead she uses it as Elizabeth's introduction to the treachery of courtiers. It's a lesson she needs, because her youth will be spent dealing with shifting political and religious alliances. Elizabeth survives the proto-Puritan reign of her brother, and the Inquisition-tinged reign of her sister because she's smart and savvy enough to stay out of the political intrigues which might land her on the throne - or the scaffold. True, she has some brilliant advisors like William Cecil, but she's also poorly served by other alleged protectors like her governess/companion Kat Astley who encourages Seymour's attentions to her charge until long after they've gotten out of hand.

Religion plays a major part in the novel, as it did in the Tudor Era. Although Henry VIII broke from Rome and is the founder of the Anglican Church, he died as a Catholic, just not one who followed the Pope and who nearly brought heresy charges against the secretly Protestant Katherine Parr. Elizabeth, too, is a Protestant, and often portrayed herself as a modest Protestant maiden, albeit one who seems to be a forerunner of the Sexy Librarian ("Why, Lady Elizabeth, you're beautiful!"). Unlike her siblings, the fanatically Protestant Edward VI and the equally ultra-orthodox Catholic Mary I, she takes a more nuanced view of faith, believing it to be more of a private matter.

I agree with Elizabeth, but wonder how much of her half-siblings' fanaticism is natural and how much grew from their circumstances. Edward VI became king at age 9 and while intelligent, was a sheltered, naive boy ripe for manipulation by Protestant courtiers who wanted to scrub the Anglican Church of its Catholic roots. He outlawed Catholicism and made the Pope a favorite villain, then died at age 16. Mary, who first found solace in her faith allowed that faith to grow into an intolerant ultra-orthodoxy during the decades in which she was a political impediment to her father and thwarted in her desire for marriage and children. After ascending to the throne, she married a man as intolerant as she who argued for her sister's execution, and embarked on the persecution of those who would not embrace the True Faith. Both monarchs encouraged evil in the pursuit of religion, and I give Weir some credit for showing Edward as weak and Mary as desperate rather than as merely despotic bigots.

This is Weir's second novel, and I enjoyed it more than her first. Innocent Traitor was good, but the dogmatic, slightly priggish Lady Jane Grey isn't as interesting of a character as the brilliant and vivacious Elizabeth. Weir also stays with Elizabeth's point of view, which gives the book a more unified feel than the shifting narration of Innocent Traitor. She has since returned to biography, including a recently published book on Anne Boleyn's final days, but I hope she returns to fiction, perhaps with a novel about Mary or a humanization of Edward.

To Kill or Cure

2010-01-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

How does a doctor expose a snake-oil salesman when the most skilled physician has little more than a belief in hand washing and a few symptomatic treatments at his disposal? That is Matthew Bartholomew's dilemma in To Kill or Cure, Susanna Gregory's thirteenth mystery set in 14th Century Cambridge. Trained in Europe by an Arab physician, Bartholomew is the most modern of Cambridge's five medical men - he has studied anatomy (illegal in England at the time) and has a basic understanding of contagion and the connection between dirt and infection. Still, many of his patients die, leaving the residents of Cambridge vulnerable to the charms of Richard Arderne, a charismatic man who claims to cure any ailment (for a large fee, of course) with his magic feather. A magic feather might not impress us as much as, say, ginko biloba capsules, but since even doctors in 1357 didn't know how or why their patients recovered, I can understand how people might want to believe Arderne's spells.

Arderne works against a backdrop of growing town/gown tensions. Several years after the plague, prices have increased but the rents University students pay are statutorily kept artificially low and the landlords have organized, asking that the rates be tripled, or else they will no longer rent to students. An apparent accident which kills one of Cambridge's other doctors leads to a riot in which a student and a townsman are killed, and a second, injured student disappears. Bartholomew, acting as the University Corpse Examiner, finds that his colleague was actually murdered, but when Arderne brings the dead student back to life as Bartholomew begins his examination, he begins to question his skills.

I've mentioned before that I'm rarely tricked by mysteries that don't cheat, and I solved the Arderne plot, perhaps a little too quickly. The rent plot was a bit murkier, and while Gregory didn't quite cheat, she threw in a few too many suspects and motivations in the last few chapters. I think Gregory may have realized that the Arderne plot was too thin and the rent plot too hard to solve for either to stand alone and tried to shoehorn them into a single novel.

It may look like I didn't enjoy To Kill or Cure, but I did. Although thin, the Arderne plot was amusing and I was happy to see Gregory return Brother Michael to his earlier characterization. Senior Proctor (and Chancellor in all but name) and Bartholomew's Michaelhouse College colleague, Michael had begun to veer towards the stereotype of the gluttonous, jolly monk with a somewhat cavalier attitude towards his vow of chastity. The rent plot, while not particularly satisfying, brought Michael the courtier - an intelligent man skilled in balancing the competing interests of multiple parties and a lover of University politics - to the forefront. He's not the fool he's played in the last few novels, but a skilled professional who manages to control a tinder-box town in tense times.

New Year's Resolution

2009-12-29T13:45:00.000-08:00

I started this blog a year ago because I'd entered a "52 books in 52 weeks" challenge and wanted a place to put my reviews. Well, for the 3rd year in a row I read fewer than 52 books (I should finish #35 by Thursday) and have given up on catching up on my reviews. I don't regret it - I fell behind because the Phillies played to well for me to turn off the TV or try writing with the game on in the background - but it's time to start again. I've signed up for the 2010 challenge, so this year I will

Read at least 52 books
Not buy any new books until I've read 10 unread books lying around my house (I bought at least 10 more books than I read last year)
Make a conscious effort to never have more than two books waiting for a review and to post at least three reviews each month.
Be less self conscious about what I'm writing. I started posting reviews so I could get used to having others read what I write, and I've been debating whether I should continue posting my thoughts 'as-is' or if I should put more thought and editing time into them. Both methods have drawbacks - when I spend too much time editing, I feel like discarding the post, but if the only editing I do is a quick grammar check, then I feel that I could have done a better job. I've decided that the lesser evil is to just post, and (I hope) my reviews will just get better with practice.

Happy New Year!

A Royal Affair

2009-11-27T16:07:00.000-08:00

As an American growing up in Philadelphia, all I knew about George III is that he was the bloody tyrant against whom the American colonist rebelled, ensuring a steady stream of tourists to my home town every summer. Stella Tillyard's A Royal Affair barely mentions George's political life and focuses on his siblings. Frederick, Prince of Wales and Augusta had nine children, six of whom lived to adulthood. George III was unusual for his time and social position in his monogamy and acetic habits; his siblings more than made up for him.

His older sister, Augusta, was too smart and too forward for the marriage market and eventually married a German Duke, producing the ill-fated and uncrowned Queen Caroline. Edward, Duke of York was the consummate playboy and a financial drain on the royal treasury before dying of malaria at age 28. Henry, Duke of Cumberland, was co-respondent in a society divorce before entering a scandalous but ultimately successful marriage with a commoner. William, Duke of Gloucester, married the illegitimate and widowed society beauty Maria Walpole, only to abandon her after reconciling with his brother.

The saddest and most scandalous marriage was that of George's youngest sister, Caroline Matilda. Married at age 15 to the cruel and unbalanced Christian VII of Denmark, she was essentially abandoned by her husband after giving birth to their son. She eventually entered into an affair with Johann Fredrich Struensee, one of her husband's advisers, was involved in an unsuccessful rebellion against her husband, was exiled, and died of scarlet fever at age 24. Tillyard spends about half of A Royal Affair dissecting Caroline Matilda's marriage, perhaps because it's a case study of why arranged marriages are a bad idea. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very interesting or long-lived marriage and A Royal Affair never comes alive like Tillyard's previous book, Aristocrats.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

2009-11-27T15:46:00.000-08:00

I want Mary Roach's job. She investigates odd topics like how we handle dead bodies or investigate the afterlife and writes witty essays which walk the line between irreverent and disrespectful. She freely admits in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife that she's a skeptic, but still treats her interview subjects, which range from a little Indian boy believed to have the reincarnated soul of a man from a neighboring village, to a scientist investigating near death experiences, to the woman whose career serves as the basis for the show Medium, with sincerity and asks serious questions. Roach saves her more sarcastic comments for the chapters on past paranormal experiments and fads (the chapter on ectoplasm is more disgusting than almost anything in Stiff), and for herself. Like Roach, I'm a skeptic, but I think I could conduct a professional, respectful conversation with a paranormal investigator. What I don't think I could do is enroll in psychic school or help with an experiment which involves listening for the ghosts of the Donner Party. Roach did both of these, and managed to both keep a straight face and make herself the butt of the joke ("I can't believe I'm doing this!") in her essays.

Careless in Red

2009-11-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

Warning - there are some minor spoilers for With No One As Witness.

Elizabeth George hooked me the first time I read one of her novels. For the Sake of Elena is her fifth Lynley/Havers novel, and George made her victim an unpleasant young woman who used people and painted the killer in a more sympathetic light. Too many evil to the core killers and sweet, innocent victims cheapen the mystery genre. Most of George's novels present a messier world, where murder isn't justified but is perhaps explicable. The murderer acts in the heat of passion, the victim has done something horrible, and the worlds of those around the pair are shattered.

George also created an engaging and intelligent detective in Barbara Havers. Technically, the hero of her series is Inspector Thomas Lynley, Eight Earl of Asherton, but Havers is a much more interesting character. Lynley may be rebelling from his aristocratic upbringing by being a policeman, but it's the nature rather than the existence of his career that strikes us as unusual. When we meet her, Barbara Havers is a bright, striving, dowdy and dumpy, working-class woman still coping with a decade-old tragedy. She's not supposed to amount to anything - maybe work in a shop for a few years, marry, and stay in the neighborhood. Unfortunately for her, she's ambitious, highly intelligent, and not pretty, and therefore doesn't fit in. The first eight or nine books split their focus between Lynley and Havers, and we see her break down her defenses, gain confidence in her abilities, and eventually carry a narrative on her own.

Then, almost inexplicably, George dropped the character. Havers dropped back, starting with A Place of Hiding, and I missed her. She's not just the most interesting character in the series, she's also the perfect foil for her aristocratic partner and his upper-crust best friend and late wife. Lynley is smart and a good detective, but Havers is smarter, more intuitive, and a better lateral thinker. She plays devil's advocate and looks for alternate theories instead of trusting the evidence as it falls. Havers-light novels just aren't as good.

Careless in Red starts out as Havers-free. Thomas Lynley is in the 43rd day of his walk along the South-West Coast Path, not trying to forget that his pregnant wife was murdered but because walking is the only way he can keep his will to live. On the 43rd day of his walk, he finds the body of Santo Kerne who has apparently died in a climbing accident. Since this is a mystery novel, we know that Santo was murdered, and because we know the mysterious Thomas is actually DI Lynley of Scotland Yard we know he will help solve the case.

George writes long novels with multiple subplots, and while I usually enjoy this aspect of her writing, I think she could have trimmed some of the threads. The earthy orchard owner, the teenager sent to live with her grandfather because she wants to enter a convent, and the conflict between local DI Bea Hannaford and her ex-husband don't add much to the story and aren't effective red herrings. I also wasn't impressed with how George seemed to be setting up Hannaford as a Havers substitute, but at least the character keeps the investigation moving until the real Havers shows up, all attitude and flannel PJs confronting Lynley before breakfast at the only inn in town. Still, Careless in Red is a partial return to form. A few characters are drawn a bit too broadly, especially Santo's nymphomaniac mother and the teenager in the midst of a religious conversion, but most of them are believable. The identity of Santo's killer isn't obvious (although I did solve the mystery with about 50 pages to go) and I didn't feel cheated, like I did in George's last three novels. It's worth reading if you've read the rest of the series, but I can't recommend Careless in Red as an introduction to the Lynley/Havers mysteries.

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

2009-10-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

I've read none of the books Ruth Rendell has written under her own name. She's one of the modern masters, but there are only so many books I can read and her Inspector Wexler mysteries haven't made it on to my shelf. I have read several of the psychological thrillers she has written as Barbara Vine, but I've also put two of them down after a few chapters. Gallowglass never grabbed me, but A Dark Adapted Eye is a near perfect mystery and I couldn't put down The Blood Doctor. Her 1998 novel The Chimney Sweeper's Boy falls in between the poles - I enjoyed it, but it's not a classic.

Gerald Candless is a famous author in failing health. At one time he was charming and well-reviewed, but he's become a shadow of himself; his latest novels have been released with little notice and he seems to get most of his pleasure from being rude to the younger writers who make the pilgrimage to his Devon home. Gerald dies the night after one of these hazing luncheons, and his publisher asks his daughters to write a memoir of their beloved father. Hope, a successful attorney, is too distraught to even attempt to write about her father so Sarah, a university lecturer, takes on the task. She soon learns that the real Gerald Candless died as a child and her father assumed his name and identity when he began writing his unacknowledgedly autobiographic novels.

While Sarah tries to unravel her father's true identity, Vine tells the parallel story of Candless's widow, Ursula. Forty years earlier, Ursula was a sheltered young woman, the youngest child by a decade of a comfortably affluent family. What she didn't realize, but the reader can easily see, is that Candless was deeply closeted and married both for the public image and to have children. His daughters were the center of his life, and after their birth, Ursula's only use to him was as material for a novel. Vine mixes memories of the Candlesses' unhappy marriage with fragments of Gerald Candless's works and the slow development of Ursula's new relationship with a 60ish bookseller.

I enjoyed The Chimney Sweeper's Boy but I was never surprised by it, and that's what separates it from Vine's better works. Her best books leave the main mystery open ended, but each passage from Gerald's novels gives just a little too much information for the final chapter to be a surprise.

Mansfield Park

2009-09-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Fanny Price is not the typical Jane Austen heroine. She's not witty, or confident, or even obviously competent like the slightly downtrodden Anne Elliot. Weak and shy, Fanny comes across as someone you want to admire for her unwavering goodness, but can't like because she's so frustratingly passive. You want to jump into the book and shake her, telling her, "It doesn't matter that you're in the right if you don't do anything to correct those who are wrong."

This is the third time I've read Mansfield Park, and this time I concentrated on the supporting characters. The main plot, about Edmund Bertram and Fanny finding true love with each other after escaping romantic entanglements with indiscreet siblings Mary and Henry Crawford, never captured my attentions. Like attracts like and there are few characters in Mansfield Park who are as dull and moralistic as Fanny and Edmund. For the same reason, I don't believe Henry Crawford actually fell in love with Fanny. He may have been infatuated with her because she was the rare woman able to resist his charms, but the novelty would have worn off quickly. Mary may have forced herself to believe she was in love with Edmund, but she was more in love with his position as the potential heir to Mansfield than with the dull, moralistic, clergyman-to-be. Additionally, Henry never really comes to life. He seems to exist only to serve the plot, flirting with Julia, courting Fanny, and running off with Maria shortly after her ill-advised marriage.

I enjoyed Mansfield Park almost in spite of its routine plot and bland main characters because much of the supporting cast is drawn with an acid-tipped pen. On this reading, I realized just how avaricious Aunt Norris is, constantly finding leftovers at Mansfield Park which she can take to her own, small home and probably saving a (meager) salary by using Fanny as an unpaid servant. I'd realized on previous readings that Mr. Rushworth, Maria Bertram's eventual husband, was an idiot, but this time I realized that he's one of the dimmest characters I've encountered in literature. He's Hugh Laurie's portrayal of the Prince Regent as a private citizen, unable to distinguish the characters in a play with which he was familiar and probably botching most of his "four and twenty" speeches. Tom Bertram's friend Mr. Yates made an impression for the first time as well. Like Tom, he's an unfettered rich kid, the sort who today gets an SUV for his 18th birthday and totals it a few months later because he's texting while driving or speeding because he can. He goes through life totally untouched by his surroundings, and we realize that when he doesn't follow the Crawfords out the door when Sir Thomas unexpectedly returns from Antigua. He's so unaware of the consequences of his theatrical plan that he practically brags about it to the obviously angered Sir Thomas.

I found other characters to be more sympathetic this time around. Julia Bertram is a self-absorbed rich girl, but she's also aware that Aunt Norris considers her second best to her manipulative sister Maria. Her eventual marriage to Mr. Yates isn't unexpected, but possibly not a bad choice. They're like Pete and Trudy Campbell in Mad Men, immature and wealthy but not without hope of eventually reaching maturity. Sir Thomas felt like a remote paterfamilias when I read Mansfield Park for the first time. This time I saw a man who cared about his family, giving Maria the option to break off her obviously doomed engagement and becoming the first to realize that Fanny had grown from a meek little girl to a pretty young woman who'd been cheated of the attention heaped on her cousins. I also felt more sympathy for Mrs. Price. She's too passive to handle life as the wife of a disabled and unemployable alcoholic, but when she married for love, there was no way for her to know that her husband would be wounded in battle and that she'd bear ten children in fifteen years.

What strikes me most about Mansfield Park, though, is how of its time it is. Austen's other five major works all feel modern, but I can't see Mansfield Park in a 21st Century setting. Emma and Pride and Prejudice were both brought into the 1990s, and I can see Northanger Abbey cast with sorority sisters or Sense and Sensibility played against the current recession, but Fanny Price feels so strongly tied to the 18th Century that I can't see how the plot could be adapted to a modern setting. Maybe that's the attraction - with the rest of Austen's books, I'm trying to see how to fit them into present-day Philadelphia, but with Mansfield Park, I just let it be.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen

2009-08-14T16:09:00.001-07:00

Lula doesn't like cops, something Janet Evanovich refers to in most of her Plum books. So what does Lula do when she sees a man decapitated in front of her? Ask Steph to call her boyfriend, Trenton detective Joe Morelli. There's a slight hitch - when they return to the scene the body is missing and Joe and Steph have broken up after an argument about peanut butter. Further complicating matters, Steph is once again working part time for RangeMan Security, this time at Ranger's request. And this is all before Lula and Grandma Mazur decide to enter a barbecue cook-off.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen is a bit of departure for Evanovich because the main crime seems to get less attention than the subplot. The headless man is celebrity chef Stanley Chipolte and there's a million dollar reward for solving his murder so Lula and Grandma Mazur decide to enter the cook-off in an attempt to find the killer. Even with the help of Lula's new man, a cross-dressing fireman who bears at least a passing resemblance to Julia Child, they are far from successful. This thread focuses more on the home aspect of Steph's life - the killers are found but the murder takes a back seat to Lula's and Grandma's attempts to make non-burnt, non-toxic barbecue sauce. It does allow Evanovich to channel her inner teenager, with a lot of bodily function humor, most of it from Lula.

The RangeMan plot is a little tighter, and gives Steph a chance to show that she's not merely lucky. Several of RangeMan's security clients have been burgled, and it looks like an inside job. Steph's job is to casually investigate the RangeMan employees while doing background searches for clients. This turns out to be a dead end, but while visiting a recent break-in with Ranger, she figures out how the crime were committed. Using that information, they lay a trap for the robbers and save the security business.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen is well plotted, but the plot is really just a framework against which the insanity of Steph's life is set. So we get multiple Car Deaths, a family dinner (with the cross-dressing fireman and a produce manager named Peter Pecker whom Steph's mom thinks could be her new son-in-law), a few appearances by Joyce Barnhardt, a fire in Steph's apartment which does not reach her indestructible 70s-painted bathroom, and a secondary FTA. Junior Turley is a flasher with a regular route (and yes, Grandma Mazur is a regular) whose capture is up there with Punky Balog. Not only is there the unsuccessful attempt to capture him during a funeral with Grandma's help, but there's also why he was arrested. It's middle-of-the-pack Plum, but still funny enough that reading it in public is a risky endeavor.

Plum Spooky

2009-08-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Plum has a problem. No, it's not the scientist who broke his boss's nose with a coffee cup and then disappeared after Vinnie Plum wrote his bond, or Lula's romantic problems, or the fact that Joe Morelli's brother Anthony was kicked out by his wife and is currently living with Morelli - and has been shot in the butt with a nail gun. Or even the fact that Diesel has reappeared in her living room. Her problem is Carl, Susan Stitch's pet monkey. Susan has gone on her honeymoon and left Carl with Steph. So while dealing with her FTA, who is apparently in cahoots with the Unmentionable Diesel is trying to catch, Lula's problems with Tank, and Morelli's frustrations, she also has to deal with a monkey who gives people the finger, plays GameBoy, and gets into an argument with Grandma Mazur about how to eat mashed potatoes.

Steph and Diesel locate their respective quarries in the Pine Barrens, where they also encounter the Easter Bunny and Edgar the Fire Farter (whom, of course, Steph unknowingly invites to dinner). Plus about twenty more monkeys. There's a creative Car Death and the unexpected and amusing capture of a minor FTA, just as we expect from a Stephanie Plum novel. This is also one of the books where Stephanie is truly in danger - the Unmentionable uses Steph as a 'reward' for her FTA, and while we know she will save herself with panic and a well-placed knee, the scene is a bit creepier than we expect from Evanovich. Still, she knows that we like our Steph books moderately fluffy so Steph escapes unscathed and even monkey-free, and in search of yet another car to destroy.

The Unruly Queen: the Life of Queen Caroline

2009-08-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

I was never particularly interested in the media circus surrounding Charles and Diana. She struck me as an initially naive girl who'd been roped into marriage and who eventually developed into a media-savvy woman. He struck me as an immature jerk, but one who'd been created by his bizarre upbringing. Strange as it may seem, I feel sorry for members of the Royal Family, or at least the ones close to succession and constantly in the public eye. It may be nice to have the money and social cachet to be a second cousin once removed to the Queen, but you can marry when and whom you want and have your own career and interests. The Queen's children and grandchildren are public property, their romantic lives must be seen through a dynastic lens. Their job is to make public appearances and lend a famous face to charities, but they are rarely allowed to take an active role.

This, however, was not the most acrimonious marriage entered into by an heir to the British throne. That dubious honor belongs to the Prince Regent and Caroline of Brunswick. Flora Fraser wrote The Unruly Queen in 1995, at the height of the Charles and Diana conflict but managed to avoid highlighting the parallels between Charles and his great-great-great-granduncle.

George, the Prince Regent may not have been quite as dim as portrayed by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third but he was as spoiled, extravagant, and concerned with his own amusement. George married for money - he'd been secretly married before to Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, and kept a succession of mistresses after he'd been persuaded (temporarily, at least) to end his relationship with her. He married his first cousin Caroline solely to increase his allowance and ended all pretense of marriage as soon as she'd delivered a healthy heir. Caroline is no more appealing of a character, although slightly more sympathetic. She'd been raised in almost total isolation, not only kept apart from children her age (as many royals of the era were) but even after the age at which she would have made her debut was not allowed to attend formal dinners or musical performances. It should be no surprise, then, that she was crude, childish, and willing to test the boundaries of her new-found freedom.

Fraser paints a compelling picture of a lonely woman surrounded by people who depended on her husband for their livelihoods. Once she'd given birth to Princess Charlotte, she was disposable and essentially excluded from royal life. Like her husband, she had multiple affairs, but one can understand why a woman whose marriage had essentially ended on her wedding night would do so. Unlike her husband, these affairs were crimes against the state and culminated in her trial in the House of Lords for treason and eventually her being barred from what should have been her coronation as Queen Consort. She died soon afterwards from an intestinal obstruction and if not forgotten, left as more of a footnote to history than an important person, unlike her 20th Century successor whose media savvy will preserve her place in the collective memory.

Death on the Nile

2009-06-07T12:29:00.001-07:00

I've been reading Agatha Christie for nearly 30 years - she was my gateway into adult fiction, and a few years ago, I realized that despite the many hours I'd spent with her books, I'd only read about 2/3 of them and re-read about a dozen multiple times. I've since worked on reading more of the cannon, but that doesn't stop me from pulling one of the favorite few off the shelf every few months.

Death on the Nile is one of those favorites. I remember the first time I read it, as a 15-year-old on my way back from vacation in Rio de Jenario. 25 years and at least a dozen revisits later, I still flash back to my mother retrieving me from the airport snack bar where I was pouring over the plan of the S.S. Karnak so intently I hadn't heard our flight announced.

The plot of Death on the Nile follows the locked room template. Someone murders Lynnette Doyle while she's on a honeymoon cruise in Egypt. No one other than her fellow passengers could have committed the crime, most of them have both alibis and motives, and it is up to Hercule Poirot to deduce the identity of the murderer. Of course, I know who murdered Lynnette Doyle, and why, and how. That allows me to enjoy the setting and the characters, especially the Allertons (does Mrs. Allerton really not know what her son is up to?), Simon Doyle (is he really the sweet, stolid, doting husband he appears to be?) and Cornelia Robeson (is she dim, or has she been typecast by her family?). Rereading Death on the Nile, or any Christie novel, is untaxing pleasure reading in its most basic form.

A Gladiator Dies Only Once

2009-06-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

The advantage to writing historical mysteries is that the author can place his stories as far apart as he wishes. Steven Saylor's Roman detective Gordianus aged 31 years over the course of 10 novels published between 1991 and 2005, with nearly a decade between the early novels and months between later ones. Gordianus's timeline speeds up because Saylor places him as a bit player in major events, and those events become more frequent as the Roman Republic segues into Empire.

A Gladiator Dies Only Once is Saylor's second collection of Gordianus short stories, and like The House of the Vestals, it both fills in gaps in Gordianus's personal history and provides insight into Roman culture. He provides a primer on gladiator games and funeral rites, the manufacture of garum, Roman sports, and the foibles of historical characters. What strikes me is how modern Gordianus's life really is. In one story, his pre-teen son has replaced toys with statues of mythological creatures, like a modern boy replacing Matchbox cars with action figures. Gordianus endures rather than enjoys dinners with his frequent client Cicero, the embodiment of the pompous, long-winded politician. He takes cases he doesn't like solely for money and deals with the cynical ends to which his work is applied. Saylor, like Miss Marple, knows that human nature is the same, no matter what the setting.

Plum Lucky

2009-05-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

How can I review Plum Lucky? Stephanie is not a deep character, and Janet Evanovich's between-the-numbers novels are short and fluffy. It's tightly plotted enough to get past the silliness, with the slightly scatty but ultimately sane Stephanie Plum holding everything together.

On St. Patrick's Day, Grandma Mazur 'finds' a duffel bag full of cash. So, like the 72-year-old juvenile delinquent she is, Grandma decides to buy an RV and head to Atlantic City, bringing along angry little person Randal Briggs as a bodyguard and driver. Unfortunately, the money actually belongs to a gangster named Lou Devina. Also on the trail of the money is Snuggy, a jockey-turned-bank robber who talks to animals and is on a mission to save a race horse, the supernatural bounty hunter Diesel, and Stephanie whose mother has threatened to cut off her supply of pot roast and pineapple upside down cake if she doesn't bring her grandmother back Right Now. Along for the ride are Lula, the hooker-turned-file-clerk who kept her wardrobe when she changed professions and Connie Rosolli, the Jersey-girl receptionist at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds who packs a lot of attitude and a semi-automatic pistol. Of course they find Grandma and recover the money and even save the horse, but that's not really the point. The plot exists only to tie together the set pieces, including Lula creating a diversion by throwing nickles on the ground...while wearing gold lame spandex that's shorter, lower cut, and tighter than usual, and a few jokes about the bodily functions of quadrupeds. It's fluffy fun, not to be read on public transit unless you're trying to get a three-seat for yourself.

Nine Men Dancing

2009-05-24T08:56:00.001-07:00

I had an account with amazon.co.uk several years before I had one with amazon.com, and Kate Sedley is one reason why. I picked up her first Roger the Chapman mystery, Death and the Chapman about 15 years ago, but after the first few installments, she must have been dropped by her American publisher. I was hooked, though, so after a few years shopping with a now-defunct bookstore in London, I started buying her books (and those by Michael Jecks and Susanna Gregory) through amazon.co.uk.

Sedley makes Fifteenth Century England feel both familiar and alien. Roger's travels wouldn't seem out of place on the Travel Channel, if they were to do a walking tour of southern England, but the bustling commercial city of Bristol only has a few thousand inhabitants, most of whom have some connection to each other. It's odd to think of a major city with fewer people than my Roxborough neighborhood, and even odder to think of a town so isolated that an outsider's marriage and relocation is gossip-worthy twenty years later and a decade after his death.

Nine Men Dancing begins, as do about half of Sedley's mysteries, with Roger leaving Bristol in January, 1478 to sell his ribbons and notions in the small settlements and villages of Southeastern England. As he begins his return trip to Bristol, he stumbles across an abandoned manor. A few hours later, he hears how the brothers who owned the manor died of plague shortly after digging a new well, and also about the disappearance of Eris Lilywhite. The prior autumn, Eris had disappeared on a stormy night after Nathaniel Rawbone announced that he planned to marry her. Eris had originally been attached to Nathaniel's son Tom, who had jilted Rosamund Bush, who first tells Roger the story. He meets Eris's mother and grandmother and promises the older woman to try to discover if Eris is dead or alive. Naturally, everyone in this small, isolated community has an idea of who may have murdered Eris, with most suspicion centering on the jilted Tom Rawbone and his older brother Ned whose inheritance would be decreased if his father started a new family with Eris.

Sedley neatly ties the threads together, ending with Eris's sad but believable fate, the details of which involve a bit more technical knowledge of water tables than I expect in a medieval tale. She also mixes in the politics of courtship in a small village where everyone knows (and is probably related) to each other. With only a few eligible men and women of marriageable age, the competition for the son of a well-off farmer (like Tom Redbone) or the tavern-keeper's daughter (Rosamund Bush, who spends the novel playing hard-to-get with Lambert Miller) can be as fierce as any seen in Jane Austen's assemblies and balls. It's one of the more enjoyable books in an entertaining series. Sedley's books are hard to find in the US, but finding them is worth the effort.

Seneca Falls Inheritance

2009-05-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

I like to re-read mystery series. I'm sure that seems odd to some people, because what's the point of reading a mystery if you know the solution? For me, the point is to revisit the characters earlier in their history and see how they've grown over the years. And, to be honest, with nearly eight years and 457 books between visits, some of the details of Seneca Falls Inheritance were a little fuzzy.

The book opens with a flatboat accident which kills Friedrich Steicher and his wife. A few weeks later, his daughter by a brief, annulled first marriage appears in Seneca Falls, asking for directions to the Steicher farm. Her body turns up in the canal the next day, and when the town learns of her parentage, Steicher's son becomes the main suspect. Constable Cullen Stuart and town librarian Glynis Tyron piece together the solution, with a few unlikely but not totally unbelievable twists.

Miriam Grace Monfredo ties this mystery to the organization of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention, and she isn't totally successful in doing so. Elizabeth Cady Stanton sets the main plot in motion by writing to Steicher's first wife, asking her to tell her daughter that she may be in line to inherit a prosperous farm and has enlisted the novel's fictional librarian/detective to help organize the Convention, but the convention itself feels unconnected to the main plot. I've always been fond of that particular historical event (I memorized Stanton's keynote address in 6th grade forensics), but in retrospect, its appearance in Seneca Falls Inheritance feels a bit forced. The book also contains a bit too much character exposition and explanation, probably because it's the first in the series, and it's not particularly complex. Like Sharon Kay Penman's Justin de Quincy mysteries, it may serve as a good bridge from YA to adult novels for pre-teens interested in mysteries or historical novels.

T is for Tresspass

2009-05-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

Series authors have a problem. Most novelists release books about a year apart, so how do you deal with aging your characters? Many authors slow the clock, allowing their characters to age at half or less the normal speed and changing cultural touchstones as the series wears on. Marcia Mueller did this with her Sharon McCone mysteries - the 60s radical who was 28 at her 1977 debut stopped talking about the 60s as time wore on and eventually turned 40 in 1999. Others, like Faye Kellerman, start with relatively young characters and stagger the spacing of their books so if there are only a few months between volumes, the next book will take place two or three years later. Then there's Janet Evanovich, who has decided that Stephanie Plum will be 32 forever, and forever accompanied by her juvenile-delinquent grandmother, and the authors of historical mysteries who either by luck or design don't have to worry about how quickly their characters age.

I don't know when or why Sue Grafton decided to deal with aging Kinsey Milhone by setting her novels further and further in the past, but it's an ingenious device. Kinsey has only aged 5 1/2 years in the 25 she's been on the scene, but the world has slowed down with her. Kinsey's new car is a 1970 Mustang which is merely used and not classic, she has no cell phone, no one suggests that Rosie's Bar hook up cable, and she actually has to get government documents in person instead of clicking on a link and printing it herself. I've felt rather nostalgic while reading the last few Milhone novels. So far, they've spanned my teens and carried me from 8th grade to sophomore year of college and I enjoy seeing how much of daily life which we take for granted barely existed just 20 years ago.

While I normally notice the historical aspect of Grafton's books, they stood out in T is for Tresspass, perhaps because the topics are so current, identity theft and the problem of caring for the elderly and alone. Grafton shifts the narration between Kinsey and a woman who has stolen the identity of a nurse named Solana Rojas and has been hired as a home health aid for Kinsey's neighbor.

Solana looks good on paper, because the real Solana (referred to as the Other) is highly qualified and because the criminal is highly skilled at ingratiating herself, and because in some ways she's picked the perfect victim. Gus Vronsky is the local crank, an elderly man whose hobby is yelling at teenagers for practicing skateboard tricks. Kinesy's landlord Henry Pitts maintains a casual friendship with Gus but few others in the neighborhood care to talk to him and his only relative is a great-grand niece who lives across the country in Manhattan. No one seems to notice that Solana is gradually cutting Gus off from society, first cancelling the Meals on Wheels delivery, then telling his few visitors that Gus 'just isn't up to company' or 'just started a nap.' Once she has control over Gus, she moves in with her disturbed and mentally disabled son and begins to steal Gus's property while physically mistreating him and frightening him into believing that she is protecting him from being locked in a nursing home.

Solana's plot fails through a series of coincidences - a chance encounter with the granddaughter of a woman she'd previously 'cared' for, seeing Kinsey's car where she doesn't expect it, and the actions of Henry's potential ladyfriend, a successful 70-something real estate agent. It falls by coincidence, and yet it doesn't feel like Grafton cheated. It may be a bit too coincidental that her prior charge's granddaughter sees her in a department store as she's planning her escape but not beyond belief, and Grafton plants the seeds of the other 'random' events while Kinsey goes about her professional life investigating insurance claims and acting as a process server.

What doesn't quite work is the ending, or rather the last two of three endings. Kinsey (with help) rescues Gus, but the fate of Solana and her son are a bit more gruesome than I expected and verge on cartoonish. Still, it's one of the better entries in what has been an enjoyable series. Grafton only has six letters left in the alphabet, so somewhere around 2015 we'll see the series end with Z as Kinsey faces the year - 1990 - in which I first met her.

Eating with the Victorians

2009-04-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

I love stores like Daedalus and (the apparently departed) Atlantic Books which specialize in remaindered books. I enjoy wandering through the warehouse or catalog and buying almost at random any book which looks like it might possibly be interesting. At best, I'll find a fascinating book at a discount; at worst, I'll not feel like I wasted too much money if the book doesn't live up to its description.

I found Eating with the Victorians in the Daedalus catalog and what I didn't realize was that it's a collection of academic papers on the topic rather than a unified work. I enjoyed it, but the chapters overlapped a bit. For example, almost every chapter discussed how the main meal of the day migrated from late morning in medieval times through midday and into the evening, or how the light, social Afternoon Tea differs from the hearty working-class supper of High Tea. The essays on formal dining and the china, silver, and servants required for different forms of service felt dry, probably because I'd read most of the same information in more general histories of the era. Eating with the Victorians falls into an odd category - the disposable academic book. While I enjoyed it and learned a few bits of trivia, ultimately it reminds me of the required reading for the history courses I took because they looked interesting and started after 10 am.

Albion

2009-04-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how I feel about Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. It was well written, and I'm interested in English history and culture, but it left me cold. Maybe it was because I don't have the requisite foundation, and a British reader would be as disconnected from an American version because she hadn't read Paul Bunyan in 4th grade. I think Peter Ackroyd's writing style and the structure of the book factor in as well. The book seemed a bit dry and choppy, like the syllabus of a survey course for students who knew 90% of the material but have forgotten about half.

Mr. Darcy's Dream

2009-03-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

Jane Austen's novels aren't the fluffy rom-com forerunners they appear to be. Austen was a witty writer who satirized social climbers, pricked the egos of the self-important, and saw courtship among the gentry as a cutthroat competition for the best merger of financial resources. Elizabeth Ashton isn't Jane Austen and her Darcy novels are unashamedly frivolous.

Mr. Darcy's Dream is the sixth book in the series, and the heroine this time is Georgiana Darcy's daughter Phoebe Hawkins. Phoebe is about to start her second London season when she receives an offer of marriage from Arthur Stanhope, scion of a prominent Whig family. Her father, Sir Giles, refuses to permit the marriage, so to prevent a scandal Georgiana plants rumors of Phoebe's ill health and sends her to Pemberly. Louisa Bingley, still single after three seasons, decides to join her and the two young women spend a pleasant few months at Pemberly planning a ball, dealing with a Catherine de Bourgh-like relative, and making social calls. No one should be surprised that Mr. Stanhope decides to visit his sister near Pemberly, nor that Louisa Bingley falls in love with Mr. Drummond, the attorney hired to oversee renovations to Pemberly, or that there's a happy ending featuring two engagements. A subplot involving a French governess and the series' usual villain doesn't quite work but it doesn't distract from the main purpose of the book, which is to keep the hero and heroine apart until the final chapter. Mr. Darcy's Dream is an ideal book to read on a tropic beach (which is where I read The True Darcy Spirit), but it also makes a fair distraction from a snow-hindered SEPTA commute.

The Great Mortality

2009-03-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

I don't think I'm particularly morbid, but I enjoy reading good books about disease and death. John Kelly's The Great Mortality focuses on a fascinating subject, but ultimately the book's disjointed narrative leaves it below the bar set by John Barry's The Great Influenza.

Kelly starts with a history of both the plague and of the trading routes along which it spread and I enjoyed the first few chapters. When he began to follow the plague from country to country, though, the book became less interesting. At points, Kelly bogged down in the minutia of probating wills where the inheritors had all died, and then he abruptly moves to another part of the country or to a new country altogether. While it must be difficult to reconstruct an epidemic among a largely illiterate population seven centuries after the fact, I think one more pass by a good editor would have improved the flow of the book.

I was also a bit put off by Kelly's attitude in a few places. Kelly used a somewhat clinical tone to describe the history of the plague bacillus and its spread from Asia into Europe and through Germany and France. His description of the Italian and English reactions to the disease, however, made me think of E.M. Forster's civilized, rational English and primitive, emotional Italians and it felt rather condescending. Still, I'd read more of Kelly's work, especially if he were to expand on his final chapter on plague deniers, modern-day scholars who claim that the Black Death was not actually plague but some other illness.

Mistress of the Elgin Marbles

2009-03-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin was rich, headstrong, and less memorable than Emma Woodhouse. Susan Nagel's biography of the Countess, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles tries to compare her to an Austen heroine, but Mary never seems to come alive. One of the greatest heiresses in Regency Scotland, she married the sickly Lord Elgin (who lost his nose to treatment for what may or may not have been syphilis), followed him on his diplomatic journeys, and earned a reputation as a captivating hostess and author of charming letters. On their return journey, Lord Elgin was imprisoned by the Revolutionary French government and while Mary negotiated his release, she fell in love with his best friend and was eventually sued for divorce.

While reading Nagel's book, I thought of Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the life of Mary Worley Montagu. Perhaps Nagel is not as talented a writer as Foreman, but I think the problem lies with the subject. Mary Nisbet just doesn't seem to have been a particularly interesting person. Yes, she was witty and involved in a scandal, but she was not actively involved in politics like Georgiana Spencer and her letters were not published and read after her death like Mary Worley Montague. Even her role as the Mistress of the Elgin Marbles seems inflated. Nagel briefly discusses the Elgin Marbles and it appears that Mary's only contribution was financial. Ultimately, the book is as forgettable as its subject.

Compulsion

2009-02-25T19:06:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, I have to put an author on probation. I only have so much time, and there are too many books I want to read to spend my time on authors who seem to be on autopilot. I'll give an author I've enjoyed a few books to retain my attention, but at some point, I'll stop reading and donate my backlist to the Book Corner.

Jonathan Kellerman is now on probation. I first read When the Bough Breaks during a Christmas break from law school and just couldn't put it down - I may have read it in a single sitting. I've been a faithful reader ever since, and like most long running series some of the books have been better than others. Time Bomb left a bad taste in my mouth, but Devil's Waltz was fascinating. I was losing interest with Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis when The Murder Book altered the formula by using Milo's POV as well as Alex's and making his partner Rick more than just a passing mention. Unfortunately, I haven't enjoyed its sequels and have come to the conclusion that I'm now reading Kellerman's books out of habit.

Compulsion starts with a young woman drunkenly staggering out of a club. Her car runs out of gas and she thinks she's in luck when an aristocratic woman in a Bently gives her a lift. The next day, the Bently's owner calls the police, claiming that it had been stolen and left on a nearby street. Milo and his subordinate investigate and find blood on the driver's seat but it's not a priority until an elderly woman is murdered by a man driving a BMW stolen from and returned to a luxury car rental service. Milo follows a few ultimately false leads, using Alex as a psychological sounding board, and at home Alex's luthier girlfriend is making custom instruments for a tone-deaf dot-com millionaire.

Compulsion comes across as an average-quality mystery until about the last 80 pages when it takes a turn for the bitter. Kellerman is a clinical psychologist as well as a novelist, so I can understand why he might see the worst in people. However, he seems to have fallen into the habit of writing himself into a corner and then 'solving' the mystery by showing that one (or more) of the characters is a creepy psychopath. It's the near-cheating more than the creepiness that bothers me. The solution may work if you trace all the way back to page one and choose the less likely outcome for every potentially ambiguous piece of data, but it feels like Kellerman is playing a trick on us. I might be a little more willing to go along with the game, but the solution usually involves such a repulsive character, I'm less willing to cut Kellerman any slack. I'm not asking for a kittens and flowers happy ending, but unless Milo and Alex start encountering murders that can be solved without cheating, they're leaving my library to make room for my ever-expanding collection of historical mysteries.

Sweet Revenge

2009-02-25T18:26:00.000-08:00

I first met Goldy Schultz (then Goldy Bear), the Colorado caterer who keeps stumbling across dead bodies in 1993, and she hasn't changed much. Her business is more secure, she's happily remarried to Aspen Meadow's sheriff, and her abusive ex-husband was killed two books ago, but she's still the same espresso-guzzling, chocoholic who solves mysteries while whipping up a souffle. Like many series characters, she's aging in slow motion (from 28 to 34 in 16 years), but it doesn't seem to matter. Goldy's never been a deep character, and Davidson's mysteries tend to be more like an angel food cake than a dense chocolate torte. It's a balancing act, because she touches on serious issues, especially domestic violence, but she usually succeeds.

Sweet Revenge is Davidson's 14th novel. It's the holiday season, and Goldy is fully booked with office and private parties and events at her still-new catering hall. On the way to a client's house to sign contracts and plan the menu, Goldy sees a ghost - Sandee Brisbane who killed Goldy's ex and then apparently died in a forrest fire. Needless to say, her husband Tom doesn't believe her - dozens of police and fire fighters saw Sandee jump into the raging wildfire after confessing to John Richard Korman's murder. But Goldy sees her again outside the library where she's setting up a holiday breakfast, and again when investigating the real mystery.

Sandee is a bit of a red herring. The real mystery involves a corpse found in the reading room, map collectors, angry ex-spouses, fighting dinner guests, and counterfeiters. It moves along pretty well, never dragging or skipping logical steps, until Goldy ties everything together in about ten pages.

Sweet Revenge is a bit formulaic, but it's a formula that works. I was usually a page or two ahead of Goldy, but I don't read these books to be stumped. I read them because I enjoy Goldy and her friends and family. Her best friend (and JRK's other ex) Marla shows up for gossip and to display expensive clothes; her teenage son skis, studies, and hangs out with his friends; her assistant/former apprentice Julian works a few events, and there are a dozen or so recipes at the end of the book. Sweet Revenge isn't the best book in the series - the series started strong, slumped a bit around book 6, and has been uneven since - but it's still enjoyable. I enjoy spending time with the characters and the mysteries are usually believable, but the main attraction is the food. I've made and enjoyed a few of the 150+ recipes included (my mom refers to Snowborder's Pork Tenderloin from Tough Cookie as Porkay Mignon) and I know that about every 30-40 pages, she's going to describe a dish that will make me drool.

Christmas Present, 2X, x2

2009-02-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

19 years ago, I made my dad an Aran sweater for Christmas - it's a greyish blue and my dad has worn it to death. I made him two other sweaters, one around 1994 and the other around 2000 but he still wears the first one. Well, since I was starting to get embarrassed when he'd tell people that I'd make his sweater, I decided to make him one for Christmas this year. He's a big guy, so this one, like the three prior sweaters, is a scaled up version of my favorite pattern - the one on the back cover of the Bernat Aran Knits book.

Yesterday, I had dinner at my parents' house. Not only is my dad's sweater stretched out and stained in front, but there's now a hole in the sleeve. To make matters worse, my dad wore the sweater after noticing the hole so it's raveled to the point where I couldn't fix it even if I did find matching yarn. So why isn't he wearing one of the other sweaters? Well, my mom told me that he gave them to a clothing drive a few years ago. He said they just didn't fit the way the other one does.

Now, I don't mind that he gave them away - there are now two large men in dire straits who are a bit warmer than they would have been. However, I really wish he'd told me he'd done that. I would have made him another sweater before this instead of, for the sake of family harmony and my ability not to wince when my dad shows off his handmade sweater, planning to make a second 2XL sweater for him this year.

And yes, I am going to confiscate the old ratty sweater when I give him the new one.

This has been the occasional "defarge" segment of this blog. Stay tuned for future adventures in knitting (which, considering what's happening in my office right now, will be attempts to finish baby sweaters before the recipients go out on maternity leave).

The Assassin's Touch

2009-02-13T16:52:00.000-08:00

Does a historical novel have to be accurate, or is it sufficient that it feels accurate? Laura Joh Rowland's sets her Sano Ichiro mysteries in Edo period Japan. I know very little about the period so I don't know how accurate they truly are but they feel real.

The Assassin's Touch is the tenth book in the Sano Ichiro series. At the end of The Perfumed Sleeve, a power struggle led Japan to the brink of civil war and sent Sano's predecessor and nemesis, Chamberlain Yanigasawa, into exile. Although he eliminated his main competitor, Lord Matsudaira did not have a large enough faction to become Chamberlain himself so Sano, who allied himself with neither side, became Chamberlain.

Like most mysteries, The Assassin's Touch starts with a death. The head of the intelligence service dies during a horse race, and he is not the only official to have recently died in suspicious circumstances. The victims have all died suddenly, with no obvious marks or signs of violence. The Shogun orders Sano to investigate, and both the Yanigasawa and Matsudaira factions see Sano's potential failure as a way to replace him. Complicating matters, Sano's wife, Lady Reiko, has undertaken an investigation of her own.

Lady Reiko is an anachronism - an independent noblewoman and skilled martial artist who has helped Sano solve prior cases - and Rowland admits this by always explaining how unusual she is. Reiko is Magistrate Ueda's only daughter and he asks the daughter he educated like a son to investigate whether or not an outcast woman accused of murder actually committed the crimes to which she confessed.

The Assassin's Touch blends two types of mysteries - the "whodunnit" and the "whydunnit" - and they collide in the final third of the book. I admit that I wasn't surprised by the solution to either mystery or the connection between the two, but it took enough effort to solve them that I didn't feel cheated. Like the rest of the Sano Ichiro novels, The Assassin's Touch includes a climactic battle scene, this time with a fairly small contingent of samurai and including a one-on-one battle between Sano and a samurai reputed to know an obscure martial art.

Innocent Traitor

2009-02-06T18:47:00.001-08:00

I don't read much straight fiction; I usually stick to mysteries, classics, and non-fiction. Innocent Traitor isn't much of a deviation for me, though, because it's Alison Weir's first novel. I've read and enjoyed most of her non-fiction but somehow missed Innocent Traitor until I saw her next novel, The Lady Elizabeth, in Borders.

Innocent Traitor is the story of Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days Queen who was executed for treason, and it's familiar territory for Weir who counted her as one of The Children of Henry VIII. Weir begins with the almost simultaneous births of Lady Jane and her cousin Edward and uses multiple narrators to chronicle Jane's short life, most of which was spent as a pawn to her abusive mother's ambitions.

Although Weir could have portrayed Jane as a "poor little rich girl" or the sweet martyr of prior historical fiction, she creates a more complex picture of an intellectual, insecure, and surprisingly dogmatic teenager. Yes, she is a pawn, but she's also a bit of a prig, a devout Protestant who seems to equate wearing bright colors with moral turpitude. Jane is extremely intelligent and well-educated and described by others as pretty, but convinced that she's plain and will end up a spinster because of comparisons to her pretty, frivolous younger sister. She comes across as a real teenager, albeit one with unusual family issues. Her one triumph as Queen is when she realizes that her mother's words no longer sting - instead of obeying the venomous Duchess of Suffolk, Jane can now issue orders to her tormentor.

Weir wrote Innocent Traitor after four non-fiction books on the Tudor court and her ease with the era shows. Improbable yet true events, such as Catherine Parr's discovery of the heresy charges being prepared against her, flow naturally and the secondary characters feel like real people rather than historical figures. Princess Mary feels particularly well developed, perhaps because she's so often portrayed as a one-dimensional character. Mary is a tragic figure. She's plain and politically suspect but desperate for marriage and children, heir to the throne but politically tone deaf, and as devout and dogmatic as her younger cousin. Catherine Parr also stands out - an intelligent, maternal woman who takes Jane under her wing and protects her from her mother. Even Guilford Dudley has an unexpectedly sympathetic scene. He's introduced as a spoiled vulgarian who preens and sneers and gets drunk at his wedding banquet, and the consummation of his and Jane's marriage devolves into a rape. In his final meetings with Jane, however, Weir shows him to be a scared boy whose father has been executed and knows he may soon lose his head as well. Even Jane's mother, whose only personality traits are cruelty and ambition, feels like an actual person. Not someone you'd like to know, but a McMansion-dwelling helicopter mom you've unfortunately met.

After two novels, Alison Weir has returned to non-fiction with a biography of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster. Based on Innocent Traitor, I hope she hasn't abandoned fiction for good. As a reader, I'd like to see her alternate between fiction and history because I find her work in both genres so enjoyable. Perhaps she'll write a novel about Queen Mary, focusing on the years between her mother's banishment from court and her ascension to the throne.

A Flaw in the Blood

2009-02-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

I've been reading mysteries for decades, so I don't get 'gotten' very often. I may not solve the case until near the end, but I'm rarely surprised by a supported solution. A Flaw in the Blood got me, and did it without cheating. Chapter 52 is totally improbable, and completely supported by the facts Stephanie Barron scatters throughout the narrative.

Barron also writes the Jane Austen mysteries and A Flaw in the Blood is a change of tone from that series. The Austen mysteries are epistolary, with Jane writing her adventures in her diary or letters to Cassandra, and part of the fun comes from meeting the 'inspirations' for Austen's characters. A Flaw in the Blood uses shifting narrators, including Queen Victoria, her daughter Alice, and a London barrister who made his name saving the queen from an early assassination attempt, to obscure both the nature and perpetrator of the crime in question.

The book opens with the aftermath of an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Prince Albert. 18 months later, he lies dying of natural causes and Queen Victoria calls Patrick Fitzgerald to Windsor Castle to disavow any knowledge of the 1840 plot on her life. He refuses and as he explains the story to his Georgiana Armatrage, a somewhat anachronistic young woman doctor, their carriage overturns, nearly killing them. This is the work of Barron's least convincing character, Victoria's henchman who all but twirls his mustache as he pursues the pair through England and into France where they encounter Prince Leopold, about whose hemophilia Albert had consulted with Georgiana.

Back in England, Victoria throws herself into the deep mourning that would last until her death while her daughter Alice questions whether Albert actually died of typhoid. No one else at Windsor contracted the disease, including Alice who nursed him through his illness, and his symptoms weren't typical of typhoid. Between bouts of hysteria and battles with her second daughter, Victoria reflects on her childhood and her recently deceased mother who was both a duchess in her own right and a political pawn. As Barron switches between Victoria's memories and Georgiana's outline of the 1860's understanding of hemophilia, Victoria's legitimacy comes into question and we wonder how far a woman raised to be Queen will go to protect her position.