The Child's Child

I'm afraid that The Child's Child will be the last book Ruth Rendell writes under her Barbara Vine pseudonym.  It's not quite as good as The Birthday Present, but Rendell was in peak form for about two-thirds of the novel.  Perhaps it would have joined The Birthday Present and A Dark Adapted Eye among her best if it had been published as a novella.

I say that because The Child's Child feels like a novella with 85 pages of coincidence-laden framework extending the work to novel length.  Ph.D. candidate Grace Easton and her brother Andrew inherited a sprawling house on the outskirts of London from their grandmother.  Instead of selling it and  sharing the proceeds, they decide to divide the house and live together-but-not-together, and it works well until Andrew's partner James Derain moves in.  James's stability, never a sure thing, degerates when the two men witness the gay-bashing death of an acquaintance of theirs, and then a somewhat unbelievable series of events leads to Andrew and James moving out, leaving Grace, pregnant and working on a Ph.D dissertation analyzing the treatment of unwed mothers in 19th Century literature, alone in the suburban mansion.  One night, she reads the manuscript a family friend gave her.

The Child's Child couldn't be published when it was written in the 1950s.  Martin Greenwell based Maud Goodwin on a neighbor, a woman who'd gotten pregnant at 15 and who also happened to be James Derwin's great-grandmother.  Maude's brother John, who was gay at a time when it was illegal, "saved" Maude by moving away with her and pretending to be her husband.  One evening, John explained to Maude why he so willingly moved away with her, but she was a puritan-leaning as the family they'd left.  Long before John disappeared, Maude retreated into a icy shell, proud and protective of her daughter. There's not much of a mystery - we know John's fate, even if the police take several months to figure it out - but Rendell wrote a compelling story about a woman who trapped herself in a facade of respectability.  While I found the modern-day section of The Child's Child enjoyable, it really didn't add anything to the book.

Strip Jack

Inspector John Rebus may be congenitally incapable of happiness.  Either that, or he's incredibly unlucky.  His new relationship seems to be failing from the start, he's a pawn in the battle between his alcoholic boss and the man who wants to replace him, and he's dealing with three totally unrelated crimes (a politician named Gregor Jack caught in a prostitution sting, stolen rare books, and a homeless murder suspect who's disappeared).  Normally, I'd consider it too coincidental for these three threads to tie together, but Ian Rankin manages to combine them cleanly, and with a murder - that of Jack's wife.  As Rebus investigated her wealthy, fast-lane friends and Jack's "old gang," it becomes clear that Jack has been betrayed and doesn't know it.  The final scenes, with the murderer holding Jack hostage before being chased through a wooded area during a thunderstorm are a bit contrived, but somehow the book held together for me.

Tooth and Nail

If John Rebus has an iPhone, Siri is useless. Siri can't understand a Scottish accent and Rebus's accent and dialect serve as both a running gag and a stealth clue in Tooth and Nail, the only Rebus mystery to take place outside of Scotland. He's in London as a special consultant due to his alleged expertise with serial killers - alleged, because unbeknownst to the London police, the crime in Knots and Crosses wasn't actually a serial killing but a trap laid specifically for Rebus.

The Wolfman is killing women in London, brutalizing them after death, and then biting their abdomens. Rebus may not be an expert on serial killers, but he's a good detective and as an outsider, someone who can look at the case from a fresh angle. That angle includes listening to a psychologist who's researching serial killers, a flash of insight while wandering through an open air market, and another one while musing on the different English dialects. That turns out to be the key to the case, and leads to a car chase through central London with a judge along for the ride.

Rankin initially set out to write straight novels rather than mysteries (although if your first book involves a series of murders and your second high level corruption, you need to be fairly dense to not realize that you're a mystery writer), and while he seems to have come to terms with his genre status in Tooth and Nail, he does include a domestic subplot. Rebus's wife had moved to London with their daughter a few years earlier, and Sammy is now 16 and seeing a rising criminal. Rankin handles this better than most of the subplot-heavy mysteries I've read since starting this blog - it doesn't take up too much of the book or feel like an afterthought, and the links between the two are believable coincidences. Still, it's the least satisfying part of the book, mainly because Rhona is so faintly drawn and Sammy seems less fully fleshed than she did five years earlier in Knots and Crosses. But maybe that's the point - Rebus is a stranger in London and what drives that home more than finding out that he's a stranger to his daughter?

Necropolis: London and Its Dead

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 Chameleon's Shadow

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.  

Careless in Red

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

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.  

Nine Men Dancing

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.

Fox Evil

Fox Evil is the fourth Minette Walters book I've read in the past few years, and it's structurally similar to Acid Row, with apparently disparate story lines colliding at the midpoint of the novel, shifting narrators, a strong professional heroine, the final third of the novel running in what feels like real time, and a happy ending.  Fox Evil is more of a whodunnit than Acid Row, which could have been named Anatomy of a Riot, and while I expected the happy ending, I didn't solve the mystery.

Fox Evil opens in August 2001 with a band of Travellers convening in Dorset.  Ten-year-old Wolfie lives with, and in fear of, his stepfather Fox, a psychotic bully with a mysteriously posh accent.  About the same time, Col. James Lockyer-Fox's lawyer Mark Ankerton tracks down his client's granddaughter, born to his then teenage daughter and privately adopted by a farm family.  Naturally Ankerton expects a family eeking out a bare living and an heir who will be impressed by her newly-found family.  Nancy Smith, however, is an Oxford grad who's a Captain in the Royal Engineers visiting her family's prosperous 2000-acre farm, and more impressed with the prospect of being the fourth generation (and her future children being the fifth) to farm the same land than with Col. Lockyer-Fox's wealth.  

Shortly before Christmas, the Travellers encamp near Lockyer-Fox's estate.  Mark Ankerton has decided to stay with his client during the holiday and discovers that someone has been making harassing phone calls  to the Colonel since his wife died.  Nancy Smith, on the way back to her unit after a holiday break, stops by the manor on Boxing Day and unexpectedly forges common ground with her newly-found grandfather.  Then the plotlines begin to intertwine.

I really feel I haven't done Fox Evil justice in this review.  It's a fantastic, fast-paced mystery with compelling characters and a believable outcome.  I stayed up well past midnight to finish it, but if I explain why, I'll be posting spoilers.  I will say that the happy ending doesn't seem tacked on as it might be.  Walters gave the secondary and tertiary characters just enough pages so that we not only want their lives to improve, we can think "That's nice," instead of "Yeah, right," when Travellers, army officers, policemen, and lawyers get together for a party.