Locked In

Marcia Muller essentially invented the female PI sub-genre when she wrote Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977. Unlike her more famous contemporaries, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, Muller has never taken a break from her character or (IMHO, of course) experienced a serious slump. The San Francisco based investigator drinks her wine with a Retcon chaser to smooth over a few biographical issues (28 at inception, McCone turned 40 in 1999 and is maybe 5 years older a decade later, and while Muller still mentions the years in which McCone's former brother-in-law Ricky Savage was a struggling musician, the allusions are now vague fleeting), but Muller has also introduced new characters and allowed McCone's career to evolve so that there are few reminders of the 60s radicals with whom Sharon worked at the All Souls Legal Cooperative.

Muller has also begun to play with the traditional PI novel structure. Her prior installment, Burn Out, found McCone struggling against debilitating depression and taking on a pro bono case almost as a lifeline. Six months later, she's regained her footing, personally investigating cases which interest her and delegating most of the administrative work to her assistant, Adah Joslin. Returning to her office to retrieve her cell phone one night, McCone walks in on a burglary and is shot in the head. Miraculously, she survives, and wakes up ten days later unable to speak or to move anything but her eyes. Her employees believe the burglary and shooting are related to one of their recent cases so they search for and reopen those with red flags (the cold case of a murdered prostitute, an identity theft expert whose identity has been stolen, a missing persons case, a brutal knife attack on a financial advisor, and *something* odd at City Hall). This allows Muller to shift POV every few pages as four investigators follow the disparate threads, regularly reporting to Sharon who, in the end, manages to solve her own attempted murder.

I really enjoyed Locked In. The Rear Window To Eleven premise was new and interesting, and Muller built an exquisite puzzle with a logical, easily supported solution which she revealed only a page or two after I guessed what happened. There's a reflective quality to the book, as you'd expect when one of the six narrators can think clearly but can communicate only through blinking, and it left me thinking about Sharon's history.

I have all but the first three McCone novels sitting on my shelf (I loaned those to an administrator in law school and never got them back), and maybe it's time to re-read the series. 1977 is almost a foreign land, and even the early-90s installments I read after catching up on the backlist take place in a strange place without cell phones or widespread use of the Internet. Sharon was different, too - the product of Berkley at the height of the protest era and a city girl who's firmly planted on the ground. While still politically progressive, she's now a licensed pilot who spends her free time at her remote ranch and is more interested in environmental issues. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with Muller's skill in allowing Sharon to evolve so dramatically over the course of the series without a single jarring shift in character. There's an academic analysis in there somewhere - or would be, if genre fiction were taken seriously.

Explosive Eighteen

Maybe Janet Evanovich needs to slow down. Explosive Eighteen made me laugh out loud (as Stephanie Plum's adventures always make me do), but the story never hung together. At the end of Smokin' Seventeen, Steph flew to Hawaii, but with whom - Ranger or Morelli? The answer was neither...but things got complicated. On the way home, her seat mate slipped a photo into her bag, left the plane at LAX, and was murdered. So now Steph has hit men, the FBI, and her family pressuring her to come clean about her vacation. On top of that, the bail bonds office still hasn't been rebuilt, she's having trouble with the low-level FTAs that pay her rent, Joyce Barnhart is making her life miserable (again), and Grandma Mazur has joined a bowling team headed up by Annie Hart who thinks Steph needs a love potion. There's a mix-up or two with the love potion, the shooting of a wig, a discussion of the physical resemblance between Tom Cruise and Ashton Kutcher (no, I don't see it either), and the most skeevey thing Vinnie Plum has ever seen - but not much of a plot. I recommend skimming the dull bits and slowing down when you start to giggle.

Taken at the Flood

It still surprises me how many Agatha Christie novels I managed to miss. I've re-read a few so often that they're nearly committed to memory, and others have sat abandoned on my bookshelf for decades. Taken at the Flood is one of those abandoned Christies, and it might have remained frail (my copy is a 1972 paperback bought used some time in the early 80s) and alone on my shelf if it weren't for a read-a-long in Ravelry's Agatha Christie group. Gordon Cloade was a wealthy man whose less affluent relatives (two brothers, a young cousin, and a middle-aged cousin and her daughter) depended on eventually inheriting his estate. Unfortunately, he married a young actress and soon died intestate, thus leaving his estate to his widow. She appears to be a soft touch for her late husband's money-seeking family but her brother is made of sterner stuff. There's blackmail, railroad timetables, and Hercule Poirot's little grey cells - everything you expect from Christie, but I'd rate this outing as middling. I didn't find any of the characters particularly engaging or entertaining, and the ending seemed more contrived than usual. Perhaps it's because Christie ventured out of her comfort zone - in most of her books, even the down-on-their-luck aristocrats retain their aristocracy, and even during the Great Depression and World War II, socialites act like socialites. Christie wrote this shortly after the war ended but with rationing still in full force. Perhaps she felt that she couldn't ignore the threadbare existence around her, but it just doesn't feel like "Christie."

The Outcast Dove

I read a few mid-list mystery series - books that don't make the best seller lists but apparently sell enough copies for the authors to keep the series going for a decade or more. That's what I loved about Borders - a 'big box' has the shelf space to carry the second and third tier authors, and will even have copies of their prior installments.

Sharan Newman is one of these authors. I 'found' her at book 5, and bought the next three installments as they came out. By the time The Outcast Dove (the 9th in the series) was published, the big boxes were in trouble and I eventually stumbled across my copy in the Daedalus catalog. It's been a while since I spent any time in Catherine LeVendeur's 12th Century France, and in that time, I'd lost track of some of the family relationships. Catherine's father Hubert was Jewish and forcibly converted as a child, one of his brothers escaped and eventually became his trading partner, and a third brother voluntarily converted and became a monk after disowning his son Solomon who eventually went into his uncles' business, taking over Hubert's partnership when the older man returns to his Jewish faith.

The Outcast Dove is a solo outing for Solomon, although he encounters both his father and Hubert, as well as a knight named Jehan who was once engaged to his cousin's sister. Luckily, the plot does not hinge on knowing the relationships between the characters because if it did, I would have been totally lost. While on a secret mission to free a family friend's fiancee who'd been kidnapped and forced into prostitution, Solomon must also discover who murdered another friend's prospective son-in-law and guard an unbalanced woman another associate is returning to her family. That may sound like a bit too much plot, but Newman ties the three lines - and a personal matter of Solomon's - quite neatly. The killer is a surprise, but fully supported by the preceding 300 pages, and most of the characters have a happy ending. I enjoyed The Outcast Dove, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it either with no knowledge of the rest of the series or without a 5+ year gap since the last installment.

The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy

Just what it says on the tin - The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy tells the story of Pride and Prejudice from Fitzwilliam's point of view. That's not particularly original (and this isn't the first inversion I've read), but I'm willing to give almost any Pride and Prejudice spin-off a try. I probably should have skipped this one, though, because the characters didn't feel right. I just can't see Darcy visiting brothels - having an arrangement with a discreet widow, perhaps, but not gallivanting with Lord Byron and following his lead towards bacchanals. I was also uncomfortable with the transformation of Wickham from a mere cad to a rapist, and I can't see the Darcy I know protecting such a character. What I did like was the novel's treatment of Lydia Bennett - instead of a selfish brat, she's a silly child who's been seduced and there's an edge of panic to her exhibitionism as she begins to realize what lies ahead.

A Dark Adapted Eye

Warning - Spoilers

I still don't know who is Jamie's mother, and neither does his cousin Faith. I've read A Dark Adapted Eye at least five times, and I've seen the miniseries, and every time I lean towards a solution, some piece of evidence pulls me back.

Vera Hillyard killed her sister Eden in a fight over the child to whom both claimed to have given birth. Decades after Vera's execution, a writer approaches the women's niece for help in untangling the mystery. Vera's son Francis has disavowed his family, and their older half-sister and respective husbands were not present for most of the important events, so the only reliable witness is their niece Faith Severn. As a young teenager, Faith escaped the London Blitz by living with her aunts, an intruder in a suffocating mutual-admiration society. Brittle, housekeeper-extraordinaire Vera had devoted her life to her much-younger sister, shipping her son off to boarding school and living apart from her officer husband when Eden was orphaned at age 14. By 1939, Eden had grown into a beautiful and outwardly sweet young woman - the ideal of femininity according to her sister, and an ideal which Faith could never hope to achieve.

Eden joined the WRENs, leaving Vera (who was only in her late 30s) lonely and wishing for another child (the son she'd abandoned a decade earlier had become - or perhaps always was - a manipulator who found joy in psychologically torturing his mother), so no one was surprised when Vera announced her pregnancy. Jamie, however, was born 10 months after Vera's husband shipped out, thus casting doubt on his paternity. Three years later, Eden married a wealthy man and after an ectopic pregnancy left her infertile, she temporarily takes custody of Jamie from an ailing Vera.

This is where things get hazy. Faith, by this time, is a Cambridge student and receives much of her information second hand or in bits and pieces to be assembled later. Her narrative is full of "I heard" and "I think" but the gist of it is that Eden refused to return Jamie to Vera because she claimed to be his mother. More than 30 years later, Faith still doesn't know which woman was telling the truth. Was Jamie the result of an affair or of a rare (but not impossible) 45 week pregnancy? Or did Eden leave the WRENs more than a year before the war ended (Faith saw her aunt in mufti when Eden was allegedly still in the service) because she was pregnant, and then gave her son to Vera to raise? This time around, I thought Eden was Jamie's mother...until I didn't. And then I did.

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

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

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

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.