Imitation Eliot

Dan Conrad, great fan of 19th century English novels, wrote after reading a new book.

I just finished The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's in no way a mystery, more an attempt at writing a George Eliot type novel -- at which she pretty much succeeds, though Gilbert's heroine, botanist Alma Whitaker, does a couple things George Eliot could not have put in her novels if she wanted to (which she probably did).

Here's a line from the book that I like. It gives a feel for the writing style she adopts: "Alma accepted and admired the Lord as the designer and prime mover of the universe, but to her mind He was a daunting, distant, and and even pitiless figure. Any being who could create a world of such acute suffering was not the being to approach for solace from the tribulations of that world. For such solace, one could only turn to the likes of Henneke de Groot [the family's ancient housekeeper]."

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• The author's web site
• Barbara Kingsolver's review in The New York Times
• Elizabeth Day's review in The Guardian
• Marie Arana's review in The Washington Post
• Kerri Miller's interview with Elizabeth Gilbert on Minnesota Public Radio

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Tempted by Literature

Every once in awhile I get tempted to read something that's not a mystery. Non-fiction often works for me. Romance never has. Comedy is good. And there are times when I am tempted to read Literature. I guess I think I should read Literature once in awhile. After all, I'm an Educated person. On rare occasions, I am rewarded. More often I'm befuddled, disappointed, and/or bewildered.

Malie Meloy reviewed Evie Wyld's second novel, All the Birds, Singing in The New York Times. Somethings she wrote there tempted me to read Wyld's book. The review was better than the book.

It was sort of like a recipe that sounded good on paper, but in reality was a great disappointment.

I thought, based on the review, that the book was set on a small island off the coast of England. Turns out that much of the book is set in Australia. And I often couldn't tell where a particular scene was set. I thought the book was a biography of the main character, an independent woman who survived a particularly awful life. Well, it sort of was, but parts of the story were told in reverse chronological order. (There was one point at which three consecutive chapters were set in times earlier than their predecessors.) For someone like me who appreciates story telling, this was a disaster.

Somewhere in the confusing story, the main character did move from shearing sheep in Australia to raising sheep on a British isle. I have no clue about where in the story this happened. Wyld made a big deal out of the mysterious and deadly attacks on sheep by something. Was it brutal nature, delinquent teenagers, delusions, or something evil and ethereal? I never found out. The main character has horrific scars on her back, which she refers to several times. I have no clue about what happened to create them or what they meant to the main character.

Evie Wyld

I went back and read Meloy's review. She described things from the book that I can't remember. I guess I was just too befuddled, disappointed, and/or bewildered to catch on to the Literary illusions in Wyld's Literature. I did like the review better than the book, but it's only a little essay. I do like to read whole books. I do like to read books that effectively tell stories. I do like to read books where characters are introduced or who introduce themselves in whatever ways they are able to understand themselves. That didn't happen for me here. Maybe I was lured in by the photograph of the read-headed author.

Nothing explains to me why the reviews are all positive and why Wyld has won awards for her writing.

Have you read All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld? What did you think of it or what did you understand? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• The author's web site
• Tim Lewis' review in The Guardian
• Catherine Taylor's review in The Telegraph
• Emily Donaldson's review iin The Toronto Star
• Caroline Leavitt's review in The Boston Globe
• Stevie Davies' review in The Independent

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Primary basketball season is over. School's out. Guess who has time to read.

None of that is quite true. Dale Stahl, a former colleague and newly named department chair is involved as a coach in basketball pretty much year round. And he e-mailed me back in mid-May (about the time his AP Econ class was pretty much over). Plus, it seems he read these books sometime earlier.

And I'm trying to figure out why I didn't get to his note sooner. Sorry, Dale. I have no excuses. Tell us more about Dead Lions.

Here's what he wrote:

Herron

Found a new author I absolutely love - Mick Herron.

He has two books set in London amidst the intrigue of the British MI5 secret service. Slow Horses and Dead Lions.

The basics plot element is that the "slow horses" are agents who have made some monumental mistake that has put them on a career path of being slowly but surely drummed out of the secret service.

Far from Regent's Park, the center of power, they are assigned to lowly tasks at the slightly decrepit and depressing Slough House. The leader of the slow horses is the overweight and seemingly burned out Jackson Lamb — a veteran of the cold war and a man with many secrets who still has his finger on the pulse of things, so to speak.

The books are phenomenal, Great intricate plots, twists, suspense without gratuitous violence, old fashioned page turners. I can see them as films and I certainly hope Herron adds a third book to the list!

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• The author's web site
• Betty's review from Mysterious Reviews
• Andi Shechter's review at Reviewing the Evidence
• Mel Jacob's review at Gumshoe

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Rereading

The rereading wasn't intentional this time. I was at the last day of the Northfield Hospital Auxiliary used book sale. Everything was half priced. I picked up a Laurie R. King novel from 2007 for a buck. It didn't look or sound familiar.

However, the opening chapter of The Language of Bees seemed vaguely familiar. Maybe it had been a teaser appended to the end of a previous book??

Most of the first third of the book seemed new. Then there was a section about flying around the Scottish islands in 1924. That rang some memory bells. But the ending seemed all new to me.

Once again, looking out the window at the shores of the little lake named Blake on a cool, cloudy weekend promoted reading. Between naps and gardening and cleaning, I read the book.

My memory must be going or The Language of Bees just wasn't very memorable. I wrote about reading it in the spring of 2010. I wasn't terribly impressed then. I'm not terribly impressed now. Go back and see what I said then. I agree with myself. I am still ready for Laurie R. King to write about people other than Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.

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Back to the Peak District

I picked up another of Stephen Booth's book at the Northfield Library. I'm glad I did.

The Dead Place is set, like Booth's other mysteries, in northern England's Peak District. Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry are, once again, primary characters. The highland moors and the frenemies status of the cops are important features in the plots and the progression of the stories.

Part of the Dark Peak District

Like the Navajo Nation in Tony Hillerman's masterful books, the northern, Dark Peak District is an overwhelming presence in Booth's stories. There are many isolated places and people, but there are many people around. That seems to me a necessity for a long series of books. Similarly, the people who live in the rural Peak District are "outsiders," like the Navajo. DC Cooper is a native and understands a lot about the locals and their culture, much like Navajo cops Leaphorn and Chee did on the rez.

I'll press the comparison a bit farther. Both Booth and Hillerman created interesting characters, plotted stories that held my interest, and told those stories well. Hillerman's stories were usually less complex than Booth's, and I liked them for that. Booth seems to revel in complicating stories and alternating between telling threads of them. I do like the way that Booth's telling brings all the disparate people and events together, but getting there is a bit frustrating at times.

(All this about how Booth's writing reminds me of Hillerman is also reminding me of how much I miss those novels about the people of the Navajo Nation. I might have to do some re-reading.)

Ah, but The Dead Place. DC Cooper and DS Fry begin by searching for a crime after a body is discovered in the moors. But, the person discovered died of natural causes and was supposedly cremated by a local funeral director. Then there are anonymous letters and phone calls hinting at other bodies and predicting murders. There are Booth's usual diversions and the development of the working relationship between the two main cops. The book kept me reading throughout, even when we hosted a couple of wonderful toddlers and their mother from California for a week. Maybe it was the distraction of the little ones, maybe it was the hangover from the awfulness of the previous book, or any number of other things, but I didn't think The Dead Place was as good as the earlier books by Booth that I'd read. But, it was enjoyable. I will look for another when I return to the library.

Have you read The Dead Place or another of Booth's mysteries? What did you think?

Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted.

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• The authlor's web site
• Karen's review at AustCrimeFiction
• Sleepy's review at Sleepy's Book Talk

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Back to the moors

I was comfortable picking up another book by Stephen Booth at the Northfield Public Library. I checked it out at the same time I checked out Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird. I've had mixed experiences with Atkinson's books and Booth was, I thought, a sure thing.

Peak District National Park

I was right. Set in the highland moors of England's Peak District, like Booth's earlier books, the story is contained and limited. The Peak District National Park is an area of pasture land, farming, old mines, and mountains. It's lightly populated and carved into many valleys. Booth made me think of Appalachia when he described the place and the isolated people who live in those valleys. But the area is near major cities of Manchester and Sheffield and millions of visitors show up in good weather. The stories in Blind to the Bones are set in late fall/early winter, so there are few tourists to muck up the stories.

And there are stories. That's one of the things I like about Booth's books. There's a story about a university student, missing for two years, and her parents who stubbornly maintain that their daughter is merely missing and likely to walk in their door at any moment. Then there's the very recent murder of a local man who had been one of the missing girl's housemates. Oh, and there is the rash of burglaries at remote farms and ramshackle villages. And I can't neglect to mention the cult-like extended family, whose repertoire of ways to get along with outsiders is very limited.

The glue that ties all these things and Booth's other books together is the cast of the local constabulary. The main people are Detective Sergeant Diane Fry and Detective Ben Cooper. As usual they are engaged in an enigmatic power struggle while working "together." There's enough individual character development to keep me interested, but not so much as to engage my soap-opera early warning alarms.  

A Peak District mountain top

 Booth does a good job of telling the stories, describing the scenery, and maintaining the characters to keep me reading. His descriptions of the hills, mountains, moors, and pastures led me, while reading the book, to check out the area with Google Earth. What I saw online is what Booth describes. I even found the Street View photo of the entrance of an abandoned railway tunnel Booth refers to. Gradually (perhaps too gradually this time) he weaves the various stories together. The resolutions are a bit too neat and tidy by my lights, but there will be other mysteries to solve for these characters in my future.

I liked reading Blind to the Bones. I could get attached to this series of books and these characters in the way I got attached to Tony Hillerman's mysteries. I've only read four so far. According to his web site, there are twice that many waiting for me.

 Have you read Blind to the Bones or another of Stephen Booth's other books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The author's web site
• Andi Shechter's review at Reviewing the Evidence
• B. Morrison's review at her web site

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Comically weird

I am really lucky. If I'd read Kate Atkinson's first novel before reading her mysteries, I might never have had the great pleasure of meeting Jackson Brodie and getting involved in the messy realities of his fictional life. That first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

That book didn't win any awards from me. I couldn't get through it.

But I really enjoyed reading the four mysteries she wrote. And I enjoyed the BBC rendition of a couple of them. I enjoyed them so much, that I picked up her third book when I was last at the library. It is Emotionally Weird, A Comic Novel.

Okay, I'll give it the comic label. There are some funny bits. Not many, but some. While reading the first half of it, I was reminded of what I've heard about Seinfeld. You have to understand, I've seen bits of Seinfeld, but never a whole half hour's worth. I've chuckled at some bits, but not many. I've heard it said that it was a situation comedy about nothing. As a very casual observer, I'll buy that. And Emotionally Weird, A Comic Novel is also about nothing -- at least in the first half that I read.

The narrator's boy friend epitomizes the book for me. She said in an early chapter:

I shut the door and went back to bed and the warm, slack body of Bob with whom I lived in urban squalor in a festering tenement attic in Paton's Lane...

Bob, known by some as "Magic Bob,"... was in fact an unmagic Essex boy Ilford born and bred...

Like me, Bob was a student at Dundee University... He seldom handed in an essay and considered it a point of honour never to go to a lecture and instead lived the slow life of a nocturnal sloth, smoking dope, watching television and listening to Led Zeppelin...

Bob's sense of humour... had been developed the Goons and honed by The Monkees. Bob's screen hero was Mickey Dolenz...

Bob was an unreconstructed kind of person... he had a complete lack of interest in anything that involved a sustained attention span... He was prone to the usual obsessions and delusions of boys his age -- the Klingons, for example, were as real for Bob as the French or the Germans, more real certainly than, say, Luxemburgers...

In the first half of the book, Bob is easily the most distinct character. If you read the quote above, you got a good taste of Atkinson's humor. And, for me, the description of Bob could be a description of the book.

Now, I can't assert that with any assurance because I didn't read the whole book -- just the first half. By page 200, I was tired of reading about an unmagic group of people who lived slow lives of nocturnal sloths. As much as I appreciate some science fiction fantasy and the craziness of The Monkees, I would rather have watched a Seinfeld marathon than finish the book about nothing.

Any chance that you have read Emotionally Weird, A Comic Novel? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.

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Other reviews (there are distinct differences of opinion here)

• Stephanie Zacharek's review in the New York Times
• Steph's [an obvioulsly different Steph] review at Steph & Tony Investigate
• Greg Villepique's review at Salon.com
• Theresa's review at Shelf Love

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What a waste

I should be taking notes about how books get to my "to read" list. Books achieve standing because a someone familiar recommends them, because I're read an approving review, or because I've enjoyed reading another book by an author.

There was this mysterious entry on the list: A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley. I don't know how it got on my list, but somehow my system failed me.

On the other hand, maybe it's good for me to read a book I don't like once in awhile as a contrast to books I like.

This novel is subtitled, "A Flavia de Luce Novel." Flavia de Luce is a precocious eleven-year-old who solves crimes. She's as obnoxious as the Sheldon Cooper ("I know everything.") character on television's The Big Bang Theory, but without comic double takes. She's as carelessly daring as [Sue Grafton's series heroine] but without a gun.

The setting is a run down country house in post-WWII rural Britain. A widower with three daughters whose most prominent characteristic seems to be his ability to write articles for a stamp collectors' magazine. Flavia is the youngest of the three daughters. The role of the older two seems to be confined to tormenting their younger sister.

There are clever thieves abroad in the countryside. A gypsy woman is murdered and her niece is attacked. Although the local police seem to be on scene and investigating, the pre-adolescent Flavia is the only one really able to identify suspects and locate clues.

Who reads this stuff? It's not Harry Potter fantasy. It's thin treacle poured over gruel. Literate eleven-year-olds aren't about to dive into the small type and dense text. Young readers aren't going to pick up this 400-page book about their little sister. Teenagers or young adults aren't going to spend time reading a book with no vampires or zombies. It's certainly not for adults like me. It's not a romance. The plot is inventive, but in my mind it's wasted on the characters and the setting. The writing is descriptive of both setting and action, but I never cared about either. Or the characters.

So why did I read it? That's a good question. If I'd bought it, I'd be sending it back to the author with a request for a refund. I read it because the weekend was rainy and windy. Television reception was awful and there really wasn't anything to watch. I'd finished two other books. I plowed on thoughtlessly. What a waste. I should have re-read the old Zane Grey that's on the shelf at the lake.

Do you have some thoughts about A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley? Write and tell this little bit of the world -- especially if you found reasons to like it. It is part of a series. Somebody must like them.

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• Nicki's review at Fyrefly's Book Blog
• Helen's review at She Reads Novels
• Swapna Krishna's review at S. Krishna's Books

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Good cop, bad cop, worse cop

It didn't take me long to get back to reading another "crime novel" by Stephen Booth. I was impressed with Black Dog, so on my latest trip to the Northfield Library, I picked up Booth's second book, Dancing with the Virgins.

Characters and characterization were big attractions in the first book, and remain important features in this one. Here's how important they were to me: there were times as I was reading this mystery, that I nearly forgot about the plot and the mystery and wondered about the characters.

The main people in Black Dog are for the most part the main people in Dancing with the Virgins. There's the local boy following in his father's footsteps on the police force. There's his nemisis, the rising star imported from the big city, who beats him out for a promotion. The other officers in the local cop shop are there, with a couple additional people mentioned for the first time.

Oh, and the virgins? They are large upright stones on the moor that local legend says were young women of ancient times who danced on the Sabbath and were turned to stone as punishment. In the midst of the circle of 9 "virgins," a 21st century woman is found murdered. The victim was a "mountain biking" cyclist, attacked not far from where a hiker had been attacked a week earlier. The quiet, rural community is alarmed and demanding that the quiet, rural cops do something about the crime wave.

There are other things going on as well, but it takes a long time for the stories to develop and merge. Maybe that's why I became more interested in the people at times.

The young detective and his nemisis are polar opposites. He operates on gut instincts and an almost religious belief in finding justice. She relies on logic and the presecribed routines of the police manual. She plots her statements and actions like a military campaign. He responds to the needs of the people and the situations around him. Both of them have secrets in their pasts. Both of them wonder about the other and can't imagine how their opposite mangages.

But several of the other characters in Booth's book get pretty extensive development. The poor farmer for whom everything is falling apart; the attack victim whose face is badly disfigured by scars and whose being is disfigured by partial memories; the murder victim, who seemed alone and isolated (like the main characters); a park ranger whose 30-year "career" as a caretaker of his aging mother ends with her death; and a pair of sad-sack misfits who get violently dragged into the story because the VW van they're living in breaks down in the vicinity of murderous violence.

I liked this book. Stephen Booth's ability to profile the people in his stories is at least as good as his ability to craft the stories. He's now written a dozen books. However, I find it difficult to imagine reading that many more books centered on the people in the first two. Booth is not Tony Hillerman and the wilderness of the Peak District is not the wilderness of northern Arizona and New Mexico and Booth's detectives are not Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I'm hoping that the next Stephen Booth book I pick up will have different characters and settings.

Have you read Dancing with the Virgins? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought about it.

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• The author's web page
• The publisher's web site
• Barbara Franchi's review at Reviewing the Evidence
• A summary of 279 rankings at Good Reads

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Saturday dilemma

I had a book I thought I'd read last weekend. It turned out to be engaging enough that I finished it late Saturday afternoon (not late Sunday). The library was closed. I didn't have any other books on my bed side pile. No! Was I to be banished to television land? Yikes! Did I have to talk to the family gathered here. Luckily, we went out to dinner -- great Japanese scallops for me and equally good food for everyone else. And we talked to one another. We even continued talking to each other after dinner. At bedtime I resorted to a collection of sermons by John Cummins, one the two preachers who has made me think and feel.

The book that encouraged conversation by being good enough that I finished it before I expected to? Black Dog by Stephen Booth. I don't know how Stephen Booth's name appeared on my "to read" list, but there it was when I was last at the library. I looked at several books and chose Booth's first, Black Dog.

The title is a red herring. There's a black dog in one of the stories, but it's a bit of distraction. Booth tells stories well, and there are several in this book. And, in a self-proclaimed "crime novel," it's the characters, not the stories that stand out.

The main character is a local boy doing well, hoping like his father to become a police sergeant in the Peak District of northern England. However, he's haunted by his father's sainted memory in the community, in part because his father died bravely in the line of duty. The supporting cast includes an ambitious young detective constable who has been newly assigned to the district and is an unexpected competitor for the sergeant's position. There's the Dickinson family, headed by Harry, who keeps acting guilty because he has secrets to keep. His granddaughter seems to be a potential love interest for the main character, but she seems secretive too. The local "aristocrat" might be the recipient of sympathy and concern because his daughter has been killed, but he's a nasty piece of work who, as a self-made man, never understood noblesse oblige. There are others, in the village and in the cop shop, who appear and leave an impression. But the characters make the story work.

I know I've said I like story telling, but a decently told story with interesting and engaging characters makes a book a pleasure to read. And I enjoyed reading this one. Somehow Booth never lets the description of characters get noticeably in the way of telling the stories, and the characters never obscure what's going on in the stories. As I said, I spent more time reading on Saturday afternoon than I intended and finished the book after the library closed.

It was the first time I sort of wished I had an e-book reader so I could download another book.

So did you recommend Stephen Booth to me? If so, many thanks. After all that character development, I expect to read about these people in more "crime novels."

Have you read Black Dog or another of Stephen Booth's books? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

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The author's web page
A summary of 478 ratings at Good Reads
Maddy Van Hertbruggen's review at Reviewing the Evidence
Luke Croll's thumbnail review at Murder Express

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Too complicated by half

Sue Scriven comes to our house regularly to help us stave off the dust bunnies, sticky crud on the dining room table, and general sediments of daily living. We are grateful and usually enjoy a week after she's been here because we don't have to dust or vacuum much. The following week we grumble and clean.

Sue knows about all the reading that gets done here and recently recommended The Coffee Trader, a book by David Liss. When I went to the library, that book wasn't on the shelf, but Liss' first book, A Conspiracy of Paper, was. So I brought it home.

The book, though written a dozen years ago and set in early-18th century London, is full of contemporary American memes. Like presidential candidate Ron Paul, there were lots of people in old London who were fearful of the "new" paper money. Like many 21st century politicians, there were many people worried about the "new fangled" national debt. And there were entrepreneurs and con men hawking derivatives based on the national debt and even lotteries based on the derivatives. Oh, and there were criminals working behind the scenes to create financial panics and sell forged shares of financial companies and ponzi scheme investments. ["There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good." - Stephen Colbert]

At the end of the book, when it was too late to matter to me, Liss explains that "British money in the eighteenth century broke down this way: twelve pence equaled a shilling, five shillings a crown, twenty shillings a pound, and twenty-one shillings a guinea." (Remember these are the same people who came up inches, feet, yards, perches, and miles.) That complicated currency probably made sense to people who used it and didn't have much of it. A London laborer, Liss says, "might earn twenty pounds a year." Nevertheless, it seems overly complex from my 21st century vantage point. So does the story that Liss tells.

If I saw a diagram of the plot, I might admire the cleverness that went in to creating it and the creativity that linked elements. But, it was over complicated by half.

Same goes for the story telling in my mind. Maybe I am just a streamlined reader thrown back into a horse-and-buggy environment. But while trying to recreate the feeling of 18th century London, Liss spends a lot more time describing things that seem irrelevant than I thought necessary. When he wants to move the story along, the author can have a character send a message by street urchin across the city and get a reply in a couple hours and a couple paragraphs. Other times he takes pages of dialogue to reveal one tiny bit of information. I spent a lot of time frustratedly skimming for details that mattered.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book to me was that the main character was a non-practicing Jew in the London of 1720. After a career as a bare knuckle boxer and petty criminal, his uncle tries to bring him back into "the tribe" and an observant family. (In some scenes I was reminded of the outsider Easy Rawlins from Walter Mosley novels, and his struggles to reenter respectable society.) The anti-Semitism and legal restrictions on the roles Jews could play just a few decades after being allowed into the country were another of those things I was vaguely aware of, but had never thought about in detail. (BTW, that new national debt and the decision to allow Jews to once again live in England were related to the English Civil War, the Commonwealth of England, and Oliver Cromwell. Without a king, the nation had to borrow money to finance itself. And that borrowing required an international banking network. Since Jewish bankers in Holland were keys to the economic success there, Cromwell sought to expand the bankers' activities to England. That meant he promoted toleration and Jewish immigration.)

I might be tempted to pick up another of Liss' novels when I have lots of down time to enjoy the leisurely story telling, but I will know not to expect contemporary pacing. I'll still probably skim for relevancies, though. Maybe I should have begun with The Coffee Trader.

Have you read A Conspiracy of Paper or another of Liss' books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• David Liss' web page for A Conspiracy of Paper
• Andrew Roe's review at Salon.com
• James Polk's review in the New York Times
• Brad Katz's review in Mash Magazine

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Dan was right, again

A couple years ago, Dan Conrad said that Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? was one of the best books he'd read that year.

I've had mixed experiences with Atkinson's novels. Case Histories was really good. I couldn't even convince myself to finish Behind the Scenes at the Museum. The last half of Started Early, Took My Dog was good, but it took me a lot of work to get to the good bits.

Hoping for the best, I picked up Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? the last time I was at the Northfield Library.

I was confused at the beginning, not because of how Atkinson wrote it, but beause I thought I'd already read the book. But I knew I hadn't read this one. Finally, I remembered that the stories in this book were in one of the BBC productions called Case Histories. The BBC producers created a miniseries out of the first three novels featuring Jackson Brodie. The setting of the first scenes in When Will There Be Good News? was different from the televised version, but the basic story was the same. Confusion resolved I read on.

There were fewer characters waved around as red herrings in the beginning than in Atkinson's other books, so I found it easier to keep track of what was going on. I also had vague memories of the television version, but I didn't remember a lot of details. I'm glad I didn't, because it made reading the stories better.

There are three stories in the book that revolve around the main characters. And there are interesting connections between the characters -- as there are in the other novels Atkinson has written.

I agree with Dan. This is the best of Atkinson's books I have read so far. Jackson Brodie, the "star" of several books, is relegated to a minor role in most of this book. He's in the hospital after nearly being killed in a train wreck. Not to worry, he heals enough and becomes a vital part of resolving things. And he's the victim of major fraud.

Brodie survives the train wreck because of first aid applied by a 16-year-old who was staying at her tutor's house next to the tracks. The tutor's car accident caused the train wreck. The teenager is also a nanny for a doctor and her baby. The doc and the baby go missing under suspicious circumstances. One of Brodie's old flames, still on the police force, is the lead investigator in that case. Oh, and the young nanny also has a brother who is dealing heroin and not being honest with his suppliers. Just to bring things full circle, there's a 30-year-old back story that ties the doctor to Jackson Brodie.

Jackson Brodie survived the train wreck and the loss of his wealth. The teenager who was the link between all the stories inherited part of her tutor's estate and is headed to university. The doc and her baby survived and got some revenge. There are loose ends that lead to the next book.

More Kate Atkinson? We'll see. There's so much to read and not enough time.

Have you read When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought about it.

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• Kate Atkinson's web site
• Patrick Ness' review in The Guardian
• Lizzie Skurnick's review at NPR Books
• Kate Atkinson reading from When Will There Be Good News?

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Sacred Treasure

On the top of Gary Sankary's Best of 2011 Reading List was Rabbi Mark Glickman's book Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah. The subtitle is "The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic."

Gary explained to me (and probably to most of us) that a "Genizah is a storeroom/closet/attic that synagogues use to store scared texts that are no longer legible or usable." Often the old documents a genizah are collected and buried in a cemetery. But, the The Ben Ezra Synagogue Genizah had basically never been emptied since the synagogue was founded in the 9th century CE.

Scottish sisters on a Victorian-era adventure in Cairo bought an old document from the Ben Ezra Genizah they couldn't identify, in spite of their expertise in ancient languages. Cambridge don, Rabbi Solomon Schechter identified it for them. It was a one-page fragment of "a Hebrew manuscript of the book of Ben Sira or as it became known in Greek, Ecclesiasticus. Today that book is found in the Catholic Bible, it was excluded from the Hebrew and King James versions." It had been written around the year 900.

That discovery sent Rabbi Schechter out looking for funding and then off to Cairo. There he found the Genizah stuffed with hundreds of thousands of documents. The Genizah which began as a place to store old sacred documents had become a place to store old written documents of all kinds.

In Sacred Treasure, Rabbi Glickman tells the story of the Cairo trove of documents. Rabbi Schechter is only the first in a century-long line of scholars who have worked to identify, read, analyze, and catalog the thousands of documents.

Rabbi Glickman looking into the Cairo Gehizah, Photo: Jacob Glickman

Back in the '70s, I spent a lot of time volunteering on archaeolgical field work projects. I have a real appreciation for the careful work that goes into uncovering and interpreting material culture from long ago. I still recall the thrill of uncovering a large clam shell, cleaning it off, drawing it into the unit's map for its level, and photographing it. When it came time to remove the shell, I (we, because no one can do all this alone) found a small, 800-year-old corn cob under it. Wow!

So, there was Rabbi Scechter, peering into a room full of a thousand years' of history. He was able to purchase most of the documents and take them to England. Back in Cambridge, he began the process of cataloging, reading, translating, identifying, and understanding documents. It was tedious and tremendously exciting work. I understand that. What would any philosopher, historian, or religious scholar give to find something written by Moses Maimonides? What was the value of many things written by the famous sage? But that just begins to tell the story of what was found in the Cairo Genizah.

Rabbi Glickman does a great job of telling this story in all its complexity. He profiles the people and the problems -- like institutional competition. I really appreciated how well the various threads of the story track in Rabbi Glickman's skilled narrative.

I learned that Medieval and modern Jewish religious movements are as numerous and varied as Protestant demoninations. If I thought about my little knowledge of Israeli politics, I sort of knew that, but reading about the varieties of Jewish ritual and rules made that diversity come alive. Rabbi Glickman makes a point of that and a few other ways that the Genizah's contents illuminate the present as well as the past.

I wish he'd written more about what the documents tell us about beliefs, worship, diet, families, law, economics, and other things that are described in the Cairo documents. But, this is not a long, scholarly tome. It's an adventure story. And a darn good one.

Thanks, Gary for recommending the book. I'm passing on his recommendation.

It's not hard to get the book. It's available from Amazon.com. I ordered my directly from Rabbi Mark Glickman, 15030 232nd Ave. NE, Woodinville, WA 98077. The cost is $24.99 plus $3.50 shipping (Continental US) and $2.25 tax if you have it delivered to an address in the state of Washington. And he'll autograph your copy.

If you read it, write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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Expedition: Genizah, Rabbi Glickman's web site
"Cairo Genizah author describes treasure trove" from The Jewish Review
"Cairo’s Jewish medieval manuscripts" from PRI's The World (includes some great photos, including the one above)

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Nosey nurse

Nineteen months ago, Dan Conrad passed on a recommendation of a Masie Dobbs-like mystery by Charles Todd, A Duty to the Dead. I finally read it.

It's good.

I found a copy at the used book sale run by the hospital auxillary last spring. I plucked it off the pile a week or so ago.

It's not a Masie Dobbs mystery. It is set during World War I, not in the war's aftermath. Hero Beth Crawford is an active duty British nurse from a well-to-do family, not a fortunate, talented former nurse who, with the right mentors, has made her own way in the world. Beth Crawford is home on recuperation leave after her hospital ship was sunk by a mine (she doesn't spend much time on R&R).

She's carrying a message from a dying patient to his family. She doesn't know want it means, but she has an overactive imagination and a really nosey attitude. She also has enough money, enough friends and family, and enough time and energy to poke around in the "private" world of a dead soldier's family.

Okay, I might make it sound bad, but if you read the book, you'll find Charles Todd putting an opposite spin on the whole situation.

The mother-son duo who is Charles Todd

In spite of that I liked reading the book. The story is complex and well unwound. The characters are pretty thin and the British countryside is mentioned, but not featured. There are some improbabilities, but I'm not inclined to award any Heart of Gold prizes for them. Well, except maybe the final one where Beth Crawford goes to a previously unmentioned aunt or cousin or something and finds a sympathetic and helpful advisor. It made me wonder why Crawford hadn't she gone to Aunt Melinda sooner.

I'll second Dan's recommendation of A Duty to the Dead, and look forward to reading another "Bess Crawford Mystery." However, I'll look forward with greater anticipation for the next "Masie Dobbs Mystery."

Have you read A Duty to the Dead or another of the Bess Crawford mysteries? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The authors' web site (There's a video of the authors talking about and reading from the book. You might want to skip it. The book is much more lively and alive than the authors' presentation of themselves.)
  
• Irma Heldman's review at Open Letter Monthly
  
• Good Reads' 600+ ratings and 200+ reviews
  
• Uncredited review at Women in World History

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Rereading again

Awhile ago I had to look at my notes here to figure out whether I had already read the latest Arnaldur novel I'd started. (I hadn't.)

When I went to the library to return that book, I checked out a James Lee Burke novel (good recommendations and good memories). I'd only read two pages when I began to suspect I'd read it before. By page three I was sure. I read the back cover and was even more sure. It was Swan Peak. If I'd written about it, it was in the old newsletter. I couldn't find any record of my reactions online. I remembered it enough to decide not to re-read it.

It was Sunday. The library was closed. The closest open bookstore was 30+ miles away. Off I went.

I bought a couple birthday presents and four books for myself.

The first one I sat down to read when I got home was A Test of Wills by Charles Todd. Before long, I realized I'd read it before, too. I looked back on what I said about it a year ago. It was okay, except I felt cheated at the end.

I decided to read it again, in part because I remembered so little of the plot.

I read it. It was okay. I felt cheated at the end. (Red herrings are one thing, but magical resolutions are something totally different. And unwelcome to me.)

Did you read A Test of Wills? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

For me it's on to new and unread books.

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Back to post-war Britain

I finished a professional project and gave myself leave to escape with a mystery by Charles Todd (actually a mother-son writing team), an author(s?) recommended by Dan Conrad.

The story is set in post-World War I Britain (like Jacqueline Winspear's "Maisie Dobbs" stories and most of Laurie R. King's "Mary Russell" stories).

A local patrician is killed while out riding one morning. No witnesses. Exact scene unknown. The body was found in a pasture some time after the murder. A local investigation seems to indicate that a famous, well-connected local war hero is the murderer. So, the locals send for help from Scotland Yard. Enter Inspector Ian Rutledge.

In the book, A Test of Wills, Ian Rutledge, like Maisie Dobbs, suffers from shell shock (PTSS). His condition is worse than Maisie Dobbs' but not as bad as Maisie's one-time fiance, who is confined to a hospital and unable to speak or care for himself. (The story is also set about a decade earlier than the Maisie Dobbs stories.) Rutledge is haunted by a soldier who mutineed at the front and whom Rutledge killed for his betrayal. The voice of the dead man is part of Rutledge's everyday life. Dark depression waits on the edges of his consciousness to take over.

The post-war period in Western Europe was traumatic for nearly everyone. For Rutledge it meant trying to return to a career that he was quite good at before 1914. A Test of Wills tells the story of his first investigation after the war and after treatment (therapy?) for his shell shock. The scene is rural Warwickshire (northwest of Buckingham -- Stratford upon Avon is in the south of the county). [Coincidence noted below.]

Rutledge's investigation seems to reach the same conclusions as the local one did, but he can't tie up all the loose ends. The voice in his head taunts him. People tell him only what they think is relevant. He keeps probing to find out what they are keeping from him. Of course, he's relentless. The voice in his head and the dark cloud at the edge of his being won't allow anything less. Eventually, he sorts out the details, finds the murderer, and returns to London with his pre-war reputation intact.

The book suffers a bit by comparison to Laurie R. King and Jacqueline Winspear. The story is not as crisply told as King's stories are. But, A Test of Wills is "Charles Todd's" first book. Dan Conrad read a later one and really liked it. I'll read another, but it's more opaque than King's stories. [Remember that teacher in high school or at the university who made it seem that there were secrets and priorities that he/she knew but that she/he wasn't going to explain? I remember several like that. I never could figure out what was most important and what would be on the exam. So I tried to learn everything. Well, this story is told like that. There are scores of details. And the crucial ones aren't revealed until the very end (the exam?). I was disappointed in the resolution as I often was with my grades on those less-than-transparent exams.]

Also, I got less of that feeling of verisimilitude that pervades the Maisie Dobbs stories. I think it has to do with a level of detail in Winspear's books. Ian Rutledge has a car that he uses to get around Upper Streetham, but unlike Maisie's little red MG, I never found out what kind of car it was, how he started it, or how he called the local blacksmith to tow it into town to fix a slashed tire.

I was disappointed in the resolution, but the story telling was satisfying and involving. It was a good book to read while relaxing after the completion of a big deal project. This is the first of an 11-book series, I learned from Wikipedia. From another source I learned that the authors, named as Caroline and Charles Todd, might be using pseudonyms and do not actually live in Delaware, where the publisher says they come from. Another source suggested that the son in this writing team might hold a sensitive position which would suffer from being identified as a mystery writer. Who knows?

Do you know? Have you read A Test of Wills or another of "Charles Todd's" books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Oh, and coincidence. A couple days before reading this book, I was researching Warwickshire census records. My dad had searched diligently for ancestors named Wedding in England and never found any. There are many circumstantial clues from colonial Maryland, but no evidence of an English origin for the most senior John Wedding we know of, who died in 1772. Many records are now online in the UK, and I found several families named Wedding living in Warwickshire in the mid-19th century. Older records are not online. Maybe it's time for my research trip to England.

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• Charles Todd's web site
• The publisher's Charles Todd web page
• An interview with "Charles Todd" in January magazine
• Austrailian Kerrie's review of A Test of Wills

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Detail-filled pictures of an era

Dan Conrad mentioned Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mysteries here and the next thing I know, Nancy has brought home two of them from the library. What was I to do but read them before they had to be returned (one of them all the way to La Crescent, Minnesota).

The first book was last year's An Incomplete Revenge. One of Maisie's patrons, James Compton, hires her to do some background investigation in preparation for a major corporate purchase. There's a factory he wants to buy, but it's part of a huge estate. He has lived in Canada for a number of years and is no longer very familiar with the estate.

Maisie, many Londoners, and some gypsies are in the area for hops picking season. And there are many local oddities that can't easily be understood by outsiders. But there's due diligence to be done. And hops to be picked. And, of course, mysteries to be solved. The mysteries and the plot revolve around recovery from the traumas (personal and public) of World War I. The characters and the stories add human details to one of my grad school topics. I probably would have been more interested 40 years ago if I'd had personal responses like these.

What really sets Winspear's books apart are the images she creates of England in the 1930s. She describes in detail what people wear, what buildings look like, how rooms are decorated, and the colors of the landscape. All that description could get tedious (and when I tried to listen to a recorded book while driving, it did get tedious).

But I appreciate the detail when I'm reading. The pictures in my mind are much more detailed than they are when I read most other books. As I've said before, Winspear and her "cannot be named 'Cheef Resurcher'" must do incredible background research into fashion, decorating, architecture, automobiles, roads, agriculture, demography, and urban landscapes. (My only complaint is that Maisie's MG is so reliable that the car must be fictional.)

The second book is Among the Mad. Maisie gets "seconded" to a Scotland Yard investigation of threats to London and His Majesty's government. Military intelligence also is involved. While Scotland Yard is chasing after political radicals of many stripes and the military spooks are looking for alien agents, Maisie is focused on war veterans who have been misused and forgotten by society.

What we'd call post-traumatic stress is part of all Winspear's stories. Maisie is a recovering victim (she was a front line nurse in France during the war and was wounded). But the effects of PTSD and the morality of weapons development are central to this story and to an important sub-plot. And Winspear seems to be setting the stage for explaining how PTSD helped create the enviornent for World War II.

Thanks to Dan and Nancy for reminding me about Jacqueline Winspear and her Maisie Dobbs stories and for putting them in my hands. I enjoyed reading them.

See Winspear in the blog index for other reactions to her books.

So, if you've read any of them, tell us what you think. There's a comment link below and you can send me your thoughts and, with your permission, I'll add them here.

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• Jacqueline Winspear's web site
  
  
• Biography and interview of Jacqueline Winspear at Book Reporter
  
  
• Debra Hamel's review of An Incomplete Revenge
  
  
• Joe Meyer's review of Among the Mad

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Radicals in high places

There are times when I seem to have no impulse control. It often happens in bookstores. I was only passing time. Waiting for someone else to do something. The specifics are lost in a maze of trivia. But the book I bought while I intended to be "just waiting" is very much on my mind. Of course, I only finished reading it half an hour ago.

When I saw Laurie R. King's Touchstone on the shelf in paperback I was lost. Since I read Beekeeper's Apprentice back in 2001, I've been a sucker for her books. It doesn't seem to matter whether she's writing about Sherlock Holmes' replacement for dear old Dr. Watson, or the San Francisco detective, or the cult busting undercover agent, or an innocents' underground railroad, I've liked her books.

I was just grateful that the book had made it to paperback before I found it. I'm sure that saved me more than a dozen dollars. (Even so, a dozen dollars for the paperback makes me appreciate the 50¢ paperbacks of my youth.)

Touchstone is a thriller set in mid-1920s England. An undercover FBI agent is paired with a British WWI veteran with PSTD. The veteran's sister is paired with Lady Hurleigh as progressive social activists. The veteran is also Lady Hurleigh's former suitor. The suit was ended by terrible, mostly psychological wounds the soldier suffered on a French battlefield. Lady Hurleigh is also paired with her current lover, a radical politician striving for legitimacy and political power. Lurking behind it all is a shadowy, semi-official intelligence agent who is planning to make Britain safe from reds and unrest, whether Britain wants that safety or not.

King tells the story quite slowly at first. It is a 550-page book. I slogged through the first half of the book. It could have used some energy and action. But the last third of the book makes up for the slowly-building tension. I had difficulty putting the book down while I read the last 100 pages.

I'd advise you to skim through the first half, but you'd might miss key elements that come into play later. You could probably live without them, but the ending does tie up all the loose ends -- well almost all. There could be a sequel, but it might be a romance novel.

Can you tell I liked this one? King has once again written a book I really like. She offers a believable picture of upper class English life and a plausible image of anti-Communist politics in J. Edgar's FBI and the infant MI5 of the 1920s.

I recommend it. Maybe this is the first recommendation for summer reading.

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• Laurie R. King's web page about Touchstone
• It's a Crime! (Or a Mystery) review of Touchstone
• Dick Adler's review of Touchstone in January magazine

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Improbable upstart

In my continuing effort to bring reviews from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site to the new-fangled blog, I'm concentrating on my favorites.

Laurie R. King is one of my favorites. I wrote this after reading The Beekeeper's Apprentice back in August 2001.

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When I read a review recently of a new mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes set in St. Paul, Minnesota and involving railroad magnate (Empire Builder) James J. Hill, I figured this Holmes stuff must be a trend. I had just finished a new post-Conan Doyle Holmes mystery myself and enjoyed it very much, thank you.

It's been a long time since I've read any Sherlock Holmes -- about 40 years.

When I was about 12 years old, I stayed at my great-uncle Clarence's home for a couple days. (He was a World War I veteran who belonged to the Fraternal Order of the Cooties, Minneapolis Pup Tent, in memory of those awful months in France.) He'd finished off an attic room and decorated it with books. One of them was Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories, which I devoured while a quiet guest. Uncle Clarence gave it to me when I went home. It's on my shelf right now.

The new Holmes mystery I read seemed to very much in the spirit of Conan Doyle's work. Maybe. Because all my Holmesian memories seem to come from Basil Rathbone movies, and the book is dead-on accurate to those images, phrases and accents. The book is one Nancy recommended, The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King [at left].

If you've ever wished that Holmes would get a gentle comeuppance, here's the book for you. And who better to chastise that old know-it-all than Miss Mary Russell, a 15-year-old American orphan "whose mental acuity is equaled only by her audacity, tenacity, and penchant for trousers and cloth caps." (quoting the book jacket flack)

The plot revolves around the kidnapping of the daughter of a US Senator who was visiting London. Holmes is lured out of retirement and persuaded to take on a teen-aged, female assistant to help Scotland Yard solve the case. Of course, the kidnapping was only a ruse to get Holmes out of retirement and into the world, so he could be killed.

It's a fine story of Mary Russell's discoveries about her new life as a ward in England and Holmes' world of treachery and detection. By the end of the book, Mary Russell is a student at Oxford and ready to take a term off to help Holmes solve another case. That must be what King's next book featuring Russell and Holmes, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is about.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice is great fun -- just keep imagining Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes sputtering in the face of a brilliant young woman. And then imagine what Dr. Watson is doing!

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