Goodluck and bad luck

The early returns from Nigeria point to the reelection of President Goodluck Jonathan. It seems a good time to write about Goodluck Tinubu.

Tinubu is the title character (and victim) in Michael Stanley's book The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu. After reading A Carrion Death at the beginning of last year, I was looking forward to reading another book by the writing team who go by the name of Michael Stanley. But in the blur of daily life, I forgot.

Then blogging friend Gary Sankary reminded me that there was another "Detective Kubu mystery." So, I looked for it on my next trip to the Northfield Library.

The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu is a big book. It has about twice as many pages (460+) as most of the mysteries I read. Then again, there are two authors. The main character is Botswanan detective David "Kubu" Bengu. (Kubu is the name for hippo. The detective resembles a hippo in girth as well as in determination.)

If you're not familiar with a bit African history, you'll have to learn about apartheid, Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe and its war for independence, and the proximity of Botswana to South African and Zimbabwe. It also helps to know a little about the terrors of present-day Zimbabwe.

You see, George Tinubu got his name Goodluck when he survived a murder during the hostilities between the white settler government of Southern Rhodesia and the independence fighters. However, the authorities listed him as dead because they found his identity papers with his fingerprints on them. Goodluck Tinubu went on to become a school teacher in Botswana. Many years later, he was killed in a tourist camp in northern Botswana near the border with Zimbabwe.

The local police don't seem able to make much headway in solving the murder because there are so many likely suspects and so many possible motives. So Detective Kubu Bengu is called in from the capital.

The story is set up well in the opening chapters, and it's well-told through conversations and bits of inner dialogue. I enjoyed reading the first half of the book and was thoroughly immersed in the story.

Then the book got better! The story telling never seemed to falter. Michael and Stanley write short snappy chapters and manage the information flow very well. There are partial escapes from the hunt for a murderer or murderers when Kubu gets home for weekends with his wife and his parents. But his wife gets more involved than expected when she's kidnapped -- seemingly by Tinubu's murderers who think Kubu has a briefcase full of cash that's gone missing.

Kubu ventures across the border into Zimbabwe to interview Goodluck Tinubu's mentor, the headmaster of a closed Zimbabwean school. He almost catches one of the bad guys by draining most of the gas from an outboard motor. He figures out that the past had caught up with several of the people at the tourist camp where Tinubu was killed.

But all that's told in a great story. And, if you need your stereotypes of Africa shattered, there's no better place for that to happen in a story set in Botswana.

I recommend it for many reasons.

Have you read The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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• The publisher's web page
  
• A reading by Michael and Stanley
  
• A review by Bernadette Inoz at Reactions to Reading
  
• Julie Kramer's review at the big Thrill Archives

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Swedish crime novel

And here's another view of Sweden to fracture your stereotypes (well, at least the stereotypes of the descendants of Swedish immigrants in Minnesota). Leif GW Persson’s novel also jostled the images of reviewer Katherine Powers, writing in The Boston Post. Persson's description of Sweden's police and intelligence organizations give credence to the cabals in Stieg Larsson's series of "The Girl Who..." stories. Powers also adds a reference to Arnaldur's Arctic Chill, something I read and wrote about just over a year ago.

From Nordic climes, come chilling thrillers

[H]ere before me is Leif GW Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End: The Story of a Crime, unquestionably the best Swedish crime novel I’ve read so far.

In it, Persson takes up the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a crime that has never been solved. Aside from that event, the specific goings-on, as well as the characters, motives, involvements, and actions are fictional, but they are also completely believable. The novel consists of two chronologies and a fraught history. Sweden’s geo-political predicament is the backdrop, especially the years that spanned the end of World War II as it segued into the Cold War up to the mid-1950s. In Sweden this was the time during which “wherever you turned you only saw the Russian bear with his mighty paws, ready to deliver the final embrace.’’...

But be warned: This is a novel to read with your cerebral capacity at its highest setting and with, perhaps, a little notebook at your side. Most of the book’s characters are members of the Stockholm police force or of the country’s security organizations. They are numerous, and their names and official titles are nothing but trouble...

The Swedish security organization in place here is made up of a number of bodies: a central organization... a smaller “external group,’’ camouflaged as a management consulting firm established for the purpose of pursuing the most secret operations; a special “threat group,’’... and a further group, whose task is to spy on everyone else in the organization....

As I'll explain at a later date, my dance card for reading is pretty full right now, but I'm going to keep Persson's book on my waiting list.

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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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The NYT reviewer speaketh

Marilyn Stasio, writing in The New York Times really likes the final Wallander novel by Henning Mankell, but she's not so enthusiastic about Jacqueline Winspear's new Maisie Dobbs mystery.

She does recommend a second Michael Robertson mystery about the brothers Heath, who rent an office for their law firm on London's Baker Street in exchange for answering letters sent to Sherlock Holmes. The first book was The Baker Street Letters. The new one is The Brothers of Baker Street. Hmmm...

New Botswana mystery?

Gary Sankary asks, "Any word on when the next Detective Kubu book might come out?"

Great question and good reminder. He and I read A Carrion Death and liked it.

There was a hint about a new mystery featuring Detective Kubu in Botswana.

At the Detective Kubu web site, there are three books listed: A Carrion Death, The Second Death of Goodluck Tunubu, and Death of the Mantis. I guess we missed the invitation to the publication party.

I am planning to go to the library today. Anything else I should look for?

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More cold mystery from Iceland

So, when I returned books to the library, I scanned the "new fiction" shelves as usual. Just in case.

What I found was an oversized paperback of Arnaldur's latest, "Reykjavík Murder Mystery," Hypothermia. (It's a British publication with all the extra vowels.) It was pretty good and the last half was better than the first half.

In fact, I read to about page 60 and then went online to search this blog. Things just seemed very familiar, and I wasn't sure I had hadn't read this book already. But, no, I hadn't read Hypothermia. The main character, the setting (Iceland), the prose, and the pacing all seemed very familiar. In fact, a couple of the "cold cases" in this book were mentioned in earlier books.

When things seem that familiar and the pace of the story telling is a slow march, I have trouble getting enthusiastic about reading. I'd read a chapter and put the book down. The next day, I'd read another chapter. However, things picked up in the last half of the book.

Arnaldur's main character, Erlendur, is off on his own in this story. Things are slow at the Rekjavík cop shop. Erlendur is doing paperwork on a suicide and taking a last look at a couple 30-year old cold cases left over from early in his career. He's motivated, in part, because the father of a young man who went missing without a trace back then is dying.

Of course things get complicated. Details of the suicide don't add up. A guy retires from a career in Denmark and comes home to Iceland. Guess who he used to know. Erlendur is still haunted by the death of his little brother in a blizzard that almost killed both of them. His adult daughter is pushing him and his ex-wife to sit down and talk to each other (something they haven't done for 20 years). There are hints of ghosts and words of mediums.

Nearly all of that is in the second half of the book. And that's worth reading. I don't know how well the second half would stand up without introduction, but I'd guess you could skim the first 120 pages.

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Now, there's the issue of counterparts. Dan Conrad noted that Charles Todd's Bess Crawford character (first created in 2009) is strikingly similar to Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs. The first Maisie Dobbs novel was published in 2003. Both women were nurses during World War I and both are independent women who get involved in solving mysteries in London after the war. I haven't gotten around to reading a Bess Crawford story yet, but here's another pair to draw to.

In 1991, Henning Mankell wrote the first Kurt Wallander novel. The Swedish detective has become incredibly well-known. The eleventh (and last) novel is about to come out. There have been television series produced in Sweden and Britain featuring Wallander. And there's a Swedish movie.

Wallander is a morose and phlegmatic man, whose wife left him and whose daughter worries him (in several senses of that verb). He's a passionate detective whose life is centered on finding the facts and explanations behind awful events. He lives in a neglected apartment and doesn't take care of himself.

Arnaldur's Erlandur first showed up in 1997. He's a morose detective, haunted by his past and anxious to explain tragedies and atrocities he confronts as an Icelandic detective. He abandonded his wife and two children long ago and has no clue about finding closure with those people. He lives in a neglected apartment and doesn't take very good care of himself. Books about Erlandur have been published in 26 countries, but none have been made in to television shows or movies. And Erlandur's putative apartment building is not a tourist destination like Kurt Wallander's.

Oh, and Arnaldur is Icelandic and doesn't use a family name. In the UK and the US, his books list him as Arnaldur Indriðason. I guess you can't be an author in the English-speaking world with only one name unless you were a 19th century short story writer or you've established yourself as a performer.

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• Northern exposure, an interview with Arnaldur by The Guardian's Nicholas Wroe.
  
• Jane Jakeman's review at The Independent
  
• Maxine Clarke's review at Euro Crime
  
• A review at Mysteries in Paradise
  

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Wait for it

Henning Mankell: the last Wallander

Forget the 40 plays, the Gaza flotilla arrest and the good work in Africa, what Henning Mankell is really famous for is the anguished detective he created 22 years ago. Now, with the final Wallander novel published this week, he tells Jon Henley why he is happy to say farewell

That's it then; the end. Twenty-two years after his first appearance and more than a decade since the one everybody - even his creator - had assumed would be his last, Inspector Kurt Wallander is working his last case.

The lugubrious, all too human but ultimately decent Swedish cop with the never-ending health problems and the terrible family life has sold 30m books in 45 different languages. This will be a sad day for a lot of people.

But not, on balance, for Henning Mankell. "Hand on heart," he says, "I thought I'd written his last adventure a long time ago. I don't even particularly like the man. We have certain things in common: we enjoy the same kind of music, we have a similarly conscientious approach to work. We wouldn't be enemies if we knew each other, but he wouldn't be a close friend. He's not someone I'd invite to dinner."...

"When you reach your 60s, you realise certain things," he says. "First, that you've lived well over half your life. Second, that you've pretty much made all your really big decisions; people very rarely change direction after that. And that leads you to look back. It's quite a . . . scary moment. So I asked: am I afraid of anything? I'm not afraid of dying. Nor of pain; we can control most pain these days. But there is one thing I'm scared of."

The thing Mankell is scared of is the reason this is Wallander's last case, so obviously I'm not going to tell you what it is. But thinking about that, and about the whole business of looking back on a life, and the idea of Wallander realising how all along he had been so resolutely non-political, then wondering what might happen if you confronted him with perhaps the biggest political scandal in Sweden's postwar history – thinking about all those things, Mankell says, "I began to think I really might have a story for Wallander. One last one."...

Crime writing, he came to realise, was not – as everyone had always told him – a literary genre that was invented by Poe or Hammett or even by Shakespeare. "It was around in classical drama," he says. "Even then, we were holding up a mirror to crime to observe society. Look at Medea: a woman murders her kids because she's jealous of her husband. If that's not a crime story, I don't know what is. And if the ancient Greeks had had a police force, you can be damn sure a detective inspector would have had a part in Medea. Society and its contradictions become clear when you write about crime."

Wallander took off almost instantly in Scandinavia, and nearly as fast in continental Europe. Britain, after a slower start, is catching up, carried on a wave of Scandi-crime enthusiasm that also features the likes of Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Detective Sarah Lund. Wallander, though, retains a special appeal. What is it?

Partly, Mankell reckons, that he has never instrumentalised the detective. "Everything has always started from a big question, not from within Wallander," he says. "I did sometimes use him, of course. But I never held him between my fingers and looked at him and said: So, what can I find out with you today? I'd written three novels with him before I realised this was . . . like a cello, that I could play."

It's also important that Wallander is real. "No one could imagine James Bond stopping to inject himself with insulin," Mankell says. "That's because James Bond isn't real. So it's important that Wallander has diabetes, he's ill, his ideas progress, he has relationship problems. He changes, like we all do." It helps, too, that he thinks: "It's challenging to have him enter a room and think for 10 pages. But that's what I'm interested in – how he reads facts, traces, situations. Running around and shooting people is easy. And it isn't normal. Normally you solve problems by thinking."...

But now Wallander has reached the end of his road. Would Mankell, prolific and hugely successful for over 40 years, be happy for the rumpled detective to be his greatest legacy? He thinks. "I believe," he says, "the most important thing you do in your life, you may not even know what it is. It may be that one day you sat down on a bench to comfort someone who is crying. That could be the most important thing you ever do. So no, I would like to be thought of as a good, and quite generous man, who tried to make life a little better for others through what he did. And the things he wrote."...

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Whew!

After slogging through the muck of the rough draft of Mark Twain's autobiography and then working, soporifically, through David Brin's universe of multiple sentients, I was worried I'd never get back to really enthusiastic reading. During the fortnights with Twain's book, I avoided reading. I did crossword puzzles. I played solitaire. I watched TV. I mindlessly surfed the web. I didn't want to go back to that book. During the fortnight with Brin, I kept falling asleep. I was on airplanes and I did come down with a blue ribbon of a head cold, but nonetheless, I kept falling asleep with the book in my hands.

Before I left for California, I not only checked out a book from the library, I also bought one from the best seller rack. Usually, reading a couple books in a week would be no big deal -- even when around little granddaughters. But I never got J. A. Jance's Trial by Fire out of the backpack during the trip.

Yesterday, after writing about my reading experiences with Twain and Brin, I got the book out and began reading.

Yipee! I can still read enthusiastically.

I know, it's mindless eye candy. Jance is an entertainer. She creates identifiable characters. She writes realistic dialogue so the characters talk to each other. Her characters aren't terribly deep, but the main ones were parts of earlier books, so there's background. They react in understandable ways within the realm of what's expected of people. She tells stories that are paced well. All these things are distinct contrasts to the books I most recently read.

I was half way through the book before I put it down last night. This afternoon I finished it. The good guys won again, with some suffering. The bad guys got their due. The scene was set for another story about some of the same characters. I enjoyed the experience. Just like I've enjoyed most of the other Jance books I've read. (She's written 40 so far -- a regular Mickey Spilllane. I don't know how many I've read.)

Trial by Fire considers the ways in which people react to fortune, good and bad. It's not profound, but it's got half a dozen telling anecdotes to relate. If I really wanted to think about it, I could ponder human nature, personality, and fate. But I only got as far as agreeing with the protagonist that I'm damn lucky and very grateful for it. Not everybody is as lucky and some who are aren't grateful. "So it goes," to quote another of my favorite authors.

Trial by Fire is an "Ali Reynolds Mystery." It's good entertainment. Try it out. Or try out something else by Jance. All the ones I've read have been worth the time I spent with them.

Or write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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Not just in Botswana

If you search for Bess Crawford or Maisie Dobbs on this blog, you'll find recommendations for books about post-World War I women who were private detectives. You won't find a review of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency because I only listened to an audio version of the series' first book. But women as private detectives does seem to be a theme (or a meme).

Be aware that this theme is not made up of whole cloth. Here's a 1911 ad from Chicago (posted at BoingBoing by Scott Edelman):

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Pioneers? Us?

My blogger friend Sank made of list of his 10 best for 2010. He recommended Death Benefits by Thomas Perry. It was a book I liked. Sank also like the Nick Adams stories by Hemingway and Ken Follett's World Without End. I like things those authors have written, too.

He recommended Sundiver by David Brin. He liked the themes of rebellion and adaptability and acceptance.

When I recently flew to California, I took along the Northfield Library's copy of Sundiver.

I tried reading it on the flight to Denver, during my layover there, and on the flight to Oakland. So many characters, such confusion, so few events. I got some good naps on those flights.

While not playing with granddaughters in California, I tried reading the book before sleep. It did put me to sleep.

After I got home, I struggled to read the rest of the book. Somewhere around page 150 of a 340-page book some things began happening. By then I'd skimmed enough to be confused and unable to distinguish one character from another, except for a couple. I had trouble making sense of descriptions of settings and events. Besides, I no longer cared about any of the characters -- even the protagonist.

Interesting ideas, yes. Well written, no. Interesting technologies, yes. Enthralling plot, no.

Of course, that's just one guy's opinions. A guy who got suckered by a century-old dead guy.

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• Tomorrow Happens, David Brin's website
• Eoghann Irving's review of Sundiver in Solar Flare
• Reviews at BookLore
• Aristeidis' review at Fantasy Report Universe

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Sucker!

It was more than 50 years ago when I first read the story about Tom Sawyer and the fence Aunt Polly tried to make him paint. My reaction then, and when I read Tom Sawyer to young David a few years ago, was that Hannibal, Missouri must have been full of dumb, gullible, backwoods boobs.

Then Mark Twain, 100 years dead, proved me to be a dumb, gullible, backwoods boob, too. He sold me a copy of his so-called autobiography.

I was excited to read Twain's autobiography, and he sold it well. I bought a copy during the week of its release. "Don't publish this until I've been dead for 100 years," he said. The purpose was to allow him to say what he really thought without earning the enmity of the people he wrote about.

Well, old guy, nobody cares about or even knows most of the people you wrote about. Even your good buddy General/President Grant is pretty much forgotten, except as a notorious drunk.

Twain might have begun doing an autobiography. Some of the opening chapters are about his family and the childhood he heard about, but was too young to remember. He quickly became bored with that. A few years later, he started again. The second time, he decided to write about what he was interested in and change topics whenever his interests change. Sometimes his interests waned in the middle of a story. Okay, most of the stories weren't interesting to start with.

Every once in awhile, Twain told a good one. In that way he resembled my blogger friend Sank. Twain would tell an amusing anecdote with some insightful commentary. Sank does it more often than Twain did. Those moments were why I kept reading (actually skimming). I kept at that skimming for over a month. Toward the end of the book, Twain goes on quite awhile about his daughter Susy, who died at age 24. It was touching and the man's pain was palpable. The book is 736 pages. Well, there are 276 pages of notes and index, but the few gems don't make the other 460 pages worth the effort. Twain needed an editor.

Oh, but there was a whole team of editors. Editors from the University of California. Instead of editing, they collected every little word Twain wrote with the note "autobiography" appended to it and put them all in this book. Well not all. They promise more volumes. Oh, goody.

I find myself in agreement with Garrison Keillor. He reviewed this book for the New York Times. If you want a more complete or informed consideration, read it. Skip the book.

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• Wikipedia on the autobiography
• The Autobiography of Mark Twain – a review by Tim Adams in The Guardian.
• Mark Twain's Amazing Embargo, a review by Craig Fehrman at Slate.com

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Usually, I put a link here so you can easily buy a copy of the book. No link this time. Go the library, check out a collection of Twain's short stories and read those.

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A Charles Tood novel and a Maisie Dobbs alert

Dan Conrad wrote from Minneapolis:

I get these "Author Alerts" from the Hennepin County Library when they order books from authors I've specified. This morning I got one announcing the purchase of Lesson in Secrets : A Maisie Dobbs Novel, by Jacqueline Winspear -- so I can pass it on to you and to get the Northfield Libray cracking--if they haven't already ordered it.

On that note, I just finished An Impartial Witness, the second Bess Crawford novel by Charles Todd. It is very nearly as interesting as the first in the series, Duty to the Dead. Of course Bess Crawford is a shameless rip-off of Maisie Dobbs -- but the novels have, I think, their own merits nonetheless: less psychological depth and angst and a bit more sleuthing and more of a "how the hell is she gonna get out of this one" climax.

Thanks for writing, Dan. I'm still hung up on Mark Twain's autobiography and trying (like the despot in Egypt) to find a graceful way out. I skim pages of pitiful prose and then, every once in awhile, run into a remarkable bit (like Twain's elegy to his daughter Susy, who died unexpectedly at age 24 while Twain was in England).

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An alternate list of the best of 2010

I'm mired in Mark Twain's sort of autobiography. I'm only about half way through and the wonderfulnesses are random and few and far between. If you want a preview of my thoughts (that I'll put together when I've finished the book or quit trying to read it) look at Garrison Keillor's review in the New York Times. In the meantime, here's a great list of the best of 2010. (I recommended one of the books on his list, and one of the 2010 books I liked was one he wrote about -- Gary writes about a lot more than what he reads, and his blog, Old and in the Way is worth reading on a regular basis.)

Okay, we're recommending each other, but Gary Sankary's list of his best reading of 2010 is worth looking at.

Best of 2010- Written Word

That time of year for Sank to start thinking about the best of 2010. Why? Why not. Oh, and as you’ll figure out pretty damned fast, it’s not books that came out in 2010, it’s books I read in 2010, and that matters. In this space anyway.

As many of you know, I’m a serious media hound. I consume a boatload of music, video and books. Well, I think it’s a boatload. When it comes to music it certainly is. When it comes to books, Mrs S kicks my butt, but I’m trying to get better and spend more time reading.

It’s the right thing to do.

I even stopped driving into the office this year so I could ride the bus and, yes, enjoy even more time for reading.

So dear readers, here it is. Sank’s BEST OF 2010. First edition- the written word...

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Lots of reviews

The New York Times is going to publish its list of 100 notable books for 2010. You can get a head start on the list here. Each book on the list includes a link to a review from the NYT Book Review. One of them I've already recommended. The list is alphabetical.

100 Notable Books of 2010

FICTION & POETRY

• AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE. By David Goodwillie...
  
  
• ANGELOLOGY. By Danielle Trussoni...
  

and on and on...
Now, go out there and READ!

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Singing not whistling

When I saw the name Ivan Doig among the new books at the Northfield library, I had good memories of a couple of his books. When I looked them up, it turns out I've read four of his books in the last 3 years. When I checked out Work Song, I had no idea exactly what I was getting into, because while Doig's books tend to be historical fiction, they range widely in that pasture.

It turns out that Work Song is a sequel to the best of the books I read, The Whistling Season.

And, like The Whistling Season, this book is just a story about a few people. It's set in Butte, Montana just after World War I. It turns out that Butte in 1919 was a multi-ethnic city of 100,000. Copper mining was just beginning to wind down. The post-war red scare was in full swing as was union activity. The Golden Age of paternalistic mega-corporations was just past its prime.

Into this scene, the University of Chicago scholar, gambling huckster, wood splitter, and school master from the earlier book, Morris Morgan, appears. He says without offering any details that he spent the decade between the two stories in Tasmania. He's unclear about what drew him back to Montana. The Chicago gamblers, who chased him to the frontier, remember him, and he's promised not to go near the woman with whom he ran from Chicago.

Whatever plans he had are thwarted when the railroad loses his trunk and he arrives in Butte with a stachel of clothes and necessaries. He ends up, luckily for a classically educated big city guy, with a job in the Butte Public Library (he was found reading Caeser in Latin by the classically inclined head librarian). The story revolves around Morris, the landlady of his boarding house, two of his fellow boarders, one of his former students (who is teaching in Butte) and her fiance (a miners' union leader) and the suspicious corporate enforcers trying to identify Wobblies (see IWW).

Like The Whistling Season, this book is about the characters. Unfortunately, the characters in Work Song aren't as well-drawn as the ones I remember from The Whistling Season. But, it has been a bit over two years since I read it. There's a bit of suspense and adventure, but no big events. The times in which the book is set deserved a couple big events. But they're not in the story. The time and place are not evoked as vibrantly as Davis and Winspear drew ancient Rome and 1930s London. But it was a pleasure to read about fairly normal life. No murders. No huge improbabilities. Just some colorful characters bumbling through life like most of us do.

I recommend reading The Whistling Season and Work Song as a pair. Then, I recommend choosing some others of Doig's books and trying them out. Have you read Work Song? Have you read other books by Ivan Doig? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted to them.

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• Ivan Doig's web site
  
• Jonathan Yardley's review in The Washington Post
  
• Tim Rutten's review in The Los Angeles Times
  
• Joanna Hershon's review in The New York Times

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I've gotta stop reading like this

The last time I was at the Northfield library, I picked up a Lindsey Davis [right] mystery, Scandal Takes a Holiday. Over the past few years, I've read several of Davis' mysteries set in the ancient Roman empire and starring Marcus Didius Falco, "private investigator." I've enjoyed them.

Like Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mysteries, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, Tony Hillerman's mysteries, and... Well, like lots of mysteries, the setting in Davis' stories is an important as the characters and the plot. The settings are often one of my motives for reading a book.

Unlike the Maisie Dobbs mystery I read recently, I wasn't drawn into ancient Rome the way I was drawn into 1930's London. Davis does an incredible job of describing the place -- even down to its aromas. Maybe I was tired of reading about the buildings, meals, and smells of ancient Rome. This book seemed to be filled with too many of them.

There were lots of interactions among a large cast of characters, but they didn't hold my attention either. Not even the gangs of evil doers kept me interested. I was curious enough to read nearly every paragraph, but it wasn't easy to do.

When I read The Mapping of Love and Death a month or so ago, I could hardly wait to find time to read more. While reading Scandal Takes a Holiday, I kept looking for excuses to do something other than read. I even watched Castle.

I really liked some of the other Marcus Didius Falco stories. The one set in Londinium and another set on the German frontier were memorable. This one, not so much. I've often discovered that my reactions have more to do with me than with the book. Your results may vary.

So, if you've read Scandal Takes a Holiday or another of Lindsey Davis' books, tell us how you reacted.

Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Lindsey Davis web site
  
• Lindsey Davis' ten favorite books about ancient Rome
  
• A review of Scandal Takes a Holiday at Shots
  
• A review at Who Dunnit

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Another book I didn't really read

Masterpiece Mystery recently featured three stories featuring Kurt Wallander, the repressed and obsessive Swedish detective created by Henning Mankell. The Wallander mysteries are intriguing and Wallander as a character is too. I keep expecting him to break out and become a real person. Maybe I shouldn't.

I picked up Depths by Mankell at the Northfield library. I'd forgotten that Mankell has written things besides the Wallander mysteries. I didn't look too closely at the book. I should have.

The back of the book jacket might have given me a hint. There's a quote from a Swedish newspaper review: "Mankell's most ambitious literary work so far." For me, that kind of response is a warning.

Depths is not a mystery and Wallander is not a character.

It's the tale of a troubled and obsessive Swedish naval officer set in 1914 as a world war is about to begin. I can't critique much about this book, because I only read about a third of it. It's constructed with little chapters of one to a dozen paragraphs each. The book jacket biography says Mankell has written many plays. The tiny chapters are like tiny scenes from a movie. Or maybe they're like individual frames in one of those antique things called films. Each of those frames is a still picture. When you run them through a projector, you get the simulation of movement.

Practically nothing happens in most of the scenes in Depths. I kept reading expecting the scenes to add up to something. I don't understand the arithmetic of the book. Even when it seemed that something had happened, I couldn't understand what was going on. (Reminded me of calculus in fact.)

I got tired of the main character rowing off into the fog to stalk a woman who lived a solitary life on an island off the Swedish coast. She was as as helpless and hopeless as he was, and nothing made much sense. Maybe if I was Swedish and not American I'd understand more. (Depths was a best seller in Sweden.) Maybe if I could better recognize my own helplessnesses. It's really not worth the effort for me. I think it should have been a short story (or as Paul Binding suggested in his review - link below - a tragic folk ballad).

After struggling through about a third of the book (maybe only a quarter), I skipped to the end and read the last couple scenes. Evidently things had happened and there was an ending with cosmic justice (I guess). But if it took 400 pages to get there, I'm glad I didn't read all those pages to find out. Next time I'll make sure I'm checking out one of the Wallander books.

Have you read any of Mankell's books? Have you read Depths? How have you responded? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Lucy Ellmann's overly-long and spot on review of Depths in the New York Times
  
• Ian Thompson's review in the Guardian (UK)
  
• Paul Binding's review in The Independent (UK)
  
• Myra Junyk's review from Curled Up

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First romance, now fantasy

Taking Bird Loomis' advice, I picked up a book by Thomas Perry. And then another and another. I liked them. One of the things I liked was that the characters were new to me in each book. There are times when it's a treat to follow characters through several novels. (See Tony Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, and Jacqueline Winspear.) But the novelty in Perry's books was refreshing.

I did notice in the dust jacket bios, that Perry was identified as the author of the Jane Whitefield novels. I was curious enough to look for one the last time I was in the Northfield library (celebrating the centennial of its Carnegie building). I picked out the oldest Jane Whitefield novel I could find and checked out Dance for the Dead, published in '96.

The book starts out like gangbusters. The first two chapters are great short stories. I was ready to read a series of short stories with little ligaments holding them together into a "novel." Turns out that the rest of the book is woven around those stories to create the novel. There are other short stories, but by the time I got involved in the book, I wasn't looking for them anymore.

This novel, like most of the other Perry novels, is a fantasy. Jane Whitefield is a magician, a superwoman, and smarter than any of the other bears. She's a Seneca woman from western New York who helps people disappear when they need to hide from bad people. It's a dangerous occupation, but she's the expert. Like Sherlock Holmes, she has people who help her in small, but essential ways. She always has enough money and another identity with documentation (even ones she can share with her clients). She always knows people she can go to. They're always home. She always wins the fights. She always is the survivor. No villain that Perry can invent can outwit her for long. She's heartless with the bad guys and motherly with victims. She probably does everything except shepherd people into heaven. The ones she sees out of this world are obviously going elsewhere.

I had to put on hold my desires for believability. There's practically nothing believable in the book. The action scenes are well done and suspenseful, as long as you forget that Jane Whitefield is coming out on top a the end. The plot is simple, but the telling is complex. That may be why I liked reading it.

Have you rad Dance for the Dead? Have you read any of the other Jane Whitefield novels? What did you think of them? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Publisher's web site for Thomas Perry's books
  
• An Australian bookworm's thoughts on the Jane Whitefield series of novels
  
• Robert Birnbaum's interview with Thomas Perry at identitytheory.com

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Romance

I've read several of Jacqueline Winspear's novels and really liked the atmosphere she creates. The novels are set in London during the early 1930s with World War I and the depression important for context. Well, not the depression so much, but the post-war experience of Winspear's main character, Maisie Dobbs, is vital. There are regular references to the depression, but Dobbs and her assistant are mostly observers. Dobbs is a private investigator and people wealthy enough to hire her haven't been hurt by the economic disaster very much. So, Maisy Dobbs and Billy Beale are gainfully employed.

It's Winspear's use of language and attention to detail that create the atmosphere of the 1930s. I can't swear that it's the 1930s atmosphere she creates, but it's definitely not a late 20th or early 21st century atmosphere. Words, phrases, and bits of material culture all contribute to a sense of another time. A romantic re-imagining of a time long past. (Maisie would have been about the same age as my grandparents.)

One of the reasons I have kept coming back to read more of Winspear's books is that they haven't strayed into romance novel territory. The stories focus on a mystery and the steps Maisie and Billy take to uncover the hidden facts. Maisie is a young, single woman and you might expect romance to be in the cards. But Winspear has created a woman who was a front-line nurse in France during World War I. She returned with traumatic stresses. The young doctor she loved and served with also came back from the war, but he was damaged much more severely. A head injury left him an invalid in a hospital for a dozen years after the war. Romance was on hold for Maisie.

But, a book or so ago, the injured doctor died. Maisie had a date or two and a serious suitor whom she turned down. In this book, The Mapping of Love and Death, romance blossoms.

But the romance is not just about Maisie and a new suitor or idealized memories of another time. Maisie is trying to find out what happened to a young American, a volunteer in the British forces during the war who went missing. In 1932, his body was found in France and, with it, a packet of love letters from an unnamed British nurse. The American parents want to identify the woman and learn more about their son's last days. (Of course it's more complicated than that because the post-mortem on the soldier's skeleton suggests he was murdered.) But there's the soldier's romance from 1915. There's a romantic image of a beautiful valley in California that the soldier visited before the war. There's an obvious romance still going on between the grieving American parents. There's are filial relationships between Maisie and her father and between Maisie and her dying mentor. And more. There is romance of one kind or another throughout the book. So, when Maisie is approached by a new suitor and she accepts his suit, it's not out of place. It does make me wonder how Maisie will continue her career if she marries into a proper upper-class family in London of the mid-1930s. Charity work, maybe. But investigative work for paying clients? I think not. The post-war, depression years were ones of great opportunity for women in Britain, but there were some things that proper women just didn't do.

In any case, in spite of all the romance and romance novel-like attributes in this book, I enjoyed it. It was a little day dream away from the fall of 2010 to an idealized time in early 20th century London. The characters are attractive. The story telling is well done and sometimes compelling. The most unbelievable thing is that Maisie's 1930 MG doesn't break down -- ever. The reputation those cars had doesn't support such reliability. Ah, escapism. Sometimes it's just the thing.

Have you escaped into a romantic past? How'd it go for you? Have you escaped into Jacqueline Winspear's London of 75+ years ago? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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Jacqueline Winspear's web site
Jacqueline Winspear talks about the book

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Perry's Death Benefits

Gary Sankary, wrote about Death Benefits by Thomas Perry. It's one I'd written about previously: More from a fox of an author.

Biological science fiction

Some time ago, Gary Sankary mentioned, in his blog Old and In the Way, that he'd enjoyed reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. That was a recommendation to explore, even though he said very little else.

In the back of my head I knew that Greg Bear was a science fiction writer. So, the next time I was in the Northfield library, I browsed through the science fiction section looking for his name. A number of his books were on the shelf, but not Darwin's Radio. Okay, I thought, I'll look again later.

After several unsuccessful forays to the science fiction shelves, I resorted to using the catalog (it's still a card catalog to me, even if it's now online). And there I found the book. It had probably been on a shelf all along, but someone had decided to shelve it in the "fiction" section instead of the "science fiction" section.

This has happened before and I don't get it. Sure, there are no space aliens, intergalactic travel, or imaginary technology in Bear's book, but it's the best kind of science fiction. It is (or was when written in '99) a projection of ideas based on contemporary science. So shelve it with the rest of science fiction.

The science it's based on is biology -- molecular biology involving DNA. Now, I still don't understand very much about this science. I have read enough Stephen J. Gould essays to grasp the concept of punctuated equilibrium, but beyond that I'm clueless. Bear could have been telling me that up is down in genetics and I wouldn't have known the difference. But he seemed to understand the basics and some of the scientific speculation. And then Bear struck out from there to science fiction.

WordiQ.com says, "The scientific details in his work are such that he is usually classified as a hard science fiction author...

"Darwin's Radio... stick[s] closely to the known facts of molecular biology of viruses and evolution. While some fairly speculative ideas are entertained (it is after all, fiction) they are introduced in such a rigorous and disciplined way within the context of the cutting edge of those disciplines, that Darwin's Radio gained praise in the science journal Nature."

The mix that informs the plot includes mass murders in Eastern Europe, some possibly Neanderthal mummies in an ice cave in the Alps (Bear was referencing Ötzi the Iceman), a flu-like illness that seemed to be connected to huge numbers of spontaneous miscarriages and new ideas about human genetics. Nearly all the main characters are scientists, although some of them have fled the ivory towers of academe for commercial ventures and public health administration.

The scientific conflict arises when some scientists see rapid evolutionary change as a disease. The public health authorities have to take action to safeguard populations. Other scientists think they recognize evolution at work and do their best to evade the public health officials who threaten a natural process.

The central characters are a molecular biologist and a discredited archaeologist. Bear makes them an attractive couple and makes them fugitives by the end of the book -- sympathetic fugitives, but on the run nonetheless. That transition from science fiction to hide and seek was difficult for me.

There's too much scientific detail in the book for me. Bear spreads his explanation of genetic details quite thickly on the story. In other places, the story telling is somewhat ponderous. I found myself skimming and skipping a lot. But it's an engaging story and I, too, enjoyed reading it. I might even go looking for the sequel, Darwin's Children.

Have you read Darwin's Radio? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Greg Bear's web page for Darwin's Radio
  
• Nicholas White's review on his web site
  
• Reviews at GoodReads.com
  
• Donna McMahon's review at SF Site

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Literature Maps

I was playing with Literature Maps this morning before really getting underway. (One delight of retirement is that I can get up, post something on a professional blog, go for a sunrise walk, read headlines in more than a dozen newspapers, have breakfast and my first coffee, and then consider "getting underway" at 9:30am.)

The Literature Maps are part of Gnod, described on its web site as "a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors." I'm not sure what that means, and there's no explanation of how the "system" works. However, if you click on the "Gnod Books" link, you get to a page titled, "gnooks." There you'll find links to the Literature Maps and a discussion about Literature Forms. You'll also find a link to "Gnod's Suggestions," which is where the site gathers data for constructing the Literature Maps. (It collects this data so literally, that typos and misspellings are also collected and republished on the Literature Maps.) At that page, you'll be asked to identify three of your favorite writers. Based on the names you submit, you'll be presented with the name of an author you might like and a link to a Literature Map for that author.

I'd looked at these Literature Maps before, but I hadn't spent much time looking carefully at them. The idea is that if you plug in an author's name, the program will create a "map" of names, and that the closer the names of "two writers are, the more likely [it will be that] someone will like both of them."

I've been tempted before to look at the names that are closest together, but this morning I discovered that the outliers are equally interesting.

So, here are links to Literature Maps for authors I've recently written about and some of my favorites. Using Carol O'Connell as an example, the names closest to hers on the "map" are Gerri Hill, Charles Todd, Maan Meyer, Elizabeth Amber, and Jo Clayton. None of these ring bells with me. However, if I look at the outer edges of this "map," I find the names Walter Mosely, Jonathan Kellerman, John LeCarre, Nevada Barr, Dana Stabenow, Marcia Muller, and Dick Francis, all of whom have written books I've liked. Does that fit with my ambivalent response to the Mallory mysteries?

• Literature Map for Carol O'Connell
  
• Literature Map for Dana Stabenow
  
• Literature Map for Thomas Perry
  
• Literature Map for John Dunning
  
• Literature Map for Åsa Larsson
  
• Literature Map for Arnaldur Indridason
  
• Literature Map for Stieg Larsson
  
• Literature Map for Tony Hillerman
  
• Literature Map for Laurie R. King
  
• Literature Map for Mark Twain
  

So, look at some of these Literature Maps or create your own. How well do they reflect your experiences? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

An American Salander?

A couple weeks ago, NetFlix delivered the DVD of the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to our mailbox. After reading the books and hearing Dan Conrad's raving about the movie, I was really looking forward to seeing the movie and reading the subtitles. I was not disappointed. I only wished I'd seen the movie on a big screen in a theater. The small screen seemed to limit the impact of the movie.

Nancy has not read the Larsson books, but she was entranced by the stories in the movie and taken by the Salander character. She was reminded of a central character in a series of mysteries by Carol O'Connell [left]: NY cop Kathy Mallory. The two young women characters are blazingly smart, extraordinary hackers, and physical fighters without equal. They both are the products of very traumatic childhoods. They're both loners. The differences are physical. If Salander is a tattooed, gothic waif, Mallory is a lucious beauty who can't do surveillance because everybody notices her.

Nancy pulled Mallory's Oracle and The Man Who Cast Two Shadows off her shelf and handed them to me. I read them both. There are big differences between the Stieg Larsson books and the Carol O'Connell books. I'm not quite sure what they are. All the characters are intriguing, but the Mallory character is somehow drawn less intensely than the Salander character.

Well, there is my reading. I think I read these books in snatches too small to get into the flow of the story telling. O'Connell uses quick cuts between "scenes" with little in the way of transistion. Sometimes there's an extra space between paragraphs; other times not. But I would be reading about a discussion of magic and illusion set in an old magician's storage spot. In the next sentence I would be reading about a poker game in which a character without a poker face keeps losing his spare change. And then there were so many characters. If I didn't remember who was who, I'd get totally lost in the transition. And if I read only a few pages at time, I had trouble remembering who was who.

So, the reading experience was, for me, disjointed.

The stories in these novels were intriguing and convoluted. The action scenes, were not interrupted by abrupt transistions and were well scripted. The setting is Manhattan. What's not to like? But, they were not as compelling as Larsson's stories. I could not have read his books in the small snatches I used to read O'Connell's.

Have you read Mallory's Oracle and/or The Man Who Cast Two Shadows? Have you read another of O'Connell's books? What did you think? Is Mallory an upper class version of Salander? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• A review of Mallory's Oracle at Jandy's Reading Room
  
• A review of O'Connell's career and several Mallory novels
  

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You're reading my memory

Novelist James Collins wrote about reading, memory, and thinking about reading in yesterday's New York Times. It reminded me of several of the reasons I began writing little bits about the the things I read. One of the reasons was to reflect on what I read. The other reason for writing an actual newsletter for 20 years and this blog for the last four is that this is my memory cache.

Collins' essay is well worth the 3 minutes it takes to read it.

PS: I've completely forgotten the plot of one of the last two books I read. My blog entry about it is in rough draft and will show up here soon — without a plot summary. In the meantime, I have to check the TV schedule to see if there's a golf match broadcast today.

The Plot Escapes Me

I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read… These are books I loved, but... all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.

Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?…

Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf… And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?…

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Alaskan summer

The other book I picked up at the Northfield library was A Night Too Dark by Dana Stabenow. I think I've been reading Stabenow's books for a couple decades. She's written more than 30. I keep reading them because most of them are set in Alaska. Kate Shugak or Liam Campbell show up in many of the books, and they are interesting characters. Besides creating interesting characters, Stabenow weaves good plots, tells good stories, writes good action scenes, and tells good jokes once in awhile.

I don't remember any jokes in A Night Too Dark, but the characters and plot are good. I never did figure out the title. I sort of expected that it might have something to do with short days and long nights of the Alaskan winter. Nope. The story takes place in the summer. Maybe it refers to the tragedy at the end. Or maybe things in Kate Shugak's future.

Oh well, the action centers on exploratory work on a potential gold mine just beyond the boundaries of a national park and native territory. Lots of new people flooding a once isolated community that welcomes the inflow of money more than the influx of people. A depressed mine worker walks off into the wilderness to return his body "to nature." A body is found. A month later, the missing guy stumbles out of the woods much the worse for wear, but very much alive.

And there are people and events as unusual and unexpected as anything in a script for Northern Exposure. It's Alaska, after all. Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin hires former PI Shugak (who is also his parmour) to help investigate. Old Sam goes fishing for salmon and hunting moose out of season. Kate's foster son Johnny gets a girlfriend and a paying job. Jim and Kate are as randy as usual.

It was fun to read. It's more chewing gum for the mind and a great summer book. Luckily, I finished it before summer was over.

Did you read A Night Too Dark? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Dana Stabenow's web site
  
• Patrick Anderson's review in The Washington Post

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Hapless

When I had read the available books from West Yellowstone, I was back in Northfield heading for the public (socialist) library. The librarians have a rolling cart positioned just in front of the main desk where recently-returned books are placed before they are reshelved. I always look at the contents of that cart.

The look paid off the last time I was there, and I went no further. I plucked a new Dana Stabenow mystery and Thomas Perry's Strip from the cart, went to the automatic check out machine with my library card, and left the library. I doubt I was there more than four minutes and walked away with several hours of good reading. I'll write about the Stabenow book later, but here's to Thomas Perry.

If many mystery writers are producing episodes of TV series featuring a few main characters and a few settings, Perry is producing movies set in a variety of places and populated with characters unseen elsewhere in the world of fiction. The dust jacket informations says that Perry "is the author of the Jane Whitefield series..." Well, I might have to go look for one of those. But for now, there is a long list of non-series Thomas Perry books that I look forward to.

Strip, like Metzger's Dog and Death Benefits, is a well-told entertaining tale.

A hapless mook lucked out when robbing a strip club owner who was trying to deposit the nightly receipts from his three gentlemen's clubs. A hapless LA newcomer, who has been spening his retirmement savings trying to impress girls, gets fingered for the robbery. A hapless police lieutenant, who has simultaneous twenty-year marriages and a kid from each who is about to enroll in an expensive university, is assigned to investigate the robbery. The mook gets a girl friend/accomplice for the next late night robbery, and she excitedly shoots someone. The newcomer proves that he's not hapless. The lieutenant stumbles along trying to figure out who is doing what to whom and where will the tuition money come from. Then, a Mexican drug boss and his bodyguards are murdered.

Details? You'll have to read Strip. It's a great and complicated tale with an ending befitting O. Henry.

Have you, too, read Strip? What did you think? Write and tell this bit of the world what you think.

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• Thomas Perry's web site
  
• Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times
  
• Carol Wallace's review at Book Group of One

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Horses and books

One of the books Nancy bought at the Bookworm in West Yellowstone was The Bookwoman's Last Fling by John Dunning. I was about to run off to the library when she said she was busy with John McPhee's Rising from the Plains and I was welcome to read the Dunning book. Such a deal.

I've read a couple of Dunning's books before and they've been entrancing. The books are about the adventures of ex-Denver cop turned rare book dealer Cliff Janeway. This one adds a little Dick Francis flavor because Janeway takes up scut work at a couple racetracks in order to find out who had stolen some treasures from an incredible book collection. Oh, and whether the books' owner had been killed some twenty years earlier.

Along the way there's the matter of a middle-age romance between Janeway and his lawyer girlfriend. And the ex-cop's hankering for a return to investigative action and away from the cerebral book business.

There are some good guys, some bad guys, and some nuts, and lots of horses, and red herrings. But the story moves along and it's interesting right to the end. It was not a book that I felt I had to read quickly (like the Stieg Larsson books). I read The Bookwoman's Last Fling methodically, and that's perhaps how the story was told. In the tropical days at the end of August when we were all hiding in the air conditioning from the heat and humidity, it was a good book to read.

Have you read The Bookwoman's Last Fling? What did you think? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• Sandy Mitchell's review at Suite101.com
  
• Kathy Weissman's review at Bookreporter
  
• A review at GoodReads

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From the far north

I had three books to write about, and I wrote about one. Now, I still have three books to write about because I've read another. It's time to write.

The other book I bought at West Yellowstone's Bookworm was The Black Path by Åsa Larsson. (She's no relation to Stieg Larsson.)

Three years ago, about the time I was beginning to read Scandinavian mysteries, I read her book Sun Storm. I liked that book enough for the vague memories to encourage me to pick up The Black Path while in Montana.

The book has echoes of the crooked business people that Stieg Larsson's character Mikael Blomkvist was writing about at the beginning and end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The story here is about a trio of successful Swedish entrepreneurs who reach too far and not too well.

The stars of the story are the same police detective (Anna-Maria Mella) and lawyer (Rebecka Martinsson) who were featured in Sun Storm. The story is convoluted and overly-complex. It's full of flashbacks and asides. I found it quite difficult to follow the story in the first half of the book before I got to know who the characters were.

This is evidently the third book featuring this cop-lawyer pair. (I missed one, I guess.) Maybe that's why I don't have a very good impression of who these women are. Maybe Larsson has never done much revelation about the characters. Too bad, there's potential.

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• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime.co.uk
  
• A review from Complete Review
  
• A review by Uriah Robinson (Uriah Robinson is the blogname of a short, balding, retired health care professional) at Crime Scraps

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Iclandic mystery, again

Suddenly, so it seems, I've read 3 books without thinking much or writing anything. What was it that some famous or notorious person said about the unexamined life or unexamined reading experience?

We are back from vacation (for three weeks now).

When we were in West Yellowstone, we visited one of our favorite bookstores, The Bookworm [see the "tower" with the word "Books" on it in the photo to the left -- click on the picture for a larger view]. Shopping there was more difficult than usual because the store was wrapped in crime scene tape for a couple days. We never found out what happened, but there weren't any body outlines taped on the floor inside. (Then again, there very little floor space inside.)

Nance and I each bought a couple books.

I mined the Scandinavian mystery section (yes, there's a table with piles of mysteries by Nordic authors). The first one I read was Silence of the Grave by Indriðason, the Icelandic writer whose main character, Erlendur, is a sad case. But Indriðason's stories aren't as depressing as those of other Scandinavian writers.

I picked this 2002 novel, which is the fourth of ten books with police inspector Erlendur as the primary character. I've read one earlier book and three later ones. Silence of the Grave offers some insight into the Erlendur character and his relationships with his children. It also allows Indriðason to tell a complicated story in which the present reflects the past.

In the murder mystery, construction excavation uncovers a skeleton. Erlendur and his partners are assigned to determine who was involved and what had happened fifty years earlier. Archaeologists excavate the burial, the detectives look at records and interview former residents, and Erlendur tries to excavate the history of his daughter in order to figure out what happened to the child he abandoned when he walked out on his marriage twenty years earlier. And he tries to find a way to save the drug-addicted daughter who has just survived a dangerous miscarriage.

There were moments (especially as I sat by the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park), when I nearly gnashed my teeth because the stories seemed overly complicated. But the stories were compelling and I kept on reading. In the end, the complexity was worthwhile and the explanations created by bringing together the very disparate details made all the stories in this book come alive.

And the story of Erlendur, his depression and his passivity and his lack of self-understanding, made it possible for me to understand a bit more about his seemingly heartless flight from his family and his relationship with his daughter (which is part of a couple of the later books).

That gets me to the point of suggesting that you read Indriðason's books in the order in which they were written if understanding the Erlendur character is important to your reading of the mysteries. That would mean reading Sons of Dust and Silent Kill before going on to Jar City, Silence of the Grave, Voices, The Draining Lake, Arctic Chill, and Hypothermia.

Looking back at my reactions to the three newer Indriðason books I've read, I'm not as enthusiastic about Silence of the Grave as I was about Voices, The Draining Lake, and Arctic Chill. But it's worth the time. Maybe someday I'll get all these books together in one place and read through them in chronological order.

Then again, there are so many other books to read.

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• Karen Chisholm's review at EuroCrime.
  
• The Brothers Judd review (and links to many other reviews of Indriðason's books).
  
• Colin Harvey's review at suite101.com.
  

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