Another solution to a "used up" character

Henning Mankell has written nearly a dozen crime novels featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander. Wallander fits the stereotype of crime novel detectives. But Mankell added some spark that made his character stand out.

In The Troubled Man, Mankell announces the end of Wallander's "public" life. "After that," Mankell writes, "there is nothing more. The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all."

But before that last line, before he is swallowed up by the shadow of forgetfulness, Wallander works to resolve one more mystery. This one involves the disappearance of his daughter's father-in-law-to-be. The older man had been a commander in the Swedish navy who had been involved in a bit of international intrigue involving a Russian submarine trapped in a Swedish fjord. Well, everyone assumed it was a Russian submarine and no one would talk about how or why it had escaped identification and capture.

Of course it's more complicated than that. The wife of the commander also disappeared. Long ago, she had been a refugee from East Germany. Or, at least everyone thought she was a refugee. Had she been a spy? Was there a larger meaning to the papers found on her body? And how does this affect Wallander's daughter and new granddaughter?

Oh, and was this somehow related to the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986?

Mankell

Mankell adds so many distant and political aspects to the mix, that it's hard to imagine Wallander finding any firm answers. Probably only Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander could have figured it all out and played vigilante to punish the evil doers.

Mankell is a master at story telling and character creation. He's also a master at putting one character out to pasture. I don't think I've read all the Wallander novels, though I've seen quite a few television versions. I might have to go through plot summaries and find the ones I haven't read yet.

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• The author's home page
• Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
• Brian Oliver's review in The Guardian
• Kenneth Turan's review in The Los Angeles Times
• James Urgquart's review in The Independent

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Long time coming

It's not just that it took me months to get around to writing about this. The first recommendation I had about this was a decade ago.

Ten years ago, Bird Loomis wrote about enjoying Ian Rankin's mysteries featuring John Rebus. Last summer I finally read an Ian Rankin book, but John Rebus was nowhere to be found in it. It seems the old guy had retired and a new main character, Malcolm Fox appeared.

Well, we can't have that. Conan Doyle had to bring Holmes back from the dead. Like Harry Bosch and Carl Morck, Rebus returns as a civilian to a cold case group (in Edinburgh it's called "Serious Crime Review"). The book is called, Standing in Another Man's Grave.

Rankin and his book

Rebus retired, but he has no life outside of detection or drinking or smoking. His chance to keep investigating is the only real possibility for him.

He gets a call from a woman whose daughter disappeared back in 1999. The woman says her daughter's disappearance must be related to the disappearance of several young women in the same vicinity in recent years. It's just the kind of case Rebus can't stay away from. Even though it brings him to the edge of a grave.

It also gets him in touch with Rankin's new character Malcolm Fox. Fox runs the complaints department and knows Rebus' reputation and hates it. Can he get rid of Rebus? Can Rebus drive around Scotland enough to wear out his vintage Saab? Will a gangster, on whose toes Rebus stepped, push Rebus into another man's grave? After the retirement age is raised, can Rebus get back on the force? Does it matter that the title is a mis-hearing of a song title, "Standing in Another Man's Rain"?

The story is well told. I enjoyed reading it. I think it's time for me to haunt Half Priced Books and look for some of Rankin's older books. What a fine prospect.

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• The author's web site
• Alison Flood's review in The Guardian.
• Mark Lawson's review in The Guardian.
• Marilyn Stasio's review in The New York Times

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Traveling in another's mind

Louise Erdrich's little book, Books and Island in Ojibwe Country, didn't remind me of Dostoyevsky. It reminded me of Malcolm X's account of his pilgrimage to Mecca. It wasn't so much the enlightenment of the travel as the sense of sacredness and the repetition of ritual that made me think of the journey to a far away desert place.

She begins by describing the trees around her home in Minneapolis, all of which she's named. Then she travels north to a big lake.

Erdrich went by boat to islands in Lake of the Woods, that huge lake on the border between Canada and the US. There are hundreds of islands in the lake, many of them with rocky cliffs around their edges. And many of those cliffs are home to ancient paintings left by Ojibwe people. The creatures and the symbols in those paintings are still familiar to many people in the ancient Ojibwe homeland.

Copper Thunderbird, also known as Norval Morrisseau, was an Ojibwe artist whose works were based on the cliff paintings. They are marvels of color and shape, but they speak of the Ojibwe past and magic.

Mishipzheu on a cliff face

Morriseau's drawing

The bench, a featured facility

After reflecting on the ancient images, Erdrich meets a friend to begin a retreat at Ernest Olberholtzer's old home on Rainy Lake. There, she reflects on books and paintings and writing and perserving identity and the past. Oh, and on birds as well.

Throughout the journey, Erdrich's  infant daughter is her companion. Her daughter is an active and living connection with the future. Caring for her makes time for reflections of the past to project into her future.

And then Erdrich returns to her home near, you should have guessed, Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. That's when she discovers that some of her precious trees, including the last elm have been blown down by a huge storm.

It's a book about nothing but life. And a journey to sacred places and times remembered and foreseen. It was a great pleasure to read it. Go for it.

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• Buy the hardcover of the book from the National Geographic Society
• Buy the paperback from Erdrich's book store.
• Yolanda A. Reid's review at Y Reid Books?
• Maureen Gibbon's review in the Minneapolis StarTribune
• Rayna's review at Libereading

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No procrastination, this time

It's been over 40 years since I read any Dostoyevsky, but I had flashbacks last night while reading Karin Fossum's Bad Intentions. Someone at NPR said a Fossum mystery is "equal parts whodunit, heart-thumper and creep show." Fossum says they are “small, quiet stories.”

Well, Bad Intentions may be small (just over 200 pages) but it's not quiet. It is creepy. It's really not a mystery, and her main detective, Inspector Sejer, plays a very minor role in the plot. But it was, for me, a "heart-thumper." Two of the main characters were guilt-ridden, Dostoyevsky-like characters. A third was a Dostoyevsky-like manipulator, who evaded his own guilty feelings by attributing them to "lesser men."

The story revolves around the death of a man after a drinking party. Three friends who were involved in hiding the body, if not directly in the man's death, try to find ways of living with their memories. One of them ends up in a mental hospital, another in a quest to stay as high as possible for as along as possible. The third friend tries to find ways to get his buddies to carry his guilt as well as their own. Two of the friends are obviously in danger and my fear for them kept me reading as much as Fossum's skill in telling the story and probing the minds of the three main characters.

I was struck by Barry Forshaw's comment in his review of Bad Intentions in The Independent (UK). He described a mystery writer's conference where everyone was having a good time with "shop talk." Then Karin Fossum spoke: "Fossum... was having none of the brandy-induced good humour that had preceded her, and her truly terrifying description of a real-life child murder was delivered point blank to a suddenly sober audience. People shifted uneasily in their seats, but it was a salutary reminder that crime – however pleasurable on the page – has grim consequences in the non-literary world." It's a connection that even the graphic visuals of television's medical examiners don't often make for viewers.

If you're looking for a short narrative story about human frailty, this might be a book to go to. If you need your stereotypes of Norway adjusted, this might be a place to begin. If you want a deep exploration of guilt, go to Dostoyevsky. Just remember that Dostoyevsky's books are really long.

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• Barry Forshaw's review in The Independent.
• Laura Wilson's review in The Guardian.
• Lesley McDowell's review in The Herald (Edinburgh).

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Better late than never?

Once again, I have procrastinated about writing things about books I've read. The books have piled up on my desk and my dresser. Why, oh why?

I have no answer.

Diversion: The last I read of Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear's hero, she had closed her private investigator's business and headed for India. It was a good move, because the character and the story lines had become rather stale. In the last two years, Winspear wrote a novel about life during World War I, and has another Maisie Dobbs mystery coming out in July. The new novel is set in Gibraltar, which might help revive the franchise.

Long running series (common to mystery writers) based on one or two primary characters, face the risk of repetition, especially if the characters are portrayed in consistent ways. Louise Penny faced that problem with her Armand Gamache novels set in the tiny village of Three Pines, Quebec. She has dealt with it by changing the status of her main character and having him retire to the little village and do some private sleuthing for one of his new neighbors.

Louise Penny has written a series of books (10 so far) about Quebec Detective Inspector Armand Gamache. Somehow he's investigated nearly a dozen major crimes in the tiny (Lake Wobegon-sized) village of Three Pines. That tiny village not only seemed to be a magnet for crime, but also for an incredible variety of interesting people (equally unlikely events in my experience). But those characteristics are what made Penny's stories so interesting. The new book is The Long Way Home.

In the book that preceded The Long Way Home, the great detective cracked a major corruption case that involved the highest levels of the Quebec police force. Then he retired to the tiny village of Three Pines that he'd come to know so well, thus increasing the variety and number of interesting people in the village.

Painter Clara Morrow's husband Peter, also a painter, went missing. The two of them had had a sort of competition as artists, and Clara had won more fame and fortune. Had Peter ceded the stage to his successful wife, had he gone off in search of a new muse, or had he given up on living? Who better to help locate the missing man than a nearby, retired police inspector? Peter's trail is obscure and convoluted.

The retired DI has to deal with the remnants of an artistic commune from the '60s. Surrounding the ruins of the commune are rumors of murders (bring in the cadaver dogs) and plagiarism (check in with a gallery owner in Montreal). Somehow, Peter was linked to the commune in the past. Was his disappearance linked to a reconnection with its notorious former leader? Oh, yes, asbestos too. Deadly asbestos. And a sad, "O. Henry" ending for the loving couple, Clara and Peter.

Well done, Louise Penny. You found a way to extend the series of Gamache novels.

• The author's web site
• Patrick Anderson's review in The Washington Post
• Marilyn Stasio's review in The New York Times
• Linda Wertheimer's interview with Louise Penny on NPR
• Viv Watts' review in The Express (UK)

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Familiar author, new story

I have four books sitting next to my desk that I've read and haven't written about. All of them were written by authors whose earlier books I'm familiar with. All of them were at least good.

Should I do more than make a list of them?

Well, of course.

The top of the pile is The Spider's Web by Margaret Coel. Coel writes about murders on Wind River Reservation in north-central Wyoming. We drove through the area a year ago. It's full of deceptively big mountains, beautiful green valleys, and desolate-looking prairies.

Coel's main characters are the Boston priest assigned to the reservation parish as a way to help the recovering alcoholic, the Arapaho attorney who returned to the rez after law school, and local and reservation lawmen.

This plot revolves around the murder of a young Arapaho who seemed to be turning his life around and an outsider who identified herself as his girlfriend. And there are other mysterious characters who haunt and threaten the main characters and other locals near the parish church and Riverton, the town in the southeast corner of the rez.

St. Stephen's parish (the model for Coel's church)

People go to and from Jackson, Wyoming in the story, but it's a three-hour drive through Dubois. Of course, in the wide west, a three hour drive is a short jaunt. I knew people in Wyoming who drove 75 miles to the grocery store and 75 miles back.

Coel writes well. She treats the landscape almost like Hillerman did. Her characters are almost as complete as Hillerman's were. Her plots are as complex as Hillerman's were. I was a big fan of Tony Hillerman, so to say that Coel is almost as good as Hillerman is high praise.

I liked The Spider's Web. If you haven't read any of her books before, I think you ought to go back to one of her earlier books to get a taste of what she does. One of her early books really strayed near frustrated romance (focused on the priest and the attorney), but she hasn't repeated that. If you like what you read, go to the library or a Half Price Books store and read away.

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• The author's web site
• Don Metzler's review at Gumshoe
• Judy Gigstad's review at BookReporter
• Emily Rowe's review at Fresh Fiction

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Now I have three books on the pile next to my desk. Back to reading.

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Artistry

A few years ago, I invented an Improbability Award for books whose plots contained unlikely or wishful events. My inspiration for this was the spaceship Douglas Adams created in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The spaceship, called the Heart of Gold is powered by the infinite improbability drive, which is governed by the Browian motion in a cup of hot tea. The absurdity of the whole idea startled and amused me. Other authors have startled and amused me with highly improbable events and circumstances to power their stories.

I think I have to hand out an Improbability Award in the nth degree to Steve Hamilton for The Lock Artist.

Adams' Heart of Gold

This book was on my "to read" list and I have no idea how it got there. It was an Edgar Award winner. It is well written, however, Hamilton often seems intent on slowing down the plot in order to describe everything he can imagine. I skipped and scanned through many paragraphs. If I later discovered I'd missed something important, I went back and skimmed more carefully. But that happened only rarely.

But the whole story and all the plot lines in the story are solidly based on improbables. The main character survives a tragedy that kills his family. He is left mute because of the experience. So, it's ironic that the whole book is told by that character in the first person. Hamilton does that part well.

The main character becomes a professional safe cracker by the time he's 17 years old. Even though he's a social outcast in school, he wins the love of a nearby school's most beautiful. Several people he "works" with on major thefts are killed, but he's left unharmed. His uncle gives him a motorcycle. Without practice or training (or a license), he speeds across the country a few times without accident or traffic ticket. On probation for his first theft, he's assigned a restorative justice project. The guy he is to work for is in a tight spot with some gangsters who lent him money. That leads to more safe cracking work. Later, one of the cops who "knows" our hero, saves him just before another of his partners in crime is about to blow his head off. And of course, it all ends happily ever after.

Hold it. Was I reading a mystery, a coming of age story, or a romance?

If you can deal with the unlikely circumstances and sequences of events, you might well enjoy reading The Lock Artist.

If you read it or another book by Steve Hamilton, write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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• The author's web site
• Fiona Zublin's review (in the last paragraph) from The Washington Post
• Marilyn Stasio's review (in the 5th paragraph) from The New York Times
• Cathi Unsworth's review (in the only paragraph) from The Guardian

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Danish police mystery

Someone, somewhen recommended Jussi Adler-Olsen's The Keeper of Lost Causes. It ended up at the top of my alphabetical "to read" list.

Adler-Olsen's whole name is Carl Valdemar Jussi Henry Adler-Olsen. An online biography notes that he grew up in "several mental hospitals" in Denmark. (His father was a doctor at the hospitals.) He studied medicine and politics, authored cartoon scripts and comic books, and, in 1997, began writing fiction.  

The Keeper of Lost Causes is his first fiction publication. At 400 pages it's about 100 pages too long.

The mystery is satisfyingly complex and the detective work seems deftly done. There are truly awful sections about a kidnap victim tortured for years in isolation.  

Adler-Olsen keeps things moving adequately in the main story line. But there are too many words.

I nearly awarded this an improbability medal for the way Adler-Olsen wrapped things up at the end. I don't think things work that way.

This was not one of those books I wanted to read because I enjoyed the reading. It wasn't so awful that I wanted to drop it in the wastebasket. I did have to keep taking breaks while reading.

The main character is a middle aged detective who is in the midst of his mid-life crisis and PTSD. In spite of his determination to take advantage of his situation to hide until retirement, he gets sucked into this cold case.

It was made into a movie in Denmark in 2013. It's showing in selected US "art houses" now.

Okay. Anyone else read The Keeper of Lost Causes? What did you think? Write. Tell us in this little bit of the world how you reacted.

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• The author's web site
• Dale Stahl's thoughts on this blog a couple years ago
• Anonymous review at Mysterious Reviews
• Anonymous review at Kirkus Reviews
Anonymous review at Seattle Mystery Bookshop web site Film review in the Sydney Morning Herald

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Crows

I think crows are ugly and noisy. They are good at cleaning up road kill. Craig Johnson's Sheriff Longmire likes crows. There are crows mentioned in the story. Maybe their presence has some meaning. I don't think so.

Johnson

One of my finds at Half Priced Books was a 2012 book by Craig Johnson. Johnson, who says he lives in a town with a population of 27 He is the guy who created Sheriff Walt Longmire. I've enjoyed a couple early books and some of the first A&E episodes of Longmire. (The most recent episodes got too dark and threatening for me to enjoy them.)

Well, I got a deal on As the Crow Flies, a story about the things that kept the good sheriff from attending to the details of his daughter's wedding arrangements. He'd promised, and as a widower, his best helper was his buddy Henry Standing Bear. Oh, and his mother-in-law to be, who turned out to be quite capable of stepping in to compensate for the sheriff who gets pulled into murders on the Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. We all "know" that the county sheriff has no authority on the res or in Montana, but Longmire gets arrested and dragged along to the crime scene by the new tribal chief of police, Lolo Long.

It doesn't help that the FBI gets involved and Chief Long is a rookie chief in over her head. And when the primary suspect is murdered, everything gets more complicated. Especially since the Longmire wedding is fast approaching, and someone is manufacturing "evidence."

Well written? Yes. I laid down to read a few pages before sleep one night and an hour and a half later, I had finished the book without realizing it was nearly midnight. This was another book that kept me so occupied I nearly forgot I was actively reading. Johnson uses events to move the plot forward and he is great at describing action in the present tense. He also uses humor to keep the characters realistic and likable.

After finishing, I was tempted to award Johnson an improbability medal, for his use of a peyote-fueled vision quest, but the evidence revealed by the drug was really only a sidelight to the story.

So, here's another recommendation.

I also recommend that you look at plot summaries for the TV series Longmire. I don't know how involved Johnson is in the script writing (I'd guess only minimally), but if the summary looks good, check it out on A&E. The cast and the acting are good. New Mexico does a good job of standing in for Wyoming.

Have you read As the Crow Flies or another Craig Johnson novel? What did you think of it? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• The author's home page
• Craig Johnson on Facebook
• Leslie DoranRobin Vidimos's review in The Denver Post
• Joe Hartlaub's review at bookreporter
• Steve Larson's review in The Desert News

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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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Three winners

A couple years ago I read Camilla Läckberg's The Preacher. It was okay, but I had issues with it. Last year I read Läckberg's The Ice Princess. I had issues with that book too.

Läckberg

In spite of those issues, I picked up another book by Läckberg from the bargain table at Barnes and Noble. I started reading it only to discover that it was the third book of a series. So I found the second book at Half Price Books and the first, in paperback, for full price at Barnes and Noble. I didn't read them in order. I read the second one first, then the third one, and then the first.

It was okay to do that because the links between the stories are minimal and the continuing characters are really well developed and distinctive. Patrik Hedstrom is a small town detective and his girl friend, Erica Falck, a writer, are the two main characters in each of the novels. They're accompanied by various family members, friends, and colleagues. All of those people have lives that compete for attention with the mysteries Läckberg dreams up.

And I don't have the reservations about these books that I had about Läckberg's first two novels. She manages two story lines in each of the books that only really merge near the end of the book, but she isn't playing with the timeline and the sequence of the story telling.

Okay, the first book in the series is The Stonecutter. One of the stories here begins in the early 1920s and revolves around a skilled quarryman, an upper class girl, their unhappy marriage, and their twin sons. The other story concerns the murder of a very young child just as Patrik and Erica are expecting their first child. Of course there are other side stories, but they are not intrusive.

The second book has the English title The Stranger. (Camus fans be patient. This is not related to the story or the philosophy in that stellar French exposition of existentialism.) A literal translation of the Swedish title is The Jinx. Patrik and Erica get married and Erica is overwhelmed by motherhood and depression. In the meantime, a local woman dies in an auto accident that looks like murder and a cast member of the Swedish version of Big Brother, filming in town, is found dead. In a small town, Patrik finds himself directly involved in investigating both murders, and feeling guilty about neglecting the new baby and his stressed wife. The second story line in this books is very opaque and dream like. I ignored most of it.

The third book is The Hidden Child. Patrik is on paternity leave, but he has real trouble not pushing the stroller and the baby past the police department and not responding to invitations to visit for coffee or a quick run to a crime scene. Erika has returned to her writing, but she's trying to do most of it in her home office. While organizing things in that office she finds a Nazi medal among her late mother's belongings. She tries to find out what it means and how a very anti-Nazi Swede ended up with such a thing. Well, the history teacher she asks about it is killed. The secondary story is set in World War II Sweden and revolves around the murdered school teacher and his small group of friends who were just a bit too young to be soldiers in the 1940s. These two stories work together much better than the stories in the earlier books.

But...

It was such a pleasure to read books that I wanted to read and finish (even though that would mean I'd be done). That was true for all three books. I can say that the characterizations were very well done. I can't tell you whether narration, or dialogue, or cause and effect moved the stories on, because Läckberg used all three, but none were obviously prominent. Except for the vague and dream like secondary story in The Stranger, the elements of the books worked well together.

I'd wondered if Läckberg's first two books were written according to a recipe that didn't quite work. If Läckberg adjusted her recipe for these books, she's done it very well. These 400-500 page novels were never daunting or too much. I enjoyed nearly everything.

I urge you to give them a try. I'm confident you don't have to be Swedish or a Minnesotan to enjoy them.

Have you read any of Läckberg's novels? What did you think of them? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• The author's web page
• Maureen Corrigan's review of The Stonecutter in The Washington Post
• Rich Westwood's review of The Stranger at Euro Crime
• Barry Forshaw's review of The Hidden Child in The Idependent
• Leslie Wright's review of The Hidden Child in The Seattle Post Intelligencer

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Good buddy John wrote from the wonderful Willamette Valley

I find great pleasure in poetry.

Many people consider it a tease or worse, artsy. Billy Collins writes a couple of very satisfying poems about, "how we want to tie a poem to a chair and beat a confession out of it."

When there was no time for books, I turned to poetry. Huge rewards. Beauty, angst, love, name it, it is there.

Heaney

Through odd circumstances I met Seamus Heaney. He was a wonderful man.

Truth, in a few words is what a poet can do.

Cummings helped me woo my wife, Neruda  has helped me and others with some tough moments. Poetry can be a joy or a mystery. It seems all art is art or not,  depending  on the consumer. I love what I love and do not worry much about critical response. Love, you

Your thoughts?

Write. Tell this little bit of the world.

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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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Have I read this before?

One of the books I picked up at the Hospital Auxiliary book sale was Margaret Coel's Wife of Moon.

I have read several of Coel's mysteries set the fictional St. Francis mission in northern Wyoming. I began reading them about the time Tony Hillerman was writing less and Coel helped fill the void of a writer who created and maintained interesting characters, who brought beauty to a rather unwelcoming environment, and who told a good story. To me, it helped that many of Coel's characters were Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation and that she appreciated cultural differences. (It also helped that a friend of mine, who grew up on the res, could identify some of real life models for Coel's characters.)

The main recurring characters are a priest at the mission and an Arapaho woman who left the reservation for law school and returned to practice there. The barriers between the two make them "obvious" partners in solving crimes and protecting the innocent. In at least one novel, things swung perilously close to romance novel, but only one time.

At some point in reading the book, I wondered if I'd read it before. When I looked at the copyright date, I found the book was 10 years old.(It's old enough that you can download the book.) I didn't recall any scenes or plot twists, but I have read many of Coel's books. If I read it and wrote about it a decade ago, I'd have written about it in my first attempt at a blog about my reading. Years after we changed ISPs, our old one erased all our old web presence, so I can't go back and find out if I wrote about reading Wife of Moon.

Arapaho tipi

Never mind. This is a good story, well told. It's fictionally tied to a 1907 visit to Edward S. Curtis, the photographer famed for staging and photographing Native Americans before what he thought was their ultimate fate: dissolving into European culture. During a fictional reenactment, a chief's daughter, the wife of a white landowner is killed.
Wyoming by

The descendant of that land owner, a successful businessman and politician in 2004, is thinking about running for president. Is he part Arapaho? Did the land inherited by his grandfather from his Arapaho wife really belong to the tribe? Now the curator of an exhibit of Curtis' photos at the mission has disappeared. An Arapaho woman is murdered. An angry Jackson, Wyoming millionaire shows up threatening anyone he can corner. The Arapaho lawyer is trying to defend a client who has disappeared on a vision quest. The mission priest is trying to find out what is going on and protect his flock. Genealogy becomes important in answering questions. And are there really some of Curtis' glass negatives still around on the res?

Oh, and campaign staffers for the potential candidate appear to smooth over bumps in the PR campaign they're running.

It's a good story, well told.

Have you read Wife of Moon? What did you think of it? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• The author's web site
• Lane Wright's review at ReviewingTheEvidence
• Rich Henshaw's review at Publishers' Weekly

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Another old favorite

Paretsky and friend

Somewhere back in the ancient '80s, I first read a novel by Sara Paretsky. She made a big splash in the mystery writing world because her main character was an active, effective woman. Not that there hadn't been women detectives in fiction before. Think Nora Charles or Cherry Ames or Nancy Drew. But, Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski was neither the partner to a man nor a girl detective.

I found the character a wonderful contrast to the male/macho detectives I'd been reading. Plus, Warshawski lived in Chicago, not in New York or LA.

But Warshawski gradually evolved into the kind of hard charging, "damn the torpedoes," kind of macho detective that had persuaded me to stop reading most other mysteries (especially Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone).

I saw Paretsky's Breakdown on the bargain table at the bookstore. I hesitated. But the bargain was so good. I gave in and bought it. I'm glad I did.

Paretsky is still a very good story teller. Her characters are still recognizable and believable, even if there are references to vampires. Warshawski didn't do anything stupid, although she had a near death experience near the end of the story. Well, there has to be a climax. And the final scene in a television studio nearly earns an improbability award.

Nothing memorable here, but I'll live with it. It'll go on the pile for next spring's community used book sale.

Have you read Breakdown? Have you read other recent Paretsky novels? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it/them.

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• The author's web site
• M.E. Collins' review in the Chicago Sun-Times
• Maureen Corrigan's review at National Public Radio
Jessica Garrison's review in the Los Angeles Times

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How old a favorite?

I first read a book by Walter Mosley when a newly elected President Clinton was photographed carrying a copy. How long ago was that? 1993? Holy cow! 21 years ago? Just 21 years? It's in that ambiguous time period that seems a lifetime ago, but a fairly recent lifetime. I had been teaching for 25 years by then. But where have the last 20 years gone?

Mosley

While I have liked most of Mosley's books, my favorite is still Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. I wrote about it in 2002 and reprinted that five years later.

At the community used book sale, I picked up a 2011 novel by Mosley, When the Thrill is Gone. It's another story about the life and world of Leonard McGill.

Following in the footsteps of many hard-boiled writers of hard-boiled detective novels, Mosley offers a tour of a very complicated and dangerous world. It's not quite the alternate universe of post-WWII Los Angeles that he used to write about, but it's very alternate to the my small town Minnesota world.

The characters are alternately attractive, repulsive, obvious, and enigmatic. The story moved along and never left me behind. I might well offer Mosley an improbability award, but there are too many parts of his world that I cannot evaluate. At times it was like reading science fiction.*

I liked reading When the Thrill is Gone. If I find another of Mosley's books at the used book sale or on the discount shelf, I will pick it up. (Right now, my problem is that I have five books stacked up on my bedside table, and one more I haven't written about yet -- another favorite from 20 years ago.)

*Rumor has it that Mosely has plans for a science fiction series to begin this year.

Have you read When the Thrill is Gone? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it. Or write about anything you've read. I can always use new ideas. And so can you.

• The author's web site
• John M. Formy-Duval's review at About.com
• Tom Callahan's review in BookReporter
• Dick Lochte's review in the Los Angeles Times

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Paying the price

There's a downside to spending a lot of time in a bookstore. Thankfully, the bookstore I'm spending time is is Barnes and Noble. They have a decent coffee shop and good quiche (which makes a great breakfast). Try to find those things at Amazon.com.

The downside is dealing with the temptation to spend money and the fact of having spent money.

I do try to limit myself to the bargain shelves, but I still spend money on things more than coffee and quiche.

Most recently, I bought Ian Rankin's The Impossible Dead. I expected the book to be another in his series about a maladjusted dectective, DI John Rebus. It wasn't.

The Impossible Dead is about Scottish cop Malcolm Fox. Fox leads an internal investigation team, which means he's automatically suspect by other police officers. Fox is charged to investigate the colleagues of a discredited detective who are suspected of covering up for their less than stellar colleague. Hardly anyone is friendly to the visiting cops' cop.

Then there's a murder committed with a gun that was recorded as having been destroyed 30 years earlier. And there are more links to troubled times in Scotland's past, when nationalists were active and more violent than the present day advocates of independence. (You do know there's a referendum on Scottish independence in September 2014, don't you?)

Rankin

There's also a 30-year-old murder that seems to need sorting out. And important people who may have been involved in a murder or the non-destruction of a murder weapon.

Oh, and DI Fox has a personal life too. His father is in a memory care facility and his unemployed sister is angry that he doesn't help out more with their father. And, yes, he has to deal with those people as well as the cops he works with.

It was a good and easy task to read through Rankin's prose and plot. It was good not to have to read about Rankin's maladjusted "star."

Have you read The Impossible Dead? What did you think about it? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• The author's web page
• Allison Flood's review in The Guardian
• John O'Connell's review in The Guardian
• Steve Donohue's review in The Washington Post

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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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Which way now, Huck?

I was delighted with John Straley's Cold Storage Alaska. Even though I got a Lake Wobegon-like story instead of the mystery I expected, Straley got me interested in his characters and kept me entertained.

In the afterward to that book, I learned that there was a prequel of sorts that was published several years before Cold Storage Alaska. I found that prequel at Barnes and Noble and snapped it up. It's called The Big Both Ways.

Annabelle was the matriarch of the community in Cold Storage, Alaska that Straley wrote about. In The Big Both Ways, Annabelle is a young adolescent on the run with her aunt, Ellie Hobbs, who is involved in radical politics, the Wobblies, organized crime, and the cops. After disposing of an inconvenient body, the two of them are joined by Slippery (Slip) Wilson, a logger who quit his job after seeing his best friend die in an awful accident. All three are headed for Alaska, new starts, and ways to make a living.

The book is the story of how this unlikely trio got from the forests of central Washington to a tiny town on the inside passage of southern Alaska. And it's the story of a Seattle cop who kept trying to follow them. (But when he finds them, he only wants to know what really happened. Then he quits his cop job and becomes part of the Cold Storage community, known by Annabelle as Uncle George.)

But this novel is not really a mystery. Somebody wrote that it was a Jack London like story. I don't think so. I think it's an early 20th century, west coast version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The river isn't the Mississippi, but it's the inside passage. And it doesn't flow south all the time. It flows south and north, depending on the tides ("big both ways").

The adventurers aren't seeking freedom for Jim, but they are seeking freedom for themselves by getting lost in unfamiliar country. They're being chased by George the detective, by some union thugs who are out to capture a traitor, and by some gangsters who want money they believe Ellie Hobbs has made off with.

The little trio row their hearts out in a skiff, catch rides with questionable characters in big boats, evade Canadian customs, fight the tides, get shot at, and poach a farmer's lamb.

Like the story of Huck and Jim, it's difficult to imagine exactly how they survived and made it through the travails of travel. But I was really glad they did. I was cheering for them from the second third of the book.

Once again, I liked the characters and was entertained by their adventures. I certainly hope John Straley writes more stories like these. Mysteries would be okay too, but modeling stories after Garrison Keillor, Mark Twain, or Jack London works pretty well.

Have you read The Big Both Ways? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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• The author's web site
• Barbara Tom's review in The Oregonian
• Reviews at GoodReads
• John Straley talks about The Big Both Ways

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A familiar book

One of the books I picked up at the community used book sale was The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow. Not only used, it was a paperback. And I bought it on the last day of the sale when everything was "half price."

I might have read this book before. It was published in 2001. I can't go look it up, because our former Internet host finally took down our old web pages where I once posted these little reviews online. (It has been 8 years since we switched.)

I didn't remember any of the plot, scenes, or clever lines when I read it. But it was familiar because I've read so many of Stabenow's books. Familiar characters, familiar settings, familiar culture...

Stabenow tells great stories without superfluous words or events. There really aren't any red herrings either. Freelance detective Kate Shugak gets hired to be security for a political campaign (the candidate had received threats). Along the way, bits and pieces of an unsavory past (some of it 100 years past) pop up. Shugak has to tie the past to the present in order to identify the danger to her client. Oh, and she's also helping a teenage runaway play hide and seek with his angry and abusive mother.

Three stories to tell and they were all interesting to me. This was one of the books that kept me from just sleeping in the hammock over Memorial Day weekend. It was a great weekend and the book helped.

Have you read The Singing of the Dead? If so write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought about it.

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• The author's web site
• Reviews at GoodReads
• A review at Kirkus Reviews

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