Hurry up!

As I walked into the Northfield library I discovered a new Jacqueline Winspear novel on a table by the staircase. A little note was taped to the cover, "Lucky You!"

It turns out that this was a recent addition to the collection that no one had reserved. I could check it out, but it wasn't renewable. Well, it was due yesterday and this evening I just finished it. I'm glad I spent the time and will gladly pay the fine when I return it tomorrow.

The book is A Dangerous Place. The dangerous place is Gibraltar in 1937.

Maisie Dobbs retreated to the mountains of India after the death of her husband and the loss of the child they had been expecting. She was overwhelmed with grief and could not face returning to England, her father, her in-laws, and all the familiar places she called home.

Finally on the way home, her ship docks in Gibraltar, and Maisie realizes she's not yet ready to face family and familiar. However, on one of her first evenings in Gibraltar, she stumbles on the body of a recently murdered man.

This Dobbs character that Winspear has created cannot resist asking questions about the death and the survivors. Once an investigator, always an investigator, I guess. However, Winspear does a fairly good, but not (to me)  totally convincing job of portraying this as a further attempt by Dobbs to evade confronting the horror of her sorrow.

Gibraltar is a dangerous place because the civil war is going on in Spain and because the isolated city is full of spies and police of all kinds. Some of the police are serving the interests of Dobbs' father-in-law and others are serving ambiguous masters.

Then there are the photographs taken by the man Dobbs found murdered. One of a German submarine and another of a German double agent. Oh, there's also weapons smuggling by some of the fishing fleet. Of course, Maisie Dobbs is close enough to be aware of all of it, though she's at a loss to put all the pieces together -- until the very end, of course.

Then Maisie meets two English nurses who are headed for a front-line nursing station (much like the one Maisie worked at in France in 1916-17). Guess who goes along. After a hectic day at the station and meeting a nun who practically runs the place herself, Maisie tells here police tail she's headed back to England. But instead she heads for the nun's nursing station in Spain. A couple months there working with the wounded, Maisie feels, will get her out of herself enough that she'll be able to return to England.

I don't know. Want to take bets?

Have you read A Dangerous Place? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

Now, I have to take this book back to the library. I was lucky.

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• The author's web site
• Nadia A.'s review at A Bookish Way of Life
• Robert Blanco's review at USA Today
• Renita Last's review at Jewish Book Council
• Bobbi Dumas' review at NPR

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Fast books, slow books

Bird Loomis writes from a Democratic enclave (Lawrence) in a Republican utopia-to-be (Kansas). Luckily, the Kansans still allow the importation of books from the outside -- even those from outside the USA. And they allow e-mail out of Kansas as well. Thank you, Bird.

Over the past few months I’ve read five books by two authors, neither of whom I’d read before. Jo Nesbo is the better known, with his series of Norwegian novels (deftly translated) about detective Harry Hole. The other is Rebecca Pawel, a native New Yorker, who writes a fascinating series of mysteries about a Guardia lieutenant in Franco-era Spain of the 1940s.

I’ve come to enjoy both authors immensely, but my approach to the books has been quite different. Nesbo writes long, fast-paced, intricately plotted mysteries. I thought that I’d just about had it with alcoholic detectives, but Harry H. has won me over, in part because his drinking is not a constant, and it’s integral to his character and his up-and-down personal life. I haven’t read his work in any particular order, which is a little, but not too, problematic. I find that I read the long Nesbo books at a whirlwind pace. I start, and even if I’m not on vacation I find it hard to put the book down. (Not quite the 6-day Girl with the Dragon Tattoo marathon for all three books, but close.)

Pawel, on the other hand, is a “few pages a night before nodding off” kind of author for me. Like KC Constantine’s Western Pennsylvania novels about Rocksburg and its fictional police chief, Mario Balzic, Pawel’s books are less mysteries and more character studies. And what a set of characters – most notably Lieutenant Tejada, from an aristocratic, Fascist family, and his wife, who comes from a communist background and constantly makes life challenging for the family (as does Tejada). Still, they love each other and their son, and the series develops these relationships slowly and unpredictably. They genius of Pawel’s work is to make a sympathetic character (Tejada) out of someone whom most readers would ordinarily detest. But like Harry Hole, Wallander, John Rebus, and others, he is a good cop and, ultimately, a fair-minded individual.

I think I read the Pawel books slowly because I need time to keep following the various characters, placed back in history, but mostly because I want to ponder the relationships of Tejada with his wife, child, family, and social class. To be sure, there is a mystery to be solved, but the books’ resolutions are more about how personal ties evolve than the solving of a crime. In many ways, there is more to savor here than in the latest Connelly or Child or Nesbo.

In the end, I have no desire to read just “fast” books or only “slow” ones – but good ones. Nesbo hooked me almost immediately; Pawel took more time, but ultimately both made me go looking for more volumes, ever eager to read more.

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• Jo Nesbo's web site
• My thoughts about The Snowman
• Monica Hesse's profile of Jo Nesbo in the Washington Post
• Kjetil Stensvik Østil's interview with Jo Nesbo in The Browser

• Ilya Marritz' profile of Rebecca Pawel in The Sun (New York)
• Steven Torres' interview with Rebecca Pawel on the blog named after him

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