Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust is an interesting little read — a case study in obsession.  It is the story of a book lover, his connections to the Proust family, and his obsession with preserving the author’s writings and possessions.  Author Lorenza Foschini does an excellent job of pulling the threads of this story together into a fascinating — if short — read.

Jacques Guerin grew up in Paris in the early part of the last century.  Born in 1902, his family life was unconventional, to say the least.  His mother, Jeanne-Louise, was married, but not to his father.  Her husband, Jules Giraud, was impotent, and Jeanne-Louis had taken up with a close friend of his, Gaston Monteux.  She had two sons by Monteax, Jacque and his brother Jean, but under the circumstances, they did not live with her.  They lived with a nanny on the outskirts of Paris.   He was described as being very handsome (oddly enough, the first photo of Guerin in the book reminded me strongly of Dwayne Johnson, complete with sunglasses - all he needed was the arched eyebrow). traveled in interesting social circles and managed an extremely successful company, Parfums d’Orsay.  He was a bit of a bibliophile, well read and an occasional collector of rare volumes.  His interest in the writing of Marcel Proust and a case of appendicitis converged to start him on an obsession with all things related to the writer.

As a result of his illness, Guerin came under the care of Dr. Adrian Proust, Marcel’s brother.  On a visit to the doctor’s home, Guerin was quite taken with the various signed books and mementos that were displayed in the home.  Guerin became known to the family, and used his connections to acquire various artifacts — books, papers, furniture, even the author’s hairbrush — over the course of many years.  The lengths he went to included threats, bribery, even haunting the funerals of Proust associates in the hopes of hearing a new anecdote or locating some further piece of memorabilia.  We are fortunate that Guerin was so devoted, considering the attitude of some of his family members, such as Adrian Proust’s wife:

“Madame Proust had an almost strident, nasal voice, and it rose above the din in the room to insist that he not speak to her of such things.  She and her husband were mired in a sea of papers.  There was an unbelievable quantity.  But they were certainly going to deal with those masses of notebooks and endless piles of letters.  They would put fire to everything.  They would burn them all.

She regained her calm demeanor, and then smiled broadly at him.  She seemed rather pleased with herself.”

If not for Guerin’s interference, a portion of history, the thought processes of a great writer, might have been lost forever.

I enjoyed  Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust, but I was disappointed by the size of the book.  I think there was more to say here — about Marcel Proust, about his eager collector, Jacques Guerin, and about the turmoil in Proust’s family after his death.  Right now, what we’ve got isn’t much more than a long magazine feature story.  Foschini includes a lot of interesting details about the collector and the author’s family. It’s interesting and engaging, but too brief. I would have enjoying learning more.

My copy of Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Sometimes, a book is not at all what you expected it to be. You pick up a novel for the mystery but get sucked into the romance along the way, or a piece of historical fiction turns out to be more educational than any college textbook. Of course, this can also be disappointing, as in the case of Refuge on Crescent Hill by Melanie Dobson. The blurb didn’t mention that this was Christian fiction, which is usually a red flag for me. I am sure there are some great writers in the genre, but in everything I have run into so far, the plot is far less important than the moral the writer wants to convey. In this case, we have the seed of a good story that never really blossoms into a great book.

Camden Bristow has hit rock bottom — freelance photo jobs have dried up and her last employer closed up shop before she got her final paycheck. She takes her only remaining credit card and heads out of town, back to her Grandmother’s house on Crescent Hill. She spent her summers there as a child when her father and stepmother didn’t want her around and she hopes to once again find solace there. Instead, she finds that her grandmother has recently passed away, the house is in disrepair, and she may not be able to save this beloved childhood memory. 

Already stressed out and now mourning her grandmother, she encounters a mystery involving hidden treasure, an unseen intruder and deeply entwined small-town loyalties. She must figure out who is on her side and who is working against her, without really knowing where their loyalties lie. From missing jewels and battered women to tales of the Underground Railroad, Dobson throws a lot out there. For me, there were just too many coincidences. Camden arrives just days after her grandmother’s funeral. There is a mysterious letter full of vital (and secret) information, but Camden is interrupted before she gets to the secret part…then the letter mysteriously disappears. The first person Camden meets in town is the man who may hold the house’s future in his hands. And don’t get me started on the graduate student, researching a bit of family history, who just happens to arrive at a crucial moment with surprises of her own. It was all a little too much for me.

There is a lot of talk amongst the characters about their personal relationships with God and every part of the story has a moral. It wasn’t terribly intrusive, but I found that the book was very obviously about the personal and religious backstories, not about the mystery. The mystery depends on some really crazy coincidences and relationships to introduce information and wrap up the story and that really made it hard to suspend my disbelief. The romance angle was completely unnecessary, at least for me; the characters seem to have no interest in each other until a giant leap at the end that came out of the blue. 

There is an art to the big reveal in a good mystery. Over time, you have been accumulating clues as well as bits of misdirection. When the culprits are revealed and the clues are explained, they should all make sense. In the case of Refuge on Crescent Hill, I found that some of that Dobson skimped a bit on the explanations. I had questions about why things happened (questions I can’t ask here without spoilers) and that some of the action at the end seemed abbreviated, like she was ready to wrap up and get things over with so we could get to the romance and the moral of the story. There were some good aspects to the story — the tie-in with the Underground Railroad and escaped slaves was especially interesting — but it needed a good editor to point out the unfinished business and help the author wrap things up neatly.

My copy of Refuge on Crescent Hill by Melanie Dobson was provided through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program.

The Killing of Mindi Quintana presents a scenario we see in the newspapers every day: a murder has occurred, and the press is far more concerned with the murderer than the victim.  The accused gets to make his or her case to the press; he turns up on Larry King or Oprah, interviews present them in the best possible light and reporters are willing to kiss up to a killer for a chance at an exclusive or a book deal.  Defense attorneys use the media to try their case before the accused ever sets foot in a courtroom and district attorneys use high-profile cases to launch political careers.  Lost in all this is the victim; if they are mentioned at all, it is only when some lurid detail from their past is dredged.  But what if someone decided they weren’t going to play the game? That’s the case study Jeffrey A. Cohen presents in his first novel.We know from the title of the book that a murder will occur at some point in this story, but there is a long build-up.  We get to know the characters very well: Mindi is an aspiring writer and editor at a literary magazine.  Her best friend, Lisa, is an artist.  Freddy, our eventual murderer, is also an aspiring writer and a man being slowly crushed by a job that he hates.  We get acquainted with our attorneys, Philip and Michael, their love lives, their careers and their ambitions.  It’s a longer build up than in most crime novels, and really sucks you in — you keep hoping that something is going to delay the inevitable.  You know where the danger lies, but you have no way to warn Mindi.

Freddy’s job as the manager of the China department at a high-end department store is mind-numbingly dull.  He’s good at it, but he hates the fact that he’s good at it.  He really wants to think of himself as a writer, and he’s ashamed of being so good at something so mundane.  He has an extraordinary talent for building displays that dazzle his customers and are the envy of the other departments, but he takes no pleasure in it.  His job is handled with particular humor — there are no corporate sharks more vicious than these guys:

“Each new lower middle [manager],” he said, “gets a turn at firing the chocolate manager…The chocolate terminations are wonderful fun,” Jamison explained, “because they are videotaped and shown at the upper-middle-management Christmas party.  The idea is to come up with the most outlandish — hence amusing — pretense for termination!”

Just when Freddy is getting sucked further down this management drain, he runs into Mindi.  They knew each other briefly in college and she appears as his savior, a way for him to make a break from the job he despises and become a writer.  They have lunch, he shows her his stories, and he has the whole screenplay written in his head.  It doesn’t really matter to Freddy what Mindi wants — she’s not a real person to him.  And when she won’t play her assigned part in his story, he snaps.

…Freddy hadn’t loved Mindi.  She was a blue ribbon as surely as the one he despised, but she represented something he wanted.  She had never been real, except maybe for the few months in college.  Not during the six years when she was flesh and blood before him, then bloody flesh before him, did he possess her with a life, purpose, or meaning of her own.

Philip, Freddy’s attorney, has just emerged from a bitter divorce and he is not a happy man.  Freddy’s case should be a dream job.  His face should be all over the news, presenting the case for his client, building name recognition for future clients.  Instead, he’s disgusted by the whole proceedings.  He knows his client is guilty, he knows that his client is not really going to be punished for it, because even if he is found guilty, he has the fame and notoriety he was looking for.  But there may be a chance for him to make a real difference in this case.

I found The Killing of Mindi Quintana an entertaining read.  Cohen has a subtle sense of humor and his writing is sprinkled with quirky little details that I found amusing and intriguing.  I enjoyed it right up until the last 30 pages; then, for me, it fell apart.  The ending simply didn’t work for me.  It made no logical sense to me that anyone would find Philip’s solution a just resolution.  It wasn’t bizarre enough to be funny — it seemed perfectly serious but completely implausible.  If I could have chosen another ending, I’d have been perfectly happy with it.  As it stands, I was annoyed and unsatisfied.

My copy of The Killing of Mindi Quintana was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Angel and Apostle takes up the story of Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, Pearl, and fills in the gaps left in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  At the end of the earlier novel, Hester and Pearl leave Boston and no one knows of their whereabouts.  Years later, Hester returns to Boston alone, still wearing her scarlet A. There are occasional letters from Pearl, who is married and living in Europe, and Hester lives out the remainder of her life alone.  Such a cheerful story, and one that infuriated all my budding feminist sensibilities as a teenager.  Why did Hester bear her burden alone?  Why didn’t she publicly declaim them — the man who dishonored her and the husband who abandoned her?  I’ve still got no satisfactory answers to those questions, but Deborah Noyes has given us the tale of Pearl’s childhood and marriage.I have to wonder: were people really sitting around, thinking about a sequel to The Scarlet Letter? Were there people who sat around at Starbucks, talking about what might have happened to Pearl in Europe?  I suppose there must have been — if not in a coffee shop, there is surely an internet forum where people talked about this stuff.  For myself, I hated The Scarlet Letter and I recall some heated arguments with my high school English teacher about. (I can’t even say for sure that I finished the book.) Deborah Noyes’ writing certainly evokes the original; the writing is lovely and gives you a real sense of time and place.  It all feels quite faithful to the world of the original.

In Angel and Apostle, Hester and Pearl are living in their small cottage on the edge of the woods.  Pearl is a willful child, but Hester isn’t exactly a doting mother.  It must have been very difficult for Pearl, never really feeling her mother’s love for her; in fact, I thought it would have been easy to decide that Hester didn’t love her daughter at all.  It was a difficult relationship for both of them.

Pearl meets Simon MIlton, a young blind man living near them in the woods.  He has his caretaker, Liza, and his brother, Nehemiah, to watch out for him, but Pearl is determined to take him on adventures, even when she is chased away from their yard.  She is heartbroken to find that Simon’s family is planning to move back to England, while her mother has arranged an escape for them to Holland.  Fate intervenes, of course, binding Pearl to Nehemiah — the husband talked about in the earlier novel.  She and Nehemiah leave their home in London for a place in the country, taking Simon with them.  Anyone with eyes can see that this will not end well.

Noyes’ writing is lyrical and true to the world that Hawthorne created, but as a Hawthorne-hater, I am probably not the best person to judge this story.  I had many of the same frustrations with this novel that I had with The Scarlet Letter.  I still wanted Hester and Pearl to stand up for themselves and point fingers at the men who had betrayed them.  I wanted to think that Pearl would have learned something from her mother’s years of torment, but she is strong-willed and goes her own way, even when it leads to disaster.  Reading this was a frustrating experience for me, although it might be better appreciated by someone who enjoyed the earlier work.

My copy of Angel and Apostle was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

In Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen, an unhappy woman makes an impulsive decision that leads to tragedy.  Stranded, cold and in danger, she has plenty of time to contemplate the choices that lead her here.  Pretty standard stuff, really, as far as mysteries go.  Luckily, Ice Cold has a handful of plot twists that keep the story moving along.  Good beach reading, when you need to cool off a little.Maura Isles is not a happy woman.  She’s having an affair with a priest, and really, how can that end well?  Their last phone call was pretty chilly and the doubts are eating away at her.  While attending a medical conference in Wyoming, she runs into Doug, an old college acquaintance — a handsome, charming, single fellow, whose memories of Maura as stable and focused and predictable make her question herself even more.  She makes a reckless and unpredictable decision: accompany Doug and his daughter, Grace, and a couple of friends on a weekend ski trip.  They’ll drive up to the lodge, get in some skiing, hang around in front of their fireplace — maybe even find time for a little romance.  What could go wrong?

Well, a few bad decisions later, their car is stuck and they are stranded on a private road that won’t be plowed until spring.  They find an abandoned village with the cheerful name of Kingdom Come and take shelter in one of the houses.  Kingdom Come is like wandering into the lost Roanoke colony - the houses are intact, windows open, food on the tables, but the people have simply disappeared.  It’s creepy, but the group has few options in the midst of a blizzard with only their overnight bags.  They settle in to wait out the storm and decide what to do.  Exploring their temporary shelter, they find signs that things might be even creepier - and more dangerous than they thought.

When, a few days later, Maura’s burned corpse is found in a ditch along with the other travelers, her friend Jane Rizzoli, a Boston police detective, gets involved.  Along with her husband, an FBI agent (how handy!), they try to find out what really happened to their friend.

There are plenty of twists and turns to the plot, which keep you guessing about what is actually going on.  I’ve enjoyed Gerritsen’s work in the past but this one just didn’t wow me.  As creepy as being stuck in an apparently abandoned fundamentalist stronghold might be, I just never really felt the danger, or got those little shivers you get when you read something that gets you truly engaged in the story.  I was just not able to lost myself in the blizzard and play along.

This is the seventh novel in the Rizzoli/Isles series.  I’ve read a couple of the others — The Mephisto Club and Body Double (another book in which Maura turns up dead) — and enjoyed them a great deal.  Tess Gerristsen is best know for her medical mysteries; she’s an MD and the medical plots are always interesting.  The Rizzoli and Isles partnership is taking a new direction, as a tv series, “Rizzoli and Isles“, debuting on TNT in July, starring Angie Harmon as Jane Rizzoli and Sasha Alexander as Maura Isles.

Ice Cold is scheduled for release on July 27, 2010, coinciding with the premiere of the tv series.  My copy was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I love a good memoir! I tend not to enjoy celebrity memoirs as much as I do those books written by relatively ordinary folks who have lived really interesting lives. I’ve reviewed a number of them over the last few years, but The Bucolic Plague is by far the funniest — from the title, which would have made me pick it up all on its own, to Josh’s thanks to Martha Stewart in the Acknowledgments. I started out marking funny passages that I might want to share in this review, but the book quickly became a forest of pink and green Post-It flags.

The names of some characters have been changed, and some are composites of various people, experiences and conversations I had then. If you think that’s unfair, you’ve obviously never lived in a small town and written a memoir about your neighbors.

Josh and Brent are partners, living in Manhattan.  During their annual apple-picking weekend, they come across a For Sale sign that changes their life.  The Beekman Mansion, built in 1802 by William Beekman, is a lovely, historic place.  It has been lived in, abandoned, restored and left unoccupied, but Josh and Brent have no problem seeing the potential.   Before they’ve even gotten the realtor on the phone, Josh is imagining their life as gentlemen farmers:

I was already imagining my life at the Beekman Mansion.  I concluded that Brent and I would probably be known as the Beekman Boys.  Or at least I hoped so.  It would be far better than, say, the Fag Farmers.

Both of the (future) Beekman Boys grew up in rural areas, so they aren’t complete strangers to life on the farm, but it has been a long time since they have done any digging in the dirt.  Josh is in advertising and his previous career (as a drag queen) and relationship (with a male escort) is not really adequate prep for the role of a Gentleman Farmer.  Brent is an MD with an MBA and a familiar face to fans of Martha Stewart as Dr. Brent, her health and wellness expert.  Also not farmer material, at least on the surface.  Still, they start off determined to breathe some life into the place.

Owning a farm, I felt, would at least bring me back in the direction of my Wisconsin roots.  I could grown my own food, support a hard-hit local economy, and metaphorically raise my middle finger at the factory farm industry that was causing so many of our nation’s ills…

At first, the farm is a weekend getaway.  They take the train in on Friday nights, armed with a long list of chores, and 48 hours later, they are on the way back to the rest of their lives, in the city.  The holiday season means a Thanksgiving dinner made entirely of food grown on the farm, right down to the Thanksgiving turkey, which Josh kills and cleans himself, learning some valuable lessons about the importance of good aim and the usefulness of a bottle of Absolut and a turkey baster.

After a while, weekends aren’t enough.  Josh begins to dream about finding a way to quit his job in advertising and live on the farm full-time.  That means finding a way to make the old farm profitable, and Brent’s office Christmas gift to Martha — a bar of goat milk soap — provides the seeds of a business plan.   These guys have great contacts (come on - Martha Stewart!) and plenty of business sense, but launching the business and keeping it afloat might be more than they can handle.

The book is full of great stories about the farm, the goats, their neighbors, their roosters and their zombie flies.  They are overwhelmed by work and their new business; they have to find ways to balance their lives in the city with their lives on the farm.  When business is booming, their relationship suffers (I had to remind myself that there must be a happy ending — after all, they’re both in the picture on the cover), but even their darkest moments here are told with great humor.  The Bucolic Plague was a joy to read — a story about falling in love with a place, about loving each other, and about living a different kind of life — that never gets too sappy.  Josh always has a story about his drag queen days or one of Martha’s parties to keep me laughing.

Some of you may remember the reality series, “The Fabulous Beekman Boys”, which documented their adventures in running a farm and a business.  For more information on their brand, check out Beekman1802.com — full of videos and pictures and recipes, as well as the Beekman Mercantile.  And for more about Josh’s earlier exploits, check out his memoir, I’m Not Myself These Days.

My copy of The Bucolic Plague was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.  It is available as of today, June 1, 2010.

What makes someone a freak?

It’s the question at the heart of The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson.  The story revolves around P.T. Barnum’s American Museum and the “freaks” who entertained the masses there.  There were midgets and fat ladies, savages from exotic lands, musclemen and other oddities.  But what made them freaks, and what would they choose, if they could choose another fate?Bartholomew Fortuno is the Thinnest Man in the World.  After a very unpleasant stretch in the tent circuses and traveling shows, he has found a home for himself at the American Museum.  He spends his day on-stage, showing his ribs and ankles to the paying customers, or sitting in tableau with his lady friend Matina, the museum’s fat lady.  His meals in the museum’s dining hall explain how he maintains his “gift”:

As usual, I counted out a dozen green beans, no more, no less, and placed them horizontally on my plate, along with a bit of horseradish to add zing.  After cutting each bean into thirds, I dipped a piece into the horseradish and popped it into my mouth, chewed twenty-five times before swallowing it, then started on the next piece.

Fortuno has his theories about his profession — he truly believes that his thinness is a gift, that it educates and enlightens the people who come to see him. He explains the difference between the True Prodigies, the regular Prodigies, the Exotics and the Gaffs.  He treats his performances as a higher calling, no matter what his fellow performers believe.

Their lives at the museum are less exciting than one might think.  They have their daily schedules, they have the little dramas of any group living in close quarters, they measure their worth in special performances and new costumes, with plenty of jealousy and gossip to go around.  All this intensifies with the arrival of a new act — an act so secret that she arrives under cover of darkness and is not housed with the rest of the performers.  Fortuno is fascinated, and when Mr. Barnum asks him to perform a small favor for him, he is sucked into the whirlwind surrounding their newest prodigy.

The novel explores Fortuno’s relationships with his fellow freaks as well as his past.  Is he naturally a Prodigy, or did he choose this?  I mean, a person can be naturally thin without subsisting on a dozen green beans a day.  And if it is a choice, conscious or unconscious, what would prompt a man to choose to be a skeleton?  Fortuno has to work out the answers to these questions while walking through the minefield of Mr. Barnum, Mrs. Barnum and the mysterious new exhibit.

I enjoyed the backstage look at life in a very high-end freakshow.  The were so normal and yet so unusual, the way they argued and envied each other, the way they had adapted to — and even grown proud of — a life on the fringe of society.  The mystery unravels slowly (sometimes too slowly), as Iell reveals her secrets and Fortuno deals with his past and his future.  He clearly did not see what he was getting himself into, even if the reader can sense his impending disaster.  He is a marvelous narrator, a man of such dignity, even in his odd circumstances.  I found myself rooting for him, hoping he could find a clear path.

Ellen Bryson’s novel was inspired by a dream; Iell was a character in that dream and Bryson’s investigations led her to the story of Isaac Sprague, the living skeleton:

She knew immediately that he would be her narrator.  You can find more photos of Sprague’s cohorts here.

This is Bryson’s first novel, and is scheduled for release June 22nd.  My copy of The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

The premise behind The Dark End of the Street is simple:

When we proposed this book to writers from both banks of the stream dividing crime writing and literary writing, we thought we had a particularly alluring idea.  Write your heart out on the twin subjects of sex and crime.  Define each however you want, take any approach you like.  What writer could resist?

The result is a terrific collection of stories from some of my favorite writers.  Editor S.J. Rozan (author of one of my favorite mystery series), introduces the collection and provides a particularly chilling story, “Daybreak”, near the end of the volume.  Great writers and great writing are the rule here, and there is a little something for everyone.They really did let the authors define sex and crime any way they wanted.  Some stories would barely garner a PG rating, a couple are far more racy.  The crimes are different, the criminals are different, and the approaches they take are all over the board — that’s what makes it such a fun read.

The first story I fell in love with was “Scenarios” by Lawrence Block.  I love his work (P.I. Matthew Scudder, among other great novels).  For everyone who has ever read a mystery story and thought “oh no!  not that again!”, this story lets you think through all the possibilities.

The very next story was also a great read, but in a totally different way.  ”The Hereditary Thurifer” by Stephen L. Carter is the story of an Episcopal priest unraveling a mystery.  The story never goes in the direction I think it will, a mystery and a main character full of surprises.

“The Story of the Stabbing” by Joyce Carol Oates takes the theme of sex and death in a new direction - not so much about the crime itself as it is about the person who witnessed it.  ”Tricks” by Laura Lippman is a great story about a conman and his next victim.

My favorite story of the bunch is “Midnight Stalkings” by James Grady (Six Days of the Condor).  I should have seen it coming.  I didn’t and I was thrilled.

The book is full of great authors:  Patrick McCabe (author of Winterwood - marvelous and twisted), Janice Y. K. Lee (The Piano Teacher), Michael Connelly (9 Dragons), Lynn Freed (The Servants’ Quarters).  Each author has their own slant on the book’s themes — they all come at it from a different angle, but it’s easy to follow the threads from story to story.

I realize that this is a review full links, but if you aren’t familiar with these writers, you should be.  Click on the links, look at their bibliographies, find yourself some great new books.  If you’re a fan of mysteries, definitely check out S. J. Rozan — I have several of her novels featuring Lydia Chin and Bill Smith.  They’re an unusual detective team and the stories are terrific.

My copy of The Dark End of the Street was an Advance Reader Copy provided free of charge.

Little Bee is the sort of book I find hard to review.  I want everyone to read this book — I want to tell you enough to encourage you to run out and put this on your wishlist.  What I don’t want to do is spoil the story, and if I tell you too much, I will.  The story at the heart of this amazing book is revealed slowly, piece by piece, a word here, a hint there.  There is a certain build-up to the story that could be easily derailed and I don’t want to do anything to take away from your enjoyment.  Author Chris Cleave has crafted a novel that literally took my breath away — confrontations that were like physical blows and passages that burned in my chest and made it hard to breathe — and I want you to enjoy the build-up as much as I did.We first meet Little Bee in a detention center in London.  We don’t know how she got here; we don’t know why she’s being held.  I found her comments on the Queen’s English and pound coins and the people around her fresh and charming, but then she would say something to remind you that she had a backstory, and it wasn’t a pretty story.  Little Bee spends her free time figuring out ways to kill herself; you never know when the men might come for you and you have to be ready.  She has figured out ways to kill herself in every situation — from the medical wing of the detention center to a movie theater to a garden party with the Queen.  She chooses her meals based on these plans:

“I started asking myself questions like: Which will make me stronger for the act of suicide?  The carrots or the peas?“

We also meet Sarah.  Sarah is a magazine editor, she has a four-year-old son named Charlie who refuses to take off his Batman costume, and her husband, Andrew, has recently died.  Her life is a bit of a shambles and she has more than enough on her plate already when Little Bee shows up at her door.  This is not the first time they’ve met, but it will be a little while before we can work our way back to a terrible, life-changing confrontation on a Nigerian beach.  Little Bee has already changed the course of Sarah’s and Andrew’s lives, and she is about to push them off course yet again.

That’s really all I think I can tell you about the plot.  To say any more would reveal these characters’ secrets out of turn, out of context.  It would loosen the knot that I felt build in my stomach as I picked up each new hint, as each conversation brought some new piece of information.  You want to know what has happened, but you are also dreading it.

Throughout the book, Little Bee has a sort of informed cheerfulness that made me laugh.  No matter what she’s been through, she is still a little awestruck by the bustling London streets.  It’s easy to forget how young she really is.  But she is not some Pollyanna; more than any other character, she has a good idea how this story is going to end for her, but she doesn’t shy away from it.

Little Bee was originally released in the UK as The Other Hand; this is Chris Cleave’s second novel.  His first book, Incendiary, tells the story of an al-Qaeda bomb attack on a London soccer match.  It’s presented as a novel-length letter from an outraged mother to Osama bin Laden.  My copy of Little Bee was loaned to me by a friend with exceptionally good taste in books.

These days, we talk about Banned Book Week and we talk about censorship in school libraries, but in the 1500’s, they were serious about censorship.  Get caught reading something on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) and your prize was an appointment with the local Inquisitor.  Based on the true story of Giordano Bruno – an Italian monk, excommunicated and on the run from the Inquisition – Heresy casts Bruno in the role of investigator, helping to solve a series of grisly murders while spying for Queen Elizabeth.Giordano Bruno did, in fact, lecture at Oxford University in 1583, and many of the characters in the book are known to history as well.  Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Walsingham, John Underhill, John Dee — they all played a part in history, as well as in Heresy. Bruno accepts the invitation to a debate at Oxford to expound on his theories of an infinite universe of independently moving heavenly bodies (ahead of his time).  He is also approached by Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and asked to do a little undercover work.  The Queen is concerned about the possibility of renegade Catholics at Oxford.  This was shortly after the publication of Regnans in Excelsis, the papal issued by Pope Pius V declaring Queen Elizabeth a heretic.  There was good reason to believe that Catholic forces might make an attempt on the Queen’s life and strong measures were taken to discover and arrest them.

I was very much caught up in the history of the novel.  I could add dozens of links, telling more of the story of Bruno’s life, the Pope’s declarations against the Church of England, the Inquisition and more.  It is hard to imagine living in the political climate of those times — Bruno had actually been condemned for reading the work of Erasmus in the privy — when people could be tortured and condemned to death, simply for reading works the church had deemed dangerous.  One of the great successes of this story is that characters on all sides of the debate seem sympathetic.  While Bruno has every reason to consider himself an enemy of the Pope and the Catholic Church, he has serious reservations about arresting people because of their manner of worship, or declaring anyone who is Catholic a mortal threat to the monarchy.  He is troubled by these issues throughout the book.

The mystery is an interesting one: a man is savaged by a wild dog in a locked garden.  Who let the dog in?  Who was the man meeting and why was he carrying a substantial sum of money?  And why does the method of the murder seem so familiar to Bruno?  The Rector, John Underhill, is primarily interested in saving the reputation of the college, and if it means a murderer goes free, so be it.  But bodies begin to pile up and soon no one can discount Bruno’s theories.  There are a number of interesting subplots, a little romance, and plenty of history to keep a reader entertained.

In life, Bruno was eventually turned over to the Inquisition and died a tragic death.  On the 400th anniversary of his execution (he was burned at the stake), the Vatican declared it a “sad episode”, all the while defending his torturers as good Catholics who wanted to “promote the common good.”

S. J. Parris is the pseudonym of journalist Stephanie Merritt.  This is her first novel — and I will be adding her to my must-read list.  Good historical fiction is a special pleasure — educational as well as entertaining — and this was an excellent example.  You can find more about S. J. Parris and Heresy at the publisher’s website,  Doubleday.com.

My copy of Heresy was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

The prologue will give you nightmares.  (Do you know what sort of sound human vertebrae make when they give way under pressure?)  Other sections of the book made me want to cover my eyes and read through my fingers.  The killer in Thomas White’s The Book of Matthew would give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. This is not a book for readers with weak stomachs or those prone to nightmares. Not a lot of outright gore — I’ve certainly read bloodier books — but the sort of enlightened cruelty that makes you double-check the locks before turning in for the night. Not that locks would save you.

Angie Strachan is a real estate agent. She has an odd but friendly relationship with her not-quite-ex husband. She comes from a family of cops and once upon a time she had ambitions of her own in the police department. That all came to an end when Angie came face to face with a monster — a monster the police couldn’t stop. She made a choice that saved lives but ended her career. Now, years later, she’s a member of the Police Reserve — basically unpaid grunt work for the San Francisco Police Department — and she’s about to get drawn into another media circus, hunting another monster.

Clemson Yao is the lead detective on the case. He’s already troubled by nightmares (mutant bugs and The Engine, churning up bodies and lost souls) and this case isn’t going to help. Their killer is very smart and the murders are planned to the smallest detail. The first crime scene they find is based on the favorite execution method of a rajah in Jaipur in the early 1700s. He draws inspiration from the Malleus Maleficarum, The Witch Hammer, a famous treatise on the interrogation of witches, written in 1486. He uses unusual implements, obscure poisons, leaves witty clues at his crime scenes. What his methods all have in common is extraordinary physical suffering and emotional anguish, the sort of torture that gives seasoned cops nightmares.

The SFPD gets a bad rap in this book. There is a lot of talk about low solve rates, incompetent detectives, promotions and prime job assignments decided by seniority rather than skill and a union that rules it all with an iron fist. I sincerely hope that is just artistic license on White’s part; if not, he really knows how to hold a grudge.

It seems strange to say that I enjoyed a book about torture and murder, but I did. I generally avoid the torture-porn movies (the first Saw was terrific, but I didn’t make it through Hostel); maybe it is easier to read than to watch. I loved the twists and turns of the story. I love mysteries and detective fiction, but I hate it when the answers are too pat, too obvious. I enjoy the stops and starts, the dead ends, the leads that could go in any number of directions; those are the investigations that feel more real. In The Book of Matthew, detectives have a lot of information to sift through, crimes that may or may not be related, clues left by the killer, and not everything takes them in the direction they think they should be going. It makes for interesting reading and a story that keeps you guessing, my favorite kind of mystery.

My copy of The Book of Matthew was purchased from Amazon.com.

True or False:
1. The safest seats on an airplane are at the back.
2. If you fall into a frozen lake, you have only 3 minutes to escape the water.
3.  In prisoner-of-war camps in Vietnam, optimists lived longer than anyone else.

Who lives and who dies in a crisis?  Do you have what it takes to be one of the passengers who walks out of the jungle after a plane crash or who keeps their cool and remembers how to work a compass when you get lost in the woods?  And if you don’t (or can’t) can you learn?  There are lots of books on survival tips and I have read more than a few of them.  The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood takes familiar territory and still turns it into a very interesting read.

I love books on survival.  Doesn’t matter whether they are fiction or non-fiction:  travel/adventure books about explorers deep in the wild, post-apocalyptic stories about the survivors of great disaster, non-fiction accounts of great rescues.  I’ve read more than one book that claims to tell me how I can survive the zombie apocalypse, or on an ice-bound ship in the Anarctic, or in the deepest jungles of unexplored continents.  Reality check: those are probably things I will never face — at least, I hope not.  But I fly a lot.  A LOT.  Usually 2 or 3 trips per month for work (6 separate flights last month).  So when a book says it can give me tips on how to survive a plane crash, I’m turning to that section first.   I love exit row seats and nothing is going to come between me and that escape slide.

Sherwood’s tips are generally pretty good.  That stuff about the safest seats being in the back of the plane?  I think the airlines came up with that to sell bad seats.  The best rule of thumb: sit on an aisle within 5 rows of the exit.  That’s doable in most cases.  Count the rows between you and the exit, so you can find your way out, even if it’s dark and smoky and chaotic.  Don’t drink before you fly and don’t sleep during take-off and landing — all easy enough advice to follow.  One of the keys to survival is being aware of your situation, knowing where you are and what’s going on around you.  If taking a minute to count the rows and checking under my seat for the life vest will help, I can do that.

I have to say that I disagree with him about paying attention to the safety announcements.  Watching the flight attendant may be polite, but I already know how to buckle my seat belt.  I know that in the event of an emergency, aisle path lighting will guide me to the nearest exit, which may be behind me.  I know that even though my mask may not fully inflate, oxygen will still be flowing.  But that’s just my opinion.

Sherwood has done his research.  I loved the descriptions of US Marine Corps Survival School that he attended.  Surviving the SWIMMER (Shallow Water Initial Memory Mechanical Exit Release trainer) and the SWET (hallow Water Egress Trainer) - basically, big dunking machines designed to teach pilots how to get out of their helicopters during unscheduled water landings.  I would love to try out the FAA’s workshop on surviving plane crashes.  He talked with people who collect body odor (”What Does Fear Smell Like?”),  doctors who study the science of luck (”Why Good Things Always Happen to the Same People”), even a researcher who thinks that people with initials that spell negative things (”Are Your Initials Killing You?).  The author’s initials are BS — that must have been fun on the playground.  I don’t know that I have a lot of faith in all of that science (my initials? really?), but I have no doubt that there are a lot of things that impact your chances for survival.  The Survivor’s Club covers luck, faith, attitude, adversity and the will to live.

There’s even an opportunity to learn more about your own survival skills.  Log in to the SurvivorProfiler and take the Survivor IQ test.  The test breaks down profiles into several broad categories.  (I’m a Thinker, not a Fighter or a Believer.)  Of course, no one ever really knows how they will react in a crisis; Sherwood talks about his own experiences and how he measured up.  But it always helps to be prepared.  If you’ve thought ahead of time about what might happen and how you should react, you’ve got a better chance of making the right decision when it’s crunch time.  And since you will (hopefully) never experience jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, why not read about it in the safety of your living room?

The Survivor’s Club is an interesting, engaging read, full of real-life stories and tales of survival and adversity.   It’s a good mix of tips, true stories and hope — I always find stories about people who have survived to be full of hope.

By the way — the answers to my first 3 questions?  All false.  The safest seats are near the exits, you can survive a surprisingly long time in cold water and, sadly, the optimists were the first to go.

My copy of The Survivor’s Club by Ben Sherwood was provided by the LibraryThing Early Reviewer’s program.

I really, really hate the phrase “ripped from the headlines.”  It ought to be on one of those lists of cliches than can never ever be used again in print.  But open a newspaper or click on a news website and you are likely to see a story similar to Megan Gunther’s situation in 212 by Alafair Burke.  Megan finds herself the subject of some particularly nasty posts on a college gossip site.  The anonymous poster is familiar with Megan’s schedule — he (or she) knows when Megan is at home, when she goes to spin class, when she has her chemistry lab.  She’s a little freaked out; who wouldn’t be?  The police are no help — there are no threats, so their hands are tied.  But when Megan turns up dead, her roommate critically wounded, someone finally decides to take things seriously.The cyber crime is just the beginning.  NYPD Detective Ellie Hatchett is convinced that finding the anonymous poster will lead them to the killer, but that is not so easily done.  When Megan’s roommate disappears from the hospital, you have to wonder — is she running from the killer, or does she have secrets of her own?  Why did Megan end up dead, but her roommate can lead cops on a citywide search?

There are almost too many threads to follow in this mystery.  Phone records lead to a real estate agent who claims she’s never met Megan.  Suspects are not who police thought they were.  Eventually a trail leads to another high-profile crime — one that has the attention of powerful forces in the NYPD — but none of that seems to tie back to Megan.  There are plenty of twists and turns and the reader ends up in a place they would not have imagined at the beginning of the book.

Mostly, those are good things.  I wish the book had focused more on the cybercrime aspect — that’s certainly the way it sells itself.  I find this aspect of the story the most interesting.  Crimes like identity theft and cyber-stalking are all over the news these days.  As someone who works online a great deal of the time, as well as paying my bills, maintaining a website, etc, I worry about my vulnerability.  Recent stories about teens who have been hounded — sometimes to death — by their peers over social networking sites make me glad I went to school back in the caveman days before the internet.  While this does play some part in the story, it’s really a minor role, and that was a little disappointing.

If that part of the story wasn’t wrapped up in a way I found particularly satisfying, although the book is still meaty with good detective work and great personalities.  Ellie Hatcher is very interesting (this is the third book in the Ellie Hatcher series) and I liked her interaction with her lieutenant, Robin Tucker.  Strong-willed women butting heads in a male-dominated workplace?  That’s gonna be interesting.  Neither ends up being a cartoon, for which I was grateful.  Her partner, J.J. Rogan is also quite a character.  It should make for an interesting series — definitely worth picking up the earlier books, Angel’s Tip and Dead Connection.

Alafair Burke is a former deputy district attorney, and now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School.  Writing is in her genes — Alafair is the daughter of celebrated crime writer James Lee Burke (I’ve got a few of his titles on my shelf).  According to her website, she traces her fascination with murder and mayhem back to growing up in Wichita, Kansas while the BTK Killer was on the loose.

My copy of 212 was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Julius Fromm was born in Russia in 1883; when he was 10 years old, his parents left Russia for Berlin. At the time, Berlin offered the hope of more economic opportunity and a better life. Fromm grew up feeling like a German, and a patriotic one at that. It all came to crushing end when Hitler came to power, because Fromm and his family — patriotic though they might be — were Jews.

Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis by Gotz Aly and Michael Sontheimer is a detailed account of how Julius Fromm built a condom empire during the sexually permissive-period after World War I. His name became synonymous with condoms in Europe, much the way Kleenex or Xerox became household names. But his wealth and status could not protect him or his family when the Nazis came to power.

Julius Fromm (born Israel Fromm) started his business empire rolling and selling cigarettes. It was an easy enterprise for an immigrant family — it required very little investment, no equipment, and everyone in the family could pitch in. The business sustained the family when Fromm’s father died, leaving a widow and 6 children, but he had higher ambitions. In 1912 he began taking evening courses in chemistry and eventually hit upon the idea of making condoms.

And this is really the crux of this little book.  If Julius Fromm had made kitchen chairs or spatulas or alarm clocks, there wouldn’t be much of a story.  What makes this an intriguing read is the little bit of naughtiness the story takes from the nature of Fromm’s business.  (Heaven knows, I found the phrase of ”condom empire” amusing.)  The book wouldn’t really get off the ground without that.  In that day and age, I can’t imagine being the daughter of the man whose name was famous for such a product, and the stories about his difficulties with advertising his product show that, in some ways, things haven’t really changed.  After all, there are still restrictions on how condoms can be advertised, which is crazy in a day when we are dealing with AIDs, teenage pregnancy and other issues of sexual health.

There is some interesting history on the development of condoms and the processes used to manufacture them on both small and large scales.  Fromm’s knack for business extended to factories and business practices — his buildings and safety procedures were on the cutting edge at that time. 

For readers interested in the history of Nazi Germany and the treatment of Jews during that period, there is a lot to learn in this small volume.  The authors, Gotz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, provide an extremely detailed account of how Fromm’s business fell victim to National Socialist policies.  Even though he was extremely wealthy, backed by banks and other businessmen and able to pull some strings, Fromm was eventually forced to sell his business for a pittance to a hand-selected German buyer, even though other buyers were standing by with better offers.  He and his family were hounded out of their home, and stripped of their possessions.  The accounts are chilling.  Policies and procedures were in place to make sure that everything of value was stripped from Jews who had been good German citizens and turned over to “pure” Germans with the right political connections.  It’s a part of the history I had only heard in the most general terms, and I found it frightening.  It’s easy to see how the wheels of bureaucracy could crush an entire people under them, if we don’t keep tabs on our government.

My copy of Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis was a review copy, provided free of charge.  It’s a quick, fascinating read for those interested in this shameful part of history.

There’s a heatwave in Oslo.  Anyone who can’t get out of the city is sweltering in the heat.  There are lines at the open-air pool, the city streets are deserted…and there is a killer on the loose.

Police investigations are apparently much the same the world over, as I didn’t find a lot of procedural confusion in Jo Nesbo’s The Devil’s Star. It’s good, gritty detective fiction — just the way I like it.  Harry Hole is a police inspector who is on his way down and out.  His drinking problem has started to take its toll: he’s lost his girlfriend and he’s about to lose his job, but he may be the only person who can solve this string of killings.

The Devil’s Star has a story that is seriously twisted.  The story moves backwards and forwards, there are interludes with unnamed characters and plenty of foreshadowing to give you hints and still keep you guessing.  Much of the tension comes from the strained relationship between Hole and his partner in this investigation, Tom Waaler.  To the police brass, Waaler is a model cop and one of the best detectives on the force, but Harry is convinced that Waaler has a dark side.  He believes that Waaler is involved in a smuggling ring, perhaps with ties to more sinister activities, but he’s been unable to make a case against him.  The obsession has ruined Harry’s reputation in the department and this may be his last chance to shine.

There are important clues that tie the crimes together: all the bodies have a severed finger — a different one in each case — and each victim was left with a red diamond, shaped like a five-pointed star.  The papers are having a field day (it’s the summer holidays are there is not much else to talk about).  The guns used are untraceable, the diamonds didn’t come from any local jeweler, and there is a chance that this is all tied into the unmakeable case against Waaler.

Harrry is the only one in the department to have experience chasing a serial killer, but he’s not in the best of shape.  Harry’s a drunk.  He shows up to work drunk, when he bothers to show up at all.  His apartment is a mess.  His very promising relationship has ended, and he’s about to flush everything important to him down to the tubes.  It makes him a very interesting character — this is a man who has had a fairly prestigious career and now seems headed for the gutter.  Detective fiction is full of flawed characters, but Harry sometimes seems to be all flaws.

Nesbo has written nine Harry Hole novels, according to his website, but not all of them are available in English.  The settings range from hunting a serial killer in Australia to accidentally shooting a US Secret Service agent during President Clinton’s visit to Norway.  Harry always seems to be struggling to keep himself together, and I read the book hoping that this would not be the moment when he finally lost his grip.  Now all I have to do is find enough of the series published in English to fill in Harry’s backstory.

My copy of The Devil’s Star was a review copy provided free of charge.

Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things.  He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache…and a pair of horns growing from his temples.

It’s a great beginning to a promising story: part thriller, part horror, part treatise on the nature of the devil.  While Horns occasionally gets bogged down in reminiscence, it’s still an extremely entertaining read. 

A year ago, Ig’s girlfriend Merrin was raped and murdered.  Ig was the prime suspect — an alibi like “I was passed out in my car parked behind an abandoned Dunkin Donuts” is not very convincing — and although he was never charged, he was also never cleared.  There is a cloud of suspicion hanging over him already, and growing horns is not going to make him look innocent.

Eventually, Ig discovers that the horns have their own terrible power.  They make people want to tell him things, the things they really want to do.  They want to get his permission, or his twisted blessing.  When he gets rousted by the local cops, he learns a little more about Officer Posada than he intended:

“I’d like to put my hand in your pocket again,” Posada said.  “And leave it there.  You don’t know how hard it is not to use my position of power to cop a feel.  No pun intended.  Cop.  Ha.  I never imagined how much of my job would involve handcuffing fit, half-naked men.”

You’re not going to believe the advice he gets from his parish priest.

Ig finds out things he wishes he didn’t know, but he also sees a way to use this power, this ability to get answers from people, to find out who really killed Merrin.  The parts of the story that involve Ig’s investigation are my favorites — filled with insights into the people around him that are both hilarious and horrifying.  We really do not want to know what goes on in the minds of the people around us.

The story, for me, got bogged down in backstory.  Some explanation of how Ig and Merrin got together, his relationship with his brother and his best friend, Lee, is necessary, but I didn’t find it very compelling.  When a story starts in the present then jumps back to the past for an extended period, it’s hard to keep up the level of interest. 

I’m also sure that some of the symbolism went right over my head (I never did figure out the whole Treehouse of the Mind thing), but I loved the commentary on the nature of the devil.  Some of the ideas Ig lays out are the sort of questions I used to ask my very-Catholic grandmother, driving her to distraction; for example, if God hates sin and the Devil punishes sinners, aren’t they working on the same side?  Seems perfectly logical to me that the Devil would reward sinners.  I’m sure that a lot of readers can relate to the comments about God and his “criminal indifference”.  After all, who hasn’t watched a tragedy unfold and asked “why?”

“If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered.  Show me the moral logic in it.  You can’t.  There is none.”

I enjoyed Horns, but not quite as much as I had hoped to.  I found a lot of humor and suspense in the story, a couple of good scares and a lot of little touches that made it memorable.  (Just for fun, take a minute to translate the Morse code on the inside cover — I got a chuckle out of it.)   Author Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King and storytelling is definitely a family gift.  I loved 20th Century Ghosts and I also enjoyed Heart-Shaped Box and I will be looking forward to his next novel — a good, scary story is hard to come by.

My copy of Horns was provided free of charge for review.

In Raven Stole the Moon, Jenna Rosen walks away from a life that is fractured.  Two years ago, her young son drowned in a tragic accident at a resort in Alaska.  Her husband seems to have moved on, but Jenna cannot let go of her grief.  On the anniversary of their son’s death, they attend a party that turns out to be Jenna’s breaking point.  She walks away from the party, gets in her husband’s car and drives… straight through to Bellingham, Washington.  She gets on the ferry and heads to her home town of Wrangell, Alaska — and straight into a mystery. 

Jenna and her husband, Robert, had a romantic courtship and a happy marriage, but all that changed when Robert got involved in an investment group that was building a resort in Alaska.  While visiting the resort, their son, Bobby, dies and nothing is ever going to be the same.  There are issues of blame, issues of money, and very different ways of dealing with grief.  Robert shoves everything deep down inside and buries himself in his work, while his wife finds a therapist with a handy prescription pad.  They don’t realize how far apart they’ve grown, until they find themselves truly far apart.

Jenna receives a strange gift on the ferry and meets an old Tlingit woman who tells her a story about the kushtaka, a shape-shifting spirit who usually appears as an otter.  According to legend, they save endangered swimmers from drowning; you can see why the story appealed to her.  She will have to come to terms with her son’s loss in a very dramatic way, and at the same time, decide if she and Robert can save their marriage.

Author Garth Stein takes the fractured family story and stirs things up.  He adds a healthy dose of mysticism; Alaska is full of legends and stories from a variety of native peoples.  When I visited there several years ago, every store, every restaurant, every person I met had a story to tell.  Many of the people I met believed in the traditional legends and stories — and not just the elderly or people living on the fringes.  It is a community that seems both modern and ancient and I can easily imagine the way these myths might act on a distraught woman.  While the legends come to life for Jenna in a very real way, the novel is not all ghost story — Robert and Jenna live in the modern world and they have modern problems to deal with. 

It’s a very interesting story — I was fascinated by the mythology and I was caught up in the family’s story.  They were both suffering, it had been a terrible loss and it had driven a wedge between them.  I was curious to see how, or even if, Jenna and Robert could find their way back to each other. 

This isn’t exactly a new novel from Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain.  This is  actually a re-release of his first novel, written 13 years ago.  It has to be a really interesting experience to look at something you wrote so long ago.  According to the afterword, the only real change he made was cutting out a lot of foul language.  Stein’s mother was born in Wrangell, Alaska, and he is registered with the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.  He has based portions of the book on the stories of his aunts and uncles. 

My copy of Raven Stole the Moon was an Advanced Reader Copy provided free of charge.

I have occasionally described books as “a wild ride.”  Books are like trips we take — some are pleasant Sunday drives, some are fast and bumpy.  John Dies @ the End is like a ride on a twisting, speeding, swooping roller coaster.  On acid.  With no seat belt.

John and Dave are slackers.  They work in a video store.  They play video games.  They are occasionally kind of silly:

“Dave?  This is John.  Your pimp says bring the heroin shipment tonight, or he’ll be forced to stick you.  Meet him where we buried the Korean whore.  The one without the goatee.”

That was code.  It meant “Come to my place as soon as you can, it’s important.”  Code, you know, in case the phone was bugged.

But this book has nothing to do with heroin shipments.  The drug involved in this story is called soy sauce.  And in this story, you don’t take soy sauce.  Soy sauce takes you.  It will, in fact, batter its way out of the vial, fly around the room and burrow right through the skin of your face to get to you.

John and Dave attend a doomed party where one of the partygoers introduces his pals to the sauce.  At first, the side effects are amazing: knowledge and clarity and heightened senses.  David knows that the cop he’s talking to has 2 daughters who attend Catholic school.  He can hear a man talking on a cell phone — down on the street, outside the building he’s in.   They see things and know things and the world is an infinitely more interesting place.  Of course, David also walks up to a fast food joint, and instead of the smiling, happy clown we’re all familiar with, he sees a terrified, eviscerated clown, being forced to eat his own intestines.   Dropping by his buddy’s house, he sees his friend already has a visitor:

There was a noise above me.
I looked up.
My heart skipped a beat.

It was hanging off his ceiling on seven little pink hands.  The ridiculous thing’s red wig was cockeyed on its head.  It looked down at me, then let go and landed a few feet away with a soft thump.

The thing is, I’m not sure that I can adequately describe the plot without giving away things that will be a lot more fun as surprises.  It comes down to this: the soy sauce gives them access, lets them see.  There are forces at work and nefarious plots.  Time is a lot more flexible than they ever imagined.  And these guys — they are very accepting.  They aren’t thrown by the weird stuff they see around them, and we are talking about some seriously weird stuff:

The only other thing that was different about Molly was the blood staining her muzzle and the fact that she was floating three feet off the floor.  Molly’s legs were stiff below her as she moved, buzzing slowly across the room as if on a track hung by invisible threads,  When Molly came near the door she turned her head my way and in a clear but guttural voice said, “I serve none but Korrok.”

I loved this book.  It was an amazingly fun read, even when it made no sense at all.  There’s a lot of really funny stuff, some truly bizarre stuff, a host of interesting characters…and underneath, there’s some depth to it.  I liked David, even though there is a certain sadness (totally understandable sadness) about him.  John is the kind of guy who would bug the crap out of me, but would still be kinda fun to hang around with.  And when the truly weird, scary stuff begins to happen, they are willing to dive right in, no matter how bad they know it’s going to be, because what else can they do? 

The Afterword is interesting.  David Wong is the editor of Cracked.com.  John Dies @ the End started off as an online story about two buddies and their adventure with a monster made of meat, back in 2001.  The buzz slowly grew, attracted readers, got the attention of a publisher; there was even a movie deal.  He says:

Word of mouth.  That’s all it was.  No one “discovered” me, I didn’t get some big break out of the blue.  It was a slow advance of strangers from around the world, passing around the link and loaning out those sad homemade copies.

Personally, I think that’s fabulous.  I love the idea that such a cool story got such a cool start — and the idea that crazy folks all over the world, joined by the internet, can force the book industry to publish something we would really like to read.  In the fine tradition of those strangers, I am putting my copy in the mail this week, sending it to my friend Julie in New Orleans.  After that, who knows where it may go?  I know a lot of people who are really going to enjoy this crazy ride.

I purchased my copy of John Dies at the End based on the recommendation of a good friend with excellent taste in books.

Historical fiction can be challenging, both for writers and readers.  It doesn’t take much — just a word, a name, a description — to bounce you right out of the story.  In the Author’s Note at the end of Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin says “It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, at least in part.  To avoid confusion, I have used modern names and terms.”  Still, she manages to evoke a sense of the time that had me completely swept up in the story.  It’s an excellent combination of a compelling story, interesting characters and the romance of an earlier time.

Mistress of the Art of Death is set in medieval Cambridge.  Four children have been murdered in bloody, sadistic fashion and the local Catholic community is blaming the Jews.  After beatings and lynchings, the Jews have holed up in the castle of King Henry II and Henry is none too happy about it; he depends on the income from his Jewish usurers and merchants.  He decides to contact his cousin, the King of Sicily, to ask for help.  The assistance comes in an unexpected form: Simon of Naples, a fixer and investigator for the King; Mansur, a eunuch; and Adelia – or more precisely, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar of Salerno –  a doctor of death.

Simon, Adelia and Mansur set out to clear the Jews of suspicion and solve the mystery surrounding these murders.  No one is informed of their mission and they have no official standing, so they must rely on their wits and the friends they make to provide inroads and information.  They are able to assist the head of the local monastery, Prior Geoffrey, with a rather personal medical problem, and he is an invaluable resource for them.  He introduces them to Gyltha, who becomes their housekeeper, and her grandson, Ulf, who becomes Adelia’s chief spy-about-town. 

Their killer is crafty as well as brutal.  Although their investigation reveals the ruse he uses to lure the children to their deaths, the trio cannot get quite close enough to catch a glimpse.  And Adelia is at a grave disadvantage: although in Salerno it is possible for women to study medicine, in England, a woman with medical knowledge would be condemned by the church and likely hanged as a witch.  She has to be very careful who she confides in.

I found the story fascinating; it was Criminal Minds or CSIset in a time when people believed that disease was caused by demons and the church condemned the use of painkillers as heathenish.  Adelia is a very modern woman — she is single (with no plans to marry), educated, independent.  There is a constant clash between the Church, the King, scientific discovery and religious superstition.  Adelia may bring a wealth of medical knowledge to the table, but she is ignorant of the local people and their way of life.  She must rely on Ulf and his understanding of local life, that strange underworld that children inhabit, to provide the insights that move their investigation along.

Many reviewers disliked the romantic sub-plot, and I must admit that I was not thrilled with it myself.  I would have liked to see Adelia be as modern about her love life as she was about her education, or see it dropped altogether.  It seemed to diminish her in some way, by insisting that under all her modern notions, she was still just a maiden who could let love cloud her judgment.  It was my least favorite part of the plot.

The story is based on the real-life tale of Saint William of Norwich.  William was 12 years old when he was murdered, and his death was attributed to local Jews, who were alleged to sacrifice Christian children during their sacred rituals.  The murder and the fact that the King and local authorities protected the Jews, fueled anti-Jewish feelings among the peasant class and resulted in the attack on the Jewish delegation attending the coronation of Richard the Lionheart, son of King Henry II.

This novel was partcularly well-suited to being an audio book.  The reader, Rosalyn Landor, has a marvelous voice and a lovely accent.  Many of the medieval terms and place-names were unfamiliar, so a good reader was a real asset.  My copy of Mistress of the Art of Death was provided by my local library. 

Paddy Meehan is probably the most flawed heroine I’ve read in a while. By page 10 of The Dead Hour, she has already taken a bribe. She lies, she has an affair with a married man — but in her own way, she’s trying to do the right thing. Her way is just a bit roundabout.

Paddy is a reporter for the The Scottish Daily News, working the late-night police beat. At the scene of a domestic call, she sees a bloodied woman through the doorway. The cops seem to be convinced the fight is over, and when the husband shoves a 50 quid note through the door and tells Paddy it’s important this stay out of the papers, she takes the money. The police don’t make an arrest, everyone goes away with a little money in their pockets, and the next day, Vhari Burnett, the bloodied woman, is dead.

Paddy prints the story anyway, but now she’s in a fix: there will be a police investigation and how can she keep her job and admit to taking a bribe? She sees right away that the police officers are covering it up — they haven’t mentioned certain snippets of important information, and when Paddy brings them up, it’s cause for an official inquest…and a lot of hostility from the other officers. Paddy can’t seem to let this investigation go. She’s driven by her feelings of guilt over Vhari’s death, by her anger at the police department for covering the whole thing up, and by a desperate need to come up with a hot story to keep her job. The economy is in a bad way, unemployment is rampant and Paddy is the only person in her family who’s working. If she can’t catch the eye of the new editor, she may be be out on the street before she can wrap up the biggest story of her career.

Woven through this is the story of Kate — a young woman on the run, slowly but surely destroying herself. It takes a while to learn the full extent of her crimes and to place her in the bigger picture, but she’s such a trainwreck that you can’t look away. Giving into an addiction-driven impulse may prove deadly, and she may be the last link to Vhari’s killers.

This took me a while to get into, mainly because I had a little trouble getting to like Paddy. Her first act in the book is so destructive, and her first lies so cowardly, that it put me off a bit. I’m glad I stuck with it, though: eventually, you get to know Paddy, and it’s hard not to like her a little. She’s a brave young woman, even if it doesn’t show up right away. Her friends and family are quite a flock of characters and I loved their stories. The ending provides quite a cliffhanger for the next book (although didn’t anyone else really see that coming?).

Denise Mina has written 7 novels, 2 plays, 2 comic books and a list of short stories, radio plays and articles. On her website, she apologizes for the lateness of the current update: “When I haven’t been working or having babies I’ve been watching DVDs and eating toast and wishing I could sleep for longer than four hours at a stretch.” Sounds like a busy lady! She’s based in the UK and I was unfamiliar with her work, but I will be putting her on my “I wonder if they have something by…” list, for afternoons spent browsing my favorite bookstores.

My copy of The Dead Hour was loaned to me by a good friend with excellent taste in fiction.