Murder most foul

A Great Deliverance - Elizabeth George (Bantam Dell, 1988)

Shortly after I moved to Orange County, three different people recommended Elizabeth George to me. It may have been partly coincidence, or it may have had something to do with the fact that she was an Orange County resident writing British mysteries. At any rate, she's been on my to-do list for awhile, until finally a copy of her first Inspector Lynley book made its way to me.

There's a rather huge cast of characters and the book visits all of them. The two inspectors, several people in some way near the crime - a farmer beheaded, his daughter confessed to the killing, but clearly something is off - and a few others who are more peripherally involved in the world of Scotland Yard. It gets a bit confusing, but allows for all sorts of red herrings.

Lynley and Havers find the whole situation ominous and unsettling from the start, but it took awhile for me to understand why, and while the climax made sense, I didn't see it coming. I found the relationship between them more interesting, as each battles his or her own inner demons. I suppose that is more how mysteries are supposed to work anyway.

P.D. James tries fanfic

Death Comes to Pemberley - P.D. James (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

I had heard some fairly negative buzz about this novel - a murder mystery set in the world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, some years after its happy ending. But that rarely stops me when it comes to P&P takeoffs, so here I am.

And while it was not perhaps the strongest of novels, and the whodunit seemed weird at best, I then looked at James' bio and discovered that she was over 90 when the book was published. And all was forgiven. Damn, if I am around at 90 (and I hope I am) I want to be clever enough to put together this novel.

Plot summary: Elizabeth & Darcy are happily wed, and happily estranged from Lydia & Wickham. Until Lydia shows up screaming bloody murder, and then end up ensconced in a murder trial. I think I've been ruined by too much media that has to have thrilling climaxes, because for all that there's a murder and a trial and verdicts and much excitement, it all seems rather calm and (spoiler alert, I guess) neither Elizabeth nor Darcy find themselves in a showdown with the real killer, waiting for some deux ex machina rescue. Which, in retrospect, was rather nice.

James also plays homage to other Austen novels, namechecking characters from at least two other novels. If there were others, I missed them and want very much to have them brought to my attention. That was cute, although sorta silly. And I didn't much take to her renditions of some beloved characters, although I suppose her visions of them are just as likely to be accurate as my own.

All in all, it made for pleasant, if somewhat incongruous, poolside reading.

Beer and B&Bs: a recipe for romance

Love in a Nutshell - Janet Evanovich & Dorien Kelly (St. Martin's Press, 2011)


My very first Janet Evanovich. (Awwwww.) Such a cheerful read. Such a cheerful read. I feel a little weird about that, considering there is a very real "mystery" element to the plot, including several moments where poor Kate's life was in danger. And even when it wasn't, poor girl was dealing with the fact that she was definitely going to lose the family summer home, behind on payments and facing an ever-growing list of necessary repairs. And does it help or hurt that the man holding the mortgage happens to make her weak in the knees?

And yet, there is something so nice and comforting about reading this, and knowing that things will all sort themselves out. And I had a long reverie concerning the role of small exurban towns in these kinds of contemporary romances. Why are so many set in places where "everyone knows everyone else" and is going to be all up in their business? Is it a matter of plot convenience? Is it simple fantasy in the sense of trying to be as different as possible from the urban/suburban world of most readers? I feel like it has more to do with a nostalgic longing, although I'm not sure if it's more for a simpler time and more Etsy-ish pursuits or more about the close-knit communities and bonds that are so frayed in our world.

Have I digressed? The love story was sweet, the dogs were awesome, the setting pretty fun, and even the mystery worked. I wasn't particularly impressed with the climax (the villain's dialogue made me sad) but that was okay since the lead-up was so enjoyable. I suppose now I'll have to give Stephanie Plum a try.

The Black Book - Part 2, where nothing gets clearer

The Black Book - Part 2
(Post on Part 1 here)

This book was hard work, people. I kept wondering why I struggled so much. But it really is hard to know whether the narrator's voice is Galip, Celâl, or someone else entirely. Plus, what is real, and what is imaginary? Plus are the cultural references -particularly the literary ones - accurate, and would they be familiar to Turkish readers? So much of the novel is an exploration of identity, of authenticity and masks and doubles. Therefore the confusion is intention, I think.

I felt much better when I got to the afterword by translator Maureen Freely, where she discusses the challenges of rendering Turkish prose in English. She paraphrases poet Murat Nemet-Nejat, who called Turkish "a language that can evoke a thought unfolding" and asks "How to do the same in English without the thought vanishing into thin air?" How, indeed.

But anyway, after slogging through so much of the novel, I found it picked up speed at the end. Galip is still searching for his wife, Rüya, and Celâl. Somehow, while pursuing "clues," he assumes Celâl's identity, and finds himself fending off a very impassioned reader. His actions don't make sense, but then, when do anyone's? And as the chapters with "Celâl's" columns continue, we end up seeing deeper into Galip and Rüya's marriage.

A few things, indicative of the broader themes:

• Celâl refers to Turkey as "a country where everything was a copy of something else" - to the point that a group unknowingly replicates the murder from a Dostoyevsky novel.
• Pamuk/Celâl opens a chapter with Coleridge: " 'Aye!' (quoth the delighted reader). 'This is sense, this is genius! This I understand and admire! I have thought the ver same a hundred times myself!' In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him."
• A prince spends 6 years just reading, the happiest time of his life. Except because his thoughts and dreams were the authors', not his own, he was never really himself.

I've loved Pamuk since My Name is Red, but haven't read nearly enough. Apparently, this is where it all started. Per Freely, "The Black Book is the cauldron from which [his later works, like Red] come."

Regularly scheduled reading interrupted for Ramses

A River in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters (William Morrow, 2010)

One of my favorite things about my volunteer job is that I often see brand new books the day before they are officially released. And since I don't particularly follow such things, it's often particularly exciting. Such was the case last week, when a cart appeared with 9 or 10 copies of a brand new Elizabeth Peters book. And sure enough, it was an Amelia Peabody one. (Yay!)

I had previously mentioned that I thought the series was probably through. I couldn't figure out how she could move forward. And it turns out she moved forward by going backward. To 1910. To young Ramses. And I can't resist young Ramses.

So I had to drop everything (sorry Orhan Pamuk!) and read this before doing anything else. I'll spare you the plot and all. It's during the lead-up to World War I, and the Emersons aren't allowed to go to Egypt. So somehow they end up in Palestine instead, where Ramses is already working and allowing trouble to find him. It's short, and genial. And again has me ready to one day go back to the beginning.

Mysteries, books, and television

Heat Wave - Richard Castle (Hyperion, 2009)

All Together Dead - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2007)

This is how I spent my spring break.

One's a book from a series that created one of my favorite television shows (returning in June!) and the other was inspired from another show in my regular rotation. I'll start with Castle.

Okay, so Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a successful mystery author who somehow manages to get permission to shadow a NYC homicide detective, who is a beautiful, tough yet vulnerable, blah blah blah, romantic tension. Anyway, the show is funny. Heat Wave is the first in his new Nikki Heat series, based on Det. Kate Beckett. Since it's such a great plot point on the show, I was highly amused when I saw (via Twitter, natch) that they actually published the "real" Heat Wave. (It's worth noting that the physical version, at 198 pages, is significantly slimmer than the tome that appears on the show.)

Since certain family members were dying to read it, and I was amused, I picked it up from the library. (The staffer at circulation was also excited, and actually yelped when she saw the pic of "Richard Castle" on the back cover.)

Oh, but the story itself. It's cute. It's not great, but it's cute, and I was entertained, particularly by all the extra-plot flourishes, like the blurbs and the dedication. Definitely for fans of the show only, but those folks will be amused.

.... And back to Sookie Stackhouse, heroine of this blog, so it seems. This, the 7th, might be my favorite installment of the series so far. It pushes along the grand narrative, and I've come to just put up with many of the quirks which I initially found annoying. And since it's been so long since True Blood was on the air, I'm finding it easier not to compare the two. I've almost been able to separate them into totally separate entities (like Gossip Girl, although I haven't actually read the books to compare).

This one actually had a quote that I enjoyed enough to note down. Sookie's a telepath, which has mostly been a problem until she started meeting supernatural beings, but she can't read vampires. So when she's in a room just with them, she realizes she has no idea what everyone else is thinking, and that this is what most of us deal with every day. She marvels, "How did regular people stand the suspense of day-to-day living?" How, indeed.

Egypt & mystery

Tomb of the Golden Bird - Elizabeth Peters (Harper, 2006)

I've mentioned before how much I've loved this series, which I think may have come to a close with this book. I didn't blog this when I finished it (2 weeks ago, maybe?) because I had a nagging feeling the whole time that I had already read it. Maybe I have, I'm still not sure. If I haven't, that sense of it not being new is troubling (like the first chapter of The Babysitters Club, which I'm pretty sure I had memorized for at least a decade after I stopped reading those).

Anyhow. I love this series. I love the characters. Peters brings so much humor to play, and the characters are way more interesting than the action. But it does sort of feel like it's time to wrap things up. It's become too modern for one - this novel involves the opening of King Tut's tomb - and I don't think there's much more to be done with the characters. When Peabody and Emerson fell into a bit of a rut, Ramses and Nefret were old enough to take up much of the dramatic slack. But now, unless Peters wants to move forward another several years to focus on Sennia and the twins (which would consign P & E to undeniably old age) it's got to be over.

(I am not going to go look on message boards, because I imagine people who don't wait four years to read new books have probably already had this discussion, and Peters may have already addressed the question, and I'm just going to be solipsistic and ignore all those possibilities.)

This isn't the strongest book in the series. But. It made me want to go back to the beginning and re-read them all. So at some point, I'll be doing that. I read the first when I was probably 12 or so. I'm ready to go back.

Murder and strange times

Duplicate Keys - Jane Smiley (Fawcett Columbine, 1984)

I like Jane Smiley a lot. I haven't read all that much by her, but seeing her was pretty much always a highlight of the LA Times Festival of Books. So when I finished 2666 and needed something witty and lighter, I saw this on my bookshelf and grabbed it.

Then I read the back cover.

It's about the aftermath of a murder within a circle of friends in NYC, circa 1980. I thought to myself, this is probably not the right book for right now, but I read it anyway. So really, is it the book's fault that I didn't like it? Maybe, maybe not. I'm discovering that I don't like much of the fiction that I read from the 70s and early 80s. I can't identify with the period, and it just seems so foreign. So that's probably part of it.

Anyway, it's a pretty good mystery. Alice, a librarian (and I'm not sure what I think about the portrayal of the profession), finds two friends shot when she comes over to water the plants. While part of a tight-knit group of friends, she finds that the group's bonds have been stretched to (and past) the breaking point. And while she is trying to find her way through the aftermath of the killings, she also shows that she's essentially in love with her best friend, is still trying to recover from her divorce, likes or doesn't like the new guy she starts sleeping with, etc. I found Alice's mind difficult to keep up with - she was a big bundle of self-contradiction. Which would normally be fine, but it didn't work for me this time. Also? I totally knew who the killer was. Maybe it wasn't supposed to come as a surprise?

While Alice is being vaguely bipolar, she also has a lot (a LOT) of conversation with her friend Susan, the longtime partner of one of the dead men. And Susan has this to say:

But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you're mad at them for being a certain way, it's actually you who's making them be that way.

Hmm. Food for thought. And now I have to go soak this book so I can document my efforts to dry it for a class assignment. Fun! :)

Sookie Stackhouse, take 3

Club Dead - Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2003

And so here is Book 3. Damn, this girl gets around. Also, lots more supernatural creatures out there. It's a little overwhelming. Nothing particularly to add to my thoughts on this series, but figured I would have it here for the record.
(Also, since there are elements here that appeared in Season 2 of True Blood, albeit in different fashion, I'm wondering exactly how they will use this book for Season 3.)

Yet another vampire post

Living Dead in Dallas - Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2002

I read the second book in the series that has become True Blood, which I miss. A classmate has noted that Harris seems to have better editors as the series goes on, and even if this second novel I feel like I might be starting to see a difference.

What's sort of more interesting to me is how drastically the books differ from the tv show. Reading this, which is essentially season 2, you can see where the writers found their inspiration, but then they went off in all sorts of directions. And most of them, I prefer. The television characters, Sookie and Bill excepted, are pretty much all more vibrant and funny and engaging. (Harris pours her all into Sookie, so she is lively on the page, and while book Bill is fine, I find him just sooooooooo boring on the show that it's not too hard to outdo him.)

Anyway, it was a good read for finals week. Vacation reading on the way...

Vampires

Okay, I would like this vampire to be my boyfriend. But I digress. To the review...

Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2001

I would never have read this were it not for True Blood. And I don't know if I would have continued watching the show - which is entertaining enough although I'm still not sure about Anna Paquin - were it not for Eric.

But I did watch the show, and got pretty into it. So clearly that meant that I had to try reading the books. My mom gave me the copies of 2-4 that she got from a friend, but I don't like starting in the middle. So I ended up buying a copy really cheap. (And now I'm babbling. Have I mentioned that Eric is hot?)

Okay. So here is Dead Until Dark. It's difficult not to compare it to the tv show. Sookie is a strange character. She can hear people's thoughts, and that creates problems for her, even as she tries to keep out of their heads. People think she is definitely weird, and possibly a little retarded. She's hot enough, but a virgin in her mid-twenties. She handles with aplomb situations that would fell me, and then gets weirded out by other things. I don't get her. And then Bill is a vampire. That's about all there is to say there.

Wow, this is a bad review. (Have I mentioned though that Eric is hot? Although not so much in this first book. Will he get more hot later on? I guess it doesn't matter as long as he stays hot on tv.) The book is enjoyable enough, and it's got some suspense and a decent mystery. I'll keep reading the series.

Light & serious reading = Egypt & Afghanistan

I've been trying to trade off between lighter fare and actual literary fiction. So this week I started out with an Elizabeth Peters mystery - Serpent on the Crown - and then moved on to The Kite Runner, the rather well-known book by Khaled Hosseini. I know there was a movie at the end of 2007, but I don't remember the source of the hype before. Was it a big book club selection?

Anyway, I knew what to expect with the Peters, although really I miss having Ramses as a more interesting character. I'm not sure she knows what to do with him as a full-fledged adult. Somehow I managed to not know much about The Kite Runner, except vaguely about one of the climactic scenes. And I think that Hosseini is a doctor, like Chekhov. (Yep.) But this novel seriously wore me down. Every time you think, okay, enough tragedy, something else goes wrong. Yet I think that Hosseini managed to avoid melodrama, which is impressive. The book is famous enough that I don't really feel like I'll have anything to add to the conversation, esp not today, when I am worn out from hiking in Griffith Park and very ready to go to bed. Perhaps next time I read a book, I'll manage to blog about it when I'm more awake...

Interred with their Bones, or the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare

I was mainly writing papers last weekend, but somehow I also found time to read a fun little mystery a la Dan Brown about Shakespeare. I had heard about this book on a podcast so figured when I saw it at the library that I deserved a change from library science, political blogs, and teenage vampires. (Seriously, what do I read these days?) (Edit: just wrote another two paragraphs without noticing that I hadn't given any other info on the book. It's Interred with their Bones (or "The Shakespeare Secret" outside of the US apparently) by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Like with Da Vinci Code, as well as I can remember it, there are two major plots tracking together. The first is the historical treasure hunt, with information that threatens to blow up everything we thought we knew about a historical figure. In this case, it's about a missing Shakespeare play... oh, and his very identity. The second is the willingness of someone to kill to keep the information safe.

I like to think I'm decently perceptive. But when I read or watch mysteries, I really don't get it sooner than the average person. I like to think this is because I enjoy the discovery process more than being right all along, but really, I have no idea if this is true. What is true is that I figured out the twists on the murder plot pretty quickly, and wasn't convinced when Carrell starting throwing up new misinformation. That was a suprise. On the other hand, I didn't mind all that much, because the far more interesting part was trying to follow her and her characters as they march through Elizabethan, Jacobian, and Shakespearean history, plus an overview of the major controversies of Shakespeare scholarship. It made me realize that I totally do not know my Shakespeare well enough. Have I read any of the English king plays? I don't think so. Or Lear? Have I read Lear? (Why, in my "Shakespeare's England" course in college, did we only read Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus? It was a history course, but still...)

I digress. The book is fun, but still sufficiently intelligent. And nicely creepy for curling up in bed at night.

The Winter Queen

Book 3 of the Russian Reading Challenge: Boris Akunin's The Winter Queen, the first in a series of mysteries set in the final decades of the 19th century. Akunin started publishing in Russia about 10 years ago, and gained massive popularity in a hurry, and TWQ first appeared in English in 2003. (At least a half dozen other Akunin titles are also available in translation.)

The book's protagonist is Erast Fandorin, a very young clerk in the Moscow police department. He is eager and curious, traits that lead him to investigate a simple suicide that proves to be anything but. The mystery has a variety of twists and discoveries, and while it's not particularly challenging, it is awfully fun. (I'd like to hear what others think of the ending though.)

A couple other aspects of the novel that I found noteworthy:
The suicide is a case of "American roulette," better known to most of us as Russian, and it prompted this observation by a rakish count: "It's stupid but exciting. A shame the Americans thought of it before we did." This led me to wonder about the origins of the term, and mini-research (Wikipedia, of course - and in Russian) suggests that Akunin is alone on the American origin thing, although there doesn't seem to be much evidence attaching it to Russia either. But it was still funny to me. (Also, a similar game of chance with gunplay is mentioned in Lermontov's A Hero of our Time - per Wiki the only instance of R.R. in Russian literature - but it's hard to call it quite the same thing, upon rereading the story.)

Aspects of the characters reminded me a great deal of Dostoevsky, particularly The Idiot, although also Bros. K. Fandorin has a shade of Myshkin-esque innocence to him, and he is also drawn to two distinct types of beauties. One is pure and fair, and of good family; the other is dark, corrupted, but utterly beguiling. And the latter has a train of roguish followers. Maybe I'm making too much of it though.

All in all though, an excellent challenge selection.

crossposted at RRC

Coming of Age

To end the year, I read two books which aren't especially thematically related (read: have nothing in common) but that I am grouping under the loose tie that both involve boys who are becoming adults.

The first is Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which I have delighted in describing as "Catcher in the Rye, if Catcher in the Rye had been good." (I had issues with CINR, most of which I now blame on my 11th grade English teacher.) Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Cameron is also the author of The City of Your Final Destination, a novel I read a few years ago about a young doctoral student who gets involved with the family of his research subject, somewhere in South America. James Sveck, of STPWBUTY, is also surrounded by a cast of eccentrics, these his upper-class New Yorker family. James, like Sveck, has a keen eye for the absurd and fake (but thankfully, whines less about it) and has devoted the summer before college to figuring out a plan to avoid going to college - which he doesn't think he will like very much - altogether.

I laughed out loud often while reading this, and agree with whatever reviewer noted that while classified as Young Adult fiction, this book can be a joy for readers of whatever age. (Well, not too young - some of the themes are a bit mature. Use discretion before buying for a niece or nephew.)

The other read of the week is one of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries, which I continue to adore. Guardian of the Horizon was especially enjoyable, as it was written out of order and returns us to a lovestruck Ramses. Here he is 20, and kind of all over the place in terms of defining his adult relationship with his parents and their ward, and determining what is love and what is a proper course of action, etc etc. I'm stretching things a bit - mainly this is a typical Peabody book, where they end up on some fool adventure (this time a return to a lost oasis in the Sudan) and people are trying to kill them and they get captured and there are twists and turns and Emerson blusters and Amelia pretends togetherness and Ramses is, well, perfect.

And all that said, Happy New Year to all!

Angelica, or The Perils of Parenthood

It seems appropriate that on Father's Day (happy day to all the dads, including mine who is on the 5 right now) I get to blog about a father-daughter relationship. And a father-mother one. And a mother-daughter one. Oh, and the mother-daughter-ghost one. And the spiritualist. And the maid, and ...



Anyway, Arthur Phillips has shown he likes to write mysteries. Not of the whodunit kind, but of a deeper, where is the truth when everyone can see only their own experience of the truth? variety. Even in his first novel, Prague, he employs multiple viewpoints to get at a wider sense of expat Budapest. (Siel has been reading about subjective reality too.)

In Angelica, Phillips goes all out - and shows how entirely people create their own truths. And with each retelling (there are 3 1/2) of the haunting of the little girl and her mother - possibly by the spectral manifestation of the father's sexual appetite - sympathies shift and misunderstandings are laid bare. And still any objective truth remains elusive. As a grown Angelica finally laments:

If each of the players performed his own unconnected drama, then it is only in the intersection of those dramas that my life can be seen, through the latticed spaces where light can pass between three stories laid over each over. And yet when I lay these stories atop each other, no light does pass and no space remains. All my knowledge consumes itself.

The Curse of the Supersmart?

There is a list of authors who make me mad. Chief among the members are husband and wife team Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Really I'm just jealous because they are incredibly talented and doing something they love and are just about my age. Added to the list is Marisha Pessl, the precocious-seeming author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

This book enjoyed a good deal of buzz, although less than Claire Messud did for her book (see my review below). Like Foer and a growing number of young authors, she is a master of the gimmick. In this case, her protagonist is hyper-read, perhaps even more precocious than Pessl herself. Blue Van Meer narrates (from the distance of a year) her senior year in high school, the first time that she and her itinerant lecturer father have settled in a place for an entire academic year. Blue fills her narrative with in-text references to other works - of fiction and non-fiction. She mixes real and fake works willy-nilly. (I was particularly disappointed to note that "British chick-lit classic 'One Night Stand' (Zev, 2002)" does not seem to exist.) But these details add humor and insight to Blue's observations, and strengthen Pessl's characterization of Blue as a preternaturally smart young lady who really only knows things based on books, her father's proclamations, and her distanced analyses of her peers. When life gets "real" on her, she can barely cope.

But luckily (I guess), real life for Blue Van Meer is bizarre as f***. We know we're in a murder mystery, but the first 300 pages of what really is a tome are lead-in. With Blue as the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, more or less. It's a stronger and more sympathetic satire of (privileged) high school culture than Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (more here and here). And then we get to the murder mystery and all hell breaks loose. I spent the last 200 pages wondering what on earth was going on. Blue has an over-active imagination, and it's a good thing she does, because otherwise she'd never keep up with real events.

That's it. I think anything more would start to give too much away. Blue and Pessl both take some getting used to. But if you take the time to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a strange and funny and almost Usual Suspects-like mystery.