book-blog.com

Book Notices | The Trap by Melanie Raabe

Melanie Raabe, The Trap

Amazon   Linda Conrads is a best-selling author who hasn't left her house in 11 years. She went into seclusion not long after finding her sister Anna murdered—and seeing the face of the murderer before he ran off. The murder is still unsolved, and Linda is still haunted by that face. So what if she sees it one day on TV? Melanie Raabe's debut novel, translated from the German, is a twisty thriller that really did keep me guessing until the end. With very few pages to go, I still half expected a different outcome. There's also a story within the story, as Linda seeks to lure her sister's killer out of hiding by writing a novel based on the crime. Passages from that text are interspersed throughout The Trap, and they provide information—lightly fictionalized, and filtered through our protagonist's perhaps imperfect memory—about what happened in the aftermath of Anna's death. An enjoyable read.

Book Notices | Rebel with a Clause by Ellen Jovin

Ellen Jovin, Rebel with a Clause

Amazon   Rebel with a Clause is a sort of grammar travelogue. Since 2018, Ellen Jovin has been setting up a folding table in public with a "Grammar Table" sign and answering any grammar-related questions that passersby happen to have. She started in New York, where she lives, but at time of writing, she and her husband (who films the interactions at the table for a Grammar Table documentary!) had hit 47 states. This book is an account of her conversations with people from all over, organized by topic rather than geography. Chapters include, for example, discussions of the Oxford comma (of course; I don't really understand the world's obsession with this one piece of punctuation); affect vs. effect and lay vs lie (see below); its and it's and your and you're and their and they're and so on. After each chapter, Jovin includes a quizlet so readers can test their skills. I love grammar, but this book wasn't really about the grammar for me. It's more about the author's personality. Jovin is an immediately likable narrator who, with her friendly vibe, managed to coax a lot of people nationwide into talking about their grammar-related issues. She is far from a grammar scold, and in fact admits to some grammatical laxity that would draw ire from some, e.g., her lack of concern about the distinction between “farther” and “further.” (This is the sort of thing that may have earned her the term "rebel" in the title.) Anybody who likes grammar will enjoy the conversations in this book. If you're a grammar expert, you're unlikely to learn anything new, but I think you'll enjoy the experience anyway. Two notes: (1) This is the perfect place for me to promote the rule of thumb I propose for those who can't remember the difference between "lay" and "lie." It is this: If you're in doubt, if you're questioning which word to use, you almost certainly want "lie." Most people (especially those who are not bricklayers and are not involved with chicken farming) can get away with never saying "lay." Why? "Lay" is one of two things. (a) It can be a transitive verb (one that takes an object), as in "laying brick" or "laying eggs" or "laying a book on a table." But how often do you say any of these things? Chances are, if you want to say that you put a book on a table, you wouldn't say "lay," you'd say "put." And I think you're unlikely to be confused when you're talking about bricks or eggs. (b) The second possibility is the one that trips people up. "Lay" is also the past tense of "lie." So, you might say, "I am lying down right now." "I will lie down soon." "You should lie down." "Lie down!" (Not "lay"  or "laying" in any of those cases!) But, if you're talking about the past tense, you'd say, "Yesterday I lay down." If that explanation is enough to make you remember the distinction, great, but if not, just don't use "lay"! Because you can get away with saying, "Yesterday I was lying down." So I repeat, if you're wondering which to use, you almost certainly want "lie" (or you can get away with using "lying"). (2) In her introduction, Jovin notes that one of the three states she and her husband did not set up shop in was Connecticut—despite its proximity to New York. They did visit Connecticut, but rather than doling out grammar advice, they got pizza. This is perfectly reasonable behavior, even expected. But as a native of New Haven, I'm sure I join a chorus of other readers from the area in my need to know, where did they get their pizza from?

Book Notices | The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz, The Sentence is Death

Amazon   This is the second installment in Anthony Horowitz’s delightful series of literary whodunits. The author (who is real) blends reality and fiction by injecting himself into the story as a Watson-like character, the somewhat bumbling sidekick of a brilliant detective, disgraced former policeman Daniel Hawthorne (who is fictional). Together, they investigate unusual crimes, with Horowitz taking notes and working on the very book that we're reading. This time around, the crime that warrants chronicling is the murder by wine bottle of a prominent divorce attorney. The mystery is compelling, but it's the relationship between Hawthorne and Horowitz that is most appealing. It’s great to watch as the author slowly uncovers more personal information about his enigmatic and cantankerous partner. This series is a lot of fun.

Book Notices | Betrayal by Tim Tigner

Tim Tigner, Betrayal

Amazon   In Tim Tigner's early stand-alone novel Betrayal, twin siblings Ody and Cassi Carr—an FBI agent and profiler, respectively—run afoul of a political plot aimed at getting Cassi's soon-to-be ex into the White House. The book is fast-paced and readable, but it falls short of being riveting or memorable. The pace often feels rushed, and I never felt any attachment to the characters. It's hard to believe that Cassi, who is so impressive in other areas, would ever have fallen for the bad guy and not been able to see through him. And Ody doesn't make the best decisions in the story either. So, it's an okay read if you've got some time to kill, but Tigner went on to write better books.

Book Notices | The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

Amazon   Anthony Horowitz injects himself into the story in this first book in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, playing the John Watson figure to an enigmatic ex-policeman known mostly by his last name. A particularly intriguing case—the murder of a popular actor's mother on the day she plans her own funeral—prompts Hawthorne to propose the partnership, and after some initial reluctance, Horowitz signs on. So Horowitz is the real-life author writing about his fictional experience tailing the fictional detective while he solves a fictional crime. I write those adjectives with the certainty of someone who's Googled to find out exactly where the many real-life details in this book give way to fiction. The blend is exquisite. So I really enjoyed that playfulness—the melding of reality and fiction—and I like the first-person narrative in which Horowitz brings us along not only while he shadows Hawthorne but also while he tries to figure out how to approach writing this kind of story in the first place. It's quite a fun read, and there are (to date) three more books in the series waiting to be enjoyed! Hopefully they'll keep coming. (In closing, I must say that I love the cover art for these books. Also, in my head, Hawthorne was played by actor Bruce Weitz.)

Book Notices | A Column of Fire by Ken Follett

Ken Follett, A Column of Fire

Amazon   A Column of Fire is the third installment in Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series.* Like its predecessors, it's a big, sprawling read, centered loosely around the fictional English town of Kingsbridge. This novel picks up the story of the city's inhabitants hundreds of years after the events of Follett's World Without End. We're now in the 16th and early 17th centuries, when Europe is riven by religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The main protagonist, Kingsbridge native Ned Willard, spends his life in the service of Queen Elizabeth helping to root out extremist plots, all the while hoping for a world free of religious division. He's a good guy who's thwarted throughout his life by, among others, the brother of his (Catholic) childhood sweetheart. If you're familiar with the author's books, you won't be surprised by anything here—the huge cast of characters and clearly delineated good guys and bad guys; the stories of characters it's hard not to root for or against woven around real historical events; and, always, the sheer readability of it all, even at 900-plus pages. *A prequel to the series published in 2020—The Evening and the Morning—complicates things: A Column of Fire was the third book published (in 2017) in the original trilogy of Kingsbridge books, which includes Pillars of the Earth (1989) and World Without End (2007).

Book Notices | The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins / Fifteen Minutes to Live by Phoef Sutton / The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith

Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

Amazon   The girl on the train is Rachel, who watches strangers from her seat during her morning commute—one particular couple, whom she embues with personalities and a backstory. As the story unfolds, we learn why Rachel is interested in this couple, how their lives overlap with hers, and we watch as she steps into their lives after seeing something disturbing from the train. The story is told primarily from the perspectives of Rachel and this woman she watches, "Jess" (although there is a third narrator as well, whose identity I won't reveal because it will give something away). Both women are broken when we meet them, and in Rachel's case, we don't know how much of what she tells us can be believed. Nor does she. So it's an interesting read. The only thing that gave me problems was kind of technical. The chapters are dated, and one woman's storyline takes place before the other's. It's not super complicated, but the prominence of the dates made them seem important, and on my Kindle I couldn't quickly flip around to see what the last date was. It was just an unnecessary irritation that took me out of the story. If the dates had been appended to the chapter titles in the table of contents, I think that would have improved my experience significantly.

Phoef Sutton, Fifteen Minutes to Live

Amazon   The conceit of the book is interesting: Moved back into his parents' house after their deaths, Carl is surprised when his old girlfriend shows up out of the blue, throwing pebbles at his window like she used to in high school. Turns out, she does a lot of things like she did back in school. Carl has to figure out what the mystery behind her bizarre behavior is, and that leads to him uncovering big secrets. A lot happens in his life in a short period of time, and a lot happens in the book in a relatively small number of pages. The book is readable, it keeps you turning the pages, but it also felt rather rushed. An okay but ultimately forgettable story.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

Amazon   This eighth book in the author's Isabel Dalhousie series brings a familiar mix of philosophy, music, and meddling. Stuff happens as the characters' lives unfold unhurriedly: Isabel helps a new acquaintance who's looking for her roots in Scotland. Professor Lettuce rears his leafy head. Cat has a new employee. Charlie eats olives. Jamie is handsome and somehow impervious to his effect on women. And so on. This time around, in addition to being annoyed at how little parenting Isabel seems to need to do, I'm irritated by Grace, Isabel's housekeeper. Sure, she's kind, and she helps out a lot with Charlie, and because of this, we're supposed to find her shortcomings endearing. But in this book she does something very stupid financially, and Isabel is there, ex machina, to pull her out of the hole she's dug. It just irritates me that she was so stupid and that there's no natural price for stupidity. And didn't Isabel already buy her a house a while back? Am I misremembering? Honestly, I don't even particularly like Isabel at this point. I just read a review that called her a "sanctimonious bitch," and they have a point.

Book Notices | Grammar for a Full Life by Lawrence Weinstein

Lawrence Weinstein, Grammar for a Full Life

Amazon   I didn't expect to like this book. Intrigued by the title, I figured I'd read a few pages to satisfy my curiosity and then delete it from my Kindle. Hippie treacle, I figured. But I was wrong. Grammar for a Full Life is a collection of some 30 essays, a pleasing mix of grammar and philosophy, humane and thoughtful musings on the power of words and syntax and punctuation to enhance the human spirit. The essays are divided into thematic sections that relate to human needs—agency, belonging, freedom, and so on. One of my favorites of the bunch considers ellipses—both the punctuation mark and, more generally, elided words—and their connection to, well, connecting, because "a good deal goes without saying" in our most intimate relationships: "It is, to a large extent, the ellipsis which accounts for the joyful, bonding power inherent in the telling of a good joke." The same brief essay considers the poem "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams, in which the narrator confesses to eating plums that his reader was saving for breakfast. It's a love poem, Weinstein argues: "Between Williams's mischievous lines, I hear him saying, 'I feel so certain of our staying power as a couple that I have no fear even of reminding you of what a problematic choice of spouse you made.'" Needless to say, I did not delete this book from my Kindle after a few pages. In fact, I had downloaded it for free as part of a complimentary trial subscription to Kindle Unlimited, and that subscription expired while I was in the middle of reading it. So I bought the book, and I bought it in hard copy—something I simply don't do these days unless a book is a fat dictionary or it's not in English. But this book is such a joy that I wanted to have it on hand for future thumbings-through.

Book Notices | Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir / Helpless by Daniel Palmer

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

Amazon   Project Hail Mary is another likable-smart-guy-in-space story from The Martian author Andy Weir. Ryland Grace isn’t stuck on Mars with a bunch of spuds. He’s been sent on an interstellar space mission with packets of food slurry so he can save the world. If you liked The Martian, in book or movie form, you’ll like this one too. And if you know anything about science — I don’t — you’ll probably enjoy it on a different level than I was able to because you’ll be better able to appreciate what Grace gets up to in space. (That’s assuming the details are believable enough that science types won’t find fault; I don’t know enough to comment on that aspect intelligently.) This was definitely a fun read. I guess Matt Damon can’t star in the movie version of this book too, so I’ll nominate Ryan Reynolds for the role.

Daniel Palmer, Helpless

Amazon   An ex-Navy Seal/high school soccer coach is framed for child pornography in a complex conspiracy that leaves him a pariah in small-town Shilo, New Hampshire. Plus, his destroyed reputation puts him on the outs with his daughter, who’s newly in his custody and unsure whether she can trust him. This book was very middle-of-the-road for me. I didn’t care about the characters very much and wasn’t interested enough in the details of the conspiracy to keep track of the plot. In general, too, I couldn’t get past the feeling that I was not in the hands of a confident storyteller.

Book Notices | The Fine Art of Invisible Detection by Robert Goddard / Never by Ken Follett

Robert Goddard, The Fine Art of Invisible Detection

Amazon   Unassuming, middle-aged Umiko Wada is a detective's assistant tasked with traveling from Japan to England to investigate a decades-old death. The assignment lands her in the middle of a huge conspiracy and other assorted goings-on: murders, kidnappings, missing persons, assumed identities. That all makes it sound more interesting than it is, though. The plot is intricate—that is Robert Goddard's forte, after all—but that's really where it lost me. The story was too complicated, and not clear enough, and not interesting enough. I would have enjoyed this book more if more attention were paid to character development and less to the plot. Wada leaves me luke warm as is, but given attention, I can see myself liking her enough to want to read more.

Ken Follett, Never

Amazon   Well, Ken Follett's 800-page novel Never is unlike anything he's published before. Sure, it shares many traits with his earlier books—strong female characters and couples that overcome great hardship to be together, multiple storylines that somehow are never hard to follow. But in most of Follett's stories there are good guys and bad guys, and the line between the two is perfectly clear. The good guys ultimately win. True love prevails. Never tells a different kind of story. There are still some heroes and some unambiguously bad guys, but mostly the characters inhabit a gray middle ground. They're people who are doing the best they can in circumstances they can't control. Follett tells his story from multiple points of view—an American spy undercover in the desert, the President, a Chinese intelligence officer, et al. But there's a lot of information that has to be delivered to move the story forward, and some of Follett's narratives bear more of the weight of delivering that information. They are as a result less fun to read: Give me a romance in the African desert over political machinations in China any day. So, on the one hand, Never is a more serious story than the author's previous books. Really bad things happen in a progression that seems plausible, and the characters living through those bad things are more realistic. All of which is laudable, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The book was good, but I prefer Follett's usual fare.

Book Notices | The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean, The Library Book

Amazon   Well, reading this was a balm. Susan Orlean here focuses her loving homage to libraries on the great fire that destroyed Los Angeles's Central Library in 1986. We learn about the events of the day itself—the damage done to building and books, the arson investigation that followed, and the unusual character on whom suspicion soon settled, a likable would-be actor and compulsive liar named Harry Peak. But in telling the story of the fire and its consequences, Orlean allows her attention to wander. She fleshes out the book with discussions of Central Library's staff and previous directors, its departments and collections, the architect who designed the building, its rebuilding and reopening in 1993; she also moves beyond Los Angeles to library get-togethers around the globe, to lending libraries that deliver books by burro and camel, to a consideration of the surprisingly large range of services that libraries have provided and continue to provide, updating always for the needs of their communities at the time. The Library Book is wide-ranging and pretty much always interesting and, really, just a lovely book.

Book Notices | Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay

Linwood Barclay, Broken Promise

Amazon   Broken Promise is the first book in Linwood Barclay’s trilogy set in Promise Falls, New York. There’s a lot going on in it: dead squirrels, murder, kidnapping, more murder, a series of sexual assaults, and a creepy tableau of mannequins on a carnival attraction. And there are a lot of characters to watch: David Harwood, an out of work reporter whose cousin is implicated in one or two of the crimes mentioned above; David's mother and father and aunt; a bully and his gun-toting mom; a donut-loving detective; a disgraced former mayor; a very busy doctor. The story is interesting, but it felt as if there was too much going on for one book. And that turned out to be true, because not all of these storylines are resolved by the end. They spill over into book two, at least. I like Barclay’s novels in general, and this one was good, but I’m not sure it was good enough to keep me reading the series for another 1000-plus pages.

Book Notices | Gone the Next by Ben Rehder / Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

Ben Rehder, Gone the Next

Amazon   This is another book that somehow has been sitting unread on my (virtual) shelves for years. And while it's languished on my Kindle, the author has added another four books to the series, now seven books strong. Gone the Next introduces Roy Ballard, a charming smart alec who pays his bills by investigating insurance fraud. That means he stakes out insurance claimants hoping to film them exercising or picking up heavy objects when their alleged injuries should preclude it. It's a stakeout that lands him in some trouble in this first outing: while on duty, Roy catches site of a child who's been all over the news. But try convincing the police that you saw a kidnapped girl when you've got a history like Roy's! The book also introduces a small cast of characters to flesh out Roy's world—a love interest, an accomplice, a policeman with whom he's mostly at odds. I liked the characters. I liked the story. Mostly I liked Roy's personality, and I'm glad he's got a series wrapped around him.

Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

Amazon   A murder mystery that references Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and whose protagonist is a cat-owning bookstore owner? Count me in! It turns out that life in the book trade is more dangerous than you'd expect. Someone's killing people, evidently using a blogged list of perfect literary crimes as a template, and the list's author, Malcolm Kershaw, is called in by the FBI to lend his expertise. This all seems like a straightforward, if unlikely, series of events plot-wise, but straightforward flies out the window early on as Swanson starts throwing twists at us. And the twists keep coming. It's a good read, with my one caveat being that I felt there were too many names of victims tossed around. I couldn't keep them straight, and I felt it distanced me from the story somewhat. Another consideration is that Strangers on a Train is not the only classic novel mentioned here. Readers who are more familiar with the books on the murderer's list will probably connect more with Swanson's novel. I was only familiar with some of them.

Book Notices | A Graveyard of Memories by Barry Eisler / The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith

Barry Eisler, A Graveyard of Memories

Amazon   A Graveyard of Memories is a prequel to Barry Eisler's series featuring John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American assassin. I've only read the first book in the series, some years ago, so I'm not familiar with the character's later development. But in this outing he's twenty years old and naive. He's bloodied his hands in Vietnam, so he's no stranger to killing, but we watch as he gets involved in a complex plot that forces him to translate the skills he honed in the jungle to an urban environment. Eisler spells out Rain's learning process as he goes. This may be a little heavy-handed, in that it's very noticeable that he's doing it, but I nonetheless do like being walked through Rain's thoughts and process. Somehow, Rain is both a vicious killer and a likable young man who's tender to a love interest, an unexpected combination, but it somehow works. One thing that I personally don't like is that the book is dotted with Japanese terminology. It's always explained, and I guess it serves to exoticize the setting, but mostly I find it an interruption, and I think a lot of it could be dispensed with. It's one thing to use a couple of terms that are repeated frequently enough that they can become part of the reader's vocabulary, but including too much unfamiliar terminology is alienating.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Charming Quirks of Others

Amazon   This is the seventh book in the Sunday Philosophy Club series, and things are going much as they always do for Isabel Dalhousie. Her life of calm near perfection, that is, is peppered with small annoyances and moral dilemmas—her own and others'—that she has to mull over. This time she's tasked with looking into the qualifications of a suite of candidates for the head mastership of a local boys' school. Of course, as usual, the book isn't really very much about that at all. The boys school plot just forms a scaffold on which to hang Isabel's reflections on guilt and trust and poetry and Scotland and so on. I still find Isabel kind of annoying (but I have more volumes of this series already on my Kindle, so I can't stop yet), and the ease with which she navigates motherhood while everyone around her jumps to take care of Charlie rankles. But no, I'm not bitter. Anyway, I love AMS, but this is not my favorite of his series.

Book Notices | The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark / The Mourner by Richard Stark

Richard Stark, The Man with the Getaway Face

Amazon   This is the second of 24 Parker novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake). Parker isn't the kind of protagonist you root for, exactly. He's a criminal, a thief and sometime killer. He's amoral. He's not very nice to women—or men, for that matter. But he's very professional, and there's something compelling about watching him plan and execute crimes. And since the early Parker novels were written in the 1960s, there's an added historical interest to them. They're gritty and dirty, and everything goes down in a simpler, meaner, pre-traffic camera world, in big hulking Chevies and Fords. In this outing, we're along for the ride as Parker plans an armored car heist and deals with an unexpected problem related to his recent facelift. I doubt I'd ever do it, but it would be fun to read all 24 Parker books in order, one after the other, and since they're fast reads, it wouldn't be a very difficult undertaking.

Richard Stark, The Mourner

Amazon   It took me a while to get interested in this fourth book in the Parker series, maybe because I was just coming off of book two, maybe because I'd skipped book three, but it just seemed a little disjointed. Eventually the story improved. What's going on is a little complicated, but in brief, Parker and his partner in crime Handy are going after a 15th century statue. They've got a buyer for it, but there's another party who's after the same mark for different reasons. And actually it's more complicated than that. Anyway, Parker is Parker—shrewd and good at what he does but not above making potentially fatal mistakes. The series continues to interest me, but after this one, probably less so than previously.