Pleasantville by Attica Locke

This is the first book I've read by Attica Locke, and I really enjoyed it.  It's the story of a lawyer, Jay Porter, who's at a low ebb in his life when he becomes caught up in a series of events, including a murder, a criminal trial, some political dirty- and double-dealing, for which he's quite unprepared.  As the novel opens, he is gripped with grief for his dead wife and struggling to care for his two children.

It all starts with a break-in at his office in an old Victorian house.  He calls the police, and they come, look over the house, fill out a report, and leave.  Then he goes upstairs and finds an intruder who laughs at him before escaping out an upstairs window.  Downstairs, he begins to clean up the broken glass only to realize that the front window was broken from inside, not outside.  He then finds a business card with his address written on the back.  The front of the business card shows the name of a lawyer at Cole Oil. a local polluter whom he had successfully sued in a class action suit but which has failed to pay any part of the settlement amount.

He's disturbed and confused by all of this, but his grief-induced numbness is something he's feeling more strongly than fear or anger.

Shortly thereafter, an African-American girl is reported missing, and she was last seen in Pleasantville, an attractive middle-class African-American neighborhood in Houston.  This affects Jay greatly because he knows many people in Pleasantville and because this is the third such disappearance in several years, and his wife, as she lay dying, was particularly affected by the trauma of the parents of one of the other victims.

Much to his surprise, he finds himself involved in the disappearance/murder case, and eventually, manages to resolve the class action suit.

This book is wonderfully plotted, and very exciting. I enjoy accounts of courtroom tactics, and there's some of that here in the presentation of the criminal case he defends.

What makes this novel different from an ordinary police procedural is that Porter defends his client without solving the case, and, more importantly, the urban setting and the sharply drawn characters. Sometimes Porter tells you who these people - who he's mostly known for years - are, but mostly, their character is revealed through their actions, which is much more interesting.

If you like Scott Turow, or if you liked John Grisham's Sycamore Row, you'll probably enjoy Pleasantville.

Attica Locke is also the author of Black Water Rising, also featuring Jay Porter, and Cutting Season. And she's also a writer and co-producer for the TV show Empire.

A Blind Goddess by James R. Benn

Army investigator Billy Boyle is asked by an old friend to investigate the murder of a local policeman in World War II era Britain.

This is the second-to-latest novel in a series of novels about Army investigator Billy Boyle.

Like A Fine Summer's Day, A Blind Goddess is a historical fiction mystery.  A Fine Summer's Day was an "origin story," and explained the backstory of the protagonist. It's a great place to jump into a long and long-established series.

A Blind Goddess is not an origin story, but because one of the characters in this story is a childhood friend of Billy's, there's a lot of discussion of his teenage years in Boston when he met this friend. So, if you haven't read the rest of the series, you won't feel that you missed something important and you should not feel compelled to read the novels in order before you can read this one.

Billy is granted leave, but before he can leave, he's asked for help by an old friend.  His friend, Tree, works in an African-American anti-Tank unit.  His gunner has been arrested for the murder of a local policeman because the dead man had warned the accused, "Angry" Smith, from dating his sister.  The dead man's body was dumped in a local cemetery, on the grave of his father.

Billy feels the pull of old loyalties and can't walk away from this request.

What I found very interesting was the setting, and the discussion of racism and segregation in the military during World War II.

The books in the series are:

Billy Boyle

The First Wave

Blood Alone

Evil for Evil

Rag and Bone

A Mortal Terror

Death's Door

A Blind Goddess

The Rest Is Silence

Suspect by Robert Crais

Scott James is a Los Angeles police officer.  One night, he and his partner stop, on the way to dinner, just to listen to the silence in a commercial district.  All of a sudden, a Bentley pulls into the intersection in front of them, and is immediately hit by a truck.  A fire fight ensues, and Scott's partner, Stephanie, is killed.  A Gran Torino appears, and the gunmen pile in and escape.

Scott is wounded in several places, and has to have multiple surgeries, screws and plates to be put back together.  He's eligible for medical pension, but he's not really considered fit for duty, and he doesn't want to go back to being a patrol cop, but he can't face retirement, either.  He wants to find Stephanie's killers.  Then he hears that there's a position open in the K-9 unit, one in which police officers work with dogs.  He lobbies hard to be transferred to the K-9 unit.

The day that new officers are assigned their dogs, he meets a dog named Maggie.  Maggie is a military dog, a German Shepherd trained to sniff explosives and IEDs, who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan.  Maggie's handler, Pete, was killed in a suicide bombing/sniper ambush, and she suffers from PTSD.

Scott admires her loyalty:  Maggie never left her handler, even when she was shot by the sniper. She's had several surgeries, too.  Scott and Maggie bond almost instantly.

Maggie's not really fit for duty, either.  But everybody at the K-9 unit loves her, and they feel sorry for Scott.  They bend the rules so that Scott can have some time to work on Maggie's PTSD.

At the same time, the cops assigned to unravel the shooting and find Stephanie's killers have retired, and the new cops bring Scott in to give his statement again and give him a little bit of a summary of the case to date.  Before long, Scott's using Maggie's exceptional sniffing abilities to do a little extra-curricular investigation of his own.

I loved this novel.  It opens with a prologue that describes the ambush in Afghanistan from Maggie's point of view.  Maggie gets some more story-telling time later in the novel.  For me, Crais really created suspense equal to that I'd experience at a movie.  I found the rising action at the end of the novel really exciting, and found the happy ending that much more satisfying as a result.  I would heartily recommend this novel to any reader of thrillers and especially to thriller readers who are also animal lovers.

Robert Crais is known for the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series but this is a stand-alone novel.

Interestingly, Crais worked as a television screenwriter on many popular TV series:  Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law.  Several of the novels I've read that were written by screenwriters seemed to me to be very proficient in giving a) lots of plot, b) hooking you right away, c) keeping the story moving.  The novels I have in mind are The Rosie Project and The Heist, Fool's Gold and I'm sure there have been others I can't think of now.  To me, Suspect felt different.  The exposition and characterization wasn't quite as detailed as it might have been in the hands of another novelist, but it seemed to me to have a certain satisfying depth.  I really enjoyed it as much or more as The Secret Place.  \

According to a friend of mine, if you enjoyed Suspect, you might also enjoy The Search by Nora Roberts.  Another book you might enjoy is Kill Switch by James Rollins.

Crais' follow-up novel, The Promise, is a continuation of the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series.  But fans of Scott and Maggie -- Maggie, especially -- will be delighted to know that star in the story, too.

What I'm Reading Now

I've just finished A Blind Goddess, by James R. Benn, which I really enjoyed.  The afterword stated that many of the things that happened in the novel happened in real life.  I think I probably enjoyed it as much as I did because it talked about issues other than the mystery (ies) at hand.

I've already started Suspect by Robert Crais.  I've read about two chapters.  The prologue has an interesting portrait of canine psychology which I think dog lovers will enjoy.

Still haven't finished My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, of which I've read only two chapters, but I know I'll enjoy finishing it.

A Fine Summer's Day by Charles Todd

This is the 20th novel (or 21st?) in a historical fiction mystery series set in nineteen-twenties Britain.
The protagonist is Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, who proposes on the same very lovely summer day that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire is assassinated, an event which sets World War I in motion.

For fans of this series, this story is a kind of "origin story" and allows us to see the Inspector before he served in WWI.

I've never read anything by Charles Todd before.  Charles Todd is a mother-son writing team who live in Delaware and North Carolina, respectively.

I found that the novel immediately drew me in, and I hardly noticed the first 200 pages flying by.  I did something I used to do all the time but rarely do any more:  I read the last chapter to see how it ended.  I'm sorry now that I did that.  The last 100 pages seemed to me to drag, and I suppose knowing how it ended robbed those last 100 pages of any suspense.

The authors supplied plenty of information about the events that began the first World War, and I found that interesting because I'd forgotten what I learned in school.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

I've just finished The Girl on the Train and I'm a little bit stunned.  I really enjoyed the beginning of the book.  Rachel's thoughts are so cleverly arranged that you feel as though you're looking in at her through a crack in the door.  Slowly you realize how desperate she is and you feel increasing anxiety - her anxiety - that something bad, something very bad, has happened and that she is somehow involved.  Rachel's attempts to buck herself up reminded me so much of myself that I began to identify with her, and I found myself feeling anxious, guilty and shamed.

As I write this, I'm recovering from my shock and feeling that this is a classically and cleverly designed plot and novel.  Perhaps someone more widely read than myself will point out that the turning points of the plot would, if abstracted, be highly similar to several other hugely popular thrillers.  It's a great structure.  And it's hugely suspenseful, drawing you in from the very first and seeming to accelerate.

I have to say that what makes the book for me is the atmosphere of Rachel's character.  Rachel changes a lot throughout the course of the novel, although she remains a little lost.  (Perhaps the ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, a little too easily to be quite believable.)  Rachel's quite the liar - it'll make you cringe - but she's quite honest with herself.

9/27/15

As I look back on the book, I find myself thinking that is has a classic, Hitchcockian quality:  things seem normal, if bleak, and as the layers of the plot are revealed, you learn that things are really shockingly different from what you imagined.  Things that appeared to be normal are not normal.

I love the idea that the plot springs from an ordinary, everyday activity .. looking in the windows of homes from the train.  I think the very surprises of the plot, hugely entertaining as they are, leave me somehow unsatisfied.

I find myself thinking of The Secret Place by Tana French.  In French's novel, she captures the ephemera of human experience:  the feeling that you have about a person as they walk toward you or by you, those flitters of judgment and assessment that are perhaps unworthy and are quickly forgotten.  Like James, she captures the thoughts and communications and the underlying reality that are never spoken but which, when shared, are still part of the situation.  I've wondered if she invites comparison with James in this respect. I've also wondered if her work as an actor has influenced her sensitivity to perception.

 I think that psychological perception was very much part of what I admired in The Secret Place, and perhaps that's part of what I'm missing in Girl on the Train.  Girl on the Train is 336 pages and The Secret Place is 480 pages. Shorter is often better, and the readers in my book group would prefer shorter.  Many readers prefer plot over characterization, and I prefer characterization over plot.

Having said that, Girl on the Train is entirely successful, in my view, in achieving its aims.  If you like suspense, I'd highly recommend it.

Last One Home by Debbie Macomber

I dreaded reading this book.  I thought the beginning was a little dull and a little stilted.  But long before I reached the end of the book, I felt as though I'd had the experience that makes Debbie Macomber the focus of such devoted fandom.

Cassie is a woman who's left a dangerously abusive marriage.  With the help of a women's shelter, she's gained skills as a hair stylist and has moved back to Washington state from Florida.

While she was married, her husband controlled her actions and movements, and she was not able to attend either the funeral of her father, or that of her mother (who died after she left her husband, but before she had any money to travel back to Washington).

Now she's working on building her clientele as a hairdresser, caring for her daughter, and volunteering to help other abused women.  She becomes involved with Habitat for Humanity, and she soon has the opportunity to use "sweat equity" to get a real house for herself and her daughter.

She has not seen either of her two sisters since she married her husband.  At the time she married, she was only eighteen, pregnant, and both her parents and both her sisters opposed her marriage.

A wrinkle develops when her Habitat for Humanity supervisor takes one look at her and decides that her long fingernails probably mean that she isn't a very good worker.  Another develops when her sister, who lives several hours away, offers Cassie furniture from their parents' home.  The furniture is in storage, and the sister only wants to pay for another month.  Cassie is desperate to have the furniture, not just because she has no furniture and no money to buy any, but because it's a link to the past and the family that she lost when she married her husband.

The novel is about reconciliation and healing and this is a frequent theme in women's fiction.  I can't help thinking that lack of reconciliation is an issue in the lives of many, and that that is the explanation for its lasting popularity as a theme.

A Walk To Remember by Nicholas Sparks

A Walk to Remember is account of a man in his fifties remembering his first love.

He's a high schooler as his story opens.  An average student, he likes to hang out with his friends.

Jamie Sullivan is the Baptist minsiter's daughter, a young woman who isn't popular with the other students.  To them, she seems so serious, and is always walking around with her Bible.

Jamie runs for student council president, and he wins.  One of his duties as student council president is to help decorate for the school dance, clean up afterward, and attend.  He needs a date.  He starts calling all the girls he knows, and soon finds that everyone already has a date to the dance.  He calls Jamie Sullivan and she agrees.

This sets in motion a series of events that make up the novel.

It's a wonderfully easy and quick read.  It's well written and very entertaining.  It is very sentimental, and the characterization is not as sharply drawn as that in The Secret Place.  The publication date on my book was 1999, so this isn't a new book.

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan

This is an epistolary novel, and it's very likely to appeal to folks who are also fans of The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Two women become pen pals because their husbands are overseas, serving in the Army and the Navy in World War II.

Glory is 24 and has only been married a few years.  She has a toddler and she's pregnant.  She lives in New England.

Rita is Italian, lives in Des Moines, and she's a little over 40.  Her husband is a professor and a biology researcher, and he volunteered even though, because of his age, he was too old to be drafted. Her son also volunteered and he's a sailor in the Pacific.  She's originally from Chicago.

The two women share their anxieties, frustration and loneliness.  Through letters, they grow close.

Under Rita's tutelage, Glory becomes a great gardener.  They comfort each other as they navigate tough family issues.

The story covers 1942 to 1945, and it's very eventful.  It's a heartwarming story of female friendship, and I enjoyed it.

And, the friends exchange recipes.  The first one is for beer bread (never heard of it before, but yes, you make it with beer).

The Secret Place by Tana French

I really loved this novel, and I highly recommend it.

Holly Mackey is a teenager, a boarder at St. Kilda's, a tony girl's prep school in Dublin.  Her dad is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad, and his name is Frank Mackey.  (Readers of Tana French's other mystery novels will remember him; her other novels are In The Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor.)

The novel's story begins when she brings a photo to the police, and specifically, to Detective Stephen Moran.  The photo came from a bulletin board in the top floor hallway of St. Kilda's called The Secret Place.  It's a place where the students can share secrets, anonymously.

A year earlier, a student from the neighboring school for boys, St. Colm's, had been found murdered on the grounds of St. Kilda's.  All the students of both schools were interviewed, but the  police investigation has come to a dead end.

Now, someone has placed a photo of the dead boy on the Secret Place bulletin board, with letters cut out from newspaper or magazine, in the style of a ransom note, which spell out, "I know who killed him."

Detective Stephen Moran's career has also stalled.  He got a break early in his career, permitting him to become the youngest detective in the Cold Cases unit, but he's now been spinning his wheels there for several years; he wants to work for the Murder Squad, but sees no opportunity to get himself noticed.  Then Holly brings him the photo of the murdered boy she's taken down from the Secret Place.

Moran know that there's is one detective on the Murder Squad who doesn't have a partner because her partner recently retired,   He knows that this is his one big chance.  If he can get himself assigned to this case, and he can solve the crime, there's a strong chance he might get promoted to the Murder Squad.  If he can't solve the case, his time in the Cold Cases area will probably stretch out until his retirement.

There's just one more snag.  The detective who worked the case earlier, Conway, is a woman, who's tough, smart, combative and hugely unpopular.  Can he solve the case?  Can he get along with Conway long enough to do so?

This novel is really about teenage girls, and what's unique about this stage of mental and social development.  It's also about the tense relationship between Conway and Moran, and the mind games that they employ as they attempt to winkle the truth out of the teenage girls they're interviewing.

What makes this novel so wonderful are the sharply drawn characters.  This was also true of Faithful Place, the other novel by French that I've read.  And the dialogue.  French has a wonderful talent for capturing dialogue.  French carefully unfolds the details of the plot, Conway and Moran's relationship, and the girls' relationships.

It's a long book, with chapters that alternate telling the story of the girls, and telling the story of how Moran skillfully navigates distrustful Conway, the interrogations, and finally, Frank Mackey.  I tried to read the book in three days, and the first 200 pages just flew by, but I found I just couldn't do it. Expect to spend a week, and give this wonderful book the time it deserves.

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12/7/2018

The "Dublin Murder Squad" novels:
 this

1. In the woods

2. The likeness

3. Faithful Place

4. Broken Harbor

5. The secret place

6. The trespasser

Her latest novel, The Witch Elm (a standalone), came out in October.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the historical fiction novel The Nightingale, a French woman named Vianne Mauriac faces the start of the Second World War with great fear. First, her husband is drafted by the French army. After France falls and is partitioned, a German officer is "billeted" at her family home, meaning that he comes to live with her. Then her sister, who is just 19, leaves to join the Resistance. Vianne manages to survive in a world where civil order increasingly breaks down, food is harder and harder to get, and the oppressive practices of the occupying German forces become more dangerous for civilians.

This book is, in some ways, a departure for Hannah, who's written women's fiction in the past. However, at its heart, The Nightingale is about loss and forgiveness, and about the healing of families torn apart by loss and bereavement.

This book was an easy and very entertaining book to read, even though it's 448 pages.  The sentences are short.  Although the opening of the book, the exposition, initially moves along at a seemingly slow pace, it soons picks up and becomes a very dramatic and suspenseful novel, full of close and too-close calls.  The combination of the suspense of the novel, the heroic subject matter, and the short sentences make it a perfect book group book.

One review I read opined that Hannah does not quite have the style for a subject matter this serious (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristin-hannah/the-nightingale-hannah).  I too, felt a lack when the relationships of the two sisters to the men they loved were explored.  The language and the content seemed similar to that of a romance novel.  But, this issue could be viewed the other way: that by presenting these men-women relationships in a very familiar way, Hannah succeeded in making history accessible to many more readers.

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Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

McClain is the author of The Paris Wife, a fictionalized biography of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.  This book was hugely popular, especially with book groups.  It combined history, bohemian/artistic achievement and glamor, and marriage drama.  I'm not sure what to call what I'm calling "marriage drama."  

Something I read opined that with its publication, McClain succeeded in creating a new genre.  Another example would be Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife, which was also a very popular book group book. Circling the Sun is McClain's follow-up, and it's a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, pioneering female pilot from Kenya. I never read The Paris Wife, but I read more than half of The Aviator's Wife and I think Circling the Sun much more entertaining.

Beryl Markham was English; her father was a racehorse trainer. She suffered an early trauma: when she was very small, her mother moved back to England with her older brother.

In McClain's novel, Markham becomes close to a nearby African tribe, and makes friends with an African boy who becomes her lifelong friend and her partner in her horse training business.  As a child she was a tomboy; she loved to run.  One day, her joy in running led to her being attacked by a lion.

As she reached adulthood, her father became overwhelmed by debts exacerbated by currency fluctuations.  He sold up and moved to Capetown.  Losing the farm was hard for her. Her father offered to take her to Cape Town but strongly suggested she get married instead.  This set in motion a long list of events, including her getting her horse-training license at the tender age of 18, the first woman of any age to do so.

She mingled with the Happy Valley set in Nairobi, the folks who figured in The White Mischief story.  In fact, when the Prince of Wales famously visited Nairobi, she was there with her husband, Mansfield Markham.

I found this novel entertaining, lively, eventful and easy to read.  Many of the chapters were short.  I felt that McClain chose as her subject someone who was a pioneer and someone with an eventful and interesting life. 

However, as I suspected, McClain seems to have bowdlerized her subject.  This bothers me, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  After all, it's an entertainment; it's not history nor does McClain present it as history.  I guess I think that McClain presents Markham as having fewer lovers and more friends than her Wikipedia entry would suggest (I have no independent knowledge of the facts of Markham's life), and I believe that McClain did that to make Markham seem a more admirable character.  To me, that implies that succeeding in a man's world (by which I mean the world of horse racing) and writing West with the Night (a book which Hemingway seems to have greatly admired) are not sufficient to make her an admirable woman.

On the other hand, I admire McClain for having written The Paris Wife which interested so many people.  It's not just that you can't argue with success; it's that ( assume many readers were introduced to characters, places and ideas they would not have otherwise encountered.  And, if all a successful book club is, is an excuse to bring people together, that itself is an achievement and a worthy one.

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Reading now: Circling the Sun by Paula McClain and The Secret Place by Tana French

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I'm about a third of the way into reading Circling the Sun and I'm almost finished with The Secret Place - perhaps 100 more pages.  I'd recommend both books.

Circling the Sun is a fictional biography of Beryl Markham, who wrote West with the Night, a well-regarded book I haven't read.  Perhaps I will now.

And, a friend gave me Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.  I read "The Prelude," and I hope I will find time to read the rest of the book.  I'm reminded that Rebecca Mead already wrote about Eliot as the chronicler of resignation and acceptance when she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the fact that a quote commonly ascribed to Eliot, about starting over, was never uttered by her.

I also started James R. Benn's The Blind Goddess.  This is part of the Billy Benn historical murder mystery series.  I didn't know what to expect, and this book is not the latest book in the series or the first one.  But I felt that, while a reader who had read the other books might enjoy a whole host of associations that I could not, I really felt that it was very engaging from the first pages.  I haven't gotten very far at all; perhaps as far as page 20.