>One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

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Alternate history, that literary genre in which an historical event is tweaked, removed, or reversed, can be interesting.  It is always great fun to play the “what if game” with the actual events of our shared past: “what if the South had won the Civil War,” “what if the Normandy invasion had failed,” or “what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated?”  Much fascinating fiction has originated from those and similar questions.  Jim Fergus plays a more subtle version of the game in One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd.”  He wonders what might have happened if, in 1875, President Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, had agreed to exchange one thousand white women for an equal number of Indian horses.

Grant is at first shocked and disgusted by Little Wolf’s proposition, but he has to admit that the idea makes sense.  Since, in the Cheyenne culture, children belong to the tribes of their mothers, Little Wolf sees the “Brides for Indians” program as the best chance to assimilate his people peacefully into the white culture that seems destined to overwhelm his own.  Grant, on his part, hopes that the women can influence their husbands into accepting, or at least tolerating, white ways and religions to the point that open warfare with the tribe can be avoided.  Thus is born the secret “Brides for Indians” program, a program that will require Grant’s people to scour mental institutions, debtors’ prisons, and other jails and prisons in search of the one thousand women needed for Grant to meet his part of the bargain. 

May Dodd, resident of a Chicago mental institution, is one of the first women recruited to go west to meet her new Indian husband.  May has been institutionalized by her father for the unpardonable sin of bearing two children out of wedlock to a man beneath her social status.  To her father’s way of thinking, no woman in her right mind could do such a thing – his daughter has to be insane.  Rather than spend the rest of her life locked up, May, ever the adventurer, leaps at the chance to regain her freedom by becoming an Indian bride for the required two-year commitment. 

Author Jim Fergus

One Thousand White Women is told largely in the words of a series of journals May begins to record almost the moment she decides to make her break for a new life.  Through these journals, we meet May’s colorful traveling companions and learn of their adventures and hardships as they begin their new lives as wives of men with whom they have so little in common.  The women, although they will suffer the hardships of winter encampment, inter-tribal warfare, kidnappings, and one horrible night when their men succumb to the evils of alcohol, find that they are learning as much about what is good and proper in society as they are teaching.  But is it all too late to save the Cheyenne from what the army has planned for them?

The audio version of One Thousand White Women is read by Laura Hicks who does a remarkable job with the various accents and languages she has to deal with: two of the characters are Irish, one is Swiss, one is from the Deep South, one is an ex-slave, and some are French.  Hicks handles all of these accents well, in addition to voicing a believable version of the Cheyenne language.  This one should appeal to a variety of readers, among them: alternate history fans, western fans, and those who enjoy feminist novels with especially strong female characters.

Rated at: 5.0

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>The Renegades

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Author T. Jefferson Parker has a theory that outlaws, in the spirit of the old American West, still exist. Parker, in fact, not only contends that outlaws still exist – his theory includes the belief that, just as in gunslinger days, many of today’s most notorious outlaws spend some portion of their lives working as law enforcement officers. In The Renegades, his follow-up to L.A. Outlaws, Parker tells the story of two modern day outlaws, both of whom just happen to be Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs.

Deputy Charlie Hood is one of the good guys. He is somewhat of a loner who prefers to ride the roads at night, even in his off-time, as he grows accustomed to his recent assignment to the county’s Antelope Valley. Charlie would, in fact, be just as happy never to be assigned a partner, but he soon finds himself working with Terry Laws, a man known to his fellow deputies as “Mr. Wonderful.” After Mr. Wonderful is assassinated while he and Charlie are on a routine call, Charlie accepts a transfer to Internal Affairs so that he can get to the bottom of the murder. Perhaps, he thinks, Mr. Wonderful was not really so wonderful after all.

Getting to the truth about his partner’s murder will not be easy – or safe. In the process of figuring out what Mr. Wonderful was up to, Charlie will make some ruthless men on both sides of the border nervous enough to want him dead. And they will do their best to make exactly that happen.

There is a good deal of dramatic action in The Renegades, but Parker has chosen to tell his story in a straightforward manner that offers few real surprises. Once the main characters have been fleshed-out in the minds of readers – and the plotline set in full motion – their ultimate fates are too easily predictable. Part of the fun in reading a police thriller of this type is trying to guess what will happen next as the hero gets into deeper and deeper trouble. Surprisingly, however, that fun is somewhat lessened when, as in this case, the reader always guesses correctly.

The nine-CD audio book version of The Renegades is read to good effect by David Colacci, a man whose voice is likely to sound very familiar to fans of audio books. Colacci’s differentiation of tone, accent, and cadence make the numerous characters relatively easy to follow despite the book’s frequent changes between first and third person perspectives. Not having read L.A. Outlaws, I am uncertain of how wise it is to read this sequel first. Jefferson does make an effort to repeat the key points from the first book to help his readers understand just how Charlie Hood turned into the man he is today, but it is very possible that readers with more background will experience The Renegades very differently than readers coming to it cold.

Rated at: 3.5

>Dexter Is Delicious

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I have followed, and very much enjoyed, Showtime’s Dexter series from the start, but Dexter Is Delicious is my first exposure to Dexter in actual book form.  It is not like I have been unaware of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter books all this time, however.  The only thing that kept me from reading one of them before now was my erroneous assumption that the books were little more than recaps of the same stories I had already watched on Showtime.  That is certainly not the case.

The books are TV Dexter’s alternate history (or should I phrase that the other way around?).  Dexter is basically the same likable serial killer we know from television but some of what he has experienced in that series has not happened to Printed-Word Dexter (and I assume that the opposite is also true).  Certain key characters have died television deaths but live on in the books.  Dexter’s new television son is his new daughter in Dexter Is Delicious.  His innocent young step-children from film are his not-very-innocent step-children in the books.

Dexter Is Delicious is a bizarre tale involving young Miami cannibals, a group that is, in its own special way, working to control the illegal immigrant population of that fine city.  However, only when two teen girls from an expensive private high school appear to have been kidnapped by the cannibals does the Miami Police Department get seriously involved.  The case falls into the lap of Dexter’s sister, Deb, who treats Dexter (a blood-splatter expert working for the same police department) as her personal employee, yanking him from the laboratory and running him all over the county in pursuit of the missing girls and those who might have them. 

Dexter, while he is perfectly willing to help Deb hunt the bad guys, is, at the same time, waging an internal battle brought on by the birth of his new baby girl.  He wants to rid himself of his Dark Passenger, that inner voice requiring him to kill on a regular basis.  Dexter wants nothing more than to feel the emotions any new father can be expected to feel.  To blend in despite being a sociopath, Dexter has already learned the proper things to do and say when around other people.  Now he is having longer and longer moments of actually feeling those emotions.  But what will his Dark Passenger think of all this?

Author Jeff Lindsay

The plot of Dexter Is Delicious is a bit farfetched, but that is unlikely to bother Dexter-regulars because this is nothing new.  From the point-of-view of someone who came to Dexter first via television, what did bug me was the limited, or even nonexistent roles played by some of Dexter’s fellow television cops.  Too, I kept  wondering how a blood-splatter expert could get away with running all over the Miami area for so long doing physical police work and only occasionally going in to the blood lab. 

The audio book version of Dexter Is Delicious, a nine-CD set, is read by its author, Jeff Lindsay, who does a good job giving voice to Dexter and Dexter’s sense of humor.  I was a little slow settling into Lindsay’s narrative style but by the second CD it all started to sound very natural, and in character, to me.  Anyone just willing to go with the flow of the story is going to have fun with this one.

Rated at: 3.5

>My Name Is Mary Sutter

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Before it was over, the War Between the States would claim several hundred thousand lives. Sadly, a good many of those lives were given up by men who never saw a battlefield or by those who succumbed to secondary infections spread to them by the very doctors and nurses whose job it was to save their lives. Volunteers, especially at the start of the war, were thrown together in crowded camps within which little regard was given to sanitation. Young men from rural areas were suddenly victim to numerous infectious diseases to which they had never been exposed. Those from the city, not as likely to fall to the more common diseases, were still easy prey to the dysentery that ravaged the tent cities.

The war offered a unique opportunity to someone like Mary Sutter, the heroine of Robin Oliveira’s Civil War novel, My Name Is Mary Sutter. Already an accomplished midwife in her native Albany, New York, Mary desires more. With all her heart, she wants to become a surgeon. The local medical school, however, refuses even to consider the possibility of admitting a female and none of the doctors in the area will agree to teach her what he knows. When Mary hears that Dorothea Dix has convinced President Lincoln to allow her to recruit female nurses, she heads to Washington to offer her services to Dix – only to find out that she is too young to qualify.

But no one would accuse Mary Sutter of being a quitter. If Dix will not accept her as a nurse, she will find someone who will. A chance meeting with John Hay, one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries, ultimately leads Mary to the Union Hotel Hospital and the job of assisting the hospital’s chief surgeon, William Stipp. Stipp needs Mary’s help as badly as she needs him to teach her, so the two form a partnership each of them will barely survive. Mary is shocked by what she sees: the hospital is short on supplies and long on patients, Dr. Stipp seems to be learning as he goes, and many of the wounded survive horrific amputation surgery in good shape only to die within days anyway.

My Name Is Mary Sutter is Civil War history as seen primarily through the eyes of the doctors and nurses who struggled, so often in vain, to save the lives of the wounded and sick soldiers placed in their care. Robin Oliveira vividly portrays the medical knowledge and limitations of the day, be it through her detailed descriptions of amputations or those of the potential terrors associated with childbirth of the period. She also reminds her readers of the great number of lives lost so needlessly to secondary infection, a medical problem that would not be solved until after the war.

All of this is tied together by the intriguing story of the Sutter family itself and how the war all but destroyed it. Some readers, I suspect, will find some aspects of the family story to be a little too strongly of the sort found in romance novels; others will find this to be the best part of the book. My Name Is Mary Sutter will appeal to a variety of readers.

Rated at: 3.5

>Innocent

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Does it seem a long time ago that Presumed Innocent (the hit novel and smash movie) transformed author Scott Turow into a household name?  If so, there is a good reason for that; it was a long time ago.  The novel was first published in December 1987 and the movie version starring Harrison Ford was released in 1990.  Now, let’s call it 22 years later, Turow is back with a sequel that tells what Rusty Sabich has been up to since he was acquitted on murder charges all those years ago.

When last seen, Rusty Sabich had just been acquitted of the murder of his mistress, a fellow attorney, and had made the decision, for the sake of his young son, to try to keep his marriage intact.  The evidence against Sabich was strong, almost overwhelming, but he was acquitted, in part because Prosecutor Tommy Molto was humiliated into admitting that his office had mishandled some of the physical evidence against Sabich. 

It has happened again.  Another woman close to Rusty Sabich is dead, and he is suspected by Tommy Molto of having caused her death.  Barbara, Sabich’s wife of 36 years, is found dead in her bed but Sabich does not bother to report her death to anyone, including her son, for some 24 hours.  Barbara’s death is at first attributed to natural causes, odd though Sabich’s behavior may have been.  Molto’s chief deputy, however, is not so sure about the cause of death, and piece by little piece, he methodically builds a case against Sabich that will end with Sabich and his old adversary, Tommy Molto, locked in a rematch.

 On the surface, it does not look good for Rusty Sabich – and that is his own fault.  There is evidence of a recent affair that he refuses to discuss, his marriage has been shaky for years, and it becomes obvious that he has been seeking a way out of it.  Turow uses alternating first-person narratives to tell the story with some chapters told through the eyes of Rusty, some through the eyes of Tommy, and others through the eyes of Nat (Rusty’s son) or Anna (Rusty’s recent lover).  As in the first novel, Turow shows the good and bad sides of all the main characters, allowing the reader to judge the rightness or wrongness of what each of them does.  The trial itself is a cliffhanger that offers the reader several opportunities to change his mind about Sabich’s guilt or innocence, and who committed the crime (if there was one) if Sabich is innocent.

The audio version of the book is read by Edward Herrmann and Orlagh Casssidy (who handles mostly the chapters narrated by the Anna Vostic character).  Herrmann does a particularly fine job with all the male characters but I had a difficult time matching Cassidy’s voice to my mental image of the youngish mistress, Anna Vostic.  That distraction was a minor issue, however, and I found that using separate readers based on the sex of the character narrating each chapter was a great help in keeping all the details straight.

Innocent will likely appeal most to those who have fond memories of Presumed Innocent, but potential readers should not be concerned if they are unfamiliar with that book.  Turow brings enough information from the first book into this one, by having the prosecutors rehash the first case in preparation of the new one, that Innocent works very well as a standalone novel.

That one or two of the novel’s plot elements do not seem quite logical to me, causes me to rate this one at a 4.5 rather than at 5.0, but I did thoroughly enjoy it over the number of days I listened to it on my daily commute.

Rated at: 4.5

>North River

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For a book that includes so much actual, not to mention potential violence, Pete Hamill’s North River is at its heart a very gentle novel. 

 Dr. James Delaney, a WWI medic who was himself wounded in the war, is having a tough time of it in 1934 Greenwich Village.  Delaney’s neighborhood patients are suffering the effects of the Depression and cash money to pay for Delaney’s services is hard to come by.  Despite the fact that his wife, Molly, who suffers from depression, has walked out of his life and has not been heard from since, Delaney keeps her room as she left it in hopes that she will walk back into his world one day.

His day-to-day routine, bleak as it is, is rocked one day when Delaney returns home to find that his daughter Grace has abandoned her two-year-old son at his doorstep.  At first, Delaney is filled with anger that Grace would do such a thing.  Later, he will realize that little Carlito and Rose, the woman he hired to help him care for the little boy, are two of the best things that ever happened to him.

Delaney’s life grows complicated when he is called upon to save the life of Eddie Corso, a local mobster who has been gunned down by a rival gang.  Delaney and Corso have a history going back to the first time Delaney saved Corso’s life – when Delaney risked German snipers to get to the severely wounded Corso one horrible day during the war.  The bond the two men formed that day is as strong as ever.  Unfortunately for Delaney and his grandson, rival gangster Frankie Botts is convinced that Delaney knows where the recuperating Corso is hiding, and Botts is willing to do anything to get that information, even if it involves the boy.

But now comes the gentle (and best) part of the story.  North River is really a very well written love story that encompasses the love of a man for his lost wife, his estranged daughter, his grandson, and soon enough for Rose, the Italian illegal emigrant who has moved so seamlessly into his life.  Before long, little Carlito, who spent his first two years living in Mexico, is speaking Spanish, English, and even a good bit of Italian as he charms everyone in the Delaney household.  Carlito’s world is one of constant discovery, and before long the adults around him cannot but help see the world through his new eyes, too.

North River gives the reader a remarkable feel for life in one New York City neighborhood during the Depression.  Hamill’s sense of what everyday life was like for those who lived within a few blocks of the Village during the thirties is a key element of his story.  This is a combination of superb historical fiction, crime fiction and romance and, as such, it will certainly appeal to a variety of readers.  Don’t miss this one.

Rated at: 5.0

>Bury Your Dead

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Bury Your Dead is book number six in Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series but, as has so often been the case for me, I am arriving late to the party.  This audio book is my first experience with Louise Penny and the Chief Inspector.  However, if Bury Your Dead is any indication as to the quality of the five earlier books, I have some great reading ahead of me because now I plan to catch myself up on the entire series.

There are several unrelated plotlines in Bury Your Dead and Louise Penny juggles them like a champion, maintaining the reader’s keen interest in each of them as they slowly reach their separate climaxes.  In addition, and an aspect of the book that particularly appealed to me, there is a very painless history lesson at the heart of the murder with which Armand Gamache is most directly connected.  

Gamache is resting in Quebec City following an investigation that went horribly wrong some six months earlier, leaving him so severely wounded that he was lucky to have survived.  He spends his time researching the old English language books in the city’s Literary and Historical Society building, particularly those referring to the fateful 1759 battle between British and French troops (Battle of the Plains of Abraham) that would ultimately result in France losing her claim on eastern North America to the British for good.  Although the battle occurred more than two centuries ago, there is still a lingering animosity between the majority French-speaking citizens of Quebec and the minority English-speaking portion of the population.  Gamache senses that this mistrust and animosity may have played a key role in the murder he is trying to solve.

Augustin Renauld, one of Quebec’s francophone citizens, is on a mission to discover the location of the missing remains of Samuel de Champlain, Quebec’s founding father.  That Renauld’s body is discovered inside the anglophone Literary and Historical Society library creates a politically sensitive atmosphere that complicates the investigation of his murder.  Gamache, a francophone himself, realizes this and investigates Renauld’s murder with current day politics always in mind.

At the same time, Gamache has asked that Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir do his own recuperating in the little town of Three Pines so that he can unofficially reopen a murder case that happened there (featured in book five of the series) because Gamache is uneasy about whether the right man has been convicted of the murder.  (This part of Bury Your Dead does make me wish I had read book five before this one.)

That Penny is able to keep the two investigations separate in her readers’ minds while reminding them of the connection between Gamache, Beauvoir, the convicted Three Pines murderer and many of the citizens of Three Pines, is a difficult enough task.  That she manages, at the same time, to intertwine the details of the case that only six months earlier almost killed both Gamache and Beauvoir is even more remarkable.

Fans of character-driven mysteries will love Bury Your Dead.  The murders are not complicated or unusual, but the amount of time spent developing the book’s main characters is.  Even the bit players in the story seem to be real people.  This one had everything I enjoy most in a mystery, not the least being an emphasis on atmosphere, backstory, characters, and a history lesson.

The audio version of Bury Your Dead, excellently read by Ralph Cosham, is ten CDs and thirteen hours long.  Despite the complicated structure of the book, the audio version is easy to follow once the numerous French names have been assimilated by the non-francophone “reader.”

Rated at: 5.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

>The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

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I did not pay much attention to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle when it was released in 2008.  I knew it was a “dog story” and, frankly, novels about dogs or cats do not have much appeal to me.  So I did little more than thumb through the book once when I saw it on the shelf of my local bookstore.

Then, in December 2009, I attended the Texas Book Festival in Austin and sat in on a an interview session with the book’s author, David Wroblewski, during which the author discussed, among other topics, how he came to write the book.  The discussion was interesting – but not nearly as interesting as the reaction Mr. Wroblewski’s presence drew from the bulk of those in attendance that day.  The man was treated like a superstar author, and the questioners seemed to know the book by heart.

I was so impressed that I purchased a first edition copy of the book and had Wroblewski sign it for me.  Then I put it on the shelf at home for another year, finally “reading” an audio version of the book just this month. 

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle turns out to be quite a story (those familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet might recognize early on where it is headed) and my usual aversion to “dog stories” did not surface.  In fact, I particularly enjoyed those portions of the narrative told from the viewpoint of Almondine, the beloved Sawtelle dog that was Edgar’s protector from the day he was brought home from the hospital. 

This is the story of the Sawtelle family: Gar, Trudy, and their mute son, Edgar.  The Sawtelles have been breeding and training very special dogs for several decades and the dogs have become so special that they are known now simply as “Sawtelle dogs.”  However, despite the quality of the animals they produce, the Sawtelles are just barely surviving financially.  That their local veterinarian owns a share in the business, and does not charge for his services, is what allows them to continue at all.

David Wroblewski at Texas Book Festival Oct. 2009

But the Sawtelles are working at something they love, and 14-year-old Edgar is preparing himself to carry the business forward at least one more generation.  Then Gar’s brother, Claude, fresh from prison, comes home and things begin to change – for the worse, and in a way and to a degree that will surprise most readers right to the very end of the book.

I admire David Wroblewski’s courage to end the book the way he did, knowing that many readers will be very disappointed in that ending.  That ending, though, is a very logical one considering all that led up to it and the makeup of the book’s central characters. 

The audio version of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is exceptionally well read, with narrator Richard Poe striking the perfect tone and cadence for the various characters for whom he reads.  It was a pleasure listening to Mr. Poe and, because of the half point I am adding for his narration, I am rating this one a solid four. 

Rated at: 4.0

>Two of the Deadliest

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Two of the Deadliest is a collection of 23 short stories specifically centered on “two of the deadliest” of the seven deadly sins: lust and greed.  Of the stories, 18 are written by women already established in the genre and 5 by female newcomers.  As in most short story collections, there are hits and misses in this volume, but the newcomers do score with what is perhaps the best story of them all, Z. Kelley’s “Anything Helps.”  And, surprisingly, one of the weaker stories in the collection comes from the book’s editor, Elizabeth George.

Many of the stories are set in contemporary, big city America, but there are also side trips to France (in the 1920s), rural California (in 1916), rural Texas (in the 1930s) and contemporary Ireland.  The narrators of Two of the Deadliest’s audio version were well chosen and, with an exception or two, were nicely matched to the stories they read.  I did, however, find both the tone  of the story titled “Enough to Stay the Winter” (by Gillian Linscott) and that of its reader to be particularly dull.  I still cannot decide whether I should blame that more on the story or the reader.

Of the book’s 23 stories, I most enjoyed “Everything Helps” by one of the newcomers, Z. Kelley.  Despite its violence, this is a rather endearing story about a single mother so desperate for the money she needs to pay for her son’s urgent surgery that she takes a cashier job in a Las Vegas storefront that combines slot machines and sales of pornographic material from a back room.  The woman befriends a homeless man who panhandles on the street outside the storefront and surprises herself by how much she looks forward to seeing him each day.  This story is solid all the way through, and its ending is a memorable one. Kelley is a good storyteller and she has filled her story with remarkable characters: the two Arab brothers who run the little casino, the cashier’s mother and son, her co-worker, and the homeless man who gives her the courage to go on with life.  

I also particularly enjoyed Wendy Hornsby’s alternate history version of Jack London’s death, “The Violinist.”  This one, set in 1916 during London’s last days, speculates about the people who surrounded London at the end of his life and whether or not one of them might have had a personal reason for wanting to see him dead.  Was it suicide or murder?  Hornsby builds a good case for the latter while introducing the reader to some of the people and problems London was dealing with at the end of his life.

The beauty of a large collection of stories like this one is the likelihood that there will be stories in it to please any reader.  Whether or not different readers will agree about which are the best stories is a whole other question, and that is another part of the fun.  Frankly, I could take or leave most of the stories in the book because they struck me as pretty average.  Of the 23, I would say that about half a dozen are outstanding, ten are average, and the rest are not very good.  I will leave it up to future readers to decide for themselves which are which.

I do have one final thought, however, concerning Elizabeth George’s contribution to the book, “Lusting for Jenny.”  The story is passable all the way up to the ending George chose for it.  As the story progressed (no spoilers here), I could see the possibility of a clichéd ending ahead, but I hoped that it would not be chosen by George.  Unfortunately, that is exactly what she used – and it is that ill chosen ending that will first come to mind any time I think about Two of the Deadliest.

Rated at: 3.0

>Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

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Steve Martin’s style of standup comedy has always been somewhat of an acquired taste. One eventually got it, or one did not, and I admit that I was one of those who did not. I figured out quickly enough what Martin was trying to do; that was not the issue. It was simply that his style of standup silliness more bored than entertained me. His stage act had a limited shelf life for most people, meaning that its popularity would peak and begin to decline relatively quickly – something that Martin, in fact, addresses directly in Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

Hearing Martin explain in great detail how he came up with his material, and how difficult it was for him to write enough of it to fill even a twenty-minute performance, did not make the gags any funnier to me. Born Standing Up did, however, make me better appreciate Martin’s comic vision and how hard he worked to find his eventual success. Steve Martin beat the odds to become one of the funniest men in Hollywood and this memoir, beginning with his childhood and ending at the point he gave up standup for good for a movie career, tells exactly how he did that.

Steve Martin was born in Texas but moved to California when his aspiring-actor father moved the family there. Just a few years later, Disneyland would open within two miles of the Martin home and ten-year-old Steve would become one of Mr. Disney’s earliest employees. He would spend several years working in the theme park, most importantly in the magic shop where he developed his love for magic and the magic act he would eventually use to break into “show business.”

In Born Standing Up, Steve Martin takes a serious look at how he became the Hollywood star he is today. He details the dysfunctional relationship he had with his father, his days as a semi-professional magician, his experiences as a young television comedy writer, his move to standup, his relationship with Saturday Night Live, and finally, his transition into movies. Along the way, he reminisces about old friends, including high school buddies who founded the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and some of the women he was involved with during those years – including his chaste and short-lived pursuit of Linda Ronstadt.

Martin reads the audio version of Born Standing Up himself, but his reading is surprisingly dispassionate and dry at times. He also provides several short banjo interludes as breaks between distinct sections of the book. This one will appeal especially to Steve Martin fans and “nuts and bolts” comedy fans interested in how Martin’s material developed over the years.

Rated at: 3.0

>S Is for Silence

>The lifeblood of any small company is the new business brought in by referrals from friends and former customers. Kinsey Millhone runs a one-woman detective agency and, although she is doing well enough with it, she is always hesitant to reject any potential clients that come her way. Still, after a friend asks her to meet with Daisy, a young woman whose mother disappeared 34 years earlier (in 1953), Kinsey only reluctantly agrees to take on a case gone so cold that it is unlikely ever to be solved.

That Violet Sullivan was Serena Station’s town slut is no secret. The stunningly beautiful redhead may have been married, with a seven-year-old daughter, but she still moved steadily from one affair to the next despite the grief it caused her husband. Men found Violet hard to resist; their wives despised her. And then one evening, she blew her daughter a kiss, waved goodbye to the babysitter, and disappeared in the flashiest car in Serena Station, a brand new 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air. She would never be seen again.

Kinsey does not expect her investigation to get far but, when one morning she finds all four tires on her VW Beetle slashed, she knows that she is making someone very nervous. Violet’s disappearance is complicated by the rumor that she left town with $50,000 in cash, and the fact that every man Kinsey interviews seems to have had a reason to want her dead. Kinsey will find that having an abundance of suspects is not a good thing.

S Is for Silence focuses almost entirely on the cold case Kinsey Millhone has been hired to investigate, even to such an extent that the book’s lack of attention to Kinsey’s personal life might disappoint some longtime fans of the series. Grafton alternates chapters flashing back to 1953 with chapters showing Kinsey stirring up things with the same characters in present day 1987, giving readers the opportunity to observe both eras in real time (in typical “cold case” fashion).

Despite being atypical of Grafton’s alphabet series, S Is for Silence is cleverly constructed up to the moment its disappointingly farfetched ending is exposed. The book’s climactic scene is so dependent on coincidence that much of its tension is lost because the reader is unlikely to be able to take the scene completely seriously. This, added to the way that so many of the investigation’s turning points are entirely dependent on Kinsey’s sudden intuition, and not on what she actually discovers about Violet’s disappearance, results in a less than satisfying mystery.

As usual, reader Judy Kaye does a magnificent job in presenting the words of Sue Grafton in the audio version of the book. Hers is the perfect Kinsey Millhone voice.

Rated at: 3.0

>Identical Strangers

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That Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein had been adopted as infants was a given.  Both were thankful to have been raised by loving adoptive parents and, at age 35, each had carved out a nice life of her own.  Paula, a freelance writer, lived with her husband and young daughter in New York City, and Elyse, a film director, considered Paris to be her home.  What neither woman knew was that they are identical twins who had been adopted out, when they were just a few months old, to separate families.

All that would change on the day Elyse contacted adoption agency Louise Wise Services to request information about her birth mother.  In addition to the minimal details about her mother’s background the agency was willing to share with her, Elyse was told that she had an identical twin sister.  And the search for her twin sister, which turned out to be surprisingly easy, was on.  Sooner than Elyse dared imagine, the two were sitting across from each in a New York restaurant on what, for both women, had the feel of a “first date.”  

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited focuses on the women’s sometimes reluctant search for their birth mother, whom they learn was an exceptionally bright young Jewish woman who suffered severe schizophrenia at the time of their birth.  They also learn that locating their birth father will be impossible because when they were born their mother was unable to name him.  But despite being fearful of what they might learn about their mother’s mental illness, both sisters already having suffered varying degrees of depression, they are determined to identify her.

Identical Strangers, however, is about much more than the search for a birth mother – that particular book has been written often enough already.  Elyse and Paula, in alternating first-person chapters, instead offer a frank account of what it is like for each of them to suddenly face the identical twin neither ever suspected of existing.  One sister is enthusiastic about their reunion and future together but the other sometimes finds herself wishing she could have her old life back, the one into which she did not suddenly have to figure out how to squeeze in a new sister.  The two will exchange frank and blunt comments, and often have their feelings hurt, as they struggle to come to terms with their new relationship. Ultimately binding the sisters together, however, is their shared determination to learn why they were separated by the adoption agency instead of being offered to a family able to keep them together.  Only after many months of determined effort, do they finally learn the shocking truth about Louise Wise Services and the decision that forever changed their lives – along with the lives of the other twins (and one set of triplets) separated by the agency for the same reason.

Along the way, one learns much about the scientific differences between identical twins, fraternal twins and other siblings as the age old question of “nature vs. nurture” is explored.  Also included are numerous stories about the often amazing similarities shared by other twins and triplets who only found each other as adults.  Identical Strangers is another of those instances that remind us that real life can be as fascinating as the best fiction.

Rated at: 4.0

>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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To start, I have to admit that the judgment I made of what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies  would be like prior to reading it was totally wrong. The whole concept of morphing a Jane Austen novel into a blood-soaked zombie farce seemed silly and beyond merit. I was certain that it would be a complete waste of time for any reader over the age of 15. I was wrong, but let me qualify that. I experienced Pride and Prejudice and Zombies via its audio version  and, largely because of the superb performance of Katherine Kellgren, I thoroughly enjoyed the story, even to the point of laughing out loud several times. On the one hand, I still doubt that reading a printed version of the book would even come close to matching the fun of the audio book. On the other, I can honestly say that this is my favorite audio book to this point of 2010.

England has been beset by zombies for more than five decades and, in order to protect his family, a man like Mr. Bennett does what he has to do. Bennett, a man with five daughters but not a single son, makes the most of having numbers in his favor by sending the girls to China for training in the “deadly arts.” Upon their return, the ladies become Hertfordshire’s primary defenders against the “unmentionables” that plague the countryside.

But despite the great joy the girls take in personally disposing of hundreds of zombies, they and their mother believe that their lives cannot be considered complete unless they make a good match as early into their twenties as possible (if not at an even younger age). Mrs. Bennett’s sole purpose in life seems to be placing her daughters into situations from which they can attract the most suitable young men in the region. So, while the daughters are busily chopping off heads and limbs, pulling still beating hearts from the bodies of sparring ninjas, and setting zombies afire, Mrs. Bennett eagerly welcomes young bachelors into her home in hopes of snaring a new son-in-law or two for the family.

Admirers of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will already be familiar with the Bennett family, Mr. Darcy, Mr. Collins, Charlotte, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, among others. Now, Seth Grahame-Smith tells the rest of their story. And what a story, it is.

Katherine Kellgren’s presentation of the novel mimics the style of whichever author’s work she is reading. When she reads the words of Jane Austen, characters speak in a voice and tone that will be very familiar to fans of movies made from the Austen novels. The words of Grahame-Smith require an added edge and vigor but Kellgren presents them in a way that sounds perfectly natural to Miss Jane’s version of the girls. Throw in Elizabeth’s wholehearted adoption of the warrior code and its requirement that one’s honor must be defended at all cost, and the new Elizabeth Bennett is, if different, more fun than ever. Call me weird, but the idea of Elizabeth Bennett yanking the heart from an opposing warrior’s chest and eating it during a tea party makes me laugh.

This audio book is great fun, and readers curious about this kind of genre mash-up will do well to start here. Whether or not they will feel compelled to venture further into the field is an open question. I do not; others might want more.

>Careless in Red

>Careless in Red opens with the still-grieving Thomas Lynley making his way along the coast of Cornwall on foot. Lynley has been walking so long, in fact, that he could more easily pass for a vagrant or homeless person than he could for the highly respected Detective Superintendent of New Scotland Yard he used to be. Since Lynley wants no part of New Scotland Yard, or anything else regarding his former life, he prefers it that way. But, as luck would have it, he stumbles upon the body of a teenage boy who has apparently fallen from the cliff below which Lynley is walking. When it becomes clear that this is a case of murder, rather than accident, Lynley will find himself one of the early suspects in the investigation.

Detective Inspector Bea Hannaford has a murder to solve but she does not feel that she has been given the proper tools to solve the case. The local policemen assigned to help her on the case do not impress her at all, so she is determined to make the most of having a former star of New Scotland Yard on the case. Hannaford refuses to let Lynley leave the area and convinces him that, since he is there anyway, he may as well give her some help. Hannaford, though, gets more than she bargained by forcibly recruiting Thomas Lynley into the investigation and she soon realizes that he will, indeed, help investigate the murder – but only on his own terms.

Elizabeth George writes big books and this is another whopper, coming in at 623 pages. It is filled with complex side plots and back stories involving a wide array of characters all the way from a grandfather trying to raise his overly religious granddaughter to a Greek expatriate sleeping her way through Cornwall’s men (married or not, young or old) at an astonishing pace. Some of the side plots and much of the back story involve the murdered boy, Santo Kerne, a young man who had more than his share of enemies for someone so young. While some might see the multiple characters and stories as a distraction, fans of George will revel in the way she gets so deeply into the lives of such different people and will be impressed with the way she tidies everything up by the book’s end.

Longtime fans of the series are, however, likely to be somewhat disappointed that Thomas Lynley is little more than a side character in Careless in Red or that Barbara Havers does not even appear in the story until about its mid-point. Havers, though, is Havers and when she does show up, Lynley’s character seems to change for the better and the whole pace of the book seems to sharpen.

Note that the unabridged audio book version of Careless in Red is some 18 CDs in length and that total listening time is something close to 20 hours in total. This is quite a challenge unless one has an extremely long commute or, as I did, brings the book along on a road trip. Narrator John Lee, who does an excellent job on the recording, is consistent throughout and does a remarkable job on a variety of British accents.

Fans of the series will appreciate this one; newcomers, perhaps not as much. The good news is that Thomas Lynley is recovering from the tragedy he suffered in With No One as Witness and that he should be more his old self in the next book in the series.

Rated at: 4.0

>The Poacher’s Son

> This is a review of the 7-CD audio book version of The Poacher’s Son, as read by John Bedford Lloyd.

Maine game warden Mike Bowditch is not in a happy place. He believes that his girlfriend of four years left him because he refuses to resign his game warden position. Now that she is gone, all Mike has left are the solitary hours he spends watching for poachers and helping injured animals in his section of the Maine woods. Mike made his choice and is willing to live with it.

Things are bad now – but they will get much worse when he discovers a phone message from his hard drinking poacher father, the man who deserted Mike and his mother when Mike was just a boy. A phone call to his son is so out of character for Jack Bowditch that his son senses that something is terribly wrong. But even knowing what a disaster his father’s life has turned into, Mike Bowditch cannot imagine that he will soon be the only thing standing between his father and the lawmen who accuse him of assassinating a policeman and a paper company executive. Mike refuses to believe that his father is capable of murder and his biggest fear is that, before he can safely surrender, his father will be gunned down by the lawmen searching Maine and southern Canada for him.

The Poacher’s Son explores the strengths and weaknesses of the father-son relationship, a bond that is often strong enough to blind a son to his father’s weaknesses, and worse. Mike Bowditch convinces himself that, despite everything he knows about his father’s despicable behavior and his drinking problems, the man would never do what he is accused of having done. He so much wants to bring his father safely into custody that he is willing to put his own job on the line by interfering in the manhunt despite direct orders from his lieutenant to stay clear of the whole thing. But is his father as innocent as Mike believes him to be? Or, as the authorities believe, is he a killer willing to use his son to cover his tracks until he can escape his pursuers?

The isolated woods of Maine make an excellent setting for Paul Doiron’s story and he gives the reader a good feel for what life in that part of the country must be like. As Doiron describes it, the locale is a mixture of awesome beauty and isolation, a place the locals fear will be spoiled by the outsiders seeking to exploit its resources for their own purposes. Those woods provide Jack Bowditch with the cover he needs to stay on the run and the isolation they create makes possible many of the twists in Doiron’s plot.

Mike Bowditch is a young man, a likeable enough hero who knows his way around the Maine wilderness but is still a little too naïve and inexperienced for his own good. His temper, combined with his inability to control his mouth when he is angry, sees him consistently making things rougher for himself than they have to be. Some of the book’s other characters tend to err on the stereotypical side of the scale, however. This is the case with Truman (the drunken Indian), the retired game warden (and his devoted wife) who takes Mike under his wing when every other lawman within 500 miles would prefer to chew his head off, and B.J., the brash young woman/slut who grew up in an isolated fishing camp known as Rum Pond.

Perhaps these characters seem stereotypical because of the stoic way that John Bedford Lloyd reads the author’s characterizations. For most of the book, Lloyd uses the same steady monotone to present the book, only occasionally changing his voice or inflection to add a little life to one of the characters. Unfortunately, it is only toward the end of the book that Lloyd seems to gain any enthusiasm about the story he is telling, when he does a nice job on the book’s climax.

Despite my misgivings about The Poacher’s Son, Paul Doiron has made me curious enough to wonder how the Mike Bowditch character will evolve over time. I will very likely look at the next book in the series to see how he’s doing.

Rated at: 3.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

>The Year of Magical Thinking

> “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” That is precisely what happened to author Joan Didion. While this would make a memorable opening line for a novel, it is actually a sentence from the very beginning of Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of what she experienced during the immediate year following the sudden loss, on December 30, 2003, of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne.

Didion’s world was already in turmoil when she and her husband sat down to dinner that night. A short time earlier, they had been sitting at the bedside of their only daughter, Quintana, where she lay unconscious, suffering from a combination of septic shock and pneumonia. Fearful that their daughter might not survive what had begun as a relatively benign health problem, the couple returned that fateful evening for a quiet dinner alone. Then it happened. Suddenly, while in the midst of preparing their dinner, Didion sensed that something was terribly wrong with her husband. When Dunne did not respond to her efforts to revive him, she called for help – but it was too late. Her partner of 40 years had been snatched from her forever.

What follows is Joan Didion’s recollection of how she reacted to her husband’s death over the next twelve months – while still having to cope with the increasing likelihood that her daughter might also be taken from her. Before the experience of losing a spouse or child, it is impossible for one to predict how she will react to a loss of that magnitude. Didion, an experienced researcher, turned to the literature of grieving so that she would better know what she should expect to experience in the first year without her husband. She might have been a bit surprised that her grieving so closely followed the pattern she read about in most medical books, memoirs, self-help books, and novels. But what most surprised her was that, at times, she was literally crazy, though she prefers to call her crazy behavior` “magical thinking.” She expected to be “crazy with grief” but not to exhibit the kind of bizarre behavior that characterized her behavior in 2004.

The Year of Magical Thinking is one woman’s account of what it was like to be wrenched from her husband and writing partner of forty years. Dunne and Didion worked so closely together that she feared that she might never be able to write again, having lost the best editor and literary confidant she ever had. It might be one woman’s story, but there is much here for those having experienced similar losses and for those who sense that such losses are approaching. It is a frank and honest description, if a bit rambling at times, and even a bit repetitive – two qualities that likely mimic Didion’s 2004 state-of-mind.

The four-disc audio version of The Year of Magical Thinking is read by stage actress Barbara Caruso. Caruso so perfectly captures the tone of voice in which the book is written that I often had to remind myself that I was not being read to by Joan Didion, herself.

This is not an easy book to read, nor is it one that will please everyone who has experienced this level of grief. It should, however, be considered as a touchstone for those seeking insight into the grieving process.

Rated at: 4.0

>Drood

> Drood is more than a book; it is an experience, a total immersion into Victorian England and the personal lives of two of the most famous authors of the day: Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Either way the reader chooses to experience this Dan Simmons book, by reading it or by listening to the audio book version, requires a major commitment of time and effort. The book itself is almost 800 pages long and the audio version of 24 CDs requires just under 30 hours of listening time. The audio book, read by Simon Prebble, is the route I chose to follow.

Drood begins with the June 1865 train wreck in which Dickens, his mistress and her mother barely escape with their lives. Amidst the mutilated, dead and dying passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish character called Drood; a man Dickens comes to believe is actually taking the lives of injured passengers rather than trying to save them. Dickens becomes obsessed with the idea of Drood and he recruits his close friend, Wilkie Collins, to help him track down the ghostlike man. Dickens, Collins, and various detectives and bodyguards will spend the next several months trying to catch up with the mysterious Drood, a man Dickens is told is responsible for more than 300 London murders. The chase will lead Dickens and Collins into London’s “Undertown,” a cavern-like part of the city, complete with its own underground river system, inhabited largely by criminal gangs, opium dealers and addicts, and London’s thousands of orphaned street children. Things become uncomfortable for the two authors when Drood takes an interest in them and begins to manipulate the pair in unexplainable ways.

There is much more to Drood, however, than the search for a man Dickens believes to be the most successful serial-killer in England’s history. This is the story of two men, both highly successful authors of their day, and their supposed friendship. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were friends and collaborators for a number of years and the working relationship seems to have served both men well. Simmons, though, chooses the voice of Wilkie Collins to narrate Drood and what Collins has to say about Dickens opens the reader to a whole different possibility about their relationship.

As portrayed here, Wilkie Collins is not a happy man, especially when it comes to comparing his literary status to that of the only man he considers a rival, Charles Dickens. In truth, Collins despises Dickens and cannot believe that the supremacy of his work over that of Dickens is not universally recognized. After all, he has written a masterpiece in The Woman in White and has even created a new genre, that of the detective novel, with The Moonstone. But Dickens is still the literary king of his day – and Charles Dickens is not above reminding Collins of that fact at every opportunity, even if he has to create those opportunities himself.

As Collins struggles to surpass the reputation of Dickens, or at least to equal it, his use of opium increases to such a degree that he begins to lose touch with reality. Collins begins to suspect Dickens of murder (as research for a future novel) and has opium-induced dreams of his own in which he murders Dickens and hides his remains so that “the Inimitable” can never be buried in Westminster Abbey. Opium plays such a large role in Drood – and in Collins’s perception of reality – that the reader will often wonder what is real and what is not. Does Drood really exist or is Dickens making his old friend the victim of a sadistic practical joke? One has to decide for himself but, in the end, it does not really matter because this book is really about the clash of two massive egos and the drug culture of the day. The mysterious Drood is just the hook on which Simmons hangs this clever character-study.

Dan Simmons has written a wonderfully atmospheric, character-driven thriller that is almost certain to appeal to lovers of British literature. The audio book reader, Simon Prebble, does a remarkable job in making Dickens, Collins, and a cast of assorted characters come to life. He does such a good job of providing distinct accents and speech patterns for the main characters that they are soon recognizable by the “sounds of their voices,” a feat few audio book readers even come close to achieving.

Rated at: 4.0

>Bangkok 8

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Bangkok 8 is the first of John Burdett’s Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep novels, a series that with 2010’s The Godfather of Kathmandu, now numbers four titles. Sonchai, the product of a union between an American Vietnam War soldier and a Thai bargirl, brings exceptional talents to his work. He speaks perfect English and has such a good understanding of Western culture that he makes the perfect front man for his department when it comes to dealing with crimes involving Westerners. And a doozy of a case has just been dumped in his lap.

An American Marine sergeant has been killed in a bizarre plot involving a multitude of snakes hopped up on methamphetamine and a huge python that comes close to swallowing the victim’s head. When Sonchai’s partner, a fellow Buddhist whom he considers to be his true soul mate, is killed during the initial investigation of the crime, Sonchai swears to personally avenge his friend’s death. John Burdett’s surrealistic version of 21^st century Bangkok, though, is not that simple.

Sonchai’s investigation leads him deeply inside the city’s booming sex trade, a world in which Western men of all ages and means flock to Bangkok by the thousands to purchase the sexual expertise of young Thai women (many of whom, sadly, are mere children). The American FBI, as a matter of course, is involved in the investigation but things begin to get complicated when a famous American millionaire is implicated in the murder along with a mysterious Thai giantess who is much more complicated than she first appears.

Bangkok 8 presents the city, and Thai culture, in such strange lights that the trust of many readers will be severely tested. But the book’s ending is so bizarre (no other description quite fits this ending) that even readers happy to go along for the ride to that point might find themselves shaking their heads in frustration. This is not so much a “who dunnit” as it is a “why they dunnit” and, while there is much of interest in Bangkok 8, the novel is unlikely to satisfy detective fiction fans who prefer their detectives to work in more realistic settings.

Rated at: 3.0

>T Is for Trespass

>T Is for Trespass is the 20th of 21 Kinsey Millhone novels written by Sue Grafton since 1982 when she published the first of what is to be a 26-book series, one for each letter of the alphabet. The books are coming a little bit farther apart these days but Grafton is on the downhill stretch now with only five books still to go. The Kinsey Millhone books are not written in real time – the last two are set in the late 1980s – and the 26th book (supposedly to be titled Z Is for Zero) will be set in 1990 when Kinsey turns 40 years old. At Grafton’s current pace, readers will have to wait most of another decade to celebrate Kinsey’s fortieth.

Kinsey runs a one-woman shop, a small time detective agency that depends on word-of-mouth, repeat business and walk-ins for its survival. As is usual for her, T Is for Trespass finds her juggling several small cases at once, going from one to another as time and opportunity allow. She is either trying to serve papers on those who do not want them, digging into what seems to be a shady injury claim against the insurance company she regularly does work for, or trying to help a friend evict non-paying residents from his apartment building.

Everything is very routine until her grouchy neighbor suffers a fall bad enough to require home care during what promises to be a long and rather painful recovery. Kinsey manages to talk the man’s niece into flying across the country to make the arrangements and is asked to investigate the credentials of the lone nurse who applies for the job, one Solana Rojas. Solana seems perfect for the job – on paper. But what if she is not really the Solana Rojas?

T Is for Trespass is a reminder that identify theft did not begin when the internet placed everyone’s privacy at risk. In her own low-tech way, this duplicate Solana Rojas has been stealing identities and worming her way into the trust of elderly patients for a long time. Sadly, though, that is not all she has been stealing – and when she has it all, her “patients” might just be asked to pay the ultimate price for her services.

Solana Rojas does not appear to be a threat to someone like Kinsey Millhone, a much younger woman who has had to fight for her life more than once but, when Kinsey starts nosing around the old man’s house to see how he is progressing , Solana’s own street smarts are triggered. Before long, Kinsey is under a restraining order to stay clear of Solana Rojas, her guns are locked up at police headquarters, and Solana is actively looting the old man’s estate. And while Kinsey is kept at bay, the old man is coming closer and closer to the day he draws his final breath.

The 10-disc, 13-hour, T Is for Trespass audio book is read by Judy Kaye, an award-winning stage actress who perfectly captures the Kinsey Millhone spirit that longtime fans of the series know so well. Grafton’s novels are heavy on dialogue and Kaye does particularly well in capturing Kinsey’s sassy sense of irony and self-awareness. During the portions of the book related from Solana’s point-of-view, Kay’s reading gives a haunting sense of that woman’s lack of humanity. The rousing, action-filed climax that ends this cautionary tale will not disappoint Sue Grafton fans.

Rated at: 4.0

>The Soul Thief

>Charles Baxter’s The Soul Thief has left me wondering what I must have missed. Baxter, after all, is a writer with a reputation, and one of his previous eight books, The Feast of Love, was a National Book Award nominee. This is my first Charles Baxter book and, based on reputation and reviews of his previous work, perhaps I expected too much from The Soul Thief. Whatever the reason, the book did not quite work for me.

The book’s central character, Nathaniel Mason, is a 1970s graduate student in Buffalo, New York, a loner who unexpectedly meets a pretty girl while making his way to a rumored party location one rainy night. Little does he know that this girl, Teresa, and the young man to whom she introduces him, Jerome Coolberg, will conspire to steal the rest of his life from him.

Coolberg is so obsessed by Nathaniel that he almost immediately begins to make portions of Nathaniel’s past his own, publicly claiming that the most dramatic events from Nathaniel’s history actually happened to him rather than to Nathaniel. With a little help, Coolberg manages to secure some of Nathaniel’s clothing and other personal items for his own use, pushing Nathaniel to the verge of collapse in the process, and uses the items to remake himself in Nathaniel’s image.

The second half of The Soul Thief happens some two decades later when Coolberg calls the Mason home asking for Nathaniel. Nathaniel, who has never mentioned Coolberg to his wife in all the years they have been married, reluctantly agrees to meet in Los Angeles, hoping for the long overdue confrontation that will provide him answers to all the questions he has carried inside for so many years.

By this point in the book, Baxter has created a level of anticipation and tension that has his reader racing toward what promises to be a dramatic climax. What the reader gets, instead, is a tricky ending that will likely leave him more confused than satisfied and perhaps, as in my case, at least a bit disappointed in the whole experience.

Rated at: 3.5

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>The Painter of Battles

>With The Painter of Battles, Arturo Perez-Reverte, offers a complete change-of-pace from what he usually provides his readers. Rather than another of the action packed thriller/mystery/war stories for which he is so well known, he has written a rather introspective novel that relies on a several-day-long conversation between two men to engage his readers in a story of slowly building suspense and intrigue. Longtime fans of Mr. Perez-Reverte might be surprised and even a bit put off, by the style and plot of The Painter of Battles, but those who stay with the story will be well-rewarded for their efforts.

Falques, an award-winning war photographer, has retired to an isolated tower in which he is painting a huge mural around one of its circular walls. The mural is intended to be both a presentation of everything he witnessed during his career and his understanding of what it is in the human psyche that allows ordinary men to destroy each other with such obvious relish. Falques, who has isolated himself from the community and surrounded himself with art books, is generally satisfied with the quality and progress of his efforts.

Everything changes, however, when Ivo Markovic appears from nowhere one day to announce very confidently that he is there to kill Falques – eventually. Before that happens, though, Markovic wants Falques to understand some things and there are things he wants to learn from Falques. Falques, of course, is at first startled by the intruder and his death threat but, after Markovic identifies himself, his appearance begins to make a certain kind of sense.

Markovic and Falques first crossed paths in one of the many wars Falques spent his lifetime recording when Markovic, in the midst of retreat with a handful of fellow battle survivors, is captured on film by Falques in a picture striking enough to add to the photographer’s fame. Unfortunately for Markovic, the photograph ends up having consequences neither man could have foreseen.

Falques, despite his aversion to sharing his thoughts with others, finds himself in a philosophical discussion of warfare, those who fight wars or take advantage of them, art history, and human nature that evolves over several days. The conversation is one between equals and both are somewhat surprised at what they learn from the other as the ultimate confrontation draws nearer and nearer.

The Painter of Battles is a literary novel that will have readers questioning their own attitudes toward warriors and warfare. It is so well written, in fact, that readers will likely find it difficult to determine which of the two men, if either, is the good guy and which the bad. Perez-Reverte provides a satisfying ending that allows each of us to decide for ourselves.

Rated at: 4.0

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>The Plague of Doves

>The Plague of Doves is the story of little Pluto, North Dakota, an isolated community with a mixed population of reservation Indians and descendants of the whites who founded the town. Louise Erdrich, through the interconnected first person narratives of various characters, builds layer after layer of Pluto’s history. The stories, sometimes told in the present and other times in flashbacks, all steadily add details to Pluto’s defining moment and contribute to the book’s surprise ending.

At the core of Pluto’s history is the horrific slaughter of a farm family just outside town that leaves only one survivor, an infant still in her crib when she is found by four Indians passing through the area. The suffering of the family’s milk cows and the plight of the child touch the group of passing Indians but they instinctively recognize the danger of becoming linked in any way to the murders of a white family. So, after milking the cows and caring for the baby, they use an anonymous note to notify the sheriff of the crime.

As things too often happen, though, their good deed does not go unpunished. Within days, a group of prominent white citizens, despite the sheriff’s efforts to stop them, identifies the formerly anonymous Indians and hangs all four (two men and two boys) from a tree on the outskirts of town. One of the boys, Mooshum Milk, manages to survive the lynching, resume his life in the community, and eventually raise a family of his own.

Mooshum has reached old age and enjoys telling his stories to his grandson and granddaughter. It is when he finally tells them the story of the murders and his near-lynching, complete with the names of those involved on both sides, that Evelina Harp, his granddaughter, begins to realize that life in Pluto is much more complicated than she ever imagined it to be.

Most often through Evelina’s eyes, but with added first-person narratives from several of the book’s key characters, the reader learns what happened in Pluto during the decades following the murders. As the years go by, intermarriage between the vigilante families and Indian families, and the deaths of most of the principles involved, mute the horror of what happened. Generations come and go, each less and less aware of the history shared with neighbors, and bloodlines become so blurred that most of the families descended from both the victims and the perpetrators of the crimes that marred Pluto’s early history hardly realize it.

As each narrator adds another layer to the story, readers will find it impossible to keep up with the various family relationships in The Plague of Doves – and Erdrich does not make it any easier to keep relationships straight by placing one of those elaborate family trees at the front of the book that have become so common. Rather, a fuzzy understanding of family relationships puts the reader on par with most Pluto residents who themselves barely comprehend the ties linking so many of them. That vagueness illustrates how the murders, tragic as they were, could have been absorbed by the townspeople to such a degree that the community thrives for decades despite a crime that should have destroyed it early on.

The Plague of Doves is a big, complicated family saga that is filled with lots of quirky humor despite the tragedy from which the story springs. Fans of Louise Erdrich know exactly what to expect, and this one will not disappoint them.

Rated at: 5.0

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>Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

>Thinking about the recent death of John Mortimer these last few days made me want to revisit grumpy old Horace Rumpole and I chose the audio version Mortimer’s 2004 prequel Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders figuring that it would offer an overview of the whole Rumpole series. It did that – and more.

The Penge Bungalow Murders is the perfect book to be reacquainted with Rumpole, in fact, because it presents the famous barrister at both ends of his illustrious career: as the young Rumpole working his first murder case only eighteen months after having been called to the bar, and as the elderly Rumpole writing his memoirs near the end of his career. Rumpole fans will have heard him boast of his triumph in the Penge Bungalow case in past books and will enjoy finally learning the details of that case and how a barrister as inexperienced as Rumpole came to work it alone.

The details of the case itself are interesting enough but this will not be a terribly difficult case for most readers to solve. Young Simon Jerold stands accused of shooting his World War II hero-father and his father’s friend to death shortly after the elder Jerold ridiculed his son, in front of a small group of war veterans, as not having the courage required to fight a war. Because Simon, in a rage, threatened to kill his father on the spot, he is charged with the murder and appears almost certain to be convicted and to receive the death penalty.

Mortimer uses the murder trial to show that Rumpole has not changed all that much over the decades and to introduce the recurring characters now so familiar to readers of the Rumpole short stories. Some of the best one-liners in the book come from the inner thoughts of Rumpole as he is forced to work with C.H. Wystan, the head of chambers and Rumpole’s future father-in-law, a man more concerned with following polite legal procedure than he is with saving his client’s life.

But the highlight of the book for most longtime Rumpole fans will be in meeting the young Hilda Wystan, the future “she who must be obeyed,” and watching the courtship that occurs. Not too surprisingly, Hilda is the one doing the courting because she sees something in Rumpole that will allow her to “make something of him,” and it is all over before Rumpole realizes that he is all but engaged to be married to young Miss Wystan.

Bill Wallis, the audio book reader, handles a wide variety of British accents with ease and uses his voice to create distinctive personalities for the book’s many characters. His presentation of Hilda makes her into a surprisingly likable character, leading one to understand why Rumpole put up so little resistance to her efforts to snare him – despite what he said in later years.

The world is definitely a poorer place without John Mortimer and new Horace Rumpole stories.

Rated at: 5.0

>Lush Life

>Lush Life is my first audio book of 2009 and I doubt that I will find a better combination of author and reader the rest of the year. Richard Price is a master of dialogue regardless of the class or color of his characters and Bobby Cannavale, the television and movie actor giving life to the characters here, handles them all with ease.

Rather surprisingly, despite the length and heft of Lush Life, its plot centers around a simple armed robbery that goes bad because of two of the people involved, one of them a victim, and the other, one of the robbers. Two people, each totally unprepared for what is happening to them at that moment, are suddenly eyeball-to-eyeball and, to the surprise of both of them, one is shot dead.

Ike Marcus, a young white guy out on the town with two friends, refuses to accept the fact that two black teens expect him to hand over his valuables despite the pistol one of them is aiming at him. After he mutters what would be his last words, “Not tonight, my man,” he is struck by a single bullet and falls to the ground mortally wounded. On the other side of that pistol stands Tristan Acevedo, a young man holding a gun for the first time in his life and who is stunned to realize that he has reflexively pulled its trigger after Ike Marcus foolishly stepped toward him.

Lush Life is not a whodunit. There is never any doubt as to the murderer’s identity or motive. Instead, Price takes a frank look at everyone involved in, or affected by, the crime: the three robbery victims, the two robbers, family and friends of all of them, the police charged with figuring it all out, and the people who live in the neighborhood where it all happens.

The book is largely conversational, perfect for an audio presentation, and the way that Price allows his characters to express themselves makes them seem very real. We get into the heads of those black kids living on the project streets, kids so caught up in the drug culture that they are oblivious to any other possibilities. We suffer along with Ike’s father, an articulate man driven by confusion and despair to hang out near the crime scene in hopes that he will overhear someone bragging about the murder. We admire Matty Clark, a good detective and a decent man, who takes a personal interest in Ike’s family and risks his own career by fighting to keep the investigation as active as possible. We sympathize with Eric Cash, another of the robbery victims, who has his life almost destroyed by what happens to him after the crime. We sneer at the way the robbery’s third victim uses his fifteen minutes of fame to advance his show business career.

Even more amazingly, we come to know dozens of people around the core of main characters, each of them adding bits of color and detail to the world so clearly illustrated in Lush Life. I seldom suggest that readers opt for the audio version of a book over its written one, but I am doing it this time.

Lush Life is a very good book, one you have to hear to really appreciate at its most powerful.

Rated at: 5.0

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>Water for Elephants

>Water for Elephants is another of those novels that I somehow managed to miss reading when it was at its peak of popularity, this time by well over two years. But I’m here to tell you that, in the case of Water for Elephants, it is definitely better late than never.

Even in Depression-era America, Jacob Jankowski is doing pretty well for himself. He is a Cornell-trained veterinarian who only needs to sit for his final exams to make it official. He thinks he is in love but his lack of experience with the ladies means that he is more likely to be in lust than in love. For him, life is still pretty good.

But things change sometimes when one least expects it, and for Jacob change comes in the form of a tragic traffic accident that claims the lives of both his parents. As bad as that is, it gets even worse when he learns that he has also been left destitute because his parents mortgaged everything to pay his Cornell tuition, and Jacob finds that he cannot sit still even long enough to finish his exams. Wanting to get away from it all, he hops the first freight train that comes along, avoids getting thrown back onto the tracks, and soon enough finds himself a member of Benzini Brothers traveling circus.

Sara Gruen lets Jacob tell his own story by alternating the first person narrative of ninety-something-year-old Jacob, now living in a nursing home, with the voice of twenty-three-year-old Jacob as he experiences his summer with the Benzini Brothers. And what a story it is because the Benzini Brothers circus is not exactly The Ringling Brothers show and only circus owner, Uncle Al, tries to pretend that it is. Everything about the Benzini Brothers is second rate: the ragged animals in the zoo’s menagerie are badly treated and lucky to eat once a day, the roustabouts and other workers are not paid consistently, the freaks are usually fakes or not all that freakish in the first place, and the girly show performer has been known to take paying customers after show hours.

Jacob manages to catch on permanently with the show even with his incomplete veterinarian credentials and all goes relatively well until he falls in love with two ladies: Rosie, the elephant who joins the circus after he does, and Marlena, the beautiful young equestrian performer unfortunately married to the sadistic August, a man who beats both Marlena and Rosie.

Gruen paints an unforgettable picture of life in a small-time Depression-era circus, an environment filled with filth, underfed animals and humans, cruelty, alcohol abuse, varying degrees of crime, lust, and callousness. Jacob, appalled at what he sees and what he learns about August, Marlena and Uncle Al, fights to maintain his sense of decency in a world he never knew existed, but his love for a married woman and his guilt at not doing more to defend Rosie from the beatings she suffers at the hands of August has him doubting himself.

Surprisingly, as intriguing as the young Jacob’s story is, the nursing home predicament that the older Jacob finds himself in is an equally touching one. The audio version of Water for Elephants (10 CDs and 11 ½ hours long) is read by David LeDoux, as the young Jacob Jankowski and John Randolph Jones, who turns in an absolutely brilliant performance as Jacob, the old man. Frankly, both of the worlds created by Gruen are somewhat horrifying and both will linger in my memory for a long time.

Water for Elephants is, however, a tiny bit blemished by its unlikely ending even though it is the kind of fairy tale ending that I personally would have wished for Mr. Jankowski. Some things, though, are just too good to be true – or to ring true in a novel even as good as this one.

Rated at: 4.5

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>The Gingerbread Girl

>Stephen King’s short story, The Gingerbread Girl, appeared in Esquire magazine in July 2007 and was published this year as one of the stories in King’s Just After Sunset collection. It has also been released as a standalone two-disc, roughly two-hour, audio book narrated by Mare Winningham, the version of the story that I recently experienced.

Emily, a young woman whose marriage has begun to fall apart after the crib death of her only baby, is the “Gingerbread Girl” of the book’s title. Searching for a way to maintain her sanity after the tragic loss of her child, she soon becomes obsessed with her daily runs, extends them to longer and longer distances and, in the process, convinces her husband that she has become mentally unstable. When a minor spat with her husband suddenly flares into something more serious, Emily hits the door and literally runs right out of her husband’s life.

Taking a page from the fairy tale Gingerbread Man’s book (“Run, run as fast as you can! You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.”), Emily depends on her legs to outrun her troubles and conflicts. She will soon learn, however, that running in the wrong direction can be more dangerous than not running at all.

Emily retreats to her father’s little beach house on Florida’s remote Vermillion Key where she is content in her aloneness and continues to add to the mileage she is capable of running. All goes well and one day she is surprised to find herself ready to invite her father to join her in the Keys for a few days. But then, despite having been warned by her only friend on the island that one of the wealthy homeowners has arrived with another of his “nieces” and that she should avoid the man, Emily lets curiosity get the best of her and practically runs into the arms of a serial killer.

At this point, The Gingerbread Girl can only hope that her legs will be able to save her from becoming the killer’s next victim. Since she is trapped on a very small island, that might not be as easy as it sounds even for a trained runner like Emily.

Mare Winningham’s presentation helps make Emily into a comfortably believable character, a woman suffering terribly and unable to express that pain to anyone who might be able to help her grieve. She is by far the most complete character in the story, especially when contrasted with the man chasing her, a character that remains a stereotypical villain to the end. It could be that the limitations of the short story format kept King from more fully developing his killer, but that failure kept me from reaching the tension level that I have come to expect from a Stephen King thriller. I suspect that this one would have made a better novel than short story.

Rated at: 2.5

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>Forced Out

>The unabridged ten-disc audio version of Stephen Frey’s Forced Out, despite its rather flawed ending, is a good choice for commuters faced with the same old mind-numbing drive or train ride. L.J. Ganser, the audio book narrator, helps give each of the main characters a distinct and recognizable personality and his reading style contributes to the story’s steadily building suspense.

Frey certainly gave himself a lot to work with in Forced Out: a washed-up New York Yankee baseball scout that stumbles upon a can’t-miss prospect buried deep in the depths of minor league baseball, a crime boss obsessed with revenging the death of his little grandson, a mafia hit man with a conscious and his own problem obsession, and a black teenager who dreams of owning a baseball team one day.

Jack Barrett, disgraced Yankee scout, is a few years past sixty and he is feeling each and every one of those years. He can hardly believe that the twists and turns in his life have finally forced him to share a home in Florida with his daughter because neither of them can really afford to live on their own anymore. When Jack, always looking for a way back into the good graces of the Yankees, recognizes that Florida minor-leaguer Mikey Clement has all the tools to make him into a great player, he dedicates himself to getting Clement a tryout with the team. Stunned at Clement’s rejection of his help, Jack is determined to find out why Clement seems so afraid of him.

Meanwhile, New York hit man Johnny Bondano has been ordered to find and kill the man involved in the hit-and-run accident that killed the young grandson of his mob boss. Bondano considers himself to be an honorable man despite the nice living that he makes by disposing of the men he is ordered to kill. Up to now, at least, he has convinced himself that everyone he has killed deserved to die, even if only for the reason that they were horrible human beings. But this time his code of ethics is being tested because he is not at all sure that the man marked for death is the one who actually struck and killed the boy.

Frey fills his parallel storylines with enough colorful, though often stereotypical, supporting characters and incidents to keep the reader interested in both worlds, especially once the reader comes to realize that bad things are bound to happen when the two sets of characters finally collide. He expertly raises the tension level, as things ever so slowly come to a head, something that takes more than ninety percent of the book’s pages. And then, in one climactic scene, it is pretty much all over.

And to make matters worse, Frey resolves the fates of several major and minor characters and their side-stories in just a few short pages preceding the book’s very predictable final scene (not to mention one pivotal character that just seems to disappear from the story completely). Readers will be uncomfortably jarred by the sudden change-of-pace that marks the book’s last few pages during which characters and incidents that took countless pages to develop are suddenly dispensed with in a matter of a few paragraphs. They may, in fact, very well feel a bit cheated.

All of that said, Forced Out, the audio book, gave me what I always hope to get from an audio book: a fast paced, easy-to-follow story with enough twists and turns to keep me awake on my early morning commutes. However, it would never have worked for me as a printed book – and I would have been especially furious at the way Frey handled the last five percent or so of the story.

Rated at: 2.5

>Skylight Confessions

>Alice Hoffman is another of those writers of whom I’ve been aware for a number of years despite not having read any of her work up to now. Based on my rather uninformed impression of the kind of fiction she wrote, I simply never felt compelled to pick up one of her books. And, frankly, if the audio book choices at my library had not been so limited a few weeks ago, I would not have chosen Skylight Confessions to entertain me on two week’s worth of my daily commute.

Skylight Confessions is one of those books in which not all of the main characters are living, breathing entities. In this case, one of them is the house in which most of the major characters live at some point in the novel’s progression. That house, an architectural marvel known locally as the “Glass Slipper,” gives new meaning to the old saying about “people who live in glass houses” because those who live there have to adapt to the fact that this house, so largely constructed from glass, allows much of the outside world to intrude on their personal space and privacy. Sadly, no one who lives in the house really seems to enjoy the experience but that is not all the house’s fault.

Hoffman’s story begins in another house, the one in which seventeen-year-old Arlyn Singer is alone and grieving the very recent death of her father. Arlyn is a romantic girl who earnestly believes in fate and destiny. She has convinced herself that the man of her dreams, if she is has the patience to wait for him, will soon present himself at her front door and that the two of them will live happily together for the rest of their lives. When John Moody, a college student who has lost his way in search of a nearby party, stops to ask directions, Arlyn happily seduces him in the certainty that he is the man for whom she has been waiting.

Arlyn is only partially correct, as it turns out. True, she will live with John Moody for the rest of her life – but she will be dead well before she is thirty, leaving John and her two children on their own. Skylight Confessions is the story of the largely dysfunctional family that Arlyn leaves behind: six-year-old Sam, a difficult child who eventually turns to drugs in order to get him through a life without the mother he adored, a baby girl named Blanca who grows into an angry young woman who resents her father and the woman he married soon after her mother’s death, and John Moody, the man Arlyn so confidently married and who has learned to draw comfort from his frequent sightings of her ghost around the house.

Skylight Confessions is filled with characters in addition to the Moody family who have confessions of their own to make. These include Arlyn’s old friend, Cynthia, a woman who offers John Moody the comfort of her bed even before Arlyn is dead and buried, and George, the window washer who kept the house walls and roof clean for so many years, a man Arlyn feels more love for at the end than she feels for her husband. All of these characters have problems and, at one time or another, all of them behave badly, making them more memorable than likable in the eyes of the reader.

But even the novel’s most consistently noble character, Meredith, the woman who appears from nowhere and accepts a job as mentor to the two Moody children a few years after Arlyn’s death, has a confession to make. Like John Moody, she sees Arlyn’s ghost and she followed Moody home after first noticing him and the ghost together far from the family home. Meredith bonds with the two children and inserts a note of normalcy into their lives but remains reluctant to admit how and why she first entered their lives.

Mare Winningham offers an accomplished reading of this six-disc audio book, perfectly capturing the emotions of the various characters as she reads their words in the various stages of their lives but, bottom line, Skylight Confessions doesn’t have much new to add and the story and characters fall a bit flat, a disappointment to a first-time reader of Alice Hoffman.

Rated at: 3.0

Skylight Confessions

Alice Hoffman is another of those writers of whom I’ve been aware for a number of years despite not having read any of her work up to now. Based on my rather uninformed impression of the kind of fiction she wrote, I simply never felt compelled to pick up one of her books. And, frankly, if the audio book choices at my library had not been so limited a few weeks ago, I would not have chosen Skylight Confessions to entertain me on two week’s worth of my daily commute.

Skylight Confessions is one of those books in which not all of the main characters are living, breathing entities. In this case, one of them is the house in which most of the major characters live at some point in the novel’s progression. That house, an architectural marvel known locally as the “Glass Slipper,” gives new meaning to the old saying about “people who live in glass houses” because those who live there have to adapt to the fact that this house, so largely constructed from glass, allows much of the outside world to intrude on their personal space and privacy. Sadly, no one who lives in the house really seems to enjoy the experience but that is not all the house’s fault.

Hoffman’s story begins in another house, the one in which seventeen-year-old Arlyn Singer is alone and grieving the very recent death of her father. Arlyn is a romantic girl who earnestly believes in fate and destiny. She has convinced herself that the man of her dreams, if she is has the patience to wait for him, will soon present himself at her front door and that the two of them will live happily together for the rest of their lives. When John Moody, a college student who has lost his way in search of a nearby party, stops to ask directions, Arlyn happily seduces him in the certainty that he is the man for whom she has been waiting.

Arlyn is only partially correct, as it turns out. True, she will live with John Moody for the rest of her life – but she will be dead well before she is thirty, leaving John and her two children on their own. Skylight Confessions is the story of the largely dysfunctional family that Arlyn leaves behind: six-year-old Sam, a difficult child who eventually turns to drugs in order to get him through a life without the mother he adored, a baby girl named Blanca who grows into an angry young woman who resents her father and the woman he married soon after her mother’s death, and John Moody, the man Arlyn so confidently married and who has learned to draw comfort from his frequent sightings of her ghost around the house.

Skylight Confessions is filled with characters in addition to the Moody family who have confessions of their own to make. These include Arlyn’s old friend, Cynthia, a woman who offers John Moody the comfort of her bed even before Arlyn is dead and buried, and George, the window washer who kept the house walls and roof clean for so many years, a man Arlyn feels more love for at the end than she feels for her husband. All of these characters have problems and, at one time or another, all of them behave badly, making them more memorable than likable in the eyes of the reader.

But even the novel’s most consistently noble character, Meredith, the woman who appears from nowhere and accepts a job as mentor to the two Moody children a few years after Arlyn’s death, has a confession to make. Like John Moody, she sees Arlyn’s ghost and she followed Moody home after first noticing him and the ghost together far from the family home. Meredith bonds with the two children and inserts a note of normalcy into their lives but remains reluctant to admit how and why she first entered their lives.

Mare Winningham offers an accomplished reading of this six-disc audio book, perfectly capturing the emotions of the various characters as she reads their words in the various stages of their lives but, bottom line, Skylight Confessions doesn’t have much new to add and the story and characters fall a bit flat, a disappointment to a first-time reader of Alice Hoffman.

Rated at: 3.0

Lottery

Perry L. Crandall’s definition of mental retardation includes the requirement of an IQ level of 75 or below and, since Perry’s IQ is 76, he is quick to point out that he is not retarded, just slow. Perry, who never knew his father, was doubly unfortunate to have a mother who wanted nothing to do with him and abandoned his upbringing to his Granp and Gran. But that’s when Perry’s luck changed for the better because his grandparents raised him to be a curious, happy and self-sufficient young man with a steady job and plenty of self-respect.

Gran always told Perry that the “L” in his name stood for lucky and, not too long after she died and left Perry pretty much on his own, he proved her correct by winning a $12 million state lottery jackpot. When all of Perry’s money-grubbing relatives, his mother, his “cousin-brothers” and their wives, suddenly became concerned about his welfare, Perry’s best friend and co-worker, Keith, decided to protect Perry from the attentions of his newly attentive family. Both Keith and Perry’s boss, Gary, soon found out just how difficult that job was going to be.

All of this is told through the eyes and voice of Perry himself and, despite Perry’s low IQ and his slowness, he is a diligent observer of what goes on around him. Perry considers himself to be an auditor, “someone who listens,” and he is a damn fine auditor, at that. He might not always understand the motivations of others or the hidden meanings behind their actions, but very little gets by without him at least having observed and made note of it.

I am unable to judge the authenticity of Patricia Wood’s Perry Crandall character because I have never really known anyone with a 76 IQ. I did note at least a couple of occasions where Perry seemed to express himself in words and manner that seemed to be likely beyond his capabilities. But someone like Perry who has studied the dictionary every day of his life since he was a boy could be expected to have an unusually large vocabulary. Whether or not he would be able to understand all the nuances of those words is a bit questionable, however.

But minor quibbles aside, Patricia Wood has created three characters in Lottery that I will remember for a long, long time. Perry’s innocence and good will make him into the kind of person any of us would enjoy being around. Keith, despite all of his rough edges, that include passing gas in public and using Perry’s dreaded “F-word” constantly, proves to be the perfect friend for Perry, someone whose loyalty is never in question. And then there’s Perry’s grandmother, a woman whose love for Perry is so fierce that it pushes him to levels of achievement that would have otherwise been impossible for him even to approach.

Paul Michael’s masterful narration of this audio book particularly shines when he is speaking in the voices of these three main characters. His reading skill, and variation in voice and tone, help to create three characters that become very real to the listener. Lottery may be one of those books that are perfect for reading aloud because I somehow doubt that the characters would have seemed as alive on the written page as they do in this audio version. These eight discs, totaling almost nine hours, really fly by and at the book’s end I found myself hating to lose touch with Perry and his new family.

Rated at: 5.0

>Lottery

>Perry L. Crandall’s definition of mental retardation includes the requirement of an IQ level of 75 or below and, since Perry’s IQ is 76, he is quick to point out that he is not retarded, just slow. Perry, who never knew his father, was doubly unfortunate to have a mother who wanted nothing to do with him and abandoned his upbringing to his Granp and Gran. But that’s when Perry’s luck changed for the better because his grandparents raised him to be a curious, happy and self-sufficient young man with a steady job and plenty of self-respect.

Gran always told Perry that the “L” in his name stood for lucky and, not too long after she died and left Perry pretty much on his own, he proved her correct by winning a $12 million state lottery jackpot. When all of Perry’s money-grubbing relatives, his mother, his “cousin-brothers” and their wives, suddenly became concerned about his welfare, Perry’s best friend and co-worker, Keith, decided to protect Perry from the attentions of his newly attentive family. Both Keith and Perry’s boss, Gary, soon found out just how difficult that job was going to be.

All of this is told through the eyes and voice of Perry himself and, despite Perry’s low IQ and his slowness, he is a diligent observer of what goes on around him. Perry considers himself to be an auditor, “someone who listens,” and he is a damn fine auditor, at that. He might not always understand the motivations of others or the hidden meanings behind their actions, but very little gets by without him at least having observed and made note of it.

I am unable to judge the authenticity of Patricia Wood’s Perry Crandall character because I have never really known anyone with a 76 IQ. I did note at least a couple of occasions where Perry seemed to express himself in words and manner that seemed to be likely beyond his capabilities. But someone like Perry who has studied the dictionary every day of his life since he was a boy could be expected to have an unusually large vocabulary. Whether or not he would be able to understand all the nuances of those words is a bit questionable, however.

But minor quibbles aside, Patricia Wood has created three characters in Lottery that I will remember for a long, long time. Perry’s innocence and good will make him into the kind of person any of us would enjoy being around. Keith, despite all of his rough edges, that include passing gas in public and using Perry’s dreaded “F-word” constantly, proves to be the perfect friend for Perry, someone whose loyalty is never in question. And then there’s Perry’s grandmother, a woman whose love for Perry is so fierce that it pushes him to levels of achievement that would have otherwise been impossible for him even to approach.

Paul Michael’s masterful narration of this audio book particularly shines when he is speaking in the voices of these three main characters. His reading skill, and variation in voice and tone, help to create three characters that become very real to the listener. Lottery may be one of those books that are perfect for reading aloud because I somehow doubt that the characters would have seemed as alive on the written page as they do in this audio version. These eight discs, totaling almost nine hours, really fly by and at the book’s end I found myself hating to lose touch with Perry and his new family.

Rated at: 5.0

Lottery

Perry L. Crandall’s definition of mental retardation includes the requirement of an IQ level of 75 or below and, since Perry’s IQ is 76, he is quick to point out that he is not retarded, just slow. Perry, who never knew his father, was doubly unfortunate to have a mother who wanted nothing to do with him and abandoned his upbringing to his Granp and Gran. But that’s when Perry’s luck changed for the better because his grandparents raised him to be a curious, happy and self-sufficient young man with a steady job and plenty of self-respect.

Gran always told Perry that the “L” in his name stood for lucky and, not too long after she died and left Perry pretty much on his own, he proved her correct by winning a $12 million state lottery jackpot. When all of Perry’s money-grubbing relatives, his mother, his “cousin-brothers” and their wives, suddenly became concerned about his welfare, Perry’s best friend and co-worker, Keith, decided to protect Perry from the attentions of his newly attentive family. Both Keith and Perry’s boss, Gary, soon found out just how difficult that job was going to be.

All of this is told through the eyes and voice of Perry himself and, despite Perry’s low IQ and his slowness, he is a diligent observer of what goes on around him. Perry considers himself to be an auditor, “someone who listens,” and he is a damn fine auditor, at that. He might not always understand the motivations of others or the hidden meanings behind their actions, but very little gets by without him at least having observed and made note of it.

I am unable to judge the authenticity of Patricia Wood’s Perry Crandall character because I have never really known anyone with a 76 IQ. I did note at least a couple of occasions where Perry seemed to express himself in words and manner that seemed to be likely beyond his capabilities. But someone like Perry who has studied the dictionary every day of his life since he was a boy could be expected to have an unusually large vocabulary. Whether or not he would be able to understand all the nuances of those words is a bit questionable, however.

But minor quibbles aside, Patricia Wood has created three characters in Lottery that I will remember for a long, long time. Perry’s innocence and good will make him into the kind of person any of us would enjoy being around. Keith, despite all of his rough edges, that include passing gas in public and using Perry’s dreaded “F-word” constantly, proves to be the perfect friend for Perry, someone whose loyalty is never in question. And then there’s Perry’s grandmother, a woman whose love for Perry is so fierce that it pushes him to levels of achievement that would have otherwise been impossible for him even to approach.

Paul Michael’s masterful narration of this audio book particularly shines when he is speaking in the voices of these three main characters. His reading skill, and variation in voice and tone, help to create three characters that become very real to the listener. Lottery may be one of those books that are perfect for reading aloud because I somehow doubt that the characters would have seemed as alive on the written page as they do in this audio version. These eight discs, totaling almost nine hours, really fly by and at the book’s end I found myself hating to lose touch with Perry and his new family.

Rated at: 5.0

Martin Misunderstood

“Martin Misunderstood” is my first exposure to Karen Slaughter’s writing so I came to this audio CD not knowing what to expect as to her writing style and tone. Slaughter is certainly a popular author, having appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and having been successfully published in 26 different languages, so I expected at the very least, to be entertained for a couple of hours as I drove between Houston and northwestern Kentucky.

And, for the most part, I was.

Martin Reed, a grossly overweight schmuck who would probably be unattractive even if his weight was under control, lives with his witch of a mother and is still being tormented by some of the same people who made him miserable in high school. He holds a senior accounting job with Southern Toilet Supply but is such a wimp that even the company’s worst employees mouth off to him with no fear of reprisal. Simply put, the man is a mess. He has no friends, especially female friends, suffers constant verbal abuse from his mother, and his only escape is to lose himself in the countless mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi novels he reads on a continuous basis.

When some of Martin’s co-workers become victims of a gruesome murderer, and blood is found on the bumper of his car, others in the office seem almost eager to help the police pin the murders on him. And for lots of weirdly personal reasons, Martin seems almost content to let it happen even if he winds up on Death Row as a result.

“Martin Misunderstood” is a jarring combination of comedy and violence, something by itself that would probably earn it an “R” rating, so parents of young children should be warned to listen to this one without the kids around. The “F-word” makes an appearance or two, the sex scenes tend to be extremely graphic (and, on occasion, borderline disgusting), and the murders are detailed in all of their gruesome glory.

Wayne Knight, of Seinfeld fame, does the reading of the story in a largely straight-ahead fashion, not making much of an effort to give each of the characters a distinct voice or accent. For example, the voice and accent that Knight uses for Martin is almost exactly the same one that he uses for the female police officer trying to prove that he is a killer. Those who prefer that their audio books be “read” rather than “acted” will likely appreciate Knight’s approach, but those who prefer more of a “presentation” than a “reading” might be a little disappointed.

“Martin Misunderstood” is interesting enough that I will probably take a look at Karin Slaughter’s books next time I visit a bookstore…might even buy one if they aren’t all along the lines of “Martin Misunderstood.” I’m not ready for a steady diet of guys like Martin Reed.

Rated at: 3.0

>Martin Misunderstood

>
“Martin Misunderstood” is my first exposure to Karen Slaughter’s writing so I came to this audio CD not knowing what to expect as to her writing style and tone. Slaughter is certainly a popular author, having appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and having been successfully published in 26 different languages, so I expected at the very least, to be entertained for a couple of hours as I drove between Houston and northwestern Kentucky.

And, for the most part, I was.

Martin Reed, a grossly overweight schmuck who would probably be unattractive even if his weight was under control, lives with his witch of a mother and is still being tormented by some of the same people who made him miserable in high school. He holds a senior accounting job with Southern Toilet Supply but is such a wimp that even the company’s worst employees mouth off to him with no fear of reprisal. Simply put, the man is a mess. He has no friends, especially female friends, suffers constant verbal abuse from his mother, and his only escape is to lose himself in the countless mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi novels he reads on a continuous basis.

When some of Martin’s co-workers become victims of a gruesome murderer, and blood is found on the bumper of his car, others in the office seem almost eager to help the police pin the murders on him. And for lots of weirdly personal reasons, Martin seems almost content to let it happen even if he winds up on Death Row as a result.

“Martin Misunderstood” is a jarring combination of comedy and violence, something by itself that would probably earn it an “R” rating, so parents of young children should be warned to listen to this one without the kids around. The “F-word” makes an appearance or two, the sex scenes tend to be extremely graphic (and, on occasion, borderline disgusting), and the murders are detailed in all of their gruesome glory.

Wayne Knight, of Seinfeld fame, does the reading of the story in a largely straight-ahead fashion, not making much of an effort to give each of the characters a distinct voice or accent. For example, the voice and accent that Knight uses for Martin is almost exactly the same one that he uses for the female police officer trying to prove that he is a killer. Those who prefer that their audio books be “read” rather than “acted” will likely appreciate Knight’s approach, but those who prefer more of a “presentation” than a “reading” might be a little disappointed.

“Martin Misunderstood” is interesting enough that I will probably take a look at Karin Slaughter’s books next time I visit a bookstore…might even buy one if they aren’t all along the lines of “Martin Misunderstood.” I’m not ready for a steady diet of guys like Martin Reed.

Rated at: 3.0

Martin Misunderstood

“Martin Misunderstood” is my first exposure to Karen Slaughter’s writing so I came to this audio CD not knowing what to expect as to her writing style and tone. Slaughter is certainly a popular author, having appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and having been successfully published in 26 different languages, so I expected at the very least, to be entertained for a couple of hours as I drove between Houston and northwestern Kentucky.

And, for the most part, I was.

Martin Reed, a grossly overweight schmuck who would probably be unattractive even if his weight was under control, lives with his witch of a mother and is still being tormented by some of the same people who made him miserable in high school. He holds a senior accounting job with Southern Toilet Supply but is such a wimp that even the company’s worst employees mouth off to him with no fear of reprisal. Simply put, the man is a mess. He has no friends, especially female friends, suffers constant verbal abuse from his mother, and his only escape is to lose himself in the countless mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi novels he reads on a continuous basis.

When some of Martin’s co-workers become victims of a gruesome murderer, and blood is found on the bumper of his car, others in the office seem almost eager to help the police pin the murders on him. And for lots of weirdly personal reasons, Martin seems almost content to let it happen even if he winds up on Death Row as a result.

“Martin Misunderstood” is a jarring combination of comedy and violence, something by itself that would probably earn it an “R” rating, so parents of young children should be warned to listen to this one without the kids around. The “F-word” makes an appearance or two, the sex scenes tend to be extremely graphic (and, on occasion, borderline disgusting), and the murders are detailed in all of their gruesome glory.

Wayne Knight, of Seinfeld fame, does the reading of the story in a largely straight-ahead fashion, not making much of an effort to give each of the characters a distinct voice or accent. For example, the voice and accent that Knight uses for Martin is almost exactly the same one that he uses for the female police officer trying to prove that he is a killer. Those who prefer that their audio books be “read” rather than “acted” will likely appreciate Knight’s approach, but those who prefer more of a “presentation” than a “reading” might be a little disappointed.

“Martin Misunderstood” is interesting enough that I will probably take a look at Karin Slaughter’s books next time I visit a bookstore…might even buy one if they aren’t all along the lines of “Martin Misunderstood.” I’m not ready for a steady diet of guys like Martin Reed.

Rated at: 3.0

The Innocent Man

Ron Williamson was at one time one of the favorite sons of Ada, Oklahoma. He was a young man with tremendous athletic skills and many locals believed that he just might be the next Micky Mantle, who is still the greatest baseball player to ever come from that state. But largely because of chronic injury problems that started in high school, Ron was not destined to become a great professional ballplayer. He got his shot, and managed to stay in the minors a lot longer than he probably should have, but baseball is not the thing for which Ron Williamson is remembered by citizens of Ada, Oklahoma.

No, when the people of Ada think of Williamson, what they recall is the rape and murder of which he was convicted and the years that he spent on death row. They remember that he came within five days of actually being executed for a crime with which he had absolutely nothing to do. Well that’s what most of them remember, anyway. Other Ada locals perhaps still want believe the local prosecutor who refuses to admit that he was wrong to ever charge Williamson with the crime, and who still wants to hold out the possibility that the DNA evidence that exonerated him does not prove that he was not involved in some way.

When it came to pinning the rape and murder on someone, Ron Williamson was certainly an easy target. Ron’s drinking problem began in high school and, when his baseball career unraveled, alcohol, drugs, and struggles with depression made it impossible for him to hold a job or to move on with his life. So when the baffled investigators and prosecutors in Ada decided that the crime was so brutal that it had to involve two people, Ron and his running buddy Dennis Fritz were “chosen” as the crime’s most logical perpetrators.

Now all they needed was the evidence to convict the two innocent men and cover themselves in glory as great crime fighters. There was no evidence to be found, however, something that did very little to slow down the police investigators or the local prosecutor who had already decided that Fritz and Williamson were guilty. A combination of creatively coerced “confessions,” testimony from local lowlifes (one who was later to be convicted of the very crime in question), sloppy testimony from experts, a judge who proved his own incompetence, and lies suggested to, and regurgitated by, jailhouse snitches, managed to convict both the men.

Their story is one that most of us would like to believe never happens in this country. Unfortunately, as Grisham proves in The Innocent Man, it probably happens much more often than we know. All it takes is the right combination of incompetent policemen, investigators, expert witnesses, prosecutors and judges to make it possible. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz had years stolen from them and their lives were largely ruined by the very people charged with protecting the public welfare. This is one scary story.

Grisham tells the Fritz and Williamson story in a very straightforward way. There is no attempt to “novelize” what happened through the use of extensively recreated dialogue or by speaking from the points-of-view of its main characters. That does make for some rather dry reading at times but the details resulting from Grisham’s research makes his straight reporting of the facts a fascinating one. The 10-disc unabridged audio version of The Innocent Man is read by Craig Wasson who does a particularly effective job in giving a voice to Ron Williamson’s frustration and outright anger about the situation in which he found himself.

Fans of John Grisham’s novels, in which the action seldom seems to stop, might find the pace of this one to be a little slow. But Grisham had an important story to tell and he told it well.

Rated at: 4.0

>The Innocent Man

>Ron Williamson was at one time one of the favorite sons of Ada, Oklahoma. He was a young man with tremendous athletic skills and many locals believed that he just might be the next Micky Mantle, who is still the greatest baseball player to ever come from that state. But largely because of chronic injury problems that started in high school, Ron was not destined to become a great professional ballplayer. He got his shot, and managed to stay in the minors a lot longer than he probably should have, but baseball is not the thing for which Ron Williamson is remembered by citizens of Ada, Oklahoma.

No, when the people of Ada think of Williamson, what they recall is the rape and murder of which he was convicted and the years that he spent on death row. They remember that he came within five days of actually being executed for a crime with which he had absolutely nothing to do. Well that’s what most of them remember, anyway. Other Ada locals perhaps still want believe the local prosecutor who refuses to admit that he was wrong to ever charge Williamson with the crime, and who still wants to hold out the possibility that the DNA evidence that exonerated him does not prove that he was not involved in some way.

When it came to pinning the rape and murder on someone, Ron Williamson was certainly an easy target. Ron’s drinking problem began in high school and, when his baseball career unraveled, alcohol, drugs, and struggles with depression made it impossible for him to hold a job or to move on with his life. So when the baffled investigators and prosecutors in Ada decided that the crime was so brutal that it had to involve two people, Ron and his running buddy Dennis Fritz were “chosen” as the crime’s most logical perpetrators.

Now all they needed was the evidence to convict the two innocent men and cover themselves in glory as great crime fighters. There was no evidence to be found, however, something that did very little to slow down the police investigators or the local prosecutor who had already decided that Fritz and Williamson were guilty. A combination of creatively coerced “confessions,” testimony from local lowlifes (one who was later to be convicted of the very crime in question), sloppy testimony from experts, a judge who proved his own incompetence, and lies suggested to, and regurgitated by, jailhouse snitches, managed to convict both the men.

Their story is one that most of us would like to believe never happens in this country. Unfortunately, as Grisham proves in The Innocent Man, it probably happens much more often than we know. All it takes is the right combination of incompetent policemen, investigators, expert witnesses, prosecutors and judges to make it possible. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz had years stolen from them and their lives were largely ruined by the very people charged with protecting the public welfare. This is one scary story.

Grisham tells the Fritz and Williamson story in a very straightforward way. There is no attempt to “novelize” what happened through the use of extensively recreated dialogue or by speaking from the points-of-view of its main characters. That does make for some rather dry reading at times but the details resulting from Grisham’s research makes his straight reporting of the facts a fascinating one. The 10-disc unabridged audio version of The Innocent Man is read by Craig Wasson who does a particularly effective job in giving a voice to Ron Williamson’s frustration and outright anger about the situation in which he found himself.

Fans of John Grisham’s novels, in which the action seldom seems to stop, might find the pace of this one to be a little slow. But Grisham had an important story to tell and he told it well.

Rated at: 4.0

The Innocent Man

Ron Williamson was at one time one of the favorite sons of Ada, Oklahoma. He was a young man with tremendous athletic skills and many locals believed that he just might be the next Micky Mantle, who is still the greatest baseball player to ever come from that state. But largely because of chronic injury problems that started in high school, Ron was not destined to become a great professional ballplayer. He got his shot, and managed to stay in the minors a lot longer than he probably should have, but baseball is not the thing for which Ron Williamson is remembered by citizens of Ada, Oklahoma.

No, when the people of Ada think of Williamson, what they recall is the rape and murder of which he was convicted and the years that he spent on death row. They remember that he came within five days of actually being executed for a crime with which he had absolutely nothing to do. Well that’s what most of them remember, anyway. Other Ada locals perhaps still want believe the local prosecutor who refuses to admit that he was wrong to ever charge Williamson with the crime, and who still wants to hold out the possibility that the DNA evidence that exonerated him does not prove that he was not involved in some way.

When it came to pinning the rape and murder on someone, Ron Williamson was certainly an easy target. Ron’s drinking problem began in high school and, when his baseball career unraveled, alcohol, drugs, and struggles with depression made it impossible for him to hold a job or to move on with his life. So when the baffled investigators and prosecutors in Ada decided that the crime was so brutal that it had to involve two people, Ron and his running buddy Dennis Fritz were “chosen” as the crime’s most logical perpetrators.

Now all they needed was the evidence to convict the two innocent men and cover themselves in glory as great crime fighters. There was no evidence to be found, however, something that did very little to slow down the police investigators or the local prosecutor who had already decided that Fritz and Williamson were guilty. A combination of creatively coerced “confessions,” testimony from local lowlifes (one who was later to be convicted of the very crime in question), sloppy testimony from experts, a judge who proved his own incompetence, and lies suggested to, and regurgitated by, jailhouse snitches, managed to convict both the men.

Their story is one that most of us would like to believe never happens in this country. Unfortunately, as Grisham proves in The Innocent Man, it probably happens much more often than we know. All it takes is the right combination of incompetent policemen, investigators, expert witnesses, prosecutors and judges to make it possible. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz had years stolen from them and their lives were largely ruined by the very people charged with protecting the public welfare. This is one scary story.

Grisham tells the Fritz and Williamson story in a very straightforward way. There is no attempt to “novelize” what happened through the use of extensively recreated dialogue or by speaking from the points-of-view of its main characters. That does make for some rather dry reading at times but the details resulting from Grisham’s research makes his straight reporting of the facts a fascinating one. The 10-disc unabridged audio version of The Innocent Man is read by Craig Wasson who does a particularly effective job in giving a voice to Ron Williamson’s frustration and outright anger about the situation in which he found himself.

Fans of John Grisham’s novels, in which the action seldom seems to stop, might find the pace of this one to be a little slow. But Grisham had an important story to tell and he told it well.

Rated at: 4.0

Love in the Present Tense

Can a book whose plot includes murder, prostitutes, desperate poverty, sexual harassment, infidelity, drug abuse, ruthless politicians, corrupt policemen, and a near-death experience be described as sweetly sentimental? Well, at least in the case of Love in the Present Tense, the answer is a definite yes.

Barely qualifying as a teenager, but streetwise as they come, Pearl suddenly finds herself pregnant and on the run because she has accidentally shot to death the baby’s father, who just happens to be a police officer. Pearl, whose own mother is a self-destructive addict, is determined that her baby will be given the unconditional love that she herself has never experienced. And that is exactly the kind of love that Leonard, who suffers from a degenerative eye disease due to his premature birth, receives from Pearl.

By the time Leonard is five years old he and Pearl are renting a room in a small California beach community and the little mixed-race boy has blossomed into the kind of kid that everyone has to love. At times displaying wisdom well beyond his years, he more often seems to be an almost dangerously trusting and forgiving little boy. The term “sweet natured” could have been invented just for him, in fact.

That is why Mitch, who runs a business from his home next door to the one Pearl is renting, so readily offers to let Leonard stay with him during the day while Pearl is at work. Impressed that Pearl assures herself that he is the kind of man who can be trusted around little boys before she agrees to accept his much-needed help, Mitch expects things to go just fine for him and Leonard. And they do – until Pearl doesn’t come to pick up Leonard one day after work and seems to have disappeared forever. Mitch effectively becomes the father that Leonard never knew but Leonard still very much believes in “forever love,” a theory taught him by his mother, and never loses the feeling that Pearl is still around to protect and love him.

Love in the Present Tense is, at heart, the story of the deeply loving relationship that develops between Mitch and Leonard, two guys who manage to cobble together a little family of their own. That’s the “sweetly sentimental” part of the story. But there is much more to their story than that because neither of them is as perfect as they may sound. Leonard grows into a teenager who, because he believes himself destined to die young, has a dangerously self-destructive outlook on life. Mitch shows his own darker side by for more than a decade relishing an affair with the wife of his major client, a man who has treated him almost like a member of the family, even at one point hoping that his daughter and Mitch would become a couple.

Catherine Ryan Hyde tells her story using three distinctive first person narratives: Pearl, Leonard and Mitch. The audio version of the book is nicely read by three separate voices, each ably contributing to the personality of one of the book’s main characters.

Rated at: 3.5

>Love in the Present Tense

>Can a book whose plot includes murder, prostitutes, desperate poverty, sexual harassment, infidelity, drug abuse, ruthless politicians, corrupt policemen, and a near-death experience be described as sweetly sentimental? Well, at least in the case of Love in the Present Tense, the answer is a definite yes.

Barely qualifying as a teenager, but streetwise as they come, Pearl suddenly finds herself pregnant and on the run because she has accidentally shot to death the baby’s father, who just happens to be a police officer. Pearl, whose own mother is a self-destructive addict, is determined that her baby will be given the unconditional love that she herself has never experienced. And that is exactly the kind of love that Leonard, who suffers from a degenerative eye disease due to his premature birth, receives from Pearl.

By the time Leonard is five years old he and Pearl are renting a room in a small California beach community and the little mixed-race boy has blossomed into the kind of kid that everyone has to love. At times displaying wisdom well beyond his years, he more often seems to be an almost dangerously trusting and forgiving little boy. The term “sweet natured” could have been invented just for him, in fact.

That is why Mitch, who runs a business from his home next door to the one Pearl is renting, so readily offers to let Leonard stay with him during the day while Pearl is at work. Impressed that Pearl assures herself that he is the kind of man who can be trusted around little boys before she agrees to accept his much-needed help, Mitch expects things to go just fine for him and Leonard. And they do – until Pearl doesn’t come to pick up Leonard one day after work and seems to have disappeared forever. Mitch effectively becomes the father that Leonard never knew but Leonard still very much believes in “forever love,” a theory taught him by his mother, and never loses the feeling that Pearl is still around to protect and love him.

Love in the Present Tense is, at heart, the story of the deeply loving relationship that develops between Mitch and Leonard, two guys who manage to cobble together a little family of their own. That’s the “sweetly sentimental” part of the story. But there is much more to their story than that because neither of them is as perfect as they may sound. Leonard grows into a teenager who, because he believes himself destined to die young, has a dangerously self-destructive outlook on life. Mitch shows his own darker side by for more than a decade relishing an affair with the wife of his major client, a man who has treated him almost like a member of the family, even at one point hoping that his daughter and Mitch would become a couple.

Catherine Ryan Hyde tells her story using three distinctive first person narratives: Pearl, Leonard and Mitch. The audio version of the book is nicely read by three separate voices, each ably contributing to the personality of one of the book’s main characters.

Rated at: 3.5

Love in the Present Tense

Can a book whose plot includes murder, prostitutes, desperate poverty, sexual harassment, infidelity, drug abuse, ruthless politicians, corrupt policemen, and a near-death experience be described as sweetly sentimental? Well, at least in the case of Love in the Present Tense, the answer is a definite yes.

Barely qualifying as a teenager, but streetwise as they come, Pearl suddenly finds herself pregnant and on the run because she has accidentally shot to death the baby’s father, who just happens to be a police officer. Pearl, whose own mother is a self-destructive addict, is determined that her baby will be given the unconditional love that she herself has never experienced. And that is exactly the kind of love that Leonard, who suffers from a degenerative eye disease due to his premature birth, receives from Pearl.

By the time Leonard is five years old he and Pearl are renting a room in a small California beach community and the little mixed-race boy has blossomed into the kind of kid that everyone has to love. At times displaying wisdom well beyond his years, he more often seems to be an almost dangerously trusting and forgiving little boy. The term “sweet natured” could have been invented just for him, in fact.

That is why Mitch, who runs a business from his home next door to the one Pearl is renting, so readily offers to let Leonard stay with him during the day while Pearl is at work. Impressed that Pearl assures herself that he is the kind of man who can be trusted around little boys before she agrees to accept his much-needed help, Mitch expects things to go just fine for him and Leonard. And they do – until Pearl doesn’t come to pick up Leonard one day after work and seems to have disappeared forever. Mitch effectively becomes the father that Leonard never knew but Leonard still very much believes in “forever love,” a theory taught him by his mother, and never loses the feeling that Pearl is still around to protect and love him.

Love in the Present Tense is, at heart, the story of the deeply loving relationship that develops between Mitch and Leonard, two guys who manage to cobble together a little family of their own. That’s the “sweetly sentimental” part of the story. But there is much more to their story than that because neither of them is as perfect as they may sound. Leonard grows into a teenager who, because he believes himself destined to die young, has a dangerously self-destructive outlook on life. Mitch shows his own darker side by for more than a decade relishing an affair with the wife of his major client, a man who has treated him almost like a member of the family, even at one point hoping that his daughter and Mitch would become a couple.

Catherine Ryan Hyde tells her story using three distinctive first person narratives: Pearl, Leonard and Mitch. The audio version of the book is nicely read by three separate voices, each ably contributing to the personality of one of the book’s main characters.

Rated at: 3.5

The Ghost

Robert Harris has written a political thriller that never quite managed to “thrill” me.

The title of the book refers to its unnamed main character, a ghostwriter who has made a pretty good living writing “memoirs” for celebrities and sports figures that are incapable of writing their own books. Despite all of his experience in the field, however, our Ghost has never tried his hand at writing a political memoir until lured to do so by the big money he is offered to complete a manuscript for a former British prime minister.

The Ghost knows that the author of the manuscript he is replacing drowned near Martha’s Vineyard, a death that some attribute to suicide and others to drink, but which is not officially marked as a questionable one. It does bother him a bit that he is ghosting for a “ghost,” but it is not until he finds a stack of pictures, one of which has a phone number scribbled on the back of it, that he begins to suspect that Prime Minister Adam Lange is not the man he appears to be and that some very powerful people in Britain and America are desperate to hide that fact.

Our Ghost wonders for a time if he is being paranoid about the potential personal dangers involved with the project but, as he gets farther and farther into his research, finds that paranoia could be the least of his problems.

Harris has basically written an anti-Tony Blair novel with The Ghost although some of the plot elements are so farfetched that it is easy to forget the similarities between Blaire and Adam Lange. One gets the feeling that Harris is making some legitimate political points in the novel but that they are a bit obscured by the envelope in which they are delivered. The Ghost would have been more effective with a few less of the “Mission Impossible” elements to distract from its political message. The impact of the novel is also lessened to some extent because Adam Lange and the Ghost are surrounded by several stereotypically clichéd characters, an element that made it difficult for the novel to build to the level of tenseness that it deserved.

Readers should be warned not to read the last pages of the book before they work their way there naturally because Harris has saved a little surprise for them that he throws in at the very end. The audio version of The Ghost was perfect for a week’s worth of my daily commuting but I am not convinced that I would have enjoyed the written version as much as I did the excellently narrated audio book.

Rated at: 3.0

The Ghost

Robert Harris has written a political thriller that never quite managed to “thrill” me.

The title of the book refers to its unnamed main character, a ghostwriter who has made a pretty good living writing “memoirs” for celebrities and sports figures that are incapable of writing their own books. Despite all of his experience in the field, however, our Ghost has never tried his hand at writing a political memoir until lured to do so by the big money he is offered to complete a manuscript for a former British prime minister.

The Ghost knows that the author of the manuscript he is replacing drowned near Martha’s Vineyard, a death that some attribute to suicide and others to drink, but which is not officially marked as a questionable one. It does bother him a bit that he is ghosting for a “ghost,” but it is not until he finds a stack of pictures, one of which has a phone number scribbled on the back of it, that he begins to suspect that Prime Minister Adam Lange is not the man he appears to be and that some very powerful people in Britain and America are desperate to hide that fact.

Our Ghost wonders for a time if he is being paranoid about the potential personal dangers involved with the project but, as he gets farther and farther into his research, finds that paranoia could be the least of his problems.

Harris has basically written an anti-Tony Blair novel with The Ghost although some of the plot elements are so farfetched that it is easy to forget the similarities between Blaire and Adam Lange. One gets the feeling that Harris is making some legitimate political points in the novel but that they are a bit obscured by the envelope in which they are delivered. The Ghost would have been more effective with a few less of the “Mission Impossible” elements to distract from its political message. The impact of the novel is also lessened to some extent because Adam Lange and the Ghost are surrounded by several stereotypically clichéd characters, an element that made it difficult for the novel to build to the level of tenseness that it deserved.

Readers should be warned not to read the last pages of the book before they work their way there naturally because Harris has saved a little surprise for them that he throws in at the very end. The audio version of The Ghost was perfect for a week’s worth of my daily commuting but I am not convinced that I would have enjoyed the written version as much as I did the excellently narrated audio book.

Rated at: 3.0

>The Ghost

>Robert Harris has written a political thriller that never quite managed to “thrill” me.

The title of the book refers to its unnamed main character, a ghostwriter who has made a pretty good living writing “memoirs” for celebrities and sports figures that are incapable of writing their own books. Despite all of his experience in the field, however, our Ghost has never tried his hand at writing a political memoir until lured to do so by the big money he is offered to complete a manuscript for a former British prime minister.

The Ghost knows that the author of the manuscript he is replacing drowned near Martha’s Vineyard, a death that some attribute to suicide and others to drink, but which is not officially marked as a questionable one. It does bother him a bit that he is ghosting for a “ghost,” but it is not until he finds a stack of pictures, one of which has a phone number scribbled on the back of it, that he begins to suspect that Prime Minister Adam Lange is not the man he appears to be and that some very powerful people in Britain and America are desperate to hide that fact.

Our Ghost wonders for a time if he is being paranoid about the potential personal dangers involved with the project but, as he gets farther and farther into his research, finds that paranoia could be the least of his problems.

Harris has basically written an anti-Tony Blair novel with The Ghost although some of the plot elements are so farfetched that it is easy to forget the similarities between Blaire and Adam Lange. One gets the feeling that Harris is making some legitimate political points in the novel but that they are a bit obscured by the envelope in which they are delivered. The Ghost would have been more effective with a few less of the “Mission Impossible” elements to distract from its political message. The impact of the novel is also lessened to some extent because Adam Lange and the Ghost are surrounded by several stereotypically clichéd characters, an element that made it difficult for the novel to build to the level of tenseness that it deserved.

Readers should be warned not to read the last pages of the book before they work their way there naturally because Harris has saved a little surprise for them that he throws in at the very end. The audio version of The Ghost was perfect for a week’s worth of my daily commuting but I am not convinced that I would have enjoyed the written version as much as I did the excellently narrated audio book.

Rated at: 3.0

The Murder Room

The Murder Room, P.D. James’ twelfth of thirteen mysteries featuring Scotland Yard’s Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is a satisfying addition to that character-driven series. For me, the main attraction to a P.D. James mystery has always been the way her excellent understanding of human psychology allows her to populate each of her novels with so many believable characters. That talent usually complicates her mysteries and keeps readers turning pages all the way to the end and, despite the fact that I listened to this one instead of reading it, The Murder Room was no exception.

In London, a city filled with world-class museums, a tiny museum like the Dupayne can easily slip through the crack and, in fact, this one has. Devoted exclusively to the “interwar years” of England, the lull between world wars with which she was blessed from 1919 to 1939, the Dupayne specializes in rare first editions and artwork of the period. But over time its main attraction has come to be a room everyone calls the “Murder Room,” a space devoted exclusively to the sensational murders of those particular days. The room is filled with exhibits detailing the murders, including pictures of victims and murderers alike, and the few visitors who find their way to the Dupayne seem to spend most of their time there.

But these are tough times for the Dupayne and the three Dupayne siblings to whom it belongs. It is time for them to decide whether or not to keep the museum open, a decision requiring the unanimous consent of the two brothers and their sister, and one that is starting to seem more and more unlikely to be reached because Dr. Neville Dupayne hates the very thought of the museum’s existence and cannot wait to see it closed forever.

When Neville Dupayne is found murdered in a manner similar to one of the more spectacular murders featured in the museum’s “Murder Room,” Dalgliesh and his team are assigned to investigate. They learn soon enough of the animosity between Neville and his brother and sister, who seem desperate to keep the museum open, but those are only two of several people they interview who might have wanted to see Neville Dupayne dead. By refusing to continue the Dupayne Museum, Neville Dupayne was in the process of throwing people out of jobs, and even out of living quarters, so it was obvious that this cold natured man had enough enemies to complicate any investigation into his death.

And things do get complicated when a second murder, which appears to be another copycat murder based on information found in the “Murder Room,” is discovered at the museum. The Murder Room is likely keep most readers guessing right up to the point the murderer is revealed – and beyond, because of the romance with which James closes this chapter of Dalgliesh’s story.

The audio version of The Murder Room is read by Charles Keating who is a master of British accents. His use of multiple accents and voice inflections makes the characters easy to distinguish from one another and was, I think, particularly effective in creating one of my favorite P.D. James characters of all-time, Tally, the lonely caretaker who lives in a small cottage behind the museum. Readers who have the time, and who enjoy audio books, would do themselves a favor to listen to this one rather than reading it. This was fun.

Rated at: 4.0

The Murder Room

The Murder Room, P.D. James’ twelfth of thirteen mysteries featuring Scotland Yard’s Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is a satisfying addition to that character-driven series. For me, the main attraction to a P.D. James mystery has always been the way her excellent understanding of human psychology allows her to populate each of her novels with so many believable characters. That talent usually complicates her mysteries and keeps readers turning pages all the way to the end and, despite the fact that I listened to this one instead of reading it, The Murder Room was no exception.

In London, a city filled with world-class museums, a tiny museum like the Dupayne can easily slip through the crack and, in fact, this one has. Devoted exclusively to the “interwar years” of England, the lull between world wars with which she was blessed from 1919 to 1939, the Dupayne specializes in rare first editions and artwork of the period. But over time its main attraction has come to be a room everyone calls the “Murder Room,” a space devoted exclusively to the sensational murders of those particular days. The room is filled with exhibits detailing the murders, including pictures of victims and murderers alike, and the few visitors who find their way to the Dupayne seem to spend most of their time there.

But these are tough times for the Dupayne and the three Dupayne siblings to whom it belongs. It is time for them to decide whether or not to keep the museum open, a decision requiring the unanimous consent of the two brothers and their sister, and one that is starting to seem more and more unlikely to be reached because Dr. Neville Dupayne hates the very thought of the museum’s existence and cannot wait to see it closed forever.

When Neville Dupayne is found murdered in a manner similar to one of the more spectacular murders featured in the museum’s “Murder Room,” Dalgliesh and his team are assigned to investigate. They learn soon enough of the animosity between Neville and his brother and sister, who seem desperate to keep the museum open, but those are only two of several people they interview who might have wanted to see Neville Dupayne dead. By refusing to continue the Dupayne Museum, Neville Dupayne was in the process of throwing people out of jobs, and even out of living quarters, so it was obvious that this cold natured man had enough enemies to complicate any investigation into his death.

And things do get complicated when a second murder, which appears to be another copycat murder based on information found in the “Murder Room,” is discovered at the museum. The Murder Room is likely keep most readers guessing right up to the point the murderer is revealed – and beyond, because of the romance with which James closes this chapter of Dalgliesh’s story.

The audio version of The Murder Room is read by Charles Keating who is a master of British accents. His use of multiple accents and voice inflections makes the characters easy to distinguish from one another and was, I think, particularly effective in creating one of my favorite P.D. James characters of all-time, Tally, the lonely caretaker who lives in a small cottage behind the museum. Readers who have the time, and who enjoy audio books, would do themselves a favor to listen to this one rather than reading it. This was fun.

Rated at: 4.0

>The Murder Room

>The Murder Room, P.D. James’ twelfth of thirteen mysteries featuring Scotland Yard’s Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is a satisfying addition to that character-driven series. For me, the main attraction to a P.D. James mystery has always been the way her excellent understanding of human psychology allows her to populate each of her novels with so many believable characters. That talent usually complicates her mysteries and keeps readers turning pages all the way to the end and, despite the fact that I listened to this one instead of reading it, The Murder Room was no exception.

In London, a city filled with world-class museums, a tiny museum like the Dupayne can easily slip through the crack and, in fact, this one has. Devoted exclusively to the “interwar years” of England, the lull between world wars with which she was blessed from 1919 to 1939, the Dupayne specializes in rare first editions and artwork of the period. But over time its main attraction has come to be a room everyone calls the “Murder Room,” a space devoted exclusively to the sensational murders of those particular days. The room is filled with exhibits detailing the murders, including pictures of victims and murderers alike, and the few visitors who find their way to the Dupayne seem to spend most of their time there.

But these are tough times for the Dupayne and the three Dupayne siblings to whom it belongs. It is time for them to decide whether or not to keep the museum open, a decision requiring the unanimous consent of the two brothers and their sister, and one that is starting to seem more and more unlikely to be reached because Dr. Neville Dupayne hates the very thought of the museum’s existence and cannot wait to see it closed forever.

When Neville Dupayne is found murdered in a manner similar to one of the more spectacular murders featured in the museum’s “Murder Room,” Dalgliesh and his team are assigned to investigate. They learn soon enough of the animosity between Neville and his brother and sister, who seem desperate to keep the museum open, but those are only two of several people they interview who might have wanted to see Neville Dupayne dead. By refusing to continue the Dupayne Museum, Neville Dupayne was in the process of throwing people out of jobs, and even out of living quarters, so it was obvious that this cold natured man had enough enemies to complicate any investigation into his death.

And things do get complicated when a second murder, which appears to be another copycat murder based on information found in the “Murder Room,” is discovered at the museum. The Murder Room is likely keep most readers guessing right up to the point the murderer is revealed – and beyond, because of the romance with which James closes this chapter of Dalgliesh’s story.

The audio version of The Murder Room is read by Charles Keating who is a master of British accents. His use of multiple accents and voice inflections makes the characters easy to distinguish from one another and was, I think, particularly effective in creating one of my favorite P.D. James characters of all-time, Tally, the lonely caretaker who lives in a small cottage behind the museum. Readers who have the time, and who enjoy audio books, would do themselves a favor to listen to this one rather than reading it. This was fun.

Rated at: 4.0

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Simply put, I did not enjoy this book – not at all. It is pretentious, wordy and boring and is filled with enough cardboard characters to fill a book of paper dolls. But, I am certainly grateful to its author, Marisha Pessl, for reminding me that I will not live forever and that I should never again waste my time on a 514 page novel as irritating and boring as this one, two emotions that I’ve seldom experienced at the same time.

Some of you will remember that Special Topics in Calamity Physics turned into a bit of an experiment for me because I listened to the first half of the book in its audio version but read the text of the book’s second half for myself. I didn’t plan to do it that way but when I was forced to return the book CDs earlier than expected it seemed like a great opportunity to compare the two versions of the book and my reaction to each of them. Let’s just say that if Emily Janice Card, an actor and singer from North Carolina, had not done such an excellent job with the audio book, I would not have suffered through the second half of the book on my own because I would never have finished the first half.

The book’s plot is straightforward. A sixteen-year old girl and her father, a college professor who changes jobs at least once a year, have reached an agreement that he will stay put for her entire senior year of high school. Completing an entire school year without having to change schools is such a rare thing for Blue van Meer that she feels as if her father has given her an early graduation gift by agreeing to plant roots for the next nine months in Stockton, North Carolina.

Much to her surprise, Blue is almost immediately taken in by a group of students known to everyone else, including teachers, as “the Bluebloods,” a small cluster of the most popular students at St. Gallway led by the school’s film teacher, Hannah Schneider. But this is a coming-of-age novel cloaked in a murder mystery, so Blue quickly learns that she is resented by everyone in the group and is there only at the insistence of Hannah Schneider who has taken a strangely intense interest in Blue. More than half the book concerns Blue’s efforts to fit into the group, something she is at first not really sure she cares to do, and the fascination that the group has with the mysterious Hannah Schneider.

Things finally get interesting when the students take a camping trip to the Smoky Mountains that Ms. Schneider has insisted upon. As revealed in the book’s opening pages, Ms. Schneider does not return from that trip and Blue spends the rest of the book searching through clues that will explain what happened to her and exactly who Hannah Schneider was and what relationship she may have had with Blue’s father. And there you have it: 350 pages used to set-up the real heart of the book, its last 150 pages.

But that’s not the real problem with Special Topics in Calamity Physics. What makes this one so difficult to read is Pessl’s use of what could have been a clever gimmick if it were not so overused and abused for 514 pages. Pessl is apparently a well read individual, and in this, her debut novel, she decided to display her knowledge of world literature by citing book references, both real and made-up ones, as qualifiers for practically every point or description she makes in telling her story, something that was clever, even charming, the first two dozen or so times she did it but which became a terrible bore by the time she had done it a few hundred times, much less what must be well over a thousand times. Such an overabundance of references, be they real or fictional ones, made Blue’s first person narrative difficult to follow and distracted from what should have been the story’s sense of urgency. Pessl’s use of the countless references, and long, drawn-out parenthetical comments, may have been more than self-exhibitionism, however, since the tendency to constantly cite references was part of Blue’s character as well as that of her father. But Pessl, as author, relied so much on this technique that she failed to fully develop the other characters in her book, asking instead that her readers fill in the blanks for themselves based on the often obscure references Blue linked to those characters.

All of these frustrations would perhaps have been worth the time and effort required to get through them were it not for the fact that the “murder mystery” ends in such an open-ended way. There is no clear-cut resolution explaining Hannah Schneider’s death and any link it may have had to Blue’s father. Blue does manage to conjure up an explanation that makes sense to her, based on the limited “inside” information that she has, but it is only one possible answer. Readers expecting the mystery to be solved will have to do more pondering on their own and will wonder if the 514-page effort has really been worth it.

For me, it was not.

Rated at: 2.0

>Special Topics in Calamity Physics

>Simply put, I did not enjoy this book – not at all. It is pretentious, wordy and boring and is filled with enough cardboard characters to fill a book of paper dolls. But, I am certainly grateful to its author, Marisha Pessl, for reminding me that I will not live forever and that I should never again waste my time on a 514 page novel as irritating and boring as this one, two emotions that I’ve seldom experienced at the same time.

Some of you will remember that Special Topics in Calamity Physics turned into a bit of an experiment for me because I listened to the first half of the book in its audio version but read the text of the book’s second half for myself. I didn’t plan to do it that way but when I was forced to return the book CDs earlier than expected it seemed like a great opportunity to compare the two versions of the book and my reaction to each of them. Let’s just say that if Emily Janice Card, an actor and singer from North Carolina, had not done such an excellent job with the audio book, I would not have suffered through the second half of the book on my own because I would never have finished the first half.

The book’s plot is straightforward. A sixteen-year old girl and her father, a college professor who changes jobs at least once a year, have reached an agreement that he will stay put for her entire senior year of high school. Completing an entire school year without having to change schools is such a rare thing for Blue van Meer that she feels as if her father has given her an early graduation gift by agreeing to plant roots for the next nine months in Stockton, North Carolina.

Much to her surprise, Blue is almost immediately taken in by a group of students known to everyone else, including teachers, as “the Bluebloods,” a small cluster of the most popular students at St. Gallway led by the school’s film teacher, Hannah Schneider. But this is a coming-of-age novel cloaked in a murder mystery, so Blue quickly learns that she is resented by everyone in the group and is there only at the insistence of Hannah Schneider who has taken a strangely intense interest in Blue. More than half the book concerns Blue’s efforts to fit into the group, something she is at first not really sure she cares to do, and the fascination that the group has with the mysterious Hannah Schneider.

Things finally get interesting when the students take a camping trip to the Smoky Mountains that Ms. Schneider has insisted upon. As revealed in the book’s opening pages, Ms. Schneider does not return from that trip and Blue spends the rest of the book searching through clues that will explain what happened to her and exactly who Hannah Schneider was and what relationship she may have had with Blue’s father. And there you have it: 350 pages used to set-up the real heart of the book, its last 150 pages.

But that’s not the real problem with Special Topics in Calamity Physics. What makes this one so difficult to read is Pessl’s use of what could have been a clever gimmick if it were not so overused and abused for 514 pages. Pessl is apparently a well read individual, and in this, her debut novel, she decided to display her knowledge of world literature by citing book references, both real and made-up ones, as qualifiers for practically every point or description she makes in telling her story, something that was clever, even charming, the first two dozen or so times she did it but which became a terrible bore by the time she had done it a few hundred times, much less what must be well over a thousand times. Such an overabundance of references, be they real or fictional ones, made Blue’s first person narrative difficult to follow and distracted from what should have been the story’s sense of urgency. Pessl’s use of the countless references, and long, drawn-out parenthetical comments, may have been more than self-exhibitionism, however, since the tendency to constantly cite references was part of Blue’s character as well as that of her father. But Pessl, as author, relied so much on this technique that she failed to fully develop the other characters in her book, asking instead that her readers fill in the blanks for themselves based on the often obscure references Blue linked to those characters.

All of these frustrations would perhaps have been worth the time and effort required to get through them were it not for the fact that the “murder mystery” ends in such an open-ended way. There is no clear-cut resolution explaining Hannah Schneider’s death and any link it may have had to Blue’s father. Blue does manage to conjure up an explanation that makes sense to her, based on the limited “inside” information that she has, but it is only one possible answer. Readers expecting the mystery to be solved will have to do more pondering on their own and will wonder if the 514-page effort has really been worth it.

For me, it was not.

Rated at: 2.0

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Simply put, I did not enjoy this book – not at all. It is pretentious, wordy and boring and is filled with enough cardboard characters to fill a book of paper dolls. But, I am certainly grateful to its author, Marisha Pessl, for reminding me that I will not live forever and that I should never again waste my time on a 514 page novel as irritating and boring as this one, two emotions that I’ve seldom experienced at the same time.

Some of you will remember that Special Topics in Calamity Physics turned into a bit of an experiment for me because I listened to the first half of the book in its audio version but read the text of the book’s second half for myself. I didn’t plan to do it that way but when I was forced to return the book CDs earlier than expected it seemed like a great opportunity to compare the two versions of the book and my reaction to each of them. Let’s just say that if Emily Janice Card, an actor and singer from North Carolina, had not done such an excellent job with the audio book, I would not have suffered through the second half of the book on my own because I would never have finished the first half.

The book’s plot is straightforward. A sixteen-year old girl and her father, a college professor who changes jobs at least once a year, have reached an agreement that he will stay put for her entire senior year of high school. Completing an entire school year without having to change schools is such a rare thing for Blue van Meer that she feels as if her father has given her an early graduation gift by agreeing to plant roots for the next nine months in Stockton, North Carolina.

Much to her surprise, Blue is almost immediately taken in by a group of students known to everyone else, including teachers, as “the Bluebloods,” a small cluster of the most popular students at St. Gallway led by the school’s film teacher, Hannah Schneider. But this is a coming-of-age novel cloaked in a murder mystery, so Blue quickly learns that she is resented by everyone in the group and is there only at the insistence of Hannah Schneider who has taken a strangely intense interest in Blue. More than half the book concerns Blue’s efforts to fit into the group, something she is at first not really sure she cares to do, and the fascination that the group has with the mysterious Hannah Schneider.

Things finally get interesting when the students take a camping trip to the Smoky Mountains that Ms. Schneider has insisted upon. As revealed in the book’s opening pages, Ms. Schneider does not return from that trip and Blue spends the rest of the book searching through clues that will explain what happened to her and exactly who Hannah Schneider was and what relationship she may have had with Blue’s father. And there you have it: 350 pages used to set-up the real heart of the book, its last 150 pages.

But that’s not the real problem with Special Topics in Calamity Physics. What makes this one so difficult to read is Pessl’s use of what could have been a clever gimmick if it were not so overused and abused for 514 pages. Pessl is apparently a well read individual, and in this, her debut novel, she decided to display her knowledge of world literature by citing book references, both real and made-up ones, as qualifiers for practically every point or description she makes in telling her story, something that was clever, even charming, the first two dozen or so times she did it but which became a terrible bore by the time she had done it a few hundred times, much less what must be well over a thousand times. Such an overabundance of references, be they real or fictional ones, made Blue’s first person narrative difficult to follow and distracted from what should have been the story’s sense of urgency. Pessl’s use of the countless references, and long, drawn-out parenthetical comments, may have been more than self-exhibitionism, however, since the tendency to constantly cite references was part of Blue’s character as well as that of her father. But Pessl, as author, relied so much on this technique that she failed to fully develop the other characters in her book, asking instead that her readers fill in the blanks for themselves based on the often obscure references Blue linked to those characters.

All of these frustrations would perhaps have been worth the time and effort required to get through them were it not for the fact that the “murder mystery” ends in such an open-ended way. There is no clear-cut resolution explaining Hannah Schneider’s death and any link it may have had to Blue’s father. Blue does manage to conjure up an explanation that makes sense to her, based on the limited “inside” information that she has, but it is only one possible answer. Readers expecting the mystery to be solved will have to do more pondering on their own and will wonder if the 514-page effort has really been worth it.

For me, it was not.

Rated at: 2.0