The Disappearing is a mystery set in a town in northern Florida. Young women are vanishing, no one knows why. Is it nefarious, or just girls being girls?
The Disappearing struck me as more of a character study than a story. Told from multiple POVs, it moved at a glacial pace. Rather than building suspense, this writing style served to mask the true chain of events with the irrelevancies inherent in the stream-of-consciousness of unreliable narrators, which for me, resulted in a loss of interest in the overall plot. However, the characters were truly deep and artfully drawn. I just didn’t like them well enough to remain interested in their deepest thoughts.
Michael Connelly has done it again! Trunk Music, the 5th Harry Bosch novel, has everything that Connelly is famous for. Complex characters. An intricate plot. Setting as character. Twists and turns. Harry Bosch continues to grow as a hero, with all of his foibles and flaws. One of Connelly’s great strengths is his ability to provide half a dozen perfectly reasonable explanations for the same chain of events, getting the reader to buy into one of them before tearing it down and selling the reader on another. And another. And another! Don’t miss this book.
The Guardians is a typical John Grisham novel. That is to say, it is well-written and the legal acumen is superb. This book is the story of a storefront legal office in Savannah that scours the prisons for innocent inmates – not only innocent, but who have a decent chance of exoneration by a group of limited manpower and means. The protagonist is Cullen Post of Guardian Ministries, a lawyer who is also an Episcopal priest. He takes on a client, Quincy Miller, who was railroaded on a murder charge in a corrupt Florida town and has been languishing in prison for over twenty years. As the story commences, it becomes known that there are still some bad guys around who would like to keep Miller in jail and the murder case closed. So an atmosphere of danger has been established. The book faithfully chronicles Post’s investigation of Miller’s case, which takes him back and forth across the southeastern US, where he meets many interesting and well-drawn characters. In the early stages of the investigation, no one outside of Miller and Guardian Ministries even knows someone is looking into the case, so the impending sense of doom is still present, but not imminent. However, Post knows that at some point, the people who engineered Miller’s conviction will become aware of Guardian’s activities, and consequences may ensue. The climax comes in an unexpected manner about two-thirds of the way through, but then Post and Guardian get the almighty FBI involved, who bring the bad guys are swiftly to heel. So the last third of the book is simply a detailed account of Miller’s exoneration (a foregone conclusion by now), which isn’t really very suspenseful. Grisham has had a problem with endings since he began writing, and he can also become immersed in the legal details that he knows so well, at the expense of the story. That’s why I’ve docked the book a star. However, the Guardians is still a fascinating read, well worth the time.
American Dirt is one of the best novels I have read. It’s realistic, poignant, beautifully written and well-researched. It’s the story of an affluent Mexican woman from Acapulco who is driven from he home when her family is massacred by a drug cartel, because her husband, a journalist, wrote a newspaper article about a local drug lord. The woman, Lydia, and her eight-year old son Luca find themselves a part of the great horde of migrants making their way to the United States in search of a better life. Along the way, they meet many memorable characters, most good, some evil. Most importantly, I gained a deep and lasting appreciation of the migrant experience. American Dirt has been pilloried by some in the media who think that the author did not have the qualifications to write it, i.e., she is not Mexican, not a migrant, and did not live the experience herself. This is extremely wrong-headed. Ms. Cummins has done a great service for Mexican, Central American and South American migrants by popularizing their tragic experiences, much as John Steinbeck did for American tenant farmers during the dust bowl in Grapes of Wrath, and Herman Wouk for victims of the Holocaust in Winds of War. One does not have to be a member of an ethnic group to empathize with its members or accurately recount their experiences-basic humanity and a talent for writing and research is all that’s required. The book has also been criticized for fictionalizing a great tragedy of our times, but the novelist Ayn Rand knew that popular fiction is often a much more effective means of promoting social change than mere journalism is. The author has been accused of stereotyping Mexicans, but all I found here were well-drawn, complex characters. I verified her research continuously as I read the book, and I found no inaccuracies, from the destruction of the beautiful city of Acapulco by the cartels, the pestilence of gangs and warlords haunting the Mexican highways, or the horrors of riding La Bestia, the freight trains that carry the migrants on top of them, between borders. I was particularly heartened by Cummins’ descriptions of the services provided for migrants by ordinary Mexicans, who donate food, water, shelter and support to them in sympathy with their plight. Of course, some may say that my opinion is invalid, because I am not Mexican. But I say kudos to Ms. Cummis for her bravery, which is already resulting in unjust repudiation. No book is perfect, including this one. The story did lag in places due to over-description. And perhaps Ms Cummins should have chosen a more plebian tragedy that caused her protagonist to be uprooted, although the murder of journalists, law enforcement and government official by cartels is rampant in Mexico. But these are minor quibbles about a very great and important book.
Where the Crawdads Sing is an excellent book, but it could have been better. The author’s expertise as a naturalist really shines throughout it, but sometimes, things get lost in that light. The novel is many things — a coming of age story, a murder mystery, a commentary on human relationships in a small town, and a lyrical description of life in eastern North Carolina — and perhaps, the author tried to do a little too much. There are times that her descriptive passages obscure the plot, causing me to gloss over passages that maybe I shouldn’t have to, to get to the meat of the story. And as a North Carolina resident, I found inconsistencies. Owens has her characters traveling to Asheville quite a bit. Sometimes there is a solid reason for this, but sometimes it’s just to visit a city. Problem is, Asheville is just about the furthest NC city (7-8 hours, by car) that they could choose — there are many closer alternatives. Owens occasionally writes in dialect, but the dialects in Crawdads are not those I’ve heard spoken in that part of North Carolina – nowhere did I find a trace of the Elizabethan “hoi toider” speech commpn to that area. I also thought that the story ended quite abruptly – I would have appreciated more time with a middle-aged and older Marsh Girl. Lest you put these criticisms down to mere quibbling, I still think the novel is exceptional, but I also think the points mentioned above justify docking it one star. Read this book. You will be doing yourself a great injustice if you don’t.
There are many reasons to like The Quaker. Chief among them are the meticulous descriptions of Scotland, Glasgow, and Scottish life and culture. I also greatly enjoyed the Scottish dialect throughout the book. The novel also does a good job of reflecting the frustration that law enforcement officials must feel when an investigation proves intractable. It also depicted how random events can be construed as important, and how this can further obfuscate things. However, I docked The Quaker a star because I felt that the police were portrayed as a little too unobservant, and the facts that the protagonist uncovered to solve the case arose a little too conveniently. Nevertheless, I think Liam McIlvanney deserves kudos for his work, and that my reading this novel was time well spent.
The latest offering of new Sherlock Holmes stories from Belanger Books, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson – The Early Adventures, is out as a three-volume set. Volume 1 contains my latest story, The Adventure of the Persistent Pugilist. Set immediately after the events chronicled by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet, it’s an offbeat tale of Holmes’ investigation of the murder of a sitting member of the House of Lords. It gives insight into Watson’s state of health in those early days, as well as his first exposure to some of Holmes’ more unusual methods of investigation. It’s available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Dr-Watson-Adventures-ebook/dp/B081V29MFD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SGQ0X9Z4LAS7&keywords=sherlock+holmes+and+dr.+watson+the+early+adventures&qid=1578405207&sprefix=Sherlock+Holmes+and+D%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-1 .
Sinner or Saint is the first installment of Brenda Donelan’s University Mysteries that I’ve had the pleasure to read. I’m not generally a cozy fan, but I must say that this one has all the elements that true aficionados seek. Criminology professor Marlee McCabe is an interesting and engaging protagonist, and her hometown of Elmwood, South Dakota and it’s Midwestern State University are well-drawn. The book has plenty of offbeat characters – Marlee’s Supper Club of her college cronies, as well as old boyfriends, cops and townspeople. The mystery is puzzling with many twists and turns, and the solution is unexpected but satisfying as an evildoer gets his (or her!) just desserts. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and to future installments. I did drop the rating by one star because of the slow pace and lack of tension.
An excellent book about broken people and their animal companions. The stories tell of life, and life is not always pretty, or elegant, or even worth living sometimes. You will find pathos here, but the author is well aware that there is beauty in pathos, even though it may be difficult or uncomfortable to notice. Her message is that there is primal bond between people and their pets, and sometimes an animal can give a person things that another human cannot, or will not. Some of the stories also depict the cruelty towards animals of which humans are capable, and it is hard to read these passages, but it is noteworthy that there’s never any cruelty towards the people from the animals. There’s a lesson in that.
Karin Slaughter loves broken characters. Maybe too much. And maybe that’s why I can’t give five stars to this book. There’s a lot of good in it–the plotting, the pace, the wordsmithery and the suspense. But the characters, especially those in law enforcement, are so broken that I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to imagine they’d even be there. The characters’ flaws end up taking me out of the story again and and again, distracting me from the rest of the good about the book.
