The Running Grave

The Running Grave

By Robert Galbraith  (J.K. Rowling)

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. 

The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. 

In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . . 

I'm not even entirely sure how this happened, but I was randomly browsing books that might fit the prompt. I haven't read any earlier books in the series, but just decided to read the preview on a whim, and 10% of the book later (which turned out to be a sizable chunk, this book is over 900 pages long), I ended up checking it out. One of the biggest persuaders was "Jayson's" review on GoodReads which took multi-chapter chunks and reviewed them in turn, giving their own thoughts and predictions on the mysteries. It was just the right amount of intrigue without the dramatics. 

[Sidenote: I absolutely cannot stand the number of reviews on GoodReads which seem to exist solely to demonstrate the reviewer's library of gifs, reaction images, and emojis and describe the books only by superlatives. The YA ones are the worst, here's one I found after just three minutes of idle searching:

WHAT A GREAT BOOK!!! 🌷💖🎀

A BEAUTIFUL READ, JUST LIKE ITS BEAUTIFUL COVER! 💍🌹😼

If you’re a fan of Stephanie Garber and Holly Black, then read it IMMEDIATELY…😘
FINALLY, a lovely fantasy read after so long! 🤗

This person writes reviews like they have a brain injury. Anyway, the nicely organized review by Jayson  - and this seems to be Jayson's M.O. - was a nice surprise.]

So I was somewhat forewarned and forearmed against the potential problem of diving into a series halfway and not knowing who anyone is. I also had the bare bones of the relationship between Robin and Cormoran - apparently full of Unresolved Sexual Tension - and the nice thing about this book is that since they're separated for a good chunk of it while Robin is undercover, we spend a minimal amount of time on their interactions which, for someone like me who is only reading this because of a macabre interest in modern day cults rather than an interest in seeing whether Robin and Comoran smooch (Spoiler: they don't), bettered my reading experience.

I assume most people who read about cults assume that they themselves would never fall prey to one, which is exactly what I would assume about myself. I have enough confidence in my cynicism and venality to feel that I wouldn't be tempted by ideas of grandeur and hidden secrets to the meaning of life - if only I give up all my creature comforts.

Now, I absolutely think that anyone who doesn't have the choice to leave would be indoctrinated like anyone else - it's basically torture with a side of brainwashing. But the question is why people who have an opportunity to leave, like the retreat members, after one week, would ever stay. The Running Grave answers this question somewhat indirectly. Obviously Robin would leave, were she not investigating the cult, but we get to interact with Will Edensor, a cultist who is "questioning" - we can easily understand why would find himself trapped, as he comes across as someone who is trying to understand everything and, when given no rational explanation, finds he must believe the supernatural. He also seems to think he's smarter than he is. And people who have no experience with normal loving relationships could easily be taken in by the ersatz strings-attached kind of love that the cult provides. 

But as unpopular as Rowling is among the liberal faction these days, you have to give her credit where credit is due: she can write a doorstopper of a book that doesn't feel long at all. Little did I know that I would be gulping up a 960 page book in a matter of days (when I had other books to finish first). The sense of dread that permeates the chapters, particularly Robin's, as she gets further and further entangled, is a masterclass in keeping suspense up. And we're able to see how Robin's weeks and then months slowly begin to break her down, and the process doesn't feel rushed or unnatural.  Now I will say that with the length, I did find myself forgetting or confusing people. I had trouble keeping the Dougherty and the Pirbright families separate, even though the children were fairly distinct, since both involved young kids in the early days of the cult.

I congratulated myself on figuring out very early on that Daiyu, the Drowned Prophet, did not actually drown at the beach (and didn't even actually go), but I assumed for most of the book that she'd been drowned at the farm instead, possibly accidentally while her parents were trying to set her up as a cult icon.  I did not guess the actual mystery, or the explanation of the cult-within-the-cult. Humorously enough, the cult's actual crimes (which include concealment of corpses, medical maltreatment, rape, and baby snatching!) are basically footnotes by the time we progress to the climax. It all seemed to hang together although I can't say that I love the "detective confronts the killer by themselves in a long monologue tying it all together" which may be a hallmark of the series? I dunno, I ended up reading the first book in the series after this one, and Cormoran does the same thing in that one, so either I'm unlucky or it's a pattern. And, like the personal relationship stuff that I mostly skimmed since I care not a whit about Cormoran's exes or his and Robin's agony about whether to get together or not, the agency's other cases and shenanigans about their employees seemed like so much filler to me, but presumably for those who have been following the series from the beginning, it is more satisfying. For my part, I would have been fine with merely a 700 page book about going undercover at cults.

7: A Book About A Cult

 

 

Person of Interest

Person of Interest
By Theresa Schwegel

Leslie McHugh is married to an undercover cop. She thinks she knows what it’s like to share her life with a man who spends his days living a lie, who keeps secrets for a living, who trusts no one, not even her. She can see the pressure, the fear, the pent-up rage, and, worst of all, the distance growing between them that Craig promised he’d never allow. But what does she really know? Lonely, tired, and starting to drink too much, she knows that their marriage is on the rocks because her husband lives a second life she knows almost nothing about.

When a thousand dollars disappears from their bank account, she wants answers, but before she can even ask the questions, their seventeen-year-old daughter, a real cop’s kid already on a collision course with trouble, turns up at the center of Craig’s investigation into a snitch’s violent death. Leslie’s had enough; she’s determined to get to the truth and protect her family---no matter what the cost.

If not for the Challenge, this would not only have been a likely DNF, but, if finished, would have been forgotten quickly, blending into a mish-mash of other mediocre police thrillers.  However, in writing these reviews, I get to memorialize a book which I cannot, in good conscience, recommend to anyone.

The book is narrated in turn by married couple Craig, a police officer investigating drugs in Chinatown, and his wife, Leslie, dealing with their terrible teenage daughter, Ivy (more on Ivy later). We get off to a rousing start with a fight between the two of them wherein Craig calls Leslie a bitch, and they don't seem to like each other at all. In their separate chapters we also get a window into all the ways they're both individually fucking up: Craig by immersing himself much more deeply into the investigation than his superiors would approve, spending his own money on an underground gambling den, and Leslie by falling for her daughter's theoretical boyfriend, Niko.

The police investigation is totally confounding and I'm not sure it's intentional. Apparently in-fighting between Chinese and Vietnamese gangs is important to the plot, but it's barely explained. I guess, ultimately drugs=bad, but why or how Craig losing money at the gambling table will unlock the whole case is never explained to my satisfaction.

There's so many bad decisions made by Craig and Leslie in the early chapters that you never really get on their side. They never become sympathetic, a critical failure of the book. Aside from Craig's stealing marital funds for an unsanctioned job (while calling his wife a bitch) Leslie decides that her drug dealing daughter's activities should be kept from Craig at all costs. So Ivy gets picked up from a rave, high and carrying ecstasy and Leslie's reaction is to cover for her, to the extent that she won't even mention to Craig that Ivy is grounded, in case he asks why (and she's incapable of lying about THAT, I guess).  Great parenting! When she's not doing that, she's flirting with her daughter's boyfriend, going to his jazz shows, and assuming Craig is having an affair (he's not).

Nevertheless, the book offers no real points of interest until Leslie is drugged, followed home, and violently raped. It's gruesome and comes out of nowhere and completely changes the tone of the book. Now Craig and Leslie are united against the rapist, whose identity takes up the plot of most of the last section of the book. Then, Craig kills him off-screen.  It's like Schwegel wanted the emotional payoff of a revenge sequence but because both of these characters are so unsympathetic for so long, mostly you're just appalled.  

In retrospect, I realized that while I checked the general ratings on Choi's A Person of Interest, I'd just read the blurb on Schwegel's book and assumed it would be a typical run of the mill procedural. I did not expect (more fool me) how... unpleasant it would be. You feel grimy and unhappy reading it.

And a minor quibble, after all that, but the title makes no sense. There's never really a "person of interest" in the book. At point Craig and Leslie call someone that, but (a) it's a lie and (b) this is like 90% through the book. Nor is there ever really an investigation into a snitch's violent death, as the blurb suggests. There is a death, about halfway through, but I'm not sure he's a snitch. 

And finally, *spoiler alert* I guess but did they ever explain how the bad guy (completely forgot his name since it's introduced at the very end) knows that Leslie is the wife of this undercover cop? It sounds like he and Leslie were both somewhat coincidentally in the club together and he took a chance to sow more discord and frame Silk, but how did he know Craig was an undercover cop when none of the people Craig was gambling with seemed to know? For awhile we think the rapist is Juan/Yuan, which makes sense that he knows Craig is a cop, but how does this other guy know Leslie is related to the case? Is it a plot hole, or do I just not care enough to pay attention? We'll never know.

38: Two Books With The Same Title

Good Girl, Bad Blood

Good Girl, Bad Blood

By Holly Jackson

Pip is not a detective anymore.

With the help of Ravi Singh, she released a true-crime podcast about the murder case they solved together last year. The podcast has gone viral, yet Pip insists her investigating days are behind her.

But she will have to break that promise when someone she knows goes missing. Jamie Reynolds has disappeared, on the very same night the town hosted a memorial for the sixth-year anniversary of the deaths of Andie Bell and Sal Singh.

The police won't do anything about it. And if they won't look for Jamie then Pip will, uncovering more of her town's dark secrets along the way... and this time everyone is listening. But will she find him before it's too late?

This is the second in the series, which I reserved almost as soon as I finished the first one... last year, though it took so long to be available now the third one's slated for publishing, and since I didn't write a review of the first, we'll just have to guess at how they compare to each other. I liked parts of this one, and didn't like parts, so it's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall a positive impression.

What I liked: obviously, the lengthy recap at the beginning, which was necessary for moi, since I never remember anything, and that it was done in such a way that it didn't seem forced or anything. It was good, I appreciated the recap, and helpful, since many of the people and events from A Good Girl's Guide to Murder carryover or have additional effects and storylines in Good Girl, Bad Blood.  

I liked that Ravi was there but not really shoehorned in as a more active participant since this mystery wasn't directly concerning him.  A lot of times it feels like shows or books with popular characters have pressure to keep those characters a big focus of subsequent plots, even though it doesn't make much narrative sense.  I also liked that the "cast" of characters was manageable - even after reading the recap of the first book, it seemed like there was just a lot of different plots to keep track of in that one. 

I also liked Pip, and the development of her character - with a caveat.  The extended "scream" sequence, after she finds out Max Hastings is acquitted is... a bit much.  I appreciated that the trauma from the first book affected her in tangible ways in this one, but because the story is so compressed here (like a week from beginning to end), even spending one whole day on it feels like A LOT of the book.

And the storyline was also a bit suspect too - so in an effort to figure out which young man is the one "Leila" is looking for, both Stanley and Luke are drawn out to meet her - and Stanley's meeting place just happens to be where Luke's drug deals go down? Sure, Jan.  And I liked that Jackson at least attempted to address WHY ON EARTH Leila would use a local person's pictures for the scam, but I found the explanation to be very silly and unbelievable.  And I think, narratively, it was annoying that the reveal about Child Brunswick came so late in the game - yes, in real life, we discover things when we discover them, but when you have readers attempting to solve the puzzle along with the detective, it feels a little cheap to pull in a HUGE aspect of the mystery at like, 80% of the way through.

I also liked, again, the structure of the book.  I can't remember if the first one had all the diagrams and pictures, but those, along with the interview records and other notes, made the reading experience fun.  I liked getting those

Although, haha, where on earth does Pip live that can comfortably manage: two murders, two kidnappings, another miscellaneous missing child, a relocated person in witness protection, not to mention assorted other crimes, like drug dealing, underage relationships, uh, I know I'm forgetting some, but you get the idea.  I mean sure, okay, all that, but ALSO able to walk from one of town to the other in less than an hour?  Hmmm. 

I do see that there's going to be a third one, and I think I'll plan on reading that one too.  I like the style quite a bit,and although I didn't like this one quite as much as the first, it was still very readable.

One By One

One by One

By Ruth Ware

 

Getting snowed in at a luxurious, rustic ski chalet high in the French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world. Especially when there’s a breathtaking vista, a full-service chef and housekeeper, a cozy fire to keep you warm, and others to keep you company. Unless that company happens to be eight coworkers…each with something to gain, something to lose, and something to hide.

When the cofounder of Snoop, a trendy London-based tech startup, organizes a weeklong trip for the team in the French Alps, it starts out as a corporate retreat like any other: PowerPoint presentations and strategy sessions broken up by mandatory bonding on the slopes. But as soon as one shareholder upends the agenda by pushing a lucrative but contentious buyout offer, tensions simmer and loyalties are tested. The storm brewing inside the chalet is no match for the one outside, however, and a devastating avalanche leaves the group cut off from all access to the outside world. Even worse, one Snooper hadn’t made it back from the slopes when the avalanche hit.

As each hour passes without any sign of rescue, panic mounts, the chalet grows colder, and the group dwindles further…one by one.

I've read a few Ruth Ware books now, and not been incredibly impressed (The Woman in Cabin 10 was okay, although had a weird anti-climax ending, and the last one, The Turn of the Key, I really didn't like the ending just because I thought it boggled all rational thought that a person would go to jail and get the death penalty rather than simply admit the death was an accident caused by a young child) but they're so popular, I can't resist checking them out.  And this one I really had a good time with!

We get two perspectives, Liz, the reluctant minority shareholder, dragged along on a corporate "retreat" that's actually a week-long presentation about whether or not to accept a buyout, and Erin, the ski chalet Girl Friday, who has a secret of her own.  The book moves at a pretty good clip, I think I finished it in about two hours or so, and there really isn't any slow point.  Yes, we find out who the murderer is about two-thirds of the way in, and yes, it's pretty clear who it is even before that, but the last third is basically a cat and mouse game which is thrilling in and of itself.  Ha, I was just going back over reviews for another of Ware's books, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and all the reviews on the first page of Amazon are all about how ridiculous that this woman drinks tea with a murderer - I wonder if the tea drinking scene in One by One is a reaction to that, which would be amusing. 

It was certainly surprising to me how much of the crime(s) were planned - since at lot of it depended on circumstances/opportunities the murderer wouldn't have been able to predict.  I guess if the first go-round wouldn't have worked, they'd have just kept (SPOILER ALERT) carrying around a red jacket and faking their skiing the bunny slopes while hoping to run into their victim on the black trails, while other people are conveniently posted in the ski-lift to witness the faux Eva go by?? Hmmm, that seems... complicated.

Are the characters in One by One more than just two-dimensional? Eh, not really.  I mean, it's a thriller? A lot of people have secrets (although really, just our two main characters are hiding anything particular) and people start dying and there's not a lot of time to take stock and think about your hopes and dreams. I did think the little sections before each chapter about Liz and Erin's "Snoop" followers was dumb though, we get all that information from the narrative itself, we don't really need it there, plus it barely changes throughout the book. 

I will say that it was compulsively readable, and probably my favorite of all Ware's books (though again, not as high a compliment as it might be) and just the kind of thing you want to read when curled up with a warm blanket on a cold winter day. 

Winter Counts

Winter Counts

By David Heska Wanbli Weiden

 

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

I think I've said this before but the hardest books to review are not the bad ones, or the good ones, but the average ones.  What can you say about a book that does a reasonably decent job, but offers neither easy critiques nor glowing commendations? I suppose this scenario is what sets an excellent reviewer from a middling one (like me) - if I were a pro, could I pierce the heart of the book? Well, I'm not, but I'd like to set things down, so here goes:

The setting is the most unique part of the story, which is otherwise a fairly generic "enforcer type goes after hardened criminals to protect/defend his family and winds up uncovering corruption and doling out justice".  It's a good thing, then, that the setting can carry so much of the story.  It influences everything from the circumstances of the crime, to the lack of justice*, and the particular methods of deus ex machina that are used (i.e., the Lakota yuwipi which gives Virgil the insight to discover where the next location is).  

Because the book hangs so heavily on that frame, I think the plot doesn't stand on its own as much as it ought to: both Virgil's initial meeting of cop Dennis at the Colorado bar, and Virgil tracking Rick Crow to the abandoned museum were coincidences that don't make sense on closer inspection.  Dennis just happens to be undercover at the only bar we know Rick frequents in Denver? And Rick is hanging out at the museum after everyone else left... why? Why did they go to the museum in the first place, since it seems like the heroin crew has their own hide-hole? I mean, I assume Rick wasn't just sitting there because he was waiting for Virgil (and then Ben) to drive up and beat the shit out of him.    And I guess we're not going to find out how the heroin crew knew Nathan's cousin was wearing a wire (aside from "it was obvious")? Lol, well, sure, I'll accept that one, I guess.

I liked the main character, Virgil, and I liked Chef Lack, and the way Virgil initially thought he was full of it (uh, yeah, let's forage for turnips) but eventually came around to someone who genuinely wanted better for the reservations and was doing good.  There's nothing I would really point to as being bad or ridiculous, or dumb, or unbelievable, just you know, an okay kind of crime thriller. 

*If all the book does is get more people aware of the shitty and messed up legal system that governs the reservations, then it's been worth it to me.  This country systematically took rights away from native people and destroyed their culture as much as possible, deliberately, and THEN, in an effort to correct the awful mess it made, made even more laws that fucked people over.  The fact that the reservations are basically governed like the Wild West, and criminal prosecutions are subject to the federal whims is not, as the author points out in the afterward, a secret.  After basically undercutting every cultural method of resolving disputes internally, the U.S. government then turned around and said, "Guess we fucked up before, so to make it up to you, we're going to leave you on your own, just like you wanted, albeit two hundred years ago, before we sacked your nations and salted the ground." It's like that saying, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas." Is bringing the nations under state law the answer? Probably not, but man, is the current system not working.  American Indian/Indigenous Peoples law is a hideous hodge-podge of papered over inequities, and we're apparently not going to do anything about it except feel bad.  That money, sitting in an account for taking the Black Hills? That's true.  Anyway, what am I doing about it, except writing angry screeds on book reviews that no one reads? Yeah, I know.

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

Disappearing Earth

Disappearing Earth

By Julia Phillips

One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.

Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska--and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

This one I liked, but it was so slow in the middle sections that I kept peeking at the end, so I could get an idea of whether we were actually headed somewhere, or just going in circles on this kidnapping thing. And for the record, we are going somewhere.  But it sure didn't feel like that for most of the (honestly, relatively short) book.

And the payoff is pretty good, actually!  As we follow a bunch of Kamchatka Penninsula residents for a year after the disappearance of two young girls, we wrap up a bunch of semi-disparate storylines in the last big section, "June".  What was interesting to me was that it looked like a lot of the chapters had been published in advance (some years and years before the book was published), so I wasn't sure if the author had taken a bunch of semi-random stories about Kamchatka women and re-worked them into a kidnapping mystery.

An interesting tidbit is that Julia Phillips isn't from Kamchatka; she's from the U.S., but she spent a few years on the penninsula (or maybe less, it's not quite clear, and she went at different times) and this does read very much more like a U.S. novel than a Russian book (from my admittedly low experience).  In fact, more than anything else, it reminds me of the movie, Wind River, which is about the discovery of a young native woman in the snow on an isolated Wyoming reservation.   The cold, isolation, uneasy and troubled relationship between native and non-native, the role of women in that environment. I didn't even realize till I was reading a description halfway through that all the viewpoints are women, but I did like it - it feels safer, somehow, in a world which can be very harsh, and particularly so here.

Since Phillips isn't writing a mystery, more of a character study, she leaves the ending a bit more optimistic than I think is warranted. Someone who steals an eighteen year old and four years later kidnaps two young girls and the first woman is still there (and alive) a year after the girls arrive? It strains belief.  But it feels  more satisfying this way, I suppose - and you get to go back and kind of track hints and appearances by various characters briefly in others' stories.

The setting is also semi-different. Honestly, considering it's set on the Kamchatka peninsula, I feel like the author tells us that it's isolated and cold and special more than we maybe see it in the narrative - maybe because the viewpoint characters are all in town (even if they're native), we don't get as much a sense of the "interior" as much.  Town is town, after all, and towns everywhere are kind of the same. 

Ten Second Reviews

A Broken Vessel & Whom the Gods Love

By Kate Ross

The second of the Julian Kestrel, regency detective mysteries, I enjoyed this one too. Although there were BY FAR too many clues, that was part of the mystery, and acknowledged by the characters partway through.  It was also entertaining how Kestrel investigated the upper class suspects, his valet Dipper managed the regular tradespeople, and Dipper's prostitute sister Sally handled the underbelly - I thought the use of each of them in their respective spheres was fun.  Kestrel is this time investigating an anonymous note which Sally stole from one of three clients, alluding to a woman in desperate trouble.  She's just died when they find her, and it quickly becomes a murder investigation instead.  Again, some coincidences, but the writing and characters still hold up - I'm checking out the third one as I write.


Aaaaand now I've finished the third, I'm checking out the fourth, and sad that the series will end soon.  Again, far, far too many coincidences (two sets of twins in this one? Not to mention that Kestrel magically lands upon the exact right madhouse by simply wandering around town, ahem) but for whatever reason, I guess I just don't mind them! These feel like dense books, since there's SO MUCH interviewing and discussion, but they're also pleasantly engrossing, especially as the clues start picking up.  I have to say though, these book jackets are driving me crazy, since all the book descriptions give spoilers about the victim and events in the book that don't become really clear until at least halfway through.  I did also guess some of the answers, but was still wholly surprised by the motives, so I'm happy both to be right and to be surprised.  Spoiler here, but I was really put off by the Jewish banker turned rapist subplot.  It felt really out of character and poorly explained how he could actually go through with it, and frankly, left the book on a pretty low note.  But onwards to numero quatro!

Predictably Irrational

By Dan Ariely

Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?

Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.

Soooo, this was fine.  Probably my impression of it is coloured by the fact that I was trying to get my husband interested in it, and it was a complete loss.  I also felt like some of the research was kind of glossed over, in terms of, for example, the chocolate pricing one in the free chapter.  I assume that they controlled for people who came to the table and didn't buy any chocolate when it was 1 and 15 cents respectively but did just pick up a free one, right?  Like, I feel like the total numbers of people getting chocolate had to have gone up (versus those who paid even just one penny) but there isn't really an explanation as to how they covered that, aside from making the sign very small so people had to get close to see it.  But I do find the ideas fascinating, even if more broadly than specifically applicable (like, not everyone is a sucker for advertising) and the chapter on placebos oddly affecting.  Frankly, we should do more experiments with surgery (with knowledge and consent of course) because unnecessarily submitting people to the knife is awful.  But I think the message, that we're all unconsciously doing these things and in some cases, the only cure is to be more conscious, is one that's hit home.

Ten Second Reviews

Cut to the Quick

By Kate Ross

Julian Kestrel is the walking definition of a Regency-era dandy. He cares about little beyond the perfection of his tailoring, he lives for the bon mot, and his life has the specific gravity and the fleeting charm of a soap-bubble. At least that's what he'd like you to think. In fact, it rather suits Kestrel to be perpetually underestimated, particularly when as in this instance his weekend at a glamorous country estate is spoiled by a dead girl's body being found in his bed.

I did like this one - it was a nice break from modern day thrillers, which can be so overwrought.  This one is much more of a classic mystery, with interrogations and secrets discovered, although there is still the confrontation of the murderer, here, it's with the guise of an actual magistrate's duty.  It feels like a pretty chunky book - there's a lot to the back story, which comes out in pieces (and more than a few coincidences, but they aren't the most egregious), so it took me a while to get through it.  Overall, I enjoyed the Regency setting, and the characters, enough to look into the sequel.  Onward and upward!

Comics for a Strange World: A Book of Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

 

This follow up in the Poorly Drawn Lines series was not nearly as good as the first, for some reason.  Possibly because it felt like it focused more on robots and technology than absurdist humor.  So-so, but I would get the first book and skip this one.

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

By Kathryn Harkup

 

This is an alphabetically arranged examination of the poisons used in Agatha Christie's books (funny: you'd never know it from the title).  I really liked this one - first of all, I never realized that Christie was a chemist, and that she kept her poison use really factual and close to reality.  Maybe this is a little embarrassing, but I barely noticed the actual murder weapon when I was reading  - it almost felt superfluous sometimes, since motive seemed so much more important (and Christie always made sure multiple suspects would have been capable of the means).  Harkup goes into detail not only in how Christie used the poison in a particular book/story, but also into the poison itself, famous real life murders, effects on the body, etc.  I have just one complaint, which is that Harkup gets into the chemical properties of the poisons more than is really necessary for most laypeople (and geez, I hope all of her readers are laypeople and not budding young poisoners looking for tips) so I tended to skim the passages about enzymes and receptors and molecules.  But the rest is highly enjoyable, although I would recommend against reading it while sitting with a dying relative receiving morphine, because it will give you bad dreams.

Ten Second Reviews

The Tiger's Wife

By Tea Obreht

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

I liked this one alright when I thought it was going somewhere, i.e., all the stories would somehow relate to one another, but it ended up not really doing that, so for me, it kind of petered out.  It did manage to elicit heavy sadness at the end of the Tiger's Wife portion, so kudos, I suppose, but nothing else really gelled for me.  Did we ever really find out why her grandfather was tramping all over the (other) country?  He was looking for the Deathless Man (in all the right places), and couldn't just wait for like, his patients to die? Was he actually trying to meet up Natalie, also for reasons unknown? Unclear.  This made me look up like, reading guides to The Tiger's Wife, trying to figure out what the point was. It was interesting how the setting of The Tiger's Wife feels more fairy-tale like than many actual fantasy books, despite (or because of?) being based in war-torn eastern Europe. There's definitely you know, motifs and shit, about animals, and war, and medicine, and society, the kind of book you teach a class about in high school.  It was well written, but wandered too much, without sufficient payoff, to be truly great.

Magic for Liars

By Sarah Gailey

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself. 

I liked the beginning of Magic for Liars, before you realize what a terrible PI Ivy is (although of course she still manages to solve multiple mysteries, so she's somewhat of an idiot savant, I guess), but then Ivy started doing that fashionable PI thing of drinking too much and sleeping with possible suspects, and also (not a small thing) telling like, everyone who asks, all about the murder case she is working on.  Even though, as she stresses at one point, the murderer is definitely someone in the school.  And yes, in case you were wondering, she does tell her sister (who by the way, committed the crime) like, every minute detail about the case, including showing her the love notes these students were passing which prove one of them got pregnant.   With almost no prompting whatsoever!  Even if her sister hadn't killed a fellow teacher, that's a huge invasion of privacy.  I liked the premise, but was disappointed by the almost deus ex machina way that Ivy ignored everything about her sister which would have pointed her in the right direction.  For someone who was a PI for fourteen years, it just seemed really sloppy and not clever.  Also, after all that, she still covered up for her sister not only accidentally murdering her lover, but also botching an abortion on a student.  Their whole relationship did not make sense to me.  It's an okay read, but sort of felt frustrating, like the plot and character actions and decisions felt less organic than it should have. 

I'll Never Tell

I'll Never Tell

By Catherine McKenzie

Twenty years ago, seventeen year-old Amanda Holmes was found bludgeoned in a rowboat at the MacAllister family’s Camp Macaw. No one was ever charged with the crime.

Now, after their parents’ sudden deaths, the MacAllister siblings return to camp to read the will and decide what to do with the prime real estate the camp occupies. Ryan needs to sell. Margaux hasn’t made up her mind. Mary believes in leaving well enough alone. Kate and Liddie—the twins—have opposing views. And Sean Booth, the groundskeeper, just hopes he still has a home when all is said and done.

But it’s more complicated than a simple vote. The will stipulates that until they unravel the mystery of what happened to Amanda, they can’t settle the estate. Any one of them could have done it, and each one is holding a piece of the puzzle. Will they work together to finally discover the truth, or will their secrets finally tear the family apart?

This one had an interesting premise and structure (I particularly appreciated the table of everyone's locations, especially when you realize that the characters themselves filled it out) but for me it fell apart a bit at the end.  We had like three "false alarms" of seeming to identify the attempted murderer and then realizing that no, it was actually someone else! At least twice (that I can remember off the top of my head), someone goes to confront the person they think is the murderer by themselves, and I mean, everyone's family is weird, but like, if my newly-realized half-brother was accused of murder and then suspiciously fled the scene, I would not then paddle out towards the deserted island where he decamped to have a heart-to-heart with him.  Although, to be fair, without any actual evidence, how are you going to call the police on that?

And to be honest, the whole half-brother thing didn't do much for me, I mean, they allude to the fact that their parents didn't seem to want any kids, so after having five of their own, they discover that Mr. MacAllister had a baby with a prostitute who is now like eight years old, and they just... act as surrogate family together?  Without any of the other kids (including the incredibly nosy one) finding out? Okay, Jan.  

I think there could have been a whole book on how creepy and dysfunctional Mr. MacAllister was: first with the secret baby having, and then the whole, "treat you like my son, and you are my son, but I won't acknowledge that and when I die, you'll get to fight over who inherits with my other son and all of my daughters, one of whom you want to bone" thing, and the the double whammy of both spying on all his children (with actual surveillance!) and enlisting his pseudo-son but actually his actual son to do the spying.  Phew.  Like, is Mr. MacAllister a psychopath?  I also didn't really follow the whole thing about how he assumed his son (Ryan) did it, and then the police did a DNA test, and somehow that cleared Ryan, but Mr. MacAllister didn't see the DNA test, so he still thought Ryan did it, but then somehow the DNA test was in his spy file after his death, so he had to have seen it at some point, but yadda yadda yadda.  

Finally, I hated the identity of the murderer.  You going to tell me that a fifteen year old girl bludgeoned a seventeen year old girl with a canoe paddle and then just like, sat on it for twenty years?  Clearly got her genes from the Mr. MacAllister side of the family.  I mean, they didn't even add that she was incredibly jacked or anything, to make it more realistic, although maybe the fact that she walked away from a horse-car crash that killed the driver of the car was supposed to be a clue that she was superhuman.  

I kid, I kid.  I did enjoy the lead-up to the denouement, it was a fun setting, and the number of characters was good - I didn't have any difficulty trying to keep anyone straight.  They were all easily distinguishable from the others, and each had their own little quirks.  It also got me thinking about what I'd do if, for example, I had five siblings and one of them murdered someone and then twenty years later committed suicide.  Like, do you say anything to the grieving family and tell them who did it?  Obviously here, the MacAllisters just... didn't say anything.  I mean, it is going to be hard to explain why you didn't say anything EARLIER about seeing a blonde girl whacking another, but that's sort of on you.  Amanda's parents deserve the same closure you all got. 

Bad Blood

Bad Blood

By John Carreyou

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

I finally finally finally got back into reading again (you may have noticed that recent reviews were lackluster, if I even finished the book at all) thanks to Bad Blood.  This one was re-energizing, and you kinda spend the whole thing doing that, "What. the. fuck??" look that I always reference from Chris Rock in Nurse Betty when he sees his dad, played by Morgan Freeman, dancing with no one on the side of the Grand Canyon. Just that sense, you know, that someone very close to you has lost all of their marbles. In this case, that WTF applies to all the people who fell for the cult of Holmes.  For years!  For years they went along with this, although to be fair, it was both a very desirable and beneficial pitch, and also it wasn't immediately apparent that it was rotten to the core.  Although it seems like even a slightly more than cursory look would have taken care of that...?

In retrospect you go, how did they sucker this many people for this long? And the answer apparently is, a combination of complete intimidation of those over whom they held power, and complete ingratiation of those who could have destroyed them.  It's incredible!  When I first heard about it, I definitely gave it a brush off:  pfft, who cares about whether another start-up is toxic and also lied to consumers.  Same shit, different day.  But no!  This was an incredible and incredibly engrossing tale of malignantly bad behavior.  Props to Carreyou for his work, he takes an almost ten year long journey about medical devices and makes it captivating from beginning to end.

For all I've complained in the past, I feel like I have to praise Carreyou's organization of his book, which is both chronological (thank you for an easy to follow and logical progression!) and, because he knows you forget people who only pop in and out occasionally, heavy on the "John-who-ran-the-Edison-room" reminders about who the various people are.  Thank you, Carreyou, for recognizing that I can only retain so much at one time, and minor characters' names and identities in books is not one of them.

Like Five Days at Memorial you kinda leave the book doubting that the villains of the piece even realize that they are in fact the bad guys.  As in that case, Elizabeth and Sunny seem to have kind of doubled down on the position that they've done nothing wrong, although I suppose anyone who has the brazen confidence to do it in the first place doesn't have a lot of room for self-doubt or even second thoughts.

The one thing I wish we'd gotten in this is a bit more wrap up of where the key players stood, particularly (for me) George Shultz, who practically disowned his grandson for whistleblowing this whole house of cards to the ground.  I can't say for sure that I'd have the wherewithal to do what he and Erika did in reporting the misdeeds, but to be personally punished for doing right strikes me as so unfair.   So much collateral damage done.  And for what!  A miracle product that didn't work? Such dishonesty in professing to care about people's health while actually causing harm indiscriminately.  Not to mention poor Ian Gibbons, who carried the shame of it to his death.  It makes you mad, it gets your (forgive the pun) blood up!  And this, for god's sake, explains why regulatory bodies, while annoying, are absolutely and completely necessary. 

Ten Second Reviews

Witchmark

By C. L. Polk

In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own. When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.

I was really excited about a magical Edwardian murder mystery and the reviews were good, but this disappointed.  I will be real honest: I skipped most of the middle of this book, from like, page 100 to page 200, and then I read the last like, thirty pages, because I wanted to know how it ended, but I didn't care about the journey.  That's a summation of my feelings on the book: I liked parts of it, but the writing didn't pull me in, and it felt oddly tense between world-building and character-building.  Each oth got short shrift - for example, Miles' reaction to seeing his sister, from whom he's been estranged for years, and who thought he was dead, was more of a toddlers Do I have to talk to her now? It felt hurky-jerky, the way things were revealed, or switching between scenes.  Interesting setting, but 100 pages in, I still didn't have a feel for the different magical classes, or anything that had happened in the war, two crucial plot lines.   Not quite a DNF, but close enough for government work.

The Woman in Cabin 10

By Ruth Ware

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

Mmm, so the trend of alcoholic women narrators in thrillers is alive and well! To be fair, I think this predates some of them (but postdates, for example, The Girl on the Train, which is sort of the ur-text for these modern thrillers). This one is a doozy: not only is Lo depressed, alcoholic, and claustrophobic, she's also got PTSD from a recent burglary.   She's so skittish the biggest mystery of all isn't the murder but how she manages to hold down a day job.  It was also interesting seeing how much of this was ganked by The Woman in the Window: unreliable narrator, suffering from trauma, disappearing women, the solution involving a woman pretending to be the wife (aside from the actual wife). I was particularly interested because I too, went on a boating cruise in the far northern hemisphere recently, but alas, even leaving aside the midnight murder, our experiences were not at all similar.  For example, if one had wanted to hide a woman on the boat I was on for more than one day, she'd have to be dead already, and preferably in small pieces, since we didn't have even empty cupboards, let alone empty rooms conveniently two floors below the crew. I was reading a little quickly, but did they ever explain whether Richard was behind Lo's burglary too, or was that supposed to be a coincidence? And whoever it was who took the mascara? What I found really a neat twist in this one though, funnily enough, is that there is no big "confrontation" scene - Lo never meets Richard after she finds out what he's done, just keeps on the lam, and I did find that a bit refreshing.  Sometimes these get so formulaic you go, "Well, she's not going to be safe here, she still needs to meet up with the villain in person" - something that The Woman in the Window definitely suffered from, by the way.  I've read a couple of Ware now, and they're not bad, but the glut of lady-led thrillers on the market means you've got to work a lot harder to stand out in a good way. 
 

The Dry

The Dry

By Jane Harper

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.

I hate prompts that require you to evaluate the book before you've read it!  I'm calling this one done, mostly because I could see this as a movie, and whether or not I think it should be a movie, well, I'm not going to ponder that one too deeply.

The conditions for reading it certainly helped me appreciate it: a warm summer day, out on a patio with a glass of rose sangria, waiting for a pizza to be ready for pick up.   You can read almost anything in those conditions and love it.

In this particular case, I very much enjoyed the beginning, felt like the middle was drawn out a bit too long, and was pretty satisfied with the ending.  Unlike the next book for review, I did not guess either answer to the book's two mysteries: What actually happened when Ellie disappeared and was found two days later drowned, and what actually happened twenty years later, when Luke's wife and child are found shot, and Luke dead with a shotgun next to him?

I liked the solution to the current day mystery, as it pretty much made sense and there were some clues, but the mystery of Ellie's disappearance felt like a side trip through irrelevantland. I understand that it added confusion  and tension to the main storyline, but every time we revisited the question, or dealt with Ellie's abusive father and redneck cousin, I got a little bit bored again.  It never rang quite true that the assumption that either Aaron or his father were involved because of a paper with their last name on it, despite their alibis, the ruling of suicide would be so bad as for them to literally pack up and never come back - I don't know, maybe I'm just not giving rural Australia enough credit for being backwards, paranoid, and superstitious.

I'm not going to lie, I was hoping that that the incredible drought (I mean, the novel is called The Dry, after all) was going to have some greater relevance to the story, like, they find new clues about the drowning because the river level is so unnaturally low.  You know how it is, nothing makes you unhappier as a reader than doing plot better than the author.  Not that it would be better, but certainly more dramatic!

Anyway, I enjoyed this enough I would read more by her (and my mother said she's got all of Harper's books, which is a strong recommendation in and of itself - she suggested I would enjoy The Lost Man as it's about a land dispute, which you know gets the old blood going, and sadly enough, she's probably right) and I did like the setting, which makes it at least a little off the well-trodden mystery path. 


04: A Book That Should Be Turned Into A Movie

Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles

Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles

By R. Wayne Schmittberger

Solve logic puzzles AND play sleuth at the same time! This thoroughly unique book—written by the former editor of Games magazine—offers the immersive pleasure of a novel as it follows a group of friends who meet regularly to play murder-mystery games at the island home of a wealthy couple. As you go about completing the puzzles, you’ll learn more about the guests, the house, and the island . . . and uncover a secret about the mansion itself. Maps of the island throughout enhance the atmosphere and draw solvers deeper into the story.

So although I was somewhat incorrect in my original understanding of what this was, I still had a really good time solving the puzzles.  I originally though that this was a story-based book with puzzles to solve, which would require the solving of an earlier puzzle in order to arrive at the correct solution for later puzzles, and this isn't set up that way at all.  It does have a loose "story" (seven guests are invited to the island and solve puzzles, but every so often there's an allusion to some secret reason the guests were invited, which is resolved in the final puzzle) but none of the puzzles require information or answers from any of the other puzzles.

What I appreciated about this book was the variety of logic puzzles (some had maps, some were based on tournaments, some were very traditional, and I just skipped the ones that asked about card hands, since I don't have time for that) and the care the author took to keep the puzzles as little confusing as possible.  What I mean by that is, names weren't similar and didn't start with the same letter, clues and important categories weren't overly long or unnecessarily numerical or anything like that.  For example, there weren't any puzzles that required you to figure out if events took place in 1912, 1931, 1971, 1928 or 1952.  Maybe it's small news, but the online logic problem site I've been going to (puzzle baron, if you're curious) seems way too invested in small puzzles which are incredibly confusing for keeping the categories straight.

I liked that we followed the same group of people the whole way, although it took me a bit to get used to the "one of these people is lying" puzzles.  I would do a few puzzles a week, and with some pauses, it took me about two months to finish.  It felt substantial.   I also really appreciated the solution key in the back, along with the explanations, they helped me when I couldn't figure out what some of the early puzzles were.  I checked it sort of religiously, although I suppose that wasn't quite necessary, since the correct answers didn't impact any later puzzles.  In fact, if there would be one change for the next book, I'd love if one or more of the puzzles had hints which relied on previous puzzles.

It's not a normal book, and I'm not at all sure that I was really following the prompt, since this is more like a book of crosswords than it is a typical book, but it's one of my most enjoyed of this project, and I am already anxiously waiting on the sequel!

39: A Book Revolving Around A Puzzle Or A Game

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

By Jason Fagone

In 1916, a young Quaker schoolteacher and poetry scholar named Elizebeth Smith was hired by an eccentric tycoon to find the secret message he believed were embedded in Shakespeare's plays.  She moved to the tycoon's lavish estate outside of Chicago expecting to spend her days poring through old books.  But the rich man's close ties to the U.S. government, and the urgencies of war, quickly transformed Elizebeth's mission. She soon learned to apply her skills to an exciting new venture: codebreaking - the solving of secret message without knowledge of the key.  Working alongside her on the estate was William Friedman, a Jewish scientist who would become her husband and lifelong codebreaking partner.  Elizebeth and William were in many ways the Adam and Eve of the National Security Agency, the U.S. institution that monitors and intercepts foreign communications to glean intelligence.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman who played an integral role in our nation's history - from the Great War to the Cold War. He traces Elizebeth's developing career through World War I, Prohibition, and the struggle against fascism.  She helped catch gangsters and smugglers, exposed a Nazi ring in South America, and fought a clandestine battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German operatives to conceal their communications.  And through it all, she served as muse to her husband, a master of puzzles, who astonished friends and foes alike. Inside an army vault in Washington, he worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma - and succeeded, at terrible cost to his personal life.

This one was a gift to me from my mother, who sometimes gets me non-fiction books that I am less than wholly interested in, but this was a pleasant enough read.  It's a biography of Elizebeth Friedman, who was apparently instrumental in early American code-breaking.  I do sometimes struggle with non-fiction because in life, unlike in a story, you have to tell an interesting story from the things that actually happened - which can be sometimes very boring, and frequently changes are made of things that were pieced together through myriad small incremental details, which doesn't always make the most exciting narrative: "We're about to enter early married life - now let's describe the ten background characters who you need to know in order to understand what happened next - but they'll never be mentioned again!"  It's understandably hard to keep the balance between the actual facts and a good story in nonfiction, so I'm somewhat sympathetic when I inevitably don't feel the same "high" from a nonfiction as I do a good fiction book.  For example, I really enjoyed Show Me a Hero and Personal History, but was a little let down by Killers of the Flower Moon and The Radium Girls, both of which are boosted by built-in dramatic storylines involving death and cover-ups.  And Ben Macintyre's books, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross, were both okay, but honestly I barely remember them.  I just don't generally find myself mulling over a good nonfiction book or wanting to re-read it afterwards, and I don't think TWWSC will defy the odds. Sidenote: it's interesting to me the similarities with A Personal History - both women quietly getting things done while their husbands suffered nervous breakdowns, although Graham's work came after and as a direct result of her husband's deterioration, while Elizebeth is just quietly getting shit done 24-7. 

So the good things: it's a well-told story, manages to keep your attention throughout, and doesn't feel too long.  If anything, it feels oddly incomplete, which is maybe not a total surprise when talking about a codebreaker whose work was highly classified until relatively recently.  But although we hear about Elizebeth's affinity for codes, only one or two types is broken down and explained to us as readers, and some of the leaps in deduction (figuring out what codephrase or book is being used for a code in another language) are so little touched on that they seem practically miraculous.  Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but I can't help but wonder if the author left it out because he thought it would be too boring or difficult to understand to the lay reader, or if he himself didn't know how she did it - after all, her materials wouldn't necessarily have a step by step manual for her thoughts.  I think it would have made a good appendix - to walk us through a (short) puzzle and see exactly how some of these mysteries were cracked.

The other problem with telling Elizebeth's story is that, frankly, although she did an important and thorough job as codebreaker during the second world war, there were no threats or danger lurking if she failed, no personal stakes, aside from the ones she sets herself.  She gets in, is very competent, and then gracefully exits when the war is done.  The decisions about when to crack down on the South American spies was made over her head and by a separate department.  I'm certainly not going to fault Fagone for not having better facts, but it is true that it is just always going to be hard to write a gripping story about someone who went to work in an office everyday and then came home, even though (or maybe especially because) their office consists of a lot of detail oriented paperwork.  It's also sort of difficult because both big "breakthrough" moments for Elizebeth and William in the war - cracking Enigma and Purple, respectively, fall flat, as Enigma was cracked simultaneously by Bletchley Park, and Purple's decoding does nothing to prevent Pearl Harbor, because of government red tape.

Fagone's style is.... definitely something.  There's a strong modern feminist bent, and a few interjections of swearing, so you do get a little more personal than most biographies, but that adds to its charm, not detracts.  Hss pu hss, h nvvk zahya mvy zvtlvul thrpun h kpcl puav jyfwahuhsfzpz!

29 - A Book With "Love" In The Title (or sub-title, I cheated a bit on this)

Comic Bonanza

Here's a round-up of a couple of kid-friendly(ish) comic books I've been reading:

Courtney Crumrin, Vol. 1: Courtney Crumrin & The Night Things

By Ted Naifeh

Courtney's parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She's not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

This one is why I'm calling these "kid-friendly (ish)" emphasis on the "ish".  Courtney is a somewhat darker take on the beginning witchcraft dabbler tale, both figuratively and literally.  I mean, everything is kid-appropriate, but at one point a changeling takes away a baby that Courtney is watching, and although she tries to get it back (being captured and sold herself) her uncle basically tells her in the end, "Forget about trying to get the baby back, these things happen, his parents won't even notice." And they don't!  That was a more chilling story than I expected it to be.  Anyway, these are set up as four short stories, all in black and white.  I would have loved to have them in color, but I suppose it sets the mood.  Courtney herself is an entertaining little curmudgeon.  The last story finds her losing energy, only to realize she's been replaced by a doppelganger who is living her life (and doing much better at it apparently).  In the final confrontation, you think that Courtney will let the doppelganger just take over since everyone seems to prefer it to her, but she comes out swinging hard with a "fuck everyone else, I'm a difficult and unpleasant person, and that's exactly how I want to be!" that completely saps the doppelganger.  Good on you, Courtney.  I would never want to meet you in real life, but bless your confidence. 

Goldie Vance Vol. 1

By Hope Larson and Brittney Williams

Sixteen-year-old Marigold “Goldie” Vance lives at a Florida resort with her dad, who manages the place. Her mom, who divorced her dad years ago, works as a live mermaid at a club downtown. Goldie has an insatiable curiosity, which explains her dream to one day become the hotel’s in-house detective. When Charles, the current detective, encounters a case he can’t crack, he agrees to mentor Goldie in exchange for her help solving the mystery.

This one is a lot of fun to read, colorful, bouncy, basically Nancy Drew in 60s Florida, if Nancy weren't so lily white.   Whereas Courtney was a loner and preferred it that way, Goldie has a colorful cast of supporting characters, including friends, enemies, potential ladyfriends, adults who seem to exist mainly for spoiling fun, and also: aliens!  Yes, I was really getting into the story when it took an abrupt right turn into Martian colony weirdness.  This was set up so the mini-stories merged into a longer connected story, so we'll have to see if all of the mysteries end like that.  It was a little off-putting, but I (a) enjoyed the rest of it enough to keep reading and (b) can kind of see where they're going with the 60s cold war and space-focus (one of Goldie's friends wants to be an astronaut) so I will allow it for now.

The Lost Path

By Amélie Fléchais

Three young boys set off from Camp Happiness, map in hand, determined to be the first to find the treasure before anyone else. But the shortcut they take leads to something far more spectacular and sinister! All manner of magical beasties live in these woods, and the kids find themselves caught between warring Forest Spirits. Will the three boys find their way out of trouble? Get your map and ready, set, go!

This was something I picked up and bought during my sojourn on Free Comic Book Day solely because of how beautiful it was, and that definitely panned out.  It is gorgeous, done in multiple color and drawing styles.  I would have liked something 100% in color, just because the coloring that was there was so beautiful, but, I acknowledge that (like Courtney) the black and white was an appropriate style choice for those sections - when the three boys are simply wandering in the woods.   I agree with a lot of other reviewers that felt the story-line was lacking in comparison to the illustration.  The story is good, but it felt oddly incomplete and only half explained.  We wind up in the middle of fighting forest spirits, but it was hard to tell who was on what side and why.  A crown/hat becomes a Chekov's Gun that never goes off, and when I got done, I went to look if this was intended to be a stand-alone story or not.  So far it is, which is a let-down.  Overall, a beautiful, but otherwise somewhat empty, little book. 

Truly Devious

Truly Devious

By Maureen Johnson

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

Holy Shit! What the fuck did I just read?!  Take a secluded high school campus, a bunch of high-strung "genius" kids, a cold case 1930s Lindbergh-adjacent murder/kidnapping mystery, an actual dead teenager, the most dangerous game of Never Have I Ever ever, and end it on a bunch of frigging cliffhangers, and you'll get Truly Devious. 

You know what, I knew this was a bad idea.  This series is clearly identified as a trilogy, and only two of them have been published so far.  But the prompt!  And it sounded really cool!  So I stepped off into the pool and now here I am, hung out to dry, waiting on the next one to come out WHO KNOWS WHEN.  God, I hate WIPs.  This is going to be awful.

Suffice it to say, this got me out of the serious-book blues. And perhaps not surprisingly, I've already read the second book too, so we can talk about both in this review.  As you can tell, I did very much enjoy the book.  It can be confusing, and be aware that unlike many trilogies, this one is actually more like a single book than a series - things are mentioned and dropped, to be picked up (hopefully) in later books.  Questions are asked in Truly Devious that don't get answered until The Vanishing Stair, and others are left for the third. 

The lead character, Stevie, is not always very sympathetic, and there were a few times I was surprised by her actions (particularly romantically) which is a little odd, considering it's being narrated by her.  I also think the first book is stronger than the second (which is parodied in The Vanishing Stair, as Nate, the resident blocked author bemoans having to write a sequel - can't you just do a set-up and a denouement?) but given how closely intertwined and plotted out everything seems to be, I have faith that the author isn't artificially bloating the story or going to wind up writing the mystery into a corner.  It helps that people keep DYING, honestly, if we weren't following Stevie around I would probably have arrested her by now. It's not a good look to discover three bodies in a matter of a few weeks.  Especially since it's also her first semester at boarding school.  You gotta pace yourself, man.

I was also recently re-reading Murder on the Orient Express, which is also loosely inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping, and it's interesting to see how each author has taken the story and molded it into very different murder mysteries.  Christie set up a classic revenge novel with the people whose family and friends were affected, and by the end, it's a visceral, cathartic feeling to know they'll get away with it.  In Truly Devious [And SPOILERS for The Vanishing Stair], the actual intended victims, Alice and Iris, are barely fleshed out, and our sympathies ride on Dottie, the clever, poor girl, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The mystery is a puzzle, not a tragedy.  Although we do get some of Ellingham's sorrow afterwards, the way Truly Devious sets it up, it honestly sounded like he faked his own death, again alleviating some of the tragic consequences.  Now The Vanishing Stair seems to counter that, having him die in a confrontation with the kidnapper, but the whole picture probably won't come out until the third. 

It does feel a little cheap that after teasing the tin box in Truly Devious, we find out that Frankie and Edward are only very distantly involved in the kidnapping and then only by coincidence - they happened to write a threatening letter, as a prank, and Frankie's comments seemed to trigger the whole plan (accidentally), and it's also unclear to me how Stevie determines that they had nothing to do with the kidnapping, since I don't think the mere fact of their being students would eliminate them.  They could just as easily have hired minions to do the dirty work as the actual kidnapper did.

I can definitely see how it would get tiring to read three books all hashing out the same mystery from different perspectives, but Johnson does a pretty good job not just of giving new clues and insight, but also of creating large new mysteries to focus on, while leaving Ellingham in the background.  It's kind of the same problem that Veronica Mars, another excellent teen detective story, had, especially in the second season, and I don't think there's really a good around it, while still keeping the flow right.  In the third season of Veronica Mars, they went to several mini-arc mysteries instead, and that's not really doable here.

Overall, I am certainly intrigued and ready for the third book.  We still have to find out who projected the message on Stevie's wall (and what it means), where Alice is, or was, what actually happened that night, who killed Fenton, why Johnson seems to be trying to make Jenny Quinn a person of interest, whatever happened to Hayes and Ellie the night he died, how Ellie knew about the tunnels but couldn't get out again, and whoever is assisting Johnson on her legal references, because this whole nonsense about a secret codicil is in fact that: nonsense.  You can't prove up a will and leave out the codicil.  It's a public document.  Everything gets filed.  Now, it's possible that he wrote a trust and the "codicil" is actually a trust amendment, but in that case, everyone is calling it the wrong thing.  It was definitely possible for someone in that time period to do a trust, so I don't know why not just say it's a trust instead, and leave me some peace of mind, but all it does is bother the heck out of me.  Maybe book three will involve a discussion of why Vermont law in 1938 didn't require the filing of the will and codicil, which would be both hilariously specific to my interests as well as genuinely appreciated by this estates and trusts attorney. 



30: A Book Featuring An Amateur Detective

Provenance

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of  Modern Art

By Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

It is the astonishing narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate cons in the history of art forgery. Stretching from London to Paris to New York, investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo recount the tale of infamous con man and unforgettable villain John Drewe and his accomplice, the affable artist John Myatt. Together they exploited the archives of British art institutions to irrevocably legitimize the hundreds of pieces they forged, many of which are still considered genuine and hang in prominent museums and private collections today.

I really enjoyed this book.  I have a semi-jaundiced eye towards art collecting to begin with, and this only proves my point: if the value of art is no longer based on the piece itself but some other extrinsic factor, then it is no longer art, but commodity.  The artist/forger Myatt makes the point (as do several others): the painting has not changed, only the name of the producer.  Why then does the price drop by the order of several hundred thousand?  Apparently the answer to Shakespeare's famous question is: no, a rose would not smell as sweet by any other name. Nor would a Giacometti.

Provenance is a really interesting book about a very specific fraud on the art world, but also about greater questions in personal responsibility, confidence, and the many cracks and seams that are available to be exploited by people without care for collateral damage, both in general terms in our modern society and also very specifically in the fine art forum.

Just this week as I'm reading it, the New York Times had two articles about long lost or newly discovered art pieces of great artists, an unearthed Caravaggio, found in an attic, and some purported Rembrandts, discovered in a collection held for six generations.  Honestly, both made me barking mad, since it seems like each loses sight of the forest for the trees. Look, all of this rush to decide whether this painting or that is painted by a "master" - authorship is more fluid than that (at least in paintings).  Stop attaching such importance to an unimportant feature.  In Provenance, they kinda wrap up the whole escapade by talking about art fraud via a broader lens, and mention that Picasso (and possibly other artists as well) would sign works done by other artists.

I've also been watching Fake or Fortune on Netflix, which is a fascinating look as the show people take paintings and try to authenticate them. It shows some of the avenues that people would use to support the provenance. It all seems to me like a giant guessing game, but there are definitely people out there who dedicate their lives to art, and in some cases, specific artists, so closely that they "know" immediately if something is off or not.  That sixth sense there is almost like a superpower.  What's interesting about this fraud perpetrated here is that it was able to succeed despite multiple people finding the forgeries lacking, because the provenance allayed all doubts.  That was the true con (obviously, otherwise they wouldn't have called the book Provenance). 

All of my aggravation about provenance aside, I am absolutely appalled at the utter gall of Drewe to callously upend historical archives for his own personal agenda and pleasure.  I am definitely a black and white seer, a rules follower, and no matter how silly I think it is to search for value in a trail of owners, I am utterly disgusted at his behavior.  Obviously, not only in this regard, but also in his refusal to acknowledge what it is. Just admit you did it for personal gain!  You're a piece of shit, John Drewe, have the self awareness to admit it.

48: Two Books That Share The Same Title