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. 

Five Days at Memorial

Five Days at Memorial

By Sheri Fink

This was an incredibly gripping book on the doctors, nurses, and patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent investigation into the numerous deaths there and accusations that patients were being euthanized (just as rescue helicopters were evacuating people again).  It's less concerned about pointing fingers or assigning blame than it is in warning how American social mores and patient care practices can break down in less than five days and how it might be prevented (or likely to occur) in the future.

Do I think that Dr. Anna Pou and her two assistants murdered at least nine and potentially eighteen patients? Yes.  Am I going to second guess her actions? Probably not.  However, although I was sympathetic to the conditions in Memorial (and in fact, all over the city, as this was not the only facility facing "suspicious" concentrations of morphine and midazolam in the bodies left behind), and I understand that the potential murder charges hang over her head, what I most aggrieved by was the complete lack of remorse, guilt, or doubt expressed by them and by their supporters after the fact.  Yes, you did what you thought was right at the time, and I don't doubt that you were despairing, after five days in post-Katrina conditions, fear, rumors, and foul smells, but when you left that hospital and realized that help had been available, that not everyone descended into chaos and death, I think that should have given you pause.  You made a mistake.  And it was life or death, and you chose poorly.  Face it.

It was only as we near the end of the book and you realize that not only did she have tunnel vision at the time, she's become entrenched into her position that I lost my sympathy for her.  Maybe it's a defensive mechanism to avoid having to examine her own actions more closely, but Fink's argument that this attitude of refusing other perspectives in end-of-life decisions can cause more harm than it purports to solve is a fairly persuasive one. There's a good argument that doctors, unfortunately, are human like the rest of us - (over)confident in their own skills, brought low by disaster, unending work and stress, and, while willing to make the "hard" decisions, unwilling to open that decision to criticism.  Of course, other actors in the justice process fucked up too, and maybe it could have been an opportunity for a discussion, but instead the whole indictment just screwed everybody over. This review is a bit longer than intended, and the book is no novella either, but it's worth a read.