Books Read 2014

Once again (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009,2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002), I’ve kept track of what I read this year.

January

Dark Mirror (2009) by Barry Maitland, in the Kolla-Brock series set in and near London. When PhD student Marion Summers has a seizure in the London Library and dies soon after, everyone is surprised to learn that she was poisoned with arsenic. But how, and why, and by whom? Kathy is the primary investigator in this case, with Brock as her sidekick. Maitland’s crime novels always include information about other topics (stamp collecting, Karl Marx, architecture, Islamists, genetic technology, alternative medicine, the Brixton riots, modern art, etc.; in this one it’s Dante Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites. Setting varies in London from St. James Square to Rosslyn Court to Ealing to Notting Hill, with a quick trip to Prague.

Just One Evil Act (2013) by Elizabeth George, in the Lynley/Havers series. A long book (719 pp) that felt longer because of Havers’ dissembling actions throughout. Plot: Her close friend and neighbour Azhar’s 9-year-old daughter Hadiyyah is kidnapped by her mother, Angelina, and taken to Italy, and from that unfolds more kidnapping, deception, tabloid journalism, family hatred, and death. Set in London and Lucca, Tuscany, with the chief inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco playing an important role in the story. One thing that’s obvious in this book is that Lynley’s and Havers’ ideas of what constitutes helping a friend in trouble differ. Meanwhile, Havers is being investigated unofficially by a coworker who hates her, and Lynley is falling in love with the large animal vet (who plays roller derby) whom he met in Cornwall.

Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson: Fictional autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an older congregationalist pastor in small town Gilead, Iowa in the 1950s, dying of a heart condition and intent on leaving some words about his life to his 7-year-old son. Poetic. I  liked the way that he kept repeating scenes, re-remembering them, like seeing his wife for the first time in church. I particularly appreciated the thoughts on baptism, and the compassionate, humane sensibility of the book. But I didn’t like it enough to read the following books in the series.

More Bitter Than Death (2010/2013) by Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff: Second in the psychotherapist Siri Bergmann series. Siri and Aina start a self-help group for a few abused women, one of whom has an ex-boyfriend arrested for a brutal murder, which was witnessed by the victim’s 5-year-old daughter. At the same time, Siri is counseling a married couple and having her own issues with her police boyfriend Markus. Good.

The Golden Compass (1995) by Philip Pullman, a fantasy novel of 11-year-old Lyra, an apparently orphaned and fierce, wild, and intuitive little girl who lives in a theological college and is cared for by the staff there. Soon, after hearing her uncle’s presentation to some at the college about the Aurora Borealis and “dust,” she is caught up in an adventure that takes her to the northmost parts of the Earth. Not really my kind of story but I like the idea of the daemons that all humans in her world have, an external animal manifestation of their spirits.

February

The Dinner (2009/2012) by Herman Koch, transl. from Dutch. A dark book about two couples whose sons have been involved in a heinous, gratuitous crime. The two couples come together over an expensive, pretentious dinner to talk about what to do. The narrator, Paul, is the father of one son, Michel, and quite an anithero, as his his wife, Claire. This is a book about scapegoating and how it can be justified by considering other people as “not entirely innocent,” “inhuman,” “subintelligent,” “a piece of trash,” “not civilized like we are.” I liked it a lot.

The Orphan Choir (2013) by Sophie Hannah. A very creepy novel about a mother, Louise, harassed by her neighbour’s loud music in the middle of the night, who then begins to hear a boys’ choir singing; not coincidentally, her 7-year-old son is in a boys’ choir that requires he live away from home except for holidays. Louise thinks she has found some relief when she is drawn to buy a second home in Swallowfield, an upscale rural housing community an hour or two away. Set in Cambridge, England, and outside it.

The Map and the Territory (2013) by Michel Houellebecq: An amusing, layered postmodern novel about the life of Jed Martin, a contemporary French artist living in Paris, and about his few long- term relationships  — his father, his gallerist, his publicist — and his few other involvements, mainly with woman (particularly beautiful Michelin staffer Olga)  — and the equally friendless author Michel Houellebecq, to whom he is attracted as a friend. The themes of the book are multiple: labour and work (particularly William Morris’s ideas on design and craft, the architecture and organisation of factories and work buildings in general, the dignity and the identity of work); machines (notably cars and boilers); modernity (including celebrity as a concept, air travel and the heterotopias of airports and shopping areas, the ubiquity of information); sex (focus on prostitutes) and death (murder, euthanasia, suicide, funeral rites); and so on. I really enjoyed the book and read most of it in a day.

March

The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt. Almost 800-page novel, spanning almost 15 years, primarily set in New York City, with significant time in Las Vegas and Amsterdam as well.  Theo Decker is visiting a museum with his mother, to get out of the rain one morning, when the unthinkable happens, leaving him essentially a traumatised, desperate, guilt-ridden, 13-year-old orphan. I can’t describe the plot any better than Theo does, near the end: “And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.” Extremely well-written, complex, perhaps a little too narrative and didactic toward the end but in beautiful way. (Interestingly, heterotopias figure largely in this book, too: museums, city parks, airports, even most of Las Vegas … places people pass through.)

A Town Like Alice (1950) by Nevil Shute. A young English woman is among other women and children taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaysia in WWII, and is forced to walk for six months essentially before settling down to grow rice in a small town for 3 years. A few years after her release, she inherits some money from an uncle she didn’t know and decides to use some to give back to the town that allowed the women to stay during the war. She also decides, on receiving some new information there, to find a man she met during the war, who was kind to her and the other women. At the same time, he is trying to find her. The last part of the book takes place in the outback of Australia. The story is told by her 70-year-old estate trustee, who loves and admires her.  The problem with this book is that it’s about 3 moral, conscientious, responsible, hard-working people who act with the best motives in all cases  and who get excellent results. There is no moral ambiguity at all, which makes it predictable and boring. The story is also more told than shown, so that even the dramatic circumstances comes across as rather flat.

April

Ripper (2013) by Isabel Allende: I was surprised how below-average a crime novel this was. Set in modern day San Francisco, it has an OK plot (though one figures out whodunit long before the end). But the characters, their relationships, and the dialogue read like a flailing young adult novel. The main characters are 16-year-old Amanda Jackson, the daughter of San Francisco’s deputy homicide chief, and her mother, Indiana, a gullible, curvy blonde holistic healer that every man desires. Other characters are an ex-NAVY Seal and his war-damaged Belgian Malinois, a well-born but no-longer-rich jealous playboy, an astrologer, a transvestite waiter, a biddable grandfather who is happy playing his granddaughter’s henchman, several misfit kids from around the world, and … you get the picture. Still, it could have worked, had the dialogue been less awkward and the plot not strain incredulity so much.

The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country (2012) by Peter Bane: Read for discussion group, meeting over several months. I found this book less helpful than many others for learning about and applying permaculture principles and practices. Bane is at once didactic (“you should” appears often) and oddly poetic and idealistic at times, once describing the garden as a lover that you take into your body and learn its signs of arousal, and suggesting that suburbanites (and others) embrace shared living, community labour and mealtimes, a farm stand in one’s front yard, and that we ask the neighbors not to spray biocides on their property (as this request is in line with best practices and “not controversial”). A few chapters are overtly political: sections on genetically modified crops, Monsanto, Big Pharma, the ethics of meat-eating, etc..  There is quite a lot of detail on plant propagation and grafting, seed starting and saving,  how to plant a tree, and the “garden farming pattern language” (of which there are 68 elements), which still mystifies me. I was also very confused by Chapter 11, Soil, which went into the Oxygen-Ethylene Cycle of aerobic and anaerobic plant nutrients in far too much depth. The diagrams and photos, almost all black and white, are unappealing. On the other hand, the four case studies included are detailed, personal, interesting and offer the only colour photos in the book; setting include the Colorado Rockies, Ontario, Harrisonburg VA, and Bloomington IN (his garden farm). His section on animals for the garden farm will be useful to someone considering this, and Chapter 4, Permaculture Principles, is a good overview. I particularly felt that the Living with Wildlife and Trees and Shrubs chapters were the most interesting. I skimmed the last 4 or 5 chapters, as they seemed to repeat what had already been said.

The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan: Read for a bookgroup and led to a great discussion of our own experiences as women coming of age in the U.S. between 1950 and the late 1980 or so. But the book itself was repetitive, over-the-top in some areas (fear of homosexuals, comparison for WWII concentration camps, etc.), not tightly edited, and a bit boring. Chapters on advertising, gender-based education, housewifery, Freud, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Margaret Mead (whom she really does not like), functionalism (the job of women was to adjust to the status quo so they would be happier), mothers who love too much and absorb their children’s personalities, etc. It felt all over the place to me. And in the end, I felt sort of cheated, as the only spheres Friedan presents as legitimate are wife and mother (she actually says “marriage and motherhood are an essential part of life”), house, and professional, serious career. If you’re a woman with no interest in any of these things, where does that leave you? She also has a strong preference for the future and potential, possibility, growth, and a strong dislike of the present moment, where, she says, schizophrenics reside. I found it all off-putting, though I appreciated learning some of the history of the women’s movement and of the culture in general.

May

Children of the Revolution (2014) by Peter Robinson in the DCI Alan Banks series. An eccentric former college professor is found dead on an abandoned railway line, with £5000 in his pocket. Banks, Annie, Winsome and Gerry Masterson investigate not only his former college colleagues and students but also a woman he went to school with 40 years before, now Lady Chalmers. As usual, a selection of Van Morrison, jazz and classical artists, and other pop music bands and singers are mentioned, as are various alcoholic beverages, in this cozy police procedural. The plot of this episode is only so-so.

Stormy Weather (1995) by Carl Hiassen: Another insane crime novel, sort of, set in southern Florida (Miami and the Keys) entirely during a hurricane. A couple on their honeymoon, a couple pulling an insurance scam. some corrupted housing inspectors, heir to an exotic animal farm, and the Skink all converge. A bit of one paragraph gives a flavour: “Max Lamb was unnerved by the wall of grinning skulls, but said nothing as he made his way down the hall to the shower. Augustine got on the telephone to sort out what had happened with his dead uncle’s Cape buffalo. Bonnie fixed a pot of coffee and took it to the guest room, where the governor was recovering from the animal dart.” Lots of violence and lots of fun.

Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter (2013) by Howard Mansfield: Nonfiction meditations on a theme, which is how do we dwell — and dwell well — in the modern world when we know that our homes can be destroyed in an instant by bombs or natural disaster? The book is divided into 3 sections: the first is about houses, homes, clutter, what makes a house a home; the second is about Word War II and the Vietnam War and the policy of “dehousing;” and the third is about “sheds,” of which all New England homes and buildings are a variation, according to the New Hampshire author. I read it for a bookgroup, and most of the members found it disjointed, fragmented, disappointing after an interesting start; I liked it precisely for this, the loose connection of the parts of the book to the whole, but it was a bit uneven.

Where the Monsters Dwell (2011/2014) by Jørgen Brekke: Set mainly in modern day Trondheim, Norway, and a bit in Richmond, VA, this gristly crime novel introduces Trondheim police inspector Odd Singsaker (who, like Finnish police detective Kari Vaara in the series by James Thompson, has recently undergone surgery for a brain tumour) and Richmond homicide detective Felicia Stone; he remembers too little and she too much. They are investigating several murders that involve skin-flaying and beheading, and harken back to the 16th century, that seem related. I’d give it a C. The writing and characters are OK but something is missing.

June

The Lowland (2013) by Jhumpa Lahiri. Starts with two brothers, 15 months apart in age — Udayan impulsive, Subhash dutiful — living in Calcutta in the 1960s, during a time of political upheaval. Soon, though, their own choices and consequent events separate them, and for most of the story we follow Sudhash, a scientist living in Rhode Island. This is a book about time, memory, how events in life line up to create a story, how the echo of a single action can reverberate for decades, for a lifetime, and over generations, and most of all, how it feels to live inside the yesterdays of our lives. I liked it more than I thought I would. Well-written, poetic in places.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach (2013) by Ben Falk. An especially important book for New England homesteaders, gardeners, and small-scale farmers. Falk’s Whole Systems Research Farm above the Mad River in central Vermont has a climate and topography similar to what many of us in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and parts of Massachusetts and New York experience. Falk goes into some depth concerning rice-growing, pond- and swale-making and earthworks in general, fertility harvesting (urine and humanure, cover cropping, scything, fungi), perennial crops, animals such as ducks and chickens, maintaining and harvesting a firewood crop, and resilient systems for emergencies. Many enlightening diagrams, appendices and photos. Recommended for permaculturists.

Vertigo 42 (2014) by Martha Grimes, in the Richard Jury series, with Sergeant Wiggins and Melrose Plant. A friend of a friend, Tom Williamson, believes his wife’s death from a fall seventeen years ago at their Devon country house was not an accident, and he asks Jury to investigate. In the course of his investigation, a 22-year-old murder is solved, and two more people are murdered, one from another fall. Very readable but not enough Melrose Plant for my taste, and the plot not as tight-feeling somehow as others; the ending was a bit of a let-down. The plot of the Hitchcock movie Vertigo is invoked several times.

Cockroaches (1998, English transl. 2014) by Jo Nesbo, second in the Harry Hole series, this one set entirely in Thailand. Took a long time for this to be translated to English, so it’s been published far out of order in the series. Harry is sent to cover up or screw up, or both, a murder investigation of a Norwegian ambassador found murdered in a brothel. It’s gruesome and harrowing, not my favourite of the series.

Skinny Dip (2004) by Carl Hiassen. One of the funniest of his books, featuring Mick Stranahan, set in Biscayne Bay, Miami, the Everglades. Chaz Perrone, a hapless “marine scientist” on the take, throw his wife, a former champion diver, overboard on an anniversary cruise, and from there his life takes a very bad turn. Hilarious.

July

Star Island (2010) by Carl Hiassen, featuring weed-whacking bodyguard Chemo and with an appearance by Skink. Bang Abbott is a celebrity paparazzo who tangles himself up with both Cherry Pie — celebrity singer and drug addict — and her much smarter and more grounded double, Ann DeLusia. Not one of his best but still a fun romp.

Bad Monkey (2013) by Carl Hiassen, set in Miami and the Bahamas. Two similar stories intersect: demoted police officer, now restaurant health inspector, Andrew Yancy bemoans and works to sabotage the oversized McMansion going up on the lot next to his, while in the Bahamas, fisherman (and bad money owner) Neville Stafford’s home has been sold out from under him by his sister to an American Medicaid fraudster cum developer, whose arm has turned up in the waters near Key West.  Bony sex-crazed voodoo practitioner Dragon Queen, hulking bodyguard Egg, obsessed ex-girlfriend and FBI fugitive Bonnie, and of course the bad monkey, Driggs, round out the cast of this amusing crime novel.

Basket Case (2002) by Carl Hiassen, set in south Florida and featuring obituary writer Jack Tagger, a 46-year-old man obsessed with dying young. He’s also a former rocker, so recognises the name James Bradley Stomarti (aka Jimmy Stoma, lead man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies) in a police report. After interviewing Stoma’s wife, pop singer Cleo Rio, about his “diving accident”  in the Bahamas, and learning that the “autopsy” didn’t include any dissection of the body, he begins to have suspicions about the accidental nature of the death. Stoma’s sister, Janet, has similar concerns. Rounding out the cast are Jack’s editor, Emma; the newspaper’s aged owner and its editor; his best friend, sports writer Juan Rodriguez; and Jack’s former girlfriend’s daughter, Carla.  Some interesting allusions noted at Wikipedia.

Lucky You (1997) by Carl Hiassen. Imparts Hiassen’s usual environmental values, employing his usual zany cast of characters, while skewering racism and the white supremacy mindset. Set in fictional Grange, Florida (apparently based on the real town of Cassadaga), rampant with religious miracles like road-stain Jesus and a crying plastic Madonna statue, this very funny novel follows African-American vet assistant JoLayne Lucks, who has just won half of a $28 million lottery prize, with which she wants to buy a piece of wild land to preserve; journalist Tom Krome, sent there to interview her; white supremacist thugs Bode Gazzer and Chub — winners of the other half of the lottery prize — who beat up JoLayne and steal her ticket too (they are soon joined by Shiner, a young convenience store clerk enchanted with the ideas of power, guns, babes, etc.); Amber, a Hooters waitress in tiny orange shorts, whom all the rednecks fall for; Tom’s almost-ex-wife Mary Andrea, his married girlfriend Katie and her vengeful judge husband, and his burned-out editor at the paper, Sinclair; JoLayne’s ATF buddy and admirer, Moffitt; and some of the religious miracle workers.

Bones of the Lost (2013) by Kathy Reichs, in the Tempe Brennan series. Thankfully, almost no Brennan-Ryan interaction in this one, set mostly in the Charlotte, NC area, and also near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Her main partner is homicide police detective Skinny Slidell. Tempe is asked to look at a likely hit-and-run victim, a teenaged girl, and quickly realises that her death was no accident. A check for Customs and Immigration of some old dog bones and a favour for her almost-ex, Pete, requiring her to analyze gun shot wounds to local nationals by a Marine in Afghanistan, all come together into one single, somewhat complex, coincidental and unbelievable plot. Fast reading but not her best (not her worst, either).

Black Lies, Red Blood (2014) by Kjell Eriksson, 5th in the Ann Lindell series set in Uppsala, Sweden. When Ann’s new boyfriend, journalist Anders Brant, takes off after a homeless man is found murdered, Ann fears the worst and busies herself with a cold case, that of a teenage girl who disappeared on her 16th birthday. Much more of Ann’s personal life (and lots of sex) in this one than in the others. There is a certain measured and philosophical way of speaking that most of the characters have that appeals to me in this series.

The Photograph (2003) by Penelope Lively, a novel for a book group. Quite a while after his wife, Kath, dies, Glyn comes upon a photograph that implicates her with another man, her sister Elaine’s husband Nick. Glyn’s obsession with learning more — about her involvement with Nick, about her possible involvement with other men, about Kath’s life, which he now realises he was quite unaware of — changes not only his own view of Kath but that of Elaine, Nick, their daughter Polly, and their friend and one-time business partner Oliver, who took the photo. None of the characters is likable; in fact, except Polly, all seem evasive, defensive, self-centered, manoeuvring, and ready to run at the slightest emotional provocation. Kath, who is the focus of everyone’s thoughts, in the end seems to have hardly been there at all.

The Coroner’s Lunch (2004) by Colin Cotterill, first in the Dr. Siri series, read for a bookgroup. Dr. Siri Paiboun is a reluctant coroner in the newly formed communist republic of Laos in 1976. He’s also a reluctant comrade to whom dead spirits appear with clues to their demise. In this novel, he investigates the suspicious death at a lady’s lunch of Senior Comrade Kham’s wife as well as the obvious murders of some Vietnamese. The book is wryly amusing, the plot so-so, and the insight into Indochina (particularly the politics, culture, and inter-relationships of the Laos, Thais, Hmongs, and Vietnamese) in this time period worthwhile.

A Dark & Twisted Tide (2014) by Sharon (SJ) Bolton, in the Lacey Flint series. Bolton’s books are imbued with a sense of place and this one doesn’t disappoint on that score, set primarily in southeast London on the Thames River near Deptford Creek. Lacey is not only living on a small riverboat but is working with the Metropolitan Police’s Marine Unit; she is out for a swim on the Thames (not recommended) when she finds the deteriorated body of a young woman wrapped in linen floating in the water, the first of several. The book’s plotting is fairly complex, with chapters about Lacey, her former boss Dana Tulloch, the killer (“the swimmer”), and each of the women who dies in the river, as well as interactions between Lacey and would-be boyfriend Mark Joesbury (on an undercover mission) and with her new friends, Alex and Thessa, who live on Deptford Creek. The book is set so firmly on and in the water that I felt a bit soggy when I finished it. Quite good.

August

In Paradise (2014) by Peter Matthiessen. A novel (which reads like very prosaic non-fiction) set in the 1990s at a spiritual retreat at Auschwitz (in Poland). American academic and poet Clements Olin travels here to learn about his past, and meets others who are there for their own reasons: nuns, priests, a female academic from Israel, Poles, Norwegians, Germans, and a “brutish loudmouth named Earwig.” The Guardian review captures it well: “Feelings and opinions about the Holocaust turn out to be raw and unpredictable; everyone responds to the immediacy of the slaughter in ways they had not expected, and it becomes evident that, whatever the purpose of the retreat, reconciliation is not a likely outcome. The retreat does not just open them up; it dangles them over an abyss of evil that most cannot understand or process.”  What’s not even mentioned in the Guardian review is how much of the book is taken up with middle-aged Olin’s drooling over a young nun, which seemed silly and detracted from the book for me. The novel felt plodding; I expected a lot more. (Read for bookgroup.)

Sick Puppy (2000) by Carl Hiaasen. One of my favourites and a re-read. Amoral lobbyist Palmer Stoat comes to the attention of independently wealthy environmentalist Twilly Spree when he throws litter out his car window, and from that moment the die is cast. After a few of Spree’s pranks have no deterring effect on the heedless Stoat, Spree kidnaps his black labrador dog and pretty soon Stoat’s wife, Desi, comes along, too. Meanwhile the lobbying machinations of corrupt Florida governor Dick Artemus, one of his major contributors developer Robert Clapley (who has a Barbie fetish), Florida representative Willie Vasquez-Washington, and Stoat continue unabated, with Artemus eventually making the mistake of blackmailing ex-governor Clinton Tyree (Skink, Captain) into capturing Spree. The major action of the book begins and ends with a private canned hunt, where Stoat et al. go to shoot “wild” game animals trucked in from circuses, zoos, etc., for the purpose.

Regeneration (1992) by Pat Barker, first in the Regeneration trilogy about World War I.  Excellent. So many things to think about after reading this novel about a military psychiatrist/anthropologist, Williams Rivers, and the patients he’s treating for shell-shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, including Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated soldier (and poet) who has written a published declaration disavowing the war, and Wilfred Owens, another poet and soldier.  Craiglockhart, Rivers, Sassoon, and Owens are all real people and their time at the hospital is the basis for the book.

The Eye in the Door (1993) by Pat Barker, the second in the Regeneration series. Focuses mostly on Lt. Billy Prior, though Rivers and to a lesser extent Sassoon are also in the book, as is Charles Manning, a married but bisexual military officer also under Rivers’ care. Homosexuality and pacifism are both targeted by the government and the public as social sins that must be dealt with by prosecution, persecution, imprisonment, and oppression. Prior, working for the Ministry of Munitions, investigates a childhood friend, Beattie, a pacifist in prison for plotting to kill Lloyd George. Eventually, as Prior represses parts of himself and events that have happened to him, his personality splits. Interesting but not quite as satisfying as the first book, in my opinion.

Death at the Château Bremont (2011) by Mary Lou Longworth, the first in the Verlaque and Bonnet mystery series. So-so novel set in Aix-en-Provence involving the death of Étienne de Bremont, who falls from a window. Later, elements of the Russian mafia and their trade in supermodels/prostitutes come into play, and throughout runs the story of Antoine Verlaque (the chief magistrate – i.e. detective — in Aix) and his former girlfriend, law professor Marine Bonnet, as well as ample commentary on food, wine, cigars, and the French countryside and customs. I enjoyed that last bit but not the romance, and the plot was thin. I actually don’t know, after finishing the book, who killed one of the victims, but I don’t really care. I may read another for the pleasant French immersion.

September

The Ghost Road (1995) by Pat Barker, the third in the Regeneration trilogy, set in Britain and France in WWI. This one focuses more than the others on actual battle, with Prior and Owen back in the war, and on Rivers’ experiences (remembered in his dreamy flu-induced state) some years ago with a tribe of thwarted headhunters on Eddystone Island in the South Seas. Some themes that emerge are healing of soul and body, sacrifice and community, societal taboos, the seeming need for war and killing of others to maintain the health of a society.

Terminal City (2014) by Linda Fairstein, in the Alex Cooper series, this one set entirely in New York City, almost entirely at Grand Central Station/Terminal. Disappointing read. Serious fans of New York City history, train history, and Grand Central Station history will find a lot of information here, but the crime novel aspect falls short and gets muddied both by the didactic history lessons and by discussion of international terrorism. The relationships among Alex, Mike, Mercer and the more ancillary characters are given less attention in this book than usual, as well.

October

To Dwell in Darkness (2014) by Deborah Crombie, in the Kincaid/James series. Kincaid has been transferred (as punishment, it seems) to the Camden borough of London and is investigating a fatal bombing in the St. Pancras International Station mall, in which a small group of ragtag Crossrail protestors is involved. Duncan calls on the help of both Melody and Doug (neither of whom works for him now) to help him identify the bomber/victim. I guessed the killer more than 100 pp before the end of the book but the plot wasn’t bad. The rest of the book focuses on the ordinary life-with-children-and-pets of Gemma (working on her own case, a rape and murder, with Melody … and yet home with the kids most of the time?) and Duncan, which gets a bit tiresome.

The Long Way Home (2014) by Louise Penny, an Inspector Gamache novel. Clara Morris is worried when her estranged husband, Peter, hasn’t returned after a year, as promised, and asks Gamache — now retired and living in Three Pines with his wife and dog — to help her find him. His son-in-law and second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Clara’s best friend, Myrna Landers, come along too, as they trace Peter’s steps finally back to Canada. As all in the series, this is a book about the complexity of human relationships, the reality of deep psychic wounds and how they heal or don’t, and the power of love. Many who like the series didn’t like this book; I felt that while there is not as much focused action — and it’s not a crime novel per se — there is just as much mystery, humanity, and complexity of motivation as in her other books.

Murder in the Rue Dumas (2012) by M.L. Longworth, in the Verlaque and Bonnet series, set in Aix-en-Provence and in the Umbria region of Italy. When theology department doyen (dean) and art collector Georges Moutte is murdered after announcing at a party that he won’t retire as planned, suspicion focuses on the three professors hoping for his position (and the spacious house-for-life that goes with it) as well as on students vying for the prestigious Dumas Award, and soon, the net widens to include art collectors and sellers. The usual discussion of food, wine, and Verlaque’s and Bonnet’s relationship. The plot is so-so, as in the first book, with a strange bit in the middle introducing a character (Marcel Dubly) who doesn’t seem to have anything to do with this book. Despite investigations by Verlaque and others in the police force, these are more cozy than police procedural.

Euphoria (2014) by Lily King, a sort of historical fiction novel about four anthropologists: Margaret Mead (called Nell in the book), her second husband, Reo Fortune (Fen), and her third husband, Gregory Bateson (Andrew Bankson), as well as her close friend, mentor, and probable lover, Ruth Benedict (Helen Benjamin). Not only are the names changed, but the outcome of the story is drastically altered as well. The book focuses on a few months in New Guinea, during the intersection of Nell’s, Fen’s, and Bankson’s fevered time together among the Tam (the Tam were the Tchambuli/Chambri) and the Kiona (the Kiona were the Baining tribe). The book felt a bit light-weight and silly, though elements of the plot were intriguing, like their development of The Grid (based on Mead’s and Bateson’s theory of squares, developed at this time), a way of classifying all people as South/North/East/West types, later used by the Nazis; the descriptions of how Nell interacted with the native people (vs. the way the men did); and Bankson’s thoughts on the subjectivity of the observer.

Death in the Vines (2013) by M.L. Longworth, in the Verlaque and Bonnet series, set in Aix-en-Provence, in the L’Aubrac region, and near Narbonne. The plot, concerning two younger women who are raped (and die) and an older woman who is murdered, holds together better than in the previous two books. There was a glaring typo on page 126, though, with the name “Sophie” (who is not a character in the book) instead of “Marine.” Much of the plot involves vineyards and wineries, and of course enjoyment and discussion of food (including gargouillou at Michel Bras) is central as always.

November

Number9Dream (2001) by David Mitchell. Wikipedia says it’s “the search of 19-year-old Eiji Miyake for his father, whom he has never met. Told in the first person by Eiji, it is a coming of age/perception story that breaks convention by juxtaposing Eiji Miyake’s actual journey toward identity and understanding with his imaginative journey.” That gives you some idea, but it’s actually more complex than that. Besides the coming-of-age story, it’s also a story about grief and coming to terms with loss. There are elements of a gristly crime novel here, a nerdy romance, a post-modern fable, a family saga. The linear plot line is enhanced by a fantastic set of stories about a goat, a hen and a hominid; letters; journals of a Japanese submariner from World War II; a movie about a man who insists he is god; and a boatload of dreams. Characters include a pothead pizza delivery guy who does magic tricks, a witch, a video store owner, a classical piano player, several sadistic yazuka underworld figures, a wealthy playboy law student, a computer hacker, a wicked stepmother and stepsisters, Eiji’s daredevil sister Anju, and the city of Tokyo itself. Satisfying.

The Soul Catcher (2002) by Alex Kava in the FBI agent Maggie O’Dell series. I really like this series, whose books are hard to find locally. In this one, Maggie and her partner Tully are assigned to investigate the strangulation of a US Senator’s daughter near the FDR Memorial in Washington DC, as well as the mass suicide of several young men who are part of the Rev. Joseph Everett’s religious sect — of which Maggie’s estranged mother is also a member.

Nature Girl (2006) by Carl Hiaasen, another “caper drama satire” (as Wikipedia terms it) set in Florida. The Wikipedia plot summary nails it: “Honey Santana becomes irritated by telemarketers and invites … one to a phony real estate promotion – which she describes as an eco-tour – in the Ten Thousand Islands in order to teach him a lesson.” He arrives with his mistress, and they, Honey’s perverted ex-employer stalker, Honey’s son and her ex-husband, and “a young half-Seminole man named Sammy Tigertail and his very willing captive, Gillian, a sex-obsessed, warmhearted Florida State coed” all end up on one very small island. Not one of my favourites; really too over-the-top, even for Hiaasen, in terms of sex, drama, and character eccentricities.

Orphan Train (2013) by Christina Baker Kline: (Re-read for another bookgroup.) YA or adult novel about two orphans: Vivian, one who was on the National Orphan Train in 1929, from New York to Minnesota (and her life in Minnesota and later, as an aged woman, in Spruce Harbor, Maine), and Molly, a 17-year-old living in Spruce Harbor. The book is simple in plot and simply written, another gentle story told with humanity.

Flesh and Blood (2014) by Patricia Cornwell, 22nd in the Scarpetta series. A sniper seems to be efficiently taking out unrelated victims in New Jersey and Massachusetts, a Twitter message and odd items left in their yard imply a threat to Kay and her family,  and Lucy and Benton seem to be keeping secrets from Kay. (AND, the word “and” is used far too much in the dialogue, as always in this series.) This episode focuses more on Lucy and Benton and less on Marino and others in Kay’s life; it will help to have read some previous books in this series to understand the complexity of the plot twists. Kay notes (this book is first-person Kay again) several times that she has become more of an activist medical examiner, more angry with the violence in the world. Book ends in Florida with a cliffhanger.

December

An Officer and A Spy (2013) by Robert Harris. Novel about the Dreyfus Affair, in which Jewish soldier Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly accused of being a spy in turn-of the-19th-century France. The novel is told from the perspective of Georges Picquart, recently appointed chief of the head of the statistical division (counter-espionage) for the army, and is well-written, detailed, and just a bit boring. Still, I was glad to know more about this important event in history, when prejudices and other foibles of human nature (like loathing of being proved wrong and a desire to go along to get along) set and kept in motion grave injustices.

The Holistic Orchard: Trees, Fruits and Berries the Biological Way (2011) by Michael Phillips. I can cut to the chase and tell you to spray 100% pure neem oil on all your fruits and you’ve just learned half of what’s in the book. The rest is trying to convince us to orchard in a way that allows the shrubs, thickets and trees to ward off disease and insect damage by maintaining a healthy, natural plant ecosystem, plus there’s information on specific diseases and pests of each fruit, the best varieties of fruits to plant (especially if you live in northern New England, as Phillips does), and how and when to prune each of them. Permaculture principles are mentioned and are inherent in his suggestions.

Murder on the Île Sordou (2014) by M.L. Longworth, in the Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal mystery series. This one is set on the fictional island of Sourdou, 15 miles fro Marseille, at the opening of a new grand hotel. Guests besides Verlaque and Bonnet and Marine’s friend Sylvie include an American couple, a fading film star and his wife and stepson, a poet, and a Parisian couple. The murder doesn’t occur until at least halfway into the book; the focus as usual, maybe more than usual, is on food and drink and being French. The series is pleasant enough.

The Caller (2009) by Karin Fossum, 10th in the Inspector Sejer series, set in a small town in Norway, looks at the motivations for and consequences of a teen’s sinister pranks, wrought on strangers to cause havoc and insecurity. Some may find the book too emotionally wrenching (especially those who abhor harm to animals and children) but it’s also a serious and calm investigation of parenting, the complexity of human motivations, and diversity of behaviours in within one individual.