Books Read 2019

Once again (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002), I’m keeping track of what I read this year. I’m always looking for recommendations for fiction, crime fiction series, and non-fiction titles!

January

Light Thickens (1982) by Ngaio Marsh, the 32nd and last of the Inspector Alleyn series. Much less detective work, no Troy, and lots of MacBeth. The first 2/3 of the book is the casting, staging, and rehearsing of the Shakespeare play, “MacBeth,” at the Dolphin Theatre in London, directed by Peregrine Jay, just as his play “The Glove” was in #24, Killer Dolphin. If you’re a “MacBeth” aficionado you’ll love this; if you wanted more detecting, you won’t. But I still wish there were more books in the series.

Kingdom of the Blind (2018) by Louise Penny, 14th in the Gamache series. Gamache is suspended due to events in 2017’s Glass Houses, but when he, bookstore owner and psychologist Myrna Landers, and a young man — Benedict Pouliot, a builder/custodian who lives in Montréal — are named as liquidators (executors) for the estate of a deceased woman none of them knew, a house cleaner named Bertha Baumgartner, who called herself The Baroness, he’s drawn back into crime and detection, along with the now-acting head of homicide at the Sûreté du Québec (and his son-in-law), Jean Guy Beauvoir. Meanwhile, more spillover from previous events, rebellious police cadet and former homeless drug addict Amelie Choquet is out on the streets searching for the Carfentani opiates that Gamache, for a greater good, let flow into Canada from the U.S. There’s a lot about revenge, secrets, and lies here. I read it in two days and was sad when it was over.

The Witch Elm (2018) by Tana French. Charming, easy-going Toby is involved in a dodgy scheme at the art gallery where he works, then is attacked at home and winds up recuperating from the attack at Ivy House, where his Uncle Hugo lives and where Toby and his cousins, Susanna and Leon, who are more like siblings to Toby, spent summers together growing up. When a skull is found in the trunk of a tree, events of a decade ago are revisited with a fine-tooth comb by the detectives investigating and by the family members. Atmospheric, gripping, terrifying in multiple ways, so well-written with characters you come to know.

Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (1985 compilation) by Agatha Christie. The coziest of cozy books, a compilation of Christie’s 20 short stories featuring Miss Marple, from The Tuesday Club Mysteries (in the first seven, Miss Marple, her nephew the writer Raymond West, clergyman Dr. Pender, solicitor Petherick, retired head of Scotland Yard Sir Henry Clithering, artist Joyce Lempriere each present an unsolved mystery and try to solve the others’ … includes “The Bloodstained Pavement;” in next six, including “The Blue Geranium” and “A Christmas Tragedy,” it’s Miss Marple, Arthur and Dolly Bantry, Sir Henry, actress Jane Helier, and Dr. Lloyd trying to solve each other’s mysteries; and in the last, “Death by Drowning,” the mystery is current, with Sir Henry Clithering on the spot); The Regatta Mystery (“Miss Marple Tells A Story,” to Raymond and Joyce); Three Blind Mice (“Strange Jest,” “The Case of the Perfect Maid” (with Inspector Slack), “The Case of the Caretaker” – Dr. Haydock writes this mystery for Miss Marple to solve as she’s recovering from illness and feeling depressed, and “Tape-Measure Murder,” again with Inspector Slack) ; and Double Sin (“Greenshaw’s Folly,” featuring Raymond West, and “Sanctuary,” featuring Miss Marple’s goddaughter Bunch Harmon, a vicar’s wife).

Lilac Girls (2016) by Martha Hall Kelly is a novel based on real people and real events, set from Sept. 1939 to 1959, told from the points of view of three strong women: Caroline Ferriday, a 30’s something (when the book starts) high-society do-gooder working at the French consulate in NYC and living on an estate in Connecticut with her mother; Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, living with her parents and older sister Zuzanna in Lublin, Poland, when the book begins; and Herta Oberheuser, an ambitious young German doctor who answers an ad for a government medical position at a “re-education camp.” The sections with Kasia and Herta, who end up at the same concentration camp, Ravensbrück — where deforming and life-threatening surgery is done on perfectly healthy girls and women to give them infections so that sulfa drugs can be tested …with varying success, — are often harrowing and sad. The Caroline section, set in or near NYC, or in post-war Paris, is a relief throughout the book, although Caroline herself is often sad and heart-hardened because the man she loves, a French actor, is married. The first 300 pp of the novel is set during the war, with all of its cruelty, cowardice, suffering, bravery, and confusion; the last 180pp are devoted to the years and events after the war, as each woman, but especially Caroline and Kasia, struggles with the war’s aftermath and seeks justice. Both Caroline Ferriday and Herta Oberheuser, as well as other concentration camp staff, were real people. The writing and plotting are clear, detailed, and nuanced, with images that will haunt the reader, an unflinching, unsettling, and embodied expression of living in this horrific time.

February

Milkman: A Novel (2018) by Anna Burns. To say, as Wikipedia starts with, that it’s a novel “set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland …. follow[ing] an 18-year-old girl who is harassed by an older married man known as the ‘Milkman'” doesn’t really summarise this book. For one thing, neither “the Troubles” nor “Northern Ireland” is mentioned, nor is any other country, city, or place other than with archetypal, mythic names like “the 10-minute place” (a borderland or no-go area), “the usual place” (cemetery), and “the country over the water.” People aren’t called by their names, either. The narrator, “middle sister,” is someone who by personality, habit, and training keeps herself to herself, so much so that she makes a blank slate of herself onto which the “intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian” community, which doesn’t trust her because they don’t know what she’s thinking, writes whatever gossip they like. This leaves her vulnerable when the married milkman, a paramilitary fighter twice her age, starts wooing her in a creepy, not-quite-wooing her way that soon has her hyper-vigilant to avoid him and second-guessing herself constantly. But even this description of the main plot doesn’t relay the humour of the narrator and the book nor does it mention the many detailed digressions concerning people’s motivations and actions, the many reasons for marrying the wrong person, the community’s irritation with women with issues (the feminists), the ordeal of finding a cat’s head after a small bombing, the community’s uneasiness with sky colours and the sunset, her mother’s dismay concerning her own aging body, her wee sisters’ delight (along with other young girls in the neighbourhood) in mimicking the dress and dancing of the now-famous international dancers from their area, the thoughts of “tablets girl,” the community’s very successful poisoner, and so on. Lack of many paragraph breaks is annoying, but the unimpeded flow of the writing, or sometimes overly-impeded-with-commas-and-hyphens flow of the writing, expresses the complexity of the situation and the narrator’s thoughts perfectly.

March

Careless Love (2019) by Peter Robinson, 25th in the DCI Banks/DI Annie Cabot series set in Eastvale, Yorkshire. A young woman is found dead in someone else’s disabled car. Then an expensively dressed older man is found dead in a gully in the moors, and despite differences, there are also certain similarities in these possible suicides/accidents/murders. Meanwhile, Annie’s father Ray’s new love interest, Zelda, who works in exposing sex trafficking rings, reveals shocking information about Phil Keane, the psycho that burned down Banks’ home and betrayed Annie in a previous book. Good, as usual. Lots of references to music, classical, jazz, and 1960s pop/rock, more than usual, I think.

The Hunting Party (2019) by Lucy Foley, a suspense novel about a group of friends who met (most of them) at Oxford ten years before and who always celebrate New Year’s Eve together. This year, Emma has planned the event for Loch Corrin, a pricey lodge in the remote Scottish Highland wilderness, but all does not go smoothly. The novel is very dark, with lots of drinking, a bit of drugs and sex, and much reminiscing, often in a harrowing way, about the past. There’s also a nasty game of Truth or Dare. The story is told from the perspectives alternately of Miranda, the golden girl; Emma, who admires her; and Katie, her best friend from before college; and from the pov as well of Heather, who runs the Lodge, and Doug, a war veteran who’s the gamekeeper, and events “now” (2 Jan 2019) are intertwined with events from one to three days earlier. Besides the three women (Miranda, Emma, and Katie), Miranda’s husband Julien, Emma’s boyfriend Mark, Nick and his boyfriend Bo, and married couple Giles and Samira along with their infant Priya make up the group. The writing is serviceable, certainly not poetic or complex, and the plotting well-paced, though unfortunately the killer is strongly hinted at about 1/3 of the way through the book. Still, I enjoyed it.

April

Look Alive Twenty-Five (2018) by Janet Evanovich, in the Stephanie Plum, NJ bounty hunter, series. I haven’t read one of these in about 10 years but they are always a quick, amusing read, if formulaic and predictable. In this one, Stephanie and side-kick Lula, and even Ranger and some of his team, find themselves working (sandwich-making, waitressing, cleaning, managing) at a local Trenton deli after several deli managers disappear, each with only one shoe left near the dumpster. Turns out, of course, there is a connection between one of Stephanie’s failed-to-appears and the disappearing managers. Unlike other readers, I’m fine with Stephanie never choosing between durable Morelli and mysterious Ranger, though I’m happy to have Ranger feature large as he does in this one.

Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration (2015) by Tao Orion, an excellent and extremely well-researched book, with lots of real-world examples, about rethinking the concept of “invasive” species and advocating a systems-thinking approach in considering and (sometimes) managing them. The main point is that we can (and should) look at invasive species — terrestrial and aquatic plants and animals, though she mainly focuses on plants — as a reflection of the ecosystem they’re part of; they tell us about the underlying conditions of the ecosystem: the soil and water health and makeup, the nutrients and metals in the soil/water, the climate and changes to the climate, the other plants and animals in the ecosystem, etc. The “invaders” don’t change the ecosystem so much as the ecosystem determines which species will grow rampantly. Invasive species fill a niche in the ecosystem and provide benefits to the other plants and animals as well as challenges. A secondary point is that no ecosystem is static; all ecosystems are dynamic and characterised by constant change. Ecosystems move through various states (a process called succession) toward a brief –in geological time — state of equilibrium, and all the while they are subject to natural and human disturbances (fire, storm, flood, drought, human encroachment and fragmentation). An ecosystem that’s unrecognisable to us over time isn’t necessarily a dysfunctional ecosystem; it may just have transformed itself, or been transformed and adapted to become, a different and functioning ecosystem.

Broken Ground (2018) by Val McDermid, in the DCI Karen Pirie series, set in and near Edinburgh, Scotland. I’d stopped reading McDermid because many of her books are too full of torture and disturbing images for me, but this series is a police procedural and much easier for me to handle; I’m going to go back now and read the others in the series. In this novel, recently bereaved DCI Pirie, head of the Historic Cases Unit, is working on several cases at once, two of them historical in nature and one, which she stumbles into, very current. The focus is on a crime (or crimes: war looting and murder) dating partially from 1944 and 1995 in rural Wester Ross, Scotland. Pirie is also under fire from her new boss, Asst. Chief Constable Ann Markie, who has personal reasons for undermining her at every step and who has saddled her with a spying detective sergeant.

No Sunscreen for the Dead (2019) by Tim Dorsey. Zany crime fiction/thriller set in the Sunshine State (known as the bastion of former Cold War era spies), among the retirees of Boca Shores Retirement Trailer Park, featuring lovable manic psychopath Serge and sidekick druggie Coleman. This is the first Dorsey I’ve read and I’ll be back.

Out of Bounds (2016) by Val McDermid, in the DCI Karen Pirie series set in Edinburgh, Scotland. Karen investigates a 1994 plane bombing that killed four people, including a Northern Island minister (a bombing presumed then to be the work of Irish terrorists), which she learns about when someone related to one of the plane bombing victims dies, either by suicide or murder. Meanwhile, the DNA of a joyriding teen in hospital turns out to be related to the perpetrator of a 1996 rape and murder, but the teen was adopted, so it’s not as straightforward as it seems. A further plot involves Syrian refugees that Karen meets on her nocturnal wanderings. Complicated and engaging plot.

A Darker Domain (2009) by Val McDermid, the first in the DCI Karen Pirie series set in and near Fife, Scotland, and, in this novel, partially in Tuscany, Italy. Pirie, DS Phil Parhatka, and DC Jason Murray are working on two investigations, one the disappearance of a miner during the 1984 miner strikes, and the other the disappearance of a young boy in 1985, kidnapped with his mother, who was killed in a shootout during the hostage hand-over. An ambitious investigative journalist, Bel Richmond, is also assisting the family in the second search. McDermid’s writing is a pleasure to read.

The Stranger Diaries (2018) by Elly Griffiths. I guess I’d call this a gothic suspense novel, set in modern-day England, not too far from Cambridge. The story is narrated in turns by Clare Cassidy, her 15-year-old daughter Georgia, and an investigating officer, DS Harbinder Kaur. Clare is an English teacher at Talgarth comprehensive high school, which is situated partly in the home of R.M. Holland, a Victorian writer of Gothic novels, whose creepy short story The Stranger begins the book and is interleaved throughout; Clare is writing a biography of Holland. When another teacher at Clare’s school is found murdered, and a line from The Stranger is found next to the body, DS Kaur starts to look with suspicion at Clare. Then a note addressed directly to Clare suddenly and unsettlingly appears in her own diary. The three main characters — mother and teenage daughter (both of whom keep diaries and are readers), and Harbinder Kaur, a gay policewoman who in her mid-30s lives at home with her Indian parents — are engaging, and I enjoyed reading their perspectives on each other, especially as Harbinder and Clare evolve from distrusting and disliking each other to cautiously sharing information and seeking each other out. But the other characters, including victims and the other potential perpetrators, are cardboard; I never felt anything one way or the other about them, which lessened my interest in the plot. I noticed Louise Penny’s blurb on the books cover — “I loved this book!” — but Penny’s novels, IMO, have significantly more depth and complexity of character development.

Fifty Days of Solitude (1994) by Doris Grumbach. Lovely meditation on spending 50 days alone on the coast of Maine (Sargentville) in the winter of 1993, mostly without speaking or listening to the spoken word except for 40 minutes of NPR news per day. I read it in about an hour but I marked many passages to copy and consider more fully later. I also learned a few new words (inguement, endolithic — neither of which my spell-checker seems to know either). She quotes from many other writers (and a few visual artists), including some of my favourites on solitude like May Sarton and Henri Nouwen. Politics oozes in, as she mentions Bill Clinton’s election and inauguration and the AIDS epidemic particularly. Besides musing on solitude and loneliness, she talks about writing, community, the self, art, winter, planning and serendipity, among others.

May

The Reckoning (2015, transl. 2019) by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, a thriller with police procedural elements. A grisly, harrowing, complexly plotted novel that begins with a young girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. Twelve years later, Icelandic Detective Huldur, languishing at the bottom of the investigative team, is given the task of following up on a strange time-capsule message — a prediction of six people who will die in 2016, giving initials only — written by a schoolchild ten years ago when the capsule was buried. He enlists the help of Freyja, a child psychologist with the Children’s House, who is not particularly eager to help, given that she has also lost her position because of recent work-related incidents involving Huldur, but she becomes curious about the list and about the court records concerning the list’s writer that seem to have been expunged from all the official files. The characters (not just Huldur and Freyja) are interesting and believable, and the dialog, motivations, and actions ring true for the most part. Not for those who can’t bear to read about children in jeopardy.

The Skeleton Road (2014) by Val McDermid, 2nd in the DCI Karen Pirie series, set in Scotland. When skeletal remains are found on a rooftop in Edinburgh, it’s up to DCI Karen Pirie and team to identify the remains, determine how the body ended up on the roof, and find a killer, all of which requires lots of backstory of the Balkan civil wars (1991-2001) and alliances made there. Not my favourite in the series.

Murder By the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens’ London (2019) by Claire Harman. A quick and cogent read about the murder of 73-year-old “unobtrusive minor aristocrat” Lord William Russell in Mayfair, London, on 5 May 1840, including the investigation, trial, execution, and aftermath, and with emphasis on the sensational novels of the time, especially William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, which seemed to lionise a ne’er-do-well. The chapters about that novel, the many plays and broadsides it spun off, its influence, and its critics (including Dickens and Thackeray), are the least interesting, but the whole book was a bit disappointing somehow. I got completely lost in the many names of Lords, Dukes, Duchesses, etc.

A Curious Beginning (2015) by Deanna Raybourn, set in the 1880s in and near London, featuring lepidopterist Veronica Speedwell, whom we meet when the last of the two sisters who raised her dies, followed immediately by someone ransacking their house and attacking her, followed immediately by another someone rescuing her and bringing her to a warehouse on the Thames in London where he entrusts her life to his unkempt taxidermist/natural historian friend Stoker and then is himself promptly murdered. So begins a feisty friendship between Veronica and Stoker and a series of narrow escapes from whoever is hunting them. I figured out the “mystery” fairly early on but enjoyed the plot, the characters, the relationship development, and Stoker’s bulldog, Huxley. Some amusing writing, too: “Most of the furnishings had been carted away and sold, leaving the few pieces that had come with the cottage — a couple of chairs, a kitchen table, a grievously worn rug, and a poorly executed still life that looked as if it had been painted by someone with a grudge against fruit.”

Stalker (2014/2019 U.S.) by Lars Kepler, 5th in the Joona Linna series, set in Stockholm. A weakened Linna is back, just as unconventional in his methods as always, though not officially on the police force; he’s helping his replacement, very pregnant Margot Silverman and her associates, including a hypnotist, try to track down a killer who, minutes before killing in a gruesome and brutal way, first sends a video to the police of the victim (always a woman) doing ordinary things. Page-turning.

Monday Night (1938) by Kay Boyle, a work of modern fiction I saw recommended by Doris Grumbach in her Fifty Days of Solitude. Takes place in France (various cities) on a Monday night into an early Tuesday morning. I lost count of the number of drinks had by the long-winded alcoholic protagonist (?), Wilf, as he dragged around Bernie (who, thanks to Wilf, has had no sleep and no food for too long — “lost between a whine and a yawn,” as the New York Times review of the book aptly puts it), a young American who’s recently graduated medical school and who has come to France looking for Sylvestre, his toxicology idol, a man who is connected through his damning evidence at trial with the conviction of several notorious poisoners. The writing is dense but not beautiful, the plot grimy and full of diversions, and would-be-writer Wilf’s verbosity and intense focus on a mission — perhaps on behalf of Bernie at first, to locate his idol, and then on behalf of others as time unfolds, or perhaps simply for his own benefit, as he envisions the book that will come of his suspicions, and even if no book comes, for the moment his vision of it is enough — is frustrating to witness, particularly the way he goes about it, steamrolling all and sundry with his baseless speculations, his “subterranean fantasy.” The contemporary NYT review of the book captures well the feeling of the reader: “The abnormal is not only obvious, as Gertrude Stein remarked; it’s also darned fatiguing. It’s true, of course, that Miss Boyle does not always concern herself with the abnormal as such; but when your people are never anything but sufferers, when they are always trapped between a blow and a scream, it’s difficult not to want a little more light and air.” The Kirkus review of the book in 1938 includes this line: “Her concentration on the gutter side of life is unpleasant.”

Blood Oath (2019) by Linda Fairstein, 20th in the Alex Cooper series. Alex is back and immediately presented with a cold case of sexual abuse to a minor that has consequences for the present District Attorney bid now that Battaglia is gone. At the same time, a co-worker is taken seriously ill a few blocks from Alex’s welcome-back party, and it soon becomes clear that Mike and Mercer will be working that case. The plot is solid, and I liked the pacing, though the ending was more “thriller” than I thought it needed to be. Rockefeller University/Hospital is the NYC centerpiece, though it doesn’t come into the story until later in the plot. This series is comfort food for me.

Mouthful of Birds (2019, and in translation) by Samantha Schweblin, a book of 20 short stories, each one creepy and strange. Schweblin is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lives now in Berlin. Her stories are otherwordly, sometimes gruesome, sometimes just horrific. I read the whole book in about 2 hours. My favourite story was “The Size of Things,” about a toy store, but the title story will stay with readers for a long time. There were a couple I really didn’t follow at all (“Rage of Pestilence,” for one, and “Olingris” for another, at least the ending).

June

Looker (2019) by Laura Sims, a debut psychological novel about a 30-something woman, living in New York City, slowly losing her grip on reality. The woman (not named) has lost a lot — her husband has just left her after they couldn’t conceive the children they desperately want — but she still has some life (including work she enjoys) when we meet her but she quickly puts everything at risk as she entangles herself in obsessions and makes poor choices. I felt empathy for her but also frustration when she sabotaged herself over and over. A good beach read but not much more.

The House Sitter (2003) by Peter Lovesey, an Inspector Peter Diamond mystery, #8 in the series. I couldn’t get the first several in the series right away, so I started with this one, which is equally Diamond (inspector in Bath, England) and another senior investigator, Henrietta Mallin from Sussex. A woman is strangled on a busy beach, and her profession ties her to a serial killer who’s announced his future victims and who is using “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as the stylistic basis for the killings. I enjoyed it; it’d be a creepy beach read.

The Circle (2005) by Peter Lovesey, one of the two Henrietta Mallin crime novels, though she only comes in to it about halfway through. Pure luck I read this one after The House Sitter, which it apparently follows on and references. “The Circle” refers to a Chichester writing circle, which Bob — a widowed single father, van driver, and doggerel writer –attends a day or so before a publisher who had recently spoken to the group is found dead in his torched house. When the chair of the writing circle comes under suspicion, Bob and the others start to investigate each other as well as others on their own to find the real culprit, but the arson and killings continue. Eventually Hen and Stella are called in to help. Interesting.

Bloodhounds (1996) by Peter Lovesey, 4th in the Peter Diamond series. Another sort of coincidence, I guess: like the previous Lovesey book I just read, out of order, this one is again about a literary circle, in this case fans of crime fiction. When one of the Bloodhounds, as they’re called, is implicated in a stamp heist, and then another of their own is found dead on the first member’s canal houseboat, in a classic “locked room” murder, all eyes are on the Bloodhounds as not only unravelers of mysteries but perpetrators.

Diamond Dust (2002) by Peter Lovesey, #7 in the Peter Diamond series, set mostly in Bath, England. Peter’s wife Stephanie is gunned down in broad daylight in a public park, and there is no lack of suspects, including her ex-husband, several of the men Diamond has put away in prison, wives of the men Diamond has put away in prison, possibly a stranger she’s gone to meet there? Of course, Diamond can’t investigate his own wife’s murder, officially, so unofficial it is. Great, twisted plot.

Diamond Solitaire (1992) by Peter Lovesey, the 2nd in the Peter Diamond series. Diamond, after being fired from the police, is working as a security guard at Harrod’s when a young abandoned Japanese girl is found in the store after closing. She can’t or won’t speak, and no family can be found for her, so she is given the name ‘Naomi’ and taken to a local school, where it’s determined she’s autistic. Diamond spends a lot of time with her at the school trying to communicate so he can return her to her family. Then a Japanese woman appears and claims her, whisking her away to New York … so Diamond follows and works with the NYPD to find Naomi. Meanwhile, there’s another plot that eventually dovetails with this one, about an American pharmaceutical company working on a promising drug for regenerating brain cells. And then there’s the Japanese sumo wrestler. Complex but it works fairly well, though I don’t buy the reason Naomi was removed from her mother (given four pages from the end of the book).

Upon a Dark Night (1997) by Peter Lovesey, the 5th in the Peter Diamond series. A young woman awakes in a hospital with no memory of who she is, what her name is, where she lives. She (nicknamed “Rose” for now) and her new friend Ada seem to be making headway in learning more about her when a woman who says she’s Rose’s sister comes and whisks her away. Meanwhile, a cantankerous old farmer has died of a shotgun wound through the jaw, and a young woman is found dead after a fall from a roof during a party. Of course, everything is connected.

The Vault (1999) by Peter Lovesey, the 6th in the Peter Diamond series, this one set in and near the vault under the Bath Abbey churchyard, where a hand has been found in concrete. Mary Shelley wrote most of Frankenstein while living in Bath (see news article), and this novel imagines the discovery in modern day Bath of her copy of Milton’s poems as well as her writing desk and sketchpad.

The Secret Hangman (2007) by Peter Lovesey, the 9th in the Peter Diamond series, set in Bath, England. Someone is stringing up couples, the woman first, then the man, in parks, from bridges, at other public structures in Bath. Meanwhile, Peter has a female admirer. Not my favourite; I don’t care about the detective’s love life.

Skeleton Hill (2009) by Peter Lovesey, the 10th in the Peter Diamond series, set mostly around Lansdown Hill in Bath and also a bit in Bristol, England. Not a favourite: Ukranian sex trafficking, British Civil War reenactments, horse racing, another case of injury-induced amnesia.

Cattail Moonshine & Milkweed Medicine: The Curious Stories of 43 Amazing North American Native Plants (2016) by Tammi Hartung. A permaculture group book discussion choice this spring, and a good, light, easy-to-read with not too much to think about, antidote to our previous book. I think we took it in four or five sections of about 45 pp each, which took me less than an hour to read. Lots of photos, illustrations, anecdotes, trivia, and facts about the different medicinal, health, food, instrument-making, fiber arts, industrial, and Native American (a variety of tribes named) uses of each plant, including Agave, Cranberry, Echinacea, Horsetail, Nettles, Panic Grass, Pine, Squash, Valerian, Wild Rice, Witch Hazel. Many of the plants grow in New England, where our group is located.

July

Stagestruck (2011) by Peter Lovesey, the 11th in the Peter Diamond series, set in Bath, England. A pop idol turned leading lady is sticken in the first moments of the Bath Theatre Royal’s production of the play I Am a Camera, apparently burned by tainted stage makeup, and then someone else connected with the play is found dead, apparently of suicide. Meanwhile, Diamond is dealing not only with his own theatre phobia, stemming from childhood, but with a new and garrulous policeman assigned to his team against his will. Reminded me, of course, of Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, often set in theatres.

Cop to Corpse (2012) by Peter Lovesey, the 12th in the Peter Diamond series, set in Bath, England, and nearby. A very complicated plot; I lost count of the number of crimes and criminals involved. Basically, three policemen walking their beats have been killed by a sniper, including Bath’s own Harry Tasker. Diamond’s team is a part of the investigation headed by Serial Crimes’ senior officer, Jack Gull, which is challenging for Diamond’s need to be in control. Much of the action — and there is a lot of action — takes place in Becky Addy Woods in Wiltshire, with Diamond in mortal danger more than once. One of the more suspenseful and action-packed in the series, which isn’t a compliment, but the plotting is tight for all that.

The Tooth Tattoo (2013) by Peter Lovesey, the 13th in the Peter Diamond series, set in Bath, England. This one revolves around a string quartet, and anyone who enjoys classical music of the sort a string quartet plays will find a lot to appreciate in this book. Mel Farrar, a jobbing violist, is offered a spot with the Staccati Quartet a few years after their previous violist went missing in Budapest, not long after the body of a young Japanese woman is found in a canal in the city where they had their last gig, Vienna, which, coincidentally, is where Peter Diamond and girlfriend Paloma are spending a vacation looking at locales from the film The Third Man. Coincidentally, again, the string quartet gets a 6-month residency in Bath, where, surprise, another Japanese woman is found dead in a canal. Besides lots of info about string quartets and classical music, there’s also info on netsukes, mammoth ivory, Japanese gangsters (the yakuza), and more.

The Stone Wife (2014) by Peter Lovesey, the 14th in the Peter Diamond series, set in Bath and Bristol, England. The title refers to a heavy stone sculpture, the Wife of Bath (dating from around the time of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), up at auction and fetching far more than expected when three people break in and kill one of the high bidders, a local Chaucer professor, with a Webley automatic revolver. Ingaborg goes undercover in a dangerous bid to learn more from a known arms dealer in Bristol while the others zero in on the man’s widow and her ex-husband and one of the victim’s co-workers.

The Island: A Thriller (2019) by Ragnar Jonasson, 2nd in the Hulda series (Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir of the Reykjavik Police department; the trilogy works backwards; this novel finds Hulda in the middle of her career) set in Iceland, in this book mainly in the Westfjords and in Elliðaey as well as Reykjavik. It’s a confusing plot to follow because several stories are started but not connected or explained (and some key names are omitted) until about halfway through. We first learn about a young couple on a romantic trip to a remote cabin in the Westfjords (5 hours or more northwest of Reykjavik), ending in something catastrophic, followed by a conclusive police investigation. Next, it’s 10 years later and some friends are meeting after years apart at a hunting lodge on the remote island of Elliðaey (about 3 hours southeast of Reykjavik), in the archipelago of Vestmannaeyjar. Meanwhile, Hulda is dealing with her own personal and work issues over these ten years. More suspense than police procedural, though there is some of that. Lots of description of Icelandic landscape and specific mountains. The second half reminded me strongly of The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley, which I read earlier this year: old friends with secrets reunited uneasily in a remote place with a creepy vibe. Suspenseful but not all that satisfying for me.

Down Among the Dead Men (2015) by Peter Lovesey, the 15th in the Peter Diamond series, set in and near Sussex, England, this time. This is one of my favourites, for three reasons: Peter and his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore, are paired in an internal investigation of a colleague in Sussex; that colleague is Peter’s old friend, Hen Mallin; and also in Sussex, some art students at a private girls’ school are infatuated with an attractive male teacher with an MG — their replacement after their previous teacher goes missing — who hosts live drawing sessions and nighttime parties on weekends for adult artists.

Beau Death (2017) by Peter Lovesey, the 16th in the Peter Diamond series, set in and near Bath, England. A skeleton is found — sitting in a chair in a building that’s being demolished — in a 1760s Beau Nash costume, complete with black wig. When it turns out the man died more recently than the 18th century, and by being stabbed, Peter and team get to work to try to identify the victim so they can perhaps find the killer. This turns out to mean mingling with the glitterati of the Beau Nash Society. So-so plot, a little too much history for me. The interplay of the police (it’s not all Peter) is definitely a strength of this series.

August

99 Nights in Logar (2019) by Jamil Jan Kochai, fiction about American 12-year-old Marwand’s visit (99 days and nights) to his family home in Logar, Afghanistan, with his parents, his brothers, his many cousins and other relations. It centers on the search for a wolf-dog, Budabash, that Marwand tortured on his last visit six years before and was bitten by (leaving him with an infected stump on one finger) soon after he arrived for this visit. During a search for the dog, he and his brothers and cousins get lost in or near a maze, along with a thief, some American soldiers, some Taliban fighters (“T”s), some drug dealers and users, and others, who all appear again later in the book. Marwand spends a lot of time either escaping the family compound or secretly listening in on the conversations of his parents and other adults. He is also sick the whole time, with “land-induced seasickness” that leaves his bowels a mess. I can’t say I enjoyed this book but it gave an interesting perspective on living in Afghanistan as the war(s) continue to be waged there.

A Beautiful Corpse: A Harper McClain Mystery (2019) by Christi Daugherty. Really enjoyed this novel, whose protagonist is a relatable crime reporter for a paper in Savannah, GA (it was fun knowing where some of the places mentioned are). A young law student is shot on River Street in the wee hours of the night, after her bartending shift ends; is the killer her boyfriend, the bar owner or a bar customer, the local district attorney’s son, or someone else? The plot was tight, though a bit obvious (but satisfying), and I enjoyed the newspaper background and goings-on. I’m looking forward to the next one already, and may go back and read the first, The Echo Killing, in which Harper thinks she’s found the person who murdered her mother, though I know how it ends and all the fallout from it after reading this book.

Magpie Murders (2017) by Anthony Horowitz, crime fiction. Lengthy, about 500 pp, and it felt long, though I enjoyed the first half the crime story within the crime story, set in a 1955 English village with the usual classic crime suspects (lord of the manor and family and servants, vicar & wife, village busybody, and so on) and a private detective (Atticus Pund) working with the police. That story, cut short before the murderer is announced, has been written by Alan Conway, whose eight previous novels have been published by Cloverleaf Books; editor Susan Ryeland is curious about the manuscript’s abrupt end and becomes all the more so when foul play moves from the 1955 story to modern day real life. I’d rate it a 4/5: It was fun to read, with a plot and characters (especially in the manuscript section) that held my attention, but the second half dragged in parts and overall I thought the book was too clever by half. Still, I think most Agatha Christie fans will find it engaging

The Echo Killing (2018) by Christi Daugherty, first in the investigative crime reporter Harper McClain series, set in Savannah, GA. A young woman is murdered and the similarities between her crime scene and that of Harper’s mother, killed when Harper was 12, is too much for her to ignore. As she digs deeper, taking greater risks that eventually lead to a 2-week suspension, the evidence seems to point to one of the women’s ex-lovers, including a police detective.

September

Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney. Fiction. This book is exactly what it’s marketed as: a coming-of-age love story. Marianne and Connell are high-schoolers in Carricklea, County Sligo, Ireland, when we meet them, Marianne an independent intellectual misfit from an abusive but wealthy family and Connell a smart and popular guy who needs to feel popular, with a good mother (Marianne’s family’s maid, in fact) from a poor family. They start a secretive friends-with-benefits relationship, and over the course of their college years at Trinity in Dublin and beyond, they continue an on-again-off-again emotionally and sexually intimate relationship. The story is told from the points of view of each, though not in a formal way. It’s a simple novel on some levels, made complex by its incisive emotional nuance, and the way it weaves ideas of power, passivity, shame, secrecy, safety, and of course normality throughout. One of my favourite lines is Connell’s thought about Marianne early on: “She’s not living the same kind of life as other people.”

Killing with Confetti (2019) by Peter Lovesey, the 17th in the Peter Diamond series, set in Bath, England. The Deputy Chief Constable’s daughter is marrying a crime baron’s son — what could go wrong? Peter is chosen to make sure nothing does, either at the Abbey wedding or the reception in the Roman Baths. But of course, the crime baron, recently released from prison, has a lot of people who’d like to see him dead, including not only rival gang leaders but enemies dating back to an attempted prison break three years before (which takes up the first 50 pp of the book). No mention of Peter’s girlfriend Paloma in this one (did they break up between books?), but several mentions of his deceased wife Stephanie.

Clock Dance (2018) by Anne Tyler, set near Harrisburg, PA, Tucson, AZ, and in Baltimore, MD, the story of a woman whose life is mostly disappointments and whose overarching concept of relationships is either be Gandhi or marry Gandhi — either be the self-sacrificing one or be the self-centered one. Her mother (and therefore her childhood) is unstable; her first and second husbands are both tedious, thoughtless, and mildly demeaning of her (not Gandhis); her sister and her two sons are emotionally and geographically distant. Then she gets a call out of the blue from Baltimore to come help someone she doesn’t know in the midst of a little crisis, and her life changes. Or does it?

Three Women (2019) by Lisa Taddeo, non-fiction about three women and their sexual desires, disappointments, traumas, risks, sacrifices, needs. It’s about how these women, and how women generally, define themselves by their sexuality, their sex lives, their sexual desires, what they want, what they allow themselves to want and the desires they hide, what they don’t want but acquiesce to anyway again and again. All the stories, oddly, IMO, are about transgressive sexual relationships, those outside the accepted norms of the culture.

I actually skipped most of the Maggie story, knowing that North Dakota’s “Teacher of the Year” walked free after criminal court cases in 2015 and is teaching even now. The court cases against him for corrupting a minor and statutory rape ended in either acquittal or mistrial. Of the other two, the Sloane story — about a privileged young woman (42) who lives in Newport, RI, and runs a restaurant with her chef husband, Richard — is by far the more complex. Sloane’s husband wants sex at least once every 36 hours and prefers it when another man (for Sloane), or sometimes another woman (for both him and Sloane), joins them; Sloane defines herself as a “submissive,” so she wants to please her husband even though she doesn’t need or really want a third person in the sexual constellation, and in fact she feels “everything inside herself evaporate” when her husband has sex with other women, even though she knows (somehow) that he cares only for her. Sloane keeps herself very thin, through eating disorders, starvation, and compulsive exercise. Lina, living in Indiana, is a bit younger, in her 30s, married for 10 years to Ed, who won’t French kiss her and with whom she hasn’t had sex in 3 months (she’s been counting every day) when she reconnects with her high school lover, Aidan, on Facebook; Aidan is no prize — selfish, careless of Lina, texting her for sex on the spur of the moment when he feels like it and when there is an opportunity away from his wife and kids (“he almost never considers her heart”) — but having sex with him, and being kissed by him, makes Lina feel alive, not like she’s dying, which is how living with Ed feels. Her section feels mildly pornographic, I think because it’s so repetitious: all the same graphic anticipation and fantasy, all the same graphic sex (with Aidan) repeated over and over so that I feel like I know his body parts, in particular, all too well. The Sloane section focuses more on Sloane’s personality and the complexity of her desires.

In each of the three stories, someone is having a sexual relationship with someone not their spouse (Maggie’s teacher, in his late 20s, is married with 2 young kids; Sloane and Richard are married and including other men and women, some also married, in their trysts; Lina is married to Ed, with two young kids, and Aidan is also married with young kids). Is desire that transgresses cultural norms the only desire worth writing about? It’s interesting to me that Taddeo ends the book with a vignette about her mother, dying in an assisted living home, not interested in the chicken wings her daughter has brought her at her request: “I was angry. At her lack of want. I was angry because she was barely trying to want.” Her mother also tells her: “Don’t let them see you happy. … Other women, mostly. … They can see you down. They should see you down. If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you.”

The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson, just a charming book of stories — days, moments — set in summer on an isolated Finnish island, where a 6-year-old girl, Sophia, and her father have come to stay with the girl’s grandmother. Sophia and her grandmother spend the summer in exploration, conversation, pretending, accommodating each other, having a real relationship in a real place. I bought 5 copies for friends.

A Better Man (2019) by Louise Penny, 15th in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, set in Quebec province. Spring flooding of epic proportions, a missing battered young wife, and vicious tweets about Clara’s latest art (miniatures) and Gamache’s recent harrowing police raid create the drama, and the plot is fairly intricate, but it’s the characters we’re really here for.

An Arrow Through the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Life, Love, and Surviving a Near-Fatal Heart Attack (2002) by Deborah Daw Heffernan. Excellent non-fiction about Heffernan’s surprise massive heart attack due to a spontaneous coronary artery dissection at age 44 in a yoga class (she was fit, ate well, didn’t smoke, had good cholesterol and blood pressure numbers, etc.), her care at nearby Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, her recuperation at her home in western Maine (near Bridgton, it seems, with a Reny’s on Main Street), and all the questions, struggles, emotions, revelations, and realisations attending it. What comes through clearly is that her support system of 15 or more close friends and family, with her husband Jack at the rock-steady core, was crucial to her immediate and long-term healing, along with the very rapid arrival of cardiac EMTS and her swift transfer initially to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, the devoted care of her physicians, surgeons, nurses, and therapists at Mass General, a raft of medications, an implanted defibrillator (for deadly ventricular tachycardia) , various complementary health practices, and her own otherwise very healthy body at the start of the ordeal. Half of all women in American will have heart disease, and it’s the number one cause of death of white and African-American women in America, killing 1 in 3 women (vs., e.g, 1 in 31 women dying per year of breast cancer).

The Whisperer (2016/2019) by Karin Fossum, transl. Kari Dickson, 13th in the Inspector Sejer series, set in Kirkelina, Norway. Ragna Riegel is a lonely woman who works as a shop clerk and whose primary happiness is derived from the scantest postcards and Christmas cards from her only son, Rikard Josef, living in Berlin and apparently running an upscale hotel. Her whisper, due to a botched operation, alienates her from most people. When we meet her, she is being gently interviewed by Inspector Konrad Sejer about a murder in which she’s implicated; chapters detailing events in her life and her thoughts are interwoven with the interview.  I thought it was actually going to be much darker than it is, though it’s plenty dark, in the usual quiet Sejer series way.

The Last House Guest (2019) by Megan Miranda, a slowly building suspense novel set in fictional seaside Littleport, Maine, where the wealthy, powerful Lomans and others like them (summer people) use the services of the locals like Avery Greer, who is our narrator and the Lomans’ rental manager. Avery’s past is checkered, but somehow she & Sadie Loman became best friends a number of years ago, which has made her life not only much easier but also much better — until Sadie dies in a cliff fall during a “Plus-One” party (held a week after most of the summer visitors leave), and now Avery’s world is turned upside down. The book moves back and forth between Summer 2017 (when the incident occurs) and Summer 2018.

If She Wakes (2019) by Michael Koryta, a thriller set partly in southern Maine and partly in a hospital in Massachusetts. The “she” of the title is Tara Beckley, a college student charged with driving a speaker to a conference; after a car wreck, neither makes it there, but Tara remains alive and in a coma. Abby Kaplan, an insurance investigator and former stunt driver realises early on that the car crash is not all it seems, but this knowledge only leads her into the path of ruthless killers who want the speaker’s phone, which has vanished. Very gripping, full of action, with a plot lead by strong and smart female characters (Tara, Abby, and Tara’s sister Shannon) who negotiate their way among heroic guardians and opportunistic sociopaths. A little too heart-thumping for me but I liked the internal monologues and thought processes of the main characters.

October

In the Dark (2018/2019) by Cara Hunter, #2 in the DI Adam Fawley series. A woman and child are found locked in a basement in Oxford, England, barely alive;  the old man who owns the house, who has dementia, persists in saying that he doesn’t know them. But then this case is tied to a similar unsolved case years ago, when another young woman and child went missing, from a house behind this one, and things get exciting.  A twisty, turning police procedural with a very satisfying plot, interesting characters, a good mix of crime fiction elements, and excellent pacing.

Big Sky (2019) by Kate Atkinson, with former police detective Jackson Brodie. As one review puts it, this book is in no hurry to get where it’s going but it doesn’t tread water. With writing that’s often amusing and a plot short on graphic violence, the novel feels light in some ways, but most of the crimes committed are related to the gritty and exploitive sex trade industry, selling naive 14-year-old girls to businessmen. Several plots meet in this book, with Jackson involved in all of them, but the complication level is satisfying, not overwhelming, helped by several strong and interesting female characters (detectives Reggie & Ronnie, wives Rhonda and Crystal).

The Scholar (2019) by Dervla McTiernan. Police procedural with a dash of suspense, set mostly in Galway, Ireland, featuring Garda detectives Cormac Reilly, Carrie O’Halloran, and Peter Fisher, investigating the hit-and-run killing of a young woman on a college campus, whose body was discovered by Reilly’s partner, Dr. Emma Sweeney. It’s soon clear that the murdered woman has some connection to Carline Darcy, heiress and granddaughter of billionaire John Darcy whose biotech lab operates on the college campus, where Carline also works. One of the best modern-day (set in 2014) crime fiction plots I’ve read, twisty and compelling, with particularly excellent relationship nuances among the often-conflicted characters. Recommended.

Hunting Game (2014/2019 transl) by Helene Tursten, crime fiction set in rural Dalsland, Sweden, introducing Detective Inspector Embla Nyström, who’s 28 and also a prize-winning boxer and accomplished hunter. She, with her uncle and some friends, are spending a week or so at the hunting cabin as they do each fall, hunting moose together with a small group of wealthy men from the city who have a “hunting castle” nearby. Naturally, there is a lot of talk of killing and gutting animals. This year, Embla’s group is joined by attractive and mercurial Peter Hansson, who used to live in the area and has returned to his birthright. Everyone’s eagerness for the hunting vacation ebbs as nasty little surprises crop up, building to a conclusion that most readers will see long before getting there. The book is very prosaic, possibly due to the fact that it’s in translation or possibly that’s just how it’s written by Tursten. I’ve enjoyed her DI Huss series and liked this one as well, but if you’re looking for lyrical writing or a breathtaking read, try elsewhere; this plot moves at a steady pace that feels muted and understated most of the time, which I like for a change from overblown thrillers that grip and don’t let go. Character development is strong here, too.

November

Liberty or Death (2003) by Kate Flora, 6th in the Thea Kozak series. Educational consultant Thea is moments away from marrying Maine state homicide detective Andre Lemieux when he is kidnapped by a Maine militia group as a bartering tool for release of a political prisoner. Against the wishes of the Andre’s colleagues, Thea goes to the backwater town of Merchantville, ME (fictitious) and goes undercover as a waitress, working overtime hoping to learn anything she can to help find and free Andre. What she learns is that the town is in the grips of a violent, arrogant, ultraconservative pastor and his similar cronies, all armed to the teeth, who suspect, berate, grope, threaten, intimidate, stalk, and attack her, partly because she’s a woman (a pregnant woman) and they just enjoy treating women this way, and partly because they think she’s a cop, which isn’t too far off the mark. The women in the town tell her to stop asking questions and try to be invisible to avoid attracting the militia’s attention. The novel is nerve-wracking, with Thea (and others) in danger constantly, but mainly for me because it’s obvious, 16 years since the book was published, that there are many places and people in the U.S. just like those described: men (primarily) who are defined by their resentments, their sense of themselves as victims, their dual anti-women and anti-government stance, and who are psychopathically and indifferently cruel, a law unto themselves in their quest for male and white supremacy. The novel is well-written and complex, with various driving motives among many of the main characters (not all believe the complete militia doctrine), though how Thea survives on so little sleep, much less manages to be persistently energetic, is pretty unbelievable.

Stalking Death (2008) by Kate Flora, 7th in the Thea Kozak series. This one is set on the campus of St. Matthew’s, a private boarding school in central New Hampshire, where educational crisis consultant Thea is asked to rubber-stamp a letter to parents in the midst of stalking allegations by an athletic black student (age 16). She quickly realises that the school administration has not investigated the matter seriously and plans on scapegoating the accuser. Anyone who likes boarding school mysteries will like this one, tightly plotted, with a chilling and frenzied climax.

Alice’s Island (2019) by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo. This novel is a sort of mystery but really more a psychological novel about loss, betrayal, redemption, hope, community. Alice and Chris have a good marriage, loving and trusting, but when Chris dies at age 35 of a car crash resulting from a brain aneurysm, on a road 100 miles away from where he should have been, Alice starts to question everything, quickly becoming obsessed with discovering why Chris was there and what other secrets he hid. As she starts on a desperate and decidedly reckless path to finding out, she’s led to Robin Island, a small (fictitious) island near Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod, where her water breaks and she immediately gives birth to her second daughter, Ruby, delivered by a veterinarian and a dentist.  Soon she, Ruby, and her 6-year-old Olivia, who is beginning to struggle with compulsive behaviours (not unlike her mother), are living on Robin Island and Alice is inserting herself into people’s lives, often at their invitation, and making a list of people she suspects were the reason Chris came to the island. She slowly pieces together bits of the puzzle, running into deadends but learning a little more all the time. The plot’s pace is steady but not plodding. The characters and their intimate lives interested me. Would be a good bookgroup read.

Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a longish but very readable novel set on the east coast of the U.S. (Philly, New Jersey, Boston, Baltimore), a bit in London, and in Nigeria. Ifemelu, a young Nigerian (Igbo) woman, gets a U.S. visa after her Nigerian college repeatedly shuts down for strikes, leaving behind her family and her boyfriend, Obinze, who can’t get into America and instead goes to live in London as an undocumented citizen always anxious he’ll be found out and deported. The two spend fifteen years apart, each learning more about who they are, what they want, how race and class work in the western world, and in Ifemelu’s case (we learn many more details of her story) how being a non-American black differs from being an American black person, a contrast she explores in her blog.  Obinze ends up back in Nigeria, where he marries and becomes very financially successful; fifteen years after leaving Nigeria, with lots of education, work experience, and relationships under her belt, Ifemelu also returns after a family crisis, and the two former lovers reconnect. It sounds like a romance but it’s not; it’s more an exploration of race, identity, coming of age, and did I mention race? I loved it.

December

The Old Success (2019) by Martha Grimes, a Richard Jury/Melrose Plant crime novel. It’s a short book — 230 pp with largish type and plenty of white space — and I could have read it in an afternoon, but instead I re-read it after getting almost to the end and feeling I had missed something (I had). For a short book, it’s got a lot of characters packed into it, including police, suspects/victims, a handful of kids, and the usual Northants gang, wealthy friends of Plant’s. The story starts with a woman killed on the Cornish coast of a remote island requiring a ferry from Land’s End to reach it. Jury is called in to help and soon Plant is part of the team too, along with Sir Thomas Brownell, former head of the Metropolitan Police. It’s a fun romp, if a plot with four or five murders can be said to be such. I particularly enjoyed it because of Plant’s enlarged role. Horse training and racing are once again an aspect of the story.

Seratonin (2019) by Michel Houellebecq, pretty much his usual fare, a lot of sex to start with, described as mechanically as possible, then no sex at all but lots of thinking about aging and dying (at not even age 50ish), and lots of regretting, and a fair amount of fooling around with firearms. Our “hero,” Florent-Claude Labrouste, thinks he could have made two women happy but instead he cheated on them and they split up years ago. His professional work promoting local cheeses in France has been overtaken by globalization and the demise of the French farmer, leading to national and personal despair that not even a prescription anti-depressant can ameliorate. A few really incisive lines in the midst of it all, like this one: “… he was bound to be happy, that brief happiness that comes with having just escaped a considerable misfortune and finding oneself confronted again with ordinary unhappiness.” Also, a brief but horrific description of factory chicken farming.

A King Alone (1947) by Jean Giorno. A strange little novel, called by some “an existential detective story” but though the book is mysterious, poetic, even mystical in some ways, the crux of it is not crime fiction, though it is a book about a police officer, Langlois, an outsider to a small French alpine village who arrives first to investigate the disappearances of several people and returns a few years later to guard the town from wolves. This description is apt: “This novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.”