Once again — as in 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002 — I’ve kept track of what I read this year, recording brief notes about each book. I’m always looking for recommendations for fiction, crime fiction series, and non-fiction titles!
JANUARY
Palm Beach Finland (2017/2018 transl.) by Antti Tuomainen. Dark comic noir. The setting is a Finnish beach — “the world’s unlikeliest resort” as one review put it — that’s been turned into a Miami Vice-themed summer playground by its unaccountably optimistic owner. When a man is found killed (accidentally, but it looks like murder) in the house that the resort owner wants to buy to expand his gaudy vision, Jan Nyman of Helsinki’s Violent Crimes dept. is sent in undercover as a maths teacher who wants to learn windsurfing. Unbeknownst to him, the man in the neighbouring cabin is a the dead man’s brother as well as a murdering psychopath. Other fun characters are lazy Bruce Springsteen-worshipper Chico and his best friend, Robin, perhaps a few cards short of a deck, a hapless duo employed by the resort owner to motivate the house owner, Olivia, to sell to him, and Olivia, who loves her father’s house even though it quickly turns into a money pit with no working plumbing. It’s a fun read.
A World of Curiosities (2022) by Louise Penny, in the Gamache series set in Three Pines, Quebec. This novel (18th in the Gamache series) alternates for a while between the case where Gamache and Beauvoir first meet, which starts when they find the body of a drug addict on a lakeshore and leads to Gamache’s and Beauvoir’s immediate and delicate interactions with the traumatised, troubled young children she’s left behind, Fiona and Sam; and present day, when Fiona is graduating from Montreal’s École Polytechnique, where in Dec. 1989 occurred one of the worst mass killings in Canadian history, borne of rage against women. Soon, a grimoire (a witch’s book of spells) and a strange copy of the painting The Paston Treasure (c.1663) are discovered within a bricked-off heretofore unknown room above Myrna’s home/bookshop, and the clues in this copy of the painting, which differs from the original in significant ways, lead Gamache, Beauvoir, Amelia Choquet, and many others on a twisty path that someone very dangerous has laid out for them to follow. Gripping, complex, provocative, and as always, deeply grounded in integrity.
Night of the Living Rez (2022) by Morgan Talty. Stories, linked novelistically. David (Dee), the focal character, is 8 or 10 years old in some, a teenager in others, in his late 20s in another, and an older adult in at least one story. The stories are about his gritty, poor, place-based life on a Maine Native American (Penobscot) reservation. Constant cigarette smoking, drinking, and prescription drug abuse throughout by almost all the characters, as well as fights and violence, physical and mental illness, so much puking, lots of traumatic incidents within a cycle of trauma. There’s also some family affection, protection, care-taking and attempts at care-taking; some bonding boyhood and young adult friendships; kindness, and infrequently, tenderness. It’s not all bleak, and there is a lot of laughter. I especially liked the descriptions of rain, the woods (where the boys spend a lot of time), the river, the driveways and houses/cabins, the birds, the smells (cigarettes, food, masses of caterpillars, a dead snapping turtle, etc.), and David’s occasional thoughts about his life, how he got here, how it could ever change. If you’re looking for recommendations concerning systemic poverty, generational addiction, harrowing isolation, etc., this isn’t that book; this book is a compassionate look into the lives of people undergoing trauma and doing what makes sense to them in response.
Little Siberia (2018/2019 transl.) by Antti Tuomainen. Dark comic noir. The setting this time is a small town (Hurmevaara) very close to the Russian border, where on an icy night and loaded with vodka, a former rally racing driver speeds into a wall to kill himself, and it would have worked had not a meteorite slammed into his car (somehow avoiding him) at precisely the moment that prevented his head-on crash. That 8 lb. meteorite, which is then housed temporarily at the little museum in the little town, turns out to be worth a lot of money, and a lot of people want it and are willing to go to great lengths to get it. Enter our (anti?)hero, Joel, pastor of the local parish, passionate volunteer overnight meteorite watcher, and former soldier stationed (and wounded) in Afghanistan, who realises his beloved wife has cheated on him when she announces she’s pregnant. Is she also trying to steal the meteorite? What about his fellow museum volunteers, a ruthless Russian duo, the woman who tends bar, or the man who takes every free conversation slot to talk with the pastor about doom and catastrophe?
Foster (2010/2022) by Claire Keegan. A very short book, fewer than 100 pp, which is easily read in an hour or two, and which feels much more like a short story than a novel (it, or a shorter version of it, was published in the New Yorker as a short story in 2010). I was disappointed, not because it wasn’t good, it was very good — robust language, spare but entirely sufficient character depiction, eloquent and subtle scene setting, clear centering in time and place, the sort of slice-of-life story I like — but perhaps because of the high level of expectation I had after reading the reviews, one of which (David Mitchell’s) heralded the book as “as good as Chekhov.” The inside flap of the book describes it as “a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love,” which is exactly what it is, the loss and love shining through brilliantly, and though I rooted for the child and the Kinsellas, my emotions just weren’t fully engaged, my heart didn’t break (though it wobbled). and I don’t know why.
The Woman in the Library (2022) by Sulari Gentill. 2.5 stars / Because writers Hannah and Leo are corresponding about her novel — which, though she lives in Australia, is about Freddie (Winifred), Cain, Marigold, and Whit, who have met at the Boston Public Library after a woman screams, and also includes as a fairly prominent character Freddie’s apartment neighbour Leo — and because character Freddie is herself working on a novel about these same characters, giving them provisional names like Heroic Chin and Freud Girl, you might think this is a multi-layered, intricately crafted novel — but it’s not. It’s slightly confusing, I’ll give it that, especially the two Leos, one fictional and one not (though of course both are fictional, since we are reading a novel), and both Leos unpleasant people, but the plot is overcomplicated and the characters are simplistically written, weakly drawn. This could have been a much better book without trying so hard (and then when the big reveal comes, not trying hard enough), but it was interesting in some ways, especially if you live near Boston and know the places mentioned. It was readable, reasonably suspenseful and even slightly chilling at times, and unlike others I appreciated for the most part the correspondence between Hannah and Leo. but as a whole the book never really came together for me.
The Displacements (2022) by Bruce Holsinger. Highly recommended for the writing, plotting, and content/warning concerning the speed and chaos of looming climate disruption. The book is set in a roughly contemporary time; at one point, it’s mentioned that Hurricane Katrina was more than 15 years ago — that was 2005, so the setting could be now. Hurricane Luna, the first Cat 6 hurricane to hit the US, takes out a lot of the Miami, Florida area and then in another landfall, Houston, and ends up displacing 500,000 people, many of whom end up in one of 13 FEMA “megashelters” in Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee. northern Louisiana, northern Mississippi, northern Alabama, central and northern Georgia, western South Carolina, western North Carolina … and Oklahoma, which is where our story is set, at the Lorimer megashelter, housing up to 10,000 people, run by Rain Holton, a military veteran whose thoughtful and strategic leadership can only go so far. This is where the Larson-Hall family ends up living in a tent after assuming they can drive away from the storm but running out of gas and money: Daphne is a wealthy up-and-coming sculptor, mother to Mia (10 or 11 years old) and Oliver (8) as well as sullen stepson Gavin (19); Brantley, her husband and their father, is a surgeon who’s stayed behind to help transport fragile patients. Meanwhile, in Houston, Tate Bondurant, an insurance salesman, drug dealer, and avid believer in toxic masculinity podcaster Jace Parkinson (like real-life Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate), and another drug dealer, Jessamyn, head to the Lorimer megashelter in a drug-filled car to do some business with the down-and-out, eventually co-opting Gavin into their scheme. Throughout the novel are interviews, charts, maps, and other artifacts concerning climate change, the storm, the shelters and the displaced people, and the aftermath; several also mention Hurricane Katrina and recent massive wildfires. The book is so realistic and compelling, both in its portrayal of weather disasters and the rapid decision-making and inevitable shock that accompanies them, as well as its nuanced depiction of the emotions, thoughts, and relationships of and among family members, FEMA staff and displaced people, the people who have been displaced themselves, etc., as both circumstances and realisations about those circumstances turn on a dime, moment to moment.
February
Liberation Day: Stories (2022) by George Saunders. As always with a book of stories, some resonate and some don’t. Characters’ often desperate attempts to justify their own motivations and actions — which strike the reader as mostly weak and self-indulgent, though in at least one story someone acts in a courageous way — seems the underlying current for many of Saunders’ stories, as well as people trying to maintain a polite or positive façade in the most dismal and uncivil circumstances. There are some laugh-out-loud moments of absurdity in most of the stories, and in fact the stories are full of characters who have accepted the absurdity of their lives as “normal.” “Liberation Day” set somewhat in the future, is the longest and I really found it interesting, though the Custer minutia was tedious. It’s similar in many ways to “Ghoul,” which is set in a post-apocalyptic future (and “Ghoul” is similar to “Pastoralia,” previously published, with all three stories’ characters taking on the roles of performers in dystopian theme parks that might just be life). I think in at least three stories there is some kind of “scrape” that occurs to entirely erase the memories of some of the characters, and sometimes the scrape is “subpar.” “The Mom of Bold Action,” in which a woman’s hastily written words lead to regrettable action on someone else’s part as well as to her own attempts to justify her rationales and actions, was thought-provoking, as was “Love Letter,” a handwritten letter from a grandfather to his grandson trying to explain why he didn’t do more to protect democracy when there was a chance. It’s chilling, actually (“It did not seem that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong”). I liked the petty interactions and self-deceptions of “A Thing At Work” and “Mother’s Day” but “Sparrow” and “My House” felt thin, and “Elliott Spencer” and its unusual typography just wasn’t for me.
All This Could Be Different (2022) by Sarah Thankam Mathews.Twenty-two-year-old Indian immigrant Sneha moves to Milwaukee for a corporate job (and a free rental apartment). She pieces together a good life there, including friends from her past and new friends met through a lesbian dating app, particularly Tig, a spiritually generous queer person who is her brutally honest and loving confidant. On the negative side, Amy, Sneha’s live-in property manager, and Amy’s fiancé, make her home life a living hell, all the while proclaiming what good people they are; her corporate bosses, Peter and Susan, have unrealistic (and probably racist) expectations of her, and they treat her badly; and her loving parents, who live in India and to whom she sends money regularly, expect her to marry someone (a man, obviously) chosen for her. This coming-of-age novel takes place mostly over a year or two, with the last sixth or eighth of it set in the five years afterward, as Sneha’s life, relationships, and career continue to shift in sometimes unexpected and unsettling ways, though her friends remain her support always. I liked it, though I didn’t really like any of the characters much except for Tig. Still, the reader is given insight into Sneha’s motivations, and the complexity of the interwoven relationships is well depicted.
Bleeding Heart Yard (2022) by Elly Griffiths. The third police procedural in the series featuring Harbinder Kaur, now DI of the Homicide and and Serious Crimes Unit of the London Metropolitan Police, based in West Kensington, London, where she’s living with two roommates. She and her team are called out when an alumnus (and conservative Member of Parliament) attending their class’s high school reunion at a posh comprehensive school is found dead under suspicious circumstances. As the reader is aware from the first chapter, the death might well be related to the sudden death 21 years ago of another boy in their class, and fellow classmate Cassie Fitzherbert, now a DS under Harbinder, is hiding a big secret about that. I sped through this. Harbinder is one of my favourite Griffiths’ characters; the plotting is tight; and the interactions among the characters — the story is told from the point of view of three of them: Harbinder, Cassie, and another classmate named Anna Vance — are intriguing. There was a certain odd repetition of words and information at times in the book, but that didn’t really detract for me from the story.
Autobiography of a Face (1994) by Lucy Grealy. A memoir, though perhaps fictionalised a bit (based on her comments at a book signing with novelist Ann Patchett, related in the Afterword), about Lucy’s diagnosis of Ewing’s Sarcoma in her jaw, not long after her jaw collided at full speed with a schoolmate’s skull at recess, and the years of surgeries following — about 30 in all over 18 years. Her family, especially her mother, play a role in the story, but you get the feeling (and sometimes it’s said directly) that she’s alone, that even those closest to her, as much as they loved her and cared for her the best they knew how, could never understand how she navigated her life, her choices, her needs. Ultimately, the book is a poetic, spare, direct meditation on the cycle of repeated hope and repeated disappointment; on shame, bravery, dignity, worthiness; on seeking one’s own truth; on almost endless suffering and how to endure it; on the nature of beauty; on the nature of medicine and health care. One of the saddest lines in this book: “Without the arena of chemotherapy in which to prove myself, how would anyone know I was worthy of love?”
The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life (2013) by Margaret Roach. Mostly garden memoir centered on this garden writer’s home and garden in Copake Falls, NY, near the Mass. border. The book is ordered season by season from winter to autumn, with rambling personal narrative accompanied by sidebars that stretch on for pages on practical topics such as garden design, how to deal with deer, succession sowing, mulching, making bird-friendly gardens, underplanting, etc. An index would have been helpful. I’m not sure how much of the book I’ll remember in a year, but one thing I particularly appreciated is her emphasis on mortality, the cycle of life, plants coming and going in the garden, gardening while growing older. Read with my permaculture group.
The Christmas Murder Game (2021) by Alexandra Benedict. This crime story has perhaps a bit too much going on, with anagrams to solve for each of the 12 days of Christmas, Christmas movies to find, 12 life-or-death sonnets with clues embedded in each, plus the actual mystery of who’s killing their fellow competitors for the keys and deed to Endgame House? The good news is that if you ignore the anagrams and films, the rest is pretty entertaining, twisty and well-thought-out. Lily, a dressmaker living in London, decides to come to the family’s country estate in the Dales, Endgame House, for the annual Christmas Game with her cousins after her aunt (and adoptive mother) Lilliana dies, because immediately after Lilliana’s death, Lily receives a letter from her that announces that Lily’s mother did not, contrary to the coroner’s report, die by suicide in the maze 21 years ago, and that she will understand more soon. Definitely a country house Christmas murder mystery, complete with non-stop snow, too much festive food, and secrets galore.
March
Checkout 19 (2022) by Claire-Louise Bennett. I think it’s a novel? but it reads like short stories whose themes repeat and intermingle. It took me weeks to get through it, but I stuck with it because there was something I enjoyed about it. Overall, though, it felt like a series of writing exercises, mostly focused on one young woman and her life (boyfriends, writing, school) in the UK. Not only her life but her thoughts, feelings, multiple perspectives on single incidents — I appreciate the idea, that our thoughts and responses are complex, contradictory, multifold, innumerable, and our reaction to our memories changes them and the narrative into which they fit, over and over through time. But in the end, it all felt so disjointed and some of it was quite stylistically annoying — endless adjectives, and endless conversations with herself in which she calls herself “we” and confirms among herself what’s felt or occured: “We quite enjoy it, don’t we when a woman feels and behaves in ways that don’t have any obvious accord with her outward aspect. We do. Why not. Yes, why not. Keep them guessing. That’s right, keep them guessing.” She seemingly spends a lot of her time nodding her head yes to what she’s just written. I was waiting for it to end or to come together. It’s described as “existential” and it’s definitely stream of consciousness even in the short story sections, and I love those things, but not this time.
How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) by Jenny Odell. Nonfiction. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction but the title caught my attention and I wasn’t disappointed — though I preferred hearing of Odell’s own experiences and thoughts and that of a host of artists to the many citations from cultural and social history books and articles (not that they weren’t valuable, but I got bogged down by them). Odell looks at many facets of the “attention economy,” that is, the way social media and other corporate-owned spaces make a profit from serving us dopamine hits, but her main focus is actually on the act of paying attention itself and on all the other things in the world that we can observe, be curious about, spend time investigating and appreciating. She writes, “[w]e inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.” She’s not advocating that we ditch social media or take breaks from it in order to become more productive, but that we invest our attention somewhere else, that we practice attending to where we are — our place, our context, the human and non-human beings in that place including not only other animals but also plants, waters, rocks, weather, everything that we interact with that makes us who we are and that expands our awareness of living on this earth. Her suggestion (one of them) is that we dismantle our supreme focus on productivity and progress; in the words of Nancy Nadel, wife of late Oakland CA activist Chappell R. Hayes, “When someone was stressed and uncentered, one of Chappell’s favorite reminders was to stay perpendicular to the earth, don’t pitch forward, don’t fall back.” As Odell writes, “It turns out that groundedness requires actual ground.”
Gallows Rock (2017/2020) by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, 4th in the Freyja and Huldar series, a suspenseful police procedural. A wealthy man named Helgi is found hung at the age-old lava flows of Gallows Rock, across from Bessastidir, the home of the Icelandic president, and Erla, Huldar, Gudlaugar, and avid intern Lina investigate the circumstances of his murder, which soon become more complicated with the discovery of a 4-year-old boy, Siggi, left in Helgi’s apartment. Siggi is unrelated to Helgi and can’t say where his parents are, where he lives, or why he’s there, which involves Freyja of The Children’s House. Once the team learns of sex videos involving Helgi and apparently recorded without the women’s knowledge, the case takes another turn. This is a dynamic and very well plotted novel, far more a police procedural than the “thriller” announced on the spine of the book.
Berg (1964) by Ann Quin. This book was mentioned several times in Checkout 19 (which I didn’t like all that much), and it intrigued me so I decided to try to find it through inter-library loan. I’m glad I did, though it was, like Checkout 19, a bit stylistically annoying at times, but not, as many critics of its time bemoaned, because of its modernist conflation of thoughts and actions, past and present, and a rather unreliable narrator. One line near the end of the book, to give you a taste of the writing style (and also quoted in a review in The Nation on the book’s reissue in 2019): “Crossing the park: a subterranean world surreptitiously risen; here a million star-fish pinned on the forelocks of a hundred unicorns driven by furious witches.” The headline and subhead in that Nation review sums it up nicely: “Ann Quin’s Surrealist Novel Berg Annihilates All Expectation: The newly reissued 1964 book is a hallucinatory mix of crime fiction, vaudeville, and modernist experimentation.” The same review speaks of her writing, her language as “lurch[ing] in unexpected directions, fishtailing wildly from the dark to the erotic to the violent to the insanely funny. It feels barely in control, but willfully so.” I’m not so sure there’s been an attempt at control, but I do feel like I might read it again. (The book is short; the 1964 hardcover edition I read is 167 pp with wide page margins.) The plot is simple on the surface and is set out in the first line: “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.” Alistair Berg is an unhappy man with an unnaturally close relationship to his mother; his father (Nathy Berg) left them when Alistair was an infant and now lives with another woman in a lodging house in Brighton where the younger Berg/Greb has taken lodging in the next room, only a thin wooden partition separating them. He schemes and fantasises about many things, returning to the patricide theme often, but his ambivalence and ineptitude create a string of chaotic happenstances that the reader tries her best to navigate. (Unfortunately, Goodreads doesn’t offer the hardcover edition I read so I had to choose one at random. The edition I read is Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964, LoC 65-23985)
April
I Have Some Questions For You (2023) by Rebecca Makkai. Part coming-of-age novel, part crime fiction, part exploration of aspects of the #metoo movement, set at a boarding school in New Hampshire from 2018-2022, drawing on the narrator’s time there in the mid-1990s. It all works together to make an effective and engaging who-dun-it that widens its focus to predatory and inappropriate heterosexual relationships and the prejudices and impediments to justice in these cases. Bodie Kane — raised by Mormons in Indiana who took her in after her family fell apart — felt like she didn’t fit in well when she attended posh Granby School in the 1990s, though she made a few close friends; and the murder of her roommate, Thalia, in the spring of their senior year is never far from her mind (or her Internet research) even all these years later. When Bodie returns to Granby in 2018 to teach two short classes on podcasting and film history, she reawakens the investigation, and she and two of her pupils, Alder and Britt, start creating podcasts based on what they believe to be the wrongful conviction of the school’s athletic trainer and the shoddy and cursory investigation of the crime at the time, threatening to upset the lives of many others.
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) by Jesse Q. Sutanto. Sort of crime fiction but more of a funny cozy story about Vera, a redoubtable older, lonely Chinese woman who runs a dark and dingy “world famous” teashop in San Francisco that’s visited by almost no one, and the several suspects she investigates after an unpleasant man is found dead in her tea shop one morning. Found dead by Vera, who draws a careful black outline of his prone body in situ, which does not endear her to the police. What I loved, besides Vera and the developing relationships among all the suspects, were the solemn 2-year-old Emma, the descriptions of the teas Vera makes, and the humour, by turns gentle and laugh-out-loud. I figured out the crime early on (p. 119 to be exact) but that didn’t detract from the story at all.
Flat Broke with Two Goats (2018) by Jennifer McGaha. Memoir. Readable memoir of a woman who through mainly her husband David’s bad choices ends up with her house foreclosed, owing lots of back taxes and fines, and overall in debt $350,000 in the middle of a recession. She and this same husband (their kids are mostly grown) move to a virtually free ($250/mo) rustic cabin in the Pisgah Forest in Transylvania County, North Carolina, without hot water and other amenities, but with wolf spiders, venomous snakes, and mice as roommates. Eventually they add to their menagerie (which already included several dogs and a cat) a variety of laying hens and some goats, for the eggs, milk, and cheese they provide. At one point — before the chickens and goats enter the picture — the author takes off with her dog Hester for Macomb, IL, where she teaches part-time at a university for 6 months, and she enjoys that experience and the people there so much that she seriously considers accepting an offer to continue, but instead goes back to Appalachia with her husband. It’s hard to say why and she never really makes a convincing argument — mainly, it’s where she grew up and where she feels closest to her grandmother (about whose life we hear quite a bit) and others who have passed on, and perhaps feels attuned to the land itself because of those progenitors — but whatever her reason for staying put in the hollows, she does appreciate the simple if financially impoverished life she and David create for themselves. 3.5 stars.
The Couple at the Table (2022) by Sophie Hannah. I was disappointed with Hannah’s books supposedly continuing in the Agatha Christie tradition, but I really enjoyed this one, which is more police procedural than suspenseful, though some of the plot beggars belief. The story is set in July 2019 at a fancy resort at Tevendon Estate (UK), when a murder took place, and six months later, Jan. 2020, with the same murder still unsolved, though not because of lack of interest by Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse. At the resort in 2019, Jane Brinkhouse was stabbed to death in her cottage when almost every suspect had an alibi (they were all together dining) except Jane’s husband, William, who was also in their cottage but seemingly stunned — and crime scene blood spatter evidence proved he couldn’t have committed the crime. Also at the resort was William’s ex-wife, Lucy, now remarried; Jane and William had had an affair before and while Jane was Lucy’s doula for the birth of her (and William’s) young son. Now, in 2020, after an unexpected and unpleasant visit from William asking her if she was the murderer, Lucy is desperate to know who killed Jane, and she’s stirring things up among the police and the other suspects to find out. This sounds more like a thriller than it is — a lot of the book is DC Waterhouse and his wife, Detective Sergeant Charlie Zailer, talking with each other and Lucy as well as with other suspects and their murder investigation team.
The Laughing Policeman: A Martin Beck Police Mystery (1968) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Fourth in the series, to be exact, and the first one I have read because I found a copy for $2 at a used book sale when I had nothing else to read. I have been hearing for years that if you like modern Swedish crime fiction, you should read this original series, so here I am. And I did like it. It’s a true police procedural, nothing really suspenseful about it, just the plodding solving of a complicated puzzle of a crime, in this case the mass shooting of nine bus riders — including an armed young police officer — by someone wielding a semi-automatic pistol. As Jonathan Franzen’s intro to my copy reads, the protagonist “Beck is cautious, recessive, phlegmatic” and suffers with stomach ailments, nasty colds, a bad marriage, and forever being awakened in the middle of a night of bad sleep. “He and his colleagues pursue a thousand useless leads, go door to door in freezing winds, endure abuse from fools and sadists, make punishingly long drives on winter roads, read unimaginable reams of dull reports.” I’m going back to start with the first in the series.
A Noël Killing: A Provençal Mystery (2019) by M.L. Longworth. As Slate’s blurb on the cover reads, “these cozy mysteries transport you to the South of France.” Food is a highlight of this series, though not in quite as much detail as in Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police series. In this episode, Antoine Verlague, examining magistrate for Aix-en-Provence, and commissioner of police, Bruno Paulik, investigate after Cole Hainsby, an annoying businessman with both money woes and an unfaithful wife, is poisoned (somewhat unbelievably) after the church Christmas concert. This is another used book I picked up for $1 recently, I’ve read a few others of hers and they’re OK. If you are enamored of that part of the world, you might appreciate them more than I do.
Roseanna (1967) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The first book in the Martin Beck police procedural series, set in and around Stockholm, Sweden. A young woman is found dead and naked in Lake Vättern near Motala, murdered by strangulation after a brutal sexual assault. For months, the police can’t identify the woman, until finally through the American Embassy they get a list of missing “girls,” including one from Lincoln, Nebraska, where Det. Lt. Elmer Kafka confirms that she’s “our girl all right,” Roseanna McGraw, a 27-year old librarian who had been on holiday in Europe. Working with Det. Kafka, a Swedish cruise ship line that operated the craft on which McGraw had sailed, a slew of holiday snaps taken by other people on the boat, and the few people they can find who knew her, the detectives painstakingly trace the line from McGraw back to her killer.
The Man Who Went Up In Smoke (1966) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The second book in the Martin Beck police procedural series, set mostly in Budapest, as Beck interrupts his barely-begun summer vacation to hunt in Hungary for a missing Swedish journalist, Alf Matsson, uncovering other crimes as he goes.
The Man on the Balcony (1967) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Third in the Martin Beck police procedural series, this one concerns first a mugger who strikes very effectively at different parks in Stockholm and then a sex murderer who also uses parks to find his victims (young girls) and who may have been glimpsed by the mugger. Beck is trying to recall something he heard (and we heard) earlier in the book for quite a few pages before it finally comes to him and leads him to the killer.
MAY
A Killing of Innocents (2023) by Deborah Crombie, 19th in the Kincaid/James police procedural series set in London. Another well-plotted and well-written crime story that begins on a November evening when a trainee doctor, Sasha Johnson, is stabbed to death on a busy Bloomsbury street. The investigative team — primarily Superintendent Kincaid, DI Jasmine Sidana, and DS Doug Cullen, with Rashid Kaleem as pathologist, and with help from Gemma and DS Melody Talbot — looks for leads from Sasha’s artsy flatmate Tully, Tully’s bar manager brother Jon, Sasha’s colleagues at the hospital, and her family, and along the way various romantic relationships (or potential relationships) are playing out and Gemma is feeling bored and underused in her dual roles as the family’s stay-at-home parent and researcher of knife crimes in her new desk job.
Little Face (2006/2007) by Sophie Hannah, a gripping psychological thriller that I read in less than two days. Alice returns home after her first outing since her daughter was born to find that it’s not her daughter in the nursery now but another baby who looks almost the same. The police are called, but they doubt her story, as do her controlling mother-in-law and husband. But DC Simon Waterhouse, who feels an instant affinity for Alice, thinks she may be telling the truth. The psychological nuances are fine. [I read this book in 2013, but I re-read it because I am picking up this series again, not having read most of the books in it previously.]
Hurting Distance (2007) by Sophie Hannah. This book is the second in the police procedural/psychological thriller series featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. Naomi Jenkins, a sundial maker who suffered a brutal rape three years ago about which she’s told no one, has now been seeing a married man, Robert Haworth, a lorry driver, at a cheap motorway motel every Thursday. She believes him to be her soulmate, so when he doesn’t show up one week and she can’t contact him, she panics, breaking her promise to him by going to his home to search. Robert’s wife, who knows of her husband’s affair, assures Naomi (while taunting her) that Robert is fine, but Naomi knows something’s not right so she goes to the police, who don’t take her missing person report very seriously until she accuses him of rape. TW: Quite a brutal plot, concerning a business that offers rape as entertainment for a paying audience. [One does get the feeling reading this series that women are emotionally unbalanced and pathological liars, and men are sexual predators and psychopathic emotional manipulators.]
The Wrong Mother (2008) by Sophie Hannah, the third in the Spilling series featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. [This was a re-read from 2013.] When Sally Thorning sees the husband and father of a murdered woman and child on TV, she recognises his name — but his face doesn’t match the man she knows by this name, someone she spent a week with the year before. This is a complicated plot featuring several sets of mothers and young daughters, with numerous twists and small details, the mothers sharing a degree of reactions to their children ranging from irritation to all-out desperation at being on-call 24/7 servants to small beloved tyrants, a taboo topic for many moms and a clever focus for a crime novel.
The Anomaly (2020) by Hervé Le Tellier. 4.5 stars. The novel is divided into three sections. In the first, we meet a handful of people around the world, who have nothing in common other than that they have survived a very turbulent few moments on an Air France flight in March 2021. We also meet a couple of young American mathematicians who had previously, with top security experts, worked out a national protocol for handling very anomalous and unpredictable security threats. In the second section, after that exact same Air France plane lands again in New Jersey in June 2021, carrying those same passengers (or at least people with exactly the same DNA), a hastily, desperately convened group of national security bigwigs and multidisciplinary experts, including religious leaders, meets to determine what’s happened and to make decisions about what to do. In the third section, we have the aftermath and fallout: the “March” passengers meeting their doubles, the “June” passengers (who haven’t lived their lives for the intervening several months, while their March counterparts have continued their lives normally); the media coverage; the violent threats by conservative Christians who deem the doubles Satanic and the idea that humans might live in a virtual simulation heretical. In a meta-twist, one of the passengers, Victor Miesel, wrote and had published a book called The Anomaly very soon after the March flight. This novel reminded me very much of Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell. I really enjoyed the first section — the details of the various passengers and what’s going on in their lives — and overall I enjoyed the book, but the second two sections, though philosophically interesting, were a bit less interesting to me. The book won the Goncourt Prize.
It’s One Of Us: A Novel ( 2023) by J.T. Ellison. When the DNA found in a murdered woman’s car reveals the killer to likely be Park Bender’s son, his wife Olivia, an upscale interior designer, knows it’s a mistake, as Park doesn’t have kids; in fact, the couple have been trying very hard and unsuccessfully to have a child. Imagine her surprise and feelings of betrayal on learning that Park had been a sperm donor and through their many years together had never told her. It’s not the only thing he’s never told her (and she has her own secrets) and soon the police are spending a lot of time in the Benders’ exquisite home learning more about the couple and about Park’s past, which sets off their radar. But soon the Benders themselves become victims, targeted by someone who seems to slip in and out of their house at will, stealing things and leaving things, creating a very unsettling atmosphere. The novel is told from several perspectives — Park’s, Olivia’s, Darby’s (who used sperm donors to conceive her two children Scarlett and Peyton), high-schooler Scarlett’s, the detectives’, et al. — but unfortunately the novel reveals the killer a little more than halfway through the novel. There are several possible twists that could have made the rest of the book more exciting and satisfying, but alas, despite the seductive premise and an interesting build-up, the plot fizzled for me.
The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969 by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Fifth in the Martin Beck police procedural series. A rooming house in Stockholm blows up while detective Gunvald Larsson is watching it, killing several people. though Larsson saves most of them. He’s watching because a small-time crook, Malm, lives there, but when it turns out that he had already committed suicide before he was burned up, and then it turns out that the cause of the fire was arson, the case gets more interesting as the team hunts for the person who planted the little fire bomb and who called the fire department from a public phone to report the fire. The usual team interactions among several men who are of varying but overall morose personality, particularly Martin Beck, who is always a little sick and whose marriage is bad.
Wow, No Thank You (2020) by Samantha Irby. I loved this book! It’s humourous, relatable essays written by a bisexual Black woman who comes from an impoverished background and now lives a fairly bourgeois life in small town Michigan with her wife. She’s self-deprecating, talks about her Crohn’s disease frequently (unsurprising, as it’s something she’s always aware of and dealing with), and uses humour deftly to handle what hurts. As she writes, “Because I try to have a sense of humor about all my devastation, I decided that I should write about it. I don’t have good processing skills — at least I don’t think I do, because I turn everything into a fucking joke and then bury it in a shallow grave in whatever part of the mind something you never want to think about ever again goes . . . until its decomposing hand emerges from the dirt on a random Tuesday at 3 a.m. to remind you of that embarrassing thing you thought you’d forgotten. But the idea that bad things can’t hurt me if I tell everyone about them in a funny way first seemed like a fun way to grieve these tiny deaths.” You can feel the underlying pain seeping from that shallow grave when you read this. I especially appreciated the “Hello, 911?” chapter, particularly the one where she visits her doctor for a sinus issue and her doctor “sounds like she thinks I’m here for obesity?” and “A Guide To Simple Home Repairs” but really I enjoyed it all.
Murder at the Savoy (1970) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Sixth in the Martin Beck series. A wealthy Swedish industrialist is shot in the Savoy Hotel’s dining room while gathered with family and employees. The shooter simply jumps out a window and gets away. How did that happen, and who would want Viktor Palmgren dead? Turns out all is not aboveboard in Palmgren’s companies — and he’s ruthlessly unconcerned about making financial decisions that turn employees, tenants, and their families into so much collateral damage — but does all that have anything to do with his murder? Martin Beck is sent to Malmo, working with Per Mansson, to handle the case and minimise political fallout.
JUNE
The Dead Lie Low (2009) by Sophie Hannah, fourth in the Spilling series featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. Simon and Charlie are engaged, first of all. Sort of? No date set, though, and friends and family aren’t all that supportive. Anyway, there’s also a crime, and lots and lots of lies, in this book. It all starts when Aidan, a picture framer, tells his newish girlfriend Ruth that years ago he murdered (strangled) a woman, Mary Trelease, who, it turns out when both Ruth and Aidan report this to the police, is patently alive. Boss Proust doesn’t want them spending police time on investigating a non-murder, but both Simon and Charlie feel a sense of danger from and for the people involved, so of course they go off on their own to find out what’s going on and try to protect potential victims. This is a deeply dark and twisty novel about what happens when trauma (&/or psychopathy) kills part of a person, while the other half lives on.
The Cradle in the Grave (2010) by Sophie Hannah, 5th in the Spilling series featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. I had a hard time following this one. Whether it was too many names or just not a plot that interested me, I’m not sure. Some women have been charged and convicted of murdering their children — though they claim SIDS/crib death — mostly based on evidence of one doctor, Judith Duffy. Eventually their guilty verdicts are overturned, mostly due to a crusade by filmmaker, Laurie Nattrass, who is making a documentary about the miscarriage of injustice in these cases and others, until he suddenly hands it off to a minor staffer in the film firm, Fliss Benson, who interviews whomever she wants, locks the threatening ex-husband of one of the women in her apartment, and sneaks around her own office to avoid the police. I lost interest way before the end.
The Other Woman’s House (2011) by Sophie Hannah, the 6th in the Spilling series featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer, who are now married and on their honeymoon when the novel begins. The plot is very twisty, beginning near the end, then circling back to Connie Bowskill’s noticing a brief blip of a seemingly murdered woman lying in a big pool of blood on a living room shown in an online virtual real estate tour. When her husband Kit looks at the virtual tour moments later, the living room is blood- and woman-free. Connie sits up most of the night reloading the tour but never sees the woman again; still, she goes to the police (Sam, in this case, as Simon is away) to report what she’s seen. The reader knows there are things Connie and Kit aren’t telling the police, but the extent of those things unfolds slowly and creepily over the rest of the novel.
The Collected Regrets of Clover (2023) by Mikki Brammer. A sweet novel about a lonely young woman (in her 30s) who’s a death doula, helping people transition from life to death by doing whatever they need to pass peacefully, whether it’s tidying up financial affairs, confessing, talking about regrets, reconciling parts of their lives. Clover Brooks was raised by her grandfather in New York City after her somewhat inattentive parents died while travelling overseas when Clover was six. She lives in his rent-controlled apartment surrounded by her grandfather’s books and objects of natural science. Among her few possessions are notebooks titled REGRETS, CONFESSIONS, and ADVICE, last words of her clients. Sometimes Clover gets lonely and then she visits a death café (where people talk about death and dying) but varies the location so she remains anonymous. Eventually, a few people break into her well-guarded psychic space and her life begins to change as she takes more emotional risks, acting cautiously on her clients’ regrets and advice. I liked the content, the themes of the story, though the plot and writing were just OK.
The Abominable Man ( 1971) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Seventh in the Martin Beck series. Police Chief Inspector Nyman, in hospital with a serious health condition, is savagely bayonetted in his room in the middle of the night. Martin Beck, Einar Rönn, Lennart Kollberg, and Gunvald Larsson soon learn that Nyman had accrued many complaints of egregious violence, cruelty, and brutality against him over the years from the public and other officers, all of which were dismissed with no action taken, so they begin to track down those who may have held a profound grudge against him, while also interviewing Nyman’s wife as well as Nyman’s second-in-command in the military and in policing, Captain Harald Hult. The book ends with a classic cast-of-hundreds shootout, unusual for this series. It’s interesting reading this novel 50 years after it was written and in the wake of recent and ongoing sanctioned police brutality (in the U.S. and elsewhere) and the reforms that have or haven’t been enacted since. [Note: This is not the actual edition I read but that edition was not an option on Goodreads. My library edition is a hardcover by Random House/Pantheon Books, copyright 1972.]
JULY
Calypso (2018) by David Sedaris. The usual fare — giant turtles with cancerous tumours, his fraught relationship with his dad, family times at their beach house called the Sea Section, remembering his sister Tiffany and his mother, comparisons of his family and Hugh’s, tales of book signings, medical procedures, travel, shopping — which I love. I read most of it aloud to my spouse.
Outline (2014) by Rachel Cusk, first in a trilogy, I think? Faye — though I think we only learn her name on page 211 of 250 or so, and for many chapters I didn’t know if the narrator was a man or woman — travels from the U.S. to Greece to teach writing for a week. During the week, she spends time with an older man she meets on the plane (he owns a boat and takes her boating and swimming), a man named Ryan who is also a writing teacher, a friend named Paniotis whom she knew previously, her writing students whose ages range from 15 years old to at least 53, a friend of Paniotis’s, Angeliki, another friend of Faye’s, Elena, and Elena’s friend Melete, and a woman named Anne who is taking Faye’s place in the free apartment accommodation and who is stymied in her work and life by her habit of summing up (“Why go to all the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up.”) Everyone the narrator runs into seems to have a lot to say, much of it rather personal and significant — about marriages, divorces, relationships in general. loss, how to live, what’s illusory and what’s real, anxieties, dreams, jealousies, theories, etc. — and we don’t hear a lot from Faye herself, so I didn’t feel as if I knew her much more at the end of the novel than at the start; she seems to barely think of her children, and her only contact with her life outside this Greek bubble is a brief phone call with a potential mortgage lender. The novel felt mildly satirical as it probed appearance, fantasy, deception, observation, and the nature of reality. One thing Faye does offer: “I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.”
Heat Wave (1996) by Penelope Lively. Pauline Carter, a book editor, is spending the summer (May-Aug) at World’s End, her cottage in a small rural town in England where wheat and rapeseed grow rampantly. Her daughter, Teresa, and Teresa’s husband, Maurice, whom Teresa loves passionately, and their toddler son, Luke, are spending the summer in the other cottage on the property, both Pauline and Maurice working remotely while Teresa tends to Luke. The novel is told from Pauline’s point of view, as she edits manuscripts, watches her grandson, makes meals, gardens, speaks with a friend or two on the phone, and generally spends her ordinary days in the moment, noticing and pondering with exacting detail the nuances of all those around her — facial expressions, voice intonation, who’s looking at whom and how, what’s said and not said, etc. — and often holding her tongue, while she also remembers episodes of her marriage to Harry (Teresa’s father) and their marital crisis, overlaying present and past exquisitely as domestic suspense builds in the heat of the summer. Lively’s work manages to feel both acute and chronic at the same time, telling an unfolding story as old as time with precision, perception, and her customary and deceptively light touch.
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) by William Styron. An 84-page book about Styron’s slippage into madness – “madness” is one of his terms for his severe clinical depression, from which he recovered (if that’s the correct word) a few years before this was published. He begins his story in Oct. 1985 in Paris, where he’s come to receive a prestigious writing award, but he’s felt the shadow of the disease since June and it isn’t until December that he is hospitalised after suicidal ideation. He talks of many artistic suicides, describes his own symptoms in some detail (though it’s also indescribable), provides information on depression and general methods to treat it (in his case, neither psychoanalysis nor the medications he was prescribed helped), but most of the book is really about how different the disease of depression is from feeling sad or being down, and how, because most people don’t have any idea what the disease of depression is or feels like, they treat those with it as if they’re lazy or just not trying hard enough. In spite of the content, which is interesting to me, the tone of the book felt dry. (3.5 stars)
Hotel du Lac (1984) by Anita Brookner. Romance writer Edith Hope is spending time at an old-fashioned hotel near Lausanne, Switzerland, in late September, sent there, apparently, by her friends after she leaves a man at the altar. They don’t know that she’s been seeing a married man, David, for quite a while, once or twice a month (when he has time), and is madly in love with him. Edith, who is accused of having little understanding of human nature and admits it, is a rather passive figure: a narcissistic wealthy woman, Mrs Pusey, and her co-dependent adult daughter befriend her so that Edith can be an audience to their attention-seeking activities and to the monologues of Mrs Pusey; Monica, a young woman with an eating disorder and a dog to whom she feeds most of her meals, forms a sort of depressing alliance with her; and Mr Neville, a middle-aged wealthy man, has intentions toward her motivated only by assuaging his own hurt feelings caused by his wife having left him, damaging his pride, and apparently his wish to rescue Edith from the rest of her sad life. Reviews speak of the book as pleasurable and humourous, but I found it dreary and dispiriting, though I liked the Agatha Christie-like setting.
Elena Knows (2007) by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle. A dark but really quite perfect book about Elena, who has Parkinson’s disease, as she struggles to navigate life on her own for one day, walking and taking public transportation to another part of Buenos Aires, where she hopes to find a woman who can help her collect evidence and convince the authorities that her daughter, Rita, did not commit suicide but was murdered. She believes that this woman, Dr. Isabel Mansilla, owes her a favour to repay a favour her daughter did Isabel twenty years ago. Most of the plot concerns Elena’s difficulty in getting around — her neck is permanently bowed (so she drools and she can’t see faces), she shuffles, she can’t in fact walk or shift her body much at all in the minutes and hours when her medication (Levodopa) hasn’t taken effect or has worn off, and she’s also poor — and we’re privy to her memories of her contentious relationship with her daughter, along with her continuing certainty that Rita would not have hung herself from the church belltower in the rain. As Kathleen Rooney, writing in the New York Times, succinctly summarises, “a piercing commentary on mother-daughter relationships, the indignity of bureaucracy, the burdens of caregiving, and the impositions of religious dogma on women.”
AUGUST
We Are Never Meeting In Real Life: Essays (2017) by Samantha Irby. I had read her Wow, No Thank You (2020) recently, and enjoyed it, so I got this one and her latest, Quietly Hostile (2023), which I’ll read next. The essays in this book vary widely, from what her job at a veterinary clinic is like (“Yo, I Need a Job”) to what having a panic attack is like (“A Total Attack of the Heart”) to graphic descriptions of sex with her now-wife (“Mavis” in the book, actually the actress Kirsten Jennings), and of course it includes lists, because she likes lists (she calls them a “commercial break”). My favourites are “Happy Birthday,” about her family and her father’s death; “A Civil Union,” about coming upon a Civil War reenactment in Naperville, IL, while waiting for a very white wedding reception to start; “Fuck It, Bitch, Stay Fat,” about being fat and trying diets; “The Real Housewife of Kalamazoo,” listing pros and cons of moving from the city to the suburbs a few hours away; and “Thirteen Questions to Ask Before Getting Married,” her responses to questions suggested by an article the New York Times for couples considering tying the knot.
Pineapple Street (2023) by Jenny Jackson. I enjoyed this escapist novel about (and told from the perspectives of) three extremely wealthy W.A.S.P. women living in Brooklyn: two sisters — Georgiana, who’s a single woman working in an international non-profit and looking for love, and Darley, a stay-at-home mom of two who is happily married to aviation whiz Malcolm, an Asian man — and their sister-in-law, middle-class Sasha, a self-employed graphics designer married to their brother Cord, who works with his dad running a high-end commercial real estate investment firm; Sasha and Cord live in the family home, a sort of 6-bed mausoleum packed with remnants of all the siblings’ lives and Sasha’s mother-in-law’s decor. There’s nothing deep here, but the unquestioned indulgences, heedless cruelties, naïveté about money coupled with suspicion of anyone not very wealthy, and exclusionary nature of young people who are accustomed to nothing but a life of unfathomable wealth are astutely observed.
Quietly Hostile ( 2023) by Samantha Irby. Loved some of it — the bits about dieting, body perception, Crohn’s disease, and her anxieties — and some of it was tedious, particularly and very much so her long chapter called “Superfan!!!!!!” reviewing many episodes of the TV show “Sex in the City,” and her shorter commentary on Dave Matthews Band songs. (If you care about those things, you might love those chapters.) The two-page chapter after “Superfan!!!!!!” was probably my favourite (“I Like To Get High At Night and Think About Whales”).
Transit (2016) by Rachel Cusk. This is the second in Cusk’s “Faye” trilogy. I really loved this one, which centers on fate, power and powerlessness, how we determine our lives, if we do, and how our perceptions and memories change over time. It starts with writer Faye accepting an astrologer’s emailed offer of a planetary reading, involving “a major transit … due to occur shortly in my sky,” at the same time that she’s looking for a house to buy in London for herself and her two sons following her divorce. She chooses a house with seething violent downstairs neighbours and everything wrong with it; to remedy the structure itself, she goes into debt to hire immigrant builders Tony and Pavel from Albania. Other interactions occur, chapter by chapter, with an old boyfriend (Gerard); among a hair stylist, a nervous boy, and the boy’s indifferent mother at a hair salon where Faye’s gone to cover some grey; at a book reading along with two men, Julian and Louis, who tell the stories of their traumas and who seem to be the antithesis of each other; with a student of Faye’s named Jane who comes to consult her concerning 300,000 words she’s written about the artist Marsden Hartley; at a meet-up with her friend Amanda whose house has been being rebuilt by Gavin, now her live-in but non-committal boyfriend, for two years, giving Amanda asthma; as she’s teaching her adult writing class, when a man tells the story of his Saluki dog; when she has dinner with a man who’s been trying to contact her for exactly a year for a dinner date; and at her cousin Lawrence’s house, where several adults and assorted children labour to bend each other to their wills while having drinks and dinner. Throughout, Faye mostly listens and asks questions to try to understand the people around her, and to try to piece together how to live her life, what changes she might make to transition from one way of being to another. As usual with Cusk’s books, I find myself not so much thinking about what she’s said as floating aimlessly on the inky sea of her hypnotic stories.
The Furrows (2023) by Namwali Serpell. Cassandra aka Cee (or C) Williams is 12 when her brother Wayne, age 7, dies in the ocean, and through her laborious efforts to save him she passes out and loses track of his body, which is never found. Her mother can’t accept this and eventually starts a foundation for missing children, which is what she wants to believe Wayne is. Meanwhile Cee is haunted by her brother’s death, replaying it in other scenarios and dreaming about it with permutations (in all of these she feels Wayne, as he dies, “ssth-ing” into her), and she sees or feels him in a number of men, some of whom actually share his name, until she meets a man who is also searching for her brother and whose name is also Wayne Williams. Unrelated, or perhaps very related, are a couple of further disasters — explosions? crashes? natural disasters? booms darkness heat flames smoke shouting running, things breaking, the reader isn’t sure what’s going on — that occur in C’s life, which is a life propelled by risk, waves of desire like a dangerous undertow, powerful dark feelings, near misses, and reunions with Wayne. She spends lot of her time dazed, uncertain, dizzy, chasing after people, “It’s like swimming. You stroke and kick to get to the outermost edge of the wave. You feel the momentum: go on go on go on. But always, something tugs you back into the scooped water, the furrows, the relentless grooves. This is the incomplete, repeated shape of it: sail into the brim of life, sink back into the cave of death, again and again.” (NYT review is good)
The Locked Room: The Story of a Crime (1972) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, eighth in the Martin Beck series, set in and near Stockholm, Sweden. (There’s reference to Ronald Reagan as California governor in this book.) Maybe my favourite so far in the series, as it really is a locked room crime that the team, with Beck returned to work after a long absence, is investigating, along with a bank robbery seemingly undertaken, very successfully, by a lone woman. There’s always some discussion or reference to social issues in these novels, and in this one there is much talk of out-of-control crime (especially bank robbing) in Sweden and of the incompetent police force, all the good and effective members of the forces having abandoned policing as corruption and violence against the citizens have overtaken it. Mention is made several times of widespread poverty, of pensioners subsisting on cat and dog food. There’s also overt comparison of criminals (like the ones who rob banks) with “the big-time criminals,” those who run companies, sit behind desks, and “profit from everything — from poisoning nature and whole populations and then pretending to repair their ravages by inappropriate medicines; from purposely turning whole districts of cities into slums in order to pull them down and rebuild others in their place. The new slums, of course, turn out to be far more deleterious to people’s health than the old ones had been. But above all they don’t get caught.” My favourite line: “Since the manner of his killing seemed incomprehensible, the simplest procedure seemed to be to try and find the murderer first, and then ask him how he’d done it.”
September
Native Tongue (1991) by Carl Hiaasen. I’ve read many of his but not this one, which I found on a friend’s bookcase just before a beach vacation. Two very rare blue-tongued mango voles are stolen from the Amazing Kingdom theme park in North Key Largo, a very faint competitor to Disney, at the behest of Molly McNamara, elderly yet fierce founder of a small environmentalist group called the Mothers of Wilderness. Due to the ineptness of her two contracted burglars, Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue, both voles are carelessly killed during the getaway. This is only one of many PR catastrophes for the Amazing Kingdom, owned by shady character Francis Kingsbury, and it’s the impetus for journalist-turned-PR-flack Joe Winder’s crusade against the place. Hijinks always ensue, and Skink is involved.
The Dumb Witness (1937) by Agatha Christie. I bought this at a bookstore in a beach town and read it on vacation. A Poirot mystery that begins when Poirot receives a letter hinting at nefarious or at least perplexing goings-on, two months after the letter-writer wrote it and almost as long since she’s been dead. Of course, he travels with Hastings to the deceased Emily Arendell’s home in Berkshire to investigate and finds that Miss Arendell had changed her will shortly before she died in favour of a companion she hadn’t had for very long and against her nieces and nephew and their partners. May not be one of her best — easy to guess the culprit — but I enjoyed it.
Second Place ( 2021) by Rachel Cusk. I didn’t like it as much as her Outline trilogy books but it’s still good. Someone named M is writing to someone named Jeffers about her encounter with the devil, an artist named L, who, at M’s behest after briefly seeing his art in a Paris gallery one morning, comes to live for a time in a cabin that M and her husband Tony built in the woods next to their home. L seems to like to keep M wrong-footed and uncertain and he disparages her in certain ways. The descriptions of Tony, of Tony and M’s relationship, of the place where they live, and of L and his effect on M and her exploration of this are nuanced and complex.
A Crack in the Wall (2009/transl. 2013 ) by Claudia Piñeiro. Pablo Simó is an architect in Buenos Aires who dreams of building a certain 11-storey tower, which he sketches over and over, the same (or almost the same) each time. He works with other architects, including his boss, Borla, and a coworker, Marta Horvat, designing banal buildings that make optimal use of space and rake in as much cash as possible for the firm. He’s married to Laura, a rather anxious and angry woman with whom he has a teenage daughter, but Pablo spends a lot of time daydreaming about Marta naked. In general, Pablo seems somewhat undeveloped and stunted emotionally. He and Borla and Marta harbor a dark secret, something they were involved in together three years ago, involving a very persistent and single-minded man named Nelson Jara, who claimed that their construction of a building adjoining his wall had caused an ever-widening crack and who pressed them for compensation “to pay for all the trouble this is causing me.” Their lives are upended when a young woman, Leonor, comes asking them about Jara. I didn’t really like the ending, which felt a little pat, but others thought it was perfect. Quite a bit of discussion of the architecture in Buenos Aires.
Thursday Night Widows (2005/transl 2009) by Claudia Piñeiro. I really enjoyed this book and didn’t want it to end. Virginia is a realtor in a wealthy gated community, Cascade Heights, in Buenos Aires. The book is told partly from her point of view and partly by an omniscient narrator. We know at the start that there have been several sudden deaths and the novel fills in the details of the people who live in this community — their personalities, their family secrets, their fears, their financial struggles, their entangled lives. The various lives and relationships are so well drawn. Enthralling.
The Midcoast: A Novel ( 2022) by Adam White. The story of a Damariscotta (Maine) lobstering family, the Thatches, as told by Andrew, who grew up with Ed Thatch and who is now an English teacher. The story jumps around in time, and the narration is sometimes omniscient and sometimes from Andrew’s point of view. The plot was really enjoyable for me to start with, then less so, and by the time we got to Ed’s lacrosse-playing daughter Allie’s story, it all felt a bit scrambled. Overall, the people and their relationships were interesting to me, but the way the novel unfolded felt somehow jagged.
The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (1997) by Agatha Christie. (This was a Wm Morrow authorized edition but it disappointingly had at least two typos, p. 139 and p. 159.) These stories mostly don’t include murder and only one features a sleuth (Hercule Poirot – The Mystery of the Spanish Chest). They tend to the gothic side, tinged with psychological darkness and/or invoking the supernatural (The Edge, The House of Dreams, Within A Wall, and The Harlequin Tea Set), often with a romantic focus or subplot (While the Light Lasts, The House of Dreams, The Lonely God). Most of the stories are crime fiction only in the most subtle, ordinary sense, the daily “crimes” people commit, like telling significant and trivial lies and being self-righteous. Jealousy, envy, greed, pride are all abundant here.
The Five-Star Weekend (2023) by Elin Hilderbrand. I really enjoyed this summery, chick lit novel. Hollis Shaw is a middle-aged creator of a popular food blog, but her devotion to her brand seems to have created some distance between herself and her physician husband Matthew as well as her college-aged daughter Caroline, who lives in New York City. She and Matthew have an argument at their home in Wellesley, Mass., one winter morning, during which he ominously tells her that she’s changed, that they’ve changed; later that morning, Matthew dies suddenly in a car crash on his way to the airport. Several months afterward, a grieving Hollis Shaw invites four friends, a best friend from each stage of her life — Tatum from childhood, Dru-Ann from college at UNC, Brooke from raising their kids together, and Gigi from the present (though she knows Gigi only online, as a fan of Hollis’s blog) — to a summer weekend getaway at her home in Nantucket, complete with great food, a busy schedule, and outfit colour suggestions. She also invites her reluctant daughter, who is a budding filmmaker, to take video and photos of the weekend for her blog. All the women attending come with secrets that are slowly shared one way or another. The pacing, character depth, relationship nuance, and the seamless weaving in of modern technology (ubiquitous cell phones and texting, drones, social media sites, viral tweets, etc.) and some aspects of modern culture (including cancel culture), are masterful and very satisfying, as are the complex themes of friendship, grief, resentment, marriage, parenting, self-image, self-discovery, and starting over. 4 stars
October
Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (2020) by Maggie Smith. Smith, after her marriage of almost 19 years dissolved unexpectedly, wrote this small book of Instagrammable slogans and inspirational thoughts along with a few pages of interspersed narrative giving more detail about the three ideas she focuses on — Revision, Resilience, and Transformation — to encourage someone dealing with divorce, loss, grief, upheaval, difficult transition and change, situational depression, starting over, feeling stuck. Some of the things she addresses (all briefly, but it’s just enough) are dissolution, the “golden repair” of kintsugi (the Japanese art of mending cracks in ceramics with gold), “beauty emergency,” the word serotinous (like pinecones whose seeds are sealed shut with resin which require a searing fire to open and carry them), miscarriage and postpartum depression, her need for solitude, the fanciful idea of blue sky expanding into the space where a tree has been taken down, pessimism and optimism, and more. 3.5 stars.
Standing in the Shadows (2023) by Peter Robinson, 28th in the DCI Alan Banks series, set in 2019 near Eastvale (UK) and in 1980 in and near Leeds. Annie’s not in this one much, off grieving the death of her father, Ray, and getting his house cleaned out, so it’s Winsome and Gerry working with Alan to try to learn the identity of a skeleton unearthed by an archaeology dig – and to find its murderer. The plot of land where the body is found seems connected to the unsolved murder of a female college student in 1980 (a woman active in socialist politics), and Nick Hartley, the ex-boyfriend of the woman and the prime suspect in that case (though never arrested), narrates about half the novel. Loads of music mentioned, as usual in a Banks novel. (4 stars)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir (2023) by Maggie Smith, the story of her divorce and its aftermath, told in a variety of ways. It’s actually much more an exploration than a narrative, looking at the fact and process of her divorce, inspecting her reactions and responses to it, from different angles and in different formats. As others have noted, it’s intensely lyrical and non-linear, adopting various metaphors for divorce, describing how she “sees” it visually, answering challenging hypothetical questions from her imagined readers. She also includes short quotations from others on the ideas she raises. I liked the variety but I prefer her brief descriptions of what actually happened and how she felt and feels about it, coupled with her sharing of the realisations and revelations that these events and interactions evoked and how they changed her, her perspective, her future. Some reviewers have said they felt that Smith was continuously whining about her husband and what he did, how it ended, etc., but I didn’t feel that way at all; I feel the book is the sharing of Smith’s evolving internal work to make space after a major life shock for her new way of seeing her life, for a new way of living that has integrity and wholeness and that feels freeing for her. She makes clear that there is no absolute truth concerning a divorce (or marriage), no one way of describing or explaining what’s happened, that there are only each others’ perspectives, and without a little of her perspective on her husband, the reader wouldn’t be able to understand as well her responses. I didn’t mind that, as she made plain, she didn’t tell her readers everything — this book is not about her marriage or her husband and we learn very little about either — though I agree with others that she made rather too much a point of saying that she wasn’t going to talk about it, at every turn. In all, I appreciated this exquisitely meticulous and insightful investigation into one woman’s experience of having had the rug pulled out from under her, and I would have read more.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023) by James McBride. A novel set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania (northwest of Philadelphia and southwest of Allenstown) from the 1920s to the 1930s. It’s set mainly in Chicken Hill, a poor part of town inhabited by Blacks and Jews, though the Jews are migrating away into the downtown as they gain wealth, but Chona — a kind, smart, generous woman with a disfiguring polio-related limp — and her husband Moshe — a theatre owner who books Black acts like Chick Webb’s swing band to attract a Black audience — remain on Chicken Hill, living above the grocery store they run with the help of Addie, whose husband, handyman-with-a-secret Nate Timblin, is Moshe’s assistant at the theatre.. When Nate’s young deaf nephew, Dodo, comes into the Timblins’ life, he becomes part of Chona and Moshe’s life as well, and most of the novel is taken up with how the adults in the neighbourhood try to protect Dodo from racist white men who don’t know Dodo but assume he’s an imbecile (which he’s not at all) and want to put him away in a gigantic insane asylum. The writing is lovely, descriptive and detailed, the characters fully human. What I like most about the book is its greyness, its reflection of real life and its complexity in the characters and the way the book is told. The adults, whether Jewish, white, or Black, are complex, exhibiting a variety of characteristics among and within themselves: prejudice, racism, and anti-Semitism, misogyny, open-mindedness, generosity of spirit, wariness, laziness, enterprise, a strong work ethic, compassion, cruelty, pragmatism, envy, silence, loquaciousness, resentment, deep loyalty, cleverness, greed, bad judgment, selfless courage, dishonesty, wisdom — just like in real life. [McBride describes the founder of the town, John Antes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek as such: “the great composer, husband, father, revolutionary, statesman, plunderer, iron maker, wife beater, cornetist, Indian grave robber, and all-around great American.”] And, as in life, though the book is very detailed and concrete about some events, occurrences, and characters’ perceptions, there are some events whose details are almost entirely skipped over; I had a lot of unanswered questions at the end of the book — I was left wondering how some actions were able to be successfully accomplished, and about some of the broken or fragmented relationships and the outcomes for some of the characters not mentioned in the epilogue. I like it that way, because it feels real to me as a reader, to not know or understand everything, to wonder, and to marvel at the good humans are capable of, individually and in social groups, and to feel alarmed and heartbroken by the damage we do. (5 stars)
November
Four Aunties and a Wedding (2022) by Jesse Q. Sutanto. More madcap, wedding-centered hijinks involving bride Meddy Chan and her mother and aunts, after they learn that their wedding planner’s family is mafia who are planning to kill someone at her wedding in Oxford, England, to Nathan Chan (no relation – yet). If you like over-the-top plotting and larger-than-life characters, at times hilariously so (think Tim Dorsey’s Serge Storm series), you’ll enjoy this novel, which rolls like a snowball down an Alp to an (almost?) unbelievable conclusion. It’s wilder than the first book in the series, Dial A For Aunties, perhaps a bit too outlandish and boilerplate action-packed — I feel as though the editors may have told the author to go back and add more warmth by (over)emphasising how much she resonated with Staph (one of the wedding planners), the lengths to which her aunts will go to protect and defend her, and how hurt she is by the actions of various people and some of the events that occur — but I still found it a fun romp. (3-3.5 stars)
The Last Devil to Die (2023) by Richard Osman, 4th in the Thursday Murder Club mystery series. The gang finds themselves in the middle of murder, heroin and antiquities trafficking, art fraud, and more when a shopkeeper friend of theirs (of Stephen’s in particular) is killed not long after he’s handed a box of heroin and told to keep it for someone who will buy it the next day. Separately, they’re helping a misguided oldie whose Lithuanian girlfriend is a thief who preys on the hapless lovelorn. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s husband Stephen gives her a letter he wrote a year ago, when his dementia was taking hold, which leads to changes in their life together. Finally, Computer Bob is helping the group with technology issues, Ibrahim is continuing his in-prison session with crime lord Connie Johnson, and cops Donna and Chris have been squeezed out of the current murder investigation by the National Crime Agency, who swoops in to handle it. As always, there’s a lot going on at Cooper’s Chase retirement community, and a lot going on in the hearts, minds, and friendships of the people there. These books are just so enjoyable and full of warmth and humour.
Zero Days (2023) by Ruth Ware. A very engaging novel. Jack (Jacintha) and Gabe are a happily married couple who do security penetration tests for corporations in the UK. When the novel opens, Jack is on scene getting through a company’s security while Gabe is home looking at schematics and other digital information, feeding the info to Jack through bluetooth headphones to help her move through the physical layout of the building. When she gets home that night, though, something terrible has happened, and the rest of the book, which moves forward a day at a time for nine days, follows Jack’s attempts to elude the cops and others who might do her harm, as she learns who she can trust and deals with harrowing pain and near-miss escapes. The pace is perfect. I appreciate that the book starts with the worst stuff (instead of building up to it like some suspense/crime fiction does) and gives the readers Jack’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations as the rest unfolds to a satisfying conclusion.
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday (2018) by Julie Corbett. For permaculture group. Essays on nature, including on noise pollution, insects, waste, energy usage, her experience as a gardener, the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City, UT, et al. For me, the book didn’t really hang together, and it felt preachy or smug in places. My favourite chapter was “A Regular Day for the Moon,” partly because it was more poetic than most of the book.
The Finisher (2020) by Peter Lovesey, Crime fiction in the Detective Peter Diamond series set in Bath UK. This one involves a couple of women learning how to run, one so she can raise money for charity by competing in The Other Half, a cross-country half marathon, the other a wealthy Russian trying to lose weight. Other characters include a couple of men who have been human trafficked from Albania into England, trapped in very low-paying menial jobs overseen by “The Finisher” who will kill them if they leave. Meanwhile, a sexual predator Peter helped put away over a decade ago has been released from prison, and Peter’s determined to keep track of him. Quite a detailed (perhaps more detailed than necessary?) and complex book, relying somewhat on Bath’s unusual geography for its plot. I enjoyed it. 3.5 to 4 stars.
Locust Lane (2022) by Stephen Amidon. Engrossing novel about class and privilege in the wealthy Massachusetts suburb of Emerson, how it operates behind the scenes and within relationships, and what it buys abusers and sociopaths. Eden Perry, a 20-year-old woman with a chequered past, is found dead after a small party involving high schoolers Christopher Mahoun (son of Michel, the local French Lebanese chef), Jack Parrish (son of Oliver and Celia, wealthy and entitled members of the upper-echelon), and Hannah (girlfriend of Jack, daughter of Geoff, and step-daughter of Alice Hill, who also has a chequered past). What did any of them, or someone else, have to do with her death? The story is told from several viewpoints, including Celia’s, Alice’s, Eden’s mother Danielle’s, and Patrick Noone’s — he’s an alcoholic wealth manager whose troubled daughter died a couple of years before. Would make a great movie, except the ending might need to be tweaked — or perhaps not.
December
Unnatural Death (2023) by Patricia Cornwell, in the Scarpetta series. I just love this series and wish I could read her work and enter their world (from a safe distance) every day; I zipped through this latest in no time. Scarpetta and Marino (her forensics operation specialist and a former homicide detective) respond to the brutal and bizarre deaths of a couple who own a gigantic outdoor equipment store that also sells tactical equipment and tools of all kinds (Wild World) and live off the grid in Buckingham Run, outside Manassas, VA. Niece Lucy, a Secret Service agent, flies Scarpetta out to the property in her “Doomsday Bird” chopper, fitted with advanced technology, and fills her in on the couple, Huck and Brittany Manson, who have been in the Feds’ sights for years because they work for a Russian criminal organisation whose goal is to aid right-wing groups like The Republic to unwittingly destroy American democracy. Marino arrived at the site earlier and found what might be a Bigfoot print, from which he’s made a plaster cast to have examined by experts. The usual Scarpetta-haters and enviers — her former secretary Maggie, TV journalists, one of her facility security team, an FBI agent, and others — dog and attack the team, but the big blow comes later while Scarpetta is doing in the autopsy in the REMOTE biosafety Level 4 trailer as her husband Benton (a psychological profiler and Secret Service’s top threat advisor) and other interested parties, like the Secret Service Director, the head of Interpol in DC, NSA officials, and the director of the CIA’s clandestine services, watch virtually and finally explain what’s going on.
Showstopper (2022) by Peter Lovesey, Crime fiction in the Detective Peter Diamond series set in Bath UK. A TV crew seems to have a jinx, with several disappearances, two deaths, and an assortment of injuries and near misses over the last six years. Suspects are numerous — including the show’s actors, stunt doubles, and production crew and their significant others, actors who used to work for the show or who declined to, and a learned vagrant with a big dog — and yet none is just right. It’s a tricky and satisfying crime plot surrounded by Diamond’s usual troubles with his boss Georgina, his intricate interactions with the rest of the team, and his conversations with his partner Paloma.
Forbidden Notebook (1952/2023) by Alba De Céspedes. Valeria Cossati, a 43-year-old mother and office worker struggling with her family to get by financially in post-WWII Rome, buys a notebook from a tobacconist on Sunday — “forbidden” to be sold by such a store on a Sunday because it constituted unfair competition with stationery stores, which were not allowed to open that day — and from that moment on, it seems. she becomes increasingly aware of how unhappy she is with her life, her marriage, who she has become. The entire novel consists of her diary entries, when she can find a place and time alone and in secret to write; and her struggle to find a place to hide the notebook becomes a prominent part of her keeping the notebook; she has no place of her own in the house, though her husband and both children have hiding places that they can lock, and she knows if any of her family — husband Michele, who works in a bank; 20-year-old daughter Mirella, who has modern ideas and the confidence of a smart young woman; and her somewhat babyish and passive university-age son Riccardo, whose girlfriend Marina he describes as “sweet, shy … she’s completely devoted to me” but whom Valeria sees differently — finds the notebook, she will be mocked, revealed, humiliated. As she writes, she questions her life, her choices, her prospects, her traditional values (particularly in contrast to Mirella’s life and perspective); and her new knowledge of herself along with her surfacing feelings of guilt, alienation, anxiety, confusion, anger, and distress make her life even more miserable than before — or at least more palpably miserable, as she is less able to deny her full experience and her feelings anymore. I love this book for its revelation of Valeria’s interior processing of her life, in contrast to what others closest to her see and assume about her, though it’s hard to read it because the existential challenges facing Valeria as she reflects on the validity of the choices she’s made and still, at 43, could make, are monumental and devastating.
Death on Tuckernuck (2020) by Francine Mathews, in the Merry Folger series. I read this book all at once, in several hours; the pacing is galloping. It’s September and Nantucket police detective Merry is about to marry wealthy Peter Mason but their plans may change as a Cat 3 hurricane bears down on the island, and on Tuckernuck, a small island of about 40 families just off Nantucket. Dionis and her father Jack Mather are caretakers for some of the Tuckernuck families and are spending the 48 hours before the storm boarding up windows and ferrying the remaining people and goods off the island when, on her last trip over in driving rain and gusting winds to try to help some horses that have been left behind in their stable (by an uberwealthy absentee NFL quarterback with initials T.B.), she sees a rocket flare from what turns out to be a grounded yacht and calls it into the Coast Guard, who find two people shot on board. The excitement and urgency of the battering storm and of other life-threatening events make this book very suspenseful and atmospheric.
The Girl By the Bridge (2018/2023)by Arnaldur Indriðason. Second in the Detective Konrað (Konrad) series. An old case involving a 12-year-old girl who drowned in a pond and a new case that begins when Konrad is called by some acquaintances to try to locate their granddaughter (in her 30s), who’s become involved with drugs and some shady people, play out alongside each other, with some similar aspects. Konrad’s retired but that doesn’t stop him from investigating both cases in conjunction with reluctant CID detective Marta, and the older case also with the help of a medium, Eygló, whose father was at one time friends — or more like partners in crime — with Konrad’s father, and in this book Konrad learns more about his (deceased – murdered) father. The pacing of these books is slower than a lot of crime fiction and the action as much interior as event-driven, and I appreciate that.
The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp: A Murder Mystery (2020/2023) by Leoni Swann, transl. Amy Bojang. Definitely a murder mystery but more than that a somewhat slow-moving story of several pensioners living independently (but together) in a somewhat unusual household, headed to some degree by Agnes Sharp, whose house this was before she began sharing it with the others. Some of residents have some dementia (which tends to come and go), one is blind, several have had careers in crime solving, one does yoga and is very close to her pet turtle, Hettie, whose voice begins the story. The story opens with the death of one of their own, Lilith, and continues through police investigations of that situation along with the death of someone Agnes was close to growing up, and then there’s another … Nevertheless, if the novel is read less as crime fiction and more as both a frank depiction of the ordinary mental and physical limitations and challenges of older age and of the gradual unveiling of the Agnes’s secret life, I think most will find it satisfying.
BEYOND RIVALRY 
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