The Yard – Alex Grecian

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London 1889. Jack the Ripper hasn’t murdered for a while but his identity is still a mystery and the city’s residents have lost faith in the police. Scotland Yard is trapped in old-fashioned police protocols but a new Commissioner just back from India, a new Inspector in Murder just promoted up from Devon and a newly-discovered dismembered body in a trunk at Euston Square Station are about to change that.

Alex Grecian’s Victorian police procedural introduces a terrific pair of sleuths—Inspector Walter Day and Constable Hammersmith are a little uncertain they will manage the overwhelming case loads and win the trust of their fellow officers. But both are unafraid to operate out of integrity and neither has the good sense to go home when a gruesome case remains tantalizingly unsolved. They have plenty of work.

The body is a fellow murder detective and what has been done to him is sickening and inexplicable. The story is larded with gory detail—a major character is the self-appointed medical examiner, a doctor with a jones for the newly emerging discipline of forensic science. He’s a keeper–very colorful and intrepid man with a strong backstory and an even stronger appeal in the middle of a homicide investigation. No dull characters in this novel—chimney sweeps to frenzied, bloodthirsty maniacs are feisty, lurid, eccentric, certifiably mad, unaccountably sane, courtly, deadly and every iteration of unexpected human being. Grecian’s characterization skills are cinematic.

The plots–and there are several that intersect, veer off and unspool into a bizarre tangle in the end–are logical and terrible. London is grubby, smelly, murderous, streaked in blood, gore and horse manure. Threats abound and none are idle. The cops are so inundated with crimes they can never catch up and big clues fall between the cracks as they land on the wrong desk—or in the trash can.

But the new team is good at seeing connections and unafraid to consider patterns of criminal behavior that haven’t been part of a detective’s arsenal before. There’s a great introduction to the questionable idea of finger printing and a willingness to examine psychological profiling as London seems in the grip of multiple serial killers. Kid victims, cop victims, lady victims and sadistic killers are tucked behind every door and most of the doors are closed–but not for long.

The Yard is gritty, sort of disgusting, convincing and gripping. I liked the characters at least as much as the plot. I would pick up a sequel to Grecian’s debut novel—and I suspect, from the way this one leaves off, Inspector Day and his tough, humane sidekick Hammersmith will be back in trouble and in print soon enough.

The Yard   Alex Grecian | Putnam 2012

The Likeness – Tana French

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Tana French writes many-layered psychological suspense novels that feature appealing (and appalling) characters, fluid prose and complex, imaginative and improbable plots. The Likeness, with a slightly unlikely core premise, is a stay-up-late que pasó that requires a large measure of the willing suspension of disbelief.

Cassie Maddox, a Dublin detective who is a repeat protagonist in French’s fiction, is pulled back into undercover work when a corpse is discovered in a tumbled-down “hunger cottage” in the countryside outside Dublin. The dead woman has Cassie’s exact face and goes by the fictional identity Cassie created (and has since retired) for her undercover work infiltrating universities in pursuit of drug dealers. The similarities are weird—and so is Cassie’s feeling about the idea of assuming the made-up life of a woman whose identity and death are unexplained.

She is lured back in, despite the misgivings of her serious boyfriend, a murder detective who has an impressive solve rate, the lead detective on the case. Soon enough her diabolical former boss from undercover is co-director of the homicide team. Cassie moves into an old Irish estate house with four roommates, assuming the identity of Lexie Madison, with a story about being stabbed, falling into a coma, nearly dying, and developing amnesia. She pulls it off and is in place to find out what really happened and who killed the mysterious “Lexie.”

Here’s where you might phone up Tana French and say “What?” How does a cop fool longtime roommates who live in close daily proximity and emotional intimacy and who have heard (and maybe seen) that their real roommate is dead? Why does Cassie take such an improbable assignment and almost immediately fall under the spell of the victim’s odd living arrangements? And when does a professional detective withhold critical evidence from her superiors for no defensible reason?  

But pretend none of this matters and you can enjoy the marvelous prose. There is a lot of it. The novel is well over 400 pages and, despite the gorgeous writing, could have been a lot shorter. There is enough introspection to fill two novels—just sayin’. It’s pretty good but maybe not important enough to earn that amount of ink, paper and reading time.

Okay, what happens: Cassie is drawn into the emotional environment of the house—the shared domicile of a bunch of PhD-candidate eccentrics who have no TV, home Internet connection or PCs (they work online on campus), or contact with hostile neighbors in the tiny village abutting the estate. The house is falling down and the five bond over shared renovation projects to clean it up. They play cards and board games by the fire at night and read, play musical instruments and restore the ancient herb garden. And, little-by-little, hairline cracks become visible fissures as Cassie apparently succeeds at impersonating the dead woman and begins to connect to the life at Whitethorn House.

The dangers of her situation intensify as she draws closer to understanding what might have happened to Lexie. Her own life starts to fray around the edges and her team in the Murder division digs up more and more information about Lexie, the four roommates, the threats and vandalism to the house, several possible villains antagonistic to the residents of Whitethorn House, and the complex web of relationships that set the stage for a bewildering homicide. If the maturity and basic mental health of these housemates weren’t significant questions, it might have been tougher to work out the rough details of the murder—or at least the rough details of the motive. I did stay up late to read it and it was good when I remembered to check my analytical brain at the door. Tana French is an amazing writer. The Likeness is a flawed but still engaging book.

The Likeness: A Novel   Tana French  -  Viking  2008

The Tale of Hilda Louise – Olivier Dunrea

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I am reading a suspense that is a well-written pleasure and very dense. So I’m double-dipping—reading shorter books while I finish this one. Absolutely disastrous for productivity—the windows are not washed, the for-pay work is behind—but I just turn my back on it all and slip into a book. Or two. The back-up book is a children’s tale that is magical and probably useful as well.

The Tale of Hilda Louise is a beautiful picture book with painted pages, mellifluous language and wonderful art. Hilda Louise is an orphan in Paris. She lives in a kind orphanage where the little girls wear frocks with aprons and hats like Madeline. Madame Zanzibar, the orphanage matron, is attentive and nurturing and given to exclaiming things like “Mon Dieu!” when Hilda Louise begins gently floating just off the ground one day.

This new skill, which improves by leaps and bounds, is the envy of all the other orphans and extremely useful for rescuing escaped balloons, balls from trees and baby birds fallen from their nests. No one discourages her so Hilda Louise works it to get better at flying. One day, a puff of wind carries her over the orphanage wall and all of Paris.

Hilda Louise does a pretty fair bird’s-eye tour of the main landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, the Bois de Boulogne, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe. But things get interesting when she floats through a window into the garret studio of an artist with the same red hair as her own. Olivier Dunrea’s story is charming. It’s a fairytale but one that is grounded in details that make it perfectly believable.

Fin de siècle Paris is picturesque and serves to remove the events from contemporary reality enough to make the book a safe read. I think the story would be particularly terrific for a kid who has been adopted. Hilda Louise is touched by magic but she is the agent of her own rescue. She parlays her ability and her adaptability to circumstance into a new story for herself. Happily ever after is still an excellent ending.

The Tale of Hilda Louise   Olivier Dunrea | Farrar Straus Giroux   1996

The House of Silk – Anthony Horowitz

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Anthony Horowitz inhabits the memories and pen of Dr.Watson in his Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk. It seems very Holmesian to me, although I would have to have recently imbibed a number of Arthur Conan Doyle’s originals to pick it apart on style.

In this story, embargoed for a century by Watson whose first-person voice relates the whole affair, Holmes is approached by an art dealer with a lethal problem. The wild goose chases that ensue are mostly fatal ones and the first crime is compounded by so many more that an entirely new level of depravity is uncovered.

The destruction of irreplaceable masterpieces leads to the decimation of a marauding Irish gang in America, the murder of a Boston Brahmin, a dead man in a cheap London hotel, a family coming undone in one of London’s fancier enclaves, many fascinating excursions through the mind of the great sleuth, and the brutal death of two children. Holmes is implicated, falsely and fairly, in puzzling homicides and he is framed and imprisoned for murder after walking deliberately into a trap.

Things get pretty wild. It’s entertaining. Some important plot points are so similar to the underlying evil in other murder mysteries I’ve read on this book-a-day hamster-wheel that I guessed what was going on earlier than I might have otherwise. But that shouldn’t spoil it for anyone. The House of Silk pays homage to Holmes and Conan Doyle quite elegantly. Horowitz was approved by the estate to write this book, probably on the strength of his other best selling mystery work. Holmes would likely find little fault with it.

The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel   Anthony Horowitz | Little, Brown and Company  2011

The String Bean – Edmond Séchan

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I first encountered The String Bean (Le Haricot) as a film and loved it. The mostly black and white French movie by Edmond Séchan, who also created the text for the book, has music but no dialog. It is the story of an old Parisian seamstress who lives alone, many floors up a winding staircase in a dark, shabby building. She is wizened and bent but her spirit is full of color and life.

Each day, after she makes glittering, pearl-encrusted evening bags for sale to elegant shops and has her sparse and simple meal, she puts on her hat and goes out to the public gardens. Wandering the Tuileries—scenes that are in color–the old woman dreams of the lush gardens of her childhood. On the way home, she makes a stop to window-gaze at a florist’s, full of gorgeous blooms she could never afford. One day, she finds an old clay pot with a dead plant that someone has tossed in the trash. She takes the pot home.

Once she has removed the dead plant with her only fork, she carefully pokes a bean into the soil and waters it. Then she sets the pot on her window ledge where it will get the few rays of sun to reach her apartment every day. She tries to protect the seedling from predatory pigeons and neighbors shaking out dusty rugs; she stakes the new leaves so the stem will grow tall. But the pigeons are too many and the sun is too weak for her plant to survive. She pulls a chair out to the hall, where a patch of brighter sun from a skylight will fall on the plant, and sets the pot on the seat.

It isn’t enough. The bean plant wilts and grows pale. So she decides to clandestinely transfer it to a boxwood border surrounding the Tuileries flower gardens. She will lose her daily companion but the bean plant will get plenty of sun and water to flower and grow. What happens next is both heartbreaking and hopeful. The photographs and straightforward text of the book are evocative and powerful, just as the film is.

The tale is an allegory for life and hope that is deceptively simple. As a book, The String Bean could certainly be handed to a kid but the emotions and the underlying concepts are very big—it might take some guidance or some maturity for the story to be appreciated. I’m happy to have experienced both the film and the book. You might have to search for a copy of either but the hunt would be worth it.    

The String Bean   Edmond Séchan | Doubleday  1982

Dorchester Terrace – Anne Perry

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Thomas Pitt has been promoted to head of the Special Branch and there are some questions—a few in his own mind—about whether he is up to the task. Pitt is a brilliant detective but his new role as Commander requires diplomacy, tact, social graces and an instinct for intrigue. In addition, he will hold the fate of many people in his hands—his decisions will be life and death in circumstances that are often ambiguous.

When he learns of suspicious questions about train crossings from Dover to London and then discovers that a Habsburg is scheduled to take that route on a visit to Kensington Palace, he may or may not be onto the early stages of a disastrous political plot. The Foreign Secretary is contemptuous and other complications create awkward situations that frustrate Pitt and may endanger scores of innocent civilians.

Add to this stew a once fabulous elderly revolutionary, a woman whose valiant and colorful exploits were matched only by the roster of her illustrious lovers during a time of unrest and rebellion in the Austrian Empire. Serafina Montserrat was legendary but now she is frail and forgetful, terrified that her ramblings may reveal secrets that can still incite murder and international mayhem. Serafina lives on Dorchester Terrace, confined to bed and the ministrations of a resentful niece, a faithful servant and visits from old friends and acquaintances—until she dies of a massive overdose of laudanum.

Anne Perry’s Dorchester Terrace reignited my interest in Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. The elevated venue in which the Pitts now solve mysteries is more interesting than the former more mundane puzzles I’ve read with the two sleuths. So I suppose I will once again pull this Anne Perry series off the shelf when I come across a few—Perry is a convincing writer with an obsessive tendency to weave detailed history in and out of her stories. The history in this book, a fictional foreshadowing of the events that triggered World War I, is fascinating and at least as interesting as the plot.    

Dorchester Terrace: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel   Anne Perry | Ballantine  2012

Bitterblue – Kristin Cashore

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The Queen of Monsea is eighteen years old and she has been trying to sort truth from lies since she was thrust onto the throne at age ten. Lies are the currency of her kingdom, a blighted, twisted, shifting land tortured into madness by her father, a man with a horrible gift for controlling people’s minds.

Bitterblue is the eponymous heroine of Kristin Cashore’s latest volume in the Graceling series. Bitterblue tells the story of her desperate attempts to sort truth from treachery, friend from foe, wisdom from the insanity that grips her kingdom. Closest to her daily and least explicable are her advisors, a small group of men who keep her plied with paperwork and never have a direct answer for any of her questions. Her true friends, gracelings who each have an odd and powerful talent, come and go, offering comfort and counsel, fighting for the rights of people in corrupt kingdoms, removing evil monarchs in the seven kingdoms from their thrones, and guarding Bitterblue from the deadly assaults that dog her every move.

She sneaks out of the castle at night, disguising herself to roam the city and discover what kind of people she rules. In her travels, she is nearly discovered, often endangered and falls in with some clandestine printers, a rakish Robin Hood, and a surreptitious literacy teacher. Some force is keeping the population in the kingdom illiterate and uneducated, although her advisors tell her the castle and kingdom is 90 percent literate. Someone else is killing the truthseekers, the people who search for what really happened during the murdered king’s reign of terror and collect evidence for remuneration and reparation.

Bitterblue’s inner circle, courts, guards and nearly everyone she deals with are not to be trusted and many are actively working to undermine her. The book is dizzy with uncertainty for as long as it takes Blue to begin sorting through the lies, half-truths and rewritten history. It is disorienting to read—the experience of the heroine is the reader’s as well. And the dawning clarity, even as it comes as a relief, reveals the perverse horrors of the real history of Monsea under Bitterblue’s vile father. Even the palace friend who helped Blue and her mother to escape the king before he could practice his sick atrocities on the child has layers of guilt and loathsome memories that devour him.

Blue deciphers a bewilderinging code her mother has embroidered into bed linens and carved into a keepsake chest. The disjointed information the messages impart can never be clarified–her mother was killed by her father as she sacrificed herself so that Blue could escape. But Blue’s persistence and her friends help her to dig for the truth, an unlikely friendship begun in deception evolves through betrayal into a lasting bond. There is not a boring passage in the book.

Bitterblue is a YA fantasy but I begin to think that is a convenience of marketing and shelving. A really good fantasy is suitable for adults and teens—it’s a story that engages and entertains and shouldn’t be pigeonholed. I like Cashore’s work and her worlds. Bitterblue is a strong story to match the others in the series. With any luck, Cashore will continue it.

Bitterblue (Graceling)   Kristin Cashore | Dial Books   2012

La Historia de los Colores – Subcomandante Marcos

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I bought the t-shirt in Palenque. The market there had all the typicos that catch tourists’ eyes but I spied a souvenir shirt with a black and white photograph of a masked guerrilla fighter on it and the caption Subcomandante Marcos. I knew who he was—at least I knew what could be known about him. Marcos was a legendary insurgent leader who might have been a college professor or a university grad student or some other lettered and middle class Mexican. But he had gone underground, taken to the wilderness in the mountains of Chiapas and become the spokesman for the Zapatista guerrilla forces against the Mexican government in the cause of rights for the indigenous people.

Very romantic story but the issues were real and the lives of the people in Chiapas could have used some economic and social justice. I hiked through the jungle for hours with a Lacandon boy as guide to visit the remarkable murals in the ruins of Bonampak. I wandered over the beautiful feminine ruins at Palenque and shared some local rice and beans and brew with fellow travelers. I got shin splints, mosquito bites, astonishing views and great photographs—all research for a novel and soul food for my adventurer’s heart. And when I got home to Manhattan, I wore the t-shirt.

I wore it for a few years; it complemented my pinko hippie credentials nicely. I stopped wearing it after 9-11 when I got funny looks and realized that the masked photograph looked a little bit like Bin Laden. But by then I had unearthed La Historia de los Colores at the Strand bookstore and I read it to my very young kid in Spanish. The book, by Subcomandante Marcos, is a bilingual retelling of a Mayan legend about how colors came to be in a black and white and gray world. The Story of Colors has lush art by Domitila Dominguez on thick coated stock—it’s a pleasure to handle. Today, I re-read it in English.

Probably just as well I read the Spanish to the four-year-old as the legend is very Mayan—the gods are constantly picking fights and bitching about things when they aren’t discovering red in the color of blood and making love so they could become tired and fall asleep. Once they’ve found enough colors, they have a sort of paintball fight at the top of a ceiba tree and get colors all over everything. Boys. In the end, after an interesting evolution of the handful of colors the gods turn up, they grab a macaw and stretch its skimpy gray feathers long enough to hold all the hues and entrust the colors to the bird for safekeeping.

So that’s how the macaw turned into a crayon box and how the world came alive in reds, greens, blues and yellows. For fun, my copy has an errata sheet tucked into it that explains that the National Endowment for the Arts withdrew committed funding for the book. Was the funding failure due to the bad-boy author or the copulation of the colors to give us all those rainbow shades? Congressional pressure, no doubt. Uptight idiots—who elects these people? Not me. I just keep subversive literature around my house where even children can find it. <G> Good book.

The Story of Colors / La Historia de los Colores: A Bilingual Folktale from the Jungles of Chiapas (English and Spanish Edition)    Subcomandante Marcos | Cinco Puntos Press   1996

Cain His Brother – Anne Perry

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William Monk has been busted out of the police force in Victorian London and, with no other skills but detective work, set himself up as a private eye. When Genevieve Stonefield comes to him with a desperate tale of a missing husband, he suspects a fiscal or romantic entanglement. But Angus, the missing man, seems to have been a model of rectitude and there is no mistaking his wife’s distress. She believes he went to the Limehouse section of town where his wastrel twin brother Caleb haunts the docks and alleys, a fearsome murderous criminal.

As Monk sets off to find Caleb and determine if and how Angus has met with foul play, typhoid fever sweeps through the slums and Hester Latterly and several wealthy patrons convert an old warehouse into a makeshift hospital. Hester and Monk have some history but it is as much antagonism as attraction and they spend this book sparring relentlessly. Monk has reasons to visit the typhoid shelter and Heather has emergency nursing duties for one of her helpers who succumbs to the fever. The woman is the wife of Lord Rathbone, Angus and Caleb Stonefield’s childhood guardian—the plot thickens.

So, we have Cain and Abel—er, Caleb and Angus—plenty of excuses for Monk’s and Hester’s paths to cross on a regular basis, a seedy waterfront setting and a hunt for a missing identical twin. Alas, I figured out a major, major plot point before the fever had even taken hold in the filthy back alleys of London. But Anne Perry pulls out her usual bag of tricks and surprises in Cain His Brother and suspecting what really happens does not dim the pleasure in tracking what is happening. Monk is framed by a beautiful woman who accuses him publicly of attacking her, a charge that will ruin him and make it impossible for him to work. Certain society matrons have rather colorful and extremely veiled pedigrees. Perry throws in her version of the movie car chase—a wild hunt for a vicious perp on and along the Thames, on foot and on barges.

The William Monk mysteries are reliably satisfying. The sights and sounds of Victorian London, especially its seedier environs, are vivid and convincing. Hester and Monk’s wary circling is acerbic and fun to watch. I ran out of hours trying to keep up with overscheduled life and a seriously long YA book that is also a very good read, so I jumped into the polluted Thames with Monk, who can always be counted on for a thrill ride and a complex, twisted plot. Even knowing the key to the riddle of the disappearance didn’t help me to unravel all of it. I did, however, slide into the last chapter well before midnight. Murder mysteries will probably get me through the year.

Cain His Brother: A William Monk Novel (Mortalis)   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books  2010

Blue Asylum – Kathy Hepinstall

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Blue Asylum has the clarity of perfectly clean water, pale blue and clear to the sandy bottom, so empty that you can see the markings on the shells there. The water off Florida’s Sanibel Island in the Gulf of Mexico, setting for the lunatic asylum that swallows Iris Dunleavy just after the Civil War, used to be that blue and translucent. The beaches were thick with prized shells and sea turtles covered the sand above the tideline with their nests each summer and their hatchlings in the height of hurricane season. I don’t know if there was ever a mental hospital on the island, back in the late 1800s, but Blue Asylum is a credible approximation of what one would have been.

Iris is delivered to the private human warehouse by cattle boat after her plantation owner husband has her declared insane and committed. Her crime is to have been too dreamy a girl, marrying a brute who considered his slaves to be disposable property, refusing to celebrate the bloody whippings for minor, or imagined, infractions, plotting a disastrous escape and insisting on her own autonomy, integrity and sanity in a sadistic patriarchal society.

The asylum is full of rich characters—the woman who believes her adored husband of forty years is still alive and dances with her on the beach, the seemingly sane woman who swallows things that are not meant to be swallowed, the Confederate soldier who slips into a screaming frenzy at any trigger for the nightmares that grip his memory and his mind. The psychiatrist is as obstinate and obtuse as the sentencing judge—Iris must be mad, else why would she be in his establishment? The matron is a malicious beast who sets Iris up for the horrifying water cure, a torture the doctor has developed to treat resistant cases.

Wendell, the shrink’s thirteen-year-old son, is going mad himself, isolated on the mosquito- and alligator-infested barrier island. He harbors terrible guilt and crushing grief for the suicide of a girl he befriended before Iris arrived. Wendell is a great character—the most empathetic and evolved person in the story. He worries about Iris as she falls in love with a dangerous patient.

What happens when truth is corrosive enough to eat through the lies wrecks the comfortable assumptions that order this mad world. The personal horrors that the main players harbor are revealed slowly but evidence of them is there from the first. Terrific book but hard to read because it made me so furious at the way human connection and the intrinsic worth of women, children, slaves and the spiritually wounded were casually and relentlessly discounted.

Confronting reality comes at a cost. People do change in the course of the novel and some are lost. That kid Wendell is a prize. Good read, if at times blood-pressure-raising. Blue Asylum is a story well-told.

Blue Asylum   Kathy Hepinstall | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt   2012