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

Acceptable Loss – Anne Perry

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I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Perry novels and come to some conclusions about this best-selling author of historical crime fiction. She writes several series with dedicated characters situated in specific venues for their exploits. By far I prefer her William and Hester Monk books. Acceptable Loss is the latest of these and they are so good I will reserve as many as the New York Public Library has so I can read all of them.

Monk shares top billing with Hester who is a strong heroine, smart sleuth, fearless investigator and highly principled woman essential to the solving of morally repugnant crimes along the Thames in Victorian London. Acceptable Loss picks up where Execution Dock left off—the pornography ring and floating salons of sexual abuse that serve as prisons for young boys is still very much alive. Even the murder-suicide of the owner of one of the boats and the prominent judge who was his customer hasn’t slowed the traffic. Monk and Hester have taken in a mudlark, Scuff, a kid who lived by his wits on the lawless banks of the Thames and was nearly destroyed by the horrible business. As Acceptable Loss opens, they know that Scuff still doesn’t feel safe and won’t until they do something to uncover the money and power behind the sex salons and the extortion ring they fuel.

When the body of a boat owner farther upriver washes ashore, Monk and his deputy find another slave ship crammed with five- and six-year-old boys. The hunt is on for the real puppet-masters, complicated by the charge that the upper-class father-in-law of London’s most prominent barrister, a close friend of both Hester and Monk, has something to do with the revolting trade in children’s flesh. Monk’s investigation threatens a major patron of Hester’s clinic for prostitutes and poor women, and makes an enemy of the barrister’s wife, a clinic volunteer and friend of Hester’s who is also the daughter of the chief suspect.

The forensics are terrific; the suspects are plentiful; the stakes couldn’t be higher; the moral questions are fierce; the courage required to pursue faint and dangerous leads to the truth is exceptional. So is the novel. I think the Monk books are by far Perry’s best and my guess is that the characters and the issues are richer and more compelling than those in her other mysteries. London’s seedy waterfront spawns an inexhaustible number of colorful individuals. The crime is cinematic; the narrow alleyways are stifling; the poverty is grinding and grimy; the gap between rich and poor is stark; the self-doubt that plagues the protagonists at key points in the crime-solving isn’t based on poor self-image but on a refusal to settle for anything less than absolute integrity.

I wonder if Monk and his cohorts are Anne Perry’s favorite creations? In my estimation, they benefit from the lion’s share of her talent. I have yet to read any of her WWI books, although I am told those are among her best. So I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve had the chance to sample all the dishes in this literary banquet. But Monk and Hester are the go-to team for times when I want a reliable, satisfying read—one that could compel you to stay up way too late so you can finish it. Which I did.

Acceptable Loss: A William Monk Novel   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books  2011

A Christmas Grace – Anne Perry

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The library had none of the books I ordered and there was a half-shelf of Anne Perry mysteries just sitting there like an open box of chocolates so I grabbed a few. Terrific escape-from-too-much-taxing-reality reading. A Christmas Grace was a lovely afternoon’s respite from several busy days. Nothing like a little murder and killer storms along the Irish coast to provide entertainment.

Emily Radley travels, against her will but guiltily, to a Connemara village on Ireland’s West coast to spend Christmas with her dying aunt. She hasn’t seen Susannah in a lifetime and she hates to leave her children and holiday celebrations in London but her husband persuades her it is the right thing to do. Susannah, who married for love against her family’s wishes and is now widowed, is very frail and troubled by some secret that seems to have the whole town in its grip. As a terrible storm bears down on the coast, the fear rises palpably and the weather explodes in a maelstrom of wind, rain, lightning and ferocious tides. Through a flash of lightning, Emily sees a ship foundering offshore and, as it sinks, the sea casts a lone survivor into the shallows.

The rescue of the shipwrecked sailor awakens old memories that plunge the village into terrified and suspicious behavior. Daniel, the sailor, can’t remember much more than his first name but has an uncanny way of asking the questions that uncover each person’s most closely held dreams, failings and fears. Emily determines that Susannah wanted her there to uncover the clandestine knowledge that is poisoning the people and emptying the village. Daniel’s questions stir up doubts and uncertainties Emily hadn’t realized she harbored about her own happy marriage. And then she discovers that seven years ago a similar fierce storm cast another young sailor ashore—and that someone in the village murdered him.

A Christmas Grace is a search for motive rather than means. It holds a sense of darkness and menace but no urgent tension or frightening threats to the sleuth or her failing aunt. Emily does come perilously close to dying at an auspicious moment in the plot and she stirs up a hornet’s nest of her own when her questions hit too close for comfort. This is a murder mystery more in the vein of Agatha Christie than Carol O’Connell or even Kate Atkinson. But it is an enjoyable read and I’m happy to have a couple more Perry mysteries to wile away blustery spring evenings in the company of good stories.   

A Christmas Grace: A Novel   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books   2008

Reprise: Beastly Things – Donna Leon

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I don’t typically read the same book twice—at least not for this book-a-day challenge–but this one has to go back to the library and I was curious about the lovely digressions that created a somewhat leisurely pace and a deeper portrait of my favorite Venice homicide detective. So I read Donna Leon’s Beastly Things again, looking for those moments, and they are not digressions at all.

The exchange between Police Commissario Guido Brunetti and the Vice-Questura’s executive assistant Signorina Elettra about unemployment and the soul rot that can accompany working with money reveals more of the delightful Elettra, gives a reminder of important elements of Brunetti’s background—his family connections—and prefigures disclosures about the motive for the murder. A conversation with his old pal, the medical examiner, establishes the fact that Brunetti is aging, if not exactly rushing headlong into decrepitude, and depicts the rich relationship of two humanitarians trying to deconstruct criminal behavior.

A bedtime story recounted by a murder victim’s widow is an exact parable for the victim’s life and the circumstances that led to violent death. Interludes with marvelous Paola, Brunetti’s college professor wife and the independent-minded daughter of a wealthy and influential Venetian family, sketch his warm home life, solid values and the contrast between his marriage and the fractured relationships of various people involved in the murder.

All the “digressions” fill in the palette of colorful characters and contemporary issues, like the choice to eat vegetarian and avoid meat, and they contain clues about the crime. It’s so well-done that the seams are invisible—no work for the reader because it is all taken care of by the writer. So, re-reading Beastly Things was very satisfying and even illuminating. I might revisit the first book in the series, Death at La Fenice , to track how Donna Leon’s treatment of Guido Brunetti and his Venice have evolved.

See related posts:

Beastly Things

Drawing Conclusions

The Starboard Sea – Amber Dermont

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Jason Prosper is a rich kid in boarding school, a new one for his senior year as he has been invited to leave his legacy boarding school after his roommate commits suicide in their dorm room. The Starboard Sea is a beautifully written and sensitive account of Jason’s struggle to deal with the suicide—the roommate was his lifelong best friend and sailing partner—as well as his attempt to remake his life in the Bellingham Academy, a New England prep on the ocean with a fiercely competitive sailing team of its own.

Amber Dermont knows her way around the politics of prep school and invests her book with a bounty of authentic details to bring that rarified world to life. The students are a slightly more polished Lord of the Flies crew. Lots of drinking, boasting, venomous bullying, casual sex, rule-breaking and exam-sweating happens in-between people climbing up and down fire escapes and in and out of dorm windows of the opposite gender. But that’s all backdrop for the serious heart of the story. The kids are privileged, obnoxious, eccentric and casually vicious. Jason is actually a likeable kid who connects with an odd girl who doesn’t know if her real father is Robert Mitchum and keeps Fred Astaire’s tap shoes hanging in her room.

Parents pull out fat wallets to buy advantage and amnesty from consequences, seniors apply to the family ivy league college with every assurance of acceptance, weekends in Cambridge and elsewhere involve penthouses, mansions, fabulous art collections, European sports cars, vintage motorboats, name brand liquor and limitless drugs. Personal relationships need plenty of strategic management and there are long memories for perceived betrayals and transgressions. Jason is an exceptional sailor, generous friend, guilt-ridden survivor and spoiled second son with parents who are divorcing. Aidan, the girl who begins to redeem him from the nightmare of his relationship with his suicidal roommate, suffers her own demons as she tests, and then trusts, Jason.  

A hurricane and a horrible accident blow Jason’s fragile world apart again and he blames himself for a second tragedy. When a slip in conversation clues him to a darker secret behind a death in the school, he turns his tactical brilliance to getting at the truth. The Starboard Sea is filled with sailing lore, rounded characters, suspense and emotion. The language is striking, the imagery is cinematic, the intelligence is visible and the story is both moving and memorable.  I couldn’t put it down–stayed up past 4 a.m. to finish it 

The Starboard Sea: A Novel   Amber Dermont  | St. Martin’s Press  2012

Beastly Things – Donna Leon

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Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries tend to follow two trajectories. Some are busy with action and clues breaking out all over from page one as Brunetti juggles multiple plotlines to arrive at his arrests. And others tend to ramble for a while, mixing murder with a native’s views of Venice, lovely interludes with Brunetti’s admirable family and appreciation for fine wines and classic literature. Beastly Things, the latest of his adventures, is the latter. There is more than just murder disturbing the polis, although murder most foul and dramatic there is. This being Venice, the corpse is fished out of the canal, not an uncommon disposal site for victims in fabled La Serenissima.

It takes a few chapters for Brunetti and his investigator, the amiable Lorenzo Vianello, to identify the dead man, whose neck and upper body are disfigured by Madelung disease, a rare physical thickening that turns a human shape into a barrel. But their search, abetted by the bewitching and devious Signorina Elettra, by now a hardened hacker who never meets a protected databank she can’t crack, leads them into a world of the non-human. Somehow veterinarians, slaughterhouses, organized crime and sheer human greed combine to keep Brunetti gainfully employed. A few of the characters are more than gainfully employed—voracious for ill-gotten gains would be an accurate description.

Beastly Things may make you a vegetarian—or a vegan if you avoid meat already. It may also awaken a craving for prosecco, for the perfect pinot grigio, for excellent cappuccino on demand, and for the pastries and homemade pasta that are daily fare in Brunetti’s Venice. It will put you off what comes out of the knackers’ world in the abattoirs that transform cows, pigs and sheep into cutlets and other slabs of protein. Hunger for the cash that comes from cutting corners on public health and unbridled blackmail is another unappetizing aspect the crew at the Questura confront while hunting for a motive.  

The Venetians still hate the tourists and Guido and company continue to mourn a vanishing world. But the Commissario gets his own computer in this episode and he isn’t half-bad at figuring it out to help solve the crime. It’s a pleasure to overhear his urbane and affectionate conversations with Paola, a fully-drawn character who manages to run a nurturing home, teach part time at a university and remain a feisty, independent woman with a strong moral core. Another pleasure to track is the dialog as Brunetti bags his prey—he is brilliant, if low-key, and occasionally indulges in provoking the witness—fun to observe.

Donna Leon writes some of my favorite books, guaranteed escapes from a driven city in which no one walks home along winding streets of crumbling, sun-splashed villas for a peaceful two-hour lunch, mulling over the puzzle of the day’s work and arriving at an intelligent conclusion. Guido Brunetti’s Venice is so civilized—even though every time we catch up to him he is solving a murder with tentacles that reach far into the corruption that taints all levels of Italian society. I like a sleuth who reads the Agamemnon and makes his own coffee at six A.M. in the Bialetti so his wife can sleep in. I loved the ingenious final scene–won’t even hint at it to avoid spoiling a treat. And I sincerely hope Leon is scribbling away at her next book so the ongoing saga of death in Venice continues uninterrupted.

Beastly Things: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries)  
Donna Leon | Atlantic Monthly Press  2012

Secret of the White Rose – Stefanie Pintoff

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Stefanie Pintoff writes the kind of historical New York puzzle that is a delight for those of us who live here to read. Secret of the White Rose is an incredibly pedestrian title for a book that winds through the filthy streets and dire deeds of Manhattan in 1906 in a classic police procedural. There are hero-detectives, corpses with interesting clues, forensic science, psychological criminal profiling, chases and races against time, political favors and cop-shop politics, broader social issues and red herrings—along with some oddly placed Bibles and white roses invariably stained red. The title makes it sound like a Nancy Drew book but all the women in this novel are pretty tough cookies and a number of them operate according to their own laws.

You can visit the back streets of Little Italy and Chinatown, the legendary Dakota apartment building on Central Park West, Gramercy Park—the keyed greensward and a bordering mansion—Barnard College, NYPD headquarters and the Tombs, its notorious jail. Check out ethnic eateries in the Village and on the Upper West Side, travel up and down Broadway by horse carriage and motor cab, see a shabbier Times Square and generally glimpse the city tourists never see—a century ago. And take these self-guided Gotham History Walks while you’re sifting clues about murdered judges, murderous anarchists, cold-hearted capitalists, boot-strapping immigrants, privileged intellectuals and a deadly code delivered in scraps of music.

Fortunately, many of the well-to-do characters have pianos in their parlors and eye-witnesses are rather chatty when Detective Simon Ziele and his amateur sleuth lady friend Isabella Sinclair are asking the questions. Ziele is convinced that the obvious motive isn’t the homicidal motive and the criminologist who involves him in the murders encourages this line of thinking—until he suddenly goes mum and then removes himself from the scene.

An anarchist’s bomb that was supposed to destroy a wedding party in Turtle Bay that included Andrew Carnegie is motive enough for the police commissioner. The bomb detonated early and killed passersby—a four-year-old boy among the victims has inspired volatile public outrage. But the real story is far older than the recent high-profile crime. The fact that the first judge to die is about to rule on the bombing case is cover for the real killer.

Secret of the White Rose is well-plotted, well-researched, and well-written. It’s a very good book and a fascinating history lesson. The story might remind you of Caleb Carr’s popular The Alienist. It’s in the same vein of historical murder mysteries in which the city that never sleeps only reluctantly gives up its secrets about the victims of its most insidious crimes.

Secret of the White Rose   Stefanie Pintoff | Minotaur Books 2011

Instruments of Darkness – Imogen Robertson

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Imogen Robertson’s Instruments of Darkness mixes eighteenth century forensic science, toxic family secrets, murder and mayhem and unconventionally plucky women in a compelling historical whodunit. The plot erupts with the discovery of a corpse on an estate outside London and doesn’t let up until a cataclysmic conclusion.

Harriet Westerman has retired from the sea to run her family’s estate in Sussex. She spent the early years of her marriage sailing aboard a ship in Her Majesty’s Navy with its commanding officer, her husband, Commodore Westerman. The birth of two children and the need to raise her younger sister have her landlocked but she doesn’t lack for adventure on shore. A man is savagely knifed on Harriet’s land and she stumbles across the body, opening the door to the neighborhood horrors. She insists that a reclusive scientist who is deeply involved in the new science of autopsies examine the body and the scene of the crime with her. The two form a reluctant partnership as events reveal worse threats and more people die.

Counterpoint to all the goings on in Sussex is the story of a brutal murder in a music shop in London and the fate of two young children who witnessed the murder and were orphaned by it. The London riots of 1780, in which Protestants destroyed Catholic homes and businesses, throws the scramble to escape the killer into high relief. The distant murders are connected with events even farther afield, a death in the recently-concluded Revolutionary War in America. A gold signet ring, a cheap tin locket, a bloody knife and a dynasty rife with corruption are central to the plot. It’s very clever but the most interesting element is the characterization. First-rate characters, independent, quirky, intelligent, tenacious and driven, they are each important to the mystery’s resolution and well-drawn enough to pique curiosity.

The history seems sound and is fascinating. The motives and methods are gradually exposed as terror mounts and the most innocent in the cast are in the gravest peril. Robertson has reprised her unlikely sleuths in a second mystery and they are good enough to revisit. I’m hoping it’s available in the U.S. because it would be a pleasure to spend more time in their company.

Instruments of Darkness: A Novel   Imogen Robertson | Viking Penguin  2011

A Christmas Odyssey – Anne Perry

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Just when you think you’ve bottomed out on genre books, Anne Perry’s A Christmas Odyssey comes along and stuns you. There is a raft of these bestselling Christmas books and the world Perry has created in this one is dark, depraved and devoid of anything remotely like tinsel. But it was fascinating, with clever clue-dropping, an insider’s knowledge of crime in Victorian London, and characters as grime-besmirched and morally contentious as adversaries in a court of law or rival theologians.

James Wentworth has everything in the world but his son Lucien as Christmas approaches. The young man has been lured by drugs and vice into a tunnel of sewers and corruption that runs beneath polite society and feeds on its weaknesses. Lucien would seem to be lost for good but Wentworth prevails on a friend, Henry Rathbone, to search for him. Henry collects a former pimp and brothel owner who has turned respectable and a “doctor” without a medical degree who runs a clinic for the down-and-out and enters the underworld.

The journey is lurid, overripe with sickening sensations, fraught with inescapable peril and peppered with colorful denizens of opium dens and whorehouses. Pubs are filthy, blood slicks stone steps in a dark alley, the mere mention of a vile crime boss inspires terrified silence, a legendary beauty haunts the scraps of information about Lucien and his descent into hell. Eventually, the unlikely trio takes on a gutsy teenage barmaid who knows something, and encounters a wraithlike old man in a lavender frock coat who is the key to the tragic story behind the story.

The streets, alleys and sewers are sinister and the festive holiday season begins to seem like the unreal realm. The interior struggles of the seekers are as interesting as their pursuit of Lucien and the truth. A Christmas Odyssey is a richly-detailed, intense journey with high stakes and wonderful characters. Evil and honor are at war in this book but there is never a simplistic attempt to paint the morbid and complex canvas in anything as obvious as black and white.

A Christmas Odyssey: A Novel   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books   2010

Shifting Sands – Anthea Fraser

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A South African safari ends in hundreds of digital photos of giraffes, hippos and natural wonders for a new widow who shocks herself by falling in love en route. Anna Farrell’s son and daughter send her on the trip to help heal her grief at the sudden death of her husband. A friend who was to accompany her has an accident and Anna goes alone—but not for long. Back home in England, Jonathan Farrell, separated from his wife and his two young sons, is contacted by a mysterious young woman who begs his help with a scandal but then refuses to tell him what it is. Jonathan is a sort-of-working freelance journalist who nonetheless manages to support a household and his lifestyle easily between gigs. He worries about finding work but lack of income never trims his sails. I wonder if this magical freelance existence is a recurring theme with Fraser?

In any case, the mystery contact keeps calling and then turning into a no-show, Jonathan enlists a friend—another freelance journalist who has plenty of work–to help him explore the elusive caller’s hints; Jonathan’s mom is wined and dined in style on safari; and Jonathan’s sister Sophie tries to sort out her troubled friends, adolescent kids and other domestic complications. Anna’s new beau is connected to the mystery caller and to a glamorous former model who is still tabloid fare and who can’t keep a confidence. Jonathan finds out what the terrible secret is and discovers something even more horrible and deadly that puts him in danger. Friends fall in and out of favor and the family obsesses over what to say to each other and when to say it.

Shifting Sands has a more believable plot resolution than Unfinished Portrait, the Fraser mystery with Rona Parish as the sleuth. But the stakes never feel high enough, the danger never gets tense enough, the misleading clues are finally disappointing and harsh reality is never very messy or inconvenient. After two books, my impression is that Fraser writes light, comfortable mysteries that provide an afternoon’s entertaining read but won’t keep you up late at night or unsettle your mind with pictures or threats too vivid to let you fall asleep. Predictable, quasi-modern cozies for those times when life is challenging enough and an undemanding genre book is the perfect respite.

Shifting Sands   Anthea Fraser | Severn House 2011