Recently read

Beautiful Sacrifice by Elizabeth Lowell — suspense with a little bit of romance.  Lowell has always done a good job of integrating research into geology, gemology, archaeology, etc. into her work.  This book is set in 2012 and centers around Mayan archaeology, history, and culture.  The main character is a museum curator and archaeologist specializing in the area, and the plot revolves around mysterious, priceless artifacts in the run up to the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar.

As a mystery it was merely okay — the Big Bad and Big Confrontation were predictable — but I appreciated the plot.  Lowell used some standard romance mechanisms: the heroine describing herself via reflection, the hero finding admirable in the heroine some average characteristics that were described as absent in all other women, etc.  At one point in an important scene, the hero began not knowing about an important gang (of sorts) but finished the scene by lecturing another character and sharing information about the gang based on his prior experience, which made me scratch my head.  If he didn’t know who they were at the beginning of the conversation, how did he have that expertise less than 10 minutes later?

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dearly Devoted Dexter, and Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay.  Loved the first book, liked the second book, bored by the third.  Perhaps it was a bad idea to read them all in quick succession?

Next up:  some urban fantasy?

Progress on the shelf clearing

+  More than 100 older category novels have been bagged for donation.  I’m not sure how much interest the library will have in them, given the short shelf life of categories, but large chunks of the backlists of several category authors are going.

~  I read Nightfall by Ellen Connor.  It was the first book of a post-apocalyptic trilogy; I think I acquired it at RWA a couple of years ago — it’s an autographed copy and that’s the only place I can think I might’ve gotten it.  Liked the idea of the book more than the execution, primarily because I didn’t feel engaged by the plot or the narrators.  Also, the POV shift near the end felt odd and inconsistent with the POV for the 75% of the book that had come before.  Not a keeper but not bad, the thing that stands out most is the cover art showing a Caucasian hero…despite the description of him as having skin the color of coffee with cream, which reads as darker than Caucasian to me.

~  Third You Die by Scott Sherman.  Third mystery in the Kevin Connor series, ostensibly the final book.  Enjoyed the mystery and the amateur sleuth, thought it stood alone well — having read the 1st book but not the 2nd.  Thought the ending personal bit felt a little tacked on but it makes sense if this is the last of the Kevin Connor books.

Reading right now

A while back, while browsing at B&N, I noticed Soho Crime’s reissues.  Well, maybe they aren’t all reissues, but the ones I’ve seen are…  Anyway, the cover art for each book is a black and white photography, which seemed appropriately noire-ish.  I picked up a Joe Sandilands book that was recommended to me at one point, as well as the first in Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc series, Murder in the Marais.

The book is set in 1993, so there are things that I have to stop and think about sometimes. For example, why are they using francs rather than euros?  But it’s very good so far.

Long, long ago

And far, far away…  Oops, wrong opening.

Years ago on the old AAR message boards or maybe a now-defunct Yahoo! group, someone recommended to me Nice by Jen Sacks.  The recommendation was (and this is not a spoiler, given the backblurb) that it was different because the narrators are killers.  Apparently I found a used copy online based on the recommendation, and the book languished on my shelves for years.

Fast forward to my recent book purge activities.  Nice was in my current pile of read/toss books, and I grabbed it this morning to read on the train.  And now I’m sucked into it.  It reminds me in some ways of Hello Kitty Must Die, although that had more dark humor.  This is more deadpan and there’s a lot of subtext (I think) about behavioral expectations for women.

I’m curious to see how Nice ends…and I’ll probably get to the end tonight, since it’s a pretty quick read.

Afterthought:  the tag line is “Bridget Jones gets homicidal.”  And Janet Evanovich gives a blurb.  Those two thing,  frankly, would have caused me to reject the book outright if it hadn’t been recommended:  I DNF’d Bridget Jones’ Diary and abandoned Evanovich a dozen books ago.

On a happier note

On a happier note, in terms of reading, I pulled A Share in Death by Deborah Crombie from the TBR shelf (paper).  It is/was her debut novel.  It’s not quite a cozy mystery, especially since the main characters are actual inspectors/detectives, but it’s much less violent and graphic than a lot of the more recent suspense I’ve tried.  (Has the gore factor gone up?)  I guess most readers would call it a traditional English detective novel.  It worked for me well enough that I’ll be checking out the rest of the series with Inspector Duncan Kincaid and DS Gemma James.

Two Tana French novels

Some spoilers follow, but not the whodunit or exactly why.

I think Tana French must be chalked up as one of those writers whose writing I can admire, but whose storytelling doesn’t suit my reading tastes.

Until recently, I’d heard great things about Tana French’s books, but never got around to reading her.  I did manage to buy a couple of her books at the UBS, but they sat in the TBR pile for ages; one of them still sits there.  B&N had a sale and I had a coupon, so I bought a copy of French’s new release, Broken Harbor, for a little less than half price, and began there. (Which may have been a mistake? Perhaps this is an author best read in order.)

I found the writing to be extremely good, and narrator’s voice to be gripping.  Kennedy is a hard-nosed cop, a cliche in some ways.  He’s got a pretty jaded worldview when it comes to being a Murder Detective, but it seems to have worked for him in the past because he’s got a good solve rate.  The set up of the central mystery here is pretty universal following the financial crash of 2008: it could be set in Ireland or Spain or Florida or Southern California. A family is found dead in a nearly empty, failed development that crashed with the real estate market.  The whodunit…I figured out early on, but still enjoyed the steps of the procedural.

What I struggled with is the treatment of mental illness through out the novel.  It is an illness.  It needs to be treated, not shoved under a rug or “fixed” by well-intentioned family who don’t know what they are doing.  On one hand, that’s what creates the internal and external plots of the book, and without it there is no book.  But as a reader, that being the ultimate causation for the plot is depressing.

 

French’s The Likeness is another police procedural, murder mystery.  Also tightly written with an engrossing first person narrator.  The whodunit is narrowed to a group in the beginning, so the mystery is more about unpuzzling the victim and the group than anything else.  The difference here is that the narrator is incredibly unreliable and unstable (IMO) to the point that the wrap up of the murder is a cheat.  For all the narrator’s discussion about the value of truth, she spent a fair amount of time lying to everyone, including herself, and twisted the truth out of recognition.  As a reader, I don’t trust that narrator and don’t find her sympathetic or empathetic.  I’m not sure I’d be interested in reading more procedurals with her as lead, and feel sort of sorry for her fiance in the ostensible HFN.

Read/reading now

I’ve recently read a few things that I’m not going to review in full or even in brief but I do want to mention them.

Kill You Twice by Chelsea Cain.  Book 5 of the Archie Sheridan series.  I commented over at AvidMysteryReader‘s blog that this is it for me with this series.  I started out loving the utterly twisted dynamic between Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell, the serial killer who tortured him but chose not to kill him, because it was so different from anything else I had read in mysteries/thrillers.  It’s dysfunctional and fascinating but is growing stale for me as a reader:  I want the narrator/protagonist to progress as the series progresses, and it feels like Archie really isn’t, and that he doesn’t want to.  And at this point, I don’t trust that Cain will let him, because Gretchen as arch-nemesis sells books.  Beyond that, most of the major plot points felt extremely coincidental and/or utterly predictable and disappointing.  Not badly written, but not up to the standards of HeartSick.

He Speaks Dead by Adrienne Wilder.  M/m paranormal/horror.  The narrator is dead.  He’s a ghost, in love with a live guy who is psychic, and they have sex by taking possession of horny drunks, which seriously squicked me; not because of the sex but because the mental/ghost possession felt like a brain or psyche rape to me.  And their excuses parallel those of date rapists — she wanted it.  I found narrator pretty unsympathetic on the whole and the entire relationship seemed profoundly unhealthy — falling in love with a dead guy you never knew while he was alive?  The other hero needed serious therapy for a variety of things, not the least being his choice in lovers.   And the ending was a complete cop out.  If this had been a paper book, it would’ve hit the wall.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling.  This is the first Potter book that I read immediately upon publication, since I came to the series fairly late.  I haven’t re-read this book since it was published, and upon re-read the storytelling stands up but the writing does not.  Rowling could have stood a firmer editorial hand with this book, as well as the next two probably.

I’m working my way into Tana French’s new mystery, Broken Harbor.  I’ve never read her before.  Love the writing and the narrator’s voice, but I haven’t felt compelled to sit down and read the book cover to cover.  Perhaps this was the wrong place to start?

 

How hardcore are you if you keep getting rescued?

SPOILERS FOR THE QUEEN & COUNTRY SERIES AHOY.

I finished Greg Rucka’s The Last Run the other night.  It’s the third Tara Chace thriller novel; there’s also a graphic novel series that fills in her backstory and some of her adventures as a covert agent for Britain’s SIS.  Overall, I have really enjoyed the three books and the scattered graphic novels I’ve managed to find, the books more so than the graphic novels mostly because I prefer word to drawing but that’s just a matter of taste.

Tara Chase is an expert; at this point, five years have passed since A Gentleman’s Game, and she is Minder One, agent in charge of the team of three in her Ops group, and apparently fairly well-known within the espionage and intelligence community.  She gets the job done, even if in the end the outcome isn’t exactly as planned; she’s always moving, planning, thinking, reacting to changes in the situation.  And yet in both the second and third books, she’s caught and either tortured or in a very bad position, and has to be rescued.  She does a good job of evading capture for a while, and maneuvers to the point that she can be extracted or exfiltrated by her service (rather than be abandoned)…and yet she’s still being rescued.

On one hand, Rucka does a great job of demonstrating how operations never go as planned, and the outcome is often not what was anticipated, resulting in possibly horrendous blowback.  And Chace is a great character, if a little underdrawn outside of professional accomplishments.  On the other hand, are there male spy protagonists who have to be rescued in the end?  I haven’t read a lot of espionage thrillers, not since back before Tom Clancy and Jack Ryan jumped the shark, so I can’t really compare.  And the ending of The Last Run makes sense in terms of the larger plot for the book and the story arc, assuming this is either the last book or a transition book.  But hovering in my mind is the question:  how often to badass spy heroes have to be rescued in the end, and would the story be different if Tara were Tim or Tom instead?

Call Me Princess by Sara Blaedel

Translation (c) 2011 by Erik J. Macki, Tara F. Chase

Published in the US by Pegasus, a Simon & Schuster imprint

Wandering around Barnes & Noble over the weekend, I gathered up several books to check out and possibly buy.  Most of the books I picked up were on my “check out” list, but the cover and title of this one caught my eye.  Even before I read the summary, the quote from Camilla Lackberg sold me on the book.  (It just happens that this is the only book I bought — the others are going to be library books.)

An online flirtation can have horrific consequences, as Detective Inspector Louise Rick discovers when she is called to an idyllic Copenhagen neighborhood where a young woman has been left bound and gagged after a profoundly brutal rape attack.  Susanne Hansson met her rapist on a popular dating website; reading the assailant is trolling the site for his next target, Louise is determined to cut hi off at the pass.  But then a new victim is found — dead this time — and the case becomes even more complex when Susanne attempts suicide.  From scanning seemingly innocent singles’ profiles to exploring a digital window on the city’s dark and dangerous nightlife, to understanding a troubled mother-daughter relationship, Louise races to uncover the shocking truth behind the crimes.

Call Me Princess is an enjoyable, quickly-paced procedural novel.  It’s a thriller, in the sense that rapist-killer is being hunted, but it didn’t feel oppressive in the way that thrillers often can.  The material — violent rape and the ramifications, along with the difficulty of investigating and prosecuting the crime — is heavy and dark, yet the books doesn’t ever bog down.  Blaedel balances Rick’s personal observations and involvement in the case with the procedural aspects, along with what’s going on in her personal life.

I thought the subject matter was very timely and current.  Most people I know, single, divorced, widowed, everyone who has been uncoupled for any period time in the last decade or so, has eventually tried online dating; among the women, security/risk of it is something they are extremely conscious of, especially after reading horror stories in the news (because of course the Very Bad Dates get press but the average or good dates do not).  Blaedel uses Rick’s personal life as a reflection point for the dating scene generally — she feels safe, but is she? — and also the online dating experience of another character as a foil to the victims’ suffering and the online trolling Rick does in a professional capacity.  It works very well, I thought, the triangulation of the failed online date, the apparently successful online date, and the apparently successful not-online relationship.

Blaedel’s website (in Danish) includes a booklist that places Call Me Princess as second in the Rick series, so I’m curious about the degree of involvement/development of other characters in the first and subsequent books.  The other book available in English, Only One Life, is actually the third book of the series.  I hope all the books get translated eventually, particularly the first one. (Why do publishers translate and publish series out of order?  It’s frustrating for mildly OCDish people like me who really need to read series in order.)

I’ll definitely be reading more from this author, as quickly as it’s translated and published in English.

A Gentleman’s Game by Greg Rucka

A while back, a member of my primary fandom who works in the entertainment industry and always writes very thoughtful posts about women in the entertainment industry linked to Greg Rucka’s interview in which in explains why/how he writes strong female characters.  And later she linked to this interview, in which Rucka talked about his protagonist Tara Chace in the Queen & Country series (graphic novels and regular novels).  There’s a lot to mull over between the two pieces, but this bit is what caught my attention:

“[Hollywood is] paralyzed by the fact that it’s a female lead. That’s what it comes down to—they’re paralyzed by the fact that the lead in Queen & Country is a woman and I’ve literally had conversations with executives where they’ve said, ‘Is there any way that we can get a man up there with her?’ and it’s like, ‘Well, sure. That’s not Queen & Country. Feel free to write that yourselves.’”

After reading that, I had to check out the book.

Title:  A Gentleman’s Game

Publishing info:  copyright 2004, published by Bantam

Based on the graphic novel series published by Oni Press

Excerpt available here.

When an unthinkable act of terror devastates London, nothing will stop Tara Chace from hunting down those responsible. Her job is simple: stop the terrorists before they strike a second time. To succeed, she’ll do anything and everything it takes. She’ll have to kill again. 

Only this time the personal stakes will be higher than ever before. For the terrorist counterstrike will require that Tara allow herself to be used as bait by the government she serves. This time she’s turning her very life into a weapon that can be used only once. But as she and her former mentor race toward destiny at a remote terrorist training camp in Saudi Arabia, Tara begins to question just who’s pulling the trigger—and who’s the real enemy. In this new kind of war, betrayal can take any form…including one’s duty to queen and country.

This blurb is…not entirely accurate.  Well, strictly speaking, it is, but it skips a huge amount of plot that comes before and also implies that Tara had a choice about being used as bait.  [Not so much.]

As you might guess, AGG is an espionage thriller set in the mid-00s.

Let’s start with the title.  Spying was considered “a gentleman’s game” by the British in earlier times — why?  Because it was a sophisticated undertaking suitable only for the sort of “gentlemen”?  One of the characters in the book, not a particularly sympathetic one, laments those lost days, now subsumed in more brutal counter-terrorism activity even as he contributes to the on-going demolition.  But it begs the question:  what is so “gentlemanly” about spying really?   And since the protagonist, the highest ranking active agent, is a woman, there’s just another step away from the traditional MI-6 spy culture.  Take yet another step away from the golden/glory days as the plot progresses and the underlying agreement between agency and agent is demolished.  By the end of the novel, there are no gentlemen and no games left.

The narration is done in third person, with the perspective of several characters.  Although Tara is the main character, readers get as much time in the head of her immediate supervisor and nearly as much in the mind of a third person.  There’s even a one-off scene with the POV of a fourth character, which is a little out of place but necessary for the narrative style.  Yet this does not scream of head-hopping, the way multiple POVs sometimes do.

Readers get to know pieces of Tara Chace, mostly the pieces that are relevant to how she does her job and what makes her good at it, but not the whole of her.  Will more be revealed in later books?  I’m not sure it’s necessary.  She’s isolated and insulated by her job, yet also vulnerable because of it.  She’s extremely skilled yet also disposable, especially in the sense that there appears to be a high rate of burnout or turnover.  A love interest is presented in the book, and I felt quite ambivalent about it:  while it made sense in context, the outcome was somewhat predictable IMO.

Rucka’s writing didn’t strike me as particularly artful — there are no passages that I marked as favorites — but it flows well and the pacing is excellent.  Once I dug into the book, I couldn’t put it down.  He does a very good job of including enough politics, history, and background information about the tension and subtext of Saudi-UK-US-Israeli cooperation on terrorism to make the plot hang together without bogging the storyline down.  He also doesn’t get mired in technical information (Tom Clancy, I’m looking at your old Jack Ryan books) while including just enough for the various operations to make sense.

One of the largest issues, that of the rights of the individual in the face of national interests, of the dismantling of an institution’s modus operandi as an obstruction to political convenience, is resolved at the level of the character but unresolved on the national and international scale.  What will be the result of MI6 basically tossing Tara to the wolves?  I guess I’ll find out when I settle into the next book of the series.

I feel a glom of all Rucka’s work coming on.

Highly recommended.