The Sirens' Song: Our TBRs

Unread books on the shelf are sirens calling. What are some of the ones beckoning you? How did they make it into your to-be-read stacks in the first place? Are you waiting to read a particular book?

Maltese Condor: Before I began following some Amazon discussions a few years ago I didn't know what a TBR list was. Of course, I had a stash of books but once a great variety of wonderful recommendations came my way, my pile became a peak, so I now have a smaller, more immediate TBR. It usually includes something old (written before 1950), something new from more recent decade, something to make me laugh, something with a foreign vista and, last but not least, a book not dealing with murder.

While Peter Lovesey's The Detective Wore Silk Drawers was written in 1971, it is part of a very nicely written series about Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, who are pounding the streets of Victorian London in search of criminals with unusual twisted minds. I first read these many years ago and have been looking forward to the repeat experience. Usually, my "old" pick is a classic mystery.

My "new" choice is Charlotte and Aaron Elkins's A Dangerous Talent, in which a young art consultant, Alix London, is introduced. Alix has had a reversal of fortune and is making a new life for herself in Seattle. I am really looking forward to this one.

I am expecting Michael Pearce to lift my spirits with A Dead Man in Tangier. Things are in turmoil in 1912, especially in Tangier. Sandor Seymour is a member of a flying squad before there were such things. He is an officer of England's Special Branch and he travels to hot spots in the British empire to unravel messy situations in a humorous fashion. I feel this author is one who can be relied on to entertain me.

Dance with Death, by Barbara Nadel, is my visit to a different culture for the coming week. Inspector Ikmen has to leave Istanbul and travel to Cappadocia to investigate the violent death of a woman who has lain undisturbed for two decades. I will have to do a little googling in this case.

Rounding off my mental stimulation will be The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. This is a perfect time to read this, since our local high school baseball team just lost the state championship by one run as the result of a beautifully played game with a weenie two-run error. Aah. You remind yourself that somebody has to lose.

My rule of thumb is that my next book choice must always be fluid and flexible. One book tends to lead to another. Recently, reading a book about a blizzard may lead me to reading about Africa. And if I do read these as planned, I may need to read more home-grown talent next week. By the way, my time estimates are usually waaaay off. But if I could allot at least 10-12 hours a day for reading and the rest for work and all the other boring routine stuff, reality wouldn't be such a splash of cold water in my face.

Della Streetwise: Spies! I'm always in the mood for stealing secrets and double dealing. My John le Carré books are demanding a re-read, but before I begin all over with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I'm going to read a le Carré I haven't read yet: Our Kind of Traitor. It's about international money launderers for Russian organized crime.

I do a lot of chauffeuring my kids around during the summer. Guess what I'll take in the car to read? It was written in 1951 and published in 1957. Mostly autobiographical and based on cross-country trips with friends. The original draft was on a roll of paper 120 feet long and there were no paragraph breaks. It speaks for the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood begins in this way. "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." It's the famous book with the novel-within-a-novel. Laura's science fiction novel and her sister Iris's memories wind around each other. Atwood won the Booker Prize for this, her tenth book.

An ex-spy! Gerard Macdonald's The Prisoner's Wife tells the story of ex-CIA agent Shawn Maguire's search to find Darius Osmani, an Iranian secretly held by the Americans for interrogation.

Sister Mary Murderous: Last week my TBRs were well-behaved, standing in orderly rows and waiting their turn. Now, all of a sudden, I'm besieged with newcomers. And they're almost all World War II and espionage. Not a quaint village mystery among them. Here are my impatient newcomers:

Joseph Kanon: Istanbul Passage. World War II is over, but when one last job goes awry, Leon Bauer is caught up in shifting loyalties, double-dealing and deadly maneuvers that rival anything that could happen during wartime.

Ben MacIntyre: Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (Advance Review Copy). Speaking of wartime double-dealing, this nonfiction book tells the better-than-fiction story of a motley collection of double agents tasked by British intelligence to trick the Nazis about the location of the D-Day invasion.

David R. Gillham: City of Women (ARC). Non-mystery literary fiction about a group of women in World War II Berlin. To be released August 7.

Gerald Jay: The Paris Detective. A police procedural/thriller set in the Dordogne in the 1990s and featuring a Maigret-like Inspector Mazarelle.


Mark Mills: House of the Hunted. Espionage on the Cote d'Azur, 1935.



J. Robert Janes: Bellringer (ARC). Murder in a Vittel, France internment camp for British and American women during World War II. Number 13 in the Kohler/St. Cyr series. To be released on June 5.

Rebecca Cantrell: A City of Broken Glass (ARC). Fourth in the Hannah Vogel series, this one takes place in Berlin around the time of Kristallnacht. To be released July 17.

Georgette Spelvin: My TBRs are making like bunnies. I swear they reproduce as soon as my back is turned. Here are some of the books waiting, more or less patiently, for my attention:

I wish I could read Spanish, because I've seen some intriguing books written in that language. I couldn't resist Spaniard Victor del Àrbol's The Sadness of the Samurai when I learned it had been translated into English. It's a story of "rebellion, murder, and political ideology," as a dying woman in 1981 Barcelona looks back at pro-Nazi Spain in 1941.

Love Joe R. Lansdale. He's insightful, funny and raunchy, and he can write like nobody's business. The one on my shelf is his 2012 book, Edge of Dark Water. I need to get to it soon because I like the synopsis: May Lynn dreams of going to Hollywood. When she dies, her friends want her dream to come true. So they plan to dig her up, burn her to ashes, and take her to Hollywood that way. They'll finance this plan by stealing some money.

I enjoyed David Mitchell's imaginative Cloud Atlas, and number9dream is another Mitchell book. From Kirkus Reviews: "A wildly inventive set of variations on an abandoned young Japanese man’s Sisyphean search for his father under the aegis of John Lennon and the mystical number nine." I hate Sisyphean tasks myself, but reading about them can be a recipe for bittersweet.

I've been discussing Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending with Sister Mary. That's been so much fun for me that I added Alex Grecian's The Yard to my TBRs after reading her comments about it. I want to see if I agree with her. I'm in the mood for Victorian London, so I'll read it soon.

I'm looking forward to Anne Korkeakivi's An Unexpected Guest. Clare Moorhouse is an American married to a high-ranking diplomat in Paris. She must host an unexpected––but very important––dinner party. Potential problems threatening Clare include a deeply buried secret (gotta love those dark secrets that come crawling out of the past).

Do you have a book you're saving for a certain time of the year? I do. Life and Fate, a 1959 novel by Vasily Grossman, is slated for this winter. I'm very fond of Russian and Balkan novels. I'm interested in sieges (hey, everybody has at least one odd interest), and this book begins with the German siege of Stalingrad and ends with the German surrender. Reading it on the beach just wouldn't be right.

Periphera: Travel in time and space! There are still a few of Robert van Gulik's mysteries about the celebrated 7th century Chinese Judge Dee Gong An that I haven't read.  In Murder in Canton, he has achieved the highest rank of judges, with authority second only to that of the Emperor. In this story, he personally goes undercover to investigate the murder of an Imperial Censor in China's most important city, with the aid of a blind cricket-seller girl.

Also from the Orient, I have a copy of The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker, set in 11th century Japan. Sugawara Akitada is an impoverished young nobleman in the Emperor's service. He is sent out on an impossible mission to a remote province to determine why the convoys delivering tax revenues to the capital have been disappearing without a trace.

My brother's fondness for Guinness, and a picture on the wall of his favorite Irish pub, made me curious about Lady Caroline Blackwood, the beautiful restless heiress of the Guinness fortune.

She was the epitome of a jet setter before the term existed, having had four husbands and a writing career before her death in 1996. I have two of her books in my TBR pile: the semi-autobiographical Great Granny Webster, about a controlling martinet in the huge gothic mansions of the aristocracy, told through the eyes of an orphaned girl; and Corrigan, the story of lonely widow who befriends a crippled man who soon exerts a great deal of influence over her. If I enjoy these, I will move on to her biography, Dangerous Muse by Nancy Schoenberger.

Meanwhile, I am woefully behind in reading Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Station for a reading group. I don't know why I have avoided this author in the past; the book so far is a lively and well-written story about the insanity the police deal with in tinsel town, where almost everyone is an actor or a wannabe of one sort or another. There is some rough language and political incorrectness (one of the officers needs to stop frequently to use a breast pump, to the dismay and embarrassment of her grizzled senior partner), but nothing out of line with the setting or the collection of very strange characters.

We'd love to snoop through your TBRs. What books are calling to you?

Only the Best Junque

Most people collect something, even if they think they don't. They may make a conscious choice or fall into it almost by accident, but you will know when their eyes suddenly light up and they begin to gleefully and minutely describe this or that treasure that you have discovered their passion. This nearly universal acquisitive instinct is fed by the surge in popularity of stories and shows about collecting and collectors.

In J.B. Stanley's A Fatal Appraisal, Molly Appleby, a writer for Collectors Weekly magazine, is on her way to Richmond to cover a shooting of Hidden Treasures, an Antiques Roadshow type of program. Having persuaded her boss to spring for a B&B instead of the usual strip motel, she is delighted with the antique-filled Traveler House, named for General Lee's horse. Several of the chief appraisers are also staying there, including one from the British version of the show.

When the famous furniture appraiser (who resembles neither of the irresistibly exuberant Keno brothers) fails to appear for the first day of shooting in the local Civil War museum hosting the show, Molly checks for his car in the parking lot only to find him, swollen and dead, still clutching the steering wheel. Traces of mold in the priceless Revolutionary War period desk that is the centerpiece of the show appear to have been the cause. Another appraiser is strangled after noting disdainfully that several valuable coins in the museum's collection are fakes. The shoot is in shambles, and the long lines of ticket holders clutching their treasures for evaluation must go home disappointed. The writing here was somewhat trite and cliche-filled, but it offered a good plot and a fascinating and unusual look behind the scenes of an Antiques Roadshow setting. I would love to read more mysteries set around the making of this show.

Jane Wheel is a Chicago-based collectible picker in Sharon Fiffer's Scary Stuff, the sixth in this cozy series. Like the American Pickers, she finds her treasures at yard sales, flea markets, and old barns and houses. She is visiting her brother and his family in California when a drunken man approaches Michael and threatens to sue him. Michael says, "Look at me closely," and the man apologizes and stumbles off after a close scrutiny of his face. Michael is disturbed; it is the third time he has been mistaken for "Honest Joe," a very dishonest online seller of fake collectibles. Since Honest Joe mails his packages from a town near Chicago, Jane takes it upon herself to investigate the man who is causing her brother so much trouble. When she learns that Honest Joe may be living with a cousin she never knew she had, and a woman whose inherited treasures she is valuing is murdered, things get strange very fast.

This story just didn't come together for me. Too many words spent on too many weird characters failed to compensate for the rather weak story line. Nonetheless, I appreciated the warning about the number and variety of frauds that can happen in online auctions.

Recently widowed antique print dealer Maggie Summer decides to participate as usual in the Rensselaer Spring Antiques Show in Lea Wait's Shadows at the Fair. She sets up her booth next to that of her friend Gussie, who is sporting a new motorized wheelchair. Gussie's nephew Ben, a young man with mild Down's Syndrome, is assisting his aunt.

When Ben knocks down a man who was threatening a woman that night, he asks Maggie for help making sure the man is not hurt. They find Harry dead, nowhere near where Ben thinks he knocked him down. Both the police and Ben think that he has killed Harry, and Ben is arrested.

When it is found that Harry died of poisoning, like a dealer at an earlier show, Harry's wife asks Maggie's help finding her husband's murderer. They have only three days before the fair is disbanded, and the dealers scattered. This solidly constructed first in a series was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Mystery, and I look forward to reading more of Maggie's adventures.

Arthur's Story, a short story by Kathleen Valentine, isn't exactly about collecting, nor is it a mystery, but it beautifully incorporates one of the enduring fantasies of my childhood. Young Arthur, orphaned and homeless shortly before WW1, discovers an unlocked window into the cluttered attic of an imposing old brownstone.

With winter coming on, he builds himself a cozy nest on a pile of carpets by a chimney and reads the winter away, only sneaking out every few days with a filched trinket or two to sell for provisions. Fortuitously, he finds almost everything he needs in the capacious attic, from clothing he can wear, to a chalkboard and chalk, to leftover staple provisions. New boxes of treasures are lugged up from time to time by a pair of gossipy footmen, who never suspect his presence. Arthur lives safely and secretly, like a mouse in the attic, for several years, until he is old enough to enlist. This heart-lifting little story, available as an ebook only, vastly improved my mood for the rest of a gloomy day.

Growing up in a large family with a relentlessly decluttering mother, I had no opportunity to collect anything. Everything was recycled through younger sibs and finally discarded. So I'm not much of a collector, except for the books, which somehow multiply like rabbits. Oh, and a bureau full of lovely antique table linens, mostly mismatched, acquired over many years. I had some exquisite lace ones, but quickly learned that lace and cats don't mix. The frogs were an accident. My husband once brought me a charming signed cartoon print of a frog flying a Sopwith Camel that had caught his eye. The word went out, and I was given at least one frog every Christmas for years. I finally drew the line after my husband and a friend hauled this jovial forty pound fellow crafted by a New England artisan several blocks to our waiting van. He still makes visitors smile, and his hat is a handy place to drop keys and wallets. Intentionally or accidentally, nearly everyone collects something. So what lights up your eyes and makes your fingers twitch?

Crime Fiction on the Couch

You're lying on a psychiatrist's couch, and there's plenty to talk about. Unshakable bad habits, haunting dreams, wacky family and friends.

You meet a psychiatrist at a party. You can't stand there stripping your psyche naked. What can you talk about? The DSM-V. That's the latest, due out in May 2013, in a series called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. Believe me, after your new friend stops sputtering, you'll have yourself a conversation.

Since 1840, when the U.S. Census asked about "idiocy/insanity," Americans have struggled to identify and categorize what isn't "normal." The DSM and its equivalent, the ICD (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), attempt to standardize the classification of mental disorders for clinical, research, and educational purposes by using specific diagnostic criteria. The DSM-V committees are still laboring under a deluge of help and a hailstorm of criticism––including fierce friendly fire––tinkering with current diagnostic categories, debating issues such as extended grief, working on new diagnoses (including one called "sluggish cognitive tempo"), and vetoing others because they sweep in too many of us or exclude too many of us already diagnosed. They have a Herculean task.

I'll be curious to see the DSM-V. In the meantime, I enjoy browsing through my husband's DSM-IV-TR and meeting complex fictional characters who'd be candidates for various mental health diagnoses. Here are a few books I've enjoyed:

Camilla Läckberg must have had the ICD handy when she wrote The Stonecutter, the third book in her series with cop Patrik Hedström and writer Erica Falck and set in Fjällbacka, Sweden. I've rarely met so many troubled fictional characters outside of a psychiatric setting, such as the one in Oregon described in Ken Kesey's terrific One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. A few possible diagnoses for some of Läckberg's characters include Asperger's disorder, pedophilia, narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

The victim is a young girl who has been diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and DAMP (deficits in attention, motor control and perception––a classification used only in Sweden). A fisherman finds her drowned, tangled in the line of his lobster pot. Patrik goes to the scene. The death of a child is always terrible, but this one is particularly bad for Patrik, father of a new baby daughter with Erica, because he recognizes her as Sara, the daughter of one of Erica's friends. The postmortem discovers bath water, rather than seawater, in Sara's lungs, so a murder investigation begins.

Photo of Fjällbacka by Frank Heuer

This thriller is one of those books that jump to a different location and set of characters every few pages. There are two story lines, one of which begins in 1923, that connect near the end. Although I had no difficulty following Läckberg's plot or keeping her characters straight, after 489 pages of constantly leapfrogging about, I felt as if I had artifically-induced ADHD. I wasn't thrilled by how the crime is finally solved, but watching how several monstrous characters are created and how dysfunctional families struggle to cope make this a very interesting read.

One of my favorite fictional psychopaths is Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, who meets DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Ripley is a complex person who takes advantage of others' naïvité and moves from one illegal activity to another. His conscience isn't completely missing; Ripley is capable of some empathy and feeling a degree of remorse, but these traits aren't strong enough to prevent him from defrauding or murdering people. Ripley isn't sadistic; he doesn't take pleasure in killing for killing's sake. The murderous methods Ripley chooses are fairly civilized: a clunk on the head with a bottle, a quick garroting or a gunshot. Despite his crimes, Ripley is strangely likable, and a reader roots for him to succeed.

Highsmith's series involves books of psychological observation that study the subject of guilt. Because Ripley's life changes over the course of the series, the books are best read in order. Begin with The Talented Mr. Ripley, written in 1955. Ripley goes to Italy at the request of Dickie Greenleaf's rich father to find Dickie and talk him into returning home. One thing happens after another, and before long Dickie is dead, and Tom's life is forever changed. This book was made into a 1999 movie starring Matt Damon as Ripley and Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf. It's an okay movie, but not as good as Highsmith's book.

In the next book, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley is living with his charming heiress wife Héloïse in Belle Ombre, a chateau near the French village of Villeperce. He has organized a lucrative scheme with some London friends that involves forging Derwatt paintings. All is going well until Thomas Murchison, an American Derwatt collector, decides one of his paintings is a forgery. Ripley pulls out the stops to convince him otherwise.

There are three more Ripley books, and they see him becoming more comfortable with his wife and more concerned about his reputation. Ripley's life is going well in Ripley's Game until one of his criminal acquaintances, Reeves Minot, asks him to commit a murder for him. Ripley refuses, but he suggests that Minot hire a poor picture framer for the job. This idea doesn't pan out well. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley, a 16-year-old American boy who has just killed his wealthy father looks up Ripley in France. American David Pritchard arrives in Ripley Under Water. Pritchard is obsessed with the rumors swirling around Ripley's past, and he digs into the disappearance of Thomas Murchison from Ripley Under Ground. These five books form a portrait of a man who doesn't feel the guilt from his actions that he should.

With Forty Words for Sorrow, Giles Blunt introduces his John Cardinal police procedural series, set in the fictional town of Algonquin Bay in northern Ontario, Canada. Cardinal's wife Catherine has bipolar disorder, and, over the series, Blunt does a great job of describing the effect of this illness on Catherine and her family. In this book, he also presents an unsettling picture of a pair of psychopaths who have none of Ripley's charm.

Like Forty Words for Sorrow, the second book, The Delicate Storm, was inspired by a real-life crime. Some of us might remember the crimes perpetrated by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in October 1970, while Pierre Trudeau was prime minister of Canada.

The ever-escalating tension and dread of the first book is absent in The Delicate Storm. It is beautifully crafted with vivid characterizations and stunningly described settings you'll never forget. As usual with this series, the cruel winter far north in Ontario is one of the main characters. As the book opens, it is three weeks into January, and the temperature is doing what it never does in January in Algonquin Bay––rising above freezing. The streets are shiny with melted snow, thick fog is sidling up against the buildings in town, and the bears are coming out of hibernation early. They're hungry, and this isn't happy news for Ivan Bergeron, who has a raging hangover. It does his head no good when he hears his dog barking frantically in the woods. By the time Bergeron makes it outside, Shep is back in the yard, whining and clawing at something he has retrieved for his master. The something "lay there, fishbelly white, hair curling along one side. Toward the wrist end, the flesh still bore the zigzag impression of a watch with an expandable bracelet. Even though there was no hand attached, there was no doubt that the thing lying in Ivan Bergeron's backyard was a human arm." While Bergeron is making his grisly discovery, homicide detectives John Cardinal and his French-Canadian colleague, Lise Delorme, are tracking down one of the area's most incompetent criminals, who has just ineptly robbed a bank. These two disparate events lead Cardinal and Delorme into an investigation of crimes that took place 30 years earlier, involving the Mounties and the FLQ.

This book should be read after Forty Words for Sorrow because what happened in that book is discussed, characters grow and change, and relationships between characters are explored in more depth. Cardinal's relationships with his father, his wife, and Delorme are very well done––this decent man could be someone we know and like. He's far from perfect, but he's not the same troubled/alcoholic cop one often finds in police procedurals these days. The inter-agency squabbles go on a bit long, and at some point I could see where things were heading, but I still enjoyed the getting there. This book does a terrific job of evoking the cultural and political atmosphere of the late 1960s/early 1970s––what the radicals were doing and the government was doing in response.

When Black Fly Season begins, it's that horrible time of the year when black flies are biting anything that moves. As Blunt says, "The black fly may be less than a quarter inch long, but up close it resembles an attack helicopter, fitted with a sucker at one end and a nasty little hook on the other. Even one of these creatures can be a misery. Caught in a swarm, a person can very rapidly go mad."

A red-haired woman draws attention from the regulars who have taken refuge from the flies to drink in an Algonquin Bay bar. She is beautiful, but covered with black fly bites; she also presents an oddly flat affect and says she doesn't know anything about herself or her present condition. Fortunately, a cop takes her to a hospital emergency room where doctors discover that she has a bullet in her brain.

Cardinal and Delorme begin an inquiry into her shooting that leads them to a mutilated corpse and into a drug dealers' turf war between the Viking Riders motorcycle gang and some small-time criminals led by a charismatic leader named Red Bear. Blunt's readers zig zag between the drug dealers' shenanigans, Cardinal and Delorme's investigation, and "Red" as she regains her memory. While the story unfolds, the cops (and the reader) become more and more anxious to see the perpetrators brought to justice.

The subtitle to Black Fly Season could be "Life as Hell." Many of Blunt's characters lead lives that can turn nightmarish on a dime: Cardinal must deal not only with his anxiety-provoking investigation, but with his estranged daughter and wife Catherine, who has been in and out of mental hospitals due to her bipolar disorder. It has been two years since her last hospitalization for depression, and she is now preparing to leave on a professional trip to Toronto. Catherine resents Cardinal's worries about her emotional state; when she's joyous or full of energy, he sees mania looming. It's a miracle neither of them has an ulcer. One of Red Bear's men, Kevin, is a failure as a poet but a resounding success as a heroin addict. Red Bear and his partner Leon scare Kevin with their propensity for violence and obsession with bizarre rituals, but he pushes these thoughts aside in favor of more comfortable fantasies about kicking his addiction and being interviewed about his poetry by David Letterman or Martin Amis.

Black Fly Season contains fascinating information (at least to me!) about various fly species and beetles that feast on corpses in various states of decay and how this information is analyzed for forensic evidence. The reasons for the ritualistic murders are interesting, but they are also disturbing. This book contains some very unsettling images of animal and human torture and gore. This is the third Cardinal/Delorme book that I've read, but Delorme is still not well fleshed out. In contrast, Blunt's characterization of the bad guys in this book is dazzling. He is insightful about bipolar disorder and addiction. The setting buzzes, whirs, and hums with insects. Life during black fly season in Algonquin Bay, Ontario, is full of pain for everybody.

By the Time You Read This describes the death of Catherine Cardinal. The book deals with depression, suicide, child sexual abuse, bipolar disorder, and pornography. Blunt handles these difficult subjects with skill, and he is very insightful when his characters deal with grief and feelings of guilt. As usual, his characterization is mostly excellent. In a few lines, Blunt can describe a very minor character so well you'll never forget him. I hope we learn more about Delorme in the next book, Crime Machine, which I haven't yet read.

For further reading, I suggest the DSM. Reading any of the above books in bed may not aid your sleep, and I offer no guarantee that you'll stay off a psychiatrist's couch. You will, however, meet some characters who should spend some time there.