There's no rapture for these crime fiction characters

I'm home from work with the flu. My coughing and sneezing are too much for my dogs, who have disappeared under the bed, leaving me alone to binge watch The Leftovers, whose characters live in a world after a Rapture-like event caused many people to vanish. I can't tell if I'm running a fever or if this TV series, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, is just downright weird. I'll see if I can collect my thoughts enough to tell you about a couple of books whose characters have their hands full sans a mass disappearance.

A man who's falling from his fifth-floor window windmills his way to the ground in the opening of Maurizio de Giovanni's The Bottom of Your Heart: Inferno for Commissario Ricciardi (translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar; Europa Editions, November 2015). It's a beautiful piece of descriptive writing in a book replete with lively descriptions of life in the sweltering summer of 1939 Italy under Mussolini. The point of view leaps among various short first-person narrations, but it focuses primarily on a third-person omniscient narrator's account of the investigation of Commissario Luigi Ricciardi and Brigadier Raffaele Maione into the death of Professor Tullio Iovine del Castello, chair of gynecology at a university hospital in Naples. There is no shortage of suspects if Dr. Iovine was pushed or thrown; the victim repeatedly flunked an old professional rival's son in his medical school classes, was having an extramarital affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and had enraged a ferocious gangster who swore revenge.

The Botom of Your Heart is the seventh book in this series, and characters from previous books reappear. Ricciardi, who fears for his sanity and keeps himself aloof since "the Deed" that allows him to hear the final thoughts and to see the ghostly shades of people who have died by violence (see Maltese Condor's review here), is still single in his 30s and is living with his beloved tata, now in deteriorating health, and her niece, Nelide. The lonely Commissario also has the affections of Enrica, the shy teacher who lives with her family across the street; Livia Vezzi, a beautiful social butterfly and widow of Italy's most famous tenor; Dr. Modo, the irascible medical examiner; and, of course, his loyal and tireless Brigadier, whose own secrets make him particularly impatient with his informant, Bambinella, a transvestite prostitute. This entertaining series is for people who enjoy crime fiction with a literary bent, keeping track of an ensemble cast of characters, and an Italian setting that's brought to life by its characters' concerns and the author's vivid writing. A reader can begin anywhere in this series, but for the full backstory, start with the first book, I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi.

The Italians in de Giovanni's series are natural philosophers. Even sassy private eye Kinsey Millhone is becoming more reflective in Sue Grafton's X (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, August 2015), the 24th book in the alphabet series set in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California. Unlike other titles in the series (see my review of W Is for Wasted here), this "X" doesn't specifically stand for anything; however, one can find all sorts of Xs (symbolic and real), in the book: Teddy Xanakis, kisses, ex-husbands and wives, mistakes, the missing, a place locator, and unknowns.

In reading X, one gets the sense that things are beginning to wind up for Kinsey. The woman who trims her own hair with a fingernail scissors and has one dress hanging in her closet is financially secure, at least for a while; she can pick and choose her cases. Kinsey agrees to find an ex-con just released from prison only when Hallie Bettancourt says she was referred by one of Kinsey's friends, and Kinsey becomes involved in Pete Wolinsky's old case only when his widow, Ruthie, asks for help in locating financial records for an IRS audit. This isn't one of Grafton's strongest books; the plot feels somewhat contrived, and I was at times annoyed by Grafton's excessive attention to detail (Kinsey doesn't just make coffee, she turns on the machine, adds the coffee, watches the water heat...). Still, it's worthwhile to revisit Santa Teresa to see how one of mysterydom's most likable female sleuths is doing, and we won't have many more chances. Grafton does a great job of conveying what it's like to live on California's Central Coast; here, in 1989. Kinsey still goes to the library to look for old records and composes her case summaries on a Smith & Corona typewriter. She and her 89-year-old landlord and neighbor, Henry, are dealing with some new neighbors and the drought. (Was this timely reading!) In this 24th book, Kinsey seems less inclined to get into trouble, but when the searches for the ex-con and the financial records open cans of worms, she can't help but start digging. By the end, she's learned a thing or two and made her peace with the fact that justice isn't always cut-and-dried.

Review of Walter Mosley's Little Green

Little Green by Walter Mosley

On Monday, our country celebrated the life and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader assassinated on April 4, 1968. Were Dr. King alive today, I think he'd share my enjoyment of some novels about the struggle for equality: Attica Locke's Black Water Rising (Harper, 2009), which delves into the campus protest movement past of a young black lawyer who is placed in jeopardy later, when he and his wife witness a murder. James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA, 2013), about abolitionist John Brown, was reviewed here.

I don't doubt King would appreciate Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins, the black Walter Mosley character who fought in World War II and moved from Houston, Texas, to Los Angeles, where he opens an office with a sign on the door that says "EASY RAWLINS—RESEARCH AND DELIVERY." Years later, the sign stays the same, but Easy obtains a valid PI license after he's earned the grudging respect of the Los Angeles chief of police, who sees him as a bridge to L.A.'s black community.

I thought we had seen the last of Easy when he takes an intentional, drunken drive off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway in 2007's Blonde Faith. When Easy tells us, "I came half-awake, dead and dreaming" to begin Mosley's twelfth series book, Little Green (Doubleday, 2013), it's two months later in 1967. Easy has no sooner staggered out of his coma when one of the most feared men in Los Angeles, his best friend, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, asks for a favor. Nineteen-year-old Evander "Little Green" Noon had gone to the Sunset Strip, where he called his mother, Timbale, to tell her he'd met a hippie woman and would come home after they'd gone to a club to listen to music. Evander never reappeared and Ray, who feels responsible for the boy since killing his father, asks Easy to find him.

Fortified by swigs of healer Mama Jo's elixir, Gator's Blood (read about how it affects Easy's body and soul and then tell me you wouldn't kill to get your hands on some), Easy tracks Evander's path through Los Angeles's Summer of Love. Easy is aided by a young female hippie, Ray and other friends such as Martin Martins, Jackson Blue and Frenchman Jean-Paul Villard. While the missing-person hunt and the extortion case Easy handles at the request of Blue are interesting, what makes Little Green and the entire Easy Rawlins series unique is its narrator, a good and tough black man, who shares his existential thinking, guides us through his black community and shows us how a black man in 1950s and '60s Los Angeles handles interactions with whites.

There is one white cop Easy trusts: Detective Melvin Suggs––but most white Los Angeles cops can't be trusted by blacks on sight. As Easy shows Evander's picture to people on the Strip, he's reminded of black towns in Mississippi and Louisiana, where workers gathered to drink homemade liquor, dance, laugh and cry because they were under the thumb of racism. He says the hippies on the Strip feel under the gun, too. They are outraged by Vietnam and ostracized because of their clothes and habits. Unlike people in older times, they feel they can change the world that tries to hold them down. After some whites come to intervene when cops hassle him and another black man on a street corner, and another white sticks up for him during a dispute in a diner, Easy feels hopeful:

When the Watts Riots had ended I saw the divisions form among the nonwhite races of L.A. I'd also seen a split in our own community, where brother turned against brother and corrupt city officials stepped in to take their revenge. But in that hippie diner there was the hint of something hopeful. There were white people realizing for the first time what it was like to be shunned and segregated, fired for no reason and arrested because of the way they looked.

It's an insightful trip back to 1967 with Easy. He might have driven off a cliff in one world, only to wake up in the beginning of a new world.

Review of Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

If you saw Matthew McConaughey play hustling criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, you're not the only one. So many Los Angeles lawyers now have an office in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car that Mickey comes out of the courthouse and climbs into the wrong Lincoln. That, and the opening courtroom scene, are two of the few comic moments in Michael Connelly's fifth series book, The Gods of Guilt (Little, Brown, December 2013).

Mickey has become increasingly melancholy since 2011's The Fifth Witness, when he ran for district attorney and lost (though his fans thank God for that). His teenage daughter, Hayley, lives with his first ex-wife and has refused to see him since a client he got off later drove drunk and killed two people. Mickey wonders how he can expect her to forgive him when, deep down, he doesn't forgive himself.

In addition to this personal angst, Mickey deals with a law practice in decline. The economy has forced him to let associates go, and only Jennifer Aronson remains, working on bankruptcies and foreclosures, while Mickey scrounges for criminal clients. When a "paying customer" accused of murder calls, Mickey knows it's likely he can make his "whole nut for the year."

The paying customer is Andre La Cosse, a man who designs websites and enables the operation of prostitutes (a "cyberpimp"). The strange thing is that the prostitute Andre is accused of killing, Giselle Dallinger, told him that if he ever needs a lawyer, Mickey Haller is the best. It turns out Giselle is actually a former client Mickey thought he knew well, Gloria Dayton (from The Lincoln Lawyer), though he didn't know everything he should have. In order to defend Andre, Mickey needs to investigate Gloria––as both victim of murder and long-ago accused.

In addition to his associate, Jennifer, Mickey is assisted by the usual gang of employees: case manager (and ex-wife No. 2) Lorna Taylor; investigator Cisco Wojciechowski, Lorna's current husband; his father's old law partner, David "Legal" Siegel; and driver Earl Briggs, who's working off legal fees he owes Mickey. Val Valenzuela, bail bondsman and process server, shows up. Writer Connelly's other series protagonist, Harry Bosch, who happens to be Mickey's half brother, does a cameo appearance. Unlike Scott Turow, Connelly tells us next to nothing about these returning supporting characters. In fact, how well do we really know Mickey? Over the course of the series, he hasn't used his narration to psychoanalyze himself. When he does talk about his feelings here, mostly about his personal gods of guilt and the jury who judges the guilt of his clients, he's unnatural and pompous.

Mickey is better when he focuses on how our legal system works, grinding down everyone ensnared in it or part of it, and the backstory of secrets, corruption and double dealing behind the current case. He shines when he shares his knowledge of LA (his restaurant talk makes me feel like booking a flight as well as a table). Mickey dazzles when he's working the angles for a client, interviewing witnesses, plotting legal strategy and performing in the courtroom. The Gods of Guilt is Mickey's detailed report of how he created his defense for Andre La Cosse and how it played out in court. It's a legal procedural rather than a suspenseful legal thriller. If you're looking for unsavory clients, dueling lawyers and a pragmatic, crafty Mickey who dances his socks off before a jury, grab this one.

Review of Sue Grafton's W Is for Wasted

W Is for Wasted by Sue Grafton

For me, reading a Sue Grafton alphabet series book is like slipping on a pair of comfortable old slippers. I live on the central California coast where the series is set (fictional Santa Teresa and ritzy Montebello are really Santa Barbara and pricey Montecito), and Grafton is meticulous when describing the area's lifestyles, geography, and history. I've known protagonist Kinsey Millhone, now in her late 30s, since A Is for Alibi was published in 1982. Obviously, Kinsey isn't aging as fast as I am.

Raised by a strict maiden aunt after her parents died in a car accident when she was five, Kinsey likes the stability of rules, although she often breaks them. She can be a smartass and lies easily. After a few years on the police force, she's now a private eye who's been married and divorced twice.

Kinsey is a cheapskate who cuts her own hair with a fingernail scissors and lives in scuffed boots and jeans unless something more formal is required; then, she drags out that one black dress hanging in her closet. After a bomb destroyed her old place, home is now a compact apartment fitted out like a ship's cabin, courtesy of her landlord, neighbor, and good friend, 88-year-old Henry Pitts. Henry, his older brother William, and William's Hungarian wife, Rosie, who runs her own restaurant (currently closed for fumigation), are like family to Kinsey. A few years ago, Kinsey was flabbergasted to learn her mother's relatives live in nearby Lompoc. Apparently, her wealthy grandmother was estranged from Kinsey's mother when she married Kinsey's dad; Kinsey is as eager to establish a close relationship with her mother's family as she is to walk across a minefield.

The joys and heartaches unique to family ties, the ways we damage ourselves by deceiving others, miscarriage of justice, the devastation of addiction, searching for meaning in a materialistic society, and contrasts between haves and have-nots are familiar themes in Grafton's series. In W Is for Wasted (September 2013, Putnam), these themes run through two narratives that ultimately connect two men, both dead at the book's beginning. Kinsey knew one of them: unscrupulous private detective Pete Wolinsky, shot late at night near the bird sanctuary.

Kinsey doesn't recognize the other man when a coroner's investigator asks her to view a corpse with no ID at the morgue. He was a homeless man found dead on a Santa Teresa beach. Such are the oddities of life, that a scrap of paper bearing the words "Millhone Investigations" found in a dead man's pocket makes Kinsey's life intersect with that of a morgue's John Doe. How the Kinsey who loves lying and snooping through a suspect's dresser drawers always feels compelled to do the right thing has always interested me. Somehow, she feels honor bound to find out who he is and why he needed a private investigator. Kinsey begins by tracking down his homeless companions, Pearl, Felix, and Dandy.

The character portraits of these Central Coast homeless are one of this book's strengths. And so is the look at Kinsey as she follows clues to a will, an old wrong, and new family connections before discovering the nature of the ties that bind her John Doe to private eye Pete Wolinsky.

It's sleuth work 1988 style, and it's comforting to see Kinsey still using index cards, a Smith-Corona typewriter, crisscross telephone directories (some decades-old telephone directories even include occupation and spouse's name for each listed address and phone number!), face-to-face interviews, pay phones, and folded paper maps. Narrator Kinsey is still witty and engaging, although somewhat more contemplative and subdued than usual. Dialogue, especially between squabbling family members, is terrific and sounds like something I'd actually overhear. There's a reunion atmosphere as familiar series names such as cops Jonah Robb and Con Dolan, attorney Lonnie Kingman, and private eye Morley Shine pop up. Kinsey's old beaus Cheney Phillips (does he ever drive anything but this year's red Mercedes?) and Robert Deitz make an appearance, and a Japanese bobtail joins the cast of characters.

It's enjoyable stuff, although some of the  connections between people stretch coincidence, and plot lines bringing old characters in feel manufactured, even if welcome. And, at 484 pages, it reminded me a bit of the old Hillary Waugh police procedural classic, 30 Manhattan East: A Case for Homicide North, in which the reader watches Det. Lt. Frank Sessions open the drawer of his desk, take out a pencil, sharpen it, chew the eraser, lean back in his chair.... In other words, there is much extraneous detail.

In any case, Grafton's alphabet books are popular for good reason: Kinsey is darned likable. I had fun seeing her and the regulars again and thinking about all the ways in which "W" is for wasted: wasted lives, wasted hopes, people who are "wasted" on drugs or killed. I'll be sorry when the alphabet ends.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

No, no, I'm not delving into what the heck Hamlet was thinking in his famous soliloquy. We'll question the philosophical meaning of life and the mysteries of death some other time. Right now, I'm talking about the pleasures of bedtime, and it's not sleeping, dreaming or sex that's foremost on my mind. I don't know about you, but the bed is one of my favorite places for reading.

There's just something so very luxurious about shedding the day as well as my clothes, slipping into bed, and picking up a great book to be whisked away to a world outside my own. My husband may or may not be by my side, but my two dogs are definitely on the bed somewhere. On the bedside table, there's something to eat and drink, a heavy-duty flashlight (for under-the-covers use, and it doubles as a club if my reading conjures up a wild-eyed ax murderer lurking behind the closet door), and a bookmark for when I submit to "Nature's soft nurse," sleep.

But first, some books:

A warm bed is the best vantage spot for pondering Jim Kelly's version of a locked-room murder in the snow of West Norfolk, England. Death Wore White (2009) opens as Sarah Baker-Sibley, driving her Alfa Romeo, obeys a detour sign on the main coast road and follows tail lights onto the Siberia Belt, a narrow unpaved road. Half a mile away, Det. Inspector Peter Shaw and Det. Sgt. George Valentine are checking a report of toxic waste on frigid Ingol Beach when they discover a dead man on an inflatable raft floating into shore. The man's bloody mouth and a corresponding mark show that he has bitten his own arm to the bone.

When the two policemen make their way to the Siberia Belt, they find a line of eight vehicles stuck in the snow behind a pine tree that has fallen across the road. There is only one set of footprints leading to the pick-up that's first in line. The second vehicle's driver, Ms. Baker-Sibley, insists that the third vehicle's driver, who walked up to the pick-up's window for a brief conversation, kept his hands in his pockets the entire time. So who stabbed the pick-up's driver in the eye with a chisel? More forensic evidence makes this murder even more difficult to comprehend. Is it related to the corpse on the raft, and a body that's discovered in the sands later? As well as investigating these three murders, Peter looks into a cold case involving the murder of the Tessier boy. At that time, Peter's father, now dead, was George's partner, and the two cops made a mess out of the investigation. The senior Shaw retired, and George was demoted.

The less-than-warm relationship between current partners Peter and George is nothing new for experienced crime fiction readers, but the ingenious plot, the interpretation of the forensic evidence, and the vivid Norfolk setting and its hard-scrabbling inhabitants make this police procedural, first in the Shaw/Valentine series, worth losing sleep.

Oh man, there are no sweet dreams when the disillusionment of Vietnam comes home to America. In Newton Thornburg's Cutter and Bone (1976), Alex Cutter is a paranoid, scarred, and disabled Vietnam vet, and Richard Bone is a hedonistic dude, fond of drink and getting high, who abandons his family and advertising career to scrape by as a gigolo. (In the 1981 movie based on the book, Cutter's Way, John Heard is Cutter and Jeff Bridges is Bone.)

One night when Bone is drunk, he thinks he sees a man dumping a bag of golf clubs into an alley trash can; however, the next day he realizes that what he saw was the disposal of a high school girl's dead body. Although it was dark, and Bone saw the distant man only in silhouette, when he sees a newspaper photo of Missouri corporate tycoon J. J. Wolfe, Bone exclaims, "It's him!" This electrifies Cutter, and, although Bone tries to backpedal, Cutter will have none of that. Cutter seeks justice for the girl, sure, but bringing revenge on Wolfe will somehow fix what happened to Cutter in Vietnam and what's wrong with the country he returned to. Bone allows himself to be overruled, and he and Cutter head to the Ozarks to investigate.

Cutter and Bone is haunting. It's not so much about redemption, as the conflict between alienated prodigal sons and corrupt authority figures. It takes place mostly in Santa Barbara, California, the same lushly beautiful beach town that provides an incongruous setting for Margaret Millar's novels about society's misfits. (It's also the model for Sue Grafton's fictional Santa Teresa, home of private eye Kinsey Millhone.) Thornburg's dialogue is pitch perfect, and you won't forget his two young men.

Noirish thrillers are perfect for night-time reading. But let's say your car needs a new muffler, your dog chewed one of your favorite shoes, or your spouse's spaghetti gave you indigestion. For whatever reason, you don't have the heart for noir, no matter how wonderful. Fix yourself a cup of tea and have one of these almond biscotti. What to read? Perhaps a little something before turning off the lights. Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, George Saunders's Tenth of December, and Jess Walter's We Live in Water are all enchanting 2013 short-story collections.

Maybe you want something more substantial than a short story. Outstanding British humor? Try the 1889 masterpiece by Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), about the holiday boating trip on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford taken by friends Harris and George and their dog Montmorency. Others: Henry Howarth Bashford's Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man. The Diary of a Nobody (1892), which details 15 months in the life of Mr. Charles Pooter, was written by brothers George and Weedon Grossmith. Cold Comfort Farm (1932), by Stella Gibbons. Stephen Potter's The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating) (1947). Gerald Durrell's autobiographical My Family and Other Animals (1956).

Or, snuggle back into your pillow and roll your eyes at Dornford Yates's "Berry" Pleydell, his family, and close friends—British aristocrats who find themselves fish out of water, as England experiences social and financial upheaval between the World Wars. In the seventh series book, The House that Berry Built (1945), the Pleydells sell their ancestral pile in Hampshire, England, and flee to the cheaper South of France, where they believe aristocrats are still appreciated. There, Berry builds Gracedieu, a mountainside château, patterned after Cockade, the author's own French residence. The joy of this comic novel is in the very detailed description of Gracedieu's construction process. As World War II approaches, the Pleydells are forced to skedaddle once more.

I could go on forever, talking about books for bed, because, really, what books aren't suitable there? It's eminently satisfying to lie flat on my back between the sheets, book raised above my face, and read about, say, corpses who can't lie still and must lurch around like zombies. Or corpses lying as quietly as I am. For example, Lee Child's Without Fail involves Jack Reacher's attempts to stop assassins targeting the new American vice president. In The Crossing Places, by Ellie Griffiths, forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway is called when a child's bones are found on a Norfolk, England beach. Or people who might be rolled up in sheets to lie quietly. You may be familiar with Oregon psychiatric patient, Randle McMurphy, in Ken Kesey's 1962 classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (made into a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture); and hospital patients in Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island (2003) (Martin Scorcese directed the movie). But have you met the man who wakes up with no memories in a mental institution and pulls himself back together in Virginia Perdue's excellent suspense Alarum and Excursion (1944)?

More sheets find their way onto mummies; for example, in books by Elizabeth Peters, featuring feminist Amelia Peabody, a Victorian Egyptologist. In Dermot Morrah's 1933 charmer, The Mummy Case Mystery, the police are satisfied that the charred body in Oxford Professor Benchley's room is the professor and not the newly acquired mummy of  Pepy I. Professors Sargent and Considine aren't so sure. There should be two bodies, not one. Their investigation is full of Oxford ambience, wit, and red herrings.

Now, I'm getting sleepy. I'll have to finish Gerald Seymour's fine book of espionage, 2000's A Line in the Sand, tomorrow night. I love reading in bed. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest you give it a try.

Monday Monday, Can't Trust That Day

Monday Monday, can't trust that day.

The Mamas and the Papas had that lyric right. Those of us working a traditional Monday-to-Friday job face Monday knowing the rest of the work week will drag on forever and ever. It helps if you have great work colleagues and love your job, like I do, but still. Work is work. Some people, including the poor folks below, don't have it easy.

Gerald Seymour: A Deniable Death (2013). This is a very remarkable book of espionage published earlier this year by St. Martin's Press. If you like your spies to do a lot of running around, this isn't for you. But if you hunger for the minute details of planning and executing an intricate spy mission and want complicated and believable characters, don't miss this one.

A misdirected sneeze provides enough DNA to identify the Engineer, who designs and oversees the manufacture of many of the improvised explosive devices that kill or maim Allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Engineer lives just over the border from Iraq in Iran. His beloved wife heads a committee in charge of sweeping Iran of land mines. When she is diagnosed with a brain tumor, the Engineer insists that the Iranian government make plans for her to receive treatment at a top-notch medical facility out of the country. MI6 and their intelligence Cousin (the US) and Friend (the Israelis) get a whiff of this plan and decide it presents a unique opportunity to assassinate the Engineer. If any of the Allied forces' spies are caught, they will be disavowed. If they are successful in their mission, the complicity of the Allied forces' governments will be denied. The question that needs an answer immediately: what facility in what country are the Engineer and his wife headed for?

To find out, MI6 sends middle-aged military surveillance expert Joe "Foxy" Foulkes and a young but gifted police officer, Danny "Badger" Baxter, to the marsh near the Engineer's family home in Iran. Badger plants microphones in the house and in the marsh, so conversations inside or outside the house can be monitored by Foxy, who is familiar with Farsi. The two men, who must lie quietly pressed up against each other for day after excruciating day, dislike each other intensely. They only have so much time before the couple leaves; before they are discovered by the Engineer's guard, who is obsessed with searching the marsh with binoculars, looking for an endangered bird; and before their support team, fending off murderous and thieving marsh dwellers over the border in Iraq, must abandon them and run away. All of these characters have reasons to agonize about the worthiness of their mission and to question their own and others' loyalties. The Iranian guard, Engineer and Engineer's wife are as human as the Allied forces characters. The marsh, home to birds, wild pigs, rodents and insects, is vividly presented. So are the horrible ordeals of the waiting and hiding Foxy and Badger and their endangered support team in Iraq. The suspense is amazing and builds to a fitting conclusion.

Secret Intelligence Service building in London

I found this book, which honors the men and women who secretly risk their lives or toil anonymously behind the scenes to serve their countries, so good that I returned the library book and bought my own copy.

April Smith: North of Montana (1994) and Judas Horse (2008). Last year, Sister Mary complained here about the scarcity of good, strong, sassy women in fictional crime. Sister, meet FBI Agent Ana Grey. Although Ana is short on wisecracks, she has goodness and strength in spades. Unfortunately, Ana suffers from an overabundance of obnoxious FBI colleagues.

In Santa Monica, California, the very rich neighborhoods are separated from the less rich by Montana Avenue. When Ana's mother died, Ana moved from the less wealthy side of the city to live with her grandfather, a retired Santa Monica cop, in a ritzy neighborhood. North of Montana, the series debut, finds Ana's climb up the FBI ladder interrupted by a jealous superior, who assigns her to investigate a local doctor. He has been accused by an aging Hollywood star of addicting her to drugs and is suspected in the death of one of his employees, Violeta Alvarado, who is possibly Ana's relative. This book is beautifully written suspense in which author Smith, an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, compares the haves and have-nots of a California city and forces Ana to reassess her family memories.

Judas Horse involves Ana's return to work after a shooting. She is sent to the FBI's undercover school to prepare her for infiltrating a Portland, Oregon animal rights group that is suspected of involvement in an FBI agent's murder. Once in Oregon, Ana finds herself sympathizing with the goals of the group and is drawn to some of its members, even though she is determined to find the truth behind the murder. She is attracted to the charismatic group leader, Julius Emerson Phelps, but she knows she can't trust him. She isn't sure whether she can trust her own FBI liaison team or the assistant FBI director, whose Portland family has powerful corporate and political connections. The strains of undercover work and conflicted professional and personal loyalties that cross sides are handled very well in this book, the third of the series.

Emma Lathen: Pick Up Sticks (1970). Tall, silver-haired Wall Street investment banker John Putnam Thatcher escapes the Sloan Guaranty Trust to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail. (No, this is not code for flying to Argentina to canoodle with his mistress like the ex-governor of South Carolina.) Thatcher's companion on the Trail, a local named Henry Morland, discovers a body and is immediately suspected by the state police, while Thatcher turns his attention to a pair of Boston financiers' real estate dealings.

This is one of my favorite traditional mystery series. The books always focus on a specific business interest of a Sloan client. Discussions among the bank's employees and conversations between Thatcher and the clients make the financial dealings clear. It's very entertaining for me to sit in on a business deal, even if it's fictional. The authors (in reality, Martha Henissart and Mary J. Latsis are Emma Lathen) write with charm and an appreciation for irony as they exhibit how a business works. Thatcher has a dry sense of humor and is never anything less than ethical. In other words, the opposite of how the Wall Street banker of today is commonly perceived.

Monday is almost over. For the rest of my work week, I'm thankful I don't have to face lying thigh to thigh in a marsh with a fellow worker, wonder about my own or my colleagues' loyalties or escape the relentless pressures of a bank's employees. I hope the rest of your week goes well, too.

Anchors of Disbelief, Aweigh!

Disbelief that didn't maintain suspension

We're anticipating a pretty big storm here tonight and rain through the weekend. Living on California's Central Coast means I don't need to mount snow tires, check a backup boiler or stock the pantry with emergency food. I do need to put our patio bar stools in the garage. During a storm last winter, the wind tossed one of them against a window. That chair took flight much more easily than my disbelief while reading on occasion. Rain at night makes reading in bed mandatory. What books can I read this weekend that will keep my eyes anchored to the pages while my disbelief goes flying?

Disbelief reluctant to take off

Getting disbelief into suspension is a tricky undertaking. Sometimes, my disbelief has its heavy foot glued to the floor, and I need to concentrate harder or put the book aside for awhile to dislodge that foot. Other times, a glass of wine or leaping into the bathtub with the book does it. Occasionally, nothing I do helps. An author I love could have written the book or it could be highly recommended, but it doesn't matter. These days, 50 pages or sometimes 20 pages is enough to tell me my disbelief's flight has been cancelled. Maybe it's an act of God, and the book and I just aren't meant to be.

Surprisingly, disbelief remains suspended

At times, a book will drag me in and keep me there, despite some nagging residual skepticism, until the final page. Such was the case when I read Marcus Sakey's 2011 book of suspense, The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes. The tale opens on a beach in Maine, deserted but for a man emerging from the water:

"He was naked and cold, stiff with it, his veins ice and frost. Muscles carved hard, skin rippled with goose bumps, tendons drawn tight, body scraped and shivering. Something rolled over his legs, velvet soft and shocking. He gasped and pulled seawater into his lungs, the salt scouring his throat. Gagging, he pushed forward, scrabbling at dark stones. The ocean tugged, but he fought the last ragged feet crawling like a child."

The man spots a lonely BMW in the parking lot. Luckily, it's unlocked, and he can get in. He hits the push-button start and in a minute the heat is roaring. Inside are a map, a Rolex watch, several hundred dollars, and an almost empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. The trunk contains some dirty clothes that fit him. The glove box holds an owner's manual, some keys, and a gun. He knows it's a semiautomatic. He knows that, but he doesn't know his name. He assumes the water is the Atlantic, and by the map, that he's in Maine; yet, he doesn't know how he got there or where he came from. He studies the owner's manual and finds a registration card and proof of insurance. He decides he's Daniel Hayes, resident of 6723 Wandermere Road, Malibu, California.

Hayes drives to the nearest cheap hotel and spends a couple of nights. He watches a TV show with a female character who somehow beckons him, and his nights are filled with disturbing dreams of concrete canyons. When a cop knocks at his door, Hayes knows he must run even though he doesn't know why. Maybe he's Daniel Hayes, and maybe he'll find out more in Malibu, California.

Saying more would be a disservice, because the fun of this book is involved in accompanying Hayes as he discovers who he is and what sent him into the Atlantic. Sakey spins his tale out at a satisfying pace. It's not mentally challenging and is suitable for reading, say, when water is 20 feet away from your beach towel or drumming little drops on your window in the middle of the night.

I haven't read any of Sakey's other books. The Blade Itself, which Publishers Weekly awarded a starred review, is about "a horribly botched pawnshop robbery by childhood friends Evan and Danny." My disbelief's foot is tapping, so maybe I'll take a looksee.

Like Marcus Sakey, Charles Frazier is an author new to me. The appearance of his Nightwoods on a Washington Post list of "Notable Fiction of 2011" made me curious. Upon reading the opening paragraph, my foot of disbelief scrabbled to leave the floor:

"Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent. She learned early that it wasn't smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she'd find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clenched. Neither child displayed language at all, but the girl glared murderous expressions at her if she dared ask where the rest of the rooster went."

At its heart, this book is about moving forward despite "whatever trail of ashes are left behind." Life goes one way only: "Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't."

Luce has chosen not to let it break her down. When the book begins, it is the 1960s, and she is a beautiful young woman who has taken refuge from life's hard knocks as the caretaker of the Lodge, an abandoned old hotel in the Appalachians of North Carolina. Luce is the daughter of Lola, who had a free-range philosophy about child raising and warned Luce and her sister Lily never ever to cry before she disappeared while they were still in elementary school, and Lit, a bantam-size deputy sheriff who is likened to a mink in a hen house and who has a fondness for substances that make him feel "up."

Luce lives across the lake from town, and her days are rather lonely, but she is content, watching the seasons change, observing the creatures in the woods, and reading the books in the hotel's library. Her isolation is broken by the appearance of her sister Lily's young twins, Delores and Frank. Lily has been murdered by her husband Bud, under the eyes of these children, and Luce is now their guardian. The twins are traumatized and mute; they love setting fires and getting themselves into trouble. But, "[b]eing uncommunicative and taking an interest in fire were neither crimes nor sins, just inconvenient. And Luce didn't have to love them. She just had to take care of them."

Taking care of Frank and Delores, and Luce's life in general, are made more complicated when Bud, whose murder trial stuttered to a halt when two jurors voted not guilty, moves to town so he can look for money he thinks Lily had and keep a nasty eye on the twins. Young Stubblefield, who knew Luce in high school and inherited the Lodge when his grandfather died, shows up, too.  The main cast is now complete, and life will go forward.

Nightwoods is a literary book. It's a compelling narrative told by a southerner with a writing style that makes one think of the words "trance," "molasses," and "baroque." Frazier's characters are all memorable, and what they do is worth watching. Sometimes the prose tends to the purple, but I had no desire to stop reading. If you love the woods, as I do, you'll probably enjoy Frazier's knowledge and feel for those dark and mysterious places. I liked the book, and I'm going to look for his Cold Mountain,  a story about a wounded Confederate deserter who walks for months to return to the love of his life, and Thirteen Moons, set in the mid-19th century and based loosely on the life of William Holland Thomas.

Disbelief well suspended

These are a couple of the books that kept my disbelief suspended during the past few days. On my bedside table for my rainy night reading are The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, a historical fantasy that I've been saving for a special treat because a friend raved about it; Michael Kortya's The Ridge, a 2011 thriller set in the woods of eastern Kentucky; Tom Perrotta's 2011 book, The Leftovers, involving a mass disappearance called the Sudden Departure; and Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson, who made me laugh out loud with his wonderful satire set in Tuscany, Cooking with Fernet Branca. When I read Gerontius, I'll head up the Amazon with Sir Edward Elgar, a distinguished composer. Other books that took me to Amazon territory are Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and David Grann's The Lost City of Z, and I recommend both of them.

Disbelief is an unpredictable thing. I'd love to hear about the books that are kept your disbelief suspended and those that didn't, and why. 

Disbelief following a moving plot