Vicki Delany Sampler

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, . . . back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time––back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." (Thomas Wolfe).

In Vicki Delany's Scare the Light Away, Rebecca McKenzie doesn't empathize with Thomas Wolfe or his beautifully evocative prose at all. In fact once she clambers on the great dirty bus in Hope River, B.C., that is to take her to Toronto, she vows never to return. She has kept that promise for 30 years, but now she feels compelled to be present for her mother's funeral.

As she pulls up to her old home, she feels like many others who see the houses they grew up in. The place looks smaller and a bit dilapidated. She finds her father, Robert, older and gray. She also finds that he is quite happy to see her again and she hopes that what her mother told her in her letters about the improvement in his drinking problem is true.

Her sister, Shirley, is not particularly happy to see her return, but her younger brother, Jimmy, once a wild and careless youth, seems to be more settled and content.

In small towns like Hope River, funerals of longtime residents are an event, but the death of Janet McKenzie is overshadowed by the disappearance of a young girl, Jennifer; a girl who had been spending time with Jimmy McKenzie at work, where he was teaching her the ropes.

Rebecca doesn't want to believe Jimmy is involved, but she knows why she left Hope River in the first place: to escape the clutches of her psychopathic grandfather who tormented her, aided and abetted by the young Jimmy. Her drunken and indifferent father couldn't––or wouldn't––stand up to the old man and her frightened grandmother, who had become withdrawn and apathetic, usually hid in the kitchen. Her mother tried  to never leave her alone with the old man, but she wasn't able to protect her 24/7.

Robert McKenzie asks Rebecca to stay and go through her mother's things. He tells her that her mother kept a journal for all of their married life. As she begins to read the boxes full of memories that Janet left, Rebecca begins to see a different picture of the woman she thought she knew.

Janet was a young girl full of dreams when she met the very handsome Canadian soldier, Robert McKenzie, in war-torn Britain. Despite the worries of her parents, who knew they might never see her again, the couple married in the spring of 1944. Her entries cover the time of waiting before she could join other war brides who were being shipped to Canada after the war. She thought she was headed for a beautiful farm and a productive life.

She sparingly describes the difficulties she faced when she came to realize that Robert still lived with his parents. The farm didn't exist. Father McKenzie had Robert cowed into a state of lethargy from which he escaped through alcohol. This left Janet at the mercy of a viciously cruel father-in-law. As Rebecca learns more about her mother, she finds out why and how her mother made it possible for her to escape.

Rebecca and her dog are taking a walk when they discover the body of the missing girl. When eyes of suspicion fall on all her family, she decides to play a part in discovering the killer.

In this story, Vicki Delany takes skeins from the past and weaves them with threads of the present into a very compelling account of a life in postwar Canada that was the seed of the terrible things to come.

Scare the Light Away is a stand-alone, but Delany has several series to her credit. My favorite is about rookie RCMP constable Molly Smith, who has been assigned to Trafalgar, a small mountain town of British Columbia, Canada, which just happens to be her hometown. She finds it hard enough to find her feet in this new job without having to deal with her parents, who are aging hippies and who still refer to her by the name they bestowed on her, "Moonlight." While Trafalgar is normally a tranquil area, Molly finds plenty of crime to keep her busy under the watchful, sometimes critical, eye of her boss, Sgt. John Winters. These take place in present day.

Another of Delany's series takes place during the Klondike gold rush of 1898. It centers on Fiona MacGillivray, who owns a dance hall in the town of Dawson in the Yukon Territory. She has a son to raise who, like all children, is growing up too fast and who being influenced by a bunch of Wild West type of characters. There is no dearth of crimes in this area and the stories are exciting with a nice sense of time and place.

A departure for Delany is a series written under the pen name Eva Gates. This series is situated on the other side of the continent in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. By Book or by Crook (Signet, February 3, 2015) is the first in the Lighthouse Library series. I do enjoy books about books and since there's a beach and warm weather thrown in, I'll look for it at my library.

Review of Louise Penny's The Long Way Home

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny

The Long Way Home (Minotaur Books, August 26, 2014) is Louise Penny's tenth Armand Gamache/Three Pines novel and, at this point, regular readers can mentally categorize them. No, it's not that they fit neatly into slots, but along a continuum, where some are weighted more toward the crime-solving end, and others more toward the examination of the soul. The Long Way Home, like The Beautiful Mystery, for example, is one of the latter.

After all the intensity and heart-thumping tension and action of the last novel, How the Light Gets In, everyone's due for a little recovery and reflection. And that's just what the newly-retired Armand Gamache is doing, now living with Reine-Marie and the German shepherd, Henri, in a cottage on the green in Three Pines.

Gamache has a lot to process, and every morning he sits on a bench on a hillside looking down at the town, reading a slim, leather-bound book. But, each morning, he begins at the beginning and stops at a bookmark before the end. Longtime readers of the series will suspect where that book came from and why Gamache doesn't move on past the bookmark.

Gamache's contemplation and retirement are interrupted when Clara Morrow asks for his help. Clara and her husband, Peter, fellow artists, had reached a crisis in their marriage the previous year. They agreed that Peter would leave, but return to their home in Three Pines exactly one year later, to see if their marriage could be saved. But Peter is now weeks late in returning, and Clara has no idea where he is or if he is well.

The bonds of friendship compel Gamache to help Clara, teaming up with her, Clara's friend, Myrna, and Gamache's longtime protégé, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. They track Peter along what seems to be a kind of quest, maybe a search for the mythical Tenth Muse, but something that will purge the artistic jealousy that has poisoned his soul and his marriage.

The trail finally leads to the Charlevoix region, a place of powerful, but sometimes savage beauty, along the St. Lawrence river, east of Québec City. And what the searchers find will change them all. (By the way, this is another Louise Penny book that makes me think the Canadian tourism bureau should be paying her. She makes me want to visit every place she describes, and right away.)

I'm making the book sound like it's ultra-serious, but of course it isn't. This is Louise Penny, after all. That means foul-mouthed Ruth and her one-note cursing duck, Rosa. It means a lot of affectionate ribbing, as here:

"Ergo, he painted them on his return to Canada," said Clara.
"Ergo?" asked Myrna.
"Don't tell me you've never wanted to use it," said Clara.
"Not now that I hear how it really sounds."

C'est encore Charlevoix, by Gerard Lapointe

So, yes, along with the serious business of tracking down Peter and dealing with some deep emotional damage, we have the usual pleasure of spending time with the people of Three Pines, who by now seem so real that it's hard for me to believe I can't just drive a few hours to southern Québec, just over the Vermont border, and drop into the Bistro in time to have a glass of wine and some of Mr. Béliveau's cheese with them all.

This feels like a transitional novel; one that moves Gamache into a new kind of life. So far, Jean-Guy is still part of it, which is good news for longtime readers. Maybe in future books we'll get to see much more of Reine-Marie, something I think many of us have long hoped for.

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing an advance reviewing copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Farewell, Lou Allin

I was sorry to learn that Lou Allin, Canadian author of the Belle Palmer and the newer Holly Martin series of mysteries, died last month. Her last blog post, on May 9 of this year, humorously described her first disastrous attempt to use the medical marijuana legally available for her condition.

Like her character, Belle Palmer, Allin's life and books were filled to the end with her love for dogs, good food, and the outdoors. Belle is a realtor in far Northern Ontario, whose four seasons she describes as "Nearly winter, winter, still winter, and construction."  A large nickel mine in the area has recently closed down, so outdoor tourism is almost the only game left in town.

Almost. In Northern Winters Are Murder, when her young friend Jim Burian, college student and part-time wilderness instructor and guide, reports hearing planes landing and taking off from the lake at night, Belle fears that illegal drug traffickers have discovered their primitive bit of Paradise.

Then Jim is killed, apparently in a snowmobiling accident. No one who knew him can imagine him being stupid enough to take his machine out on a semi-frozen lake, and neither his family nor Belle are satisfied with the verdict of accidental death.

Pets de soeurs

Allin's books offer an excellent sense of place and climate, and the remarkable efforts required to survive them. Belle and her German Shepherd, Freya, live out of town on the lake, in a new lodge-type home. A lonely and possibly dangerous location for a woman alone, but she has good neighbors in Ed and Hélène DesRosiers. Ed is very handy; can fix most things, and Hélène's baking could rival that of Louise Penny's Olivier. Her tourtières are to die for and, while I know these luscious little pastries in the picture as pinwheels, I had never heard the French name of Pets de Soeurs. Sounds much better in French than the translation: Nuns' farts. Whatever you call them, Hélène always has a fresh batch of them* (easy recipe below) and a pot of hot coffee on hand.

These newsy, gossipy stories sometimes take awhile to get to the crime, but when they do, it's horrifying, as any murder must be in a very small community whose residents must rely on each other for their survival. All five Belle Palmer mysteries are available separately, and the e-book omnibus edition is a terrific bargain.

Lou Allin wrote only three mysteries in the Holly Martin series, all with interesting titles, before her untimely death. I have yet to read any of them, although the first awaits on my e-reader. In the first, And on the Surface Die, the young RCMP Corporal taking up her first post must investigate the death of a girl found rolling in the surf before an epic typhoon wipes out the evidence. These stories are set in Vancouver, where Allin spent her last few years with her partner and their beloved dogs. Like the older series, they are also available in an omnibus version. Mere weeks before her death, Allin was interviewed here for the charming Coffee with a Canine blog. Clearly, she kept her compassion, lively interest in the world, and sense of humor to the end. Godspeed, Lou, and may your many rescued pets meet you on the other side.

*Pets de Soeurs, or Pinwheels, or––Nuns' Farts (Pictured above)

Pie dough - homemade or purchased
-Softened butter
-Brown Sugar
-Cinnamon or real maple syrup (Vermont or Canadian are best)
-Chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

Roll pie dough thin. Brush liberally with butter. If using cinnamon, mix it with brown sugar before crumbling over dough. Spread brown sugar and nuts evenly over dough, drizzle with syrup if using.

Roll up, cut into 3/4" slices, and arrange in baking pan. (Tip, keep sides touching so they don't separate while baking.) Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, until golden. Allow to cool for a few minutes in pan before turning out onto cooling racks. Easy and delicious. Thanks, Lou, for reminding me of these childhood treats!

Review of Peter May's Entry Island

Entry Island by Peter May

As I watch the intrepid athletes compete in the Sochi Olympics, I know that some would give anything for a "do over." It is a fantastic concept, but it is one that is only acceptable in children's games––and then only when played among forgiving friends. Real life is not forgiving. On the other hand, in fiction the rules can be bent and sometimes downright broken! Peter May teases us with this notion in his latest book Entry Island (Quercus, 2013).

"There has been a murder on the Magdalen Islands, out in the Gulf of St. Lawrence," are the first words that Sime Mackenzie hears after another tortuous night of twisting-and-turning insomnia. He is to be part of the investigation team sent from the Montreal police. This was the first murder in these islands since living memory. It took place on l'Île d'Entrée, better known to its inhabitants as Entry Island.

The Madelinots are French-speaking for the most part, but on Entry Island they speak only English. This explained Sime's inclusion on the team, because he was equally at home with French or English. Entry Island is about 900 miles from Montreal, although it is still part of the province of Québec. The police team must make the final leg of the trip by boat.

The victim, James Cowell, was a native of the Islands (called the Magdalens by the French speakers and the Madeleines by the English speakers) and a wealthy businessman who, among other things, ran half the lobster boats in the Madeleines. His wife Kirsty claimed there was an intruder in a mask who attacked her and, when Cowell came to help her, he was stabbed several times.  Most of the team thinks this will be an open-and-shut case, but Sime is unsure because, for one thing, Kirsty looks very familiar to him and she does look as if she has been beaten up.

Sime (pronounced Sheem) is not at the top of his game, because his personal problems are overwhelming him in his sleepless state, and when he does sleep, he is disturbed by vivid recollections of stories read to him by his grandmother, triggered by meeting Kirsty. His grandmother read these stories from an old family journal written by a Simon Mackenzie, written in the mid-1800s when the lands in the Outer Hebrides were being cleared of the starving, poverty-stricken Scottish sharecroppers by the English lords so they could raise sheep. What was it about this remote location that was triggering these memories of the Highland clearances?

There wasn't much on Entry Island except a dwindling population of about one hundred people, a few stores, a church, a school and a post office. So when Kirsty claims she has not left the island for 10 years, and says she never wants to leave, no one believes her. And since the area is so hard to get to, the police doubt the talk about an intruder.  The spotlight is focused solely on Kirsty, particularly when there is another disappearance and possible death of another of the island's inhabitants.

Remnants of a hurricane are barreling down on the islands, and the weather becomes a character in itself as it wreaks havoc, with mighty and furious winds and burning, spitting rain. Entry Island is temporarily cut off from the world as it hunkers down in the storm. I myself felt cold, damp and miserable as I was caught up in the descriptions of the tempest.

Peter May has written several very successful series. His first featured Li Yan, a detective in the Beijing police who has partnered with an American pathologist, Margaret Campbell, to solve some very unusual cases. Then May moved onto France, where Enzo Macleod, a Scottish biologist, took on several amazing cold cases. My favorite series has been the Lewis trilogy, in which Fin Macleod, a Detective Inspector in Edinburgh, returns to his birthplace on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

Entry Island is somewhat of a departure for Peter May, because the murder mystery takes a back seat to the history of the settlement of some of the Madeleine Islands. There is a focus on the very bad old days of the times between the forced dispersal of the Scots to the New World and the difficulties the immigrants faced when their welcome was not to be counted on. The story moves on at a slow pace, as Sime has repeated flashbacks to the days of his ancestors. I believe May's descriptions of the injustices and the inhumanity of the past kept my blood on the boil. It was due to the same Scot in me that makes me shiver when I hear the bagpipes.

Despite an exotic location and the distinctive individuals involved in the crime, the motives for murder are not that unusual. Sime Mackenzie faces a conflict between his professional duty and his personal desires and he is led down a path he could never have foreseen. If you enjoy your crime novels with connections to another time this book would be a great addition to a TBR pile.

Review of Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

It may be summer for us, but it's December in Québec as How the Light Gets In begins. The story in this ninth in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series picks up shortly after the predecessor book, The Beautiful Mystery, ended, and things are just as grim as you would imagine for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, if you read that book.

Gamache's longtime enemies at the Sûrété du Québec are circling like sharks, taking bites out of his Homicide team. All of his team members have been moved to other departments, except for Isabelle Lacoste, and the officers moved to his team in their place are slackers, insubordinate and obviously playing for Gamache's saturnine enemy, Chief Superintendent Francoeur.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's second-in-command and closest colleague to both him and Lacoste, is now with Francoeur. Jean-Guy is a mess. Hooked on painkillers again, completely alienated from Gamache and broken up with Gamache's daughter Annie. Of course, all of this has been orchestrated by Francoeur and his compatriots. The sharks have isolated their prey and are coming in for the kill.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Considering what his office has become, it's almost a relief to Gamache when Myrna Landers, Three Pines's flamboyant bookseller, asks for his help to find a missing friend. This seemingly simple case unexpectedly becomes a last chapter in the story of Québec's most famous baby boomers, the first quintuplets to survive their birth. This part of the plot is obviously based on the Dionne quintuplets, whom the baby boomers among us will remember very well.

The Sûrété corruption plot that we've been following for this entire series takes center stage in this book, and it's a nail-biter that puts all of the characters under make-or-break stress. For those who have been wondering about the reach of the corruption and the long-term goals of its principals, this will be a particularly satisfying read.

What does this have to do with the book? Read it and find out.

Penny uses the corruption plot not just for thrills, though, but as a return to one of her perennial themes, good and evil. I remember back in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in the series, there was a passage explaining the difference between Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache always believed there was good in people, but Beauvoir was the opposite. Beauvoir believed that at bottom, you would always find evil, "without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Now Gamache, at his moment of crisis, wonders if Beauvoir was right, that maybe evil has no limits. He knows that it will be hard to find the impetus for the corruption, because most likely, it "started as something small, invisible to the naked eye. It was often years, decades, old. A slight that rankled and grew and infected the host." And now the infection is overwhelming.

Nathaniel Parker as Armand Gamache in the upcoming film of Still Life

Penny always manages to explore the themes of good and evil, love and hate, and sin and redemption without sounding preachy, because she does it through her particular strength, the character study. After reading all the books, and then going back and listening to the whole series on audio, I've come to know the characters as real people, with histories, strengths and flaws. I know their homes and how they live. Louise Penny writes so that there is no distance between the reader and the characters; their thoughts and emotions, what they eat and drink, how they interact with each other and, most important, how they react when bad things happen.

Penny is such a keen observer that it's all too easy to believe that you can travel to Three Pines, sit down at the Bistro and join in the conversation with all these characters, walk the green with them and watch the village children playing hockey, sit in Clara's messy house and enjoy a meal, browse for books at Myrna's bookshop and head upstairs to sit around the wood stove with a cup of tea and a scone. Hmm, there sure is a lot of eating and drinking that goes on in Three Pines––not that there's anything wrong with that! But there's more to it than that. Penny can also use a small moment to evoke poignant emotion, as when she has Gamache pick up a book at a murder scene, flip it open to the bookmarked page and see what the victim would now never read.

Louise Penny has transformed the police procedural and village mystery genres into not a mash-up, but something unique, original and genuine. Every summer, I look forward to my next visit with these characters, and at the end of the book I regret that my visit was all too short. I hope you'll visit too.

Note: How the Light Gets In will be published on August 27 by St. Martin's Minotaur. I received a free review copy of the book.

International Waffle Day

Yes, folks, March 25th is International Waffle Day. Observing this holiday means eating waffles for breakfast or waffling about decisions or issues. Or reading books in which characters do these things.

Andrew Pyper: Lost Girls (2000). An astonishingly fun and thought-provoking read narrated by a cynical, cocaine-snorting, and Keats-spouting Bartholomew Crane of Toronto's criminal law firm Lyle, Gederow & Associate (better known as "Lie, Get 'Em Off & Associate"). Teacher Thom Tripp is accused of murdering two teenage girls, whose bodies haven't been found, and Crane travels to the decrepit North Country town of Murdoch to take on his defense. There, Crane's usual disregard of the truth and own little-remembered past get a workout as he investigates his client's bizarre story of the girls' disappearance at Lake St. Christopher.

This literary legal mystery/psychological suspense/thriller is Canadian lawyer Pyper's debut novel. It has a nice touch of the frightening supernatural and an entertainingly acerbic lawyer/sleuth. Lost Girls was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2000 Edgar and Arthur Ellis Awards for Best First Novel.

Peter Guttridge: City of Dreadful Night (2010). Whether you'll enjoy this complex and compelling book, the first in Guttridge's Brighton series, all depends. Can you handle a plot's coincidence and the ambiguity of a tale left dangling at the end? If you can, and you like gritty British police procedurals set in the present, but that take a look at an unsolved real-life crime in the past, this may be something for you.

An armed police raid at a house in Brighton and Hove, a seaside resort in East Sussex, England, goes wrong, and four people are killed. Chief Constable Robert Watts is forced to resign, and his marriage ends when his affair with DS Sarah Gilchrist, who participated in the raid, becomes known. Despite his superiors' warnings to back off, Watts digs into the web of political and criminal relationships behind the botched raid and the deaths in its aftermath. Meanwhile, a diary related to an unclosed 1934 case, in which parts of a woman's body were discovered in trunks left at Brighton railroad stations, surfaces and may involve Watts's father, a former cop, and the father of Watts's old friend and government fixer, William Simpson. Helping Watts investigate are DS Gilchrist; a young reporter named Kate Simpson, who is William Simpson's daughter; and James Tingley, Watts's old MI5 friend. I'm looking forward to seeing these characters again in the next series book, 2011's The Last King of Brighton.

Rex Stout: Too Many Women (1947). Private eye extraordinaire Nero Wolfe considers Archie Goodwin an expert on young women. So when the president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc. asks Wolfe to investigate rumors about Wally Moore's hit-and-run death that are distracting his employees, Wolfe sends Archie to work undercover as an efficiency expert in the engineering firm's warehouse, which is full of beautiful young women. Although Archie goes through these obstructive women like a dolphin goes through waves, Wolfe doesn't decide to close the investigation before several more people die. It's an enjoyable mystery, as well as an interesting look at women in the post-WWII workforce.

Stout's Nero Wolfe books form an utterly charming traditional series, a slice of Americana set from its beginning in 1934 with Fer-de-Lance, to its conclusion, A Family Affair, in 1975. (An omnibus of earlier novellas, Death Times Three, was published in 1985.) Its main characters––Nero Wolfe, a gourmet food-, books-, and orchids-loving brainiac of a detective who refuses to leave his Manhattan brownstone on business, and Archie Goodwin, his competent right-hand man of action––are supported by a great cast of regulars who include Wolfe's household help, several New York City cops, a band of self-employed detectives hired by Wolfe, the doctor next door, and Archie's lovely inamorata, Lily Rowan. Stout supposedly published his first drafts, and the writing has a casual elegance and spontaneity that's fun to read.

Philipp Meyer: American Rust (2009). Sister Mary Murderous had no sooner reminded me of this book when I saw Meyer's The Son appear on Publishers Weekly's list of most anticipated books for Spring 2013. I'm not waffling when I say this: American Rust is wonderful.

It's set in the same economically devastated Pennsylvania country as K. C. Constantine's first-rate Mario Balzic series (see Maltese Condor's review of Constantine's The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes here). Buell's steel mill is shuttered, and many people have moved away. Isaac English and his older sister, Lee, were the smartest kids in their high school. When Lee goes to Yale, Isaac is left to take care of their disabled father. Now Lee is married and gone for good, and Isaac is desperate to leave Buell for his dream of studying astrophysics in California. Early one morning, Isaac packs his books into a backpack, robs his father's desk of $4,000, and walks to the house of his best friend Billy Poe. Billy is a none-too-smart, hot-tempered ex-high school football star on probation for assault. The two set out on foot. A chance meeting with transients in an abandoned factory where Isaac and Billy take shelter from a snowstorm leaves a man dead and Isaac's dream in pieces.

Meyer has been compared to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and William Faulkner. American Rust is about the unraveling of the American Dream. With beautiful prose, Meyer examines the price of loyalty and the constrained choices suffered by the working class. The book's characters––especially Isaac; Billy's self-sacrificing mother Grace, who earns minimum wage sewing wedding dresses for the wealthy and has her own dreams of returning to college; and Grace's lover, the sheriff––are three-dimensional enough to break your heart.

Lachlan Smith: Bear Is Broken (2013, Mysterious Press/Grove). Leo Maxwell has just received notice that he passed the California bar exam. He hopes the days of being called "Monkey Boy" by his 12-years-older brother, Teddy, are now a thing of the past. Teddy hasn't even congratulated Leo when they walk into a San Francisco restaurant to have lunch before closing arguments in one of Teddy's trial cases. Teddy is a highly successful criminal defense attorney, beloved by San Francisco's criminal class, but reviled by its cops and prosecutors, who insist that his success must be based on bribes and perjury. Leo and Teddy are waiting for their order when someone walks up behind Leo, shoots Teddy in the head, and disappears into a waiting car. While Teddy lies in a coma, Leo tries to understand his enigmatic brother, who was responsible for him after their mother died when Leo was 10 years old. Just how much of a rogue is Teddy? Leo now deals with Teddy's ex-wife, investigator, and clients. He also decides he can't trust the cops to adequately pursue the attempted murderer, so he will investigate himself. Leo opens Pandora's box.

Like Canadian writer Andrew Pyper, Lachlan Smith is a lawyer, and following his legal sleuth in the courtroom and in his sleuthing is enlightening as well as entertaining. Bear Is Broken is much less literary than Pyper's Lost Girls, and Leo is much less cynical than Pyper's Barth Crane, but both books involve a young lawyer's coming of age and evoke a tragic past. In this debut novel, Smith writes with unusual clarity and assurance as Leo shuffles a deck of likely suspects and plays a game of Solitaire. Smith slows the denouement a bit with a few too many details, but this by no means spoils the book's worth. I really liked it for its close and compassionate look at the tragic consequences of crime and at a San Francisco attorney who learns about himself and the nature of family loyalties. I'm happy that this is the first book of a proposed series.

On this important day, when we honor waffles and waffling, especially in crime fiction, be sure to get your fill of both. You may need to decline a second serving of breakfast, but there's nothing to stop you from being a glutton in your reading.

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.