New Year's Unresolutions

I have been seeing flashes across the Internet suggesting that making New Year's resolutions is passé. Apparently, it's akin to hanging a sign around your neck saying "geezer." For one thing, resolutions are considered clichés and it’s better just to take life as it comes.

One life guru recommended substituting personal mantras that are less vague and have more room for flexibility. Such as: "I choose happiness" and "Today is going to be a great day." My favorite is "I will be healthy" which just gives me the mental image of some smiling innocent being dead after he gets hit by a bus.

My personal choice this year is to make some unresolutions suggested by recent reads.

Gain weight. I learned in Rick Gualtieri’s Bill the Vampire series that it's mostly good-looking thin types who are chosen to be turned into the undead. Bill is a pudgy computer nerd who wears glasses and has no luck with women at all, but he is ever hopeful when the best-looking girl he has ever seen comes on to him. Little does he know what is in store for him. But funnily enough, it is the girl (a vampire by the way) and her crew who have a shock coming. This book is hilarious and leads the way to several other vampire Bill adventures.

Don't volunteer to help others. Sookie Stackhouse, in Charlaine Harris's Dead Ever After, has made it a habit to help other people––and just consider what's been going on in her life. After everything she has done to help Eric Northman and crew, they turn a cold shoulder on her. When she is accused of a shocking murder, she finds that a girl's best friend is a dog.

Start smoking and drinking. The only way to ratchet down the building tension in Michael Gruber's Tropic of Night is to have something to do with your hands. Jimmy Paz is a Cuban-American with a gruesome murder case on his hands. A young pregnant woman has been murdered, and unspeakable things have been done to the baby. Jane Doe is an anthropologist living in the shadows under an assumed name, but she knows the real motive behind the killing. It is related to African magic and many more drastic deaths are to come. I found the book exciting and complex, with dollops of mumbo-jumbo.

Stay home instead of taking an interesting trip. In Mapuche, by Caryl Férey, there is a view of the Argentina of the present, which has flashes of all the atrocities that have gone on since the 1950s. One critic found the book riveting, horrifying and more. My view was that it showed the worst of human nature, and some of the good things, but not enough to ever compel me to visit the area. The Mapuche were indigenous to the southern South American continent. Many Argentines and Chileans have Mapuche ancestry and this was what initially drew me to the story.

Get to work late. In The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett, it seems that if Amy Gallup had just elected not to show up to teach a writing class at her local community college, her life would have been much better. Gallup was published once at 22, with critical praise, but never again.

Now her former life is gone and she is a reclusive widow, with a daily mantra of Kill Me Now. This semester's class is full of the usual writer wannabes, but it also includes one sick puppy who could be any of the students. The problems start with prank phone calls, but end in murder. Amy is shaken out her doldrums, as she uses all her skills to unmask the villain.  

Don’t take vacation days. In A Grave Waiting, Jill Downie's Detective Inspector Ed Moretti is coming back from vacation with still a few days owed him, when he gets called back to work. This is the second outing for Moretti and his partner, Detective Sgt. Liz Falla. The location is the Channel Island of Guernsey, a place at one time believed to be back of beyond. Now a center of high finance and banking because of its favorable tax laws, Guernsey has left the days of greenhouses, flowers and produce behind.

Moretti and Falla are called to a luxury yacht to look into the murder of a wealthy man. Mr. Masterson was a financier, and there's more to his murder than meets the eye. One thing that is not clear is why Masterson decided to come to the island in the first place and, secondly, who of the many people who had motives to kill him did the deed. The detective duo makes an excellent partnership, and the plot of the story is engrossing.

Don’t make appointments with doctors who are going to tell you what you don't want to hear, most important considering Unresolutions #1 and #3. Max Tyger, a PI and part-time adjunct college professor in Darlington, Connecticut, went to the doctor because he had trouble choking on food and the diagnosis he got was hard to swallow––esophageal cancer, which required both chemotherapy and radiation.

In This One Day, by K. A. Delaney, Max is at this low point in his life that includes a lack of health insurance and the loss of his girlfriend Helen, which he attributes to a birth defect—his lousy personality. But Helen comes to him with the case of a high school boy who has disappeared. The art teacher at a prestigious private school wants to hire him to find the boy, even though his parents have not reported him missing.

Fighting fatigue, desperation and loss of dignity, Max takes the case primarily because he owes reparation to a boy from one of his college courses whom he could have helped if he had recognized there was a problem sooner. The loss of this boy haunts him. He wants to take the advice from another chemo partner to live just one day and try to do something good during the course of it.

Avoid having fun. Vish Puri, a most private investigator, solves The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, by Tarquin Hall. An Indian scientist, well known as a debunker who exposes fraudulent gurus, is somehow murdered by a manifestation of the goddess Kali when she plunges a sword into his chest. Puri is more clear-sighted than the other investigators, and he and his team of undercover operatives—Facecream, Tubelight, and Flush—will not stop until they know how the magic was performed.

Read books with cute punning titles. Since I usually avoid these books, I thought it would make a change for me and I do enjoy series, so Rosemary and Crime (Piper Prescott series, Book 1) by Gail Oust fit the bill. Piper Prescott, a recent divorcée estranged from her youngest daughter, is adding some spice to her life by opening her own business in a small town in Georgia. Spice it Up! as it is called, is prepared for its opening day until a star attraction, a chef with a maniacal temper, is murdered.

Since Piper is finding herself in the frame, she takes the investigation into her own hands. Naturally, the killer decides that Piper is in the way and opts to eliminate her as well. Even after a few near-death experiences that might have been avoided with the use of a cell phone near at hand, Piper continues to leave hers here and there, mostly uncharged as well. This unresolution may be stricken from my list.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Should we believe in coincidences? I believe I should. Lately, I picked up several books in a row that all repeated a similar theme. It meant either that plenty of authors have similar dreams, or my reading picks are not as random as I thought. It may also be a sign that I am meant to write about these books. Their main idea is that what goes around comes around, and what you did during World War II will come back to haunt you, no matter where you did it. It is usually Sister Mary who has the goods on skullduggery during the Second World War, but I will trespass just a little bit today.

William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This quotation might be the best part of his Requiem for a Nun and it really came to mind with Death on the Marais by Adrian Magson.

Marais is the French word for marsh, or quagmire, and that is what Inspector Lucas Rocco finds when he is transferred from his Paris job to Poissons-les-Marais. He had been a Paris policeman for a long time when a new broom in the Interior Ministry felt that the more rural provinces needed some Parisian expertise in law enforcement. Rocco was exiled to this country village in Picardie, a northwestern province of France. His superiors had a few interesting things to say of him, like that "he was an insubordinate bastard, insolent as well as pushy, dogmatic and a nobody, reckless … a rebel. A good cop, though."

Rocco expects the new assignment to be quiet, uneventful and maybe boring, but he doesn't expect that the first thing he will run into in the village is a crowd pulling a dead woman from the marsh at the edge of a war cemetery. The shocker is that she is wearing a Gestapo uniform––when World War II has been over for 20 years.

This novel is set in the 1960s, and Rocco's war experiences are of another war, not World War II. He spent his army days in the jungles of Indochina during the conflict between the French and the Vietnamese, after France reoccupied the area after World War II. He had developed sharply-honed survival skills that come back to him as he negotiates the treacherous bogs of the marais, as well as the vagaries of the locals as they once again align themselves into separate camps of collaboration and resistance.

Once the woman is identified as the daughter of a well-connected wealthy man named Phillippe Bayer-Barbier, Rocco heads back to Paris, following the trail of very dirty secrets. The detective is astounded at the man's reaction to his daughter's death. Bayer-Barbier begins to lie and then distance himself, behaving as if she brought this on herself. He is a man with many skeletons in his closet, most of them nasty, and most of them having been buried during the war.

There is an interesting cast of ancillary characters in this village: the local policeman, a tramp whose expertise is defusing bombs left over from the war, as well as several people who service a small mansion where Parisian men come for nefarious, mostly sexual, purposes and perversions. Rocco doesn't know whom to trust, and the seemingly calm waters hide dangerous undercurrents. The mystery is exciting and as murky as any marais, and what has happened in the past lies bubbling just under the surface.

The dogs of this war refuse to lie down in other countries as well. In Italy, there is still a pas de deux featuring people who took different sides in the war, and who still distrust each other, but now must perform together amicably.

Jill Downie's Daggers and Men's Smiles begins in Guernsey, a Channel Island that was the site of great German fortifications and an Organisation Todt forced-labor camp in which prisoners were worked to their deaths. Detective Inspector Ed Moretti returns from a trip to Italy to find that while away, he has been assigned a new female partner, DC Liz Falla. There is also an international production company on the island, making a movie based on a bestselling novel about an aristocratic Italian family at the end of the Second World War.

The novel is called Rastrellamento and dramatizes a military round-up of partisans who had been betrayed to the Nazis. Guernsey's cement bunkers, underground command post and hospital make for excellent film locations, and the cream on the pie is that the manor house is still inhabited by expatriate Italians, the Vannonis.

Ed Moretti himself is of Italian heritage. His father was a prisoner of war in the Todt camp and his mother was a native Guernsey girl who risked her life to give him food. After the war, he came back and married her. Ed speaks Italian and this is of help when a series of murders shakes up the island.

First to die is the philandering son-in-law of the Vannonis, and then the pompous author of Rastrellamento. The striking feature of both murders is the use of a ceremonial dagger similar to one on the Vannoni coat of arms.

There is quite a bit of mystery surrounding the Vannonis, and the past is never spoken of. The solutions to the crimes lie in Italy and in what went before. The Vannonis were, at one time, involved with Mussolini, fascism and more. Moretti goes to Italy to find his answers.

Both Death on the Marais and Daggers and Men's Smiles are the first in a series. I liked Rocco, Moretti and Falla. Both of the Guernsey cops moonlight musically in the evenings, when they have free time. Ed plays a mean jazz piano and Liz is a folk singer with an Enya sound.

Even in the US, the echoes of the World War II past come back like ghosts. In Desert Run, by Betty Webb, the mystery is fashioned on some of the real events surrounding the German POW camps in Arizona. A documentary is being shot at Papago Park about the German POW camp that had been located there, and the "Great Escape" of Christmas Eve, in 1944. The film is to tell the story that during the autumn months, the prisoners dug a tunnel under the desert floor to a nearby river, which the escaping Germans planned to use to transport themselves to Mexico.

With the help of a map, which appeared to show that a nearby river flowed all the way to Mexico, and under the cover of singing Christmas carols, 28 escapees went under the fence. They soon discovered that in the Sonora Desert, rivers are usually dry and go nowhere. Most escapees were recaptured in days.

One surviving escapee, Kapitan Erik Ernst, is now 90 years old and about to be interviewed about these past events. Before he can speak his piece, he is murdered. Scottsdale PI Lena Jones is doing security for Warren Quinn, the director of the documentary. Both Quinn and the Ethiopian caregiver, who has been accused of Ernst's murder, want Lena to find his killer. The answer may lie in the past.

During the escape, three men separated from the others, who were recaptured. Ernst was among the three who avoided immediate recapture. They fled into the mountains, where they were suspected of brutally murdering a local family. Another suspect in Ernst's death is Chess Bolinger, the only member of the family to survive the massacre. He had plenty of motives to kill Ernst, because he had been living under the suspicion of being the murderer of his family as well. And he knew the truth.

Nothing is known of the other two men who were with Ernst, and Betty Webb weaves an intriguing tale about what happened to these men. In a postscript, she gives the reader a short history of the POW camps, the 1944 escape and the recapture off all of the 25 escapees. She mentions that several former POWs moved to Arizona after the war. In 1985, there was a reunion of former POWs at the site, which is now part of the Oakland Athletics training fields.

Out of the blue, the next book I picked up was Kate Ellis's The Armada Boy, which tells a tale of a D-Day veteran returning to England for a reunion.

Fifty years after D-Day, a group of elderly Americans have returned to the Devonshire town of Bereton, where they had prepared for the Normandy invasion. One of the old soldiers, Norman Openheim, is found murdered on the grounds of an old chapel where the GIs used to meet the local girls for romantic encounters.

The people of the area have long memories––many of them good, but most bitterly recall that their village was taken from them by the authorities, and when they return, it was a shambles. It was no secret that the GI influence over the local girls was resented.

It seemed also that Norman might have left more than just memories behind. His wartime girlfriend was pregnant when he was recalled to the US. Norman's wife does not seem particularly saddened by his demise when Detective Sergeant Wesley Peterson begins his investigation by interviewing her. Motives swirl around this case, because one of the reunion party is suspected of raping a local girl and one of the GIs was supposed to have shot a local man who was poaching in an out-of-bounds area. Yes, indeed, the past is where the answer is to be found for this death in the present.

The historical facts of the matter were that there was an area of Devon evacuated at the end of 1943 so that the US troops could rehearse the D-Day landings there. All the local people and their animals were evacuated and had to find alternative places to live. There is a memorial on Slapton Sands in South Devon to the American troops who died during Exercise Tiger, a practice for the D-Day landings held in April 1944. Nearly 800 men (more than the number who died during the actual invasion of Normandy) were killed in the exercise, one of the great tragedies of World War II.

I began with Faulkner and end with Faulkner, who really understood the past and the present. "It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago."