Today We Celebrate Our Ex-Spouses

No, I am not making this up. Today, April 14, is Ex-Spouse Day, when we're supposed to acknowledge our ex-spouses. I'm not sure whether this special day was created by Congress––always working hard to be seen as improving Americans' lives––or the Hallmark card company. I'm also not clear about how we're to celebrate, although getting out the old voodoo doll and poking fresh holes or offering fervent prayers of thanks that the marriage is over are no doubt appropriate in some cases. In other cases, maybe dinner is on the menu, so you can raise a glass to being friends instead of partners.

Given that I don't have an ex-husband, I thought I'd celebrate the day by telling you about a pair of exes I've encountered in my reading.

Wade Chesterfield isn't a monster, but the ex-minor league baseball player is so irresponsible that his ex-wife had him sign papers relinquishing parental rights to their daughters Easter and Ruby, now 12 and 6. When their mother dies, the girls are placed in a foster care home in Gastonia, North Carolina. This isn't okay with Wade, who does love his daughters. He pulls the kids out of their beds in the middle of the night and they set off for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It soon becomes clear to Wade and the girls that the police and Brady Weller, a former cop who's now the girls' court-appointed guardian, aren't the only ones interested in finding them. Also on their trail is a scary ex-felon, Robert Pruitt, hired by a local crime boss who believes Wade stole a fortune from him. Pruitt is a very enthusiastic hunter, because he nurses a personal grudge against Wade from the days they played pro ball together.

Wiley Cash's This Dark Road to Mercy (William Morrow, 2014) is set during the race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to topple Roger Maris's home runs record in 1998. This thrilling competition we know now was tainted by Big Mac's and Slammin' Sammy's illegal use of steroids, and it's a fitting backdrop for this book of country noir. There's always a suggestion of menace lurking just around the corner. No matter how hard these people run or chase, they're still dogged by their pasts and at the mercy of fate. Twelve-year-old Easter, who is both heartbreakingly naive and cynical beyond her years, takes a turn narrating, along with Pruitt and Weller. Unlike a lot of hardboiled books, most of the violence in this one happens off stage. This isn't to say I didn't close my eyes when Pruitt slips on his gloves because I didn't have to be clairvoyant to see what's coming. I was pleased that Wade goes to bat for his girls, and his ex would be proud of him.

Mrs. T. Lawrence Lamb has long considered her husband an unimaginative plodder and money grubber. She sees him as cramping her artistic and intellectual style; an unsatisfactory husband any way she looks at him. But Thorne Smith makes it clear from the beginning of The Stray Lamb (originally published in 1929) that Mr. Lamb is no ordinary man. On his commuter train, he gazes at a "perky shred of an ear ... ornamenting a small sleek head" and wonders what it would feel like to tentatively, delicately bite it. On the outside, Mr. Lamb is one of the more sober of his community's citizens. On the inside, he contains "a reservoir of good healthy depravity that was constantly threatening to overflow and spill all sorts of trouble about his feet." This depravity is tapped after a chance meeting with a man in the woods, and Mr. Lamb wakes up to discover he's a black stallion. And this isn't all. He's soon experiencing the world through the eyes of a succession of animals. As we all know, when you do this you can't help but create havoc. Soon, Mrs. Lamb has had more than enough.

James Thorne Smith, Jr. died at age 42 in 1934. Under the name Thorne Smith, he wrote the Topper books and other charming and hilarious books about booze, sex and fantastical transformations. They deserve a spot on your shelf next to books by P. G. Wodehouse, Tom Sharp, Spike Milligan and Jerome K. Jerome.

Two for the Hammock: Dunant and Hiaasen

How's the summer reading going so far? Hitting rough seas or sailing through books like a dolphin goes through waves?

My own reading hasn't been on cruise control. It's been warmer than usual on California's Central Coast, and I've found it too easy to accelerate from zero to crabby. This has made me very finicky about books. Some need to wait until it's a little cooler. Take Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored by Philippe Georget (Europa, July 2013). The reviews for this French noir are excellent, but they contain words like "languid" and "exquisite Gallic ennui." As eager as I am to meet tired Perpignan cops Sebag and Molino, I'll wait until I'm not so heat exhausted myself. Likewise, I'll postpone the literary horror Red Moon by Benjamin Percy (Grand Central, 2013), described as "a cross between Stephen King and the Michael Chabon of The Yiddish Policemen's Union." Its lycan terrorists sound too energetic for my current listless self. It might be time to cool off with James M. Tabor's Frozen Solid, a tense thriller set at the South Pole, published in 2013 by Ballantine. It supposedly reads like "Andromeda Strain meets The Thing." No need to break into a mental sweat for that, and a lot of fun, I hope.

Here's a dissimilar duo that recently hit the spot:

As soon as I opened Sarah Dunant's Blood & Beauty: The Borgias: A Novel (Random House, 2013), I wanted to yell "that's amore!" One finds a historical note describing the city-states of Italy, family trees of these city-states' rulers, and a map of Italy at the turn of the 15th century before the story begins on August 11, 1492, with the papal election of the Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who will reign as Pope Alexander VI.

While the animal on the Borgia family crest is the bull, "everyone knows it is the cunning of the fox that runs in the family." Wily Alexander, who is both warm and ruthless, immediately sets out to amass wealth and political power through his much-loved children by his mistress Vannozza dei Caanei: cold Cesare, who resigns his cardinalcy to become a formidable politician and a genius as a soldier; beautiful Lucrezia, who enters into three politically advantageous marriages, and is close to Cesare; Jofré, the youngest, marries Sancia of Aragon for political reasons, and she then has affairs with Jofré's older brothers; Juan marries and has two children before he is murdered in 1497.

Can you think of any other family dynasty more in need of a good public relations firm than the Borgias? Through her depiction of history and psychological portraits, Dunant shows that they were more than an incestuous family of crafty murderers. They were a brutal family, but they lived in brutal times. Blood & Beauty, which ends in 1502, will be followed by another Borgias book. Given Dunant's fascinating characters, story-telling talents, and rich prose, I'll definitely read it.

It's a long way from 15th-century Italy to present-day Florida, but there are still people determined to make money and gain power through deviousness.

It's very comforting, when you're feeling kinda grumpy and sweaty, to read the crime fiction of Florida native Carl Hiaasen, in which he uses black comedy to savage the greedy, the corrupt, and the ignorant who are ruining the environment of his beloved state. His 2013 book, Bad Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf), doesn't rank with his best, but it's still plenty entertaining for people who don't have issues with raunchiness, gross-out moments, or bad language; and who enjoy oddball characters, zany plots, and poking fun at South Florida.

The story involves Andrew Yancy of the Monroe County sheriff's department, who did something bad in public with a portable vacuum cleaner to his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's husband, and Yancy will be busted down to restaurant inspector as a result. He will do anything to get his badge back, and a window of opportunity opens when the sheriff asks him to drive a severed human arm—caught by a tourist fishing on his Florida Keys honeymoon, of course—up to Miami.

There are only 250-300 of these tiny Key deer
left. They are about 2-feet high at the shoulder.

Now, you won't believe the bizarre directions the plot takes from these facts: Miami forensic pathologist Rosa Campesino is pretty and adventurous, as well as smart; Eve Stripling recognizes the severed arm as wearing her husband Nick's wedding ring and is accused by her stepdaughter Caitlin of killing him; Christopher Grunion is breaking ground on a resort at Lizard Cay in the Bahamas, displacing and angering Neville, owner of a monkey that appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean; developer Evan Shook is building a spec McMansion on the lot next to Yancy's house, and Yancy passionately hates the McMansion; and Yancy's ex-girlfriend, Bonnie Witt, is wanted in Oklahoma. There you go.

Tonight, instead of visiting the South Pole via Frozen Solid, I'm reading A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife, which features alternating character portraits of Todd and Jodi, a man and wife in a marriage deteriorating to murder. I'm emulating the conditions of the South Pole, however, by accompanying Harrison's book with homemade salted caramel ice cream. I should have accompanied Blood & Beauty with an Italian gelato, and Bad Monkey with coconut ice cream, but I try not to plug in my ice cream machine when no one else is home. I'm sure you're good enough detectives that I don't need to tell you why.

I'd love to hear how your own summer reading is going.

Book Review of Dennis Lehane's Live by Night

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

Mamas, don't let your boys grow up to be gangsters. That is, if this book's opening quakes your bones:

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life––good or bad––had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.

It's the same Joe Coughlin, son of powerful Irish cop Thomas and younger brother of Aiden (Danny) and Connor, whom we met in Lehane's sprawling historical epic, The Given Day, set in 1918-19 Boston. While that 2008 book is about the Coughlins during a dizzying epidemic of flu, corruption, and striking police, Live by Night is all about handsome Joe, although his father appears and Danny drops in briefly. Joe was conceived in an effort to fill the hole at the center of his family, a chasm between his parents, and between them and the world at large. Rather than filling, the hole found its center in lawless Joe. Yet, despite Joe's refusal to heed his father's warnings or to obey the rules, he is the most open of Thomas's three sons, with a heart you can see "through the heaviest winter coat." Joe is an immensely conflicted and appealing young man. He lives for "moments in a world without nets––none to catch you and none to envelop you." Joe knows he'll probably die young. And now, here he sits, not yet 30, hands tied and feet encased in cement, while Lehane takes us back to watch the trajectory of Joe's career from rebellious outlaw to gangster prince.

It's 1926, and Prohibition is in full force. Mobs––split down ethnic lines of Italian, Jewish, and Irish––control illegal activities such as gambling and supplying alcohol. While most mobs deal in whiskey, the Hickey and Pescatore gang handles rum. They've cornered the market on sugar and molasses imported from Cuba into Tampa, Florida, where the alcohol is distilled and driven up the Eastern Seaboard in midnight runs.

Nineteen-year-old Joe comes across Emma when he and the Bartolo brothers rob a gaming room in a South Boston speakeasy. Until then, they had stuck to petty crimes. Had they known the speakeasy belonged to prominent mobster Albert White, they might have run as far as their legs would carry them. The stickup is a mistake. Joe compounds that error by losing his head over Emma, whose eyes, "pale as very cold gin," fit a young woman who hails from Charlestown, where "they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee." Emma is White's mistress.

White doesn't like being robbed, and he likes competition for Emma even less. He takes advantage of a bank heist's disastrous aftermath to vent his rage on Joe; however, White's actions take a backseat to those of Joe's father, Deputy Police Superintendent Thomas Coughlin. Like Lehane's series protagonist Patrick Kenzie, Joe has old grievances with his dad. Father-son issues––the limits of loyalty, the consequences of violence, and the nature of betrayal––provide the backdrop as Joe is incarcerated in Charlestown Penitentiary, "a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals." There, Joe finds another father figure in imprisoned mob boss Thomaso "Maso" Pescatore, who runs his bootlegging operation from behind bars and directs Joe to Florida upon his release.

Before radio and mechanization, Ybor City cigar
factory workers listened to someone reading aloud.

The outrageous heat and humidity aren't the only jungle-like attributes of Ybor City, the Tampa neighborhood where Joe muscles himself into a job. The survival of the strongest involves rival gangs fighting over bootlegging turf, and the judges, city councillors, and cops slipping in and out of the gangs' pockets. There's also what I'll refer to as the heat of Joe's loins. While Joe claims that he's "out of the heartbreak business," copper-dark Graciela Corrales, a pro-Batista Cuban who works in a Ybor cigar factory, captures his attention as soon as he hops off the train. Her body moves "under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water." Joe's lack of racial prejudice not only finds him a beautiful woman, it allows him to work directly with the Suarez siblings, Cubans who import sugar and molasses into Ybor City. In a few years, the Suarez-Coughlin gang has strengthened its grip on rum trafficking in Florida and is expanding into Louisiana; however, no matter how lucrative, racial inclusiveness isn't popular with Joe's Italian boss, Maso Pescatore. And it isn't at all popular with the Ku Klux Klan.

As the end of Prohibition approaches, the global economy is worsening. People need hope, as well as jobs, but they've often had to settle for a drink. When alcohol becomes legal, then what? While the world is changing, Joe has always believed people don't really change. Yet, he and Graciela have already started to live by day, "where the swells lived." How do good works follow bad money?

Questions such as this one arise from Lehane's examination of faith, love, redemption, and revenge, and the role luck and fate play in human destiny. Early on, Joe tells his father that there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself. Joe is a fascinating character due to his evolving interpretation of events, assessments of people, and understanding of himself over a decade. Clear prose and depth of characterization are Lehane trademarks, and following Joe is a treat. Unlike others who stayed on top in the rackets, Joe isn't known for having amputated his conscience. He's the kind of mobster who hopes he won't have to kill his best friend, but that's not to say he won't; he simply won't do it for reasons of greed. Joe's father Thomas Coughlin, Maso Pescatore, and best friend Dion Bartolo also develop; however, there's something unknowable about the book's three beautiful women. Perhaps it's because Joe doesn't really understand them, even though he realizes why the nuns rail against the sins of lust and covetousness, which can "possess you surer than a cancer," and "kill you twice as quick." I found the idealistic Graciela less interesting than the two more complex women: enigmatic Loretta Figgis, beautiful daughter of Ybor's Chief of Police Irving Figgis, and the inscrutable Emma Gould, behind whose pale eyes "lay something cold and caged . . . in a way that demanded nothing come in."

The tone and pace change from noirish suspense to a slower ending, suitable for its tropical location, but a little languid and mushy for my taste. No matter, Dennis Lehane has written a gangster novel, captivating for its characters and philosophical questions and moving in its bittersweetness, vividly set during Prohibition. The Coughlins aren't a Mafia family like the Corleones, but one can hope to see them vault from book pages onto the movie screen. I've heard that director Ben Affleck is interested. I've also heard that Lehane may make these two books into a trilogy, and my pulse does a rumba thinking about this.

Note: Dennis Lehane's Live by Night was published earlier this month by Morrow/HarperCollins. It isn't necessary to read The Given Day first, but a reader loses by not doing so. Now is the perfect time. The World Series is just around the corner, and baseball is one of The Given Day's pleasures. Be sure to close with Live by Night.

Following a Trail of Blood

I've been practicing in front of a mirror for Mother's Day on Sunday. Started a wince and erased it, began a laugh and cloaked it with a cough. Registered pleased surprise when I'm thinking this gift will make my butt look enormous. Warned my reflection not to eat all the candy my sons always give me. I've also been reading some books by or about my fellow women. I've followed the trails set by my good friends here at Read Me Deadly, although I've veered off in some different directions.

Gladys Mitchell

Sister Mary Murderous loves Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey books. I agree they're great. Sayers is one of England's best Golden Age of Mysteries writers. Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie are two more. Another one not often mentioned in the U.S. is Gladys Mitchell, creator of Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, a psychiatric consultant to London's Home Office.

There are more than 60 books in the Dame Beatrice series, written over more than 50 years. The first book is Speedy Death in 1929. To say it's a memorable debut of an unusual sleuth may be putting it mildly. How many other sleuths are tried and found innocent of murder, only to happily confess to a son/defense attorney later? Dame Beatrice's appearance alone is remarkable. She is described as a wrinkled pterodactyl with a Cheshire Cat grin. She has yellow skin and hands like a bird's talons. I wish she laughed instead of cackled, but she does have a very melodious speaking voice. Children and animals instinctively like her.

Mitchell's books are strongly plotted and beautifully written, but there is often a supernatural element or a weird and comic aspect to the plot or the murder itself. These books are an acquired taste––like caviar, rap music, boxing or asparagus. You either learn to love them or you don't. I do. It takes me a few pages to get acclimatized to Mitchell's voice and then I appreciate her.

One book I've enjoyed recently is The Rising of the Moon, written in 1945 and set in a small English town before World War II. It's narrated by Simon Innes in reflection upon this time when he was 13. He and his younger brother Keith are fantastic characters. They are orphans and live with their older brother Jack, Jack's wife June, their young son Tom, and Christina, a beautiful young boarder who loves the Innes family but who isn't liked by June, because June is jealous of her.

Simon and Keith are prowling around one night after the circus has come to town, when they see a man leaning over a bridge. The knife he holds glints in the moonlight. Or that's what they assume. The next day, they learn that a circus performer has been found, hacked into pieces. This death begins a series of murders, and eventually Dame Beatrice arrives to investigate, but she plays a supportive role here. I loved Simon's take on people and their relationships, and the maneuvering he and Keith do to cope with house rules. It's an interesting depiction of life in a pre-War England. And yes, there are some bizarre but typical Mitchell touches with her eccentric characters, the haunting setting and the methods of murder.

A few months ago, Georgette Spelvin told us about Wallace Stroby's outstanding bad girl, Crissa Stone. I want to read Cold Shot to the Heart, that first series book, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Instead I read Stroby's stand-alone book, Gone 'til November. I'm happy to say this author does outstanding good girls too.

Deputy Sheriff Sara Cross is on her first overnight shift in eight months when she responds to a call. Fellow deputy and former lover Billy Flynn called in. He did a routine traffic stop on an out-of-the-way road and the stop went wrong. Sara arrives at the scene outside Hopedale, Florida and Billy tells her that he asked the young black driver, a stranger to him, to open his trunk. After he did, the driver spun around with a gun in his hand, so Billy shot him. It was self-defense, Billy says. The trunk contains a bag full of illegal guns. The driver now lies dead at the bottom of the bank off the road, a gun close to his outstretched hand. Billy's story and the scene look legit, at least at first viewing. Is it because Sara knows Billy so well that she's uneasy? The driver's wife appears in town and outside law enforcement investigators arrive to audit the deputy's shooting.

Meanwhile, in a bad part of a New Jersey city, another kind of investigation of the Hopedale roadside shooting is brewing. Mikey-Mike is a drug dealer interested in that shit down south. He hasn't gotten to the bottom of it yet, he tells his middle-aged enforcer, Nathaniel Morgan. Let it go, Morgan counsels. Mikey says he can't. He needs the Florida drug connections and the money because his court case is looming and his lawyers need cash. Get down there and find out what the fuck happened, he orders Morgan. Then settle the hash of those responsible for good. Morgan is reluctant to go for several excellent reasons. He hits the road anyway and the two stories connect. Wait. That's not a good way of putting it. The two stories collide.

What else can I tell you about this book? The best way I know to describe it is to say it's a barnstorm through hell with great perks. The dialogue is entertaining and the characterization is spot on. This insightful writer does bad and good guys equally well. And I mean well. Sara is a conscientious single mother and has a keen moral compass. She's as ballsy as everybody else in the all-male sheriff's department but she's kinda lonely. Billy, from a family of Florida crackers, lives with a trashy girlfriend but he still sorta hankers after Sara. Morgan is smart and ruthless, but he has hammered out a set of principles that make sense to him. The supporting characters, including a set of XX-large New Jersey brothers who work for Mikey and go to Florida too, are every bit as well done as these. They struggle to figure out each other, and their actions make sense given who they are.

The Everglades summer is hot enough to blister paint and Stroby's prose and plot made me sweat. The plot rolls on like God's own thunder, just hums right along. If you're lookin' for a noirish thriller involving every sort of human need and greed, this is your baby, baby.

This is where semi-following a trail laid down by Sister Mary and Georgette sent my reading this week. Next time, I'll tell you about where I went courtesy of Maltese Condor and Periphera. These are books by or involving women of distinction. Maybe a little like your own mom. Don't forget Mother's Day this weekend.