Readersplaining Your Books

It's hard to believe summer is over; before you know it, you'll be composing a wish list for Santa. I've been working on my own list for what seems like forever, because my Santa, a husband who has known me for 25 years, has a head full of ideas about what books I'd like. Bad ideas. An idea will start out on track (he knows I'm interested in sports, politics, and current events) before derailing and heading into the weeds (but I really cannot get into a biography of former pro basketball player/North Korea visitor/oddball Dennis Rodman). Wouldn't you think he'd automatically know this?

Because who wouldn't want to see if his or her head
would fit through the hole in that chair

Apparently not. I've asked Hubby to keep certain facts in mind when he book shops for me. These facts explain why some books are up my alley. I've given a pair of these facts below. Maybe they'll jump start your own readersplanations before your Santa begins shopping.

I appreciate good food and drink––and crime fiction characters who do, too.

One of my favorite old series features Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. Wolfe is a gargantuan genius who loves food, books, and orchids and refuses to leave his New York City brownstone on business. His side kick, Archie Goodwin, provides the witty narration. Books I liked best include Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, The Doorbell Rang, and The Silent Speaker.

Italian crime fiction is a good bet for mouth-watering food. Take Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano books. They are best read pinned open with one arm while the other arm stays busy hoisting rigatoni and a bold Italian red mouthward. In addition to the food and Sicilian atmosphere, I like Montalbano, a world-weary but decent man, and his colleagues. The latest, A Beam of Light (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Penguin Books, September 1, 2015), finds three crimes requiring Montalbano's attention. On the personal front, Montalbano's eye strays from long-time lover Livia to a gallery owner named Marian.

No, thank you, I'd prefer to remain ignorant.

We can't skip France. It's hard not to love the Dordogne and Martin Walker's books about Bruno Courrèges, chief of police. Reading them is the next best thing to a visit; one can almost smell and taste the meals described on the pages. In The Patriarch (Knopf, August 2015), Bruno's attendance at a birthday celebration for a World War II veteran is ruined by murder. One also finds murder in the darkly comic and macabre The Debt to Pleasure, by John Lanchester. The Nabokovian book's unreliable narrator, arrogant gourmet Tarquin Winot, provides recipes à la Brillat-Savarin and a travelogue as he follows a couple to Provence.

I can't say I first think of the English when the topic is good fictional food; in fact, what initially pops into my mind is James Hamilton-Paterson's weird and wacky Cooking with Fernet Branca. Its part-time narrator, the Englishman Gerald Samper, is a ghostwriter for celebrities ("an amanuensis to knuckleheads") and an amateur cook. He lives in Tuscany, although his kitchen seems to be located in hell. Ice cream with garlic and Fernet Branca and mussels in chocolate are bad enough; consider yourself lucky my divulging the ingredients of Alien Pie would be a spoiler. While Samper's recipes are atrocious, this book is a treat.

At first glance, some books of crime fiction seem unlikely to stimulate the appetite. No matter, John Harvey's food descriptions in his Charlie Resnick police procedurals always send me to the kitchen. At home in Nottingham, that melancholy cop tends to his cats, listens to jazz (readers get educated), and rustles up a delicious sandwich or a cup of decent coffee. Wait, we can't forget the paper towels; one of Resnick's men says that if he ate as messily as Resnick, his wife would make him sit out in the garage. Harvey's characters are no strangers to life's miseries or ironies. I like that about them and the books' look at their relationships and the social issues in post-Thatcher England. The first one is Lonely Hearts.

Here's a comforting thought.

I'm an insomniac who often reads until I fall sleep.

Now, I can bore myself to sleep by reading the instruction book for my washing machine, but this can be torture. So, I usually give the instruction book idea a pass and instead read a suspenseful novel with one eye open. That way, my goal of falling asleep is already half accomplished. Does it impress you that I figured this out as a kid? Actually, suspense is best read with one eye in bed; there's something about the reduced field of vision that makes the tension bearable. For bedtime purposes, the book should not provoke the sort of fear that sends you diving under the bed, but, rather, should make you cringe and beg the character to rethink what he or she is doing, such as pawing through a murder suspect's dresser drawers while the suspect is, naturally, beetling home early because he forgot something. One example of this cringing and begging sort of one-eyed read is Joyce Carol Oates's Jack of Spades (Mysterious Press, May 2015), in which the alter ego of best-selling crime-fiction writer Andrew J. Rush steps in to protect a secret.

Another route to dreamworld is reading a book whose accelerated pace leaves me feeling so depleted by its end I can't help but nod off. Duane Swierczynski's Canary (Mulholland Books, February 2015) fits into this category. Swierczynski is known for his stomp-on-the-gas pacing, plot twists, and unlikely heroes/heroines. In Canary, his unlikely heroine is college honors student Sarie Holland, who is forced to become a confidential informant for Philadelphia narcotics cops. Reading Swierczynski makes me wonder what it would be like to share a meal with him; whether we'd eat by stopwatch.

Always only too happy to encounter Moby-Dick in my reading

For times when sleep is obviously a long-distant goal, an engrossing book like The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt, February 2015), is a good pick. The "Whites" of the title are the NYPD's Moby-Dicks, those great white whales who escaped justice and who continue to haunt the cops who pursued them. One of them has now re-surfaced for disgraced Sgt. Billy Graves. Price, whose previous novels include Lush Life, about the murder of New York City bartender Ike Marcus and its aftermath, has a terrific ear for dialogue. That, these books' rich prose, and their original, psychologically complex characters make for great reading.

If sleep is hopeless, but I'm really tired, give me a book with crisp prose and an interesting setting. Malcolm Mackay's Glasgow Trilogy (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, and The Sudden Arrival of Violence) is suitable. While these books have received international critical acclaim, they were only published in the United States by Mulholland Books last April. They involve a Glasgow crime syndicate trying to eliminate the competition. At their heart are two hitmen: the legendary Frank MacLeod and the up-and-coming Calum MacLean. Mackay's writing is clear and easy to follow, and he brings the criminal underbelly of Glasgow alive. Man, what lives these characters lead. I read this trilogy three nights straight because I wanted to know what happens to Frank and Calum.

That's it for my 'splaining today. Good luck with your own readersplanations.

Fall Preview 2014: Part Seven

British crime mysteries have always charmed me. They have a very distinctive flavor and atmosphere. For one thing, all the different regions have different characteristics, in both geography and personality. My fall selections for this category take place in such locations as the Outer Hebrides off northern Scotland, as well as on the south coast and over in the Midlands.

One of Peter May's most intriguing series is a trilogy that takes place on the Isle of Lewis, part of the archipelago of the Outer Hebrides. The central character is Edinburgh Police Detective Inspector Fin Macleod. Fin left Lewis 18 years earlier, returning once only for the funeral of the aunt he lived with for several years. He had never looked back until he was sent to solve a murder that may have involved old friends and auld acquaintances he had not forgotten.

As the second book in the trilogy, The Lewis Man (Quercus, September 2) begins, Fin has come to the realization that he and his police career are not a good fit, so he packs up his belongings and moves back to Lewis. He is camping out and living rough while he restores his parents' derelict cottage, when there is a bit of excitement on the island. Changed little over the centuries, the custom of harvesting peat for fuel can, on occasion, yield secrets from the past. Now, a thin brown arm reaching out of the bog seems to be attached to an ancient Celt, because it is withered and deeply brown. But there is a cute little tattoo of Elvis on it. And the rest of the remains point to a tortured end.

Well, that was then, but now we have DNA and these double helices from the Lewis Man are a sibling match to someone on the island. This someone is an elderly farmer, Tormod Macdonald, whom Fin had known for years and who always claimed to be an only child. But Tormod is now suffering from dementia, and spending great amounts of time living in his head, revisiting his past. His was one of those childhoods spent in care and under the heavy hand of keepers, whose main job descriptions were sadists with sticks. One of Fin's other aims in returning to the island was to repair fences and reestablish old relationships. So when Tormod's family asks for help in this matter, because the local police are looking hard at the Lewis Man's only connection, Fin agrees to help. Fin has always had difficulty leaving his own past behind, but he tracks Tormod's secrets. Naturally, he turns over stones that are hiding surprises, mysteries and evil things that scuttle away trying to remain buried in the sand before he is finished.

The story is as captivating and forbidding as the Hebrides themselves. I read it when it came out in the UK in 2012.

Periphera and Sister Mary Murderous have mentioned G. M. Malliet's Max Tudor adventures before (see here, here, and here). Tudor is a vicar at St. Edwold's, in the not-always-tranquil village of Nether Monkslip in rural England. But once upon a time, Max worked for MI5 and, for one reason or another, he seems to need the skills useful in his previous life more than he could ever imagine.

Max and the villagers have been through A Wicked Autumn (followed by A Fatal Winter and A Pagan Spring) and they are now looking forward to A Demon Summer (Minotaur, October 7), the fourth book in the series. One of the problems this summer arises from local Lord Lilselivet, the 15th Earl in that lineage, who had never met a person he couldn't dislike––and the feeling was usually mutual.

One day, an ill-wisher slips him a dose of gastric discomfort encased in a fruitcake made by the Handmaids of St. Lucy of Monkbury Abbey. The earl's ire results in the bishop asking for help from Max Tudor––which is a turnabout, because he usually is counseling Max to stay away from murder investigations. This is a good thing, because at this abbey there also turns out to be a corpse in the cloister. Max is back again in MI5 mode.

Max wants to put this case to rest, because he is looking forward to his own good fortune, in the form of marriage to a lovely lady who is not exactly the ideal vicar's wife in the eyes of some in the village because of her independent beliefs.

Malliet always provides an interesting tale with characters you can identify with and root for.

It seems that earls just like to cause trouble. In Sally Spencer's eighth book featuring DCI Monika Paniatowski, Supping with the Devil (Severn House, October 1), there's the Earl of Ridley, who is planning to hold a rock festival on his vast grounds. This is the 1970s, Monika has some of the few XX chromosome pairs on the police force and she's not particularly welcome. She recognizes that the move by the Chief Constable to make her an advisor to the earl is really an attempt to wreck her career.

One of the earl's novel moves has given her some concern. He has chosen to employ the notorious Devil's Disciples motorcycle gang to provide the security for the festival. Added to this is the fact that the earl's mother is also outraged enough to want to throw a spanner in the works.

When the body of a tabloid journalist is discovered, the CC excludes Monika from the case, but he may find to his detriment that you can't keep a good woman down.

This is a story that takes on Monika after she has been around a while, so her back story may be a little vague, but the threads of the plot are laced with some humor and unexpected complications. I am really looking forward to this one. It's a bit of déjà vu for mem perhaps.

A little lighter fare is this debut novel by a young librarianm Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell (Minotaur, October 14). If you enjoy the Georgette Heyer mysteries, or the Dolores Gordon-Smith Jack Haldean series, this may a nice choice for a fall read.

Amory Ames is a wealthy young woman who has a rickety marriage to a young playboy, Milo, so she takes the opportunity for a trip with an old friend who is going to a luxury hotel, the Brightwell. This friend also happens to be ex-fiancé Gil Trent, who is trying to stop his sister from marrying a wastrel. Seeing a reflection of her own marital woes, Amory is happy to help. But when the disreputable ladies' man, Rupert, sticks his spoon in the wall (a Georgette Heyer phrase meaning "kicks the bucket") and Gil is arrested, Amory is determined to prove his innocence.

This becomes complicated when Milo turns up and Amory enlists his help in her investigation. Although theirs is an uneasy alliance, the stakes are high and the lines between the friends and enemies are blurred. A little romance, high society gone awry and murder, what more can you ask for? By the way, if you haven't read Gordon-Smith's Haldean series, you are in for a treat. He is an interesting and complex aviator who flew in World War I and is now a private detective.

Back in 2008, in John Harvey's Cold in Hand, Charlie Resnick went through a particularly distressing time and then must have gone into hibernation or retirement. But now he's back, in what is supposed to be the final Charlie Resnick book, Darkness, Darkness (Pegasus, September 15). Charlie Resnick is famous for his love of Dagwood sandwiches, jazz and his cats named after jazz greats, Dizzy, Miles and Pepper.

Charlie worked out of the Nottingham district and had an excellent squad working under him, and is now asked to return to active duty when a cold case heats up. The original crime was the disappearance of a woman during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85, which tore the country apart with civil discord and turned friend against friend and fathers against sons. Some of these enmities still exist. At that time, Resnick had recently been promoted to Inspector and he played a peripheral role in the case.

The case is slow moving, but the most intriguing part of the story is the flashes back and forth through the years, which meld the past and present of Resnick's life. Another book, which uses the Miners' Strike as a backdrop for murder, is Reginald Hill's exciting Underworld, a Dalziel and Pascoe adventure.

I have been a longtime fan of Charlie Resnick and I am sorry to see him go, but he deserves to sit back with his cup of coffee and his Thelonious Monk or Bessie Smith album and put his feet up. Harvey reports that this is certainly the last crime novel that he is going to write. I will keep up with John Harvey through his blog on Goodreads.

Finally, if you enjoy reading mysteries going a bit further back in time, with a sharp eye for period detail, take a look at Charles Finch's latest, The Laws of Murder (Minotaur, November 11), which takes place in 1876.

Charles Lenox is a Victorian gentleman who enjoys exploring via armchair, and relaxing in his study, reading quietly, and sipping tea. But there is another side to Lenox. He can't pass up a mystery, and at one time he could be found looking for clues throughout London; in Mayfair, in pubs, in the halls of parliament and beyond into the rarefied airs of Oxford.

But more recently, he has been a sedate Member of Parliament until he realized his calling was to do something a little more active. Lenox joins a group of friends in a new venture––a detective agency. He hopes he still has all his sleuthing faculties and will get a chance to prove this when a friend, a member of Scotland Yard, is shot and killed near Regent's Park. He is on the case to prove his mettle.

The clues are quite intriguing: an unlaced boot, a recent wound, and a mysterious luggage ticket––untraceable. Sherlock would have loved the case. Mostly, Lenox reads the message in the clues as danger ahead, but he is ready for anything!

In a few days, I would like to share with you some stories of home-grown crime that top off my fall reading selections.

Absolutely Perfect for You!

Removing wrinkles isn't thrilling enough

I've never set you up on a disastrous blind date, have I? So trust me when I tell you I have some suggestions that are absolutely perfect for you! Susie, the sport of extreme ironing. It combines danger with the satisfaction of a perfectly pressed shirt. Believe it or not, Rowenta sponsors a team. Sister Mary, wife carrying. The world-record holder is a tax attorney, and I bet the fortitude required to deal with taxes pays off during an obstacle race like this. Kev, toe wrestling. The perfect TGIF sport, requiring a good sense of humor, especially since "it is common courtesy for each player to remove the other player's shoes and socks."

For the rest of you, some absolutely perfect suggestions for books:

Estonian-style carrying is good training for tax law

For people who've been in psychotherapy or promise themselves they never will: Ellen Ullman's 2012 book, By Blood. A professor on leave rents a room in an old office building in 1970s San Francisco so he can work alone yet feel connected to other people. He becomes obsessed with eavesdropping on the therapist next door while she talks with one of her clients, who has a "richly creamy" voice and feels dropped down like an alien into her present relationship and the world of the couple who adopted her. Themes of identity, secrets, and obsession.

Sloths are banned from toe wrestling competition

Jazz lovers who like writers Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson: John Harvey's Wasted Years. Some present-day robberies remind Nottingham cop and loner Charlie Resnick of an investigation he handled a decade earlier.

People mulling a second career after racing horses: Dick Francis's Odds Against. In the first Sid Halley book, an ex-steeplechase jockey sets himself up in the private eye business.

Fans of resourceful female protaginists, not to mention those who love Paris: Cara Black's Murder in the Bastille. The fourth Aimée Leduc book finds our heroine struggling with her vision as she investigates a murder.

Bossaball is for volleyball players who need more oomph

Golf fans who don't believe someone named Bubba Watson won the 2012 Masters Golf Tournament: Simon Brett's Situation Tragedy. When actor Charles Paris wins the golf club barman role on the BBC TV series The Strutters, you know murder is par for the course.

People into long books, who think Vikram Chandra's wonderful Sacred Games is too short at 900 pages: Gregory David Roberts's Shantaram. This 950-page book, by a great Australian storyteller, is about a man who escapes from prison and flees to Mumbai, India. There, he runs into all sorts of interesting characters.

No snow necessary and picnicking-ants friendly

Those considering a career in stealing art masterpieces and double crosses, reasons why not to: Aaron Elkins's A Glancing Light. Seattle museum curator Chris Norgren travels to Bologna, Italy, to finalize arrangements for an upcoming art show, and he runs into Trouble.

Hardboiled/traditional fans who know how to be a friend: Jeremiah Healy's The Staked Goat. Healy is a law-school grad and former military policeman who uses this knowledge in a series about John Francis Cuddy, an Army-cop-turned-private-eye in Boston. In the second book of the series, Cuddy gets a call from an old buddy and hears a code for danger. Soon, Cuddy investigates his friend's death.

Extreme croquet is not for the timid or sane

Readers who struggle with an aging mother or need a goat-kidnapping how-to––or both: D. C. Brod's Getting Sassy. Robyn Guthrie's freelance journalism doesn't pay enough to keep her mother at Dryden Manor, so Robyn starts windowshopping around for a doable crime. It just so happens her accountant, Mick Hughes, is a former jockey who knows a goat-loving horse favored to win the Plymouth Million. It also just so happens the owner of the goat-loving horse conned Robyn's mother out of a lot of money.

Lovers of swashbucklers: Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Pirates of the Levant. The last book in the series featuring freelance soldier-of-fortune Captain Alatriste and his companion, Íñigo Balboa, is narrated by a reminiscing Íñigo.

There you go. One of these books will be perfect for you. If you can think of a book perfect for someone else, don't be shy. We're all looking for the absolutely perfect book. Set us up, please!