There's no rapture for these crime fiction characters

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Walter Mosley's Little Green

Little Green by Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy Politics: Review of Joseph Flynn's The President's Henchman

Fall is football season, and for many, fantasy football season. Participants study stats and games, carefully choose their players by whatever method is allowed and works for them, praying all the while to the gridiron gods and performing arcane personal rituals to choose and strengthen their players. At the end, their carefully nurtured teams reward the participants' hard work by playing opposing teams. I used to think politics worked kinda like that, but apparently not for the current Congressional lineup. Their infantile temper tantrums make a bar full of inebriated enthusiasts during the big game look like, well, rational grownups in comparison.

Author Joseph Flynn has put together a charming fantasy First Family team for us in his series of political thrillers featuring Jim McGill and his beautiful wife, President Patricia Grant. When Jim got his P.I. license after the election, the Secret Service changed his code name from "Valentine" to "Holmes." He couldn't imagine spending four or eight years in the White House cutting ribbons or offering cooking tips while Patricia did the heavy lifting for the country, and he had no interest in running the FBI or the CIA. With her complete approval and his 25 years experience as a cop, P.I. seemed a good fit for him.

It was a second marriage for both of them. After the then-Chicago cop had been shot and nearly killed, his first wife, Carolyn, felt that she couldn't cope with the stress, and they parted amicably. She had since remarried, but they remained friends and Jim saw his three kids often. He first met then-Representative Patricia Darden Grant (R-IL) when the life of her billionaire philanthropist husband Andrew was threatened by a radical religious group who wanted her vote on an extreme anti-abortion bill in Congress. She voted her conscience, and despite the best efforts of the police and FBI, the terrorists accomplished their threat. Within 12 hours, McGill had arrested Erna Godfrey, wife of fundamentalist preacher Burke Godfrey, and several others for the crime. Erna had been tried in federal court and was currently on death row in a federal facility.

McGill will accept only one member of the Secret Service and one White House driver as escorts, and chooses both very carefully. Young mixed-race agent Donald "Deke" Ky is his choice as bodyguard. Leo Levy, McGill's driver, is a good ol' Jewish boy from North Carolina, a veteran driver of the NASCAR circuit. Leo, while not willing to take a bullet for McGill (that's not his job, and besides, his mother would kill him if he got shot) helpfully offers to run over any shooter several times.

McGill rents himself a third floor office in a rehabbed building near Rock Creek Parkway and opens for business. After spending two weeks politely turning away lobbyists whose principals want to offer him five- or six-figure retainers "just in case" they ever require his services, he realizes he needs serious help, so places a call to his former police partner and family friend Margaret "Sweetie" Sweeney, an angelic looking ex-nun described as a cross between a Valkyrie and the Archangel Michael.

With Sweetie guarding his door, the crowds vanish and his first actual case appears. Chana Lochlan is the White House reporter for a Fox-type cable news service. She is receiving phone calls at her private number from a stalker who calls her "Gracie" and describes her body in intimate detail. She is sure she has never heard that voice before, and none of her lovers has ever called her by that name. He had opened their first conversation with the question "Do you remember the last time we made love?" Chana wants him caught and stopped, but is unwilling to go to the police––she reports the news, and doesn't want to make it. McGill accepts the case.

Meanwhile Patricia, a moderate Republican loathed by the extreme elements of both parties, has been handed a very hot political potato her first weeks in office. Carina Linberg, a colonel in the Air Force, has been accused of adultery with a married officer in the Navy. The Air Force is considering whether she should be tried for "conduct unbecoming an officer." Her married lover is the sole witness for the prosecution, and will not be charged. If found guilty, she could be dishonorably discharged and spend several years in Leavenworth. It has been assigned by the general to a very inexperienced lieutenant, in the obvious hope that he––and his results––could be controlled by his superiors. The President, in her position of Commander-in-Chief, takes direct charge of the investigation, assigning Lieutenant Welborn Yates an office in the White House for the duration and requiring him to report directly and exclusively to her.

The U.S. Congress or a barroom brawl?

Joseph Flynn is a seriously gifted storyteller with a wicked sense of humor, who leavens serious commentary and legal procedure with amusing and often outrageous incidents. McGill strolls around the city with only one Secret Service agent at his side and his car crawling a half block behind (wouldn't D.C. drivers just love that!) talking to anyone who stops him in the street. The President's Henchman is a huge tapestry of conflicting and interlocking interests that never stops moving; a feel-good story for America just when we badly need one.

It could have been ripped from the headlines, except that it doesn't go far enough in describing the intransigence and ninny-fication of our present Congress. Truth has outpaced even Mr. Flynn's fertile imagination there. For me, the saddest words in this book are the publisher's disclaimer: "This book is a work of fiction...Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental." That's a pity. Surely, we the people of these United States can, in sanity and good will, put together a pair of fantasy teams that can settle their disputes like competent adults within the framework of law to get our government working again! Go team, whichever side you're playing; let's not just sit on the sidelines, whining.

Veronica Mars: Not Just for Teens

If you keep up with popular culture––or even if you don't––then you probably heard recently about the website Kickstarter's impressive fundraising to make a movie followup to the Veronica Mars TV show. The show appeared for three seasons, from 2004-2007, starred Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars, Enrico Colantoni as her father, Keith, and featured a raft of young actors, like Tina Majorino, Jason Dohring, Percy Daggs III, Amanda Seyfried and Max Greenfield. Veronica Mars was set in the sun-drenched southern California beachside town of Neptune, where you were either extremely wealthy or worked for the rich folks.

I remember one evening in 2004 when I was channel surfing and caught the beginning of the show. I was definitely not part of its target demographic, but who could resist the smartest, most badass 17-year-old blonde PI ever?

When Keith Mars was the county sheriff and Veronica was dating Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn), son of billionaire software developer Jake Kane (Kyle Secor), she was part of the in crowd. All that changed after the murder of Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), Duncan's sister and Veronica's best friend. Certain anomalies on the scene and in alibis made Keith suspect Jake. All hell broke loose after that.

When Jake Kane's company went public several years earlier, he'd made millionaires of dozens of people in town; pretty much every single employee at the company. Needless to say, he became extremely popular, and fingering him for the murder of his own daughter was politically unwise. Keith was booted out of the sheriff's job and started his PI firm (Mars Investigations), Veronica's mother (Corinne Bohrer) left the family and Veronica was forced by her so-called friends to choose between loyalty to her father and her membership in the "09er" social group.

Veronica chose Keith. Working at Mars Investigations and being cast out by the 09ers opened Veronica's eyes to the dark underside of Neptune and Neptune High. She lost every bit of sunny naïveté she'd ever had and became a tough-talking teenage Philip Marlowe. She even packed heat and wasn't afraid to use it––in this case a taser, though, not a revolver.

Here's the basic plot of Season One of the series. Like many crime series, there is a season-long mystery to be solved; in this case, it's the murder of Lilly Kane. This part of the story is a bit reminiscent of Twin Peaks, only without the incomprehensible and supernatural plot twists. Every episode of Veronica Mars also includes a single-episode mystery to be solved; either a case that walks through the door at Mars Investigations or something that comes up at Neptune High School.

In the pilot episode, Veronica rescues the new kid in school, Wallace, when he's found duct-taped to the school's flagpole. It seems Wallace made a big mistake in his job at a convenience store. He pressed the silent alarm button when local Mexican-American biker gang members shoplifted beer, but when the sheriff showed up and confronted the gangbangers and Wallace, Wallace decided his skin would be more likely to stay intact if he didn't rat on them. Too late, though. New Sheriff Don Lamb may be a smarmy jerk, but he's not an idiot. He calls Wallace a wimp and takes the store's security tape. Of course, that means the bikers are going to be charged. In one evening, Wallace has managed to alienate both the new sheriff and the biker gang members, who are classmates at Neptune High.

Now that Veronica has made friends with Wallace, that means she's got problems with the gang, including its head, Weevil. After exchanging some witty threats with Weevil, Veronica offers to fix the criminal case if the gang agrees to leave Wallace alone. She manages this in a clever caper that shows her ingenuity and the fact that in spite of everything, she still has some people in her corner. Her scheme gives Wallace protection and has the welcome side benefit of causing acute embarrassment for both Sheriff Don Lamb and one of her 09er tormenters.

In another episode, "Credit Where Credit's Due," Veronica has established an almost friendship with Weevil. (As the Shangri-Las used to sing, "He's good-bad, but he's not evil.") Weevil's grandmother is fired from her longtime domestic job with the family of movie star Aaron Echolls (Harry Hamlin) and is charged with having fraudulently used a credit card she obtained under the Echolls name. Veronica investigates, and in the process of clearing Weevil's abuela, she finds out a lot more about the secret lives of the 09ers––and Weevil's gang.

Subjects of other episodes' mysteries include missing family members, a dognapping ring, a school mascot-napping, a con game perpetrated against young 09er women, steroid smuggling, blackmail, extortion, a cult, money stolen in a high-stakes poker game, a fake ID ring, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and bomb threats at Neptune High. And all the while, Veronica continues her investigation into Lilly Kane's murder, her missing mother, and her own rape at a party where she was roofied by a person or persons unknown. The final two episodes of Season One resolve all these mysteries, and they're thrill bombs, filled with action and motion.

Despite the fact that this show's protagonist is a teenager, this is no juvenile effort.  The mysteries' construction and solution are a cut above most TV crime drama. True, there's still time for teen romance, Veronica's cat-and-mouse battle against Sheriff Lamb, frequent clashes with the half-admiring Vice Principal Clemens, and high school hijinks; not that that's such a bad thing. This is also one of those shows filled with music that sends you to iTunes to check out that song with the catchy hook.

Here and here are some amusing moments from the show. Several bits feature teacher Mrs. Hauser, and I should note that the episode involving her (2.13: "Ain't No Magic Mountain High Enough") may be a psychological catharsis for you if you've had lingering emotional scars from a nemesis teacher.

For somebody AARP-eligible to enjoy a show about a teenage PI should be embarrassing, but can I call this a guilty pleasure if I frequently recommend it to my contemporaries––and the ones who've watched it have given it rave reviews?

Today is the final day of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign. If you want to be part of it, you can make a pledge anytime before 11pm EDT, here.

Even if you don't want to be part of the Kickstarter campaign, check out the show; no matter if you're well past your own high school years. You can easily find the DVDs for purchase or rental, or watch episodes online here. And, you're in luck, because reruns of the series have been showing on weekdays at 5pm EDT (and repeated on the weekends) for some months on SOAPnet (argh, I know), and they are back to the beginning starting today.