Castillo and Unger and Giveaways, Oh My!

For many Americans, the image of our hardy pioneer forebears struggling to make the wilderness productive and living their simple, but rewarding, lives is deeply embedded in our national psyche. In most respects, the Amish still embody those sturdy values of faith, honesty, hard work, and care for their neighbors. Author Linda Castillo's series featuring Chief of Police Kate Burkholder opens this hidden world to readers in a sensitive and often sympathetic manner.

The Dead Will Tell: A Kate Burkholder Novel by Linda Castillo (Book 6) (Minotaur, July 8, 2014)

Dale Michaels had been receiving threatening letters, culminating in a request for a meeting at the old burned-out Hochstetler farm. "I know what you did," proclaimed the first. Dale's body is found by his daughter in his own barn. He'd been shot and hanged. Stuffed deep into his mouth is one of the faceless Amish peg dolls with "Hochstetler" carved in the bottom. Several similar murders follow. The only known surviving Hochstetler is Billy, who was 14 the night his father was shot, his mother kidnapped, and his four siblings burned to death in the fire that subsequently swept through the farmhouse. Billy had hidden the younger children in a cellar while he ran to get the help that arrived too late. Today, Billy, who was later adopted by the Yoders, runs an apple orchard with the help of his wife and children. The case was never solved, and despite monumental efforts by the police, the body of Billy's mother, Wanetta, was never found. While Billy is the obvious suspect, his Amish wife swears that he was at home the night Dale was killed.

Amish Peg Dolls

Kate Burkholder was raised Amish, and while she is shunned for having defected to "the English" (the Amish name for anyone outside of their community), her ability to speak to members in their modified high German language is an asset in her police work. When she is approached by a terrified town council member who has also been receiving threatening notes, she realizes that she may first have to solve that old Hochstetler case to find the perpetrator of the current series of brutal murders. Several people have reported seeing an Amish woman walking along the roads at night. Some think it is the ghost of Wanetta, seeking her revenge. But Wanetta, if still alive, would be a very old woman now. The solution offers a rather unusual twist on the adage that old sins cast long shadows.

In the Blood by Lisa Unger (Touchstone, January 7, 2014; paperback edition by Pocket Books, July 22, 2014) (Non-series)

Lana Granger, the first-person narrator of Lisa Unger's stand-alone psychological thriller, is a liar. But then, so are most of the other major characters in this creepy, well-written thriller. At age 11, Lana came home one day to find her father standing over her murdered mother. He forced Lana to help him bury the body and lie to the police. Despite his efforts, he was tried for murder, and is currently on death row, all appeals having finally failed.

Lana is in graduate school studying psychology, with her trust fund running low. At the suggestion of her mentor, she accepts a job as part-time nanny to 11-year-old Luke, a troubled child. From the beginning Luke, a near genius, is manipulative and controlling. Lana, who was a brilliant and difficult child herself, feels a certain sympathy with both the boy and his harried mother, Rachel, so she falls in with his obscure and somewhat creepy games. The boy's father is not in evidence and is never mentioned.

The story is interspersed with the diary entries of an unnamed woman struggling to cope with her brilliant but defective "high maintenance" child. Then, Lana's roommate, Rebecca, disappears, the second of Lana's friends to do so within a few months. A brooding sense of twisted lives infuses this book almost from the beginning. It kept me second guessing myself throughout, with a surprise that pulled it all together at the end. Are psychopaths born or made? Can they ever be a functioning part of society, or are they just too dangerous? Read this book and decide for yourself. This was the first thriller I've read by Lisa Unger, but it certainly won't be the last!

Both Kate and Lana have borne witness to––and unwillingly participated in––terrible crimes in their earlier lives that led to their completely reinventing themselves as people. The insanity in Castillo's book, imposed by horrific outside events, feels almost clean in comparison to the (perhaps?) genetic evil that infuses Unger's. Both are terrific summer reads.

The Giveaway:

Through the courtesy of Minotaur Books/St. Martin's Press and Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, we have a package consisting of a hardcover copy of Linda Castillo's The Dead Will Tell and a mass-market paperback copy of Lisa Unger's In the Blood to send to one lucky reader in the U.S. or Canada. If interested, email us at materialwitnesses@gmail.com by next Friday, July 11. One reader will be randomly selected to have the chance to read and compare these two chilling and remarkable books. We'd love to hear what you think of them!

Happy Independence Day. Long may it wave!

The Perfect Travel Companion

I laughed when one of my friends wished she had somewhere to go, so she could listen to an audio book in the car. I know exactly what she means, though. Sitting in a moving vehicle for hours can be a treat if you have the perfect travel companion: entertaining enough to merit attention, but not so demanding as to make your head spin. While this also goes for the human in the seat next to you, let's focus now on books along for the ride.

Max Kinnings's Baptism (Quercus, 2014) is a minute-by-minute account of a London Underground train hijacking. Tommy and Belle Denning, religious fanatic twins, kidnap conductor George Wakeham's kids and thereby force him to stop the train in the tunnel between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road stations. The book is amazingly suspenseful. Initially, the 300+ passengers, with a few exceptions, don't know the train has been hijacked. Point of view varies among the Dennings; some of the Dennings' former associates; Wakeham and his wife, who is also on the train; MI5; and DCI Ed Mallory, the blind hostage negotiator. Unlike many thriller writers, Kinnings draws compelling psychological portraits of his characters. Graphic violence. Riveting; the hours will fly by.

There's a pleasing symmetry about reading a book involving a train while traveling by train. One of these days I'll devote an entire post to train settings, but in the meantime, let me tell you about I Married a Dead Man, William Irish's 1958 classic. Irish is one of the pseudonyms used by noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich was a master at creating an atmosphere of paranoia, and does he ever in this book about Helen Georgesson, a woman abandoned by her lover when she became pregnant. Helen is traveling across the country when she meets Patrice and Hugh Hazzard, newlyweds expecting a child. When their train crashes, only Helen survives. She decides to pass herself off as Patrice to Hugh's wealthy, grieving family, who have never met Patrice. Things get tough for Helen/"Patrice" when her old lover comes weaseling around.

If you like eccentric British characters, clever traditional mysteries, and witty language that makes you laugh out loud, Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles are for you. In the first book, Coffin Scarcely Used, DI Purbright and Sgt. Love investigate a series of murders, beginning with unlikable newspaper editor Marcus Gwill, who is found electrocuted in his slippers, his mouth filled with marshmallows, and flower shapes burned into his palms.

All twelve books in this series are fun, but be sure not to miss Lonelyheart 4122, in which you'll meet lovely conwoman Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who signs up with a matrimonial bureau.

On the weekend before Christmas, robbers shoot two super-mall guards and disappear with a whole heap of money in Silvermeadow by Barry Maitland. Scotland Yard's DCI David Brock and Sgt. Kathy Kolla investigate the robbery, as well as the death of a young girl, which is tied into disappearances from the mall. I like the chemistry between Brock and Kolla, and I also like the information that writer/architect Maitland adds to his books. In this one, the fifth of the 12-book series (you don't have to read its predecessors to enjoy it), we learn about how malls are designed to encourage consumption.

Ruth Rendell writes the excellent 24-book series featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. In the 2013 book, No Man's Nightingale (Scribner), Wexford has retired from the Kingsmarkham police force. Mike Burden brings him in as a consultant when the controversial vicar, Sarah Hussein, is murdered in her vicarage. This isn't among Rendell's best Wexford books, but it's still very enjoyable to spend time in the company of Wexford; Burden; Wexford's wife, Dora; and Rendell's other meticulously drawn characters.

When I'm traveling by plane or train with my husband, we often work on a crossword puzzle together. We alternate between impressing and amusing each other with our right and wrong guesses. A good book après-crossword puzzle is Ruth Rendell's standalone of psychological suspense, One Across, Two Down. It features a no-good named Stanley Manning. Stanley is addicted to cross-word puzzles, and he can hardly wait for the mother of his long-suffering wife, Vera, to die so he can spend the inheritance.

Happy traveling, and happy reading!

Review of David Ellis's The Last Alibi

The Last Alibi by David Ellis

On Thursday, Della Streetwise will tell you about some sure-fire scares for Halloween. She'll also include some titles for those whom the name "Stephen King" inspires a mad scramble for the exit. Today, I have a suspenseful book that kept me up late, turning pages to see what in the world was going on and how it all would end. It doesn't pit its hero against rampaging zombies, a deadly virus, or a crazed killer. (Well, okay, sorta that last one; but, not in a way you'd expect, even after you read my review.) It takes place day-by-day in a Chicago murder trial. Flashbacks to six months earlier interrupt the trial and count down to the present, so we see how Jason Kolarich comes to sit at the defendant's table, and not in his usual role of defense attorney. Early on, Jason tells us he'll probably testify, but he's not sure if it will be enough to establish reasonable doubt. He's sure of only one thing—that when he testifies, he will not tell the truth.

Jason, a former college football player, was a prosecutor before he joined his best friend, Shauna Tasker, in Tasker & Kolarich. Now in his 30s, he grew up with his brother Pete in a dysfunctional home, where "Dad volcanoes" made conflict avoidance an art form. Jason still dislikes conflict in his personal life, but he lives for it in the courtroom. We first meet him in 2009's The Hidden Man, when he defends a man accused of a revenge killing; by then, Jason had already won fame involving a case of high-office political corruption, detailed in Breach of Trust. (Note: Edgar Award-winning author and lawyer Ellis prosecuted and convicted Governor Rod Blagojevich in the sensational 2009 impeachment trial before the Illinois Senate.) Last year, Jason took on the murder defense of a homeless Iraq war vet in The Wrong Man.

Now, in The Last Alibi (August 2013, Putnam), Jason hasn't been himself since blowing out his knee while running earlier in the year. Out of court, his life is a shipwreck. He's beginning to feel like a shill; even if he gets his clients off once, sooner or later, they'll find themselves behind prison bars. Shauna and Joel Lightner, the firm's private eye, say Jason looks like shit and wonder what the heck is wrong with him.

This is the Jason who begins to court the beguiling court reporter, Alexa Himmel. It's also the Jason who eyes an odd-looking new client and doesn't know what to make of him. Recently, two women James Drinker knows have been found, stabbed to death. Drinker says he didn't kill them, but he's afraid he'll be arrested. In fact, Drinker wonders if he's being framed and asks Jason how he'd go about framing somebody. Jason helpfully mentions a few things he'd do. Then he suggests Drinker go to the police before they come to him.

But Drinker doesn't want to go to the police. As more women die in a similar way, Jason begins to suspect that his client is killing them; yet, he can't ethically report his suspicions. Inevitably, Jason comes to wonder just who is framing whom.

You don't need to be a fan of courtroom dramas or legal thrillers to appreciate The Last Alibi, although there's plenty here for such fans to love. For Jason, a trial means war. It's not so much that he loves to win as that he hates to lose. It's a pleasure to learn his insider's view of the courtroom's characters and what he thinks of the prosecution's strategy and witnesses' testimony. While Jason's attorney, Shauna, is conscientious and competent, she's not highly experienced in homicide cases, and Jason often overrules her proposed strategy. Even so, he tells us he wouldn't consider anyone else defending him. The reader only incrementally understands his defense, as Jason and Shauna slowly reveal the legal strategy and what happened before trial.

I really like series regulars Jason and Shauna, who both narrate. I feel I have a handle on what makes them tick, and on the motivations of the other characters, too. Writer Ellis does a superb job of unexpectedly yanking the plot this way and that, and of heightening suspense with the hints Jason drops and Shauna's self-revelations. Inside and outside of the courtroom, The Last Alibi thrills. It's a perfect fall or winter read. Get comfy, because you won't want to put down this diabolical legal thriller before you're finished.

Review of Erin Kelly's The Burning Air

The Burning Air by Erin Kelly

The mother-child relationship can generate a lot of heat. Think about how Psycho's Norma Bates emotionally crippled her son Norman (Anthony Perkins), and then she, Norman, and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) pay the price. Recall the havoc caused by the relationship between Stephen King's monstrously abusive Margaret and her telekinetic daughter Carrie. But even the most loving and well-meaning of mothers can plant the seeds of their children's ruin. Take the Greek goddess Thetis, who loved her son Achilles and tried to give him immortality by dipping him in the river Styx, but left him vulnerable because she'd held him by his heel. There's no denying that the bond between mothers and their children can make the children stronger or destroy them.

In her third novel, The Burning Air, Erin Kelly enthralls us with the unintended, devastating consequences of mothers' relationships with their children. That combustible familial bond—as well as class, identity, obsession, psychosis, and vengeance—is portrayed with the intensity and aching sense of loss we expect from Ruth Rendell, Kate Atkinson, or Tana French. This book is as suspenseful as Kelly's previous fiction, The Poison Tree and The Dark Rose (also published as The Sick Rose), yet it tells a more complex story.

As The Burning Air begins in January 2013, Saxby matriarch and court magistrate Lydia MacBride has terminal cancer. She has obsessively kept a diary her whole life, and she now feels compelled to record her confession of an act that took place years ago. It's unthinkable, however, that any eyes other than her own would see it. As Lydia writes, "Reputation is one thing; family is quite another. Family matters." And it was love for her children, love for her son, that caused her to act wrongly as she did.

The book leaps to November 2013, nine months after Lydia's death. The plan is to gather for a MacBride family healing. Lydia's husband Rowan and their three adult children—Sophie, Tara, and Felix—will assemble at the MacBrides' country vacation home, Far Barn, in Devon; participate in the village celebration of Fire Night, as traditional; and scatter Lydia's ashes.

An omniscient narrator describes the arrival of Sophie, who gave birth to Edie on the day of her mother's death, her husband Will, and their four children. The writing is gorgeous and full of foreboding, as "the hedgerows themselves seemed to squeeze their oversized car along the road like a clot through a vein," and "branches jabbed witchy fingers through the windows" before they spot the barn, "a black mass on a cloud-blind night." Once inside, the rich reds of the barn's upholstered furniture, rugs, and tapestries give one "the impression of standing in the belly of a great beast." The acoustics of the barn are strange, and there is no nearby cell-phone reception.

The atmospherics of the family's arrival and the barn aren't the only evening's premonition of the trouble to come. Rowan, retired headmaster of Saxby's elite Cathedral School, is already there, inexplicably drunk. Tara soon confides that Jake, her 14-year-old mixed-race son from a teenage relationship, has been in serious trouble. Tara and her lover, Matt, notice tensions between Sophie and her husband Will. Twenty-nine year old Felix, a disfigured furniture-restorer who lives "entirely ironically," unsettles his family by arriving with his first-ever girlfriend, a ravishingly beautiful woman named Kerry, who barely speaks.

As the day of Fire Night unfolds, attention centers on baby Edie, the "beating heart of the family." Her family adores her; cousin Jake wants to feed her; Kerry is entranced by her. This creates sparks of friction, as Sophie is overwhelmed by feelings of jealousy and protectiveness toward Edie, but she's pulled in many directions. She discovers an old sweater of her mother Lydia's, and instinctively holds it to her nose and inhales. "The rush back through time, to their house in Cathedral terrace, was so swift that Sophie half expected to feel her hair flying." She must pay attention to her husband and sons, too.

Thus does Sophie unintentionally set the stage for Lydia's close-knit MacBrides—three generations of upper-class privilege—to harvest the seeds sown by Lydia and another well-meaning mother with her own secrets, whom we meet in an extended flashback through her child's narration. Author Kelly peers into that narrator's head and illuminates the symbiotic mother-child dynamic like a psychiatrist presenting an interesting case study, but with a twist that shocks the audience. Other characters and the multiple narrative voices are also well done. Even though the ending's structure somewhat deflects the arc of suspense, I liked its kaleidoscopic nature.

The Burning Air is entertaining and evocative, character-driven suspense, about the dangerous nature of mother love. Its flame can burn like hell.

Note: I received a free digital galley of Erin Kelly's The Burning Air, published earlier this year, by Viking/Penguin Group (USA).

Book Review of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Secrets can make delightful surprises. Check under the tree on Christmas morning. But you don't need to turn over a rock to find another kind of surprise. You can pick up Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, in which there are more hidden things awaiting discovery than those offered by the treasure-hunt clues Amy always leaves her husband, Nick Dunne, on their wedding anniversaries. On their fifth anniversary, Nick has a more serious puzzle to solve. He returns home to find Amy's declawed cat outdoors, the front door wide open, the iron still plugged in, the tea kettle burning, imperfectly mopped up blood in the kitchen and the living room appearing as if a cyclone had dropped in. And Amy herself? Gone.

When the book opens, narrator Nick is reflecting on his wife's pretty head. The shape of it. What's inside of it. In fact, he says the question he's asked most often during their marriage, if not out loud, is "What are you thinking, Amy?"

Amy Elliott inspired her child-psychologist parents' children's book series about a perfect girl named Amazing Amy. The books always ended with a multiple-choice question about what Amy would do in the circumstances. Perhaps it isn't surprising that when Amy grows up, she earns a master's degree in psychology and writes personality quizzes for women's magazines. She doesn't need to work, though, because Amazing Amy amassed a nice trust fund. This comes in handy when Nick, a magazine writer, loses his job and Amy loses hers shortly thereafter. They spend weeks in their pajamas, aimlessly roaming their Brooklyn brownstone, until Nick receives a call from his twin sister, Margo, in North Carthage, Missouri. Nick and Margo are so close he thinks of her as "mytwingo." Their mother has cancer and maybe six months to live. Nick isn't fond of his father, who's so full of fury his teeth grinding can be heard across the room, and who now lives in an assisted living center, but Nick has always loved his mother. Without consulting Amy, Nick promises Go that they'll move back to his childhood home to help Go cope.

Nick had a boyhood job playing Huck Finn in Hannibal, Missouri.

Once in Missouri, Nick and Go borrow $80,000 from Amy, from her trust fund, to open a bar. Nick figures people will always need a drink and Amy can take her time to figure out what she wants to do. This sounds like a workable plan, but what's the saying about the best-laid plans of mice and men? This one doesn't adequately take personalities into account. At one time, Go tells Nick, "You'd literally lie, cheat, and steal––hell, kill––to convince people you are a good guy." He craves approval and can't deal with angry or tearful women. This is when he feels his father's rage rise up. After Amy is gone, Nick confides to the reader: Amy could tell you about that, if she were here.

Early little asides like that one unsettle the reader. So do Nick's descriptions of a new, brittle, bitter Amy who was no longer his wife "but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers . . . untrained in the intricate dangerous work of solving Amy." One reads Nick's account in chapters dated "The Day of," "Six Days Gone," etc.

Given that Nick has called Amy "the girl with an explanation for everything," it's instructive to read Amy's sporadic diary entries, which alternate with Nick's narrative chapters. Amy is articulate and opinionated, insightful and funny. Her diary begins on January 8, 2005, the day she meets Nick ("a great, gorgeous dude, a funny, cool-ass guy"). Amy describes her parents' marriage as so "cherishing" that she feels like a useless appendage who's pressured to be perfect. The perfect girl becomes the perfect girlfriend and the perfect wife for the perfect man. Amy doesn't force Nick to do pointless tasks, and make myriad sacrifices to prove his love for her like other women whose husbands perform like dancing monkeys. The move to Missouri changes them and their marriage. The competitiveness and relentless achieving that made her at home in New York City are greeted with "open-palmed acceptance and maybe a bit of pity" in Missouri. Her husband and his twin sister often make her feel like a third wheel. By the morning of Nick and Amy's fifth wedding anniversary, they have been in Carthage two years. What happens then?

Amy says Tom Petty's music has accompanied everything important in her life.

Gillian Flynn photo by Heidi Jo Brady

Gone Girl has appeared on best-selling lists since its publication in June 2012 by Crown. There are good reasons for the book's popularity. It's a psychological feast about love and violence and a treatise about various types of manipulation. Who can know the truth of a marriage? If Flynn didn't enjoy writing it, she fooled me. Her characters revel in themselves and their admissions to the reader. I'm not sure what true-life disappearance inspired Flynn, but some elements of Nick's story after he calls the cops to report his wife missing resemble real events, like the 2002 disappearance of Laci Peterson in Modesto, California.

Carthage's fictional cops, Det. Rhonda Boney ("brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday ugly") and her partner, Det. Jim Gilpin (who looks like he should stink of cigarettes and sour coffee but who smells of Dial soap instead) organize a search and a press conference. Nick's in-laws swoop into town to set up a Find Amy Dunne headquarters at the Days Inn, and all kinds of people seep out of the woodwork to help. Nick decides his journalist background qualifies him to investigate possible suspects from Amy's past. The case catches the eye of Ellen Abbot (think "Nancy Grace"), a permanently furious former prosecutor and victims' rights advocate, who doesn't like the sound of Amy's vanishing or the looks of Nick's killer smile. Human tragedy becomes cable TV entertainment. Need I tell you that before long Nick hires a celebrity attorney to represent him?

At this point, I hope I don't need to tell you this is a very fun and suspenseful read. Get a friend to read it too, so you can compare your interpretations of the clues with another reader. You'll be thinking about the foreshadowing, the characters, our media-obsessed culture and the book's ending when the final page is gone.

Note: I received a free copy of Gone Girl for purposes of this review.

Book Review of Michael Kardos's The Three-Day Affair

The Three-Day Affair by
Michael Kardos

If you're lucky, you have no personal experience with the proverb "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" You can count on your friends to cheer your successes, help you mop up your messes, and forgive you for liking bad movies. If they catch you careening off the rails, they yank you back on. Before the weekend events of Michael Kardos's The Three-Day Affair, narrator Will Walker would probably have agreed.

Will and three other young men became very close friends at Princeton University. Every year since they graduated nine years ago, these best buddies reunite for a weekend of golf and conversation. This year, rather than meeting at a luxurious resort, Will asks them to come to his home in suburban New Jersey. He's a sound engineer at a third-rate recording studio, and he's trying to save money to start his own small record company. He feels a little bad requesting this, because his friends are past scrimping and saving. Jeffrey Hocks, married to Sara, the most beautiful woman of their Princeton class, earned $30 million in a dot-com company's stock before he was age 25; Nolan Albright is a wealthy Missouri farmer's son who's now running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives; Evan Wolff is overloaded with work, but he'll make partner at his high-powered Manhattan law firm. Despite his embarrassment, Will is confident Jeff, Nolan, and Evan will not only understand, but they'll also be happy to invest in his new company. They're that kind of friends.

Princeton

After college graduation, Will became the drummer in a New York City band. He and his wife Cynthia, who's in public relations, fled to New Jersey after the band's bassist was killed by a stray bullet while she stood near Will outside the Cobra Club, where they'd just finished a gig. Cynthia and Will have lived in a rental house on a quiet street for three years. They're now expecting their first baby and, surprisingly to Will, are content with their lives.

Cynthia heads off to stay with her sister for the weekend as Nolan arrives. Jeff is due in a few hours; Evan's job has detained him in the city, but he'll come as soon as he can. The forecast is for a pleasant, laid-back weekend with friends. As Will explains in the prologue, "By then, violent crime was about the furthest thing from my mind, until the night when I helped one of my best friends kidnap a young woman."

Ordinary man Richard Hannay in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps

With an impulsive act so dumb it transcends understanding, Will is drafted into the club of ordinary men placed in extraordinary situations, where he joins characters such as Fredric Brown's newspaperman Doc Stoeger (Night of the Jabberwock) and the civilians pressed into service against the Nazis by espionage writers Alan Furst (Dark Voyage) and Helen MacInnes (The Double Image). These ordinary folks surprise themselves, and so does Will. Of course, Will isn't exactly extraordinarily ordinary, since he did make it through Princeton. Part of the pleasure of reading this book is the mental trip Will takes back to his college days in an attempt to recognize the friends with whom he explored literature, life's meaning, and what it's like to fall in love. These are the friends with whom he now shares a nightmare, and he's no longer sure of what they, or he, will do. They're as unfamiliar as when they first met: the Princeton legacy from Los Angeles whose baby clothes had little tigers stitched onto them, the ambitious and jaw-droppingly hard-working Missourian, and the nice guy from New Jersey with a deep love of music.

The high IQ and sophistication of these men make their weekend behavior surprising, and the tale isn't absolutely airtight in its logic. But then again, who's to say what I'd do on such a weekend with college friends in Newfield, New Jersey? After all, isn't this a story about smart people doing stupid things; a crisis of conflicting needs that create a moral dilemma; a situation in which everyone defers to everyone else to solve a problem? Man, oh man, The Three-Day Affair is the sort of book you read with one eye closed because you can hardly stand to see what will happen, but there's no way you can put it down. Author Kardos created characters you can't help but care about. Will is wonderfully human. Great use of settings, clear writing, and a plot gratifying in its complexity and surprises. It would make a terrific book for a group to read and discuss. Pandora's box was opened, but by whom and when?

Michael Kardos

Like his protagonist, Will, the author grew up in New Jersey, received a degree in music from Princeton, and played the drums professionally. Kardos currently lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where he is an assistant professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His previous publications include short stories and a collection in One Last Good Time. I'm happy to say he's working on another novel now.

Note: For review purposes, I received a free advance reading copy of The Three-Day Affair, published earlier this month by Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, which also named it one of fall's best books.

Book Review of Ruth Rendell's The St. Zita Society

The St. Zita Society by Ruth Rendell

In this, her sixty-second book, Ruth Rendell channels ethologist Jane Goodall. The population under study, however, isn't lowland gorillas, but the residents of Hexam Place, a swanky street of white-painted stucco or golden brick Georgian houses in Knightsbridge, London.

Living in these houses is a diverse group in class, character, and ethnicity. Lord and Lady Studley, their two servants, and their driver, Henry Copley, reside at the large, detached Number 11. Gay men Damian Philemon and Roland Albert, Thea, who teaches information technology classes, and 92-year-old Miss Grieves all have flats in Number 8. Rabia Siddiqui, a widowed Muslim woman who's wonderfully warm and honest, is the nanny for Preston and Lucy Still's youngest child at Number 7. Monserrat Tresser, 23-year-old daughter of one of Preston's friends, is their live-in au pair. Her Serene Highness the Princess Susan Hapsburg has lived at Number 6 with her lady's maid, June Caldwell, since the Princess left her husband, an iffy Italian prince, 60 years earlier. The Princess's cleaner was born in Antigua and also cleans several other Hexam Place homes. The Kleins, a pair of Americans, celebrate Thanksgiving at Number 14. At Number 3 is an easy-going pediatrician, Dr. Simon Jefferson, and his handsome driver Jimmy, who has a bedroom downstairs. Dr. Jefferson's gardener, Dex Flitch, also tends Ivor Neville-Smith's garden at Number 5.

Of all the characters we meet, Dex shows us most openly that The St. Zita Society is a Rendell creation. Dex is a former patient of Dr. Jefferson's friend Dr. Mettage. After trying to kill his mother, Dex has been declared sane. He has seen no evil spirits since coming to work for the kindly Dr. Jefferson in Hexam Place, but sometimes it takes weeks of observing and following them before Dex can be sure. To Dex, people appear as if they wear featureless masks. His smiles scare Jimmy. He never told Dr. Mettage or Dr. Jefferson that women feel like a threat to him, although he did tell Peach, his god. Peach resides in his cell phone and communicates with Dex in enigmatic ways. Then again, what are a god's ways––stopping the rain, making the sun shine, getting Dex a job––if not mysterious?

Like the rest of England, Hexam Place is not a classless society, but the upper and lower classes intertwine, as well as interact in the roles of employer and employee. Monserrat, a not-so-nice woman, doesn't do much for anyone unless it's to her advantage; socialite Lucy Still makes use of this trait when she wants to see her lover. Preston Still, a wealthy insurance baron, loves his children, but expresses it only in his concern for their health. Seemingly more than both of them put together, Rabia loves their baby, Thomas. Dr. Jefferson came from a working-class family and wouldn't hear of Jimmy, his driver, calling him "sir" and would walk half a mile without complaint to where the car is parked. Jimmy, rather than despising Dr. Jefferson for this, rather likes him. On the other hand, Lord Studley thinks nothing of making Henry wait in the car outside Number 11 for two hours. And this is the reason some of the Hexam Place household help meet at the neighborhood pub, the Dugong, to form the St. Zita Society.

St. Zita

St. Zita, June informs them, is the patron saint of domestic servants. ("If you see a picture of her, she'll be holding a bag and a bunch of keys.") Although Thea isn't a servant, she does many unpaid tasks for Damian, Roland, and Miss Grieves, and is part of the Society. They tackle such problems as dog walkers who don't clean up satisfactorily, noise, pigeons, and cats. They do not tackle the problem of Lord Studley's rudeness to Henry, because Henry has a fit at the very idea. Henry, who has a "marked resemblance to Michelangelo's David," had a difficult time finding this job, and his flat at Number 11 is very pleasant. Its one drawback is that it doesn't have a lock, and Lady Studley, with whom Henry believes he has no choice but to have an affair if he wants to keep his job, has the habit of simply walking in. This makes Henry feel as if he's living by the skin of his teeth, because he's also having an affair with the Studleys' beautiful college-age daughter, who is crazy about him and wants to tell her father. Henry thinks this is crazy.

Hexam Place is united, more or less, by the tradition of candles in the windows at Christmas time. The neighbors share the visits of an urban fox that slinks from house to house, but prefers the garbage of Miss Grieves. Miss Grieves can't get up the stairs fast enough to chase the fox, but she keeps a gimlet eye out for it and on her fellow citizens. The fox can be excused for its manners; after all, it is a wild animal. What about Hexam Place's human residents? How does one account for their immoral behavior and their deliciously unexpected deaths?

photo by Jerry Bauer

Ruth Rendell has received the Diamond Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers Association and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She writes the wonderful series featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford set in Sussex, England, and nonseries books. Her most complex and disturbing psychological suspense is written under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. The St. Zita Society, a nonseries book published in August 2012 by Scribner, isn't that type of unsettling story; rather, it's an insightful and amusing sociological study of upstairs, downstairs and down-the-street relationships enlivened by death. It's for people who enjoy a very character-driven plot and perfect for an autumn evening.

Note: It's easy to learn the characters' names and their relationships if you photocopy the street map, which shows the houses and their occupants, on the inside cover of the book.

Memories Are Made of This

I'm sure you've walked into a room, only to discover you've forgotten what you planned to do there. And maybe you've heard the comment, "You'd forget your head if it weren't screwed on." Finding yourself headless would create a world of problems; however, this isn't The Twilight Zone, so we won't explore this topic further. The head sitting so firmly on your shoulders is capable of generating enough Big Headaches for you, like, how do you know what you're perceiving is reality? Can you trust the validity of your memories, the foundation of your self-identity? Is it possible for your memories to be implanted or altered?

These are questions David Ambrose poses in his 2000 book, The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk. The title refers to Luis Buñuel's surrealist film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which some friends are trying to have dinner together, but their plans are constantly thwarted by disturbing events, odd scenes involving other characters, or their own bizarre dreams. None of these interruptions cause the friends to give up the idea of sharing a meal; they relentlessly continue their efforts, despite the illogical or impossible nature of what's happening around them.

Like a viewer who tries to make sense of that movie, a reader must figure out the actions of Ambrose's characters, who may not be what they seem. Brian Kay is a middle-aged man with brain damage caused by a viral infection. He remembers everything before the virus, but he can't turn experiences since then into permanent memory. Susan Flemyng, Kay's neurologist, conducts research in visual memory in Washington, D.C. When the book opens, she is enjoying close relationships with her father, husband, and young son. Charlie Monk has difficulty remembering events from his youth. He's currently a James Bond figure working for an agency so secret it doesn't have a name; Charlie takes instructions from a man he knows simply as Control. In between his super-heroic feats, Charlie relaxes in Los Angeles with beautiful women and good wine.

As the plot progresses, the characters and the reader relax no more. Dr. Flemyng explains:

"Chuang Tzu was a Chinese sage who lived twenty-five hundred years ago. He told once of how he dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamed he was a man. People have been telling that story ever since, because it represents something that mankind has always known instinctively--that we can never be sure whether the outside world corresponds to the picture of it that we have in our head. We can't even be sure that the outside world is actually there."

While The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk isn't a ghost story, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw comes to mind. Ambrose cleverly and energetically twists his futuristic thriller's plot, and the reader will need to interpret what has happened. This is one of those books that provoke thinking about the nature of evil.

After choosing his identity and memories, this shopper
should choose a good memory-foam mattress.

Carsten Stroud's Niceville, published in June 2012 by Knopf, is another. Sylvia Teague has often thought Niceville, founded in 1764 by four families who've now been feuding for a century, would be "one of the loveliest places in the Deep South if it had not been built, God only knew why, in the looming shadow of Tallulah's Wall." On top of this limestone cliff sits an ancient forest that whispers and creaks around a large sinkhole, full of cold black water, called Crater Sink. Cherokees considered it a place of evil; all the present-day citizens know is that nothing goes into Crater Sink and comes back out. In addition to this unsettling place, Niceville claims a bothersome statistic: people disappear at a much higher rate than the national average.

The latest such disappearance is Rainey Teague, Sylvia's 10-year-old son, last seen looking into the window of Uncle Moochie's pawnshop. A few days later, the kid is found. Oh, man, you'd never guess where. This is the point in the book when I visited the likker cabinet for a glass of bourbon and settled deep down in a comfy chair to savor Stroud's vivid writing, oddball characters, black humor, and crazily complex noir plot.

What else? Two men rob the First Third Bank, and a third coolly shoots not only the cops pursuing the first two, but also the people covering the chase in the news helicopter. Then the shooter puts on his Ray-Bans and lights a cigarette, "consoled by the warmth and the lovely light" of what promises to be a pretty evening. Do I need to tell you these three outlaws have watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? I must also mention a dentist who poses and then photographs his unconscious female patients in erotic tableaus, and a civic leader who installed a video camera in the bathroom his teenage daughters use.

Obviously, those characters make a mockery of the name of the town, but lawyer Kate Kavanaugh tries to be nice. Her client just won a divorce custody case against her husband, the extremely nasty Mr. Christian Antony Bock, who should, but doesn't, ooze down into a dank cellar and stay there. Although Kate's husband Nick is troubled (he served in Iraq with the Army Special Forces), he's now a more-than-competent lawman with the Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division, and he adores his wife. Kate's dad is a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, and her sister is married to a hot-tempered jerk who runs a private security company. Sorry, I was talking about good guys, and the bad guys keep intruding. There are only so many nice people in Niceville.

There are more disappearances, macabre deaths, and mysterious events that can only be explained in supernatural terms. Like Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280, Niceville puts a comedic edge on crime. And like The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk, it will give you a chance to contemplate how memories can entrap their creator and others, and identity can be manipulated for evil purposes.

This gothic thriller isn't for everyone. It's not a soothes-you-to-sleep read. If you appreciate dark humor, lyrical writing, and a plot that's spooky as hell, master storyteller Carsten Stroud wrote it for you. Let's hope very hard we'll see a sequel.

Note: I received a free review copy of Niceville.