Review of Kate Racculia's Bellweather Rhapsody

Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

It's a November weekend in 1987, and the down-at-heel Bellweather resort hotel in the Catskills is hosting its annual music convention for New York's high school talent. Twins Rabbit (Bertram really, but everybody calls him Rabbit––and that does seem like a slight improvement over Bertram, doesn't it?) and Alice Hatmaker from tiny Ruby Falls will be there, Alice for the second time.

Alice is a singer, featured in all of her high school's musical theater performances, and absolutely convinced she is destined for stardom. Rabbit is a much more low-key character. He's a bassoonist in the orchestra and hasn't managed yet to gin up the courage to tell anyone--even Alice--that he's gay.

Viola Fabian, the new organizer of the competition, is as striking and sociopathic as Cruella de Vil, and her flautist daughter plans to use this weekend as a chance to get away from her. Fisher Brodie, the symphony conductor, and Natalie Wilson, music teacher at the Hatmakers' school, are scarred veterans of their different past experiences with Viola.

Minnie Graves is an outsider to the conventioneers, but not to the Bellweather. Exactly 15 years earlier, when she was a girl, she witnessed an event outside Room 712 that has haunted her ever since, and that she hopes to exorcise this anniversary weekend. Harold Hastings, longtime Bellweather concierge, has been a witness to years of music competitions--and the mystery of Room 712.

You can just imagine the emotions, hormones and scheming when you gather hundreds of talented, competitive teenagers, and their adult supervisors, and shut them up in kind of spooky old hotel in the middle of nowhere for three days, as a blizzard approaches--maybe you've even experienced it yourself, or you had a too-much-pizza-fueled nightmare in which American Pie's band campers and Glee's singers and orchestra got transported to The Shining. When a new horror occurs in Room 712, all that intensity is dialed up to the peak setting.

Some actually are describing this book as Glee + The Shining, and I can see that, but there is more––and less––to it than that. It doesn't live up the horror potential it presents in its opening, but it does combine a young adult coming-of-age story with an amateur detective story, adding in some romance, magical realism, and some horror/suspense, all done in breezy, entertaining prose.

Racculia is one of those writers who can paint you a character portrait in just a few words, and make you feel you almost can see right into the character's soul. She directs this large cast of characters like the most skilled conductor, weaving their themes together, sometimes in harmony and sometimes clashing. Every character is a bit of a misfit, but her writing is filled with understanding and sympathy for them. (Well, maybe not Viola, but everybody else.)

I don't usually like to quote at length from a book, but there is one passage that will give you a vivid idea of the Viola and Minnie characters, and Kate Racculia's writing style.

The boy gets off at five and a woman gets on. No––a coiled, terrifying creature in woman's clothing. She is tall, though she's getting the bulk of her height from horrifying-looking red pumps that make Minnie's arches ache in sympathy. Her hair is white and pulled back in a murderously tight ponytail. As soon as she's inside, she stabs the L and then the Close Door button and casts a glance at Minnie that might as well be a shiv jerked between her ribs.

'Gotta move faster than that, honey,' this insane woman says.

It takes Minnie a moment to understand the woman thought Minnie meant to get off at five with the boy. Logical; not many people go joyriding in the elevator. Still, Minnie resents it. She knows she looks like an unremarkable cupcake. Fluffy, pale, round as a moon pie. But what Minnie resents most is this horrible woman's assumption (some would say reasonable) that if you are fat––and Minnie is fat, not overweight, not chubby, she is solid with fat––you are someone who Cannot Help Herself. Someone Who Will Defer. Someone Who Is Weak.

When the fat, in fact, is one of the few parts of Minnie that make her strong.

'Lady,' she says, and pushes the emergency stop button. The elevator jiggles to a halt. 'Do you have a problem with me?'

'Who wouldn't,' the woman says, her eyes glimmering. 'Now be a good girl and release the elevator, so I can get back to my life and you can get back to your collection of limited-edition Beanie Babies.'

Minnie stares at the woman but doesn't speak. She steps close and pushes her belly into her like a sumo wrestler. Minnie moves with surprising speed and the woman, caught off guard, wobbles on those ridiculous heels. She tries to steady herself by placing a hand on Minnie's arm.

Minnie removes the woman's hand from her arm and twists her wrist backward with a sound like a fistful of uncooked spaghetti snapping in half. The woman makes a cartoon noise––Auck!––and slams against the mirrored wall to her right. She slides down to the floor, holding her wounded wrist to her stomach, and Minnie smiles.

None of this happens in real life, of course. But Minnie imagines it so vividly she finds it hard to believe actually doing it would be any more satisfying.

This is not that dissimilar to the retribution I mete out in my head to people who cut in line, tailgate, double dip, talk on cellphones in movies, and commit other social felonies, so I thought it was delightful. There's more where that came from, so if that bit appeals to you, give the book a try. Once I was finished, I foisted it on my husband, and he enjoyed it too.

Note: Thanks to the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Amazon's Vine program, for providing an advance reviewing copy. Bellweather Rhapsody was published on May 13, 2014. Versions of this review appear on Amazon, goodreads, and BookLikes and may appear on other sites under my usernames there.

I See Dead People: The Fiona Griffiths Series

Awhile back, I complained that there weren't enough strong, smart, sassy female protagonists in crime fiction. Scratch that! I've definitely found one: Harry Bingham's young Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, part of the Cardiff, Wales police force.

The series begins with Talking to the Dead (Delacorte, 2012), and the second, Love Story, with Murders, hits the shelves on February 18, 2014, from Delacorte. Because the books are first-person narratives, we experience the plot from inside Fiona's head, which is a weird and wonderful place.

Sometime in her childhood, Fiona suffered a deeply traumatic event, but exactly what happened is buried deep in her subconscious. Like a virus, though, it flares up from time to time, and in an unusual way. Fiona's post-traumatic stress flare-ups take the form of Cotard's syndrome, a condition in which dissociation and depression combine to make her lose touch with her physical and emotional feelings, turn the world into shades of gray and, at its worst stages, make her believe she is literally dead.

When I first heard about this new series featuring a lead with such an bizarre condition, I was dubious. I thought this sounded like too much of a gimmick. But author Harry Bingham doesn't fall into that trap. Fiona's condition isn't something that her co-workers even know about. They definitely think she's odd, but that's because she's a Cambridge University graduate, often seems to be in never-never land while she's thinking, has a contrary and smartarse personality, and a real knack for pushing other people's buttons––even people a lot higher up in the police hierarchy.

Readers only know about Fiona's condition because we hear her thoughts. Even though she's doing her best to be at resident of "Planet Normal," as she calls it, she knows that other detectives don't relate to, and even commune with the dead, as she does. She can sit with a murder victim's corpse (or even parts of one––yikes!) and feel the energy. Surprisingly, it's not usually a dark energy.

The way Fiona sees it––though she doesn't share her philosophy with her colleagues––the murder investigation isn't "only about finding the killers, but about giving peace to the dead. It's not primarily a question of justice. The dead don't care about that. The murder investigation, arrest, and conviction are just part of the funeral rite, the final acts of completion. Gifts I bring to the dead in exchange for the peace they bring me. The peace of the dead, which passeth all understanding."

Fiona is quite a bit nicer to the murder victims than to many of the living she encounters. While on a house-to-house search: "We do gardens. We're asked seven times if we want tea, and are told six times to be careful of various tedious-looking plants, which I make a point of standing on when no one's looking."

She's not a fan of profiling: "[P]sych briefing[s] . . . are normally mind-numbingly stupid, amounting to little more than 'I think your killer may not be quite right in the head.'"

You won't be surprised that she can be a handful for those on the wrong side of the law. She has an Israeli friend who taught her hand-to-hand combat methods and she doesn't hesitate to treat any threatening bad buys to broken noses and jaws, cracked kneecaps and severe damage to their nether regions.

Fiona is also a refreshing contrast to your all-too-common unsocial detective protagonist with a laundry list of bad habits. She has a loving family, a boyfriend (Detective Sergeant Buzz Brydon) she's getting serious with, and the only beverage she abuses is peppermint tea. True, her father has an inches-thick police file detailing all the organized crime activities he's suspected of having presided over for the last few decades. But at least he has no convictions and he's always happy to help the police with their inquiries.

Alright, enough about Fiona for a little bit. Let's talk about plots. In Talking to the Dead, Fiona is slogging through accounting records as she prepares for the trial of a former cop, Brian Penry, for financial fraud. That gets put on the back burner when the call comes in reporting the bodies of a young woman and her child found murdered in an abandoned house. Why was the ATM card of a very wealthy man, Brendan Rattigan, found in the house? Was the young woman a prostitute? Is her death related to Rattigan's spectacular death many months before?

In Love Story, with Murders, Fiona is on a team investigating a sensational case. A young woman's leg has been found in the garage freezer of an old lady who recently died. Next thing you know, more bits and pieces are found scattered all around the neighborhood, in the oddest places. Things get even stranger when another dismembered corpse is discovered. Are the two murders connected?

When Fiona's not putting in overtime hours on the murder/dismemberment case (which the team, with macabre humor, privately calls Stirfry), she has two other cases occupying her time––and a whole room in her house. Since her parents don't want to talk about the past, she's decided to investigate herself and find out just what happened to her as a child that left her so traumatized. She's also still pursuing the case that was officially wrapped up in Talking to the Dead. In her view, there were a lot of people on the periphery of that crime who need to be held responsible, and she's going to find out exactly who they are.

Though these books are strongly character-driven, both are also satisfying police procedurals with big splashes of heart-thumping action. Without falling too deeply into the too-stupid-to-live trap, Fiona manages to get herself into some life-threatening jams that had me re-thinking giving up biting my nails. I was taken with Fiona's James Bond-ian ingenuity in extricating herself from peril.

Although the crimes in these books are violent and quite often against women, Harry Bingham doesn't shove gore and brutality in the reader's face. He takes these crimes seriously, but he respects the victims and the reader too much to wallow in detailed descriptions of that grimness.

One final pleasure of this new series is the setting; principally Cardiff, but also quite often in its suburbs and in the Wales countryside. It's a treat to read about these settings and those wild Welsh names, like Cyncoed, Capel-y-ffin, Pen-y-Cwm, Brian ap Penri. I'm ready for another visit to Cardiff, and Fiona, whenever Harry Bingham can deliver.

Note: I received a free review copy of Love Story, with Murders. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, goodreads and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Wolf Haas's The Bone Man

The Bone Man by Wolf Haas (translated from the German by Annie Janusch)

I swear I will talk to you about The Bone Man without using phrases such as "choking on words," "picking a bone with," and "putting somebody through the meat grinder," even though I'm in the mood to be snarky after reading the book's droll narration by someone I can only assume is meant to be God.

Maybe I'm wildly off the mark. The narration is an unusual combination of omniscience (the characters are psychoanalyzed, and their behavior is bemoaned or complimented), philosophizing, and breezy self-deprecation ("Anyway, where am I going with this"). The narrator pulls the reader close with chatty little questions ("she looked like that actress in the French film—real quick, what's it called again, the one they reran on TV recently") and heartfelt advice ("Now, when you're close to hysteria, it's best if you eat something"). Then the narrator winks and pokes an elbow into the reader's ribs by abruptly changing the subject or falling into free association. The narration must have been a challenge for Janusch to translate without changing its flavor, and whether you find it entertaining or think it gets old or in the way of the story will determine in large part whether you like this 176-page book.

The story begins at Löschenkohl's Grill, a restaurant catering to day trippers in the sleepy town of Klöch, East Styria, Austria. It is famous for its crispy fried chicken; in a good week, the restaurant serves 10,000 chickens. That translates into four tons of bones, pulverized in the basement bone grinder by former Yugoslovian soccer player Goran Milovanovic. In 1995, Milo made a gruesome discovery: among the chicken bones was the femur of a middle-aged man. Unlike the health inspectors, who always found something, the police were unable to identify either victim or perpetrator. Later, renowned Styrian artist Gottfried Horvath disappeared.

Today, private eye Simon Brenner arrives at the urgent request of the restaurant manager, old man Löschenkohl's daughter-in-law, Angelika, but she's nowhere to be seen. It's not unusual for Angelika to leave her husband Paul for a few days, but Paul insists Brenner find her. Brenner moves into a room up in the attic, next door to the cheerful waitress, who only eats frankfurters. More disappearances and the appearance of a severed head in a bag of soccer balls prod Brenner to stop contemplating his long-gone fiancée's incessant chicken-eating and "huge rack" (surely, the result of eating hormone-fed chickens) and focus on his investigation.

Brenner is an unassuming and appealing character, a lonely ex-cop whose favorite technique is to sound people out by not asking them follow-up questions. His thoughts readily stray from the case to the wife of a former police colleague, the time he went to a whorehouse on business, the music and games of his youth. For a book of under 200 pages, there are quite a few characters, but I didn't have problems keeping them straight. Their activities—disappearances, soccer, travel by bus and car, creating and collecting art—provide plenty of grist for Brenner and that deadpan, omniscient narrator. The action takes place in a surrealistic haze until it breaks out to run helter skelter across the finish line.

Austrian writer Haas's award-winning Simon Brenner books are very popular in Europe and have been made into three German films. It appears as if the seven-book German-language series is being translated willy-nilly like those of Jo Nesbø and Nele Neuhaus, but Melville International Crime is working to bring out the entire series. The most recent book, Brenner and God, is the first English translation. The Bone Man is second in the series, and second to be translated. It can stand alone in its wackiness, and you'll either get a kick out of it, like I did, or you won't. I recommend it to readers who enjoy quirky crime fiction, black humor, and digressive narration.

Note: I received a free review copy of The Bone Man, published by Melville International Crime, in March 2013.