Review of Charlaine Harris's Midnight Crossroad

Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

Along with the azaleas, the last weeks of spring are fading away and the colder-than-usual weather has allowed me ample time to appreciate the fortunate choices on my reading list for the last three months. Soon, I'll be excitedly picking some real finds for the summer.

One of my spring picks takes place in Midnight, Texas, a town that is a cross between a dismal sere ghost town of the Old West, with tumbleweeds running the single red light and a small community from anywhere in the South. It has one of everything: one gas station, one restaurant––the Home Cookin, of course––a pawn shop and, also, the one sign that there are people who really do live here, a nail salon combined with an antique gallery.

There is a small core of people who inhabit Midnight, and when Manfred Bernardo is moving into his new digs there, a few neighbors come to help. There is Bobo, his landlord, Joe Strong from the nail salon and Fiji, the local witch. When Manfred is settled in, he realizes that despite all the camaraderie of unpacking and moving in, no one asked the expected questions like Why are you moving to such a godforsaken place? Who are you and where do you come from? This suits Manfred to a tee and he realizes he has moved to the right place.

The unusual character names may be a clue to the author's name—Charlaine Harris of Sookie Stackhouse fame. This first book in a trilogy is Midnight Crossroad (Ace Hardcover/Penguin Group (USA), May 6, 2014).

When I delved into the first chapter, some of the characters seemed familiar. Manfred Bernardo is a truly psychic young man who traveled with his grandmother Xylda, and they helped Sookie on several occasions. They also appear in the Harper Connelly Mysteries (Grave series), my favorite of all the Harris works. Bobo Winthrop is a man in his thirties; big, blond and buff who has migrated from Harris's Lily Bard stories. There may be a few other transplants popping up in the book and in the future of the series.

Manfred has come to set up shop as an Internet psychic. He doesn't get real insights over the net, but he uses a lot of psychology and a bit of gobbledygook to flesh out his predictions.

But Fiji, named after the country, has reservations about Manfred because she knows who he really is, she knows of his powers and she's afraid he will find out the secrets of those lying low in Midnight––and almost everybody here has something to conceal.

Most of the denizens of Midnight maintain certain personal boundaries that include the cliché "what happens in Midnight" etc. There are lesser-kept secrets, and one of those is about Lemuel who runs the pawnshop at night. Lemuel, who, next to Bobo, looks bleached, desiccated and shrunken only comes out at night. His skin is white as snow and he has lived here for a long, long time.

For a seemingly lifeless town, things start happening in Midnight after Manfred's arrival. The only mystery previously is the disappearance of Bobo's girlfriend, but now a body is discovered, lives are threatened, murderous plots are revealed, more people disappear and fantastical elements enter the arena. There are white supremacists, motorcycle gangs and anarchists rounding out the unrest.

There is definitely a sense of unease pervading Midnight, which Harris communicates well, but where it comes from is vague. Many questions are left unanswered. Harris reveals little about what motivates the characters to do what they do. We have yet to find out why Manfred Bernardo chose to come to Midnight, Texas, and how he even found the place. The same goes for Bobo, Lemuel and Fiji.

There doesn't seem to be a main thrust to the plot. At first I accepted Bernardo as the central character, but then the focus gently shifts to Fiji. Plenty of time is spent fleshing out the different people––and I mean different in a weirdo way. While I was expecting some supernatural elements, I was a bit disappointed because everyone kept their big guns under wraps. On the other hand, getting to know the cat makes up for that.

The quirky humor of the Sookie books doesn't appear until the last third of the book and it is at this part of the story that the pace picks up. But when all the dust settles, the impression I got from the book is that it is mostly laying the foundation for future stories in which the characters and their histories will be brought to light.

I am looking forward to that.

Today We Celebrate Our Ex-Spouses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Fred Vargas's The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec by
Fred Vargas

A female author named Fred and a French protagonist named Adamsberg. These are your first clues that this series is a little off plumb, but more fly at you quickly in these books, and the seventh in the series, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, is no different. We begin with Commissaire Adamsberg of the Paris police detecting a murder just by following a trail of breadcrumbs.

Back at the station, Adamsberg rescues a pigeon whose feet have been bound together, and hands the nearly dead bird over to his team for rehabilitation. While he's hanging about outside the station, he's accosted by a timid Norman countrywoman who has been told that Adamsberg is the one man in France who may be able to help her.

Madame Vendermot tells Adamsberg an outlandish tale of a Furious Army of ghouls who periodically roam the old highways at night, placing a curse on evildoers that will cause their death within weeks. Mme. Vendermot's daughter, Lina, has seen the Furious Army, and in their company some men of their village, Ordebec. One of those men, Herbier, has disappeared and, although these men are mostly despised within Ordebec for various unpunished sins,  Mme. Vendermot wants Adamsberg to find him before he's killed––if he's not already dead.

Though Adamsberg is busy with a more conventional crime, that of the murder of one of France's preeminent industrialists, found dead in his torched Mercedes, he's intrigued by Mme. Vendermot's tale and can't resist a trip to Ordebec to look around. A country boy himself, from the South, he's charmed by Normandy's Ordebec, including the old woman, Léo, who offers him her hospitality––including Cuban cigars and Calvados––when he misses his train back to Paris.

When the Furious Army case becomes very serious, Adamsberg is called on to lead an official investigation. With two demanding active cases, he must allocate the resources of his team carefully. And what an oddball team it is, including his second-in-command, Danglard, a melancholy, walking encyclopedia with a bottomless thirst for white wine; Retancourt, a giantess whose size and weight do nothing to detract from her gift of being able to mesmerize people with hardly a word; Veyrenc, who is quite a sight, with the streaks and spots of red in his dark hair, and who has a penchant for reciting Verlaine at the most inopportune times; Mercadet, a narcoleptic; Froissy, a bulimic who stashes crackers, patés, sweet and other foodstuffs all over the detectives' office. You get the idea. Adamsberg's team also expands to encompass some irregulars, including his son, Zerk; his Spanish neighbor, Lucio; Léo and other Ordebec villagers; and even a prisoner-for-life whom Adamsberg was responsible for capturing in an earlier case.

Does all this make the Adamsberg series sound so whimsical as to be silly? It's definitely quirky, but the characters' eccentricities mesh well and even their weaknesses can sometimes be used as strengths. Just as Adamsberg's absent-mindedness and apparent ignorance conceal a great, though unpredictable, intellect.

A hostile policeman calls Adamsberg a peasant, cloud shoveler, lost in the mists. He's right, but what gives Adamsberg his ability to solve crimes is that he lives close to the ground and nature. He seems like he's absent-minded, and he is, but only because his mind has wandered off to replay what he's seen, heard and even smelled, and is putting it all together to tease out what it means.

Above all, Adamsberg is human and humane. He understands human nature, for good and ill. That's how he detects murder in a trail of breadcrumbs. That's why he saves that pigeon––and vows to find out who tortured the bird.

This series is unique and original, filled with imagination and a love of the land and people of France. There's a sort of magical spell that always falls over me when I read one of these novels, and I wish Fred Vargas would hurry up and become popular enough to get her novels translated into English a lot faster.

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was published in the UK by Harvill Secker on March 7, 2013, and will be published in the US by Penguin Books on June 25.

Note: Versions of my review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my user names there.

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.