Review of Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele

Years ago, I went through a period when I read tons of Victorian novels. There were times they drove me crazy, when the young female lead endured endless abuse from all quarters and then was finally saved by some guy, often one who hadn’t previously been particularly nice to her himself.

I know it was the Victorian era, when women had very little power, but I couldn’t help wanting to shake these women and tell them to stand up for themselves. Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele (G. P. Putnam's Sons, March 22, 2016) is like wish fulfillment for me. Jane Steele is a version of Jane Eyre, but with 21st-century updates, like overt female sexuality, anger and vengeance.

When I first heard about this book, what I heard was that it was a satire of Victorian novels in which Jane Eyre is a serial killer. Really? I wondered if it would just be a spoof or some kind of mashup. Or maybe a dark twist on the original. It turns out to be more and better than any of those things. It’s fun and sometimes very funny to see the new spirit Faye breathes into her Jane Eyre-ish character. But it’s also elegantly written, in a style true to the era, just infused with a bit more modern sensibility and wry wit.

Jane Steele’s story doesn’t track Jane Eyre’s either. Sure, there are lots of parallels, but this novel has its own plot. And what a plot! It ranges from the danger and squalor of London’s streets, to a country house filled with secrets, to the exoticism and intrigue of the Punjab. There are deadly feuds, false identities, hidden treasures and even romance. It’s packed with action, atmosphere and emotion and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are even possibilities left for a sequel. In the meantime, I'm thinking I need to go back and read some of Lyndsay Faye's earlier titles, like her Timothy Wilde series, set in 19th-century New York, which has three titles: The Gods of Gotham, Seven for a Secret and The Fatal Flame.

Note: I received a free advance reviewing copy of Jane Steele from the publisher, through Amazon's Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites, under my usernames there.

Image sources: goodreads.com, quotesgramcom.

Two for the Hammock: Dunant and Hiaasen

How's the summer reading going so far? Hitting rough seas or sailing through books like a dolphin goes through waves?

My own reading hasn't been on cruise control. It's been warmer than usual on California's Central Coast, and I've found it too easy to accelerate from zero to crabby. This has made me very finicky about books. Some need to wait until it's a little cooler. Take Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored by Philippe Georget (Europa, July 2013). The reviews for this French noir are excellent, but they contain words like "languid" and "exquisite Gallic ennui." As eager as I am to meet tired Perpignan cops Sebag and Molino, I'll wait until I'm not so heat exhausted myself. Likewise, I'll postpone the literary horror Red Moon by Benjamin Percy (Grand Central, 2013), described as "a cross between Stephen King and the Michael Chabon of The Yiddish Policemen's Union." Its lycan terrorists sound too energetic for my current listless self. It might be time to cool off with James M. Tabor's Frozen Solid, a tense thriller set at the South Pole, published in 2013 by Ballantine. It supposedly reads like "Andromeda Strain meets The Thing." No need to break into a mental sweat for that, and a lot of fun, I hope.

Here's a dissimilar duo that recently hit the spot:

As soon as I opened Sarah Dunant's Blood & Beauty: The Borgias: A Novel (Random House, 2013), I wanted to yell "that's amore!" One finds a historical note describing the city-states of Italy, family trees of these city-states' rulers, and a map of Italy at the turn of the 15th century before the story begins on August 11, 1492, with the papal election of the Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who will reign as Pope Alexander VI.

While the animal on the Borgia family crest is the bull, "everyone knows it is the cunning of the fox that runs in the family." Wily Alexander, who is both warm and ruthless, immediately sets out to amass wealth and political power through his much-loved children by his mistress Vannozza dei Caanei: cold Cesare, who resigns his cardinalcy to become a formidable politician and a genius as a soldier; beautiful Lucrezia, who enters into three politically advantageous marriages, and is close to Cesare; Jofré, the youngest, marries Sancia of Aragon for political reasons, and she then has affairs with Jofré's older brothers; Juan marries and has two children before he is murdered in 1497.

Can you think of any other family dynasty more in need of a good public relations firm than the Borgias? Through her depiction of history and psychological portraits, Dunant shows that they were more than an incestuous family of crafty murderers. They were a brutal family, but they lived in brutal times. Blood & Beauty, which ends in 1502, will be followed by another Borgias book. Given Dunant's fascinating characters, story-telling talents, and rich prose, I'll definitely read it.

It's a long way from 15th-century Italy to present-day Florida, but there are still people determined to make money and gain power through deviousness.

It's very comforting, when you're feeling kinda grumpy and sweaty, to read the crime fiction of Florida native Carl Hiaasen, in which he uses black comedy to savage the greedy, the corrupt, and the ignorant who are ruining the environment of his beloved state. His 2013 book, Bad Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf), doesn't rank with his best, but it's still plenty entertaining for people who don't have issues with raunchiness, gross-out moments, or bad language; and who enjoy oddball characters, zany plots, and poking fun at South Florida.

The story involves Andrew Yancy of the Monroe County sheriff's department, who did something bad in public with a portable vacuum cleaner to his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's husband, and Yancy will be busted down to restaurant inspector as a result. He will do anything to get his badge back, and a window of opportunity opens when the sheriff asks him to drive a severed human arm—caught by a tourist fishing on his Florida Keys honeymoon, of course—up to Miami.

There are only 250-300 of these tiny Key deer
left. They are about 2-feet high at the shoulder.

Now, you won't believe the bizarre directions the plot takes from these facts: Miami forensic pathologist Rosa Campesino is pretty and adventurous, as well as smart; Eve Stripling recognizes the severed arm as wearing her husband Nick's wedding ring and is accused by her stepdaughter Caitlin of killing him; Christopher Grunion is breaking ground on a resort at Lizard Cay in the Bahamas, displacing and angering Neville, owner of a monkey that appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean; developer Evan Shook is building a spec McMansion on the lot next to Yancy's house, and Yancy passionately hates the McMansion; and Yancy's ex-girlfriend, Bonnie Witt, is wanted in Oklahoma. There you go.

Tonight, instead of visiting the South Pole via Frozen Solid, I'm reading A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife, which features alternating character portraits of Todd and Jodi, a man and wife in a marriage deteriorating to murder. I'm emulating the conditions of the South Pole, however, by accompanying Harrison's book with homemade salted caramel ice cream. I should have accompanied Blood & Beauty with an Italian gelato, and Bad Monkey with coconut ice cream, but I try not to plug in my ice cream machine when no one else is home. I'm sure you're good enough detectives that I don't need to tell you why.

I'd love to hear how your own summer reading is going.

Spreading Some Holiday Cheer

Take a break from the winter holiday planning. Abandon your shopping, cleaning, New Year's resolutions listing, gift wrapping, cards mailing, decorating, baking, madly running around, or smooching under the mistletoe. Swipe a cookie. Fetch a drink, and settle down with a terrific book, like one of those below:

According to Mike Bowditch of Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son, his father Jack is a "saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil." The 24-year-old Mike hasn't spent much time with Jack since his parents divorced when he was nine, and he moved to southern Maine, from its wild northern woods, with his mom. After glumly watching the pavement spreading beneath his feet and graduating from college, Mike became a Maine game warden, a cop whose beat is the forest. It's an all-consuming, poorly-paying job, but Mike loves it.

Now, Mike's girlfriend Sarah has given up on his ever attending law school and has moved out. He hasn't seen his father for several years. An angry meeting about a Canadian timber company's purchase of Maine forest land and what it means for the land's leaseholders ends with the ambush-style shootings of Jonathan Shipman, the company's spokesman, and Deputy Bill Brodeur, who was driving him. Immediate suspicion falls on Jack. When Jack escapes from police custody and disappears into the woods, Mike and his mother are the only people who think he's innocent. Mike risks his job, his friendships, and his relationship with Sarah to find and clear his father.

While we follow Mike's actions in the present, he reminisces about earlier times with Jack. The shifts in time and setting are very smoothly handled. Doiron's characterization, setting, pacing, and plotting are all first-rate. This book is a realistic portrayal of complicated relationships between a son and his father, men and women, and people and nature, as well as the suspenseful search for a double-murder suspect that reaches an explosive finish. By the end, I was holding onto my chair.

The Poacher's Son, published by Minotaur Books in 2010, was nominated for four major mystery fiction awards and received the 2011 Barry Award for Best First Novel. The author grew up in Maine and is currently the editor-in-chief of Down East and a Registered Maine Guide. During this last week, I've been unhappy about the shooting of wolves right outside Yellowstone National Park. Reading this achingly vivid book, written by a man who obviously loves the woods of Maine, its traditional way of life, and its wildlife––and who also recognizes the terrible toll of progress––somehow soothed my spirit. Shelve Doiron's Mike Bowditch books next to books by C. J. Box. I highly recommend this one, the first in the series.

A father-son relationship isn't the main focus of Canadian writer Linwood Barclay's 2012 stand-alone book, Trust Your Eyes, published by Penguin Group (USA). Instead, the center of interest is the relationship between two adult brothers: Ray is a 37-year-old illustrator who lives in Burlington, Vermont. He looks like the slender Vince Vaughn from the movie Swingers. His two-years-younger brother, Thomas, lives in Promise Falls, New York, and looks like the meatier Vince Vaughn from The Break-Up.

Thomas is a schizophrenic and maps savant. He has decorated the upstairs hallway of the family home, where he lives with his widowed father, with so many map pieces it looks "as if someone had put the world into a blender and turned it into wallpaper." Thomas spends 23 hours per day in his bedroom, and he uses almost every waking moment to memorize the world's cities, using the computer program Whirl360. According to Thomas, this is a job he does for the CIA. Thomas foresees a catastrophic global event that will cripple computers and thus create a world without maps. He'll be the only person who knows how to reproduce them. "And not just maps, but how each and every street in the world looks. Every storefront, every front yard, every intersection." Keeping track of Thomas's progress on this project and acting as his CIA liaison is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who "talks" in Thomas's head.

Whirl360's street-view maps are made
by a car similar to this one

When Ray and Thomas's father dies in a lawn-tractor accident, Ray returns to Promise Falls to take care of his father's estate and to figure out Thomas's future. It helps Ray when he runs into Julie McGill, an old high-school acquaintance who now works as a reporter for the Promise Falls Standard. It becomes more difficult for him when Thomas's emails to the CIA cause the FBI to visit. Things get more complicated still when Thomas insists that Ray investigate something Thomas saw while "walking" through Whirl360's streets of Manhattan: an apartment window revealing what looks like a woman's head covered in plastic. Thomas believes he's witnessed a murder.

Trust Your Eyes alternates chapters, in which Ray narrates his travails with Thomas, with chapters detailing a political campaign that's running amok. These two story lines, which travel back and forth in time, require the reader's attention, but eventually they connect in a very satisfying way. The whole 498-page book is satisfying; a Russian nesting doll of layer-upon-layer deception and betrayal. There's a delicious contrast between obvious blunders that just get worse and seemingly inconsequential actions that lead, step by step, to disastrous consequences. It's great to see characters with mental illnesses featured as interesting good guys, rather than villains, in books such as Franck Thilliez's thriller, Syndrome E (reviewed here); Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (reviewed here); George Dawes Green's The Caveman's Valentine (reviewed here), and this one.

Doiron's The Poacher's Son and Barclay's Trust Your Eyes are written by talented story tellers. They feature characters who grow and change. They provide a fascinating look at relationships, the nature of love, and the expectations people have for each other. These books are a good springboard for discussions about how we make decisions and the role that chance plays in our fate. On top of this, they're fine mystery fiction. They're sure-fire holiday cheer.

Book Review of Dennis Lehane's Live by Night

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

Mamas, don't let your boys grow up to be gangsters. That is, if this book's opening quakes your bones:

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life––good or bad––had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.

It's the same Joe Coughlin, son of powerful Irish cop Thomas and younger brother of Aiden (Danny) and Connor, whom we met in Lehane's sprawling historical epic, The Given Day, set in 1918-19 Boston. While that 2008 book is about the Coughlins during a dizzying epidemic of flu, corruption, and striking police, Live by Night is all about handsome Joe, although his father appears and Danny drops in briefly. Joe was conceived in an effort to fill the hole at the center of his family, a chasm between his parents, and between them and the world at large. Rather than filling, the hole found its center in lawless Joe. Yet, despite Joe's refusal to heed his father's warnings or to obey the rules, he is the most open of Thomas's three sons, with a heart you can see "through the heaviest winter coat." Joe is an immensely conflicted and appealing young man. He lives for "moments in a world without nets––none to catch you and none to envelop you." Joe knows he'll probably die young. And now, here he sits, not yet 30, hands tied and feet encased in cement, while Lehane takes us back to watch the trajectory of Joe's career from rebellious outlaw to gangster prince.

It's 1926, and Prohibition is in full force. Mobs––split down ethnic lines of Italian, Jewish, and Irish––control illegal activities such as gambling and supplying alcohol. While most mobs deal in whiskey, the Hickey and Pescatore gang handles rum. They've cornered the market on sugar and molasses imported from Cuba into Tampa, Florida, where the alcohol is distilled and driven up the Eastern Seaboard in midnight runs.

Nineteen-year-old Joe comes across Emma when he and the Bartolo brothers rob a gaming room in a South Boston speakeasy. Until then, they had stuck to petty crimes. Had they known the speakeasy belonged to prominent mobster Albert White, they might have run as far as their legs would carry them. The stickup is a mistake. Joe compounds that error by losing his head over Emma, whose eyes, "pale as very cold gin," fit a young woman who hails from Charlestown, where "they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee." Emma is White's mistress.

White doesn't like being robbed, and he likes competition for Emma even less. He takes advantage of a bank heist's disastrous aftermath to vent his rage on Joe; however, White's actions take a backseat to those of Joe's father, Deputy Police Superintendent Thomas Coughlin. Like Lehane's series protagonist Patrick Kenzie, Joe has old grievances with his dad. Father-son issues––the limits of loyalty, the consequences of violence, and the nature of betrayal––provide the backdrop as Joe is incarcerated in Charlestown Penitentiary, "a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals." There, Joe finds another father figure in imprisoned mob boss Thomaso "Maso" Pescatore, who runs his bootlegging operation from behind bars and directs Joe to Florida upon his release.

Before radio and mechanization, Ybor City cigar
factory workers listened to someone reading aloud.

The outrageous heat and humidity aren't the only jungle-like attributes of Ybor City, the Tampa neighborhood where Joe muscles himself into a job. The survival of the strongest involves rival gangs fighting over bootlegging turf, and the judges, city councillors, and cops slipping in and out of the gangs' pockets. There's also what I'll refer to as the heat of Joe's loins. While Joe claims that he's "out of the heartbreak business," copper-dark Graciela Corrales, a pro-Batista Cuban who works in a Ybor cigar factory, captures his attention as soon as he hops off the train. Her body moves "under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water." Joe's lack of racial prejudice not only finds him a beautiful woman, it allows him to work directly with the Suarez siblings, Cubans who import sugar and molasses into Ybor City. In a few years, the Suarez-Coughlin gang has strengthened its grip on rum trafficking in Florida and is expanding into Louisiana; however, no matter how lucrative, racial inclusiveness isn't popular with Joe's Italian boss, Maso Pescatore. And it isn't at all popular with the Ku Klux Klan.

As the end of Prohibition approaches, the global economy is worsening. People need hope, as well as jobs, but they've often had to settle for a drink. When alcohol becomes legal, then what? While the world is changing, Joe has always believed people don't really change. Yet, he and Graciela have already started to live by day, "where the swells lived." How do good works follow bad money?

Questions such as this one arise from Lehane's examination of faith, love, redemption, and revenge, and the role luck and fate play in human destiny. Early on, Joe tells his father that there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself. Joe is a fascinating character due to his evolving interpretation of events, assessments of people, and understanding of himself over a decade. Clear prose and depth of characterization are Lehane trademarks, and following Joe is a treat. Unlike others who stayed on top in the rackets, Joe isn't known for having amputated his conscience. He's the kind of mobster who hopes he won't have to kill his best friend, but that's not to say he won't; he simply won't do it for reasons of greed. Joe's father Thomas Coughlin, Maso Pescatore, and best friend Dion Bartolo also develop; however, there's something unknowable about the book's three beautiful women. Perhaps it's because Joe doesn't really understand them, even though he realizes why the nuns rail against the sins of lust and covetousness, which can "possess you surer than a cancer," and "kill you twice as quick." I found the idealistic Graciela less interesting than the two more complex women: enigmatic Loretta Figgis, beautiful daughter of Ybor's Chief of Police Irving Figgis, and the inscrutable Emma Gould, behind whose pale eyes "lay something cold and caged . . . in a way that demanded nothing come in."

The tone and pace change from noirish suspense to a slower ending, suitable for its tropical location, but a little languid and mushy for my taste. No matter, Dennis Lehane has written a gangster novel, captivating for its characters and philosophical questions and moving in its bittersweetness, vividly set during Prohibition. The Coughlins aren't a Mafia family like the Corleones, but one can hope to see them vault from book pages onto the movie screen. I've heard that director Ben Affleck is interested. I've also heard that Lehane may make these two books into a trilogy, and my pulse does a rumba thinking about this.

Note: Dennis Lehane's Live by Night was published earlier this month by Morrow/HarperCollins. It isn't necessary to read The Given Day first, but a reader loses by not doing so. Now is the perfect time. The World Series is just around the corner, and baseball is one of The Given Day's pleasures. Be sure to close with Live by Night.

Not Leaping on Leap Day

I haven't been shot, stabbed, or run over by a homicidal maniac behind the wheel of a car. No, the reason I've been glued to the bed is a bad case of the flu. I'd like to tell you about what I've read this week, but I'll have to make it quick. I need my hands free for wielding a tissue or for pulling the covers firmly over my head.

I don't think Wallace Stroby's Crissa Stone has ever pulled the covers over her head in her life. That doesn't mean Crissa hasn't pulled a blanket over another person's head during her work as a professional thief. Crissa isn't her real name, but it's the name she uses to rent her New York City apartment.

She lives in a way that allows her to jettison a name and disappear at a moment's notice, according to rules her mentor and lover, Wayne Boudreaux, taught her. Wayne didn't do a good job following those rules, and now he's in a Texas prison with seven years to go on his sentence. For $250,000 placed in the right hands, Wayne's upcoming parole hearing might go well. This means the cool-headed and resourceful Crissa is desperate for money and must perform a robbery she might otherwise turn down.

I don't want to say anything more about the plot. This hardboiled book, published in 2011, is absolutely terrific and deserves to be read "cold."

Stroby's Cold Shot to the Heart is the first in the Crissa Stone series. The sequel, Kings of Midnight, is due out in April 2012, and I'm really looking forward to it. Crissa is the best bad woman I've met in a long while. Stroby has a big talent for intricate plotting and finely-tuned characterization. It's not easy to make career criminals sympathetic, but it's easy to root for some of them in Stroby's book. It's not at all easy to put this book down.

Duane Swierczynski's Fun & Games is another book difficult to close before the finish. In this one, Charlie Hardie is an ex-consultant to the Philadelphia Police Department who had a very stressful time and now makes a living house-sitting for wealthy clients. Charlie has just arrived at his current job in the Hollywood Hills, where he plans to settle down on a comfortable sofa with a cold drink and a classic movie in the DVD player. But the key isn't in the mailbox where it should be. And there's a woman in the house where there shouldn't be. Charlie has wandered into an assassination scenario set up by the Accident People, who specialize in fatal "accidents" with a "narrative" that will make them plausible to the cops and the public.

This June 2011 book, the first in the Charlie Hardie trilogy, is relentless adrenalin-fueled action. I stashed my disbelief under the bed and enjoyed the book, but I was almost relieved when it was over. The second in the series, Hell & Gone, was published in October 2011, and I'll have to read it to see what Swierczynski and the Accident People have next in store for poor Charlie. He doesn't get much of a breather before his third appearance in Point & Shoot, due in March 2012.

One more book, and then I'll go back to sleep: Anne Holt's 1222, a snowbound, locked-room mystery that's a homage to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

After a Norwegian train derails during a blizzard at the top of the Oslo to Bergen line, the 269 passengers are evacuated to the hotel near the station, Finse 1222. Luckily, the hotel is almost empty, and the staff is happy to make the passengers at home and to stuff them with gourmet food.

Among the passengers are a right-wing media personality, a Muslim couple, several priests, a physician who's a dwarf, good-looking bad boys in hoodies, and a beleaguered financier. Although some suspect royalty, nobody's quite sure about the mysterious passengers from the special carriage at the end of the train; they were evacuated first and are now in a cordoned-off apartment guarded by armed men. Let's not forget the passenger/narrator, grumpy and antisocial Hanne Wilhelmsen, who retired from the police force four years ago when a bullet severed her spine and left her paralyzed from the waist down. She hates being carried, so she refuses the offer of a bedroom and spends most of her time in the lobby, a good place for observation from her wheelchair.

Author Anne Holt, who once worked for the Oslo Police Department and is a former Norwegian minister of justice, creates an atmosphere of increasing claustrophobia and tension inside Finse 1222 as the temperature drops and the blizzard worsens outside. It's the worst storm Finse has seen in 100 years, and nobody can leave until it subsides. When people start to die, Hanne––aided and impeded by a trio of helpers––has to deal with it whether she wants to or not.

1222, published in 2011, is the eighth Hanne Wilhelmsen book, but it's the first to be translated into English (by Marlaine Delargy). The book's dedication says, "This book is a little bit serious and a lot of fun" and, while there are no surprising twists and turns, it is fun. I love snow, and Holt writes so beautifully about it, it becomes a character. She shows a good sense of humor with her colorful cast of people. I enjoyed Hanne and this book, and I'm looking forward to reading the others by this best-selling Norwegian writer. The first book in the series is due to be released in English as The Blind Goddess in the UK in June 2012.

And now, I'm looking forward to going back to bed.

Anchors of Disbelief, Aweigh!

Disbelief that didn't maintain suspension

We're anticipating a pretty big storm here tonight and rain through the weekend. Living on California's Central Coast means I don't need to mount snow tires, check a backup boiler or stock the pantry with emergency food. I do need to put our patio bar stools in the garage. During a storm last winter, the wind tossed one of them against a window. That chair took flight much more easily than my disbelief while reading on occasion. Rain at night makes reading in bed mandatory. What books can I read this weekend that will keep my eyes anchored to the pages while my disbelief goes flying?

Disbelief reluctant to take off

Getting disbelief into suspension is a tricky undertaking. Sometimes, my disbelief has its heavy foot glued to the floor, and I need to concentrate harder or put the book aside for awhile to dislodge that foot. Other times, a glass of wine or leaping into the bathtub with the book does it. Occasionally, nothing I do helps. An author I love could have written the book or it could be highly recommended, but it doesn't matter. These days, 50 pages or sometimes 20 pages is enough to tell me my disbelief's flight has been cancelled. Maybe it's an act of God, and the book and I just aren't meant to be.

Surprisingly, disbelief remains suspended

At times, a book will drag me in and keep me there, despite some nagging residual skepticism, until the final page. Such was the case when I read Marcus Sakey's 2011 book of suspense, The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes. The tale opens on a beach in Maine, deserted but for a man emerging from the water:

"He was naked and cold, stiff with it, his veins ice and frost. Muscles carved hard, skin rippled with goose bumps, tendons drawn tight, body scraped and shivering. Something rolled over his legs, velvet soft and shocking. He gasped and pulled seawater into his lungs, the salt scouring his throat. Gagging, he pushed forward, scrabbling at dark stones. The ocean tugged, but he fought the last ragged feet crawling like a child."

The man spots a lonely BMW in the parking lot. Luckily, it's unlocked, and he can get in. He hits the push-button start and in a minute the heat is roaring. Inside are a map, a Rolex watch, several hundred dollars, and an almost empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. The trunk contains some dirty clothes that fit him. The glove box holds an owner's manual, some keys, and a gun. He knows it's a semiautomatic. He knows that, but he doesn't know his name. He assumes the water is the Atlantic, and by the map, that he's in Maine; yet, he doesn't know how he got there or where he came from. He studies the owner's manual and finds a registration card and proof of insurance. He decides he's Daniel Hayes, resident of 6723 Wandermere Road, Malibu, California.

Hayes drives to the nearest cheap hotel and spends a couple of nights. He watches a TV show with a female character who somehow beckons him, and his nights are filled with disturbing dreams of concrete canyons. When a cop knocks at his door, Hayes knows he must run even though he doesn't know why. Maybe he's Daniel Hayes, and maybe he'll find out more in Malibu, California.

Saying more would be a disservice, because the fun of this book is involved in accompanying Hayes as he discovers who he is and what sent him into the Atlantic. Sakey spins his tale out at a satisfying pace. It's not mentally challenging and is suitable for reading, say, when water is 20 feet away from your beach towel or drumming little drops on your window in the middle of the night.

I haven't read any of Sakey's other books. The Blade Itself, which Publishers Weekly awarded a starred review, is about "a horribly botched pawnshop robbery by childhood friends Evan and Danny." My disbelief's foot is tapping, so maybe I'll take a looksee.

Like Marcus Sakey, Charles Frazier is an author new to me. The appearance of his Nightwoods on a Washington Post list of "Notable Fiction of 2011" made me curious. Upon reading the opening paragraph, my foot of disbelief scrabbled to leave the floor:

"Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent. She learned early that it wasn't smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she'd find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clenched. Neither child displayed language at all, but the girl glared murderous expressions at her if she dared ask where the rest of the rooster went."

At its heart, this book is about moving forward despite "whatever trail of ashes are left behind." Life goes one way only: "Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't."

Luce has chosen not to let it break her down. When the book begins, it is the 1960s, and she is a beautiful young woman who has taken refuge from life's hard knocks as the caretaker of the Lodge, an abandoned old hotel in the Appalachians of North Carolina. Luce is the daughter of Lola, who had a free-range philosophy about child raising and warned Luce and her sister Lily never ever to cry before she disappeared while they were still in elementary school, and Lit, a bantam-size deputy sheriff who is likened to a mink in a hen house and who has a fondness for substances that make him feel "up."

Luce lives across the lake from town, and her days are rather lonely, but she is content, watching the seasons change, observing the creatures in the woods, and reading the books in the hotel's library. Her isolation is broken by the appearance of her sister Lily's young twins, Delores and Frank. Lily has been murdered by her husband Bud, under the eyes of these children, and Luce is now their guardian. The twins are traumatized and mute; they love setting fires and getting themselves into trouble. But, "[b]eing uncommunicative and taking an interest in fire were neither crimes nor sins, just inconvenient. And Luce didn't have to love them. She just had to take care of them."

Taking care of Frank and Delores, and Luce's life in general, are made more complicated when Bud, whose murder trial stuttered to a halt when two jurors voted not guilty, moves to town so he can look for money he thinks Lily had and keep a nasty eye on the twins. Young Stubblefield, who knew Luce in high school and inherited the Lodge when his grandfather died, shows up, too.  The main cast is now complete, and life will go forward.

Nightwoods is a literary book. It's a compelling narrative told by a southerner with a writing style that makes one think of the words "trance," "molasses," and "baroque." Frazier's characters are all memorable, and what they do is worth watching. Sometimes the prose tends to the purple, but I had no desire to stop reading. If you love the woods, as I do, you'll probably enjoy Frazier's knowledge and feel for those dark and mysterious places. I liked the book, and I'm going to look for his Cold Mountain,  a story about a wounded Confederate deserter who walks for months to return to the love of his life, and Thirteen Moons, set in the mid-19th century and based loosely on the life of William Holland Thomas.

Disbelief well suspended

These are a couple of the books that kept my disbelief suspended during the past few days. On my bedside table for my rainy night reading are The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, a historical fantasy that I've been saving for a special treat because a friend raved about it; Michael Kortya's The Ridge, a 2011 thriller set in the woods of eastern Kentucky; Tom Perrotta's 2011 book, The Leftovers, involving a mass disappearance called the Sudden Departure; and Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson, who made me laugh out loud with his wonderful satire set in Tuscany, Cooking with Fernet Branca. When I read Gerontius, I'll head up the Amazon with Sir Edward Elgar, a distinguished composer. Other books that took me to Amazon territory are Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and David Grann's The Lost City of Z, and I recommend both of them.

Disbelief is an unpredictable thing. I'd love to hear about the books that are kept your disbelief suspended and those that didn't, and why. 

Disbelief following a moving plot

There Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens

On Monday, my good friend Della posted "Last Night I Went to Bed With a Murderer" about her propensity for reading murder mysteries in bed. Excellent stuff; you should go read it if you haven't already. Della's post got me to thinking about reading in bed and especially about reading spinetinglers in bed. The fact is, though, I can't. First of all, my record for staying awake while reading in a horizontal position is somewhere around 11 minutes. But, more importantly, I don't like my spine tingled at any time, especially not when it's dark and who knows what might be lurking outside. When you live in the sticks, there are enough creepy noises in the night. I don't need some author prompting me to imagine even more.

I admit it: as a reader and viewer, I'm a complete coward when it comes to violence, horror and sometimes  even suspense. I was the kid who had to leave the room when The Twilight Zone came on. Just hearing the theme's dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee-dee would have me rocketing out of my chair. The first movie I ever went to was Pinocchio, and when he got swallowed by the whale well, let's just say that's 50 cents my mother regretted spending.

I haven't gotten a lot more sanguine with age. I've never seen Jaws or The Exorcist. And don't even think about trying to persuade me to see them now. It would just confirm what I already know–and make me bitterly resent you on top of it. We don't want that, do we?

I'm only slightly better when it comes to books. My preferred mysteries are those in which the violence occurs off scene. It isn't that I've never read suspense or thrillers. I've read some of Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, for example. I can't say they weren't excellent, but when I got to one with the title The Torment of Others, I took that as a none-too-subtle hint that it would be beyond the horizon of my tolerance. I mean, seriously: the torment of others? I won't watch America's Funniest Home Videos because it torments others too much. I gave up Stuart MacBride's Logan MacRae series when I read Flesh House (a major mistake for me) and the titles alone of his subsequent books make it clear to me that I got out in the nick of time: Blind Eye, Dark Blood and Shatter the Bones.

I've been a big fan of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series, set in Oslo, but his most recently translated book, The Leopard, features a serial killer whose work is spectacularly creepy and repulsively gruesome. This from a guy who has written a children's book called Doctor Procter's Fart Powder? But he's hardly the first author who has decided, for some reason inexplicable to me, that a serial-killer plot is just the ticket. Well, not only are those books too scary for me, the last thing I want is to be taken into the twisted psyche of the killer, which seems to be part and parcel of serial-killer books. The book becomes a cat-and-mouse game in which the reader is invited to feel at least a tug of sympathy for the killer. I prefer my murderer to have a particular animus toward one person (I might stretch it to a small group of people), and I like him or her to have a reason for murder that I can relate to, even if I wouldn't find it sufficient to drive me to shoot, stab, poison, electrocute, cosh or otherwise dispatch the victim.

So, is it clear to everyone that when it comes to violence, horror and serial killers, I'm way off the bandwagon? What appeals to me about crime fiction is the puzzle solving and the characters. I want to read books that tell the truth about the characters in it and how they came to do whatever it is they do. True, in one case, that character will have committed the ultimate sin. But I don't need to have that sin described to me in graphic detail or have the victim's terror and pain played out in the text.

In light of this confession of my lily-livered nature, some might think it's strange that I read a lot of World War II history in which, of course, there is enough horror for even the most intrepid reader. But somehow, I feel that because there can be such real horror in the world, I don't want it in my fiction reading. I know there are many other readers who feel just the opposite: they will read novels with violence and horror, but don't want that in their nonfiction reading.

But back to mystery. In traditional mysteries, the reader need never see into the full depravity of the murderer's mind because, for one thing, the murderer is exposed at the close of the book. But just because a book isn't filled with teeth-clenching suspense or harrowingly graphic descriptions of violence doesn't mean that it's mild or dull. The discovery of the victim's body can be a moment of shock and horror; all the more so because the reader hasn't been subjected to a literally blow-by-blow account of how the corpse came to be. The examination of motives and the revelation of the murderer's identity are often emotionally intense.

In Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, there isn't even a murder, but when Lord Peter Wimsey takes center stage in the Senior Common Room of an Oxford women's college and reveals the identity of the person who has been leaving poison pen notes and playing increasingly nasty tricks on its faculty and students, it's one of the most emotionally raw and intense moments in crime fiction. I recently re-read Ngaio Marsh's A Clutch of Constables (or, rather, listened to the audiobook), and Agatha Troy's horror when, while admiring the river and countryside while on a barge cruise, she discovers a murder victim, is arresting:

"Troy leant on the starboard taffrail and watched their entry into this frothy region. She remembered how she and Doctor Natouche and Caley Bard and Hazel Rickerby-Carrick had discussed reality and beauty. Fragments of conversation drifted across her recollection. She could almost re-hear the voices.

'–in the eye of the beholder–'

'–a fish tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful–'

 '–if a dead something popped up through that foam–'

'–a dead something–'

'–a dead something–'

'–through that foam–'

'–a dead something–'

Hazel Rickerby-Carrick's face, idiotically bloated, looked up; not at Troy, not at anything. Her mouth, drawn into an outlandish rictus, grinned through discoloured froth. She bobbed and bumped against the starboard side. And what terrible disaster had corrupted her river-weed hair and distended her blown cheeks?"

I was out walking on a warm, sunny day when I reached this point in the audiobook, but I felt a chill upon hearing these words and visualizing the scene so vividly portrayed. I had a real feeling of the disorientation and shock Troy felt when making this nightmarish discovery. And that's what works for me. Horror once removed. (At least once; after all, I am a chicken.)

My state of mind puts me on the sidelines when people rave about authors like Mo Hayder, Thomas Harris and Jeffery Deaver, but I know there are plenty of other people who can't wait to read their books. Some of my best friends enjoy a good nightmare-inducing plot, an evisceration or two and witnessing a gruesome autopsy alongside a medical examiner who is expert in the arcane ways of establishing time of death. Who knows, some of the Material Witnesses may be in that group. If so, we'll be hearing from them very, very soon.

So are you in the chicken coop with me or are you prowling around the pen, just waiting to pounce? If you're in with me, you're probably already familiar with classic authors like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. Have you tried modern authors like Louise Penny, Reginald Hill and Fred Vargas? These are authors who don't sneak up behind you and yell Boo! but who also don't shy away from examining the feelings that compel a murder and describing the emotional impact of the crime on witnesses and those connected to the victim.

Now if you're not a chicken, my recommendation is um, uh . . . Can I get some help here?