Collected Miscellany

It’s Fall, at least by the publishing calendar. That means the big hitters roll out big books, influential titles designed to stoke reader interest and fiscal results, summer tans fading, back to work, back to school. Time to get literary.

The Diviners is a maddening novel, brilliant, funny, annoying, over the top. Don’t think of it as a novel, not in terms of scene and sequel, storyline or plot. Don’t do that, because if you do, you might take the book back to the store and hit someone in the head with it.

The book is enjoyable once those expectations are held in abeyance, immensely rewarding at times. It is perfectly safe to skip the prologue and head for Chapter One, because the prologue sets up a dimension of the story you can probably take for granted, that we toil on this earth deaf, dumb, and blind to the majesty of nature. But you knew that.

Once the characters get rolling, there is no stopping them. Moody introduces tangent upon tangent, many of which are funny and insightful, all of which serve multiple masters, including ambition, wealth, fame, celebrity, colitis, driving directions, the fall of Rome, the cycle of failure in cultural dress, greed, envy, and good places to drink. He also presents Adam and Eve as both myth and screenplay material. Read the book in sections, front to back or the other way around, the writing is well worth the exasperation.

Blonde Lightning is TL Lankford’s follow up novel to Earthquake Weather. The setting is Hollywood during OJ Simpson’s low speed chase memorialized in our collective memory banks as a prelude to travesty. Mark Hayes has lost his job as a d-boy after the murder of his boss, but hopes to catch on with a low budget company making a film called Blonde Lightning.

The heart of the story becomes the making of the movie on a shoestring budget. Lankford makes skillful use of his knowledge of filmmaking to produce a tense and enjoyable ride, the kind of story that gathers force as it progresses. I’ll skip the plot details to avoid spoilers, but this novel delivers the goods with a resolution of the Mark Hayes story as a cautionary tale.

The story’s disfigured beauty provides Mark with a sembalnce of a love life as well as central metaphor for the author’s view of the movie business. The cast of secondary characters is excellent, made plausible by the world they inhabit. My only complaint is that the book felt short. Lankford’s guiding sense of understatement leads to a number of summary paragraphs, perhaps a vestige of his days writing coverage for screenplays. His passion for the subject prevails, making this his finest novel to date.

Tess Gerritsen doesn’t fit the profile of unknown author. She’s been a successful romance writer, conquered the medical thriller genre and seems to moving toward the traditonal thriller. Vanished is her newest novel, just released by Ballantine. The subject matter is reminiscent of Robert Crais’ work rather than Patricia Cornwell despite the fact one of the principal characters is a medical examiner.

Vanished is one of those ‘what if’ stories, what if a body in a morgue isn’t a body, but a living breathing woman? That’s a tough one for a writer to execute, great concept, but how do you bring her back from the dead? Tess Gerritsen pulls it off, largely by underselling the situation, by putting her character to immediate use, creating a hostage crisis in downtown Boston.

Thrillers need complications, and this one delivers them in a plausible and enjoyable barrage, until the immediate crisis is resolved. One of the principal charcaters, Jane Rizzoli, is a Boston homicide detective. Her husband, Gabriel, is an FBI agent. A visit to the hospital becomes a nightmare for Jane. She is nine months pregnant and is taken hostage by a pair of desperate fugitives.

The hostage takers are killed. Jane and Gabriel are disturbed by their memories of the take down. Jane is having nightmares, reliving the crisis, haunted by a phrase uttered by Olena, the mysterious woman from the morgue. Meanwhile Maura Isles, the ME, is forced to release the bodies of the doers to the Feds. To avoid plot spoilers, I’ll leave the set up description at that.

Tess Gerritsen takes many familiar elements of the genre and turns them a degree or two for good effect. Her structure and pacing are close to perfect, that is to say, to dissect the modern thriller, it would have to have the elements present here. She brings the backstory into focus just as the pace of events slows in the middle of the story. The characters are likable, with Jane Rizzoli the most developed and appealing. There are alot of secondary characters to meet, the dialogue sounds forced at times, and the villains of the piece are underrepresented, forcing archetypes into play to satsify plot requirements. Overall, Vanished is one of the better thrillers I’ve read. Tess Gerritsen is setting up series characters in this one and I hope she keeps them coming.

All the noir elements are present in this fine novel from Peter Abraham. Nick Petrov is a PI with celebrity status. Armand Assante portrayed him in a movie. In film conscious LA that could carry a man for a lifetime of “hey, aren’t you the guy?” Nick is the guy, finder of missing women, a fellow as relentless as a Santa Ana. When he is approached by a woman who needs help finding her missing daughter, the reader feels uneasy. This lady is unreliable. She lies. Therein lies a tale.

The setting is Los Angeles. Nick lives in Venice, canals and all. Like most Angelenos, Nick has maps in his head, freeway maps, primary and alternate routes, a matrix for navigational purposes. Nick has a cabin in the mountains, an ex-wife, a teenage son. He bought his house before prices soared, he’s got it made.

Any number of contemporary authors set their stories in LA. Michael Connelly, Barbara Saranella, Peter Moore Smith, Terrell Lee Lankford, Gregg Hurwitz, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, just to name a few. Why not? Nowhere else does stunning beauty coexist with brutal ugliness with such panache.

Nick Petrov is smart, tough, successful, but flash bulbs are popping behind his eyes. Penny sized headaches, lost moments, blank spots. He has brain cancer, diagnosed after what he calls The Lost Weekend. The disease is nearly always fatal, and so is bad judgment. Nick is searching for a missing girl, at least that is what he thinks. What he is really looking for becomes the novel’s most compelling aspect, a tangled web of memory, history, passion, and betrayal.

Peter Abraham is not try to bust any genre boundaries, in fact, he takes all the classic elements of noir, shakes them up, serves them cold. This book is right from the opening scene to the climax. If you are not familiar with Abraham’s work, this novel is a great way to get acquainted.

Since Kevin and Booksquare have picked up on the Wall Street Journal’s attempt at rationalizing publishing success, I’ll give it a shot. I read The Historian. My review of it is available at Backspace. The thing I enjoyed about the novel was the author’s blatant disregard for current fashion, the slow pace, which, like an English bulldog, is ugly and lovable all at once. In my warped view I thought Elizabeth Kostova showed a certain chutzpah, perhaps even a satirical undertone in the way she went about the business of layering her novel with elegant details that did nothing to further the story. Given Kostova’s status as a debut novelist, it is amazing that her editor went along for the ride, yet if she hadn’t, the whole device might have dissolved into something akin to Buffy Does Istanbul.

On the flip side, we have The Traveler, a book Kevin reviewed. Steve Rubin at Doubleday is convinced that “we didn’t need our author prepub.” I think you did, Steve. Mr. Twelve Hawks needed to be squeezing his mug into that 8:50 time slot when Katie Couric cannot drink anymore coffee and it’s time to talk books. Sure everyone has left the house, but the television is still on. Maybe the yard service guys might have pressed their noses against the family room slider and thought, ‘yeah, I’m gonna buy that book.’

But Twelve Hawks lives off the grid. He’s reclusive. He didn’t hit a home run, and just beat the tag for a double. Not bad for a guy who refuses to leave the house.

I’ve been following Kevin’s thread about book reviewing, reasons to do it, pro and con. Kevin and I review a lot of books. Sources as varied as publicists for the New York houses and authors themsleves ponder the efficacy of reviews. Do reviews sell books? The jury’s out. They’ve been out for fifty years, sequestered in a seedy hotel, studying sales figures, returns, bestsellers, conspicuous flops. Let’s call it a mistrial. Let these people go.

The heat wave in New York may be clouding editorial judgment. Ed has a link to an article in Newsday about creating buzz for books. Picture this: you’re in Central Park on a Sunday. A person approaches you with the first two chapters of a novel; stunned or alarmed, you accept those pages, if only to make the person go away. It’s harmless in the greater scheme of things. You’ve been buzzed. Curious, you begin to read. A new plan evolves. Why waste time in the park when you could be in a bookstore?

When I lived in New York, thousands of buzz agents approached me on a daily basis. Most wanted change, loose change, sometimes for a purpose, a subway token back then, or bus fare to Tampa. A solid third of these change agents held brochures for restaurants, coffee shops, cheap suits, discount shoes, designer eyeware, the Circle Line tour, shares in penny stocks. No one ever offered me a book. I never allowed the person to get too deep into their spiel.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, out of touch, behind the times. I don’t want perky street people buzzing me. Okay, maybe a star map of Beverly Hills, but that’s the only exception. Once I know where Eddie Murphy lives, I can settle down and read a book review, unless the book is by Brett Easton Ellis. Then I have to go the park.

Denise Mina returns to her Garnethill style with Field of Blood. Her main character, Patricia Meehan, known as Paddy, is a teenager working as a copyboy for a Glasgow newspaper. There is a second Paddy Meehan, a former spy for the Soviet Union, convicted of a crime he did not commit, only to be freed by the efforts of a journalist, Ludovic Kennedy. Both Kennedy and the older Paddy Meehan are real people, and much of the plot thread about the safecracker spy is a cautionary tale about cops and journalists.

When a three-year-old boy is brutally murdered, the jaded newsroom is stunned by the crime. Paddy is a Catholic kid from working class stock, living at home and engaged to Sean, another Catholic kid from a neighborhood much like Paddy’s. When Paddy learns that Sean’s cousin is one of the suspects in the murder, she confides in the only other woman available, Heather Allen. Heather betrays the confidence, reveals the boy’s identity in a syndicated story, and exposes Paddy to the wrath of her extended family.

Field of Blood is set in Glasgow in 1980-1. Denise Mina explores the sectarian rage of the Catholic-Protestant divide, using Paddy’s background to examine the social fabric of Scotland at the time. The bottom up view of society is not a pretty picture, a landscape of failed government housing, broken urban vistas, high unemployment and poor prospects. Paddy is determined to break the pattern of the life she feels predestined to live, her parents’ life. She wants to be a journalist and that drive propels much of the plot. Her impersonation of Heather has consequences beyond Paddy’s darkest fears, and leads her to confrontations she is not equipped to handle.

Some of the novel’s emotional impact is muted by the necessity to set up both stories. North American readers may not understand the references to the Paddy Meehan spy case or his subsequent imprisonment for murder. Yes, the words are on the page, but without the emotional pull of memory or experience, the injustice spelled out never intersects precisely with the primary story. This is a social novel with a crime hook and resolution. Field of Blood is the first of a series, always a tougher task for a writer, as the characters develop in Denise Mina’s meticulous way. Complex and beautifully written, the novel does the heavy lifting for the new series, one I am looking forward to reading.