I've very much been in a reading slump these past couple of months. If the books were "assigned" as part of a reading group I read them. Otherwise I found myself reluctant to read anything that took any effort. This month that meant finishing Bleak House and reading Wild Dark Shore for my book club next month. By the end of the month I decided to stop fighting it and just binge read mysteries.
These are the books I finished in April.
Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich
I am not a reader of short stories. There are occasionally a few that I like but normally I am left wanting more from the story. However, I make it a point to read everything by Louise Erdrich and this is her latest book, a collection of short stories. The title is taken from the title of the first story in the collection, the story of a guard dog named Nero. The collection is diverse. A woman reminisces with her niece about her four marriages, not telling her niece everything. A schoolbus driver tries to drive his bus full of students safely through a blizzard. A woman remembers a trip to Venice at a young age and then later as a married adult. A mother discovers that local kids, including her daughter, are playing a game similar to paintball in which they "kill" the enemy. A number of the stories had cats in them ranging from Tigers to a feral cat in a bathroom. My least favorite were two stories about corporations that control the afterlife, where your consciousness is uploaded and lives on - or does it? In general, all of them were fine for short stories. As I said, I'm not a short story reader. But every once in a while I read a short story that strikes me as the perfect length for a story and is written in a way that is complete and yet makes you continue to think long after you read it. That story in this book, for me, was "Amelia" in which a teenage girl works at Kentucky Fried Chicken where she meets a local man who comes in to eat every night dressed as Colonel Sanders. I won't give any of it away but I read it twice and still think back on it with a smile.
The Sea Child by Linda Wilgus
Widowed by the Napoleanic Wars, left destitute by her late husband's debts and the subject of embarrassing gossip, Isabel Henley leaves Greenwich and moves to an isolated cottage near a small village in Cornwall. Although she has never lived there, the local people know her story because she was found nearby as a child, soaking wet, and her birth parents were never located. Adopted by a sea captain and his wife and taken to Greenwich, the villagers seems to feel that if luck had run any differently she may have been brought up by one of them. According to the mythology believed by the villagers, she is the child of a sea creature. This is an historical romance and the truth is that I don't read a lot of romance anymore (at one time I read quite a bit) mostly because you always know how it will end. I specifically seldom read historical romance because I prefer straight historical fiction. But I think if you like historical romance you would like this novel. At first I worried that the author relied on too many romance tropes. There are the usual Cornwall smugglers. There is the handsome but mysterious, and slightly dangerous, man the heroine is drawn to. There is the villainous man who threatens her. There is the "but there is only one bed" trope. But part way through the book the plot took a somewhat unexpected turn that made the story more interesting for me. Wilgus also created an interesting heroine in Isabel, a woman who loved her dead husband and is drawn to the dashing, mysterious man but also likes the independence that widowhood gives her. The story is not written in the first person but in close third person from Isabel's point of view, which was a mark in its favor for me. (I tend to dislike first person narration in mysteries and romances.) The best thing about this novel for me was how she created a sense of place, making Cornwall a place I would want to visit again. There is a (very) slight fantasy element to this novel also, which didn't bother me. If you like romance novels in an historical setting you would probably enjoy this (it is only, maybe, two chili peppers on a scale of five) but if you aren't a romance novel reader you could probably find some straight historical fiction you would enjoy more.
A Day of Judgment by Charles Todd
Charles Todd is the pseudonym of a mother/son writing team who wrote the Inspector Rutledge mystery series and the Bess Crawford mystery series, two of my favorite mystery series of all time. Unfortunately the mother passed away a few years ago and there was some question as to whether the son would continue either or both series. This is the next installment of the Inspector Rutledge series and, unfortunately, I found it disappointing. It wasn't so much the mystery that was the problem; the mystery itself was fine. As with most of the Rutledge mysteries, Rutledge must leave London to assist on a murder investigation in a smaller town. This town is up on the eastern coast of England near Lindisfarne, or Holy Island. When a body is washed ashore near Holy Island the church hierarchy is concerned that people will think the murder occurred there and calls in Scotland Yard. Rutledge is of course able to solve the mystery. The problem with the book, for me, was the writing. One of the reasons the Charles Todd mysteries were among my favorites was because the writing excelled. The team managed to integrate descriptions of place, the psychology of the characters and the mystery in interesting ways that always propelled the plot forward. Now that the son is the sole writer, I suspect that the mother was the truly interesting writer of the pair. Yes, there are lots of descriptions of place in this novel but they aren't integrated into the action; they read as if they were lifted from a travel guide or are describing a room/location in a historic house. Where, previously, "action" portions were written in complex sentences with multiple clauses, this novel's action is told in straightforward, simple sentences. And Rutledge himself seems very wooden in this novel, especially at the end in which he is meant to be showing his softer side. All in all this novel was a disappointment and I'm sad to lose one of my favorite series.
When the Wolves are Silent by C.S. Harris
The Sebastien St. Cyr Mystery Series, which is set in England during the Regency, is probably my current favorite mystery series and after being disappointed by the Charles Todd mystery I started this latest installment with trepidation. But I should not have worried. Even though this is the 21st book in the series, the writing remains fresh, the mystery is interesting and she continues to slowly build the characters we have come to know and their universe. In this installment, someone is killing a group of six young(ish) aristocratic friends one by one. The murdered victims are then "arranged" in such a way as to suggest that they were ritual murders by a Celtic Druidic Cult. I was left in the dark as to the murderer up until the end. The plot also (slightly) moved along the overarching story of Sebastien and his family. As with some of the novels in this series, I wish there was more of one particular character but you can't have everything. These novels are very well written, blending characterization and sense of time/place in a manner that propels the plot along.
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Although I have read a number of novels by Dickens in my life, Bleak House was the novel that I started multiple times and just could not get into. I was very happy to join in the BlueSky group readalong that took place in March and April because I knew the peer pressure would keep me reading. Many of Dickens' books are real door stoppers and this one is one of the longer novels. My e-version of the book was 2,639 pages. I discovered that after the first 500 pages of character development I enjoyed the story. It was somewhat of a surprise to me (and my fellow readers) how the novel hit a point where the plot just took off and galloped along to the end. Part of the novel is told in third person and part of the novel is told in first person by a character named Esther Summerson. Many of us had trouble relating to Esther, including me. It didn't stop me from enjoying the novel but I liked the third person sections much better. They were dark, "foggy" and in some ways pitiless. Esther's sections, while showing Dickens' disdain for England's Chancery Court, were I think supposed to convey some hope through Esther's "good" character. I can't say that this is my favorite Dickens novel of the ones I have read (Great Expectations remains in first place - with perhaps a close second of David Copperfield) but I did enjoy it very much. And perhaps my memory of those other books is skewed by the fact that I was so much younger when I read them.
Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan
City of Destruction by Vaseem Khan
The Edge of Darkness by Vaseem Khan
This are the the fourth, fifth and sixth novels in Vaseem Khan's Malabar House mystery series set in Bombay in the early 1950's (not long after Indian Independence). Malabar House is the station of the Bombay police where officers who are out of favor are sent (like an Indian version of Slow Horses). The main character, Persis Wadia, is there because she is a woman detective and the force has no idea what to do with a woman detective. In the first of these novels, a young white man has been found guilty of the murder of a prominent Indian lawyer. All of his appeals have failed and he is scheduled to hang. Persis is tasked with re-examing the case in the days before he is scheduled to die to see if perhaps the crime was committed by someone else. This search eventually takes her across the country to Calcutta and back. I've enjoyed all of the books so far in this series. The mystery in this one is good (I did not guess whodunnit) and I enjoyed the descriptions of Calcutta. I also usually learn something new about a part of the world I find fascinating. What was particularly interesting to me in this novel was Khan's exploration of what it takes to be an "Indian". The subcontinent was settled by many different types of people, all of whom consider themselves "Indian". Then they were subjugated by the British. The British government left but individuals stayed on. The accused white man was born and raised in India and has no Britain to "go back to" since he wasn't from there in the first place. Can he be considered "Indian"? It was an interesting question that flowed through the novel.
The second of these novels involved the attempted assassination of a high level politician who was promoting war with Pakistan to "take back" the land and have a united India. Persis stops the assassination attempt but is haunted by the (dead) young man who pulled the gun. She tries to figure out who he was and how he was convinced to do this deed. This novel very much goes into the partition of India and Pakistan and the pressures by the world to keep them apart or pull them together.
The third novel sees Persis sent to a completely different, backwater, part of India near the border with Burma. The local tribes (former headhunters) want their own country and don't want to be part of India but India is determined to keep that area (partly because it is a buffer with China). When a high level official is found dead by beheading (the head is missing) the military immediately wants to blame the insurgent tribes but Persis is determined to discover the truth. This was a "locked room mystery" and, perhaps because of that, was the weakest of the three books. I find that locked room mysteries work better in short stories because the interest is in the "how" rather than the "why". There seemed a lot of padding in this novel with Persis doing a lot of thinking about things that happened in the previous two books. Hopefully she will be back in Bombay for the next installment.
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Dominic Salt, a widower with three children, lives with his family as the caretaker of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica and home to the world's largest seed bank. But global warming has caused the waters around the island to rise and it is slowly disappearing. Although once full of researchers, Salt and his family are the only inhabitants left and they are charged with packing up as many of the seeds as possible before they and the seeds are evacuated in only a few weeks. Then, during one of the worst storms the island has experienced, a woman washes ashore. As the family nurses the woman, named Rowan, back to health they form a bond with her. But it is clear that neither Rowan nor Dominic (nor indeed the entire family) is being entirely truthful with the other. McConaghy tells the story in an interesting structural way. Each chapter focuses on a different character but is told in a different person. Dominic and Rowan's stories are told in the first person as they try to figure out what the other isn't telling them. The two older children's stories are told in the third person. The youngest child's chapters are in the first person, but mostly him telling Rowan about the flora and fauna of the island. McConaghy has created compelling characters with a surprisingly propulsive story arc as the characters (and we) try to figure out what is actually going on. McConaghy is clearly interested in the natural environment and the harm that man has done to it but she is not preachy. She can make nature itself seem like a character. There was actually a moment when tears came to my eyes as Rowan described how, after a huge fire, she discovered that the local wombats had saved many of the forest animals by letting them hide in the wombat burrows. I remember hearing about this when Australia was suffering huge wildfires a few years ago. I also found myself rooting for the seals and penguins on the island.This is the second McConaghy novel I've read and I've enjoyed both of them (the first was Once There Were Wolves about a woman working on a project to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands). This very well might go on my best of the year list.
