#108: Now You See Him

Now You See Him, by Eli Gottlieb

(New York: William Morrow, 2008)

Summary:
"The deaths of Rob Castor and his girlfriend begin a wrenching and enthrallingly suspenseful story that mines the explosive terrains of love and paternity, marriage and its delicate intricacies, family secrets and how they fester over time, and ultimately the true nature of loyalty and trust, friendship and envy, deception and manipulation.

"As the media take hold of this sensational crime, a series of unexpected revelations unleashes hidden truths in the lives of those closest to Rob. At the center of this driving narrative is Rob's childhood best friend, Nick Framingham, whose ten-year marriage to his college sweetheart is faltering. Shocked by Rob's death, Nick begins to reevaluate his own life and past, and as he does so, a fault line opens up beneath him, leading him all the way to the novel's startling conclusion."

Opening Line:
"At this late date, would it be fair to say that people, after a fashion, have come to doubt the building blocks of life itself?"

My Take:  
Side note:  While the barrage of end-of-year books I've just posted may have gotten somewhat out of order, I do know this was the last book I read in 2012. Just as parts of our lives have their own soundtracks, much of what I've done and read this past year comes with its own scenic backdrop. (Of course, some of the scenery was prettier than the rest.) There are novels I know I read in Boston because I can't see their covers without picturing the bedspread in my Boylston Street apartment; others I place in D.C. from the memory of painstakingly cramming the flimsy Days Inn pillows into place behind me so I could lean back while I read. Strangely, I could certainly look it up, but I don't know what I read in Pullman. I can see the autumn Palouse light, golden on the rolling hills and tinged pink through my window; I know I sat in the Lighty Hall atrium at lunchtime with a mocha in my right hand and a book in front of me. (What I remember from that trip is the podcast -- Frontline's "God in America" -- that served as its soundtrack: gasping uphill through the wildfire and paper mill smog in Lewiston on the way to the Nez Perce County Fair; twilight descending between the downtown taqueria with the mural and the community garden's fading sunflowers as I took the scenic route back to my hotel; gazing out the airplane window as Minneapolis fell away and realizing I'd be back amid the familiar bustle and mess of my family within hours.)

But this book did not come to Pullman. This one came to Boston over New Year's; I fiddled with the adjustable mattress as I sprawled on my bed in the Revere, the air smelling faintly of peppermint shampoo, Eliza channel-surfing and Mike doing game prep on his laptop at the art deco-inspired desk. Perhaps I sipped a glass of the wine we picked up at the 570 Market on our way back from dinner at Addis; it's likely I schlepped it to Manchester in my satchel when we drove up to see the NH side of the family.

If only. If only I could make the time to capture moments like this more frequently, rather than just sneaking them into tangentially-related blog posts like Jessica Seinfeld's vegetable brownies.

But oh, yeah, the book. Gatsby a la Richard Russo, if you transplant the title character from Roaring '20s Long Island to 21st-century Mohawk small-town Upstate New York. This is a good thing, and a good (if sad) story.

#40: Agent 6

Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012)


Summary:
"Leo Demidov is no longer a member of Moscow's secret police. But when his wife, Raisa, and daughters Zoya and Elena are invited on a 'Peace Tour' to NewYork City, he is immediately suspicious. 


"Forbidden to travel with his family and trapped on the other side of the world, Leo watches helplessly as events in New York unfold and those closest to his heart are pulled into a web of political conspiracy and betrayal -- one that will end in tragedy.


"In the horrible aftermath, Leo demands only one thing: to investigate the killer who destroyed his family. His request is summarily denied. Crippled by grief and haunted by the need to find out exactly what happened on that night in New York, Leo takes matters into his own hands. It is a quest that will span decades, and take Leo around the world -- from Moscow, to the mountains of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, to the backstreets of New York -- in pursuit of the one man who knows the truth: Agent 6."

Opening Line:
"The safest way to write a diary was to imagine Stalin reading every word."

My Take:
Not bad, but certainly the weakest in the trilogy that includes Child 44 and The Secret Speech. The first two books were solidly entertaining political thrillers; this one alternates between dragging a bit and jumping abruptly across way too much time and space for the reader to have a good grasp of what's going on. It's not clear if Smith's trying to write a thriller about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan or a psychological novel about a secret policeman who starts having doubts about the rightness of all he's done, and it doesn't quite fit either niche correctly.

#37: The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland) (New York: Vintage Books, 2009)


Summary:
"Part blistering espionage thriller, part riveting police procedural, and part piercing expose on social injustice, The Girl Who Played with Fire is a masterful, endlessly satisfying novel.


"Mikael Blomkvist, crusading published of the magazine Millenium, has decided to run a story that will expose and extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past."

Opening Line:
"She lay on her back fastened by leather straps to a narrow bed with a steel frame."

My Take:
Perhaps not quite as gripping as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I don't know that I can blame Larsson for that; part of that book's punch is that it introduced us to a completely new and unexpected (to U.S.-based readers, anyhow) take on the crime/ suspense genre, and to the complicated but fascinating character of Lisbeth Salander. Neither the genre or Lisbeth are as new to us here, but both Larsson and Salander still have a few tricks left up their sleeve. Another thriller with a social conscience, and a darned fun read to boot.

#24: 1Q84

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

Summary:

"The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

"A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestions and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 -- 'Q' is for "question mark." A world that bears a question.' Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

"As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shootout with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

"A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's -- 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant bestseller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers."

Opening Line:

"The taxi's radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast."

My Take:

Interesting in the way it combines a fantasy world/ parallel universe, a mystery/ suspense story, and even a little bit of a love story ... but it wasn't worth the almost 950 pages it took to get there (or else this just isn't my genre, or something was lost in translation, any of which are possible). The concept of a parallel world with 2 moons where everything's just slightly different was interesting, but the whole Air Chrysalis novella that Tengo is ghostwriting and the Little People who featured prominently therein just left me cold. I can appreciate the positive reviews the book got, but it didn't really speak to me personally.

#22: Zero History

Zero History, by William Gibson (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010)

Summary:

"Hollis Henry worked for the global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend once before. She never meant to repeat the experience. But she's broke, and Bigend never feels it's beneath him to use whatever power comes his way -- in this case, the power of money to bring Hollis onto his team again. Not that she knows what the 'team' is up to, not at first.

"Milgrim is even more thoroughly owned by Bigend. He's worth owning for his useful gift of seeming to disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic -- so much so that he spoke Russian with his therapist, in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of the addiction that would have killed him.

"Garreth has a passion for extreme sports. Most recently he jumped off the highest building in the world, opening his chute at the last moment, and he has a new thighbone made of rattan baked into bone, entirely experimental, to show for it. Garreth isn't owned by Bigend at all. Garreth has friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors that a man like Bigend will find he needs, when things go unexpectedly sideways, in a world a man like Bigend is accustomed to controlling.

"As when a Department of Defense contract for combat wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy that even Bigend, whose subtlety and power in the private sector would be hard to overstate, finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift in a seriously dangerous world."

Opening Line:

"Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city."

My Take:

A bit too much description of hotel room decor and clothing in the first few chapters; I'm a bit confused by exactly who and what everything means in this world. Maybe that's deliberate. We'll see.

Meh. I think this is the first of Gibson's oeuvre I've read, and honestly, it was a letdown. I can accept a slow-ish start in this genre; it's not what I read the majority of the time and it always seems to take me a little while to put all the who's who and who's on which side together. And the surveillance technologies were both cool and creepy, the characters at least reasonably interesting ...

But. Yeah, there's a but. Maybe I Just Didn't Get It or maybe this was the whole point, but the bad guys just, um, weren't. Hubertus Bigend, despite his awesome name, always comes off as a rich eccentric rather than someone with ill intentions. And all this skulduggery and danger around, um, getting a contract to design military or pseudo-military clothing? Frankly that seemed more than a bit of a stretch to me, and nothing in how Gibson got us there made it less so. One of those books I ended up finishing because by the time I realized it wasn't really going to get much better, it was too late not to. Definitely underwhelming, though.

#63: When the Killing's Done

When the Killing's Done, by T. Coraghessan Boyle (New York: Viking, 2011)

Summary:
"Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara -- the Galapagos of North America -- T. C. Boyle's powerful new novel combines action-packed adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world."

Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the islands' endangered native creatures from invasive species such as rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a muscular, dredlocked local businessman who, along with his inamorata, the folk singer Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever, and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.

"Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, contemplate acts of sabotage, court danger and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma's grandmother, Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise's mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island.

"In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives and breath and souls of all the creatures who share this planet with us? When the Killing's Done offers no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle's classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in the position to decide."

Opening Line:
"Picture her there in the pinched little galley where you could barely stand up without cracking your head, her right hand raw and stinging still from the scald of the coffee she'd dutifully -- and foolishly -- tried to make so they could have something to keep them going, a good sport, always a good sport, though she'd woken up vomiting in her berth not half an hour ago."

My Take:
Liked it a lot -- I'm usually a big Boyle fan, ever since The Tortilla Curtain, and this one didn't disappoint. Complex, interesting characters; decent story line; no pretty red bow to wrap everything up at the end.

My main critique (and perhaps this is with the dust jacket writer and not with Boyle himself) is that there wasn't quite as much conflict or tension in the plot as I might have hoped for. As this Onion A.V. Club review suggests, the author's portrayal of animal rights activist Dave LaJoy isn't exactly balanced or sympathetic; he owns a chain of high-end electronics stores he's never seen actually managing or working in, holds everyone except maybe his trophy girlfriend Anise in open contempt, and (in a recalled scene of his one and only long-ago date with Alma) has no qualms about ordering bottle after bottle of a restaurant's priciest wine, only to proclaim each one unacceptable after it's opened and send it back. Nice guy. He is fun to roll your eyes at, though, and does indeed eventually get a suitably dramatic comeuppance. (As Barbara Kingsolver's New York Times review reminds us, "Boyle has elsewhere dispatched characters by the likes of meteor strike and bear consumption.")

Alma's character is far more subtly rendered, though I still might have preferred to hear a bit more about how she herself thinks and feels rather than just who her parents and grandmother were. And while it's not really a tidy red bow, or even close, her own resolution seems a wee bit too clean -- perfunctory, perhaps.

Still, an excellent book, and one I'd highly recommend to others.

#55: Scarlet Nights

Scarlet Nights, by Jude Deveraux (New York: Atria Books, 2010).

Summary:
"Engaged to the charming and seductive Greg Anders, Sara Shaw is happily anticipating her wedding in Edilean, Virginia. The date has been set, the flowers ordered, even her heirloom dress is ready. But just three weeks before the wedding, Greg gets a telephone call during the night and leaves without explanation. Two days later, a man climbs up through a trapdoor in the floor of Sara's apartment, claiming that he is the brother of her best friend and that he's moving in.

"While Mike Newland is indeed telling the truth about his identity, his reason for being there reaches far deeper. He's an undercover detective, and his assignment is to use Sara to track down a woman who is one of the most notorious criminals in the United States -- and also happens to be the mother of the man Sara plans to marry.

"Mike thinks the job will be easy -- if he can figure out how to make a 'good' girl like Sara trust him, that is. But Mike has no idea what this mission has in store for him. He's worked hard to keep private his connections to Edilean, which date back to his grandmother's time there in 1941. But as Mike and Sara get to know each other, he can't help but share secrets about himself that he's told no one else. And in return, Sara opens up to Mike about things she could never reveal to Greg. As the pair work together to solve two mysteries, their growing love begins to heal each of them in ways they never could have imagined."

Opening Line:
"'I think we've found her,' Captain Erickson said.

My Take:
Yes, this is shaping up to be as lightweight and silly as it sounds -- perfect for a holiday weekend beach read, which is when and why I checked it out.

Well, it was about what I expected. Long on action and purple prose, short on believability and character depth. I've passed less enjoyable afternoons but this certainly isn't a particularly interesting or memorable book. Next.

#89 - Innocent

Innocent, by Scott Turow (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010).

Summary: "More than twenty years after Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto went head-to-head in the shattering murder trial of Presumed Innocent, the men are pitted against each other once again in a riveting psychological match. When Sabich, now over sixty years old and the chief judge of an appellate court, finds his wife, Barbara, dead under mysterious circumstances, Molto accuses him of murder for the second time, setting into motion a trial that is vintage Turow—the courtroom at its most taut and explosive.

"With his characteristic insight into both the dark truths of the human psyche and the dense intricacies of the criminal justice system, Scott Turow proves once again that some books simply compel us to read late into the night, desperate to know who did it."

Opening Lines: "A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.

"The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother."

My Take: Not surprisingly, this one was about what I'd expected. Yes, it entertained; no, it didn't disappoint.

The latter's always a risk in a situation like this. It seems almost everyone's read Presumed Innocent, or at least seen the Harrison Ford movie. The ending there was surprising enough, and the characters sufficiently compelling, that you can't help wondering what happened to Sabich and Molto and all their other pals after all those years; heck, I don't think I've been as excited about a much-delayed sequel since Michael Tolliver Lives came out. But for all that readers are curious, we're also an oddly proprietary lot. Even for an accomplished author like Turow, it's a fine line to walk: the next installment needs to seem logical and plausible given what we know of the characters, but not so logical that it seems obvious or unsurprising.

Fortunately, Innocent seems to pull it off. Many of the characters we remember from Presumed Innocent are back, and one of the things that makes this book work so well both as a sequel and a stand-alone is that they've both changed ... and they haven't. Time has passed, and their lives have taken unexpected turns, but nothing we see here is out of character with the folks we've gotten to know. At 60, Tommy Molto has recently married a much-younger woman and is the proud father of a small son. After a brief separation following Rusty's first trial, he and Barbara reconciled, but Barbara struggles with bipolar disorder and their relationship is a rocky one. Their son, Nate, is 22, a newly-minted lawyer himself, and still wrestling to carve out an adult identity and relationships apart from his parents.

And that's where we come in. When we pick up the story, Barbara has just turned up dead one morning, apparently of natural causes ... or is it? If so, why did Rusty sit beside her body for a full day before notifying the police, or even his son? And what's the significance of Rusty's recent affair with a young law clerk (which we learn about in the first few chapters) -- his first since the ill-fated tryst recalled in Presumed Innocent? I formed a few theories early on about how the story would ultimately end, and for once, I'm glad to say I was wrong. Great literature it's not, but an enjoyable legal suspense novel -- absolutely.

#69 - A Fierce Radiance

A Fierce Radiance, by Lauren Belfer (New York: Harper, 2010).

Jacket summary: "Claire Shipley is a single mother haunted by the death of her young daughter and by her divorce years ago. She is also an ambitious photojournalist, and in the anxious days after Pearl Harbor, the talented Life magazine reporter finds herself on top of one of the nation's most important stories. In the bustling labs of New York City's renowned Rockefeller Institute, some of the country's brightest doctors are racing to find a cure that will save the lives of thousands of wounded American soldiers and countless others -- a miraculous new drug they call penicillin. Little does Claire suspect how much the story will change her own life when the work leads to an intriguing romance.

"Though Claire has always managed to keep herself separate from the subjects she covers, this story touches her deeply, stirring memories of her daughter's sudden illness and death -- a loss that might have been prevented by this new 'miracle drug.' And there is James Stanton, the shy and brilliant physician who coordinates the institute's top secret research for the military. Drawn to this dedicated, attractive man and his work, Claire unexpectedly finds herself falling in love. But Claire isn't the only one interested in the secret development of this medicine. Her long-estranged father, Edward Rutherford, a self-made millionaire, understands just how profitable a new drug like penicillin could be. When a researcher at the institute dies under suspicious circumstances, the stakes become starkly clear: a murder has been committed to obtain these lucrative new drugs. With lives and a new love hanging in the balance, Claire will put herself at the center of danger to find a killer -- no matter what price she may have to pay."

Opening line: "Claire Shipley was no doctor, but even she could see that the man on the stretcher was dying."

My take: What do you say about a book that's part historical fiction, part mystery/ suspense, and part medical drama, with the obligatory bit of romance mixed in? Well, in the case of A Fierce Radiance, I'd say it's surprisingly good. You'd think, from the jacket flap, that the plot would either get impossibly complicated or implausibly cheesy, but it actually doesn't. A hard-core mystery or medical thriller it's not, but Belfer does an admirable job of blending the varied elements of the story without making the reader want to skip over one section or the other. No mean task, that.

It's not spoiling too much to say that yes, the man on the stretcher in Act I does, indeed, die. After a minor scrape on the tennis court gets infected, he arrives at the Rockefeller Institute in grave condition. Claire, a Life photojournalist who excels in blending into her surroundings to capture the story, has been sent to document penicillin's emergence as a miracle drug -- just in time to treat the countless injuries our soldiers will incur in World War II, which the U.S. has just entered the week the novel opens. With no other avenues left to treat Mr. Reese, his wife agrees to subject him to the first human penicillin trials. His recovery is nothing short of miraculous.

There's a catch, of course. While scientists have known about penicillin since the 1920s, its mass production continues to elude them. The Institute has only what they can grow in milk bottles and bedpans, and supplies are limited. Having never tried penicillin on humans before, dosage levels and frequency take some guesswork. A short few days later, Reese relapses, and dies before more penicillin is available.

His story and those of the researchers involved set the stage for the bulk of the novel. The military is sure to need as much penicillin as they can produce; civilians are bound to want it when word gets out; and yet there's no viable way to produce it on a large, commercial scale -- even though a Navy-led team of scientists from all the major pharmaceutical companies is throwing everything they have at the problem. Or are they? While the government's pre-emptively barred them from patenting anything to do with penicillin, there are sure to be other mold-based medicines out there, and all the drug companies have already realized that identifying and patenting them is where the real money lies. Needless to say, they're none too eager to share their progress in this area; patriotic duty, after all, only goes so far.

Furious when Life kills her penicillin story (Reese's death makes it too depressing for wartime), increasingly drawn to chief Rockefeller penicillin researcher James Stanton, and desperate not to be sent overseas on assignment, Claire pitches a new project to publisher Henry Luce: let her document the nascent penicillin production process, and don't publish it until the magazine and the country are ready. The formidable Luce agrees. Things get complicated in a hurry, however, when Claire is assigned a second job, working for the federal government: use the knowledge she gains to keep tabs on the pharmaceutical companies, and make sure they aren't holding anything back. A researcher who's just started to see promising results from a penicillin alternative ends up dead; was it suicide, accident, or murder? And Claire's father, the inventor/ tycoon she's just recently begun to know after a decades-long estrangement, has just bought a pharmaceutical company, and is turning up in the oddest places.

While A Fierce Radiance is certainly a page turner, it's the supporting details that really set it apart. Belfer succeeds brilliantly in capturing the texture of everyday Americans' lives in the early days of WWII: the constant fear that the nightly bombings of London would come to New York and Washington, the potentially devastating consequences of illness and injury in the pre-antibiotic age, the lingering aftermath of the Great Depression. While Claire herself has a bit of Mary Sue about her, the bulk of the characters are complex and believable; I especially appreciated how the author portrayed Rutherford, Claire's father, in this regard.

If anything, the romance is the weakest part of the story. It's not that I object to a love story that starts out with an intense physical attraction; heck, it happens all the time. But because it is so common, it's hard to write about it in a way that feels fresh or non-cliched. Fortunately, the somewhat-trite beginning is largely redeemed as the story progresses, Claire and Jamie are kept apart by their respective wartime assignments, and ... well, life happens.

All in all, an engaging read, and an interesting twist on the World War II novel. If you like historical fiction and/or medical thrillers, you'll probably like this one.

#41 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Decided after the poignant and literary but somewhat slow-paced Independence Day that I needed a book where something actually happened, darn it. Well, for anyone who's missed the hype around the books and/or the movie, Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) more than fit the bill.

Summary: "The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age -- and a terrifying capacity for ruthlesness -- assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest echelon of Swedish industrialism -- and a surprising connection between themselves."

Opening lines: "It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday."

My take: Hold on to your hat, folks. It's not often that a book surrounded by this much hype manages to impress and entertain me, but Dragon Tattoo certainly did. Lots of interesting characters, all worthy of varying levels of suspicion. There's the 82-year-old Henrik Vanger of the opening line; principals Blomkvist and Salander ... but also a host of supporting characters, ranging from Blomkvist's publisher and occasional lover, Erika Barger; Harriet's brother Martin, who took over as CEO of Vanger when Henrik retired; Henrik's seemingly devoted attorney; Salander's own boss; Harriet's inscrutably nasty mother; and many other curious members of the Vanger tribe. True to form, you wonder early on how all these threads -- Blomkvist's libel conviction; Harriet's disappearance and presumed murder; Salander's questionably-ethical sleuthing skills -- will tie together, and the answer mostly works. Without spoiling it, there is a particular romantic pairing I don't approve of -- and more importantly, that doesn't seem to add much to the story -- but otherwise, you can bet I'll be lining up for The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, stat.

#35 - Little Bee

Wow. Little Bee (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), by Chris Cleave, was awesome. Not in the flip, synonym-for-"cool" way the word's come to be used since, oh, the 1980s, but in the classic, "stunning, sobering, worthy of awe" sense.

Summary (from Booklist Review): "Little Bee, smart and stoic, knows two people in England, Andrew and Sarah, journalists she chanced upon on a Nigerian beach after fleeing a massacre in her village, one grisly outbreak in an off-the-radar oil war. After sneaking into England and escaping a rural immigration removal center, she arrives at Andrew and Sarah's London suburb home only to find that the violence that haunts her has also poisoned them. In an unnerving blend of dread, wit, and beauty, Cleave slowly and arrestingly excavates the full extent of the horror that binds Little Bee and Sarah together. A columnist for the Guardian, Cleave earned fame and notoriety when his first book, Incendiary, a tale about a terrorist attack on London, was published on the very day London was bombed in July 2005. His second ensnaring, eviscerating novel charms the reader with ravishing descriptions, sly humor, and the poignant improvisations of Sarah's Batman-costumed young son, then launches devastating attacks in the form of Little Bee's elegantly phrased insights into the massive failure of compassion in the world of refugees. Cleave is a nerves-of-steel storyteller of stealthy power, and this is a novel as resplendent and menacing as life itself." -Donna Seaman

Opening line: "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl."

My take: A beautiful, moving, and tremendously original story. As the less-than-descriptive jacket blurb suggests, "the magic is in how the story unfolds," so I'll try not to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that at some point before the story opens, the English Sarah and the Nigerian Little Bee met on a Nigerian beach. Between that meeting and their unexpected reunion in London two years later, Sarah has lost a finger and her husband, the depressed and inscrutable Andrew, and Little Bee has lost her beloved big sister Nkiruka. How this all happens, and how Little Bee comes to ring Sarah's doorbell on the morning of Andrew's funeral, makes for a breathtaking and horrifying read. Don't miss this one.

#33 - A Fair Maiden

For me, Joyce Carol Oates' books are the reader's equivalent of a train wreck. Almost, but not quite; the writing is superb, so it's not as though the stories have no redeeming value. It's more that they always leave me feeling, well, more than a little icky. And yet I'm always quick to snap each new one up when I come across it. I can't seem to look away.

A Fair Maiden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) is no exception.

Summary (from Library Journal Review): "A summer nanny in an upscale New Jersey Shore community, 15-year-old Katya Spivak is approached by wealthy 68-year-old author and artist Marcus Kidder -- and one immediately wonders where this is leading. Oates (Dear Husband) creates a growing sense of evil as Katya becomes more involved with Kidder. First she visits him innocently enough with her charges for tea, then comes over alone when she needs money to help her mother out of a jam; finally, after one unreasonable demand, she rebels. In exploring Katya's life and relations, including her gambling, man-chasing mother, jealous sisters, and criminal boyfriend Ray, Oates makes it clear why a wealthy, sophisticated man would become irresistible to Katya. The answer to the question whether Kidder's intentions are good or evil and whether Katya will eventually be saved or ruined lead to the climax of this short but satisfying novel."

Opening Lines: "Innocently it began. When Katya Spivak was sixteen years old and Marcus Kidder was sixty-eight."

My take: A good book, especially if you enjoy Oates' work and/or have a taste for the contemporary gothic and vaguely grotesque. I did, however, come away feeling like the ending, while unsettling, wasn't nearly as horrific as the jacket blurb had made it out to be. Yes, Kidder is a lech, and when you finally realize what his ultimate plan for Katya is, your (or at least my) reaction is somewhere between a shudder and an "Ew!"

What's interesting, though, is the nuanced way in which Oates manage to make your basic (albeit rich) dirty old man appear almost sympathetic. By comparison, the blurred snapshots of Katya's other romantic/ sexual encounters, unremarkable though they may be, seem far more perverse and ultimately damaging. What's worse for an impressionable, not-as-worldly-as-she-thinks young working-class girl: a brief liaison with a much-older man who asks about her dreams and tells her repeatedly that she's talented and beautiful, or a blatantly coercive on-and-off affair with an only-slightly-older cousin who also happens to be an ex-con? How will each one affect the woman Katya ultimately grows into? Without giving too much away, there's a violent encounter between the two towards the end of the book that didn't hit me till after the fact as, "Wow. This says something about what's in store for Katya, from here on out."

I do, of course, need to jump on my socioeconomic soapbox for a minute, and argue that Oates' depiction of Katya's home town of Vineland may be unfairly bleak. OK, it's not quite Knockemstiff, but still ... no matter how blue-collar the town, I find it hard to believe that no one of Katya's acquaintance has ever done anything except get pregnant or join the military out of high school. Surely there'd be a cousin or neighbor at community college somewhere? Believe me, I totally get the "working-class kid goes to upper middle/ upper-class summer resort" culture shock thing (been there, done that), but a bit more subtlety on this point might have made the point more effectively.

#49 - Gorky Park

On Friday night, while Mrhazel and Littlehazel were engrossed in original Star Trek reruns, I finished Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (Ballantine, 1981). This one's been on my list since I read Child 44 a few months ago; eventually, I'll go back to The Gulag Archipelago and complete the Soviet-era political thriller troika.

The verdict? A decent read, engaging enough, but definitely a period piece. Set (mostly) in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, it tells the story of Arkady Renko, a Moscow homicide investigator of average ambition and less-than-average Party loyalty who (we suspect) achieved his position only by dint of his father, a famous Stalinist-era general. The novel opens with the case that will change Arkady's life forever: the discovery of three frozen bodies, fingertips removed and faces mutilated to thwart identification, in Moscow's Gorky Park. He and his old nemesis, Major Pribluda of the KGB, respond at the same time, but after tromping around contaminating the crime scene, the KGB washes its hands of the case. Their lack of interest remains even when Arkady discovers one of the victims is an American. Given his history with Pribluda, something about this doesn't sit well with Arkady, and to distract himself from the collapse of his marriage, he immerses himself in an ill-advised investigation to find out who the Gorky Park victims are and who killed them.

For a suspense novel, I found the book a bit slow-paced. Smith's descriptions of Moscow are rich and vivid, and definitely succeeded in giving the reader a sense of place. Unfortunately, his descriptions of his characters are less so (yeah, I know I complain about this with almost every suspense novel I read ... you think I'd learn), and with so many of them to keep track of, this made the story line a bit confusing in places. Suffice it to say that there are elements of international intrigue and plain old ordinary greed at play here, and Arkady ultimately becomes unable to trust anyone. This would be more compelling if we'd gotten to know him well enough to be moved by his plight, but for me, this didn't happen.

All in all, Gorky Park is worth reading if you stumble across a copy and want something you don't need to think too much about (though maybe if I had, the characters and plot twists would have made a bit more sense) -- but not really something that, in our post-Cold War era, seems to have aged very well.