Collected Miscellany

Regular readers will recall that I am a fan of children’s or young adult fantasy series. I have been reading a number of series as new books come out. One such series is the Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Although I haven’t really reviewed each book in the series, I have discussed the series as a whole.

In fact, in that post I outlined the series pretty well:

The first three books follow the lead character Twig from his intial adventure in the Deepwoods through his search for the magical stormphrax with his real father and his subsequent flight out into the void of open sky where the entire crew is scattered across the Edge. But the Curse of the Gloamgozer goes back in time to explore the story of Twig’s father and mother. The next three books in the series (The Last Sky Pirate, and the yet to be released in the states Vox and Freeglader) focus on the Rook Barkwater character and take place fifty years after the end of Midnight Over Sanctaphrax.

The most recent book I have read is Freeglader book seven and, as noted above, last in the Rook Barkwater stretch of books (5,6,7). This volume, like the other books, is a complicated mix of characters and story lines. Freeglader, however, connects and explains much of the series so far by relating the history of Rook’s family tree.

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The Blue Zone by Andrew Gross

Publishers Weekly

Having coauthored five bestsellers with James Patterson (Lifeguard, etc.), Gross makes a solo debut superior to his collaborative efforts, if short of the first thriller rank. His engaging heroine, Kate Raab, a medical researcher in the Bronx, is shocked when the Feds arrest her beloved gold trader father, Benjamin, and charge him with laundering money for a Colombian drug cartel. A hit team’s attempt to kill the entire Raab family prompts all of them, except Kate, to start their lives anew in the witness protection program. Kate’s choice, predictably, places her in continuing danger, even as she begins to suspect that her father’s involvement with the narco traffickers was more deliberate and extensive than he’s willing to admit. The secret revelations at the heart of the plot may strike some as a little far-fetched, and the details about the witness protection program fail to convince, but Gross shows sufficient talent for readers to want to see more from his pen alone.

– The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid

Publishers Weekly

An intriguing, 200-year-old mystery propels this multilayered stand-alone from British author McDermid set in England’s Lake District. Scholar Jane Gresham pursues her theory that HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian returned secretly from exile to his homeland in the late 18th century. A shriveled body found in a bog seems to bear resemblance to this dashing hero, right down to the South Sea tattoos that blacken his buttocks. Jane searches relentlessly for a lost manuscript by the poet Wordsworth that relates Christian’s tale in tantalizing excerpts between chapters. Various subplots complicate her quest, including a fraught friendship with precocious 13-year-old Tenille, a lonely, mixed-race girl who also loves Romantic poetry. With a feminist, socially conscious spin, McDermid (The Distant Echo) vividly contrasts marginal subsistence in London’s dismal Marshpool neighborhood with the Lake District’s bucolic lifestyle. Boasting blurbs from such notable authors as Harlan Coben, Tess Gerritsen and Joseph Finder, this could be McDermid’s break-out book.

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One of the many talents I admire, and wish I possessed, is the ability to capture a book in a couple of sentences or a paragraph. As regular readers know, I admire the short synopsis and one or two sentence commentary that the folks at Publishers Weekly and Booklist produce (I read them at Amazon.com). I raise this rather obvious point because I want to once again commend and use just such a paragraph. This is one from Booklist and it covers Avalanche – the latest Bo Tully Mystery from Patrick McManus. Here is the entry:

Blight County, Idaho, sheriff Bo Tully, his dad, and friend Dave Perkins head to West Branch Lodge to check out a missing-person report. Mike Wilson, a co-owner of the business, stormed out of the lodge after a fight with his wife, Blanche. Tully and his dad, Pap, the lovable but corrupt former Blight County sheriff, narrowly miss being killed by an avalanche on their way to the lodge. When Mike turns up dead, Tully has a murder investigation on his hands, but he is stuck at the lodge until the road is cleared. In town, Mike’s business partner is also found dead. The partners had purchased key-man insurance, and Blanche is the beneficiary–leaving her the chief suspect. But how did she get to town with the road blocked? Quirky characters and plenty of wit enliven this folksy mystery from the author of several collections of outdoor humor.

A succinct plot summary and a one sentence description/review all in less than 150 words. Nice work! I can’t even clear my virtual throat in 150 words.

I am not sure I have much to add to that description either. That last sentences captures the book quite well. Basically, you have a police procedural set in a unique locale – a lodge in Idaho – spiced up with McManus’s wit and quirky characters. The Bo Tully books have all the trappings of a successful mystery series: a setting that provides interesting background, reoccurring and developing characters that you can get to know, and enough new characters and plot twists to keep it from getting old or overly formulaic. Avalanche hits all of these points.

Bo, Pap, Dave the Indian, and other regulars from The Blight Way are still the central characters but the details and location of the mystery are different and so are the secondary characters and/or main suspects. A good blend of the comfortingly familiar and the interestingly new is what makes these mystery series work, IMHO.

McManus captures the unique nature of the folks who live in the rural and mountainous west and they make for interesting, and humorous, characters. Bo and Pap Tully are the focus of course, but McManus often makes even the minor characters interesting. The dialog is snappy and funny and Bo’s musings on women and his relations with them are sure to bring a laugh and maybe even a nod or two.

So yeah, “Quirky characters and plenty of wit enliven this folksy mystery” is a pretty good description. Fans of McManus will snatch this one up, if they haven’t already, but anyone who enjoys a lighthearted – or “folksy” – mystery series will get a kick out of Bo Tully.

It has been quite a while since I have posted one of these “In the Mail” features. For those of you unfamiliar with the format, basically I just post a link and a blurb to books that I have received from publishers. This provides notice of books readers might not be aware of, rewards the publishers for sending me said books, and is a handy way for me to keep track of the books I get and what critics are saying about them.

– Freud’s Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis by Brenda Maddox

Publishers Weekly

In writing the life of the man who established psychoanalysis in Britain, veteran biographer Maddox (Nora: The Real Molly Bloom) gives an equally fascinating (if more familiar) picture of the early world of psychoanalysis, with its conflicting egos and theoretical battles, particularly between strict Freudians and the followers of Melanie Klein, which fiercely divided the English psychoanalytic society founded and ruled over by Ernest Jones. Maddox frames Jones’s life as the story of a man whose enormous gifts finally allowed him to triumph over early disgrace. A Welshman who’d shown brilliance as a medical student, Jones (1879–1958) had to leave England in 1908 after accusations of sexual impropriety while examining several youngsters; Maddox finds the evidence in one case “damning.” But Jones returned two years later to practice psychoanalysis and advocate tirelessly for it, soon becoming a member of Freud’s inner circle.

While one wishes for a bit more insight, Maddox wisely refrains from psychoanalyzing Jones, who took full advantage of his ability to mesmerize women before finally settling into a happy marriage, and his alternately affectionate and irritable relationship with his mentor (Jones at one point accused Freud’s daughter, Anna, of being “insufficiently analyzed”; Freud in turn called Jones a lying Welshman). Perhaps Jones’s greatest moment was in saving Freud and many other Jewish psychoanalysts from the Nazis. Maddox adds an important chapter to the history of psychoanalysis in this balanced and skillful biography.

– Michelangelo in Ravensbruck: One Woman’s War Against the Nazis by Karolina Lanckoronska

Booklist

Countess Lanckoronska’s memoir of struggle and survival in Poland during World War II chronicles two tragedies: the Holocaust and the war of occupation and conquest against the Poles by the Russians and the Germans. In 1939, at the outbreak of the war, she lived in Lvov, where she held the post of professor of Renaissance Italian art. Lanckoronska (1898-2002) became active in the resistance movement. She describes her work in the underground in Soviet-occupied Lvov, her escape into Nazi-occupied Polish territories, and her imprisonment in Nazi jails and in the concentration camp of Ravensbruck. There she refused the so-called “privileged” treatment of a special solitary cell, choosing instead to share the fate of her fellow inmates, whom she tried to help. She worked in the sick bay and also gave lectures on art and European history to women facing death. First published in Poland in 2001 and containing eight pages of black-and-white photographs, the book offers a rare insight into this aspect of the Holocaust and of the courage of those who resisted the mass murderers.

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Tony Woodlief over at Sand in the Gears has been discussing Christian Fiction (Part one is here). Here is a snippet from his latest post:

What is Christian fiction? Does Doris Betts’s story, “Serpents and Doves” count? In it a dying, guilt-ridden man has a feverish conversation with the Devil that brings him to realize the salvation that has eluded him. Then there’s Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, wherein a priest is executed for refusing to renounce his faith. Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River is infused with grace, and its noblest character is a through-and-through Christian. Do any of these count as Christian fiction?

I suspect not. There’s cursing in them, for one thing. Greene’s book depicts sex in a prison cell. Plus his priest fathered a child. Each book has an edge to it, and perhaps that’s the best demarcation. Christian fiction seems to be a safe harbor for people who want no cursing, or sex, or difficult theological quandaries. It’s a place where the bad people are clearly bad, where the troubled find Jesus, the wicked get their comeuppance, and children have the wisdom of angels. It’s escapist literature, and as such it’s part of a long tradition. It’s the literary equivalent of bubble gum, only it’s sugarless, for those who care about the state of their spiritual teeth.

To further develop my interest in historical fiction mysteries, I read Candace Robb’s The Nun’s Tale (this is the third book in the Owen Archer Mystery Series). I am becoming more interested in this genre because of the historical context and the intrigue of a mystery.

Here is a brief description of the book from the author’s website:

When a young nun dies of a fever in the town of Beverley, England, in the summer of 1365, she is buried quickly, for fear of the plague. The following year, the Archbishop of York is concerned to learn that a woman who claims to be the resurrected nun is talking of relic-trading and miracles. When murder follows in her wake, Owen Archer must undertake his third case. Traveling to Leeds and Scarborough to try to unearth clues, Owen finds only a trail of corpses.

A meeting with Geoffrey Chaucer, spy for King Edward, establishes a connection with mercenary soldiers and the powerful Percy family. Meanwhile, Owen’s wife, the apothecary Lucie Wilton, pregnant with their first child, has won the mysterious woman’s confidence. But the troubled secrets that start to emerge will endanger them all.

As with the two previous books, I think Robb does an excellent job of bringing the time period to life. She seems to understand the daily life of men and women in Medieval England. Without skipping a beat, she switches from characters who are wealthy to those who less fortunate.

The plot and character development are superb. Robb keeps you guessing throughout the book. You get to know the main characters more in this book as they try to solve another mystery.

I hope you enjoy this wonderful look at Medieval England.