Collected Miscellany

THE WATCHER IN THE PINE is the third novel in Rebecca Pawel’s series set in Spain during, and immediately after, the Spanish Civil War. Carlos Tejada has married Elena Fernandez, been promoted to lieutenant and given his first command within the Guardia Civil. Elena is pregnant and somewhat conflicted about her husband’s posting. The village of Potes is a remote outpost in the Picos de Europa mountains of northern Spain. They arrive in a blizzard; there’s no decent rooms available at the post, so the Tejadas settle in at the fonda of Barbara Montalban.

Elena soon senses they are in unfriendly territory. The Civil War is over, but the maquis, the guerillas, operate in the pine forests that flank the mountains. Barbara Montalban’s husband is missing, her son dead at the hands of the Guardia.

Carlos takes command of the small force assigned to the area. His predecessor met an untimely death at the hands of the maquis; his second-in-command, Sargeant Marquez seems more interested in Elena’s ‘red’ background; she’s a university graduate and a teacher and hails from the Republican city of Salamanca. Cut off and isolated, Tejada begins to investigate the theft of dynamite from a job site in Potes.

Elena sets off to a neighboring village to locate a carpenter. They need furniture and bookcases; her loneliness is accentuated by her sympathy for the ordinary people of the Deva Valley. The war has left them designated as a devastated region; every family has lost someone to the fighting or the Fascist arrest squads, led by the Guardia.

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Before I plunge into my review of Karin Slaughter’s new novel, I thought I’d exorcise a few demons about reviewing. A few months ago I tried an earlier work by this author called BLINDSIGHTED. I couldn’t get into it. At first I blamed Ms. Slaughter, then I wondered if I was simply in the wrong frame of mind. INDELIBLE arrived at my doorstep in a battered box from NYC. Books tumbled out of the box like marathon runners at the finish line. I’d spoken to the publicist at Harper Collins and hemmed and hawed about INDELIBLE. I didn’t think I was going to like it. I’m too busy. The TBR pile looms. The volcano is erupting a few miles up the road; molten lava, man. That’s a valid excuse for distraction, isn’t it?

INDELIBLE opens with a powerful scene. Two armed men invade a small town police station. Local kids are on a tour of the station; the gunmen kill a deputy, shoot another. Sara Linton is trapped inside with her gravely wounded ex-husband Jeffrey Tolliver. Sara is the town’s pediatrician as well as the coroner; she’s cool under fire, but shocked by the mayhem unfolding before her.

Lena Adams is a detective dreading her first day back on the job. Her boyfriend is pressuring her to see her that night. Lena walks into the nightmare and is told that Jeff Tolliver has been killed.

Sylacauga Alabama is Jeff Tolliver’s hometown. Sara flashes back to a road trip with Jeffrey a decade earlier. On the way to Florida, he detours for an overnight stay in his hometown. The trip becomes a nightmare, especially for Sara. Jeff’s mother is horrible, his father’s in jail. Terrible secrets come to light after a shooting death embroils Sara in Jeff’s past.

Karin Slaughter covers a lot of ground in this novel. Her style is direct and the action blunt and sometimes disquieting. She defies convention in her non-linear approach; after the set-up she takes us back in time and keeps us there while she reveals the events in Jeffrey’s life that challenge Sara’s faith in him and her own understanding of love.

The novel works best when told from Sara’s point of view. Jeff and Lena are less reliable narrators, by design, not from lack of skill. INDELIBLE moves quickly, its plot derived from the theme Sara ponders throughout the narrative. What is love? How do we know it when we feel it, how do we explain that unique reaction to someone else that often dictates what we do?

Karin Slaughter takes the social order apart with precision and purpose; she wants to show us the consequences of actions taken years earlier. She succeeds, and when her narratives of past and present converge, you’ll be sorry the ride is over.

I’m a big Edgar Allan Poe fan, in fact, I have his picture on a file cabinet to my left and often look over at him during the day, musing on what his life must have been like. I love his dark writings, I feel a kinship to his melancholy approach to life. The pureness of his writing, its cadence and imagery, has always spoken to me more effectively than any other writer.

When I was given a mystery novel which purported to use Edgar Allan Poe’s writings in its theme, I was reluctant, at first, to read it. It seemed an insult to him, to the craft of mystery writing, to the expertise apparent in almost everything Poe has ever written. After all, how could a mere 20th century novel (this book was written in 1996, published by Little, Brown and Company) capture Poe’s brooding style, the grainy shadows of his descriptions, the sense of being trapped in a musty, forgotten well on a plantation forgotten by man and time?

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The latest Boldtype issue is out and this one focuses on translation. There are some interesting books discussed so check it out. I was particularly intrigued by the description of the book Snow by Orhan Pamuk:

A crafty fundamentalist fugitive, an over-the-hill actor besotted with dreams of greatness, and a newspaper man who prints the news before it happens are just a few of the characters who populate Pamuk’s devilishly complicated novel. Yet, despite its bustling plotline, Snow remains an eerily quiet, introspective work. Its empathetic protagonist lives out the conflicts that roil the snowed-in town, but the work somehow gracefully toes the line of allegory without ever crossing it. Pamuk doesn’t trade in facile notions of clashing civilizations. Instead, he delves into the divisions within a single country, a single town, and, ultimately, a single person.

Sound fascinating. Might have to pick that one up myself. Maybe it will get me out of my funk.

Via Ed by way of Bondgirl comes a quiz about not what you have read or watched but what you have done or experienced. Below my answers (in bold):

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I think we’re all aware of the state of the thriller. Cartoon characters save the world from other cartoon characters; there’s sex, but not too much. Weapons systems, jargon, the future of mankind at stake; the dialogue typically forces the reader to the dark side, rooting for the villain.

Chris Dickey’s novel THE SLEEPER is a serious setback to this downward spiral. This is a page-turner with style, force and genuine passion.

The novel’s catalytic event is the destruction of the World Trade Center. Yes, 9-11, 2001. Kurt Kurtovic lives in Westfield Kansas with his wife and daughter. Like a lot of people he saw the cataclysm unfold on television. Unlike most of us Kurt thinks he knows who’s responsible; not in a general sense, but in a very personal one.

Kurt is an ex-army ranger and a former mujad fighter in Bosnia. Despite his blond hair, blue eyes and Midwestern roots, Kurt is a Muslim, albeit not in current standing. The destruction in New York and DC propels him into action. It becomes apparent quickly that the FBI and CIA are well aware of his background. With his family at risk, Kurt undertakes a preemptive journey through the looking glass of international terror.

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