Compassion Fatigue? What If It Were a Leg Muscle?

It's been a very hard 8 days here in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, with losses and grief and discouragement, thanks to terrible flooding from a 6-inch rainstorm.

But it's also been 8 days of being amazed, touched, and proud of our communities, as people have pitched in to rebuild roads, deliver groceries, share water, and yes, provide funding for those whose homes were destroyed.

But Rachael Moragues and her sons didn't know until yesterday that their brookside house would be condemned as unlivable from the flooding, so she's not yet receiving the enormous support that's available. I'm hoping this is your moment to dip into a pocket again -- or for the first time this season -- and give what you'd appreciate receiving if you were in her shoes.

The way you care for a muscle that's overworked is to rub it some, hydrate, then stretch it. Let's stretch our hearts for Rachael. Donate here, and be part of this caring community.

Book Notes: Dark, No Sugar—from Eli Cranor, Scott Phillips, Stuart Neville

These three crime novels are all from Soho Press: two from the Soho Crime imprint, and one from a new imprint called Hell's Hundred. Brace yourself. And note that the blue links are usually to reviews I've posted earlier, often on our Kingdom Books blog.

BROILER by Eli Cranor came out last week (July 2) so you may have missed it, considering the fireworks both physical and political. I reviewed Cranor's two earlier books, Don't Know Tough and Ozark Dogs, and this new one follows his curve toward increasingly bitter exposure of hard lives in Arkansas. Being ground down by circumstance, poverty, and the power of your boss is a classic situation that breeds thoughts of revenge. "Hardworking, undocumented employees" Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo suffer some of life's terrible losses ... and that's before you add the horrors of their work at a chicken plant.

What they can't imagine is that the rich and powerful in their lives might also have wounds. And it takes the women to sort this out. There's a lot of "ugly" to wade through in this very new take on a kidnap crime -- but there's a lot of beauty, too, in Cranor's resolution of the hot mess.

THE DEVIL RAISES HIS OWN (August 6 release) is  Los Angeles noir at its richest and funniest, set in 1916 as photographers fumble with the new film technologies available—and the shocking delights of the mild porn called blue movies. Scott Phillips is known for his Midwestern noir but his 2020 That Left Turn at Albuquerque was already shifting the locale westward ... and isn't the classic noir often rooted i n LA?

When the photo would-be professionals cross paths with Bill Ogden and his studio, not to mention Bill's strong-willed granddaughter Flavia, complications multiply. Still, each of the men in this tangle has his own ways of keeping calm:

On the streetcar home from Pasadema Bill sat next to a handsome woman wearing spectacles, a basket full of vegetables at her feet. After a while she turned to him and spoke. "You hurting, mister?"

"What makes you say that?"

"You keep wincing."

He hadn't been aware of it. "I pulled a muscle in my back."

She looked him up and down, mouth pinched tight. "You look like a man's been up to some mischief. ... You have a look I recognize. A cheat. ... I can smell her eau de cologne on you. And I'll bet she's married, too, isn't she?"

Love noir, especially LA noir? Or dipping back into the start of the Golden Age of film? Pull this one onto your summer reading shelf and get ready for a lot of sneaky grins.

I would read almost anything by Belfast author Stuart Neville. His Belfast Noir books have been compelling, often threaded with the paranormal, and fisted with the generation-to-generation wounds and darkness of The Troubles. So I grabbed BLOOD LIKE MINE without realizing the shift of genre. It's quickly obvious: This is an all-American Western plus horror crossed into crime fiction, with that bloody tang of the Donner party in the background. (If you don't recall that from history class, take a moment to look at what took place back then.) It's compelling and gruesome ... and I hope that Neville isn't going to take this as an ongoing theme for a series about the historic burdens of growing up in the United States!

Almost anything else I could tell you about BLOOD LIKE MINE would be a spoiler -- you need to roll into it and figure out the twists as you go. I'll just tip my hat to Neville's unusual positioning of a mother and daughter and their very unusual motives for their Western journey. Shudder ....

The book's release (August 6) marks the second of the "Hell's Hundred" collection (it started in June with youthjuice by E.K. Sathue. Follow, pre-order, do all that important planning if the mingling of horror with crime and noir is your cup of ... certainly not tea!

Book Notes: Fresh Books from Hugh Laurie and Rex Stout

1996 hardcover

When I heard Hugh Laurie's crime novel THE GUN SELLER was being re-released this summer by Soho Press (which published it originally in 1996), I found the advance review copies were missing the hyped "introduction by the author" and "foreword by Stephen Fry." I bought one of the first edition hardcovers -- marked up by a library -- and dug into the story. 

Laurie is a noted actor, and in the US best known recently as Dr. House in the eponymous TV series House. I was tickled to find that his sense of plot and pacing in this book, his first novel, is first rate. Either he absorbed the rhythms of his performances (also including Blackadder on TV, and 101 Dalmations among films), or he's been reading and soaking up crime fiction for a long time. Or both.

2024 softcover

When former Scots Guard officer Thomas Lang receives a pitch for contract murder, he declines immediately and goes above and beyond the ethical call by going to see the prospective victim. That gets him into several kinds of trouble, from legal to physical, and at the same time makes him the target of an old-fashioned "honey trap" enterprise. The first half of the novel plays out as expected, with plenty of that familiar wry humor familiar from Blackadder. The second half is frankly unbelievable, but still a fun and lively read.

And now that the new edition's in print, you can read the very short intro material. But if you can grab the earlier edition, you might as well, because there's nothing of note in those added segments. The "Discussion Questions" in the new version are pretty funny, though. 

Espionage fiction shelves and British humor shelves should both include THE GUN SELLER.

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As a devoted fan of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series (if you ever met my darling extra-large husband, you can appreciate one reason), I rushed to pre-order HOW LIKE A GOD when it was announced in January that a never-published Stout book would be released by Hard Case Crime. It arrived as promised at the start of June. After several attempts, I've passed it along elsewhere. It's a cross between an existential exploration of a potential murderer's mind, and a grim LA-style noir, narrated as if it were an existential pseudo-novel. Not my cup of tea. If you like very dark noir and can put up with a slow pace and many diversions, give it a try and let me know your thoughts afterward. I'm going back to the Nero Wolfe series, which often warms my heart, as well as providing classic mystery narrative.