A (Vermont) Romance of the Revolution: DEAREST BLOOD by Jessie Haas

Ready to detach from the politics of the moment, to celebrate the American Revolution? Although the big national festivities will blossom next year, when we reach 250 years from the Declaration of Independence, this past April marked a quarter century from the Battles of Lexington and Concord. In many ways the push for independence was already "old" by 1775, with initial historical moments coming in 1763 (end of war with the French) and 1765 (protests begin).

Vermont author Jessie Haas, an expert in the history of the Vermont towns of Westminster and Westminster West, provides an exciting, enjoyable, and yes, romantic way to step into the flow of revolution in her newly self-published novel DEAREST BLOOD. (I bet some traditional publishers are hating that they missed out on this!) Cleverly, she positions her 250-page tale on the very edge of the young adult/adult reading line: Fifteen-year-old Fanny Montresor is the daughter -- well, that's complicated, because neither of her parents in Westminster is her birth parent -- but let's keep this simple for now and say that, as the townspeople see her, she is the daughter of a British-loyal civil servant whose wealth is mostly in land, and a lovely and skilled mother who's even more loyal to The Crown. In a town and state on the verge of armed rebellion, that's not a helpful heritage. And it's a shock to Fanny when her mother prescribes marriage to a man of means, locally, as a way to keep Fanny safe in the likely dangerous times ahead.

But there's little time for Fanny to seek other options: "War was normal in America, and left its long trail of debris and grief." Whether battling Abenaquis or the French or pestilence, Fanny's seen enough to believe her mother's insistence that an arranged marriage is suddenly a must.

Armed conflict breaks out far sooner than either expects, and surrounds Fanny's home; she witnesses the death of a young man her own age, and there's ample reason to fear she and her mother could be attacked soon. Her discoveries quickly shatter her worldview, even bringing her toward the rebel cause in her own reasoning.

Haas is a seasoned author, noted for both her often horse-focused children's and adult fiction, and her dedicated historical research that bore fruit in her 2011 book Revolutionary Westminster. Scene by exciting scene, she draws Fanny into deeper understanding of what freedom and liberty might mean, personal and national. Sharp-eyed readers will spot the potential romance that will become a force in the second half of the novel, which jumps to the year 1783, when the Treaty of Paris affirmed America's liberation and (more or less) safety. 

But it is also a time of grief for Fanny, who's endured multiple large losses in the meantime. Returning to Westminster with her mother, she visits the grave of the man she saw killed, and here is the source of the book's title -- on his marker stone, "For Liberty and his Countrys Good / he Lost his Life his Dearest blood." Fanny reflects, "His dearest blood. In my mind's eye I saw that dark smudge on [friend] Isaac's handkerchief. The lump in my throat grew."

How Fanny will resolve her compromises and take agency in her own life becomes a delightful background to a much happier situation than an arranged marriage "for safety." The sweetness and cleverness of the remaining plot -- based on real people and events -- make this novel of the American Revolution into a swift and uplifting read. 

And that, in short, is why historians like Haas sometimes bring their deep knowledge around the corner to a fictional approach. Lucky readers: Those who love American history, Vermont history, historical fiction, and a true-life romance can all savor this book. Do you know a dreamer who's paying attention to friendship and maybe the scary edge of current events, and wish you could draw that person's eye to what this nation has achieved in the past? Here's a great gift, then. Order two copies, because you'll want to hold onto your own. 

DEAREST BLOOD can be ordered by bookstores, or online; read more about the author and her other publications at her website, https://www.jessiehaas.com.

PS: Watch for family names of people who settled much of Vermont; Haas writes that her "work of fiction" is "closely based on historical people and events." Maybe you will spot some relatives or familiar neighbors among the names. I did! 

Book Recommendation: THE AMATEUR by Robert Littell, an Espionage Classic

Soho Crime, a Soho Press imprint, today releases a reissue of Robert Littell's 1981 espionage classic, THE AMATEUR. What a gift! Littell even catches the tang of some sardonic Russian fiction of that time, as he positions one angry coding analyst, Charlie Heller, as an American geek who find he just has to do something about the murder of his darling fiancée. When Heller discovers that the CIA -- to him, the Company -- knows which three terrorists have killed his sweet and beautiful Sarah Diamond, jeering at her for being a Jew, and knows where those three are, yet plans to do nothing about this, his unexpected emotions lead him to an insistence on action.

Heller's quickly aware that no action will come from his employer. In fact, he's subtly demoted, moved away from the urgent daily coding and deciphering that have been his area. He's been managing communication for an embedded spy located near where the killers now reside. What can he do about all this?

His geeky decision to take matters into his own untrained hands leads him to blackmail his boss into letting him train to go after the murderers. Even the Company's trainer thinks he'll fail -- a gun in the hands of such an amateur is less than fifty percent likely to hit what he fires at. And as a desk jockey, he's not in the physical shape to choose other killing methods, is he?

But Heller's almost father-in-law, Sarah's father, is a Holocaust survivor who already lost his first family, and tells Heller bluntly, "To survive the death of people close to you, you need ritual. ... I spent three years tracking the doctor who sent them to the gas." Mr. Diamond confesses that he strangled that doctor. When Heller says, "it didn't bring them back from the dead," the old man gives him the real point: "It brought me back from the dead!"

Even the Company shrink seems to agree: "From a medical point of view, revenge is very therapeutic." So Heller feels he has all the best reasons to pursue his new plan.

Things get tangled up, of course. The spy he chases isn't who he thought it was. His feelings aren't manageable. He is, indeed, a clumsy amateur, and when the Company tries to control his actions, things get quickly even more dangerous.

Littell's delightful plot takes Heller into highly satisfying changes and actions, and reveals slyly the other meaning of amateur that we've known all along: One who loves.

Pick up a copy for the pleasure of this still great story, for insight into how Littell cut a path for today's espionage authors, and for the foreword by Mick Herron. Totally worth it!

Making a Scottish/British Crime Series Powerfully New Again: MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Ian Rankin

A quick count suggests that MIDNIGHT AND BLUE is the 24th novel in the deeply admired Inspector Rebus series from Ian Rankin. Along with similar protagonists, like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, John Rebus has reached retirement age. How can a man whose life is framed by his investigative work manage the transition?

Shockingly, it seems Rebus will have to manage it in a dangerous prison, HMP Edinburgh, surrounded by criminals who have good reason to hate and threaten him. "Rebus felt hemmed in, not only by walls but bu the same daily faces too. He had visited the prison many times during his detective years — he recalled being shown the Hanging Shed, now demolished -- but this was different. The various smells were never going to be showered away.  ... Prison, nick, jail, chokey, inside -- many names but only one game: incarceration." 

There's only sparse explanation of how he's landed here with a life sentence, a result of bodily threatening a criminal who minutes later died of a heart attack. Clearly, Rebus's many slippery judgement calls and careless antagonisms of the past must have caught up with him as the courts ground him in their teeth. Protected briefly in solitary confinement, then pressed into the population of his old enemies and, of course, the antagonisms among them, it seems he's only surviving because the death that cost his freedom proved highly advantageous to gang leader Darryl Christie, who's offered to protect him (more or less). 

Of course, Christie is powerful, menacing, and in Rebus's estimation, quite mad. So that protection immediately equals additional danger. Too bad there isn't time to sort it out any further before Rebus's miseries are compounded by a death inside the prison, and fresh expectations from both the investigators and the prison's governor that Rebus will help solve this murder. To do so would quickly mean his death at the hands of the other prisoners, though. Or would it?

It's no spoiler to admit that all the action of this very high-action crime novel takes place in one dangerous week of Rebus's incarceration. Walking with him through the seeming impossibility of crime-solving while balancing threats around him is fascinating and suspenseful, and Rankin provides plenty of aggressive and startling twists along the way.

British cover.

MIDNIGHT AND BLUE will also satisfy readers who want a chance at the better side of human nature despite darkness and violence. Rankin's final acknowledgment shows he knows exactly what he's painstakingly built into this book: "I am grateful to staff and inmates (present and past) who spoke to me and allowed me to tour the facilities. I have taken a few necessary liberties, but I hope I have also managed to show that prisons are places where compassion and hope can be manifested on all sides."

In other words -- you might think you know the author, and the series, but this is a must-read to add to the experience. On my bookshelves, it's hanging around for a second delicious reading over the winter. 

Oh yes, the publisher is Mulholland (aka Little, Brown); I like the British (Scottish) cover design better than the American.

One Traditional Crime Novel, One International Thriller

"Genre" fiction still has to meet the standards of good writing: strong characters, a sense of place, and in a plot that makes you want to open the next chapter. When you reach the last page, there should be some form of satisfaction -- and if there's frustration too, that's got to fit with an expectation that developed while you were getting acquainted with the author's temperament and motives.

But genre fiction —in this case, crime fiction, mysteries, and thrillers — also has to meet more criteria, because readers understand them as "game rules." For example, the mystery can't be solved by a walk-on character saying "Oh, didn't I tell you, I saw my uncle buying that rifle?" As another example, crime fiction doesn't generally allow ghosts into the picture (unless you are reading Stuart Neville; yes, highly recommended but, as we say in New England, it's wicked dark).

These two books are classic genre fiction, but "deeper, stronger, better," because the authors bring a powerful motivation to shape your experience and have the well-honed skills to do it.

First, consider THE HOLLOW TREE by Philip Miller. Don't judge this by the cover, which looks a bit like a desert cactus in color shades speaking of Arizona ... the actual setting is a small gritty town in north England where crimes can linger unsolved for a generation and memories and resentments can reach even further.

With his second crime novel, Edinburgh author Philip Miller comes into his prime. The first sentence of THE HOLLOW TREE offers a perfect example of this book's engrossing pattern of laying out one truth, then pulling it back: "Shona Sanderson was going to a wedding. The day would end in death."

Sandison is an investigative journalist, now saddled with a permanent disability that forces her to maneuver with a supportive cane ("stick" in British) and leaves her always off balance. So does the case she tumbles into, as she witnesses the gory suicide of a wedding guest. Miller presses Shona into overwhelming conflict when what she witnessses threatens to destroy her valued friendship with the bride-to-be. An as a caustic, insightful, and probing person, Shona's got very few close friends. The more she pushed for answers to a set of hidden crimes, the more she risks devastating consequences to the people she treasures—and herself.

Reading THE HOLLOW TREE parallels eating a globe artichoke, leaf by leaf. Your teeth scrape the sweet richness at the bottom edge of each, but you can't reach the aromatic heart of the 'choke until you complete the disrobing. In a steady accretion of toxic loyalties and occult dangers, Shona exposes how a core of evil has infected the community across time and can shatter strong bonds of love. Shona's body can't always do what the circumstances demand. But her insistence on revelation becomes the core of Miller's demonstration that the texture and questioning of crime fiction create an ideal lens for the dobt, anger, and passion of our time.

Though it's also "genre" fiction and even published by the same firm (Soho Press under its Soho Crime imprint), Andromeda Romano-Lax's THE DEEPEST LAKE couldn't be more different. Revolving around an upscale writing retreat in Guatemala on the shores of Lake Atitlán, complete with a charismatic writing teacher known for unpleasant memoirs, the story quickly establishes a mode of threat, danger, and deceit. Alternating points of view in the present tense, although they may reflect different time periods, challenge readers to stay alert and pin the evidence together around the disappearance of Rose's grown daughter Jules. Rose's ex-husband already funded a conventional search for their daughter at the lake, and concluded she was dead. Rose pretty much believes that too, but can't leave the loose threads alone as she mourns and faces her own despair and helplessness.

Experienced thriller readers may see the fierce psychological darkness that Ruth Rendell instituted in British thrillers under her pen name Barbara Vine. These frightening books (best not read at bedtime) exposed the horrors a twisted psyche can impose on others. Because of how Romano-Lax plays out her various points of view, readers know what's going on and where the threats are coming from, long before Rose does — which can be frustrating. But it's also playing fair with the traditions of thrillers, which pin the reader into a form of helplessness like that of the victim or victims in the book. 

Another parallel to this work, set on the American side of the ocean, is the Maine paranormal mystery series offered by John Connolly, where again it's the wickedness of some human hearts that drives the threats and harsh disasters of the fiction. Hat tip to Romano-Lax for probing a fresh setting at a time when Central America is becoming part of a prevailing US nightmare of difference and greed.

Cute and Sweet "Cozy" Mystery: SPOON TO BE DEAD by Dana Mentink

I review (and savor) a lot of dark mysteries. Well, the darkness often comes with the nature of crime! But not always ...

Suppose you owned a darling little ice cream shop in, let's say, Oregon -- and winter was around the corner. Would you be worried? Trinidad Jones surely is, as she anticipates a drop in the sales of her very creative specialties. So to make sure the Shimmy and Shake stays in business and her unusual but sweet employees get paid, she'll compete for a catering slot: a holiday party on a steamboat owned by Leonard Pinkerton, who can certainly afford her prices.

In this third in her delicious "Shake Shop Mystery" series, Dana Mentink offers a set-up that's far more complex than just the sugary side of an ice cream business, though. Trinidad is one of three former wives of the charming but cheating Gabe Bigley, who's currently in jail, since his fraudulent dealings extend to more than just these women. Against the odds, the three of them have become friends and all live in the same town. (That's the only thing you really need to know from the two earlier books in the series.)

So when Gabe, apparently paroled, stumbles through the door of the ice cream shop with blood on his clothing and says something about having killed someone—then passes out—the immediate disruption hits a lot of lives all at once. Moments later, the victim turns out to be Trinidad's friend and ally, Oscar.

The day had started out with such promise. Now Oscar had been run down, her ex-husband was involved, and there was an orphaned parrot nesting above her rib cage. Oh my giddy aunt indeed, Trinidad thought as they returned to the Shimmy and Shake Shop.

Mentink offers a network of friendships, sleuthing, and potentially thwarted romance as the small-town mystery leaps toward a dramatic finale. This is a classic "cozy" mystery, packed with as many flavors of sweetness as a banana split. Add it to a stack of books for light and often giggling distraction on a winter afternoon.

A Worthwhile Protagonist Has "Agency" -- Like Dr. Kate, the Vet

Although I hosted a wonderful elderly dog at my home for two months earlier this year, it turned out that I'm not a very skilled dog trainer ... and am getting a bit past learning new tricks myself. It hurt my heart to return the sweet pet who'd come here for a try-her-out visit, but it was the right thing to do, before I either broke a bone by falling while she tugged me along, or lost too much sleep to her eager awareness (bark, bark, bark, growl!) of the other animals around this rural place.

Even without a "companion animal" at hand, I found strong interest in the creatures in the new "Dr. Kate Vet Mystery" from Eileen Brady, released this month: MURDERS OF A FEATHER (Poisoned Pen Press).

As in many a "cozy" mystery series, the complications of crime in this lively tale are paired with Kate Turner's aching heart and hope for romance in time for Valentine's Day. Too bad the new vet in the area, "Dr. Mike," is married with newborn twins, as the two adults work so well together in a barn, meshing one's large-animal skills with the other's deft surgical and medical approaches. This too will turn into a twist of the plot, of course!

The murders Dr. Kate discovers are very human ones, but she'll tug at the strands of the crimes for the sake of both her own staff members and the many related animal emergencies around her, in an upstate New York harsh winter. Ice, snow, and slippery suggestions of motive and means fill the pages in a well-twisted plot with abundant discoveries. Her insistence on "agency" — that is, independence and taking her own direct actions — moves the plot well.

The best part of reading Brady's mysteries is the way she weaves Dr. Kate's animal and owner experiences into the insights that sleuthing requires: "Obsessive love. Jealous vindictive love. You see it in people and in animals that fixate on one person. That one being is all they want, all they need. And when they can't have them—they show their teeth."

Similar to the progress in a true crime investigation, it takes quite a while for Dr. Kate to unwind the final strand she needs. And that, in turn, allows readers more time to meet and enjoy the intriguing pets and farm animals along the way.

Between its charm and its intrigue, MURDERS OF A FEATHER (yes, there are crows involved!) can be a rewarding addition to the winter reading stack, and a handy choice for a holiday gift to an animal-loving friend or mystery aficionado.

And it's so very different from the next book I want to tell you about, which begins also in winter ... in urban Detroit. No pets involved at all, but plenty of love and loyalty, and a deft hand with crime.

Judith Janoo's New Collection of Poems, JUST THIS — and the Resonance of Place (Book Recommendation)

As of 2022, Vermont (said the US government) had 130 people earning an income as writers. This figure looks ridiculously low to anyone who's been to an author event or book festival here ... but I suppose it's because of the income aspect. Vermont mystery writer Archer Mayor used to claim the average writer's income was $7,000 per year, which won't pay for the rent these days, let alone food and car. So most of Vermont's writers probably combine another paid gig with their writing. 

Cover art by Helen Stork.

Still, it's a small state and in a given region, you get to at least know each other's names and often faces. And that's about all I've known of Judith Janoo, after crossing paths with her at maybe a dozen writing-related events but never even having tea together. Plus I read and reviewed her 2019 collection of poems, After Effects, and recently saw and enjoyed one of her new poems in a literary magazine.

So I bought a copy of her newest book, JUST THIS (so new it's not yet on her website), and settled down to enjoy. And investigate.

Because yes, for me, a book of poems is a double-direction investigation -- looking at how someone else sees the world, and comparing it with my own experience, and learning from the gaps and overlaps. Before I'd finished reading the "front matter," I'd discovered things I hadn't wondered about ... including pointers that showed me that Judith's last name came from her late husband Vincent, born in Malaysia. Why hadn't I wondered about the name "Janoo" before? Maybe it just seemed to fit so well with Judith? 

The front matter also says she absorbed Malaysian culture for 27 years. Hungry for more about a culture I don't know, and how a "Maine-er" like Judith would connect with it, I began looking at PLACE in Judith's poems.

The first two are instantly located "here-abouts": one poem build in stubby and intriguing tercets, called "Route 132" (I know where that is, in real life!), and the next, "Bear Cub," also in tercets but with slightly longer lines and a rich trove of sensations, from touch to scent to bright color and hunger, and a deep tenderness. I'm home, I thought -- these are poems of "my place" in Vermont.

Then with a flip of the page I arrived in Maine, tasting the salt air and savor of my own mother's longed-for location, listening to the poet's childhood and new adulthood forming. "I am from the rocks and shore / of fishermen, lobster boats // dove gray mornings that rise / from blackness over water."

Abruptly, at the end of the first section of poems, I tumbled around the world to "Johor Bahru" on the South China Sea, and needed to press onward into the next section, that reader part of my mind whispering, "Tell me more! More!"

And so it went, through the collection. I might have asked for a sequence of poems that felt more geographically organized, but that, I know, is because I like organization. Instead, JUST THIS offered me five senses and a daring freedom of the map. 

I enjoyed it. I didn't put it down until the end, and then a few hours later I picked it up again and dipped back for more tastes. Let me know if you feel the same way about this resonant new collection.

To Wrestle With Abuse, Pain, and Anger -- in a New Noir Crime Novel by Matt Phillips, A Good Rush of Blood

The first time I started reading A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD by Matt Phillips, I had to stop. Thanks to the heavens, the fates, a few better decisions, and a middle-class upbringing that cloaked me in some forms of protection, I haven't lived on the street or sold drugs. But Oh Dear God, I've known plenty of others who have (if you haven't known any, you've cut yourself off from the sad side of America), and more than once, I've experienced a dangerous locale and wondered how I'd deal with being sexually violated, should it happen. Probably the worst season for that last issue was in my late 30s, living in a rough cabin and often alone at night, creating fear out of the darkness.

I finally reached a quirky and only marginally rational conclusion, but it was enough to let me get some sleep: I had heard that nerve cells, the slowest in the body to regenerate, are made anew every seven years. So, I reasoned, if rape took place and I became estranged from my own body, I would just need to survive seven more years until every cell would be clean and new. 

The mind, unlike the cell, doesn't regenerate. We'd be lost if it did, having to start all over again with how to balance on two feet, how to move food to our mouths. The drawback to this continuity is, most of the time, the hardest scariest parts of life are not fully forgotten, are they? We just make a sort of peace that lets us move forward.

So the young woman named Creeley Nash, driving a valuable load of potent drugs to Portland, Oregon, scared the you-know-what out of me. Not only was she balancing her life on "ordinary" drugs like booze and weed, but in order to earn a decent living, she'd agreed to run the transport for a man named Animal. 

What Creeley was: Thirty-nine years old, unwed, poor as sh**,  and somewhat proud to be a second-shift waitress at Walburn's in downtown Portland. But no, she was not Animal's girl.

The constant danger she's in when driving illegal drugs reflects the nastiness, cruelty, and crudeness of most people in that business. But to Creeley, who thinks a lot about what's going on, the treatment she gets from the people she delivers to is a predictable part of life as she understands it:

She expected it because being a woman meant being seen as a possession—men thought they deserved her. Or wished they deserved her. At her age, Creeley found this dynamic amusing. She'd stopped being afraid of men a few boyfriends ago, and now she steered clear of them. She'd given up on love. Didn't exist. Not for her.

A tip of the hat to Matt Phillips: The author's gender is almost irrelevant to this 300-page crime novel.

Creeley's inner commentary on drug running is revelatory: Rich people commit as much crime as poor ones, but hide it better. All cops are bent in some fashion, from her point of view. In a way, that reassures her, because it lets her finally ask for help from one, when she realizes she's got to know for sure whether her imprisoned mother really did murder someone, or was framed.

OK, I had to stop reading early, in my first dive into this book. I wrote to one voice of the publisher, Vern Smith, about the way the book trampled on old traumas of mine. I wasn't sure I'd do the review.

Vern replied, in part:

I think we always considered that this might be read as a heavy book, and accepted it as such, seeing literary and social value in that, too. I do believe that eliciting such a response is more of a blessing than a curse in that a book like this should spark conversations, and the best thing, I think, we can do in response is talk, which is sort of what we’re doing here.

So you can guess what I did. With the lights on brightly and the locks on the doors double-checked, I stepped back into the story.

Turns out, within the violence and peril, A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD is a classic crime novel after all. A murder took place. Blame got distributed. Someone—Creeley in this case—is searching for both truth and justice and willing to make sacrifices for that.

So it turned out to be a powerful book worth reading. The investigation makes sense, the voices are real, and yes, Vern and Matt, there will be more conversations about it, when I find some other folks who've read this (that's a hint, folks). 

And if I didn't especially like some of the resolution, and would have made different choices in Creeley's shoes, well, thank goodness those shoes aren't mine. Because despite all the strange and scary parts of my earlier life, I found a really great set of decades eventually. Sometimes life really is stranger than fiction. Safer, at least. And happy.

A Little Wobble on a Rainy Day; and PROUD SORROWS by James R. Benn

It's raining ... again. A quick look at online records suggests that in Vermont, in August, you have a 50/50 chance of rain on any given day. But it feels this year like the rainclouds slip around on a fairground track, headed back toward us the moment we think they're gone.

That's good for anything I've transplanted this month, since the roots are being steadily wetted down. On the other hand, I've started resorting to the dryer to get my towels back to useful status, instead of hanging them on the porch. We'll remember this wet and often flooded summer, as we look back on it.

Speaking of looking back -- well, isn't that one of the functions of historical fiction? For the hours that I am "inside" a well-spun story, I'm no longer comparing then and now, but I'm experiencing a different time altogether.

The Billy Boyle World War II Mystery series presents its 18th title next week (Sept 5, Soho Crime imprint of Soho Press): PROUD SORROWS, by James R. Benn. The title comes from a Shakespeare couplet in the play King John, referring to the force of grief. In November 1944 in Britain, surely everyone had a reason to grieve: The war hadn't destroyed Britain, Germany hadn't defeated the proud island nation, but death, crippling injuries, and residual trauma affected all.

Benn's first chapter swiftly reveals all the English village characters who'll have potent roles in the murder investigation ahead of Billy Boyle and his colleagues. Poor Billy! He's supposed to be taking a long-overdue break at the country home of his girlfriend Diana's father -- it's damp and chilly, a classic English November, but he comments, "I shouldn't complain. I was dry and no one was shooting at me."

Trust a big dinner group to show the cracks in family and friendships, though. Soon enough, Billy's worrying about the tensions that surround him. Some vacation! Series readers know he grew up in a Boston "cop" family and landed in Europe as a criminal investigator working for one of General Eisenhower's teams. Benn, however, is a straightforward author who won't leave you guessing about that, and about Billy's skills, in case you're new to his books:

Curiosity is the curse of any decent cop, as my dad and Uncle Dan, both detectives with the Boston Police Department, had drummed that into my thick Irish skull on many occasions. Always wonder why things happen, they'd say. Figure things out, even little things.

Billy's not-a-vacation-after-all involves a retrieved German bomber, some local feuding, injured and missing persons, and eventually the discovery of a murder. Will the little things help solve the crime? Trust Billy to see what's not obvious, even when looking at a ransacked home: "When a house has been gone through so thoroughly, it's usually because the object in question wasn't found."

A good part of the pleasure of Benn's Billy Boyle books is discovering what quirky, politically forceful, and culturally mystifying historical forces this author has unearthed in his march through the years of World War II. This time, the focus is on the Ritchie Boys and on right-wing politics. Benn provides a fascinating set of notes at the end. As usual, what cracks the case will be what Billy and his allies pull together, in this case about Nazi prisoners of war, but also about the land and nearby ocean. 

PROUD SORROWS offers an exhilarating and often emotional adventure, with hints at what lies ahead for the series in its inevitable movement toward the final year of the war. Now I think about it, re-reading this well-told mystery is just perfect for another Vermont rainy day. Time to make a cup of tea and tip back into the armchair.

Slow Horses, Dark Discoveries: THE SECRET HOURS, Mick Herron (Sept. 2023)

My favorite characters from the Slough House/Slow Horses series are River Cartwright and Catherine Standish. I identify with each of them for a different set of reasons. (No, I am not going to whine about my father or my past here! I do that in memoir pieces, here.) And I can't stand Roddy Ho, with his endless primping and overweening self-esteem.

But the ones that obsess me are Jackson Lamb, Molly Doran, and Diana Taverner. Why? Because I'd love to have learned from each of them, and I wish I were as brave or as smart, and I know that I'm not. As a small child, when I began to realize that my parents kept secrets from me, I hoped with a deep unholy thrill that one of them was my identity as a Genius. By ninth grade, I knew that wasn't on the map. In the Slow Horses/Slough House series, though, each of these three has special incisive mind and, as a result, a degree of power that I'd now hate to have in my hands. The books let me peek into the inner selves of these characters, though, and there's a marvelous illicit thrill to that past-the-curtain view.

Hence the absorbing, impelling fascination of Mick Herron's 2023 offering, THE SECRET HOURS. Breaking the tradition of the reader knowing the sneaky secrets, this London/Berlin espionage novel offers a kaleidoscope of work names, job positions ("First Desk" at MI5), and hidden motivations as if the story unfolded in a very foggy neighborhood where any sighting of a spy on the sidewalk ahead could actually be the local bartender lost outside his terrain—and vice versa. 

Because the narrative involves so many hidden identities—some for the sake of anonymity among espionage professionals, some for political manipulation, some due to multiple identities either on British soil and foreign, or while publicly appearing "kind and wise" and secretly shown as manipulative and wicked— THE SECRET HOURS offers a shadow dance at first. Naive young "spooks" experience real life; political hostages slowly notice their bondage. Series readers will get the most from this novel, as they'll be alert for signs of which First Desk is hiding in the shadows, who could be a traitor, and small character traits long since revealed among the so-called slow horses. As one mask after another is lifted, the masquerade turns deadly. Yet, of course, this is Mick Herron writing, so deadly is also simultaneously funny and heartbreaking.

There are also delicious asides into evocative description, slipping in mention of the book's title phrase: "Even when apparently peaceful the [MI5/MI6] hub is alert for disturbance, whether in the world at large, on the streets of the safeguarded cities, or at the next work station along, because—as the whispered mantra has it—You never know. You never know when treachery might strike, or from what quarter. This is true whatever the time, but especially true after dark, since how we act in the light of  day is largely for other people's benefit, but what we do in the secret hours reveals who we really are."

Or the revelations of character in the face of rude awakening: "There was a big rip down the centre of everything now. It wasn't fair, she absurdly thought; wasn't fair that people should expose the violent terrors history held, and expect you to know how to respond." 

In the deliciously balanced double time spans of the book, the same character in another era will reflect: "The events she is recalling took place years ago, decades ago, but there is no statue of limitations on remembered damage, if that is what this is. And how can it be anything else? Happiness takes on a different shade in the light of  its consequences."

Don't let the "literary" phrasings mislead you -- this is also a book of fistfights, kidnapping, death threats, and some murder-for-politics. The difference is, in Mick Herron's hands, the questions asked by the ordinary people doing the footwork really matter. And ache. (And sometimes make you snort with an unexpected laugh.)

I often tell people to plunge into a book without worrying about whether they've read earlier work in a series. And you can do that with THE SECRET HOURS, of course. But if you do, then dip into some of the earlier Mick Herron books and come back to this for a second read. Then you, too, will double your time periods of engagement, and perhaps see, and feel, the movement of the world more clearly.

Release date from Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press: Sept. 12, 2023.

 

A Last Round of Summer Reading: Book Recommendations

I've recently taken photos of leaves turning red and yellow and landing lightly on the back roads or new-mown grass. It's still summer here in Vermont, where mowing the lawn with the walk-behind mower means working up a good sweat, but the cool evenings glitter with shifting constellations. Orion will rise in a few more weeks, and we'll start worrying about frost.

One of the unexpectedly moving crime novels on my summer reading stack has been WHERE THE DEAD SLEEP by Joshua Moehling (Poisoned Pen Press). This is his second book and takes a deeper look into the life of Sheriff Packard, introduced in And There He Kept Her. Significantly, it opens with an "inconsolable" three-legged dog whose nightly share of Packard's bed was taken by a visiting lover. Within a few paragraphs, it's already clear that Packard isn't handling his personal life well, while trying to be a small town's first gay (acting) sheriff. This personal confusion inevitably interferes in his crimesolving, and in his insight into why a local gambler turns up murdered in a home invasion.

Moehling is a gifted storyteller who sets up situations that clarify how greed, anger, and frustrated love can all become motives for crime. Packard's strengths depend on his ability to enlist loyalty and honesty from people who may not readily offer them. He also captures a twist of information and character in a few well chosen words, as in this fragment of a poker game: "When the river card turned, Jim raised and Richard folded. Alan shuffled his chips, then finally called. Jim took the hand with a three of a kind. Alan tossed his cards, showing a low pair." Minutes later, Packard will clear the high-stakes table with a haul of $75,000 that he can't accept, but that buys him enough respect to get some of the truth of the crime at last.

This book interfered seriously with my work plans. I wish you the same experience.

Also in the August heap has been EVERGREEN, the second crime novel of Japanese internment and anti-Asian prejudice surrounding World War II, by Naomi Hirahara and published by Soho Crime, imprint of Soho Press. I wasn't a huge fan of Hirahara's first, Clark and Division, finding it a bit too stilted (tasting like a translation despite the California birth and life of the author) and without a lot of character. 

To my delight, I found Evergreen smoothly written, intriguing, with strong development of determined Aki Ito and her struggles with both family and the unwelcoming nation, and with a complex strand of crimes involving both the plight of "second-class citizens" and the postwar new growth of America. Here's one of the polished turning points as an example:

The next meeting was going to be held in the Japanese-operated flower market on Wall Street in a few weeks.

"It's going to take time, Pop," I said.

"Those son-of-a-bitches," my father cursed. "They are not going to get away with it."

I sat quietly in the passenger seat, clutching my pocketbook. I knew that he wasn't just talking about the produce market. I couldn't bear to say out loud what I felt: Pop, they already have.

You'll want this one for any collection that circles World War II and the aftermath, or hate crimes, or American history, as well as Japanese culture and well-plotted urban crime fiction.

Later this evening I'll be working on my new memoir segment at Medium; I really enjoyed sharing some writing tips with other authors on the platform last weekend, using my extensive reviewing background to point to what makes a strong piece of writing and offering tried-and-true tips to get there. Every day, I'm aiming to deepen my own writing; it gets easier to make time after Vermont's first serious frost arrives, but until then, I've got a yard and garden to tend, as well.

The Writer, the Page, the Reader: A Magical Triangle

If you were a shy kid in elementary school, you will see entirely different things in a poem than your neighbor will, who arrived in first grade with friends from the neighborhood.

If the first time you made love was with the person you married, romance as a thread in the mystery you're reading may feel familiar and make you chuckle; when you've just concluded an acrimonious divorce, you might skip over those pages.

That's why I think of a piece of writing as one point on a triangle; the other two are who I am, and who you are. Good writing leaves room for the triangle to spin in different directions, expand, make a fresh angle, and rise into a second dimension. Yet the triangle, the bond between story and reader, must remain resilient and still touch all three anchors.

On August 12 at 5 pm (Eastern time), I'll bare my reviewer "chops" on Medium.com and offer a tips session for writers of haiku to short story to novel -- even applicable to nonfiction feature articles. There'll be some time for questions and answers, maybe even controversy.

Please do stop in and check it out! Scan the offerings for Medium Day and register here.

Meanwhile, a couple of sites with intriguing material on "endings":

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-the-perfect-ending-for-your-novel

https://www.emwelsh.com/blog/find-best-ending-story

https://scribemedia.com/write-book-conclusion/

Make A Promise In Your First Chapter: How-To Tips And Q&A For The Writing Life

Whether you’re writing a segment about your life, insight into history, a feature article, a novel, or a poem (yes, even haiku!), you’re laying out a path, an adventure, for your reader. There’s a reason for every ending: It seals the promise you make in your first line or paragraph or chapter. Then satisfaction makes your reader say, “Ah, that was good!” This seasoned author and reviewer shows how crafting your opening builds a promise to a reader. Discover the power of a beginning and ending that fit together (even when they have to fit head to toe). Gain a strategy for writing stronger and more memorable work. You’ll shape your writing with fresh insight from this chat.

Tag:Writing

Beth Kanell Writing That Braids Loss, Joy, Love

Sometimes Parents Can't Be Saved (and a Book Recommendation)

Martha Kanell, Dave's mother

Floods, fires, mass shootings -- in each news report, my eyes strain to see the children, in hopes that someone has saved them, putting them first. It seems like a shared value: If we can, we rescue the children. Then we look for others, including parents, grandparents, and more.

My husband Dave and I found many "coincidences" as we compared our lives before we met, at age 50. One especially poignant one involved our mothers: His mother, Martha, had died suddenly when just 57 years old (trust me, younger readers, that's a very unfair age for death), of a preventable complication from a hospital procedure. My mother, Joan, died suddenly at age 53 from a preventable complication from a hospital stay that in turn should never have happened.

Both of us agonized over those deaths—not just the grief of losing your mother before you've really had time to share adulthood with her, but also the insistent feeling that there must have been something we could have done to save them.

Sometimes, though, as I'm probing in my memoir segments at https://bethkanell.medium.com, that saving notion is a fantasy. Maybe it makes us feel that life is more predictable, if we imagine we have the strength and skills to save people. Maybe we're drowning in persistent guilt and trying to breathe.

One way I balance the loss and grief that life brings is by walking each morning, looking for ways to frame Vermont's natural beauty in photos. Poetry steps into that same balancing. And, of course, I read books. Although I read a lot of mysteries, some of them present caring stories where people support their neighbors and some people DO get saved! Here's a good one, new to the market today:

Birder, She Wrote, by Donna Andrews -- Relaxing Reading!

[originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Between the careful plotting, the clever twists, and the colorful descriptions, Birder, She Wrote fills a nice slot for summer beach reading.”

 

Ah, summer in the country—a hammock, watching the hummingbirds, a break before going back to her job as the mayor’s special projects assistant. Meg Langslow ought to be able to count on that much, right? But that would be leaving out the hive of bees her father is setting up at her home, her grandmother Cordelia’s community activism that’s somehow landed a reporter among them, and of course, the political challenges of her job, inconvenient and pressing.

 

Her “short list” at the end of the first chapter already involves calming two wealthy families in town and finding the two unusual men whose lives have caused an upset. An upset, that is, about bees. Funny coincidence, right?

Actually, from the moment Britni the reporter pushes into the family’s efforts, nothing feels very funny. Almost immediately—after all, this is book 33 in the lively Southern mystery series that always involves some level of bird life out in the countryside—a dead body turns up. And finding the lost naturalist resolves nothing! Meanwhile, why on earth is Britni determined to profile Meg’s socially active grandmother for a sappy sweet-tea magazine that focuses on decor and dresses?

 

Count on Andrews for liberal splashes of humor: Meg and the law enforcement team, including Meg’s father, search the woods using Pomeranians as snuffling body detectors and then as search-and-rescue canines. Gentle puns also abound. But Andrews also sticks with the tried-and-true regimen of a good crime novel: clues and red herrings, and probing for the perfect combination of motive, means, and opportunity that makes clear who’s got a mission to murder in the neighborhood.

 

Meg presses the chief of police to reason more closely about the murder victim: “How’d he manage to get himself killed out here near one of Clay County’s better-known drug and moonshine markets? And … isn’t it more usual for drug dealers and moonshine sellers to keep shifting around where they do their dealing?” She pairs the circumstances with her knowledge of her hometown and past crimes, and takes the notion further: “What if Wally the Weird now fancies himself a hotshot vigilante anti-drug crusader? What if he thought he’d found another neighborhood teen on his way to buy drugs and followed them out here to get the goods on them?”

 

Meg’s also blunt when questioning local citizens, including those complaining about wildlife around their new homes in the country: “The bees were here first,” she points out. “If a bee-free environment was essential to your health and happiness, maybe you should have done a little more investigation before you bought your house.” The point’s well taken, and might have eliminated some local friction and even dropped a suspect off the list, if only the woman Meg lectured hadn’t turned out to be a likely victim of blackmail. So the question becomes, at what point does blackmail and the threat to “tell a secret” become motive enough to kill?

 

Adding fresh timeliness to the novel is a sideline of tracking down a long-vanished African-American cemetery in the woods—something that the prissy-appearing reporter tagging along finds totally uninteresting, but that puts the Pomeranians to even more use and engages Meg and her family with more of the neighbors and their histories.

 

Andrews offers a smoothly spun story full of her trademark observations of nature (not just birds) and women’s friendships. Between the careful plotting, the clever twists, and the colorful descriptions, Birder, She Wrote fills a nice slot for summer beach reading. Just don’t start looking up things like the “murder hornets” Meg has to consider, before packing your book bag for vacation.

Summer Books, and Summer Writing -- and Sweating

Summer in Vermont is glorious, and this year it's also scary -- that steady drumbeat of climate collapse becoming part of the pulse of my body and mind. The torrential rains with floods tore apart roads, homes, businesses. And, because "this is Vermont," they also bound many of us more closely in compassion and determination. When you face Winter together (the capital W is intentional), you value the arrival of others who can tow you out of a snow-filled ditch. So when you look at what remains after flooding, with the structures already starting to grow mold and the smothered fields stinking of decomposition, you add Summer to what we need to handle together somehow.

I've been mowing and planting, "grocking" my way to gardens that will eventually thrive without much attention and bring my rehabbed land, which was scraped bare just two years ago, to something loved and lovely. Writing comes slowly for me in the heat, but I wrapped up two trios of polished work and am constructing something about bears. Yes, the ones we live with. 

In the next couple of weeks I'll post reviews of a new birding mystery from Donna Andrews, and a strange direction for Alexander McCall Smith. Yesterday my review for a new trade edition of a James Patterson thriller posted at the New York Journal of Books:

The Perfect Assassin: A Doc Savage Thriller by James Patterson and Brian Sitts -- review by Beth Kanell

“The perfect start to a pulp-fiction series brought into the 21st century.”

 

Pretend you don’t know who Doc Savage is or was, and you’ve opened The Perfect Assassin for its promise of being a James Patterson thriller. You’re ready for espionage, battle, comparison of weapons, intrigue.

 

Instead, Pattison, with Brian Sitts, offers a double narrative: The first involves a baby kidnapped 30 years earlier in eastern Russia, confined within a brutal boarding school that removes human affection and demands total attention to mastering skills, both in the classroom and in deadly physical situations like swimming in mid winter under ice on a lake. The second begins as a perverse echo of that: A harsh and powerful woman in Chicago kidnaps a wimpy anthropology professor, Dr. Brandt Savage, and cages him in a see-through cube, forcing him daily to complete agonizing physical training, eat only the disgusting nutritional smoothies she issues to him, and be punished with a shock to his bottom whenever he doesn’t do what she tells him.

 

Just before the story disintegrates into some strange BDM session, the narrative abruptly widens and the connection between the kidnapped baby and the dominating trainer named Meed becomes clear. When “Doc” Savage finally dares to ask why he’s been detached from his own life and is being rapidly remade, the answer makes no sense: He’s there to save the life of—this trainer? No way.

 

But he’s stopped resisting her demands, and even at strategy he’s more than catching up with Meed, as an intense game of three-dimensional chess reveals:

 

“’Check,’ I said. … ‘Nicely done, Doctor,. she said. I could see that she was annoyed—but also impressed. Part of her liked that I beat her. I could tell. So I decided to push my luck. … I slid out the throwing knife that she had hidden there. Before she could react, I held the knife up and whipped it at the man-shaped target across the room … Kill shot. My first. I could tell that Meed liked that even better.”

 

When the strengths and capacities of Savage’s remade body show up as irrational and, let’s say, far above human capacity, the penny may drop (as they used to say), if you’re a fan of the original Doc Savage from the pulp magazines. Or, of course, if you’ve stopped to look him up.

 

Like another series Patterson is masterminding featuring “The Shadow,” a long-ago radio show hero battling the forces of darkness, this one takes a notable heroic character from American life in the 1930s and redevelops him for today’s readers. How would you change your body in order to display a six-pack of muscles? What could modern science do to remake your senses of vision and hearing? How much could you learn in your sleep, if forced to?

 

At its midpoint, The Perfect Assassin switches direction and mood, from this mingling of attraction and torment, into a mission focus. The thriller mode that Patterson’s developed takes over, with attacks, angles, weapons, and more. Brace for deadly peril, of course, and devotion to crimefighting, as well as chase scenes, explosions, and espionage.

 

But there is also an underlying mission focus to the story, as well as links in the deep past that explain why Doc Savage and his tormentor/savior “Meed” must connect, and then must align themselves with a near-impossible challenge. It’s one that seems likely to require many more books of adventure and thrills—the perfect start to a pulp-fiction series brought into the 21st century.

* *

Later today I'll remove the latest set of delights from the flower press. Here's a portrait of my mother. Mixed media, mixed feelings -- check out the chapters as they accumulate on Medium. There will be a new one later today, I'm pretty sure. If the heat doesn't flatten me first.