THE GREY WOLF by Louise Penny

 

The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny

Penny’s 19^th Gamache novel starts slowly with strange phone calls and proceeds into a complex dissection of fateful moral choices. Do you save your family and run or make an effort to save the planet?  What we are saving the planet from is a large-scale terrorist conspiracy that reaches into the heart of a corrupt government. More specifically the issue in The Grey Wolf involves a plot to insert a deadly poison into the water supply which will kill thousands and create a panic in the population. The panic will drive citizens to support a new strong leader who will then use his power to subjugate the populace and enrich himself and his cronies. Does this sound just a bit familiar to you?

The book starts in Three Pines and does journey back on occasion, but by and large, we see little of the fascinating group of residents that add just the right warmth and humor to Penny’s writing. The wolves  dominate here. Several of Gamache’s old cases keep popping back up and I can see her point to deepen the psyche of her main character, but it may disconcert new readers. The re-appearance of the grisly slaughter and the nasty frozen monastery on the lake may not be as significant for them as for me. Forgive me if I find that Penny seems to be targeting re-current readers at the expense of new ones. Perhaps she feels that, given the size of her following, there is no need to curry favor with newcomers to her work.

Through it all Armand Gamache does survive, though once again battered and torn. For the moment the Grey and Black wolves are kept at bay. Some friends turn out to be enemies and some foes to be friends.  The foes want to stop Gamache because he cannot be corrupted. His friends know that he will choose the survival of the society at large even though his own family may be sacrificed. John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of Utilitarianism comes to mind. The moral direction should be to maximize utility and produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of citizens with the least pain.

It's still a fine hook and I will be on the list to get the next adventure that her ending of this one is pointing to. Gosh, shouldn't be ending a sentence with a preposition!

REVIEW OF THE GREAT HIPPOPOTAMUS HOTEL by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Andrew McCall Smith is up to his old tricks again in this the umpteenth entry in the long-running No. 1 Ladies‘ Detective Agency series. We are treated to two story threads in the current book.  Mma Rmotswe takes charge of a Speedy Motors customer who is undergoing a mid-life crisis by purchasing a bright colored sportscar from Mr. JLB Matekoni without telling his wife. After the car is totaled in its first test drive, Mma comes to the rescue with her usual wily compromise.

The second story puts Mma Makutsi in the investigative lead and features the tracking down of the perpetrator or perpetrators of a series of actions designed to destroy the reputation of the Great Hippopotamus Hotel. We get several twists and turns in this thread as there are multiple suspects. With the help of her shoes, Mma Makutsi does a fine job locating the villain.  

I don’t rate this as the best of the series, but it is the kind of uplifting Christmas read we all need this time of year. All of the familiar characters are there, the gentle humor rings true, and the life-supporting philosophy of forgiveness brings everything to a satisfactory close. McCall Smith's prose just seems to float like a summer cloud above the violence, cruelty and tension of the present day.  Almost like clockwork, every twenty-five pages or so you can underline a droll piece of comedy, a heartwarming observation, or a philosophical gem.   

To wit: "Men drink beer and eat sausages—they are all a bit like that –after a while their stomachs say ‘no more room for all this beer and sausages—and then they spread in the only direction possible—which is to the front.’”

or 

“It is helpful if a people’s leaders build things, rather than knock them down.”

or 

“If only we could go back and cancel the misunderstandings and acts of selfishness that are like millstones in our lives, but we cannot, and so perhaps it is best for us to forget those things we cannot change.”

I love his books. I give this one a 4.8 out of 5. 

Robert Harris PRECIPICE

 

Robert Harris Precipice

Having just finished Robert Harris’s CONCLAVE and liking it, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a copy of his September release of PRECIPICE at the Marion Library. It is set in London and the English countryside, which enchants an Anglophile like me. The time was the beginning of WWI, which is always a fruitful period for generating juicy plots. In this semi-fictional novel the British Prime Minister Asquith is battling his own cabinet and the European powers as the war breaks out.  There is the scheming Lloyd George and the raging bluster of a young Churchill to contend with and then there is Asquith himself, who is having an affair with a young moneyed British woman named Venetia Stanley. He is sending her lovey-dovey letters topped off with classified information and actual state documents that he and his lover have been tossing out of moving car windows. His love letters to Venetia have actually survived, but Venetia’s responses have not. Harris solves the problem by re-creating them. This ends up making an interesting spy procedural that shows the British government at the beginning of WWI engaging in attempts to ferret out German intelligence agents long embedded in the country.  Harris also creates a young Scotland Yard detective as a lower-class representative, who is assigned to go undercover to smoke out where the leaks are in both the civilian and political population. Needless to say, when the evidence begins to point to the Prime Minister himself, the situation heats up.  

It's not a great book, but a pleasant throwaway read all the same.  I give it 3.5 out of 5.

Review CONCLAVE by Robert Harris

 

Harris, Robert Conclave

Robert Harris writes potboilers. In 2016 he wrote CONCLAVE-- a book about the inner workings of the Catholic church when in the throes of election of a new Pope. The current hot movie of the same name starring Ralph Fiennes is adapted from the book.

There are plotters a plenty amongst the Cardinals who are vying for the throne of St. Peter and some of the activity seems a bit far-fetched. For instance, Harris manages to get the Cardinals all housed in a sort of Motel Six with paper-thin walls, but has it also contain the living quarters of the former Pope. It’s justified by the old guy's preference for poverty, but it just makes it convenient for one of the Cardinals to burgle the apartment in order to find the secret materials that have caused the current Conclave to be so compelling.

Otherwise, it is smoothly organized around the sequence of ballots that show who’s up and who’s down and the intrigue that goes on between all of the nominees. It’s a good ride in print and I am looking forward to seeing the film. 

I give it a 4  out of 5.

Review Kathy Reichs FIRE AND BONES

 

Kathy Reichs, Fire and Bones

Ms. Reichs has written twenty-three crime procedure novels featuring a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. The jacket sidebars are quite giddy in their claims of excellence.  She is top-notch, amazing, and an incredible plotter. Her science is on-target, her characters are fascinating, and every paragraph carries menace. I wish I could join in affirming this praise, but frankly I found Fire and Bones  rather disjointed and tedious. We do get plenty of gory details of what it is like to autopsy people killed by fire, but the villains don’t seem to draw out compelling interest while the victims get little emotional attention aside from their existence as statistics.

The story is fairly simple. Temperance Brennan puts off a great weekend with her current squeeze to help investigate two nasty fires that came complete with four fatalities so badly burned that they are hard to identify. One of the burned-out structures also contained a much older unidentified corpse that is discovered in a burlap sack in a sub-basement. The first four deaths turn out to be connected to old criminal gangs and bootlegging and the other goes back even further in time. As we cycle between the two different cases, the last one seems to get lost until the author decided she must tie that one up with a final twist. It came off as a forced afterthought.  

I found the supporting characters to be either unbelievable, like Ivy Doyle, the way too rich sidekick telejournalist. She just doesn’t make a very satisfying Dr. Watson and the various arson detectives come off as pretty traditional types rather than people.

In sum, I found this a pretty modest offering. I won’t be heading back to the library to search out any of the earlier books.  I give it a two out of five.  

Review Dona Leon The Jewels of Paradise

 

The Jewels of Paradise

 The authorial reputation of Donna Leon rests comfortably on her twenty-plus novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, who investigates crime in the atmospheric confines of one of the most enchanting cities in the world—Venice. 

This is a leisurely, contemplative stand-alone novel that will be too slow paced and too much dependent on an interest in 17th-century opera and court intrigue to attract a lot of readers.  The main character, Catarina Pellegrini, a Venetian musicologist, is working as a researcher in England when she gets a strange invitation to apply for a job that will require her to return to her hometown of Venice and research the contents of two ancient chests that may contain valuable items. Two venal relatives of the original owner of the chests are now vying for the riches that may or may not be inside. 

The ensuing search for the rightful heirs allows Leon to do what she does best and that is to immerse the reader once again in all of the pleasures, the food, the history, and the corruption of Venice as it is and was.  What is discovered at the end is an enduring truism that is operable in any century and any country. “If enough people choose to believe something is what other people say it is, then it becomes that to them.” The just completed election seems to prove that. 

I give it 3 out of 5 

Jim De Young, 10/25/24

  

Review: Jen Psaki SAY MORE

 

 Psaki’s 2024 book is subtitled “Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World.”  There is no ghost  writer listed and it reads as a group of suggestions about the nature of communication in general and political communication in particular. There is no muss, no fuss, no interminable length. Her focus is positive and reflects a quote from the early pages.  “People who are drawn to public service want to be part of a greater good—it isn’t about them as individuals, but how they can contribute.”      

 

Her practical advice is on the money.  I liked “Do the task you are dreading most first. Then everything that follows will feel easy.”  Another favorite was to admit to yourself that you can’t be good at everything. Locating your weaknesses can go a long way to make successful corrections as you move through life.

 

Often her suggestions focus on the particular problem of being a political spokesperson. She says it is difficult to reflect your bosses’ views accurately without letting your personal views creep in. She rues the ease with which disinformation and violence can be spread in today’s social media.  If an attack is personal to you as a spokesperson, then use it to remind yourself that if you got so much under the skin of your adversary they felt the need to attack you with lies, you may be on the right track. Also defending yourself strongly from these kinds of attacks can be counterproductive. I note here that Kamala Harris has been able to use a laugh and humor to sidetrack personal slanders thrown at her. 

 

Good communication doesn’t have to be loud or long. One descriptive and emotional human interest story is often worth more than a string of statistics. For all communicators, but especially spokespeople, you must know your audience. You can’t craft a good  message or response if you don’t know who you are speaking to. Do your prep. Anticipate objections and have answers ready. Own up quickly to mistakes. It helps to be a better listener because then you can read the content and body language as it comes at you.

 

She claims the successful political communicator has to build bridges where none exist. I grant you there are adversaries who want no bridges and are concentrating on filling the river with crocodiles, but one way to build a bridge is to speak humbly about hardships you might have had that they also may have faced.  Just present yourself as human and flawed just as they are.

 

Her best advice was “Don’t take the bait!” When you get questions like “Many are saying”, “Some say”, or “Critics are saying”, your best option is to respond with a question rather than launching into a refutation. i.e.  “Can you tell me more about who they are?  Can you attach a number to apply to your question? In other words “How many is some?” or “Who are they?” There is a difference between your golf foursome and a clutch of twenty foreign heads of state.  

 

She closes by emphasizing that good communicators are optimists at heart and they keep on thinking that connection is possible and something positive is attainable. She also successfully steers clear of the contemporary political scene. That means you can pick up some good ideas regardless of your party. The book is a long way from being a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize, but does give you a bit of a look at the development of a political junkie. It is not exciting, but the advice is pretty solid.

 

I give it a 3.5 out of 5