Suspect by Scott Turow

 

This “legal thriller” from 2022 by established author Scott Turow supplies courtroom, bedroom, and investigative action in roughly equal doses. It is told from the viewpoint of Clarice “Pinky” Granum, who is an investigator for a lawyer named Rik Dudek. Dudek has been hired to defend Lucia Gomez a high flying long-time successful police chief who has been accused of soliciting sex in exchange for promotions.

Pinky has had a checkered career and is now a tattooed bisexual who is still looking to find the right lover and the right fit into today’s society. When a mysterious man, who has just moved into her apartment building, attracts her, she finds her work for lawyer Rik now merging with her obsession. The guy, who has now become her lover, turns out to be a security expert in the employ of the Ritz--a former cop and old enemy of the Chief.

The Ritz is the head of an extensive criminal network that runs to real estate fraud, sex, and drug peddling in the city. The police chief’s trial is barely underway when one of the trial witnesses is murdered, possibly by the Ritz. Pinky and her guy are now center stage and each positioned to either help solve the case or crash and burn.      

Most of the characters in this book, even the supposed good people, are just too sleazy for me.  I simply could not like Pinky or the Chief. Rik Dudek, the lawyer, never rises to the fore and the arch villain, the Ritz, was so shadowy that he never came alive in my mind either. 

Definitely not Turow’s best work.

I give it a 2.5   

Stoppard Gets a Theatre

 A friend in London has just informed me, coming on the heels of the renaming of the Shaftsbury Theatre  the Judy Dench, that the Duke of York's Theatre has just been renamed The Top Stoppard. The naming will be celebrated by the limited run of Stoppard's marvelous play ARCADIA.

This blog has featured a quote from ARCADIA as its namesake since it was started many years ago. This honor is well deserved. 

Strangers in Time by David Baldacci

 

As most avid readers know, David Baldacci is one of America’s most prolific writers. He has been translated into over eighty languages and has sold over 150 million copies of his books worldwide. And I must confess that I do not remember reading a single one of them until now. The jacket, featuring a recognizable image of London, pulled me in, and the plot did keep me turning the pages even though it depended on the rather improbable intersection of the three main characters--all from radically different layers of British society--during the Blitz.   

A young girl of means, Molly Wakefield, who has been shipped out of the city to avoid the bombing, returns to the family home in posh Chelsea at the age of fifteen. Her mother is in a mental institution in Cornwall and her father has disappeared. She connects with Ignacious Oliver, a mysterious bookstore proprietor in Covent Garden, and a fourteen-year-old street urchin, Charlie Matters, who has lost his family and is now living rough.  All three bond as the destruction goes from bad to worse. Molly’s Chelsea home is leveled by bombs; Charlie is running from the law because of possible involvement in the death of a policeman; and Ignacious, while mourning the death of his wife, has a strange visitor who comes and goes at all hours. The trio all end up living in Oliver’s bookstore as the German attacks increase in ferocity.    

Every time you think WWII has been picked clean of plots, an author returns to the well with a new twist. Baldacci manages this with practiced ease. The mystery of Oliver's visitor ultimately merges with Molly's father's disappearance, and the ending produces more sadness and violence. I still find the coincidences that throw these three characters together a bit much, but the history remains compelling.

In sum, Strangers in Time is a workmanlike thriller that holds you right up to the last pages.  It is not  great literature, but it sure is vintage Baldacci.   

I give it 3.5 out of 5

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

 

Finished reading THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans yesterday. Ms. Evans’ novel is a hot best seller and one of the best reads of the year. It has some similarities to Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden in that both books feature a singular main character who is hiding an element of the past that is slowly revealed as the book progresses. The difference is that Evans uses letters (an epistolary form) to reveal the world of Sybil Van Antwerp and her friends and family.

Sybil is, a divorced and now retired lawyer, who spent her working life as a legal clerk to a highly successful judge. She is now experiencing retirement alone and exposed to all those things that she may have given up to serve him. Her marriage has produced two living children and one who died at the age of eight. She is also an orphan, working through how much she wishes to know about her DNA, her birth parents, and her previously lost family.

A hand-written letter writer all her life, Sybil is now facing blindness and the loss of her ability to write and read responses without help. The letters she has sent over the years are carefully and beautifully composed in a style that would make Jane Austin proud. They inch us slowly forward in time and reveal the path of her own failures and successes in relationships, marriage, and parenting. Central to the plot are the little clues to the identity of one person she often writes a letter to, but never puts in the mail. As her sight declines, she begins to see more clearly the lingering grief that has haunted her and how forgiveness can heal her suffering soul. 

This may be an especially engaging book for older readers who may, like Sybil, be spending some time assessing their past. It may also be attractive to a younger reader who is thoughtfully contemplating the future. For every reader there is a lucid analysis of the impact of a female’s career choices and behavior on her future.  There is also an implicit shout-out to the efficacy of the very act of writing letters by hand--an act that has almost disappeared from our culture.

This is a significant novel. I give it a five out of five and not just because she apparently wrote the entire book in a closet from 4:30-7:30 AM while raising two small children and working full time.

Jim De Young

REVIEW Hillerman, Anne Shadow of the Solstice

 

Hillerman, Anne Shadow of the Solstice

The summer solstice is the day in June that contains the most daylight of the year. Even with that length, Anne Hillerman’s Shadow of the Solstice just barely manages to encompass the slightly over-complicated plot. It begins with the potential arrival of a high government official to Shiprock, a promotion of Lieutenant Jim Chee to Chief of Station when a heart attack fells the current head. Chee then needs to take up the slack and work with the FBI on the identification of a body just inside the fence at a no-go nuclear waste site. Before you catch up on this apparent murder, a strange Jim Jones-style cult that preaches love through abusive violence is deemed dangerous enough to need on-site monitoring by Chee’s wife, Bernadette Manuelito. Shortly after that, Bernie’s not always reliable younger sister, Darleen, who is now employed as a home health aide, gets embroiled in the disappearance of an elderly client and her grandson. They have been whisked away to Phoenix in a scam that is sold as a program to treat drug and alcohol abuse among the native population. It  bills the government for providing programs that do not exist and sends its addicted clients off onto the city streets, often worse off than they were before.

What saves the book from being buried in its multiple plot lines is that the major characters, Chee, Bernie, Mama, and Darleen are already well known to readers of the Hillerman father and daughter franchise. They need little addition to character development or to the overlay of Navajo customs, history, and land. The climax does neatly pull all the threads together. It all feels like you are slipping your feet into a pair of well-worn hiking boots. First-time readers might find themselves a bit more at sea.

4 out of 5

 

 

Fedarko, Kevin A Walk in the Park

 

                                  “The true story of a spectacular misadventure in the Grand Canyon”

                 Fedarko meets his potential readers at multiple interest levels. If the history of the human occupation of the canyon interests you, it’s there. If the long-term geology of the chasm floats your boat, it is covered in detail. If you have a penchant for exploring the environmental changes caused by the contemporary commercialization of one of our largest and oldest national parks, you can get full coverage of the various arguments. .

If you are just an adventure hound who revels in reading in great detail about the trials and tribulations of long-distance hiking in one of the world’s most inhospitable locations, you will be satisfied in spades. Although the walk described is long, dangerous, and accompanied by real pain, and several miscalculations, the ability of the human body to continue to push a dream is beautifully portrayed. 

Fedarko’s nice sense of descriptive humor is always on tap to help you over the hardships. For instance, as he and his trail companion sit down to a  dehydrated dinner of Shepherd’s Pie, he comments, “It tasted like somebody tore up a cereal box and poured ketchup on top.”

In dealing with the ancient peoples who lived in the canyon, he says, “I found myself confronting, for the first time, the notion that any understanding of this landscape that fails to embrace the story of these people and their descendants is fundamentally incomplete.”

And literally every step of his journey confronts the nature if the layers of rock that the river has cut through. That stone occasionally helps but mostly impedes the dedicated walker.

The environmental works of Edward Abbey are often cited—from Dessert Solitaire for instance, “when traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe.”  When the day’s noise is put to rest, the author concludes, perhaps they weren’t meant to see or learn anything. Perhaps, they were just supposed to listen.  “What “we were meant to hear was silence.” He ends by citing his father, a Pennsylvania coalminer, who believed that any day spent outdoors walking, even if it was on spilly piles, was a good day . . .”

It is a slog at over 400 pages and some may find the preamble takes up too many pages. I still had a hard time putting it down once the group was out and walking.

I give it a good solid 4.

 

 

Eleanor by Alice Loxton

How about some more walk books? When I was eight or nine, I remember being enthralled reading about the journeys of Marco Polo. Much later, I reveled in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.  That one even had a movie starring Robert Redford made about it. And then, there was the pride and lost shoe leather that goes with putting together the two editions of my own book--London Theatre Walks. It should not be surprising then that my eyes perked up when this title appeared on the new publication shelf at the Marion library.

Eleanor, by British writer Alice Loxton, is subtitled “A 200 mile walk in search of England’s Lost Queen.” In 1290, when Eleanor of Castile not Aquitaine, the wife of England’s King Edward I died, her embalmed body was carried from Lincoln to London before its burial in Westminster Abbey. At each of the twelve overnight stopping places on the route, her devoted husband decreed that a stone cross be built to commemorate the journey. Few of these so-called “Eleanor Crosses” have survived, but Loxton put on a stout pair of boots and decided to make an on-foot pilgrimage along the entire cortege route. Her impressions of the towns she passed through, their ancient and current history, the people who accompanied her or met on the way, and the English weather she faced because it was December in the midlands, make for a sort of modern Canterbury Tales. There is trial and tribulation, flooding and sunshine, humor, and above all, a fine historical portrait of an almost forgotten Queen. You can even enjoy this book if you aren’t a history buff, because it is filled with some lovely fellow hikers and quirky citizens of the mainly small towns along the way. One little nugget I remember was about the two rival inns in a tiny town called Stony Stratford (a place where a bridge of stones forded the river Strat). It had two rival inns across from each other on the high street. One was called the Cock and the other the Bull.  Both were hotspots for local gossip and each became famous for their, sometimes wild, embellishments of the stories. Thus, we have the true origin of “a cock and bull story.” Can’t leave without noting that the photo reproduction is pretty shabby, but the book is blister-free.

I give it a four out of 5.