Sister Mary Murderous

The TV series Foyle’s War and the WW2 coming-of-age movie Hope and Glory both illustrate the concept that even in the midst of the Blitz, everyday life goes on––and that can include non-war-related disasters and crimes.  In The Language of the Dead, Stephen Kelly uses that concept as a backdrop to his 1940 village murder mystery.

Detective Chief Inspector Lamb is called to the Hampshire village of Quimby to investigate when old Will Blackwell is found murdered, apparently in a ritualistic way traditionally used to kill witches.  Blackwell was a loner, long rumored to be a witch, but Lamb and colleagues, Peter Wallace and Harry Rivers, have other, more prosaic, avenues to explore to explain Blackwell’s murder before they think about the supernatural.

Wallace is a good detective, but Lamb worries about his drinking.  Rivers is new to the squad and an uncomfortable addition, because he holds Lamb responsible for the death in battle in World War I of a childhood friend who was in the same unit with Rivers, under Lamb’s command.

Lamb’s 18-year-old daughter, Vera, is working in Quimby as an Air Raid Warden, and Lamb is glad to have the chance to see her.  During the investigation, we learn more about the personal lives of David Wallace and Vera Lamb, each of whom is entangled in a troubled love affair.

More murders take place in Quimby, Lamb and Rivers clash over the current investigations and their Great War history, other strange happenings in Quimby are hinted at, and the personal lives of some characters take turns for the worse.

The murders are solved in a bit of rush, and mostly through lengthy exposition rather than clues coming together in a way that allows the reader to solve the puzzle.  Some of the plot lines that I expected to tie in to the murders never do, which made me wonder what their point was.

Though the book is set in England, you’ll spot pretty quickly that the author is an American, for example by references to candy and sweaters, where an English author would say sweets and jumpers.  I noticed those slips, but they didn’t particularly bother me.  At the same time, I can’t say I thought Kelly managed to convey a strong sense of the Hampshire village or wartime England.  It appears that this is the first in a series, but this book doesn’t make me interested in a return.

I love time travel books, and if they have great dialogue and a sense of humor, all the better.  And if they don’t waste a lot of time with historians running around the past missing each other and complaining about it (cough, Connie Willis, cough), then I’m thrilled.

Somebody mentioned this book in a discussion forum on Amazon and I gave the Audible audiobook a try.  The narrator, Zara Ramm, was terrific and I will be looking for other books she reads.  The protagonist, Lucy Maxwell, known as Max, and the story were even better.

This isn’t a hard-science time travel book––in fact, there are some inconsistencies in the book’s description of the rules of time travel.  It’s a mix of history, adventure, comedy and a little bit of romance.

The historians of St. Mary’s travel in time to do historical research for the University of Thirsk, which then sells the research to moviemakers, writers, museums and what have you, as if it is traditional research.  Max passes through a rigorous vetting process to become one of the historians and then is allowed to go on missions.  Even though historians are instructed to observe and no more, the missions are still dangerous and Jodi Taylor conveys the grief the team members feel when one of their members is killed or badly injured.  At the same time, she makes the missions sound so exciting that it’s not at all surprising that the team members stay enthusiastic about wanting to go on even the most dangerous missions, as when Max and her historian partner are sent to the Cretaceous era to observe the climate, geology, flora and fauna––especially the dinosaurs.

The dangers of time travel are increased when St. Mary’s becomes the target of hostile time travelers from the future.  It looks like this will be the source of a continuing story line for the series.

Max is a little bit scatty, but she’s also a very strong-minded and tough young woman.  She makes for a protagonist I want to read more about, along with the other St. Mary’s team members.

I was sorry when this book ended and I’ll definitely read later books in the series.

I was so impressed by Tony Parsons’s first Max Wolfe novel last year (titled The Murder Man in the US and The Murder Bag in the UK) that I couldn’t wait for the next one.  I love Tony Parsons’s writing style and his main character, but I had a lot of problems with the plot of The Slaughter Man.

When I began listening to the audiobook of The Slaughter Man, I smiled to hear, once again, Colin Mace’s perfect voicing of the first-person narrative.  The Detective Constable Max Wolfe character is such a good one.  A copper who knows how bad the world can be but hasn’t become completely cynical; a single father devoted to his little girl, Scout, and their Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Stan; a guy who loves boxing as the sweet science, not for its brutality.  Refreshingly, Max Wolfe is an interesting guy without being an alcoholic or drug abuser.

As with The Murder Man, The Slaughter Man begins with a prologue that graphically describes a horrific crime.  In the current book, the crime is the murder of the wealthy Wood family, including father, mother and two teenage children, and the abduction of their young son.  The book’s plot takes two paths: the solution of the murderers and the attempt to find the little boy, Bradley.

As a fan of police procedurals, this plot often made me crazy.  I can’t say too much without spoilers, but I can say that it depends way too much on the fact that several (yes, several!) of the characters don’t tell what they know, and on the cops being just plain thick.  There is some fundamental sloppiness in procedure, and on multiple occasions Max wades into danger without calling for backup, even though there is time.  He escapes impossible situations and injuries that should have killed him or at least hospitalized him but, unbelievably, somehow he’s on his feet and even boxing in nothing flat.  Sheesh.

Again, I can’t say much without spoilers, but almost nothing about the Bradley plot makes sense.  On top of that, the direction that investigation takes Max is lurid and repulsive.

This was a real letdown after The Murder Man.  I like the Max Wolfe character enough to give the next book a try, but I hope Parsons will do a much better job of plotting.  I’m also hopeful he can go for a less sensationalistic murder plot, and one with less sexual violence.

Below, I’m going to post some VERY spoiler-y notes about things that bothered me in the book.  Don’t read further if you don’t want to read spoilers.

It took way too long for the police to figure out that Peter Nawkins wasn’t the murderer.  I’m not saying they should have known who the murderer was, necessarily, but that they should have doubted it was Peter.  Sometimes they seemed to realize that it probably wasn’t Peter, but then in the next scene they’d be back to being convinced he was the guy.  That was frustrating and sloppy.  And hey, since Mary Wood was raped, why was there not even a mention of a DNA screening of the sperm in her body?

Parsons makes a lot of the fact that the Wood family had recently had their driveway asphalted, but nobody else in the Garden community did.  But he never explains why they had the work done.  Was it for the sole purpose of Niles Gatling and Sean Nawkins setting up Peter for the later murder?  But how would that work?  It would be Brad Wood who would arrange for work to be done at his own house, not his brother-in-law or Nawkins.  It didn’t make sense.

I can just barely accept that Mary and Charlotte never told anybody about their brother Niles’s sexual assaults, but what I don’t believe is that the grown woman Charlotte, as Parsons depicts her, would associate with Niles.  It didn’t ring true.

Rocky is supposed to be a gifted boxer.  He knows that his girlfriend Echo’s father, Sean Nawkins, is abusive, but he does absolutely nothing about it.  Speaking of Rocky, why doesn’t he take Max to Savile Row, as Max asked?  It was dawn, he could have done it.  But even if he didn’t want to go to the police station, why not drop Max at a hospital?  Why go to Oak Hill, when Rocky knew Sean was responsible for nearly killing Max and would most likely be there?

Why was Bradley at the Bishop’s Road house if he wasn’t being abused?  Why did Niles Gatling spare him?  Parsons himself doesn’t seem to know, since he has Max ask that question and Niles doesn’t answer it.

When Max finds Bradley at the old Gatling family home, he also discovers that the patriarch is there, deep in dementia and being abused by his caretakers.  Supposedly, Mary and Charlotte loved their father, and he was a very wealthy man.  So why is he left to the care of a couple of low-life staff who abuse him?  Did his daughters have such terrible memories of what happened to them at their childhood home that they wouldn’t even visit their beloved father?  Did Niles set up the situation and purposely allow the abuse?  We never find out.  Instead, we just get this gratuitous bit of nastiness.

Father Alex Andreou is a Greek Catholic priest, which means that he is a subject of the Roman Catholic pope, but otherwise follows the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church.  As a Greek Catholic priest, he was allowed to enter the priesthood as a married man.

The priesthood is Alex’s family business and the Vatican is his world.  His father was the seventh in a generational line of Greek Catholic priests. Alex lives in his childhood apartment in Vatican City, along with his five-year-old son, Peter.  Alex’s wife, Mona, suffered a breakdown from postpartum depression not long after Peter’s birth and left her family.

Alex’s adored older brother, Simon, is a charismatic Roman Catholic priest who is a Vatican diplomat.  Like his father and then Pope John Paul, his passionate ambition is to heal the centuries-long schism between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches.  At the time this novel is set, the Pope is crippled with Parkinson’s disease and nearing his death, but still absorbed with this goal of rejoining the sects.

Alex and Peter are in their apartment, eagerly awaiting a visit from Simon when he calls, evidently distraught, and asks for Alex to meet him at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer retreat, where Alex is shocked to find Simon with the corpse of Ugo Nogara, a museum curator. 

Ugo is an old friend of Simon’s whom Alex was tutoring in Gospel theology to help Ugo with an exhibit at the Vatican about the Shroud of Turin.  Years earlier, the Shroud had been claimed by scientists to be carbon-dated as being from medieval times and could not have been the burial shroud of Jesus.  Ugo promises his exhibit will shatter what the world thought it knew about the Shroud.  As if the murder isn’t enough of a shock, Alex and Simon return to Alex’s apartment to find that someone has come into the apartment and rifled Alex’s belongings, while Peter and his caretaker cowered in the bedroom closet.

With Simon reluctant to fill Alex in on what might have been behind these two crimes, Alex begins his own investigation, calling on the many old friends and acquaintances who work at the Vatican as Swiss Guards, drivers and clerics.  But the real solution may be the subject of Nogara’s exhibit and, for that, Alex’s expertise in the history of the Gospels is critical.

You wouldn’t think that a mystery that revolves around the intricacies of Gospel history and critical interpretation could make for a decent thriller plot, but it’s surprisingly compelling stuff.  Caldwell has that gift of taking a subject you might not have any interest in and making it fascinating.  It doesn’t hurt that he adds in lashings of intrigue, with different groups within the Vatican favoring or implacably opposing any reconciliation with the Greek Orthodox Church––a reconciliation that would have to overcome centuries of hatred and mistrust, due in large part to the violence and plundering visited by Catholic Crusaders on the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople.

If you’re looking for an action-heavy thriller, this isn’t it.  The plot plays out deliberately and works more cerebrally than physically.  This isn’t just a thriller, though.  Unlike so many thrillers, the focus is at least as much on the characters, and on history and ideas.  And, without a bit of romance, this is a novel that is overwhelmingly about love.  Love of family, of God, of friends.  The kind of love that changes lives and leads to bonds that can’t be broken and to sacrifice.

The novel is a bit of a slow starter, but as I read on it became completely engrossing.  I think it’s important to say you don’t have to be a believer to find the story and its characters compelling.  I’ve heard some people mention The DaVinci Code in connection with this book, but this is nothing like The DaVinci Code––and that’s a good thing, in my opinion.

A note about the audiobook:  The narrator is Jack Davenport.  If you watched the NBC series Smash, he played the libidinous English director.  He has a voice like Irish Coffee and, to be honest, he could read me an insurance contract and I’d keep listening.

Author Peter Watson bases his story on the real-life young men and women recruited by Churchill’s Special Operations Executive to be parachute-dropped behind enemy lines.  Their orders were to “set Europe ablaze” by helping the Resistance and sending intelligence back to England.  The likelihood of an SOE agent living through the war was only 50/50, so it’s all the more impressive how many young people volunteered eagerly, knowing the chances of being captured, tortured and killed.

Watson fictionalizes the SOE as SC2, and uses other fictional stand-ins for real-life SOE personalities.  But his descriptions of training methods and the details of SOE espionage techniques are based on reality.

Matt Hammond is an SC2 operative who was injured in France and smuggled home.  Now missing a lung, he can’t go back into the field, so he’s now a trainer for new agents.  Madeleine is the recruit he falls in love with, and they have an idyllic few weeks together before she is sent to France, very shortly before D-Day.

When Madeleine’s contacts with SC2 stop, Matthew is filled with fear that she has been captured by the Nazis.  As France is in the process of liberation, he has the chance to go there on a mission and to combine that with his search for her.

The story plods for its first half, until Matt heads off to France.  After that, it’s far more engaging, and sometimes even exciting.  Watson is a historian, and it’s understandable that he wants to incorporate his knowledge in the plot.  Sometimes he does it seamlessly, as when Matt explains coding techniques to the recruits.  Other times, though, it’s way too didactic and drags the story’s pace down to a crawl.

It was particularly odd when Watson had Matt tell Madeleine in 1943 that after the war, “TV” would likely replace newspapers, and that people would get rid of private medicine because they wouldn’t stand for the social divisions that existed before the war.  Well, it’s true that Britain went Labor in a big way after the war and socialized medicine, but what does that little history lesson have to do with this story?  And did the British ever refer to television as TV?  Bits like this were distracting and they made me feel like Matt was a bit of a “mansplainer” as they’re called these days. 

I wasn’t ever able to warm up to Matt as a character, which is too bad, considering the story is told entirely from his point of view.  It also annoyed me no end that Matt remarks on Madeleine’s whisky-brown eyes at least a dozen times, and probably more.

To be fair, I’m pretty hard on novels based on the SOE.  It’s one of my favorite reading subjects and I’ve read so many fiction and non-fiction books about SOE agents and operations that I am probably overly critical.  At this point, maybe I should stick to reading non-fiction, but it’s hard for me to resist anything about the subject.

Henry Hayden is one of those very successful writers who pumps out one best-selling thriller after another.  His success saved the publishing house that discovered his first manuscript, he’s charming to the fans who seek him out in the coastal village where he lives with his quiet wife, Martha, and he is modest and generous.  Now, which of these things isn’t true?  As we find out right off the bat, it isn’t Henry who is the writer, but Martha––though not a soul besides the couple knows that.

When Betty, Henry’s editor and mistress tells him she’s pregnant, Henry’s carefully-arranged life threatens to unravel.  Henry’s quick fix goes awry and he has to engage in more and more complex schemes to avoid exposure of his current misdeeds––and the revelation of his past by an old acquaintance who promises to turn into a nemesis.

You might have figured out by now that Henry is a sociopath and this is one of those books (like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, for example) that invites us to identify with the amoral lead character.  It was hard to do that at first; Henry is just too cold.  But as we learn more about Henry, a bit of a thaw comes.  Even if it’s only admiration of Henry’s skill at constructing complex schemes to wriggle out of trouble.

This short novel moves along quickly and I kept turning the pages as fast as I could to find out what happens to Henry––and to the manuscript Martha has been working on when the novel opens.  I enjoyed the plotting, and the translation from the original German is well done.  There isn’t much sense of place; in fact, I couldn’t tell you where this is supposed to be set, other than that it’s a coastal town and it’s somewhere in Europe.  I would also say that it’s not nearly as skilled in roping the reader into “sympathy for the devil” as Phil Hogan’s A Pleasure and a Calling, but it’s a quick and entertaining read.

This short novel tells the unusual love story of Laure and Laurent, a couple of Parisians no longer in the flush of youth.  I know, “Laure and Laurent,” sounds a little too precious, but don’t worry.  This is a French novel––never too sweet; just a small, delicious mouthful of a novel.

You can easily knock this off in an afternoon or evening, and it won’t haunt your memory, but I can say it should be a very pleasant afternoon or evening, leaving an afterglow for the rest of the day, anyway.

My favorite mysteries are the ones that expose me to a different world.  That’s something I get with the Gilles Sebag series, which began with Summer, All the Cats Are Bored, and now continues with Autumn, All the Cats Return.  Sebag is a homicide inspector in Perpignan, in France’s Mediterranean south, just across the Pyrenées from Spain.  Perpignan is a center of the Catalan region and the reader has the pleasure of being exposed to both French and Catalan language, food and culture.

In this new book, the reader’s cultural and historical horizons are broadened even further by the book’s main plot, which is the murderous targeting of Perpignan residents who, back in the 1960s, were Pieds-Noirs, French residents of Algeria, during the bloody fight for independence, when the African liberation forces were violently battled by Pied-Noir guerrilla forces called the Organisation de l’Armée  Secrète, or OAS. 

When an old man is discovered executed in his apartment, with “OAS” painted on his door, Gilles Sebag and the rest of the squad soon figure out that despite the decades that have passed since Algeria gained its independence, someone is targeting old OAS fighters.  After all this time, they have tough challenges to identify potential new victims and to figure out who the murderer could be.

At the same time, Sebag is anxious to help his grieving teenage daughter by conducting an unofficial investigation of the death of her school friend, who was on his scooter when he was struck by a delivery van.  The cop assigned to the investigation isn’t known for his work ethic, and Gilles wants to make sure his daughter and the dead boy’s family know exactly what happened.

If you haven’t read the first Gilles Sebag, that’s OK.  There is not much that happens in the first book you need to know to enjoy the second.  There is a running theme from the first book that continues in this book about Sebag’s fear that his beloved wife had an affair, but you don’t really miss anything on that plot element if you haven’t read the first book.

To appreciate this series, I think you need to have a strong interest in reading books set in unfamiliar locales.  You must also enjoy a long book with a deliberate pace and an often melancholy tone.  The subject line of this review is a Victor Hugo quote that’s used in the book and is a good comment on the book’s own style.

Perpignan:

Around the time World War II began, two young men joined one of England's most exclusive clubs, the intelligence service now known as MI6. The two had similar backgrounds: tony prep schools and Cambridge, where they became friends, and forebears who had served the British Empire. In other words, both were in the country's ruling elite and well plugged into the old boys' network. They were both admitted to the British intelligence service with little more than a "he's one of us" type of introduction. 

That's where the similarity ends. Nicholas Elliott was everything that his background would suggest: conservative, patriotic and a firm believer that he and his class were born to rule. Kim Philby was only pretending to be the same. In reality, he was a Marxist, had been an agent of the USSR since 1934, and for over 30 years ruthlessly betrayed his country, his friends, family and colleagues, and sent hundreds, or even thousands, to certain death by betraying them to Soviet intelligence. 

Kim Philby

In a presentation at a bookstore upon this book's publication in the UK, Macintyre said this is "a story of male friendship and Englishness." The "Englishness" part of the story is tightly linked to the friendship part. Britain's MI6, formerly the Secret Intelligence Service, is the UK's foreign intelligence service. (For US readers, MI6 is the rough equivalent of the CIA, while MI5 is like the FBI.) When Elliott and Philby joined, MI6 was a very upper-crust place, filled with Eton/Cambridge men, from families that had been running the show in the British Empire for generations. 

Elliott wasn't even a particularly good student, but he was from the right sort of family, so he had his ticket stamped to Eton and Cambridge. When he graduated from Cambridge, his third-class degree was no bar to him. He had only to express an interest in becoming a spy to an old family friend and he was in. Kim Philby's credentials were better, his degree was a 2:1, but he was also hired with just an "I know his people" from the right sort and, apparently, no checking into his background. A background, by the way, that included working for the underground Comintern in Vienna in the tumultuous uprising of 1933 and marrying another one of its activists. 

Macintyre takes us into the heyday of espionage, and it's a wild ride. It's mind-boggling how many familiar names there are, from Peter Ustinov's father, to even Pope John XXIII, when he was Monsignor Roncalli. Macintyre gives the reader an evocative depiction of the atmosphere of spydom, from the intensely serious to the downright silly. For an example of the latter, I had to laugh out loud at the description of that hotbed of spies, Istanbul, during World War II, when a chief of station of any one of the combatant countries' agencies would enter a certain nightclub, the bandleader would swiftly lead the orchestra in a rousing version of "Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy." (Macintyre sets down all the lyrics, which are delightful, and I'm just disappointed that I haven't been able to find an online recording, other than some modern––and dreadful––hip-hop version.)

Cambridge University

But just when I might be shaking my head or laughing at some absurdity Macintyre describes, he would drench me with a cold bucket of reality, describing how Philby eagerly turned over information about anti-communists, knowing that they would be mercilessly killed by the Soviets. In some cases, his reasons appeared to be ideological, but in others it was done to avoid his being exposed. In his later writings, it's clear Philby never felt any qualms about the blood on his hands. 

Nicholas Elliott

Adding to the chill reality is the fact that Philby got away with it for so long and was climbing the ladder within MI6, on his way to possibly even becoming chief of service. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody in MI6 to match up all those cases where the Soviets seemed to know what the British were up to with the small handful of people who could have given away the game to them. Was it sheer stupidity? Both Philby, in his reports, and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper rated many of the MI6 higher-ups as lacking in brain power. But Macintyre makes the case that Philby was the right sort, and that this made his betrayal quite literally unthinkable to the posh clubmen in MI6. It's a shame Philby's victims weren't the right sort, or they might have been served better. 

Philby didn't find it hard to manipulate Yalie and Anglophile James J. Angleton, who would become the CIA's chief of counterintelligence and unwitting source for Philby and the USSR

Retelling the well-known Philby story within the framework of his friendships and the British gentlemen's club mentality of MI6 reanimates the familiar tale of Philby's treason. This is an espionage book, but it is not about spycraft. It is a study of personalities and a society. Macintyre's focus is on how Philby was able to make strong––and maybe even sincere in his mind––friendships, such as the ones with Elliott and James J. Angleton, who later become head of the American CIA, assiduously pump his friends for information, promptly turn over all of that intelligence to the Soviets, and get away with it long after he should have been exposed. 

While the betrayal-of-friendship aspect of Philby's story is interesting, it is the "Englishness" part that is most revealing––"Englishness" actually meaning the world of the English upper class. What Macintyre exposes is a peculiar kind of tribal sociopathy, in which the clubmen of MI6 simply couldn't see that one of their own might not fall into line with their worldview. Worse yet, they didn't see anyone outside their class as quite worthy of their consideration. For example, when they trained Albanian guerrillas to slip back into the country, rally locals and overthrow the communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, the MI6 handlers dismissively called the Albanians the "Pixies." And when Philby's perfidy ensured that the guerrillas were wiped out almost immediately, the MI6 functionaries rued the failure of the mission, but had no depth of feeling for the loss of all those men. 

Elliott and his tribe belonged to White's, the oldest and most exclusive gentlemen's club in London

The upper-class types within MI6 failed to see the betrayer in their midst and also failed to understand that the exclusionary nature of their system played a part in creating traitors. Just one example is George Black, an MI6 agent who was not part of the tribe, hated the British class system and became a Soviet agent after having been in a North Korean prison camp in the 1950s. After he was exposed and put on trial, he was sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison. 

This is actually Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, but this is just how I picture Elliott, sitting down for his chat with le Carré

And yet, when MI6 finally saw the light with Philby, just a couple of years after Blake's sentencing, putting Philby on trial was apparently unthinkable. He was immediately offered complete immunity if he would reveal all, and Macintyre makes a good case that he was allowed to do a "fade," to slip away to Russia, after he was interrogated. Was it just because MI6 couldn't stand another round of bad publicity? That must have had something to do with it, but I was struck by the author John le Carré's talk with Nicholas Elliott some years later. When le Carré asked Elliott if MI6 had considered having Philby liquidated, Elliott instantly reproved him, saying: "My dear boy. One of us." At that point, I lost whatever sympathy I felt for Elliott and his smug, hard-drinking, clubby tribe. 

Earlier this year, I was riveted by Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy, which also described elements of social discrimination within an intelligence service, in this case the French service during the Dreyfus Affair. I thought that likely to be the most fascinating espionage title I would read in 2014, but A Spy Among Friends just edges it out. Even if you've read every book about Philby there is, I think you'll find food for thought in Macintyre's latest.

Note: This review originally appeared on Read Me Deadly, under my username there.

Joël Dicker: The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

I only have two problems with this book: (1) the ludicrous and lurid plot, and (2) the stunningly amateurish writing. It was increasingly painful, but I read every bit of the book, mostly because I just couldn't believe this could be the same book that has been such a huge best-seller abroad. I figured it had to transform itself into something great, but if anything, it just got worse with each passing page.

I'll keep the plot summary brief, since you can read that just about anywhere. The protagonist, Marcus Goldman, is a young writer who hit it big with his first novel and is now hopelessly blocked. Under tremendous pressure from his agent and rapacious publisher, he flees to the seaside town of Somerset, New Hampshire, to get help from his college mentor, the literary lion Harry Quebert.

Shortly after Marcus's visit, Harry is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl, Nola Kellergan, who disappeared over 30 years earlier and whose body has just been found buried under Harry's lawn, along with the original manuscript of Harry's most famous novel, The Origin of Evil. Marcus decides he must investigate to clear Harry, and submits to his publisher's pressure to write a book about what is being called the Harry Quebert Affair.

First of all, it's downright creepy that the then 34-year-old Harry had a love affair with a 15-year-old girl.  And he's not the only grown man in town to have a thing for Nola.  We have to read a lot about these age-inappropriate passions, but at least there is a little comedy value in that reading, with deathless prose like this:

"As soon as he saw her, he felt his heart explode. He missed her so much. As soon as she saw him, she felt her heart explode. She had to speak to him."

Unfortunately, those exploding hearts were not fatal. Harry and Nola continue to play their parts in Somerset, a burg whose citizens behave like cartoon versions of that old-time celebration of small-town sin, Peyton Place. There are shrewish wives, henpecked husbands, tongue-tied swains, gossipy diner denizens, a hideously-scarred chauffeur with a speech impediment.  (And, yes, his dialog is presented with the impediment: "Pleave excuve me, Mifter Quebert, I didn't mean to fcare you.  But Mifter Ftern defperately wantf to fee you.") But most of all, there are people with deep dark secrets.

If this description makes the book sound kind of fun, in a campy soap-opera-ish way, I apologize. It isn't.  None of the characters seem to have emotionally progressed beyond Nola's age––which doesn't make all the men lusting after her any more appropriate.  The writing manages to be both purple and uninspired.  I think it's because when the author writes with constant literal and figurative exclamation points, hyperbole and overblown description, the reader soon becomes dulled to it.  Also, Dicker's writing is clichéd and he repeats himself––repeatedly! A good couple of hundred pages could have been edited out of this thing. It would still be bad, but at least there'd be less of it.

At last, in the final one-third or so of the book, we learn what happened to Nola in that summer of 1975. Or do we? Over and over, the mystery appears to reach a resolution, but then we find out that the resolution was wrong.  You soon learn that when the police investigator exclaims something like "we've got it this time!" it's another red herring.  Clearly not a believer in the less-is-more approach, Dicker pulls a few other rabbits out of his hat (in addition to the mystery of Nola), but each trick is about as impressive as nine-year-old learning to be a magician.

Before I posted this review, I decided to try to find out why some people thought this was a great book. I found a couple of print reviewers who talked about what a terrific satire this is of the publishing industry and how interesting it is as a piece of metafiction--because it's a writer (Joël Dicker) writing about a writer (Marcus Goldman) writing about a writer (Harry Quebert).  I also noticed that a disproportionate number of the favorable print reviews seem to have been written by fellow authors.  Over time, I've learned to be leery of those.  Too often, authors feel obligations to agents, publishers or others they may have in common with the author of the book being reviewed.  And authors quite often have different priorities from readers.  In any case, to me, the real satire of the publishing business is that this novel was published at all.  As for metafiction, well, no matter how "meta" this might be, that bit of writerly cleverness can't elevate the terrible writing and plotting into something that serves the reader well.

For quite awhile, it bothered me that I wasn't enjoying this book.  So many people loved it that I decided it must be that I don't much care for the paranormal in my reading.  Finally, though it's definitely true that I could have easily lived without the yucky descriptions of people with their viscera on the outside, killer fungus and the like, that wasn't the problem.  The problem is that the book is a big old mess.

The story is told in the first person by Myfanwy Thomas, a Rook in Britain's powerful secret paranormal intelligence service, the Chequy.  Actually, it's told by two Myfanwy Thomases, because the current Myfanwy is the one who wakes up surrounded by dead bodies wearing latex gloves, and no memory at all, including how the bodies got there and whether they were the ones who beat her up.  She soon learns that the prior resident of her body, also Myfanwy Thomas, but whom our current Myfanwy refers to as just Thomas, heard from mysterious strangers that she'd be killed by conspirators within the Chequy.  Thomas left letters and a big notebook so that Myfanwy could successfully take over the Rook position and find out who killed Thomas.

OK, so that's supposed to be the story, but it turns out it really isn't.  Instead, we have alternating narratives. One is these long, long, long info-dump excerpts from Thomas's notebook, which serve to fill us in on the history of the Chequy, its current personnel and Thomas's experiences with recent cases and colleagues.  It's pretty heavy going, as is usually the case when you get your background information in this style.

The current Myfanwy's story describes her various encounters with putting down paranormal threats (including that killer fungus thingie) and battling internal traitors who have betrayed the Chequy to the organization's centuries-old nemeses, the Grafters, who had been thought to have been wiped out long ago.  The revelation of who killed Thomas and why is left for the very end of the book, pretty much of an afterthought.

In addition to the deadly dull exposition bits of the book, the story violates a whole laundry list of other how-not-to-write-a-thriller rules.  For nearly all of the book, Myfanwy is a too-stupid-to-live heroine, in addition to being a dull-as-dishwater charisma-free young woman.  A villain commits the errors we're all familiar with from early James Bond movies.  There is a lack of pacing and no real excitement.  The characters are one-dimensional.  The execution was a waste of an intriguing concept.

I'm a francophile and I've read all of Peter Mayle's nonfiction books about Provence, his three Sam Levitt caper books and his other French novels Hotel Pastis, Anything Considered, Chasing Cezanne and A Good Year.

With his last Levitt book I joked that whenever Mayle needs some more cash to support his Provencal lifestyle, he dashes off one of these books. That quip seems not to be so much of a joke at this point. This is a very short book, more of a novella than a novel. It made me wonder if Mayle had to raise funds quickly for some urgent repairs on his villa in the Luberon.

As with the other books in the Sam Levitt series, the plot of The Corsican Caper is simple. Somebody does something threatening to a friend or acquaintance of Sam's, he and his girlfriend Elena travel from Los Angeles to Marseilles, and they and their wide circle of friends there (in both high and low places) outwit the bad guys–––in between sessions of eating plates of lovingly-described delectable food and drinking glasses of palate-pleasing wine.

As usual, Mayle manages to plug into currently popular prejudices; he chooses a Russian oligarch/thug for his villain. Billionaire Vronsky wants to acquire Sam's friend Francis Reboul's Marseilles estate and will stop at nothing to do it, despite Reboul's adamant refusal to sell. A cat-and-mouse game begins, as Vronsky plans his underhanded attack on Reboul, while Sam and his compatriots simultaneously put together a counter-plot against Vronsky.

Don't get me wrong; this is an entertaining book(let). But it will take you no time at all to read it and you'll have forgotten all about it in about as much time as it took to read. If you've read The Marseilles Caper, you will find this extremely similar––only shorter and a soupçon less charming. It's worth reading as a quick bit of fun, but I'd borrow it from the library.

Thanks to the publisher, Knopf, and Amazon's Vine program for providing an advance review copy. The Corsican Caper will be published on May 16, 2014.

Have you heard that slogan, "Information wants to be free" ? In The Accident, a certain bit of information is bursting to be free and, at the same time, in danger of being obliterated, along with everybody who has come into contact with it.

A mysterious messenger delivers a hard copy of a manuscript titled The Accident to literary agent Isabel Reed. An exposé that would destroy Charlie Wolfe, a media mogul with political ambitions, the manuscript quickly multiplies and gets into the hands of assistants, competing agents and editors. Isabel knows she has a dangerously hot property, but she doesn't expect that anybody who touches the manuscript will be targeted for death, and that she will have to go on the run to avoid being another victim.

Chris Pavone made a big splash with his first book, The Expats, but The Accident isn't up to that standard. It's a stylish and energetic thriller, but it suffers from having too many characters, and cutting so frequently back and forth among them that it's hard to engage with the story or the characters. Sometimes it's even hard to keep the characters straight.

The big, elephant-in-the-room problem is the notion that in this day and age, a hot exposé would go out in hard copy only, rather than be uploaded to the internet. The entire plot depends on this contrivance, but the book's explanation of why hard copy is better than electronic seemed nonsensical to me. All along, I kept thinking just one person needed to take the manuscript, OCR it and send it out to a few media outlets. Of course, then the whole story would go poof.

Given how good The Expats was, I'll give Chris Pavone another chance, but I definitely won't be recommending this one to anybody.

2.5 stars

Thanks to the publisher and Amazon's Vine program for providing an advance reviewing copy.

It's a November weekend in 1987, and the down-at-heel Bellweather resort hotel in the Catskills is hosting its annual music convention for New York's high school talent. Twins Rabbit and Alice Hatmaker from tiny Ruby Falls will be there, Alice for the second time.

Alice is a singer, featured in all of her high school's musical theater performances, and absolutely convinced she is destined for stardom. Rabbit is a much more low-key character. He's a bassoonist in the orchestra and hasn't managed yet to gin up the courage to tell anyone––even Alice––that he's gay.

Viola Fabian, the new organizer of the competition, is as striking and sociopathic as Cruella de Ville, and her brilliant flautist daughter, Jill, is determined to use this weekend as an opportunity to get away from her somehow. Fisher Brodie, the symphony conductor, and Natalie Wilson, music teacher at the Hatmakers' school, are scarred veterans of their different past experiences with Viola.

Minnie Graves is an outsider to the conventioneers, but not to the Bellweather. Exactly 15 years earlier, when she was a girl, she witnessed an event outside Room 712 that has haunted her ever since, and that she hopes to exorcise this anniversary weekend. Harold Hastings, longtime Bellweather concierge, has been a witness to years of music competitions––and the mystery of Room 712.

You can just imagine the emotions, hormones and scheming when you gather hundreds of talented, competitive teenagers, and their adult supervisors, and shut them up in the middle of nowhere for three days, as a blizzard approaches––maybe you've even experienced it yourself. And when a new horror occurs in Room 712, all that intensity is dialed up to the peak setting.

Some people are describing this book as Glee + The Shining, and I can see that, but there is a lot more to it, though it's hard to classify. It combines a young adult coming-of-age story with an amateur detective story, adding in some romance, magical realism, and some horror/suspense, all done in breezy, entertaining prose.

Racculia is one of those writers who can paint you a character portrait in just a few words, and make you feel you almost can see right into the character's soul. She directs this large cast of characters like the most skilled conductor, weaving their themes together, sometimes in harmony and sometimes clashing. Every character is a bit of a misfit, but her writing is filled with understanding and sympathy for them. (Well, maybe not Viola, but everybody else.)

If you have an interest in quirky stories and unusual characters, presented by a skilled storyteller, I recommend you give this book a try.

Note: Thanks to the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Amazon's Vine program, for providing an advance review copy of the book. Bellweather Rhapsody will be published on May 13, 2014.