A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE by Arkady Martine

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn’t an accident—or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.

Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan’s unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare has more than one identity crisis on her hands: she has a deep affinity for the empire that wants to annex her home and she also literally has someone else’s personality nested in her brain. Dzmare’s internal conflicts correlate with the external ones that drive the novel’s plot. Living within the Teixcalaan Empire has been her heart’s desire since childhood, yet her primary aim as ambassador is to keep Teixcalaan from assuming control of her home, Lsel Station. This same conflict between personal desire and professional duty may have gotten her predecessor Yskandr Aghavn killed. It is Yskandr whose “imago” (an impression of the man built from his recorded memories) is implanted in her head. Imago technology is a Lsel state secret, yet the Teixcalaanlitzlim find it during Yskandr’s autopsy, and this discovery could embolden those who wish for Teixcalaan to consume Lsel.

Good story, although I had a bit of a struggle placing credulence on the way the memory of the previous ambassador in the head of the current Ambassador was handled.  At times, they were having conversations between themselves (in her head), although the technology is explained as it being only the memories of the previous person integrated with the current living person, and that they were integrated, not separate individuals having a dialog.

The other thing I found extremely irritating was the absolutely overuse of italics. I mean, in every paragraph there were at least two or three words italicized, and really,  if your writing is so unclear that you must italicize  what you are thinking, then I would seriously recommend a rewrite.

None of which will stop me from reading the next volume in the series.

A BALI CONSPIRACY MOST FOUL by Shamini Flint

In this second of the series, Inspector Singh, everyone’s favorite portly and wheezing homicide detective, is still recovering from his last case when terrorists set off a bomb on the neighboring island of Bali. With Singapore’s anti-terrorist team busy defending the home front, Inspector Singh’s bosses ship him to Bali to assist with the investigation. Unfortunately, Inspector Singh has as much experience with terrorism as he does with proper diet and exercise – none.

When the police find a skull fragment of a man who was killed before the bomb went off, Inspector Singh is assigned to the case. With Bronwyn Taylor, a peppy and eternally optimistic Australian cop, at his side, Singh’s investigation leads him to the wife of the murdered man, and her group of entitled, expatriate friends. The murder seems like an open-and-shut case – that is, until Bronwyn and Singh realize that this crowd is riddled with enough cheating and discontent to fill out a soap opera.

This simple murder is quickly becoming more complicated than Singh could have imagined. And how does it all tie into the act of terrorism that brought him to Bali in the first place? Set in an exotic locale and starring an unforgettable cast of characters, this second mystery featuring the utterly lovable Inspector Singh is exciting, funny, and suspenseful, with an ending that even the most seasoned detective couldn’t predict.

Shamini’s characters are gloriously and unabashedly ordinary, human, and in some cases downright homely. Shamini is the Somerset Maugham for the 21st century, but in 3D. Her characters are overweight, overskinny, and poorly dressed.  A fun, cozy mystery without the old ladies knitting or the single thirties lady protagonist and the handsome homicide detective.

STILL LIFE by Louise Penny

As the early morning mist clears on Thanksgiving Sunday, the homes of Three Pines come to life – all except one…

To locals, the village is a safe haven. So they are bewildered when a well-loved member of the community is found lying dead in the maple woods. Surely it was an accident – a hunter’s arrow gone astray. Who could want Jane Neal dead?

In a long and distinguished career with the Sûreté du Quebec, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has learned to look for snakes in Eden. Gamache knows something dark is lurking behind the white picket fences, and if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will begin to give up its secrets.

Definitely a fun mystery, with a nice police detective who isn’t an alcoholic, a drug addict, divorced, strange, or otherwise a less-than-fine human being.  Nice change.  Looking forward to more of this series.

CLAIRE DeWITT AND THE BOHEMIAN HIGHWAY by Sara Gran

When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt’s musician ex-boyfriend, is found dead in his Mission District home, the police are convinced it’s a simple robbery. But Claire knows nothing is ever simple.

With the help of her new assistant, Claude, Claire follows the clues, finding hints to Paul’s fate in her other cases—especially that of a missing girl in the gritty 1980s East Village and a modern-day miniature horse theft in Marin. As visions of the past reveal the secrets of the present, Claire begins to understand the words of the enigmatic French detective Jacques Silette: “The detective won’t know what he is capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart.” And love, in all its forms, is the greatest mystery of all—at least to the world’s greatest PI. 

Claire is heavily tattooed; she drinks and takes drugs to excess, as often as not stealing the drugs from the medicine cabinets of unsuspecting friends. To solve her mysteries, she relies on mysticism and dreams as much as on more traditional methods of investigation.  Claire investigates for the next several months with the aid of her new assistant, Claude, a graduate school dropout. In and around the investigation, Claire ruminates on the disappearance years earlier of one of her best friends, a girl named Tracy. As teenagers, Claire, Tracy and a girl named Kelly were inseparable. They discovered Silette’s book, Detection together and began investigating mysteries of their own. Then, shortly after they solved a particularly difficult case, Tracy simply disappeared and neither Claire nor Kelly ever heard from her again. Tracy’s disappearance was a critical element in the first Claire DeWitt novel and we now get the backstory that fills in many of the blanks.

In Bohemian Highway, we meet a Claire who is clearly out of control and not functioning well in her life’s destiny as a detective. She spends much of her time searching out sources for purchasing cocaine and whenever she visits anyone’s house or apartment, either as part of the investigation or just because, she seeks the bathroom and checks the bathroom cabinet for drugs. If she finds Percocet or Vicodin or Valium or anything else that will help her get high, she takes one or two of the pills and puts the rest in her purse. If she finds cocaine in the house, she steals it.

She is, in short, a mess. Her nose is constantly bleeding. Half the time it’s not clear whether she’s experiencing reality or some drug-induced dream. It is thoroughly depressing.

And yet, we are meant to believe that her finely honed instinct for detection is totally intact and that she is able to intuit the clues that she needs to eventually solve this case. I have no experience with cocaine, but somehow, I just don’t think that’s the way it works, especially when you are mixing cocaine with Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Adderall or whatever else the next medicine cabinet holds. Yes, one has to suspend disbelief when reading fiction and allow the author his/her artistic license, but this was too much for me.

It seemed that the mystery, the main one and the smaller side ones, took a definite back seat to her drug use and her fogged musings on the friend of her high school days who went missing and was never found.

Not as good as the first in the series, but I think a third is coming out and perhaps that will wrap everything up.

LETHAL WHITE by Robert Galbraith

When Billy, a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled. While Billy is obviously mentally distressed, and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. But before Strike can question him further, Billy bolts from his office in a panic.

Trying to get to the bottom of Billy’s story, Strike and Robin Ellacott—once his assistant, now a partner in the agency—set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament, and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.

And during this labyrinthine investigation, Strike’s own life is far from straightforward: his newfound fame as a private eye means he can no longer operate behind the scenes as he once did. Plus, his relationship with his former assistant is more fraught than it ever has been—Robin is now invaluable to Strike in the business, but their personal relationship is much, much trickier than that. 

OK, we all know that Robert Galbraith is really J.K. Rowling in disguise.  And this is a detective story disguised as a romance, or a love story disguised as a detective story.  Pretty good mystery, less good romance, leaning a bit to the hokey side. All that magical mystical stuff from Harry Potter perhaps having smooched up her brain.

And now after the howler Mz Rowling created with her phobic remarks about transgender women, and then her long blogged essay with even more transgender phobia explaining her first transgender phobic remarks, it is hard to want to read the rest of the series.

It becomes one of the issues about the art and the artist, and can one separate them, compartmentalize them, and enjoy the work and dislike the creator?  Tough one.

CLAIRE DeWITT AND THE CITY OF THE DEAD by Sara Gran

This new series features Claire DeWitt, the world’s greatest PI—at least, that’s what she calls herself. A one-time teen detective in Brooklyn, she is a follower of the esoteric French detective Jacques Silette, whose mysterious handbook Détection inspired Claire’s unusual practices. Claire also has deep roots in New Orleans, where she was mentored by Silette’s student the brilliant Constance Darling—until Darling was murdered. When a respected DA goes missing she returns to the hurricane-ravaged city to find out why. 

Well, phooey, that little blurb doesn’t even begin to describe this book.

One reviewer named Claire DeWitt is a detective, willing to use all means necessary–including hallucinogenic dreams, the I Ching and fingerprint analysis–to solve her cases. She knows ultimately she will be solving the case for herself, because sometimes the client doesn’t want it solved:
“The client already knows the solution to his mystery. But he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t hire a detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can’t be solved.”

Leon is a client who has requested her help finding his uncle Vic, a lawyer who disappeared during Hurricane Katrina. He feels a little guilty: “‘You know what it says in the Bible,’ Leon said with resignation. ‘Look out for thine uncle as you would thineself. Or whatever.'”

Claire tends to lie a little if it suits seeking solutions to a mystery, and isn’t entirely honest about her history to Leon. “‘How old are you?’ ‘Forty-two,’ I said. I was thirty-five. But no one trusts a woman under forty. I’d started being forty when I was twenty-nine.”

Claire’s search brings her into contact with gangs of feral, forgotten children and with her own tumultuous history as a detective when she apprenticed in New Orleans. Claire frequently references a book by a famous detective (albeit fictional) whose thoughts on detecting are philosophical musings on mystery, truth, and humanity, as well as her history with Constance, her mentor. The time shifts flow smoothly and don’t feel the intrusive into the story; in fact, they blended very well, sometimes foreshadowing the next development in the mystery. Claire’s own mystery was worked in nicely, leaving a feel for her character but with a sense there is a lot more to discover.

As in many detective mysteries, setting plays a crucial role. One of the many small mysteries of the book is how Claire and the people of New Orleans never refer to Katrina by name, the way the rest of the country does. They call it a ‘flood’ and speak of it in terms of days (“‘By Monday the phones were down and…’ The rest of his sentence was obvious and he didn’t say it out loud”) or by location: at the Superdome, Houston, back home. Claire notes the problem with locating people, phone numbers, addresses in post-Katrina New Orleans, and at least a couple of the locals involved in Claire’s mystery are suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder. Finding Vic means visiting some of the ravaged areas, and Gran’s imagery is striking in its objectivity:
“Signs with letter missing told the story: lots of OTELS and HOT BO LED CRA FISH and AWN SH PS. In the intermediate zone I started to see the marks spray-painted on houses: circles with X’s through them, numbers and letters in the hollows of the X.”

There is proliferate drug use, but it is handled well. It is apparently an activity Claire engages in to self-medicate as well as bridge gaps between herself and other people.  This is very much a noir mystery, dark and painful in spots, but one I could not put down. 

And no, Jacques Silette is not a real person.   

SLEEPING GIANTS by Sylvain Neuvel

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.

Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved – the object’s origins, architects, and purpose unknown.

But some can never stop searching for answers.

Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top-secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the relic they seek. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unravelling history’s most perplexing discovery-and finally figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?

The story is told through a series of interviews with a nameless interviewer, as well as the occasional journal entry and news article. It gives us a look at all the people involved in this project – in uncovering the body parts, finding out how they work, what it all means, and trying to keep their sanity as the world becomes more and more insane.

What I am is very much a function of what I am not. If the “other” is the Muslim world, then I am the Judeo-Christian world. If the other is from thousands of light-years away, I am simply human. Redefine alterity and you can erase boundaries.

We see how this discovery and the subsequent revelations affect the world. Imagine what this means for humanity. It is the suggestion that we are not alone and are not the most advanced creatures in the universe. What were these giant body parts created for? Are they a message or a weapon? What does this mean for religions? Is someone out there waiting for us?

All of the parts of the relic are finally found, and put together, it is a 22 ft tall woman, whose knees are backwards, and which is basically a short range defensive weapon.

A fun read, except for the boyish wet-dream of how gosh golly attractive the nasty attituded female helicopter pilot is.  I mean, really.

PUCCINI’S GHOSTS by Joss Morag

This is a haunting, harrowing masterpiece of psychological suspense. With equal parts subtlety and menace, Joss takes us on a dizzying journey toward a collision between fantasy and reality, and an astounding moment of revelation that shatters illusions, hopes, and lives forever.

The year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town utterly devoid of culture and charm. Here, Lila lives as the third player in her parents dramatically embittered marriage. Until her flamboyant, irrepressible uncle George shows up from London and her family decides to squander a windfall on the most preposterous of causes: a civic production of the Puccini opera ‘Turandot’.

Lila knows nothing of opera and little of her uncle or the dashing young man he hires to sing the role of Calaf. But Lila does know passion. Because it is coursing through her veins and rushing blindly, wildly all around her. Now a girl on the verge of womanhood is about to blunder into a grown-up world where secrets are kept and exposed, hopes soar and wither, and where crimes petty and great exact the most chilling punishments of all.

Masterfully paced and spellbinding till its final, haunting scene, it is a piercing look into the fierce darkness that lurks behind seemingly ordinary lives.

A better plot description from another reviewer:  Lila DuCann is an opera singer who returns to her hometown of Burnhead to complete the last rites of her dead father.

While sorting out papers and stuff in her childhood home, Lila’s mind flashes back to the summer of 1960 when she was fifteen.

Through alternate uses of the first and the third pronouns, to distinguish the flashbacks, we come to know that she has lived with boisterously-bickering parents. Her father is a mumbling-fumbling failed lawyer, her mother is a woman who grudges her husband for dreams of being an opera singer and grudges her husband for nipping her glorious opera singing career in the bud. Her only solace is playing endless repetitions of the opera Turandot.

Burnhead is a place with no charm, no adventure and lots of wet, muddy rain and nosy people. Due to an unintentional comical misunderstanding, Lila leads everyone to believe that her family is staging a production of Turandot.

Slowly Lila’s family is caught up in this preposterous idea that they can actually produce the play, strengthened by Uncle George’s impulsive statement that he will stage a play. Lila has worshipped Uncle George, an insane music teacher in London, all her life. He recruits the townspeople in the play, casts Lila’s mother as the female lead and Lila as a slave character.

Meanwhile Joe, Uncle George’s assistant and on whom Lila develops a crush, comes down to the town to play as the lead singer.

Her obsession with Joe turns so fierce that she has no idea how her mind will destroy every hope, every dream and every moment of their present and carry echoes of that destruction far into the future.

As the book and narratives go on, the reader comes to understand that the daughter, Lila, now grown up with a mediocre singing career of her own, is very much like her egotistical mother, superior without cause, and delusional, which delusion grows more harrowing as she sorts through her late father’s effects.

In fact, we come to see that all of the characters in the story are operating under their own delusions, and no one sees themselves or admits to seeing themselves, as who and what they truly are.

I fascinating read, that kind of sticks with you long after you have finished reading it.

 

A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD by Alan Bradley

“… a cup of ale without a wench, why, alas, ’tis like an egg without salt or a red herring without mustard.”  – Rhomas Lodge and Robert Green, in A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande (1592).

A beguiling novel starring the insidiously clever and unflappable eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce. The precocious chemist with a passion for poisons uncovers a fresh slew of misdeeds in the hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey–mysteries involving a missing tot, a fortune-teller, and a corpse in Flavia’s own backyard.

Flavia had asked the old Gypsy woman to tell her fortune, but never expected to stumble across the poor soul, bludgeoned in the wee hours in her own caravan. Was this an act of retribution by those convinced that the soothsayer had abducted a local child years ago? Certainly Flavia understands the bliss of settling scores; revenge is a delightful pastime when one has two odious older sisters. But how could this crime be connected to the missing baby? Had it something to do with the weird sect who met at the river to practice their secret rites? While still pondering the possibilities, Flavia stumbles upon another corpse–that of a notorious layabout who had been caught prowling about the de Luce’s drawing room.

Pedaling Gladys, her faithful bicycle, across the countryside in search of clues to both crimes, Flavia uncovers some odd new twists. Most intriguing is her introduction to an elegant artist with a very special object in her possession–a portrait that sheds light on the biggest mystery of all: Who is Flavia?

As the red herrings pile up, Flavia must sort through clues fishy and foul to untangle dark deeds and dangerous secrets.

A sweet, charming mystery,starring  a pre-adolescent who is constantly tormented by her really rather nasty two older sisters.  Appropriate for all ages, young and those of us with a few miles on us.

 

THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.

The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

Anne Patchett is a wonderful story teller.  Her tales have guts and density.  I guess I mean they seem to have heft.   In this  novel, the Dutch House is as much a character as the human characters, and it is beause of the existence of this house that the lives of the characters took the turns that they did.

It is set in the Philadelphia area, Jenkingtown, my old stomping grounds.  Loved it.