On Fire

Little Fires Everywhere: A Novel by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press, $17.00, 368 pages)

I and I, in creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives. Bob Dylan

When a person reads an author for the first time, rarely will one know what to expect. Sometimes the reader is more or less satisfied than what was expected or anticipated. In the case of bestselling author Celeste Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, this reader was extremely excited to discover what an excellent book it is. Fires features something for just about everyone: young people finding their way; good people who become victims of circumstance; entitlement; the search for identity; the human judging that accompanies an attempt to make sense of those who can’t or won’t conform to convention; and revenge.

In Shaker Heights, Ohio, Elena Richardson likes things tidy. She desires perfection, keeps up appearances, runs in the right social circles, is a gossip, and assuages her conscience by renting out a property for less than market value. Concurrently, Richardson looks down upon those she’s attempting to help. Enter Mia Warren, an artist, nomad, and mother of Pearl – a high schooler who finally seems to be hitting her stride.

Lexie, Richardson’s daughter, befriends Pearl but as they attempt to interact with the opposite sex and apply to colleges, past and present intersect in ways that exempt no one from the powerful hand of Fate. What makes the story great is how Ng expertly and brilliantly brings the individual stories together. The total is greater than the sum of its parts as unique subplots play off against each other to form a coherent and shocking climax.

Little Fires Everywhere is a perfectly paced novel and the ending – satisfying as it is, is as mystifying as the journey to get there.

Highly recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was received from the publisher.

Dave Moyer is the superintendent of a public school district north of Chicago. He is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel. In his spare time, he listens to the music of Bob Dylan and attends Dylan’s live performances.

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Cruel Summer

The Summer We Lost Her: A Novel by Tish Cohen (Gallery Books, $16.99, 352 pages)

Tish Cohen has knocked it out of the park with The Summer We Lost Her.

An aspiring Olympian and dreamer, Elise – who gets “oh, so close” to her dream after years of dedications and near misses – is confronted with the brutal realities of her future and past. She has decisions to make. Especially in light of the birth of her daughter, Gracie.

Elise’s lawyer husband, Matt – the dutiful father and conventionalist, must also reconcile his vision of reality and the myths that catch up with him regarding his past, and the grandfather he loves. When confronted with the presence of his first love, Cass, and the psychological connections of his past, he has decisions to make.

In Summer, Gracie disappears at a lake community in northern New York state. There is no greater evil than this, and there is no greater reckoning than what transpires in the face of such an event. And a reckoning there is. But as the story unfolds the humanity of the characters is revealed in such an understated way, it is hard to root for or against anyone. And so what hangs in the balance until the final pages of the story is totally satisfying.

The couple wrestles with the decision to sell their property near Lake Placid, New York, amidst the loss of their daughter. They must also deal with Elise’s quest for excellence, the appearance of Matt’s first love, revelations of Matt’s grandfather’s questionable practices, and the reappearance of Elise’s mercurial father.

It is no surprise that the rights to the tale have already been claimed for a TV mini-series.

The ending could go in multiple directions. Part of me says Cohen should have written a Great Expectations, with two different endings and let the reader decide. But, short of that, it is hard to find fault with this extremely satisfying novel.

Highly recommended.

Dave Moyer

This novel was released on June 4, 2019. A review copy was received from the publisher.

Tish Cohen’s excellent debut novel was The Truth About Delilah Blue (2010).

Dave Moyer is a public school superintendent in Illinois, and is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel about baseball, Bob Dylan, and love.

Advance praise for The Summer We Lost Her (click on the image to see a larger version):

Cold As Ice

Stone Cold Heart: A Novel by Caz Frear (Harper, $26.99, 328 pages)

Detective Constable Cat Kinsella stars in this, the second British police procedural mystery from author Caz Frear.  For many readers it’s the second novel that’s the true test of a writer’s skill.  Rest assured readers of this genre – fans of writers such as Peter Robinson, Jane Casey, and Peter James – I could go on.  Ms. Frear has another success in Stone Cold Heart.  After reading this novel, I’m looking forward to reading the first in the series, Sweet Little Lies.

Predictably, the opening page features a stream of consciousness statement from an unknown person.  The requisite references to killing and death are assurances that this read will not be tame or boring.  DC Kinsella begins her narrative in August 2017 with a rather ordinary trip to a coffee shop.  Well, the coffee is not ordinary nor is the barista.

Fast forward to November of the same year, a Tuesday to be specific.  We’re introduced to Luigi Parnell, Kinsella’s partner, as well as their boss, Detective Inspector Kate Steele.  Murder Investigation Team 4, as they are called, is considering a scene with a 22-year-old murder victim, Naomi Lockhart.  Kinsella’s remembrance of past visits to this neighborhood is a head’s up to the reader that there will be a blend of her past and the present.  She encounters many triggers to her memory during the tale.

Author Frear provides the usual banter among the members of the MIT4.  Moreover, throughout the book she takes time to thoughtfully describe the various aspects of each scene and the thoughts and actions of her characters.  Perhaps it is the cinematic feel of her writing that sets these characters and their profession apart from an ordinary British police mystery.  In fact, the DC Kinsella novels are now being made into a television series.

The underlying issues that move the story forward are trust and truth.  As one would expect, the tale is advanced as MIT4 searches for the answer to the age old question, who done it?

The book is highly recommended for mystery/thriller readers and especially those who are dedicated readers of British police procedurals featuring a female detective as the main character.

Ruta Arellano

Stone Cold Heart was published on July 2, 2019.  A review copy was received from the publisher.

Beyond the Sea

You, Me, and The Sea: A Novel by Meg Donohue (William Morrow, $15.99, 368 pages)

Author Meg Donohue opens You, Me, and The Sea with a rainy morning in Sea Cliff, an exclusive residential neighborhood in San Francisco.  Will Langford and Merrow Shawe have carefully planned their engagement party in their home and surrounding garden.  They hope for better weather later in the day.  What transpires is the beginning of the real story.

Merrow is the narrator for the entire two-part novel.  Ms. Donohue gives her a singsong voice when Merrow describes her early childhood on a dirt poor farm.  There are warning signs mixed in with a few pleasant events.  To make matters worse, older brother, Bear, constantly torments Merrow.  There is a bit too much anxiety, anticipation and pain for this reviewer.  Unlike How to Eat a Cupcake, a prior work by Ms. Donohue, You, Me, and The Sea lacks balance with its overwhelming tension.

Readers can be sure of Ms. Donohue’s knowledge of the Bay Area.  She sets up striking contrasts between wealth and poverty using detailed descriptions of the locales where the action takes place.  Although the Pacific Coast is the overall setting, this is not a beach novel.

It’s a shame that the read is far from being as engaging and fun as Donohue’s delightful debut, How to Eat a Cupcake.

Ruta Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.  This book was released in trade paperback and hardbound and other versions on May 7, 2019.

Lost and Found

The Library of Lost and Found: A Novel by Phaedra Patrick (Park Row, $24.99, 352 pages)

Family secrets, we all have them, right?  Martha Storm is no exception.  She’s a no nonsense middle-aged woman living on her own in the house she inherited from her parents.  It’s the house she grew up in and nothing has changed.  Well, not really.  There are bins and bags and piles of items throughout the house.  Each contains a project that Martha has taken on for neighbors, coworkers, the local school and even her sister.

Martha is an over functioning library volunteer and all around reliable person who dedicated 15 years of her life to caring for her aging parents.  Five years after their passing, she faces new challenges – a dwindling inheritance, the need to seek a paying job, and undeniable loneliness.  She frequently reflects on the happier times in her life when Zelda, her devil-may-care grandmother, was alive.

A brown paper parcel left on the library steps on Valentine’s Day evening triggers events that Martha could never have imagined no matter how hard she might have tried.  The story gracefully swoops here and there picking up momentum until the reader is thoroughly engaged in Martha’s quest.  There’s no way this reviewer will divulge more of The Library of Lost and Found.  To do so would be a grave mistake.

Author Phaedra Patrick has once more written a deeply moving yet amusing tale of a life, not the ones her characters are living, rather, the ones that unfold when they pay attention to unexpected happenings, however ordinary they may seem at first glance.

Ms. Patrick, the author of The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper and Rise and Shine Benedict Stone, has switched up her main character for a feisty and determined woman who tries to avoid feelings.  These novels are not a series.  Feel free to begin enjoying the magic of her writing with whichever one you choose.

Highly recommended.

Ruta Arellano

The reviewer purchased the Kindle edition ($11.00) of The Library of Lost and Found.  The book was published on March 26, 2019.

 

 

Believe Me

A Mystery/Thriller Roundup

Little Girl Lost by Wendy Corsi Staub (William Morrow, $7.99, 400 pages)

This classic two-story thread mystery/thriller that draws from events in 1968 and 1987 makes the most of what can happen when serious life choices are made. Author Staub combines smooth writing, some shocking violence and lurking evil to keep her readers’ attention.

Well recommended.

Bleak Harbor: A Novel by Bryan Gurley (Thomas & Mercer, $24.99, 395 pages)

It’s a terrifying kidnapping of an autistic teenager at the center of this tale. The location is a small seaside resort on the Atlantic Coast where the year round families are deeply entrenched. Most of these folks accept the public personas of the neighbors they’ve come to know over the years. Guess again, danger is lurking!

Highly recommended.  A stay up all night reading page-turner.

39 Winks: A Maggie O’Malley Mystery by Kathleen Valenti (Henery Press, $31.95, 296 pages)

A third-person narrator shocks the reader on the first page, a very gory first page. A cosmetic surgeon is found at the breakfast table, face down in a bowl of Life cereal. To make matters worse, he’s gluten-free.  Quirky characters and plenty of pop culture references make the story feel connected to “the real world.”

Well recommended.

Believe Me: A Novel by J P Delaney (Ballantine Books, $27.00, 352 pages)

You guessed it, another violent prologue and this one is a flashback. The author employs a unique form of dialogue that’s as if it is taken from a theatrical script. An undercover call girl, no pun intended, works for suspicious wives who want to catch their philandering husbands. The writing is beautiful with amazing timing that creates tension, anxiety and confusion; in other words, a true thriller.

Highly recommended.

Ruta Arellano

Review copies were provided by the publishers.

The Unexplained

A Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere by Mikita Brottman (Henry Holt and Co., $28.00, 288 pages)

Author Mikita Brottman lives at the Belvedere Hotel, a Baltimore landmark with a long history of strange occurrences, suicides, and mysterious deaths.  Brottman here professes her fascination with the occult, tarot cards, and suicide so the examination of the apparent 2006 suicide of Rey Rivera – a once-fellow resident of the Belvedere, would seem to be a perfect topic for her writing.

Brottman’s account of events, An Uexplained Death, provides numerous details surrounding Rivera’s death as well as a tremendous amount of conjecture on her part.  What it fails to do is to provide clarity or new information beyond what was already known or presumed. (The authorities found the death to be a suicide.)  Brottman goes on – in what seems like a stretch – to explore cultural attitudes about suicide from around the world, and she provides her personal views on various matters whether related or not.

Rey Rivera was a tall and attractive aspiring film maker who moved to Baltimore from Los Angeles with his new wife, Allison.  He joined with Porter Stansberry of Agora, publishing newsletters offering financial advice.  His death happened to come at the time when he had borrowed money to produce his own film, was getting ready to quit Agora – which was engulfed in an SEC investigation – and was about to move back to L.A.

Did Rivera jump from the roof of the Belvedere, falling through a skylight at the top of a space which once housed the hotel’s swimming pool, or was he running from someone intending to do him harm?  Brottman investigates various alternatives to suicide possibilities, but none of them seem either likely or probable.  She wonders aloud whether Rivera was depressed about the Agora investigation or whether he became entangled in a homosexual affair.  It’s all so much smoke and mirrors because each such alternate explanation is discarded shortly after being raised.  And Brottman’s conclusion of this strange, quasi-fictional investigation of a real-life death provides nothing of substance.

The story is slightly compelling during the few periods in which Brottman sticks to the subject matter at hand.  But she spends far too much time writing about herself, her life, and her obsessions.  Oh, but for an editor!

The typical reader is unlikely to find Brottman’s affinity for rats very endearing.  The same is true concerning her fascination with strangely committed murders, and the time she spends imagining herself in another person’s shoes (such as Allison Reyes’s).  All in all, this is a book of rambling distractions, which is as generally uninteresting as it is undisciplined.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Dave Moyer is a public school superintendent in Illinois and is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel.

Notes:

The Beaux Arts style Belvedere Hotel was opened as Baltimore’s first luxury hotel in 1903 and was converted to residential condos in 1991.

I read the book and wondered why the writer spent an obsessive amount of time attempting to solve a crime which the local authorities had already solved, resolved and literally closed the book on.  – Joseph Arellano

Afflicted

The Affliction: A Novel by Beth Gutcheon (William Morrow, $16.99, 384 pages)

Maggie was sitting on the floor paging through a book on Bernard Berenson and Hope was deep in one of the desk drawers when a voice from the doorway said, “What the hell do you think you are doing?”

Prolific author Beth Gutcheon serves up her second Maggie Detweiler mystery in a decidedly Miss Marple/J.B, Fletcher tone.  Of course, this being a mystery novel, someone is murdered.  There are subplots of unrest among the students at a private girls’ school.  Various members of the Rye-on-Hudson community where the school is located have been plotting their own schemes.  The infusion of developer capital to the otherwise bucolic community energizes the action.

Maggie and her buddy Hope Bobbin insinuate themselves into the community after a call for assistance.  Initially, Maggie arrives at leader of an Independent School Association accreditation evaluation team.  The school, Rye Manor School for Girls, is facing the likely loss of its accreditation.

Ms. Gutcheon seamlessly brings her reader along on Maggie and Hope’s quest for the killer.  Along the way the faculty, students and campus of the school fill in a privileged New England experience around the wonderful dialogue.  There’s no lack of finger pointing and accusations to make solving the murder a challenging effort for the Detweiler and Bobbin team.

The Affliction is consistent with its predecessor, Death at Breakfast.  Hopefully, Ms. Gutcheon will deliver more such engaging adventures for her readers.

Well recommended.

Ruta Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.  The trade paper version of The Affliction will be released on November 27, 2018.

When the Men Were Gone

When the Men Were Gone: A Novel by Marjorie Herrera Lewis (William Morrow, $26.99/$15.99, 240 pages)

When the Men Were Gone, based on a true story, is Marjorie Herrera Lewis’ debut novel about Tylene Wilson, an assistant principal at a Texas high school who takes over the school’s football team during World War II, when all of the men are either at war or returning home dead.

Wilson has grown up an avid fan and shares many childhood memories with her father, but when she steps up to make sure the boys get one last chance to play football before the war comes calling, she is seen in a less than favorable light by many of the locals.  Her heroic gesture is met more with scorn than gratitude, because “everybody knows” that coaching football in Texas is clearly a man’s job.

When Wilson finally clears the imminent hurdles with her principal and the school board, the team takes the field for its first game against a powerhouse program in front of a full house with reporters from hours away descending upon Brownwood, Texas.

It turns out that Wilson does know what she’s doing, and Lewis tells both an inspiring and enjoyable story.  She does well to avoid too much commentary and simply leads the reader through the thoughts and actions of the characters, bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.

The book, however, is arguably a bit too lean at less than 250 pages.  Its primary drawback is that a little more meat at times could have made for a better, more complete story.  This does not seem to have been the goal for Lewis, but more could have been done to shore up the characters and plot.

Lewis herself covered the Dallas Cowboys for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and endured some taunting from some insiders before winning them over.  She went on to join the Texas Wesleyan University football staff.  Though not autobiographical, Lewis apparently relied upon her knowledge and personal experiences to lend credibility to the inspiring account.

Well recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by the publisher.  When the Men Were Gone will be released in hardbound and trade paper versions on October 2, 2018.

Dave Moyer is the Superintendent of Schools for the Elmhurst Unit District 205 public school district, located just north of Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel about baseball, love and Bob Dylan.

Murder, She Cooked

Death al Fresco: A Sally Solari Mystery by Leslie Karst (Crooked Lane Books, $26.99, 320 pages)

Death al Fresco is the third Sally Solari novel by Leslie Karst.  When I first received the book to review and saw on the cover a plug that the book includes recipes, I was immediately skeptical.  I was proven wrong.  Death is a very enjoyable read and Karst manages to deliver a book that allows the reader to read it in big chunks because it breezes along nicely and sustains interest.  Or one can elect to put it down for a while and return to it without having missed a beat.

Solari’s is an Italian restaurant owned by Sally’s father on Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz, California.  Much to her chagrin, she finds herself supporting her father’s endeavors more than she would care to.  She dates a member of the District Attorney’s office and – in addition to her restaurant pursuits, takes up painting as a hobby.

Most importantly, Sally is an accomplished amateur sleuth, which comes in handy when Gino, a renowned Santa Cruz fisherman is found dead (by Sally’s dog) after an evening at Solari’s.  Early in the novel, a local accuses her of being the next Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote), which, by the way her character is drawn is the exact analogy I had in mind while reading the story.  The unfortunate death compromises a major event planned for the restaurant; an event for which Sally was the unwitting chief organizer.

Sally’s father becomes a suspect in the crime and in order to salvage both the restaurant and her father’s reputation, she becomes the chief busybody and lead investigator in Gino’s death.  Sally is too sweet to be perceived as precocious, but just barely.  She is far too nice to be disliked, even when she is covering up evidence.  She is also, apparently, too cute to upset her boyfriend with all of her meddling.  All of which somehow – and surprisingly – makes for a story that works extremely well.

There are various iterations of possibilities introduced as the circumstances of Gino’s death come to light, from his having imbibed too much before he dined at the restaurant, to an interest in his boat upon his death, and – which is perhaps a bit too much, to lead or copper poisoning.  But in the end, Sally gets it right and the series should continue for at least a fourth novel.

At the conclusion of Death al Fresco, I was a satisfied reader as I put the book down.  I think most readers will arrive at a similar verdict.

Well recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by a publicist.

Dave Moyer is the chief administrator of a public school district in Illinois, and is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel.