Paul Austin Ardoin's Blog, page 12

Paul in the UK Pt. 2: Sherlock and Me

Over spring break, my family visited the U.K., and you can read about our visit to Stonehenge. We also went to the Sherlock Holmes museum.

Now, I've loved murder mysteries as long as I can remember. I grew up with Danny Dunn, Scientific Detective (hey, somebody, put this series back in print!) and the Encyclopedia Brown series. And one of the series I've read and reread and reread again is, of course, Sherlock Holmes.

Many people think that the Sherlock Holmes stories were the genesis of the detective story. However, the first English-language detective story was written by Edgar Allan Poe almost 50 years before Sherlock: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," starring detective C. Auguste Dupin. (And of course many detective stories pre-date Poe, although scholars debate whether some of the early stories meet the right criteria.)

There's no doubt, though, that Holmes had an incredible impact on popular culture—the Sherlock and Holmes characters "transcend time," as Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss put it. In a decade that has seen two blockbuster movies and two critically-acclaimed television shows based on Sherlock, it's hard to argue that point.

And so on a gorgeous morning in April, my family and I walked from our rental off Edgware Road (above a really amazing Egyptian restaurant called Ahl Cairo that you should definitely try) past the Marylebone rail station to 221B Baker Street.

Since the museum is for a fictional character, there really isn't a whole lot there that's historical. There are a lot of objects that were...Read More

One Year

Wow—it’s been a year.

 

I’ve been a published author for exactly one year today.

 

When I started this journey on October 31, 2017, I had no idea I’d be where I am today.

See, on October 31, 2017, Facebook popped up one of those “on this day” messages to me.

“I’ve had this idea for a murder mystery in my head about a coroner named Fenway. I think I’m going to sign up for NaNoWriMo and start writing it this month!”

 

That message was dated October 31, 2009.

 

Now, I’ve always believed that one day I’d write a novel. I majored in English with a creative writing emphasis, and I’ve taken so many creative writing classes that I’ve lost count. I wrote a bunch of short stories in college, and I started a novel back then too, but I wrote myself into a corner about 40,000 words into it. And I had obviously promised myself I’d participate in National Novel Writing Month—where you pledge publicly to write 50,000 words in a new novel in 30 days—and I never got past Chapter One.

 

When I saw that Facebook “on this day” message come through, it felt like a slap in the face. Had I really spent the last eight years doing absolutely nothing to make my dream of becoming a novelist a reality?

 

So right then and there, I made a promise to myself: I would write the murder mystery about Fenway the coroner, starting the very next day.

 

And here’s the important part of the pledge: I wouldn’t stop until I was done.

 

I wouldn’t stop to edit in the middle.

 

I wouldn’t second-guess what I was doing.

 

I wouldn’t stop until I was finished.

 

I signed up on the NaNoWriMo website, and started drafting my book on November 1.

 

The first draft of the novel was actually written in first person, from Fenway’s point of view. About 50,000 words into it—I still had a few days before the end of the month when I hit the goal—I realized the...Read More

Paul in the UK!

In mid-April, my kids had spring break from high school, and the whole family went to the United Kingdom for a week. I'll share some highlights from that trip in the coming weeks—starting now!

One of the highlights of our vacation was a trip to Stonehenge. Although I'd been to the UK several times—mostly on business for my cybersecurity job—I had never been to Stonehenge before.

For those of you who have read The Reluctant Coroner or The Incumbent Coroner, you know there are some details of police procedure in those books. I've never worked in law enforcement, so I turned to Jason Collins, a detective with the Sacramento Police Department, who is also one of the liaisons between the department and the FBI. He was a fantastic consultant for me, detailing who'd get involved in the unique kidnapping scenario in book two, as well as giving me some pointers on how sheriff's departments deal with evidence gathering and conflicts of interest.

Even though we live across the street from each other, our families hadn't hung out together in awhile, and our kids had spring break at the same time—and they were traveling to the UK too! So we all signed up for the same Stonehenge bus tour.

Stonehenge is one of the biggest mysteries of all time—the early theory that druids had constructed the site has effectively been debunked. And seeing the stones up close—something that can't be done (we were told) except through tours like the one we were on—is a pretty magical experience. As you stand in the circle, you can feel the reverence that these stones held for the people who built it.

Here's the photo of police detective and Fenway consultant Jason Collins (left) and me at Stonehenge. Stay tuned for more stories of my UK trip!

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Review: When the Party Died

When the Party Died

Brock & Poole Mystery Book 3 by A.G. Barnett • ★★★★

The first Brock & Poole mystery was excellent, but the second one was disappointing. Fortunately, the third installment of this series is solid, and frankly I'm relieved at the return to form.

When The Party Died gives us our first real glimpse at Brock's wife Laura, at her career and at other complications in their relationship (beyond the very singular focus of the couple's problem in first two books). The plot soon zooms delightfully between an art gallery and a country manor, with an enormous amount of potential clues—and, like the reader, the investigators have no idea what they mean.It's a great setup for the main plot, which kept me interested throughout, and satisfied with the reveals. It's one of the few mysteries I've read lately in which I had no idea who did it, but looking back, there were plenty of clues.The subplots were a bit less effective; Poole is now at a point where he's just an idiot for not being more forward with the intelligent young female constable who's so into him, she's being threatened with Perfect Girl Syndrome. (It's an interracial relationship, which no one seems aware of in the book, which struck me as more than a little odd. Certainly it's not that big of a deal, but when Poole meets Sanders' Indian mother, Barnett seems to go through contortions not to mention it.) The climactic scene reveals something quite delightful about her character. I hope Barnett continues to show us her multiple dimensions in future books.The continuing subplot of Poole's mother and father are getting diminishing returns for me as well, but there wasn't much of it in this installment.One nitpick: there were a lot of typos and grammatical errors in this...Read More

Paul featured at the Folsom Library Author Expo!

On April 27, I was one of 40 authors at the Folsom Library Author Expo. (Yes, it's that Folsom—the city in the Sacramento area that Johnny Cash made famous with Folsom Prison Blues. The library is even at the end of Johnny Cash Trail!)

Quite a few mystery writers were in attendance besides me, including Claire Booth, James L'Etoile, and Cindy Sample, and the Mystery Writers of America had a table there as well! I also stopped by to see New York Times bestselling author Jamie Thornton, and I bought all the books in her YA dystopian series, Doormaker (one of them wasn't even out yet!).

I donated all three Fenway Stevenson Mysteries to the library's collection, I had a great time talking with readers and other authors, and I signed quite a few books, too!

I hope to do more of these in-person book signing events, so keep your eyes peeled. I'll likely start off with other libraries in the Sacramento area, but I may expand to other regions in the future!

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Review: The Silent Madonna

The Silent Madonna by Michelle Damiani is a sequel to Santa Lucia, which I absolutely loved. So, I had high hopes for the second book in this series—and the book surpassed my expectations! 

I loved the magic and light themes in the first book, and The Silent Madonna continues those. It follows most of the characters from the first book, but introduces a couple of intriguing new characters, and wraps together all the crazy, disparate threads into an enormously satisfying whole.

After the disaster that the town experienced at the end of Santa Lucia, the townspeople begin to recover. And they gossip about the impending arrival of an American, the last heir to the castle on the hilltop that has cast its long shadow over the the town. The American begins to make drastic changes to the castle, but soon, the town begins to change him too. It's a believable transformation—made possible by the magic and light, but the American's growth both angers his deliciously narcissistic wife and confuses the local woman who captures his heart.As with the first novel, The Silent Madonna contains multiple interconnected character arcs, and Damiani deftly weaves every thread together in a colorful, buoyant tapestry. There's the pregnant estranged wife. There's a nasty ex-husband. There's a body buried in the backyard. There's even an homage-laden reshaping of Pride and Prejudice. Oh—and the bird attacks! They'd make Hitchcock proud.

I haven't read a book this delightful and satisfying in a long, long time. Highly recommended.

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Who Was George Nidever?

In the new Fenway Stevenson mystery, The Candidate Coroner, Fenway goes to a pre-election dinner for all the county's political candidates—the 47th Annual George Nidever Dinner.

Estancia is a fictional city (sort of a mash-up of the real cities of San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria) on the California coast, about 250 miles (400km) south of San Francisco, and about 180 miles (300 km) north of Los Angeles. Nidever University is a fictional private college in Estancia, named after a real California historical figure: George Nidever. I've lived in California all my life, and I had never heard of this guy. But as I started to fill out the novel, I learned more about him—and I thought he was the perfect person whom to name the private university after.

Nidever (pronounced NIGH-dev-urr) was an American who came to California in the 1830s, when it was still under control of the Mexican government. He was a fur trapper by trade, but he seems to have had a gift for self-promotion. He survived several battles with Native American tribes, fought in the Spanish-American War, and was so successful on his fur trapping boat expeditions that people called him "Captain."

His legend grew when, in 1853, he led the expedition to one of the Channel Islands off the Santa Barbara coast and retrieved "The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island." Her tribe, the Nicoleño, had been massacred by Russian seal hunters in 1811, and the few surviving members were transported to the mainland in 1835—but she didn't make it to the ship in time, and didn't get transported to the mainland until Nidever's expedition came to get her—after 18 years of living on her own. Her life was fictionalized in a popular book, The Island of the Blue Dolphins (which was made into a movie in the 1960s). Nidever's account says she was "rescued," but as she died of disease not even two months after being relocated to Santa Barbara, I don't think "rescued" is an...Read More

Review: Back to Reality

Back to Reality by Mark Stay & Mark Oliver • ★★★★

One of the first chapters of Back to Reality is a marvelously written scene where our heroine, a forty-two-year-old working mother named Jo, nursing a gin-powered buzz, gets up on stage at a karaoke bar and stuns the crowd with her command performance. It's an electric scene, satisfying, dizzyingly wonderful, encapsulating perfectly the adrenaline high of music performance—and the buzzkill of reality's aftermath. It's such a spectacular scene—it's impossible for the rest of the book to be as good as that early chapter.

Oh, but Stay and Oliver come pretty close. As Jo—and her alternate-universe self, Yohanna—become enmeshed in a time-space-yoga continuum fever dream (or is it a nightmare?), Stay and Oliver keep the accelerator all the way to the floor.

The writers give us a few pockets where we can breathe, but the stakes are high and the action is non-stop. The high-concept setup provides a lot of opportunities for absurdity; it's clear that Douglas Adams is a big influence to the authors. But while Adams often veered off in absurdity to its own end, Stay and Oliver keep the emotions of Jo/Yohanna front and center, as well as their goal of fixing everything that went wrong. And the mother/daughter dynamics may give readers a bit of a tearjerking moment or two.

The morass of characters can be a bit difficult to keep track of. Jo's husband, for example, disappears for the entire story except the bookends, and it's hard to believe Jo's actions toward him near the end of the book. In addition, for those of you who found the book as I did by listening to the writers' The Bestseller Experiment podcast, there are several meta moments which took me out of the story. But overall, the book hits the right notes—and it's an enjoyable journey.

It's a satisfying read, and it's a hard book to put down.

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Review: Rubbernecker

Wow. What a complex, crazy, fascinating, jaw-dropping novel.

Rubbernecker is not only a well-written book, but it's a fantastic achievement. The narrative contortions that Bauer goes through with this book are labyrinthine. Quite often, writers' tricks like this just come off as "show-offy" at best, and convoluted and painful at worst. But not with Rubbernecker; the unusual structure but not only works, but serves to build the suspense as the story unfolds.

First, the unusual narrative: Rubbernecker is told from three points of view, and in different time frames, and with three different unreliable narrators. Then everything crashes together about two-thirds of the way through, then races toward the climax—I couldn't turn pages fast enough. Quite often, I detest these types of seemingly detached stories coming together, because they're usually done poorly (just find my online reviews for the 1994 Robert Altman movie Short Cuts or the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson movie Magnolia). But Bauer weaves the threads masterfully.

The main character is Patrick, an eighteen-year-old on the autism spectrum who's fascinated by death. He takes an anatomy class at university, his first time away from his mother, who's too broken to care for him properly.

It's also partially narrated by a man in a coma, and the story additionally follows a mean-spirited but beautiful nurse who works in the facility where the man lies. Revealing any more about the plot would venture into spoiler territory.

I'm not familiar enough with the ins and outs of autism to know how good of a job Bauer did with Patrick's believability, but it did fit in with the little I do know. I believed everything about Patrick—his actions, his interactions with other people, and his motivations.

Ultimately, this is a murder mystery, and Patrick makes a compelling amateur...Read More

Review: A Fatal Flaw

Most people have found the Ryder & Loveday mysteries by way of Faith Martin's DI Hillary Greene series, and I was no exception. Faith Martin wrote seventeen mostly-excellent police procedural murder mysteries featuring an outstanding heroine in DI Greene, and I very much looked forward to this new mystery series.

This series has a bit of a different flavor. Like the DI Greene series, they're set around Oxford, but unlike that series, Ryder & Loveday are set in 1960. Both of our heroes—sexagenarian coroner Dr. Clement Ryder, hiding a medical secret, and probationary WPC Trudy Loveday, whose all-male station house co-workers continually underestimate her—are excellent, well-rounded characters; easy to root for without making either of them goody-two-shoes. The differences in the culture are pronounced as well, especially in terms of gender dynamics, but in the first two books of the series, it never overpowered the story.

In A Fatal Flaw, the third book of this series, gender dynamics are at the foré, as the murders take place around a beauty pageant. The book gets awfully close to Making A Point in a few spots, but while it gets close to the line, it never crosses it.

The murder investigation itself, of one of the pageant contestants, is a masterful piece of misdirection that never quite feels like misdirection. The red herrings are well done, never leaving me feeling like I just wasted my time, and when the reveal comes, it's much different than in the first two books—and while I had suspected who the murderer was, the way the plot unfolds near the end is satisfying. Martin is a talented writer indeed: even though what I suspected would happen actually came to pass, I was still on the edge of my seat.

However, I have to dock the book a star because of narrative tricks in the constantly shifting point of view. We see the perspective of the unnamed (and even ungendered) murderer, going...Read More