David Schwinghammer's Blog, page 2

IF IT BLEEDS

Stephen King's story collection includes four novella-length stories, the best of which is “The Life of Chuck”.
I especially liked that one because it reminded me of John Donne's “No Man is an Island” and his proviso “Each man's death diminishes me.” Chuck is an accountant who appears to be retiring after thirty-nine years juggling numbers. For some reason there are billboards extolling Chuck's achievement. In reality Chuck is dying at age 39, and it appears the rest of humanity is going with him because each man contains multitudes.
Holly Gibney of the Mr. Mercedes mystery trilogy returns in the title selection “If It Bleeds”. Holly is now the head of the detective agency, Finders Keepers. Some sneaky devil has left a bomb at the local Middle School, ostensibly meant for a class that had a long-distance relationship with a school in Scotland. Holly sees something odd about the reporter covering the bombing. This one is more of your typical King story. Think about the clown character sticking his head out of the manhole cover in IT.
The first story “Mr. Harrigan's Phone” is about a nine-year-old boy, Craig, who takes a job reading, watering plants and doing minor dusting for a retired billionaire, Mr. Harrigan. His father's reaction is that Harrigan is cheap for only paying Craig five bucks an hour. He is only minimally bothered by the possibility Harrigan may be a perv. He's not. Craig is an inveterate reader having assumed the job of reading the LESSONS at his local Methodist church. Mr. Harrigan is in the congregation and is impressed. They read some very heavy fare including Conrad's THE HEART OF DARKNESS. But Harrigan sends Craig birthday, Valentine's and Christmas cards that include lottery tickets, one of which returns five thousand dollars for Craig. Eventually King reverts to form when Harrigan dies and Craig calls him on his iPhone, which Harrigan had reluctantly accepted as a gift from Craig. He answers.

The fourth one is about a writer who experiences writer's block every time he tries to write a novel. I was wondering when the rat would show up. Let's just says the rat takes a Faustian role as it negotiates a deal with Drew Larson to finish a novel he had started at his cabin and was cruising along until he caught the Flu and a killer storm hit upper Maine, putting the brakes on Drew's efforts. Drew thinks he's dreaming the whole thing, but is haunted when everything happens according to the agreement.
I have read some excellent King short story collections, including THE SKELETON CREW; I don't think there was a bad story in that compilation. He's actually a better short story writer than he is a novelist IMHO. This one seems a bit redundant, although I would like to see more mysteries from King. Holly Gibney is a very likable character.

Stuck in the Mud

Lately, not wearing a mask during the Covid-19 pandemic has become some kind of macho thing with our Fearless Leader and his base. Apparently they don't know the masks protect others from the possibility you might have the virus. So . . . what's wrong with these people, besides their inability to admit they made a mistake when they voted for the Twitter maniac? Basically, it's a fear of change. Some conservative said, “If God had meant us to fly, he would've given us wings”. When the automobile was invented, they hated it because it scared the horses. Really far right conservatives refuse to admit man landed on the moon, and of course there are the Adam Jones types who deny the New Town massacre of 26 little kids and their teachers ever happened either.
Besides a fear of change, there are several words conservatives are unfamiliar with or that they associate with “Snowflakes”. The first of these would be “empathy”. Those Central Americans on the Mexican border are all criminals and rapists. Not by a long shot. Their coffee crops and the influx of Los Angeles gangs have made their homes uninhabitable. Then there's the Statue of Liberty. How do you read Emma Lazarus's poem at the base and still believe the above? Worse yet, some of them are Christians. Their own Bible says, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of our brothers, so you do unto me”. “It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.” Yet they appear to worship the rich and insist that the rich provide jobs when statistics say small business employs most of laborers.
The second important word they don't seem to know is “Introspection”. Catholics would call it examination of conscience.
A progressive might look at the refugees on the border and say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” or “I'm willing to let those people in because somebody has to pick the strawberries, pick up the garbage and work at meat packing plants. I'm certainly not going to do it.” How about a harder dilemma? Do we really need all that carbon based fuel? It's only going to last for another hundred years anyway. How about we put a tax on it or pass Cap and Trade? No dice with a conservative law maker. They only see the heavy bucks coming from the Charles Kochs of this world. A progressive might say, “What about your grandchildren? Don't you care what their world will be like? Have you seen Australia?” The Aussies have a leader just like the Twitter Fiend. That's too far from the end of their noses for them to worry about it. They might say, “We'll invent cold fusion by then.” But it may be too late if the scales have been tipped.
The last word is “nuance”. Everything is black and white with conservatives. Let's look at abortion. Nobody really likes abortion, but what would you do if you were raped or were forced to have sex by your father and got pregnant? What if the fetus doesn't have a brain? Conservatives say it's still a human being. If you don't have the baby, it's murder. But that's where they stop. If the unwed mother has the baby and can't afford to raise it, tough bounce, work for Mac and Don's. Evolution is another example. We're supposed to believe we were meant to know, honor and serve an invisible man. That's a slave's existence. Charles Darwin came up with an alternative to Adam and Eve. A single celled animal divided itself and became two. But mitosis was no fun and eventually we got sex after much trial and error and survival of the fittest. How about reverse engineering self awareness? Well, we were hunter gatherers in Africa, and in order to bring down a mighty animal like an elephant or a wooly mammoth, we had to communicate and share. So . . . if you can talk to your fellow hunter, you can talk to yourself and Bingo! We've got self awareness. Let's look at women taking a larger role in society, shall we? A really block-headed type would say women should stay home and take care of the family. But even the lowest of the low would have to admit women have greater dexterity. And where there's dexterity, we get increased intelligence. You could say they were always smarter than men. I mean, tool making lead to a giant leap for mankind, right? Those guys were wasting women by turning them into gatherers. What happened? They gained greater verbal proficiency by talking to each other as they picked berries and nuts. And did you know that the first God was the Great Mother? Archeologists have found these little pregnant figurines that Stone Agers appeared to worship. It makes sense, actually. Women give birth.
Yes, the root word in progressive is progress. When you look at matters in black and white, you're limiting yourself. We will overcome Covid-19 when scientists develop a vaccine, not when some bozo recreates the great economy he got from Obama in the first place. Open your eyes. Some anti-vaxers are saying they won't take the vaccine if we do find a cure. Nothing but bone from the neck up.

Masked Prey

Sandford's new Prey book is especially appropriate these days with Covid19 demonstrations supposedly organized by gun rights groups and sometimes violent and destructive demonstrations in response to the George Floyd police abuse incident.

Lucas is called in by the FBI to ferret out those behind a web site called 1919, which means SS. There are pictures of the children of congressmen and women alongside extreme anti-government articles. The FBI thinks it's a call to murder congressional children to barter votes on radical issues. Oh yes, there's a social media loving daughter of a democratic senator involved. She discovered he site while looking to see how her brand is circulating on the Web.

Eventually Lucas calls in Bob and Rae, his new partners and fellow US marshals. Lucas talks to an “expert” on potentially violent militia and right wing groups who may be involved. They are surprisingly helpful. You'd think they were essentially good hearted underneath the dangerous exteriors.

Lucas is working with FBI Special Agent Chase. She's meant to keep a damper on the sometimes off-the-record Davenport. Like that's going to work.

We also get a look at the man who plots and carries out a murder influenced by 1919. He thought it was real. At first he sent out letters to three others who might want to do his dirty work for him. It's surprising how normal this guy is in his every day profession. He's a surveyor. Anyway the letters help find him. And that loose cannon Lucas isn't about to let him get away with murdering kids.

The ending kind of fizzles. The reader is expecting some kind of catastrophic denouement, which doesn't happen. After all, in the last Prey novel, Lucas was shot.

Redhead by the Side of the Road

Micah Mortimer will remind you of Tony Shaloub's Monk character. He's hyper organized with a day each week set aside to vacuum the rugs, do the laundry etc. He doesn't exactly have OCD, but he's close. He has his own business as an IT specialist. There's a scene where a woman calls him about her grandmother's computers; she can't find the passwords. Micah assures her he can't help her with that, but he goes anyway. Sure enough, he finds them, and she's really grateful.

His four sisters are just the opposite of Micah, messy as all get out with no systems at all. They say Micah takes after their grandfather, a house painter, who had all of his paint cans labeled.

Micah doesn't have a lot of luck with women, but he seems to have found his ideal mate, Cass, a fourth grade teacher, who's close to his age, 40, with a good heart. There's an episode where two boys tell her they don't want to go to the senior citizen's home because they smell bad and try to kiss them. She gives the fourth grade a touching lecture about how these people have lost all the people they loved, including most of their friends. Then she asks who still wants to stay in school on that day. Nobody raises his/her hand. She's a keeper.

Cass is worried about losing her apartment as she's sub-leasing it from this woman who looks like she might get married. Micah is not sympathetic. He even cracks a joke about the possibility of her living in her car. She is not amused.

Then a boy named Brink shows up, claiming Micah is his father. Micah assures him that's impossible as he and his mother never had sex, one of the reasons they split up. Brink has just started college and already he's taking a break. Micah insists he call his mother, and the boy splits.

This is a very short book. The ending snuck up on me. I turned a page, and it was over. The main thread is about Brink's traumatic situation, but the reader wants to know if Micah will ever find the right woman and how he could mistake a fire hydrant for a redhead at the side of the road.

The Mirror and the Light

It took me a month and eleven days to read THE MIRROR and THE LIGHT. I was reading twice a day for around two hours, averaging ten pages a shot. This is just a hard book to read.

If you're going to tackle this seven hundred-fifty page book, you need to bookmark your cast of characters and remember Cromwell is in every scene. Sometimes he's in his own head; you will confuse what he says with whomever he's talking to.

I knew this book was about the downfall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Master Secretary. Cromwell was always reluctant to blame Henry for anything. He actually believed that Devine Right bull. Cromwell had helped him get rid of Anne Boleyn. It's hard to tell if the men who died with her were actually guilty or if Cromwell even cared. He does regret the death of Henry's jester or fool. It's hard to believe Anne would actually consort with a jester. Henry just wanted to prove she was cheating on him so he could marry Jane Seymour.
BTW, her brother George was also accused of having congress with his own sister and died with her.

You will question the maturity of a leader who is so offended by a look from his new queen (a political arrangement) that he can't consummate the marriage. I also expected that turn of events, but I had always thought he rejected Anne of Cleves because she was homely. Not according to Hillary Mantel. The look she gave him was shock that Henry was old and overweight, and he took her by surprise.

We get to see the tower of London quit a bit. Thomas Wyatt, who testified against the other Boleyn lovers, was in the tower early in the book. Cromwell gets him out, and he becomes an effective ambassador. We see Anne decapitated. Later we learn that was a compassionate way to execute someone.

At the end Cromwell thinks he might be the exception to the rule when he is made an Earl and given the title of Lord Chamberlain. He should've known better than to tell Henry it was a bad idea to reject another queen.

I did get an answer to the question I'd had after reading the first two books in the trilogy. Is Thomas Cromwell related to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England after the Civil War of the early 17th Century? Thomas has a nephew, Richard, who was Oliver's grandfather.

Things in Jars

The setting of THINGS IN JARS is Victorian England circa 1840 and 1860. If you've ever read about the Jack the Ripper murders you'll get the same vibe. There was a huge distinction between the rich and the poor. The poor would do virtually anything to get by.

Bridie Devine was an Irish orphan employed by a gaffer, Gan Murphy, who was a grave robber by trade. He sold Bridie to Dr. John Eames for a guinea, and she became the doctor's assistant until his wife objected, and she was demoted. Dr. Eames was an amiable sort, but his wife and son were villainous in the extreme. And Gideon was violent. Dr. Eames was into “curiosities,” one of which was the Mermaid in a jar, a dead baby with a fish-like tail. When there was a conflict with Gideon, she was sent to work for another doctor, Dr. Prudhoe, a chemist, toxicologist, and expert in medical jurisprudence who would become a reliable mentor into her adulthood.

Then there's a jump cut to the 1860s's and Bridie is a grown woman, a detective with a ghost as a sidekick and a seven foot tail maid, protector, Cora, whom she saved from an exploitive circus. The ghost is an ex-prize fighter named Ruby, who claims to have known her but won't tell her where he knew her from.

All of these fantasy elements create a need for suspension of disbelief that's hard to overcome. In other respects this is a kind of mystery. Bridie is hired by her former childhood friend inspector Rose to find out who kidnapped Christabel, Edmund Athelstan Berwick's strange child, another one of the “curiosities” rampant in this novel. Berwick had kept the child hidden and for a good reason. She resembled the baby with the tail in the jar and she had sharp little teeth that she didn't hesitate to use. Christabel had an impact on nature. The halls were wet and snails and newts as well as seagulls clamored to be around the girl. And she impacted the weather. London was about to be submerged by the rains.

The pace slows as Bridget tries to find the girl. And she's not as tough as she seems. At one point she has her incisors knocked out.
I never got lost in the nineteenth century, and I never believed that mermaids were possible. In other words I didn't experience suspension of disbelief. I know that the author's world existed, and that more people then did believe in ghosts, but children with fish tails who can only live in water? Nope.

The Night Watchman

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN is based on a true incident involving Patrick Gourneau, Louise Erdrich's grandfather. The fictionalized version of him, Thomas Wazhashk, is fighting government termination of the Chippewa Turtle Mountain reservation. Wazhashk is the Chairman of a committee under the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

He is also a night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant just outside the reservation. He has many mystical experiences while on the job. In one incident, spirits let him back in the plant after he locks himself out. His niece Pixie also works there. Much of the book is about Pixie's confusion in respect to sex. She's drawn to a boxer named Wood Mountain.

Pixie is also looking for her sister, Vera, who has disappeared. For the first time in her life she visits the big city of Minneapolis, where she portrays a sexy Babe the Blue Ox at a notorious. During her search for her sister she does manage to rescue Vera's baby. Vera is symbolic of sexual exploitation of Native American women.

Erdrich skips around quite a bit. We even meet two Mormons who are trying to convert the Chippewa. This is somewhat ironic since Joseph Smith, their prophet, taught that Native Americans were really the lost tribes of Israel. Another Mormon, Senator Arthur V. Watkins, sponsored the bill to dissolve the Turtle Mountain tribe to assimilate them into American life. He's a pompous ass.

The Chippewa arrange a meeting with a senate committee considering dissolution of their tribe. Thomas has been working on his presentation for months, so much so that he makes himself sick. Perhaps the best thing he does is to thank Arthur V. Watkins after their presentation is over. Watkins is surprised. No one has ever thanked him before. You will route for Thomas throughout the story. He is a lovable character.

Wood Mountain comes to love, Archille, the name he and Pixie gave the baby. The baby will become important in the resolution of Pixie's feelings toward Wood Mountain.

Another strange little character is Millie Cloud who did her Master's thesis on the Turtle Mountain tribe. She will present to the Congressional committee also. She grew up a city Indian, but is very much drawn to Pixie and her family.

This novel is not Erdrich's best work, but it addresses an important moment in American History: how we consistently broke the treaties we made with Native Americans. In Erdrich's plot, Arthur W.Watkins is trying to do it again.

Long Bright River

The title LONG, BRIGHT RIVER is somewhat perplexing. For one thing it's a dark novel about drug abuse and murder, and the word “bright” doesn't seem to fit. The reader doesn't find out why author Liz Moore used that title until late in the book, and I almost mistook that chapter for the acknowledgments.

The book is about two sisters, one a drug addict and a prostitute, the other a patrol officer for the Philadelphia Police Department.

Then Kacey, the younger of the two, the drug addicted one, goes missing, and Mickey is obsessed with finding her, so obsessed that she neglects her job. Somebody is also murdering prostitutes and Mickey gets a tip as to who it is.

Liz Moore offers a couple of red herrings to start. At first she targets a drug pusher named “Doc”. There's a minor theme involved here. Even the worst of us has some redeeming qualities. She misjudges Doc, and she misinterprets what's going on with her former husband, Simon, who groomed her as a counselor at the Police Athletic League. She thinks he might be a suspect, and when she follows him to the neighborhood where the prostitutes hang out, she's certain he's the killer. Mickey has a platonic relationship with her former partner, Truman, which could lead to something more serious but never does. He's on leave due to what she thinks is a job related injury. But Kacey's fellow prostitutes suggest he might be the real killer. That ruins that relationship. If you're the type who's obsessive about finding the one who done it, concentrate on the first couple of chapters. That's what most mystery authors do. They plant a hint at the beginning.

Another part of the suspense is whether or not Kacey will turn up dead like the other prostitutes. There are a few examples of foreshadowing. At one point Liz Moore actually tells the reader, so you'll know before the resolution. Another one is when Mickey finds several letters and child support checks from her father, who left the family when their mother, also addicted, died, at her grouchy grandmother's house. Her name is Gee, and she's a real winner.

There's also a surprise concerning Mickey's son, Thomas, whom we assumed was Mickey and Simon's son. Not the case. Guess who the real mother is.

Dennis Lehane, author of MYSTIC RIVER, really liked this book. Personally, I thought Mickey spent too much time running around in circles. The story wasn't moving.

How Quickly She Disappears

Elizabeth's sister disappears when she was a young girl. They were twins, and Elizabeth senses that Jacqueline is still alive.

She has an opportunity to find her when an airline pilot named Alfred Seidel enters her life. He's a substitute mail pilot serving the interior of Alaska, where Elizabeth and her husband John have moved for his job as a teacher. Elizabeth stays home to homeschool her daughter Marjorie who reminds her a lot of Jacqueline.

Then the story gets a bit hard to believe. Seidel says he has problems with his plane and asks if he can stay at Elizabeth's house. There is no hotel or motel in the small of Tanacross, a mostly Athabaskan town and she and John have an extra bedroom. There's nothing wrong with Seidel's plane, but when Mack, a friend of Elizabeth and John's, sniffs out the real reason he's there, Seidel murders him and is imprisoned.

He wants to see Elizabeth and hints that he knows where Jacqueline is. She's still alive. You won't believe what he has to say, but he keeps stringing her along until of all things, she agrees to let him talk to Marjorie, who's been acting up because her mother is spending too much time obsessing over Jacqueline, alone for twenty minutes. You know this can't be good. He's a murderer after all.

The book did have me on pins and needles toward the end when Elizabeth gets closer to finding out about Jacqueline, so close that she carries a gun.

If you can get past the coincidences (Alfred lived in Elizabeth's town in Pennsylvania, and she had no idea who he was despite the fact that he's been stalking her for years), you'll enjoy this book, but if you're constantly saying, “Wait a minute!” you won't. I ignored the little voice inside my head that was muttering those words.

Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia Owens was a renowned nature writer, winning several awards, before she wrote WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING. In other words she was writing about what she knows, and she hit the jackpot on her first outing. It has been at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for at least six months.

Kya Clark is the “Marsh Girl”. She has several brothers and sisters, but they all leave her because of their drunken abusive father. When her mother leaves also, she is all alone with him. Surprisingly she begins to get along with him until her mother writers a letter; she can't read, and she makes the mistake of giving it to him. He tears it up and reverts to his old behavior. Eventually he disappears as well and she's left alone with her friends the gulls and the owner of a small gas station, a black man named Jumper who trades gas for her boat her father left behind in return for mussels she collects. She also meets a boy in the estuary. She's just a little girl, around seven, and he helps her find her way back to her shack. He leaves rare feathers for her on a stump in the clearing, and they become more than friends. But he leaves her, too, going to college where he doesn't see her fitting in, although she's very smart. He teaches her how to read and do arithmetic.

Then she meets the wrong guy, Chase Andrews, who's a lady killer. He promises marriage, but he eventually marries another girl. He still won't leave her alone. When he turns up dead, falling from a fire tower, Kya is the principal suspect. Two witnesses see her racing toward the fire tower. But there is no evidence. All the foot prints and finger prints have been wiped away. He could've accidentally fallen from the tower. She also has an alibi.

You will cheer for Kya. Nobody's mother leaves a seven-year old girl with an abusive drunk. Her boyfriend Tate is a decent guy, who realizes he made a mistake, but she has trouble forgiving him. Later on she says, “We don't need to get married; we're like geese.”

The ending is a shock to the system. Never in a thousand years would I have believed who really killed Chase.