David Schwinghammer's Blog, page 4

Land of Wolves

Walt is back from Mexico where he took quite a beating and doesn't feel all that well. But he doesn't let that stop him from doing his job when a Chilean sheep herder either commits suicide or is murdered.

It becomes a murder case when donkey hair is discovered on the inside of Miguel Hernandez's pant legs. When Walt had arrived at the murder scene the donkey was tied up.

The sheep herders work for Abe Extepare who owns the sheep ranch. The old Basque supposedly mistreats his sheep herders. Walt also has a deputy who speaks the language and has been approached to run for sheriff if Walt decides to retire. Then there's Vic, his female deputy who's always had a thing for Walt; he keeps warding her off, but she's quite a handful as is his office manager, Ruby, without whom he'd be lost. She's trying to teach him how to use a computer.

As Walt investigates he keeps seeing this wolf nobody else seems to see. He has a gray snout and seems to have been kicked out of a Yellowstone pack by a younger male. Walt's native American friend, Henry, thinks the wolf might be a spirit guide. Another woman Keasik Cheechoo belongs to some kind of animal protection organization, wolves in this case. The townspeople want the wolf killed and are worried about an influx. Some dead sheep have been found. Cheechoo also seems to have eyes for Walt.

A man named Donald Lott is a principal suspect; his son Liam is Abe's grandson and Abe doesn't want Lott anywhere near him. Hernandez was quite a loner, but there is a rumor that he was in a fight at a bar in town.

The ending is predictable except for the part where Walt tries to save the life of Hernandez's murderer.

The Bitterest Pill

The title has to do with an opioid epidemic at the Paradise High School. A popular cheerleader has turned up dead from an overdose. Jesse quickly identifies a student suspect as her source, but he turns up missing and is eventually found dead, having been tortured before being shot.

Reed Farrel Coleman, Parker's most successful replacement, gives the drug chain their own point of view. They're mostly Eastern Europeans with a Moslem thrown in for good measure. There's also a female teacher involved.

I'm actually more familiar with the TV movies than I am with the Jesse Stone series written by Parker. There are some disappointments. There's no lovable dog in this one, Reggie. And Jesse's relationship with his favorite deputy Suit is given short shrift. Jesse no longer drinks and attends AA meetings with a sponsor, but the baseball connection is still there. Jesse was once a minor league prospect; he's got a new glove but it's not as good as his old one.

Jesse also has a son he didn't know about. The son finds Jesse, and at first, he's still blaming Jesse for not knowing his birth father, but their relationship improves and almost gets the boy killed.

Jesse quickly becomes involved in an affair with one of the teachers. We know one of the teachers is seducing her student drug pushers from her anonymous point of view, and we hope it's not her; we don't find out for sure until the last part of the book.

The last part of the book reads faster because we're closing in on the teacher and we want her Jesse's girlfriend to be a red herring. A lot of people wind up dead, but we never find out who the higher ups are, so we're right where we were at the beginning with no assurance that Jesse has solved the problem. There might be another BITTEREST PILL.

Knife

One of the most entertaining aspects of being a murder mystery fanatic is figuring out who did it. In Jo Nesbo's most recent Harry Hole epiisode, you will have a hard time keeping the characters straight, much less target the killer.

First off, there's a big shocker. Someone has killed Rakel, Harry's wife and the love of his life. The sourpuss was actually happy for a time, until she threw him out; the spouse is always a suspect in a murder case, so Harry doesn't even get to investigate, officially, that is. Harry is absolutely certain Svein Finne, rapist and serial killer, who somehow got out of jail, is the culprit. This guy is really crazy; he doesn't get a big charge out of killing people; he just wants to impregnate every young girl he can get his hands on; he will only murder them if they abort the baby or get rid of it in some other way. That's why he has a motive for Rakel's murder. Harry killed his serial killer son, and he wants revenge.

Nesbo knows we inveterate murder mystery readers are looking for a red herring; it's pretty clear that Finne is just a thread in the plot that needs to be dealt with. Nesbo throws in a few more; for a time Harry thinks Roar Boar, a former special forces officer who worked with Rakel in human resources may have done it (watch out for some foreshadowing here; this guy is a sniper). Then there are the women Harry has bedded over the years; there are three main ones who may have been jealous of Rakel. One of them is married to Harry's best friend; another was a young homicide cop when Harry bedded her. I was sure the murderer was a woman; it was getting toward the end of the book and Nesbo was featuring these women quite a bit.

Another shocker. When Harry finds out who killed Rakel he doesn't seem all that upset. That's because Harry has empathy and blames himself. For a while Harry is even suicidal; he thinks he might have killed Rakel in a drunken stupor, and there's some evidence that he did.

The climax is not when Harry finds out who killed Rakel. It's when Svein Finne finds out his lawyer has a woman on the side and blackmails the lawyer into giving her to him. It's pretty slick how Harry and the lawyer deal with a psychopathic killer. It's not clear if it was Harry's idea or the lawyer's.
Joe Nesbo gives Stieg Larsson a run for his money; I've read about half dozen Harry Hole (pronounced Hole') and they always give me a run for my money when it comes to guessing who done it.

Star Spangled Scandal

With the invention of the telegraph, Congressman Daniel Sickles's murder of his wife's lover, Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, became the first trial of the century, only we're talking about the 19th century.

The murder happened in 1859, just prior to the Civil War. A dead giveaway as to the result of the trial is that Major General Daniel Sickles fought at Gettysburg and is more famous today for what he did there than the murder and trial.

Barton Key seemed to be asking for it. He rented a house near where Sickles lived with his beautiful wife Teresa; it was almost across the street from
where the Sickles lived. This is where he carried on his affair with Mrs. Sickles. He would signal her by waving a handkerchief and she would signal back if she was there. Somehow Sickles never found out until he received a letter from an anonymous source. Almost simultaneously Key received one telling him Sickles knew about the affair. Sickles saw him passing his house and possibly signaling on the day he killed him.

A similarity with the trial of the 20th century, the OJ trial, was Sickles' dream defense. One of the lawyers on Sickles's team was Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War under Lincoln and several other famous lawyers of the day. They decided to claim Sickles was temporarily insane, that Keys had provoked him. They also used the Unwritten Law, that a man had the right to protect his marriage bed, which Sickles claimed when he was apprehended.

The trial went on for twenty days. Most of the witnesses claimed they'd seen Key wave the hanky. After a while it gets downright boring; they all seem to say the same thing. The judge didn't like it one bit. He didn't like the idea of adultery being put forward as a defense. The result was that every man and some woman caught up in the same situation claimed the Unwritten Law defense and they usually won, right up to the 1950's when women began to claim equal rights and weren't put on a pedestal.

The author seems to be a Sickles defender. The worst thing Sickles ever did, beyond the murder of Barton Key, was at Gettysburg, ordering an attack on Longstreet who was trying to flank the Union troops on Cemetery Hill, the high ground, disobeying General Meade's direct orders to hold his ground. According to the author, Sickles was driving Longstreet back when he was hit by a rolling cannon ball, ultimately losing a leg. I've read just about every book on Gettysburg that I could find and most historians side with General Meade. Luckily, for the Union forces, General Hancock saw the hole in the line and called up the First Minnesota who had to hold the line until more troops could be called up. They were cut to ribbons. Every man was either killed or wounded. DeRose claims Sickles was only one of two “political” generals who was a corps commander. That's the point. He never should've held that command in the first place.

Please excuse the diversion; what the trial ultimately did was create a market for trashy stories about the fallibility of the human character that carries to this day. Some people actually believe what they read in the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

A Gentleman in Moscow

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW starts in 1922. Count Alexander Rostov has returned to Russia just as the Civil War has ended. He is immediately confronted with a Bolshevik court who decides he isn't sufficiently repentant about his aristocratic background ; they condemn him to house arrest in an attic at The Metropol hotel where he has been living in a ritzy apartment.

Rather than try to sneak out of the country, the Count becomes a head waiter at a fancy restaurant in the hotel where he becomes a member of the triumvirate, the maitre d', the chef and the head waiter. He's reading the paper one morning when he's confronted by a whirlwind of a nine-year old, Nina Kulikova. She becomes his bosom buddy. Nina is a spy; she knows the hotel like the back of her hand; she teaches the Count about all the hidden nooks and crannies; they even spy on a meeting of a Bolshevik planning session.

Years pass and Nina becomes a member of the Komsomol, a Communist youth group. She eventually marries one of them, but he's sent to a gulag and she goes to join him, leaving her daughter Sofia with the Count, the only person she trust.s Sofia is a prodigy on the piano; she also thinks the Count is her father, and he calls her daughter.

Something the reader should know is that Russian aristocrats were known as the “former people” under the Bolsheviks. The worst waiter the Count has ever employed is now his boss, and the guy gets even every chance he gets. When that begins to involve Sofia, the Count first thinks about getting her out of Russia.

You'll be wondering what happened to Nina. She was supposed to pick Sofia up in a few months, but she never showed up. Sofia becomes a virtuoso on the piano; she has a concert in Paris at the age of nineteen. Still no Nina. There's a bit of foreshadowing that implies the Count never sees Nina again, but that's not necessarily so; we're thinking the Count will go to Paris to see his “daughter” perform, but that's not where he goes. That's the only complaint I have about the book. He's such a great guy; you want to see him happy and out of Bolshevik Russia with his “daughter” but because of the ambiguous ending, we're not sure what happened.

Furious Hours

Before TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was published, Nelle Harper Lee, helped Truman Capote research his true crime book, IN COLD BLOOD. Author Casey Cep outlines Lee's contributions. For one thing, the people in the town where the Clutter family were murdered, didn't like Truman, but they would talk to the likable Nelle.

The question has always been why Harper Lee never wrote a follow-up to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. One reason was that it zoomed to the top of the best seller list, and reporters and fans wouldn't leave her alone. But after her work researching Capote's book, she realized she was good at compiling the material and interviews necessary to write true crime, and she had a handy case to work on. Serial murderer Reverend Willie Maxwell lived close to her home town of Monroeville. Life insurance was cheap in those days and Maxwell insured just about all of his relatives. His first two wives were found dead in their cars parked on lonely country roads.

Casey Cep divides her book into four parts. First, we learn about Maxwell and his motivation. Then we get a look at Tom Radney, his lawyer, democratic super lawyer who based his style on Clarence Darrow, homespun lawyer whose clients were never guilty. Unbelievably, Radney got Maxwell off. The people of Alexandria City and nearby small towns were scared to death of Maxwell. They were worried he might have a life insurance policy on them. Often there wasn't any evidence of what killed the victim. That's when superstition took over. He was thought by some to be a voodoo priest. This really bugged Nelle Lee. She knew that Truman Capote fictionalized part of his book. She wasn't about to do that, so superstition was a roadblock.

Then Shirley Anne Ellington is found murdered. She was living with Maxwell and his third wife. During her funeral Maxwell was shot three times in the forehead by a relative, Robert Burns. Ironically Radney agreed to defend him. That's when we get to the third section. We get a brief bio of Nelle and how she finally got published. And finally we see Harper Lee in the courtroom during the Burns case,, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. She had a devil of a time researching the case, but eventually attorney Tom Radney gave her a briefcase full of evidence and files, and she paid clerk Mary Anne Karr a thousand dollars for a transcript of the case.

She worked on the book for years. Her older sister said she read it, and it was better than IN COLD BLOOD. Then Truman Capote died of an apparent drug overdose and she apparently lost interest. Truman had always been jealous of Harper Lee's dumbfounding success, and she played no small part in the success of IN COLD BLOOD. They were childhood friends. She didn't deny Dill, Scout's next door neighbor, was based on Truman. So there was some competition, and now the competition was dead. Another factor was that everybody who helped her with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was dead: her original agent and her editor at Lippencourt who convinced her to feature the kids, even her agent's wife who had become a bosom friend.

Whatever the case, the book was never published and her literary assets are under seal. Her new agent claims Lee was very happy GO SET A WATCHMAN was published, apparently because she was trying to show that not every Southerner who opposed integration supported the KKK.

I don't believe any of the excuses for not publishing THE REVEREND, Lee's working title for the Maxwell book. I don't think she thought it was good enough. There just wasn't an Atticus she could use as a protagonist to be the voice of the book. The closest she got was Radney, but he defended an obvious serial killer.

Vacuum in the Dark

Jen Beagin has all the potential in the world as a humorist, just a hair beneath the stellar career of Dorothy Parker.

Who else would feature a cleaning lady as her protagonist, give her a biting wit, and include an invisible friend named Terry who also functions as a therapist of sorts? Mona also likes to rename people, including her mother, whom she calls Clare. Clare isn't even her real first name. She also acquires a Ford Fairlane, which she calls Maxine.

Mona has a problem with men. For instance, she goes to work for a blind woman who's married to a jerk who insists Rose, the blind woman, and he have an open relationship, which makes it okay for him to hustle Mona. Mona calls this guy, Dark; she has an attractive for bad boys. Eventually she escapes this relationship and begins another with Kurt who inherits a hotel. It doesn't take long before Mona is cleaning all the rooms. But Kurt is by far the best man she's been involved with. She's willing to put out on their first date, but he wants to get to know her first. She thinks he must have a small penis.

That's the problem I had with the book. It reminded me of FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY; there's enough material and oddities involved in being a cleaning lady to fill a very funny book without the obsession with sex. She even has unhealthy thoughts about her mother.

Then there's the lack of enough backstory. We know Mona had a terrible childhood and young adulthood. She spent eight years in an institution. We get a hint that was about cutting herself. She still has moments when she wants to cut herself. She was also given up for adoption, but even that's not really formal. We know Clare liked to drink and her grandfather was a perv, so that might have had something to do with it.

The ending is also confusing. We know the Kurt relationship is too good to be true due to her penchant for the bad boys, but we're not sure if she suddenly and miraculously sees the error of her ways.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

David Treuer's book emphasizes what happened after the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Prior to Lyndon Johnson' “War on Poverty” government legislation concerning Native Americans seemed to involve attempts at assimilation of the Indians. This included boarding schools and allotment. At one point Treuer, half Jewish, half Objibwa, focuses on the cemeteries surrounding the various boarding schools, the most famous of which was Carlisle. Allotment was an attempt to divide the reservations into private homes. The amount of acreage depended on the amount of Indian blood each person had. The remaining land was sold to non-Indians, hence the number of white people who live on Indian reservations today. The government also passed the Dawes Act in 1887 which gave each head of a family a quarter section; each single person over eighteen one-eighth of a section etc. the idea being that Indians would look a private ownership of land rather than tribal tradition of shared ownership. Citizenship came much later, in 1924, although most tribes still remain sovereign nations as well. The government also sanctioned such nefarious acts as to kill off the buffalo to thwart the Plains Indians who were putting a whupping on the American army. They also refrained from innoculating soldiers for smallpox which killed off even more Native Americans.

The second half of the book is much more optimistic. In some ways the boarding schools brought the various tribes together; they got to know each other and their various cultures. Many Indians fought in WWI; they were among the most decorated soliers. But Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty treated Indians as Americans rather as a problem. Tribal government was encouraged and such tribes as the Ojibwa and the Osage were extremely good at it. Oil and gas were discovered on the Osage reservation. They negotiated their deals directly with the oil companies. The Ojibwa served as middle men in the fur trade and had a strong influence.

Occasionally Treuer will switch to an anecdotal style. He emphasizes Indian entrepreneur success where Bobby Matthews lives off the land, selling leechess. Spruce cones, wild rich. Another character, who moved from the reservation to the city, was a rodeo rider for much of his life. Another tribe is exploring the possibility of getting in on the ground floor selling marijuana extracts.

One of my favorite books was BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE by Dee Brown. As I recall it was much more readable than Treuer's book. Treuer also has a problem with Brown's cut-off date of 1890, seeming to imply that Indians ceased to exist after that date. Hardly. Since the casino craze Indian wages have increased (although only half of remaining tribes have casinos). The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux with only 480 members control a large casino near Minneapolis. They have a 99.2 percent employment rate; each member receives $1.08 million annually.

Indian population is increasing. There's also more of an emphasis on wellness in the Indian community, with Indians rejecting flour and lard in favor of more healthful fare.

Scrublands

Riversend is a small town in New South Wales. Not only has it been devastated by a terrible drought but there's been a murder. An Anglican priest, of all people has murdered five townspeople.

Journalist Martin Scarsden has been assigned to the story. He's been all over the world and is suffering from a form of PTS as he was locked in a trunk on the Gaza Strip during an Israeli attack. He was in there several days. You will be reminded of Dickens a bit as characters like Harley Snouch, Codger Harris, and Mandalay Blonde are introduced.

There are several other threads Martin must confront as the story progresses. Two female backpackers are found murdered in a dam at the only water source in the Scrublands. He assumes Byron Swift is responsible for those murders as well. Martin needs a big story as his career is on the skids; the whole continent is spellbound by this one.

At one point he follows the town drunk into a rundown out-of-business hotel; it's the aforementioned Harley Snouch; Mandalay, the beautiful book store owner, tells Martin he's her father and that he raped her mother and he's been watching her from across the street. Snouch says she looks just like her diseased mother.

Chris Hammer, the author, spends a lot of time describing how hot it is in Riversend, sometimes at the expense of moving the story ahead. Eventually he does. Swift is an imposter; he has a connection with a motor cycle gang that sells marijuana, but he also sends money to an orphanage in Afghanistan.

There's also a wild fire in the Scrublands. Martin and the town constable go in to save Harley Snouch who refused to evacuate. Snouch owns the land with the water source and his home is the home of somebody with money, not the dump Martin expected. Snouch ends up saving Martin and the constable rather than the other way around.

We find out who killed the two German backpackers rather early but we don't find out why an Anglican minister (and he really was one) would murder five Riversend citizens. I got the impression Hammer didn't know either as his resolution is rather clumsy and hard to believe.

I liked the atmosphere for the same reason I liked James Michener tomes, but by the time we get the answer to the main quandary, I almost lost interest.
Oh, yes, we also want to know if Scarsden manages to save his career; he also has a thing for Mandalay, and we want to know how that works out. You'll have to read the book to find out, but you will probably be able to guess. This isn't O. Henry.

Asymmetry

The first thing a reader might want to know about this novel is why it's entitled ASYMMETRY.

The book consists of two novellas and a short story: FOLLY; MADNESS and EZRA BLAZER'S DESERT ISLAND DISCS.

If you agree that “asymmetry” means unbalanced, the first one is rather easy to figure out. A young woman, Alice, is having an affair with a famous, older author. Their combined age is 97; she's 27 towards the end of that section. She notices he's looking “decrepit” and that he takes a lot of pills. I was immediately reminded of the J.D. Salinger, Joyce Maynard affair. Anyway, it's a folly. She works as an assistant editor at a publishing house, but she doesn't know who Camus was, pronouncing his name, “K-mus”. He asks her at one point if she doesn't has any higher ambitions. She can't answer that.

The second one, MURDER takes a hundred and eighty degrees flip. It's about an Iraqi-American PhD candidate born in America who gets stuck at the airport trying to get into England to briefly connect with a journalist friend, take a flight to Turkey, then go on to be with his family in Iraq. He's refused entry, despite the fact that he once held an internship there as an undergraduate in medicine. The obvious title reference is to the kidnapping of his uncle; his family pays most of the ransom, but all they get in return is his dead body. There's lots of talk about how the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Once the Americans defeated Saddam, the regular population turned against the Americans. Here's where the asymmetry comes in. Americans make New Year's Eve resolutions; the Iraqis can't relate; they don't know if they'll wake up in the morning.

The final section moves back to Ezra Blazer; he's doing an interview on PBS radio. One of the questions the interviewer asks is what he'd take with him if he were stranded on a Desert Island. The book he picks is ULYSSES, the strange, esoteric book by James Joyce, about a day in the life of a Dubliner. Ezra regrets never writing a book about Pittsburg where he was born. He also makes a pass at the lady interviewer who is married with two kids. The only similarity I could see with the first episode is that he refers to himself as “decrepit”. The whole interview centers, first off on Blazer's favorite music which is almost all classical, rather like Ulysses in that you need notes in order to know who or what he's talking about. I read the “topics and questions for discussion” at the end. Alice in Wonderland was mentioned as a possible connection between all three sections. Alice went down a rabbit hole with Ezra and Amar went down a rabbit hole with his family in Iraq, but otherwise I barely remembered the references.