I have a theory about why I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed another entry in in Akashic Books noir series, Delhi Noir. Seattle Noir solid, but it didn’t grab me quite like the earlier anthology.

Theory: I have a lot of biased assumptions about Delhi that made the setting very foreboding. But being Seattle born and raised, I know this place much better and have a much harder time seeing its seedy underbelly. Oh, we have our problems. In its early days, Seattle could hold it’s own against any up and coming city. But today this is not a place where crime runs rampant, the cops are on the take, or organized crime takes a cut of everything.

In addition, with a few exceptions, the stories don’t mine the reputations and possibilities of the Seattle neighborhoods in which they’re set. Or they do use genteel areas which limit the crime possibilities to a fairly narrow set. Where’s Lake City, or Aurora, White Center, Rainier Valley? Conversely, a couple of the stories set in places I wouldn’t have expected to be so scary turned out to be quite good at imparting a dark mood.

Blood Tide by Thomas P. Hopp (Duwamish)

The anthology starts out in an area just south of downtown. The Duwamish river has been dredged and shaped into a shipping hub, surrounded by the medium heavy industries that like close proximity to easy international freight. The land once belonged to the Duwamish, a branch of the Salish tribe that inhabited the area when Europeans moved in. Unrecognized, the Duwamish dwindled in number without a reservation or a dedicated tribal government to keep them together. The tribe persevered even so. Hopp’s story interacts more with a few Duwamish members rather than the Duwamish area, which doesn’t have the distinctly Native American feel implied by the text. The crime is that of red tide poisoning, where someone has distilled the poisonous substances from the tide and used it to murder someone. The hero is Peyton McKean, a virologist of some sort. He stars in Hopp’s self-published novel The Jihad Virus. He has a journalist sidekick who comes running to write up McKean’s exploits in mutual symbiosis. While sufficiently noirish, it’s utterly predictable and clunkily written. Good for bringing some exposure to the Duwamish cause, however.

Promised Tulips by Bharti Kirchner (Wallingford)

Wallingford is not a neighborhood I would associate with dreaded crime. The essence of noir (I.M.H.O.), is the ominous knowledge that someone is going to get screwed, and that I both don’t want to watch and can’t help watching. A professional gardener who lives in Wallingford (this certainly fits the area) imagines what could have happened to her best friend who has disappeared, leaving behind a less than upset social climbing husband. The location is not dreadful, but it inspires a quietness that allows a person to think a lot, expanding worry into something huge. It’s all around a very good story.

Golden Gardens by Stephan Magcosta (Ballard)

This is another story that manages to be ominous despite the idyllic location. Magcosta uses Golden Gardens Park to set a tale of emotional revenge. The park’s beach isn’t remote, but it’s secluded from residences by the railroad and a steep bluff. Consequently, if you wanted to kill someone without being bothered by passersby, Golden Gardens wouldn’t be the worst place to do it. A Hispanic woman distraught over her soldier son’s death in Iraq wants to avenge him on the first convenient Middle Eastern looking person she can find, a cabbie. An ugly, inevitable end packs a lot of emotion. Recommended.

The Center of the Universe by Robert Lopresti (Fremont)

Fremont is yet another area that isn’t particularly seedy. It features a weird combination of left-wing free-thinking and good old crass American commercialism. Lopresti really nails the vibe of the neighborhood through the eyes of a somewhat mentally ill homeless person. He can’t always tell the difference between the true and the false already, and Fremont’s dichotomy doesn’t make things any easier. In the middle of this, our guy thinks he sees a girl get murdered, and the guys who did it to boot. Another recommended story.

Blue Sunday by Kathleen Alcalá (Central District)

Alcalá’s story doesn’t really work as noir for me. Someone’s gonna get screwed, but it happens right at the beginning so there’s little in the way of menace afterward. A couple of Iraq soldiers on leave party it up and get drunk when they run into a cop all to eager to suspect the worst of minorities. Alternates between scenes of the soldier recovering from his police encounter in the hospital and scenes of him handling Iraqis roughly. Well worth reading as a portrait of how racial bias fucks us up, and it’s an issue that comes up often in the Central District.

The Taskmasters by Simon Wood (Downtown)

The first of four stories where the person who’s going to get screwed is being set up to take a fall for the unscrupulous. A bar brawler gets taken in by an underground group called the Taskmasters, whose ostensible reason for existing is as a band of vigilantes, righting wrongs ignored by the police. They have one method: they decide someone is guilty and execute them. Sounds like a 70s T.V. movie plot. Predictable. Not a lot of downtown flavor. And I didn’t get a feeling of peril.

What Price Retribution? by Patricia Harrington (Capitol Hill)

A half mile from my place is a steep hillside that separates the Capitol Hill neighborhood from my Eastlake home base. Between Interstate 5 and the incline, there’s only a few streets connecting the areas, at the north and south end of this bluff. However, there’s a couple of stair climbs that lead from us to them, which pass under wooded branches so dense that it’s dark in the daytime during the height of summer. Among those trees is a homeless camp according to Harrington’s story. When a homeless guy gets the crap beat out of him, the Mayor of the camp, an erstwhile cop, sobers up enough to seek revenge on the drug dealer. This one is great, not so much because I wanted to see the dealer live, but because the revenge could get really bad. (Though why a big time dealer would try to sell to penniless homeless folks in the first place is a little fuzzy.)

Till Death Do Us … by Curt Colbert (Belltown)

The second story of set ‘em up to take a fall variety. 1940s Jake Rossiter stars as a P.I. who takes a bad domestic case because he needs the money. Coincidentally within minutes of each other, both sides of a divorce case hire Rossiter to prevent the other spouse from murdering them. A fun story, but not in a dreadful way.

The Best View In Town by Paul S. Piper (Leschi)

Piper’s story is the first of two commit a crime against someone close to you for the money entries in the book. Here a drunk loser brings home a girl, only to find out the girl’s grandfather grew up next door, where he supposedly stashed away valuables that the family never recovered. And she’s damned pissed the new owners seem to have maybe found them. Just a little too predictable. Good portrait of a loser though. I liked that.

The Wrong End Of A Gun by R. Barri Flowers (South Lake Union)

The third of the set ‘em up to take a fall stories, and by far the worst story in the collection. Dude wants to get with a girl just because she’s hot, despite hundreds of warning signs that would make even the most besotted 17 year old run. And he’s a veteran of divorce court, who’s world weary tone should give him a clue. Flowers uses some awfully trite physical descriptions too: Her complexion was like maple syrup over buttered waffles. A) Food descriptions of skin tone are tiresome. B) Maple syrup I can see as a skin tone. Smooth and brown. On top of buttered waffles? Have you ever looked at buttered waffles after pouring syrup on them? They are blotchy, greasy and pockmarked. This is not attractive. Tasty and delicious in a waffle, but not so much for a complexion.

Paper Son by Brian Thornton (Chinatown)

Thornton writes historical noir set in 1889, when Seattle wasn’t exactly welcoming to its Chinese immigrants. One of them washes up dead on Mercer Island, and a rookie Treasury Agent investigates. Triads and prostitution and drug running and multiple missing people! And I definitely didn’t see where the ending was … er … going to end.

The Magnolia Bluff by Skye Moody (Magnolia)

The second of the set up people you know for money stories. Circus clown midgets have a rivalry that spills into really good resentment when one of them makes it to Hollywood. Magnolia as a setting, although described accurately, didn’t lend itself to bad shit happening.

Sherlock’s Opera by Lou Kemp (Waterfront)

Moriarity’s adoring little brother Jacob lures Sherlock Holmes to Seattle to take his revenge on the sleuth. Why? Why?

Food for Thought by G. M. Ford (Pioneer Square)

The final story is the last of the set folks up to take a fall ones, though this one works out a little differently. But again, a broke P.I. takes a domestic muscle case that he’d rather not, because he needs the money. A short, enjoyable story that broke the mold of the previous three.

A few standout stories but overall not as good as I’d hoped.

One other blogged review:

• Bookgasm

Title: Seattle Noir
Editor: Curt Colbert
Cover creator: Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Noir
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Paperback
Length: 268 p.
Publication date: June 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-80-4

Innocent is Scott Turow’s follow-up to his defining work, Presumed Innocent. Turow artfully weaves a story that incorporates the characters’ history from his prior work without much in the way of spoilers for what happened in Presumed Innocent. If you haven’t read that book, you’ll be fine reading the sequel. Having read it in the ancient past, so far back my memory is fairly fuzzy as to a lot of the details, I felt a huge sense of deja vu reading Innocent. The first three quarters of Innocent follows, near as I can remember, the plot structure of Presumed Innocent. It’s only at the end that the story diverges, in both predictable and unexpected fashions.

Rozhat Rusty Sabich is now the chief appellate judge for largest city in his state (popularly seen as an analogue for Illinois). He’s running for the state Supreme Court, but the election is nearly two years away. Plagued by an unhappy marriage, he embarks on an affair with his former law clerk, but ends it shortly after it starts. The clerk, Anna Vostic, later takes up with Rusty’s son Nat, also a lawyer. Complicated? Yup. Even more complicated is that a criminal with a case before Sabich knows the judge is seeing someone on the sly. Sabich ain’t really that good at hiding his tracks.

In Presumed Innocent, Sabich’s mistress ended up dead and Sabich was tried for murder by the prosecutor’s office where he worked at the time. That history comes back to bite him in Innocent. Shortly before the election for the Supreme Court, his wife Barbara dies in her sleep. Sabich doesn’t call the authorities for most of the day after he wakes up, sitting with the body instead. That’s suspicious to the prosecuting attorney, Tommy Molto, who was the assistant prosecutor 20 years earlier. So he starts digging, and decides to charge Sabich again.

The authorial tone of the text is much the same as in Presumed Innocent. The reader is led to believe that Sabich is innocent. Turow tells much of the story from Rusty’s point of view without having him reflect much in particular about the circumstances of his wife’s death (thus avoiding telling us explicitly what happened). The result is that I read into it that Sabich is not the kind of person who would commit a murder, without confirmation. And yet, all the evidence, also presumed correct, points at his guilt. Turow is a master at constructing situations that look damning but could also be perfectly innocent too. Particularly if you’ve read Presumed Innocent’s ending, in which case you’ll assume you know who did it and why. I kept thinking, this is the exact same plot, and Turow’s too smart for this, so when and how is it going to change.

The other thing that keeps Innocent interesting is that Turow gives each of his characters motivation that brings them to life. Tommy Molto burns at having been unable to convict a murderer two decades ago, but is resigned to never being able to right that wrong. It makes him extra cautious to take on Sabich again. Sabich for his part deeply loves Nat but never makes much of a personal connection to him. He hides his affair as much to protect Nat as to save his own hide. In fact, one big question throughout is whether or not Rusty will be able to hide the affair from Nat (whether he’s convicted or not).

My biggest beef is with the final chapter of the book. Despite going to great pains to keep Nat from knowing much of the failings of both his parents, Turow uses a conversation between Rusty and Nat at the end to have Rusty finally go back to the day Barbara died. Sandy or Marta Stern (his attorneys) or even Anna, his former fling, would have been more in character.

One minor detail I really liked is that Turow slipped in references to gay relationships as normal and accepted without making a point of it. Anna refers to a housing situation that went bad in her life when a prospective male roommate moved in with a boyfriend because it was cheaper. And Marta Stern refers family life when Helen is away. Simple.

In some ways, I wish that Turow had steered clear of Presumed Innocent. His other books use the characters and events of Presumed Innocent as background without intertwining themselves much. This time, I couldn’t help but repeatedly go back to what I’d previously read. It constrained the story too much. Nevertheless, I think Turow did an excellent job within those constraints and it’s a worthwhile read, but I’ll still think of Presumed Innocent as his peak story.

A few other personal reviews posted on the internet:

• Rhapsody in Books
• Fervent Reader (has spoilers)
• My Random Acts of Reading

Title: Innocent
Author: Scott Turow
Cover creator: Ann Twomey (designer)
Series: Kindle County; 8
Imprint / publisher: Grand Central Publishing / Hachette Livre
Format: Hardcover
Length: 406 p.
Publication date: May 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-446-56242-3

I received Innocent from the publisher free through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. The program does not place constraints on the content of the review other than prescribing a minimum length. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I am donating $15.09 (the cost of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

]]> http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/innocent-scott-turow/feed 0 http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/surgeon-tess-gerritsen http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/surgeon-tess-gerritsen#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:23:31 +0000 King Rat http://reading.kingrat.biz/?p=1470

For Memorial Day weekend, I went to WisCon 34, the worlds leading feminist science fiction convention. I’ll write more about that later. But for travel to and from Madison, Wisconsin, I needed something light to read. Something that would be complicated enough to be interesting, yet not so complicated that I couldn’t interrupt my reading lots while running from airport gate to airport gate. When looking through my ebook library, I realized this would be perfect. I love a good police procedural.

The serial killer’s modus operandi is to duct tape women to their beds, surgically remove their uteruses while they are still awake and unanesthetized, wait a day, then slit their throats. It’s very brutal, and if you have trigger issues about male on female violence or gory mutilation, do not go near this book. Thomas Moore is the detective on the case, widowed 6 months and grieving, but known as the unflappable uncorruptible cop. Jane Rizzoli is the up and coming, uber-competent homicide detective with a well deserved chip on her shoulder over how she’s been treated in the police department. Catherine Cordell is the E.R. surgeon who treats some of the victims, and also the one who got away from a serial killer with the same m.o. in another city.

The killer is really after Catherine Cordell. Why is a whole nother story that isn’t revealed until late in the book. He taunts her with messages written in magic marker on victim’s bodies. He allowed another victim to live so that he can kill her under Cordell’s nose in E.R. And he knows details of the original killer, who is quite provably dead.

For the most part, I really enjoyed the book. It’s paced well. The police work seemed more tedious and realistic than exciting, which I like. The tension is built around the stalking behavior, with a few moments of he’s calling you from inside your house!

One thing that I ambivalent about was the budding relationship between grieving Thomas Moore and shell-shocked Catherine Cordell. While Cordell has lots and lots of good qualities, Moore seemed most attracted to her when she lost her shit and became vulnerable. I’m sure that happens in real life, but it sure seems like a bad idea to begin a relationship by having to be the emotional support immediately. The two partners don’t come in as equals. I’m not too critical of this because Gerritsen had no-nonsense Rizzoli become critical of this beginning as well. The author wasn’t portraying it as an ideal way to begin. Still, I kept wanting to scream at those two characters, Are you idiots??!

And with that, I find that I don’t really have much more to say about the book. It’s well written but well within standard crime fiction tropes. Definitely fun and readable and I’ll look for more Gerritsen.

Title: The Surgeon
Author: Tess Gerritsen
Cover creator: Carl Galian (designer)
Series: Rizzoli/Isles; 1
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine Books / Random House
Format: PDF download
Length: 350 p.
Publication date: 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-44784-5

Expiration Date is a noir-ish time travel piece of crime fiction. While it uses science fiction tropes, I don’t think it’ll appeal particularly to that fandom. The story really rides on the crime fiction rather than the science fiction.

Mickey Wade is a newly unemployed alt-weekly writer who has to move into his comatose grandfather’s apartment to make ends meet. Free rent and all. The place is located back in his old neighborhood of Frankford, Philadelphia where Mickey grew up. It’s not a pretty neighborhood, and there resides all sorts of Mickey’s ghosts. Mickey takes a couple of grandpa’s aspirin one night that turn out to be not the pills he thought they were. They transport him to the past as a ghost, where he runs into the 9 year old boy who will years later kill Mickey’s father.

The time travel trope used here is very standard. Can you go back and become your own father sort of thing. Swierczynski’s story, as plot driven as it is, relies more on its characters and relationships and a sense of place about Frankford more than it does who does what when. Time travel serves more as a device to parcel out the narrative. Mickey can only travel back in time for short periods, and he can’t precisely place himself in the past storyline, and thus the jigsaw puzzle can’t be filled in smoothly for the reader. It’s pretty artfully done.

What I really enjoyed about the story though was Mickey’s relationship with his family and his neighborhood of Frankford. Mickey both loves and misses his father, but also resents his father too. He idolized his father’s musical ability but remembers all the weekends without him because he was working gigs. In retrospect Mickey is also mad his father screwed up the possibility of a big record contract. And Mickey can’t say enough bad things about Frankford and how it’s a bad neighborhood, but he also takes pride in the fact that a serial killer stalked the area during the late 1980s.

However, as much as I enjoyed the time travel as narrative device and the relationships of the book, I am rather pissed at the book’s ending. Actually offended even. The ending turns a dirty crime novel into a Leave It To Beaver episode. For the love of god, just stop reading at the end of the second to last chapter. It’s so much better that way. I read an advance uncorrected proof. I hope to god someone came to their senses and dropped the last chapter for the real book.

Luckily, everything up to there was awesome, and the second to last chapter is a great ending for the story. I’m just going to mentally block out the last bit and call this one of the best crime fiction pieces I’ve read in ages.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Rod Lott at Bookgasm
• Pop Culture Vulture
• FNORDincorporated
• Blood of the Muse

Title: Expiration Date
Author: Duane Swierczynski
Imprint / publisher: Minotaur / Macmillan
Format: Advance reader copy
Length: 246 p.
Publication date: March 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36340-6

I received this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Review program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $11.19 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

Well, I thought I would get in a nice quick read in between other books. But personal projects took over my brain for the last week, so I took some time to read Turn on the Heat by Erle Stanley Gardner (writing under the name A. A. Fair).

Turn on the Heat is a decent read, though a bit hard to follow a lot of the time. It has all the elements of a whodunnit, but unlike a lot of crime fiction I read, also has the main character actively manipulating events about which he doesn’t always have complete information. Gardner made this main character, Donald Lam, into an anti-caricature. Lam is mouthy, but he’s a scrawny runt, and so he gets his ass handed to him a few times in the book. I’m also not particularly fond of the way female characters come off in the book.

This is the second book in the Cool and Lam series. Bertha Cool is the owner of a P.I. agency. Donald Lam is a former lawyer who works for her as an investigator. Their client wants them to find a woman who disappeared around 20 years early, around the same time the woman’s husband disappeared as well. The client has something to hide; he’s running for mayor of a town, and would possibly be implicated by the disappeared woman. Another investigator then gets murdered. Lam not only must find the missing woman, but steer the police investigation away from their client.

That plot synopsis is only the tip of the iceberg. It gets way more complicated. The other investigator wasn’t hired by their client. And a goon strong-arms Lam out of town just before he’s about to find a woman claiming to be the lost woman. The whole time, Lam is actively playing everyone, including his own boss Bertha Cool. Lies left and right to get the police looking in one direction, to a girl he meets while investigating to get her to do his dirty work, and more. It’s all very complicated and hard to follow along. Even the normal post-story recounting of what really happened still left me feeling like I didn’t know what was going on.

I liked Donald Lam as a character. His goals aren’t exactly to find out the truth. He’ll happily spin tales to all sorts of people. And he doesn’t even feel the need to tell the truth at the end. He’s not cowardly either. He’ll provoke people into taking swings at him left and right, even without a way to fight back. He gets beat up and it’s not even part of his plan.

I didn’t like the women though. One starts off as smart and wanting to move up in the world. But she’s also been written with the normal for the time female frailty. Normally written that is. She swoons for her man Donald. And she happily lets him make her decisions, even though Gardner shows she’s a little bit smarter than that when she reveals she knows Lam is lying to her. Bertha Cool isn’t a delicate flower. She’s assertive and just as willing to play people as Lam is. But she also comes off as somewhat incompetent. Most of the secondary women in the story are gullible and easily led, where the men are less so. I suppose there needed to be intermediate steps like this one, where women aren’t mothers and wives only, but not yet portrayed as equal to men. But I felt like I needed to grit my teeth through some parts. Still, even with women being not so reflective of reality in the book, Turn on the Heat actually passes the Bechdel test, which is more than a lot of contemporary literature can say.

Definitely mixed.

Title: Turn on the Heat
Author: Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair
Series: Cool and Lam; 2
Imprint / publisher: Triangle Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 306 p.
Publication date: November 1942

Set in fictitious Pecan Springs Texas, Thyme of Death concerns formerly high-powered attorney China Bayles, her herb shop … and murder! Her best friend is found dead, the cops think it’s suicide, but everyone else says she would never have committed suicide. Curiously, China herself never expresses a strong opinion despite having been best friends for two years. And then things get more complicated.

The whole plot seemed contrived, particularly getting China involved in solving it and keeping the police out of solving it. The characters are all small town busybodies with little charm, all of them very much right out of small-town character casting. I’ll sorta spoil it right now: that’s how this gets solved. A town of 15,000 worth of closely built houses where everyone knows everyone else. In other words, snooping neighbors. All of them get involved in everyone else’s business all the time. And despite the chief of police being described as smart and competent, he’s just as quick to declare a murder solved and get back to watching his Sunday football game as any caricature ever was.

I suppose I should have guessed this was just a step above cozy when I realized it was the first in a series about an herb shop owner who solves crimes. My personal feeling is that if you have random people solving crimes, they should have a black van and be four people on the run from the U.S. military.

A couple other blogged reviews:

• Reading Days with J
• Princess Merry’s Court

Title: Thyme of Death
Author: Susan Wittig Albert
Series: China Bayles; 1
Imprint / publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 245 p.
Publication date: March 1994
ISBN-10: 0-425-14098-9
Subject: Bayles, China (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Women detectives — Texas — Fiction
Subject: Herbalists — Fiction
Subject: Texas — Fiction
LC classification: PS3551.L2637 T48 1992

There are some minor spoilers in this review. It’s 17 years old, so it’s well past the statute of limitations on spoilering.

Bootlegger’s Daughter started off as a good mystery set in rural North Carolina and ended up being a halfway decent setting piece about the area. It did not end up as a good piece of crime fiction though. Simple and straightforward converted to overly complex and cliche-ridden by the end.

The book consists of far more than the mystery. While the crime drives the plot through it’s paces, Maron stops along the way to describe the area, its institutions, and particularly its residents. Deborah Knott is of course the focus. She’s an attorney running for district court judge. She’s also the daughter of a prominent local bootlegger, and so she has a history to deal with, though a great deal of that is in the past. Knott’s other quality that stands out, though it proves less of an issue in this book, is that she is in her mid-30s but still unmarried. Not only unmarried, Knott has dated a series of local men but refused to settle down with any of them. I liked that aspect because Maron had Knott making no apologies for her lifestyle, beyond some acknowledgments that it wasn’t the norm.

Every time Maron introduces the reader to another character or setting, she digresses into a paragraph or two of history and how the character fits into the local fabric. These descriptions don’t really flesh out the characters themselves so much as paint the scenery of the New South and how it’s evolved from the old South. For instance, when Knott becomes the subject of a whisper campaign designed to play on racial fears, she and her opponent head to the small town newspaper publisher to issue a statement. The extended description of the publisher says more about what small newspapers mean to small towns than it does about what kind of character he is.

The mystery is nearly two decades old by the start of the novel. Eighteen year old Janie Whitehead asks Deborah to investigate her mother’s murder when Janie was just a newborn. Janie herself had been found crying, unfed near her mother’s body. At first the crime part is good reading, as Knott intersperses asking questions with her judicial race. But it devolves into cliches about halfway through.

Characters stop taking actions that make sense. One person living near the crime scene, Michael Vickery, is pretty traumatized by the crime and years later still doesn’t want to talk about it. Both he and his live-in lover, Denny McCloy, are friends with Deborah Knott. Rather than ask Knott to make her questions of his lover quick and emotion free, McCloy decides to anonymously shoot at her to scare her away from investigating. The former would have been vastly more effective.

Contrived Hollywood techniques are overused. On more than one occasion Knott decides to go solo rather than call the police. Worse, the local police do the same. Rather than radio in to investigators when clues arise, officers make the excuse that it’s too late to call or radio and head into dark spooky places alone. Or they decide stumble on a possible suspect and decide to conduct a full impromptu interrogation at the scene, alone, rather than bring him to jail and where the environment is controlled.

The ending was also pure Hollywood. Having essentially gotten away with it, the bad guy comes back with a warped sense of blame to exact revenge on people who clearly weren’t responsible for the predicament. If the mailman hadn’t delivered the mail with that letter-bomb, my accomplice would still be alive! Therefore the mailman must die! Thus both the mystery is solved and the killer apprehended and I wondered why both of these developments had so little basis in the earlier story. The killer fits. But there’s no setup for it.

Loved the portrayal of the setting and characters. Hated the mystery (at least the second half).

Other blogged reviews (which pretty much all disagree with me):

• Vixen’s Daily Reads
• The Sleepy Reader
• The Good, The Bad and the Bookish

Title: Bootlegger’s Daughter
Author: Margaret Maron
Narrator: C. J. Critt
Series: Imperfect; 1
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Audiobook download
Length: 9 h. 30 m.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4361-2053-1
Subject: Knott, Deborah (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Women lawyers — Fiction
Subject: North Carolina — Fiction
LC classification: PS3563.A679 B6 1992

Going beyond explication of investigation, Miyuki Miyabe’s All She Was Worth also mixed in a good amount of characterization with its crime fiction plotting. It’s a little slow in the first half, but the pacing picks up quite a bit in the second. I didn’t care much for the anti-consumerism anti-credit diatribes, even though I agree with them philosophically. I think they could have been shortened resulting in a better paced book. Miyabe’s multi-layered characters were the strong point of the book.

All She Was Worth has a different vibe than most of the crime fiction I’ve read, but not really all that different. The investigator is unfailingly polite, though he employs a few psychological tricks that give him more control than the politeness gives him haplessness. The book’s setting is Japan, primarily Tokyo. The differences in the laws and cultural norms between Japan as told by Miyabe and the U.S. really are pretty minimal. A woman is treated as part of a man’s family and working women have expectations placed on them by their employers that we don’t see here. In the context of this novel, the differences are so few that any U.S. mystery reader will feel at home.

Shunsuke Honma is the detective, injured and on leave. A relative, Jun Kurisaka, comes to him seeking Honma’s help to find his fiance who has skipped town. Shoko Sekine disappeared after the relative decided to get her a credit card. A five year old bankruptcy prevented the application from succeeding. It’s initially baffling as to why she ran, but it quickly becomes apparent that Shoko Sekine is not the original person named Shoko Sekine. The fiance has assumed someone else’s name. We have a mystery, not just where she is, but who she really is and why and how she became Shoko Sekine.

The book is constructed to comment on the debt and consumer culture. In fact, one whole chapter is a minor character’s explication of Japan’s debt and credit industry, how regular people get themselves into trouble, and how bankruptcy works. I think the early part of the book overfocused on this and was slow as a result. I’ve seen several summaries that make the motive for the crime one of consumer culture. It didn’t appear that way to me. It was a complicating factor to the investigation, as the real Shoko Sekine got herself into debt and the revelation of bankruptcy is what caused the impostor to run, and there are some cascading effects of that knowledge. Obviously I see the motive as something else, but this is a spoiler free review so I won’t say what. I’m glad consumerism wasn’t the motive, however. It made the criminal much less crass and much more real in my mind.

I can’t think of one character I didn’t like in context of the story. Some are people I would hate in real life, of course. The investigating team, initially just Honma, slowly grows as more people get sucked in: a fellow detective, a high school mate with an unrequited crush, and even Honma’s pre-teen son. I had problems tracking who was who in the ever increasingly sizable cast, but only because of their number. Even those who the reader sees only in glimpses are characters with multiple facets. One scene just after the man with the unrequited crush asserts he will join the investigation stands out. Honma has a conversation with the man’s wife, who is hurt over her husband’s still strong feelings for Shoko long after Shoko has passed out of his life. Nevertheless, she assents to him going on his quest. She barely makes an appearance and yet her character is far more than one dimensional. Even the real Shoko Sekine leaves her personality behind her, rather than just a trail of evidence of her life. The reader gets to know what she was like and what her family was like, all through revelations from people she knew.

One thing was very different than every other crime fiction novel I’ve read. Most have a short wrap-up at the end. A kind of unwinding that says what happened or didn’t happen to the criminal, possibly something that transitions the investigator on to the next book. Miyabe’s ending occurs right at the climax. Scooby-doo pulls the mask off the monster to reveal the caretaker, and we go to credits. (Obviously, this is not Scooby-doo, and no mask gets pulled off. Again, no spoilers so I pulled my example from something else.) I’m sure it’s not that unusual, but it’s very different from the stuff I’ve read and refreshing. I might get annoyed if all my mysteries ended that way.

I liked the book enough that I’ll read more from Miyabe.

Other blogged reviews:

• In Spring It Is the Dawn
• An Adventure In Reading
• Naked Sushi
• Bookphilia.com

Title: All She Was Worth (火車)
Author: Miyuke Miyabe (宮部みゆき)
Translator: Alfred Birnbaum
Cover creator: Glen Allison (photographer) / Mark R. Robinson (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin
Format: Paperback
Length: 296 p.
Publication date: 1999 (originally 1992)
ISBN-10: 0-395-96658-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-395-96658-7
Subject: Japan — Fiction

Wiscon hosts an event called The Gathering at the start of their convention. It’s kind of a mish-mash of activities to welcome folks to the convention before the main festivities begin. This year I saw a zine table, a couple of tarot readers, a palm reader, a group performing shapenote singing (not quite sure what defines that, but they sounded great), a clothing swap (mostly women’s clothing so not of much use to me, but I did get a book bag there which was oh so useful), and more. One table presented a plethora of ARCs and proofs for conventioneers as a fundraiser for Wiscon (or maybe the Tiptree Award, I forget which). One buck per ARC. I have no idea who donated the ARCs. Most appeared to be fantasy, with a chunks of science fiction, paranormal fantasy, and young adult titles as well. And there I saw Delhi Noir.

At the beginning of this year, I’d never heard of Akashic Books, publisher of Delhi Noir. But in one of my periodic internet searches for books by authors I like, I saw that Curt Colbert would be the editor for a forthcoming book of noir short stories set in Seattle. I loved Colbert’s Jake Rossiter series put out by the much missed Uglytown imprint, and keep hoping (and searching) for a fourth installment from some other source. Anyhoo, poking around I’ve seen that Seattle Noir (just released) is actually part of a decently large series put out by Akashic Books. When I saw the Delhi Noir A.R.C. I had to grab it.

Why did I need it? Well, partially to find out what sort of quality I might expect before I plunked down real money for the Seattle edition. And secondly I’ve been to Delhi and know a little bit about the city (just enough to be dangerous though). If ever there are cities that are ground for noir-ish crime fiction, India has them, and Delhi is prime in that set. Parts are seedy, dirty, and dark. They exist in close proximity to fresh, upscale malls and developments. Large numbers of people are on the take. Kickbacks, while by no means universal, are so common as to be a way of life. Small rebel groups operate within 100 miles of the city. Bandits and highway robbers with one name and (probably undeserved) Robin Hood reputations operate nearby as well. In many ways it’s like America in the early 1900s. That’s mulch for noir. I figured there was a good chance I’d enjoy this book.

I’m happy to report this my expectations have been met. I’ve only read a small handful of crime fiction anthologies (so take this for what that’s worth), but Delhi Noir is easily the best one I’ve ever cracked open. None of the stories blew me away, but Sawhney’s selections consistently turn out good. I liked every single story in the book. Every single one. Delhi did indeed turn out to be good setting for noir.

I wish I lived near enough to New York City to attend one of the upcoming readings/launch parties for this.

Yesterday Man by Omair Ahmad

Suhasini Das is a private investigator in Delhi, formerly partnered with Jaidev Triloki. Triloki has disappeared, and one of his clients comes to Suhasini to finish the job. Arjun Singh wants to find a man he, scared out of his mind at the time, helped to kill another man. He’s living his life backwards, so to speak, to reach that point in time and redeem himself. It’s more a traditional crime fiction story than an noir story filled with atmosphere, but it does have a noirish ending.

How I Lost My Clothes by Radhika Jha

Fancy schmancy upper class consultant type barely maintains his life as he does lots of drugs on the side. So much an addict that he ends up doing drugs with people under the bridge, he wakes up after a particularly bad week missing deadlines, far from home, having his clothes stolen by his homeless drug buddies. Wasn’t even left his underwear. He has to get himself home, or somewhere safe at least, and get himself something to wear. I enjoyed the story, but it was the only story in the collection that didn’t seem to have the feeling of threat, of double-cross, of the possibility of bad things happening. So it stood out in a book of noir as feeling not noir. Still good.

Last In, First Out by Irwin Allan Sealy

Baba Ganoush drives an auto-rickshaw long hours to get ahead. Sometimes he works late into the night. Sometimes he sees the worst of things. Sometimes he does something about it. A little vigilante justice sometimes hits the spot!

Parking by Ruchir Joshi

It’s common for public servants in India to want a little cash to do their jobs, or do a little bit extra of their jobs. Neighbors fight over a parking spot that is technically public. One set of neighbors has a couple of friendly (to them) parking enforcement officers put the pressure on the girlfriend of the other neighbor. No heavy threat this time, just ordinary justice for hire.

Hissing Cobras by Nalinaksha Bhattacharya

Inspector Raghav Bakshi investigates the supposedly accidental death of Mukta Agarwal’s mother in law. Though living together, Mukta and Kamla didn’t get along, and Bakshi is out to prove Mukta’s responsibility for the crime. Moreover, he’s gonna collect payment from Mukta to make the hissing cobras (pieces of evidence) disappear. He is not a nice guy! I could see where this story was going, but I thoroughly enjoyed it getting there.

The Railway Aunty by Mohan Sikka

A shy young virgin is initiated into the worldly ways of sex by an older friend of his guardian aunt when he stops by to pick up a box of apples. He goes back for more, and more, and then she starts pimping him out to other women, for money. Perhaps not even remotely realistic at all, it’s bow-chicka-bow-bow fun with a dark edge! One of the few stories in the collection where the woman isn’t the one getting taken advantage of in the worst way.

Hostel by Siddharth Chowdhury

Zorawar Singh is the landlord of a hostel filled with miscreants. After they protect him one day from a group of sword-wielding men who come to the hostel to avenge a husband’s honor, a newer miscreant learns the story of how Zorawar came to own and run the hostel. My least favorite in the anthology, but still not bad.

Small Fry by Meera Nair

A street urchin works selling tea at the bus terminal in Selhi, and assists a tout who sells unlicensed bus tickets. He gets involved a bit more than usual when a gorgeous young woman, a Bollywood level beauty, needs tickets fast out of town. The tout and he have to make a run for it. Kind of cold-blooded, but I liked him.

Fit of Rage by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

The protagonist lives in Delhi, hiding out from a crime he committed in a fit of rage in Mumbai. He rents a room upstairs from his landlord Mrs. Bindra, but he hangs out with the servants, who harbor a little resentment of their own. Another very cold-blooded story. Another good one.

Just Another Death by Hartosh Singh Bal

After a servant dies in suspicious circumstances, a new journalist investigates but is persuaded to drop the case. Decades later after he has become a revered newsman he decides to poke into the case that started him off and see if his hunch had been right. Yet another very cold-blooded story. Still another good one.

Gautam Under a Tree by Hirsh Sawhney

Several years prior to the story, Gautam worked with a foreign documentary maker, Lauri Zeller, to film a tribal group that was fighting corruption and capitalism. Though lovers, they had a falling out when Zeller wanted to make the documentary about how art could save the tribal members and several key leaders of the group were murdered including a man Gautam considered a friend. Now he has a chance to write an expose on how an industrialist orchestrated the murder. The story is told from the point of view of Gautam’s girlfriend. I do wonder which foreign documentarian Sawhney is taking a shot at here. Anyway, Gautam is presented with a pretty awful choice.

The Scam by Tabish Khair

A couple of somewhat gullible celebrity types convince a cynical journalist to investigate a caste atrocity in Bihar. The story the low-caste mother and child tell is of being forced off their land by another caste. The journalist doesn’t believe because he caught the child running a turd scam, where a kid throws birdshit on your shoes and then offers to polish them for a fee (something the India guidebooks warn visitors about). Also, if the atrocity were real, in his mind, a politician would already be milking it for publicity. A tale of people changing their minds, but not always for the better.

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash (Prakash’ English language blog, Hindi language blog)

This is the only entry in the book not originally written in English, and it is perhaps my favorite. One of India’s poor, who squats in a ruined castle with his family, works as a janitor cleaning government buildings. Until he finds a cache of millions hidden in a building he cleans. He steals some to finance a lavish lifestyle, even taking on a mistress. Will greed take him too far? Who really owns the money? Loved this.

Cull by Manjula Padmanabhan

And this story actually has a connection to Wiscon! I’d been wondering why the hell a mystery anthology would find its way to a science fiction convention. The last story is a Philip K. Dick kind of near-future S.F. noir. The ruling class decides to do something about an uncontrolled group of the underclass living in a 2,000 acre garbage dump on the northern outskirts of future Delhi, where historical buildings have been moved to underground parks to make way for rigid rectangular city blocks. It’s not particularly original, other than the Delhi setting. Still, it does have a different cultural vibe than these stories usually have.

One word of warning about the collection: violence against women dominates most of the stories. I’m not in a position to know whether that’s representative of Indian culture today or if it’s an editorial bias. It’s not presented in a positive light. Pretty much every story has men taking advantage of men. By my quick count, eight have men taking advantage of women, all violently or sexually. Two have women taking advantage of men, one sexually and one violently. Be that it might reflect reality, some people won’t enjoy the level of violence against women. If you get squicked when that sort of thing predominates, don’t read this.

Title: Delhi Noir
Editor: Hirsh Sawhney
Cover creator: Madhu Kapparath (photographer) / Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Books Noir Series
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Advanced readers copy
Length: 280 p.
Publication date: August 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-78-1

For the last 9 months I’ve been eagerly awaiting China Miéville’s The City & the City, ever since I first saw the title pop up on Amazon. Earlier this year I started seeing people add their review copies to their catalogs on LibraryThing, feeling green with envy. (Or perhaps yellow. I’ve never caught an envy so my only clue to it’s color is what other people have written.) I tried several different ways to get a copy, but failed in each. (I don’t request review copies from publishers as a personal policy.) Then Suvudu (an arm of Miéville’s publisher, Random House) had a few contests for copies. I won! I would get my copy before the on sale date! Or I would have had I not been attending Wiscon when the copy arrived. Doh! Denied! Still free copy! Anyhoo, can you tell I’m jazzed about Miéville? I think he’s the only author I fanboy over.

Fanboydom aside, The City & the City is a pretty original though somewhat flawed science fiction police procedural. In a somewhat unusual move, I’ll actually give a rating for this, because I think it will help illustrate how I feel about the book. On the A through F scale, I’d give this a B or B+, not quite as good as Perdido Street Station or Un Lun Dun.

The story follows Tyador Borlú, a police inspector for the eastern European city state, Besźel. Local gutter punks (as we call them in Seattle) find a body in a park, a pretty foreign girl mutilated. Besźel, like other eastern European countries, has myriad less than legal shadowy groups: smugglers, nationalists, gangs of foreigners, and perhaps even the government itself. It appears one or more of these groups are involved.

As in all Miéville novels, the setting is what makes the novel. Besźel comes off kind of dark and somewhat noirish. Ul Qoma, the other city that also figures into the narrative, has a similar feel but is Turkic in flavor rather than Slavic. Despite what you may read, these cities are the most realistic of the cities in any of the author’s novels. There’s no half-human half-beetle inhabitants, nor walking window (or was it picture?) frames. They have more in common with Dashiell Hammett’s cities than with New Crobuzon. I guess the short version of this paragraph is not to expect the wildly fantastic this time around. And no monsters.

I think the key to the success or the failure of the novel for anyone will ride on how effective one finds Tyador Borlú. The perspective is first person. You know what Borlú knows, except that Borlú isn’t talking to the reader in a memoir fashion, explaining his history. More as if he’s talking to a colleague who understands his background. How Besźel’s police and especially it’s politics work is something that Borlú expects you to know. Since Besźel doesn’t actually exist, we’re all foreigners when we read the novel. To be successful, Borlú’s character has to suck the reader in to the story, yet let him remain displaced and the other long enough to make things interesting. Because frankly, the crime and police procedural aspects of the novel didn’t do a whole lot for me. The setting makes the novel, and Borlú was an excellent tour guide. By the end of the novel, despite the strangeness of the place, Borlú’s point of view was my point of view. That’s good writing.

Anyhow, I do want do write more in depth about the book and some of the things it got me thinking about. But to do that I’ll have to spoil what happens. Do not read page two of this entry until you’ve read the book. Normally I’m of the opinion that a book should be enjoyable even if spoiled, or it’s not really that good. The City & the City probably won’t be as good if you know the ending, which is one of the reasons why I wouldn’t rate it as high as some of his other novels. However, it’s chock full of discussion substance, which is high recommendation on its own right. That part goes on page 2. Since comments still fall on page 1, don’t put spoilers in comment responses. If you want to respond to my spoilers, write it up on your blog and use a pingback or trackback. Again, page 2 has spoilers.

Some other blogged reviews:

• SFReviews.net (contains spoilers)
• Boston Bibliophile
• Punkadiddle (contains spoilers)
• The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Book Review
• Speculative Horizons
• Torque Control (contains spoilers)

Title: The City & The City
Author: China Miéville
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Random House
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 312 p.
Publication date: May 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-49751-2
Subject: Murder — Investigation — Fiction
LC classification: PR6063.I265 C58 2009