Year: 2007

Posted on

Christie, Agatha: Sleeping Murder (radio play)

In Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, a woman buys a house and then slowly remembers that she lived there as a child . . . when she may have been the sole witness to an unknown murder.

This is a very linear mystery, with lines of investigation raised and dropped one after another. I saw the end result of every line of thinking shortly before the characters did, including the solution. I don’t object to this, but it was notable.

The other thing of note about this story, at least in the radio adaptation, is that Miss Marple has a distinctly supporting role. The point-of-view characters are the woman and her new husband, who Miss Marple advises and does some secondary information gathering for. While the couple aren’t that exceptional, they are nice as a change of pace.

No Comments

Posted on

Jones, Diana: Dogsbody

I’ve been vaguely meaning to read Diana Wynne Jones’s Dogsbody for some time. Recently I saw a passing mention of it just before I was going to the library and just after I’d finished re-reading A Night in the Lonesome October. Hey, they’re both fantasy novels narrated by dogs, right? (Entities in dog form, at least.)

It turns out that even though A Night in the Lonesome October is about an attempt to open this world to Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, as told by Jack the Ripper’s dog, it is still lighter than Dogsbody.

Some of this darkness is present from the beginning, in which the occupant of the star Sirius is wrongfully convicted of murder and condemmed to live and die in a mortal body, unless he can find a MacGuffin. Not long after his birth, his mother’s owner tries to drown him and his littermates. He’s rescued by a girl named Kathleen and raised by her—as best she can, considering that she is the despised Irish relative-by-marriage of a horrible English woman who makes her do all the housework and starves Sirius.

I know, cheerful, right? But after that, the book focuses on Sirius getting the hang of being a dog (he only dimly remembers his prior existence), so the nastiness is buffered by this and by the prose style:

 . . . it came to him what it was he really wanted to chew. The ideal thing. With a little ticker-tack of claws, he crept to the door and up the stairs. He nosed open the door of the main bedroom without difficulty and, with a little more trouble, succeeded in opening the wardrobe too. Inside were shoes—long large leather shoes, with laces and thick chewable soles. Sirius selected the juiciest and took it under the bed to enjoy in peace.

The thunderous voice found him there and chased him around the house with a walking stick. Duffie spoke long and coldly. Kathleen wept. Robin tried to explain about teething. Basil jeered. And throughout, Tibbles sat thoughtfully on the sideboard, giving the inside of her left front leg little hasty licks, like a cat seized with an idea. Sirius saw her. To show his contempt and to soothe his feelings, he went into the kitchen and ate the cats’ supper. Then he lay down glumly to gnaw the unsatisfactory rubber thing Kathleen had bought him.

(The book is actually in omniscient, and I found its shifts to other characters’ points-of-view rather distracting, since I had been attributing the prose style to Sirius’s nature.)

As Sirius’s new body grows, he remembers more, and the plot starts happening . . . until the ending, which is like getting hit in the face out of nowhere. Some of this reaction is undoubtedly the cognitive dissonance caused by reading this right after A Night in the Lonesome October. Even putting that aside as best I can, though, I don’t feel that I understand the reasons for the ending—not the character motivations, but why the book went in that direction. (The one thematic explanation that comes to mind seems an odd fit for the mythology.) And so I am left baffled and somewhat bruised.

Jones’s books are very hit-or-miss for me in ways that defy categorization, and I think in the end I’m just not the right reader for this book.

I’m putting a spoiler post to discuss the ending over on LiveJournal, because it’s a better audience for it.

6 Comments

Posted on

Crusie, Jennifer, and Bob Mayer: Agnes and the Hitman

Agnes and the Hitman is Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer’s second collaboration, which I like quite a bit more than their first, Don’t Look Down. It has the same virtues—characterization, banter, action—but in service of an overall plot that I found more enjoyable. I borrowed this from the library, but am now tempted to buy it in hardcover rather than wait for the paperback. (I’ll probably resist, but still: tempted.)

Agnes is a food columnist with an anger problem and a newly-purchased house. When a guy shows up in her kitchen demanding that she hand over her dog, she smacks him with her frying pan . . . and he falls through a papered-over swinging door into the basement and breaks his neck. On hearing this, one of Agnes’s friends decides she needs protection, and sends it in the form of his nephew Shane, a government hitman. Complications ensue in ways that pretty much defy easy summary but include a mob wedding, old family secrets, and a startlingly high body count.

Despite said body count, this strikes me as a nicer book than Don’t Look Down, perhaps because it’s much more explicitly about building bridges (both literal and figurative) and creating family and a home. The romance between Agnes and Shane also clicks better than the prior book’s. My only complaint is that the portrayal of the sole black character makes me twitch just a bit; I kept getting flashes of Samuel L. Jackson or Laurence Fishburne reprising their serene-yet-kick-ass black man roles. However, the characterization isn’t entirely stereotypical, and the very existence of the character is a good thing, since I can’t remember another black (or even non-white) character in Crusie’s books.

The first chapter is online and is a lot of fun.

No Comments

Posted on

Roberts, Nora: High Noon

Really, I have so little to say about Nora Roberts’ High Noon that I almost didn’t bother writing this. I checked it out of the library on Saturday when I saw it on the two-week shelf, read it on Sunday when I was feeling bleh and needed words to pass by my eyes in a mindlessly entertaining way, and here on Monday, have already forgotten a good many of the details. Nevertheless:

This is basically Blue Smoke with hostage negotiation instead of arson investigation, a less obvious villain, and a movie motif that seems almost random, because what I remember about the movie High Noon doesn’t fit this book very well. In other words, it’s pretty much what I expected, and some days that’s just not a bad thing.

No Comments

Posted on

Wilks, Eileen: (01) Tempting Danger

I grabbed Eileen Wilks’ Tempting Danger from the library based on Hannah Wolf Bowen’s review (scroll down). I don’t think I liked it quite as much as she did, but I liked it enough to check out the rest of the series.

In a parallel present-day San Diego, Detective Lily Yu is investigating a murder that appears to have been committed by a lupus (werewolf). Rule Turner, the heir to the local clan, is the chief suspect. And while it’s probably never a good thing to be a murder suspect, it’s worse than usual for a very visible member of a clan that supports the Species Citizenship Bill, currently facing an uphill battle in Congress. (Though it’s no longer legal to shoot lupi on sight, that came from courts, not legislatures.) Because of the potential political damage, Rule offers to assist Lily with the investigation by briefing her on lupus culture and habits, which are generally unknown or misunderstood. But this murder turns out to be a piece in a bigger game, one played not just by mortals and with life-changing stakes.

I liked quite a lot about this book, including a number of the things that Hannah talked about: the matter-of-fact diversity of the characters, the pre-existing family relationships and friendships (I want more about Lily’s Grandmother!), the general lack of stupidity among the characters. I liked that the tragedies in the characters’ pasts were not overwhelming revelations of DOOM. I liked the world: there are werewolves, gnomes, deities, humans with a wide variety of magical abilities, and other realms that shouldn’t touch any more but perhaps are starting to. This is a world on the cusp of social and magical change, and I find that interesting.

This book is shelved in romance, and so that’s where I’m categorizing it, but that is strictly a marketing decision: give it a different cover and stick it in fantasy, and I assure you that no-one would bat an eye. In fact, I recommend not thinking of it as a romance novel, because I wasn’t interested in the way the romance began and was therefore not very interested in the book at first, when I thought the romance was going to be more central than it was.

Other small complaints: the expository prose isn’t anything special, and while the dialogue is generally good, every use of nadia as a title/endearment rather than a proper name jolted me out of the story. And although I suspect there will eventually be an in-story reason for all lupi to be men, it bugs me now.

On the whole, an enjoyable paperback read. I look forward to seeing how the sequels develop.

2 Comments

Posted on

Christie, Agatha: Sittaford Mystery, The (radio play)

I picked a radio adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery because it was referenced in To Say Nothing of the Dog, though not in a way that helped me solve it. This opens with a seance that communicates that a Captain Trevelyan is dead—murdered—though the last anyone knew, he was just fine. One of the seance participants goes to check, and of course discovers his corpse. (Oddly, the seance is not mentioned in To Say Nothing.)

This didn’t work very well as a radio play. The solution relies on a psychological motivation that’s told, not shown. And John Moffat plays a character who is not Hercule Poirot, which was tremendously distracting. The story itself also has some problems: the method is not very interesting, and it contains an odious view of marriage. So, long story short: just because it gets a shout-out from Connie Willis, doesn’t mean it’s good.

3 Comments

Posted on

Brockmann, Suzanne: (11) Force of Nature

My Suzanne Brockmann binge is over for the moment with Force of Nature, the most recent hardcover in her Troubleshooters series and the reason I went on this binge in the first place. (Well, okay, one of the reasons. The other is the sequel, which will be out at the end of the month.) More specifically, I wanted to read Force of Nature because it moves forward the romantic arc of one of my favorite characters, FBI agent Jules Cassidy. Who is gay, making this not exactly standard fare in the romantic suspense subgenre.

That arc is braided into two others: a suspense plot involving a mobster who may have terrorist ties, and a romance between characters who unwillingly get involved with the mobster. These are basically fine, though I have nitpicks about both. (A suspense subplot is dropped rather abruptly, and one of the romance conflicts drops out of the sky, instead of being present in the character’s point-of-view throughout as it should.) Oh, and the whole “resolving romantic conflicts upon thinking you are going to die/the other person is dead” thing, while a natural fit for romantic suspense, is getting a bit repetitive.

I was pleasantly surprised that this book didn’t have any show-stopping speeches about tolerance or other such Important Messages; it’s not shy about taking positions on such matters, but seems to integrate them somewhat better into the flow of the story. And despite my quibbles, the book has good forward momentum and is a fun read. But in the end, I have to admit that I might very well read about Jules doing his laundry or reading the paper, so I’m not really objective.

No Comments

Posted on

Brockmann, Suzanne: (08-09) Hot Target; Breaking Point

More catching up with Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series. I don’t have much to add to my initial comments about Hot Target, except that I was more interested in the principal relationship thread this time around. It’s still not as engaging as Jules’ secondary thread, but I didn’t want to skip over it.

Oh, and it does contain most of the characters introduced in Flashpoint, but in a low-key enough way that I’d completely forgotten them in the interim.

The next book in the series, Breaking Point, is new to me. It’s similar to Gone Too Far in that it’s the culmination of a long-running relationship arc that I ended up enjoying more than I expected. Yes, Max and Gina are angst puppets, but I like Max a lot more than Sam. And while his issues are the obstacle to their relationship, they are revealed to be more complex than his inability to get past her rape.

The external plot seems rather elaborate and did not really come in focus for me, but possibly this is because it’s mostly about another set of characters, Molly and Grady, who I’m indifferent to. However, it serves the purpose of pushing forward the relationships—including the friendship of Jules and Max, which I particularly enjoyed seeing.

No Comments

Posted on

Willis, Connie: To Say Nothing of the Dog (audio)

Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time-travel novel that pays tribute to, while gently poking fun at, Three Men in a Boat and Golden Age mysteries (Christie & Sayers particularly). I listened to the audiobook read by Steven Crossley.

This book is a good example of why genre is important. The time travel in the beginning reminded me vaguely of Kage Baker’s Company series, and so I was expecting something sinister to be lurking the background—especially with the airy, implausible assertion that there was no profit in time travel because material objects couldn’t be brought out of their own times, and so it was left to the academics. (The Company’s strategy for exploiting the past, hiding away artifacts lost to history and then “rediscovering” them, would work just fine.) However, this is a comedy, so nothing sinister’s to be seen.

Instead, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a long, amusing wander through Victorian England from the point of view of Ned Henry, a seriously time-lagged 21st-century Oxford historian who boats down the Thames with two men and a bulldog, and winds up at a country house trying to identify a mysterious Mr. C—in service of a mission that he can’t remember, but that may be vital to the outcome of World War II or, perhaps, to the preservation of the time-space continuum. At points I thought it might be a little too long for listening. For one thing, I figured out Ned’s mission well before he did; for another, the whole book is almost 21 hours, which is on the long side no matter what’s happening. However, the narrator does a nice job, and listening means I’m more likely to notice the jokes.

Time travel stories tend not to be my thing: either they make my head hurt or they take a view of the universe I don’t care for. I could take or leave the time-travel plot here. However, I adore the conclusion of the country-house plot—I laughed and laughed when it was revealed—and that made the whole book worthwhile, for me.

(A couple other minor infelicities about the audio version: every time the title is worked into the narration, it really stands out, and sometimes it feels forced. Also, I was deeply disappointed to find that “placet” is pronounced with an audible “t”; I didn’t take Latin and was mentally pronouncing it as though it were French, which sounds much more suited to romance. Not that this last is the book’s fault, of course.)

10 Comments

Posted on

Brockmann, Suzanne: (07) Flashpoint

Flashpoint starts a new arc in Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series, focusing on all-new characters and the new civilian team created as a result of the prior two books. It has no World War II content whatsoever and is substantially shorter than its immediate predecessors. After an earthquake in an Afghanistan-analogue, a covert five-person team heads in to recover a MacGuffin. Two of them, Tess and Nash, are forced to pretend to be married, and of course they just happen to have unresolved relationship issues. Meanwhile, they cross paths with another new character, Sofia, who is escaping from sexual torture at the hands of the local warlord.

Oracne and I were just discussing, in comments to the Into the Storm post, the allocation of Giant Angst between the men and women in this series, and this book definitely felt to me like the men had a disproportionate share. In the principal relationship thread, it seems like Tess’s role is basically to stand around while Nash wrestles with his Giant Angst. I didn’t find this thread satisfactory, and then I realized at least one reason why: it isn’t complete. There’s absolutely no way to tell that from this book—which is another problem—but some unresolved problem is hinted at in Into the Storm, which I hadn’t registered at the time because I didn’t know the characters.

Sophia also strikes me as problematic in terms of Giant Angst, though partly I’m judging her by (1) her appearance in Into the Storm and (2) her functional resemblance to Gina Vitagliano, another character with a long arc that started in traumatic sexual violence. Sophia is brave and tough and manages to rescue herself pretty well in this book. However, what I’ve seen of both her and Gina’s subsequent arcs—and I haven’t completed them—strike me as taking their Giant Angst, of trauma to be overcome, and making it instead their would-be lovers’ Giant Angst, as an obstacle that they can’t get past even though the women already have. And I am uncomfortable with this shift, together with the extended focus on the trauma.

As I said, though, I haven’t finished either of these arcs—indeed, Sophia’s arc isn’t finished yet—so perhaps my concerns will be addressed. However, it was another thing about this book that left me feeling mildly grumpy. But even though Brockmann’s relationships are hit-or-miss for me, I still want to find out what happens next . . .

No Comments