Author: katenepveu

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Robb, J.D.: (25) Creation in Death

Creation in Death, the most recent J.D. Robb novel, is a nicely-paced, straight-ahead police procedural. The killer responsible for a series of torture murders nine years ago is back, and Eve Dallas and the rest of the police department race the clock to find him before he finishes killing his victims.

For all that I quibble with aspects of this series, it is hugely readable, and this one is particularly so, with a very effective sense of urgency and tension. I also liked what it does with the character of Ariel, and the nice moment it gives Morris.

Obligatory quibbles: the author forces Eve to silently ignore an obvious follow-up question (I mean so obvious that even I was waiting for it) to drag the story out a little longer. (Possibly also to act stupidly later for extra tension, but I’m not as sure about that.) And I wasn’t quite convinced by one of the personal conflicts that accompanies the main plot.

But, on the whole, I think this is probably one of the better books in the series, and I enjoyed it a lot.

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Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I listed to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as read by Eric Idle. I don’t think I can say anything new about the book overall: its fantastic inventiveness, its peculiarity, and its cruel streak are all much-remarked. So instead I’ll make a couple of comments about the listening experience.

Idle does a very enjoyable job generally, but I wish the producer had managed his volume better. Generally, when a character whispers on the page, the reader should not whisper, because it’s too hard for a listener to make out the words. (Ditto shouting, though that’s more a matter of sparing the listener’s ears.) Experienced audiobook readers manage the intensity of their reading rather than the volume, which works much better.

The other thing about listening is that it made me wonder where the book was supposed to be set. I’d always assumed it was in Britain, as Dahl was a British writer and it has that indefinably British air. However, though Idle gives Charlie and his family British accents, the money Charlie finds in the street is a dollar bill, and some of the other children have American accents. It’s a bit peculiar, though only distracting in the slower pace of an audiobook.

I don’t remember a thing about the sequel, and look forward to rediscovering it.

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Chase, Loretta: (102) Mr. Impossible

Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible was very favorably reviewed back when it came out, so I picked up a copy and left it on the shelf to age. On Halloween, I was cranky about trick-or-treaters interrupting me and agitating the dog, so I picked it up as likely to cheer me up.

Well, this was simply adorable: a fun, sweet, solid romance. I finished it and immediately ordered all of Chase’s other available books from Amazon and Fictionwise (one was only available as an e-book).

Daphne Pembroke is a widow living in Cairo and studying Egyptology. However, thanks to 1820s prejudice against women scholars, she passes her linguistic work off as her brother’s. This backfires when her brother buys her a particularly fine papyrus that is rumored to contain the location of an undiscovered royal tomb. Now he’s been kidnapped and the papyrus stolen by a ruthless, slightly deranged antiquities seeker. When Daphne asks the British counsulate for help, it kills two birds with one stone and has her bail Rupert Carsington out of jail to act as her assistant. (He’s been imprisoned for stopping the pasha’s soldiers from beating a beggar—not the first time he’s been in trouble—and the consulate is finding him expensive.)

Rupert resembles Ivan Vorpatril, without all the trauma. He spends the early part of the book being provokingly stupid, at first because he’s bored in jail and then to distract Daphne from her anxiety. He’s not just comic relief, of course, being perceptive and straightforwardly commonsensical. Perceptive about people, that is: he’s not much for self-analysis, and so doesn’t quite know what to make of the fact that he doesn’t just want to get Daphne naked.

For Daphne’s part, she comes to appreciate Rupert’s support and admiration (once he stops being deliberately provoking, that is). She’s spent years suppressing her passions, and then Rupert comes along and is impressed by her intellect; teaches her to use a pistol; trusts her to rescue herself; and, of course, gets her naked. The book is thus a lovely combination of Daphne learning to fill her own skin and the two of them gradually, convincingly getting to know and rely on each other.

Another thing I liked about this book is that it doesn’t have Daphne discover an unknown tomb or make a breakthrough translation of hieroglyphics or anything like that (which is sadly common in historical stories). The book shows us that Daphne is smart, and doesn’t need to rewrite history to hammer the point home. Similarly, it effectively employs period beliefs such as bodily humors and the formal use of names (and quietly critiques others, like the wholesale looting of Egypt’s antiquities). I’m sure a scholar would find things to criticize about the historical details, but the characters don’t feel like modern people playing dress-up, which is refreshing. (The secondary characters are also fun, including the mongoose.)

I recommend this highly and am looking forward to reading more of Chase’s books.

(The book is part of a series, but stands alone well.)

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Brockmann, Suzanne: (12) All Through the Night

Suzanne Brockmann’s All Through the Night is the sequel to Force of Nature, and a bit of a departure, for three reasons. First, it’s a wedding book, and almost all prior weddings in the series have taken place off stage. Second, the plot contains much less emphasis on suspense. And third, two men are getting married.

In other words, Jules and Robin have moved to Massachusetts for work reasons and, at the start of the book, decide to get married. The run-up to the wedding includes the home renovations from hell, a deceitful newspaper reporter, a nuisance-making ex, and a crazy stalker. The focus of the book is, however, squarely on Jules and Robin’s relationship: the stalker is part of less than half the book, and the secondary romance thread is underwritten to the point of being unconvincing. (For those who’ve read “Winterfair Gifts,” Lois McMaster Bujold’s wedding novella that I appear never to have booklogged, it’s basically the inverse of that.) Fortunately, there’s still plenty of development of Jules and Robin’s relationship to fill the book; though marked as a “holiday novella,” it’s a satisfying read at 300 pages (84,000 words).

Oddly, then, this may not be a bad book to start reading the series, as it’s shorter, more focused, and less dependent on backstory than many in the series. It would also give the new reader an idea whether they don’t mind Brockmann’s political commentary, which is on full display here. (She is donating all income from this book to Mass Equality.) I enjoyed it a lot, for all that the external plots are rather thin, and am happy to leave the series here for a while.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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