Black on black crime.

If that phrase made you cringe, you know how I felt when I started reading Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy. As someone who strives to be anti-racist, and who has been very dialed in to the Black Lives Matter movement, I was immediately put off by the use of this phrase in the forward. Saying that the black community has no place demanding redress for police brutality until they "stop killing each other" is the worst kind of victim blaming. "We (white supremacist power structures and the white folks who perpetuate them) have ghettoized your communities and cut you off from economic and social advancement. We are shocked-SHOCKED-that this might lead to communities in crisis". I almost stopped reading the book without ever getting to the first chapter.

But I am glad I persevered (thanks, Mom-the fact that you read it and sent it to me was the only thing

to get me through). Leovy is not blaming the victims for the systemic racism in law enforcement. She is laying the blame for the high rate of black (and brown) people killing other black (and brown) people squarely on the shoulders of the racist policies of decades of policing in urban centers. Leovy's premise is that through overpolicing minor, non-violent crimes, and underpolicing/under prosecuting assaults and murders, law enforcement policy has encouraged the creation of informal systems of "justice". This "justice" system is predicated on neighborhood affiliation, with respect as currency. In this shadow system, revenge takes the place of criminal prosecution of perpetrators. Leovy explores this idea through the lens of a true story-the murder of the teen-age son of a police officer from South Central LA, otherwise know as Ghettoside by the officers who work there.

Most of the book follows a few dedicated homicide detectives working in the poor black communities in South Central LA.  One of the things that I liked about the book was the even-handed way in which the author portrays both the police detectives and the residents of the community. There is no hero and villain dichotomy, at least not at an individual level. The homicide detectives profiled are all guys who want to do their best to close cases, and the community members the author writes about are shown as multi-faceted people, rather than caricatures of "thugs" and "ghetto rats". Leovy saves her real venom for the systems and policies that have hampered the efforts of the well-meaning detectives to solve cases, and for the deep lack of understanding of the social dynamics of the communities they serve exhibited by the higher-ups who determine policy and staffing levels.

My one criticism is that the story is told primarily through the experiences of the detectives themselves, and Leovy's descriptions of their work ethic and dedication occasionally veered towards the "white savior" archetype (think the teacher from the movie Dangerous Minds), but that did not take away from the impact of her argument. Step by step, she took us through the murder case that frames the book, and through the historical and contemporary circumstances that have led us, as a nation, to where we are today in terms of urban law enforcement. As much as I hate the phrase "state monopoly on violence", that is exactly what is at play in our safer, whiter neighborhoods. As a white resident of a middle class community, I have every expectation that if I were assaulted, or God forbid murdered, that the police and the justice system would do everything in their power to prosecute the perpetrators. People living in poor black and brown neighborhoods have no such expectation. This book is thought-provoking, and provides another piece to the complex puzzle that is racism in America.

Burial Rites, Hannah Kent

While support for the death penalty seems to be a forgone conclusion in the United States, most other developed nations long ago gave up the practice.  Regardless of how you as an individual American may feel about the morality and effectiveness of the ultimate punishment, surveys show that many people around the world find it odd that we have such a strong attachment to it.  I don't actually have evidence to support what I'm about to write, but I suspect that the people of Iceland would be among them.  At least, based on the fact that the last person to be executed in Iceland was over 150 years ago.  In her novel, Burial Rites, Hannah Kent uses the real-life case of the last people to be put to death under the death penalty in Iceland as the basis for a book has been labeled a mystery, though I think it could just as easily  be called historical fiction, for its examination of the intersection of religion and law in Icelandic society.  Or women's fiction, as it examines the role of women in a society that I imagine very few American's have much experience with.

Agnes Magnusdottir has been convicted of murdering her lover.  While awaiting execution, she is sent to a remote farm to live with a district official and his family.  Escape is essentially impossible, since no one could survive in the wilderness for long.  While there, she is expected to meet with a spiritual advisor in order to repent and make her peace with God before meeting Him face to face to be judged.  The wife of the district official is at first very resistant, but as Agnes works with the family, and her story comes out, it becomes clear that executing her would be a miscarriage of justice.

Kent uses a combination of third person and first person narrative (from Agnes' point of view) to tell the story.  Agnes' story is revealed both through the comments of the other characters and her own thoughts.  The official documents that were included, and the conversations of the other characters about Agnes, are then  given context when the truth from Agnes' point of view is revealed.

What really sets this book apart from other books in this genre is the setting.  Otherwise it's a sadly familiar story of a woman who was taken advantage of by a man she loved.  But the description of Icelandic culture and the interesting narrative structure help this novel stand out from other similar mysteries, even ones with historical settings.  I look forward to seeing if Kent's future books will continue to offer familiar stories with engaging twists.

Is the Universe Trying to Tell Me Something?

The last book I reviewed for this blog was about a medieval hangman who solved the mystery of a murder supposedly perpetrated by a woman who was then falsely accused of withcraft, The Hangman's Daughter.  I read the last page, looked at my Kindle library, and chose a Robert R. McCammon book that I hadn't yet read.  The first McCammon book I read, called Boy's Life, reminded me a lot of one of my very favorite author's, Stephen King.  I assumed I would get something similar with Speaks the Nightbird.  So imagine my consternation when I found myself reading a mystery, about a murder, that was blamed on a woman, who was falsely accused of, you guessed it, witchcraft.  What exactly is the universe trying to tell me?  Should I refrain from making poppets and potions?  Healing the sick? 

Speaks the Nightbird stars Matthew Corbett, clerk for Magistrate Isaac Woodward, who is on his way to the far flung town of Fount Royal, in the Carolina territory to hold the trial of an accused witch, Rachel Howarth.  The year is 1699, and the Salem witch trials are still a fresh memory in the minds of many.  Fount Royal is the dream of a weathly shipbuilder who will do anything to see his town survive.  People have been fleeing ever since the murder of the minister and Daniel Howarth, husband of the accused.  The town founder had one goal-burn the witch, for the sake of the town!  But things are not as cut and dried as one might think.  Matthew finds himself drawn to Rachel, but more importantly to his sense of honor and justice, he thinks she has been framed, meaning the real killer is getting away with murder, literally.

Well, regardless of the message I was being sent, Speaks the Nightbird and The Hangman's Daughter are not exactly the same.  The Hangman's Daughter takes place in 17th century Germany, and Speaks the Mightbird takes place in 17th century America.  Matthew Corbett, the main character of Speaks the Nightbird, is a well educated man who was rescued from the almshouse as a young man.  The titular hangman of the other novel is an older gentleman who is a societal outcast because of his profession.  But the stories end up being remarkably similar, and both shine a light into the kind of superstition and hysteria that caused innocent men and women to be burned alive as punishment for the supposed witchcraft they hypothetically practiced. 

To be honest, if you had given me both Boy's Life and Speaks the Nightbird, minus the author's name, I would never have guessed that these books were written by the same person.  McCammon's earlier books are mostly supernatural thrillers or horror, but he took about a decade off from publishing, and Speaks the Nightbird was the first book he published in this new genre.  This book is the first in a series, of which there are at least two more.  I'm looking forward to both carching up on McCammon's earlier works, and continuing the journey with Matthew Corbett and 17th century America.

The Silent Wife

The description for The Silent Wife makes it sound a lot like your average women's fiction.  Boy meets girl, boy cheats on girl, girl pines and pines for boy, girl eventually finds a way to move on.  What makes The Silent Wife different is that the moving on is more hitman and less gallon-of-ice-
cream-on-the-couch.

Jodi and her common law husband Todd live a charmed life.  Todd, a successful developer, and Jodi, a part-time therapist, live in a luxury condominium right on Lake Michigan in the Chicago Gold Coast.  While from the outside their marriage looks charmed, within the relationship there is nothing but coldness and a lack of true connection.  Todd is a serial philanderer, and in order to keep their lives from completely falling apart, Jodi chooses to live in the state of denial.  But soon, Jodi realizes that Todd is not content to play the part of loving husband.  He is looking for a way to leave her, and as he slips away, so too does her sanity, until finally she makes her way inexorably towards a decision she can never take back.

The story is told from alternating perspectives, first Jodi's, the Todd's.  The voices change chapter to chapter, so unlike Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (to which this book has often been compared), you are reading about all of the events in real time in the story.  This book is defintely no Gone Girl.  It does not rise to the leve of dark and twisty that Flynn's book portrayed.  Honestly, the female character in that book was just evil.  Jodi is not evil, nor is she a sociopath, but she is someone who has been deeply scarred in the past, so deeply that she doesn't even remember what happened to her that created this ability to compartmentalize to such an extreme.  Once her inner boundaries start to fall, however, she begins to realize just how big a lie she has really been living.   The Silent Wife starts out slowly, and the writing style and plot stay rather understated.  But despite the sometimes clinical feeling of the writing, especially the parts narrated by Jodi, the ending has a satisfying emotional jolt that made the effort to read it worth it.

Back Roads, Which Should be Titled All Things Dark and Twisty

Let me start by saying that I am not usually squeamish about dark and twisty stories.  I have the stomach to read about things like incest, sexual assault, murder, etc...Not for me just the books that are full of sweetness and light-I like a book with a dark side.  That said, I usually want there to be some sort of redemption involved, or justice being done, or something to resolve the story such that there is a larger message about this experience of being human we are all going through.  Apparently, author Tawni O'Dell didn't get the same memo.

Back Roads is about as dark and twisty as a family drama can get.  The description on Goodreads makes the book sound a bit like an overblown Lifetime movie.  Harley is a 19 year old who suddenly finds himself looking after his three sisters after his mother is convicted of killing his abusive father.  The pressures of working two jobs to make ends meet, and dealing with the emotional fall-out of their father's murder, takes a toll on Harley.  Looking for an outlet, he begins a relationship with a mother of two from down the road.  He becomes obsessed with her, and his obsession sets off a series of events that ultimately tears his family apart.

I remember when I wrote my review for the novel Push, which I actually really appreciate as a work of literary art.  My one criticism of it was that I felt the author, Sapphire, had gone overboard on the tragedy, giving her main character every single problem that a person of her race, gender, and class might be expected to ever have.  At least in that book, however, the problems were, if not resolved, improved throughout the course of the book, and it felt as though Sapphire was trying to highlight the specific issues of racism, sexism, classism, and gender violence that many people living in urban poverty experience.  O'Dell's book also throws pretty much every family problem at her characters-incest, alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual assault, poverty-but in the end I was left wondering what the point of it all was.  Almost none of the characters were that likable or relatable.  They were all deeply flawed, which would be fine except that they never developed past them.  I felt as though just about every character left the novel in exactly the same state as when the book began.  And the serious issues presented about toxic family dynamics were sensationalized rather than examined critically.

Given all of that criticism, you might expect me to pan this book completely.  But I still gave it three stars on Goodreads.  Because despite my dissatisfaction with the ending, the story was engaging enough that I wanted to keep reading.  Granted, I wanted to keep reading because I was sure that O'Dell was going to eventually offer a moment of redemption for at least one of the characters, but it was well written enough that I didn't want to give up on it.  So if you don't mind dark and twisty for the sake of dark and twisty (and based on the number of true crime shows out there that do nothing but highlight dark and twisty there must be lots of you), then you would probably enjoy this book.

Joyland, Stephen King

King has tackled a lot of supernatural creatures over the years-mind readers, fire starters, vampires, werewolves, and really, really, REALLY creepy clowns.  But there is nothing he does as well as an old-fashioned ghost story.  He's written quite a few over the years (Bag of Bones being one of the better examples), and Joyland continues his tradition of creepy goodness!

Joyland is set in an amusement park, and the main character Devin comes there as a college student to work for a summer.  Heartbroken after losing his first love, he throws himself into the carny life.  While working at the park, he is drawn into a mystery-a young woman was killed on the haunted house ride.  People claim to have seen her ghost haunting the ride, and Devin's best friend has his own close encounter with the apparition.  Devin also befriends a dying boy who has the power to see things that most people can't see.  He tells Devin that the girl will not be at rest until her killer is found.  Devin is drawn into both the search for the murderer and a relationship with the boy's mother.

King does his usual masterful job of creating characters that almost leap right out of the pages into real life. There is a nostalgic feeling to the story, which is told as a long flashback from Devin's point of view, and which I've noticed in more of his books the older he's gotten.  King must have also done quite a bit of research into the world of carnies, which has its own culture and language. Like in many of his books, the character with a disability has some sort of special ability, which sadly does not keep them from tragedy.  As ghost stories go this one is less scary and more sad, given the circumstances of the girl's death.  As mysteries go it's pretty well done, with a noir feel that suited the setting perfectly.  On a scale of one to The Stand, I'd say this one is about an eight.  Easy to read, entertaining, and perfect for a lazy day at the beach, which is exactly where I read it.

Boy's Life, by Richard R. McCammon

I suppose it is human nature to idealize our own past.  As we age, we recall the good ol' days when things were simpler.  Nothing beats the nostalgia of our remembered childhood.  A certain toy or a snippet of a

song can transport us back to an earlier time, when the biggest thing most of us had to worry about was our little league team's record, or when the next installment of our favorite comic was coming out.

Ok, I know that the past was not nearly as idyllic as "Leave it to Beaver" or "The Brady Bunch" would have us believe.  There was ugliness-child abuse and alcoholism and racism and poverty are not exactly new phenomenon in human history.  But if you were lucky, and you grew up in the 60s and 70s in America, your dad had a decent job in a mill or a factory, mom was home to greet you after school with a snack, and your summer was full of bike-riding and swimming and catching fire-flies.  It is that America that exists in Richard McCammon's Zephyr, Alabama, the setting of his novel Boy's Life.  The main character, Cory, is a 12 year old boy, in that awkward phase we now call the 'tweens.  His dad was a milkman, his mom a stay at home mother, and he and his four best friends loved comics and baseball and looking for arrowheads.  But, just as we know that the good ol' days weren't always that good, Zephyr has its secret horrors hiding below the surface.  One morning, on the way to school, Cory and his father see a car go over the guardrail and into the lake.  Cory's dad jumps in to save the driver, only to find that he is already dead-his face unrecognizable, a piano wire wrapped around his throat, handcuffed to the steering wheel.  This incident haunts Cory's father, and throughout the course of the novel we find out what happened to the man in the car.  The novel takes place over the course of a year, and is chock-full of magical happenings, culminating in the resolution of the original mystery.

The novel is written very much in the style of "Stand By Me" by Stephen King, and there appeared to be a few send-ups to the great man himself-a pet that comes back from the dead, a ghost car that prowls the roads.  McCammon sets a scene about as well as King does, with evocative descriptions and creative turns-of-phrase.  Perhaps it was my own summers spent in rural southern Alabama as a kid, but the characters and story felt very authentic to me, even as the magic strains belief.  While reading the novel, one can take the story literally as a supernatural mystery, or one can see the magic as a metaphor for the magical thinking we all have in childhood, when monsters under the bed are real, and riding our bikes really does make us feel like we've sprouted wings to fly.  It is also very much the story of one boy going from child to not-quite-a-man, and realizing that the adults in his life are not entirely what he thought them to be.  Cory learns some hard lessons the year he was 12, but they are lessons that all of us learn at one point or another.  Most of McCammon's other novels sound very much like lurid monster fiction, but they are on my to-read list anyway, because I have to believe that the man that wrote this thoughtful, nostalgic book handled those stories with the same finesse he used writing Boy's Life.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

Never having read any of Gillian Flynn's other books, I wasn't sure what to expect from Gone Girl.  The plot sounded intriguing enough, but a story about a missing woman and her murder suspect of a husband could also go horribly, Lifetime-movie wrong.  But Flynn's story goes far beyond a schmaltzy made-for-tv plot.  In fact, it takes the all-too-familiar story and turns it on its head.

Gone Girl is a story in three parts, each told from one of two perspectives.  The first part sets the stage-a woman, Amy Dunne, is missing.  Her husband Nick comes home to find the front door open and the house a wreck.  He calls the police, and cooperates with their investigation until it becomes clear that he is the prime suspect in what the police have decided is a murder.  The rest of the novel explores both Nick and Amy's marriage and the investigation-both Nick's and the police's-that twists and turns its way to a really strange and dark place.

I realize that this summary is a little light on detail.  That's because this is apparently THE book of the summer, and I've decided not to ruin anything for anyone.  The fact is, this is a book that really needs to be read to be believed.  Flynn takes a rather cynical idea about marriage-that we pretend to be someone we're not when we meet our mate, only to be disappointed when we realize they aren't who they pretended to be either-and uses it as the basis for taking the reader to some dark and twisty places.  I literally had almost no clue what might be coming next for most of the book, and that unpredictability kept me reading long past when I should have put the book down and, oh, I don't know, cooked dinner/mowed the lawn/SLEPT!

Flynn also achieves another uncommon feat.  Even though I didn't like either of the main characters, or frankly most of the minor characters, I couldn't stop reading.  This book is really just one long object lesson against selfishness.  Every single character is selfish in some way, and it makes them pretty unattractive.  But it became an ugly fascination for me.  I couldn't believe some of the lengths to which the characters went to hurt each other and/or protect themselves from their own bad acts, but not in a bad "this books is ridiculously unbelievable and therefore unreadable" sort of way .  The mental gymnastics necessary to justify their actions was pretty impressive.  And you get to see a lot of mental gymnastics in this book-despite the fact that there is a lot of action, at least early on, the book really delves into the internal lives of the characters.  Flynn has really created an engaging, un-put-downable piece of fiction!

Clean Break, by David Klein

As much as we may enjoy flashy stories about fantastical characters (you know, like mind-reading waitresses , sparkly vampires, and serial killers), the most moving, powerful fiction most often comes from the stories of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.  Such is the case with David Klein's newest book, Clean Break.  It tells the story of four people-Adam, Celeste, Jake, and Sara-and the way their lives randomly intersect, causing each person's path to be drastically changed as a result.

Celeste is a wife and mother, living the dream in the wealthy suburbs of New York.  At least, she is until she discovers that her husband, Adam, has gambled away all of their savings, and finds himself in debt to some unsavory characters.  Adam, for his part, admits he has an addiction, and goes off to rehab, certain that this will make everything OK between he and Celeste.  But Celeste has other plans.  After years of making excuses and forgiving his transgressions, she leaves him while he is in rehab.  When he comes out, he is determined to get her back-and even justifies a return to gambling (short-term, of course) as a way to get the money to convince her he can be a good husband.

Things come to a head one night when Celeste discovers that her husband has once again gambled away all of his money.  When she confronts him, and asks for a divorce, Adam attacks her.  Lucky for Celeste, Jake stumbles upon them on his way home from work, and he is able to diffuse the situation and save her from any further harm.  Jake, for his part, is at the end of an affair with an NYPD officer, Sara.  When Celeste comes to thank him for his help, he becomes infatuated with her.  But will be do whatever it takes to make her safe?

The story is told from alternating perspectives, a narrative structure that has become more and more common for this type of story.  Each person becomes the protagonist of their own chapters, and Klein is able to show each person's mental journey to the choices they eventually make.  Despite some initial sympathy, Adam end up being a very unsympathetic character indeed.  But the other three characters are more layered.  Each person is flawed in some way, but trying desperately to do the right thing in the face of their own bad choices.

The title is a bit on-the-nose regarding the essential question of the story-is it possible to get a "clean break"? But each characters is, in their own way, trying to find a new way to be.  They want to shed their old selves and become better.  But each one is fighting against something-their own nature, their past relationships, guilt over past actions.  The thing about making new start is that it is impossible to completely leave all of your past behind.  We are, each of us, the function of all of our experiences-good, bad, or neutral, each person we come into contact and each decision we make forms who we are, and we can't help but be affected by the patterns of thought and behavior they create.  But sometimes, we end up doing something that we never would have guessed we were capable of doing.  Whether that ends up being a good or bad thing is up to us.

Pray for Silence, Linda Castillo

After years of reading almost nothing but mystery/thrillers (they were mostly free, don't judge!), it is pretty hard to find a book in that genre that feels entirely new to me.  Part of why I like a lot of mysteries and thriller is because they are usually fairly predictable and formulaic, thereby allowing me to lose myself in the story of the moment without actually having to think terribly hard.  Admittedly, this gets a bit old.  And it is for that reason that I am glad that I discovered Linda Castillo and her Kate Burkholder series.

I read the first book in this series, Sworn to Silence, earlier this year.  It introduces chief of police Kate Burkholder, a former Amish who chose not to be baptized into the church after a traumatic event in her childhood.  Pray for Silence starts with the discovery of an Amish family murdered in their own home-mom, dad, and five children.  Violent crime is very rare in the Amish community, and Kate can't imagine what the motive could be.  But the Amish have the same human fallibility as the rest of us, and it soon became apparent that at least one of the family members was hiding a secret that put their entire family in danger.  Kate once again teamed up with state bureau of investigations agent John Tomasetti, who shows up in Painters Mill after being suspended for a failed drug test.  Their budding relationship continues, both of them dragging their respective baggage, and tripping over it more often than not, in their desire to be together.

The horrific nature of the crime scene stands out starkly against the backdrop of the peaceful Amish community, though the bulk of the action in this novel takes place in the English community, not the Amish.  Castillo does a decent job of describing the Amish community, their history and traditions, in such a way that it does not feel stereotypical.  Where she is pretty stereotypical, however, is in the characters of Kate and John.  I mean, to read most mystery writers, one would assume that all detectives are damaged, stand-offish, and terrible at relationships.  Add the fact of Tomasetti's drug and alcohol problems, and you have a caricature of every hard-boiled detective ever.  Luckily I don't read her books for creative characterization, but for an engaging story set in an unusual setting, and that Castillo delivers on.

Shoot to Thrill, PJ Tracy

Usually I don't really care for novels that have more than one author.  I tend to find them disjointed and without the flow that novels by one author have.  The rare exception is the Monkeewrench series by PJ Tracy.

PJ Tracy is the pseudonym of the mother and daughter writing team of PJ and Traci Lambrecht.  Together they have created one of the more unique crime-fighting teams in today's contemporary thriller landscape.  Monkeewrench is a company made up of four completely unique individuals.  Harley Davidson, Annie Belinsky, Roadrunner, and Grace McBride are computer geniuses with enough quirks and eccentricities to fill a football stadium.  They were fist introduced in the novel Monkeewrench, in which they were reluctantly dragged into helping the police after someone started killing people in exactly the same way as the serial killers in a serial killer detective game they had created. 

In this new novel, Shoot to Thrill, Grace and her team must put their considerable computer skills to work tracking someone who is murdering people, filming it, and then posting the video online.  While there are many possibilities (like every internet user in the country), what is more frightening is the idea that there could be a whole community of people who are participating.  Rolseth and Magozzi, along with new character FBI Agent John Smith, ask the Monkeewrench team to use their special (hacking) skills to try and trace the videos, and what they discover is closer to home than they think.

While I really enjoyed this book, I didn't think it was quite as good as the others.  It seemed as though the Monkeewrench people took a backseat to the law enforcement officers on this one, and they are so fascinating as characters it left the story feeling a little flat.  Not that Magozzi and Rolseth don't have their charms-they are some of the most likable police characters since Milo Sturgis from the Alex Delaware novels by Jonathan Kellerman (though any faithful reader of this blog knows I'm mad at them right now!).  When we did get to spend time with the crew at Harley Davidson's mansion, it was more about their work and how they interacted with the FBI agent in their space than about them as characters.  However, the way that the book ended gives me hope that some interesting changes are coming to the world of Monkeewrench for the next book, and I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes computers and mysteries.  Go back and start with Monkeewrench, though, if you haven't read this author yet.  This particular series is better in order.