The Old Cape Blood Ruby - Barbara Eppich Struna

Truly a story that travels from sea to shining sea and spans the years from earliest beginnings of the United States to today. It is part memoir, part mystery, and part historical fiction. Parts of the story are written in the first person and parts from the third person points of view. There are a lot of threads to weave together into a coherent and entertaining tale.

The “pigeon’s blood” ruby is a set in a mysterious ring that appears on the finger in the portrait of a historic lady that hangs over the fireplace of Neil Hallett. The ring is allegedly from the treasure of the pirate, Sam Bellamy, captain of the notorious Wydah—another neat loop in Struna’s tale. Hallett, the thief, is descended from a thief. New England, and Cape Cod in particular, is filled with family history. The graveyards are filled with Bangs, Swetts, Allens, and Brewsters. They were settlers, fishermen, and ministers. The fictional Walter Ellis of this story was a fisherman, whose livelihood was cut short by the destruction of his ship in the Portland Gale of 1898. Leaving his family, he sets off to find gold in Alaska.

By a twist of fate, he is set upon by thugs on the streets of Seattle, and misses his passage to Alaska and separated from his friends. When he recovers, he signs on to another ship owned by a millionaire named E.H. Harriman, a railroad tycoon. In 1899, Harriman sponsored and accompanied a scientific expedition to catalog the flora and fauna of the Alaska coastline. Many prominent scientists and naturalists went on the expedition, aboard the luxuriously refitted 250-foot steamer, SS George W. Elder. Struna’s fictional Walter Ellis signed aboard to complete his journey to Juneau. Another twist of fate, burns and disfigures Ellis, and causes him to lose the sight of one eye and putting him into the hospital in Juneau where he is cared for by an attractive Indigenous nurse.

These aspects of history are interwoven with present day Nancy Caldwell, history detective. She is the link that connects Provincetown to Juneau and the past to the present. Nancy has a son who happens to be living in Alaska near where Walter Ellis ended up. During a familial visit she acquires the remnants of a letter and a wallet discovered by a young girl in a cleft in a rock.

Nancy is an antiques sleuth, and when she returns to Cape Cod she is invited to survey the contents of an old house in Provincetown. Neil Hallett is also interested in the contents of the house, and Struna begins to weave the stories into an interesting tapestry. Will Walter abandon hopes of returning to his family and marry the beautiful nurse? Will the Tlingit tribe accept him? Will his wife remarry, declaring Walter dead? Will Neil Hallett find the ruby before Nancy Caldwell does?

This is a complicated story with Struna juggling all the different elements. As a reader, I could feel her joy at bringing the past to life. An old house is full of memories from all the lives that have passed through it. This is a well researched, well founded, and interesting tale that satisfies an interest in history, twisted into a gentle and loving mystery. It is respectful of Indigenous Alaskan people as well as the present day residents of Cape Cod while honoring the use of the reader’s time.

Killer Houses

I have been working with houses professionally for over forty years. They intrigue me. They talk to me. I feel their pain when they are neglected or badly constructed or torn down and thrown in the dump like a pile of discarded bones. When bad things happen to the occupants, it’s not the house’s fault.

A house is an assemblage of wood, stone, metal, glass, pipes, wires, and mechanical equipment—just like Frankenstein was an assemblage of body parts. His evil qualities were imbued by those that didn’t understand him. The framing of the house is the skeleton. The wires are the nerves. The pipes and the ducts are the veins and the lungs. The boiler or furnace is the heart.

There is no question that houses play major roles—often title roles—in many novels. They become part of the story in a variety of ways just as the other characters do. Wuthering Heights begins, “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.” Susan Howatch, the author of Penmarric, introduces the house as soon as she introduces the protagonist. Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, wastes no time, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”

If the occupants care, battle nature, and maintain the paint, roof, windows, and conditioning systems, the house can last a very long time. There is a wooden house in the Faroe Islands that is presently occupied by the seventeenth generation of a family who have lived in the house for almost five hundred years.

The houses that have been in a family for generations are replete with all the family’s own ghosts and skeletons in the closets. But another theme of nasty house related stories involves houses that are new to the subjects of the novel, families moving into them to escape memories of some tragedy or other. The death of a child seems to be common one. It becomes abundantly clear in these escape stories that the memories move along with the souvenirs of Niagra Falls and Disney Land. The family is attempting to start a new life and leave the old memories behind, but they are often about to inherit someone else’s family horrors.

Many of the old family houses are grand mansions, meant to impress, with hundreds of rooms. (Some mysteriously have more space inside than outside.) Some of them are as simple as a London flat as in Jemma Wayne’s To Dare or the cottage in Billy O’Callaghan’s The Dead House. In Noel Vindry’s locked room novel, The House that Kills, the stone house is definitely an innocent bystander that gets attacked by investigators with picks and shovels seeking a secret passage. I found it particularly telling that the investigators in this 1932 novel used a perfume as a tracer gas to find air currents.

In 17 Church Row, James Carol takes evil spirits connected to a house to a whole new level. The evil persona in this novel was created by man but takes on a life of its own. This persona is the disembodied soul of the house. A nice young family, suffering from the tragic loss of a child think they can escape their memories by moving to a brand new, state-of-the-art house with no door knobs.

The virtual assistant in this book has been taught to think, reason, and feel at least to the level of a six-year-old’s consciousness with almost infinite access to the world’s knowledge base, connected by wires, fiber optics, and satellites. ‘She’ does open doors and drawers and make coffee on command, but ‘she’ is a character. There is an immediate connection in the opening sentence: “Father attempted to murder me once.”

Houses are shelters. Not killers. They carve out a safe place to protect us from wind, rain, and snow. There are indeed mysterious places in houses—under the stairs, under the eaves, down in the basement, in the back corner of the attic where no one ever goes. But it is the ghosts in the occupants’ imaginations and the guilt in their memories that are the real killers.

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There will be a podcast episode about this on February 11, 2022 on https://www.buildingHVACScience.com Give it a listen.

Clever Cozies

What is a COZY Mystery? A cozy mystery has been described as a “fun read that engages the mind”. They are commonly a series of books with an amateur sleuth that is tied to a fictional community such as Jessica Fletcher’s Cabot Cove in the Murder She Wrote series. These books are usually written from the first person or close 3rd person point of view. They commonly have side-kicks—sometimes pets as side-kicks. They come in a series because cozy readers like to keep coming back to the same characters. There is a victim and usually three or four plausible suspects.

As a cozy writer, you can’t kill someone in a real place or town, and you can’t kill pets or children. There is minimal violence, sex, or obscenities. Harvard University can’t be used for anything for some reason. And justice prevails in the end.

The plot is basically a puzzle that comes together piece by piece. The protagonist guides or pushes the action and, although level headed is not fantastically brilliant.

It always amazes me how many people can be murdered in small quiet towns like Cabot Cove or the English counties of Midsomer or South Devon where the Coroner TV series is set.

These books are often derogatorily referred to as “pot-boilers” or “penny-dreadfuls”. Series are commonly themed around food, clothing, holidays, or clubs. Although many of the titles are “cute”, like Brewed Awakening from Cleo Coyle, Absence of Mallets from Kate Carlisle, or To Helvetica and Back from Paige Shelton, there are a surprising number of writers like Agatha Christie, Elizabeth George, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers who are included in the lists of cozy authors. Authors like Maddie Day produce a first draft in six weeks, and publish three or more books a year.

Can a Cozy Mystery be considered a serious novel? I dislike the slots and genres that writers are dropped into. Amazon classifies a novel like The Overstory by Richard Powers as “Genre Fiction” to avoid the classification conundrum. I suppose it makes it easier for marketing, and cozy mysteries are solid sellers.

Let me know if you read cozies and who you like and what you like about them. I would appreciate the input.

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan

This little book is a classic that was published in 1915. For context, it is important to remember that World War I began in July 1914.

It is a fairly simple story: Richard Hannay returns to England from a stint in Africa and finds life in London to utterly boring. He has “made his pile” and has nothing to do. But then a stranger accosts him in his doorway one evening and tells him a fantastic tale that Hannay finds amusing but believable. He takes the man in and listens to his tale, but then, coming home one evening, he finds his guest stabbed to death. Fearing that he will be accused of the murder, Hannay escapes to Scotland. So the story leads on through a bunch of improbable events while Hannay is pursued by both the police and German spies.

Hannay is the narrator of the novel, and it is told entirely from the first person point of view. Hannay is an observant chap and clearly describes the people and the countryside. This book came long before James Bond and sets the stage for how spy novel should be written. To today’s reader, perhaps it seems naïve in its style and the events are coincidental, but the reader can follow Buchan’s thinking as his character moves from place to place and interaction to interaction. In each cliff hanging event, Buchan works out what the options are and then chooses one of them to move the story forward and unravels the riddles posed by the dead stranger in his apartment written in code. It appears the story was written by the seat of his pants.

It would be a fairly simple matter to take the basic elements of the story and pin new clothing on them to use as a template for writing a mystery story. Because the point of view is all from Hannay, there isn’t a lot of mystery to the tale. But it needs to be thought about relative to the time in which it was written. There were German spies in Britain. The country was in a war. Life was uncertain.

Buchan went on to a strong writing and political career, becoming the Governor General of Canada in 1935. This novel is more than what used to be called “a penny dreadful”. It lives on my shelf of classics.

Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

Before there was a movie there was a novel - a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. It is a novel about difficult subjects, a novel that would probably not do well today although it reflected the world that it was written about. How much of it is a true reflection? I am not scholar enough to say. So much has changed since this was published eighty-five years ago. It was controversial then, and it may be even more controversial now.

There was a time when the rebellious south stood as a symbol of independent thinking, when Robert E. Lee sat high atop his monument, and served as the moniker of a 1969 Dodge Charger in the Dukes of Hazard. Just in the past year that image has shifted to a traitorous point of view as the capital was stormed and the union was in jeopardy once again. The movie has been removed from HBO Max.

It’s still a block buster of a novel, romantic fiction that puts all the novels with the sweaty bare chested men with a beautiful woman draped over them to shame. Scarlett O’Hara cannot be beaten as a heroine for the ages.

War is a nasty business no matter when or where. The civil war was no different. You cannot fight a war if you don’t care about the outcome. Clearly the citizens of the Confederacy were passionate about their cause and Margaret Mitchell portrayed that through the character of Scarlett and the characters surrounding her. Even today (perhaps more so) it is difficult to set all the politics aside and just read this as a well written story. Scarlett is a fully developed and beautifully described character. Mitchell granted each and every character a clear and distinctive voice as they dance alongside the death, devastation, and horror of the war. She wrote lyrical dialog, built up tension, twisted in the cliff hangers for the sixty-three chapters.

I saw the movie years ago, and I was intrigued as I continue to hone my own writing skills to see how a master wrote it. A novel is a story first and foremost, and I certainly rode along with the tale. Scarlett is a maverick. She does things her own way - right or wrong, good or bad. She certainly doesn’t make the right choices every time, but she doesn’t sit on the sidelines and watch. Scarlett is one of those people who make the world turn. I think if romance fiction writers of today were compelled to read Gone with the Wind, we would have better novels.

Exit - Belinda Bauer

This is a good one. Belinda Bauer has a wonderful sense of humor—about death and dying and old men and gambling and a bunch of other stuff. I don’t know how a 58 year old woman can have such accurate insight into the thinking of a 75 year old man. But she does.

Felix Pink is an Exiteer. Bauer’s sense of whimsy shows just in the name—connecting my thinking to Disney’s Mouseketeers although Bauer references the Musketeers. The Exiteers are a group of people who stand by as terminally ill people end their lives. Suicide is legal in England which is where this story takes place. Actually helping someone to kill themselves is murder, but the Exiteers can sit by and tidy up afterward so that the family is not disturbed and insurance is covered. Felix is very patient and can eat his strawberry jam sandwich and drink his tea while waiting for the subject to decide that the time to die has arrived. But of course it is critically important to attend to the death of the right subject!

Felix lives an unassuming life now that both his wife and his son have died. He shares his house with his dog, Mabel. His life is, in fact, very well ordered. When his Exiteer partner, Chris, decides to quit, a young lady takes his place. And in their first venture together, things do not go as planned, and the story spins out from there with Bauer adding element after element until it seems unlikely that she will ever find the way out of the entanglements. But she does succeed.

Bauer chooses her words carefully and crafts a clever tale around them. Felix not only contemplates the end of life for his subjects, but his own mortality. “He had bought his last three-pack of Y-fronts [underwear] a year a go, and the socks he had now would see him out. It was a strange feeling - that he would be outlived by his socks.” “He sometimes wondered whether his dying thought would be of a half-pint of milk going to waste in his fridge.”

But Felix is not a morose character, and when he finds himself in serious trouble, he faces up to it and in the process begins a relationship with his neighbor, Miss Knott. Bauer develops all of the minor characters well, and one of the few flaws I found with the story is that the focus sometimes drifts too far from Felix as other characters take on leading roles.

I am looking forward to reading more of Belinda Bauer’s books.

The Locker - Ted Nulty

People have too much stuff! When it gets overwhelming, storage lockers are an option. You can put all that stuff that you can’t stand to get rid of in a storage locker, lock the door, and come back for it when you have more room.

But that final step doesn’t always happen. Then what’s in the locker gets forgotten, and often it doesn’t make sense to keep paying the rent and the locker is abandoned and the storage facility auctions off the contents. There is a large turnover in these things. There are websites like https://www.storageauctions.com/ and https://www.storagetreasures.com/ where you can go to seek out options in your area. But you need to be cautious. These anonymous spaces can contain items that you are not expecting—sort of like the tarantula in the bunch of bananas!

Nulty has taken full advantage of this premise in his book, The Locker. It just so happens that a drug cartel is using one of the storage units to stash their cash.The problem occurs when the “abandoned” locker come up for sale, one of the lockers on the abandoned list is mislabeled and the cartel’s locker is auctioned off to Tom and Sheila Stanford who are looking to buy useful items for their church. Needless to say, the cartel is not happy about the loss of their drugs and their money. But Tom and Sheila Standford are not your average citizens. They are both ex-marines and they possess a lot of weapons. They also have a lot of friends. And it just happened that along with a bunch of misprinted t-shirts there was six hundred and forty million dollars in the cartel’s locker and that provides a lot of options.

There are a lot of guns and a lot of violence in this book as the Standfords and their friends and their money take on the bad guys of the cartel. As an ex-marine, Ted Nulty writes from experience. He has a family pedigree of marines and weapons. Part way through the book, I was ready to put it down because of the amount of violence. I’m still not sure why I need to know exactly what brand of gun is being used to shoot somebody. It did remind me of a Lee Child story.

But I like the premise of this book and Nulty fleshes out his characters well—both the bad guys and the good guys. The reader knows that there is going to be a major confrontation because neither side is willing to let things slide. Nulty also sets up the Home Alone scene as Tom (as Kevin in the movie) sets up his traps for the final confrontation. Nulty wrote the movie script for The Locker but production is in limbo.

If you’re fond of shoot-em-up stories with the good guys winning out in the end, this is a book for you. Nulty writes up to seven books at a time, so there is a feast more stories for you to follow up with.

Fireplay - Steve P. Vincent

Jack Emery is a reporter in Afghanistan. On a ride-along with some marines, the Humvee in front of him blows up from an IED. A lone combatant is spotted across the desert. The combatant identifies himself and then indicates that he came from Camp Navitas - a prison camp run by the marines which seems to operate out of bounds along the lines of the real Bagram prison. Jack thinks he’s on top of a major story, so he requests a stay at the base. His intention is to talk to the prisoners and discover what is actually going on.

This is a very short book—a novella or short story. Jack Emery is the good guy who gets in trouble trying to right a wrong by writing about it. He gets out of one hot spot only to get into another. This book is an intro to Vincent’s series of four other full-length novels about the reporter. Vincent has written about fourteen books in several series since 2014, for which he has been well reviewed. That’s a lot of books.

Fireplay is well edited. This shouldn’t be a claim to fame because all books should be well edited, but many are filled with a wide variety of typos, and that is even more common when books are written and published in a hurry. This book was originally published by Momentum Books: “Momentum specializes in providing authors with attentive, turn-key custom publishing services.” The ebook edition that I read was published by Steve P. Vincent.

He is described on his website as: “Steve has a degree in political science, a thesis on global terrorism, a decade as a policy advisor and training from the FBI and Australian Army in his conspiracy kit bag.

“When he’s not writing, Steve enjoys whisky, sports and dreaming up ever more elaborate conspiracy theories. Oh, and travel. He’s traveled extensively through Europe, the United States and Asia.” So I would put him in the same author box as Lee Child.

This book was a good, short, fast read and a solid introduction to Vincent’s Jack Emery series.

#amwriting #CapeCodMurder

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Have you added my novel Death at the Edge of the Diamond to your Goodreads reading list yet? Please check it out and add it to your Goodreads shelf here >>

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54473532-death-at-the-edge-of-the-diamond

Murder for a Worthy Cause - Neal Sanders

This story takes place in the little boutique town of Hardington, MA. The town is under the spell of a televised home improvement program called Ultimate House Makeover. The show is hosted by the flashy star—Whit Dakota. While Liz Phillips, chair of the Hardington Garden Club, is setting up the landscaping for the new house, a body is discovered in a trunk of spare tent parts. The body belongs to the town selectman who was in charge of the volunteers for the project, and Liz is commandeered to replace him.

Detective John Flynn of the Hardington Police Force is charged with solving the crime. Although both Liz and John are married to other people, a bit of romantic tension hovers throughout the book as the two work together. Sanders adds some interesting touches, such as the fact that there is a famous New England Patriots quarterback named Tom Snipes living in Hardington. That pseudo-famous identification brings out an interesting aspect of the bad guy in the story, Whit Dakota, who demands to play catch with the famous star to promote his own reputation.

Sanders develops the plot well—starting out slowly, with Detective Flynn trying to put the pieces together and sort through multiple suspicious characters. 

Liz Phillips, meanwhile, comes across what seems to be a wholly unrelated crime that paints a seamier side of the home makeover TV phenomena. It seems like an interesting but irrelevant plot development until Sanders brings the plots and the Liz and John stories together. That was a gratifying and pleasant surprise.

Sanders provides depth and color to his characters and is able to provide flavor to the town of Hardington, its location in Massachusetts, and the reality show industry. Suspects develop from the complexities of normal human relationships: lawyers, gardeners, volunteers, and filmmakers. And all of that happens before the family around whom all this is evolving comes back to the town and the story.

Amazon has this listed under Mystery, Thriller, Suspense. The mystery and suspense work, but the thriller category doesn’t fit, but it is a good read with an intriguing plot structure.

Dead by Dawn - Paul Doiron

Mystery, Thriller

Mike Bowditch, Maine game warden extraordinaire, has made a name for himself among naturally nasty people. In the opening scene in this novel, his Jeep plunges off the edge of the road and down into the partially frozen Androscoggin River. He and his wolf-dog rapidly submerge in the freezing water.

The chapters in the book alternate between Bowditch’s survival efforts and his activities earlier in the day that got him into this predicament. He was just taking his dog (wolf) to the vet, and was just going to make a quick stop to check up on a complaint about a potentially mishandled investigation. But Bowditch is a curious character, and follows lead after lead until the sun has set, he begins his journey home, and is ambushed.

Mike Bowditch is a great character and has proven his bravery and curiosity about life throughout the series of Doiron’s books. Another thing I like about this book is that it matches its genres of both mystery and thriller. It is a mystery right from the opening scene as to why this deadly scenario is happening. And it is a thriller as to how Bowditch is going to extricate himself from the multiple ‘crucible’ situations that Doiron puts his protagonist in, chapter after chapter. Just when you think he has come up with a clever way to get dry and warm and get home for Christmas, his tormentors inflict another wound. One other thing: Doiron keeps fans hanging about Bowditch’s situation with women. That may be another author cliff hanger to keep love-story readers hanging from book to book.

This book, written in the first person, alternates between the present and the past tense until the two story lines finally merge. Paul Doiron is one of my favorite contemporary writers. His books are a pleasure to read and I’m sure that’s because he takes pleasure in writing them.

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The End of Everything - Megan Abbott

I don’t think I will make many people happy with my feelings about this book. There are pages and pages of raving reviews included with the book, but I must have missed something because I couldn’t wait for it to get to the end. The structure of the story reminded me of Nabokov’s Lolita, told from an outside observer’s point of view - like a neighbor left behind.

The story is written in the present tense by thirteen-year-old Lizzie Hood. Lizzie’s neighbor and best friend, Evie, vanishes, and the story centers on figuring out what has happened to her. Is she dead? Has she been raped, murdered, and dumped in the lake? Lizzie thinks she should know more intuitively. After all, she and Evie did everything together. They lived like sisters. There are numerous sexual innuendos in the story: Evie’s father flirts with Lizzie and Evie’s sister, Dusty. Lizzie’s mother is having sex with a local doctor. And then there is the mysterious man who may have spirited Evie away, fragmenting his own family in the process.

Telling tales in the present tense is difficult because, frankly, the reader is not there where Lizzie is telling the story. Abbott is certainly a skilled writer. A reviewer from the Los Angeles Times called the book a “psychological thriller and a freshly imagined coming-of-age story”. I’m good with the psychological and the coming-of-age, but I don’t see the ‘thriller’ component. Maybe because I really didn’t care what happened to the characters.

Man in the Middle - Jim Nelson

This is the first pandemic related novel that I have read. I’m sure there will be many more. Most of it takes place over four days in March of 2020. Since the pandemic is still going on, the final outcome is not yet over. But it is an interesting detail that throughout the book, Nelson includes the number of cases and number of deaths worldwide and the number of cases and deaths in the United States as of that particular date. The novel ends on July 25, 2020 with 145,860 people dead in the U.S. when “baseball resumed” in the Oakland Coliseum—although there were no people in the stands and all the support franchises were missing. There are now 664,000 deaths in the U.S. and the virus is still going strong.

It is interesting that both Nelson and his character are unsure of what to do—how to react to the pandemic. Back in March of 2020 it was all new in terms of how to confront the disease, whether it was going to be short term and over in six months or long term and be with us for a long time. Some of the characters don’t seem to care—and that’s still true. The protagonist is immune-compromised which makes his condition uncertain. He is also recently separated from his wife, who has been cheating on him, and he has lost his job as a security guard because the building and business that he worked for has laid him off. And just to add a bit more complexity, the protagonist is offered a job guarding the computers that store BitCoin transactions.

The world is portrayed as gray, as a world after the apocalypse—stores closed, streets empty of cars and people. All that adds to the fact that the protagonist works the night shift.

The story is written from the first person point of view as would suit the loner existence. The protagonist seems gray and flat, like a paper doll. There’s a doctor that has some character and a friendly, old security guard that added a touch of color. But it is a sad scenario and maybe that fits the world right now.

Writing about the pandemic while it is going on was a bold challenge. We still don’t know where it is going to go, and some subjects need time to develop so you can look back on them and say, “Oh, that’s what was going on.” Nelson certainly writes well, and he tells an interesting tale.

Five Knives - D.F. Bailey

Five Knives is the first in a series of tales featuring San Francisco newspaper reporter, Will Finch. D.F. Bailey has written ten novels in the same vein. Five Knives, the Front Matter says, is inspired by true events.

Will is almost hit by a falling body in the opening scene of this story. It hits the pavement in front of him. From there he pursues the story - as a good reporter would. But he’s not a reporter yet. He is a master of journalism student at UC Berkeley after spending four years in the army with about half that time at Abu Ghraib prison. He uses the story of the falling body to land himself a position as a free-lance reporter at the Post. Finch continues to pursue the story, strengthening his position at the newspaper, and putting his and his girl-friend’s lives in danger. At one point in his investigation he comes across a small man, duct-taped to a straight backed wood chair who had been punctured by five different knives, including a “short paring knife buried in the left ear”. Hence the title of the book.

Will develops as a character as reflected by his backstory and the characters around him. Will’s girl friend, Cecily, works as a research librarian, and he has a friend who was a recent graduate of Berkeley Law. So he has a solid support team. This allows Bailey to use Finch as an amateur detective without the direct need for police support. Although he does report to the paper and to the police as the story unfolds.

Bailey does a good job of making it all work. This is the first in the series, and it does feel as though Bailey hasn’t quite gotten his writer’s sea legs under him with this one. I haven’t read any of the other books in the series, but I look forward to going there. There is nothing delicate about the tone of this story. It is very much in the style of Micky Spillane, Raymond Chandler, and Robert B. Parker private eye mysteries. Falling bodies do not “go gentle into that good night”.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Do you ever experience vellichor — that strange wistfulness of used bookshops? Being surrounded by books that have lived other lives can cause a bit of melancholy. Or have you ever had a jouska — that hypothetical conversation that you play out in your head? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows includes dozens of these spectacular words with equally spectacular definitions such as chrysalism: “the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.”

Who thinks up these words? I pulled out my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to see if I could find where some of these words came from. I wasn’t successful with the few I tried. Maybe they’re too recent. But wherever they came from, these words would be difficult to throw into the middle of a conversation at a cocktail party. (Do people still have cocktail parties?) I’m experiencing exulansis so I am just going to give up trying to tell my story about swimming across the Atlantic Ocean. People just can’t relate to it!

One of my favorites is Nodus Tollens which is the realization that the plot of your life just doesn’t make sense to you anymore. I mean seriously! How often have you felt that way? In the dictionary there are clues to the derivation.

Directly from the dictionary:

aftersome

adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

From the Swedish ‘eftersom’ because.

agnosthesia

n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

From Greek ‘agnostos’ unknown + ‘diathesis’ mood.

Words are amazing! There are so many of them that we’ll never get to know.

Private Viewing - Geoff Palmer

Genre: World Literature

Private Viewing was published in 2015 by Podsnap Publishing Ltd.

I am always pleasantly surprised when I come upon a writer who knows what they are doing and cares about how they are doing it. Geoff Palmer is one of those pleasant surprises. He has won some awards and spent twenty plus years doing freelance technical writing. From his bio, “he has climbed mountains in Africa, picked grapes in Switzerland, sold cameras in London, programmed computers in Fiji, and spent eight years working as a professional photographer. He’s also quite tall.” He lives and writes in Wellington, New Zealand.

Jane Child , the protagonist of this story, is a banker. At the beginning of the novel she thought she had a straight line path to an Divisional Manager role at Bartley’s Bank. It is not to be, however, because the position has been filled by a rising star in the British Banking world who just happens to be the son of Sir Jamieson Trotter, who has deep societal connections.

But Damien Trotter is good looking and Jane is good looking, and despite her best efforts she is not able to resist his charms. It’s not at all surprising that Damien turns out to be an ultimate, salacious sleaze. What is surprising is the role that the seemingly homeless man who sits on the sidewalk across the street from the bank plays in the story. Jane is not the most sensible young woman, but she is a romantic and that gets her into trouble.

Palmer develops his characters well, providing a personality to good-old Aunt Daisy and the neighborhood cat, Bluebell. There is a plethora of spy gadgets and technology which is always fun, and with Palmer’s experience with computers in Fiji, I am assuming that he got that stuff right. There is the occasional word that is missing, but that seems to be common unfortunately these days. No matter how many times you read through your own book, it is easy to see the words on the page the way you are seeing them in your head.

Private Viewing is a fun, entertaining read, with enough suspense to keep the pages turning and the midnight lamp burning.

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Bookfunnel gathers writers together to give books away. My novel - Death at the Edge of the Diamond - and Geoff Palmer’s as well as D.F. Bailey’s Five Knives along with a bunch of others are in this group. This is a very helpful program. The downloads can be to virtually any platform. And they’re free!

The Red Lotus - Chris Bohjalian (Copy)

Genre: Thrillers & Suspense

Chris Bohjalian published The Red Lotus at the very beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic. After reading this book, you have to question whether or not he had an inside track! I’m glad that I read it at the end of the pandemic. (I hope it’s the end. Don’t want to jinx it - as Bohjalian writes about one of the characters at the end of the book.)

Alexis - an ER doctor - and her boyfriend go off to Vietnam on a bike tour. At the beginning of the book she is waiting in the hotel for him to return from a solo ride taken ostensibly to visit sites that were important to his family. But he never comes back. It was a dangerous road. And he probably shouldn’t have been biking alone. But the story is much more sinister than a simple bike accident.

As Alexis begins to learn more about this man, his lies unravel. Her need to know parallels her emergency room character. She could have just left it alone, but she feels the need to hire a private investigator, to contact police sources in Vietnam, and not trust anyone.

The most positive characters in the story are in Vietnam. There is an overlay of the horrible things that Westerners have inflicted on the Vietnamese people.

I had a problem with her insertion into the mysteries of his character because he told her that his father was wounded in battle. And he wasn’t. Would that really have been enough to catapult someone into a cascade of events that resulted in a great deal of death and dying?

And there was a long filler piece about the private eye’s experience in Vietnam during the war that didn’t move the story forward.

On the other hand Bohjalian’s writing is excellent and worth reading. The story is carefully researched and technically well supported. It is a thriller tale that comes way too close to paralleling reality.

Don’t ignore the Epilogue.