The Soul of Discretion - Susan Hill

Some booksellers, including this one, have a love-hate relationship with character series.

On one hand, if a writer hits one out of the park on their first at-bat, gets great reviews and word of mouth and otherwise has the feel of a sure thing, our job selling subsequent books isn't so hard. 

But on the other hand, once a writer has a long backlist of titles in their series, it can be hard to start someone on what seems the daunting task of reading every book, in order before they can get to the latest one.

I tend to be a purist: series should be read in order; and the notable exception to this are the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child.  Reacher travels light, and each book has a different setting as well as a whole new cast of characters. It's a bit of brilliance on the part of Mr. Child, and I can't help but wonder if the concept wasn't influenced by this short-lived but memorable TV series:

Of course, it's entirely possible that I am the only person who remembers it. I had the world's biggest crush on Michael Parks when I was 11 (the year this show aired). I should thank my lucky stars every evening that by the time it came time to pick a life partner for myself that I'd gotten over the crush. 

ANYway. 

The truth of it is that most series books don't require that you read all of them; they often reference things in the past, but typically in a way that doesn't make you feel you've really missed anything. It's sort of like meeting a person at a cocktail party that you find quite interesting, even without knowing their life story.

The one series, however, that I insist be read in order is Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler mysteries. I insist upon it so stringently that if a customer comes in and picks up a later one I always ask if they've read the preceding ones. If the answer is no, then something like this happens:

If you haven't already discovered this series, you have plenty of time to get started right now with The Various Haunts of Men before The Soul of Discretion hits bookstore shelves in January. 

For those who have heeded my advice, or that of their own amazing indie bookseller, here's what you need to know about this one. 

Simon goes deep undercover in an operation designed to bring down the most reprehensible criminals to whom the town of Lafferton has ever played host. It means leaving his family and the woman with whom he has just begun to have a serious relationship in the dark. While Simon is away, a member of his own family becomes the focus of a criminal investigation, one that threatens to rock Lafferton to its roots. 

Simon's sister, Cat, continues to find her way through the twin minefields of widowhood and life as a single parent, and faces a big decision about the direction her life will take. 

Hill doesn't disappoint in any of these plot lines. She routinely puts her main characters in harm's way, and some of them end up the way you don't expect. Neither does she feel any need to sew up either the mystery or a relationship crossroads by the end a novel. Hill knocks down the rules for mysteries and for series novels in ways that set her far apart from others in the genre. 

Far apart, and shoulders above. 

The Soul of Discretion gets ***** from me. 

Publication Date: January 2, 2015

Published by: The Overlook Press

                       Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

                      

Neverhome by Laird Hunt

She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her husband and donned the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. Neverhome tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a traitor, a madwoman, and a legend.   - From the dustjacket

It's a fact that many women disguised themselves to take active roles on both sides of the Civil War.This slim volume--fewer than 250 pages long--tells the story of one such woman over two years' time. Ash narrates the story in the vernacular of time and place, a device that doesn't always serve the flow of the novel well. I found that it sometimes became difficult to follow unless I read it aloud to myself. 

First person narratives generally make me feel like I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with the person speaking, but I never developed that connection with Ash (nee Constance). I just couldn't quite get a grip on who she was in any of her contexts: wife, daughter, soldier.  It's never fully explained why her husband Bartholomew didn't serve, although of the two, she was the one most equipped for such. There certainly is no suggestion that she did so out of any fervor for the Union stance; it's more that the idea of such an adventure was irresistible to her. The author suggests some tension between her and Bartholomew that predated her decision to fight, but we are never made privy to that. 

Her tale is told over the course of two years, and they are full ones, indeed. She sees battle, escapes capture by mercenaries, imprisonment as a traitor, and the long walk home to Bartholomew when her fighting days are over. Ash/Constance is not a person to whom life happens: she takes charge of each situation with grit and sheer will. I wish I'd liked her more. 

*** of *****

The High Divide - Lin Enger

I'm the youngest of four who had the unfortunate role of being the caboose on a string of dazzlingly brilliant and very good looking siblings. Me? I read the encyclopedia, and spent hours upon hours copying names out of the phone book, writing them all in cursive. (Remember cursive?)  I have no doubt that my parents fretted over me, and it is entirely possible that if I were growing up now I would have a legitimate shot at being found to be on the autism scale somewhere.

As much as I adored and idolized my older brothers and sister, I hated the first day of school every year. I dreaded I'd get a teacher who loved loved loved one of them. I couldn't hold a candle to any of them in any area--except penmanship (see above)--and I knew it, and it didn't take long for my teachers to know it, too.

To this day I believe I passed from grade to grade on the Bless Her Heart grading scale.

All this has a point, I swear.

One of my all-time favorite novels is Leif Enger's luminous Peace Like a River.  His second novel, So Brave, Young and Handsome, didn't do much for me but I still watched publisher notices every season, patiently waiting for something - anything - else from him.

And then came the announcement that his brother Lin had a novel on the horizon and I just got giddy. Surely these two would have some of the same stuff, and they had even written a series of mysteries together some years back. I could scarcely contain myself, casting aside any idea at all that people raised in the same house don't always get the same goods.

From the get go, something about The High Divide bothered me. The year is 1886, and Ulysses Pope's family is on the brink of financial disaster. It was not unusual at that time for heads of household to leave their families to take a chance on some prospect for financial gain, but I just didn't and couldn't buy in to Ulysses leaving his family with nothing but a note reading, "A chance for work, hard cash," with nary a word about where he was headed, or how long he expected to be gone.

It doesn't take long for his sons to light out after him, riding the rails to where they believe he may have gone, based on a letter Eli, the older son, had found.  They don't tell their mother they are leaving, so now you have this woman with a missing husband and two missing sons, who is fixin' to lose the home they lived in together, with no hope of raising money to keep a lecherous landlord wolf at bay.

I don't mind a dose of improbable in my fiction, understand that, but it's just a whole lot easier to overlook if there is something in the narrative that makes you glad the author took the leap.

I am well and truly sorry that I did not like this novel. I finished it, but I'm not sure why. After that leap Enger asked me to take at the opening, he then throws in a couple more implausible plot developments, peppered with stilted dialog and so many wasted opportunities to let the reader in.

And ultimately, that's the thing:  I never felt like I'd been invited into the story. There was no character with whom I could form even the most tenuous bond, or in whom I developed any interest.

The High Divide has gotten buzz out the wahoo, but I'll be darned if I can figure out why.

The Drop - Dennis Lehane

Here's something on which I usually don't bite: repackaging of a short fiction first published in a collection, particularly when the reason for the repackaging is to coincide with the release of a motion picture based on that short fiction. 

But The Drop was by DENNIS LEHANE, one of a handful of authors in whom I have never, ever been disappointed. Ever. It also didn't hurt that I've been on another run of novels that just refused to engage my heart or my imagination, and which, therefore, I did not finish. 

Bob is, by all appearances, a feckless bartender with little going for him. When he finds a puppy abandoned in a trash can, and then meets a young woman with plenty of bad decisions in her resume, Bob begins to find himself in unfamiliar emotional territory. A cast of treacherous friends, the Chechen mafia, and the godless man who dumped that puppy in the garbage provide plenty of windmills against which this modern day Don Quixote must tilt. 

Dennis Lehane clearly has a heart wide open for folks who live around all the dark corners, the ones you'd feel safer crossing the street than encountering on a public sidewalk at dusk. He knows what we all know, of course: there's a story and a tragedy and a triumph somewhere in every one of them. That he consistently invites us into something like communion with them through his novels is a wonderment. 

Highly, highly recommended.  

Publication date: September 2, 2014

William Morrow

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

And here's a little treat... the trailer for the movie

That Night -- Chevy Stevens

Let's make this short.

Ms. Stevens has held me in thrall with some of her earlier novels.

This one read like a first draft script for a bad Lifetime Original Movie, filled from start to finish with characters right out of central casting, in a plot that isn't only predictable but sophomoric.

Plot synopsis: "Bad sister" (whom we all know isn't really bad, just misunderstood) and her "bad boy boyfriend" (whom we all know isn't really bad, just misunderstood) are convicted of murdering her sister, the "good girl," (whom we all know isn't really all that good because she has secrets and she loses weight and cries a lot). "Bad sister" had been bullied by the Golden Girls at school because she was different, and her mother doesn't even like her. At all. After 18 years in prison, she's released, tries to rebuild her life, and then another person is murdered (a now drug-addicted former Golden Girl), after she begins to talk about That Night that Bad Sister's Good Girl Little Sister was killed.

I'm giving this one * out of *****, simply because I finished it, sure that Stevens would surprise me at the end.

She didn't.

The Forsaken -- Ace Atkins

One of the dangers of following any writer for any length of time is running up on that inevitable book that misses the mark, sometimes just by a hair. You can forgive this, of course, because no matter what it is a person does, nobody doesn't have an off day. It was with a certain level of trepidation, therefore, that I cracked open The Forsaken, the new Quinn Colson novel by Ace Atkins.

In order to finish this one last night I shooed my husband out to the picture show. Finish it, I did. I thought better of writing my review last night, because I really needed to think through what I could say about it that would make you want to read it.

I've had a good night's sleep, and now, in the light of morning and two strong cups of coffee into the day, here's what I have to say about it.

Oh. My. Stars. In. Heaven.

How does Ace do this?

How does he consistently make his well-limned characters even more interesting every single time?

If you're waiting for Ace to trip over his own success, you're going to have to keep waiting, folks.

Sheriff Quinn Colson is compelled to investigate what appeared to be a closed case from 1977, one in which two young girls were brutalized, and one of the girls was killed. A man was hanged by a lynch mob for that crime, but now survivor Diane Tull has come forward to say that her assailant was not the man who was hanged all those years ago.

Quinn soon meets with plenty of tightly locked lips, and a growing realization that his father may have been a member of the motorcycle club who was responsible for the unjust hanging.  The leader of that club, Chains LeDoux, is still so feared that his imminent release from prison has series bad-guy Johnny Stagg practically begging for help from Quinn.

All of this sets up a mighty powerful and moving story about how hard, and how necessary, it is to make past wrongs right.

If that's not enough, The Forsaken made me fully appreciate how strong Ace Atkins' women characters are, strength that comes from a place of quietude and necessity. That he stays well clear of making these women caricatures of the Steel Magnolia variety is even more remarkable.

Oh -- and it appears Atkins has introduced a new and, I hope, recurring character who should provide even more interesting plot developments down the road.

If you have not yet read any of Atkins' Quinn Colson novels then you now have your summer reading list. Start from the beginning. (The Ranger, The Lost Ones, and The Broken Places)

Trust me.

A very, very solid ***** of ***** 

Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

I hate when reading slumps happen. Last time I had one, I quit even trying to find a book that would grab me. Once it became clear I was in a slump this time I determined I was not going to let that happen.

The stack of books I started and tossed aside may have upset the delicate balance of my home's foundation. I'm not listing those books, because when I'm in a slump I can't ever be sure if it's a me thing or a them thing, and it wouldn't be fair to be dismissive if there's not really a good reason to do so. (And you know how much I like to wreck a book that has it coming.)

My coworker suggested that a collection of short stories might help. This is where I need to say that while I do enjoy the occasional short story upon which I stumble, I have never been a particular fan of collected short works by a single author. I don't know why. I'm not proud of it or anything. It just is whatever it is.

On her suggestion, though, I brought home Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck & Other Stories, and as with most collected works by one writer, I found some of the stories to be just wonderful and rich and full, and others to be more on the meh end of the scale. In some fashion, all of them have to do with losses --what we do to work them into something that will remain in some way, and how much more we stand to lose if we allow ourselves to be defined by them.

The title story was so good it will resonate with me for a long, long time, for it spoke of crazy hope and perception stained by love and guilt, and it was as fine as any short story I've ever read.

I've considered carefully how to assign a star rating to this one. I didn't read every story through, which makes this something shy of a read book. Rating it, therefore, doesn't feel like the right thing to do...but go back and read that last paragraph. Nobody writes a story that good who is not a fine writer.

What can I say? I own this blog and I can change my rules whenever I want.