The Beautiful and the Wild

This thriller by Peggy Townsend gets off to a slow start and I had to push myself to keep reading. It has become so commonplace to constantly flip back and forth between "then" and "now" in novels that I have gotten bored and slightly annoyed with that sort of structure. Nevertheless, I persisted and was satisfied with the ending. I can't say I ever really identified or empathized with any of the characters in the story. However, reviewers clearly felt otherwise. Here is the plot summary from Publishers Weekly:

" For months, Liv Russo has believed her husband, Mark, died after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. But when a series of cryptic texts and emails lure her and her developmentally disabled seven-year-old son, Xander, from California to a compound in southeastern Alaska, Liv finds Mark alive, cohabitating with another woman and a 10-year-old boy who calls him “Dad.” Stunned, Liv threatens to leave with Xander and return to California. Mark responds by locking her in a shipping container for weeks until she convinces him that she’s accepted their new polyamorous, off-the-grid lifestyle. Once she’s freed, Liv begins to plot her and Xander’s escape, but Mark becomes increasingly violent and unhinged. Townsend elevates the proceedings above standard-issue genre fare by zeroing in on Liv and Xander’s relationship, which she renders with aching sensitivity. The mother-son bond at the heart of this tense melding of domestic suspense and survival thriller makes it tough to shake."

Unlike me, Booklist finds the protagonist admirable: "Facing starvation and the harsh winter will push Liv past her own physical and mental limits. Townsend...constructs a lush and dangerous Alaskan landscape, using it to build tension and suspense. Liv is a strong and flawed protagonist whom readers will admire for her determination and feral need to protect her son. The shifting perspectives and fast-paced plot will keep even the most avid suspense readers on the edge of their seats. Recommended for fans of scrappy female leads facing the most dire circumstances..." Similarly, Library Journal offers, "One woman's quest to survive the harsh Alaskan wilderness and the even harsher people is a riveting read of determination and perseverance from Townsend."

Kirkus is a bit cooler in their view of Liz and the storyline: "Even after Liv toes the party line far enough to earn release from her confinement, her subordination to the man she once loved renders her status not only dangerously marginal but grindingly creepy. The finale is stuffed with so many surprises that it feels like a long-deferred Christmas morning."

Starter Villain

Okay, I admit it. I was hooked by the title...and the cover. Villain is such a melodramatic and somewhat antiquated term and why on earth was a cat wearing a collar and? This thoroughly entertaining novel  by John Scalzi, something of a mystery and something of a fantasy,  kept me engaged and rooting for the good guys (the good villains?). Made me look at our pet cats a bit differently, too. Kirkus opens their review by saying, "Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them. Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle." They did end the review on a bit of a sour note--"Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books."

Publishers Weekly apparently did like it: "After the funeral, to which goons show up just to make sure Jake is really dead, a bomb destroys Charlie’s house, leading him to move into his uncle’s secret island volcano lair, complete with a satellite-destroying death ray and genetically modified superintelligent cats. Danger comes in the form of the Lombardy Convocation, a coalition of fellow evil billionaires who secretly rule the world and want Charlie to join them or die. Scalzi balances all the double-crosses and assassination attempts with ethical quandaries, explorations of economic inequality, and humor, including some foul-mouthed unionizing dolphins. The result is a breezy and highly entertaining genre send-up."

Booklist also applauds Scalzi's wit and style: "Scalzi ... again examines tropes in a tale of an ordinary individual being cast into an extraordinary situation with his trademark quick pacing, clever banter, and ability to find humor in desperate situations." Library Journal offers: "Combining the sarcastic humor of Scalzi... with an origin story for James Bond...this story of snark with a heart reminds readers that the logical conclusion of "dogs have owners, cats have staff" is that cats are management and never let anyone forget it. VERDICT Readers of humorous fantasy are sure to love Scalzi's latest ... as much as those cats; it's also for those who enjoy seeing superhero stories folded, twisted, and mutilated and anyone wishing for a righteous villain lair surrounded by intelligent sharks [actually they're dolphins]." I, too, recommend it for a fun read.

Whalefall

The title for this science fiction novel by Daniel Kraus is an actual term used to describe when a whale dies and sinks to great depths. "...their carcasses--known as whale falls--provide a bounty of nutrients for deep water creatures (NOAA)." I would almost call this book speculative fiction rather than science fiction as other reviewers have, since all the descriptions and even--except one which the author calls out in his Notes--are based on experts' and his own research.

The book opens with our protagonist:

"That diver is Jay Gardiner, and you won’t meet a more tortured, resourceful fictional character this summer. At 17, he is reeling from the death of his father, Mitt, a legendary diver and mean drunk who had terminal cancer and drowned himself, his pockets full of diving weights, rather than waiting for death to come to him. Jay is racked by guilt — he was estranged from Mitt when he died — and so he decides to atone by recovering Mitt’s remains from the bottom of Monastery Beach, a dangerous spot off the coast of Monterey, Calif. What is meant to be a quick redemptive dive turns into an epic struggle for survival when a massive whale, swallowing a meal of giant squid, fails to notice the surprise side dish: human teenager. The New York Times  goes on to describe the plot as follows: "The book runs along two tracks. One is a moment-by-moment account of Jay’s battle to escape. As in the survival film “127 Hours,” the clock is ticking; each chapter ominously notes how much oxygen remains in Jay’s tank, an hour’s worth in all. For every positive development (Jay avoids death-by-squid in the whale’s mouth) a new disaster arises (Jay gushes blood from his neck, blows out his eardrums, loses his fins, snaps off one of his teeth, burns his hands on acid and faces possible death from methane poisoning) ... In the second track, interspersed with the first, Jay revisits his past and tries to work through his messy relationship with his father. A revered éminence grise in the Monterey Bay diving community, Mitt was also a disappointed old man who couldn’t hold down a job and spent much of his time lecturing his son and railing against humans’ careless disregard of the ocean and its inhabitants."

I found the formatting very distracting as NPR's Ayesha Rascoe notes in her interview with author Kraus: "I have to ask you about the pace because what I found was some chapters are super short. They're just, like, a sentence. They flash back and forth in time. How did you go about planning the writing for this and the structure of this?" Kraus' reply is "My idea was that I wanted the chapter breaks to feel like gasps for air. And I wanted the reader to constantly be aware of how much air he's losing, you know? The chapter headings are all essentially telling you how much oxygen he has left. So with the short chapters, you're constantly gasping and constantly having to sink, then, back down to the drama. And it alternates between what's going on inside the whale and these flashbacks."

Publishers Weekly calls it a "...gripping sci-fi thriller..." and concludes, "Kraus provides solid nautical science alongside the stretchy coincidences that fuel Jay’s survival. Just on the brink of horror fiction, especially for the claustrophobic, this deep-sea thrill ride will have readers on the edges of their seats."Library Journal's review is  also favorable. " Jay's plight is viscerally intense and claustrophobic, even as he grapples with real and raw emotions that stem from remorse and a need for reconciliation. ...This hard sci-fi thriller is full of cinematic and wild suspense and would be great for fans of Andy Weir, although the tone is far more austere." While Booklist calls it "...a moving character study disguised as a riveting, cinematic survival thriller...it is Jay's constant growth throughout the story that makes this novel shine, allowing its beauty to emerge and leave its mark on all who encounter it."

I, on the other hand found Jay to be an unappealing character who does nothing but whine about his horrible father in the first part of the book and then, struggling to escape his living prison, becomes so philosophical that I found it unbelievable. But clearly I am in the minority so judge for yourself. 

 

Blood Sisters

Vanessa Lillie's protagonist, Syd Walker, is several things. She is a successful archaeologist working for the BIA's Rhode Island district. She is a wife to a successful doctor, Mal, who has just become pregnant and Syd is still unsure if she wants to be a parent. She is a "two-spirit" Cherokee (according to her beloved Aunt Mercy) who has escaped her small life in the even smaller, polluted town in northeastern Oklahoma, Picher. She is a survivor of a traumatic home invasion when she was a teenager; she managed to shoot one of the two men in devil's masks and escape with her sister, Emma Lou, but her best friend Luna and Luna's parents were murdered and both the killers and the Myers family burned up in their trailer.  Syd hasn't been home in three years, since she went with her then new wife, to celebrate with her extended family, only to have to track down and rescue sister Emma Lou from a nearly fatal drug overdose.

Syd is called in by her supervisor and told to go to Oklahoma to identify a woman's skull that was found next to her family's property, with Syd's old BIA internship badge stuffed in its mouth. There she learns that sister Emma Lou has been missing for a week. She is determined to find her in spite of local BIA authorities' apparent stalling tactics. Her hot-headed nosiness quickly makes her a target of the huge and powerful Daweson family, two of whom were responsible for the murders of Luna and her family 15 years ago and who are now trying to build a new and improved drug trafficking operation. What Syd discovers will turn her world upside down.

This is a compelling thriller (and a bit of a ghost story) that kept me up into the wee hours of the morning. It is also a heartfelt exegesis of the centuries of mistreatment and broken promises by the U.S. government to the tribes of Native Americans who shepherded this continent for thousands of years prior to contact. The betrayals continue to this day as the the federal government largely ignores the disappearances and murders of Native American women. It is only recently that the numbers of Native American or Alaska Native women and girls have been tracked. Violence against women is under-reported. The rate of violence on Indian reservations is ten times that of the national aveerage. As recently as 2016, according to the National Crime Information Center, 5,712 missing indigenous women were reported, whereas, only116 made it into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

Reviews are uniformly positive. Library Journal concludes their review by saying, "The author ...combines Cherokee history and legend with contemporary drug and land problems in a gripping story of missing Indigenous women." Publishers Weekly notes, "Lillie does an excellent job of balancing a riveting plot with a moving portrait of her troubled lead." Booklist praises, "Lillie paints the beautiful yet bleak landscape with a fine brush. Readers who enjoy strong voices will be pulled in by the characters, while those who are drawn to setting will feel as if they are in Picher." The book is also recommended by The Washington Post;  the Star Tribune, which raves ,"Just a few pages in and this novel is roaring with mystery, danger, anguish and regret. Lillie fuels her Native characters with hope, resentment, anger and despair... Blood Sisters lead[s] us on a path toward knowledge and discovery;" and the Los Angeles Book Review, "Blood Sisters is a book about family bonds and the lengths we will go to protect our own."

Even though this is fiction, I was reminded of Killers of the Flower Moon in terms of the dishonest and cruel treatment of Native Americans. Although the main character is flawed in ways that she and those close to her recognize, I did occasionally want to grab her by the shirt collar and quit going into dangerous situations on her own and usually unarmed. In many ways the book, storyline and protagonist all reminded me of the V.I. Warshawski books by Sara Paretsky, who hot headed and idealistic P.I. often ends up tackling much larger social issues in her efforts to solve a crime.

West Heart Kill

I have very mixed reactions about this mystery of Dann McDorman. On the one hand, I feel like he was being just way too clever with his admittedly unique approach to story telling. On the other, I was impressed with all the knowledge/ reseach that must have gone into the numerous references to the genre and its creators. The ending was not satisfying to me and I won't spoil it by telling you why. On the other hand, reviews are positive--although I sometimes think reviewer praise follows on novelty--so decide for yourself. 

Publishers Weekly's review begins, "McDorman’s wily debut breaks the fourth wall immediately, in a sign of the authorial shenanigans to come: 'This murder mystery, like all murder mysteries, begins with the evocation of what the reader understands to be its atmosphere,' goes the opening line." And it concludes, "As the story unfolds, the omniscient narrator intrudes to offer up tangents on subjects including murder mystery genre rules ('The key is a sense of fair play—a reader must not feel cheated') and Agatha Christie’s famous 1926 disappearance. While these peregrinations may not appeal to mystery fans who prefer a more direct route from crime to solution, McDorman ensures they never come at the expense of satisfying twists or shocks. For readers willing to try something a little different, this is quite the diversion."

Similarly, Booklist's review is also laudatory: "McDorman enters the crime fiction arena as a former newspaper reporter and an Emmy-nominated TV news producer steeped in the traditions and history of the mystery genre. He presents a classic closed circle mystery set at a private hunt club with a "manicured killing ground" in upstate New York, an enclave owned by a complexly entangled coterie of wealthy and dysfunctional families. Adam McAnnis fits the bill for a just-scraping-by private eye, circa 1976; he's a philosophical, weed-smoking, PTSD-harried Vietnam vet skeptical about everyone and everything. McDorman simultaneously revels in and comments on the many-faceted plot as the narrator directly addresses the reader with the assumption that she is equally knowledgeable and ardent about mysteries, decanting intriguing insights into the genre and its luminaries, including Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Jorge Luis Borges. Readers will encounter a quiz, Q & As with the suspects, and a play. McDorman is funny, canny, and nimble in this clever, unusual, and enormously entertaining mix of criticism and suspense, this mystery propelled by witty banter, hidden trauma, messy affairs, and vicious schemes."

The Which Way Tree

This novel by Elizabeth Crook reprises the setting she has used in several other of her novels, the Texas Hill country, this time during the post-Civil War era. When a marauding panther invades the Shreve homestead, it catches 6-year-old Samantha outside.

"...her mother fights it long enough to save the girl but loses her own life. The incident leaves young Sam disfigured and bent on vengeance. Six years later, she and her half brother, Ben, having also lost their father to “fever,” are living miserably by themselves when the big cat returns. Their efforts to trap the beast fall short, but they find an ally in a Mexican man named Pacheco while they make a dire enemy of a Confederate soldier named Hanlin, who aims a gun at Sam in their first confrontation and loses a finger when she gets off a lucky shot. Also lucky is Hanlin’s knowledge of a dog in the vicinity that specializes in panther tracking and is owned by his uncle, Preacher Dob. After much palaver, Hanlin departs, for a time, while Dob and his old dog join the quest. The trek that follows recalls Cormac McCarthy’s horseback meandering and keen eye for terrain and flora in The Crossing. There are also obvious echoes of True Grit, though Sam is even more fiercely single-minded than Mattie. Most unavoidable is the 90-ton whale in the room. Ben, the engaging narrator who delivers the story in the form of dispatches written for a judge weighing evidence against Hanlin, mentions early on that he has twice read Moby-Dick. He refers to it many more times for any reader who doesn’t make a connection with Sam’s obsessive drive to destroy an almost-mythic beast that scarred her face and is known to some as El Demonio." (Kirkus)

Booklist concludes, "This is a story of unremitting deprivation allayed by unexpected kindness, with a dangerous chase motivated by love and suffused with humanity." I would agree with with School Library Journal that "Samantha Shreve remains an enigmatic character throughout Crook's new novel and emerges as a heroine in her wayward, single-minded resolve to end the life of the panther that killed her mother and left Samantha...scarred." Speaking of brother Benjamin, Publishers Weekly says "Crook crafts Benjamin's narration beautifully, finding a winning balance between naiveté and wisdom, thoughtfulness and grit." Library Journal suggests who might enjoy this book. "Crook's ... fifth novel will be a must-read for fans of Joe Lansdale's Western adventures and Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers. Readers new to the Western genre will be hooked if they start with this compelling novel."

The Spellman Files

Lisa Lutz has written several stand-alone novels as well as six books in the "Spellman Files." She has won an Alex Award for this book (best adult novel with appeal for young adults), awarded by a division of the American Library Association, and has been nominated for an Edgar. This is the debut novel (2006) in the "Spellman Files" series; I read a review of a later installment but wanted to start at the beginning to get a flavor for the characters.  I think the author herself offers a wonderful overview:

"In THE SPELLMAN FILES you first meet Isabel Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to Get Smart reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors—but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Isabel. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman, tail a Spellman, dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman."

Kirkus calls this book a "spirited, funny debut from screenwriter Lutz that mixes chick-lit, mystery and a dose of TV nostalgia." The protagonist is addicted to Get Smart re-runs.They continue, "It’s all casual, swift and hip. But an underpinning of reality, the complex emotions of growing up and letting go, shows through occasionally, warming up this hilarious debut." Publishers Weekly offers, ""Cracking the case can get complicated and outrageously wacky when a family of detectives is involved, but Lutz has a blast doing it in her delicious debut...Can the family that snoops together stay together? Stay tuned as a dynamic new series unfolds."

West with Giraffes

This charming, if somewhat bittersweet story is a fictionalized account of true events that occurred in 1938--the Dust Bowl was driving destitute farmers west to California in droves and Hitler's power and aggression was on the rise in Europe. Woodrow Wilson Nickel, has watched the rest of his family die from dust pneumonia or suicide (in the case of his abusive father) so he makes his way to New York City to work for a distant cousin on the docks. When a hurricane hits, his cousin is killed and Woody is once again left to his own devices. When a freighter that somehow survived the hurricane comes limping into port, Woody is amazed to see that 2 of the crates on board carry giraffes who have suffered only one broken leg between them. He follows then to quarantine, observes the people around the giraffes--including a young woman photographer who claims to work for Life magazine, and eventually talks himself into the position of driver for the giraffes' cross country trip to the San Diego zoo. The appearance of the customized truck with the two giraffes--named by Woody as Boy and Girl--excites awe, greed and violence along the way. But more importantly, Woody learns about himself and the amazing connection to be had with these two animals. Based on true events, weaving real life characters in with the fictional ones--all of which is clarified in the Author's Notes. I thought the last part of the book blurb on the cover summed it up well: "Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it's too late"