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The latest in the Sue Grafton alphabet series. I have read and enjoyed (and own) "A" through "W" so was happy to dive into this. The brevity of the title gives an inkling of the serious nature of the story...usually the titles have a sub-title, e.g., W is for Wasted. Not only is there a worse than usual bad guy, but Kinsey must come to terms with her own prejudices and misjudgements of former acquaintance and work colleague Pete Wolinsky, who was recently murdered. Then there is the elderly couple who have moved in next door and seem to be taking advantage of Henry's good nature--they turn out to be practiced con artists. Kinsey sets out to catch them cheating in a way that will get them into jail. She takes on one of Pete's old cases to make amends to his memory and to his widow, and in the process crosses swords with a violent stalker of women. She also gets dragged into an enraged divorcee's efforts to get even with her philandering husband by stealing some art.
This felt like a rich and satisfying read. Grafton always has a bit more to offer than, for example, Janet Evanovich, in terms of moral quandries and complex characters. I would put her on the spectrum somewhere between Evanovich and Sara Paretsky--some quirky fun, but also serious issues.

The Marriage of Opposites

This is the newest of Alice Hoffman's novels, which tells the story of Rachel Pomié, the woman who was to become the mother of Impressionist painter Camille Pizzarro. She grew up in a Jewish family on the island of St. Thomas, when it was still a territory of Denmark (early 1800's). The Jews had been driven from one place to another and so could not be blamed for feeling that this sanctuary under Danish rule was precarious and that should do their best not to draw any undue or negative attention to themselves. This led to a strictly proscribed life, however. Women had no rights, children should obey their parents and follow in their parents' footsteps whenever possible, and no one must marry outside their religion, much less outside their race.
This is a tale filled with forbidden loves. When Rachel's infant brother dies of a fever, her mother takes in a baby boy and raises him as her son and favored child. Only much later do we learn who Aaron really is. Aaron and Rachel's best friend, Jestine, fall in love but are forbidden to marry because Jestine is the daughter of the Pomié's African maid, Adelle. Before Aaron is sent away to France to work in the family business there, Jestine becomes pregnant. When Aaron eventually returns with a French wife, they kidnap his daughter and Jestine does not see her again for decades.
Rachel is married off to a much older man, a widower with three children, to help her father's business ( shipping and trading) stay solvent. She never comes to love Monsieur Petit, but he is kind and they have several children together before he dies in his 50's. A handsome young nephew,  Frédéric Pizzarro, comes from Paris to run the family business, and now Rachel falls passionately in love. Of course she is forbidden to marry because he is family, but they nevertheless become lovers and eventually have children together, including Jacob Abraham Camille. They continue to petition their community for acceptance of their marriage, which comes only much later, after years of social exile that profoundly affect the family. 
There is a  lot of story here, but perhaps more compelling is the abundance of character and atmosphere. Rachel dreams of escaping St. Thomas and going to Paris and both of these locales are described in evocative images. The prose is lush and wraps you in feelings, place and dreams. You understand what it feels like to be constrained by custom and to yearn for more--and then to carry those constraints with you even after you have escaped. I have read other books by Hoffman, and, although I am not a big fan of magical realism, this one really got under my skin.
More reviews: Kirkus, NPR, The New York Times 

Working Stiff

The sub-title of this book by Dr. Judy Melinek and her husband T.J. Mitchell is "Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner." I read a blurb about this book in a book catalog and, rather than buy it, I checked it out of the library and found it sufficiently engrossing to read the whole thing. Although she started a surgery residency after completing medical school, Melinek soon came to believe that the conditions of the residency threatened the health of both patients and residents and she switched to forensic pathology. She did her residency at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. This is considered one of the very best residency programs in the field and she felt it offered her the opportunity to continually learn more about the human body and how it functions or fails to function.
She tells a series of vignettes about the cases she work on, including discussions of various ways that the families of the deceased deal with their deaths. Homicides were not a large percentage of her cases, but she did help convict a number of killers through thorough work and documentation. On the other hand, she felt some people got away with murder because assumptions were made about the victims' life styles or because the police were unwilling to investigate.  Since her father committed suicide when she was a teen, she felt a particular empathy with the families in those cases. She even had a stalker--a mother who could not accept that her son had died of a drug overdose and wanted the death certificate change to indicate his death was due to accident or homicide.
Melinek was in the middle of her residency when 9/11 occurred and she documents in detail what the process was like to deal with the remains of nearly 3,000 victims. Within a month of that disaster, a plane crash in Queens killed almost 300 people, further straining an already overloaded system. She speaks highly of the professionalism, expertise and compassion of her co-workers.
A really interesting read, presented in a sympathetic and totally non-sensationalistic manner. Technical terminology is usually explained pretty clearly. Appeals to our morbid fascination with death. Reviews available from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Kirkus.  

The Job

This is another installment in the "Fox and O'Hare" series by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg.  Master thief Nicolas Fox, having finally been caught by FBI special agent Kate O'Hare, is now more or less working with the FBI to stop other bad guys. When a series of museums thefts seem to lead right back to Fox, Kate is brought in to track him down--again. But she doesn't think he would be so careless as to leave fingerprints or let his face be caught on a security monitor and he, in fact, denies being the thief. Clearly someone wants his attention, however, and when Kate catches the actual thief, a former accomplice of Fox's, they decide to go after the man she was trying to trap, the man who murdered her brother. Menendez is also the head of a major global drug ring; the problem is, no one knows what he looks like since he had extensive plastic surgery, so an elaborate trap is laid, targeted to his known weaknesses. An elaborate scam is conceived and carried out to make Menendez think a couple of clever but resource poor archaeologists have discovered the sunken wreck of the Santa Isabela, which carried hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold. Kate gets to spend time as a hostage with Menendez' sadistic bodyguard girlfriend while Fox and crew take Menendez on a make-believe ride to the site of the wreck--all accomplished with virtual reality and special effects. Light and entertaining reading when you just want something fun--there is a fair amount of sexual banter between Fox and O'Hare. Evanovich is a very competent writer and the characters are engaging. O'Hare is a strong female protagonist.

The Light of the World

This book by Elizabeth Alexander was one I read because I thought my friend, Joan* had recommended it. Turns out she told me she could NOT read it. But it was too late. I cried and I sighed and my heart broke and soared. It is a book about loss, specifically the death of her husband from a heart attack when he was barely 50 years old. He was a refugee from the wars in Eritrea, but embraced life with a fervor that perhaps sought to balance out the trauma he had endured.
So it is also a book about love and living life to the fullest. Not many of us will have a love or a marriage like Elizabeth and Ficre, but if we have loved at all, then we know that loss is the inevitable flip side of the coin. Whether or not this is a loss you have experienced personally, much will resonate as she describes her --and her sons'-- struggle to cope with life after Ficre.
Alexander is a poetry professor at Yale so it is not surprising that her writing is rich in sensory image, emotion and recollection. She read one of her poems at Obama's 2009 inauguration. Well worth reading. Much more comprehensive review here from the NYTimes and this much briefer but touching one from Kirkus.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

This review in The Guardian by Caspar Henderson does a wonderful job of contextualizing (literarily) and summarizing the Pulitzer Prize-winning (2015, General Non-fiction) piece of science writing by Elizabeth Kolbert--better than I could ever do. There have been five major extinctions in the history of planet earth and Kolbert documents the evidence that bolsters the assertion that human beings are the cause of the sixth. A major extinction is an "an event in which a significant proportion of life is eliminated in a geologically insignificant amount of time" (see The Guardian) whether the cause is a catastrophic event like the asteroid which wiped out 75% of the planet's life forms in a matter of weeks or the human-caused acidification of the oceans, deforestation, and warming of the atmosphere in the last few decades.
Kolbert travels to numerous places around the world to observe and question those scientists doing work in the study of various animal and plant extinctions today, thus offering the reader a rigorous and first hand look at the extent of damage caused and the irreversible effects of our rapidly burgeoning, increasingly mobile population. She provides an overview of history in the big sense--beyond human habitation--to put this in perspective. Which makes the rapid rate of extinctions occurring today, at one and the same time just another cycle in the big picture, and also a tragic tale of loss and destruction that will inevitably lead to a very different world in the near future.
She reports; she does not lecture or advise for she does not see that as her role. Often compelling, sometimes an effort, it is a sobering read but well worth the effort. Several online interviews with Kolbert are available including this one in the NYTimes.

The Visitors

I am woefully behind on posting books that I have read, but need to get this one back to the library pronto so will start here. This is the BBC (Biblioholics Book Club) selection for December by Sally Beauman (journalist and author of Rebecca's Tale). It is a historical novel for the most part, although part of it is also set in more contemporary times. The major historical focus of the book is the period around the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923. Just prior to that, our narrator, Lucy, is taken as a young girl to Egypt by a governess, following the death of her mother. She herself is still recovering from the typhoid fever that was fatal to her mother. There she meets Frances, daughter of the American archaeologist Herbert Winlock, and, though somewhat younger than Lucy, the girls form a deep friendship that lasts until Frances's untimely death in her early 20's from TB.
This is a very detailed and gritty portrayal of the major players working in the Valley of the Kings in that decade, notably Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon from England and the archaeologsits from the Met in New York. There were rumors of some shady activities surrounding the opening of Tut's tomb and these were later borne out by documentary evidence in letters and diaries.
The other significant settings and events are a few chapters detailing the death of Frances who disappeared from Lucy's life for a couple of years while she was secreted away in Saranac Lake, NY, a haven for those suffering from TB. The cold clean air was thought to be restorative and shortly before she dies, she contacts Lucy and asks her to come. People hid the fact that someone had TB since it was contagious and carried social stigma. Lucy was able to reconnect with her friend for her few last weeks.
Then there is the contemporary setting of Lucy's house in London, where she is recalling all these events at the prompting of Mr. Fong, who is making a documentary about the discovery of Tut's tomb. Lucy is now in her 90's. She is still friends with one other woman she met as a girl in Egypt, Rose. Rose's younger brother Peter briefly became Lucy's lover at the beginning of WWII before he he was killed, and their baby died. So there are a lot of ghosts in Lucy's life.
The settings are colorfully portrayed and Beauman has scoured historical documents to make the historical people and events as accurate as possible. However, I find Lucy to be a less than compelling character and the book felt slow at times. Nevertheless, I learned a lot--about the discovery of Tut's tomb and the role of Lake Saranac--and that is always satisfying.
See this somewhat more cogent and pointed review in The Guardian or this one from Kirkus. 

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

This account of the Dust Bowl epoch in the southern great plains by Timothy Egan certainly does make clear what a horrendous loss of lives and property occurred in the "dirty thirties." Tim Egan recently gave an "Author! Author!" talk here in Bend (through our public library) to discuss his book about Edward Curtis. Because his talk was focused on that book, he did not answer questions about his other works. I recently read and posted on Breaking Blue, another historical narrative.
I grew up in Oklahoma until I was 15 so had certainly heard about the Dust Bowl and the migration of "Okies" to California. Egan attempted to personalize these events by interviewing survivors, drawing from diaries, newspaper accounts, and government documentation. The scale of the disaster, caused largely by human behavior really was staggering--millions of tons of dust was blown away. In the process, people died of "dust pneumonia," lost their crops, livestock, land, and way of life. Egan does a good job of painting the plains as the home of bison and Indians, with grasslands that held down the dirt for thousands of years of human habitation. But then came the wholesale slaughter of the bison to deprive the natives of their food source, followed by ranchers who fenced the land, and finally--fatally--by farmers who tore up the grass to plant wheat. So that when the drought came, as they historically always do, and the crops died, there was nothing holding the earth in place. Even when people could get small crops to grow, the hordes of grasshoppers ate everything down to the ground.
The facts and figures are consistently astounding. And a few characters emerge as memorable. But largely I found this book tried to do too much, talk to too many people, and portray too many stories to make it a compelling read. It felt choppy and slow, with frequent shifts in the locale and time frame of the narrative. Egan may well have had his journalistic reasons for such choices, but I have not enjoyed reading his books, unlike those of Erik Larson, who does basically the same genre. Nevertheless, Egan won a National Book Award (2006) for this tome, so it's just my opinion. More detail and positive reviews at Kirkus and the New York Times.

The Fifth Witness

I really like this series by Michael Connelly featuring itinerant lawyer, Mickey Haller (aka The Lincoln Lawyer). Fifth Witness is the 4th major book for this character series--there are posts for 4 other books in the series (Lincoln Lawyer, The Brass Verdict,  The Reversal, The Gods of Guilt). Crime has been slow during the Great Recession (as it came to be known) and Mickey has put himself in the business of helping those whose homes are being foreclosed. There are plenty of clients, some more legitimately victims than others, and then there is Lisa. She is always inserting herself in Mickey's efforts to keep the bank from foreclosing on the house where she is living with her son. When the head of the mortgage department at the bank is murdered, Lisa is arrested. Mickey is convinced that she is being railroaded by the police department, and also that the whole thing may have been a set up by the CEO of the company that contracts with the bank to do foreclosures. It appears he has ties to organized crime and does not want that disclosed in an upcoming merger with a public company that will bring him millions of dollars. There is the usual push to get his client off with whatever strategies work--discrediting witnesses, creating a "straw man" to put reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors, and always trying to stay at least one step ahead of the prosecution. Mickey and ex-wife Maggie continue to dance an approach-avoidance two-step that is complicated by their mutual love for teenage daughter., Hayley. Maggie, as a prosecutor for the county, still considers Mickey's tactics reprehensible. Even his new associate, fresh out of a department store law program, has her doubts. But Mickey wears his blinders so he can live with himself and defend his clients to the best of his ability. In this case, the enemies may be much closer than he thinks.

The Screaming Staircase

Now there's a title that makes you want to run right out and read the book, right?! This is another fun YA book from Jonathan Stroud. I read the Bartimaeus Trilogy a long time back so when I saw this new series--Lockwood & Co-- in e-book format, I grabbed it.
The Problems have come to England--an excess of ghosts of varying levels of malevolence generally causing the shape of life to change. No one goes out after dark--except the children who are still able to sense the ghosts by sound or sight. They are on the defensive front line and Lucy Carlyle, having left her small village agency which just lost 3 agents, has come to London and joined Lockwood & Co. This is London's smallest ghost fighting group--only Lockwood, George, and now Lucy--and the only one without an adult supervisor. They are getting on OK until they accidentally burn down a house while fighting a surprisingly strong ghost. They are being sued and stand to lose the entire business until a new client makes them an offer they can't refuse.
But the murder they uncovered in the fire-related haunting has sinister ties to this new client, whose motives may not be simply to rid his country estate of terrifying spirits. These books are just a kick to read if you enjoy YA and the supernatural. Dive in, and don't forget your rapier, salt bombs and chains to keep the ghosts from getting too close! The e-book also provided a glossary of ghost types and the weapons used to fight them :-)