The Herd

I was unfamiliar with author Andrea Bartz, for whom this novel is her second outing. The Washington Post reviewer, esteemed Maureen Corrigan, considers it to be the ideal "airplane novel"--if people were still taking airplanes anywhere these days. Corrigan goes on to summarize the plot: "An insular group of well-groomed women becomes drawn into investigating the murder of one of their own, all the while keeping scandalous personal secrets tightly sealed behind their persimmon pink-stained lips." The story gradually unfolds in alternating chapters told by two adoptive sisters; the older (adopted) sister is Hana, a woman of color who is now a successful public relations entrepreneur, and younger sister Katie, a journalist and wannabe book writer. Hana, Mikki, and Eleanorall went to Harvard together and have remained close friends. Katie also became friends with Eleanor and Mikki when Hana jaunted off to Los Angeles right after college. Mikki is a graphic designer and struggling artist. Eleanor first started an ethical line of cosmetics called Gleam and then created the HERD, a membership only club and co-working space for women entrepreneurs. It has become so wildly popular that there is a waiting list to get in, even with the $300 per month membership fee. With success, however, often comes resentment and Eleanor's ventures have generated their own groups of haters, one of which calls itself the Antiherd. A telling aside about the name of the venture is offered by one character who muses, "A herd’s primary purpose is to keep the highest percentage of its members alive. Evolution doesn’t care about the individual, about survival of the least-fit. We team up for the most selfish reason possible: self-preservation." When Eleanor goes missing on the eve of a big announcement about the HERD, everyone is in a panic, and Hana and Katie each set off independently to find out what happened to Eleanor.

The book felt slow to start and I was about half-way through before I really felt compelled to find out whodunnit. The dark secrets of Eleanor, Mikki, Hana, and Katie are hinted at so frequently and with such a heavy hand, that I figuratively had to roll my eyes many times. I would agree with Corrigan that it feels like the characters do not get fully developed and we really only find out what motivates them toward the very end of the book....slow, slow, slow, rush, rush, rush.  However, to be fair, I never saw the resolution coming and once we find out what lies beneath the shiny surfaces of these women, it seems all too plausible. I do think there is a lot of potential meat for discussion here in terms of how women are minimized and perjoratively interpreted in our culture, especially when it comes to business. Additionally, the contrast between who people really are and how they present themselves in social media is dealt with both head on and sideways--which could certainly generate good book group discussion.

Kirkus calls this a "soapy and fun woman-centric thriller."Publishers Weekly lauds it as "a smart, twisty thriller..." The Los Angeles Times says, "A pulpy satire of millennial corporate feminism and a parodic homage to the Wing..."  I had never heard of The Wing and if you read this piece in The New York Times Magazine, it will indeed sound very similar to the setting for this book.

Camino Winds

I haven't read any John Grisham in quite a while, although I certainly enjoyed what I read in the past, as well as  the movie spinoffs I watched. However, I found this book somewhat disappointing. Fictitious Camino Island, just off the east coast of Florida is a literary haven, anchored by Bay Books and owner/mover/shaker Bruce Cable. Cable loves to cultivate and foster budding young authors and doesn't mind bedding the attractive female ones, given that he is in an open marriage. There is a handful of other authors, who write in various genres, that make Camino Island their home, and independently wealthy (although perhaps not legally so) Bruce frequently hosts literary dinner parties in partnership with his antiques dealing and beautiful wife, Noelle. Bruce also has several author events each week at the bookstore during the busy summer tourist season. But this season is different because an unpredictable hurricane, Leo by name, decides to hit Camino Island head on. After the storm has passed, Bruce, his bookstore employee Justin, and crime writer Bob Cobb--all of whom remained instead of leaving--find that one of their friends, lawyer turn thriller writer Nelson Kerr, is dead. The police department want to write it off as an accident but Bruce and his pals find clues that suggest otherwise. When the local and state police seem all too willing to write this off, Bruce is determined to find out if the last book Nelson was writing might lead to the killer of his friend. Kerr has exposed some heavy hitter bad guys before and this time they may have decided they would go to any lengths to prevent publication of the book. Publishers Weekly sums up the rest of the action nicely, to wit: "Believing the manuscript is fact posing as fiction, Bruce retains the services of a dodgy security firm to infiltrate nursing homes. This effort leads to more murders, a cover-up, and a massive FBI operation to bring the book’s villains to justice."

The resolution of the book seems anti-climactic although perhaps more realistic for all of that. But, to me, none of the characters were very engaging. This is a sequel to Camino Island and I might have liked some of them better if I had read that. Kirkus writes a generally favorable review, although noting that "Cable is perhaps Grisham’s least sympathetic hero; he drinks night and day, sleeps around, and has few apparent scruples. At least he’s not a lawyer. Neither is he a cop..." The New York Times notes this effort is a hybrid of Grisham's earlier and more serious legal thrillers with a sort of beach book.

The Red Lotus

I was unfamiliar with author Chris Bohjalian, although he has apparently been a prolific author with several best sellers to his credit and is also a well-regarded playwright. This is the 2nd germs vs. humans book I have read since our current pandemic began (see also The End of October).

Wars leave behind so many casualties. In Vietnam, our deluge of agent orange not only killed people and plants but left a legacy of birth defects and...rats that are highly resistant to the things that normally kill them. Alexis, an ER doctor, and Austin, a development officer at the same hospital, have come to Vietnam for a bicycle tour. It is intended both as a vacation for them--now dating for 6 months--and an opportunity for Austin to pay homage at the place where his uncle died and his father was wounded during the war. He goes off on a solo ride to that end, leaving Alexis to go with the bike tour. But Austin does not come back that night and his body is not found until the next day, apparently the victim of a hit and run. Alexis finds several anomalies in the coroner's report and the circumstances of Austin's death. But all her efforts to figure out where Austin was in the intervening hours turn up only a couple of high energy gel packs, ostensibly dropped on the road he took. When the local FBI representative gets involved, Alexis learns that Austin's story about his uncle and father are not true and she begins to wonder what else he might have been lying about.

She continues to investigate after returning home to New York City and even hires a private investigator to help her. What they uncover is a deadly plan to sell mutated plague pathogens to the highest bidder.  Fast paced with good character and setting development. Recommended.

Positive reviews from The Washington Post, The New York Times, Kirkus, and Publishers' Weekly.

The Drifter

This mystery by Nick Petrie is one I have read before but apparently failed to post; however, it is July's selection for my mystery book group, so I reread it. This is the debut (published in 2016) of his series featuring Afghanistan veteran, Peter Ash--a man who can no longer stand to be indoors without suffering full-blown anxiety attacks. It was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Hammett Awards. Set in Milwaukee (Petrie's own city of residence), Ash has come to help the widow of one of his sargeants, Jimmy Johnson, who apparently killed himself. Of course Ash feels guilty that he never visited his former friend and fellow soldier after they came home. He is doing some repairs on the run-down house where Dinah and her two young sons live. His first task is to somehow get a vicious dog out from under the nearly collapsed front porch. In the process, he discovers a suitcase with $400K and 4 blocks of C-4 explosive. Dinah denies all knowledge and furthermore wants nothing to do with the money, even though her house is nearing foreclosure. She introduces Peter to a gangster type, Lewis, who went to school with both Jimmy and Dinah and still carries a torch for Dinah. He also denies knowing anything about the money. But now Peter is determined to find out what Jimmy was doing with the money and the explosives. In alternating chapters, we follow a man in a "black canvas chore coat" as he systematically gathers the materials for a massive fertilizer bomb. Some good guys turn out to be bad guys and some bad guys turn out to be not so bad after all. The storyline and characters illustrate all too well the poor treatment many veterans have had at home. The plotting and pace are solid as are the characters--an engaging read.

  Publishers Weekly offers up a positive review as does Kirkus.

Out of Darkness, Shining Light

This historical novel by Petina Gappah purports to tell the story of the return of Dr. David Livingstone's body to England after he died in central Africa--a journey of 1,500 miles that took almost a year. It is told from the perspective of Livingstone's expedition cook, Halima, and Jacob Wainwright, a secretary who joined the expedition shortly before Livingstone died. Halima was bought out of servitude by Livingstone to be a "travel wife" to one of Livingstone's main expedition organizers, an abusive man named Amoda. She is outspoken at times and has even run away from the expedition following an argument with one of the other "travel wives." Halima is critical of a man who could basically abandon his family to search for the source of a river (the Nile), but she pragmatically notes, “People can do good and still be bad, and do bad and still be good.” Livingstone has promised to buy her a house of her own when they return to Zanzibar so she may live as a free woman. In spite of his death, Livingstone's son honors his father's commitment to Halima. The other narrator, Jacob Wainwright, was rescued from slavers as a child and taken to an English school in India run by a missionary named Nassick; the graduates of that school are often referred to as Nassickers. Jacob is very pious, in fact self-righteous and full of himself. Yet he has also incorporated some degree of self-loathing as a result of his colonial education. Jacob has taken it upon himself to organize and preserve Livingstone's papers and has aspirations of returning to England with Livingstone's body, becoming ordained as a missionary, and returning to convert Africans to Christianity. He will be disappointed in these aspirations.
In the review from The Guardian, they claim that these various narratives serve to demythologize a man "who was often petty and occasionally venal; who blundered through the continent propelled by a conviction of the superiority of his own ideas; who considered it impossible to overstate slavery’s evils yet relied heavily on the assistance of slave traders; and who wasn’t above 'having a man beaten if that is what has to be done.'”I would agree with their reviewer that, at times, the book stuttered because it "felt loaded too heavily with information at the expense of plot." And, I might add, too many unpronounceable names. Might be better to consume as an audio-book, although it would still be a challenge to keep track of all the characters and places--which, by the way, were not reflected to any significant degree on the enclosed map! The review from The New York Times is lukewarm; whereas, Kirkus gushes, "a rich, vivid, and addictive book filled with memorably drawn characters. This is a humane, riveting, epic novel that spotlights marginalized historical voices."
Guess you'll have to decide for yourself. 

The Familiar Dark

This book by Amy Engel is indeed dark and the darkness to which it refers is the darkness within each of us. In the case of our protagonist, 30-year-old Eve Taggert, that darkness runs deep thanks to an abusive and drug dealing, mother. But Eve has kept it in check these last 12 years for the sake of her daughter, the light of her life, Junie. When Junie and her BFF, Izzy, are brutally murdered in the wretched town park of Barren Springs, Missouri. Eve no longer cares what others think of her. And she turns to the mother she determinedly turned her back on for lessons on vengeance; for when her mother wasn't dealing out physical or emotional abuse, she was fiercely protective of her two children, Eve and older brother Cal. No one ever bothered either child due to her reputation for swift and terrible retaliation. Now all Eve wants to do is find the person who murdered her daughter and do the same thing. She feels no need to work with the corrupt sheriff or the parents of the other dead girl, Zach and Jenny Logan, who come from a different social class and, therefore, different world than Eve. She is emotionally supported by her brother and the cook and waitress at the cafe where she has waited tables since she was in high school. Her brother Cal is a cop, and a fair one by all accounts, but consistently warns Eve away from her inquiries. So Eve finds out on her own, through an informal network, that Izzy was seeing an older man, Matt. Matt is a key member of a drug selling operation run by Eve's physically abusive ex-boyfriend, Jimmy Ray. Eve will even turn to him to get what she wants. But it is none of the really dangerous people she confronts who finally, ultimately betray her.
This not a happy ending book. Kirkus says it is "a bleak drama of rural America that offers grim lessons but minimal hope."  Publishers' Weekly refers to the genre as "rural noir." But it is well-written with loving descriptions of the hidden green hollers and rolling rivers of the Missouri Ozarks. The Daily Herald offers a good succinct review of the plot as well as a glowing review.

City of Girls

I am a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert. I was privileged to hear her speak at an author event in Bend. This is the 4th book of hers I have read (plus I watched Eat, Pray, Love) and I love her writing. That being said, this was not my favorite book she has written. I had several notes in the first couple of chapters and the last couple of chapters, and nothing in between.
In the Prologue I noted that I HATE the use of the work impact as a verb--it communicates nothing.
Chapter One:
p 3, "In the summer of 1940, when I was nineteen years old and an idiot..." Aren't we all. She remained an idiot for quite a while it seems.
p. 4, "...same shapeless wool skirts that looked as though they'd been constructed out of old sweaters..."  Love this description.
p. 4, "...some artistic girls with long and self-important hair, and some high-bred socialite types with profiles like Italian greyhounds..." Ditto.
p. 6, My own friends were moving forward with their lives, too. They were heading off to college, work, marriage, and adulthood--all subjecs that I had not interest in or understanding of. So there was noboydy around to care about me or entertain me." What a privileged--spoiled? being!
p.8, "...her hats were so big they required their own seats at the theater." (speaking of her colorful grandmother.
p.10, "It was a sleek, black Singer 201 and it was murderously powerful (you could sew leather with it; I could have upholstered a Bugatti with that thing!).  Speaking of the best gift she ever received--also from her grandmother.
p. 12, speaking of the death of her grandmother..."(my best friend, my mentor, my confidante)...That devastation might've had something to do with why I performed so poorly at college...Perhaps I had not been such a terrible student, after all, Perhaps I had merely been sad. I am only realizing this possibility at this moment...Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out."

Chapter Two:
p. 13, "Anyway, I arrived in New York City safely--a girl so freshly hatched that there was practically yolk in my hair."

Chapter Four:
p.57, "...I didn't pay much attention to maids back then. I was so very accustomed to them, you see. They were nearly invisible to me. I just expected to be served. And why was that?...Because I was rich. I haven't said those words yet in these pages, so let's just get it out of the way right now: I was rich, Angela. I was rich, and I was spoiled."

Chapter Fifteen:
p. 200, "To listen to his singing," Billy diagnosed, "is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf." Speaking of Edna's husband.

Chapter Twenty-Two:
p.304, "I am an old woman now, As such, I have reached an age where I cannot stand the tears of young girls. It exasperates me to no end. I especially cannot stand the tears of pretty young girls....who have never had to struggle or work for anything in their lives....it makes me want to strangle them."

Chapter Twenty-Nine:
p. 405, "The field of honor is a painful field," Olive went on at last..."That's what my father taught me when I was young. He taught me that the field of honor is not a place where children can play. Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person--a person without honor--might take....Of course, nobody is required to stand in the field of honor," Olive continued. "If you find it too challenging, you may always exit, and then you can remain a child. But if you wish to be a person of character, I'm afraid this is the only way." I am reminded of Edna telling her that "You will never be a person of the slightest significance." I think this was a turning point for the character.

Chapter Thirty-Three
p. 466, "...as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela. It's not that there is ever a shortage of people--...It is merely that--as the years pass--there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history." Reflections on mortality and friendship.

I guess I just never really liked Vivian very much for most of the book, or any of the other main characters for that matter, even though they were fully and beautifully rendered.
I won't try to summarize the plot. Others have done that better than I can. Reviews abound:
NPR, which uses the term "sockdolager" in its review--Wow!
The New York Times
The Washington Post, which pretty well sums up my experience, "Unfortunately, what should have been a mere 300-page novel became a 470-page tome. The best and worst thing that can be said about “City of Girls” is that it’s perfectly pleasant, the kind of book one wouldn’t mind finding in a vacation condo during a rainy week. In exchange for a series of diverting adventures, it demands only stamina from its readers."
The Guardian, which says "an eloquently persuasive treatise on the judgment and punishment of women, and a heartfelt call to reclaim female sexual agency. “At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time,” says Vivian as she looks back on her life. “After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”And I also sort of agree with this latter bit.
And, finally, Kirkus, which obviously loved the book, describing it as "A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you."

Vinegar Girl

This is a retelling of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" written by Anne Tyler. In this version, Katherine is a 29-year old still living at home after a brief attempt at college; she was asked to leave because she told one of her professors he was lazy. Her mother is long deceased and Kate cares for her absent-minded scientist of a father and her 15-year old younger sister, Bunny. It's already a thankless task to ride herd on Bunny with almost no input from her father, who clearly takes her for granted. When he begs her to bring his forgotten lunch to his lab one day, he seems very keen that she get acquainted with his assistant Pyotr.  Turns out that Pyotr's green card is going to run out in 2 months and Kate's father wants Kate to marry him--just on paper of course--so he can keep the most valuable colleague he's ever had. Kate is incensed, of course, but eventually comes around to helping her father out. There's a break-in at the lab on the day of Kate & Pyotr's wedding, but the ceremony--such as it is-- belatedly proceeds and Kate figures out where the missing mice are. The epilogue ties it all up in a tidy little package at the end. I found it uninspiring although other reviewers had more positive reactions: NPR, The New York Times, and Kirkus.

Books I Gave Up On

There's quite a long list. I have less patience these days with things that don't grab me, so, unless it's for one of my book groups, I read anywhere from 50-150 pages and then let it go.
Slammerkin by Emma Donaghue: slammerkin is an 18th C English term for a loose dress or a loose woman. Mary Saunders is raised in poverty and when her step-father throws her out of the house because of a rape pregnancy, she is taken in by a prostitute and learns the ways of the streets. When she gets sick, she goes into a religious institution for women who want to reform, works on her seamstress skills and then goes to work in a small Welsh town as an apprentice. Based on an actual murder. But I gave up before that happened.
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga: Danny, an illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka, is working as a house cleaner when he discovers a murder. If he reports it, he'll probably be deported.
Things in Jars by Jess Kidd: I actually read quite a bit of this book before giving up. I actually liked Bridie Divine, an unusual woman detective in the underbelly of Victorian London. She has been hired to find a 6-year-old kidnapped child. Evidence accumulates that the girl, Cristabel, is no ordinary girl but rather vicious type of sea creature. Bridie is determined to find the girl, even if she thinks Cristabel may be part of Sir Edmund Berwick's "collection" rather than his actual daughter. Bridie is assisted in her investigations by the ghost of a recently deceased boxer, Ruby Doyle.
Paul Simon: The Life (biography) by Robert Hilburn. Just read a couple chapters.
Naked Came the Florida Man by Tim Dorsey: Apparently this is the 23rd installment in the "Serge Storm" series so some people must like it. I couldn't get past the first few chapters of a road trip to take tombstone rubbings in the run-up to a hurricane.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Casiopea (yes, named after the constellation) and her impoverished widowed mom live with a brutal grandfather who treats Casiopea like a slave. On a day when the rest of her family are away, Casiopea opens a forbidden trunk in her grandfather's bedroom and accidentally fres the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who forces her to help him regain his throne from a treacherous brother. If they succeed, Casiopea can escape her miserable life; if they fail, Casiopea will die. Intriguing premise but the writing and storyline just didn't hold me. Nevertheless, she has some other interesting sounding fantasy and thrillers which I will investigate.

Red Dress in Black and White by Elliot Ackerman. 

Woman 99 by Greer Macallister. Although I liked the historical aspect of it, the protagonist, Charlotte Smith, just didn't engage me. She seemed flat and the plot device, to get herself admitted to an insane asylum in order to get her sister out, felt overdone. It was well reviewed by another author, Fiona Davis, who also talked about the use of such places to sideline inconvenient women in her book, The Address.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I had never heard of this author, Grady Hendrix, but he has had some best sellers in the horror genre and the premise of this book, that a group of southern housewives take on an ancient vampire who is preying on the local children, was too tempting to pass up. A group of fairly well-to-do  housewives in 1990's Charleston, South Carolina, surreptitiously enjoy a book club focused on true crime, happily discussing how serial killers get away with their dark deeds. One wife tells her husband she is attending a Bible study group. When a crotchety neighbor dies in a rather ghoulish fashion, a man claiming to be a distant relative, James Harris, moves into the woman's house. Patricia Cunningham is bored with her life as wife to a successful psychiatrist, caretaker for his demented mother, and mother of two teenage children, and she wishes "something exciting would happen around here." She does the neighborly thing and takes a casserole over to the new neighbor, but gets worried when he does not answer the door. She goes into the house to find him dead--she thinks--and gives him mouth to mouth resuscitation (having been a nurse in her earlier years).  He "revives" and tells her he has a medical condition that makes him sensitive to daylight and that his wallet with his identification has been stolen. Patricia agrees to help with paying some overdue utility bills and setting up a checking account with some money he "found" under the house. That night, he comes to return the casserole dish and is invited in to meet Patricia's family. Anyone who has read vampire stories knows the significance of that move. By the time Patricia begins to suspect that he is not who he claims to be and is, in fact, something very dangerous, the damage is done. Children begin disappearing and/or dying in a poor neighboring Black community, and Patricia does some sleuthing of her own, discovering James in the back of a van feeding on one of the children. She tries to convince her fellow book group members that they need to take issues into their own hands, but the women are co-opted by their husbands who have become bosom buddies with James and think the women are all hysterical over-reactors. Patricia's husband actually puts her in a mental hospital for a time and when she comes out, she keeps her head down. Meanwhile James has ingratiated himself socially and financially with the community, getting the men to invest in a new real estate development. Patricia discovers one night that James has come into their home and is feeding off her older daughter and this galvanizes her to try once more to plot his demise. The most religious member of the book club  believes her but thinks she can handles James on her own, given her strong faith in God. She is sadly mistaken. The rest of the the book group eventually agree to help Patricia in a desperate attempt to protect their children from this greedy monster. The book is a bit grisly at times but uses the device of under-values and disaffected housewives to good measure in setting up the tension in the story.
Kirkus considers this to be Hendrix's "best book yet." And USA Today highlights "incisive social commentary and meaningful character development" as well as the female bonding that make these women ultimately a formidable opponent to incipient evil. They warn, however, that this is a "proper horror novel" and not for the faint of heart.
READ this interview on NPR with Hendrix to learn the backstory for this book. It's very personal and thoughtful and will add to your appreciation of what he's written.