OPEN, HEAVEN is poet Seán Hewitt debut coming-of-age novel, sad and beautiful

OPEN, HEAVEN
SEÁN HEWITT
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Daddy issues are powerful among men. (Probably women too, but I have no direct information about that.) People never love you the way you think they do, or should. Teenage is bloody awful to live through, and golden gorgeous once you know what the rest of life is.

Time runs faster backwards. The years–long, arduous, and uncertain when taken one by one–unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind, is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow-encrusted garden. And then the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms again in reverse.

This, my olds, is the way reading this book progresses. Imagery, metaphor, simile, all deployed in gorgeous swathes of lushness. Does anything *happen*? ask my Plotters. Does anyone get fucked? ask the Smutleys. What about character growth? wonder the odd (very odd, frankly) straights who accidentally stumble across things I write. (Howdy, both of y'all!)

If you are reading this story with An Agenda (eg, what happens to Daddy, does the kid get his cherry popped), put it down and read something not by a poet. One of those Seán Hewitt decidedly is. I am not a poetry reader. Let go of your pearls, that's far from the first time I've said it. Then I read a line like, "It was like walking through a folk song that afternoon—the blackbirds and the thrushes, the sweetness if the flowers, the boy who I loved, and who might even love me, waiting for me between the trees," and I get all swoony and wander around smiling (scared my roommate to death, he thought I was having another stroke) and vow to read more poetry.

I'm better now.

So we're clear: You're here for the writing, not the first-love-coming-of-age story. It is lovely writing indeed. I honestly never once thought about how rural north-of-England boys in the Aughties found out how absolutely mind-blowingly amazing it is to fall in love with another boy. I'm closer to knowing that now, and whaddaya know it's a lot like the ways city boys in Seventies Texas did. Hence the evergreenness of that plot. It's never going to be all that dissimilar to other times and places. Plotters, you've read it before, and nothing unusual happens here. Very slowly. Described in words and images designed to make your tear ducts open like stopcocks on a clepsydra. Until the ending, when it's more like the outflow channels through the Three Gorges Dam.

As to why, you'll find out.

What makes this journey down a well-worn cart track, jolts and ruts and huge potholes of Emotional Discovery℠ and all, worth my while is that I'm really there with young James. A poet who understands the power of leaving something unsaid, unheard, and all there in the spaces between the words—the boys—can make an old cynical great-grandpa think about how it happened, how it felt, who to hide from and how to cover it up. Things that hurt, that warped me in the moment, that felt like having my skin ripped off and salted vinegar poured on the wounds, are visible now in a gentler light, more importantly a context that makes them Meaningful Developments towards adulthood.

Is that good? Dunno, but it makes me feel good and likely will you, as well.

THE LEIGH RUSSELL PAGE: JOURNEY TO DEATH, first Lucy Hall procedural & GIRL IN DANGER, the second

JOURNEY TO DEATH
LEIGH RUSSELL
Thomas & Mercer
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five for suiting my exact mood

The Publisher Says: Lucy Hall arrives in the Seychelles determined to leave her worries behind. The tropical paradise looks sun-soaked and picture-perfect—but as Lucy soon discovers, appearances can be very deceptive. A deadly secret lurks in the island’s history, buried deep but not forgotten. And it is about to come to light.

As black clouds begin to gather over what promised to be a relaxing family break, Lucy realises that her father stands in the eye of the coming storm. A shadow from his past is threatening to destroy all that he holds dear—including the lives of his loved ones.

A dark truth is about to explode into their lives, and that truth is going to hit them right between the eyes.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The wages of sin are paid by those born of it. This is the first of a new series starring the woman who will pay for hte sins of the past. It definitely kept me going as we start the book following George in the 1970s...a time of terrible political crises and much violence, as any of us who lived through it remember. Despite the terrible things happening, we're moving at a dream-like pace...it kept me from being fully immersed and presented a problem for me throughout the read.

Landing in the Seychelles for a family vacation, Lucy, George's twentysomething daughter, is ready for a complete change because she's just broken her engagement to a man whose idea of marriage isn't like hers. Because we do hear a LOT about that subject, I was about to skip the rest of the read. I kept going because the descriptions are fully and completely involving. I can't really extract one to show you, sorry...the problem with reading a DRC is that I can't copy-and-paste the way one can with normal Kindle books.

What I found ironic is that ever-so-betrayed Lucy's mother, put in jeopardy by her husband lying by omission, doesn't seem ready to snatch some passing policeman's gun and shoot him dead. I assure you that, were my Young Gentleman Caller to whisk me off to a beautiful foreign destination where he (searching for a lost love) got me kidnapped, you would need one sheet of blotting paper and a whisk broom to clean up what was left of him once I was free.

Anyway, I love reading about tropical places, I enjoyed Lucy's complete unwillingness to accept anything told her at face value no matter whose face was uttering it, and I wanted just this level of readerly demand. It's not perfect, it's not fast-paced, but it is lush and it gives you plenty to think about. Recommended!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

GIRL IN DANGER
LEIGH RUSSELL
Thomas & Mercer
$3.99 Kindle editon, available now

Rating: squeaks to 4* of five on its mood-suiting qualities

The Publisher Says: Chasing a story, reporter Lucy Hall plunges into a desperate fight to save her own life.

Lucy Hall’s first summer in Paris promises to be idyllic. She’s fallen in love with the city and enjoys her new job as an investigative reporter. When her friend Nina comes to stay, the girls look forward to a wonderful summer. But Paris is a city of contrasts and Lucy is about to experience its dangerous side.

When an anonymous source promises her a scoop, Lucy can’t resist the chance to make her name. The deeply unsettling meeting with her informant indicates that there may be more at stake than she’d suspected. Returning home with questions instead of answers, Lucy finds her apartment ransacked and Nina gone.

Lucy knows her friend is in danger, but the police are unwilling to help. When her informant is found dead, she realises she may be next. Lucy has something the killer wants and he’ll do anything to get it back…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another case of feeling the scenery is a co-star in the read and might deserve a cut of the royalties. This time it's set in a place I've been! So I felt even more connected to the locales.

Another situation where I wonder how the bloody hell the woman got there...how is a twenty-four-year-old going to get an investigative journalist's position in a city she's not from, and barely speaks the language? And what journalist's boss would chastise her for pestering people for story ideas? That is the literal definition of her job.

Well, no matter, I wasn't asked to fact-check the MS so I let it go.

I totally bought that Lucy, knowing she's dealing with a dreadful underworld figure, would go to the police the second her visiting gal-pal vanishes and her apartment gets ransacked; I also totally bought that the police, knowing what they are bound to know of the criminal in question, basically shrugged and said "come back after forty-eight hours, kthxbye" because the young visitor will either arrive back confused from being lost or in Ziploc baggies piece by piece to scare Lucy away from being a journalist investigator. Either way the police don't really need to do much.

A little harder to buy is Lucy teaming up with Alain Michel (Alan Michael, the author didn't spend much time researching names), the proverbial P.I. with a Past; of course he Knows Stuff. It's a pearl-clutcher, this level of suspense. I will say that the author makes a serious effort to add some physical danger to this entry (largely theoretical last time), but most does this with details of the aftermath of violence and that doesn't have the same effect long-term.

But as I thought these dismissive thoughts I realized I was more than half-way through the read. What?! How did that happen? It happened because the prose is direct, well-formed, and the plot is familiar enough to make few demands and still involving enough to require that I finish the read. I enjoyed the sentimental journey to Paris, I liked the resolution of the plot, and found myself exactly the right read for a sloppy Sunday in this series.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW...taking Shakespeare literally is good strategy

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW: A Novel
GABRIELLE ZEVIN
Alfred A. Knopf
$28.00 hardcover, available now

TRADE PAPER EDITION ON 25 JUNE 2024 It will cost $19.00 and pre-orders are accepted now.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When you're old, like me, you don't expect to follow middle-aged peoples' passions because you raised them so you know there's just stuff not shared between generations. One of those things is gaming. I've watched people get really passionate about the games they're playing and, frankly, wanted to yawn in their face. I do not see the appeal. But, knowing this was going to be the spine of the story, I was ready for that and factored my indifference out of the story's appeal.

Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn't be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.

What we're left with is the childhood friend, I think most of us have had one, whose idea of a good time marches well with our own and whose ability to connect with our quiet places makes them invaluable and necessary companions. This is not to say they're romantic-partner material, and in some odd way I think that romantic facet, if present, actually works against this sort of long-term companionship. The relationship that Sam and Sadie take with them through their lives is that companionably silent, creatively clicking connection. It's a wonderful thing to find and, mirabile dictu, Author Zevin makes the force of it real, present, and never overplays her hand with it. A tremendously admirable and no doubt difficult achievement.

Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said "love" all the time, and it didn't mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

–and–

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

The hardest thing to admit to yourself is that you're the Bad Guy in someone else's fairy tale of life and love. Someone out there thinks of you with acute hurt and badly wounded feelings. Sam and Sadie are that to each other, as well as companionable besties. It's complicated, and it wouldn't do to spend time spoilering it, but suffice to say that the ability to betray, then to forgive yourself and seek forgiveness from the betrayed, is another very difficult thing to present in any believable way in fiction. Author Zevin does that, too.

"We work through our pain. That's what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can't ignore me and our company and everything that came before."

It's a story about the depths of devotion to an idea, an ideal, and a cause in service of one's burning passion to make and be more than one is. It's a story about Love being, in the end, enough to make even failure less important. It's a story about Sam and Sadie making a life with each other: even though not spouses, they're necessary in each others' world because...well, because.

“I thought you were worried I was going to die," Sam said.

"No. You'll never die. And if you ever died, I'd just start the game again," Sadie said.

"Sam's dead. Put another quarter in the machine."

"Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we'll win eventually.”

There it is, in that brief passage. That is what some connections offer, and what some of us luck into once or twice in a lifetime. It's precious beyond price and it's the heart of this loving story of the messy, cruel, angry thing we call life.

Why, then, have I given the read a mere four stars? Because I am, as noted above, old. It is not a story written for me, and so I am not as invested in it as I would be if I were 42 not 62. I expect that others will love the delicate and intricate love among all three main protagonists without the sense I had of being spoken around at the dinner table. It's a fate, like bed-wetting, that comes around again after being left behind in childhood. Hence the lack of a fifth, or fraction of a fifth, star. Still a story I'd encourage you to read. (With an agèd person caveat.)

THE NARCISSISM OF SMALL DIFFERENCES, posted properly at last

THE NARCISSISM OF SMALL DIFFERENCES
MICHAEL ZADOORIAN
Akashic Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A hilarious and poignant novel about growing up, buying in, selling out, and the death of irony.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children, contrary to their Midwestern values (and parents’ wishes). Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they’re not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering—both in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

Set against the backdrop of bottomed-out 2009 Detroit, a once-great American city now in transition, part decaying and part striving to be reborn, The Narcissism of Small Differences is the story of an aging creative class, doomed to ask the questions: Is it possible to outgrow irony? Does not having children make you one? Is there even such a thing as selling out anymore?

More than a comedy of manners, The Narcissism of Small Differences is a comedy of compromise: the financial compromises we make to feed ourselves; the moral compromises that justify our questionable actions; the everyday compromises we all make just to survive in the world. Yet it’s also about the consequences of those compromises— and the people we become because of them—in our quest for a life that is our own and no one else’s.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think Author Zadoorian's Detroitophilia needed this book to come to a head...

It was a way for gray-flannel types to shed their inhibitions, go native, and get weird—uninhibited boozing, semierotic dancing to faux-exotic music, gaudy flowered shirts, sticky finger foods, unclad maiden flesh, and phallic tiki idols. At one point, Detroit had three Polynesian palaces, but when the city started bleeding honkies after the '67 race riot, all of them eventually closed.
–and–
Should you be going to tiki parties in your forties? Was it possible to maintain ironic distance for that long, or should you have outgrown it by then? How long before you needed an irony supplement?

Joe is an urban explorer, a man whose purpose in life is looking for something to look at; this isn't a tremendously profitable career, but he freelances as a local-music critic and spelunks the abandoned spaces of the city as his avocation. He has no mortgage and no kids, just a partner of over a decade, Ana. They're living an intentional life, but that ain't free. So Ana, his squeeze, makes the bills...in advertising, in a dead and dying city, that takes skill and luck which she abounds in.

And then, as it always will, Life happens. The two of them are wearing on each other. The thing about stasis is, no matter if it's tolerable or not, it has to end. Things in life are growing or dying:

“Truth like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
–and–
When is it going to end, this worshiping of ephemera? How long will our generation be obsessed with the past, with stuff that barely meant anything when it happened, that’s remembered only because it’s old or bad or weird or kooky?

There's nothing like the world for knocking your corners off...just sucks when the chunks go flying into those closest to you.

"You drop names and make references. You talk about songs, but rarely does a song speak to you. You laugh at cleverness because you recognize it's supposed to be funny, not because it is funny. You know about things for the sake of knowing about them, because you think you're supposed to, because you're afraid of being left out, not because they interest you. You're a dilettante, a potterer. You simply stopped trying to be anything more."
–and–
"It looks different through the lens, doesn't it?" {Joe's friend} said {to him}.
  "I don't know why. It just makes more sense this way. It's easier to take in."
"Uh-huh. Sometimes what I'm looking at is too intense for me to understand without a filter, a way to view it. The camera helps." Brendan leveled his camera...and squeezed off a shot.
  "Why is this so magnificent? What's wrong with us?"
"I told you...The verity of decay."

If Ana had wanted a sullen teenager, she would've had a kid...but here she is with a fractured man-child who resents her for winning their bread and whose friends are nasty pieces of White Male Privilege...Transphobia: one-half star off. N-word and repeated misogynistic bullshit use by white character: one-half star off. Yes, it's set in 2009...yes, it's not like these are people whose sophistication is meant to hold them up as examples. But this is ugliness and prejudice, and it doesn't get treated as such.

But the story is about more than that. It's about what it means to be You at last. These are forty-year-olds doing what the middle-aged literary characters of US while privilege are supposed to do: Reflecting on the emptiness of a life of getting and spending. And coming to terms with what they really, in fact, want from The System. Ana's decisions are less crowd-sourced...her one obvious friend isn't who she thought she was at exactly the wrong moment...than Joe's, but considering the caliber of his friends that's a good thing.

I found the story...exasperating. I found the dramatis personae...uncongenial. I found the ending...condign.

CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN, how the world looks to someone who isn't like the rest of us

CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN
SAYAKA MURATA (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Grove Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 12, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech patterns so she can play the part of a normal person. However, eighteen years later, at age 36, she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life but is aware that she is not living up to society's expectations and causing her family to worry about her. When a similarly alienated but cynical and bitter young man comes to work in the store, he will upset Keiko's contented stasis—but will it be for the better?

Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko's thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind. Convenience Store Woman is a fresh, charming portrait of an unforgettable heroine that recalls Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, and Amélie.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IT!

My Review: I dunno, y'all. Miss Furukura and Shiraha aren't people I'd want to hang with. I kept reading their names as "Lieutenant Uhura" and "Sriracha," which didn't help me identify them as actual people.

Oh wait....

This is definitely a sharp, pointed tale. It takes on the internal and external expectations of women and their "proper" roles. It's a culture that is, in some disturbing ways, behind my own culture's flawed and unhelpful attitudes towards women. As this is a translation from a language with which I feel absolutely no kinship, I'll confine my observations about the writing to: this is a very quick read, possessed of enough narrative drive to make reading it with dilated eyes and a headache (as I waited to go home from an eye doctor visit) seem like a good idea. I was diverted, I cared a strangely large amount about Keiko Furukura, and while there was not one single surprise or twist in the tale, it was keenly observed and honestly told.

First we practiced the various phrases we needed to use in the store. Standing shoulder to shoulder in a line, our backs straight, we lifted the corners of our mouths to match the smiling face in the training poster and in turn called out the stock welcoming phrase: Irasshaimase! ... I was good at mimicking the trainer's examples and the model video he'd shown us in the back room. It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech.

I have never been so glad in my life as when Author Murata stopped banging my eyeballs with "Irasshaimase" about halfway through the book. I am one of those subverbal-vocalizers, and that phrase got my entire limbic system into an uproar because, although I know Japanese pronunciation is dipthongless, I could *not* scan that alphabet soup to save my life, and the YouTube videos pronouncing it for me made my nose hairs hurt. I think Japanese is a hideous language. Cool words, great concepts, please don't speak it to me.

Anyway. So Lieutenant Uhura meets Sriracha and things get weird. Only they don't because, well, they're exactly alike and while that's an awful thing to say, it's just the truth. She's one step away from a serious psychiatric break when she visits her younger sister and interacts (sort of) with her infant nephew. He (Shiraha) is already broken, beaten by expectations he is incapable of meeting. Her broken self's saving grace is that she knows *she* is the problem:

"Um, you do realize you'll be fixed?"
"What?" {Shiraha} asked, as if he hadn't heard right.
"Oh, nothing. Hurry up and change so we can do the morning practice!"
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment, so the likes of you are fixed right away I thought as I watched him taking his time getting changed. But I didn't say it out loud.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the tale kept me reading. I was fascinated against my will by the savvy that she brought to the problem of acting human when she quite simply isn't. She knows she lacks something, hasn't a clue what it is, and no one knows how to explain it to her; what she stumbles upon in the convenience store is a model she can emulate. A worker is supposed to BE the job in the convenience store and she needs someone to be. Perfection.

Poor Sriracha is an incel, as we call them these days, a loser/misfit/nobody whose essential wrongness comes from the other usual place this unsocialized-male issue comes from: He knows what being human means but he's too lazy to do it, then feels outrage and anger when he isn't given all the privileges being a human male customarily affords the Y-chromosomally endowed. Lieutenant Uhura can't grok this, since she's a hard worker and a genuinely indifferent-to-normal-humans person. She doesn't feel excluded, as he does; she realizes she is excluded and takes steps to minimize the exclusion so others will feel happier:

You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange—maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to "cure" me.
These past two weeks I'd been asked fourteen times why I wasn't married. And twelve times why I was still working part-time. So for now I'd decide what to eliminate from my life according to what I was asked about most often I thought.
Deep down I wanted some kind of change. Any change, whether good or bad, would be better than the state of impasse I was in now.

See? Faultlessly logical. Not human, but deeply logical.

So fiction about the neurodiverse made my uncomfortable day of eye-doctoring, riding back and forth in a cramped position, and having to soak the bloodstains from my knee-rocks breaking through the skin due to sitting *ptooptoo* on sitting! for five hours, bearable. That by itself deserves praise. It's hard to know what to do about recommending such a quirky tale to others. In general, I'm against "must read" recommendations in all but a very few cases. I think this read will quite rightly polarize people's opinions, as did that "Completely Fine" thing that made me so bone-rattlingly mad that I Pearl-Ruled its condescending self. But this story, told by a person whose grasp on how to be human was tenuous and whose desire to figure it out was other-directed, is a different matter altogether. I might not love the way it ended, which I won't discuss, but I fully agree that it was an inevitable ending. I ended up glad I'd read it, and that's saying something.

SIDE LIFE, a beautiful trip to the inside of reality

SIDE LIFE
STEVE TOUTONGHI
Soho Press
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. There is also a dog-eared notebook filled with circuit diagrams, beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, and pages of code.

When Vin decides to climb into one of the caskets to see what happens, his reality begins to unravel, and he finds himself on a terrifying journey that asks fundamental questions about reality, free will, and the meaning of a human life.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED AN ARC FOR MY REVIEW. THANK YOU.

My Review: I want to tell you everything about the story because I can't imagine you'll pass up the book if I do. The problem is that the Spoiler Stasi will come drag me away, never to be seen or heard from again. So here:

“The machines of the mind are more difficult to recognize than machines of iron and steam.”

That's the basic building block of the entire imaginarium that Author Toutonghi creates. The story of Vin, a tech startup failure, is predicated on the principle that he will know what machinery is when he sees it. Of course, the story's existence means that there is no way he will.

What's a tech bro to do when he fails to make his wad of cash from creating a new, wild Thing That'll Change The World? Vin decides to house-sit for fabulously rich but vanished Nerdean. Her house is an amazeballs mansion on Queen Anne Hill, the beating heart of Seattle's too-rich too-young $10-coffee-drinking yuppies (as my generation sneeringly called them). Author Toutonghi, a lifelong Seattleite, made me feel the city was a character in short, deft strokes. No long paean to place, this, rather a grounded in particularity poem. I like the latter just as much as the former. My lip-curling snark at the expense of Vin's generational cohort comes with being old and poor, so YMMV as always.

Vin's obsessive nature, in fact the Asperger's he seems never to have had diagnosed, leads him to disassemble the interior of this beautiful piece of architecture. He's searching for the one-name owner, convinced she's invisibly there somewhere although not likely to be either safe or, in fact, necessarily even alive. Vin keeps going, ignoring his only friend and the remnants of his family, not heaving his less and less clean body into sunshine or showers, until he finds what he most wants: Escape.

What are these crèches in the sub-basement hideaway? There are three...why? Can Vin, who recklessly and quite necessarily climbs into one, rely on coming home from wherever it is he's about to go? Hell, who cares, what the guy's leaving behind just ain't that great so off we go! I'd do precisely the same thing. See that weird device that can't be explained in any framework I possess? Notice the craptastic life I've got? Tally-ho! Let's see what happens.

And here is where I got that half-star thump. Author Toutonghi wrote Join, which I gave a good solid review in 2016. I liked that book a great deal as well. I didn't like the major missed opportunity I saw in it, and complained a bit about in my review. That's my issue here: Major missed opportunity again. If someone comes onto the stage I want them to be somehow explained and/or justified. Not necessarily even all that thoroughly, although I'd like that better as a reader, just tied in to the subtle and complex framework of this inner-space novel. Several pieces of the puzzle of Vin's multiversal travels and lives weren't given enough shape to assume real meaning in the story. NOTABLY included here is the cruel tease of introducing the fascinating scientification of the art of cliodynamics, utterly dropped...which means not explicitly tied into the story.

Now, the story itself: It's not a rollicking sci-fi thriller, as the publisher's comparisons to Philip K. Dick and Blake Crouch imply. Instead it's a well-built and deeply affecting interior novel, an exploration of Vin in all his multivarious selves, and in that sense a very French sort of récit. We're always a step away from the action due to the nature of our trip down the rabbit hole with disintegrating Vin. He's lost everything, he's throwing the dregs away with both ungrateful hands, and now he's found an out. Well, well, Vin, how shocking that you'd choose to duck out, so not like a guy like you. *snort*

But that character trait (I damn near typed "flaw" but had a stern talk with myself) makes possible a thoroughly fascinating self-autopsy. Vin's travels through the multiverse are all about working through a dreadfully wasted life, assigning blame and meaning, and all without consequences...except death, insanity, and Armageddon. Y'know, little bagatelles like that.

In the end, we get to this exact moment in identity discovery, this basic building-block of reality:

"But think about this, maybe even though there are infinite versions of you, maybe every single one of them is an asshole."

Hm.

STILL WATERS, cozy Swedish Scandicrime debut novel & CLOSED CIRCLES, its decent follow-up

STILL WATERS
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy; Sandhamn Murders #1)
AmazonCrossing
$2.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On a hot July morning on Sweden’s idyllic vacation island of Sandhamn, a man takes his dog for a walk and makes a gruesome discovery: a body, tangled in a fishing net, has washed ashore.

Police detective Thomas Andreasson is the first to arrive on the scene. Before long, he has identified the deceased as Krister Berggren, a bachelor from the mainland who has been missing for months. All signs point to an accident—until another brutalized corpse is found at the local bed-and-breakfast. But this time it is Berggren’s cousin, whom Thomas interviewed in Stockholm just days before.

As the island’s residents reel from the news, Thomas turns to his childhood friend, local lawyer Nora Linde. Together, they attempt to unravel the riddles left behind by these two mysterious outsiders—while trying to make sense of the difficult twists their own lives have taken since the shared summer days of their youth.

My Review: I downloaded this onto my Kindle when it was a Kindle First offering about three years ago. It finally snagged my attention. I think it finally got me because, when I opened it, I read this:

The department’s coffeemaker produced a liquid that was positively toxic. How Margit could knock it back in such quantities was a mystery. Thomas had switched to drinking tea for the first time in his life because of it.

THOMAS!! RUN!! Run fast and run far, no good can ever come from a place where the coffee is so bad that *retch* tea *shudder* is a better beverage option!

*glowers Blightyward* Y'all got nothin' to say here, Brits, you gave the world chattel slavery, John Bull, and cricket, and kept National Health Service, Cornwall, and Prince Harry!

Thomas Andreasson is from Harö in the Stockholm archipelago's unfashionable bit, or at least it wasn't fashionable when he was a lad. His world has been upended in so many ways in recent months, his life as a husband and father is over without warning or any desire for it to be so, his best friend Nora is suddenly among murderers on their shared childhood home of Sandhamn, and he's got no clues to solve the suspicious death followed by sure and certain murder, followed by *very* suspicious death and bring the killer to justice.

So he plods along, doing responsible policework, following leads that don't lead, until he is weary of the routine as well as of the whole enterprise of staying alive. We switch PoV characters a good bit in this book, but Thomas is the policeman so he gets most of the tedious legwork in the story. His senior partner, Margit, is dying to spend the short, sweet Swedish summer with her husband and teenaged daughters somewhere south. This case is foiling her desire to get away. Interestingly, Thomas has no issue with Margit being the lead in the case; he's never once shown being resentful of her authority, but once feels a bit downhearted when she corrects an error he's made...because he made the error, not because a woman corrected him. This was refreshing.

One lead, found by Thomas' lovely young colleague (and clearly intended to be love interest) Carina, takes him and Margit to a self-made man's home on Sandhamn. Thomas' past on the island makes the appearance of the house grating to him, and Margit's social conscience shows up for a pleasant interlude:

Apart from the white eaves and steps, every last piece of timber was nauseatingly green. Without the eaves and steps you could easily have imagined you were standing in front of a giant marzipan cake. Only the rose was missing.

"I’ve never seen such a fine example of nouveau riche." (said Margit)

      
This is a Swedish Prinsesstårta, which is what Author Sten referred to in the original Swedish text.
We see that a lot on the South Shore of Long Island. It's the arrivistes buying old cottages and slapping down out-of-proportion McMansions onto their zero-lot-line dreams of seaside living. Drearily familiar to anyone living by a water feature. Thomas doesn't like the house and really doesn't like the man in it...there is something *wrong* with a person who moves to a strong, distinctive community like Sandhamn and flouts every tradition and norm that makes the place itself!

But then there's Nora, whose roots on Sandhamn go way back before even Thomas' do. She doesn't like this new reality at all, and doesn't like the cultural shift it represents. She feels it as an affront to her core principles, as we're told directly:

It gave Nora the unpleasant feeling that everything was for sale. Everything could be bought or sold.

Sandhamn is more than a place to Nora, it's a life and a lifestyle she feels is hers down to her very core. These values agree with mine. I approve of them and wish there were more Noras in the world.

So what the hell drew her to the insensitive clod of a scion of the booboisie that she married?!

Henrik just didn’t get it. He was blind and deaf to any hint that his mother might not be the best mother-in-law in the world. Nora gave in.

Now she had been offered her dream job, and he didn’t even seem to want to discuss it. It wasn’t fair.

Why challenge Henrik, instead of paying attention to the clear signals he had given her?

I found this infuriating. Which is it, Author Sten, Nora's a modern woman or a housewife? She started their marriage with compromises on where they'd live, what he'd be expected to do as a parent, and somehow thought he'd magically divine that she was seriously convinced he'd do the same for her?! Why?! How?! Begin as you mean to go on, Nora. Was it Mary Poppins who said that first, or just most famously? Anyway, there was absolutely no reason to think Henrik would ever be anything but his parents' son, since he never made a single solitary peep of dissatisfaction with them and the way they live(d) their lives. Oh! Oh! And then there's her best friend, Thomas, whose reaction to Henrik should've made Nora run screaming:

There was an underlying distance between the two men that never quite disappeared in spite of the fact that they had known each other for a long time. Henrik’s upper-middle-class background and deeply conservative values didn’t exactly improve matters.

There's no way in hell that didn't show in Thomas' responses to Henrik over the years. So lay off the shockhorror about the way the reactionary poltroon responds to your desire to do something for yourself, lady, he's never been different and expecting him to change will only make both of you and your kids angry and upset and end up in divorce. Skip the middle bit: Get the divorce, start the new life, and make sure the kids know *why* mommy left daddy without rancorous vituperative invective flowing from you. Him, you can't affect. As should be obvious to you by now.

The two sleuths are close friends and each has made a hash of their personal life. This isn't familiar at all, is it. But it's an evergreen for a reason, since it gives the author a great line of attack to keep series readers reading. Nora's marriage is doomed, Thomas' relationship with Carina is doomed, the whole island of Sandhamn...faithless to the crime statistics for Nordic countries...will soon be hip deep in dead bodies, much more will be made of Nora's diabetes (which figures in the action but not the resolution of this book), and if there is a just and merciful gawd Nora's mother-in-law will be savagely torn to bits by ravening wild dogs on live television.

Translator Delargy, based in the UK, uses some tricks to keep the prose feeling uniquely Sten's own. One is the use of a nonstandard form of the verb "to get hold (of)", viz. "ahold." In spoken words I'm not averse to this formulation of the verb, but it abounds in this book and I found it irksome after the sixth or seventh usage. It's purely a personal twitch, no knock on the skills Delargy brought to bear on the Englishing of the book. I am on record many places as despising the unnecessary and ungainly "u"ification of perfectly simple words like "valor" and "honor" so I needn't go into why that made me flinch every time I ran across it. Delargy does a creditable job making Sten's words readable in English, and that's no mean feat, so kudos to you Madam.

The world has lots and lots of gritty Scandicrime. You can hardly open your Kindle without being offered some more gritty Scandicrime. What the world doesn't have is cozy Scandicrime. Sten's involving debut novel is both pine-scented Scandi and cozy, sense-of-place crime. I like that about it and it's what will cause me to seek out the next book in the series.

So switch your mental gears to Swedish cozy. Step out of the Vauxhall and into the Volvo station wagon. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
REVIEW OF BOOKS 3 & 4 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 5 & 6 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 7 & 8 HERE
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CLOSED CIRCLES (Sandhamn Murders #2)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrosing
$2.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s a beautiful day for a regatta—until one of Sandhamn Island’s most prestigious residents is killed aboard his sailing yacht.

Oscar Juliander was a rich lawyer and deputy chairman of the prestigious Royal Swedish Yacht Club. While at first his death seems like a tragic accident, there is evidence of foul play. Police detective Thomas Andreasson teams up with local lawyer Nora Linde to investigate. As they work to uncover clues, they face resistance from an elite world where nothing but appearance matters.

When the rich and powerful inhabitants of Sweden’s idyllic island getaway come under scrutiny, Thomas and Nora must work closely and secretively to seek justice.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Ya know what's frustrating? Like lips moving from Heaven to flapping at you frustrating? NOT BEING ABLE TO TELL YOU WHY THIS ISN'T A 4-STAR REVIEW. Because major, major spoilers would be required for me to do that. And y'all're some seriously spoilerphobic readers.

So I'm left in a bad position...I can't get into much detail...but I can, and herewith will, offer some thoughts.

Minor irks: Carina and Thomas, as a couple, are brought up and dropped in the space of a few sentences. I'd like more of that please. The partial resolution of Nora's marital woes is a good start, but this entry has next to no Nora-and-Thomas time and I missed it. The Eva subplot's resolution doesn't seem finished, somehow. It seems unlikely to be complete as it stands and it itches for that reason.

What keeps me coming back is also what makes me a little impatient. Something about these books and their lutefisk-and-cardamom atmosphere makes me crave a jalapeño cheeseburger. I guess that's an index of how very Swedish they are. And how cozy are they? So cozy I want to cruise the piers (I'd have to learn to time-travel back to 1980s Manhattan, but that's just an added bonus) to recover from the wholesome.

That's a Scandicozy strength, like a nicer-neighborhood version of the immersiveness of Nordic Noir. Wholesome isn't bleached into blankness; it's the juxtaposition of Nora's and Thomas's friendship to their deeply unhappy marriages (over, in Thomas's case; needs to be over in Nora's). Thomas's police career is spent with a partner we don't see all that much of in this book; but she's got enough screen time to get her name in the credits, so to speak.

The mystery here is one that I found myself nodding along to, by which I mean the dead'un just needed killin' as we say in the US South. What Thomas, in his official capacity, has to do with the case is pretty peripheral. Mostly we're among Nora's husband-the-doctor's scummy social set of unpleasant, entitled (in the US sense, not as in "having titles") friends. Why she stays with this creep...well, kids. Plus stubborn, maybe, unwilling to admit to herself she's made an awful mistake. But it's the spoiler subject that annoys me the most. Once this happens, call it a day. And yes, it's about Nora.

There's a Swedish-language TV show that does away with some of the canon here, but is visually stunning. It's available to US audiences via the MHz Network.

ZEITOUN, Hurricane Katrina's nasty cover-up of systemic racism

ZEITOUN
Dave Eggers
McSweeney's
$12.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.

Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

My Review: Okay. I herewith open my piehole for the crow to be inserted. I have said nasty, judgmental things about Eggers's writings, and I meant each and every one of them. I still do.

But this book is excellent, and this book is Eggers's, so it is obvious that the old adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day applies to writers and writing as well.

It's a direct, elegantly simple telling of the nightmare side of the American Dream. It's powerfully focused, unlike every other one of Eggers's overpraised books that I've read, and it's superbly structured, with no room for improvement in pacing and character development that I can find.

I don't believe I'm typing these things, someone reassure me that this is *me*! Every criticism I've leveled at this guy's previous writing is out the window! Will they turn off the gravity next?

But truth is truth, and honesty compels me to say: I haven't enjoyed a book this much in ages. Well, enjoyed is a strange term to use for the true and factual, and awful, story of a decent, honorable man made the butt of society's opprobrium for no reason other than his religion and origins. But the book is deeply enjoyable, because at every turn, Zeitoun's decency and honor and integrity shine through. That alone makes the book worth buying and reading. Add to that the fact that, rare in this world failed of kindness, Zeitoun summons the best and the most positive people to him in his desperate hours.

I am disappointed that Twilight *shudder* and The Life of Pi *retch*, vastly inferior books to this one, and to name but two of the many, many books this applies to, have more copies on Goodreads.

Please...do your part to change this, and go buy a copy. Then read it. It will, contrary to any expectation you might have, leave you uplifted and happier for having read a book about Hurricane Katrina and an Arab immigrant. Very strongly recommended.

And, thanks to my friend Terri for making me read this...even sending me a copy...one it will be extremely hard to release back into the bookosphere. That I will *have* to buy a replacement is a small economic price to pay.

********Addendum in 2013: Yes indeed, Zeitoun has been arrested and accused of crimes recently, and many have taken this as an invalidation of his post-Katrina experiences. Apparently no thought is given to what these experiences of injustice in The Home of The Free might be expected to do to a man is irrelevant to those who hold this opinion. That's just bad, sloppy thinking. What happened to Zeitoun after Katrina is still real, and his story of that time is still one of a horrifying miscarriage of justice using "race" as a flimsy, transparent attempt at justification.

And of course, from the vantage point of 2017, the story never quite got better, as Kathy Zeitoun alleged a long pattern of domestic abuse, attempted to have Zeitoun re-arrested, etc. etc. Again...and again...and again it must be said that, even if every awful thing ever said about the man is true, none of it excuses the horrors he experienced at the hands of the legal system.

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS, 2017 Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS
IMBOLO MBUE
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook edition, available now

2017 NEWS! THIS 5-STAR READ IS THE WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. I read somewhere on the internet that this just might be The Great American Novel. I agree.

My advice to someone like you is to always stay close to the gray area and keep yourself and your family safe. Stay away from any place where you can run into police—that's the advice I give to you and to all young black men in this country. The police is for the protection of white people, my brother. Maybe black women and black children sometimes, but not black men. Never black men. Black men and police are palm oil and water. You understand me, eh?

Nothing is more American, in my experience of being a life-long one, than rooting for the underdog. Nothing is more American than relishing, with unabashed schadenfreude, the fall of the mighty and greedy.

Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart.

Followed by:

“That’s exactly the problem! People don’t want to open their eyes and see the Truth because the illusion suits them. As long as they’re fed whatever lies they want to hear they’re happy, because the Truth means nothing to them. Look at my parents—they’re struggling under the weight of so many pointless pressures, but if they could ever free themselves from this self-inflicted oppression they would find genuine happiness. Instead, they continue to go down a path of achievements and accomplishments and material success and shit that means nothing because that’s what America’s all about, and now they’re trapped. And they don’t get it!”

These two fundamental American character traits intersect in this well-crafted debut novel. (This is the author's debut novel, but I will bet large sums of cash money that it's not her first...this is an accomplished, polished, beautiful piece of writing and plotting, and it has numerous older siblings in the "recycle" folder on her hard drive or I'm your maiden auntie.)

Don't waste time reading reviews, go get the book and read it! Now! Quick sticks, possums, don't deprive yourselves of this pleasure.

WICKED AUTUMN, first Max Tudor mystery with room to improve

WICKED AUTUMN
G.M. MAILLET Max Tudor #1
Minotaur Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.125* of five

The Publisher Says: What could be more dangerous than cozy village life in the English countryside?

Max Tudor has adapted well to his post as vicar of St. Edwold's in the idyllic village of Nether Monkslip. The quiet village seems the perfect home for Max, who has fled a harrowing past as an MI5 agent. Now he has found a measure of peace among urban escapees and yoga practitioners, artists and crafters and New Agers. But this new-found serenity is quickly shattered when the highly vocal and unpopular president of the Women's Institute turns up dead at the Harvest Fayre. The death looks like an accident, but Max's training as a former agent kicks in, and before long he suspects foul play.

Max has ministered to the community long enough to be familiar with the tangled alliances and animosities among the residents, but this tragedy surprises and confounds him. It is impossible to believe anyone in his lovely village capable of the crime, and yet given the victim, he must acknowledge that almost everyone had probably fantasized about killing Wanda Batton-Smythe.

As the investigation unfolds, Max becomes more intricately involved. Memories he'd rather not revisit are stirred, evoking the demons from the past which led him to Nether Monkslip. In 'Wicked Autumn', G.M. Malliet serves up an irresistible English village - deliciously skewered - a flawed but likeable protagonist, and a brilliantly modern version of the traditional drawing room mystery.

My Review: Sexy, haunted Maxen "Max" Tudor, former MI5 (domestic spying branch, think FBI not CIA, which any Bond fan knows is MI6) superagent and present-day Anglican priest and vicar of Nether Monkslip, revels in his obscure village's somewhat habitual somnolence, broken only by tempests in the teapot of the Women's Institute {think Junior League}. It's run ruthlessly by one Wanda Barton-Smythe, a harpy with no discernable good qualities except a fatal peanut allergy. Her murder unburies secrets and lies, causes no end of trouble for the allegedly retired Max because {naturally} the cops of Monkslip-super-Mare, the big town in the area, discover his past and rope him into the investigation. Who suspects the Vicar of working with the police, after all?

The village cast of crazies all walk through their days with Max, all spent at the Harvest Festival so ably and unpleasantly organised {oh dear, the Britishness of it all hath infected me} by the late Mrs. Barton-Smythe {B-S, get it? Know what I mean? She's a goer!...aaarrrggghhh it's happening again!}, only, well...let's be charitable towards all and say they're forgetful and leave out some details. Well, a LOT of details. Not all of them innocent.

Max solves the crime, brings the murdering swine to justice, and fills us in on his backstory by flashing back to the reason he decided to become a priest in the first place. He doesn't appear to be a pedophile, which is a nice change of pace. Wait, that's the Catholics...well, anyway, let's just go with the fact that his reasons for doing what he does now will either make you like him more, or strike you as silly. {I'm in Camp B.} He's given a couple of love interests, one of whom he clearly favors over the other, and the village is gifted with the usual suspects for a cozy Brit-stery: Nosy old schoolmarm, shop-lady with a troubled past, doctor who's better than he should be for such a small place, and so forth. Fans of cozy Brit-steries are urged to pre-order. It will fulfill your expectations ably.

My expectations, not so much. Competently written and plotted, the book misses out on every opportunity to surprise or jolt or do more than atmosphere-ize the deeply experienced cozy reader. Nether Monkslip is one of those towns that will, like Lumby, Washington, and its American cousins, always seem wrapped in a dense fog of Atmosphere and Sense of Place. That's fine, I want that, and even expect it from this genre; but PLEASE give me more than just that! St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple's homeplace, was a lot moer than just a swirling-point for Atmosphere, even though we saw it fairly seldom. Agatha Christie gave it some *oomph* and I want modern cozy-ers to do the same!


**********SPOILER***************SPOILER*******************SPOILER**************


And now for the obligatory grumble: When the reason for Wanda's death is revealed, her suddenly-revealed-to-be-gay son and his lover being greedy, it was such a cheap, long-telgraphed cop-out that I actually considered not reviewing the book at all. Really, Mme. Malliet? Couldn't think of ANYthing better than that? I don't think you tried hard enough, then.

MURDER IN THE RUE CHARTRES by Greg Herren, third entry in the Chanse MacLeod mystery series

MURDER IN THE RUE CHARTRES (Chanse MacLeod #3)
Greg Herren
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 eBook only, available now

WINNER OF THE 20th Lambda Literary Award—BEST GAY MYSTERY!

Rating: 4.3* of five

The Publisher Says: Murder hits the Big Easy.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Chanse MacLeod returns to a different, shattered New Orleans in an attempt to rebuild his own life and face his own future. When he discovers that his last client before the storm was murdered the very night she hired him to find her long-missing father, he is drawn into a web of intrigue and evil that surrounds the Verlaine family.

My Review: There is no escape from the past. It supports us, if we're lucky; it drags us down from otherwise attainable heights, if we're not. This third installment of Herren's Chanse MacLeod mysteries reinforces this sad, inescapable lesson in a harsh and cruel and painful way, only for once it's not Chanse that does most of the suffering. Hired to look into a 32-year-old disappearance by the daughter of a vanished father, Chanse ends up fired before he can so much as cash the check...and then his client turns up dead. Odd, that...and her in the throes of planning her wedding? Something smells fishy to Chanse, who returns her retainer check in person to the dead woman's older brother. Surprise there: Chanse now has a much larger retainer check and a new client who wants the same job done. In short order, Chanse meets the patriarch of this singularly unlucky clan; loses his new client to what he is morally sure is murder; breaks up with his rebound guy, a nice-but... that he met in the last book; has a quickie with an old friend, newly single; and learns that his hag/best friend is leaving post-Katrina New Orleans. To finish her book, she says.

Rest assured, though: The right people end up in the right places and Chanse, for a wonder, actually unthaws his cryogenically preserved, battered, bruised, and broken heart, resolving to live his life and not simply exist in it because he's not dead yet.

New Orleans post-Katrina is a grim backdrop for this outing. I suspect in many ways anyone who has written about New Orleans since 2005 has written out of a sense of atonement, or expiation, or making things right, because after all they're alive and so very many aren't any more. Chanse comes home from a stay in Dallas to find that he's lost nothing in the storm or the flood; his friend Venus lost everything, for example, as did so many. The hero of a mystery series needs obstacles to make him more interesting that simply a crime-solving computer. The obstacles here, well, they're pretty grisly...driving around and seeing those horrible, horrible "X"s showing where bodies were found...refrigerators abandoned as far from homes as possible so they won't add to the mold problems, and adorned with anti-government slogans...well, this leads Chanse to a minor breakdown. No duh.

I am not, at heart, a New Orleanian. I got out of the car in 1975 and said, "Jesus, what a dump." Nothing in all the time since has made me think anything different. I don't miss going there, and wish our friends from there would come here to visit. But the city is one of the world's most popular destinations, and it's got a certain raffish charm that shines through in these books. I still don't want to go there. But I like the Chanse MacLeod character's development and growth, and I like the secondary characters like Paige, his hag, and Venus, the tall and elegant lady detective; who knows, maybe Herren has let us see a glimmer of hope for Chanse to have a shot at boyfriendly bliss!

Kinda doubt it, though. Remember what happened to "Moonlighting" when Cybill Shepard and Bruce Willis finally got it on?

MURDER IN THE RUE ST. ANN by Greg Herren, the second Chanse MacLeod mystery

MURDER IN THE RUE ST. ANN (Chanse MacLeod #2)
Greg Herren
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 eBook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When sexy gay private eye Chanse MacLeod investigates the financial shenanigans of club promoter Mark Williams, he discovers that not only does Williams have ties to the New Orleans judiciary, he also has ties to Chanse’s lover, Paul—a connection that reveals secrets about Paul’s past that Chanse had never guessed and now wishes he didn’t know. When Paul disappears, it seems his past has caught up with him in a terrifying way.

My Review: Second of the Chanse MacLeod murder mysteries set in New Orleans, this is a more assured performance by author Herren. He winds a good tale around the sudden end of happiness for our tight-lipped hero...boyfriend Paul goes, in the space of twenty-four *really* lousy hours, from apple dumpling sweetie pie to murder suspect to missing person. Chanse reveals more to us in the course of his frantic search for Paul, and along the way steps in the dogshit-laden middle of a Federal Mob case, almost becomes a wrestle-porn whore, and winds up with a tender and loving experience of family and love and acceptance. As his entire world ends. Ain't it always the way?

*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON*
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I don't know if I've told my grim secrets often enough for them to be scabbed over or not, but this book ripped them scabs right off. Chanse's trailer-trash past is detailed here, and while the setting of his agonies was way way down-market from mine and my mother was the abuser not my father, we came from similar backgrounds of unknowable trigger-points for screaming violent abuse. It was harrowing to read. (Sucked to live, too.)

Then, after a very unpleasant break-up, we see Chanse's self-involvement and inability to love and care in a real and significant way for others: Check! Did that. I hid it behind being an AIDS volunteer, and put a braver face on it for the public, but oh yeah. Ask any of the women I married. Ask the men I dated. I promise they'd back me up here: Cold as a walk-in freezer when it came down to it.

And then, and then...oh my oh my...Chanse loses Paul to a vile and horrible crime, as I lost my son to his mother's drunk driving in 1981, as I lost my dearly, dearly treasured Bland to AIDS in 1992. Herren gives his reactions to the horror in a direct and laconic way, which makes them all the more affecting. Those of us only slightly and tangentially able to feel emotions anyway respond to grief in a particular way...all the color goes out of the world. There may be a storm of weeping, then *slam* the gate goes down. No more tears. And then the torment begins: You are made of lead, of iron-bound lead, and the world is papier mache. Moving is a delicate task. Nothing at all works. Drinking and drugging suddenly seem like *wonderful* ideas, so off you go!

And that, my friends, is where Herren leaves Chanse--at a bar, drink in front of him, at 11:45am.

Oh yeah. Been there, done that, and so (I suspect) has Herren. I don't think a person can make this imaginitive leap without a real solid launching pad. I hurt for him, no one should have to know what it's like. But then, isn't that what art does? Take the fortunate to the places the unfortunate know how to find? Well, whatever the source, the book takes the reader there, that awful agonized place of loss.

But then you get to close the book, put it on a shelf, and get a glass of water for your nightstand as you go to bed.

Sweet dreams.

MURDER IN THE RUE DAUPHINE by Greg Herren, first Chanse MacLeod mystery

MURDER IN THE RUE DAUPHINE Chanse MacLeod #1
Greg Herren
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For gay New Orleans private eye Chanse MacLeod, it seemed like a simple case: find out who was blackmailing his pretty-boy client's rich, closeted boyfriend, collect a nice check, and take some time off. But then the pretty boy turns up dead in what looks like a hate crime and the gay community of New Orleans is up in arms, demanding justice. In the stifling heat of a New Orleans summer, Chanse searches for an extremely clever killer on a trail leading to a gay rights organization, boys for hire, and New Orleans society, knowing he has to find the killer before the entire city explodes.

My Review: Chanse MacLeod, former LSU football star, New Orleans policeman, and present-day private detective, gets a client in the most appealing possible way for a gay male mystery: His hottie hirer picks him out, and up, at the gym. Hunky Mike Hansen is, wait for it, in love with a rich, married, closeted doctor who is being blackmailed. Mike arranges to meet Chanse at Mike's home, after getting the incriminating blackmail tape from Dr. Delicious McWallet. (We don't find out his real name until well into the book.) Chanse, worn out from the workout and still sad over his peripatetic lover's departure for another multi-day trip as a flight attendant, oversleeps and is an hour late for their meeting. Darn good thing, too, since if he'd been on time, he'd've seen Mike being murdered.

Discovering the body, reporting the murder to his former colleagues at NOPD, and then trying to stay out of the circus that ensues is the meat of this short first mystery in a series by author and anthologist Herren. Gold diggers, horny creeps, jaded reporters, single-minded do-gooders, whores and whoremongers jig and caper through Herren's pre-Katrina French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny. MacLeod's laconic page presence still allows for character development, since we're in first person. What solves the mystery is an attempted murder that, for a wonder, vivifies the term "feed 'em to the fishes." The resolution is in no way a surprise, but the way it arrives is fun.

I'm not sure Chanse would give my fat carcass the time of day, muscle queen that he is, but I don't mind hitchhiking on his betank-topped muscular shoulder. The book is a fantasy, and it's not played for realism, but it's got some good character bases for a long-legged series: gruff black lady cop, honest and forthright, whom everyone erroneously assumes to be a lesbian; Chanse's hag, reporter Paige Tourneur, is appealingly damaged and quite obviously hangin' with his hunky self out of self-protection, so fertile ground for fun developments; Chanse's lover the air mattress (gay male slang for stewards), who commits the Unpardonable Sin of saying "I love you" to Chanse not once, oh no we can ignore that, but TWICE! Chanse's attack of the fantods led me to the mirror to see if maybe Herren had a camera in there...and leads Chanse to the brink of an affair with a most, most inappropriate man.

Enjoyable fluff, this. I wish the author's editor had made him do a few of the obvious development tricks, delving just a wee bit deeper into the recurring characters' pasts, but all in all this is a good and solid effort. It lacks suspense to an almost fatal degree as a mystery, but it makes up for it in blithe and quick-witted writing. Book 2, Murder in the Rue St. Ann, awaits on the nightstand. It's only 1am, I can fit in 50pp or so, can't I?

TRAIN TO POKIPSE, the last book midwifed by the legendary Barney Rosset

TRAIN TO POKIPSE
RAMI SHAMIR
Underground Editions
$9.99 trade paper, $7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in New York during the George W. Bush years, TRAIN TO POKIPSE has become an underground critical sensation since it was first published in a limited, highly sought-after edition in 2012. The last book to be edited and championed by famed publisher Barney Rosset, POKIPSE bookends a literary canon of twentieth century masters that includes Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Including a beautiful new introduction from Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White, TRAIN TO POKIPSE is finally available to a mass audience in this first-ever digital edition. White, who was named one of Esquire Magazine's most impacting millennials, reasserts TRAIN TO POKIPSE's standing as the the millennial generation's foremost literary work: "The novel you are about to read is a timeless chronicle of the psychological origins—the collective mood and affect—that catalyzed Occupy Wall Street... TRAIN TO POKIPSE deftly captures the essence of what compelled the millennial generation of cognitariat youth, over-educated and burdened with student debt, to suddenly throw aside ironic nihilism and rise up in an earnest spiritual insurrection."

My Review: Rami knows me from Twitter, where we both follow "Barney's Wall," a tribute account to publishing legend Barney Rosset. I got a Kindle copy of the book after we had discussed it for a while; I wasn't sure what I'd find, but had confidence in Barney's taste. It was not misplaced.

I was in Manhattan's downtown scene in the 80s and 90s, and had a blast. That's all I'm going to say in public. I recognized the life that our main character is living as my own attempt to run away from crippling depression and the wretched misery of anxiety that I never knew was there. I figured that was how everyone felt; none of us talked about it because, well, why?

Like Rami's creation, I also had relationships that rotted away from under me; I didn't think it was my fault, of course, but hey presto! comes the dawn and my self-sabotage smacked me in the teeth. Unlike the main character in Rami's novel, I waited until I was 54 to crack under the strain of coping and then spent four and a half months in the bin. I have to wonder, having read this novel, if I wouldn't have done better to have cracked thirty years earlier...but anyway, all of which is to say I relate. I relate to this little pisher's adolescent posturing, angst, escapism, lust...it's all part of me as much as it's part of the narrator.

That's a fine feat of writing, ladies and gents. A man closer to sixty than to forty reads himself into a book written by someone younger than his own child? Impressive prose-making. It's a wonderful feeling to see the art of storytelling safe in the hands of the millennials, even the dangerous high-wire balancing act of non-linear narrative is alive and well. It's there, however, that I grade Rami down a bit.

Non-linear narrative in TRAIN TO POKIPSE, with its time-shifts and varying ages of one narrator, requires something to knit it together. That something is up to the author; Rami chose a big risky knitting yarn in using the cocaine habit. It isn't entirely successful because unless one's been there it's simply repetitive unrelatable woollyness. Coke makes you feel sharp and masterful; then you crash into a vat of lint. (So I'm told.) (It says here.) That's fine for a shortish stint in a novel, but grows dull. What he has written here is faithful to the experience, no argument. But the dullness of the experience is in its many pleasures vanishing in that vat of lint.

But let's not forget that it takes big people to make big mistakes, and that this is a first novel. Rami Shamir. Learn his name, because you'll be hearing it again. And again. Thank the good Muses for that!

THE OTHER WES MOORE, not my personal preference for positive reading about race in the US

THE OTHER WES MOORE: One Name, Two Fates
WES MOORE
Spiegel & Grau
$13.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.

Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?

That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.

Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

My Review: Chronic overachiever and Marine Wes Moore gets captivated by the fate of his fellow Baltimorean, who is a convicted murderer, Wes Moore. They meet and become friends, leading to this book.

More's the pity. This damn thing is like getting a sunshine enema. One feels far crappier about disliking this book than a mere novel, or a tendentious political screed from some libertarian or conservative wingnut *coughHannitycough*. I'm all for interrupting the prevailing narrative of Black failure and the misery of existing as a Black male in our society. I'd just prefer to have that experience without the regressive reminder that "there but for the grace of God go I" (wonderful, useful phrase but origin unknown despite my belief that John Bradford said it first). One certainly empathizes with Author Moore, his relief that he's not the one in the cell is palpable, but so is his compassion...and his quietly judgmental satisfaction. Or so it felt to me.

The author's breezy, anecdotal style is perfectly adequate to the task of telling his story. It's in no way unique or even very interesting, but the points are made, the language is limpidly clear, and I never once thought the publisher was crazy for acquiring but not copyediting (meaning there are only a few errors of spelling or grammar) the book. This is an increasingly rare feeling on my part.

So what's with the curmudgeonly reaction to it? I loathe being preached at. This book feels preachy and smug to me. I can almost feel Jesus in every word, and this is a most disturbing and disagreeable sensation to me. The entire time Author Wes is reporting the conversations he has with Murderer Wes, I wished the murderer was the one I was listening to...I am that averse to being chirped at.

I didn't like it, and I doubt I'd like either Wes Moore in the flesh either. I'm glad I read it, but I don't recommend it to anyone not in search of the Wonderbra experience: Uplifted beyond that which is natural (not to mention desirable).