D. P. LYLE'S PAGE: The Jake Longly series 2

CULTURED (Jake Longly #6)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Money, sex, power. Jonathon Lindemann offers it all—just don’t mind the missing girls.

Jake Longly, ex-pro baseball player turned restauranteur, is back where he belongs: relaxing on the beach in front of his restaurant in Gulf Shores, Alabama. His peace is interrupted, however, when he receives a call from his private investigator father—April Wilkerson has gone missing from Lindemann Farms, the rustic, yet posh, resort built by self-help and financial guru Jonathon Lindemann.

Lindemann, founder of The Lindemann Method (TLM), recruits wealthy people to join his program, charging a hefty entry fee but in return promising huge financial gains and self-enlightenment. Jake’s celebrity status makes him the best person for the case.

When Jake and his girlfriend, Nicole, go on an undercover visit to Lindemann Farms, some suspicious activity makes them wonder about the legitimacy of TLM. Soon, a private conversation with one of the girls hired to work at the resort reveals their unorthodox, and immoral, recruitment methods.

As the layers peel away, darker edges appear. Does Jonathon truly make money for his investors, or is he a scam artist? Is April merely the latest in a series of missing young women? Jake and Nicole need to find her, and soon, before TLM catches wind of their true reasons for visiting the farm.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My, how Epsteinesque, how very similar to Madoff's financial scams, how end-stage capitalism and awful pedophile-adjacent this entry in the series is.

It's book six; I say start with any of the first three. I started with #3, Sunshine State; it was an easy lift to get the basic idea of the series at that point. By #5, The OC, things are a great deal darker and the humor won't read as well for a newbie.

This entry in the series is darker still, it's much more threatening and anxiety-inducing to be around people disappearing; the smooth, unctuous face of the organization is so offensively slick it's just horrible to read. As always, Jake has snark to spare, unleashing it on these dreadful lying sacks of shit.

As the deeply weird cultists try to smarm Jake and Nicole into believing they're the good guys, the hairpins keep falling. The dynamic duo are pretty experienced by now. They can smell rats from a closed car ten miles from the nest; what that talent gets then in this case is unhappy certainty of unpleasant things. The actual resolution is a gut punch. I does not come from a simple direct relationship to the set-up, though. It takes you through the weeds. It makes you think about people's deepest motivations, more often than not greed prominent among them.

I'd love to tell you I didn't think this actually happens. I can't.

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

UNBALANCED (Jake Longly #7)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jake Longly is never saying yes to his father again

It was a simple task. Five minutes tops.

Ex-pro baseball player Jake Longly and his girlfriend, Nicole, are asked by Jake's father, Ray, a private investigator, to pick up some papers from a realtor for his business. Jake would rather be lying on the beach outside of his Gulf Shores restaurant, but he begrudgingly agrees. It'll only take a few minutes.

But somehow, things are never simple in Ray's world. When Jake and Nicole reach the office, they find it empty—except for the dead body of the realtor lying on the floor, a single gunshot wound to his head. Who could've wanted him dead? The long suspect list and the numerous possible motives make untying the knot difficult.

Working with the police department, Jake, Nicole, Ray, and their friend Pancake dive into the deceivingly simple investigation, which grows more complex by the minute. With millions of dollars at stake, weeding through the realtor's entanglements requires all hands on deck, and yet again, Jake is dragged into the PI business he can't seem to escape.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Anyone who's ever bought property knows the feeling of rage and frustration that accompanies this complex process. Multiply that many times over for large investment properties, and you can relate to someone putting a bullet into this guy's head.

Only he wasn't a bad guy, he was actually a helpful soul...and Jake's dad Ray (the ex-military black ops dude) trusted him enough to work with him...only to have the dude accuse him of embezzlement! So what gives?

Naturally Jake and the ever-perfect Nicole need to find out. Clues build up, there seems to be some kind of offshoring of sizable sums of cash. There also surfaces an entire separate life the guy was leading that he definitely could not afford to have his family know about.

Jake is his usual snarktastic self. It was nice to be back in more salubrious surroundings after the last story! It's not quite by-the-numbers yet, but it's treading familiar paths.

It agrees with me, so I'll keep going until it doesn't anymore.

THEY DREAM IN GOLD, debut novel from tyro publisher SJP Lit...both worth watching

THEY DREAM IN GOLD
MAI SENNAAR
Zando/SJP Lit
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A “luminous” (Tara Conklin) literary debut following two dreamers, one intercultural family, and the diasporic pursuit of home.

When Bonnie and Mansour meet in New York in 1968―his piercing gaze in a downtown jazz club threatening to carry her away―their connection is undeniable. Both from fractured homes, with childhoods spent crossing the Atlantic, they quickly find peace with each other. And as Mansour’s soaring Senegalese melodies continue to break new ground, keeping time with the sound of revolution and taking him and Bonnie from Paris to Rio and Switzerland, it seems as though happiness might finally be around the corner for them both.

Then Mansour goes missing. His Spanish tour was only meant to last three weeks, but three months later, he and his band have not returned. In his absence, Bonnie reckons with her memories of him, and comes to understand that the hopes of so many women―her mother and grandmother; his mother, aunt, childhood friend―rest on her perseverance. Stirred by the life growing inside her, Bonnie puts a plan in action to find him.

Spanning two decades and moving through the hotbeds of the African diaspora, They Dream in Gold is an epic yet intimate exploration of the migrant hunger for belonging and a powerful, intergenerational testament to our shared humanity, for lovers of Tara Stringfellow’s Memphis and Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice.

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

My Review: Buckle up...this is a complicated read. Long at over four hundred pages, complex in its interrelated cast of characters, difficult to summarize as a result. Senegal, Paris, New York...the Twenties, the Sixties...familys seen in passing, a family being formed...this novel's a web.

It's a debut novel for the storyteller and close to a debut for the publisher. Sarah Jessica Parker's SJP Lit is part of a company called Zando Projects (Zando's website). SJP Lit's mission statement is:

Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Lit publishes sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking, and discussion-driven stories that are inclusive of international and underrepresented voices. SJP Lit books capture the contemporary imagination and reflect a wide range of ideas and experiences.

So someone famous decided not to start a book club, or an imprint in the Corporate World, but a company publishing books she curates and pays for and edits for us to see what she wants to read and offers us as worth it to read, too. As I would expect from Parker's résumé, the story told here is very much focused on character development. Bonnie and Mansour are not, despite what you could reasonably expect from the synopsis, the only or even the best developed characters. Because the story does not conform to linear time's slightly tedious constraints, we get the family polyphonics as well as the dynamics. This is a fancy way for me to say, if you're expecting a straightforward family saga, you're going to be left wanting. If you really want a book you can inhabit, one that feels more like a series (I mean this in the good way!) than a standalone, here's a great summertime immersion.

The way we move from time to time, from place to place, demands of the reader a level of participation, of code-switching, that might be off-putting for some. I think you'll twig quite quickly to the cues that indicate we're going to shift, though they are not the same from one instance to the next. What I like about that is the mood of the read never stagnates, a danger that family sagas can fall into readily. After a time many of them feel like trauma porn, or a weird triumphalism celebrating a character's Strength, Nobility, and Fortitude. Yeeeccchhh

Author Mai Sennaar doesn't succumb to that too-easy, too-incredible stuff. Her women are beset by worries and doubts. They wonder if things are worth it if they hurt this much, demand this much of them. They stumble, fall, and fail. But they never stay down for good.

It is a distinction, not a difference, but it is a consequential one that speaks to the author's intent. She is not going for the facile road to storytelling success. That is clear from the start. For this old white man, that made the read all the more interesting and involving. Some of that could be down to the slightly more...distant...way the narration is deployed, it gets an overview feeling across. Back to that polyphony of PoVs. This is a natural outgrowth of it. I found it enhanced my reading experience, in part because it enabled Author Sennaar to put me more firmly into the time and place the different strands of her story-web flow through.

I found I was disgruntled by one big, star-losing thing: Like Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (whose author flatteringly blurbed this book), every one of these women is circling a man. The story's center is a man (absent though he be). Is it that hard to make these women interrelate around themselves and each other?

A crotchet of mine. The Bechdel test still matters to me because the queer equivalent is abysmal still...gay characters feature more than ever, less than reality says is fair. So, no fifth star for you, debut novel. Author Sennaar is deeply talented and should be supported, make no mistake.

Maybe she's got more to say, soon. Let's show we're listening.

NOBODY KNOWS HOW IT GOT THIS GOOD, startlingly good debut collection from a Southerner to watch

NOBODY KNOWS HOW IT GOT THIS GOOD: Short Stories from the Deep South
AMOS JASPER WRIGHT IV
Livingston Press
$25.95 hardcover, available now
SALE ON HARDCOVER THROUGH PUBLISHER'S SITE (linked above) ONLY $13.95

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award

"A finely crafted collection that perfectly evokes a place and culture." - Kirkus Review

"He successfully combines the anarchic nihilism of Hunter S. Thompson with the deeper, exploratory writings of William Faulkner, identifying the cancers of his chosen corner of the American South and providing not solutions so much as requiems." - Kirkus Review

A used car salesman finds himself embattled with a local gang. A U.S. Census enumerator disappears in the Black Belt. A former Birmingham fire fighter is haunted by his involvement hosing peaceful protestors during the Civil Rights Movement. A riverboat captain recounts his time working for a mining company while sailing down the Black Warrior River. A newlywed couple’s honeymoon is botched by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A lynching survivor tells the story of his near-death experience.

Through sixteen stories sharing common environments and characters drawing heavily on the author’s experiences growing up in central Alabama, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good explores themes of racial injustice, class, the Civil Rights Movement, environmental catastrophe, imprisonment, suburbanization, and the perennial themes of love, life and loss. Though set in the Deep South, these stories aspire with humor and pathos to address national dilemmas.

My Review:

As is my wont, I will use the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to view the stories as they come.

The Jaguars of Southtown permaybehaps it helps to know that the stories are Birmingham, Ala., in it splendid decaying fetor; I know some folk from there so I wasn't lost, but I can think of many who'd struggle with specific location anxiety, what am I missing?-itis. Page 18 contains a w-bomb. I'd hand this a 3.5-star rating for its cruelly clear eye on a particular Rabbit Angstrom-y man manqué.

Nobody Knows How It Got This Good says the Mayor at the opening of the shiny new Wal-Mart ("before they took out the hyphen") he's been courting for years. Offering the usual roll-overs of lowered taxes and people desperate for a paycheck, any paycheck, even one "you cash all three figures of" at the payday loan place. I promise you most of these good folk don't have bank accounts anymore, banks do not want this tiny little pie even if it's all to themselves. So the spiffy obsequies of opening the place lead the narrator to reflect that:

It was some kind of Mardi Gras meets Donner party.
–and–
The parking stall stripes were white as a grand wizard's starched bed sheets.

Pizitz even figures in the introductory page, a list of the retailers now gone from the world , done in by the class war on labor that killed Fairfield, Alabama. What rises when incomes fall, children? That's right, reactionary politics and social attitudes do! Gold star, Muffin, for remembering what happened to bring us to 2020.

Settling Down in Peckerwood

Miscreant Populations and Their Effects on Jim Crow Methodologies of Street Paving in the Industrial South

Birmingham Goddamn

Deepwater Horizon

Tilting at Windmills

Wells Fargo

Twenty-Six People Per Square Mile

Ave Maria Grotto

The Song of the Abyss Eater

The Last Suppers of Violent Men Executed by the State

When Christ Returns to a Slave State

Down the Black Warrior I Sailed to Byzantium

Last of the Old Guardsmen

Long Hot Summer of 2018