WHIDBEY, evoking a planet-scale beauty spot to soothe and smooth the pain of victimhood

WHIDBEY
T. KIRA MADDEN
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning literary achievement and portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from beloved and award-winning memoirist, T Kira Madden.

Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution, a plan for revenge.

But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.

Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunnit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?

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

My Review: "Be careful what you wish for," taken to apotheosis. Now including "be careful what you say out loud" because you can never know who is listening...what they want from you...what they will do with, and to, the thoughts you leave unguarded in the air.

A paranoid thriller about sexual abuse of girls does not sound like something I, sexually abused by my mother, will find pleasant reading. It wasn't prurient...it stops short of recreating the abuse...and it very properly presents the topic in high relief instead of flattened into caricature.

Abuse is not foregrounded, at least the mechanics were not. Emotional devastation is this story's heart. I'm not exaggerating, unless you're made of stone, this is a deeply sad and often brutal tome. Linzie is my personal most awful victim of abuse because she parades it for attention, for the validating fame her honesty affords her and the materially comfortable living that brings. If that's not sad....

Birdie is mid-process in trauma terms. Her loose lips, her willingness to talk when silence would serve better, isn't like Linzie's garrulous yappin' for the cameras, the ghostwriter, the audience. Birdie doesn't have a plan, a purpose, a canny angle to show and sell. Birdie can't keep the chirps inside. It's a far worse place to be, because it's doing bad things to her belovèd girlfriend Trace.

But every abuser has a mother. How often do we, as a society, stop to think about what it means to a person to see their child in the harsh glow of a perp walk? How much rage and hate can this lone soul transmute into denial? Mary-Beth is the character I wanted to hug, to stand before her with my arms aroud her and just let her cry. Whatever she did, didn't, couldn't, wouldn't do, she is the one whose role in this was the most devastating to me. Then, while expecting her son to come home to her after incarceration and mandated psychotherapy, she hears the words your blood freezes even thinking about: "your child is dead."

Oh. My. GOD.

Parts one and two make the cases. The stakes get set. The pain is explained. No one's an angel but each one's a clear, passionate survivor. Part three's where we hit the top of the loop on the roller coaster and time speeds up as things happen, people talk but the Doppler effect renders them only partly comprehensible, events occur too fast for old-man me to see why they're causally connected to the first bits. The ending...well...it's a first novel, I grade on a curve for those, but...dude. Resolving plot threads should not feel as though you're doing a time-sucking chore you don't really want to do. Whatever the real ending was, and I'm morally certain there was one, it probably took the murky misty part-three energy around the bend.

If Author Madden reads this (ha! don't read reviews, your publicist does that) please take this sentence away, where you should go now, with you: You have an outstanding literary touch, a visual vocabulary most never acquire, and you need to read Mary Renault and Patricia Highsmith novels.

Everyone else: Support debut authors, or we'll never get more work from them. But maybe check this one out of the library.

BROUGHT TO BOOK, first of ten very, very cozy English-village mysteries

BROUGHT TO BOOK (Rona Parish #1)
ANTHEA FRASER
Severn House
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Rona Parish is asked to write the biography of an acclaimed thriller writer who drowned in unusual circumstances, is she diving into danger?

Biographer Rona Parish is exhausted after finishing her latest project on Arthur Conan Doyle, but her hope for a break between jobs is dashed when the wife of late bestselling thriller writer, Theo Harvey, asks her to write his biography.

Theo Harvey drowned mysteriously six months ago. No one knows why . . .

Theo’s inexplicable death six months ago left many unanswered questions. Why did he retreat from the limelight six years ago, only to reappear three years later and produce two outstanding, if much darker, novels? And what is the truth behind his mysterious drowning? Rona Parish is determined to uncover the truth behind his death, but at what cost?

Intrigued, and with her golden retriever Gus by her side, Rona starts to piece together the author’s life. But someone doesn’t want her to uncover Theo’s secrets. And they’ll go to any lengths to make sure they stay hidden . . .

A page-turning cosy mystery set in the fictional English market town of Marsborough in the stunning Chiltern Hills.

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

My Review: First published twenty years ago, this supremely cozy, very definitely page-turning first-in-series mystery introduces a biographer sleuth...first time I've run into that one!...with a happily unconventional home life, a tidy income from her main career, and a bottomless well of curiosity. It felt to me like a story, and is told in a style, from sixty years ago.

I do not intend an insult with this statement of an observation.

Gender politics will derail any discussion of why I personally find myself squicked out by stalkery behavior. The cultural conversation about this behavior was only just getting started back then, so I can't really point a shaming finger at it; just something I myownself find unpleasant to read. This book, like some of the ones we labeled "romantic" many decades ago, valorizes some things I characterize as really stalkery behavior. That's a very big nope from me. I get it, in the sense that, at a point near the end of the story, the plot really needed something to happen at precisely that juncture. Why the other something that was in already set in motion by a different character and was, in fact, in progress and that occurs with near simultaneity wasn't enough for the author only she knows. A choice she made that I was appalled by, and it really caused me to reassess the prior appearances of the stalkery character in a much less flattering (to the author) light.

A trope that just won't die is the villain infodump. There is one of these at the end. I really rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain as the guilty party settles in for a cozy chat with people whose murders are essential to the sociopath's happy getaway. The sociopaths I've known wouldn't be that careless. This is, from their point of view, a necessary act not to be lingered over because the risk to them getting away with their awful decision decrease with every delay or diversion from its accomplishment. I've never known a stupid sociopath.

The age of the story shows in multiple ways, eg the fact that Rona goes to her publisher's office and hands him an envelope with a printed version of an article she's submitting. Wow, does that take me back...no one even five years later would conceptualize this as a possibility! It's actually a bit wistfully charming. It dates events, but that's not necessarily bad...just a passing note for informative purposes.

The series character's world is most charmingly set up, and I would absolutely love to live in that village. I would be seriously surprised if a revelation that genuinely shocked me regarding Rona's twin wasn't going to loom large in a future installment. The changing technology of the day wasn't ignored, because Rona does look up the subject of her proposed biography on the Internet (still capitalized back then) and discusses what she's found with the subject's widow. Rona also notes the biography subject's lack of a computer to the widow. So it became even more odd in my eyes that she submitted her article on paper.

There is an instance of an animal being harmed, but it is set up so that the event, while bad, doesn't kill the animal in question. It is used, I felt, gratuitously, though it's later revealed to have been the last straw for the one committing the harmful act. It fell short of my slam-the-book-shut threshold because it's clear there's not going to be fatal outcome very soon after it occurs.

What I most want to convey to you is how high my hopes were set up, and then to be let down by the issues I've detailed above was a deep disappointment. There was every reason to think I'd found a ten-book series that's clearly complete (the most recent was published in 2017) to dive into.

Unfortunately that's not to be. I don't care to risk my own money on books that bid fair to repeat these kinds of unwelcome to me tropes.

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!


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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.