THE DEEPEST LAKE, eerie, nasty flensing-knife to the guts of the writing industry

THE DEEPEST LAKE
ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX
Soho Crime
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this atmospheric thriller set at a luxury memoir-writing workshop on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, a grieving mother goes undercover to investigate her daughter’s mysterious death.

Rose, the mother of 20-something aspiring writer Jules, has waited three months for answers about her daughter’s death. Why was she swimming alone when she feared the water? Why did she stop texting days before she was last seen? When the official investigation rules the death an accidental drowning, the body possibly lost forever in Central America’s deepest lake, an unsatisfied Rose travels to the memoir workshop herself. She hopes to draw her own conclusion—and find closure.

When Rose arrives, she is swept into the curious world created by her daughter’s literary hero, the famous writing teacher Eva Marshall, a charismatic woman known for her candid—and controversial—memoirs. As Rose uncovers details about the days leading up to Jules’s disappearance, she begins to suspect that this glamorous retreat package is hiding ugly truths. Is Lake Atitlan a place where traumatized women come to heal or a place where deeper injury is inflicted?

Perfect for fans of Delia Owens, Celeste Ng, and Julia Bartz, The Deepest Lake is both a sharp look at the sometimes toxic, exclusionary world of high-class writing workshops and an achingly poignant view of a mother’s grief.

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

My Review: Simplicity is a virtue in plotting, if not writing, a thriller. What complexity there is, in a truly involving example of the genre, comes from the characters and what they want that takes them far outside the safe confines of bourgeois life. The death of a child's good for rage, and even revenge; but the death of a child who evokes a guilt or a regret in a parent...that will move one far outside behavioral norms.

This iteration of the mother-hunting-murderer starts to show us complexity about halfway through. The first half is a not-that-exciting takedown of the Writing Industry as a hollow, pretentious ego farm. Been there, read that. I kept going because, as a hardened old reader, there was something prickling my arm hairs, something I couldn't quite put a finger on. The writing about the titular lake was lovely, but not unusually so. The character of the snobby writing coach, if that's what she is and not some super Svengali creating murderous minions out of lonely women who like to write, is in a word predictable. The mother...easiest point of failure because pathos wears thin fast...it's the mother, I thought. But why? echoed back at me.

I couldn't answer myself.

On I read, waiting for the...something. That was it! I was reading a book waiting for this unknown, but subtly prefigured somehow I couldn't quite grasp...something to occur. Let me say that again: Without being able to say what, or when, I got my expectation set on, I was hooked into not being able to put this book down. To beat you about the forehead some more with what an impressive feat that is, I'll tell you that I started reading mysteries with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in...well, let's just say people born that year are grandparents. Several times over.

No, I won't tell you what happens. I will tell you that, while I was satisfied that what ended the book ended the story, I was that smallest bit, that vague hint, disgruntled at how long it took to get there. That constitutes a quibble given how much enjoyment I'm going to get from exploring Author Romano-Lax's back catalog from Soho Crime. The synopsis writer gives you some very apt comps, and those should hint at the direction you can expect the story to take.

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, a Goodreads group-read that really rang me like a bell

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST
STUART NEVILLE
Soho Crime
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sooner or later, everybody pays.

Gerry Fegan, a former paramilitary contract killer, is haunted by the ghosts of the 12 people he has slaughtered. Every night, on the point of losing his mind, he drowns their screams in drink. His solution is to kill those who engineered their deaths.

From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all are called to account. But when Fegan's vendetta threatens to derail a hard-won truce and destabilise the government, old comrades and enemies alike want him dead.

Winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Thriller.

My Review: First, read this:

“Hate's a terrible thing. It's a wasteful, stupid emotion. You can hate someone with all your heart, but it'll never do them a bit of harm. The only person it hurts is you. You can spend your days hating, letting it eat away at you, and the person you hate will go on living just the same. So what's the point?”

That's the logical, and irrefutable, argument against hate. But there's no chance humans will give up hating. It's an addictive drug, a high that can only be bested by the Absolute Assurance that YOU ARE RIGHT, They are Wrong, and therefore they deserve _____. Ireland's been in the toils of both, Hate and Rightness, for centuries. They've made it the basis for their identity as a nation. It ain't goin' nowhere.

That grim prognostication delivered, the story we're told in this (debut!) novel is based around a single person's efforts to mitigate the toll Hate takes on society as a whole. That he's chosen, um, a counter-productive solution to the problem is...kind of the core of the read. The way there's no out for a person whose persona is warped by war, by violent and utterly anti-social normative training, whose core is eaten out to nothingness by hatred. That is who such a one will be always. And Gerry Fegan is a stone-cold killer, a person whose life is without the sense of remorse that a normal person would have for depriving others of their entire futures.

Which is why they haunt him. Their ghosts won't let him sleep, or think, or be normal.

Discussions of Gerry's ghosts' reality are circular. Real? Imaginary? Guilt phantasms? Doesn't matter. Gerry is the person he's been made into. The ghosts demand something be done to balance the scales of their lost futures. And Gerry being their instrument means that something will be murderous.

This is a huge problem for the world. Men and women like Gerry exist all over the globe, and they represent a ticking time-bomb of violence and chaos in every place they exist. Conflicts based on such idiotic things as religion and ethnicity and national identity are going to sink any "peace process" that ever gets past the hot-air stage. People like these need their Hate-hit to feel good. Feeling good, about yourself, about your superior place in the world, is fundamental to humans' ability to thrive. In far too many cases, that represents itself as Hate for Others. Nothing effective has ever been done about that...can anything effective ever be done about it? Don't look at Ireland. It's a pink-skinned Rwanda.

And this novel, this brilliant noir tale of revenge if not exactly redemption, brings that to its...conclusion is the wrong word. "Stopping place" in the sense of "the buck stops here" is permaybehaps closer. The man Gerry, expiating his sins, commits others...but do they count as sins? They're balancing scales, not to say that the choice of method is one I approve of. But he's made some attempt to redress the vile acts he's committed. By committing others.

The Mahatma was correct. The world continues to ignore him, and the cycle of violence continues to spiral ever downward into chaos.

Finally, let me say that this book's the first in a series called "Jack Lennon Investigations." This will bumfuzzle most readers. "Who the hell's Jack Lennon?" I hear you ask. Well...don't worry your pretty little head about it is my response. Read Collusion and don't fuss. It's well worth your eyeblinks, just as this delight of a violent, nihilistic noir read is.

CURSE OF THE POGO STICK, 5th Dr. Siri Laos mystery

CURSE OF THE POGO STICK (Dr. Siri Paiboun #5)
COLIN COTTERILL
Soho Crime
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Vientiane, a booby-trapped corpse, intended for Dr. Siri, the national coroner of Laos, has been delivered to the morgue. In his absence, only Nurse Dtui’s intervention saves the lives of the morgue attendants, visiting doctors, and Madame Daeng, Dr. Siri’s fiancée. 

On his way back from a communist party meeting in the north, Dr. Siri is kidnapped by seven female Hmong villagers under the direction of the village elder so that he will—in the guise of Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old shaman with whom he shares his body—exorcise the headman’s daughter whose soul is possessed by a demon, and lift the curse of the pogo stick.


My Review: Dr. Siri Paiboun is my role model for growing older. I want to be as cantankerous and unafraid as he is, and as forgiving and tolerant as he is, and marry someone I'm in love with like he does.

Who am I kidding? I'd like any of those things NOW, except the marriage thing, which no thank you, I remember that too well.

So this is the fifth book in the series, and the action takes place late in 1977 into 1978. Siri's seventy-three. The reason I'm reviewing a book so late in the series is simple: I want to tell everyone that, contrary to established custom, the series isn't sagging, and the sleuthing isn't drooping. Siri's believability is quite as firm as it was, meaning if you didn't buy in from the get-go, you won't be in now either. I love our secondary characters quite a lot, and am invested in the world of Dtui and Phosy and Geung as much as Siri and Daeng and Civilai. It's just too much fun to perch on the back of the lilac police Vespa, pull my scarf over my nose and mouth, and whip along the trafficless roads around Vientiane to chase malefactors!

Now that's one helluva mental picture, isn't it? But in this book, in this series, your fat old stiff-jointed American correspondent here can do exactly that. AND solve a crime. (Sort of, there really isn't a mystery-novel crime to solve in this book...so what, though?) I get to travel to the Hmong Otherworld! I am invited to an illegal Buddhist wedding! And through it all, my green-eyed hobbit-sized impish cicerone, Dr. Siri, sees how true and marvelous the world is, how little in it matters except being present and available and kind.

Rightness. Completing one's journey and, thereby, completing the journeys of others. I hope all of us are able to say, looking at our last dawn, that we did that very thing, at least once.


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ANARCHY AND OLD DOGS, 4th Dr. Siri Laotian Mystery

ANARCHY AND OLD DOGS (Dr. Siri Laos Mysteries #4)
COLIN COTTERILL

Rating: -14,975* of five

The Publisher Says: A blind retired dentist has been run down by a logging truck on the street in Vientiane just opposite the post office. His body is duly delivered to the morgue of Dr. Siri Paiboun, the official and only coroner of Laos. At the age of seventy-four, Dr. Siri is too old to be in awe of the new communist bureaucrats for whom he now works. He identifies the corpse, helped by the letter in the man’s pocket. But first he must decipher it; it is written in code and invisible ink. The dentist’s widow explains that the enigmatic letters and numbers describe chess moves, but they are unlike any chess symbols Siri has previously encountered. With the help of his old friend, Civilai, now a senior member of the Laos Politburo; Nurse Dtui (“Fatty”); Phosy, a police officer; and Aunt Bpoo, a transvestite fortune-teller, Dr. Siri solves the mystery of the note and foils a plot to overthrow the government of Laos.

My Review: Dr. Siri and his best pal since jungle-fighting revolutionary youth, Comrade Civilai the Politburo senior cadre and all-around curmudgeon, uncover a major problem in the course of an investigation into the death of an old blind dentist whose habit of coming by bus to Vientiane, the capital, to pick up a letter written in invisible ink every week is interrupted by a runaway logging truck. The widow, far from grieving, is damn near slobbering to get the letter away from Siri. This makes him wonder....

So Siri, Civilai, Nurse Dtui, and Comrade Policeman Phosy (Mr. Geung, the Down-syndrome-having morgue assistant, is still recovering from dengue fever from last book) are set on a collision course with modern Laos's first attempted counter-coup by Royalists based across the Mekong River in Thailand. Siri also solves the murder of a small boy, a troublemaking 1970s version of Siri himself I suspect, is betrayed, finds a long-lost revolutionary-era gal-pal of his and his wife's, is betrayed again, and suffers the pangs of later-life love. In the end, of course, the murder of the dentist, the murder of the small boy, and the pair of betrayals are interconnected by Cotterill's undeniable panache in plotting. And, well, love is in the August, 1977, air....

...but none of it is comin' from me. Anyone who has read my outraged screech of a review of The Brutal Telling by Lousy Louise Penny will remember how bitterly I responded to her ripping out my heart and shredding it into gobbets, then pouring boiling salted vinegar into the still-living cavity she left, with the character development that ends the book. I rated it -15,000*. I give Crummy Colin Cotterill 25 more stars because the ripping, shredding, and pouring were very slightly ameliorated by the in-book resolution to the main betrayal, and the sheer rightness of the second betrayal that ends so happily, and by the whimsical pleasure of the love affair for Dr. Siri.

Plus there's Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite shaman who works the riverside in front of the Aeroflot office, of whom I devoutly hope to see more.

*gets out voodoo dolly in Cotterill's likeness to inflict severe tooth pain on him for forseeable future*


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DISCO FOR THE DEPARTED, 3rd Dr. Siri Laotian Mystery

DISCO FOR THE DEPARTED (Dr. Siri Paiboun #3)
COLIN COTTERILL
Soho Crime
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, is summoned to a remote location in the mountains of Huaphan Province, where for years the leaders of the current government had hidden out in caves, waiting to assume power. Now, as a major celebration of the new regime is scheduled to take place, an arm is found protruding from the concrete walk that had been laid from the President’s former cave hideout to his new house beneath the cliffs. Dr. Siri is ordered to supervise the disinterment of the body attached to the arm, identify the corpse and discover how he died.

The autopsy provides some surprises but it is his gift as a shaman that enables the seventy-two-year old doctor to discover why the victim was buried alive and, eventually, the identity of his killer.

My Review: Comrade Doctor Siri, the only coroner in the newly “liberated” Communist regime of Laos, returns to the northeastern jungle caves where he and his Pathet Lao insurgent comrades once fought the Royalists and the Americans for control of Laos. His purpose: Find out, in the ten days before a celebratory concert takes place there, whose body has been discovered in the newly laid cement walkway leading to the president's former hideout. Formidable Nurse Dtui in tow, Dr. Siri uncovers a series of awful, painful truths about families, friends, and the departed but not gone spirits of those who (willingly or not) gave their lives for the cause of communism.

Along the way, Dr. Siri encounters an old Cuban friend from insurgency days, a host of disco-dancing spirits, a Lao cadre with the personality of a rock and the temerity to file a request for permission to woo before approaching Dtui to ask for her hand in marriage, becomes the living host of a different, dead Cuban, and unknowingly loses his eidetically gifted, Down's syndrome afflicted morgue assistant Mr. Geung, who contracts dengue fever (often fatal) in an epic walk across most of Laos to get back from his politically motivated exile from Vientiane's—indeed Laos's—only morgue at the hands of insufferable idiot politico Judge Haeng.

When triumphant Siri and Dtui host an official delegation from Vietnam, their delightful antics offer an ending to this entry in the long-running series that should, if you're at all a fan of the comedy of cosmic justice, have you chortling with appreciative schadenfreude for hours.

In any series, there comes a point when things either get stale or take some sort of turn that's got long-range implications and bends the course of future events. The latter point has been reached in this series, here in the third book, and there are some characters not present who would ordinarily be on-scene. Comrade Inspector Phosy is completely absent; Comrade Minister Civilai is only a token presence; but they will be back. Won't they? I haven't read the next book yet, so I can't be sure, but they should...and Dtui, bless her cotton socks, not only gets a marriage proposal (rejected) but other life-changing news (good) that will make the rest of the series look a little different.

Series mysteries appeal to me for these reasons, these ongoing characters having ongoing lives that change the way things transpire in the books. I am, I suppose, the soap-opera-watching sort of personality. I like getting to know the characters in my entertainments over time, and watching them develop as logically as fictional characters can. Which is often a great deal more logically than corporeal characters can, or at least do, develop. And of course there is the orderliness of bad people being punished for doing bad things aspect of mysteries that's very appealing. It happens so seldom in life.

Cotterill's Laos has the virtue of being completely unfamiliar to me, and therefore adding a (possibly spurious) sense of learning something about an alien life-way. I found the expanded knowledge of Laotian communitarian culture very interesting in this book. The moments that Mr. Geung, walking across most of his country, spends in the care of his countrymen are charming to me, revealing a place and a time that valued humanness and kindness over and above any -ism or credo. Cotterill is at pains to point out that the cities might already be changing, but the populace still valued and followed the ancient principles of hospitality and generosity to others.

A deeply involving series, an interesting entry in it, and a story that both wraps itself up sensibly and satisfyingly as well as sets up the changes and events of the next entry...what more can a mystery addict ask for?


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THE CORONER'S LUNCH, Dr. Siri Laotian Mystery #1

THE CORONER'S LUNCH (Dr. Siri Paiboun #1)
Colin Cotterill
Soho Crime
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Publisher Says: Laos, 1975. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Dr. Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old Paris-trained doctor, is appointed national coroner. Although he has no training for the job, there is no one else; the rest of the educated class has fled.

He is expected to come up with the answers the party wants. But crafty and charming Dr. Siri is immune to bureaucratic pressure. At his age, he reasons, what can they do to him? And he knows he cannot fail the dead who come into his care without risk of incurring their boundless displeasure. Eternity could be a long time to have the spirits mad at you.

My Review: In the Vientiane, Laos, of November 1976, green-eyed Dr. Siri Paiboun is the seventy-two-year-old coroner...the only one in the newly liberated by communism country...charged with discovering why Mrs. Nitnoy, powerful leader of the Laos Women's Union and wife of Member of Parliament Kham, suddenly keeled over dead. Her husband insists it was her peasant taste for raw pork. The judge Dr. Siri works for thinks that sounds reasonable, and also unnecessary to investigate.

Dr. Siri knows otherwise. Not because he's that good a coroner, since he's only had the job for ten reluctant months...he knows because Mrs. Nitnoy told him so.

After she was dead.

So begins a fascinating look into the chaotic world of Southeast Asia in the wake of the Vietnam War, told from the out-of-the-Anglophone-ordinary viewpoint of the Southeast Asians left to pick up the pieces. The story follows Dr. Siri as he is manipulated from behind the scenes in someone's quest to hide truths from the doctor, someone who clearly doesn't know...heck, even the good doctor doesn't know!...that Dr. Siri is the latest incarnation of legendary thousand-plus-year-old shaman Yeh Ming, and so has the ability to see spirits and call on ancient energies intrinsic to Laos's beautiful forested mountains.

Dr. Siri is called upon to use his increasing skills as a coroner to look into the deaths of three Vietnamese nationals, in Laos for purposes both secret and unknown to anyone Siri knows; then is sent to the ethnically Hmong south to deal with the sudden and unexpected deaths of Army officers in charge of an economic revitalization program that doesn't seem to be revitalizing so much as devitalizing the men in charge; and while among the Hmong, who worryingly seem to know him better than he knows himself, Siri finally gets to know Yeh Ming, his fellow traveler in this green-eyed body in a country of brown-eyed people.

With a combination of mundane detective skills, spirit guidance, and help from a formidable nurse, an eidetic Down's syndrome laborer, an old friend in high places, and a new friend in clandestine ones, Siri ties all the malefactors in knots and delivers them to the proper authorities (whether spiritual or mundane) with ribbons on.

This book is such a welcome addition to my series-mystery-loving world. Dr. Siri is a delight. He's too old, and too weary, and too smart to be scared by petty bureaucratic thuggery. He values his comfort...oh yeah baby, the older we get, the more we do!...but his idea of comfort includes doing the real right thing, not the easy right thing.

Cotterill gives Dr. Siri a deep and rich backstory reaching into Laos's colonial French past, extending into the jungles of Pathet Lao communist resistance, and through to the time of victory and the inevitable Animal Farm-esque disillusion that accompanies regime change. "Throw the crooks out!" the cry goes up, but the unsaid and often unrealized second part of that cry is, "and let our crooks have a turn!" Dr. Siri sees this, knows it, and frankly doesn't care. He's got no children, so no grandchildren, and so no, or a very small, stake in this Brave New World. Except, well, you know, there IS justice in the world, imperfect and piecemeal though it may be, but justice demands a good man's best be given and a heavy price be paid both for administering and evading it.

He might only have one (metaphorical) eye, but Siri is honor bound to use it among the blind he lives with. It's this quality that makes him irresistible, and gives Cotterill's creation a semblance of life that brings him out of the pages of the book and into the imagination of the reader who lives in a world where ideals of fairness and decency and selflessness have degenerated into "don't tread on me" selfishness and mock-"liberty" that curiously resembles "don't tell me what I can do with what's mine" greed. It's these very things that Siri grimaces at.

Just like me.


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