THE CLARE CARLSON SERIES: THE LAST SCOOP & BEYOND THE HEADLINES

THE LAST SCOOP
R.G. BELSKY
Oceanview Publishing
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Martin Barlow was Clare Carlson’s first newspaper editor, a beloved mentor who inspired her career as a journalist. But, since retiring from his newspaper job, he had become a kind of pathetic figure—railing on about conspiracies, cover-ups, and other imaginary stories he was still working on. Clare had been too busy with her own career to pay much attention to him.

When Martin Barlow is killed on the street one night during an apparent mugging attempt gone bad, it seems like he was just an old man whose time had come. But Clare—initially out of a sense of guilt for ignoring her old friend and then because of her own journalistic instincts—begins looking into his last story idea. As she digs deeper and deeper into his secret files, she uncovers shocking evidence of a serial killer worse than Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, or any of the other infamous names in history. This really is the biggest story of Martin Barlow’s career—and Clare’s, too—as she uncovers the path leading to the decades-long killer of at least twenty young women.

All is not as it seems during Clare’s relentless search for this serial killer. Is she setting herself up to be his next victim?

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

My Review: Terrific first read in a series. It's book three in order, but it is my introduction to Clare and her media-centered world. Since I lived in Manhattan during the 1980s and all the 1990s, I love reading about that uniquely different world.

There are two strands to this story. Clare's early-days mentor, when she was cutting her jounalistic teeth in the newspaper business (making this kind of an historical novel, since that was rendered impossible early this century), has declined in mental health of late. She thinks, in common with others, that he's lost part of his mind because he's going on about conspiracies and cover-ups at great length...so Clare's done what she can to avoid him. It's not as cruel as it sounds, her job in the TV-news world of New York City really is consuming. She just...stops making time to see Marty.

This definitely rings true...happens all the time when someone has a high-powered position.

Thus we get that high-quality evergreen inciting event: Guilt and remorse over past behavior after someone dies. The senselessness of an older man of apparently diminishing capacities dying in a violent mugging is so utterly believable that I was pretty sure it would end up being a red herring.

Not at all. Author Belsky does a darn fine job of using it to motivate Clare to look into the wild and woolly world of Marty's carryings-on about the web of evildoing he's discovered. As she gets deeper and deeper into the material Marty's been trying to interest her in, she realizes...believably slowly and frustratingly incompletely...that he wasn't ranting about nothing but fantasies loosely based on coincidences. I admit I wanted to shout at her as she continued in her doubts. That, to me, means Author Belsky's doing a fine job of making me care about and invest in the story. For this reader, the fact that we're in first-person narration by Clare helps this investment.

The deeper Clare gets into this topsy-turvy world of power and corruption making devil's bargains, though, the more I came to think that I was missing something big about her character. When she uses a quid pro quo that, while I'm sure it's been tried before, would get a news director AND an FBI agent fired right quick by their respective employers, I realized that I wasn't buying in to Clare as a professional as fully as I would need to for this to be the next-level read it started out to be. Clare's deep personal issues aren't overly emphasized, but they're rather too neatly dovetailed into the dark, evil doings of some truly horrifying people.

The stakes ratchet up steadily as Marty's research unfolds in Clare's hands. Her skills as an investigative reporter are pretty well delineated. There are, I think inevitably given the problem I have outlined above, some credulity-straining convenient hurdle-collapsing events and coincidences. It's not the main thing I took away from the story, but I was aware that this was happening.

In the end, the *astoundingly* (but believably) heightened stakes of this investigation would have resulted in dire and condign consequences that don't happen here. I was glad to forget about that lapse, as I saw it, in authorial credibility because I really, really liked the way the story ended.

So on to the next one!

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

BEYOND THE HEADLINES
R.G. BELSKY
Oceanview Publishing
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: She was a mega-celebrity—he was a billionaire businessman—now he’s dead—she’s in jail

Laurie Bateman was living the American dream. Since her arrival as an infant in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon, the pretty Vietnamese girl had gone on to become a supermodel, a successful actress, and, finally, the wife of one of the country’s top corporate dealmakers. That dream has now turned into a nightmare when she is arrested for the murder of her wealthy husband.

New York City TV journalist Clare Carlson does an emotional jailhouse interview in which Bateman proclaims her innocence—and becomes a cause celebre for women’s rights groups around the country. At first sympathetic, then increasingly suspicious of Laurie Bateman and her story, Clare delves into a baffling mystery which has roots extending back nearly fifty years to the height of the Vietnam War.

Soon, there are more murders, more victims, and more questions as Clare struggles against dire evil forces to break the biggest story of her life. Beyond the Headlines is perfect for fans of Robert Crais and Harlan Coben.

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

My Review: The witty, sarcastic, self-destructive Clare Carlson is back. This time she's looking into a dead rich guy who, frankly, just needed killin' and no matter who did it they should get a severe chastisement and a ride home from the police. That would, however, make a boring story.

As with The Last Scoop (above) Clare is in no way reluctant to spread her...charms...far and wide to get dirt and details and help that she wouldn't otherwise come across. This was more of a problem for me on this second outing because it felt reductive to me. A woman in a powerful position, coming to the aid of a woman who seems to be wrongly accused of her dirtbag husband's murder, and using sex to accomplish lots of things she shouldn't be able to do, is problematic for me. Why make her out to be good at her job, show her being possessed of professional skills, then set her out as a serial sex-hound?

So there went that quarter star.

What *did* work for me was the investigation into accused husband-killer's past that resulted from a seeming slip of the tongue on her part. The way this book took on dark and ugly stuff from the US's past was very well-handled and integrated into the crime story. I was so involved in the whys and hows of the story that I could put aside my unhappy response to the overuse of Clare's sexuality.

I'm not so sure that will last, I must say...I hope Author Belsky will dial this back before the next book. Which I will definitely read.

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS isn't perfect...but it's excellent!

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS: A Novel
TOM RACHMAN
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English language newspaper as they struggle to keep it—and themselves—afloat.

Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.

As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.

Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

My Review: I was very remiss with this book. It came out in 2010, and I read it that year. I've since gifted it to several others. Did I set down a review? No! Lazy lazy me. That doesn't mean that I don't encourage you to read it, because I do.

There is nothing of the novel about the book, though. Don't go in thinking you'll get Time's Arrow bedecked with cohesive details. You're getting interconnected short stories set in the same world. But say that to the marketing people at any publishing house, the buyers at every bookery, and even the Woman in the Street, and watch their eyes dim and their arms cross and their butts shift uncomfortably in the chair. Stories = Death in publishing. Less than a third the copies of a novel, be it hit, bestseller, or failure. So disheartening! So very annoying to me, too, since what is a chapter except a deeply woven short story set in a shared universe?

Anyway. Enough about that.

Why should all you storyphobes read this book?

“What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past- it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's that line from Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.”

That's one of many passages that made me pause, reach for the Book Darts, and mull. Memories are us, we are our memories, life is a brief flash before the eyes and then a deposit on the stockpile of memories. Yes. Well. What makes that okay, for me, is the existence of literature and the presence in my environment of books. So Rachman puts it to me, in this passage, that my stockpile of memories is susceptible to loss and reminds me that it's something to fear...except:

“You can’t dread what you can’t experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That’s as bad as it gets. And that’s bad enough, surely.”

Aha. Yes. As bad as it gets is losing the memories to come! Agreed, and in a very odd way, it soothed a bit of my ill temper at the inevitability of death. (I'm still ticked at the prevalence of loss, which is in fact a thing to dread.)

That is the bargain one makes in forming relationships, though. Loss is a part of it, whether to death or separation. We're always in a process of loss after a certain age, or a process of *consciousness* of loss to be precise. It's the defining characteristic of being in relationship. Or A defining characteristic, as Rachman points out:

“I have to wonder if you're not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing from people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I'll name the motive. Even saints have motives -- to feel like saints, probably. ... But still, the point of any relationship is obtaining something from another person.”

For good or for ill, that is the basic motivation, the essential need, the driving desire of them all, be they romantic, sexual, casual, intense, fleeting, or enduring. We want something, unless we're Bodhisattvas. That makes the whole of human existence sound so tawdry, doesn't it?

But nothing in all of the Universe is unmixed. Not even the pure chemical elements are unmixed. After all they each and every one began their existence as hydrogen, the simplest thing in all of creation, and were forced, compressed, annealed into their current pure states by the explosion and death of a star. From that death, that ultimate transformation of a bright and shining object into a myriad of other, unshining things, all of existence as we know it flows. Our own lives show us that endings are beginnings and all beginnings are neutral. It's what one does next, what flash of the present one accepts into the stockpile of memories, that determines which endings are "good" and which "bad." Rachman says this more succinctly, I think, when he writes, “Anything that's worth anything is complicated.”

Mmm hmmm.