DON'T START ME TALKIN' is a blues road novel done right

DON'T START ME TALKIN'
TOM WILLIAMS
Curbside Splendor Publishing
$5.00 trade paper via the link to the publisher's website above, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Don’t Start Me Talkin' is a comedic road novel about Brother Ben, the only remaining True Delta Bluesman, playing his final North American tour. Set in contemporary society, Brother Ben's protege Silent Sam Stamps narrates an episodic 'last ride,' laying bare America's complicated relationship with African American identity, music, and culture, and like his hero Sonny Boy Williamson once sang, Silent Sam promises "I'll tell everything I know."

Don’t Start Me Talkin’ is not merely a story about the blues, but with its rhythm, language, and sense of self and place, it also channels the DNA of this very American style of music.

THIS REVIEW FIRST APPEARED IN THE SMALL PRESS BOOK REVIEW.

My Review: Why do you pick a book up? This book, not that book, a blue cover or a red jacket or a picture of a headless male torso glistening with glycerine sweat as he rubs his abs? What makes the choice for you?

Like picking a radio station on a road trip, picking a book from among the numberless offerings of eager publishers large and small is a matter of click, of fit between your brain and its style. The cover...the intro of the song...has to tickle a little place inside you that feels so good, makes a little smile come on your face. Then a short flip through some pages, look at a few sentences, like listening to the vocals come in or the horns join the bass. Does this one have what it takes? Hit the tuner, put the book down, or settle in with the cruise control set and the spine snugged in your palm?

So start with the cover. Curbside Splendor is a small house. They're based in Chicago. Neither of these things matter much until you see what they're doing. This cover is blue like the bluesmen in it. This cover is lifted, aesthetically, from 1956 and the Verve/Decca/Mercury aesthetic; the book's trim size echoes an album's proportions (or a CD's, for y'all young'uns); and the chapter list is an old-fashioned album label with the twelve chapters (like the number of tunes on an old 33-1/3 album) named and numbered.

They got me with the design. It spoke to me, old man that I am, and it spoke to the contents of the book, and it gave itself the side-eye in the text, knowing that it's not necessary for the reader to know, or care, about these things to get, really fully gut-level get, this book's beauties and strangenesses. But it helps.

Road novels all get compared to On The Road whether they need or deserve the comparison or not. Well, not me, not this one. This isn't the Quest Novel writ American.

I wonder if {he's} made it to the Delta, been inside a real jook. Many a blues lover flies to Memphis, rents a car and drives down 61, though I hear now Tunica and its casinos sits there like a juggernaut, keeping most from even making it to Clarksdale, let alone Rolling Fork or Alligator, or across the river to Sonny Boy's town, Helena. Truth is, though, {he} must have hired some good people to construct the building. Much study of old photographs and newsreels went into the work, maybe even a visit or two to Junior Kimbrough's place near Holly Springs. I allow my eyes to follow {his} hand to the Nehi, Jax, and Falstaff signs, artificially rust-spotted and rakishly hung on the exterior walls, which are made of a material that looks as faded and ready to fall apart as the warped and rotted shingles of a genuine jook but is surely as sound as a dollar and will probably be around for hundreds of years...There's even an empty sack of Sonny Boy corn meal next to the checkerboard atop an old wooden barrel. I try to jump a white piece with a black piece but they're all lacquered in place.

This is Hero's Journey, and the Hero changes more than once. Ben's the Last Delta Bluesman. Peter's the acolyte. But what's a Hero for but to make room for the next one? What's the point of a journey when each rest stop could lead to the dirt nap? Peter's place is beside Ben, picking up, moving on, cleaning the gene pool around the eminence of fame.

"Lawd but I hopes everyone all right," Ben says, his head tilting forward, his shut lids squeezing out tears.

"No one was hurt," the cop says. ... He stops, rubs a finger over his chin and turns to Ben's driver's license. "Just what brings you to Florida, Mr. Mabry?"

So here it is. Bad enough Ben was reckless—though I doubt the retirees slaloming through the lanes in their Caddies earn more than a warning—we're dressed like pimps, operating a vehicle preferred by drug dealers, and an out-of-state one, to boot. ... I read the cop's name tag and wonder if Officer Reese ever shed a tear for a song sung by Charlie Pride or O.B. McClinton. If it helps, I'll get out my harp and play "Okie From Muskogee."

Ben lifts his head, sniffles, and says, "My son and I here to look at some them whatchamacallits? What is they, junior?" He turns to me. Fuck if he doesn't wink. His son? We don't even look alike. "Them houses," he continues. "The connected kind. ... Start with a c. Kuh-kuh-kuh."

My cue, I guess. I stammer, "Condominium," getting stuck on the c and losing track of how many m's are needed. I know Ben's scheming to make us seem harmless—not sharp or belligerent—and Officer Reese is now smiling at us, though he does click his ballpoint pen.

But he's also absorbing and internalizing the ways and means of a dead, or dying, world's beauty. He's learning the music that grew from a fucked-up mating of meanness and stupidity with fear and desire. He's coming into an inheritance that he, only he, can have. He's becoming a blues man.

"Brothers and sisters been tired for years with that old, broken-down woke up this morning bullshit of yours. Tired." I'm now aware of people watching, none of them Ben, but sound crew, maintenance men, the pair of massive security guards. Perhaps this audience causes my voice to rise, or I just want to be absolutely sure {he} hears me. "Least we playing something. Besides other people records." Before {he} can say another word, I've got my harp in hand and blow the intro to "Fattening Frogs up For Snakes." I keep my eyes wide open now, watching...as each note flies past him. And because I'm sure he doesn't know the tune, I put down my harp and sing the first line:
It took me a long time, to find out my mistake
Took me a long time, long time, to find out my mistake
It sure did, man
But I'll bet you my bottom dollar, I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes.
Don't need to sing or speak another word. Pocket my harp, turn around, and there's Ben before me. I blink. My contacts shift and settle. "Sam," he says, "you done been practicin'! ... Couldn't have drawn it up better myself," he says. "You just wrote your way into the book, Pete. ...You just wrote your first few sentences with that scene back there. ... Exactly the hook every kind of writer loves," he says. "Trust me."

Who's the hero, the teacher or the taught? The trust Ben talks about is unearned but deeply merited. The trust Pete can't give, only give up.

Trust Tom Williams, y'all. Give it to him, or give it up for him, he earns and he merits every eyeblink and pulse-pound you give him on this road trip. Wry knowing grins and purse-lipped nods await your crow's feet. Have I ever told you how lovely you are when you snort knowingly at an in-joke? Be lovely for me. We can't sell it, our used furniture, but let's sit on it and savor the dying licks from Pete's harp.

August Book-A-Day #4: GAHAN WILSON SUNDAY COMICS, 5-star hilarity

GAHAN WILSON SUNDAY COMICS
GAHAN WILSON
Fantagraphics
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: however many stars there are

The Publisher Says: Gahan Wilson is probably best known for his macabre Playboy cartoons, filled with charming monsters, goofy mad scientists, and melting victims, and his cutting-edge work in the National Lampoon, but he’s also one of the most versatile cartoonists alive whose work has appeared in a wide range of media venues. Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics is Wilson’s assault from within: His little-known syndicated strip that appeared in America’s newspapers between 1974 an 1976. Readers must have been startled to find Wilson’s freaks, geeks, and weirdos nestled among family, funny-animal, and soap opera offerings. (The term “zombie strip” — a strip that has long outlived its original creator — takes on a whole new meaning in Wilson’s hands.)

While each strip, at first glance, appears to be a standard, color Sunday strip (albeit without panel borders), each Sunday Comic is a collection of one-panel gag cartoons, delineated in Wilson’s brilliantly controlled wiggly-but-sophisticated pen line. The last gag cartoon on each Sunday is part of a recurring series, either “Future Funnies” or “The Creep.” Some Sundays are a freewheeling mélange of board meetings, monsters, and cavemen (with cameos by Wilson’s Kid character from Nuts, his gimlet-eyed view of childhood, collected last year by Fantagraphics), while others riff on a topic or subject (clocks, plants, wallpaper, etc.). As is his wont, Wilson mines the blackest of black comedy in the banal horror of human nature. Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics collects, for the first time, each and every one of these strips, luxuriating across a 12” x 6” landscape format, with Fantagraphics’ trademark high production values, innovative design, and succinct historical commentary.

My Review: The UK Book-A-Day meme, a book a day for August 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten SF-book reviews. Today's prompt, the fourth, is meant to be about a favorite comic book. I mean, oh goodness me, I mean "graphic novel." *snort* That's like asking me who my favorite female porn star is. So instead here I am with this magically delicious collection of forty-year-old hilarity. Wilson's art is a perfect accompaniment to his very darkly twisted humor. I adore it.




What else need be said? It's Gahan Wilson, and it's either your kind of thing or it's not. It's very much my kind of thing.



I feel like these sofa-sitters about most of modern life. I don't get it. I feel like I have sixteen thumbs, mostly on my feet, and color-sensing seismographs instead of ears, in the rap-infested, reality-show-obsessed, Fox-as-news world I'm in. I don't fit, and I don't want to.



Goodness knows, there is no reason to assume it ever will, at least for very long. I keep slugging. Books like this, humor from 40 years ago, show me that there is in fact nothing new under the sun. Some people have always felt, as I do, that the world makes no sense, that up is in fact down, and the best we can do is cope.



I paint what I see.

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*


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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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THIRTY-THREE TEETH, 2nd Dr. Siri Laotian Mystery

THIRTY-THREE TEETH (Dr. Siri Paiboun #2)

COLIN COTTERILL

Soho Crime

$9.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Feisty Dr. Siri Paiboun is no respecter of persons or Party; at his age he feels he can afford to be independent. In this, the second novel in the series, he travels to Luang Prabang where he communes with the deposed king who is resigned to his fate: it was predicted long ago. And he attends a conference of shamans called by the Communist Party to deliver an ultimatum to the spirits: obey Party orders or get out. But as a series of mutilated corpses arrives in Dr. Siri’s morgue, and Nurse Dtui is menaced, he must use all his powers—forensic and shamanic—to discover the creature—animal or spirit—that has been slaying the innocent.

My Review: Returning to Vientiane, Laos, a good three months after we left it in The Coroner's Lunch, Colin Cotterill drops us in the midst of Laotian Hell: It's the hot season, before the rains, and so the entire nation greets each other with, "Hot, isn't it?" Responding, "Damned hot."

I felt that horrible, stifling, miserable heat the entire time I was engrossed in the two mysteries Dr. Siri Paiboun, Laos's only coroner, sets out to solve. The first is a truly terrifying series of maulings, which are blamed on a Malay black bear recently escaped from terrible, cruel captivity at a local luxury hotel's menagerie. Dr. Siri sees the first victim in his morgue, determines there's no human agency in the death, and goes home...there to awake with a black bear breathing on him! He suspects his last earthly moments have come, but the bear merely shambles off after communing with him for a time. More maulings are reported over the course of the book, but the bear herself is not found despite an intensive manhunt.

The next layer of mystery announces itself with a strange death at the Ministry of Sport and Culture. An official charged with overseeing the Ministry's archive is found dead at the base of the fountain in the square the Ministry's on, clearly having been precipitated from the roof. The archive is locked, the only key is on the inside of the door, and the official can't possibly have thrown himself that far from the building. Siri breaks into the archive with his pal Inspector Phosy, last seen as a covert cop, and now a Vientiane police inspector. They discover a chest with the Royal seal intact on it, and can't bring themselves to open it because of its evil aura. Siri warns Phosy and his fellow officers to stay away, he will find a way to get into the chest using his newly discovered connections to the Other World; reluctantly they agree; Siri must now figure out what to do, since he has not Clue One how to manage evil spirits.

And here is where Cotterill takes this tale from a very good 3.5 to near 4 stars, over the bar, and into the four-star world. Siri is summoned to Luang Prabang, Laos's ancient Royal capital, to look into the deaths of two men whose identities the Communist authorities are eager to discover for reasons they won't go into. Siri meets the spirits of the men, uncovers a vicious and wicked betrayal, and brings the malefactor to Justice, instead of legal justice. In the process, Cotterill introduces Siri and the reader to the Laotian kingdom's central spirit repository, and reveals the unhappy reason for an unhappy nation's descent from quiet prideful independence into ever-increasing want and lack. The scene of the reveal is so moving and so affecting that I was compelled to read it twice.

Far from leaving his readers there, though, the author then proceeds to tie in and tie up the maulings with Siri's morgue nurse, Dtui, earning her detective stripes (literally) by her determined and courageous pursuit of a solution to the mysterious animal's whereabouts, taking her from Comrade Minister Civilai's world of the Politburo (where the old codger is the Voice of Reason, an exhausting and thankless task, making him miss his youth spent in the jungles as a freedom fighting boon companion to Siri), to the hidden world of the prisons Laos isn't supposed to need anymore in the Socialist Paradise, and finally to the ragged edge of her own life at the mercy of the evil forces causing the mutilation killings. Siri and his boon companions wind all the loose ends into a very, very happy ending, though just as in real life, there are prices to be paid for all happiness...but on balance, the good outweighs the painful and unhappy.

Like we wish it would in Real Life.

Oh my heck. I just can't get over several scenes in this book, the one I won't spoiler that I mentioned above, but also some character scenes that I was moved by. One involves Comrade Coroner Siri, Comrade Minister Civilai, and Comrade Inspector Phosy having lunch by the river, something that childless Siri and Civilai have done together often, but now include the unmarried, middle-aged Phosy in. The scene comes at a very interesting point, where Siri has just confirmed that he (like Buddha) has thirty-three teeth which marks him out as a being who is a bridge between the Other Realms and the mundane world we all live in. It feels like the reader is the quiet fourth person watching a pair of old uncles chaffing and loving their younger, respectful nephew, all with the quietest and most enjoyable teasing sweetness. I was very pleased and honored to be allowed into their moment of closeness, and then remembered that the author was creating this scene, not recording or reporting it.

And then there came a moving scene between Siri and Nurse Dtui, which I can't talk about for fear of spoilering events. I hate that I can't talk about it, but to anyone who has felt the ghastly sense of anti-climax when reading a spoilered ending, I need not explain my hesitation. Suffice it to say, Nurse Dtui is more of a daughter to Siri than even he knows yet.

Four full and happily given stars, plus a quarter star to grow on. This is a series my mystery fanboy heart has embraced for good.

A TREASURY OF REGRETS, fourth Aristide Ravel mystery

A TREASURY OF REGRETS (Aristide Ravel #4)
SUSANNE ALLEYN
CreateSpace
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For police agent and investigator Aristide Ravel, the teeming streets and alleyways of Paris are a constant source of activity. And in the unruly climate of 1797, when gold and food are scarce, citizens will stop at very little to get what they need.
When Jeannette Moineau, an illiterate servant girl, is accused of poisoning the master of the house where she works, Ravel cannot believe she is guilty of the crime. With stubborn witnesses, a mysterious white powder, and stolen goods all stacked against her, however, he knows it will not be easy to clear her of the charges. But Ravel finds an unexpected ally in Laurence, a young widow of the house, whose past surprisingly intersects with his own.

In a large household brimming with bickering and resentment, everyone seems to have a motive for poisoning old Martin Dupont. But as more family members turn up dead, the list of suspects rapidly dwindles. Tensions rise and Ravel and Laurence must probe the secrets of the city's crafty politicians and confidence artists for clues to clear Jeannette's name. Finding information, though, in dissolute post-revolutionary Paris can lead to costly and dangerous demands.

From the author of Game of Patience comes a new historical mystery, bringing alive the sights and sounds of eighteenth-century Paris---brimming with atmospheric details, scandal, and murder.

My Review: The second published, and fourth in reading order, Aristide Ravel mystery, set in Revolutionary Paris, leads us deeper into the twisty byways of our sleuth's character and, at the same time, deeper into the vanished Paris that was so influential in the creation of the modern world.

I like series mysteries for reasons I've discussed elsewhere...orderly things, mysteries, and the recurring characters make the world feel a little less random than it actually is...but they come with some hazards. Writers under the pressure of deadlines sometimes make us feel as though they're phoning it in, characterization can dwindle to a series of overused tics (like Miss Silver's cough in all those Patricia Wentworth mysteries) or a catchphrase so overused as to make one want to scream blue murder (Hercule Poirot's "little gray cells" oh clam up already).

Alleyn avoids these pitfalls by enriching our understanding of Revolutionary France and its creators as well as our sleuth. This is a spolier, so stop reading if you're spoiler-averse:

**SPOILER**

Aristide, from the last book, is still mourning his childhood chum Mathieu's death at the hands of the National Convention, which judicially murdered a lot of people belonging to an out-of-power political faction. Aristide dreams of this beloved friend's death at the beginning of this book, and we see him relive the horrible ride to the guillotine that Mathieu took, though I'd think that the presence of a friend there, at that moment, would be a comfort to Mathieu...but the kicker is, as we find out in the course of this murder investigation, that Mathieu was actually In Love with Aristide, who until now was blissfully ignorant of this important fact of his friend's life.

**END SPOILER**

So what does Alleyn do with the major revelation that she gives to not one, but two, of the major characters in this book? Does she grandstand a little and make it a huge stonking Brie wheel of a deal? No. She incorporates the revelations into the actual plot, the real mystery to be solved. It's a very nice touch. It's a reason to keep reading in the series, since this isn't the first time she's done this. It's a marker of a careful, considerate writer, one respectful of her readers, and that kind of writer deserves our dollars.

So, in the end, does this book satisfy? Yes. Are there problems? Yeah...none big...a few scanted red herrings, a little bit of background not quite colored in, that's about all. But history, the living breathing thing history, can never fail to satisfy the discerning reader. Be one of Susanne Alleyn's discerning readers, you won't regret it.