Breaker: A Windy City Dark Mystery, by Richard Thomas*****

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breakerawindycityRichard Thomas is a monstrously great writer. In Breaker, a Windy City Dark mystery, he presents us with Ray, a man of unusual and intimidating appearance; a sinister stranger in a white van who victimizes Chicago’s working class school girls; and Natalie, the girl that lives next door to Ray. Though this is the first Windy City Dark mystery I read, I fell in, only extricating myself close to bedtime, because this is not the kind of thing you want entering your dreams. This smashing thriller came to me free of charge from Net Galley and Random House Alibi.

The first thing I usually look for in fiction is strong character development. In excellent fiction, sometimes the setting drives the character; sometimes the setting and character drive the plot; sometimes the plot is driven by character. Breaker definitely falls into the last of these categories. Told primarily in Ray’s first person and counterpointed by Natalie’s, along with a narrative that pops in and out surrounding the white van, the suspense is almost unbearable. The character is so palpable that I impulsively reached into my Goodreads account and checked the “literary fiction” box among my own library categories. The story is dark and haunting; fans of Stephen King, a writer Thomas lists among those that have influenced him, won’t want to miss out on this story. Though it is not driven by the supernatural, the tone and level of nightmarish suspense are quite similar.

Part of the hook is the affinity the reader must feel for Ray after just a short time. He lives alone; others are often afraid of him on sight because of his enormous size and ghastly pallor. His mother is dead, and we learn more about this eerie aspect of Ray’s past as the story progresses. He lives in the city’s gritty underbelly, spends almost nothing of what money he makes as a cage fighter—a sport so much more horrible than boxing—on himself, and he is constantly alone.

Meanwhile, Natalie, the 15-year-old next door, is being stalked by the white van. Because Natalie is kind to him and does not fear him, Ray reaches out to her in an uncharacteristic way and teaches her the self-defense tips none of her high school teachers will ever be able to provide. Their friendship is platonic but the bond is tight.

Meanwhile, the white van has Chicago even more on edge than it usually is; girls are disappearing, and no one knows who is taking them. Every white van begins to look sinister. I found myself gripping my electronic reader, and though I had been resting the arm that held it on a pillow, I found myself holding it up in the air because my hand had nearly tightened into a fist.

It’s that creepy.

I marked a number of really stellar passages—this guy is fantastic with gripping figurative language—but at the end of the day, I am not supposed to reveal any quotes till the book is on the shelves, and I want you to know about this one right now.

It’s up for sale January 5, 2016, and it will help you forget all about your post-holiday blues. Get this book!

Concussion, by Jeanne Marie Laskas*****

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concussionYou don’t have to enjoy football to appreciate Concussion, the riveting new biography of Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian neurological pathologist that discovered CTE, a type of permanent brain damage caused by repetitive concussions, such as that experienced by football players. Not only the content, but the engaging voice with which it is told, make it worth everyone’s while. I was fortunate enough to read it free, courtesy of Net Galley and Random House, but when it comes out Tuesday, November 24, I recommend you get a copy for yourself. It’s information everyone really ought to have, especially those that play American football, or have family members that do.

As for me, several years ago the middle school where I taught was rocked by the news that a young man we had taught had been killed on the football field while playing for the high school next door to us. DeShawn had died in a way the Seattle Times assured its readers was unheard of, a terrible tragedy with little explanation other than that of the coroner, who said he died of a traumatic brain injury. Our in-house football coach, whose frustrated students were stuck playing the “dumb”, safe version known as flag football, opined that maybe DeShawn hadn’t burped his helmet. One of DeShawn’s team members, a friend of my son’s and a frequent guest at our home, considered that DeShawn hadn’t “kept his head down like Coach said”. But the fact is, he was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Dead at 16.

So I was interested indeed to read about the discovery made by Omalu, the pathologist that by coincidence was in charge of the autopsy of Iron Mike Webster, who played for the Pittsburgh Steelers. But I was equally interested in Omalu’s own story, a man of great enthusiasm and character, a faithful Catholic who used “Gee!” and “Gosh!” with youthful vigor as he uncovered one discovery after another, certain, so very certain that the NFL would want his discovery announced right away so that they could modify the game and make it safer. That poor man.

Omalu left Nigeria, which some Boomers will remember as having once been Biafra, home of genocide and terrible corruption, and he could not wait to live the American dream. The USA was free and open; there were no checkpoints at any of the highways; it was the home of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Oh yes, he could shake the dust of Africa off the soles of his shoes and never look back. He had a full scholarship to the University of Washington, so although he had no idea where Seattle was, he had a ticket through the gates, and he would never live anywhere else.

Laskas uses Omalu’s own narrative in places, a wonderful thing given his buoyancy and eloquence:

Having seen this game [football] played on satellite TV on a few occasions in Africa, all I knew was the players ran into one another a whole lot and banged their heads repeatedly like guinea pigs running around…What an odd and inelegant game…If it hurts so much that you have to bubble-wrap your body, maybe you should play something different.”

But until he examined the brain of Iron Mike, the local hero who had lost his sanity following retirement, tasering himself in the hope he would be able to sleep, trying to fix his rotting teeth back into his own mouth with crazy glue, this was a side issue. His interest was in pathology, in the stories the dead had to tell.

But to Bennet, it seemed obvious enough, when the topic arose, because

“Anybody who knew anything about the anatomy of the head knew…It was a simple matter of physics. The brain floats, is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull. If you hit the head hard enough, that brain is going to move, no matter what kind of protection you put around the skull. A helmet protects the skull. A helmet can’t keep the brain from sloshing around in that skull. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.”

The helmet, it turns out, is more a weapon than protection for the brain.

Huh. No wonder Europe didn’t rush to join us in playing this sport.

Omalu’s story, from beginning to old age, is vividly told, and he is such a fascinating individual that you won’t want to put this story down once you’re into it. I could tell you more, but why ruin it? You really just have to read it. Order it now, or go out next week and buy a copy. You won’t be sorry!

The Lake House, by Kate Morton *****

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thelakehouseAs a rule, I am not fond of British fiction; I prefer working class protagonists to the silver-spoon variety; and I like urban settings more than pastoral ones. But The Lake House is written by the author that produced The Forgotten Garden, and so when I had the chance to grab the galley, I went for it. And once more, experience proves that a brilliant writer can sell any story, in the setting of her choice, with the protagonists of her choice, and she can make it flow smooth as warm butter.

This deep, luminous story came to me from Net Galley and Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. Thank you once, twice, and a third time too, because Morton has done it again. The book is a must-read for all that love mysteries and literary fiction.

Sadie Sparrow works for the Metropolitan Police, but her job hangs by a thread because she has become over-involved in the case of a missing woman. A toddler was found abandoned in her home, and Sparrow is haunted by the insistence of the child’s grandmother that her daughter would never, ever leave the child intentionally. Sparrow has been told to take some time off and stay away from the case; she retreats to her grandfather’s home in Cornwall, and becomes transfixed by an older, colder case, that of the mysterious disappearance of a child that lived in the beautiful old home nearby, Loeanneth, where a baby boy vanished many years earlier. Sadie sublimates her urge to follow up on her current, forbidden case by poking into the old mystery in Cornwall.

Morton takes us deftly from one setting, both time and place, to another so seamlessly that we cannot help being spellbound; this is literary fiction at its best. We meet the various members of the family that once summered in the once-lovely, now neglected Cornwall estate, and we watch across the years over three generations of the Edevane family that lived there, both in the years before World War II up to the present, with its elderly descendants that remain living.

Rather than a gripping page-turner, this is a well-crafted tale to be sunk into, like a feather bed or one’s favorite chair, with the phone turned off and a steaming cup of coffee (or tea, if you must) to go with it. Those without the stamina for a complex, well-developed story of the necessary length will find themselves frustrated; this one is for true literature lovers, so be prepared to give it the time it deserves.

The characters are developed so expertly that they feel like people we have known a long time. My favorite was Eleanor, who in my own mental movie appeared as a young Vanessa Redgrave; readers of a later generation than mine will choose some other face to match Morton’s description. Every possible stereotype one might create having to do with women of that time and social station has been cleverly sidestepped in a fully credible manner. Even the haughtiest among them is presented with dignity and a certain grace.

Some will find the ending a little too perfectly resolved perhaps; I find it congenial.

For those that like visuals to go with their fiction, here’s a clip of grand homes in Cornwall:

Liar, by Rob Roberge*

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liarApologies, dear reader; I hate having to pan a book. I only request galleys that I believe will be either good or great, but when I inadvertently find myself with a terrible book, I have to call it as I see it. I have another review about ready to post that will occupy this space soon.

I received this DRC free of charge from Crown Books and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. To be honest, it is the second-worst galley I have ever read. (The very worst lacked punctuation and was unreadable.) I wondered how a book like this wound up with such a reputable publisher; an internet search tells me that he has written other books that were well received. But I can’t find any redeeming value here. I actually came out of it feeling as if I’d been played, and I read it free.

This memoir is billed as a testament of sorts to the writer’s mental illness. I have a relative who struggles with bipolar disorder, and I like the idea of educating the public and of advocating for greater support and funding for those struggling with mental illness and also addiction issues, which are another key part of this book (If it can be said to have parts at all). The two often go hand-in-hand, the mentally ill using alcohol and/or street drugs to self-medicate. So I was on board when I began reading. But soon, I found excuses to read other DRC’s instead. Today, I made myself finish this thing so I could write the review and move on.

Liar isn’t even really a memoir. Let’s start with the title; some of what is in the book is true, some of it is invented, and we don’t get to know which is which. As if that weren’t bad enough, random dark matters (the death of the last passenger pigeon is one) are dropped into the text in no particular order. In fact, the text itself is not linear. This is clearly intentional, with things that happened (or didn’t happen) from 1977 dropped in between what happened (or not) in 1995, or 1982, etc. to let us see how confused is the mind of the mentally ill individual. The whole book is a mishmash of horrors that may or may not have transpired, just as the stricken person’s mind may not always be able to discern the real from the imagined. But for that, we hardly need a whole book; one short chapter would do the trick. I wanted to believe it would prove to be an artistic and if hard to read, avante garde approach to bipolar disorder; by the end, my head hurt and I was pissed.

How can anyone charge money for this?

Part of the reason I wanted to read Roberge’s galley is because it is billed as “blackly comic and brutally frank”, but it isn’t comic, and it isn’t frank. I found two (very, very darkly) humorous moments roughly between the 15% and 20% mark and thought maybe this was where the story would get rolling. Not so much. Nothing else—and I mean nothing else—was amusing. If it had been billed more accurately as merely dark and brutal, I would not have gone anywhere near it, nor do I recommend it to you. If it were at least entirely truthful, however disorienting and disjointed its telling, I could say it shines a light on the mental health crisis in the U.S., but since some of it is just tossed in for the hell of it and didn’t occur, I can’t even, in good conscience, recommend it to those researching bipolar disorder. How could a researcher cite this book in an academic publication?

The only positive thing I can say about this shipwreck of a book, apart from its accurate punctuation, is that no matter how bad your own life looks right now, it probably looks better than this.

Pawn’s Gambit and Other Stratagems, by Timothy Zahn*****

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pawnsgambitPawn’s Gambit and Other Stratagems is a collection of kick-ass science fiction stories, including a novella, produced digitally for the first time. This is the cool thing about Open Road Integrated Media: the publishers find outstanding work from the pre-digital era and bring it to present-day readers anew so that it can be widely read and appreciated all over again. But though these stories were written earlier, many of them have never been published in book form before. I got to check out the collection free in exchange for an honest review, and I struck oil. I wondered why I hadn’t found this writer earlier, since I have been known to binge on sci fi now and then since the 1990’s. What Zahn is best known for is the Star Wars series, which I didn’t read. In passing it by, I nearly missed a fine writer, and I will watch for him in the future.

The settings, situations, and moods within this collection are artfully staggered, ranging from the ethical and philosophical dilemmas that the fertile imagination runs up against when what if scenarios are presented, to surprisingly funny situations. I love the characters Zahn creates, and the way they drive his stories forward. From that first “multi-tentacled grin” of the “Sk’cee” in The Price of Survival, I was hooked. The Giftie Gie Us had an infuriating ending that left me thinking of alternative possibilities. My own personal favorite, Cascade Point, was apparently the favorite of many others also, because it won the Hugo Award in 1984.

A couple of times I noted some gender stereotypes, but for work of its time period in a genre rife with this issue—which is probably why I need time out from my sci fi binges to read other things—it was surprisingly muted. Of 82 marks I made while I read it, only 2 related to gender stereotyping.

There are no weak links, nothing that seems like filler in between good stories; everything here is strong. At a couple of points I had to bite back the urge to laugh out loud while cruising through late at night while my spouse slumbered next to me. My second favorite story is the title novella, Pawn’s Gambit; I found it unexpectedly hilarious.

This brilliantly crafted collection goes on sale January 5, 2016. The only real question for the science fiction lover is how you are going to wait that long. Mark your calendar; you won’t want to miss out on this one.

Petty, by Warren Zanes*****

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It came out at the end of last week, so I’m running my review one more time…cause you won’t want to forget this one if you love rock and roll!

seattlebookmama's avatarSeattle Book Mama

pettyOh my my, oh hell yes! If Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is a band that lights your fire, you have to read this biography, which comes out Tuesday, November 10. You’ll be happiest if you can do it near a source of music, and the very best of all is to be near a desktop or other screen where you can view and hear the music videos as you read about their inception. Petty made it big just as I graduated from high school. By the time my first-born entered elementary school, I had a backseat full of little kids who bounced their heads along to the unquestionable rhythm of his music playing on the radio. And right about now I am supposed to tell you that I got this DRC free for an honest review, courtesy of Net Galley and Henry Holt Publishers.

Zanes has really done his…

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A Cold White Fear, by RJ Harlick***

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acoldwhitefearMeg is alone with a 12 year old in her isolated cabin during a Canadian blizzard, when three escaped prisoners land on her doorstep, one of them injured. She helps dress the wound of the injured man, but then is held hostage, along with Jid, who is like a son to her, and her puppy. This mystery is the seventh in a series, but it was the first I had read, and it is easy to follow as a stand-alone thriller. Thank you to Net Galley and Dundurn Publishers for the DRC, and my apologies in being so tardy with my review. The book has been released and is available for purchase now.

Those that enjoyed The Shawshank Redemption or that are fans of Val McDermid’s mystery series will probably enjoy this story a great deal.

Each of us has a threshold of tolerance for how much terror and violence they can stand in a novel before it stops being entertaining and starts to be just scary and violent. That’s what happened to me here. Roughly eighty percent of this book is set in and near Meg’s cabin, with one aborted effort at escape after another; the writer wants us to also be worried about the puppy, and she played the card well, maybe too well for me. The small moments in which interesting tidbits of Algonquin culture are released, or in which one of the escapees does some small, compassionate deed are eclipsed by the sheer weight of the isolation and brutality present, and I finally got to where I could not stand it anymore around the 65 percent mark, and I skipped to the end and traced it back. That said, I also know that my own tolerance is lower than most. I watch very little television and few movies, and so a little goes a long way where I am concerned.

Harlick deserves a lot of credit for being able to spin a linear plot line with a limited setting, time span, and for most of the story with a limited number of characters. She never loses the reader’s interest or wanders off on a tangent; her facility with setting is good, and the tangibility of the place and people add to the terror experienced by the reader on behalf of the protagonist.

Scary-as-hell fiction from a series writer worth following in years to come.

The Sleeper, by Robert Janes***

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thesleeperThe Sleeper is an espionage thriller set just before Britain enters World War II. David Ashby is living in Germany with his family, but international tensions become so compelling that a British citizen is unable to live there safely anymore. Splitting from his German wife, he grabs their seven year old daughter and goes back to the UK with her. The German government is determined to retrieve the child, and the struggle over little Karen is the basis of the story. Thank you to Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media for the DRC, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

This one is tough to review, because it has so much going for it, and yet other aspects hold it back. Foremost among the latter is the premise; would Hitler really send this much firepower after one kid locked in a domestic dispute? Youth were a big part of his recruitment campaign, yet it’s hard to conceive of all this time, money, and attention being lavished on the retrieval of one solitary child—and at that, a girl, who by Nazi definition is bound for motherhood, church, and her kitchen. But once we just leap in and let ourselves believe either that this could be true, or that there may be a secondary reason as yet to be revealed to us for Hitler’s diligence, it’s an enjoyable read.

Janes is painstaking in his attention to historical detail. The culture, the more formal reference to others, with the salutation of Miss, Mrs., or Mr. (or their equivalents in other languages) rather than the common use of first names used in Western nations today resonates, along with technology and a host of other historical minutiae. His attention to all aspects of setting is equally outstanding. He weaves a complex, hyper-literate plot that at times is compelling, but the story would be better served if he were to streamline it a little, because there are a lot of side details that lend nothing to the story. For example, whether Ashby has a gay relationship has no bearing on the main story or its outcome. In fact, there is way too much of who is sleeping with whom; I can see why his ex-wife would be motivated partially by jealousy, but the reader is treated to the romantic or sexual inclinations of just about every woman in the village, and it’s distracting rather than useful, and it gets in the way of stronger character development. I also found many of the transitions ragged, sometimes startling, but this may very well only be true of the galley; sometimes the DRC doesn’t include little dividing marks that will be in the final copy to cue the reader of a change of scene; thus I didn’t include this issue in my rating.

About halfway through , the style of writing changes, becomes less fluent and takes on some odd quirks that made me flip to the author page to see whether the writer was perhaps not a native English speaker and the book translated from another tongue. However, since he credits two others with helping him with the brief bits of dialogue in German and French, that doesn’t seem likely. There is one particularly distracting feature of the grammar that I tried to ignore, but after awhile found myself highlighting its frequency to see whether it was really occurring as often as I believed. The specifics of this I will send to the publisher, in the hope that perhaps it can be mitigated by the time it comes out. With this distraction removed, the book would be 3.5 stars, maybe even 4.

The climactic scene in the mine tunnels is absolutely riveting, and the stilted language and grammatical quirks that occur roughly from the 50% to 80% portions are nowhere to be found during this critical part of the book. It is largely Janes’s outstanding word-smithery with regard to setting that makes the climax so palpable and taut.

Should you invest in this novel? I guess that depends on your fondness for WWII fiction, and how deep your pockets are. There are other novels in the same vein that I recommend more highly, but it’s such a large field, and you could certainly do worse.

This title becomes available for purchase December 15, 2015.

Newly Released: Nirvana, by JR Stewart Excerpt

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Nirvana

After a big-time rewrite and vast improvement, this hot new novel hits the shelves today. Below is an excerpt, courtesy of the publisher:

The shrill five a.m. siren jolts me awake to the usual calamity. The bunker’s stale air; the pelting of dust balls and stray debris. I groan and hear Andrew’s chuckle. When I open my eyes, he’s getting dressed.
“Are you leaving already?” I ask.
Andrew leans down for one long kiss. “It’s eight o’clock.”
I bolt up in bed. “The five a.m. just went off.”
“Nope. You slept through that one.”
I groan. “I’m late.”
He leans over me. “You always are, Kenders.”
I rub my eyes. “When will you be home?”
“Late. I’ve got a meeting with my boss.”
I let out a long yawn. “Cheating on me again?” I wink.
He laughs and pulls out my photo from his breast pocket. “I’ve got
this framed on my desk.”
“You should get a better picture.”
“The green dress matches your eyes.”
I turn up my nose. “My grad photo is outdated.”
“It says everything about you. No one dictates what Kenders does. You wouldn’t wear school colours like the rest of the class did. Your green dress stood out, just like you do.”
He’s right. Our punk band was protesting the loss of habitat for bees, and this wardrobe choice was one of many anti-establishment statements we made that year. Since 2080, when Hexagon became the university’s major sponsor, it had been a new tradition to wear school colours. We boycotted that convention, and even at graduation we were handing out flyers, standing up for what we believed in.
Andrew kisses me on the lips. “I’ll see you at lunch.” About an hour later, I wake up to a softer buzzing. This time, Andrew has set the alarm for me. He knows me well enough to be sure that I’ll drift back to sleep the moment he leaves. I jump out of bed to get ready. I run a comb through my tangled bangs, and pull up a mat of brown hair, covered in dust. That’s what happens when you hit the shower too late: no water in the reservoir, not even enough to brush my teeth. I rub at the dark splotches of dirt until my pale skin turns bright pink, and then give up on my hair and pull it into a ponytail while I step into my uniform. I stop for a moment before heading out the door, and pull Andrew’s sweatshirt over my head. It drapes in a large fold over my narrow shoulders. I rush to jump onto the bus rumbling down the road, but it’s already passed by my compound.

Flashpoint, by Lynn Hightower*****

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flashpoint“Anybody talk to a doctor?”
“Guy came out of emergency and talked to the brother.”
“Hear what he said?”
“Just that they were very concerned with Mark’s condition, and were doing all they could.”
“Shit. Mark won’t make it then. They’re already hanging the crepe.”

Sonora Blair is one of the most kick-ass female detectives to hit the shelves in a very long time. Lucky me, I read it free, thanks to Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media. The original publication date was 1995, and so the initial publishers must have dropped the ball big-time when it came to promotion, because I know this is the kind of story that resonates with large numbers of people, especially women. And I am glad to see it being resold by Open Road, because they know how to do the job right.

So back to Sonora. No wait, let’s go back to Hightower first. What a total bad-ass when it comes to setting! I loved seeing her enter the home where her children were asleep, and the explosion of naked Barbie doll parts in her daughter’s room. I loved the moment when her elderly dog had an accident in the living room, and she was so distracted by the hundred other things, personal and professional, all colliding at once, that it was not even the first thing she took care of once she found it.

So we have two interesting threads here. One is the problem. A killer out there has murdered a man by handcuffing him to the steering wheel of a vehicle and setting fire to it…and him. It’s grisly business, but Hightower doesn’t overwork the detail to where it triggers my “ick” button; in other words, although it’s terrible, it is never so terrible that I just don’t want to read it anymore. And the problem just becomes thornier and trickier the longer she works on it. Clues drop here and there, and the stakes go up.

The other thread is Blair’s personal life, and the problems she faces in dealing with home and work. It sounds like a tired old song when I put it that way, but like any really skillful writing, it sounds brand new when the author rubs her own brand of English on it and sends it spinning.

After having read several hundred mystery, crime fiction, police procedural, and thriller novels—okay, if I had starting keeping track sooner, I know it would be well over a thousand—there are a handful of devices that are so frequently used that my eyes auto-roll when I see them utilized. I was watching for them. But Blair never gets tossed into the trunk of anybody’s car; she never gets the phone call saying the killer has her kids; there is never a moment when we realize she has been framed for the killing herself, and has to solve it to save her own butt. I’m not saying a great writer can’t get away with any of those; there are some Grand Masters out there that have done it and before my eyes could make the full roll, they were glued back to the page. But once someone reaches into that worn, soiled bag of tricks, it becomes a lot harder to engage me, and I was delighted that Blair never went there.

Her facility with setting is consistently brilliant throughout the book.

One tiny odd bit: for the first chapter or two, I was convinced that Blair was African-American. When she turned up blonde later, I had to mentally reinvent her. It didn’t take long though, because I was riveted and had to get back to the story.

For fans of outstanding detective fiction, this is a must-read. Order it now for yourself, or as a gift for someone you know will love it.