Review: A Bad Day For Pretty

Author: Sophie Littlefield
Format: ARC galley 304 pages
Characters: Stella Hardesty, Sheriff "Goat" Jones
Subject: crime
Setting: non-specific town in the tornado belt
Series:  "Bad Day for...."
Genre: crime fiction
Source: Library Thing Early Review Program
Challenge: ARCs completed

Stella Hardesty makes her living "convincing" abusive males they really don't want to be abusive any more.  Her methodology is best described as extra-legal, and she withholds most of the details from her beau the local sheriff.  This episode of her adventures is the sequel to A Bad Day for Sorry, which I have not read, but I don't think that created any problem in understanding and enjoying this one.

Stella is called by a former client to help prove that her husband is not guilty of a murder he is suspected of.  While she's investigating this, Stella is still recovering from physical wounds suffered in a shooting during her previous adventures, and she is dealing with the sudden reappearance of Goat's ex-wife Brandy.  Or is she an ex-wife?  She's also breaking in a mysteriously adopted dog, training a new partner, and feeling quite jealous at the sudden arrival of a female forensic team member who obviously has her sights set on Goat also.

The plot in this one is somewhat convoluted, but I loved the characters, and I adored Stella's smart-ass take on life.  She is not going to let any man get the better of her, having already killed abusive husband #1.  Nuf said.  I don't want to ruin a solid read.  It's not great crime fiction, but it's more than just chick-lit.  Littlefield has given us a character who has much potential for future adventures.  Think Kinsey Milhone with a chip on her shoulder.

I received this free copy for review from the Library Thing Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Postmistress

Author: Sarah Blake

Format: paperback galley, 322 pages
Characters: Iris James, Harry Vale, Emma Fitch, William Fitch, Frankie Bard
Setting: Franklin Mass, London 1941
Genre: literary fiction
Source: LibraryThing Early Review program

Set on both sides of the Atlantic during the early months of WWII, this is a compelling novel that pulls us right into the lives of Iris James-the Postmaster at Franklin Mass on Cape Cod; Emma Fitch-new bride of the town's doctor; Harry Vale-a WWI vet who is convinced that the Germans will land a Uboat on Cape Cod; and of Frankie Bard, the radio reporter working in London with Edward R. Murrow during the Blitz

Miss James is determined to maintain order and discipline in her life. The mail will be stamped and delivered on time without pause.  Harry Vale wants her to lower the Post Office's flag pole by several feet, claiming it serves as a beacon to Germans off-shore.  Iris balks at that suggestion, but agrees to petition the postal department for permission.

Emma, still recovering from a feeling of being abandoned by parents who have died, clings to her husband trying to establish an identity in this small town. After listening to Frankie Bard's emotional broadcasts about the hardships being endured by the British during the bombing of London, and after other events I'll leave to the readers (I DON'T DO SPOILERS), Dr. Fitch leaves behind his practice, his town, and his bride to go to London to help the many victims of the bombings.  He writes to Emma every night, and she mails him a letter every day. He promises he will return after six months.  When his letters suddenly stop, Emma becomes more detached, and Iris, as she watches her continue to mail her daily letter, becomes more concerned.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Frankie meets Dr Fitch in an air raid shelter one evening, and emerges to find her apartment destroyed and her roomate (who had been covering the Jewish story) dead. She convinces Murrow to let her go behind the war lines into Germany to find out what is really going on with the Jews.  She goes through France and Germany, gathering stories but not sure how (or whether) she will be able to tell them.

It is difficult to write about this story without spoiling the ending.  It's not necessarily a mystery, but this is a nuanced, evolving study of the impact of trauma, callousness, abandonment, death, and cruelty on the human beings who must live through war, and whose ability to survive, whose very humanity is constantly tested.  Frankie's stories of horror and personal suffering are particularly poignant and her mental anguish as she struggles to find a frame in which to report them, and deal with her meeting with Dr. Fitch,  are a cogent and mesmerizing thread pulling us along to an inevitable and powerful ending.

I encourage the reader NOT to read the cover blurb.  The 'hint' there about what is going to happen is overplayed, and comes so late in the story, that it is better left behind.  The forceful march to the inescapable ending, and Blake's exquisite character development and prose make this a compelling page-turner. It is a five star read, and the reader needs no road map to enjoy the journey.

many many thanks to LT Early Review program for making this copy available.

Review: Rizzo's War

This is NOT your average police/crime/forensic procedural. This is a book with great police characters who actually have brains and hearts as well as brawn with some police procedure to help flesh out the characters.

Lou Manfredo's debut novel opens with a crime scene, but quickly shifts to a discussion between the two main characters: Detective Joe Rizzo, a 20+ year veteran of the NYPD, and his newest partner, young just-made detective, eagerly ambitious Mike McQueen.  By the end of the first seven pages, I was determined to dislike Rizzo intensely.  By the end of the book, I was in love with him.  Manfredo's character development is some of the best I've seen in a police procedural, and to me is exceptional in a first book.

As they solve their cases, Rizzo teaches young McQueen the ropes, gingerly stepping through the minefield of looking the other way, developing a series of 'favors' given and returned, and staying just inside the law.  Set in a predominently Italian neighborhood, Joe exhibits the ability to take cultural differences into account when questioning people, when trying to determine what really happened and why, and he insists that McQueen try to apply those same attitudes.

Unlike many books currently featuring policemen and detectives, the cases are not the central point of the book.  While they are well presented, giving us a good view of the dreadful, often demoralizing life of  big city crime solvers and the reader is drawn steadily along to see how they are resolved, the core discussion is the subject of honesty, integrity, right vs wrong, black vs white and how the average cop on the beat is confronted with moral decisions every day.

The author, drawing on his own 25 years experience in the Brooklyn criminal justice system, adds into the mix the inevitable crooked politicians and cops on the take to give us an exciting, tightly drawn picture of law and order in today's world.

In the end, we come to understand Rizzo's motto: "There's no wrong. There's no right. There just is."

This was ARC copy I received from the Early Review program of LibraryThing.  Thanks to Minotaur books for making it available.  It also came with a promtional sampler of the audio book to be released.  If you like your books in this format (as I certainly do) this one is OK, but I didn't care for narrator  Bobby Cannavale's rather flat rendition.

Review: Guardian of Lies

This is a "clear your calendar and prepare to stay up all night" thriller.  Although Martini plants numerous clues, and the reader thinks he knows what's happening, the plot twists are numerous, and aggregate into an incredible story featuring the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war, Homeland Security, the Columbian and Mexican drug cartels, a beautiful model from Costa Rica, Guantanamo bay detainees, missing nuclear weapons, and a bunch of lawyers in San Diego California trying to prosecute or defend the beautiful model when she is accused of killing a local coin dealer (who turns out to be a retired CIA operative).

Anyone else trying to tie all that together would have left us in a sinking morass of confusion.  Martini pulls it into a breath-taking fast-paced, very scary (because it's so believable) story with an acceptable resolution.

I've read several others in the Paul Madriani series.  I think this is definitely the best.  I'll certainly be looking for the rest. 

This was an Early Review book I received from LT. 

Review: American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House

Before I read this book, I knew that Andrew Jackson was the 7th president, he led the army in victory at the Battle of New Orleans, and there was a great deal of scandal/ dispute over his marriage to Rachel Donelson. After I read this Pulitzer Prize winning discussion of his years as President, I now know all I ever wanted to know (and a WHOLE lot I could have done without) about the ladies dispute over 'receiving' Mrs. Margaret Eaton, wife of his secretary of war. It seems Margaret was regarded as a rather loose woman by many of the grand dames of Washington, and the author chose to spend literally 100's of pages discussing the reactions to her and Jackson's insistence that the Eatons be treated with respect. Meacham's theory seems to be that Jackson was sympathetic to the couple since he had undergone the same kind of shunning when he married Rachel. Consequently, we are given short shrift on some of the more vital aspects of Jackson's life and presidency. For instance, Jackson's views on slavery are fairly glossed over. There are exactly 5 pages devoted to his ownership of slaves (he owned 150), and the fact that he did not ever free any of them. We hear nothing of his actual views of this abominable practice. We are treated to his denunciations of the US Bank and pages upon pages of everything he did to try to disband it, but for those of us with a lack of indepth knowledge of the issue, we are never given a good reason WHY he wanted to disband the bank. Again we are treated to many many pages of personality conflicts of all the players in this debacle, but scant delineation about the issue itself. We hear of Jackson's views on nullification and secession, and very his often conflicting views about the Native American population---I definitely would have liked to have had a much more indepth discussion of this vice the ladies tea party debates. Jackson's policies led directly to the Trail of Tears -- the forced expulsion of the Cherokees to western lands, but nowhere do we see how he reacted to it. We are given speeches in which he identified himself as the Great White father, and some indication that he felt justified in breaking treaties, but the subject deserves much more if this book were to truly explain Jackson's achievements. Meacham posits that because Jackson was orphaned so young, he deeply missed having the opportunity of belonging to family. He saw the American people as his family, and used his popularity to enforce his views. He believed in a powerful executive. He was the first American president to have used the veto simply because he disagreed with a bill Congress had passed. Prior to Jackson, presidents had only vetoed bills they thought were unconstitutional. If you were white, you were entitled to the full protection of the government. If you were black or Native american, (or Mexican--we mustn't forget the few pages devoted to the Mexican wars), you didn't deserve the liberties spelled out in the Constitution. Meacham sums it:

(Jackson) also proved the principle that the character of the president matters enormously. Politics is about more than personality; the affairs of a great people are shaped by complex and messy forces that transcend the purely biographical. Those affairs, however, are also fundamentally affected by the complex and messy individuals who marshal and wield power in a given era. Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a trancendent personality.....he gave his most imaginative successors the means to do things they thought right. The great often teach by their failures and derelictions. The tragedy of Jackson's life is that a man dedicated to freedom failed to see liberty as a universal, not a particular, gift. The triumph of his life is that he held together a country whose experiment in liberty ultimately extended its protections and promises to all--belatedly it is true, but by saving the Union, Jackson kept the possibility of progress alive, a possibility that would have died had secussion and separation carried the day.

Jackson certainly changed the role of the Presidency. Whether those changes were good or not so good is impossible to determine from reading only this book.

Progress report: ARCs

When we first moved to the woods of Maine, our house wasn't even on Google maps. Now the UPS man has found our house so often these past two weeks that he doesn't have to look us up anymore. The ARCs are piling up, so I need to buckle down and read instead of spending so much time blogging. In addition to Andrew Jackson, (see earlier post), here's what's sitting on my TBR table awaiting review:

• Sacred Hearts Random House, pub date: July 14, 2009, 304 pgs

From Sarah Dunant, acclaimed author of the Birth of Venus and In the Company of Courtesans, comes an engrossing new novel set in a convent in Renaissance Italy where a defiant sixteen-year-old girl has just been confined against her will--for life.

I can't wait to read this...it's next up after I finish three current reads: Dewey (for the 999 challenge Libraries category) , Lobster Chronicles (for 999- read again category), and Tall Tales (for 999-short stories).

********************************

• Evolution of God by Robert Wright; Little, Brown, pub date: Jun 8, 2009, 576 pgs

The New York Times Book Review calls it " A feast of great thinking and writing about the most profound issues there are...fiercely intelligent, beautifully written, and engrossingly original."

I've had Karen Armstrong's History of God on my TBR pile (in fact I've started it twice) so I think I'll give this one a go and see how they compare. It's definitely going to take a few weeks to read it. So look for a review later this summer.

***********************************************

• Cemetery Dance, an Hachette Audio book by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, and read by Rene Auberjonois--13 hrs of listening.

Publisher's Weekly says: "Bestsellers Preston and Child kill off a regular supporting character at the outset of this suspenseful tale of urban terror, their ninth to feature FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast (after The Wheel of Darkness). William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife, Nora Kelly, an anthropologist with the New York Museum of Natural History, are celebrating their first anniversary when Smithback is fatally stabbed in their Manhattan apartment, apparently by a creepy neighbor, Colin Fearing, an out-of-work British actor."

I haven't read the previous books, but this sounds like one I can't wait to listen to. As soon as I finish Cutting with Stone, this is next on the audio list.

***********************************************

• The Night Gardener by George Pelecano; a Back Bay books reprint hot off the presses, 400 pgs.

From Amazon: "The haunting story of three cops:one good, one bad, one broken, and the murder that reunites them in a showdown decades in the making.... Gus Ramone is good police, a former Internal Affairs investigator now working homicide for the citys Violent Crime branch. His new case involves the death of a local teenager named Asa, whose body has been found in a community garden. The murder unearths intense memories of a case Ramone worked as a patrol cop 20 years earlier, when he and his partner, Dan Doc Holiday, assisted a legendary detective named T.C. Cook. The series of murders, all involving local teenage victims, was never solved. In the years since, Holiday has left the force under a cloud of morals charges. Cook has retired, but he has never stopped agonizing about the Night Gardener killings. The new case draws the three men together, re-igniting the love, regret, and anger that once burned between them, and old ghosts walk once more as they try to lay to rest the monster who has stalked their dreams."

I may have to fight my husband (an aspiring crime writer) for this one. Seems he's had Pelecanos on his TBR list for quite awhile. I think he thought I got this for him for Father's Day. So...if I play my cards right, we could have a guest reviewer for this one.

********************************

• I'm waiting for at least 3 more I know are on the way, so I need to get cracking...

Review: Wife of the Gods

Inspector Darko Dawson has been sent to Ketanu, a village several kilometers away from his home base of Accra, the capital of Ghana, to investigate a murder. He has mixed emotions about going, since Ketanu is the site of his mother's disappearance more than 25 years ago. In fact, he still has relatives living there. While in Ketanu, not only must the urbane Dawson contend with a population fixated on witchcraft, but the murder investigation involves him with many local superstitions, faith healers, and priests with several wives. While the publisher compares this book to Alexander McCall Smith's 1st Ladies Detective Agency series, the only similarity is the setting. This is a good police procedural, with well developed and believable characters, an engaging setting, and a cleverly twisting plot that kept me guessing until the end. Dawson is a wonderful character-- a dope smoking, firey tempered, independent, 'take no prisoners' detective. He reminds me very much of J.A. Jance's J.P. Beaumont character. While he fights his own demons, sneers at inept superiors and peers, and constantly annoys everyone, he befriends the helpless, listens to his inner senses, and cleverly solves the crime. Dr. Quartey writes eloquently, in spare but beautiful prose. The book proceeds quickly from the opening to the end, --in fact, the cliche 'page-turner' is very applicable. I especially enjoyed having a glossary of Ghanian terms available. It made the dialogue (which is masterful) readily accessible to a reader unfamiliar with the area. I was thrilled to see that he is already working on book #2. Both the character of Dawson and the author have the makings of a great series. I was lucky enough to get this as an Early Reviewer for LibraryThing. Watch for it in July!

Review: The New 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth

Forget Baking Cookies--This is Neat Stuff for Kids! I wish I'd had a book like this when I was growing up. It would have been worth at least 5 Girl Scout merit badges, 2 or 3 science projects, and lots of feel good fun. I got an advanced copy as part of LT's Early Reviewer program, and for once feel like I've hit the jackpot. Young granddaughter (8 1/2 yr old) will be arriving for her annual summer vacation with Tutu and we are really going to have a great time with this one. Much more fun than baking, or even roasting marshmallows. This is a well organized, interesting, appealing book directed at youngsters from about age 9-15. Parents, grandparents, scout leaders, teachers, and even baby-sitters will also love it. Topics covered include recycling, water and air pollution, wildlife preservation, climate change, keeping the earth green, and energy conservation. But forget the topics, it's the layout that is so terrific. Each section begins with a quick multiple choice question called "Take a guess." It sets the tone for short presentations on the topic: Did you know? What You Can Do, Amaze Your Friends (what kid can resist that?) and See for Yourself. "What You can Do" includes projects for both home and school, things to do alone, or with a group. It's full of games, quizzes, experiments, and puzzlers. It is easy to read, doesn't talk down to kids, and still manages to be interesting enough for all of us grandmas. And to put frosting on the cake, it has an incredibly well researched list of web pages for more information. Grab one when you see it...we can all pitch in and help save the planet, and have fun doing it.