Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

I'd long looked forward to reading Michael Connelly because I know a few people who are very enthusiastic fans.

I'd enjoyed The Reversal but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read the other books in the series first because I was not as familiar with the characters.

I was delighted, therefore, to discover the Scarecrow is a almost a stand-alone novel .. a sequel to The Poet, I believe.

I enjoyed Jack McEvoy's relationship with FBI agent Rachel Walling, the information I picked up about the world of computer security (something about which I knew very little), and the little elegy for the dying newspaper business (Jack is a crime reporter at the L.A. Times).

Jack is a prize-winning reporter for the L.A. Times. The newspaper is slowly laying off all of its reporters, and Jack gets a pink slip. He is asked to train his replacement, a "cub" reporter who will take over his crime beat but whose salary will be considerably less.

The same day he learns that he's to leave in two weeks, Jack gets a phone call from the distraught mother of a murder suspect. He'd written about the son in routine news story, but the mother insists that her son is innocent. Jack decides he'll investigate the mother's claims and try to write one last story about crime in Los Angeles. Only thing is, he soon discovers that the kid almost certainly is innocent. And his cub reporter colleague starts to put details together and begins to suspect the murder was actually carried out by a serial killer. Things start to get interesting.

A little nostalgia - it's Christmas

It's out of print now  but a book I loved as a child was The Children in the Jungle. (It's out of date in its cultural attitudes but it features an anarchical sense of creativity that's fun.)

Generally, what I've been reading lately

For myself, I just want to make a record of what I've been reading lately.

I'm currently reading The Scarecrow, by Michael Connelly.

Before that, I read Elegy for April, by Benjamin Black. Before that, I read The Reversal, also by Michael Connelly. Somewhere in there, I read Connie Briscoe's Sisters and Husbands.

Before that, I read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization. Before that, I read Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, which I found interesting but can't quite recommend. It was a little dour-spirited.

Before that, I read Night and Stars by Maeve Binchy. Before that, I read Persuasion by Jane Austen, for my book group. Since then, I've been reading Jane Austen for Dummies which I have greatly enjoyed and highly recommend.

Before that, I think, I read Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. That was also for my book group. I loved it. I also read a book on building buzz (word-of-mouth) for libraries by Peggy Barber and Linda Wallace.

Elegy for April by Benjamin Black

(I do not know the photographer of this image, but it came from structurae .net, an international database and gallery of structures on 8/18/19). 

Elegy for April by Benjamin Black (the pen name of Irish mystery writer John Banville) is the third in the Quirke series.

Quirke is a pathologist living and working in Dublin in the 1950's. His grown daughter, Phoebe, lives in town and works in a hat shop. She socializes with a group of four very disparate friends: Jimmy Minor, a reporter for a Dublin paper; Isabel Galloway, an actress at the Gate Theatre; Patrick Ojukwu, a Nigerian surgery student; and April Latimer, a well-connected junior doctor at a Dublin hospital.

After Phoebe doesn't hear from April for a week, she shares her concern with her friend, Jimmy. Jimmy laughs off her concerns -- after all, their friend April is known to be a little wild and certainly impulsive. She may have left town for an short holiday. As time passes with no word of April, Phoebe slowly realizes how much she misses April and how little she knows her.

She turns to Quirke for help. Quirke, awkwardly recovering from a stint in rehab, uses his contacts in the police and medical establishments to begin to investigate April's disappearance.

After I finished this novel, I went onto Amazon to see what other readers thought of it. One reader complained about the plotting but acknowledged that if you're reading Benjamin Black, you're not reading for the plot. (As for the plot of this novel, I imagine many readers might find the conclusion less than satisfactory -- not all the ends are tied up -- but I think it's an ending entirely consistent with the novel and a drizzly Dublin winter). For as another reader pointed out, Black is a poetical prose stylist.

His poetry is hidden. It's in the colorful and sometimes abrupt adjectives he uses. Gosh, I'm so impressed.

Sometimes when I have wondered, "What is it that I love about cities? Why do I love the Near North Side or Southwark?" I try to answer myself by saying, "I love abrupt juxtapositions." Certainly, city life gives us plenty of those. And so does Black's prose.

Here's a little bit from the novel:

"The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there .. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead."

The Reversal by Michael Connelly

The Reversal is the latest in the Harry Bosch series. It's the story of the retrial of a man convicted of killing a little girl 20 years ago before DNA testing technology was available.

The defendant successfully sues for a new trial when he has the evidence in the case DNA tested and the DNA proves not to be his.

Mickey Haller appears here as well, this time working for the prosecutor's office, improbably, as a special prosecutor.

Perhaps because of his skill as a defense attorney, his work as a prosecutor is masterly, even though he's not familiar with the role.

Harry works as the investigator on the case, at Mickey's request. Maggie, Mickey's ex-wife, serves as his second chair.

This story gives you a chance to see Harry (and Mickey) as a father. Harry's daughter has returned from Hong Kong to live with him after the death of her mother. Her adjustment is awkward and slow and worries Harry. By the end of the novel, some of those domestic pieces are beginning to fall into place.

If you read this novel, "ripped from the headlines" as it is, I think you will be surprised. I certainly was!

Sisters and Husbands, by Connie Briscoe

I've been meaning to get to this novel for a long time. I'd call it a light read: it moves right along.

It's about 3 sisters and a friend. Beverly is about to get married, but everyone around her is afraid she'll have cold feet at the last minute because she's called off two weddings before.

Her sister, Charmaine, has recently remarried for the third time. Her marriage is strained by her husband's relationship with his daughter.

Evelyn, the oldest, the stable one, the responsible one, and the professional one (she's a therapist), seems to be the only sister with no problems. What her sisters, who resent her for being so seemingly perfect, don't know is that Evelyn has a secret: she's having trouble in her marriage and she's not only crushed, she's bewildered.

Beverly's closest friend is going through some things, too. Her boyfriend struck her. Beverly thinks that there's no way that relationship should be repaired. As far as Beverly is concerned, violence of any kind crosses the line and she can't understand why her friend can't see that.

All of these issues weigh on Beverly and increase her anxiety about whether getting married is really the right thing to do. Her fiance is kind and sexy, a professional, and seemingly everything a girl could want but Beverly sees her sisters' problems and feels deeply uneasy.

One thing surprised me. As Evelyn's marital problems escalate, she remains determined to stay calm and not make any rash decisions. She feels that as a marriage counselor, she of all people should know that marriages have their ups and downs and she is committed to do whatever's needed to save her marriage. But then she does something that seems to me to be completely out of character, and I needed that explained. But perhaps that's part of the fun of this book: that Evelyn steps out the patterns of her current life when her husband leaves her -- that his abrupt departure opens her up to viewing herself and her life in a new way.

A brisk read with an eventful story and interesting characters.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

My book group is reading Persuasion and I'm ecstatic.

I think other folks in my book group are also enthusiastic about reading Persuasion and that, as a result, we'll have a lively discussion.

I guess I'm a Janeite although I'm unsure when I underwent the change. Sometime between when, as a college sophomore, I was present as two professors discussed Emma and I thought that they meant Emma Bovary and the end of college, at which point I'd read all six of the finished novels.

Persuasion is my favorite Austen novel. I suppose that's because it's been described as a novel of second chances. At the beginning of the novel, Anne seems to be destined to be an old maid although she hasn't quite arrived there yet: Lady Russell says that she's been "too little seen," which I took to imply that Lady Russell that socializing only at home with her family prevented Anne from meeting men whom she might marry.

Her fine qualities are overlooked by her immediate family. Lady Russell is her close friend but seems not to understand how deeply she regrets her lost chance to marry Captain Wentworth. Her sister insists that she be accompanied to Bath and says that Anne had better go visit their married sister because she's sure "no one will want" Anne.

As much as it embarrasses her, she is forced to meet Wentworth frequently when his sister and brother-in-law move into Anne's old home (rented to help meet an embarrassing level of indebtedness). After their first meeting in seven years, Wentworth opines to her sisters-in-law that she is much changed -- so much so that he wouldn't recognize her. I'm not sure exactly what he means but I know it isn't meant to be complimentary.

But, by the end of the novel, things have changed: one acquaintance is thought to have been interested in her (Captain Benwick, although that interest does not last long) and another, Mr. Elliot, has proposed. Most significantly, she is now to be married to the man she's always loved, Captain Wentworth.

So Anne is the underdog and you're rooting for her once you understand her situation. But she's not just the underdog but "really nice." She strives to control her emotions in public and mostly succeeds, almost too well; she's a good nurse and a loyal friend; she supports and shows concern for others.

I read Fanny Burney's Evelina earlier this year and saw that that novel is greatly concerned with proper conduct. Austen's work also shows much concern for proper conduct but entertains us at the same time with humor, satire and romantic stories that all end happily.

Part of the delight I take in this novel is that the happy ending could not happened to a nicer person. Anne Elliot is so deserving. I read somewhere once that Jane Austen said of Anne something like that she was "too good." I'm delighted to know that Anne's creator can appreciate that it's pretty hard to be as patient and restrained as Anne is. But while I recognize that Anne Elliot is too good to be true I still enjoy her virtue and I'm happy that the ending is "virtue rewarded."

I thought about the Elliots and the "Elliot pride," a common enough failing, as I was reading the book. Pride seems to me to rarely be considered seriously. It is a failing but also has positive aspects. In short, it's a complicated topic. Mary Elliot is not just proud; she's someone who desperately needs attention. That, too is a familiar quality I've noticed in myself and others. I suppose this portrait of human nature, a little exaggerated (but possibly not much) for comic effect, is timeless and another attraction of this novel.

Faceless Killers and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

With mysteries, especially, I think it's important not to spoil the ending for those who haven't yet read the book.

For myself, I find preserving the suspense of storytelling important, whether it's a book, TV, or movies. I can't tell you how delighted I was to discover the happy ending of Orfeo ed Euridice. Oops! Gave away the ending!

I enjoyed both of these novels but despite the huge popularity of Stieg Larsson's The Girl series, I actually liked Faceless Killers more.

Both novels are by Swedes, set in Sweden, and both of them display an intense anxiety about the seamy underside of modern life that reminds me of the Len Deighton and Alistair MacLean novels about the espionage during the Cold War that I read as a child.

In this, they're really very similar to the police procedurals on TV that deal with corruption and terrible crimes. That perhaps explains part of their popularity.

One of the things I really admired about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was that Larsson, whose work as a journalist seemed to focus on business reporting, especially exposes of criminal corporate behavior, uses that knowledge in his novel but also introduces many other classic elements of popular novels. I'm sure that this, too, is part of its popularity.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a murder mystery, a business thriller, a family saga, and, most interestingly, a critique of violence against women. It has surprised me that this aspect of the novel, the presentation of violence against women, is so little discussed.

As befits a long novel, the exposition begins slowly and indirectly.

With great sadness, an elderly man opens a package. It contains a rare flower, pressed and framed. He regards the collection of similar flowers he’s received every year on his birthday, for forty years. Who is sending these mysterious gifts and why are they sending them? He calls another retired man, a former detective, as he always does when he receives these somber packages.

Mikael Blomkvist is a disgraced investigative journalist, convicted in court of libel. He's lost his reputation and is going to jail. The fate of his once-prestigious business magazine is now uncertain. The man who brought Blomkvist to court is a businessman named Wennerstrom.

And Wennerstrom is being investigated by Armansky. Armansky is an interesting man with an unusual background and an unusual helper, the tattooed hacker Lisbeth Salander.

What connects these people? An aged, retired Swedish industrialist who is haunted by the loss of a beloved niece. It turns out that he thinks that there's something fishy about the Wennerstrom case, and he decides to take advantage of Blomkvist's unemployment to entice him to look into the disappearance of his niece, so many years before.

And that's just the very beginning of this intricate and varied novel. There are other people to meet, and many other stories to tell.

Lisabeth Salander is a fascinating character. I don't know how to describe her. She's a little wild although really very reclusive, very tough and well -- almost fearless. This first novel in the series has so much in it, so many characters and so many pieces of a large, intricate plot that Salander isn't as central here as she is in the other two books of the trilogy.
Blomkvist is fairly unconventional, too, but less so. I'd say that although he's quiet about it, Blomkvist is a lover of women and so perhaps it's fitting that his character is here not only as a detective but as a witness.

The strength of Faceless Killers, in my eyes, is its sharper focus. It's a more character-driven novel. Wallander is a senior police detective in a obscure, mid-size Swedish town. He's divorced and still misses his ex-wife. He's estranged from his daughter. He sees his father but not nearly as much as he should: his father is quite angry that Wallander can't find more time for him. He misses the people in his life, his people, but he doesn't seem to really see them.

He would never say this himself but he is married to his work. It fills his waking thoughts. He's a good man nearly crushed by loneliness and love of his work which, while fascinating, is hardly emotionally sustaining. This aspect of the novel is, I think, realistic. It's hard to be a cop -- it can be draining or worse.

This novel is filled with anxiety as well. Here, the anxiety is less about the crimes of the past than it is about profound social change. The plot turns on the murder of an elderly couple on their farm in the middle of the night. Their neighbors realize something is wrong because they hear the couple's horse neighing. The isolation of this couple intensifies the horror of the case.

A media feeding frenzy erupts when someone leaks to the press that the dying woman's last word sounded like, "foreigners," igniting a murderous backlash of anti-immigrant feeling and revealing the existence of Swedish fascists.

Wallander is a complicated character, a man who has the best of intentions but can't sustain relationships. Wallander is someone whose sometimes inappropriate behavior is quietly tolerated by those around them, I think as a mark of respect. His subordinates say nothing but drive him home when they find him driving up to a checkpoint with liquor on his breath. He makes a clumsy pass at a local prosecutor who eventually dates him. Its this complexity that makes him such an appealing character to me.

Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated from the French novel by Muriel Barbery, is a remarkable book in so many ways.

It lingered on the New York Times bestseller lists for over a year, and that's a rarer achievement given that it's a novel translated from the French.

It's also a novel with twin and very different protagonists: a young French girl and the concierge of her expensive Parisian apartment building. The young girl, Paloma, is painfully precocious and the concierge, Renee, is surprising, too: a woman who pretends to have no interests "above her station" and yet is an avid reader of philosophy and viewer of Japanese film.

And, finally, it is not only a novel that discusses philosophy and philosophers but is itself about the central question of philosophy: how should we live?

All this highfalutin' philosophy and class consciousness is wrapped up in a sprightly and very conventionally plotted novel. The exposition at the beginning of the novel may move a little slowly but the pace of events picks up very strongly after that. The suspense I felt about what was going to happen to the concierge, whom I'd grown to love, was just as gripping as if I were reading a mystery and waiting to discover the true identity of the killer.

Let me assure you that I'm no philosopher: I dropped two philosophy classes in college. I dreaded reading this novel because I feared the philosophy I'd heard it contained: I thought it would be way over my head and would put me to sleep.

I can't tell you that I understood the philosophy but I can tell you that the story held my attention from start to finish. If we used this phrase in talking about novels, I'd call this novel well-made. And, while I'm no philosopher, the struggle of our protagonists to decide how to live was moving to me and very immediate. I cared tremendously about both of these characters.

My book group read this book for their inaugural book. I was a little disappointed that no one else seemed to love it quite as much as I did. I think I was more than prepared to overlook some of the lack of sentiment Paloma expressed because I thought that what she had to say was interesting.

I wondered if I found it a little more accessible because the question of how we should live never seems to come up again after college and I was actually eager to hear some earnest and also jaded people talk about that.

Heart and Soul, by Maeve Binchy

The plot of Heart and Soul is essentially this: a doctor is given a limited amount of money to open a heart clinic that will emphasize lifestyle changes for heart patients.

Along the way, she begins to collect a number of interesting and lovely people around her, while coping with her two adult daughters and an ex-husband who's still adjusting to life as a divorcee.

There's also quite a bit in the book about her skill as a manager in obtaining things for the clinic from a number of people, including the hard-hearted, skillful political infighter hospital administrator -- the Dick Cheney of Ireland. In the end, you know she wins him over, too. That's our girl!

One of her friends at work is a hard-working Polish girl who wins everyone over with her eagerness and pleasant manner. When we finally learn her back story, we sympathize with her plight and admire her pluckiness even more. It's not very original, but it's very up-to-the-minute given that the rise of the Celtic Tiger meant that for the first time, the Irish at home had to learn to accept strangers.

This is the first book I read after I finished grad school. I really love Maeve Binchy, and so that makes sense.

Heart and Soul was not as exciting to me as some other Binchy books. I feel apologetic about saying I was a little bored by the excellent information on heart treatment. Some of the characters had been introduced in other novels (Scarlet Feather, Night of Rain and Stars, and probably Quentin's) and I recognized that they were familiar to other readers, who were probably delighted to meet them again.

I love that characters in Maeve Binchy's novels work, they think and worry about money, and they work hard (they're always terribly talented, no slackers or losers here) and take pride in their work.



I love Binchy's unflagging optimism and knowing but unassuming view of the world. I think her fiction reflects the big heart of the author. That's a quality I greatly admire. When I finished this book, I felt deeply satisfied.

The Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White was one of the books that my online book club read this year.

This book was one I'd been curious about for a while. It was made into a Masterpiece Theatre presentation a few years ago, and I knew that some folks feel that it's the first detective novel. One writer opined that it is not really a detective novel but an example of an extinct genre, the "sensation novel."

Wikipedia explains the "sensation novel" this way: "Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder.[1] It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in ordinary, familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life."

Sure enough, The Woman in White does include adultery, theft, kidnapping, forgery, seduction and insanity. I don't think that there's any bigamy. Oh, I forgot, there is murder...and a fire! I suppose a scene with a fire, especially if it's a major plot point, should score extra points.

Some of the sensation of the novel left me cold. I found myself looking for something I could identify with and found very little. This is not really a criticism. My feelings about the novel are really a reflection of my personal taste, and as we know, "there's no accounting for taste."

The novel concerns itself primarily with one man (who's offstage for much of the novel) and two sisters. One of the sisters is a very strong person, and I find myself feeling that you could argue that she explodes the convention of Victorian womanhood by being strong and independent.

I found myself feeling a little uncomfortable with her characterization, however. Her only aspiration for herself was her wish to remain close to her half-sister. That certainly was consistent with the Victorian ethos. One of the villains of the piece frequently mentions how much he admires her yet he certainly sees her as a threat to his own plans. Is his admiration sincere? I think it is actually an expression of hostility.

The novel was serialized, as many novels were at that time. As a result, it's probably longer than it otherwise would have been (writers were paid by the word) and its plot might have been more cohesive had it not been serialized.

Wilkie Collins was not a conventional person. His father had been an accomplished painter. Collins had two mistresses and never married. That Bohemianism does not appear in the novel; in fact, the heroine rejects the man she loves to marry a man chosen by her father who has much more money (or is thought to--the perils faced by an heiress in the marriage market is a theme that makes an appearance here).

What I do love is Marian's character. She is brave. She is a realist. She does try to temper her realism with kindness and restraint.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I think I first began to be interested in Tana French as an author when I saw that folks at my library were reading her two earlier books, The Likeness and In the Woods.


I became more interested when I realized that she writes mysteries.




So I brought home Faithful Place as part of the usual stack of books I bring home but may or may not read.





I've just been surfing the web, and came across a short piece on Agatha Christie by Nicholas Blincoe.  He points out that Edmund Wilson criticized her work for its apparent contentment at remaining at the surface of things:  "Christie has no interest in dramatising the emotional impact of events on her characters."


The opposite is true of French's Faithful Place, and that's ultimately what I love about it.  Central character Frank's emotions are patiently dissected as they flow and change, as he reminisces about the past that resurfaces in the novel, his obsessive first love and his very complicated feelings about his family.


That is what I love about the novel.  That the novel is partly about coming to terms with one's difficult childhood, as well as the painful loss of first love and the difficulty of letting go, add to its appeal to me.  Frank's a plenty complicated guy; the world he used to inhabit so complicated that Frank considers at least four suspects for a recently rediscovered murder.  And, Frank is dynamic -- the action of the novel changes him by the end.  


Finally, French has an ear.  She has a gift for dialogue so lifelike that I found myself adopting some Dublin speech mannerisms. And the Dublin language she recreates here is especially vivid.