The last two weeks of March haven't been the greatest reading--don't even have any favorite passages. I do want to note that I am rereading Hidden Valley Road for an online book group and it's as fascinating to me as it was when I read it a year ago.
Fiction
We Are the Brennans, by Tracey Lange, appears to be inspired by (that's the generous way of describing it) Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys. The Mulvaneys and the Brennans are quite similar--Irish, four children--three boys and one girl, well-regarded in the small New York towns where they live, somewhat problematic parents. Something happens to the daughter that isn't acknowledged/talked about but that sends the family into a decline. But then, somehow, there's redemption and family togetherness. Lange's book is unoriginal and unnecessary IMHO.
Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson, might be categorized as an environmental novel, but it's also more than that. Set among redwood timbermen in Oregon, the book looks at the consequences of not only spraying done to control brush in the forest but also of the logging itself. It also looks at the different ways people respond when their livelihood is threatened. At the same time, it's the story of Rich and Colleen Gunderson's marriage. Rich is a fourth-generation logger while Colleen is a midwife (although she doesn't seem to be officially trained) mourning her stillborn child and seven miscarriages. She is longing for another child (they have a five-year-old), but Rich doesn't want to see her suffer yet again. This causes stress and a sexual drought in their marriage, just as her teenage boyfriend, now an environmental scientist returns to town and asks for her help investigating water quality. Some of what happens is predictable and I didn't care for the ending, but the story is told so well and the characters are so well developed, those factors didn't bother me.
People We Meet on Vacation, by Emily Henry, had been on my TBR list for quite a while--I think it was recommended in some magazine, but it was also on a few "best of 2021" lists. It's the story of Alex and Poppy who grew up in the same small Ohio town but didn't meet until they were students at the University of Chicago. Despite being very different, they become best friends; after college, Alex returns to their home town to teach while Poppy heads for New York and life as a travel writer. Each summer, they take a trip together. I'm guessing that just from this description, you can predict what happens--the story line is utterly predictable. Disappointing.
Mysteries/Thrillers
I'm not sure how Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen got on my TBR list because I'm not a big fan of historical mysteries. And reading it did not change my mind. It's the story of a minor royal, Lady Georgiana, whose Scottish family is broke. As a result, she decides to try to make her way in London on her own. It's a struggle--and then a man trying to steal her family home winds up dead in her bathtub, her half-brother is arrested, and she is subject to a series of mishaps that just might be someone trying to kill her. It's played for laughs, but I don't think I even cracked a smile. Guarding my TBR more closely in the future.
Weirdly, I also just read another historical mystery, Messenger of Truth, by Jacqueline Winspear. Although I'm not keen about the plots in the Maisie Dobbs mysteries and Maisie herself is almost insufferably virtuous, I do appreciate the depiction of the difficulties of life in post-WWI Britain, so I read one every year or two.
56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard, is a pandemic mystery told in multiple timelines. In one, a couple meet in Dublin just as the pandemic is starting. As Ireland shuts down, they decide to isolate together, despite having known each other for only a few days; the same events in that timeline are narrated from both the man's and woman's perspectives, which lets us know the man has some kind of terrible secret.. In another timeline, police officers are called to the apartment where the couple was living because a terrible odor was coming from the apartment. A male's decomposing body is lying in the shower with glass from the shattered shower door around him--but there's no blood and the apartment has been wiped clean. The lead officer feels sure a crime has occurred but can't find the evidence, while her partner is happy concluding the man's death was an accident. Well into the novel, we encounter a third timeline, starting before the couple met. By the time the author starts rolling out the twists, I was not actually surprised, but I found the way the author put the story together so interesting that I didn't mind some degree of predictability.
One thing I like about Peter Swanson's books is the way he references other literary works--and is transparent about it. In Nine Lives, nine people receive a mysterious list of names in the mail--the name of each person who receives the list is on it--but, with one exception, they don't recognize any of the other names. Days later, the murders of those on the list start. The plot references Memento Mori and And Then There Were None and characters talk about poetry and novels. Fun read!
If She Wakes, by Michael Koryta, is the second mystery I've read in which a character has "locked-in syndrome." It's a complicated narrative involving multiple paid killers trying to get their hands on a phone--but we don't know what's so special about the phone or why people want it til the very end. The protagonist is a former stunt driver, which may account for much of the book feeling like an extended chase scene. Not my favorite.
Some time ago, I read Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King and thought it was a decent mystery. Then I discovered it was the first volume in a trilogy. So this month I read both Finders Keepers and End of Watch. Finders Keepers was again a mostly traditional mystery featuring retired police detective Bill Hodges and his rather unusual sidekicks, Holly and Jerome. They work a case involving a family, the father of whom was severely injured in the original crime at the heart of Mr. Mercedes. The interesting part about this book was that both the family's son and the criminal had an obsession with an author with similarities to J.D. Salinger and John Updike. Although End of Watch again features Bill Hodges et al., it takes a serious turn toward the weird--the perpetrator from Mr. Mercedes, believed to have been in a vegetative state for six years, can put his consciousness into other people and can communicate with people playing a video game, causing them to commit suicide. Not sure why King decided to go supernatural in the last book in the trilogy, but it was definitely my least favorite.
In Say Her Name, Dreda Say Mitchell and Ryan Carter deal with serious issues--police corruption and the ways in which the police and the media deal differently with crimes involving Black women versus white women. I appreciate their attention to those issues, but the plot had a lot of problems, not least of which being that an out-of-work doctor could unravel a historic case that her adoptive father, a retired police officer, had been unsuccessfully trying to solve for two decades. Not believable.
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