An Embarrassment of Riches

Hero with a Side of Angst - by Joanna Welcome to Joanna, a new blogger for EOR. She has this to say about herself: After a tropical childhood, I stumbled upon Portland and decided to sit for a spell; nearly twenty years later, it appears that I'm here to stay. I am an enthusiastically geeky Library Assistant, which means that I sometimes approach strangers in coffee shops to gush about library databases. When it comes to my media intake, I am omnivorous: I will read or watch anything if the characters grab me and don't let go. I don't leave the house without a book. I still think A Bargain for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban is one of the smartest books ever written.

When I can't sleep at night, I am sometimes haunted by cringe-worthy embarrassments I suffered in high school. Maybe I'm just a little too in touch with my inner 14-year-old, but I love books that capture teen angst and the way our adolescent mortification reverberates into adulthood. I couldn't help but fall in love with Celia West, the 20-something protagonist of After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn.

Celia has just been kidnapped. Again. It’s the worst thing about being the child of the world’s greatest superheroes; well, that and knowing that you will never, ever, live up to your parents’ expectations. The crushing sense that she was a disappointment led Celia to a teenage rebellion that was a shocking betrayal to her parents; she joined up with their archival, ubervillain Destructor. Seven years later and she’s still dealing with the repercussions; meanwhile, she's trying to use her skills as an accountant to solve Commerce City’s latest crime wave. Also, she might be falling in love with the mayor’s son. And she’s broke. Oh, and she’s trying to avoid being kidnapped. Again.

After the Golden Age is a snappy mystery about family, identity, forgiveness, and what it means to be a hero. Now if I could just stop thinking about that time in the cafeteria...

Hardboiled - by Rachael Recently a fellow library employee was looking for some books to keep her company on a long plane ride. She took advantage of our “Looking for a good read?” form, requesting noir-like mysteries with “an engaging narrative, compelling characters, and an overall doesn't-insult-your-intelligence-ness”.

I was excited to answer this question because I love noir, and I love leading people to books. My first suggestion was Dashiell Hammett – his characters suffer, and his language really sings. Among his best works is Red Harvest, in which a nameless detective is called to the corporate town of Personville (the locals call it Poisonville) and becomes embroiled in byzantine back-stabbing. Our poor Continental Op always seems to think he’s one step ahead when he’s one step behind. The cast includes gangsters, union men and heartless capitalists. No one is better than Hammett at writing a sentence – every word pulls the weight of three.
 
A lesser known noir author is Chester Himes. His detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson investigate crimes in Harlem. The language isn’t quite Hammett (nothing is, in my opinion -- not even Chandler), but it’s good, some of his metaphors really make you sit up. And this is popular fiction written in the 1950s by a black man about black people – a rare bird. The first book in the series is A Rage in Harlem.
 
One author that I did not suggest to my co-worker, but I will here, is James M. Cain. Cain was originally from Maryland (where he formed a close friendship with H. L. Mencken), but did not find his voice until he came out west. Western working people were his muse, and he wrote about them with a succinct and grim humor. His best books went on to be made into some of the greatest noir movies – The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. 

Happy Dance - A Series to get Excited About - by Sola

Our guest blogger is Sola, who is an avid reader and a library school student through the University of Washington. She is interning in the Central Branch Popular Library until the beginning of June.

I'm a sucker for a series where the characters start to feel like family members. That discovery that I can be reunited with someone I've come to appreciate (dare I say cherish?) by just reading another book is almost enough to make me do the happy dance. Usually this results in me devouring the books one after another, and then moping around until I find a new book I like, or the next one in the series gets published. If the series is something that my husband enjoys and we can chat about? Well, so much the better. A few years back, shortly after my twins were born, I stumbled on Craig Johnson's The Cold Dish. Being sleep deprived usually means that I'll forgo reading for a little shut-eye, but Sheriff Walt Longmire, of Absaroka County, Wyoming, jumped off the page and into my life, and I found myself unable, during those rare, quiet moments, to put the book down. Walt is one of those characters who is not immediately likable, and in fact, I don't really know that many mildly depressed, middle-aged, widowed, almost-alcoholic lawmen. Those questionable features were balanced out by the fact that he's also sweet, sincere, well-read, and is totally lost around women. Once I added in his friends, including a Native American named Henry Standing Bear, the former sheriff Lucian, and Walt's current deputy, the ever full-of-attitude Victoria Moretti, the scales definitely came down on the side of wanting to keep these people in my life. Walt would rather hang out in his partially built cabin, drink rainier, and obsess about a rape case that ended with suspended sentences for the four young men who were convicted, when one of those young men is found shot. Walt's sense of justice is strong enough to start looking into it, and determine that it wasn't, in fact, a hunting accident, when the second of the four is murdered in the same way, and it's clear that someone is out for revenge (a cold dish indeed). With a solid mystery, characters I found myself caring about, and a setting that I was starting to feel like I'd visited even though I've never been there, I powered through The Cold Dish.

And, in fact, I did do the happy dance when I found out it is was the first in a series of books with Sheriff Longmire. I'm up to speed at this point, but I'm always on the lookout for the next book by Craig Johnson. In the meantime, I'm hunting for a new book (or series) that I can fall in love with to fill the gap. Any suggestions?

Sinister Stories from Childhood - by Ruth When I was a kid, I loved creepy stories: the grimmer of the Brothers Grimm fairy-tales, books of ghosts and hauntings and anything that had a mystery with history. I spent a fair amount of time on visits to Grandma's big, old house back east trying to live in those stories: running up the (long gone) servants' back staircase, scouting around the gigantic attic and searching for secret doors and hidden passages ala Nancy Drew. It would have been so cool to visit the places where some of my favorite stories originated, but my grandmother's house, fascinating though it was, was not one of them. The characters in two novels for adults I read recently were luckier.  

In Carol Goodman's Arcadia Falls, Meg Rosenthal has just snagged a teaching job at Arcadia School, an art institute for high-schoolers in upstate New York.  The school was founded in the first half of the twentieth century by several women who wrote and illustrated a haunting tale entitled "The Changeling Girl", one that Meg read to her child and one whose origins she is now researching. Being the good gothic novel that it is, secrets abound, a death occurs, the past impinges upon the present, and there is, of course, a romantic element.

The Distant Hours, Kate Morton's latest, takes place during WWII and in 1992. Driving back from a business trip, Edith comes across Milderhurst Castle, the place where the author of her favorite childhood story, "The True History of the Mud Man", lived and, coincidentally, the place where Edith's mother was evacuated to during WWII.  Now it's occupied by the author's three spinster daughters, all well beyond seventy years of age. Edith is dying to find out more about the family and her mother's stay there, but Mum isn't talking and something's being hushed up. Secrets, death, romance yada yada yada and 500 plus pages later, we know the whole story including the true "True History of the Mud Man." So pull your chair close to the fire, get your goth on, and read some slightly sinister stories the are definitely for adults during these cold and rainy March nights.

The Scottish Mystery - by Ruth Last spring, I finally got to visit Scotland, Land of the Tartan and black slugs, which I dubbed the MacSlug. Part of that trip included a 73 mile trek on The Great Glen Way, one of the many long-distance paths in Britain. Most of the walk was through or alongside beautiful scenery including placid lochs, rolling pastures filled with cute little lambs and a few shaggy Highland cows, and forests (although I was shocked to see some pretty darn ugly clear-cuts as well). Shortly after coming home, a mystery passed my desk entitled A Small Death in the Great Glen.  I knew I had to read it, and although I couldn't figure out if the fictional village was based on one that I had passed through, I was pleased to revisit the landscape if only in literature. The small death is that of a young boy who has been found in a canal (the Caledonian Canal that along which I had walked miles?). Turns out that he had been murdered and dumped in the water. Who would do such a thing? Several young girls might know, but they're not telling. Employees of the local newspaper are the amateur detectives in this debut novel and they're a pretty interesting bunch. I'm looking forward to the second in this series. I just polished off another new debut mystery from Scotland, this time set in 1860s Edinburgh. In The Unbelievers, our middle-aged detective, Inspector Allardyce, is trying to figure out who has bumped off the Duke of Dornach. What was, at first, a missing persons case, turns into a murder investigation when the Duke is found shot. We travel with Allardyce through the dirty underbelly of Victorian Edinburgh society and politics as we visit the Duke's questionable haunts and hope that we get to the murderer before he or she strikes again. If you're still hankering for Scotland after these two, read Raven Black by Ann Cleeves, set in the Shetland Islands. But don't blame me if you feel the need for a shot of whiskey after all this death!

Pickett Rides Again - by Helen Joe Pickett, game warden in the Big Horn Mountain region of Wyoming, has now been featured in 10 novels beginning with Open Season.

Nowhere to Run is the newest Pickett mystery by C.J. Box.
    
    Wyoming setting
    Camps looted
    Tents slashed
    Elk butchered
    Do the right thing
   
    Runner missing
    Brothers hiding
    Suspense building
    Pickett searching
    Shootout ending
    Storm coming

Is this the harbinger of things to come in the next Joe Pickett novel?
 

A Literary Slurpee - by Ross Summer! Finally! Do you have more time on your hands than you have books lined up to read? I envy you. And you should be sure to check out our webpage where we have assembled links to summer read picks by a variety of sources (including, among others, Oprah!)

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney would be a great choice for your summer reading. In language as stark and beautiful as the snowy Canadian forests that it describes, Penney tells a story of a murder in 1867 and the intrigue and adventure that ensues. I wanted to read it as fast as I could to find out what happens next (it's definitely a page-turner), but at the same time I wanted to read it slowly and deeply, to savor the characters and place. And did I mention that there's lots of snow? A literary slurpee for the hot days ahead.

Buried Secrets - by Ruth

Many mystery novels feature figurative and sometimes literal skeletons in the closet, but there are a number of titles where the skeletons are out of the closet and into the ground. The Crossing Places is one of those, and it's a good mystery in a brand new series by Elly Griffiths. Ruth Galloway is a late thirty-something, overweight archaeology professor teaching at a new university in the county of Norfolk, England. When the bones of a young girl show up in the salt-marsh close to her home, DCI Harry Nelson asks for her help in figuring out how old they are. Turns out, they belong to an Iron Age girl, but it's not long before a much more recent skeleton appears. Are these the bones of the girl who went missing a decade ago?  Nelson's desperate to solve that mystery and help the parents get on with their lives. The ending is a bit melodramatic, but I liked the book and especially the atmospheric setting and unusual character of Ruth. I'm looking forward to The Janus Stone, the second in the series coming out in the fall of 2010. For two other mysteries with forensic anthropological and archaeological bents, read Haunted Ground by Erin Hart and Old Bones by Aaron Elkins, one of my favorite mysteries ever.

Lawyers and Solicitors and Barristers, Oh My! - by Ruth All of my siblings are attorneys which means that the conversation at family gatherings can be a bit contentious and peppered with legalese. This talk, coupled with the law classes I took as an undergraduate in political science, has at least given me a decent grounding in the American legal system. Most everything I know about the English judicial system, however, has come from mystery novels and television.  A patron recently introduced me to a great but, alas, short mystery series starring some young London legal eagles and an Oxford professor. I am sometimes baffled by all of the lawyerly terminology, but that hasn't prevented me from enjoying the banter that goes on amongst the five principal players including Cantrip who has an "inferior" education (Cambridge rather than Oxford) and Julia, who gets her knickers in a twist on a fairly regular basis. The Shortest Way to Hades finds them investigating the death of a young woman who has turned greedy and demanded 100,000 pounds in exchange for her signature on a document that will allow an heiress to avoid massive taxes on a multiple million pound inheritance. Was the girl pushed over the balcony or was it suicide?  As Hilary Tamar (the Oxford professor) points out, if it was murder, then the wrong girl died. For more judicial antics, try the Rumpole of the Bailey series by John Mortimer. While not the first in the series, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders provides the back-story on Horace Rumpole's early years. For a wonderful television show about an English law firm and some courtroom drama, watch Kavanagh Q.C. starring the fabulous John Thaw. Any other great stuff out there to amuse me while also increasing my knowledge of law in Great Britain?

Mysterious Characters - by Felicia

I love a good mystery. You know, one that draws you in from page one and keeps you guessing until the end. I have a few authors that I follow faithfully. These are a few of my favorites:

Michael Connelly’s Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch character really interests me. (He is named after the 15th century Dutch artist). He first appears in The Black Echo and he’s still going strong 15 novels later. I like Harry because he’s very human. It doesn’t hurt that he also works as a detective in modern-day Los Angeles, so we can picture many of the places in the novels. He’s what we all know about cops – hard-nosed, arrogant, gritty. But he also loves jazz, believes in doing what’s right and fights to bring criminals to justice. The series takes us through complex, cases and introduces us to Harry’s fellow policeman, some savory FBI agents and shows us the side of police work that will make us wonder about the motives behind their actions. These novels will make you angry at Harry sometimes. At other times, you will want to buy him a drink.

Walter Mosley introduces us to Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress (I also highly recommend the movie with Denzel Washington), who lives in Southern California in the 1940s. An ex-Army man, Easy sees the injustices of being a black man during this time. By taking an assignment from a white man to find a woman, Easy’s career as a detective is launched. His sidekick, Mouse, is a small man with a taste for violence and death. But we like him. His hilarious commentaries and loyal demeanor endear him to us in a strange way. Every book in this series takes you through a story layered in seduction, murder, suspense and humor. I love this series.

Patricia Cornwell writes a wonderful series with Kay Scarpetta. Post-Mortem, the first in the series, introduces us to Kay, the chief medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia. I really enjoy this character because she is strong, yet very sensitive. Each book takes us through a case from a forensic perspective, while also drawing in the other characters. We get to meet Detective Marino, who struggles with his feelings for Kay; Lucy, Kay’s brilliant niece, whose character goes through some traumatic and devastating events as the series progresses; and Benton, an FBI profiler and Kay’s love interest. A few books in the series will disappoint, but overall it is well-done.

James Patterson brings Alex Cross to life in Along Came a Spider. His novels tend to be fast-paced and simply written. They’re not what you would call meaty. Although at times I find it a bit hard to believe some of the dialogue, the story lines are compelling. Alex is a Washington, DC, homicide detective and forensic psychologist. Each novel presents a new case that he must solve, and the series gets most interesting when his family becomes involved – his grandmother and two children. The criminals always seem to be larger than life, but Patterson always manages to make you feel like they could actually be walking amongst us.

Mystery on Martha's Vineyard - by Helen

Several summers ago, our friends invited us to spend a week with them on Martha's Vineyard. They rent the Joshua Slocum house for the month of August. I have since discovered the mysteries of two of the island's writers, the late Philip R. Craig and Cynthia Riggs.

Solving the mystery is not the point of these stories. Learning the lore of the Vineyard is. I find it fun to read references to the beetlebung tree, West Tisbury, East Chop, the ferry to Chappaquiddick and all the little ponds and side roads that are so much a part of the island.

Craig writes with a touch of humor and real love of the island, the fishing, and the swarms of summer visitors that clog the roads. His main character J. W. Jackson, a retired Boston cop, now lives year around on the island and does odd jobs to support his wife and two children. He loves to fish and to cook and to sit on the balcony with drink in hand watching the ocean. Jackson's signature saying is delish (either preceded or followed by a recipe).

In one of the books, Jackson drops by Victoria Trumbull's house to check on her reaction to a case that he is investigating. Victoria Trumbull is the 92-year-old detective in the mysteries by Cynthia Riggs. Victoria is a feisty character who uses her knowledge of  the feuds and families and forebears of the residents of West Tisbury to help out the local police.

In his latest book, Third Strike, Philip Craig has teamed up with William G. Tapply, author of the Brady Coyne mysteries. Brady, a Boston lawyer, gets a call from a former client who tells him about mysterious crates loaded and unloaded at midnight on the island. Coyne and Jackson team up to crack the case of a crime with international ramifications.

Delish!

The Highly Introspective Detective - by Helen

Richard Yancey, author of The Highly Effective Detective has now written a sequel featuring his laughable, lovable, compassionate and bumbling private investigator, Teddy Ruzak. In The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs, Teddy's business is closed down by the state of Tennessee because he has failed to pass the P.I. test.

He befriends a homeless man and gives him his hat, which changes both of their lives. The next day Teddy discovers the body of this same homeless man in an alley outside his office and his conscience leads him to investigate the death. But it is not the investigation that intrigued me. Teddy is such a marvelous creation with a brain full of miscellaneous trivia, a habit of speaking in non-sequiturs, and a strong appreciation of the odd ball characters that he meets.

His interactions with his long suffering secretary, his wanting to adopt a stray dog, his questions and doubts about God and his care and compassion for the eighty-plus, Eunice Shriver, who has attached herself to him in order to write his biography, make him an endearing character.

Teddy says:

"I pulled a random page from Eunice Shriver's manuscript and read this:  
    You would think living alone would free me from all the normal burdens of responsibility that people complain or worry about, but all living alone does is increase your psychological weight, as if your soul were living on Jupiter. It tends to make you more important to yourself and exaggerate your problems to the point that they're insurmountable afflictions.
The passage got my heart rate up. Not only did it strike me as eerily prescient, it even sounded like something I would say. Either Eunice Shriver had found her way into my head or I had indeed found my way into hers."

Later, observing the big brown eyes of his adopted dog, Archie, Teddy muses, "I had read somewhere that God is to us as we are to dogs, that the gulf separating our intellects must be, if God is God, wider than the universe. Archie sensed I cared for him. He sensed his entire existence relied upon my tender feelings. But my thoughts were unfathomable, unknowable, and so he stared, unable to reach me except through signals as easily interpretable to me as mine were ineffable to him."
    
An unknown caller with possible information about the murder keeps calling Teddy, but remains silent. "'You know', I said into the phone, 'this is a little like praying. I talk and hope you are listening, and I don't expect a reply. At least, not a direct one. Look, I can't help you and you can't help me -- or yourself -- unless you tell me what you want. What do you want?'"

In trying to solve the murder, Teddy remarks, "I ascribed meaning to everything, even to things that had no meaning or no potential meaning…Life is pretty damned random, and maybe it was the randomness that terrified me."

I can sympathize. I spent a fun evening musing along with Teddy Ruzak, the highly effective detective.

    

Let's See...Old Mother Hubbard... - by Nicola

…went to the cupboard to eat her curds and whey. Wait, that’s not right!  Well, it has been a very long time since I've even thought about nursery rhymes, but I did think about them a lot while reading two books in the Nursery Crimes series by Jasper Fforde (pronounced “ford” like the car).  Are these books even for adults?  Oh yes!  Many children would have trouble with all of the nuances Fforde inserts into his whimsical stories. The Big Over Easy is the first title in the series. The main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary, are head of the Nursery Crimes Division of the local police constabulary in Reading, England. Their assignment is to investigate the death of Humpty Dumpty. The second  book in the series is The Fourth Bear.  Was there a fourth bear?  Why didn’t Mama Bear and Papa Bear sleep in the same bed?  And how could Jack Spratt not look for the violent Gingerbreadman who had just escaped from the supposedly secure mental hospital?  Well, mystery readers won't be surprised that Jack will not forget the Gingerbreadman is on the loose, even though he has been suspended for screwing up another assignment involving Red Riding Hood.

Jasper Fforde’s highly imaginative books are not for everyone, but those with a sense of fun will enjoy going along for the ride with him wherever his mind takes them.  

Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties - by Alison

I'm unfortunate in that I like a good scary movie. Unfortunate because they come along so rarely. I can't get behind those slasher sort of films where someone leaps out from behind a door and the audience sees a knife plunging up and down to the strains of a badly tuned orchestra. No. Give me movies with a bit of mystery. A creepy old house is good, hopefully one with a troubled history. A ghost -- or I should say -- the suggestion of a ghost -- is even better. And ideally, the protagonist will have to go to the local library to research the events that took place in this strange little town back in 1890 or whenever. And may I say that looking for this information on a microfiche reader is just so much more atmospheric than seeing our protagonist jump on the internet and google "mysterious circumstances in Creepyville". In my opinion one of the best of these was The Changeling. If you were around at the time, perhaps you remember the ads for the movie which showed a creaky wooden wheelchair, unoccupied, chasing one of the characters down a long hall. George C. Scott played the unsuspecting man who moves into the house, only to find that someone is still living there. Sadly, the library no longer owns the movie, and I suspect it is long out of print. Add to that The Watcher in the Woods (a Disney film no less) and The Lady in White about a boy who gets locked in the school cloakroom on Halloween night and sees a murder from the past replayed before him. Alas! They don't make them like that anymore.

But hey, wait! They do! I recently watched Guillermo Del Toro's (Pan's Labyrinth) The Orphanage. A woman and her husband have purchased the orphange where she grew up with the idea of making a home for disabled children. Their son, Simon, soon begins telling his parents about his new friends. A sensitive kid, an old house with a past, mysterious visitors, bumps in the night, what's not to love? Though some of the reviews were less than glowing, sometimes all you want is a good atmospheric movie, someone to watch it with, and a blanket with which to cover your head.

Cozy Up to a Good Mystery - by Ruth

Agatha Christie was queen of my reading list when I was in junior high school, and when I ran out of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot books, I started consuming other English mysteries of their ilk. It turns out that what I mostly liked was a sub-genre of mystery called "the cozy", and I read truly frightening numbers of them during the summers from the age of 12 until about 18. Barry Trott notes in Read On…Crime Fiction that "In a cozy mystery, most of the deaths occur offstage, and even when death makes a visit, there is a distinct lack of violence. The same applies to sex….Although the action may be mellow, the characters and the humor in cozies keep the reader entertained and coming back for more." Favorite authors of mine included Dorothy Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Catherine Aird, Elizabeth Daly, Margery Allingham and Robert Barnard. In later years, I discovered and enjoyed M.C. Beaton's Hamish MacBeth books and Rhys Bowen's Constable Evans series. Mostly these days I prefer British police procedural series with complex characters and relationships that change and develop from book to book; however, the brooding inspectors and their personal problems have been a bit too heavy for me this year, so I was pleased to read a new book in the cozy arena entitled Death of a Cozy Writer by G.M. Malliet. It was perfect - it had all of the elements that I love in a good cozy: dysfunctional English families, lots of suspects, murders that were not too graphically described and, best of all, a country house setting! When the eldest son and heir apparent to the Beauclerk-Fisk family fortune is bumped off in the wine cellar and it looks like the murder is an inside job, family secrets begin rising to the surface and nobody is exempt from suspicion. Will the rest of the family get out alive?

Check out the following websites for more on the Cozy Mystery:

The Cozy Library

Cozy Mystery List

And here's a source for long lists of authors and cozies by theme, courtesy of cozymystery.com.