Donna Leon writes lushly about a Venice in regal decay, with the urbane and likable Commissario Guido Brunetti as her main character, yet it was not until 158 pages in (halfway through the novel) that the crime the good detective was supposed to investigate even occurred. This, I think, encapsulates everything I found frustrating about Through a Glass, Darkly.

I waffled between giving this book 3 or 2 stars on Goodreads because it really wasn’t an awful book. But as a mystery, it completely reneges on its promises. It’s as if the writer simply wanted to write a travelogue with Brunetti as the main character telegraphing his thoughts on the dangers of nuclear waste and its effect on a historical city such as Venice. The crime here is an afterthought.

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  I found the mystery interesting enough, if a bit slow moving. The world Anne Perry paints fascinates the Victorian fetishist (no pun intended) in me, particularly the parts where the art of photography and transgressive theatre are explored. However, the moralizing tone the author uses when discussing issues like censorship was difficult to ignore. Had there been less pontificating, the final reveal wouldn’t have felt forced and uncomfortably pointed. The red herring is also kind of pointless–I would’ve liked if Perry took a quite interesting premise to a totally different direction.

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Reading this book is a thorough pleasure, a perfect blend of realism and lightness. Though the discovery of the corpse is described baldly, the story never delves into grittiness for very long. Camilleri with moments that actually made me laugh out loud, as well as loving descriptions of food and art, two of Montalbano’s interests. While the plot itself is decent enough, the best part of the book are the deft characterization of the characters and the society they live in. That the dialogue succeeds in translating some of the flavor of the Sicilian slang originally used by Camilleri is the mark of a very good translation by Stephen Sartorelli.

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 In the hands of a more skilled prose writer, VL McDermid’s Final Edition could have been a pleasure to read. The premise itself is compelling: investigative journalist Lindsay Gordon returns to Scotland after a brush with the Secret Service sent her to self-exile. She immediately finds out that she’s been replaced by her girlfriend. Meanwhile, a close colleague of hers named Jackie Mitchell is in jail for the murder of the notorious Alison Maxwell, Lindsay’s former lover. When Lindsay is asked to prove Jackie’s innocence, she becomes involved in a sordid tale of blackmail and scandalous relationships that ultimately affects the life she is trying to rebuild.

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Despite my fondness for British Golden Age mysteries (Christie, Sayers, Marsh), I have yet to find a more contemporary mystery writer that I really enjoy. To wit, Ruth Rendell is widely regarded as a master of the form, yet this manor mystery about a woman found dead in the woods left me cold (pun not intended). There's a certain amount of wit that I feel is lacking here, despite erudite nature of the story.

A Guilty Thing Surprised is a novel that features Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden investigating the murder of Elizabeth Nightingale, the mistress of a manor that only seems genteel on the surface. Suspects immediately crop up as a series of interviews reveal the victim's manipulative nature. The retiring husband, the worldly au pair, and the professor brother--each one has something to hide. The novel's title is from a Coleridge poem, alluding to a setting that involves many literary and academic preoccupations.

I don't know why but I found the investigation, which mostly hinges on witness testimony, that I feel is too innocuous and paint-by-numbers. The alibi structure Murder at the Orient Express was utterly engaging for me, but the similar strategy here isn't successfully executed at all. The final clue to the murderer's identity is certainly transgressive, but the expository nature of the reveal dampened whatever reaction I may have had about the facts.

I will have to examine my preference for older cozies at a later time, because it's something that has become more evident as I continue reading mysteries.

Originally posted on my blog.

the big plot twist of this book is kindda racist, so.

 Orginally posted here.


In the beginning of Tana French's The Likeness, detective Cassie Maddox is nursing a wound from an old undercover case gone horribly wrong. Reassigned to a desk job after her old team imploded, she feels both frustrated and alienated from her career. Going into this second novel in the Dublin Murder Squad series (the first novel is In the Woods), I did not know the particulars of the old case, but it sets up the extent to which Cassie has been emotionally and professionally compromised.

All this was before a corpse that looks exactly like her was found. By the time she agrees to impersonating a dead woman named Lexie and living inside a foreboding house with four murder suspects, you can kind of tell that this new thing is going to mess her up even more.

In the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour discussing the archetypal role of the detective in popular culture, panelist Margaret H. Willison lays out a brilliant three-pronged schema of qualities embodied by a fictional detective. These are: Amateur vs. Professional, Observer vs. Intuitor, Traumatized vs. Impervious.

The last dichotomy is arguably a 20th century invention. The often beaten, often betrayed gumshoes of noir fiction distinguished themselves from the unruffled gentlemen detectives of the Golden Age* by their complicity with the criminal underclass and the way they took their cases personally. Trauma, as felt by enforcers of justice, has been further explored in our time with the proliferation of police procedurals. Modern crime batters the human soul, the trope says, and even the best among us does not come out of it unscathed.

French's protagonist is clearly on the extreme end of the trauma spectrum. The narrative fuel for much of the novel comes from Cassie's high-wire double act of completely inhabiting the dead Lexie's character while continuing to gather evidence. Although she has had a career as an undercover cop, this case asks her not to invent a believable but whole fictitious identity but to approximate a formerly living person in order to fool her closest friends. This puts her in a state of constant hyperanxiety, as even something as innocuous as food choice can put her entire case and safety in jeopardy.

Aside from this, she also battles with her not-so-subconscious desire to inhabit the life led by the old Lexie. She is part of a charismatic group of five intellectuals who go through their lives studying liberal arts at a prestigious university. The working class Cassie is enamored with the quiet bourgeois world that they've built for themselves in the house, despite knowing full well that some horribly dark stuff has already occurred there. She ends up overidentifying with one of the suspects, even going so far as misleading her handlers.

French takes the paradigm of the traumatized detective and puts forth the idea that even trained professionals such as police officers are still at the mercy of their own complete subjectivity. Cassie's trauma doesn't so much as break her ability to be objective--she never had objectivity in the first place.

I found The Likeness by Tana French quite enjoyable when I read it back in 2012. But I fear that time and my subsequent reading of a book with a similar premise and outcome (a book which I liked much better) has dimmed my esteem. Because the story marries the Traumatized Detective trope with the Woman in Peril trope, it at times struck me as overheated in its gothic tones.

Some of the reviews I've read of Tana French's books complain about the unsatisfactory nature of some (if not all) of her endings. The plot of The Likeness, while convoluted, ultimately lands in an unsurprising place. But unlike many mysteries, it's the interior lives of the characters that is the point of this particular book. Cassie is well-wrought as a character in this sense, someone who could infuriate you in her decisions, but who is wonderful in the way she is fully alive.



*Though Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey arguably straddles the divide between traumatized and impervious, but that is a term paper for another day.

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