octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is very well-written and exceptionally well-constructed, but 460+ pages is far too long to spend with such unpleasant protagonists. I'd say that I didn't care what happened to either of them, but it would be a lie. I did care. I wanted both of them dead so that no one else would have to put up with them. That's caring, I guess. 

I read and reviewed the three books collected here separately, so this is basically for my own records. I rated them all as three stars, so the collected rating is (easily) the same. Looking at them as a group, I think I'm struck most by two things. The first is that, as the books go on, I'm increasingly seeing them as straight mysteries, rather than a combo of mystery and thriller. The second is how interested I am in Kinsey. I'm not extraordinarily compelled by her, to be honest, and it may just be a function of having spent three books with her now rather than one, but I was largely indifferent to her in the first book. In each subsequent volume, however, I like her a little more. I suspect that Grafton was simply improving as a writer as she wrote the series, and the character work gets better as a result. If the trend continues, I look forward to liking the protagonist even more in the future! 

I think I shelved the first two books in this series as mystery and thriller, but I wonder if that's really accurate. It isn't here... this is straight mystery, until about the last ten pages, when there's a violent encounter with the culprit. I don't know that that's enough to be classed as thriller... a lot of what Kinsey does in C is for Corpse could be done by Miss Marple, in that it's conversations and information gathering rather than anything that would risk breaking a hip, if that makes sense. An almost laid-back type of mystery, and I find that appealing. It gives more opportunity for character work, and as always I enjoy Grafton's supporting characters. Lila Sims, for example, is awful, but her nasty personality is neatly encompassed over not a great many pages, and Bobby's mother Glen is an interesting character in her own right. Also, I like that the general lack of action ties in well with Kinsey's character - she's been injured in the previous two books, and ongoing physiotherapy and a general dislike of pain means that she's not remotely into the idea of danger for danger's sake. There's a strong streak of sensible self-preservation in her that I find both sympathetic and extremely realistic. 

This is a Gothic ghost story set on the Yorkshire moors of the late 1600s, and I wanted to like it better than I did. I did enjoy reading it, and I will say that the prose is very accomplished and easy to read: I gobbled down the book in two sittings. The grim, bleak atmosphere was also exceptionally well done, as the evil living up on the moors seeps its way into Scarcross Hall and the family who lives there. That evil is centred around a group of standing stones, some disappearing coins, and a series of historical tragedies that make it clear to the local community that the Hall is pretty much inescapably cursed. The problem is - and this is dropping the rating half a star for me - the link between this historical evil and current events is thin. Really, ambiguously thin, and the book sells itself as a ghost story, but I'm never exactly sure who the ghost is supposed to be, or even if it's a ghost at all, instead of a generally random demonic presence. There's no sense of character to the ghost, as there is in, for example, The Woman in Black. It's so un-anchored to the rest of the text that any sense of personality or motivation for the so-called haunting is just entirely absent.

All of which leads me to the other issue, which drops the second half-star. This is a horror story, and I wasn't scared in the slightest. I read the bulk of this book in bed, late at night, and there wasn't even a single tingle of fear. There was admiration for the prose and the setting - and really, those things are four star quality, both - but I read horror stories because I want to be creeped out by them... and here, I just wasn't. 

I don't think I've read anything from Wendt before, shame on me, but this was really enjoyable. An elderly leader in a Samoan community wakes up one day, totally sick of everyone's shit, and starts feigning madness so as to get his own back and right some of the wrongs about him. This strategy, somewhat reminiscent of King Lear, starts out well but then begins to go badly wrong in much the same way. Faleasa finds out the hard way that, bereft of his standing as leader, his wants and needs don't garner much respect within the family, who are largely a pack of ingrates. There's a very sardonic sense of humour that runs through the beginning of this book, but it slowly turns to a sort of doomed tragedy - again, very like Lear - that destroys most of everything Faleasa was trying to achieve. 

The whole thing is just cuttingly observed, and very entertaining. I'm going to have to read more of Wendt's work in the future, because this was excellent! 

I enjoyed this, but safe to say it's my least favourite thus far. A lot of it is that I'm just fed up with the levels of rape and related abuse of women in this series. This time it's sex slavery, including the rape and murder of a young girl, and I see the interest value in having the two main investigators of these crimes be women themselves, but I feel like Gerritsen's scraping the bottom of this particular well. Time to move onto another type of victim already. Also - and I feel like this may not be valid, given the author's a doctor and I'm not, and also I've never given birth, so there's that - Rizzoli has her baby, and mere days later is running round investigating, and there's nary a word about her physical condition. I remember in the last book, the autopsy of one of the murder victims noted the state of the menstrual pad she was wearing. There's no such detail given to Rizzoli. It's as if all immediate physical effects of birth vanished as soon as the baby was out. There's one part where she expresses milk, true, and she's tired, but even a mention of general physical discomfort? Nothing. As I said, no first-hand or professional experience to draw on here, but the gap was notable... especially as the bodies of female victims are always examined so closely. I don't know whether it's a comment on agency or not, or a more general reluctance to conflate investigator with investigated, but it did strike me as odd.

I continue to enjoy the main characters, though. Not so much of Isles in this one, but the two of them seem to balance out over the series. 

Super cute little book about a bookstore cat. Every bookstore should have one! Mulligan, the cat, has his jobs and they are not always entirely helpful, and then one day a pigeon gets into the shop and Mulligan, doing his job, is less helpful than ever. I have to say, though, the dismay that Mulligan shows at having birds in his shop is not very convincing... it would be funnier if he were delighted about the opportunity for carnage. The illustrations are pretty, though, and I appreciate the underlying humour, but now I want to put the picture book aside and go and find a full length book about a bookstore cat. I read one about a library cat, last year I think. Surely there's a bookstore one about as well... 

An award-nominated novella from the 1980s, about the technological search for God. I was interested, but not riveted. I'm not religious myself, so it was hard to feel sympathetic to Devrie... but then it was kind of hard to feel sympathetic to anyone here, given that they're all such nutters. For a hot minute Keith seemed normal, then he got caught up in the incest storyline that both his sisters were also willing to exploit, and you know what? These people are off their rockers, all of them. It can only be a family trait. And they might have found God at the end, or God might have found them, but I'm not entirely sure that God deserves them. 

I first read this a while back, in the collection of the same title, and I've now come across it again, and read it again, so thought I'd make a note of it. My reaction, I think, is nearly the same. The novella is a fragmentary one, interspersing the life of the narrator's daughter with the efforts of the narrator, and her colleagues, to understand an alien language. That language, particularly the written aspect, results from a perspective that sees things simultaneously, rather than with cause and effect. Studying it changes how Louise sees the world, and impacts on the relationship with her daughter, whose life she is able to encompass through this different experience of time. (I'm trying not to spoil things, for those who haven't read it or seen the film.) 

When I first read this story, I was rather more interested in the daughter than the language, and I think I am primarily still more interested in her. I have a little extra patience for the linguistics this time around, but although I find them curious, I have little emotional attachment to them. The sense of wonder is a little vague. The sense of appreciation, however, is not - this is an extremely well-constructed piece of fiction, thoughtful and original and interesting. 

This was extremely interesting, with a sympathetic protagonist who, the story argues, does not entirely deserve the sympathy. It's set in the aftermath of the US Civil War, and white populations from the South are being made into refugees, forced at gunpoint onto trains to be taken to camps in the North. Clara, the protagonist, is seventeen and absolutely destitute, having lost both mother and supplies in the stampede at the train station. She's rescued by Quakers, who are saving as many people as they can from camps and starvation through a version of the Underground Railroad, although "as many as they can" is vanishingly few. Clara's so young and alone that it's easy to feel sorry for her, although, as the Quakers point out, she and others like her were slave-owners. The Quakers don't want to fight the evil of slavery with the evil of internment camps, but that doesn't mean that they enjoy helping those who were complicit in human misery and suffering. Is Clara complicit? Their household owned slaves. Technically, those slaves would have belonged to Clara's mother, but Clara's mother has dementia, so responsibility falls on her almost-adult daughter. How much responsibility, and to what ends? It's a really compelling take, and works perfectly as a short story. I think a lot of the punch would be lost if this were longer.