wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Myra Savage has The Plan that will finally draw attention to her extraordinary powers as a medium and her husband Bill is responsible for executing The Plan. ‘Seance on a Wet Afternoon’ outlines the execution of this horrific plan, which the reader can see is doomed from the start. Character development is spare, as is the couple’s backstory. What precipitated Myra’s diabolical idea? It’s a mystery so I assumed it was her overweening ambition. What leads Bill to do his wife’s bidding, even when he know it is the wrong thing to do? That’s a mystery, too, unless he thinks he can mitigate the worst of the consequences. The book doesn’t offer much more than the movie, but it’s definitely a page-turner.

This book is like a fever dream of a murder mystery, although there’s no mystery because the assembled servants of a Geneva estate make it clear from the beginning that no one will emerge from the locked room where Baron and Baroness Klopstock are meeting with secretary Victor Passerat. The three have given instructions that they are not to be disturbed under any circumstances, so the servants spend the night making plans for life after the Klopstocks. They are strangely optimistic about the fact that life will go on without their employers, as they plan to cash in on the media attention in the morning. “The career of domestic service is the thing of the future,” head valet Lister tells his compatriots. “The private secretaries of the famous do well, too” (78). My first Muriel Spark—I’m not sure about more.

This very moving novel tracks a follow-on pandemic to COVID-19 from a village in Greenland to a level 4 biological facility in Montana, exploring the disrupted lives and the heroism of those it touches along the way. Shepard is a realist about the relentless growth of the (so far fictional) organism with the 40% fatality rate, but he is an absolute optimist when it comes to the epidemiologists and medical professionals charged with stopping the pandemic and caring for the sick. The result is an admirable set of characters—beginning with young Aleq, witnessing his entire village wiped out—who exemplify the love and care that make us human even in the face of the unthinkable. ‘Phase Six’ is a sad and beautiful reminder of how we can be courageous when the worst happens.

Published in 2016, two years after Russia successfully took Crimea from Ukraine, ‘Putin Country’ is the result of 40 years of Anne Garrels’ reporting in Russia. Set in Chelyabinsk, Russia’s industrial region on the edge of Siberia, the books looks at Russian institutions chapter by chapter, to unpack the mystery of why the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980s into the 1990s did not result in a more free and prosperous country. In spite of the unimaginable cruelty and corruption she finds in business, media, prisons, schools, and the nuclear industry, Garrels manages not to find fault with the Russian people, which is admirable; she is clear-eyed but compassionate. She acknowledges that western sanctions have driven ordinary Russians deeper into Putin’s arms, underlining his argument that the West’s goal is to humiliate and undermine Russia. But as she described it, theirs is a loyalty based in fear: “Whatever sense of community the ‘collective’ once enforced is gone,” she writes. “Everyone now lives behind high fences, suspicious of neighbors and the local government, which is dependent on the regional government and ultimately on the Kremlin. But no one is protesting” (210). Even those environmentalists, victims’ advocates, lawyers, and journalists willing to sound the alarm become exhausted by the apathy, fear, and cynicism around them, until their only choice is to emigrate or give up. The one glimmer of hope she offers is the internet: most believed in 2016 that if Putin tried to be overly restrictive of access to technology, young Russians would not stand for it. With 900,000 Russians to date having fled the country since Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, many of them young professionals, that demographic crisis may have already begun.

Actor and singer Sutton Foster started crafting early on, in part to relieve her anxiety at growing up with a difficult mother and also as another expression of her creativity, this one offstage. Foster’s story is not always happy, but it is candid and admirable. The book would have been more meaningful if I had ever seen her work; nevertheless, I enjoy reading about all kinds of creative processes and this book is full of that.

The charm of this book is its setting in the British countryside and E. C. R. Lorac’s loving descriptions of it. The book opens with the return of the Garth family’s prodigal son, Richard, a character who is never seen again throughout the novel, yet remains a suspect for most of it. There are numerous other odd things about the book: changing detectives partway through for seemingly no reason; the inclusion of not one but two unlikeable curmudgeons (one of whom ends up the victim); and some gaping holes in the logic of the story. But, again, the Lunesdale farmers and their taciturn ways—their fox hunt that isn’t really a fox hunt and their dislike of gossip unless it’s about someone they know—provided enough interest to keep going. The second detective, Chief Superintendent No-first-name Macdonald infused the investigation with a kind of straightforward bonhomie that was refreshing. I’d try another Lorac.

Philips has done an admirable job mastering the many sources that went into. researching this book that focuses on one of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s running buddies, Ralph Fults. Philips details the Parker-Barrow crew’s brief exploits in exhaustive and unromantic detail, always keeping one eye on the brutality of the Texas prison system. It was Clyde Barrow’s victimization in Eastham Prison—he was repeatedly beaten and raped as a 15-year-old—that launched him on the outlaw life; his fantasy, once he got out, was a major prison break that would simultaneously help his friends and humiliate the prison guards and administration that brutalized him. All of his and Bonnie’s actions—bank robberies, car thefts, and national guard armory break-ins—were aimed at this goal, at least in their own minds. Philips focuses on the blow-by-blow details of the gang’s confrontation with police and prisons, sometimes neglecting history that would also contextualize their actions. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating look at how a brutalizing penal system created a generation of terrifying criminals in the 1930s.

Actually 3.5 stars. I enjoyed the first half of this book much more, in which a series of unreliable narrators lay out the troubled household of Margaret and George Harrison, her companion Aggie, and their upstairs tenants, artist Haworth Lathom and writer John Munting. ‘The Documents in the Case’ starts out as an epistolary novel and as inconsistencies in their accounts pile up, it slowly occurs to the reader that some or all of the letter-writers may be undependable, or at least they have conflicting perspectives. George’s unusual hobby is foraging for unusual foods, particularly mushrooms, with predictable consequences. The second half proceeds as a written account of a murder investigation conducted by Munting and George Harrison’s son from his first marriage, Paul. The character Aggie completely disappears with little explanation, which is odd since hers is the first voice we hear and she’s the first to give us insight into the relationships among the various members of the household. The investigation turns on the science of synthetic poisons and their introduction into food; the “documents” relating to the science try to derive their drama from the novelty, but I missed the household intrigue and emotional interplay. Not one of Sayers’ best, but still an unusual mystery that was worth the time.

Detective Adam Dalgleish and his team—Kate Miskins and Sgt. Benton-Smith—find themselves detailed to Combe Island off the coast of Cornwall to scope out its safety for a visit by the Prime Minister, when the inevitable happens: much-detested writer Nathan Oliver is murdered. Plenty of the staff and guests on this private retreat had motive, but who could have had the strength to display his body in such a startling way? James has written an interesting version of the classic locked room mystery, with mysterious characters, a wild Cornish setting, and a bit of SARS thrown in to complicate the investigation. Kate takes center stage partway through the book, but she’s ready. And Det. Dalgleish spends a fair amount of time in self-examination of his distant relationship with Emma (hence, the three stars). Not one of my favorites, but I appreciated the setting.

Also, thanks to the previous reader who included a handy list of characters on a bookmark—a smart trick that I won’t forget!

I have enjoyed others of Greene’s novels more than ‘The Quiet American,’ with its almost claustrophobic focus on the relationship between veteran British journalist Thomas Fowler and American fixer Alden Pyle in the very earliest days of the Vietnam War. The two are locked in a contest over Fowler’s “girl” Phuong, who is also a stand-in in Greene’s world for the entire country of Vietnam. But their rivalry is also a metaphor for American and European approaches to war, colonialism, and morality. Pyle may be a “quiet” American in comparison to his brash compatriots, but he is deceptively over-confident of his righteousness, a worldview that leaves no room for the rights and even the lives of others. Fowler cannot help envying Pyle’s confidence, youth, and connections, while deploring his impact in the country, a tension that is exacerbated by Pyle’s saving his life under fire. “I became a bore on the subject of America,” Fowler observes. “It was as if I had been betrayed, but one is not betrayed by an enemy” (132). Ultimately, he must decide whether and how to stop Pyle’s subversion in Vietnam, a decision that engages him in the conflict in ways he had always managed to avoid.