Book Review: The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths

The Woman in Blue (Ruth Galloway #8)

By Elly Griffiths

Published and Sold by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 6, 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Two and a Half Stars (out of five)

Note: This is the eighth book in a series.  I suppose some of what’s contained in this post could be construed as spoiler-ish if you haven’t read the first seven, though I do not discuss the actual mystery plots of any book besides The Woman in Blue (and do not spoil the resolution).

Hmmm.   So, I usually really like the Ruth Galloway mysteries.  Ruth is an archaeologist whose skills the police put to use on occasion, and since part of me is still a twelve-year-old girl who wants to be an archaeologist when she grows up, they’re right up my ally.  I do not and have never loved the primary “romance” (if that’s what it is) in these books, though I do like that Ruth is a single mother.  Maybe that’s why this book ultimately just didn’t work for me; there’s really no archaeology at all and the personal relationships have a central role to play—and a strange one at that.

The plot centers around two murders and one assault in the town of Walsingham, where there are Anglican and Catholic shrines.  Ruth gets a call from a grad school friend who’s now an Anglican priest right around the same time a young woman receiving treatment at a nearby hospital is murdered.  It turns out that Ruth’s friend, Hilary, has been receiving threatening letters from someone who doesn’t like women priests.  She’s in Walsingham on a conference for women who might want to become bishops, so she and Ruth meet up.  The second murder victim is another priest, a friend of Hilary’s who was also attending the conference.  DCI Nelson has to figure out what, if anything, a cult of the Virgin Mary has to do with the murders and/or the letters.  Also complicating the situation is that Nelson’s wife, Michelle, is assaulted by the murderer—leading to the revelation that she’s been having an affair with Tim, one of Nelson’s assistants.

Clearly, there’s a lot going on here.  Sadly, none of it has anything to do with archaeology, though Griffiths does gesture toward Ruth’s skills by having her dig around in a basement for some old artifacts.  While Ruth finds a clue that ends up being important to the case, she really doesn’t have much to do besides listen to Hilary’s worries and pass the information she learns along to Nelson.  Because of Michelle’s affair, Ruth and Nelson’s always awkward relationship gets even more awkward, and there’s some stuff here that I felt embarrassed to read.  It’s probably realistic, given that Nelson is married to Michelle and he and Ruth have a child together, but yikes!  The longer Griffiths drags that relationship on without some definite “we parent a shared child and nothing else” resolution, the less interested I get in reading these books.

The whole point of this series is supposed to be (I thought) that Ruth helps the police solve crimes by using her archaeology skills, and that didn’t happen here.  For me, this is the weakest entry in the series so far.  If there’s another new entry next year I’m sure I’ll read it, but if it’s not a stronger novel, I’ll no longer rush to read these right after they’re released.

Book Review: The Moonlit Garden by Corina Bomann

The Moonlit Garden

By Corina Bomann (translated by Alison Layland) 
Published by AmazonCrossing and Sold by Amazon Digital Services, February 2016
Free as part of Amazon’s Kindle First program for Prime members 
Link: Amazon 
Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed this book quite a bit.  In fact, it might be my favorite Kindle First selection (certainly my favorite in some time).  It’s the kind of book I tend to enjoy anyway, as it moves back and forth between a present day story and a historical story related to a mystery the present-day characters are trying to solve.  The story begins when Lily Kaiser, a young, widowed antique dealer in present-day Berlin, receives a violin from a mysterious man who tells her it belongs to her.  In the lining, she finds a piece of sheet music, which takes her on a quest to England and then to Sumatra in search of the music’s origins and the reasons why she was given the violin.

The historical plots concern the violin’s two most famous owners, Rose and Helen, both of whom are child prodigies born on Sumatra who go to England for training and later become famous violinists.  Both women’s careers end in tragedy (that’s not a spoiler; we find out very early on), so the story isn’t terribly happy, but it’s certainly engaging.  The Moonlit Garden was a page-turner, in fact, as I followed Lily’s quest to discover what happened to Rose and Helen.

There were, however, a few things that didn’t quite work.  The first concerns the piece of sheet music.  That mystery drives the rest of the plot, but its resolution was unsatisfying.  I also found some other aspects of the book’s ending to be either unbelievable or so predictable that I rolled my eyes.  The writing is, in general, fine.  Bomann keeps up the tension pretty well, and since this is a translation (from German), it’s hard to judge the prose.  However, I was always aware that it’s a translation, insofar as characters’ language choices often didn’t seem natural and a lot of the wording just doesn’t quite “fit.”

What made me enjoy the novel in spite of its weaknesses was the way I came to care for the characters.  I wanted Lily to find out why she got the violin and I wanted to know what exactly happened to Rose and Helen.  I even got mildly interested in the present-day romance plot, once Bomann gave up pushing the “Lily is widowed and needs to learn to love again” plot point.  The relationship happened pretty organically once it got started, and they didn’t rush into a happily ever after ending that may or may not be feasible.  I appreciated that the characters were adults with lives that included romance but didn’t exclude everything else.

  

On the whole The Moonlit Garden isn’t great literature, but it’s fun.

Book Review: The Evening Spider by Emily Arsenault

The Evening Spider

By Emily Arsenault

Published by William Morrow and Sold by HarperCollins, January 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed Arsenault’s latest more than any of her other books.  I haven’t read her first novel, The Broken Teaglass, but I have read the other three (What Strange Creatures, In Search of the Rose Notes, and Miss Me When I’m Gone).  Obviously, I liked each of the above three enough to read the next, but I can’t say I’ve found her books to be must-reads.  In fact, I probably wouldn’t have read Rose Notes or Miss Me had they not been marked way down, and wouldn’t have bought The Evening Spider when I did had it not been on sale for 99 cents.  On the whole, I’d describe Arsenault’s writing as Domestic Suspense.  Her young(ish), female, main characters are usually solving some mystery that directly effects them and their daily lives.  This is fine, but both Rose Notes and Miss Me suffered from flat plots that (too me) petered out, and the resolution to What Strange Creatures was melodramatic enough that it bothered me (also, I guessed the culprit very early on, which always cuts into my enjoyment of a mystery).  But, like I said above, I really enjoyed The Evening Spider.

The story alternates between the present and 1885.  In the present-day story, young mother Abby suspects that her house is haunted and that the ghost is trying to harm her young daughter.  In 1885, Frances, also a relatively new mother, becomes obsessed with a murder that took place near her Connecticut home.  Both stories are told in the first person; Abby’s is a standard first-person narrative, but Frances’s unfolds as she tells her twin brother the story of how she ended up in a mental hospital.  The latter narrative strategy is highly effective.  I really wanted to know what happened to Frances.  So does Abby, who finds Frances’s journal and becomes convinced that her fate is somehow tied to the earlier woman’s.

The story is told in short chapters alternating between Abby’s perspective and Frances’s narrative with, for a while, sections of Frances’s journal.  Short chapters keep it moving and kept me reading, sometimes to the detriment of my sleep schedule.  Since Abby’s story is all about finding out what happens to Frances, we accompany her on her journey—but we know more than she does, which is sometimes frustrating (in a good way—we’re frustrated for Abby, not with Arsenault).  The stakes for Frances are much higher than those for Abby.  While Abby is unsettled by what’s going on in her house, she’s not actually in personal danger from it, and most of the danger Frances is in comes from her historical circumstances.  That is, Frances can end up in a mental hospital because her husband finds her inconvenient, and we know very well that nothing like that is going to happen to Abby.

My one problem with this book is that it doesn’t always seem to recognize that the stakes for Abby just aren’t as high as the stakes for Frances.  Maybe my problem with that is that I have a hard time buying that supernatural forces are an actual danger to anyone, even in fiction, but it does mean that the conclusion of the present-day story is a little underwhelming.  There’s simply nothing to really resolve, while the nineteenth-century story has a satisfying and logical conclusion.  Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot and would recommend it for fans of historical fiction and mysteries.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 2

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for episodes 4-5 of US Season Three.  Here’s a link to all previous posts in the series (in reverse order).

Ah, Season 3, we hardly knew you!  It’s only two episodes shorter than Season 2, but the difference feels much greater for some reason.  These two episodes bring us five murders.  One victim is an undergrad, one is a faculty member (of sorts), and three are unaffiliated with the university.  There are no university-affiliated murderers here, but the events of both episodes have everything to do with the victims and/or murderer’s college days.  This theme of the past coming back to haunt you is very prevalent here and episode 3.5, in particular, is very creepy in that regard.

Season 3 brings us a total of thirteen victims (two episodes have three victims instead of the usual two).  Of those, one is an undergrad, three are faculty, one is an administrator, and one is staff.  The remaining seven (just over 50%) are unaffiliated with the university.  Of the six murders (episode 3.5 has two), only one, a staff member, is university-affiliated.  I have to say, season three suggests that the university is a pretty dangerous place, but not because of those who work and go to school there!  You’re much more likely to be killed by someone outside the university than someone within it, and employees are in a lot more danger than students this season.  Also, I’m curious to rewatch seasons 5-7, because I remember thinking that there were quite a few grad students murdered on this show, and to this point not a single one has met his or her end at the hands of one of Oxford’s many deranged killers.  Maybe it’s just that grad school feels so deadly that one assumes that on a show like this, it must be.  Hmmm…  Anyway, Season Three suggests that while it’s probably safe to go to school at Oxford, you might want to think twice about working there, and watch out for your old college friends.

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s the Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime if you have it.

Details for Episodes 3.4-3.5 below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 1

Special Series: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 1

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for episodes 1-3 of US Season Two.  All previous posts in the series (in reverse order).

I’m back, after an unanticipated hiatus induced by a combination of novel-writing, family insanity, and other things, and I have for you another Lewis post.  Season 3 is shorter than Season 2—five episodes—so I’ll break it down into two posts.  This post covers episodes 1-3, and I’ll cover episodes 4-5 in the next installment.

Having gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s move on to the season!  We have a total of eight victims in these episodes, of whom four are in some way directly affiliated with the university.  None are students, but two are faculty, one is an administrator, and the fourth is, nominally at least, staff.  Of a total of three murderers, one is staff and two are unaffiliated.  So, once again, Oxford is more dangerous to academics than in danger from them.

I’d forgotten until this rewatch how many of my favorite episodes are in Season 3.  We have rockstars, war reenactors, and a community orchestra, and we learn about both Hathaway and the M.E., Dr. Laura Hobson.  Also, I’ve learned since my last Lewis post that there are new episodes airing in Britain, as we speak.  We should have them here at some point (I’m looking at you, PBS), so there’s even more deadly fun ahead.  But, without further ado, onward to the Season 3 details!

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s the Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime if you have it.

Details for Episodes 3.1-3.3 below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Book Review: The Lake House by Kate Morton

The Lake House

By Kate Morton

Published by Atria Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, October 20, 2015

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

So I love Kate Morton’s work.  Every time I hear she’s going to release a new book, I get excited.  I’m always torn over whether to get the book as soon as it comes out and read it in bits and pieces as I have time or to wait until I have a free weekend and can seclude myself with the book and some snacks.  This time, I chose option A, not having a free weekend in the immediate future.  I think I’m glad I did.

Like all Morton books, The Lake House has two intertwined narratives, one from the present and one from the past.  In this book, the present-day (well, 2003) story concerns Sadie Sparrow, a London police detective who, after a case goes badly wrong, goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandfather.  While there, she stumbles across an old, abandoned estate and discovers that the family who lived there left the property after their baby son was kidnapped and never found.  As you can probably guess, the past (1933) story concerns what really happened the night Theo Edevane was kidnapped.  Theo’s older sister, Alice, who is a successful detective novelist, also plays a significant role in both stories.

I think I’ve mentioned that books like this, which move back and forth between the present and the past, are some of my favorites to read.  Usually in books like this I prefer one story or the other, and with Morton, that’s usually the past story.  This time, I found both narratives equally convincing and enjoyable, and I particularly liked seeing how Alice developed from the young girl in 1933 to the acerbic novelist in 2003.  As I progressed from the beginning to the middle of this book, past red herrings and false leads and alongside likable, human characters, I thought, “This is great!  I’ll finally be able to give a book five stars on the blog!”

Alas, it was not to be, and the ending is the reason why.  I had it figured out long before I finished the book, and when I first thought of it I dismissed it:  “No, she wouldn’t be that obvious, or that trite.”  Well, she was, and I was quite disappointed.  So disappointed, in fact, that I almost knocked the book down to three stars, or maybe three and a half (now that Miss Fisher has induced the half star ratings).  Then I remembered how much I enjoyed reading most of the book, and decided four was the way to go.  And now that I think about it, I was disappointed with the end of The Secret Keeper, too, after staying up way too late to finish it one night several years ago.  The Forgotten Garden thus remains, for now, my favorite Morton.

As you can see from the sidebar, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year, and since I’m writing historical fiction I’m doing quite a bit of research reading, so this may be the last book review I post for a bit.  We shall see.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 2 Part 3

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for episodes 6-7 of US Season Two.  Previous posts in the series: Intro, Season One, Season 2 Part 1, Season 2 Part 2.

 The final two episodes of Season 2 give us one undergraduate victim, three community victims (one an Oxford alum, though), and two—yes, two—faculty murderers (one for each episode).  So we’re back to the Season One problem, it would seem, insofar as Oxford is in more danger from academics than it is a danger to academics.  If it’s any comfort (and I’m not sure it is!), only in “The Quality of Mercy” do the murders directly relate to university life; in “The Point of Vanishing,” the murderer is just a murderer who happens to have “professor” as his job title.

As this is the last season 2 post, it’s time for some overall season totals.  Over seven episodes, we have fifteen victims (only episode 2.3 breaks the “two victims per episode” norm).  Three of those victims are undergrads, two are faculty, three are administrators, one is staff, and six are unaffiliated with the university.  Of eight murderers, four are faculty members (two in episode 2.1, remember) and four are unaffiliated with the university.  A variety of faculty, staff, and students assist Lewis and Hathaway in their investigations, so the university isn’t all bad for the community, but I have to admit that these episodes make faculty look pretty scary.  It’s even more worrying to this humanist that three quarters of the faculty murderers are in the humanities.  And we like to think our fields of study improve our behavior toward our fellow humans!  The good news, I guess, is that while grad school often feels like a kill-or-be-killed kind of world, not one grad student has done either—yet (though to be fair it’s kind of a grad student’s fault that everything goes so badly wrong in “The Quality of Mercy”).

If you haven't seen the season, here's the Amazon link.  It's included with Prime, if you have it.

Details for Episodes 2.6 and 2.7 below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 2 Part 2

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for episodes 4-5 of US Season Two.  Here's the Intro post; here's the Season One breakdown; and here’s the first three episodes of Season 2.

In the first three episodes of season 2, things look pretty grim for Oxford faculty, staff, students and administrators.  We have victims in all four categories, and two faculty murderers.  Thus far in Season 2, undergrads aren’t as dangerous as they are in Season 1, but the community of Oxford is still pretty dangerous, what with all the murderous ex-Communists and, in these episodes, vengeful parents running around.

Episodes 4 and 5 contain a total of four victims (two in each episode).  Only one—a faculty member—is a member of the university community at the time of his death, but most of the murders connect to Oxford U in some way.  Neither of two murderers is directly affiliated with the University.  These episodes suggest that you can’t escape your past (even by becoming an English professor).  Your high school and college days may or may not be the best of your life, in other words, but they will haunt you forever whether you like it or not.

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime, if you have it.

Episode-by-episode details below the cut.  Contains Spoilers.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 2 Part 1

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for the first three episodes of US Season Two.  Here's the Intro post; here's the Season One breakdown.

My Miss Fisher-induced euphoria cased me to neglect my favorite British inspector, but have no fear, I have not forgotten my commitment to assessing the dangers of Oxford for academics and would-be academics.  Season Two of Inspector Lewis is inexplicably long.  At seven episodes, I believe it’s the longest season of the series.  In fact, I think it might have been two different “series” (seasons) in Britain that were combined into one for us Americans—so maybe not “inexplicably” long, but long.  For that reason, I’m breaking the season in to three posts, covering episodes 1-3, 4-5, and 6-7.  Onward with the first installment!

While Season One had only 25% university victims, in Season Two things are looking a little bleaker for academics, at least in the first few episodes.  We have, in total, seven murder victims (plus a suicide) and four murderers.  Two victims are undergrads, one is faculty, one is a staff member, and three (count them, three! And all in one episode!) are administrators.  That means all the victims are affiliated with Oxford University in some fashion.  Two murderers are faculty members, and the other two are unaffiliated community members, though one is the parent of an undergrad.  So, Oxford University is definitely a dangerous place to work or study, and the town/gown issues dwarf those in most US university towns!  It’s far from certain that you’ll die in Oxford, but you might want to invest in some Mace or something.

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime, if you have it.

Episode-by-episode details below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Review: The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley

The Dead Key 
By D.M. Pulley 
Published by Thomas and Mercer (an Amazon imprint), 2015
Free as part of Amazon Kindle First for Prime members 
Link: Amazon 
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed the The Dead Key more than any Kindle First book I’ve read since joining Prime a year or so ago (I should note that they tend to sit unread on my Kindle for longer than other books, since they’re free).  It had a lot going for it, in my, erm, book: it’s a mystery, it centers on two female protagonists, and it moves back and forth between two connected stories set twenty years apart.  In spite of a slow start, I was drawn into the story and by halfway through, I had trouble putting the book down.

The more recent (1998) story focuses on Iris, a young engineer assigned to draw plans of the defunct First Bank of Cleveland (FBoC).  Iris discovers that the bank had suddenly shut down twenty years before and that the vault is full of unclaimed safety deposit boxes.  Why?  And what does the FBoC’s closure have to do with Iris’s engineering firm?  This is what Iris wants to find out.  We also follow the adventures of Beatrice Baker, who in 1978 goes to work at the FBoC and uncovers a web of intrigue, fraud, and corruption, some of which concerns her personally.  By the novel’s end, both women face serious danger.  Will they survive?

Overall, I found myself drawn more to Beatrice than to Iris.  Beatrice is very young—only sixteen—and has to lie about her age to get her job at the bank.  While we eventually find out why she did this, I’d like to have learned more about her background.  She’s vulnerable and sweet but not stupid, and I found her interesting.  Iris, on the other hand, is harder to root for.  She drinks a lot and, while she recognizes that it’s a problem, she doesn’t seek help and even drives drunk.  Because her drinking seemed like a plot device and an afterthought more than a trait that drives her character, this got in the way of her likability for me.  I still found her story interesting, but that was more because of the situation in which she found herself than because I cared about her personally.

I’m a big fan of books that combine a present-day story with a historical story (though it’s hard to call 1998 “present-day” and I’m sure my parents would object to the labeling of 1978 as “historical”).  It’s easy to do this badly, but Pulley handles the dual plots quite well, keeping up the tension in both and making it clear from the beginning how they relate.  The plotting and storytelling are excellent, and overall I enjoyed this book very much and would read more of the author’s work.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis, the Academic Body Count, Season 1

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for Season (series, if you're British) One.  Here's the Intro post, if you missed it.

In the first season of Lewis, the university remains fairly safe.  Of eight murder victims, only one is a faculty member, and one is an undergrad.  No staff, administrators, or grad students are murdered.  However, the community of Oxford is not necessarily safe from the university; taking into account the past murder in “Whom the Gods Would Destroy,” we have a grand total of five undergraduate murderers (out of eight murderers total; the past murder in “Whom the Gods…” was a team effort).  Both “Whom the Gods Would Destroy” and “Expiation” feature professors who assist Lewis and Hathaway in their investigations, so the university isn’t a complete drain on the surrounding community, but (as you may know if you’ve ever lived in a university town), it’s wise to be wary of the undergrads. 

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s the Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime, if you have it.

Episode-by-episode details below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Intro

If you’re a fan of mysteries, you might well watch PBS’s Mystery (does anyone who’s not a fan of mysteries watch that show?  If so, why?).  If you watch Mystery, there’s a good chance you’ve seen at least some of Inspector Lewis, which chronicles the crime-solving adventures of DI Robert Lewis.  Lewis might be my favorite British TV mystery franchise, and the title character is certainly my favorite British TV police inspector.  This blog series won’t review Lewis, exactly.  Rather, it will analyze a particular aspect of the show: its relationship to academia.

Of course, Lewis is set in Oxford, England, home of the one of the world’s most famous and prestigious universities, so the crimes Lewis and his “dishy sergeant” Hathaway solve often involve students, faculty, and staff.  In fact, according to Lewis, Oxford is a very dangerous place to study or teach. 

But how dangerous, exactly, and for whom?  Should you give up all hope of that most prestigious of degrees or jobs if you wish to remain alive?  Are students or faculty more likely to be killed?  And what about staff and administrators?  And who among your university acquaintances is most likely to kill you?  Clearly, there are a lot of questions to be answered, here, and in the coming weeks, The Mysterious Scholar will break down the numbers and let you know who, in Lewis’s world, is most likely to be murdered and, even more importantly, whom to watch out for.

Note: This series of posts will contain spoilers for Inspector Lewis.  I’ll tell you who died and reveal the identity of the killer.  If you haven’t seen the show or a particular season/episode and plan to, I recommend watching it before you read.  The whole show is available with Amazon Prime streaming.  If you’re not a Prime member, you can get it electronically or on DVD at Amazon or from your preferred video source.  Also, I’ll be using the American series breaks and numbering, which are for some reason different from the original British ones.

Review: The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman

The Angel of Losses

By Stephanie Feldman
Published by Ecco, and distributed by HarperCollins  (2014)
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I very much enjoyed this book, even though it isn’t the kind of thing I normally read (it was another Amazon sale book—an August monthly deal, I believe).  It’s not the kind of thing I’ll normally review here, either, but I’m doing so because there’s an academic connection.  The Angel of Losses is a Jewish magical realist narrative about family, faith, and the enduring power of stories.  It is very well written and compelling, but the narrative style might not be for everyone; Feldman intersperses her first-person narration set in the present day with folk tales as written down in the main character’s grandfather’s notebooks, and some readers might find this cumbersome or confusing.

The main story in The Angel of Losses follows Marjorie, a grad student in English who is writing her dissertation on the Wandering Jew.  Marjorie’s sister, Holly/Chava, to whom she used to be very close, converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married a man from the obscure Berukhim sect, and there has been a rift between the sisters ever since.  Marjorie desperately wants to feel close to Holly/Chava again, but she doesn’t like her sister’s husband, Nathan.  When she discovers that their grandfather concealed important parts of his past, Marjorie embarks on a quest to discover the truth, hoping that the information she finds will help her reconcile with her sister.

This isn’t really an academic novel.  Marjorie’s status as a grad student is important because her personal quest connects to her academic work, but the story centers on family and folk tales.  I really appreciated how positive the novel was about literary study, though.  At one point, Marjorie thinks, “Theory was killing literature, people said, but it had allowed me to see a whole subterranean world: every text meant something profound, if you would only follow it into the dark” (63).  The texts she follows into the dark aren’t literary classics but her grandfather’s notebooks, which contain stories of a magical White Rebbe, but Marjorie nonetheless uses her analytical skills to discover the stories’ meaning.  She also meets and dates a librarian who is working on a digital map of the Jewish diaspora, and digital humanities wind up being crucial to the plot.

For the most part, this is a very good story about family, especially the relationship between sisters.  There are some elements of fantasy; Feldman writes squarely in the magical realist tradition.  In some books, this bugs me, but I was able to accept the fantastic elements of The Angel of Losses without much difficulty.  The novel also deals with some fairly obscure aspects of Judaism, but Feldman handles these pretty well.  Marjorie isn’t Jewish, and since we follow the story mostly from her perspective, we discover what she discovers and learn alongside her.  Overall, this is an accessible, enjoyable novel, and I recommend it.

Review: The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

The Surgeon (Rizzoli and Isles Book #1)

By Tess Gerritsen 

Published by Ballantine and distributed by Random House (2001)

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's
Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

Gerritsen is a great storyteller, and this book kept me hooked in spite of the fact that it has a couple of traits I don’t usually enjoy.  I read it because I like the TNT series Rizzoli and Isles and the book happened to be on sale for $2.99 for Kindle (sadly, the sale is over now).  If both of those things hadn’t been true, I probably wouldn’t have read it because it’s a serial killer book with a healthy medical component (pardon the... humor) and I don’t particularly enjoy serial killer stories or do well with gross things.  I don’t at all regret picking this up, though.

The novel follows Detectives Jane Rizzoli and Thomas Moore as they track a serial killer dubbed “The Surgeon” who is preying on vulnerable women in Boston.  Because the killer appears to be a copycat of a killer who went on a spree in Georgia a few years earlier, they enlist the help of Dr. Catherine Cordell, the last victim and apparent slayer of the Georgia killer.  As the Surgeon terrorizes Boston women in general and Dr. Cordell in particular, the detectives realize that there may be some unanswered questions about the Georgia killings.  Dr. Cordell has the answers, but they have to keep her safe from the Surgeon if she is to help catch him.

The book is suspenseful and gripping, and if you're a fan of the serial killer subgenre I suspect it’s an excellent read.  There are a lot of blood and guts, both plot-related and not; Gerritsen is a former doctor, Cordell is a surgeon, and the killer is a pseudo-surgeon, so the author has the expertise to describe the inner workings of the human body in detail and her story gives her ample opportunity to do so.  If you’re easily grossed out (I’m not ashamed to admit I am) you’ll want to skim some sections.

It’s important not to go into this book expecting it to be much like Rizzoli and Isles the TV show.  Maura Isles is not in the book, and while Jane Rizzoli is a central character, she’s not the only one—Moore and Cordell also play significant roles.  The TV show’s warm depiction of female friendship is completely absent here (maybe it shows up in later books?) and Rizzoli’s family is hardly the quirky, lovable crew we see on TV.  On its own merits The Surgeon is a good book, though unnecessarily frequent and graphic descriptions of violence, including sexual violence, and surgery undermined my enjoyment somewhat.