A Great Reckoning: Louise Penny

Louise Penny's Armand Gamache series is now up to 19 books, with the latest book due to be published October 29, 2024. When I began reading the series, it was primarily a police procedural series, with Gamache as a Chief Inspector of the Surêté du Québec. 

This book is the 12th in the series, and in a previous book in the series, Gamache left his position as head of homicide. At least two of the books after that focus on mysteries not related to Gamache's role as a policeman. But both he and his wife knew that he would someday look for a new career and return to active work. At the beginning of this story, Gamache has made that decision and accepted an offer to become the head of the Sûreté Academy. In the past, the Sûreté had become filled with corrupt officials and the Academy still shows the results of that influence. Gamache hopes to correct that, but he knows it will take time.

Thus this book is primarily set at the Sûreté Academy, and that is an interesting setting. But Armand and his wife Reine-Marie now live in Three Pines, so a good amount of time is also spent there. I like the books no matter where they are set, but when they are in Three Pines, it means that some of the interesting characters who live there will be featured: Ruth, Clara, Olivier and Gabriel, and Myrna at the bookstore.

Not long after Gamache comes to the Academy in his new position, an instructor at the Academy is killed. And Gamache is one of the suspects, although no one believes that it could be him. Clearly Gamache cannot run the investigation of the crime, but he is involved in the investigation as much as possible. 

There are several smaller mysteries in this story. One is why Gamache decided to approve Amelia Choquet for admission to the academy. She is a misfit, has been in trouble with the law and has obvious tattoos and piercings. He obviously feels some connection to her. 

There is another mystery around an old map found in the walls of Olivier and Gabriel's bistro in Three Pines. It turns out to be an orienteering map; some cadets from the Academy and the residents of Three Pines work together to figure out its origins.

At this point in the series, I have a hard time reviewing the books because going into much detail can spoil plot points of earlier books in the series. I also think that reading the books in order is important because some of characters just seem needlessly quirky and irritating without know some of their background.

The mysteries in this series are always rewarding. Usually very complex and sometimes circuitous and perplexing, they keep me guessing. I never even came close to suspecting the perpetrator in this book.

Louise Penny is very good at creating characters we want to read about. She also continues to develop the characters, both the main characters and the continuing secondary characters in Three Pines. It is hard to look back and compare all the books, but I think this is my favorite book so far. 

See other reviews at Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan and Mysteries in Paradise.

 -----------------------------
Publisher:   Minotaur Books, 2016 
Length:      386 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Armand Gamache, #12
Setting:      Quebec, Canada
Genre:        Police Procedural
Source:      I purchased this book.

Short Story Wednesday: Fantasy and Science Fiction

At the Planned Parenthood Book Sale last year, I found two groups of science fiction and fantasy magazines tied together, for sale for a few dollars per bundle. This week I pulled out one of those and read some stories from it.

These stories come from the October/November 2000 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. 

"Dreamseed" by Carolyn Ives Gilman

This is a novelette about the discovery of a young man found in a box in a warehouse, hidden there for fifteen years, placed in a induced state of perpetual sleep. His name is Aspen, and he is the son of Dr. Semic, who developed a theory of dreams and how people could share dreams and develop realities in their sleep. But while Aspen has been dreaming all these years the world has been taken over by a contagion that has caused conflict between different groups. 

This was my first story by Gilman, but I am definitely interested in reading more by her. Per Goodreads, in her professional career, "Gilman is a historian specializing in 18th and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history."

"The Devil Disinvests" by Scott Bradfield

A very fun short story in which the Devil decides to leave his business of torturing and bartering for souls and live a normal life in a beachfront cottage in California. He falls in love, marries, and has two kids. One of his disgruntled ex-employees comes back for revenge.

"Earth's Blood" by Kate Wilhelm

This is the story I was most interested in. Kate Wilhelm has written two mystery series and many stand alone novels in the mystery and science fiction genres. She was married to Damon Knight, also a very well-known author of science fiction. Yet this is the first piece of writing I have read by Kate Wilhelm. Kate Wilhelm's fiction was first recommended to me by Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom.

"Earth's Blood", a novelette, did not disappoint. The protagonist is a down on his luck photographer who picks up a low-paying job to scout for a suitable location for a low-budget horror story. He is looking for a ghost town with a good setting. The build-up seems like the story will be about ghosts and horror, but the plot goes in a different direction. The story has lots of depth and detail and a great ending.

"Magic, Maples and Maryanne" by Robert Sheckley

This was another humorous short story, about a man who worked in a department store and practiced magic at night, alone in his home. The floor manager at the department store catches him doing some magic at work, and persuades him to let a few friends make some money on the magic.

"Auspicious Eggs" by James Morrow

This is a much darker story, a novelette that mixes technology, religious beliefs, and reproductive rights and ends up being a very uncomfortable story. Interesting but I would not want to read it again.

My Ántonia: Willa Cather

 

This is the first book I have read by Willa Cather and I now understand why other readers are so effusive in their praise for the book. The book was published in 1918 and begins in the 1890s, at a period when immigrant families were settling on homesteads on the prairies.

The story focuses primarily on Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrant parents who have settled on a farm on the Nebraska prairies. The Shimerda family doesn't have much money and suffer from inadequate shelter and food the first year they are at the farm. The nearest family is the Burdens. Jim Burden arrived in Nebraska on the same train as Ántonia and her family. His parents had both died in the previous year, and his cousins sent him to live with his grandparents. The house the Burdens live in is a wooden frame house, with a basement, and a floor and a half built above the basement. The Shimerda's home is basically a cave in the earth, but they hope to eventually build a house to take its place. The Burdens are the Shimerda's closest neighbors and they try to help the Bohemian family as much as possible.

There are so many interesting aspects to this book that I could never cover them all. The descriptions of backbreaking work on a farm; the difficulties of the immigrants, most of which cannot speak much English; life on the prairies and in the small towns. Ántonia is a girl full of life; she and Jim have adventures while still on the farm, and develop a lifelong friendship. He would like their relationship to be more than that.

The story is narrated by Jim Burden starting when he is about ten and meets Ántonia and her family. He likes Ántonia immediately and volunteers to teach her to read. Both Ántonia and Jim have to do work on their farms, but Ántonia must contribute much more just to help her family survive. As she grows older she takes on more and more of the heavy farm work, trying to compete with her older brother Ambrosch. 

A few years later the Burdens move to Black Hawk, buying a house and renting their farm. Jim's grandparents want him to go to school. Mrs. Burden worries about Ántonia laboring on the farm, and finds her a place to work as a housekeeper with one of their neighbors. This brings positive changes into Antonia's life. 

The book is divided into five sections. Book I is "The Shimerdas"; Book II is "The Hired Girls"; Book III is "Lena Lingard"; Book IV is "The Pioneer Woman's Story"; and Book V is "Cuzak's Boys". After the first longer section dealing with the years that the Shimerdas and the Burdens are neighbors out on the prairie, the following sections are vignettes that follow portions of Jim's and Ántonia's lives after adulthood.

In "The Hired Girls", various of the immigrant farm girls are hired by families in Black Hawk, the nearby town, and learn new skills and make their own way in the world. 

Book III follows the career of Lena Lingard, a Norwegian immigrant who has learned dressmaking skills and has set up a shop in Black Hawk. She is a liberated woman who is not interested in marriage or a family, and plays a big part in Jim's development. This was one of my favorite parts of the book and Lena is a wonderful character. 

"The Pioneer Woman's Story" is very brief and brings Jim and the reader up to date on Antonia's life at that point. I was not prepared for how emotionally I would react to the last section, "Cuzak's Boys", when Jim sees Ántonia for the first time in many years.

As I noted above, there are many things I loved about this book. This was set in an area and a time that I have little experience or knowledge about. But the best parts were how well all of the characters are described and developed throughout the book; and the beauty of the writing and the descriptions of nature.

Short Story Wednesday: Stories from Fire Watch by Connie Willis

 

Back in August 2022, I read the novelette, "Fire Watch," by Connie Willis. It was published in a collection with the same title, and was part of the same universe as Willis's Oxford Time Travel series: Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1995), Blackout (2010), and All Clear (2010). I liked "Fire Watch" a lot but I did think that it might not be too clear if the reader had not read at least one of the books in her time travel series.

After reading an additional three stories from Fire Watch last week, I hesitated to write a post about them. Mainly because I found the stories confusing, and two of them I did not really understand at all. 

"Service for the Burial of the Dead"

This one was pretty good. It is a ghost story, set in the 1800s (I am guessing). A young woman is shunned by her neighbors because she has had an affair with a young man. He dies and she dares to attend the funeral. Embarrassed, she leaves the chapel and goes into a room nearby. To her surprise her lover is there, and says he won't reveal himself to any one else until the father of his fiancee settles his debts. The story is somewhat open ended.

"Lost and Found"

An apocalyptic story about cults and the state stealing treasures from the churches. It isn't that this story is totally unclear, it is more that I wanted some more concrete information on what is going on.

"All My Darling Daughters"

This story was long and very icky, but I could not stop reading it. I was hoping there would be some resolution that would make it worth reading. It is science fiction and it concerns a school (on a large space craft). It was about sex and fathers and implied rape and incest. Some reviewers loved this story and others hated it, so don't take my reaction too seriously.

"Blued Moon"

I did not want to give up on the stories in this book and only report on ones that I had mixed reactions to. The fourth story I read was "Blued Moon." It was a highly recommended story by Willis. It was undoubtedly the best story of these four. It is a romantic comedy and a fun and humorous read. It involves a project to restore the ozone layer, which may or may not have disastrous results.

There are seven more stories left in this book and I will persevere,  plus I have two more books of Willis's short stories to read.

Two Novels by Raymond Chandler

 

Raymond Chandler is a very well-known and highly regarded author of hard-boiled mysteries featuring Philip Marlowe. He was also a major influence on future writers in that subgenre. I have read five of the Philip Marlowe novels and I rate all of them very highly. However, it is not the mystery plots that keep me coming back, it is Chandler's writing style that I love.

The Lady in the Lake

Philip Marlowe, a private detective with an office in Hollywood, is hired by Derace Kingsley to find his wife, who has been missing for about a month. The marriage was on shaky ground anyway, and he had received a telegram that she was going to Mexico to get a divorce and marry another man, Chris Lavery. Then a few weeks later, he is told that her car had been left unclaimed at a San Bernardino hotel. He is mostly concerned that she is going to cause some kind of scandal and he will lose his job. 

The plot does get very complex. Kingsley has a cabin on a private lake in the mountains near San Bernardino. Bill Chess is the caretaker for the cabins on the lake; his wife, Muriel, left him about the same time Kingsley's wife supposedly left for Mexico. When Marlowe goes to the lake to interview Chess, they find a decomposed dead body in the lake. Chess assumes it is his wife. There are many characters involved, and an excess of suspects. 

In addition to the beautiful writing and the terrific dialogue, there were several appealing things about The Lady in the Lake. The book was published in 1943, and it was written after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The US was involved in World War II and there is evidence of this throughout the book. This book also seemed to have more humor than other books in the series.

The edition above of The Lady in the Lake is my favorite. It has cover art by Tom Adams, who also illustrated the covers for many paperback editions of Agatha Cristie's mysteries. 

The Long Goodbye

I read The Long Goodbye over two years ago, in 2022. I didn't write a full review at the time and I decided this would be a good time to review it.

In this book Philip Marlow gets involved with two very messed-up men, both alcoholics. Terry Lennox hires Marlowe to drive him to Mexico, no questions asked, and Marlowe goes along with it, because he trusts Lennox. When he gets back to L.A. he finds that Lennox's wife is dead and the police think that Lennox killed her. Following this, Marlowe is hired to find a once successful author, Roger Wade, who has been missing for three days. He finds him and returns him to his wife at their beach house. They want Marlowe to stay with them and keep Wade sober and working on his book. Marlowe doesn't want to get involved with that situation but he keeps getting dragged back into it. That doesn't sound like a complex story but there are many characters, and the two "cases" start to merge. 

These are my notes from two years ago shortly after I read the book:

The writing is beautiful. The reading experience was wonderful, even if the plot confused me (and defies description without spoiling the story). This seemed very different from the first three books. Marlowe never has a real client in this one. He tries to help two different people, over several months time, and neither one seems to deserve his help. The whole experience seems aimless but all the threads come together in the end, with some surprises. 

The Long Goodbye was published in 1953, 10 years after The Lady in the Lake was published. It is the 6th book in the series. 

Short Story Wednesday: "Scribbling" by Helen DeWitt

"Scribbling" by Helen DeWitt was published in the July 18, 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books. The story was fun to read but in the end I did not know what to think of it. It seemed to me to be full of whimsy, but whimsy has never really appealed to me, so why did I like it so much? It is impossible to describe adequately, and so short that I do not want to retell the story.

The premise:

A woman, Flip, is hounded by a New York agent to send him a manuscript. This irritates her husband to no end, and he is uncooperative in every way. Eventually she succeeds in sending a manuscript to get the agent off her back. The agent is thrilled and wants to discuss it. Through a series of mishaps, she finally gets to New York to meet the agent.  

I had to read the story twice, because the first time through I was trying to focus on the sequence of events, and there is much more to it than that. The next time through I focused on the writing style, which is a little over my head. I think I could re-read the story many times.

From the little I have read about Helen DeWitt, I understand that she has had problems with getting published; thus this story could certainly be poking fun at that process. 

If anyone can shed light on this story or other writing by Helen DeWitt, I would love more information on that subject.

Books Read in July 2024

 

I am so far behind on my monthly reading lists; I am writing this summary of July reading in early September. Looking back on July, there was a good bit of variety in my reading. Only three of the seven books I read were crime fiction, which is unusual. The five novels were from my 20 Books of Summer list but the two nonfiction books were not.

So here are the books I read in July...

Nonfiction / Books about Books

More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason (2005) by Nancy Pearl

This book is part of Nancy Pearl's Book Lust series, which includes Book Lust and Book Lust to Go. I have read all three of these books multiple times, and I believe this was my fourth time to read More Book Lust. One of the limitations of this book is that it was published almost 20 years ago and so could be considered out of date. For me, that doesn't matter, as I want to know about older authors as well as newer ones. The book is divided into various topics. Many of the topics include mystery and crime fiction suggestions, which I appreciate. And each time I reread the books, I discover new books and authors.

Nonfiction / Travel / Adventure

Lost Lands, Forgotten Stories (2002) Alexandra Pratt 

The subtitle of this book is "A Woman's Journey into the Heart of Labrador." Pratt describes a challenging canoeing expedition that she took with a native guide (of the Innu tribe) on a series of rivers in Labrador. It was an amazing journey. See my review.

Science Fiction

A Closed and Common Orbit (2016) by Becky Chambers

This is the second book in the Wayfarers series; the first two books are only loosely connected. The only characters shared between the two books are Pepper, an engineer, and Lovelace, an AI that ran the ship in the first book. I loved the writing and the story telling and the world building.

Fantasy

The Dead Fathers Club (2006) by Matt Haig

This is a modern retelling of Hamlet. The main character and narrator is 11-year-old Philip Noble whose father recently died in a car accident. I am not sure if it was aimed at adults or young adults, and I am still not sure what I think of it. I liked it, mostly, and it definitely wasn't boring. It was very funny at times and I was pleased with the ending.

Crime Fiction

A Cast of Falcons (2016) by Steve Burrows

Steve Burrows is a Canadian author and this was the first book I read for the Canadian Reading Challenge. A Cast of Falcons is the third book in Burrow's Birder Murder Mystery series. See my review.

War Game (1976) by Anthony Price

Anthony Price published 19 novels; all featured David Audley, a British spy during the Cold War. The focus in this espionage series is on characterization and intellect, not action, although there is some of that present. Most of the books in this series have historical events infused into a present day story (keeping in mind that they were written between 1970 and 1990). In Other Paths to Glory, which won the Gold Dagger in 1974, it was World War I and the battlefields of the Somme. In Colonel Butler's Wolf, the site of the story is Hadrian's Wall. War Game is the seventh book in the series and centers around the English Civil War and events in 1643. I love this series, but I need to read them closer together because I forget who the continuing characters are, except for David Audley.

Dark Fire (2004) by C.J. Sansom

This is a historical mystery set in London in 1540; it is the second book in a series of seven featuring lawyer Matthew Shardlake as the protagonist. In the first book, Dissolution, Shardlake was working for Thomas Cromwell, helping with the dissolution of the monasteries. In this book, it is three years later, and he is again working for Thomas Cromwell, this time under duress. See my review.

Currently reading

I am now reading The White Lioness by Henning Mankell, the 3rd book in the Wallander series. It was published in 1993. It is the story of a murder in Sweden that has its roots in South Africa, and it addresses the issues of Apartheid at that time.

 

The two photos at the top of the post were taken in our back fenced-in area in 2010. They are motivating me to spend more time cleaning up the back yard and potting up more plants. The photo immediately above is Rosie the cat, taken in 2013, the year that she came to live with us. Click on the images for best viewing quality.