Review: 'Death Overdue'

DEATH OVERDUE
By Mary Lou Kirwin
cozy mystery
November 2013
Gallery Books
ISBN: 9781451684667

Middle-aged Minnesota librarian Karen Nash had a dream come true in Killer Librarian, the opening book in this traditional mystery series by Mary Lou Kirwin. She went on the trip of a lifetime to England, even though the guy she was going to go with dumped her the day of the flight, flew over to London with a younger, prettier woman and ended up dead.

Still, it all worked out. Karen figured out who did in the guy who done her wrong and met the possible love of her life in Caldwell Perkins. He owns the B&B where she ended up staying on her first trip, but what his main passion is collecting books.

In this second entry in the series, Karen has returned to London while she and Caldwell figure out if they should merge their book collections, so to speak. He wants to sell the B&B and set up a bookshop, with Karen as his partner as well as signficant other.

But before they have even found a place to set up shop, Caldwell's past comes back at a most inopportune time. His former lover Sally Burroughs ditched him, leaving the B&B and disappearing for nearly seven years. Now she shows up with an Italian boyfriend, determined to make Caldwell buy her out.

Even while Caldwell and Karen are processing this information, former girlfriend Sally ends up under a bookcase that was toppled onto her. The coppers suspect both Karen and Caldwell, so mystery book lover Karen is determined to find out who really did Sally in to clear both of their names.

The mystery proceeds as an honest country house-style mystery in which a limited number of suspects, most seeming to have a motive to murder, are within cramped quarters. The B&B setting works very well to bring together Sally's new boyfriend, her sister, a book lover visiting London, the B&B's only employee, Caldwell and our heroine.

The whodunot is the strongest part of the novel. It would fit within the fair play rules set up by the Detection Club (including Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton and E.C. Bentley) and rolls along at a nice pace.

The author also shows her knowledge of classic crime fiction, weaving in information about Christie works and other tidbits without committing the faux pas of information dumps.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: '& Sons'

& SONS
By David Gilbert
Contemporary literary fiction
July 2013
Random House
ISBN: 9780812993967

Inferring, filling in the blanks, making connections and making meaning by inferring are what I use and what I gain from reading literary fiction. These same techniques are used by the characters in David Gilbert's & Sons as the basis of how they feel and what they base their decisions on. The results are not always predictable, but they do feel right within the context of this novel.

Gilbert's novel opens with a famed recluse of an author near the end of his days attending the funeral of his lifelong friend. It's a harrowing scene as one of the few times in this huge novel that the reader is inside A.N. Dyer's head. He's feeble in just about every aspect, and it's not his old friend who concerns him, it's his youngest son. Where is he? Where's Andy?

Teen-age Andy's outside the grand Manhattan church chain-smoking, looking for a woman he met online who promised to meet him. She works for his father's publisher and would love to be part of the great A.N. Dyer's world. Like all the other characters, these two will discover their importance to each other not as individuals, but as satellites in the great writer's orbit.

A.N. Dyer's first novel, Ampersand, is renowned and taught and read even on their own by succeeding generations. Dyer's sons include two with his former wife, grown men who have not quite become adults, and Andy, a younger son whose surprise existence ended Dyer's marriage and who may resemble his father far more than the average son. Dyer's apparent wish to be a better father to his youngest than he was to the first two boys -- or at least his obvious affection for this child -- both spurs several actions that dictate the destiny of characters and displays the ways in which fathers and sons let each other down.

Another once-young man, the son of Dyer's best friend whose funeral opens the novel, wishes he was Dyer's son. Phillip is both a bystander who reports incidents he shouldn't know about and a character that expresses the futility of yearning for something that will always be beyond one's reach. Neither aspect of this character is a detriment -- it all works.

Devastatingly, Gilbert reveals the significance of Dyer's first novel's title and how at least one of the next generation of characters has lived a lie when the story behind the novel is made clear. That novel, with its Exeter setting and student cruelty, is haunted by both A Separate Peace and The Secret History. This makes it one of those novels that don't exist but that you wish did.

The world of publishing is as important to the scope of the story as family ties. Gilbert's ability to bring to mind various segments of publishing in the 20th century and today, real novels and writers, and the compulsion of creative people to create are well-drawn.

The construction of the novel keeps the story from being the same-old, same-old tale of old man regret and young man sorrow born of broken promises and unfulfilled potential. For example, letters written through the years from Dyer to his friend Charles Henry Topping don't appear to say much when they appear at the beginning of the various sections, yet the cumulative effect is important to the Dyer story. The sections in which the two older Dyer sons are introduced could veer into sloppy Franzen territory but Gilbert keeps that from happening with active narratives that show, rather than tell, where the boys are coming from. They want to carry on the legacy but be their own men. And they don't wallow in their own emotional swamps.

What is revealed in the end is that, even more than fathers and sons who wish for more from each other, is the unapologetic heartlessness of the creative ones who greedily take from those who are not the artists. Those from whom they take and those to whom they give are not always the same people. And feelings have little to do with it. All that is left are the works that have been taken from others' lives. Fittingly, Phillip uses the story of the Dyers to convey what his life has been like and leaves the reader to infer what will become of him next.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Counting by 7s'

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews

COUNTING BY 7s
By Holly Goldberg Sloan
Middle grade contemporary realistic fiction
August 2013
Dial Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780803738553

Willow Chance is a quirky genius of a 12-year-old whose adopted parents know how to nurture her talents and interests. They die in a car crash at the start of this novel. Willow doesn't have any other family.

What she does have are two teens she met when sent to a school counselor (her teacher didn't believe she could ace the standardized tests so quickly so must be cheating somehow), their Vietnamese mother, the inept counselor himself and a taxi driver.

Willow's voice works in the sections where she describes the world through her own perspective, because the author is talented enough to show us both Willow's perspective and the way other people would see what is happening.

But the novel doesn't work as well as a story for younger people, because the most interesting characters are the adults. They're the ones who grow and change under Willow's influence. Looking at the novel as a reader, it was enjoyable enough. But looking at the novel as a middle school librarian, it would be difficult to justify spending money in these days of vastly reduced budgets on a book that adults would like more than students.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: Wilkie Collins

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I've read this week, presented without further commentary:

It only remains to be added, that 'the person chiefly concerned' in Miss Clack's narrative, is happy enough at the present moment, not only to brave the smartest exercise of Miss Clack's pen, but even to recognize its unquestionable value as an instrument for the exhibition of Miss Clack's character.

-- Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

Sunday Sentence: David Gilbert

Inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, and presented without commentary or context, the best sentence(s) I read in the past week:

How much of experience is merely filling in the blanks from earlier experience.

-- David Gilbert, & Sons

Sunday Sentence: Alice Munro

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read in the past week, presented without further commentary or context:

And as they sped along she was able to see not much trace at all of the recent past -- no big puddles in the fields, showing where the seed had washed out, no miserable spindly cornstalks
or lodged grain.

-- Runaway by Alice Munro, from the collection of the same name

Sunday Sentence: Eowyn Ivey

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams of The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without commentary or context:

She picked up the book and held it closer to her eyes. The next illustration had always been her favorite. In a snowy clearing, the girl stood surrounded by the wild beasts of the forest -- bears, wolves, hares, ermines, a stag, a red fox, even a tiny mouse. The animals sat on their haunches beside her, their demeanors neither menacing nor adoring. It was as if they had posed for a portrait, with their fur and teeth and claws and yellow eyes, and the little girl gazed plainly out at the reader without fear or pleasure. Did they love the little girl, or did they want to eat her?

-- Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child