Book Review: Fox Evil by Minette Walters

Accomplished writer Minette Walters does her usual magic act in Fox Evil, bringing complex, three-dimensional characters to life in this psychological thriller’s pages.

At either end of the mystery is an isolated old man, retired Colonel James Lockyer-Fox, and his now-grown biological granddaughter, Captain Nancy Smith, who was long ago put up for adoption. Caught in the middle is the Colonel’s lawyer, Mark Ankerton, who is tasked with bringing Smith back into the family.

It turns out that Smith, whose character and features echo those of both her grandfather and his deceased wife, doesn’t really care about being a long-lost heiress. She’s more than happy with the family who adopted her, who are well-to-do themselves, as Ankerton realizes while he waits to meet her in the Smith sitting room. “A nineteenth century map on the wall above the fireplace showed Lower Croft and Coomb Croft as two distinct entities, while a more recent map next to it showed the two within a single boundary, renamed Coomb Farm.”

Farms, land owners, tenants, and property rights are recurring themes in the story, which deals with long-buried secrets, shame and blame, loyalty, and gossip. The Colonel hopes to leave his estate to Smith, largely cutting out her biological mother and uncle. The gossip mongers who have cruelly isolated the Colonel since his wife’s suspicious death live on parts of the farm that he’s already had to sell off to pay his wastrel children’s bad debts. The man and his property are both being neglected by his elderly servants, who live in a “tied cottage” on the property and cannot be evicted and replaced with younger workers. And now travelers are camped on adjoining land, intending to take over “waste property” and put down roots.

The action takes place in Devon, largely on the Colonel’s estate, which Walters describes deftly. “He opened the door on to a walled courtyard and ushered Nancy through...Weeds grew in profusion between the cobbles, and the terra-cotta tubs contained only the brittle skeletons of long-dead plants...They emerged onto an an expanse of parkland...Frost still lay in pockets under the shrubs and tress that formed an avenue facing south, but the bright winter sun had warmed it to a glistening dew on the sweep of grass that sloped away and gave an unrestricted view of Shenstead Valley and the sea beyond.”

The travelers are led by a man calling himself Fox Evil. His name hints at a connection to the Colonel, and he knows far more detail about the area and its inhabitants than a stranger should. He runs his band of travelers like a military group, even down to insisting they all wear black scarves and balaclavas when they face the locals. He alternately neglects and terrifies his own young son, Wolfie, and when some of his fellow travelers begin to balk at his treatment of both Wolfie and themselves, he ratchets up the fear with razor and hammer he carries in his pockets.

Walters does a great job of moving between points of view and raising tensions as she peels away layer after layer of the lies and deceptions from which her characters have woven their lives. 

While the story is compelling, and its setting is beautiful, I can't say it's set me on fire to go and explore Devon in reality, just in case its inhabitants are all as deceptive, angry and vindictive as most of this story's characters.

Book Review: The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan

This ninth book in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series is told from Private Investigator Lydia’s point of view, and is centered in her Chinatown community. The story has all the elements I’ve grown accustomed to from S.J. Rozan: wonderful characterization, interesting twists in a compelling plot, and evocative scene-setting.

A surprise element was a fascinating historical component to the mystery. Using letters and many interviews with “old Chinese men,” as a tea-bloated Lydia refers to them affectionately, Rozan deftly tells the history of tens of thousands of Jews who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Shanghai at the outset of World War II. Letters written by 18-year-old refugee Rosalie Gilder bring to life her flight from Europe aboard a steamer bound for Shanghai, the ups and downs of life in a Shanghai ghetto, and the drama of forging new family bonds against a backdrop of war and oppression.

The letters and history are woven in among scenes and events in Lydia’s private and professional life, and the quaint mystery of a valuable long-lost jewel takes on urgency when it becomes the key to the murder of one of Lydia’s colleagues. Lydia’s unique voice is strengthened by her warring impatience with and appreciation for her own cultural background. 

With help from her on-again, off-again partner Bill Smith, Lydia unravels the mysteries within mysteries and brings several wrongdoers to justice. During the investigation, Lydia scorns herself for getting so involved and caring so much about these people whose lives were in the past. I sympathized with her reading Rosalie’s letters late into the night, eagerly reaching for the next one to find out what happened next, since I was doing the same, neglecting sleep and chores in favor of devouring chapter after chapter of The Shanghai Moon, wanting to know what happened with both Rosalie and Lydia.

Through Lydia, Rozan brings to life contemporary New York: Chinatown bustling with people and redolent of noodles and exotic tea, the Diamond District full of couples gazing at engagement rings, suburbs with their small houses set in neat yards. Through Rosalie and her descendants, she brings to life the Shanghai of decades past, from walled gardens and plush restaurants to stinking wharves and crowded ghettoes. And as their stories intertwine, Rozan, Lydia, and the reader explore themes of separation and togetherness, family and belonging, cross-cultural relationships, and deception.

This story’s only real shortcoming for me -- and it’s a minor one -- was a lack of imminent peril; even when one of the bad guys is shoving a gun into Lydia’s face, the conversation is so civilized that I couldn’t bring myself to fear for Lydia’s welfare. Nevertheless, this latest installment in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series is a wonderfully complex novel that leaves the reader wanting more.

A Visit with Lucy: Part 3

After learning far more about Ethiopia than I knew I wanted to know, I reached an “interactive” gallery devoted to Lucy. It began with a recreation of the gully where Lucy’s remains were uncovered, and led you through a series of stations that explored the anatomical features that made Lucy so special.

The challenge at the dry wash full of pebbles and cobbles and boulders was to spot the four “obvious” (to a trained fossil hunter!) fossils that lay exposed amid the geologic rubble. I spotted one of the four bone fragments immediately, and wondered if that was the magical bone that had caught Johanson’s eye, too. After some study, I decided I could see two more, but the fourth eluded me until I hit the “I give up!” button and spotlights hit all four specimens. None of the visitors around me managed to spot more than three, either.

At another station, a human (or hominid -- they are so similar!) skeleton had been drawn on a table, and the challenge was to place jumbled bones (casts, of course) in the right spots. Yet other matching games involved trying to figure out which complete bones were represented by fossilized fragments.

Lucy, although fully grown, was about the size of a contemporary six-year-old girl. Several of the exhibits compared her features to a chimpanzee’s and a human’s, to show how she fit into the winding, wobbly, rather dotted evolutionary line that connects us.

At one station, three skulls -- chimp, Lucy, and human -- were attached via their foramens magnum (the hole in the base through which the spinal cord passes) to the tops of what looked like two-liter plastic soda bottles. The bottles were filled with blue water, marked with lines showing cubic centimeters (cc), and mounted so that they could be turned upside down. When you flipped one over, the skull hung down and blue water poured into the brain case, and you could see by the bottle’s marks how many cc’s it took to fill the brain case. The chimpanzee and Lucy were remarkably close, about 400 ccs each, while the human skull’s brain volume was around 1250 ccs. Up until Lucy’s discovery and analysis, scientists believed that brain volume had increased before walking upright -- bipedalism -- took root. This was one of the major theories of human origin that Lucy’s remains shifted.

Another station invited you to examine the pelvises of a female chimp, Lucy, and a female human. They were mounted to the wall, but on a ball-joint, so that you could really move them around and look at them from different angles. The signs pointed out differences between the chimp and Lucy (and similarities between her and the human) that made it clear that she was bipedal. They also pointed out birth canal similarities the between the chimp and Lucy (and differences between her and the human) that indicated that her offspring would indeed be small-brained as compared to a human.

Still other stations explored the differences and similarities among the knee joints, teeth, and posture of the three species.

From the interactive exhibit room, a long ramp led up to Lucy’s chamber. Every fifteen feet or so, the skull of one of our hominid ancestors stood on a pedestal: Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species), Australopithecus robustus, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Neanderthal man, and finally Homo sapiens. They were just beautiful, and I kept going back and forth, comparing and contrasting. Just before the entry to Lucy’s room was a five-minute video interview of Johanson, and I made myself sit through it before I let myself go into the final darkened chamber, where Lucy herself lay.

The room was circular, and all around was a mural showing fleshed-out hominids in their probable environments. They carried babies, peered from behind bushes, snatched big flying insects out of the sky -- one even seemed to be wrestling a crocodile, which I found a bit jarring. From the explanatory text, I gathered that the latest thinking is that bipedalism began not in the grasslands, where it might give the advantage of seeing over the tall grass, but rather in the forest, where it granted better mobility.

To the right of the entry stood a glass case showing casts of Lucy’s bones put together as though she was standing upright. A mirror at the back of the case let you compare your body to her gracile and incomplete skeleton. The audio presentation for that display talked about how amazing it was that nearly forty percent of her skeleton was recovered, and how even more fortunate that there was enough to “mirror” her left and right sides’ missing pieces: how her lower right leg bone could be used to create a mirror image to take the place of the missing left lower leg bone, while the left upper could be used to complete the right, and so on.

On the other side of the room another upright case surrounded an “artist’s reconstruction” of a fleshed-out Lucy. Diminutive and sporting thumb-like big toes (her feet looked closer to chimps than humans -- they only ever found two toe bones), she was depicted covered with sparse but coarse hair, short and reddish-brown. The hair covered her entire body except for her face, chest, stomach, and the palms of her hands. Her exposed dark skin had the shiny, leathery look of a chimp’s, and her soulful brown eyes were surrounded by crinkles, which made me think she must have smiled a lot.

Finally I let myself approach the glass-shrouded table in the center of the room, where Lucy’s bones -- the actual fossils recovered from that hot and dusty gully in Ethiopia a lifetime ago -- were laid out in their familiar resting conformation. There are only about 30 bones, represented in whole or in part(s), and it was fascinating to see the hairline cracks where they hundreds of pieces had been fitted together to make them. In the short video introduction Johanson had said that most of those pieces had been partially encased in sandstone matrix, all of which had to be carefully removed before they even knew the true shape of each little fragment.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be standing there gazing upon Lucy’s actual bones. I went back and forth between the displays in her chamber, comparing every inch of bone to the fleshed-out mannequin, then backtracked down the ramp to look again at each ancestral skull, and then returned to Lucy’s chamber to marvel at her all over again. All told I spent three hours in the exhibit, and only left when I realized I was in danger of missing the IMAX film I had a ticket for!

The article that alerted me to Lucy’s presence in Seattle went on to say that other museums that had been planning to show Lucy’s Legacy were backing out of the deal in droves, afraid they, like the Seattle museum, would lose money on the show, which is very expensive to host. It’s a shame, and a wonder to me, that Lucy didn’t have a better showing. It will be a loss to us all if she has to go back to her vault in Ethiopia before her five-year planned tour of the US expires.

A Visit with Lucy: Part 2 (Ethiopia)

For the first hour at least, I wended my way through several galleries that explored the culture and history of Ethiopia. I am ashamed to say that my concept of Ethiopia until I encountered that exhibit yesterday was of a barren land inhabited by starving people -- ideas planted by my parents’ frequent refrain of “There are children starving in Ethiopia” whenever I left food on my plate, and reinforced by photo and video images of the famine of 1984-85.

In Lucy’s Legacy, I learned that Ethiopia is the only African nation never to be colonized by Europeans. I admired cultural artifacts -- spears, water carriers, drums, stringed instruments -- that were both beautiful and useful. I discovered that Jews, Muslims, and Christians have coexisted relatively peacefully for centuries, and saw rooms full of boldly colored religious icons, elaborate carved and metal-work crosses, and religious texts.

Photos and models showed amazing churches hewn out of solid rock, and reproductions of colorful murals told both religious and historical stories. The exhibit included an audio tour delivered via a remote-control-like device which you used by punching in numbers and holding it up to your ear. One of the artists whose work was on display explained that it was customary for paintings of people to have slightly large eyes to show their purity of heart. People show face-on were good and innocent, while wrong-doers or those with dark hearts or suspect motives were shown in profile. A mural showing the 1896 Battle of Adwa, during which Ethiopia managed to fend off Italy’s attempt to colonize it, was a wonderful example of these traits, with nearly all the Italian ranks shown in profile, and the virtuous Ethiopians defending their territory shown full-face.

I learned just a little about Haile Salassie, the last Emporer of Ethiopia, who was deposed in 1974 -- the very year that Lucy was discovered. His rule began in 1930, and he brought Ethiopia into the United Nations. He was a vocal proponent of racial equality, and his work was so admired in Jamaica that Bob Marley named his music and movement “Rastafarian” after the last Emporer, whose birth name was Ras Tafari.

Before entering the galleries, I had planned to blow through the Ethiopian culture and history portion of the exhibit quickly, assuming that they wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as the science and romance of Lucy herself. But the folks who designed the exhibit outmaneuvered me. Between their carefully chosen artifacts, the artful way in which they displayed them, and the written and audio descriptions of what they were and how they fit into the complex and colorful puzzle of Ethiopia, they drew me in and made me care.

A Visit with Lucy: Part 1

Just a few weeks ago, as we were finalizing our plans for our Pacific Northwest road trip, an article about the traveling Lucy’s Legacy exhibit popped up on the web. Lucy is the Australopithecus afarensis that anthropologist Donald Johanson and his colleagues discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Her 3.2 million year old skeletal remains changed some fundamental ideas about humanity’s antiquity, and her story -- told in Lucy: The Beginnings of Human Kind, by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey -- fascinated me as a teenager and got me interested in writing about science.

The article said that the Lucy exhibit was appearing at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and that although the show had nearly run its course -- it ends this coming weekend, March 8, 2009 -- only about 60,000 of the anticipated 250,000 visitors had come to see it.

On Monday, March 2, I became one of those lucky few. I arrived at Seattle Center via the monorail, which started handily close to my hotel, an hour before my 11 a.m. entry time for the special exhibit. I used the electronic kiosk at the entry to print my pre-ordered and pre-paid tickets (for the showing of the IMAX film The Mystery of the Nile as well as the Lucy’s Legacy exhibit), then wandered through the museum’s nice but far-from-earth-shattering dinosaur exhibit. At the appointed time I presented myself at the special exhibit’s entry, and spent the next three hours immersed in Lucy’s Legacy.