Review of Acid Row by Minette Walters

I think I have a new favorite from Minette Walters' list of psychological suspense novels: her 2002 novel Acid Row.

The setting is Bassindale Estate, a poorly designed low-income housing development in England. Acid Row gets its name from the crumbling sign at the entry: "assi d" is all that's left, and the sign is a symbol for the entire poorly maintained development, which is little more than a warehouse for the eldery, the disabled, and single mothers on the dole.

Most of the inhabitants live in fear of each other. Many are angry about their seeming abandonment by the government, an emotion fueled by both drugs and injustice. A rumor that the government has now parked a dangerous pedophile in their midst without a word of warning combines with the disappearance of a child like petrol poured on banked embers.

Two mothers worried about the estate's children organize a peaceful Saturday morning protest march, but the event is hijacked by the estate's maddened youth. They barricade the four entries to the development with overturned cars to thwart the police, and set upon the suspected pedophile with Molotov cocktails. Those who organized the original march find themselves trying to hold back a demonic tide of violence. An idealistic young female doctor finds herself caught in the crossfire.

Most of the action takes place in one very long, very hot Saturday in July. Walters gives us a chance to see this small world poised on the brink of Armageddon through the eyes of a thief and drug dealer fresh out of jail, his pregnant girlfriend and her mother, and the idealistic young doctor whose been trying to improve the lives of those on Acid Row. These would-be heroes form unlikely allegiances with others in the estate as they try to defuse the situation -- or at least escape with their lives and loved ones.

The cold, quiet investigation of the missing child provides a chilling counterpoint to the scorching heat of the battle of Acid Row. The entire story is a page-turner peopled with sympathetic characters whose fate I grew to deeply care about, and the ending is both tragic and satisfying.

Review of Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs delivers an interesting and entertaining mystery in this 11th entry in the Temperance Brennan series.

During the course of this story, Tempe is residing in Charlotte, North Carolina, dividing her time between teaching at the university and doing forensics for the local authorities. Reichs as usual describes the geography and history of the city, but I could have used a few more sensory details to help ground me in Tempe's reality. Scenes unfolded at a variety of settings, including her lab, her home, a strip mall on the wrong side of town, a Wiccan bonfire, and a riverside body dump site, but all seem oddly remote.

Review of The Spellman Files and Revenge of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Sometime early this year I read Lisa Lutz's Curse of the Spellmans, thinking that it was the first in the series. It's not, and because there are some references back to "previous documents" in the later books, I recommend that you read them in the correct order, which is:

1. The Spellman Files

2. The Curse of the Spellmans

3. Revenge of the Spellmans

The Spellmans are a San Francisco-based family who run their own Private Investigation business. They spend as much time investigating each others' secrets -- and trying to protect their own private lives from each others' prying -- as they do investigating outsiders.

Review of Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

I read a number of mysteries in October, and Among the Mad was the standout. 

In this sixth Maisie Dobbs mystery, the psychologist and sleuth -- and the rest of London -- is still dealing with the aftermath of WWI. Although the tale is historical, set in London as 1931 draws to a close, its disabled soldiers, disgruntled workforce, and depressed populace resonate with today's world.

Maisie is drawn into working with the police on a high-profile case that could jeopardize tens or even hundreds of people if they can't catch the culprits in time. At the same time, she must help her assistant, Billy, deal with his wife's hospitalization and caring for his children. I really enjoyed seeing more of Billy's life, although the situation was heart-wrenching. I also loved Maisie's new sense of self-confidence as an accomplished career woman, and liked seeing her lighten up a little bit.

I've never been to London, and I can't say that Winspear's version of the city sets me on fire to visit it -- she paints a bleak cityscape inhabited by a downtrodden people, caught between the horrifying memories of WWI and the gathering clouds of WWII. But the setting is superbly crafted and had me shivering even on Indian Summer days.

I find the Maisie Dobbs series a bit uneven, but this is one of its stronger books, highly recommended.

Oregon Coast Aquarium Exceeds Expectations

I’ve been a member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium for more than 20 years now, which means that I’m often disappointed when I visit other aquaria. Perhaps they don’t have a very good variety of critters on display; or their tanks may seem too small and barren for their inmates; or their displays may be jazzy but lacking in educational value.

I’d heard good things about the aquarium in Newport, but as I walked through the doors of the Oregon Coast Aquarium and paid my $14.95 admission, I tried to keep my expectations low. They’re a much smaller operation, I kept reminding myself. They haven’t been in business as long. They don’t have the endowments that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has. Don’t expect miracles.

The woman who sold me my ticket said that the sea otter feeding would be in 15 minutes, and the sea lion feeding 30 minutes after that, and pointed me towards their enclosures. I went out into a courtyard and wandered around with my mouth hanging open, delighted by the naturalistic setting the aquarium’s builders had created. 

Eureka, CA: A Tour Aboard Madaket

One of the highlights of our day in Eureka was an afternoon tour on a 99 year-old wooden motor boat called the Madaket. She’s been beautifully maintained, and has a gorgeous cabin with, the captain proudly pointed out, the smallest fully-equipped bar licensed in the state of California.

The crew are very proud of the boat and the captain recounted a bit of her history  as we chugged up and down the channels of the bay. Madaket was originally used as a ferry to move workers to lumber camps, saw mills, and other work places in the decades before the bridges were built. She carried some 1500 people a day; to put that in perspective for us, the captain pointed out that there were only about 15 on our tour, although she is licensed to carry 45 at a time. Our uncrowded tour gave me plenty of elbow room for taking photos!

A Stroll Through Ferndale, CA

Heading north up 101 to explore the far northern California and southern-central Oregon coasts, we took a slight detour to look at Ferndale. It turned out to be a photographer's delight.

Ferndale is a tiny community that looks like it’s still largely driven by agriculture. Plowed fields and fenced ranch land stretch from the highway to infinity, and one of the biggest welcome signs at the edge of town is sponsored by the 4-H club.

The town is known probably the world over for its amazing Victorian gingerbread buildings. The main street is lined with beautifully crafted storefronts, lovingly painted to show off the beautiful wooden adornments framing every window, every door, every corner.

Multi-story houses, some converted into B&Bs, dot the surrounding streets. Walking the quiet streets is a real feast for the eyes. Although this style of decoration is a bit too elaborate for my taste, I really had fun taking photos of these amazing buildings. I couldn’t help but be touched and impressed by the time, love, and attention to craftsmanship lavished upon them by not only their original builders but also the owners and craftsmen who have maintained and restored them.

As we strolled through the historic downtown, taking photos, admiring the architecture, and popping in and out of galleries and shops, I kept thinking of a new show I’ve been watching on SyFy, Warehouse 13. Ferndale seems exactly the kind of setting for the “bag and tag” team to find an artifact with supernatural powers...

Here's a link to a facebook album of a few of my photos.

Review of The Price of Silence by Kate Wilhelm

I was a teenage science fiction addict when I first encountered Kate Wilhelm’s work in the form of her classic “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.” A few years ago I was delighted to stumble across her mystery series featuring attorney Barbara Holloway. When I started packing for my current trip (I’m writing this in a motel in Coos Bay, OR), I hit the library to search out fiction set in Oregon, and was reminded that some of Wilhelm’s work fits the bill.

The Price of Silence is a mystery, but not part of the Barbara Holloway series. It’s the story of Todd Fielding, a young female journalist trying to support herself and her graduate student husband, Barney, who is trying to finish his studies in Corvallis, Oregon. Hard up for work in a down economy and with a dwindling array of newspapers, Todd takes a job in a small, remote town (““Where the hell is Brindle, Oregon?” she muttered, opening the envelope’ (which contains an invitation to a job interview).)

Wilhelm does a nice job of setting the scene. “On the left, a mammoth greenhouse seemed ridiculously out of place considering the temperature was 101. A motel, a gas station with a small convenience store attached, a Safeway...Another store, general merchandise, a tourist-type souvenir store, another motel with a cafe, a rock shop...It looked like a move set waiting for the actors.” Then after a few more turns of the car’s steering wheel, “Brindle had turned into a real village with houses and yards, green things growing, a restaurant, a few people going on about their business.”

Not all is well in this tiny hamlet, as Todd soon discovers when she goes to work for a feisty 80-year-old publisher named Ruth Ann Colonna. Ruth Ann has lived in Brindle all her life, and has memories of helping her father paste up The Brindle Times when she was just a child. Her son Johnny is the managing editor, and proves more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to collecting and printing real news.

A few weeks after Todd arrives in town, a young teenage girl vanishes on the walk to the school bus one morning. Todd is amazed and then incensed at how sanguine local law enforcement, the powers that be, and the community in general are about the girl’s disappearance. When a postcard arrives a week after she vanishes, everyone but the girl’s frantic mother writes her off as a runaway. Probing further, Todd discovers a pattern of girls gone missing over the last two decades, and begins publishing articles about her research in the weekly newspaper. Everyone except Ruth Ann views this as stirring up needless trouble, and Todd soon finds her life threatened.

I loved the characters in this book, and think Wilhelm captures the setting nicely -- I could smell the desert in the scenes where Todd and Barney are exploring the back country. I could have done without the supernatural aspect that came into play, I found the premise that an entire small town would shrug off the disappearances of five teenage girls a little hard to swallow, and I knew the identity of the villain about half-way through the book. But all those negatives didn’t detract from the unfolding of the story, which was logical and well-written and peopled by characters I genuinely cared about.

Review of The Ice House by Minette Walters

I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Minette Walters’ mysteries over the last fifteen years or so. I just finished The Ice House, her debut novel published in 1992, and I’m glad it wasn’t the first of her works that I encountered, because I might have skipped her later books, and that would have been a shame. 

Walters has a way of getting into the creepy psyche of her stories’ bad guys in a fashion that is almost too deep and intimate for my comfort. In this first novel, the twisted emotional and moral fabric of the cops investigating the crime was almost too difficult to stomach.

When a body is discovered in the ice house on the grounds of an English manor, it stirs up reinvestigation of a ten-year-old disappearance. The man who vanished was a scoundrel and a criminal, but his presumed murder turned the narrow-minded villagers against his wife, Phoebe Maybury. She has maintained her innocence and reinforced her isolation with the help of Anne Cattrell and Diana Goode, old friends who moved into the manor with her shortly after her husband vanished. All three of them have things to hide, even from each other and their now-grown children. 

The two primary investigators, an inspector and his sergeant, are more deceitful and vindictive than the criminals they are trying to catch. They have a bizarre relationship that swings without warning between gruff fondness and antagonism.

Walters uses shifting third-person viewpoint to good effect, telling parts of the story from the vantage points of each of the cops, each of the women, and a few key witnesses. She does a masterful job of revealing just enough information in each scene to keep the reader turning the page.

Eighty-five percent of the action takes place in the manor house and its grounds, a setting drawn with loving detail. The big house has been divided into three separate flats for the three women sharing it. The characters’ distinctive personalities and careers --horticulturalist, interior designer, and writer--are reflected nicely in their natural habitats, and the reader gets a real taste of the isolation in which they live from spending so much time on the manor grounds. The sights, scents, and sounds of the houses and the pub where the cops encounter various suspects and witnesses also come right off the page.

I found the corrupted cops disturbing and the unfounded animosity of the villagers shocking, but was most deeply unhinged by the way Maybury, Cattrell and Goode all rolled over and accepted their victimization without fighting back. The Ice House was a good mystery with a logical solution and a satisfying ending. It will please readers who are already fans of Minette Walters, but I wouldn’t recommend it as the first of her books to try.

Review of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Precocious 11-year-old narrator Flavia de Luce is the highlight of this crime novel, the first in a series intended for adults, although middle-grade readers might also enjoy it. Ignored by her family and the adults around her, she takes solace in chemistry, spending hours in her glassware-filled laboratory at the top of her family’s mansion in the English countryside. When she stumbles upon a corpse in the garden, she sets herself the task of finding the murderer -- or at least saving her father, even if he is guilty, from going to prison for the crime.

I finished this book largely because I found Flavia’s voice so enjoyable. The setting was a disappointment in that the descriptions lacked the telling details that make you feel like you’re right there. I often had a hard time remembering whether the story unfolded in 1950s England, or some decades earlier.  

Most scenes had a sketchy, dreamy quality that failed to transport me into our heroine’s reality; the only moments when I felt like I was with Flavia were when she was visiting her dead mother’s mothballed car in the estate’s carriage house, and when she was in the defunct garage that had been pressed into use by the village library for storing overflow materials. 

I had a hard time picturing a lake with an island you could wade to, and never had a good picture in my mind of what the rooms of Flavia’s house looked like, or even whether the manor was well-maintained or going to seed. 

I figured out early on who the murderer was, also a disappointment. Flavia’s unravelling of her father’s secrets during the course of the investigation was interesting but not terribly compelling. 

Unfortunately I found the depictions of all of the other characters, with the exception of the inspector Flavia butts heads with, mere caricatures. Although I never really did understand the inspector’s quote that gave the book its title, I liked the way their relationship grew, and hope that the inspector will become something of a mentor for Flavia in future adventures.

In spite of all my criticisms, I look forward to Flavia’s next adventure, because her voice is so unique and her perspective on life so enjoyable.