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.

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.

Review of Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel

Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel
By Kirk Russell
Chronicle Books; 2003; 347 pages; $12.95 (paperback)


[A truncated version of this review appears in the June 2008 issue of Between the Tides, the quarterly newsletter of Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. http://www.fitzgeraldreserve.org/]


I grew up on the east coast, spending most of my elementary school years in Connecticut. Every summer my parents took me to the coast of Maine for a week or two, and I fell resoundingly in love with the Atlantic Ocean and its inhabitants – especially marine mammals – as a result of those trips. After my parents divorced I spent a landlocked adolescence in Wisconsin. When I was twenty-one I lit out for the West Coast in the old Chevy Malibu I inherited from my mother before the ink was dry on my Beloit College degree.


I had completed my degree in 3.5 years, motivated by a strong dislike of being trapped in classrooms and hog-tied with institutional red tape, so it was late January when I first saw the Pacific Ocean. I no longer remember the route I used to cut across the state, but I was somewhere in southern California, twisting along on Highway One on cliffs high above the water, when I noticed a cluster of large boats very close to shore.



It was a spectacularly clear and sunny day, the kind implanted in my brain by hours of listening to the Beach Boys’ golden oldie “California Dreamin’” while I studied in snow-blanketed libraries and dorm rooms. Watching the almost motionless boats while I wondered what they were doing in a spot that was so obviously not an anchorage, I suddenly saw one, then three, then half-a-dozen puffs of spray.


Whales! I swerved into the nearest pullout, yanked my binoculars out of my backpack, and reveled in the sight, wishing my mother, who had been even more of a marine mammal enthusiast than I, was still alive to enjoy the scene with me. I learned from a roadside interpretive sign somewhere along the way that these were gray whales, and that they followed the coast of California on their migration north and south between Alaskan feeding waters and breeding lagoons in Baja, Mexico. It took me many hours, with many roadside stops along the way, to inch my way up the coast.


I arrived in Mendocino, California, late the next day, and by the time I had been ensconced in my Aunt Jane’s spare bedroom for a couple of weeks, some gray whales had worked their way that far north. I saw them daily on my walks on the trails of Mendocino Headlands State Park, and the three week California visit I had planned turned into a permanent relocation when I went to work at the historic Ford House Visitor and Interpretive Center. (http://www.mcn.org/1/mendoparks/mndhdld.htm)


For a year I worked there, exploring the myriad other state parks, wandering daily through Highlight Gallery and the Gallery Bookshop, and haunting the bakery and The (now-defunct) Chocolate Moose. (http://www.mendocino.org/html/shop.html)


After I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as a technical writer, Aunt Jane relocated to Fort Bragg, the mill town twenty minutes north of Mendocino, and my visits included exploring the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, going to Glass Beach, walking the Ecological Staircase at Jug Handle State Reserve, and camping in Russian Gulch and McKerricher state parks. (http://www.fortbragg.com/fort-bragg-attractions.php)


In between visits to Aunt Jane I came to know and love other spots on the Northern California coast, including Sausalito, Bodega Bay, and Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.


So imagine my delight when I discovered Kirk Russell’s Shell Games, a well-told mystery with numerous plot twists and turns, which begins with the discovery of a pile of hundreds of empty abalone shells and two abalone divers tortured to death in a fictional state park south of Fort Bragg. “They started up the creek trail, skirting waist-high greasewood and taller poison oak with dead leaves curled and drying. He smelled creek mud and the dry oaks…” Russell’s description of the scene transported me back to my old stomping grounds.


Protagonist John Marquez is a California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) warden, one of the unsung heroes in society’s struggle to save what’s left of our natural resources. Working undercover, he and his team of DFG agents are hot on the trail of large-scale abalone poachers who are threatening the survival of the species.


In the torture deaths of the two abalone divers, Marquez believes he recognizes the handiwork of a criminal mastermind he crossed swords with when he worked undercover in the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). As he carefully cultivates informants from abalone divers to seafood wholesalers, he learns – to his regret – that his own actions have sometimes tragic repercussions in other people’s lives.


Marquez and his agents stake out harbors, dive sites, and houses up and down the northern California coast, and Russell’s writing brings to life many of the spots that I’ve grown to love in my adopted home state. His descriptions of the various places where the action unfolds had me feeling the fog on my face and hearing the surf in the background.


Marquez lives in a house built by his grandparents on Mt. Tamalpais. “A wooded shoulder of Mt. Tam fell away to the right of the house and below there were stands of trees, open flanks of dry grass and folded ravines with oak and brush, then the ocean. In winter he watched the leading edge of storms approach…He had a partial view of the top of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge…and still, it was dark enough at night to see the stars.”


Early in the story Marquez meets an informant near Half Moon Bay, transporting the reader along with him: “Forty minutes south of San Francisco Marquez left Highway 1 and drove through fields of pumpkins out to a broad stand of eucalyptus trees along the bluffs. Fog shrouded the high branches of the trees and under the canopy the road was wet and dark. Droplets ticked onto the hood as he parked.”


The current undercover operation has Marquez’s team based in a house in Fort Bragg, where “They met on Elm Street and walked down the old road alongside the Georgia-Pacific property, between the blackberry bushes and down to Glass Beach where for decades earlier in the past century the citizenry of Fort Bragg used to dump its garbage into the ocean. Over the years the broken china, glass, and metal had been worn by the ocean, the glass rounded like small stones that glittered now in the moonlight.”


Glass Beach is a real place that you can explore the next time you’re in Fort Bragg, as are the Sausalito docks: “Sodium lights strung along the dock hummed and swung in the wind and the shapes of Bailey and Heinemann flickered through the pale light of their rear cabin window. Across the bay, the skyline of San Francisco glowed with a hazy brilliance and as the night deepened and quieted he listened to the water lapping at the dock and faint strains of music…”


Marquez puts a lot of mileage on his truck during the course of this investigation, and just reading about the long drives involved in a day’s work made me road-weary!


Time and again the team comes within striking distance of the bad guys, only to have their bust thwarted by a turncoat informant, an unexpected maneuver by the poachers, or – the most frustrating and frequently encountered hurdle – jurisdictional problems. The cops in the small towns where the action takes place are often more of a hindrance than a help. And Marquez and his team aren’t just up against the evildoers; in this post-9/11 world, they must also deal with their wardens and patrol boats being diverted to operations for Homeland Security. Finally, the FBI seems to be after the same perpetrators as Marquez is, and they don’t care how many abalone or game wardens get caught in the crossfire.


Marquez is a believable protagonist, physically and mentally strong and devoted to his work. He’s knowledgeable as well. “A century ago, abalone had been so plentiful along the California shoreline that all you had to do was wade in a foot or two and pick them up. Shellmounds attested to how plentiful they’d once been…Diving came after the easy stuff was gone and we’re down to the end game for a species that has survived for a million years.” And yet Russell’s deft characterization prevents Marquez from being a self-righteous know-it-all.


Although everyone around him thinks he’s gone off the deep end when he jumps to the conclusion that his quarry is a shadowy figure from his own dark days in the DEA, Marquez trusts his instincts. He is emotionally grounded in the world with strong feelings for his estranged wife and stepdaughter, affection for his agents, and concern even for the informants who may be betraying him – feelings that raise the stakes as the action unfolds.


The story isn’t flawless. There are so many minor characters that I had a hard time keeping track of some of the agents on Marquez’s team and his informants. And I thought the foreshadowing of the book’s ending was a little heavy-handed.


But Marquez and those characters close to him are people I enjoyed spending time with, and I loved the glimpses of how a DFG agent works. “Tell most people that white abalone was the first ocean species humankind could genuinely claim bragging rights to extinguishing and they’d shrug. Big deal, extinctions happened. Talk about managing resources and they’d agree with you, as long as it didn’t cut into their lifestyle too much…Not much glamour in an abalone and there never would be.”


Such a down-to-earth perspective is intriguing in a world where “going green” is fast becoming more of a fashion statement than a philosophy. This John Marquez character will be worth getting to know better.


I look forward to reading the rest of Kirk Russell’s series.

Preview Your Destination with a Good Book

Thinking about a trip somewhere? Whether you’ve already booked a long weekend away or are in the early stages of planning a multi-week trip to the other side of the globe, reading fiction set in your destination can give you a the flavor of the place before you even leave home. You can read before you go, or stockpile books and read them during your actual trip.

I always get a kick out of driving through a place just as I’ve reached mention of it in book I’m reading. The first time I remember this happening was on my first international adventure, a guided camping tour of Australia that I took soon after graduating from college. We of the Never Never, by Mrs. Jeannie Gunn, tells the story of a white couple managing an enormous cattle station in the rugged outback landscape 300 miles south of Darwin, Northern Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Reading the story as the gravel highway between Darwin and Ayers Rock unrolled beneath the bus tires transported me out of my plush seat in the climate-controlled vehicle right into the arid, dusty land zooming past outside the windows.

Audiobooks are another great way to get into a new place. On the last few driving trips I’ve taken through the American Southwest, I’ve been sure to pack along a couple of audiobook versions of Tony Hillerman’s wonderful mysteries. His series features Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he uses myriad telling details to evoke the setting with such intensity that I can smell the rain falling on the parched desert of Navajo Country even when I’m holed up in my fog-shrouded house on the coast of northern California.

In 2007 I toured Mesa Verde on my own, then met up with my archaeologist friend Erica at Chaco Canyon. When I packed for the trip, I was disappointed that my local library didn’t have an audiobook of Nevada Barr’s Ill Wind, a Ranger Anna Pigeon mystery set in Mesa Verde that I had read several years before, for me to take along for the Mesa Verde National Park portion of the trip. But they always have a Hillerman on hand, and I had the great luck to find A Thief of Time, one of my favorites of his, in which a woman archaeologist working at Chaco goes missing. Reading about fictional pothunters destroying the picturesque, peaceful ruins with backhoes gave another layer of meaning to my own wanderings through the ruins of the store rooms and living floors and great kivas. As I admired and photographed the amazing stonework of the prehistoric complexes and contemplated the people who built and then walked away from them hundreds of years ago, I understood what might drive a modern-day researcher to try to trace one ancient artist’s work through time and space.

Has the setting of a story you’ve read ever inspired you to take a trip? Do you tap into fiction when you’re in the planning stages, or do you take along fiction set in your destination?

I had so much else going on when I was getting ready for my February 2008 trip to Maui that I didn’t get a chance to look for fiction to read ahead of time or even take along with me. I went to the Borders Express bookstore in Kiehei soon after I arrived and scanned their shelf of “Local Authors.” There wasn’t much fiction, and I found only one mystery: Murder on Molokai, by Chip Hughes. I’ll review it in my next post.