This is Kate Atkinson’s sixth in her series of Jackson Brody novels. Brody is former British police, now private investigator, called upon to look for a stolen painting: Lady with a Weasel. The question of who stole the renaissance oil painting is secondary. Front and center is Atkinson’s delightful send-up of two of Britain’s most hallowed traditions. In one part of her farce, a lunatic of a family live in a Downtown Abbey-like mansion called Burton Makepeace. While Atkinson destroys the obsession with old money and crazy old Ladies of the house, she also dismantles the British preoccupation with murder mysteries. A bedraggled, over-the-top, full-of-itself, not-very-talented, understaffed troupe of actors host a murder-mystery dinner in Burton Makepeace mansion. In a nod to Agatha Christie, all of the main characters find themselves trapped in a single location (a vicious snowstorm makes travel impossible) to solve a real crime, while Jackson Brody tries to make sense of it all. A fine escapist read for troubling times.
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Guide Me Home by Attica Locke *** (of 4)
In southeast Texas’s Nacagdoches County, Texas Ranger Darren Matthews has problems big and small. As a Black Texas Ranger he is self-motivated to uphold the law of the land and in so doing demonstrate to African Americans that law enforcement can be a force for good. But he may also face an indictment for actions leading to a false conviction of a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood. In despair over decisions he has made, and swimming in alcohol, he turns in his badge and gun.
Torn between upholding the law and standing up for justice, a drunken Matthews is surprised when his estranged mother, who gave him up at birth and who also suffered from raging alcoholism, appears, quite sober, with the story of a missing Black teenage girl. Sera was the lone Black student in an all white sorority. Mom, who has been sober for a couple of years works as a cleaner in the sorority at Stephen F. Austin University, and begs her son to investigate, saying all of Sera’s things have been taken from her room and tossed in a dumpster.
Taking life one day at a time without drink, Matthews, still enraged by his mother’s motley treatment of him over his entire life, cannot resist being a policeman, even though he is no longer one. He investigates beginning with Sera’s dad. Sera’s dad is a Trump supporter, telling anyone who will listen that when Obamacare was passed he could not afford it and his daughter Sera’s case of Sickle Cell went untreated while he and his family became homeless. He has a job now at a meat packing plant, a house, and healthcare for his family. And when he went to a Trump rally, he was treated as a man, not as an African American looking for a handout.
The action takes place during the first Trump administration. The book was published in 2024 so it was written as a history, but its prescience is frightening, and its study of how to be a Black man today in America is provocative.
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We Solve Murders by Richard Osman *** (of 4)
Richard Osman has taken a break from his retired senior citizens of the Thursday Murder Club. His new crew of investigators include Amy Wheeler, a spritely bodyguard with a blond ponytail, who really, really likes punching and shooting people; her father-in-law, Steve Wheeler, a retired cop living in a small town in rural England whose desires in life, now that he is a widow, mostly revolve around petting his cat and going to trivia night at the local pub; and Rosie D’Antonia, an aging crime novelist with so much money that she owns islands and jets, but suffers from insufficient stimulation and cannot wait to get involved in drugs, alcohol, murder, and general mayhem.
The bodyguard company that Amy works for begins to lose clients to mysterious murders and Amy appears to be implicated in several untimely deaths. While Amy is protecting Rosie D’Antonio on a secluded island off South Carolina, things go south, and suddenly the old novelist and the young protector are on the run. They cover a good part of the globe as new attackers hunt them down and they investigate, now with assistance from Amy’s father-in-law, the mysterious deaths of several mid-level instagram influencers.
The book contains a handful of Osman’s signature funny moments, and the question of who is behind all the mayhem is suitably obscure, but the characters are more contrived and less compelling than the old folks at Coopers Chase retirement village.
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James by Percival Everett **** (of 4)
On the face of it, a book that can be described in a single sentence. What would the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn look like if it were written by Huck’s enslaved friend and protector, Jim?
Everett uses the narrative arc, plot details, and characters from the original, but Jim, in this telling is not simply a slave. Rather, he is an enslaved man complete with emotions, anxieties, family, and the unremitting fear of white citizens. He is well read in the philosophers of his time — Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau — and so bilingually fluent he can speak the expected slave in front of whites.
The dehumanization of enslaved people is brought into clear focus while Huck and Jim run through the adventures laid out by Mark Twain. Blacks are beaten like animals and an absence of subservience can be trained into slaves by torture. Jim rises above and most satisfyingly, near the end, chooses his own name: James.
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The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich **** (of 4)
In a small farming town in North Dakota, sugar beet farming is almost as much everybody’s livelihood as keeping track of one’s neighbor’s business. Kismet, a high school senior, receives a marriage proposal from the star of the football team, Gary Geist. Crystal, Kismet’s mother disapproves, but Kismet is more like her mother than either wishes to acknowledge and will probably go through with the wedding. Gary is what you’d expect of an 18-year-old football player, which makes this book so captivating. Gary, Kismet, and their high school group of friends are on the verge of adulthood yet still saddled with the judgement skills of adolescents.
Bad things, and good things, happen while we readers sit as silent flies on walls in half a dozen homes. Parents navigate their jobs, their spouses, their prying and supportive friends, their finances, loving their children, and letting them go. All of Erdrich’s characters, like all of us, are colored in varying and changing shades of goodwill and shortcomings. In the background, the call of agro-capitalism is keeping the small town alive while farmers lose topsoil and nature succumbs to the over-application of farm chemicals.
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Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke *** (of 4)
The Civil War has come to Louisiana. Union soldiers are making advances, but slavery, and its cruelties persist. The experience of war, and its changing fortunes in 1863, are told through first-person eyes. Hannah Laveaux, a recently freed slave still living in the south, is accused of murder with only circumstantial evidence. She is supported by Florence Milton, an abolitionist from Connecticut determined to make life hell for enslavers. Pierre Cauchon is the local sheriff charged with enforcing the law, which means discounting most of what the enslaved and recently enslaved might have to say in their defense. Pierre answers to the truth, however.
There are soldiers aplenty and considerable chaos and dislocation rampant in the swamps and plantations . Marauding troops are poorly commanded and consist of more irregulars than professional soldiers. Many of the people in this story have been abused and have lashed out with deadly force at one time or another. There are chases and dangers that keep the plot moving, but just below the surface Burke has us recognize some major themes.
First, that much of the Civil War was fought over economics. A tiny wealthy class of landowners were willing to fight to the death to protect their enslaved source of labor. In so doing, owners of enslaved people degraded anyone with even tiny amounts of Black blood in their lineage. This helped ensure a class war between poor whites and Blacks that persists to this day.
Second, in times of great crisis, love is a powerful corrective.
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Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon *** (of 4)
Athenian soldiers attacked ancient Syracuse (Sicily) in 414 BCE, expecting a quick victory. They lost. Athenian soldiers were captured and held in a quarry on starvation rations. Two wine-swilling, Irish-slanged friends and gabbers since childhood decide they are going to use Athenian prisoners to stage two of Euripides plays. Gelon and the irreverent and irrepressible Lampo smuggle food into the quarry and offer morsels in exchange for any prisoners that can recall Euripides’ lines. An epic quest ensues, both hilarious and painful, to hold auditions, practice scenes, acquire costumes, learn dances and songs, and enlist an audience. Gelon and Lampo, who now consider themselves Directors. The Athenians lucky enough to recall Euripides’ plays try not to starve to death.
Ferdia Lennon’s decision to trade-in stilted ancient look-alike language for the cheeky gab of an Irish bar is brilliant. The two friends decide to stage the two plays back to back–The Trojan Women begins immediately after Madea. Similarly, Lennon’s book has two unrelated components: the twin performances and a mad escape with smuggled prisoners across Sicily. The book cannot quite decide whether it is a comedy or tragedy, and Lennon ‘s indecisiveness puts a gentle damper on the outcome. I suppose Lennon might be saying that life, like great theater, is both tragedy and comedy. Glorious Exploits is a first novel. A good one, but not quite a great one.
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Creation Lake ** (of 4) by Rachel Kushner
A left-wing philosopher advocates that it is time for humanity to return to nature, but sends his diatribes via e-mail. Acolytes reading his emails in France form a commune and strive to live pure lives. They exclude people who are not sufficiently indoctrinated with the existential crisis that Homo sapiens has brought upon themselves. The superior humanity of Neanderthals (now sadly extinct) fill lengthy electronic missives.
The commune is suspected of sabotaging a big geo-engineering project that will destroy the water table in the Central Massif. It will also ruin the lives of very-pure peasants (who the commune has excused for taking on modern agricultural techniques even though they might be advancing neo-liberalist agendas and the success of Capitalism with a capital C!)
Sadie has been hired by some agency (we aren’t exactly sure which) to infiltrate the commune and entrap them into doing something illegal, thereby proving the commune-ists were responsible for the initial sabotage. Sadie (in a book written by a woman) seems quite preoccupied with the size of her breasts, and has no compunctions about deceiving people into doing illegal acts they might not otherwise have undertaken.
This book made so many critic’s must-read lists. Seriously? Feh. Read it if you want to meet characters with no moral centers and read a lot about a nihilistic crackpot of a cult leader.
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The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich *** (of 4)
In the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, an American scientist, Charles Wilson, was working on chemical weapons in service to the CIA when he “jumped or fell” from an upper story hotel window. After the so-called “accident” the scientist’s family was compensated handsomely and quickly, but given few details. The body of the suicide victim was so mangled, they were told, they could not view it before its hasty burial. The Coldest Warrior does its best to put flesh on the bones of a skeletally true story by fictionalizing the CIA operatives most likely to have encouraged Wilson through the hotel window.
Was Wilson a risk to counter espionage because he had been unknowingly given LSD by the CIA and had become mentally unstable? Was he having second thoughts about the validity of chemical weapons? Did the CIA do the right thing in covering up the story to maintain its advantage in the Cold War when communist aggression felt like it was spreading around the glove like an unstoppable infection? Or were the CIA’s actions, in the end, not very different than Soviet tactics involving sending exiles to Siberia?
Paragraphs with scenery, weather, and outfits appear as stand-alones. Characters and their motives are a little difficult to keep track of. Nevertheless, there’s just enough action to provide inertia.
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In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy *** (of 4)
Investigative journalist Tom Klay works for a renowned globally recognized photo-journal called Sovereign but is really National Geographic. Even the building’s HQ is National Geographic’s down to the carpet, wall hangings, and tribal tchotchkes in the lobbies (the author once worked for NG). Klay, on assignment in Africa to track down ruthless elephant poachers barely escapes crossfire in the bush. A close colleague and a politician are not so lucky. Klay dedicates himself to tracking down the murderers.
Tom Klay also works for the CIA, which you can learn from the jacket cover, but not from the author until you are nearly 100 pages into the book. Bryan Christie’s style is to introduce characters, conversations, and situations without explaining them until you have paid the price of reading in obscurity for a while. I suppose he does it to build tension, but it comes across as unnecessary and annoying.
Tom Klay’s true nemesis turns out to be an international arms dealer, kabillionaire, and megalomaniac who is CEO of something called Perseus Group. Perseus Group sells arms to everyone, making profits from all sides of an arms race. The CIA’s relationship to Perseus Group, as well as its true intentions, are hidden behind mirrors, screens, clouds of smoke, and misinformation. The action hums along quickly enough to be engaging, but the book does not quite match the hype.
