Back from the Beach with Recommendations

I went off to the beach with 8 books, acquired one more (birthday gift) and managed to read 7 of them.  It was an unusually good group of titles with only one real meh in the bunch.  I rated all of these 4 stars on Goodreads:

The Knowledge, Martha Grimes

All of the titles of Martha Grimes’ series featuring New Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Richard Jury are named after pubs.  I thought she had broken with tradition but it turns out that the title refers to the knowledge of the city that London cabbies must possess in order to pass the difficult test to get licensed.  One cabbie comes up with the idea of opening a pub just for cabbies, one that’s not on any map and which can be found only by drivers and he names it, appropriately, The Knowledge.  The story also begins in a cab.  A wealthy couple are driven to an exclusive casino/art gallery; they are shot on the steps of the building and the killer jumps into the cab they have vacated.  Not only do the London cabbies have ways to signal each other when a fare goes bad, but there is also a group of children who hang out around train stations and at Heathrow and who are mobilized to track the man who gets on a plane to Nairobi with one of the children in tow.  Enter Richard Jury and his wealthy friends whom he mobilizes to help him discover the cause of the crime and uncover a tangled web of relationships that extend from Reno, Nevada, to London to Nairobi to Tanzania.  The characters in Grimes’ books are always well done and she injects some humor with the involvement of the savvy children who continue to astonish the adults with their abilities to gain information.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway,Ruth Ware

Harriet Westaway, a 21 year old orphan, ekes out a living reading tarot cards at the Brighton pier.  Wondering how to fend off a loan shark, she sees an out when she receives a letter inviting her to the reading of her grandmother’s will.  Hal knows her grandparents died decades earlier so there has to be a mistake, but curiosity and dire financial straits compel her to travel to Trepassen, an old estate in the English countryside where old Mrs. Westaway’s relatives have gathered.  The vine-covered house with cawing magpies along the drive is a bit creepy and the maid puts Hal in an attic room that has bars on the window.  As Hal gets to know the three siblings who have lost their mother, she learns stories about their youth and a cousin who lived with them for a time – Hal’s mother.  The atmosphere turns ominous as it becomes clear that there is no love lost between them, no fondness for the apparently controlling and acerbic mother who has died, and the fight over the inheritance has been complicated by Hal’s presence.  Reviews of the book suggested that it is not up to par with Ware’s others, but I thought it was well done and reminiscent of Daphne DuMaurier.

29 June 2018, Tangerine, Christine Mangan

The Joyce Carol Oates quote on the dust jacket reads:  “As if Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn, and Patricia Highsmith collaborated on a screenplay to be filmed by Hitchcock” and that is as good a description as any of this compelling noir-ish novel.  Lucy and Alice are college roommates and close friends until an incident during senior year, referred to mysteriously as “the accident,” occurs. Lucy disappears, Alice finishes school and, as the novel opens, has relocated to exotic Tangier with her new husband.  One day there is a knock on the door and Alice opens it to find Lucy with her suitcase, acting as if nothing happened to ruin their friendship.  The story is told alternately from each woman’s point of view, both moving forward and also flashing back to earlier years.  About the time the reader learns the truth of “the accident,” ominous things begin to occur in the present leading the reader to wonder if history will repeat itself.  Mangan heightens the suspense with hints that one of the two is both unstable and an unreliable narrator but which one?  The ending is a surprise.

3 July 2018, How Hard Can It Be?, Allison Pearson

This was a hilarious, all too realistic account of a woman, Kate Reddy, turning 50 who is dealing with the onset of menopause, a hideous teenage daughter, a husband with a mid-life crisis, ailing parents, a renovation of their newly acquired fixer-upper and a return to the office she headed 7 years earlier as a junior assistant.  As the pre-menopause symptoms set in – hazy memory, huge gushes of blood at inopportune moments, new facial hair- painfully funny scenes ensue.  Kate pretends that she has a little librarian shuffling around the shelves of her memory in house slippers whom she refers to as Roy, and throughout the novel she parenthetically calls on Roy – e.g. “Roy, please find the name of the woman walking towards me. Roy, please add ‘Pick up carryout for dinner’ to today’s list.” Her encounters with her sixteen year old daughter are particularly funny if you have a)had a teenage daughter and b)said daughter has now grown out of that horrible phase.  The book opens with her daughter having snapped a “belfie” (British, I presume, for bum or butt selfie) which has now been spread far and wide across the internet by her frenemy.  This is a wonderfully funny read for any middle-aged woman who has juggled far too many balls and yet kept a surprising percentage of them in the air.

5 July 2018, The Word is Murder, Anthony Horowitz

Horowitz tells the story as if it is autobiographical, with himself as a character who gets roped into writing a book about a brilliant but disgraced private detective who is investigating the oddly timed murder of a woman who only six hours earlier has visited a funeral home to make plans for her own demise. I kept stopping to google various things that he mentions (the title of his last book, his consultation on a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, his residence in London) wondering if, in fact, the story is real, but I think it is just a conceit, and a very clever one at that.  The detective, Daniel Hawthorne, is a bit of a Sherlock Holmes – pretentious, not particularly nice but an observer of the most minute detail. Horowitz gives the reader the salient clues and yet I was surprised by the twists and turns and ultimate solution. 

                                                                                      

6 July 2018, You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfeld

I read the ten stories in Sittenfeld’s new collection in a day (at the beach).  Several of the stories seem to be about coming to terms with one’s earlier self and many of them have characters who confront assumptions.  In the story from which the title comes, “The World Has Many Butterflies,” Julie becomes enamored with Graham, a colleague of her husband and, along with his wife, a fellow parent of children at the same private school. They play a game, “You think it, I’ll say it,” in which Graham names a person at whatever gathering they happen to be attending, and Julie offers clever criticisms.  Because Graham never says anything, she assumes that he agrees and then further assumes that this shared intimacy means something.  When Graham and his wife separate, Julie invites Graham to lunch and confesses that she thinks about him all the time.  “It’s a non-starter,” he tells her, pointing out his relationship with her husband and their kids’ mutual school.   Adding insult to injury, he tells her pointedly that he was never romantically interested in her and, “You do realize, don’t you, that you weren’t saying what I thought?  You were saying what you thought.  I was just listening” (33).   In “Bad Latch,” the narrator meets Gretchen in a pre-natal class and is immediately jealous of this woman’s maternity boutique clothes, resentful of her superior attitude about keeping the baby’s gender a mystery, and annoyed by her freedom to stay at home; as Gretchen tells her, “If you’re going to outsource your childcare, why even bother to become a parent in the first place?” (62)  A year later, Gretchen and the narrator meet again at day care drop-off; Gretchen’s circumstances have changed and the two women begin a budding friendship, earlier assumptions about Gretchen cast aside. In “A Regular Couple,” on her honeymoon, Maggie crosses paths with her high school nemesis, Ashley who is, as luck would have it, on her honeymoon too.  Maggie wants to avoid her, regaling her new husband with stories of Ashley poaching someone else’s boyfriend, then cheating on him and the incident that sealed her hatred – Ashley asks Maggie to tie her shoe in the locker room after a volleyball game.  Her husband says, “She doesn’t seem like that person anymore.  Obviously, if anything, she is intimidated by you” (99).  In “Off the Record,” a freelance journalist scraping to get by lands a big profile with a star she had interviewed briefly years before.  Each woman makes assumptions about the other’s trustworthiness and pseudo-friendship.