What I read on my summer vacation --- great titles to take to the beach or read on your screened porch

Anthony Horowitz clearly has a lot of fun with the reader in this second outing in which he is featured as a character.  In his previous The Word is Murder, Tony Horowitz, the writer, becomes involved with Daniel Hawthorne, a Scotland Yard detective turned private investigator who taps Horowitz to play Watson to his Sherlock with the idea that Horowitz will write a true crime book about him.  They pair up again in The Sentence is Death to discover who murdered a lawyer by breaking a £2,000 bottle of wine over his head and then cutting him with the shards.  Horowitz writes as if he is penning a nonfiction book, providing locations and names of people, all convincingly real.  You assume, however that this is all a conceit, yet he creates doubt with first, an afterward in which he thanks people who appear as characters in the book and then, rather brilliantly, including an interview of himself supposedly written by a writer sent by Barnes and Noble to do a feature on him.  The journalist tells you in her article about her efforts to track down various people from the book who always seem to be out or too busy to see her when she calls, and she includes a face-to-face meeting with Hawthorne who shows up at Horowitz’s flat while they are talking. You can imagine Horowitz chuckling as readers shut the cover and immediately Google characters and even the journalist’s name.  The mystery itself is good but it is the interplay between the two main characters and the character Tony’s own second guessing and self-doubt that propel the narrative forward.

In Long Gone by Alafair Burke, Alice Humphrey is the 37-year old daughter of a famous Hollywood director and a one-time Oscar-winning actress.  Intent on escaping her father’s fame – both as a director and as a philanderer – and his money, Alice, out of work for 8 months after being fired from the Metropolitan Museum, takes a job as a small gallery manager in the meatpacking district of NYC.  The job seems too good to be true, but despite her reservations about the dubious talent of the feature artist and mystery gallery owner, the money is good and Alice feels happy to be working again.  Two days after the gallery opens, an out-of-town religious group protests the gallery art and the man who has hired Alice proves difficult to reach until he finally answers her calls and asks her to meet him at the gallery. When she arrives, she finds the place cleaned out – artwork, counters, even pens, and her employer dead, apparently shot.  Meanwhile, a young girl who looks remarkably like Alice has disappears from a small town in Connecticut and her prints show up at the gallery crime scene.  The story moves back and forth between the perspectives of Alice and the various detectives trying to solve the cases.  

In Miracle Creek by Angie Kim, I was introduced to a therapy I’ve never heard of before:  HBOT - apressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic “dives” with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility. People don helmets, similar to what an astronaut or deep-sea diver would wear and breathe in higher contents of oxygen.  In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run one of these experimental medical treatment devices and have built a steady business for The Miracle Submarine.  As the book starts, a fire destroys their business, killing a mother and child who are in the chamber at the time and disfiguring several others, including their teenage daughter.  Much of the book is the trial of one of the other mothers who is charged with the crime, but as various characters give testimony and the narrative flips back and forth in time, the reader and others begin to doubt her guilt and realize that the day of the accident was much more complicated than it appeared.  

After reading Conviction by Denise Mina, I had to ask myself, why haven’t I read anything by her before?  Motivated by a stellar review to add this one to my Kindle, I realize that the Scottish mystery writer has authored numerous others that have met with acclaim.  In Conviction, Mina sets the main character, Anna McDonald, and the reader on a wild ride.  The day begins ordinarily enough; Anna is preparing breakfast for her two children while her husband busies himself getting ready for work.  She listens to a true crime pod case, a pastime to which she is addicted.  The day becomes decidedly unusual when her best friend, whom she is supposed to meet later, shows up in traveling clothes and with a suitcase.  It seems Anna’s husband is leaving her for the friend and taking the two children with him.  In shock, Anna returns to the pod cast and realizes that the story featuring a sunken yacht and a murdered family involves someone she once knew when she herself was someone else.  The friend’s husband shows up on the doorstep and, to escape the wreckage of their own lives, the two begin a wild adventure to clear her former friend and discover the truth behind the mystery.  Fast paced, at times humorous, it has all the makings of a summer movie.

I am reminded that a Kate Atkinson mystery is not like any other detective story I have read. In Big Sky, her hero, Jackson Brodie, is back in his fifth outing.  He’s now living in a small town on the coast of Scotland to be near his son and former lover, Julia.  Jackson’s story is as much about the travails of being the parent of a teenager and longing for Julia is it is about solving a mystery.  The narrative switches back and forth between a cast of seemingly unrelated characters in and around this town and at times, Jackson disappears from the story entirely.  Unlike most detective books, the story does not stay focused on his sleuthing.  Eventually however, all of the story lines converge and Jackson, a minor character in several of them, becomes more prominent.  It’s an easy and enjoyable read and you don’t have to have read the others in the series to pick this one up.

Two books challenge our notions of the way time works.  In Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald, it is December 1937, and Joe Reynolds, a young railroad lineman, reports to work at Grand Central Station in NYC.  A beautiful young woman dressed like she’s come from a party in the 1920’s catches his eye.  He looks for her every day but doesn’t see her again until a year later when he summons up the courage to approach her and buy her a coffee.  He is confused by her talk of the Roaring Twenties and her seeming ignorance of world events, and after spending the day with her, he is dismayed when he walks her home and she vanishes into thin air along the way.  Another year goes by before he sees her in the terminal again, wearing the same clothes.  

Nora Lansing is an aspiring artist, just off the boat after a year in Paris.  She and a friend are taking the subway when a huge accident occurs and many people die.  When she wakes up after the crash, she finds herself lying on the floor of Grand Central.  Eventually, it becomes apparent to both Nora and Joe that she died in the accident but she never left the train station.  As long as she stays within a certain distance of the station, she is alive. If she goes too far away, she vanishes, only to reappear on a particular day in December.

Grunwald makes use of “Manhattanhedge”, (a very real solar phenomenon when, on certain days of the year, the sun is perfectly aligned with the line of the streets, shining through the windows of Grand Central), to provide an explanation of sorts for Nora’s comings and goings.  She also uses world events, particularly WWII, to show both the passage of time, Joe’s aging and the impact of outside events on both his world and Nora’s very limited one.   The reader, like the characters, is challenged to consider the circumstances of Nora’s comings and goings, and to contemplate the situation in which one lover ages and one does not.

From the author of the Wayward Pines series, Blake Crouch, Recursion is a thought-provoking story that engages the reader in a thought experiment – what if Einstein’s theory that time is not linear is true?  What if the past, present and future all exist simultaneously?  And, what if you could not only recall the past through memory but actually return to an earlier moment in time?  People begin reporting what becomes known as “false memory syndrome.”  They vividly recall relationships, experiences, years of their lives that do not seem to have happened.  NYC cop Barry Sutton is called to the scene of a woman attempting suicide from the 41^stfloor of a building.  As he tries to talk her back, she tells him about herself but also about a marriage and son that she remembers in an alternate reality.  She has found the man, a widower whose first wife jumped from this very ledge, and not only does he claim that he doesn’t know her, but his wife is very much alive.  Too conflicted and devastated over the loss of this phantom child, she plunges to her death.  Barry begins to investigate and gets the man to confess to him that they were married – in another time line.  The narrative switches to Helena Smith, a neuroscientist who is working to develop the technology to capture memories.  Her mother has developed Alzheimer’s and she wants to be able to help her re-experience her past.  Helena’s work succeeds in ways she could not have foreseen and soon she is burdened with trying to stop what she has started.  The book is fast paced and fun.  As Barry ponders, so too the reader – if I could go back and change the outcome of an experience, would I?