Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow' is her best

From Erie Times-News --

Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow' is her best --

By MARY FOSTER --
December 27. 2009 --

Can it really be 27 years since Kinsey Millhone sifted through clues in "A Is for Alibi?"

Yes, it is, and as the end of the series looms, Sue Grafton has never been better.

Millhone, who is still solving crimes in the 1980s and just about to turn 38, has changed little since that first novel. She's still living alone and slightly in love with her landlord, Henry.

By the time of her latest novel, "U Is for Undertow" (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95), though, the plot is more complicated than usual, and much darker.

A mysterious man tells Millhone that a recent newspaper article about a 20-year-old kidnapping has unleashed a flood of memories for him.

It was his sixth birthday, Michael Sutton tells Millhone, when a 4-year-old-girl was kidnapped. In his recently restored memories, Sutton remembers being in the woods behind his house that day, and he thinks he knows where the child was buried.

Millhone is skeptical, but reluctantly agrees to devote a day to the case.

In "U," Grafton switches voices and points of view, leading the reader through distant events and current happenings.

"Here's the odd part. In my 10 years as a private eye, this was the first case I ever managed to resolve without crossing paths with bad guys," Millhone writes. "Except at the end, of course."

The action switches between the 1980s, and Millhone's investigation, and the 1960s. In this earlier period, we meet Deborah Unruh, an upper middle class homemaker whose son Greg has dropped out of college and taken up with Shelley, an unpleasant young woman, and her 6-year-old son.

The trio has been panhandling or outright stealing to make ends meet. But now Shelley is pregnant, and they crash at the Unruhs in an old bus they park behind the house.

"What fascinates me about life is that now and then the past rises up and declares itself," Millhone writes by way of introducing her latest case.

As all fans know, Millhone is a loner, raised by a cantankerous aunt after her parents were killed in a car crash. Her feelings for family have been bitter and distant. Her mother was disowned for marrying her father, and Millhone knows few of her relatives.

That's another situation Millhone needs to clear up, and in "U Is for Undertow," she does.

Joy Fielding takes readers' questions

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

Joy Fielding takes readers' questions --

Apr. 06, 2009 --

Joy Fielding has a story familiar to every writer who's ever made it: The first work she ever submitted was rejected.

Only in her case, she was eight years old and the editor who rejected her story worked at a children's magazine called Jack and Jill . She also felt the bitter sting of rejection at the age of 12, when a TV script about a 12-year-old girl who murders her parents was also turned down, according to the mini autobiography on her website.

Fielding has of course since gone on to become one of Canada's most successful authors, writing dozens of bestselling novels centred around the lives of women in jeopardy, often because they're involved with a bad man.

Her books, which are part thriller, part psychological drama, are never nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize or a Governor-General's award, but they sell around the world by the millions and have a huge following.

Fielding's latest novel, Still Life , is about a successful interior designer whose every bone is broken in a car accident, and who discovers in the hospital that, while she can't see or talk, she can hear everything being said around her. “She quickly discovers that her friends aren't necessarily the people she thought them to be – and that her accident might not have been an accident at all,” says the blurb on the jacket flap.

Fielding was born Joy Tepperman in Toronto in 1945. She had a brief career as an actress, appearing in one film and an episode of Gunsmoke , before moving onto full-time writing. She changed her name to Joy Fielding as an homage to the English writer Henry Fielding (author of Tom Jones ).

Her first novel, The Best of Friends , was published in 1972, was well received, and the New York Times called her 1981 novel Kiss Mommy Goodbye “a knockout.” But it wasn't until the release of See Jane Run in 1991 that Fielding hit the big time and made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

“Probably my favourite book to date is See Jane Run ,” Fielding says on her website. “I'm not sure why it is so special to me. Maybe because it accomplished everything I wanted it to do. I felt it was an important story, one that existed on many levels, and I was very proud of both the writing itself and the story line.”

Fielding says she gets her ideas from news articles or takes them from the experiences of people she knows. And she still brings a bit of the actress to her writing.

“My main characters are all aspects of my own personality, although their stories are very different from my own,” she writes on her website. “Still, I find that I approach the heroines as if I were a Method actress. I think, how would I react if this were happening to me, what would I say if someone spoke this way to me? Sometimes, I try to take the easy way out by neglecting the characters and concentrating on the plot. This never works and I have to start again.”

Fielding lives in Toronto and Palm Springs, Fla., and also lived for three years in Los Angeles. “I think I have a fairly American sensibility, although this is very much tempered by my Canadian upbringing,” she says. “Generally, I set my books in big American cities.... The American landscape seems best for my themes of urban alienation and loss of identity. I am much more interested in the landscape of the soul.”

Anne Rice: Interview With the Vampire Killer

From LA Weekly --

Anne Rice: Interview With the Vampire Killer --

By Gendy Alimurung --
December 24, 2009 --

It’s Angel Time for the famed author

On a rainy December afternoon, Rice is resting in her suite at the Mission Inn, the historic Riverside hotel where she will be signing copies of her new book, Angel Time. She leans back in her chair, arms folded primly across her chest. Having emerged from the proverbial darkness, she looks thin and frail, her once-inky bobbed hair now grown snowy gray, but her voice is precise, matter-of-fact and forceful still.

“I am curious as to whether anyone will show up,” she says. “You never know. Maybe no one will come.”

It is her first signing in four years. Worry sounds quaint coming from someone who’s written 29 novels and sold 100 million books, but there is something to it. Her new novel is about angels. Clearly, in this society, you can bank on vampires. But angels?

Three decades ago, Anne Rice did for the vampire what Martha Stewart did for housekeeping: She made it sexy, modern and marketable. Everybody who comes after her with a variation on that theme owes her an enormous debt of gratitude.

So Rice is not surprised when she sees the fresh generation of vampire fans, who lately seem to be everywhere, with their own conventions, TV shows, musicals, video games and even vineyards (vampire merlot, anyone?). Blood is certainly the new black. They remind her anew of the richness of the original vampire concept. “I remember how it excited me in 1976, when not a whole lot had been done with it,” she says. “Just Dracula and some old Hollywood films.”

That was the year she published the seminal Interview With the Vampire. The setting was her childhood home, New Orleans. She was 35 years old when that first novel came out, and a devout atheist. With the addition of The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, her Vampire Chronicles trilogy became required reading for the black-lipstick-and-sunscreen set.

One consequence of not having to crank out vampire stories is a freedom to finally enjoy them. She finds HBO’s True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, to be great satirical fun. Harris’ novels are the clever, postmodern response to Rice’s decadent Southern Gothic vampires, who creep around in decaying, antebellum mansions.

While she hasn’t read the Twilight novels, Rice has seen the movies. “They’re romances for very young kids. They’re about a young woman wanting and needing an older, mysterious figure who’s protective and yet something of a menace,” she says. It’s the Brontë sisters and Jane Eyre. “It was almost genius on Stephenie Meyer’s part to set it in high school. It works perfectly.”

Rice isn’t jealous of Meyer’s success. If anything, she is sympathetic. “You know, when you’re very, very popular the way she is now, a lot of people want to tear you down,” Rice says. “But she deserves credit for making a lot of readers happy.”

Meyer’s genius may be in getting teenage girls to fall in love with vampires. But Rice’s was in establishing the persona to be fallen in love with. Her books, written from the vampire’s point of view, are about the monster’s suffering and agony — the ultimate outsider: himself. What would it be like to interview a vampire? To get him to tell you his whole story?

“You wanted to know, what does he do when he’s alone?” she explains. “What does he do for kicks besides drink blood and turn into a bat? What books does he like to read? I took it in the direction of having that vampire open up to you and tell you all those secrets.”

There were inklings of things to come. When the film version of Interview With the Vampire came out in 1994, producer David Geffen told Rice that he’d noticed an awful lot of teenage girls attending the preliminary screenings. This was unexpected. “They didn’t make that movie for young teenage girls,” Rice says. “Producers saw it more as a gay allegory. They chose those handsome men, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, with that in mind.”

She stayed away from the public, not for lack of love for her audience but for personal reasons. When the popularity of her Vampire Chronicles books reached its pinnacle, she did marathon signings. “We did an eight-hour [signing] once at a Walmart in Denver,” she says, with a grin and a shiver. National book tours are glamorous but hard. Rice, who is a Type 1 diabetic, would be sick for months afterward.

The past four years have been especially rough. Poet Stan Rice, her husband of 40 years, died in 2002 of brain cancer. She sold the last of their three houses in New Orleans mere weeks before hurricane Katrina hit, and moved to Rancho Mirage to be near her son, Christopher, who lives in L.A. The move was painful, she says, but she needed the change.

When Rice did book signings in the old days, she adds, you couldn’t presume who would show up. You couldn’t tell whether there would be more men or women. Just when she’d think her typical reader was a goth kid in black velvet, up would march a bunch of soldiers just back from the first Gulf War, saying they’d read the books there. Or she’d be approached by a country kid in a cap with a bill, who’d ask, “Where’s Lestat? When’s he comin’ back?”

The infamous vampire Lestat — equal parts Casanova, trickster-god Pan and Justin Timberlake — is never coming back.

God has taken the vampire’s place. Rice came through the turmoil of the past few years by finding faith. She converted to Catholicism. In 2002, she consecrated her writing to Jesus Christ, declaring that she would henceforth write only about salvation, not alienation.

Of the novels that made her famous, Rice says, “To me those stories are about grief, about suffering, about atheism. They were stories I told because I was going through that kind of crisis. People respond to those books strongly, particularly if they’re going through a rebellion of their own, where they feel kind of lost. They can identify with the darkness in them.”

The world is never lacking for lost souls. Many of her fans wanted her to keep going with the dark stuff. To keep driving a hearse and to keep showing up at book signings in a coffin. (Even if Catholic dogma wasn’t her style back then, she surely took cues from its theatrics.) But Rice is done with seductive, demonic adversaries. At least, to the extent she can be. Good, after all, cannot exist without evil, and God and Satan are always at their game of chess. Demonic adversaries are inevitable. Mainly, she wants her work to reflect her faith, just as the earlier work reflected her unhappiness and despair. “Why can’t you redeem the vampires? Why can’t you save Lestat?,” Rice’s fans ask.

Though not in so many words, that is exactly what she’s doing. Angel Time, as its title suggests, is about angels. It too will be part of a trilogy, this one called Songs of the Seraphim. Instead of being visited by a vampire, the doomed hero is visited by an angel. After a decade of conscienceless killing, government assassin Toby O’Dare is visited by the angel Malchiah. It is never too late to repent, Malchiah tells him: “I’m here to tell you that everything can change for you. I’m here to take you to a place where you can begin to be the person you might have been.”

Vampires and angels may seem like opposites, but they aren’t, Rice argues. They are similar, especially in the way vampires are used at this particular cultural moment. In the works of Harris and Meyer, they function as guardian angels. True Blood’s Vampire Bill is perpetually rushing in to save his human girlfriend, Sookie, and Twilight’s Edward Cullen would sooner die than ravage his flesh-and-blood crush, Bella Swan. No, actually, he’d rather take her to prom.

“I’ll be very interested to see who’s lined up downstairs,” Rice says. The only generality she can make after all these years is that she has yet to see an 80-year-old at a book signing. “Though, maybe 80-year-olds don’t go to book signings,” she says, slyly.

She recalls a personal appearance in Toronto some 30 years ago, in the earliest days of Interview With the Vampire. It snowed. No one came. Bored, Rice pulled books off the shelves and started reading. “It was very upsetting to the store people. They were so embarrassed,” she says, laughing.

Today’s signing — and Rice has only ever done signings, never readings, preferring instead to let her characters “speak” for themselves — is taking place downstairs, in the Mission Inn’s overly warm lobby. A toasty fire crackles in the hearth. The halls are decked with gold ribbons, lights and cheery, creepy animatronic elves. The whole florid setup leaves you dazzled and slightly sweaty, much like Rice’s prose. Major scenes in Angel Time are set in the Mission Inn and its environs. “A giant confection and confabulation of a building ... an extravagant and engulfing place sprawling over two city blocks ... unfailingly lively and warm and inviting, and throbbing with cheerful voices and gaiety and laughter,” is how Rice describes the hotel in the novel’s noirish opening pages.

“The hero comes here,” she says. It is his refuge, as it has been Rice’s. “He’s given an assignment to assassinate someone here. It’s upsetting to him. I was dreaming of the book when I visited the Mission Inn. I got a huge lift from being here.”

She hopes to do for angels what she did for vampires. She loves the idea of powerful messengers of God coming down to Earth to answer prayers. Rice’s angels aren’t weak. A being from heaven, living in the presence of God, she imagines, would be a strong, complex spirit. “I really want to write about the good guys,” she says, “to prove that they can be as interesting.”

Angels, with their wings and halos, sound like a tough sell to a jaded public. But then again, a generation ago, one might have said pretty much the same thing about vampires.

As it turns out, Rice needn’t have worried about people not showing up. The fans, a mixed bunch as predicted, are lined up around the block. They clap when they spot their idol, the former queen of the vampires, in her long, black-velvet skirt. Rice’s assistants stand at the ready with extra pens and Diet Coke. “She’ll be signing books for hours,” says the doorman.

Book Reviews: Assorted titles for every reader (Ann Rule)

From Journal Gazette (Illinois) --

Book Reviews: Assorted titles for every reader --

By Juanita Sherwood --
December 21, 2009 --

'But I Trusted You'
By Ann Rule

This book by Ann Rule is the 14th in her series of true crime stories. The title story is the longest story in the book. It is about a female who is accused of murdering her husband.

Rule’s stories are always intriguing, and not sensational. She delves into the psychology of the situations she writes about.

Five other crimes are also featured; some of them occurred several decades ago and aren’t quite as interesting as the first one, but the book is still a good read. For the reader who enjoys Rule and/or who enjoy seeing what makes people “tick.”

Do I Have to Read Sue Grafton?

From The Daily Beast! --

Do I Have to Read Sue Grafton? --

by William Boot --
12/21/2009 --

Book: U is for Undertow
Author: Sue Grafton
Pages: 403
Readable Pages: All of them

Sample line: “How could I have known then that within days, he’d be laid out on a coroner’s slab with a bullet hole between the eyes?”

This isn’t your typical book-review column. I’m reading the bestsellers: the Grishams, the Cornwells, the Higgins Clarks. Moreover, I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports. I’ll tell you which of the bestsellers, if any, are readable. If they’re semi-readable, I’ll tell you which pages to skip. With any luck, you’ll know which one to pack for the flight to Jakarta. If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.

Our first book is Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow, a fat, royal blue book that sits at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The year is 1988. The hero is one Kinsey Millhone, who sounds less like a private eye than a natural-gas concern. The flap jacket says this is Grafton’s 21st alphabetically enhanced mystery (A is for Alibi, etc.), and Kinsey feels like she’s been around the block. She’s 37 and twice-divorced; she’s incapable of using an eyebrow pencil without giving herself “the fierce demeanor of a Kabuki.” Kinsey’s got some long-festering family drama, and if you want to cut straight to the whodunnit you should skip over pages 25-26, 226-233, and 253-260.

But that’s not recommended, because U is for Undertow isn’t much of a mystery. Sure, there’s a baby who was kidnapped and murdered 20 years ago, and a 6-year-old boy, now grown, who may or may not have seen its burial. But what’s wonderful about the book is the sharp-eyed details Grafton packs into its frame. For example, watch Kinsey arrive at a cat hospital, where she’s gone to chase down a clue, and size up the receptionist: “Her salt-and-pepper hair was heavy on the salt, shoulder length, and blunt cut. Her bifocals had beveled edges, with thin wire stems. The tops of the lenses were tinted blue and the bottoms tinted pink. … She looked like someone who’d carry a cat around while the office was closed for the lunch.”

Meow. And Grafton not only gives us Kinsey and her world-weariness—she always has a quip about what other women are wearing—but drops into the minds of the murder suspects, too, allowing them dozens of pages to establish their own humanity. There is Walker McNally, a sodden drunk for whom the pouring and stirring of a drink becomes a kind of sexual foreplay. There’s Jon Corso, a restless kid caught in the crossfire of a weenie professor father and a domineering mother-in-law. (“There was no court of appeals,” he laments.) And Shelly, a refugee of the '60s who doesn’t care for shaving and is fiercely vegetarian. Oh, and lately she’d rather you call her “Destiny.”

Warning: There is talk of social class here. Kinsey has a chip on her shoulder about the well-to-do folks in her California town, so read the book discreetly if flying first class. Grafton’s interest is in such friction, however—she gets turned on when sad, oafish yuppies are bold enough to commit a crime but not brave enough to see through its consequences. “It’s only in the movies the bad guys keep firing,” Kinsey tells us after discharging her Heckler & Koch pistol. “In real life, they sit down and behave.”

Read it? Absolutely.

Book review: U is for Undertow, Sue Grafton

From The Independent Weekly (Australia) --

Book review: U is for Undertow, Sue Grafton --

By DENISE PICKLES --
23 Dec, 2009 --

Kinsey Millhone is back for another outing as the series gets perilously close to the end of the alphabet. What fate awaits the doughty protagonist as Z advances?

In the late’ 80s, Kinsey is interviewing Michael Sutton. He is having a delayed reaction to something he saw when he was a small child in the late ’60s. Two days after Mary Claire Fitzhugh was kidnapped, Michael says he saw two men digging a hole that would accommodate the body of a small child. What the police find at the site when they dig it up gives Kinsey reason to extend her inquiries.

Meanwhile, also back in the late ’60s, Deborah Unruh has to give shelter to her dropout son and his heavily pregnant hippie girlfriend and her small son. When the child is born, Shelly, the mother, has no compunction about moving on with Greg, Deborah’s son, and leaving the child, Rain, to grow up as Deborah’s adored daughter.

The melding of these two threads is done well and the introduction of Kinsey’s family problems serves to keep the interest of the reader on the investigator.

The characters are believable, including, unfortunately, the baddies, who are very bad indeed. Michael Sutton, the fellow who starts Kinsey on the case, is a strange bird indeed.

Further chunks of Kinsey’s family are no doubt lying in wait for readers as the author approaches the terminus of the alphabet. – Macmillan, $32.99

FBI agents look for romance, killer in ‘Hot Pursuit’ (Suzanne Brockmann)

From The Decatur Daily --

FBI agents look for romance, killer in ‘Hot Pursuit’ --

By Carolyn Brackin Orr --
12/20/09 --

My preferred way of reading a book is straight through in one sitting. I was not able to do this while reading Suzanne Brockmann’s latest novel, “Hot Pursuit.” I was, however, late for church, late to pick up my child and trying to read in a fast-food drive thru. This novel was so intense and page-turningly good that I did not want to put it down.

It is not your usual catch-the-bad-guys’ story. It is rather, a book within a book. It has sub-plots within the plot. It takes unusual turns and keeps the reader guessing until its conclusion.

The cast of characters are not your run-of-the-mill, everyday friends. In the acknowledgments, the author mentions that she is a PFLAG mom (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). This soon becomes apparent when Brockmann introduces a married gay couple.

Jules is a high ranking FBI leader, while his partner, Robin is a bona fide movie star. A second couple dances around the idea of “coming out” to friends and co-workers.

Alyssa and Sam are an interracial couple. They have a young child and are top enforcers for a security firm featured prominently throughout the saga. She is African-American and he is Caucasian. Their story line is just another unusual dynamic in this fun-filled narrative.

Assemblywoman Maria is perceived to be the main target for the killer. This idea is aborted as new information is discovered and shared with the former Navy Seals team. An independent woman, she does attempt a connection with one of her bodyguards. She meets with no success but continues trying.

Jenn and Dan round out the couples who lend diversity to this eclectic group. He is the strong, handsome, sought-after alpha male. She is the chunky, dependable best friend, chock-full of low self-esteem, who has never had a serious relationship. These two connect and it is their courtship that highlights the book.

Entering the mind of the serial killer offers few surprises. His dad was absent in much of his life. His mother died when he was two months old and he was raised by nannies. He was a killer of small animals as a child. He has vague plans of killing Alyssa and raising her child as his own.

The killer, hiding in plain sight, knows each of the individual key players. He has formed an alliance with them and this heightens the thrill of the kill. As he escalates his murders, he begins making mistakes, which lead investigators to his identity.

There is a lot of muscle flexing, male bonding, gushy female moments and boy-girl flirting. The love scenes may be off-putting for more conservative readers. I found the gay scenes too much information for my taste.

Forgive me if this review seems short, but I am headed to my local bookstore to purchase more Suzanne Brockmann novels.