Fiction Book Reviews: 1/4/2010 (Linda Fairstein)

From Publishers Weekly --

Fiction Book Reviews: 1/4/2010 --

1/4/2010 --

Hell Gate Linda Fairstein. Dutton, $26.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-525-95161-2

At the outset of bestseller Fairstein’s winning 12th legal thriller featuring New York County ADA Alex Cooper (after Lethal Legacy), the bodies of human trafficking victims wash up on Rockaway Beach. At least one young woman appears to have been dead before she hit the frigid waters. Meanwhile, Ethan Leighton, a rising Manhattan congressman, has fled the scene of a car accident, possibly to avoid exposure of an extramarital affair and a love child. Leighton’s paramour, who calls 911 to report that Leighton has threatened her, later disappears amid signs of violence. Both cases attract the keen attention of Vin Statler, New York’s ambitious post-Bloomberg mayor, who adds political pressure to the crime solving. Fairstein throws a City Council slush fund into the mix, but manages to resolve the various plot threads nicely. While the main criminal’s identity will surprise few, readers seeking a realistic depiction of law-enforcement work will be more than satisfied. 8-city author tour. (Mar.)

(Sandra Brown) This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back --

By Margaret Cannon --
Sep. 18, 2009 --

SMASH CUT
By Sandra Brown, Simon & Schuster, 367 pages, $29.99

This is a great fat escape novel by one of the queens of the romance/mystery combination. The setting is moneyed Atlanta, where rich and powerful Paul Wheeler is killed during an armed robbery. His gorgeous mistress, Julia Rutledge, wants his killer punished to the limits of the law. Wheeler's nephew Creighton is accused of the crime, and his family has hired the best legal talent around. Is Creighton guilty? If not, who is? Julie Rutledge won't rest until someone is convicted. This is definitely one of Brown's best.

(Sara Paretsky) This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back --

By Margaret Cannon --
Sep. 18, 2009 --

HARDBALL
By Sara Paretsky, Putnam, 464 pages, $33.50

Sara Paretsky's detective, V.I. Warshawski, has had some completely impenetrable storylines to follow. But Hardball isn't one of those. Fixing her sights firmly on the civil liberties that the Bush administration snatched away from Americans in the name of “the war on terror,” Paretsky is on a roll.

It all begins as Vic takes on a pro bono case. The chaplain for a local home for the aged has asked her to find out whatever became of a man named Lamont Gadsden. He has been gone for more than 40 years, but his aunt, a woman of great faith, has never given up hope that he'd be found.

Now she's dying, and all she wants is to find out what became of her beloved nephew before she dies. There's no money and not much in the way of thanks, but she's going to give the old, cold case a good try. How this small tragedy leads Vic to conspiracy, abuse of power, murder and her own near-death is what Hardball is all about.

I love Warshawski and respect Paretsky, but I must say this book has a major flaw. That's the irritating and totally unbelievable young woman Paretsky uses to focus the plot. Petra Warshawski, Vic's twentysomething niece from St. Louis, is dim and ditzy. Nothing from her lingo to her motives works. When she disappeared, I hoped she'd turn up dead, but no such luck. It's great to have V.I. back, but Petra should take a hike.

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back (Kathy Reichs)

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back --

By Margaret Cannon --
Sep. 18, 2009 --

206 BONES
By Kathy Reichs, Simon & Schuster, 308 pages, $32

Kathy Reichs's 12th novel featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is tight, taut and filled with the kind of solid science her fans love. Reichs has always been a writer who learns from her mistakes. Characters a bit thin? She adds depth. Plots weak? She works them out more thoroughly. Too much scientific hugger-mugger? She tones it down. 206 Bones has suspense to burn and a terrific plot, and all of Reichs's talents are on show.

The story begins with a truly horrifying setting. Tempe Brennan awakes to find herself hogtied in the dark. Not only is it dark, it's dank and cold and she quickly realizes that she's somewhere underground, buried alive.

It begins in Chicago, where Brennan and her ex-lover, Montreal Detective Lieutenant Andrew Ryan, have delivered a set of bones to the Chicago coroner, and where Brennan seems to be accused of some form of dereliction of duty. The dead woman has been identified as Rose Jurmain, a Chicago heiress who went missing three years earlier while on a Quebec holiday. The remains show no reason to think a crime was committed, and Brennan's work is sound, but it appears that someone is out to smear her, and that someone seems to be in the Montreal lab.

That story line lets Reichs jump to three more bodies in Quebec. All are older women killed ruthlessly and with no apparent reason. The work leaves Brennan little time to search for the person who put the Chicago coroner on her trail. It also makes her a bit oblivious to the fact that the Montreal lab staff is uneasy. Something is wrong, and the tension ratchets up.

Reichs keeps moving back and forth between Brennan's horrific present and her muddled past. As she tries to free herself, she's unravelling the mess of the past several months, including her unresolved feelings for Ryan.

206 Bones is Reichs at the top of her game. Unlike many of her crime author contemporaries, she has pared down her prose, not plumped it up, so this is a solidly edited 300-page novel that moves like lightning, which I read in a wonderful, day-long rush.

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.