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.

BOOK REVIEW: Sue Grafton's latest is her best

From The Star Press (East Central Indiana) --

BOOK REVIEW: Sue Grafton's latest is her best --

By MARY FOSTER --
December 20, 2009 --

NEW ORLEANS - U Is for Undertow (A Marian Wood Book/Putnam, 403 pages, $27.95) by Sue Grafton - can it really be 27 years since Kinsey Millhone sifted through clues in A Is for Alibi?

And can Sue Grafton really be approaching the end of the alphabet?

The answers are yes, and yes, and as the end of the series looms, 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 this time, though, the plot is more complicated than usual, and much darker.

Millhone is working in her office when a man shows up unannounced and tells her 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 child was buried.

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

Among the first things she finds out is that Sutton has a reputation for not telling the truth. Still, there is something about his tale that rings true for her, so she pushes on.

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

"Here's the odd part. In my ten 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 Unrhus 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. That also applies to her personal life.

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 didn't know any of her relatives until a few books back.

That is another situation Millhone also needs to clear up, and in U is for Undertow, she finally does.

BOOKS: Two historic towns and madness (Katherine Howe)

From The Washington Times --

BOOKS: Two historic towns and madness --

By Philip Kopper --
December 20, 2009 --

THE PHYSICK BOOK OF DELIVERANCE DANE (A NOVEL)
By Katherine Howe
Hyperion, $25.99, 371 pages

DOGTOWN: DEATH AND ENCHANTMENT IN A NEW ENGLAND GHOST TOWN
By Elyssa East
Free Press, $26, 291 pages

Two books make fascinating forays into a storied corner of New England and two occult worlds — contemporary and colonial — with special reference to ancient witchcraft, modern sociopathology and that timeless element of the human condition, evil. Given the coincidence that the narratives occur in two historic Massachusetts towns, a dissonance between them is more important: that one is a delicious novel and the other a tart sachet of history and journalism.

It bears mention that each book arose from its author's graduate work, Elyssa East's in an art history project, Katherine Howe's in the hybrid historical discipline, American studies. Was there ever a better argument for going to grad school? If a parent worries about the expense, don't quarrel. Tell them: "But Mom, Dad, I might get a best-seller out of it."

In "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane," Ms. Howe spins a sort of white magic to create from whole cloth a splendidly persuasive community in Marblehead upward of three centuries ago. It has real historical similitude as she weaves details of colonial life that differ from our own, such as the use and meanings of words. "Physick" has to do with human health, healing and the botanical substances used to treat illness; "Deliverance" is a given name in a period when parents often named children for desired virtues. (Does anyone name their daughters Charity any more, let alone Chastity? Or their sons Increase?)

It might seem too cute or autobiographical that the book opens as Connie Goodwin, doctoral candidate, is actually sitting for her oral exam before a panel of august Bostonians. The dust jacket states, "The idea for this novel developed when Howe was studying for her doctoral qualifying exams and walking her dog through the woods between Marblehead and Salem."

Be that as it may, Connie is convincingly human — by turns pedantic, intellectual, curious, sexy, anxious, sly, nervy, bitchy and justifiably terrified. Like her creator, she too has a dog, Arlo. Connie passes the acid test of her orals, then (conveniently) must find a subject for her dissertation under the supervision of a predictably duplicitous Yankee professor who is at once sympathetic and driving. A pipesmoker in tweeds, he coddles his grad students while using them as indentured intellectual servants to dig up new grist for the corpus of his own lifelong scholarship into colonial occults.

Summer comes and Connie sojourns to Marblehead to claim and tidy up a house she has inherited. Standing vacant for 20 years, it is a derelict overgrown and alive with spores of its past lifetimes. Her long-dead grandmother was a gardener and healer, like some of her ancestors, thus a feral garden surrounds the place: "instead of a lawn, riots of wild herbs and plants … standard to a home kitchen garden: thyme, rosemary, sage, parsley, a few different mints." There are obscure flowers that Connie "knows only from horticulture books: monkshood, henbane, foxglove, moonwort." She asks, "Hadn't Granna known that a lot of those flowers are poisonous?"

Of course Granna knew, how else to explain the root that Arlo digs up and drops at her feet, mandrake, "among the most poisonous plants known to man." Flashback to 1682 and neighboring Salem's infamous witchhunts. Enter the title character Deliverance Dane, in due course an accused "witch that she ha' murdered his darter [daughter] as part of her pledge to do the Devil's work."

Thereafter the narrative swings back and forth between Connie's world and the colonials'. At one apogee, our heroine advances her academic search for as-yet-undiscovered source material, nay the aforementioned Physick Book. At the other, Deliverance and her daughter practice their arcane arts and find their fates. If Ms. Howe's denouement is a bit forced and tidy, her counterpoint is genuinely entertaining and the two worlds delightfully realized. Furthermore, it offers some genuine social history.

"Dogtown" is a more difficult book that starts in academe. In search of a study topic, Elyssa East became an almost accidental author after stumbling on the work of the early 20th-century artist Marsden Hartley and found it mesmerizing. She was especially taken by the abstract landscapes he painted in a bizarre wild place that captivated him near Gloucester on Cape Ann. The place called Dogtown was wild when Harley found it and much of it had been denuded by logging. Its strangest feature was and is a scattering of huge boulders in extraordinary shapes and configurations, erratics in the vocabulary of geology, pushed here by Pleistocene glaciers millennia ago.

Ms. East found it a magical setting, albeit much of the magic is black. Boggy and thin-soiled, this had been a hard place for human habitation since early English immigrants settled here. They ultimately abandoned it, but people kept coming there, drawn by some impalpable attraction. Some moderns say it lies above an electromagnetic hotspot, others that it is simply and irrevocably haunted. According to one local mystic, nature is "constantly broadcasting across a frequency that only a few knew how to turn in to. Dogtown happened to be one of the places where the signal was strongest. And when people listened to the earth, it listened back." But it was not always benign.

Twenty years before Ms. East arrived, Dogtown was the scene of a particularly heinous murder. A gentle schoolteacher who loved those now-deep wild woods was attacked while taking one of her long rambling walks on a rainy morning. The killer smashed her head with a rock, stripped off her clothes, then dragged her body from the trail and hid it. When her husband went searching, he was led to the body by her faithful dog.

The book "Dogtown" is a fabric of many strands: the murder; the trial and conviction of one Peter Hodgkins, a local ne'er-do-well who appears crazy by every standard except legal ones; the failure of our institutions to cope with his madness; the human history of the place; its geology, botany and ecology. One pedestrian theme is the sorry possibility that Dogtown may be developed as real estate. A more moving theme is Dogtown's healing affect on some troubled souls, the artist Hartley for one, the author for another. She closes with an epiphany in a discovery that the reader had best experience for himself.

Consider: "The silence of this rock grove was so deep it seemed as though I could hear the sound of the trees drawing up water through their roots, the lichen and moss breaking rocks into dust, the soft burrowing of every animal. It was as though the Earth's hidden, most essential forms had risen up from deep inside its core and spilled over into this little valley." Dogtown is one of those special places to see before you die. Deliverance Dane is a dame I'd love to meet.

Closing in on the letter Z (Sue Grafton)

From Los Angeles Times --

Closing in on the letter Z --

By Sarah Weinman --
December 17, 2009 --

A talk with Sue Grafton about her latest Kinsey Millhone mystery, 'U Is for Undertow.' For the series' first half, people bet that she couldn't finish it. 'Now,' she says, 'they are rooting for me.'

Reporting from New York - In 1982, reviewing Sue Grafton's first private detective novel, "A Is for Alibi," the pseudonymous New York Times crime fiction critic Newgate Callendar wondered, "Will the series take hold? This first book is competent enough, but not particularly original." Twenty-seven years on, Callendar's dismissive attitude toward the book -- and its tough-minded thirtysomething heroine Kinsey Millhone -- demonstrates the dangers of prognostication and how instantaneous judgments don't age well.

Grafton's alphabet-titled series not only took hold, but the books are also available in 28 countries (and 26 languages) in abundant quantities, well into the millions of copies. In the last two years, Grafton has won lifetime achievement awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Without her and crime-writing colleagues Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, the female private detective subgenre would simply not exist. And with the end of the alphabet in sight, no author is more closely identified with reader expectations -- especially when "Z Is for Zero" shepherds Kinsey and her hometown of Santa Teresa to a fictional end.

Grafton has certainly reaped the rewards of this bigger picture: But what's been lost in the collective race toward the finish line is that Grafton, interviewed on the first day of her book tour for "U Is for Undertow" (Putnam: 404 pp., $27.95), has produced a better book each time out, and "U" is her most structurally complex, psychologically potent book to date.

The 69-year-old woman I met at the Four Seasons Hotel, where she stays regularly when visiting the city, was comfortable in the skin of her black sweater, gray speckled skirt and black boots. But just underneath the extroverted mask she presents at bookstore appearances is the deeply contemplative writer still determined to stretch her chops and chart territory that removes any semblance of a comfort zone. Rather than rest on her laurels, Grafton does the exact opposite.

The main story line in "U" concerns the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl in the late 1960s -- a topic "fraught with emotion" for Grafton, who has a granddaughter the same age.

"I could hardly bear the subject matter," she said. "Children are so precious, and it was very difficult to talk about the disappearance of a child, because I could identify all too well with the agony that parents and grandparents must go through."

Grafton had actively resisted working on such a story line for a while -- it was one of six possible plots she considered and took notes on for her previous book, "T Is for Trespass" -- but found it worked this time once she decided to keep the crime itself off-camera. While her books by definition deal with homicide and violence, Grafton doesn't want to "repel her readers" and rub the gory details in their faces.

Instead, Grafton is more concerned with what happens in the gray areas, when ordinary people cross the line.

"Many criminals are not evil people," she says. "They are not pathologically twisted. Many ordinary folk somehow wander from the straight and narrow. And those kinds of deviations and crimes are interesting to me because they are closer to the norm. They are outside what I consider acceptable behavior, but not as cut and dried."

Echoing her last two books, Grafton no longer relies on Kinsey as the sole narrator, but "U" goes a step further: There are several additional points of view from characters with deep connections to the kidnapped child, told in alternating time sequences between the late '60s and the "present day" of 1988. The added rigors kept Grafton off-balance in the two years it took to complete the novel.

"It was the most bizarre thing: I could 'see' the story, like it was a little light box, but I couldn't figure out how to break down the elements and how to present them, what was the beginning, middle and end," she said. "So I kept dumping it. But every time I would do that, it was like there was a figure tapping my shoulder, insisting I keep trying. I must have started the story wrong about three times. It was like throwing dinner plates at the wall in order to see what sticks."

As frustrating as the process is for her (Grafton confessed there were days she "nearly burst into tears" when the writing wasn't working), she takes comfort that she's gone through similar routines every time -- and can prove it by looking back to the voluminous journals she's kept for each of her books. (Notes dating back to "G Is for Gumshoe" are archived on her computer; Boston University, to which she donated her archives, houses the journals for the series' earliest installments.)

Of course, the looming specter of "Z" -- which will coincide with Kinsey's 40th birthday in 1990 -- can't be completely ignored. With just five more letters in the alphabet, Grafton estimates she'll be an octogenarian when she shuts the door on Kinsey -- and no, there won't be more using the Cyrillic alphabet, or double letters, or anything of the sort. "I'll never do linking titles again," she said.

But who's to say she needs to continue the sequence? She's the author, the god of her writing, and surely, she could stop whenever she likes?

"Well, I don't know," Grafton said, a half-smile on her face. "When I started writing the series, who even knew this was going to work? Was that gall, was I being cheeky or not? For the first half of the alphabet, people bet I couldn't [get to the end]. Now, they are rooting for me."

Talking to Grafton reveals some of the yin and yang between author and readers. On the one hand, she stresses that she "has to put up a wall" and tune out most of what they might suggest for Kinsey: "[They want her] to have more than one dress, get better haircuts, diet improved. If I did all that she wouldn't be Kinsey Millhone."

But a letter from a reader named Pat did spur one of the most important story pieces in "U": a deeper investigation of Kinsey's personal history (first delved into in "J Is for Judgment") and the motivations of both her rich, distant grandmother and her aunt and onetime guardian, Virginia. Why did this letter hit home more than any of the other missives that Grafton gets? "It was a message I must have been ready to receive," she said.

Grafton is also adamant that Hollywood won't get its hands on Kinsey. She's joked in the past that she'll haunt her kids if they ever capitulate, but the long-running reticence has concrete roots in the 16 years she spent as a screenwriter (the latter portion with her third and current husband, Steven Humphrey). "Part of my issue with Hollywood is that if an actress is attached to the series to play Kinsey, she's going to be in my head. I can't afford that. Once they own her, once money changes hands, [Hollywood] can do whatever they want."

She may have left the film and television world behind 20 years ago, but some lessons are hard to forget. "I know how those meetings sound and how the decisions are made," Grafton said. "They court you up front and all they want to do is get your stuff. Anyone who falls for it is a fool. It's like being picked up in a bar: If you really believe when the guy tells you you're beautiful, you're going to be in for a big surprise."