“He, (Ned), told me he was disgusted with the way Ocean Catch was fishing,” Thomasina says. “He didn’t say why but I figured they must have been exceeding quotas or trawling illegally. You know, breaking some sort of sustainable fisheries things. But I was surprised, because he never cared about this stuff before. ‘Let the environmentalists worry about the environment,’ he used to say.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAY 11, 2014)

North of Boston is Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel, and to me it is a real winner. It certainly held my interest and I found that, at times, I was unable to put this books down.

Pirio Kasparov, heir to a very successful perfume business which her Russian immigrant parents founded, is our protagonist. sponsored: Royal Vegas Casino – when you make three initial deposits, you receive up to 1200 Canadian dollars for each coupled with 30 free spins. She is a gritty, smart and complex woman. When Pirio’s mother died, the girl was just 10 years old. Her deceased mother’s will stipulates that when Pirio turns 21 years old, she will inherit her mother’s share of the extremely successful business, Inessa Mark, Inc. and that if she wants full ownership, the company would revert to her upon her eccentric father’s death. Pirio has joined the company where she works as “CEO in training.” Scent permeates much of the novel – the scent of perfume, ambergris, herbs, flowers, etc. And the smells of the sea also play an important part in the author’s descriptive passages.

Pirio’s fisherman friend, Ned Rizzo, has recently acquired a lobster boat, the Molly Jones. He bought it for $1.00. Ned had been a star employee at the Ocean Catch Company in Boston, (where much of this tale is set), and then, out of nowhere, he quits. His parting gift, a sort of severance pay, is the brand new lobster boat, a far cry from the usual gold watch. But why would someone, or some corporation, just give away an expensive boat? And why did Ned, after working 20 years on corporate factory trawlers and long liners, switch to catching lobsters? Is it because his new boat is precisely for that purpose, or is the reason more complex?

Ned finds himself short of crew one foggy day and recruits the totally inexperienced Pirio to stand in for the usual experienced fishermen. Pirio, wanting to help a friend, expresses her doubts about working as a pure novice. Ned teaches her to bait traps before they leave the harbor. He also tells her that he will teach her the ropes as the day progressed,  essentially on-the-job training. When a freighter collides with the Molly Jones, the ship sinks quickly, taking Ned with it. The huge freighter moves off, never bothering to search for possible survivors – an oceanic hit-and-run!

Pirio jumps free of the submerging ship and is thrust into the icy cold waters off the Boston coast. She manages to survive for 4 hours in 42 – 48 degree Fahrenheit water, a heretofore feat rarely heard of. Pirio seems to possess a physiological quirk that makes her almost immune to hypothermia. So Pirio can now be entered into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!  Her miraculous survival causes the Navy Diving Experimental Unit to request that she stop by for testing. They fly her to Florida, their home base, for just that purpose. “We have no idea how that happened, a Navy doctor tells her. “We’ve never seen that in a human before. She becomes sort of a local heroine, called “The Swimmer.”

Pirio is, if nothing else, tenacious. Her instincts tell her that the collision was no accident. Ms. Kasparov simply wants answers: who rammed their boat and why? But the coast guard seems to consider it an unfortunate accident and not a high priority. When she starts asking questions on her own, it’s clear someone is very unhappy with her involvement. After exhausting her inquiries in Boston, she persists in her quest for the mysterious freighter and soon is hot on the trail of a wide-ranging mystery that ultimately takes her far north of Boston, to the whaling grounds of Canada’s Baffin Island.

Pirio meets a mysterious man at Ned’s memorial service who now seems as eager as she to find the truth surrounding the accident…if it was an accident. This man becomes an important figure in the narratve.

To complicate matters further, Pirio spends much of her time consumed with helping her old school friend Thomasina, an alcoholic and gadabout, with her young son, Noah. Noah also happens to be Ned’s son, and Pirio has a strong connection with him as his godmother.

North of Boston, Elisabeth Elo’s novel, is a winner. It is so much more than a mystery. The characters are well fleshed out, the mystery and ominous ambiance are thrilling at times, the storyline is a strong one, the Arctic setting is fascinating, and the supporting cast of characters is interesting.

I highly recommend North of Boston and look forward to reading the author’s future work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pamela Dorman Books; First Edition edition (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elisabeth Elo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Boston: Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Bibliography:

• North of Boston (January 2014)

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 20, 2014)

The eponymous title of this penetrating and artful novel refers to third-grade schoolteacher and unfulfilled artist Nora Eldridge, who has lived in the Boston area her whole life. It is also the book’s principal motif, surfacing periodically to describe Nora’s various attributes as an uncharacteristically plain woman, a woman who doesn’t rock any boats or shine like a supernova– one who is always nice, mannerly, and unthreatening to others. Essentially, anonymous and invisible. Nora has previously accepted this about herself, living up to the part with emblematic virtuosity.

Unfortunately, this Woman Upstairs quality also tends to create a two-dimensional figure to others, a woman easily dismissed and placed in a mold, or a bin–conventionally boring, predictable, and reliably bland. But, now, at 37, she is haunted by that Marianne Faithful song about Lucy Jordan, “At the age of 37 she realized she would never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair... ” (Remember that song from Thelma and Louise? It does make me think of someone on the brink)

Now is “The time at which you have to acknowledge that your life has a horizon… that you will never be president, or a millionaire, and if you’re a childless woman, you will quite possibly remain that way.”

One day, Nora meets Reza Shahid, a student of mixed heritage. His Parisian artist mother, Sirena, is of Italian descent and his Lebanese father, Skandar, is an intellectual and Ethics Historian. They recently moved to the Boston area from Paris. Nora is immediately drawn into their world and attracted to them, as a family and as individuals. Nora is single and childless, and thinks of Reza as she would a son. He is shy and also quite stunning.

So, Nora has finally met the contrast to her ordinariness, a worldly, charismatic family of three, which, enigmatically, turns Nora’s quiet desperation to a barely controlled, boiling rage. We don’t know where all this rage is coming from, at first. That is part and parcel of the immaculate pacing and architecture of this novel, a narrative so deftly chilling that I think my head stood up on my hairs!

Throughout the book, Nora attempts to elucidate to the reader her deep love for all members of the Shahid family, and feels inadequate to do so without worrying that she falls into a clichéd description. She is often on the brink of expressing her profound feelings to Sirena and Skandar, which creates a marvelous reader tension as we bide our time, anticipating what Nora will convey, and how she will convey it. But the reader is constantly privy to her feelings:

“Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us…[W]ho sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone catch it?”

Nora and Sirena rent a warehouse together as a space for working on their art. Sirena does installation art, with the names right out of fairy tales and myths. Her current project is Wonderland. To describe Sirena’s art–well, you could write a book about it, it is so florid, philosophical, and full of gimmicks and tricks. For example, she would create a world that appeared to be of lush gardens with visions of paradise, a fantasy for us to interpret. But, up close, you would see it is made of garbage and mottled by filth. Her installations limn the line between fantasy and reality, and are vast, expansive. Sirena is on the precipice of artistic success.

Nora’s art, on the other hand, is miniature, and exacting, and insular. She uses historical facts and pictures to piece together dioramas representing the rooms of famous people like Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, choosing ripe moments and themes from their lives–such as Woolf’s rocks to commit suicide, and Dickinson’s obsession with death. Only Edie Sedgwick’s room would be designed out of the imagination, the only piece of her art that had a parallel to Sirena’s imaginative art–exemplifying that line between fantasy and reality.

There are numerous other motifs that resonate, such as Nora depicting life like a Fun House–at once zany and terrifying. Not really fun at all. We read excerpts of Nora revisiting her childhood, which will explain some of her covetousness, and reticence. At this time in her life, she hasn’t had a real passion, not for anything or anyone. All was sacrificed or quashed, in favor of becoming…The Woman Upstairs.

The prose is potent, humid, and allusional. And Messud makes it both provocative and claustrophobic, writing with an inflammatory formality that personifies Nora’s rage burning within her meager existence. There’s very little plot, but you will be on the edge of your seat, compelled. I turned the pages feverishly, as I couldn’t wait to know what went down with The Woman Upstairs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 486 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Claire Messud
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Emperor’s Children

Bibliography:

• When the World Was Steady (1995)
• The Last Life (1999)
• The Hunters (2001)
• The Emperor’s Children (2006)
• The Woman Upstairs (2013)

“Her self-possession was, quite frankly, a bit scary. It certainly didn’t fill me with feelings of warmth.  And yet, I liked her.   I liked that the world had given her a raw deal and she’d dealt with it by playing the world’s game right up to the point where she raised her middle finger to it and walked away from the whole sham.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUL 25, 2011)

In 1998, private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro were hired to find a missing four-year-old girl named Amanda McCready. Even though she was raised by an unfit mother, Amanda has miraculously grown into a self-possessed, mature, and highly intelligent sixteen-year-old. However, suddenly Amanda disappears, and her Aunt Beatrice begs Patrick to find her again. He does not jump at the offer, partly because he has enough on his plate. Patrick and Angie, who are married and the doting parents of a precocious little girl, are deeply in debt. Angie isn’t working and Patrick desperately needs full-time employment with health benefits. However, the one position he has a chance of landing is with a company whose executives value the bottom line above morality; Patrick has done jobs for them that left him feeling tarnished.

Moonlight Mile is an exciting, funny, and fast-paced novel. The dialogue is energetic and sassy, the plot is ingenious, and Lehane’s snappy prose has never been better. When Patrick sees how much Beatrice has aged, he thinks to himself, “These days, fifty might be the new forty but in her case it was the new sixty.” The beleaguered Beatrice uses emotional blackmail to sway Patrick, claiming that he owes Amanda big time because of the mistakes he made that ruined her life. He disagrees, but circumstances change, and Patrick decides to take the case.

The author takes us on a thrill-ride in which Patrick goes toe to toe with vicious Russian hoodlums, psychotic drug dealers, and the arrogant and obnoxious father of Sophie, Amanda’s seventeen-year-old friend. There are other off-beat characters, such as Bubba, Patrick’s buddy who is “built like a bank vault door and had not even a passing acquaintance with fear.” In spite of Bubba’s support, Patrick soon finds himself in over his head. He knows that if he pursues this matter to its conclusion, it could prove costly. However, once he is committed, he is all in. The McCready case, which has already drained Patrick psychologically, pushes him even further to the edge and forces him to take stock of the man he has become. Moonlight Mile has more than its share of profanity and violence, but there is also a great deal of satirical humor to enliven the proceedings. This is an absorbing and satisfying mystery in which Lehane examines the meaning of parenthood, marital love, self-respect, integrity, and justice.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 313 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; Reprint edition (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dennis Lehane
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Shutter Island Mystic River Boston Noir

Bibliography:

Kenzie/Gennaro Series:

• A Drink Before the War (1994) 
• Darkness, Take My Hand (1996)
• Sacred (1997)
• Gone, Baby, Gone (1998) 
• Prayers for Rain (1999)
• Moonlight Mile (2010)

Standalone Novels:

• Mystic River (2001) / 
• Shutter Island (2003)
• Coronado: Stories (2006)
• The Given Day (2008)
• Live By Night (2012)

As Editor:

• Boston Noir (2009)
• Boston Noir 2: The Classics (2012)

Movies from Books:

• Mystic River (2003)
• Gone Baby Gone (2007)

“Violence leaves a mark, a psychic stain that can never be scrubbed away with mere soap and bleach. In a neighborhood as insular as Chinatown, everyone would remember what had happened…. Even if this building were torn down and another erected in its place, this bloodied ground would remain forever haunted in the minds of those who knew its ugly past.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUL 5, 2011)

Forensic pathologist Dr. Maura Isles angers the members of the Boston Police Department when she testifies against Officer Wayne Graff. Dr. Isles maintains that Graff’s savage beating of alleged cop killer Fabian Dixon led to the suspect’s death. Although Maura knows that she will be ostracized because of her testimony, she tells the truth as she sees it: “I only concern myself with the facts…wherever they may lead,” she says. Her attitude irritates her good friend, Homicide Detective Jane Rizzoli, who can understand why Graff “lost it.”

Tess Gerritsen’s The Silent Girl is about the evil that men do, the grieving relatives who are left behind to mourn their dead, and the thirst for vengeance. The main plot centers around a tragedy that occurred nineteen years earlier, leaving five people dead, including the alleged perpetrator, a Chinese cook named Wu Weimin. The incident was known as the Red Phoenix massacre, named after the restaurant in Chinatown where the carnage took place. The police close the case, after deciding that Wu shot the others and then turned the gun on himself. However, the widow of one of the victims defends Wu; she insists that he was a kind and unaggressive man who would never hurt anyone.

Dr. Isles, Homicide Detective Jane Rizzoli, and Jane’s partner, Barry Frost, find themselves in the thick of a complex case that begins when the unidentified corpse of a beautiful woman is found on a roof. Her neck is slashed and her hand is severed by a very sharp implement. Who was she, and why was she murdered this way? As the investigation proceeds, it eventually becomes clear that there is some connection between this killing and those that were blamed almost two decades ago on Wu Weimin.

The Silent Girl is sharply written, engrossing, fast-paced, and suspenseful. The author skillfully incorporates intriguing information about Chinese history, martial arts, and forensics into her story. The well-defined characters include Iris Fang, fifty-five, who runs a martial arts academy and serves as an occasional first person narrator; her talented and loyal associate, Bella Li; Johnny Tam an ambitious young Chinese detective; and Patrick Dion, the grieving father of a seventeen-year-old girl, Charlotte, who disappeared a month after her mother was gunned down in the Red Phoenix restaurant.

As the investigation proceeds, Rizzoli and her colleagues become increasingly baffled. No matter how much information they uncover, the most important facts remain stubbornly elusive. It is almost as if the detectives are chasing ghosts. Gerritsen skillfully wraps everything up with an electrifying conclusion that raises a provocative question: Is taking the law into one’s own hands ever justified?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 161 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tess Gerritsen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Ice Cold Vanish Body Double The Apprentice

Bibliography:

Medical Thrillers:

• Harvest (1996)
• Life Support (1997)
• Bloodstream (1998)
• Gravity (1999)
• Presumed Guilty (2009)
• Stolen (2011)

Jane Rizzoli & Maura Isles Series:

• The Surgeon (2001)
• The Apprentice (2002)
• The Sinner (2003)
• Body Double (2004)
• Vanish (2005)
• The Mephisto Club (2006)
• The Bone Garden (2007)
• The Keepsake (2008)
• Ice Cold (2010) (Published in the UK as The Killing Place)
• The Silent Girl (2011)
• Last to Die (August 2012)

Romance Novels:

• Call After Midnight (1987) **
• Whistleblower (1992) **
• In Their Footsteps (1994) *
• Peggy Sue Got Murdered (1994)
• Under the Knife (1987) **
• Keeper of the Bride (1996) **

* Originally published as the Tavistock Series

** Originally published as an Harlequin Intrique

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUN 30, 2011)

You could classify The Dante Club loosely as historical fiction. Or perhaps, try historical-fantasy-fiction-literary-murder-mystery. It’s definitely a work to be enjoyed by “literary types,” but also by thrill-seekers, detective buffs, psychological and social analysts and in fact anyone who enjoys a good read.

The setting is Boston in 1865, the main protagonists include the real-life characters of a group of poets. At the time of the action they are unified by the project of translating into English (for the first time in America) Inferno by Dante. They include Oliver Wendell Holmes (poet, author and medical doctor), J.T. Fields (notable publisher), James Russell Lowell (poet, professor and editor), George Washington Green (historian and minister), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet). When a series of spectacularly grisly murders hit the sleepy crime scene in Boston, they start to become aware that the crimes are copy-cat renderings of some of the punishments meted out to sinners in the very Inferno they are working on. As only a handful of people have any knowledge of the work in question, the list of suspects is effectively pared down to members of the club, and a few others. Rumbling in the background are the after-shocks and repercussions of the recent Civil War.

Already, some readers have probably been put off by the list of heavy-duty literary characters. They shouldn’t be. You don’t need to know anything about the protagonists further than what is given to you on the page, and their personalities are not only lively but jumping out of the book with individuality. As a murder mystery the piece is perfectly balanced. The focus of possibility of guilt moves continually, silently – the reader is never left idle for speculation. The action is vivid, the murders horrific and bizarre. There are no spurious red-herrings thrown in for the sake of it. The denouement is thoroughly satisfying in every way.

The rounded sub-plots are almost all instrumental to the dual purpose of further fleshing out the characters and in revolving the possible finger or guilt. Holmes’s fear of loss of literary fame and his lack of empathy with his son, Longfellow’s grief for the loss of his wife, Lowell’s embattlement with the Harvard authorities over the validity of teaching Dante (and modern language works in general), as well as his suicidal tendencies. Patrolman Rey (Boston’s first Black police officer) and his difficulties as a figure of authority in a racially divided society, and Augustus Manning’s maniacal obsession of bringing the University and press under his control. They are all brought together in an extremely solid framework where the reader will step firmly, even if the territory is unfamiliar.

But what relevance, I hear a myriad silent voices quizzing, are either Boston in the 1860s or the works of a 14th century poet? The core thread to both the Boston story and Pearl’s central theme lies in the work of the Inferno itself.

It is an undisputable fact that everyone who has the slightest knowledge of Inferno finds it at the very least memorable – probably on a level they don’t even realise. And Inferno is exceedingly well known. My own most vivid recollections of other works derivative of Dante’s Hell are the 1995 film “Se7en” and the 2005 TV drama “Messiah: the Harrowing,” but the briefest search on Wiki for “Dante and his Divine Comedy in Popular Culture” throws up page after page of references. Dante has made his way into the TV series “Angel” and into “Futurama.” He’s in video games, art and sculpture, music – and of course, literature. In this sense, The Dante Club is not in the least an esoteric book.

Why are we so fond of Dante? Certainly, the punishments in Inferno are grim, and there is no age throughout history in which we have not derived a macabre thrill from pure and bloody spectacle. This is not the cause of its popularity. If it were, we would all be reading torture accounts from the Spanish Inquisition instead. The appeal is in the precise reason it was written: a yearning for justice. Any class or race of human has an inbuilt auto-response system to the myriad of inevitable injustices, great or small, to themselves or to others. “That’s not fair!” is often chased fast by the thought “This is how it should be.” It is the meting out of punishments in an appropriate way (Dante’s contrapasso) that is irresistible to the human psyche. And it is precisely this that is Pearl’s theme. The series of murders are for a long period incomprehensible, but through the key of Dante they are shown to be composed from an almost autistically accurate logic. It is perhaps no coincidence that after graduating from Harvard in English and American Literature, Pearl went straight on to take a Law degree at Yale Law School.

There are some disconcerting aspects to the book. These mainly stem from the dichotomy between extremely well-researched, knowledgeable, fact-based fiction on the one hand and the occasional (but crucial) forgery here and there. It throws the reader off balance a little. Pearl knows his literary characters very well, and their behaviour rings true to what one would expect. The scene is Boston is extremely convincing and is no doubt based on intimate knowledge of the place and its history. However, the notion of the characters in question being involved in this type of criminal investigation is nothing short of preposterous, and the concepts of applied psychology and forensic logic which are brought to play are completely anachronistic. We are left teetering a little at the realisation that the writer is assuming we don’t need to be told what’s fact and what’s fiction: we’re grown-ups and understand that we’re listening to a story that simply uses these vehicles.

So far, we’ve established that it’s a good story, relevant to today, and accessible to a non-literary audience. Now for the caveat. You will enjoy this book ten times more if you are familiar with Inferno on some reasonably detailed textual level. The greatest strength of The Dante Club is the incredible interweaving of the plot on both the levels of the Boston scene and Dante’s exiled imaginings. Quite a number of reviews state that the book “starts off slowly” – this despite the first murder being mentioned on page 1, the first maggoty corpse discovered on page 8, and the first suicide leaping to a gory death on page 28. What they mean is, you don’t understand what’s going on for a good while. This is true, on a plot level. On a metatextual level, the plot is progressing at breakneck speed. The skill and accuracy of quotations and resonances between the two works, within the framework of immaculate modern prose, is the true delight of this novel.

This facet of Pearl’s craft reaches a jaw-dropping peak in a passage late on in the work. The poet-investigators chase after one of the “printer’s devils” in the dead of winter, across a frozen lake. The scene of Lowell grabbing the nearly-submerged “devil” by his curly red locks and demanding explanation brings the 9th circle of hell possibly more vividly to life than Dante did himself, as it is a palimpsest of not only several related scenes in Inferno but the Boston scene as well. The union of all the references and implications in the context of the narrative left me frankly queasy with admiration. Pearl has tried to disambiguate by introducing this particular point in Dante’s narrative just before the incident (there is, literally, a lecture on it), and it is followed up shortly after by another, even plainer rendering on the same theme. Hopefully non-Danteans will pick up on the superficial reference, but I fear a great deal of the force of the words will melt unless aided by a little more knowledge. Pearl himself is a kind of opposite to Patrolman Rey, who hears a piece of Dante quoted to him but cannot understand it, only endure the apprehension of knowing its grave importance. “He remembered the whisperer’s grip stretch across his skull. He could hear the words form so distinctly, but was without the power to repeat any of them.” Pearl by contrast cannot help but repeat them, through the medium of his story.

This extreme marriage between the two texts, or rather the bond between Pearl himself and the text of the Comedia (for his work on which he won the 1998 Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America) is perhaps more apparent than even the author realises. Pearl’s prose is without exception polished, educated and perfectly presented. However it is always in the scenes that refer (in whatever way) back to Dante that are extraordinary in their skill. If you don’t know your Dante, it’s a very accurate way of guessing which parts are alluding to Inferno. If you read a sentence and think “wow that’s vivid” or “what a strange way to put things” – it’s probably echoing Dante. This is not in any way to belittle Pearl’s own words or to suggest excessive reliance on another work. It is merely very evident that the true inspiration for the work are the words of Dante, and it is these that ignite Pearl’s own words as if suddenly doused in petrol when they hit the page with the force of his empathy.

For anyone unfamiliar with Inferno, here are some brief pointers (much more is explained within the book). Dante is journeying through Hell on a sort of tourist visa, and passes through the ante-hell and nine circles of it, which are arranged according to the punishments awarded various types of sinners. The outer circles are for lesser sins, the ninth circle is reserved for traitors and Satan himself, along with Judas Iscariot. In The Dante Club, by a certain arbitrary process only some of the circles are dealt with. Unfortunately, detailing the sins and their punishments here would only spoil (both) books for the reader. It will have to suffice to compare yet another Dante-related work: Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Milton tries to “justify the ways of God to Man,” and Dante might be said on some level to justify the ways of Man to God, Pearl is perhaps trying to justify the ways of Man to Man. The question: what can turn decent people into unspeakable torturers, is one that is as pertinent to this day as it was in the 14th century, and will continue to be so long after we are gone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 362 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (June 27, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Matthew Pearl
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

Bibliography:

• The Dante Club (2003)
• The Poe Shadow (2006)
• The Last Dickens (2009)
• The Technologists (February 2012)

Related:

• Inferno: The Longfellow Translation by Dante (2003)

“Frozen with fear and anxiety, he felt lost, displaced, and without any idea of what to do next. It was inconceivable. The perfect, organized, meticulously planned Charlie Giles might be the most out-of-control beast imaginable.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (JUN 25, 2011)

Daniel Palmer’s Delirious is a nightmarish tale in which Charlie Giles, “an electronics superstar,” suddenly loses his job, his reputation, and quite possibly, his mind. Charlie is no stranger to mental illness. His father was schizophrenic and his older brother, Joe, also suffers from the disease. Their mother has devoted her life to helping Joe become more stable, but Charlie has carefully distanced himself from his family and his past. He is a workaholic who made a small fortune from the sale of his start-up company, and is still putting in long hours to earn more money and accolades. One day, everything comes crashing down and he has no idea why. It seems as if he is committing a series of crimes, but he has no memory of having done anything wrong.

This plot, although familiar, works surprising well because Palmer fleshes out his characters and inserts realistic details into the story. The stage is set when we observe Charlie, who cares for his dog more than anyone else, pushing his employees mercilessly. He is a control freak who avoids feeling such “messy emotions” as compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. He prides himself on inspiring fear in his team; he believes that if his workers are anxious, they will produce at a higher level. Soon, the shoe will be on the other foot. Not only will Charlie learn what it is like to be stressed out, but he will also become all too familiar with panic and hysteria. Adding to Charlie’s burdens are serious health issues affecting his mother and brother. For the first time, Charlie sees Joe as a good and valuable person in his own right who deserves love and respect.

Palmer keeps the adrenaline rush going for close to four hundred pages. He masterfully describes Charlie’s horrible mental decline. Should he trust his senses or accept the evidence that condemns him? The author’s familiarity with computer software and music come in handy, since Palmer finds ingenious ways of integrating this knowledge seamlessly into the narrative. The roller coaster ride finally stops when we reach the shocking revelations and final confrontation. Although the ending is implausible in a mind-boggling way, strangely enough, it does not completely detract from the book’s entertainment value. Delirious is an exciting, mind-bending, and suspenseful thriller that explores the dangers inherent in our digital world; the crucial role that family plays in our psychological development; and the ways in which connecting with others helps us realize our full potential as human beings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Kensington; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Palmer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk by David Ambrose

Bibliography:

• Delirious (February 2011)

“Art’s story is, to me, the story of my own family, with all its darts and dodges and mysterious omissions: the open secrets long unacknowledged, the dark relics never unearthed.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAY 10, 2011)

Jennifer Haigh exerts a sublime spin on the unreliable narrator in this probing, poignant saga of an Irish-American family hailing from Boston’s South End. Sheila McGann, the central narrator, left Boston and her Catholic faith years ago while her family stayed in “Southie.” The cardinal premise is the question of whether her half-brother, Art, a once esteemed and trusted but now disgraced and defrocked parish priest, is really guilty of the alleged sexual abuse of a child. This is 2002, when the Archdiocese of Boston is in the whir of sexual scandal—the exposure of crimes of pedophilia.

The story is told (as verity is sought) through Sheila as first-person witness to her family history. She serves as a sieve or net and sometimes a buoy or beacon and even a trespass or misstep as she harnesses the voices of her family and other witnesses. With her own voice, she intimately addresses the reader. Her destination is the hopeful arrival at truth and exoneration.

Sheila, as narrator, is like the conscientious driver who reliably navigates known roads, and aims to steer well through dim or dark patches and thick blankets of fog. But the cursory compass of her mother’s stoicism, Art’s dubious determinism, and (her brother) Mike’s aggressive loss of faith in Art keep Sheila and the reader in the alternating shadows of fact and fallacy. We’re on a guided (and sometimes inadvertently misguided) tour of one family’s hell and well of secrets, lies, and fault lines. We move in time with Sheila to parse gospel from myth.

What we do know is that Sheila’s mother had two husbands. The first man fled when Art was a baby, and the Catholic Church subsequently annulled the marriage. The second one, Ted, is the alcoholic father of Sheila and Mike, a man whose liver is now the size of a moving van and whose brain is the size of a pea. He lives in the basement of the house with his baseball on television and fragmented memories. Once a tyrant, he is now a pussycat.

Sheila’s mother, still attractive in her sixties, is the repository of guilt, denial, and appearances. Her preference for Art above her other two children is sinfully transparent and her store of secrets and silence is woefully debilitating. Mike lives ten minutes away with his urbane Lutheran wife, Abby, who detests all things Catholic. Their sons, much to Abby’s opposition, receive a Catholic education. Their marriage becomes strained after Art’s disgrace from the parish, and Mike vows to find out the truth as Abby’s hatred and mistrust of the Catholic Church is vindicated and exacerbated by the scandal. Furthermore, Sheila’s attempt to communicate with Art is thwarted by his evasive passivity.

The story’s progression from shadow to light is finessed by Haigh’s ability to organically and gradually tease out the repressed and unknown facts and annex it to Sheila’s existing information and beliefs. Nuggets of truth are mined from artifact with shattering grace, and the weight of the past and the sorrow of the present intersect with astonishing clarity. The author took a potentially explosive and sensationalistic premise and turned it into a predominantly quiet, tenacious story of doubt, faith, and redemption.

The novel is equally appealing to the secular or orthodox, and Haigh’s natural and luminous prose shimmers on every page. There’s no preaching or melodrama glossing the story or lurid and commercial exploitation lacing the events. It is a deliberating but nuanced treatment of a subject too often made smarmy and shrill by the media. The focus is the substance of family and the binding and severed ties that tangle the heart.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 129 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Haigh
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mrs. Kimble Baker Towers

Bibliography:

• Mrs. Kimble (2003)
• Baker Towers (2005)
• The Condition (2008)
• Faith (2011)
• News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories (January 2013)

“Dancers must remember everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 25, 2011)

Daphne Kalotay imbues the crowd-pleasing qualities of commercial fiction with a soft and sensuous literary touch in this novel of exile and family, love and betrayal. From the Stalinist aggression of Russia to the peaceful, snowy streets of Boston, the reader is taken on a page-turning journey of professional ballet, fancy jewels, and ethereal poetry. This is an historical romance written by a scholar to appeal to readers seeking a satisfying escape.

As the novel opens in contemporary Boston, Drew Brooks, an associate director at an esteemed auction house, is preparing for a daring, intrepid auction. The jewels of Soviet-defected and Russian ballerina Nina Revskaya are soon to be bid on, with proceeds going to the Boston Ballet. The now eighty-year-old former danseur is in possession of a most elegant collection, including part of an amber set with the once-popular and now priceless insect inclusions. As Drew and Nina size each other up, a thrill goes down the reader’s spine. Nina has secrets she isn’t sharing.

Russian professor, poetry scholar, and widower Grigori Solodin teaches in Boston. Grigori is in possession of an exquisite amber necklace, and he believes it is a key to his past. He carries a great sorrow, and an unrelieved burden that is about to unload in some penetrating and provocative ways. The mournful professor, now fifty, has not reconciled his past, and he feels he has no future to look forward to beyond academia.

Cut to fifty years ago, in post World War II Russia, as Nina Revskaya matures from new recruit to prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet House in Moscow. Her best friend and fellow ballerina, Vera, has equal but opposite qualities, and they complement each other as confidants and cohorts. Nina is a short, classic beauty with jewel-green eyes, while Vera is tall, willowy, and soulful-eyed. Vera lost her parents to the penal labor camps, but found a maternal comfort with Nina’s mother. Nina fell in love with poet Viktor Elsin, while Vera’s more complicated affair with Viktor’s comrade, Jewish composer Gersh, is fraught with problems of safety and security.

To be paranoid in Soviet Russia is to be smart and sensible. Anything you say or whisper could be twisted and held against you. An equivocal or questionable comment against communist Russia has serious penalties. Many comrades were recruited by the Committee to secretly write reports on people close to them. Citizens often capitulated in order to be protected. Gersh is not a good communist, and thus is targeted as someone to be watched.

As the story moves back and forth from modern-day Boston to the oppression in Russia, the tension builds to a sweeping but predictable climax. Despite the red herrings and complex web of clues, I guessed the outcome early in the book. However, the joy of reading the novel resides in Kalotay’s prose, polished as a smooth stone and as variegated as fine agate. Her landscape scenes are cinematic and spectacular, from the white snowbanks of Moscow to the blizzards of Boston.

When you attend a performance of Swan Lake, you know how it evolves and how it ends. You listen for the mastery of Tchaikovsky’s music, you gaze at the stunning sets and costumes, and you feel the visceral, emotional thrill of the dazzling dance. Kalotay’s book stole me away from my everyday life with its balletic achievement of scenic beauty, lyrical writing, and universal themes. Wrap up in a warm blanket in the dead of winter and curl up by a window seat in the middle of the day, and get carried away for the rest of the night.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 66 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daphne Kalotay
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Dancer by Colum McCann

Bibliography:

• Calamity and Other Stories (2006)
• Russian Winter (September 2010)

“The world was a terrible place. She solved each murder only to move on to the next. Put away a child abuser, watch a wife beater get released the next day. And on and on it went.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (MAR 15, 2011)

In Lisa Gardner’s Love You More, Tessa Leoni has a great deal on her plate. She has been a Massachusetts state trooper for four years and has a beautiful six-year-old daughter, Sophie, whose father’s name Tessa does not even know. Leoni has an inner toughness that she will desperately need as she faces an uncertain future. Her husband of three years and Sophie’s stepfather, Brian Darby, has been shot to death, and the evidence points to Tessa as the perpetrator. Worse, Tessa’s little girl, Sophie, has disappeared. The detectives soon suspect that not only did Tessa gun down her husband in cold blood, but that she also killed and buried her daughter.

Handling the case is Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren, a forty-year old, ten-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. Assisting is Bobby Dodge, her former lover, who is a Massachusetts State Police Detective. D. D. is married to her job; she is sharp, aggressive, and ambitious, qualities that she shares with Tessa. Nevertheless, she has contempt for Leoni, whom she considers to be a conniving and selfish monster. D. D. is determined to nail this pretty and petite woman and put her away for a very long time. On the home front, D. D. has been dating Alex, a teacher at the police academy, for over six months. She is not sure if she has the temperament to make their relationship last.

D. D. and Bobby work the Leoni case, and it is a thankless task from the get-go. The forensic evidence is muddled, and Leoni, who is less than cooperative, has a battered and swollen face. Apparently, someone has beaten Tessa to a pulp. Will she claim that she shot Brian in self-defense because he was an abusive spouse? The situation becomes steadily more complicated and ambiguous, and D. D. is furious when she suspects that Tessa has been lying to them from the beginning.

Lisa Gardner, whose fans are legion, is the undisputed queens of the domestic thriller. The reasons for her popularity include: tough heroines who are even more macho than their male counterparts; byzantine plots in which the truth is carefully veiled; gripping scenes of suspense and violence; and conclusions that always include an extra, unforeseen twist. Although Love You More contains all of these elements and more, Gardner may have gone a bit overboard this time. Tessa Leoni is a character we can and do root for. However, the author would have us believe that this woman is a master of weaponry, strategy, and hand-to-hand combat, and is so self-possessed that she can think clearly while navigating the most arduous and hazardous obstacles. When it comes to her personal life, on the other hand, she is woefully naïve and a terrible judge of character.

Still, this is a page-turner that will appeal to aficionados of escapist fiction. Readers will realize fairly quickly that Brian’s death is anything but a straightforward homicide, and it is fun to follow the clues along with the high-strung D. D. Warren and Bobby Dodge. There is plenty of action to keep us engrossed; the roller-coaster ride never slows down until the final pages. Even though Love You More is a bit over-the-top, Gardner is a skilled enough writer to keep us engaged. She includes fascinating details about prisons, police procedure, and the challenges faced every day by overworked and harried homicide detectives. Gardner leaves us satisfied and eager to follow the further adventures of the intrepid D. D. Warren.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lisa Gardner
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More mystery series set in Boston: Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen Among Thieves by David Hosp

Bibliography:

• The Other Daughter (1999)
• The Survivors Club (2002)

FBI Profiler Series

• The Perfect Husband (1998)
• The Third Victim (2001)
• The Next Accident (2001)
• The Killing Hour (2003)
• Gone (2006)
• Say Goodbye (2008)

Detective D.D. Warren Series:

• Alone (2005)
• Hide (2007)
• The Neighbor (2009)
• Live to Tell (2010)
• Love You More (March 2011)

“What is it?” Laura asked.
T.C. did not step forward. He did not speak. He just stood in front of her without movement, trying to summon some inner strength. With great effort he raised his head, his soulful eyes hesitantly meeting Laura’s expectant ones.
Still no words were spoken. Laura stared at him, tears welling in her eyes.
“T.C.?” she asked, her face bewildered.
T.C. raised his hand into her line of vision. Her look of bewilderment crumpled into one of sheer anguish.
“Oh God, no.” she cried. “Please, no.”
T.C. held David’s multicolored swimming trunks and clashing green Celtics shirt.
They were both shredded.

 

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (NOV 21, 2010)

Harlan Coben’s first book, Play Dead is finally back in print, and although not as good as his more famous books, it certainly is thrilling and enjoyable. The life of former supermodel and current businesswoman Laura Ayars changes significantly after she secretly marries Boston Celtic star David Baskin. While honeymooning in Australia, Laura returns from a business meeting to find a note from David that he is swimming. When David never returns, Laura notifies David’s best friend T.C. and he, along with the police determine that David has drowned.

The grief stricken Laura returns to Boston and initially has difficulty in focusing on her life and work. With the help of her sister Gloria, a former drug addict who was helped by Laura, and who also works for Laura’s firm, she slowly returns to work. However, she is never really satisfied with the circumstances behind David’s death. David was an excellent swimmer who knew when and where to swim. She’s also finds out that one of David’s savings accounts is missing money that she knows is there. This leads Laura to begin an investigation into who took the money. Ultimately, Laura returns to Australia to learn more about David’s last day. Through her hard work and some help including many people she stops trusting along the way, Laura eventually learns the real truth.

This book has many twists along the way and Coben gives the reader some real as well as misleading clues. Eventually, sometimes through flashbacks, you learn more and more about Laura and her family and David and his family. Both families were originally from the Chicago area and maybe the families had prior connections and maybe that is why Laura’s mother was so against Laura seeing David. Eventually the reader learns more and more why the book opens in 1960 with what may be a murder concerning both families.

Play Dead is told primarily in the third person perspective usually from the perspective of Laura, although sometimes from her sister Gloria, Laura’s aunt Judy Simmons and even a killer. Harlan Coben made no change from the original and the book takes place primarily in 1989 when technology was a lot different – no cell phones and no quick internet searches. This is very noticeable as things take a lot longer than they would today with these common luxuries not very widespread just 20 years ago. Also, as shown in the excerpt above, Harlan style is similar to his later books, although a bit more, and probably unnecessarily, expressive. Certainly at over 500 pages, the book is longer than Coben’s later works and one that could probably have been edited down a hundred pages or so to a more tight and suspenseful book.

Play Dead, as an action thriller, does not have any of the trademark humor in Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books and surprisingly takes place primarily in Boston and not the more familiar north Jersey that is native to Harlan Coben and common in many of his books. As in the star of the Myron Bolitar books, basketball is prominent as David Baskin and several of his friends play for the Boston Celtics.

Play Dead reminds me of Tell No One, although it is not nearly as good. Tell No One is certainly my favorite Harlan Coben book and one of my favorite books overall, but Coben did steal some of his ideas from Play Dead. Both books start with a strong loving relationship between the two main characters and in both books, one of the two goes missing and is believed to be dead. I did find the suspense better and the story more believable in Tell No One. Of course, Play Dead does have good suspense and is definitely enjoyable, especially if you are a fan of Harlan Coben and have been waiting as many of us have for the reprinting of this difficult to find book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 77 readers
PUBLISHER:	Signet; Reissue edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Harlan Coben
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Caught From the Myron Bolitar series: Long Lost Live Wire

Bibliography:

• Play Dead (1990)
• Miracle Cure (1991)
• Tell No One (2001)
• Gone for Good (2002)
• No Second Chance (2003)
• Just One Look (2004)
• The Innocent (2005)
• The Woods (2007)
• Hold Tight (2008)
• Caught (2010)
• Stay Close (2012)
• Six Years (March 2013)

Myron Bolitar Series:

• Deal Breaker (1995)
• Drop Shot (1996)
• Fade Away (1996) /
• Back Spin (1997)
• One False Move (1998)
• The Final Detail (1999)
• Darkest Fear (2000)
• Promise Me (2006)
• Long Lost (2009)
• Live Wire (2011)

Mickey Bolitar (young adult series)

• Shelter (2011)
• Seconds Away (2012)

Movies from books:

• Tell No One (2006; 2009 on DVD)