“Simon believed in opioids. He prescribed them frequently, sometimes in magnanimous doses. He hated the skepticism about addiction. He believed the studies that showed opioids were the best therapy for chronic pain. Those studies were reason enough to use them. ‘There’s no point in suffering,’ he stated.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 11, 2010)

Special –> interview with Kate Ledger

Kate Ledger has written a poignant and painful novel about a marriage that is barren of communication and intimacy, left to wither after the death of a six-week old infant named Caleb. Simon and Emily Bear initially married with hopefulness and love, though Emily was as much drawn to the marriage by the potential of Simon’s future success as she was by his being her one and only. Together they have a child. When their child dies, so does their marriage.

Simon is a physician in general practice by himself. He has a large and loyal patient following. Emily is Vice President of a public relations firm representing large and important corporations and clientele, an expert on spin. They have a 13 year old daughter, Jamie, who is incommunicative and oppositional. She is lonely and depressed, isolated from her peers. Her parents are each busy with their own worlds and she is left to flounder on her own. Simon spends his days trying to do good, to do the best for his patients that he can. He listens to them, respects their own diagnoses and gets his self-worth by being needed. His specialty is pain relief. Emily lives the corporate life, traveling to conferences, giving talks and attending meetings. Neither of them have much time for anything but their professional lives.

Fifteen years before the novel opens they had a child named Caleb who died from meningitis. His symptoms were atypical and there was no way that the diagnosis could have been made early enough to prevent his death. Both Emily and Simon have spent the years following Caleb’s death second guessing and blaming themselves for his demise. They each think about what they could have done differently – if only they had recognized the severity of his illness, if only they had checked on him sooner, if only they had taken his crying more seriously. Each lives in their private hell but they never talk to each other about their suffering. They have shut off from one another completely.

Simon is an impulsive man who thinks he enjoys hobbies. However, he doesn’t follow through with them. At one time, he thought he’d raise orchids but that did not come to fruition. Recently, he wants to take on wine making. He thinks this will impress Emily and bring them closer. He has even engaged Jamie in the excitement of wine making. True to form, however, his attempts at wine making don’t pan out. In fact, they further alienate Simon from both Emily and Jamie.

Simon is at his highest form when he is helping patients who are in pain. Unlike many doctors, he is willing to prescribe opioids for pain relief, even in large doses. This is a very important aspect of the book. Opioids are the best pain relief known to man. However, many physicians are reluctant to prescribe them because they fear being reported to the licensing board or being viewed suspiciously by their colleagues. Simon trusts his patients’ reports of pain and treats them all with respect. He is willing to believe them and prescribe strong medicines to improve their quality of life.

At one point in the novel, Simon believes he has found a cure for pain. It is sad to view his naive attempts at getting his colleagues to pay attention to his findings. He has no idea how to market his research. It is further ironic that he is married to an expert in spin who is not even interested in listening to Simon’s findings. Simon tries over and over to get Emily to listen to him but she has no interest at all.

Both Emily and Simon are their own worst enemies. Each of them live in a world of denial, repression, sublimation and self-blame. They have lost the ability to reach out to each other or anyone else. They are stuck in their own excruciating pain – a pain that has no cure and no relief. This is a wonderful novel that demonstrates how two people can live together and be completely isolated from their inner lives and one another. Kate Ledger has written a strong and powerful debut novel, one that holds the reader in its grip.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Berkley Trade; Reprint edition (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Ledger
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide Bonnie’s interview with Kate Ledger
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Similar authors: Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman A Friend of the Family by Laura Grodstein

Bibliography:

• Remedies (August 2009)

With Lisa Roy Sachs:

• The Cats’ Book of Romance (2003)
• The Dogs’ Book of Romance (2005)

“You’ve got a dark side hidden away in there somewhere, haven’t you?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUN 18, 2010)

Special –> interview with Jenn Ashworth

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a nice quiet little middle-class street policed by the local volunteer neighbourhood watch. All the gardens are tidy and well-kept. The neighbours know one other, and nothing much ever happens here. And then imagine that a madwoman moves in next door.

Ok, now switch scenarios and imagine yourself as that madwoman, and that you’ve moved into that nice little neighbourhood. You’ve not only moved there, but you want to belong, you want to mingle, you want to make friends….

If you have an image forming in your mind, then you have arrived at the wickedly funny novel, A Kind of Intimacy by British novelist Jenn Ashworth. Politico compares the novel’s unreliable narrator, anti-heroine Annie Fairhurst to Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes from Misery. If you need any other analogies before buying this wonderful book then consider that for its savage, quirky humour, A Kind of Intimacy is likely to appeal to fans of Muriel Spark. Social identity is the fabric of this tale, and Annie’s refreshingly subversive, warped world view clashes with her tireless attempts to conform into conventional roles.

A Kind of Intimacy is told through the eyes of obese twenty-something Annie, and when the novel begins, it’s moving day. Annie loads up her cat, Mr. Tips, kicks the settee one last time, and says goodbye to her old life and nine long miserable years spent with her husband, Will. Full of optimism and determined to reinvent herself into some sort of suburbanite diva, Annie moves into her new home. When she propositions the milkman the very next day, it’s clear that Annie has serious problems, and that she’s going to make quite a splash in this small bland corner of suburbia:

He looked closely at me, and I made sure he could see a fold of pale, damp-seeming cleavage as I modestly tucked in the gown. He gave me another wink and tucked his clipboard under his arm.

“That’s the best offer I’ve had in about two days,” he said. “But I’ve got three more streets to do before I’m due home and if the wife doesn’t get her cup of tea in bed in,” he made a show of looking at his watch, “ooh, an hour and a half’s time, my life’s not worth living.”

I nodded, and tucked my hair behind my ears, not bothering about the gown flapping open now. Nothing ventured, and all that. I’d learned not to take it personally. I’m not to everyone’s taste. A friend of mine, Boris, told me I was a minority interest, like collecting Stilton jars or learning to fold birds.

Armed with self-help books borrowed from the library, Annie soaks up helpful hints she thinks will ignite her reinvention process. Reading titles such as: Loving Yourself: Tips for the Single Woman, Controlling Your Anger, Freeing Yourself, and Weekend Fixes for a Broken Heart, Annie hordes tips on social etiquette which she keeps in a cross-referenced notebook. While she thinks all this reading will bring dramatic changes to her life, instead it leads to a series of social disasters, and any social life Annie hoped to make in the neighbourhood is undermined by her petty vandalism. After eavesdropping on her neighbours Neil and Lucy, Annie decides to hold a house warming party as an ice-breaking event. The party draws a total of 4 guests–the drunk, newly-single Raymond, Neil and Lucy, and Dr. and Mrs. Choudhry. While Annie is convinced that Raymond casts lust-filled looks her way, her attention is solidly on Neil, a man she’s sure she’s met before.

At the party, Annie serves “six bottles of wine, a cheese and pickled onion hedgehog, a bowl of twiglets and a plate of fairy cakes.” It’s an awkward event, with the Choudrys radiating the complacent self-satisfied smugness of a happily married couple while valiantly pretending everything is normal. Lucy and Annie square off over the absence of olives, and the evening ends in disaster. This major disappointment heralds a self-destructive eating binge for Annie:

“My memories of the next few days are hazy. Someone called me on the telephone about an unpaid credit card, and I remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs in my nightdress singing all the verses to ‘Found a Peanut’. In my mind’s eye I can see myself very clearly, stamping my bare feet on the carpet and conducting myself through the chorus with an unlit cigarette. I can only presume I attempted to take up smoking, a habit, I’m pleased to confirm, that didn’t stick longer than my celebrations of those few days. I made frequent trips to the corner shop for tins of condensed milk, more wine, more cat food, and managed to spend a frightening amount of money there. I also remember a brief conversation with Lucy about local by-laws regarding noise levels in residential areas between the hours of eleven at night and seven in the morning.”

As the plot develops, Annie parcels out memories from her past–a childhood coloured by a father who can’t wait to get rid of her, a sexual experience that leaves a lasting impression, and a miserable marriage to a parsimonious man who seems to select Annie for her child-bearing abilities. In spite of the fact that she’s deranged, Annie, the most admirable character in the novel is an endearing anti-heroine–a mad woman who tries to survive in an insane world. Annie’s narrative is direct, funny and also rather disarming. Her world view and peculiar social identity is laced with a quirky sense of primness which mingles with her frankly unapologetic aberrant asocial behaviour; the result is a deliriously unique literary cocktail.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (May 25, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jenn Ashworth
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Guy Savage’s interview with Jenn Ashworth
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another interesting female from Europa Editions: Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam We don’t have a review of this one yet, but also check out: The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens

Bibliography:

• A Kind of Intimacy (May 2010) Betty Trask Prize
• Cold Light (October 2012)

“Sometimes,” he told clients “what frightens us the most is that which is nameless.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JAN 7, 2010)

Special–>  Interview with Aifric Campbell

Therapists make fascinating fictional characters–just consider the raw material. They listen to the secrets of others all day long, but where do those secrets go? It’s assumed that therapists are rational, ethical, well-balanced individuals. But what if they’re not? These questions surface whenever I come across a fictional therapist. Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You features a therapist with a very messy private life, while in Irvin Yalom’s novel, Lying on the Couch, the fictional therapists are both seduced and conned by patients.

This brings me to The Semantics of Murder, the first novel from Irish author Aifric Campbell, recently published by Serpent’s Tail Press. This engrossing tale is inspired by the 1971 unsolved murder of UCLA Professor Richard Montague. Montague was born in California and attended UC Berkeley where he earned degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics. As is often the case with truly brilliant people, Montague’s work crossed subject boundaries, and he pioneered a logical approach to semantics known as Montague Grammar. Montague was also a talented organist and a real estate investor. But Montague had a dark side, and it’s this dark side which led to his murder.

The Semantics of Murder begins with London-based therapist Jay Hamilton as he begins a session with another of his troubled clients. Jay is well-respected and has a practice full of affluent clients who can afford his services, and yet there’s something not quite right about him. He has no sustained relationships, no private life to speak of, and his professional manner is carefully prepared, studied and manufactured. In reality, Jay is an emotional vampire who unethically feeds his secret literary career with the private confidences of his clients:

“The air was thick with frantic secrets. Closing his eyes, Jay caught a fleeting glimpse of a red silk scarf flapping through a car window, heard the sound of swift, light footsteps receding in the night—it was the hurried press of Cora’s story unfolding just out of earshot, but when he listened, it fell silent. For five weeks now he had watched her scuttle round the fringes of her past while he sat in the armchair, a textbook arrangement of attentiveness in the fifty-minute hour. His body language had been successfully deflated years ago, during long sessions in front of the full-length mirror in his studio room, head swiveling between an oblique view of the bay—all he could afford in San Francisco in those early days—and a honey strip of afternoon light sliding across the back wall. He’d studied his reflection, monitoring the gradual erosion of his identity into a pared–down expression of alert neutrality that would reassure his clients that he could listen without judgement, without pity, shock or horror; that he could take the story of a life and help them to rewrite it, give it a sequence and consequence it didn’t have, make it a better story.”

In the dark, almost-forgotten recesses of Jay’s life are the memories of his elder brother, Robert, a mathematics professor at UCLA who was murdered decades earlier. Jay, now 51 years old, finds these memories somewhat unsettling, but he’s managed to minimize his past by moving to Britain and establishing his successful practice there. Jay is disturbed when contacted by writer Dana Flynn, a woman who intends to write a biography of Robert Hamilton, and he finds old, unwelcome memories resurfacing:

“Jay had found himself continually ambushed by reminiscence which presented as a sort of arrhythmia that disrupted the familiar beat of his days.”

Jay doesn’t quite approve of Dana’s last book, the biography of an eminent scientist and a secret homosexual, for while the book cannot be faulted, its author questioned the official verdict of death-by-suicide in a “rather dubiously presented closing chapter.” Jay is cautious at the prospect of the resurrection of old, painful memories, and concerned about the intrusion of a biographer, but at the same time, he isn’t averse to the idea that Robert should receive some recognition of his life’s work. So simultaneously curious and uneasy, Jay, as the “keeper” of Robert’s memory agrees to meet Dana.

The novel goes back and forth from Jay’s present to his past, and in these glittering, bitter-sweet memories, Jay emerges as the younger brother who lived in the shadow of his brilliant, favoured brother’s success. Robert never approved of Jay’s career choice, and thought he could do better. Robert, a dynamic, vibrant person comes alive in these pages through intense, painfully sharp moments which vacillate between an astonishing academic career and a dark “private underworld.” The duality of Robert’s nature, one half productive and the other seemingly unconnected half of secret, brutal sexual encounters haunt Jay–a man whose life is about control, order and presentation:

“It was as if a lid was creaking open on his vaporous past and old unwelcome phantoms were slipping out to invade the present. His resuscitated brother was gliding towards him, gathering up the years.”

The Semantics of Murder is difficult to define within the context of genre; the novel occupies the space where reality meets fiction, past blends into present, and genius merges into the dark recesses of sexual gratification. Part mystery, The Semantics of Murder explores the difficulties of biography, the fragility of the therapist-client relationship, and the unfathomable depths of motivation. Campbell shows a sharp understanding of the complex duality of human nature and this duality is explored and accepted unflinchingly within the pages of this excellent novel.

Aifric Campbell’s next novel The Lost Adjustor is due out in February 2010, and I’ll be first in line to read it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Serpent’s Tail (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AMAZON PAGE:	The Semantics of Murder
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aifric Campbell
EXTRAS:	Our interview with Aifric Campbell
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books with shrinks: The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom Dry Ice by Stephen White

Bibliography:

• The Semantics of Murder (2009)
• The Loss Adjuster (2010)
• On the Floor (June 2013)

Does Habermeir know you’ve asked me to look into his work? I asked…I didn’t like stepping on the toes of other scientists in the Omnitech family. But I needed Johnston’s support for my own programs and to keep the support I had to keep the CEO happy. Politics. There was no way around it, you had to be good at politics to get to do the science you wanted to do.

Still, I couldn’t help muttering, “How can you expect anything but trouble, dealing with radioactive material?”

Johnston fixed me with a stern gaze. “There’s a lot of money to be made in cleaning up nuclear wastes. And it’s a good thing to do, Arthur. You’re always telling me we should be doing good things, aren’t you?”

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes (Dec 29, 2009)

The Immortality Factor was first published in 1996 as Brothers. It is now presented, according to Bova, not as a science fiction novel, but as a contemporary novel. Due to advancements in the field of cellular regeneration, it is no longer science fiction.

The novel begins a little slow – with a trial that plays out between flashbacks throughout the story. The trial is conducted in a newly devised Science Court, established with the express purpose of determining the validity of the protagonist’s line of research. In spite of his objections and the Court’s original intent, the prosecutor continually brings up peripheral matters: Which brother’s idea was this growing of new organs and limbs? What about the lab’s scientist who died? What about stem cells and the babies who have to die to provide them?

The trial gains momentum as the characters’ individual dramas unfold. Arthur Marshak is a scientist who was drummed out of academia and is set on winning a Nobel Prize from his commercial lab in lower Connecticut. His brother, Jesse, married Arthur’s former fiancé, understandably trashing the brothers’ relationship.

“Julia, it isn’t right for Jess to drag you off to these places. They’re dangerous.”

Very patiently, Julia replied, “As I’ve told you before, Arthur, dear, he’s not dragging me anywhere. I want to go. I want to be able to help him, to help those poor miserable people. I couldn’t remain here while he’s off in the bush somewhere risking his life.”

…”Stay here where it’s safe,” I said, meaning, Stay with me.

“No,” Julia said, as if she knew precisely what I meant. “No, I really can’t, Arthur. My place is beside Jess, wherever he goes, whatever he does.”

Worse still, Jesse initially suggests the possibility of regenerating organs and limbs only to oppose the project in the Science Court. The Immortality Factor may be a glimpse into the inner circle of modern scientists, but the driving force is the novel’s characters. Bova makes the reader care about their fates – and not just the protagonist’s. I was invested in all of the major characters whom Bova gave voice to in short chapters from their own point of view.

Buffeting Arthur about are: the possibility of a hostile corporate takeover, the love he still feels for his brother’s wife, religious and political opposition, office politics and two other women who have set their sights on him. Though Arthur is a bit self-absorbed and single-minded, you’ll want to see him succeed, if not in winning that Nobel Prize or in saving paraplegics, at least to become a happy man.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Tor Science Fiction (December 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ben Bova
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mars Life Titan Venus Able One Our interview with Ben Bova on MARS LIFE

Bibliography:

• The Weathermakers (1967)
• Out of the Sun (1968)
• Escape! (1969)
• THX 1138 (1971) (with George Lucas)
• As on a Darkling Plain (1972)
• When the Sky Burned (1972)
• Gremlins, Go Home! (1974) (with Gordon R. Dickson)
• The Starcrossed (1975)
• City of Darkness (1976)
• Millenium (1976)
• The Multiple Man (1967)
• Colony (1978)
• Kinsman (1981)
• Test of Fire (1982)
• The Winds of Altair (1983)
• Privateers (1985) (features Dan Randolph, but is not a Grand Tour novel)
• The Kinsman Saga (1987)
• Peacekeepers (1988)
• Cyberbooks (1989)
• The Trikon Deception (1992) (with Bill Pogue)
• Triumph (1993)
• Death Dream 1994)
• Brothers (1996) (released as The Immortality Factor (2009)
• The Green Trap (2006)
• Able One (2010)
• Hittite (2010)
• Power Play (2012)

Watchmen

• The Star Conquerors (1959)
• Star Watchman (1964)*
• The Dueling Machine (1969)

Exile Series:

• Exiled from Earth (1971)
• Flight of Exiles (1972)
• End of Exile (1975)
• The Exiles Trilogy (2011)

Voyagers

• Voyagers (1981)
• The Alien Within (1986)
• Star Brothers (1990)
• The Return (August 2009)

Orion

• Orion (1984)
• Vengeance of Orion (1988)
• Orion in the Dying Time (1990)
• Orion and the Conqueror (1994)
• Orion Among the Stars (1995)
• Orion and King Arthur (June 2013)

To Save the Sun

• To Save the Sun (1992) (with AJ Austin)
• To Fear the Light (1994) (with AJ Austin)

Grand Tour of the Universe:

• Mars (1992)
• Empire Builders (1993)
• Return to Mars (1999)
• Venus (2000)
• Jupiter (2001)
• Saturn (2002)
• Tales of the Grand Tour (2004)
• Mercury (2005)
• Powersat (2005)
• Titan (2006)
• Mars Life (2008)
• Leviathans of Jupiter (2011)

Moonrise (part of Grand Tour):

• Moonrise (1996)
• Moonwar (1998)

Asteroid Wars (part of Grand Tour):

• The Precipice (2001)
• The Rock Rats (2002)
• The Silent War (2004)
• The Aftermath (2007)

Sam Gunn (part of Grand Tour):

• Sam Gunn, Unlimited (1993)
• Sam Gunn Forever (1998)
• Sam Gunn Omnibus (2009)

Nonfiction:

• The Craft of Writing Fiction That Sells (1994)
• The Story of Light (2002)

Related:

• Biography – Bova, Ben – Gale Reference Team (2006)

“Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (DEC 3, 2009)
SPECIAL: MF Author Interview

Humans have varied and convoluted relationships with the animals on this planet. We eat some, wear others, and a few enjoy or endure the precarious position of becoming household pets. Sometimes the relationships people have with their animals make the headlines. Take for example, Dutch artist Katinka Simonse–who strangled and then skinned her own cat before turning it into a handbag. While this act unleashed a storm of controversy and a range of reactions, it also raises many questions. What, for example, is the difference between Katinka’s feline purse and a purse made of cow hide? Is the difference between the death of the pet cat and the death of a cow a moral question or a question of species? Do “owners” have the moral and legal right to kill their pets? Should Simonse be prosecuted for animal cruelty? This case illustrates the complexity of animal rights issues precisely because we humans pick and chose which animals we will love and cherish and which ones we will objectify. There’s a moral dissonance afoot in our relationships with animals, and it’s a dissonance that allows us to coo about how much we love animals while we continue to exploit them through factory farms and animal experimentation.

And these complex moral issues are at the fore in the short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet–a short story collection which “treads newly imaginative territory with charismatic tales focused on our fascination with famous people, animals and human-animal relations.” Each of these ten stories examines some aspect of human interaction with animals with some of the stories focusing on real people and fictionalized animal related incidents in their lives. In “Sexing the Pheasant,” for example, we enter the mind of Madonna–a singer notorious for her radical self-inventions. In the story, Madonna newly married to Guy Ritchie and still in the warm glow of her British phase, dons a hunting outfit and totes a rifle around. In “Girl and Giraffe,” George Adamson tells a haunting tale of one afternoon spent in the African bush.

One of the stories, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov” incorporates a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction incident involving Edison and the 1903 electrocution of an elephant. This true story, set to fiction for the purposes of the collection, records the death sentence duly delivered to Topsy:

“Topsy, the elephant in question, was a disgruntled circus and work animal who had suffered the pains of forced labor, captivity, neglect and abuse. She had responded by killing three men, the last of whom fed her a burning cigarette.

Simple shooting would not have been theatrical enough for her owners, Thompson & Dundy of Coney Island’s Luna Park, had decided to make an example of the rogue.”

And this “example” results in the hideous electrocution of Topsy, her “fiery death” duly recorded on film.

In the title story “Love in Infant Monkeys” based on fact, animal researcher and psychologist, Harry Harlow, moves between his laboratory and a faculty party. Harlow, seen by some as a key figure in the rise of the Animal Liberation Movement is depicted as a troubled man, a “functioning alcoholic” whose familial relationships leave a lot to be desired. His lack of connection with his estranged children is reflected in his experiments–extreme isolation experiments using baby monkeys. Harlow’s sadistic callousness is evident here as he records–without emotion–the decline of monkeys in the “pits of despair.” (Harlow named the apparatus himself. For example, he also named the forced mating device, the “rape racks.”)

Of this excellent collection, “Sir Henry” remains my favorite. It’s the story of a New York based professional dog walker, a conscientious and sensitive man who selects wealthy, reliable clients in order to insulate himself from exposure to the harsher aspects of dog ownership:

“When a dog was taken from him—a move, a change of fortune or, in one painful case, a spontaneous gifting—he felt it deeply. His concern for a lost dog, as he thought of them would keep him up for many nights after one of these incidents. When a young Weimaraner was lost to him with not even a chance to say goodbye, he remained angry for weeks. The owner, a teenage heiress often featured in the local tabloids, had given his charge away on a spurt of the moment to a Senegalese dancer she met at a restaurant. He had no doubt that drug use was involved. The dog, a timid, damaged animal of great gentleness and forbearance, was on a plane to Africa by the time he found out about it the next day.”

The dog walker prefers dogs to humans as dogs are clearly our “moral superiors.” To the dog walker, most people are unworthy of owning a dog and they are not as much dog owners as “dog neglecters.” While the dog walker imagines that he has rules for accepting clients that will shield him from the more painful aspects of his job, he is ambushed by an unforeseen incident involving a poodle owned by an elderly violinist.

These excellent stories run the gamut of the relationships between humans and animals–we read of beloved pets, not-so-beloved pets, research animals that exist to fulfill sadistic paradigms, zoo animals, wild animals, animals as accessories, and animals as entertainment. While animals exist to fill whatever needs and whims humans may have, we also see the hypocrisy of humans in their relationships with animals as well as a total lack of accountability in how we treat them. And that lack of accountability ranges from the ownership of our pets to the shadowy world of animal experimentation in which sadism seems indistinguishable from “data collection.” Yet in spite of the subject matter, Millet, in telling these stories manages to remain an observer and a recorder rather than a moralist. This sometimes uncomfortable position is left for the reader.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lydia Millet
EXTRAS:	ExcerptOur interview with Lydia Millet
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of  How the Dead Dream

Bibliography:

• Ominvores (1996)
• George Bush: Dark Prince of Love (2000)
• My Happy Life (2002) 
• Everyone’s Pretty (2005)
• Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)
• Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories (2009)

Trilogy:

• How the Dead Dream (2008)
• Ghost Lights (2011)
• Magnificence (November 2012)

For younger readers:

• The Fires Beneath the Sea (July 2011)

Other:

• State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (terrific essay on Arizona)

“I should have told you that a long time ago.” Her mother rests her back against the pillows. “I should have told you how beautiful you are,” she says softly.

When Anna was fifteen, the brother of one of her friends from school held her hand and said, “You are the prettiest of my sister’s friends.” She felt a surge of irrational happiness then. This is the feeling Anna finally recognizes in the confusion of emotions that swirl through her. Will they talk now? Will they have closure?

But the timbre of her mother’s voice changes, the softness that was there evaporates. “I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you that,” she says. No emotion, a chastisement even.

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes ( NOV 14, 2009)

SPECIAL:  MF Author Interview

Anna In-Between is a novel about an unmarried, Caribbean woman in her late thirties, Anna Sinclair, who begins to understand herself as she comes to understand her parents. The novel explores issues of caste, race and culture in a moving, deeply poignant tale of mother and daughter. Anna goes back to the island of her birth as she does every year, but this time she stays for a month to spend more time with her aging parents. Her mother, Beatrice, reveals to Anna that she has a lump on her breast – one for which she has not sought treatment. Beatrice has not even mentioned it to her own husband, though she knows he sees it. And he doesn’t say a word about it, either. He respects her privacy. The whole “elephant in the living room” thing is hard for a modern American to comprehend, especially when we’re talking – or not talking about – a life-threatening disease.

Anna grew up in an upper-class neighborhood among Englishmen who didn’t accept her because of her black skin. In New York, she doesn’t quite belong either, being from a very different culture and lineage than most Afro-Americans, with her Amerindian, European, African, Indian and Chinese blood. And the influences of the New York culture over time make her feel even more alien when she goes home to the Caribbean to visit.

Beatrice fights against social mores and long-held Victorian tradition in order to accept help for her cancer. Still, she can’t bring herself to travel to the States to better medical facilities and doctors because  blacks are still second class citizens there.

Anna’s insecurities come through as she analyzes her mother’s every word and gesture for hidden meaning. And hidden meanings abound, but are not outnumbered by her mother’s overt manipulations and judgments. Anna’s extremely convincing inner dialog felt like something beyond truth, more raw and intimate.

Nunez draws on her recollections and experiences from growing up in Trinidad to weave a sensual sense of place throughout the novel. When I read Daphne DuMaurier, I wanted to go to Cornwall, when I read Eugenia Price’s St. Simons Trilogy I wanted to visit St. Simons, Georgia. Now Nunez has infused me with longing to see the Caribbean and get to know its people that have such a rich and tumultuous history.

I highly recommend Anna In-Between, especially to women, because Nunez captures the mother-daughter dynamic so well. And to anyone who struggles with finding where they belong.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Akashic Books (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AMAZON PAGE:	Anna In-Between
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Allbc page on Elizabeth Nunez Akashic Books page on Anna In-Between
EXTRAS:	MostlyFiction.com interview with Elizabeth Nunez
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Caribbean authors:Edwidge Danticat Nalo Hopkinson Donna Hemans Jamaica Kincaid

Bibliography:

• Beyond the Limbo Silence 1998)
• Bruised Hisbiscus (2000)
• Discretion (2002)
• Grace (2003)
• Prospero’s Daughter (2006)
• Anna In-Between (September 2009)

Other:

• Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad (2005)

---

“I had a body in the trunk of the car.

I hadn’t planned it that way, but then it wasn’t that kind of job. It wasn’t a job at all, really, rather a speculative venture, and now I’d made more of an investment than just my time and a little money.“

Special: Author Interview

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft (OCT 27, 2009)

Writers are always telling each other to steal, but cover your tracks. So it’s funny that Max Allan Collins, in his new novel Quarry in the Middle, has decided to blatantly admit his inspiration by way of three epigrams at the beginning of the book. The epigrams are quotes from Dashiell Hammett, Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, one novelist and two film directors who each told stories about lawless men who played one gang of criminals against another in the hope of getting paid by each. Perhaps Collins thought his rip off was too blatant and it was better to display rather than hide his appropriations. This was unnecessary because Quarry in the Middle stands very well on it’s own and merely nods to the works of these other artists.

All of Collins’s Quarry novels, this is the eighth, concern a midwestern hitman who has cut his mob ties and has decided to go freelance. Most of these books were written in the 1970s and are only available in used editions. Then, a few years ago, Collins decided to bring Quarry back with a final book in the series The Last Quarry. But that hasn’t stopped Collins from writing books that take place earlier in the criminal’s career.

Quarry in the Middle is his third recent novel in the series. It takes place in the mid 1980s with Quarry dressed like Don Johnson, spying on another known hitman and simply following him to his next “job.” This takes him down the Mississippi to a town called Haydee’s Port, Illinois. And the “job” the other man has is to kill the owner of an enormous illegal riverfront casino. Of course the suspected employer of the hitman is the owner of another illegal casino on the other side of the river.

Quarry intervenes in the assassination and gets himself hired by the man who was supposed to be dead. He then infiltrates the other casino and tries to get hired by the other owner as well. Both of these owners are backed by warring wings of the Chicago mob and Quarry nearly manages to get himself killed in each casino. And of course he makes friends with a couple ladies along the way. The book is pure sex and violence in the classic tough-guy mode.

Throughout the book, the first-person narration runs sardonic as Quarry trips his way through the less elite members of Ronald Reagan’s America:

“The joint was encased in the cheapest paneling known to God or man or even you uncle Phil, beautified by black-marker graffiti that made dating and other suggestions. Right now the tables were about half full, and the bar about the same. The clientele appeared to be blue-collar or below, displaying lots of frayed faded jeans, a look courtesy of factory work, not factory fabrication. One corner had been taken over by bikers in well-worn leathers — the bikers were pretty well-worn themselves, in their thirties or forties. Marlon Brando in The Wild One had been a long fucking time ago.”

Quarry’s narration, like the author’s prose, is simple and direct. Collins doesn’t waste any pages, paragraphs or even sentences on digression. Like all of the Quarry novels, this one is only about 200 pages and like the best ones, it has a fast pace with one scene intruding into another. There is no end to the action and violence and no chance for the reader to put the book down for the night. And, as usual with Collins, the plot is air-tight with no coincidences, holes or loose ends.

Once, in an interview years ago, Collins said that he would love to revisit all his old recurring characters that he invented years ago. The problem, he said, was that he didn’t want to conform to modern publishing schedules to do it. Quarry in the Middle is the third Quarry novel to lurk into bookstores in four years — hardly a tight schedule. There is also another book in the works but with no solid publication date as yet planned. Hard Case Crime, the small publisher with big distribution, seems to have helped Collins solve his dilemma.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime (October 27, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Daniel Luft’s interview with Max Allan Collins
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Quarry’s Ex The First Quarry Dearly Beloved Kiss Her Goodbye

Bibliography:

Nathan Heller series:

• True Detective (1983; 2012)
• True Crime (1984: 2011)
• The Million-Dollar Wound (1986; 2011)
• Neon Mirage (1988; 2011)
• Stolen Away (1991; 2011)
• Dying in the Post-War: A Nathan Heller Casebook (1991)
• Carnal Hours (1994; 2011)
• Blood and Thunder (1995; 2011)
• Damned in Paradise (1996; 2011)
• Flying Blind (1998; 2011)
• Magic Man (1999; 2011)
• Angel in Black (2001; 2011)
• Chicago Confidential (2002; 2011)
• Kisses of Death: Stories (2001)
• Triple Play: 3 Novellas (2011)
• Target Lancer (2012)
• Ask Not (October 2013)

Road to Perdition:

• Road to Perdition (1998)
• Oasis (2003)
• Sanctuary (2003)
• Road to Purgatory (2004)
• Road to Paradise (2005)

Quarry novels:

• The Broker (1976)
• The Broker’s Wife (1976)
• The Dealer’s Cut (1977)
• Primary Target (1987)
• Quarry’s Greatest Hits (2003)
• The Last Quarry (2006)
• The First Quarry (2008)
• Quarry in the Middle (2009)
• Quarry’s Ex (2011)
• The Wrong Quarry (January 2014)

Mallory Mystery:

• The Baby Blue Rip-off (1983; 2011)
• No Cure for Death (1983; 2012)
• Kill Your Darlings (1984; 2012)
• A Shroud for Aquarius (1985; 2012)
• Nice Weekend for Murder (1986; 2012)

Historical Mysteries:

• The Titanic Murders (1999)
• The Hindenburg Murders (2000)
• The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001)
• The Lusitania Murders (2002)
• The London Blitz Murders (2004)
• The War of the Worlds Murder (2005)

Eliot Ness Novels:

• The Dark City (1987: 2005)
• Butcher’s Dozen (1988)
• Bullet Proof(1989; 2005)
• Murder by the Numbers (1993; 2011)

Ms. Tree Series:

• Deadly Beloved (2007)
• Ms. Tree (2008)

Other:

• Johnny Dynamite (2003)
• Two for the Money (2004)
• A Killing in Comics (2007)
• Strip for Money (2008)
• What Doesn’t Kill Her (September 2013)

writing as Patrick Culhane:

• Black Hats: A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone (April 2007)
• Red Sky in Morning (2008)

with Mickey Spillane:

• Dead Street (2007)
• The Goliath Bone (2008)
• The Big Bang (2010)
• Kiss Her Goodbye (2011)
• The Consummata (2011)

with Matthew Clemens:

• You Can’t Stop Me (2010)

Movies from books:

• The Road to Perdition (2002)
• The Last Lullabye (2008)

“Enshrined within the Colonial Spanish penal code is the Latin maxim talem qualem, which means you take your victim as you find him. American cops call it the eggshell skull rule. Slap someone with a delicate cranium, break it, and they’ll still charge you with murder. Talem qualem. Take your victim as you find him. In other words, be careful who you kill.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Guy Savage (AUG 18, 2009)

Special: Author Interview

Adrian McKinty’s latest thriller Fifty Grand begins in Wyoming on a frozen lake as a masked assailant forces a naked man at gunpoint to hammer a hole in the ice and then jump into the freezing water. Sobbing and begging for mercy, the man asks, “How did it come to this?” Then the novel goes back in time to answer that question.

Fifty Grand is narrated by female Cuban detective, Mercado. Mercado’s father defected to the U.S from Cuba years before, and while his abandoned wife is now a borderline nutjob, Mercado and her brother, Ricky never really got over the shock or the taint of their father’s defection. Now years later, Mercado learns that her father has been killed in a hit-and-run accident near Fairview, Colorado. Sketchy details that seep back to Cuba reveal that he was making a meager living as a ratcatcher. Apart from the ugly fact that Mercado’s father crawled off to die and that no one has been arrested for the crime, Mercado is also haunted by questions about her father’s desertion of his Cuban family. Since Mercado is not allowed to travel to the US from Cuba, she gets a week’s leave of absence supposedly to travel to Mexico City. But once there, Mercado takes an enormous risk and posing as an illegal immigrant, she pays her way across the border into America.

As planned, Mercado, who now goes by the name “Maria,” ends up in the wealthy ski resort of Fairview. It’s a nasty little tight-assed town owned by the corrupt Sheriff Briggs. Briggs has reason to believe that the Hollywood Scientologist crowd will make a vacation nest in Fairview and with Tom Cruise firmly in place as part of the advance landing crew, Briggs buys illegals to work the hotels and local businesses. He expects the illegals to be invisible, compliant and assist him–under threat of violence–in the upcoming economic boom.

Mercado begins working as a maid and in this capacity she sees the other side of Fairview: the cocaine, the prostitution, and the endless partying of the Hollywood crowds–those on their way up, and those on their way down. She has just a week to investigate her father’s death before she must return to Cuba, and if she fails to return, the consequences towards those she loves will be painful. Naturally since her father defected, there are those in Cuba who imagine Mercado will do the same if given the chance, but the detective sees America as some sort of racist assault course to be negotiated and barely tolerated until she discovers the truth about her father’s death.

Irish novelist McKinty isn’t that widely read in North America, but perhaps Fifty Grand will expand this author’s readership. Perhaps best known for his Forsthye trilogy (Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, The Bloomsday Dead) McKinty is a versatile novelist who appears to have slipped easily into the skin of a female Cuban detective with the result that Mercado is a dynamic, believable character from page one. Fifty Grand is weakest when we question how an illegal alien smuggled in by a coyote and sold to local law enforcement, and now in America for less than a week has the time or the energy to sniff around the rich and famous of Fairview. The fact that Mercado is apparently so unsupervised and has oodles of free time defies credibility, and this implausibility nagged at me during parts of the novel. However, that complaint aside, for the most of the novel, McKinty’s narrative is so strong, that the skepticism of “Maria’s” work demands takes a back seat to the action.

The novel creates a portrait of a troubled Cuba, a country harnessed by the restraints placed by Castro and with conflicting forces waiting in the wings to carve up the prize when Castro dies. Mercado questions Cuba’s systems and yet when she arrives in the so-called paradise of America, she’s automatically placed at the bottom of the totem pole, and is treated like trash by the wealthy whose homes she cleans. As a result, both worlds are seen as unpleasant places–poverty-stricken Cuba in limbo until Castro dies, and America with its vastly contrasting worlds of the filthy rich and the dirt poor who serve them. Fifty Grand’s strength is in its excellent, clever structure, and consequently, the novel is much more intense than many thrillers I’ve read this year. McKinty is a bold writer who isn’t afraid of handing out advance plot information as a means to tease us into the story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co. (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Adrian McKinty
EXTRAS:	Excerpt MostlyFiction interview with Adrian McKinty
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of Dead I May Well Be And other Cuban Detective novels: Comrades in Miami by Jose Latour Havana Red by Leonard Padura Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano

Bibliography:

• Orange Rhymes With Everything (1997)
• Hidden River (2004)
• Fifty Grand (2009)
• Falling Glass (2011)

Dead Trilogy:

• Dead I Well May Be (2003)
• The Dead Yard (2006)
• Bloomsday Dead (2007)

“Where we were going was kind of a peckerwood suburb, which was pretty much a clutch of fall-defoliated trees, some evergreen pines, a listing mobile home, and a dog hunched to drop a load in what passed for a yard. The dog was medium-sized, dirty yellow, and looked like the last meal he had eaten, he was dropping. He was working so hard at dropping those turds, his eyes were damn near crossed, had the kind of concentration that made you consider he might be close to figuring out the problems with string theory. He didn’t look owned. Had the look of a freelance dog. Maybe there was something to be said for that.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Guy Savage (JUL 23, 2009)

Special: Author Interview

If you like novels that are riveting, wildly profane and yet strangely profound, then welcome to Vanilla Ride, the latest novel in the Hap & Leonard series from author Joe Lansdale, and if you haven’t read one of his novels yet, then what are you waiting for?

As I’ve said before on this site, one of the very best things about reviewing for MostlyFiction.com is that I’ve been introduced to authors I never knew existed, and I hope I don’t hurt writer Joe Lansdale’s feelings when I say that up until 2008, I’d never heard his name. Now I can’t wait for his next book to hit the shelves.

Vanilla Ride is the latest novel in the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series, and as always the tale is narrated by Hap and flavoured with his laid-back style. Hap and Leonard, two tough working class men, are a couple of strange characters who hook up occasionally, through circumstance, usually to engage in some “serious ass-whooping” in their East Texas hometown. Hap and Leonard are not normally people you’d imagine as firm friends. On the surface of things, they seem to be polar opposites. Hap is white and straight, and Leonard is gay and black. Of course, this leads to all sorts of assumptions about their relationship, but bottom line is that these two seemingly disparate men share an unbreakable bond of loyalty and friendship with each other. The fact that Leonard is gay, and fiercely proud of it, makes the friendship between these two that much more intriguing–especially when those around them sometimes don’t know how to take the off-the-wall remarks they bounce back and forth.

Vanilla Ride is at once very, very funny and very violent–an unusual combination that can’t be easy to achieve, and yet the author blends these two elements easily and seamlessly without ever seeming facetious or superficial. The violence is explosive and often unexpected, but it’s never glorified. While Leonard can kill with impunity, Hap makes the perfect narrator as he occasionally ponders the ramifications of his actions, and this laconic self-reflection is never over done. The humour runs almost non-stop through the tale, and it either occurs through Hap’s unique interpretation of events or through the dialogue between Hap and Leonard. If they ever decided to take to the stage, they’d have a career in stand-up comedy. I’d like to say that the humour overrides the violence, but the other books I’ve been reading lately impact that statement. Lansdale is known for his Texas Noir tales, so expect all the things that implies–a dark soulnessness, good guys and bad guys, but at times the line between “good” and “bad” blurs to the point of being practically non-existent. Vanilla Ride–like the other Hap & Leonard tales tackles racism, homophobia, with the occasional jab at organized religion. Hap & Leonard, naturally, are magnets for all sorts of –isms, and not accepting these characters probably says a great deal about the readers’ tolerance. Oh and if any of you prissy readers out there don’t care for bad language, then I suggest that you don’t bother with Hap and Leonard and move right along to something else. Hap and Leonard don’t just swear, they could give lessons in profanity, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The story begins when Leonard Pine shows up at Hap’s house late one night with ex-cop, Marvin Hanson. Hanson’s in trouble and he’s turned to Hap and Leonard to ask a favour. It seems that Hanson’s granddaughter, Gadget, is holed up in a trailer in the middle of nowhere with her drug dealing boyfriend. Hanson has the idea that Gadget wants out, and he tried and failed to extract her. Now he wants Hap and Leonard to use their muscle to get his granddaughter back:

“I studied on this a moment, looked at Leonard. He gave me a small nod. I said, We’ll do it, but if she doesn’t want to come home, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the case, we bring her back, she’ll just run off again.’?

“I understand that,” Marvin said. “But I saw something in her eyes before she got pulled away. She wanted to come home. I’m not sure she knows it outright, but I could tell.”

“I don’t trust things you see in people’s eyes,” I said. “You might be seeing your own reflection.”

This simple favour for an old friend soon lands Hap and Leonard into some very serious business, and they find themselves stuck in the middle of a mess involving stolen money, a protected witness and an FBI sting. In shaking up some gormless drug dealers, Hap and Leonard run foul of the Dixie Mafia, and the doors to hell open wide with a professional hit woman known as Vanilla Ride on their trail.

Vanilla Ride is a wonderful read and is certain to please fans of the series, but if you haven’t read the others yet, don’t despair, you can start here and back up later. Hap and Leonard’s long-term friendship often resonates with the familiarity of an old married couple. They survive in a world in which conventional morality fails, police who “uphold” the law are on the take, and Hap and Leonard–a couple of latter-day cowboys must once again solve their problems by operating outside of legal systems.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 30, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Joe R. Lansdale
EXTRAS:	Excerpt MostlyFiction interview with Joe R. Lansdale
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Hap & Leonard Series: Savage Season and Mucho Mojo Bad Chili and Captains Outrageous Devil Red   Others: The Bottoms Sunset and Sawdust Leather Maiden Similar: Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series is probably the only one that comes close to this one, if you are look for similar reads.

Bibliography:

• Act of Love: a thriller (1980)
• The Nightrunners: a dark suspense novel (1983)
• Texas Night Riders: a western novel (written as Ray Slater) (1983)
• Dead in the West: a horror novel (1986)
• The Magic Wagon: a western novel with fantastic elements (1986)
• The Drive-In: a horror novel (1988)
• Cold in July: a dark suspense novel (1989)
• The Drive-In II: a horror novel (1989)
• Waltz of Shadows: suspense (1991)
• Batman: Captured by the Engines: a suspense novel (1991)
• Batman in Terror on the High Skies: a juvenile suspense novel (1992)
• The Drive-In: A Double Feature Ominbus (1997)
• The Boar: a period drama (1998)
• Freezer Burn: a suspense novel (1999)
• The Bottoms (2000)
• Zeppelins West (2001) *
• A Fine Dark Line (2003)
• Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)
• Sunset and Sawdust (2004)
• The Boar : young adult (2005)
• Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In (2005)
• Flaming London (2006) *
• Lost Echoes (2007)
• The Shadows Kith and Kin (2007)
• Leather Maiden (2008)
• Deadman’s Road: Stories (2010)
• Crucified Dreams: Stories (2011)
• All the Earth Thrown to the Sky (2011)
• Edge of Dark Water (2012)
• Dead Aim (January 2013)
• The Thicket (September 2013)

Hap Collins / Leonard Pine series:

• Savage Season (1990)
• Mucho Mojo (1994)
• The Two-Bear Mambo (1995)
• Bad Chili (1997)
• Rumble Tumble (1998)
• Captain Outrageous (2001)
• Vanilla Ride (2009)
• Hyenas (2011)
• Devil Red (2011)

“There were places too murky ever to see through. The bloody fury of the night and everything storming up to it, none of it was ever going to lie flat and let her run knowing fingers across it and see all the patterns and shapes and meanings for what they were. There was no essence to them. It was all mayhem and blood and now preening sorrow” — BURY ME DEEP

Click here for interview with MEGAN ABBOTT

Gorgeous starlets who vanish from the elusive glitter of Hollywood, dingy dives that cater to the decadent, deviant tastes of the terminally depraved, and repressed housewives who clean by day and party by night–these are the sort of women who inhabit the novels of Megan Abbott, one of the most exciting names in today’s world of crime fiction. The Czar of Noir, author and film critic Eddie Muller gave Megan Abbott a tagline: Queenpin, and it’s a fitting name. Not only is it the title of Abbott’s third novel but it also refers to the idea that Abbott reigns in the world of noir. Males have long dominated this genre; consider the triptych of noir: Hammett, Chandler and Cain, and what of the creations of noir fiction? Immortalized in our minds are detectives Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. But where does that leave women in noir?

In noir fiction, the archetypal femme fatale emerges as the dominant female character, and of course the femme fatale is the polar opposite of that other oft-found character: the drab little woman in the kitchen. Megan Abbott’s novels stand apart from the herd because she successfully creates strong female types who transcend the typical noir boundaries. In noir fiction, female sexuality not only leads men astray, but it’s something to be controlled by men in a male-dominated world.

Abbott takes the idea of suppressed and controlled female sexuality and unleashes it through her female-centered novels. While men exist in the pages of Abbott’s novels, and they exist sometimes to control women’s sexuality, the male characters are not the centre of the novels, and each of Abbott’s novels pulse with the unslaked passion of the female protagonists. This is a remarkable feat and no small achievement, especially in The Song is You, the story of starlet Jean Spangler who disappears without trace. The tale of Jean’s disappearance is told through the eyes of a male, but the story remains firmly focused on a woman who isn’t there, and this, of course, recalls Laura–one of the greatest noir tales that also happens to have been written by a woman, Vera Caspary back in 1943.

In Queenpin, Abbott gives us two main female characters. There’s Gloria—a vicious “collector,” feared and respected by the males in her world. She promotes her protégé–an unnamed, ambitious twenty-two-year-old grooming her for the future. But is the future strictly professional? And while Abbott plays with traditional mother-daughter female roles, she cleverly lets other possibilities emerge.

It’s always rewarding to follow a novelist as they become increasingly more popular, and that’s exactly what’s happened with Megan Abbott. I came across my first Megan Abbott novel a few years ago, and incidentally, it wasn’t Megan Abbott’s first novel–it was her second, The Song is You. Even now a few years later, the novel still haunts me, and it was so good I was convinced to back track and pick up an out-of-print copy of Abbott’s first novel, Die a Little. From that point, I had to wait a year or so to get my hands on the third novel Queenpin, and this leads me to Abbott’s fourth novel, Bury Me Deep, based on the life and crimes of Winnie Ruth Judd.

In Bury Me Deep, it’s still a man’s world, and it’s a world inhabited by women who are the temporary playthings of the men who have the money and power to enforce society’s rules. The novel’s main character is Marion, an innocent, naïve and lonely woman whose much older husband finds her a job as a filing clerk in a medical clinic, and leaves her in a rooming house while he slaves away in Mexico, working as a doctor for a mining company. Left to her own devices, Marion is gradually led astray and slowly corrupted by a nurse named Louise. Louise pimps on the side in order to maintain her female lover’s drug habit, and so she feeds Marion to a local satyr, Joe Lanigan. The sexually naïve Marion is vulnerable to Lanigan’s sly courtship, and of course, she completely misunderstands the relationship, trading quick sex and the unchartered territory of female pleasure for vague promises. The book’s dark atmosphere of dread and impending doom is maintained steadily and relentlessly from page one. Even though Marion attends parties and imagines that her drab little life is “improving,” it’s obvious to the reader that the tension and drama can only go in one direction, and as Marion’s life spirals out of control, events take an explosive, irrevocable path.

In some ways, by reconstructing a real-life crime, Megan Abbott has returned to familiar territory in Bury Me Deep, but in this novel she enters the mind of a woman whose fling with sexuality leaves her scarred, damaged, and dangerously cornered by circumstance. Aspects of the crime committed by Winnie Ruth Judd remain a mystery, and Bury Me Deep addresses the mystery by its powerful recreation of the mind of a horribly damaged woman.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (July 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Megan Abbott
EXTRAS:	MF Interview with Megan Abbott
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Queenpin The Song is You

Bibliography:

• Die a Little (F2005)
• The Song is You (2007)
• Queenpin (2007)
• Bury Me Deep (2009)
• The End of Everything (2011)
• Dare Me (2012)
• The Fever (June 2014)