“He wanted a new case. He needed a new case. He needed to see the look on the killer’s face when he knocked on the door and showed his badge, the embodiment of unexpected justice come calling after so many years.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (DEC 17, 2011)

Harry Bosch is the real deal. Michael Connelly’s The Drop is another superb entry in this outstanding series about an L. A. cop who is cynical and battle-weary, yet still committed to doing his job. Harry has had his share of troubles over the years, but now that Maddie, his fifteen-year old daughter, is living with him, he has cleaned up his act. He no longer smokes and avoids overindulging in alcohol. Harry is determined to be there for his little girl as she grows into adulthood. Maddie, who is smart and observant, has announced that she plans to follow in her father’s footsteps. She already has the makings of a good detective; she notices small but significant details, handles a firearm like a pro, and can spot a liar by looking for “tells.” The scenes between Bosch and his precocious teenager sparkle with warmth, humor, and love.

Harry knows that his days working for the LAPD are numbered. He has already “unretired” once, but in order to stay on the job, he will need a special dispensation under a program called DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Plan). Meanwhile, he is working on two investigations. As a member of the Open-Unsolved Unit, he is assigned to a cold case that involves the abduction, rape, and strangulation of nineteen-year-old Lily Price. New DNA evidence has come to light, but the data that it reveals raises more questions than it answers. The chief of police also orders Harry to look into the apparent suicide of forty-six year old George Irving, the son of a former ex-cop turned councilman, Irvin Irving. The outspoken and arrogant councilman loathes Bosch, but respects his ability to ferret out the truth.

The author’s crisp writing, use of jargon (“high jingo” means that higher ups are involved, so watch your step), and colorful depiction of police procedure imbue The Drop with energy, immediacy, and realism. The reader observes Harry making some tough decisions. Should he pull in a possible perp for questioning or first try to gather more evidence? Should he surreptitiously search a suspect’s home before obtaining a search warrant? How should Bosch deal with the brass, the media, and his skittish partner, David Chu? When a new woman enters his life, Harry is attracted to her, but is the relationship worth pursuing

Connelly juggles his plot brilliantly while he keeps us guessing about the outcome. Although Bosch can be brusque, tactless, and dismissive, he is willing to put his reputation on the line and is unafraid to make powerful enemies in his obsessive pursuit of justice. At times, Harry worries that he is starting to lose his edge. He needn’t be concerned, since he still has the expertise to read a crime scene, interview witnesses, and follow all of the clues to their logical conclusion. Even the way that Bosch assembles his “murder books” testifies to his tireless dedication to catching predators. If Harry’s performance in The Drop is any indication, he still has what it takes to put the bad guys away.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 324 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Connelly
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Harry Bosch reviews: Nine Dragons The Overlook Echo Park The Closers The Narrows Lost Light City of Bones Michael Haller: The Fifth Witness The Reversal Brass Verdict The Lincoln Lawyer Stand-alone mysteries: The Scarecrow Chasing the Dime Bloodwork

Bibliography:

LAPD Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch Series

• The Black Echo (1992)
• The Black Ice (1993)
• The Concrete Blonde (1994)
• The Last Coyote (1995)
• Trunk Music (1997)
• Angels Flight (1999)
• A Darkness More than Night (2001) *
• City of Bones (2002) /
• Lost Light (2003)
• The Narrows (2004) ***
• The Closers (2005)
• Echo Park (2006)
• The Overlook (2007)
• Nine Dragons (2009) ****
• The Drop (2011)
• The Black Box (November 2012)

Mickey Haller:

• The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) /
• The Brass Verdict (2008) **
• The Reversal (2010) **
• The Fifth Witness (2011)

Other:

• The Poet (1996) ***
• Blood Work (1998) *
• Void Moon (2000)
• Chasing the Dime (2002)
• The Scarecrow (2009)

* Terry McCaleb is in these novels
** Harry Bosch is in these novels
*** The Poet is in these novels.
****Mickey Haller is in this novel

Nonfiction:

• Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers (2006)

Movies from Books:

• Blood Work (2002)
• The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Highway Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

Bibliography:

• In Search of Snow (1994)
• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002)
• The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Mr Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2009)
• Into the Beautiful North (2009)
• Queen of America (December 2011)

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

• Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993)
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996)
• Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998)

More Nonfiction:

• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004)

“I am a smart guy. I recycle. Once I found a lost cat and took it to a shelter. Sometimes I make jokes. If there’s anything wrong with your car, I can tell what by listening to it. I like kids, except the ones who are rude to adults and the parents just stand there, smiling. I have a job. I own an apartment. I rarely lie. These are the qualities I keep hearing people are looking for. I can only think there must be something else, something no one mentions, because I have no friends, am estranged from my family, and haven’t dated in this decade. There is a guy in Lab Control who killed a woman with his car, and he gets invited to parties. I don’t understand that.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (AUG 19, 2011)

Special –> interview with MAX BARRY!

Max Barry’s books take a satiric look at humans within the corporate machine. In Syrup, a marketing graduate named Scat devises a new soft drink called Fukk, only to discover that he’s the victim of corporate theft when his idea is stolen by his nefarious roommate, Sneaky Pete. Max takes a futuristic look at the corporatization of the planet in Jennifer Government, and in Company, a business school graduate finds himself unexpectedly and suspiciously promoted when he questions some of the company’s peculiar business practices.

Machine Man, an off-kilter tale of a man who accidentally loses a leg and who then discovers that the enhanced replacement is more efficient than the original, seems to be the natural progression of Max’s grimly hilarious, eccentric, yet uncannily spot-on skewering of corporate culture. The novel is the tale of shy, isolated scientist Charles Neumann who works for a large company called Better Future. Since this is a company that’s in the business of scientific research and development, security is tight:

“I swiped for the elevator and again access to Building A. We were big on swiping. You couldn’t go to a bathroom in Better Future without swiping first. There was once a woman whose card stopped working and she was trapped in a corridor for three hours. It was a busy corridor but nobody was permitted to let her out. Ushering somebody through a security door on your pass was just about the worst thing you could do at Better Future. They would fire you for that. All anyone could do was bring her snacks and fluids until security finished verifying her biometrics.”

Charles Neumann isn’t particularly thrilled with his body and considers himself weak and puny. Then he has an accident that leads to an amputation–a tragedy for some, but to Charles it’s just the beginning of an obsession to build a better body.

The amputation also marks the beginning of a social life for Charles as a number of new people enter his life. First comes an annoyingly bouncy physical therapist, and then there’s prosthetist, Lola Shanks, “with a bunch of artificial legs under each arm like a Hindu goddess.” Lola is tickled to hear that Charles doesn’t care about a “natural look,” and that he’s much more concerned about function. Charles and Lola share an obsession when it comes to the performance of bodily parts, and so Charles selects the relatively high-tech attributes of the “exegesis Archion foot on a computer-controlled adaptive knee. Multiaxis rotation, polycentric swing. … The Olympics banned it because it provided an unfair advantage over regular legs.”

But to Charles, the leg needs improvement, and since he’s a scientist, he embarks on a one way ticket to bodily perfection. In his quest, he’s aided, abetted, and funded by Better Future. Better Future dabbles in pharmacological products, non-lethal weaponry and bioengineering. Suddenly the company, represented by brisk manager Cassandra Cautery, wants to provide Charles with a lab fully staffed by eager young things ready to improve the human body. The quest to improve the body becomes the latest link in the money-making frenzy at Better Future, but are there more sinister motives afoot?

In spite of the fact the book includes self-mutilation, Machine Man is extremely funny. Max Barry successfully captures the insanity of bodily perfection, meshes it with corporate greed and takes it, with hilarious consequences, to its logical conclusion. In this age of cosmetic obsession (yes, botox specials on the lunch hour, and you can finally grow thicker, longer, lashes), organ harvesting, and robotic prosthetics–a technology heralded as “an opportunity” for the multiple limb amputees pouring out of the Iraq war–Max Barry once again writes with vision, humour, and a poignant look at the humans trapped within corporate machine.

(Syrup is currently being made into a film, Jennifer Government has been optioned by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, and Universal Pictures acquired screen rights to Company.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 81 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Original edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Max Barry
EXTRAS:	Guy Savage interview with Max BarryExcerpt Guy Savage’s additional blog comments…
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Company Jennifer Government

Bibliography:

• Syrup (1999)
• Jennifer Government (2003)
• Company Man (2006)
• Machine Man (2011)
• Lexicon (June 2013)

“Homeland security is a myth…. It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUL 25, 2011)

As Daniel Silva’s Portrait of a Spy opens, art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon and his wife, Chiara, are living quietly in a cottage by the sea. Silva sets the stage with a series of events that are eerily familiar: Countries all over the world are “teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster;” Europe is having difficulty absorbing “an endless tide of Muslim immigrants;” and Bin Laden is dead, but others are scrambling to take his place. Government leaders in America and on the Continent are desperate to identify and thwart the new masterminds of terror.

All of this should not be Gabriel Allon’s problem, since he is no longer an agent of Israeli intelligence. However, Gabriel happens to be in London when he learns that two suicide bombers have struck, one in Paris and the other in Copenhagen. Later, Gabriel is strolling through Covent Garden when he spots a man who arouses his suspicions. Should he alert the police or take out this individual on his own? A series of unexpected events ensue that will bring Gabriel’s brief retirement to an abrupt end. He becomes a key player in a complex plot–involving high finance, a valuable painting, and a beautiful heiress–to destroy the new Bin Laden and his bloodthirsty cohorts. Allon will clash not just with his natural enemies but also with certain American politicians and their subordinates whose short-sighted and self-serving attitudes he finds repugnant.

Portrait of a Spy is an intricate, powerful, well-researched, and engrossing tale of deception, betrayal, and self-sacrifice. The most memorable character is thirty-three year old Nadia al-Bakari, a savvy businesswoman who is highly intelligent, secretive, and one of the richest women in the world. Her late father was a known supporter of terror networks. Will she follow in his footsteps or choose a different path? Silva brings back many of Allon’s comrades, including the amusing Julian Isherwood, an aging but still sharp-tongued Ari Shamron, and art curator/CIA operative, Sarah Bancroft.

The author choreographs his story perfectly and manages an extremely large cast with consummate skill. The sharp and clever dialogue, meaningful themes (including a description of how women are demeaned and manual laborers are exploited in Saudi Arabia and Dubai), as well as the nicely staged action sequences all combine to make this one of the most entertaining espionage thrillers of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 377 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; First Edition edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Silva
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Rembrandt Affair Moscow Rules The Prince of Fire A Death in Vienna

Bibliography:

• The Unlikely Spy (1996)

Michael Osbourne series:

• The Mark of the Assassin (1998)
• The Marching Season (1999)

Gabriel Allon series:

• The Kill Artist (2000)
• The English Assassin (2002)
• The Confessor (2003)
• A Death in Vienna (2004)
• Prince of Fire (2005)
• The Messenger (2006)
• The Secret Servant (2007)
• Moscow Rules (2008)
• The Defector (2009)
• The Rembrandt Affair (2010)
• Portrait of a Spy (2011)
• The Fallen Angel (2012)
• The English Girl (July 2013)

“Fatherhood held at its heart a sweet, paradoxical masochism, the self-abnegation of one willing to die for another. Why else would he have come to this place?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUN 19, 2011)

The core of this exotic fusion of mainstream and literary fiction is defined by the eponymous title– displacement, exclusion, alienation, and even expulsion. The exquisite, poetic first chapter thrusts the reader immediately into a remote setting in Kathmandu 2006, where American cardiologist, Peter Scanlon and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Alex, face a guerilla death squad in the Himalayas. The reader is instantly spellbound with the story, where survival and danger coalesce in a taut, tense thriller that examines contrasts in exile: spirituality within human suffering, inner peace outside of war, and prosperity beyond pestilence.

Backtrack to 2005, and the events that shaped the current peril of the Scanlons. Peter, forced to expel his troubled daughter from proximity to her meth addict mother, removes her from the U.S. to start a new life. At his persuasion, Alex pitches a dart at an atlas to select a new home, which lands on Kathmandu, a deep valley surrounded by colossal mountains, and a politically sensitive and turbulent place marred by outlaws, massacres and instability. Peter gets a job at a volunteer health clinic, where diseases he has never seen and cries he has never heard permeate the city and pierce his cynical American heart.

Warring Maoists pervade the mountainside and threaten the life of citizens, and the lawless and nihilistic underworld controls the corrupt police and politicians. Moreover, the clinic’s acquisition of life-saving drugs depends a lot on the negotiation with these syndicate bosses of the city, specifically a savage man who runs a huge sex trafficking ring of young females, many who are sick with STD’s. Peter’s desire to save these girls threatens his MD’s license and his personal safety, and his frustration to cure the sick is challenged by the powerful epidemics that are resistant to antibiotics.

Peter and Alex live in relative comfort compared to the natives, but without heat and in extreme temperatures. Peter’s boss at the clinic has arranged for a housekeeper/cook, Sangita, a Tibetan woman whose daughter, Devi, is Alex’s age. Alex and Devi bond instantly, and Santiga’s maternal instincts are a welcome energy to the household. Mina, the nurse at the clinic who functions more like an agitating partner, vexes Peter, as well as beguiles him.
Ailments, treachery, and poverty permeate the city like the thick, grey fog and charcoal sky that hovers over the inhabitants. A feeling of dread snakes through the narrative, yet a soulful backbone of human stout-heartedness and endurance surprises the reader at each descent of gravity. Groner’s exuberant prose imbues the story with keen paradoxes and nimble dialogue that flow with sharp, pointed wit. The pace is quick, thrilling and cinematic; you will probably finish this novel in a few sturdy sittings.

The disadvantage of this hybrid genre of fiction is the tendency to inject the main characters with a staggering puissance. They wear their courage a little too easily, including the teenagers. There are also several convenient and predictable plot turns that are too facile, giving the narrative a rushed simplicity at times. Also, although Peter is out of his element, he steadily challenges pernicious criminals with a force and conniving that periodically flouts credibility.

Mina, who enters as an intriguing individual, flattens out as her contentious nature is mitigated. Sangita turns out to be a straw character, as are several other players in this drama. Buddhist practices lend a warm and exalted glow to the story, but almost tips into precious territory at intervals.

However, this is a potent story that, despite some inorganic elements, never fails to fill the reader with wonder. The magic arises from the immaculate prose and imagery, as well as luminous, cosmic turns of phrase, and the ties that bind humanity. This is a novel ripe with quotable passages, with a landscape of flourishing detail. As a story of exile, it lures and invites the reader within its foreign enclosures to a map that contours the human heart.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cary Groner
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Bibliography:

• Exiles (June 2011)

“I could hear the sincerity in my voice. I could imitate sincerity so well that even I believed it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUN 4, 2011)

Clare O’Donohue knows what she is talking about in Missing Persons, a satirical and amusing novel about a Chicago-based freelance television producer who specializes in true crime stories. Since O’Donohue has been a producer, she understands “the frustration, annoyance, and craziness” that go with the territory.

Kate is an adorable character who is bright, hard-working, blunt, sassy, and very skilled at what she does. However, she would be the first to admit that she is driven and will do almost anything to get a good sound bite. It’s her mission to manipulate the people she interviews. If she wants someone to cry, she knows how to make it happen. It is no wonder that Kate has become so jaded. Her commitment to her work may be one of the factors that broke up her fifteen-year marriage. She is separated from her soon to be ex-husband, Frank, an aspiring artist. While Kate earned a living, Frank dreamed, puttered, and made promises that he never kept. Now he has found a new significant other and is moving on with his life.

A shocking tragedy changes everything and Kate becomes involved in her own personal drama. In addition, she has a new assignment for a show called Missing Persons. With the help of her cameraman and audio guy, Kate is conducting interviews with everyone who knew Theresa Moretti, a twenty-two year old woman who vanished over a year ago. Did Theresa walk away from her life voluntarily or did someone abduct her? Kate, an amateur sleuth, conducts her own informal inquiries into the Moretti case.

This is a clever and engrossing mystery that, happily, avoids most of the clichés that make readers wince. There is no gloppy romance for Kate; the trajectory of the investigation goes off in unexpected and original directions; and the ending is surprisingly tame and free of melodrama. Even more unusual is the fact that Kate befriends Frank’s mistress, Vera Bingham, who seems to be a rather nice person.

There is witty and sometimes profane banter between Kate and her crew–her cameraman, Andres, and her sound man, Victor. We also get an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the making of a low-budget cable television program. Kate’s profession is challenging and highly competitive. She sometimes loathes herself for using devious tactics to get the footage that she needs. In a particularly telling scene, Kate says about a woman she is interviewing, “She was so vulnerable, in so much pain. It would look great on camera.” How cynical can you get? This is a lighthearted story with some serious themes: First, television executives often cater to the lowest common denominator, exploiting an audience that craves sensationalism. (“People love other people’s misery.”) In addition, Kate, in a rare moment of introspection, begins to understand the part that she played in the dissolution of her marriage. She realizes belatedly that, had she been a bit more unselfish, compassionate, and giving, she and her husband might have managed to stay together.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Plume; 1 edition (May 31, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Clare O’Donohue
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Burning Garbo by Robert Eversz Look Again by Lisa Scottoline

Bibliography:

Someday Quilts Mysteries:

• The Lover’s Knot (2008)
• A Drunkard’s Path (2009)
• The Double Cross (2910)
• The Devil’s Puzzle (September 2011)

Kate Conway Mysteries:

• Missing Persons (May 2011)

“Work. Tom knew what work was; knew what the work really worth doing was, too. Work in rain or shine, the work of keeping a good farm on the go. He knew Mark liked to read, liked to write, and Tom liked to read, the odd time, himself, but there was no way you could think of that, truly as work.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 28, 2011)

Solace, by Belinda McKeon, is a novel about love and longing. As a noun, “solace” means to find comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness. As a verb, it means to give solace to someone else or oneself. This book is about people who find solace in the small things of this world and find it difficult to talk about the bigger things. They hang on to what they know, especially when they face tragedy or their worlds turn upside down.

Tom and Mark are father and son. Tom works his farm in Ireland and Mark is working on his doctorate at Trinity University in Dublin. Tom finds it difficult to understand a life that does not consist of working the land and he finds it very difficult to understand his son.  Mark comes to his father’s farm when he can to help out, usually on a weekend. There is a huge emotional distance between them and they often end up fighting. Maura, Mark’s mother, tries to smooth things out but the gap between father and son is huge.

Mark meets a woman in Dublin named Joanne. Unfortunately, there is bad blood between Mark’s father and Joanne’s deceased father. This makes the relationship difficult for the family dynamics. When Joanne becomes pregnant, issues rise to the surface and even more distance is felt between Tom and Mark.

The novel takes place in the mid-2000’s when Ireland is just beginning to go from a booming country to a place of poverty. What was once a land of opportunity for everyone is becoming a place where housing values are decreasing, unemployment is rising, and large companies are moving out of Ireland to cheaper venues.

Mark has been working on his dissertation for several years without much success. He chose the topic of a woman writer who lived near his father’s farm and to assess her writing and relationships with other writers of her time in a new way. His thesis advisor is not impressed and Mark makes one false start after another.

Symbolically, these false starts are similar to the attempts at conversations that Mark and his father have. They start and stop, try to meet one another at some common ground but fail. When tragedy befalls both of them, Tom becomes very dependent on Mark but Mark distances himself even further from his father, burying himself in his studies.

The prologue opens with Tom and Mark alone on the farm with a baby girl named Aiofe. There are no adult females present and Aiofe is very enamored of her grandfather. Tom takes Aiofe with him on errands he has to do in town and ends up in a grand discord with Mark who did not know where his daughter was. No matter how they try to bridge their distance, they fail. They can find no solace in one another when they are faced with tragedy or pain.

The solace that they have comes from what is familiar to each of them. For Tom it is his farm and the land, and for Mark it is his child and his studies. We readers sadly watch the fumbling attempts they each make to reach each other and the increasing distance that occurs. At one point, Tom gets a cell phone and attempts to call Mark several times a day. Mark makes it a point not to answer and Tom keeps calling.

This is a story of a father and son, of rural Ireland trying to maintain its identity, and the difference between living in a city and living on a farm. Tom can’t understand cities and Mark abhors life on a farm. The book is very well-written but at times it goes very slowly, losing the pace that it might have carried. Belinda McKeon is a playwright and there is that sense of discourse in this novel. She has an MFA from Columbia University and this is her debut novel. She is a very promising novelist with a poetic sense and a gift with words. I especially love her characterization of Tom and Mark. I look forward to her future work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Belinda McKeon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle

Bibliography:

• Solace (May 2011)

“Gilgamesh, whither rovest thou? The life you seek you shall not find.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAR 01, 2011)

In his fantastic and insightful book, On Writing, the prolific writer Stephen King once said: “People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.”

But what if that work is especially mind-numbing and unfulfilling and involves plodding away at an outfit called the Tank—chatting, shuffling papers, composing reports, sending e-mails and wondering where things went wrong? Would that still make for a readable story? As Thomas Kennedy’s new book, Falling Sideways shows, the answer is yes.

It’s probably because most readers will be able to relate to the book’s central protagonist, Fred Breathwaite. Breathwaite is an American expat living in Denmark, his adopted country, and works as an international liaison at the Tank—he is its “eyes in the greater world outside of Denmark” which means he is also responsible for bringing in international clients and accounts. Breathwaite has no great fascination for his job—as the book opens, he is dreading the Wednesday morning meeting at the “Mumble Club” a weekly meeting of department heads—but knows that the job affords him material comforts and a comfortable life he otherwise would not have had.

Breathwaite has older children comfortably settled and leading their own lives but it his youngest, Jes, who “gave him cause for concern and hope.” The teenaged Jes is convinced he does not want his life to turn out like his Dad’s. It seemed to Jes that “almost nobody in Denmark actually did anything anymore; they all just sat in offices sending e-mails to one another or went to meetings where they sat around a table and talked about the e-mails…Meanwhile, there were a million truly important things that needed doing in the world, things that were a matter of life and death for people who lived in poverty and misery. Jes wanted a foot into that door. And meanwhile, he wanted to do something concrete,” Kennedy writes. This “something concrete” is work at a key shop owned by an Afghani immigrant—Jes works here with his hands duplicating keys and reading Rilke is his spare time.

The elder Breathwaite can’t stand to see his son throw away his life. “The boy had all the right ideas and not a chance of realizing them,” he thinks. It is this conflict between father and son that forms one of the two central theses in the novel.

The other of course, is Breathwaite’s own job. Early in the book, he finds out he is being laid off and replaced by a younger executive Harald Jaeger, a skirt-chasing insecure worker with personal problems of his own. Breathwaite uses this career turn to question what the net sum of his life has really amounted to.

Falling Sideways is populated by a whole host of other characters including Martin Kampman, CEO of the Tank, and professional downsizer; Martin’s son, Adam, who also rebels against his father; and Birgitte Somers, the company’s CFO.

Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy’s “Copenhagen Quartet” to be released in the United States. The city comes alive in these pages and Kennedy does a fantastic job of portraying the city in the beautiful season of fall. The problem with Falling Sideways is that it does not meet the high expectations set by the first book in the quartet, In the Company of Angels. Compared to that earlier work, this one seems much more ordinary, its conclusion and narrative path foretold well before the end. In addition, quite a few of the characters seem clichéd and flat—probably because Kennedy never gets a chance to realize them fully. Nevertheless if the point of the quartet is to show Kennedy’s “range,” this book does that task well.

Together, the Copenhagen quartet is meant to encompass the four enduring seasons and if the first two books are any indication, the quartet is on its way to achieve this objective very effectively. In The Company of Angels embodies the spirit of spring. It is possible, after all, to view that book as a ray of hope despite horrific events in the characters’ past. In Falling Sideways, it is the melancholic allure of fall that beautifully permeates the novel. The season of decay and slow death is a perfect metaphor for the downward spiral many of the characters face. And just like the season, there are brief and spectacular splashes of color before it all ends.

It is fitting that Gilgamesh makes a brief appearance in the book. The moral of the story, if there is any, is that one could do no worse than to follow the timeless advice given to Gilgamesh:

Make thou merry by day and by night.
Of each day make thou a feast or rejoicing,
Pay heed to the little one that holds thy hand,
Let thy spouse delight in thy bosom,
For this is the task of mankind.

But as many of the characters in Falling Sideways realize, sometimes the best advice is the hardest to follow.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Thomas E. Kennedy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In The Company of Angels And another book all about office work: And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Bibliography:

• Crossing Borders (1990)
• A Weather of the Eye (1996)
• Unreal City: Stories (1996)
• The Book of Angels (1997)
• Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight: Stories (1997)
• A Passion in the Desert (2007)
• Cast Upon the Day: Stories (2007)

The Copenhagen Quartet:

• Bluett’s Blue Hours (2002)
• Danish Fall (2003) To be published as Falling Sideways (March 2011 US and UK)
• Greene’s Summer (2004) Published as In the Company of Angels (March 2010 US and UK)
• Kerrigan’s Copenhagen: A Love Story (2005)

Nonfiction:

• Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (1988)
• The American Short Story Today (1991) (with Henrik Specht)
• Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992)
• Index to American Short Story Award Collections (1993)
• Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction (2002)
• The Literary Traveler (2005) (with Walter Cummins)
• Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America (2008)

“Jessold was an embarrassment. His name became proverbial, signifying a kind of artistic dementia, a byword for murderous obsession: the same fate Gesualdo had suffered. The works, best dismissed on grounds of taste, were completely unrevivable. These were his missing years, not in life but in death. Nothing of the real man (the charismatic, genius Jessold) survived: only the cartoon, the caricature, the parody, the deluded monster.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (FEB 4, 2011)

Wesley Stace’s ample new novel — half murder mystery, half music criticism — opens with a press report on the death of the talented young English composer Charles Jessold in 1923. He appears to have shot himself in his apartment after poisoning his wife and his wife’s lover and watching them die. The murder-suicide has not one but two ironic precedents. It reproduces the story of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who similarly killed his wife with her lover. It is also the subject of an English folk-ballad, “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave,” which Jessold had taken as the subject for his operatic magnum opus, due to premiere the following night. Given the circumstances, the opera was canceled and Jessold’s posthumous reputation ruined. It seems clear that he was a man obsessed by the career of Gesualdo, his near-namesake, as he squandered his own talent in alcoholism and excess. The facts are not in dispute; it only remains to trace the sorry path that led to this debacle, and ascertain the composer’s possible motives.

This task is left to Leslie Shepherd, a gentleman of independent means who writes musical criticism for a leading London paper. Meeting Jessold at a country-house weekend, he takes it upon himself to promote the young man and guide his early career. It is the period of the English folk-song revival, when composers such as Vaughan-Williams and Holst would go out into the countryside to transcribe ancient versions of the old ballads as sung by aged countrymen, in search of a home-grown nationalism to combat the dominance of German music. Jessold is staying with Shepherd and his wife Miriam when they hear the “Little Mossgrave” ballad (sic) sung by an old sheep-shearer, planting the seed for the eventual opera, for which Shepherd will write at least the first draft of the libretto. But a decade must pass before that. Jessold attracts attention with a number of smaller compositions; he makes two trips to study in Germany, but is trapped there by the outbreak of the 1914 war, and
spends the next four years in an internment camp. There, he manages to write music of ever greater brilliance, and returns to London in 1918 as a musical celebrity and clearly the next great hope for British music. But he also becomes personally unreliable, rejecting his old friends, and turning to drink.

Wesley Stace is clearly a musician; in fact he has a separate career as a singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding. But he knows the classical repertoire too. Unlike virtually all novels about musicians that I have read (Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music being the sole other exception), the musical background to this one is impeccable. Stace understands the conflict in prewar British music between pastoral Englishism and dilettantish daring. He is also aware of the great movements on the continent; he has superb passages on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and especially Schoenberg’s second string quartet, the work in which he renounced tonality. Shepherd sums up his experience of the latter: “Yet I had to admit that I too felt the wonder of the music, its power, its horror. I had laughed at Jessold’s ‘breeze from other planets,’  but I had experienced it, that chill wind blowing from the future, in the hairs on the back of my neck, in my soul.” Stace is brilliant at showing how Jessold steered his way between these various influences. He makes the composer always plausible, but very much his own man. If there is any one composer whose early music one thinks of more than others, it is Benjamin Britten, and the 1945 premiere of Britten’s Peter Grimes is another of the brilliant musical set-pieces in the book.

I do have problems, however. There are many times when I am not sure whether the music is just the background to the personal story, or whether the story has been devised solely to enable Stace to write about the music. As a musician myself (including as an opera librettist and former critic!), I was fascinated by everything, but other readers might find the book slow. Stace also goes out of his way to imitate the mandarin style of a lot of English writing at the beginning of the century, flowing with the stately amplitude of a Henry James, and there are times when you just wish he would get on with it. This is especially so in the second part of the book, after Jessold is long since dead, and Stace continues into the later years of his biographer, Leslie Shepherd. The musical details continue to fascinate, but when Hamlet has left the scene, who is interested in Horatio? Yet stick with it while Stace goes through the same events again but from an intiguingly different perspective. Some of his surprises come close to narrative cheating, but in the end they transform the book into a different kind of psychological study altogether, still very much worth the reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wesley Stace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Charles Jessold website
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music in fiction: Paganini’s Ghost by Paul Adams Blue Duets by Kathleen Wall

Bibliography:

• Misfortune (2005)
• By George (2007)
• Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace (February 2011)

“He’d been promoted to sergeant and was getting transferred to Fort Hood soon, and she had assumed their relationship would end when he left. But, standing in that parking lot, talking about death, knowing he had been close to it and survived, she wanted to marry this man. She wanted to give up her islands for him and his scars.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JAN 28, 2011)

In this terse and bold book of eight interconnected stories featuring Fort Hood army wives, breakout author Siobhan Fallon invites readers to peek through the hazy base-house curtains into largely uncharted territory. She offers an intimate glimpse of the spouses and children left behind to cope when the men in the fictional infantry battalion of 1-7 Cav are deployed to Iraq.

We’ve seen media pictures proffering the stalwart strength and Mona Lisa smiles of army wives, but we haven’t been host to their private trials–of farewells, homecomings, and transitions. Fallon captures their mixed emotions and fears with a gritty realism, and reveals critical, vital moments in their insular and marginal lives. She glances sharply into the tearful deployment, the lonely absence, and the stirring homecoming. How the wives cope with these changes is a recurring theme.

This is fiction, but Fallon writes with authority: her husband, a major, was deployed in Iraq for two tours of duty while she lived in Fort Hood. She knows the depth of the cookie-cutter, thin-walled houses–they are occupied by courageous and terrified women with thick skins, empty beds, and tentative thoughts.

The wives in this book form a proxy family together, the FRG (Family Readiness group), where, for better or worse, they convene and connect. They bond in this dry and desolate patch of Central Texas, support each other, and wait for news of the front. Mingling with civilians off base is distressing. It’s painful to watch a dad knock around a ball with his son, or a couple dining out and dancing cheek to cheek. Some of these wives have babies who haven’t yet met their daddies. How they endure the complex emotions of separation drives the narrative and compels the reader.

As Fallon shows us, the time in limbo is often marked with dread and confusion. It can be a powerful change agent, mushroom their fear, or injure self-esteem, to name a few effects. It can dash a formerly positive body image, especially if anxiety and loneliness create eye bags and a gaunt complexion. The women in her stories often have sleep disturbances and eat erratically. One woman quells her insomnia by listening to her neighbor’s routines through the permeable walls.

In the first story, Meg goes to the Commissary, eyes a raw slab of steak–the rivulets of fat, the sanguinary juices, the protruding bone–and imagines a mortal battle wound. The women wake up every morning and scan the Internet news for reports of ambushes and roadside bombs, wondering if their husbands are safe in their quarters or unrecognizably shattered in numberless pieces. Meanwhile, they have individual, separate concerns. Fallon kicks it up a notch with her story about a wife in remission from breast cancer, waiting to see the latest reports of her medical tests. In the meantime, her kids did not show up for school, and she has to deal with the embarrassment of soldiers on base assisting, investigating, and scrutinizing her actions that day.

And, what is it like to communicate with your loved one only through technology, to feel the unbearable absence of touch? To wait, and wait, time folding in on itself, or rolling out, while you cleave, living on emails, snail mail, and the rare skype. And, even when they return, the complex dynamics of adjustment and role reversal are stunning; the wives have been independent for so long that sharing a life again can be raw and awkward. Instead of joyful and warm, it may be glacial and fraught with erosion. All that alone time carves out multiple reflections and haunting desires. At least one wife has some lacerating news for her returning and wounded husband.

And, what is it like for the men, the soldiers and officers who have bravely committed this time to the safety and well being of their fellow infantrymen? They didn’t sign up to divide their loyalties, to betray their families, but the quixotic beast of war invades the frontier of domestic life, too. Some of them sneak cell phones into their camp. One of the soldiers becomes enchanted with a comely foreign interpreter while on a mission to search for IEDs (Intermittent Explosive Devices). Another soldier isn’t sure if he is just paranoid or failed to perceive his wife’s change of heart, and acts frantically on his fears. And some of them don’t make it home. For those wives, it is the pain of the unknown, the moment of death that is now gone, that took their husband away. That image, the memories, and the disfigurement of grief remain.

Imagine, all alone, with a flashlight, tiptoeing in the dark inside a squat, yellow, dusty rectangular building, suddenly bumping up against a life. You emit a startled gasp. That’s what these stories are like. Fallon’s prose is stark and incandescent. There are no frills or filler necessary to embellish these candid characters and situations, and I have only hinted at a few. The passages are powerful and lean, the nuances chilling and urgent, and the dénouements radiate with ambiguity. These are bracing mini-portraits with mega-wattage. When you hear Fort Hood mentioned in the news again, it will palpate with familiarity. You’ll feel a jolt. It will never again be just that abstract military post in Texas. You’ll know when the men are gone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (January 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Siobhan Fallon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• You Know When the Men Are Gone (January 2011)