A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A time travel story that's also a murder mystery, starting with the murder and working backward.

Jen is shocked to witness her 18-year-old son Todd murder someone who's a total stranger to her, though apparently not to him. Todd is immediately arrested, but won't say anything about it. The next day - well, the next time Jen wakes up - it's the day before the murder. Jen manages to confiscate the murder weapon before it can be used and goes to sleep, thinking she's fixed things. But when she next wakes up, it's two days before the murder...

Jen keeps going backward in time, trying to figure out why Todd committed the murder as everything she does to fix it gets erased every time she falls asleep... or does it? As time unreels itself under her feet, she scrambles to find out what was really going on with her son, and what the purpose of her travel is. Is she supposed to stop the murder? Find out why it happened? Figure out all the things she didn't know about her family? Save her dead-in-the-present father's life? Fix her relationship with Todd? Is the whole thing her fault, for being an insufficiently perfect mother? Is there any purpose at all?

This is a pretty good book that doesn't make it to excellent. It feels too long, not because there's not enough happening but because there's a lot of verbal fluff. It probably could have been cut by 20-30K words without losing any of the plot or characterization. But the conceit really is clever, and I liked her relationships with her son, a friend at work, and a scientist she drops in on periodically to quiz about time travel. There's also some nice plot twists that are unexpected but make sense - no "actually, Jen was secretly a psycho killer all along" nonsense, thank goodness.

Owning a bookshop is GREAT for reading extremely new books.

Title notwithstanding, nothing supernatural happens in this novel. A much more appropriate, though less cool, title would be Self-Reliance, which is both the name of the summer camp where much of the book takes place and a quality frequently evoked by the characters in varying contexts.

God of the Woods is partly a mystery and partly a family saga about a wealthy family who has two children disappear, a son aged eight in 1961 and a daughter aged thirteen in 1975 at a summer camp they founded. It's also the story of a second-generation Polish immigrant who's the only female investigator on the police force, the lesbian camp leader whose family is intricately tied to that of the vanished girl's, the other girls and their counselors at the camp, the many people who become collateral damage of the investigations, and, almost incidentally, a serial killer who - coincidentally? - is on the loose during both disappearances.

This is a kind of book which I often enjoy but have not read many of recently, an immersive historical with a large cast, lots of details of place and culture, and many characters all trying to forge their place in the world under difficult circumstances. In this case, it's all wrapped around a central mystery or possibly a pair of them - one of the big questions is whether the two disappearances are connected. The mysteries are nicely constructed and do get satisfying solutions, though ones which probably put the book more in the "literary fiction" shelf rather than "mystery." They do have clues and are at least partially solvable in advance, but the nature of what happened feels more "fiction" than "mystery."

I was most captivated by the story of Barbara, the punk vanished girl, whose parents neglect her when they're not trying to force her into a mold she doesn't fit; her painfully shy bunkmate Tracey, who has her own problems at home; their counselor Louise, who makes a number of extremely bad decisions because she's so desperate to escape poverty; and Judyta, the second-generation Polish-American investigator who has to manage hostile co-workers and supervisors, parents who think they know best, and her own insecurities and inexperience.

Alice, Barbara's mother, is not a particularly nice person but when we see what she went through in the fifties, which is basically every bad thing that could happen to rich white women in the fifties, it's deeply tragic. Judyta's hopes for the future, in 1975 when it looks like things are really breaking open for women, come across as a lot more sad now than I think the author intended.

In particular, [big spoiler] ( Read more... )

Recommended if you like this sort of thing. It feels to me like it's in the same genre as The Secret History, though it has a completely different tone.

Content notes: domestic violence, emotional abuse, period-typical homophobia and misogyny, child death, addiction, hunting for food, extremely heartbreaking depiction of mother-child separation and socially enforced bad parenting. There's zero details on the serial killings; the killer is plot-relevant but that's it.

I finished reading this and immediately rushed to write this review to warn people off this book. It's one of those books where I was VERY ANGRY upon finishing it, and thinking about it more only made me angrier.

I bought it on the strength of this blurb:

And Then There Were None meets The Last Breath in this tense and suspenseful locked-room thriller that takes place inside a hyperbaric chamber.

Six experienced saturation divers are locked inside a hyperbaric chamber. Calm and professional, they know that rapid decompression would be fatal and so they work in shifts, breathing helium, and surviving in hot, close quarters.

Then one of them is found dead in his bunk...

Ellen Brooke, the narrator, is one of the very, very few female saturation divers. Sat divers do repairs and maintenance on underwater structures by being living in an extremely high pressure chamber in between doing their dives, so they only need to do decompression once, when they finish the job. The chamber is above-water. If it's breached before it's decompressed, they will basically explode. This has happened once in real life, in an incident on the Byford Dolphin. It's gruesome.

The rest is as the blurb says: the divers start mysteriously dying within the chamber. The team outside immediately begins decompression, but this takes days. They can't open the chamber, or they'll all turn into raspberry jam (as is stated, in those words, something like 20 times.) So they're all trapped inside, maybe with a killer amonst them, trying to figure out what's happening and why.

I figured that even if the prose and characterization weren't the greatest, the book would be carried by the strength of its premise. The challenge from a writing standpoint is incredible. They can't get out. It's a tiny space. They can see each other at almost all times. They're being observed from the outside 24-7. And yet somehow they're getting killed off one by one. How can the writer pull off this bravura feat?

I will tell you how: by constructing the book like it's a locked-room mystery, and then not solving the mystery. Thought it would be incredibly hard to pull off a mystery under these circumstances? Ha ha! It's easy when you don't have to bother with solving the mystery.

Cut for angry, spoilery details. ( Read more... )

I hate this book. I hate it so much. It was pretty engaging, if somewhat repetitive, until the 98% mark and then it earned my FOREVER HATE.

ETA: Oh wait, I forgot to mention that in retrospect, given the ending, it's also really sexist! ( Read more... )

Holly Gibney, a 50-something private eye with anxiety and a passion for movies, takes on a missing person case that's bigger than it initially seems.

Previous books explain how Holly became a detective in middle age and detail some past cases. You don't need to read the others to read this one - you can pick up what you need to know in this book - but ideally you should have read Mr. Mercedes, The Outsider, and If It Bleeds.

Holly is set in the summer of 2021, such a specific time period that it makes the book feel like a well-observed period piece, complete with people bumping elbows and telling each other which Covid vaccine they got. When it begins, her business partner is out with Covid and Holly, who's germ-phobic and whose mother just died of Covid, doesn't plan to take on any cases. But then a woman calls, frantic. Her adult daughter Bonnie has been missing for weeks, and the police seem to have given up...

We, the readers, already know more-or-less what happened to her. A prologue showed a pair of unlikely serial killers - an elderly professor couple from the local college - kidnapping a different victim years ago. Periodically we flash back to them taking other victims. While we know who took Bonnie, we don't know whether she's still alive, or exactly why an elderly couple have been kidnapping and murdering an apparently random selection of people.

In the prologue we also got a snippet of what I initially believed to be one of King's excellently sketched cameo characters, an elderly poet who's a professor at the same university. The poet, Olivia, turns out to be a very important character in a major subplot that is connected to the main story, but is primarily about her mentorship of Barbara, a young poet who's a friend of Holly's. (If you've read the other books, Barbara is Jerome's younger sister; Jerome has some excellent scenes in this book too.) King doesn't often write about female writers, so this storyline, which is about 80% unrelated to serial killers, was an unexpected delight. It's a very moving portrayal of the growth of a young writer under an older writer's mentorship, and the passing of the torch.

Holly's story is a straightforward gumshoe narrative, made extra nervewracking by our knowledge that the people she's tracking down are right in front of her nose, and also by the presence of Covid and some family drama involving her mother's death. I love Holly and King clearly does too; she's got very believable struggles with mental health and childhood trauma and generally being a misfit, but she's kind and brave and she never gives up.

I was initially reluctant to read this because of the setting, but it works surprisingly well. The omnipresence of Covid and people talking about Covid and conspiracies and politics functions both as an obstacle for Holly and a reflection of the major theme, which is aging and mortality and changing times, and how we deal with them.

The poet Olivia is 99 years old, while Barbara is 19. They both know they have very little time to learn and teach and enjoy each other's company, and they make the most of it, knowing all the while that the more they get from the relationship, the more it will hurt when it ends. Holly is facing personal fears of inadequacy and social anxiety plus the fear of death from Covid every time she interacts with anyone, and soon the fear of death by serial killer is thrown into the mix; she takes precautions but doggedly keeps pursuing her case.

The other big theme is mothers and daughters. Holly is dealing with her relationship to her dead mother, who is still fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Since this is King, I should explain that I don't mean as a ghost, I mean psychological baggage plus some unpleasant revelations via her will.) Bonnie Dahl and her mother had a big fight right before Bonnie was kidnapped, Holly spends a lot of time unraveling their relationship in retrospect while trying to figure out if Bonnie might have actually run away, and her mother's anguish both kicks off the plot and remains a force throughout the book. Barbara has a good relationship with her actual mother, but her mentorship with Olivia has aspects of mother-daughter/grandmother-daughter. Even one of the earlier victims has a subplot involving a surrogate mother-daughter relationship she had with a neighbor as her birth family was a disaster.

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This is a very polarizing book, but I loved it. The characters are great, it's often very moving, and it's got a banger of a climax and a perfect final line.

I met Shawn Cosby at Boucher con, where he mentioned that he was worried that All Sinners Bleed wouldn't be as good as Razorblade Tears, and a friend encouraged him by saying that it didn't have to be as good as Razorblade Tears, it just had to be good.

In fact, All Sinners Bleed is very good but not as good Razorblade Tears. It's about the first Black sheriff in a small southern town investigating what turns out to be the work of a serial killer. Titus, the sheriff, is a great character, and so is his father. The characterization and themes are classic Cosby, and the writing is propulsive. I finished the book in one day. It has a very very satisfying final page.

The basic problem with the book, which made me like it less than his last two, is that plot itself is pretty standard. It's about a cop investigating a serial killer in a town where that isn't something that's happened before. The serial killer's motivations are pretty predictable. The writing is very good but it doesn't have the lushness of Cosby's earlier work. He seems to be going for a more stripped-down style, which, again, is very good on its own terms, but I don't like it quite as much. The dialogue, however is pure Cosby and the end is terrific.

Recommended if you like Cosby, but if you haven't read anything by him before, read Razorblade Tears or Blacktop Wasteland.

Changes have come to St. Mary's Mead. A big housing development (known as the Development) has sprung up, Mrs. Bantry has sold her house to a movie star after her husband's death, and Miss Marple has become frail enough that her doctor has ordered her to have a 24-7 caregiver. The caregiver, Mrs. Knight, is obnoxious and infantilizing, and Miss Marple is depressed and diminished under her care. But a murder turns out to be (literally!) just what the doctor ordered...

This has a great hook for the mystery. Marina, the movie star, and her director husband Jason host a charity open house. A local woman, Heather Badcock, is a huge fan of Marina and met her once some ten years ago. While Heather is recounting well-worn story to Marina, Mrs. Bantry sees a frozen look of utter shock come over Marina's face as she stares straight past Heather at the party crowd. When Heather's drink is spilled, Marina gives Heather her own drink. Heather drinks it and dies.

Who or what did Marina see? Was the poison meant for Marina? Will Miss Marple ever get out from under the thumb of the awful Mrs. Knight?

I'd read this before and had remembered the murder mystery fairly well, particularly its very memorable motive. (I read this while on vacation, and freegratis had also read it and recalled the motive.) I'd forgotten the storyline involving Miss Marple and her caregiver, and was very invested in it on this read.

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I have to note that this book includes characters named Badcock, Allcock, Lowcock, and Clithering. That is a lot of cocks and clits, in addition to the inevitable "old pussy."

Christie Ism Scale: Ableism, both embedded in the narrative and depicted but not narratively endorsed. Anti-Italian slurs.

Next up: A Caribbean Mystery.

This one starts with a banger of an opening - an old lady traveling on a train sees a murder take place on a different train traveling on parallel tracks - and then turns into a delightful comedy-drama starring one of Christie's most memorable and likable characters, the housekeeper-entrepreneur Lucy Eyelesbarrow.

Miss Marple, who is friends with Mrs. McGillicuddy (the murder witness), needs someone to stay in a household that's near where she thinks the body was dumped and search for it, but she's gotten too old and frail to do the legwork herself. Enter Lucy, a brilliant businesswoman who has gotten rich and even somewhat famous by being England's greatest short-term housekeeper.

Lucy, who loves her work, is intrigued by this unusual assignment and gets herself hired on to do some housekeeping (officially) and search for the body (unofficially). She promptly gets entangled in the affairs of the household, where she receives proposals of extremely varying nature from literally every male person in it, from becoming the second wife of the crotchety and very elderly father to joining the business of the prim married son to running off to be a criminal with the no-good son, to, via the delightful young son of the boyish former fighter pilot, becoming his step-mother!

The actual mystery, after the excellent opening, becomes almost a subplot (and is not one of Christie's best), because the real meat of the story is following Lucy on a job that is both typical and very unusual. Lucy is marvelous and I wish Christie had made her a series regular; this is one of my very favorite Christies even though the mystery's solution isn't the most interesting.

A particularly fun element is that it's a peculiar sort of romcom with an absurd number of men for Lucy to choose from, but no guarantee that she'll choose any of them. Miss Marple points out very early that it would take a very special sort of man to match with Lucy, given her strong personality and that she's clearly not planning to stop working.

Lucy's suitors are a hilariously motley crew, but she has two (and a possible stealth third) who seem like real possibilities. One is Cedric, a cynical artist living in Spain, with whom Lucy enjoys bickering. The other is Bryan, the fighter pilot who never found anything to match his wartime adventures and whose emotional development was arrested at about age twelve. Neither of them seem good enough for Lucy - Cedric is too full of himself and Bryan needs a mommy, not a wife - though Bryan does have the benefit of a terrific young son. Who she chooses, if any of them, is left open at the end, but...

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Christie Scale: I don't recall anything offensive. Some characters express mild sexism, but it's clearly their opinions and not the author's.

Next up: The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side.

A murder is announced in the local paper of a small village, to take place at Little Paddocks, the large home of Miss Leticia Blackwood. Locals assume it's a murder game and show up; Letitia is baffled but knows people will show up, and prepares for an unexpected party. The lights go out, everyone screams happily, there's a gunshot, and the lights come up on the very real corpse of a man nobody knows...

This is set after WWII, when rationing and black market food trading is still going on, and one of the consequences of increased social and literal mobility is that there's a lot more new people and being able to know people from birth to death is no longer such a thing. As a result, it becomes much harder to tell if people really are who they say they are.

This is one of my favorite Christies. It has a clever but solvable mystery, a fun cast of characters including a sympathetic lesbian couple, some heartbreaking tragedy, an interesting setting, and a fun premise.

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Christie Scale: MEDIUM levels of stuff about refugees, but the refugee character, while caricatured, is heroic (in a way that involves taking advantage of stereotypes about refugees) and gets a happy ending.

This is the first time I ever read this book - a bit of a rarity for me with Christie.

It opens with a very funny scene in which a business executive keels over after drinking a cup of tea, and the office workers are thrown into a tizzy trying to figure out how to summon medical help. No one knows who his doctor is, they think 999 is only for police matters, and doctors are not listed in the phone book under "D." It was both historically interesting, a playful poke at the "summon a doctor!" trope, and deeply relatable.

The businessman dies in the hospital of an unusual poison, and it's discovered that his pocket is full of rye. Yes, the grain. No, not the bread. No, not a breakfast cereal, as the police inspector gets very tired of explaining when he inquires about it. Everyone is either baffled or pretends to be baffled by this.

The police investigate his home, which contains his eccentric elderly mother living in the attic, his thirty-years-younger second wife, his pompous son and the son's unhappy wife, his frustrated daughter, and a number of servants including a maid, Gladys, whom Miss Marple used to know, and the omnicompetent housekeeper, Mary Dove, who provides the dish on everyone to the investigator, confessing at the end, "I'm a malicious creature." Later, the black sheep son Lance and his charming wife Pat show up.

Lance is Pat's third husband, though she's still quite young. Her first was a fighter pilot who was shot down almost immediately after they married, and her second had financial bad dealings and killed himself when he was caught.

Something that comes up here as well as in some other Christie books is the idea that some people are much more suited for war than peace, and a heroic ace may find himself adrift in peacetime. Her autobiography mentions that she knew a number of people like this - including her brother, who wasn't notably heroic but was certainly better suited for war than peace; he performed fine when there was a war, and was a disaster when there wasn't. I remembered that theme of hers when I read Manfred von Richthofen's autobiography - he seemed extraordinarily well-suited for war, but not for peace unless he could do nothing but hunt and play sports.

The murder victim turns out to be a terrible person with plenty of money and a somewhat complex will, so almost everyone has a motive. Family history seems relevant, up until the point when Miss Marple shows up and points out the significance of the pocket full of rye...

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CHRISTIE SCALE: Some mild classism and ableism, I think? Nothing egregious enough for me to remember specifically.

Modesty forbade Miss Marple to reply that she was, by now, quite at home with murder.

An old friend of Miss Marple is worried about her younger sister, who has married a man who runs a home/reform school for juvenile delinquents, and wants Miss Marple to investigate. The friend rather nervously suggests asking her sister to invite Miss Marple for a visit as she's poor, proud, and needs a rest; to her relief, Miss Marple is completely fine with both being thought a charity case and going under false pretenses, if a friend thinks it's necessary.

This book combines an intricate family saga with the juvenile delinquent home setting to pleasing effect. It's not one of my very favorites but it's a great setting and a very fair mystery with a satisfying solution. This one is clearly set post-WW2, when the country was just starting to economically recover. One of the characters is an American pilot who married a young English/Italian woman whose Italian side of the family got in trouble for being fascists.

The mirrors are not literal, but refer to the idea of a stage magician tricking the audience. Amateur and professional theatrics play a minor role, and misdirection by murderer plays a major one.

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Christie scale: MEDIUM-HIGH levels of ableism (mental illness) and attitudes about juvenile delinquents, but surprisingly less endorsed by the author than I'd initially assumed; different characters have different opinions, and the juvenile delinquents we meet are fairly sympathetic and likable.