A brieft hiatus from the longer hiatus...

An unexpectedly free hour today leaves me with time enough -- I hope -- to express myself regarding some recent reads. Then, I have no doubt, will come another long silence from this corner. I have some hope that next summer will bring more free time my way. Until then, this is all I got.

In 1929-30, a string of assaults, rapes, and murders occurred in Dusseldorf, Germany, that were attributed to Peter Kürten, a career criminal. Among the victims he eventually admitted to killing was 35-year-old Emma Gross, though he later retracted that confession. No evidence linked him to that crime, and he hadn't the knowledge of time, place, or body positioning that would have implicated him in the strangulation death of Emma Gross. Her killer was never caught. Novelist Damien Seaman weaves a fascinating tale of obsession - compulsion around these events in THE KILLING OF EMMA GROSS, providing a credible killer and motive for her murder while weaving in the atmosphere of a city in the grip of fear for months while police chased the Dusseldorf Ripper. Chalk up another dark winner for small e-press Blasted Heath.

The second entry in Ace Atkins' Quinn Colson series, THE LOST ONES, shows the author taking more of an ensemble approach to these books, instead of the popular but overused lone-hero approach. The character of Colson, a county sheriff, will forever have my heart because no matter what other problems crop up in his fictional county  -- gunrunning, drugs, political corruption, etc., -- they never outweigh a problem like child abuse. Colson is sympathetic and interesting, but so are his deputies and his friends and family. The author has all kinds of room in future books to further deepen and define both the good and the bad folks who inhabit Tibbehah County.

It's no secret that this blogger is a fan of Dave Zeltserman's work, and for good reason. Short stories, novellas, novels; noir, classic crime, horror, paranormal -- the guy can do it all. His most recent release, MONSTER, is an ambitious stretch for him, marrying his story to Mary Shelley's original FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS while yet flipping it a full 180 degrees. No surprise, Zeltserman succeeds in capturing the feel and mood of the classic while one-upping Shelley on the horror aspect. Victor Frankenstein is not a tortured man of genius whose aspiration to play God gets out of hand when he creates a thing of evil. Instead it is Frankenstein who is the evil one (along with a guest appearance by the Marquis de Sade), while the monster is an innocent, tortured by his continued existence and the loss of his one true love, brutally murdered by Frankenstein. Shelley's theme, men who would play at God, is countered by Zeltserman's take: men who would play at Satan. And in both stories, it is men who would simply be men who suffer the most at the hands of those who see themselves as superior. Fans of the original tale should enjoy this book immensely; readers new to the literary Frankenstein will enjoy the weaving in of vampires, wolves, severed heads that talk, paintings that come to life, and of course the monster himself. Teachers of Mary Shelley's classic would do well in future to assign MONSTER for contrast and comparison and downright fun.

A re-read of THE MONKEY'S RAINCOAT for my book club was a welcome look back at the beginning of The World's Greatest Detective, Elvis Cole, and The World's Most Badass Sidekick, Joe Pike. In this award-winning debut novel, a wisecracking Elvis looks for a missing husband and finds himself up to his Hawaiian shirt in shady characters, drugs, and murder. Joe Pike fans should re-read this book once in a while just to remind yourselves how close the world came to losing Pike forever. I went to book club armed with deep analysis and counter-arguments and a Colt Python, but none of it was necessary to convince anyone to read further in the series. I really must learn to trust author Robert Crais to sell his own books. He does a far better job of that than I do. And with less violence, too.

PLACES, PLEASE! BECOMING A JERSEY BOY by Daniel Robert Sullivan. What, you say, YOU reading a non-fiction, non-crime-related title? Lud, what has the world come to? But you fans of the Broadway musical, JERSEY BOYS, you know why I read this book, right? See, fans of the show often see it multiple times (check); and if you see different productions you see different actors in the roles (check). And when you see different actors in the same role, you pick favorites (check!). Daniel Robert Sullivan is my favorite actor in the role of Tommy DeVito, the founder of the rock group, The Four Seasons. It's a role that requires not only sharp talent in the singing, dancing, and acting areas of theatre, but also exquisite timing if the role is to carry the weight that it ought. Sullivan delivered, and in spades. His book is a simple retelling of the extremely complicated process -- two years -- it took to audition and win a place in the Toronto cast. This book is really aimed at aspiring stage actors, but the details regarding the hard work and sacrifice that go into achieving and living one's goals will be lost on no one.

I never thought that a book about scheming, manipulative high school cheerleaders could be so intense, but this story, DARE ME, about the friendship between narrator Addy Hanlon and her best friend, and captain of the team, Beth Cassidy, is anything but juvenile. Author Megan Abbott reveals raw passion in the simplest of actions: turning off a cell phone, watching one person whisper to another. One can read the story superficially as a whodunnit, but for this reader the story is all about friendship; and not about the nice, courageous things one will do for a friend but rather the terrible, vicious things one will do to hold on to a friend who is drifting away. This is the first book I've read that has shown the too-close -- dangerously close -- relationship that sometimes develops between teacher and students. Having experienced that first-hand lo, these many years ago when I was a high school sophomore, the partying and gossiping and not-so-casual betrayals of Addy Hanlon's world rang all too true. The insular, animal world of these upper-middle-class girls is revealed in the way they microscopically examine each other for signs of weakness. At book's end you should be asking yourself whether you have ever been as passionate for one single person as these girls are. And then ask whether you are lying to yourself. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for outstanding characterization, prose, tension, and theme.

Ah, me. I'm still not caught up but my hour has expired. Back to doing what I must, instead of what I'd rather.

REVIEW: THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott

Thirteen-year-olds Lizzie and Evie are neighbors and best friends in the 1980s. They look like sisters, they dress alike, but they are closer than that superficiality implies. They share everything: hopes, dreams, emotions, as well as clothing, books, toys. They do everything together, from school to sports to vacations. Only one day after school, Evie disappears. Convinced that her heart would tell her if Evie were dead, Lizzie starts to live in the lap of Evie's family, begins exploring the yards and houses of her neighbors, looking for clues to Evie's whereabouts, why she left, and who she might have gone with. Lizzie is convinced that if she can bring Evie home, everything will be just as it had been.

Megan Abbott's THE END OF EVERYTHING is bound to draw comparisons with Alice Sebold's LOVELY BONES, but the basic premise of these stories -- the disappearance of a young girl -- is the only thing that ties them together. Rather than relying on narration from a dead-and-gone-to-heaven victim, Abbott's Lizzie narrates a tale of wonderment, joy, dread, and dark revelations, sometimes all within the same paragraph. Young Lizzie is perspicacious and naive at once, as only girls-on-the-verge-of-becoming-women can be. Wisely innocent.

Lizzie is a magnificent narrator, wanting to be the center of attention and wanting not to be, deriving clues and evidence surrounding Evie's disappearance as much or more from how she reads a glance and interprets a sentences, as she does from facts and logic. Lizzie is imbued with a voice that mimics the child-adult so very accurately that one is left wondering how did so much about those emotions, that youthful worldview , that sexual innocence dawning on yearning, how is it that it was all forgotten? And how is it that Megan Abbott remembers it all with such perfect clarity?

The characters of Evie's family, her parents and magically beautiful sister, Dusty, are all explored by Lizzie in the manner of an Impressionist painter: from a distance they make a pretty, well-defined picture; close-up, as Lizzie longs to be to them, they seem all blurred edges and colors without definition.

The author has penned a delicious psychological thriller that never gets it wrong by going for the cheap thrill or easy answer. The reader may feel bruised but never slapped, and Lizzie is always there to offer solace to the reader as well as to Evie's family. Evie's disappearance and the events surrounding it all work to lay bare the relationships and conflicts not just within Evie's family but within Lizzie herself. As much as Lizzie is able to read emotion and motive in others, she is almost blind to what drives her from her own family's side to spend evenings with Evie's anguished father, beautiful sister, and nearly invisible mother. The one thing Lizzie is certain of is that when Evie vanished, it was indeed the end of everything -- if 'everything' is Lizzie's innocence.

The author does a stellar job of foreshadowing without being obvious, of misdirecting without misleading, of instilling dread without removing hope, and revealing without judging. Readers of Abbott's more traditional novels of noir should find this newest work fascinating, as her considerable talents tackle more mainstream subject matter here without sacrificing one jot of the style and insight that has garnered her previous books so much praise. THE END OF EVERYTHING is a haunting and moving story about losing and finding and losing again those intangibles, those nearly inexpressible things we most treasure.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.


The first three chapters of THE END OF EVERYTHING are available for reading at Facebook, and I recommend you go read them right now. Following is just a brief excerpt from chapter two, for those too lazy to click a mouse button:

The next day, Evie and I are standing in front of the school, tapping our sticks against each other in time. The dream from last night is hovering in my head, and I think I might tell Evie about it, but I keep stopping myself. No one ever really wants to hear your dreams.

Anyway, we are having a day of no talking, just being, walking together, tapping our new hockey sticks and yanking our sweaty shirts from our chests.

Still, I can't keep my eyes off the violet stain flaring over Evie's temple. It looks like it could move without you, get up and go. It's like a purple butterfly, I tell her, flitting from her face.

She puts her fingers on it and I can almost feel it pulsing on my own face, a gentle throb.

"What did your dad say?" I ask, and I imagine Mr. Verver's wrinkled brow, like when I slipped on their stairs, running way too fast in my stocking feet, skidding down three steps, and making brush burns all up my calves.

"He bought me a raw steak at Ketchums to put on it," she says. "Mom said it cost more than their anniversary dinner."

It sounds like Mrs. Verver, who says everything with a yawn.

"All night," Evie says, a grin creeping, "he kept calling me Rocky."

We both roll our eyes, but we love it. When the boys tease, you don't want it to be you, but with Mr. Verver, his teases are like warm hands lifting you.

Evie thrusts her hockey stick out in front of her like Zorro. "Dusty said I looked more like a battered wife on a TV show," she says.

Then she tells me how, after dinner, her dad took her for pecan pie at Reynold's, the good kind, gritty-sweet on your teeth. The waitresses felt sorry for her and gave her an extra scoop of ice cream.

I think of sitting with Mr. Verver, gooey pie plates between us, and how the waitresses probably always give him extra scoops. Waitresses were always doing that with Mr. Verver, just like the mothers who buzzed around him at the PTA meetings, filling his plate with sugared cookies and inviting him to their book clubs.

I wish Evie would have invited me to Reynold's. Like other times, with Mr. Verver dabbing Cool Whip on my nose.

Out of the blue, my ankles feel itchy and I wish I could take off my gym socks.

I look down the street, which has that four thirty hush. The summer heat seems early, hovering above the asphalt.

"Where's your mom taking you?" Evie asks, watching a car flutter upward at the speed bump in front of the school.

"The mall," I say. "Are you going to wear your sister's old dress?" I remember the lavender Laura Ashley with the gored skirt that Dusty wore to her own middle school graduation. All those ringlets dangling down her back and her face bright with achievement—it wasn't something you forgot.

A maroon car shimmers out of nowhere and glides past us quickly.

"I don't know," Evie says, kicking her shoe toe into the pavement.

Squinting, she looks down the street. "I think I see her."

We both watch as my mom's tan Tempo floats before us on the horizon.

"We'll give you a ride," I say.

"That's okay," she says, twirling her hockey stick over her shoulder. I hear the stutter in my mom's car as she pulls up.

The moment stretches out, I'm not sure why.

Evie is looking past my mother's car, down the street.

"Someone's lost," she says.

"What—" I start, but then we both watch as the same maroon car drifts past us again soundlessly. Something in my head flickers, but I can't place it.

I turn back around and there's that Evie face, cool and orderly, the line for a mouth and her smooth, artless expression, like a soft sheet pulled fast, hiding every corner.

I twirl my stick around and clatter it against hers.

"Call me," I say, turning toward the idling car. My mother is looking at us from behind big sunglasses, smiling absently.

I open the door and lean in. "Mom, can Evie come with us?"

But when I turn around, Evie's gone, slipped behind the tall hedgerow, behind the stone columns of the old school.

Do I see it in her expression, as she looks at me, as she pulls her face into blankness? Do I hear her say, in some low register, a creeping knowingness always between us? Do I hear her say, This is the last time, this is the last time?

This face, my face, gone forever.

   Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books, Little, Brown
   Publication Date: Available now.
   ISBN-10: 0316097799
   ISBN-13: 978-0316097796
   Order on Indiebound or Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and lots of other places.

Review: BURY ME DEEP by Megan Abbott

Marion Seeley is an innocent in a strange city. At first sheltered, then abandoned by her older, physician husband, and struggling to find her way in a Depression-era world wholly unlike anything she's ever experienced, she makes two good friends: Louise and Ginny. Through these women, the parties they hold, the corrupt and faithless men they entertain, Marion meets and falls hard for Joe Lanigan, a businessman and rising politico who charms all, high and low, men and women. But there's more to Joe than hair pomade, a flawless tuxedo, and an invalid wife; and he slowly wraps the trusting Marion in a web of drugs, deceit and murder.

Much of the publicity around this book has to do with the Winnie Ruth Judd case as its inspiration. That seems to do a slight disservice to the book, as though without that knowledge the reader might not appreciate the story. Au contraire, the reader need have no knowledge of the Judd case to enjoy this fine tale and its deft prose. The author reveals the passion, fear, jealousy, and rage of true noir but paints her characters and their motives with the delicate flicker of an eyelash. Revelations occur between the lines as tension mounts and finally bursts into betrayal and violence. Just read how the author paints both isolation and desire in brief depth:

At work again, walking down long clinic hallways, spinning carbon paper and willowy onionskin around the feed roll, jamming keys under fingernails, taking long dictations, crying in the ladies' room, tearing tissue into long curls around her fingers.

What glamour might I cast, she wondered, to embed needs under this man's skin, make him crave me so deep like the deepness of something that goes through the blood, goes through the blood and bursts soft or swells hard in the brain?

A thread running through the story is disease: the clinic where Marion works, the tubercular Ginny, the invalid wife, the drug-addicted husband. And also the diseased souls, most notably Lanigan's but also many of the men with whom the women come in contact: doctors, businessmen, politicians; not riff-raff or lowlifes, but respectable types whose sicknesses are hidden and treated with money and power, all the while they act as carriers of contagion and corruption. This might be a description of the clinic, or it might be a description of Joe Lanigan:

She said hello, Mr. Lanigan, and nearly curtsied, seeing him as she had, three days before, under a sugared skein of girl-pink champagne, under the heavy weight of parlor heat, thick on their skins, thick with their own energies, own high spirits. And now here like this, in the cool, bleachy hallways of the blasted-brick clinic, didn't it look so innoculated? Yet it was a pox, vermin in every sweating pore, sputum lining every crevice no matter how swabbed and brush-scoured it was.

The best noir is more than simply crime or mystery. It is a pulling back of the veil covering dark emotions and twisted spirits. Bury Me Deep is the most impressive work of pure noir I've read since James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, and is just as dark, sexy, and riveting as that classic.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Gonzo goings-on

A GONZO NOIR, Declan Burke's latest novel, is finally on the print publishing horizon. Though a print run of only 500 copies is planned, should the run sell out, the net profit will all go to the Children's Hospital in Tallaght, where Burke's daughter spent some time last year.

For anyone not familiar with Burke's novels, just allow your mind to contemplate these two words: screwball noir. Burke doesn't admit to it, but it's possible he's the literary love-child of Preston Sturges ('A pratfall is better than anything.') and James M. Cain ('I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight). With Tom Stoppard ('I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.') as godfather. I'll be keeping tabs on a pub date. Who knows, maybe at that time we can lure DB over to The Drowning Machine and get his feet wet.

In the Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues department,  the January issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine arrived yesterday. It appears the good folks at EQMM begin celebrating their 70th year in 2011. Hats off to them, that's a great run. And may it continue for another 70.

Of particular note in this latest issue, is a new story from Liza Cody, MR. BO. Cody only popped up on my reading radar this past summer, and I've since been tracking down copies of as many of her novels as I can find. I turned directly to this story and got sucked right into the world of a single mom struggling to make ends meet just as her long-lost affluent sister swans into her world and turns it upside down. This story should win many new fans for Ms. Cody, and I won't be surprised if it's listed among EQMM's reader favorites at the end of '11.

Talk about getting sucked into a story. I just started Megan Abbott's BURY ME DEEP, and the first chapter is ultra-humbling for us wannabe-a-writers. Here's a small sample:

Thrill parties every night over on Hussel Street. That tiny house, why, it's 600 square feet of percolating, Wurlitzering sin. Those girls with their young skin, tight and glamorous, their rimy lungs and scratchy voices, one cheek flush and c'mon boys and the other, so accommodating, even with lil' wrists and ankles stripped to pearly bone by sickness. They lay there on their daybed, men all standing over round, fingering pocket chains and hands curled about gin bottle necks. The girls lay there on plump pillows piled high with soft fringes twirling between delicate fingers, their lips wet with syrups, tonics, sticky with balms, their faces freshly powdered, arching up, waiting to be attended to by men, our men, the city's men. What do you do about girls like that?