Review: The Lost History of Dreams

 If you like to be on solid ground, Ms. Waldherr’s book may not be for you. But if you like unreliable narrators and the tension they create when you know they’re unreliable, she has nested one unreliable narrator inside another, so that you never quite no who you’re dealing with. And the narrators so reflect the people whose stories they’re narrating that it becomes a game of fun-house mirrors. And some of the most important characters may be ghosts, whether real or imagined by two people trapped in the past.

Robert starts with a simple task, His cousin, famous poet Hugh de Bonne, has died, and wishes to be laid by the side of his wife Ada in the stained-glass shrine he built for. There’s a strange codicil in his will, however, which Ada’s niece Isabelle refuses to bow to—and she’s the only one with a key to the shrine. Her reason is bound up in the history of Hugh and Ada, which she proposes to relate to Robert in a mock-Scheherazade style.  But instead of making things clearer, it merely draws Robert deeper into a net of doubts.

All is laid bare at the end, and I’ll leave you to decide whether it’s a satisfying denouement. But this Gothic-soaked joy-ride is worth your time one way or the other.

Review: Crashed

 Crashed is apparently the first of seven Junior Bender novels, at any rate the first I’ve read. If this is a taste of what the rest of the six are like, he can keep churning them out as far as I’m concerned. Junior is a burglar, and a smart one at that. Which is what gets him in trouble. Can his smarts to get him out? But when you’re burglar, a smart burglar at least, you also have a sense of ethics to deal with too–not a simple true-blue code, but a constantly moving target.

These are the two elements to guide our plot, and the target is indeed constantly moving. Hanging from the chandelier with a slobbering pack of dogs beneath you? It’s just another job, except it’s not just another job, it’s a setup, one which will get our hero blackmailed and dropped into the soup, and then further into the soup, till he eventually finds himself at the bottom of the bowl. Bender finds himself in the distasteful (and precarious) position of being hired out to a (female) crime boss who’s heard about his smarts, and wants him to run herd on a former child star turned junkie she’s picked out to make her porno debut–against unknown forces intent on sabotaging the production. But Bender develops a soft spot for the girl, and when a close friend winds up dead he decides to turn the tables.

There follow more curves than it takes to get to the Shady Rest Hotel, and it takes every bit of ingenuity Bender has to extricate himself, without (too much) collateral damage. If you like Elmore Leonard (and who doesn’t?) but always felt like he could be a little bit funnier and the little bit sharper, give Tim Hallinan a try.

Review:A Knife in the Fog

 There must be nearly as many pastiches matching Sherlock Holmes against Jack the
Ripper as there are well … Sherlock Holmes pastiches. But how many books match Arthur Conan Doyle against Jack the Ripper? And team Doyle up with his mentor and inspiration for Sherlock Holmes Dr. Joseph Bell? And further add in Margaret Harkness, a real-life author and fierce activist who functions as both damsel in distress and constant rescuer of Doyle and Bell? And entangles Doyle and the Ripper so completely that no one else could ever bring the serial murderer of women to justice? The Knife in the Fog has all these things.

More, author Bradley Harper brings a sterling ear for the voice of the narrator to the proceedings—not the voice of Watson, but the voice of Doyle himself, which is different. If sometimes that voice seems overly dry, and occasionally over pedantic. If you’ve read any of Doyle’s non-fiction works, you’ll recognize it, and appreciate the thoroughness of the research Harper brings to this little tale, as well as a very plausible (and I think, original) candidate for the identity of the Ripper unmasked. And a wholly convincing and nerve-rattling denouement to his tale.

It’s not a perfect tale—the subplot of the men in the checked jackets could have been jettisoned, and some of the lighter moments are marred by repetition, but on the whole this is an original and very satisfying tale. Pick it up and read it before it gets made into a movie, and then you can lord it over your friends by saying “the book was better”.

Review: The Ghost of Madison Avenue

The tradition of ghost stories at Christmas is an old one. Dickens wrote four more
after the success of A Christmas Carol. One could hope that Nancy Bilyeau’s The Ghost of Madison Street is so successful that she’ll feel tempted to write another next year.

Ms. Bilyeau has crafted a charming little tale (and my main complaint about this tale is that it’s too short—which is also in keeping with tradition) of a lonely widowed librarian who goes to work in the private, cathedral-like library of the fabulously wealthy, fabulously powerful J. P. Morgan, who really was a fabulous personage at the turn of the century. But the librarian—Helen O’Neil has a secret which threatens her job and the peace of her family. She’s being haunted by a ghost—or is it a ghost, good Catholic girls don’t believe in ghosts, and she doesn’t know who she can share her secret with.

Nor is she an ordinary librarian. Her Irish-born mother, now dead, early on pronounced her aes sidhe, a fairy child, due to her uncanny skills with her hands, which was the reason she was hired by Morgan to begin with. Yet her secret and her attempts to confide it in her brothers and sisters only lead to resentment and recriminations, until she sees—well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I’ll only say that the lighting of the candle on Christmas Eve brings a beloved member of the family home.

Bilyeau brings love and understanding to the Irish of her native New York, and paints a picture which brings us close to that time while keeping it elusively distant: a masterful trick, and exactly the type  of tale you’ll want to re-read, aloud, under the lights of the Christmas tree.