The Curse of the House of Foskett

This is the second in the Gower Street Detective series by M.R. Kasasian.  In this mystery series we follow the life of Sidney Grice, a personal detective and his ward, March Middleton.  It is set in 1882 Victorian England on the streets of London.

In this story March Middleton is recording the case of the Curse of the House of Foskett.  She is also assisting her guardian, Grice in solving the deaths that are occurring through this book.  The case appears on the surface to be a simple fact that the members of the group, the Final Death Society each are dying off in turn.  According to Grice, what would you expect if you have signed up for a group whose purpose is to leave the fortune of all the members to the last person standing after all the others are dead.

But in every mystery things are not always what they seem.    Author, Kasasian, has created a wonderfully colorful character in Grice, a bristly, irritable personal detective who is  investigating the murders.  His style of speech is sharp and witty.  He is nasty and argumentative with everyone, even his ward, who I really think he likes.  This rapier wit is delightful to read and really lends substance to Grice's character.

Grice on the hunt for clues puts the housekeeper in her place, "...'Hold still woman.'  He picked a piece of fluff out of her wig and popped it into an envelope.  'I am most particular about whom I follow, why, when, and where, and I shall not have witnesses dictating the sequence in which I collate evidence.  At best your suggestion is impertinent.  At worst it might be construed as suspicious."

March Middleton who seems to be a young woman in her early twenties is a great match for her guardian.  She is feisty and quick tongued also.  She can match Grice's cutting repartee, comment for comment.  Over dinner they banter back and forth, "He swallowed.  'You know March, your excursion seems to have done you some good.  You have constructed an entire sentence of rational thought.'  'You are the only man I know who can turn a compliment into an insult.'"

The writing style is in this book is quite syncopated, with a quick fascinating style.  Wonderfully engaging and fun to read.  This reader will go back and read book one and look forward to another mystery featuring Sidney Grice and March Middleton.

Gangsterland

How funny is Tod Goldberg's new novel, Gansterland?  A laugh a page funny.
A book about a gangster who is relocated from Chicago to Las Vegas and given a new identity as a Rabbi!!

This is a really fun summer read.  Sal Cupertine is a legendary hit man with the Chicago Mafia Family. He is the best at getting in and out of a crime scene without a trace.  Then in a job gone wrong he kills three FBI agents and leaves behind evidence to link him to the crime.  His cousin Ronnie sells him to a Las Vegas gang to make him disappear.  He undergoes some reconstructive surgery and resurfaces as Rabbi David Cohen.

As Rabbi Cohen studies to Talmud and Torah so he can minister to the congregants at Temple Beth Israel, former FBI agent Jeffrey Hopper is on the trail of Sal Cupertine.   This is a fun book that shows the dark side of the Mafia in a funny light.  Describes murder, then describes the Jewish thoughts on death, all in a light manner.  Tod Goldberg says in an interview, "I knew I wanted it to be a mordantly funny book, but I also knew I wanted to deal with serious issues, and to strike that balance was hard, because if you do either one poorly, the other one feels gratuitous."

I think Goldberg has hit the mark, he has used a topic that is real, the Mafia in Las Vegas, Chicago and other major cities and he has made it funny.  Rabbi David Cohen is finding his way in his new life, "It didn't matter to David what Ruben was paid.  He just wanted to know how Bennie was keeping him quiet and what David would need to do if he wanted to keep him quiet..."  He continues to work both as a hit man and a Rabbi, "It dawned on David then that he wouldn't just be presiding over the funerals of the war dead, that he might not know one body to the next who was a natural death verses a murder."

This is definitely a fun book to read and really got me thinking about the Jewish players in the history of the mob.  I will be doing some more reading about this topic.  Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and many others, Tod Goldberg has whet my curiosity about this topic.

The Book of Speculation

Author Erika Swyler has used her extensive imagination to create the history of the Simon Watson's family.  Simon Watson is a young librarian living in a small beach town on the Long Island Sound. He is living alone in the house he and his sister grew up in.  His parents have died and his sister moved out. The story begins with the house crumbling around him as he is let go from his job as a research librarian due to budget cuts.  He is unable to find the funds to fix up the house and he is contemplating leaving town himself.

Involved in a romantic relationship with Alice, the girl next door, he feels unable to borrow the money to repair the house from her father, but Frank McAvoy seems intent on keeping the house in one piece.

Then one day a mysterious book arrives.  It is the diary and log of a traveling circus that seems to have faced an unfortunate end.  Simon's mother was a mermaid in a traveling circus before the children were born and his sister, Enola has gone off with a modern day traveling carnival.
In the book Simon finds mention of names he remembers his mother mentioning.  This sets him doing what he does best, researching the characters in the book and finding out family secrets that have been hidden for generations.

When his sister announces she is coming for a visit and shows up with her electric performer boyfriend all the cards are now on the table and the pieces of the family history start to fall into place. Past and present start of come together and it is up to Simon to find out the common thread between the book and the Watson family.

In a story of parallels between Simon's modern day family tribulations and the historic traveling circus the reader gets the flavor of what it was like to travel with those 18th century circuses. Throughout the book there are also crude pictures and descriptions of the Tarot card readings, interesting to those who are intrigued by the psychic, spiritual world.

Written in similar fashion to Marisha Pessl's Night Film, and The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman, Erika Swyler has written a wonderful novel about the power of books, magic and families.

The Day of Atonement

Author David Liss once again has made history come alive.  The Day of Atonement is a quick moving, suspenseful story of life in Lisbon during the Inquisition.  His ability to write about historical facts interwoven with a personal story makes the time period feel realistic and immediate.

This is the story of what it was like to be a New Christian living and doing business during the 1700s in Lisbon, Portugal.  When Sebastiao Raposa finds himself an orphan of the Inquisition at the age of 13, he escapes to London.  There he is taken in by a benefactor, the notorious bounty hunter, Benjamin Weaver.  He apprentices under Weaver for ten years and then returns to Lisbon disguised as a English businessman.  He is anxious to have his revenge on the men who imprisoned his family.

Sebastian has become a practicing Jew in London even though his family had been "New Christians" Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity generations before but are still the subject of focus by the Inquisition.  Foxx wrestles with atonement and sin.  He goes to Lisbon with the intention of making the priests atone for their sins, but as he begins to exact his violence he is concerned that it will make him as evil as the Inquisition priests.  "Yesterday I had killed in self-defense.  Could I truly kill a man in cold blood?  I had always believed that when the moment came, I would be equal to the task.  Now here it was, and it was no longer simply a matter of rebalancing the scales of justice.  A child's life, a parent's love, hung in the balance, and yet I found that murdering a man, even the most hated of men, was a harder thing than killing in the heat of conflict."

Of course all is not what it seems, as Sebastian Foxx, as he is now known, finds out.  He is ruthless and unafraid, feeling he has nothing to lose.  But as time goes by and he becomes embroiled in many different business plots, his feelings change and his hardness softens.  This could be either an impediment to his success in exacting revenge or it could be his opening up to feelings of vulnerability again.  He indeed has a conscience that guides him through life.

This is a book of suspense, subterfuge and romance.  The reader is pulled in from the beginning and is left sitting on the edge of his chair till the final page.  Characters who seem loyal may turn on you to save their own skin and fill their personal coffers.  Foxx learns he cannot trust anyone until the final ship has sailed.

All the Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr is an incredible book.  It has won a few awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It is well deserved.  The author has created a story that describes life in France under the occupation of the German Nazis in such a realistic way.  His characters are so believable and the reader can see why people acted and reacted to the war in the many ways they did.  Each character shows a different style of personality and how people could either stand up to the tyrannical leaders that were demanding allegiance to the war effort or were caught up in the war machine and did not know how to break free.

This is the story of two children and their families and how in their parallel worlds their lives are affected by the war.  First there is  Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young girl blinded by cataracts at the age of six.  Her father works for the Museum of Natural History of Paris.  When his daughter becomes blind he spends his time carving replicas of all the buildings in their neighborhood.  Marie-Laure learns how to travel through her neighborhood by touching those models and memorizing their layout.  This is the first literal definition of "light we cannot see".  

In the country, lives Werner Pfennig, a young boy who has been orphaned by the mines that are the mainstay of income for the town.  He and his sister live in the orphanage and he dreams of escaping the life ahead of him in the mines.  The outbreak of war becomes his light out of the tunnel, but he cannot see where it will lead him.  He has a gift of understanding how radios work and while in the orphanage, he and his sister, Jutta, listen to someone broadcasting on the radio late at night in French.   Broadcasting on radio waves, another light that cannot be seen.  The person on the radio talks about the brain's power to create light in the darkness.   about science: “What do we call visible light?” the Frenchman asks. “We call it color. But . . . really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

Doerr creates Werner as such a believable character.  He gives the reader wonderful insight into how a young man could be swayed to follow the army officers directions, building an angry man ready to fight against even an unarmed civilian. The Nazi military commander tells the boys, “You will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. . . . You will eat country and breathe nation.”

 In this way Doerr makes the reader realize how Germans could turn in their Jewish friends and neighbors and how the soldiers in the German army could torture and send so many Jews and others to the concentration camps.

Marie-Laure and her father leave Paris for the small town of Saint Malo on the Brittany coast.  Her father carves her another set of buildings for this small village and gifts her with braille copy of  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Her father is arrested and Marie -Laure shows her true strength of character through her ability to survive in the home of her great uncle and to join the resistance, again learning her way around the town by memorizing the replica her father built her.  

Doerr has built a story here that covers so many of the different situations that were faced throughout the war by people on many different sides of the conflict.  His descriptions are realistic and you become so attached to the characters that you can feel what they are struggling with as they grow and change through out the novel.

The Book of Aron

The Book of Aron, author Jim Shepard points out, on the book's cover, is a novel.  Though at the end when you read through the acknowledgements he does write that he used factual material about Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary; The Selected Works of Janusz Korczak among other sources about living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust.

The Book of Aron is the story of life in Poland as Germany starts its march on Poland and its containment of Jewish citizens into smaller and small ghetto areas that become known as the Warsaw Ghetto.  We start with Aron, also known by family and friends as Sh'maya, narrating the story of his life.  He lives with his family, two older brothers and one younger brother, and his parents in the Polish countryside.  His father gets a job at a fabric factory in Warsaw and the family moves to Zamenhofa Street in the city.  There at the age of eight he makes his first real friend Lutek.  By the time he is ten  the war has started.  Aron and Lutek find that they have a knack for sneaking around unnoticed.  They can bring home some stolen food for their families.  They can sneak out through a hole in the wall, out of the Ghetto, and bring back items to trade for food and other necessities.  He and Lutek meet Boris, Adina and Zofia and become a small gang of bandits, smuggling and trading contraband to help their families survive.

This story describes from Aron's point of view how as life slowly changes, the children and adults living in the Ghetto slowly adapt to the new routines.  You feel like you are there suffering with the sickness, lice and starvation the people are experiencing.  You can understand how Aron feels and reacts to the circumstances of the hand he has been dealt.  As the walls of the Ghetto squeeze in tighter and more and more of the area is quarantined for typhus, Aron is approached by the Jewish Yellow police, who want him to work as an informer.  Aron has to wrestle with his conscience and work to stay alive and one step ahead of the blackmailers, Jewish, Polish and German Police.

Aron ends up in the orphanage, with Dr. Janusz Korczak, his childhood changed forever by the war, "We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it.  If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew.  All anyone could think about was the table's next loaf of bread.  In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds.  We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan.  It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand.  On Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard."

Shepard has written this novel in such a convincing voice that the reader will much more clearly understand the dilemmas and choices people had to make to survive these horrific times.