Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Gallery/Saga Press, 320 pages, $16.99 (c2012)

Chuck Wendig never met an ordinary sentence he couldn’t torture.Which is also what he does to his characters. It’s a thing. There’s no doubt Chuck Wendig could write a story with sentences that don’t plead for release with every word. He is in fact one heck of a writer. But the gore and violence in this book is not for everyone. Not that Chuck Wendig wrote it for general acceptance and acclaim. Also, why use one word when one word and a curse word will do. Chuck Wendig knew what he was doing when he wrote “Blackbirds.”

Chuck Wendig’s protagonist has put the “agony” in protagonyst. Even the name, Miriam Black, sets Chuck Wendig’s readers up for the fall. Miriam sees into the void. She can “see” how people die just by touching them. This “talent” has ruined Miriam’s life. She does not want to be the keeper of the universe’s ultimate secret. So she runs and cons and conspires and uses and runs some more. What she is running from she cannot lose, because, of course, the power is in her. There really is no explanation of the power. God does not descend and bless/curse her. As far as Miriam is concerned, this is one effing useless power.

Miriam hitches rides as she runs away. Sometimes she is there at the moment of someone’s death. Then she robs the body. Hey, a girl has got to eat. But she herself does not commit murder. Eventually, however, she finds she may be the catalyst that causes the deaths of people. Oops. Even though she has practiced the fine art of not giving a shit, there comes a time when perhaps she might want to consider another course of action.

As you might expect, there are drugs, guns, villains, dead bodies, innocent victims, torture, copious amounts of blood, segregated body parts. “Blackbirds” is the first of the so-far six books in the Miriam Black series. (I guess “spoiler alert” for the fact that Miriam survives her first adventure.) This series was designed for a cult following.

P.S. Both Chuck and Nick of MBTB loved this book.

 

Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun

Other Press, 160 pages, $20 (2019, U.S. Ed. 2021)

Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong

Korean culture seems to be washing up on our shores at a rapid rate. Have you seen “Squid Games,” listened to BTS, watched “Parasite”? How about “Kingdom,” the Medieval Korea zombie series on Netflix? Or “Minari,” the movie about immigrant Korean farmers in Arkansas? Did you read “Pachinko,” by Min Jim Lee? Korean artists are having another American moment, eleven years after Psy first intruded on our consciousness with “Gangnam Style.”

And now here’s “Lemon,” a strangely hypnotic tale by Korean author Kwon Yeo-sun. The cover, I am happy to say, is lemon yellow.

It’s not just a matter of understanding if there are any cultural differences; it’s trying to understand if those differences have an impact on a reader’s apprehension of the story. I'm weighing in on the side of no difference, because the book's world has its own reality.

“Lemon” is a small book, especially in light of today’s conviction that more is better*. The book is deceptively small. A reader is tempted to read quickly. There, done! is a worthy goal if one is keeping score. That would be a disservice to the author. There is a lot packed into the pages, but the art of the author is that that is not obvious.

Kim Hae-on was a beautiful girl. It was a burden carried lightly. Some of the book is narrated by her younger sister, Kim Da-on, and she is at a loss to understand what thoughts might have been swirling around in Hae-on’s head. Although Hae-on was the older child, it was up to Da-on, even at the age of five, to cover for and take care of her older sister. Hae-on was petted and fretted over by almost everyone. She didn’t have to work hard to get things, and so she didn’t. She was barely passing at school, had no true friends, had no interests or goals in life.

Then it didn’t matter what her thoughts or goals were when she died at eighteen. She had suffered cranial injury severe enough to cause death. The police searched diligently for her murderer. The choices seemed to center on two young men separated by several layers of social structure. Shin Jeongjun was a rich kid with a beautiful girlfriend — the second most beautiful girl at school. Han Manu was an inarticulate, poor delivery boy. They were among the last people to see Hae-on. No proof could be found to indict either one.

Most of the book is narrated by younger sister Da-on. Some of the story is narrated by Yun Taerim, the second most beautiful girl in school. We hear her as she talks to her therapist in later years. We also hear from Sanghui, Hae-on’s classmate and Da-on’s friend from poetry club. We hear stories of the same events recounted by different people at different times, up to sixteen years after Hae-on’s death.

Do we learn whodunnit? Probably. Does it matter? Probably not to the reader who should be more enraptured by the strange dance the main female characters weave into their stories. The mystery of who Hae-on is is not truly solved. I can live with that.

* As an aside, the latest book by one of MBTB’s favorite authors, Tana French, is “The Searcher,” which clocks in at 464 pages. So, obviously, book length is not in and of itself a bad thing, if done well. While I’m on the subject, John Le Carré’s last book, “Silverview,” leaves us with an elegant 224 pages. J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was a lean, mean 309 pages, while her last weighed in at 784 pages and 1.15 pounds for the paperback.

Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

Atria Books, 304 pages, $26

The tale of a psychic, karaoke-singing, travel reservation-making woman named Leda Foley in Seattle was a good diversion in the high-stress, low-energy week preceding the Christmas weekend. 

Travel agent Leda Foley saves one of her (few) clients from an airplane crash when she suddenly changes his reservation to fly out of Florida back to Seattle. Grady Merritt is upset until he sees the flight he should have been on crash moments after take off. (Perhaps this is not the book you want to read in transit.) When he safely gets back to Seattle, Detective Merritt of the Seattle Police Department pays Leda a call.

Grady does not pooh-pooh Leda’s psychic ability. Instead, he wants to use it on the down-low to get a lead, any lead, on a case which baffles him. Not that he truly believes in psychics. Not that Leda believes she is a true psychic; she has, rather, hunches.

Leda’s best friend, Niki Nelson, is on this earth to have a fun time. She knows about Leda’s premonitions and has more faith than Leda in her talent coming to fruition. In fact, because of Niki, Leda performs psychic karaoke in Niki’s boyfriend’s bar. Leda picks an audience member, holds an object belonging to that person, and then sings an appropriately related song. 

Yes, Leda sings a song.

The upside of performing is Leda feels she is growing better as a singer — although don’t start lining up a singing tour or a broadway debut yet — and her psychic visions are getting stronger. The trouble with her “visions” is she doesn’t know how to interpret them. The karaoke beneficiaries are content, however, with many of them sobbing their relief after Leda’s songs.

Although Leda has helped many people in small measure, she cannot help the one person who needs it the most: herself. A couple years ago, her fiancé died, murdered and left in the back seat of his car in a ditch, with the body of a woman, a stranger, adrift in the same ditch a short distance away. The police have no leads and the case is on the back burner, the way-back burner.

Now Grady brings Leda the case of a man shot in a seedy motel room and his adult son shot in the parking lot. Would Leda try to get vibes from things and places associated with the case? Leda is hesitant until she shakes Grady’s hand. OMG. She faints. When she comes to, Leda realizes the flash that sent her reeling is because Grady is related somehow to the death of her fiancé, Tod. 

Yes, yes, yes, Leda will help Grady. If Grady will help her.

The premise of the plot had me turning the pages but the story pulled up short for me with the character of Leda. In exchange for riding along with Grady — in some cases with her best friend Niki — she agrees to be the strong, silent type in the interviews. Instead, she gabbles and sputters, interrupts and pokes around. Niki is worse. I could picture the thought balloons over the interviewees’ heads, “And who are you, again?” Nevertheless, the subjects patter along and accept the incongruous presence of two random women. As a result of Leda’s actions, I had less faith that Grady’s character could possibly be a legitimate Seattle police detective.

I liked Leda best when she was going through Tod’s possessions, looking for the four costumes she had for Ethel, Lucy, Ricky, and Fred for a costume party night at the bar. She lingered sentimentally over the remains of her life with Tod. She seemed the most human and accessible then.

Despite what I feel about Leda, this is a premise with potential. May the psychic travel agent live to solve another mystery!

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

Tor Nightmare, 352 pages, $27.99

A horror story set in the Pacific Northwest, normally the home of just vampires, ancient forests, mystical rites? Now something else is stirring in the forest? Sounds like a perfect winter’s read.  

Author Catriona Ward has many narrative voices in her chilling tale of murder (maybe), abuse (maybe), creepiness (definitely). One of those voices belongs to a cat, Olivia. Another is a young (maybe) girl, Lauren. The other two voices are Ted, Lauren’s father, and their new neighbor, Dee. As their stories move along, the dread grows.

What exactly is happening in Ted’s house, the last house on Needless Street? The windows are boarded up, there are three locks on each door. The backyard, once the scene of a bird massacre, is rimmed by a dark forest. As forbidding as Ted’s house is, new neighbor Dee still tries to make Ted’s acquaintance. She has an ulterior motive.

Long ago, one sunny summer day, Dee lost her younger sister at a lake not far from Needless Street. Ted was one of the people questioned by the police after Lulu’s disappearance, and he was exonerated. Nevertheless, Dee remains suspicious. Over the last eleven years, since the loss of her sister, Dee has become her own best detective, and it is Ted who has finally drawn her undivided attention.

It is clear Ted has issues. He is seeing a therapist for some of those issues — but mainly to get medication. He calls his therapist “the bug man,” mostly because he has a hard time remembering names. Ted drinks to excess, tries online dating, has difficulty making friends. There are gods in the forest, green something-or-others in the attic, and his mother is somewhere undefined. And where is the chihuahua lady who lives a few doors down? Ted sometimes appears at the bug doctor’s with scratches on his face or arms. The cat, he explains.

The book sounds crazier and crazier as it goes along. The dread increases and so does the puzzlement. What the heck is going on? If Dee gets into any trouble, she cannot call the police; she has burned that bridge. If Ted needs help who can he turn to; it’s clear the bug man is a terrible therapist. Lauren has many issues and no one seems lined up to help her. Olivia the cat is the only one with someone to rely on: God. She knocks over the Bible, reads whatever page opens, and follows the advice.

It’s a lot to swallow, but Ward slowly draws her reader into the craziness and unraveling of the tale and the characters. Even “Needless Street” has a transmogrification at the end.

The tale hangs on twists and whether you buy those twists. I liked it, when I wasn’t closing my eyes in case something bloody awful happened to Lauren.

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

Hard Case Crime, 432 pages, $22.99

What an appropriate book to review in December!

At first glance, "Five Decembers" appears as though it is going to be a traditional noir book. Then, surprise! World War II intrudes and it becomes a spy book. A history book? A lesson in integrity and honor? Whatever else it is, at its very heart, it is noir at its best.

Joe McGrady was a soldier and when he mustered out, he became a cop. The draw for me is that Joe is a cop in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His story begins days before the Pearl Harbor attack and the commencement of the United States’ official involvement in World War II. Joe is a regular guy who has a smart girlfriend, a ball-busting cop partner, a hope for a better life. Fate intervenes to do its damndest to see that he doesn’t get to keep any of that.

On a certain day in November 1941, Joe is sent out by his boss to investigate a hanging in a small shack on a dairy farm on the other side of the island of O’ahu. What Joe finds is horrible. A man is hanging in the shack, but also, a woman is found covered by a pile of stuff on a cot. Both have been brutally murdered. The man is Caucasian and the woman is Asian. Does racial intolerance have anything to do with their deaths?

Upon returning to the shack after phoning his boss, Joe encounters a man who looks as though he intends to torch the shack. In a firefight, Joe is forced to kill the man, thus eliminating a chance at getting information the easy way. Joe has had enough experience with crime, and with a little help from well-honed intuition, he guesses that there is another person who also committed the crimes. His new mission in life is to track down who the victims are and who the killer in the shadows is.

Author James Kestrel does a wonderful job of re-creating Honolulu in the 1940s. There are the bawdy streets of Chinatown in downtown Honolulu, there are the drive-in restaurants that serve local fare, there are the old buildings, including the Hawai’i Theater and Alexander and Baldwin building, which marked downtown. It’s all wonderfully nostalgic. It’s also a very white version of O’ahu. There are no pidgin English-speaking locals, no tenements. At one point, Joe drives out to a plantation town of Okinawan immigrants —immigrants were used for manual labor in the pineapple and sugar cane fields — to see if the dead woman was their missing daughter. That’s as close as we get to seeing the other view of Hawai’ian society.

It turns out the man in the shack was the nephew of an Admiral of the Pacific fleet. All of a sudden, Joe has a lot of support and resources to find the remaining killer. That’s good because he certainly doesn’t have much in the way of either from his chain-smoking, prune-faced boss at headquarters.

Because of this, that and the other thing, Grady soon finds himself on a marathon trip across the Pacific to find the killer, whom he believes fled on an earlier flight. His first point of investigation is Wake Island, a small, flat island holding no more than a military staging base. There was another death there, with a similar MO to the one in Hawai’i. And that death leads him ever further westward until Joe is caught in the dual nets of fate and time in the adventure of a lifetime. Joe hopes he will have more of a lifetime to tell his tale.

This book has so much to offer. The details of old Hawai’i might appeal to only me, but the character of Joe, his history, his hurts, his hopes, his tough-guy demeanor should pull any reader to read one more page, and then yet one more. Although credulity must be accommodated at some points, it is a well-balanced story: gunfights and gentleness, brutality and beauty.

For Charlie Chan fans — who must know that Charlie was based in Honolulu — there is a reference by Grady’s prune-faced captain to Apana Chang, the legendary, real-life police detective upon whom Earl Derr Biggers based his fictional character. That reference sold me on this book. Then so did almost everything else.

Congratulations to James Kestrel and Hard Case Crime for a sensational book. MBTB star!

The Truants by Kate Weinberg

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 320 pages, $17 (paperback), c2020

I started this book about a year ago, read about twenty pages, and stopped. I didn’t want to read yet another book about college students and their passionate secrets. Yet, there I was a year later, picking up the book again, and this time engrossed in the storyline. What’s the moral to this little story? Heck if I know.

Jess Walker has just begun her freshman year at an English university (not Oxford, not Cambridge), which she chose because her hero, author Lorna Clay, is teaching there. A few years back, Lorna published a popular book called, “The Truants.” (Yep, same title as Kate Weinberg’s book. Meta much?) Jess was bummed when she was kicked out of Lorna’s class because of overcrowding. As appeasement (or maybe manipulation), Lorna has enrolled Jess in her class on Agatha Christie. A far cry from the original class on the “gin-soaked authors” like Hunter S. Thompson, Zelda Fitzgerald, and John Cheever Jess had chosen. Lorna’s class on Agatha proves anything but delicate and genteel. 

Jess finds a best friend almost immediately. She is Georgie, the daughter of two wild, crazy, and privileged aristocrats. Georgie has issues. Jess has issues. Yay, sistah-bond! Jess meets Nick, nice looking and geeky. Georgie meets Alec, an 26-year-old student, who is drop dead gorgeous and charismatic. Georgie is in love. So is Jess. Secretly. With Alec. It’s hard not to be. The guy’s got lines and moves.

Let’s not discuss the plot too much, because it’s actually the character delineations which engrossed me. Author Weinberg can write. Even though one of her main characters, Lorna, is an author, the book isn’t about writing or the writing process. Nevertheless, it is made obvious that Lorna is working on a new book, about Dame Agatha, no less. The central mystery, Lorna says, is why Agatha disappeared for eleven days in 1926.

Agatha Christie was already famous for her detective stories when she disappeared. The police found her abandoned car and started a huge manhunt for her. She was found in a hotel, registered under the name of her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s mistress’s name. She never publicly explained what happened. Was she an early feminist making a convoluted statement about infidelity? Was she passive-aggressive?

Jess, Georgie, Nick, and Alec become fast friends. And most of them fall under the thrall of Lorna. That’s a good set-up, isn’t it, but it doesn’t lead where you think it will lead — at least it doesn’t for three-fourths of the book. Until then it is Jess’s inner monologue. Will she and Alec? What about Georgie? Does Lorna have ulterior designs on Jess?

And why would these people eat mushrooms Alec, who grew up in South Africa, picked in his aunt’s garden somewhere on the coast of England? Honestly. It’s a wonder they aren’t all dead by page thirty.

I don’t mean to make fun of the book. I think it’s well-written and I was just as enthralled by Lorna as everyone else, even as I found her nature wildly inconsistent and challenging to understand. (Villain or savior? Teacher or cult leader? Cheers to Weinberg for her exquisite ambiguities.) 

Is there a murder? I don’t know. Maybe there were several. Somehow it all revolves around Alec. Is he the crusading reporter from South Africa, who fled for his life from criminals because of his hot-potato work on the abysmal mine conditions in his country? Or is he a charlatan?

Weinberg has written a story about college students and their passions, and I didn’t throw the book against the wall. Furthermore, here I am recommending it.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book:

That was the thing about Georgie. She changed tone so fast that your head whirled. Mostly, she was like a slot machine flashing all its lights in constant jackpot, but there was a kindness there, and in amidst the glib, smart chatter, beguiling glimpses of something more tender.

About a puppet show version of Agatha’s last Poirot book,* Lorna says:

Its standout idea is the fact that the villain is not the murderer but the person who applies psychological pressure, teasing out murderous intent. A puppet-master, in other words, pulling deadly strings.

* Curtain

The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo

Pushkin Vertigo, 320 pages, $14.95 (c2020)

I think it’s a revelation to read books written by foreign authors. For some (most?) books there are nuances we may not fully understand from the viewpoint of our own culture without annotations or cultural treatises, but with the help of a good translation, we will get the gist of the story and appreciate the culture. (I should add that sometimes I don’t fully understand the culture of an American book with a strong regional flavor! I remember when I first had to figure out what a "moon pie" was!)

Seishi Yokomizo, a writer treasured by the Japanese, wrote many mystery books. He was a great fan of Sherlock Holmes. That influence, with the exception of an Inverness cape that makes a brief appearance in the story and the classic mystery book structure of many suspects and deaths, doesn’t affect what appears to be a very Japanese story in “The Inugami Case.” So far, four of his books have been translated into English over the last few years. (As an aside, the covers for these books are stunning.) Can he become a hit in the United States forty years after his death?

“The Inugami Curse” was written in 1950, and it is set just after the end of WWII. A few of the characters refer to their own release from the military and eventual repatriation into Japanese society. It is not a political novel, however; there is no real reference to Japan’s loss or Allied prominence in Japan’s governance. Instead, it is a Japanese tale told in a melodramatic way, with much sweating and hair-tearing, glaring and snarky eyerolls. There are daring references to the breaking of societal mores. And there is an abundance of human anguish, regret, sacrifice, and feelings of entitlement. It could be an American 1970s nighttime soap opera transported across the sea.

“The Injugami Curse” is also known as “The Inugami Clan.” That perhaps is more descriptive. The deaths, torments, and mental pain are contained within the Inugami family compound.

Let me spill the beans a little. You won’t gain the following knowledge until a bit into the book, but I see no harm in listing the family characters and the contents of Sahei’s will.

Rich old man Sahei Inugami has died, leaving three daughters, who are half-sisters because their mothers were Sahei’s mistressees. There is also Tamayo, the granddaughter of Sahei’s best friend, the priest of the local Shinto shrine. After Tamayo was orphaned, Sahei chose to raise her as a family member. She is roughly the same age as Sahei’s three grandsons by his daughters.

This is where I am going to plant a spoiler alert. If you do not want to know the contents of Sahei’s will — and there’s a lot of family melodrama before the actual reading of the will — then scroll on by.

SPOILER ALERT

Naturally, the grandsons, especially the eldest, Kiyo, are expected to inherit Sahei’s empire. The in-fighting among the half-sisters is vicious and sly. It gets worse because old man Inugami pulled a fast one on everyone. According to the will, the empire goes to Tamayo but only if she marries one of his grandsons. If all the grandsons die within three months from the reading of the will, Tamayo is free to marry whom she wants. If Tamayo dies, Kiyo gets to run the business, the rest of the estate is divided into five parts, two of which will go to a mystery man, Shizuma Oanuma. Can you say, everyone is now ripe for killing or being killed?

END SPOILER

Renowned private detective Kosuke Kindaichi was called before the reading of the will to investigate some hanky-panky the estate lawyer suspected was happening. Then the lawyer was murdered. Good thing Kindaichi was on-site. He witnesses the reading of the will. Yes, he thinks, there’s a lot going on and there’s bound to be some resulting chaos.

Indeed.

There is the first murder, then the second. Will there be a third, and a fourth? Haha! You will have to read the book. I will say that the murders are bizarre and the display of the bodies ritualistic.

Kindaichi is a very excitable detective. Like the hound of the Baskervilles baying in the dark signaled a death, Kindaichi signals his presence by viciously scratching and shaking his head when he has an aha! moment. (I don’t know, is this a cultural thing? Do a lot of Japanese do this? Japanese of a certain age? Or is it a tic, like Columbo and his, “Ah, one more thing,” and has nothing to do with Japanese culture?) It’s hard not to get waylaid by the odd-to-Western-understanding gestures, grimaces, tremblings, side-eyed venomous glances. It all adds to the color and exotic nature of the story, and once I got used to and accepted the accentuated reactions, the story flowed more easily.

In Japan, Yokomizo has received many accolades and several books were made into movies. I don’t know what Wikimedia’s attribution is, but his page says he is referred to as “ the Japanese John Dickson Carr.” In the case of "The Inugami Curse," Yokomizo has truly developed a unique mystery within the classic whodunnit framework.

MBTB's GOAT

You can see the huge number of books MBTB has treasured over the years. First owners, Jill and Carolyn, started putting stars on books they really liked. Other staff members put in their two cents, too, and a list was born. Towards the end of MBTB's run, everybody chipped in their stars. It gathered dust after the physical store's closing in 2013, but here it is, dusted off, updated, and raring to go. It represents 40+ years of deep thinking about what constitutes a good mystery. The conclusion? It depends on the reader's mood, tolerance of style and/or plot slippage, cover design (yes, we did judge books by their covers, sometimes), and whether there was an intriguing character. There were 20+ people over the years contributing their opinions, so the variety is keen and expansive.

MBTB's Favorite Books Through the Years