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411. The Deserter

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Mike Brady

Author:    Nelson DeMille

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Suspense

448 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Army Special Operator Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor of the Criminal Investigation Division are sent in by the military to Venezuela to capture Captain Kyle Mercer of the Army’s elite Delta Force.  When Mercer disappeared from his post in Afghanistan, a video released by his Taliban captors made international headlines.  But it was unclear if Mercer deserted before he was captured.  A second video sent to Mercer’s Army commanders revealed that Mercer intentionally disappeared.

Quotes 

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

 

“He had a clean shot, but he also had an informal rule of trying not to kill anyone within an hour of landing in a new country.”

 

“The first casualty of war is the truth.”

 

“I’m always ready for anything, but prepared for nothing.”

 

My Take

The Deserter is a somewhat engaging, but a bit clichéd, thriller.  With the nonstop machismo of the main character, I think its appeal was wasted on a 54 year old woman like me.

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398. The Secret Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Foreign

480 pages, published August 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

A year after the discovery of a teenaged boy’s murder at a girlsʼ boarding school, Detective Stephen Moran is brought in with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case.   Moran had been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.”  Under the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Moran and Conway investigate the murder which leads them to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, a rival clique, and to the snarl of relationships that bound all of them to the murdered boy.

Quotes 

“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst.  How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”

 

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

 

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”

 

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”

 

“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”

 

“They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”

 

My Take

The Secret Place is the sixth book was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fifth in her Dublin Murder Squad series).  While I loved her other books (The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor) I liked, but did not love, The Secret Place.  I found the characters and the central mystery a bit less interesting than previous French reads.  It is still a good book, just not quite up the standard French sets in many of her other books.

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396. Broken Harbor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

450 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In one of the half-abandoned luxury developments that populate Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered.  Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad investigates the case and finds that all is not as it seems.

Quotes 

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”

 

“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”

 

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”

 

“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”

 

“I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”

 

“If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.”

 

“One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead… I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.”

 

My Take

Broken Harbor was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fourth in her Dublin Murder Squad series) since starting my thousand book quest.  Like The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor did not disappoint.  French is a gifted storyteller and her mysteries are much more about the human nature involved than whodunit.  A great read.

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392. Faithful Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

416 pages, published July 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1985, 19 year old Frank Mackey was from a dysfunctional family living in a poor part of Dublin in small flat named Faithful Place.  He and his girl, Rosie Daly, were all set to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, and break away from the despair of their lives in Ireland.  However, on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show.  Frank assumed that she’d given him the brush-off and gone to London on her own.  Frank left Faithful Place and never went home again.  22 years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.  Frank, now a Detective on Dublin’s Murder Squad is going home again where he must figure out what happened to Rosie and deal with his family demons.

Quotes 

“My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.”

 

“I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”

 

“Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.”

 

“I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?”

 

“We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.”

 

“You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”

 

“Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed The Witch Elm, In the Woods, and The Likeness by the brilliant Irish writer Tana French, I was highly anticipating Faithful Place (the third book in Dublin Murder Squad series).  It did not disappoint.  French brings you into the time, place and motivations of her characters so completely that I felt like I was right there with them.  Additionally, her insight into the human condition adds a depth and richness that keep her books in your psyche long after you are finished reading them.

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389. American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Monica Hesse

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Mystery

255 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Intrigued by a five-month arson spree across the rural coast of Virginia in Accomack County, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse decided to check out the scene.  She discovered a compelling story of rural life in the age of Trump and the strange twists and turns that human nature can sometimes take.

Quotes 

“This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”

 

“By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay. How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.”

 

“In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.”

 

“Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere.”

 

“Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s — Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Frank “Jelly” Nash — were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers — women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music — did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.

And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia.”

 

“It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin’ mystery.”

 

“The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love.”

 

“As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and pass it down to generations.”

 

“But maybe rural America isn’t dying so much as it’s Shucker-ing: adjusting, adapting, becoming something new, getting a new outdoor sign and adding jalapeno hush puppies to the menu. I’d like to think that.”

 

My Take

American Fire is a page turner.  The primary reason for this is that Monica Hesse is a very talented writer.  She takes a subject and characters that could be a bit boring and brings them to life.  Even though you know who the arsonist is from the beginning of the book, you keep reading to find out why.  Her insight into the depressed coastal region of Virginia, like many of the rural areas in the U.S., makes for compelling reading and gives the reader a clearer picture of the disparities in our country and the impact that is having.

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377. The Woman in Cabin 10

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ruth Ware

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

357 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Woman in Cabin 10 is a thriller that takes place in the constrained confines of a high end luxury yacht that has set sail on the North Sea.  Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, is on board to cover the maiden voyage.  At first, she enjoys the glamour and opulence.  However, when the weather starts to turn, Lo is awakened in the middle of the night and views a woman being thrown overboard.  When she rings the alarm bell, no one believes her since no passengers are missing.  Things become more desperate for Lo as she begins to doubt her own sanity and struggles to figure out what happened.

Quotes 

“My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.”

 

“Maybe that was closer to the truth–we weren’t captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.”

 

“I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say… I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.”

 

“There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part—they’re not safe to be let out in public.”

 

“Of course the one type of sashimi you really must try is fugu,” Alexander said expansively, smoothing his napkin across his straining cummerbund. “It’s simply the most exquisite taste.” “Fugu?” I said, trying to insert myself into the conversation. “Isn’t that the horribly poisonous one?” “Absolutely, and that’s what makes the experience. I’ve never been a drug taker—I know my own weaknesses, and I am very aware of being one of life’s lotus-eaters, so I’ve never trusted myself to dabble in that sort of thing—but I can only assume that the high one experiences after eating fugu triggers a similar neuron response. The diner has diced with death, and won.”

 

“she had made her way up the corporate ladder by treading on the backs of more young women than you could count, and then, once she was through the glass ceiling, pulling the ladder up behind her. I remembered Rowan once saying, Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.”

 

My Take

I gave The Woman in Cabin 10 four stars because it has the quintessential quality of a good thriller:  I couldn’t put it down.  In a similar fashion to Something in the Water (a page turner that I also really enjoyed) Ware does a great job of keeping the tension high, the red herrings plentiful and the twists coming at just the right moment.  Highly recommended vacation read.

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369. Still Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Louise Penny

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

402 pages, published May 22, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Still Life is the first book to feature Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec.  He is called in investigate the suspicious death of Jane Neal in the rural village of Three Pines south of Montreal.   Neal’s body is found in the woods, shot in the heart with an old fashioned arrow.  Shortly before her death, Neal’s painting Fair Day which depicts many of the local community members was accepted into a local art show.  A coincidence?  Inspector Gamache must discover the truth.

Quotes 

“Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It’s as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful.  So when I’m observing that’s what I’m watching for.  The choices people make.”

 

“There are four things that lead to wisdom. You ready for them?’

She nodded, wondering when the police work would begin.

“They are four sentences we learn to say, and mean.” Gamache held up his hand as a fist and raised a finger with each point. “I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong’.”

 

“Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”

 

“Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving, you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.  Most of these people are very immature. They lead “still” lives, waiting.”

 

“I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.”

 

“They waited for life to happen to them. They waited for someone to save them. Or heal them. They did nothing for themselves.”

 

“The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices. But, but’ – now her eyes shone and she almost vibrated with excitement – ‘the most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. We’re the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted.”

 

“I’ve been treating you with courtesy and respect because that’s the way I choose to treat everyone. But never, ever mistake kindness with weakness.”

 

“Aid workers, when handing out food to starving people, quickly learn that the people fighting for it at the front are the people who need it least. It’s the people sitting quietly at the back, too weak to fight, who need it the most. And so too with tragedy.”

 

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table,”

 

“Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room.  But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves. ”

 

“Life is loss.  But out of that, as the book stresses, comes freedom. If we can accept that nothing is permanent, and change is inevitable, if we can adapt, then we’re going to be happier people.”

 

“Everyday for Lucy’s entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks on to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up. Every morning Lucy’s prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelt like roses and lived in the kitchen.  But no more.  Lucy knew her God was dead. And she now knew the miracle wasn’t the banana, it was the hand that offered the banana.”

 

“Almost invariably people expected that if you were a good person you shouldn’t meet a bad end, that only the deserving are killed and certainly only the deserving are murdered.  However well hidden and subtle, there was a sense that a murdered person had somehow asked for it. That’s why the shock when someone they knew to be kind and good was a victim. There was a feeling that surely there had been a mistake.” 

My Take

While Still Life has received critical acclaim in the mystery fiction world (named One of the Five Mystery/Crime Novels of the Decade by Deadly Pleasures Magazine, Winner of the New Blood Dagger, Arthur Ellis, Barry, Anthony, and Dilys awards), I had a hard time really engaging with it.  I never warmed up to Chief Inspector Armand Gamache or the supporting characters.  Penny does have many insightful things to say about the human condition.  However, I was happy to finish the book so I could move onto something new.

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362. The Colorado Kid

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Novella

205 pages, published October 4, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Colorado Kid is a novella by master storyteller Stephen King that centers around an unsolved mystery.  On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body.  It’s more than a year before the man is identified and the more that is learned about the man and the bizarre circumstances of his death, the less that is understandable.  It seems like an impossible crime.

Quotes 

“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

 

“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.”

 

“Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”

 

“Well then, I’m going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who’s been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories – those with beginnings, middles, and ends – are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.”

 

“We poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does.”

 

“You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.”

 

“It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.”

 

“I like a woman who hasn’t decided the kitchen’s a place of slavery just because she works for a livin.” “I feel absolutely the same way about a man,” 

My Take

While I’m a big fan of Stephen King, I really didn’t enjoy The Colorado Kid that much.  Not enough story, character development and an unsatisfying ending.

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357. The Likeness

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

466 pages, published May 1, 2009

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Likeness is book two in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series.  It starts six months after the end of In the Woods (book one).  After the events that occurred in the previous book, Detective Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad with no plans to go back.  She is pulled back in when the victim in a grisly crime scene looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Cassie goes undercover must discover not only who killed this girl, but, more important, who she was.

Quotes 

“There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.'” “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”

 

“I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack.”

 

“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”

 

“Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”

 

“Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It’s because they’re held here so lightly: they haven’t yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.”

 

“Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world – we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”

 

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

 

“It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it.”

 

“It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost. ”

 

“The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”

 

“That kind of friendship doesn’t just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.”

 

“Look at all the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart- and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. The king was the country; how could he possibly expect it go into battle without him? But now… Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he’s started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousand for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means nothing; human life means nothing. We’re ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go.” 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed two previous Tana French books (The Witch Elm and In the Woods), I had high hopes for The Likeness.  It did not disappoint.  French is such a master storyteller and has such affection for her characters that it is impossible not to become completely absorbed in the story.  Some interesting twists, but this book is worth reading for the quality of the writing rather than the puzzle of its central mystery.

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354. Lethal White

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

650 pages, published September 18, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Lethal White is J.K. Rowling’s fourth book featuring Private Investigator Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott.  It opens with Billy, a mentally troubled young man, telling Strike “I seen a kid killed…He strangled it, up by the horse.”  This statement sets Strike and Ellacot off on a hunt that turns into a murder investigation of a member of Parliament.

Quotes 

“Pretending you’re OK when you aren’t isn’t strength.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Robin contradicted him. The champagne had fizzed on her tongue and seemed to give her courage even before it hit her brain. “Sometimes, acting as though you’re all right, makes you all right. Sometimes you’ve got to slap on a brave face and walk out into the world, and after a while it isn’t an act anymore, it’s who you are. If I’d waited to feel ready to leave my room after—you know,” she said, “I’d still be in there. I had to leave before I was ready.”

 

“I was in therapy for a bit. Now I do CBT exercises.” “Do you, though?” Strike asked mildly. “Because I bought vegetarian bacon a week ago, but it’s not making me any healthier, just sitting there in the fridge.”

 

“Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.”

 

“How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever?”

 

“Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”

 

“The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for years.”

 

“As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin’s face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, “Come with me”, but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.”

 

“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can’t go on. I don’t really know when I stopped loving him,”

 

“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve loved anyone, since, like you loved me.”

“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and thank fuck for that.” 

My Take

The reason to read Lethal White isn’t the mystery at its core, which is fine but a bit convoluted at times.  The reason to read it is the superb portrait painted by J.K. Rowling of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot, the two main, recurring characters in the Cormoran Strike series.  They are so richly drawn and so accessible that it makes reading the book worthwhile.

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