Two Mysteries: Kate Shackleton and Mrs. Blossom

Happy February! 

The Super Bowl was fun, and we enjoyed seeing the Seahawks beat the Patriots since the latter kept the Broncos out of the big show. The commercials were mostly lame--I just cannot get excited about AI and was super-disappointed that Matthew Broderick used his Ferris Bueller persona to encourage companies to use AI to do the work real people need and can do better. I also loathe the ads that encourage people to gamble. The best commercial was the Dunkin one with stand-ins for all our favorite TV characters from days gone by. Fun. I may have to go to Dunkin to show that the ad worked!

The Olympics are fun, although it was heartbreaking to see Lindsey Vonn crash. Those winter sports are, on average, so much more dangerous than the summer ones.

Mysteries

Based on Constance's review on Staircase Wit, I read and enjoyed Death Takes a Vacation, by Laura Lippman. Our heroine, Muriel Blossom, was an assistant to Lippman's main detective, Tess Monaghan, and is now on a vacation in France where she finds herself at the heart of a murder mystery and she has to figure out who to trust and what the heck is going on. I absolutely enjoyed every minute spent with Mrs. Blossom, as the narrator and most of the other characters call her. I thought only my mother preferred the Mrs. moniker, and since Mrs. B is only a year older than I am, this seemed pretty dated, but that's okay.

Visiting Paris with Muriel was fun--she goes shopping, visits art galleries, and dines in wonderful restaurants. I absolutely loved traveling down the Seine with her, stopping at Versailles, Giverny, Rouen, and Normandy. I especially enjoyed learning about the artist Joan Mitchell, whose home near Giverny Muriel makes a pilgrimage to.

The mystery itself is good and kept me guessing until all was revealed, which is the way I like it. 

I've only read one Tess Monaghan mystery, but now I am motivated to read more.

Dying in the Wool, by Frances Brody, is the first in the author's Kate Shackleton series, set in Yorkshire in the post WWI years. There are 11 books in the series, so I imagine they lead up to WWII. Anyway, I digress. This one involves a young widow, Kate, who lost her beloved in the Great War and is beginning a career as a private investigator, having proved to herself that she is quite good at finding lost people. She is commissioned by a friend to discover what happened to the friend's father, mill owner and local bigwig who disappeared following his arrest for attempted suicide. 

This was interesting primarily because of the setting and time period--the mystery wasn't riveting although it was well told. I have another in the series and plan to read that as well.

Speaking of Sheep

I was speaking of wool, which comes from sheep, so not too great a leap there!

My daughter just told me about an upcoming Hugh Jackman movie, The Sheep Detectives, which is based on the novel Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann. Here's the trailer and it looks so much fun. I know what I want to do for Mother's Day!

Wilde Lake

I read Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman with the GoodReads TuesBookTalk ReadAlongs group.  The only other Lippman novel that I'd read was The Girl in the Green Raincoat, which was the 11th in the author's Tess Monaghan series) and so I really didn't know what to expect as this one was not part of a series.

I hadn't read any reviews of Wilde Lake so the first thing I noticed was the connection to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.  At times Wilde Lake really reminded me of the Austen fanfic I used to read (and write)--the names were altered a bit and the setting modernized, but the characters, their relationships, and basic story arc was all there ready to be tweaked and poked and prodded in the process of exploring the themes that the characters and their story set out.

Lu Brant is Scout--and she tells her story both in the present and remembering when she was a child, mainly a nine-year old when her older brother, AJ, broke his arm.  We learn in flash backs the circumstances that led to the breaking of the arm.  We learn about Lu's and AJ's friendship with the precocious neighbor boy, Neil (i.e., Dill/Truman Capote), and the charges brought against AJ's friend Davey Robinson, an African American accused of a raping a white girl.  Lu is a newly elected state's attorney, following in the footsteps of revered father. The family, of course, has a devoted housekeeper, and Lu even has a chifferobe!

Honestly, I think I would have liked the book better if it wasn't a riff on TKaMB.  I read an interview with Lippman:

How did the idea for this book come to you?Well, it’s a little bit of a convoluted story. It began when the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow story surfaced again. I read a lot, and I thought a lot about it. The conclusion I came to is that as an individual, I was going to believe people who said they were sexually assaulted. I just decided for my own humanity that I would start always at a place of saying, 'Yes, the victim is telling the truth' . . . But then I thought, if you really embrace this idea, how do you deal with the story told in To Kill A Mockingbird? Big disclaimer: I don’t think Tom Robinson is a rapist. He’s clearly innocent. But, I thought, what if you thought of it differently, but not in the pre-Civil Rights era? And where would this story be most interesting? It’s about an African-American man who is handsome and is generally seen as a good person. He is accused of raping a young woman who’s seen from being from the other side of the tracks, not as being a particularly well-thought-of member of society . . . I thought about the era in which I grew up, and the place I went to high school, and I began thinking, 'This is a story that really fits Columbia in the 1970s.' I took that and I ran with it...It was probably between April and May of 2014 when I started writing this book, and I can usually write a book in about 11 months. 

That's all well and good, but I have to wonder if the discovery of Lee's Go Set a Watchman and the resultant controversy that was bubbling in 2014 before the book was published in 2015 wasn't wasn't also a factor in the development of the story.  Without being too cynical, I have to wonder whether Lippman didn't think that perhaps she could provide a sequel to TKaMB too, because that's essentially what Wilde Lake is.

As a mystery it was okay--and I never really liked any of the characters and didn't feel invested in their story.  In a way, it seemed as if Lippman was intent on showing that all good, heroic people have a dark underbelly.  Maybe I just resented the characters I loved in TKaMB being treated so disrespectfully.  Sort of the way I felt when Kevin Sullivan trashed Anne and Gilbert in his final Anne of Green Gables movie.

The best thing about Wilde Lake was the nostalgia I felt for the flashbacks to the 70's.  I started junior high in the fall of 1970 and graduated from college in the spring of 1980, so I definitely enjoyed the trip down memory lane when Lu was remembering the time when she was a child and AJ was a teenager.  I also enjoyed learning about the planned community of Wilde Lake, which is a real place in Columbia, Maryland. That bit of social history was interesting, and I think a novel set in the time/place is a great premise.  But the TKaMB foundation undermined the whole book for me.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat

I've been reading reviews of Laura Lippman's The Girl in the Green Raincoat for a couple of years now, and it's been on my TBR list since I first learned about it...so glad that I finally made time to read it over the weekend.  It is a perfect weekend book, at only 158 pages, and the writing and story really make it zip along.

The premise is straightforward--Tess Monaghan, private eye, is on bedrest, awaiting the birth of her first child, and is bored out of her mind.  She observes a young woman in a green raincoat walking her dog every day at the same time, and when one day the dog comes back from the park without its owner, Tess assumes the woman has been assaulted and decides to investigate.  The resultant mystery is interesting, with a twist I didn't anticipate, which is always fun, and Tess Monaghan is an engaging character...one I look forward to getting to know better as this is the 11th in the series. 

I don't usually like to read books out of order, but since this one was the first I heard about, and the premise was so wonderful--with acknowledged debt to Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and the Jimmy Stewart movie, Rear Window--I decided to read it and see how I liked Lippman and Tess.

In addition to the good writing, great premise, and engaging characters, I also enjoyed the literary and cultural references, and found myself reaching for my iPhone to look up such things as a "shaggy dog story," Marjorie Morningstar, and What a Way to Go! On the other hand, there were enough references that I did get, like Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, that I felt the book was written for someone like me, which is a bit comforting actually.