A Heart Full of Headstones - Ian Rankin

 

Hard as it is for me to believe, A Heart Full of Headstones is Ian Rankin's twenty-fourth John Rebus novel. I haven't read all of them, but I have read most, and by now I think I have a pretty good feel for the kind of man John Rebus is. Maybe that's why the last couple of Rebus novels have left me feeling so sad for him - this one most of all. As A Heart Full of Headstones opens, Rebus sits in a courtroom accused of a crime as serious as many of the ones he investigated in his prime as an Edinburgh cop. But just when Rebus's past seems about to be catching up with him, he throws fuel on his own funeral pyre, and jumps on top the pile all by himself. 

The bulk of A Heart Full of Headstones is spread over the immediate eight days prior to the crime Rebus is accused of having committed, and as John Rebus novels usually do, it includes multiple, simultaneous subplots. One sees Rebus's loyal friend Siobhan Clarke working on the domestic abuse case of a fellow policeman that is about to blow up in the face of the whole department. A second involves DCI Malcolm Fox's push to build a case against a cop he believes to be among the dirtiest of all those he investigated when he was working in Internal Affairs. And the third storyline finds Rebus agreeing to do a personal favor for an elderly crime boss he's battled so closely for so long that the two seem to know more about each other now than their friends and families know about them.

What none of them realize at first is that one Edinburgh cop, a man threatening to rat out his fellow cops, is at the center of all three investigations. And when they do finally realize it, it just might be too late to minimize the damage.

What I find disheartening about A Heart Full of Headstones is exactly what makes the novel so realistic. John Rebus has always considered himself to be a good cop, a man who would do just about anything to protect the innocent and ensure that the bad guys get what is coming to them. Younger policemen still see Rebus as a kind of role model for the most effective kind of policing. If a little embarrassed by that sentiment, Rebus is also maybe a little proud of that status whether he would admit it or not. But now, a man Rebus worked with for years is about to name names and tell stories to save his own hide, and John is forced to admit something to himself he doesn't really want to face...he was a bad cop, one not above lying and falsifying evidence if that's what it took to get a predatory criminal off the streets for a while. His intentions may have been the best, but now Rebus wonders if his willingness to turn a blind eye to the real corruption in the ranks made sure that he was just spinning his wheels the whole time.

Now Rebus is an old man who can barely breathe anymore, and it may just be too late for any kind of personal redemption.

Ian Rankin is one of my favorite crime writers, and John Rebus is one of my very favorite fictional crime fighters, so a new Rebus novel is always something I look forward to reading. Still, I'm sad that Rebus has ended up here after thirty-five years (24 novels from 1987-2022). The next novel in the series will be published in the U.K. in October, and I can't wait to see what's in store for Rebus. Who is he going to end up being?

Falling - T.J. Newman

 

Now don't get me wrong. T.J. Newman's Falling is a very well written thriller that kept me turning pages all the way to the end. The thing is, though, I was probably turning those pages for the wrong reason. I'll try to explain why.

Anyone who reads thrillers on a regular basis, and I've read dozens and dozens of them over the years, learns eventually that the hero is never going to die in a thriller like this one. (And that has to be the farthest thing from a spoiler alert I can imagine.) It just doesn't happen - even in standalone thrillers. It is so rare, in fact, that I often find myself hoping that an author somewhere has written a disaster-style thriller in which the hero actually does die and the bad guys win because I would very much admire the courage of a writer who managed to pull that off. So if any of you know of such a book, please let me know.

The beauty of Falling is Newman's creativity, the way that she sets up one seemingly impossible-to-survive scenario after the next and manages to find a way for the hero (in this case, it's airline pilot Bill Hoffman) to not only survive, but to turn the situation to his advantage. I can't even exaggerate how clever a plotter T.J. Newman is, or how fascinating it is to watch her come up with solution after solution for Bill Hoffman and everyone on board the airplane he's piloting.

I'll quote the back of the paperback edition of Falling to give you the basics:

"You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don't know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot's family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight."

I'm not much of a fan of the kind of book blurbs you find on the first couple of pages and covers of a lot of paperbacks, but the blurbs for Falling really jumped out at me because of who they are attributed to: Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Don Winslow, Diana Gabaldon, Ian Rankin, and others. There are even numerous quotes from newspapers and journals like the Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Guardian. And I agree with most of them. This is an excellent thriller.

 But as those airline passengers in Falling might tell you, the real surprises all come from the ride, not from the landing.

What I'm Reading This Week (April 22, 2024)

 

I did a lot of reading this past week but much of it involved "test reading" of books to see if I really wanted to read them or not. I didn't decide to keep reading all of the books I read from, but all of the "sampling," in addition to firming up my "TBR-soon" list exposed me to a handful of books and authors I would have never otherwise have experienced, so it was all time well spent in the long run. And I did finish both Ian Rankin's Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones and Alba De Céspedes's Forbidden Notebook (more on those to come later this week, I hope). I added another not mentioned before, An American Dreamer, and decided to permanently table the Elmer Kelton western I was reading because it's a little too YA oriented for me to take it all that seriously right now. In addition to An American Dreamer, I come into the new week reading four others: The Plague, The Man Who Smiled, Displaced Persons, and Mercury.

Mercury is one of those novels my library system underestimated demand for, so it has a much shorter time-fuse on it than I realized when I first picked it up. That means I'll be spending a lot of time with it this week so that I don't add to the wait for those behind me in line. It's taken me longer than I thought it would to get into the novel's rhythm, but at 100 pages in, it's finally starting to happen for me. It's a coming-of-age story for multiple characters, and reminds me a little bit of the kind of story that Anne Tyler writes so well. The Joseph family doesn't know what hits them when seventeen-year-old Marley comes to town and catches the eye of one of their boys...and then another of their boys.

When it comes to politics, I like to think that I'm a middle-of-the-roader, but lately I find myself drifting toward the more conservative side of the line. Even my reading has started to reflect that drift, so I wanted to read a current book that I think is written from a more liberal perspective than my own. An American Dreamer by David Finkel focuses on an Iraq war veteran trying to reconnect his vision of what America should be with what he sees happening all around him every day. What first caught my eye was not the book's title, but its subtitle: "Life in a Divided Country" because of how sad I find that phrase to be.

I hadn't planned to begin Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons quite so soon, but I was in the mood for a short story one day last week and decided to read "The Baghdadi," the first story in this fourteen-story collection, to see what I should expect from the book. And I was wowed by it, to say the least. I know that most authors lead off a compilation with a story they feel is one of the strongest in the book, but this story of an American academic's experience with a Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel fifty years earlier is so exceptional that now I can't wait to read the other thirteen.

I'm in danger of not getting to three books that I just realized are not eligible for additional check-out periods, but I'm still hoping to get to one of them this week (probably by tabling The Plague again):

So that's the plan on this Monday morning. And now I'll see what really happens. Happy Reading, y'all...

The Storm We Made - Venessa Chan

 

Kuala Lumpar - February 1945

"Teenage boys had begun to disappear."

 At first, the Japanese invaders were welcomed as Malayans hoped for "a better colonizer" than the British had turned out to be. But after the Japanese ended up killing more people in only three years of occupation than the British killed in more than fifty, they saw their past - and their future - much differently.

Vanessa Chan's The Storm We Made is the story of one fictional family caught squarely in the middle of what happened in Malaya between 1935 and 1945. The novel's central character, an ambitious and resentful Eurasian woman who realizes that she will remain a second class citizen in her own country as long as the British are there, dreams of a better life. And when a smooth-talking Japanese business man offers her a chance to help Malaya end its British rule - even if it means spying on her own husband - she is all in. 

The Storm We Made begins in early1945 when Cecily's family, like all of those around her, is struggling just to survive from one day to the next. Her husband's daily obsession is simply to find something for the family to eat, Cecily's to protect her children, especially her two daughters, from the Japanese soldiers who roam the city all day long "recruiting" girls as young as eight or nine years old for military brothels. But ironically, it is her son, not one of her daughters, who disappears on his fifteenth birthday.

"...as with the pieces she had set in motion ten years before, there was no fixing to be done. There was no coming back from this."

Vanessa Chan alternates flashback chapters to 1935 with the present to show exactly how and why Cecily planted the seeds of her own family's destruction, beginning on the night she first met Mr. Fujiwara, a prominent Japanese businessman favored by the British. Cecily, who carried the blood of the country's original Portuguese invaders in her veins, was a soft target for the persuasive Fujiwara. She already felt slighted and looked down upon by the British wives whose husbands her own husband worked with every day, and Fujiwara offered her the chance to get even with them all. Fujiwara convinced Cecily that the British would ultimately lose to Germany's aggression and would have to abandon its interests in Asia. With her help, Japan could be prepared to fill that void, and Asians would finally be given the chance to govern themselves.

"Yet perhaps this was what a woman's idealism is: not the reach for a utopia - everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach - but the need to transform one thing into something better."

Best be careful what you wish for, Cecily. 

Vanessa Chan author photo

Final Thoughts on the 2023 Booker Prize

 

As of last week's reading of Prophet Song, I'm finally ready to give a final ranking of the 2023 Booker Prize nominees as I experienced them for myself over the past few months. Obviously, my final ranking reflects only my personal experience with the nominated books. I took one final look at the list of nominees, and ended up doing a bit of last-minute juggling that I hadn't expected to be doing at all. 

I read and reviewed eleven of the thirteen nominated novels, and decided to DNF two others at about the 100-page mark of each. The DNF books are to be found, as you would expect, at the bottom of the list:

1. Prophet Song - Paul Lynch (Reviewed on 4-14-24)
2. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray (Reviewed on 11-18-23)
3. The House of Doors - Tan Twan Eng (Reviewed 12-26-23)
4. If I Survive You - Jonathan Escoffery (Reviewed 11-24-23
5. How to Build a Boat - Elaine Feeney (Reviewed 3-18-24)
6. Western Lane - Chetna Maroo (Reviewed 11-10-23)
7. All the Little Bird-Hearts - Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow ( 1-17-24)
8. Pearl - Sîan Hughes (Reviewed on 12-1-23)
9. Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry (Reviewed on 10-27-23)
10. This Other Eden - Paul Harding (Reviewed on 12-8-23)
11. Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein (Reviewed on 2-24-24)
12. A Spell of Good Things
13. The Ascension

Links refer to my thoughts on each of the completed novels immediately after finishing them. I did not review or comment on the two nominees that I did not finish reading. This is one reader's response to Booker Prize 2023; make of it what you will.

What I'm Reading This Week (April 15, 2024)

Seldom does my week go as far off course as this last one did, and it all started just two days after I posted my reading plan for that week. A routine doctor's appointment turned into two days of outpatient testing that I won't be getting answers from for another two weeks, but at least there was enough sitting around time in waiting rooms during the week for me to get a fair amount of reading done. As a result, I finished two novels that I really enjoyed: Eileen Garvin's Crow Talk and the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. That leaves me beginning this new week still messing around with a couple of books I seem to have informally tabled for a while (The Plague and Many a River) while also having made good progress on another, the Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones. I've also started two new ones that came out of nowhere to claim my attention: Forbidden Notebook by Italian author Alba de Céspedes and The Man Who Smiled by Swedish author Henning Mankell.

The Man Who Smiled is the fourth novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender series. I'm a fan of both television series featuring Wallender (one is in Swedish, the other in BBC English), but for one reason or another I've never actually read one of the books. Fortunately, I'm pretty hazy on the all the plot details of the TV shows by now, but I still retain a clear enough impression of the Wallender character that I have a little bit of a jumpstart when it comes to getting right into the books almost immediately. This one already strikes me as being very good. 

Forbidden Notebook first saw life as a serial novel published in an Italian magazine between December 1950 and June 1951. The edition I'm reading is this 2023 Ann Goldstein translation published by Astra House. The "forbidden" aspect of the notebook is that the woman who purchases it does so illegally by insisting that it be sold to her on a Sunday at a time when only tobacco could be sold in Italy on a Sunday morning...cigarettes being so essential a product, you know. But now she has to keep its existence a secret from her husband and children because she doesn't want them laughing at a woman her age (43) keeping a private diary. The very process of putting her innermost thoughts down on paper makes her reassess her life completely.

Those are the five books I expect (whatever that's worth) to be spending the most time with this week, but I've also just acquired a couple of other interesting ones:

Displaced Persons seems like an especially timely read to me considering everything that is happening in and around Israel today. I've read Joan Leegant before and enjoyed her writing, so I'm looking forward to this collection of short stories, about half of which occur in Israel, the other half in the U.S. The world is, of course, a very complicated place for all of us to live in, but I can't imagine anyone under more pressure right now than the people of Israel and those who have family living and working there. Displaced Persons is not scheduled for publication until June 1, so this one may end up sliding two or three weeks more. 

I wish I could remember what first brought Amy Jo Burns's Mercury to my attention, but it was on hold for so long at the library that I've forgotten where I learned of it. It's a strange coming-of-age story about a seventeen-year-old girl who comes to Mercury, PA, all on her own to start a new life and ends up being the glue that holds a family of three roofing brothers together after they lose their mother and their family roofing business starts to fall apart around them. It has a certain amount of mystery involved, too, but I'll know more about all of that when I pick it up in a day or so. 

I do still have another handful of library books that are aging rapidly, and I might end up plucking one or two of those from that stack this week. That's the plan anyway, but life is, after all, one big surprise after another and I love the serendipitous things that happen along the way. I'll probably be just as surprised by what I end up reading as you are. (Happy Income Tax Day, America.)