The Secret Guests - B.W. Black

As part of Germany’s attempt to destroy British war industry during World War II, German bombers dropped thousands of bombs on London and the country’s other key industrial and port cities. The concentrated bombing campaign that began in 1940 and ended in 1941 would ultimately see the destruction of more than one million homes and 20,000 civilian deaths in London alone. Roughly ten percent of those killed during the London Blitz were children despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of children were evacuated from the city. B.W. Black’s The Secret Guests wonders what it would have been like if the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had been among those children sent to safer ground.

In this alternate history of events, not only are Elizabeth and Margaret evacuated from London, they are sent to Ireland - where they face a different kind of danger - rather than to a country like Canada where they would have been completely safe. The problem, of course, is that getting the girls safely to Canada is much more dangerous than getting them to “neutral” Ireland. Even as World War II progresses, the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence (resulting in the creation of Northern Ireland and all of the problems to come from that partition) is still very much a factor in the relationship between Ireland and Britain. That Ireland has declared herself neutral in the war between Germany and Britain does not necessarily mean that the majority of the country’s citizens are secretly rooting for Britain to prevail. No, for their own political purposes, there are plenty in Ireland who would love to get their hands on the young princesses – and they are willing to kill to get them.

B.W. Black (John Banville)

Elizabeth (age 14) and Margaret (age 10) arrive at the remote estate belonging to the Duke of Edenmore not knowing what to expect. By the time of their arrival, the girls have learned to answer to the names Emily and Mary but they are a little taken aback by the physical state of the large old house in which the Duke lives alone with his staff of servants. Joining the girls is newly minted British secret agent Celia Nashe, who is on her very first assignment, and a young Irish cop, Detective Garda Strafford. Before long, the girls and their protectors have resigned themselves to a routine of horseback riding, reading whatever is on hand or available in the village’s small library, quiet meals together, early bedtimes, and general solitude. The only one of them able to maintain much of a spark is young Margaret – who spies on everyone constantly and has a better grasp of what is really going on around her than any of the adults there.

But boredom breeds complacency, and in this case, complacency breeds danger.

Bottom Line: B.W. Black (pseudonym for Irish novelist John Banville) offers something here a bit different from the spate of World War II fiction of the past few months. Interestingly, the bulk of The Secret Guests is spent exploring everyday life on the estate and how the royal princesses settle into the dullness of their new world as they learn more about those secluded there with them. Black presents Elizabeth and Margaret as children already clearly exhibiting the personalities that would later define them as adults. Elizabeth is seen as aloof and proper; Margaret as impetuous and adventuress. As such, Margaret, the youngest person in the story, is often its driving force.

Review Copy provided by Henry Holt and Company

Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

Figuring that all the hype about Where the Crawdads Sing could not possibly be right, I was in no real hurry to read the Delia Owens smash bestseller of late 2018. For a while, the book  seemed to be all that anyone was reading or talking about. It was everywhere. And Crawdads is still so popular today that it’s ranked at number two on the paper’s hardcover bestseller list (December 8, 2019) despite having first hit that list some fifteen months ago. Now that I’ve finally read the novel, I’m wondering what took me so long because it’s almost as good as people have been saying it is. 

Most readers probably already know the basic premise of Where the Crawdads Sing even if they haven’t read it yet:

            The “Marsh Girl” has been living alone in the marshes around Barkley Cove, North Carolina, for years. Kya, deserted one-by-one by every single member of her family, has in fact been living alone in the family shack since she was nine years old. She has attended school for only one day in her entire life, and her survival has largely been possible only because a black family provides her with secondhand clothing and makes sure that she has all the things the marsh cannot provide her. But then in 1969, when Kya is 24 years old, she is charged with the murder of Chase Andrews, a young man she is known to have had a personal relationship with for over a year. Now, the reclusive “Marsh Girl” is fighting for her life in a death penalty trial whose jury is filled with many of the same townspeople who have been ridiculing her for her whole life. She has a good lawyer, but does she have good enough a story to tell the jury?

Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing is, though, much more than its intriguing plotline. Delia Owens creates a marsh setting for her novel that becomes real to readers despite their probable unfamiliarity with such a place in the real world. The tides, the swamp critters, the shack’s isolation, the weather, and the intricate network of coves and inlets that allow Kya so easily to avoid her trackers are as important in making Crawdads unforgettable as the plot itself is. Where the Crawdads Sing begins as a tragic coming-of-age novel, morphs into an intriguing murder mystery, and ends as a rather unlikely courtroom drama. Of the three stages of the novel, the coming-of-age portion is the strongest and the courtroom drama the weakest and least believable. 

Bottom Line: Where the Crawdads Sing may not be a perfect novel, but it is one that I won’t be soon forgetting. Catherine Danielle Clark (Kya) is one of those characters that work their way deep inside a reader’s heart, a character it’s impossible not to pull for and worry about. Kya’s coming-of-age story, hard as it may be to believe if one thinks about it too much, is simply beautiful. The murder mystery itself is well done, offering enough clues to keep the reader guessing away without making it either too hard or too easy to recognize the killer. It is the courtroom portion of the novel that keeps me from rating Crawdads even higher than I do.  I found it too difficult to believe that a capital murder trial, against even this particular defendant, could be built and prosecuted with so little evidence, and I think that killed some of the drama of the situation.  Still, you need to read Where the Crawdads Sing because you are probably going to love it. It’s almost impossible not to. 

Like a Runaway Horse - Random Thoughts on the End of 2019

I don’t mean to sound like some cliché-addled whiner today, but here goes anyway: Where has 2019 gotten to? I realized just today that reading-wise I’m not prepared for it to end just 26 days from now. I still have way too much to do.

Every year, I prepare a couple of Top Ten lists for December posting, one for fiction and one for non-fiction. I limit the lists, of course, to the books I’ve actually read and reviewed on Book Chase, so in the great scheme of things, they don’t much reflect the big picture. But they do represent my personal reading year, and when I go back and look at the lists from prior years they remind me of all the great books I’ve already read – and they get me excited about all the great ones already out there in the pipeline for the next year. 

But this year, I’ve got at least three unread books on my desk that I know very likely deserve to be on one or the other of the two lists. I’ve read the authors before, some of their previous books are among my longtime favorites, and I was so excited to get my hands on the books in the first place that I shelled out the hardcover price for each of them the week they were published. Problem is, they were published in October or November and I don’t think I’ll be able to read them before next year because of the books I’ve already lined up for December reviews. (And I really don’t want to rush through them anyway and cheapen the experience of reading some of my favorite writers.) I suppose the good news is that they were published so late in the year, that I can, by my standards (books published between October 1 of the previous year and December 31 of the current year are list-eligible), consider them for my 2020 lists. 

The Unpeelable Sticker 

And I suppose that I should confess to being something of a reading contrarian. I’ve mentioned before how I find celebrity-headed book clubs to be cringe-worthy. Oprah is pushing it? Reese Witherspoon chose it for “Reese’s Book Club? Well, no thanks then. Honestly, I’m kind of embarrassed to be seen carrying around a book with one of their book club stickers on the cover because it makes me feel like a little lost lamb in a very large herd of sheep. And now to make things even worse, many of the books they choose come with their "stickers" actually printed as part of the book's cover; you can’t peel the sticker off even if you want to. 

That’s why I may be the last person in the world to read 2018’s Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I’m about 200 pages into the 34^th printing (geez, how many millions of copies has this book sold) of the book right now, but even that probably would not have happened if my wife had not mentioned last month that she thought she would enjoy it. So, dutiful husband that I am (it’s OK to laugh), I came home with a copy the next day. She loved it – although that’s not always a good sign because she also loves just about every Hallmark movie she’s ever watched. But 200 pages into Crawdads, I’m starting to think that she is right about the book.

Too, I wish I didn’t feel so much like a magpie these days. I’m just as guilty of acquiescing to an urge to acquire every shiny new trinket I spot (brand new books) as that well known flying-thief is. And that means that I have read exactly nine books so far this year that were on my shelves on the first day of 2019. Nine! And I have dozens of them staring at me all day long from my shelves and waiting patiently for their turn to finally come along. Some of them, I keep reminding myself, have been sitting there since the mid-eighties and I’m starting to wonder if they will ever be read. (That may become an official challenge for next year, now that I think about it.)

Don’t let all of this whining make you think that I’m not excited about the rapid approach of 2020 and all that a brand new year offers, because I am, and I can’t wait to see what our book world has in store for all of us next year.  As I’ve said here many times before, readers are special people and book-blogging is the best way to bring some of them together where I can enjoy their company and be a more active part of the reading community. Thank you for being part of that community.

So, ready or not, I can’t wait for 2020.

From the Grave - Jay Brandon

From the Grave is Texas author Jay Brandon’s second Edward Hall novel. It follows 2018’s Against the Law, the novel that introduced the impulsive ex-con, (disbarred) lawyer who never expected to practice law again but soon enough finds himself defending his own sister against a charge of murdering her husband. 

Now, this time around, Edward is back in the courtroom at the specific request of a Houston district attorney who wants him to defend the black man accused of kidnapping and terrorizing the D.A.’s sister. If he accepts the case, Edward will be facing a judge who justifiably despises him and a ruthlessly aggressive court-appointed prosecutor who wants to put his client away for the rest of his life. If it doesn’t sound like Edward has much of a chance of keeping his client a free man, that’s because he doesn’t. But Edward has been assured that if he impresses the District Attorney and her cronies enough with his handling of this case, the state board will consider reinstating his law license on a probationary basis. 

Jay Brandon

Edward Hall is no fool. He understands that the only way he is going to impress the D.A. is to lose the case in spectacular fashion. They are making it easy for him to let that happen, but Edward is not even certain that he wants to practice law again in the first place – and losing a case that will cost his client the rest of his life behind bars, is most certainly not the way he wants to get reinstated. It doesn’t hurt that the accused kidnapper happens to be the only friend that Edward made during his years in prison, the man who protected Edward from all-comers and made it possible for him to walk away from the Texas prison system in one piece. It’s a no-brainer; Edward is taking the case - and he plans to win it. 

Bottom Line: From the Grave allows Jay Brandon to expand nicely upon his Edward Hall character. Hall has a good sense of right and wrong, but he is not a man who plays by the rules if that means that the bad guys are going to come out on top. He considers burglary to be a useful evidence-gathering tool despite having been caught both times he’s previously tried that tactic. And now he has a girlfriend who is even more enthusiastic about the potentials of burglary than he is – so what could possibly go wrong? This one may be a bit farfetched, but that’s what makes it so much fun.

Review Copy courtesy of Severn House Publishers

Without Expiration - William R. Hincy (Book Trailer of the Week Series)

I have been a fan of well-produced book trailers for a long time, and I've been featuring them here on Book Chase since sometime in early 2012. Book trailers, I think, are an asset whose value is all too often underestimated by publishers and authors. In numerous cases, it was only because I stumbled upon a book trailer that I even became aware of the book's existence at all - and some of those serendipitous discoveries went on to become favorites of mine instead of forever remaining under my radar. 

The trailer below is in promotion of William R. Hincy's recently released paperback Without Expiration: 

Without Expiration is a collection of twelve of the author's short stories. I have not read the stories, but they appear to share the theme that personal mistakes do not come with expiration dates and that all of us are flawed - it's only a matter of degree - in one way or another. Or as the trailer puts it, "Are we bad people who sometimes do good things, or good people who do bad things?" 

And, in the long run, does it much matter?

William R. Hincy is a Los Angeles area writer whose work is described this way on his Amazon.com author's page: "...Hincy aspires to use literature to connect society on an emotional level through characters who no longer create messes but have instead become the mess." That may be a little too dark for some, but as a fan of noir fiction, I find it intriguing. 

And it all started with a book trailer.

The Secrets We Kept - Lara Prescott

After struggling with it for years, in 1957 Boris Pasternack finally completed Dr. Zhivago, the novel that would come to define his life. But, unfortunately for Pasternak and his countrymen, there was no way that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would allow the book to be published there. It is thanks to the efforts of Italian publisher Gianglacomo Feltrinelli that the Zhivago manuscript was smuggled out of Russia and published (in Italian) in 1957 to became a best seller in the West. Strangely enough, Feltrinelli, a left-wing activist and militant would himself go on to die while setting explosives during a botched act of terrorism in Milan just fifteen years later.

As if all of that were not already crazy enough, it turns out that America’s Central Intelligence Agency saw the book as a useful Cold War propaganda weapon. To that purpose, the Agency had the novel translated back into Russian and it produced just over 350 copies that would be handed off to vetted Russians traveling in the West. Lara Prescott’s historical novel, The Secrets We Kept, tells us just how that may have been accomplished – and what the results were.

Beginning in 1949 and ending in 1961, the story is told in alternating “East” and “West” segments. The “West” segments are told largely through the eyes of members of the CIA typing pool, a group of women who have trained themselves somehow to type documents without absorbing the real meaning of the words they put on paper. But not all of these women are what they seem – to a woman, for instance, they know much more about what is happening around them than their male superiors suspect they know. And they have secrets of their own, secrets with the potential to get people killed. 

Lara Prescott

The “East” segments, at least until characters start to cross over, are narrated by Boris Pasternack’s mistress, a young woman who does several years of hard time in the Gulag because of her association with the author. Without her help and the secrets she keeps for him, it is unlikely that Pasternack would have successfully completed Dr. Zhivago. Olga may have sacrificed years of watching her two children grow up, but her love and support for Boris never wavered for long, and their relationship was a deep and meaningful one for both of them. 

Favorite Quote: “They had their satellites, but we had their books. Back then, we believed books could be weapons – that literature could change the course of history. The Agency knew it would take time to change the heart and minds of men, but they were in it for the long game.” 

Bottom Line: The Secrets We Kept is based on an interesting piece of seldom discussed Cold War history, a period during which books and authors were important weapons in the propaganda war between Democracy and Communism. Lara Prescott has peopled the novel with a remarkable group of female characters that play key roles in the Doctor Zhivago story and how that novel became one of the key books of the twentieth century.  As evidenced by the three-page bibliography at the end of The Secrets We Kept, this is a well-researched novel, one likely to appeal equally to fans of historical fiction and to fans of books about books. If you are a fan of both types, this is your lucky day.