Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler

I’m going to go out on a limb here and call Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road a coming-of-age novel. And it is one, if you concede the point that some people don’t manage to get that job done before reaching their fortieth birthday. Micah Mortimer is one of those people.

Micah is in his early forties now, and he still lives alone. In fact, he lives in the basement of the small apartment building he manages on the side for its out-of-state owner. In lieu of a salary, Micah lives rent-free in the basement apartment. His “real” job, the one that actually brings him in a little cash, is as a computer-problem troubleshooter for his little one-man company called Tech Hermit. Tech Hermit could not be a more appropriate name for the company – or for Micah – because it’s who he is.

The world sees Micah this way:

            “He has a girlfriend, but they seem to lead fairly separate lives. You see her heading toward his back door now and then with a sack of takeout; you see them setting forth on a weekend morning in the Kia, minus the TECH HERMIT sign. He doesn’t appear to have male friends. He is cordial to the tenants but no more than that. They call out a greeting when they meet up with him and he nods amiably and raises a hand, often not troubling to speak. Nobody knows if he has family.”

The scary part about all of this is that Micah is perfectly content to go on living exactly the same way for the next thirty or forty years. Even when his girlfriend makes it obvious  that she has had enough of the status quo, Micah is so egocentric that he doesn’t get the message. And when a teenager shows up at Micah’s front door wondering if he might just be the boy’s biological father, all Micah can think about is how his old girlfriend, the boy’s mother, suddenly dumped him the way she did all those years ago.

So it’s now or never for Micah. If he’s ever going to grow up, this may be his last best chance.

Bottom Line: Redhead by the Side of the Road is a satisfying character study of a novel centering on a not-so-young-anymore man who is still trying to find himself. He is not particularly likable, even to the reader, the way he is, so it is easy to root for an emotional awakening on his part. This Anne Tyler novel may be a relatively short one, but Micah Mortimer is a complete character – like him or not.

I Really NEED to Visit a Brick & Mortar Bookstore - And Soon

I can't tell you how badly I want to get inside a brick & mortar bookstore right now - any brick & mortar bookstore will do. I want to want to experience again the immense pleasure that comes from picking up a book that I know absolutely nothing about, a book whose cover just reached out and grabbed me as I was walking past it. There's nothing like experiencing the crispness of a brand new book, the weight, the paper grade, the way the pages have been cut and bound, and best of all the new book smell that, for me, is rivaled only by the smell of a new car. 

I want to wander the shelves aimlessly on a Saturday morning, maybe taking the occasional coffee break along the way, and gathering up a few books to take home with me that I didn't even know existed on Friday night. 

I want to search the "Bargain Book" shelves to see if something by an author whose work I collect has recently ended up in the stacks of remainders there. 

I want to take a look at the magazines on offer to see if there's some new literary magazine I need to read or subscribe to. 

I want to listen in on the occasional bookish conversation between customers or between customers and booksellers that often make me smile to myself. (Sometimes, I even gather the nerve to worm my way into the conversation - even if a bookseller is part of it.)

 I want to browse all the bookish junk that bookstores place near the front of the store in order to tempt you one final time as you stand in line to check out (bookmarks, pens, journals, book-lights, bookends, bookstands, etc.).

I even want to look at all the puzzles, games, toys, and LPs on offer in so many bookstores today - a practice I've often criticized, so I must be getting soft.

The thing that scares me most about not being able to shop an actual bookstore is the possibility that I will forever miss out on dozens and dozens of books I would have otherwise discovered for myself by browsing shelves. 

And, I'm really getting tired of reading so many e-books. That's just not the same reading experience as reading a hardback or quality paperback, and it never will be.

Just writing this short post has made me realize that if I ultimately contract Covid-19, the most likely reason will be that I started shopping bookstores before it was really wise to do so. 

I can hold off on most other shopping without much of a problem because I didn't do all that much of it even before this mess began. And, as for groceries, I find that if you go early enough in the morning, and keep that cart moving, you don't run into all that many people anyway. So I'm not as nervous about grocery shopping as I was just a few weeks ago. 

No, it will be a bookstore that gets me, I'm pretty sure, if anything does. I can't imagine holding out until a vaccine is available in a year, or two years, or ever. I really need my bookstore-fix, and I need it soon.

The Cruelest Month - Louise Penny

The Cruelest Month (2007) is Louise Penny’s third Inspector Gamache novel. With the addition of 2020’s All the Devils Are Here, that popular series now numbers sixteen novels and one short story, The Hangman, which is published separately and rather generously called a novella by its publisher, so seventeen books in all.

Three Pines, a little Canadian village not very far north of the border with the U.S. is not long on entertainment possibilities, especially in the colder months of the year. For that reason, when someone with even a remotely unusual talent comes to stay in the village for a few days, Gabri, who helps run the local bistro, is quick to try to put them to work. This time around, he has convinced a visiting psychic to hold a séance to entertain the locals. Unfortunately, one of them ends up being entertained to death – and Inspector Gamache and his team are going to have to figure out why and how it happened.

Louise Penny’s Gamache novels more or less begin where the previous one ended, and although it takes almost fifty pages for Gamache to make his first appearance in The Cruelest Month, that is largely the case with this one, too. After making a quick determination that the victim was murdered and did not simply die of fright during the séance, Gamache and his team of misfit investigators are faced with the task of determining which of the tiny group of suspects had reason to kill a woman who seemed to be so universally popular. (As it turns out, at least half-a-dozen people who attended the séance that night will qualify as legitimate suspects before this one can be solved.)

The Cruelest Month is the kind of solid murder mystery that readers have come to expect from Louise Penny. It comes complete with multiple credible suspects and tosses out enough red herrings to keep most readers guessing to the end as they narrow down the list of suspects in their own minds. But Gamache fans are not necessarily there to solve a mystery. Instead, they are there to watch the brilliant Gamache do the hard work as they learn more and more about what makes the man tick, how his methods work, and what is going on behind the scene in his personal life.

Louise Penny

And then there is the core group of Three Pines citizens that readers, especially those who may have started reading the series halfway through like I did, have already learned to enjoy so much. We want to know more about people like Ruth, Gabri, Olivier, Myrna, and Clara, so the early books in the series now read to us more like prequels than anything else. We want, too, to learn why investigators like Isabelle Lacoste and Jean-Guy Beauvoir are so loyal to Gamache, and more about younger versions of Gamache’s wife and children. The Cruelest Month does not disappoint in any of this.

But personally, I will remain particularly fond of The Cruelest Month because of its introduction of Rosa, the duck who will be Ruth’s constant companion from this title onward. Who knew that Rosa ever had a sister called Lillian? Also, this is, I think, the first Gamache novel in which the Inspector seriously contemplates a life for himself and Reine-Marie in Three Rivers – either before or after retirement from the Sûreté. Gamache still has enemies in high places, men who are determined to force him to resign in disgrace because of how he exposed the corruption of a very powerful colleague of theirs. The problem is that, so far at least, Gamache is smarter than them – and much, much more patient.

Bottom Line: Don’t miss this one, Gamache fans. There’s a lot to chew on here.

Past Reason Hated - Peter Robinson

Past Reason Hated, published in 1991, is Peter Robinson’s fifth Inspector Banks book. By this point in the series, even though Robinson is not an author prone to using much of a subplot to explore the personal life of his main character, Inspector Banks is better known to series readers. He is now 39 years old, his wife Sandra is probably about the same age, his son is 17, and his daughter is a preteen with a rapidly expanding interest in boys, make-up, and what her friends think. The man absolutely loves to drink and smoke, preferably at the same time, and he still seldom passes up the chance to do either even when on the job. Interestingly, too, he does not seem to be particularly empathetic when encountering homosexuals of either sex during an investigation – even when, as in his current case, the victim turns out to have been a lesbian. (Was 1991 really that long ago?)

Banks left the London crime scene behind a few years earlier hoping to be able to do his crime-solving at a much slower pace, but so far the citizens of Eastvale, the North Yorkshire town that became his new home, have not much cooperated. Instead, Eastvale and its surrounding suburbs have supplied Banks with a rather steady supply of murders to investigate. In Past Reason Hated, the murder victim is a young lesbian whose bloody corpse is found on her couch just three days before Christmas. Poignantly, the room is well-lit by a decorated Christmas tree, and an album of classical music is playing over and over on the stereo.

Caroline Hartley was a new member of a community theater group on the verge of opening a timely production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, so Banks and his team begin their murder investigation with an immediate abundance of suspects. But, starting  with the fact that no one else in the group even suspected that Caroline was gay, Banks and his investigators will soon learn that the real Caroline Hartley hardly resembled the woman she presented herself to the world to be. Banks keeps pulling on threads, the number of suspects grows longer and longer, and Banks even finds himself following leads all the way to the strip clubs in London’s SoHo district and back before he identifies the murderer.

Peter Robinson

This is one of the more complicated plots of the early Inspector Banks novels, but ironically, it is also one that seems easier for the reader to solve than it is for Banks and his whole crew to figure out. It is a case of “one of these things is not like the others” that will give many readers a solid hunch about the murderer’s identity some 60% or so of the way through Past Reason Hated. And if those readers are like me, they will be disappointed in just how predictable this makes the book’s entire climax. This is one of those times I would have really preferred to be wrong because a surprise at the end would have been a whole lot more fun.

Bottom Line: Past Reason Hated is a well-written literary murder mystery that fails to completely satisfy the veteran mystery reader because it is a little too solvable. That does not mean that fans of the Inspector Banks series should skip this one, though – not at all -  because it does add a few details to the Banks character, especially as it relates to the detective’s past, that fans are sure to appreciate.

In West Mills - De'Shawn Charles Winslow

De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s In West Mills is not at all the kind of novel that would usually grab my attention – not even close. But back in the good old days, sometime during March 2020, on my very last visit to a brick and mortar bookstore before virus-hell suddenly broke out all around the world, I spotted a copy on a display table near the store’s front door. Looking now at the book’s front cover, I’m still not sure why I stopped to pick it up, but I’m grateful that I did because this 2019 debut novel has become one of my favorite reads of 2020.

The book’s main character is Azalea Knot Centre, a brand-new schoolteacher who has come to little West Mills, North Carolina, in the early 1940s to school the town’s black children in their separate, but hardly equal, schoolhouse. “Knot,” as she becomes known to the black community, is not a typical starry-eyed young teacher, however. She is most definitely her own woman, and she doesn’t care who knows it or resents her for being it. Oh, Knot enjoys teaching well enough, but her three great loves in life are really good moonshine liquor, men, and 19^th century literature (especially Charles Dickens novels), pretty much in that order.

Obviously, two of her three main loves, especially when experienced together, have a tendency to get free-spirited women like Knot into a lot of trouble (hint: Great Expectations is not part of the problem). Knot’s lifestyle did not much lend itself to teaching school in the first place, so when the inevitable finally happens, and she finds herself pregnant, her days in the classroom are destined for an early end. Knot simply cannot see herself as wife-material, much less as someone qualified to raise a child, but she knows she will have to give birth to the baby because, “As scared as Knot was of being someone’s mother, she was more scared of dying on some old woman’s kitchen table, trying to avoid becoming someone’s mother.”   

Right now, marriage and motherhood may just be the last two things she wants, or needs, in her life:

            “Knowing that she wasn’t ready didn’t mean she liked not being ready. But it felt safe to her – the only kind of safe Knot felt all right with. Safe by not having to worry about hurting a child’s feelings, the way her mother had hurt hers. Safe by not becoming someone’s wife just to figure out, years later, that she didn’t want him. Safe to get a bit of joy from the moonshine – something that couldn’t hurt her or be hurt by her.”

De'Shawn Charles Winslow

But with a little help from her friends, especially neighbor Otis Lee Loving, Knot Centre creates a nice little life for herself in West Mills, North Carolina. As it turns out, in fact, this woman who spent most of her life living all alone, will have as great an impact on the lives of the citizens of West Mills as most anyone who ever lived there.

Bottom Line: In West Mills may be De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel, but it certainly doesn’t read much like an author’s first book. The novel spans the years 1941-1987, and it is great fun to watch its colorful cast of characters age and mature over the decades as West Mills itself evolves. There is a lot going on in this one, especially with the complicated relationships that develop between the main characters, but it would be unwise to risk inadvertently revealing a major spoiler or two by saying much more about the plot. This is one you need to experience for yourself in order to get the most out of it.    

My Sister the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

Once upon a time, two very different sisters shared a home in Nigeria with their mother and a handful of servants. Their father, a corrupt and brutal man, has died – but not before leaving his indelible mark on both daughters. During his lifetime, the girls feared their father much more than they loved or admired him, but now that he is dead, they still try to live their lives in a manner that would make him proud of them. They can’t help themselves.

Korede and Ayoola are sisters, but they could hardly be more different. Korede, the oldest of the two, is a tall, “sensible” woman of average looks who works for a charismatic doctor in a small clinic. She gets along well with the young doctor, and although he hardly notices it, Korede is falling in love with him. Ayoola, on the other hand, is very short, with stunning good looks; the word “sensible” is not one likely ever to come up in anyone’s description of her. As Oyinkan Braithwaite reveals in My Sister the Serial Killer, the more appropriate s-word for Ayoola probably would be “sociopath.”

Oyinkan Braithwaite

Early on in My Sister the Serial Killer, Korede receives a shocking phone call from Ayoola that by this point in their relationship is not really unexpected. Ayoola has just killed her third boyfriend with the same knife, and once again the tiny Ayoola needs her big sister’s help in disposing of the body. The always sensible Korede knows that her sister is a murderer, and she understands that telling the police about Ayoola’s tendency to end relationships so permanently is the right thing to do. But she’s had three chances to do the right thing now, and hasn’t done it yet. Ayoola is, after all, her only sister, and Korede will do whatever it takes to protect her sister from the law.

But that all changes on the day that Korede learns Ayoola’s new boyfriend is none other than the same young doctor she herself has been fantasizing about for months. Korede knows that she can’t just sit back and wait for the man she loves to become her sister’s next victim. But how can she stop Ayoola before it is too late, and how far is she willing to go to do it?

Bottom Line: My Sister the Serial Killer is satirical comedy disguised as bloody crime fiction. It is as much about sibling rivalry and how adult relationships between siblings are shaped by events shared in childhood, as it is about serial killings and the disposal of bodies. The bloody, bizarre novel is laugh-out-loud funny at times, and it’s filled with a handful of memorable characters that left me wishing it had been a little bit longer than it is. This one is fun, so don’t let all of the blood in it put you off it.