A Trick of the Light - Louise Penny

A Trick of the Light is book number seven in Louise Penny’s seventeen-book Chief Inspector Gamache series. The novel falls near the halfway point of the series in more ways than one. By this point, longtime series readers already knew the main characters well enough to appreciate how their experiences were changing them and their relationships to each other. Gamache and his fellow cops had been through a traumatic experience that changed all of them — and some were more obviously than others still suffering from the psychological trauma of the shootout they were so lucky to have survived. But Gamache and his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, who both first came to Three Pines on a murder investigation, by now consider several of the villagers friends, a development that often complicates their official visits to the community. 

Much has been revealed about personal relationships already, but those relationships continue to evolve in A Trick of the Light. Gamache and Jean Guy are struggling to define the way they see each other after what they experienced together in the infamous warehouse gun battle that will forever mark their careers and their feelings about each other. Jean Guy’s marriage is in trouble; Annie’s (Gamache’s daughter) marriage is in trouble; and the cracks in the marriage of Clara and Peter Morrow (longtime Three Pines residents) are about to shatter that relationship. Still, despite the number of times that Gamache has been called to Three Pines on serious police business, he realizes now that he loves the place and feels great peace there. All of these things foreshadow a new phase in lives that will be explored in the second half of the series.

Right now, though, Clara Morrow is enjoying the moment. After years of struggling as the anonymous artist wife of her slightly better known husband Peter, whose art pays most of the family bills, Clara is about to get the break of a lifetime: the major solo show that could suddenly make her famous and wealthy. Despite Clara’s fears that it is all too good to be true, the show goes well and the reviews, though a bit mixed, are enthusiastically positive in the publications that count most in the art world. But Clara, as it turns out, was right to be worried because the morning after her celebratory party in Three Pines her husband discovers a dead body in their backyard. 

Once again, Gamache and his investigatory team set up shop in little Three Pines. And that’s when the fun begins. Gamache will learn the dirty little secret of the Québec art world: nothing is as it first seems; it is a world of greed, jealousy, ego, and dirty tricks. The book jacket puts it this way:

“Behind every smile there lurks a sneer. Inside every sweet relationship there hides a broken heart. And even when facts are slowly exposed, it is no longer clear to Gamache and his team if what they’ve found is the truth, or simply a trick of the light.”

Bottom Line: All of the best detective/crime series have one thing in common: memorable characters that readers enjoy revisiting year after year. Setting and plots are important, of course, but without continuing characters the reader can truly care about, those alone will not make a series stand out from the crowd for long. Louise Penny, remarkable storyteller that she is, offers the whole package. If you are not already reading the Gamache series, you need to grab a copy of Still Life (2005) and get started.

Louise Penny

2021: A Reading Year Filled with Surprises

Ann Cleeves

As we approach the end of 2021, I've started preparing my own "Long Lists" for favorite fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. I already know that it's going to be a shorter nonfiction list than usual because, as of today, I've read only 22 nonfiction titles. It also looks, because of my efforts to read more from prior decades this year, like the lists are going to be a mix of new and old books rather than being strictly limited to books published in 2021. 

Sherman Alexie

But what jumped out at me today as I scanned the 116 titles I've read so far is how many "breakthrough" authors there are there - authors I either barely knew or didn't know at all,  just a few months ago - who have now become must read authors to me. 

Thanks largely to my fellow book bloggers, I will be looking forward to new books from these authors, as well as reading their back catalogs, for years to come:

• William Shaw
• Reavis Z. Wortham
• Tana French
• Ann Cleeves
• Ragnar Jonasson
• Sherman Alexie
• S.A. Cosby

S.A. Cosby

This is the first time ever that I've ended a reading year being this excited about so many new-to-me authors. Usually, I'm lucky to add one or two writers to my list of favorites; never anywhere near seven, so 2021 has become one of my favorite reading years ever. With only six weeks in 2021 still to go, and a few goals still to be worked on, I'm hoping that 2022 can be half as much fun as 2021 has been.

Tana French

William Shaw

Ragnar Jonasson

Reavis Z. Wortham

The Silent Sisters - Robert Dugoni

The Silent Sisters (2022) marks the completion of Robert Dugoni’s Charles Jenkins trilogy, following The Eighth Sister (2019) and The Last Agent (2020). For the uninitiated, Charles Jenkins is a six foot, five inch black man who in his sixties has been called back into CIA service so that he can extract several women who were trained to spy for the US since birth. You read that right: a huge, black American spy is expected to go undetected inside Russia long enough to help US spies escape the only country they have known their entire lives. Rather surprisingly, Dugoni makes it all seem very possible…if not likely…to work.

Originally, there were seven women working in critical Russian positions who were providing key intelligence information to American counterintelligence officers. Each of the women had been groomed and trained by their Russian parents from birth to believe in what they were doing, and to do it well. But now, things are starting to fall apart, and time is running out on the Seven Sisters because an American traitor has revealed their existence to the Russians. Russian intelligence officers do not know their names, but do know that seven women were planted —  and that some of them are still on the job. Now, the Russians are ruthlessly looking at all women in their early sixties who are working in jobs that would allow them to pass critical intelligence to the US. In biblical fashion, all of these women are going to be eliminated in order to make sure that no spies survive the purge; they will be tortured and killed, one-by-one, until that possibility is eliminated.

The CIA knows that two of the women are still active, but each has gone silent in recent weeks, meaning that the women realize the end is near for them. They need to get out of Russia, and if they are to survive, they need to do it now. Charles Jenkins, who has already gotten one of the seven women out, is going back again to rescue the surviving pair before they meet the fate of those who have already been arrested, tortured, and killed. That the odds are stacked against Jenkins is an understatement. Before this one is over, Jenkins and the women will simultaneously be chased by Russian intelligence agencies, the Russian police, and the Russian mafia, all of whom want to capture Jenkins for reasons of their own. But is being chased by three such powerful groups at the same time necessarily a bad thing?

Bottom Line: Robert Dugoni writes a heck of a thriller, the kind of story involving long, potentially deadly chases where the hero must run for his life even though survival seems a long shot at best. But what Dugoni does better than most thriller writers, is create characters that the reader truly cares about because they become so easy to identify with. We learn about their spouses and children, their hopes and their fears…what makes them tick. And Dugoni does it for both the good guys and the bad guys. The world is not as black or white as we used to believe it was; it’s a hundred shades of grey, instead. There are good guys, and there are bad guys, on both sides. The beauty of The Silent Sisters is watching the good guys find,  recognize, and help each other. 

I recommend the Charles Jenkins trilogy to spy novel fans, and personally I’m happy to see that Dugoni has at least left the door cracked open enough to allow for the possibility of a fourth Jenkins book. So here’s hoping this is not the last time I’ll be reading about the man.

Robert Dugoni

Review Copy provided by Thomas & Mercer

The Silent Sisters to be published on February 22, 2022 

Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy - Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Travels with George is one of those books that appeals to readers on multiple levels. In my case, it particularly appeals because it recounts a modern road trip that exactly mimics the one taken by George Washington in 1789 only six months after his inauguration as America’s first president. But, in addition to being a book about identical road trips separated by centuries, Philbrick also explores Washington’s intimate involvement in the enslavement of Africans and their descendants for the benefit of himself and his wife’s family. 

Washington knew in 1789 that the country he had been elected to help govern could fall apart much more quickly than it had been created. Governors of the thirteen former colonies, to a man, still considered their state boundaries as the “country” in which they lived. Two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not even ratified the Constitution by the time that Washington’s inauguration came. And that is precisely why Washington hit the road.

The brand new president decided it was time for him to make himself available to ordinary citizens so that they could express their concerns about the new government directly to him. At the same time, Washington hoped to convince the people he spoke with that they now had a new identity in common with everyone else in the former colonies: they were Americans. Some 229 years later (in 2018), Nathaniel Philbrick decided to follow in Washington’s tracks to see if the people in America were any more united today than they were when Washington first embarked on his own travels. 

Washington began his trip by traveling through the New England states, but he bypassed Rhode Island until that state finally ratified the Constitution. The president would only, in fact, visit Rhode Island after the state’s ratification of the document, and he combined that portion of his road trip with a tour of Long Island where it is believed he spent time with several of the anonymous spies who were instrumental in key military victories over the British. A second, even longer, road trip was undertaken a few months later during which all of the Southern states were visited. Washington was happy to learn during this portion of his tour of America that the expected opposition from Southern leaders was not as common as he had feared it to be. 

It is unlikely that any other national figure could have united the former colonies as quickly or as securely as George Washington managed it through his reputation, words, and action. During his travels, the purposely accessible new president stayed in public inns rather than in the much more comfortable, and private, homes of political allies who would have been happy to offer him shelter. He also despised all the pomp and ceremony that so many local dignitaries wanted him to sit through, and despite being a very private man, he made sure that everyone at least got a look at him if they wanted one. 

Washington, though, was far from perfect. He owned slaves, his wife owned slaves, and the family’s profiteering from slavery cannot be glossed over. Philbrick, to his credit, takes an approach to the past that I appreciate: he hides nothing, but he never forgets that:

“A reckoning is going on in which many Americans have come to wonder whether anything from our country’s history is worth saving. People from the past — even from just a few decades ago — will inevitably fail to meet the evolving standards of the present. That does not mean they failed to meet in their own imperfect way, the challenges of their own time as best they could.” (Page 171)

I wish more people, historians included, would keep this in mind.

Bottom Line: I thoroughly enjoyed the comparisons that Philbrick makes between what he and his wife encounter on the road and what Washington saw in the same locations two centuries earlier. This country may be just as divided today as it was during Washington’s first term as president but the union held then, and what Philbrick heard from strangers during his own travels gives me confidence that the same will be true today. George Washington was a remarkable man, someone who came along at precisely the moment he was needed most. Washington sensed that he had the power and the charisma to make the United States into whatever he wanted it to be, even into a dictatorship if he chose to do so. But as Philbrick says, “…his (Washington’s) only interest was in establishing a federal government that was strong enough to survive without him.” And he did it.

Nathaniel Philbrick

An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed - Helene Tursten

In An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, Helene Tursten provides the backstory of the 89-year-old killer she first introduced to the world in her five-story compilation, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good. As her victims would attest to if only they could, Maud was most definitely up to no good in that first collection, and in this second book featuring her, anyone crossing Maud is still likely to pay the ultimate price for doing so. This time around Maud, who has decided it’s time to enjoy the money she’s accumulated over her long lifetime, is embarking on a luxury vacation to South Africa. This is the structure Tursten uses to tie the book’s six stories together so that they read more like a short novel than as a collection of short stories.

If Maud has any kind of motto to live by, it’s probably this thought that she has at the end of “Lancing a Boil,” the third story in the book:

“Certain Problems have only one solution. That’s just the way it is.”

In the book’s first story,”An Elderly Lady Begins to Remember Her Past,” Maud has attracted the interest of two police detectives who do not buy her explanation about the dead antique dealer she supposedly discovered in her apartment (in a story from the previous collection). The two cops keep returning for follow-up interviews, and Maud is beginning to fear that she may have finally gone too far in solving her own problems. She decides the best thing to do is to make it impossible for them to question her for a while, and decides that this is the perfect time for a return visit to South Africa. 

It takes a while to get from Sweden to South Africa, though, and Maud, who is determined to get every penny’s worth of what she has payed for her first class ticket, is enjoying more — and better — booze than most of her fellow passengers. She can barely hold her eyes open anymore, and when she falls asleep, it is only to dream vividly about some of the memories she has more or less suppressed over her long lifetime of solving “Certain Problems” for herself. 

In the next four stories, we learn: how Maud dealt with two boys who were bullying her older sister; how, as a fresh graduate, she turned a part-time teaching job into the full-time job she held for the rest of her life; the truth about how she was finally freed from having to be her sister’s caretaker; and how she rescued her only friend from certain financial ruin. But Tursten saves the best for last, a story titled “An Elderly Lady Takes a Trip to Africa,” which comprises just over half the book’s total pages. 

This final story is a blending of two Maud’s, one we’ve seen before, and one we never expected to see at all. Maud has discovered her soft side now that she’s approaching the end of her life, and although she’s not above using her usual solution to solving Certain Problems, she finds herself wanting to keep a family she’s met from becoming homeless in just a few weeks. But because there’s no one to kill to make this new problem go away, Maud comes up with a creative solution that will change their lives — and hers — forever. 

“In Maud’s case, it had taken an unusually long time, but now everything felt right. She’d even gained a little family in the process. Not bad for an elderly lady, she thought. She decided to treat herself to a little dose of Power of Life with her coffee.”

Bottom Line: So are Maud’s killing days over for good now? It remains to be seen whether or not Helene Tursten has more in mind for Maud, but it’s already been one heck of a ride with one of the most memorable serial killers the fiction world has ever seen. It’s been fun. 

Helene Tursten

"Cutting the Cord" and Saving Money in the Process

This has unexpectedly turned into a weekend of very little reading...but this time,  I'm OK with that. It's taken several hours of web research and set-up time, but we have finally cut the cord with traditional "cable TV." In the process, we've cut our cost by around $80 per month while gaining a video menu much more suited to what we enjoy watching - and the picture is finally coming in at the quality AT&T uVerse has been promising us but never delivering.

Oh, we also upgraded our AT&T-provided internet speed to the maximum offered for the same price we were paying for less speed because promotional offers were available that AT&T keeps secret from longtime customers already paying the same cost for less speed. That, and our so-called "landline," is what AT&T is now providing us.

So what do we have now? Well, for $80 less (plus the around $20 worth of Federal taxes associated with it), we now subscribe to Hulu plus Live TV, Discovery Plus, and Hallmark movies. In addition, we get a bundled price through the Hulu subscription for Disney+ and ESPN+. You can probably see that some of the choices were my wife's and the others were mine. She loves the old Disney classic cartoons; I love all the extra live sports events on ESPN+. She loves the Hallmark movies and all the programming that comes with the Discovery Plus connection. I love the fact that the SEC network is part of the live programming offered so that I can keep up with the Texas A&M Aggies and the rest of the conference.

We both love that all of our local channels are available through Hulu Live (with the exception of our local PBS station). We love the cloud DVR that gives us 200 hours of recordings we make off of live TV broadcasts (I've already saved A&Ms 20-3 win over Auburn yesterday). And we love all the on-demand programming that comes with the various services. Because the local channels are streamed via Hulu, there's no $50 antenna to buy for the local stations, which used to be the only way to cut the cable cord and still have access to local stations.

But most of all, I love the picture quality that streaming delivers as compared to what AT&T was delivering via its fiber optic network. The difference, in some cases, is astounding. My televisions have never looked so good. 

In addition we were already subscribed to Prime, Acorn, and BritBox. So, yes, we are still spending too much money on entertainment...but now it's first rate, and more importantly, we are not overpaying for things that just cluttered up the menu. And there are no contracts on any of this stuff; we can cancel or "pause" the services whenever we want to without being tied to the calendar. I suppose it's all still an expensive extravagance, but hey, it's a whole lot cheaper - and better - than it was on Friday.

Now I need to tear myself away from the screen and get back to my reading.