Murder to Go by Emma Lathen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"To-oo Make Life Bright
Have Chi-i-cken To-oo-nite!"

Murder to Go (1969) is my first novel by Emma Lathen, a pseudonym of a mystery-writing duo of economists, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. Alas, it is not a particularly auspicious introduction to the authors. I may try to read another book of theirs, but my interest has substantially decreased. Wikipedia tells us that all mysteries by Emma Lathen are situated in the world of business and that each novel deals with a different type of industry. While indeed the complicated business/finance/economics matters are presented in a way accessible to a layman reader like myself, I tend to be less interested in business activities than in watching gray paint dry on a gray wall.

John Putnam Thatcher is a senior vice-president of Sloan Guaranty Trust, "the third-largest bank in the world". The bank happens to be financing the Chicken Tonight company, a chicken dinner home delivery franchising operation that has been booming under the leadership of Frank Hedstrom. Mr. Hedstrom "built up a million-dollar business - almost overnight": he is a "boy wonder" in the business world and he is planning to expand into other areas by taking over an insurance company.

But then 72 people in six states are hospitalized with acute food poisoning and the health authorities quickly establish that Chicken Tonight is to blame. The seemingly accidental poisoning was in fact the result of tampering with the food ready be delivered. One of the victims dies so that the police and other government agencies now have to deal with murder. The authorities suspect a disgruntled employee. However, it is actually Mr. Thatcher who solves the case and uncovers business machinations that underlie the tampering.

We learn a lot about various aspects of franchising business and gain insights into the basics of finance:

"When trouble befalls a debtor, there is a period when he covers up, when he minimizes his predicament, [... when] he is the one who does the worrying. But let things go really sour and positions get reversed. The creditor does the worrying, and the debtor holds the whip hand."

The novel also provides slight comedy relief: one of the threads describes preparations to celebrate work anniversary of a high-ranking employee of the bank. The preparations are so elaborate that they virtually bring all other activities of the third-largest bank in the world to a standstill.

This competently written and somewhat engaging mystery might be quite interesting for readers interested in business intrigues. Certainly not for me.

Two stars.


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Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"She's a phony. But she's a real phony."
(O.J. Berman, Holly Golightly's agent in Breakfast at Tiffany's.)

Funny how one (mis)remembers things. I vividly remember the place where I read Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's in summer of 1965, but I only vaguely remember the book. On the other hand, I do not remember, even roughly, when I watched the movie based on the book, but I vividly remember Audrey Hepburn in her iconic black dress and her long cigarette holder. Sam Wasson's Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2010) is an detailed story of making of that movie, and the title refers to the exact time and place when the shooting began on October 2, 1960. The book was awarded the honor of New York Times' Best Book of the Year so I am happy that I like it a lot too.

The reader will be impressed by the completeness of the author's study. In addition to obvious aspects like Capote's story on which the movie story is based, Audrey Hepburn's performance, and Blake Edward's direction, Mr. Wasson discusses a variety of other factors: Edith Head's costumes, Givenchy dresses, Mel Ferrer's (Ms. Hepburn's husband) meddling, Henry Mancini's music, the "Moon River" song, and many others.

Two aspects of the study appeal the most to me. The author succeeds in explaining one of the sources of the movie's success: the change in social norms and attitudes regarding depiction of women in movies that was happening between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. The author also stresses the movie's role in furthering that change in social norms. Before 1960s the women in films were portrayed either as "saints" or "sluts." Breakfast breaks with this stereotype: its heroine, Holly Golightly, is basically an expensive call girl, presented as a kooky plaything, sweet and very likeable:

"It was one of the earliest pictures to ask us to be sympathetic towards a slightly immoral young woman. Movies were beginning to say that if you were imperfect, you didn't have to be punished."

The other aspect I find very interesting is the author's clear understanding that making Hollywood movies is not about art, not about entertainment, and - of course - not about changing social mores and climate. It is ONLY about business, ONLY about making money. The actor's skill, the screenplay, the director's talent are just tools to make money for the producers:

"... the crude reality of supply and demand contends that great talent, no matter how awesome, must be a salable commodity marketable to its era..."

Creating a new star, creating a new look for women are a business. Even the famous Little Black Dress worn by Holly had to be appropriately "packaged" for ensuring maximum business.

The reader will find many other fascinating observations and analyses: for instance, I love the fragments about how movie censorship worked in 1960 - from today's point of view the practices seem totally insane. Passages about the French author, Colette, noticing Audrey Hepburn and about the Givenchy's dresses are fascinating. And of course the never boring persona of Truman Capote is towering in the background. If not for the overly florid language, painfully pretentious chapter titles, and abundance of gossip tabloid stuff, this could be a truly great book.

Three and a half stars.

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Helvetesilden by Karin Fossum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"It was always the small things, the links between people and where they could lead."

Another great book from Karin Fossum, one of my most favorite mystery writers. So far I have reviewed nine of her books on Goodreads, and rated two of them ( Black Seconds and The Murder of Harriet Krohn ) with five stars, a very rare rating for this very picky and fussy reader. Of hundreds of authors in the crime/mystery genre that I have read in over 50 years, Ms. Fossum joins only Nicolas Freeling and Denise Mina in the select trio of mystery writers for whom I feel a deep, total, and virtually uncritical admiration. They just seem never to have written anything that I wouldn't at least like a lot. (After the rating I am trying to explain the reasons why I love Ms. Fossum's books so much.)

As far as I know Hell Fire (2014) is the newest work by Ms. Fossum to appear in English translation. Inspector Sejer is on the scene of a brutal murder of a young woman and her five-year-old son. The story shifts to half a year earlier and we meet a single mother, Mass, living with her adult son, Eddie, who has not quite adapted to societal norms and is unable to hold a job. We follow the two parallel and interleaving threads: one of Bonnie and Simon, the future victims, and the other of Mass and Eddie.

Of course we know almost right away who committed the crime, but the mystery lies in the reasons and motives. Many readers will not be disappointed in the denouement, which is one of the most unexpected for Ms. Fossum. I prefer her usual unsurprising ones.

Bonnie is employed as a home health aide; to me the best thing in the novel is the portrayal of her work with the elderly and handicapped. The scene of cleaning Erna's house, after first dressing the table legs in multiple pairs of socks, is unforgettable. Erna, one of the background characters, is painted so vividly that I could swear I know her. Also, the novel is desperately sad. It shows, without being overtly didactic, the social consequences of broken families and unwanted children.

Translation is far from stellar. Not being a native speaker of English I have been able to spot numerous awkward phrases. I have doubts about several words: for instance, the alcohol that characters drink in the novel is likely the Scandinavian specialty, akvavit, for some reason translated as eau de vie. Sure, it means the same thing, but they drink akvavit in Norway, not eau de vie.

Hell Fire is certainly not a five-star book. While I loved reading it - I will probably never not love anything written by the author - there is not much in it that wouldn't feel as just another instance of a standard template of a Fossum's novel. It sort of reads as the author's manifesto "all my novels are like this."

Four stars.


(I revere Ms. Fossum's novels for four reasons. First, she is not much interested in the whodunit aspect of the story. People and their motivations are her main focus. This is precisely what interests me: I want to know why rather than trying to figure out who did it. Second, and perhaps most important: Ms. Fossum is never judgmental: even the brutal murderers of children are portrayed in her novels as human beings. It would be so easy to condemn the evil beasts that they are, but instead she tries to comprehend what made them commit the acts of brutality. To grossly oversimplify, I don't think she believes people are born evil.

The two other reasons for my adoration of Ms. Fossum's work are related to her writing. Other than the crime that sets up the plot, nothing much seems to happen in her stories. We do not have any "twists or turns"; we read about ordinary, everyday events, and ordinary life. Inspectors Sejer and Skarre thoroughly and patiently do their work, and Sejer then conducts his slow questioning of the accused. Finally, I love Ms. Fossum's quiet, understated writing style: no big words, no flourish, no hyperbole. Just the "small things.")

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?"

An important book, particularly for people of my generation, people for whom death is no longer a quasi-fictional event that only happens to other people. The Year of Magical Thinking (2006) is a non-fiction book in that it describes actual events that happened to actual people. It focuses on two main topics: the psychology of grief after death of one's closest person and the rituals of magical thinking in which people indulge after the death shatters and disintegrates their world.

For 39 years Ms. Didion had been married to John Dunne, the well-known poet. Indeed, he had had heart troubles earlier in his life and had undergone several procedures, but recently everything has been fine with his health. And suddenly, over dinner, he dies of a massive coronary. The phrase:

"How could this have happened when everything was normal."

becomes a sort of leitmotif of the entire book which describes Ms. Didion's thoughts and behaviors during the year that followed. The major trauma of the lifelong partner's death is compounded by a serious, continually life-threatening illness of her adopted daughter Quintana Roo, who has to be hospitalized during the author's mourning.

One of the main points the author is making is that we are unable to know what grief is until it hits us personally. When it does it becomes a catastrophe that we are completely unable to imagine and is in no way similar to the simplistic depictions shown on TV and in the movies. Grief overwhelms us and debilitates us; it is more powerful than anything we can summon against it:

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. [...] We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind."

Ironically, the copy of the book that I read had a stamp of "Self Help" genre: Ms. Didion clearly tells us that there is no help for grief, no 'healing' is possible, and that no one can ever learn how to mourn.

Probably the most fascinating passages in the book are those where the author recounts numerous episodes of magical thinking during her year of mourning. The term 'magical thinking' refers to people's belief that events may happen that are not subject to the usual, scientific rules of causation. For instance, we think that 'if only we did this and that, the unavoidable event would not have happened.' Ms. Didion hauntingly recounts the moments she thought she was guilty of her husband's death because she "had allowed other people to think he was dead." She writes the following about her thought half a year after her husband's death:

"'Bringing him back' had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. 'Seeing it clearly' did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need."

The reader will find so many more important topics in Ms. Didion's compelling work; for instance she writes about changing attitudes to death or the sickening tendency to use euphemisms instead of dealing with painful reality. However the most important message of the book is simply that death is final, and we humans are just not built for that.

Four stars.

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Dirty Blonde by Lisa Scottoline
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'Against the door,' Cate heard herself say.
'Whatever,' he murmured , easing her back against the door in the dark hallway. She was on fire, and his hands grabbed at her skirt, pushing it up. He moaned when he felt bare skin."

In my previous life of a reader interested only in mystery and crime novels I had read several legal thrillers by Lisa Scottoline, in the Rosato & DiNunzio series. Fortunately, Dirty Blonde (2006), the book that I selected to refresh my acquaintance with the author, is a standalone novel. Unfortunately, even if I am marginally recommending it, I do not like the novel much. The clever setup and the first 80 or so pages are the best things about the book.

We meet judge Cate Fante as she is attending a party celebrating her appointment to the district court. When the party is over Judge Fante drives to a bar, meets a guy, and lets him touch her intimately. We soon learn that in her free time Judge Cate solicits casual sex in seedy bars. The double entendre of the title works really well! Ms. Fante is a highly qualified and conscientious judge, who cares not only about the law but also about so-called justice (Ms. Scottoline knows pretty well that these two often have very little in common). She also helps her best friend raise an autistic son to whom she is a godmother.

Judge Fante begins her district court career by presiding over a trial where the plaintiff, a lawyer named Marz, sues a Hollywood producer for stealing his idea of a very successful TV show. Judge Fante's verdict follows the law but not her idea of justice. The outcome of the trial sets up one thread of the plot: the producer is soon killed and Mr. Marz apparently commits suicide. Another thread is preposterous: Judge Fante learns that a TV series is in preparation based on her work as a judge and detailing her sexual escapades. At that point the novel loses any semblance of plausibility and devolves into a TV-show-like silliness, with ridiculous twists and turns.

We have to endure inanities like Cate's playing a detective, good cops arresting good cops, FBI involvement, shenanigans in the court building, etc. Many pages in the later part of the book are just pure space filler that does not serve any purpose in characterization or advancement of the plot. Probably the publisher has an acceptable range of the number of pages and Ms. Scottoline was a bit short. We also have a syrupy happy ending, quite implausible considering the plot.

Other than the beginning and the setup I like the well-written and touching passage when Judge Fante visits her mother's grave and the rather incongruous but interesting reference to Centralia, a coal-mining town in north-eastern Pennsylvania. Stories about the horrendous underground mine fire and the plight of the anthracite coal miners suffering from the black lung disease are moving but all that is not enough to like the novel much.

Two and a half stars.


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Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] it seemed to Vernon that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all."

I finished reading Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (1998) - my first novel of this quite famous author - only few days ago but have been too busy since then to write a review. Alas, I am finding out that I have already forgotten much about the novel and need to reach to my notes to refresh memory. It does not seem like an auspicious introduction to the author.

The novel begins with a formidable sentence:

"Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill."

Molly, a well-known restaurant critic and photographer, has died rather suddenly of a rapidly progressing brain disease. Her funeral ceremony is in progress: Clive, a famous composer, and Vernon, the editor of Judge, a popular London tabloid, reminisce about their times and sex they had with Molly. Another Molly's former lover, Julian, who is currently the foreign secretary and has his sights set on the position of Prime Minister, is also a subject of the conversation. Molly's husband, George, completes the quintet of the main characters in the novel.

After the interesting opening - the conversation in the crematorium is quite a nice piece of real literature - the novel morphs into a sort of mystery. George finds compromising photographs from Molly's past, and all three former lovers become involved in the plot that focuses on whether to publish the pictures in Vernon's magazine. Unfortunately, I could not care less for the plot: it is of as sensationalist quality as the stories in Judge that Mr. McEwan is ridiculing.

On the other hand, there is some good stuff in the novel as well. For instance, I appreciate the author's sense of humor: Clive has been commissioned to compose the Millennial Symphony to be performed at the dawn of 2001, the task he envisions as something on the order of Beethoven's Ninth. When he finishes the work by composing a sort of current-day Ode to the Joy, the Ninth final movement, he contemplates whether he is a genius - a hilarious fragment of prose.

Obviously, the best passages in the novel have nothing to do with the plot. In addition to the outstanding beginning, the account of Vernon's hectic day as an editor of Judge and the description of the workplace politics are first rate. Yet perhaps the best fragment of the novel shows how Clive composes the key musical motif for the final movement of his masterpiece: while hiking near Allen Crags in the Lake District he hears a bird's piping sound on three notes. That sound becomes the inspiration for his monumental work but prevents him from paying attention to more important things that are happening at the same time. Realistic, well written, and funny! The ending is probably supposed to be funny as well, but I find the comedic payoff somewhat feeble.

Amsterdam is an easy read (maybe a warning sign?) and one can find quite a few thoughtful quotes in the text. While Mr. McEwan is certainly a gifted writer and his accomplished prose is a pleasure to read I do not think that the highly polished sentences add up to much.

Two and three quarter stars.

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On the Line by S.J. Rozan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"Focus! Christ, Smith, focus"

What an extreme disappointment! This is my tenth novel by S.J. Rozan, the author of remarkably good Winter and Night and Stone Quarry , an author whom until now I would have trusted not to be able to produce bad novels. Even the weaker installments in the series, for instance, Mandarin Plaid, were at a decent level. Alas On the Line (2010) is a completely different story. Juvenile, utterly implausible, and brimming with clichés worthy of the greatest Masters of Formulaic Thrillers.

Bill Smith is practicing Brahms piano sonata when his phone rings: Lydia Chin manages to say a few words but then the kidnapper interrupts. An electronically altered voice tells Mr. Smith that he has 12 hours to find Lydia. Otherwise she dies. The kidnapper, once wronged by Smith, is now exacting his revenge. Our hero is invited to a game: he will be offered a series of clues and if he does not solve even one of the puzzles, Lydia will be killed. Yeah, as lame as that. If you are new to the series: Lydia is Bill's detection business partner, and also his unrequited (as far as we know) love. Please read better books by S.J. Rozan than this one. This mess is not worth your time.

Mr. Smith enlists the help of Linus, Lydia's "kid cousin", a teenager computer whiz, and his girlfriend, Trella, who is "barely old to drink". Linus and Trella are accompanied by a canine superhero named Woof. So Smith, Linus, Trella, and Woof are the crew to battle the Super Evil Villain in the series of puzzles. Later in the story they are joined by a "piece-of-work pimp and his boys." I am not sure even Mr. Patterson would stoop so low with the plot.

And now combine the canine-enhanced juvenile crew with murders of Chinese prostitutes, the murders being parts in the puzzles set by the Super-Evil Villain. Combine the human drama of torture and death with the (maybe unintended) humor inherent in the composition of the good guys' team. The combination is putrid.

The clues left by the ArchVillain are usually booby-trapped. When the dramaturgy of the story requires explosion, BAM! There it is. Obviously Mr. Smith knows what the booby traps are. So lame! The puzzles are based on loose associations related to popular culture. Of course, Smith and the crew are instantaneously able to decrypt all the references. It reminds me of the most atrocious cliché of the last 50 years of thrillers. Suppose a computer geek needs to get into a passworded computer system: the genius sits at the keyboard, thinks for seven seconds, makes a guess, and the guess is right!

I would like to say: FOCUS!, S.J. ROZAN, FOCUS!!!

One and a half stars.

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