Innocence by Dean Koontz

Addison Goodheart. Born in the woods to a crazy woman who pushed him out for days on end, finally for good at 8 years old to fend for himself. Then she blew her brains out.

Addison learned to survive in the woods and in the city. He snuck into NYC under the tarp of a flatbed. Not long after, someone of the same ilk (“Father”) takes him in to live under the city, coming out only after dark for food and clothing; Father had a key to a thrift store where they took only what they needed.

Father and Addison are both unique. People who see their face and hands become terrified and strike out in an attempt to kill them. Each is, in Addison’s words, “A monstrosity. A miscreation, freak, abomination.” But Addison learns from Father the ways of the city and of the people who hate and fear them. He is also very well read because they know the unlocked doors of the city’s heart, its libraries, its museums.

Father died at the hands of the people they avoid when Addison was 18. For 8 years, he lives entirely alone in the home Father had welcomed him. On one sojourn into a museum, he hears footsteps. No, he hears two sets, one in pursuit of the other. A man is chasing a teenage girl, but her skills at hiding exceed the man’s skills at seeking, but not Addison’s.

The two, Addison and Gwyneth, form an alliance of sorts. She has a social phobia. Don’t ever touch her. He is a monster. Don’t ever look at him. She is from privilege. He is from the backwoods and the underground. Her dead father left her 8 apartments in town, a deep trust fund, and a loyal caretaker to look after her.

The man chasing Gwyneth is his own kind of monster. He had had business dealings, art sales, with her dad, but Gwyneth's uniqueness even as an 11 year old and his own failings drove him to want to place his own personal sculpture in a place only the most depraved would approve. For this purpose and obsession, he had searched for Gwyneth for 7 years.

A vicious winter storm brings maybe 5 or 6 subplots together for this reprobate's ultimate confrontation with Gwyneth and Addison. 

But there are still over 50 pages left. It can’t take that much to tie up any loose ends. But it is in these final scenes that Koontz reveals the true nature of the heart and spirit that has drawn Gwyneth and Addison together and just what their particular gifts really are meant to be.

OK, Koontz is huge. He has 65 previous novels, so he's obviously got this writing thing down. I used to think of him (without any firsthand information) as one of those writers whose work is most often found in the magazine/book section of a supermarket. And being the snob that I am, I avoided looking any further. I was drawn to this book by his Kindle single ‘Wilderness’ that I commented on last month.  During the wait for my reservation to come to the top of the wait list at the library, I tried a Koontz book from his Odd Thomas series – a book I gave up on so I was a little wary. 

But not this one. One I became accustomed to the rhythm of his presentation and how he flipped back and forth between the present and the backstory of both Addison and Gwyneth, the pages pretty much turned themselves. I’ll admit it, Koontz has a literary vocabulary that exceeds mine by well over 500%; some of his descriptive prose used words I had never encountered and could’ve used a dictionary in some places. But no matter, I got the idea. Based on the way the story unfolded, I’d be very curious if and how he’d carry the story and characters into another book, but that may also be Koontz's gift to us, and I’ll keep an eye out for part 2 sometime late 2014, if there is to be one. I hope so. I came to kind of like these two oddballs.

ECD

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

Louise Penny has written another gem of a crime novel, this being one of a series with Armand Gamache, as the protagonist, the chief inspector of the Surete du Quebec. This is the fifth novel in the series that has been reviewed in Men Reading Books, all reviewed favorably. The Brutal Telling is no exception to that. I won’t review the plot except to say that one of the beloved characters that has evolved over the course of the earlier books, Oliver Brule, is in trouble. He’s been keeping secrets from his partner, Gabriel. A body has been found, and no one in the small village of Three Pines knows who it is. Penny has presented her most intricate plot, but has done so while continuing with exquisite character development. This series is as much about character as it is about plot and crime. She weaves in wonderful history about Canada, particularly Montreal. She delves into the art world with its rewards, difficulties, and troubled personalities. 

I can tell you the moral of the story without giving away the plot. Near the end, Penny writes, "But there was no hiding from Conscience. Not in new homes and new cars. In travel. In meditation or frantic activity. In children, in good works. On tiptoes or bended knee. In a big career. Or a small cabin. It would find you. The past always did." 

This series of stories is worth savoring and not hurrying through. My advice -- start with her first book, Still Life, and then work your way forward.

City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris

This is part 2 of Ferraris’ police procedural trilogy set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia that also continues the developing relationship between desert guide Nayir ash-Sharqi and coroner tech Katya Hijazi, who met up in part 1, Finding Nouf.

A girl has washed up on a Red Sea beach near Jeddah. It’s hard to tell how long she had been in the water. The fish had worked over her face pretty severely. He hands have been burned, almost like someone wanted to make sure she couldn’t be identified. She was still in her cloak, but the cloak was pulled up around her neck, her jeans were clumped around her ankles, and she had numerous cuts on her leg, sliced repeatedly using a very sharp knife.

Seeing as how the victim was a woman, the coroner calls in a female former tech, Katya, now working in the Jeddah version of the CSI unit.They can’t ID the woman, so they call in a forensic anthropologist to craft a drawing, but Katya goes digging through the missing person’s reports and thinks she has an idea – an independent filmmaker and freelance videographer for local television stations named Leila.

Miriam Walker is wife to one of those ubiquitous security guards from the US, here for the money, but also falling in love with the Saudi lifestyle. To assimilate, they live away from the American compounds in a rental apartment where Miriam is expected to adopt Saudi religious customs about the role and behavior of women; she ain’t happy. She’s been back in the US for a month and her flight back kinda sucks because of her seatmate. After hubby Eric picks her up at the airport, they drive to their apartment where Eric just vanishes when he goes to buy some carry out.

Leila shoots boring background shots for the news shows and lives with her brother's family after her divorce from an arranged marriage that lasted maybe a month or so. Osama Ibrahim is in charge of the investigation and, after his female colleague gets fired for lying about being married, draws Katya into the investigation because a woman is needed to dig into a woman’s past – it’s just not right for a man to be in the company of a woman who is not a sister or mother or wife much less ask sensitive questions about a woman. Even though he is a cop, he has to work within religious restrictions of decency. 

The police question Leila’s family. Her brother is very strict and doesn’t like Leila going out on her own with no escort, just her video camera. They fight often. Leila’s also been filming a art collection for some richer than rich guy from Riyadh. After a few blind alleys, Osama and Katya get an address for this rich guy and when they knock on the apartment door, Miriam answers.

No detective believes in coincidences, especially in Jeddah. So the investigations of Leila’s murder and Eric’s disappearance become intermingled as Ferraris deftly takes us on a circuitous route through Jeddah, the nearby desert, Islamic scholars and rumors of long-lost translations of the Qur'an, and the hidden underbelly that makes Jeddah look far more like Las Vegas than it does as the gateway for pilgrims on their hajj headed for Mecca. This oppression of women and scholarly debates about the Qur'an are the subjects Leila is preparing for her documentary so you can imagine someone, make that many, will have issues with what she is planning. 

I read these 3 books a bit out of order. When read in order, the reader is gently introduced to Nayir and Katya, but the main gist of each book is the crime(s) under investigation. But when viewed in order, the gentle interplay of Nayir’s devotion to Islam and the proper behavior of an unmarried man with an unmarried woman vs. Katya’s interest in becoming a full fledged investigator for the police seem to be at odds with each other, but over the 3 books, they work out some semblance of an alliance and a gentle connection. So, depending of the view of the reader, this trilogy could be seen police procedurals ahead of their developing relationship or as a growing love story between two people with divergent views of traditional Saudi life that just happens to blossom around some particularly gruesome crimes. When I first started the series, I saw it as the former, but having finished, I’m not so sure.

Guess that means that Ferraris is a pretty darn good story teller, able to present police investigations (that violate some of the protections we here in the US take for granted) and a compelling love story, capable of entertaining lovers of blood/guts cop tales as well as those who would prefer to curl up with a relationship tale, Saudi style. If you think you'd like to take a chance on this series, I'd suggest reading them in order: Finding Nouf, City of Veils, Kingdom of Strangers. 

ECD

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers,” “The Tipping Point” and other nonfiction works. If you’re already familiar with Gladwell, then you know he is a creative thinker, and a controversial one. In this book, he starts with the legend of David and Goliath, but he does not challenge the reality of that encounter. Rather, he analyzes how David understood that he was not facing long odds against Goliath. It was the others, the Philistines and King Solomon alike who misunderstood the nature of the encounter, which as David understood, was favorable to him. Gladwell explains, “Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”

Gladwell’s stories in support of his thesis are wide ranging (and well written), from 12-year-old girls basketball strategy, to the advantages of dyslexia, to the England’s failure to quell the Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the civil rights movement in the U.S., to the resistance movement in Vichy France during WWII, to why some students would be better off going to a middle range university than accepting enrollment at one of the Ivies, and more. He may present only anecdotal information, but his data and arguments are thought provoking with regard to the way most of us tend to analyze the world around us. This book is absolutely worth reading and it gets my strongest recommendation.

Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

Nouf ash-Shrawi is 16 and soon to be married. Child of a big and rich family that lives on their own island off the coast of Jeddah. A family pick-up is missing and so is one of the family’s camels. Nouf appears to have run off into the desert. The police are looking, but the desperate family has hired lots of people to look for her, including Nayir ahs-Sharqi, a desert guide/friend of one of her brothers, Othman. 

The search goes on for a couple weeks and hope fades with each passing day. Some Bedouins find her body, alert the search party, and her corpse is hustled to the medical examiner’s office for a quick autopsy so she can be buried that day, per their custom.

Nayir accompanies the body so that he can then take her remains to the family. The examiner does a cursory exam. An autopsy tech, Katya Hijazi, tells Nayir that no, she had not been molested. Cause of death? Drowning. In the desert? But they both wonder why the family wants the investigation and post-mortem wrapped up quietly and quickly.

Nayir and Katya form an uneasy alliance. Not just because they are both good (but not ‘devout’) Muslims and unmarried men/women just do not interact, but because Katya is engaged to Nayir's friend and Nouf's brother - Othman. The two conduct a delicate waltz around their commitment to Islam vs. their growing obsession for justice for Nouf.

Both being amateur investigators, the misread clues and take wrong turns in the investigation, but each misstep leads to an important clue the takes them closer to an answer. All the while being very delicate in their developing affection for each other that their circumstances won’t allow.

This is #1 in the 3 part series of police procedurals set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by Ferraris. It was a LA Time award winner for first mystery and deservedly so. Ferraris deftly takes we infidels behind the veiled curtain that Islam has surrounded itself to see a cultural existence that we can only imagine . . . and assuming her description is far more accurate than what we perceive . . . our understanding is probably 95% wrong.

One part police procedural – one part cultural unveiling – entirely entertaining. I’m reading part 2 now. The last time I slammed though an author’s trilogy this quickly was the Moscow secret police trilogy by Tom Rob Smith.  Give this series a chance. It's not just entertaining, it's also eye-opening.

ECD

Premium Life by Thomas K. Matthews

Premium Life is another excellent crime novel by Thomas K. Matthews, but you’ll have to wait a little while to get your hands on this one. The author forwarded this book to me in a rough and relative unedited form, so the story is still in pre-publication format. Collectively, you can eat your hearts out that I’ve gotten first dibs on this one. I’ve already read two of Matthews’ books, and this one clearly lives up to the standards that led to my highly favorable reviews.

The author’s intent in this one is to introduce a new detective character for what I hope is the beginning of a long series of stories. We’ve seen other authors create such men who are talented detectives but who must live with great flaws. Matthews has created Robert Jacobi, a police detective who cannot walk away from a case once he’s involved, no matter what. But, Jacobi has a different backstory, and his handicaps are both physical and emotional. After generations of Jacobi cops in San Francisco, this very large and scary looking Jacobi was injured on the job. He was in the midst of rescuing the teenage daughter of a city council member when the girl’s abductor pulled the trigger on his shotgun, thereby vaporizing Jacobi’s left hand. He replaced it with a hook, which certainly adds to the formidable image that Matthews invented. While Jacobi remained an able bodied guy, without a left hand, he no longer could be a cop. After retirement, a year of drowning himself in booze, and a divorce, he got sober and reluctantly accepted a job as a life insurance fraud investigator.

In his new role, Jacobi is assigned to take a cursory look at a $500,000 claim in which a man was apparently murdered, but no body was ever found. The insurance policy was new and would be voided if death was due to suicide, and the claimant, David Franklin, was in serious debt, had a family to support, and was dying of pancreatic cancer. For a crime novel, that’s enough of a teaser except to say that the characters are interesting, believable, and well-developed, and the plot lines are riveting. My only frustration with the novel was that I started it when I had too much real work to do, so I couldn’t just finish the novel in one sitting. Don’t you hate it when life intrudes on fantasy? This book gets my strong recommendation, so just be patient until it hits the shelves.

Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

Inspired by the recommendation of WCD, I checked out the most recent Louise Penny work available at our local library, Bury Your Dead.  What a treat!  Penny skillfully weaves three major plot lines to satisfactory conclusion while teaching a history lesson and offering a cultural experience of Quebec and its citizens.  Penny tells the story through lead character Chief Inspector Armand Gamache who heads the homicide unit of the Surete du Quebec, the law enforcement body for all of Quebec province.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is staying in Quebec City with his former boss, Emile Comeu, while recuperating from a recent violent police operation in which several of his officers were killed or wounded.  Most of these officers were chosen and trained by Gamache so he is particularly critical of himself and of the decisions he made under fire.

Meanwhile with time to reflect, Gamache is having second thoughts about a recent arrest and conviction of a Three Pines man, Oliver, who is now in jail for killing a hermit.  The evidence clearly points to Oliver but some of the details bother Gamache.  He phones his second in charge, Jean-Guy Beauvior (also on leave recuperating from the violent police operation) and asks him to make further but subtle inquires in the village of Three Pines.

As part of his therapy Gamache takes long walks with is dog, Henri around old Quebec City.  He admires the four hundred year old architecture and spends time in the Literature and Historical Society library reading about the conflicts between the French and English that are the foundation of modern life and culture in Quebec.  On one of his visits to ‘Lit and His’ Gamache learns a murder has been committed in the ancient library’s basement.  The victim, Augustin Renaud was an historian and archeologist whose passion was to discover the location of the French founding father, Samuel de Champlain’s burial site.  As a courtesy Chief Inspector Gamache is asked by local authorities to consult on the case.  Gamache reluctantly agrees but soon finds himself pulled into the lives of all who knew the foul disposition of Renaud.  In his quest to find the murderer, Gamache finds healing.  He finds his extraordinary sensitivity and empathy for others is what makes him an extraordinary if not perfect Chief Inspector.

Bury Your Dead is a good read and Louise Penny a gifted author.  She delves deep into characters and gives you a background to understand their motivations.  Plus she offers a view into Quebec, city and province, rich in history and culture. I was just in Quebec City last March and now want to go back… equipped with new insight.  Thanks WCD… a great find.

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

I saw that Obama bought this book, Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews, during a recent book buying binge, so I thought I’d check it out. The pitch on the book was that it was a realistic spy novel. Maybe that’s true, but I’ve always thought the real life side of spying would be really boring. If it wasn’t for the hope that this would turn into a really great story (and maybe my loyalty to the President), I would have given up long before it got really interesting, which did not occur until about the 2/3 mark of the book – which is far too long to wait. Ultimately, the premise is good, but the plot is very simple. There is not much in the way of subplots. There are two agents, one Russian, one American, who are each trying to recruit the other to their country’s clandestine services. The characters were interesting and thoroughly, if not slowly, tediously, and painfully developed. There was just one big surprise at the ending. If you like the genre of the international thriller, there are lots of other books out there that are far more entertaining. This one does not get my recommendation. Check out the blog.