Book review: A Little Class on Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirty-eighth book I read in 2016 was the fifth book in Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, A Little Class on Murder.  Annie is invited to teach a class on mystery novels at a local college.  In the journalism department.  You know, how establishments of higher education are always asking local business owners to teach classes in subjects they're unqualified in and which don't even fall under the aegis of the department.  Happens all the time.

Inexplicably, some of the rest of the faculty of Chastain College (who, presumably, are trained educators or have experience in the field or are teaching actual journalism classes) are of the opinion that Annie's hiring is a travesty which cheapens their profession, but they are distracted from the ludicrous development when an anonymous source starts to spread their dirty laundry in the campus newspaper.  There is a suicide; the newspaper office is bombed; and the department head is murdered.

Thankfully, there is no Bryce Posey in this book; the heavy is Police Chief Harry Wells, making a repeat appearance from Design for Murder.  Hart does people Annie's class with her favorite eccentrics, Max's mother Laurel and mystery lover/nutcase Henny Brawley, and completes the crazy-older-woman triumvirate with Miss Dora, from the aforementioned Design.

In addition to the laughable situation that turns Annie into a college professor, the book is notable for its appalling portrayal of Emily Everett, an overweight college student and secretary to the head of the journalism department.  Hart writes about her appearance with the same gusto she expends on homes and gardens but with visceral disgust rather than admiration.

"Slowly, an enormous creature, bulbous with fat, wedged sideways through the doorway.  She -- it was a woman, perhaps even a young woman -- was a mass of flesh almost lacking in definition, a bloated moon face atop a swollen body, chest and girth and hips merging into a mountainous whole that moved and swayed within a huge yellow caftan.  She clutched a handful of tissues in bratwurst-sized fingers."

That's frankly a repugnant description that denies the character's humanity -- and Hart clearly enjoys every cruel, fat-shaming syllable of it.

It's things like that which make me not feel bad at all about mocking her about things like Annie's course's name: The Three Grande Dames of the Mystery.  She means, of course, grandes dames, but neither Annie nor Hart knows any better.  I bet she pronounces it "grand dames," too.

Book review: Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2016 was the third book in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, Pardonable Lies.  I haven't been a huge fan of the series thus far, but this installment was particularly lackluster.

Maisie is hired by a friend of her patron, Lord Julian Compton, to investigate the supposed death of his son in -- wait for it! -- World War I!  A pilot, his plane went down in occupied France, but his body was never recovered.  Sir Cecil Lawton was satisfied with the official report which declared his son killed in action, but his late wife never stopped wondering if Ralph might still be alive somewhere.  On her deathbed, she made her husband promise to look for him so, against his better judgment and his own wishes, he feels honor-bound to put an inquiry in motion.

Unfortunately, Maisie's investigations take her to France, which is tedious for many reasons: first, because we are introduced to one of the most annoying/precocious French children since Adèle Varens in Pascale Clement, whom we are obviously supposed to find enchanting despite her general unbearableness; second, because Maisie is still suffering from PTSD due to the experiences during the war she hasn't properly processed so we get a lot of blah-de-bloo where she passes out from the trauma of standing on the very ground where she got blown up good as a nurse and has to go through a delicate convalescence because she's just so sensitive; but third and most importantly, because that's where Maisie's horrible college friend Priscilla Evernden now lives and we have to put up with her for far more chapters than I ever wanted to see Priscilla again.

Pris, of course, is rich!  and happily married to a poet!  and living the glamorous expatriate life in Biarritz! and KILL ME NOW she is so insufferable.  I hated her in the first book when she was just a character in an overlong flashback; having to put up with her in real time is cruel and unusual.  Now, of course, she has the extra added allure of being tormented by her past!  Unable to face the deaths of her brothers in the war (what war would that be, I wonder?), she lives on perpetual vacation in the south of France, and we're supposed to find her sympathetic, rather than just pathetic.  Besides running away from her problems, she also smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish, both of which were utterly commonplace in the time period, but since Winspear is anachronistic about mores in the books so that Maisie can be a woman ahead of her time, I'm hoping that lung cancer or liver disease will strike down Pris before her time and give Maisie's psyche further battering.

Apart from the presence of Pris, the overall lameness of the main plot, and the overused girl-power protofeminism which is getting wearing, two facets of the book are particularly egregious.  The first is Maisie's sudden obsession with her dead mother.  Her mother's passing was largely passed over in the first book, except for its use as a plot device to get Maisie into Lady Rowan's household.  In the previous two installments, Maisie's closest and most influential relationship was portrayed as being with her father, so it comes out of nowhere here for her all of a sudden to be pining for the mother she has never mentioned before.

Of course, the reason for the abrupt focus on Maisie's mother (aside from the aforementioned feminism: perhaps Winspear took some criticism about the most respected influences in her character's life being men?) leads into the second facet I disliked: Maisie is said to have inherited her psychic abilities from her mother's side of the family, and psychics play a large and rather awkward part in this story.  Ralph Lawton's mother was encouraged to believe that her son might still be alive through consultations with psychics after the war, and Maisie mentions that she and Maurice Blanche were instrumental in testifying against and shutting down psychics who preyed on the bereaved -- the false ones, that is.  Because, of course, Maisie truly has 'the gift.'  It's dissonant, like "real" extraterrestrials debunking all the charlatans who are hoaxing the world, or like someone denouncing the Nessie photos while claiming actually to have seen the Loch Ness Monster.

Book review: Nancy and Plum by Betty MacDonald

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2016 was Nancy and Plum, a children's book by Betty MacDonald, author of the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series.  Unlike that series, this book hasn't stayed in print since its original publication in 1952.  This is a reissue apparently inspired by a few of the biggest names in modern children's literature: Jeanne Birdsall of The Penderwicks, who wrote the introduction to this edition, and Mary GrandPré, illustrator of the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter series, who provided new illustrations.

It is, in my opinion, a travesty that this book was allowed to fall out of print. It is a delight, if tropey as all get-out.  Nancy and Plum are orphaned sisters who live in a boarding house run by the evil Mrs. Monday.  (Are there any good people who run orphanages in children's literature?  They're neck-and-neck with stepmothers in the evil sweepstakes.)  Mrs. Monday mistreats the two, knowing that she'll never have to answer for it, going so far as to steal the Christmas gifts sent by their only distant relative to give to her spoiled niece Mirabelle.  Nancy and Plum are, in the tradition of mistreated orphan girls everywhere, both good and clever and well-liked by all their non-evil peers.

Discovering the existence and vague benevolence of their Uncle John, Nancy and Plum attempt to contact him secretly and tell him how they are being mistreated.  When Mrs. Monday and Mirabelle conspire not only to keep them from him but also to persuade him that Nancy and Plum are spoiled, ungrateful liars, the sisters run away and find sanctuary with a childless farm couple.  When Mrs. Monday, with the deceived Uncle John, tracks them down to force them to return (both for the money Uncle John pays for their board and just for the continued pleasure of being mean to them), it's up the farmer and his wife, the town librarian (as guaranteed to be good in a children's story as a stepmother is to be evil), and a school teacher to reveal the truth and expose Mrs. Monday's perfidy.

Everything turns out exactly as you expect it to, which is both a feature and a bug in a story of this type: It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy to see virtue rewarded and evil punished, but an adult reader can't help but feel the loss of any complexity to the narrative.  In addition, GrandPré's illustrations fail to match the text.  Like Quentin Blake, her pictures are notable for their lived-in messiness, but when the book mentions on more than one occasion how tightly the girls' hair is braided so that no loose strands can escape and yet every picture shows them with loose and messy braids and hair falling in their face, it's on the illustrator to convey what the author intended, not just to draw stuff the way she wants to.

Book review: Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2016 was a birthday gift from my friend Leslie, Full Dark House, the first in a series of Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries by Christopher Fowler.  In the present day, Detectives Bryant and May are octogenarians with a long and successful partnership investigating "peculiar crimes" behind them.  When an explosion rips apart their office, the surviving Detective May must pore through his memories to determine which of their old investigations may have left a loose end which resulted in violent revenge, served decades cold.

I did not particularly like this book.  Too much about it failed to ring true to me, beginning with the very first page, in which the explosion is said to recall the London Blitz.  Really?  Intervening decades of terrorist blasts, first from the Irish Republican Army and then from radical Islamists, and a sixty-year-old war is the first thought of a Londoner when a bomb goes off?  I grant the author that it makes a neat segue to his extended flashback to WWII, but he had me on the defensive from that point on.

The blurbs on the cover refer to the series as "deadpan, sly," "madcap," "completely crazy and great fun," descriptions that led me to expect a series akin to Jasper Fforde or Douglas Adams, but I never got the "comedy" in the mystery; rather, the tone seemed uneven, with the eccentric office politics of the Peculiar Crimes Unit jostling uncomfortably next to gruesome deaths and characters who seem designed to evoke sympathy or pathos.  While most of the victims of the killer in the novel seem portrayed to "deserve it," one man in particular is a mere innocent bystander, and his death is the longest, most-drawn-out, and most bloodily and brutally portrayed in the book.  How the reader is meant to retain any sympathy for the killer's point of view after that episode escapes me.

And now I have to leave some space for spoilers, because I can't fully express my dissatisfaction with the book without discussing the solution to the crime:

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Okay, so Elspeth has sex one time (she is raped) and gets pregnant.  Biologically possible, but very unlikely.  Elspeth goes through nine months of pregnancy, gives birth, and hides a baby/toddler/child/grown man in her workplace for almost twenty years, and no one ever notices.  I call shenanigans.  Can we declare a moratorium on the magical symptomless Hollywood pregnancy for a while, particularly when employed by male writers?  And the Emma Geller-Green syndrome wherein small children only exist when they are plot-relevant but never interfere with their parents going out, traveling, working, or engaging in child-non-centric activities?

That hoary saw in the flashback investigation, combined with the author actually employing amnesia (amnesia!) as a plot device to explain the present-day mystery, really precludes me from having any respect for his work as anything beyond the shallowest melodrama.

Book review: Honeymoon with Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2016 was the fourth book in the Death on Demand series by Carolyn G. Hart, my semi-nemesis from The Village.  In Honeymoon with Murder, Annie and Max's wedding has come off (thankfully between books so we don't get a blow-by-blow à la Jan Karon, an author for whom I have a much higher tolerance for self-indulgence), but their departure for their honeymoon is postponed when (this time) Annie's friend and employee Ingrid Jones telephones in a panic and then vanishes from the line.  When the pair investigate, they find a dead body on Ingrid's floor and no sign of Ingrid.

Unfortunately, this installment features the return of Brice Posey, who insists that Ingrid is the murderer and a fugitive from justice.  Yeah, it meets my requested criteria of Max and Annie investigating when it's not their neck on the line, but just barely.  Mrs. Brawley, still in her mentally-worrying habit of taking on the personae of different fictional detectives, is left to organize a volunteer search for Ingrid, whom the locals are convinced has been kidnapped, and Laurel Darling teams up with a self-proclaimed psychic to try to solve the crime herself.

Hart gets all activist-y about battered women, insisting that an abused woman with a police witness to her injuries doesn't have a chance of winning in court.  No one even bothers to argue the point (including the police officer); instead, it's Max's money to the rescue once again, providing round-the-clock security for the poor woman whom the system has failed!  The author's constant harping on the theme that rich people are evil oppressors, except for her rich protagonists, is getting old.

The denouement of the mystery revolves around a character with a certain almost-unbelievable talent that was used in the course of the crime, yet which the same character smugly flaunted in public for no real reason.  So the perp is smart enough to plot the crime but dumb enough to demonstrate how it was done to the very people trying to solve it.

Faith asked me why I keep buying these books when they annoy me so much.  I think I'm partly doing so to vindicate my poor opinion of Carolyn G. Hart from more than twenty years ago.

The world's most incompetent scammers?

I am delighted by the subject line of an email in my Junk Mail folder:

"Not a Spam,Kindly Treat as Urgent."

The fact that it's from "UNITED NATIONS" is just icing on the cake at this point.

The body is even more delightful.  I am to be sent a Visa card pre-loaded with 9.25 million dollars. The "Contact Information Officer" has a Yahoo email address.  You know, as UN officials do.  And it's signed by Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general, himself!  

I only have to pay $235 for postage.  What a deal!