Library Limelights 174

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J.T. Ellison. Tear Me Apart. Toronto: MIRA Books, 2018.

No, it's not a psycho-horror binge. This is a brilliantly plotted mystery that Colorado FBI agent Juliet Ryder and a couple of Tennessee police detectives want to solve. Mindy Wright is an Olympic-calibre teenaged skier popular with sports fans; sadly, she breaks a leg, by chance revealing she has acute leukemia. Neither of her doting parents, Lauren (sister of Juliet) and Jasper, are a match for stem cell procedure; in fact the DNA shows they are not Mindy's biological parents, to everyone's shock. Time is critical for finding a donor or her birth parents. Aunt Juliet uses all her skills and contacts in the hunt. Hovering throughout we get backdated glimpses of interactions between two young psychiatric patients. Mindy is mature beyond her seventeen years, often a delightful respite from the growing adult apprehensions.

Hidden secrets multiply when Mindy finds some old letters and Juliet finds her biological father. Zack Armstrong is an ex-military intelligence officer whose wife was murdered by persons unknown when their baby was stolen. Zack himself was promptly dismissed as a suspect. And he's the blood match they need although Lauren and Jasper react with complicated feelings. Sick as she is, Mindy welcomes the idea of a "bio-dad" with a dog called Kat. But Juliet is still uneasy, seeking the truth about an illegal adoption trail. Her family could either unite in support of Mindy or be torn apart by forces set in motion long ago. The usually short and snappy scenes/chapters shift from one character's location to another, from one revelation to another, expertly tightening the tension. I'm all for exploring earlier books by this author.

One-liners:

▪ Nothing comes between Mindy and the mountain. (39)

▪ "You've dreamed up all this because you aren't the center of attention, for once." (82)

▪ Dying in increments is a seriously lame way to go. (310)

Two-liners:

▪ The advantage of a long marriage, the marital glance. Words unspoken but messages sent. (87-8)

▪ Please, he prays to an invisible god. Please let me have more time with her. (293)

Mother reacts:

Lauren leaves the office angry. Angry at God, at Dr. Oliver—who doesn't deserve it, the man is a saint—angry at herself, for her incredible lack of discipline. Scratching open her arm like a common dog. She has to get herself together. (117)

Bio-dad reacts:

Tears run freely down his cheeks. He looks at all the photos twice in utter silence, then sniffs hard, wipes his face with his sleeve. The idea that this is his daughter, his Violet, is both wrong and somehow exactly right. She doesn't look how he's always imagined; now he can't imagine her any other way. He knows her; his body reaches out to hers. His soul recognizes his baby girl. (233)

Father's furious mood change:

"The man is morally corrupt, and I will not have him near my child." 

She is getting angry now. She wants to jump from the car, stamp her feet, scream and pull his hair, but she maintains her measured tone and grips the steering wheel harder. 

"He's saving your child's life, you idiot. Have you stopped to think about that? His blood is saving her, the same blood you claim is so tainted. I don't know what world you're living in, Jasper, but it's not reality. The stress has gotten to your brain." 

Juliet is so intent on Jasper she doesn't notice the cameraman who's snuck up and is filming the entire incident. (363)

Media seizing on scandal:

Online and on air, the sort of gleeful befuddlement that follows any great criminal unveiling is underway. Twitter and Facebook explode. Tips come pouring in. Sightings abound. Talking heads are pulled in. No one has any idea what they're talking about, but talk they do. (419)

April Smith. White Shotgun. 2011. USA: Pocket Black Lizard/Vintage Books, 2012.

Here's a strange landscape for travel fans: Siena, Italy, in the midst of their Palio festival, an enthusiastic annual return to mediaeval ways. FBI agent Ana Grey is the guest of her newly discovered half-sister Cecilia, wife of the wealthy coffee importer Nicoli Nicosa and a medical doctor in her own right. It's not all family reunion, of course; Ana is charged with investigating Nicosa's suspected mafia connection. As the city gears up for the festival pandemonium, Cecilia disappears. Her distraught husband thinks it is "merely" another kidnapping for ransom. Ana, joined by her security agent boyfriend Sterling, suspects more sinister motives.

The author has a deep grasp of Italian culture ‒ both good and bad ‒ making this thriller rich in context. Cecilia's son Giovanni is involved in the omnipresent bank of cocaine. The squalid scenes of drug addiction and hopeless lives in Calabria are chilling, too real not to be believed; comparison with the Nicosa lifestyle gives us a balance. Written in a snappy present tense from Ana's point of view, Smith's prose is both elegant and sparse, injected with some gentle humour. Ana and Sterling are genuine characters, begging for more novels. Altogether quite an amazing journey.

One-liners:

▪ The heat comes at you in scorching puffs, like the fiery breath of seraphim, that eternal chorus of angels who do nothing but praise God. (29)

▪ Like Sterling, I am a soldier for hire, part of whose job is to soldier on alone. (41)

▪ All my life I have held myself apart from family bonds because I never believed family could mean anything but cold disappointment. (46)

▪ If you graphed it, our little shopping trip would look like a killer hills workout on a treadmill. (76-7)

▪ The goon barks obscenities and warns her not to speak. (173)

Two-liners:

▪ The exhilaration of being plucked out of London for a whirlwind trip to Rome now seems hideously misplaced. It's just another assignment. (41)

▪ You could stand here all day, absorbed in silence, watching the sun creep through the spikes of lavender. Open a door in Los Angeles, and all you get is noise. (59)

▪ The boys, many under the age of eight, deliver drugs and act as lookouts. A literal underground crime network. (172)

▪ "My father thinks everything is a race. Be first or die." (205)

Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian. Penguin Random House Canada, 2013.

I was definitely overdue for reading this, a must-read for caring Canadians if not all North Americans. It was a cruise read, therefore my notes are minimal. But the effect is lasting. Since genealogists necessarily become historians at a certain level, I've been aware of the role of Indians (which they were called in the centuries of my study) in our landscape and in current news. Still, the extent of their displacement, denigration, distress, and dismissal is almost overwhelming to comprehend. King has done a magnificent job at pulling together a litany of battles and defeats, but goes way beyond. Chapters on Dead Indians, Live Indians, Legal Indians ― all record the arbitrary, patriarchal treatment handed out by government after government, both Canadian and American.

The bureaucratic legacy in Canada continues with waffling, the ignoring of reports, commissions, recommendations, and court decisions. Policy perhaps no longer aimed at segregation or assimilation, but still — to our great shame. Yet King exhibits undefeated, ironic (survival?) humour at the lasting stereotypes and complicated messiness. Written before the "hard truths" of Talaga's Seven FallenFeathers, nevertheless this book is a masterpiece of "curious history."

One-liners:

▪ Forget Columbus. [emphasis added] (3)

▪ [re Hollywood depiction] What we watched on the screen over and over was the implicit and inevitable acquiescence of Native people to Christianity and Commerce. (14)

▪ The demise of Indians was seen as a tenet of natural law, which favoured the strong and eliminated the weak. (60)

▪ North America defends democracy as the cornerstone of social, religious, and political enlightenment because it is obliged to think well of itself and its institutions. (79)

▪ While the Old Testament is filled with angry gods and bad business, and the New Testament is awash in gospels and epistles, there just aren't many good quotations that deal with confronting hate. (185-6)

▪ The Freedmen saga reminds me of the old adage that democracy had to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. (164)

▪ The issue has always been land. (217)

Two-Liners:

▪ [re The Apology] The North American legal wiggle. Guilty but not liable. (123)

▪ [re Oka confrontation] But rather than do something creative or at least intelligent, local, provincial, and federal politicians stood around and pointed fingers at each other. And did nothing. (235)

The movies:

Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that facepaint, the breastplates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths, not to mention the bows and arrows and spears, the war cries, the galloping horses, the stern stares, and the threatening grunts. We hunted buffalo, fought the cavalry, circled wagon trains, fought the cavalry, captured White women, fought the cavalry, scalped homesteaders, fought the cavalry. And don't forget the drums and wild dances where we got all sweaty and lathered up before we rode off to fight the cavalry.