Library Limelights 176

Asa Larsson. The Second Deadly Sin. 2012. NY: Quercus/MacLehose Press, 2014.

The comfortable world of Kiruna again, northern Sweden; Larsson's series about prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson is always infused with the natural surroundings and a love of dogs. When Sol-Britt Uusitalo is brutally murdered, Rebecka suspects a family connection. But her boss puts her inept and unpopular colleague von Post in charge of the case, causing not only Rebecka's ire but also police resentment, particularly Inspector Anna-Maria Mella. The woman's grandson Marcus may be the next target. Krister Eriksson, Rebecka's admirer and the police dog specialist, instantly bonds with seven-year-old Marcus. They learn that Marcus's family history has too many unexplained deaths, prompting thoughts of greed as the second deadly sin.

We are also following the story of Marcus's great-great-grandmother in 1914, when Kiruna was a tough pioneer mining town. Elina Pettersson becomes their new, enlightened school teacher. Suffice to say here that her passionate love affair with the mine's managing director does not end well, but causes us to wonder if it affected the following four generations. Oh yes, definitely a genealogical twist. Not coincidentally, Elina and Rebecka – so far apart in time – share a certain subjugation to their male bosses. Rebecka, of course, does not stay away from the case, putting herself unwittingly in danger. Does she turn up battered and bruised at the end of every book?! At least there are promising signs she might dump that arrogant Stockholm boyfriend. With dismay I see no hype for a next novel in this series. Yet?

One-liners:

▪ Perhaps he was also dreaming about all the local bitches responding to all the bewitching love letters he peed onto every available blade of grass during the day. (16)

▪ "Everything you do stirs up a hell of a lot of drama, Martinsson." (197)

▪ Around her neck was a leather strap with a large ornament of silver and wood, which von Post assumed was supposed to bring out the goddess in her. (212-3)

Two-liner:

More than ninety percent of a human being's intelligence, creativity, and analytical ability is based in the unconscious. And all those things people called "gut feelings" or "intuition" were often the result of an intellectual process which they hadn't the slightest idea they had been involved in. (197)

Von Post tries for authority in a car full of cops:

"It is absolutely essential to gain the trust of the witness. She must have confidence in the interrogator." 

You don't say, Mella thought. 

"An experienced interrogator interprets all the signs―body language, for instance." 

Somebody in the back seat grunted. Stålnacke blew his nose. 

"An uninhibited conversation. That's what we try to achieve. What we are working toward. We don't ask any direct questions. We simply talk about things. In that way an experienced interrogator can ... can get to know absolutely everything." 

Now Olsson seemed to have something stuck in his throat. 

Thank god it's dark in the car, Mella thought. She joined in the grunting. (140-1)

Manager-in-chief Fasth:

He is as hard as the iron in the mine. His private opinion of the police superintendent and Managing Director Lundbohm is that they are weak. He has no problem when it comes to treating people like dirt. He never hesitates to evict, dismiss, reject, lay off, punish, or abandon anybody. The fear in the eyes of the poverty-stricken leaves him cold. (161)

As an elegant group approaches:

They are wearing their oldest and shabbiest clothes. Elina has borrowed a worn-out leather jacket from one of the lodgers; it goes down almost to her knees. She has a headscarf tied under her chin like an old lady. Lizzie has on a knitted sweater that is falling to pieces. 

They have been sawing wood and are covered in bits of bark and sawdust. The hems of their skirts are stiff and heavy with snow. Together, they are pulling a sledge laden with firewood.Elina sees the elegantly dressed group and wishes the earth would swallow her up. (217)

Words hit home:

"Three years ago, you said?" 

"Yes." 

And Sol-Britt's son was run over three years ago, Martinsson thought. 

"I'm sorry," Jaako said, wiping her eyes that were suddenly filled with tears. "But I miss him so very much. If anybody had told me when I was your age that I would meet the love of my life when I was over seventy, I would have killed myself laughing." 

She looked hard at Martinsson. 

"You have to make the most of love when you find it, you know. Before you know where you are, you've experienced it for the last time. And everything else is meaningless." (306)

Olen Steinhauer. The Middleman. NY: Minotaur Books, 2018.

This far-from-ordinary thriller couldn't be more timely. Building on U.S. civil unrest against the entrenched "1%," Steinhauer creates a fictional band of pacifist protesters under Martin Bishop and Benjamin Mittag who rally against a broken government system. Hundreds of the followers of this so-called Massive Brigade vanish from their homes at a preset signal, their intentions unknown; the FBI, led by agent Rachel Proulx, keeps an eye via an undercover agent. Meanwhile, a right-wing news broadcaster fuels the fear, abetting protests and demonstrations against the Brigade. Sudden political assassinations lead to a bloody end for the Brigade. The FBI avoids blame for all the dead bodies by releasing a heavily redacted public report.

That's only the half of it. Rachel finds herself the victim of a doublecross, running for her life. Seeking to untangle the murky world of corporate interests that pull government strings, she joins forces with the undercover agent and a Brigade member in hiding. It's complicated and dense, with references to a protest group that immolated in Berlin eight years earlier. None of the story reflects well on America's domestic intelligence agency. Brimming with credible characters and espionage details, Steinhauer has another compelling and thoughtful winner.

One-liners:

▪ He'd heard all the conspiracy theories, and every time someone said "false flag" his stomach seized up, because he knew he'd entered a space where rational thought was being thrown under the bus. (87)

▪ "Americans aren't falling victim to celiac disease; they're being poisoned in order to maximize profits." (87)

▪ Whatever the truth, in those initial moments she'd known only one thing: to stay still was suicide; she had to move. (197)

Two-liners:

▪ "Have some faith in your government," Barnes told her. "We march stupidly into countries we don't understand; we sit back as our cities are decimated by natural disasters; and we let our schools go quietly to shit―despite these things, one thing we're pretty good at is finding people who don't want to be found." (74)

▪ "Don't worry. You'll never be alone anymore." (99)

Meeting Brigade confederates:

Kevin stared at him a long moment. "It's not a black struggle. It's a human struggle." 

"Sure it is," George said, frowning. "But what are humans but a bunch of special interests? That, my friend, is why we're going to win. We're an army of special interests. I'm in the antigreed struggle; you can fight for your race if you want. Someone else can fight for the whales. But in the end we all fight for the same thing." 

"The end of all this," said Kevin. (18)

Panic:

Though her impulse was to call the police, she changed her mind after searching his body and finding that he carried nothing at all, not even keys, and that the labels had been cut out of his clothes. No―not like an aggrieved Massive Brigade follower coming for revenge. Not that, but ... 

Thoughts ran fast and slow in her head, crashing into each other. She closed her eyes, trying to focus on one: Who? 

He said he didn't know, and she believed it. He was just a hired hand who'd failed back in August and had been sent back to finish the job. 

Why? 

She had nothing. Without one she couldn't know the other. Who would explain why, and vice versa. But she had neither. (192-3)

Meeting the undercover guy:

He refilled their cups, and while they talked for another half hour Rachel still did not tell him about Seattle. By then she trusted him well enough, but she read in his laconic behavior a clear message: I do not want to be involved. He was out, and that was where he wanted to stay, communing with nature and sharing recipes with neighbours. It was what you did when you resurfaced after a year undercover: You hooked your wagon to the repetitions of domesticity. You kept things as simple as possible and tried to reconnect with whoever you originally were before you spent a year being someone else. (215-6)

Ruth Ware. The Death of Mrs. Westaway. Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Harriet ("Hal") Westaway is an impoverished twenty-something, orphaned when her mother died in a traffic accident. She reads tarot card fortunes for a miserable pittance. Her hopeless situation might change when she's mistakenly contacted as an heir of Mrs Hester Westaway. Accepting the invitation ‒ with trepidation ‒ is preferable to dealing with loan shark thugs, and Hal spends her last money on a train trip to Cornwall. Enter the prospect of three brand new uncles, in a decrepit mansion complete with the obligatory sinister housekeeper, Mrs Warren. It's a bit too gothic (almost parodic: tidings of magpies) for my taste, if not for the several clever identity conundrums. Hal learns that Mrs Westaway was a vindictive woman greatly unloved by all her children. Vindictive enough for the reading of her will to shock and dismay them.

Hal does have guilty feelings about her masquerade as a missing granddaughter, but it holds up fairly well even though she knows her mother is not whom her new Westaway relations believe her to be. Eventually she confesses her deceit; the assurance of a real but more distant relationship remains, and thus her new family does not throw her out. But the ghosts and secrets of two young women, Maud and Maggie, continue to haunt Hal in the spartan attic bedroom she was given. Slow moving and heavily atmospheric most of the time, the story breaks out into final, terrifying moments. Some of the clues appear to be deliberately misleading; the little boy who drowned in the lake went nowhere. I have credibility issues with that lake and how fast it formed a layer of ice. And really, Hal goes against the grain as a female name, n'est-ce pas? ... Niggles?

One-liners:

▪ "God knows the family cared little enough for her comfort, though I see you're all happy enough to come down picking like magpies over the spoils now." (84)

▪ You know nothing about me! she wanted to shout back through the sitting room door. (134)

Two-liners:

▪ "You take any money they offer you and run, that's my advice. Take the money and run." (28)

▪ If she failed, she would be stranded. So she would just have to ensure that she didn't fail. (63)

▪ What had Hal got herself mixed up in? And what had she started? (124)

Regrettable family wisdom:

"Girls aren't worth educating," she said, with a bitter little laugh. "Or not worth paying to educate, anyway. But whatever she thinks, I've got twice his brains. I'll be at Oxford while he's still sitting retakes at some shitty crammer in Surrey. I'm going to show her, this summer. Those exams are my ticket out of here." 

I didn't say what I was thinking. Which was—what about me? If Maud leaves, what will I do? Will I be imprisoned here, alone, with her? (96)

Tattoo admirer:

Too late she realized she had let her guard down and had been on the verge of making a horrifying mistake. The truth was that she had got the tattoo in memory of her mother. Margarida. One for sorrow. It had seemed apt at the time. But cold horror washed over her at the realization that she had been about to admit her mother's real name. Stupid, stupid. 

"Her—her nickname for me was Magpie," she said, after a pause long enough to feel like a chasm opening beneath her feet. As cover stories went, it was beyond lame, but it was the best she could manage on the hop. Regardless, the boy didn't seem to have noticed the yawning pause. (101)

A new sensation:

A strange feeling was prickling in the pit of her stomach. Part of it was trepidation—an unwillingness to face the plethora of choices she would have to confront when she stepped off the train in Brighton. She could go home for a couple of nights perhaps, but any longer than that and Mr. Smith's men would come knocking. 

But beneath the worries was something else, something that tugged at her heart when she thought of Abel and Harding and Ezra, and the feeling of their arms around her. It was homesickness almost, a visceral longing so sharp it was like a pain inside her. But it was not for any home she had ever had. It was, perhaps, a longing for what might have been. For that alternate existence where she had family to fall back on, a safety net. She had never realized how alone she was, until she glimpsed the alternative. (301)