Library Limelights 180

Stuart Kaminsky. Denial. USA: Forge/Tom Dohert Associates, LLC, 2005.

Here's Lew Fonesca again, in one of the late Kaminsky's prolific series. Even though he reestablished himself in Sarasota after the death of his wife in a hit-and-run, Lew is all about Catherine. Depressed and largely aimless, his only distraction is acting as a process server. But he is trusted for his willingness to find people; his buddy Ames is there to assist. Dorothy wants him to find out who was murdered in her assisted-living complex ‒ and the killer, of course ‒ a story widely believed to be a figment of Dorothy's imagination. Nancy wants him to find the hit-and-run driver (shades of Catherine) who killed her teenage son Kyle. Lew's cop friend Ed is skeptical but doesn't forbid him to investigate.

Nothing much happens apart from Lew's habitual bad dreams and consumption of Dairy Queen Blizzards, until someone tries to kill him. A strange someone who phones him often to warn him off, half-apologetically. Seeking witnesses in both cases, Lew and Ames meet their share of characters, including the elderly woman who has a hungry alligator friend hiding behind the assisted-living home. Social worker friend Sally talks Lew into Big Brother-ing underprivileged Darrell whose initial reluctance turns into zeal at the prospect of internet action and guns. For a man who never smiles, Lew brings satisfaction with a deadpan delivery.

One-liners:

I didn't want to invest in someone else who might be taken from me by age or accident or intent. (6)

He was wearing a dark rumpled sports jacket with a tie the color of Moby Dick. (41)

"If death wants me, I'm easy to find." (109)

Two-liners:

I guarded my grief. I had paid a high price for it. (6)

"Willpower," I said. "Man owns a bar and can't drink." (30)

"I've thought of starting a church, the First Presbyterian Church of the Tupperware. Sell religious and plastic containers that you put things in and pop the top." (95)

The other cop:

"Ed told me about you," he said, taking a step toward me. "I am politely asking you to not interfere with my ongoing investigation." 

"But―" 

"Now I'm firmly asking you," he said, coming even closer. 

"If―" 

"Now I'm telling you," he said, almost in my face. 

I smelled onions and jalapeno. 

"Tell Ms Root I'm working on it. Tell Dr McClory I'm working on it. And tell yourself not to obstruct justice. Fonesca, I'm a tired man and I think I've got some kind of gastric problem. I've got an appointment with my doctor in the morning. This job can give a person a very bad stomach. Don't make it worse. Now, if you want a kosher dog, I'll pop for it, but you carry it away and don't look back." (45-6)

Go get 'em:

Now I was juggling three hit-and-run scenarios, Catherine's, Kyle McClory's, mine. 

My hands stopped trembling. They hadn't been trembling with fear. They had been trembling because the person who had tried to kill me had opened the curtain, letting in memory. 

Since my wife had died, among the things I had lost were fear and a willingness to experience joy. (67-8)

Assisted-living comedian:

The man looked at the three of us, blinked and said, "Is there a carnival in town?" 

"John," the little nurse admonished, taking back the plastic cup. 

"Well, I mean it," John said. "Look at them. I worked a carnival summers when I was a kid. We had a couple of Negro midgets." 

"I ain't no midget," said Darrell. 

"You ain't?" John said, looking astonished. "You fooled me. This other fella, though," he went on, pointing a bony arthritic finger at Ames, "definitely runs a shooting gallery." 

"John," the nurse warned wearily. 

"He's carrying a gun right under that yellow raincoat," John said. 

"John likes his little jokes," said the nurse, who looked beyond tired. 

"I like a good bowel movement too from time to time," he said. "I don't ask much." (198-9)

N

Nadia Murad. The Last Girl. USA: Tim Duggan Books/Crown Publishing Group, 2017.

Witness to the atrocities of Daesh (ISIS), Nadia is of course the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for her now-activist work against terrorism and "sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict." The subtitle of the book says it all: My story of captivity, and my fight against the Islamic state. Tough reading. Tough, because the violence is so endemic. Nadia was one of thousands of Yazidi girls and women in Iraq captured by Daesh, forced into religious conversion and sexual slavery—sabaya (sabiyya is singular). Life in her poor rural village of Kocho held no preparation for such a horror, although persecution of the peaceful Yazidi was not new. Their ancient religious practice sets them apart; they are not Arabs, nor Kurds, nor Muslims, but lived amicably among them all. When Daesh came, all the grown village men were shot en masse.

The politics and internal struggles of the region are not easy to follow; Islamic religious factions (Shiites v. Sunnis) fighting for supremacy underly the entire Iraq situation and Yazidi were not the only victims. It's impossible to understand how Daesh successfully perverted Islam to attract so many fanatics and hold great swathes of the population in fear. Nadia wanted her fellow countrymen to shout at them: "I am a Muslim, and what you are demanding of us is not true Islam!" Daesh organization and planning was far more substantial than I realized. Too often death seemed preferable to the abuse they inflicted. There are many more nuances within this shameful, heartbreaking experience. Activist Amal Clooney provides the Foreword; the decline of the militant brutes known as ISIS does not mean humanity's worst sins against each other will ever end.

One-liners:

▪ For twenty-one years, my mother was at the center of each day. (25)

▪ The only decision the rich, connected Kurds and Arabs made that mattered to us was the decision to leave us alone. (39)

▪ "Please, God, turn me into a star so that I can be up in the sky above this bus," I whispered. (124)

▪ My hopelessness was like a cloak―heavier, darker, and more obscuring than any abaya. (189)

▪ Kathrine and Lamia were turned in six times by people they approached for help, first in Mosul and then in Hamdaniya, and every time they were punished. (230)

Two- and multi-liners:

▪ "The home of my father is torn apart," my mother whispered from where she sat. It's a saying we use only in the most desperate times; it means that we have lost everything. (108)

▪ Yazidi girls were considered infidels, and according to the militants' interpretation of the Koran, raping a slave is not a sin. We would entice new recruits to join the ranks of the militants and be passed around as a reward for loyalty and good behavior. (123)

▪ Everyone on the bus was destined for that fate. We were no longer human beings—we were sabaya. (123)

▪ No man ever touched his wife like this. Hajji Salman was as big as a house, as big as the house we were in. And I was like a child, crying out for my mother. (166)

▪ Families in Iraq and Syria led normal lives while we were tortured and raped. They watched us walk through the streets with our captors and gathered on the streets to witness executions. (230)

▪ If the cities and towns are the vital organs of Iraq, the roads are the veins and arteries, and as soon as ISIS controlled them, they controlled who lived or died. (241)

2014 genocide attempt begins:

ISIS conquered Sinjar easily, encountering resistance only from the hundreds of Yazidi men who fought to defend their villages with their own weapons but quickly ran out of ammunition. We soon learned that many of our Sunni Arab neighbours welcomed the militants and even joined them, blocking roads to stop Yazidi from reaching safety, allowing the terrorists to capture all non-Sunnis who failed to escape from the villages closest to Kocho, then looting the vacant Yazidi villages alongside the terrorists. We were even more shocked, though, by the Kurds who had sworn to protect us. Late at night, without any warning and after months of assuring us that they would fight for us until the end, the peshmerga had fled Sinjar, piling into their trucks and driving back to safety before the Islamic State militants could reach them. (57)

Human worth:

Attacking Sinjar and taking girls to use as sex slaves wasn't a spontaneous decision made on the battlefield by a greedy soldier. ISIS planned it all: how they would come into our homes, what made a girl more or less valuable, which militants deserved a sabiyya as incentive and which should pay. They even discussed sabaya in their glossy propaganda magazine, Dabiq, in an attempt to draw new recruits. From their centers in Syria and sleeper cells in Iraq, they mapped out the slave trade for months, determining what they thought was and was not legal under Islamic law, and they wrote it down so that all Islamic State members would follow the same brutal rules. Anyone can read it―the details of the plan for sabaya are collected in a pamphlet issued by ISIS's Research and Fatwa Department. And it is sickening, partly because of what it says and partly because of how ISIS says it, so matter-of-fact, like the law of any state, confident that what they are doing is sanctioned by the Koran. (139-40)

David Baldacci. The Guilty. USA: Hachette Book Group/Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

A master storyteller offers another adventure in the life of CIA sharpshooting assassin, Will Robie. The venue is Cantrell, Mississippi, Will's hometown where his father Dan is in jail, accused of murdering Sherm Clancy. Will had left home some twenty years earlier without saying goodbye, after years of abuse, and the two have not spoken since. But return he does; not only to help the father he dislikes, but also in the hope of resolving new and old issues of his own. No one knows about his secret CIA life. He runs into people he went to school with―Taggert the cop, Davis the prosecutor, Billy the former football player―but not Laura, his first love. Plus Dan has a new wife and small child, challenging Will's repressed feelings.

The cops and the feds are pretty much all good guys in this case, as Will hunts for a killer. Or perhaps killers, plural. Big business ‒ casino business, oil business ‒ creates jobs and allows the elite to get away with any kind of vice. Someone wants Will to stop, so out come the guns and more killing; good thing his trusty colleague Jessica Reel shows up. We expect fast action and surprise complications from Baldacci but sometimes the credibility gap stretches a bit far. Small things like the timing of some events or contradictions in behaviour or convenient alibis are annoying. Dan's lawyer Toni Moses is the best character in an unattractive portrayal of an inbred, racist South. Baldacci's ugly Mississippi is not Burke's bittersweet Louisiana.

One-liners:

▪ "We women all got that stupid gene from time to time 'round the boys." (75)

▪ "You lose all your manners when you moved from Cantrell?" (79)

▪ She said, "I leave the country for five minutes, and you get yourself in so much trouble I have to come here and save your ass?" (192)

▪ "Might be some folks that were in the woods last night on the north side of town doing some gator baggin'." (207)

Two-liners:

▪ His father didn't want to see him. Robie didn't see any reason to be here. Yet he wasn't going to leave.(62)

▪ "Now you really sound like you're from Mississippi, not Harvard."

"Hell, baby, when I go into that there courtroom you won't hear nothin' but Mississippi come out my damn mouth."(149)

▪ "In a way, Will, we've all been abandoned, haven't we? Some of us just don't know it, is all." (242)

Taggert empathy:

What am I going to do? thought Robie. "I'm going to hang around a few days, see what happens." 

"Well, the boys you beat up won't let that lie. They might come back with more boys." 

"So do I call the police when they do?" 

"You call me." She handed him a card. "Got my personal cell on it. You call 911, I'm not sure you'll get a speedy response." 

"Is that how it works here?" 

"That's how it works in a lot of places, Robie. Now look, I'm not tellin' you to go out and shoot nobody, but do you know how to use a gun?" 

He looked out toward the Gulf. On the horizon all he could see were storm clouds, thought the sky was clear. 

"I know how to use a gun," said Robie. (76)

Millennial p.o.v.:

"What, you expect me to be all upset and stressed out? Yeah, I'm pissed that Janet is dead although she just thought of me as her dorky kid sister. But they needed money, and if Clancy was willin' to pay them, so what?" 

"So you don't see anything wrong with that?" 

"Consensual sex? No, not really. We're living in the twenty-first century, in case you hadn't noticed." 

"Sex for money is illegal." 

"Lots of things are illegal, that doesn't make them wrong." 

Robie rubbed his eyes. He had little experience with teenagers, but he still couldn't believe he was having this conversation with a thirteen-year-old. Had the world really changed that much while he wasn't looking? (177)

Confrontation:

Robie turned back to his father. 

"I had to get out of Cantrell." 

"Why?" 

"You know damn well why. Because you were here." 

"Is that right?" snapped his father. "Just up and left without a word." 

"You left home. So did I. Why was it okay for you and not me?" 

Dan erupted, "Because my old man was a—" 

"A what?" interrupted Robie. "An asshole that made his son's life a living hell? Who made things so bad that his own wife couldn't live with him and finally up and left, leaving the son alone with him?" 

"You just blurred two lives, Will, mine and yours," said his father. 

"Apparently they were identical," shot back Robie. 

"You can't understand. You don't know anythin' about—" 

"Then why don't you explain it to me, Dad? Because I'm here now. And I'm listening." (313)