Library Limelights 183

April Smith. Good Morning, Killer. USA: Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

FBI Agent Ana Grey got her promotion and seems more self-assured in her job. Yet she allows her emotions to go too far in the case of a kidnapping where the victim, Juliana, survives. Empathizing with the young girl takes Ana on a reckless path to career death. Her L.A. cop boyfriend, Andrew Berringer, is sometimes involved with the same cases that she works. As her rage builds against the man who could be a serial rapist/kidnapper, Ana also has doubts about Andrew's romantic commitment — doubts fed by Margaret, the volatile civilian employee of the L.A. police department. The pressure to find and capture the pathological criminal has Ana questioning her own stability while she nurtures the growing relationship with Juliana.

It's Andrew who hits on a key descriptor for the kidnapper's profile, leading to a targeted manhunt. But their relationship is on the rocks even though Ana seems obsessed with him, identifies with him on more than one level. Does she subconsciously recognize they are mirror images? Is she approaching a breakdown? A spectacular fight takes place; Ana is arrested. Her cohorts support or avoid her, as the case may be, while she faces court action. Smith paints real people with real problems in the richly atmospheric environs of Los Angeles. Obviously I'm a fan, although this one didn't quite pack the extra punch of Ana's debut in North of Montana (LL181).

One-liners:

▪ I realized from Galloway's narrowing expression I had better put the brakes on my Inner Bitch. (68)

▪ Andrew and I had become profoundly contaminated by the materials we were working with. (87)

▪ "I mean, are you a joke, Margaret, or just unbelievably cruel?" (140)

▪ I was sitting rigidly in the ergonomic chair, mind flip-flopping between chaos and a vacuum of black. (177)

Two-liners:

▪ I was ready for us to bear down and get this guy. I did not expect to be ambushed. (108)

▪ The sorrow that I felt was ferocious. It fueled the searing pain in my own abdomen. (186)

▪ I sat in the badness. There was no other place to go. (204)

Caution:

"I'm just saying, don't get carried away."

"With what?"

"Overidentifying. You don't know anything about this girl."

But I felt that I did. I knew something. She was an outsider who wanted to belong. (34)

Street witness:

"Did they give you medication?" 

"They just gave me medication and you talk to someone and they release you. I'm taking medication right now," said Willie. "I'm a depressed person right now. I personally knew Sylvester Stallone in the HBD. He was killed in nineteen seventy." 

Willie said these things with the same measured dullness as before. I felt as if I were in the presence of something enormous, like the pulsing of the stars. 

I gave him ten bucks and said, "Take care of yourself." (40)

Professional observation:

The girl sat up, hooking long blonde hair behind her ears. She wore skintight jeans with a snakeskin pattern and a short top that revealed a flawless abdomen with navel pierce. 

The room smelled like burning raspberries. 

"Is Juliana all right?" 

"She's still missing." 

"Really?" 

Stephanie sat up straighter, surprised. 

"We're hoping she's all right." 

"Me, too. Definitely." 

But Stephanie's hands were laid along her thighs so the elbows stuck out and the thumbs pointed down. In the Comprehensive Coding System for Emotional Recognition, should we be taping this interview and running it through a computer, we would call it a backward sign, like nodding yes when saying no. It meant there was some emotional leakage in that heartfelt answer. (26-7)

The boss speaks:

"Kelsey is a trained psychotherapist. I think we should pay more attention to the psychology of the offender." 

"We do. It's called criminal investigative analysis." 

It used to be called profiling, but the term sounded too much like racial profiling, so they figured out a way to make it incomprehensible altogether. After completing several hundred hours of advanced instruction at Quantico, I was selected to be a profile coordinator. I learned how to analyze a suspect by age, profession, marital status, sexual history, style of attack, IQ, social adjustment, appearance and grooming habits and a host of other factors in order to come up with a hypothetical portrait. Profiling is not about whether the guy was potty-trained too early. It's a working description that narrows the field. (67)

Assessing her lawyer:

"I'm shaking my head, Devon, because that's impossible." 

"What is?" 

"For me to sit here and listen to whatever bullshit the DA is going to come up with." 

"Forget the DA. You know how that's played. Let's focus on Andrew. He's the one who can push your buttons." 

I said nothing. 

"Am I right?" 

"Well, he did. Apparently." 

Devon took a breath to observe me in silence. Our eyes held, like infrared devices connecting and adjusting, sharing information. We were framing the relationship. Who was in charge? How far would the other yield? 

"If you can't keep it together in the courtroom, the ramifications will be—well, let me remind you. Sometimes clients need to hear it again: Your life is on the line." (224-5)

Catriona McPherson. The Child Garden. USA: Midnight Ink, 2015.

Hard to believe this is the woman who wrote Scot Free (LL179)! But must not underestimate this clever author, whose splendid mystery is masquerading as a cozy. Gloria, of literary bent, names her pet animals after authors; she's also mother of Nicky who suffers a terminal neurodegenerative disease. At his nursing home, she reads to him daily. Gloria lives in the former home of Miss Drumm, now in the same nursing home, who feeds her local legends of how to contain the devil. As the story opens, Gloria encounters an old classmate, Stephen. Stig, as he was called at school, is bedevilled by a tragic event of twenty-eight years earlier when thirteen youngsters went on an overnight school camp-out. Maybe the devil was loose that night: one boy fell off a bridge to drown with no witnesses.

When Stig and Gloria find the body of one of those classmates, they conceal the discovery. With the police looking for Stig, Gloria offers him shelter and is appalled to learn how many of the original thirteen have died unnaturally. To help her old friend she determinedly tracks down the living and the dead. Her ex-husband Dougall (Duggie) was one of them, still alive. Her relentless enquiries seem to point to a mastermind killer who knew all about the experimental school and the camp-out. More and more intricacies evolve as stories about the night in question differ. Threats appear as she and Stig try to reconstruct the truth, raising fear for her disabled son. Surprises galore, of course. McPherson is nothing but impressive.

One-liners:

▪ "You stopped being innocent when you found her and didn't call it in." (43)

▪ She winked at me, which I always wish people wouldn't do. (111)

▪ She smiled and accepted me―or, the me I had invented to match her. (180)

▪ "When our little one was taken, my husband couldn't do right for wrong." (189)

Multi-liners:

▪ "There's too much and it's too complicated." His breathing was starting to sound panicky again, like the night before when he was pacing. (61)

▪ "I'm not listening," shouted Miss Drumm through the open door. "Say what you like and don't mind me." (80)

▪ "Couldn't forgive herself. Who knows what they all did that night? I wasn't there." (162)

▪ Sig was staring at me. Gaping, really. "Who the hell's Lynne?" (199)

Learning the disease diagnosis:

"There's testing" said Mrs. Best. "But I suppose if you're ... you wouldn't ..." 

I had said it once to Duggie, when he was sitting numb with the shock, nursing a vodka so big I'd thought it was lemonade, sitting hunched on the footstool bit of his leather lounger, just staring. "There's testing," I'd said. "I'm not saying I'm not glad to have Nicky, but it's different going ahead with another one now that we know. But we can have tests. We wouldn't have to carry on." 

He had shuddered. I'll never forget it. He had actually shuddered. Then he'd taken a slug of the vodka and focussed his bleary eyes on me. "Glad to have Nicky," he repeated, in a flat voice. 

"Of course," I answered. He's our son." (118)

Someone else's son:

"And there we were, sitting in the house having a beer, coke for the kids, and she asked why I wasn't called Jacky after my dad. Why it was the second son who was Wee J." 

"Was Stephen your granddad's name or something?" 

"No, it wasn't that," said Stig. "My mum explained it to the girlfriend that day. I'll never forget it. She stubbed out her fag in this big glass ashtray and said, "We didn't think he was going to make it—a lot of complications at the birth—so we didn't want to waste the name in case it ended up on a headstone." (139-40)

Someone else's children:

"We're all right most of the time," Rain said. "The parents left us okay for money and the thing about heroin is, it's not actually all that bad for you. Coke'll kill you and speed'll kill you even faster—ha-ha—but if your supply is clean and you eat right, there's no reason heroin will ever do you much harm." 

"That's an unusual point of view." 

"I don't beat myself up anymore," Rain said. "I look after Sue and I look after me and I've let Claudie go. I can't change it, and I can't spend the rest of my life feeling bad about it." 

I nodded. She must have had some therapy of her own. No one spoke like that who hadn't been trained to. (228)

Michael Ondaatje. Warlight. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018.

Confession: had to skim this. Clearly it was critically well received, but. Where's the dialogue?! Apparently my patience grows thin on a diet of elegant but unrelenting prose, as it drifts through bits of childhood memory enlightened by adulthood. The first part recalls young Nathaniel's strange teenage year, or years, abandoned by parents to the care of a man he and his sister Rachel call The Moth. It's England, the years known as the Cold War. Pals of The Moth more or less move into what was the family home; Nathaniel agreeably participates in The Darter's illegitimate activities, including learning every canal along the Thames. Until he and Rachel are suddenly, secretly removed. Nathaniel's memory is incomplete, fractured.

The second part is grownup Nathaniel researching why his parents left them. Now, alienated from his sister, severed from the closest people he knew, he seeks elusive family warmth in his missing youth and the one girl who understood. His mother had worked for the Foreign Office, a "secretive" whose wartime activities made her a target of foreign assassins. Finding haphazard pieces, Nathaniel works at a tentative timeline reconstruction for her and the man who mentored her. But emotion has little place here. Underneath lies the purposeful destruction of clandestine political and military wartime activity. Let's be real: this is a beautifully created fiction written as a memoir. Apologies, sir, for the short shrift from a linear thinker.

One-liners:

▪ Ours was a family with a habit for nicknames, which meant it was a family of disguises. (6)

▪ Over the Christmas holidays the house filled up with The Moth's acquaintances, most of them staying late into the night, the conversations entering our bedrooms as we slept. (35)

▪ In retrospect Rachel and I were not too different in our anonymity from the dogs with their fictional papers. (97-8)

Two-liners:

▪ But I skated over what might be heavy or indigestible. The illegal world felt more magical than dangerous to me. (99)

▪ She was inhaling the world around her. She wanted to understand every skill, everything people spoke about. (108)

▪ Anything questionable was burned or shredded under myriad hands. So revisionist histories could begin. (133)

▪ Is it Felon who chooses her, or is this something Rose always wished for? Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be? (211)

Days at the races:

The music-loving Moth appeared blind to the evident anarchy in The Darter. Everything the ex-boxer did was at a precarious tilt, about to come loose. Worst were the crowded car rides when the two of them sat in the front, while Rachel and I and sometimes three greyhounds squabbled in the back on the way to Whitechapel. We were not even certain that the dogs belonged to him. The Darter rarely recalled their names, as they sat tense, shivering, their bony knees digging into our laps. There was one that preferred to lounge around my neck, its warm belly against me, and once, somewhere around Clapham, it proceeded to urinate, through either fear or need, onto my shirt. I was supposedly going to a school friend's house after the dog races, and when I complained, The Darter laughed so excessively he had to avoid hitting a Belisha beacon. No, we did not feel safe around him. (48)

Expanding education:

I became intrigued by women who were outside my realm, with no blood or sexual motive. Such friendships were not controlled by me, and they would be passing and brief. They replaced family life yet I could remain at a distance, which is my flaw. But I loved the truth I learned from strangers. (63)

Seeking connection:

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually to you. "A memoir is the lost inheritance," you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine. (135)