Library Limelights 184

Kate Moretti. The Vanishing Year. Atria Paperback/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2016.

Another rags to riches scenario, young woman wooed and wed to Manhattan's wealthiest, most eligible man. Is this sounding familiar? ... smitten, pampered, and protected Zoe Whittaker soon finds herself a little bored with her arm-candy paradise while hubby Henry works long hours to make more money. Because she's not Zoe at all. Adopted at birth by Evelyn, she's hiding her previous identity, her sad and sordid history, from everyone. After testifying at a grand jury against west coast sex trade trafficking, she ran ... making her terrified self disappear. On the other hand, the difficult search for her birth mother Carolyn involves Cash, a sympathetic journalist. They soon learn that danger has followed her, but who could have found her?

Henry has little patience for the past; he lives in the present and it doesn't include the messiness of finding an unknown birth mother. He keeps his own past quiet, preferring to adore Zoe and shower her with gifts. Zoe feels friendless in her identity crisis despite fondness for Lydia. We see a marriage crumbling without knowing all the factors. The revelations come rolling in soon enough although a few contradictions in the characters or plot are a bit much. E.g. the police tell Zoe her condo is under complete protection (244) and then say it's too dangerous to go there (245). Zoe tells us Henry habitually controls his anger (192) but that's after he's exhibited "wild rage" (166). Okay, it's a wild ride of suspense, regardless.

One-liners:

▪ Henry is a product of a traditional household and paternalism runs deep in his veins, which I find both charming and a little infuriating, depending on the day. (15)

▪ Sometimes I wonder how all three of us can possibly fit in this one body. (84)

▪ Every woman should have a man who looks at her like that, like she's the only one in the room. (179-80)

▪ I feel it then, the pressure of what being Henry Whittaker's wife would eventually do to me, and it's as heavy as a house, perched right on my chest. (257-8)

▪ I nodded the way one does when they've just learned their father was named Trout Fishman. (201)

Multi-liners:

▪ "What matters to you, matters to me. Is that so hard to believe?" (21)

▪ A hold line clicks on and I hear classical music, which strikes me as ironic. Anyone calling this line is dealing with a possible life-or-death situation. Here, have some Chopin. (91)

▪ I have always felt like Henry's pet project, to some extent Lydia wasn't far off. I've been groomed to fit into his life, among his friends and colleagues. (121)

Henry's insecurity:

"I said you can do anything you want to do. I mean that. But you are restless. You are not content in our life. With everything we have, you want more. You bring up this Carolyn every time I turn around. She's the woman who left you. I am the man who is here. And it will never be enough." (66)

Courting a punk:

He calls me brilliant to his friends. Sometimes I think he's lost his mind. They surely think that too. 

Me with my hair spiked like, well, a bat orchid, and dyed just as black. With my facial piercings and my fishnet stockings and knee-high boots. With my too-short skirts and my dubious taste in music. My suspect circle of friends, acquaintances mostly, Lydia's friends. But most of them not so arrow straight, some who dabble in drugs. I've heard his colleagues say things, seen their looks. They smirk when they think I'm not looking—but I see it. I'm a dangerous hobby, an expensive yacht. I'm a midlife crisis. He's slumming and getting off on it. I see it, they see it. Henry doesn't. I tell him this and he just shakes his head. (77)

The approaching storm:

"How many times did you meet with this man, Zoe?" 

I sit carefully, in the chair to Henry's right, concentrating on unfolding the napkin on my lap. Half of me flares up: how dare he ask, how dare he care? I'm free to talk to whomever I'd like, this is hardly the fifties. 

"Three." I spear a piece of lamb, the tender meat falls apart, a perfect doneness. Sometimes I'd like her to, just once, burn a meal. Overestimate the cooking time. It hasn't happened yet. 

"Yet, you've said nothing. I ask you about your daily activities. You've remained vague. Why?" 

I tip my wineglass and swallow it all down at once, like a nervous freshman at a fraternity party. "Not purposefully. They've all been brief. I'm sure whatever else I did that day was more interesting." 

"Your entire day is interesting to me, Zoe. You know that. Why would you lie? Why would you cover it up?" 

"I'm not covering it up, Henry. This whole conversation is ridiculous. We met three times in public places, discussed the charity, my involvement, that's it. Enough of this." 

I stand, planning to get another glass of wine. 

"Sit," he commands in his boardroom voice, the one no one dares defy. (164-5)

M.R. Hall. The Chosen Dead. UK: Mantle/Pan MacMillan, 2013.

Another extraordinary mystery in the series about Bristol Coroner, Jenny Cooper. Jenny always manages to annoy her superiors when pursuing the truth and its accompanying circumstances. Last time it was the aviation industry; this time it's biotech research into disease bacteria. The extent of Jenny's investigation ‒ and the collective information ‒ is nothing short of amazing. Plenty of agencies or individuals would like to cover up the local suicide of Adam Jordan, a humanitarian aid worker in African communities. Jenny explores the possibility of a connection to an aggressive, antibiotic-resistant "bug" that subsequently killed two young women. When the military and government get involved, she knows she's on the right track.

"Recombinant gene technology" ... "post-transcriptional gene silencing" ... we learn, along with Jenny. Her love life suffers as she plunges ahead; her reconquered anxiety threatens to burst. In fact all her personal relationships come second to her goal of revealing questionable activity in her public inquest. Interviewing reserved academics, distraught parents, and many associates builds up to life-and-death danger. I could not put the book down when she found herself totally alone, unable to trust a soul. Her prickly assistant Alison pulls off one of the surprises. Pay close attention: it's a very complicated pursuit with a scientific subject all too believable and frightened players who want to hide everything.

One-liners:

▪ Just like the micro-organisms he had spent his professional life studying, human beings had an uncanny knack of bringing life to the most unlikely corners of the planet. (6)

▪ "You deliberately create a monster in order to learn how to kill it." (153)

▪ It was just the way it was, as inexorable as the cycle of life and death: human beings only truly learned from their most catastrophic mistakes. (378)

Two-liners:

▪ "You want to stop treating foreign patients? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" (67)

▪ "Doctors are very clever people, but as prone to irrational responses as the rest of us. You know, there is a very good reason why we don't let them run hospitals by themselves." (77)

▪ "It seems Mrs Jordan disturbed some intruders. I'm afraid she was hurt." (155)

▪ Jenny felt the muscles of her diaphragm tense. She had smelt his fear as they had sat in his car at Great Shefford. (348)

Body warfare:

She learned that there was a lively debate over precisely how such a sophisticated bacterium had come to exist, and even why it existed at all. During the course of its evolutionary history, it had clearly developed alongside healthy and productive cells, learning to pick the locks as swiftly as the human organism fitted new ones. But it had no purpose beyond its continued existence, no positive benefit to any other life form. It seemed to exist only to destroy. The more Jenny read, the more obvious it became that anyone who believed in such a thing as a "life force" had also to believe in its opposite. Every human body was, at the microscopic level, a permanent battleground in which life was winning the day only by a fraction. (112-3)

Guilt:

"Jesus, Jenny. What did you think you were doing? I just had a call from Fiona Freeman. She said you didn't even offer an explanation. One minute the inquest was in full swing, the next you'd delivered an open verdict. Now they're both going over the edge." 

Jenny had been back behind her desk in Jamaica Street less than an hour when she answered the call from David. She was already consumed with guilt, and he was confirming her worst fears."I will speak to them. It's just —" 

"Just what, Jenny? Have you any idea how upsetting this is? I told them they could trust you, for God's sake." 

"I know!" 

"And?" 

"I said I'll talk to them" 

"When?" 

"When I've something to say. It may take some time. A few days." 

David sighed, infuriated. "This is hopeless. Thanks for nothing. I hope you can live with yourself." 

She started as he slammed down the phone. A hard lump had formed in her throat: all the symptoms of anxiety clawing at her one by one. (264)

Jonathan Lethem. The Feral Detective. USA: HarperCollins, 2018.

Inanity and insanity rules in the Mojave Desert. Tribes of hippy-fringe-back to-the-earth people (called Bears and Rabbits) inhabit the isolated region with mutual hostilities or uneasy truces. This is what Phoebe discovers when she hires "the feral detective," Charles Heist, who "finds people." Heist himself was raised in a desert commune so he may be just the right man to find her missing friend Arabella. Seeking signs of Arabella, last heard from near Los Angeles, the two searchers enter a dystopian landscape where everyone is stripped down to elementals, albeit each to their own fantasy. Urban runaways; strange monks at a mountain monastery; Bears who want to defect; Rabbits who spout dharmachakra; like they're all stoned on cactus juice.

Tough-talking Phoebe falls hard for Heist. Although alienated from her own real world, Phoebe can't totally dissociate from it. Are we led to believe it's all an allegory for the divided USA since Trump's election? Phoebe is keeping track of the new president. The enigmatic Heist engages in a savage ritual Bear fight where they spot Arabella as some kind of winner's trophy. Oh, please. It must have been the word "desert" that made me choose this book! Black humour aside, I didn't expect the fruitcakes. Mildly entertaining; one notably hilarious episode of splaining.

One-liners:

▪ An only child, I might have been one too many. (19)

▪ This desert, I now understood, was a place where things came to be unaffixed from old purposes.(198)

▪ I preferred not to end up shackled by my wrist to their other guest in some sort of cute Hitchcockian nightmare. (165)

▪ His murder-sized forearm detonated outward to wallop me free of him, bruising my shoulders and jaw and brain all at once and instantly. (188)

Multi-liners:

▪ "Really, you could say men are the past of the human species. They need a lot of help from us with that." (167)

▪ Heist had raged for his life like a creature not even a prison-monstered man could contend with. He should have been called the Atavistic Detective. (189)

▪ Someone had once told me you never know who you'll be in an emergency. I discovered that apparently my response was to try to make myself into the whole emergency. (189)

▪ "I might go to Canada. There's somebody I met who split and went to Halifax. They have good music there." (219)

▪ "We murdered him, Charles. I think we might have murdered them both."(315)

Desert tribal culture:

"A night like this is a test of one's concentration," this angelic youth said, by way of welcome. He imparted real warmth in the remark. 

"How so?" I asked. 

"We're embedded in the dream, but it actually doesn't care about us. It's very harsh to consider, really. I feel a weight on my chest like the embodiment of a large animal, but it probably isn't trying to comfort me. There's a taste in my mouth like burnt flowers. I haven't smoked anything, but I did eat some seeds." 

I didn't know how far I should try to follow him. "I'm Phoebe," I said. "What's your name?" 

"I'm not entertaining a name at present." (177-8)

Affection grows:

He was the thing I'd seize for myself, in this new world. An untamed creature of the middle spaces, a resister stranded from all camps, tending to decline needless battle, infinitely kind toward the weak, yet capable of killing if cornered. I'd be Heist's other, he'd be mine. I understood him now, his appetite for distance, his noble disaffiliation—I'd show him we shared this, and then he could affiliate to me. (241)

Trapped in a rusty ferris wheel:

"Are you comfortable?" shouted the man below. ... The man's voice reached me surprisingly easily. 

"No!" I shouted back. 

"Normally it goes around and around!" he called out. Even shouting, his voice had a grin in it. "I wish I could show you! It makes a better illustration of the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma!" 

"I know how a ferris wheel works, thanks," I shouted back. "I'm not in the mood right now. Let us down." 

"I can't do that, sorry!" 

"I'm calling the police." My phone had no signal, of course. My attempts were draining the battery, so I'd switched it off. 

"Go ahead, but I don't think they have any influence on the dharmachakra!" 

"I'm not talking to you anymore." (276)

Lunacy is contagious:

"Listen, this has been great, but we've got to get back to the room now. Did I mention that we killed a man? Maybe two men, it depends on how you count. Also, I'm outlandishly great in bed, though no one ever seems to mention it. Maybe I just need to hear it too much, I don't know! But Charles and I are driving back tonight, he's got to get home to feed his dead possum, and he needs me to drive the Jeep—it's a rental, and it's only in my name, plus there's a chance he's slowly succumbing to internal injuries, so I'm sure you understand. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Edge." (322)