Library Limelights 189

A.J. Finn. The Woman in the Window. USA: HarperCollins, 2018.

This very creative story claims your full attention from start to finish. Child psychologist Anna Fox suffers from agoraphobia, making it impossible for her to leave her house, to go outside. While she works with a shrink and a physiotherapist to overcome her disabilities, much of her time is spent watching old movies and aimlessly observing her neighbours through a zoom camera. She makes herself feel useful by counselling similar sufferers on an internet social network, Agora. But basically, Anna is a mess: self-medicating on liquor and heavy-duty drugs. Sometimes her reality blurs with the audio or video of her movies. At a climactic point, we learn about the trauma that caused the separation from her husband Ed and little girl Olivia. But that's only half the story.

Anna meets Jane, the wife in a newly arrived family on her street. Jane, and later her son Ethan, come to visit Anna who feels a welcome bond developing. But when she witnesses a murder in the house across the park, no one believes her ... and she begins doubting herself, avoiding her doctor. Her diet and hygiene deteriorate. Anna's thoughts so often contradict what comes out of her mouth. She doesn't know who the murderer is. Or was it a Hitchcock movie? Jane's husband Alistair is hostile; Anna's tenant David acts strangely; did she hallucinate about danger in her own house? The novel is engulfing, brilliant – mind-blowingly brilliant.

Word: diegetic ‒ in a film, diegetic sound is intrinsic, heard by the characters as well as the watchers

One-liners:

▪ Watching is like nature photography: You don't interfere with the wildlife. (4)

▪ And although he speaks softly, his voice creaking like an old door, he's precise, particular, as a good psychiatrist should be. (76)

▪ She's been so playful, so jolly, that to see her looking serious produces a kind of jolt, a needle skidding off the vinyl. (88)

▪ Who am I to tell anyone else how to manage their disorder? (336)

Multi-liners:

▪ As a doctor, I say that the sufferer seeks an environment she can control. Such is the clinical take. As a sufferer (and that is the word), I say that agoraphobia hasn't ravaged my life so much as become it. (27)

▪ I think of him tonight as I stare at the ceiling, feeling dead myself. Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene. (59)

▪ "These are powerful psychotropics, Anna," Dr. Fielding advised me at the very beginning, back when I was woolly on painkillers."Use them responsibly." (123)

▪ As Shaw also said, alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. Good old Shaw. (129)

Wine with a new friend:

"You've got a lot of merlot over there," she says, eyeing the kitchen counter. 

"I order it in bulk," I explain. "I like it." 

"How often do you restock?" 

"Just a few times a year." At least once a month. 

She nods. "You've been like this—how long did you say?" she asks. "Six months?"

"Almost eleven." 

"Eleven months." Pressing her lips into a tiny o. "I can't whistle. But pretend I just did." She jams her cigarette into a cereal bowl, steeples her fingers, leans forward, as though in prayer. "So what do you do all day?" 

"I counsel people," I say, nobly. 

"Who?" 

"People online." 

"Ah." 

"And I take French lessons online. And I play chess," I add. 

"Online?" 

"Online." 

She sweeps a finger along the tideline in her wineglass. "So the Internet," she says, "is sort of your ... window to the world." 

"Well, so is my actual window." I gesture to the expanse of glass behind her. 

"Your spyglass," she says, and I blush. (85-6)

The fear:

I can't move. 

I can feel the outside trying to get in―isn't that how Lizzie put it? It's swelling against the door, bulging its muscles, battering the wood; I hear its breath, its nostrils steaming, its teeth grinding. It will trample me; it will tear me; it will devour me. 

I press my head to the door, exhale. One. Two. Three. Four. 

The street is a canyon, deep and broad. It's too exposed. I'll never make it. (148-9)

The pain:

I stretched forward and pressed my hands to the ground outside, felt the burning snow against my palms. Dug my elbows in, steadied my knees, and pulled. Dragged my torso out of the car, flopping onto the frost. It squeaked beneath me. I kept dragging. My hips. My thighs. Knees. Shins. Feet. The cuff around my ankle snagged on a coat hook; I hitched it loose, slid free of the car. 

And rolled onto my back. My spine went electric with pain. I sucked in air. Winced. My head rolled, as though my neck had quit. (274)

Sara Paretsky. Shell Game. USA: HarperCollins, 2018.

What a bonus winter! At least five topnotch mysteries/thrillers in a row! Among her peers, author Paretsky and her private eye V.I. (Vic) Warshawsky are icons. I'm glad to report that Vic is not quite as badly beaten up in this book as in some. Her latest problems have two tracks: finding her missing niece Reno, at the request of her sister Harmony ‒ nieces she hasn't seen since they were kindergarten age; and helping her best friend Lottie's student grandson Felix avoid a murder charge. The latter means Vic must find the real perp in a plot thick with immigration and cultural questions and an uncooperative Felix. The former means butting heads with her loathed ex-husband Dick to whom money and pretentious lifestyle are gods. Inevitably Vic also runs up against Chicago cop Finchley, County cop McGivney, and an assortment of unknown thugs.

Reno disappeared with damning evidence of her bosses' company fraud. Vic has to work through that to find out who took her, whether she's kidnapped or dead ‒ suspecting her ex is somehow involved. It's quite a night when she goes in disguise to ransack his office. Felix's involvement with a Syrian national leads to archaeology and artifact smuggling. It was a relief when Vic and the very nice museum director have a meeting of minds. And bodies. To my excitement, the conclusion involved Pigeon River and Thunder Bay. Good to see you again, V.I.. Do come back soon!

Words:

shigellosis - illness known at archaeological digs; think Montezuma's revenge or Delhi belly

cortado - Vic drinks a lot of these, what we'd call latte

One-liners:

▪ I carried my breakfast with me in the car and ate in a precarious and unhealthy way, swallowing fruit and yogurt at traffic lights, choking on toast crumbs, spilling coffee on my coat. (41)

▪ There ought to have been something bigger I could do, like erase her childhood and give her one like mine. (60)

▪ "Dick always says you have the personality of a pit bull." (178)

Multi-liners:

▪ "But she's the kind that hides her insecurity under an ice robe. If someone melted the ice, she might drown." (45)

▪ For some reason, I'd thought Dick shared my passion for social justice. For some reason, Dick thought I'd shared his passion for his career. (55)

▪ Tension and fear were all that had kept me upright. There were no chairs in the hall. I collapsed onto the floor, head on my knees. (249)

▪ "The U.S. government," I said earnestly. "Isn't that the refuge for people yearning to breathe free?" (343)

Illegals have chronic suspicions:

"Perhaps you yourself are working for the American government, wanting to catch undocumented people?" 

I started to bristle, then I thought of ICE agents descending on 7-Elevens and arresting hundreds of employees. Of the mothers detained in front of their children, of chemistry professors arrested as they buckled their daughters into their car seats. We had become a nation of bullies. (127)

The daily grind:

I kept the radio tuned to the news, in case a report came in about Felix. More shootings on the South and West Sides―hurray for a government that lets every citizen arm themselves with enough weapons to kill us all five or six times. Nothing about Felix. 

At the bottom of the hour, there was a brief human interest story about the fish man I'd seen this morning at the Oriental Institute. 

"We can't add it to our collection," Institute director Peter Sansen explained. "We don't know anything about its history, including whether it's stolen or looted. We've sent photographs to Interpol's art crime division and we're comparing them to international databases as well, but it's an intriguing piece. We're glad to have the opportunity to study it." 

And then back to somber news―the firing of all scientists from the EPA, nuclear threats, droughts, floods, avalanches. Shooting in progress on East Eighty-Ninth Street, a hop away from my childhood home. (135-6)

Some of the 1%:

The hyperwealthy aren't like you and me. Not, as Hemingway supposedly told Fitzgerald, because they have more money, but because the money makes them think their needs, however debased, should be met on the instant. A billionaire's bacchanal in the Caribbean where members brought beautiful women as party favors for their friends seemed vile; the idea that the billionaires entertained themselves by bidding on the women was beyond vile. 

My vocabulary was too limited for me to come up with a word for the disgust and rage I felt. (311)

Mick Herron. Down Cemetery Road. 2003. USA: Soho Press, Inc., 2015.

I'll say it again ‒ no one creates thrillers quite like Herron's inventive genius. This novel is the first of four in his Oxford Series. Pre-dating his acclaimed Slough House/Slow Horses Series, this also bears his stamp: the dark side of government. Sarah Tucker is a bored housewife married to Mark, a rising banker. When a neighbour's house is bombed, she becomes obsessed with their four-year-old daughter, the only survivor. But little Dinah has disappeared. Hiring Joe, a complaisant P.I., fails to find the child; then Joe's death is a shocker and Sarah's trail of fear begins. She is threatened with arrest over planted drugs found in her house, told that Joe was a drugs dealer, fed tranquillizers to keep her quiet. The downfall of a somewhat unsatisfactory marriage accelerates.

Meanwhile, mysterious events simmer for Michael, a traumatized ex-soldier, and the brutal agents who want to silence him. Amos and Axel Crane, the relentless agents, are barely under the control of department head (read: MI5) Howard. Killing civilians? ... whatever is expedient to conceal clandestine army experiments. On the run with Michael, Sarah finds her world upside down although her natural instincts manage to sustain her. Joe's wife Zoe follows them; each has a different mission, either to find Dinah or to wreak revenge. Leavened with sprinkles of Sarah's sassy humour and a friend called Wigwam, there's an underlying dose of what could be reality. Yet another intricate, thoughtful winner for Herron.

One-liners:

▪ A war might rumble into life thousands of miles away, but who the neighbours were having round next Friday, that was news. (29)

▪ Her considered view was that from the age of about three children were incredibly dull, until they got to twelve or so, at which point they became unspeakable. (33)

▪ "Sometimes," he said hopefully, "the client develops romantic yearnings towards the detective." (63)

Multi-liners:

▪ "Many things become legal when you can afford them, Ms Tucker. We live in a culture of expediency." (49)

▪ "You know what I don't want? I don't want you turning back into the girl you were when I first met you." (161)

▪ "Wasting police time, that's still an offence." They should lock up the whole bloody world, his tone implied. (175)

▪ Death squads were for fascists. In a democracy, accidents happened. (275)

Down the drain:

"Christ, why do you have to be so sanctimonious all the time? You never bleat about my job while you're spending money." 

"I don't notice you being particularly supportive about my career." 

"What career?" 

"Yeah, thanks a bunch. Congratulations, Mark. You really have turned into one of the shits we used to hate so much in college." 

"I work bloody hard―" 

"You spend all day arse-licking on the phone. I tell my friends you sell crack to schoolkids. I don't want to alienate them." 

"You've been a real bitch these past months, did you know that?" 

"And you turned into a yuppie prick about three years ago." (70-1)

Hitting the road:

Michael Downey had dropped the gun in three different drains between the house and the railway station: the gun itself, its silencer, ammunition; all done with perfect fluidity; a dip and a drop with no hint of a stumble, so that even a close watcher would have had difficulty being sure that he had actually seen the disposal of a murder weapon, rather than a clever mime. Throughout, Sarah succumbed to circumstance. Your best friend's husband tries to kill you; your bogeyman blows him away. Her options seemed limited, somehow. All she had taken from the house was her wallet. All it contained was twenty-odd pounds. (191)

Bottom line?

"That's the point. Nobody ever knew about it. You think people are happier knowing the truth, Sarah? About everything? You think they want to know what goes on in the margins of their democracy? They don't. That's my job. That's what clearing up means." (339)