Library Limelights 208

Mick Herron. Smoke and Whispers. 2009. USA: Soho Press, Inc., 2015.

The fourth and final novel in Herron's Oxford Series, featuring the fierce private investigator Zöe Boehm. But what turn of events is this? Her old friend Sarah Tucker learns that a body pulled from the Tyne River in Newcastle has been tentatively identified as Zöe's. In sorrow and disbelief, Sarah goes north to assist with identification; she stays at the same run-down hotel where Zöe'd been. At the morgue, although Sarah recognizes Zöe's belongings, a water-submerged body is not so easy. Coincidence? — Gerard Inchon, a man from their past, is holding an investors' meeting at the same hotel. He latches onto Sarah, introducing her to some Newcastle entrepreneurs. Her thoughts occupied with Zöe, she drifts into Gerard's orbit in his business dealings with locals Jack Gannon and research scientist John Wright.

Sarah's partner Russ worries while she lingers in Newcastle; she’s becoming certain that Zöe was murdered, interviewing anyone who'd seen or talked to her friend. Gerard is acting suspiciously, on a mission of his own; he reveals his bitter family secret to Sarah. Some marathon drinking is involved from time to time. But in Sarah's mind the spectre of Alan Talmadge is rising, a clever killer of lonely women, a man Zöe was hunting. Sarah has no idea what he looks like. Assuming he's still in the city, she tries to smoke him out. Success. Creepy Talmadge finds her. There's a hair-raising climax in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art after a few mistakes and several surprises. A fitting finale to this series and an exceptional friendship bond.

One-liners:

▪ "Gerard likes to test people's patience," she found herself explaining. (32)

▪ Words were sharp-edged objects, to be issued carefully, in case they caused damage. (44)

▪ But to believe it coincidence, she had to lean on it first, to see if it broke. (63)

▪ She was talking to a naked man in a derelict shipyard. (180)

Multi-liners:

▪ It occurred to Sarah, not for the first time, that conversation with many men would be a lot simpler conducted on their terms: Yes, No, Fuck off. It would limit the agenda, but a lot of them seemed to prefer that. (57)

▪ Whatever had brought her here had faded into insignificance once Alan Talmadge reared his head. He was her unfinished business. (143)

▪ And now she was here, looking for safety. She could almost hear Zöe's voice: Safety? You don't know the meaning of the word. (171)

▪ She rang him, reached voicemail, and left a loving, apologetic message, or hoped she did. It was always possible she'd left an incoherent, half-crazed one. (193)

Stark reality:

Sarah closed her eyes, and opened them again. The body on the slab hadn't moved. It was Zöe. But it was not Zöe. It was like looking at a lamp from which the bulb had been removed, and trying to guage how much light it once shed. (46)

Vicky, Zöe's IT whiz kid:

"Well, you don't think I believe it, do you? Zöe? In a river? Like that's gunna happen." 

"There's a body," Sarah said. 

"There's always bodies. People die all the time." But not Zöe, apparently. "Anyway, you don't believe it any more'n me. Else you wouldn't be asking if I'd heard from her." 

It was no time to start deconstructing how much she'd been prepared to divulge. Besides, the kid probably had a polygraph wired to her phone. "Either way, she hasn't been in touch," Sarah said. "Don't you think, if she was able to, she'd have let us know she was okay?" 

Teenagers have a gift: they can shrug audibly, over a mobile. "I said she wasn't dead, that's all. I dunno what's happened to her." (59-60)

A father's anguish:

"My son would be better off dead. That's not self-pitying rationalization. He would be better. Off. Dead." 

His voice had risen, and for a moment afterwards an echo ricocheted around the bar, stirring hosts of ancient conversations and long-forgotten sorrows. 

Then he said, "I was a practising Catholic, did you know that?" 

She nodded, but he wasn't looking at her. "Yes," she said. 

"Paula still is. That's the funny thing." 

"You've lost your faith?" 

And now he looked at her, with eyes that were dark absences. "Lose it? No, I didn't lose it, Sarah. I nailed it to a tree and set fire to it." (112)

Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö. Roseanna. 1968. UK: Harper Perennial, 2016.

A filler for me, but a classic. Henkell Manning reflected on its influence in the recent introduction. The Swedish author team were breaking ground at the time, inserting social commentary as well as presenting police officers as real people rather than action heroes. Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the national police manages the investigation of a strangled woman pulled from a northern canal. Beck is devoted to his job and to this difficult case in particular. Identifying the body is a tricky business in a world where cell phones and internet are absent and 'women's lib' scarcely had a foothold. With local cop Gunnar Ahlberg and others, he learns that this woman, Roseanna, was an American who'd been on a canal tourist boat. Their first job: narrow down the scores of summer passengers and crew for eligible suspects.

Everything takes time, especially tracking some of the erstwhile vacationers of other nationalities. Collecting tourists' photographs become a necessity. Only patient, exhausting months of paperwork, footwork, and some luck uncovers the likely killer, but evidence is totally lacking. During that time we are privy to Beck's dismal home life. Then he convinces his superiors and a skeptical policewoman that a honey trap is the best hope of catching the man. The waiting is very fraught. A dry but thoughtful read, both as a police procedural and as new directions for crime novels.

One-liners:

▪ Words like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers, not in your thinking. (44)

▪ In spite of the thousands of examinations he had conducted, he had a funny, bad feeling in his stomach and in the left part of his chest. (175)

▪ "Of course I acted in school plays but mostly as angels or mushrooms." (200)

▪ The hounds chased themselves to death without the fox even noticing it, Martin Beck thought. (213)

Multi-liners:

▪ "Yes, think what a lot of nonsense one can figure out with plenty of time. Brooding is the mother of ineffectiveness." (50)

▪ He felt like a long-distance runner one second before the starting gun. There were only two things that worried him: the murderer had jumped the gun and was three months ahead of him, and he didn't know in which direction to run. (53)

▪ "That pipe smells dreadful. By all means sit here and poison the air. You are most welcome." (59)

Starting point:

"Didn't you get anywhere?" 

"No. We don't know a thing. We don't know who she was, where she was murdered, and least of all by whom. We know approximately how and where but that's all." 

Hammar sat with the palms of his hands on the top of the desk, and studied his fingernails and wrinkled his forehead. He was a good man to work for, calm, almost a little slow, and they always got along well together.Commissioner Hammar folded his hands and looked up at Martin Beck. 

"Keep in contact with Motala. You are most probably right. The girl was on vacation, thought to be away, maybe even out of the country. It might take two weeks at least before anyone misses her. If we count on a three week vacation. But I would like to see your report as soon as possible." (38-9)

Progress:

Twenty photographs were spread out on the table in front of Martin Beck. He had pushed nineteen of them aside and was studying the picture of Roseanna McGraw in the magnifying glass's circle of light for, perhaps, the fiftieth time. She looked just exactly as he had imagined her. Her glance seemed to be directed upward, probably in the direction of Riddarholm's tower. She looked healthy and alert and totally unconscious of the fact that she had only about thirty-six hours left to live. (127)

Lucy Foley. The Book of Lost and Found. HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

No crime, no thrills, but a trans-generation epic, a blend of love stories, and – of course – at least one simmering mystery. Kate is still grieving the tragic, premature loss of her mother June when her adoptive grandmother dies. On her deathbed, Evie tells Kate she hid the fact that June’s biological mother tried to contact her. The rejection feels like betrayal to Kate, but offers her a purpose out of depression: searching for her true grandmother who might still be alive. The slimmest of clues, plus a mesmerizing sketch of a strange woman, set Kate on the road to solving family mysteries. Her journey takes her first to Corsica and the home of acclaimed artist Thomas Stafford; Tom is very welcoming but his grandson Oliver is hostile.

The narrative evolves among Kate, Tom, and Tom’s lost love. From the 1920s in England’s Oxbridge country to 1930s Paris to New York in the 1980s, Tom’s life intermingles with that of the alluring Alice. Could Alice possibly have survived her years of loss, poverty, war, and imprisonment? Paternity in several generations is a big question mark and I found myself having to doodle some potential family trees. Kate herself is feeling alive again as her heart fills with hope and Oliver becomes more supportive. For those who eschew hardboiled cops and violence in their mystery readings, it’s a long, comforting read.

One-liners:

▪ I had come to look at the work of the artist who had suddenly become so uniquely important to me. (51)

▪ “To truly create, to innovate, you cannot care about the sensibilities you may offend.” (133)

▪ How terrible, I thought, to bear witness to your parent’s failure ‒ to be embarrassed for them in that way. (214)

▪ This is what happened, I thought, when you let someone beyond the barrier you had set up: you opened up the possibility for pain. (295)

Multi-liners:

▪ I wanted to capture it all: the scent of herbs, the hush of the breeze, the tentative warmth of the newly risen sun on my bare shoulders. I wondered if this was something Stafford might experience, too, when he sat down to try and render it in paint. (88)

▪ She would have real men, men of experience, vying for her company, while I was still just a boy. How could I hope to compete with that? (95)

▪ By the bottom of the third glass, Negronis are Alice’s favourite drink in the world. She could bathe in them. (180)

▪ Matisse, I thought. Henri Matisse had made them for her. (446)

Kate:

His kindness was disabling. I felt something rend within me and panicked, thinking I might be about to cry. It was with a great surge of effort that I managed to regain control. I sipped my tea carefully, watching the incremental progress of that distant boat across the horizon, and gradually felt myself retreat from the edge. (69)

Tom:

The hold the past had on me turned out to be even stronger than I had realized. I could not sleep at night for thinking about it. Or, when I did sleep, my dreams were of long ago, so astonishingly vivid that when I woke reality itself seemed false, and I could not understand where I was ‒ how I had come to be trapped in this old man’s body, on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Thus through the girl’s letter the past called to me, staked its claim once more upon me. And the lure of revisiting that time ‒ both the good and bad of it – was, in the end, irresistible. (84)

Aunt Margaret:

Alice’s aunt is, in a word, astonishing. She wears loose pantaloons in a vivid green silk, far more shocking than the most revealing flapper’s skirt. These are topped by what appears to be a man’s dress shirt, several sizes too large for her thin frame and tucked in so that it billows extravagantly at the waist. A jewel of the same hue as the trousers flashes at her collarbone. Her limp is prominent, thought she carries it well, and she walks with a silver-topped cane of polished ebony. Her hair is wet, smoothed back over the crown of her head, and Tom can see that it is very short and very red. (130)

Voices on paper:

I looked at the envelopes within. The paper had yellowed with age, and the colour of the ink had faded markedly. They seemed like ancient relics. How strange for Stafford, I thought, to see that something from his own lifetime ‒ something that he remembered receiving, the ink fresh, the paper stiff and white – had become antique. 

He bade me take them away to read in my own time, so I carried them down to the cove with me that afternoon after lunch. I sat on a large rock ‒ flat and sun-warmed, but, by four o’clock, pleasantly shaded by the cliff behind. I kept the pages in the wallet, for fear of harming them ‒ or worse, losing them to a sudden breeze. The hand was immediately familiar. Sloping, italic, with that slightly debonair flourish. (170-1)