Library Limelights 212

John Sanford. Holy Ghost. USA: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018.

Sanford’s government agent Virgil Flowers is always involved in a small-town Minnesota adventure and this is no exception. We get to know well the quirky townspeople of Wheatfield as he searches for a sniper targeting crowds in front of a church. An apparition of the Virgin Mary has drawn throngs, revitalizing local business – especially the souvenir/convenience shop newly opened by mayor Holland and teen genius Skinner. Virgil and Sheriff Zimmer are at a loss to discover the angle of rifle attack or the motive for injuring two pilgrims and killing Mrs. Osborne, a well-liked local. The possibility of an out-of-town perp is dismissed and the cast of characters increases exponentially as early suspects are interviewed and eliminated. Another dead body, owner of a gun club, adds to the confusion.

Days go by with Virgil batting zero but meeting a lot of folksy people, including a set of backwoods Nazis and a misogynistic trucker with a trailer full of stolen Legos; everyone seems to be skilled with guns. Joined by Shrake and Jenkins, two of Virgil’s colleagues, the lawmen have much discussion on rifles and ballistics. But it’s still cui bono regarding the sniper. Complications follow when plans to lure him out are foiled by a murderous archery expert. It’s a romp, pure Sanford, never failing to entertain.

One-liners:

▪ If he needed more than fifty-one shots at somebody, he deserved to die. (12)

▪ “You’re looking for a scam, a cheat,” Brice said. (99)

▪ “Don’t give me a reason to beat the shit out of you now because I don’t know if I could stop.” (215)

Multi-liners:

▪ He lived three blocks over from Martin, and when he saw Virgil standing on his porch, he said, “I didn’t do it. If I had done it, I’d have done it better.” (105)

▪ “Everybody in town knows who you are,” Ford said over his shoulder. “Danny Visser put up a story on the town blog and links to some newspaper stories about you.” (106)

▪ “There is the bow hunter problem,” Virgil said. “I believed Osborne when he said he didn’t have a bow.” (303)

Virgil’s logic:

If it’s criminal, it’s either stupid or crazy. 

Stupid people usually have guns, crazy people always do. 

In a choice between stupid and crazy, first investigate the stupid, because stupid is more common than crazy. 

In many cases, stupid is also more dangerous than crazy. You could sometimes talk to crazy, but there’s no dealing with stupid. 

None of the above is always true. (161)

Cops’ caution:

“To tell you the truth, I’m almost afraid to work with her. She’s an excellent cop, but she’s too good-looking, and that ain’t good, if you know what I mean. I don’t joke with her. I don’t walk too close. I won’t even buy her a cup of fuckin’ coffee. Or even non-fuckin’ coffee.” 

“Very strange,” Virgil said. 

“It is, and she doesn’t like it any more than us guys. But it’s not up to her. Somebody else could say I was walking too close to her, and, the next thing you know, there’ll be an inquiry and we could both have career problems,” Wood said. “The world is getting goofier by the minute, Virgie.” (200)

Jenkins:

“I bought some black jeans and a long-sleeved black polo shirt. Black really is slimming. I give off this terrific artist vibe. When I get back to the Cities, I’m gonna head go over the Art Institute. Horny art women are stacked up like cordwood over there.” (287)

Standoff:

“We gotta check his cell phone, see who he talked to, see if he talked to anyone after we left. We need to know where he was this morning, too. Did he tell somebody something that triggered the killer? We gotta get on this ...” 

“Whoa! Whoa! Slow down, man. You’re freakin’ out,” Jenkins said. “This ain’t our fault, it’s the killer’s fault. We’ll have the guy in the next day or two ... He’s gotta be plugged in tight to what’s going on in this town, him always being one step ahead of us.” 

“One step ahead of me, you mean,” Virgil said. (323-4)

Paula Hawkins. Into the Water. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2017.

Hawkins chose to fashion a modern psychological spin onto old tales of killing witches. Danielle/Nel Abbott is the most recent person to be pulled dead from the river’s bucolic but sometimes-named “drowning pool.” Investigation by local DI Sean Townsend and district DS Erin Morgan question whether it was suicide or murder. Nel’s daughter Lena; Nel’s sister Julia aka Jules; Sean’s wife Helen; Sean’s father Patrick; neighbour Louise Whittaker; Louise’s son Josh; teacher Mark Henderson; self-proclaimed psychic Nickie — many had a reason to get rid of Nel, if indeed it was murder. Every character we meet is guilty of something, continually blaming others, and glad to express an opinion. I say everyone in the entire town needs serious psychiatric counselling.

Nel’s death had closely followed that of Lena’s best friend, Katie Whittaker, who also fell, jumped, or was pushed from a cliff into the pool. And we learn Patrick’s wife Lauren met the same fate years ago. Who did what to whom and when, becomes a scavenger hunt for the police to sort out; each person’s “truth” is a different story. Referring to an old legend of “troublesome women” (i.e. the drowning of witches) is not a successful application here, IMO. Teenager Lena mourns her friend and her mother, desperately loyal to both, acting out her anger. Louise is devastated by her own loss. Emotions run out of control as secrets are peeled away. Hawkins is very good at mood setting and switching among multiple narrators to drive the drama, but Jules’ endless agonizing over past mistakes is a bit too much.

One-liners:

▪ The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming. (11)

▪ I didn’t understand you, but if you were strange to me then, you are utterly alien now. (62)

▪ “They say,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “that if you look hard enough you can still see the blood on the walls.” (205)

▪ Some old part of me, some furious, fearless relic, had surfaced; I imagined myself lashing out at him, clawing at him. (251)

▪ “I think you were jealous of both of us, weren’t you?” (289)

▪ I knew then that I was in trouble, that she was trouble, the sort of trouble I’d been waiting for my whole life. (304)

Multi-liners:

▪ How could this be my fault? If you were unhappy, you never told me. If you had told me that, I would have listened. (59)

▪ “Don’t mention my mother to me like that. Today of all days. Christ! What sort of person does that?” (118)

▪ Nel had gone off in a huff and said that if Nickie couldn’t tell the truth, then they were wasting their time, but really what did she know about the truth? They were all just telling stories. (222)

▪ “Have you seen my service record, Erin?” he asked. “Because I’ve seen yours.” (334)

A memory of Nel:

You made me swear that I wouldn’t tell our parents about what happened. 

“Promise me, Julia. You won’t tell them. You won’t tell anyone about this. OK? Not ever. We can’t talk about it, all right? Because ... because we’ll all get into trouble. OK? Just don’t talk about it. If we don’t talk about it, it’s like it didn’t happen. Nothing happened, OK? Nothing happened. Promise me. Promise me, Julia, you’ll never speak about it again.” 

I kept my promise. You didn’t. (184)

Louise talks:

She stopped and took a deep breath. “I don’t seem to be making a lot of progress. Moving on, moving past things, moving at all ...” 

“I don’t think anyone would expect you to,” I said softly. “Not—“ 

“Not yet? Which implies that at some point I won’t feel like this. How can I not feel like this? My sadness feels right. It ... it weighs the right amount, crushes me just enough. My anger is clean, it bolsters me. Well ...” she sighed. “Only now my son thinks I’m responsible for Lena going missing. Sometimes I wonder if he thinks I pushed Nel Abbott off that cliff.” She sniffed. “In any case, he holds me responsible for the fact that Lena was left like that. Motherless. Alone.” 

I stood in the middle of the room, my arms carefully folded, trying not to touch anything. Like I was at a crime scene, like I didn’t want to contaminate anything. (277-8)

Nel’s book-in-progress:

Nickie tutted crossly. “No! That’s what I’m telling you. She wrote down some things, but not other things, and that’s where we disagreed, because she was perfectly happy to write down the things Jeannie told me when she was still alive, but not the things Jeannie told me when she was dead. Which makes no sense at all.” 

“Well ...” 

“No sense at all. But you need to listen. And if you won’t listen to me,” she said, thrusting the pages towards me, “you can listen to your sister.” (296)

Karin Slaughter. The Last Widow. USA: William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.

Emergency! It consumes the first half of the book although the tension never lets up. Doctor Sara Linton and her great love, GBI agent Will Trent, happen onto a bizarre road crash moments after huge explosions rock the university campus in Atlanta. It’s a breathless, confusing scene as names of the car drivers are uttered while they beat up Will. Helpless and disbelieving, Will sees them abduct Sara. GBI boss Amanda, Will (aspirin for his concussion), and cop friend Faith connect Sara’s plight to the previous kidnapping of Center for Disease Control expert Michelle Spivey. A militia group is suspected in the bombings but the motive for the kidnappings eludes them, or whether the same people even did both. The FBI only half-cooperates with information about the Independent Patriot Army (IPA). But Will recognizes its leader, Dash, as one of the men abducting Sara. Will, of course, is in a frenzy to find Sara and kill Dash. He gets his chance when the agencies agree he can try to infiltrate the IPA undercover.

Yes, Sara is in the IPA’s hidden forest camp after an eventful journey. She’s horrified to find dozens of sick children and a rigid patriarchal rule. Illustrating the dark side of humanity, it’s a loathsome misogynist cult in which psychopath Dash dispenses semi-literate screed in preparation for creating a cataclysm. Michelle Spivey, still alive, is nowhere in sight. There are many more wrinkles to the plot but suffice to say dead bodies pile up alarmingly. Author Slaughter is good for maintaining a high degree of tension, plus the ever ups and downs of our heroes’ love story.

One-liners:

▪ He was a redneck straight out of Lynyrd Skynyrd. (36)

▪ “The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders.” (61)

▪ “Michelle is a lesbian who gave birth to a mixed-race mongrel child.” (196)

▪ “White women with their abortion and birth control and their careers are choosing their own selfish desires over the propagation of the race.” (328)

▪ He was nothing but a loaded gun waiting to be pointed in any direction. (387)

Multi-liners:

▪ “Save those two women. Don’t let them get hurt. Give your dad something that makes him proud of you again.” (107)

▪ Dash returned the gun to his holster. He told Sara, “I hope, Doctor, you don’t think that we are the sort of animals who use rape as a weapon of war.” (150)

▪ The bright screen had shot tiny swords into his eyes. His brain had turned back into a balloon. He could feel it bumping against his skull. (209)

▪ Her entire adult life had been spent wishing that she had more time, but not this kind of time. This endless, tedious, nothingness of wasted time. (221)

Michelle:

Murphy pulled out two chairs and sat down. “Spivey is an Epidemic Intelligence Officer attached as a rapid responder through the emergency ops center.” 

Faith sank into the chair. She took out her notebook. EIOs were field investigators deployed into hot zones. They could work on anything from tying a lettuce farm to a salmonella outbreak or trying to stop the spread of Ebola. 

Faith said, “The news is making Spivey out to be a scientist who spends all day with her eyes stuck to a microscope.” 

“She is a scientist. But she’s also a licensed MD with a master’s degree in public health and a Ph.D. in diseases and vaccinology.” (128)

Will is in:

Beau said, “Tell Dash we need to talk.” 

The Flunky clearly didn’t want to work with another flunky. He asked Will, “Everything good, bro?” 

“He’s not your contact, dickslap.” Beau thumped the Flunky’s chest. “Tell Dash I want more money.” 

“For what?” 

“For fucking your mother.” 

Will was two seconds ahead of what happened next. (274)

Dash at dinner:

“It is time to send the message. We have gotten so far off track that the white man doesn’t know his place anymore.” 

He forked a mound of potato into his mouth. Obviously, he wasn’t finished with his speech, but he wasn’t content to play the game without Sara. 

She cleared her throat. “What kind of message?” 

He took his time drinking from the glass of water. “The Message will make it clear that the white man will not be conquered. Not by any other race. Not by a certain type of woman. Not by anyone or anything.” (325)

Faith & the FBI guy:

“Michelle was going to use her CDC ID card and her handprint on the biometric scanner to open that door, and they were both going to go inside that building.” 

“You think?” 

Here’s what I think: Your boss and my boss are friends, but they’re quarterbacks playing in different conferences. So your boss told you to tell me some things, but not everything, but you think I can actually help you, which is why every God damn interaction I have with you gets turned into a teaching moment.” 

“I love that you know about football." 

Faith hissed out air between her teeth. (397-8)