Library Limelights 218

Lee Child. Blue Moon. USA: Delacorte Press, 2019.

What can be said about a quintessential Jack Reacher story? In this case, Reacher arrives in a new city – standard opening – to learn that two rival gangs each control half of it. It’s the Ukrainians v. the Albanians, currently in a peaceful understanding. Basically, Reacher disrupts and destroys them all with the help of a few henchmen and a lot of Hockler H&K P7s. Glocks too, with Parabellum bullets. His new sweetheart Abby is his chief kill assistant, along with a stray ex-soldier and assorted musicians. The goal is to find Maxim Trulenko: force him to compensate an elderly couple, Maria and Aaron, for their daughter’s enormous medical costs. So there’s a bit about the American health system.

Maria and Aaron are deep into the moneylending-cycle trap, prompting Reacher’s offer of assistance. Possibly his last act of human kindness. His step-by-step observations for mission success and strategizing on the fly take up a lot of space; no bit of logic or calculated percentages is too trivial to share. Tiresome. Slo-mo fight enactments go without saying. References to man’s atavistic nature as some kind of righteous justification for savage killings become hollow. It’s violence without equal for Reacher. I mean complete obliteration of dozens of men. Mayhem over the top. Me: Speed reading. Dare I say: Must be a guys’ book? Goodbye, Jack. And OFF OF.

This should tell you all you need to know:

▪ The guy’s head cracked open like a dropped watermelon and the bullet came out the top of his skull and lodged in the ceiling directly above him. (263-4)

When the bodies keep charging, only to be shot:

▪ At first Reacher thought of their sacrifice in medieval terms, but then he revised his estimate backward, all the way to the dawn of time, a hundred thousand generations, to the pure insane grip of the tribe, and the absolute terror of being without it. (323)

Daughter’s desperate parents on the hook for treatment:

“She needs so much. Two or three sessions a day. Chemo, radiation, care and feeding, all kinds of scans, all kinds of lab work. She can’t get welfare. Technically she’s still employed, technically with a decent salary. No one in the press is interested. Where’s the story? Kid needs something, parents willing to pay. Where’s the punchline? Maybe we shouldn’t have signed that paper. Maybe other doors would have opened. But we did sign the paper. Too late now. Obviously the hospital wants to get paid. This is not emergency room stuff. It can’t be written off. Their machines cost a million dollars. They have to buy actual physical crystals of radioactive stuff. They want the money in advance. It’s what happens in cases like these. Cash on the barrelhead. Nothing happens before. Nothing we can do about it.” (66)

One second in a fight (2½ pages):

The guy froze for an imperceptible period, just a blink of time, thinking as fast as he was about to act, and then he swooped down, twisting, his right hand whipping through a long arc, aiming to snatch up the gun and grab it tight and whirl it away to safety. An instinctive calculation, based on space and time and speed, all four dimensions, with his own generous capabilities no doubt accurately accounted for, and his opponent’s capabilities no doubt cautiously estimated, based on worst-case averages, plus a safety margin, for the purposes of the arithmetic, which still showed plenty of time for a guy as quick as he was. (176)

Typical Reacher thinking:

“About a third of U.S. households own a dog. Just over thirty-six percent, to be precise. Which gives us a little worse than a two to three chance of being OK. Plus maybe it won’t bark anyway. Maybe the neighborhood dogs are calm. Maybe the Ukrainians are too lazy to get out to check. Too warm, too comfortable. Maybe they’re fast asleep. I think it’s safe enough.” (218-9)

Ann Patchett. The Dutch House. Large Print. USA: Harper Luxe/HarperCollins, 2019.

It was a long wait for this beautiful, evocative family story revolving around an unforgettable house. Maeve and Danny are the children in the Conroy household. Their father Cyril bought the mansion and everything in it: a home unlike any other in the small Pennsylvania town, filled with architectural curiosities, elegant furnishings, and objets d’art. First Fluffy, then housekeepers Jocelyn and Sandy, ensure that the children are cared for, meals are cooked, laundry is done, the household ticks along. Their care is especially important when Elna the mother abandons them. Trouble’s not far off when Cyril marries the grasping Andrea who brings her two young girls into the equation.

Some time later when Cyril dies, the wicked stepmother kicks twelve-year-old Danny out into his sister’s care. Maeve was seven years older, employed, with her own tiny apartment. The close relationship of brother and sister bears them through the following disinherited years. That closeness is a constant irritant to Danny’s wife Celeste. Danny himself finds his way from medical school to real estate, reviewing what he knows of his childhood and parents. Told from Danny’s perspective, the loss of their beautiful house is always a haunting symbol of their childhood. Resolution comes, but not what they expected. Patchett is a nuanced, magic storyteller. Clearly she has many more resources to draw on.

One-liners:

▪ Maeve was always careful to wipe the table down when we were finished and put everything back the way we found it because she thought of the kitchen as belonging to Sandy and Jocelyn. (53)

▪ He’d bought the most beautiful house in Pennsylvania and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her. (243)

▪ There was very little forgiveness in my heart and what I had I gave to Fluffy. (276)

▪ Everything Celeste didn’t like about me was Maeve’s fault, because being mad at your husband’s sister was infinitely easier than being mad at your husband. (312)

Multi-liners:

▪ There would never be an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder. (166)

▪ But I had picked the woman who had committed herself to smoothing my path and supporting my life. The problem was that Maeve thought she was taking care of that herself. (284-5)

▪ “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter what. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?” (329)

A wedding:

Our father couldn’t marry Andrea at Immaculate Conception or ask Father Brewer to come to the house to marry them because he was divorced and she wasn’t Catholic, which made it seem like they weren’t really getting married at all. The ceremony was performed by a judge that none of us knew, a man my father had paid to come to the house to do the job, the way you’d pay an electrician. When it was over, Andrea kept holding up her glass to the light, remarking on how the champagne matched the color of her dress exactly. (60)

Musing in the car:

“I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees. 

“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.” 

Maeve took a drag off her cigarette and smiled. “I love this. Is this what they’re teaching you in school?” 

“Introduction to Psychiatry.” (61)

The house:

There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside. (103)

The Nutcracker:

When the theater darkened and the audience ceased its collective rustling, the curtain rose to Tchaikovsky’s overture. Beautiful children dressed as children never are came racing out to the Christmas tree, and the lights came up on a set that might as well have been the Dutch House. It was a kind of architectural mirage, if such a thing were possible, a visual misunderstanding that I knew wasn’t true but was still, for a moment, wildly convincing. (336-7)

Robert K. Tanenbaum. Infamy. USA: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2016.

Once you get past the confusing initial scenario—who are these people being killed deep in a hidden desert encampment?―you’re good to go, in this courtroom thriller. Over the years I’ve seen the Karp family grow in all directions, and enjoyed all the adventures they’ve encountered. This book concentrates on Butch Karp, New York’s district attorney, as he builds a case against Wellington Constantine, ultra billionaire and nasty conspirator. In order to discover what a secret file called Mirage contains, and who Constantine’s allies are, Karp collects information from many sources: the journalist Ariana Stupenagel; anti-terrorist task force leader Espey Jaxon; Constantine’s wife Clare and her lover Richie Bryers; bodyguard thug Fitzsimmons; and assorted criminals—all have a piece to add for a convincing indictment.

Yes indeed, a large cast. Some of them are familiar characters populating more than one book in Tanenbaum’s series. Arch-spy Nadya Malovo, or Adjaani as she’s known in other circles, is new to me; she’s a wild card hovering on the edge of Karp’s plan. Bottom line, you have to buy in to clandestine conspiracy theories at the highest level of government. Not difficult, if you accept a certain degree of arrogance among the powerful and wealthy. My only (recurring) kvetch? The OFF OF usage!

One-liners:

▪ A small black hovercraft drone not much larger than a shoe box dropped out of the darkness above their heads and hovered at twelve feet. (183)

▪ “The fact is that one of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is the insanity defense, which can provide an escape mechanism for wrongful violent misconduct.” (215)

▪ “They waved that money in my face, and I went for it.” (228)

▪ “I believe it was your Senator John McCain who said that Russia is a ‘gas station masquerading as a country,’ and that is not far from the truth.” (315)

Multi-liners:

▪ “I look forward to the day when I’m no longer in this pain. It’s destroying more than my body; it’s taking my mind, especially when I need morphine. I feel like I’m losing myself, and that’s no life ...” (79)

▪ “I guess this is what happens when you get older,” Stupenagel said. “You start losing the people you created the memories of your youth with; it makes me feel old.” (141-2)

▪ “You can kill me and bomb Islamic fanatics into oblivion. But we will be replaced until you stop the people at the top whose only desire is for power and money.” (316)

Overheard:

He was about to get out of the pool and make a dash for the guesthouse when suddenly the quiet of the night was shattered by the sound of Wellington shouting in a drunken rage at his wife. 

Hanging onto the edge of the pool, Bryers cringed as his client cursed Clare, slurring his words but not the viciousness. “You whore! Shoving your tits in every man’s face!” 

“Wellington, please, you bought me this dress. You asked me to wear it and said I looked good when we left the house,” Clare pleaded. 

“I didn’t say flirt with anybody with a dick the whole dinner!” There was the sound of a slap, and Clare cried out in pain. 

“Wellington, please. I won’t wear it again. I was just trying to be nice to people and make you happy.” 

“Bitch! Whore! Slut!” Each word was accompanied by the sound of a slap, then of a struggle.

(94-5)

Suicide?

“That’s not enough,” Fitzsimmons said. “You fucked up and now you’re a loose end.” He walked over to where Moore’s handgun hung in its holster on the closet door. Grabbing a tissue from a box on the desk, he removed the gun and brought it back to the bed, tossing it on Moore’s lap. “You’re going to take one for the team.” 

Moore’s eyes grew wide, and then his face got angry and red. “Fuck you, Fitz. And fuck your boss! I ain’t eating no bullet for either of you! You crazy asshole.” 

Fitzsimmons shrugged. “Okay, let me tell you how it’s going to go. You know my boss has a lot of money, right? Very powerful man, lots of connections. Well, first thing that happens is the press is going to get a large file about a certain Detective Ted Moore and some of his extracurricular activities, including his connection to several murders and other rough stuff. I think the DAO and the brass at the NYPD will get the same file.” 

“I’ll let ‘em know who put me up to it!” 

“Yeah, really? Who, Teddy? I’m a ghost. I’ll be sipping margaritas in Mexico when you’re indicted. ... Imagine your poor parents, the media camped out on their front lawn. Only it’s not to talk to the ‘hero’ Ted Moore, but the dirty cop. The embarrassment alone will probably kill them.” (123-4)

Conscience?

“Perhaps I have a few debts on my account to repay as best I can. And perhaps I have an issue with ISIS, the murderers of children and women, though I have done both and am haunted by it, and with governments that pretend to be moral and just but in reality are in the control of entities that thrive on chaos, war, and suffering.” 

Malovo stopped talking for a moment, then looked up at Ivgeny, her former lover. “And perhaps the girl in me who has been buried for so long is tired of being hunted and longs for peace.” She turned back to Karp. “You and I are through after this?” 

“As long as you stay out of New York County,” Karp replied. 

“Oh, but I will miss Broadway,” Malovo said with a laugh. “But it is a deal.” (276)