This is the third in a trilogy about Ilka Jensen, the Dane who inherited a Wisconsin undertaking business upon the death of her father. Blaedel’s action takes a mad pace, almost as if she’s making it up as she goes, so I do recommend reading at least the previous book (Her Father’s Secret, see LL194). Ilka has her hands full right at the start of this one, with Lydia, the fugitive who was masquerading as a nun and the funeral home’s receptionist. The business has been closed since Artie, the establishment’s embalmer, went into hospital with serious injuries inflicted by the Mexican drug-gang brothers chasing Lydia. Never mind Ilka’s problems with her father’s American family: her half-sister Leslie just shot and killed her abusive maternal grandfather but it’s her mother Mary Ann who is in prison. That gives you an idea of the tempo!
Now Lydia tells Ilka her father is alive and in Florida. Ilka’s priority is to drive to Key West and confront her father, Paul; the man had abandoned her and her mother in Copenhagen years ago. Paul thinks his Wisconsin family believes he is at a rehab centre for his gambling addiction, whereas they too were told he was dead. Although Ilka is extremely worried about Artie and how to pay his horrific, escalating hospital bills (aside: native of civilized socialist country reacting with incredulity to U.S. medical costs), Lydia seems to come up with eye-popping amounts of cash before she disappears. Maybe Ilka’s casual sex partner Jeff can find Lydia. Maybe the sick, sinister cult in Lydia’s background is the biggest problem. Maybe not-dead Paul has some answers. Then Ilka’s mother and her companion arrive from Denmark, determined to restart the funeral home business with Danish hygge. Sprinkled with coffins and kringle, the madness is worthy of Carl Hiassen (oops, he’s of Norwegian extraction. But still).
Teasers
▪ But finding he was alive had shaken her, and now she struggled to get everything clear in her head. (14)
▪ “You’ll have to excuse me, I need to deliver a body to the crematorium.” (22)
▪ The man with the bleeding knees was still sitting on the ground when she pulled out. Darkness was falling and Key West still lay far away. (44)
▪ She decided it wasn’t a good time to tell him his wife was in jail after confessing to shooting her father. (78)
▪ Her mother showing up had brought out that old familiar feeling in Ilka of being safe and warm, but it also terrified her. (203)
▪ She looked around the room. She had the feeling they were all suffering from some sort of mass psychosis. (221-2)
▪ “You can take the hearse. Everyone might as well get used to driving it.” (223)
▪ “They took the papers,” Lydia said. “All the evidence.” (347-8)
▪ Their eyes locked, and she froze when he said, “I find people. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve done.” (357)
Louise Penny. A Better Man. USA: Minotaur Books/St. Martin’s Publishing, 2019.
Armand Gamache and his son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir seem to be sharing the position of Chief Inspector of homicide in the Quebec Sûreté. For Gamache, it’s a demotion; for Beauvoir, it’s his last post before the new job awaiting him in Paris. And their mutual case comes from their own agent Lysette Cloutier, convinced that something dire has happened to a missing woman. Cloutier knows the family, was implored by Vivienne Godin’s father Homer to find her. Vivienne’s husband Carl Tracey is a known wife abuser. As inquiries begin, the spring thaw and monumental ice jams are creating massive flooding, threatening the province’s great dams and bridges; Penny truly outdoes herself in the vivid descriptions. When Vivienne’s body is found in the flooded river not far from Gamache’s home village of Three Pines, the police encounter all kinds of contradictory statements in their interviews with husband, father, and other associates; abuse—or breaking its cycle―recurs. Homer is constantly restrained from attacking Tracey. Nevertheless, the case against Tracey is solid enough for an arrest and the courtroom.
There’s a twist, of course! A well-wrought legal point torpedoes all of them, forcing the Sûreté officers under great pressure to review everything. Clara the artist is also forced to re-examine her work, her recent paintings in her case. Social media has a part to play too. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, having to admit ’twas not thus with previous Penny books. Then, what struck me as chunks of overly dramatic prose and pauses in order to make a point, was spoiling the flow of an absorbing story. And I often found some of the Three Pines residents rather cloying in character and interactions. This time, almost none of that irritation surfaced; a wee bit overboard with empathy reminders (how would you feel, Gamache?) among professional cops. Have I become a Penny fan? Suffice to say, is it possible that her next book could be even better?
One-liners
▪ How did a man without internet have a website? (111)
▪ “I’m coming down to help,”—he glanced at the clock―”if I can get off-island before they close the bridges.” (119)
▪ As soon as Vivienne had been born, her father had become simply skin stretched over his love for his daughter. (191)
▪ “I’m sorry, sir, it’s just that I know you have a daughter about Vivienne’s age, and I thought—” (228)
▪ Homer stared, in a pose so contained, so dignified, so stoic it both amazed Gamache and bruised his heart. (291)
▪ “Everyone who talks about Vivienne describes a woman frightened out of her wits.” (364)
Multi-liners
▪ Gamache’s mind was racing. Had they thought to open the spillways for the dams across the province? (80)
▪ This spoke of more than a cop going off the rails. Emotionally het up about the horrific crime. It spoke, and smelled, of personal involvement. (154)
▪ When does a cucumber become a pickle? It was the question Gamache sometimes asked when contemplating human behaviour. (242)
▪ “We’re just running in place,” said Zalmanowitz. “Going back over crumbs and trying to assemble a banquet.” (310)
▪ “I was just telling the truth.”
“All truth with malice in it,” said Ruth. (347)
Distrust:
Beauvoir still harbored the suspicion that those who could live in Montréal or Québec City and preferred the countryside had at least one screw loose. This was confirmed when he’d first met the residents of Three Pines, and especially the old poet. Who seemed to have lost all her screws and, as a result, spent her time screwing with others. Or at least with Jean-Guy. (53)
The river:
The water in the beams of light was frothing, foaming. Like something rabid. It scudded along the lip of the shoreline. Rising faster than they’d expected. The jam, just a little way downriver, out of Three Pines, must be getting worse.
And then.
Armand heard a low hum, almost a moan, from Reine-Marie. As they watched, the Bella Bella broke up and over her banks.
It was now racing along the bottom of the sandbags. (123)
Domestic abuse:
“Without realizing it, we go to what’s familiar. When I finally told my best friend, she didn’t believe me. No one did. They didn’t want to know. There was only one shelter here at the time. Overflowing. But they took me in and gave me a mattress on the floor. I slept on it for three months. First time in my life I felt safe. You know why it’s safe? Not because the cops protect us but because we look after ourselves. We make sure it is.”
“’We’ the workers?”
“’We’ every woman there. You asked if we had a weapon? We do. And you gave it to us, with every blow. Every bruise. Every broken bone. It’s the toy at the bottom of every cereal box.” She clunked her mug down on the table so hard that tea shot out the top and other patrons looked over.
“Rage,” said Beauvoir.
“Baseball bats,” said Madame Fleury. (218)
Ilana Masad. All My Mother’s Lovers. USA: Dutton/Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
In this era of straights’ awakening to LGBTQ lives and their issues, Masad’s novel is a fresh breath of reality. Maggie in adulthood seems to be arguing with her mother Iris as much as ever; it hurts that Iris can’t fully come to terms with her daughter being a lesbian. Iris is a dedicated events planner now in her sixties who has always worked long hours, often away from home. Father Peter has been the anchor for Maggie and her brother Ariel; their parents have the happiest marriage of anyone Maggie knows. And Maggie, full of insecurities, thinks she may be in love, at last, with her girlfriend Lucia. Then suddenly, Iris is killed in a car accident. Peter collapses into a zombie state of grief. Maggie arrives at her old home.
Maggie and Ariel find six letters that Iris wished to be mailed after her death; they are all addressed to men. Maggie decides to hand deliver them, escaping from the emotional demands of sitting shiva, and to satisfy her astonished curiosity. Had Iris been having affairs? Was she the same person Maggie thought she knew? Through her encounters, Maggie discovers more of her mother—the abusive first marriage, the abiding pride in and love for her children, things all too seldom verbally expressed. The narrative shifts between Maggie and Iris as the blanks in Maggie’s perception are filled. All becomes clear eventually, after Maggie herself has a serious accident, and after we’ve lived an intense and intimate experience in a very twenty-first century family.
One-liners
▪ “Old age is a real thing, Iris, and you’re lucky that you’re not afflicted with it yet.” (23)
▪ But of course, she thinks, of course he is angry with her, his older sister who got five more years with their mother than he did; he’s probably angry at Peter, at Iris, at the whole damn world. (43)
▪ “Hello,” she says, shaking the man’s hand and giving the little half bow she’s been perfecting over the past twenty minutes, a kind of shorthand for thank-you-for-coming and yes-this-is-very-sad-and-shocking. (65)
▪ “You don’t want to air out dirty laundry, I get it, but this is Iris’s daughter and she asked us a question and deserves an answer.” (143)
▪ “So before you bring your little judgments in here, and before you assume you know diddly-squat about what I care or don’t care about, I suggest you take a good, hard look in the mirror and think about what kind of moral standards you expect from your elders that you don’t keep yourself.” (197-8)
▪ “Call me,” she said, two words she had never spoken to a man before. (271)
Multi-liners
▪ “I was very lonely,” he says. “Iris was extremely special.” (108)
▪ “So that’s it? No compromise? No conversation, even?” He sounded angry too. A petulant child, Iris thought unkindly. (120)
▪ She just can’t picture her mother ever shrinking before another person. She seemed always like a woman who never had a doubt.(143)
▪ “Are you just going to nag or are you actually going to help me run this place?” He didn’t yell, which was part of what made it so scary. He didn’t wait for an answer, just shoved her face and head back and let go, making her lose her balance. (155)
▪ Lucia’s always saying that good relationships—of any kind―require trust and communication. If Lucia gets sick of her or her neediness or her complaints about her mother, it’s her job to communicate that. (240)
▪ She doesn’t understand how it can be possible to feel this full—of love, of grief, of anger. It’s an exercise in containment. (284)
Parenting:
“Dad, you need to get up and do stuff,” Ariel says from the doorway. His face is screwed up and angry, and as he speaks, his voice rises. “There’s shit to do, stuff to plan, you can’t just sit there!” Ariel’s arms wave around as he yells this, and Maggie knows she needs to stop this and control the situation.
“Okay, now, Ariel, come on—“
“No, no, don’t you do that, Maggie, don’t you dare, it’s not your responsibility, it’s Dad’s, he’s the parent—hello? Are you still a parent?” Ariel is full-on screeching now, and Maggie wonders what the last eighteen hours have been like in this household without her. (30)
The funeral:
Ariel and Peter are called on to be pallbearers, but Maggie isn’t. Four men rise from the crowd, volunteering to help carry the casket, but Maggie refuses this sexism. Not now. Not here. Come on, she thinks. She stands behind Ariel and stares down one of the men. He walks back, hands held in front of him like she’s a rabid dog. She, Ariel, Peter, his stepbrothers and a stranger to her lift her mother’s casket together. (66-7)
Lucia:
Maggie misses her now ferociously, in a way that she’s never felt before with anyone. It’s an ache, a physical itching at her fingertips when she wants to touch Lucia’s cheek or hair or arm after something she says but can’t because there’s miles of distance between them and only technology connecting their voices. (222)
Loss:
She wants this to be over. It isn’t just the hangover, the second day in a row, that’s making her tired. It’s all of this, this trying to understand a person who doesn’t exist. When she thinks of it that way, her mind feels like it’s shrinking, the corners of her vision going momentarily dark—the same way they do when she’s high and tries to contemplate the vastness of the universe. The idea of Iris not existing, nowhere, nothing, it rocks her, an existential inability to fully grasp the concept. (222)
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