Library Limelights 239

Lucy Foley. The Guest List. E-book download from Toronto Public Library. USA: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.

A terrific whodunit, elegantly written, about an elegant wedding. Minor celebrities Jules and Will make a gorgeous couple who choose an isolated island off the Irish coast for their lavish weekend. The highlight of the entire event is a murder and at least four of the guests had a reason to commit it. Agatha Christie, updated? With expert timing back and forth, we hear from a delicious set of characters: Aoife, the wedding planner; Hannah, wife of Jules’ old friend Charlie; Olivia, half-sister of the bride; Johnno, the best man; and also individually from the bride and groom. Tensions abound below the surface, between sisters, between children and estranged parents, between husband and wife, and among former old-boy schoolmates of the groom. Some feel that the marriage is too hasty, that the couple hadn’t yet spent enough time together. As the evening celebrations continue in the marquee tents, a howling storm completes the atmosphere.

Jules is determined that nothing will go wrong to spoil the wedding she planned so carefully, although a goodly portion of the guests, thanks to an unlimited supply of booze, happily abandon their normal inhibitions; clandestine sexual capers are not unknown. Aoife and her husband Fred—owners of the venue with its mansion called Folly―are the only sober people on this fantasy island. It’s a job to keep inebriates from falling off the cliff or sinking in the adjacent peat bog. Bonds from shared past history and relationships are deteriorating; will some tear asunder? Olivia is miserable, Hannah is angry, Charlie feels left out, Johnno is conscience-stricken. Foley has mastered the genre with intricate twists to keep you glued till the end.

Aoife

▪ See, mine is a profession in which you orchestrate happiness. (14)

▪ In my experience those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them. (181)

▪ My tone does not invite conversation. But I imagine Will Slater isn’t used to people not wanting to talk to him. (202)

▪ “You took everything from me that night.” (432)

Jules

▪ Will says I’m like a general hanging his campaign maps. (30)

▪ I’m genuinely not certain if my parents have spoken more than a few words to one another since the nineties and it’s probably better for the harmony of the weekend if that continues. (118)

▪ But Mum has never let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good story. (122)

▪ “So you’re going to walk me up the aisle. That’s the very least you can do. You can walk me up that aisle and look bloody delighted for me, every step of the way.” (241)

Hannah

▪ I only wish that our first proper escape in ages didn’t have to be at the glamorous wedding of Charlie’s slightly terrifying friend. (71)

▪ They’re flirting. There is no other word for it. ((106)

▪ This might have something to do with the crusting of white powder around one of his nostrils; it’s everything I can do not to lean over and dash it off with the corner of my napkin. (325)

Olivia

▪ I suppose I don’t seem like the Olivia they remember. That girl was chatty and outgoing and she laughed a lot. But then I’m not the Olivia I remember. (272)

▪ “If you were ten years older, you’d be my ideal woman.” I saw it all. (321)

▪ I could imagine telling my mates, giving them a live running commentary on the absolute cringe fest going on in front of me. (377)

Johnno

▪ When we get together there’s this kind of pack mentality. (138)

▪ It’s so dark in here. It’s too dark. I feel like it’s pressing down on me. Like I’m drowning in it. (167)

▪ “I’m not at my best,” I say. Understatement of the century. (230)

▪ “I’m going to tell them,” I say. “I can’t deal with it any longer.” (360)

 Sara Paretsky. Dead Land. USA: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.

Paretsky pure gold! Her private eye V.I. (Vic) Warshawski has never been better in her many years of fighting Chicago’s political corruption and removing scum from its streets. One thread of this book concerns a proposal to reclaim a stretch of overgrown Lake Michigan waterfront—dead land―for a beach and parkland. Concealed from the public is the real plan to hand it over to private developers. Two of the citizens’ group studying the proposal are found bludgeoned to death one after the other. Vic is on it because her goddaughter Bernadine was a friend of one.

At the same time near that very place, Vic chances upon a once-famous musician now homeless in rags: Lydia Zamir was severely traumatized during a mass shooting four years ago at a concert where she was performing. Her soulmate Hector Palurdo was killed beside her. Lydia had effectively disappeared from sight soon after; she can’t speak and trusts only the odd, volatile man called Coop to protect her. The killer at that concert later died suspiciously in prison. Vic feels guilty for telling her old friend, newspaper man Murray, about her discovery of Lydia hiding in squalor. Murray’s published story raises a clamour to meet Lydia, to rehabilitate her. But she disappears again and many people want to find her, not all of them altruistic.

Those two threads eventually have a common knot. Vic is the only one to uncover it, and since serious people are trying to kill her, she needs to unravel some stories and find hard evidence. Alas, she finds nothing but trouble—from Coop; from cops in Chicago and Kansas; from Lydia’s mother; from newspaper executives and high-priced law firms; from Hector’s mother; and from small town gossips. PTSD is the worst ongoing consequence of mass killings. From the “mean streets” to high-level powers to nature at its best, this is probably Paretsky’s most absorbing and complicated novel ever.

One-liners

▪ “Someone apparently called an ambulance, but there’s no word on where they took her.” (46)

▪ I’d help him out because Lydia Zamir’s story was an all-too-common American tragedy: she’d lived past a mass murder, but she’d been hideously damaged by it. (50)

▪ “Have modern journalism’s bounds expanded to include chasing people into the path of danger?” (133)

▪ Once a South Side street fighter, always a street fighter. (157)

▪ “Anyway, anyway, this story keeps sprouting new tentacles, like an octopus with an infinite number of legs.” (276)

Multi-liners

▪ Tessa looked at me soberly. “Think about it like this, Vic: maybe you are only a drop in the bucket—or a teaspoon in a desert―but there some fragile plants that will die if your teaspoon goes away.” (50)

▪ Coop looked at me strangely, then said, “If I had my way, all economists would be whacked. Now tell me how to find Lydia.” (120)

▪ He was like a man in a rowboat, desperately trying to catch up with a departing ship. And I hated it. Our work had made us closer than lovers at times. I hated thinking I could not trust him. (137)

▪ “Grief is a selfish bitch. She wants you to shut out the rest of the world, including other people’s suffering.” (192)

▪ I touched my head and chest with bleeding fingers. You’re lucky to be alive, V.I. Don’t waste it on self-pity. (325)

Lydia disappears again:

“I can’t tell you more than you know yourself: Lydia disappeared from Provident. She was never formally admitted, so there’s not a paper trail. She either walked off, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, or a man lifted her from the gurney and carried her away. I lean toward scenario two but I have no proof of anything. I’ll keep looking, but you can’t rag me—it doesn’t help.” (71)

Can nicotine patches kill?

Vishnikov muttered under his breath, doing calculations in his head. “Eight patches would do it in nine or ten hours, I suppose, assuming prescription strength, assuming no one noticed. If the guards were doing their job, they should have seen him covered with sweat, clawing for air. Horrible way to go.” (107)

A star is born?

“Your life would make a great TV series,” Bolton said. “Your work has all the drama we look for in our short series—the chases, the high-profile situations, and then you’re a female, and that’s hot right now.”

“Yep. Every thirty or forty years, being female is hot, and then the men in charge get bored with us and revert back to filming the creatures they know best: the faces they see in the mirror every morning.”

The corners of Norm’s mouth twitched as he fought back a frown. (132)

The plot thickens further:

“Hector Palurdo was American,” I said sharply. “He was born in Chicago to two American citizens.”

Lutas waved an impatient hand. “His father was from Chile, which amounts to the same thing. We’ve contacted our Santiago offices to be on the lookout for Zamir. It seems Hector Palurdo had an aunt who worked there a long time ago. The Zamir woman might have gone there, looking for his family.”

“Filomena Palurdo worked for Devlin in Chile?” I was so startled I ignored her ignorant statement about Jacobo’s Chilean birth meaning Hector was essentially Chilean. (219)

Kansas prairie:

I stopped to watch butterflies and grasshoppers flitting among the flowers. Under the heavy sky, with land stretching to an infinite horizon, it was hard to imagine my city, its buildings and people crammed cheek by jowl. How could both worlds exist simultaneously? (279)

Jo Nesbø. The Kingdom. USA: Random House Large Print, 2020.

Holy moly, a saga woven out of frosty Norwegian air and family dynamics. The Opgard brothers Roy and Carl protect each other through thick and thin, mostly Roy having the slightly younger Carl’s back. Orphaned as teenagers, Roy seems such a strange one, so quiet, so uninterested in the local girls unlike his brother. He’d prefer to use his fists at local dances. Until well into the story of their village and county, we suspect he harbours sinister secrets. Then we find out that he does, since he’s the narrator. A pesky sheriff still has questions about the accident their parents died in, years ago. Car accidents on winter mountain roads are not uncommon in rural areas. From that enquiry, one incident after another snowballs into a tangled mass of dissembling, disappearances, and dead bodies. The villagers are consumed with rumours.

Roy’s job is managing a service station, while Carl goes away to Minnesota to further his business education. So Roy is alone for some years (or is he?) in what their father called their kingdom: hundreds of acres of wild mountaintop above the village. Land development—their land―is the farthest thing from his mind until Carl returns home with big plans—and a wife. Barbados-born Shannon is described as almost albino, a lovely redhead with skin like snow. Roy is smitten and does everything possible to avoid her, moving to a different town. Yet he supports their vision to construct a grand hotel and spa resort nearby; Carl must use all his charm to win approval and financial support from the villagers. A fatal flaw recurs in the family DNA. Beautifully crafted, The Kingdom is as dense and intriguing and ominous as a Shakespearean plot.

One-liners

▪ I don’t give a fuck about generations, at least not as far as this family is concerned, and we’re talking about a wilderness that has no sentimental value whatever nor any other type of value either, unless someone suddenly discovers a rare metal. (58)

▪ “My hair and skin are from an Irish redleg who drank himself to death before I was three years old.” (141)

▪ “He wondered why I’d moved the tractor and I told him I’d had three calls from people who wanted their cars repaired at the same time, so we needed the room.” (228)

▪ They say you never really get a winter down here in the south, just more of that pissrain that isn’t really rain but just something wet in the air that can’t decide whether to go up or down or just stay where it is. (514)

▪ Maybe we Opgard men didn’t always say everything that was on our minds, but we didn’t talk in riddles. (539)

Multi-liners

▪ “The partially destroyed Greek statue is extra beautiful because from what isn’t damaged we can see how beautiful it could have been, should have been, must have been.” (144)

▪ As though all of this was my fault. I didn’t pursue the thought, because I knew it would end up with me thinking that it really was my fault, that it always had been. (226)

▪ “Do like the Americans do and bomb it first,” I said. “Extinguish all life. And then advance and conquer.” (290)

▪ And I remembered something Uncle Bernard said. That in time all memories turn into good memories. (315)

▪ “See, trust is a benign, contagious sickness. So if you don’t kill me, I won’t kill you.” (451)

▪ Shannon made a face. “And he’s willing to kill. Do you think his enforcer really meant that, Roy?” (598)

Father’s creed:

Then he stroked the back of my head. As far as I could remember he had never done that before. And he never did it again.

“You and me, we’re alike, Roy. We’re tougher than people like Mum and Carl. So we have to look after them. Always. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“We’re family. We’ve got each other and nobody else. Friends, sweethearts, neighbours, the locals, the state. All that’s an illusion, it’s not worth a candle the day something really matters. Then it’s us against them, Roy. Us against absolutely everybody else. OK?” (7)

The prodigal:

Because that’s why people like Carl return home, people who have made it out in the big wide world, while back in their old home town they’re still just the randy bastard who got dumped by the chairman’s daughter and ran off. There’s nothing like being acknowledged in your own home town, the place where you think everyone misunderstood you, and at the same time the place where you are understood in such a consuming and liberating way. ‘I know you,’ they would say, half threatening, half comforting, meaning that they know who you really are. That you can’t always hide behind lies and appearances. (120)

Both Roy and Kurt lost fathers too soon:

“You sort of grow up overnight,” said Kurt. “Because you have to. And you begin to understand something about the responsibility he had, and how you did everything you could to make his job more difficult for him. You ignored all his advice, dismissed what he thought and said, did all you could to be as unlike him as you could. Maybe because there’s something inside telling you that’s how you’re going to end up. As a copy of your father. Because we go round in circles. The only place we’re going is back where we came from.” (195)

Shannon’s party talk:

“All I’m trying to say is that morality as a motivating force is overrated in us humans. And that our loyalty to our flock is underestimated. We shape morality so that it suits our purposes when we feel our group is under threat. Family vendettas and genocides throughout history are not the work of monsters but of human beings like us who believed they were acting in a way that was morally correct. Our loyalty is primarily to our own and secondarily to the changing morality that at any given time serves the needs of our group.” (342)