Library Limelights 241

 

Alice Feeney. His & Hers. Flatiron Books ebook via TPL. UK: Macmillan Publishng, 2020.

Him: Jack Harper, big city DCI in a small town. Her: Anna Andrews, BBC news anchor in London. Both: grew up in the small town where Jack works and Anna’s mother still lives. They married, had a baby who died, they divorced; they are thrown together again in a downward spiral of bad luck. Anna’s friends, part of a teenage quintet, are being murdered in this town. Jack is the lead investigator, but he’s hiding evidence that frames him as the killer; his young sergeant Priya Patel is suspicious. Unforeseen circumstances force Anna to revert to humble news reporter again, and so she is covering this story—who could know the area better? Aware that her drinking sometimes causes blackouts, she makes excuses for losing track of time or why she’s always first on the crime scene, sometimes ahead of the police. Is she or he—or both―unstable?

I should mention that before it actually turns into a good plot, the shopworn self-analysis and tiresome self-esteem musings, plus other trite observations, became so irritating I was prepared to hit the “send the book back” button. But, persistence. For a woman who professes to love her mother, Anna neglects her unconscionably. Somewhere between discovery of the second and third bodies your brain demands functioning again; timing in the scenarios is everything. By the time only Anna and one other of the original sixteen-year-olds are left alive, you’ll be switching your guesswork about the killer faster than a cardshark shuffles dem cards, especially since he or she regularly contributes non-identifying thoughts in italic sections. Although in one part of the reveal, Feeney injects an over the top credibility fail. Read at your own risk.

His

▪ Nothing this bad has happened here for years, and it makes me feel good—optimistic and energized. (29)

▪ Anna has always been intensely private, a condition she inherited from her mother. (102)

▪ “You can’t keep blaming everyone else for what happened to us.” (203)

▪ “There’s something I need to tell you,” Priya says, and I try not to react even though it feels like a small bomb just went off inside my head. (435)

▪ “I don’t think you know what you’ve done, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do it,” she says. (481)

Hers

▪ Dementia stole time from my mother, and stole my mother from me. (44)

▪ Sometimes I find the only way to ease the worst pain is to damage myself in a different way. (73)

▪ The woman has clearly had a charisma bypass. (76)

▪ This is a familiar dance and we all know the moves—it’s the same steps for any breaking news: get the shot, get the story. (77)

▪ Being with him made me happy, and loving him made me dislike myself less. (349)

Italics

▪ Like most people, there’s more to me than my job. (304)

▪ Those girls were not good friends and they deserved to be silenced. (462)

Sample banalities

▪ Coming here always felt wrong, but none of this feels right. (126)

▪ You are more than the worst thing you’ve ever done. (127)

▪ Sometimes it feels like I don’t know who I am anymore. (235)

▪ I want people to like me, so being myself is not an option. (240)

▪ People often see what they want, rather than what is really there. (306)

Fredrik Backman. Anxious People. E-book download from TPL. Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Sheer genius constructed this story of a bank robbery like no other. A failed robbery. And it’s priceless, precious! Swedish author Backman up-ends the norms of the mystery genre. The third-person narrator argues that even though a bank robbery kicks off the action, it could really be a love story. Or a story about a bridge. Jim and Jack are father and son small-town policemen. We don’t know who the pathetic bank robber is, but the main action takes place at an apartment viewing where the real estate agent is missing. Visitor Zara is a woman whose habit is to attend open house for apartments that have a view of the bridge; she happens to be the manager of the bank in question. Two couples also attend, vying to buy the apartment. Then there’s ancient Estelle. The would-be bank robber rushes into their midst chased by the police. Standoff. There’s no option but to hold these people hostage at gunpoint.

Each hostage exhibits some sign of life’s great anxieties, even an occasional panic attack. For one, Zara has been seeing psychologist Nadia in the hope of recovery. What happened before the planned robbery brings the reader’s dawning of connections; the bridge is a link. The two cops disagree on managing this incident, including whether a planted bomb prevents their access to the apartment. Or whether it is a bomb. There were moments when I was laughing hysterically; other moments on the brink of tears. The group eventually finds the cowering real estate agent. They find a giant rabbit in the bathroom. They get fireworks on demand. By the time the hostages are released, deep friendships have formed due to pizza and wine, the robber vanishes, and an apartment has been sold. Kindness and forgiveness are restorative; perfection in many ways may not be achievable but learning to accept good enough can be rather satisfying. Backman’s sly, dry humour covers life’s challenges and absurdities. Any reader can relate to this most refreshing tale—storytelling at its best.

Anxieties

▪ We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow. (8)

▪ It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer. (60)

▪ We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. (143)

▪ She isn’t traumatized, she isn’t weighed down by any obvious grief. She’s just sad, all the time. (144)

▪ Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. (147)

▪ Can you imagine what a bad parent you must have been for your children not to want to be parents? (175)

▪ It almost looks, just for a single, solitary moment, as if she’s going to jump. (450)

Jim and Jack

▪ You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that patent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. (36)

▪ “There are days when I can’t help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you’re still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it’s as impossible now as it was back then.” (39)

▪ People simply didn’t take other people hostage in this town, and people didn’t rob banks here, either, especially now that they’d gone cashless. (77)

▪ “You’re about as sharp as a wet box of cornflakes, aren’t you?” (109)

▪ “He said that even if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today.” (418)

Zara

▪ She still believed that Zara’s biggest problem was her loneliness, but perhaps there’s a difference between loneliness and friendlessness. (140)

▪ Zara interrupted wearily, seeing as she’d rather drink nitroglycerine and go on a trampoline, than have to listen to yet another man lecturing her about financial responsibilities. (331)

▪ “And we’re not going in a car with lots of crap dangling from the rearview mirror. That’s an evolutionary dead end.” (440)

Hostages

▪ One was dressed in clothes that looked like she’d made them herself out of capes she’d stolen from murdered magicians, and the other as if she sold drugs outside a bowling alley. (157)

▪ That’s never a comfortable combination, someone crying with a pistol in their hand, so none of the others was entirely sure how to react. (184)

▪ “No one’s listening to me! You’re the worst hostages ever!” (214)

▪ “Sensitive and principled, you hear that a lot,” Julia nodded, thinking that it was a good description of all the old men who’ve started wars throughout human history. (246)

▪ “Drinking? At this time of day? The day before New Year’s Eve?” the negotiator wondered. (319)

▪ She liked the fact that Estelle was concerned, more people should do that, ask if you’re hungry instead of how you’re feeling. (338)

▪ “For what it’s worth, I hope they shoot you in the leg, Lennart.” (396)

Sharon Bolton. Dead Woman Walking. E-book download from TPL. UK: Transworld Publishers/ Penguin Random House, 2017.

Bolton is ever inventive with storylines and the locales to go with them. Picture a hot air balloon gliding across the sky of the Northumberland National Park, an enormous, little-populated area of northeast England—an idyllic mini-trip for twelve people. Until it crashes. The minutes before the catastrophe became chaotic as the high-flyers witness a crime scene on the ground below and the balloon’s pilot is shot dead because of it. Sole crash survivor Jessica Lane is convinced the killer knows she can identify him; she is right, and assumes correctly that he is going to hunt her down. He is Patrick Faa of Romany descent whose extended family is involved in several criminal enterprises. Jessica has to leave the body of her sister Bella (a nun known as Sister Maria Magdalena) and the others, attempting to reach home and her laptop; she doesn’t trust the local police that will soon be on the crash site.

Ajax Maldonado is the officer in charge of the investigation when police reach the downed balloon and bodies. Both they and the malicious Patrick are looking for Jessica, for different reasons. She is escaping them on the Pilgrim’s Way, a trail well-known to her. Flashbacks fill in some of the two sisters’ lives, including many visits to Bella’s convent on the nearby coast. To my delight, the nuns at one point are singing one of my favourite hymns, “To Be a Pilgrim.” The Lane family has its own mystery involving their father’s death and their brother’s disappearance. Keeping track of the tricky switches in timeline needs full attention from the reader. As a special police officer working on a secret operation, Jessica had been collecting evidence about illegal immigration; she suspects the Faa family is implicated, but the truth is so much worse. Some shocking twists are about to come. Bolton scores yet another winner.

Teasers

▪ The pilot was lying face up, or would have been, if he’d had any face left. (85)

▪ “Do you hear me, Bella? You will never be a nun.” (65)

▪ Dogs slunk around the perimeter, night and day, stealing through the shadows, always on the watch for a stray fox, a sly rabbit or a stupid human. (115)

▪ “Don’t you dare patronize me, Jess. It didn’t happen to you, you don’t get to tell me how to deal with it.” (200)

▪ “Look, Ajax, I know this sort of thing is always going to be an issue for you, but personal crusades have no place in the police service.” (219-20)

▪ How did he keep finding her? How did he always know where she was? (236)

▪ “I tell you what, mate, if you don’t find her it’s all over for you.” (422)

▪ Nuns, she’d decided years ago, were like cruelly broken ponies, stripped of all self, emptied of humanity in a never-ending quest to become vassals of a non-existent God. (427)

▪ “With a new liver, I could live as long as the rest of you.” (467)

▪ “So it was about love then, not money?” said Hildegard. “In the beginning, anyway?” (480)

▪ Of everyone in his wife’s big, eccentric family, Patrick was the one he found hardest to get used to. (516)