Library Limelights 253

 

Denise Mina. The Less Dead. USA: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group, 2020.

Dr. Margo Dunlop felt compelled to meet her birth family and learn more about her mother Susan, after finding letters her adoptive mother, Janette, had hidden from her. Margo is in the process of packing up Janette’s house after her death. The family that meets with her is Susan’s older sister Nikki—bringing bad news. From the letters that Nikki had written, Margo knew Susan had died, but now she’s told that she’d been murdered, at the age of nineteen. That would be when Margo was but a few months old. Both sisters had been prostitutes, junkies, on the worst streets of Glasgow where they were treated like scum, even by the police. Nikki is clean now, bursting with theories about who killed Susan and who is harassing her with threatening notes. She wants Margo, because of her hospital position, to check patient files and do some DNA testing.

Margo has a hard time digesting Nikki’s information overload, but feels compelled to learn about Susan’s life. Was her boyfriend Barney the father of Margo? Pregnant herself, Margo needs some peace of mind about it. Someone else is interested in Margo (who happens to look exactly like her mother). She starts getting handwritten hate notes like Nikki did; her apartment and Janette’s house are broken into. Jack Robertson, the author of a book accusing a bent cop of the murder, adds to the paranoia. In the midst of her growing panic, we have the antics of Margo’s boyfriend Joe, her brother Thomas who is Joe’s best friend, her best friend Lilah, Lilah’s ex, Richard, who is Joe’s brother, and like that. It’s messy. But it is more interesting and less depressing than the terrible lives of wretched sex workers whom some cops call “the less dead.”

Oh yes, it’s gritty alright. But somehow disappointing, as if incomplete, not up to Mina’s usual balance? For me, it doesn’t hang together well—Margo’s wildly fluctuating feelings and unprofessional demeanour, the cruelty of police, the vicious language of a stalker, all the face-saving lies―but that may be due to my overriding sadness at the poverty and despair some women face all their lives.

One-liners

▪ “It was hard for an addict to go through with a full pregnancy, you know, it was hard for all of us.” (30)

▪ She can never let Thomas meet Nikki because, if he does, Margo will be the only thing worse than a snob: she’ll be an exposed snob. (41)

▪ Joe is problematic but Richard is dangerous. (74)

▪ “You shouldn’t have to be nice for the police to investigate a murder, surely?” (163)

▪ The man jumps at Margo, his fingernail scores her cheek, but Nikki swings at him, hits his knee at the side and knocks him down. (173)

▪ “I hope you don’t mind us, what we are.” (175)

▪ That’s when she realises: Nikki lied too. (181)

▪ “I’m not watching you jump from one burning bucket of shit straight into another.” (229)

▪ All she can think about is Janette, the absence of her, how wrong that feels. (259)

Multi-liners

▪ Barney is just a sperm donor, really, a genetic reference point. He’s not who she is. He’s just a ball sack with a backstory. (96)

▪ “See,” says Jack, “you had to be there to understand: back in the mid to late 1980s, when heroin came to Glasgow, it changed everything. A whole generation was wiped out, parts of the city became chaotic.” (104)

▪ Nikki knew Margo smiled and looked her in the eyes, said all the right things to get away from her. She knows Margo doesn’t ever want to see her again. (180)

▪ The terror rises up through the floorboards, she’s powerless. It comes in heavy black waves that stun and drown her, dragging her down to a frozen place. (256)

Her new aunt

The class divide between them is glaring and it shames Nikki. It’s a source of intense discomfort to Margo too, because she doesn’t like to think about class or how privileged she is. She just thinks she’s normal.

There are scars between the knuckles on the back of Nikki’s hands, emphatic white against the pale pink skin, healed track marks: white station stops on a map of her circulatory system. She has been injecting but stopped a long time ago. She doesn’t have the sleepiness of a methadone user or the drowsy disgust of someone on Valium. She doesn’t seem to be on anything else. (13)

Her best friend

Margo sometimes wondered if they actually hated each other, if they were secretly attracted to each other or thought they were each other. There was always something of the other-self in her feelings for Lilah. But Margo didn’t have that relationship with other female friends and Lilah always seemed to. Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, Margo didn’t feel right when she didn’t see her regularly. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was sisterhood. Maybe it was competitiveness. It was no accident that they ended up going out with brothers. (71)

Being followed

The M8 slip road to the city rises from the bridge, rising like a stunt driver’s ramp and then sweeps right. She is driving with her arms locked straight, wired and terrified and aware of her limitations, talking herself down like a passenger-hero left to land a plane. Brake-brake-brake, she stops at the lights. Check mirror, change gear, thank you, ground control. (261)

David Swinson. The Second Girl. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

It doesn’t take long to realize that ex-policeman, now P.I., Frank Marr is a secret coke addict. We get liberal, detailed descriptions of his usage and how it affects his physical well-being. Who knew. Likely I would not have chosen to read it. But OK, he accidentally finds a missing girl being held captive in a drugs house, so let’s see where that goes. Busting relatively smalltime drug pushers helps supply Frank’s own habit. He’s hailed as a hero, which leads to being hired to find another missing high school-age girl. Normally he works as an investigator for defence lawyer Leslie Costello, a woman he is half in love with, but he’s on his own with this one. Miriam Gregory disappeared months ago. Because he’s held in good regard by his former cop colleagues, he’s able to call on them from time to time for information.

Marr’s search for Miriam, among the criminal lowlife of DC, reveals far more than I wanted to know. The street characters, their activities and routines, their language, Marr’s dealings with them, are all authentic, coming from an ex-cop author with all the requisite experience. A lot of it became a bit of a blur; an ex-cop over the dark edge with brutal interrogations and threats. I still don’t know what a “hooptie” is in cop-speak, nor an “okeydokey.” No question Swinson won writing awards for this novel, but it was hard to empathize with an antihero always on the brink of a trainwreck. Apparently this novel begat a series.

Bits

▪ I’ll just have to give Costello the condensed version of a story I haven’t thought of yet. (24)

▪ “So are you and Costello like ‘together’ or something?” (74)

▪ “C’mon, Leslie, you know I don’t work missing persons, certainly not a case like the one that involved that little girl.” (104)

▪ Costello’s my weak spot, always has been. Boys like these, once they find that weak spot, love nothin’ more than to push your buttons, hoping you’ll break. (110)

▪ This city is all about tearing down to build up. That should be DC’s new catchphrase. (262)

▪ “I’m going to find your girl.”

   I hear him begin to sob. (307)

▪ In my line of work the most commonplace decision can destroy a life, or take it. I don’t worry about things like that ‘cause it’ll cripple you. (333-4)

▪ The politics of the job can wear you down faster than the actual work. I’m grateful not to be a part of that anymore. (358)

Alexandra Andrews. Who Is Maud Dixon? USA: Little, Brown and Company/Hachette, 2021.

A change of pace after the above two heavies. Andrews has crafted a tricky identity tale that slowly works up to a fitting climax. Florence Darrow is a quiet, average, but ambitious assistant editor at a New York publishing company. Like most of her cohort, she considers herself a writer, but her submissions are only deemed to have “potential.” Her clumsy attempt to blackmail a married senior editor into publishing her short stories merely gets her fired. Then Florence hits the jackpot: she’s hired as an assistant to the elusive author known as Maud Dixon—a pseudonym for Helen Wilcox whose first novel was a runaway bestseller. Fully expecting the greatness to rub off on her, Florence finds herself in upstate New York while Helen works on her second novel; above all, she is contracted to keep Helen’s real name secret.

Helen is not an easy person to live with, with her blunt expressions and eccentricities. Florence slogs away at answering tons of fan email and correspondence, paying the bills, and typing the growing manuscript that Helen writes in longhand. Suddenly Helen announces they are going to Morocco, a necessary research trip for the novel. Things are still looking quite straightforward at their villa on the Atlantic coast until Florence wakes up in hospital after a car accident—with no memory of what happened. No spoilers here—it’s a convoluted plot―I’ll just say that this basically two-character driven story also involves a policeman, some tourists, friends from the past, a frantic agent in New York, and a delicious cameo of a passive-aggressive mother. Well done, Ms Andrews, for your own first novel!

Bits

▪ By its nature, every secret contains the power to destroy something. (72)

▪ “Everyone in Marrakesh is pretending to be someone they’re not,” he added with a wink. (131)

▪ “Is this what is called a bribe?” He smiled mirthlessly. (218)

Florence

▪ Her mother’s bloated and wildly imprecise flattery had the unintended effect of making Florence feel utterly insignificant. (27)

▪ She had been blithely walking around thinking she knew more than everyone and all of a sudden she realized she didn’t know a thing. (40)

▪ She’d never had her own space before—her own building―and this one felt right in a way no place he’d ever lived before had. (79)

▪ She was certain of one thing: Now that she’d been given this gift, no one—no one―was going to take it from her. (192)

▪ Had it been so absurd for Florence to think that her reward had finally come due, after all this time? (243)

Helen

▪ “You will come to learn that patience is not Maud’s strong suit.” (67)

▪ “Something you should know: I deplore moderation.” (88)

▪ “Arabs can’t drive,” she’d said in the same matter-of-fact tone someone might say, “I grew up in Boise.” (134)

▪ She constantly withheld information for no good reason, and she’d loved to throw Florence off guard with outlandish assertions. (202)

▪ “Florence—don’t worry, we’re going to get everything all sorted out. Helen is volatile, but she always settles down.” (236)

A sheltered gaze

There was a world beyond her world, Florence knew, that was entirely foreign to her. Every once in a while, someone took this other world in their hands and rattled it, dislodging a small piece that fell at her feet with a plink. She gathered up these fragments like an entomologist gathers rare bugs to pin to a board. They were clues that would one day cohere into something larger, she didn’t know yet what. A disguise; an answer; a life. (25)

Insular Helen

“I can barely muster up enough empathy to cover the humans I know. Every day we’re asked to feel sorry for refugees from Syria and gay men in Chechnya and Muslims in Myanmar. It’s too much. The human mind wasn’t built to assimilate so much suffering. It was designed to produce just enough empathy to cover its own little community.” (111)

Unexpected advice

“Take my word for it,” Helen went on. “If you spend your life looking for fairness you’ll be disappointed. Fairness doesn’t exist. And if it did, it would be boring. It would leave no room for the unexpected. But if you search for greatness—for beauty, for art, for transcendence―those are where the rewards are. That is what makes life worth living.” (149)

Time stops

There are some emotions, like rage and lust, that seem to speed up time. But shock creates a moment of stasis, a pocket of time outside the passing seconds, during which the mind has to veer off the neural pathway it has just been traveling down in order to start hacking away at a new one. (259)