Library Limelights 259

 

Louise Penny. All the Devils Are Here. USA: Minotaur Books, 2020.

The Gamache family is in Paris, Armand and Reine-Marie visiting their now-resident children. Foremost is a dinner reunion with Armand’s godfather Stephen Horowitz, after which the elderly man is deliberately run down in the street in front of them. A far-reaching series of events quickly unfolds, from after and before this devastating blow. For one, a stranger lies shot dead in Stephen’s ransacked apartment. Why was Stephen himself staying at the Georges V Hotel instead? As Armand tries to piece together Stephen’s recent activities, his trust in an old friend, Claude Dussault ‒ Prefect of Paris Police – is tested. As is Armand’s strained relationship with son Daniel, an investment banker in the city. His son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, has a new job here at HSG Engineering, a company which may have been on Stephen’s agenda; Beauvoir is already dubious about his assigned assistant, Séverine Arbour. Stephen was a very wealthy man who quietly sought to redress corporate corruption, making some high-powered enemies.

Thanks to help from many sources, including expert librarians and his personal memories of Stephen, Armand’s attention focuses on HSG and its upcoming annual board meeting. Even the owners of other influential companies are trying to stop him at all costs, but Armand needs to discover what they are all hiding. Can he identify them and protect his family? Daughter Annie is about to give birth. Son Daniel becomes a pawn in the sinister showdown. It’s looking like a massive screw-up with global implications. Penny is a literate crime writer, and this may be her most complex novel yet. Among other attributes, her business knowledge is acute. Of all the characters, Gamache shines through one surprise after another and the gripping tension is alleviated by mini-tours of Paris and its grand hotels. Guaranteed to win awards.

One-liners

▪ The Prefect looked through the wallet, checking every slip of paper, then picking up the shattered iPhone and examining it. (45)

▪ Was he going to suspect a friend, a colleague, of murder based on such flimsy evidence? (115)

▪ And then, dropping his head to Stephen’s hand, he whispered, over and over, “Help me. God, help me.” (151)

▪ “I understand, sir, you were a member of the Canadian special ops unit, Joint Task Force Two.” (165)

▪ The tidal wave that had been moving toward father and son for decades was upon them. (247)

▪ “If stupid was sand, he’d be half the Sahara.” (331)

▪ The four of them sat in individual pools of light, their fingers tap-tap-tapping on the keyboards, like the soft patter of feet, sneaking up on a killer. (332)

Multi-liners

▪ Sometimes it took him years, but eventually, he brought them down. Power. And patience. Stephen Horowitz had command of both. (9)

▪ Slightly citrusy, she thought. And sort of muddy. Not a perfume, a cologne. Definitely masculine. Not pleasant. (73)

▪ If there was a trap to step into, Daniel would find it. If there was no trap, Daniel would create one. Then step into it. (167)

▪ The telling detail about the woman wasn’t her intelligent eyes or her warm smile. It was her hair. It was gray, almost white. (215)

▪ “The original owners were mining silver. When it tapped out, they walked away, not realizing what else was in there.” (271)

▪ “His whole collection is fake?” asked Reine-Marie, eyes wide. “Even the ones in Montréal? All of it stolen?” (287)

▪ “I’m not a child,” snapped Daniel. “I don’t need you. Never have, never will.” (294)

▪ “You and Reine-Marie need to get your family and leave. Get on a plane and go back to Montréal. For God’s sake, I’m begging you.” (348)

Containment

Dussault knew Gamache well enough to know the man was almost always calm and courteous. Gracious, in an almost old-world manner. It was what made him an effective leader. Aramand Gamache never flew off the handle. Never lost control. Unless he wanted to.

But Dussault also knew that the angrier Gamache became, the more contained, the more polite he became. Putting iron straps around any violent emotion.

As he regarded his colleague and friend, Claude Dussault realized with surprise that Armand’s politesse was being directed at him. (143)

Second in command, Paris Police

The man confused her.

She didn’t like that.

She didn’t like Gamache’s ease and natural authority. She didn’t like his accent. She sure didn’t like that he seemed oblivious to the fact that he was not their equal, socially, culturally, intellectually, professionally. Couldn’t be. Not coming from Canada. Not coming from Québec.

She didn’t like his relationship, his close friendship, with the Prefect.

She didn’t like that when something bad had happened in the past twenty-four hours, Armand Gamache wasn’t far behind. (157)

Inside HSG

“Why hire someone unsuited to the job? Why put someone so absolutely incompetent in charge?”

“I wasn’t so incompetent,” said Beauvoir. But at a stern look from Madame Arbour, he conceded the point.

“Unless,” she continued, “because of his vast ignorance, he could be easily manipulated. Or, more likely, you were part of it. There to help them cover up. If you knew crime, presumably you’d also know how to hide it.”

“While we’re at it,” said Beauvoir, “why put a competent engineer—”

“Brilliant engineer.”

“—in a department where there’s no original engineering done? Unless the idea is that you’re there to cover up, to make sure I didn’t spot anything.”

“No fear of that,” said Madame Arbour. “You’re perfectly capable of missing it without my help.” (305)

Christina Sweeney-Baird. The End of Men. Ebook download from TPL. UK: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021.

Whew! The breadth and ramifications of the basic premise here are breathtaking. A robust virus is killing men across the world; only men. About one in ten is immune, and women are carriers. It’s a plausible scenario if you have a superficial knowledge of DNA. Written before our current pandemic occurred, but eerily similar in some aspects, the narrative is acceptable. It seems so right that the author presents different perspectives from a dozen or more women, as time progresses. Some are on the cutting edge of their careers, some are traumatized or lost. Emergency planning eventually morphs into new social and government structuring. State-assigned jobs and positions become the norm; some women succeed at things they never dreamed of. The professions, trades, essential services and workers, manual labour—women have to do them all. That’s after they deal with loss and grief.

Amanda in Scotland is the emergency room physician who first alerts her country to the crisis (she’s initially ignored), eventually tracking down “Patient Zero” and how the virus developed. Catherine, after losing husband and son, determines to record the pandemic through personal interviews. Amaya works with top health colleagues in London, successfully sequencing the relevant gene for the virus. Lisa in Toronto is an arrogant but expert virologist who creates a vaccine; she’s destined for the Nobel prize. Elisabeth comes to London as America’s CDC rep. Dawn is an intelligence analyst who rises to Operations Director of MI5. Faith is a U.S. army wife who, unlike some, embraces the subsequent draft to become her husband’s soldier replacement. Morven runs an isolated highland hostel that protects immune teenage boys. Fei Hong is one of the rebel leaders who jointly curtail China’s civil war in a peaceful restructuring. Rachel is employed by New Zealand’s Birth Quarantine Program. Maria the crack journalist makes an international name for herself in pandemic reporting. And so on.

A world run by women? Of all the dystopian novels I’ve read the past two years, this is perhaps the most humanly credible. Is that because I’m a woman? One must note, it dwells minimally on men’s reactions—fear of dying, despair for their families, sometimes outright abandonment in hope of outrunning it. The remaining immune men might develop enormous sexual egos or band together protesting the virus as a huge conspiracy. For a novelist, it’s a remarkably brilliant debut.

Amanda

▪ His body went from being normal to near dead in under an hour. (33)

▪ I’m being gaslit by the entire Scottish medical establishment. (52)

▪ Being a doctor has never been more important. We must preserve the lives of the roughly one in ten men who are still alive. (132)

▪ In my new Health and Protection Scotland role, I have the delightful job of creating an Urgency of Care Protocol, which essentially boils down to Young People Get Treated, Old People Don’t, If You’re a Man With a Working Penis We Want to Keep You Alive. (217)

▪ “The virus causes a massive spike of white blood cells. It mimics an extreme form of leukemia.” (467)

Catherine

▪ It will be a bereavement in slow motion, knowing he is dying just feet above my head in the bedroom. (104)

▪ A human need. Thousands of years old. I was here. (416)

▪ My nose runs in the cold and huge gulping sobs take over, which my body works its way through, alone. Always alone now, it seems. (451)

▪ Amanda understands loss and grief and rage. She understands it all.

▪ We can never regain what we have lost and we must accept that, mourn that, grieve what cannot be, and find a new way to exist. (475)

Dawn

▪ Every day I fight ten fires, and then the next day ten more appear. (92)

▪ Men dropping off everywhere: the police, the armed forces, in every government department, every part of the civil service. Sudden gaps where crucial work wasn’t, and sometimes still isn’t, being done. (282)

▪ Five swift promotions later and here I am. Arguably one of the three most powerful people in the British Intelligence Services. (347)

▪ It’s not her fault that the government’s new Department for Change has decided to review every bloody thing we use, buy and think about. (442)

Lisa

▪ “I’m a professor of Renaissance history with decades of knowledge of the ways in which female artists and inventors have had their work stolen, Lisa.” (252)

▪ As a community, the scientific world has sexism running through it like gray swirls in marble. It’s deeply woven into the fabric of labs, university departments, hiring panels, boards determining tenure. (302)

▪ “Yes, I am in fact a God. I have a vaccine. One hundred percent success rate.” (305)

Elisabeth

▪ Part of me is completely baffled that, in a time of crisis, the political showmanship that’s endemic in public institutions is still happening. (73)

▪ When half of the population is walking around, symptomless, carrying and spreading the virus, you’re in trouble. And we are. (78)

▪ The Plague virus requires the absence of a specific gene sequence. (201)

Maria

▪ And so, in typical journalistic fashion, I’m letting the world know that I’m married to a woman and getting some good copy out of it. (439)

Rachel

▪ “You don’t tell the women you’re taking the babies?” she repeated after me in a horrified voice. (239)

Lauren Oylen. Fake Accounts. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Catapult, 2021.

This book was not written for me. The reader should be someone born after at least 1990, whatever collective generation noun that may be these days. Or those who embrace all the possibilities of holding their lives in a phone in their hand. An unnamed young woman takes us through her inner and outer life—mostly inner―of her latest romantic relationship. He is Felix: they met in Berlin and soon get together in her native New York. Later as she prepares to dump him, having discovered he’s a secret online conspiracy theorist, he dies in a motorcycle accident. From there, the young woman explores, and tries to resolve, her conflicting feelings about him. Apparently this requires a return to Berlin, to pursue scads of online dating meetups, and see how convincing she can be at inventing backstories for herself. A scathing indictment of how cyber technology can tempt us to distort reality? Sorry, stuff about Relationship Anarchy put me to sleep. The entire novel is ever-so-well-written, although the author is a champ at long, long sentences and paragraphs. Our hero is engaging, funny, sarcastic, imaginative—but even for me, it all wore thin after so many pages. So: I’m old.

Bits

▪ I’ve always been drawn to pragmatism, just not exactly natural at it; as my brain says, “Calm down,” my heart says, also weirdly calmly, “A paradoxical comfort can be found in drama.” (8)

▪ You take so long to tell stories. It’s hard to say what it is they saw in me if they didn’t appreciate this crucial aspect of my charm. (37)

▪ He had a full, deep laugh, head occasionally thrown back, that I wanted to capture and keep as a pet. (41)

▪ I felt my high-level search-engine excavation skills were knavish and petty: they marked me as a member of a generation that grew up without respect for fundamental principles of functional society and the human soul. (51)

▪ The fact that Felix was my boyfriend made me want to give him things, like pancakes he didn’t want. (66)

▪ It was not this man’s fault that he had a bad personality, but I was totally responsible for leading him to believe he didn’t. (161)

▪ I was starting to get annoyed. These people just wanted to talk about themselves. They weren’t giving me a chance to talk about my characters. (201)

▪ It never occurred to me that some of these men might be faking it with me. (234)

▪ I saw now that what he’d presented as realistic generosity was actually a hard bargain: if he expected nothing from anyone, he wouldn’t have to give them anything in return. (305)

▪ You should always take pictures of yourself with your phone held above you, looking down at you, so that your eyes look big and your nose small. (310)