Library Limelights 267

Paula Hawkins. A Slow Fire Burning. Ebook download from TPL. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2021.

What to say about an ambitious crime novel with so many twists that it swallows its own tail? I had reservations about Hawkins’ previous Into the Water (LL212) and they multiplied here. Daniel Sutherland’s murder is front and centre, introducing us to several connected characters in the community. Miriam lives on a canal narrowboat (this is London) and found the body. She’s been accusing well-known novelist Theo of plagiarizing her own memoir she’d sent him in a moment of trust. Theo’s ex-wife Carla has never recovered from the accidental death of her only child, then her sister died, now her nephew. Irene is verging on senility, missing her best friend, next door neighbour Angela—Daniel’s mother and Carla’s sister―who recently died in an alcoholic mishap. Then there’s Laura, the wild child. Hit by a car as a youngster, the serious damage left her with disinhibition, no control over her reactions and emotions. They are all unstable, every one of them!

Nearly always, these people are interacting in confrontation and conflict with one another. “It’s not my fault” and “I’m not stupid” are repeated refrains as each fumbles with suppressed guilt, blaming others, revising the past, or vacantly sleepwalking through their days. They contradict their own feelings. At times: it’s unclear whose voice is being expressed; the narrative is choppy; timelines are blurred. Three of these people are arrested, in sequence, for Daniel’s murder by the perplexed police. Daniel—never more than a cardboard figure. Only Laura and Irene, when together, have a more realistic human touch. Hawkins spins a complicated tale of many threads, yes, but it’s unnecessarily further complicated by the author’s overdone psychological spinning. Sorry, couldn’t get my empathy on. See Laura’s last line below.

Theo

▪ “I didn’t ... really think much of it, because London is awash with strange, drunk people, isn’t it?” (33)

▪ He hadn’t known about the relationship with Daniel—that had come as a shock, and he was upset, not least because of the nature of its revelation.

▪ The Sutherland mess, all that poison they had injected into his family, into his marriage, it could start to drain away now. (282)

▪ “Who else did you show it to?” he asked. “Your ... uh, your manuscript. Who else read it?” (360)

Carla

▪ Carla was the sort of woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. (60)

▪ This forgetfulness was new. It came from sleep deprivation, she supposed; there was a reason they used it as a form of torture—it robbed you of all capacity. (167)

▪ Carla blinked slowly. “You saw him with Angela?” she asked. (195)

Miriam

▪ People looked at Miriam and they saw a fat middle-aged woman with no money and no husband and no power. (101)

▪ She believed she was entrusting her story to a man with integrity, a man of good character, when in fact she bared her soul to a charlatan, a predator. (139)

▪ Back aching, knees pressed painfully into the cabin floor, she worked methodically, trying her best to sweep away all traces of her confrontation with that vicious girl. (256)

Laura

▪ He grabbed her, digging his thumbs into the flesh of her upper arms. “You fucking psycho, you ... crazy bitch.” (49)

▪ “So, it’s fair to say that you cannot always control yourself? You have emotional outbursts which are beyond your control?” (56)

▪ There was something so terribly raw about her, so unguarded, Irene feared for her. Someone like that seemed so vulnerable to the worst the world had to offer. (158)

▪ “So then four years after I got run over, my mother married the man who knocked me off my bike.” (198)

▪ “You really can’t make this shit up,” Laura said. (368)

Linden MacIntyre. The Winter Wives. Toronto, Random House Canada, 2021.

Two almost-lifelong friends: Allan Chase and Angus Byron whose last name doesn’t enter the picture. Byron was so nicknamed, affectionately, for his limp incurred after a freak childhood accident. Allan is larger than life, self-confident and resourceful. Eventually they marry sisters—Peggy and Annie Winter. While Allan moves to Toronto to pursue business interests, the others linger longer in their native Nova Scotia, country that casts its own spell. But the women are drawn into Allan’s orbit, hired to perform the accounting duties as his wealth increases. Byron is a lawyer who, with Annie, cares for his mother for years in her Alzheimer’s state. Then he, too, undertakes assigned tasks from Allan, who considers them the only group he can trust. Allan plays his cards tightly, knowing Byron wants nothing to do with illegal activities.

I will always pick up a MacIntyre book, not just because he’s a Caper.* Here, I am totally fascinated by the author’s adroit skill at making the reader fill the gaps. The things unsaid are tremendously effective—Byron’s love for Allan’s wife Peggy; what really happened to Byron as a child, that he can’t recall; the exact nature of and plans for Allan’s businesses. Beyond that, it’s a study of friendship, how well we know others and ourselves. The deceptively slow buildup leads to the biggest mystery of all. Byron narrates from the point of Allan’s unexpected death with reminiscences of how they got to where they are. A police blitz-raid into their offices and homes is in the aftermath. Full of mystery if not crime—well, okay, that too―MacIntyre at his best, in my opinion. You decide.

* from Cape Breton

One-liners

▪ To me, the female world was little girls and older women, every one of them a mystery. (27)

▪ He could be like that, one minute all piss and vinegar and jokes, the next sunk in gloom. (32)

▪ ‒ Allan is a fiction, a creative enterprise that he’s been working on for decades. (161)

▪ ‒ I want to believe you, Byron, because I’d hate to think of what will happen to you if you’re just stringing me along. (269)

▪ As we were all finding out, Annie insisted, there was a whole world of deception beyond anything we knew about Allan’s businesses. (286)

Multi-liners

▪ I might have been offended by his obsession with physical mobility, except that I knew he saw me as he saw himself. He never viewed me as the lame guy, the guy who grew up with the reality of falling down. The guy who, for a large part of his young life, lived under the control of other people, not to mention drugs. (21)

▪ He now projected a certain edgy toughness, not the adolescent bravado I remembered. I recognized in it a trace of the performed aggression I encountered in the business people I sometimes had to represent, not to mention other lawyers. (106)

▪ ‒ We’re in a very delicate phase now, the final stages of the transition, all according to Allan’s instructions. Transferring all remaining assets into a trust. (273)

▪ ‒ You three ran everything. I have no idea what you know and don’t know. (285)

▪ ‒ Anything we say will be just between the two of us. Anyway, you can always play the dementia card. (291)

From early days

Allan had a phobia about signing anything, even something as innocuous as a small-town hotel registry. You could hunt forever, but you’d never find my partner’s name on a bureaucratic document, not even on our letterhead. I handled most of his official business.

Actually, Allan had many names—inventions he could use when necessary then leave behind, as irrelevant as worn-out shoes. A name is a persona, he’d say, and a persona has no substance. It was one of his many eccentricities, but I had come to understand his reasons. A name is only a name. Identity is something else, something deep and private, shared only with those who, over time, we come to trust. (12)

Destiny?

‒ On that score, I might as well tell you, Peggy has already agreed to be my partner.

‒ Your partner? How?

‒ Taking care of the money end. Accounting. That’s her magic. But one of these days, we’ll tie the knot. So, come on. We’ll be kind of like a family. Me, Peggy. You, Annie.

‒ I’ll think about it.

‒ Talk to Annie.

‒ Why would I do that?

‒ Just talk to her. We’d be a killer team, the four of us.

He laughed, punched my shoulder. Guys are always doing that for whatever reason. My arm was almost useless for the next half-hour. (113-4)

Endings

My body ached. Old sensations working now in tandem with the new aches and pains, from which there will be no recovery.

I can live with dying. Everybody must. But what about that other possibility? The one that robs us of our ability to know anything? Mom stayed silent on that score.

At first she did try to welcome her dementia as a gift of spontaneity, the freedom to be herself, to say anything she wanted without consequences, say anything to anyone, about anyone. I believe the reality I witnessed was something else, an imprisonment. (145)

Claudia Piñeiro. Elena Knows. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Charco Press, 2021.

It’s a mystery to me that I chose this book, because apparently I misunderstood the descriptive blurb. It is a mystery—who killed Rita by hanging her from the church belfry? But it’s the story of Rita’s mother Elena, the only person interested in pursuing the unknown murderer. Everyone else accepts a verdict of suicide. Catholic ritual (think: funeral) and dogma are dispensed by a reproving priest, disdained by Elena, whose sights are set on answers to her daughter’s fate. Popular Argentinian crime writer Piñeiro has been translated into many languages, and ... a light bulb switched on post-facto when I realized I’d read her Betty Boo several years ago (LL123). Same criticism here: long, long sentences and even lonnnger paragraphs, pages filled with them; dialogue inserted mid-paragraph with no distinction between speakers. That said, no one can fault the articulate writing and the impact of the storyline.

So. Elena. She has advanced Parkinson’s that naturally hinders her intent to find a killer, not to mention its severe effect on her daily life. Rita had provided all her personal care on top of a regular job. After absorbing some of this incredibly painful, difficult life, I had to skim the agonizing passages where Elena struggles mentally and physically with the mere business of reaching a standing position from sitting, or placing one foot in front of the other to take a step, trapped in a body less and less responsive. We wonder if she will ever reach the house of the acquaintance she seeks for assistance—Isabel, who owes Rita a debt. One can’t help admiring Elena’s feisty spirit, but this is more than one wants to know about terminal misery.

Word: sternocleidomastoid – the two long muscles that connect the sternum, clavicle, and mastoid process of the temporal bone and serve to turn and nod the head.

Bits

▪ She’s going to call in that debt, though if Rita were here she wouldn’t approve, life’s not a swap meet, Mum, some things are all done because God wills it. (11)

▪ But as much as they try to convince her, or remain silent, no one can refute the fact that Rita never went near the church when it even threatened rain. (29)

▪ A few months ago she began to drool since her stooped position made it harder and harder to keep her saliva inside her mouth. (46)

▪ ... your daughter committed an aberrant act, she took her own life, she wasted a body that did not belong to her but to God, she decided she couldn’t continue living even though every Christian knows that it is not up to us to decide when our life will end, that’s the truth and we have to feel pity for her. (60)

▪ What’s left of you when your arm can’t even put on a jacket and your leg can’t even take a step and your neck can’t straighten up enough to let you show your face to the world, what’s left? (76)

▪ I killed her by wishing her dead so many times, Isabel clarifies, because she realises she needs to. (121)

▪ Isabel looks at her, and says Another person’s body, sometimes, can be terrifying. (142)