Library Limelights 277

 

Marie Rutkoski. Real Easy. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Henry Holt and Company, 2022.

Opening scenes are at a club called Lovely Lady. Be prepared for meeting a dozen strippers who use stage names. The prevailing law says they can dance nude but no touching at all by the clients; it’s all in the open, no private rooms. As a fascinating edge of show business, the women’s working lives are held together by rough camaraderie and humour. Club owner/manager Dale allows no funny business, but it’s still ripe for misogyny, drugs, and extracurricular prostitution. Ruby (real name Samantha) is a performer popular with the customers, earning enough to support her partner Nick and his daughter Rosie. One night Ruby offers to drive Lady Jade (Jolene) home when she feels sick; Samantha’s car is soon found wrecked and Jolene was murdered nearby.

Samantha’s body turns up many days later. Detective Holly Meylin is on the case, possibly a serial killer. Characterization in general is excellent, except for the killer who pops in from time to time. Seasoned readers will cotton onto him almost immediately, while Holly struggles with three potential suspects, all of whom are ultimately well-alibied. Lots of tension as we try to cheer her onto the right path, almost too late. Thus the story is not exactly detective-driven. The strippers may unknowingly have small clues to the killer; only Gigi (Georgia) cares enough to risk losing her fragile income that depends on keeping her mouth shut. This is a glimpse into an “exotic” world of hardworking women. The pacing is great, and it’s one novel where switching from one character to another works well.

Bits

▪ “Send an ambulance,” he tells dispatch. “An evidence tech. And an accident reconstructionist.” (52)

▪ She is hungry but afraid of him coming back, even if he brings food. (92)

▪ She likes Ruby. Everyone does. “I don’t know her,” Georgia says. “Not really. I didn’t know her real name until you told me.” (112-3)

▪ Zack slouches in his seat with the lithe disregard of a teenager. “You ain’t got shit.” (162)

▪ He rubs his finger and thumb over the pearl earring in his pocket. (173)

▪ Holly didn’t want to see the body. It was her duty to see the body. (216)

▪ “I hoped that you would reconsider being my CI,” Holly says. “I could pay you.” (249)

▪ “Women are allowed to feel powerful for ten years, and then they turn thirty and men barely look at them again.” (274)

▪ “Do you remember when you told me that a monster took Samantha? You said that he called you.” (322)

▪ “So I turned the car around and went back home. I got into bed. Then I woke up and my whole life was gone.” (333)

Tana French. The Searcher. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Penguin Books, 2020.

For many pages, we are privy to the boring life of Cal Hooper. A former Chicago detective, he has taken up residence in the back of Ireland’s beyond, renovating a shabby old house, and being mentored by Mart, his nosy old neighbour. Me: waiting for something to happen. Bucolic bliss reigns, exactly what Cal needs to re-wind after a sad divorce and serious doubts about his police calling. Acclimatizing to the vernacular of the locals and the surrounding natural beauty is like immersion in a rich new culture. Still nothing happens. Oh, one or two sheep are mysteriously slaughtered in the middle of the night but no one seems the least bit fussed about it. Mart ensures that Cal meets the entertaining village characters and farmers – at the pub, of course. Noreen the shopkeeper is eager to match-make him with her sister Lena but there’s no coy romance in the works.

Cal’s instincts are right on when he suspects someone watching him while he paints and repairs. A great deal of coaxing brings semi-wild child Trey into his life. Trey—of the most disreputable family thereabouts― insists that Cal investigate the disappearance of his brother Brendan. Against a sense of foreboding, Cal agrees. Thus, superficial trimmings begin to drop away from almost everyone he’s met, and warnings pop up. Something did happen! However, the pace remains steady even as Cal uncovers the truth, learning as much about himself as he’s been teaching Trey. A thoughtful, smooth jumble of poteen, puppies, and acceptance, with some charming Irish logic.

Bits

▪ “Because you’re American. Ye’re all mental with the guns, over there.” (56)

▪ Trey says behind him, “I heard you’re a cop.” (78)

▪ He can’t shake the feeling that some emergency is heading towards him, someone is in danger, and he needs to keep all his wits about him to have a chance of fixing things. (127)

▪ “For Jaysus’ sake, don’t be savoring the bloody bouquet,” Mart orders him. “Knock that back.” (229)

▪ He resigns himself to waking up in a ditch with his pants missing and a goat tied to his leg. (232)

▪ Cal would love to know what and who, exactly, he’s supposed to be scared of. (274)

▪ “Maybe up in Dublin the gays are all marrying the bejaysus out of each other, but I haven’t heard of any in these parts.” (342)

▪ “She’s gone and pissed off some bad people.” (446)

▪ Under the chair is a towel stiff with dried blood. (452)

▪ “Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man.” (458)

▪ “I don’t want you getting it into your head that the townland’s always this exciting.” (463)

Meg Mason. Sorrow and Bliss. USA: HarperCollins, 2021.

Not a crime novel. The appeal was what seemed to be a study of one woman’s bipolar experience; perhaps there would be small illuminating flashes of this always-challenging disorder. Martha has reached the age of forty knowing something is wrong with her, but psychiatry and medication and therapy have not changed anything. Her unconventional, artsy parents Celia (alcoholic sculptor) and Fergus (unpublished poet) are mainly oblivious. Over the years she’s exhibited only bad behaviour toward other people, including their financially supportive Aunt Winsome and Uncle Rowland. Her best qualities come out in the tight bond with her sister Ingrid and in her writing job. Alas, that doesn’t apply to her patient, loving husband Patrick; she contributes as little as possible to their domestic life. Depression is a regular cycle, but mania brings rage as well as euphoria. Adding a baby to their slightly chaotic life was clearly not an option Martha wanted.

Lest it all sounds gloomy, it’s mostly not. Martha is very funny in recounting a patchwork of her own activities and the interactions of various family members. Her first marriage, to Jonathan, was a six week disaster that should never have happened. After moving from London to Oxford, Martha tells no one about her visit to Robert, a new and different psychiatrist. He diagnoses her with ______, prescribing appropriate medication; we are never told what the disorder/disease is. As Martha’s disposition and behaviour modify for the better, she gets more than one family shock, but worst of all, she resents, then hates, Patrick because as a medical doctor he should have been able to diagnose her long ago. Illogical, yes. Self-examination does not come easily to her. Yes, much resonance with the darkness and loneliness of mental illness struggles, and the alleviating power of humour.

One-liners

▪ Throughout childhood our parents would separate on a biannual basis. (16)

▪ “Ideally, Martha, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.” (233)

▪ All I wanted was to hate my mother, and punish her and expose what she’d done. (241)

▪ He told my father it was their fastest seller since the bottom fell out of the adult coloring-book market. (327)

▪ I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. (335)

Multi-liners

▪ Without my medication, I was not euphoric anymore. I was not depressed, the old me or a new one. I just was. (56)

▪ At Soho House, wearing Chloé, holding lily of the valley flown in from somewhere, I told Jonathan I was so happy I felt like I was on drugs. He told me he was positively ecstatic, and actually was on drugs. (80)

▪ “But yes, thank God you didn’t manage to get me pregnant, Jonathan. A baby I didn’t want in the first place turning out to have a genetic predilection for cocaine and white jeans.” (99)

▪ “First novels are autobiography and wish fulfillment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.” (116-7)

▪ I listened to the relentless jangle and bleat of the pneumatic drill. It wouldn’t stop it wouldn’t stop it wouldn’t stop. (177)

▪ “I’ve never known a psychiatrist who wasn’t full of shit. They want us all to be mad. It’s very much in their interest.” (234)

▪ “You knew he was right. You have known the whole time and you didn’t say anything.” (235)

Growing pains

Patrick and I were part of each other’s childhoods; there was no need for us, newly coupled, to share the particulars of our early lives. It became an ongoing competition instead. Whose was worse?

I told him, once, that I was always the last one picked up from birthday parties. So late, the mother would say, I wonder if I should give your parents a ring. Replacing the receiver after a period of minutes, she would tell me not to worry, we could try again later. I became part of the tidying up, then the family supper, leftover cake. It was, I told Patrick, excruciating. At my own parties, my mother drank.

He stretched, pretending to limber up. “Every single birthday party I had between the ages of seven and eighteen was at school. Thrown by Master. The cake came from the drama department prop cupboard. It was plaster of Paris.” He said, good game though. (15)

Counselling

We had one session with a therapist. She was white but dressed as if she had come directly from a Kwanzaa celebration and said, “Not to worry!” when neither of us could articulate why we’d come.

Patrick could not say, “Because on a recent occasion, my wife behaved like a psychotic, and much older, Anne of Green Gables in the Lady of Shalott episode.”

I could not say, “Because I have lately discovered that the pillars of my husband’s personality, the qualities for which he is so broadly admired, the exceptional stoicism, emotional equanimity, and never complaining, are actually just symptoms of a newly classified disorder.”(221)