The Quarry by Johan Theorin

The Quarry by Johan Theorin

Book 3 in the Oland Quartet

Translated by Transworld Publishers, 2011

Originally published as Blodläge, 2008

Source: I bought the book.

The Quarry is a moody book that delves into new and old residents of the island of Oland near a quarry. Gerlof, who has appeared in the earlier books, moves out of the old folks home and back into his own home. Two people with ties to the island move back into his village, Vendela, who is married to a villain author and publicity hound, and Per, who inherits a small cottage near the quarry.

The back copy makes it sound like the murder investigation is key, and really, it’s only the focus of the second half of the book. Theorin spends a lot of time building the world: isolated island, small population, tormented Vendela whose returned to the island after a miserable childhood, Gerlof whose been freed from the old folks home, and Per Morner, who inherited a rundown cabin near the quarry. There is a mystery from Vendela’s past, there’s sadness in the current times, and there’s a plot about Per’s father’s unsavory and criminal career in pornography. And the setting and the elf-stones are important as well. So many runs in the alvar to the elf-stone.

I’m writing about this book because a) I’m a completist and b) this book stood out positively in my reading year. I think reading older books means I don’t get tired of the same trends in publishing.

Here are links to my reviews of other books in the series:

Echoes from the Dead

The Darkest Room

Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

Emily Bestler Book, December 2017

Disclosure: I received a review copy.

Anatomy of a Scandal is a courtroom thriller more than anything. James Whitehouse, a member of Parliament is on trial for raping a young staff member, and the story switches between Kate’s(the prosecutor) and Sophie’s (his wife) perspectives, with a bit from James’s (the accused) point of view. The story also cover the contemporary criminal case and everyone’s college years.

The cover of my review copy is misleading, a quibble I often have with books. “You want to believe your husband. She wants to destroy him.” That is not this book. There is no direct confrontation between Kate and Sophie. Vaughan does not play clear favorites between those characters. She’s more interested in how everyone is affected by James, both during the criminal case as well as before and after. She’s more interested in how women live in a world where men abuse women both criminally and psychologically. It’s very reflective.

The humiliated politician’s wife shows up in movies and in real life over and over, and this book gets at Sophie’s struggle. And it’s very perceptive about the slitheriness of James, the accused. The longer I am away from the book, the more impressed I am by how damning this story is to him.

A Rare Benedictine by Ellis Peters

A Rare Benedictine by Ellis Peters, Myserious Press, 1989

Source: My bookshelves

Project: Read-from-by- Bookshelves continues since I was last able to check books out from my library on March 14. I picked up A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael, a collection of short stories that are prequels to the Brother Cadfael series, on the recommendation of someone at a library sale some time ago. I miss book browsing, and I’ve also got a stack of books to donate too from the past two months. Some day, right? Anyway, back to the book.

This mystery is one of the few historical crime novels I’ve read, and the compactness of the stories made them perfect for reading this weekend. The three stories take place in 1120 as Cadfael leaves the Crusades and joins the monastery in Shrewsbury, and in the span of just 150 pages, he solves a kidnapping, a theft of silver candlesticks, and an attempted murder in Shrewsbury. Compact stories are good for my short attention span.

Reading a new-to-me author writing about the twelfth century was a project in vocabulary, notably about the plants and herbs that Brother Cadfael grows and uses. My favorite plant name was orpine, also known as “witch’s moneybags.” I have at least two more Brother Cadfael books on my shelves, and I’m looking forward to them.

 

What I Read This Week

I finished something short and something long this week:

1. Mario and the Magician, a novella by Thomas Mann;
2. Doc by Maria Doria Russell

First off, I read Thomas Mann along with an online reading group/program called #MutuallyMann. There were a series of short videos and articles from Mann experts to help ground me in this novella that’s about a strange vacation in Italy with a horrifying magic show.  I’ve never read Mann for class or in a reading group before, so I appreciated the background. Going slowly helped too, and that fits my level of reading concentration these days.

Next, I finished the quite wonderful Doc on audio, read by the wonderful Mark Bramhall, about Doc Holliday. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a western, but I’ve watched my share, including Tombstone, which happens years after the events in this book. Certain things jumped out at me as I read this in 2020:

• Of course I pick a book about a man with tuberculosis as we’re dealing with a horrible respiratory virus. I try to limit my news consumption, but I’m still preoccupied, you know;
• The focus on small-town politics, including shifting alliances and powerbrokers who tried to keep that status secret, seemed very of-the-moment. And in the author’s note, Russell said she simplified the political history of Dodge City significantly. I can only imagine how much more convoluted the power plays were;
• There were no hookers-with-a-heart-of-gold, refreshingly;
• The focus on building a city whose economy depends on ridding cattle drivers of their money was interesting because right before Michigan’s stay-at-home order went into effect, I was at a meeting about branding our county for tourism. I think that conversation is on hold for at least a year, but we’ll see. I mean, cowboys aren’t tourists exactly, but they are passing through;
• Finally, there was a mysterious death that took up a lot of focus in the story, so I haven’t totally abandoned my love of crime fiction. This book focused a lot more on atmosphere and the whole town of Dodge City than a whodunnit, though.

That’s it for now. Stay safe, and happy reading.

Checking In

Hello, everyone. Hope everyone is well and staying safe, and I hope that just maybe reading is working as a solace for you. I’ve been pretty distracted– I can focus for about 30 minutes max on what I’m reading– but I hope I can read and blog more in the coming days.

Here’s a selection of the books I’m juggling at the moment:

A Matter of Motive by Margot Kinberg

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Clean Breaks by Ruby Lang

I’d be happy to hear what you’re reading.

The Valedictorian of Being Dead by Heather B. Armstrong

I think I started reading memoirs centered on mental health well over ten years ago because books like The Glass Castle and Prozac Nation were book club picks. I’ve read a few more since then, but I’m by no means an expert in the genre. The Valedictorian of Being Dead centers on Armstrong’s experimental therapy for severe depression that involved extreme anesthesia instead of electroconvulsive therapy. She’s pretty explicit about her reasons for writing the book: she wants to eliminate the stigma around depression and explain what depression and treatment felt like for her. It makes for rough reading, but it’s also fascinating to hear about the experimental trial and her positive response to it.

The Valedictorian of Being Dead by Heather B. Armstrong

Gallery Books, April 23, 2019

Disclosure: I received a review copy.

American by Day by Derek Miller

The most accurate blurb/ review I’ve read about American by Day is that it’s a hybrid sort of crime novel. But a hybrid of what, exactly? It’s a story about a crime, and it’s a story about a Norwegian police chief taking an unexpected trip to America. But it’s not really a thriller, and it’s not really a methodical investigation like a police procedural.  It is a book that has stayed with me, despite the fact that I’m not as fond of it as I was by the first book in this series, Norwegian by Night.

American by Day starts shortly after the shooting at the end of Norwegian by Night. Sigrid, the police chief in the first book, is still grappling with the aftermath of the first case when she finds out from her father that her older brother is missing in the United States, where he’s lived for a number of years. Sigrid reluctantly travels to the US, and the plot slows a bit, and Miller is explicit about his narrative principle when Sigrid explains her investigatory technique: “Observations first. Questions next. Interpretation last.”

And the observations are about America, race, police, and more. Sigrid’s brother is suspected of murdering his girlfriend, and African American university professor who was despondent about her young nephew’s death at the hand of the police in his backyard. Sigrid is skeptical, and eventually she uncovers the truth, and that’s the satisfying part of the read, while the sociology-of-the-US portions are the parts of the book that make me more ponderous.

American by Day by Derek Miller

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2018

I received a review copy from the publisher.

Update

So when I stopped blogging a few months ago I started contemplating starting a booktube channel, and I think I’ll go for it soon. But first, just to get back into the blogging/book-talking in general, I’m writing this to catch up on what I’ve been reading and loving over the past few months.

1. The Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series by Julia Spencer-Fleming is quite good: I wasn’t expecting as much action as there is in the first 5 books of this series. The books have mystery, romance, and no unreliable narrators!
2. Sherman Alexie’s memoir about his mother is harrowing and wonderful, and I can see why he needed to take a break from his book tour because it was traumatizing.
3. I’ve tried a couple giant nonfiction books lately, the first LBJ book by Robert Caro and Reformations by Carlos Eire about a couple hundred years of history, and I’ve read about half of each. It’s good to read stuff I don’t normally read and realize how much I don’t know about Texas in the early 20th century or Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries.

I’d love to hear your reading recommendations because I’ve nearly caught up on the Spencer-Fleming series.

Out of Bounds by Val McDermid

I haven’t been reading much fiction lately, and I especially haven’t been reading a lot of crime fiction lately: I tend to go down a rabbit hole reading the news instead, and it’s not necessarily good for my equilibrium. I was happy to get into this police procedural with a new set of characters and with a plot not nearly as gruesome as the Tony Hill- Carol Jordan series by Val McDermid.

Out of Bounds is the story of Karen Pirie, the head of the Historical Crimes Unit. She’s mourning her dead partner  Phil by burying herself in work, and she’s not a dour presence at all in the story. Score 1 for McDermid. Karen becomes involved in both a current and a historical murder investigation: a recent death of a young man whose mother died in an unsolved airplane bombing in the 1990s piques Pirie’s interest because she suspects that murder- or at least suspicious death- doesn’t run in families

What I liked most was the matter-of-factness not only of Karen but of a whole slew of highly competent women in police, social work, and forensic science. And McDermid had a damn sympathetic portrait of not one but two lawyers, for which I’m personally grateful. Also, McDermid is so good at populating this book with interesting people during the parade of investigatory interviews, etc. I hope this is the beginning of a new series.

Out of Bounds by Val McDermid

Grove Atlantic, December 2016

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher.

Quick Takes

So my reading lately has been either very plot-driven (a couple more thriller-y reads) or a comfort read in the sense of reading books in a series I like. Ultimately the thriller-y stuff are not my favorites, mostly because I like less explicitly gruesome books.

First for the series I’ve grown to like more as they’ve gone on:  I’ve read the first two Julia Spencer Fleming books, which have a bit of thriller stuff in them, which is surprising because I expected them to be a lot more like the Louise Penny books. I was happily surprised by In the Bleak Midwinter: it’s the first entry in a series featuring two military vets: the police chief in a town of 8,000 covering a district of maybe 20,000 in upstate NY, and the new Episcopalian minister in town, a transplanted southerner who was a badass helicopter pilot. The characters were interesting– just enough backstory to see why they click. The plot was actually twisty, which I wasn’t expecting because I’ve read sort of dour snowbound mysteries (1222, Cover of Snow). And I was expecting less excitement because the marketing plan/covers look an awful lot like Louise Penny books (same publisher), and I don’t think of those as gripping.

Speaking of Louise Penny, I also just finished A Trick of the Light, and what strikes me most is that the characterizations are getting so much deeper as the series goes on. Hopefully her books don’t get bloated, but so far so good.

On the new front, I tried a debut mystery called August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones, which takes place in contemporary Detroit. The main character is a former cop who became a whistleblower (sort of inspired by the real Gary Brown, Detroit cop turned whistleblower turned politician). He lost his job and becomes a private investigator. Plot-wise the book left me cold because the action felt too amped up for me. I do like some big action-filled, conspiracy thrillers (Alan Glynn comes to mind), but this one just felt unreal for me. I think it felt too much like a superhero story for me.

Next, I tried a very dark thriller, The Dime, by Kathleen Kent, about a lesbian detective that moves from Brooklyn to Dallas and becomes embroiled in what appears to be a drug cartel war. The body count is quite high, the last third of the book is over-the-top violent, a move that I assumed was coming after reading books like The Keeper of Lost Causes. I kept on reading (and skimming some) because the book was written well, the workplace scenes worked well with interesting relationships among the characters, but I hate being put through the wringer when an author tortures her main character so thoroughly.