| Hiassen, Grabien, and Martin for Great Summer Mysteries |
August 30, 2010
I finished off my summer vacation the same way I always do, by reading through a pile of mysteries. I read a number of great mysteries this summer, some of which I've already written about, including City of Veils and the great thrillers of S.J. Bolton. I want to add in three more: Star Island by Carl Hiassen, a writer I always enjoy; The Weaver and the Factory Maid by Deborah Grabien, who has created a series linking charm, ghosts, and music; and The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin, a gem of a book discovered thanks to an email from a Readallday reader.
Star Island by Carl Hiassen is another one of his crazy rides through Miami. We are accompanied, as usual, by wacked-out, drugged-out, burnt-out, or sold-out screwballs. Lucky for us readers, the fabulous and previously-seen character of Skink, ex-governor of Florida and current Everglades commando, makes a comeback as a stabilizing but definitely skewed force of justice and equity. The novel, as always, is powered by a full-blown, wholly accurate, and laugh-out-loud funny satirizing of popular culture; this time, Hiassen uses his particular genre of satirical literature ("sat-lit") to expose and ridicule the making of the teen pop star, or rather the making of an image and un-making of a person. Paparazzi, parents, pariahs, peach-fuzzed wannabes, and piranhas all play a role in the creation that is Cherry Pye. When Cherry's double (used to cover-up her drug-addled sallies and subsequent forays into rehab) is kidnapped, Skink gets involved, heart and soul, and no one is safe until the pie has been cooked and set to cool. Lovers of Hiassen will love this latest addition to the oeuvre of Southern Florida eccentricity, greed, and justice, and new readers will be hooked on Hiassen's unique brand of sat-lit.
For something completely different, try the first in Deborah Grabien's ghostly fun "Haunted Ballad" series, entitled The Weaver and the Factory Maid. Grabien's novels are love songs to England, mixing up great olde English atmosphere with eclectic tidbits of from English history, music, and theater. Starring two beautiful, witty, and intelligent contemporary lovers, one of whom can see and feel and hear moments from the past -- especially emotionally charged and exciting moments -- and the other who is gifted in music-making and period-reconstruction, Grabien develops her plots easily, seducing her readers with humor and ghosts and problems to be solved. Her books are hard to put down and completely satisfying when finished. In The Weaver and the Factory Maid, Ringan has been given an old cottage and tithe barn in exchange for a debt owed, and together with his lady love Penny, discovers the place is haunted with star-crossed lovers from the past. Ringan's music and Penny's intuition will bring more questions than answers, until the final chilling resolution of love labour's lost.
Another series set in England but dispensing with all that is ghostly, unexplainable, or musical, is The Jim Stringer series of novels by Andrew Martin. His novels revolve around the trains and railways of the early 1900s. Jim Stringer is a fireman, loading coal to keep the engines of his beloved trains moving along, with vague hopes of becoming a driver, hopes matched by his witty and gutsy wife's more defined aspirations to middle class security. In The Blackpool Flyer, Jim and "the wife" (as he always refers to her) must cope with the fall-out after a train Jim is firing is sabotaged and a passenger dies. The Blackpool Flyer is filled with charming details of mill town life, sprinkled with details of early anarchists and growing awareness of workers' rights, and fascinating with facts about the trains that connected the towns, and brought hundreds of workers to the sea -- Scarborough or Blackpool -- for their one week of vacation.
Miami and all its vices; England and all its charms; trains and all their thrills: read one or read all, you will be satisfied.
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August 17, 2009
If you can suspend disbelief over ghosts, theater troupe managers driving Jaguars, and wills going through probate in two weeks time, you will like The Famous Flower of Serving Men by Deborah Grabien. And if you are a closet Anglophile with a hankering for embroidered history (particularly those juicy bits about monarchs run wild with power and lust), gory but palatable ghosts, and too-good-to-be-true heroines, you will love this book. I had a lot of fun -- chills and thrills and laughs -- reading this second in a series of five "Haunted Ballad" mysteries about Penelope Wintercraft-Hawkes, a woman who leads her own troupe of actors, drives a Jag, lives in a picture-perfect cozy apartment, has parents out of Enid Blyton, and talks in perfectly idiomatic English (ta, lovely, brilliant, barmy, criminy, bloody hell, etc). Penny has friends in high places (just where she needs them) and the capability to attract and channel ghosts, whether she likes it or not. She also has Ringan, a boyfriend with his own fancy car and his own stone treasure of a cottage, and a stunning ability of singing the wrong song in the right place, awakening the undead.
In this book Penny inherits a bit of property that comes encumbered with a horrible smell and worse: when checking the site out, Ringan lets loose with a gruesomely detailed song that dates from the time of the Plantagenets and the lyrics set off a powerfully pissed-off ghost -- who seems to have been the original inspiration for the ditty. Penny finds herself channeling this Lady from centuries past, bastard child of some royal or another (I can't give anything away) who did something really bad and burned for it -- or did she? That's what Penny, Ringan, and their devoted cronies have to find out. Rest assured our determined, well-placed, beloved, and irresistible (to anyone she asks to do anything) heroine Penny will make sure the job gets done and that her plays will go on.
The Famous Flower of Serving Men is perfect escapist reading for the beach (or for a winter's day before the fire or a fall day under red-tinged trees or for reading in a warm bed on a rainy spring day): there is enough intelligence and challenge in the writing to feel good about the book and more than enough pleasure, atmosphere, and scary bits to enjoy it thoroughly. There is nothing deep here, the characters are engaging caricatures, the plot dips and turns just enough to keep you guessing, the ghost story chills appropriately and effectively, and finally, there is more than enough of past and present English lore, history, and customs to satisfy any thirsting Anglophile. Ta.
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