He knew that this room held presidential secrets, national secrets,
and pine-box secrets, as in, the kinds of secrets that came with
coffins.
There’s a reason why the National Treasure movies have
grossed a billion dollars between them and, believe me, it’s not
Nicholas Cage. The fascination with archival secrets kept by
mysterious cults also gave birth to the Dan Brown phenomenon but
Brad Meltzer does it much more effectively in his latest potboiler
The Inner Circle, going Brown one better by actually setting
his tale within Washington’s cavernous National Archives.
That’s where young Beecher White (“Mysteries are my specialty.”)
toils as an archivist whose most recent assignment is helping the
President himself on his regular, supposedly casual visits. Then
his boyhood crush Clementine Kaye shows up and all bets are off.
Before you know it, he’s giving her a tour of the room where the
President has been doing his reading, where a secret compartment in
a simple desk chair leads to a conspiratorial mystery that’s not so
simple at all, dating all the way back to George Washington and the
Founding Fathers. The requisite chase ensues with betrayals,
double-crosses, and murder abounding in wholly satisfying fashion.
Simply stated, Brad Meltzer is the finest storyteller going today.
No other writer spins a yarn with so many expertly crafted layers
and TheInner Circle is probably his best ever. An
extraordinary accomplishment not to be missed.
Walsh’s third novel continuing the adventures of Dorothy L. Sayers'
master amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey rivals Sayers' original
works. It's 1950, and Peter, now age 60, and his manservant Bunter,
pass a few rainy afternoons telling Peter's wife, mystery novelist
Harriet Vane, the previously-untold story of their first case. Just
after World War I, a shell-shocked Peter was slowly making his
return to society. He was attending a country house party when the
fabulous Attenbury family emeralds disappeared shortly after the
arrival of a foreign emissary wishing to buy the jewels, which
belonged to his employers' ancestor. The gems were eventually
recovered. This was the first of several adventures for the King
Stone, the magnificent emerald at the center of the collection. Over
the ensuing decades it would be lost, pawned, and used as security
against debts of honor. Now, after the relative calm of the Second
World War, the Attenbury family is in trouble, and the King Stone is
again the cause. As Peter reminisces and investigates, and bodies
begin to pile up, Patterson paints a portrait of that fairy-tale
world of upper-class English life during the years between the wars.
The characters are keenly aware that those times are gone for good,
and that England in the second-half of the twentieth century is
going to be very different. The story is laced with the aftereffects
of the two world wars and particularly their disruption of class
distinctions. The mysteries are intriguing, and the educated wit
that has always been a staple of the Lord Peter mysteries is here in
abundance (The horses at a stable look at Peter's wife “with long,
intelligent faces, making Harriet think simultaneously of Houyhnhnms
and Virginia Wolfe”), and along the way we learn plenty about jewels
and horseflesh. A great read, even for those who are not mystery
fans.
The Curtlees are clearly just what they seem—good people, wealthy
beyond measure, who bring young Latinas here to work for them out of
the goodness of their souls.
Well, not exactly since the smarmy scion of the family, Bo,
apparently raped eight of those young women and murdered one for
which he ended up in prison until an appeals court overturned the
conviction. Power, you know, and power lies at the heart of John
Lescroart’s spectacular Damage. Best known for his
wondrously staged courtroom tales, Lescroart breaks new ground here,
fashioning a multi-layered thriller ringed with decadence and
cultural complexity.
Whether Bo Curtlee is or isn’t guilty of murder takes a backseat to
what happens after he’s freed from jail while awaiting a new trial.
Specifically, all those who lined up against him to see justice done
have their lives and careers derailed in devastating fashion. But
the vengeful Curtlees have met their match in Lescroart stalwarts
Detective Abe Glitsky and prosecutor Wes Farrell. Glitsky and Hardy
aren’t about to get pushed around, much less let justice go undone,
and the result is a titanic battle akin to David versus Goliath in a
perfectly staged metaphor for our own culture’s current class
struggles.
A perennial bestseller and terrific storyteller, Lescroart elevates
himself to an entirely new level here, capturing big city politics
in a fashion akin to James Carroll’s brilliant Mortal Friends
or the classic All the King’s Men. Damage is a great
thriller but an even better novel, Lescroart’s voice as crisp and
true as his vision.
An
entertaining anthology of stories from across the spectrum of the
genre, from straight technological tales, like the too-obvious
environmental theme of “Foggy Goggles,” to the Faerie-versus-science
war of “Imperial Changeling,” one of the stand-out stories. “The
Battle of Cumberland Gap” is a nice bit of military fiction, while
“Portrait of a Lady in a Monocle” features a female character
bucking the traditional role of women in Victorian society. The
Egyptian setting of “Chance Corrigan and the Tick-Tock King of the
Nile” and the frozen Russian wilderness of “Foretold” are a nice
stretch from steampunk's Victorian origins. “The Echoer” is a weak
link, offset by the compelling horror of “The Whisperer,” which
shares its theme of a man searching for his lost love. “Of a
Feather” and “Scourge of the Spoils” feature driven female
characters, but I prefer the former's rollicking Lost World
adventure to the bleakness of the latter. The disparate elements of
“Edison Kinetic Light & Steam Power” didn't gel for me, and the
twist ending seems like it belongs to a different story. “The Nubian
Queen” features the most-changed alternate history of the group, and
its royal intrigue in a nineteenth-century Europe dominated by an
Egyptian empire is complex and exciting (although slightly marred by
a too-clever historical reference at the end). “Opals from Sydney”
is an entertaining adventure if a bit pat, and “The
Transmogrification Ray” overcomes its slow start with a strong
ending. Well worth reading.
Winters, famous for his mash-up novels Sense and Sensibility And
Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, demonstrates a deft
hand with purely original material as well. In this short,
light-hearted story, we follow the adventures of Bethesda Fielding,
a seventh-grader who has just pulled off the greatest Special
Project in the history of Mr. Melville's Social Studies class. Told
to solve a mystery, she eschewed such mundane matters as why hot
dogs are sold in packs of twelve while buns are sold in packs of
eight or whether Happy, the dolphin in the local aquarium, is really
happy or just faking it. Bethesda wanted to know what their music
teacher, Ms. Finkleman, is like outside of school. No one seemed to
know anything about her. Bethesda soon learned that Ms. Finkleman
was Little Miss Mystery of The Red Herrings, a 1990's punk band. But
this is only the start of the real mystery: why did
Ms. Finkleman give up the rock lifestyle, and
why has she hidden her past for so long? Will being forced to teach
her students rock music instead of Sixteenth-century English folk
ballads for an inter-school choral competition bring her back to her
roots? Before it's all over you can bet that Bethesda will feel
sparks for a boy, and a piano genius raised on classical music will
learn to rock out, but Ms. Finkleman's twists and turns will
surprise.
This latest addition to the exploding genre of teen dystopian
fiction will likely win many readers, particularly among fans of
Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Cassia lives in a world where
everything, including your life partner, is chosen for you by The
Society. (It's assumed that everyone in The Society is heterosexual.
Presumably, The Society would find any other sexual orientation
unacceptable, but it’s a problem that goes unaddressed.) As the book
opens, Cassia is happy to go along with the Society's plan for her
life, but when she begins to fall in love with someone who is not
her Match, the fabric of her faith in her world begins to unravel.
The romance element is very much in the foreground here, so
Matched may not be as big a hit with boys as with girls. In the
beginning, when she's supposed to be a true believer, Cassia’s
narration is less convincing, but she gains believability as a
dissident. Readers will be clamoring to find out what happens to
her in the second installment of the planned trilogy.
