Non-Fiction
 

A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game

by Jenny Uglow

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

In 1660, England, after a failed attempt at republicanism under Charles Cromwell, restored the monarchy. This detailed, lively survey of the first years of the reign of the newly installed Charles II reveals how he launched a cultural revolution. His laws and actions as a role model overturned two decades of Puritanism, and the ensuing freedoms laid the groundwork for the eventual might of the British Empire. Charles ordered the dead Cromwell and his co-conspirators dug-up and their corpses re-hung, but he also pardoned many former enemies of the crown, establishing himself as “the arbiter of vengeance” but also “the dispenser of mercy.” Not everyone was happy to have a monarch, no matter that he was “the Merrie Monarch.” (Uglow draws heavily on contemporary diaries and letters, ensuring that we know every entertaining and salacious detail of the king's affairs, which resulted in over a dozen bastards.) Aware that he ruled a divided country, Charles sought constantly for unity. His laws allowed relative freedom of religion, and he was fascinated by the “experimental philosophers,” the scientists of his time, who put aside their political and religious differences in the search for knowledge. Charles was instrumental in the creation of their Royal Society, and he discussed with them the idea of circling London with “a belt of green” in order to have plants scrub London's smoky skies clean. Charles reopened the theaters, which ushered in plays reflecting the atmosphere of his court: bawdy and satiric, spreading intellectual stimulation as well as laughs. He encouraged banking and international trade to such a degree that Dutch competitors soon became enemies in two wars. In the middle of the second war bubonic plague hit London, killing, at its height 7,165 people in one week. This was stopped by the Great Fire which left only one-sixth of London still standing. Just as he set the tone for this new era, Charles saw this too as a chance to re-make London, and he chose the architect and had a hand in the designs.

The Cheap Bastard's Guide to Washington, D.C.

by Rob Grader

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

Now that you've read The Lost Symbol, perhaps you're thinking of visiting Washington, D.C. Yourself. And why not?  Practically all the museums are free. This guide, useful for both tourists and locals, does a wonderful job of steering you towards the other free or low-cost aspects of our nation's capital and of its closest Virginia and Maryland suburbs. As someone who lives in that area, I can certify that Grader knows his stuff. The guide is well-organized, helpfully labelling “Catches” where free might not exactly be free (“Your child will beg you for a toy” at Kinder Haus, and there are various $1 and $2 service charges to make reservations for attractions such as the Washington Monument). But you can walk your way around town, eating for free from the numerous stores that offer free samples. Grader is on the money noting the cheese at Cowgirl Creamery and the marvels of Biagio Fine Chocolate. A couple of topics earn special charts, allowing you to plan your wine tastings every day of the week (not in D.C. on Sundays, but allowed in Virginia). There are free films somewhere every day of the week. Those at the Library of Congress and National Geographic tend to be documentaries, but free is free. You can also get free haircuts at any number of pricey salons if you're willing to allow your head to be used for “practice” or “experimentation” by a stylist. From the Embassy of Argentina's free tango lessons to children's story time at the National Building Museum, this is a most useful companion for anyone with a cheap (but discerning) heart.

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

by Julie Powell

reviewed by  A.B. Mead

Julie Powell was so nice in Julie and Julia, her story of cooking her way through Julia Child's cook book. Now it's a few years later, and Julie is confused. We're confused too. I keep having to remind myself that this is a memoir, because as a novel it wouldn't work. Why is she cheating on her husband, whom she admits is her soul mate? I hope she didn't do it just to have another stunt to write about:  My Year of Having An Affair. Those who only know Powell's history from the sweet, funny film may be surprised by her detailed confessions about how she enjoys rough sex (OMG! TMI! Suddenly, I can't see Amy Adams in the film version of Cleaving.), but amidst the train-wreck she makes of her life, there is still plenty for foodies to enjoy. For Powell, butchers represent certainty. There are fixed ways to kill and to prepare, say, pork cheeks. So, Powell, even though she is now fairly well-off and fairly famous, sets off to seek stability by becoming an apprentice butcher. Through that she explores the three definitions of cleaving:  separating from her husband, sex with her boyfriend, and cutting chuck shoulders and ribs. She loves her band saw. Those who enjoyed Powell's wit will find it still intact, and, though her demons are self-inflicted, she's certainly found a fascinating way to exorcise them. And, yes, the  mysteries of head cheese are revealed.

Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

Valentino (that's the name he likes to go by) is a finder of lost films and restorer at the UCLA Film Preservation Department. In Frames, the excellent first novel in this series, Val bought an abandoned movie palace and started restoring it, which plunged him into a murder investigation.  He was also haunted by the ghost of director and actor Erich von Stroheim. There's no such paranormal activity in Alone, unless you count the particularly vivid dreams Val is having set in Hollywood's Golden Age that just might help him solve his latest mystery. Millionaire Matthew Rankin has shot a blackmailer who was threatening to make public a letter revealing a lesbian relationship between Rankin's late wife and screen legend Greta Garbo (of “I vant to be alone” fame)—something that would sully his wife's memory and be Hollywood dynamite. Investigation into the origin and authenticity of the letter, combined with complications in Val's romantic life as well as his problems with a building inspector who’s threatening to shut down his renovations make for a great read.  Alone is a solid, frequently funny mystery steeped in films and film history.  Readers who are already familiar with Garbo's work (as well as other black and white classics; this is the series for the Turner Classic Movies crowd) will get the most out of Alone. Though, if you aren’t already a fan to begin with, this book will send you racing to update your Netflix queue. Estleman's guide to Garbo's films at the book's end is helpful and charmingly opinionated:  Mata Hari is “Garbo's campiest role,” while Susan Lenox is simply “steamy.”

Lovecraft Unbound

Edited by Ellen Datlow

reviewed by Scott Pearson

A suitably creepy and satisfying collection of Lovecraftian fiction. Datlow explains in her introduction that she wasn’t interested in pastiches impersonating Lovecraft, but in a variety of inspirations springing from his mythos. From the Antarctic after World War I to an advanced space station, from a Lovecraftian writer to writhing tentacles, the anthology collects a wide-ranging group of stories. Although a couple of the stories’ links to the mythos are tenuous, they’re still well-crafted and worth reading regardless of how they are classified. The best capture the slow-building unease and paranoia of a Lovecraft tale. 

Joel Lane’s “Sight Unseen” describes an estranged daughter discovering there was more to her father’s life—and death—than she wanted to know. Holly Phillips’ “Cold Water Survival,” although modern in setting, uses a drifting iceberg as a Lovecraftian frozen wasteland. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Houses Under the Sea” modernizes the creature-from-the-depths Lovecraft motif with remote-controlled submersibles and 24-hour news coverage. Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng” brings a contemporary expedition to catalog mushrooms in a distant region of China to an unsettling conclusion. Michael Chabon’s “In the Black Mill” is more openly an homage and features an insular mill town with a Lovecraftian secret. And Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s “Mongoose” is a futuristic story of unspeakable creatures from beyond space which have been given names from Lewis Carroll; it’s an unlikely take on Lovecraft that works in spite of its distance from the original. Recommended to any Lovecraft fan.

Silencer

by James W. Hall

Selling those handcrafted lures to Keys fishing guides and a few long-time customers brought in a meager income, though it was the only income Thorne had ever required. 

James Hall’s enigmatic hero Thorn is back in Silencer, albeit no longer in need of the money brought in from tying bonefish flies.  Indeed, his last adventure, Hell’s Bay, ended with him inheriting a ten-figure fortune from a grandmother he didn’t known he had.  With money, though, comes problems and Thorn faces a host of them this time out, not the least of which is getting kidnapped by a pair of brutally deviant brothers right out of the Carl Hiaasen school of Florida lowlifes.  They’re actually hired to kill Thorn, but opt to snatch him instead in order to see if there’s more they can get from the job than their bargain basement fee. 

Ernest Hemingway explored similar territory in his brilliant short story “The Killers,” and the comparison holds further since Hall ranks with James Lee Burke as a brilliant stylist, lyricist and novelist as well as storyteller.  And, make no mistake about it, there’s plenty of story in Silencer, including an animal preserve for rich folk who like to shoot geriatric big game and a sinister plot involving, as always, the tortured state of Florida’s land and environment. 

Hall never disappoints and Silencer is no exception.  A tale as wonderfully told as it is crafted.  Like Burke, to read Hall is to savor every sentence and description, and Thorne remains crime’s most unique, if phlegmatic, hero.

Remarkable Creatures

by Tracy Chevalier

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

The cover and the first few pages suggest that this might be just Sense and Sensibility With Fossils, but eventually Chevalier settles into an engaging piece of historical fiction. The novel is based on the true story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two young women who, in the early 1800s, were some of the most successful fossil hunters in England. The southern shores near Lyme Regis were strewn with “curies,” odd stones that some locals suspected were the remains of snakes that had lost their heads or even “the Devil's own toenails.” But Mary and Elizabeth forge a friendship over the idea that these are unbelievably ancient items that have turned to stone. This was the time when people were just beginning to understand prehistory, and what it meant. If God “was willing to sit back and let creatures die out” did that mean He might allow humans to die out as well? Even more blasphemous, creatures that no longer existed meant that God had made an animal and then disposed of it, suggesting the correction of a divine error. And, of course, the Bible says that rocks were created before animals. Matters of faith and early modernity clash, but this is no heavy, philosophic tome. Along with scenes of low-tech excavations are razor-sharp, Austen-esque social observations like the smugness of married women, who are “set like jelly in a mold, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable.” By centering her tale on something nearly all readers are interested in—dinosaurs (it's not a crocodile Mary finds, it's a ichthyosaur!)—Chevalier has created a real crowd-pleaser. 

The First Rule

by Robert Crais

reviewed by Jon Land

Was a time when Joe Pike played no more than sidekick to Elvis Cole, the sharp-tongued series sleuth featured in a bunch of thrillers by Robert Crais.  Well, no more.  The First Rule marks the second book Crais has let Pike out on his own, following The Watchman, to spectacular results. 

“So dig this,” a character blurts at one point, “those assholes are somewhere right now . . . and they do not know a storm is on the horizon and coming for them.” 

That storm is none other than Pike himself, an ex-Marine and private Special-Ops mercenary who is as loyal as he is deadly.  That’s important since what sets off the action in The First Rule are the brutal murders of Frank Meyer, one of Pike’s “guys,” along with Meyer’s entire family.  In the code of Joe Pike, that’s something you just don’t do, so off he heads on the trail of the killers who may or may not have targeted Meyer for his own illegal doings.  That trail leads ultimately to an especially brutal lot of Serbian gangsters of whom everyone is terrified.  Except Pike, of course. 

The First Rule reads like an old western with Pike cast perfectly in the role of the lone gunman out to avenge the deaths of innocents.  In that respect he’s more like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher than Crais’ own Cole, a fitting comparison given both heroes’ backgrounds and aura of invincibility.  And that help makes Crais’ latest a devastatingly effective thriller that’s as close to perfect as it gets.

Powerless

by Matthew Cody

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

Twelve-year-old Daniel Corrigan has just moved to Noble's Green, Pennsylvania—a perfectly ordinary, boring small town. But Noble's Green has a secret. Every now and then a child is born with superpowers. Some can fly, some have super-speed or super-strength, and some develop combinations of powers. Daniel soon stumbles into a friendship with this handful of “Supers” and learns how they've managed to keep their secret over the decades. The powers, along with any memory of them, disappear on your thirteenth birthday. Coached by the (slightly) older Supers, the children hide their powers from their parents. They try to live normal lives, going to school, and clandestinely using their powers to solve local crises like getting kids out of the way of speeding trucks. None of them wants the attention or interference that would come if any of them should one day “show up in a cape and tights.” They have their hidden clubhouse, and they follow the rules that have been passed down by their predecessors from generation to generation. But there is a legend that one of the first Supers managed to keep his powers into adulthood and become a secret superhero working for the government. Because any other Super, regardless of age, who is with a Super the night they turn 13 also loses their powers, the kids want Daniel to observe and report exactly what happens to their oldest members when the time comes. After all, he has nothing to lose; he's already powerless. The novel is a solid adventure that takes a number of delightful twists and turns. The mythology surrounding the origin and history of the powers is particularly satisfying. Though geared towards a young audience, comic book fans of all ages will enjoy Powerless.

The Pharaoh's Secret

by Marissa Moss

reviewed by A.B.Mead

Young Talibah and her brother Adom are Americans, but of Egyptian ancestry. They are visiting Egypt for the first time, along with their father who is researching ancient Egyptian literature. From the moment Talibah sets foot in Cairo, strange things begin happening. The image of a gold snake with ruby eyes appears everywhere. Talibah has dreams, and daytime visions, of herself in the days of the pharaohs and being condemned by the jackal-headed god of the afterlife, Annubis. And then there is her father's old friend Rashid, himself an archaeologist, whom everyone else likes, but whom Talibah finds unnerving. Her trips through crowded city streets, dusty museums, and, eventually, stone tombs are all steps in solving a 3,500-year-old mystery. Hatshepsut was Egypt's only female pharaoh. Several of the structures erected by her chief architect (and perhaps lover) Senenmut still stand day. But Senenmut disappeared mysteriously all those millennia ago. Is the ghostly voice Talibah hears whispering, “Find him,” the spirit of Hatshepsut seeking her help? Moss' recreations of life in modern and ancient Egypt are quite vivid. There is a lot of complex background information required to follow the plot, and much of it comes out in lectures or Talibah's own reading, which sometimes slows things down. But Talibah also has a notebook. The sketches she makes of family trees, hieroglyphics, and cartouches help keep some of the more esoteric facts straight.

Richard Thompson’s latest Cul de Sac collection, Children at Play, (Andrews McMeel, $12.99) continues to explore the life of the preschool kids that live in their hilarious comic strip neighborhood.  Rarely does a cartoon invoke true emotion while making the reader laugh out loud, but Thompson has a tremendous gift.  If you’ve never heard of this strip, find the books and start reading them.

Jason Pinter’s follow up to The Fury finds newspaper reporter Henry Parker trying to uncover an extensive drug ring in New York City.  The Darkness (Mira, $7.99) examines the inherent evilness of the drug trade and the cost in human lives.  A great read that will have newcomers scrambling to find Pinter’s earlier novels.  April cannot come fast enough for his next Parker novel, The Invited. 

What happened to the pieces of silver that Judas Iscariot obtained for his betrayal?  And why, in the present day, has an elite team been sent around the world to stop calculated terrorist attacks? Silver (Variance, $25.95) is everything I want in a thriller. History, ancient prophecy, religion, conspiracy, chases in exotic locales, and a Mission:Impossible-like team that brings it all into focus. I can't wait to bring home the follow up, Gold.

I grew up reading Bloom County every day in the Spokesman Review (yes, I grew up in Spokane) and I was sad to see it end.  Now I can relive those times in high school in Bloom County: The Complete Library Volume 1 (IDW, $39.99) I didn’t remember the beginning at all and it’s fun to see the evolution and origins of Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat.  This covers 1980-1982 and Volume 2 comes out in April.

I was delighted to be asked to pick the five best thrillers of 2009 for Library Journal.  Here are my choices from the LJ site:

Connelly, Michael. The Scarecrow. Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-16630-0. $27.99. 

This is a scary thriller starring reporter Jack McEvoy (from The Poet) and an even scarier look at the decline and fall of the newspaper industry. (LJ 4/15/09) 

Doetsch, Richard. The 13th Hour. Atria: S. & S. ISBN 978-1-4391-4791-7. $25.99. 

A man receives a chance to prove he did not murder his wife and to save her life (yes, you read that right) in this utterly original thriller. (LJ 11/1/09) 

Gardner, Lisa. The Neighbor. Bantam. ISBN 978-0-553-80723-3. $25. 

A mom tucks her daughter into bed and then vanishes. With a seemingly uninterested husband and a convicted sex offender living down the street as possible suspects, Gardner's twisty domestic thriller keeps readers guessing. (LJ 6/1/09) 

Lawson, Mike. House Secrets. Atlantic Monthly. ISBN 978-0-8021-1885-1. $22. 

A reporter's death ties in to the political aspirations of a powerful senator, and House troubleshooter Joe DeMarco will learn that DC is built on cover-ups and deception. An outstanding political thriller. (Xpress Reviews, 7/17/09)