It is always a pleasure to
welcome the newest offerings from three of the leading writers in American
crime fiction. Susan Wittig Albert, Nevada Barr, and Laura Lippman
produce a new text on an annual basis, and that is a yearly gift. All three
writers are as powerful as they are prolific.
Wittig-Albert, a Berkeley PH.D
and former university professor and administrator, ably utilizes the mystery genre
to present and explore pressing social issues that (unlike the popular
television series’ mantra) are too-often absent from mainstream headlines. In Blood Orange, Wittig-Albert deftly tackles
Medicare fraud—and by extension both nursing and convalescent care facility
conditions and the treatment of our elderly and disabled.
The first of the families and
the family legacies that this review highlights is the mother and son duo and
their business/medical partnership that starts Blood Orange. One of China Bayles’ short-term tenants has
discovered potentially fraudulent hospice structures and schemes and wants to
expose them; she seeks advice from China, and thus the former-lawyer-turned-herbalist,
small business owner, and entrepreneur gets involved.
As usual, Wittig-Albert’s plot
is well-paced and fact-driven. What is remarkable is the writer’s uncanny
ability to use crime to celebrate rather than threaten community. As the plot
thickens, for instance, heroine China thinks through her options, “I put the
Toyota in gear and pulled onto the street. What I needed was a glass of wine in
a familiar place with familiar people. And I needed it now. I was glad that it was just a few blocks away” (166). Her
description of that clean, well-lit place is priceless.
Bob
Godwin has run Beans’ for five or six years. His food is good, and yes, often
great. But not everybody goes there to eat. Some go to sit at the bar and cheer
for the Texas Longhorns on TV, play pool (eight-ball, nine-ball, or
one-pocket), or throw darts. Others go there to drink with friends and catch up
on the gossip or listen to gen-u-ine cowboy music—the
Sons of the Pioneers or Tex Ritter or Gene Autry—on
the wheezy old Wurlitzer jukebox.
But
when you get right down to it, it’s the down-home food that bring people, as it
brought me that night. There’s always barbeque on the menu—beef, chicken, and
pork grilled out back in old metal half-drums over mesquite fires.
Chicken-fried steak. . . .Big bowls of Bob’s
secret-ingredient chili (be warned: it’s spicy), served with hot-water
cornbread flattened into five-inch pancakes and friend. . . .usually
cabrito in various forms—kabobs, or drunken goat
stew, or (as it was this week) fajitas. Plus there are
the sides: mac and chees, mashed potatoes, deep-fried pickled jalapenos,
frijoles, black-eyed peas, collards, cole slaw.
Desserts, if you’re still able—pecan pie, peach cobbler, fried ice cream.
(167-68)
Wittig-Albert always puts
people first, but her dexterous descriptions make both people and place come alive.
******
The family and kinship ties in
Lippman’s Wilde Lake are more
frightening.
Siblings Luisa (Lu) and AJ
Brant share more than the high social standing their father’s former position
as state’s attorney provided. Although he was privy to many of the community’s
secrets, and while he was able to serve as both power-player and seeker of
justice, he cannot protect his adult children from their own family secrets. Lippman paints a baroque, somewhat disturbing picture of
small-town life, showing that both the haves and the have-nots suffer from
class mores and gender expectations. For instance, Lu finds a best friend in in
1979 whose house she sees as “funhouse mirror version of my own—a distorted,
disturbing mirror version” (206). Even as a fourth-grade Lu makes the class
comparison. She describes Randy’s motherless household as “[c]haotic and cramped and messy, with far too many people,”
and she observes “my house always felt as if it didn’t really have enough people
to justify all its rooms” (206).
In addition to showing her perspicuity,
this burgeoning friendship also reveals her competitive nature. Their nascent
friendship almost founders when Lu misreads Randy’s attempts at “building”
conversation as attempts to correct her. She explains, “I hated being
contradicted, topped” (207).
Lu Brant’s description of her
six-year-old self attempting to impress her first grade teacher, reinforces
that competitive streak. She fails to ingratiate herself with the teacher, so a
competition of sorts starts instead., young Lu struggles to make sure she makes
no mistakes and earns the highest marks. When her father questions her about
her obsession, assuring her he only wants her to do her best, she responds,
“Yes, being the best is important. Winning is important” (66). Her father
refuses to admit his own competitive nature and affirms, “No, being a good
person is important. Caring about others. Being warm and empathetic” (66). At
the time, Lu can only respond, “’I just want to win.” (66)
However, as an adult Lu is able
to look back offers a considered re-evaluation, “The thing I had gotten wrong
was showing how desperately I wanted to win. That was what I had to learn to
conceal, what my father and AJ knew from birth: disguise your desire” (67).
A grown-up Lu, now serving as
state’s attorney for Howard County, Maryland, continues to compete in a man’s
world and to read people and their social stations as part of her job. She does
a better job of disguising her desire, but she is still driven by a need to
excel and to win.
As she begins jury selection
for a murder trial (the crime at the heart of this novel), the lawyer reviews her
options, admitting to herself that she “distrusts early Columbia [MD]
‘settlers,’ despite the fact that her family was among them. That first
generation of Columbia homeowners, now in their seventies and eighties, skew
bleeding heart liberal” (248). She recognizes that the suspect’s “status as one
of them, along with his mental health issues, could win him sympathy with that
crowd” (248).
County borders and biases also count
in her calculations, as does race, “I’m
so happy this is a white-on-white crime, Lu thinks, and not for the first
time. . .” (248).
Lippman’s portrait of Lu Brand--single
mother, successful lawyer, and up-and-coming state’s attorney--is believably
drawn and developed from the history of the precocious and competitive child. When
Lu finds herself digging into the past cases of her father and mining her own
family’s history in order to solve a current case, past meets present in dangerous
clash. Bygones cannot be bygones, but atonement can be made. As the personal
becomes political and vice-versa, Lu Brand is one who can mete
a suitable justice and make amends.
******
The family and community ties
in Nevada Barr’s Boar Island are
neither wholesome nor supportive. Simply put, they are strange and sinister.
Barr brings back Heath Jarrod
and her adopted daughter Elizabeth from Hard
Truth and Destroyer Angel. Now
living a stable, secure, and middle-class life together in Denver, the Jarrod family
finds itself threatened: Elizabeth attempts suicide due to cyber-stalking and
undeserved slut-shaming. The child who survived a kidnapping by a sadistic
psychopath and then endured a second kidnapping by a group of rough felons with
repeated physical abuse and constant threats of rape, now faces allegations of
seducing her best friend’s father and rumors of her own perverse sexuality.
Family and friends decided the
best course of action is flight, and so Heath and Elizabeth follow Anna Pigeon
to Bar Harbor, Maine as she takes a temporary position as acting chief ranger
for Acadia National Park. Unfortunately, their 2,239 mile journey and the Acadia
National Park acreage cannot protect them from the stalker, who has followed
them and who now attempts to make physical as well as cyber contact.
Barr’s Maine town, like
Lippman’s Columbia, is firmly structured on class hierarchies. Again, both the
haves and the have-nots (lobster-fishers and tourist/hospitality workers) have
family rivalries and secrets that threaten individual lives and community
stability. Two separate plots involving the town and the park and the past and
present, spousal abuse, sexual assault, divorce, family separations, and a
diabolical medical diagnosis come together around the figures of Anna, Heath,
and Elizabeth.
The title, Boar Island, is an unfortunate homophonous foreshadowing as the
plot is both boorish and boring—as in drilling—in its adamant examination of
degradation and emotional and physical squalor. The author’s unyielding use of Elizabeth
in book after book as all-encompassing figure for misuse begins to seem less
like an investigation of aberrant behavior and more like an exploration of
personal proclivities and peccadillos.
Even the sections that do not
focus on Elizabeth are inflated. Violence is excessive and seems self-indulgent
and savored. In one five page assault scene, it is hard to tell if one’s
sympathies should lie with the attacked or the attacker. A woman who wants
revenge carefully plans her attack and encourages herself, “This was
straightforward. A simple task: You walk in, you dispose of the spider, you
walk out” (132).
Only it isn’t. The killer’s expectations are not met. Although
her “bullets cut so cleanly through the plastic they didn’t even disturb the
[shower] curtain,” the instant death she imagined doesn’t come. A second shot
is needed. It is also unsuccessful, and the scene erupts in histrionic
violence, “The curtain exploded out. . . . [the victim’s body] crashed into
her with the force of a freight train.” (133).
As the scene unfolds, the similes
become mixed, and the spider—already un unfortunate metaphor for a physically
abusive husband, morphs from the train, to a “hog in rut,” to a “bear or mad
dog,” to a horror movie’s monster, back to a “hog bent on eating pig for
lunch,” and finally into a bull (134). Unfortunately, this bull, one “ready
to gore,” whose head does sway from “side to side,” is barely able to pull
himself into a kneeling position (134).
In this scene, the
attacker’s description is also over-done and ill-fitting, “Like a snake from
under a boot, she coiled from beneath him, slid the rest of the way off the bed
to land on hands and knees” (134).
Barr’s suspense-building
is equally stilted. It is mawkish, “Heath had read the phrase “deathly Pale”
many times, but this was the first time she’d ever witnessed the phenomenon. It
was as if she watched the blood drain from beneath her daughter’s skin, leaving
a gray pallor in its wake. For a moment she though E. was going to faint or
scream or vomit. What she did was even more frightening” (21). And hackneyed, “That
was okay. Cybercreep would expect Elizabeth to appear
frightened. After all, he’d spent weeks carefully fraying every single one of
the girl’s nerves. One of these happy people in bunny slippers was feeding on
E’s fear at that very moment. Anger, so intense it dimmed her vision, flooded Heath’s
entire being” (323).
*****
Conclusions are the showpiece
of a crime novel. Well-done endings
make the whole tale worthwhile. While Wittig-Albert’s endings consistently celebrate
the resurgence of normalcy and the healthy nourishment offered by family and
community, Lippman’s endings offer recompense and restitution. In Blood Orange, in fact, the ending is a
homecoming of several sorts, as friends gather for police chief, Sheila Dawson’s
birthday celebration, “an old-fashioned block party” (287). McQuaid
(China’s husband) has returned with the chief’s husband from their own
sleuthing assignment in Mexico, and the famous Bob Godwin of Beans’ is
catering. Sheila, aka Smart Cookie, China’s close friend, announces a second
pregnancy (after an earlier miscarriage) and announces her department’s new
parental leave policy. In Wilde Lake,
the protagonist sacrifices her career to finally lay the family demons to rest
and to pursue the promise of a happy, less-encumbered future with her daughter.
However, Barr’s Boar Island does not
even offer the possibility of redemption or restoration. Anna, who does save
one child’s life, closes the novel alone, “look[ing]
away from the tragedy clogging the door . . . to the painted sunlight through
the fake windows” (374).
