December 2007
Reader in Ecstasy

Mariette in Ecstasy is so well written, reading it is a religious experience. Its exquisite prose is so fine, so beautifully and carefully crafted, so delicate and precise, there's not a single superfluous word. That marks on a page can be transformed from letters to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to pages, so profoundly, is truly a work of art. That this work of art is in the service of such a sublime subject lifts it above the merely extraordinary into the transcendent.

A mystery novel in the most existential and mystical sense, Marriette in Ecstasy is the story of life lived within a religious order at the turn of the Twentieth Century—a life characterized by silence, poverty, fervent prayer, Gregorian chants, and the complexity of simple existence in the close proximity of a small, cloistered community. With spare prose befitting vows of silence and poverty, Ron Hansen tells a story that is rich and complex, provocative and fascinating, and, ultimately unsettling. Through Mariette Baptiste, a young, beautiful prioress among many older nuns, he explores the confounding mysteries surrounding ecstatic devotion to the divine.

Mariette enters the convent with a ceremony similar to that of a traditional Christian wedding. Wearing her mother's wedding dress and flanked by girlfriends, classmates, and villagers, she makes her way to the church. At the Church of Our Lady of Sorrow, she walks down a white runner to the alter. Amid the rite, the assessment of Mariette begins. Mother Saint-Raphael thinks that she is "too-pretty," but nonetheless, is pleased. Sister Honore glances at Mariette, thinking unwillingly of another sister who was expelled from the order for tattooing the Sacred Heart on her chest. Sister Philomene is overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and prays for the grace to be just like Mariette.

Indeed, Mariette's presence in the priory has an immediate—and eventually profound—affect on the quiet, introspective nuns. Her devotion to Jesus is complete, and her reputation for lapsing into episodes of prayerful "ecstasy" inspires in her fellow sisters both reverence and jealousy. Jesus appears to Mariette often, and they hope that by being close to her they can get closer to him. They are jealous because each one of them—craving that intimate connection with Jesus—has sacrificed the worldly pleasures of the outside for a cloistered religious life. Why has he chosen Mariette? When Mariette's "ecstasy" culminates in a series of stigmatas, life at the convent starts to unravel, its tranquility shattered, and the mysteries of the mystical manifest in faith and devotion, doubt and skepticism.

The stigmata, like other supernatural occurrences, are seductive and its sensational nature could easily become the center of Mariette in Ecstasy—something Hansen never allows. Instead, he explores human nature, our desires and fears, ambitions and absurdities, which elevates what could be exploitation pulp into the sublime. His haunting novel is not a who-dunnit—God or Mariette?—but a far more profound investigation into the mysteries of life and human behavior. What drives humanity to hunger for a connection to divinity? How closely related are religious rapture and sexual ecstasy? And why, through the ages, have we persistently searched and yearned for miracles? Hansen doesn't presume to know the answers to these questions, and leaves his readers to wonder. Like sages from every century, he realizes that questions are far more telling than answers, and their exploration is what art is for.

Religion, like art and every profound thing, is a mystery. What better way to explore the mysteries of humanity and divinity than in a mystery novel? Hansen's exquisite work of art is an investigation into its readers as much as the members of the Sisters of the Crucifixion Convent, providing those who open his book to be opened themselves, an ecstatic experience if there ever was one.

I only heard of Mariette in Ecstasy recently when James Lee Burke another transcendent writer (and one of my favorites), gave it the following recommendation in Entertainment Weekly: "Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy is the best "mystery" I have ever read, primarily because it's a metaphysical detective story, dealing with cloistered Roman Catholic nuns in whose midst a phenomenon suddenly occurs: One of the nuns experiences the stigmata, the bloody wounds of Christ, forming on her skin. However, this is not necessarily a story about religion or even about Catholic nuns. This seemingly supernatural event disrupts every aspect of life within the convent. But quickly the reader comes to learn that the convent represents the world, which rewards mediocrity and sycophancy and loathes and despises altruism and courage. If you read this book, I promise that you will never forget it. Hansen is one of the great stylists of our time, on a par with Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx."

As far as I'm concerned, praise doesn't get any higher, so all I can add to what Brother Jim says is, "Amen."

November 2007
Gone, Baby, Gone

Rarely do film adaptations do justice to their source material. Graham Greene and then Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair is one exception. Dennis LeHane and then Ben Affleck's Gone, Baby, Gone is another.

Rightly considered one of the world's best contemporary detective fiction writers, Dennis Lehane's name is often breathed in the hallowed company of James Lee Burke, Robert B. Parker, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, and Walter Mosley. Of his many stellar novels, Gone, Baby, Gone , is the best, surpassing even the much celebrated and more critically acclaimed Mystic River .

Originally published in 1998, Gone, Baby, Gone was the fourth novel to feature Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. By far their most complex and compelling case, it involves the abduction of four-year-old Amanda McCready, who was taken one night from her apartment in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston, where her mother had left her alone. Kenzie and Gennaro, hired by the child's aunt and uncle, join in an unlikely alliance with Remy Broussard and Nick Raftopoulos, the two cops with the department's Crimes Against Children squad who are assigned to the case. In tracing the history of Amanda's neglectful mother, whose past involved her with a drug lord and his minions, the foursome quickly find themselves tangling with Boston's crime underworld and involved in what appears to be a coup among criminals. Gone, Baby, Gone is filled with appropriate violence—bloated and mutilated corpses; gangland executions; shoot-outs; descriptions of the sexual abuse of small children; threats of rape and murder—all of which serve to make Amanda's likely fate all the more chilling.

As usual, Lehane's dialog isn't just quick, it's witty, his descriptions sharp and telling, his characters wondrously and tragically human, but what elevates this work above his other work, to the top of the genre and beyond, is the way he illuminates corruption, brings his complicated plot to a satisfying resolution, yet leaves readers pondering moral questions about social and indiv idual responsibility long after the book has been re-shelved. This makes Gone, Baby, Gone a literary page turner that is both endlessly entertaining and tremendously thought-provoking, a haunting tale told by a master, which, contrary to its title lingers with its brave readers and is never fully gone.

Gone, Baby, Gone is director Ben Affleck's first feature film, but you'd never know it. He navigates the blue-collar Boston neighborhoods like a world-weary old tour guide—and why not? The mean streets he has Patrick and Angie walking down are his, the landscapes surrounding them, his old haunts, the colorful characters they engage, the very ones that peopled his world before he struck gold with Good Will Hunting and moved to Beverly. As with Lehane, Boston is one of Affleck's main characters, and he captures the city's dark alleys and the desperate souls who inhabit them with realism and artistry.

Affleck honors Lehane's novel, making a movie that is more translation than adaptation, his respect for and care of the source material causing his plot to be far more novelistic than filmic, and it works. Never in a hurry, Affleck takes his time, telling his story without ever rushing it or resorting to the slick, M-TV, sound-byte, video game style of whip pan shooting and frenetic cutting.

Assembling an impressive ensemble, Affleck, surely an actor's director, manages great performances from his players—most notably baby brother, Casey , and seasoned veteran, Ed Harris—but it's the supporting characters of locally cast Bostonians, actors and non, who truly steal the show, and though Angie's Michelle Monaghan is underused, the story doesn't suffer from it.

Read Gone, Baby, Gone , then see the movie, or, if you must, see Gone, Baby, Gone , then read the book—a movie this good won't be at your local cinema long, and you need to see Boston on the big screen. Just be sure to read the book, too. In fact, read all five novels featuring Patrick and Angie, and pray to St. Jerome (it's Boston, it's got to be a Catholic prayer) the patron saint of writing and translation, that Lehane will write more books featuring the two detectives and that Affleck will translate them into film—two things that will likely take a miracle to happen.

October 2007
Feeling Heartsick? Call the Doctor

It's not that Chelsea Cain's debut thriller, Heartsick , isn't good. It is. It's just not as good as many critics are saying. What most reviewers seem to be doing is criticizing serial killer thrillers as much as they are praising Heartsick , which says far more about the state of the genre than Cain's foray into it. It's true. Heartsick is better than many of the books being published in the houses that Hannibal built, but comparing Gretchen Lowell to the good doctor who eats the rude and Susan Ward to Clarice Starling, which the book itself actually does, is getting carried away—way away. I've read Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lector books (a few of them again recently) and you, Heartsick , are no Red Dragon or Silence of the Lambs .

From the publisher: "Damaged Portland detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years tracking Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful serial killer, but in the end she was the one who caught him. Two years ago, Gretchen kidnapped Archie and tortured him for ten days, but instead of killing him, she mysteriously decided to let him go. She turned herself in, and now Gretchen has been locked away for the rest of her life, while Archie is in a prison of another kind—addicted to pain pills, unable to return to his old life, powerless to get those ten horrific days off his mind. Archie's a different person, his estranged wife says, and he knows she's right. He continues to visit Gretchen in prison once a week, saying that only he can get her to confess as to the whereabouts of more of her victims, but even he knows the truth—he can't stay away.

When another killer begins snatching teenage girls off the streets of Portland, Archie has to pull himself together enough to lead the new task force investigating the murders. A hungry young newspaper reporter, Susan Ward, begins profiling Archie and the investigation, which sparks a deadly game between Archie, Susan, the new killer, and even Gretchen. They need to catch a killer, and maybe somehow then Archie can free himself from Gretchen, once and for all. Either way, Heartsick makes for one of the most extraordinary suspense debuts in recent memory."

Perhaps one of the reasons Heartsick is getting such good reviews is the publisher's use of the word "debut." Though technically not the author's first book, it is her first thriller, and critics are often too kind to first books, as if the words "first" or "debut" lower their expectations before they ever read the first word. First novels aren't often as good as critics say, second ones not as bad. After cataloging the ways in which Heartsick is like so many other serial killer thrillers, one critic went on to say that it is "the most original serial killer thriller to appear in several years" and that it could well be "the thriller of the year." Of course, he also said that it "breaks the mold" so obviously clichés don't bother him, but what bothers me most is how he lists all the ways in which the novel is derivative and then says "but there is nothing derivative about it," which sounds somehow defensive, even preemptive to me.

One reason the comparison to Hannibal is made is because Heartsick copies the pattern created by Harris—a detective visiting a prison to see a serial killer he caught while in pursuit of a new one. Another is because both Hanibal Lector and Gretchen Lowell are psychiatrists—or at least function as such. Gretchen, in reality, is merely pretending. She's a poser, which compared to Dr. Lector is exactly what she seems.

It's unfair to compare Gretchen Lowell to Hannibal Lector, Chelsea Cain to Thomas Harris, and I wouldn't had the author and so many other critics not.

I found Grethen Lowell the least interesting character in Heartsick and largely unconvincing. I thought saying she had over 200 victims was way too excessive, and I kept wondering if, until she was captured no one had ever seen her, that, in fact, Archie and others thought they were in pursuit of a man, why was it called the Beauty Killer Task Force? Least convincing of all was the use of Stockholm syndrome as an explanation for why Archie is still so messed up and sexually attracted to Gretchen when she only had him for ten days. I'm not saying such things can't happen, just that the book failed to convince me of the transformation (even though it spends a lot of time recounting what Gretchen did to him in that locked basement two years ago).

In addition to suffering from comparisons to Harris and Hannibal, Heartsick is also weakened by clichés, the overuse of overused phrases, and too many adverbs, but the low point for me comes near the end of the book when Archie confesses to Anne, an FBI profiler, how much he feels for Gretchen. "She's a psychopath," Ann reminds him, and I actually cringed when Archie replied, "Yeah, but she's my psychopath."

A lot of reviewers seem to revel in writing bad reviews. In fact, they almost seem to enjoy writing them as much as readers and other writers seem to relish reading them. This is not true of me. I rarely write a mixed review (like this one), let alone a bad review (as I did of Cross by James Patterson). It's party my nature, partly my philosophy (why criticize a bad book when I could be alerting readers to a good one?), partly my experience (I know how hard it is to write a book), and it's partly karmic (like JT says, what goes around, goes around, goes around, comes all the way back around). Criticism is easy, it's creation that's difficult. So lest I've been too harsh, let me break it down: Heartsick is a good book. It's just not a great one. It's an entertaining page-turner with some interesting characters, and if you like serial killer thrillers, I recommend you read it. But, if after reading it, you're still feeling heartsick, call the doctor—and not just any doctor. Call Dr. Hannibal Lector, whose storied stature among literary serial killers is as secure as ever—maybe even a little more so now.

September 2007
The Perfect Storm Novel

The Faulkner of crime fiction is back with The Tin Roof Blowdown (Simon and Schuster, $26.00) his 16 th Dave Robicheaux novel (following last years Pegasus Descending). What better way to prepare for the approach of this year's hurricane season than by walking down the mean streets of post-Katrina New Orleans with Streak?

Burke's trademark lyrical, dense, rich, poetic prose, southern gothic atmosphere, languid pacing, meticulous attention to detail, and seeming unending sentences (like this one) are all on display in The Tin Roof Blowdown, and they've never been better suited to or served a story better than this tragedy set before the backdrop of Katrina.

This most recent outing thrusts Dave and his coworkers in the New Iberia police department headlong into the disaster zone. Katrina has just leveled New Orleans, and Robicheaux and other relief workers are combing the flooded city for survivors.

One missing soul stands out from all the others—Dave's childhood friend Jude LeBlanc. LeBlanc grew up to become a priest who happens to be a morphine addict—or maybe it's the other way around.

As the water line rose and darkness fell, members of LeBlanc's Lower Ninth Ward congregation were trapped in the church attic. LeBlanc managed to snag a boat and was last seen cutting a hole in the roof to let those inside escape, when there was a cry in the dark and then silence. The boat disappeared into the night. LeBlanc hasn't been seen since. Almost everyone in the church drowned.

As the floodwaters recede and Robicheaux returns to New Iberia, the LeBlanc case continues to eat at him knowing that LeBlanc was probably killed for his boat. In those desperate hours, a boat meant the difference between life and death. Dave traces the boat to a robbery/homicide that took place across town hours after the priest's disappearance.

Four men were using the boat to loot empty houses uptown, when shots rang out. An unidentified sniper killed one of the thieves and rendered another paraplegic before the others fled the scene. The evidence points toward a resident of the neighborhood, a mild-mannered insurance adjuster named Otis Baylor. Baylor's teenage daughter was gang-raped two years ago by men who were never caught. The looters match their description.

At the time of the shooting, the looters were robbing the house of Sidney Kovick, a New Orleans mobster notorious for his facility with a chainsaw. He's rumored to have kept millions in blood diamonds stashed in his dry wall—dry wall that was smashed to bits by the looters. Kovick isn't waiting for the cops to recover his contraband.

One of the looters, Bertrand Melancon, reaches out to Dave. He is a common thug, possibly responsible for the death of a priest and the rape of teenage girl. But now he seeks redemption—if Kovick doesn't get to him first.

Meanwhile, a degenerate named Ronald Bledsoe shows up in New Iberia, claiming to be a private detective. Robicheaux suspects that Kovick hired Bledsoe to recover the diamonds. But Bledsoe's leering advances toward Robicheaux's adopted daughter, Alafair, suggest another agenda.

In many ways the darkest of the Robicheaux novels, Katrina and the crimes committed in her wake elevate Burke's series—something I didn't think was possible.

As usual, the characters that people Burke's book are numerous, multi-dimensional, and have hidden connections that only a writer of Burke's gifts could pull off. This time, even more than in his previous works, no one is innocent. No one has straightforward or simple motivations. And no one, no matter their sins, is damned. All who walk through Burke's world are sinners, but all are also ripe for redemption.

Summer is often associated with lowbrow entertainment—blockbuster "popcorn" movies at the theater and crassly commercial mass market paperbacks at the beach—but Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown is anything but a light, quick summer read. It's a powerful, poignant, and haunting, a story that will stay with us long after we finish the novel. As Americans in general and as Gulf Coast southerners in particular, Katrina will be with us the rest of our lives. The same is true of the work of James Lee Burke. His are epic, mythic, timeless tales featuring one of the most complex, conflicted, and interesting characters ever to wear a badge or tip back a bottle.

August 2007
The Closers

This summer brings with it the return of two of LAPD's very best closers, deputy chief Brenda Leigh Johnson and detective Harry Bosch. The former can be found heading the priority homicide squad Monday nights on TNT's The Closer , the latter working in the open unsolved unit in Michael Connelly's new novel, The Overlook . The two detectives couldn't be more different—or more effective, or more entertaining.

Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (played perfectly by Kyra Sedgwick ) is a police detective who transfers from Atlanta to Los Angeles to head up a special unit of the LAPD that handles sensitive, high-profile murder cases. Despite a tendency to step on people's toes, Johnson manages to convert even her strongest adversaries with her unique ability to perceive the truth—and to get others to reveal it. Like a gifted priest, Brenda Leigh Johnson makes people want to confess and make an act of contrition—or maybe their confession to her with the certain knowledge of the arrest that will follow is their act of contrition.

Sedgwick's detective is a great television character, and a welcomed addition to females who pound a beat, but long before Brenda Leigh Johnson fled Atlanta for LA, Harry Bosch was working the mean streets of the City of Angels.

Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels are among the very best police procedurals writt en today. Well researched, well plotted, and well written, they are the kind of books that cops find credible. They are also extremely easy to read—and highly entertaining.

The Overlook , Connelly's latest Bosch book, was originally serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine , but the novel includes material that was not published in the magazine, including new characters and more obstacles in Bosch's path.

In his first case since he left the LAPD's Open Unsolved Unit for the prestigious Homicide Special squad, Harry Bosch is called out to investigate a murder that may have chilling consequences for national security.
A doctor with access to a dangerous radioactive substance is found murdered on the overlook above the Mulholland Dam. Retracing his steps, Harry learns that a large quantity of radioactive cesium was stolen shortly before the doctor's death. With the cesium in unknown hands, Harry fears the murder could be part of a terrorist plot to poison a major American city.
Soon, Bosch is in a race against time, not only against the culprits, but also against the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI (in the form of Harry's one-time lover Rachel Walling), who are convinced that this case is too important for the likes of the LAPD. It is Bosch's job to prove them all wrong—which, of course, he does.

Ever adding new changes and challenges for Bosch to deal with, Connelly keeps his series fresh all over again by giving Bosch a new partner, Iggy Ferras, who's youth, naiveté, inexperience, and by-the-book approach not only make him a nice contrast to Bosch, but injects plenty of conflict and drama as well.

Each year across the country, thousands of cases go unsolved—some of them forever—but only because Harry Bosch and Brenda Leigh Johnson aren't assigned to the investigations. To ensure "CLOSED" is written across the case file and that the murder book will never have to be reopened, tune into The Closer on TNT and pick up a copy of The Overlook at your local bookstore. Serving up justice has never been more fun, interesting, or entertaining. Case Closed.

July 2007
The End of the World as We Know It

All roads lead finally and inevitably to The Road (Vintage Books, $14.95).

Not with a bang or a whimper does the world end in Cormac McCarthy's The Road , but a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions." Of course, it wasn't the end, only the end of the world we knew, and the beginning of a nameless father and son's journey down the long, nightmarish, seemingly unending, yet certainly dead end road known only as the road.

Cities are left desolate, forests burned, animals dead or dying, very few people remain, most of them resorting to violence and even cannibalism, and a gray shroud like a burial cloth rests over the atmosphere, as ashen tears fall from the sky.

This bleak backdrop provides the lifeless landscape of Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, a poetic post-apocalyptic parable, unflinchingly frightening, undeniably inspiring.

As the father and his son walk alone through burned America (the man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself), nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. They are, as the son keeps repeating, "the good guys."Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is a sobering reflection of the worst and the best that humanity is capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Even more minimalist than usual, McCarthy's spare, lean, brutal prose befits the world it's used to create. His use of language is as startling as ever, sentences so spectacular they can cause the breath to catch. This is an artist at the height of his powers.

Faith, hope, and love, the apostle Paul wrote, these three remain, but the greatest of these is love. In McCarthy's world, where nothing remains, love is all—the unwavering, unending love of a father for his son, and this love is so total, so all-consuming, that by the end of the road it has, perhaps, brought back a bit of the other two.

Using terms like post-apocalyptic, faith, hope, and love, and the phrase the father and son use often, keepers of the fire, imply religious overtones. However, if The Road is a religious book, it is only so at its most essential and only in the most visceral sense. It is religious in the way any exploration of ultimate issues is. What could be more fundamentally religious than a father taking care of his son and their desire to survive?

I find the title for McCarthy's previous book, No Country for Old Men , ironic. It is precisely old men like Cormac McCarthy (and Phillip Roth and Don Delillo, peers and peerless in my opinion) that we need to take us on literary expeditions of the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. Perhaps it is their proximity to the grave, or maybe it's the culmination of lifetimes of careful writing, but the terrain they're treading is no place for young men. They alone have the experience, skill, and credibility to lead us to such precarious places.

If you take only one trip this summer, travel The Road . It's not an easy journey, nor is it particularly pleasant, but as Milton said, "Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light." Remember this as you make your pilgrimage with the nameless father and son of the story, and remember, too, that the road is the thing, for it's the journey and not the destination that matters most.

June 2007
After The Fall

As with most mysteries, not much is what it appears to be in Christine Falls —including the author. Benjamin Black is a pseudonym for Dublin author, John Banville, whose novels have won numerous awards, including, most recently, the Man Booker-Prize for The Sea in 2005.

In this "debut" crime novel from Black, Dublin pathologist, Garret Quirke backtracks the life and death of a mysterious corpse into a web of corruption in 1950s Dublin and Boston.

It all begins when Christine Falls, a young maid who died in childbirth, shows up in Quirke's morgue. Quirke is pulled into the case when, one night after a few drinks at an office party, he stumbles down to the morgue to find his brother-in-law, Dr. Malachy Griffin, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when Quirke is sober again, it looks like his brother-in-law, an esteemed physician, has in fact, tampered with the corpse of Christine Falls—and concealed the cause of death.

It soon appears that both the political establishment and the criminal justice system are in denial over Christine's mysterious demise and part of the coverup, and the deeper Quirke delves, the more his own family and the Catholic church appear to be involved.

Like the most famous fall of all, the original sins committed by the flawed individuals and systems of Christine Falls are only the beginning, and it's the coverups and further crimes of concealment that often account for the most insidious acts and greatest corruption.

Christine Falls is a well-written literary crime novel, and though it succeeds far more as a literary novel than as a crime story, it is no less highly recommended.

The characters who inhabit Christine Falls are fascinating and fully developed—none more than the expertly and subtly drawn Quike. The world that the cast of multi-dimensional characters move about in, has a vivid, yet suitably spare and melancholy quality.

Where Christine Falls falls short is in pacing and narrative drive. For a work being marketed as crime fiction, even a thriller, the pacing is slow, occasionally plodding. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to character versus plot, I'll go with character every time, and while plot concessions must be made in order to give characters the time and space required to develop, the one doesn't have to be sacrificed for the other.

Read Christine Falls for the pitch-perfect mood and atmosphere, and for the psychological insights it provides into its characters. Read it, too, for the fine writing on display, for whether it's under the name Benjamin Black or John Banville, the author can write. He can write so well, in fact, that only occasionally will his lingering so long over character explorations make you wish he would set them free so we could all see what happens. If he had done so here, Christine Falls might contain more surprises—for its author no less than its readers. Still, it's a beautifully written book, filled with fallen characters, some of whom are as melancholic and introspective as any in contemporary crime fiction.

May 2007
The Art of Listening to the Lives of Others

Red Cat (Knopf, $22.95), the third installment (following Black Maps and Death's Little Helpers) in Peter Spiegelman's series featuring New York City private investigator John March, is neo-noir as good as any being written these days.

With a troubled past and a job that attracts too much attention from the law, March has always been the black sheep of his staid merchant-banking family, which makes the identity of his latest client all the more surprising—his smug older brother David.

David is desperate and deeply scared, and with good reason: a woman he met on the Internet, and then for several torrid sexual encounters, is stalking him. David knows her only as Wren, but she seems to know everything about him—and she's threatening to tell all to his wife and his colleagues. His marriage, his career, his reputation at stake, David wants John to wren and warn her off. Reeling from these revelations, John begins the search for Wren and what he discovers both alarms and fascinates him. Part actress, part playwright, part performance-artist and noir pornographer, Wren is a powerfully compelling mystery—though no more so, John discovers, than his own brother.

But when a body surfaces in the East River, March suddenly finds he's no longer searching for a stalker. Now he's hunting a killer—and following a trail that leads ever closer to his brother's door.

Red Cat is well-written, fast-paced, dark, gritty, adult, with well-developed, three-dimensional characters—everything one wants in New York neo-noir. As an added bonus, the resolution to the mystery is surprising, yet not incredible. With this stellar entry into an already strong series, Peter Spiegelman's John March is encroaching on the territory of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder—good company and high praise, indeed.

From modern New York to East Germany of the mid 1980s . . . .
The most poignant, profound, moving, and thought-provoking film I've seen in a very long time is German. Fortunately, I didn't have to travel to Germany to see it—just 80 miles to Tallahassee and the wonderful foreign/art house theater, The Miracle Five, on Thomasville Road. Like all the films I've seen there, this one was worth the trip.

When I'm asked about a book or script I'm working on or a film I've seen or a novel I've read, I'll often jokingly say, “Art isn't about anything,” and while this humorous cliché is true, the truth is, of course, far more complicated. It'd be far more accurate to say that art is about everything—or at least so many things that it can't be reduced to a slug line, synopsis, or sound byte.

The Lives of Others is a work of art. It's simultaneously about nothing and everything. It's about art itself, and artists, about power and its abuse, about love and loyalty, fidelity and betrayal, about freedom and totalitarianism, about truth and lies, about voyeurism, human weakness and heroism, oppression and liberation, and about a trillion other things—all as relevant today as they were in 1984.

In 1984 East Germany, Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler, a heart-felt supporter of the communist regime, is assigned to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman, who is suspected of Western leanings. Stasi agents secretly enter Dreyman's apartment and install small microphones in the wall sockets. Then, in an attic space above the apartment, Wiesler and an assistant take turns monitoring the activity below twenty-four hours a day, typing a daily report with anything they hear that might be relevant.
Wiesler soon finds out that the real reason why Dreyman is being spied on is that a minister and member of the Party's Central Committee is attracted to Dreyman's girlfriend, actress, Christa-Maria.

Dreyman is a supporter of the regime, but dislikes the way dissidents are treated. When Jerska, an artist friend commits suicide because he has been blacklisted for several years, Dreyman anonymously publishes an article on suicide rates in the GDR in a West Germany publication.

Wiesler, who has been monitoring all of Dreyman's activities, finally has the proof he needs to destroy his subject and to serve the GDR by foiling Dreyman's plot. But Wiesler's unemotional facade is showing signs of erosion. While he observes the day-to-day life of Dreyman and Christa-Maria, he begins to be drawn into their world, which puts his own position as an impartial agent of the GDR into question. His immersion in “the lives of others,” in love, literature and freethinking, also makes Wiesler acutely aware of the shortfalls of his own existence.

In 1991, two years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dreyman is in for a rude awakening when he runs into the now ex-minister and learns that he had been the subject of a Stasi surveillance. Immediately afterward, he finds the cables and microphones secretly installed years earlier behind the wallpaper in his apartment. In disbelief, he sets out to research and discovers the different reality of his past, which not only has a profound impact on his life but also surprises him with shocking revelations.

Both John March and Gerd Wiesler, as a private eye and a spy respectively, are spending their lives observing the lives of others. In this way, they are surrogates for us, the readers and viewers. Like the private eye and the spy, you and I have a lot to learn from reading about or watching the lives of others—it's a big part art's purpose. In fact, when art is created as well as it is in Red Cat and The Lives of Others, we don't just read or watch, but actually experience the lives of others, informing, enriching, and inspiring our own.

April 2007
Sex and the Single Noir Writer

Walter Mosley's new book is so different for him and so unique among books being published these days, they had to create a new word for it—sexistentialism. It was also too hot for his longtime publisher to touch, so for this effort he left Little, Brown and Company for Bloomsbury USA, the American division of Harry Potter's British publisher.

With Killing Johnny Fry (Bloomsbury USA, $23.95) Walter Mosley ( Devil in a Blue Dress , etc.), one of the most popular and prolific crime writers of our time, has created a remarkable new work that is being referred to as noir erotica by some and porn by others. In this highly sexual novel, the sex is not an end in itself, but part of an awakening by the protagonist.

Walter Mosley, one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today, is the author of more than 25 critically acclaimed books, including the major best-selling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into 21 languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel, but as varied as his previous work has been, his new book represents his greatest novelistic divergence.

Mosley's departure will shock some, offend others. It's graphic, and at times raw, but it's also an honest portrayal of a lost and confused man in mid-life on a quest for sexual redemption. When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. In that instant, the calm existence of this middle-aged New York City man becomes something unrecognizable: he wants revenge, sure, but the incident also makes him realize how empty he is inside and causes him to long for something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. His guide is a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city. Killing Johnny Fry will surprise, provoke, arouse, inspire, and maybe even enlighten. It's the story of a man questioning the rules most people take for granted—and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when the rules are removed.

As I often say, expectation is everything. If you expect to open Killing Johnny Fry and find Easy Rawlins or Fearless Jones or the worlds they inhabit, you will likely be disappointed, if not downright disgusted by Cordell Carmel and the underworld he journeys through. If you're uncomfortable with sexually explicit literature, this book is not for you. For though Killing Johnny Fry is literature—well written, urbanly poetic, with fully-formed, complicated characters, it is also highly erotic. The sex in Killing Johnny Fry , and there is a lot of it, is depicted in great detail. Whereas many modern novelists stop at the bedroom door or cut to another scene just as things are heating up, Mosley lingers, refusing to let his readers look away, creating literature out of human sexuality at its most intimate and, sometimes, animalistic.

I should note here that names and descriptions of sexual acts and organs are notoriously easy to scorn, and some reviewers have done just that, but it's a cheap and obvious shot. Who, in the harsh light of day, doesn't find humorous or even embarrassing what is said and done in the dark, in the altered state of sexual arousal? If you read Killing Johnny Fry as if you're the only sober person at a party, you won't just miss the point, but miss out on the experience. However, if you give yourself over to the dream, you'll hear the genuine expressions of passion and the erotic descriptions of desire. All of this means that Walter Mosley is not only a gifted writer, but a brave one, as well.

Like Siddhartha, Cordell Carmel has been asleep. Like the Buddha, he wakes up. We don't know a lot about Siddhartha's journey into enlightenment, but we see Cordell's step by step. Like most transformations, his is born out of crisis. Seeing his longtime girlfriend with another man, witnessing what they are doing, sets Cordell on a journey. He has a sexual-spiritual awakening, and discovers just how much his slumber has cost him, how much time he has wasted. He also realizes he's far more passionate than he ever knew or allowed himself to be.

In many ways, Cordell Carmel can be seen as representative of America. We're still largely a sexually repressed nation that is far to prudish and dishonest about sex. There's no denying the residual effects of our Puritanical past. As a culture, we use sex as a tease to sell products and personalities, but routinely keep serious discussions of sexuality out of the public arena. As Cordell discovers, repressed sexuality is unhealthy, its underground manifestations dangerous, and when it resurfaces it's almost always explosive, even violent. Art should be exploring all forms of sexuality, as Mosley does here. Religion should be leading the way in addressing how this powerful gift from our creator can be as transcendent an experience as any we can have. Both artistic and religious endeavor and expression in our country have let us down. There are exceptions, of course, and Walter Mosley is one of them. (Thomas Moore is another. His book, The Soul of Sex , profoundly demonstrates how spirituality and sexuality can meet in the deep soul.)

Some readers and reviewers, especially those of the female persuasion, have referred to Killing Johnny Fry as a male fantasy. Maybe it is—actually that's exactly what it is, but it is more than that, too. It will make many readers uncomfortable and anger others, but for those open to a modern New York novel, who enjoy exploring the sexual side of humanity as much as the spiritual, emotional, and psychological ones, it will instruct and enlighten, even as it titillates and entertains. However, if you don't like explicit depictions of sexuality, and I mean all kinds of sexuality, you should skip Killing Johnny Fry , even if you're a fan of Mosley. Wait for Easy Rawlins' next appearance. You've been warned. Don't blame me if Cordell's journey is one you don't wish to witness, let alone take. I encouraged you to stay home. If, on the other hand, a sexistential novel sounds intriguing, and you want to travel with Cordell, I highly recommend that you let Walter Mosley be your tour guide through the tricky terrain of sexual awakening, for the trip he provides is all the way around the world.

March 2007
Mystery Alaska

For over a year, Dana Stabenow and I have shared the same literary agent in New York, the gifted Richard Henshaw, and though I had been aware of her for many years before I signed with Rich, I had never read any of her books. With the release of her latest novel, A Deeper Sleep, her first since last year's New York Times best-selling Blindfold Game, I decided to remedy the situation.
A Deeper Sleep is the 15th entry in the Kate Shugak Alaskan mystery series (after 2004's A Taint in the Blood) which features some of the most popular conventions of crime fiction today—a female detective, a remote locale, and conflict between traditional ways of life and modernity. Before retiring to the Park, 20 million acres of Alaskan wilderness, and becoming a private investigator of sorts, Kate Shugak was the top investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney's Office. An Aleut (people indigenous to the Aleutian Islands), Kate lives on a 160-acre homestead, her roommates, a half-wolf, half-husky dog named Mutt, and teenager Johnny Morgan, son of her late lover, Jack Morgan. Her world is filled with moose, grizzlies, dog mushers, miners, hunters, trappers, fishermen, bush pilots, pipeline workers, Park rats, Park rangers, other Aleuts, Athabascans, a few Tlingits and the residents of Niniltna, a village perched on the edge of the Kanuyaq River, a 600-mile long, salmon-rich tributary that winds through the Park to Prince William Sound.
Alaska is a character in this series—perhaps the main one, or maybe second only to Kate, whose individuality and independence seem especially well-suited for the unforgiving beauty of the wilderness she calls home.

In A Deeper Sleep, Kate helps the Anchorage District Attorney with a case involving the murder of a young woman by her husband, a man named Louis Deem. Kate is determined to find the evidence to convict Deem, who has been arrested and tried for several serious crimes but never convicted. Once again, he is released, but shortly after he is, a double homicide occurs and a witness places Deem at the scene. Deem is a dangerous and deadly man, and Kate and her family won't be safe until he's in jail. In addition to being a strong, smart, respected investigator, Kate is deeply connected to her Alaskan community. In fact, the tribal elders want her to assume a leadership role in the tribe's affairs, a role Kate resists. Helping Kate (and distracting her) is Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin, who seems ambivalent about the prospects of a more permanent relationship with her.

Well-written, with interesting, well-rounded characters, A Deeper Sleep is a strong entry in this popular mystery series. New readers to the series might feel like a little more background information on the many characters and significant past events would have made A Deeper Sleep both more accessible and more meaningful, but there's always the option of beginning with an earlier book in the series (that's why the publisher keeps them in print). Though the plot is engaging, it's the character of Kate Shugak and the detailed depiction of Alaska that make this such a winning book. Its greatest strength is how specifically regional it is, for it is as much about community as crime, and more than anything else, Alaska is the real mystery here.

February 2007
The First Cut is the Deepest

Gillian Flynn's stunning debut novel is so sharp the tip of its blade nicks bone. Sharp Objects is as good a first novel as I've read in a very long time—maybe ever. Though promoted as a mystery/thriller, the book is far more a character study of its heroine, Camille Preaker, her sick family, and the sinister secrets small towns conspire to keep.

Fragile reporter, Camille Preaker is a cutter, but instead of slicing lines into her skin to release the buildup of tension inside her, she carves words into her flesh—Wicked above her hipbone, Girl across her heart.

Words are like a road map to Camille's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

Nasty on her kneecap, Babydoll on her leg.

Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriacal mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

Harmful on her wrist, Whore on her ankle.

As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

Given her childhood trauma, it's not surprising Camille cuts herself, writes words into the paper of her epidermis with sharp objects. What is surprising is that with a mother like hers she hasn't cut her throat or slit her wrists.

Gillian Flynn, whose day job is television critic for Entertainment Weekly, writes prose so poetic, descriptions do detailed, metaphors so revelatory you'd swear this couldn't be her first novel. In fact, the sharpest thing about Sharp Objects is Flynn's finely honed skills. Her knife-like pen must surely drip blood instead of ink—blood that flows through the veins of the living, breathing Camille and the other deeply developed, three-dimensional characters who inhabit Sharp Objects.

Flynn's lush writing, finely wrought small town environs, and the “real” people who have been relegated to its purgatory-like prison are nearly flawless, and though some might call the ending of Sharp Objects predictable, I prefer to think of it as
inevitable.

Red Smith said, “Writing is easy. You just sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Gillian Flynn has taken his advice. She has bled all over this astonishing work, but the self-inflicted wounds that gave birth to this book won't be the only ones. I suspect Sharp Objects will bury its blade in all who read it, but don't let that stop you from rushing out to buy it, for as Camille herself discovers we are our scars and those that don't kill us make us stronger (not to mention more interesting).

January 2007
Portrait of a Monster as a Young Man

Are monster's made or born? Opinions vary. Literary monsters are made—and few with as much care and detail as Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter. In Hannibal Rising (Delacorte/ $27.95), Harris shows how Hannibal was made a monster, but hints that the seed of the beast was in him from the beginning. In the age-old nature vs. nurture debate, Harris seems to indicate that it's not just a lack of nurture, but actually something in the little Lecter's nature, that the cauldron of his horrific childhood drew out something that was already there.

Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck. He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him.

Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal lives with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki.

Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn. He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy. (Interes tingly, Harris completed the script for Hannibal Rising before the novel, and the movie will be at the box office in February. And even though the wait is far shorter than usual, don't wait for the movie. Read the book now.)

Perhaps more than any literary monster ever created, Hannibal Lecter represents the very best and worst of us. He is charming and witty, intelligent and insightful, and has impeccable taste. Unlike most serial killers of both reality and fantasy, Lecter limits his victims to a very narrow group. There's nothing capricious or random in what he does. He only eats the rude.

Harris loves Hannibal and takes great care in explaining him to us, the childhood circumstances and experiences that shaped the person he became.

Hannibal Rising is a story of wartime brutality and inhumanity, its ramifications and the consequences of retaliation. It's a story of revenge, that elegantly and artistically embodies the proverb “When you seek revenge, dig two graves,” for in avenging the death of his sister, Hannibal Lecter dies, Hannibal The Cannibal rising from the ashes.

I've read many negative comments about Hannibal Rising by disappointed readers. Hoping for a taut, chill-inducing thriller like The Silence of the Lambs, they got, instead, a character driven exploration of a crime fiction icon written by one of the genre's premier iconoclasts.

Audience expectation is nearly everything. Readers expect certain things from their favorite writers based on the author's previous work. As a novelist, I don't want to write the same book over and over again—I can't—but I also know I have to be aware of my readers' expectations. It's why so many novelists use pseudonyms when a new work takes them in a different direction.

True artists need to grow, to try new things, to experiment, and we as loyal readers need to let them, disciplining ourselves to leave our expectations behind when we turn the very first page, approaching each new work as just that—something new, possibly different, possibly radically different.

Maybe as much as Hannibal Rising is a portrait of a monster as a young man, its even more the portrait of an artist as an older man, for what Thomas Harris has created is a work of art—crime fiction as literature.

Had the relatively short (for Harris) Hannibal Rising been part of a larger, more traditional suspense/thriller novel, flashbacks used to explore Dr. Lecter (as with the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon), I think it would be far more accepted and appreciated. As it is, readers who love chilling serial killer tales are going to open a book that is far more historical fiction than modern thriller. But taken on its own terms, I highly recommend Hannibal Rising.

Exquisitely written, well-developed characters, an engaging, though not thrilling, plot, if you liked Hannibal, you'll appreciate Hannibal Rising. However, if you are among the many who loved Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, but hated Hannibal, you best avoid Hannibal Rising—which would be a shame. Better yet, alter your expectations—even those set up by the author himself—and take the journey into darkness, witnessing firsthand how a monster is made.