Ian Rankin retires Rebus and sets this tale of dirty cops in The Complaints.

I always enjoy Ian Rankin’s Scottish police tales, and this one is as good as any I’ve read.










The Complaints

In The Complaints (448 pages, Reagan Arthur Books, $24.99), Ian Rankin moves beyond John Rebus, who retired in the novel Doors Open, and opens what might become a new series centered on the fascinating Malcolm Fox. Fox works in the Complaints office, which investigates internal affairs and the police’s own wrongdoing. Needless to say, that places him in harm’s way almost automatically.

The plot of this latest thriller is very complicated, but suffice it to say that Fox himself gets implicated in some wrongdoing of his own, and in struggling his way out of the accusation, he finds that there are very few people in the force (or out of it) whom he can trust.

When his sister’s ne’re-do-well boyfriend is brutally murdered, Fox meets Jamie Breck, who is investigating that crime. But Fox has already been asked to investigate Breck on the charge of child pornography. As Fox finds himself becoming friends with Breck, he starts to realize that they have both been set up for a fall.

In the course of working out the plot, Rankin creates some wonderful characters. Fox himself, single (and still hurting from the breakup) and sober (and still salivating when he sees a vodka bottle), is wound so tight that he seems ready to explode. Breck, much cooler, explains his ease in tight situations to the hours he spends on a role-playing video game. The other cops in Complaints are fascinating, and so are the several female figures who conduct their own investigations of the two policemen.

One of these women, Annie Inglis, fascinates Fox, and they almost become close. But in the end something comes between them. Something similar happens with Caroline Stoddard, who is brought in to investigate both men. At a certain point, Fox has to decide whether she might offer the chance to escape the trap into which he has fallen. This is a gamble, but he decides that he can trust this woman. Whether or not he is right is part of the thrill of the story.

Rankin paints a wonderful picture of Edinburgh at the moment of the recent financial collapse. Everything that transpires is the result of a sudden drop in the economy and the collapse of the property market that results. People holding deeds to worthless building projects are liable to do some dastardly things, and Rankin loves nothing better than taking us into the backrooms to witness their sleazy dealings.

Some critics writing about this novel lament the absence of Rebus. But I enjoy seeing Rankin doing something new and figuring out how to handle this new assortment of characters he has introduced. I have to say, Rankin never disappoints. This is a novel to stack up against his best.















Ian Rankin

The Complaints is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Tom Shone writes about 12 steps to self awareness.

I have heard of Tom Shone, but this is the first novel of his I have read. I enjoyed it.









In the Rooms

In the Rooms (352 pages, Thomas Dunn, $24.99) is set in New York. Patrick Miller, a literary agent, has moved there from London and he is having some trouble getting his career off the ground.

One desultory lunchtime, he gets a big break, he thinks, when he sees the reclusive writer Douglas Kelsey walking through Washington Square. He thinks nothing of following the writer, and when he turns into a vaguely labeled academic building, Patrick tries to think of some way to introduce himself.

It does not take Patrick too long to realize that he has stumbled into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. If the structure of such a meeting wouldn’t be enough to tip Patrick off, he is so aggressively welcomed, or so it seems to him, that he knows right away exactly where he is. But because he sees Kelsey slumped in the corner, and because the woman who is welcoming him is rather attractive, he makes everyone believe that he knows where he is and he wants to be there.

This creates certain problems for Patrick, who doesn’t think of himself as an alcoholic, not least of all because he finds himself attracted not only to Lola, the woman who greeted him, but to some of her friends and others at the meeting. He knows enough about alcoholics to know that they do not appreciate looky-loos; but even as he keeps persuading himself that he doesn’t need a twelve step program, he starts demonstrating that his relation to alcohol is anything but healthy.

As Patrick screws up his life in this way, he does manage to meet up with Kelsey, and he even, against all odds, manages to secure a deal for the much anticipated third novel. Kelsey makes certain demands on Patrick, and he is quick to agree to them; but because of the degree of subterfuge in his life, and because he cannot be honest even with himself, he loses control of some of those details, and Kelsey gets dragged into a bidding war that he had hoped to avoid.

Almost like clockwork then, Kelsey falls off the wagon, just about at the time that Patrick starts to realize that he belongs in AA himself. This is not before he has alienated his friends and come close to losing his job. What saves him, as it saves the alcoholics who are able to be saved, is that he hits bottom. That isn’t pretty, but it gives him a sense of how very much worse things could be.

Shone writes compellingly about drunkenness and about the struggle to escape it. In addition to Patrick, we see others who have been helped by the hokey program that AA offers. Many of them don’t even know why Alcoholics Anonymous works for them, they just know that it does.


















Tom Shone

Get a copy of In The Rooms at Powell's, Vroman's or Amazon.

Allison Pearson writes an engaging novel about a crush on a pop star.

I was not at all sure I would enjoy this novel, but something about the topic sounded intriguing. Allison Pearson took this slightly unpromising topic and created an exciting novel.








I Think I Love You

People familiar with pop music of the 1970s would recognize the title as that of a David Cassidy song. (I didn’t realize that until more than halfway though the novel.) Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You (336 pages, Knopf, $24.95) tells the story of the crush that a teenager in Wales had on David Cassidy, singer and star of “The Partridge Family” TV show in the early 1970s.

Petra and her friend Sharon are no ordinary fans—or maybe one point of the novel is that they are exactly like all the millions of other fans—they collect memorabilia and subscribe to the David Cassidy Magazine. They know every detail of his private life, and they even wear clothes that match what is supposed to be his favorite color, brown. They build a shrine to the pop star in Sharon’s bedroom—Petra’s mother, a German, believes only in serious music, and to placate her Petra also studies the cello.

Once we have become accustomed to listening to these two girls expound about their obsession, we meet Bill. Bill is a scruffy dirty-blond bloke who has just graduated from college with a degree in English. He loves rock music and he answered an ad for a writer in a music magazine. When he finds he is working for the David Cassidy Magazine, he is not at all happy; but he needs a job and he starts writing for the fans. In fact his job is to create David Cassidy for the British readers. He makes up details of David’s personal life, and he writes letters to the fans. He creates a fictional David, as it were, so that the fans can have something to sink their teeth into.

When it turns out that David Cassidy is coming to London for a series of concerts in 1974, the magazine goes all out to get their readers involved. They run a contest—a really hard one—about the details of David’s life. We see Bill making up the questions, and then we see Petra and Sharon doing all they can to solve them. The story reaches a culmination when the girls attend the crush of a concert in a venue that is overrun by screaming teenagers. Bill attends too, and at one moment there is a chance meeting between the young music writer and these avid David Cassidy fans.

This all takes us half way through the novel. The second half takes place nearly twenty years later. Petra has been married and divorced, and she lives in London as a professional cellist working in music therapy. Bill has risen to an executive position in a company that deals in entertainment journalism of various kinds.
Through one coincidence after another—it would ruin the story to say exactly how—these characters meet up again, never sure whether they met earlier, and find their different roles in the David Cassidy phenomenon are actually quite complementary. That is not before confusion, misunderstanding, and mutual accusation, of course.

Pearson brings everything together beautifully at the end, and then she closes the novel with an Afterword which consists of her own interview with David Cassidy himself in 2004. That makes great reading too, and it is a wonderful way to bring this fascinating novel to a close.
















Allison Pearson

I Think I Love You is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Jacqueline Winspear sets her mystery between the wars.

I read about this “Maisie Dobbs” novel and recognized that it was a risk to jump into the middle of series with six titles already. But I needn’t have worried. This novel is fine on its own, and I now have several more novels to read and enjoy.









The Mapping of Love and Death

Jacqueline Winspear’s The Mapping of Love and Death (338 pages, Harper Perennial, $14.99) is set in the depressed England of the early 1930s. Like much recent British fiction, however, its real interest lies in its fascination with the First World War.

The story involves a young American, of British parentage, who feels the call when war is declared and goes off to fight in Europe. Before going he had managed to purchase a tract of land in California where it was likely that there would be some oil reserves. The novel opens with a stunning scene of this young man, Michael Compton, who is himself a cartographer, surveying the scene of his purchase and taking pleasure in the soft undulations of the California landscape.

Michael dies during the war. As a cartographer, he was a valuable asset to the military. Maps of the French and Belgian landscape were hard to come by, especially since French and English maps were not drawn to the same scale, and chaps like Michael were necessary for lining up proper artillery fire. But a stray bomb, it seems, blew up the bunker where he and his crew were working.

That seems like the story anyway, when Michael’s parents bring Maisie Dobbs onto the scene. It seems that they have seen some love letters in Michael’s belongings, and they would like the private investigator to find out who she was. What Maisie discovers, however, when she looks at the coroner’s report, is that Michael seems to have been murdered, with a blow to the head, before the blast that destroyed his bunker.

So Maisie has two jobs before her, and both involve looking deeply into the life of the cartographer who lost his life in World War I. As a result, she finds herself interviewing family members and retired military men, even as she searches among nursing units for the possible identity of the mystery woman to whom Michael wrote his heart-felt missives.

Winspear does a wonderful job of creating both cultures, both the foggy and depressed London of the 1930s and the earlier wartime city with all its energy and confusion. Throughout the narrative, we also follow Maisie’s own emotional life, which is nothing if not lively; and with her occasional trips out of London in her MG, we are able to construct a quite full history and a rich set of present options.

The novel is truly engaging as a mystery, but it is also compelling as a personal story of Maisie’s burying old ghosts and finding a new direction. Because Winspear drops so many hints about Maisie’s past, it is impossible not to want to go back and fill some of those details in. I am not sure whether I will do that first of read the latest Maisie Dobbs novel which is waiting for me on the shelf.

How delightful it is to find a series like this.
















Jacqueline Winspear

The Mapping of Love and Death is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Michael Robertson follows his debut with another intriguing Sherlock Holmes mystery

I said I would read the second novel in this series. To be honest, I will read however many more Michael Robertson decides to write.









The Brothers of Baker Street

The Brothers of Baker Street (274 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), Michael Roberston’s sequel to The Baker Street Letters, takes up where the first novel left off. Reggie is back in London trying to make a go of his law office—he is a barrister—and Nigel is off in California with the girl he met there in the earlier novel.

When Reggie is approached by a solicitor who asks him to defend a London cabbie who has been accused of killing an American couple, he is at first very hesitant. In the first place, he has sworn off criminal cases—an earlier defendant he had cleared of killing his wife went home on his release and killed his mother-in-law—and is loath to take on a crime of this sort. Secondly, his is unsure of the motive in this killing, and he doesn’t want to defend what he doesn’t understand.

When he meets the cabbie, however, he likes him, and he recognizes that the other man’s background is rather similar to his own. The cabbie insists on his innocence, and no forensic evidence has been found in his cab. The authorities claim that he had the cab cleaned to clear it of evidence, but he argues that his regular weekly cleaning was all he did. Witnesses place him at the crime scene at the very time when he claims to have been returning home to the other side of London.

Reggie decides to take the case on, and as it is going into a preliminary hearing, Reggie receives a hand-typed note that tells him a way to get his client off. He uses it—it has to do with CATV camera footage that puts his client where he says he was--and the cabbie goes free. That is all well and good, but when some time later Reggie goes to see the cabbie, he not only finds the cabbie murdered, but he finds that he is himself accused of the crime—standing over the body with a bloody knife that he found of the scene perhaps gave the police that idea.

In any case, with Reggie in over his head, Laura, his sometime girlfriend who is now engaged to a Murdoch-like news mogul, summons Nigel from California, and together they try to find ways to prove Reggie’s innocence. The bothers are very different, and Nigel’s careful attention to minute detail helps to turn the tides. But so does Laura’s ability to get her boyfriend to spring for the one million pounds bail.

When Reggie gets out of prison, he goes searching for the attorney who engaged him in the first place. While she can’t be found, he starts getting wild communications from a woman who calls herself a descendant of Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis who died in a fall in Switzerland.

With this new Moriarty hounding him, his brother outdoing him in detection, and Laura running around in limousines, Reggie has all he can do to look at himself in the mirror. But he manages to do more than that and to bring the case to an exciting conclusion.

Michael Robertson is having a lot of fun with these novels, and there is no reason why we shouldn't share in the fun. I hope he writes many more.



















Michael Robertson

The Brothers of Baker Street is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Michael Robertson brings Sherlock Holmes to life again.

I always like novels that refer to Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective. In this case we are updated to the early twenty-first century, but still the tale is reminiscent of its predecessor.










The Baker Street Letters

The Baker Street Letters (277 pages, Minotaur Books, $13.99) is Michael Robertson’s debut novel concerning the brothers Reggie and Nigel Heath. When this novel opens they are both working in Reggie’s law firm. Reggie is a barrister - in England that is the type of lawyer who actually argues cases in court - and he has given his brother the not-so-glamorous job of answering mail to the firm.

That might be tedious in any situation, but in the present case it is especially so. It seems that the law firm occupies a building on the very same block of Baker Street, in London, which Doyle’s fictional hero occupied over a century ago. Never mind that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character from the late 1800s, people still write to him and Nigel is in the position of answering those letters with a form letter that was prescribed by the official owners of the building.

There seems to be some dark past that explains why Nigel has taken this menial-seeming job. The younger brother, Nigel seems always to have been caught in Reggie’s shadow, with the result that he is almost always caught in a compromising situation when Reggie escapes and looks blameless. It seems that Reggie stole his girl, even though Nigel doesn’t see it that way, and he screwed up his career because of a connect Reggie had made. And now, when simply supposed to be mindlessly answering letters, he gets caught up in one that had been written by a young girl some twenty years before, and he goes off to Los Angeles in search of her.

Because he takes off on the very day that his lawyer’s suspension was meant to be reconsidered, Reggie is beside himself at Nigel’s absence and flies off to LA himself in hopes of finding his brother and talking him out of this crazy caper.

Well, it soon happens that both brothers are in over their heads. Dead bodies are turning up everywhere in the California haze, and either Reggie or Nigel is implicated every time. What is ingenious about the novel is the way in which it catches the brothers up in the corruption of politics and development in LA, in a plot that is reminiscent of Chinatown, for which Robert Towne wrote the screenplay, and at the same time makes them sibling rivals of a familiar kind.

Robertson is great at creating the almost world-weary mood of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and although he is only thirty-five, Reggie Heath seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. This is in part because he takes responsibility for his brother. But there is also a woman, the attractive and confusing actress Laura, who leaves Reggie wondering where she stands or whether he has any standing at all.
I am excited to read this first novel in what is already becoming a series. I am starting the second one already.

The Baker Street Letters is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

E. M. Forster’s first novel introduces familiar themes.

It struck me that I hadn’t read Forster’s first novel in a while, and when I started it I wondered if I had ever read it before. It’s quite a wild story, but it’s one that surely inspired Forster's later novels.









Where Angels Fear to Tread

E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (128 pages, Dover, $3.50) lays out many of the themes that obsess him in later novels. At the opening of the novel, Philip Herriton’s sister-in-law, the widow of his brother, is on her way to Italy, where she will be the companion of a local girl who is traveling there.

Lilia was disappointed in her first husband, in part because his family tried to control her so extensively. Mrs. Herriton is the kind of dominating mother who assumes it is her duty to control everything around her. Her daughter Harriett is an even more gauche agent of control, and she uses the church to give her position some authority. Philip, the surviving son, is a bit ironic about it all and tries to remain detached, but he is as much a product of middle-class upbringing as any of them.

When it turns out that Lilia has fallen in love with a young Italian man, the son of a dentist, Philip is dispatched to bring her home. He has had a love affair with Italy, but the trip to retrieve Lilia is so sordid that the romance is driven out of Italy for him. What is sordid for Philip is the fact that these two people seem to be in love and that they have taken upon themselves to marry without a thought of the family in England. Philip goes so far as to offer Gino some money to let him take Lilia home, but when he realizes that they are already married, he flees.

The younger woman, Caroline Abbot, flees with him, and Lilia is left to make her way among the Italians. She fails at this marriage miserably, or the marriage fails, but that is in part because she really doesn’t understand the man she has married. He doesn’t understand her, either. And when he starts to stray, in what Forster presents as the inevitable Italian way, she becomes withdrawn and terribly unhappy. She does bear Gino a son, but she dies in giving birth.

The child causes quite a stir back in England. Caroline, who has been in the background up to this time, comes forward with the idea that the child must be saved from the wicked man who destroyed her friend. The Herritons agree, and Philip is dispatched once again. He does with a sense of foreboding, but it seems that Caroline has gotten there first. She rushes to the home of Gino and the baby, and there she finds herself swept away by the image of the young man and his child. Immediately she switches sides, as it were, and decides that the child must stay.
Philip sees her point and tries to work things out with Gino in an honorable way.

Harriet, who has come along to hector Philip into doing what’s right, takes matters into her own hands when she is dissatisfied with what the men have decided.
A tragedy ensues, and all the characters emerge brutally shaken. Caroline and Philip sees things in a similar way, and it seems for a while that they might bond over what is coming to be seen as their mutual loss. Whether they can or not is the problem the novelist sets himself.

The English misapprehension of Italy is the topic here, and the English need to control others. This need brings them into conflict with themselves, and Philip Herriton’s inability to escape the dictates of his mother is a measure of his inability to function in the world. The novel is tragic, but it is also exciting to see these ideas emerging: ideas that Forster will return to again and again.



















E. M. Forster

Pick up a copy of Where Angels Fear to Tread at Powell's, Vroman's or Amazon.