Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Title: Night Watch (Discworld)
Author: Terry Pratchett
Year of Publication: 2002
Length: 408 pages
Genre: urban fantasy
New or Re-Read? New!
Rating: 4.25 stars

This is the first City Watch book that I’ve really, genuinely liked. I’ve read others – Guards! Guards!, Jingo, and The Fifth Elephant (though none terribly recently) — and while they’re all good, because Pratchett is good, none of them quite ever grabbed me the way the Witches series did.

I decided to pick this one up after someone tipped me off to the fact that it was Pratchett doing Les Miserables – and, at a wide stroke, this is true. I was expecting a far stricter parody than I ended up getting, though, and I think I’m okay with that. Really what Pratchett does is invert the structure, giving us the story of a good copper with quite a lot to lose. Night Watch is not as broadly comic as many of Pratchett’s novels, particularly those involving the Watch, and there are few moments in it which are truly just gut-wrenchingly awful. Pratchett throws some punches here that he often pulls elsewhere, particularly with regards to mortality. His political satire is as good as ever, with some particularly incisive observations regarding the nature of mob mentality, of anything done for the good of “The People,” and, as Ankh-Morpork so often allows him to demonstrate, of the lifesblood of cities in general.

So: What happens in Night Watch? Well, we begin with Sam Vimes at the top of his career and not entirely sure how he feels about that. He’s restored the Watch to repute and efficiency, he’s been made a Duke, he has a wife and a child on the way… and there’s something discontent, like his life doesn’t fit him quite right. He ruminates on this as his wife is in delivery on the Twenty-Fifth of May — a local day of observation having something, we gather, to do with lilacs. Later that day, while pursuing the maniacal murderer Carcer, Vimes accidentally gets sent back in time thirty years, where he has to fill in the gap left in history when Carcer (also sent back) kills Sergeant John Keel pre-emptively. Keel was, it turns out, young Sam’s mentor when he first joined the force, so Vimes now has to mentor himself to make sure he turns out okay. Make sense? No? Well, here’s Monk of Time Lu-Tze on it:

“Nothing’s certain, ’cause of quantum.”
“But, look, I know my future happened, because I was there!”
“No. What we’ve got here, friend, is quantum interference. Mean anything? No. Well… let me put it this way. There’s one past and one future. But there are two presents. One where you and your evil friend turned up, and one where you didn’t. We can keep these two presents going side by side for a few days. It takes a lot of run time, but we can do it. And then they’ll snap back together. The future that happens depends on you. We want the future where Vimes is a good copper. Not the other one.”
“But it must’ve happened!” snapped Vimes. “I told you, I can remember it! I was there yesterday!”
“Nice try, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore,” said the monk. “Trust me. Yes, it’s happened to you, but even though it has, it might not. ‘Cos of quantum. Right now, there isn’t a Commander Vimes-shaped hole in the future to drop you into. It’s officially Uncertain. But it might not be, if you do it right. You owe it to yourself, Commander.”

It’s more of the exploration of alternate realities that Pratchett does so well, and a theme which I always adore (Trousers of Time, and all). Vimes realises that he basically has no choice, if he ever wants to get back to the appropriate future, and so he takes up with the then-dissolute Night-Watch-as-was, takes himself under his own wing, and pretty soon is running the whole operation, never mind what the higher-ups have to say about it. Of course, this is an extremely effective way to make enemies very fast — especially since Carcer has taken up with the Cable Street Particulars, a special force with an expertise in torture.

Vimes also realises that he’s had the highly-questionable fortune to land smack in the middle of the famous street uprising which led to the bright-but-brief People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road. He tries to assume the place in history left by John Keel, but his own thoughts and urges assert themselves, too, and as he tries to protect as many people as possible, he discovers that, thanks to his interference and Carcer’s, things aren’t turning out quite as he remembers them having done. Vimes has to out-think and out-react his opponents in order to keep both of himselves alive. We meet a whole contingent of Ankh-Morporkean regulars, including Rosie Palms, Nobby Nobbs, Fred Colon, Reg Shoe, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, and even a young Havelock Vetinari, the Assassins’ Guild’s most talented if under-appreciated student.

The poignancy of the novel really comes into full swing when Vimes ends up in charge of the rebellion, knowing full well how it ends, knowing full well who dies — and trying like hell to change history and to save them anyway. He knows what’s going to happen, and he wants to change it enough to matter, but not so much that he can’t get back. It puts him in a terrible position, really, particularly as he tries to convey the importance of it all to his younger self. There are a few little moments that Pratchett sneaks in there that really do just seem to punch you in the stomach. Right in the feels, as it were.

Overall, I think what I can say the most about Night Watch is that it surprised me. It was not the book I was expecting to read, but I’m exceedingly glad that I read it.

Someday I really must read all of the Discworld novels in order.

Interred with Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Title: Interred with Their Bones
Author: Jennifer Lee Carrell
Year of Publication: 2007
Length: 416 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 2.5 stars

Interred with Their Bones is a Shakespearean twist on The Da Vinci Code, and if you approach the book with that firmly in mind, you’ll probably find some enjoyment in it. It is, however, one of those books where you can only apply but so much logic to it before the entire structure collapses under the weight of sensibility.

The book’s plot structure follows a little too neatly in the Da Vinci path, involving many of the same character tropes and narrative devices. We open, after a brief and vague historical flashback, with Kate Stanley, director of the Globe’s Hamlet, meeting for the first time in years with her estranged and eccentric mentor, Roz Howard. (If you’re enough of an early modern history geek to be quirking an eyebrow at those names, rest assured: yes, everyone in the book labors under similarly referential nomenclature). Roz has some terrible secret to impart and a quest to set Kate on, but before she can reveal the details of either, she is found dead in the aftermath of a fire (not, as the book jacket would have you believe, at the Globe itself, but in an auxiliary building). Kate feels obligated to pick up Roz’s trail of bread crumbs. As she follows them, more dead bodies start piling up around her, and she ends up fleeing with the police on her trail, a device which feels even more strange in this book than it does in The Da Vinci Code. Kate has no real reason to distrust the police, no reason not to clear herself from culpability before embarking on her quest, and so her actions just seem bizarre and inexplicable. It gives the drama of the plotline a false echo, and it’s just one of the threads that a reader has to avoid plucking at in order to avoid a total collapse of the narrative. Still, with thrillers, you do sometimes have to make plausibility allowances, so this element may not prove troublesome to all readers.

Part of what hindered my enjoyment of this book, which I could otherwise have consumed as mere Da Vinci Code-esque fluff, is that I resent, as a scholar, how much this book not only entertains anti-Stratfordian opinions, but implies that very serious people in the Shakespearean world would hold those opinions. (Hint: They don’t. Some actors and directors, shamefully, but no scholar worth his or her salt gives the authorship “controversy” any credence because it doesn’t deserve any). I started to recoil as soon as Carrell broached the topic, and eventually, that aversion colored my reading of the text pretty strongly. I now know how art historians and theologians alike must feel about Dan Brown.

Despite the pitfalls of the exploration of the “controversy,” the book is actually at its best when traipsing through historical possibilities — the inventions linking Cardenio to Catholic plots via Cervantes and Jesuits are reasonably entertaining and provide some profitable fodder for exploration. I could cheerfully entertain all of that, if not for the editorial commentary suggesting that any of it might be true. The jet-setting aspect of the book, volleying from London to Harvard to the Southwest to Spain (and ricocheting back and forth between some of those a few times) is a fun diversion, and Carrell does an admirable job of painting her landscapes.

One of the critical failings in this book, unfortunately, lies in its protagonist and narrator. Carrell presents Kate as though she is some big up-and-comer in the Shakespearean field, a director that a Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellan type would refer to as “that brilliant American child.” Kate, of course, demurs from this description in , but the whole thing smacks of Informed Ability. Kate is a brilliant scholar and director because Carrell tells us that she is. This trait in of itself wouldn’t be so bad, except that, for such a prodigy, Kate has some pretty glaring gaps in her knowledge — and one of them is the fundamental underpinning of the mystery, the fact that Shakespeare wrote a lost play entitled Cardenio. The first-person narrative also hampers the book, partially because Kate’s head is not quite an interesting enough place to spend four hundred pages in, partially because it accentuates that gulf between her reputation and what she actually knows. First-person narration creates a trap for a writer: if the audience needs to know something, either the narrator knows it and tells it, which can come off as preachy, or the narrator doesn’t know and has to find out in order for the audience to find out, even if it’s something the narrator should already know — or shouldn’t need quite as much hand-holding to figure out. Interred with Their Bones manages to fall into both pits multiple times at different points in the story.

Interred with Their Bones was adequate entertainment for lying on a beach. If you’re in a place where your mind can let go and indulge freely in a suspense romp, then by all means, pick this up. The pace clips along well enough to keep a reader engaged, and if the plot turns are occasionally too predictable, sometimes that’s what you’re looking for out of light summer reading. If you’re looking for heavier fare or superlative writing, though, you may want to look elsewhere, as this book doesn’t hold up well under even light scrutiny. Apparently there’s a sequel. Might I read it? Sure, if someone handed it to me free of charge, and I had some time to kill. Unfortunately, that level of engagement and investment is all that Carrell’s writing warrants.

Cold Vengeance, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Cold Vengeance (Pendergast #11)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2011
Length: 480 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: somewhere shy of 4 stars
Spoilers: For Fever Dream, the preceding book in the series, as well as other previous Pendergast novels. Most of this review will be spoiler-free for Cold Vengeance, though I will have a clearly marked spoiler-full section at the end.

This is definitely the middle section of a trilogy. That shouldn’t automatically be taken as criticism; The Empire Strikes Back is my favourite of the Star Wars movies, and The Two Towers, in my opinion, is a far better tale than The Fellowship of the Ring. (Well. Half of it is, anyway). There’s nothing wrong with being the filler of the sandwich. But it does make it damn hard to review the thing. Not just for the spoilers, but also because — it doesn’t really begin or end. We start in medias res, with Pendergast on what’s bound to be an ill-fated hunting trip with his erstwhile brother-in-law — whom he has just learned was responsible for his wife Helen’s death. The first few chapters are wonderfully evocative, exploring a boggy mire in Scotland. P&C’s talent for breathing life into a location is as active here as ever, and they walk the reader through the twists and turns of this Highland battle in a way that keeps the tension well-mounted. Eventually (and as this happens in the first few pages, I’m not going to consider it a spoiler), Judson Esterhazy gets his shot in and leaves Pendergast for dead.

This being a Pendergast novel, I don’t think it’s a spoiler, either, to reveal that Pendergast makes yet another of his fabled great escapes — otherwise there’d be very little book left. Once healed, he embarks on a mission to hunt down Judson and determine where Helen might be now. Of course, every avenue he pursues leads to more evidence, apparently incontrovertible, that Helen is dead. Yet Pendergast persists.

I wish Preston & Child had worked in a little more of the revelations from the first book in the trilogy into the opening few chapters, to better remind the reader of what was at stake. It’s been a year since I read Fever Dream, and though my memory for books is pretty good, I was a little hazy on the details. I had trouble remembering exactly what Helen had been up to on Spanish Island that made her so dangerous she had to be killed, had trouble recalling precisely what was unearthed there — and my last review was of no help in jogging my memory, since I was so careful to keep spoilers out of it. So it was a ways through the book before I felt like I was back on terra firma as far as background was concerned, and by that point, all sorts of new confusions had been thrown into the mix.

Overall, the book clips along at the usual good pace of P&C novels, but I admit I found the second act somewhat muddy. It seems to amble and meander a bit, with a lot of shady clues, red herrings, and cul-de-sacs. It could’ve used some tightening up to give it the sort of laser-focused plot I’ve come to expect from the Pendergast series (Wheel of Darkness not withstanding).

Pendergast is also on his own more in this book than ever, eschewing help from the usual suspects. New character Ned Betterton never really gets the chance to take off, which is a little jarring considering how much time we spend with him — he seems very much a character designed to relay information to the reader because no one else is still in the place where that information is, not someone designed as a person in his own right. When Corrie Swanson (of Still Life with Crows) turned up, I was really hopeful she might get to take an active role, but that never quite panned out fully. She hovers at the edges of what Pendergast is doing, trying to unearth some revelations, but she’s not quite the active, engaged partner that D’Agosta, Heywood, Green, Kelly, and Smithback (RIP) have been in the past. Pendergast has gone solo and rogue by this point, yet that doesn’t really serve to clarify the story very well. He continues to keep secrets from the reader, and we have no other solid means of unearthing them.

That said, the last several chapters of the book — which involve a raid on a yacht and urban combat, among other things — are electrifying. This is the sort of close-quarters action we got in some of the earlier novels (Relic, The Cabinet of Curiosities, and Still Life with Crows come to mind), but with a very super-spy sort of feeling grafted on. It’s a bit of a change from the standard fare, but in some ways, it feels more like Pendergast-as-FBI-agent than we often get to see him. It’s an interesting tactic, and a definite way of rollicking through towards the end of the book –

Which, of course, has no satisfactory ending whatsoever. It’s a cliffhanger by design, as is typical for the middle book of a trilogy. Nothing wraps up, and we end the book with almost no more answers than we began it, and a whole lot more questions. Effective, in its way, but ultimately, I’ll have to wait to see how everything pans out in Two Graves before I can really pass judgment on what happens in Cold Vengeance. It’s an odd feeling to leave a book with — not necessarily bad, but unfulfilled nonetheless.

Alright. From beyond this point, consider yourself in spoiler territory, because I’ve run out of ways to talk about this book without giving away major plot points.

First off, I don’t mourn Ned Betterton (we hardly knew ye, and couldn’t really be compelled to care), though I was a bit surprised that he bit the dust so pre-emptively, but I really hope P&C are punking us about Corrie, because if she’s really dead, I might well and truly have a hissy fit. I think there’s hope — they note she was reaching into her purse just before the gunman fired, so maybe she managed to mace him and spoil his shot or something. I really hope she’s not dead, because I really want her to take an active role in the next book. She deserves it — and it would, to me, feel a fantastic waste of a character to have introduced her way back in Book 4, have kept her in the readers’ consciousness with peppered references to her since then, and then just take her out like this. (Then again, I still feel that killing off Bill Smithback was a waste of a character, so there’s really no telling what P&C might do).

The neo-Nazi angle was a highly unexpected hard left turn. I don’t know that I don’t like it, but I don’t know that I do, either — if that makes sense. This is all down to personal preference. World War II and the Nazis have never been subjects that I voluntarily go to in fiction; it’s just not an area of interest for me. I’m hoping that P&C manage to make this interesting in a new and innovative way, rather than falling into any Nazis-as-villains cliches and pitfalls.

There were a lot of bits and pieces in this book that really didn’t come together for me, and I’m giving P&C the credit that those threads will intertwine in Two Graves. One of the biggest was the revelation of Helen’s faked death. That’s going to require a lot of explanation — and unfortunately, Judson’s now incapable of telling us anything about it. How on earth did he manage that? How did Helen not know? What required the sacrifice of her hand? Honestly, I was pretty infuriated with the utter refusal of either Judson or Helen to explain anything within the confines of this book. I know P&C are heightening the cliffhanger, but in this case, I found it more annoying than pleasingly suspenseful. If there’s good enough payoff in Two Graves, I’ll cheerfully forgive them — but they’ve got a ways to go to get there.

The Book of the Dead, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: The Book of the Dead (Pendergast #7)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2007
Length: 597 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.5 stars
Spoiler Warning: Spoilers for Dance with Death

This is probably my favourite Pendergast novel. Perhaps coincidentally, it’s also the first Pendergast novel I read.

Like Brimstone, this book has a lot going on, a lot of different threads that weave in and out of each other. To begin with, Aloysius Pendergast is in a maximum security prison, awaiting trial for several murders and for the theft of the jewel collection of the Museum of Natural History — all crimes perpetrated by his brother, Diogenes, during the last book. Diogenes’s frame job was masterful, near-perfect — but there are just enough holes to be holding up the trial, and Laura Heyward finds herself investigating them despite herself. Vincent D’Agosta is taking a much more active role in clearing Pendergast’s name, risking his own career and his relationship with Laura in order to break Aloysius out of prison. He’s working with Eli Glinn, a forensic psychologist introduced to the Pendergast series in Dance with Death to analyse Diogenes, and who apparently appears first in Ice Limit, another P&C novel that I haven’t read.

Meanwhile, Diogenes is taking advantage of Aloysius’s incarceration to set his real ultimate crime into motion. His planned apotheosis wasn’t stealing the Museum’s jewels, nor was it framing Aloysius for the murders. His true goal is on a much larger scale, and he uses his alter ego’s position at the Museum to set it into motion. He’s also somehow managed to find Constance Greene, sequestered in Aloysius’s Riverside mansion; he wants to win her loyalty away from Pendergast, and slowly attempts to befriend her and turn her against her guardian.

At the Museum, Nora Kelly is back, tapped to organise the Museum’s next big exhibit: an authentic Egyptian tomb, first installed in the 1930s, which closed and was walled off after a series of strange accidents happened in connection with it. Inevitably, rumours of a curse grew — but now a mysterious Baron is fronting the money to re-open it. Everyone shrugs off the old superstitions, until more tragic “accidents” start to occur. A lighting technician is found disemboweled, apparently by the computer programmer. A notable British Egyptologist, brought over to help Nora, goes mad and attacks her, forcing a security guard to shoot and kill him. When his replacement turns out to be the lovely Lady Viola Maskalene, a woman with a profound connection to Pendergast, more people start to suspect that something is up — but all attempts to stall or cancel the exhibit’s opening fail. I don’t want to say too much about the nature of Diogenes’s plan, or how Pendergast figures it out, because there’s so much rich character work that goes on in both of those revelations. Like many elements of the Pendergast series, it dances right on that edge of implausibility.

I like this book best of the series because it handles all the disparate threads so well. None of the plotlines ever feel like it’s gotten subsumed by the others (as the subplots in Brimstone did). The action clips along throughout the book, and the double-climax carries the last 200 pages of the book along superbly. We get to see Pendergast at his best and at his worst, navigating his way through obstacles yet unable to face his own personal history. This book also wraps up the Diogenes trilogy, though not all the threads tie off precisely — there’s plenty to continue carrying through the next books in the series.

As always, P&C do a great job with atmosphere. From the detail of the extremely regulated world of Herkmoor Correctional Facility, to the eerie, gilded claustrophobia of the Tomb of Senef, to the various locations visited in the last 100 pages of the novel, as the story turns from crime to chase, the authors know how to make the reader feel the full effect of where the story is happening. It’s a wonderful way of giving you intimacy with a place you may never have been, and it makes the story that much more real — a necessary quality when other aspects of it may strain credulity.

I highly recommend this book, though I would recommend that you at least read Dance with Death first. The Book of the Dead is one of the most tightly-plotted and best-paced of the Pendergast series, with the added benefits of giving the characters some real, tangible depth.

Dance of Death, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Dance of Death
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2006
Length: 592 pages
Genre: suspense thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4 stars
Spoilers: for Brimstone‘s ending

Dance of Death picks up not too long after Brimstone leaves off, with Aloysius Pendergast presumed dead and Vincent D’Agosta left to assume a troubling legacy: the charge of stopping Aloysius’s brother, Diogenes, from committing the perfect crime. He has the assistance of Pendergast’s ward, a major player in this book for the first time, though her history stretches back to Cabinet of Curiosities. Constance Ward is an improbable creature, her life unnaturally prolonged since the late 19th-century by the mad scientist schemes of Pendergast ancestor Enoch Leng. A century of secluded life has left Constance old-fashioned and socially inept, but has given her time to hone a brilliant mind, making her an ideal research assistant. Such is the state of events when the book begins.

And then people start dropping dead. A professor at Tulane. An artist in New York. An FBI agent . At first, there’s little to connect them, but eventually — and then Aloysius turns back up, not at all dead. As was implied in the epilogue to Brimstone, Diogenes freed Aloysius from Count Fosco’s entombment and nursed him back to health; his triumph wouldn’t be complete without his hated older brother there to witness it. Aloysius soon figures out that not only is Diogenes killing people from his past, but he’s murdering them in ways that emulate the gruesome deaths of Pendergast ancestors — and aiming to frame Aloysius for the murders.

This mayhem is set against the backdrop of events back at the Museum of Natural History, yet again. Nora and Margo are back. Nora’s working on a Sacred Images exhibit; Margo is editing the magazine’s journal. They clash a bit over an interesting repatriation issue regarding some Native American artifacts, but decide that their professional disagreements on such matters shouldn’t be a bar to friendship. Unfortunately, Margo’s desire to make sure that the Sacred Images exhibit is at least presented respectfully leads her into the exhibit alone at night, where Diogenes attacks her. P&C pull off a masterful move here, and I won’t spoil it for anyone, but it’s a good one. Margo’s death enhances the feeling that no one is safe, and it alarms Pendergast, who realises that Diogenes is speeding up his timetable.

The book’s endgame is magnificent, involving chases, a jewel heist, a kidnapping, and Aloysius’s total entanglement in the web that Diogenes spun. It definitely sets up The Book of the Dead, and so it’s not quite a stand-alone novel in that regard, because I don’t know how you could read this one and not want to know what happens next. Dance of Death is one of the more compelling Pendergast novels, and it’s also the first to feature almost no sci-fi or supernatural element. The tension here comes entirely from the characters, from their personal histories and harrowing situations. Pendergast’s vulnerabilities begin to show, which is strangely nice to see, and Vincent D’Agosta ends up having to balance his personal life and professional responsibilities against his loyalty to and respect for Aloysius. The plot is tightly and intricately woven, and manages to keep up a clipping pace of action while still introducing us to new facets of familiar characters — making it a success, in my judgment.

Brimstone, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Brimstone (Pendergast #5)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2004
Length: 752 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3.5 stars

There is a lot going on in this book. Brimstone throws out more side plots and red herrings than the other P&C novels tend to, which makes for an exciting read, but which also gives the book a bit of an uneven pace.

Brimstone opens with our old friend Vincent D’Agosta, who we learn is now with the Southhampton PD, after leaving the NYPD to try to make it as a mystery writer. When that doesn’t pan out, he can’t make it back into the NYPD thanks to a hiring freeze, so he has to take a less vigorous duty in a beach town. A bizarre murder brings him back into contact with everyone’s favourite FBI agent, Aloysius Pendergast. The victim has been burned alive, but with no trace of accelerant — or, indeed, of any fire whatsoever. The only hints are the smell of brimstone in the air and a hoof-shaped mark scorched into the floor.

Two more murders happen in New York, with similar — though not precisely identical — trappings. The psuedo-religious nature of the crimes gets attention (thanks to hack reporter Bryce Harriman, nemesis of Bill Smithback, who doesn’t appear in this novel thanks to being on his honeymoon), and eventually, a crowd of hippies, anarchists, Satanists, pagans, and fundamentalists start gathering in Central Park, near the scene of one of the crimes. Their unofficial leader is a lost soul with a Messiah complex, and when his following gets a little too large and rowdy, it’s up to another old friend, Captain Laura Hayward, to try and sort things out. Unfortunately, not everyone’s willing to give her way of doing things a chance, and the situation rapidly spirals out of control. And then, on top of all of that, we get the first hints about Pendergast’s alarmingly adroit brother, Diogenes — a psychopath who faked his death, but is resurfacing in order to commit the ultimate crime, and taunting Aloysius along the way.

Pendergast and Aloysius find themselves at a loss as to connecting the dots between the crimes. When they finally do piece some bits together, the lead takes them across the ocean, to Florence, Italy, where thirty years ago, a group of young men attempted to summon the devil and make a pact with him in exchange for fortune and glory. Pendergast and D’Agosta take several twists and turns in Italy, and the story there is quite gripping (even if the villain’s ultimate motive seems a little odd and improbable). Unfortunately, as soon as Pendergast and D’Agosta depart for Italy, the plot back in New York sort of gets the short end of the stick. Which is a shame, because there was good material there, but it’s definitely a side plot at that point, no longer tied to the main stream of events. Everytime they return to New York City, it feels like getting jerked out of one book and dropped down into another.  It sort of feels like P&C started this thread and then weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Preston handles the concept of religious fervor boiling over into violence a lot better in his solo book Blasphemy.

Overall, I really enjoy this book, and it’s definitely a good setup for Dance of Death and The Book of the Dead. I knock a little off the score for the jumble of plotlines and the flagging nature of the Central Park events. It does meander a bit, but there’s a whole lot of juicy material, and I like that they took more chances with the red herrings than in previous books. The endgame is heart-thumpingly good. You see the full force of the villain’s diabolical machinations, Pendergast suffers a miscalculation that keeps him out of “too-perfect” territory (which, admittedly, he can veer near sometimes), and you see some wonderful if slightly shocking growth in D’Agosta’s character. And then, the cliffhanger finale segues directly into the next book, Dance of Death.

Still Life with Crows, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Still Life with Crows (Pendergast #4)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2003
Length: 592 pages
Genre: mystery-thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3 stars

If anyone ever asked me to play “one of these things is not like the other” with the Pendergast series, this would be the book I would choose. (Well, perhaps this and also Wheel of Darkness, which we’ll get to later). It has a very different feel to it than the other books do, thanks in large part to its very different setting, and also, ultimately, to its very different criminal.

Still Life with Crows finds Agent Pendergast in Medicine Creek, Kansas — of all places. Medicine Creek is a dying town, suffering from lack of jobs, lack of tourism, lack of, well, anything. Its one hope hinges on some experiment cornfields that Kansas State University might plant in the town’s territory — unless they choose neighboring town Deeper. The situation infuses the characters native to Medicine Creek with a certain desperation in a very different way than the characters in the New York books typically have.

With the review for the KSU cornfields underway, it’s pretty much the worst time ever for a serial killer to crop up. Admittedly, there’s never a good time for that, but you take my meaning. It’s attracting attention of the wrong sort, particularly because the nature of the gruesome killings suggests a correlation to the vengeful ghosts of local Native Americans. One victim is found naked in a cornfield, surrounded by the arrow-impaled bodies of crows. Another is boiled alive, buttered and sugared. Another is cut open and has creepy-crawlies sewn up inside of him. The killings are clearly deranged, but Pendergast struggles with getting a profile on the killer, because he seems to be neither the “organised” nor the “disorganised” variety of serial killer. There’s no recognisable pattern to his murders, yet the ritual nature of several of them suggests some kind of underlying order, at least in the killer’s mind. Thus is Pendergast’s challenge: to figure out the inscrutable mystery behind these strange murders. His job isn’t made easier by the local PD, who, resentful of his intrusion into the town’s matters, decides that the killer must be from Deeper, trying to scare the KSU rep into not choosing Medicine Creek. He barrels on with this idea despite a lack of evidence, threatening Pendergast if he keeps getting involved, and generally causes a lot of trouble.

I honestly find a lot of this book forgettable. On re-reading it, I had trouble remembering the sequence of events and the endgame. I had a vague awareness of how everything was interrelated, but the finer details escaped me. Overall, this book has less to do with the overall Pendergast series than any of the others, and there’s never really any good explanation for why Pendergast even ended up there in the first place. I do thank this book, though, for giving us Corrie Swanson. Corrie is a disaffected teenager with Goth affectations, desperate to get out of Medicine Creek and away from her alcoholic mother forever. She ends up Pendergast’s assistant, and he demonstrates a faith in her intelligence and abilities that no one’s ever really shown her before — and with that, and her salary for helping him with the investigation, he also gives her hope for a way out.

Overall, this isn’t one of the better Pendergast novels, in my opinion. It’s the odd duck out, the plot meanders a bit too much, and it’s not quite as gripping a premise as some of the others. It’s worth a read if you’re in it for the whole series, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it in isolation.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Title: Mockingjay
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year of Publication: 2010
Length: 390 pages
Genre: young adult – dystopian thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 4.5 stars
Spoiler Warning: Armed and active for entire series

This book was not at all what I expected. And I sort of love it for that.

I knew right from the start that it wouldn’t be, that I wasn’t getting Return of the Jedi. District 13 is about as far from a utopian paradise as you can get. It’s a complete military state, to the extent that each citizen’s schedule for the day is temporary-tattooed on their arms when they wake up. Everyone has a place and a responsibility, cogs in a machine. Practical, but creepy — and it clearly rubs Katniss the wrong way. Fortunately, since she’s still classified as “mentally disoriented”, she can get away with not following orders all the time, but it doesn’t take her long to start finding out just how far she can push her new allies. They want to use her as the Mockingjay to unite all of the Districts in rebellion against the Capitol, but they’re having some trouble stabilising her moods, not to mention dredging her out of despair about Peeta. She’s pissed as hell that the rebel operatives chose to save her and leave him behind, and when she finds out he’s not dead but captured, controlled by Snow, she’s naturally pretty concerned for his safety.

So, a lot of the book is Katniss adjusting to life in 13, pushing her limits, and trying to come to terms with having to live up to the image the public has of her. What does it mean to be the Mockingjay? How can she be that and stay true to herself?

There’s something really beautifully subversive in this book, and I don’t just mean about that reversal of expectations. On the surface, this book seems to be so unlike the first two. The situations are entirely different. The characters have changed, some to be nigh-unrecognisable. But the mechanics are gruesomely similar. Katniss is still stuck in the Hunger Games. Only they’re playing for keeps now. The Games were, of course, always deadly serious to the 24 combatants, and to an extent to people in the Districts, but they were still so choreographed, so thoughtfully executed. War isn’t, even when you try. There’s no hope of begging aid from on high, of getting sponsors, just for being impressive. In war, reinforcements and supplies come only when you’ve planned for them, not dropped as if by magic out of the sky. Critical differences — but critical similarities, too. Collins, brilliantly, doesn’t harp on this theme much — but she lets it shine in tiny details (details that I’m wondering if they would be as apparent if I hadn’t devoured all three books in under 48 hours). Like when, during the mission in the Capitol, Katniss tries to reckon up who they’ve lost, repeats the list to herself, just as she did her list of opponents during the Games, to keep track — only now it’s not to keep track of who’s still a threat, but to remember who they’ve lost. Similarly, the Capitol broadcasts those suspected still alive (even when some are already dead), which echoes the projections of dead tributes during the Games. And then there’s how Katniss still has to play for the cameras, still has to put on a good show, not to win sponsors, but to keep up the spirits of the rebels in the Districts. She’s still styled, throughout the book, both in 13 and on the road, still putting on a show. Still accompanied by a camera crew (a rather morbid commentary, I feel, on our current 24/7 news cycles). Even down to those damn silver parachutes at the end, even down to what ultimately happens with Prim, so many details of this book echo the Games and the first book, but in such brutal, sadistic, horrifying ways.

I also enjoy how this book subverts so many expectations. Katniss doesn’t turn into a 100% badass warrior chick. The love triangle between her, Peeta, and Gale does not consume the story. The rebels are not necessarily the good guys. The story is not one of glory and triumph. It’s dark, definitely edgy, and occasionally hard to read. It’s a lot of psychological trauma for a young adult book to deal with, but I think Collins handles it pretty deftly. The subversion of the romance angle is particularly nice. Gale turns out to be just a little too violently inclined, a little too gung-ho about playing just as rough and mercilessly as the Capitol does. Katniss isn’t sure what to do about that, and she clearly struggles with what these revelations about Gale’s character, about the man he’s grown into, mean for any potential future between them. Meanwhile, Peeta has been brainwashed by the Capitol via a form of psychological poison. By the time the rebels retrieve him, he thinks Katniss is a genetically engineered abomination trying to kill them all, and he nearly strangles her. It’s a far cry from the contrived images of the happy couple they had to create earlier. Getting him back is a long, slow process, and with both Peeta and Katniss suffering some pretty severe PTSD, Collins isn’t shy about stating that neither one of them will ever come back completely. Part of them will always live in this dark world, in these terrifying circumstances. They will never be what they were before or who they were before. But that doesn’t mean they can’t salvage something out of the ashes. (Salvage is, incidentally, a pretty big although subtle theme throughout all three books).

There were some flaws. A couple of times the action jerked around so fast that I got a little lost and had to back-track to figure out just what had happened. A significant character’s death got sandwiched in a way that I nearly missed it entirely. And Katniss possibly spends just a little too much of the book out of it — either literally or psychologically. In some ways it’s effective, to display the effects all of this is having on her, but in some ways it’s just really frustrating to have your heroine and narrator continually knocked out of either consciousness or sanity.

This paragraph has an extra spoiler warning on it because it really is the granddaddy spoiler, since it’s about the ultimate endgame. So. Be ye warned.

I knew Katniss was going to have to kill Coin even before she knew it. Coin proved, so thoroughly, that she wasn’t any better than her opponent. Rule by 13 would have been no better than rule by the Capitol — just restricted in different ways. While the Capitol celebrates excess and indulgence, flinging human life away for entertainment value, 13 buckles everything down until there’s no room left to breathe. Individual life and choice don’t have any meaning there, either, but for completely different reasons. There, it’s all about serving the cause, being the well-functioning machine you’re meant to be. Each civilisation represents one end of the Evil Empire spectrum, but they’re both pretty horrific to consider.

What we come to learn is that, for District 13, this war was never about liberation, never about freeing the Districts from the yoke. President Snow was right about that — 13 could’ve helped them in the first rebellion, but instead they cut and ran. No, for District 13 and for Coin, this was about revenge and domination. She wanted her own empire to rule, larger and more satisfying than subterranean 13, and she didn’t care who she had to throw under the bus to get that. Individual life meant as little to her as to Snow; she would sacrifice whoever and whatever in order to win. With her out of the picture and someone saner at the wheel, there’s hope that Panem might yet turn into a functioning republic, as the District rebels hoped.

So. Overall, it’s hard to say I enjoyed this book, because so much of it was so painful. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t exquisite. Collins crafts a fantastic story in a complex world (a world that I’m sort of annoyed I still don’t know enough about, but that’s my own private obsession with dystopian world-building, there). Katniss is a remarkable heroine, who defies expectations at every turn — both of her handlers, her friends, and of the reader. She won’t be what anyone else wants her to be, and that includes us. I appreciate that. Collins has done something different, which is quite an achievement. I want more heroines like Katniss in the literary world.

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

Title: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year of Publication: 2009
Length: 391 pages
Genre: young adult – dystopian thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 4+ stars
Spoilers: Armed and active for both this and The Hunger Games; I don’t know how to talk about this book without them, unfortunately.

The last time I felt this way about a series was starting Harry Potter, back almost a decade ago. Nothing else in recent memory has matched the sheer irresistibility of this series. I’m a little floored, honestly, by how much I’m taken with this series and how desperately I need to move on to find out what happens. But I thought it important to pause and capture my thoughts now.

Catching Fire ups the ante in a big way. It continues more or less seamlessly on from the end of The Hunger Games. Katniss and Peeta are expected to go on a Victory Tour around all of the Districts. The trouble is that unrest has been sizzling in some of them for a long time, and Katniss finds herself the inadvertent mascot of rebellion. No true uprisings have broken out yet, but you can feel them simmering, low-burning embers, all through this book. And that’s terrifying the living hell out of the Capitol. Enough so that the President himself feels compelled to visit Katniss and make a few well-placed threats against her family and friends.

This includes Gale, who was kind’a-sort’a Katniss’s boyfriend before she went to the Games, but who she’s had to treat as an amiable “cousin” ever since she got back, since her only thread of protection lies in being able to claim that love for Peeta made her act so defiantly. There’s a lot of emotional entanglement between the three of them, and I think it’s handled very well. It’s not overblown or made into the stuff of melodrama. Instead, all three act in the time-honoured manner of teenagers everwhere: with extreme awkwardness. They don’t know what to say to each other, how to act. And it doesn’t help that just as soon as poor Katniss is thinking she’s set her heart on one, the other will do something spectacular to sway her around again. And yet, all without turning her into just some pathetic chick.

Is it wrong of me to hope that Katniss will get to live polyamorously happy-ever-after with them both? Yes. Yes, it is. That would barely pass muster in fairly edgy adult fiction; it’s going to be another century or so before you could get away with that in young adult. What I then assume is that either Gale or Peeta has to die. So, then, is it wrong for me to hope that it’s Gale? Nothing against the guy at all, but he’s not the one we, the readers, have spent as much time with. My emotional investment lies far more in Peeta.

So. All of that’s going on, and then District Twelve has a really hard year. It’s partially to punish Katniss — law enforcement becomes really strict, the minor infractions (like hunting in the woods) that folk used to be able to get away with, they can’t anymore — and it’s partially just bad luck, from a really hard winter. Desperation’s sinking in, and even while Katniss feels the urge to rebel burning deep inside her… she can’t. Not with so many people relying on her. Not with so many innocent lives at stake.

And then the Capitol changes the rules on everyone again, and announces that for the 75th Hunger Games, they’ll be drawing only from a pool of prior victors — who are supposed to be exempt for life. The second half of the book deals with this. With no other female victor living, Katniss has to go for 12, and though their mentor Haymitch’s name is chosen, Peeta immediately volunteers to take his place. So they’re back, and have to quickly determine who among the other tribute-victors they might be able to trust at least long enough for a temporary alliance. The arena designed for the 75th Games is diabolical and utterly ingenious, and in some ways I wish they’d gotten to it earlier in the book in order to spend more time examining it.

Some other reviews I’ve seen charge that Catching Fire suffers from middle-of-trilogy syndrome and that it’s slow to get going, that too much time is spent on exposition in the beginning. I couldn’t disagree more. I think this book is superbly strong, and I don’t feel it has any of that lag. In fact, I sort of wish they’d spent more time on the Victory Tour, describing the various Districts — but that’s because I’m obsessed with world-building, especially in dystopias. I want to know everything. From what I can gather, District 4 is probably Gulf Coast (wherever the coastline actually is now), because their main industry is fishing. 3 seems like it might be Detroit-ish, as they focus on electronics and manufacturing. 7 seems like Wisconsin-Minnesota, timber country. 11 I can’t quite place, because it might be either the South or the Midwest. I’m guessing Midwest because the agriculture seems a bit more wheat-and-corn, though in Book 1 Rue does talk a lot about orchards — but also because, if part of the cataclysm leading to this world setup was rising waters, most of the agricultural south is probably under the Atlantic Ocean now. Anyway — I wish I knew more. I want to know about all the Districts, where they are, how many people, how they got to be the way they are. What we do learn along the way is that District 11 is much more strictly controlled than 12 has been, and that the people there seem to be getting sick of it.

So. This book is fabulous, the series is fabulous, I’m moving on to Mockingjay as fast as may be — and it looks like it’s going to have pretty much my favourite thing over. Not just a dystopia, but a dystopian rebellion. I am aquiver with excitement.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Title: The Hunger Games
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year of Publication: 2009
Length: 374 pages
Genre: young adult – dystopian thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 5 stars

It has been a long, long time since I tore through a book as quickly and as avidly as I tore through this one. The word for The Hunger Games is, absolutely, “compelling.” This is a book that grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

The book takes place in a dystopian future — which gets me right there. I love a good dystopia. North America as we know it has fallen to pieces, thanks to what the heroine vaguely describes as “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.” The civilization that replaces America is called Panem, a cluster of districts ruled by the Capitol. There were once Thirteen Districts; now, after a failed rebellion, there are only Twelve, with the Thirteenth having been obliterated in the war. As a reminder to the Districts of its power, and to prevent further rebellions, the Capitol holds the Hunger Games each year. Each District sends two tributes each year, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18.

In coal-mining District 12 (probably situated in what was once West Virginia, based on the descriptions), Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her sister’s place when twelve-year-old Prim is chosen. The “reaping”, as the ceremony is grimly called, is a stark look at how the government can so easily manipulate poverty. A twelve-year-old has his or her name entered once, a thirteen-year-old twice, and so forth — but, you can also choose to enter your name more times in exchange for tesserae, allotments of grain and oil. This is a frequent occurrence in District 12, impoverished and struggling. Katniss has been her family’s provider since she was 11, when her father died in a mining accident and her mother slipped into a deep depression. She’s now sixteen, with her name put in 20 times; her friend Gale, with more siblings to support, has his name in 42 times. And yet it’s Prim, with her name only in once, because Katniss wouldn’t let her take on any more risk, who gets called.

And this is all just in the first few chapters.

Katniss goes to the Capitol to prepare for the games, along with Peeta, the male tribute from her District — a boy who once threw her bread when she was starving, near-death, before she learned to hunt and trap. They’re up against others like themselves, unwilling tributes who’ve never had a full belly in their lives, but they’re also up against tributes from wealthier Districts, where the Games are not a punishment but a chance for honor and glory, who’ve trained their whole lives for this moment. Katniss experiences the shock and confusion of being treated like a pampered pet even though she’s really a beast for slaughter, and through her eyes, we see the horrific, casual cruelty of a society that places enormous monetary value on her life but no spiritual or moral value on it whatsoever. Because the Hunger Games are entertainment, televised and trumpeted.It’s the Olympics as bloodsport. (It’s no surprise that everyone in the Capitol seems to have a Roman name — Flavius, Octavia, Cinna, Portia — because there’s certainly a smack of the Colosseum about the whole thing). The tributes have to compete not only against each other in the field, but also for sponsors, who can send them life-saving gifts during the Games — and the tributes who put in the best show during the opening ceremonies, training, and interviews. Katniss, both feisty and sullen, unable to conceal her resentment, is saved from making a total mess of things partially through her own audacity and partially through the machinations of the District 12 handlers, who manipulate circumstances so that Katniss and Peeta look like star-cross’d lovers. The burden for that is on Peeta (and for a long time Katniss isn’t sure if he really has feelings for her or if he’s just playing the game), but Katniss reaps some benefits of it, and eventually learns to work the angle herself.

The strength of this book is in the relentless way that Collins builds suspense. Even when Katniss is on something resembling “downtime”, healing from wounds, feeding herself, scoping out the lay of the land, it never feels as though the action slows down. There’s always another threat, always something else lurking on the horizon — and those things explode into action with magnificent force. The Games are a fascinating look at survivalism; the “Career Tributes” from the wealthy districts may know how to fight, but they don’t know how to hunt for food, find safe berries to eat, or bandage up their wounds. Eleven tributes are killed outright in the first battle, but from then on, it becomes a matter of playing advantages and covering for weaknesses. It’s gruesome, deeply troubling, heart-poundingly thrilling, and unexpectedly emotional. There was one moment that got to me, not because of who died or the way in which she did, but because of Katniss’s reaction to it — and the unexpected benefit that Katniss received afterwards. I don’t want to throw in a spoiler, but it’s a really poignant moment, and it made me tear up. And then it’s right back to breath-holding suspense.

So, this book is fantastic. Collins has created not only a fascinating dystopia, but also an eminently relatable heroine. I’m usually not a fan of first person narratives; they have to be done really well for me to like them. And this one is. Katniss’s voice is wonderful, practical and laced with sardonic humour, but you also get to hear her struggling with vulnerabilities she doesn’t want to admit to. She is not a perfect person, but she’s a tremendously engaging protagonist.

I know I’m late to the train, and I don’t know why. It wasn’t for lack of interest, I just somehow never got around to picking this book up. Probably no one actually needs my recommendation to read this book, as I suspect I was the last person in America not to have done so already. But if you do need it, here it is: Read this book. Immediately if not sooner. I’m off to get Catching Fire and Mockingjay right now, because I can’t stand not knowing what happens next.