Silver Wedding by Maeve Binchy

Silver Wedding
by Maeve Binchy
ebook
978-0-440-33760-7
Delta / Random House

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 3.5
Characters: 3
Writing: 3.5
Final: 3.33
       
Comments: I had read a couple of Ken Bruen books in a row and was in dire need of a little Binchy.

Publisher's description

There was never any question that Deirdre and Desmond Doyle would celebrate a gala twenty-fifth anniversary. Naturally, their daughter Anna, would plan their grand affair. Of all three Doyle children, Anna knew exactly what their mother wished--even as she lived her own secret life. Will Brendan, the rebellious son, even bother to return to London? Will Helen, the hapless would-be nun, embarrass them all? This is Deirdre’s day, a triumph for a woman obsessed with keeping up appearances, her silvery revenge after “marrying down” twenty-five years ago. She’s determined to show them all: the maid of honor, still unmarried, still gorgeous, now a successful London business woman . . . the best man, once Desmond’s close friend, now his boss . . . their reluctant priest, who harbors his own guilty secret.

As family and friends gather, a lifetime of lies takes its toll. But what begins as a family charade brings with it the transforming power of love--and truth.

The Guards by Ken Bruen

The Guards
by Ken Bruen
ebook
0-312-32027-2 (paperback)
St. Martin's Press

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 4
Characters: 4
Writing: 3.5
Final: 3.83
       
Comments: As you can see, I'm reading the Jack Taylor novels completely out of order, thanks to my inability to consistently find them as ebooks. What's even worse, I had to read the Kindle edition of this one and the formatting was so horrible. I've never seen formatting any where near this bad in either eReader or Barnes & Noble eReader editions. Check it out below: I know it's blurry (it's a picture of my iPod Kindle app taken with my Pre), but you can still see the huge gaps between the words, which means you're constantly turning the page. And that brings up another complaint: I hate having to "swipe" the screen to turn the page. Such a hassle. Why not allow me to just touch the screen like every other ereading app? Come on, Kindle. Help a girl out.

Publisher's description

Jack Taylor's life is spiraling downward. Dumped from the Garda Siochana ("the Guards"), Ireland's elite police force, he now passes his days drinking in a friend's bar. Enter Ann Henderson, a woman searching for her missing daughter. Jack agrees to take on her case, learning about Ann's daughter as well as other young women who have recently disappeared . . .

The Dramatist by Ken Bruen

The Dramatist
by Ken Bruen
ebook
97-8-142-99023-6
Minotaur / St. Martin's Press

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 3.5
Characters: 4
Writing: 4
Final: 3.83
       
Comments: Don't read Ken Bruen if you don't want your heart broken--his books hurt. This one actually made me gasp audibly at the end.

Publisher's description

The impossible has happened: Jack Taylor is living clean and dating a mature woman. Rumour suggests he is even attending mass . . . The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that "The Dramatist," a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns Jack's refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he's maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss. 

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

Beat the Reaper
by Josh Bazell
ebook
978-0-316-04030-3
Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 4.5
Characters: 4.5
Writing: 4
Final: 4.33
       
Comments: Super fast-paced, foul-mouthed, with graphic descriptions of violence and medical procedures. Fun!


Publisher's description

Dr. Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan’s worst hospital. He has a talent for medicine, a shift from hell, and a past he’d prefer to keep hidden. Whether it’s a blocked circumflex artery or a plan to land a massive malpractice suit, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwna is a hit man for the mob, with a genius for violence, a well-earned fear of sharks, and an overly close relationship with the Federal Witness Protection Program. More likely to leave a trail of dead gangsters than a molecule of evidence, he’s the last person you want to see in your hospital room.

Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is Dr. Brown’s new patient, with three months to live and a very strange idea: that Peter Brown and Pietro Brnwa might--just might --be the same person . . .

Now with the mob, the government, and death itself descending on the hospital, Peter has to buy time and do whatever it takes to keep his patients, himself, and his last shot at redemption alive. To get through the next eight hours--and somehow beat the Reaper.

10 Questions with Josh Bazell (on Goodreads--I'm not sure if you need to be a member to see this)

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Sharp Objects
by Gillian Flynn
ebook
978-0-307-35148-7
Shaye Areheart / Crown / Random House

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 4
Characters: 3.5
Writing: 3.5
Final: 3.66
       
Comments: Something about this book just didn't quite work for me. There are some interesting ideas and images here, but there was just too much--too bad Tim Gunn wasn't there to tell her to bring her editing eye to this project. In the video below, the author describes intending the book to have a fairy-tale quality to it so maybe that explains the excess.

Publisher's description

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’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, hypochondriac 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.

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo
cloth
978-0-375-41496-1
Knopf

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 4.5
Characters: 5
Writing: 5
Final: 4.83

Comments: This book deviates a little from the usual Russo formula where the small northeastern town is treated like an additional character. I happen to really enjoy that formula, but I liked this one, too.

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father’s ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents’ respite from the hated Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that’s now thirty years old and has largely come true. He’d left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain; they’d moved into an old house full of character; and they’d started a family. Check, check and check.

But be careful what you pray for, especially if you manage to achieve it. By the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura’s, on the coast of Maine, Griffin’s chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Home
by Marilynne Robinson
cloth
9780374299101
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 5
Characters: 5
Writing: 5
Final: 5

Comments: I'm not going to be able to do this book justice. The two words that keep coming to mind are beautiful and devastating. It gave me a feeling I don't experience much any more--I don't know how common this feeling is, so this might not mean much to you. Particularly throughout my childhood, in that indefinable period of stillness between late afternoon and evening (generally on Sundays) I would be overwhelmed by what I can only describe as a crushing, suffocating sense of melancholy. This book gave me that same feeling. However, lest you get the wrong idea, I loved it. I couldn't put it down.

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames's closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson's greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

Devil Bones
by Kathy Reichs
ebook
978-1-4165-7983-4
Scribner (Simon & Schuster)

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 3
Characters: 4
Writing: 4
Final: 3.66

Comments: Not to be confused with Devil's Bones (no wonder I kept thinking I'd already reviewed this). The mystery, while fine, was less interesting to me in this one than the developments in Temperance's personal life. I do love a flawed main character.

In a house under renovation, a plumber uncovers a cellar no one knew about, and makes a rather grisly discovery — a decapitated chicken, animal bones, and cauldrons containing beads, feathers, and other relics of religious ceremonies. In the center of the shrine, there is the skull of a teenage girl. Meanwhile, on a nearby lakeshore, the headless body of a teenage boy is found by a man walking his dog.

Nothing is clear — neither when the deaths occurred, nor where. Was the skull brought to the cellar or was the girl murdered there? Why is the boy's body remarkably well preserved? Led by a preacher turned politician, citizen vigilantes blame devil worshippers and Wiccans. They begin a witch hunt, intent on seeking revenge.

Evil at Heart by Chelsea Cain

Evil at Heart
by Chelsea Cain
ebook
978-0-312-36848-7
Minotaur Books (St. Martin's)

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 4
Characters: 4
Writing: 3
Final: 3.66

Comments: Cain hasn't run out of twisted ways to torment Archie yet. I wonder how long she can keep it up. Currently, though, Susan is my favorite. I'm so glad she has become a recurring character. Here is one of my favorite Susan bits where she is casually tossing around her Lewis & Clark knowledge:

"Go Pioneers," he said.
"They should have gone with Seaman," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"They should have made the mascot Seaman. After Lewis's Newfoundland. He was right there with them, blazing the Oregon Trail."

And now, please to enjoy author Chelsea Cain with Archie & Gretchen, Episode 1: Valentine's Day

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
cloth
ISBN 978-0-385-34230-8
Delacorte Press

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 5
Characters: 5
Writing: 5
Final: 5

Comments: Perfection.

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story—of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school’s tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder—but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse . . .

Listen to author Alan Bradley talk about the main character, Flavia de Luce:

Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich

Plum Lovin'
by Janet Evanovich
cloth
ISBN 0-312-98536-3
St. Martin's Press

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 2
Characters: 3
Writing: 3
Final: 2.66

Comments: This was not a wise choice on my part--I picked it up because I was too impatient to wait for the new title in the Stephanie Plum numbers series. This was just too silly for me (the regular Plum series is about as silly as I can take). Since I haven't read any other books in the "Between the Numbers" series I can't tell you how this one compares, but I'd guess that if you like the others, you're likely to enjoy this one, too.

Mysterious men have a way of showing up in Stephanie Plum's apartment. When the shadowy Diesel appears, he has a task for Stephanie-and he's not taking no for an answer. Annie Hart is a "relationship expert" who is wanted for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Stephanie needs to find her, fast. Diesel knows where she is. So they make a deal: he'll help her get Annie if Stephanie plays matchmaker to several of Annie's most difficult clients. But someone wants to find Annie even more than Diesel and Stephanie. Someone with a nasty temper. And someone with "unmentionable" skills. Does Diesel know more than he's saying about Annie Hart? Does Diesel have secrets he's keeping about Stephanie and the two men in her life-Ranger and Morelli? With Stephanie Plum in over her head, things are sure to get a little dicey and a little explosive, Jersey style!

Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

Best Friends Forever
by Jennifer Weiner
ebook
ISBN:978-1-4391-6549-2
Atria Books (Simon & Schuster)

Rating (scale of 1-5, with 5 being the best)
Plot: 2.5
Characters: 4
Writing: 3.5
Final: 3.33

Comments: The beginning of this felt very much like a Jodi Picoult book to me--like there was going to be some big twist ending. Maybe that threw me off because I never really got into the story. The characters, though, were very believable.

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

Wishful Drinking
by Carrie Fisher
ebook (which was a mistake--go for the real book on this one)
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5380-2
Simon & Schuster

Rating (scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: n/a
Characters: n/a, but I'm going to give it a 5 anyway
Writing: 4
Final: 4.5

Comments: As I mentioned above, I read this as an ebook but I recommend you buy a real book for this one so you don't feel like you've missed out on the photos (they are in the ebook, but they never come across very well on the screen).

In Wishful Drinking, adapted from her one-woman stage show, Fisher reveals what it was really like to grow up a product of "Hollywood in-breeding," come of age on the set of a little movie called Star Wars, and become a cultural icon and bestselling action figure at the age of nineteen . . . It's an incredible tale: the child of Hollywood royalty--Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher--homewrecked by Elizabeth Taylor, marrying (then divorcing, then dating) Paul Simon, having her likeness merchandized on everything from Princess Leia shampoo to PEZ dispensers, learning the father of her daughter forgot to tell her he was gay, and ultimately waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed.

Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy

Firefly Summer
by Maeve Binchy
ebook
ISBN: 978-0-440-33759-1
Dell (Random House)

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 3
Characters: 4
Writing: 3.5
Final: 3.5
Comments: This is an older Binchy--from 1987 or 1988--and the parts where she switched perspective or jumped forward in time felt very disjointed to me. I wonder if there were design/typographic cues in the print editions that didn't make it into the ebook?

It was a summer of warmth.... Kate Ryan and her husband, John, have a rollicking pub in the Irish village of Mountfern... lovely twelve-year-old twins... and such wonderful dreams.... It was a summer of innocence... but all that is about to change this fateful summer of 1962 when American millionaire Patrick O'Neill comes to town with his irresistible charm and a pocketful of money... when love and hate vie for a town's quiet heart and old traditions begin to crumble away.... It was a summer of love that would never come again.... A time that has been captured forever in Maeve Binchy's compelling family drama... a novel you will never forget.

Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass

Bones of Betrayal
by Jefferson Bass
cloth (borrowed from my mom)
ISBN: 9780061284748
HarperCollins

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 best)
Plot: 3.5
Characters: 3.5
Writing: 3
Final: 3.33

Comments: My favorite thing about the Body Farm novels is all of the scientific detail you get about skeletons and the process of putrefaction.

Dr. Bill Brockton is in the middle of a nuclear-terrorism disaster drill when he receives an urgent call from the nearby town of Oak Ridge—better known as Atomic City, home of the Bomb, and the key site for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Although more than sixty years have passed, could repercussions from that dangerous time still be felt today?

With his graduate assistant Miranda Lovelady, Brockton hastens to the death scene, where they find a body frozen facedown in a swimming pool behind a historic, crumbling hotel. The forensic detectives identify the victim as Dr. Leonard Novak, a renowned physicist and designer of a plutonium reactor integral to the Manhattan Project. They also discover that he didn't drown: he died from a searing dose of radioactivity.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich

Finger Lickin' Fifteen
by Janet Evanovich
cloth
ISBN: 0312383282
St. Martin's Press

Rating (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best)
Plot: 2.5
Characters: 4
Writing: 3.5
Final: 3.33

Comments: Good, silly fun. Not the best in the Stephanie Plum series, but not the worst.

Stephanie Plum is working overtime tracking felons for the bonds office at night and snooping for security expert Carlos Manoso, A.K.A. Ranger, during the day. Can Stephanie hunt down two killers, a traitor, five skips, keep her grandmother out of the sauce, solve Ranger’s problems and not jump his bones?

Catching Up: Three Books I Finished Recently

Three quick reads, all enjoyable. Especially the one by Elinor Lipman, who is new to me (via Laura Lippman).

Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult
ebook 1-4295-3335-8
iPod Touch, eReader Pro
copyright 1995

As Picture Perfect begins, it is daybreak in downtown L.A. A woman suffering from amnesia is taken in by an officer new to the L.A. police force, after he finds her wandering aimlessly near a graveyard. Days later, when her husband comes to claim her at the police station, no one is more stunned than Cassie Barrett to learn that not only is she a renowned anthropologist, but she is married to Hollywood's leading man, Alex Rivers.

A Date You Can't Refuse by Harley Jane Kozak
ebook 978-0-307-58871-5
iPod Touch, eReader Pro
copyright 2009

Wollie Shelley isn't happy about taking the job as a "social coach" at MediaRex, but the FBI makes her an offer she can't refuse. If she agrees to infiltrate the company, they'll guarantee that her schizophrenic brother will have a home at the federally subsidized halfway house he's come to love.

So Wollie launches into teaching three foreign celebrities how to cope with the customs of Beverly Hills, improve their English, and become Oprah-ready. And when a coyote-chewed corpse appears in the MediaRex compound, Wollie realizes that her colleagues are concealing some serious secrets of their own.

The Dearly Departed by Elinor Lipman
ebook 1-58836-013-x
iPod Touch, eReader Pro
copyright 2001

With her latest work, Elinor Lipman expertly serves up her usual delicious dish of entertainment. When the story opens, the not-so-sunny Sunny Batten has just received news that causes her to be even more morose than usual: her mother, Margaret Batten, has died in a freak accident with Margaret’s alleged fiancé, Miles Finn. Thus Sunny returns to the small New Hampshire town of King George and to the charity bungalow on the edge of the country club’s golf course where Margaret raised Sunny by herself. While at the funeral, Sunny catches her first glimpse of the brash Fletcher Finn, Miles Finn’s son and self-described possessor of “a heart of plutonium.” And who can’t help but notice, as they sit together at the graveside, the resemblance between Sunny and Fletcher, “the flagrant display, wherever one looked, of Miles Finn’s genes” [p. 79]?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I am incredibly pleased to post this review from one of my real-life and long-time BFFs, Tammy. Especially since I've been so bad at posting lately. I'm also excited to see this review because I have a copy of it waiting for me at the bookstore (I think) along with It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather Armstrong. Enough about me, though. On to the zombies!

Seth Grahame-Smith’s mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a lot like finding chocolate in your peanut butter. Never could two more esteemed genres find companionship. The story is, of course, still Jane Austen’s—often verbatim—but with the much appreciated addition of zombies.

In P&P&Z, the sisters Bennet have all been trained in the deadly arts. They spend their days hunting unmentionables and husbands, Bingley is still dreamy and Mr. Darcy intolerable. The parody of manners and civility remain, enhanced with the burden of proper conduct during battle with either zombies or ninjas. Before roundhouse kicks, one must consider modesty. During their visit to Rosings, Elizabeth suffers Mr. Darcy and the unfortunate transition of her dear friend Charlotte:

What remained of Charlotte would liked to have believed this change the effect of love, and the object of that love her friend Eliza. She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success, for her thoughts often wandered to other subjects, such as the warm succulent sensation of biting into a fresh brain. Mr. Darcy certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind. And upon imaging Mr. Darcy’s mind, her thoughts would again turn to the subject of chewing on his salty, cauliflower-like brain.

Who, truly, has not, on occasion, desired a little blood and gore while reading of repression and propriety? Haven’t we all shared Elizabeth’s feelings toward a suitor at one time or another when she “resolved to hold Darcy’s heart, still beating, in her hand…?” Wouldn’t Wharton’s The Age of Innocence be more satisfying if Countess Olenska became a blood sucking vamp, rather than expiring pathetically of tuberculosis?

Grahame-Smith is also a screenwriter, so a movie version cannot be far behind. Spare us Keira Knightly or Gwyneth Paltrow. Give us the girl who always plays the outsider, a Kat Dennings or Eva Amurri. And LET HER KICK ASS!

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid

A Darker Domain
Val McDermid
Palm Reader edition, December 2008
978-0-06-176189-8

I started reading this on my trusty Treo using eReader. About halfway through I bought an iPod Touch and finished it on there (still using eReader).

McDermid is so good that things that would normally annoy me don't. For example, I don't often find myself liking mysteries that take place over a large amount of time, jumping back and forth from past to present. I'm not sure what it is about this technique that bothers me, I just know that it serves as a red flag warning me that I'm likely to be disappointed.

Here are a couple of my favorite bits from A Darker Domain:

The woman who answered the door had the air of someone who had spent her days lying down so life could more easily trample over her.

--------------------

"It felt like a slap in the face. Nothing glamourous about helping the miners, was there?" A bitter little smile lit up her face. "Could have been worse, though. We could have had to put up with that sanctimonious shite Sting. Not to mention his bloody lute."

From McDermid (via valmcdermid.com):

People sometimes remark that I must work hard to produce a book a year. They look offended when I laugh. Then I explain. And they get it. Both my grandfathers were miners. The one who only had daughters rejoiced that no child of his was going to have to spend a working life underground. Deep underground in the heat and the stink and the filth and the danger, they knew what hard work was, my grandfathers.

I spent a lot of my childhood in East Wemyss, staying with my grandparents. My grandfather once took me underground in the cage, strictly against the rules. I was about six years old, a lover of fairground rides and scary helter skelters. Nothing had prepared me for the way the cage dropped through the darkness, so fast I felt weightless, my stomach left behind somewhere above me. The faces around me, weirdly lit by the lamps on their helmets, were unmoved. They were used to so terrifying a start to their shift. They were destined for eight hours of hell, relieved only by the companionship of the other men on their gang. Me, I went straight back to the surface. My grandfather took me to the canteen for steamed pudding and custard.

Another memory from childhood: a close family friend, Uncle Doddy, was caught in the blast when a fuse burned too fast and a shot fired too soon. His face was wrecked, healing into a mask of scar tissue and blue-black coal tattoos. He lost most of his eyesight, spent months in a hospital bed. Everybody was reluctant to let me visit. They thought I'd be too scared. But it turned out I was too young to be scared. I knew his voice, I knew him. I had no reason to be scared. Other kids, kids who hadn't known him before—they were scared. They were terrified of the man with the melted face.

I didn't realise it then, but those tiny windows into life at the coal face tempered my whole experience of life in a mining village. It saved me from sentimentalising the community spirit that ran through East Wemyss like the veins in blue cheese. It was real enough, that sense of mutual support, that 'kick one and we all limp' mentality. People did take care of each other. It was bred in the bone, a legacy of the grim battles the miners had fought through history to earn respect and a decent living wage. My grandfather remembered when miners were treated as if they were as much the property of the mine owners as the coal itself. He remembered the strike of 1926 when he was barely thirty years old with three children and a wife to support, when they stood in line at the soup kitchen, when he walked twenty miles for a hand-out of new boots for his gang. If you didn't stand together at times like that, you all went under. The miners united will never be defeated.

They played together as well as working together. I remember mass picnics, miners' galas, football matches on terrible pitches, pit bands playing in Sunday parks. I remember visiting my grandfather in the miners' convalescent home when he was recovering from his first episode of heart disease. He'd had rheumatic fever as a boy, which had kept him out of the WWI trenches but not the mines. Years underground compounded the damage. When I was growing up, he'd walked us kids for miles along the beaches and through the woods, teaching us the names of shells and trees. The last few years, he could barely make it to the end of the street. At least by the time he was sixty, they finally had running hot water. And a bath.

Our village got a preview of the devastation that would hit mining communities after they lost the 1984 strike. In 1967 a devastating underground explosion and fire killed nine men. The Michael had been a vast, showcase mine, with seams running under the sea for miles. But there's no way to extinguish a fire like that short of sealing up the shafts. So in 1967 the Michael died and East Wemyss went into terminal decline.

The miners left to find work in other pits, taking their families with them. Only the pensioners were left. As they died off and houses were left empty, so the shops, churches and pubs closed. Then a few years ago, when Edinburgh house prices went through the roof, commuters discovered the Wemyss villages and colonised them. The pit buildings were flattened, the slag heaps trucked away and the Fife Coastal Path was inaugurated. If you want to know the history of East Wemyss, don't bother asking anyone who lives there. Google it instead.

I'm glad my grandfather was dead before Thatcher and her vindictive crew chose the miners to be the sacrificial victims of their policy to emasculate the trade union movement. If he'd been alive, it would surely have killed him to see what happened to his village replicated all over Britain's coalfields. The 1984 miners' strike is part of the history syllabus now. It feels far too recent for history to have weighed those events in the balance. But at least these days, it's not only the victors who have the chance to write the record. A DARKER DOMAIN touches on some of that history. I'm proud that it's also part of my own past.

Links:
Val McDermid talks about A Darker Domain
Interviews with Val McDermid

Life Sentences by Laura Lippman

Life Sentences
Laura Lippman
Hardcover edition
978-0-06-112889-9

I'm in the middle of season 4 of The Wire on DVD (thanks, Beth!), I just watched an episode of the Bill Moyers Journal featuring David Simon, and my new boss grew up in Baltimore. And, of course, I just finished reading Life Sentences. I'm starting to feel a little stalker-y.

Here is how Lippman describes Life Sentences:


(Side note: I first found this video on the HarperCollins site, but couldn't see a way to embed it. Thank you Barnes & Noble for making it easy for me.)

Book description:

Author Cassandra Fallows has achieved remarkable success by baring her life on the page. Her two widely popular memoirs continue to sell briskly, acclaimed for their brutal, unexpurgated candor about friends, family, lovers—and herself. But now, after a singularly unsuccessful stab at fiction, Cassandra believes she may have found the story that will enable her triumphant return to nonfiction.

When Cassandra was a girl, growing up in a racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore, her best friends were all black: elegant, privileged Donna; sharp, shrewd Tisha; wild and worldly Fatima. A fifth girl orbited their world—a shy, quiet, unobtrusive child named Calliope Jenkins—who, years later, would be accused of killing her infant son. Yet the boy's body was never found and Calliope's unrelenting silence on the subject forced a judge to jail her for contempt. For seven years, Calliope refused to speak and the court was finally forced to let her go. Cassandra believes this still unsolved real-life mystery, largely unknown outside Baltimore, could be her next bestseller.

But her homecoming and latest journey into the past will not be welcomed by everyone, especially by her former friends, who are unimpressed with Cassandra's success—and are insistent on their own version of their shared history. And by delving too deeply into Calliope's dark secrets, Cassandra may inadvertently unearth a few of her own—forcing her to reexamine the memories she holds most precious, as the stark light of truth illuminates a mother's pain, a father's betrayal . . . and what really transpired on a terrible day that changed not only a family but an entire country.