OPEN HOUSE by Elizabeth Berg

Finished Sa 9/28/19

This is a hardback that I borrowed from Janny. She said that this was one of her favorite authors, and if I liked Ann Tyler Elizabeth Berg would be a shoo-in.  She was right!

Samantha Morrow is a woman who was happy, satisfied, and content in her marriage in upper-class, suburban Massachusetts. Until her husband, David, walks out. 

Sam and David; son- eleven year old Travis

Veronica- Sam's mother

Rita- Sam's friend who lives in California

Lydia and Thomas- a couple in their eighties. Lydia is Sam's first roommate.

Edward- an older gay man who becomes Sam's roommate.

Lavender Blue- a college student who becomes Sam's roommate. This young woman is depressed and has a very negative outlook. She leaves and was never a good fit.

King is an overweight young man who falls in love with Sam. He has a graduate degree from MIT even though he takes temp jobs that are far below his capacity.

Sam takes temp work suggested by King. This is also the reason that she takes in boarders. I think she also wants to recreate a 'family'. And, she does. 

For almost the entire novel Sam would take David back in a second, but she finally realizes that the relationship is dead. She wants someone who can accept her for who she is and allow her to grow. David would not allow this...ever.

The writers page on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Berg_(author)

From the book's page at Amazon:

"Samantha's husband has left her, and after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany's, she settles down to reconstruct a life for herself and her eleven-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tries to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. The first is an older woman who offers sage advice and sorely needed comfort; the second, a maladjusted student, is not quite so helpful. A new friend, King, an untraditional man, suggests that Samantha get out, get going, get work. But her real work is this: In order to emerge from grief and the past, she has to learn how to make her own happiness. In order to really see people, she has to look within her heart. And in order to know who she is, she has to remember--and reclaim--the person she used to be, long before she became someone else in an effort to save her marriage. Open House is a love story about what can blossom between a man and a woman, and within a woman herself".

I loved the book and will read more by Elizabeth Berg. I thought the writing was chock-full of wry humor and charming insights.

THE FAR FIELD by Madhuri Vijay

The September 2019 selection for the Contemporary Book Club

Finished Tu 9/24/15

'THE FAR FIELD'; A hollow book that I learned nothing of the major  political and social elements of the story. A complete absence of exotic or local color. It could have happened in Peoria. My least favorite book of all of the books picked by the book club.

********After the book club meeting I changed my mind on the book. I listened to the podcasts by the author and listened to the discussion about the book by the members, and I think that I now appreciate the book. The theme is that Shalini is on a hero's quest, but she's in way over her head. She ends up hurting the people that she was trying to help. And they resent her and are unforgiving.


Shalini ("Murgi"- chicken)- The protagonist of the story

Bangalore- pop. 12 and a half million
Kishtiwar- pop. 131,000
1,900 miles between the two cities. America is approx. 2000 miles east to west

Shalini's mother commits suicide by drinking pesticide.

Her mother calls Shalini 'little beast'

Shalini gets 12,000 rupees to make the trip; $169
Pays Amina or Zoya??? 500 rupees for rent; $7

Bashir Ahmed- this is the peddler from The North Country who visits Shalini's mother and they, along with Shalini for a kind of relationship.

Abdul Latief
Zoya. The couple that take Shalini in when she travels to Kishtiwar.

Riyaz is the son of Bshir Ahmed and he lives in a small village within sight of Kishtiwar,
Amina is his wife and their son is Aaquib

Mohammad Din is the village elder and councilman. His daughter is Sania who Shalini teaches.

Stalin- a young soldier who hassles Shalini

Brigadier Reddy is a friend of Shalini's father and he has his soldiers get Shalini out of Kishtiwar during 'the troubles'.
Ramchand is Reddy's personal assistant

Shalini sleeps with the general. Why????

Comment on GoodReads: her naiveté, thoughtlessness, and selfishness rather repellent.

Bengaluru

Kashmir is contested by India, Pakistan, and China

"The Far Field is the recollections of Shalini, a thirty year old privileged woman living in Bangalore who shares what happened to her when, as a twenty-something grieving the death of her mother, she decided to track down a traveling salesman from Kashmir who visited their home (and who her mother was fascinated with) when she was a child/teenager."

This book was a spotlight into how the rich and powerful really hold the lives of the poor and disempowered in their hands, and how actions, whether malicious, or casually thoughtless, or even made of misdirected helpfulness all lead to the same thing.... the theme of cowardice.

CADILLAC JUKEBOX by James Lee Burke

Finished Tu 9/17/19

This is one of my ancient paperbacks and instead of throwing it away, I'll give it to Janny. It's got about one more read in it. According to the flyleaf, I bought the book at West Branch on Sa 2/7/04 for a quarter. I finished it the first time on Sa 2/20/06 after I had scheduled all Fridays off until April.

I love everything by James Lee Burke and last week I got his very first novel and another early James Robicheaux from Amazon. All the books are full of interesting characters, with colorful names, and compelling plots, and this book was no different.

The central plot is the murder of a black 60's civil rights advocate by a North Louisianan red-neck , Aaron Crown.
However, here's the twist:

Aaron Crown really did kill civil rights advocate, Ely Dixon, but it was by mistake. Crown went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon, but didn't know that he had moved, and he murdered Jimmy Ray's brother in error. He wanted Jimmy Ray dead because he had gotten Aaron's daughter, Sabelle, involved in the prostitution rackets. Ely Dixon was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because there was so much hatred for civil rights workers at the time, it was just assumed that a white supremacist had done the deed.

There is also a very strange and evil white couple in the novel. Buford and Karyn LaRose are a very wealthy and influential family in the area. Buford is a powerful political figure and will be made governor, and Karyn was an early love of Dave Robicheaux's. Dave is married and in love with Bootsy, and resists Karyn's overtures. It's revealed that Buford isn't really crooked, but it is Karyn who is caught  up in the evil of the area.

From the novel's page at Amazon:

"No one was surprised when Aaron Crown was arrested for the decades-old murder of the most famous black civil rights leader in Louisiana. After all, his family were shiftless timber people who brought their ways into the Cajun wetlands--trailing rumors of ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Only Dave Robicheaux, to whom Crown proclaims his innocence, worries that Crown had been made a scapegoat for the collective guilt of a generation.

But when Buford LaRose, scion of an old Southern family and author of a book that sent Crown to prison, is elected governor, strange things start to happen. Dave is offered a job as head of the state police; a documentary filmmaker seeking to prove Crown's innocence is killed; and the governor's wife--a former flame--once again turns her seductive powers on Dave. It's clear that Dave must find out the dark truth about Aaron Crown, a truth that too many people want to remain hidden."

13 STEPS DOWN by Ruth Rendell

Finished Th 8/12/19

This is one of my hardbacks that I first read and finished Fr 2/16/07. The note on the flyleaf says that I took 'E-Time' at 1115am due to an antifreeze leak in Brown's truck on the way to Godfrey/ Maryville.

Ruth Rendell is a master at creating a snapshot of the mind of a madman. She really makes evil understandable.

Michael (Mix) Cellini is a young man who repairs exercise equipment for a living.

He lives in an old and disheveled house owned by Miss Chawcer. He has the attic apartment and it's 13 steps to his door.

He is obsessed with a 1950's killer, Reggie Christie.

The house is in northwest London and also the neighborhood of Christie, but his house has been torn down.

Mix is also obsessed with a London super-model, Nerissa.

Mix tracks Nerissa to a gym owned by Madame Shoshana.

Nerissa didn't workout at this club, but visited Madame Shoshana to have her fortune told.
While at the club Mix meets Danila who worked as a receptionist.

Mix dates Danila, but murders her because she disrespected the poster of Nerissa that hung in Mix's room. He puts her beneath the floorboards in the next room, but Miss Chawcer suspects something so he buries Danila in the garden.

Mix thinks that he is seeing the ghost of Reggie Christie, but it is really an asylum seeker from Iraq that is secretly living in the house.

From the review at Kirkus:

"Another brilliantly rendered Rendellscape in which the central figure is the blond, blue-eyed psychopath next door.

They are the essence of ordinary, Rendell’s monsters—no one’s ever sure how to describe them. Eyes? Well, maybe blue, maybe gray. Hair? Blond probably. Or maybe blond fading to brown. Like Michael Cellini—the latest in a long list of unremarkable archfiends from Rendell (The Babes in the Woods, 2003, etc.)—they are meticulously designed to pass in a crowd. Michael calls himself Mix, and we meet him first in the grip of one of his two obsessions. The street where John Reginald Halliday Christie, famed serial killer, formerly lived, has been obliterated, replaced by what Mix calls up-market soullessness. Mix is outraged. Christie’s house should have been preserved as a museum, Mix as curator. Why not? Who, after all, knows more about Reggie? And then there’s Mix’s new landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer: elderly, eccentric and a snob. She views Mix as irredeemably vulgar, resents the straitened circumstances that compel her to accept him as a lodger. Perfect embodiments of class warfare, the two detest each other on sight, and this will have chilling ramifications. In the meantime, here’s Mix’s second obsession: a beautiful young model named Nerissa Nash. On his wall, there’s a poster of her, iconic. He worships at it, idealizing her and wanting her passionately. In the weird, parallel universe he’s created, she wants him with equal fervor—so that what he conceives of as wooing, she, in terror, considers stalking. And, inevitably, this, too, will have the chilling ramifications that have become Rendell’s nail-biting stock in trade.

Masterful, as usual. No one does evil better."

From the Penquin Random House page:

"Mix Cellini has just moved into a flat in a decaying house in Nottinghill, where he plans to pursue his two abiding passions–supermodel Nerissa Nash, whom he worships from afar, and the life of serial killer Reggie Christie, hanged fifty years earlier for murdering at least eight women. Gwendolen Chawcer, Mix’s eighty-year-old landlady, has few interests besides her old books and her new tenant. But she does have an intriguing connection to Christie. And when reality intrudes into Mix’s life, he turns to Christie for inspiration and a long pent-up violence explodes. Intricately plotted and brilliantly written, 13 Steps Down enters the minds of these disparate people as they move inexorably toward its breathtaking conclusion."

I found out that several years ago a two part mini-series was made of the book. I will be watching this on YouTube this afternoon when I workout at Planet Fitness. 

PIGTOWN by William J. Caunitz

Finished Su 9/8/19

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I first read and finished "mid June of 2002".

I am a sucker for the Police Procedural Genre set in NYC during the seventies through the nineties, and this one was right up my alley.
'Pigtown' no longer exists (now the area is 'Wingate'), but it was in Flatbush and it was a kind of agricultural area of the city. As late as the 1930's it was still possible to find shanties with goats and pigs in Brooklyn. This area was the location of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1912 to 1957.

The novel begins with the discovery of a body stuffed in a refrigerator. Beansy Rotulo was a minor 'made man' in the mafia and he was gunned down and placed in the fridge by two members of a Rastafarian gang.

The house where the body was found was owned by  Andrea Russo, a woman who worked in a bar owned by Paddy Holiday. This man was a retired IAD cop and was working for the mob while on the job and still was a player.

Matt Stewart is the protagonist and he is a detective working at the NYC'Seven One Division'.

The most interesting part of the novel is about the widespread police corruption.

In 1963 there was a meeting called the Knight's Roundtable where the police commissioner asked the Intelligence Division what would happen if the department did away with 'good money'. 'Good money' was the phrase used to explain graft paid on gambling, prostitution, and loan sharking- anything but drug money.

So what they did is to put Frank Serpico, a lily-white, clean cop, into the most larcenous police district in the entire department.  The Knapp Commission came in and shut down all sources of 'good money' and this opened the floodgates for drug money. This allowed the drug cartels to turn NYC into a wide-open drug supermarket by the  70's. And the kickbacks from 'good money' to 'drug money' expanded from thousands of dollars to millions.  The police bosses were able to funnel most of the money to themselves under the new 'drug money' system.

I couldn't find anything on the Internet about this 'Knight's Roundtable' (in the book the name refers to the police commissioner by the name of 'Knight'), but something like this probably happened- A pact between the police and the mob.

 From Publishers Weekly about the book:

"The gritty realism of Caunitz's new novel (after Cleopatra Gold), as in his earlier ones, reflects the more than two decades he spent with the NYPD. Caunitz's cops sound and act like the real thing, and his villains, while occasionally over the top, are fetchingly sinister (only the extravagant, mostly illicit sex here comes off as more fantasy than reportage). The murder of small-time hood Beansy Rutolo in the Brooklyn neighborhood dubbed ``Pigtown'' has a special significance for Lieutenant Matthew Stuart: the deceased's unexpected testimony once saved Matt's father from being kicked off the job for political reasons. Now the effort to track down Beansy's killers is revealing corruption that reaches deep into the Department-and goes back years. Matt is struggling with assorted personal demons too-the tragedy that ended his marriage; his secret relationship with a superior officer known as the ``Ice Maiden''; and an attempt to frame him for dereliction of duty. Caunitz's prose is flat-footed, weighed down with mundane detail, and his theme of ancient, festering corruption was old hat when Teddy Roosevelt was the city's police commissioner. Still, his feel for cops and cons matches anyone's, as evidenced once again by this flawed but still engaging novel, a police blotter come to life. Author tour."

A MORNING FOR FLAMINGOS by James Lee Burke

Finished We 9/5/19

This is a paperback that I recently ordered from Amazon and received on Sa 8/24/19.

An earlier work about The Cajun Detective, Dave Robicheaux. I loved this one, and all of them!

The novel begins when Dave and his partner are transporting two prisoners to Angola. One young black kid, Tee Beau, who is accused of killing his boss. He allowed a truck to drop on his boss mechanic. The man was under the truck and the kid knocked over the jack. And, another man, Jimmie Lee Boggs, who is a vicious killer for the mob.

They stop because Boggs claims he needs the restroom, and there was a gun hidden in the toilet left by his girlfriend. Boggs kills Dave's partner, and badly wounds Dave. Dave crawled away and Boggs sends Tee down with the gun to finish Dave off. But the kid shoots into the weeds and Dave is later found and rescued.

Dave is on disability for a few months and during this time he is approached by a federal agent and asked to take part in a sting to bring down Tony Cardo, a new crime boss in the area.

The scam is to let the street know that Dave is a washed up drunk and has been dropped from the force, and he's interested in making a big dope deal. He has hundreds of thousands in fed money to make it look like he's legit.

The interesting 'hook' is that while Dave is setting up Tony Cardo, he gets close to the man. Cardo has a crippled son that he loves and he also shared some of the same experiences as Dave had in Vietnam. And both Dave and Tony struggle with substance abuse.

Dave reconnects with Bootsy, the first love of his life. And later he learns that she is suffering from Lupus. She had married one of the local crime bosses and this man is dead and she runs his 'mobbed up' vending machine business.

Clete Purcell is also in the story. He helps Dave in the sting even though other law enforcement agents do not trust Purcell. He runs a bar in New Orleans on Decatur Street.

I loved the book and I want to read all of the Robicheaux series.

A description of the book from its' page on Amazon:

"In a muddy, weed-filled coulee, Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux begs an escaped convict for his life and is left more troubled by his lack of courage than by his gunshot wounds. Burke ( Half of Paradise ) proceeds to balance the resulting self-doubts of his tough, sympathetic hero with a complex, credible plot in his latest Cajun mystery. Robicheaux, a widower, leaves his small town for New Orleans, where he used to be a cop, to run a sting operation for the DEA. He engineers drug buys aimed at incriminating the local drug lord, an ex-Marine with nightmares and a habit from Vietnam, while trying to ferret out Jimmie Lee Boggs, the killer responsible for the coulee incident. Vivid supporting characters include Robicheaux's former NOPD partner Clete Purcel; an old true love now the widow of a Mafia figure; Gros Mama Goula, a juju woman; and Tony Cardo, the jumpy dealer whose inner struggles reflect Robicheaux's. Attentive to language and atmosphere, Burke delivers action on churning Gulf waters, in city streets, in deserted fields and within the souls of his memorable characters--and a fully satisfying resolution".