A Woman of Mystery

I put this book on my queue courtesy of Carrie at Mommy Brain. Interred with Their Bones is an amazing first novel from Jennifer Lee Carrell, an Ivy League English lit. scholar whose first book was about the history of smallpox. Except for the fact that I am in the middle of a reading willpower exercise, I wouldn’t have put it down for a minute!

(I have written in my other blog about the challenges of being a reading addict; the willpower exercise is an effort (hopefully to be more of a long-term habit) not to let reading subsume my entire life – silly, I know! – but instead maintain balance with pesky details like dishes, laundry, sleep, children… So it did take me two whole days to string together the necessary minutes to finish the book!)

This mystery takes its grounding in two pieces of Shakespearean scholarship: an historically documented but missing play (Cardenio); and the lively debate around whether the glovemaker’s son from Stratford is the true author of the incredible body of work given his name. The protagonist is a Harvard Shakespeare scholar turned director, Kate Stanley, who is drawn into a globe-crossing chase of mayhem, murder, and Shakespeareana by her mentor.

This is an intellectual mystery. There is an extraordinary level of intricacy throughout, and the author deftly avoids turning that into a slog through a mire of words. The amount of attention given to the plot does result in the characters being less deeply formed than I would have wished, but I am a character-driven reader and I still felt good resonance with them. Carrell creates an evocative environment for the story as well, taking us on a three-dimensional journey through locales such as the renovated Globe Theatre in London; the Widener Library at Harvard; and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, to name just a few.

As a point of reference, this book had a similar feel to the best-seller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which I also very much enjoyed (and which comparison is common in reviews of the book). Not being Catholic, or even religious, I had no problem with Brown’s adaptation of some of the wilder theories of Christianity into his book; other readers might appreciate the greater historical authenticity of Interred with Their Bones. All in all, a wonderful read, highly recommended by me, your guide – a solid A, 4.5 of 5 stars, etc., etc. Enjoy!

I have been quite busy this month, mostly because my partner has been overtaxed with his consulting and our free time was more limited. I have managed to read some books, but they’ve mostly been of the interlibrary loan, must-return-in-two-days, nonfiction variety that were therefore reviewed at my other blog.

I couldn’t let an entire month go by without offering a review for you to ponder, though, so I pulled out a book I haven’t read in quite a while, and gave it a whirl.

Whose Body? is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers. In introducing this intriguing character – a younger son of an aristocratic family, a seeming dilettante, collector of rare books, yet also a shellshocked survivor of World War One and a pretty egalitarian guy given his socioeconomic class – Sayers skillfully builds a traditional whodunit. The alert reader who pays attention to detail will make note of the subtle information that eventually leads to the killer, and the reader who enjoys simply reading without attempting to presolve the mystery will find plenty of good dialogue and narrative to entertain them.

I went on to read the entire Wimsey series and enjoyed them all very much; in fact, this was probably my least favorite. That had very little to do with Sayers’s skill or the mystery itself; both are quite good. However, the suspected victim in this book is a rich, self-made Jewish financier who convinced an ‘otherwise well-bred’ English lady of the upper class to marry him (by the expedient of them being in love). I do not know whether it represents Sayers’s personal prejudice, or more generally that of the era she was writing in and about, but there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this book. I suspect it is the latter, as there is no continuation of this effect in the other books. Still, it made this first book a bit uncomfortable to read, and I remember experiencing trepidation as I was preparing to read the second Wimsey book.   Since there was no recurring anti-Semitic theme, I read as I said the entire series, and I don’t hesitate to recommend them to others.

This is book 24 in the Eve Dallas series by J.D. Robb (a pseudonym for Nora Roberts). These books are futuristic police mysteries; they are very light and rather formulaic, your basic literary junk food. Eve is a NYPD cop in 2150 or thereabouts; she’s married to the richest man in the world. (This is a facet of almost every Nora Roberts book I’ve ever read, and I’ve probably read almost 100 of her books. It’s not always the fella who’s rich, and they aren’t always billionaires like Roarke, but the intended couple will always end up upper-middle class at the lowest!) These books also fall into the traditional romance novel trap of the man always being just a bit more together than the woman – just enough to save the princess, as it were.

Still, as I’ve disclosed, I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s books and I continue to read them, just as I continue to have a Twix bar every once in a while. The character of Eve Dallas is stimulating. She was a terrifically abused child who became a homicide cop; she is a major control freak and she hates emotional scenes. Still, she is also sensitive and loving and committed to her work and her friends, and the struggle between the aspects of who she is frequently takes center stage. I like her quite a bit, and enjoy seeing the blend of power and vulnerability that is in all of us.

This particular volume dealt with the murder of an innocuous schoolteacher, for which no satisfying motive could be found.  It became obvious to me fairly early who the murderer was, not from any clues in the plot itself but from the nature of the character; the ability of such a character to commit a murder meant a large deviation from normal psychology and that deviation was quite apparent in the behavior and dialogue.  I don’t generally read a mystery with the intent of figuring the solution before it is revealed, so it didn’t bother me to know, any more than it bothers me not to know.

I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this book or this series except to a reader looking for a very particular type of literary experience.  The futuristic cop mystery is heavily saturated with Nora Roberts’s experience as a romance novelist.  (In other words, there are the requisite scenes of passion, complete with “throbbing members” and so forth, as well as the relationship dynamics I described above.)  The plots are solidly devised, but also deviced – they follow a predictable formula – although the information revealing the killer isn’t always so awkwardly developed as in this particular book.  If your preference is for a junk food book, you may just enjoy this one, though.