Innocent in Death by J.D. Robb
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.
New books in from the library
I just got the first four of the Irene Adler books, by Carole Nelson Douglas, in from the library. However, tech week is starting for my chorus, which means rehearsals or concerts every night tomorrow through next Sunday. I don’t anticipate getting to finish anything to review until April is here – I may not even get to start one! I have a review to write up for the newest J.D. Robb book as well, and that I may get to.
One Across, Two Down by Ruth Rendell
The traditional appositive for Ruth Rendell is “today’s Agatha Christie” (or something of the sort). She’s never had a mysterious disappearance, but Rendell has been writing mystery novels for more than forty years; she has twenty books in her Inspector Wexford series, starting with her first book, as well as 28 non-series books and sixteen short story collections. She happily goes where Agatha never went, though.
I’ve read all the Wexford books and enjoy them; this year I started reading chronologically through her non-series books. One Across, Two Down is the fourth of these, from 1971, and it packs a punch. Agatha made the murderer the protagonist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but you didn’t know it; in this book you very much are in the story from the beginning from Stanley Manning’s murderous perspective. Funny thing, though: he doesn’t actually murder anyone until the last page.
While the Wexford books are a serious character series, I feel Rendell takes her stand-alone books into a far grittier place. They explore deeply what what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “the line dividing good and evil [that] cuts through the heart of every human being” (from The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956). Beyond this, in every character she traces the darkest emotions: stifling panic, crowing sadism, numbing despair. Bewilderment, defeat, pity – all the feelings experienced by those inhabiting the space around murder.
Are these depressing books because of their darkness? I don’t think they are, but I’ve never been afraid of seeing or even experiencing darkness; it’s an important part of reality and to my mind serves paradoxically to illuminate the human condition. The actions of darkness may sometimes be evil and destructive, as with murder; the darkness itself simply is, without judgment. (Remember that the actions of darkness can also be creative and good, like the writings of Virginia Woolf.)
I’m excited to see where else Ruth Rendell goes in her writing; she packs a lot of talent and I’m only up to 1976!
Welcome to A Woman of Mystery
I spend a lot of time reading books – reading and singing are my two main hobbies. I read books across many genres, but like most people, I do have a favorite genre: mystery. And within that genre, I greatly enjoy reading books by women authors and/or with a female protagonist.
For 2007 I decided to start keeping a book journal, not just of mysteries but of all the books I read. Primarily, I think this will help me keep track of books I read in advance of needing them for homeschooling, which is the educational path for my two girls (11 and 7) and my boy who is only a toddler. I also enjoy giving books as gifts, except that reading so many books makes it hard to remember whom I’m inspired to gift!
It recently came to me that since I do make a concerted effort to read a specific subset of the mystery genre, I could build a blog that was limited to that theme. I have a personal blog, Closer to Fine, which contains entries on a diversity of things that interest me, but it appeals to me to take what I know about these books and start another blog. For now, I decided to host the blog at WordPress (which is the blog software that I use for Closer to Fine), but I splurged and bought the domain names for A Woman of Mystery with the thought that if this proves successful I can migrate the blog to an independent location.
Anyway – Welcome!
