book review

Marrow and Bone

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Jonathan Fabrizius is a journalist living comfortably in 1980s Hamburg thanks to a rich uncle, but his thoughts often turn to the Nazi years and the end of WWII when his family fled East Prussia.  His mother died in a cart giving birth to him and that death and the chaos of flight sometimes seem more real than the life he’s living.

Out of the blue, he gets an assignment to travel in a luxurious new Japanese car into former East Prussia to report on local culture while the driver and another passenger record the route for a future rally.  And the fee is tremendous: 5,000 marks with negotiable expenses.

As he thinks of it, “his job was to write an article about the cultural riches of the People’s Republic of Poland.”  Given that he’s traveling through a once-German region that was called Masuria, despite new Polish names for towns, those riches don’t seem very Polish or even much in evidence.  He’s most impressed by a massive medieval fort built by the Teutonic Knights and a huge Gothic redbrick church.  Such churches in northern Europe are his obsession.

The tone of dark and sometimes bizarre humor is set almost immediately by the work his Swedish girlfriend is doing to curate a museum exhibition on cruelty.  She’s gathering materials about massacres and torture with a museum director who actually believes that excessive “pedantry” can be a form of “secondary” cruelty–and so can hit-and-run accidents.

There are no accidents on Jonathan’s off-kilter road trip, but it’s broken up by an unexpected robbery, encounters with curious peasants and obnoxious German tourists, meals that are inconsistent or not available, shabby hotels, and Jonathan’s travel companions. They work for the car company:  Hansi is a famous race car driver with epic adventure stories behind him and chatty Frau Winkelvoss wears twenty-six necklaces, harem pants and a blizzard of scarves as she and Hansi help record the route in meticulous detail. Their “map” will guide drivers in some future rally.

Jonathan’s snark is his shield against feeling anything much at all.  A typical observation: When Frau Winkelvoss can’t get good coffee at a Polish café he notes “Presumably during the war there wouldn’t have been any coffee here under the Germans either.”

The trip into his past (and Germany’s) challenges and then slowly strips away his sarcasm as he comes closer and closer to where his parents died and to an infamous concentration camp–that he can’t get into.

In Europe Kempowski is considered one of Germany’s greatest postwar writers but I hadn’t heard of him until I was on a book tour for the memoir My Germany and a professor said I had to read his book Have You Ever Seen Hitler? It’s based on interviews with people who lived through the rise and ruin of Nazi Germany and had wildly different opinions of their Fuehrer.  The book is a stunning record of a country where many people worshiped Hitler like a god,.

Equally stunning is the richly layered and detailed novel All for Nothing, set in an East Prussian manor house whose inhabitants see waves of refugees fleeing the Russian troops.  That book and this one have particular bite because Kempowski apparently himself witnessed waves of refugees as a teenager near the end of WWII.

Marrow and Bone is a sobering meditation on memory, forgetting, and the price paid for both.

Lev Raphael is the author of The German Money and twenty-six other books in many genres.

Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939

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At a time when democracy is faltering around the world, this brilliant book makes salutary and scary reading.

The author’s aim in the first of two volumes is to strip away myths from Hitler and see him as the individual he was, not just a giant of megalomania and crazed antisemitism. He was petty, vicious, paranoid, deft at spotting anyone’s weaknesses and exploiting them, cruel, socially awkward and proudly uncomfortable with his social betters.  The pages describing his rage dealing with the King of Italy and the royal court on a state visit are truly hilarious and bizarre.  Likewise, it is beyond satire to read about his obsession with flower arrangements at meals and how he stupefied dinner guests with his endless speechifying.

Ullrich takes time in his introduction to survey the major biographies of Hitler and demonstrate quite clearly that they all have one way or another failed to see Hitler in the round because of their narrow focus. His focus is global and mesmerizing. The author is especially good at laying out the complex political currents during the Nazi party’s rise to power and exploring the widespread German longing for a savior. The quasi-religious nature of Hitler’s regime and the ways in which he was basically worshiped by millions as a messiah may remind readers of more current leaders who are also brutally larger than life–and yet very small.

Hitler was a chameleon, a talent actor and a brilliant orator, which readers who have only seen snippet of his speeches and don’t know German cannot appreciate.  Ullrich does a superb job of analyzing one crucial speech after another to demonstrate Hitler’s dark brilliance.  And he’s just as deft at eviscerating the army of toadies and sycophants Hitler surrounded himself with.  Here, the recently available diaries of Goebbels serve as stunning evidence of the hero-worship Hitler thrived on.

A passage near the end sums up his dark talents and how they meshed with the time and the damaged nation he would lead to disaster:

“Never stop–that was the law by which the National Socialist movement and its charismatic Fuhrer operated and which gave the process of coming to and consolidating power its irresistible dynamic. After the great foreign policy triumphs of 1938 [which included dismembering Czechoslovakia], Hitler never for a moment considered taking an extended break and being satisfied with what he had achieved, as Bismarck had done after 1871. He constantly needed new victories to compensate for nascent popular dissatisfaction and to bolster his own prestige. As a result, he was willing to take ever greater risks, and his fear that he would die young lent further urgency and impatience to his expansive activism. Hitler both drove events and was driven by them.”  ★★★★★

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about The Second Generation, the children of Holocaust survivors.  He’s the author of My Germany and 26 other books in many genres.  Special Archives at Michigan State University’s library collects his literary papers.

Hitler’s Little Helpers

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Hitler’s Aristocrats by Susan Ronald could just as easily have been called Hitler’s Stooges. It’s a survey of wealthy and upper-crust Britons and Americans who for various reasons supported and even idolized Hitler in the 1930. Some of them were grotesque and paranoid anti-Semites, others admired the man or were even hypnotized by him. Still others believed in his mission to create a strong, stable Germany–no matter the human cost.

Whatever their reasons, they were wildly deluded and dangerous because they either ignored the truth about Hitler’s Germany or just didn’t understand it. For readers of WWII history in books like The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson or a novel like Munich by Robert Harris, the material here in general might not seem new, though its scope might as you explore the range of this informal international propaganda machine.

Ronald writes in a surprisingly breezy style given the subject matter and calls these people “influencers.” You can decide whether you think that term makes them more understandable or seems too mild for the profound damage they tried to do to democracy and the aid they gave to the dictator and his criminal regime. 

Perhaps most fascinating of all here is the story of British press baron Lord Rothermere and his quixotic-verging-in-nutty campaign to restore the German and Austrian monarchies, believing that Hitler was on his side.  That story deserves a book of its own.

Ronald takes more time than necessary explaining Hitler’s rise to power before we actually see the “influencers” plying their filthy trade.  She also isn’t quite as evocative a writer as Lynne Olson, who’s written extensively about WWII and the lead-up to that war in books like Citizens of London, but she does keep her dark tale moving briskly in short chapters filled with often quirky details.  Like noting that one German émigré  had “irregular teeth, with one tooth on the upper left side of his mouth protruding to force his upper lip over the gum whenever he laughed or spoke emphatically.  At some point during the Nazi rule, he had the offending tooth capped in gold.”  

Make of that what you will, and welcome to a despicable rogue’s gallery of wealthy businessmen, quisling politicians, real and fake nobility and lots of very odd ducks.  Of course the notorious Duke and Duchess of Windsor make their appearance here though readers might prefer a whole book about the couple, Andrew Lownie’s recent Traitor King.

To her credit, Ronald can turn a phrase more often than not, as when she notes that the mass producer of cars, Henry Ford, also mass produced antisemitism via his newspaper and endless crazy pamphlets.

Whether malign, naive, power-hungry or ambitious in other ways, these reckless and ruthless people functioned as a kind of PR Third Column to aid Hitler’s regime and his war effort.  Hitler’s Aristocrats is a solid introduction to a sordid time.  And for readers who want a deep dive in Hitler and his Germany, I highly recommend the amazingly-detailed biography by Volker Ullrich.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations. He is an #SMPInfluencer.

A Death in Denmark

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Danish Gabriel Præst is not your typical PI.  He’s intellectual, dandyish, and upscale.  He quotes Kierkegaard and Sartre, wears designer clothes, loves fine wine and good whiskey (though he’s also a beer aficionado).  His high-end coffee maker likely costs several thousand dollars and he’s fastidious in other ways, too: he’s been working for a decade on remodeling a townhouse he inherited.  Latest DIY problem? Locating more hard-to-find 17th-century Spanish tiles to finish the bathroom that already has a wildly expensive antique French claw-foot tub.

Præst’s main clients are corporate law firms in Copenhagen, and his brief is corporate theft, embezzlement, industrial espionage, corporate corruption, insurance fraud and that old PI standby, adultery.  The man’s personal life is intriguing.  He has a woman journalist friend-with-benefits, gets along amicably with the mother of his daughter, really likes her new husband, and even rents space in the husband’s law firm building.

Unlike most crime fiction–whether screen or book–his daughter in this book is not troubled, difficult or any other cliché of the genre.  In fact, she’s “morally sound, smart, self-aware and courageous.”

The story begins when Præst has been asked by an ex-lover to investigate the case of a Muslim Dane convicted of killing a right-wing politician.  He accepts the case because he’s still under the spell of this ex-.  She’s “the one who got away.”

In a classic genre scene, he’s warned off the investigation by a tough advisor to the Danish prime minister himself.  Of course nothing will stop Præst and every step of his investigation seems to expose right-wing bigotry against Muslims living in Denmark even if they were born there.  As the investigation unfolds, we learn that the victim was secretly working on a book about Denmark’s time under German occupation that might reveal a less-than-heroic role for some important Danes.

The characters are vividly described, the translation from Danish feels smooth and the story is compelling, though readers might feel the author overdoes Præst’s foodie lifestyle since it feels like he’s eating or drinking on almost every page.  And  awareness of his “white privilege” is practically a flag he waves as if he has to prove some kind of point.  A careful editor might have suggested a lighter touch, and did he need to be beaten up so often–and shot too?

However, the author does a good job of leavening this mystery with humor. There’s a constant joke that everyone refers to the mother of Præst’s child as his “ex-wife” when they were never married and it frustrates them.  And some of the best parts of the book are Præst’s sarcastic observations about the difficult weather in Denmark and complaints about people lacking style.  Readers who don’t find the food references overdone may feel like they’ve been given a welcome tour of cool places to eat and drink in Copenhagen.  As well as a style guide for men who want to look like what one character calls “a southern Swedish metrosexual.”

Lev Raphael has reviewed crime fiction for The Detroit Free Press and is the author of the Nick Hoffman mystery series.

 

The New Agatha Christie Biography

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This engaging biography explores why and how Agatha Christie in effect lived a life of disguise: Despite her international fame and mammoth audience, she sought to be inconspicuous.  Not an easy task given that fans could come from as far away as Finland to try to meet her–and bang on her door!

When Christie was growing up, the ideal British woman and wife was like the one depicted in a revoltingly sentimental poem by Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House.”  This ideal figure was meant to be “devoted and submissive to her husband….passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all–pure.”

Christie was anything but passive, however, in both her marriages or when dealing with agents, publishers, and directors.  As a young woman she was funny and flirtatious despite being shy, a great dancer, loved to surf and seemed nothing like the grande dame we see in later publicity photos.  Through most of her adult life she was a “compulsive writer” despite self-deprecating remarks about her work as an author and she could turn out a fine mystery in six weeks when inspired.

If she were alive today, she might be a fan of makeover shows on HGTV because one of her great loves was buying a house, then remodeling and redecorating it.  At one point she actually owned eight homes.

The book devotes a great deal of time to Christie’s famous “disappearance” in 1926 when she seemed to be missing (and possibly dead) for almost two weeks.  Worsley does a fine job untangling what really happened amid of welter of possibilities, and is especially clear on how Christie’s image seemed to suffer at first when journalists and others suggested it was a publicity stunt.  That story gripped England and America, and readers might be surprised at how sexist some of the contemporary analysis of her reasons for going off the grid were.

Curiously, the author doesn’t tell us anything about Christie’s sales figures until almost midway through the book.  That’s especially puzzling for her early books.   Surely sales figures are a significant part of her story as a famously best-selling author who’s sold more books than anyone else in the world?  And how can we judge the success of her early books–or even later ones like Death on the Nile–without comparisons to books by her contemporaries?  Worsley also classes a number of Christie’s techniques as “tricks,” which seems a strange label.  There’s nothing unusual about novelists using real settings and real news stories in their books–it’s common practice.

Mystery fans can sometimes be ticked off that the genre they love is considered inferior  to Literature, but what struck me as revelatory was the sexism she face throughout her career. Christie was demeaned, diminished, and derogated not because of her genre but primarily because she was a woman.  Far too many critics couldn’t resist saying something sexist when they reviewed her books or plays. 

In An Elusive Woman, Christie has found a keen-eyed and witty biographer who honestly assesses her strengths and weaknesses, and makes a solid case for considering Christie one of the 20th Century’s most important writers.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations.  He recently reviewed a collection of Christie ghost stories and a volume of new Miss Marple stories.

Into the Woods with Ruth Ware

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As a crime fiction reviewer, I’ve often had to say, “Sorry, I haven’t read it” when people ask me about a new book.  The reasons can vary.  I might be swamped with review copies.  I might not have been in the mood for that particular book after sampling it.  Or I might be wary of the publicity blitz around the book since I’ve seen so many crime novels over-hyped by publishers and been disappointed when they turn out clichéd or badly written.

But then it’s a wonderful surprise to pick up a book with thousands of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and discover that it truly lives up to the promotional material.  This past week I finally caught up with Ruth Ware’s gripping debut In a Dark, Dark Wood.

After an enigmatic brief prologue, the book opens in a hospital with Leonora, a heroine who can’t remember how she got there but has hands sticky with blood.  Something horrible has clearly happened.  Is she a murderer?  She’s desperate to regain her memory and for much of the book that struggle is a dark, dark thread.

How did she end up in the hospital?  Well, because she should have said no to a bizarre invitation.  Leonora, a crime writer herself, has led a solitary life for a decade after university for undisclosed reasons but readers know they’ll find out and will surely hope there’s high drama involved.  The invitation breaks into her solitude: it’s for what the English call “a hen party” and Americans call a bachelorette party.  Weirdly, she hasn’t been invited to the wedding itself and it takes some coaxing from a friend of hers and the bride’s to say “yes.”

The party is hours from London, very remote, in a big, isolated, ugly ultra-modern house.  Though it’s not haunted, it has far too many large, un-curtained windows and is surrounded by bleak forest.  Everything about it is oppressive, creepy, and exposed.  Tensions soon rise among the motley group of partiers and what seems at first to be an Agatha Christie homage turns violent and bloody.

In the second half of the novel we learn what drove her and her bride-to-be friend apart and while some of the revelations aren’t as surprising as you might wish, they fall into place in a satisfying way.  Ware is deft at building tension, evocatively describing people and places, and the book is explosive in many ways.  It’s also intriguing to read about a crime novelist caught up in a series of mysteries, a woman who might be a murderer herself.  And a woman who by all rights should have been far more wary and suspicious from the start.  When you read a Christie novel, a great deal is revealed in dialogue and readers of this novel should pay close attention to what characters say if they want to figure out what’s really going on in this taut, enticing novel.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other newspapers and public radio stations.  He’s the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries.

Colm Tóibín’s “The Magician” is Anything but Magical

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As a reviewer for many years in print, on-air, and online, I’ve gotten used to books being hyped to help the author gain a foothold in a crowded market.  But the fulsome book jacket copy for Colm Tóibín The Magician, a novel about German author Thomas Mann, is the kind of effusive panegyric that can often make me decide to skip a book because it’s just so over-the-top.

Jacket copy for The Magician raves that “Reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer.” That’s the kind of hyperbole Tóibín’s work has received from critics in the past, and it’s always turned me off.

But I did my best trying to read this novel because a good friend wanted to share it with me and compare notes.

It wasn’t really a difficult decision for me to make, even though I’m not a fan of the author’s previous work.  Thomas Mann, however, is an author I’ve enjoyed in the past.  I’ve read some of his fiction, a biography as well as a biography of two of his children in which he understandably looms large.  Mann was also a favorite author of my late mother, who read him in German, so I have a kind of sentimental connection to him too. 

Mann was a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and is probably best known for his novella Death in Venice (made into a stunning film by Luchino Visconti) and his sprawling novel The Magic Mountain.

The Magician does have have some good period detail of northern Germany in the late 1800s, but I found it very uneven and at times flat and listless. Several things stood out for me as problems an editor should have helped the author fix: Mann writes stories and has them published but we don’t always know what they’re about–why not? This is a book about a writer, yet it doesn’t tell us enough about his writing.

Then Mann writes the novel that made him celebrated, Buddenbrooks, but how long does that take? We don’t know. Again, why not? It almost feels as if the author is doing a Best Hits of Thomas Mann, name checking them as the story drags on and on. And why are some characters described in detail but many others aren’t, even important ones?

Perhaps in choosing Mann, the author was trying to recreate his success writing about Henry James in The Master.   If so, it was a misguided attempt because the book never quite takes wing and is anything but masterful.  Picking up the book wasn’t difficult for me, as I noted above, and neither was putting it down.  Maybe he’d have better luck with a lesser writer like Edgar Bulwer-Lytton who in his day outsold Dickens but is almost unreadable now.  Reading about a faded idol like that might be engaging in ways this book is not.

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and has taught creative writing at Michigan State University.  He’s done 100s of talks and readings about his work in 9 different countries.

“On Royalty” in England and Beyond

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Fans of The Crown or anyone who watched Queen Elizabeth’s recent funeral will love On Royalty, an exploration of the very strange institution of monarchy across Europe.  The focus by English journalist Jeremy Paxman is mainly on the world’s most prestigious and most talked about throne, the English one, but the author also explores monarchies across the continent and through the centuries.

The book is amusing, thoughtful, wide-ranging. A case in point: his account of  Albania and its kings.  There were advertisements in 1913 in British newspapers for a country gentlemen to become the Albanian king after various princelings in Europe were offered the position.  They decline ruling the wild, mountainous little land where clans engaged in ancient vendetta. A local chieftain ended up as King Zog but abandoned the throne after a year, and a highlight of the book is the author’s interview with the current pretender to the thrown, his son King Leka, who seems utterly clueless and delusional.

What does it take to be a king or queen? Birth is the prime requisite but after that, expectations are low: being able to decently deliver a speech that’s been written for you is high on the list. Royalty across Europe seems rarely to have been particularly well-educated, with past multilingual exceptions like Queen Elizabeth I and the more recent Queen Margarethe of Denmark.

The right religion counts too, not just in terms of whom you marry.  There’s a good deal of fascinating detail about Queen Elizabeth’s deep religious feeling, some of which came across deftly in The Crown.

The author has a gift for well-crafted, dramatic anecdotes; his storytelling never lags and he always offers insight and entertainment. Paxman’s analysis helps explain both the global fascination with royalty and how monarchy survives today “not by any will of its own, but by the collective delirium of its citizens.” 

As Paxman says early in the book, many kinds of monarchs are accepted: “good or bad, saintly, lecherous, wise, stupid, athletic or indolent.  All will be tolerated because those who believe in the hereditary principles necessarily accept that their heard of state will not be there by election, talent, or ambition.  No other area of human activity is so easily reduced to three essential transactions of birth, marriage and death.”

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and has seen his work studied in university classrooms, written about by academics, discussed at academic conferences, and translated into 15 languages. 

The Marvelous Miss Marple

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I discovered Agatha Christie in junior high school at my local library and was usually more interested in reading about Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple than anything my English teachers assigned me for homework. Christie’s characters were unfailingly intrepid as detectives and their cases deliciously mysterious. While I could never remotely match their sleuthing skills, I didn’t mind because the journey was enjoyable and the solutions so satisfying.

Given that Poirot was Belgian and my parents had lived in Belgium, it was Miss Marple who actually seemed more exotic, living in an alien-to-me world of gossipy small towns, vicars, cottages, servants, gardens, servants, endless cups of tea and glasses of sherry.  And she was such a delightfully unlikely  amateur sleuth, given her age and retired life, yet as keen-eyed and sharp-witted as Sherlock Holmes, though far less arrogant. 

I especially loved it when she discoursed on the nature of the human heart and evil in the drawing room, and I relished the way people underestimated her ability to pierce what might seem like an impenetrable fog around a murder.  My students at Michigan State University enjoyed her too when I taught The Murder at the Vicarage, Christie’s first Miss Marple mystery.

Val McDermid pays homage to that fiendishly clever novel with her standout story in Marple, a book that collects twelve new Miss Marple stories by an international array of bestselling women crime writers like Kate Mosse and Ruth Ware.  McDermid’s story, wittily titled “The Second Murder at the Vicarage,” is filled with dry dialogue and lovely clues.  And its vicar isn’t remotely as stupid and unbelievable as the one played by David Tennant in Netflix’s appalling new series Inside Man.

The Marple anthology isn’t rooted in England, but also takes Miss Marple abroad to New York, Cape Cod, Hong Kong and Italy.  That last locale is the setting for Elly Griffith’s luscious “Murder at the Villa Rosa” which opens with the elegant, mouthwatering line “It’s not necessary to travel to a beautiful place to commit murder, but sometimes it does help.”  The gorgeously written story about a crime writer haunted by success is a pleasant surprise.  Though Miss Marple’s role is a minor one, something she says proves to be pivotal.  Of course.  Perhaps most surprising in this glittering volume is Miss Marple’s response after she unmasks a murderer in Leigh Bardugo’s complex “The Disappearance.”

Throughout the volume, Jane Marple twinkles, knits, drinks tea, calmly spies on neighbors, assures her friends that murder is much more ubiquitous than they imagine, softly jokes about mystery novels vs. real life, and glows with quiet fire.  One character in Ruth Ware’s “Miss Marple’s Christmas” amusingly praises her ability to solve crimes by saying she has a mind “like a bacon slicer.”  Ware’s plot turns in part on a story by another mystery legend, Dorothy L. Sayers–what a treat for fans of both authors.

These highly entertaining stories make for a wonderful vacation and are a fine tribute to the genius of Agatha Christie.  All the authors deftly play with the sharp contrast between Miss Marple’s appearance and her dark knowledge, as expressed in “The Murdering Sort” by Karen McManus where Miss Marple notes that “no one is ever the murdering sort until they are.  The least likely people can shock you.  Young mothers, elderly clergy, esteemed businessmen. You can’t rule out anyone, I’m afraid.”

Lev Raphael was a long-time crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and is the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries which have been praised by reviewers across the U.S.

 

“The Favor” Needed More Suspense

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The husband and wife team who write as Nicci French are acclaimed as “masters of psychological suspense” and their latest, The Favor, has the short chapters we expect from suspense novels.  But “masters”?  A major secret is pretty obvious from the prologue onward, and that drains a lot of energy from the over-long, over-crowded story.

Jude is a London doctor whose ex-boyfriend Liam re-enters her life after eleven years and asks for a favor he won’t explain.  Liam wants her to take his car and drive to a rural cottage, use his credit card en route and not her own, then meet him when he arrives later by train.  The favor has to be kept absolutely secret, and  Liam will only tell her what’s going on when he gets there.

She says yes.  And why?  Because after the two of them survived a car accident as teenagers, his life turned out badly while hers was a relative success, so she feels guilty.  That’s supposedly it.  But it doesn’t quite add up, and if you read the prologue carefully, you’ll guess what her real reason is, something the authors reveal about two hundred pages into the book.

Liam is murdered and having said “yes” to his request gets Jude involved in a police investigation where she’s a prime suspect and the detective sounds more like a therapist than an investigator.  When it’s exposed, Jude also has to explain her bizarre behavior to her fiancé, her parents, Liam’s parents, Liam’s unsavory friends and Liam’s lover in a round of cringe-worthy encounters.  

She plunges more deeply into the mystery of what Liam was up to when she discovers he’s made her one of the executors of his will and she agrees because “for whatever bizarre reason, he had chosen her for this task.”  Well, that’s just half the story: she has a profound reason to agree, something that would make almost anyone feel indebted and we can guess way too early.

Liam’s financial affairs were a total mess and people keep telling her to back off, but she doesn’t.  She feels so helpless and trapped, though, that it’s hard to believe she could help anyone as a doctor. Jude is the kind of heroine who viewers would yell at when she’s on a TV or movie screen: “Don’t do it!”  Though she’s supposed to be a competent doctor, she seems clueless and lacks agency, and the authors at times seem to be indulging in what crime fiction fans call “femjep.”

Jude lets herself be repeatedly insulted and these interactions are annoying–more seriously, she doesn’t seem much interested in who might have killed Liam until after p. 300.

Despite its flaws and extraneous detail, the book has some good lines in it.  Like this one when she heads home after a long shift at her hospital and feels a migraine coming on: “Jude held her migraine at bay all the way home, pushing her bike for the last mile as if a moment of clumsiness might tip the pain over like a scalding liquid.”

Migraine sufferers might of course wonder why she chose to ride her bike instead of taking an Uber….

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed for The Washington Post and a handful of public radio stations.  He’s the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries.