murder

Review: Dark Irish Mystery

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★★★★★

Celebrated author John Banville’s latest novel is a slow-burn mystery simmering with secrets, fears, and sins. Almost everyone in it seems a bit off in one way or another, including Detective Inspector Strafford. He’s a fascinating character: brooding, alienated from himself, his feelings, and even the woman he thinks he loves. “It sometimes appeared to Strafford that his life was a series of tableaux as elaborate, studied and unreal as a stage performance at Versailles at the height of the reign of the Sun King.”

The mystery opens in the 1950s with the discovery of a flashy car in the middle of a rural Irish field and a peculiarly calm man claiming that he and his wife have argued, she’s run off and he’s been looking for her. Has she had an accident, committed suicide, or just abandoned him?

At a nearby house where the police are called, the couple renting the place for a week seem to know this man but pretend they don’t. When the local cop shows up, he’s drunk, which adds to the peculiar buzz underlying every word and glance of these people. The mystery fades in and out of view from that point, seeming to parallel a previous mystery Strafford and his pathologist colleague Quirke were involved in. At the end of the novel we find out why that other case lingers here.

Along the way we dive into and out of Strafford’s ambivalent love life and alcoholic Quirke’s profound loneliness. This is where some of the book’s best, most moving prose can be found. And writers who want to polish their dialogue can take a master class from Banville in Chapter 5 where Strafford and his estranged wife have a long conversation that’s quietly nasty and deeply unsettling for both of them. It’s a scene I read twice because it’s so finely crafted. 

There’s also a dazzling, deeply moving foray into the depths of mourning and loneliness which details how badly Quirke is badly coping with the death of his wife. Banville paints the portrait with elegant, moving brush stokes: Quirke feels as “if nothing had happened. The blunt, unceasing continuity of things, baffled him, affronted him. It was a scandal, the entire indifferent business of being alive.”

Equally as fascinating for this American reader, there are many smarky interactions where people recognize with great accuracy each other’s origins and religion based on their accents, something that does not have the charm of anything Henry Higgins sings in My Fair Lady.

Adding to the overall melancholy of the book is the deft description of scenery and the weather which is grim whether the summer has gone on too long or winter rain is pelting down. Physical and emotional atmosphere is everything in this novel.  The Booker Prize-winner is a masterful writer about anything that has been lost.  Here’s how colleagues feel after their boss has died:

“Yet his going left a vast and unfillable absence. It was as if a sacred idol, present for so long that even the attendant priests had ceased to take much notice of it, had been stolen by some sacrilegious vandal, and suddenly the rgeat, glittering temple was reduced to bricks and mortar, and nothing remained of its former sanctity, save a wisp of incense and a gleam of light through one corner of a stained-glass window.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

Review: Must-read Social Media Satire

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★★★★★

Jesse Sutanto’s searing satirical crime novel is set in LA among the world of TikTok and Instagram influencers who are all desperate to be skinny, beautiful, and have millions of followers no matter what their online “niche” is.  Not just any kind of skinny, mind you, but “LA skinny.”

Successful influencer and gifted schmoozer Meredith, whose super power is making people like her, was offering “beauty and fashion advice with sass” until her fan-protégée Aspen led her into “momfluencing.”  That’s content aimed at mothers of all ages to show how their lives can be fabulous and efficient at the same time. It seems like a deliciously inventive, smooth road that all-too-soon turns rocky.

Aspen was struggling hard until she met Meredith in person. She’s got three kids, one of whom has diabetes; no insurance; and a resentful, low-earning husband. As she puts it, she feels “like I’m on a hamster wheel, needing to come up with nonstop content to feed the perpetually hungry social media machine. But my family, spoiled by my success, had no idea how I was breaking my back to earn as much as I could for their sake.” 

Originally, Aspen only had a measly five thousand measly followers. Under Meredith’s canny guidance about “looks” and content, Aspen soon outpaces her mentor and her numbers blow up. But major success is a torment because it’s absolutely voracious–it makes her hungrier for more, more, more.  She’s increasingly desperate to churn out video and photos of her home and family to show how perfect her life is.

And pretty soon, the All About Eve bell starts to ring as the two women’s friendship goes downhill–and takes a wonderfully bizarre and vicious detour halfway through the book.

Dealing with racism and greed in subtle ways, the novel is alternately hilarious and chilling, an indictment of social media fakery and emptiness. I read it straight through, laughing on many pages, appalled on others, and transfixed by the author’s keen eye for detail and paradox.  She’s also given her dual narrators, Meredith and Aspen, pitch-perfect voices–and that extends to all of the minor characters too, including the kids.

Sutanto excels at hitting readers with the unexpected, and there are several jaw-dropping twists near the end along with what feels like a super-subtle reference to Sharon Stone’s Diabolique.  And then there’s the ever-delightful satire of LA:

“LA is full of wannabes.  It is weary of wannabes.  Its skin has been hardened by cynicism (and Botox), and it has no time for wannabes.”  And it’s “the land of over-the-top emotions.  When it comes to emoting here, you’ve got to go big and fake, or go home.”

I don’t dog-ear books, but I did find myself putting Post-its on page after page and even reading memorable passages to my spouse, like one about a picture-perfect dinner Asp[en cooks that is a total, tasteless sham. 

You Will Never Be Me can be seen as a beach read, but that doesn’t do it justice.  Sutanto’s thrilling, electrifying novel is an evisceration of how social media oppresses and intimidates far too many people and can ruin their lives when it’s ostensibly doing the very opposite. It’s also a fast-paced and thrilling story of narcissistic friendship and betrayal. 

I bloody love this book.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

Strangers on a Crazy Train: Book Review

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★★★

So there are these two contract killers who meet on a train to Paris.

That’s not the start of a joke. It’s the opening of It Had to Be You, an often bizarre novel labeled “romantic suspense” by the publisher. 

Jonathan and Eva are lonely and self-pitying sociopaths who feel most alive when they’re killing someone and earning huge fees from the respective agencies that send them out to commit murder. When they first meet on that Eurostar train, they end up having wildly intense and athletic sex on a luggage rack in the baggage compartment.

Sound improbable?  Well it’s even more so when you consider that drug-addled Jonathan has a bullet in his chest as well as what might be a concussion.  Also improbable: the fencing class where Jonathan’s neck gets cut by the teacher even though his face mask should have included protection for his neck. Likewise the scene where the two killers have a seven-course meal together at a tiny French restaurant whose owner’s name is Gestalt (!) and we only hear about the salad and the snails. Given that Jonathan’s a metrosexual sophisticate in Tom Ford suits, it’s weird that he doesn’t even discuss the wine.

After that first erotic onboard collision, he and Eva have been drawn back together because Eva feels that he ghosted her when in fact he just passed out in one of the train’s toilets. But he must be a horrible person for mistreating her, and because her job is killing horrible people, she becomes obsessed with revenge.  So she gets assigned to take him out. Jonathan, on the other hand, had plans for blockbuster sex on his mind, not murder. He’s been longing for one more magnificent encounter with Eva because he is “obsessed, magnetized, dangerously in lust.” 

Their paths cross again and again through the book with multiple plot twists amid the sex and violence. Both hired killers are surprisingly reflective about their lives, their outsider status, what it’s like to stalk and kill an assigned victim. This can sometimes makes for mordant comedy as when Eva thinks, “I know he’s lying to me, even though I’m lying to him, too….it’s how every relationships starts.”

But there are also lines that are laughable in and of themselves: “I want to touch her, but not so much, not all at once.  It is overwhelming.  I have been cooking her for so long that she burns.  I need to take her in slowly.  Blow on her first.” They’re almost redeemed by spots of lovely writing when the author describes Paris, something she excels at.

The publisher is targeting fans of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Killing Eve, and perhaps folks who remember Prizzi’s Honor. It’s ultimately a very dark book that draws you deep into Eva and Jonathan’s sociopathy and trauma. Can they have a lasting relationship while the body count around them keeps mounting? The sketchy last pages seem to say yes because they feel like they’re setting up a sequel.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed books for The Washington Post and several public radio stations in Michigan.

Review: Goth Girl, Interrupted

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★★★★

Agnes Corey isn’t your typical New York editorial assistant.  She hasn’t earned a degree in publishing, didn’t go to a ritzy college, and her past is “a story of abandonment, foster homes, petty crimes, and state institutions.”

She works at a near-bankrupt Manhattan legacy publisher that hasn’t had a best seller since the early 1990s and is likely to be swallowed up by a conglomerate. That might explain why even as a probationary hire, she’s grossly underpaid, earning much less than the current real-life average salary for her job.

Corey is troubled, vulnerable, poor, plagued by nightmares and memories of her mentally ill mother. Adding to the misery is being so broke she can only afford to live in a crummy hostel until luck and daring take charge of her life. She’s hired to help a famous, reclusive author of a very Gothic novel adored by millions, the novel that put her publishing house on the map. Fans have been ravenous for more content from author Veronica St. Clair, a sequel to be exact, because the first book had an ambiguous ending.

The mansion Corey comes to at night and in the rain (of course!) is like every castle or mansion from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontës to Shirley Jackson and beyond: eerie, overwhelming, oozing menace and mystery. Even better, it was once a mental institution and like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it seems a bit mad itself.

The author name checks plenty of celebrated Gothic works, and the novelist’s name even echoes the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert.  Goodman deftly deploys time-tested Gothic tropes: scary scenery, shadows, the damsel in distress, exploring dark corners, paranoia, claustrophobia, imagined phantoms, dreadful weather, real and misplaced fears–and of course the house that seems like a brooding, malevolent being.

The author can even make the West Village in Manhattan seem creepy and mysterious–at least at night.  She also writes good satire of the publishing business while giving it the ironic hipster appeal of vinyl and flip phones.

As the novel develops, Corey’s nightmares are so intense that they bleed into her everyday reality, in part because she’s a sleep walker. When she starts taking dictation from the reclusive author whose life might echo the storyline of the original best seller, is that fact or fiction?  Is she a remotely reliable narrator?  If she is, can we trust Veronica St. Clair?  The novel more and more feels like a Russian nesting doll as stories keep appearing within other stories.

Readers may either be fascinated or thrown by the way the book slowly drifts into a tale of drugs and Goths in New York whose soundtrack could easily be Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. And the focus on Corey’s dreams can sometimes feel excessive.  For a deeper immersion in the Gothic style, I highly recommend Sarah Perry’s brilliant, beautifully-written novel Melmoth which revisits the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin and turns it inside out.

Lev Raphael spent his senior year of college reading all the classic Gothic novelists, some of them in period editions.  The author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery, he has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other outlets. His most recently published short story “Lost in London” is a Gothic ghost tale.

Review: “Shanghai” Is a Great Wartime Thriller

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★★★★★

Like Alan Furst and C.S. Harris, Joseph Kanon has a remarkable gift for time travel. Open one of his novels and you’re immediately immersed in the sights and sounds of another era–and something even better: how people thought in that period, what they feared, and what they dreamed of.

That gift is on rich display in his new novel, Shanghai, set in 1939 when part of that city was basically a European-controlled enclave–or colony. Take your pick. It’s been the destination  for European refugees, many of them Jews, who have fled the Nazis and the inevitable war that will plunge Europe into complete and utter chaos. But while they may be safe in Shanghai in one way, there’s the threat of what Japan, which now controls vast swathes of China, might do if their army decides to seize the city. The “island” they cling to could sink at any moment.

Tension and fear permeate the book, infusing the staccato, jittery dialogue and a narrative that is filled with sentence fragments. Kanon has made those compelling stylistic choices to better plunge us into the lives of refugees who have nothing and now live in a chaotic and dangerous work of smuggling, drug dealing, gambling, prostitution, gangsters, and murder.

The hero is Daniel Lohr who’s escaped from Berlin thanks to a mobster uncle in Shanghai paying for his first-class passage from Trieste. As a writer,  Daniel has had no real involvement in anything illegal before, but he learns quickly what the “smart play” is in every situation when navigating the murk of Shanghai’s criminal night life and hyperactive underworld. 

Daniel’s deftness at negotiating comes perhaps too fast to be completely believable. Yes, he was in the nascent anti-Nazi resistance, but he never got a real foothold there before he had to flee from the Gestapo. Ironically, on board the ship from Trieste, he meets Colonel Yamada, a member of Japan’s version of the Gestapo, and their lives become balefully intertwined once they reach China.

Yamada is man whose every word, smile, nod, and glance seems like a move in three-dimensional chess. An on-board scene where he subtly spars with a Jewish table-mate is a chilling masterpiece of threatening understatement. 

As one high-ranking criminal in Shanghai puts it, however, “The Japanese are the war lords now. They want tribute [and they] really believe they’re a superior people.  So they underestimate everyone.” That of course includes Daniel who becomes more and more enmeshed in his uncle’s business.

One of Kanon’s other gifts is the ability to write about sex in a way that is not remotely mechanical: he doesn’t just move bodies around like erotic puppets but stays focused on what the characters are thinking and feeling. They’re people, not just an assemblage of parts. Here’s a brief sample from aboard the ship to Shanghai when Daniel sleeps with another penniless Jewish refugee, Leah:

“Afternoon sex was slower, exploring, running his hand over her skin as if they had all the time in the world.  Nights were like the first one, furtive, rushed, one ear cocked toward the hall, half expecting footsteps. Every night. The sex fed on itself, their last meal, greedy for crumbs. Again and again, the hunger part of some larger defiance, outrunning whatever was chasing them. You can’t get me. Not a romance, an escape.”

Shanghai is a short, lean novel, not remotely as dense and enveloping as Kanon’s Alibi set in post-WW II Venice, for instance, but it punches way above its weight with gripping characters and scenes, and an explosive finish made for a miniseries.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and the author of nine mysteries and one thriller, along with seventeen other books in many genres.  Raphael has also reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations in Michigan where he had his own interview show. His author guests included Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, Julian Barnes, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

 

 

England’s Medieval Game of Thrones

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While history buffs are likely very familiar with the Norman invasion of England in 1066, they might not know as much about the preceding half century and this epic book fills that gap.

It was a time of violence almost beyond belief, though it might remind readers of early 1900s pogroms in Russia and October 7th in Israel. Raiding Vikings from various countries as far away as what became Poland weren’t satisfied with just burning Anglo-Saxon towns and cities to ash–even if they’d received gold and silver as ransom. They raped women and cut off their breasts, threw victims into fires to burn alive, speared babies to death or smashed their skulls, and hanged men by their privates when they weren’t beaten, clubbed, or hacked to death.  The survivors often became slaves.

Strife seemed almost constant, with Anglo-Saxon and Viking armies “marching back and forth and up and down the length of England for years, each time inflicting punishment on whatever unlucky locals got in their way, for not having sufficiently resisted the previous conquerors.”  And as if that wasn’t bad, in Normandy, nobles were known to “tear each other to shreds and destroy themselves, for they lust after rebellion, love sedition, and indulge willingly in treachery.”

In both countries, alliances between factions and families could shift with stunning speed, oaths were followed by betrayals that were followed by promises of fealty, exiles and returns were as common as brothers having their own brothers murdered and treasuries raided. Feuds simmer and erupted and died down again, only to savage a new generation.

In these sometimes hellish landscapes, castles were besieged and destroyed and rebuilt, farms were burned, cattle slaughtered, and danger and death were omnipresent–and likewise disease, since the Anglo-Saxons had no understanding of hygiene. They used water riddled with garbage, human waste, and animal corpses. “Random death was so common in England that the Anglo-Saxons had a word for it, aelfscot, ‘elf shot,’ struck down by an invisible, otherworldly arrow.”

And among the various kings, lords, and chieftains on both sides of the English Channel (or “The Southern Sea”) there were plots, coups, murders, betrayals, assassinations and enough violence to make the series Vikings look like something from the Disney Channel.

Parallel to all this madness and dislocation was the quiet, steady, painstaking work of monks copying manuscripts in scriptoriums, work that was encouraged by Alfred the Great to save such treasures for posterity. That very human impulse to save learning and wisdom is both touching and fragile, because raiders had no use for books and loved burning them.

There’s what seems like a cast of thousands here and the names like Aelgifu are hard to scan, but the author does a decent job of individualizing people and separating legend from fact, as well a immersing you in a period that is at times both familiar and utterly alien. Hollway is especially good at charting the changing names of places from Latin to Danish to Old English and Modern English, helpfully explaining the roots of those names. All the same, the fusillade of names can sometimes be exhausting, especially when someone has two or more different names. And there’s way too much speculation about what people might have done or said or felt. 

Beyond that, this book that has two main faults, both of them inexplicable: there are no maps and no genealogies whatsoever, so it’s hard to picture where cities, counties, and countries are located when they’re mentioned, and hard to remember who’s related to whom–and how.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other news outlets as well as for several NPR radio stations, one of which hosted his interview show with guests like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

 

Downton Shabby

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Brandy Schillace’s debut mystery The Framed Women of Ardmore House is a classic fish-out-of-water crime novel.  Jo Jones may have a drab name but she’s a fascinating woman: autistic, divorced, broke, an editor who loves mysteries and classic literature, and the surprised inheritor of an English country mansion.

It’s not remotely a show place. The once-magnificent gardens are dilapidated and the house is a wreck: there’s a major roof leak, filth, mold, and water damage throughout, and it’s all overseen by a creepy caretaker who has boundary issues. 

Not surprisingly, he’s soon dead with Jo as the prime suspect because they’ve argued and she had him fired. As you might expect from an author who’s been a professor of Gothic Literature, the lights often go out in this book and there’s a mysterious portrait that Jo finds hanging in the wrong place before it disappears completely. The hunt is on!  Who was the woman, who stole the portrait and why? That’s Jo’s mission while the police zero in on her  as the murderer because of her barbed interactions with the caretaker.

Schillace has skillfully made Jo’s autism turn her into a suspect because her behavior is awkward to say the least. She seems to those around her either strangely detached and unemotional when you’d expect the opposite–but she can also flare up and panic. She can ramble and is frequently inappropriate in her questions and answers. As a stranger who is truly strange in the eyes of almost everyone in town, Jo is a magnet for suspicion. 

But Jo has a keen memory that makes her a terrific amateur sleuth even if she sometimes has trouble reading people. Conversely, she can see connections that other people can’t and can make those connections faster. 

Book lovers of all kinds will relate to her because she lives in books, noting “Always, I love words. The way they look and feel and smell. It’s hard to explain. Words have just always been my people. And I don’t forget them after I read them.”

This is a charming mystery with bite and filled with wonderful observations. Like these about the stodgy detective investigating the murder: 

He did not want to be in the incident room on a Saturday. He wanted to go for a walk with the dog he didn’t have (but kept meaning to get) and have a pint somewhere with real food and the general hum of humans.  Murders were damned inconvenient.

That parenthesis is delicious and so is that last line worthy of P.G. Wodehouse, though I suppose he would have used “dashed.”

With plenty of suspects, the book is a fine blend of darkness and light and will make an entertaining weekend read wherever you are.  ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, Jerusalem Report and several NPR stations in Michigan. His suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award finalist.

Family Drama and Mystery

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Two very different families are central to the plot in Nina Simon’s debut mystery Mother-Daughter Murder Night, and given the recent fires in California, it’s not surprising that fire is just as pivotal.

Fire, and fiery women, even if they’re cool on the outside. Lana Rubicon is a super-stylish “diamond-hard” realtor who’s been forced out of work and has retreated from chic, high-energy LA to a small town up the coast. She moves in with her somewhat estranged daughter Beth needing support during cancer treatment. Will this highly critical woman work Beth’s last nerve? And where does her granddaughter fit into the family geometry?

The other family’s toughest member is wealthy Diana Whiteacre whose first husband was a young duke and whose ailing father is a local landowner. His death pits her and Martin, her Maserati-driving brother, against each other since they have very different dreams for the ranch that they’ll inherit. Martin’s a bit too smooth for his own good.

The men in this novel are either pushy-verging-on-aggressive, or less than competent in contrast to the deeply resourceful women of all ages. And that’s just fine, since Lana’s barbed view of men and power permeates the story and she offers a steady supply of wit and hard-earned wisdom.

There are some minor mysteries tied into the main one that involves two murders and those aren’t too hard to unravel (and neither is the murder weapon), but Simon does a good job of shifting suspicion back and forth among various characters as Lana, Beth and Jack become embroiled in solving the crimes. At great risk to themselves, of course.

Simon’s people are real, her prose is taut especially when describing pain and physical peril, and she excels at making you feel transported to places you’ve never seen. Here’s Lana gazing out a window late at night:

The moon was full above the slough, and the whole world looked flattened out in grayscale wispy clouds, grainy fields, fast-moving current.  Glints of moonlight bounced off the water where harbor seals surfaced, hunting crabs along the mud flat that edged the slice of beach behind the house.

Simon cleverly gave Lana a very rare American surname, Rubicon, to recall the famous decision Julius Caesar made when he crossed the river of that name in 49 B.C.E, breaking Roman law to bring troops into Italy for the first time. The characters in Mother-Daughter Murder Night keep crossing one kind of boundary or another and that makes for an entertaining read.

Simon’s afterword adds another layer to everything in the book, since she wrote the novel when her mother developed lung cancer and they both needed distraction and a project. As such, it’s a powerful gift.  ★★★★

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries set in the hothouse world of academia.

“The Street” is Too Easy to Figure Out

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It’s no surprise that Anna and Peter have been moved in The Street from London to a brand-new, upscale, little development in Scotland because they’re in witness protection.  Anna’s experiencing high anxiety, she and Peter are very much at odds, and their new home is too meticulously furnished and equipped.  The street of eight houses itself is on the creepy side: “perfect white cubes with their perfect gardens.”

Tension mounts when Anna starts meeting the neighbors, all of whom live in identical homes whose doorbells play the same annoying tune.  You start to wonder: Are they cult members?  Aliens?  Spies?  Is this some weird kind of prison?  The enclave is gated and there are security cameras, okay, but why does Anna have a very intrusive phone app?

Something is definitely amiss on this street, because no matter who Anna talks to after her boozy first night (more about that below), she experiences “an odd sensation, a shift in the atmosphere that seemed to happen every time she spoke to one of the residents.”

Their next-door neighbors seem like fun, drink a lot, and enjoy Indian food just like Anna and Peter, and the four of them have a hard-drinking, hilarious night before the couple have settled in (or tried to).  But the day after, those neighbors have disappeared and their house is totally empty. Everyone on the street denies they were even there. . .

It’s an intriguing hook if you’re going to be hooked.

As the book progresses, we learn through flashback chapters more about how the couple came to be ripped out of their London lives and planted in Scotland, and why they might be in profound danger.  She’s a writer and he’s a carpenter but each of them is far more complex than they first appear to be, and they have some ugly stuff to hide from the world and each other.

Holliday writes keenly about fear, paranoia, and how married couples can work each other’s last nerve and not have any idea who they’re really married to. She builds tension skillfully and  keeps you actively guessing as to what’s going to happen next. 

All the same, the  book has a gigantic sinkhole of a problem: the explanation for all the strange behavior on Anna’s street was so obvious early on that you may wonder why Anna couldn’t figure it out herself.  After all, she’s a crime novelist.  The time changes throughout the book complicate the storyline, but they don’t camouflage the excruciatingly simple solution that’s apparent before the book truly takes off.  This is a mystery that’s ultimately not mysterious enough. ★★

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer at The Detroit Free Press.

Murder Most Foul

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Before you even turn The Girls over to read the blurbs on the back or open to read the publisher’s description on the inside jacket, you know you’re in for a lovely, barbed treat. The cover illustration is by Edward Gorey and that means you can expect sly wit and unusual mayhem.

Susan and Janet have lived a harmonious and very busy life for almost a decade near a picturesque English village doing picturesque things to stock their odd little shop in town. They keep free-range chickens and bees, sew and cobble.  The store is filled with their fresh eggs; jams, preserves, and chutney; honey combs; clogs; home-made aprons and cloth belts; their prize-winning elderflower wine–and even labor-intensive goat cheeses.

The two women have a busy and apparently satisfying life until Susan goes off to Greece to find herself and something unusual finds Janet: a one-night stand that leaves her pregnant.  It’s her first time with a man, so that’s either luck or misfortune, how she and Susan react is worthy of a miniseries.

Bowen is absolutely brilliant when it comes to charting the highs and lows of an intimate relationship, the swift changes of mood minute-by-minute as well as over months and even years.  He finds comedy there, and tragedy too.

The writing throughout is rich with color in descriptions of flowers, shrubs, flowering trees, do-dads and knickknacks, and the narrator is like a deadpan story-teller trying hard not to smirk because she knows you’re going to be surprised and doesn’t want to give anything away.  I had to read passages aloud to my spouse because they were so amusing, as when Bowen writes that “the sound of raindrops on the window was like hundreds of old gentlemen rustling the pages of the Financial Times.”

At times you may feel like you’re in wacky P.G. Wodehouse territory: the adventures of an escaped pig which will surely make you laugh aloud.  At others, you’re entering the realm of Patricia Highsmith where the quotidian is most definitely going to be exploded.  I was also reminded of Stella Gibbons’ satirical Cold Comfort Farm, but Bowen has his own voice here and his own style because his narrator is so wonderfully intrusive and even challenging.

Special kudos have to go to the book designer: The Girls isn’t just a pleasure to read, it’s a distinct pleasure just to hold in your hands.  Readers should be grateful for the publisher’s mission to reprint forgotten novels that deserve new audiences–and do so with elegance and style.  This is must read for anyone who’s a fan of British fiction, crime fiction, and comic stories set in supposedly bucolic towns. ★★★★★ 

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and several public radio stations.