FASCINATING, JARGON-RICH DETECTIVE NOVEL DELIVERS A PUNCH

Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

ISBN: 9781250013309

A 2013 hardcover release from

Minotaur Books. 308 pages

It’s not difficult to understand why this novel won the Private Eye Writers Association award for best first. Here’s a fresh, intriguing voice, vibrant characters that make you want to know them better, and a wandering, complicated, story that is frustratingly incomplete by the end of the tale.

Littered with jargon and slang some of which is pretty obscure, the book sucked me in from the first page because its principal characters are so different and so appealing. Clayton Guthrie is a little detective. We know that because the writer refers to him exceedingly frequently as the little detective. Yet, before the tale is told, he casts a long shadow, based on his years of experience, his basic humanity, and his understanding of the ways of the unseen world. He hires a young Latina who is looking for a better path in life. Fresh from high school, possessor of a quick analytical mind and great good looks, Raquel Vasquez at first finds routine surveillance boring and the pay isn’t much. Then comes a meaty case.

Afghan veteran Greg Olsen has been jailed for murdering his fiancé, wealthy Columbia University student and heiress to a publishing fortune. New York police have enough evidence to go to trial so they aren’t looking for alternative possibilities. Guthrie thinks Olsen is probably innocent and we’re off and running, because he knows he has to find the real killer, not just open questions about the validity of the case against the veteran

A large portion of the novel involves the clever use of the denizens of the big city who exist in the unwashed armpits and smelly crotches of New York. The language feels gritty and authentic, even though sometimes hard to follow. The plot makes sense, the characters, as written, belong in their scenes and act logically. Everything works. It will be interesting to watch this author’s development from this raw state to succeeding stages.

NEW COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ABOUT THE BEST WRITER IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Living With Shakespeare  

edited by Susannah Carson

ISBN: 978-0-307-74291-9

A 2013 Vintage Original release

from Random House. 493 pages.

A very long time ago, my parents collaborated to make to me a gift of a beautiful book that my father originally acquired in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1928. “The Complete Dramatic and, Poetic Works of William Shakespeare,” was compiled and discussed by Professor Frederick D. Losey of Harvard. The book was published in 1926 by The John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia and Chicago. It is a beautiful leather-bound volume of thin gilt-edged pages. The book survived our travails in Goodwell, Oklahoma, between 1930 and 1938. I treasure and refer to it often. And I had the great good fortune to perform a minor part in a community theater production of “Othello,” a good many years ago.

And now there is a companion book, about which, I cannot say enough good things. “Living With Shakespeare,” is a series of essays from a wide array of writers, directors and others about their lives with this astounding writer’s works. Some are funny, some of them are irreverent. Some will engender disagreement and all will add to our understanding of the greatest writer in the English language. Ask yourself; how it is that 400 years after he lived, his plays are being re-interpreted, his sonnets sung, his insights helping us to better understand ourselves?

The book is smoothly organized with a few fine photographs scattered throughout the thirty-eight original essays from the likes of Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, Isabel Allende, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley and James Earl Jones. Readers should not neglect to read the excellent introduction by Susannah Carson. Bravo to all the aforementioned individuals, as well as those who produced this handsome volume. Readers should not pass by Harold Bloom’s precise and pointed Foreword that echoes the question so often asked in literature classes, “Why Shakespeare?” And the answer comes still, after four hundred years. “Who else is there?” Who else, indeed.

MINNETONKA ART CENTER

One of the worst kept secrets of the Twin Cities art Scene, the Minnetonka Art Center. Here's their website:
Minnetonka Art Center. Right now they have two interesting exhibits up. The largest is from the MN Watercolor Society, their Spring Exhibition. Some outstanding watercolors. One or two artists seem to have cheated (a little) and combined some acrylics as well.
It's a very nice exhibit, well-mounted in a truly excellent gallery space.

The other exhibit I confess a personal interest in: My sister-in-law Mavis, a long-time member of Manamore has been included in their show of  32 pieces. We attended their opening at which the accomplished Minnetonka String Quartet played for a while.

It was impossible to get a picture of Mavis and her photograph without reflection from the glass. But, you can go see the picture in person.

LOCAL PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS

Good daily journalism is still all alive and well in Minnesota. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis has won two Pulitzers. One is for local reporting. Three reporters won for a story on the alarming rise of deaths in homes where child care was being performed. The other award is for editorial cartooning. This makes four for the Star-Trib. The Pulitzer is the highest honor achievable in journalism, awarded annually by Columbia University in honor of the great publisher, Joseph Pulitzer.

WHOSE NAMES ARE UNKNOWN--astounding novel

Whose Names are Unknown

by Sanora Babb

ISBN:0-8061-3712-6

A 2004 trade paper release from

University of Oklahoma Press.

222 pages

It’s 1938 and a young talented, adventurous woman from the Oklahoma panhandle lands a job with the Farm Security Administration in California, working with the refugee farmers from her home state. These were the people of the high plains who saw their farms and their lives blown away in the horrendous dust storms of the nineteen thirties. The camps in California were one legacy of the Dust Bowl.

Out of that experience, those associations, Sanora Babb fashioned this novel, a first-hand up-close story with intense empathy and understanding for the people. The novel has an interesting and unfortunate history. In 1939 the author submitted her manuscript to a New York publisher, Random House. The publisher’s editor, Bennett Cerf called the novel an exceptionally fine piece of work and planned to publish it. A few months later, publication was halted in the face of the huge success of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”

Sanora Babb went on to a strong literary career, authoring five books and numerous shorter pieces published in the top literary magazines of the Twentieth Century. Now finally, sixty-five years late, this moving, intimate novel is seeing daylight. Is it as good or better than Steinbeck’s? Read it for yourself and judge. This is no grand pronouncement to illuminate the scope of what we know as the Dust Bowl Years, “Whose Names are Unknown” looks poverty and deprivation in the face and deals with the lives and deaths of those most materially affected.

Babb’s writing is clean, she wastes no words and the narrative voice brings her fascinating characters to the pages in a way that will remain with the reader for some time. This is truly a novel to savor.

STANDALONE SCORES BIGTIME

Ordinary Grace   

by William Kent Krueger

ISBN: 1-978-4516-4582-8

A March 2013 Atria release in

HC and as an e-book.

To maintain complete transparency, Mr. Krueger and I are long-time friends, we frequently travel together as the Minnesota Crime Wave, and I received a pre-release copy of this book at no cost to me.

“Ordinary Grace” is a standalone novel, a project the author has long desired to write. The book is significantly different from his multiple-award-winning Cork O’Connor series. Yet there are links to the thoughtful, carefully structured, series of crime novels. In one sense, for those so inclined, a case can be made that here, Krueger addresses the ultimate mystery. “Ordinary Grace” benefits from everything the author has learned over the years writing the O’Connor novels. It is directly and powerfully written, wasting no words, yet always moving the story ahead at appropriate pace, depending on the actions of the characters and the plot. “Ordinary Grace” is a novel that will affect readers in unusual, interesting and, quite possibly, surprising ways.

Set in a small community in southern Minnesota in 1961, this is how the story begins: “All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota.” The narrator is an adult white male, son of the Methodist minister in town. Frank is recalling the momentous events of that bygone summer when he was but thirteen years old, a teen-ager on the cusp of young maturity. The death of that child sets in motion events and revelations of suppressed attitudes that alter the lives and futures of many people in the town. Some of the people affected are important and wealthy, others, as plain and ordinary as one could imagine. Yet everyone in the novel is required to come to terms to greater or lesser degree, with who they are and how they must relate to family, friends, members of their faith, and how they function in the wider yet limited community. What Frank learns that summer, and equally importantly, how he sees and interprets the evil and the grace of that time, will affect him for his entire life. It’s an important lesson.

Krueger’s writing, as always, is smooth and strong and the logic of the plot is easy to follow. While the story has many layers, there are no convoluted or tricky passages readers will have to struggle to interpret. That’s part of the book’s charm and its strength.

The novel explores faith, mysticism, and rationality in thoughtful, even-handed and open ways that lend itself to recollection and continuing reflection, regardless of readers’ experiences in those areas of life. The characters, and there are many, are carefully and consistently well-drawn. This is a novel of discovery and exploration, for the author and for readers. A well-done reading experience for anyone.