We’re well into fall now, with the clocks about to go back to Standard Time and the ghouls and goblins all set to trick and treat just a couple of weeks from now. Beach reads may have passed into the rear-view mirror and the return of school upped the pace of daily life, but longer evenings and cooler weather also add to the appeal of escaping into a well-written novel. Here are three books we loved this month to get you started.
Magda Alexander, Murder on the Golden Arrow (Hearts Afire Publishing, 2021)
As must be clear by now, I read a lot of historical mysteries. Even the regular historical fiction that I read benefits, in my view, from a touch of mystery, although there’s a wide stretch between questions that need answering—which I try to include even in my own novels—and classic mysteries with their multiple suspects and tightly plotted solutions.
So what sets a series apart for me, to the point where it becomes a book I loved? The Kitty Worthington Mysteries, of which this is book 1, are a great example. The main character has just returned from finishing school in Europe (where she has learned not only how to tell a salad fork from a fish fork, as the blurb asserts, but self-defense in case of danger), and she’s on her way home to England when someone dies in her train car and the police suspect her brother. Naturally, she steps in to save him, if she can.
But it’s 1923, and her mother has other plans for Kitty: to marry a nobleman, if possible (Mom doesn’t much care which nobleman). Although Kitty herself has no plans to wed in her early twenties, she hates to disappoint her mother, so she plays along, even though the most attractive man around happens to be the supercilious detective handling her brother’s case.
The setup is familiar, and that’s what makes this series such a good example of what pulls me into a book. Kitty is smart, self-aware, close to her family, and willing to accept help wherever she can find it—even from the police. She doesn’t throw herself into danger unnecessarily but instead reasons things out and mobilizes support. Her reasons for getting involved are personal, compelling, and believable. She has a distinctive voice and her own take on things, one appropriate to her place and time. The writing flows, with sharp descriptions and flashes of humor. I rejoice that this book is the first of many. That the whole series is available on Kindle Unlimited is just another plus.—CPL
Hernan Diaz, Trust (Riverhead, 2022)
Trust, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is broken up into four sections. The first section—“Bonds,” written by the fairly well-known (and fictional, of course) author Harold Vanner—is a short novel about an extremely wealthy, turn-of-the (twentieth)-century New York-based financier and his reclusive wife. The second section, “My Life,” starts out as a memoir, but its author, Andrew Bevel (the same wealthy financier Harold Vanner’s book is based on), never completes it. The third section, “A Memoir, Remembered,” is written by Ida Partenza, the young woman Bevel ultimately hires to ghostwrite his memoir for him. The last section, an autobiographical manuscript titled “Futures,” is written by Mildred Bevel, Andrew’s reclusive wife, and discovered by Ida Partenza many years after both Bevels have passed on and their personal papers have been opened to the public.
Because Trust is presented in tidy packages, it’s much easier to follow than it may sound. All of them are stylistically differentiated. Andrew Bevel’s writing, sprinkled as it is with notes to himself about topics he intends to flesh out later, is nothing like Harold Vanner’s, which is fluid and precise. And while Ida Partenza is charged by Bevel to write his memoir in his voice, her memoir is about the year she works for him, so of course it’s written in her own engaging style. Mildred’s manuscript is the poetic jewel of the lot.
In fact, one could say the entire book centers around Mildred, who is basically unknowable until we get to her manuscript at the end. Vanner paints her as a kind-hearted, supportive, music-loving philanthropist who, fragile since childhood, begins to break down sometime after the stock market crash in 1929 and winds up in a Swiss sanitarium. In his novel—in which Andrew and Mildred Bevel go by the fictional names of Benjamin and Helen Rask—Helen’s physical devolution in the sanitarium is a direct result of Benjamin’s bad decisions regarding her medical care, which, like everything else in his life, he controls. When the Vanner novel comes out, Bevel is furious to see that Vanner has saturated it with such untruths, hence his motivation for attempting to write a memoir that he believes will clear his name. His contract with Ida stipulates that she will sit in his office while he “tells” her about his and Mildred’s life, and she will take notes for the book he is paying her to write. But the first thing Ida notices is that Andrew Bevel is not forthcoming at all about anything other than his business successes, especially regarding Mildred. The Mildred he describes is so vague, so nonspecific, that Ida becomes deeply intrigued, and even after she is no longer working for Bevel, finding out who Mildred really was and how she died becomes her life’s work.
Trust is set against a background describing the financial history of the United States from colonial times onward. That may sound dry to some, but like its format, it only adds to the beauty of this fascinating, clever, and important novel. Trust could easily be classified as a suspense novel, a risky search for truth in a world where it is so easy—for the very rich at least—to bury it.—JS
Percival Everett, James (Doubleday, 2024)
Sly and subversive, poignant and humorous, James, the lauded retelling of the Huck Finn saga, deserves the praise.
The story is told from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huck on his adventures on the Mississippi. We get to know Jim, who prefers the name James, as an intelligent and moral man whose emotions are almost entirely shut down. The scrutiny of White people has forced James into an emotionally dormant state, where he accedes, outwardly compliant. His inner world is focused on the need to maintain the pretense of stupidity, laziness, and occasional joviality that is expected of a slave. We experience the variety of White people we meet through his perspective, from the outright abusive to those who fancy themselves kind to those who support freedom for slaves until their own financial needs are involved.
The novel begins with James’s decision to escape, when he finds out that his apparently well-meaning owner, a widow, has decided to sell him, which will mean permanent separation from his wife and child. When young Huck, the son of an abusive drunk, runs away as well, James and Huck partner together to navigate the Mississippi River. Huck, as a poor White child, has almost as little agency as James himself, and Huck becomes increasingly aware of the world’s injustice. One adventure follows after another, leaving the reader on the edge of her seat. Some escapades are hilarious, others truly disturbing, but they all serve to make James aware of a deep, cold rage that intensifies as he encounters mostly greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy.
Part of Percival Everett’s brilliance is his handling of dialect, a minefield for many authors. Everett, who is Black himself, has the slaves in James speak in the culturally expected way for their masters, meaning they use incorrect grammar and simple words, as well as drawing incorrect conclusions from events and being superstitious. Among themselves, though, they speak normally, and the “Lordy, Lordy” falls away. Most of the slaves are adroit in this double-speak, none more than James himself, whose secret reading of books has endowed him with an advanced vocabulary, as well as familiarity with complicated philosophical and economic theory.
Everett manages the delicate act of portraying the suffering of enslaved Black people without becoming preachy or sentimental, using irony and humor like a lance. The violence that James finally commits, which reviewers allude to, is thankfully not sadistic or prolonged and should stop no one from enjoying this fantastic novel.—GM
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