The Grouchy Editor

 by Caroline Graham

An elderly schoolteacher is found dead, her best friend thinks it’s a case of foul play, and Chief Inspector Barnaby is dispatched to Badger’s Drift to investigate.  Graham sprinkles her prose with words and expressions that are oh-so-British, her characters are colorful, and her plot is clever – albeit at times far-fetched.  My complaint:  I find Graham’s hero, DCI Barnaby, a bit smug and a bit dull.  I have the same problem with the actor (John Nettles) who portrays Barnaby in the popular TV series based on Graham’s novels, Midsomer Murders.

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by John le Carre

Twenty years ago when I read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, my first taste of British novelist John le Carre, I described it as “endless cloak-and-dagger shenanigans that were all the rage in the 1960s.”  After reading a second le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I am still underwhelmed.

This time, we follow British agent Leamas, who embarks on an elaborate charade to snare a villainous Cold War foe, and in the process discovers cross and double-cross.  It’s a cliché to say this, but still true:  Spy is all head, no heart.  Its central romance is shallow and its characters are either remote or unpleasant.  Yes, it’s cleverly plotted and there are some nice twists, but the downbeat tone and lack of relatable characters left me, well, cold.

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by Dan Riskin 

Premise:  Mother Nature is not nice.  In fact, she is inherently selfish and cruel, interested only in perpetuating her own DNA, and if there is any hope for the future of mankind, it behooves us to rise above our own hard-wired, self-serving instincts to build a better world.

The Good News:  The book itself is – or should be – an example of how technology can improve the experience of reading.  There are links in the text so that, for example, after you read about a wild bird in the Brazilian rainforest, you can click on a link to watch YouTube videos of that very bird in the Brazilian rainforest.

The Bad News:  The links did not work on my Kindle.  Amazon would not take me to the Amazon.

More Bad News:   Riskin’s decision to link wildlife to humanity’s “seven deadly sins” is often a gimmicky stretch.  Is an insect that eats lots of food truly indulging in “gluttony” – or is it simply acting on instinct?  Is a monkey really “envious” of another monkey’s bowl of grapes – or does it simply crave the grapes?  Riskin’s theories are more successful when he likens human behavior to our animal cousins, less successful when he attributes human-like motivations to animal behavior.

Despite the publisher’s best efforts to convince us that Mother Nature is a unique take on what people are and why they do what they do, this is mostly just a biology book about creepy crawlies.

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by Laurie R. King

I guess that if Arthur Conan Doyle’s 60 Sherlock Holmes stories just aren’t enough for you, there’s always this, but King’s reimagining of the Holmes saga, in which the legendary detective teams with a teenage girl to solve crimes, is a bit too Nancy Drew Meets Her Teen Idol for my taste.  King ostensibly keeps the relationship paternal between 50-something, semi-retired Holmes and the novel’s heroine, young Mary Russell, but the sexual undertones – Mary giving Holmes backrubs, sleeping in the same compartment with him, etcetera – are prevalent and creepy.  There is also a bizarre, lengthy plot digression in which our two detectives take a break from solving crimes to visit … Palestine.  Huh?

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by Janet Evanovich

There is no point in my writing yet another review of yet another Stephanie Plum novel.  Plum creator Evanovich has been phoning in series entries for years now, and so I will phone in this review.  For more, you can go here.  Or here.  Or here.

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TV late-night host David Letterman recently announced his retirement, but I think I’ll miss his follow-up act on CBS, Craig Ferguson, even more.  Ferguson, who will be leaving his late-show gig in December, is a funny, affable guy, and that winning personality is on full display in this 2009 memoir.

Possibly I enjoyed the book because — aside from the born-and-raised-in-Scotland business — Ferguson and I share similar backgrounds:  We’re about the same age and we both drank way, way too much alcohol in our younger days.  I do have two quibbles with American on Purpose.  Quibble 1 – the title is a bit misleading; it would more accurately be titled Growing Up Drunk in Britain.  Quibble 2 – Ferguson gushes about former wives and girlfriends, understandably when you consider his behavior toward them, but also unrealistically.  Were all of his former flames such stunning beauties and flawless human beings?  But overall, this is a charming memoir, and I look forward to a sequel.  There will be a sequel, right?

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by Jim Thompson

Nice title, because Thompson’s killer, a “good ol’ boy” deputy sheriff, certainly gets inside the reader – or the reader gets inside him — whether we like it or not.  We go along for the ride as soft-spoken Lou Ford goes on a psychopathic binge in his West Texas town, providing first-person narration as he revenge-kills and then kills again in an attempt to cover his tracks.  Ford is one repellant dude, but this Barney Fife from hell is also fascinating.

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by Michael Hastings

Michael Hastings’s roman a clef about his days as a young intern at Newsweek magazine is very much a product of his generation:  full of snark, cynicism, and — man, I’m getting tired of this one — “irony.”  Hastings, who famously brought down General Stanley McChrystal with a Rolling Stone article, in Magazine creates thinly veiled characters that skewer former real-life colleagues like Fareed Zakaria and Jon Meacham, exposing their gung-ho support of Bush’s war in Iraq, and revealing how ego and career trump ethics and morality in the world of Big Media.

But Hastings the news reporter’s book is short on motivation and depth of character, which are the novelist’s bread and butter.  Are the editors he mocks truly so one-dimensional and without, apparently, any redeeming qualities?  Hastings’s novel is not, however, short on something else:  extremely graphic, off-putting descriptions of one character’s sex fantasies.  Weird.  And yuck.

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by Joe McGinniss

A fatally bloated book.  The case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the “all-American” young doctor who was convicted in 1979 of slaughtering his family, is fascinating, but not enough to justify 900-plus-pages that too often read like dry trial transcripts.  McGinniss crams Vision with page after page of often-repetitive legal minutiae – which is fine for aspiring lawyers but a drag for the true-crime aficionado.

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by Jacqueline Susann

There is good soap opera, and there is bad soap opera.  Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was a literary sensation in 1966 (it was the top-selling book that year), and it’s easy to see why:  It’s juicy and entertaining.  Part of the enjoyment comes from trying to decode former actress Susann’s roman a clef.  The penniless singer who becomes a major star, then succumbs to alcohol and pills – is she based on Judy Garland?  The boom-voiced Broadway battle-axe – is it Ethel Merman?

Susann’s prose is occasionally dreadful, and her story about three Cosmo Girls trying to make it in New York and Hollywood show business, circa 1945-65, is quaint by today’s standards, but her gossipy style is infectious and her themes about doing whatever it takes to achieve love, fame, and success in America are timeless.

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