Back on the horse

In Cold Blood is behind me. My book discussion group talked about it on Tuesday so it is finished. I did not enjoy the book and now I remember why I have passed up reading it for 40 years, it is grim, ugly, without redemption, and not my cup of tea. Monday evening we had a showing of the film Capote at the library, it was an interesting sidelight on the book and gave another dimension to the story, but again, it was cheerless and without redemption. Yuck!

Now I can read some fun stuff. Currently on the nightstand is Slipknot by Linda Greenlaw. She is the gutsy swordfishing captain from Maine who appears as a character in Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm. Her memoir of the storm event was titled The Hungry Ocean and it is a good read. She has produced several books about her life fishing and one family cookbook. She writes a good sentence and tells a good story. Slipknot is her first mystery and I like it so far. A good interview of Greenlaw ran in USAtoday.

The Indian Bride by Karin Fossum is another one of those "Translated from the Norwegian," books that fascinate me. Set in the quiet village of Elvestad, Norway it concerns the brutal death of an Indian woman who has arrived in Norway to join her new husband who lives in the village. Events conspire to keep him from picking her up at the airport and she is murdered as she makes her way to meet him. Fossum has concocted a touching story wrapped in a solid police procedural. Fossum writes Inspector Konrad Sejer and this is the eighth book featuring him, but only five of them have been translated. If you liked Henning Mankell you might like Karin Fossum. The titles that we own by her are:

1. When the Devil Holds the Candle
2. He Who Fears the Wolf
3. Don't Look Back
4. The Indian Bride

Guest Blogger - Kim Alden Mallin, M.D.

What if you walked into a morgue to view an autopsy? Hmm. Pretty gruesome. Well, what could make it worse…? What if you looked down at the body and it was someone you knew? Ugh, even more gruesome. But…what could make it even worse? Hmm, what if you looked down at the body and it was you…or at least it looked like you?

That is the process Tess Gerritsen used to come up with the premise for Body Double, the fourth book in her series about Detective Jane Razzoli. She has said that once she gets an idea for a novel, she tries to imagine what could make it worse, or scarier or more horrific. When her son became a typical annoying adolescent, she wondered where had her sweet boy gone…who was this alien? Hmm, alien? What if all the kids in a small town seemed to become “aliens”? What if there was a natural cause for it? What if they became violent? What if…? And her book Bloodstream was born.

When she overheard a dinner conversation about children disappearing from Russia, she imagined what could be happening to them? What if… they were taken hostage and brought to the US as sex slaves? What if Jane Razzoli, her main character, was somehow taken hostage along with them? What could make it worse? Hmm, what if Jane was very pregnant when she was taken hostage? What if…? And the premise for Vanish was developed.

And so it goes.

Tess Gerritsen began her writing career while out on maternity leave and bored. Watching made-for-television movies whose endings she didn’t like and thinking she could do better led to her first book, a romance titled Call After Midnight. She published eight more romances before telling her agent that she had an idea for a medical thriller. To which her agent said "No", she’d better stick to what she knew, since physicians had the market on medical thrillers. That’s when Tess said, umm…I need to tell you something. I am a physician!

Her first medical thriller was Harvest, published in 1996. She recently published her eleventh novel, The Bone Garden. Weaving together a modern day mystery involving the unmarked grave of an unknown murdered female with serial killings from the 1830s, the novel is both entertaining and informative. It brings to life 19^th century medicine through the eyes of protagonist Norris Marshall and his fellow medical student, Oliver Wendell Holmes. As a physician I was equally disgusted and fascinated by Tess’s version of how Holmes came to his conclusions regarding disease spread and control. (The real Oliver Wendell Holmes was the physician responsible for establishing the importance of washing hands in the prevention of contagion.) Her description of a ward full of women, either about to give birth or immediately post-partum, being examined one after the other by a physician who barely wipes his hands in between, carrying germs and pus and who knows what, is horrifying to me. The Bone Garden was an interesting mystery and I loved the medical history twist. Even if it was disgusting.

Now let me go wash my hands…

(Tess Gerritsen has an excellent web site linked above, and I have brought over an interesting interview of Gerritsen from YouTube, this is the first of a multi-part interview, the rest of the interview is easily available at YouTube. Our library owns 16 of Gerritsen's titles in print and as audio books. - Pete)

Guest Blogger - Kim Alden Mallin, M.D.

Kathy Reichs is my hero. With me being a Carolina born and bred woman who practices medicine by day and struggles to write medical thrillers by night…she is the very embodiment of all of my deepest desires. Not only is she a full professor at UNC-Charlotte, working for Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and for the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale for the province of Quebec…she is the best-selling author of the Temperance Brennon series, of which Bones to Ashes is her most recent.

It was her involvement with a serial killer case that inspired her first book, Deja Dead. Serge Archambault had killed two women and admitted to having killed a third victim, cutting her body up and burying it in five locations. Kathy Reichs helped with the investigation and identification of that case. Due to the unique and skillful methods used to dismember the victim, she advised the police to look for someone who knew something about anatomy - an orthopedic surgeon or butcher. And as it turned out, the killer was a butcher.

I have enjoyed each of her novels, whether the forensic evidence uncovers cults, identifies skeletons from clandestine graves or aids disaster response teams. Her accurate descriptions of the Carolinas, from the mountains of western North Carolina to Dewee’s Island, a barrier island off of my hometown of Charleston, SC, make me feel right at home. However, her greatest appeal for me lies with her protagonist, Temperance Brennon. Tempe has a great reputation in her field and is respected for the excellent work that she does. But her non-professional life is full of complications and conflicts, which reveal her humanness, making her vulnerable just like the rest of us. Her relationships with men are troubled, she struggles with her desire to drink alcoholically, and she has a love-hate relationship with her sister all of which only make her a more likable character.

So, as I stated earlier, Kathy Reichs is my hero. But quite honestly, although I find her work fascinating and I certainly would love to be able to write like her, I much prefer my living, breathing, and usually nice-smelling patients to her larvae-filled, pungent corpses.

Dr. Mallin, Kim, is a Florida buddy from the not-so-long ago Delray Beach days. (Pete)

Reichs has ten novels to her credit. We have six titles (*) in our collection and will try to fill out the run. The television crime series Bones is based on Reichs' character Temperance Brennon.

1. Deja Dead (1997)
2. Death du Jour* (1999)
3. Deadly Decisions* (2000)
4. Fatal Voyage (2001)
5. Grave Secrets (2002)
6. Bare Bones (2003)
7. Monday Mourning* (2004)
8. Cross Bones* (2005)
9. Break No Bones* (2006)
10. Bones to Ashes* (2007)
    

Who loves a parade?

If you missed our Neewollah Grand Parade last Saturday then you missed a doozie. Two hours of pretty girls, high school bands, horses, floats, the Budweiser Clydesdales, clowns, Shriners in funny cars, and more. Here are a few pictures taken by Julie Hilderman. More of the pictures can be seen and downloaded at Picture Independence.

The Tenderness of Wolves

I saw this one sitting on our Interlibrary Loan desk waiting to be returned to the Grant County Public Library. The title, The Tenderness of Wolves, caught my interest. I don't know why, because I hate cold weather, but cold weather settings intrigue me so I read the blurb and the opening paragraph and decided I wanted to read it. Stef Penney is British but the novel is set in Canada in the 1860's. More than simply a mystery it is a historical drama set against the ethnic difficulties that faced the Indians, French, English, Scottish, and Norwegian settlers as they faced life in the New World.

A brutally murdered trapper is discovered as the book opens by a mother whose 17 year-old adopted son goes missing. Crime, clues, treks, hostile weather, unforgiving landscape, and privation face those seeking answers to the various unknowns introduced by author Stef Penney.

The first novel has won several European awards and Penney is working on her second novel set in England.

After finishing Pete Hamill's latest, North River, I still wanted more of a taste so I picked The Gift off the shelf for a quick read. The novel is slight, but,

"A powerful short novel that's vintage Hamill-an evocative, emotionally involving tale of fathers and sons, loss and yearning, forgiveness and approbation-is restored to print..."
--according to Amazon.