The Bed Moved: Stories / Rebecca Schiff, 139 pp.

Sex and Death are great topics for short stories; maybe they are they only topics for short stories. But it sure says something (I don't know exactly what) when a collection's death stories are way less bleak than the sex ones.

Schiff's stories all feature as protagonist a single, straight, Jewish, Gen-Y/millennial who lost her father as a young adult. And they are keen, compulsively readable, observant, and sharply witty. Still, they make me glad I am closer to death than I am to any of the dismal sexual encounters she describes. Men and women her age hook up, have sex, and don't remember any of it the next day, not because they blacked out, but because they were bored, it seems. And as for love, that is entirely missing in action. Kids these days...

Dwight Garner gave this collection a glowing review in the NYT, and I get it. Lines such as, "We drove back to his grow house with egg dripping off the side of the car, then fucked in an Aeron chair he'd bought when he had money..." (from It Doesn't Have to Be a Big Deal) are good, and not just because they're funny and snarky and rude. Schiff has a real economy with language, and she can load more meaning in a paragraph than some writers put in entire novels. Take as another example this line from Little Girl: "She slept with men who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan." Or 100 more like it. I might wish I had written those things, but I'm glad I haven't actually lived them.

Of Mice and Magic

Of Mice and Magic by Ursula Vernon  277 pp.

This is the second volume in Vernon's new Hamster Princess series. Harriet, the very un-princessy princess is bored since she is no longer invincible (see the first book). She rides off on her faithful battle quail, Mumfrey, in search of a quest. Her mission this time is to break the curse on the twelve dancing (mouse) princesses. Vernon's take-off on the classic fairy tale involves a king who has named his daughters after the months of the year. The witch Molezelda, whose twelve sons are named for the signs of the zodiac has cast a spell to marry her sons to the princesses by forcing them to dance all night, every night. Harriet, with the help of a magical "poncho of invisibility" (easier and cheaper to make than a cloak of invisibility) foils her plot with the help of Prince Wilbur who appeared in the first book. This is a fun series with lots of goofy humor.

The Guise of Another

The Guise of Another by Allen Eskens, 267 pages.
Minneapolis Detective Alexander Rupert is under investigation for corruption. He had been in Narcotics, but his partner was arrested for various misdeeds and Alex may be implicated as well. His semi-trophy wife may be leaving him, and he may or may not be on the verge of losing everything he has, including the respect of his older brother Max who is also a cop (and who was a pivotal character in Eskens excellent The Life We Bury).
When Alex gets the chance to investigate an apparent identity theft by a man, now deceased, who had faked his own death 15 years before, he believes he may have found a path to resurrecting his career. The characters, plot twists, and decisions that stand in his way are all well-crafted, and make this an interesting read.
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An Ember in the Ashes

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir, 446 pages.
Sabaa Tahir's first book, in what I assume will be a big series, works pretty well. Laia is a Scholar. Her people were conquered 500 years ago by the Martial Empire. Elias Veturias, a Martial soldier-in-training, is completing his last year at Blackcliff.
Blackcliff academy takes in 6 year-olds and trains them to be Masks, the Martial Empire's elite soldiers. They train for a couple of years, during which there is a relatively high death rate, and then they are sent out on their own with nothing for a few years, during which time there is a much higher death rate, and then they get to be the cool upperclassmen of this killing academy.
Laia's path crosses that of Elias as they are both having to choose how they will lead what is left of their lives. Neither can stand to live with the crushing oppression of the Martial Empire any longer. Laia feels she must join the rebellion and Elias feels that he must desert. There are prophecies and unexpected plot twists standing in their respective paths. Well done if not startlingly original. Read by Fiona Hardingham & Steve West. 15.5hours
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The Crossing

The Crossing by Micahel Connelly, 388 pages.
Harry Bosch, who had been working as an LAPD Detective since the time of the Vietnam war, has retired. His half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, wants to hire him as an investigator to help defend a man accused of murder. This pretty much goes against everything that Bosch has ever stood for, and he is a little reluctant to help out someone he is convinced is a murdering scumbag. He does agree to look at the casefile, and as his brother knew he would, Bosch finds several discrepancies when he compares the file to the locations, witness statements, and physical evidence. As Bosch anticipated, just working for a defense attorney draws the wrath of many of his former LAPD coworkers, but since Bosch has always chosen to speak for the murder victim, those who can no longer speak for themselves, this bothers him less than he thought it might. A solid part of a great series.

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A Thousand Naked Strangers: a Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge andBack / Kevin Hazzard, 261 pp.

I doubt I have anything to add to the several favorable reviews that have already been written on this blog, except to say that I once knew someone who worked at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, where Hazzard spent most of his time, and their stories of outlandish chaos definitely jibe.

I was struck by something Hazzard said about the anticipation (and anxiety) he would feel as he approached a call: what would he find there? How out-of-hand would the situation be? His descriptions of negotiating his way through extremely difficult situations with patients and their families, many of them drunk, doped, angry, and in pain, were just a teeny bit familiar.

Mothering Sunday: a Romance / Graham Swift, 177pp.

A brief and strangely powerful story shows us one important afternoon in the life of Jane Fairchild, 22-years-old in 1924 and housemaid to a wealthy family. More importantly, she is the secret lover of Paul, the scion of an even wealthier neighboring family. Their tryst on this unseasonably warm March Sunday, a holiday which was the forerunner of the modern Mother's Day, sets the course for Jane's future in unexpected ways. Deeply sensual but not gratuitous, and unlike anything I've read in recent years. Recommended.

The Dirt on Ninth Grave

The Dirt on Ninth Grave by Darynda Jones  352 pp.

I picked up the audio version of this not realizing it was the ninth book in a series. The main character, Charley Davidson, sees dead people, animals, and other spiritual entities and can interact with them. She is living in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. (yes, that one) as Jane Doe because she is suffering from an acute case of amnesia. She has no clue about her former life or even what her real name is. All she knows is that she is seeing ghosts everywhere and that a customer at the diner where she is working has all the women, her included, in an extreme state of lust. She doesn't understand or quite know how to handle her unusual abilities and it leads her into situations that soon become dangerous on all plains of existence. When a town shop owner is endangered, "Janey" feels compelled to save him and his family, putting her life in danger. I liked this book with the exception of the frequent use of popular slang which will date it quickly.

The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrimur Helgason, 256 pp.

No, this is not a companion piece to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It is the tale of a hitman from Croatia with the nickname "Toxic". He is a professional with 66 successful hits to his, um...credit. When he accidentally kills the wrong man he is forced to flee the U.S. and murders a clergyman in an airport restroom to assume his identity and tickets to Iceland, not realizing the clergyman is a t.v. evangelist due to appear on Icelandic television. In Iceland he stays with a married couple who run a religious television network but when his identity is discovered ends up being tracked by the police and the mobsters who want him dead for the bad hit. During all this he realizes it's time to "retire" from the hired killer business and tries to begin a new life with the daughter of the the evangelist couple. Convoluted but entertaining. The Icelandic author chose to write this novel in English rather than his native tongue and have it translated. The latter method might have improved the flow and the dialogue.

Spur of the Moment

Spur of the Moment by David Linzee, 323 pages

Mezzo-soprano Renata Radleigh is preparing for a minor role in the St. Louis Opera's avant garde production of Carmen when a bigwig donor is found dead. For the police and the court of public opinion, Renata's brother, Don, the SLO's main donor schmoozer, is the prime suspect, and while there's no love lost between the Radleigh siblings, Renata is convinced that her brother's innocent and starts digging around the donor's life to clear his name. Her investigation takes her into the competitive world of medical research and development at Adams University, where she suspects she'll find the truth.

I'll be completely honest: the main reason I checked out this book was to support Linzee, a UCPL patron, and someone I've worked with on various projects over the years. I'd never read any of his novels and I wasn't sure what to expect. What I discovered was a well-written, engaging murder mystery, with plenty of twists and turns that I didn't see coming. Renata is a fantastic heroine, and I genuinely hope that Linzee writes more books about her escapades as both an amateur detective and an opera performer. (I also hope to read about many more of the wacky opera productions; Linzee's kooky Carmen was hilarious.)