Are you completely ignorant as to how rude you are being?

Do you know how to set the table? You should. You have been doing it all your life. You think you do, right? Well sorry to be the one to tell you this--but you don't.
You are picturing this:

Correct?

Dream on. See that space over by the cup and saucer? It's missing something.... Can you guess? A phone! That's were the phone goes at meal times. It comes out of the pocket or purse and gets set on the table at the end of the place setting. Remember that, OK? Whether dinning at home or at a restaurant, the phone goes on the table.

It's a must. It completes the Schizophrenic Toast To Rudeness Dinning Experience. If the phone is on the table your companion can talk to you and the invisible other person at the table, the person on the phone. It's great. It makes you feel special to be so important, so interesting to another person or persons.

Out

Sisterhood takes a turn for the worse in Out by Natsuo Kirino when four women in no-hope jobs have a murder to cover up. This is no 9 to 5 romp where a group of gals try to cover-up a murder and out pops bonding, empowerment and happy endings. Out is more a spiral of desperate and questionable choices out of Dostoyevsky.
 

Pretty Yayoi works the night shift in a Tokyo factory that produces boxed lunches. During the day she battles with a cheating husband who gambles away what little income she brings in. When rage and frustration lead to murder, Yayoi looks to older, wiser co-worker Masako for help. In an attempt to extricate Yayoi, Masako enlists two other co-workers help in getting rid of the body. All four of these women are smart and caring but they are also trapped in lives that are grimly doomed to never get beyond a difficult daily struggle survive. As loyalties, violence, money, accessories to murder, body parts, police, gangsters, pimps, casinos and the power of self-preservation collide with tenuous friendships a riveting and realistic read opens up.  

If the thought of reading about Japan and/or Japanese women conjures up images of cherry blossoms and geishas think again. You will find none of that picture postcard fodder in Out. Kirino’s description of the underbelly of Tokyo is as sensational and gritty as her characters are. This is a tasty slice of hard boiled life. Out is as dark and revenge filled as any noir novel populated by men and twice as psychologically shrewd.

The House at Sea's End

Raise your hand if you get happy all over when you discovery that a much enjoyed, new-to-you author has multiple titles waiting for you to gobble up. Yeah, me too!

The “new” author is Elly Griffiths and the books are her series of mysteries featuring detective Ruth Galloway. I came upon Elly and Ruth while browsing at my local. The cover of their latest book , The House atSea’s End, hit a number of my impulse purchase buttons. The unevent typeface, house of nooks and crannies, the cliff, the stone barrier, the sea and the almost monochromatic tone of the palette all combine in a siren song way for me.

Ruth is a forensic archaeologist. Her Born Again parents have left their mark. She’s brainy, independent, forty-ish, chubby, not fashionbale, a bit awkward and in general a difficult person. Things in her life are messy but she’s no tortured loner—although she would just as soon be left alone.  Though of course she has two cats.

The first of the three Ruth Galloway mysteries is The Crossing Places.  Ruth is living the quiet life in an area of England known as Saltmarsh in Norfolk. Oddly enough the local detective inspector, Harry Nelson, calls on Ruth because he needs help identifying a body. Nelson has been taunted by letters for years regarding the unsolved case of a child. I know. Poor fictional policemen so lost without the local historian, middle school teacher, scientist, librarian or spinster! It’s a hairy old beginning for an amateur detective but it gets it all started up.

Second in the series is The Janus Stone. This time the demolition of an old home in Norfolk leads to the discovery of a body and Nelson again asks Ruth for forensic and historical help.  Roman gods, sacrifice, a charismatic priest, a questionable new age spiritualist, an Iron Age excavation, adultery and romance all mix together with atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere to great effect.

Third up is where I first came in, The House at Sea’s End. Six well persevered skeletons are reason enough for Nelson to call in Ruth Galloway, right? The bones turn out to be German and date back to World War II. The dead in Norfolk really pile up when a visiting German journalist and several octogenarians who might have been witnesses or accomplices to murder also bite the dust. It’s nice and complicated.

Elly Griffiths has done a bang up job. Ruth Galloway is a stand out among amateur sleuths. Aside from that universal Not A People Person quality that is wired into the fictional DNA of every detective, pro or part timer, ever created since 1940, Ruth is unique. She can be tough to enjoy even for the reader at times but she is completely three dimensional and worthy of the time you want to spend with her.

 The ancient history worked into the books is natural given Ruth’s work but Griffiths makes it organic to the stories and not a display of her own research. Each of these mysteries feels as though it couldn’t possibly take place anywhere else but Norfolk. Griffiths is building a world in this series and she is doing a fantastic job.

The fourth book for Elly and Ruth, A Room Full of Bones is due out in July 2012!

The Gift of Rain

In 1939 life in Malaya (now called Malaysia) changed forever. The haze of British colonialism, class structures, calm and everyday life disappeared with the invasion of the Japanese. Author Tan Twan Eng uses this dramatic backdrop for his novel The Gift of Rain, a vivid coming of age story. And. A 2007 Man Booker nominee.

When the novel opens a surprise visit from a stranger forces Philip Hutton to look back on the changes that over took his life fifty years earlier when he was a young man. It was a time that took him from The Huttons are one of Malaya’s most powerful, white families. Their place in society and their wealth are long established. The youngest son in the family Philip, in spite of money and privilege, feels like an outsider. His mother is Chinese. As half English half Chinese he is well aware of what his mixed race means and how protected he is by his family’s’ money and position.

Shortly before the war Philips’ father placed him in charge of the family’s trading company. Without what little security he feels when surrounded by his father and brothers Philip drifts into a friendship with another outsider, Hayato Endo a Japanese diplomat. Philip is excited to finally have someone to share things with and Endo reciprocates by teaching Philip aikido, how to speak Japanese and about the Japanese culture. In fact Endo becomes Philips’ mentor. When the war arrives in Malaya by way of invading Japanese soldiers, Philip is unsure of where is loyalties lay. Has he already betrayed his family?

Tan Twan Eng layers the complications into The Gift of Rain artfully. The full weight of choices and behavior, the conflicts created by war and family relationships build steadily until Eng has the tension set at page turner degree.  The Gift of Rain is not perfect: the dialog can get clunky, the flashback technique is a little cumbersome and Eng sometimes has a heavy had with morality. However there is also a sweeping plot, a captivating recreation of place, intrigue and strongly developed, charismatic characters.

The Technologists

Matthew Pearl has made a career out of capitalizing on authors we love. He’s the ultimate success story in fan fiction.  In his novels: The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow and The Last Dickens Pearl  build  on our general knowledge of the lives of  Dante, Poe and Dickens to become enjoyable  What If mysteries that allow us to visit a favorite writer. However Pearl’s latest novel, The Technologists doesn’t have that classics author hook that has served him so well. I guess in that regard it is his first stand alone.

The Technologists is about Marcus Mansfield. He is a survivor of years in a Confederate prison trying to adjust to civilian life in Boston.  Mansfield is a loner with a gift for invention. By night he works on his designs and by day he is a student at the newly founded MIT. Guess what? His inventions are ahead of their time.

When Boston experiences an attack of seemingly otherworldly proportions the local police are baffled. Mansfield and some of his fellow students decide to investigate on their own. These new kids on the block, first generation American geeks are up against a fiendish foe and the respected and well heeled Harvard crew that’s on the same case. That’s gumption at work my friends.

The Technologists has its moments; specifically, Pearl’s use of the science of the times to battle steampunk-esque villainy and his convincing portrait of Boston in 1868. Good thing as these two elements are the heart of this boys own adventure novel. The failure in The Technologists is in the drama. There isn’t any.

Oh well.

The Rain Before It Falls

 It is a death that sets Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rain BeforeIt Falls in motion but in the novel it isn’t always death that is the worst life has to offer. Coe’s story is a family saga where wretchedness begets wretchedness through successive generations.

As a little girl Rosamund is evacuated from London and sent to live on the Shropshire farm of her aunt and uncle. Once there she forms a deep bond with her cousin Beatrix who is horribly emotionally abused by her mother. The repercussions of Beatrix childhood reach out to successive generations.  

Years later after Rosamund passes away she leaves a record –literally—of her life on cassettes and in photographs. Rosamund records her stories right up to her death. She wants these things to go to Imogen, Beatrix’s granddaughter and it is up to Rosamunds’ niece Gill as executor to make this happen. Gill has a vague memory of Imogen as the blind woman met years ago at a family gathering. Unable to locate Imogen right away Gill listens to the cassettes.

Rosamund is the character you fall for in The Rain Before It Falls. Her experiences: being sent away from her family during the war, her first true love, attempting to raise Beatrix’s daughter, life for a woman in 50’s and 60’s Great Britian, her life with her companion Ruth and her choice at the end all come together in Coe’s wonderful writing to create a treat of a character. She is what you cling to when the miseries –inflicted by woman—mount up.

 The conceit of the tapes, the photographs and Gill’s examination of them all isn’t perhaps the most inventive way for Coe to get his story out there and it does lend itself to some meandering but these are minor points. The Rain Before It Falls is something different for Coe. It’s more touching and less shiny.  The keep up with me brilliance of The Winshaw Legacy: Or, What a Carve Up and The Rotter’s Club are set aside in The Rain Before It Falls in favor of a bit more humanity.

The Darlings

Here where I live in the Northeast we are having Weather. Yesterday we got snow, sleet and ice and today we are getting more snow. In like a lion, right?

I wish could say the same for my snow day read, The Darlings by Cristina Alger. In this debut novel, a financial thriller, Alger was unable to convince me why I should care about stereotypical, self centered, extremely rich characters who might lose all their money and their family owned investment company in a Madoff-esque event.

The only real interest—and it was mild-- I had in The Darlings was wondering if Alger had meant to reference Peter Pan by naming her family the Darlings. Is it that the financial crisis is putting an end to living in Neverland?  Deep.

I could have stopped reading The Darlings at any time and gone on to lead a full and happy life. So why didn't I? Blame it on the snow day. Coziness won over literary merit.

It’s been a long time since I read as big a snooze fest as The Darlings. The cover is attractive though.