Julia Spencer-Fleming’s To Darkness and to Death is the fourth novel in her top-rate mystery series featuring priest-sleuth Clare Fergusson. As with the prior three installments, Clare’s vocation as the priest at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Millers Kill, New York shapes her character but not the plot. Here, Clare gets involved in the disappearance of a young woman, not because Clare is a priest, but because she is called in as one of the volunteers on the search and rescue team.

Unlike the earlier books, Fleming experiments in this one with a 24-hour format. The action starts with a pre-dawn phone call summoning the search team to look for the missing Millie van der Hoeven, local heiress and co-owner of a 250,000 acre parcel of Adirondack forest. Things take off from there, with lots of moving pieces, including multiple kidnappings, assault, cover-ups, blackmail, shady dealings, murder and mayhem.

Throughout, the romantic current between Clare and the married Chief of Police, Russ van Alstyle, still hums. Probably because of the 24-hour format, the two do not spend a lot of time together on the pages, but they are always aware of each other and their relationship makes a significant step forward before the story wraps up.

This is more thriller than who-dun-it, with the pieces ultimately falling into place – or at least coming to rest – in a pretty exciting finale. For those who prefer analysis to action, clues to chaos, this lack of actual mystery solving will be a let down after the prior books. But it is still an engaging story and Spencer-Fleming is a gifted writer. She has a good thing going with this series, which she describes as “novels of faith and murder for readers of literary suspense.”

‘Faith and murder’—you’ve got to love that combination!

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew who, in the early 1900s, is unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Yakov Bok has a hard luck life as a handyman, or fixer, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Although political reforms following the 1905 revolution gave Jews new freedoms and political clout, life in the Pale had not improved. After his childless wife abandons him for a goy, Yakov leaves the shtetl for Kiev, where he ends up working in, and living above, a Christian-owned brick factory. With an assumed name, no papers to allow him to live in that part of the city, and anti-Jewish sentiments on the rise, Yakov is headed for trouble. . . .

Read the rest of this review on Rose City Reader.

Four brothers, twin sisters, a father with minor league baseball in his blood, and a Bible thumping mother form the story skeleton of The Brothers K. David James Duncan packs a lot of meat on these bones in his very long, very elaborate, quasi-biographical novel of the Chance family of Camas, Washington.

As I explain in my full review on Rose City Reader, I have some problems with this book, although I enjoyed it overall. For one thing, the pacing of the first half is so slow, while the pacing of the second half is a roller coaster ride—the contrast was jarring. Also, Duncan’s style gets to be too much for me. He is just too relentlessly clever and self-aware. There is too much frosting to get through to get to the cake.

For years, wine writer and ardent Francophile Michael Steinberger ignored the doomsayers trying to hang crepe on France’s gastronomic culture. He dismissed out of hand a 1997 New Yorker article with the interrogatory headline, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?” He refused to consider the emergence of super star Spanish chefs and their la Nueva Cucina as a real threat to France’s dominance in the kitchen. And he discounted his own sub-par dining experiences as well as the accelerating death rate of France’s restaurants, closing by the hundreds each year.

But, eventually, the totality of the evidence overwhelmed his denial. The “snails fell from [his] eyes,” he explains, after a particularly bad lunch at his favorite Parisian restaurant. His “adored institution” had changed, replacing its classic dishes with a dumbed-down menu and the equally classic waitresses with “bumbling androids.” The experience forced him to consider the unthinkable idea that French cuisine might really be in trouble. He decided to find out for himself. . . .

Read the rest of the review on Rose City Reader.

Whether you live in a little house and need more practical space, or a big house and want some psychological space, Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways will inspire your dreams with its “Big Ideas for Small Backyard Destinations.” Author Debra Prinzing and photographer William Wright spent a year investigating and photographing some of America’s most wonderful sheds, follies, tea houses, pavilions, and other grown up play houses and packaged their work in a book as beautiful as it is informative. . . .

Read the reast of the review on Rose City Reader.

In Changing Places, David Lodge’s 1975 novel, American and British college professors exchange teaching positions for part if the 1969 academic year. Mousy Philip Swallow finds himself basking in California sunshine in Berkeley, but embroiled in campus shenanigans, student protests, and an exciting new world of counterculture experimentation. On the other side of the Atlantic, Morris Zapp, a flamboyant and famous Austen scholar takes his new “red brick” college by storm, wowing the English Department as well as the wife of his colleague.

Lodge guides the reader along the crisscrossed paths of the two scholars, from one comical escapade to the next, but never shies away from the difficulties that arise. This is the type of story at which Lodge excels – examining how people react when outside events force them to reexamine what they believe in and hold dear.

He makes it funny, but the underlying dilemmas are as serious as they come. For example, the scene where Zapp realizes that his flight to England was so cheap because it was a charter flight of pregnant women taking advantage of Britain’s newly relaxed abortion laws, includes this passage: . . .

Read the rest of the review here on Rose City Reader.

There is a reason Elinor Lipman gets compared to Jane Austen – like Austen, she can dissect a closed community down to its bones, but is so charming and witty about it that the process looks easy and her thoroughness is only admired in later musings.

In My Latest Grievance, Lipman turns her keen eye on academia with the story of Frederica Hatch’s unconventional upbringing at Dewing College in the late 1970s. Born to a duo of bleeding heart professors-turned-dorm-parents and union activists, Frederica is raised in the dorm of their minor all-girls college in Brookline, Massachusetts. When her father’s ex-wife finagles her way into a Dorm Mother job and the bed of the college President, Dewing will never be the same.

With Frederica’s as the beguiling narrator and Lipman’s wit flowing, My Latest Grievance is a novel of contemporary manners not to be missed.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

With the stock market still in the doldrums and the dust from the housing bubble explosion still settling, the timing of Steve Fraser’s Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace seems perfect. A concise history of this symbol of American market ingenuity looks like just what we need to understand the mess we are in now. Unfortunately, while entertaining, the book falls short of providing much substantive history, let alone any insight into the current situation.

Read the rest of the review on Rose City Reader.

Published in 1965, The Beggar is, on the surface at least, the story of Omar’s midlife crisis. While less overtly political than Naguib Mahfouz’s other works, this novella takes on the biggest “political” issue of all – the meaning of life. Omar’s tale is a metaphor for the “midlife crisis” of modern Egypt, 17 years after its 1952 revolution, as both Omar and the country search for meaning after achieving worldly success.

The story reunites three childhood friends all engaged in the same struggle to find the deeper purpose of their adult lives . . .

Read the rest of the review on Rose City Reader.

Richard Wright is famous for his novel, Native Son, which is a classic of American realism, made it to the Modern Library’s list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, and was the first Book of the Month Club title by an African-American author. His autobiography – at least part of it – is an acclaimed account of life in the Jim Crow South.

Only the first part of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, was published contemporaneously with his finishing it in 1945. The second part, American Hunger, was not published until 1977.

Understandably. . . .

Read the rest of the review on Rose City Reader.