Midnight (W)rite ~ Book reviews and other curiosities

Intense murder mystery starring anti-hero P.I. Theo Tate   Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave Great story with a grim and urgent tone that seems a cross between a funeral eulogy and a runaway train. Theo Tate is a former cop and current rogue P.I. who is working on a multiple murder case despite warnings from his former colleagues on the police force to stay away. He is compelled to act, weaving in and outside of the law, by his feeling of responsibility for having possibly missed an opportunity a few years previous that may have brought the killer to an earlier justice, thereby saving lives. Tate is not an especially likable character. Although the reader can sympathize with his grief and pain, it's difficult to decide whether or not his unpredictable moral compass is leading him down the right path. With such heavy happenings at such a fast pace, this reader wanted to cry uncle on Tate's behalf at least once or twice. The story has the structure of a police procedural, b...

Dark and disturbing story, beautifully told   Drowning House By Elizabeth Black Knopf Doubleday Publishing When professional photographer Clare Porterfield receives an invitation to return to her home town of Galveston, Texas, to coordinate a historical photo exhibit, she accepts it. Her marriage is crumbling beneath the weight of a family tragedy, and Clare takes the opportunity to return to her roots, despite the cloud of scandal under which she left some years previous, and the shaky bonds she’s barely maintained with the surviving members of her family. Clare begins to examine the community’s oldest photos and poke into her own family history, and that of one of the most powerful families in Galveston. But the deeper the story goes, and the further back in history, the darker the secrets get, until Clare uncovers the most shocking secret of all. A lot of first novels ramble along like a clumsy puppy, mechanically uneven and stilted, tripping a b...

Heart-filled stories describe the landscape and spirit of Michigan The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Available 1/8/2013 Harrison’s latest consists of two novellas, The Land of Unlikeness and the title story. In The Land of Unlikeness , Clive, a sixty-something, cultured art appraiser who resides in a condo in New York when he isn’t rubbing elbows and taking the measure of the art of the rich and famous, is summoned home to a small farming community in Northern Michigan in order to care for his elderly mother while his sheltered younger sister goes on her first European vacation. The secluded community of Reed City hasn’t changed much, and Clive is flooded with memories and a feeling of warped time. Clive’s mother still seasons bland meals with salt and pepper only (any further seasoning is a sign of weakness), the small-town ‘girl next door’ who broke Clive’s heart while they were in their teens is still around when she’s not working her Grand Rapids gro...

Magical realism, Russian folklore, and real world issues intermingled   Moscow But Dreaming by Ekaterina Sedia Prime Books Published December 5, 2012 Moscow But Dreaming is a collection of Ekaterina Sedia’s short stories. The stories contain elements of magic realism, Russian folklore and mythology, social commentary, and studies of Moscow and its surrounding areas, mostly in the late 80s and 90s. The grittiness of subject matters like child abuse, sexual abuse, starvation, and death might make a reader cringe if not for the fact that Sedia’s combination of dark imagination and equally dark real world issues shines a light on some ugly truths without sensationalism. My first exposure to Sedia’s incredible prose was in the reading of The Secret History of Moscow , which I plucked from the library shelf on my way to the checkout station on a whim, based solely on the stark design and testimonial paragraph written by Neil Gaiman on the front cover. I was c...