Another Strong Suspense Story

At the end of last year, Stephen King recommended Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere as one of his favorite books of 2010.  So, even though I just finished a good suspense novel (or maybe because I just finished a good suspense novel), I decided to listen to King’s advice.

The summer that Eliza Benedict was 15, she was kidnapped.  For 39 days, she was held captive by Walter Bowman, a troubled young mechanic.  He killed four other teen-agers, but he allowed Eliza to live.  Why?

Now married and the mother of two children, Eliza leads a privileged life in the suburbs.  But her life changes one day when she receives a letter from Bowman.  From his prison cell in Virginia (where he has been on death row for 22 years), he has seen a picture of his only surviving victim.  “I’d know you anywhere,” he writes to Eliza.

Suddenly, Eliza relives everything that happened to her in that distant summer.  She worries that her children will learn her closely guarded secret.  She fears that a sleazy journalist will relocate her.  She questions, once again, why Walter allowed her to live.

Things become even more troubling when Bowman suggests that he would like Eliza to visit him.

Lippman weaves the events of the present with the weeks of Eliza’s kidnapping in 1985.  As the narrative moves closer to Eliza’s final days of captivity, it becomes clear that there are parts of Eliza’s story that she hasn’t shared with anyone—that she doesn’t even want to acknowledge herself.

I’d Know You Anywhere—much like Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter—is a suspense novel much richer and fuller than that genre name suggests.

 

Mystery in Mississippi

I heard about Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter from a friend; I was expecting a thriller/suspense novel.  I suppose that it does fall into that genre, but it’s a suspense novel with rich and interesting characters.

Larry Ott, now in his early 40s, lives alone on what remains of his family’s farm in southeastern Mississippi.  When he was in high school, a girl down the road disappeared.  Because she was on a date with Larry the night she disappeared, people in the town believed (and continue to believe) that Larry killed her.  Now, when the daughter of the town’s biggest businessman disappears, Larry is the prime suspect.

Silas Jones (called “32,” the number on his baseball jersey in high school) is the constable of the small town. As boys, Silas and Larry enjoyed a brief, strained friendship—strained because of their different races, strained because of Silas’s social status (and Larry’s social awkwardness), strained because of secrets that emerge from the past as the book unfolds.

So…while the disappearance of two young women sets this book in motion, it’s really a story about two men, their families, and the secrets that bind them together.

 

Doesn’t Quite Match the Thrill of the Chase

One of the best pieces of narrative non-fiction in recent memory is James Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.  In fast-paced and thrilling pages, it details the plotting of John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators, the assassination of President Lincoln (and the attempted assassination of members of his Cabinet), the flight of Booth into Virginia, the efforts to track down the assassin and his friends, and the ultimate fate of each of the conspirators.  I recommended Manhunt to some colleagues and to several members of my family, and the reviews were universally positive.

Swanson’s latest foray into the Civil War, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse, made its way onto my reading list with high expectations.  Unfortunately, I have to report that it doesn’t live up to the success of Manhunt.

The book covers exactly what its subtitle promises.  In intercutting sections, Swanson follows the flight of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (after the fall of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy) and the passage of Lincoln’s funeral train from Washington (where every federal building was decked in black bunting) to Springfield, Illinois (Lincoln’s final resting place).

For readers of Manhunt (surely the prime audience for this book), Bloody Crimes spends too much time on the shooting of Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, on the final night of his life at the boarding house across the street, on Mary Todd Lincoln’s desperate behavior during her husband’s final hours.  After all, we already heard all about this in Manhunt! 

The book also devotes far too much time to painstaking description of the hearses, floral arrangements, and processions at each stop of Lincoln’s trip to Springfield.  (At one point, Swanson is critical of press coverage in 1865, which devoted pages and pages to description of funeral orations, names of participants at each stop, details about the rooms where Lincoln’s body reposed for viewing.  I found this remark amusing, though, since Swanson copiously describes the catafalque constructed for Lincoln’s body in each city from Washington to Springfield.  At one point in the third quarter of the book, I wasn’t sure that I could continue slogging through this.)  As a result, Bloody Crimes doesn’t seem to give justice to Davis’s part of the story—a part of history which is probably far less familiar to the casual reader.

By the last quarter of the book, I also noticed a number of simple proofreading errors creeping into the pages.  It almost feels like Swanson’s editor had grown weary of the text and was no longer reading carefully.

I know that what I’ve written sounds like a bit of a pan.  I didn’t hate this book, but it isn’t Manhunt.  Bloody Crimes could use more Jefferson Davis, fewer funerary details, and more of the pacing that kept Manhunt exciting.

 

Martin’s Latest is a Work of Art

I’ve been a great fan of Steve Martin’s writing ever since viewing a production of his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile.  His first novel, Shopgirl, was a relatively quiet affair, but I loved his second novel, The Pleasure of My Company.  When I saw Martin giving an interview for his new book, I added it to my reading stack.

An Object of Beauty follows Lacey Yeager through the high-powered art world of New York.  From her days in the basement of Sotheby’s to her own gallery in Chelsea, Lacey navigates a world of old masters, contemporary upstarts, European collectors, art heists, and big money.  An Object of Beauty is a look behind the curtain of the Manhattan art scene at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first.

This novel reads quickly, and Martin creates enough questions (especially about a mysterious incident early in Lacey’s career) to keep the plot moving.  I often felt like I was walking through chic art galleries, listening to conversations between collectors and dealers, sitting in on secret back-room deals—all good things!  And Martin raises some good questions about art as “object of beauty” and art as commerce.

In a few places, the intersection of Lacey’s life with other key NYC moments (the attack on the World Trade Center, the stock market crash in 2008) feels a little contrived, and one of Lacey’s key romantic relationships in the book just didn’t matter to me.  Still, if you’re a lover of art—or a lover of Steve Martin—you’ll enjoy this book.