Hilary Mantel. Bring
Up the Bodies. ©2012 This whole novel is an internal dialog in
Thomas Cromwell’s head as he sets about the task of destroying Anne Boleyn so
that Henry VIII can marry plain Jane Seymour.
As in Wolf Hall, Cromwell
comes out looking better than one might expect.
As “Secretary” he is all powerful as long as he has the king’s
trust. He must do the king’s will, and
he sets out to get the job done with the least possible collateral damage and
the maximum positive benefits for his family and colleagues and for
England. I don’t see this as analogous
to the Nazi bureaucrats who claimed they “were only following orders.” It’s a fascinating read as Cromwell goes
about building the case against Anne and four of her alleged lovers. As in Wolf
Hall, it’s hard to know when Mantel is filling in the blanks and when she
is relying on actual documentation.
Twice she mentions that Cromwell has kept his deceased daughter’s
notebook, and I assume that it actually exists.
Details from Anne’s execution are interesting. Henry brought in a French executioner from
Calais, and he sent the order before Anne’s trial. On the day, Cromwell himself tested the
scaffold to make sure it was sturdy, and he examined the executioner’s
sword. The blade was four feet long, two
inches wide and rounded at the tip.
Unlike the English axe men, The Frenchman did not have his clients rest
their head on a block. They knelt blind
folded and whoosh. He was paid 27 pounds
for taking off Anne’s head and the head’s of her four supposed lovers. Someday I hope Mantel or another writer will
do a novel about Cromwell’s early life.
Just here and there through this book we learn that his abusive father
was a blacksmith from whom Cromwell fled at age 15, that he made his way
briefly in Calais as a card sharp, that he was a mercenary soldier for the
French against the Spanish, that he learned accounting working for the
Frescobaldi family in Italy, that he learned French and Italian during his travels
and maybe Spanish and Flemish and that his English was better when he returned
to England than the lower class version he spoke when he left home. December 2013
.
Lars Kepler. The
Fire Witness. ©2011 Joona Linna, a detective with the National
Police in Stockholm, is sent as an observer to the scene of a double murder at
a school for troubled girls. One of the
girls, Vicki, is missing and presumed to be the murderer when a bloody hammer
is found under her pillow. This seems
confirmed when she steals a car while the woman who owns it is peeing in the
woods. Unfortunately the woman’s four
year old son is trapped in his car seat in the rear and this makes Vicki a
kidnapper as well as a car thief and a murderer. For Joona the murders don’t add up, because
the bludgeoning with the hammer would have taken considerable strength, but as
an observer he is powerless to guide the investigation beyond suspicion of
Vicki. The twists and turns that follow
make this one hard to put down. I didn’t
see the finger pointing at the real murderer until close to the end, when Joona
finds a witness to the crime in a most unusual way. When that’s all settled, Kepler sets up his
next book about a creepy and manipulative serial killer, whose threats had
earlier forced Joona to fake the deaths of his wife and daughter and live apart
from them for the past 12 years. January
2014
.
Dean Koontz. Deeply
Odd. ©2013 I had read two other novels by Dean Koontz,
so I thought I knew what to expect, but this mystery is in a class all by
itself. At a truck stop Odd Thomas (the
“T” was accidentally left off of his birth certificate) is almost shot by an
evil cowboy. He escapes onto the
highway, but the cowboy catches up in his semi trailer and blows Odd off the
road. Odd is picked up by Edie Fischer,
age 86. She is driving a specially
modified stretch Mercedes limousine and looking for a chauffeur, because hers
just died at age 92. She’s also looking
for adventure. Together they track the
cowboy, who seems to be involved in the kidnapping of several children. They see the semi at another truck stop, and
pull in to try to find him. Edie gives
Odd the pistol in the glove compartment and tells him not to worry because she
has others. In his search through the
truck stop, Odd steps into an alternate reality and gets shot in the throat,
but the wound is gone when he returns to his own world. He’s helped by the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock
and eventually he and Edie get back on the road, trailing the cowboy’s semi by
using Odd’s paranormal senses. The quest
goes on. They meet some of Edie’s
unusual friends and end up outside the cowboy’s estate, where he has invited a
large group of Satan worshipers to participate in the slaughter of 17 kidnapped
children. In the course of rescuing the children
with the help of Alfred Hitchcock, Odd finds a girl who has the same powers he
does. It’s a fantasy. I liked it, especially Edie. December 2013
.
Martin Cruz Smith. Three
Stations. ©2010 This is the seventh novel featuring Arkady
Renko, a police inspector in Moscow, where the justice system and everything
else seems to be corrupt Two things are
going on in this mystery. First a young and
unwilling prostitute named Maya tries to escape to Moscow with her newborn baby
from the “club” where she has been working.
On the train two hustlers drug her and steal the baby for sale to an
army general and his wife. Meanwhile
Renko and his partner Zurin find a young woman murdered in an abandoned trailer
at Three Stations, so called for the three subway stations that surround
Komsomolskaya Square. It’s supposed to
look like suicide, but Renko can’t accept that and gets fired for continuing to
pursue the case. Eventually he is able
to prove that the woman was one of five victims of a serial killer. As for Maya, the criminal organization that controls
a big chunk of the prostitution trade sends two thugs after her. She gets some help from the homeless youth
who live in the streets around Three Stations and towards the end meets Renko
and recovers the baby. Things don’t go well
for the two thugs. One is killed by an
attack dog owned by one of the street children and Renko finishes off the other
one. As I noted when I read Stalin’s Ghost, one comes away feeling
fortunate not to be living in contemporary Russia. January 2014
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