PS I no longer participate in WWW.WEDNESDAY via that link because her blog won't accept Blogger comments. I mention this only to save you the frustration I experienced trying to link up.
1. What are you currently reading? Trail of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz. I just finished a gritty, at times depressing, book that could only take place in Miami. How should I follow it? I'll go west! To San Francisco, a city that reminds me not at all of Miami. The Spellmans are many things, but they are not remotely gritty. So this just may be the change of pace I'm looking for.
Isabel Spellman is the oldest daughter in a ridiculously dysfunctional family of private investigators. Izzy drinks too much, watches too much TV and never ceases to disappoint her parents. Yet she is actually quite competent at her job. She's also a very good, very funny narrator.
We've all heard of cozy mysteries, but these are zany. As in the other Spellman books, Isabel is juggling legitimate casework from a paying client (a wife who wants to know how her husband spends his days) and her wacky family. This book introduces us to Gertrude, her boyfriend's mother and Izzy's newest drinking buddy. These books are funny but also very affectionate. Loony as they are, I wish I'd been born a Spellman.
2. What did you recently finish reading? Act of Betrayal by Edna Buchanan. Coco Chanel famously said, "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." I wish Edna Buchanan had taken this sentiment to heart and eliminated one of the subplots in Act of Betrayal.
Our heroine, Britt Montero, is a reporter on the crime beat for a major Miami daily. She's covering a car bomb that killed a local media personality, trying to find what linked the disappearances of junior high school aged boys, and working on a profile piece about a charismatic Cuban who has become a mover and shaker in Miami politics. Speaking of moving and shaking, a hurricane is coming. That's the thing about weather: it's a force to be reckoned with, whether you have time to deal with it or not.
That's plenty to keep a reader engaged. Yet Buchanan loads the book up with newsroom gossip, her best friend's unsatisfying love affair, and Aunt Odalis' health problems. It was too much. It annoyed me to be taken away from the real action. Buchanan should have made like Chanel and lost at least one of these subplots.
Also, one of the stories Britt is working on is, as they say, "ripped from the headlines" and based on one of Chicago's most notorious crimes ever. Britt is wrong when she says repeatedly that this is the biggest story of her career but because of the hurricane no one will notice. I'd like to assure her: we have many weather events here but the name of that real-life perpetrator – I won't use it here because I don't want to spoil the book for you – won't be overshadowed. Maybe in 1997, when this book was written, no one foresaw the industry true crime would become. (In real life, the home of that monster became such a national magnet that after it was demolished, the address was changed to discourage gawkers.)
But these are quibbles. I found the end of the book, once the storm hit, truly un-put-down-able.
3. What will you read next? I don't know.
