Two Brief Reviews

I read these books in March. Both were good books and very different stories. Each was challenging to read at times, and both were well worth the effort.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

The story is about a woman, Lucy Barton, who was in a hospital in New York City in the 1980s for many weeks due to complications following an appendectomy. Her husband doesn't visit her very often because they have two young daughters at home and he has a job. Her mother comes to sit with her for a few days when she is in the hospital and they have some strained conversations about the past. This leads Lucy to remember her strange and unfortunate upbringing and her relationship with her parents and siblings. 

Lucy tells the story; thus it feels very personal. She is telling it years after it happened. That approach worked very well.

My thoughts...

•  I loved this book. I do have to caution that this is not a happy, feel good book; I found it unsettling and sad at times.  Also sometimes it was very funny. 
• On the other hand, it is only about 200 pages long and it had me longing to read more about Lucy and her life. Fortunately there are three more books about Lucy Barton. 
• I like the themes, childhood experiences and mother-daughter relationships. This was only my second book by Strout; I read Olive Kitteridge a few years ago. 

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

This is a historical mystery, set in a very small town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique in 1952. New apartheid laws have recently gone into effect. 

The protagonist is an English police detective who is investigating the death of an Afrikaner police captain. The Security Branch takes over the investigation. They would like to blame the death on black communist radicals, and will be happy to beat a confession out of any suspect that fits their bias. Detective Emmanuel Cooper is directed by his superior to stay in the area so that he can ensure that the real murderer is arrested, if possible.

The story gets very complex. Emmanuel, an emotionally traumatized World War II vet, has problems of his own. The dead Afrikaner policeman's sons have it in for him, and he spends a lot of time avoiding them. He is lucky to be working with a native Zulu officer, Shabalala and a Jewish doctor who has no real credentials in South Africa.

My thoughts:

• The setting of South Africa in the 1950s was well done. There was plenty of action and a sense of dread about how the English detective could survive. 
• I could have done without some of the melodrama but I liked the depiction of apartheid at this time, and hope to continue reading the series. 
• Apartheid is not a totally new subject to me, but I don't know much about it. I am still trying to understand the differences between the various racial groups involved.
• It was a good story but a difficult read. The same thing applies to the other book I read that was set in South Africa during apartheid, A Lonely Place to Die by Wessel Ebersohn. That one was published in 1979 and set around that time. 

Instruments of Darkness: Robert Wilson

Excerpt from synopsis for the book at the author's website:

Bruce Medway, fixer and debt collector, operates along that stretch of West African coast they used to call The White Man's Grave. He spends his time drinking hard and getting steamy with his girlfriend Heike, a German aid worker. He always needs cash but finds he's bitten off more than he can chew when the formidable Madame Severnou, having given him a bedsheet full of money for a 7000 ton cargo of rice, comes back to collect. Warned off any notion of revenge by his client, Jack Obuasi, Bruce instead directs his energies into the search for missing British expat, Steven Kershaw.

This is my capsule review: I enjoyed this book but it is not in my favorite sub-genre. This book, part of a four books series,  is described by the author as 1990's West African noir. The author admires Chandler, and it shows in his style of writing. But this novel is very gritty, very violent.

The characters in this book seem to be divided into good and bad. Very little in between. Most of the characters are very bad people, either very evil or very crazy. There are a few "good" people among the protagonist's friends and acquaintances: his girlfriend Heike, his driver Moses, the policeman who works with him and becomes his ally.  Bruce Medway and the policeman, Bagado, are the characters with the most depth in this novel.

I read this book at this time primarily because of the setting. Medway lives in Benin, but some of the action also occurs in Togo, Nigeria and Ghana. Because of Robert Wilson's background (he has lived and worked in Africa), I believe the depiction of the area and the people to be accurate. This article, Crime Beat: Ayo Onatade on the African crime novels of Robert Wilson, also indicates that he has done a good job of describing the situation in this part of Africa.

This book is the type of thriller that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. But most thrillers are like that and for the most part that is OK. The good guys escape from impossible situations, and go on living to save another day.

As soon as I finished this book, I was ready to jump into The Big Killing, the second book in the series. So, yes, it is a very readable book, and I do want to know what happens to the characters. But, from what I have read about that book, it is more of the same, thus I will have to wade through more violence and endure more corrupt characters. I cannot start the second book now. I have other reading commitments for 2013, but I do hope to get to it in 2014.

I have read one other book by Robert Wilson. It was The Company of Strangers (my review here), a spy thriller, and it was one of my favorite reads of 2012. That novel is a spy thriller, one of Wilson's two standalone novels, published in 2001. The story is set in Lisbon initially, then moves to East Berlin and England. It covers the years from 1944 through the early 1990s.

Wilson has written two other series, and I plan to read both. The Javier Falcon series is set in Spain; a new series, featuring Charlie Boxer, is set in London.