Reading in November and Pick of the Month

In November, I read eight books. Seven of these books were mystery novels but the last book I finished in November was Monuments Men, a non-fiction account of the efforts of a group of men and women who worked to save art treasures during and after World War II.

The seven crime fiction novels I read in November were:

Enigma by Robert Harris
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron
Murder Within Murder by Richard and Frances Lockridge
Garnethill by Denise Mina
A Season for Murder by Ann Granger
The Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton
Slicky Boys by Martin Limón

I also read a novella for the Christmas season, "Christmas Party" by Rex Stout.

The Crime Fiction Pick of the Month meme is hosted at Mysteries in Paradise. Bloggers link to a summary post for the month, and identify a crime fiction best read of the month.

In November I read several really great books so it is very hard to narrow it down to just one.

This month I would choose Garnethill by Denise Mina as my favorite book.

Set in the city of Glasgow, this novel deals with tough topics: incest, patient abuse, drugs, unemployment, dysfunctional families. It is a very dark story, but there is an optimistic resolution.

As I said in my review: "I loved this book. Midway through I was thinking that it was a really uncomfortable book and the characters were hard to like. But by the end I was won over completely.  I read 400 pages in two days, which is an accomplishment for me."

Both Enigma by Robert Harris and Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron were strong contenders for favorite book of the month.

A Brief Hiatus

I will be away from the blog for a while.

My mother passed away yesterday. It was not unexpected, but still quite a shock.  She was a beautiful person, caring selflessly for my father 24 hours a day during the last years of his life when he suffered from dementia.

 A picture of my mother and father, visiting us in Santa Barbara. I am guessing that Daddy was in his early 60s, Mother in her late 50s.

Joining the 2015 TBR Pile Challenge

Recently three challenges have been announced that relate to whittling down the many books in our TBR piles. I participated in all three of them last year and I will be joining the challenges again this year.

In this post I list the books I will read for the SIXTH ANNUAL “TBR Pile Challenge!” hosted by Roof Beam Reader. 

One of the differences in this challenge is that each of the books must have been on your bookshelf or “To Be Read” list for AT LEAST one full year. This means the book cannot have a publication date of 1/1/2014 or later. 

There are specific rules and I will refer you to this page if you are interested in joining in.

My list:

She Shall Have Murder by Delano Ames (pub. 1948, on my TBR since 2005)

Blood Will Tell by George Bagby (pub. 1950, on my TBR since before 2005)

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon (pub. 1959, on my TBR since 2005)

The Last Enemy by Grace Brophy (pub. 2007, on my TBR since 2010)

Diamond Solitaire by Peter Lovesey (pub. 1992, on my TBR since 2003)

Die With Me by Elena Forbes (pub. 2007, on my TBR since 2011)

Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky (pub. 1982, on my TBR since 2005)

Chiefs by Stuart Woods (pub. 1981, on my TBR since 2005)

Where Memories Lie by Deborah Crombie (pub. 2008, on my TBR since 2009)

Motor City Blue by Loren D. Estleman (pub. 1980, on my TBR since 2005)

Fender Benders by Bill Fitzhugh (pub. 2001, on my TBR since 2005)

Norwegian by Night by Derek Miller (pub. in US 2013, on my TBR since 2013)

Two Alternates:

The Cold, Cold Ground  by Adrian McKinty  (pub. 2012, on my TBR since 2012)

Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr (pub. 1993, on my TBR since before 2005)

Garnethill: Denise Mina

From the description in the Publisher's Weekly review:

Eight months after spending almost half a year in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital devoted to treating sex abuse victims, Maureen O'Donnell is desperately trying to hold together her shattered life. Bored with her job at a theater ticket office and depressed because her affair with one of the hospital's doctors, Douglas Brady, is over, Maureen and a friend get drunk. The next morning Maureen finds Brady's body in her living room, his throat cut.

I loved this book. Midway through I was thinking that it was a really uncomfortable book and the characters were hard to like. But by the end I was won over completely.  I read 400 pages in two days, which is an accomplishment for me.

After her lover's dead body is discovered in her apartment, Maureen is one of two persons the police consider to be the most likely suspects. Some people might be intimidated by the police, but she questions their treatment of her and their methods, and she works at clearing her name. Although she was planning on breaking up with her lover, she wants to know why he was killed.

The story deals with tough topics: incest, patient abuse, drugs, unemployment, dysfunctional families. It is a very dark story.  There is an optimistic resolution, but many of the characters in the book are not very pleasant people. Nor is there the possibility for a truly happy ending.

There as so many things I liked about this book it is hard to cover them all. The policemen start out seeming heavy-handed to the extreme, treating Maureen and her brother badly in interviews. As the novel progresses, they become more human. I liked that progression in their behavior and characteristics.


Maureen is a character you grow to love. She has been in a mental institution recently, which leaves its stigma. She has a dead end job. But she is fiercely independent and determined to find out what is going on around her. Maureen is a caring person, and willing to put herself out to protect others. She is not entirely likeable, but the reader roots for her in making the effort to take control of her life.

This description of Maureen's manipulative alcoholic mother is painful.

Maureen didn't want to go. Sober Winnie was almost as much work as Very Drunk Winnie and Very Drunk Winnie was a lot of work. She was angry and vindictive, shouting carefully personalized abuse at whoever happened to be in front of her, casting up any failure or humiliation, however petty, always going straight for the jugular. It was her special talent, she could find anyone's tender spot within minutes. Sober Winnie was an emotional leech, demanding affection and reassurance, bullying them with her limitless neediness, crying piteously when she didn't get her own way.

And it goes on.

As a warning to readers who might be offended, there is lots of cursing in this book. I don't find cursing off-putting at all, but this book is filled with it from beginning to end. A lots of the words (both profanity and otherwise) I am unfamiliar with, and I am glad that they did not try to Americanize it.

In the back of the edition I read, there are excerpts from an interview with the author, in 2004 at L.A. Weekly:

L.A. WEEKLY: You started writing crime fiction because you were, and I quote, “fed up with big men solving crimes with women in the background.”
DENISE MINA: Yeah, absolutely! I don’t know how it is in L.A., but everywhere I go in Glasgow, there are wee guys shouting abuse at you. “Show us yer tits!” That just doesn't happen to male protagonists at all. I think it’s a very different landscape if you’re a woman.

The entire interview is very interesting. She has a lot to say about Glasgow, the city the book is set in.

In addition to two other books in the Garnethill trilogy, Mina has written a trilogy of books about journalist Paddy Meehan, and a third series about Glasgow DI Alex Morrow.

See Bernadette's review at Reactions to Reading and Margot's Spotlight post at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.

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Publisher:   Back Bay books, 2007 (orig. pub. 1998)
Length:       400 pages
Format:       Trade Paperback
Series:        Maureen O'Donnell, #1
Setting:       Glasgow
Genre:        Thriller
Source:       I purchased my copy.

Enigma (film)

Enigma is a film by Michael Apted that was released in 2001, based on the 1995 novel by Robert Harris. Both are fictionalized accounts of the British code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park in 1943.  Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) played a big part in breaking an important code earlier; now he is returning to Bletchley Park after a nervous breakdown to take part in a new effort, although there are indications that he is just there for show. His girlfriend Claire (Saffron Burrows) is missing, and he and Claire's roommate Hester (Kate Winslet) try to solve the mystery of her disappearance.

I recently read the book and enjoyed it very much; my review is here.

Did I enjoy the film?

This was my second viewing of the film. I don't remember that much from the first viewing and I suspect I might have enjoyed it more if I had read the book first. This time around I did enjoy it very much. I liked the acting. In addition to the main actors mentioned above, I enjoyed the acting of Jeremy Northam as an intelligence agent, Tom Hollander as another member of the code-breaking team, and Matthew Macfadyen as a naval officer who had been badly burned.

One negative aspect of a book to film review is that I usually read the book and watch the film back to back. In that situation, I tend to nitpick at details while watching the film. This second viewing may have been one of those times when I was watching too much for discrepancies and not immersing myself in the film enough. Regardless, overall I liked a lot about the film and we will be watching it again.

Did the film represent the book fairly or well?

Some reviewers noted places where the film was not true to historical facts. Both the book and the film were supposed to be fiction, so that was not a problem for me. I don't know much of the real history of Bletchley or the code breaking effort, so I wasn't looking for errors, nor was I expecting to learn the strict facts of what happened from either the book or the film.

I was disappointed that the character of Hester Wallace was so changed in the film. Both versions show the discrepancy between the roles of women and men in work like this, and emphasize Hester's frustration at doing more clerical work, and not having the opportunity to work on code breaking. However, the nature of Hester's and Tom's relationship is very different in the book. I prefer not to go into more detail about that for the benefit of those who have not seen the book or the film. Overall, I did not feel that this change marred the film.

While a film usually cannot get into the characters and their relationships (and thoughts) as well as a book does, a film can portray action in a clearer and more effective way. The war scenes that can only be imagined while reading the book are given more reality in the film version.

Given that changes are always necessary to make a novel conform to the needs of film, I found the changes made for this film acceptable. The film focused much more on the espionage subplot, and spent less time portraying actual conditions at Bletchley. I like the portrayal of characters and relationships better in the book. The film had more to offer in action and pacing. I felt that both stood well on their own.

This film review is submitted for the 2014 Book to Movie Challenge at Doing Dewey.

Books of 1946: Murder Within Murder by Richard and Frances Lockridge

The Mr. & Mrs. North series features a married couple, Jerry and Pam, who often solve crimes with Lieutenant Bill Weigand. Thus the series is half amateur sleuth / half police procedural, and I think that is why I like them. They are often described as light and breezy mysteries. Usually I prefer a more serious tone, but for some reason I like the Mr. and Mrs North series.

Murder Within Murder is the 10th book in the series and was published in 1946. As it is set following World War II, there are indications of how life has changed due to that event. In this story, an employee of Jerry's is murdered in the public library. Miss Amelia Gipson was a retired teacher who had doing research on a book for Jerry's firm. Lieutenant Weigand asked Jerry to formally identify her.

I did read some books from this series when I was younger and I remember liking them. Some of my enjoyment when I read them now is probably nostalgia. I lucked out choosing this as the first one to read in many, many years. Even with some annoying elements, it has a lot going for it. The story is complex. The secondary characters are interesting.

The couple reminded me of Nick and Nora Charles (of The Thin Man) in that they drink an awful lot of alcohol. Unlike Nick and Nora, they are not rich, but they do have a surprising amount of free time to follow their policeman friend around. Pam smokes a lot too. This surprised me only because where I grew up (the South) in the 1940 and 50's, it was unusual for women to smoke.

I mentioned earlier some things I found annoying. Pam is kind of ditzy, and that doesn't appeal to me. I don't mean she is dumb, but she senses things or has an intuition.

I was surprised that there were no racial slurs in this book, given its age, but Sergio at Tipping My Fedora did note the presence of such in an earlier book, Death on the Aisle.

A quote from an article at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki:

The biggest strength of the North novels are the people in them. Pam and Jerry North are appealing human beings, and so are most of the suspects in the story. Unlike some detective authors, who mainly write about nasty characters, the denizens of a North tale tend to be civilized, intelligent, decent people. They are people whom one would love to know in real life.

Not everyone would agree with that assessment, but I do think it explains a lot of the popularity of this series.

This is a mystery novel from 1946 – my contribution to Rich Westwood’s regular monthly meme at the Past Offences blog. I received my copy as a prize from Bev at My Reader's Block. I was thrilled to get this post-war mystery in an edition with a skull on the cover. Bev's review is here. She goes into more detail on the plot.

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Publisher:   Pocket Books, 1982 (orig. pub. 1946)
Length:       207 pages
Format:       Paperback
Series:        Mr. & Mrs. North, #10
Setting:       New York City
Genre:        Mystery
Source:       Received as a prize.