New Orleans is the setting–graveyards, abandoned plantations, and a voodoo priestesses add to the ambiance.

Danni Cafferty’s dad has recently passed away, and Danni thinks she’s following his final instructions correctly by keeping the family’s antique and curio store open for business.

When a distraught woman comes into the store rambling about an evil statue that Danni must take away, Danni’s journey into discovering her family’s true calling begins.

Michael Quinn, a private investigator, has been tracking the statue. He thinks a string of murders and thefts is directly related to whomever last possessed it. And he hopes to find it before more blood is shed.

Michael had worked with Danni’s father on a number of supernatural cases in the past, but he has his doubts about working with Danni. Especially since it seems that Angus had not explained the full nature of his business. The two seem to have no choice but to work together when more murders are committed in the wake of the statue’s possession…

I like that Danni and Quinn don’t particularly like one another when they first meet.  They have to learn to trust one another.  Danni surprises both Quinn and herself when she realizes that she is able to contribute to the investigation–even without understanding what Angus’ cryptic message to “use the light” really means.

I figured out some of the key elements of the story faster than the characters did.  So I’d say the plot was comfortably predictable.  Stay away if you’re looking for twisty, unexpected surprises. But for a solid entertainment ride, check out this first book in the “Cafferty and Quinn” series.  I’m looking forward to seeing what these two paranormal sleuths come up against next.

Check the WRL catalog for Let the Dead Sleep

The phone belongs to Sam Roxton’s personal assistant who quit without giving notice, so when Sam calls the number and reaches Poppy, she is able to convince Sam to let her keep the phone until she finds her ring  and she’ll forward all his messages.

The crazy plan works, but of course, Poppy reads all the texts that come to Sam and gets a pretty good idea of what’s going on behind the scenes in his office.  Sometimes she understands what’s going on better than Sam, who is too busy to read, much less return, most texts.

And because this is a Chick Lit with romantic elements, Poppy and Sam gain insight into each other through this odd arrangement.  And they like what they find!

I listened to most of this book on CD.  Jayne Entwistle is the reader. I loved listening to her perky British accent–she was perfect for Poppy!  It was easy to follow the narrative even with the texts and footnotes read aloud.  (Yes, there are footnotes in the book.  Why? Because Poppy’s self-important fiance is a scholar, and Poppy was impressed with the number of footnotes in his book.)

Personally, I never thought texts could be romantic, but I changed my mind after listening to the incredibly touching scene where Poppy and Sam are texting each other in the dark woods.

This is a light, fun, satisfying book.  I highly recommend it for poolside entertainment this summer.  I even enjoyed the secondary characters, even the snarky ones.  And rooted for Poppy’s happily ever after with Sam right from the beginning.

Check the WRL catalog for I’ve Got Your Number

Bridget, frustrated by the roaring success of her sister’s social debut compared with her own lackluster first season, has been declared a shrew and her “character fixed as ‘unpleasant.’  And there seemed little she could do but endure it.”  Until, that is, she receives a letter from the famed Italian composer, Vincenzo Carpenini, inviting her to become his student when he returns to England for an extended stay.  Bridget is elated. Finally, proof of her own worth!  But after finding out that Carpenini has suddenly changed his mind and no longer plans to leave Venice, she is heartbroken and humiliated.

However, not one to simply accept defeat–at least when it comes to her heart’s desire–and assisted by the convenient collapse of a tree on her family’s townhouse, Bridget manages to persuade her mother, together with her younger sister, to decamp for Venice and warmer climes.  When she arrives in Venice for her long-awaited music lessons, she is stunned to discover that the composer does not remember her at all.  But Oliver, Carpenini’s friend and supporter does; and since Carpenini has foolishly risked both his career and Oliver’s with a wager against the Austrian composer Klein–the new favorite of the Marchese–Bridget’s sudden appearance is well-timed.

The blossoming relationship between Bridget and Oliver is lovely to read about. As Bridget’s passion for life and love flourishes, so does her ability on the piano.  Oliver is unlike any other romantic hero I’ve ever encountered. Very much a beta, he supports and encourages Bridget, and believes in her in a way no-one else has.  His character has a good natured temperament and a gentle sense of humor–somewhat refreshing after the big, bad alphas, who seem to get riled up over nothing.

Noble’s writing is lyrical and filled with musical metaphors and similes.  Framing the relationship in terms of music was an enjoyable novelty.  I particularly liked reading a historical romance set somewhere other than Britain or America, and I’ll admit I’m partial to the romantic setting of Venice.  For those seeking a well-written, touching romance with a hero and heroine worth cheering for, I highly recommend Let it Be Me.

Check the WRL catalog for Let it Be Me

Barry, whose interest in language and manipulation runs through books such as Jennifer Government and Company, takes a direct run at the topic in this complex thriller. He posits an organization dedicated to exploring ways to control the nearly 300 personality types they’ve identified. Potential students are recruited and tested, and those that pass enter a rigorous and disturbingly competitive education program on their way to analyzing personality types, running experiments on them, and providing the sanitized results to those who will use them in some kind of marketplace. Those who rise to the top of this select group become poets, able to utter a series of nonsense syllables that make the hearer suggestible. To what? In the course of the story, to involuntary sex, giving away money and cars, even committing murder and mayhem, with the implication that these are long-standing and frequently used methods that reach to all levels of society. Those poets are themselves rebranded with the names of real poets, which is why Tom Eliot and Virginia Woolf are playing cat-and-mouse from Australia to Washington, DC. Woolf is a rogue poet capable of suborning even the most experienced of the organization, and Eliot wants to stop her before she executes a horrific plan.

Barry structures the story with intertwined past-and-present narratives. We learn about street kid Emily’s recruitment and training into the organization, and the colossal mistake she makes when she’s sent to Broken Hill, Australia as punishment for another major mistake (A word of warning to the actual Broken Hill Chamber of Commerce: Barry makes it sound like the place where they recruit garbage men for the last stop on the road to the back-of-beyond; it sounds like a cool place in real life). In the present storyline, Eliot violently kidnaps an innocent man from the airport and dodges pursuers on a nonstop quest to find out why the man has been targeted by opposing poets. As the storylines begin to merge, we slowly come to understand why the factions have moved into open warfare with each other.

Barry departs from the cynical humor of his earlier work as he creates this speculative look at power and language. The real tension in his ideas is that the ongoing quest to motivate (command?) masses of people may actually succeed by reducing that mass to precisely defined individuals. If there is humor, it is found in occasional side notes from chat room comments on erroneous news stories which come off as conspiracy theories but are closer to the truth than the commenters know. He also takes those ordinary Website quizzes and polls and gives them a more sinister purpose. I’ll certainly look twice at those ‘recruiting for psychology experiments’ posters and ‘take this online quiz to discover your true self’ with a little more skepticism than I have in the past.

(Lexicon isn’t in the WRL catalog yet, but the link will be added here when the library receives it.)

As Coogan demonstrates, the potato famine presented a golden opportunity for absentee landlords to rid their land of their least important asset–the people who actually created the wealth that gave landlords status. The spectrum of  methods landlords used to accomplish this depopulation ranged from ‘merciful’ to monstrous. The end results were the same: the Irish were pushed from the homes they’d built, the work that gave their lives structure, the cottage industries that added to their meager income, the churches where they worshipped, and the graveyards where their history lay.

The famine opportunity was also a chance to put in place theories by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and Edmund Burke.  From drawing room discussions, British policy makers took the idea that markets seek their own level, that poor people should just stop reproducing, that selfishness is a virtue, and that interfering in business is a crime against God. Working behind the scenes as advisors to parliamentary ministers and wealthy landowners (often the same people), they managed to implement a system that deprived the peasantry of even life’s basic necessities.

Of course, they never went to Ireland to see people dead and dying along the roadsides, or working under brutal and humiliating conditions in the workhouses, or rendered homeless by the destruction of their cottages. Those who did–especially the Society of Friends–pleaded with all levels of government and with the English population as a whole for some form of assistance. Contributions also flooded in from around the world, including $170 from the Choctaw Indians in the United States, but the scale of the disaster was so great that even the Quakers gave up their efforts when it became apparent that only funding for food, housing, and work from a willing government could end it.

Tim Pat Coogan points an especially damning finger at Sir Charles Trevelyan, a bureaucrat working for the Home Secretary and Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. His virulent anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bent combined with his adherence to Smith and Bentham enabled him to block relief supplies and use his position to steer public opinion onto his course. Under his instruction, others created workhouse and roadbuilding schemes so onerous that even those clinging to the last strand at the ends of their ropes didn’t qualify. At every turn, he frustrated even basic humanitarian acts and promoted the most monstrous of the depopulation schemes.

The end result of the famine was right in line with Trevelyan’s goals and those of whom he served. The generally accepted numbers show that between 1841 and 1852, the Irish population declined from 8.1 million to around 6.2 million. Whether from death or emigration, Ireland lost an enormous part of its population in a short period. While historians in the past have been somewhat passive in tracking causes, Tim Pat Coogan does not hesitate to search out and indict the people he places at the heart of a deliberate genocide.

Check the WRL catalog for The Famine Plot

Based on his own conversion experience, Loren Collins decided to walk out of the mudpit of one particular argument to examine the short supply of critical thinking skills. By looking in detail at a select few Internet memes, he distills the methodology of online “discussions” to illustrate the many paths people take to passionately uphold their beliefs in spite of evidence that they are wrong:

• Denialism – It didn’t happen because I want it to not have happened.
• Conspiracy theory – It happened, but not the way everybody else thinks it happened, and only I know the truth.
• Rumor – It happened!  It really happened!  I know somebody whose sister had a friend…
• Quotations – This famous person said it perfectly, and it just so happens to apply.
• Hoaxes – You’re never going to believe what happened!
• Pseudoscience – It happens, but not when anybody can actually study it.
• Pseudohistory - This person says it happened, and I believe him even if so-called historians don’t
• Pseudolaw – I happen to have read the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is wrong.

As a librarian, I like to think of myself as a dispassionate consumer of information with the ability to analyze and spot the kinds of fallacies Collins describes. I am certain that in my professional life I provide patrons with their requests even when I believe those materials are patently poor sources of information. But I utilize selective news and information sources to check when I hear a fact too good to be true or too inflammatory to be tolerated (I hope I’m wary enough to take their information with a grain of salt). And even though it never does any good, I still don’t let my wingnut uncle get away with his stunts over the Thanksgiving turkey. After all, Josh Billings said, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

Wait a minute.  That was Mark Twain?  Will Rogers?

Maybe I better stick with “Ignorance is bliss.  Knowledge is power. You’ve got a choice to make.”

Check the WRL catalog for Bullspotting

When glasnost and perestroika open Russia to the West, Stalina leaves as soon as she can, walking out of her job as a scientist creating scents that cover up the odor of nerve gas, packing a suitcase full of Russian-made bras (expatriate women can’t get any that suit their particular needs) and heading to the United States. A childhood friend has promised her a place to live and a job–a chance to leave her gray life behind and start afresh.

Her job is at the Liberty Motel, a hot sheet hotel that originally catered to weary long-distance truckers but is now a rendezvous for illicit love affairs. That’s fine with Stalina, interested only in hard work to earn a paycheck; when you must change sheets every hour or so, you really earn that money.

Stalina wants to put a twist in the business. With the owner’s grudging permission and a few bucks, she begins transforming those drab anonymous rooms into fantasies: a beachside cabana, a theme park, a gazebo in a rainstorm. Word about the rooms begins to spread; repeat customers want to try the different themes, and business skyrockets. What she doesn’t know is that there is significant competition in the short-stay industry and her success translates to trouble for the Liberty Motel.

Stalina is the ordinary person at the center of an odd world, one which most people don’t know exists. From the businesslike owner to the couple carrying on a long-term affair, Stalina engages with people who ordinarily shun or fear such contact. Stalina is an innocent in many ways with those who want to take advantage of her. As Russians have through the centuries, she endures good and bad with equanimity.

Emily Rubin taught an oral history class in Brighton Beach, a Mecca for Russian emigres, garnering much insight into Stalina’s voice from her students. Her real talent lies in making this woman into a singular and memorable character in a singular and memorable read.

Check the WRL catalog for Stalina

Meet Bernie Gunther; an old-school private eye in 1936′s Berlin, he’s surrounded by people wholeheartedly, even joyously, wallowing in the darkest places of their souls. How’s a fedora-wearing gumshoe supposed to knock off bad guys, bed and discard dames, and squint through cigarette smoke at “good guys” who are worse than himself?

Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther mystery, March Violets, contains the ugliness of anti-Semitism, Nazi Party infighting, and concentration camps (KZ’s in the parlance). Much of his business is searching for ‘U-boats’–people who have disappeared, possibly into a KZ, or into canals as unidentifiable corpses. The so-called ‘German desire for order’ is in full flower, and the black Mercedes are waiting for any who question, challenge, or stand up to it. As a former policeman with a high-profile career and a veteran of World War I, Gunther can get away with it to some degree, but even he feels constrained to salute Hitler when parades pass.

Gunther has a reputation for discretion, so when the daughter and son-in-law of a millionaire industrialist are murdered, their safe burgled, and house destroyed by arson, he’s a natural choice to take on the investigation. Since it’s a PI mystery, he’s blocked at every turn, his motives are questioned, and he’s threatened by mugs and thugs of every stripe. He’s brought before the highest Nazi officials (including Goering, who envies Gunther’s supposed cinema noir lifestyle) as his search gets close to sensitive areas with implications for the Party. The end stage of the investigation puts him in the worst circumstance I’ve ever read in a mystery novel, one so unexpected that both Bernie’s body and soul are put into peril.

Kerr captures the look and feel of Berlin–the shops and restaurants on the streets, the trams and cars, the vibrant clubs where decadent jazz hasn’t been completely eliminated. Add the background of ubiquitous swastikas and street-corner boxes selling newspapers with vile caricatures of Jews and you’ve got a fair glimpse at the “garden of beasts,” keying in on “March Violets” who joined the Nazi Party after it came to power in 1933 and used it both to promote themselves and to wield the power of the State against their enemies.

Kerr’s writing has been favorably compared to Raymond Chandler’s, and I mostly agree. The way I read it, Sam Spade could probably look around and see some decent people trying to live ordinary lives. Bernie Gunther has no such consolation.

Check the WRL catalog for March Violets

Closing this week’s reviews is a musical selection written by Mandy.

In her review of the Civil Wars’ CD Barton Hollow, Charlotte discussed her susceptibility to earworms—“those catchy snatches of melody that get stuck in your head for hours on end, sometimes for days.” Last fall, I encountered an earworm in the song “Lights Out, Words Gone,” the second single off of A Different Kind of Fix, the third album from British quartet Bombay Bicycle Club. I stumbled upon the song while driving home from work one night and instantly loved it, but, much to my chagrin, the announcer never gave the name of the song or the artist. This song, with its lovely, haunting intro and gently brooding lyrics, was stuck in my head for weeks until I was able to identify the group and check out the album.

Since the release of their debut album in 2009, Bombay Bicycle Club have received numerous accolades in England, including Best New Band at the 2010 New Musical Express Awards, and their second album Flaws was nominated for the Ivor Novello Award for Best Album. In addition, the group performed during the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony concert in Hyde Park.

I discovered Bombay Bicycle Club through “Lights Out, Words Gone,” and was happy to find that the rest of A Different Kind of Fix lived up to the promise of that single. It’s a tightly-focused collection of guitar-driven rock that’s quite catchy and very accessible. Along with “Lights Out, Words Gone,” standout tracks include “Your Eyes,” “Bad Timing,” and the irresistibly jaunty “Shuffle.”

Fans of alternative rock groups such as Phoenix and Two Door Cinema Club who are looking for something new might want to check out Bombay Bicycle Club’s A Different Kind of Fix.

Check the WRL catalog for A Different Kind of Fix. 

A few months before the headlines were filled with news of North Korea’s military actions and potential nuclear threats, I came across this intriguing book. Being an avid fan of old war movies, I thought this might be a book about POWs and the Korean War. When most people think about labor camps, political prisoners, and the atrocities reported, they picture the German death camps and POW camps during WWI, WWII, the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It only took reading the jacket notes inside the front cover to realize this was a modern day story of a young man born in a North Korean political prison camp in 1982.

Blaine Harden, serving as the East Asia Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, a boy subjected to unfathomable physical and emotional torture, his extraordinary escape at age 23, and Shin’s current struggle to survive in the outside world. This intriguing story gives the reader insight into the secretive world of the most repressive totalitarian state still in existence today.

As I read Shin’s story and watched current news events in North Korea, it made his harrowing experience come to life, albeit gruesome at times. It was emotionally painful to realize that these types of atrocities continue to this day. Detailed accounts of torture, brainwashing by way of isolation from civilization, and the teaching of young minds to be snitches to protect their own lives. Families were simply forced to be in competition for food. Shin was made to witness the killing of his mother and brother to show him what happens to those who even speak of escaping. Being raised with such a lack of human affection made these horrifying situations more bearable at the time but has caused great difficulties in his current life.

Generations of families were held in the camps for the crimes of distant relatives to ensure that descendants would not rise up against the government. Shin is the only known person born in the camps who is also known to have escaped.  His story will not only open your eyes to the struggle of one young man but also to the struggle of over 200,000 people still being held in the camps to this day. Although the camps have been aerially photographed and documented, the North Korean government continues to deny their existence. In an interview Shin was quoted as saying “I am evolving from being an animal.”

Check the WRL catalog for Escape from Camp 14.

It’s also available as a CD audiobook, read by the author.