Murder of Mary Russell

 

I was really into the Mary Russell series by Laurie King a little while back, I enjoyed the first one but then the subsequent ones got progressively worse and I stopped reading them. I decided to go back and give some of the later ones a chance. I figured I didn't necessarily need to read them in order. 

Spoilers ahead: Mary does not (thankfully) die. She is home alone one day when a man shows up, claiming to be Mrs. Hudson's illegitimate son. The bulk of the book is Mrs. Hudson's backstory, and maybe that's why I enjoyed it so much, it was really fun! Mrs. Hudson's mother died when she was about 10, leaving behind Clarissa (which was her name then), her younger sister, Alicia, and her drunkard criminal husband, James. James fled to Australia before Clarissa was born to escape the Bishop, a man he owed money to back in London. Clarissa's mother followed him and while she was alive, things were good, but after she died everything fell apart. Clarissa discovered she had a talent for acting and mimicking accents, a talent her shady father soon put to use running con jobs with him. The two of them became very adept criminals and when Clarissa is of age, they return to London (leaving Alicia in Australia) to score a really big prize. 

Things are going well until Clarissa falls in love and ends up pregnant. The man deserts her and she's left to try to muddle through on her own. She meets a young Sherlock Holmes, who agrees to give her a second chance on the condition that she will give the baby to her sister to raise and they'll never speak of her criminal past again. 

Fast forward almost fifty years and Clara (as Sherlock has rechristened her) finds out her sister has passed away. Her son, Samuel, discovers the truth in his mother's old letters and comes to find his birth mother. Oh, and the fortune that James Hudson apparently hid that's never been found. He's convinced Clara knows where it is. 

Clanlands: Almanac

 

I hate to say anything bad about "Outlander" or anyone involved in the show, but man, was this just a cash grab. Seriously. If you watched "Men In Kilts", this was basically just a print version of the show with a few extra bits of history added in. As I was reading it I kept thinking "I watched this on the show, what the heck?". 

And not even any pictures to make it worth my while. Blah. 

Havana: a Subtropical Delirium

 

I've always wanted to visit Cuba and particularly Havana. I blame "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights", which I caught on TV the other day and was kind of shocked at how bad it was. I remember it being so much better. At any rate, it made me say "I want to read a book about Havana". And here we are. 

The problem is that I want to visit pre-Revolutionary Havana, the Havana of Batista, not Castro. So unless someone invents a time machine, it won't happen. 

Kurlansky is very much in favor of Castro's Havana. He doesn't have anything good to say about Batista and Cuba before Castro. Of course he never saw Cuba back then, so there's that. He probably didn't watch "Havana Nights", either. 

All in all it was interesting. It really does sound like a fascinating country, full of warm and friendly people. Since I can't visit (well, I can, if I want to jump through all the hoops, which I kind of don't) I'll enjoy reading books and looking at pictures of the beautiful architecture and eating at Cuban restaurants. 

Hell's Half-Acre

 

The Bender case has intrigued me for a long time, ever since I heard the rumor that Laura Ingalls Wilder's father, Charles (or, as I think of him, "Pa"), supposedly had a hand in killing the family after the community learned of their crimes. That has been disproven, sadly. I like to think of Pa and the rest of the men in town engaging in a little well deserved frontier justice.

The Benders lived in Kansas, not far from Independence. They had a cabin and travelers would stop for a meal, provisions, and a place to sleep. The daughter, Kate Bender, was apparently quite pretty and men would deliberately go by the Benders' cabin just to get a glance at her. 

Unfortunately, in addition to being pretty, she was also deadly. No one was quite sure of how the members of the family were related to each other. There was an older couple everyone assumed were the parents, and a younger couple everyone assumed were brother and sister, but maybe Kate was married to John Jr. The "parents" spoke very little English, only German, and were not friendly. 

Travelers started disappearing and the last place they were seen was the Bender cabin. The area started getting a bad reputation as a place to avoid. A widower and his infant daughter were headed back to Iowa after the death of his wife and disappeared, prompting a family friend and popular local doctor named William York to go looking for them. York too disappeared. York came from a prominent family: his brother Alexander was a senator and his other older brother Ed was a Colonel. A search party was organized. After Colonel York confronted the Benders, they denied any knowledge of William's whereabouts but soon after fled their cabin. The men dug up the cellar and discovered the bodies of at least ten people, including the poor widower and his baby daughter and William York. A massive search for the Benders was undertaken, and they were tracked to Texas and New Mexico, but despite large rewards for information they were never caught. 

It was an interesting book and I think Jonusas did a good job with the scant details she was able to dig up. It's a shame there wasn't a more conclusive ending to their story, but that's the way it goes. 

When a Killer Calls

 

I didn't care much for Douglas' last book so I was glad I enjoyed this one. Everyone's entitled to a bad day.

I shouldn't say "enjoyed". I didn't enjoy it. It was very sad. But it was well written. 

In 1985, high school senior Shari Smith was abducted from the end of her driveway when she stopped to get the mail. Her killer made several calls to her family, basically torturing them. He had Shari write them a letter titled "Last Will and Testament". In the letter she begs her family not to hold hate in their hearts and to hang onto how much she loved them. It was absolutely heartbreaking. The killer finally revealed the location of Shari's body, ending all hope that she was still alive. Two weeks after he kidnapped Shari, he snatched a nine year old little girl named Debra May out of her own front yard where she was playing with her little brother. The killer called the Smith family, specifically Shari's older sister Dawn, to let her know where to find Debra May's body. The FBI speculated that it was because Debra May's family didn't have a phone in their house, but also because the killer was fixated on Dawn. 

Luckily this sick son of a bitch was caught and convicted of these two heinous crimes. He was a prime suspect in a few others, but law enforcement couldn't get anything out of him. In court this dirtbag professed his love for Dawn and proposed to her three times. I can't even begin to imagine how Dawn held it together, listening to this garbage heap who raped and murdered her beloved baby sister profess his love for her. She's a stronger woman than I am because I would have had to be physically restrained from going after him to put his eyes out. 

At any rate, they executed him and good riddance. 

The Nineties

 

I've never read one of Klosterman's books. The covers are always interesting. I had that phone :) Since the 90s was the decade I was a teenager/young twenty year old, I was curious to see what he had to say about it.

It wasn't bad. It wasn't a nostalgic look back at the decade, it was a more sociological critique. He talked about how people have a hard time not applying the social mores they hold now to times in the past, something I've frequently found very frustrating. I try not to do it and to remind people I'm talking to that yes, we feel that way now but we didn't then. People by and large have very short memories, I've found. I think I'm coming off a bit more pretentious than I mean to. I just have a really good memory plus I've always kept a journal, which I enjoy going back and rereading, so things that happened decades ago seem very fresh in my mind. 

All in all it was okay. I disagreed with him on some things (Kurt's murder, OJ Simpson being guilty) but I've come to expect I'm in the minority on these issues, so I try not to get upset any more. Mostly what I took away from this book is how much I miss my clear landline phone. 

Woman Beyond the Attic

 

I was trying to describe "Flowers in the Attic" to a coworker who had never read it, and I told her it was my gateway drug. V.C. Andrews was my bridge between Babysitters Club and Trixie Belden to authors like Stephen King and William Faulkner. My sister and I devoured the Flowers and Heaven series. I read Dawn but didn't love it, and I gave up on Ruby. 

V.C. Andrews was always a bit of a mystery. By the time I started reading her books, she had been dead for several years. Pre-internet days I wasn't able to find out much about her. Neiderman (who has been her ghostwriter since she passed away in 1986) admits that she was very reclusive, hated giving interviews, and basically lied a lot about things she didn't want to talk about like her age and her health issues. As a result, this "biography" was very short, about 150 pages. It was pretty repetitive. I was disappointed. I was hoping for more. He included an unfinished book Andrews had started (I was shocked he didn't finish it at some point over the last 30 years) which was not really interesting. It felt like, if Andrews had lived longer and had a chance to write more, she would have kept treading over the same tired ground. It's unfortunate, considering how groundbreaking Flowers was. She just couldn't seem to move on from those themes.