Murder of Norman Ware by Rosamund Kendal

Advocate Norman Ware has been murdered in the men's room by the pool in the exclusive San Le Mer eco-estate near Durban, South Africa. The '...murder was the culmination of a series of seemingly unrelated, purely random events.'

Rosamund Kendal builds her story on the lives and actions of 20 people who contributed to Norman Ware's murder—21, if you include Norman himself since he played a part in his own demise. 21 character studies! How can the author pull that off without the story bogging down? In Kendal's case, very well, indeed. The stories-within-a-story are sometimes humorous, poignant in one case, and deliciously cynical when examining politicians, corrupt businessmen, and wealthy suburban dwellers. You'll find some anthropology, sociology, politics, and history worked in. Since at the heart this is a murder, you also get some police procedural and decidedly non-CSI forensic science.

As a reader, I couldn't wait to find out how each person's story fit into the overall scheme. I wasn't disappointed by any piece to the puzzle which is no mean feat when you are juggling this many mini-narratives. After I finished the book and found out how Norman Ware came to be dead, I went back and mapped out the connections between the characters and the murder and marveled at how well the author pulled everything together. I wish I could give some examples but there is no way to do so without spoiling part of the story.

I don't think I've ever read a crime story structured like this one and found it an irresistible, fun read. I think non-South African lovers of a good mystery (such as myself) will enjoy it as well and perhaps learn a bit.

I learned about this book from a brief blurb on Books Live announcing the launch party and found it available for download from kalahari.com. It was a happy whim on my part that I gave into impulse and purchased it. How much do I like this book? When it became available on Kindle I purchased a second copy so I would show up as a an Amazon Verified Purchase when I posted my review.

The Murder of Norman Ware is available for the Kindle and in print at Amazon and Adobe DRM epub and print from Kalahari.

Detroit Breakdown by D.E. Johnson

Detroit, Michigan, 1912. A vibrant, active city, the trolleys are packed no matter the time. The automobile industry is booming with the electric vs internal combustion engine question still to be decided. The suffragette movement is going strong.

A late night anonymous call takes Elizabeth Hume and Will Anderson to Eloise, the insane asylum outside of Detroit. Her cousin, Robert Clarke, a long-time resident there, is accused of strangling another patient. But Robert says it was the Phantom. Francis Beckwith, son of the hospital administrator and himself a schizophrenic, agrees. Francis is obsessed with  The Phantom of the Opera, and says the murder was committed with a Punjab lasso, just as in the book. Furthermore, there have been three other murders committed in the same manner.

Elizabeth wants to clear her cousin but there is something fishy going on at Eloise. The Asylum is a small town with its own police force and gates have slammed shut against outsiders. Frantic for information —Elizabeth can't even find out where Robert is being held —Elizabeth agrees to let William get himself committed so that he can continue the investigation from the inside. For her part, Elizabeth forms a plan to become a volunteer at the hospital. With the plans in effect, Detroit Breakdown shifts into thriller mode with plenty of action to bring the story to a perilous and satisfying conclusion.

Detroit Breakdown was an unexpected treat. I don't often read historicals but I accepted Detroit Breakdown as a review copy and I was quite pleased with the reading experience.

This is the third in a series featuring Elizabeth Hume and Will Anderson. As such, there is a lot of backstory. The author doesn't do a data dump of everything that happened previously but integrates references to prior events into the story as the characters experience feelings of self-doubt or guilt. What is soon obvious is that the Elizabeth and Will are tortured souls— emotionally, psychologically, and, in Will's case physically. The story can be enjoyed without knowing the entire backstory but I'm going to follow up by reading the first two books: The Detroit Electric Scheme and Motor City Shakedown.

If you are looking for a book with a strong, independent female protagonist then this book should satisfy. Elizabeth comes across as the stronger, more adept of the two characters. She is an active suffragette, preparing for the vote to ratify the 19th amendment. She owns two guns and shows herself capable of using them. She has vulnerabilities and insecurities but is a determined, proactive woman. I quite like her. Both she and Will appear to be prone to drug abuse but have overcome that by the events here. Will's role is to take the physical brunt. Here and in the previous books, he suffers horrific physical trauma. Both Elizabeth and Will are complex characters with backgrounds they have to suppress to solve the mystery.

I visited Detroit several years ago and it is fascinating to read about a time when it was thriving. This being Detroit, the competing automobile industries are part of the story. Will's father owns Detroit Electric which began as Anderson Electric Car Company. I hadn't thought much about early electric cars before reading this book but it sent me off to Wikipedia where I learned that Detroit Electric was an actual company started by someone named Anderson. Elizabeth drives an electric which allows the author to work in the logistics of owning an electric automobile. Interesting stuff particularly with the battery powered car making a comeback with the hybrids and the Tesla.

The main focus of the story, Eloise, was an actual psychiatric hospital. As in the story, it was self sufficient in many ways with its own train stop, police force, fire station, pig farm. It even had the tunnel that figures into the story. The Tales of Eloise web site is an interesting read and it was fun to compare the map included in Detroit Breakdown with the map of the actual institution. Johnson  graphically illustrates the state of psychiatric care at the turn of the century. Have amnesia, don't speak English, the police found it convenient to warehouse problems by sending to the mental hospital. Psychiatric therapy was just emerging when the story is set so we see alternate approaches to treatment that we would consider horrific today.

Detroit Breakdown is a good read particularly if you enjoy a well written historical story. Johnson works the culture, fashion, lifestyle, and technology of the day into the story naturally without leaving readers feeling that they have happened upon entries from an encyclopedia. I like the characters, enough to want to read the first two books in the series. They're flawed human beings which makes them more interesting, even likable. You'd want them on your side in a fight.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Last year I was excited to see that Megan Abbott had a new book out. But cheerleaders! Nah, not for me. Jump ahead to January and I'm browsing bookshelves and see Dare Me. "Hold on", I think to myself, "this is Megan Abbott. She wrote the novel Queenpin (a Jim Thompson style noir that I love) and the non-fiction book, The Street was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir (which I have on permanent loan from the library). She's hardboiled and knows her stuff" and picked up a copy. This was a lesson to me and Megan I'll never doubt you again. I loved the book from page one and consumed it in one sitting. I'm late to the game and won't be doing a full-on review but, for those readers who know nothing about Dare Me, these blogs wrote what I wish I had so check them out:
Full Stop
Three Guys One Book
Jen's Bookshelves
Spinetingler Magazine

Full Stop calls this a "suburban noir" and it's a good description. The teenagers in Dare Me are dark, hardboiled, and like a gangland mob with a rigid hierarchy and a vicious enforcement of discipline. Mean Girls. Hah! This cheerleading squad would eat them for breakfast.

The crime isn't the main focus of the story which is the power struggle between Beth, the head girl, her faithful lieutenant Addy, and the new coach, Colette French. The story is pretty self-contained in that the rest of the high school is more or less a shadow behind the actions of the squad.

Megan's prose is perfect and the lyrical flow of the first person narration pulled me into the story. The characters became scary real the more I read and I was both fascinated and repelled by them.

When you read Dare Me, I recommend you make a note of the cheerleader routines Megan describes. There are You Tube videos demonstrating all of them. Stop reading and take a look at what the girls are doing. Remarkable stuff.

Exhibit A by Sarah Lotz

Rape. An ugly word. A heinous act. Is justice possible if the rapist is someone whose job it is to provide protection, a police officer? Sarah Lotz's first legal drama explores this question.

George Allen is a Cape Town lawyer. He can't afford a pro bono case but when a woman he met in a bar (and whom he'd like to know better) asks him to help her sister who says she was raped in a police cell by a policeman, he agrees to investigate. George heads off to Barryville, a small town in the Klein Karoo. Backing him up is Patrick McLennan, known to the entire legal community (and his wife) as the Poison Dwarf, 'one of the most feared advocates in Cape Town' who makes up for his short stature by being a 'total and utter bastard'. In the backseat is Exhibit A, a scruffy dog Patrick claims is a witness to a crime. The many irregularities they find resolve George and Patrick to pursue the case all the way to the courtroom.

Aside: The South African legal system is modeled after the British. George is an attorney. He meets with clients and handles their legal needs like contracts, divorces, etc. If the case goes to court, the attorney briefs an advocate who is an expert in arguing cases in front of a judge.

Exhibit A is based on an actual event and dramatizes the serious problem of rape in South Africa. The country is reported to lead the world in rape cases and a 2010 study reveals that a quarter of the males in South Africa have admitted to committing a rape. And those are just the known cases. Searching South African news also shows that rape by police officers is disturbingly common. Some readers might prefer a little more distance between their fiction and reality but I think the author's decision to solidly anchor the story in a national crises makes it a stronger.

Lotz has a deft touch creating her characters who are among my favorites in crime fiction. She also finds a way to include dark, ironic, sarcastic humour to offset a grim topic.  Patrick is often the focus in humorous situations being short, Scottish, and constantly eating, but his excellence as an advocate is never questioned. Likewise, George, a little down at the heels, practice eking along, and whose love life is a shambles after breaking up with fellow attorney, Val (aka The Witch), has wry observations about himself but still comes across as a lawyer I would engage. Val is George's ex domestic and law partner. She doesn't get as much page time but when she does, it is a treat. She is the target of some of Patrick's best caustic comments. If the author asked me what I wold like to see next in this series, I would ask for a story from before Val and George broke up.

In addition to a good story and characters, the author gives you a good sense of place. You know you are in South Africa. I enjoyed the way she described Barryville in the Klein (Little) Karoo. She lets you feel that you are in one of those 'tiny South African towns that stuck in a time warp and is dripping with small-town prejudice and incipient racist values'. If you enjoy books set in a different country that gives you a feeling for the location then I predict you will enjoy Exhibit A.

Sarah has a second book featuring these characters, Tooth and Nailed. Both are available in Kindle editions here: Exhibit A, Tooth and Nailed. Buy both and maybe she will be encouraged to write a third.

Deadlands by Lily Herne

Lele de la Fontein has problems not all that different from many 17-year-olds: prone to whinging; stubborn; convinced her step-mother hates her; resentful that she's been taken from a warm agricultural community where she and her brother lived with their grandmother until she died to the smelly, dirty, and hostile city; out of place in her new school where the in-crowd students mock her as Farm Girl; and attracted to the bad boy in her class. But most teenagers don't live in a world where the dead rise and what remains of humanity has been forced into fenced enclaves.

This is the Cape Town city enclave, ten years after the dead reanimated and the living fought a savage war of survival, one that would have been lost if not for the arrival of the mysterious Guardians. Daily existence is mostly pre-industrial. The Guardians can control the reanimated, the Rotters, and established the enclaves but no one knows anything about them, where they came from, what they look like under their hooded robes. They rule the Deadlands, the area outside the enclaves. Within the city, a fanatical religious cult has taken over. The Resurrectionists worship the Guardians as saviors and see the Reanimates as the next step for humanity, as one of the ReBorn. In response to her teacher telling her that things are much better now, Lele thinks to herself:

Sure. Trapped in a muddy, stinking prison, surrounded by a sea of dead people and ruled by a bunch of hysterical nutters, that's so much better than before. Not.

This is Lele's world and it is treacherous. Her parents are trying to steer her into a career path but if she is too rebellious she might find herself forced into marriage and required to produce as many children as possible. Under the influence of bad boy Thabo, Lele gets involved in the anti-Resurrectionist, anti-zombie movement, the ANZ. Through Thabo, Lele learns about the Mall Rats, and underground organization able to supply pre-war goods.

Looming over the life of all teenagers is the Lottery, an event demanded by the Guardians in return for reintroducing technology. At the Lottery Dance, teenagers are selected to be taken by the Guardians. This is considered an honor though no one knows what happens to those chosen. Lele is supposed to be exempt from the Lottery because her brother Jobe had been taken by the Guardians at the beginning of the War and returned. Unfortunately for Lele, she has been noticed and she finds herself "chosen" and in the back of a wagon driven by Guardians with four other teenagers hurtling toward an unknown fate.

Deadlands is the first book in a young adult series by the mother and daughter team of Sarah and Savannah Lotz writing as Lily Herne. South African author Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and Moxyland said that...

Deadlands is cool, provocacative and sharp as spiny teeth. A viciously satirical, pop-culture loaded, teen zombie apocalypse with heart – it's smart, dark, sweet, gruesome, political and, best of all, funny.

Lauren sums up everything I like about this book.

Before I go any further, let me address one issue. There is a lottery in Deadlands in which teenagers are chosen. Someone is going to say that since there is a lottery it must be derived from The Hunger Games. No. Lotteries are hardly new to literature (Shirley Jackson, anyone) and this lottery only gets four pages. The implications of the Deadlands Lottery are huge for this post-apocalyptic society but it is given only a brief treatment to get things rolling.

You can read Deadlands as "teenagers fighting the establishment" and it works well there. The writing is sharp, no superflous exposition, you get to the heart of the story quickly. Important questions are answered so the reader isn't left with a "gerrr, what the hell is going on and why do I have to wait until the next book for answers" feeling. I'm a sucker for this sort of story having grown up on Robert Heinlein's juvi novels. But, as Lauren points out above, there are satirical elements to the story.

In personal correspondence and social media I've noticed that events in the US are carefully watched by the world. What happens here can have far ranging effects. In many cases, observers from other countries are more aware of what's going on in the US than many of its own citizens. I suspect that the Resurrectionist cult is based on the religious extremism that is asserting itself in this country where we have fanatical true believers prone to rewriting history some of whom call for the death of non-believers, corrupt individuals exploiting that fanaticism for their own ends, and people who wear the outward trappings without the fanatical adherence because it is easier not to get noticed.

The authors take a poke, sometimes humorous, at consumerism and popular culture. Sarah seems to have something against malls.

Below I explain several references found in the story which might not be obvious to non-South Africans. There might be a spoiler depending on the level of detail you are willing to accept before reading a book so be warned.

Unless you live in South Africa or know someone planing to visit South Africa (which is how I got my copy), you won't be able to read Deadlands now. It is available for pre-order from Amazon UK and will be available 18 April 2013. Here is the link.

Deadlands takes place around the year 2020. The war has been over for 10 years. When dead reanimated there were visitors in the country for the soccer World Cup which took place in 2010.

The new history textbook given to Lele's class references an iconic photograph from the 1976 Soweto Uprising. A dying Hector Peterson (Pieterson), shot by police, is shown in the arms of a classmate. The Resurrectionists use this to how how bad things were in the past in contrast with the security people now enjoy.

The Cape Town city enclosure was constructed around what is now the Khayelitsha township in Cape Flats. It is about 20 miles outside of Cape Town proper. Cape Town was destroyed in a great fire during the war against the reanimates. I wonder if it is irony on the part of the authors to move the survivors to a fenced enclosure in Cape Flats which has been described as apartheid's dumping ground.

The Resurrectionists use gangster and slasher films to show the people how bad things were in the old days. Lele and her family go to see Jerusalema. This is an actual film and now has the title Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema. It is a 2008 production and quite good. I watched it on Netflix and ordered it on DVD immediately after it ended. I'll review it later.

You will read references to a panga. The Panga is a machete and shows up in many South African crime stories.

You can order one from The Knife Center. I'm planning to get one for my zombie contingency kit. I already have a cricket bat.

Ratanga Junction is mentioned in the story. This a theme park and part of Century City. A super-regional mall is nearby.