Caught in a Web – The Dissident by Paul Goldberg

A very hard book to read, and like, in my opinion. Another of my choices to read and rate for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, I had very different expectations, based on the brief synopsis provided by the prize organizers (and the rather deceptive jacket copy). 

Set in 1978, as the Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate, it is a story about Refuseniks, especially one in particular, Viktor, a Jewish man who is stuck in Moscow, since the government has refused his visa request to emigrate to Israel. Of course, this was a common situation at that time with many Jews seeking to leave for Israel or the United States. I knew a few who managed it, and spent some time getting a taste of their world in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, visiting the shops and restaurants. 

Since it is the Soviet Union, he gets caught up in the impenetrable web of a KGB murder investigation, after he comes upon the scene of the crime, and is seen leaving the site. Viktor's hero is none other than Henry Kissinger, certainly a highly controversial figure on his own, but who is supposed to be arriving for a state visit when the murder, which involved an American, took place. The investigation must be resolved before Kissinger's visit, as it will be a diplomatic issue.

As Winston Churchill said, Soviet Russia is "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.", and that is certainly true of this novel. Perhaps obtaining a view of that warped world was the author's point, but I just couldn't go along. 

In my Mark Twain reviewer's scoring form, I said that this book did not represent an American voice, but while that's not entirely correct, the form does not provide a lot of space to elaborate. The author is a Russian immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager, so while you could say his is one of many hyphenated American ethnicities writing in the United States today, with the setting of this book in Moscow, it is very far away from what I find to be a relatable tale or an accessible point of view. 

Violence Against Girls and Women – When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain

Due to the subject nature (abducted/missing young girls and teens), this was a tough book to get through. There is some violence, a lot of emotional stress and accounts of emotional abuse, and the suspense of the dark plot details. The book is set in 1993, during the search for abducted and murdered Polly Klaas, a young girl from Petaluma, CA.

Anna Hart is a San Francisco detective, specializing in missing persons. After a personal tragedy, unrevealed till much later in the book, her husband insists on a separation. Anna heads to Mendocino, the small California town where she grew up with foster parents Eden and Hap, who were kind and nurturing to her after the very difficult past of her earlier childhood. She finds a small cabin in the woods to rent, and acquires a dog.

Anna becomes embroiled in the search for Cameron, a missing girl, one of a few concurrent cases in Northern California, including the Klaas case, which is receiving a lot of media attention, partly because actress Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, has taken a personal interest. 

Cameron, the adopted daughter of a former actress and her producer husband, is a beautiful but sad girl who is dealing with early trauma, much of which is unknown to her parents. During Anna's intensive detective work on the case, she uncovers much about Cameron's early childhood, and finds Cameron's protective older brother, Hector, from whom she was separated when she was adopted.

While searching for Cameron, Anna is confronted with her own unresolved, unreconciled personal tragedies, both her current situation, and the earlier ones that haunt her. She becomes reacquainted with Will, the sheriff and an old friend, and Caleb, another, whose twin sister Jenny disappeared during their high school days.

The multiple threads of Cameron's case, and that of another girl named Shannen, and Anna's inner search for resolution with her past coincide and collide throughout this novel, but it never descends into melodrama, as the situations described are all too common, and in the Klaas case, real. 

By the end, nearly all of the tensions and conflicts reach a conclusion, though author Paula McClain does leave one untied thread...which I found both surprising and disappointing.

This subject matter is very disturbing, and since we read and hear about similar cases every day, it's also an important, urgent topic, one that certainly should not be diminished or dismissed by some of our political structures, which seem, in some cases, to care less about the ongoing care and nurturing of children, than than they do about their so-called "pro-life" stance, which ends once birth takes place. Those politicians, who are limiting the rights of women and girls, and who refuse to provide adequate funding to local governments who need help combatting the type of crime addressed in this book, need to be voted out. Please think about that in this very important election year.

 

A World of Darkness – Ravage & Son by Jerome Charyn

Set in the Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan not long after the turn of the twentieth century, Abraham Cahan, the legendary editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, rescues Ben Ravage, a boy living at a trade school and home for orphaned boys and sends him to Harvard, where he earns a law degree. Ben, rather than joining a law firm, returns to the neighborhood and becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a Robin Hood sort of gang fighting corruption and violent crime.

Ben is the illegitimate son of Lionel Ravage, a cruel, swindling landlord and businessman who lives uptown among the other wealthy German Jews, including Jacob Schiff (who was in real life a principal at the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and a prominent figure in charitable enterprises) who in this story operates various businesses, not all above board. The older Ravage lives a dark life making his downtown rounds, but he falls in love with and seduces the beautiful but impoverished Manya, who gives birth to Ben.

The story moves back and forth between the various principals and threads: Cahan, who is fighting F.W. Woolworth's plan to raze buildings on Grand Street in order to build another five and ten store, which he believes will change the character of the neighborhood and lead to gentrification that will drive out the poor and destroy a traditional mode of commerce; the conflicts between the two Ravages, Schiff's enterprises; and, Clara Karp, a fictional Yiddish theatre actress of tremendous influence who appears as a female Hamlet, and alongside the real-life king of Yiddish theater, Jacob Adler, known for his King Lear.

This is a complex and picaresque tale, violent to the point of gruesome, including some very graphic details I could certainly have done without, though they are important to understanding the characters. This Lower East Side is dark, and far beyond any tale of poverty, squalid living and working conditions, the press of Tammany Hall corruption, and the spread of vice, drugs, and violence against the innocent and often illiterate inhabitants of the area. Despite this darkness, this is still a fascinating portrait of a way of life that is now long gone, and barely remembered except in the memories of the aging grandchildren of the inhabitants of that era.

Crime Solvers – The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

It is interesting how discussing a book with a book club group can change your opinion of it. I was very enthusiastic about The Word Is Murder when I began reading it, though I had misgivings about the portrayal of one of the major characters, Hawthorne, the crime-solving detective, as a homophobe. For me, that's a major flaw in a character's (a person's) personality. The more we discussed it, and the more I considered it, the more it disturbed and offended me, and I don't understand why the author gave Hawthorne that characteristic, since he doesn't seem to take it anywhere. Hence, I downgraded my opinion from "4 Stars" to "3 Stars" on my Goodreads page.

The author, Anthony Horowitz, is himself the other main character and narrator, who relates the story of the crimes involved from his perspective. This is an unusual technique, but I found it clever, and amusing. Not all of the book clubbers agreed, but I'll keep my opinion intact.

The plotting is excellent, and Horowitz keeps the reader guessing almost until the very end. I may or may not read the next book in this series, if only to find out more about the mystery of Hawthorne's homophobia, and if Horowitz manages to change his mind. The Word Is Murder is the fourth of these novels.

Horowitz, a British author, was previously unknown to me, but it turns out that he has had a prolific and successful career in children's and young adult fiction, as well as adult fiction. He is also well known as the television writer of "Foyle's War" (which has run on Netflix) and "Midsomer Murders" which has run on PBS, though I have never watched it. It might be work a look...

Why It Happened – Murder on Bedford Street by Victoria Thompson

I didn't think this installment was as appealing as some of the others I have read in the series (I really need to go back and read all the ones in order that I have missed, since I'm fairly new to Victoria Thompson).

There wasn't as much interaction between the leading characters, the husband and wife investigating team of former policeman Frank and midwife Sarah, or with their employees Maeve and Gino, though Maeve played a large part in the story, which was a plus. I also didn't get quite as much of the period flavor as in others in the series.

What made it interesting (and actually important) was the novel's focus on mental illness, how it was recognized, and treated, in the early twentieth century. The stigma of mental illness was even more profound then than it is now. It leads to the question: how much have we progressed, or not, in treating people with serious conditions that could lead them to hurting themselves or others, as occurred in this book? The answer, I think, is not as much as we should have. While large municipal and state-run institutions that housed patients often in appalling and prison-like conditions have largely been abolished and destroyed, we now lack enough facilities or practitioners who can care for people who are suffering, untreated, and often living homeless in the streets of our cities. That is as far from humane as can be, and fallout from COVID exacerbated the numbers of people who need treatment. Perhaps that was Thompson's impetus for this book, and I do recommend it for that reason.

Mott Street Mystery: China Trade by S.J. Rozan

So much fun to come across a series that is completely new to you and then discover that the author has already written more than ten books. Since I really enjoyed China Trade by S.J. Rozan, I have great expectations for the subsequent titles.

China Trade is set in early '90s Manhattan, mainly in Chinatown, and features Lydia Chin, a young Chinese-American detective and her partner Bill Smith, who is decidedly not Chinese. Some rare antique porcelains have been stolen from a small neighborhood museum and Lydia is called in to investigate. The theft investigation moves quickly from Chinatown to the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and back downtown again. An intricate story with great ethnic atmospheric details quickly draws the reader into the story, which comes to a satisfying conclusion and drops a few hints for what may come in future installments.

The descriptions of Chinatown and the depictions of Lydia's mother, her brother Tim, and her friends are so spot on. Whether Lydia is on Mott Street, in a neighborhood restaurant grabbing a quick bowl of noodles, or taking her shoes off at the door of the apartment where she lives with her mother, you get a persuasive depiction of the culture. It adds so much truth and immediacy to the story (even though this book is twenty-five years old) that you are eager to know more.

Perhaps a Chinese-American reader might feel differently, but I was certainly convinced that the author must be at least partly of Chinese background since the details were much what one might expect from known Chinese-American writers like Amy Tan or Lisa See. S.J. Rozan is most definitely not of Chinese heritage, and I would love to know what her research for this book entailed. After reviewing her website and reading her Wikipedia entry, that remains a mystery of its own, which just makes her writing all the more intriguing. Rozan's latest book was release in July, 2019, and her most recent blog post was just a few weeks ago, so it is great to know that she is still actively writing. More to look forward to...yay!

Manhattan Mayhem, circa 1909 – The Interpretation of Murder (Freud, #1) by Jed Rubenfeld

Love these historical/psychological crime novels, especially when they are set in New York. Hadn't really thought of them before as a favorite genre...but it's become clear that there's a pattern here!

Rubenfeld brings the great Freud and the younger Carl Jung to New York during a period of great change and growth. It's 1909 and in the last ten years, there are subways, cars, electric lighting and telephone service proliferating in Manhattan. There are also all the ills of a city rapidly expanding in population, including crime, political corruption and a lively economy with women and children now working in great numbers in the clothing factories and other businesses. The immigrant neighborhoods are overcrowded and disease-ridden.

Against this backdrop, there is, of course, a sensational murder. A young woman of the "better" classes is found dead, and another survives, but can remember nothing. A young psychologist, a disciple of Freud, is engaged in trying to reach the memories of the second victim.

There is a great deal of weaving fiction with actual circumstances and characters, but it works in the most compelling way. It will keep the reader engaged with fascinating historic detail as well as the plot. The book is well-researched and fast-paced.