Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

I am Patti Black. That’s Patricia A. Black, age 38, TAC officer in the Chicago Police Department; the woman some call the most decorated officer in the history of the CPD. That may be so, but sometimes my Sunday afternoon rugby matches feel more important than that shiny career. It’s the “shiny” part that makes me nervous; nervous because it’s only my seventeen years on the force that can shine. No one knows what my life was like in the years that are missing from my application to the academy; no one but me. And then we found the body in the wall: Annabelle Ganz, my foster mother, half of the couple who made my life a living hell. And Annabelle was the “gentle” one… it was Roland Ganz who so casually treated my body, my mind as if they were toys… Roland who fathered the child I gave away at fifteen… Roland whose tender ministrations left my body and mind covered with the kind of scars that would twist the soul of someone weaker… Roland who has re-appeared after twenty-three years to steal the son I gave up, the son I’ve never seen.

He’s not going to get my John. He will die trying and I will be the one who kills him.

Patti Black’s life is about to become Hell on earth, not that Patti hasn’t already seen Hell. Hell was Calumet City, where Roland Ganz – mild-mannered accountant by day, demon incarnate by night – raped and battered the foster children in his care. Hell was twenty-three years ago, but for Patti Black it might as well have been last night. Hell is what made Patti Black the woman she is, a ghetto cop who knows no fear, a loner whose only dependents are a pair of goldfish, an alcoholic seventeen years sober. But then one Monday, it all starts to unravel for Patti Black. Within the next seven days, she will become a suspect in half a dozen murders, her name will be tied to corruption in the CPD, and “Idaho Joe” will put out a contract on her head. She’ll spend a night in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert and face a waterspout on Lake Michigan, find man and beast mutilated beyond recognition. And all that pales in the face of fear, fear for the son she hasn’t seen since the day he was born; and the only people she can count on are a reporter aiming for a Pulitzer and her sergeant. Small comfort in the face of the coming disaster, but she’ll take it.

Roland is coming for her, coming for John; and Patti Black Will! Not! Let! Him! Get! John! even if she dies keeping the Devil at bay… Read the rest of this entry »

There must be a million coming-of-age novels, from classics like Emma and Tom Jones to modern novels such as The Secret Life of Bees. It’s a literary form that has been written from the viewpoint of both genders and from many an age, but it’s also a form that has a recognized structure and progression. At some crisis point in his or her life the youngster embarks on a journey, either physical or metaphorical, that takes him or her across the bridge from childhood to adulthood; concluding in realization of the powers and responsibilities of that adult. Sexual awakening is sometimes present, often hinted at, but not absolutely necessary. Note that I said “youngster”: coming of age usually focuses on the transition from chronological youth to adulthood; less often on transition from social youth to adulthood. And then there is the third form of transition: emotional… the probable topic of Scott Spencer’s Willing.

Avery Jankowsky’s personal crisis is palpable: Deirdre, the much younger woman with whom thirty-seven year old Avery lives, has dropped the bombshell that she has been and continues to be unfaithful. Said announcement rocks the freelance journalist’s tidy, circumscribed world; not least because his essentially hand-to-mouth finances mean that he’ll find it difficult to afford to live alone. What’s a boy to do? [note the personal disaster that is essential to a coming-of-age novel]

That’s when a white knight, in the form of Avery’s uncle Ezra, appears bearing an unusual, not to mention expensive, solution to both his fiscal and his personal difficulties. A bosom buddy of Ezra’s has comped the elderly gentleman for a two-week, all expenses paid sex tour. And not a sex tour to the unsavory brothels of Thailand; this one will… errr…. “introduce” its participants to a variety of gorgeous northern European women in such venues as Reykjavik, Oslo, Riga, and Copenhagen. Just imagine all those willowy, long-tressed ABBA lovers attentive to one’s every – and I do mean every – desire. How can Avery not leap at such a chance, especially when he can document the trip and sell his memoirs for a pretty penny – not to mention get even with the wayward Deirdre. And so that’s just what Avery does: he sells the rights to his story for the mid six-figures, climbs in a taxi, and heads for the Fleming Tours terminal at LaGuardia to join his fellow “tourists.”[note the journey (physical, if not also metaphorical) that is expected in the form]

A prime tenet of journalism is that the writer must remain outside the story, reporting rather than participating: “embedded” takes on an entirely different meaning for the freelancer surreptitiously (he hopes) recording his impressions of a journey that consists mainly of hopping from one bed to another; from pair of willing (financially, anyway) arms to pair of willing arms. Avery’s intent to remain a disinterested participant, however, will not last: Sigrid and then Nina will see to that.

But if Avery was envisioning an idyllic romp in a series of white-sheeted featherbeds with willing blond Barbies, his hopes are soon dashed: the romps are anything but idyllic, the beds aren’t feathered, and the local hookers aren’t Barbie-esque; and to make matters worse, there is strife among the ranks of the tourists – but Avery ain’t seen nothing yet: the biggest surprise of all is yet to come… [here’s where that “bridge” should be crossed] Read the rest of this entry »

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly landfall, most authors whose regular beat is the Gulf Coast worked the tragedy into their next storyline, just as many writers (and musicians and artists) expressed their grief after 9/11. Homage to the victims – and the heroes – of New Orleans was probably best done by James Lee Burke in 2007’s Tin Roof Blowdown. It’s also been done, err, not so well in First the Dead (A Bug Man Novel) by Tim Downs. Not at all well, in fact…

The Bug Man? Think forensic entomologist, like television’s Gil Grissom of “CSI,” with all that talk of corpse beetles and blowfly larvae (aka maggots). This one’s Nick Polchak, PhD: a North Carolina State professor summoned to staff the mobile morgue set up to handle hurricane victims. Chafing at orders to participate in search and rescue operations before collecting bodies (chafing, in fact, at any order), Polchak reluctantly acquiesces long enough to rescue one pre-teen roof-sitter. When he begins, however, to stumble across bodies in the Lower Ninth Ward that his expertise tells him were already dead when Katrina arrived, all pretense of following orders ends, even though he’s been ordered by a DEA agent to leave the floaters alone. Within a day, Polchak is in mortal danger; as is anyone near him.

Amid the horrors of the drowning Crescent City, Polchak and his helpers – a funeral director from Indiana and the rescued boy, J T – float around looking for more suspicious bodies. And as for the living and the city’s thousands of residents dead in the aftermath of the storm? Tough noogies: the bug man’s on the track of a killer, and those bodies take precedence over everything else. Read the rest of this entry »

Back when I was a college undergraduate the line of demarcation was clear: if you were headed for a B. S. degree, you took neither Music nor Art Appreciation. Those classes were for the people who planned to wimp out with a mere B. A. As the child and brother (and, eventually uncle) of music teachers, I’ve absorbed enough over the years to be able to tell a Pachabel from a pachysandra and differentiate Bach from Beethoven. But art? I know nothing beyond American Gothic and La Giaconda; and as for artists? Well, how about the drip guy¹ and the squares guy ²? My dirty little secret, I guess, is that I’d never much cared that I knew very little of art.

That’s all different now, and it’s Michael Gruber’s fault – Gruber’s and Chaz Wilmot’s:

Will the real Chaz Wilmot please stand up? Is he a fabulously gifted artist wasting his talent on a hand-to-mouth existence drawing magazine illustrations? a renowned modernist painter whose recent retrospective at the Whitney was a smash success? the modern world’s most gifted forger?

Or is he all three?

When the fiftyish painter volunteers for tests of a “creativity-enhancing drug,” he figures the results will be no more striking than the decidedly bogus “creativity” of his youthful LSD trips. His expectations are far too modest, however: in the drug’s afterglow Chaz paints some of his finest work, and does so at an astonishing pace. More striking, however, than even his increased output is that the drug seems somehow to pierce the veil of time. Chaz \believes his mind to be linked with the mind of 17th-century Spanish master, Diego Velázquez.

In Venice on commission to “recreate” (for a none-too fastidious Italian robber baron) a ceiling fresco by Velázquez contemporary Tiepolo, Wilmot is approached to “create” a hitherto unknown work by that same Velázquez. Some might call it forgery, others simply call it art… the affair of the Alba Venus, however, will shake Chaz Wilmot to the very core of his humanity, the place from whence rises his talent. And his becomes a talent of terrifying power.

Inhabiting a strange world that seems to span centuries, Chaz Wilmot becomes Velázquez – or perhaps he does not. Perhaps he is but a tortured artist driven mad by his own talent – or perhaps not. Perhaps the drug has liberated his mind, given it the power to journey through time and space – or perhaps not. Perhaps all are true; perhaps none are true – for what is truth? For Chaz Wilmot and for The Venus Forgery, Art is Truth, and naught else matters. Read the rest of this entry »