SOME TRADITIONAL Christian publishers don’t do much in history. After years of reading overstatements from both left and right concerning America’s founding, I enjoyed the calm and thorough analysis of Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Thomas Nelson, 2019). Those who read minds and extrapolate diaries may still fight over questions of sincerity and personal faithfulness, but Hall clearly shows what’s most important: that Christian ideas profoundly influenced the Founders, and through them all of us.
Book 2 in David Blake’s Norfolk Broads police procedural series is St. Benet’s. As you might guess, this novel takes its name from a church, and the issue of religion gets touched on.
Detective John Tanner is now cohabiting, at least much of
the time, with his partner, attractive DC Jenny Evans. This is against
regulations, but nobody’s called them on it yet.
Jenny in particular is appalled when they’re called to the
ruined abbey adjoining the Catholic church to which she (technically) belongs,
though her practice has lapsed. A man has been found on the site of the old
altar, his head nearly severed and a knife in his hand. It looks like suicide,
but if so it’s an extreme one, and John isn’t certain about it. The dead man
was the former priest of the parish. Years ago he was accused of the rape and
murder of a teenaged girl. He was acquitted, but excommunicated. After that he
became the head of his own Satanic cult, and wrote a bestselling book. In that
book, he suggested that he might be able to kill himself and rise from the
dead, through diabolical power.
And then his tomb is struck by lightning, and another young girl is murdered on the site. And the priest’s corpse disappears.
Tanner’s and Jenny’s working relationship is strained when he makes some disparaging remarks about religion, which offend her. But they have to keep their eyes on the puzzle, because more murders are coming, and they are very cruel murders. Of course they can’t have been committed by the dead priest… can they?
St. Benet’s was a fairly engaging mystery in which religious questions were handled more or less even-handedly (though some very poor theology gets expressed, but that may just be the individual characters’ voices). My biggest problem with the book was that I figured out the murderer fairly early on.
Poet Jessica Hornik says she remembers January in her poem “Recuerdo, January,” but they sound like October words nonetheless.
Walking back to the ferry in the evening chill,
they knew they’d never have reason enough to return to this place, which made the leaving as sad as a paradise gained and lost
in the space of two hours.
This year has been one to remember. No paradise gained, only loss. I feel I’m reluctantly slipping into the autumn of my life; I don’t know if I can turn around somewhere.
The “local color” mystery seems to be an established literary tradition by now. David Blake kicks off this particular new series with Broadland, the first in a series featuring Detective Inspector John Tanner of the Norfolk police in England.
Tanner is newly arrived from London. Burned out after the murder
of his daughter and his subsequent divorce, he hopes the quieter atmosphere of
the “Norfolk Broads” country will bring him some peace. He moves onto a friend’s
sailing yacht and reports for work.
His hopes for peace are frustrated, however, by the discovery of a young woman’s body, mutilated in an encounter with a boat’s motor. Everyone assumes she merely fell into the canal and drowned, but Tanner is unsatisfied with that explanation. On top of that, another detective, with less experience but more local knowledge, is put in charge of the investigation.
This will prove to be a tragic decision.
When another woman is found drowned and mutilated, Tanner
gets his own case. Partnered with a young female detective (with whom he soon
begins a not-entirely-appropriate relationship), he follows the clues to a
shocking and nearly disastrous final showdown in an abandoned windmill.
The Norfolk Broads series (I’ll review the next two in the
next couple days) is a competent, entertaining police procedural series. It’s
not a standout at this point – the characters are a little shallow, I’d say,
and Tanner has a suspicious habit of being right all the time – but I enjoyed
the book.
One interesting point – which I’m not sure how to interpret –
is that each book is prefaced by a Bible passage – not just a single verse, but
a paragraph or so. The books are not particularly “religious” in the Christian
publishing sense, but the verses are there. Make of them what you will.
Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles is a new documentary on the making and lasting influence of Fiddler on the Roof. It first appeared on Broadway in 1964, was released as a movie in 1971, and has been on stages around the world ever since.
Through cast, crew and luminaries’ commentary, [Max] Lewkowicz examines the play’s time-transcending magic as he wonders why “mainstream America is interested in a bunch of Jews living in a pale of Russia of 1905.”
…
“Tevye is from the shtetl, but his message is universal,” Lewkowicz told The Jerusalem Post from his New York home. “He could be a family man in Honduras, or anywhere in the world for that matter – a father whose children rebel and want to go a different way against his will. He is a man whose tradition is being seriously challenged.”
Motel may have believed marrying Tzeitel to be a miracle of miracles, but many smarter-than-thou philosophers have argued against miracles being a thing (FWIW, “When You Wish Upon a Star” is now playing on my Your Classical stream). Michael J. Kruger of Reformed Theological Seminary has a post about a popular view on miracles, that “given how unlikely miracles are, it is always more likely that a miracle did not occur.”
But we must remember the context of every “miraculous” event. If God is living and active in our world, then miracles will occur. They may even be likely.
Fenene looked even bigger indoors than he had in that alley. Like being in a phone booth with a freezer.
Not a book that will make a fan out of me,Threshold by G.M. Ford is nevertheless a very well-written mystery novel, offering many pleasures. I’ve become pretty shameless at discarding books I disagreed strongly with in recent years, but I stuck with this one (perhaps because I’m tightening my belt these days), and I don’t really regret it.
Grace Pressman is a beautiful albino with a mystical gift.
In some cases, she can bring people back to consciousness from deep comas. The
problem is that she’s not always sure she did them a favor. On top of that, she
dislikes the limelight, and so she keeps hidden. This is also advisable in that
she assists her mother in running a shelter for battered women. Right now, they’re
even conspiring to break the law – hiding a bipolar woman and her daughters
from a powerful husband who is rich enough to get custody in spite of evidence
that he’s been abusing the girls.
Meanwhile Detective Mickey Dolan, just returned to work
after a divorce and temporary suspension, is assigned to find the fugitive
mother and her children. When he meets Grace and learns the true story, he’ll
be faced with a crisis of integrity, one that forces him to choose between his career
and freedom, and his soul.
Threshold was a compelling mystery with a (possible) touch of the supernatural. It worked very well. The writing was classic hard-boiled of the highest quality. Author Ford did a good job, I thought, portraying his (mostly liberal) heroes as flawed human beings. He was less successful (I thought) with his villains, who are generally crude stereotypes of right-wingers.
I imagine Ford wouldn’t want someone like me for a fan anyway, so I won’t read more of his books. But I will say that Threshold was an extremely well-written novel. Cautions for language and disturbing themes.
In the eleventh outing in Bruce Beckham’s enjoyable Inspector Skelgill series, the author once again plays with old detective story tropes. Murder Mystery Weekend has a setting right out of Agatha Christie – a castle in Cumberland, where a millionaire has gathered a group of friends to celebrate his birthday with a “murder mystery weekend” game. Only before the festivities can start, his young, beautiful wife is dead – hanging from a hook in the bathroom. It looks like suicide – but what reason did she have to kill herself? Inspector Skelgill is called in to investigate, and soon begins to suspect foul play.
These old friends, it turns out, have complicated
relationships – including a tradition of mate-swapping. The millionaire host is
not as beloved as initial reports said, and his deceased wife had a checkered
history of her own.
It’s not Skelgill’s preferred kind of case – he much prefers
something less psychological, set in the outdoors. But he’s up to the
challenge, supported by his subordinates, female DS Jones and male DS Leyton.
The secrets will come out, and Skelgill will fish deep to bring up the truth.
Very enjoyable, like all the books in the series.
Recommended.
Turns out I’d missed a couple books in the Inspector Skelgill series by Bruce Beckham. But no matter. The continuing characters and Cumberland setting remain much the same, barring Skelgill’s gradual retirement from his fell running hobby, which just leaves him more time for his fishing.
Murder at Dead Crags seems to be a sort of tribute to The Hound of the Baskervilles. Antonia Crow, co-owner of a wild animal zoo, has been found dead at the foot of Dead Crags, an ill-omened local landmark. Antonia is the descendent of Piet Crow, a big game hunter who long ago returned from South Africa to establish the zoo. He owned a terrifying large black dog, and local legend says the dog still walks the fells, seeking to waylay nighttime walkers.
When Antonia’s sister Vivienne is nearly killed by a high
caliber rifle bullet, Inspector Skelgill looks for more prosaic motives and
perpetrators. There are a couple bidders who’d love to get their hands on the
Crows’ land, and an animal rights group has set up a camp to protest the zoo
itself (Skelgill’s female subordinate, DS Jones, is working undercover among
them). When the culprit is revealed, both their lives will be in peril.
The Skelgill books are a lot of fun, though Skelgill can be
a tad annoying – especially in his denial of his mutual attraction to DS Jones.
I would say the animal rights people don’t come off terribly well in this book,
but on the other side of the balance there’s a predatory real estate developer
who is clearly a caricature of Donald Trump. So we’re all even, more or less.
Recommended, and the author himself admits he edits his dialogue
to soften bad language.
“While I was writing The Lost Family, I cooked a lot—to meditate on the day’s writing as well as to kitchen-test all the recipes I then featured on the book’s menu. Some of my favorite lines for the book would bubble up that way, as if from a Magic 8-Ball, and one of them was ‘vegetables have no language.’ I revised this slightly for the novel, but it means that food is universal. The produce and spices will vary from country to country and cuisine to cuisine, but if you love food, you have a vast family out there. We can all communicate about how our beloved dishes are different—and how they are the same.” – Jenna Blum, The Lost Family
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