Transplanting a Seattleite

My sister and I share an ebooks account, but there is limited overlap in our reading preferences: a few non fiction books, slightly more numerically but even fewer percentage wise romance novels. But Linda Howard is definitely in the overlapping area, so I thought, it's short, I'll give it a try.

This is part of the "snowbound with a stranger" subgenre (yes, there is one). Some romance novels -- often longer -- have a huge cast including secondary romances. Some romance novels -- generally shorter -- have an incredibly abbreviated cast and basically lock up the couple-to-be until they get their shit together. As one does. In this case, it isn't precisely _snow_, rather an ice storm on a hill in Maine.

DID I MENTION SPOILERS? RUN OR SOMEONE WITH BAD TEETH WILL GET YOU

This is also a romantic suspense novel, which means that in addition to the budding romance, there is someone chasing/attacking/threatening The Good People. Here, it is a couple of meth addicts attempting to rob Lolly. They follow her home and lock her in her room.

The male romantic lead is an MP home to visit his son over the winter holidays. His dad, the local law, has sent him to find Lolly, who is in town to pack up the remaining family belongings (everyone moved -- it's not tragic or anything), out of cell phone coverage and may not be aware of the incoming ice storm. Antics ensue.

Did I mention the shared childhood history in town? She is/was kind of a nerd; he enjoyed tormenting her.

Good things. It was short. It moved along well.

Bad things. Why is it that every ladder in every book has its rungs break at a crucial moment? Why would anyone who lived in Maine be wearing non-weatherproof shoes and anything other than wool socks in December? She spends her time in Portland, but still. He's down in North Carolina for his job, but again, _he grew up here_.

I'm still trying to figure out what I think of the meth addict bad guys. On the one hand, I feel like this indicates that suburbia, or at any rate Northeastern exurbia, has gotten so safe (in a criminal sense, not in a weather sense -- it continues to be treacherous in a weather sense) that authors are stuck using characters like meth addicts just to have _someone_ attack someone to drive the plot forward. On the other hand, I felt like these meth addicts were way too persistent and had too complex thinking/goal orientation to actually be believable. Also, there is sort of this disturbing privilege issue, when you start thinking about who tends to wind up spiraling down into meth, vs. the daughter of (once) rich parents.

This isn't going to make me run right out and read more Linda Howard. On the other hand, this is approximately what I expect from Howard, so it's not likely to make me avoid her any more in the future than I already do. And it enabled me to avoid reading more of _Wild_, which was getting on my Last Nerve.

For those paying attention, once the kids were in bed, I watched Captain America: Winter Soldier. It was really good, just like everyone told me.

My sister recommended this after I reviewed _Shadow Woman_, as better romantic suspense albeit dated. I haven't read Elizabeth Lowell novels for a long while, probably the early 2000s. I think I read the Donovan series (_Pearl Cove_, etc.). As near as I can tell from the author website, _Tell Me No Lies_ was a paperback original in 1986, reissued in hardcover in 2001. A mid-1980s date is compatible with the internals of the text. Unlike some reprints of Jayne Ann Krentz works from a comparable time period, no efforts have been made to deal with the massive technological changes that have occurred since the original writing/publication. Thus, making calls from pay phones using coins is a crucial plot element, and the only cell phone to make an appearance fills a briefcase.

http://www.elizabethlowell.com/books.html

The plot, while complex, is straight out of the 1980s. Young career woman (early 30s) with a failed starter marriage in her past has devoted herself entirely to her work, in this case, she works at a museum and as a consultant authenticating Chinese bronzes. Lindsay Danner was an only child and recently her American missionary to China mother died. Lindsay was born and grew up for several years in China (her dad also a missionary, altho he was from Canada). Lowell handwaves around the problem of the dates; Danner's childhood would make a lot more sense if she were born ten years earlier. She has nightmares which have returned since her mother died, involving a mostly forgotten childhood event when she saw someone die.

Catlin (who has a first and middle name), formerly dba as Rousseau in Indochina, is "hired" by Chen Yi to protect Lindsay Danner. The hiring is somewhat coercive, in that Chen is calling in an old debt that Catlin/Rousseau owed someone who saved him from his own bad judgment (and at the cost of his savior's life). Rousseau, at the time, was a deep cover CIA agent.

Brad Stone, FBI counter espionage guy, leans on Danner's boss at the museum to get her to participate in an undercover operation. Her role is to be a credible authenticator of a Chinese bronze charioteer that may or may not exist and may or may not have been smuggled from China to the US. If it does exist and is real, it is a crucial element of a series of plots, and Stone in particular is worried that significant damage might be done to the then-blossoming trade relationship between the PRC and the US.

There's a whole morass of additional elements to the plot: the guy who hired the hit on Catlin shows up, an old friend of the Danner family gets involved, there are layers of double agents and blah blah bleeping blah. But the major plot elements are pretty much the three people above, and a whole lot of people machinating around the bronzes. The suspense of the book does not actually involve a lot of danger: there are no chase scenes (beyond the FBI setting up surveillance nets and so forth, which hardly count). There are no gun battles. There's a little bit of kung fu fighting, which Lowell persists in calling karate, which makes approximately zero sense, possibly negative sense. (There is one way it might make sense, if Catlin really did learn it from the CIA guys, maybe in Japan? But why? And why would anyone stick to that, if they were spending a bunch of time in Vietnam and trying to fit in there?) There's a little bit of looking for bugs and car bombs and dealing with them, but it is very much in the background. The suspense derives instead from the emotional and psychic pressure on Lindsay Danner as she acts the part of a woman of integrity who is so in love with a Bad Guy that she is willing to give up on her morality/integrity/ethics/professionalism/wtf.

It's totally not believable. Lowell writes it _beautifully_, but I was unable to believe it. At all. If it freaks you out that much to have the people around you Think Bad Things Of You, then you actually are not a person of integrity. You are a person who is a complete tool, concerned only with the thoughts and opinions of others. Yeah, no. It might have worked a bit better if it were presented more explicitly as a cultural conflict, but it really and truly wasn't. It might have worked a bit better if it were presented more explicitly as a levels of loyalty conflict (loyalty to profession vs. patriotism). Lowell did actually do a nice job of presenting Lindsay as a kind of aspie-level Can't Tolerate the Lying person. That I believed.

In general, I don't like this kind of wheels within wheels plotting, because I just don't really believe that anything that convoluted happens in the real world. Or, if it does, any reality based person who encounters it should run away. No matter how much the participants believe in this kind of crap, no one outside the inner circles knows or cares, but a participant nutty enough to believe in this is nutty enough to do all kinds of random shit and there's no point in sticking around to get caught in the crossfire.

That said, Lindsay Danner turned out to have some seriously awesome instincts. While not drawn to this game for the usual reasons (Fun! Which I think _is_ a valid reason to participate), she turned out to have a lot of personal connections to the game, and her limited participation allowed her to work through her personal history in a therapeutic way. She didn't die. She learned a lot. Also, picked up a hot dude.

Reading mid-1980s genre fiction that was written as skillfully as _Tell Me No Lies_ (or, similarly, _The Desperate Game_, which isn't as good but has some of the same attributes, altho it got butchered trying to fix the payphone/cell phone problem) is an interesting experience. 30 years on, it is more like a historical novel than a contemporary, but of course the background details tend to be more accurate in a contemporary than in a historical. It differs from a historical, in that it _really is like the 1980s_. It isn't like a 2014ish perspective on the 1980s. So there's a whole lot of stuff going on that is deeply irritating because the 1980s kind of sucked. Among other things, smoking indoors, in a work context, etc. Also, 1980s ideas about how to present a Chinese character are really shudder inducing now.

I've tried to capture my extremely mixed feelings about this book. I almost certainly will go back and reread some of the Donovan books, because now I'm curious about how those have aged. They were written later, but in the last couple of years I've really started noticing how romance authors tend to write to their cohort. The years may pass, and the heroine may stay 25-35 years of age, but as the authors get up into their 50s, 60s and 70s, the gap in values and perspective between a author born in the 1940s or 1950s or 1960s and the viewpoint character born in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s becomes painfully obvious. I don't think I'd have any trouble writing a character who was 25 and exploring a new romantic relationship. I'm pretty sure that no amount of effort on my part could convince a discerning reader that that 25 year old was born after, say, 1979. And in a contemporary set in 2014, she'd be born ... somewhat later than 1979.

TL;DR? I really don't blame you. I liked it. I'll read more Lowell (again). But it's kind of a specialized taste at this point.

ETA: Here's a probably unintentionally humorous blog post saying that historicals set in the 1980s are yawn-inducing. *blink*

http://www.stackedbooks.org/2013/02/its-1980-something.html

I feel like I probably should go read a few of these. *pause* Yeah, no. It'll set off all my, but that's not what it was like!!!! issues.

JAK = Jayne Ann Krentz (contemporary), Amanda Quick (historical) and Jayne Castle (futuristic/scifi)

With the exception of a _Deep Waters_ reread, which I'm not going to describe in any detail here, all of the recent rereads and new reads are part of her Arcane Society universe. If you read a ton of these back to back, a couple of things happen. First, you really, really, really notice some plotting tics. I don't mean the character tics -- you really cannot read more than two JAK novels without noticing those. But the plotting tics (what is _with_ all the murderous realtors?) are something else again. Second, there are some minor themes throughout that you can really miss if you just read these things as they come out: genealogy/surnames are really important in these books (especially within trilogies, but also throughout the universe) AND she has reused surnames of characters from standalone contemporaries (Elias Winters from _Deep Waters_ is depicted in a way utterly compatible with the Winters men in general, and not necessarily so compatible as with the Sweetwaters, Sebastians, etc.). Given the subtler presence of intuition in those standalone contemporaries, it's a tough call whether this was something that JAK always wanted to do, but was prevented from doing until she became powerful enough to tell her editors what she was going to do and not get any backtalk -- or whether this is something that evolved over time through incremental reuse. Does not really matter.

I've assembled a bunch of mini-reviews into one long post, so you only have to TL;DR once. These have been fantastic holiday season/I am sick/I am working out reads, because they are so highly structured, and because they are so predictably rewarding, especially if you are from Seattle (well, excepting the Amanda Quick entries and a few of the desert ones). There are a bit more than a dozen novels represented here. I think there is at least one JAK I still haven't read (of the recent ones -- there are several classics I haven't read. And the Guinevere Jones books are now available on kindle! I don't think I've read any of those.) -- _Copper Beach_.

Arcane Society

Sizzle and Burn: Another niece with a dead aunt plot line, in which the niece is pursued by someone who it turns out killed her aunt. There are a lot of these in JAK books. In any event, she runs a costume shop. There’s another scary realtor. Zack Jones is a Jones & Jones PI who regularly defies Fallon to do what he thinks is best (this is fine, since he ultimately winds up in charge of Arcane, IIRC). Nightshade is making trouble, and not fully on Arcane’s radar until towards the end of the book.

White Lies: Clare Lancaster is a human lie detector. She helps rescue her half sister from a nutty husband — and then discovers his murdered corpse. The mother, because this is a JAK novel, then blames Clare and spreads vicious gossip causing her to lose her job and be unable to find another. Dear Old Dad steps in with a job offer, which Clare (predictably) declines, but she is stuck in Arizona long enough to get involved with Jake Salter — and to find another body and herself be nearly murdered a few times. Once again, Fallon Jones totally gets it wrong, repeatedly. It is sort of funny, how almost every time he is wrong, it is because he is unwilling to be a total conspiracy nut job — and yet the people around him think he is too willing to see conspiracies everywhere. It’s either terrible writing or a really funny running gag. I’m going with (b).

Running Hot: Luther Malone lives in Hawaii, working as a private investigator, sometimes for Fallon Jones of Jones & Jones. Fallon sends him Grace Renquist to help out on an assignment. They are trying to crack Nightshade, another cabal attempting to recreate the Founder’s Formula that started the long line of Jones with psychic talents. The Sweetwater clan makes an early appearance here, and there’s a hilarious subplot involving an opera singer with a deadly voice.

Scargill Cove Case Files: novella involving Fallon Jones suggesting that some of the nuttier background characters in Scargill Cove actually aren’t nutty at all. Probably not worth reading if you aren’t really crazy deep in this universe already.


Dreamlight Trilogy: Arcane Universe trilogy involving dream light talents. As above, first entry is contemporary, second is Victorian London, third is set on Harmony. In all these entries, the male Winters must find a female dream light talent to help him use the Burning Lamp artifact to stabilize his developing talent

Fired Up: Jack Winters is having a spot of trouble involving what seem to be blackouts. Little does he know what’s really causing those. He hires Chloe Harper to help him out. Unusual twists in this story include, IIRC, a female stalker (that isn’t a mom avenging the death of her son, which is the usual form that takes in JAK books). I think this is the book that caused me to quit reading JAK for a few years. I had trouble even figuring out why, but I have concluded the issue is the can’t-sleep-in-the-same-bed/room theme. I was okay with the idea that a woman who couldn’t sleep in the same bed/room as someone else might have relationship troubles as a result, altho I also felt like these were kind of oversold. I had a ton of trouble with the magical The One who she could sleep in a room/bed with. That I just found irritating. Really, really, really irritating.

Burning Lamp: Griffin Winters, underworld boss, hooks up with Adelaide Pyne, who already _has_ the Burning Lamp. Convenient. Pyne’s goal is to rescue women from prostitution. Fortunately, that’s not one of the criminal trades that Winters specializes in.

Midnight Crystal: Adam Winters is running the ghost hunter guild. Marlowe Jones is running Jones & Jones. He hires her to not only work the Burning Lamp to stabilize his developing talent, but also to stabilize the Mirror Maze in the Rainforest on Harmony — or the whole planet, well, all the cities and ruins could be destroyed!!! Also, dust bunnies. Marlowe rides a motorcycle.


Lookingglass Trilogy: Arcane Universe trilogy involving glass reading talents and Bridewell devices which are unique artifacts that store this kind of paranormal energy and are uniquely deadly. As above, first entry is contemporary, second is Victorian London, third is set on Harmony.

In Too Deep: Fallon gets an assistant and a girlfriend/fiance/wife. Isabella is on the run, wanted for possible criminal activities in conjunction with paranormal artifacts. She winds up in Scargill Cove, and decides that she and Fallon can help each other out with their respective problems. Many conspiracy theories involved. Also, nutty people in Scargill Cove, some backstory involving a cult, and a stash of Bridewell machines. Did I mention the serial murderer? Also, seriously, you _never_ want to trust a realtor in a JAK novel. (Highly reminiscent of _Deep Waters_ in parts involving the cult backstory.)

Quicksilver: Owen Sweetwater helps Virginia Dean get out of a really sticky situation involving a mirrored room and a dead body. They must deal with a Bridewell creation on the way out, as they also rescue another young woman waiting her fate in a cell. It only gets more complex from there. Unusually well developed secondary romance. Nice development of the alternative, mostly fraudulent psychical society.

Confusingly, the third entry in this trilogy is ALSO the first entry in the next trilogy (Rainshadow Trilogy: Canyons of Night). See below.

Rainshadow Trilogy: on future Harmony, in the Arcane Universe, minimal Arcane Society involvement. I read these as if they were set on turn of the 21st century century Orcas Island with some fantastical elements and it was a ton of fun. If you haven’t spent time on Orcas, it might not work out so well for you.

Canyons of Night: Charlotte and Slade met as teenagers, briefly, on Rainshadow and they are both back now after more than a decade. He had a bad accident while working for the FPBI. Charlotte is running an antique store she inherited from her aunt and has combined with stock from her own successful shop on the mainland. Her neighbor is overwhelming everyone except the dust bunnies with zucchini bread (the dust bunnies _love_ the stuff). A guy who was stalking Charlotte drops dead in her shop and it’s all really a puzzle. Of course, all those seemingly useless and/or damaged talents Are Not.

The Lost Night: Rachel's great-aunts retired and left her their book store. Harry Sebastian has arrived to try to figure out why things are going so wacky in the Preserve. Rachel had a weird experience in the Preserve (doesn’t really remember much if any of it) and he thinks she’s connected to what is going on inside. Creepy psi-path Marcus has been stalking Rachel for a while (longer than she realizes, actually), and at first it looks like there are two sets of bad guys involved. But no, this is a JAK novel so it is all connected.

Deception Cove: Alice, a descendant of Pirate North, has fallen upon hard times. A light talent who can make herself and other people/things invisible by bending light around them, she’s on the run from the mother of the (MC) husband. Husband is dead (he tried to kill her and things sort of went south for him from there) and mom blames her. She hooks up with Drake Sebastian, whose fiancé (supposedly dead, but you know how these things go) blinded him with an alien weapon. So he wears mirrored sunglasses everywhere, unless all the normal lights are off. They have to save the increasingly isolated Rainshadow Island from the increasingly unstable energies leaking out of the preserve. Alice has a dust bunny.

Ladies of Lantern Street: in the Arcane Universe, Victorian London, with psychical powers, but without actual Arcane Society involvement

Crystal Gardens: Evangeline’s story. As a Paid Companion available through the Flint and Marsh agency, Evangeline exposed a Fortune Hunter who then came after her. She was able to dispatch him; alas, that was not the end of her troubles. She retires to the countryside renting a cottage on the cheap from the owner of Crystal Gardens. She is attacked again, and the owner and the titular Gardens deal with him. She moves into the psi-soaked mansion with Lucas Sebastian and his man Stone, dragging with her her housekeeper Molly and Molly’s extended family. Obviously, Lucas supplies some additional Sebastians to keep up appearances. The crystals which will wreak so much havoc on Rainshadow Island on future Harmony have their origin story here (well, their origin story with the Sebastian family at any rate). I’m a little bummed that the bookseller had such low morals.

The Mystery Woman: Beatrice’s story. She was Miranda the Clairvoyant until Ronald Fleming was killed by the Bone Man. Then she becomes a Paid Companion/discreet investigator and Fixer for Flint and Marsh. Her romantic interest, Joshua Gage, was injured a yearish ago when he trusted someone he should not have. Also, has psychical abilities, but doesn’t believe in them. He’s a finder. He was working for a strat. His sister is being blackmailed and Beatrice is implicated. It all gets more complicated from there. On the one hand, it’s a little disappointing in terms of how far into the book the first sex scene occurs. On the other hand, it was a decent plot line in many respects and the development of the relationship was above average for JAK. The whole scarred face thing is way overdone, and JAK presents the idea of using the cane as a weapon as a surprise to people who it _really_ should not be surprising to. I paid more for this than any of the others, but it was still within the $9.99 envelope. 2nd in this trilogy, set in Victorian London. The events occur slightly before some of the Victorian Arcane novels — Weaver dies in this book. Flint and Marsh appear on screen for a few pages in this entry. This is not, strictly speaking, an Arcane novel but clearly shares the same universe.

Hedge fund VP Vanessa Porter is one of Miranda Lang's sisters. Wade Cordell, who had a bit part in the previous book, goes down to the Caribbean to convince her to come up to South Carolina and donate blood marrow. She's a tough sell, because she, in turn, is looking for her former co-worker who went on vacation and disappeared. They wander Nevis, arguing, and having a variety of unpleasant encounters with trucks that try to drive them off the road, people who yell at them or shoot at them, and so forth. Vanessa's friend is a gay man, but St Clair keeps the walk-into-a-gay-bar-antics-ensue to a minimum, altho the resolution of the story line is awfully melodramatic.

Vanessa's adoptive parents were an implausible mess. Why would they have resorted to an illegal adoption, if 10 years later it was still possible for her mother to get pregnant? They should have been able to swing a legal adoption, if she was 35 or younger. Very confusing. The story with Miranda's parents was more coherent, however, both back stories seem designed to provide the women with psychological issues that were clearly a result of "nurture" rather than "nature".

I did laugh a bunch at the description of breaking into Palm Grove Villas at the Four Seasons Nevis. Then I spent way too much time looking at pictures of Caribbean resorts with similar kinds of housing, and then contemplating a romantic suspense novel with a chase scene on the monorail at Disney World. *snicker* Books do weird things to my head.

In the larger arc, more deaths are attributed to the Big Bad Guy in the Background, and a lot is made of the tattoos on the back of the babies necks. With "66" and "hi" or "14" as the first two found (and the other triplet dead a couple months ago), I'm betting something like "Higgins" for our Big Bad guy.

This is the first entry in a long series of connected-but-can-standalone romantic suspense novels featuring the "Bullet Catchers", run by Lucy, an ex-CIA agent with deep tragedy in the backstory, who recruits people to act as part of a team that provides "executive protection". In this first outing, Alex, who is Cuban-American, is assigned to protect Jessica, a Miami anchor woman who has set her sights on The Network. When he arrives, however, "Jessica" is being impersonated by Jasmine, her identical twin sister who got out of the TV business a while ago and recently got her PI license in California. Jessica asked Jasmine to pretend to be Jessica while Jessica pursued a Hot Story. The plan was for Jessica to brief Jasmine, but Jessica's already gone without leaving a note when Jasmine arrives. Nevertheless, Jasmine goes through with the plan, woefully underprepared. Alex decides to play along and does not initially tell his boss.

The "clues" that convince Jasmine that Jessica really is still on the story and really is still okay were utterly unconvincing to me. However, there was some effort on the part of St. Claire to provide a psychodynamic between the twins that would explain Jasmine's decision to cover for her missing twin. St. Claire does a _nice_ job of providing a lot of possible suspects in Jessica's disappearance. A _really_ nice job. Lucy presents the job to Alex as having an official client, Kimball (new owner), but also an unofficial client that Lucy isn't going to tell Alex about. This struck me as incredibly poor judgment, and turned out to be incredibly poor judgment. St. Claire's efforts to provide an explanation for that were substantially weaker.

On a previous job, Alex chose to become sexually involved with a principal's (person being protected) spouse as a way of protecting the principal (the spouse found out the principal was having a same sex liaison and was going to carve him up). Alex's outrageous behavior (apparently of a piece with a long history of less than wise hookups) has resulted in Lucy banning Alex from getting it on with the principal in this case, telling him he'll lose his job at Bullet Catchers if he does. This being a romance novel, obviously, he'll break that rule. Equally obviously, it won't be enforced.

Slightly less than halfway through this novel, I almost abandoned it. I really thought everyone in it was being Too Stupid to Live. I went and did some baking, thought about it, and concluded that I was sufficiently wrapped up in both the characters and the plot to have trouble walking away; I finished it and don't regret doing so. But if you have a sensitive TSTL meter, you may want to steer clear of this book. The other reason I stuck it out is because later entries in the series got really favorable reviews over on SBTB. I know from other experience that early series entries can be weak, but useful to read to better understand later entries. I will (probably) be reading more in this series. St. Claire explored the Capable Woman Who Wants to Take Care of Herself But Hooks Up With Hot, Controlly Guy theme and instead of coming out the usual, Oh, Gosh, Someone To Watch Over Me exit the way that usually goes, went out the door marked, Okay, Can I Hang Out With You While You So Competently Take Care of Yourself? I liked that. It would have made up for a much, much worse book.