Reviews and Comments

Fradkin has sent the heroine of this series westward across Canada as she sets up therapeutic travel adventures for people suffering from addiction or PTSD. Amanda Doucette herself is dealing with PTSD from her work for an NGO in Nigeria, interrupted by a terrorist attack. By setting up a series of rigorous outdoor activities she hopes to help a group of men suffering from addiction find strength in the beauty of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. While scouting options, she sees a striking painting and wants to meet the artist - an aging recluse who lives in seclusion on an island. She soon realizes he, too, has been scarred by trauma, visible in a studio where the artwork evokes the terrors of war and his experiences decades ago in Vietnam. returnreturnWhen a nosy visitor turns up dead, he becomes a suspect, and Amanda wants to help him, since she's convinced he wouldn't kill anyone. What follows is an evocative trip through beautifully-described forests, mountains, and rocky islands as the story of the artist's past and his family history is teased into view. returnreturnI really enjoyed this book, though I've only read one other in the series. It will be interesting to see where Fradkin goes next, as this appears - maybe? - to be the final installment in this series.

Aaron Falk joins his law enforcement pal Greg Raco in a lush vinyard-filled valley to become a godparent to his child - for a second time. When the christening was originally scheduled, also during an annual food and wine festival, the event was canceled after Raco's brother's ex-wife disappeared, leaving an infant behind in a stroller parked beside the fair entrance. A year later, authorities suspect she drowned herself, a victim of post-natal depression. But her teenage daughter from her first relationship isn't convinced and has prepared an appeal for more information to be held at the festival. Did anyone see anything last year when the woman abandoned her child and vanished? Aaron, a federal police officer, can't help being drawn in. returnreturnAs usual, Jane Harper weaves a dense story rich in character development. relying on interpersonal relationships and small-town intrigue to carry the plot rather than dramatic action. I found the first chapters confusing as they introduced a number of characters and switched between the events of the previous year and the current situation, but once I sorted out who was who and what happened when it was smooth sailing, though frankly rather slow, at least in the first half of the book. The trick with Harper is to relax, slow down, and let the story surround you. returnreturnThose looking for a thriller should look elsewhere, but if character development is your thing, this slow burn of a mystery, one that introduces the armchair traveler to yet another side of Australia's geography, will fit the bill.

Kwei Quartey has been introducing readers to Ghanaian life ever since his first mystery was published in 2009. After five entries in the Darko Dawson series, he turned his focus to Emma Djan, a private investigator in Accra, along with the team she works with. In this third entry, Emma is tasked with tracking down Ngozi, a young woman who abandoned a promising academic career when she fell in love with Femi, a handsome young con man. Whether or not Ngozi wants to be found is in question, but the case grows more worrying when Femi is found murdered. Emma will have to go undercover and into danger to track Ngozi down and discover who murdered her lover.returnreturnQuartey's tone has grown darker over the course of this series, and LAST SEEN IN LAPAZ is no exception. Rather than being restricted to looking over Emma's shoulder as she conducts her investigation, the perspective shifts to peer into Femi's past: his teen years engaged in petty crime, a stint in prison, and eventually his foray into human smuggling. He's able to clothe himself in a certain amount of charm as he taps into the dreams of ambitious Nigerians who feel trapped in poverty and are susceptible to the claims of a "migration agent" that safe passage to Europe can be arranged for a fee.returnreturnFemi diversifies his business ventures when he persuades a Ghanaian woman who runs a profitable prostitution ring in Accra, that he can supply her with Nigerian girls. As they go into business together, Ngozi joins him in managing the sex workers, but finds out too late that it's a line of work that can be deadly.returnreturnWith so much of the narrative spent with a callous criminal and a young woman who seems all too eager to join him in his cruel endeavors, the story can be a challenging read. Quartey has depicted many aspects of West African life in his mysteries, but this one delves deeper into its dark side, and travels further, even following the desperate journey of a family journeying through the deserts of Niger and Libya. They're hoping to reach Europe but find themselves in a hellish dead end. While their story isn't integral to the mystery itself, it's a memorable depiction of the human cost of a vicious trade that we rarely see apart from its all-too-frequent terminus in the waters of the Mediterranean. The tawdry experience of life as a sex worker is likewise brought to the page, as Emma goes undercover to track down Ngozi's whereabouts.returnreturnAltogether, the mystery is skillfully woven into a larger story of criminality, salted with a sprinkling of colorful pidgin (helpfully defined in a glossary) that adds to the flavor of the Ghanaian setting. Quartey provides a vivid depiction of lives that are too often overlooked in news stories that treat Africa as a void at the edge of the map. returnreturnReposted from Reviewing the Evidence.

It's the Christmas season in Nantucket, and the recently-appointed chief of police has her hands full. First, the POTUS visited, then the Secretary of State, with her family and a large retinue of security folks. Topping it off, a film is being shot on the island, and the large crew of actors, some of them famous, and technical crew staying at a tech mogul's island estate adds another wrinkle. Especially when two seemingly unrelated murders happen, affecting each of the parties. One of the victims seems to have no enemies, but the other has far too many. returnreturnWhile I wasn't especially puzzled by the mystery, Mathews has done a great job of creating characters and relationships that carry the story along at a brisk pace. Of particular interest are two children who have histories of serious emotional problems and fraught relationships with their over-protective parents. The government and film circles are enriched with details but without info-dumps, and one character, a bird photographer, is drawn with especial skill. This series is a cross between police procedural and cozy, leaning into the cozy designation at times, but overall is a solid traditional offering that can please even those who are cozy-allergic.

A small town girl, Hannah, is delighted to be accepted to Oxford, where she feels like a fish out of water but soon makes a cluster of good friends, including her best friend, a glamorous and rich roommate - who is murdered. A creepy porter who seemed to be stalking Hannah is found guilty, largely based on Hannah's eyewitness account of seeing him leave her lodgings at the time of the crime. Years later, Hannah has been traumatized by the publicity around the murder, is expecting a child when she learns the guilty man has died in prison, still protesting his innocence. Was her testimony flawed? If so, who could have committed the murder? returnreturnThis novel didn't work for me. While it's pleasant to spend some time at Oxford, the drama among a cluster of friends, it all felt artificial to me, and the drama of pointing the finger at various old friends got old. The denouement seemed manipulative - which may be a feature of thrillers, but I found myself rolling my eyes. returnreturnEvidently mine is a minority opinion, but I was disappointed and glad when I finished the book.

It's a common trope in police procedurals: committed cops are stymied by a terrible boss. But not in this series, which has developed an ensemble cast of detectives who work well together under the caring and smart leadership of an excellent manager. Seriously, a whole management book could be written based on the decisions Joe Gunther makes again and again to keep his diverse team working at its best. returnreturnIn this case, a series of seemingly unrelated crimes surface when a body is found in the trunk of a stolen car. Why is the owner of the stolen car so dodgy? How did a phone belonging to a boy who went missing years ago end up in the car thief's possession? The more they dig, the more questions they have. returnreturnIt's a busy plot with lots of angles to investigate but, as usual, Mayor keeps all the plates spinning while also taking readers on an insiders tour of Vermont and New Hampshire. The denouement is a doozy.

Peter Diamond's boss is making noises about his retirement, which throws him into an uncharacteristic panic. When a missing persons case presents itself, he's ready to seize on it to show he's still a sharp investigator. As usually happens, the plot thickens as the team learns another member of the same television production crew also vanished a few years earlier. Are they related? And could they have anything to do with the death of an elderly and popular cast member, who surprised a burglar at her home and was shocked into a fatal heart attack. returnreturnDiamond digs in, and suspicions grow, especially when the leather belt a vagrant picked up at the airfield where the missing man was last seen turns out to be stained with blood. Could the vagrant, a strangely erudite and assertive man, be the killer? Or could it be down to rivalries among the fractious company, many of them well-equipped to lie with conviction? returnreturnI didn't find this as strong as other entries in this long-running and usually top-notch series. Diamond, in particular, seemed far too quick to spin up elaborate theories as soon as he fastened on a suspect, which seemed unrealistic for a seasoned detective, even if he was rattled at the thought of retirement. The television setting was, as usual, richly drawn, and some of the red herrings were nicely diversionary, but the passages devoted to hashing out the possibilities and, too often, seeming convinced of a perpetrator on slim evidence slowed the pace down. Maybe when Diamond returns, he'll be back on his game and less distracted by shiny objects and fear of retirement.

This is the sort of book that may give catalogers (or anyone trying to figure out what shelf a book belongs on) fits. It's a novel, but it's history. It's a primary-source-based retelling of the past, but it's mostly invented. It's a gifted author shuffling a handful of clues and filling in the vast gaps between them, using the inventive process as an opportunity to reflect on the narrative threads that tie history and fiction together. returnreturnIn Ancestry, Mawer imagines the lives of two couples, his 19th-century great-great-grandparents. The first ran away from the dreary life of agricultural labor to become a seaman and later married a dressmaker who had a child out of wedlock. The other was a soldier who married an Irishwoman who had to manage alone in a hostile world when he was sent to fight in the Crimean war. Their stories are anchored with scraps of paper - birth, marriage, and death records, some marked with an illiterate's X - but the documentary evidence is scant for people who are poor and landless. What Mawer accomplishes is an imaginative reinvention of these families and their worlds, which I found absorbing and illuminating. The women, in particular, are vividly brought to life, and their hard-scrabble determination to create a life for themselves and their children is more dramatic than ocean crossings or battles. At a time when I often despair of our world, it's eye-opening to see how difficult ordinary lives were not all that long ago. It's an immersive reading experience.

Readers familiar with the author's previous series will not be surprised to find that this novel has a highly diverse cast with a particular focus on the Muslim and immigrant experience. Here, instead of taking place in Canada, the action is set in a community outside Denver that is home to a meat-packing plant, a high=tech contractor providing sophisticated surveillance equipment deployed at the US border with Mexico, a popular evangelical Christian mega-church, a crew of tough Christian bikers who are muscle for the church, and a sheriff who runs the town like his personal fiefdom. returnreturnA group of Denver-based detectives have been brought into the town to investigate a murder that has created strains between the refugee community and the dominant White culture. A bright young Muslim girl has been found dead, her body displayed in a gruesome replica of an image of the virgin Mary. Soon the detectives hear hints that this isn't the only Muslim girl who may have become a victim. returnreturnI appreciate the way the author highlights immigrant and minority perspectives in her work, and the ways she probes the stresses between a law enforcement culture that is supposed to serve and protect and the too-often brutal experience of the public they police. Here, she also contrasts evangelical Christian nationalism and the spiritual life of her Muslim heroine. (There's also a tense romance thread that, frankly, I could do without.) returnreturnThough I enjoyed the book and found the characters well-developed, in the end I found the plot to be contrived. It may be that our times are so weird, so much stranger than fiction, that it's hard to know what will strike readers as plausible.

What a fascinating book - and, though it may seem odd for a historical novel, very timely. Departing from a series, this standalone sends two New Yorkers to Los Angeles to seek a new start just as the US is debating whether to join the Allies in World War II. One is Vi, a mother who is in mourning for her husband and the other Veronica, her loving daughter, who is burning to have a meaningful journalism career but has burned all her bridges by having an affair with a married man who turns out to be both a scumbag and the spouse of a vengeful woman. Without jobs or money, they move into a cottage belonging to a West Coast relative and begin to establish themselves. Veronica gets a job with a weird couple who run a newsletter that turns out to be a nest of Nazis who despise Jews and support America First, an isolationist movement that is aligned with the KKK and the German Bund. Since Veronica had reported on the notorious Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden, she recognizes immediately what she has stumbled into. But the local police and the FBI are only interested in pursuing communists. It's not until they connect with a Jewish activist who's monitoring the rise of Nazi sentiments in Southern California that they know what to do: infiltrate the organization and gather intelligence. returnreturnWhat follows is tense and well-furnished with historical material, both in terms of popular culture and daily life and the political scene in that time and place. I sometimes found the emotional responses of the characters a little unlikely for undercover agents, a bit less complicated than I would expect. I was also skeptical the two could avoid detection as easily as it seemed, such as not letting the Nazi plotters know where they lived. Vi was somewhat underutilized as a character, and I think there could have been more development of her interesting support of isolationism - that could have been a useful way of teasing out the nuances between "of course we have to fight" and full-on Nazi fandom. To be fair, it's there - I just wanted more of it, and of Vi!returnreturnIt's illuminating to read this story, based on historical facts and actual figures. We tend to forget America First is not a new concept, and it was a noxious white supremacist notion the first time around, too. We tend to think of the US as being heroic in fighting Nazis back in the day, and completely united in the struggle, and overlook the history of fascism in this country. While the author, through her characters and their actions, does make a strong case for pluralism as an American virtue, she leaves it up to readers to connect the dots to our current crisis of democracy. But the connections make the book especially compelling.returnreturnI hope it reaches a lot of readers, if only to help us see our present moment in historical context, so we don't blithely say "this is not who we are" without stopping to think.

I have mixed feelings about this novel. The narrator, Pinky, is an intriguing character who sees herself as being socially odd but comfortable with herself and her choices, including enjoying casual sex but avoiding commitment. Her puzzling neighbor is also intriguing though some of the elements didn't add up for me (such as his being Hmong - it's dropped in but doesn't seem to have shaped his character at all. His family relationships are equally contradictory: his wife is completely mad and out of control, but then seems not to be when he goes back to her, but he says she is . . . it was hard to put it together. returnreturnThe main plot concerns a personable and interesting police chief who does things so stupid it seemed another example to me of a character that is in part vividly drawn but also inconsistent. Would a smart and ambitious woman endanger herself the way she did? Well, make a case for it, but I was not convinced. returnreturnThe pacing was fine up to the final scenes, which to me dragged around the technical aspects of getting the goods on a billionaire bad guy. (Another character inconsistency for me: he sure didn't act like a billionaire, but like a local hood who had a powerful but totally small-town empire.) Then the dramatic confrontation is filtered through our narrator, who watches it from afar, which diluted the suspense for me. At any rate, I didn't find the last few chapters especially effective. It may have been reader error. returnreturnMy previous experience reading this author set my expectations high, so I may be being unduly harsh, but I was disappointed.

A young widow who has found a comfortable way of making a living in a well-run and not-too-demanding brothel in mid-19th century California, works with her friend to find out who has been killing women and getting away with murder because really, who cares? Inspired by Poe's Dupin, they rely on logic and observation to crack the case.returnreturnI have mixed feelings about this novel. There are some aspects of it as historical fiction that I enjoyed - the setting is quite interesting, and the protagonist is often interesting company in her observations. The pace, considering the subject matter, is leisurely and ... oh, look, a butterfly. returnreturnSometimes crime fiction has serious literary chops, and sometimes a historical mystery pays more attention to history than mystery, and that can be fine. (Consider Naomi Hirohara's Clark and Division, a decent mystery that gracefully took a backseat to the work of vividly recreating a time and place.) But somehow the parts of this novel didn't sit easily together for me, and the history itself seemed sometimes to be experienced by a twenty-first century time traveler. At any rate, I enjoyed it, somewhat, but felt overall dissatisfied, perhaps because I expected something more substantial from the author, even if it the mystery element were not front and center.

(Reposted from the Journal of Creative Library Practice)returnreturnIn a new book, two Swedish LIS researchers lay out a series of “paradoxes” that face librarians and others who struggle to align their media and information literacy programs with the needs of the present moment, drilling deeply into issues that practitioners will find familiar – and enormously challenging.returnreturnWhile information literacy instruction is often justified as being both beneficial for individual consumers and necessary for democracy, ideals tend to stumble when faced with classroom realities. Many instructors struggle to incorporate into their everyday practice new strategies to address the complex information landscape we live with today, one so fraught and contested as to constitute a crisis for society. Learning how to critique individual media objects or find and evaluate sources – the traditional focus of media literacy and information literacy programs – is insufficient given our current situation which, according to the authors, has been shaped by algorithmic infrastructures and the actions of political figures to use the affordances of platforms to tailor and amplify messages.returnreturn“The importance of algorithms, user data, and increasingly AI-based systems for contemporary culture, more specifically for multi-sided platforms such as search engines, recommender systems, intelligent household assistants, streaming services, or dating apps, cannot be overstated.” (5)returnreturnAfter introducing the crisis, chapters address a series of overlapping problem areas:returnreturn --Who is responsible for vetting information? Is it up to individuals now to each become well-informed gatekeepers? This framing rests on the assumption that people are rational citizens with a common interest in establishing what is true, and that private entities that provide our information infrastructure have no responsibility for the information that flows through it. How can media and information literacy address common social issues when most of our information infrastructures are controlled by privately-held corporations and responsibility has been individualized?return return--Should media and information literacy instruction train students to accept certain norms about what makes information valuable and trustworthy, or should we acknowledge information is situated in society and influenced by shifting social perspectives? The authors point out that many who seek to upend social norms do so by actively manipulating information – employing the skills many instructors strive to teach. Collective meaning-making is always negotiated, but some norms for what we should trust (and why) still matter. We must simultaneously promote trust in some norms while also fostering a plurality of experiences and beliefs.return return--Should media and information literacy focus on how information has worked in the past (e.g. on finding peer-reviewed articles in journals through library databases in order to succeed at school) or should it address how information will be experienced in future? How can we anticipate the technologies to come while questioning narratives of technological progress, giving students tools to resist and make choices about engagement with algorithmically influenced information?return return--Should media and information literacy promote trust or skepticism? What are the consequences if nothing can be trusted? As the authors put it, “promoting a critical agenda without relying on a shared and reasonable trust in society’s knowledge institutions, despite good intentions, risks reinforcing distrust, and the volatility of information more generally. The ramifications of reinforcing a ‘trust-no-one narrative’ may be to strengthen distrust rather than to establish causes for trust or even reasons for justified mistrust . . . Media and information literacy challenges the unconditional trust in information, but at the same time relies on trust” (115-116). The trick is to unpack why knowledge institutions should be trusted, while acknowledging they are inevitably imperfect at a time when trust has been strategically undermined by political actors.returnreturn--How can we interrogate “neutrality”? After drawing comparisons among the educational practices of three nations – the US, England, and Sweden – the authors dive deeply into the Swedish emphasis on källkritik, or source criticism, derived from an outdated historiographic approach to examining documents from a position assumed to be neutral and objective. It became especially attractive to educators as the web broke down gatekeeping mechanisms and challenged traditional institutions of knowledge. Källkritik was promoted by the Swedish government as both a way for individuals to engage with democracy but also as a matter of national defense against foreign disinformation. For that reason, the confusingly-named far-right wing Sweden Democrat party characterizes källkritik education as indoctrination that both endorses institutional information sources and interferes with individuals’ right to self-determination. Educators who teach fact-checking and skepticism of all sources claim to take a neutral stance, but the right-wing appropriators of the källkritik method understand that information and its infrastructures are political.returnreturnIn the end, the authors argue educators must be prepared to explore the infrastructures of information search and production and reveal the values and practices that underlie “structures of trust” such as well-conducted journalism, science, and scholarship. This approach to information literacy addresses the relationship of information to power. Ultimately, we can’t ignore how information and the infrastructures through which it flows reflect positionality and power.returnreturnThis is a short book, but its 159 pages are packed with provocations for K12 media literacy educators, information literacy instructors at the college level, and public librarians. It is not, however, a user guide. The text builds on a wealth of published scholarship and reports on the authors’ own research, but it leaves up to readers how to answer the question, “okay, so now what do we do?”