murder

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago

brittany — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

During the 1920s, a rash of killings rocked Chicago. The murderers were young women who drank, and most killed their lovers. Most were white and all-male juries that refused to believe women were capable of cold-blooded murder released most of them. During this time, the crimes were reported in the newspapers by “sob sisters,” female reporters who were able to interview female inmates and victim’s family members.

The Girls of Murder City is about this period in time, two killers in particular, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, and a female reporter, Maurine Watkins. Beulah and Belva both killed their lovers after the men threatened to leave them. Both were beautiful, rich, white, and relatively young. The newspapers gave both women a chance to be famous, and both used it to their advantage.

Maurine Watkins was a hardworking, pious Christian who came to Chicago with the plan to use her column to show the evils of the world. Her sarcastic, strong-willed writing was often the only counterpoint to the sob sisters’ tales of woe in the papers. She would eventually use her stories to write the play Chicago, which would become the long-running musical.

The book tells an interesting story about the rise of the “girl gunners” and the creation of Chicago. The problem is that the story feels a bit unfocused. Maurine is not the main focus of the book, but neither are Belva and Beulah (or Chicago characters Velma and Roxie, if you will). The book explores their cases and delves into the lives of the other women in jail with them, but then switches to focus on Maurine. As a result, the story feels a bit shallow. I wanted more from both of the stories. Other narratives, like the story of the murder of Bobby Franks by teenaged killers Leopold and Loeb, are shoehorned into the story and feel tacked on.

Most importantly, the book is very poorly cited. For a while, I did not know if I was reading a non-fiction book or a “non-fiction” fiction book like In Cold Blood. Douglas Perry included details he seemingly could not know unless he had been there. There is an extensive note section in the back of the back of the book, but without explanation as to where each note belonged, reading them was slow going. More confusingly, there are footnotes in the book, but not to the main facts. They function more as author asides. Actual footnotes would have made the book much better, and given it much more authority.

I enjoyed The Girls of Murder City, but it could have been much better.

Written by: Taylor Rhodes, April 12th 2011

Beautiful Boy

mandy — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Shawn Ku

Anchor Bay Films

Considering how common the tragedy of school shootings has become in our society, it is strange how infrequently this phenomena appears on both the silver and the TV screen. Perhaps this is because understanding these incidents is difficult, even when it comes to fiction. In Beautiful Boy, director Shawn Ku attempts to explore unanswerable questions by depicting a married couple who are torn apart by the death of their son, a college student who is both the victim and culprit of a massively fatal school shooting.

Maria Bello and Micheal Sheen play Kate and Eric, a married couple on the brink of separation. Despite living in the same home, the two move in completely separate spheres: eating dinner apart, sleeping in separate beds, and conversing with one another from different rooms. Their coldness to one another seems to have spread to their sole child, Sam (Kyle Gallner), who is attending college away from home.

Beautiful Boy opens with Sam reading a short story aloud, sadly recalling a long gone happy memory of his family at the beach. Eyes large and heavy with sadness, he calls his family from his dorm room and tries to communicate his frustration. His parents, however, are completely distracted by their own troubles, and unable to register his need for help.

The next morning the couple’s routine is interrupted by news of the shooting at Sam's school. Panicked, Kate fruitlessly attempts to get in touch with Sam. When the police finally come to their door, Kate and Eric learn that the truth is more terrible than even their greatest fear: not only is Sam dead but he is the sole perpetrator of the shooting.

With the media waiting on their doorstep, and the phone ringing incessantly, the two find themselves unable to carry on with their normal lives. Unsure of who to turn to and where to go, Kate and Eric walk away from what they knew. At first this tragedy seems to push Kate and Eric further apart, but eventually it's the only thing big enough to hold the couple together.

The question that haunts Kate and Eric, and no doubt the parents of real-life shooters, is how they could have created a child capable of carrying out such an unspeakable act. The two are forced to face this question amid intermittent snippets of television footage showing their son explaining his actions. Defying cliche, Sam is never made out to be overly angry or monstrous; rather, he is shown to be a boy ripped apart by the seemingly bleak world around him.

In the end, it is the raw and unsettling internal examination of a disjointed couple’s struggle to reunite in the midst of an an overwhelming crisis that is the sole focus of this film. Bello and Sheen give incredible, understated, and emotionally bare performances in which they portray the anguish of their characters without seeming overly dramatic. Both prove themselves to be immensely gifted actors, skilled at lending realism and believability to the most unbelievable of moments.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, March 13th 2011

Each and Her

mandy — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Valerie Martínez

University of Arizona Press

It can be easy and convenient to forget facts learned and impressions made about our southern neighbor, Mexico. Because I like to think of myself as conscious and conscientious of both international news and poetry, I was surprised by my recent discovery of Each and Her by Valerie Martínez. A widely anthologized poet and former poet laureate of Santa Fe, Martínez has been recognized for a career’s worth of community outreach and education, and even for translating Uruguayan poetry.

On the back cover of Each and Her, Martínez’s mentor, Joy Harjo, admires the poet's elegance, metaphor, and noble purpose: “They were roses, those tender girls broken against the edge of the border between Mexico and the U.S. They were our sisters, our daughters, our nieces, granddaughters; they are us… There can be no more silence. These poems make an opening in the pathway for justice.”

I must agree; this is one of the most lovely and thought provoking elegies I have read in a while. Martínez bestows a quiet honor on the lives of nearly 500 victims (since 1993). She does this by encompassing their names in her larger meditations on the cultivation of roses, and on representations of cultures that value (or devalue) those who are vulnerable, female, and poor.

Each and Her is, essentially, a book-length poem; there are seventy-two numbered, title-less meditations that follow a starkly written introduction to the paramount problem: many females, often students or factory workers, have been (and continue to be) murdered in or around Juárez and Chihuahua, Mexico. Martínez’s objective, page-long prologue tells us that the murders are linked by evidence of sexual violence, torture, or mutilation, and that the numbers each year are steadily rising (from twenty-eight in 2004 to eighty-six in 2008). The problem is getting worse, and in its background we see a drug and labor trafficking culture, and exploitation in the maquiladoras, the export assembly plants where some of these girls are employed. In one of her many numeral-rich poems, Martínez cites the number of girls and women who currently work in that industry:

472,423
while they can be hired legally
at the age of 16, it is common for these girl-women
to get false documents
start work at 12, 13, 14

Martínez arranges beautifully sparse facts next to rich details that mesmerize with their quiet reality (“Amalia went back to Juárez / dirt floors/ sheets for doors/ Coca-Cola in small bottles/ in wood crates stacked/ bundles of tortillas and tamales/ out the front window/ pesos and dollar bills/ crushed on the ledge”). Moments like these, and small poems like “this / way” or “I refuse” helped me contemplate the horror (“right breasts severed / left nipples bitten off”) while holding onto glimpses of how these women and girls may have lived before they were tortured and killed (“crush of the crowded Juárez market / Malia is first / hand clutching mine/ Grandmother behind / tethered to Mom”).

I admired how Martínez incorporated found poems, such as selections from the Orthodox veneration of the Virgin Mary and Eve and “the missive / from the attorney general / of the state of Chihuahua,” into the same long poem as her narrated lesson on worthy ancient women: “finally, a great throng of women deserving to be named, some as Greeks, some as muses, some as seers, for all were nothing more than learned women held and celebrated…” Whether suggesting the beauty and toil of flower harvesting labor, evoking the motif of sisterhood, or considering the working conditions of women, as in poem "36." (“a typical maqui working schedule/ 60 hours per week/ typical daily wage—$8.29”), Martínez left me amazed at the breadth of her careful poetry.

The emotion of each experience—of a girl-woman and her loved ones—is nodded to and transcended. Martínez understands that the deep icon of the rose radiates out from what mathematicians or ethicists can understand about these brutal murders. I was literally propelled through these poems by a need to privilege these lives with my attention, by a kind of reverent curiosity about these girls’ and women’s stories, and by the utter pleasure of Martínez’s lovely, sparse, and thoughtful language. Justice often comes through awareness and empathy, and the way that Valerie Martínez reverently and tenderly handles her collection of meditations about this terrifying cultural pattern buoys the possibility of justice, and hopefully, a remedy.

Written by: Julie Ann, January 21st 2011

Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera

mandy — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Georgina Guzman

University of Texas Press

Making a Killing is a collection of essays exploring the history and social/political/economic context of the murders of women in Juarez, Mexico from 1993 to the present day. Essays analyze the economic context of free trade that has contributed to a culture that devalues women workers and sees female bodies as expendable in the making of cheap products for American women. Essays examine activists’ and artists’ efforts to gain attention for the plight of women in Juarez, analyze the culture of law enforcement in Juarez, and vividly portray the efforts of mothers and relatives to get justice for their missing and murdered daughters.

Though the essays collected here are primarily academic, they are easy to read and will be of interest to the general public, not just other academics. The collection provides a thorough history and a complete picture of the efforts to stop the violence against women in Juarez throughout the last two decades. Though the subject is difficult, I enjoyed the book a lot.

I lived in El Paso, Texas for fifteen of the last twenty years; the stories of Mexican women being raped, murdered, and dumped in the desert on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico filtered into my consciousness early. But so did the stories of narco-murders. In the last three years, the world has lost its preoccupation with the murder of women in Juarez and turned its attention instead to the mayhem and murders of over 25,000 Mexican citizens in the drug cartel wars ripping the nation apart. Juarez is the city most affected by these murders (3,000 in 2010 alone).

If I have one criticism of Making a Killing, it is that it pays little attention to the general culture of killing in Juarez. The murders of women didn’t begin in 1993—nor have they stopped. And the narco-murders didn’t begin in 2007—and who knows when they will end? Because the editors focus on femicide, only one essay suggests that the femicides overlap or are inextricably intertwined with the narco-murders. The culture of violence in Juarez envelops the femicides—but exceeds them as well. If we fail to explore and analyze this truth, then the murders of women by individual men and groups of men will be forgotten as we increasingly pay attention to the drug cartel war instead.

Written by: Jessica Powers, January 15th 2011

The Monochrome Madonna

mandy — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Kalpana Swaminathan

Penguin India

For the last year or so now, I have been avidly pursuing murder mysteries by an Indian author or with an Indian connection. Some have turned out very good, and some were simply tolerable. The latest in this genre to fall in my way is The Monochrome Madonna by Kalpana Swaminathan (of Kalpish Ratna fame). I approached the book very positively, having read much praise of their work, but I have to confess that The Monochrome Madonna left me feeling let down.

First, a quick outline. The Monochrome Madonna is a "Lalli mystery"; Lalli being an aging detective who has retired from the Bombay police. For much of the novel, however, Lalli is away, and it is her niece Sita (not Seeta, she reminds you, though I still can’t tell the difference) who is stuck with the corpse and the sleuthing.

Sita is all at ends, and the involvement of Ramona, a friend’s suicidal teenage daughter, doesn’t help. The couple in whose flat the corpse is found are an odd pair, and for much of the novel, it is not clear what any of the characters are thinking. It is only upon Lalli’s return that things start falling into place... slowly.

Part of the reason the book didn’t appeal to me much is the somewhat florid language. Especially in the first half of the book, everything is simile, and rather outlandish ones at that.

Festive in a hot pink and purple chaniya-choli, she looked like a designer candle, solid, waxy, sequined. Besides I didn’t like her voice. It rang like a coin at the end of every sentence, metallic, definite, with an exact sense of its value...The scalp had unfurled like a scarlet hibiscus, trailing sticky pistils of bloof all over his matted hair...There was a light bulb up there. It made the maw of that low space smoulder like a sulking volcano.

All this within ten pages, by which time I was wishing the book had a ruthless editor who would’ve chopped off the verbiage. This is part of the reason why, at 250 pages, the book feels too long.

The other (and perhaps larger) issue with The Monochrome Madonna is that the plot itself is too slow for a mystery. For long stretches, nothing much happens. Even when Lalli returns and things start happening, we are not given much insight into the motivations of any of the characters. There are interesting digressions, and Sita is the one character who comes out strongly etched, but it isn’t enough to make up for the somewhat vaguely written and numerous other characters.

At the end of a mystery novel, I like to be able to plot together a logical outline and trace how the author has led up to a certain ending. It is no fun to feel that character A could as well have been the murderer as B, and the only thing preventing that was the author’s whim. I guess what I’m saying is that the reader needs to be able to work with the detective and at the end feel that the culprit had the best possible motive and opportunity. With The Monochrome Madonna, this doesn’t happen, and the end feels quite arbitrary. To me, this is the worst sort of thing one could say about a murder mystery.

Cross-posted from Apu's World

Written by: Aparna V. Singh, November 14th 2010

A Kind of Intimacy

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Jenn Ashworth

Europa Editions

In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.

Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.

The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.

This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.

Written by: kristina grob, August 7th 2010

'Til Death

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:49:00 +0000

By Miasha

Touchstone Books

In 'Til Death, the third and final installment for bestselling series Secret Society, Miasha takes us on a whirlwind adventure of sex, drugs, fame, and money. 'Til Death picks up where its predecessor Never Enough left off, and now fans can follow Celess and Sienna (better know as Si-Si) as they travel the world trying to avoid police who have accused them of murder and the psychopathic murderer who wants Si-Si dead. This fast-paced story takes you to places such as Rome, Italy; Cape Town, South Africa; and Dubai as our two leading ladies live off of rich men while building up an extremely successful escort agency.

I wanted to read the other books in this series so I would have a better sense of the current plot and background. While I love the storyline for its realism and energy and how it gives women power, I can't say I enjoyed the book as much as I would have liked to. Using the style of slang commonly found in R-rated gangster movies, 'Til Death is crudely written, making it difficult for a person not completely familiar with it to read the book without having to re-read, as much of it feels as if it hasn't been edited very well.

Along with this, the descriptions could use some cutting as they drag on needlessly, such as in Rome when Celess and Si-Si have multiple outfit changes. Miasha sees fit to take us from head to toe of everything the girls change into. While I understand that Celless is a shallow, money-obsessed woman who defines a person's wealth by what they wear, descriptions of all things Gucci that are a bit much for those of us who buy Levi's jeans. A simple and quick description would do just fine. The dialog also needs to be trimmed, such as when Si-Si, Celess, and Andrew go to a Roman night club to make a business deal and when Andrew finds the girls in Dubai. The reader is subjected to needless and sloppy segments of dialog that review what the reader already knows or can be pieced together from contextual clues.

All in all, the story itself was enjoyable but the way it was laid out left much to be desired. I wouldn't recommend 'Til Death to someone who isn't familiar with the author.

Written by: Nina Lopez-Ortiz, August 6th 2010

The Killer Inside Me

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

IFC Films

The song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" sums up all Jim Thompson’s oeuvre. When he wrote his novels (mostly in the '50s) they were rightly regarded as violent misogynist twaddle. It was only after his death that certain misguided critics mistook his nihilistic, bad-day-at-the-abattoir style for art. Thompson’s writing has all the literary merit of pissing your name in snow. Like Mickey Spillane, he saw two kinds of people in the world: bad men and the women who love them. The mistake director Michael Winterbottom makes in his new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me is to believe Thompson’s worldview teaches us anything apart from bad taste.

In a dusty, nowhere little town in Texas, a young sheriff likes to beat women. He was raised to be bad, by his no-good daddy and his paedophile half-brother. Even his babysitter was a sadomasochist. Now, cloaked by his badge of office and spurred-on by legal impunity, he plots the death of a rich boy who manslaughtered his sibling. Since we’re in Jim Thompson-country, he can’t just kill the rich boy, of course. He must kill a few chicks along the way (because he’s bad and women want him, badly). He’s got two women in his life: a good girl and a whore (one girl, if you read Freud). They both worship him enough to inspire hate, and to turn him on to murder.

I shut my eyes when Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba to death. Even listening for a minute was tough. This scene, which has stirred the critical backlash against the movie, is true to Jim Thompson’s lurid vision, but watching it doesn’t tell us much. In interviews, Michael Winterbottom has argued that ultra-violence is moral, because it’s unattractive to most people. The trouble is: it’s only unattractive to moral people. (Wife-beaters love watching women get punched in the face.) Does Winterbottom think we’re under some illusion about what beating a woman to death looks like? Jim Thompson wasn’t a feminist, for Pete’s sake. He wrote what he wrote because lurid violence sells. His work only seems insightful because psychos have so few thoughts. Pity the man who wants to see women battered.

As the sheriff, Casey Affleck has a coward’s smile. His signature look—like Ben Affleck if he’d killed somebody—is used to good effect here. He’s got eyes that seem to die on people. His voice is permanently curled into his throat, waiting to be kicked. Everything about him is wounded. Unfortunate women think he’s “vulnerable.” Men mistake him for a servant. But both ways of seeing him look like weakness from his point of view. His wounds aren’t there to be healed, or to be used against him. He’s long past that. His wounds are, in fact, the only reminder there is that he was once a child. For him, feelings are what he fakes, the way a hunter baits a trap.

There’s no such complexity to the women’s roles. (The old action movie maxim: “Any woman is superfluous to the plot unless naked or dead” was probably invented by Jim Thompson.) Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson do their best, but their roles are pretty much confined to the bedroom (or the grave). They are the women who’d sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)". Every woman in Jim Thompson’s fiction has a taste for male dominance and bloodshed disguised as sex. The only difference between a murder scene and a sex scene for Thompson is that his killers actually enjoy murder. Sex might be hot for these guys, but it’s always foreplay to death.

There is an audience for this kind of thing. In the '50s—hell, for most of human history—men wrote violent misogynist twaddle, and people lapped it up. As in rap lyrics today, there’s a supposed authenticity in boy-on-girl spite. But woman-haters are all liars. And not even interesting liars at that. Misogyny is the thinnest veil for self-doubt. Women are everywhere, after all. How big a man’s fears have to be to encompass an entire sex! (So big they dwarf him.) The makers of The Killer Inside Me know their anti-hero is a personality void, so they accentuate violence, like real misogynists. This can’t hide the littleness of the man, or how empty the movie is.

Cross-posted at Movie Waffle

Written by: James Tatham, June 12th 2010

The Red Riding Trilogy

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker

Channel Four Film

Movies about rape, murder, and child abuse should not be photographed this beautifully. Channel Four Film’s Red Riding Trilogy, shown as a miniseries in the UK but as three movies in the U.S., is one larger story connected by characters, place and the unrepentant horror of Yorkshire, in the northern England. In the north, as the characters say, they do what they want.

The three films are set in three years, 1974, 1980, and 1983, respectively. The first, 1974, directed by Julian Jarrold, focuses on Andrew Garfield’s Eddie Dunford, the new crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post, and his investigation into the disappearance of three young girls, the most recent found with wings sewn into her back. The second, 1980, directed by James Marsh, focuses on Paddy Considine’s Peter Hunter, a Manchester detective brought to Yorkshire to review the police’s handling of the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer. The third, 1983, directed by Anand Tucker, has two focuses: the first is on David Morrisey’s Maurice Jacbson, a corrupt detective having second thoughts, and the second is Mark Addy’s Eddie Pigford, a local boy turned lawyer who returns home to close his mother’s affairs and gets tangled up in the crimes, and becomes an unlikely hero. Characters appear and reappear in each story, changing in significance depending on who is seeing them.

The overarching mystery of the films is intriguing, if not original. Much of the joy from watching them comes from witnessing the characters move the pieces into place. As I watched 1983, I gasped out loud at certain parts. Waiting between the movies was legitimately frustrating, as I wanted to know what would happen almost more than I could stand, even though I knew it couldn’t be good. However, 1980 felt a bit disconnected from the other two. The timeline, fractured by the style of the movie, made some parts of all three hard to follow, but 1980 was all over the place. Ultimately, the story carried beyond the confusion.

The direction is amazing. All three parts are incredibly vivid, with powerful, dreamlike scenes haunting me well after the credits. All three employ dreamlike touches, with slow motion, flashbacks, time skips, and nontraditional camera angles. The movies looked like 1970s horror movies, and this gave the whole proceedings an eerie undertone. 1974, in particular, is gorgeous, and that beauty is used in such wonderfully unsettling ways. 1980 is a bit more straightforward, to mirror Peter’s traditional views. 1983, though, loses a bit of its power by having two main characters, diluting the style choices to very different men.

The entire cast is incredible. The standout is Andrew Garfield, who carries 1974 with ease, giving Eddie the believability of a cocky young investigative reporter and runs the gamut of emotions, making his ending both shocking and inevitable. Paddy Considine carries the conflicted nature of 1980’s Peter Hunter like a second skin-does actor carry sorrow better? Mark Addy is a pleasant addition to 1983, but isn’t around enough to make a big impact. David Morrisey’s Maurice Jobson has the strength to hold his character’s honor while doing terrible things, and still make you pity him. There were few female characters, but Rebecca Hall, as the mother of one of the lost girls in 1974, makes a strong impression. Secondary characters, including Sean Bean, Sean Harris, Richard Sheehan, and Daniel Mays, are wonderful. No one fits a false note.

If you like thrillers, horror movies, or mysteries, you aren’t going to do any better than the Red Riding Trilogy.

Written by: Taylor Rhodes, June 6th 2010

Cook the Books

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant

Berkley Publishing Group

Cook the Books is part of a series of mystery books (Gourmet Girl Mysteries) by mother-daughter writing team Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant.

Chloe is a graduate student in her mid twenties, who lives by herself and has a passion for food. She has an incredibly gorgeous best friend named Adrianna, who is married to a goofy but honest and lovable free-spirited (broke) man named Owen. They have a delightful little bundle of joy named Patrick, who happens to melt Chloe’s heart so much that she overspends and ends up in debt because she just can’t resist buying him all the expensive toys and clothes she sets her eyes on; he’s that adorable. Then there’s Josh, her ex-boyfriend, a chef, who left a year before for a better job in Hawaii and left her behind.

Did you get all this? If you didn’t it’s okay because once you start reading the novel, this will be retold in pretty much every chapter. Do you want to know what else is constantly repeated? The word “Josh.” It comes up in every other sentence. Of course there’s more to the novel: there’s murder, there’s cooking, and there’s a villain (or many?). More importantly, at the end Josh returns to make everything alright (because he’s perfect). But don’t worry, I haven’t spoiled the end; you can guess that one by the end of the fourth chapter.

The story itself is pretty bland but its biggest sin is mainly that it’s not very relatable. Chloe is supposed to be young, bright and independent, and yet she appears to be everything but. Why am I supposed to care about this character? She has no true interests other than her godson, the lives of other cooks and her ex-boyfriend. It probably doesn’t help that the novel is written with a significant amount of dialogue, which, for the most part, is heavily contrived. For example, Chloe’s employer, a serious man in his mid-thirties has just met new mommy Adrianna and all three of them are sitting down for dinner, his treat:

“And Adrianna,“ he said to my friend, “you especially should eat a lot, since you probably have no time to eat while taking care of a tiny baby, huh?”

This was not meant to be funny, or sarcastic (or creepy) but rather to portray what a great guy Chloe’s employer is! The entire novel is written in this type of dialogue, which aside from being annoyingly predictable, becomes overly repetitive.

Cook the Books is filled with bad cliches and references. The murder that sets motion to the core of the storyline leads to Chloe’s view to the “dark” side of cooking, the cutthroat competitive world of chefs. It’s in fact the same world described by so many other chefs, except that in this case, it’s overly dramatic.

The book cover includes a review blurb promising "snappy dialogue, puzzling murder and mouthwatering menus," which I guess is what fueled my disappointment, as I did believe it. In contrast to other mystery novels that portray unlikely heroines, Cook the Books didn’t hit the mark, It has no sparkle and the heroine lacks a sense of self and definition. It was difficult to really care. It could have been light, fun reading, if only it had been half as long. If I was to recommend the book, it I would assume pre-teens might not mind it, but I don’t know how memorable it would be.

There are some recipes added at the end of the book, which only adds to my confusion as to who the target group for this book is supposed to be. The recipes are courtesy of other authors and chefs. Some are easy enough to follow and make (the Baked Tomato Nests), and some (like the Grilled Ohio Lamb Steak) are meant for the serious cooks who strives to entertain. The Baked Tomato Nests are a cute and fast idea, and in fact, the recipe jumped out at me from one of the actual chapters of the novel, so there was a nice connection there. However, overall the recipes were not very innovative, and in a way, that echoes my overall impression of the book.

To put it simply: it didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth, it needed spice (cayenne, Habanero, or even just plain old pepper)—it was just too bland.

Written by: Jessica Sánchez, May 27th 2010

September Fair: A Murder-by-Month Mystery

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Jess Lourey

Midnight Ink

Librarian and small-town reporter Mira James discovers the dead body of the latest Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, while covering the Minnesota State Fair for the local newspaper. Milkfed Mary is teenaged Ashley Pederson. Mira is covering a carving of Ashley’s head in butter as part of the Queen of the Dairy ceremony when the lights go out in the Dairy building. A few moments later Mira finds Ashley on the floor of a refrigerated booth, her skin a strange shade of red.

Ashley’s body is the fifth Mira has discovered in the last few months. Consequently, Mira has no desire to get involved in another murder investigation. The newspaper editor wants Mira to find out more information regarding Ashley’s murder, but she wants to keep her distance. Mira is more interested in seeking closure to her own drunken and emotionally deficient past. Mira is finally convinced to seek out the cause of the teenager’s death when Ashley’s mother begs her to find the killer.

In her quest to find Ashley's murderer, Mira is joined by Mrs. Berns, her elderly sidekick, and Kennie Rogers, Battle Lake’s mayor. While investigating the murder and covering the fair for Battle Lake’s newspaper, the trio engages in a variety of activities such as rodeo sheep riding, attending a Neil Diamond concert, and setting up a kissing booth to raise money for the town liquor store. The suspects begin to pile up as well. Is the murderer the bankrupt fair organizer? Did the anti-cattle industry activist kill Ashley? Or did a jealous Milkfed Mary contestant bump off Ashley so that she could become the new Queen of the Dairy?

In September Fair, Jess Lourey uses humor to raise questions about the food production industry and beauty pageants. Lourey uses aspects of the mystery to make readers think about the origins of their last meal and its impact on the environment. Lourey is rather scathing in her assessment of the beauty pageant industry and how young women are made to conform to outdated notions of femininity to win a contest. The mystery is fast-paced and kept me guessing about the killer until the very end. Jess Lourey’s previous murder-by-month mysteries feature Mira and the other residents of Battle Lake. I enjoyed reading about the wacky characters from Battle Lake, Minnesota so much that I have put the previous book in the series, August Moon, on hold at the library.

Written by: Rekesha Spellman, March 15th 2010

Love You to Death

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:03:00 +0000

By Shannon K. Butcher

Forever

Love You to Death raises many moral questions: How far would you go to have a loved one returned to you? Would you fly halfway around the world on a moments’ notice because you had a hunch something was wrong? Would you put your own life in danger to save a loved one?

Catching a last minute flight from Hong Kong to Illinois cost Elise McBride a fortune, but she would pay that numerous times over to make sure her sister came home safely. Ashley had only been missing a few days when Elise flew into town, a move thought as extreme by neighbors and local police. Ashley was a flighty twenty-one-year-old who they did not believe was missing until Elise persisted in the matter.

Doing everything she possibly can to track down Ashley under the unsolicited supervision of ex-cop Trent Brady, Elise finds a disturbing image on Ashley’s computer. Unbeknownst to Ashley, as she was snapping pictures of the animals outside, she caught the picture of a man hiding behind a tree in her yard. Ashley had become the object of desire by one very deranged maniac, Gary Maitland. As the days drag on and the body count rises, the search for Ashley becomes more frantic. Willing to do anything, including putting her own life in danger as bait, Elise wants her sister returned safely.

Maitland had lost his wife in a car accident many years before. Unable to let go of his perfect wife, he kept her body refrigerated in his basement, giving him access to her anytime her wanted. His need to keep his wife near sent him on a killing spree leaving many devastated families in his wake. Using body parts from the women that he kidnapped and murdered, Maitland was creating a new body for his beloved wife, whose was crushed in the accident. In his eyes, no other woman would ever measure up to Wendy.

Love You to Death brings together romance and murder in an expected way. Girl meets ruggedly hot neighbor, girl sleeps with ruggedly hot neighbor, well, you know how that goes. The plot itself seemed to lack the intrigue that made you want to know what happened next. The last seven chapters made the book. Love You to Death was a good casual read, but not something that gripped my undivided attention from start to finish.

Written by: Ryanick Paige, January 14th 2010

Sleep No More

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:02:00 +0000

By Susan Crandall

Forever

It starts in young children and for many continues throughout the early adult years: being afraid of night, the dark, and anything associated with what might happen when we close our eyes. Imagine closing your eyes while safe in your bed and then opening them find to find yourself standing in the middle of the living room. You have no recollection on how you got there or what you may have done in the process of getting there.

In this twisting tale of Sleep No More, Susan Crandall follows the solitary life of Abby Whitman. Abby is the town florist and a lifelong resident of Preston. While most are afraid of the dangers that can happen to us while we sleep, Abby is afraid of the danger she poses to others while she sleeps.

Abby had been sleepwalking her entire childhood until she puberty, but it wasn’t without incident. When she was just eleven years old, a sleepwalking episode destroyed the family home and scarred her sister for life. Or so she thought for the last twenty years. Because of this disturbing event, Abby spends her nights in solitude, unsure of herself and what may happen after she falls asleep.

To confirm those fears Abby wakes up at the scene of an accident where a Senator's son has been killed. Unable to remember the details of the accident, Abby assumes the worst - that her sleepwalking has claimed another victim. As the truth unfolds, evidence at the accident scene reveals that another person is involved just as Abby begins receiving threats.

A divorced father of two, psychiatrist Dr. Jason Coble is smitten with Abby, after seeing her at his ex-wife’s grandmothers’ funeral. He wants to save her from the dangers that are lurking along with her sleepwalking fears, not as a doctor, but as a friend or lover. To make matters worse, Abby is the only florist in the small town of Preston. The phone calls for the Senator’s son’s funeral arrangements come pouring in and she is faced to relive the nightmare again.

The more time she spends with Jason, the more threats Abby receives. The secrets of the past begin to unravel, leaving Abby to realize that her memories are not always what they seem. As Abby’s days collide with her nights, she has to decide which aspect is more terrorizing. Does she fear the lurking dangers in the day enough to let Jason protect her? Or will her fear of her sleepwalking keep her away from his arms?

I would recommend Sleep No More to anyone looking for a book that will keep your brain working from the beginning to the end. The fear that Abby feels because of her past sleepwalking episodes can be unbelievable at times throughout the book. However, it does make you wonder how a traumatic experience would impact your life and to what extremes you would go through to prevent it from happening again.

Written by: Ryanick Paige, January 2nd 2010

Dead Floating Lovers

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:51:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

Midnight Ink Books

Set in the lush landscape of upper Michigan, Dead Floating Lovers (the second in Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli's series of the Emily Kincaid mysteries) chronicles the experiences of aspiring mystery writer Emily Kincaid, who is enmeshed in one investigation after another as a journalist-cum-sidekick for the local law—her friend Deputy Dolly Wakowski.

Floating in a remote upper Michigan lake, Deputy Dolly discovers bones that she thinks belong to her ex-husband (he disappeared some thirteen years prior), or the Native American girl he ran off with. Determined to find out whether her ex-husband is the victim, or perhaps even the murderer, Dolly and Emily set out on a goose chase after Dolly’s long-lost family and wade through Native American tribal land and law where neither woman navigates comfortably.

As mysteries go, this one isn’t particularly gripping, and I won’t give away the details. The mystery itself (Who was killed? Who is the killer? Why?) is anticlimactically revealed. Mysteries typically employ some element of danger, and perhaps it is a testament to my desensitized nature that the danger in this mystery wasn’t nearly palpable enough. For this quick and easy read, the place setting, characters, and fairly predictable relationship scenarios comprise the more entertaining elements of the book.

Emily Kincaid fled from Ann Arbor and her broken marriage to Jackson Rinaldi, a pompous lothario of an academic. His purposefully overdone character convinces the reader to immediately side with Emily—Jackson drives a Jaguar, tosses scarves over his neck and shoulders, and is passionately engrossed in writing a book about T_he Canterbury Tales_. Oh—he speaks Italian and he can’t keep it in his pants around younger female grad students. Yet Jackson still holds sway over Emily—an all-too-familiar trope. Luckily, the hard-nosed and law abiding Deputy Dolly is always on hand to remind Emily (albeit unsuccessfully) that Jackson’s looming presence in her life only ends in heartbreak. And yet Dolly’s story is surprisingly similar. Dolly is inexplicably faithful to her long-gone husband (continuing to call him her “husband” and insisting on loyalty to one’s “family”) who after six months of marriage took off with another woman.

As delightful as it can be to read novels with women protagonists, what is mysterious here is that both women feel strong obligation to the men whose love for them seemed dead from the start. Both Emily and Dolly fall into a pattern I’ve been seeing lately in both print and on the screen, of women who fit into emotional extremes without leaving room for a middle ground. Dolly is exaggeratedly unemotional, and showing emotion seems to wound her soul in some unmentionable way.

Out of their unlikely friendship Emily is pitched as the “smart” one who should know better than to let herself be emotionally unwound by a man who comes off as skeezy, for lack of a better word—let alone force herself to achieve perfection for him when she says, “I wanted everything perfect when Jackson came to dinner. A wild, atavistic urge to feed a man came over me. Must’ve been straight down from a grandmother I’d never met; from back in the times when a woman caught herself a productive male or perished.”

Though I am starting to think I would prefer a bit more balance among women protagonists, the ways Emily and Dolly navigate the men whose presence (or absence-as-presence) is injected in their lives successfully propel the book and entertain the reader when the mystery lags. However, through their dramas Buzzelli succeeds at addressing a larger significant reality outside the story itself—that when it comes to relationships, physical extraction rarely equals emotional extraction.

Written by: L.Y. Bertram, November 16th 2009

Women Who Kill

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:06:00 +0000

By Ann Jones

The Feminist Press

Let me first just throw the creepiness right out there and admit I am a big fan of all media coverage related to serial killers. I love the horrible shows like Cold Case Files, and I love the even crappier rushed books written about every case. So when I saw Women Who Kill, I immediately zoomed in and claimed it.

I originally expected it to rely heavily on Aileen Wuornos, maybe some of the Manson girls, or even the women involved in couple-assisted murders, like Karla Homolka. I was expecting a similar sensationalized retelling of widely known to fairly well known cases, but what I got instead was an amazing surprise. Author Ann Jones doesn’t bore you with any of these tired old cases; in fact she rarely goes too deep into any individual case at all.

Women Who Kill marries the relationship between why and how women have killed during America’s history with the social problems of each time period behind them. This is a fascinating book for history buffs, sociologists, feminists, crime buffs—essentially, everyone. It’s so easy to write off a murderer as just being “crazy,” so I loved how this book went further to show that many of the female murderers throughout history actually had very rational reasoning behind their crimes brought on by their social position.

The book does not focus on any one criminal, but is divided rather loosely into crimes and time periods. The first type of murder brought up is that of women murdering their own children. Murdering your child is never a justifiable offense, but when Jones examines the American culture of the late 1600s and early 1700s to views on women, sexuality, and rape, the crimes become easier to understand.

The last type of murder covered is that of battered women retaliating against their batterers, from the late 1970s to the present. This was one of the more infuriating chapters, as it was closer to my lifetime. Jones never excuses any woman’s crime, but simply lays out each case on a carefully planned timeline of women’s social progress throughout the ages. All of the accounts are still extremely sad. And while this was a fascinating read that I could not put down, Women Who Kill left me feeling incredibly depressed and frustrated with how little progress it seems society really has made.

Between the language, euphemisms, and attitudes still in use—such as using seduction for the term rape in the 1600s, to the present favorite usage of had sex with, to the overall concept of how women still receive harsher sentencing for similar crimes committed by men—I didn’t feel our culture is much closer to equality, as I did before reading. Jones does a truly terrific job in presenting a morbid subject in an extremely interesting way, but I was left wishing for was some sort of guidance in what I could do personally to change things.

I don’t fault Jones for this though, as I doubt she has any idea herself. While it’s a wonderful book, the subject matter can be a little heavy to take in all at once. Surprisingly, Women Who Kill is not so much light beach fare (no ready-made for E! TV or movie sensationalism here) as it is a fresh insight to a little realized and ongoing problem.

Written by: Jen Klee, November 7th 2009