Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

This author was recently in Bend for The Nature of Words. His mystery series centers on Walt Longmire who is a sheriff in a small Wyoming town. Death Without Company is the second in this series. Lucian Connally, the former sheriff and a current resident of the Durant Home for Assisted Living, is convinced a fellow resident did not die a natural death. His convictions are complicated by his past relationship with the woman, Mari Baroja. The sheriff investigates Lucian’s allegations while also delving into the past.

A major strength of the book is that Johnson introduces an incredible number and variety of characters. The town doctor is not just the local doctor, but a survivor of a concentration camp. Here Sheriff Longmire describes his deputy, “I looked at my recently divorced deputy, a beautiful, intelligent woman with a body like Salome and a mouth like a saltwater crocodile.” (pg 151) Johnson makes it seem like each person in this fictional Wyoming town is interesting in a unique way. Mari Baroja and her family’s identification as Basque is mentioned; more information on that transplanted culture would add to the book.

The writing is enjoyable. Some of it is just quirky and gives you a sense of the main character. “I pulled my pocket watch out and consulted it as to lunchtime; we concurred that it was early but acceptable.” (pg 54) At other points there were phrases that I almost missed and then wondered what they really meant. For example, “I smiled as the feathers brushed the inside of my chest like they always do when I get irritated.” (pg 42)

The mystery from the past was almost too easy to figure out. The present day problems with increasing violence and danger keep one interested in the plot. There are some dream sequences that I felt did not really mesh with the rest of the book.. It helps with background to have read The Cold Dish first.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Check this book out at the library to read at least the first chapter. Min Jin Lee does an amazing job of capturing the family dynamics while introducing the four members of the Han family. This chapter is told from four points of view. Casey Han is the central character. She is living at home after recently graduating from Princeton. Her younger sister, Tina, is on break from MIT. It would appear to be every parent’s dream to have two such bright and successful daughters. Leah and Joseph, the parents, married, had Casey and Tina right away, and then immigrated to the United States. They manage a dry cleaning business. The author pulls the reader in and it becomes obvious that this family dinner is heading in a troublesome, but not unanticipated, direction. It is clear that each family member has a role to play and knows what is coming.

The story continues following Casey as she struggles with what to do in her life after college. Her conflicts with her boyfriends, her interactions with a businesswoman who has repeatedly helped her, her financial issues, and her continuing struggles with her family are the backdrop to her main struggle with choosing a career and getting along in the larger world. Here she reacts to a kindness from her boyfriend’s mother. “Casey swallowed, unable to speak. Her parents had never said anything like that in her entire life. Korean people like her mother and father didn’t talk about love, about feelings-at least this was how Casey and Tina had explained it to themselves for not getting these words they wanted to hear.” (pg 75) She spends a great deal of time thinking about her clothing. This is not something that I am into, but I could appreciate her view. “Through clothing, Casey was able to appear casual, urbane, poor, rich, bohemian, proletariat. Now and again, she wondered what it’d be like to never want to look like anything at all – instead, to come as you are.” (pg 219)

The story is told from multiple points of view. At times I wished the story would focus more on Casey rather than, for example, the thoughts of her mother’s choir instructor. It is a long story and does not keep the intenseness of the first chapter the whole way through. As I was nearing the end of the book, I started to wonder how everything was going to be wrapped up. I realized that like real life, the story of Casey Han, her friends and family, her co-workers and acquaintances, was not going to end neatly. And that was okay. It is a good read, especially if you are in the mood for a longer book.

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

The End of Mr. Y begins with a very vivid and accurate depiction of a poor graduate student. Ariel Manto is obsessed with many things, including theoretical physics and obscure writers. At a conference she meets a professor who shares her fixation on the author Lumas and decides to undertake graduate studies with him. At the start of this book Burlem, the professor, has been gone for months; he’s vanished. By a series of unexpected happenings, including a building collapsing into a tunnel, Ariel stumbles upon the last book by Lumas, which has the same title: The End of Mr. Y. The book is very rare with only one known copy. It is also rumored to be cursed.

Following the book’s instructions Ariel ventures into homeopathic remedies that lead her into the troposphere. The troposphere is Lumas’s term for the world of the mind. It is possible to move from mind to mind in this space. The book becomes a thriller with former agents from America trying to retrieve the book so they can make more of the remedy to enter the troposphere. The agents are after Ariel physically and in her mind. They employ KIDS to try and hurt her mind. She is saved by a mouse god named Apollo Smintheus. Ariel is helped in her endeavors to escape the agents by Adam, a former priest.

This book has some really great descriptive writing in it. The intertwining descriptions of quantum theory and religion are interesting to read, especially the multi verse versus the godverse theory. This is rare to find in a novel. I personally found the story much more interesting when it stayed in the physical world than in the troposphere. Ariel’s interactions with her lover, Patrick, are complex and seem to not correlate with the actions of an intelligent person. She keeps referring to what’s happening as only happening to her body so it doesn’t really matter. She would prefer to live a life in books, “Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of the book; I’d give anything for that.” (pg 117)

I’d highly recommend reading this book if you’re interested in science or religion or simply in how other people’s minds might work. As I mentioned earlier, I was not thrilled with the troposphere part of the book. I also was disturbed at the idea of the KIDS being autistic kids who were sent out to perform missions. However, the descriptions in some parts were intensely real with Ariel being able to feel the pain of the mind she was inhabiting. Here she is in her housemate’s mind, “I was facing the door; I’d placed myself there like a little welcome mat ( ) waiting for him to wipe his feet on me. So he sat there sipping his coffee, looking beyond me to the wall, covered in postcards from Paris, and I just watched people leave like bacteria looking for a new host to infect.” (pg 176)

Free Fire by C. J. Box

Somehow I had never heard of this author until Free Fire was published. It is the seventh in a series of mysteries staring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. The game warden’s wife, Marybeth, and their two children are also well-developed characters. The language is not eloquent, but to the point as in this example.
“But in a job where nearly every man he encountered in the field was armed as well as pumped up with testosterone- and calling backup was rarely an option- playing dumb was a survival skill. And Joe, much to Marybeth’s chagrin, could play dumb extremely well.” (pg 76)
It is very much a departure from many mysteries in that the action primarily takes place far removed from where most people live.

This particular mystery is set in Yellowstone National Park. Joe has been fired from his normal position of game warden in the Saddlestring area, but has managed to become known to the new governor as someone who stirs things up. The governor hires him to investigate a mass shooting in an area of Yellowstone, which is now being called the Zone of Death as the shooter is released on a technicality. The park is under federal control so the governor sends in Joe unofficially.

The plot is convoluted and involves the unique setting of Yellowstone with its geysers, paint pots, and wildlife in all forms. The book can be read on its own without reading any of the preceding mysteries. However, there were enough hints to prior activity that I felt compelled to read the rest of the books in the series. Also, I wonder what will happen to the Pickett family in the future and look forward to the next in the series. I liked these mysteries so much that I'm adding Box to my list of top ten writers of mystery series.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Imagine a world where crazed fans battle over whether Shakespeare really wrote those plays or where the removal of a minor character from a classic book is a national crisis. Thursday Next is a Literary Tech in England in 1985 and her job is to protect books. She faces some complex personal issues such as whether she should forgive the man she loves, Landen Parke-Laine, for telling the truth about her brother during the war. This is the ongoing war, in its 131st year, between England and Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. She faces some incredible issues in hunting down Acheron Hades and battling the Goliath Corporation. Here she has told Landen that she is too busy to go out with him.
“I could see he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t really tell him I was on the trail of a master criminal who could steal thoughts and project images at will; who was invisible on film and could murder and laugh as he did so.” (pg 118)

This book is a crazy mix of fiction, science fiction, action thriller, and a whole new genre where books are at the center of life. The science fiction part is well done and interesting. For example, Thursday’s uncle invents a car that can change color and even become invisible using liquid crystal technology. This is just one of many of his inventions and another, the Prose Portal, becomes important to Acheron as well as the Goliath Corporation, and potentially devastating to literature everywhere. The Eyre mentioned in the title refers to the book Jane Eyre. The characters in Jane Eyre become endangered characters in this book.

This is the first in a series of books with Thursday Next as the protagonist. I enjoyed reading this book with its many convolutions and look forward to the second in the series, Lost in a Good Book. I wonder if the author can continue to invent such outrageous scenarios. I did think that some of the characters in this book spoke in clichés, especially Acheron, and whether this was on purpose by the author or not, it did not help develop them as characters. The action also slowed down dramatically at the end of the book.