SACRED GAMES by Vikram Chandra

This book is just too long.  Even if its length were halved, it would still be 450 pages, and I might be OK with that.  It reminds me a lot of Shantaram, another too-long book set in Mumbai.  In this one we have two main characters—a gangster and a policeman.  The gangster is Ganesh Gaitonde, who dies early in the novel, but his first person narration gives his backstory and occupies a large portion of the book.   Sartaj Singh is the policeman who is the heart and soul of the story, however.  He and his fellow officers are unabashedly on the take.  Their illegal earnings constitute a hefty percentage of their income, and everyone involved seems to think that graft is perfectly acceptable.  The poverty and crowded, squalid living conditions described here are not surprising, but the level of corruption is astonishing.  Still, Santaj is doing his best to juggle several cases, knowing that he cannot completely quash the gang violence.  Numerous lengthy chapters are devoted to other tangential characters, such as Santaj’s mother, and sometimes we don’t discover their relationship to other events and/or characters until later.  In other words, the structure of the novel is a little annoying, as is the inclusion of numerous words that need translating.  I found the glossary at the end to be beneficial for reading the first few chapters, but as I got deeper into the novel, the foreign (Hindi?) words were not defined.  I suppose I should have read with my phone handy so that I could look them up, but, honestly, I just wanted to get to the end.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

Lillian is going to work for her rich friend Madison as a sort of governess to Madison’s two 10-year-old twin stepchildren—a boy and a girl. Their mother has died (her death is a story in and of itself), and their father, Madison’s husband, wants nothing to do with them. They pose a very real liability to his political career in the U.S. Senate. The kids have been living with their grandparents without any sort of discipline, because, if they get agitated, they get hot, and I don’t mean that they develop a fever. They burst into flames and torch everything around them except their own bodies. Lillian, with no child-rearing experience whatsoever, sees these kids as afflicted children who are desperately in need of love and attention. This is the second Kevin Wilson book I’ve read with a female protagonist, and she is once again authentic and funny and relatable. My only beef with Lillian, or perhaps with the storyline, is that she adores Madison, who comes across as a spoiled brat, who carelessly throws Lillian into the line of fire, pun intended, because Madison herself just can’t be bothered with such a task while supporting her husband’s political ambitions and raising a small child of her own. Lillian admits to being in love with Madison, but Madison’s physical beauty seems to be all that she has to offer, and Lillian does not strike me as being that shallow. Then there’s the boarding school incident, which I found completely unforgiveable, in which Madison screwed Lillian over and wrecked her life. Madison is the perfect foil for Lillian’s good intentions but turns out not to be quite as witchy as I thought, following a blockbuster plot twist. It’s a “Whoa! What just happened?” moment that turns Madison’s household on its ear. I particularly love the title, which probably has even more implications than I picked up on. When Lillian decides to take the “fire” children to the library, she soothes their anxiety by calmly telling them that they will be indistinguishable from other kids there; there’s “nothing to see here.” The unfortunate alternate interpretation of that statement is that their father makes every effort to ensure that they are invisible to his constituency and therefore unable to tarnish his squeaky-clean public image. No wonder the kids start heating up whenever they see him.

PERFECT LITTLE WORLD by Kevin Wilson

Izzy is a pregnant teenager, and the father of her unborn child is the high school art teacher, Hal.  Izzy wants to have the baby, with or without Hal’s support, and she comes to the attention of a scientific study involving communal child raising.  Dr. Preston Grind, who is in charge of the project, claims that the living conditions for the 10-year duration of the study do not represent a commune, but he’s basically splitting hairs on that question.  Still, Izzy signs up, as she figures raising her son in a closed environment with nine couples and their newborns is preferable to having to work two jobs just to make ends meet. The kids, of course, don’t realize that they are guinea pigs, but the parents create an unpredictable family dynamic.  Izzy is the only single parent, and, in many ways, she is an observer, but she also has more common sense than the rest of the collective family, despite a few lapses in judgment—understandable for someone so young.  Whether or not the project is successful as a child-raising alternative is almost beside the point, since the parents are the real wild cards here.  Unfortunately, I felt that the author painted them with overly broad strokes, so that we never really get a clear delineation of who’s who.  His focus is Dr. Grind, whose own childhood was a nightmare, and on Izzy, and, granted, she is the character we care about the most—strong, intelligent, compassionate.  Oddly, the author has chosen not to make her ambitious, and I was frustrated that she was not motivated to make better use of her smarts.  I finally realized that one of Izzy’s many gifts is that she is not restless or impatient, nor is she particularly concerned with what comes after the 10-year project is complete.  She is mostly content to let things run their course and then take it from there.  On the other hand, she is diligent in her pursuits and goes after what she wants.  As for the group parenting project, I am curious as to what inspired the author to come up with this idea.  He has certainly given us something to contemplate with regard to what constitutes a family and that families can devolve into mayhem, even without the influence of outside forces.

LADY IN THE LAKE by Laura Lippman

Maddie Schwartz is ready to leave her husband in 1966.  To her surprise, her teenage son elects to live with his dad.  Maddie charges on, though, and strikes out on her own.  When she and a friend find the body of a girl who disappeared, Maddie finagles her way into a clerical job in a newspaper office.  Then another body is discovered.  This time it’s a young black woman named Cleo, discovered near the fountain in a lake after the body interferes with the lighting system.  Maddie gets caught up in this murder as well, as she is the one who reports the electrical issue, as a result of a letter to the newspaper.  Cleo’s life parallels Maddie’s in many ways, but Maddie is very much alive—more so than ever actually.  She pulls a stunt early in the novel that did not endear her to me, but her fearlessness, ambition, and ineptitude in interviewing family members and possible perpetrators related to the two murders definitely got my attention.  I sincerely wanted her to succeed, but she takes no prisoners along the way.  Her flaws, though, are what make her such a compelling character.  I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the format of this book.  Several first-person (italicized) chapters are narrated by the murder victims.   The voices of a number of other chapters, also in first-person, belong to characters just introduced in the previous chapter, and sometimes these characters are very tangential.  Whether this chain of narrators has some purpose or whether it is just a gimmick, I’m not sure, but the author manages to keep the storyline on track.  Sometimes I found the diversion welcome and sometimes not.  Most of the chapters, however, are third-person and follow Maddie’s unwavering efforts to build an independent and fulfilling life for herself.  Although she does not intentionally trample people close to her, sometimes there’s collateral damage.

THE LAST PLACE by Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan is not the most talented fictional private investigator.  In this case she has a lot of help from a former Toll Facilities cop named Carl Dewitt, who had the misfortune of discovering a head without a body in the middle of a highway bridge.  Carl then became obsessed with the murder of Lucy Fancher.  Tess is actually investigating five cold murder cases, including Lucy Fancher’s.  She has no inkling that these cases are anything but random.  However, as a reader, I thought the first two cases seemed eerily similar, even if Tess didn’t pick up on that fact until quite a bit later in the book.  This was a fast and enjoyable read but certainly not special.  It has the usual twists and turns and red herrings, but I thought Carl was a much more compelling character than Tess.  Tess may be tenacious, but she is not in Carl’s league in that department.  Also, with five more or less disparate victims, I thought the connections between the cases were a bit contrived.  The author does intersperse throughout the novel a few pages devoted to the musings and activities of the killer, so that we know he has his eye on Tess.  Does he intend for her to be his next victim?  No doubt.  I found these interruptions, distinguished by a different typeface so that I could groan each time I encountered one, to be annoying and not really that informative, other than, of course, his focus on Tess.  I found her to be a bit elusive, and her investigating skills seemed mediocre at best.  This book does build on some events from previous novels in the series, but this is the first one I’ve read.  Perhaps The Last Place is not the ideal starting place.

LONG BRIGHT RIVER by Liz Moore

Mickey Fitzpatrick is a Philadelphia cop who shutters each time she gets a call to the scene of a dead woman.  It could be her missing sister, Kacey, who has struggled with drug addiction for years, swatting in abandoned buildings.  Mickey’s life is not an easy one.  Her new partner talks too much, and her boss doesn’t like her.  Mickey’s biggest joy is her young son whose father, also a cop, contributes no support, and whose babysitter routinely falls asleep on the job.  Mickey and Kacey lost their parents when the two girls were children, and their grandmother Gee reluctantly took over the job of raising them.  Gee is emotionally abusive and has to be one of the more despicable grandmothers in modern literature.  Given her lack of parental nurturing, it’s no wonder that Kacey has ended up on the streets.  Mickey is mostly a victim of her own poor judgment of character.  As for the dead women, apparently a serial killer is preying upon prostitutes and junkies.  His identity was fairly obvious to me early in the story, but the big revelation that comes later in the book is not about him.  Let’s just say it’s more of a family matter, and this is primarily a story of a family, rather than a murder mystery.  Mickey’s search for Kacey is admirable, except that she sacrifices almost everything to that quest.  Again, I questioned her judgment and her priorities.  This book is well-written, but it is very dark and gritty.  There is one scene in the neonatal unit of a hospital that is absolutely heartbreaking and almost a little too vivid.  This novel has its uplifting moments, but don’t hold your breath.

WHEN WE BELIEVED IN MERMAIDS by Barbara O'Neal

Kit’s sister Josie has been dead for fifteen years.  Or at least that’s what Kit thinks until she sees Josie on a news clip from New Zealand.  Kit takes off for Auckland, where she almost instantly meets Javier, a hunky Spanish musician.  Josie has a hunky man, too—her husband Simon—and two children.  There’s no mystery here, really, except perhaps what caused Josie to fake her own death and change her name.  The premise and the plot are pretty lame, and this book is definitely not high quality literature.  It’s an Amazon imprint, and it shows.  It has a little of everything—betrayal, multiple types of abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, a drowning and a near-drowning, earthquakes, and a fair amount of sex.  It’s mindless entertainment, kind of like a daytime soap opera.  This is not a book that you can sink your teeth into, although the descriptions of food are mouth-watering, as it does not require much thinking.  Still, I didn’t find it a chore to read, as it held my attention, and the writing was not a distraction.  One oddity is that both Josie, whose new name is Mari, and Kit are first person narrators.  However, the author does not make you guess who is talking, as each chapter bears the narrator’s name.  I did not expect to like this book, but, honestly, I can’t complain.  It’s cheesy women’s lit, but sometimes frothy and frivolous fun is just fine.