THE STOLEN QUEEN by Fiona Davis

If you want a plot that is fairly realistic in a novel, this is not the book for you.  Plus, the three main characters in the book—Charlotte, Annie, and her mother Joyce—are lacking in common sense.  This deficiency does not deter Annie and Charlotte from suddenly traveling to Egypt to try to find and recover an artifact that was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  (Nineteen-year-old Annie whose occupations are mainly waitress and housekeeper has never traveled abroad but miraculously happens to have a current passport.) Charlotte is also on a personal quest to discover what happened to her husband and infant daughter after a shipwreck on the Nile forty years ago.  Why did she wait so long?  She believes in a curse supposedly applied by a female pharaoh whom Charlotte is trying to prove was unfairly maligned.  Trying to clean up that pharaoh’s reputation would seem to negate the curse, right?  Charlotte is theoretically a smart woman, and Annie has a knack for solving riddles, but they are just not very wise, if you ask me, as they both knowingly put themselves in harm’s way.  I can live with bumbling characters who stumble onto vital discoveries, but I would prefer a plot that doesn’t border on fantasy.  The author builds suspense fairly well, but the writing leaves a lot to be desired, as does the believability factor. 

THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann

The opening of this novel is priceless.  Wilzek leaves his sanatorium in a chauffeured car so that he can appear on TV as a talk show guest.  Unfortunately, his dementia is such that he really has no idea where he is going and becomes somewhat unhinged during his on-air interview.  We learn that he was an assistant to the Austrian director, G.W. Pabst, but we don’t discover his role in the story until much later.  Wilzek is fictional, but Pabst, whose life dominates the narrative, was a real person who directed silent movies and then later movies with sound in the U.S.  He knows that as a director he is only as good as his last project and returns to Europe as things are heating up in Nazi Germany.  The author paints him as a comical character in many ways, but the circumstances are anything but.  Negotiating how to make a worthwhile movie that is subject to Nazi scrutiny is a tightrope that Pabst walks with questionable success.  Besides the opener, another hilarious scene is a book club meeting attended by Pabst’s wife and wives of Nazi party members.  Only one author is really suitable for a discussion in which the walls may have ears, and that author’s work is not exactly great literature.  This novel will make you want to look up biographical info on Pabst and the movie he makes of a novel by the author his wife’s book club always reads.  The twist at the end is fictional but definitely one of the highlights.

I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME by Lorrie Moore

The best thing about this book is that it’s short.  A close second is the fabulous writing.  However, the plot is bizarre.  Actually, there are two storylines that intersect eventually.  The first is a series of letters written by a rooming house proprietor shortly after the Civil War.  She describes a handsome lodger who seems to be John Wilkes Booth, although she never says so.  The second storyline is the one that is extremely weird and unfortunately occupies most of the pages.  Finn is a history teacher who doesn’t believe in homework and who doubles as a math teacher.  He sits at the bedside of his dying brother who is hanging on to life by watching the World Series.  Then Finn gets a phone call demanding that he drive halfway across the country because something has happened to his mentally ill ex-girlfriend, Lily.  He immediately abandons his brother and jumps in the car.  It turns out that Lily has finally accomplished the suicide she has always wished for. However, her wish for her body to be given to the Body Farm, the forensic anthropology site at the University of Tennessee, was not fulfilled.  Finn is completely enthralled with Lily--dead or alive, it seems, and she’s actually in some kind of undead state--maybe.  Anyway, why is Finn with the dead(?) ex-girlfriend who didn’t want to live and not with the brother who does?  Also, how does Finn do such a massive amount of driving on almost no sleep?

CITY ON FIRE by Don Winslow

In a novel about the Rhode Island mob in the 1980s (who knew there was such a thing?), I don’t mind wise guy grammar in the dialog, but the author applies it inconsistently in the third-person narrative as well.  For example, on page 3, we have “what he doesn’t know,” but then on page 5, there’s “He don’t have it in him to cheat.  She don’t mind he looks at other women… .”  I found these choices disconcerting, but this novel still works, if you don’t mind a high body count.  A turf war develops between the Irish mob and the Italian mob, after a long period of uneasy détente.  Marty Ryan’s alcoholism has forced him to yield his power position on the Irish side to John Murphy.  Marty’s son Danny, the protagonist here, is married to John Murphy’s daughter but has never earned a seat at the table.  With a baby on the way, Danny is tempted to take the Feds’ offer to rat out the mob on both sides and get out.  The question is which “family” deserves his loyalty, given that he thinks of Pat Murphy as more of a brother than a brother-in-law.  Unfortunately, Pat’s brother Liam has a propensity for igniting powder kegs.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

A matchmaker pairs a twelve-year-old girl with a 40-year-old widower in southern India in 1900.  The groom sees his bride for the first time at the wedding and balks at marrying a child, but the wedding takes place anyway.  Not consummated for years, the marriage actually works out well, but the bride learns that she has married into a family in which someone in every past generation drowns.  We follow this family for three generations through thick and thin.  Other characters have their own story, including two surgeons, one of whom is Scottish, but everyone has ties to the family of our original couple.  There is enough tragedy here—children dying in unusual ways, a lover dying in a fire, a mother abandoning her child, a man becoming an opium addict—to sink this book into a melodramatic tearjerker, but instead it always manages to lift the reader up into a world where sunny horizons await.  For example, a retreat for lepers becomes a self-sufficient community where everyone pitches in.  Of course, a novel that covers this much ground is going to be long, and this one is exceptionally so.  The tragedies keep the plot moving forward, but they are merely setbacks to lives that refuse to stay mournful indefinitely.

THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong

Hai is a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American on the brink of suicide when an elderly Lithuanian immigrant, Grazina, talks him out of jumping from a bridge.  Ultimately, Hai saves her as well, by moving in with her and becoming her de facto caretaker.  Grazina is still having flashbacks of Russians and Nazis, and Hai plays along during these episodes to calm her down, calling himself Sgt. Pepper.  Hai still has a drug problem after rehab and has convinced his mother that he is in medical school.  In reality he is working a minimum wage job at HomeMarket, whose menu sounds a lot like the now almost defunct Boston Market.  The misfit employees of HomeMarket, including Hai’s cousin whose mother is incarcerated, become Hai’s family, along with Grazina.  The characters in this novel are well-developed, colorful and poignant, as all are struggling with an assortment of problems—mental, physical, financial, you name it.  However, the tone never descends into melancholy.  The writing is mostly good but is occasionally overdone and pretentious, and the pace is glacial.  The opening chapter in particular is purely descriptive of the setting, and we have to make it to Chapter 2 to get to the aborted suicide.  A road trip near the end has the potential to provide a spark but doesn’t really deliver. 

DEATH AT THE SIGN OF THE ROOK by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, private investigator, is back, along with the author’s usual clever dialog.  His conversation partner here is Reggie, a cop who views Brodie as sort of a know-it-all father figure.  However, the book gets off to a rather slow start, except for the chapter about Simon Cate, the vicar.  His calling to the ministry is somewhat in doubt, and now he makes an effort not to disclose his atheism to his meager congregation.  Anyway, back to the crime-solving duo, Reggie and Jackson, who are each investigating an art theft, and their two heists may be related, as the housekeeper is the prime suspect in both cases.  Several other characters wander into the plot, which culminates in a murder mystery weekend at the estate from which one of the paintings was stolen.  A series of madcap misadventures, some caused by a blizzard, lands most of the characters at the castle as the audience for the mystery performance.  Yes, this is somewhat Agatha Christie-like and somewhat entertaining but totally outside the realm of believability, what with the dead nanny’s body in the pantry, bricks being thrown, and fireplace pokers being wielded as weapons.  Jackson has a reputation, with Reggie at least, for differentiating between what is legal and what is just, and he demonstrates that distinction quite clearly here.