AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES by Alice McDermott

Sometimes I like books with good characters but scant plot, and sometimes I don’t.  In this case, I enjoyed the book for its lyrical writing and vivid sense of place.  Three children—Margaret, Bobby, and Maryanne—accompany their mother, Lucy, twice a week to visit her three unmarried sisters and her stepmother, Momma.  Momma raised all four of her sister’s girls and married her sister’s husband after her sister died in childbirth.  The author treats Lucy’s three children as sort of a collective entity that is observing and listening to the interactions among the adult women, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their father to rescue them.  Despite the languid pace of this novel, I was never bored and chose just to savor every word.  The tragedies of the past haunt this family, but their story is not really morbid.  Then we have the occasional anecdote, such as the story of Momma arriving in the U.S. from Ireland literally penniless because she spent all of her money on chocolate during the voyage.  My only problem with this book is that sometimes I had to remind myself which generation was which, as the author fuses the past with the present at times, and we even get a brief glimpse of the future in which the three children are adults.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

I found this book to be absorbing at times and aggravating at times.  The Barnes family is a fairly affluent family until they fall on hard times.  Then family secrets start to emerge, and each family member struggles with a different problem that they, for whatever reason, refuse to share with the very people who could help them.  Dickie, the father/husband, is running his father’s car dealership, and some would say he is running it into the ground, as customers discover that someone in his shop is stealing their catalytic converters.  Cass, the daughter, plans to attend Trinity College but doesn’t act like it with her excessive drinking.  PJ, the son, is being bullied and shaken down for money he doesn’t have.  Finally, we have Imelda, the beautiful wife/mother, who comes from poverty and an abusive father.  Each family member’s story is heartbreaking in its own way, and Imelda’s rather lengthy story just about drove me crazy, since it has zero punctuation marks.  These are just not the kind of people I would normally want to spend 600+ pages with, as they felt a little too real, and not in a good way.  However, except for Imelda’s sections, which actually I finally became more or less accustomed to, this book is very readable, although it is, I think, overly and unnecessarily long.  The author keeps the reader guessing about a lot of things, and that uncertainty propels the individual storylines ultimately toward a convergence.  This was not a book that I was eager to get back to, but it was a book that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

MOTHER DOLL by Katya Apekina

I’m not sure if this book has zero plot or two plots.  If it’s two plots, neither is to my liking.  One involves Zhenia, a young rudderless woman, and the other involves her great-grandmother, Irina, who is deceased.  Irina tells her story to Zhenia via a medium, and no one seems to question how ludicrous this is.  Also, the author does not clearly delineate the two stories, except that Zhenia’s is third-person and Irina’s is first-person.  I had to remind myself constantly that the “I” was Irina.  Basically, Irina is trying to atone for leaving her daughter Vera, Zhenia’s beloved grandmother, in a Russian orphanage.  Neither Zhenia’s nor Irina’s story, nor Vera’s for that matter, held my interest.  By far the most unusual story is that of Paul, the medium, but he doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as the women.  Zhenia’s mother Marina, a biologist, seems the most grounded, but she gets short shrift as well, and human interaction is not her strong suit.  I think Irina’s history as a Russian revolutionary definitely has the potential to keep the reader engaged, but it just fell flat for me, and her betrayal of a beloved teacher left me scratching my head.  Rasputin’s cameo grabbed my attention during his brief appearance in the novel, but it wasn’t nearly enough to salvage it for me, and I would have appreciated a little more background regarding this period in Russian history.

SMALL MERCIES by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat is a feisty, white “Southie broad,” to use her words, in 1974.  She has lived her entire life in the projects of South Boston, which now face the eruption of a racially-motivated conflict stemming from a judge’s order to bus white students to a predominantly Black school.  Then Mary Pat’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules, goes missing on the same night that a 20-year-old Black man is found dead in a subway station near where Jules was last seen.  Mary Pat has already lost her first husband to organized crime and her son to drugs, and Jules’s disappearance is the last straw.  She goes on the warpath, seeking out anyone who might have information on Jules’s whereabouts and becoming a volatile vigilante in the process.  She makes a series of shocking discoveries about her neighbors and about Jules but also about herself and how she has fomented hate and bigotry in her own daughter.  This is a gritty, visceral, violent tale of vengeance, but the unabashed hostile racism is what makes it hard to digest at times.  Dennis Lehane, I do hope this is not your last novel, because it is one of your best.  It is full of really striking observations, and there are a few moments that lighten up the dark nature of this book.  On page 234, we have this reflection from a cop: “Damn, Bobby thinks, if I’d met Mary Pat five years ago and she worked the street like this?  I’d have made lieutenant by now.”  No doubt.

SINCE WE FELL by Dennis Lehane

Rachel is a TV journalist who wants to find out who her father is.  Her mother has died and has always refused to divulge his identity.  Then Rachel’s career and her marriage take a nosedive after she has an on-air panic attack in Haiti.  We know from the prologue that Rachel will shoot her husband but apparently not her first husband.  Her second husband is Brian, a former private detective whom Rachel had tried to hire to find her father.  After the Haiti fiasco, Rachel becomes increasingly reclusive and rarely ventures outside her home, but Brian encourages her to face her fears.  Except for the violent prologue, we would wonder if Lehane has moved from thrillers to character studies, and with a rare female protagonist to boot.  Then Rachel discovers that Brian may be leading a double life, and the real action begins, in more or less typical Lehane fashion, with lots of twists and turns.  One reviewer suggested that the author wrote this book with a movie deal in mind, but I can’t complain.  I will want to see the movie, too.

MOONLIGHT MILE by Dennis Lehane

This novel may lack some of Lehane’s usual bite, but, hey, it’s the last of the Angela Gennaro/Patrick Kenzie novels, and I’m willing to cut the author some slack.  Angie and Patrick are now married with a four-year-old daughter, when the girl from Gone, Baby, Gone reenters the picture, or not, as she has actually gone missing again more than a decade later.  Amanda McCready is now sixteen, sharp as a tack, and apparently does not suffer fools gladly, including her incompetent mother.  Patrick wants to make amends for having returned her to said mother in the first place and now must determine whether she has been kidnapped again or has simply taken off of her own accord.  The latter seems unlikely, since she needs to finish school in order to qualify for admission to an Ivy League university.  The real start of this novel is Amanda herself, absent or present, who overshadows Patrick and Angie with her guile and ability to bend others to her will.  Patrick and Angie are no slouches, but Patrick unwittingly challenges Russian Mafiosi, who, of course, threaten harm to his daughter.  Where is my favorite Lehane character—Patrick’s very capable sidekick, Bubba--in all this?  He takes a backseat as babysitter, and I did not like him in that role at all, even if he is the one person who can do the job effectively.  Anyway, I will miss our two intrepid investigators.

PRAYERS FOR RAIN by Dennis Lehane

Sometimes I just want to curl up with nothing but Dennis Lehane novels, especially the ones featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.  Patrick is the narrator, and, along with his daunting pal Bubba, deters a stalker from continuing to bother Karen Nichols.  Six months later Karen has done a swan dive from the top of a tall building, and Patrick is determined to find out why.  She seems to have run into a huge spate of very bad luck, including the death of her fiancé.  Although Patrick and Angie have gone their separate ways, Angie soon becomes involved in the case, and our two favorite gumshoes are casting looks of longing at one another—again.  I just can’t get enough of these characters, and, although the twisty plot is front and center, their relationship and their sparkling banter is enough to keep me turning the pages.  And let’s not forget Bubba, who can’t resist an opportunity to blow things up and make the bad guys wish they’d never been born.  When he’s involved in a conversation, he gets most of the funniest lines.  The adversary in this novel is an elusive baddie whose mission seems to be finding his target’s weaknesses and exploiting those until his victim basically self-destructs.  His true motive, however, remains a mystery until the very end.