Another Thing to Fall, Beedle the Bard, Black Ships

I'm a little behind again, so I'm going to blitz through a few books and get caught up.

Laura Lippman's Another Thing To Fall is the latest featuring her series character, PI Tess Monaghan. Tess Monaghan doesn't have a gimmick, unless living in Baltimore counts as a gimmick, which maybe it does. She straddles the line between cozy-mystery and thriller-mystery. If you like mysteries and haven't read Lippman, give her a try--but start anywhere else. This one wasn't awful, I guess, but partway in--shortly after the murder, if I remember correctly--I put it down, and I read four other books before I picked it back up and finished it.

I think the main problem is that the characters--apart from Tess and the rest of the series' recurring characters--were just so damn unlikeable. The basic setup is that Tess blunders into the set of a TV show that's being shot in Baltimore, and somehow ends up being hired as a bodyguard/minder for the show's leading lady, a stupid spoiled whore after the fashion of Paris Hilton. (Spoiler: It's revealed late in the book that she's consciously acting the part of a stupid spoiled whore for the publicity, but her actual personality isn't any more likeable.) She doesn't want the job, but takes it anyway, for reasons that aren't developed to my satisfaction, and spends most of the book reflecting on how unpleasant the TV people are to be around. Lippman's point seems to be that TV shows are like laws and sausages--if you want to enjoy them, avoid seeing them made. But if the whole point is that the movie/TV business is sordid and unpleasant, why write a whole novel revolving around that point? I'm glad I got this one from the library, because I can't imagine wanting to re-read it. But it did kind of put me in the mood to re-read one of hers that doesn't suck--probably In a Strange City, which was the first of hers I read.

Next up, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. If you follow Harry Potter, you know that this is JKR's little book of wizarding fairy tales; if you don't, you don't care. It's a quick read, with five short stories of conventional children's-story length, and short commentaries by Albus Dumbledore. I wondered before reading this if it might be wizarding re-takes of traditional fairy tales, but as far as I can tell, these are original stories. What's surprising about them is how much they feel like real fairy tales--the un-Disneyfied versions. The Amazon reviews seem to reflect that--readers aren't sure who is supposed to be the indended audience for these stories. They're short, with simple storylines and minimally-developed characters, which suggests they're for small children, but they're kind of grim and weird. But if you know your literary history, you know that fairy tales weren't intended for children to begin with.

Finally, The Black Ship is the latest of Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple books. The books are set in a reasonably historically accurate version of the period immediately after the Great War, where Daisy is a magazine writer and the wife of a Scotland Yard detective (who she met in the first book of the series and married, oh, eight or ten books in). In the previous book, Daisy had twins, but she has a nurse and a nursery-maid and a housekeeper, so her children aren't afflicted with such a terrible case of satchel-baby-itis as some others I can name. She just pops up to the nursery to visit them when she feels like it, and when she has some detecting to do, they remain safely offscreen. (The family can afford all this on a policeman's salary because Daisy not only makes some money with her writing, but is the daughter of a Viscount, and her husband recently came into an inheritance of his own.) Anyway, the book was interesting enough. For some reason, Dunn chose to pretty much give away the solution to the mystery at the very beginning, but there you go.

Next time, I'll be writing about Larklight and its sequels by Phillip Reeve, which I'm enjoying greatly so far.