The Night Bell, Inger Ash Wolfe

Brilliantly written: the type of mystery where there's so much going on that, at the end, you have to sit around, thinking, to figure out how all of the strands connect and resolve. Smart, with biting humor, "The Night Bell" involves a cold case series of murders from fifty years before, and the book zigzags between 2007 and 1957, involving the detective's own past. There's also her mother, a firecracker of an old lady, who is having periods of dementia in which past and present flow together, which was also brilliant. I can't recommend highly enough - I'm afraid to say more because I don't want to spoil anything in the book!

I stumbled across "The Night Bell" because I've been reading cold case mysteries, but the first book of the Detective Hazel Micallef series (which I instantly requested from the library), is "The Calling."

For some reason, the following was one of my favorite bits from "The Night Bell" (although the prologue is nothing short of phenomenal). Hazel, as a local detective, has a combative relationship with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has swooped in and taken over one of her cases, effectively blocking her investigation on everything else. She's sitting in the command trailer with the CO, Superintendent Martin Scott:

     "God. I've always found you guys inscrutable, you know?"
     "Us guys? We are also women and dogs and horses."
     "Sometimes I wonder if you're just pretending in those shiny uniforms of yours."
     He looked at her steadily for a long count. It made her feel she shouldn't blink. "I assure you," he said, "we are not pretending."
     She rose and pushed her chair away. Its feet bumped awkwardly backward over the red, tight-pile carpet. She reached out, a little stiffly she though, to shake his hand.
     "It's true you have to watch out for the horses," he said to her at the exit. "They are both inscrutable and mischievous. Come back if you like. Command is lonesome." 

The Restless Sleep, Stacy Horn

Non-fiction. Horn's account from inside the NYPD Cold Case Squad, published in 2005. Four cases are covered in-depth, with side-ventures into Property, DNA, the prison system, finances and internal politics, the history of the squad, etc., as well as the personality of the detectives and leadership. It's fascinating and largely depressing - well, I think you would have to be someone able to see the glass '1/4 full' - at least there is a squad, and committed detectives, out there, but the task is Sisyphean and desperately underfunded.

'Success,' when it comes, takes months, years, and is by no means guaranteed. Not all of the cases Horn chooses get resolved. Worse, one really grasps how illusory and deceptive the concept of 'closure' is: If the detective is lucky enough to solve the case the perpetrator may or may not be already dead, or in prison for another crime, or the ADA may simply have no interest in prosecuting an old, possibly shaky, case. If the perpetrator is prosecuted, he or she may not end up in prison, or end up serving a ridiculously short time. Even when 'justice' is served, the families realize - after an initial euphoria - that nothing essential has changed: their loved one is still just as gone, the tragedy that has warped their lives continues.

Horn has a keen sense of the permanent, destructive tragedy of murder that gives the book tremendous poignancy, an emotion many of the detectives themselves are not able to openly feel because it would cripple their functionality. They roll their eyes at the idea of themselves as heroes - most of the job involves endless paperwork and hours on the phone, interviews and re-interviews - but in some cases they do remove a previously unknown killer from the streets, and sometimes the heroism is just that someone cares enough to make an effort on behalf of a victim everyone else seems willing to forget.

One of the unexpected things I got from reading this was a sense of the peripheral damage of 9/11, how much of a wrecking ball it was because everything else got put on hold, or lost, while they dealt with the immediate problems of a mass casualty event. It also skewed funds and attention toward counter-terrorism, which means less manpower and resources for all the other departments in this zero sum situation.

One Damned Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor

The title comes from Arnold Toynbee's famous quote "History is just one damned thing after another." A self-described blend of "history, adventure, comedy, romance, tragedy, and anything else the author could think of," this is the first book in the Chronicles of St. Mary's series involving a group of eccentric Brit time-travelling historians - if you liked (or wanted to like) the TV series "Timeless," this is all that and miles better. It is hilariously funny, although there are moments of tragedy as well, but you read it for the comedy. Taylor hooked me in the first chapter when she described the time travelling device:

"The tiny space smelled of stale people, cabbage, chemicals, hot electrics, and damp carpet, with an underlying whiff from the toilet. I would discover that all pods smelt the same and that historians joke that techies take the smell then build the pods around it."

I had downloaded the second book in the series before I finished reading the first because I knew I just wanted to keep going. You either like the St. Mary's crowd or you don't, but they reminded me of Pink's lyrics:

So raise your glass if you are wrong,
In all the right ways,
All my underdogs,
We will never be never be, anything but loud
And nitty gritty, dirty little freaks

They all do seem to be in one non-stop, zany house party that occasionally spills over into history in which anything goes.

My one complaint, and I feel a bit guilty making an issue of it, but it grates on me, is that these are not, truly, historians - I mean in the sense that they don't really care about history. History is the backdrop against which the story plays out, but it is window dressing, in a way, for example, that Connie Willis' "Blackout" never is, and the characters have a shocking lack of interest or reverence for anything in it. If you can overlook that, it's just a fun book.

     Peterson rushed past. "Come on, Max! Swans in the library!"
     "What? How?"
     "Who cares?" Good point.
     In the distance, I could hear shouting. And screaming. Familiar sounds. St. Mary's thundered past on their way to make a crisis considerably worse.
     It was nice to be home.

The Shadow Child, Joseph A. Citro

This gothic mystery started slow, grew on me in the middle, and then went in a direction I didn't care for. Citro specializes in Vermont/New England and tall tales involving horror and the supernatural, both in his fiction and non-fiction.

I'm not, generally speaking, into horror. I prefer justice. But what I found most interesting was a statement in his bio at the end in which he describes his early fascination, growing up, with the woods and mountains of Vermont as both rustic comfort and the Unknown, so there's this sort of mesmerizing blend throughout of L.L. Bean Catalog and creepy horror. You get the feeling of people living on the edge of something amoral or downright evil: something out of the control of humanity.

The Fifth Queen, Ford Madox Ford

I bogged in "The Benefactor" (FMF's chronologically previous work) and skipped ahead to "Fifth Queen," hoping for the Tudor version of Tietjens. Ford's Henry VIII does bear a physical resemblance (heavy, slow-moving, with immense personal dignity and a sense of tragic disillusionment), but misses Teitjens' facile brilliance and principled integrity.

The real focus of the book is Katharine Howard (FMF's spelling of her name), the future fifth wife of the king. It is a highly romanticized view of her, which has more in common with Valentine Wannop in "Parade's End" than actual history, but she's a spunky, passionate, interesting character to follow. For Ford, being able to correct mistakes in Latin on the fly is one of a woman's sexiest qualities!

Where the book succeeds is in creating an atmosphere of dread and Machiavellian intrigue. It's also worth reading for the unique (in my experience) style and language - 1540 mediated through 1905 (roughly). Where else are you likely to run across the word "goosetherumfoodle" in a line of dialogue? There are fascinating, tricky characters, like Lady Mary (the future Queen Mary), and a lady in waiting nicknamed "The Magpie," or the evil but persuasive Throckmorton, and the king himself, who moves through this world with ultimate power and yet seems hopeless thwarted and heart-sick.

One of the things Ford does very well is indirection: a character will demand an answer to a question and not receive it for pages, or in such an ambiguous fashion it creates more questions. It makes the scenes and exchanges of dialogue more intense, but does add to the meandering quality of the book - it's rarely clear to me what Ford's characters want or where the plot is headed. I adore the (brilliant) winding, chronologically nonlinear zig-zag of "Parade's End," but in this novel where the narrative is straight-forward the wandering bothered me.

But one wades through Ford's archaic language and seemingly-directionless plot because there are moments of such psychological astuteness.

"Being young, she felt that God and the saints alike fought on her side."

And in a line that feels especially resonant in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo:
"Nevertheless, she made no comment. For she knew that it is the nature of men calmly to ask hateful sacrifices of women. But her throat ached with rage."

There is a stunning conversation between Throckmorton and Katharine in which he accuses her of looking at the world as black and white where it is grey - this is not the days of Plutarch that she venerates in which right and wrong seem so clearly delineated - and then he suggests that even this is a mistaken impression - the world has always been grey and no man, or woman, is completely good or evil.

Beyond Physicalism, Edward F. Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Paul Marshall (Eds.)

Beyond Physicalism is the companion book that follows Irreducible Mind. Both are massive collections of jargon-heavy, scholarly essays that map out the fringes of the science and philosophy of mind and then survey various attempts to provide the outlines of a Grand Unified Theory for it.

Kelly writes in the opening chapter: "Our a priori commitment to conventional physicalist accounts of the mind has rendered us systematically incapable of dealing adequately with the mind's most central properties. We need to rethink that commitment." He draws comparisons with the field of classical physics, which had to be substantially rethought to make room for the more fundamental realities of quantum mechanics.

One of the things I like very much about these essays is that they show that the word 'science' describes a method, not a subject. These are intellectually serious people grappling with outlying data rather than dismissing it as 'impossible' and therefore not worth study.

The fringes interest me. I also find, from what previously I've read, physicalist accounts (perhaps I should say 'attempts to account') for consciousness deeply unconvincing. Personally, I lean toward what Beyond Physicalism describes as panentheism, and a view expressed, rather poetically, by Williams James in his last published essay:

. . . we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences . . .

• "Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher' in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589