BookOpinion

Fanatics of mystery books will love Crippen & Landru, publishers of “Lost Classics” — a line of titles that resurrects previously forgotten and little-known mystery writers.

“We’re interested almost entirely in whether the stories deserve to be put in book form,” says co-founder Douglas Greene in a Publisher’s Weekly interview, “and only secondarily whether the author has ‘name recognition.’ We just signed a contract for a book by Vincent Cornier, to be edited by Mike Ashley. Cornier has been almost completely forgotten, but his tales about Barnabas Hildreth, written mostly in the 1930s, are bizarre and challenging. The best may be the story about a bullet fired 250 years ago that almost kills a modern victim.”

Compiling and digging up these collections of mysteries takes work.

“We are locating these works by contacting the authors’ heirs, major collectors, and archives of crumbling pulp, digest, and slick magazines,’ write the publishers. “The first printing of each book will be small — perhaps 400-500 copies, divided between clothbound copies in dustjacket, and trade softcover.”

The Grandfather Rastin Mysteries by Lloyd Biggle Jr. is the 23rd book in the line and is scheduled for release soon.

Publisher’s Weely writes that the collection of 14 Biggle mysteries presents “tales of smalltown detection from the pen of prolific science fiction author Biggle (1923–2002). As with his better known SF works, Biggle’s stories of life in Borgville, a fictional Michigan community, emphasize vibrant characterization and gentle good humor. The title character, an adroit, insightful and irascible old man, delights in contradicting the local sheriff and in solving mysteries, ranging from burglary to murder. These puzzles, with their affectionate and intelligent portrayal of smalltown life, will remind mystery buffs of Ed Hoch’s superb Sam Hawthorne impossible crime stories.”

Readers can order many of the Lost Classics books at Amazon or from the Crippen & Landau website.

If you missed the L.A. Times Festival of Books, you can catch the podcasts from a few of the sessions: 

Robert Crais and Harlan Coben in Conversation

• Click here to listen.

Jane Smiley received a Pulitzer Prize for “A Thousand Acres” amd the 2006 PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for literature. Her new novel is “Ten Days in the Hills.”

• Click here to listen.

“Talk Talk” is the most recent book by T.C. Boyle, who has written 19 works of fiction, including “After the Plague,” “Drop City,” “The Inner Circle” and “Tooth and Claw.”

• Click here to listen.

Walter Mosley, author of 28 books, spoke with Karen Grigsby Bates about his career in fiction on Sunday, April 29.

• Click here to listen.

Nonfiction: The Ties That Bind

• Click here to listen.

Joseph Wambaugh and James Ellroy in Conversation

• Click here to listen.

Serial murders in the border town of Juarez, Mexico, are the topic of this true story written by reporter Teresa Rodriguez. In her book, The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border which was released this March, she details the continuing horrors that occur with stunning frequency.

More than 400 women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez in the past 12 years. Despite a number of arrests over the years, the murders continue — the killers growing bolder.

“You’ve got police ineptitude, you’ve got an understaffed police department, some authorities who may be corrupt or complicit in this crimes,” Rodriguez said in an NPR interview. “I think, unfortunately, as long as these victims are poor, it’s obvious there is like a silent cycle of discrimination. There is an activist who helped me through the process who said, ‘You know, Theresa, it is a disgrace to be a women in Ciudad Juarez, but it is a crime to be a poor woman.’”

Both the numbers and the brutality of the crimes is shocking. “This story is more horrifying than a Stephen King novel, has more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie plot, and has a higher body count than any James Bond flick — and it is all true,” writes journalist and author Edna Buchanan. “You will never forget The Daughters of Juárez, which is exactly what the authors intend and accomplish brilliantly. This book must be a beacon, a catalyst for justice, that rare commodity so nonexistent in Juárez. The authors bring to life the human faces, shattered families, and lost dreams of those who must not be forgotten.”

Listen to the NPR Podcast or read the first chapter of The Daughters of Juarez below:

Chapter One: A Corpse in the Sand

I don’t feel safe because once I step out on the street, I don’t know if the second step I take will be my last.

— Guillermina González, victim’s sister

Ramona Morales hurried from her small concrete house in Juárez, Mexico, just after 8:30 P.M. on July 11, 1995. She was determined to be at the bus stop when her daughter, Silvia, arrived after a long day of school and work.

In the last thirty-six months, there had been a series of brutal sexual attacks against young women in and around the Mexican border city, all of them fatal. Ramona wanted to make sure her teenage daughter didn’t become the next victim.

She had noticed short stories about the killings in the newspaper. Many of the victims had disappeared on their way to or from work, often in broad daylight; their lifeless remains were found weeks, sometimes months later, in the vast scrublands that rim the industrialized border city. What the newspapers hadn’t reported would have frightened her even more. The victims bodies exhibited signs of rape, mutilation, and torture. Some had been bound with their own shoelaces. Others were savagely disfigured. One young girl endured such cruelty that an autopsy revealed she had suffered multiple strokes before her assailant finally choked the life from her.

The victims were young, pretty, and petite, with flowing dark hair and full lips. All had been snatched from the downtown area, while waiting for a bus or shopping in stores. An alarming number were abducted en route to their jobs at the assembly plants, known locally as maquiladoras, that made parts and appliances for export.

The once unremarkable border town was fast becoming the fourth-largest city in Mexico with the opening of hundreds of these export factories. Locked behind towering gates and manned security booths, these contemporary assembly plants, many with neatly tended greenery and lush lawns, seemed a stark contrast to the prickly cacti and blowing tumbleweed indigenous to the arid region. Eighty percent of the factories were American-owned and produced goods for major U.S. corporations including Lear, Amway, TDK, Honeywell, General Electric, 3M, DuPont, and Kenwood. They had been built in response to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by the United States and Mexico in 1993.

The plants, which looked just like the ones constructed by those same companies north of the border, were drawing tens of thousands of laborers from across Mexico each year with the promise of work. The constant influx of people was rapidly creating a booming metropolis. Indeed, the city of Juárez was growing so fast that it was nearly impossible to map.

The city’s roadways were a hodgepodge of paved and unpaved streets, some marked, others anonymous sandy paths that led to the shantytowns and squatters’ villages continually springing up on the outskirts of town. When viewed from north of the border, Juárez appeared a vibrant and major metropolis, but on closer inspection the city seemed to be El Paso’s poor, depressed relative, more reminiscent of a third world country.

The one- and two-story buildings crowding the narrow streets just off the Santa Fe Street Bridge from El Paso were dilapidated, their pastel colors dulled by a layer of brown dust from the sandstorms and car fumes. There were no emissions laws in Mexico, and pollution continued to be a problem.

In addition to car exhaust, road debris was a major concern in the city. Ramshackle tire shops — little more than wooden huts — dotted almost every corner, offering motorists a quick fix for the innumerable blowouts caused by such debris. American-built cars and trucks from the seventies and eighties dominated the landscape, many of them looking like they’d been resurrected from junkyards.

After dark, loud music blared from the nightclubs and cantinas that lined the streets of the red-light district, frequented by local street gangs, drug traffickers, and those who wanted to dance and party. Bars stayed open all night on Mariscal and Ugarte Streets, magnets for those eager to cross the border and indulge under the veil of anonymity.

Driven by a desire to maximize profits, the city’s factories also operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Even some of the schools held two sessions each day to accommodate the ever-growing student population.

Getting a job on one of the hundreds of assembly lines meant a chance at a better life for the impoverished and often untrained laborers flooding into the Juárez area from throughout the region. Construction and forestry jobs had all but dried up in other parts of the country. Juárez was one of the few places in Mexico that was experiencing a growth in the job market.

The truth, in fact, was that there were plenty of employment opportunities in the factories of Juárez — so many that entire families could expect to find work there in a fairly short period of time. Girls in their early to mid teens were especially sought after because…

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Charles Rappleye has won the George Washington Book Prize, which awards $50,000 for the most important new book about the era during the founding of America. His book, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, is about John and Moses Brown. They were brothers and partners in business, politics, and the founding of Brown University, yet they passionately opposed one another on one of the most divisive issues of the day—the slave trade.

“I wanted to do justice to a wonderful story and refresh our understanding of the dilemma posed by slavery in the early days of the Republic,” Rappleye said. “It’s very gratifying to think that, on the strength of this award, that story might reach a wider audience.”

In their report on the winning entry, the jurors wrote that “Rappleye, a journalist, spotted the ideological polarity represented by Moses and John Brown and turned the greatest contradiction in the Revolutionary period into the history of two men: one a Baptist-turned-Quaker opponent of slavery and the other a passionate revolutionary who was a major actor in the slave trade. Rappleye’s book shows how this contradiction was not a conflict between North and South but a battle waged in the North, within a state thought to be one of the most independent and liberal of any in the Union, and in fact within one family.”

Created in 2005, the George Washington Book Prize was awarded in its inaugural year to Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton and last year to Stacy Schiff for A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.

The Washington Post wrote about the award for Sons of Providence:

…The book, which sheds light on how controversial slavery was in this country long before the Civil War, covers 100 years, from the birth in 1736 of John Brown, a robber baron who ran slave ships from Providence, R.I., to the 1836 death of Moses, the younger brother, who with slave blood on his hands became an abolitionist.

“The book opens with the family’s first venture in the trade, staged by patriarch James Brown the year John was born,” the introduction to the book says. “Thirty years later, the brothers establish a personal stake in the trade when they stage their own voyage to Africa. It results in a human and financial disaster: after a journey attended by disease and shipboard rebellion, more than half the slaves perish, an ordeal illuminated by detailed notes from the captain’s log.”

It’s after this experience that the brothers take their separate paths on the issue.

“It’s a fascinating story,” Rappleye said in an interview from the grounds of Mount Vernon, where he was awarded the prize at a black-tie dinner yesterday.”You have two brothers who share the same background and end up on the opposite sides of the slavery issue during the American Revolution. I was interested in what drove them apart and what kept them together despite the dispute on slavery.”…

…Rappleye, 51, who lives in Los Angeles, said he began working on the book about three years ago after he lost his job as a journalist at the LA Weekly, where he was an editor and a staff writer. “I was fired by the LA Weekly when a new regime at the paper came in,” he said. “They cleaned house and I went out the door.” He had wanted to write about the Brown brothers for some time and the firing gave him time…

…The other finalists for the prize were Catherine Allgor for “A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation” and Francois Furstenberg for “In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation.”

Read the Full Post Article
Read the AP Article

Michael Connelly’s newest book, The Overlook, hit bookstores this week. This is Connelly’s 13th Harry Bosch novel. The novel began as a 16-part serial for the New York Times.

“Despite being expanded somewhat for book publication,” Booklist writes, “the story’s roots as a plot-driven serial remain visible: readers familiar with Connelly’s celebrated Harry Bosch series–And what hard-boiled fiction fan isn’t?–will notice less character development and less psychological texture here than in any of the full-length Bosch novels, but that isn’t to say the story doesn’t pack a wallop… Unlike other Bosch novels, which effortlessly mix action with the hero’s inner struggles, this one unfolds like an episode of 24, pounding its way relentlessly to a surprising conclusion. Treat The Overlook like a tasty hors d’oeuvre: down it in one quick gulp, and look forward to the next Bosch entree.”

Connelly said writing The Overlook in the serialized form was tricky since he had a word limit each week for the Times. With the book version he was able to pace it the way he wanted. He also appreciated being able to look at it again with a fresh eye.

“I got a chance to revisit a story about eight months after it was supposedly finished,” Connelly said in an Amazon interview. “In the publishing world today it is rare that you get a chance to finish a story and then sort of mull it over and think about what you would add or change.”

An Excerpt From Chapter One of The Overlook:

The call came at midnight. Harry Bosch was awake and sitting in the living room in the dark. He liked to think that he was doing this because it allowed him to hear the saxophone better. By masking one of the senses he accentuated another.
But deep down he knew the truth. He was waiting.
The call was from Larry Gandle, his supervisor in Homicide Special. It was Bosch’s first call out in the new job. And it was what he had been waiting for.
“Harry, you up?”
“I’m up.”
“Who’s that you got playing?”
“Frank Morgan, live at the Jazz Standard in New York. That’s George Cables you’re hearing now on piano.”
“Sounds like All Blues.”
“You nailed it.”
“Good stuff. I hate to take you away from it.”
Bosch used the remote to turn the music off.
“What’s the call, Lieutenant?”
“Hollywood wants you and Iggy to come out and take over a case. They’ve already caught three today and can’t handle a fourth. This one also looks like it might become a hobby. It looks like an execution.”
The Los Angeles Police Department had seventeen geographic divisions, each with its own station and detective bureau, including a homicide squad. But the divisional squads were the first line and couldn’t get bogged down on long-running cases. Whenever a murder came with any sort of political, celebrity or media attachment, it was usually shuttled down to Homicide Special, which operated out of the Robbery-Homicide Division in Parker Center. Any case that appeared to be particularly difficult and time consuming—that would invariably stay active like a hobby—would also be an immediate candidate for Homicide Special. This was one of those.
“Where is it?” Bosch asked.
“Up on that overlook above the Mulholland Dam. You know the place?”
“Yeah, I’ve been up there.”…

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BOOKOPINION REVIEW: To the vast majority of fashionable Victorian-era London society, Louisa Bryce would be considered a dull, forgettable spinster. However, Louisa hides not only a deeply scarred past, but a secret career as an investigative reporter for a popular tabloid-esque newspaper.

In Amanda Quick’s “The River Knows,” Louisa’s most recent investigation leads her into the arms of a wealthy gentleman, Anthony Stallbridge. Anthony is on a quest to discover whether or not his fiance was the victim of suicide or something more sinister. As it turns out, their investigations center around the same man, Elwin Hastings, a member of society who makes his money financing brothels and cheating the lower classes out of their savings.

At first glance, the plot and characters seem intriguing, but I found myself less interested in “The River Knows” as in Quick’s past works. I would love to have seen more of Anthony Stallbridge’s family, they were a quirky, exciting bunch. In fact, most of the characters seemed to fall short of what could have been. Everything was here for a terrific read, but it just never seemed to grab my attention. The romance, at least on Anthony’s side, seemed kind of forced, and I miss the wit and vivacity so present in other Amanda Quick books.

A side note to those uninitiated, Amanda Quick is a pseudonym for Jayne Ann Krentz. Krentz writes popular contemporary romance/thrillers under her own name and historical romance under the guise of Amanda Quick. I’ve read the entire Amanda Quick collection, and highly recommend the earlier works, such as “Deception“, “Scandal” and “Affair“. “The River Knows” is a good book, and I intend to give it another chance, but, alas, I am still waiting for Quick to pen another truly great romance.

– Jane Leisteiner

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Tana French appears to be making a successful debut as a novelist with her first book, In the Woods. The thriller was just released last week and is getting strong reviews. It has cracked Amazon’s top 100 sellers.

French worked on an archaeological dig around a castle when she was inspired to write this Irish police procedural. Next to the castle were some woods. “While I’m working away up to my eyes the mud,” French said in a video interview below, “I am thinking what would happen if three kids ran into those woods to play and only one ever came out, and he had no memory of what happened.”

The N.Y. Times writes:

…The way French tells it, the history of Knocknaree will never be whole until the dual mysteries of Katy’s death and the disappearance of the children are resolved. Although she overburdens the traditional police-procedural form with the weight of romance, psychological suspense, social history and mythic legend, she sets a vivid scene for her complex characters, who seem entirely capable of doing the unexpected. Drawn by the grim nature of her plot and the lyrical ferocity of her writing, even smart people who should know better will be able to lose themselves in these dark woods.

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The Seattle Times reviewed the book:

“In the Woods” (Viking, 429 pp., $24.95) is an auspicious debut from a young Irish writer, Tana French. The theater-trained French clearly knows a thing or two about drama.

A child is murdered at an archaeological dig near Dublin. Years before in those same woods, two children disappeared and a third was found with blood in his shoes and no memory of what happened. A homicide detective, Rob Ryan, finds a clue connecting the cases, and, desperate to stay on the investigation team, hides an explosive secret: as a kid, and with a different name, he was that boy in the woods.

The book’s plot and pacing are rock-solid, but its tender characterizations — particularly the deepening relationship between Ryan and his brainy, tough female partner — are what set it apart. Strong stuff.

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USA Today also briefly covered the novel:

Readers who like their hard-boiled police procedurals with an international flair will love Irish author Tana French’s debut novel(on sale Monday) Detective Rob Ryan of the Dublin Murder Squad snags a case involving the murder of a young girl. What most people don’t know — and Ryan isn’t telling — is that 20 years earlier he was found in the same woods remembering nothing about how he ended up there without his two playmates. They were never found. The hunt for the killer of young Katy Devlin is brilliantly laid out, as is the unraveling of Ryan’s blocked memories. Could there be a connection? In the Woods is as creepily imaginative as it gets.

Below is a short interview with the author about In the Woods:

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