Fiction: “Club Dead” by Charlaine Harris

It’s been over a year since I read the last Sookie Stackhouse mystery. Coincidentally, I have the first two discs of the third season of True Blood hanging around my living room somewhere.

The third novel (and, supposedly, the third season) concerns Sookie and her relationships with men. There’s her previously-ever-present boyfriend, Vampire Bill; Bill’s boss, Eric Northman, the vampire sheriff of Area 5, which covers at least Bon Temps, Louisiana (if not all of Louisiana); Sookie’s boss at Merlotte’s bar, Sam, a shapeshifter; and now Alcide Herveaux, who owes Eric something so he agrees to help Eric and Sookie out when Bill goes missing.

Because yes, Bill goes missing. He’s working on some secret project or whatever and won’t tell Sookie about it, and when he goes to do more research or whatever, he ends up kidnapped in Mississippi. Eric wants Bill back, because now Bill’s on the turf of the Vampire King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington. (Louisiana has a Queen, if you’re keeping track.) Eric doesn’t want to send Sookie by herself, because even though she’s a telepath, she’s also merely human. So he calls on Alcide to stand by her. Oh, and Alcide’s a Werewolf.

So Sookie leaves Bon Temps behind and heads to Jackson, MI, with Alcide as her bodyguard. Except the more they get to know each other, the more Sookie and Alcide start liking each other. But both parties know they can’t get involved with the other; Sookie’s on a rescue mission for her boyfriend, after all, and Alcide is still getting over being dumped by his ex, Debbie.

Their first stop is Club Dead, a bar where supernatural beings congregate and regular humans can’t enter (unless accompanied by a supernatural being). Sookie’s goal is to listen in on humans and see if any of them are thinking about Bill. On the first night, Sookie nearly gets into a bar fight over some Weres flirting heavily over her. Russell Edgington happens to come to her rescue, and then practically demands that she and Alcide return the next night. Which they do, and Sookie interrupts an assassination attempt on one of the second-in-commands of Russell. Sadly, Sookie ends up with a stake in her side for her efforts. Russell (and Eric, who’s there in disguise, keeping an eye on Sookie) takes her back to his mansion so she can recuperate. After having a vampire blood transfusion, she’s ready and raring to go, because Eric’s spy vampire, “Bubba,” has found Bill.

To speed up on my plot recap: Bill, Eric, and Sookie all get back to Bon Temps safely. Sookie breaks up with Bill, because while he was missing, he hooked up repeatedly with his sire, Lorena. And it is revealed that Bill was going to leave Sookie for Lorena. Understandably pissed, Sookie rescinds Bill’s invitation to her house. Recognizing that there is also sexual tension between herself and Eric, she rescinds his invitation, too. She and Alcide agree to remain friends — for now.

Before I get into the awesomeness that is Sookie, let me recount why I enjoy these vampires so much. A of all, they don’t sparkle. (Hey, one of the books on my to-read list is Breaking Dawn. I’m not done with sparkling vampires yet.) B of all, they can stay awake during the day, if they have to, but really, they should be in a coffin when the sun comes up. Vampires are able to be tortured through the use of silver. They do feed on humans, though TrueBlood has made it easier for vampires to get sustenance without having to hunt. And they are most definitely evil. Now, I could digress here and discuss how The Vampire Diaries‘s vampires have the tendency to be more violent, but I’m not going to, because a, it’s a digression, and b, we all know it would end up being an aria praising Damon as the King of Awesome, and this is neither the time nor the place.

Now, Sookie. Sookie is, for the most part, human. Sure, she can hear the thoughts of other people, but in terms of immortality or changing her genetic structure when the moon is nigh, she is human. This sets her apart from Buffy (super-powered vampire slayer), Caroline Forbes (normal-girl-turned-vampire), and even Elena Gilbert (*gasp* the Doppleganger!). [The last two are from The Vampire Diaries.] Anita Blake, of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is a necromancer, with an innate talent towards raising the dead. So I think that leaves Sookie’s only human contemporary to be … Bella Swan. So let’s turn to one of my favorite segments: Ways in Which Bella Swan Sucks.

… Basically, Bella wants to end her life in order to be with her boyfriend forever. Even when said boyfriend can be somewhat abusive and controlling (I will remind you about the WATCHING HER IN HER SLEEP). Also, she’s a whiny bitch and makes everything All About Her.

Sookie, meanwhile, doesn’t define herself by her man. When she finds out Bill has been cheating on her, she is very tempted to cheat her-ownself with Alcide. But she doesn’t, because she was raised right by her Gram. Instead, she breaks up with Bill. And even though she isn’t truly supernatural, that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t believe herself strong enough to hold her own against other supernatural beings:

If Alcide expected or wanted me to ask for smelling salts, or to beg him to save me from the big bad wolf, he had the wrong woman. [130-131]

She also remains her own person:

“They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide’s apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains.” Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute for us.

“My Sookie hid a corpse?”

“I don’t think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun.”

“Where did you learn that term, Northman?”

“I took ‘English as a Second Language’ at a community college in the seventies.”

Bill said, “She is mine.”

I wondered if my hands would move. They would. I raised both of them, making an unmistakeable one-fingered gesture.

Eric laughed, and Bill said “Sookie!” in shocked astonishment.

“I think that Sookie is telling us she belongs to herself,” Eric said softly. [269]

Hands-down, I prefer Sookie Stackhouse over Bella Swan. She’s sarcastic, she swears, she can hold her own, and she doesn’t want to subvert her own identity in order to keep a man. How’s that for a female role-model?

I continue to enjoy both the Sookie Stackhouse mystery series as well as True Blood, though the TV series is remarkably different from the novels. Someday, I’ll write that essay on their differences, but tonight is not that night — tomorrow ain’t looking that good, either.

Grade for Club Dead: 3 stars

Fiction: “The Surgeon” by Tess Gerritsen

Well, it would probably help if I spelled the author’s last name correctly …

I had been meaning to get into the Tess Gerritsen novels for a while. My mother actually was the first one to draw my attention to the series, though she never got in too deep when discussing them with me. She knows that I enjoy crime thrillers and not like a lot of romance (while I have since branched out into reading historical romances, you may have noticed that recently, that genre is not appearing as frequently as it was for a while), and as an added bonus, Ms. Gerritsen is sort of a local, living in Camden, Maine. She did a book signing years ago at the now-defunct Bookland, and Mom got a couple of her books signed by Ms. Gerritsen.

And then my roommate started watching Rizzoli and Isles on TNT last summer, and I don’t think it was until this summer that I realized that the series was based on the Tess Gerritsen series. I can’t remember how I figured it out — I think someone mentioned ‘the books’ in my hearing, and then I had them put two and two together for me. Sometimes I need extra people to do math for me.

Anyway. I went to the library (because both Bookland and now Borders are defunct, and also [and more importantly] I need to stop buying books all the damn time, that’s what libraries are for) and picked up Naked Heat, this, and the next book I’ll read, Cooking for Geeks. This came before the cookbook.

I liked the book. I don’t really watch Rizzoli and Isles when the roommate watches it; I have so much TV to watch as it is, and also, the plot didn’t really interest me. I like Angie Harmon well enough, but it seemed like just another procedural. I’ll watch it if she’s watching it and I’m in the room, but it’s not appointment TV. But the point of that sentence is that I began reading The Surgeon without preconceived notions. I had no idea what I was going into; I only knew to picture Angie Harmon when I read the part of Rizzoli.

This is the first book in the Jane Rizzoli series (I’m going to call it Rizzoli & Isles in the tag, however, because Dr. Isles appears in the next book, The Apprentice). She is a homicide detective for the Boston PD, which meant that I actually knew the neighborhoods the different characters lived in. Back Bay, Southie, Jamaica Plain — all are somewhat familiar to me. Well, there is a serial killer running around Boston, nicknamed The Surgeon. His modus operandi is to kidnap women, lash them to their bed with duct tape, perform a hysterectomy on them while they’re still alive, and then slit their throat. Yeah, it’s pretty gory and gross.

Det. Thomas Moore is the lead on the case, assisted by a handful of other detectives and Det. Jane Rizzoli. Rizzoli is tough and unemotional, the product of fighting for the spotlight as the youngest only sister to two brothers, as well as being the sole female detective in her unit. Meanwhile, Moore is patient, calm, and saintlike. During the course of the investigation, they discover a connection to a rash of killings that occurred in Savannah, Georgia. Those murders were committed by Andrew Capra, and he was killed by his last victim, Dr. Catherine Cordell. Dr. Cordell was able to shoot him while he was attacking her, so she survived. She then moved up to Boston. One year later, another woman is killed in a similar fashion. A year after that, the second murder is committed, and now there’s a series. The clues, once gathered, all point to a copycat of Andrew Capra, and the more they investigate, the more they are horrified to find that the murderer is killing in order to terrorize Dr. Cordell from afar.

Over the course of the investigation, Det. Moore begins to fall for Dr. Cordell, and she for him. At one point, he is sent to Savannah to investigate possible associates of Andrew Capra, but more importantly, to separate himself from his growing attraction for Dr. Cordell. In the end, the killer is caught, and all becomes right with the world.

What rubbed me the wrong way in a couple of places was what I felt to be over-the-top feminism. Now, before I go too far, let me explain my personal stance on feminism: yes, it sucks that women make sixty cents for every dollar that men earn in the same position (blanket statement). Yes, it sucks that women are always being portrayed in the media as sluts, whores, and sexual objects. Yes, it sucks that women are rarely recognized for their intelligence and reasoning skills. Do I find myself fighting the status quo and the media machine due to those portrayals? … eh. Not really. Because I am aware of those portrayals, and they are portrayals I’ve seen all my life, and because I know that the media machine is now a near-unstoppable male empire of testosterone and jackassery, I’m going to spend my time fighting for things where I know I can make a bigger difference. Like, attending the Rally to Restore Sanity, or writing that comedy pilot that finally portrays people like ordinary people and not stereotypes.

Oookay, that was a rant and a half. I apologize. To get back to the main impetus of the story, the victims of The Surgeon had all been sexually assaulted prior to being brutally murdered. I know, right? As if getting raped wasn’t bad enough, now they find themselves the target of a brutal killer. And yes, again, it sucks, but I almost took offense at this woman who runs a women’s crisis center in the book. Moore and Rizzoli are following a lead, and learn that one of the victims of the Surgeon availed herself of services at this clinic.

Here’s the first quote I bookmarked to return to:

“It’s a possibility we’re considering,” said Rizzoli. “Unfortunately, the victim is comatose and can’t talk to us.”

“Don’t call her the victim. She does have a name.” [119]

And I’m like, yes, she does have a name, but she is also a victim. It sucks that she is also female, but let’s not look past the dictionary definition of the word victim.

And then, two pages later, the Women’s Crisis Center lady [Sarah] has another feminist moment:

“Did she remember the man who took her home?” asked Rizzoli. “That’s what we really need to know.”

Sarah looked at her. “It’s all about the criminal, isn’t it? That’s all those two cops from Sex Crimes wanted to hear about. The perp gets the attention.” [121]

Listen, lady, do you know why the perp gets all the attention? Because they want to catch him and prevent him from hurting more women. Because at this point, the cops have done all they can towards helping the victim — they can refer her to health care, they can refer her to therapy, and they can refer her to support groups. But after that, the attention turns to the criminal so they can catch him and punish him. And this is why I tend to have a problem with the more severe feminists — at some point, they rely so much on redefining gender that they no longer rely on logic.

So in the end, I enjoyed the book. There were a couple of descriptions of violence that I had to read through quickly (I do admit, I can be squeamish at times), and I see the beginnings of a great character in Jane Rizzoli. I will most likely continue reading this series in the future.

But next? Molecular gastronomy for geeks.

Grade for The Surgeon: 3 stars

Fiction: “Naked Heat” by “Richard Castle”

Dudes, after the travesty in decision-making that was “reading The Mayor of Casterbridge,” I am so proud of myself that I finished this book in, like, 48 hours. Granted, I had a big assist from my time in Boston this weekend (no, thank you, Holiday Inn Express-Saugus and the Public Garden), but this is how I’m supposed to read books: quickly and efficiently, in less than a week.

So where does the story pick up from Heat Wave? Well, for one, Jameson Rook’s article on Nikki and her team has been published, and though we don’t get to read it, we’re left to believe it’s a lot like No Doubt during Tragic Kingdom‘s huge sales. You know, the video for “Don’t Speak”? Where everyone’s trying to make a big deal out of Gwen and the boys aren’t having it? And even Gwen’s pissed that she’s become the center of attention? Well, substitute Nikki Heat for Gwen and Raley and Ochoa for Adrian, Tom and Tony, and that’s essentially how the whole situation shook out. Oh, and Heat’s pissed at Rook for making her all popular and stuff.

But the actual case is this: Cassidy Towne, one of the premier gossip hounds for one of the leading New York City papers, is stabbed in the back. And while that would be juicy enough, it turns out that Heat’s old pal Jameson Rook just happened to be doing a story on Towne, and so they’re back working together on a case.

The book still reads like a longer episode of Castle, and since that’s a show I enjoy weekly (OH SHIT I just remembered I still owe Brad five bucks for his raincheck Season One Castle he bought for me dammit), I will continue to read the Nikki Heat series.

And, much like the TV show, “Richard Castle” rewards his readers with little nuggets like these:

Heat didn’t like to bigfoot [detectives] Malcolm and Reynolds, but she wanted to check out the Dragonfly herself. [142]

I’ll admit, it took me a couple of seconds, but yes, that is a rather oblique reference to the great Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly, played by the awesome Nathan Fillion.

There weren’t as many weird grammar things in this book, which gives me hope — maybe someday, I’ll read one that has no weird grammar things. This was the only one I caught:

Detective Heat knew Soleil Gray had a music video shoot that day because her lawyer had mentioned it the afternoon before when she accused Heat of harassing her client at her places of business. [226]

It just seems that there are too many prepositional phrases in that sentence.

So while I got Naked Heat from the library, I’ll be keeping an eye out for it used, as well as the third book in the series, Heat Rises. And I think the best part about these books? Is that you don’t have to be a fan of Castle to enjoy them. I mean, yeah, that’s how I got into it, but I’d like to think that if I happened across either of these books on the shelf in the library or the now-defunct Borders or wherever, and there wasn’t an author photograph or a dot that tells me to watch Castle to tip me off, I’d enjoy it as a separate entity. So, if you don’t watch Castle, that’s okay — the books are great on their own.

Grade for Naked Heat: 3.5 stars

Fiction: “The Mayor of Casterbridge” by Thomas Hardy

Oh, my God.  I can’t believe I spent SO LONG reading THAT.

A) of all, I did not think it would take me nearly a month to read The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Of course, having said that, I did not take into account the craziness that would explode at work, what with writing reviews and staying late and all the other … well, craziness.  And B) of all, dudes — the next time I have a dream wherein I’m reading a book I’ve never read before, and I decide that I want to read that book to see if there are any parallels between the novel and the dream or whatever else is going on in my life?  I want y’all to point to this moment in my life, say “Mayor of Casterbridge,” and then smack me in the face, because there are never ANY parallels between what I dream and what I read.

And here’s a difficulty for me and this book: I liked Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  I thought I would like any Hardy equally.  I WAS WRONG.

The titular Mayor of Casterbridge is Michael Henchard.  You may think the narrative focuses on his tenure as Mayor — you would be wrong.  The novel begins when Michael, his wife, Susan, and their infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane enter the fair at Weydon Priors.  They have been traveling, and they are hungry.  So they buy something called furmity (which sounds like porridge to me), and Michael spikes his with rum (as I would do, given porridge as my only option).  He gets progressively drunker, rants against his poverty, and in his supreme moment of drunkenness, proclaims to sell his wife for five pounds.  A passing sailor, Newsom, takes him at his deal, and voila – Mrs. Henchard now becomes Mrs. Newsom.  The next day, Michael is appropriately chastised, but decides it’s for the best for both himself and Susan.  He vows to abstain from alcohol for twenty-one years, which is his current age.

Flash-foward about nineteen years or so, and Susan and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, are entering Casterbridge, looking for an ‘old relative,’ Henchard.  They are astounded to find him in good health, good spirits, a wealthy corn-and-hay-broker, as well as one of the Mayors of the town.  They spend the night in an inn, rather than claim kin right away.  While there, they meet Donald Farfrae, a Scotsman who’s passing through the town towards the coast, hoping to set sail for the Americas.  Henchard meets up with him, and is impressed with his solution for saving blighted corn, and offers him the job of manager of his corn processing plant (or whatever).  Farfrae and Elizabeth meet in the inn, but neither say anything to each other.

The next day, Elizabeth goes to Henchard and claims kin in a roundabout way.  Henchard goes to meet Susan that night, and they agree that the best idea for both of them (due to Henchard’s claim that he’s a widower) is to have the Newsoms move into a house in town, have Henchard ‘court’ Susan, and then remarry later.    Meanwhile, Farfrae is gaining in the business, and Henchard is starting to feel slightly unnerved by the quiet, stoic Scotsman.  When Susan dies, Henchard is afraid that Elizabeth will leave him alone, and so he tells her that he is actually her father, not the sea captain Newsom she had believed all of her life.  But then, right after he tells her this, he goes looking for something in Susan’s bureau and finds a letter addressed to Henchard, to not be opened until Elizabeth’s wedding-day.  Henchard, being a curious bugger, opens it, and finds that — gasp! — his Elizabeth-Jane died shortly after being sold to Newsom, and Elizabeth-Jane in the parlor is actually Newsom’s Elizabeth-Jane!  [Did you see the math I did up there, where Elizabeth-Jane was 18 only 19 years after being sold?  Huh?  Did you see that?]

But he doesn’t tell her that, because a) of all, he doesn’t want to lose her, and b) of all, it would look really stupid of him to say “Hey, uh, remember five seconds ago when I said I was your dad?  Apparently your mom lied to me and you’re not my daughter after all.  Sorry.”

And then, there’s Lucetta.  Lucetta comes to town shortly after or shortly before Susan’s death (I can’t remember, and even though the book is right next to the keyboard, I’m not going to look it up).  She wants to marry Henchard, because they had an affair years ago, in which he proposed marriage, but then rescinded because his wife wasn’t really dead.  Now that she’s dead, Lucetta can marry Henchard!  But then she meets Farfrae and falls in love with him even more, and so she rebuffs Henchard and marries Farfrae on the sly.

Meanwhile, Henchard has forecasted poorly in that year’s harvest, and he has lost everything.  So he has lost his actual wife; the woman he was going to marry; his daughter; his business; and his friendship with Farfrae.  He continues on his downward slide; Lucetta asks him to return her love letters to him.  He gives them to his new manager, Jopp, to deliver, because he doesn’t want to see her again.  Instead, Jopp goes to a shady tavern and reads them out loud, which leads the bad side of town to discern that Henchard and Lucetta were adulterers years ago, and they plan something called a “skimmington ride,” which used to happen when adultery was discovered.  One night, after a Royal Personage goes through town (and Henchard embarrasses himself by trying to shake the Prince’s hand in front of everyone, apparently that’s something that’s frowned upon in mid-19th-Century Rural Britain), and the shady people send Farfrae out on a stupid mission to get him out of town (because if there were a sitcom based on this book back then, it would be Everybody Loves Farfrae), and the shady people make up some dummies of Henchard and Lucetta, tie them to a donkey, and set the donkey marching through town.  Lucetta sees the donkey, is able to add two and two, and has a seizure from the shock.  She’s also pregnant, not that it matters, because both die.  Thanks, donkey.

Henchard ostracizes himself from society, but when Elizabeth sees how lonely he is, she goes to him and offers to stay with him to keep him company and take care of him.  But then!  Sea Captain Newsom returns from the dead!  And he wants to see Elizabeth!  And Henchard lies and tells him that she died.  So Newsom leaves town, but then Henchard regrets doing that, but he’s too greedy to let Elizabeth know her real father is alive.

Eventually, Farfrae proposes marriage to Elizabeth-Jane, she accepts, then Newsom returns again and she is made aware of Henchard’s deception.  Henchard returns to Casterbridge on this, the day of his ‘daughter’s’ wedding (I’m sorry), and they have a big fight and he leaves again.  He dies like, four days later, not wanting a proper burial or recognition, because he feels he doesn’t deserve it.

Er, thus endeth the Cliffs Notes edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge.  And look, if I wasn’t so tired all the time (no, seriously, I fell asleep at 4 a.m., slept until 1 p.m., then woke up from an hour-long nap on the couch at 6 after trying to finish this book, what the hell), I may have enjoyed it more.  Hardy really enjoys playing with happenstance and random events that aren’t under any character’s control, which is different from any other novelist writing during that time period (I direct your attention to Charles Dickens and any of his books).  There’s a lot about making decisions based on selfish needs and the dichotomy between Farfrae and Henchard is interesting — I just found it a chore to get through.

So I rate it with 1.5 stars (because classic literature automatically gets half a star if I can finish it), and move on to trashier things: the second Nikki Heat mystery, for one; the third Sookie Stackhouse mystery for another.

Grade for The Mayor of Casterbridge: 1.5 stars