Once Pocket Books stepped up to the table with a whopping two million dollar deal for Margaret Cuthbert’s first two novels, the talk began that her debut, The Silent Cradle was certain to be one of the “hot” books in 1998. Happily for all concerned, The Silent Cradle actually lives up to its advance billing. Dr. Rae Duprey, vice-chairman of the prestigious OB/GYN Department at San Francisco’s Berkeley Hills Hospital, is passionate about her work, her patients, and most of all, about babies. But Berkeley Hills is losing so much business to the new Birth Center across the street that the hospital’s Board is making plans to close down her department.
Run by Rae’s vindictive former lover Dr. Bo Michaels, the Center is an upscale pastel haven for low-risk deliveries. Any sign of a problem and the expectant mothers are delivered to Rae’s doorstep. And lately, there seem to be a few too many “bad babies” coming Rae’s way and she’s getting the blame. Someone is out to destroy both her department and her career, and if a few mothers and babies lose their lives in the process, so be it.
Determined to uncover who’s masterminding the sinister plan, Rae’s soon caught up in a web of murder, medical sabotage, and hidden agendas. The killer, Rae is certain, is someone on staff at Berkeley Hills. But is there a colleague she can trust to help her discover the truth? Dr. Sam Hartman, the new chief of cardiac anesthesia, is a willing volunteer as both a detective and a potential romantic interest. A complication Rae tries her best to avoid.
Unable to convince hospital management that there is a murderer in their midst, Rae finally contacts the police, who dismiss her story they need “proof, not grudges.” Then a vengeful Bo has her railroaded off the staff, crippling her ability to investigate within the hospital. To make matters even worse, she’s beginning to suspect that Sam may be in league with her enemies. Finally, disguised as a hospital cleaning woman, Rae sets a trap for the killer a killer she hopes won’t be Sam. There’s a terrifying showdown in the hospital nursery before the murderer and his motives are exposed.
With a smart feisty heroine and heart-stopping medical emergencies worthy of the best of ER, Cuthbert, an obstetrician turned novelist, has produced a chilling medical thriller that should satisfy even the most discriminating fans of those other doctor/writers, Robin Cook and Michael Crichton.
Reviewed by Lucinda Dyer.
Once Pocket Books stepped up to the table with a whopping two million dollar deal for Margaret Cuthbert’s first two novels, the talk began that her debut, The Silent Cradle was certain to be one of the “hot” books in 1998. Happily for all concerned, The Silent Cradle actually lives up to its advance billing. […]
No one does an art thriller quite like B.A. Shapiro, and with such as novels The Art Forger and The Muralist, she’s carved out quite the niche by blinding literary thrills with questions of authenticity, value, museum politics and the inner workings of various historical art scenes.
Shapiro’s next novel, Metropolis, arrives this spring from Algonquin Books, and BookPage is delighted to reveal its cover and an exclusive excerpt!
First, read a bit about Metropolis in the official synopsis from Algonquin:
This masterful novel of psychological suspense from the New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger follows a cast of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect when a harrowing accident occurs at the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But was it really an accident? Was it suicide? A murder? Six mysterious characters who rent units in, or are connected to, the self-storage facility must now reevaluate their lives. We meet Serge, an unstable but brilliant street photographer who lives in his unit, which overflows with thousands of undeveloped pictures; Zach, the building’s owner, who develops Serge’s photos as he searches for clues to the accident; Marta, an undocumented immigrant who is finishing her dissertation and hiding from ICE; Liddy, an abused wife and mother, who re-creates her children’s bedroom in her unit; Jason, who has left his corporate firm and now practices law from his storage unit; and Rose, the office manager, who takes kickbacks to let renters live in the building and has her own complicated family history.
The characters have a variety of backgrounds: They are different races; they practice different religions; they’re young and they’re not so young; they are rich, poor, and somewhere in the middle. As they dip in and out of one another’s lives, fight circumstances that are within and also beyond their control, and try to discover the details of the accident, Shapiro both dismantles the myth of the American dream and builds tension to an exciting climax.
Metropolis hits bookstores and libraries on May 17, 2022. While you wait, we’re delighted to reveal the cover from designer Sara Wood and art director Christopher Moisan. Plus, an exclusive excerpt after the jump!
BOSTONGLOBE.COM, JANUARY 7, 2018. Cambridge, MA—Rescue workers were dispatched to the Metropolis Storage Warehouse at Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street in response to a 911 call at 11:15 this evening. At least one person was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with critical injuries after a fall down an elevator shaft. Details are limited, and neither police nor hospital officials identified the victim. Questions were raised about what people were doing at the self-storage facility at that hour, and police are investigating other violations concerning the building. This is a developing story. It will be updated.
ONE
Zach
May 2018
It’s Rose’s fault. It’s Aetna’s fault. It’s Otis Elevator’s fault. All of the above and none of the above. Zach Davidson hovers at the edge of the crowd, but at six two it’s tough to blend into the background. The auctioneer doesn’t know Zach is the recipient of the money from the forthcoming sales, and he wants to keep it that way, although he doesn’t know why this matters. He isn’t even sure why he’s come, unless as some perverse form of self-flagellation.
“Most of you know the rules,” the auctioneer begins in her booming voice, “but I’m going to go over them quickly. Due to foreclosure of the building, the contents of twenty-two abandoned storage units are up for sale. The minimum bid is one hundred dollars. Cash only. I’ll open the door to each unit, and you’ll have five minutes to see what’s inside, and then I’ll start the auction. You may not cross the threshold. You may not touch anything. You may not ask me any questions, because I don’t have any answers. You take it all or you leave it all. Then we move on to the next unit. Is this clear?”
There’s a murmur of acceptance, which echoes off the concrete walls and floor, the steel-reinforced ceiling. They’re standing outside Rose’s old office, the woman Zach shouldn’t have relied on. Every direction he looks pisses him off. Rose’s empty desk, the dim bulbs, the peeling paint. He turns his back on the yellow police tape stretched across the elevator.
It’s been almost four months since it happened, and still no one knows for sure if it was an accident, a suicide attempt, or a murder attempt. Could be any of them, but it doesn’t make all that much difference. He’s screwed any which way. Damn elevator. Damn Rose. Damn hard luck.
He follows the auctioneer as she marches down a corridor lined with heavy metal doors, each imprinted with a round medallion containing a large M intertwined with a smaller S and W. Metropolis Storage Warehouse. One hundred and twenty-three years old. Six stories high. Ninety feet wide. Four hundred and eighty feet long. Almost four hundred storage units of various sizes and shapes; some even have windows. Zach knows it well.
Author B.A. Shapiro
The potential bidders are a mixed bunch. Two men in ratty clothes smell as if they’ve been sleeping on the street, which they probably have. Another three look like lawyers or real estate developers, and there’s a foursome of gray-hairs who appear to have just stepped off the golf course. A gaggle of middle-aged women in running shoes sends stern glances at a girl clutching a pen and a pad of paper, who seems far too young to be the mother of the children she’s yelling at. Male, female, tall, short, fat, slim, white, Black, brown, rich, poor, clever, or not so clever. Like the inner recesses of Metropolis itself, a diverse assemblage that stands in contrast to the archipelago of cultural and economic neighborhoods Boston has become.
Zach has owned Metropolis for ten years, bought at a ridiculously low price in a quasi-legal deal that looked to be the way out of the consequences of his bad choices. Although it still belongs to him, however temporarily, he has no idea what’s behind any of the doors. The building had a well-deserved shady reputation when he purchased it, and he concluded he was better off not knowing what people were storing in their units. In retrospect, a little prying might have averted this mess.
The auctioneer, a beefy woman with biceps twice the size of Zach’s, takes a key from her backpack and dramatically twists it into the lock. Then she slides the ten-foot-wide fireproof door along its track on the floor to reveal a murky room, lumpy with shadowy objects. She reaches inside and flips on the light.
“Take it all! Leave it all!” she cries. “Five minutes!”
Revealed by naked light bulbs hanging from the eleven-foot ceiling, #114 is decidedly dull. An old refrigerator, an electric stove, a bunch of mismatched chairs, a couple of mattresses, clothes overflowing from open cartons scattered all over the floor. There are at least two dozen sealed boxes lined up against the far wall and a four-foot pile of empty picture frames ready to topple. Everything is coated with what appears to be decades of dust. Zach groans inwardly. He needs every cent he can squeeze out of this auction, and no one’s going to bid on any of this junk.
But he’s wrong. After the auctioneer starts rippling her tongue in an impenetrable torrent of words, people start raising their hands. When the contents go for $850, Zach is flabbergasted. The other units surely contain more impressive stuff than this and should generate even higher bids.
Some do, some don’t, and two are completely empty.
“Take it all! Leave it all! Five minutes!”
When the auctioneer unlocks the door of #357, there’s a collective gasp. The interior looks like a stage waiting for the evening performance to commence: a complete upscale office suite, including a desk, bookshelves, and a small conference table surrounded by four chairs. Bizarre. It goes for $3,500.
On the fifth floor is a tiny and perfectly immaculate unit: a neatly made single bed, an intricately carved rolltop desk, a chair, a small bureau. Nothing else. One thousand dollars. In #454, there’s another bizarre tableau. Creepy, actually. It appears to belong to a couple of teenagers. Two desks piled with books and trophies, walls covered with movie posters, and corkboards adorned with invitations and photos and newspaper clippings. Did they come here to study? To hide? Zach stretches his neck in as far as he can without the auctioneer cutting it off.
She almost does. “Step back, sir!” she yells, her voice stiletto-sharp. “This minute!” Everyone looks at him as if he’s committed a heinous crime. “Take it all! Leave it all! Five minutes!”
Annoyed, he does as she orders, but he wants to see more, surprised to find himself interested in the lives lived here. This is something he’d never considered before, or to be more correct, he had thought about it, but only as a means to get the bad guys out of the building and clean up his own act. Now the questions surge. Who were these people? Why these particular items? And, most intriguing of all, why did they leave so much behind?
Unit 421 is another stage, but this one is freakish in its attention to detail. It’s a double unit with two round windows, and it looks like an upscale studio apartment, perhaps a pied-à-terre. Against one wall, a queen-size bed is covered by a rumpled silk bedspread and an unreasonable number of pillows. A nightstand holding a lamp and a clock sits to its right side; a large abstract painting is centered over the headboard. At the other end of the unit is an overstuffed reading chair, a writing desk, and a sectional couch, also with too many pillows, facing a large-screen television. In the corner, there’s a small table, two chairs, and a compact kitchen featuring cabinets, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a fancy hot plate.
“Take it all! Leave it all! Five minutes!”
This time there’s no doubt in Zach’s mind to whom the unit belongs, or rather, to whom it had belonged. Liddy Haines. He closes his eyes and presses his forefinger to the bridge of his nose in an attempt to make the horrific image go away, which it does not. Six thousand dollars.
Unit 514 was apparently used as a darkroom, and from the looks of it, also as a bedroom. He stares at the sheets pooling at the edge of a cot, at the dirty clothes heaped on the floor. He’s seen three beds in three different units over the last hour, and he clenches his fists to contain his anger. If Rose didn’t know people were living here, she should have. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen—even if it wasn’t the lawsuit now upending his life. An irony he’d appreciate more if he weren’t so damn furious.
In contrast to Liddy Haines’s unit, there’s no expensive furniture here, but there is a lot of high-quality photographic equipment. A long table edges the south side of the room, overflowing with trays, chemicals, jugs, paper, an enlarger, and an assortment of spools, filters, thermometers, and timers. A clothesline with pins attached stretches over the jumble, and there are at least a dozen five-gallon Poland Spring containers, most of them full, along with another dozen warehouse-size cartons of energy bars.
A Rolleiflex camera is perched atop a stack of cartons, its well-worn leather strap dangling. Zach recognizes it because of the nature photography he’s been doing lately, his current obsession. Highpointing, climbing the highest peak in every state, was his last one, and that’s what got him into taking landscape pictures in the first place. But his interest in mountaineering has been waning—thirty-two states is more than enough—as his new interest in photography has waxed. He’s usually only good for one obsession at a time, dropping the previous one when another grabs his fancy. He’s an all-in or all-out kind of guy.
The Rolleiflex is a twin-lens reflex, medium format, which hardly anyone uses anymore. But if you know what you’re doing, it takes remarkable photos. Zach rented one when he was at Bryce last year, and the first time he looked down into the viewfinder—which is at waist, rather than eye, level—he was blown away.
The vastness of the mountains and the big sky in front of him were perfectly reflected through the lens, without the tunnel vision effect of a standard camera. When he returned to Boston, he kept it a few extra days and experimented with street photography. The cool part is that because you’re looking down rather than directly at your subject, no one is aware they’re being photographed. Vivian Maier, arguably one of the greatest street photographers ever, used a Rolleiflex.
Zach leans into the unit as far as the Nazi will allow, searching for pictures. There are a few lying about, but it’s difficult to see them from the hallway. The ones he can see are all square rather than rectangular, a feature of the Rolleiflex. He tilts his head and squints at a photo on the end of the table closest to him: a striking black-and-white with afternoon sunlight cutting a diagonal across the image.
A man is standing in front of an open door with an arched top; the word “Office” can be clearly read behind his head. His shoulder leans against the doorframe, one knee slightly bent. His eyes stare off into the distance. Before Zach understands what he’s seeing, his stomach twists. It’s a photograph of him.
The Seville Communion is a literary mystery and thriller so tight it could hold hot water. With each page there seems the opportunity for more danger, more strength, more weaknesses, more blood (either hoped or dreaded) leaving the reader continuously baited. Arturo Perez-Reverte, the author of The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas, has created a story and characters so real and likable (even the evil ones) that the reader can’t help but become emotionally involved.
Originally released in 1995 in Spanish under the title La Piel del Tambor, the translator Sonia Soto does a skillful job in capturing the nuances of both the Spanish and English languages, with a little Latin thrown in for the priests.
The story at first seems deceptively simple. A hacker breaks into the Vatican computer system and sends a personal message to the Pope regarding the fate of a local church in Seville, Spain. There are two deaths, both accidental. The e-mail letter, however, differs with authorities and implies anonymously that the church building itself is responsible. Concerned mostly with the reality of the security breach and not the crack-pot message, the Vatican sends one of its best to investigate. In a textbook study of how things are not always as they appear, it is here that storyteller Perez-Reverte begins to tie the reader in knots in an intriguing and foreign location with old and new blending seamlessly together in a realistic story which is rich in history and frighteningly contemporary at the same time. Romantics will fall in love with Seville and with the investigating priest from Rome who serves as the main character. What Richard Chamberlain was to The Thorn Birds, Father Quart is to Seville. He is attractive, disciplined, and tested. Unlike Chamberlain’s character, though, Quart’s discipline comes not from faith, but from pride. Characters begin to emerge and evolve quickly. All can betray and be betrayed. It becomes clear to the reader and to the main character that what is at stake is much more than electronic security or the survival of a particular parish. For what would it profit a person to gain any of these and lose his own soul in the process? The challenge is a serious one. You must determine how Seville unravels before Perez-Reverte tells you, and he waits until the very last line to do it. From intricate plot to well-developed characters, every storytelling element is here for the lazy “reader” (film rights sold to Canal Plus and Iberoamericana), but don’t wait for the celluloid.
If we are to believe the sad publishing statistics that the average American buys only one book per year, this should be that book. If you can afford the luxury of two books, read this one twice. It’s that good.
Reviewed by Clay Stafford.
The Seville Communion is a literary mystery and thriller so tight it could hold hot water. With each page there seems the opportunity for more danger, more strength, more weaknesses, more blood (either hoped or dreaded) leaving the reader continuously baited. Arturo Perez-Reverte, the author of The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas, has created […]
Several years ago there was an actor, a former bodybuilder, who starred in some B-grade movies. While these films had made money, they really hadn’t taken his career to the next level. Then his agent sent him a script, a science fiction story about a man who is sent into the past to prevent an assassination. Would he be interested in playing the hero? The bodybuilder was muscular, but he wasn’t stupid; the part he really wanted, he told the agent, was that of the assassin. The agent pitched this to the director, James Cameron, and the bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, became The Terminator and a star.
Let’s face it, in movies and in literature the villain is often the most interesting character. Look at John Milton’s Paradise Lost the devil gets all the good lines. So it is in Daniel Silva’s new novel, The Mark of the Assassin, a thriller set against the background of modern-day geopolitics and the covert war waged by intelligence agencies behind the scenes. A war that is suddenly made hotter by the actions of one man, a freelance killer for hire with a trademark signature three bullets in the face.
CIA operative Michael Osbourne is drawn into this war when a jumbo jet is shot down over Long Island. A middle-east expert, Osbourne is called in when the body of a known terrorist is found near the crash site with three bullet holes in its face. The evidence points to a Palestinian splinter group, but Osbourne isn’t so sure. What follows is an investigation that takes him to three continents as he unravels a startling conspiracy, and puts him on a collision course with the assassin known only as October.
The Mark of the Assassin shines is in its portrayal of October, otherwise known as Jean-Paul Delaroche, a deep-cover Soviet killer without portfolio. At least without a killer’s portfolio. Delaroche does have a portfolio of sorts he is also a painter who takes his art seriously. Indeed, there are many layers to Delaroche, and I liked the fact that as many things as Silva shows us, we never quite find out what makes the assassin tick. The one gripe I have with this book, and this is really not against Daniel Silva specifically, but to the authors of all thrillers, is the need to make up what I call the “Presidential cast of characters,” that is “President Smith,” “Secretary of State Jones,” etc. If they’re peripheral characters, write ’em out, I say. Use real politicians. It worked marvelously for Frederick Forsythe in The Day of the Jackal. It could have worked here. At any rate, the real story in The Mark of the Assassin is the assassin himself. Reviewed by James Neal Webb.
Several years ago there was an actor, a former bodybuilder, who starred in some B-grade movies. While these films had made money, they really hadn’t taken his career to the next level. Then his agent sent him a script, a science fiction story about a man who is sent into the past to prevent an […]
S. left prisoners of war in Vietnam. The premise of MIAs being alive somewhere has colored the diplomacy of the U.
S. toward Vietnam and of course given fiction writers a place in which to let their imaginations run free. Patrick Davis’s debut novel is a case in point. There was a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam called Cao Dinh, the very mention of which made the top brass freeze, and others in the Pentagon react very nervously. What happened there? What fearful tragedy hides behind falsified record books? General Raymond Watkins, the Air Force Chief of Staff, has been sent to Vietnam to look around, and presumably to lend his support to diplomatic moves for recognition of that country. Upon his return, however, General Watkins is discovered dead in his quarters. He had been tortured by means common to the North Vietnamese during the war, in which a fish net was put over the victim’s skin and drawn tight until the flesh that was protruding from the net could be cut off.
Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Jensen is the officer assigned to the murder investigation, but he finds a paucity of clues. The general’s personal computer and those in his office have been fed a virus; some of the hard drives are even removed. Following the general’s final phone call from his office Colonel Jensen is led to a Vietnamese restaurant, and ultimately to the murder of one of the owners. This is a fun book to read, for just when the reader thinks he or she knows who the murder mastermind is, that particular suspect turns up dead. But Colonel Jensen plods doggedly on, pursuing the few leads he has. There are lives, reputations, and careers at stake in this mystery, and finally it becomes a test of the colonel’s loyalty to the brass in the Pentagon versus his own brand of integrity and patriotism. Make note of this fine new writer this military thriller surely won’t be his last.
Reviewed by Lloyd Armour.
Many believe that the U. S. left prisoners of war in Vietnam. The premise of MIAs being alive somewhere has colored the diplomacy of the U. S. toward Vietnam and of course given fiction writers a place in which to let their imaginations run free. Patrick Davis’s debut novel is a case in point. There […]
It’s been a decade since I wrote my first legal thriller. Like many authors, I was caught in the updraft of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. The Letter of the Law was the first novel I’d written that became a bestseller, and it changed my career. Since my first legal thriller—a story about Casey Jordan, a tough, resourceful female lawyer—was the catalyst that propelled me to a new level as a writer, my editor thought revisiting that character might prove itself again. I’ve done that with my last two books, Above the Law and now False Convictions.
As I did when I first wrote about Casey Jordan in The Letter of the Law, I went to my wife for inspiration. I needed a story that would entertain and inspire. Since my main character was a woman, I needed a woman’s perspective. But I also needed a subject rooted in the legal system, a subject that anyone could relate to, and that also carried with it the weight of life or death. My search began with a simple conversation about the law, about crime and punishment.
My wife has an uncompromising view of the justice system: if someone is guilty, he should be punished. The death penalty? Well, that’s okay, too. Some crimes are so bad they deserve the death penalty, if the person really did it.
There’s the rub.
“But how do you ever know that for certain?” I ask.
“Well,” she says, “just in the cases where you really know, like someone saw them do it or something, or if they get the DNA. Those people should never get off.”
While I agree with her ultimate goal, the lawyer in me argues about her certainty.
“What if the witness is lying?” I ask.
“DNA and a witness,” she says. “That’s proof.”
And a great setup for a thriller.
The O.J. Simpson trial first opened the public’s mind to the possibility of corrupted DNA, throwing back the curtain on the magic of science. The defense brilliantly called into question the validity of the processes and the people who give us the 13 matching loci that constitute a match with a billion-to-one certainty.
When we think about human manipulation, so many things become possible, and the switch between right and wrong is easily flipped. Of course, those with the power or the opportunity to flip that switch need motivation. For the rich and powerful, it’s often greed that motivates them and money that fuels their mission.
We regularly hear about prisoners who’ve spent 20 years or more in jail being set free. The mechanism is DNA testing where physical proof directly refutes the evidence that led to their conviction. Many times these people were unjustly convicted by witnesses who, for one reason or another, lied or were mistaken. The DNA may have been taken from the murder weapon, some matter on the victim’s clothes or person, or some other object from the scene of the crime, proving that it was someone else who committed the act instead of the convicted prisoner.
Twists and turns drive suspense novels to make the story fast-paced and hard to put down. The obvious is a story about a lawyer working hard to overturn an unjust conviction in order to free an innocent man from nearly two decades of imprisonment. We’ve seen thousands of those.
As a writer, I can turn up the heat by giving reasons why other people would want the accused to pay for the crime instead of the real criminal. And I can create a close-knit, politically charged small town where nearly everyone will present an obstacle to the lawyer because she is a mistrusted outsider. However, the real twist comes from the unexpected, from challenging people’s perceptions of reality: can a smudge of matter from 20 years ago prove guilt or innocence? And, if it can, how can we know for certain that the smudge is what someone says it is? Where did the smudge come from and how do we know?
I love that DNA can free men wrongly imprisoned for decades. I’m hungry to lock up murderers, rapists and pedophiles and throw away the keys and know that modern forensic science can help. Still, at the end of the day, contrary to my wife’s wishes—even with the power of DNA—the ultimate arbiters are imperfect humans. The guilty don’t always get the punishment they deserve and the innocent don’t always go free.
A former lawyer and pro football player, Tim Green is the author of several legal thrillers, a memoir and a children’s chapter book series. When he’s not writing, he is hosting the ABC show “Find My Family” or spending time with his wife and five children at home in upstate New York. You can find more information on his website.
It’s been a decade since I wrote my first legal thriller. Like many authors, I was caught in the updraft of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. The Letter of the Law was the first novel I’d written that became a bestseller, and it changed my career. Since my first legal thriller—a story about Casey Jordan, […]
My first novel, The Sixth Lamentation, deals with two time frames. The first presents the exploits of a group of Catholic students in Paris during the Nazi occupation of World War II. They call themselves The Round Table and smuggle Jewish children to a monastery in Burgundy. The students are betrayed, and only one person survives Agnes Aubret. The second time frame begins 50 years later. Agnes, now living in England, learns that she will soon die from a terminal illness. This terrible revelation comes on the same day that the German officer responsible for the fate of her compatriots is exposed hiding in a Gilbertine Priory. In due course a war crimes trial begins, and Agnes will either die vanquished or vindicated. The legal process flounders, however; there are secrets the participants will not reveal. Father Anselm, a monk in the community where the German officer sought refuge, is compelled to unravel the moral complexity of the past and bring an unexpected moment of redemption to Agnes before she dies.
It is perhaps a truism to state that a first novel is often a plundering of one’s past. This is certainly true of me, although the fields of memory I explored were not restricted to my own. In 1942 my mother was arrested by the Gestapo while smuggling a Jewish infant out of Amsterdam. The child was taken away and my mother was imprisoned. She survived the war; the child almost certainly did not. I had always been struck by the unimaginable antecedents to this dreadful incident: the anguish of the parents; the comprehensive nature of the Nazi project; and the need for extraordinary heroism from ordinary people in impossible circumstances. Thus, before I had any sense of the novel’s content, I pictured a group of students with their faces set against the times: a Round Table of chivalry in a world gone mad.
I moved the story to France because I thought the history of occupation and collaboration to be a powerful metaphor for the invasive presence of evil. Here was an Žpoque where cooperation and resistance were often blurred; where courageous acts were required from those who were most compromised; and where good, strong people sometimes failed despite best intentions. In many respects, it seemed to me, this was a model of human experience, writ large. And perhaps nowhere was the human confrontation with evil more starkly demonstrated than in the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 1942, when 4,051 children were separated from their parents before deportation to Auschwitz. From the outset, then, I wanted to present the agony of this history, along with the morally charged position of the bystander, whose only choice was opposition or compliance. I was as much concerned with the peculiar status of collaborators, who were sometimes in a position to influence their masters, as with resistantes, who were often powerless to intervene.
Much of my adult life has been spent as an Augustinian friar and then a barrister. Perhaps that is why I chose to explore the subject of this novel not through a re-enactment of the past, but through a present-day war crimes trial. This perspective had significant consequences: I was immediately free to explore how suffering can work its way through successive generations, such that the resolution of the past is profoundly necessary for those who were neither victims or witnesses; by using judicial procedure, the elements of the narrative are examined from an adversarial perspective, insinuating a sort of licensed scepticism that picks away at memories grown frail by the passage of time; the use of a religious context, and indeed the emphasis on the French experience, meant that the narrative had to unfold with reference to anti-Semitism in its political, theological and literary incarnations. It was my hope that all these complications personal, legal and moral could be gently touched upon in the tragic story of Agnes.
I wrote the novel after the first (and probably last) war crimes prosecution under British law and during the Irving v. Penguin libel trial. Lost retribution and Holocaust denial were thus painfully before my mind. The voices of the witnesses were fading away. All of which suggests this book is a testament of sorts, but not mine. It is in part, the handing on of someone else’s memory. A native of England, William Brodrick became an Augustinian friar at the age of 19. Leaving religious life six years later, he worked with homeless people and then became a lawyer. His first novel, The Sixth Lamentation is being published this month by Viking. Brodrick lives in Normandy, France with his wife and three children.
My first novel, The Sixth Lamentation, deals with two time frames. The first presents the exploits of a group of Catholic students in Paris during the Nazi occupation of World War II. They call themselves The Round Table and smuggle Jewish children to a monastery in Burgundy. The students are betrayed, and only one person […]
It was a leaden, wintry Sunday afternoon two years ago, and Don Davidoff and I were supposed to be brainstorming ideas for our fourth Dr. Peter Zak mystery we share the pseudonym G. H. Ephron. Instead, Don was enthusing about a new magnetic resonance imaging scanner that had recently arrived at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital where he runs an inpatient unit. This was not just any scanner. “It’s a 3.5 tesla,” he said. Teslas? I hadn’t a clue what those were. But if Don thought 3.5 of them were a lot, then I knew enough to be impressed. “What if . . . ” Don began. Obsessed with the brain since he first dissected one in graduate school, he was off, speculating. Could an up-close look at functioning brain cells reveal signs of dementia long before intellect began to noticeably decay? Don’s enthusiasm was contagious. We could use this in the book, I thought. Magnetic resonance imaging could be the backdrop for a story about a brilliant doctor whose research is driven by the tantalizing idea that dementia can be diagnosed and treated early. I began taking notes. By the end of the afternoon, we had a premise, a rough plot outline and a working title: Obsessed. During the week, I massaged the outline and e-mailed it to Don. That’s how our partnership has worked for the past eight years. We meet every Sunday, moving from general idea to broad outline to specific scenes. I bring the characters to life, create the drama and suspense, sprinkle the red herring, while Don lives, eats and breathes the issues we weave through our books. Lower-case amnesia, addiction and delusion have all turned into upper-case book titles. Obsessed, our latest, explores a range of obsessions from psychosexual stalking to obsessive hoarding to apotemnophilia (the desire to be an amputee). As in all our books, we examine what goes on in the mind and how that shapes the reality a person creates.
Our partnership is based on a 30-year friendship, and works precisely because we have virtually no overlapping skills. When we started to work together, Don was afraid I was going to make him write. It took me a while to realize that I’d been afraid he was going to want to write. That surprised me, because I’d spent decades insisting that I was not a writer.
I come from a family of formidable literary talents. My parents were Hollywood screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Carousel; Desk Set). My sisters Nora, Delia and Amy are all novelists and screenwriters. But I didn’t try my hand at the family business until about 10 years ago. That’s when a freelancer called. She wanted to write an article about me because I was, as she pointed out, “the only one who didn’t write.” I was shocked to hear myself shoot back, “If anyone’s going to write about me not writing, it’s going to be me.” Soon after that, my husband and I were having dinner with Don and his wife, Susan. Maybe it was too much wine, but by the end of the evening, Don and I had agreed to collaborate on a mystery series with a central character based loosely on Don.
“My better half,” is what Don calls Peter Zak, who is a little taller, a little younger and a little more conventionally handsome than his prototype. Like Don, a neuropsychologist, Dr. Zak runs a unit at a psychiatric hospital, and spends time in jails in four-by-four cubicles evaluating people accused of murder. That’s Don’s voice when Dr. Zak says, “A lot of people who end up accused of serious crimes are poor schnooks, in the wrong place at the wrong time, who rarely get an adequate defense.” I remember one of our earliest working sessions. It was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in late summer, and we were supposed to be coming up with an opening scene for Amnesia, the first series novel. Instead, Don was wishing he was out rowing on the Charles River. I hate boats, but I found myself mesmerized as Don described the Zen-like state of calm rowing brings him. “You’re pulling, harder and harder, until the stern clears the puddles before the oars dip again, and boat, body and mind become one,” he said. I didn’t know if the stern was the front or the back of the boat, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by “puddles,” but I was absolutely certain that our character was going to be a rower. I began taking notes.
Hallie Ephron and her coauthor, Dr. Don Davidoff, both live and work in Massachusetts. Their fifth novel, Obsessed (St. Martin’s, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0312305311), released under the pen name G.H. Ephron, goes on sale this month.
It was a leaden, wintry Sunday afternoon two years ago, and Don Davidoff and I were supposed to be brainstorming ideas for our fourth Dr. Peter Zak mystery we share the pseudonym G. H. Ephron. Instead, Don was enthusing about a new magnetic resonance imaging scanner that had recently arrived at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric […]
Where do the people in books come from? Authors are often asked this question, and they often find difficulty in answering. As the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels, I am often asked how it is that I have ended up writing about a woman who lives far away in Botswana, when I am a man living at the other end of the world. This strikes people as rather strange, and I suppose that in a sense it is.
I decided to write about a woman from Botswana some years ago, when I witnessed the remarkable sight of a woman chasing a chicken about the yard in a Botswana village. The chicken came off second best, and was duly dispatched to provide the next day's lunch. But what remained in my mind was the cheerfulness of the woman who performed this rather everyday task. And I thought that one day, I might write about a woman who was competent and resourceful and who was born in that particular village.
Years passed before I sat down to write a story about just such a woman. My wife and I were spending some time in the south of France. I sat down at the desk in the house in which we were staying and wrote a short story about a woman called Precious Ramotswe, who inherits cattle from her father and sells them. She decides to set up a small detective agency with the proceeds, rather than to establish a more mundane and safer business. I enjoyed writing this short story, and I found that I liked the character I had created. At the end of the story, it occurred to me that I should write further stories about this woman, and I did so. These became a book and the book became a series. These books then completely changed my life.
I had not intended to write a mystery series, and indeed there is comparatively little mystery in these books. They are really the story of one woman, Precious Ramotswe, and of those who play a part in her life her fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni; her assistant, Mma. Makutsi; and her friend, the matron of an orphan farm, Mma. Potokwani. They are the sorts of people who might escape notice, except for one thing: they are all, in their various ways, good people.
I decided to write books about good people for a set of very particular reasons. I think that there are so many books which stress the dysfunctional in life, that deal with conflict and tragedy. In my books, everybody behaves rather well towards one another. They are polite people they use courteous language, they understand and forgive, they are kind. And why not? Why should we not have books about people like that? People have said to me that I am a Utopian novelist. Some people suggest that there cannot be people like this, that Precious Ramotswe cannot exist. I disagree! Botswana is a remarkable country which has made a great success of itself. It is has shown that countries in Africa can be well run and prosperous. And what is more, there are plenty of people in African countries who are leading profoundly decent lives, often in conditions of some difficulty. I hope that my books show that this is all possible. And if these books are, as some people have suggested, a love letter to a country, then I am proud to sign my name to that love letter.
The fifth book in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, has just been published in the United States. I have finished work on the manuscript of the sixth, which will be published next year. With each visit I make to the world of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the more I become attached to the characters and involved in their lives. They are very real to me, as I suppose must be inevitable if one is writing a series of this nature. So I hear their voices. Mma. Ramotswe, too, is at my elbow, giving me occasional pieces of advice. And if she were to walk in the door tomorrow, I know that we would sit down together and have a cup of her favorite bush tea. And then we might go for a walk, and look out over that landscape that she loves so much, with its wide plains and its thorn trees, and its great, echoing empty sky.
Alexander McCall Smith was born in Africa and currently lives in Scotland, where he teaches medical law at Edinburgh University. His latest book is The Full Cupboard of Life, the fifth installment in the best-selling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.
Where do the people in books come from? Authors are often asked this question, and they often find difficulty in answering. As the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels, I am often asked how it is that I have ended up writing about a woman who lives far away in […]
Dashiell Hammett wrote fiction for only 12 years, but in addition to four novels he produced hundreds of short stories for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and mainstream periodicals like Collier’s and The American. Twenty of these stories, long unavailable, are collected in Nightmare Town.
Overall these are not Hammett’s best stories, but there is much to recommend them, not least of all Hammett’s often imitated but rarely equaled prose style, marked by its oddly poetic cynicism. Crisp dialogue, peppered with the street argot of the ’20s, keep the stories moving along at a good clip. Corruption, duplicity, and deception are rife.
Some of the more enjoyable selections are novella-length, a form that was common to the pulps and at which Hammett excelled. Zigzags of Treachery has all of the ingenious plot twists that a fan of The Maltese Falcon might crave. In the crafty whodunit The Assistant Murderer, Hammett breaks with tradition by substituting a conspicuously ugly detective for the usually rakish hero we expect in the genre. The title novella, Nightmare Town, is pure pulp fiction, a hyperbolic yarn about a town in which every single citizen is corrupt.
Three of the shorter stories feature Sam Spade, the consummate hard-boiled detective from The Maltese Falcon. One of Hammett’s enduring protagonists, the Continental Op, appears in seven. Among the more interesting pieces is The First Thin Man, an early, unfinished draft of Hammett’s final masterwork. Written in 1930, before he moved to Hollywood and met Lillian Hellman, this version of the story bears little resemblance to the published 1934 novel. The plot is substantially different, most significantly in the absence of Nick and Nora Charles, the hard-drinking, clever-talking crime solvers modeled on Hammett and Hellman.
There are also a few less typical stories in the book that stray a bit from Hammett’s usual turf. For example, in A Man Named Thin, the clever detective moonlights as a poet, of all things. But maybe that’s not really so strange. Hammett, after all, had been a detective before becoming a poet of sorts a poet of the gritty, rogue-filled, crooked streets he knew and wrote about so well.
Robert Weibezahl’s compilation of mystery-related recipes, A Taste of Murder, has just been published by Dell.
Dashiell Hammett wrote fiction for only 12 years, but in addition to four novels he produced hundreds of short stories for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and mainstream periodicals like Collier’s and The American. Twenty of these stories, long unavailable, are collected in Nightmare Town. Overall these are not Hammett’s best stories, but there […]
Perhaps no one is more well known or respected as a modern day master of crime fiction than Robert B. Parker. Like Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, Parker has mastered the art of the hardboiled detective novel. He is best known for his tough but sensitive Boston private investigator Spenser. He has written over 20 Spenser novels, which spawned the 1980s television show Spenser: For Hire. With his latest book, Family Honor, Parker introduces an entirely new character a female P.
I. named Sunny Randall.
Sunny is a complex character: a former cop, college graduate, divorcee, and aspiring painter. Sunny is hired by a wealthy family to discreetly locate their daughter, who has run away. Tracking down the runaway Millicent does not prove to be difficult, but deciding what to do with her does. It appears that Millie’s problems are far greater than running away, and Sunny is now caught in the middle.
Unsure of what to do with Millie, Sunny finds herself acting as both bodyguard and surrogate mother, and occasionally as a moving target. It seems that a certain group of mobsters is also looking for Millie, and they have no problem taking out one female detective to get her. Fortunately Sunny is not without resources. Her ex-husband, Richie, is himself the son of a mobster, and her best friend, Spike, is an ominously dangerous gay man. With their help, Sunny delves into the mystery of why everyone wants Millie, all the while trying to teach her how to be a strong, independent woman.
Family Honor introduces what may be an ongoing series. Parker has created a number of engaging and well-thought-out characters in Sunny, Richie, and Spike. His writing style is short and to the point with very little extraneous exposition. And as with his other novels, the true joy of reading Parker is the stellar dialog. He writes the way people speak. There are no long speeches, no overly emotional outbursts; he writes it like it is. So intelligent and cutting are Sunny’s comments and come-backs, you’ll find yourself wishing you were as quick on your feet.
Family Honor is an enjoyable book that focuses more on the characters and their development than it does on the mystery surrounding them. While the mystery is interesting, it serves merely as a catalyst to propel the characters through the story. You may begin Family Honor for the story line, but you’ll finish it for Sunny Randall.
Wes Breazeale grew up in Robert B. Parker’s turf and now does research for a college in Oregon.
Perhaps no one is more well known or respected as a modern day master of crime fiction than Robert B. Parker. Like Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, Parker has mastered the art of the hardboiled detective novel. He is best known for his tough but sensitive Boston private investigator Spenser. He has written over 20 […]
Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC’s daytime drama “One Life to Live” while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn’t want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or a journal. Besides, there was already more than enough fiction for me to imagine in the world of “One Life” itself five hours of drama a week, 52 weeks a year of interlaced, multigenerational plots for a whole town full of people of every social and psychological ilk. That narrative range and abundance of character was what had drawn me, as a novelist, to writing soap opera. I loved its capacious canvas and its generic receptivity. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Hyperion’s suggestion, and about how soap opera might lend itself to the idea not of novelizing the show, but of writing a novel on the show. That was the genesis of The Killing Club.
We would watch a fictional character create a piece of fiction, a mystery novel, as a storyline on “One Life to Live.” We would watch the novel as it was being planned, and as it was written, and read, and finally published. The novel was “written” by Marcie Walsh (wonderfully played by the actress Kathy Briar), a smart, spunky young woman who attended “Llanview University” and worked as the receptionist at the Llanview police station. For her fiction, she drew upon as writers do people and events in her “real” life: the detectives and lawyers with whom she worked and the crimes she saw being investigated around her. As she caught the mystery bug, she read other mysteries (including one of mine) and she tried (sometimes with comic, sometimes with dangerous results) to solve crimes herself. Finally, encouraged by her doctor boyfriend and her crew of college friends, she decided to write her own book. The Killing Club is that novel. The plot evolved from an idea for a movie that my colleague at “One Life,” Josh Griffith, and I had had about a group of misfits in high school who have a club in which they imagine ingenious ways to murder their “enemies.” Then, 10 years later, one of the club members is murdered in just such a bizarre way. Then another club member dies. Then another. Who is killing the Killing Club? And why? On the show, a friend of Marcie’s sent the manuscript to Michael Malone, the novelist, a “professor at Llanview University.” Mr. Malone liked what he saw of Marcie’s book and decided to help her with it and then to find her a publisher. He sent the novel to Hyperion Books. They accepted it. Excitedly Marcie traveled to New York to meet Gretchen Young, who is the real editor of the real book, just as Chip Kidd, whom she was also thrilled to meet, is the real cover designer. The Killing Club was “published” on the show at the same time that it was published in “real life” mid-February. In the future, mysterious goings-on will happen in Marcie’s life that eerily reflect the plot of the novel. The creation of the novel, The Killing Club, over the past year on “One Life” has been, then, the creation of a fiction about a fiction inside a fiction. But it is also a “real” novel. In that regard, for me the challenge was, as always, the narrative voice. What sort of narrator would Marcie Walsh “create”? The voice turned out to be that of Jamie Ferrara, a young wisecracking homicide detective in the small town of Gloria, New Jersey, the working-class daughter of an Italian-American cop, and herself one of the founders of the Killing Club.
People ask me, is this a Marcie Walsh book or a Michael Malone book? I would answer that my books are Michael Malone books, but each evolves from the characters who inhabit it. The minute I hear the voice of a narrator, from word one of page one of a story, I am listening to that character’s voice. The narrator of Handling Sin is very different from that of The Last Noel, and Jamie Ferrara is very different from the Southern detective Cuddy Mangum in my Hillston novels. But they are all, I trust, equally at home in the landscape of my fiction.
Acclaimed novelist Michael Malone published his first book in 1975 and went on to write such Southern comic classics as Handling Sin. He has also written extensively for television, including two stints as head writer for the soap opera “One Life to Live.” In his latest book, The Killing Club, Malone combines both careers with fascinating and spine-tingling results.
Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC’s daytime drama “One Life to Live” while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn’t want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or a journal. Besides, there was already more than enough fiction […]
Tom Corcoran knows Key West intimately, from its unforgettable sunsets to the smell of conch stew. He writes in the manner of the Keys’ laid-back generation and with the realism of its low-tide smells. He surely belongs on the must read list of those who like a good mystery excellently told.
In Corcoran’s new novel, Gumbo Limbo, Alex Rutledge is a smooth-talking freelance photographer who sometimes does crime scene work for the police in Key West, just to keep abreast of local matters. Rutledge owns a home there and has settled in for a short vacation when he is jolted by a telephone call from an old Navy friend, Zack Cahill, demanding that Alex join him at a neighborhood bar. When Alex shows up minutes later, Zack is gone. He left his Rolex watch with the waitress to guarantee payment on a few drinks, but he is nowhere to be found. He is not listed at any of the hotels or on the passenger list of any recently docked cruise ship.
While Alex searches, there is a murder in the tourist district, a ransacked apartment in the residential sector, and some very strange happenings elsewhere. Alex has a chance encounter with Abby Womack, Zack’s ex-mistress, which leads him to wonder if Zack’s disappearance is linked to these unusual happenings.
Soon Abby is shot and slightly wounded. To complicate matters even more, Zack’s wife Claire shows up. She has no clue to Zack’s whereabouts, but then throws Alex a curve ball by having a sunbathing session with the bandaged Abby at his house. In the next two days Alex will be severely tested in courage and loyalty as he attempts to follow the leads to the disappearance of Zack. One lead takes him to New Orleans and the meeting with some sinister hoodlums. While there he is badly beaten and can barely walk when he returns to Key West. He has a back ache but is not much closer to the truth about Zack.
Gradually, with the help of a cast of characters not seen this side of the Florida Keys, Alex unravels a 20-year-old mystery of a smuggling deal gone wrong and its bloody effect on so many people. Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor.
Tom Corcoran knows Key West intimately, from its unforgettable sunsets to the smell of conch stew. He writes in the manner of the Keys’ laid-back generation and with the realism of its low-tide smells. He surely belongs on the must read list of those who like a good mystery excellently told. In Corcoran’s new novel, […]
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Praised by horrormeister Stephen King, Paul Tremblay’s shocking new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is an often graphic account of one family’s ordeal when their vacation is shattered in a cult-like home invasion. We asked Tremblay about the book’s origins, its dark path and his inner fears that helped forge the novel.
Julia Kelly’s first historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, takes readers into Winston Churchill’s secret underground headquarters during World War II.
