The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson

Posted on April 3, 2023 by pagesofjulia

On a day that I claimed to be overwhelmed with the student papers I had to grade, I also managed to wake up and immediately begin this book… and then stay up til midnight finishing its nearly 400 pages in the same day. I loved Truly Devious and was even more entranced by The Vanishing Stair, which annoyed me with a cliffhanger the night before and sent me directly into this one, book three. My main goal today is not to read a whole book by accident when I’m supposed to be working.

The Hand on the Wall is book three of three in the Truly Devious series – but the Stevie Bell series continues for two more books, a bit confusingly. The Truly Devious murders themselves (aka the crime of the century, the murder/kidnapping at Ellingham Academy in the 1930s) are wrapped up in this book, but newly minted detective hero Stevie apparently continues on. (I haven’t read book four yet! I’m staying strong.) This installment sees the advancing of Stevie’s investigations and her modest decline in terms of personal hygiene and nutrition; the beginning of real fears for her personal safety and/or that Ellingham may indeed be cursed; the continuing friendship and alliance with Security Larry (this is a relationship I have really enjoyed in two books now); and the bumpy evolution of Stevie’s match with the troubled David. I said in my last review that getting to know him a bit better would yield more sympathies, and we do get that here. I still find him a bit obnoxious and don’t appreciate his treatment of Stevie, but they’re making progress.

Stevie grows in her relationships with others. A bit weirdly, the amazing Janelle continues to be identified as Stevie’s best friend, but our hero actually spends more time talking with and confides more in Nate, a hilariously Eeyore-like blocked writer. Janelle is a great friend, but involved in her own love match (that’s going more smoothly than Stevie’s), and it’s actually Nate who ends up fulfilling a day-to-day best-friends role. We have a new friend as well, Mudge, who is loveable if a bit of a cariaciture: he’s here to exhibit exactly how drolly eccentric Ellingham students can be.

Mudge was Stevie Bell’s lab partner–a six-foot-something death-metalhead who wore purple-colored contacts with snake pupils and a black hoodie weighed down with fifty Disney pins, including some very rare ones that he would show off and explain to Stevie as they dissected cows’ eyes and other terrible things for the purposes of education. Mudge loved Disney more than anyone Stevie had ever met and had dreams of being an animatronic Imagineer. Ellingham Academy was the kind of place where Mudges were welcomed and understood.

Security Larry, mentioned above, is a former police detective and becomes a mentor to Stevie in her own work, both cautioning and trying to enforce the rules upon her and gradually, increasingly, viewing her as a peer. He’s great. Several other faculty members develop as well. I very much related to poor Dr. Quinn trying to convince her students to do the readings before class.

I love Stevie more and more. She “would rather eat bees than share her tender inner being with anyone else–she didn’t even want to share it with herself.” She undergoes an actual epiphany (pages 108-109) when she realizes that her weird, awkward self is just a perfectly fine version of a human, and that her own unique combination of qualities is precisely what’s gotten her where she is in life; this is a passage I would like to share with everyone I know, but especially young people and especially girls just making their way and finding themselves. I would follow this protagonist anywhere.

As befits the final book in a trilogy, this one ends on a note of triumph, closure, and hope – perhaps a bit neatly tied up, in fact, but I know there’s another Stevie Bell book to follow. Again, for the sake of my sleep I’m taking a day or two off, but expect more any time now. Maureen Johnson is my new favorite. Thanks again, Liz.

Rating: 9 moose.

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The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson

Posted on March 31, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Book two of the Truly Devious series flew by. I stayed up late to finish this one and it ended on a serious cliffhanger, so look for my review of book three to follow this one immediately.

At the close of Truly Devious (for which there are mild-to-moderate spoilers here), The Vanishing Stair opens with Stevie glumly returned home to her parents’ house and her public high school. The gamechanger comes quickly in the form of the despicable Senator Edward King, her parents’ hero and employer and (surprise) the father of her love interest from Ellingham Academy. King has arranged everything for Stevie to return to Ellingham – funding the trip, heightening security following a student’s mysterious death, and convincing her parents of her safety. He wants Stevie, in return, to keep an eye on his wayward son David, with whom Stevie’s not on particularly good terms anyway. She’s thrilled to be back at the school where she feels stimulated: with her friends Nate and Janelle again, working on her life’s greatest passion, the solving of the 1930s Ellingham murders, and yea, David. Quickly a second body is added to the modern Ellingham count. Stevie gains a new advisor, an eccentric academic from the local (Burlington, Vermont) university with a drinking problem and a very nice nephew. David’s moods and attitude toward Stevie continue to swing wildly, hot to cold to nuclear.

The best thing about these books is Stevie herself. She’s socially awkward but mostly doesn’t care; she’s occasionally bothered by her inability to fit in back in the ‘normal’ world (of which Ellingham is not part), but only when she remembers. Despite sometimes showing signs of a standard teenager’s low self-esteem, she generally carries on as herself, unbothered. I like her. She’s an extremely focused detective – perhaps to the point of mild self-neglect, but that’s part of a long tradition of detective types in fiction (a fact she’s aware of). Johnson’s prose is downright funny: after camping out overnight in the school’s yoga studio, Stevie “felt a waffle pattern of yoga blanket on the right side of her face and the faint smell of lavender and patchouli permeating her being. It was like she had been run over by a boulder made of hippies.” Our young hero can be a little bumbling and dense – just like a teenager, no matter how smart. I have a little less patience for David’s antics, perhaps in part because he’s a rich boy? but mostly, I think, because we don’t have the close third person window into his interior self that we have into Stevie’s. He’s a suffering kid, too, and I think if we got inside his head it would be just as sympathetic as hers.

The mystery plot remains compelling: this book focuses in on the riddle that Albert Ellingham left behind on his final day, which the title of this book nods to. We’re learning things, about the historic murders as well as the modern suspicious deaths, but not the big final thing we want to know. Again: this one ends on a mad cliffhanger; I was actually a little peeved, and even more relieved that I already had book three ready and waiting. I recommend you do the same.

Liz was (as ever) 100% correct about this one. I’m pretty sure she said she ripped through the whole series, as I am clearly going to do as well.

These books are recognizably YA in a few ways: teenaged protagonists, a gentle handling of gore, violence, and sexual content, and humor. But the plotting is not too simplified for adult readers to enjoy, and a strong female lead who is still in her teens appeals to this reader at any age. I’m a fan.

Rating: 8 cats.

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The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer

Posted on March 27, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A fracturing family in Brooklyn with roots in Jamaica and Trinidad navigates love and loss in this debut novel influenced by Caribbean folktales and the power of stories.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is Soraya Palmer’s first novel, a phantasmagoric interweaving of family and folktale. Readers first meet two sisters, Sasha and Zora, when they are young girls in Brooklyn’s Flatbush, dealing with the household complexities of their father Nigel’s violence and infidelity and their mother Beatrice’s headaches and distance. Soon this timeline meanders to visit Nigel and Beatrice as children in Jamaica and Trinidad, respectively, and then as a young couple. These individual and family histories blend with folktales of Anansi (spider, god, man, woman, trickster storyteller), demons and exorcisms. The Rolling Calf haunts butchers, and Mama Dglo is the protector and mother of the ocean and “all things water,” among other mythical tales. The narrator of these time-jumping tales, with the repeating refrain “Let me tell you a story,” is mysterious, driven by motivations not always clear nor necessarily reliable–but always concerned with the power of storytelling itself: “You see I am what they call Your Faithful Narrator, found in places the West calls fairy tales, what men call gossip, what children call magic.” Small actions can be revolutionary: “They realize there is nothing more dangerous than a story with an owner that no one can touch.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, Sasha discovers chest binding as she navigates gender and sexuality. Zora studies her book of Anansi stories and hones her craft (that of her namesake) in her diary. As much as the sisters love each other, their respective self-explorations push them apart. In different ways, Nigel and Beatrice separate but remain intertwined. Caribbean and West African folktales continue to influence each of these threads until they come together again in Trinidad with a 106-year-old grandmother, several reunions, an ending and a new beginning. None of these characters is entirely innocent or faultless, but they are finely drawn with compassion and compelling, colorful pasts. Love and family contain both beauty and pain in this telling.

Palmer imbues her novel with both snappy pacing and deep feeling in a lovely prose voice with music and poetry behind it. The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter has big things to say about sisterhood and family; race, sexuality and class; life and death; and above all, the power of storytelling. “Why do we remember some stories more than others? And what happens to the ones that we forget? Let me tell you a story.” The result is wide-ranging and thought-provoking–but also an immersive and sumptuous read. Palmer shines.

This review originally ran in the March 3, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Apple J’s.

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The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on March 24, 2023 by pagesofjulia

It’s getting hard to keep track of (let alone rank) the Jemisin novels I’ve read, but this feels like one of the best. I was absorbed by The Killing Moon (book one in this duology), but this feels better still. We’ve returned to the same world, where Hananja is the most revered Goddess in Gujaareh. We’ve kept the systems – for example, Hananja’s worshippers following the four Paths to become Sharers, Teachers, Sentinels and Gatherers; but now, ten years after the action of book one, Kisua rules Gujaareh as an occupying force. Sunandi, who we know from book one, returns as Kisuati governess of Gujaareh; despite her role as occupier, she retains a certain sympathy and understanding for those she rules over, and an uneasy near-friendhip with the Gatherer Nijiri (also returning from the earlier book). Our protagonist is new: Hanani is a Sharer-Apprentice, the first woman to serve on any of the four Paths (the Sisters are an unofficial fifth route of service, but not as respected or formalized in the same way on the Council). Hanani experiences the prejudices and underestimation you would expect as the first woman in her world, but she soldiers on, so to speak.

Both within the city of Gujaareh and outside of it, revolution is brewing. The occupiers’ forces have begun to step out of line, the locals have begun to chafe, uppercaste nobility are angling for advantages, and a would-be prince of the Sunset Lineage has surfaced, living with the nomadic and so-called barbarian Banbarra tribes of the desert. Meanwhile, a nightmare plague (literally – it is spread, and kills, in dreams) is racing through the city, even infiltrating the Hetawa (Hananja’s church). In an unlikely turn, Sharer-Apprentice Hanani is given an opportunity to prove herself through a most difficult trial, which lands her in the desert, in a canyon full of Banbarra tents, and in the company of Wanahomen, heir of the Sunset Lineage.

Wana is a prickly one, and despite the lingering traces of Hananja’s Law and Wisdom in his memory and his heart, he has been with the Banbarra long enough to be quite a cultural leap away from Hanani’s devout obedience to her faith. (Hint: the “barbarians” are in some ways the more enlightened.) The two are bound together by a common goal to save Gujaareh, and soon by shared traumas and a bit of something like chemistry to boot. They will struggle sometimes against each other but often together, both learning about themselves and from the other. They grow into stronger versions of themselves in hopes of saving their shared homeland.

Wana is an interesting and eventually sympathetic (although never perfect) character, but Hanani is the star, followed by other women she meets along the way, including Wana’s mother and his former lover, a really fun one who helps outfit Hanani with Banbarra clothing, ornamentation, wealth and customs. Hanani fears that as the first and only woman in her line of work, any mistake she makes will reflect on her entire gender (isn’t that familiar), but eventually learns that this also means she gets to chart a course no one’s ever known. I love what she does with that.

Reading these two books in proper sequence is a must, and familiarity with the world of the first absolutely enriches the second. This was one of the deepest, richest pieces of fantasy reading I’ve done lately. Only wish there were more.

Rating: 8 polished rubies.

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Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

Posted on March 20, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Yet another gem from Liz, Truly Devious is a positively delightful piece of fun (that also involves murder). It’s for young adults, but easily well-written enough, and sufficiently funny and clever on a few levels, to please adults (like Liz & me).

There are two timelines, although we spend the bulk of the book in one of them. First, in 1935, a teenaged genius is lucky enough to be plucked out of her New York City public school to attend a special new educational experiment in the mountains of Vermont: Albert Ellingham, major mogul, has established the Ellingham Academy to let kids like Dottie pursue the joys of learning in their own ways. Unluckily, a year later, Dottie is murdered at the idyllic Academy, apparently a bystander in a plot to kidnap for ransom Albert Ellingham’s wife and daughter. Readers get a glimpse of Dottie’s final moments, but her assailant is unnamed, undescribed, and genderless.

Much later, more or less in contemporary times (I didn’t notice a year for this timeline?), another teenaged girl is also delighted to be admitted to Ellingham, not despite but because of its murderous history. Stevie Bell, of Pittsburgh, is crime-obsessed: she hopes to become a detective, ideally for the FBI, and the Ellingham Academy murders are her dearest project. The remains of Iris Ellingham (Albert’s wife) were found as well as Dottie’s, but the body of young Alice Ellingham, aged four at the time of her disappearance, has never been found; technically Alice is Stevie’s host and educational benefactor in absentia. Socially awkward Stevie arrives at Ellingham determined to distance herself from her parents (who love her but do come off rather obnoxious, especially with their unfortunate political leanings), begin a new chapter in her life, maybe finally make some friends, and – most importantly – solve the biggest best crime she knows. Each of these goals will turn out to be ambitious, but Stevie is both smart and scrappy. She easily pairs up with Janelle (who hails from Chicago and excels at building machines and gadgets) and establishes a harder-won friendship with even more socially awkward Nate (a published and thoroughly writer’s-blocked novelist). Their dormmate Ellie is a free-wheeling artist who both impresses Stevie and makes her nervous; there is also a famous and spectacularly handsome filmmaker/actor (who however seems not very smart), and a mysterious boy named David who both attracts and repels Stevie.

While we check back in with 1936 (investigation, trial of an apparent straw man, Ellingham’s grief), the modern timeline dominates. Stevie is both a fine amateur detective (in a long literary tradition) and a teenaged girl, grappling with hormones, friendships, school, the sandpaper grip of her parents, and other challenges that will be familiar to all readers, not just those with true crime obsessions and unusual educational settings. By nature of having a female lead, Truly Devious involves some girl-empowerment messaging, but like its handling of nonbinary genders and queer characters, this messaging is simply built into the story, not A Point To Be Made.

Was this was pretty was?
Who knew. This was what a Stevie was, anyway.

Stevie and her friends are lovable above all; also smart, bumbling, funny, painfully awkward, and pleasingly eccentric. There is everything to enjoy.

I finished this book having just ordered book two but it wasn’t here yet and I felt a real sense of loss. I expect to burn right through books two through five, so look out for more Stevie Bell.

Rating: 8 poles.

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The New One by Evie Green

Posted on March 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Artificial intelligence, family troubles, love and aspiration combine for a delightfully suspenseful novel of secrets and betrayal.

In The New One, Evie Green (We Hear Voices) takes readers on a propulsive journey through grief, loss and secrets kept by those we love. This compelling novel will have readers up all night, following the tribulations of a struggling family offered a great gift–or possibly a curse.

Scarlett, the Trelawneys’ daughter, was a perfect angel–brilliant, beautiful, sweet, gifted–until she turned 13. She then becomes a terror: lying, staying out late at night, neglecting her schoolwork. “They had become a shouty family,” Green writes. “They all yelled at one another every day, and [Tamsyn] had no idea how to stop.” In near-future Cornwall, Scarlett’s parents, Tamsyn and Ed, are barely surviving in their humble camper: Ed works nights, and Tamsyn is up early mornings, “a peasant working in fields.” They subsist on stolen cauliflowers and rarely speak to each other (without shouting). Then tragedy strikes: Scarlett is left lying in a hospital bed in a coma, and Tamsyn fears she’ll never see her daughter conscious again. Just as their insurance runs out, they receive an offer that seems a mix of magic, miracle and horror: while a company called VitaNova rebuilds their daughter, the comatose Scarlett will receive the finest medical care, and her parents will be granted a fully funded fresh start in Geneva, Switzerland. Scarlett, now named Sophie (her middle name), is part human clone and part AI. She shares Scarlett’s memories and gifts, although with the traumatic past year erased, and has been augmented with a better knowledge of French and physics–and a perfect, innocent love for her parents.

Most of the story is told from Tamsyn’s point of view, with brief ventures into the perspectives of the other members of her family. Tamsyn is unsure of her manufactured daughter: this new one is so like her darling Scarlett that she’s impossible not to love. But Tamsyn grasps what Ed seems not to: their real, true, original daughter still lies unconscious, and every bond with Sophie represents a small betrayal.

The New One‘s creepy Stepford atmosphere is not to be underestimated. Readers can see what even Tamsyn cannot: Sophie understands more than she seems to, and her best interests and Scarlett’s may not align. Ed is keeping secrets. Geneva is a bit too perfect. Green’s (aka British author Emily Barr) prose is compulsively readable, her characters disarming and capable of great mystery. The New One is deliciously disturbing, engrossing and surprising at its every turn. This not-to-be-missed novel of family dynamics and what it really means to be human and to love is both pleasurably escapist and thought-provoking.

This review originally ran in the February 23, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 DVDs.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: S. A. Cosby

Posted on March 13, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of All the Sinners Bleed, here’s S. A. Cosby: The Light in the End.

S.A. Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. His fourth novel, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books, June 6, 2023), introduces Sheriff Titus Crown, who has returned to his Southern hometown and is out to right some wrongs from the inside. When not writing, Cosby is an avid hiker and chess player.

Is Sheriff Titus Crown a hero?

S. A. Cosby

S. A. Cosby (Sam Sauter Photography)

He is, but like all heroes, he’s flawed. Flawless heroes are boring. It’s the reason they had to give Superman kryptonite. A perfect hero is aesthetically something to aspire to, but existentially it’s a bit of a dud. It makes the hero stronger that they’re able to overcome those flaws and still do the right thing.

How well does he fit the classic loner noir detective model?

He is a classic noir detective–even though he’s the elected sheriff, he has more in common with Philip Marlowe than with Wyatt Earp. But he has a strong support system that a lot of those classic heroes didn’t have. He has his dad, his brother–I really love their relationship–his girlfriend and some of his deputies. Even though he’s their boss, he does respect and lean on them. But at the end of the day, he is the lone man standing up for what’s right. He’s the one that has to face the devil, eventually, by himself, and that’s by design. I’m fascinated with what somebody does when they’re faced with a life-changing moment. How do they stand up? And it’s most interesting to me when they stand up in those moments alone. You know, character is what you do when no one is looking. I wanted to firmly put him in that situation.

How important is a character’s backstory?

Incredibly important. When I create characters, I do their full biographies, and a lot of the time none of that makes it into the book. I create long documents about their childhood, their past, their likes and dislikes, intrinsic quirks. Even things that will never be revealed completely still influence the character’s arc, their decisions, their decision-making process. You don’t need to know everything about Titus, but you need to know that the things that have happened to him have shaped him, have defined his morals and his idealism, and his small bit of nihilism.

Titus is part of that tradition of the lone wolf, but he’s also very much in the tradition of the local boy made good. Charon County is so much a part of who he is, whether he’s in the FBI or, now, the sheriff. There is a proprietary sense about him. He cares about this place, and he knows some of the people–most of the people–don’t particularly care for him because he’s the sheriff, but he still feels protective of this place. The roots of Charon are so deep in his psyche.

What makes for a compelling villain or protagonist?

Your protagonist is only as good as your villain. You need a villain that matches the protagonist in drive and intellectually, but also personality-wise. Eminem and Kid Rock were both coming up in Detroit at the same time as rappers, and people would ask him why he would never battle Kid Rock. And he said, because beating him wouldn’t have meant anything, because I don’t respect his skill. He didn’t see him as a worthy opponent. For Titus, I wanted the villain that he has to face to be a genuine threat, not just physically but intellectually, because I wanted his triumph to mean something.

When readers get to the end of the book, they’ll realize that Titus understands some of what the villain has gone through. That creates a pretty interesting dynamic, to show the differences between these two characters. There are elements in their background that are similar, but whereas Titus went the way of wanting to protect people and not giving in to the pain of his past, the villain chose another route.

How important is place to this narrative?

Place is important in all my stories, but I think it’s the most important aspect of this story. In my previous books I’ve written about place as a more general, macro idea. I’ve written about THE SOUTH, all capital letters, what that entails and what that means. I’ve spoken ad nauseum about how proud I am to be from the South but at the same time how much I recognize the flaws that are here. As an artist, I think it’s my duty to examine that. With this book I really wanted to delve into the micro of that, and what’s it’s like in a town like Charon, which has a deep history. It has this sort of mythic quality to it. The citizens experience it in totally different ways. The white citizens experience it differently than the Black citizens. The young citizens experience it differently than the older folks. This town can have a multiplicity of definitions based on who you are and what your background is. I think place gives the story its weight. Charon County is a secondary protagonist and antagonist in the book.

Is this a novel about race?

In Southern fiction four things will always come up: race, class, sex and religion. Those are the four pillars of Southern gothic fiction. All are represented to various degrees in All the Sinners Bleed. As an African American person, I’m always going to write about race, because race is always a part of the conversation for me. People ask, why do you have to bring up race? I didn’t bring it up. This country brought it up; my life brings it up. Race is important, because Titus is a Black man, the first Black sheriff in this town. But religion is also on the forefront, maybe even more so, because in the rural South, there is an incredible hypocrisy that comes up with religion. Small towns with 25, 30 churches talk about Christianity as a concept but not as a practice. Flannery O’Conner said she doesn’t believe the South is Christ-centered, but Christ-haunted. And I believe that’s emblematic of the hypocrisy of the modern Christian evangelical movement, that you purport to love your sisters and brothers in Christ, but you vote against helping people, you vote against empathy. You live in a world where you thump a Bible and worry about the lives of children, so to speak, but once those children are out of the womb you could not care less about them. I wanted to talk about all of that. Religion can be a hammer to break down doors or it can be a cudgel to beat you down, and I think it’s represented in both ways in the book.

Is it difficult or draining to write bleak stories? Or is there catharsis there?

It’s never as draining as you might think. I’m a pessimistic optimist; I write these bleak characters in these bleak situations, but my characters triumph in the end. Not without some difficulty, some wounds and some scars, but they triumph. I was raised Southern Baptist, and I have this Old Testament philosophy that “I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken,” to quote Titus’s father. I write these really dark, morally complex characters and situations because I want the good guys to win, because that doesn’t really happen in real life. If it’s going to happen anywhere, it should happen in my book; I’m the one writing it. So as dark as my characters and their situations can be, they come through with the light in the end.

This interview originally ran on February 13, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

Posted on March 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on February 13, 2023.

From S.A. Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed is a lushly dark mystery set in fictional Charon County in Southeastern Virginia and starring a Black sheriff in a town that’s not at all sure it’s ready for one. Recently elected Sheriff Titus Crown is out to right some wrongs from the inside: police corruption, racism and profiling, law enforcers living above the law. He’s also dodging a few traumas of his own. Having come home to Charon County means he gets to live with and help his aging father, but it also means he’s reminded of his beloved late mother. His brother lives in town but rarely comes around. Titus has a local girlfriend who’s very sweet and good for him, but sort of unremarkable; he has a sense he should love her more. He’s haunted by the events that ended his FBI career in Indiana. Running a small staff of deputies in a small Southern town has its own challenges, mostly manageable ones; he hopes to redeem himself in this way from wrongs only hinted at.

But then there’s a call about an active gunman at the high school in town. In minutes, Titus is looking at a popular teacher of decades shot to death in his classroom, and a young Black man killed by deputies while the school–and via their cell phone videos, the entire Internet–watched. Before Latrell Macdonald died, “with a wolf’s snout in his left hand and cradling a .30-30 like a newborn in the crook of his right arm,” he spoke of crimes that make Titus’s blood run cold. The ensuing investigation will crack Charon County wide open, and challenge to the core Titus’s plans to clean up his hometown and make amends for things that happened in Indiana.

Titus is no investigative slouch. “His instructors at the Academy had their own version of String Theory. The way they explained it, there were invisible strings that vibrated unseen in the liminal spaces between sunrise and secrets, between rumor, shadows, and lies. Strings that pulled all this together. All you had to do was find the seam and unravel it. Or rip it apart.” His years with the Bureau and training under his friend and mentor there give him an edge on profiling and pursuing an enemy who seems determined to toy with him. He finds the remains of badly tortured and murdered Black boys and girls; as he investigates, the body count only rises. An old girlfriend from his FBI years appears, asking to interview him for her crime podcast; his father pleads with him to come back to church. The Sons of the Confederacy are planning a march at the upcoming Fall Fest, and a strange story surfaces about a reclusive fire-and-brimstone snake-handling preacher. Increasingly distressed at his inability to keep his county safe, Titus is plagued by memories and the present evil attacking his home. On less and less sleep, he doggedly puts in work. “He went over a few other emails, reviewed the gas expense reports, checked the arrest log from last night, updated the Sheriff department’s social media page…. It felt strange to attend to the mundane and the profane at the same time but that was a defining aspect of the job.”

All the Sinners Bleed is noir with a particular American Southern twist. Place figures heavily. “The soil of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears…. Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built.” Cosby deals in timely themes: returning home and reckoning with old wounds and crimes; the unsavory histories of the places we love; the legacies of Confederate statues, of slavery and racism; the darkness within all of us, even those playing the good guys; the role of police and policing. His prose is gruff, poetic but stark: “The clouds gathered like young men on a corner getting ready for a fight.” Titus has a code like that of Michael Connelly’s Detective Harry Bosch: “Either we all matter or no one matters. Everyone deserves to have someone speak for them.” He believes that something hard and mean dwells in every heart–and in a few, true evil. What has beset Charon County is not supernatural. It is merely the wages of sin (as his churchgoing neighbors might say), or the county’s bloody past coming back around. There is something of the lone gunslinger–damaged but virtuous–in Titus Crown, who stands against the worst elements of human nature. Like Cosby’s previous novels, All the Sinners Bleed is often grim, but it lands on a surprisingly hopeful, even joyful ending.

For fans of gritty, dark mysteries with an interest in the very real and contemporary demons of United States culture and history, Cosby’s work offers a sinister but satisfying voyage into the best and worst of returning home and starting fresh.

Rating: 7 sheep.

Come back Monday for my interview with Cosby.

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What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez

Posted on March 6, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This debut novel about a family still searching for a long-missing daughter and sister brims with voice, attitude and yearning.

Claire Jimenez’s first novel, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, brings to life a close but troubled Puerto Rican family in Staten Island, N.Y., carrying on but rocked by loss. “The five of us seem normal for a while, up until Ruthy turns thirteen and disappears…. Draw my mother sixty-two pounds later. Give her diabetes. Kill my dad. Cut a hole in the middle of the timeline. Eliminate the canvas. Destroy any type of logic. There is no such thing now as a map.” No one ever figured out what happened on the day Ruthy didn’t come home from track practice on the S48 bus as expected.

More than a decade later, Nina, the baby, is “blessed with the brilliant luck of graduating [from college] into the 2008 recession,” the first in her family to attend college but now returned home to live with her mother and work at the mall selling lingerie. Jessica, the eldest, lives with her boyfriend and their baby; she works as a patient care technician at the hospital, harried and tired but proud of her work. Their mother, Dolores, depends on her relationship with God and the church. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez unfolds in alternating chapters, through the first-person perspectives of these four central characters: Nina, Jessica and Dolores in the late 2000s and the stormy, troubled 13-year-old Ruthy in 1996 when she disappeared. The latter is all attitude: You really want to know what happened to Ruthy Ramirez, she asks? Most people “think they got it all figured out, about who I am and what happened. Whatever, who cares? Not me, I promise you.” She describes the day it happened, the schoolgirl dramas and fights, whose pain appears superficial only from the outside. Years later, her sisters and mother struggle with everyday life and with moving on–until the day Jessica believes she sees Ruthy’s face on a sordid reality TV show: the woman shares the missing girl’s beauty mark, her laugh, the toss of her head, a couple of key phrases. And the remaining Ramirez family is off on a mission to recover their lost member.

One of Jimenez’s greatest achievements lies in the individual voices of her narrators, crackling with life, wit, humor, pain and personality. Jessica and Nina wrestle with the complicated love they feel for their family; Dolores rants in a well-meaning but frustrated one-sided conversation with her God; Ruthy oozes teenaged bravado and angst. Readers will be tugged by hope and despair alongside these true-to-life characters. In the end, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez offers observations about race, class, family and the fate of missing girls beyond its title character.

This review originally ran in the February 7, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 grilled cheese sandwiches from the school cafeteria.

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Deadly Deceit by Mari Hannah

Posted on March 3, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Micro-review today because it’s what I can spare for this title at this time, friends. Thanks for your patience.

On the one hand: I’m glad to be getting a bit deeper into DCI Kate Daniels’s personal (read: love) life. I find her a bit frustrating! but what else is new with our hardboiled detective types. She’s got baggage and lack of closure with an ex (who is also a coworker, remember), and a possible new beginning with a newer acquaintance who we met in an earlier book (who was, briefly, a person of interest in a case). I’m glad for this new sideplot, because that’s part of what I enjoy about mystery series in general: personalities and personal lives.

On the other hand, I found some frustrations this go-round with writing, specifically the overuse of ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ when more interesting nouns would have been appreciated. (This is something I get onto my students about. Maybe it’s just that I’m in-semester now.) I’m giving some grace because I think it was in part intended to be about voice – this was most noticeable in chapters in the close-third-person belonging to one or two characters in particular. Still bothered me a bit. If I’m paying attention to the writing, you’ve lost me for the story, however briefly.

I’m still committed to the series; I care about the people, and am looking forward to book four. But this one was not an unqualified success.

Rating: 7 wigs.

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