At St. Alban’s Church there is a stained glass window picturing a Roman soldier with a halo dressed as a Priest. The Roman soldier was Alban. When the Priest who converted him was sentenced to death, Alban switched clothes with him and died in his place.
A soldier disguised as a priest describes in some sense the Rector herself, an ex-army helicopter pilot, who turns up at crime scenes, and helps the Chief of Police solves crimes in a small snowy parish about 2 hours drive from Albany.
Read this series by Jan Karon about a diabetic Episcopalian rector in a small town in North Carolina whose fat happy female parishioners cant stop baking him pies cakes and cookies. Very very funny scenes with neglected husbands eating unthawed church sale cakes the minute their wives aren’t looking, a big dog who settles down only upon hearing Scripture, a bossy secretary with a drawer full of Little Debbies, a perky wife-artist who likes to move the furniture around, and a parish full of souls in need of interference…
1235 12399 1234
First create a pattern. A pattern creates an expectation. Then, disappoint the expectation. So Lehane gives us a prostitute who turns into a decoy who turns into a very pretty woman who wants to take her detective-investigator boss to a hotel room, and does. But she is his wife.
Lehane’s title is from a Rolling Stones song, and his investigator is aging. He does piecemeal work for a 100 year old security firm that doesn’t advertise and into which he doesn’t fit. The investigator has a chip on his shoulder called class struggle.
The investigator used to be bad and rich; now he and his wife are good, but in debt. They miss being bad. They have a daughter.
6/1:23 “After my daughter was born I considered buying a shotgun to ward off suitors 14 years or so up the road. Now a I listen to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language I considered buying a shot gun to blow my own fuckin head off.”
Arkady, the permanently grim, dejected, despondent Moscow cop wants another autopsy done on the body of a prostitute and finds his old friend Willie at the morgue, having moved in.
Immense and unshaven, Willie Pezenko shuffled around the morgue like a wooly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hung from his lips, a glass of antiseptic alcohol from his hand. At school he had been called Belmondo after the French actor for his style with a cigarette. Arkady had been his classmate but now Willie looked 20 years older…. “I can’t do it. I’m not up to it. Doctor’s orders.”
“You could do it with your eyes closed, ” Arkady said.
Willie waved a glass at the cadavers…”Don’t you think I would like to dive in? Some of the work that comes out of this place you wouldn’t believe. Butcher’s work at a butcher’s pace. A real abattoir. They dig out the heart and lungs, slit the throat, pull out the esophagus. No finesse, no analysis. Run a saw around the skull, pop the brains, dig out the organs, bag them, weigh them, dump them, tween the knees, and finish in less time than it takes to dress a rabbit….”
“I’m retired. On the sidelines. … Friends come by. Some of them alive, some of them dead. And when I drop there’ll be no need for an ambulance. Cause I’m here…”
Lottie, Director of the local Historical Society, is assembling the memories and diaries of the townsfolk into a local history. She is also stirring up the dust of very old emotions, old enmities, old wrongs.
The old families get hysterical and the hysteria turns to one murder, then another. Things get frayed and violent and personal. Lottie becomes the sheriff’s deputy, and begins to investigates the murders as both cop and historian.
What begins as a story about a girly James Dean with two wicked sisters and a drunk mother becomes a story about a CPW apartment building and its history, its doorman, its neighbors.
Tina Finn is outrageous and outraged, at everyone with a bank account or a stable identity, at her sister with the crackberry, at her other sister with the perfect husband, at grown ups. But in a Jacuzzi surrounded by gay men she becomes another Doris Day …. relaxed, bubbly, verbal. The twelve room apartment gathers around itself a seraglio of children, thieves and lovers, and delivers an ending both righteous and happy.
Two London twits, one Giantess and one Mum, run a domestic agency, performing unlovable chores for unlovable wives with money. The two twits rehash I Love Lucy daffiness during the subprime era of extravagance. Another dose of the English language fading into bad American dialogue and imitation Hollywood idiocy.
It could be any neighborhood in the 1970s or 1980s or any conventional middle class development with young childless couples on the verge of divorce or adultery. The neighborhood librarian becomes a felonious sleepwalker before becoming the librarian at a Women’s Correctional Institute, teaching other felons to read, doing sit ups in her cell, falling in love with a white collar criminal in the medium security men’s prison across the way.
After 12 years she is reprieved by DNA evidence and returns to the neighborhood to re-examine a life she inhabited uncomfortably. Once she was a woman in between miscarriages, who locked her doors at night so that no one would steal the mattress stained by her third dead fetus. Now she is a woman in between innocence and guilt, trying to remember the truth.
There is something beautiful and more than beautiful about these women who enjoy their kitchens, who love all the rooms of domesticity. Jane gives us wives, book club ladies and hostesses, in Manhattan or Westchester, well groomed and well mannered and well off, obedient to husbands or mothers in law or schedules. Some are jolly and educated New Englanders, old and odd, wealthy and artsy and irrepressible. The plot? It is as comforting as warm bread, about women organizing people and things; themselves and each other. One woman most of all: Callie Perry, who has always been the happy center of many friendships.
Nan localizes Nantucket. Charmed, beautiful, slightly eccentric, she is at that age where she can get away with mostly anything: trespassing or swimming naked or wearing scarlet lipstick everywhere.
Nan lives in a huge old house where she has decided to run a bed and breakfast for summer guests. It is this house which brings together a handful of curious, complicated personalities: Michael, Nan’s son, Bea and Daniel (a soon to be divorced couple), Daphne (a divorced real estate agent) and her hormonal and horrible daughter.
Nan eases and re-invents the lives which assemble around her; she couples, amuses, and converts her guests, into friends, into family.
