This is the first book in Leon's series set in Venice featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. A world-famous conductor is found dead in his dressing room at the end of the second interval, apparently poisoned, and Brunetti catches the case. There's a lot of wry humor in Brunetti's attempts to keep the political constraints from interfering with his investigation.

The first Donna Leon book I read (several years ago now) disappointed me. I think this was because I had hoped to feast on the enchantment of the setting in Venice, but instead found a police procedural with little enchantment but much insight into the human spirit, as well as into corruption in the government and within the police force.

My friend, Warren, encouraged me not to give up on Leon’s books. I read more books in the series and acknowledged that they gave me a better understanding of the Venice behind the touristy postcards. Then I remembered a talk I once heard by mystery writer Nevada Barr about how she prepared to write her first mystery. She took a handful of mysteries that she admired and took them apart, looking at structure, pacing, and suspense. Her efforts paid off: her first book blew me away, winning all kinds of awards, and subsequent books have been equally good.

I had not previously thought much about basic patterns of mysteries. I knew that there were a number of categories—cosies, police procedurals, hard-boiled, etc.—the definitions of which vary somewhat from one source to another. Here, though, I'm talking about the patterns inherent in the book, their structure. Basically, most of the modern-day mysteries that I enjoy have certain common characteristics:

a. an accelerating suspense that culminates in a life-threatening crisis: Nevada Barr and William Kent Krueger handle this especially well.
b. a detective who grows and changes in each book: Rebus in Ian Rankin's books is an excellent example.
c. a place that is almost another character in the books: Look at Baltimore in Laura Lippman's books or Boston in Robert B. Parker's.
d. a puzzle that challenges my intellect: P.D. James is the best.
e. psychological insight: Peter Robinson's insight into his characters enables him to make even the most damaged people seem real, not inexplicable monsters.

There are some older mysteries that I've enjoyed tremendously that don't fit this pattern or have only one or two of the characteristics. For example, John Franklin Bardin’s three novels of psychological suspense (The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter, and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly) may not have all of the characteristics listed above, but they plunge the reader into a fascinating, dark maelstrom of shifting realities, questionable identities, and murder. Also, Wilkie Collins, whom I blogged about in June, 2007, is a master of suspense without needing a shoot-out or car chase for a climax.

Once I thought about all this, I realised that my disappointment with the Donna Leon book was caused by the lack of driving suspense. There is suspense but it is quieter, trying to work out who did what and why, wondering if Commissario Brunetti will be able to negotiate the labyrinthine politics of the Venetian police force. Leon's books are a gradual unfolding of plot and motive. Here it's the puzzle that keeps me reading, not the adrenaline rush of a car chase or some looming danger that threatens either the detective or other characters.

Not only do I find Leon's puzzles intriguing, but the description of the bureaucratic forces Brunetti faces make me shake my head in rueful recognition. Other things that I like about Leon's series is the way she brings even the most minor characters to life. Every character in these books—victims, suspects, police officers, families—has a depth and complexity that make the story compelling. I also like the way she placed Brunetti’s decisions within a larger context of ethical and societal concerns. I’m very glad Warren encouraged me to continue with this series and recommend it to readers who are willing to try something different.

In my blog about Office of Desire I mentioned wishing more books were set in offices, and Steve kindly recommended this book. It is all that I wanted and more.

Set in an ad agency on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, Ferris’s first novel captures the nuances of office life, from the race to get the stale cookies in the break room to the personal email mistakenly sent to the entire company. His office dwellers play pranks on each other to ease the daily boredom and fight over office chairs left behind by a departing employee. They have their own version of Celebrity Death Watch, betting on which co-worker will die next.

Ferris perfectly describes the shifting alliances, the secret crushes, and the surprising friendships that tie a workgroup together. Their interactions are hilarious and all too familiar. The subtle hierarchies are very well done: each person is desperate to move up to the next level, from Art Director to Senior Art Director to Associate Creative Director, even as they realise that the new job title “came with no money, the power was almost always illusory, the bestowal a cheap shrewd device concocted by management to keep us from mutiny”.

Where Ferris really shines, though, is in the relationship between workers and management. Lynn Mason, the partner they work for, has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer according to the office rumor mill. Caught between sympathy and excitement, they spend hours—hours when they are supposedly working—comparing notes about Lynn’s health and picking apart shreds of information. Their affection for Lynn coexists with not only respect but also fear of her and for her. Somewhere in the middle is Joe Pope, a man who bikes to work regardless of the weather and holds himself aloof from the group, refusing to get involved in the rumor-mongering and petty spats. Joe is trusted by Lynn and used by her as an intermediary, thus earning the group’s envy and inevitable hazing.

Best of all, Ferris has written the story in rare first person plural—”we”—which is a terribly difficult point of view to keep interesting. He succeeds brilliantly. And what could be more appropriate for a story about a herd of office workers? He makes it work by shocking us with the unexpected but completely accurate detail: “Karen Woo always had something new to tell us and we hated her for it.”

Individuals do emerge, such as Tom Mota who wants to throw his computer against the window when he finds out that he’s been laid off, but doesn’t because it would be too embarrassing if the window didn’t break. Or Benny Shassburger, the storyteller of the group, who comes and lounges in the doorway when he’s bored. Among the copywriters, Hank Neary is working on a “failed” novel and Don Blattner writes unproduced screenplays. When Don finally gives up on his dream of becoming a famous writer, the group is dismayed: “We took back all our ridicule and practically begged the man to continue . . .”

As Steve said in his recommendation, the book is especially timely now because it is set in a company caught in an economic downturn and starting to lay off employees. Instead of inspiring them to work harder, the threat of being laid off increases the amount of time spent gossiping in the hallway or over long lunches. All the little games to avoid working continue. But then a curious thing happens. They finally start to work on a project, determined to outdo each other, but as they work they begin to take ownership of the project, to care about the quality of the end product, and—however enviously—applaud the good work done by others. I laughed; I cried; I was moved. This is simply a terrific book.

Another book club read, Loving Frank is a fictionalised account of the scandalous love affair of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, a housewife and mother who abandons her family to run off with the famous architect.

We follow Mamah, already in love with Frank as the story opens, having gotten to know him when he was building a home for her and her husband, Edwin. The timing in the first few chapters is a bit confusing because one flashback is not resolved into the “present” of the story before we are thrust into another flashback and then another. Even after reading it twice, I cannot pin down the chronology of events. The pair become lovers, and eventually Mamah takes the children and goes to stay with her friend, Mattie, who is about to deliver her first child. Mamah hopes that the time away from both Edwin and Frank will help her decide what to do.

It is a first novel, so perhaps much can be forgiven. The dialogue can be clunky, particularly when it is used to convey undigested lumps of back story. Also, at times the language is a bit florid, like something out of a romance novel, though I admit that finding a fresh way to describe being in love is dreadfully hard.

My biggest problem with the book, however, is that the characters do not come alive for me. Curiously, some of the minor characters seem most real, such as Mamah’s unmarried sister, Lizzie, who chastises Mamah at the end of the book for leaving her to raise Mamah’s children, effectively precluding any chance she might have had for living her own life. What this says to me is that Horan is adept at characterisation when freed from factual constraints.

Mamah does begin to emerge as a more rounded character in the middle section of the book, when she is in Italy with Frank and later in Germany by herself. I especially enjoyed the section in Germany when Mamah meets a circle of avant-garde artists. She learns Swedish and begins translating into English the work of Ellen Key, a leader in the Woman Movement. I recognise that it is difficult to portray a feminist, even one from this first wave, without sliding over into stereotypes. Perhaps if I were new to feminism and had not spent decades working out my own answers to these questions about women’s roles, I might have found Mamah’s soul-searching more interesting and felt more sympathy for her struggles.

Frank himself never becomes a real person. Granted, I tend to dislike novels that use real people as characters. One reason is that it seems to me unethical to make up stories—this is fiction, after all—about someone who is not alive to defend himself. The second reason, which also applies to novels using someone else’s characters (e.g., the recent plethora of books starring Sherlock Holmes), is that it seems to me that the author is taking a shortcut, assuming that the reader already knows the character, so the author doesn’t have to bother describing him or her. Finally, although I know it is done all the time, it doesn't seem to me quite fair for an author to trade on someone else’s celebrity, at least without the person's consent. I doubt this book would ever have been published if it had not featured Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s simply not good enough to stand on its own merits.

However, I believe it could have been with just one more revision cycle. While obviously my experiences and biases color my opinion of this book, most of the problems I have with it result from typical hazards that entrap novice fiction writers—using dialogue as narrative, confused plot sequencing, inadequate characterisation—crimes we’ve all been guilty of; well, I have certainly. Another revision could have fixed these problems. I also think that in writing this book Horan set herself some very difficult challenges, ones that would test even an experienced novelist.

Perhaps my expectations were raised too high by the rave reviews and the “New York Times Bestseller” banner splashed across its cover. Certainly some members of my book club found it absorbing. There is much promise here, and I look forward to Horan’s next book.

Pullman’s trilogy— The Golden Compass (published as Northern Lights in the U.K.), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass —resist categorisation. At first glance, they appear aimed at readers of Young Adult (YA) fantasy adventure stories, a group which has grown tremendously due to the Harry Potter books, although Pullman’s first two books predated this publishing phenomenon. And they can certainly be read that way. But there is much more going on here, and not just the slyly amusing character names that Rowling uses in the Harry Potter books to reward a well-read adult’s attention. No, Pullman draws on particle physics, theology, history, and literature from Milton to Tolkien to examine fundamental questions, not just of good and evil, but free will and predestination, democracy and totalitarianism, innocence and experience.

With a nod to the Narnia books, the story is set in motion when a girl hides in a wardrobe. From her hiding place, Lyra eavesdrops on a meeting of the scholars of Jordan College, the pre-eminent college in Oxford, as the mysterious and powerful Lord Asriel presents his findings from a mission to the Arctic and requests funds for a further mission. What he reveals to the startled scholars is proof of the existence of Dust, a mysterious substance that appears to accumulate on adults but not children, a substance whose properties are unknown and whose very existence is denied by the Magisterium, the organisation that runs this world.

Lyra’s world is similar to ours, but different in ways consistent with a slightly different history, a past where the battle between the Enlightenment and theocratic forces determined to suppress it turned out differently. In the first book, Lyra is presented with a simple quest: to rescue her friend Roger, who has been stolen by the Gobblers and carried into the North. She is pursued by the truly terrifying Mrs. Coulter, but finds comrades to help her: a great white bear, an aeronaut who travels by balloon, and the Gyptians, like Gypsies a nomad tribe living in narrowboats and led by their king, John Faa, a name which tickled me no end, obsessed as I have been with the tune to the ballad Johnny Faa as played by Laura Risk and Jacqueline Schwab (available from Dorian, DOR-90264).

The second book opens in our world, our Oxford, but these are not the only parallel worlds. Young Will, whose name and friend Mrs. Cooper refer to the wonderful Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper, stumbles into the world of Citta’gazze, apparently a crossroads between many worlds. There he meets Lyra and helps her regain her alethiometer, the golden compass of the first book, despite the machinations of Mrs. Coulter. In the third book, the two find and move between multiple worlds, seeking Will’s long-missing father and caught up in the war being waged by Lord Asriel against the Magisterium.

I’ve left out much which is fun about these books: daemons and zeppelins, witches and harpies. What I loved about Lyra in the beginning was what a brat she was: rude and untutored, leading gangs of children in glorious battles in the mudflats or devious pranks against the Gyptians. Manipulative, dishonest, and not particularly bright, she finds that she has an extraordinary talent for working the alethiometer. Unfortunately, Pullman allows this promising start to be overwhelmed by the adventure. As Michael Chabon noted in his essay on the books, the exigencies of plot and theme take precedence over character development, until it begins to feel as though the characters only exist to move the plot forward and illustrate the theme.

My other quibble with the books is that I found Pullman’s anti-church agenda as distracting as C.S. Lewis’s pro-church (or at least pro-Christianity) agenda in the Narnia books. While sympathetic to the preference for imagination and intelligence over obedience and orthodoxy, I thought the portrayal of the Magisterium could have been handled with a bit more subtlety.

However, these are very minor quibbles indeed. I enjoyed these books, gobbling them up in the course of just a few days, and highly recommend them. They sent me back to Paradise Lost, which I hadn’t read for many years, and set me thinking again about those big questions. Can’t ask for more than that.

A few years ago, I read a lot of memoirs in preparation for writing my own, and was surprised by the variety of approaches. One might be a linear narrative about a particular event or period of time, such as Jill Kerr Conway's The Road to Coorain while another might play with time and perception, such as Nabokov's Speak, Memory. One might set a personal story against world events, such as Penelope Lively's Oleander, Jacaranda while another focuses on the author's experience, such as Marguerite Duras's The Lover.

In this memoir of healing and survival, Shumaker has provided a linear narrative describing a serious biking accident she suffered and her slow recovery. However, that narrative makes up only a small fraction of the book's pages. Thus, it is not so much a central road from which the author makes occasional excursions as it is a rare blaze on a tree to indicate that you haven't wandered off the path.

Instead, the book is primarily a collection of vignettes capturing some fragment of memory or family legend. These pieces are beautifully written, in lyrical prose that had me reading and rereading simply to savor the language and the swift twist of meaning, as surprising and satisfying as the last line of a haiku. No matter how short—most are only a few sentences or a paragraph in length—each piece captures emotion with an immediacy rare in recounted memories.

In these vignettes, Shumaker describes moments from her parents', grandparents', and great-grandparents' lives, imagined from family stories and photos. She describes memories from her childhood: joy when a pinata bursts showering her with candy, fear when an arroyo floods carrying off a reckless child. A later set of vignettes concerns scuba diving with her husband. But mostly she uses these tesserae to build a picture of life with her parents, two deeply flawed people, who had too many children too soon and struggled with alcohol and illness, abuse and early death.

The variety and scope of the vignettes may provide a clue for my lingering very slight sense of dissatisfaction with the book as a whole. I loved the prose and enjoyed every minute of reading this book. Intellectually, I recognise how well the form—these tesserae arranged in seemingly random order—reflect the fragmentary nature of memory itself, especially after a traumatic brain injury.

However, I was surprised to reach the last page because I felt that the mosaic of pieces had not yet cohered into a picture. As one person in my book club asked, intending to prompt discussion, what was the story? Sure, okay, survival. And the scars, physical and psychological, that we carry. But there seems to be so much more here, a potential story that I cannot quite see, probably due to my own dim-wittedness. Of course, that is the way life is, and perhaps the very open-endedness is the point: to carry all that complexity into the future.

The narrative of the accident seemed designed to tie the shorter pieces together, although it didn’t fulfill that function, for me at least. Rather, it seemed to distract from the accumulating picture built up by the beautiful fragments. At the same time, the shorter pieces did not seem to me to enhance the accident narrative. I would have been tempted to separate this book into two books, but certainly found it interesting to see how this unusual structure played out.

My book club decided to read this classic which most of us hadn't read since our schooldays. I was curious to see how it would hold up. What I remembered most about it was the sense of sin, the guilt around having sinned, the secrecy. Since I don't think much about sin these days, I wasn't sure the story would still be relevant.

I do think a lot about good and evil. There is much good done in this world, and much evil. Perhaps I missed too many Sunday School classes or heard too many harmless activities classified as sins, but it always seemed to me that when you talk about sin, you're talking about a basically decent person who does some wrong thing, carried away perhaps in the heat of the moment or even misled by others. Evil, on the other hand, is when someone who knows full well what he is doing and how many people will be hurt by his action and still selfishly, greedily, goes ahead and does it.

Hester's sin, having sex outside of marriage, having a child out of wedlock, does not seem so terrible to me. Apparently Hawthorne agreed, since the way he describes the people who condemn her, their hypocrisy and self-righteousness, makes her a far better person than any of them. Even the villagers come to respect her for her good works and almost forget what the letter stands for.

Guilt is something else again, though. Guilt is always with us. And secrecy that eats away at you.

The part I hadn't remembered in the story was the ending. After everything falls apart, Hester sets aside the letter that marks her and leaves with her daughter. The daughter grows up and marries a rich man, but Hester returns to the community that branded her. She puts the letter back on and lives out the rest of her life in the same cottage where she'd lived before.

Why, having once escaped, would she voluntarily take up the symbol of her shame among those who knew how she'd earned it? Perhaps it was the only place she felt like herself, the self she had become through the terrible ordeal of prison, ostracism, and isolation. Surely sharing the untainted, privileged life her daughter was starting with her new husband was impossible for Hester. She could not return to the normal social life she had enjoyed before her sin.

I think a lot about coming back. In fairy tales and legends, the hero sets out on some great adventure, and then you come home, profoundly changed. Whatever the trials you've been through, you return changed, maybe harder, maybe kinder. Perhaps, as with Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings, your home too has changed while you were away. There's a profound sadness in this return, a lost and lonely nostalgia that can never be assuaged.

And you can't tell anyone where you've been or what you've been through. Who would understand? They look at you and talk to you as though you were the same person you were before you left. But you're not. You're like the soldiers of the Great War whom Wilfred Owen described, those grey ghosts, “too few for drums and yells,” who “creep back, silent, to village wells,/Up half-known roads.”

I first encountered this periodical at the Baltimore Book Festival. Visions used to be based in Maryland but has since moved to Texas. What drew me to the little booth under Baltimore’s Washington Monument was a wire rack of 5.5 × 8.5 inch stapled chapbooks in many colors with cover illustrations of scenes from around the world. One concentrated on Scandinavian poetry; another on Croatian poetry; another on Macedonian poetry. Glancing through the tables of contents, I found each issue included poetry from the U.S., yes, but also from many other countries and cultures.

We in the U.S. are rarely exposed to literature from other countries, except perhaps from England. Until someone wins the Nobel or other prize, his or her work is generally not available here. Although this situation has changed somewhat with the advent of online bookstores, how do you know what authors to look for? How do you know what literary masterpieces are being produced in Denmark or Uzbekistan?

When my son first moved to Canada, one of his first communications home informed me that there was a whole world of Can Lit that I had never suspected was there. Sure, I’d read Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje. But you cannot imagine the delight with which I threw myself into books by Timothy Findley, Jane Urquhart, Rohinton Mistry, David Adams Richards, Paul Quarrington. Some of these authors are now distributed in the States, but at that time, one could not purchase their books here.

Since then, I have tried to attend Toronto’s International Festival of Authors as often as I can. Held at the end of October, this festival brings famous and not-so-famous authors from all over the world to Harbourfront for readings, interviews, and panel discussions. I particularly like the interviews, where one author asks questions of another, eliciting the kind of insights that you won’t hear on a talk show. I was thrilled to hear Timothy Findley interviewed by Jane Urquhart and later read from his books. I loved listening to an author from Finland read the beginning of his novel in English and then in Finnish, enabling me to hear the rhythms he himself heard when composing.

So I was delighted to stumble upon this small periodical that publishes poetry from all over. Now in its 30th year, Visions comes out four times a year. The most recent issue, #79, has two feature sections: one on Argentinean poet Roberto Juarroz and one of Armenian poetry translated by Diana Der Hovanessian.

The particular value for me is not just exposure to otherwise unknown voices, but the insight into their particular experience, such as in this poem “After the War” by Armenian poet Ghurgas Sirounan:

“After a truce war is not over
although roses reappear
although brooks thaw,

. . .

“Ask those who will not return. Ask
the grief that covers the earth.
Ask the soil, now precious as heavy lead . . .”

I also value the common themes, such as here from the poem “He & She” by Pakistani poet Adrian Hussain, translated from the Urdu by David Kamal:

“Her beauty has burnt his eyes
but he imagines
he sees her still
as a silver ship
in the folds of an impossible sea.”

Visions is available from Black Buzzard Press, 3503 Ferguson Lane, Austen, TX 78754.

Justin recommended this book, a marvelously inventive collection of essays. The cover alone is spectacular: a black hardback with three staggered layers of paper slipcover. The largest, in tones of gold shows earth and stone and figures of cowboys and giants, dueling soldiers and ragged refugees. The next is a jungle in shades of green with, among others, Tarzan and an aviator climbing out of a crashed plane. The smallest shows frothy ocean waves with a giant squid and broken-masted ship. Similarly, each essay peels away layers of stories and references to lay bare what's at the heart of things.

Readers of Chabon will be familiar with some of these subjects, such as his passionate defense of genre literature and comics/graphic novels, his appreciation of Sherlock Holmes, the metaphor of the Golem of Prague. Where he takes these subjects may astonish you.

I particularly liked the title essay, which starts as a meditation on Chabon's childhood in Columbia, Maryland. Being a native, I watched this planned city grow from its first idealistic foundations to the city it is today. James Rouse, famous for developing festival marketplaces such as Faneuil Hall in Boston, Pioneer Place in Portland, and Harborplace in Baltimore, had experimented as well with building a small community—not just houses, but a real community—in Baltimore called the Village of Cross Keys. Taking his cue from the influential urban planner Jane Jacobs, Rouse believed that we need cities, not suburbs, and that our urban life is best served by a mixture of public and private spaces, by small clusters of homes, and a heterogeneous population.

The core of Cross Keys is a group of shops surrounding an open plaza, with office space on the second floor. Originally, the shops aimed to include everything you would need: a grocery store, cafe, hotel, clothing stores, a bookstore, and so on. Clusters of homes—some apartments, some rowhomes—are all within easy walking distance. Nowadays, the hotel is still there, but the shops are mostly upscale clothing stores. The grocery couldn't compete with the large chains nearby and the neighborhood grocery store that we had all been going to forever. Talk about everybody knowing your name. My sisters and I had to bus to another neighborhood to buy our feminine hygiene products.

Columbia started out as a large-scale version of Cross Keys. A central mall and office buildings were located by the man-made lake. The town was divided into villages, groups of homes for ten to fifteen thousand people, with a central gathering place and schools. Rouse insisted that a certain percentage of the homes in each village were to be priced for low-income families. He also insisted that Columbia would be racially integrated—no small thing for a town situated between the race-riot hotbeds of Baltimore and Washington in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Chabon's essay is about the map, Rouse's Plan for Columbia and the other maps that inspired his childhood imaginings. What he found especially seductive were the unfinished parts, the empty spaces, the unexplored territory. It's fascinating to follow Chabon through permutations of this idea.

Columbia hasn't completely fulfilled Rouse's vision, its villages looking more like upscale suburbs, its mall grown to monstrous proportions. But there's time yet. This month, when we have seen dreams start to come true, it's good to remember Rouse and others who have dreamed big dreams.

Tokyo noir. I asked for more workplaces and certainly get one here: vivid descriptions of working the night shift in a factory that makes boxed lunches. Kirino sucks in the reader with detailed descriptions of the inspection process before the employees start work, the smell of the different foodstuffs to be assembled, and the way the line works.

Four women have banded together to support each other and make the line run more efficiently. Their ages and characters vary widely but all struggle in the traps their lives have become, watching their families disintegrate.

At 43, Masako has learned to walk alone, her natural reserve having hardened into an enigmatic shell. Her teenaged son has not spoken for three years, since being expelled from school, and her husband has withdrawn into his own world as well, sleeping in another room and rarely speaking to her. The co-worker who runs the line is Yoshie, a widow in her late fifties, whom they call the Skipper. She is barely scraping by financially, and cares for her rebellious, teenaged daughter and invalid mother-in-law. The descriptions of changing the old woman’s diaper—cloth because Yoshie cannot afford disposable diapers—bring back memories of when my children were babies.

The youngest at 29, Kuniko, is deeply in debt. Never one to postpone gratification, she is overweight and lusts after designer clothes and shoes. As the story begins, her husband takes all their savings and disappears, leaving her with no way to pay off her debts, even if she were inclined to do so. The fourth woman, Yayoi, is 34 and quite lovely. However, the strain of taking care of two small children has driven a wedge between her and her husband, who has fallen for a hostess in a gambling club. When Yayoi discovers that he has gambled away all their savings and complains, he becomes physically abusive.

I’ve rarely encountered such memorable characters. Men don’t come off very well in this book, most of them selfish and greedy, intent on using women as toys that can be abandoned when you get bored. I’ve certainly known my share of irresponsible men, but I don’t think it is a universal trait by any means, nor one necessarily linked to the y-chromosome, so I was relieved to see at least one thoughtful and responsible male character, a young worker at the factory, half-Brazilian and half-Japanese.

Although I often read hard-boiled crime fiction, some of which is pretty gruesome (think: Minette Walters, Dennis Lehane), no book has disturbed me as much as this one. I found that I could not even read it in the evening or my dreams would be simply horrendous. It wasn’t the level of gore that disturbed me; hey, I laughed at the wood chipper in Fargo. No, what horrified me were the psychological changes that the murder caused in all of the characters.

Most mysteries follow the detective who is trying to solve the crime. A few might interpolate a chapter now and then from the evil murderer’s point of view. But Kirino stays almost exclusively with the murderer and the murderer’s accomplices, all of whom react to their first murder and the stress of the police investigation in ways that surprised me. Surprised me? No, they staggered me. I had no idea that the human psyche could go down those paths. Yet, with Kirino leading me by the hand, I found each step completely believable.

I recommend this book with caution. It is a murder mystery like no other.

So why don’t we get more books set in the workplace? Granted, most offices have fewer opportunities for drama than a police station or a hospital, but in the end the same things drive the story: the interactions between a group of people within their environment.

Anyone who has worked in an office knows that there is plenty of material for both drama and comedy. In fact, during a period when I worked in a particularly stressful environment, we joked about what a great sitcom our work lives would make. Each new, absurdly counter-productive move by the management would send us racing to the back parking lot to compare notes on how that particular sitcom episode would develop. Later, when the British series about office life came out, I figured they must have gotten the idea from us.

Here we have a small doctors' office, staffed by two doctors and three employees. Caroline is the receptionist and tells much of the story, alternating with one of the doctors, Hap Markowitz. The other two employees are Alice, the nurse, and Brice, who handles the financials. Caroline calls them “the ABCs”. The other doctor is the recently divorced Will Strub. In the course of the story, the friendships between these five characters develop and shift in unexpected directions. They clearly care for each other, even as they annoy one another.

The book is quite funny, in a dark way. Brice’s love of old movies, Alice’s reinventions of herself, Will’s discovery of religion all lard the storylines with humor. Some of the storylines are very dark indeed, yet the prose is compulsively readable.

At first, I thought this was going to be a chick lit book, something light, in the “Sex and the City” vein perhaps. But it turns out to be much more serious than that and becomes a very interesting exploration of friendship, what we owe to our friends—our work friends, our personal friends—and where we draw the line between our responsibility to them and our responsibility to ourselves. I would love to find more books like this one.