Category: Stu’s Reviews

Genre: Book 

Grade:  B+

Notable People: Julie Smith

Title: “New Orleans Mourning”

Review:    Mid 90s pre-Katrina book set in New Orleans, that introduced Smiths ongoing series featuring heroine NOLA policewoman, Skip Langdon. Interesting to read about NOLA before the storms hit and changed everything. Book is focused around the Uptown/Garden District blue bloods of N’Awlins and how they try to get away with murder-literally. If you’ve spent time there, this book is loaded with place – relevant chestnuts, and the story is a good one, but Smith (a former reporter for the New Orleans Picayune) lacks the kind of grit details that you find in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby books and frankly, lacks depth in her writing. Characters seemed stiff an formulaic to me….but still a good, quick read if you like the place. I’ll give her another shot to see how her craft advances.

Genre: Book       

Grade:  B+/B

Notable People: Paul Doiron

Title: “One Last Lie”

Review:    Doiron’s latest in his highly acclaimed Maine Game Warden, Mike Bowditch series…is a bit flat. Though the characters remain vivid and the setting of remote Maine is still sharp and continues to develop, the story seems more farfetched than his usual and rambled on a bit. This one focuses on a long forgotten murder and its long hidden survivors and is set in the rugged areas along the Canadian border. Doiron is a lifelong Mainer and it shows. He’s also quite the naturalist. I probably would not highly recommend this as a standalone book, but it’s a rich continuation of this fine series, which I do highly recommend.

Genre: Book    

Grade:  A-

Notable People: Ann Patchett

Title: “The Dutch House”

Review:    Award winning novelist’s eighth novel takes on three generations of a broken family covering a period of fifty years. Set outside Philadelphia in an ornate mansion that becomes the obsessive focal point of the family’s life, it is a beautifully told story of loyalty, surrender, rediscovery and complete angst. The characters are vivid, the relationships heart wrenching, the prose top notch and has a wonderful evocation of time and place. A memorable read thanks to my most erudite referral sources, Feel and Maux.

Genre: Book 

Grade:  A-/B+

Notable People: Caleb Carr

Title: “The Alienist”

Review:    A huge dynamic book that many will be familiar with from the TV series, though I’ve never seen it and did not make the connection until I got the book (after reading Carr’s most recent work, “Surrender, New York”). Carr likes historical fiction with very real characters and is thorough is his research; think Teddy Roosevelt, John Pierrepoint Morgan, William James). Alienists were the precursors to today’s criminal profilers and reviled as dingbats and heretics during the 19^th century. This book takes place in turn of the century New York-a very different place than it is now, and it is a wonderful picture of the time and place. The pursuit of a “whore-boy” serial killer is fascinating and well-grounded in both the theories of the time and what we now know. Hard to put down for most of the book though the end was little shadowy. Good one to hunker down with.

Genre: Book      

Grade:  B

Notable People: Tony Dunbar

Title: “Night Watchman”

Review:    this is the ninth in Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series. Tubby is a N’Awlins lawyer trying to live the good life, but nagged by conscience to do the right thing. Complimented by a splendid cast of characters and Dunbar’s (a local attorney) amazing sense of the city, the books are quality diversions. This one went a little overboard with Tubby becoming haunted with a murder he witnessed when first coming to The Easy in 1970……which leads to the usual mayhem…. how many car bombings can go off unnoticed in one day? The story lost momentum in the last third, and had poor resolve, but a very quick and entertaining read, nonetheless. If so inclined, you could follow Dunbar’s food and drink descriptions for a memorable tour of the city.

Genre: Book 

Grade:  B+

Notable People: Anthony Doerr

Title: “About Grace”

Review:    Hard to believe……500th review over the last eight years or so…. must need something else to do……This is a very complicated first novel from the author of “All the Light We Cannot See”, which I reviewed here and loved. Doerr is meticulous in his writing and at times a bit hard to keep up with. This is a sweeping story of a tortured hydrologist and his quest for some form of truth and meaning…. lots and lots of minutia about all things water in the book, most of it symbolic. The story takes place over 30 or so years moving from Anchorage to Cleveland to St. Vincent’s in the Caribbean, as the protagonist tries to find his wife and daughter, who he abandoned in in 1979 during a flood in Cleveland that he had dreamed would occur (a frequent event in the book). He has no idea if his daughter had died in the flood and escapes to the Caribbean, living a minimalist existence and obsessing over the causal link between his dreams and people’s horrific misfortunes- possibly even his daughter’s death. I was inclined to give up on this book multiple times, but it kept me just enough hooked to carry on, and was glad I did. This is a book that takes time to read and absorb, but is ultimately quite moving.