Dogfight, a Love Story review up on Library Journal website

It was published in the fiction section of the September 15, 2010 issue. (It's the 2nd one down).

http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprint/currentissue/886443-403/fiction_reviews_sep_15_2010.html.csp

Book Review: City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris

You know a book is good when you ache to get back to it because the characters demand your attention and you need to know what's going to happen next. That's how I felt about City of Veils, Zoe Ferraris' novel about love and murder set in Saudi Arabia. Written in taught, seamless prose, City of Veils is a first-rate mystery, but it is also so much more.

As the story opens, a young woman's mutilated body washes up on a beach outside Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. At first the police think she must be another housemaid; the foreign workers are the women the most found murdered in the area. It soon becomes clear such is not the case.

Meanwhile, Miriam Walker is returning to Jeddah from a month-long visit to her family in the United States. She and her husband Eric came to Saudi Arabia for a year for his work as a security guard. Miriam is not looking forward to her return, because she and Eric do not live in one of the compounds where most Americans live; he insisted it was safer and more authentic to live among city natives. Instead, they live in an apartment in town where Miriam is a virtual prisoner, because she knows no one and women going out unaccompanied risk stares from men and being stopped, perhaps jailed, by the religious police. Minutes after bringing Miriam home from the airport, Eric goes out for takeout…and doesn’t return. One of Miriam's worst nightmares becomes a reality.

Back at police headquarters, Katya, a lab technician, and one of the few women who work for the police, searches the evidence for clues about the unidentified female murder victim. Katya is good at her job, but looking for more. When she decides to investigate the murder on the side, she asks her friend Nayir, who shows up unexpectedly, for help. Katya and Nayir have not seen each other since solving the mystery in Ferraris’s first novel, Finding Nouf.

And here’s where the various strands of the narrative start to merge and pick up speed and intensity. Ferraris does an excellent job integrating cultural issues into her who-done-it. She creates empathy for her Muslim characters while realistically depicting their lives. As a reader, I first found the restraints imposed by Muslim religious law quite frustrating, but somewhere in the middle of the book I began to accept them for what they are: the social milieu of the characters. Their concerns became real to me, and their actions more understandable.

At the same time, Ferraris shows that hiding women’s bodies from men will fend off temptation or prevent serious crimes against them. She also depicts the characters who choose humane action as opposed to strictly adhering to custom with the greatest sympathy and allows some religious characters come to question the role of law in their lives.

I highly recommend City of Veils for readers looking for a book that is both sensitive and entertaining. In fact, it should be required reading because it opens up a world that Americans need to understand.

First published by Writers News Weekly

Book Review: I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman

A serial killer who abducts and rapes teenage girls chooses not to murder one of his victims. Why not? What is like for her to be the one who survived? These are the questions that sparked Laura Lippman's writing in latest novel.

I'd Know You Anywhere is the story of Elizabeth Lerner, a 37-year-old woman who had been abducted at age 15. Not only was she the victim who survived, but Walter Bowman, her abductor, also took her on the run with him for six weeks.

The book opens when Elizabeth, now Eliza Benedict, moves back to the Washington, D.C. area after 20 years away, living first in Texas, then in England. She's a married, stay-at-home mother of two children who believes she's left the past behind her. At the same time, Walter Bowman is finally going to be put to death in nearby Virginia, and he contacts her, saying he wants to see her to make amends before he dies. Understandably, this rocks Eliza's world.

What follows is a thoughtful and thorough tour of both the abduction—told in real-time chapters alternating with the present—and its aftermath. The narrating voice moves among Eliza, Walter, a creepy death-row advocate helping him, and the mother of the last girl killed. Eliza is forced to revisit memories she had long kept at bay and examine her own motives for her actions when she was taken. Her sister tells Eliza the effect of the abduction on the Lerner family, and Walter explains and makes excuses the whole way.

I'd Know You Anywhere is compelling reading, its socially-conscious topic putting me in mind of Jodi Picoult's books. It also struck me as honest, in that there are no easy answers for any character. Ms. Lippman appears to inhabit her characters with ease, switching voices—and in the case of Eliza, ages—convincingly. She channels serial-killer Walter with aplomb, an ability she talked about when she appeared on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson:



Ms. Lippman's writing is eminently readable. The action is unpacked slowly, suspensefully, in tightly-constructed chapters that are real page-turners. I found the ending slightly anticlimactic after the drama coming before it, but it is satisfying none-the-less. Loosely based on a real crime (I do so wish Ms. Lippman had told us which one!), I'd Know You Anywhere should make any lover of contemporary crime fiction happy.

Article first published as Book Review: I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman on Blogcritics.

New review, review to come, and now reading

My review of Johannes Cabal the Detective was posted today on Blogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-johannes-cabal-the-detective/

I just finished I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman and presently working on a reivew. Check out the author's interview with Craig Ferguson (courtesy of Library Love Fest): http://harperlibrary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/09/laura-lippman-on-craig-ferguson.html

And I've taken a break from reviewing duties to read Catching Fire, the second book in the fabulous YA series "The Hunger Games." Loving it!!