Adrian McKinty has produced another solid mystery set amidst the Troubles in Northern Ireland-- Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly-- and this time Detective Sean Duffy is doggedly investigating a murder committed by crossbow, and along the way he has his requisite adventures of a Fenian in a strange land (the IRA and the RUC are more porous and intermingled than you might imagine) and the book is chock full of the usual McKinty-esque musical allusions (the title is a line from a Tom Waits song . . . who I coincidentally saw last night, playing a crippled Vietnam vet in The Fisher King) and the rest of the references run the gamut from The Butthole Surfers to Morrissey to Rachmaninoff (there's also a few literary allusions, including a nod to one of my favorite Orwell works: Homage to Catalonia) but the throwaway moment that elevates this book over the top, and makes it a work that should be passed down through the ages, a timeless piece that should represent our era, the Odyssey of our generation, is when Detective Duffy tries to break the ice and tells my favorite joke, the Willie Nelson joke . . . I just heard this joke for the first time a couple months ago and the earliest link to it on the internet is 2011 but I'm willing to excuse the anachronism (and the joke could easily be from the '80s . . . because Willie Nelson has been old since I was a kid, and-- remarkably-- he's still the same amount of old) and now, if you check the comments, Adrian McKinty himself provides the origin story of the joke, the first ever celebrity cameo on Sentence of Dave.
I just finished my 46th book of 2017 this afternoon and it's a fitting one for the end of the year; Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials by Malcolm Harris is an intelligent, analytical and provocative book written by a millennial about the millennial generation that might just change your mind about millennials in general . . . from my perspective, this book is about the end of my era, Generation X, and any slackerly influence it might have had upon the world: kids these days are more prone to anxiety, work harder, do less drugs (drug overdoses seem to be following the Baby Boomer cohort), have less sex, do more homework, get surveilled more-- for a scary take on this, watch Episode 2 of season 4 of Black Mirror-- take out giant student loans which fund ever expanding building projects on college campuses, intern more, get paid less, compete more in an organized fashion, train for this organized competition in areas that are supposed to be fun and healthy-- sports, music, the science fair, dance; are trained by their cell phones to be more available and productive than any work force in history, and don't have much of a shot at the wealth in our nation, which has increasingly been hoarded by the old and the 1% . . . Harris backs this up with plenty of data-- beware: there are charts in this book-- but it is slender and if you have kids or teach or coach or work with kids in any capacity, then you should read this book; the conclusion is not very hopeful . . . I worry about my own children and this book is making me take a step back in my expectations for them and for myself as a parent; the book is also making me enjoy my stable and noncompetitive union job, as the millennial generation will experience job precarity as a matter of course; anyway, this ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution, which is to try to live more in the slow, meditative, and profound world of great books, and avoid the twitchiness of the internet as much as possible . . . I did a pretty good job of it in 2017, especially because we cut the cable and I stopped watching football (and playing fantasy football, which is another one of those productivity training devices that "prepares" people for 24/7 availability and efficiency) and while I didn't quite reach my goal of a book a week, I was close . . . anyway, here is the list-- I discussed my seven favorites on Gheorghe: The Blog-- and wrote reviews of all of them here on Sentence of Dave . . . my favorite book of the year is The Power by Naomi Alderman: if you're going to read one book in 2018, that should be the one . . . and you should try to read at least one book a year, just to avoid being part of the American 26% that reads zero books each year; these are just the books I finished, I started plenty of others and bailed, so anything on this list is pretty good:
1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga
2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927
3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty
9) Normal by Warren Ellis
10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior
11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman
12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack
13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon
15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun
17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty
20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan
21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick
26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue
28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie
31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane
32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons
36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road
37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
42) Roddy Doyle's Smile
43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
45) The Power by Naomi Alderman
46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.
Just after Christmas, my parents took our two boys to Florida with them. This afforded me, my wife, and our dog Lola a chance to take a kid-free vacation in the Hudson Valley. My kids got to relax and live it up with their grandparents in Naples. Their trip looked like this:
This is NOT their story. Theirs is a story of balmy weather, good eating, and luxurious living. They had a wonderful time and my wife and I are much obliged to Grammy and Poppy. But it's boring stuff.
This post is about what to do in New Paltz if you're lucky enough to go without your kids. In December. In all sorts of weather. In a tiny cabin. With a dog. And a sick wife. Not only will I regale you with my eloquent prose, but I'm also going to include a visual feast for the eyes: digital photos! I will save the best shot for last: during a chance wildlife encounter, I actually had the wherewithal to snap a picture with my cellular phone. I generally forget that my phone has this capability, but now I'm emboldened. Now I'm a photographer (as well as an expert at indoor plant installations . . . but that's for another post).
Two days after Christmas, we dropped the kids at my parents and headed to New Paltz for our romantic getaway. The dog traveled in the crate, which turned out to be a godsend. Lola normally pukes on longish car-rides-- which is not very romantic. She had recently puked directly into our tennis-ball hopper. The hopper contained at least forty-five tennis balls. Tennis balls have a radius of 1.25 inches, so if you multiply that by 4π then you get nearly twenty inches of surface area per tennis ball. There was dog vomit on most of the balls, hundreds of inches of vomit covered surface area. Really gross. But in her crate, she lay down and slept. Vomit-free trip. Very romantic.
While we were traveling northbound on Route 1, we saw something kind of sexy on a Sonic sign (if you're into carnivorous bestiality).
This is not the actual sign we saw, but apparently Sonic restaurants across the nation use this obscenely anthropomorphic/cannibalistic haiku as a marketing gimmick. The chicken strips in central Jersey go for $5.99.
Two hours after we imagined a pullet performing at a gentleman's club and then promptly being thrown into the deep fryer, my wife and I arrived at our cozy and dog-friendly Airbnb cabin on the Rail Trail, less than a mile outside of downtown New Paltz. The location couldn't have been better. You could hike the Rail Trail for miles into the wilderness, or you could go the opposite direction and stroll into town, passing through scenically historic Huguenot Street. We unpacked and got ready to begin our (moderately) romantic kid-free vacation. Moderately romantic because-- unfortunately-- my wife was recovering from strep throat and also had a nasty cold (and accompanying cough). Phlegm makes things a little less romantic than lack of phlegm. But despite this, to her credit, she never complained once . . . she just blew her nose a lot.
Our little cabin
It was a beautiful afternoon.We took the dog for a long hike down the Rail Trail and then pondered where we should go for an early dinner.
My wife looked over her handwritten list of great things to do around New Paltz, provided by her friend Kristen. Kristin highly recommended an Irish bar/restaurant called Garvan's. We checked the map and learned that while downtown New Paltz was nearly a mile from our cabin, Garvan's was only a few hundred yards. It was just across the Rail Trail, by the golf course. We were walking distance to a bar! On a vacation without the kids! Pretty sweet. And it had a fantastic happy hour.
Garvan's is in an old building near the club house of the New Paltz Golf Course. It's the most Irish place I've ever been (I've never been to Ireland). The owner-- Garvan-- was very friendly and very Irish. Thus I decided to go with the Guinness. It tasted especially good, which I mentioned to the bartender. It was the end of his shift, so he might have been a little more brusque than normal, but he basically told me that it had better taste good, since Garvan's was one of the few places in the country where Guinness had installed the tap, so the blend of nitrous oxide and CO2 was perfect. Okay, I said, that explains that. What else could I say?
Catherine went with a half and half (also known as a snakebite or a poor man's black velvet). It consists of half cider and half Guinness. We also had the beet and jicama salad, some truffle fries, and some sliders. And some fish and chips. Very Irish and very delicious. The place is awesome, especially for happy hour.
Then we walked back to the cabin, walked the dog, and watched Derry Girls. If you haven't seen it yet, Derry Girls is the perfect show to watch after going to an Irish bar. It's an Irish Netflix comedy; essentially Mean Girls meets Adrian McKinty's "Troubles Trilogy." Catholic school girls (and one boy) amidst the political/religious conflict in Northern Ireland. In the '90's. It's fabulous. (Also, I'm good buddies with Adrian McKinty, so I don't use him in an analogy unless I'm dead serious . . . check the comments).
The bed was a bit soft and there was some coughing and snoring from my wife's side of it, but I had consumed enough Guinness to sleep through the sniffling.
The next morning, I walked the dog down the Rail Trail again (while my wife slept). And I realized that while the location of the cabin was great, the cabin itself was not perfect. It was clean, and it was cheap, but it was cozy. I am a solidly built American male, so when I say the cabin was "cozy," I actually mean claustrophobically small. Normally when we travel, we make some coffee and grab a light breakfast at home, then do something active, eat lunch out, and then-- at least a few times-- we cook dinner back at the ranch. This is the most economical way to do it. Lunch is the cheapest meal to eat out. It's also nice to get back to home base for dinner. You can drink as many local beers as you desire, without worrying about driving under the influence in a new locale. And going out for breakfast is just stupid. Pay for eggs? I can make eggs.
This photo makes the kitchen look bigger than it actually is.
On this trip, our normal schedule got turned on its head. The first morning, I tried to make some coffee, but I kept banging into things in the kitchen. The kitchen was too small to make coffee in. I made an executive decision and told my wife we were going to the Mudd Puddle for coffee and breakfast. She readily agreed. She loves to go out for breakfast but recognizes that going out for breakfast defies all my logic and reason. Lunch food is better than breakfast food. I hate to eat before I do some exercise. If you eat breakfast out, then you're not hungry for lunch. If you eat breakfast out, then you're not ready to snowboard, ski, hike, run, etc. It's completely insane to eat breakfast out. But my claustrophobia (and the lack of children) overrode that decision.
We had been to New Paltz once before-- with the kids-- and remembered that the Mudd Puddle had the best coffee in the universe. While we would never bring the kids to a local coffee shop for breakfast-- the place was too small and slow and local-- we realized that we did not have the kids with us. We could bring our books and read while we drank coffee.
So we went to the Mudd Puddle, got coffee, read our books, and I ate a James Special sandwich, which involves eggs, bourbon-soaked bacon, balsamic caramelized onions, and some kind of homemade bread. It was wild! It was crazy! We were eating food before doing exercise. The sandwich was the best thing ever. I had one every morning for the rest of the trip.
Then the rains came. We beat a hasty retreat back to our tiny cabin. Catherine, still nursing her cold, fell fast asleep. I took the dog for a long walk down the Rail Trail in the rain. It was gross. Hugeonot Street was historical and scenic, but I was full from breakfast. It's hard to appreciate 17th century architecture when your is stomach is full and your socks are damp. I got back and we watched "Bandersnatch" on Netflix. It was fun to choose but the plot was only okay.
It was pouring. The kids were sending us pictures. Ian caught a lizard. They were lounging around the pool. What the fuck were we going to do? The cabin was tiny and it was raining cats and dogs. Once again, it took a moment to realize that we didn't have to amuse the kids. They were in Florida. We took a ride to the Yard Owl Brewery. It was run by James, the guy who owned the Mudd Puddle. The beer had to be good.
It was. But playing Bananagrams in a small craft brewery on the Hudson Valley Rail Trail with my beautiful (but phlegmy) wife was even better than the beer, though. Very relaxing. Time seemed to stand still. And you could blame it on her illness, but I kicked her ass three times in a row (which doesn't usually happen).
The best beer at the Yard Owl was the Chouette D'or. It was divine! Divine I say! And that means a lot, because I hate eating, drinking, and enunciating anything French. The Owlet was also tasty (and very cute). We also had a cheese plate with red onion relish. The red onion relish is to die for. To die for! And it doesn't have a French name.
Catherine also liked the local cider.
The next day the rains let up. We went hiking in the morning on one of the trails in the Mohonk Preserve. We wanted to see the Mohonk Testimonial Gatehouse up close. It was built in 1908 and apparently, it was in a 1985 horror movie called The Stuff.
The Mohonk trails are beautifully maintained, but there is a $15 dollar fee daily fee per hiker. Fuck that! We trespassed.
This was harder than I imagined. Catherine was pretty good, but I kept picking my head up. Also, Steve-- our instructor-- gave me a "man's gun." A 12 gauge. Catherine got to use the 20 gauge. Every time I picked my head up to watch the shot fly, the gun kicked and hit me in the cheek. This hurt like hell. We shot fifty rounds. Forty of them whacked me in the cheek. Ouch. If you look closely at the picture, my cheek is swollen. I would have not made it very far in the Wild West. Clint Eastwood would have shot me while I was rubbing my swollen cheek.
Over the next few days we did more of the same (aside from the shooting). We visited Catherine's favorite cider house: Bad Seed. They had a lot of interesting ciders on tap. There was also a wild double birthday party going on in there. A gaggle of women in their mid-fifties dressed in 70's style clothing. Apparently, this is what you do around New Paltz. Drive out to breweries and cider houses and have a good time. They are spacious places. You can bring kids and dogs. It's a sweet set-up.
Here's a shot of historic Huguenot Street. If you look closely, you can see that I am balder than I think I am. If you look very closely, you'll see my dog's anus.
One morning we drove out to Lake Minnewaska and hiked from Awosting Falls up to the cliffs around the lake. It's a spectacular place.
Here's a shot of Awosting Falls. The falls were really running because of all the rain.
There were a couple of other excellent spots. Arrowood Farm-Brewery is scenic and has great beer. Another big open space that is dog and kid-friendly. The Main Street Bistro serves vegetarian food good enough to make me a vegetarian (at least for a little while, later in the day I couldn't pass up short rib sliders at Garvan's). We had one fancy meal at a place called A Tavola and it was worth it (and I hate expensive restaurants). Then we went to the Denizen Theater and saw a play called "Adaptive Radiation." The play was very experimental, as was the performance space. It's called intimate black box theater and it's cozy. By cozy, I mean claustrophobically small. We were right on top of the four actors; the stage and seats were in a sort of an alley set-up: the seats rose up on either side of the stage, so you were staring at half of the audience (I enjoyed seeing their reactions to all the weirdness in the play). The play was more professional than I thought, and it was also louder than I thought. I also think that theater should happen before dinner. As I pointed out, The Denizen Theater was a cozy space, and I had just drank quite a few Molly IPAs and eaten a heavy meal. There was certainly something brewing in my belly, and a brisk walk in the air would have been more appropriate than sitting very still in a small black room in close proximity to a bunch of strangers. I managed to curtail any flatulence, but it wasn't easy. I had to sit very still.
And now, as promised, I'll show you the pièce de résistance . . . some stunning wildlife photography. I was out walking with the dog at dusk, on the Rail Trail, and I felt a presence. Something looming over me. It was an owl! A very appropriate animal, since we had been to the Yard Owl Brewery (where Cat bought an owl hat). And the owl is the Highland Park mascot (Highland Park is the town in which I live and coach).
Because of all this heaping significance, I actually remembered to pull my cell phone out and snap a photo. A few people who saw the photo were curious as to my equipment: I used an LG Harmony phone to take this picture. It costs twenty dollars when you sign up for Cricket. I don't think I had it on the highest resolution. Here is the photo. It's a keeper!
Let me zoom in. This is the stuff of National Geographic.
A vivid memory from a fantastic trip.
We had a smooth ride back to Jersey, hosted a small New Year's Party/game night, and picked up the kids at the Trenton airport on New Year's Day. The kids were fat, happy, and tired. Alex had gained 8 pounds and Ian had put on 5.
Once we got home from New Paltz, the dog seemed pretty depressed but then when Ian walked in the house she went totally bananas. It was like a miniature version of the end of the Odyssey; Odysseus returns home after his twenty-year voyage and his dog Argus sees him and gets so excited that he dies. Lola did not die (nor did she pee in the house) but she was pretty damned excited to have the kids back (and so were Cat and I . . . especially because they had followed our instructions and watched Derry Girls, so we had a lot to discuss).
The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian Mckinty, is so much more than your typical police-procedural-hunt-down-the-serial-killer mystery; it is set in 1981, amidst "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, and Belfast is close to complete anarchy . . . Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop (or "peeler") works on an entirely Protestant force, and has to investigate a killer targeting homosexuals while navigating a byzantine world of IRA heavies, hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, Protestant Militia groups, and angry unemployed locals . . . but the book still has a sense of humor (quite a bit more than this film) and some romance between the murders, riots, and explosions; a quick read that takes you back to a chaotic time with which Mckinty is extremely familiar: nine severed hands out of ten.
Adrian McKinty's newest Sean Duffy novel-- number seven-- is just as good, if not a wee bit better, than all the rest; The Detective Up Late has the usual mix of criminal mystery, Belfast Troubles politics, and oddball hipster allusions-- musical and otherwise . . . and at the start of this novel, we turn the page from the 80s to the 90s and the musical allusions follow suit-- except for all the Mahler and Wagner references-- anyway, here are a few new jokes and references I learned:
1) I read a joke about an alternate ending to Peter Pan where Captain Hook wins the duel and sends Peter Pan back to London in a body bag-- not a very joke funny and quite dark, and it truly requires a dead Pan delivery . . .
2) There was a young man from Peru/ Whose limericks stopped at line two;
3) The English title of the French novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne was mistranslated: the original French title-- "Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers," translates to "Under the Seas" but Mercier's translation is "Under the Sea" and this mistranslation can lead to confusion about the distance traveled by Professor Arronax and Captain Nemo in the novel. In the French version, "twenty thousand leagues" refers to the distance traveled-- as a league is about 3.5 miles-- but in the English version, it can sound like the Nautilus dives that far downward, however, that's not possible because the distance is greater than the diameter of the Earth, so the voyage actually takes place around the world under different seas
4) Duffy has a print of the 1968 painting by Giorgio de Chirico "The Return of Ulysses" on his wall-- I was not familiar with Chirico but this image is a perfect allegory of Duffy returning home from the insane violence, betrayal, and ruin of Belfast, to his wife and child and collection of music-- and in this novel he is splitting his time between two homes, one in Northern Ireland on Coronation Road-- where he has made great inroads as a Catholic peeler among prods . . . and his new safer home in Scotland-- anyway, another bang-up job by McKinty-- highly recommended.
My favorite joke of all time-- the Willie Nelson joke-- appeared in one of Adrian McKinty's crime novels, leading to a visit from McKinty himself at SoD . . . now the joke has reared it's ugly (but adorably stoned) head in the new Sedaris memoir, Happy-Go-Lucky . . . which means that Sedaris has to come visit my blog as well.
Though Sean Duffy is as cool as they come (especially his eclectic musical taste) he isn't is as particular as James Bond about his alcohol: in fact he'll ingest most anything -- single malt scotch, pints of bitter, glasses of the black stuff, Vodka gimlets, enormous quantities of wine, cans of Bass . . . whatever, and he's not afraid to chase it with narcotics . . . stolen pharma grade cocaine, weed, codeine, or anything else that he runs across . . . sometimes this is to assuage physical pain, he often takes a beating, whether it's donning riot gear in Belfast, trying to keep some order as the lone Catholic in a Protestant housing project on Coronation Road in the town of Carrickfergus, discussing delicate matters with various Loyalist Protestant paramilitary groups in perpetual battle with the IRA, or getting officially roughed up by some American spooks for poking his nose where it doesn't belong . . . and sometimes he's drowning his troubles in drink and drugs to handle the mental anguish of being a "Fenian" peeler in the midst of the Troubles; in Adrian McKinty's new novel, Gun Street Girl, despite all this baggage the MI5 recognizes Duffy's talent and while his contact, Kate, remarks that "your house stinks of marijuana and Scotch, and there's what appears to be cocaine on the lapel of your dressing gown" she still wishes to enlist him in the British secret service, but then things get complicated . . . oddly, the wildest things in this novel are based on real events: a mysterious missile theft, MI5 agents lurking about Ireland in the 80's, a notable heroin overdose at Oxford, a Chinook helicopter crash, and connections to the Iran/Contra scandal . . . if you haven't read any of the McKinty's books, start with The Cold Cold Ground and make your way from there.
This sentence would be much better if I came to the end of three trilogies-- which is entirely in the realm of possibility, because the boys and I just watched The Matrix and I've never seen The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, but I don't want to ruin the original movie and I've heard the sequels are nothing special, and so I may never complete that one; I did race to the end of two detective sagas, though, and both are well worth it: the final book in Adrian Mckinty's Troubles Trilogy (In the Morning I'll Be Gone) is the best one of the series -- IRA plots, a locked room murder, multiple intelligence agencies, and plenty of atmosphere . . . and the season three finale of the British TV series Sherlock (His Last Vow) is also worth the ride, enough twists and turns in the plot to make you queasy and -- like the Mckinty novel -- some wild violence, which seems even more so because of the intelligent build-up . . . summer is coming to a close so enjoy this stuff while you still can.
A new episode of my podcast is up and streaming-- "Bubble, Bubble, The Irish Troubles" . . . this one is inspired by Stuart Neville's thriller The Ghosts of Belfast and it is a major improvement from my last effort, which was a rambling and convoluted attempt to cover far too large a topic-- this episode has an eclectic crew of special guests to boot, including: The Hasbro Pop-O-Matic, Detective Sean Duffy, Adrian McKinty, Sinead O'Connor, Indiana Jones, Erin Quinn, Grandpa Joe, The People's Front of Judea, and U2.
Mercury tilt bombs, Castle Carrickfergus, Jimmy Savile, the Troubles, Belfast, Coronation Road, atrocious scandals, a locked room murder, copious pints of beer, plenty of illicit substances, Steve Reich and other obscure minimalist music . . . this all adds up to another excellent Sean Duffy crime novel: Rain Dogs.
So here's the big follow-up to the first post ever commented on by an acclaimed author on Sentence of Dave . . . I've noticed that whenever I go into the yard with the good intention of cleaning up the dog poop, while I am searching for the dog poop so that I can bag it and dispose of it, I always end up stepping in dog poop . . . this happens 100% of the time-- including this afternoon-- and if it happens 100% of the time, then I believe this makes it a scientific law: Poopy's Law.
The first book I've finished during the Covid-19 Crisis has an apt title: Death Without Company.
Death without company is the unfortunate demise for a number of people around the world, especially in Italy. It's tragic.
But Craig Johnson's second Longmire mystery is a perfect escape from the news in more densely populated places. The book is set in Wyoming, the least populated state in the U.S. Less than 600,000 people. And declining. Twenty-six cases of Covid 19. You've got a better chance of getting eaten by a grizzly.
Death Without Company is full of sassy, autonomous old people. No quarantining here. The novel begins with a suspected murder at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I won't get into the plot-- it's too complicated-- but there are snowstorms and icy rivers and cold nights on the rez, as well as murder and mayhem and methane aplenty. And, as usual, Sheriff Longmire takes the brunt of the punishment (along with his buddy Henry Standing Bear).
I will definitely be distracting myself with mystery novels during the quarantine. There's nothing like a procedural crime fiction to take you away to a different place. The setting is actually significant-- it's not window-dressing. The details are important to solving the crime. You can go to New Mexico with Tony Hillerman, you can go to Northern Ireland with Adrian McKinty, you can journey to Scotland with Ian Rankin, you can roam Los Angeles with Harry Bosch . . . and it's better than a travelogue (because at any moment the narrator might get shot or stabbed).
I can barely follow the plot of most mystery novels I read-- I'm too thick-headed-- but I love observing a new place through the eyes of a detective.
Adrian Mckinty's second book in his "Troubles Trilogy" is as good as the first-- not only does the I Hear the Sirens in the Street have a cracking good mystery (headless torso, layers of espionage, John DeLorean, hauntingly beautiful widowed Irish farm lass, etc. etc.) but the setting-- the early '80's in Northern Ireland, amidst the worst of the terrorism, bombings, mob violence, and sectarian anger-- lends an extra air of tension and futility to the typical "damaged detective" story, and the writing is top notch-- a great beach book for the end of the summer . . . and also in the way of mysteries from across the pond, the Sherlock Holmes episode "The Sign of the Three," where Watson gets married and Sherlock Holmes delivers the most fantastically awkward, moving inspirational, deductive and dramatic best man's speech in matrimonial history is a must see, and it works as a set piece, so you don't need to watch the rest of the series to understand it.
This photo makes the kitchen look bigger than it actually is.
