Loneliness pervades tale of gruesome murder

After living with a pandemic for nearly three years, and almost two years after the first vaccines arrived, most people have returned to normal life, even if it is a different normal than before covid. I don’t worry about going to stores or restaurants unmasked, I hug people I love, and we enjoy large family dinners. However, the worry is always in the back of my mind, manifesting as anxiety in very crowded spaces. It is not difficult to recall the loneliness—for some, isolation—that the pandemic brought.

Katrine Engberg’s new installment of her Korner and Werner series, “The Sanctuary,” written during covid, deftly captures the pain of loneliness, not from pandemic lockdown, but from the usual trials of life.

After Copenhagen police find a suitcase with half of a body in it—the left half—detective Anette Werner travels to the tiny Danish island of Bornholm following clues to try to determine the victim’s identity and find his killer. While working on the case, she has to contend with missing her husband and toddler daughter, and her three troublesome border collies.

Anette’s partner, Jeppe Korner, has been on a leave of absence for months after a painful breakup. He’s on Bornholm working as a lumberjack, living alone, and socializing only with his shut-in neighbor. Since he’s already on Bornholm and acquainted with many locals, Anette asks Jeppe to find out what he can as she sets up her investigation out of the local police station. This is Anette’s first time to head up a homicide investigation on her own, and she is both anxious and missing her partner.

Jeppe’s friend Esther also arrives on Bornholm, grieving the recent death of her roommate, Gregers. She’s there working on a biography of a famous anthropologist—Margrethe Dybris—now deceased. She was invited to stay in the woman’s home by the woman’s daughter, who is also staying there. Meanwhile, Anette learns that the suitcases that the two half-corpses (the second one being found a few days after the first) once belonged to the famed scientist. Anette and her team begin to suspect that the scientist’s missing son is the victim.

The story alternates between the present investigation and Dybris’s life, which we learn about through Esther reading her correspondence. Dybris eschewed marriage, electing to adopt two children, live modestly, and pursue her work. While her daughter attended college, married, had a career, her son struggled in school and got into trouble—pranks and mischief mostly. However, at his eighteenth birthday party, his pregnant girlfriend died from a mysterious fall. Suspicion fell on the son, and his life began to spin out of control, leading to drugs and petty crime.

The plot is intriguing as Anette and her team meticulously and methodical investigate the gruesome murder. There are plenty of suspects, and readers are treated to some action and suspense at the climax.

I am very much a fan of Nordic Noir, which can be quite dark and somewhat disturbing—even disturbed. Readers who may not be comfortable with the gloomy, unsettling stories in most of the genre will enjoy this series. Despite their loneliness, grief, and pain, the characters find connection or reconnection with others by the end of the book—happy endings for all but the killer.

How, not who, is question in tense thriller

Ana Reyes’s debut novel, “The House in the Pines” is a tense thriller that keeps the reader turning pages and trying, as the protagonist does, to figure out just what happened.

Twenty-something Maya, trying to kick her addiction to tranquilizers, sees a Youtube video of a woman seeming to drop dead while sitting in a diner. Maya recognizes the man with the young woman as Frank, whom she had known seven years ago when Maya’s friend Aubrey also dropped dead in Frank’s presence. Convinced that this second death is no coincidence, Maya returns to her home town to try and find out what happened and prove that Frank is responsible for both deaths.

The story is told in two chronologies. The present chronology of Maya’s attempt to regain lost memories, fight her addiction, and prove Frank a killer is told in the past tense, so that readers share Maya’s guarded, emotional distance from the frightening events of finding the video and hunting a killer.

The second chronology, the summer after Maya finishes high school, plans for college, and meets Frank, is told in the present tense, drawing the reader into Maya’s fragmented memories and the tragedy of Aubrey’s death and Maya’s inability to escape or move on from that summer.

Readers, and Maya, know all along who the killer is. Since the only question is how he did it, there is little suspense until the end when Maya gets close to the truth. However, the book’s interesting structure keep the reader’s attention. It’s a rewarding read that moves quickly, especially good for a day locked in the house by bad weather.

Marburg’s lonely, desperate characters struggle to find human connection

Louise Marburg’s new short story collection presents snapshots of twelve women at difficult and painful turning points. Written during the pandemic lock-down, “You Have Reached Your Destination,” due out Nov. 10, exudes the anxiety, fear, and sometimes despair that many were feeling at that time.

The youngest of these women is just 12 years old and struggling to understand and accept her father’s suicide while tiptoeing around her alcoholic and abusive mother. Her one ally, her sister, who is 10 years older, inexplicably turns on her, adhering instead to an alcoholic and abusive boyfriend. Not even a teenager yet, Katie realizes she is utterly alone, with only herself to trust and depend on.

At 91, June is the oldest of Marburg’s protagonists. June lives alone in New York City, “an easy place to be old.” She can take a taxi wherever she wants to go and have her groceries delivered, and she has a best friend in her building. However, June’s friend dies suddenly while having tea with her.

When newlyweds move in next door, she is happy to find the young wife is friendly and even offers to pick up items for June on her shopping trip. It is not long before June hears loud noises coming from her new neighbors’ apartment: loud voices, thumps, and crashes. The next day she sees the young wife with a bruise on her face. June, having escaped an abusive first husband, tries to help her neighbor, but the woman becomes angry. June confides in her daughter, who never knew about her mother’s first marriage. The daughter doesn’t believe her and implies that June is becoming senile. June misses her best friend and feels abandoned by her daughter.

The other ten stories feature young women desperate for family, middle aged women desperate for love, and older women desperate to be seen. Many are orphaned or come from abusive homes. One is so ashamed of her parents, she tells everyone they are dead.

Marburg’s stories of loneliness are not without humor and hope. Matronly, 60-something Lydia finds an obscene and threatening note on her desk. Her patronizing boss promises to find out who left it although he never intends to do anything about it at all. Then Lydia’s duplicitous and self-involved best friend accuses Lydia of leaving it herself for attention. To console herself, Lydia takes an all-afternoon lunch at a downtown bar, not realizing it is a gay bar, even after meeting a woman named Dade who actually turns out to be David.

In “Next of Kin,” a 41-year-old freelancer who has been “actively wooing” a rare-book dealer “despite his obvious lack of interest” finally makes her move on him only to discover that he’s gay. Neither of them can understand how she missed this. Although they don’t make love, they do become close friends, and he promises to be her next-of-kin.

Marburg’s protagonists are searching for human connection, something that was painfully missing for many people during 2020. They are looking for friends, allies, lovers, or children. They are realistically drawn characters struggling with their very human needs in a cold and chaotic world. This fourth collection of shorts stories cements Marburg’s place as an important and compelling voice in contemporary literature as she captures American angst and loneliness as few have done since Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 

Magickal mystery arrives in time for Halloween

Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, with a heavy dose of magical realism, “River Woman, River Demon” by Jennifer Givhan is an entertaining page-turner ahead of Halloween.

Eva, Chicana/indigenous artist and mother of two, lives on a dusty ranch near Albuquerque with her college professor/magickian husband, Jericho. Eva is also a practitioner of brujería and curanderisma.

Just a couple of weeks before Halloween, or Hallows as Eva and Jericho call it, Eva is drowsing at her kitchen table when she awakens to a woman’s screams coming from the direction of the river. She runs barefoot across the scrubby grasses, cactus, and rocks to find Jericho in the water with their friend Cecilia. Cecilia is beaten bloody and drowned.

Cecilia’s blood is found both in her car and Jericho’s, and the police find intimate photos of Cecilia in the glovebox of Jericho’s car. Eva, still traumatized by the drowning death of her best childhood friend, Karma, is now re-traumatized by both Cecilia’s murder and her husband’s betrayal.

Where before she was haunted just by Karma’s memory and her fragmented recollections of her death, Eva is now also haunted by Cecilia, sometimes in the form of an owl. And someone—or something—is cursing her with unexplained bruises, statues running blood, fainting, and paralysis.

Then suddenly, people from Eva’s past begin appearing. First the boyfriend that abandoned her in San Diego shows up at Cecilia’s funeral. He and Eva rekindle their relationship. Then the girl, now woman, that had accused Eva of drowning Karma arrives at Eva’s house offering to help her. Although Karma’s death was eventually ruled an accident, Eva had come under suspicion because of the girl’s accusations.

Not knowing who she can trust, Eva has to rely on herself and her magick to make sense of the tragic events of her life and keep herself and her children from danger.

Although Cecilia’s murder and the climax of the story are the only parts of intense action, the author uses short chapters to keep the story from dragging, even the passages that are just Eva dreaming or talking with her sister.

Eva’s memory gaps and fainting spells make her a somewhat unreliable narrator, suggesting to the reader, and to Eva herself, that perhaps she is responsible for the deaths of her two friends. The suspense builds even further at the end when the reader realizes before Eva who the killer is.

“River Woman, River Demon” releases Oct. 4, just in time for Hallows. It is a fun, quick read that will entertain and intrigue.

Imagery and mystery make debut novel enjoyable read

Virginia Hartman’s debut novel, “The Marsh Queen” is a treasure trove of birds, swamps, moss, and herbs. Add to that family secrets, stalkers, and murderous bad guys and the result is an interesting read.

Smithsonian bird artist Loni Murrow returns to her Florida pan-handle hometown after her mother suffers a fall and starts displaying signs of dementia. Her relationship with her mother has always been tense. In addition, returning home dredges up painful memories of Loni’s father’s suicide when Loni was 12 years old.

Officially recorded as an accident, Loni keeps the facts of her father’s death from her brother, who was an infant when Boyd died. But as she is going through her mother’s things, she finds a cryptic note from Henrietta saying it’s time that they talk about what really happened to Boyd. Loni begins searching for this Henrietta, whom everyone in town denies knowing.

As Loni spends week after week in Florida, she takes long canoe trips through the swamp looking for models for her free-lance work. Hartman’s precise and beautiful detail put the reader in the quiet swamp, the only sounds the oar’s dip in the water and the occasional bird calling its mate.

Although the mystery of Henrietta and her note drive the plot, the narrative does drag a bit. At least 100 pages could have been cut from the book’s 384. After the third canoe trip through the swamp, we have the idea. And Loni has lots of breakfasts and lunches with her brother where she learns a little bit more to aid her search for the truth about her dad. Several of these conversations could have been combined.

However, readers looking for beautiful prose, well-drawn characters, and intriguing mystery will enjoy “The Marsh Queen.”

Unique memoir describes the power of story

Elisa Bernick’s new book, “Departure Stories,” is unique among the many memoirs—from Mary Karr to Julia Child to Stephen King—that I’ve read.

Out Oct. 4, the book is seasoned with history, statistics, science, philosophy, jokes, and recipes. The first half is primarily Elisa’s story growing up Jewish in “Minneapolis…the most antisemitic city in the country” with an abusive mother and an emotionally absent father. The second half of the book is a thoughtful treatise on how what we remember and what we forget shapes us and our lives.

Arlene, Elisa’s mother, is verbally and physically abusive and views her children as impediments to her happiness. Arlene constantly harangues her husband as a cheapskate who never gives her enough money to feed the family and run the home.

Elisa endures the chaos at home and antisemitic taunts at school and in the neighborhood. She comes home one day and asks her parents if their family killed Christ. And who is Christ, by the way?

In 1964, Arlene enters the Mrs. Minnesota contest. When she finishes ninth, her mother tells her “I told you they’d never let a Jew win.”

In 1969, Elisa’s parents divorce and a couple of years later Arlene takes three of her children and moves to California where her boyfriend, Bernie, moves in with them. Things do not improve. Bernie is also physically, and possibly sexually, abusive to Elisa.

In addition to telling the story of her childhood, Bernick also gives the historical context that explains her mother’s behavior. She discusses the history of trauma of the Jewish people, the limited opportunities afforded women in the mid-20^th century, the “divorce revolution” of the 1970s, as well as the dysfunctional family that Arlene grew up in.

Bernick also explains how humans remember and mis-remember events and how they remember events they were not even witness to. Like Tim O’Brien in “The Things They Carried,” Bernick posits that stories don’t have to be factual to be “true”; that there is “truth” and “Truth.” More important that facts, capital-T Truth, relates a truth about human nature, experience, emotion, or the world in general.

However, the most interesting part of Bernick’s work is her explanation about the power of storytelling. According to Bernick, the words we choose and how we tell our stories determine how we see ourselves and how we live our lives, that “As we shape our stories, they shape us.”

Just as many people who experience crime or violence describe themselves as “survivors” instead of “victims,” people who shape their stories of trauma into stories of resilience become the authors of their own stories. They overcome their trauma instead of living each day inside of it. This is how Bernick describes herself.

In addition to being a unique way to present her life, “Departure Stories” is an informative, moving, and uplifting story of resilience and forgiveness—and the power of storytelling.

Psychological thriller questions perception, mortality

Best-selling author Iain Reid’s newest, “We Spread,” is a riveting, disturbing examination of the isolation and decrepitude of old age. Some believe that death, and our foreknowledge of it, are the worst part of the human experience, but Reid’s latest novel shows us that there could be worse things.

Penny is an elderly woman living alone in a large city. Her long-time partner is dead. She goes for days or weeks without speaking to another human being and doesn’t seem to have any family. There is nothing about her existence that she enjoys.

The first part of the novel is quite difficult to read. Penny’s first person narration emphasizes her miserable marking of time without love or companionship. Even her cat has died. Then weird things begin happening.

She begins hearing voices coming from the next apartment, which is unoccupied. One day, standing at the window she sees a mysterious stranger staring up at her from the street. After she suffers a fall in her apartment, her landlord packs her up and deposits her at Six Cedars, an assisted living residence.

However, strange things continue to happen once she is at Six Cedars. There are only four residents. The only staff are Shelley, the director, and Jack, an assistant. At first, Penny is happy to find that she sleeps soundly at night and that her appetite has returned. However, when she’s been there just four days, she is told she has been there for three years.

And there are mysterious gaps in her memory. She wakes from naps she doesn’t remember lying down for. She looks out a window briefly to find that hours have passed. Her slippers fit fine one day but are too small the next and too large the day after that.

Penny suspects that Shelley is up to something nefarious. Her conversations with Jack convince her of it. Shelley tells Penny that everyone wants more time. More time to live, to work. However, Penny comes to realize that immortality comes at a price, one that is perhaps too high.

Although Penny is suspicious of Shelley and mourns the loss of her memories, she does find human connection that renews her energy and appreciation of life. Hilbert, another resident, becomes a particular friend to Penny. She quickly comes to care for him and tries to protect him.

Hilbert explains to her about Pando, as aspen tree colony that is actually one organism with a massive, connected root system. Pando, Latin for “I spread,” becomes the primary metaphor of the novel. It’s suggested that Shelley, a former biologist, is trying to prove that a similar interconnectedness among people will give them infinite time on Earth. Penny concludes that interconnectedness is what gives our lives meaning and purpose but that infinite time is too much.

Penny’s narration and limited point of view ask the reader to wonder if Shelley is up to no good, or if Penny is merely suffering from dementia. The novel’s ending gives no clear answers. However, this psychological thriller, out Sept. 27, will certainly leave the reader thinking about how we live our lives, especially how we end them, and how much we should rely on our own perceptions. Certainly not light reading, the novel is rewarding for those who appreciate an unreliable narrator and an ambiguous ending.