Friday, November 11, 2016

The boy in the suitcase (2008) by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

Book review: The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis
translated by one of the authors, Lene Kaaberbol.
Soho Press, 2011. First published in Denmark in 2008.

The Boy in the Suitcase tells a story from the point of view of the four main characters. Jan is a rich Danish businessman who is very fond of his wife, Anne, and her family. He goes on a business trip, or so he tells her, but becomes stuck on a plane due to a series of technical problems. He therefore phones Karin, who works for him, and asks her to undertake the work he’s set out to do. She agrees, reluctantly.
Nina is a nurse who works for an organisation helping abused women and children, as well as illegal immigrants. She receives a desperate phone call from Karin who asks her to do Jan’s assignment in her place. Nina was Karin’s closest friend but the two have been estranged for years. Karin knows that Nina is part of a mysterious “network” and hints to her that this is why she is asking for Nina’s help. Nina agrees.
The other two characters live in Lithuania. Jucas is married to an older woman, Barbara, and dreams of moving with her to her home town of Krakow. But first, he feels he has to make plenty of money. Jan is his ticket. Finally Sigita, a young mother, is plunged into a nightmare from which she can see no way out.
How these characters connect to each other becomes apparent as we follow their actions in sections told from each one’s point of view, in the present as Nina takes Karin’s place; and in the past as we see how each person’s actions affect the other characters in the tense series of events that ensue. Although slow to unfold, the story is an exciting and involving one. Given the information provided to the reader at the start, it is not too hard to work out what is going on and why, but this does not detract from the plot – even though in the end it depends on information deliberately withheld from the reader. Unfortunately, in my view, the climax to the main story is marred by some unnecessary and protracted violence which, together with the coda explaining Nina’s character, are somewhat clunky compared with the more subtle approach of most of the rest of the book.
The character of Sigita is exceptionally well portrayed, and is for me the most sympathetic character in the novel. Nina is more of a cliche; she’s a typical damaged protagonist (seems to be suffering from manic depression) who had a childhood trauma and has been compensating ever since, distancing herself from her husband and children in order to save them from herself, while compulsively helping other “outsiders”. I liked the Jan/Anne dynamics, though these characters are less developed, but thought that the Jucas/Barbara subplot less convincing. Nevertheless, though there are some flaws in the book, not least a tendency to overdo the back story in some cases, it is a very good read, highlighting some of the social injustices that are all too familar to us today from reading the newspapers and other crime novels.

Review borrowed from blog Petrona, excellent blog about intelligent crime fiction

Heads in Beds (2012) by Jacob Tomsky

Need a Room? Be Careful How You Ask

‘Heads in Beds,’ a Memoir by Jacob Tomsky

By JANET MASLIN of The Times NOV. 5, 2012

If you ever find yourself staying in Room 1212 of a New York City hotel, Jacob Tomsky’s “Heads in Beds” suggests that you think back to the way you behaved while checking in. Were you rude to the front desk? Cheap to the bellman? Yammering nonstop on your cellphone? Asking irritating questions about the gym and the ice machines?

Mr. Tomsky, a self-taught expert in the passive-aggressive tricks of hotel workers, says that a Room 1212 may not happen by accident. It may be assigned spitefully, because it is a torture chamber where the phone rings at all hours of the day and night. It is well known to hotel management that guests dialing the New York area code 212 often hit 1-212, not knowing they must first dial 9 to get a local outside line.

“Heads in Beds” is Mr. Tomsky’s highly amusing guidebook to the dirty little secrets of the hospitality trade. But it is neither a meanspirited book nor a one-sided one. It tells the tale of how and why Mr. Tomsky worked his way up the industry ladder, beginning as a rubber-burning parking garage valet in New Orleans (“AC running and classic rock on low for you, sir,” went the patter) and then making his way indoors. It views the worst species of hotel guests with a gimlet eye. But Mr. Tomsky also captures the thinking of hotel patrons who just want decent treatment. His main tip on that score: tip. And don’t do it nervously. “It’s not a drug deal,” he says.

The transactions described in “Heads in Beds” do involve a high degree of cupidity and dishonesty on both sides. If there is one lie that desk clerks tell most often, Mr. Tomsky says, it is that all of the hotel’s rooms are the same. They aren’t, and a good frontman will know the specifics about each one of them. If there is one crass goal that hotel guests share, it is the desire to get something for nothing, whether it’s an upgrade to an elite floor or a free bag of cashews. “Heads in Beds” explains ways that each side in such trade-offs can wind up happy.

If this were simply a travel book of the news-you-can-use ilk, it would be of only minor interest. But Mr. Tomsky turns out to be an effervescent writer, with enough snark to make his stories sharp-edged but without the self-promoting smugness that sinks so many memoirs. He begins by explaining why he so enjoyed working in New Orleans. He learned the habits of his fellow valet car parkers, like the guy who spent time in the back office counting the change he stole from cars. “He made too much noise when he ran.”

Mr. Tomsky soon learned that the misery of running up the garage’s 10 flights of stairs in New Orleans heat could be offset by driving some stranger’s car around its ramps fast enough to make his stomach drop. “And so does the front end, right into the concrete, but who cares,” he writes. “That’s internal and nonvisual damage.”

He then became privy to the opening of a lavish hotel. “Luxury is more than chandeliers and horrible oil paintings of horses,” he counsels. This establishment encouraged staff members to cosset guests in every conceivable way, even if that left Mr. Tomsky, chin in hand, pretending to be amused by a description of exactly the same street performer another guest told him about on the previous evening.

After the New Orleans hotel became more hard-nosed and Mr. Tomsky more worldly, he began work at an established hotel, near Times Square, that he calls the Bellevue. Here, as elsewhere, almost all the names are changed but the stories sound very real — even Mr. Tomsky’s protective portrait of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who could jump in fear if the staff’s orders were yelled too loudly. New York was a much more cutthroat environment for hotel workers, and Mr. Tomsky directs special blame toward Bernard Sadow. Mr. Sadow, he says, is much loathed by bellmen for having invented the suitcase with wheels.

This book’s Manhattan stories are more mercenary than the earlier ones, not least because the Bellevue’s management decided to renovate the place and double its prices. Blame these crass business practices for Mr. Tomsky’s advice about cheating the house: he explains how to watch free movies, steal the entire contents of a minibar, avoid a cancellation charge even when canceling hours after the room rental started, and generally win any argument you choose to pick with a hotel employee.

But he winds up sounding like an essentially honest, decent guy. And his observations about character are keen, perhaps because he’s seen it all. If a guest checking in is noisily abusive, another guest who overhears this nastiness is apt to be almost unreasonably nice. “When his turn comes, I could tell him that he is staying in the basement rat room for fifteen hundred dollars a night, and he would say, ‘Hey, not to worry.’ Maybe even lean in and add a concerned, ‘Have a nice day, O.K.?’ ”

How much of this mano-a-mano combat could Mr. Tomsky take? He is no longer a hotel employee and now, with good reason, thinks of himself as a writer. There are hints of a “Heads in Beds II” to describe the anger-management group therapy to which the Bellevue finally drove him.

“Heads in Beds” embraces the full, novelistic breadth of hotel experience, not just the squalid late-night couplings for which they are so justly known. Many other kinds of things happen to guests, too, Mr. Tomsky writes: “They receive news of a loved one’s death from a blinking red light. They sign a fax that begins production on a factory in China. They receive a FedEx box containing everything left of their marriage.” And they “propose, get married, impregnate each other, turn 40, get divorced, snort heroin, murder and die in hotel rooms,” he adds. “Sometimes in that order.”

A banquet of consequences (2016) by Elizabeth George

In “A Banquet of Consequences,” Elizabeth George presents one of the most wildly dysfunctional families you’ll find in fiction. At its center is the mother (and mother-in-law and wife) from hell, Caroline Goldacre, a pathological liar who has deeply damaged both her sons, driven one husband away and made the incumbent miserable, all the while proclaiming her own virtue and everyone else’s duplicity.
The story, set in London and two English villages, begins as Caroline’s troubled son Will kills himself, whereupon his girlfriend blames his domineering mother, who in turn blames the girlfriend. Caroline’s meddling has also shattered the marriage of her other son, Charlie, who spends much of the novel trying to win back his estranged wife, who wants to move on to another, more stable man.

Caroline’s constant abuse of her entirely decent second husband (“You’ve actually become a bigger fool than you were when I married you”) has driven him into the arms of a kind and loving woman, a development Caroline greets by threatening suicide even as she’s denouncing her rival as a slut.
Somehow, amid this turmoil, the scheming, grasping Caroline has found work as an assistant to a well-known feminist writer named Clare Abbott. We learn that the vivacious Clare has secrets to protect and that her friend and editor Rory, a lesbian, is in love with her. When someone is poisoned, the question is whether Caroline, who is clearly a monster, is also a murderer. Or, as she insists, was she the intended victim

Enter beloved Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, whose personal lives add to the drama unfolding around them. This story takes place 18 months after Lynley’s wife was murdered and, although Lynley remains heartbroken, he has managed a brief, unwise affair with his attractive superior at Scotland Yard, Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. He’s also smitten with a vet at the London Zoo, but she fears that his aristocratic origins are too unlike her hardscrabble past for them to truly connect. “A Banquet of Consequences” is, among other things, a novel about relationships, some hopeless, most difficult and one or two miraculously sweet.
Havers, as unruly as ever, lets fly at Lynley an occasional backhanded compliment such as, “You’re a decent bloke for all your fine ways and your family silver and ancestral portraits.” Havers is said to resemble “a barrel on legs with porcupine hair,” and with her Pop-Tarts diet and fanciful T-shirts (“On the eighth day God created bacon”), she exists mostly for comic relief, which the novel sometimes needs. George has one character relate in excruciating detail how she and another woman were raped by a knife-wielding intruder. The scene is not essential to the story but neither is it gratuitous; George is grimly reminding us just how ugly this world can be.

For readers determined to puzzle out who’s guilty of the poisoning, the problem is that the hateful Caroline is so obviously a suspect that our instinct is to search for a less likely candidate. Or will we be outsmarted if we jump that way? George’s mystery unfolds with great psychological depth, finely drawn characters and gorgeous portraits of the English countryside. Yet it must be said that this is a long novel and some readers, facing yet another leisurely look at English landscapes, may feel an urge to skim until the plot kicks in again.
To skim or to savor? Either way, George, an American who sets her novels in England, is an essential writer of popular fiction today.

Thanks to Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post.