Sinister Plots Found in Colonial and Revolutionary America -- for Real

Author Brad Meltzer, whose recent books include both thrillers for adults and amazing American biographies for early readers, just completed his tour for THE FIRST CONSPIRACY. History fans won't be surprised that it probes a real attempt to dislodge George Washington himself. We'll post a full review later, but wanted to mention the book today as part of a list-in-the-making of American adventures based in what really happened. This one's nonfiction -- but as noted historian (and eqeually gifted storyteller) James M. McPherson comments, “This story of skullduggery, bribery, espionage, and treason sheds new light on the beginnings of the American Revolution.”

Another is SAVAGE LIBERTY (A Mystery of Revolutionary America) from Eliot Pattison. This page-turner opens with conflict and conniving in Boston, involving Sam Adams, John Hancock, and other familiar figures. Check the full review here. Others in this series from Pattison give new views of Benjamin Franklin, the quintessential American inventor, entrepreneur, explorer, and politician.

Last on the list today, a book that frustrated me in some ways as a mystery, but that also tackled the George Washington plot: Charles Rosenberg's THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF THE TRAITOR GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Clear a good space on the shelf -- we'll add more to the list in a bit.

A Scientific Look Behind a Thriller, in MAKING THE MONSTER, from Kathryn Harkup

Kathryn Harkup calls herself a "science communicator," and her book A is for Arsenic: The Pisons of Agatha Christie made quite a hit a few years ago. Now she's tackled the work of another woman author -- or should we say teenager in this case, since Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was just 18, and saw it published at age 20!

Somewhat to my disappointment, MAKING THE MONSTER: THE SCIENCE BEHIND MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN rarely looks at the author of this classic thriller and sci-fi progenitor. But that's my own curiosity going in the wrong direction -- Harkup is clear from the start that what she's gathered are the scientific backgrounds to the many fresh creative efforts that Shelley drew together into the novel of Dr. Vincent Frankenstein and his animated cadaver, the monster himself. After a brief opening laying out Mary's personal troubles (ouch!), Harkup swiftly moves to the medical, chemical, and electrical amazements that were rocking the European world 200 years ago. I particularly enjoyed her assessments of alchemists and their theories as they played into the eventual novel Mary would craft:

The three alchemists that Mary chose as influences for Victor Frankenstein's early life -- Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus -- were three of the more dominant names in the history of alchemy as it was viewed in the early nineteenth century. However, the interests of these three historical figures demonstrate the huge range of philosophies held by so-called alchemists. Interestingly, none of the three would have called themselves alchemists and all of them wrote dismissively about those who tried to turn base metals into gold.

That's a fair sample of the writing that Harkup packs into this densely typeset, 300-page book. She moves quickly from one thorough assessment of scientific revelations to the next, including aspects of lack of refrigeration at the time, issues of anatomy, and even embalming:

Egyptian practices of mummification were for empowering the soul after death. The ancient Egyptians therefor saw no need to preserve everything in the body. Most of the internal organs were thus removed with only the heart being returned to the body. The bain was probably allowed to liquefy so it could be drained out of the skull. ... Bodies were dessicated using salts, left exposed to the elements, or dried out in ovens. Such techniques would not have been appropriate for Victor's requirements.

If you're able to overlook the slight queasiness of that liquefied brain part, and find you'd like to know more, MAKING THE MONSTER is meant for you! But it's also a great background text for those appreciating (or writing for!) TV shows like Criminal Minds, as well as grasping more of the background to Thomas Harris's grotesqueries. In other words, even if you can only digest a chapter or two now and then, there can be good reason to have this comprehensive reference on your shelf.

The book is published by Bloomsbury, and retains its British-isms. Great timing, for the 200th anniversary of Shelley's book. And if you're hungry for more about the author of Frankenstein herself, check out Fiona Sampson's book In Search of Mary Shelley -- Sampson is even appearing at times with Harkup in the United Kingdom, in this brave new era of appreciating the women who crafted potent thrillers and gothic horror at a time when they were better known as victims of Jack the Ripper and others.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Drug-Gang Police Work, in TAKEDOWN, Jeff Buck, with Jon Land & Lindsay Preston

The cover of TAKEDOWN, the new true-to-life drug bust tale from police investigator Jeff Buck and two co-authors -- Jon Land, noted author of the Caitlin Strong Texas Ranger crime fiction series, and Lindsay Preston, an established and esteemed ghostwriter -- says the book reveals "A small-town cop's battle against the Hells Angels and the nation's biggest drug gang."

Stop! If you're looking for a shoot-out with the wicked and powerful motorcycle gang called the Hells Angels, this is not the book you want!

But if the actual day by day process of setting up a drug bust at a high enough level to actually get the dealers out of the territory for a few years (in this case, out of Ohio), grab your copy of TAKEDOWN when it goes on sale on March 8.

Land explained the genesis of the book in his post last week at the online 'zine, The Big Thrill. It's fascinating. I'll paraphrase, but really, it's worth reading all of it, by clicking here. The short version: In her (nonfiction) ghostwriter life, Preston tackled police detective Jeff Buck's life story, only to realize the details were more striking, more important, than a simple ghosting task could do justice to. When she said to Jon Land, "Did you know more drugs come into the US over the Canadian border than the Mexican border?" -- Land was hooked. He leaped into the process, interviewing Buck for many more hours, learning about undercover life, family stresses, successes, complications, and most of all the urge to avoid the low-level arrests of neighborhood drug dealers, in order to reach up to where cutting the pipeline can actually have effects.

For Buck, that meant tangling with the Russian mob, while running parallel to a major Canadian sting operation that would arrest 143 Hells Angels in Montreal around the same time. It also meant coming to grips with a gap in US border enforcement, which Buck and co-authors describe as taking place where the Akwesasne tribal lands straddle the US–Canada border. (Yes, that does mean this book portrays reservation poverty as having an effect on people being willing to run drugs. It's a grim take on an American social issue.)

Land's seasoned narrative technique brings the police detective's tale up to "noir" standards. Here's Buck explaining how he maneuvered his way around the multiple territories of other police forces involved in the region:

From the look on Kondrat's face, I knew I had him. But the scrunched, bushy eyebrows of Detective Meyers said otherwise.

"That is, if you want me to," I added in a show of deference, already contemplating how best to negotiate the politics of crossing jurisdictions to take control of this particular drug case.

Because it was time to go after the real bad guys again.

"Of course, we'd love to catch this guy," Kondrat responded, "but I gotta tell you, he's good."

I started to smile and stopped. "We can get him," I said confidently. "It's all how you go about doing it."

"I just don't want you to get your hopes up," Kondrat said, not swayed by my experience or swagger. "I just don't think this kid ever touches the drugs or the money."

I found it amusing that Kondrat didn't want me to get my hopes up. Then again, he didn't know me. It wasn't about anything as random as hope; it was about the handling of a case, knowing what to do and when to do it and when to give up if necessary.

Of course, you might not always like this narrator! But he's real, and Land and Preston clearly took great pains to carry Buck's own voice into nearly 300 pages of tough police work. And that puts this book at an intriguing intersection of nonfiction and police procedural and thriller -- even though Buck makes it clear that a shoot-out is the last thing a good investigation needs. Or wants.

Prowling along with Buck in TAKEDOWN is great background for crime and crime fiction writers, as well as entertaining for readers. Buck makes some great points, too, about why he doesn't consider marijuana use to be a victimless crime (worth reading for all of us, really).

As Land points out in his Big Thrill article, despite the cover design, you're not going to run into many Hells Angels here, because Buck himself was too smart to do that. But his investigative journey around the drug pipelines that he sees as manages by the crime syndicates turns out to be at least as compelling.

And he lives to tell the tale. And see Ohio, his home state, have a reprieve from those drugs, for at least a little while.

Vermont Diversion: Everyone's Mortal in WHAT'S THE STORY, Sydney Lea

Vermont sprouts poets even in the winter -- there is no closed season for their interactions with the landscape. But Sydney Lea, with a Pulitzer finalist among his list of collected poetry and essays, turns instead to interaction with neighbors and community, and WHAT'S THE STORY, his release this month via Green Writers Press, elevates the poetic reflection to astounding levels of love and awareness.

It's a risky direction: Sometimes the friends and relatives of writers aren't wild about being brought onto public pages. Lea dodges a bit of that risk by writing mostly here about people who've already died. This choice allows him to reflect and grieve, as he confronts his own aging -- not just a waning physical ability to climb mountains and loosen boulders, but the near-daily loss of friends and neighbors his age and older. Reflecting on the passing of a chair-building craftsman, Irv, dead at 82 while tilling the vegetable garden, Lea writes, "Irv's gone, and the earth keeps healing, not to be healed for now, maybe never. Probably never."

But he presses beyond the wound of loss to say, "How fine, that almost shy way the man would greet anyone he cared for, his smile barely perceptible, his ice-blue eyes cast down, his words hard to discern at first. Not that Irv was cold, only modest. He was what he was, irreplaceable among other things."

In WHAT'S THE STORY, Lea grapples to portray why each friend matters so much; he does it with precise yet rich descriptions of people and even of hunting dogs, as well as shared terrain. And that terrain is not just the ridges of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire; it's also the passionate country of jazz, so that these "reflections on a life grown long" involve Charlie Mingus, Muddy Waters, and more. When he writes in memory of Jack Myers, a poet friend, by first replaying his own college experience of Mingus's music, he then tastes the state of "Jack's not with us" like this:

His absence may account for the sound, which has nothing, really, to do with the intricate magic of that Mingus sextet I listened to, nor with any line or stanza from Jack's mournful, witty, brilliant poems, nor is it the cry of sea birds. If Wagner didn't drive me almost mad, or maybe because he does, I'd say that the chord was a dark Wagnerian one. It washes over me the way the surf does a rocky shore.

After nearly seventy of these short reflections -- most just two or three pages long, and each one threaded so precisely that it's half memoir, half prose poem, and three-quarters jazz improv in words -- I wanted to shout at the author: Stop worrying! We are all getting older! Enjoying your grandchildren, your remembered childhood, picking a cemetery plot -- what's so terrible about all that?

But that's exactly the point in what Syd Lea's done with these short, bladed, budding items: taken the terror of aging and proved its tender beauty. So I return to the first page, in the reflection titled "Whatever I May Say," and re-read: "Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle's low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends."

Read this one to savor the way friends matter, and love abides. Thanks, Syd, and Green Writers Pres.

Vivid History, and Reasons to Honor "Indigenous Peoples Day"

Nonfiction mystery this time!

Sometimes the mysteries of the U.S. mail baffle me. A page-proof copy of GLOOMY TERRORS AND HIDDEN FIRES by Ronald M. Anglin and Larry E. Morris arrived here a month or so ago, and when I saw "October 10" as the release date, I assumed it meant 2015. Actually the book was published a year ago. But I'm very glad it arrived here anyway, with its compelling U.S. history and narrative of the life of an early explorer.

John Colter, who traveled with Merriweather Lewis and William (Bill) Clark in their famous early-1800s expedition sponsored by Thomas Jefferson, could almost have had his own book on the strength of his work with the noted explorers "West of the Mississippi." But he became far more recognized for the generously mythologized episode in his life that happened in 1808, when he supposedly accepted a challenge from a group of Blackfeet (Native Americans). He ran -- naked and shoeless -- for his life, outracing the indigenous people he had already deeply offended by trespass, theft, and the deadly shooting done by his partner. Not only did he make his way through the "wilderness" alone for eleven days, half starving en route -- but he became known as the man who'd bring Yellowstone itself to national notice, and he survived a few more years, to become legendary.  "Colter's Run" is still observed as a race today.

What Anglin and Morris do with their book is trace and retrace Colter's sparsely documented life. Working from records kept by others -- Colter left none -- they build a forceful tower of speculation that eventually stands on its own, to describe the frontiersman himself.

But far beyond hanging flesh onto the bones of legend, these authors outline bluntly the repeated, deliberate, and deceitful treatment by the explorers, of the tribal peoples who welcomed, guided, supported, and often rescued them. By the time I'd finished the first three chapters, I was mightily sickened by the actions of the "white men" who'd probed the Western lands, and even more horrifid by the actions that followed, whether by settlers or by politicians. In the words of the authors:

Four short years into the nineteenth century, Lewis and Clark had failed to understand the Lakota for want of an interpreter -- and also for want of a desire to treat the Indians as equals. Sadly, this misunderstanding prefigured an entire century of false impressions, misreadings, distrust, and tragedy. On that pleasant day of September in 1804, when Colter looked up to see his horse gone, he could not have imagined what that missing horse would someday symbolize.

So I'm recommending GLOOMY TERRORS AND HIDDEN FIRES as a book to open on "Columbus Day" (today) or any time this coming winter. Ignore the flawed introductory material -- the chapters themselves are full of detail and well written. The passion of the two historians rings clearly, and they document their narrative and assertions -- and in particular their view of the interactions of the early invading entrepreneurs and the Lakota Sioux nation -- in abundant detail. It's a page-turner, and may also be a mind changer. It was for me -- I think it's long past time to make the change from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. It's the least we can do to acknowledge the presence of the nations of tribal peoples who were so terribly dealt with for so long, and who still struggle for the treaty rights that once seemed legally binding.