Latest Rasmussen mystery clever, dark

loading...

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

THE MARBLE KITE, by David Daniel; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2005; 294 pages, hardcover, $23.95.

As former UMaine student David Daniel’s latest Alex Rasmussen mystery opens, the infectiously curious private investigator from Lowell, Mass., appears to have settled down a bit. He’s strolling around a low-budget traveling carnival feeling cautious but promising sparks with his new friend, Phoebe Kelly. Two years divorced, Rasmussen thinks maybe he could live like this.

Then, the expected unexpected – a scream from the outskirts of the fairgrounds. Rasmussen hurries with Phoebe to the scene, where a crowd is collecting near a dead body that’s been stashed in the bushes. Rasmussen, a former police officer, knows what to do and takes charge until the law arrives.

One of the carnies is immediately arrested for murder, and the carnival owner, who runs the operation more like a family than a business, hires a lawyer. The one-handed young suspect won’t talk, even to the lawyer, and so Rasmussen gets hired to find out what’s going on.

Things slowly get darker from there, and Phoebe doesn’t like it. Rasmussen’s perennially thorny relationship with the police gets even pricklier when he begins to suspect cops are involved in the murder. The jailed man maintains silence, and the news media whip up the townies against the carnival workers. Soon Rasmussen and the carnival seem surrounded by the whole city of Lowell, not to mention some gangsters bent on buying up and shutting down small carnival operations, doing business the way you imagine Enron and associates do in nicer clothes.

For a long time, as in the previous books in the series, Rasmussen’s quick wit and take-it-as-it-comes optimism keep this a pleasant world to live in, despite the murder. But as things get more complicated, they also get darker, and finally it’s even too much for Phoebe. The ending is surprising, and sinister, and while Rasmussen’s good humor and honesty never flag, your faith in human nature might.

“The Marble Kite,” like its predecessors “Goofy Foot,” “The Skelly Man” and “The Heaven Stone,” is a fast, literate, exceptionally clever story with vivid characters and evocative descriptions of northeastern Massachusetts in autumn.

David Daniel occasionally makes journeys back to UMaine to give readings, and recently was Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Dana Wilde can be reached at umit.maine.edu.

BY JULIE MURCHISON HARRIS

OF THE NEWS STAFF

BEST LITTLE WINGMAN, written by Janet Allen, illustrated by Kim Postier, Boyds Mills Press, Honesdale, PA, 2005, 32 pages, hardcover, $15.95.

A story from the heart is the best kind. “Best Little Wingman” is told from author Janet Allen’s childhood memories of riding the plow truck in Westfield with her father Murle Bean, referred to in the book as Beanie. The story opens with Janny not wanting to come away from the kitchen window to eat her supper because she might miss seeing the lights of her father’s plow truck. She holds her hands against the frosty glass, almost willing him to come to her.

“It was her job to pull the lever that raised the plow’s right wing, so the big plow didn’t knock over people’s mailboxes along the road. Suddenly, she heard the snowplow’s blade as it scraped the road. She saw the truck’s lights shine through the snowy night. Janny ran to the door, just as the plow stopped at the end of the driveway. ‘Is my wingman ready to go?’ her dad asked from the doorway.”

Janny and Beanie take readers over the roads of the small Maine town, introducing some of the townspeople as they go, offering a feel for the community’s values and the down-home flavor that only good memories can accentuate.

The colors in Kim Postier’s illustrations are beautiful, but many features in the drawings are very stiff and without detail. The characters lack expression; even their eyes and faces resemble mannequins more than real people. Postier has taken more care with the inanimate objects, some of which display more soul than the people.

As a reader, however, it is possible to overlook that flaw because the story is told so well. Somehow it makes up for the lack of character and expression in the illustrations, and lets the reader apply the missing traits through imagination.

Author Allen could have ended the story in a conventional way: Beanie brings Janny home and helps her mom put her to bed before he continues to plow. Instead, Allen whisks the memory and the reader through her mind’s eye to current times, making the closeness between them palpable by having Janny hold her older, woman’s hands against the glass and wishing she could see the lights of her father’s plow again.

You will have to read the book for the rest.

Julie Murchison Harris can be reached at 990-8285 and jharris@bangordailynews.net.

BY DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

CRYSTAL SOLDIER, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Meisha Merlin, Decatur, Ga., 2005, 321 pages, hardcover, $25.95.

In their ninth book set in the Liaden Universe, the Winslow authors return to the beginning.

“Crystal Soldier,” which the science-fiction authors began in 1986, then set aside, finally unveils who the characters Jela and Cantra are to longtime readers. The two are the ancestors of the Clan Korval, whose exploits have been recorded in previous books in the series. But this novel shows who they were at the start.

M. Jela Granthor’s guard was bred to be a soldier, created for a life of service and dedication. On a mission early in the book, he is saved on a dead planet by a tree, which becomes his constant companion.

On a future mission, he crosses paths with Cantra yos’Phelium. She is an ace pilot and smuggler. In the interest of survival, the two form a tentative partnership that becomes something more.

“Crystal Soldier” does an admirable job at advancing their relationship, and the action-packed book rolls along nicely. Also, it serves as a good jumping-on spot for new readers. However, Lee and Miller describe it as “Book One of the Great Migration Duology,” and as such, it introduces many characters but resolves very little, leaving much hanging for the sequel, “Crystal Dragon,” due out in February of 2006.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

WHERE LUCKY SPRINGER REALLY WAS THE TIME WE FIGURED JACOB KILLED HIM AND 6 MORE OUTLANDISH MAINE STORIES read by Fred Pratt; Morning Glen Audio, 2004; four CDs, $24.95.

The most prominent feature of these four CDs containing stories written and read by Fred Pratt is the reader’s Maine accent. In fact, the stories are all but obliterated by the accent. It’s a fairly good imitation of Tim Sample’s fairly good imitations of the twists and turns of down-Maine speech rhythms and sounds, although certain repeating grammatical dysfunctions and malapropisms, which I have rarely or never heard before in 50-odd years of living here, are given as part of what Pratt calls the “dialect.”

The stories, whose plots are roughly equivalent to Popeye cartoons, seem to be set in the first half of the 20th century. There are schoolboy adventures in quarries, piles of horse manure on town streets for people to fall into, and a good many hayseed characters who seem dumb but are actually clever, sort of. The general atmosphere of the stories is best captured in the divider music, which is ragtime piano.

The voice, though, is the overpowering element. Fred Pratt of Bangor may have a future in local radio commercials, if he isn’t doing them already. These CDs will make great gifts for tourists to lug back to Montana as proof of what they fantasized Maine is like.

The CDs are available at bookstores in Bangor and www.luckyspringer.com.

Dana Wilde can be reached at umit.maine.edu.