Duck Duck Book

Dead air / Ed Goldberg.
New York : Berkley Prime Crime, 1998.
[Multnomah County Library does not have this book.]

When New York City private detective Lenny Schneider comes to Portland on a job, he finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery that centers around local independent community-supported radio station, KOOK F.M. (sound familiar?). Portlanders among you, see if you can track which characters are modeled after real people!

The Bromeliad trilogy / by Terry Pratchett.
New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
[MCL call number: j PRATCHETT; 20 copies, no holds]

The Bromeliad Trilogy is a collection of three novels about a people called “nomes,” a major social crisis, and the methods they use to solve their difficulties.

Nomes are tiny people — not to say that they’re just little humans, because they’re definitely more than that — who live in the midst of us. The nome society we meet in the first book (Truckers) live in a department store, and believe that the margins of the universe are the walls of the store. These nomes have a complicated, hierarchical society based on the circumstances in the store — a powerful religious order inhabits the stationary department, for example. The store nomes are in trouble — Masklin, a nome visitor from Outside, has arrived and freaked everyone out (he’s from outside the bounds of the universe, after all) and he has a very important black box with him that is reporting that the world is pretty much going to end really soon. Clearly this is a crisis — socially, religiously, and perhaps mortally.

The genius of these books is not merely the concept, the story, or the characters — the genius is that Pratchett has created a world that is similar to the one we know, but this world is shown from a completely alien perspective. The world of the book has deatils very different from our world which Pratchett logically explores and eloquently explains. For example, Nomes are very small, only a few inches tall. Like other small mammals, they have very tiny hearts that beat very quickly. Their voices are much higher than ours, and although during the story the nomes come across lots of humans, and they try to listen to us talk, they cannot understand us very well at all because our voices are so impossibly low, our speech so slow and groaning and rumbly.

But still, the story is fascinating and the characters compelling. The books are charming entertainment, and yet they give us a great deal of real substance to contemplate. No doubt The Bromeliad Trilogy would be wonderful to read out loud, so as to maximize the potential for having a good discussion later.

The three books in the trilogy were originally published separately, and are available from various publishers and in various editions. They are: Truckers (originally printed in 1989), Diggers (1990), and Wings (1990).

Murder in the Marais / Cara Black.
New York, N.Y. : Soho Press, 1999.
[MCL call number: MYSTERY BLACK; six copies, no holds]

Murder in the Marais is the first in a series of novels. In this debut we meet Aimée Leduc and her partner, René Friant, private detectives who specialize in computer forensics and security. Despite this more or less unglamorous specialty, Aimée’s tendency to run into mysteries bigger and more dangerous than “how can we keep this data safe?” provides the storyline for this and later Leduc mysteries.

In the first pages of Murder in the Marais, Aimée is asked to break the code on a computer file, and deliver the results to an associate. Her prospective client, Soli Hecht, is old and weathered, and as it turns out he is a fighter from way back, having been a major player in the resistance to the Nazi occupation during the war, and a hunter of Nazi war criminals ever since. Aimée takes the job, and is drawn into a mystery of larger proportions than she anticipated, involving international trade agreements, old Nazis, life in Paris during the occupation, the ultimate fate of collaborators, and modern-day racist activism.

This is a complex story ranging through fifty years, with attention to the relationships within and between many different families and communities, and exposition of a broad slice of French and European political life. The mystery is set against the backdrop of Aimée’s life — her struggle with the death of her detective father in a bombing, her mixed feelings about her American mother (who walked away from the family when Aimée was a child), the anxiety with which she and René run their almost-financially-successful business, and other details bring richness to the novel.

Aimée Leduc solves more mysteries, gets in more fights, and has more adventures in four later novels: Murder in Belleville (New York : Soho Press, 2000), Murder in the Sentier (New York : Soho Press, c2002), Murder in the Bastille (New York : Soho Press, [2003]), and Murder in Clichy (New York : Soho Press, 2005). I was well-satisfied with the first books in this series, as mysteries and also as novels, but Murder in Clichy isn’t as good as the others. It comes too close to the hackneyed, formulaic dullness that the mystery genre has been so often faulted for. It’s still a decent book, but not a really great one.

So, my advice is, if Aimée’s story sounds interesting to you, read Murder in the Marais. If you’re really fascinated with her, continue on to the others in the series. If not, then I guess you can make your own decisions about how many of the series to read.