EVEN MORE GREAT READS FOR APRIL, 2014
My Notorious Life, by Kate Manning
Madame X, as all the
newspapers of the day called her, was a notorious midwife and abortionist
plying her dreadful trade in Nineteenth century New York. Constantly reviled by the Press, her name was
connected to all kinds of crimes, even murder:
she was eventually arrested but committed suicide before she was forced
to stand trial. After her death it was
discovered that she and her husband had amassed a huge personal fortune – not
only from ‘murdering the innocent’, but manufacturing and successfully selling
all types of potions for ‘female complaints.’
By the end of her life, Madame X had profited handsomely from the
misfortunes of her gender, but was powerless to withstand the united opposition
of the entirely male medical profession, men who believed without question that
women were put on earth only to bear children – and serve men. Nothing and no-one should try to change the
status quo.
Kate Manning has taken up
the cudgels on behalf of Madame X, transforming her real-life travails into a
gripping novel narrated by Ann ‘Axie’ Muldoon, called Axie because she is
always asking questions. She and her
sister and brother are the children of impoverished Irish immigrants, come to New
York to find the crock of gold but experiencing instead poverty and
discrimination much worse than that which forced them from Ireland. The slums in which they live teem with
filthy, starving children, desperate women and men who drink away their little
money so that they won’t have to face the dire straits in which they live.
When the story opens, Axie
and her two siblings are begging outside a bakery shop. Their father has died in a work accident and
their Mam has been terribly injured by a mangle at a laundry and it has been
days since any of them have eaten – until a kind gentleman buys them bread at
the bakery, then takes them back to see poor Mam in the evil tenement: Mam’s condition is dire, and she consents to
her three babies being taken to an
orphanage, then sent ‘out West’, to be adopted into kind families who are
childless but will love them as their own.
What choice does she have?
Reverend Brace of the Children’s Aid Society is there to offer a
solution, but poor Mam implores Axie not to let her brother and sister out of
her sight: they must all stay together,
promise, promise! And Axie does, making
the promise that will haunt her for the rest of her life, for the promise is
soon broken ‘out West’; brother and
sister are taken to separate homes, but nobody wants Axie: at twelve she is no longer malleable – and
she has a mouth on her that people don’t like:
she is sent back to New York city as a malcontent. She will have to find work, and her own way
in the world. And that is the stuff of
this marvellous novel: Axie’s attempts
to survive – and prosper; her ceaseless
quest to find her lost brother and sister so that she can fulfil the vow she
made to her beloved Mam, and to try by whatever means possible to make the lot
of women less onerous – she is one of the very early advocates of birth control
and is not afraid to expose the male hypocrisy of sowing the seed but avoiding
the harvest.
Kate Manning has created a
wonderful protagonist in Axie Muldoon.
She is the perfect herald of changing times; she is hilarious,
bumptious, loud and vulgar – but true to herself and her loved ones in heart
and mind. Well done, Ms Manning: Madame X and her times have been well served. Highly recommended.
The
Chase, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
Oh dear. I was so sure that Book # 2 would be a vast
improvement on Book # 1 (see September 2013 book review below) that I looked
forward to reading ‘The Chase’ and the return of FBI agent Kate O’Hare and her
impossibly attractive nemesis Nicholas Fox, allies in the war against crime,
despite the fact that Nicholas is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List of
Criminals. The first book had a lot of
rough edges, not least the uneasy differences in prose styles (‘you can take
over now, Lee – it’s my coffee break.’) which should never have been so
obvious; in the second book the seams
are not showing as much but: WHERE’S THE
ACTION???
I am the first to admit to
being picky when it comes to pacing and plotting, but when you consider that
the authors have lined up heavy artillery (literally!) in the shape of
rocket-launchers and drones, the action should have been incendiary, to say the
least. Sadly, the reader doesn’t get
beyond an amble to the final page, with only an occasional snicker at
one-liners that don’t appear often enough.
Our sexually repressed
crime-fighters (no, nothing has happened yet, despite Nick’s determined
efforts: Agent Kate has her tin nickers
on, and he doesn’t have a can opener) are now on the trail of a fine art thief
who used to be White House Chief of Staff – he is also the Boss of Bosses of a
huge security firm called BlackRhino (does that ring any bells?) and he is utterly ruthless in his pursuit of his own wicked ends. Just like real life! Our crime-fighting duo must bring him to
justice, the only fly in the ointment being Nick’s inherent love of crime: all the wonderful art that has been purloined
has a fatal fascination for our arch-criminal, and it is up to
Whiter-than-white Agent O’Hare to restrain him from temptation. Absurd as this plotting may sound, it could
have worked (even the presence at the climax of Kate’s elderly Mission
Impossible Dad and his seedy old mates) if the plot hadn’t sprung a slow leak
somewhere along the line. I haven’t had
the pleasure of reading Mr Goldberg’s solo efforts, but I feel that either of
the authors would have fared better if they hadn’t combined their talents. I am sure there will be a third book, for Ms
Evanovich’s name is a powerful drawcard but can’t say if I will send myself to sleep
for a third time – thrillers should have the opposite effect.
The
Heist, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
I have been a devoted fan
of Ms Evanovich and her bungling bounty hunter Stephanie Plum (not to mention
Stephanie’s sidekick ,former ‘Ho Lula, now an inept filing clerk but
magnificently unaware of her shortcomings:
what a neat character!) since ‘One for the Money’. Ms Evanovich has now reached # 20 in the
series, the latest being ‘Takedown Twenty’, a treat I have yet to enjoy. In between times, she tries her hand with
other characters and now she has teamed up with Lee Goldberg (so sorry, Mr
Goldberg – despite the stellar qualifications you enjoy in the book jacket
notes you are a man of mystery to me) to produce a new set of ongoing
characters in ‘The Heist’, the story of goodies and baddies collaborating in an
uneasy partnership to catch the ultimate Ponzi schemer, an investment banker
who has skipped the U.S.A. with $500 million.
His whereabouts are now unknown.
All well and good: the bones of the plot are sound. the FBI figure that it takes a conman to know
one and help them apprehend Mr Banker, so make a deal with Nick Fox, a crook
they have just jailed, thanks to the determined - not to say obsessive - efforts of their agent
Kate O’Hare to Bring Him to Justice: a
phony escape is arranged and Mr Fox makes his getaway as part of the deal. The only fly in the ointment is that no-one
kept Agent O’Hare in the loop: she is
dancing with rage – puce with it, and decides that that S.O.B. is not going to
get away from her. He is not going to outsmart her.
Even if she has to kill him she will bring him back alive!
Fair enough. The only problem is the writing. The first chapters are just about the
klunkiest things in print: Agent Kate is
slim, trim, an ex-Navy seal, trained to
a standstill in myriad different ways to kill.
Naturally, she is blonde and possesses sparkling blue eyes. As an added bonus her Dad is also an ex intel
operative, with favours owed to him all over the globe from his many secret
missions on behalf of the U.S. He
rescues her a lot, which is good because it keeps his clandestine skills honed
and besides, it gets him out of the house.
Nick Fox is charming,
irrepressible and a lover of the high life.
Naturally, he has windswept brown hair, dark brown eyes and a lazy
smile. And formidable, crooked skills
that enable him to pull off breathtaking crimes of absurdity. Just like real life!
The only requirement to
make all this silliness work is that the writing must be credible – and
seamless, and that doesn’t happen until at least chapter six, before which it
is almost possible to tell when either or is saying, ‘well, you can have a turn
now’. Because I am so familiar with Ms
Evanovich’s style it was pretty easy to work out when she was at the helm, and
as always, the minor characters are great fun, and fans of hers take
heart: there are twenty seven more
chapters to go and it does get better.
Despite the wild plotting (including lightning fast trips to Greece,
Berlin, Bali and other more remote Indonesian islands, where Agent Kate’s Dad
gets to quote geographical info about each destination with Wikipedia-like ease
– oh, the joys of cutting and pasting!) Nick and Kate Get Their Man, no-one
gets rubbed out except the bad guys, and Kate’s dad has so much time away from
home that he’s looking forward to his former life as an Old Fart.
It’s a sure thing that a
sequel will be planned; I just hope that by the time it appears, all the rough
edges of this new partnership will have disappeared and what was a fun concept
becomes a great series.
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