ALL DAY AND A NIGHT – Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke had already published a dozen novels before I had any inkling she existed. And when it finally sank in that she did, I put off reading anything she wrote until a couple of days ago. Took me awhile to get used to the idea the Alafair I had watched grow up in her father’s novels wasn’t the same. Even then I no doubt shall always see the real one, the nonfiction daughter of James Lee Burke, through the same Louisiana bayou’s misty glow as Burke’s fictional character, Dave Robicheaux, continues to see his grownup Alafair:

Whenever I looked at Alafair, I saw the little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged plane that went down in the salt by Southwest Pass. I saw a little girl I called Alf who wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a T-shirt with a smiling whale named Baby Orca and tennis shoes embossed with the words LEFT and RIGHT on the respective toes. The image of that little El Salvadoran girl will always hover before me like a hologram.

That’s from Burke’s most recent of his twenty elegant Robicheaux crime novels, published three years ago with the Alafair character a graduate of Stanford Law School and writing her second crime novel. And still instructing her father, as she has from about the midpoint of the series, to stop calling her “Alf”. I’d be willing to bet (were it not illegal, of course) that Alafair Burke, a graduate of Stanford Law School, a former prosecutor and now a law professor in New York City, instructs her father as well to stop calling her “Alf”. Knowing this, and knowing the power of richly imaginative writing and how it can carry you to a magical landscape from which it is hard to take leave, maybe it helps to understand my ambivalence toward venturing from the bayou’s misty glow into another, perhaps more objective light, even and especially one emanating from the same corpuscular soup (despite the myth being more fun, the real Alafair is JLB’s natural daughter). There’s the curiosity and the caution. Ultimately the first prevailed when I decided to read Alafair Burke’s ninth crime/suspense novel, All Day and a Night.

Not her father’s style in any way, but smart and engaging in her own. All Day and a Night is the fifth and most recent in a series starring Ellie Hatcher, a thirty-something (I think—maybe fortyish) New York City homicide detective. She grew up in Wichita, same as Alafair Burke. The plot uses a familiar serial-killer trope but with several clever twists. Hatcher’s boyfriend, an assistant district attorney, arranges for her and her partner to re-investigate the murders of five prostitutes for which a man is already serving life without parole (known in prison parlance as all day and a night).Why the fresh look? Because the victim of a new murder was mutilated in the same way as the others, a way that was never made public, suggesting the real killer is still unknown.

At the same time a ruthless, publicity-hungry defense lawyer lures brilliant young corporate attorney, Carrie Blank, from her prestigious firm to help spring the convict. The attraction for Blank, whose half-sister was one of the victims, is that proving the wrong man was convicted might help lead police to the real killer.

Alafair Burke and her father

Complicated indeed. And it gets more so, much more so, before eventually it all comes together. There’s something of the classic police procedural here as well as edge-of-the-seat suspense. And the writing is deft. So are the main characters. Here’s a taste, right at the start, right after Hatcher has won a bet with her partner, J.J. Rogan, that she’d be the one to finesse a confession out of the woman they were interrogating in the stabbing death of her cheating husband. This is the banter shortly afterward in the squad room between Hatcher, Rogan and another detective:

Rogan was handing Ellie a crisp new set of twenties from his wallet when John Shannon emerged from their lieutenant’s office and witnesses the transaction. “Looks like a nice wad of dough you guys got there.”

Ellie could already see where this was heading. The most effort John Shannon ever put into the squad room was cracking wise. With money changing hands from Rogan to Ellie, his wee brain was probably overheating from the collision of potential barbs: Would it be the attractive female detective earning her money the old-fashioned way, or yet another comment about Rogan’s family wealth? Lucky for Ellie, more often than not Shannon had a way of opening the door for her go-to retort.

“You mean like those wads of dough you snarf down every morning at Krispy Kreme?” She tapped out a “bu-dump bump” on her desktop. “I’m sorry, man. You just make lame cop-eating-doughnut jokes so...damn...easy.”

“When you got it, you flaunt it,” he said, patting his oversized belly. At least the guy had as good a sense of humor about himself as he expected in others.

Ah, dear little Alf, look what you've become.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

YOU WILL KNOW ME – Megan Abbott

          Megan Abbott doesn’t know me, and probably never will. Still, she owes me six hours of restful sleep. They were strange dreams I had last night. Not my routine searching-for-a-place-to-pee or getting-lost-in-a-building or trying-to-impress-my-father frustration scenarios. I shake those off soon as I'm awake and on my way to the bathroom. Nosiree, ma'am. These things last night were unfamiliar, deeply discomfiting, clinging dream fragments. Semi-conscious glimpses of something vaguely menacing. I can't recall any particulars, but whenever I woke, or seemed to be waking, I felt a presence near me. Hovering close to my head. A cold, mocking presence. And I was alone. No one to call out to, like Drew Knox did when he had his ghastly nightmares in You Will Know Me.

   

       It was You Will Know Me, of course, disturbing my sleep. I'd stayed up late finishing it. Something I seldom do. Something I knew I shouldn't do with a Megan Abbott novel, but something I know I'll do again, and again, and again, regardless. Abbot casts a deliciously unsettling spell I am powerless to resist. It comes upon me incrementally, hints revealed in what seems a perfectly ordinary tableau. Faces I recognize and feel I know. Until I notice something different. An odd glint in the eyes, shadows that lie beyond my first impression. Words in an unexpected, inappropriate context.

   

       The effect is cumulative, edging into my comprehension like a storm front blotting a sunny horizon. In You Will Know Me, Abbott reveals the suspicious cloud bank's nose at the very beginning:

      The vinyl banners rippled from the air vent, the restaurant roiling with parents, the bobbing of gymnast heads, music gushing from the weighty speakers keeled on the window ledges.

      Slung around Devon’s neck were three medals, two silver and one gold, her first regional-champion title on the vault.

      “I’m so proud of you, sweetie,” Katie whispered in her daughter’s ear. “You can do anything.”

      Later, Katie would come to think of that night as the key to everything that came after, the secret code.

      But at the time, it was just another party, a celebration like dozens of others, all to honor their exceptional fifteen-year-old daughter.

           Trouble ahead. Fair warning. And Abbott does play fair, all the way. The clues she scattered so artfully along the narrative create a random texture that now and then gave me the sense I was a step or two ahead of the main characters. Yet collectively these nebulous erratic whiffs of danger never quite coalesced into certainty. One thing, though, was for sure: a relentless encroaching unease weighting the air.

Megan Abbott

 

           A large part of the fragility of my confidence in the appearance of things in You Will Know Me came from the woman whose viewpoint carries most of the story--Katie, mother of Devon, the teenage gymnast prodigy and focus of everyone's concern. I shared Katie's bias as a mom, which included misinterpreting or rationalizing initial signs that raised tiny questions about the way things seemed. I stayed with her as these signs mounted until I began to see, or think I saw, significance Katie was missing. Now it got tricky for me. I could see the true narrator--Abbott--was being sly, smooth as satin, playing with me as she led Katie, and then me, this way and that until I yielded to her mastery and simply hung on for the ride.

           It helped calm me recognizing a couple of Abbott's ploys. She foreshadows by ducking back to an earlier time. The beginning, for example, gave me Katie already knowing how it all comes out reflecting how it all started. This happened several times, the finding clarity from a step or so back. I suppose it can confuse readers accustomed to strictly sequential narrative, but for me it helped bring into focus Katie's own attempts to understand what was happening as it unfolded around her.

 

          While all eyes ostensibly were on Devon, a fascinating individual around whom the story centers with its theme of how far people will go, what they're willing to accept and to sacrifice in order to realize a dream, I found Devon's younger brother, Drew, the most interesting character. Both as a person and as the character that ties the story together. He's a brilliant, precocious little nerd. In some settings he'd be an obnoxious little nerd, and sometimes he was that here, too. But the obnoxiousness, I eventually learned, was in fact a gift. Drew is a little oracle. His nightmares had a prescience I found unnerving, especially as it eluded, even annoyed his family. At the same time I came to respect his outlook, his observance of detail, and his native savvy. I came to rely on the little guy more and more as niggling suspicions began to gather, merging, fusing eventually into a roar of revelation that assaulted my own ears.

          "I could hear thousands of eyes watching us," gold medal Olympian Nadia Comaneci says in her book Letters to a Young Gymnast, a book Megan Abbott quotes from variously in You Will Know Me. 

          I know I'll never get back those six hours of sleep Abbott took from me, and in truth their loss was a small price for the return. The vital human questions she raised in this all-too-human story continue echoing for me. I hope they always will.

WINNING TEXAS – Nancy Stancill

Bad news in Texas is good news for Annie Price, the leggy, intrepid Houston Times investigative reporter whose exposés broke up a dangerous secessionist plot and quashed a rich rancher's campaign for governor. Bad news good for Price despite the cost of a colleague's murder and almost her own, such being the calculated risks for clarion snoops of her stripe.

That was four years ago, described with nail-chewing suspense in Saving Texas, prequel to Winning Texas. Their author, former investigative journalist Nancy Stancill, has worried bad guys for newspapers in Houston, Charlotte, N.C., and Newport News, Va.

This time there's bad news for Price as well as the other kind of bad news, the good bad kind. Although she's been promoted to investigative editor, her newspaper is sinking like the Titanic—the deck is already awash under her feet, and the water's rising. But this is the kind of bad news daily newspapers are facing everywhere, with plunging readership and advertising revenue forcing owners to cut operating costs. This includes freezing pay, leaving vacancies open, and laying off staff. Price's team of reporters is stretched so thin she's forced to grab her notebook and hit the pavement herself when, while eating breakfast, she hears on the radio that a floater has turned up in the Houston Ship Channel by the Valero petroleum refinery. “Floater” is police parlance for water-borne corpse.

She heads down to the channel, her mind spinning with anxiety and excitement:

She'd never outgrown a reporter's stage fright, even now as a fairly experienced editor. She was spending too much time at her desk editing other people's stories. Would she still be able to coax enough details out of the police? Could she frame her story fast enough to be competitive? Would she get all the details right? Timing was everything on the police beat, especially now that Houston's radio, TV and newspapers all had fiercely competitive websites. She was definitely rusty and she'd always performed better on longer stories with more expansive deadlines. But she knew that once she got on the scene she'd stop worrying, and her skills would take over.

To her relief the lead detective on the scene is an old friend. They go for coffee. He fills her in on the skimpy available facts, which she phones in to the newsroom. For Annie Price the game is literally afoot once again.

Stancill bases her fictional material on real happenings. In Saving Texas, the secessionist movement, Nation of Texas, resonates from a long tradition of secessionist feeling in the Lone Star state. Annie Price's reporting drives it underground, but it's creeping back in the sequel. This time the ex-CIA operative who's secretly behind Nation of Texas targets a new group that's promoting German-Texas, also inspired by circumstances outside the novel. According to the Texas State Historical Association, “after Anglos, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, the ethnic group with the largest impact on Texas has been the Germans.” Probing by Price and her team turns up key figures in the German-Texas movement, being sold ostensibly on the idea of encouraging businesses to emphasize their ethnic culture as an attraction for tourists to the Central Texas Hill Country, location of the largest German settlements.

As with the Nation of Texas movement, German-Texas has some questionable undertones, including a plan to arm members of the community supposedly as an adjunct to understaffed police departments. One of the movement's biggest donors is a man who owns a chain of strip clubs. A Houston Times reporter, one of Price's team, is beaten to death behind one of these clubs after trying unsuccessfully to interview the owner. Someone slashes the tires on Price's car parked behind her apartment. Another member of her team leaves to take a TV anchor job, and, as if in spite, moves in on Price's former fiance. Her personal life takes an unexpected hit when, intending to surprise her new lover at his apartment with the key he'd given her, she finds him in bed with another woman.

Nancy Stancill

Of course she's battling a drinking problem—the traditional occupational hazard, but... But she's intrepid, remember? Did I mention the “sinking” newspaper? Price can't help wondering if the Houston Times will still be there to print the story she's working on, if in fact she and her shrinking team can manage to live long enough to crack the case. The paper's owners have already jumped ship, notifying their employees in a grim newsroom meeting they've sold out to a hedge fund that intends within several weeks to shift the entire news operation to its website. This would mean reducing the already downsized staff to little more than a handful of reporters and editors. Would Price even have a job?

She can't let this stymie her, though, intrepid newsie that she is. Do she and her two remaining reporters get the story? Bet on it. Is there still a Houston Times to print it? Barely. Will there be a sequel to Winning Texas? Stancill promises us there will. It's a credible promise, too, as, like at the end of Saving Texas, a couple of really bad guys are still on the loose. There's even a chance Annie Price will finally make it to the altar with one of her on-again-off-again boyfriends, this one looking like a sure thing. If so, will her two cats mind? Probably, but isn't that what cats do?

[find more Friday's Forgotten Books reviewed at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog:

http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/]

Union (snatch 6)

“Scream.”

“What?”  His reaction was spontaneous, despite a synchronous understanding of what she meant as she uttered the imperative. He felt her face turn to him. He kept his eyes on her ballpoint, frozen a half inch above the pad.

“It might help.”

Her voice had softened further, reaching a tonal intimacy that cupped his heart with an easy, intuitive confidence. Alarmed, he raised his eyes to her face, and in doing so he heard it, the scream. He thought at first it was Aggie, that her humming had moved to a higher register, ascending to soprano or beyond. A ragged crescendoing shriek, it seemed. Could it yet be music? A cry of terror? The questions went moot when the swelling sound oscillated and then became two. Aggie's ditty tripped away, leaving the shriek in solo.

He knew it now. Knew it well. He moved his focus to the face, and realized he knew it now, too.

Union (snatch 5)

Oh shit in neon lit up his mind an instant after he heard his voice say it, the “I'm scared of dying.” He'd meant it when he said it, he thought, but with the oh shit came a deeper understanding of how he really felt at that moment. Well, how he felt now, not at the moment he'd blurted it out. A more philosophical construct had winked at him soon as he'd said it, calling him first on using such a colloquialism, as if he'd lifted a lyric from “Old Man River” or regressed to something a child playing in a sandbox might say, and reminding him he'd long before conquered with sophistication his primal fear of personal finis.

His blurting it out had come on a whim. Nothing more, he decided, and began probing for the whim's derivation. An instinctual breakout? Was he losing control, his cognitive authority reverting to rationalization? He suspected this is what the shrink was thinking, had been striving for, employing professional dicta to unveil. He watched her ballpoint execute swift, exuberant swirls on the legal pad, while her face, he saw with a flicked glance, yielded nothing save studied dispassion.

  He knew she believed she had him. And maybe she did. Ordinarily he dreaded blushing, so much so that merely thinking about it could bring it on. He felt the heat rush to his face now. A flash of panic, then the realization his blood betrayal should signal he was onto her trick. She must know he was no fool. He wanted to sigh with relief that this instinctual eruption might be saving him from the other.

Out of control yet, though, riding his hard drive. She'd found the chink, happily noting nuances. Dangerous. What the fuck, he figured, and sighed, remembering almost too late to keep his lips apart.

Union (Snatch 2)

Many of the shrinks' questions had a déjà vu feel to them: Do you know why you're here, Jack? Do you like being here, Jack? If you could be anywhere else, Jack, where might that be?

He looked at their faces only to establish he wasn't afraid to look, to make eye contact long enough to certify his “self-confidence” but not enough to convey challenge. He did this at the start and end of each session. During the sessions he kept his gaze steady, focusing on the hand that held the pen that wrote on the yellow pad, and every now and then darting up to the face for a quick reminder he was “paying attention.”

There were little fights.

“Please do not address me as 'Doc'.”

“Why?

“I'm your psychiatrist. There should be a formal distance.”

“What's wrong with 'Doc'?”

“It's too familiar.”

“You call me 'Jack'.”

“What would you prefer I call you?”

“Jack's fine. You want me to be comfortable, right?” Asshole smiles coldly, nods. (All the shrinks are assholes.)

“You can be comfortable without being familiar.”

“Why?”

“It's the preferred way.”

“Preferred by whom?”

“Professional standards.” Asshole clears throat, writes something on yellow pad.

“You can't be flexible?”

“Of course, but within professional boundaries.”

“Am I making you nervous?”

“Of course not, but I can't help you if you won't cooperate.”

“Who said I need help?”

“Everyone needs help.”

“Do you?”

“That's all for today.” Asshole leaves.

Exchanges like this came intermittently, initially as each shrink strove to test the dynamic, “establish a relationship.” Later incursions were intended to surprise, discomfit. Always obvious, occasionally evoking overt laughter.

This was all pre-Aggie. She was there, he knew now, but not on his radar. Once she was, the session evolved. After his radar had found her, he felt more potent. Deleted the snark from the “Doc.” (Embarrassed to seem so predictable.) The vigilance remained, of course, but leavened with insouciance.

But...but whenever Aggie was not immediately present, so he could witness her, he forgot what she looked like.

Chapt. 34 (1st draft) - Saving Bart

Trueblood heard the barking as soon as the elevator door slid open. He recognized the voice as Bart's although the sharp bursts had a different timbre, a loud but strangely meek hollowness absent the personality of their habitual bullying bluster. It was as if someone were doing a poor impression of Bart, or practicing to imitate him. And it continued longer than Trueblood remembered it ever had. Three or four in a row, then a pause, then three or four more. These series repeated without variation as though following the percussion notations on a music sheet. They continued while Trueblood walked from the elevator to his office, and diminished in volume after he entered and closed the door to the hallway.

Doris looked up from something she'd apparently been studying on her desk. Her face was tense, lips remaining pursed as they resisted her effort to stretch them into a smile. “Morning, boss,” she said, her voice low and tight with caution.

“Happy Monday, Doris,” Trueblood said quietly, then,” What's with that?” He tipped his head toward the barking, which had indicated no sign of letting up.

She motioned him closer and began speaking in a near whisper. “The goonies,” she said, using her name for the two WACKO men who of late had commandeered the National Drug Control Policy offices.

“Didn't think I could ever feel sorry for that bag of wind, but they've been making him do that ever since I got here this morning. It's been going on over an hour now. Poor Cathy came in here crying. Said she's never been so scared. They've made him kneel on the floor and say Bart Bart Bart like he does, you know, and they won't let him up.

“You know, boss, how irritating that was at first, for me, anyway, but I got used to it after a while. Hardly even notice it anymore. Until now.”

“Yeah, I know. Where's Cathy now?”

“I sent her home. She was afraid to go back over there.”

“Same two guys?”

“She said yes. The big goon and that skinny one, the one I think is creepier. Talks like an undertaker.”

“Did Cathy say what set them off? Bart's been cooperating with them, so far as I know.”

“She said she heard their voices get louder, Bart's, anyway, but she couldn't make out what he was saying. She went to the door to hear better, and that's when she heard the undertaker tell him to start that Bart Bart Bart business.”

“Did she say what he said? The undertaker?”

“She started crying again when she told me that part, and I was afraid her voice would carry and they'd hear her. She said once the undertaker started talking Bart hardly said anything anymore, until he started with the Bart Bart Bart.

“She couldn't make out most of what the undertaker was saying because his voice was so quiet, like it usually is. But then she said it got louder, when he told him, Bart, to start saying his name. He got real sarcastic, like, You like to bully people? Huh? Makes you feel like a big shot when you bark at them, make them say your name? Huh?

“Let me hear how you say it. Go on, bully me. Tell me how you say Bart! He started shouting at Bart then, saying he couldn't hear him, to say it louder, and pretty soon she could hear Bart saying his name, but the undertaker kept telling him to say it louder, and finally she said he told Bart to get on his knees.

“That's when she said she got scared and thought maybe they were going to shoot him, like they do in the movies, like they do when they make someone get on his knees. That's when she came over here. She was practically hysterical. I calmed her down but then she started crying again when she was telling me all this. I told her she might as well go home, then, that I'd tell Bart she was sick.

“And that would be the truth, boss. She was sick by then, and I'm starting to feel sick now, too. What on earth is happening here?”

Coffee Betrayal (Chapter 33 - 1st draft)

“Alright, Harry,” said Miriam, “What is it?”

Trueblood looked up from his coffee and peered at his wife, unaware that his eyebrows had lifted. It was a reaction less of curiosity at her question than from surprise by her tone. The cheerfulness she served at breakfast was as customary as the accompanying black coffee, scrambled eggs, toast and orange juice.

Miriam's smile was the same as always but her voice came out too soft. It was as if she was confiding something to him in a hotel lounge during happy hour. They were alone in their kitchen, and she'd made no effort to lean toward him as one would do in the hotel-lounge scenario. So...

Trueblood set his cup down as his brow relaxed, and considered her words. Off the top of his head what is it? meant nothing to him. A quick scan of likely contexts found no hits. Her question apparently had come completely out of the blue. He focused closely on her eyes.

“What is what, Miriam?” he asked gently.

“Something's wrong, Harry. It's not like you to keep things from me.”

“Nothing's wrong, Miriam. I'd tell you if there was. You know that.”

“Harry.”

They sat awhile looking earnestly at each other. Trueblood slurped coffee and his wife munched on a piece of buttered toast. Trueblood broke the silence.

“Look, Miriam, where is this coming from? What makes you think something's wrong?”

“Harry, you put creamer in your coffee.”

“Huh? I what?”

“Creamer, Harry. In your coffee. You put creamer in your coffee. You never put anything in your coffee...”

Trueblood stared at his cup as confusion disturbed the natural composure of his face. “What the...” He cut himself off and looked up at Miriam. “I did,” he said, barely audible, shaking his head as if to deny what he was seeing. He added, “I must have been distracted. I don't remember doing it. I don't know why I did it.

“It is odd, I agree, Miriam, but I don't think it means anything.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. Her smile grew wider. “It wouldn't mean anything if I did something like that,” she said. “You know I get distracted easily. But not you, Harry. You're always so focused.”

He rocked back in his chair, breathing deeply and letting it out in a noisy sigh followed by a half-hearted chuckle. “You're right, Mimi. My focus is my strong suit. I guess...well, I have had a lot of things to focus on lately. You know that. Maybe I've gotten a little jammed up. Too much on the plate, huh?”

“Harry, who are you trying to fool? It's me, Miriam, your loving wife. You always have a lot to focus on. It's what you're good at. Something else is bothering you. Don't try to deny it. It worries me that you're keeping it to yourself. I've never known you to keep something serious from me. Ever. And frankly I'm not sure what to think. I'm a little hurt, Harry.”

Sacrifice brings home the "Good"

My second novel, Sacrifice, has been awarded a "Good Writing Seal" by The indiePENdents, a nonprofit organization that promotes independently published books. Sacrifice is available as an ebook or paperback. Click on the title for Amazon.com's Kindle listing at 99¢.

Descent to the Bunker (Chapt. 32 - 1st draft)

Small pangs of dread began arcing through Geddes's intestines halfway down the seemingly endlessly spiraling concrete stairs. His first thought was that he might be experiencing a wave of vertigo or maybe a flashback from his own experience with Vulcana. He took several deep breaths, but the clammy feeling persisted. Probably the greater sense of depth into the Earth from the stairs. His only other visit to the bunker – that he knew of – had been by elevator with Ruth on her introduction to Camp David after the Inauguration.

Morowitz explained that he'd had the stairs installed because of his claustrophobic fear of elevators.

“I've gotten it under control pretty much,” he told the others in the lodge's tool shed, where the staircase entrance was hidden, “but I don't want to come unglued in a crisis, and heading down there would mean we were in a pretty stressful situation, I figure...and, well, I guess you could call this a fairly stressful situation, too.”

He grinned sheepishly and turned his palms to his guests. “You can take an elevator if you like. There's one in here...that door there, looks like a closet.”

Ruth looked at others, shrugged. “I've never felt all that comfortable in elevators, either. Besides, I can use the exercise.”

And so the procession started, speechless at first, cautiously down the steep, narrow staircase, footwear scuffs on concrete steps. A pervasive alien mustiness pricked the nostrils with growing disfavor. Blue lights, strategically recessed along the descent in the rock-walled silo, glistened off the steel handrail creating an eerie surreality that seemed to mock the intruders with a discomfiting urgency. Morowitz explained that blue light was easier on his eyes at night. “Doesn't affect the pupils like white light does.

“We keep it blue in the bunker, too, but can switch it up gradually to white if we're gonna be down there awhile. Sort of an artificial dawn...heh heh.”

Whether the blue light was what bothered Geddes it was definitely the light that replaced his anxiety with something new and truly frightful. He saw it in the way the light treated Ruth's eyes when he heard the shoe scuffing falter directly behind him. Leaning against the rail, he turned and braced himself in case Ruth had lost her balance. He found that she, too, was leaning and that her grip on the rail was so fierce her arm trembled. He took a step toward her and put his fingertips on her wrist.

He saw that her eyes were glazed in the way he'd learned to view with alarm. He saw them from an angle in which the light, refracting oddly within the unfocused lenses, magnified them to create the illusion of shimmering discs, electric versions of the empty ovals Orphan Annie and her dog Sandy presented as eyes in the comics.

Lit Dick report: Hunting the elusive George La Fountaine

Lit Dick

Lit Dick here. Yes?  No...well, a little progress, I guess you could say.  No photo.  I struck out with Google and Amazon, ma'am. All of his books still in print.  Most recent, The White Room, came out on Kindle last October.  Hey, this guy's even more elusive than Pynchon. That's right. 

Facebook?  The only George La Fountaines with photos are too young.  Our man was born in 1934.  Apparently still alive or, I expect, I'd have found an obit.  Hmmm?   Yes, a brief bio published in 2002 in Gale's Contemporary Authors. $9.95 for a single-page Kindle document, copy protected so I can't email it.  Most of it is review summaries of three of his books. Certainly. I'll mail a printout this afternoon.

Yes, all 15 are on Kindle.  Yes, I read Flashpoint.  Yes, definitely the most erotic seduction scene in literature, in a bar, all eyes and the barest minimum of words.  Yes, ma'am, I agree. The movie is good. The characterizations differ, as do the endings--yet, both are shockers.  I think Kristofferson and Treat Williams are more believable on screen, but in the book we get inside their heads more intimately.  Yes, ma'am.

OK, then, here's my report: