"Black December" by Scott Hunter

Detective Chief Inspector Brendan Moran of the Thames Valley Police is recovering from a near-fatal automobile accident. He’s still dealing with lingering physical, like falling asleep at inopportune times, temporary paralysis, and even hallucinations that may or may not be dreams. The doctors assure him he will eventually recover. But in the meantime, his police superior would like nothing better than to see Moran retire on disability. The detective is not only a bit unorthodox; he’s also extremely good at his work. For the present, he has to rely on team members to drive him anywhere.

He’s called to an old local Catholic school, one that includes an abbey. A monk has been found murdered in an underground chapel and a priceless relic is missing. At first believed unrelated, a second death is reported – a man is found dead from a knife wound at a nearby hotel. 

Moran’s troubles are limited to his physical injuries from the accident. His alcoholic older brother shows up, asking for a place to sleep for a few nights. The brother hand’s over the key to a “Romanian” he meets in a pub, and a whole group of Romanians take up squatting residence in Moran’s house. They leave only when Moran’s car explodes, the object of a bomb (they also leave quickly). The Irish detective in England discovers that the long arm of the IRA may be involved in the bombing – and his murder case at the school.

Scott Hunter

Black December by Scott Hunter is the first in the “Irish Detective” or DCI Brendan Moran mystery series, and if you’re looking for a novel or a series when action seems to explode on virtually every page, this may be it. Moran finds himself in a race to prevent more deaths, including possibly his own. To succeed, he has to reach back more than 40 years in the school's history.

The series includes Black December, Creatures of Dust, Death Walks Behind You, A Crime for All Seasons(short stories), and Silent as the Dead. In addition to writing his crime fiction, Hunter is an IT consultant and musician. He lives with his family in England.

Black December is a fast-paced, anything-can-happen-and-probably-will story, with a physically and mentally-impaired detective whose brilliant mind is still able to overcome his injuries. It’s a solid introduction to a new crime detection series.

When the Story Emerges from the Words

I’ve been working on a story, and Michelangelo pops into my head.

He has nothing to do with the story. And I’m not writing about art or sculpture on Italy or the Renaissance or anything related to those subjects.

But something happens in the process of writing that story, and it has to do with something Michelangelo said about sculpture.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it,” he says, “and it it’s the task the sculptor to discover it.”

He follows it up with a slight variation: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved it until I set him free.”

I think the quotes were a bit presumptuous, but it is Michelangelo who says them, so who am I to judge?

And then I have something like a Michelangelo moment.

To continue reading, please see my post at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Akash Patel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"When You Look at Me" by Pepper Basham

Julia Jenkins is a young woman juggling several balls in the air. The victim of date rape, she found herself pregnant and decided to keep the baby, delaying her final year of college to do so. She’s running a bakery, using her own recipes, and she’s clearing out an old Victorian mansion willed to her by her deceased aunt. The young man who raped her was tried for the crime but was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Henry Wright is an English composer; he’s staying in the town of Pleasant Gap to write the music for a movie being produced by his best friend. He’s shy and introverted; he also carries baggage in the form of a brother who stole his fiancée and a mother who believes she controls her children’s lives. 

He literally collides with Julia at the bakery door, and she mashes iced cupcakes all over him. From that inauspicious start begins a friendship that grows into a relationship. As Henry helps Julia clear out her aunt’s mansion, they discover that the aunt was not only a concert pianist, but also an American caught up in World War II espionage. And, though dead, she has a lesson for both Julia and Henry.

Pepper Basham

When You Look at Me is the second novel in the Pleasant Gap series by author Pepper Basham (the first is Just the Way You Are, and it tells the story of Henry’s actor/producer friend, Englishman Wes Harrison). It’s the story of two people, both with buried hurts but strong in faith, who slowly overcome internal resistance and fall in love.

Basham is the author of numerous historical and contemporary romance novels, novellas, and stories. Charming the Troublemaker is the second in her Mitchell Crossroads series; the first is A Twist of Faith. Second Impressions is one of two novellas by Basham involving the work of Jane Austen, the second being Jane by the Book. Basham and her family live in Asheville, North Carolina. 

When You Look at Me is a charming, easy-reading story about surviving traumatic experiences, letting down walls, and learning some lessons from the past.

Related:

My review of A Twist of Faithby Pepper Basham.

My review of Second Impressionsby Pepper Basham.

Poets and Poems: Chad Abushanab and “The Last Visit”

How does a child grow up when the father of the family is an alcoholic? How does a child respond when an alcoholic father abuses the mother? In such a situation, where does a boy look for a role model, or is the alcoholic father the role model?

Poet Chad Abushanab doesn’t ask these questions directly in his debut poetry collection, The Last Visit. But he might have, since he answers them in the poems he’s written. Many of the poem are written informal, rhyming verse, oddly heightening the sense and meaning of the poems. A formal, rhyming, metered poem about your father’s alcoholism? A poem about your mother’s split lip, and how she’d take you and your brother to buy a cheap toy after a violent episode? Or beating up another boy because you’re trying to prove something to your father?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“My Father Left Me Ireland” by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Doughtery is the child of an Irish father and an Irish-American mother. His parents ended their relationship before he was born, and his mother returned to the United States. From that heritage of Ireland, an absent father, the Catholic Church, and a mother who saturated herself and her son in Irishness came a hunger for knowing who he was, where he came from, what had shaped his parents and, by extension, himself, and what it meant for him and his own family.

What Dougherty did was to write a non-fiction romance, My Father Left Me Ireland. In a series of eight, longish letters to his father, Doughtery tells and gradually makes sense of his story. Slowly we see what he knew and what he didn’t know. He overlays his family’s story with that of Ireland, and especially the Ireland since the Easter Rebellion in 1916. And thus a family story becomes a national story. It’s a story that applies to far more than Ireland.

As a child, Dougherty rarely sees his father, except for vary rare “parachuting in and out” type of visits. He first interprets it like any child might – that something is wrong with him that his father doesn’t want to see. Over the years, he comes to understand that the visits were framed by the complex relationship of his parents, and that much of what he understood about his father’s absence had more to do with his mother than his father.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

It’s a moving account. The pain involved is more than only Doughtery’s, which he comes to understand over time. He seeks resolution in learning Ireland’s history, reading its literature and poetry, and trying to understand the events that shaped both of his parents.

Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and formerly national correspondent at The Week. He’s worked at Business Insider, and he’s been published in such national publications as Politico, The New York Times Magazine, ComedyCentral.com, Washington Monthly, and The American Conservative. He lives in Mt. Kisco, New York.

My Father Left Me Ireland is the story of an ache, the ache of an absent parent, the ache of a vague loss of national identity, the ache of a child and a man who belong but don’t belong. That ache is never fully healed, but it is understood and lessened, and terms are reached with it. Doughtery has written what is ultimately an optimistic book about how a positive life can be fashioned from brokenness. 

The mark of Simeon

After Luke 2:22-38

Aged, and aging still,

each day I feel the creak

and rub and grind of bones, 

infirmities of growing old,

but not yet old enough, hair

fading and gray, back

beginning to arc into stooping,

but not yet old enough,

not yet ready to be embraced

and wrapped by the shroud,

not yet, not until I see

the one, the king, not

just another baby or child,

but the One.

It was promised.

Photograph by Omar Lopez via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

World War I, or what was then called “The Great War,” toppled four empires – Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power from a weak provisional government in Russia, and the communists came close to grabbing power in Germany. The war also had powerful effects on the combatant least physically affected – the United States. Mark Malvasi at The Imaginative Conservative writes about World War I: War as Revolution.

It’s been many weeks since the first at Notre Dame Cathedral, and everyone’s still waiting for the billionaires who pledged financial aid to deliver. Many words have been written about the cathedral, how it should be restored, and how the fire likely started. But the fire and its aftermath can be seen as a kind of morality tale, and Sean O’Hare at Mere Orthodoxy tells that story in A Call to Remembrance: Notre Dame and the Internet Age. 

In April, the deputy editor of Britain’s New Statesman Magazine tweeted a series of what he described as racist quotations by Sir Roger Scruton, an unpaid advisor to the British government, author, philosopher, and one of the finest minds of our age. The Tory government immediately fired Scruton from his unpaid job, which tells you a lot about the Tory government. What the staffer, George Eaton, actually did, however, was pull statements and fragments of statements out of context. Eaton, in turn, was outed by defenders of Scruton, and the magazine undertook an investigation. It’s now publicly issued an apology to Scruton, and (possibly) demoted the staffer. Douglas Murray at The Spectator says there are still three unanswered questions about the hit job on Scruton.

More Good Reads

Culture

You Are Not Too Old for Lullabies – Kaitlin Miller at The Rabbit Room. 

Jeffrey Bilbro: Wendell Berry exemplifies sustainable life – Faith & Leadership.

9 Essential Points on the Theology of Work – Dr. Art Lindsley at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

Farmers and Humanists in an Age of Crisis: Technology, Death, and Resurrection – Tessa Carman at Mere Orthodoxy.

Faith

Fr. Jerzy Popieluzsko’s Long Road – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

Art and Photography

The Importance of American Art – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.

Poetry

Asperges – Martha Serpas at Image Journal.

British Stuff

The Foundation of Britain's Feudal System – Eifion Wyn Williams at English Historical Fiction Authors.

American Stuff

A Harvest of Death: The Days After Gettysburg – Paige Gibbons Backus at Emerging Civil War.

The Gerrymander: A Gift from the Founding Fathers – Eric Stermer at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

Writing and Literature

Giving him his due: Claire Lowdon on why we should still read John Updike – The Times Literary Supplement.

She’s Always a Woman – Fyfe Dangerfield

Photograph of man reading by Kyle Wagner via Unsplash. Used with permission.