"Death at Rainbow Cottage" by Jo Allen

A jogger out running discovers the body of a man, stabbed to death just steps from the cottage she shares with her husband. With a combination of anxiety attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder, she nearly comes unglued.

DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his Cumbria Police team are called in, and soon discover there will be nothing straightforward about the crime, including a virtual lack of suspects. The victim operated a tea shop and bakery with his sister, and the man didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world. 

 

The only suggestive thing about the murder is the location, an isolated lane known to attract both straight and gay couples. The man is discovered to have had a number of assignations there, but who they might have been with remains an unknown. 

 

Satterthwaite also has a new chief superintendent, one Faye Scanlon who may take the prize for one of the more obnoxious bosses in British crime stories. She soon has all of her people attending diversity and inclusion training seminars, taught by the husband of the jogger who found the stabbing victim. She also tells Satterthwaite rather baldly that, from her perspective, he was only promoted because he is a privileged white male. Further complicating the case is that Satterthwaite’s team includes Ashleigh O’Halloran, Satterthwaite’s current girlfriend who just happened to have had an affair with Scanlon at their previous posting in Cheshire.

 

Jo Allen

In the fourth Jude Satterthwaite mystery, Death at Rainbow Cottage, British author Jo Allen pulls in the sub-themes of gender and identity. And I will be straightforward here – I was fully expecting a stereotype ending with the killer being your caricature of a right-wing fundamentalist wacko. What kept me reading was, first, the quality of the writing, and second, the ambivalence implied about the training seminars. It would have been easy for Allen to have tipped into the kind of story expected with the themes she’s exploring, but she avoids it. Instead, she ends up focusing on telling a good story, and she succeeds at doing so.

 

Allen is a native of Wolverhampton, England, and has graduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and earth science. After a career as an economic consultant, she began writing short stories, romance, and romantic suspense under the pen name of Jennifer Young. She began writing the DCI Satterthwaite crime novels in 2017.  

 

Related:

 

Death by Dark Waters by Jo Allen.

 

Death at Eden’s End by Jo Allen. 

 

Death on Coffin Lane by Jo Allen.

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Limehouse Hole Stairs and the Breach – A London Inheritance.

 

On the Beat with PC Lew Tassell Again – Spitalfields Life. 

 

The true darkness of classic crime – Frances Lasok at The Critic Magazine.

 

Scattering my father’s ashes in the Camino de Santiago – Gus Carter at The Spectator.

 

A Sonnet for St. Luke’s Day – Malcolm Guite.

"The Story of Camp Douglas" by David Keller

One Civil War prison has tended to receive most of the attention from historians, and with some justification. Andersonville in Georgia was a POW camp that housed up to 45,000 Union soldiers, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, overcrowding, or exposure. After the war, its commandant, Austrian-born Captain Henry Wirz, was arrested, charged, tried by a military tribunal, and hanged. 

I’d heard of the POW camp in Elmira, New York, which imprisoned Confederates referred to as “Hellmira.” In 2020 Civil War historian Derek Maxfield published Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp—Elmira, NY. Almost 3,000 prisoners died at Elmira. And I’d heard of the prison at Alton, Illinois, which housed up to 1,900 Confederate prisoners at any given time and at which some 1,500 died. If you add the totals for all prisons, more Confederates died in Union prisons than Union soldiers in Confederate prisons. But the numbers can be deceiving; the totals on both sides were likely higher.)

 

But a prison camp in Chicago, which started life as an army base near the present campus of the University of Chicago, holds the dubious honor of being the Union prison where more Confederates died than any other. Officially, about 4,400 Confederate prisoners died at Camp Douglas, the highest number of deaths of any Union POW camp.  And the number is likely higher because of poor recordkeeping and the destruction of records in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Can a Donor Revolt Save American Universities? – Joseph Savage at The Free Press.

 

A Fall Break for the Army – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Civil War.

 

Who or what are ‘the Palestinians?’ – Roger Kimball at The Spectator.

 

Why Was My Talk at a Medical Conference Canceled? – Vinay Prasad at The Free Press.

 

On the Railroad Tracks to the Western Theater – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War. 

Poets and Poems: Ben Okri and "A Fire in My Head"

Standing in Hatchard’s Bookstore on Piccadilly Street in London, I’m looking through the shelves of poetry. Hatchards’s is the oldest, continuously operating bookstore in London, having opened in 1797. It’s next door to Fortnum & Mason, and across the street from the Royal Academy of Arts. The Ritz Hotel is one block west, while Piccadilly Circus is two long blocks to the east.  

Hatchard’s poetry section is not huge, but it’s sizeable, larger than what you find in most American bookstores. A small table display of books occupies the space in front of the shelves. Perhaps it’s the striking black, red, and white color design, but one volume draws my eye – A 
Fire in My Head: Poems for the Dawn by Ben Okri. The cover contains a sentence: “It was like a burnt matchbox in the sky.”

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Witches in the Woods – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Memory eternal for Marcus Aurelius Spartanicus, the priest’s dog – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion. 

 

Autumn Winds Have Come Again – poem by Roy Peterson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Falling days – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

Things Worth Remembering: When the World Went Mad – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on poet Edward Thomas and World War I.

“The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham” by Robert Hudson

A friend who had worked in academia before joining the corporate world once told me what a relief corporate politics was after university life.  

“A relief?” I said, somewhat shocked. Our workplace politics was not known for being benign.

 

He nodded. “It’s worse in academia. The smaller the pie, the more vicious the politics.”

 

That exchange happened more than 40 years ago, but I was reminded of it while reading the new novel by Robert Hudson. Novels about academic life aren’t my favorite genre of fiction, but if more of them were written like this one, I could easily change my mind.

 

Hudson’s The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham is simultaneously one of the funniest and thought-provoking novels I’ve read this year. It’s also disquieting, especially when you begin to see some of yourself in a few of the characters – and they’re not necessarily the characters you want to identify with.

 

Martin Bonham is chair of the English Department at Cupperton University, a small religious / liberal arts college in an unnamed region of the United States, possibly the Midwest. Cupperton also has an associated seminary and theology school, chaired by the Rev. Dr. Cornelius C. Dunwoody, who considers the seminary the final word on all things theological. 

 

The “trouble,” if one can call it that, is when a seminary student named Katie Westcott brings her troubled soul to Dr. Bonham. She doesn’t feel God in her life, she says. She doesn’t love him. She’s not angry at him. She’s simply not experiencing him in any way in her life. And this is not a concern she can bring to her seminary professors.

 

Robert Hudson

Katie’s question leads to a brainstorm. Theology is all about the knowledge of God. What if, Bonham wonders, they could create an interdisciplinary department that would be all about the love of God? They could call it the Department of Theophily, a complimentary enterprise to the School of Theology. The lecturers could be drawn from the staff of the liberal arts and sciences in the university. 

 

Bonham and Katie map the plan, submit it, guide it through the university’s approval system, and with a few strokes of good fortune, get their new department approved. That approval, however, has not been without the staunch opposition of one Dr. Dunwoody, who doesn’t see the new venture as complementary but as competitive. Not content to lick his wounds in academic defeat, Dr. Dunwoody goes to war. And Dr. Bonham, for his part, rises to the challenge.

 

What ensues is a series of one-upsmanships, prank following prank following counter-prank. Neither Bonham nor Dunwoody are prepared to call a truce, and the reader (or this reader) rather hoped the war would go on forever. It is that funny and entertaining. But, of course and unfortunately, it can’t. Something or someone will have to give, or yield.

 

What Hudson is depicting in fictional form is an age-old battle within the church told within an academic setting. Both men (and viewpoints) are right. And both are wrong.

 

Hudson has published 12 previous books, including Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present, The Poet and the Fly: Art, Nature, God, Mortality, and Other Elusive Mysteries; Kiss the Earth When You Pray: The Father Zosima Poems; The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966; The Art of the Almost Said: A Christian Writer’s Guide to Writing Poetry; Beyond Belief: What Martyrs Said to God; and Thomas Dekker’s Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare. His articles and poetry have been published by Christianity Today, The Other Side, The Mennonite, The Seneca Review, Mars Hill Review, and other magazines and literary journals. He lives in Michigan.

 

The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham will have you smiling, laughing, and occasionally frowning in recognition (“Hey, wait a minute, that’s a little too close for comfort”). It’s something of an achievement by an author when a reader recognizes something of himself in both the protagonist and the villain, but Hudson adroitly pulls it off. 

 

Note: The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham will be published Nov. 14. It can be pre-ordered at Amazon.

 

Related: 

 

Robert Hudson Explains the House Fly – and Poetry. 

 

Seeing Jesus by Robert Hudson.

 

Robert Hudson: What Thomas Merton Had on His Record Player.

Some Monday Readings

Louise Gluck, Nobel-winning poet of terse and candid lyricism, has died at 80 -- Associated Press.

Saving St. Louis One Block at a Time – Rachel Ferguson at Acton Institute.

 

It can happen at Harvard: Hamas is inside the gates of American campuses – William Jacobson at The Spectator.

 

Ed Gray’s Innocence & Experience – Spitalfields Life.

 

In defense of the Dark Ages – Samuel Rubinstein at The Critic Magazine.

Poetry Prompt: Beginning "Ab Obo" or "From the Egg" -- Tweetspeak Poetry.

Is timing everything?

After Luke 14:1-6 

Does it matter,

this art of healing,

on what day

it happens? It

seems a quaint 

concern, to be

worried whether

someone heals

on a Sabbath.

Does any form

of work, and

especially healing,

matter if it’s

on a Sabbath? But

I suppose it does

matter, for anyone

more concerned

with form, rather

than substance.

 

Photograph by Denise Jans via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Living with Dementia – Peter Milsom at Evangelical Magazine. 

 

Impossible Christianity by Kevin DeYoung – Redeemed Reader.

 

Here Shall Your Proud Waves Be Stayed – Kathryn Butler at Story Warren.

Saturday Good Reads - Oct. 14, 2023

It’s literary prize season, and the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse. You’re not going to read in most, if not all, mainstream media reports, but Fosse is known as both a writer and a Catholic writer. Merve Emre at The New Yorker wrote a brief profile, while John Wilson at Prufrock finds some reasons to be encouraged by many of the prizewinners.  

In September, we has the great good fortune of being able to see the new exhibition at London’s National Gallery of Art, “Frans Hals.” One of his best-known paintings is “The Laughing Cavalier,” but the entire exhibition was rather wonderful. William Cook at The Spectator enjoyed the exhibition as well, and he wrote about Hals’ sense of fun. 

 

If you’re interested in intelligent, thoughtful book reviews, including those of classic books, you might consider Joel Miller, who writes his Miller’s Book Reviews column on Substack. This past week, two posts in particular were well done – The Strange(r) Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and G.K. Chesterton: The Man Behind the Fence.

 

More Good Reads

 

Writing and Literature

 

Processing: How Dan Sinykin Wrote Big Fiction – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft. 

 

In Search of Writer’s Haunts – Drug Bruns at The Millions.

 

The Immense Appeal of Ordinary Characters – Lou Berney at CrimeReads. 

 

So you want to be a writer – poem by Charles Bukowski.

 

British / Irish Stuff

 

Raped by the IRA – Josephine Bartosch at The Critic Magazine.

 

Poetry

 

Why the Russian Protest Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky Still Matter Today – Philip Metres at Literary Hub.

 

Poetry Pairs, 5: “Some One” and UT Tower Shooting, 1966 – Megan Willome at Poetry for Life. 

 

The Colour of Dreams in Cryonic Sleep – Roger Hare at Ice Floe Press.

 

Art

 

How museum guides are being enlisted in the US culture wars – Julia Halperin at The Art Newspaper.

 

Raining – watercolor by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Faith

 

Psalms for Men Who Are Struggling – Scott Slayton at One Degree to Another.

 

Today’s Defining Question: What is a Human? – Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition. 

 

The Light Never Fades – Kristin Couch at The Palest Ink.

 

American Stuff

 

The Dusty Bookshelf: The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style – Max Longley at Emerging Civil War.

 

Culture

 

Campus Cowardice and Where the Buck Stops – Bari Weiss at The Free Press.

 

Hold On – Katy Nichole

 Painting: Lady Reading by a Window, oil on canvas by Thomas Benjamin Kennington (1856-1916). 

Waiting

After 2 Peter 3:9 

We wait on a promise,

a promise to be fulfilled,

a promise spoken and

unspoken from

the beginning. Waiting

is not an acceptable word

in our vocabularies. Yes,

we believe. Of course,

we believe. But can’t it

happen now? The years

become decades, become

centuries, become 

millennia, and yes, we

believe, but when, when

will it be time? We don’t

understand why it’s so

slow, why it takes so long,

almost as if you want all

to be saved, none to perish,

all to repent, none to be 

left behind, all to be

embraced, all to walk

in the light.

 

Photograph by Zhu Liang via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Zeal – poem by Sofia Starnes at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

Forgiveness in the Foam – Dwayne Sheridan at An Unexpected Journal.

 

Israel, Palestine, Hamas and Some Things That Are True at the Same Time – Eric Geiger.