Politics and Crime

A newly elected president appoints a woman he hates to be his secretary of state.  Their term has barely begun when there are bus bombings in England, France, and Germany.  Is the United States next?  And could there be something worse planned?  An insignificant foreign services officer may be the one to crack the secret code.

This is an excellent stand-alone story but knowing something about the authors and current political figures, plus figuring out which author contributed what, adds layers to the fun.  There is the wonderful cameo interview with the incompetent former President “Dunn” (we wish) whose aggressive manner and coarse jokes are so rude.

The audacious secretary of state, who we catch wearing a pantsuit, deals with Russian brutality and Middle East maneuvering as she tries to rebuild relations and reassert America’s authority abroad.  At home, there is confusion and mistrust among her peers.  And wow!  What the intelligence services can find out – and quickly – about any of us.

Although Louise Penny picks up her usual pace considerably in this tale full of feints and misdirection, her use of repetition leapt out at me: “He’d left the US just a day ahead of when he’d planned to.  When he had to.  Just over a day ahead of when the world changed forever.”    She tempers her moralizing, but cannot resist a fable or two.  At the end she produces a delightful Three Pines surprise.

In the acknowledgement section of the book, the two authors tell how they met, became friends, and decided to work together.  This friendship between women shines through the story in the warm relationships between the secretary of state, her best friend, and her daughter.

Like Louise Penny’s Gamache, Donna Leon’s Brunetti, Peter Mayle’s Sam Levitt, or Michael Stanley’s Kubo, all of whom wine and dine in mouthwatering detail in some of the most beautiful places in the world, there is Martin Walker’s Bruno, chief of police. 

Living in a scenic village in the Dordogne, Bruno effortlessly whips up dinner from his garden and local delicacies.   In Chateau Rock, he rides every morning with a charming woman and takes his male basset hound for its first encounter with a lady basset.  Against this idyllic backdrop, there is murder. 

When a farmer is found dead, his children learn he has given his estate to a shady sounding retirement home, and they have been disinherited.   His odd behavior is mixed with Russian money laundering, espionage, and an aging rock n roll singer to make an intricate plot for Bruno to unravel.  This is the next to the latest Bruno mystery, #15.  The most recent, The Coldest Case, was published in 2021.

Kidder provides a tutorial in the history of these two countries, the invasion and control by colonial powers, and the relationship between the Tutsis and Hutus.  He uses flashbacks, a device usually found in fiction, to show Deo’s early life and the atrocities he suffered when barely out of his teens.

The book raises many philosophical questions. What is it about Deo that attracts the most extraordinary help from strangers?  Or – what is it about these people that they are willing to give that kind of help, take a stranger into their small home and support him for an indefinite amount of time?  How does Deo explain to himself why people did the terrible things he witnessed?  What are the manifestations of PTSD and how do they affect a lifetime?  

Years after his escape, Deo has attended the Harvard School of Public Health and Dartmouth Medical school and returned to Burundi to build a hospital.  The interested reader can go beyond the book to the website Village Health Works to see the progress of this remarkable person.

The rhythm of the physical work, the independent people who live along the water, and the leisure to contemplate helps them to reevaluate and find new life directions.  The calm slow pace of the book echoes the leisurely movement of the boat along the canals and through the locks. 

Anne Youngston is also the author of Meet Me at the Museum, a novel about an older man and woman who find each other through a shared interest in the Tollund Man, subject of a poem by Seamus Heaney.  These two charming stories star people in midlife willing to take chances for more fulfilling lives.

At our last book meeting, our group, when talking about Strength, wondered how much the world loses because immigrants, or people in general, are too poor, uneducated, or prohibited by culture from developing their talents.  I was reminded of that when I saw that Noah Stewart, the tenor who sang Mario, Tosca’s lover, is black.  How recently has it been ok for a black man to portray a white woman’s lover?  What a loss it would have been not to have heard this terrific singer who was the best of the three leads.