New 09.07.03

I read a positive review of a new Michael Connolly book, so ordered a copy for son Jim and his partner Stefani, who are fans of Connolly's books. I gave into temptation and ordered it online. The deal was that there was free shipping (about $7.00) for orders over $25.00 or something, and the Connolly book was just a bit less than that. So I ordered a copy of Nevada Barr's latest book at the same time. After discount and saved shipping charges, it cost about what a paperback would have. I know. This is a marketing scam designed to put the "bricks and mortar" competition out of business so the online booksellers can charge more. (The head of Amazon.com said they were "investing" millions in this.) I continue to buy books mostly in stores where I can see them, but I figure that by the time the online sellers put the off line sellers out of business, someone will have come up with a new marketing technology to put the online sellers on the trash heap. Try this one: Xerox has invented electronic paper. You could conceivably download a book into a volume made up of electronic paper, read the book, and then erase it and order a new one. You don't get to build a library, but you could always download a book again if you wanted to reread it. Anyway, back to Nevada Barr and Flashback. I've enjoyed her other mysteries quite a bit. However, my imagination kept me from reading the one set in Carlsbad Cavern National Park. Even after being in the public parts of that cave, I don't want to think about getting stuck or lost in the underground dark. All of Barr's novels have been set in national parks and the main character is park ranger Anna Pigeon. This one is set at Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas National Park. It's a Civil War-era fort on a tiny island in the Gulf of Mexico two hours by boat from Key West. Anna Pigeon is on temporary assignment for bureaucratic reasons and is intrigued by a batch of letters written by her great-great aunt who was a temporary resident of Fort Jefferson at the end of the Civil War. So there are really two stories here: one in the letters from 1865 and one in the adventures of Anna Pigeon. It didn't work well for me. The narratives kept interrupting each other. I kept looking for parallels (besides geography and consanguity). No luck, but then maybe I'm just oblivious. Barr should take lessons from Diane Smith (Letters from Yellowstone) on using correspondence to carry a story. And Anna Pigeon kept doing stupid things. She began to remind me of Sue Grafton's or Sara Paretsky's investigator. You know, the writers who think their heroes have to be as stupid as the testosterone-poisoned, middle-aged private dicks that populated so much of hard-boiled detective fiction before women writers showed up. Think James Patterson if you want to. And the bad guys were doing stupid things too. I think my rule is that these characters get to do one stupid thing under duress in a book. After that they're out of the game. I forgave Barr a bit when she revealed that Pigeon was being drugged, but I almost quit reading this several times. As I was putting these notes together, I found another cultural artifact. At the top of the inside flap, the publisher has highlighted a quotation from People magazine's review: "Fans of Barr's mystery series ... will enjoy her platinum-plated engineering ... She has a plainspoken gift for sustaining suspense without using SAT words ..." Huh? I'm a fan of a writer who is limited to one and two syllable words? The review is not signed and I understand why. No one maintains suspense using multi-syllabic words that retard the progress of the reader. Any high school sophomore literature student could tell you that without SAT words. Are there people out there who read books and are put off by words that don't show up in popular newspapers written at a fifth grade level? Well, besides romance novel readers. Oh, well, I'll continue to imagine that Barr had nothing to do with the review or the republication of it on her book's dust jacket. I just can't imagine the marketing strategy that prompted either. If you want to reach the linguistically challenged audience the comment is aimed at, you put it in big type on the front cover.