Game Warden Joe Pickett has been told about a dead moose on someone’s property, and has gone to investigate to see if it’s natural causes or someone winging a moose out of season and then living the poor creature to die in flight. When he arrives at the location, though, he’s horrified to learn that the corpse is not a moose, but a human being: a fly fisherman guide who has a shack not too far away. When he investigates the man’s cabin, he discovers evidence that the poor man was tortured with ordinary house tools before being set alight, and our horrified warden has to wonder what on earth could have transpired. At the same time, Mary-Beth has discovered a bizarre donation at the library: a photo album from the year 1937 belonging to a senior Nazi official, one who collected shots of himself hob-nobbing with Hitler and other Nazi elites, along with his activities in the Reich that year. How on Earth did a top Nazi’s private photos find their way not only to America, but to a little town library in the middle of Wyoming? When suspicious sorts are spotted in town, Joe and Mary-Beth realize their two discoveries are linked: someone wants that album, and they’ll kill to get it. Meanwhile, Nate Romanowski’s wife was beaten and his falcons stolen by an amoral cretin who is using falcon sales to Saudi emirs to bankroll evil – and, as it turns out, the cretin is going to be a villain with some staying power.
Well, this is as strange a Thanksgiving novel as anyone could ask! While Joe and Marybeth are looking forward to the return of their daughters to the new family home – Joe’s last one was burnt by a vengeful ex-con and the state dragged their feet on building a new “game station” – discovering another murder just down the road throws a pall over Turkey Day, as does the fact that Nate, who was supposed to be at the table with his wife Liv and their daughter Kestrel, is instead involved in hunting down a former special operative who is now embittered against DC and wants to foment riots using antifa as his useful (and newly armed) idiots. Fortunately, Nate – who is just as close to fifty as Joe is now – has backup in the form of another falconer named “Geronimo”, and the two will make their way through metropolises filled with sons and daughters of privilege LARPing as black-clad social justice warriors chasing a villain with the appropriately memorable name of Axel Soledad. The central mystery to this one was very interesting to a WW2 history fan, and I enjoyed Nate having a ‘wingman’ for a change.
Joe Pickett has been asked by the governor to do something he’d….really, really, rather not do. The governor wants him to take Elon Musk hunting. Well, not really: the character’s name is Steve-Two, and he’s an eccentric techbro who has decided that he needs to know what it’s like to hunt, kill, dress, and cook his own meat. While the embattled governor doesn’t like Joe – he wants a bootlicker and Joe is 100% Western American Male – the Game and Fish head knows Joe is solid, reliable, and will keep the techbro out of trouble, whether that involves game laws or grizzly mouths. And so into the mountains they go, but there’s someone waiting for them who has a beef with Steve-Two, and Joe may get himself caught in the crossfire of a hashtag war. Dark Sky combines discussion over the morality of social media platforms – their responsibility in hosting or amplifying poor behavior – and combines it with an action-survival story in the mountains, as Joe is thrown to the wolves and elements.
Dark Sky is….strangely prescient in that its awkward tech bro Steve-Two, who styles himself such because he regards himself as the second coming of Steve Jobs, owns an up-and-coming social media network, “ConFab” – despite this book being published a year before Elon Musk bought twitter. Steve-Two arrives in an air of wild idealism and arrogance, shadowed by a gruff security-type and his business partner, and Joe and another local who have been recruited to help with this hunting trip can only look at each other in befuddlement as they listen to the breathtaking naiveté that these silicon boys are bringing into the wilderness. Despite being there for hunting, for instance, Steve-Two is aghast at the presence of Joe’s guns: he brought a bow that he intends to take his quarry with, and he’s been practicing. Nevermind that the technical ability to shoot a bow is only part of bow-hunting, and one overshadowed by the ability to read the land and the animal behavior to maneuver into a spot where using the bow is actually practical. (As someone who is only familiar with white-tail bowhunters, I was surprised to learn that yes, there are people who hunt elk with bows.)
It turns out that an Area Man’s daughter was driven to suicide after being bullied relentlessly on ConFab, despite Area Man’s attempts at contacting ConFab so they could put a stop to it by squelching hashtags or whatever. He blames ConFab and TwoSteve for the amount of social antagonism their platform facilitates and allows to accelerate and target the social media mob’s bete noir of the day. And…he’s not exactly mentally stable. Soon, Joe is ambushed and fleeing for his life through the mountain wilderness and a bitterly cold mountain night, being hunted himself. Fortunately, Marybeth has gotten concerned about Joe’s radio silence (his phone was sabotaged) and sicced Nate Romanowski – and Nate is bringing Sheridan, who is now his 24 year old coworker who is riding shotgun.
This was, as ever, a solid thriller, one in which I used my Good Friday day off to read in one sitting — under a perfect blue sky amid the smell of honeysuckle. Not quite the musk of elk or mountain pines, but close enough! There was one bit of humor in this I especially appreciated: when Mary Beth (Joe’s wife, a librarian) confronts the sheriff, she encounters him in flagranti delicto: in the awkwardness that ensues she can only comment to the sheriff’s paramour that she has three overdue books at the library.
Leeds, Alabama. Hand-painted rockers and a Little Free Library. There’s a bookstore nearby called The Burrow!
Well, that was certainly an unusual April. It’s not the first time Read of England has been waylaid by a cowboy, though. Although I did start the month with some English-type reads, by and large it was Joe Pickett Month again. I did finish the series, though, and have freed myself from the hostage situation. In other news, I paid a visit to the oldest government archives in the United States — the Alabama Department of Archives and History, thank you very much — and spent a day doing research on a passion project (some would call it a morbid obsession) of mine, the history of the Hotel Albert.
The Albert was a ridiculously beautiful hotel standing in the center of my hometown, Selma, modeled after the palaces of the Doges in Venice, and was torn down in 1968 because the landowners thought they could make more money on the property selling it to the City. I’ve written a four page history of the hotel, but the ending was always soft and now I’ve gained enough to wrap things up more solidly. I’ll share that once it’s in better shape, for those who might be interested. (I did share some thoughts on the ADAR research here, but that’s an unfinished site — something I want to flesh out during the summer when I have more time.) I want to finish going through the boxes, first. One of the more interesting discoveries in ADAR’s collection was a one hundred and thirty page letter from one of the Albert’s managers about drama that happened on his watch in the late fifties and early sixties. It was quite scandalous and involved carbon monoxide poisoning, a distracted manager, a jilted wife, and a beauty salon owner whose feminine wiles, seductive charisma, and social influence appear to have made her have more say over what went on at the hotel than the manager or the controlling board! I probably could have gotten more research done, but I was fascinated by the letter-manuscript, and it offered some insight as to how the hotel operation was entirely different from the building management — and how the Albert Hotel Company board’s interests were very different from the interests of the Hotel Albert itself.
This is page 2, and no one’s even died yet!
Unreviewed
While the What I’ve Read This Year page makes it look like I have a pile of unread titles, in reality all but the Doiron books have scheduled reviews, and I have half-finished reviews for the Doiron titles.
Moviewatch
Another quiet movie-watching month, as my cinema friend was again running around in Atlanta looking at houses and making offers. Once he actually moves to Atlanta my movie-watching probably crater, but we’ll see. Posting this is slightly premature as we’ll probably watch something tonight, but I’ll just add it to May.
Cabaret, 1970. An English writer arrives in 1931 Germany and befriends a cabaret performer named Sally. Although it’s a bit of a Breakfast at Tiffany’s situation, soon they become an item, but this is interrupted when Sally becomes infatuated with a posh baron. This is a musical directed and arranged by Bob Fosse (making it my fourth or fifth Fosse), so there’s repeated cuts to the cabaret where Sally performs, and the music is connected to the plot: Sally’s social-climbing is mocked by a song about money, and there’s a piece at the end whose final line has distinct relevance for Germany circa 1931.
Snatch. 2000. British crime drama about ….different criminal groups trying to get ahold of a diamond? Brad Pitt is in it with a dialect even more obscure than whatever that attempt at Appalachian was in Inglourious Basterds.
La Cage aux Folles, 1978. A drag night club owner’s son decides he wants to get married: his intended is the daughter of a prominent conservative French politician. Said club owner must somehow convince the politician that he’s quite respectable, thank you, nevermind the shrieking in the background. I’ve seen The Birdcage before but had forgotten most of the plot and so was able to thoroughly enjoy the French original. Quite the comedy.
Marty, 1955. An aging butcher named Marty is shot down by the dames so much at the dances that these days he spend his weekends sitting in a park listening to his fellow chronic bachelors grouse about girls while they drink, listen to the ball game, or talk about Mickey Spillane’s novels. One night he encounters a school teacher who has likewise given up on finding someone, and they hit it off. But Mickey’s mom and friends are jealous of the girl and tell Marty he should dump her for being a “dog”. Fortunately, he stands up for her — and himself.
The Trouble with Angels, 1966. Teenage cloister hijinks
Showgirls, 1995. A young woman hitchhikes to Vegas to be become a dancer and does what she needs to do, including sleeping with her boss and kicking his current girlfriend down the stairs, to make it to the top.
Serial Mom, 1994. A…comedy/horror about a family who realizes that their June Cleaver mom might be more of a literal cleaver…..
Hannah and her Sisters, 1986. Character drama about three sisters and the men who love them;’ Woody Allen has an existential crisis. Lots of stars in this: Woody himself, Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, and Carrie Fisher for starters.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but we had the worst night of my life together.”
Going in Style, 2017. Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, and Morgan Freeman are in dire financial straits and about to hit eighty. The obvious solution is to rob the bank that’s robbed them. Solid comedy. A remake, I think.
Coming up in May…
I read so many Pickett books that they’ll continue posting themselves all the way to May 6, but I’m hoping it will be a return to normalcy here — or , whatever approximates normalcy.
Joe Pickett is back on the job riding the ranges, documenting wolf expansion into the Bighorns, and trying to figure out who is using a large drone to frighten elk and deer herds around. He doesn’t just find the drone annoying, it’s also criminal: the stress is causing members of the herds who were weakened by winter to collapse from exhaustion and die. He’s working with the lady warden across the mountain, Katelynn, since the drone appears to be working in her district but retreating to someplace in his. Suddenly, though, both he and Katelynn are confronted separately by two goonie boys who try to threaten and intimidate them into laying off their chief suspect, some strange man who lives on an isolated retreat outside of Saddlestring and who has public records only going back two years. While Katelynn – a young warden still learning the job – is overwhelmed with shock and fear at being threatened by feds simply for doing her duty, this ain’t Joe’s first rodeo. He recorded their threats, and while they might’ve sweet-talked him into more ready cooperation, their suited thuggery leaves a bad taste in his mouth and he has no intention of helping them whatsoever. But lo! Then came the Mexican hit squad.
Wolf Pack begins with a game warden lead before quickly accelerating into DC vs Cartel warfare, with the small town of Saddlestring and Joe caught in the middle – and in more ways than one, because it seems his youngest daughter Lucy has been dating a boy who lives from within the mysterious compound. This is a particularly bloody book in the Pickett series, as the presence of a hit sq uad would hint at: the members include three generic killers and one femme female, a beautiful woman who smiles and flirts alllllll the way until she jabs a stiletto into her victim’s heart. Unfortunately for the people of Saddlestring, these operatives are increasingly desperate and likewise unhinged, and as they make mistakes their pool of “People we have to kill because they saw us killing people we had to kill because they saw us trying to kill our original targets” broadens and things get sloppy. Unfortunately, we lose some characters.
Another enjoyable thriller, though I liked it more when it was still about the jerk with a drone than the assassin psychos. Villains are better when we know more about them from previous stories: with these guys (y chica) I was just waiting for them to get themselves killed.
Like most, if not all, Selmians, I was surprised and saddened by the sudden death of former Mayor George Evans. The mayor had been a figure in my life since I was a child, as he was the school superintendent and periodically addressed our classes through the years. Later on, when he served on city council and then as mayor, he was a breath of fresh air — serving as he did between two self-obsessed preachers whose egos brought them into constant conflict with the city council. Selma’s Mayor is part biography, part memoir: Egertson met the mayor during a tourist trip to Selma and was immediately taken with his graciousness, and put aside her disinterest in biography after he asked if she might be willing to aid him in writing his own memoirs. They worked together through coronamania, but he passed away unexpectedly before the book could be finalized. The book is thus a memoir by Eggertson about her collaboration with the mayor, their evolving friendship, and his life in service. When the book is focused on its subject — the Mayor — it’s a wonderful tribute to a man who embodied the motto “service before self”. It is slightly marred, however, by the author’s intruding self-consciousness: she’s so nervous about being a white woman writing a book about a black man that her feelings frequently get in the way of the subject.
George Evans grew up in the segregated South in a time when Selma’s black and white kids effectively lived in two worlds that only rarely bumped into one another. Raised well by a strong set of parents, the future mayor took even greater strength from his high school mentors, particularly coaches. He was a distinguished enough athlete that a Catholic university in Kansas offered him a full scholarship, which took him from the Gulf to the plains — and, for the first time, he was living and working with whites. Perhaps it owed to the Catholic university, or the fact that Kansas was 90% white and had never had enough inter-racial contact to produce conflict*, but Evans found that getting along with his classmates and teammates was easy — frictionless. It made him realize that racial conflict at home was not a preordained fact of life, but something that could be overcome. When he began entering into the workforce as a teacher, school integration was becoming the norm, and he would make good the lessons his teachers and coaches taught him to become a mentor to multiple generations of young people — rising through the ranks of school administration, and following the prementioned path of serving his city on the city council and then as mayor. One of the young people he mentored was Terri Sewell, one of Alabama’s future state representatives.
As a Selmian, I enjoyed most of this book enormously. I was fond of the mayor, not only from my school days but from his relationship with the library: even after he’d left office, Mayor Evans came to the library to read stories to children. His love for the city and its people, regardless of their race or politics, was obvious to me, and I liked seeing how it manifested itself in various ways throughout his long career here. Before the book was released, I had no idea that his education had been in Kansas, of all places, let alone a Catholic university. I also didn’t know that he was both a teacher and a referee, and drew on athletic mentoring his entire life to help foster senses of teamwork. I knew he was a force behind trying to revitalize the Riverwalk/Water Avenue area of town, but the book reveals even more interesting ambitions for the city. As much as I enjoyed the parts about Mayor Evans, though, the parts that were more author-centric were…tedious, and unfortunately this is not unique to the books I attended a booktalk by her last year, and far too much time was consumed with her biography when every one in the room was there to hear about Mayor Evans. It didn’t help that — being a local — I knew some of the people she was talking to and found her naive. She blithely accepts one lady’s claim to being the youngest person to be “attacked on the Bridge on Bloody Sunday”, which is false on two grounds: one, the woman in question was a teenager in the third march, and two, no one was attacked on the bridge in the first “Bloody Sunday” march. The attack happened when marchers attempted to begin marching on the state highway after a judge denied them the permit, but somehow “being attacked across the bridge” has become some a potent myth in the last thirty years. Similarly, she accepts the assertion that Selma’s incoming manchild mayor unseated Evans because of the “young white vote”, which is absurd given Selma’s demographics. (Selma’s white population is ~16%, and I’d venture to say the average age of white persons is between 50 and 60.) She does at least mention the economic factor, but not Manchild’s youth, charisma, and status as an attractive newcomer in a race filled with aging men who had either been mayor or been running for mayor for decades.
I wound up rating this 4 stars on goodreads, more of Mayor Evans’ sake than the books.
[*] With the somewhat obvious exception of Indian wars, of course…
In One No, Many Yeses, journalist and green activist Paul Kingsnorth detailed his journeys across the world, spending time with people who were actively resisting globalization — or rather, the disruptions that globalization caused in their local communities. Real England: Battle against the Bland does something similar, but much closer to home for Kingsnorth. So much closer to home that he visits the community his ancestors came from, Kingsnorth. The deep local connections people had to their places and how richly their place-cultures enveloped these peoples’ lives, enraptured Kingsnorth, and he explores that aspect here. Kingsnorth travels around England visiting people who are fighting government bureaucracy for the control of their canals, trad pub owners who are being displaced by pub corporations, and farmers who are being displaced by the English version of agribiz. The result is something like Berry’s Unsettling of America, or The Small Mart Revolution — a celebration of common folk finding ways to resist the corporate colonization of their villages and the homogeneous cookie-cooker offerings it makes predominant. Jim Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere also strongly applies, Reading this book as an American means sailing into territory that is both familiar and alien: while I have firm notions of pub culture in England, for instance, they’re almost wholly informed by CS Lewis and the Inklings — and the culture of canalways was wholly unfamiliar.
Relatedly, sort of, I stumbled upon Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook while prepping for a Teaser Tuesday. The book is based on her observations traveling through several Gulf states in 1970, though the narrative often breaks for scattered observations without comment. The locations chosen strike me as very haphazard: she begins in New Orleans, strikes out for Biloxi but wind up on Meridian instead, then wanders over to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham before returning back to Mississippi. There is no program or agenda at work, only her desire to experience the south and get an idea for what was on people’s minds in 1970. This is an interesting period to experience the South, only five years after the high watermark of the Civil Rights movement — and I was amused to see that Didion was touring the Gulf South during the worst part of the year for tourism — late summer, when the sunny south is at its hottest and stickiest. It’s a time of the year that explains some of the culture of the South — the way older homes were constructed, for instance, with high ceilings and dogtrot planning, and some would argue it’s why we’re so violent. (Jim Webb would argue that Scots-Irish blood and culture had more to do with that.) Not surprisingly, Didion finds a bit of summer lethargy — people sitting on porches, rocking and waiting for the long day to close and the night to bring some relief from the heat, and Sunday lunches that seem to fill the entire span between morning church and evening service. I’ve never read Didion before, but she has a wonderful talent for description that drew me in. There was surprisingly little about race relations in this, aside from her conversation with a municipal booster who said that people were starting to make peace with one another after the activists and reactionaries had gone away. The biggest remaining issue was forced bussing and integration. Didion also remarks on a strong sense of ambiguity about indutrialism and progress: people wanted growth, but were wary about the character of their places being lost. (I can sympathize: I remain grateful that Atlanta, not Birmingham, netted an international airport because the resulting sprawl would have overwhelmed the bucolic university town I’ve spent some of my happiest years in!) I’ll have to look into Didion’s works to try more of her writing style.
Today’s treble T is top ten books with ____________ in the title, so I chose to go with South, or Southern. Given that I’m a librarian in a southern river town, I really should read more southern literature…
But first, the tease!
“See what happens when good people spend too much time around you? They kidnap their local sheriff.”(Battle Mountain, CJ Box)
The Square Deal Diner, in Sennebec Center, was owned by a plump and hyperactive widow named Dot Libby who also ran a motel and gift shop out on the highway, served as chair of the school board, organized the municipal Fourth of July picnic, and played the organ every Sunday morning at the Congregational Church. She was the mother of six (four living) and grandmother of twenty-two. I knew all this within five minutes of meeting her. Dot liked to talk. (The Poacher’s Son, Adam Doiron)
Modern societies exacted a far crueller toll on those who judged themselves to have failed. No longer could these unfortunates blame bad luck; no longer could they hope for redemption in a next world. It seemed as if there was only one person responsible and only one fitting response. As Durkheim showed, in perhaps the largest single indictment of modernity, suicide rates of advanced societies are up to ten times as high as those in traditional ones. Moderns aren’t only more in love with success, they are far more likely to kill themselves when they fail. (How to Survive the Modern World, Alain de Botton)
To be modern is to be robbed of any sustained capacity for calm. It is to be assailed at all times with news of every latest beheading, bank run, government fiasco, film premiere, mass shooting, guerrilla movement, nuclear mishap and sexual indiscretion to have occurred anywhere on the planet in the preceding minutes. We are always connected and always aware. The average twelve-year-old has access to 200 million more books than Shakespeare had. The last person who could theoretically have read everything died in around 1450. We know so much and understand so little. (Ibid)
“What do you mean you shot him and then HIT HIM WITH A FISH?!”
Joe Pickett has a problem. The new governor, who is a bully and an ass, has discovered that Joe used to do a little investigating for the former governor on the sly, especially when local authorities were regarded as corrupt and the governor wanted eyes and ears on the ground he could trust. The new governor seems to think Joe could be his own hatchet-man, intimidating those he wants to shut up and get out of the way, but that’s not the kind of man Joe is. So, he’s dispatched well out of his district to the middle of nowhere to look for some English woman who’s gone missing after a week spent at a ranch for rich people who like pretending to play cowboy. Fortunately, the last game warden has gone missing, giving Joe a credible reason for being there. Unfortunately, Joe seems to have been setup for failure. He doesn’t have access to the information he needs, the original investigators of the case have been removed, and someone knows Joe is there because they break into his room and remove all of the notes and research he does manage to accumulate. The chicanery here is strong. The story here is mostly Joe being used and abused by the governor and his staff, who are exemplars of why Americans used to tar and feather politicians: I’m fairly certain that if they’d ever shown their faces instead of hurling orders and abuse over the phone, at least two noses would’ve gotten broken. There’s an interesting sideplot that – surprise! – feeds into the main plot, involving Nate Romanowski and eagle permits, since our nature boy is now a successful businessman, using his falcons as pest mitigation. My favorite part of this novel was the role played by Sheridan Pickett, who is working on the very dude ranch the English lass hailed from: she’s an active part of the story throughout. The best part of this novel, though, was the line that I used as the caption for the cover. Nate Romanowski is…something else. (I think it helps that I always hear Joe as Roger Clark’s “western” voice used in Red Dead Redemption 2, so the mental delivery is hilarious.)
Game Warden Joe Pickett Mike Bowditch just got a call about a bear attacking a man’s prized pig. Mike’s just a rookie serving the Game and Fish department of the State of Maine in the middle of nowhere, so taking on a bear on his lonesome isn’t exactly an attractive prospect. But, it beats the hell out of learning a few hours later that a car was ambushed, killing two men that included a sheriff’s deputy, and that the chief suspect is Mike’s own dad. Mike doesn’t think much of his father: the man was a drunk and ne’er do well whom women were inexplicably drawn to and who more or less abandoned his family when Mike was just a youngun’. But both men are drawn toward the life of the outdoors, and there are certain bonds that even the Olympian gods can’t shake – like that of a father and son. Against wisdom, against the advice of his superiors – against anyone who might occasion to offer advice, in fact – Mike holds to the idea that his father Jack, while being a bar-brawling SOB, would never murder in cold blood. In this, he is partially aided by a retired warden with an airplane, who thinks Jack could very well be guilty, but thinks there’s more to the story than is currently known. The result is both an action-thriller, a mystery, and a compelling character drama about a man who stands to lose everything…and very well might. This is an interesting story in part because it deals with how we deal with failure — that of those we look up to, and of ourselves, since Mike doesn’t necessarily make the best calls here. The reader gets to enjoy his venturing out on an extreme limb, though, holding fast to what he believes and pursuing the truth even though everyone is telling him to rein it in.
I’ve since read another in this series, and I don’t think I’ll take it it as obsessively as Joe Pickett: first, my library doesn’t have all of the collection, and while Maine is interesting it’s not…..Wyoming interesting. I mean, it’s woods. I have woods at home. Granted, these have moose in them, but hills and woods aren’t exactly an escape for me, even with the addition of a coast. Also, I really want to read some nonfiction despite the current scheduled reviews being 100% nonfiction Characterization is so far the strong suit: I liked Mike well enough, but especially enjoyed his sergeant and the retired warden who appears to have a more mentor-role in later books, judging by what I’ve read since.
Reading Freely 
