"A Spot Of Bother" is a humane, humorous look a man slowly unravelling in retirement and the reaction of his family to his slide into mental illness. It gets us inside the heads of an older couple and their adult children, showing, with a mix of wit, acute social observation and admirable empathy, how they try to cope with lives that are not the ones that they expected to live but are the only ones they have.

As the title suggests, this is a very polite, very English view of dealing with personal crises by trying to pretend that they're not happening, or, if they are, then convincing yourself that they can be fixed by carrying on as normal for as long as possible.

George Hall has always been a quiet, responsible man. Now he is slowly, quietly, and with as little inconvenience to others as he can manage, being overwhelmed by mental illness. He suffers from constant anxiety and panic attacks that bring him to his knees. He has convinced himself that what his doctor diagnoses as eczema is really a fatal form of cancer.

He is aware that this is probably not a rational conclusion but it's not a belief he can free himself from. Nor can he share that belief with others, especially with the way things are with his family. So he continues alone until he does something that no one can ignore. Although this sounds like a source of humour and is handled lightly at times, the thing that came through most strongly to me was how George's illness isolated him, leaving him deeply afraid, quietly desperate and totally unable to ask for help. This felt very real to me.

Jean, George's wife of many years is portrayed honestly and non-judgementally. Given her frustration at having George under her feet all the time after decades of having to live her life mostly in his absence and her affair with an ex-colleague of George's, she could have been a stock comedy figure. Instead, we see the world through her eyes understand that her life and her loves aren't that simple.

George and Jean are put under stress by their children who are going through dramas of their own and who both seem to be attracted to men who are not from either the class of the culture that their parents would have chosen.

Their divorced with one child daughter, Katie, announces her intention to marry the not-quiet-smart-enough-or-well-read-enough Ray. He's very nice of course and so good with Katie's son. He's solid, dependable chap, but is he really someone their daughter should marry?

Their gay but only recently come out of the closet son, Jamie has a relationship with a very working-class young man that the family has never met. The upcoming wedding stresses Jamie's relationship and makes him question the comfortable but perhaps overly-safe life he's built for himself.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the skilled storytelling. The chapters are short. Each one immerses the reader in the mind of a member of the family. The plot is carefully crafted to get the most humour and tension from the interlocking characters while the voices of the characters keep the story real, reflecting the ambiguities and confusions and complex emotions of people who are dealing with what life is dishing out to them.

I recommend listening to the audiobook version of "A Spot Of Bother". It's narrated with skill and precision by Alex Jennings.

There be spoilers. I'm pretty pissed off at the moment. What a waste of time this was.

CW: Homophobia, racism, cheating, and sexual assault.

I only liked Holden. And even he was an idiot. But I could empathize with this struggles - coming to terms with his feelings for another boy, figuring out that he's bi-sexual (though I'm not sure why he'd think that, since he hasn't even had a girlfriend), and dealing with being bullied at school, on top of living with an asshole father and a doormat mother, unable to live up to his Golden Boy older brother, who was much less an asshole than I expected based on how his character was initially set up. Holden's best friend of 14 years (Tiffany) is abandoning him for a boy, though I'm honestly not even sure why Holden thought of her as his friend in the first place - she was nothing but a bitch to him. 

All the characters in his book are one-dimensional card board cutouts. You have the rich boy jerkface who thinks he can throw his daddy's money in everyone's face, the bitchy-only female, the pedophile principal (ew, ew, ew, what the fuck was that shit, touching Holden inappropriately, talking about blow jobs to make a record go away, and then comparing his dick to Aaron's whose dick he presumably knows NOTHING about), and the cheating daddy fucking Holden's best friend, who's - you guessed it - suddenly pregnant.

None of the characters, including Aaron, the love interest, made any fucking sense with their actions. Not a single one. Not Holden thinking he can just go to the city and enroll in college, and find a job that will pay him enough to cover his cost of living, not Aaron, whose pillow talk was the most ridiculous thing I've ever read in a romance novel, not Jeff, the jerkface, not Tiffany, the bitch, not the principal (what the FUCK was that shit), and not Holden's parents. 

At one point Aaron's father leaves for a conference of some sort in Seattle - which, super convenient, amirite, so Aaron and Holden can have a sleepover and sex it up (virgin ass and all), and we're supposed to believe that a small town mechanic goes to a conference, leaving no one to work on the cars in the shop? 

This book was an utter mess, and I don't just mean the stilted, unrealistic dialogue and ridiculous plot. The editor was MIA, and the proof-reader took a vacation, I guess. Grammar seemed optional. 

Men don't have a g-spot. A virgin like Holden, never having even CONSIDERED gay sex, has likely not heard of the prostrate. And he sure as fuck wouldn't call it a g-spot. 

At one point, Aaron says "Open Says Me". I suppose the author meant OPEN SESAME. How was that not caught? Then a few pages later, Aaron opens the condom and puts it on, with HIS TEETH. On himself. Uhm, sure, whatever floats your boat. I guess you're super bendy. Never mind the holes you just made with your teeth, you moron, which sort of defeats the purpose of putting on a condom in the first place. 

And to top off the editorial proof-reading fuckery, in one instance HOLDEN is called AARON. 

And, and, and... there's no HEA, not even a HFN - the couple has broken up at book's end because Holden is leaving town and Aaron isn't. We get a "To Be Continued" as if that isn't something you should tell your readers up front.

Not recommended. Possibly the worst book I've read this year. JFC. Yeah, I know it's YA, but young adults would like to read good books. And this isn't a good book. 

I'm so sorry, Secret Santa. I was swayed by the blurb and the positive reviews, and I now regret putting this book on my wishlist. I kind of hate that you wasted your money on this, even though I truly appreciate you getting it for me. 

Not recommended.

She was about my age, early forties, though I had to look at her hands to tell it. She was good-looking, too. Good-looking is putting it mildly, maybe. I looked around vaguely for a priest to strangle. She was tall and lean, with the kind of green eyes a lazy novelist would describe as "piercing." Her copper hair was pulled back from her face with a strip of brown cloth. I imagined that its more honest self was touched here and there with gray, but that was just a guess. . . . I put down the picture. She looked at me and it and frowned the kind of desperate, exhausted frown that turns the room upside down and shakes the sympathy from its pockets.

Yeah, the spirit of Raymond Chandler is alive and well in the Midwest.

I first heard about Jason Miller through this episode of Mysterypod and thought his conversation with Steve Usery was fascinating. I finally got the chance to read his first book this week -- We spend the first 3 and change pages with Slim in a coal mine in Little Egypt, Illinois. There were so many things in those pages I just didn't understand -- but somehow, Miller still created a fantastic sense of place. Claustrophobic, dark, dirty, and dangerous. I was hooked almost immediately. Then we started meeting people -- and it got better.

Slim works in the Knight Hawk -- one of the remaining coal mines in the area -- he's known for tracking down a couple of people that no one else seemed capable of finding, and was willing (and able) to get violent as necessary. More importantly, Slim's a single father to a 12 year-old named Anci. He's dating a teacher and has a best friend named Jeep, who's sort of a Joe Pike-figure.

Matthew Luster is the owner of the Knight Hawk -- and probably just as ethical as you'd expect. Just as rich, too -- at least by small-town standards (and then some). He talks Slim into looking for a newspaper photographer who went missing about the same time as the reporter he worked with was found dead inside the mine. Roy Beckett, the photographer, is married to Luster's daughter -- and it doesn't really seem like they're really close. Why Luster wants him found is a bit murky, too -- primarily, he seems curious about the story that Beckett and the photographer are working on.

The top contender is a blossoming meth trade in Knight Hawk and another mine in the area. But there's an environmental group making noise, too. Throw in Beckett's reputation as a womanizer, and you have any number of potential reasons why he's scarce. Slim makes a token effort in tracking him down -- when bodies start piling up, and bullets fly near Slim, his girlfriend and daughter. Which just makes him buckle down and get to work.

Overall, it's a pretty standard PI tale from this point out. Entertaining enough in and of itself, a solid story that will keep mystery fans reading. But what makes this book shine and stand out is Slim and his perspective -- like any good PI novel, it's about the narrator primarily. And Slim is, right out of the gate, right up there with Spenser, Walt Longmire, Patrick Kenzie, and so on. Right there, Miller's given people a reason to enjoy this book and come back for a sequel or three.

But it gets better -- the way most of these people talk. I loved it -- I'm not saying Little Egypt is full of Boyd Crowders, but it's close. A ritzy-subdivision's security guard, one of Beckett's mistresses, Slim, and others -- I made notes to quote them all, but I won't -- just a sample of the dialogue (and narration, which is pretty much just internal dialogue):

• That old man is so bad, they'll have to come up with a new definition of the term just so ordinary bad men won't get all full of false piety.

• You ever see one of these Taurus Raging Judge Magnum things? . . . I know it sounds like a gas station prophylactic, but let me tell you, it's enough gun to kill the Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.

• ...the public defender system is a good thing--but you got the feeling that, in this guy's hands, you could walk into to donate to the policeman's fund and end up tied to a metal table.

Anci, I have to say, is the coolest kid in Crime Fiction today -- that's not saying a whole lot, I grant you. But she is. I like Maddie Bosch, but she's no Anci (and outside of Bernie Little's and Andy Carpenter's sons are okay, too -- but we don't get that much time with them). She's smart, she's brave, she's vulnerable, funny, well-read . . . and more mature than Flavia de Luce (and doesn't seem to go looking for trouble). All without being too cute and therefore annoying -- she's a kid, but an important part of Team Slim.

The novel ends making it clear that there are more stories about Anci and Slim to tell. There's another novel and a short story in this series -- hopefully with more to come. I had so much fun reading this and totally dug this one and can't wait to read the others. Give this a shot, folks.

3 Stars

don’t bother

I was so excited when I came back to reading that there were two more Jeffrey Deaver Lincoln Rhyme Novels.  I love this series but I don’t really like the Katherine Dance novels that much.  I read the Kindle edition and there were some minor formatting errors which were a little annoying but I lived with them.

The beginning is a bit slow and a bit formulaic (is that a word?).  But just when I didn’t think I could take the play by play content of going over the crime scene again things begin to get interesting.  And of course all the damned tables which make up filler space for me have shown up..  Those are really annoying to me. And I was hoping they were dropped.  

What is interesting about the book is the premise.  Like most of the novels in this series, the book starts with a murder of a youngish girl.  The murder killed her by tattooing her with poison.  I have no idea if that’s even possible but it’s an interesting topic.  I love tattoos (I think I have close to 10 individual tattoos) so this concept is pretty cool to me.

I read somewhere around 75% of the book and I think that’s a fair amount to give a review of the book.  This was way to formulaic and it got very boring. I don’t want to waste my precious time finishing the last of this book when I don’t really cares what happens that much.

I spend the majority of my time working with computers, and (with the exception of a system glitch here and there) we (computers and I) get along pretty well. So, when tasked with attending a symposium involving *gasp* other humans, I naturally turned to books for guiding me through it. I know, I know—I could have just practiced actual human interaction, but that seemed like a lot of work.

I don't know exactly what I was expecting from David J. Lieberman's book. If I had bothered to read beyond the first half of the title,“You Can Read Anyone,” I probably wouldn't have clicked ‘borrow.’ But apparently I just wasn't on my A-game. And thus, I ended up reading a book for which a more appropriate subtitle might have been something to the effect of How To Be The Creepiest Creep In All Of Creepdom.

My Findings 

I'm no social savant, nor am I a behavioral psychologist, but I do know quite a bit about the scientific method, and a thing or two about being sketched out by weirdos. So, with those credentials in mind, I'm gonna tell you that this book is rife with horrible advice and some seriously distorted views on the application of statistically significant findings from experimental studies in real life.

The Pen and The Gorn

In 1982 a man by the name of Gerald Gorn published a study that, in essence, showed that a given participant in a study was more likely to choose a pen that had been paired with pleasant music than one that had not. Basically, it was good old classical conditioning in action, which set off a storm of excitement about using music in advertising.

So, how might you use this to “read anyone?” Well, to find out whether or not someone liked your presentation, of course. Here's Lieberman's take:

“A person is listening to your presentation. You are both seated in blue chairs. Afterwards, he is taken to a new room with a round table and four chairs: two blue and two gray. If he has a favorable impression of the talk, statistically speaking, he is more likely to choose the blue chair over the gray one.”

Lacking access to Gorn's paper in its entirety, I'm not sure exactly how strong his findings were. However, Gorn had a sample size of at least 122. In Lieberman's presentation scenario it seems that your sample size would be hovering around one or two.

Also, given that the pen study was in a peer-reviewed journal, I would hope that the methodology involved some serious isolation of variables. So, unless you've some how jerry-rigged your post-presentation debriefing room layout to have chairs that are, by forces unknown, equally appealing (ease of access, person's handedness, leg room, etc.), chair choice isn't going to be all that revealing. My advice: Spend all that time you would have spent maneuvering seats working on your presentation.

How To Lose A Guy in 10 Seconds

Lieberman's advice isn't restricted to the office, though. Luckily, he's got some helpful hints for us ladies out there trying to find the right man too. Scenario: You're out on the town with potential Mr. Right, and it occurs to you that he might be on “some kind of substance—prescribed or otherwise.” What's a girl to do?

“To find out, she can ponder aloud, ‘Isn't it interesting that people can use drugs and think that others don't know?’ Alternatively, she could say, ‘I was just reading an article that said 33 percent of adults have tried recreational drugs at one time or another in their lives.’”

I'm not even going to get into just how said lady can “read” his reaction because, at this point, I'm pretty sure the date's over. My advice: If a yes-or-no answer to “Dude, are you high right now?” doesn't suffice, then maybe it's time to call it quits.

Mythical Math

For a while, I considered going into quantitative psychology. My mom's a therapist, and my dad's a data guy, so it seemed like a natural fit. Though I ultimately went in a different direction, I still feel the need to defend the field by pointing out that Lieberman's liberal use of the term “psychological math” would make any real practitioner cringe.

“No matter how much a person appears be happy with himself, if he has a big ego, he is not—he is miserable. The statement is not conjecture, but a law of human nature—it is psychological math.”

If I thought I could stomach it, I'd take on his misappropriation of the “transitive property” to draw out “true feelings without arousing suspicion,” but I can only handle so much.

My advice: You can read ANYTHING…I just hope it's not this.