The Changelings, and House Report

The Changelings, a short story by Kat Yares, deals with the internal dialog of a mother of teenagers. As her children become more and more demanding, she struggles to both meet their needs and deal with her own fears of them. The emotional changes within her son and daughter soon affect both their lives and her own. She begins questioning her own sanity. She dreams of demons each night.

Yares tells this simple, short story in few words, but manages to convey an empathy rather than a criticism of this failed passive parenting style. Her story offers a quiet rationale of why teenagers cannot be controlled by love alone. It is a sad tale, and one that leaves both the reader and the main character lost in thought. It is a different sort of horror story, and just right for Halloween week.

Yares has several more books in print, and I'll be reading and reviewing Beneath the Tor next.

 House Report, a Kate Carpenter Mystery by Deborah Nicholson is a mystery quite different from any other I've read. The murder takes place in a rest room within a large multi-plex building housing several theatres and restaurants. Kate Carpenter is a manager of one of the theatres, and supervises both the employed house ushers and the volunteers, balancing the accounts for each night's receipts, and keeping things running smoothly.

Kate has a relationship with one of the building engineers who works in "The 'Plex" as an all around building maintenance man, fixing furnaces and clearing clogged toilets. Not a glamorous job, but a necessary one, and one that pays the bills. Cam is qualified for much more. Kate is concerned with solving the murder as her significant other, Cam, is one of the leading suspects.

Nicholson tells the story from Kate's point of view, while following her travels throughout The Plex's complicated non-public corridors, staircases and rooms. Kate is in danger as she begins sleuthing to determine who the murderer is. But her confidence in her relationship is tested repeatedly as she learns things about Cam that seem to tarnish his innocence. She enlists the aide of one of the ushers, Graham, in checking alibis of the other employees of The Plex. And in time, both she and Graham suffer physical attacks as a result.

I learned a great deal about the backstage life of theatre employees and their workplace, and I enjoyed the twists and turns that led the reader to many dead-end assumptions. The murderer is not identified until the very end of the story. Is it Cam? Is it not Cam? Is it Cam?

There are more Kate Carpenter Mysteries, and I look forward to discovering and reviewing them.

Taking a break and reviewing two more books!

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Survival of the Fittest: The Last Hope for the Human Race  by Michael Taylor

Recommended for: all readers aged 13 and up

Read from March 28 to April 12, 2012, read count: 2

Survival of the Fittest blends the elements of science fiction with a story line that looks at parent/child relationships, and world powers collaborating in the face of alien attack, and teen issues and roles complicated by the unsettling rules of engagement.

Anyone who has watched young teenagers become totally involved in video games and then instantly disengaged to take a phone call or a family conversation will appreciate their ability to detach and adjust to the unexpected. Teachers see this flexibility every day, as their students move from history content to chemistry to physical education and then to art or music ... the adult world expects that this generation will adapt to the new technologies ... never stopping to think that innovations today happen exponentially faster, and are a world apart from the changes we witnessed in the twentieth century.

Michael Taylor writes with the sensitivity of adults who spend their working lives guiding adolescents through the myriad changes life presents to them. His depiction of adults, those manipulating and those manipulated, is blunt, painfully so.

The story ends with the unknown ... it has a bit of a coming of age feel to it, and the characters themselves are faced with the choice of what will happen in their foreseeable future. This is a fascinating story, raising ethical questions and moral dilemmas for all who will read it.

I would recommend this book to all who are invested in the healthy development of adolescents, and perhaps to those media pundits who delight in running headline stories of negative events in teens' lives. Someone once said, "Love ... is not always what it seems."

Medical Error, by Richard Mabry M.D.

 

This was a mystery that, due to life's complexity, I read in many interrupted sessions. But the story held together so well that I never lost track of who was who, what happened when, or how many clues had been presented.

Characters were very well developed, very consistent in the points of view, and easily recognizable in dialogue. Doctors, police officers, federal agents, health workers, ambulance attendants, and bad guys were all easily recognizable and true to the reader's perception of their roles.

I won't summarize the plot here, as many others have already done that, but I will say that even though I'd missed the first story in this trilogy this is a stand-alone success. I look forward to reading the other two.

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June Shaw's Relative Danger, a novel of family and school murder

Relative Danger  by June Shaw

It's not easy being a relative ... adolescents would agree, in-laws would agree, and sometimes parents and grandparents even agree. June Shaw has written a mystery novel that involves the intricacies of three generations, three individuals, daughter, father and grandmother, coming together to celebrate a life event: high school graduation.

There is no mother in the picture; Nancy died several years before her daughter Kat reached high school age. Kat's dad, Roger, is still living a subdued life as a widower, and is now foreseeing what his home will be like when his daughter goes off to college. Roger's widowed mother, Cealie, comes to town to catch up with her son and granddaughter between her travels as a single woman who is finding herself.

When Cealie realizes that her granddaughter has stopped attending classes and may miss final exams, and is considering not attending the graduation ceremony at all, she is stunned. Cealie had made a death-bed promise to her daughter-in-law Nancy that she would see her granddaughter graduate, and up until now, Kat had been on the way to do so with honors and scholarships.  It doesn't take long for Cealie to find out that there has been a death at the high school, and that Kat seems deeply affected  by the circumstances of the young custodian's death, and preoccupied with and perhaps afraid of who might have caused that death.

Cealie struggles with her maternal feelings of protective love for both her son and granddaughter and her recent decision to live life as a single, independent woman. But to help return her granddaughter's confidence and scholarship, Cealie enters the high school as a substitute teacher. She finds a vastly different setting in the large crowded school, recognizing that clothing and manners have changed both students and faculty from her recollections of teaching in a small private school decades earlier. She observes the cold structure, the anger and rudeness, the frustration and resignation of senior staff and the hustle and bustle of a teacher's full day. She experiences attacks first on herself and then on another teacher; she also hears of the shooting death of a substitute teacher like herself, and determines to help the police find the person responsible for these acts in their effort to keep her granddaughter and other students safe.

June Shaw's characters are richly developed, whether they are main characters or secondary. Her description of physical attributes is clear, as is the point of view of a grandmother finding her way into her granddaughter's world. Cealie's relationship with her son hovers between sheltering him from what she sees happening and bolstering his own strength and involvement in Kat's life. She talks to herself, and talks to her houseplant, her beloved cactus named Minnie, trying to sort out the sketchy line she is walking. Her mixed messages, both those received and sent, emotionally resonate with readers who share the same family role.

Cealie's life is further complicated by the presence of her former lover, Gil, a restauranteur with a Cajun flare whom Cealie still loves but does not want to settle down with. This tension creates another layer of mystery in this story, and Shaw brings all of the characters into it within their established roles. And  yet, with her family around her, Cealie still feels alone in dealing with the worry and angst, unwilling to share her concerns with Gil or with her son. And she feels that she must re-enter the dreaded building to determine how the death occurred, and who the responsible person is.

June Shaw's mystery remains unsolved until the very end, and her story engages the reader's feelings, no matter what the role of the reader in the family may be.  Five Stars for Shaw's Relative Danger!

 

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