Bread and Butter by Michelle Wildgen

Published by Doubleday on February 11, 2014

I enjoyed reading Bread and Butter, in part because I enjoy a good meal as much as I enjoy a good book. There's also something romantic about the restaurant business. Like many people, I love the idea of owning/managing a restaurant even though I know nothing about food preparation. I do know that most restaurants fail and that I'm much too lazy to put in the hours that a successful restaurant demands. Reading a book that's set in the world of fine dining is therefore a vicarious pleasure that appeals to my culinary fantasies.

Two brothers, Leo and Britt, have been in the restaurant business for ten years, having grown a successful upscale restaurant in the economically deprived soil of Linden, Pennsylvania. Britt is the restaurant's handsome face; Leo the brains. Britt knows how to manage people while Theo is adept at managing finances. Their younger brother Harry, long absent from Linden, has returned to start a restaurant of his own. Britt is bugged that his little brother would have the audacity to compete, particularly without paying his dues in the business. Britt is also bugged when Harry turns up for dinner with Camille, a beautiful regular at Britt's restaurant who nonetheless remains a mystery to him.

While always written in the third person, the novel shifts point of view among the three brothers. They have very different personalities, all brought into sharp focus during the course of the novel. Their outward personalities -- Leo is withdrawn but ultra-competent, Britt is outgoing and relaxed, Harry is charming but high strung -- often mask their true selves. Each is doing his best to conceal his insecurities from the others and the brothers' perceptions of each other (like the reader's perceptions of each) are constantly evolving. Getting a better understanding of the characters as their depths are gradually revealed is a highlight of reading the novel.

Still, the best part of Bread and Butter is its fascinating behind-the-scenes look at restaurant management (in the case of Britt and Leo's established venue) and restaurant development (in the case of Harry's startup). The drama of the restaurant business is complemented by family conflict -- sibling rivalry combined with personal and professional jealousies. To make an innovative high quality restaurant work, you might need to be a little obsessed. All three brothers are obsessed in their own ways. Bread and Butter drives home the point that obsessions might help you succeed professionally while destroying you personally, particularly when obsessions begin to clash.

Some portions of the narrative are too expository and some of the relationship drama is too predictable to be dramatic, but those flaws are overshadowed by the lush descriptions of food and the quirkiness with which line cooks, dessert chefs, and other members of the gossipy and insular restaurant community are portrayed. This isn't a perfect novel but it is one that I imagine most food fans will enjoy.

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Hangman by Stephan Talty

Published by Ballantine on May 13, 2014

Marcus Flynn, convicted of the serial killing of several teenage girls, escapes from prison under unlikely circumstances. How he manages the escape is one of the novel’s mysteries. The killer known as Hangman soon resurrects his career, sending panic throughout Buffalo. Police Detective Abby Kearney is charged with stopping him.

It’s a challenge for crime fiction writers to find a fresh angle on the “hunt for a serial killer” plot. Hangman follows a predictable formula -- the reader gets to know a teenage girl who eventually ends up in the hands of the killer as the detective races against time to save her -- but the formula is well-executed. While Hangman offers little departure from a standard police procedural storyline, the clues Kearney follows to find the killer keep the reader guessing. The ending is somewhat surprising without being overly contrived, a trick that scores points in this genre.

Hangman is worth reading for several additional reasons. The killer is suitably creepy. The steady pace never wavers and Stephan Talty generates a fair amount of excitement as the story rushes to its climax. Talty writes convincingly of Irish culture in Buffalo, particularly in the city’s police agencies, and of the class division between working class South Buffalo and the Ivy League North. He gives Kearney a strong, believable personality. Instead of turning her life into a soap opera or telling us in every third paragraph how much she cares about victims (as too many current crime fiction writers do when they create a female character), Talty gives Kearney a moral crisis to confront and allows her to confront it without becoming self-aggrandizing or self-pitying. For all those reasons, Hangman is formula fiction done well.

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Fatal Enquiry by Will Thomas

Published by Minotaur Books on May 13, 2014

If you can imagine Sherlock Holmes as a bulky action hero, you might have a picture of Cyrus Barker. Fatal Enquiry, the sixth novel in the Cyrus Barker series, takes place in 1886. Barker is a private enquiry agent in London. His younger version of Watson is his assistant, Thomas Llewellyn, who narrates the story. Barker's Moriarty is Sebastian Nightwine, who made an appearance in a previous novel in the Barker series. Barker is no match for Holmes as a thinker but he is clearly a better brawler.

In Fatal Enquiry, Barker reveals how he came to know Nightwine and explains why Nightwine is his mortal enemy, a tale that has Barker fighting with and against the British in China during the middle of the nineteenth century. Early on in the novel, Barker falls victim to Nightwine's scheme to frame him for a crime. He and Llewellyn spend the first half of Fatal Enquiry prowling the alleys of London at night, trying to avoid arrest. Much of the second half belongs to Llewellyn as Barker hatches a plan behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, Llewellyn has a chance encounter with the lovely Sofia Ilyanova, who wishes to become a client of the Barker Agency. Her problem, of course, is related to Barker's, much to the smitten Llewellyn's dismay. Unlike Barker and Llewellyn and even Nightwine, Sofia does not come across as a credible character. She is the novel's only weakness.

Fortunately, the strengths of Fatal Enquiry overcome that misstep. While Barker is no Sherlock (there is very little deduction in this novel), his backstory is intriguing. Most of Fatal Enquiry centers on Llewellyn, a sympathetic character for whom it is easy to root. On the whole, this is a flavorful novel that tells a fun, engaging story in literate prose with a Victorian flair.

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Cubed by Nikil Saval

Published by Doubleday on April 22, 2014

I did not know that more than half of working Americans work in a cubicle (or even that more than half work in offices) but since they tend to be hidden from the public, I suppose I'm just not aware of their pervasive existence. I have no trouble believing that 93 percent of those workers dislike their cubes. The cube world has been lampooned in Office Space, The Office, and Dilbert, among other sources of comedic fiction, but Cubed takes a more serious approach to understanding the world of cubes and the workers who inhabit them. Nikil Saval's wide-ranging discussion is largely a history office workers and their changing environment. Saval explains that he wants to tell that story from the perspective of office workers, but that's the book's least successful ambition.

Cubed discusses the history of clerical workers from nineteenth century counting-houses to their role in modern American life. Some early clerks (like Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin) rose above their stations while most (as is true today) toiled in obscurity. In the nineteenth century, clerks in literature received little respect (Bartleby and Uriah Heep are notorious examples) while clerks in the real world were mocked for their aristocratic pretensions by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman. But growing membership in "the clerking class" arguably gave birth America's middle class. At that point they were mocked (by Emerson, among others) not for pretension but for whininess, a convention that continues in modern satire.

The urbanization of America gave birth to the large office buildings that form the environment Cubed explores. Clerks were lined up in rows to mimic the factory floor until an anal-retentive mechanical engineer named "Speedy" Taylor made efficiency in the factory and in the office a managerial obsession. Cubed gives detailed attention to Taylor, to Frank Lloyd Wright's contribution to modern office design, to skyscrapers, to the growing role of women as clerical workers after the Civil War (with the concomitant fear that they would seduce their unwary bosses in order to secure raises and special workplace privileges), to the impact of labor unions on office work, and to the evolving way in which political movements and political theorists viewed office workers. He also covers the psychology (and pop-psychology) of office workers, the competition between humans and machines, the language of white collar business (complete with sports metaphors), competing styles of office management (from rigid hierarchies to Zen-like naturalism), potted plants as status symbols, and office sex, little of which takes places inside cubicles.

Cubed also offers an introductory course in the theory of office design, illustrated with pictures of office buildings and their interiors. Work spaces themselves become the focus of the last third of the book, including the "action office" (i.e., an easily disassembled cube). As one critic noted, it is a design that works well for office zombies, the working dead who are crammed into small, disposable spaces. Perhaps deliberately, the spaces create no sense of permanence. Still, the Action Office caught fire and spread across America, with managers taking little notice that nearly all the workers hated their cubes, particularly after they started getting smaller ... and smaller ... and smaller. Attempts to reinvent cubes have largely been futile (unless you count Nerf basketball as a serious workplace improvement). Most experiments to replace cubes have failed although Saval suggests that some (like Google's environment) show promise. He also notes that more employers are recognizing that many skilled employees work better at home, a concept that frustrates the controlling desires of middle managers.

Cubed is well-researched and informative but I'm not sure it is anything more than that. The book told me more than everything I always wanted to know about skyscrapers and the history of office workers, but I'm not sure it gave me much insight into how the world is perceived from the confines of a cube, which is Saval's declared intent. I do like the book's pithy characterization description of "the unholy expectations of the modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return." And of course I like all the quotations from Office Space and Sinclair Lewis. Cubed is informative and enjoyable, even if it is a bit scattered and doesn't quite meet its stated goal.

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Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Penguin Books on April 29, 2014

Ludevic Senechal buys an old film from the son of a man who recently died. The film's former owner was obsessed by espionage and conspiracy stories. As Senechal watches the film, he goes blind. By chance, he speed dials the number of a Lucie Henebelle, a police lieutenant he dated for a short time. When Lucie watches the movie, she almost wishes she had gone blind instead of seeing the gruesome footage. But, as Lucie eventually discovers, there is more to the film than meets the eye ... or the conscious mind.

While Lucie is investigating the movie, Chief Inspector Sharko is lending his assistance as a behavioral analyst to provincial police who are investigating five dead bodies -- their skulls sawed open, hands chopped-off, brains and eyes removed -- that have been found buried in Upper Normandy. Sharko's efforts are hampered by Eugenie, a young woman who blames him for a certain traumatic event in his life. Eugenie is not real but the treatment Sharko is receiving for paranoid schizophrenia hasn't made his tormenter go away. Why Sharko is allowed to carry a gun is a bit of a mystery but perhaps delusions and schizophrenia do not disqualify police officers from carrying lethal weapons in France.

The two mysteries are, of course, linked, and so the two protagonists, Lucie and Sharko, are fated to meet. Their relationship proceeds in a way that is too obvious, but given that this novel is followed by a sequel, perhaps their relationship will take a less predictable path in the next installment.

Soon after they meet, Sharko travels to Cairo to investigate similar murders that occurred 16 years earlier while Lucie's investigation takes her to Canada. Franck Thilliez captures the rhythms of Cairo and Montreal as convincingly as those of his native France. The story relies upon a dark period in the history of Quebec involving the "Dupleissis orphans," a scheme that allowed church-operated orphanages to obtain government funding by falsely certifying orphaned children as mentally ill. Eventually a conspiracy is revealed that, in the tradition of modern thriller conspiracies, is far-fetched but (unlike some modern thrillers) at least remotely plausible. The notion underlying the "syndrome" that gives the book its title is fanciful but not without a scientific foundation.

Once Lucie and Sharko uncover the killer's identity, Lucie is shocked, but I doubt the reader will be. My reaction was "oh," simply because there is no way for the reader to have made the discovery independently. The information dump that ends the story comes as an anti-climax. Despite the disappointing ending, I enjoyed the character of Sharko and will probably read the next novel in the series.

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