A good friend of mine remarked that possibly book groups are at their best when the majority of the members don’t like the book they’ve just read. It’s absolutely true that the best movie reviews are the ones that creatively pan the movie, and while book reviewers aren’t always as biting as movie critics, there’s something to be said for reading a book that everyone can find fault with, especially if the “everyone” is a group of well-read, articulate people who are genre-savvy and not afraid to express their opinions, which is a good description of the Field of Mystery Book Group. So, yes, we didn’t particularly like The Woman in the Library, our January book, and we even criticized the noir-ish cover which wasn’t a good guide to what was inside, so you can imagine (if you weren’t there) how much we had to say about the rest of the book. We debated whether the device of having a framing story around the book within the book worked, discussed why the characters in the book inside the book seemed so flat and one-dimensional, and why the author resolved the murder plot so quickly and unsatisfyingly.
It was a fun discussion, and we managed to choose our book for February in one round.
The book is An Honest Living, by Dwyer Murphy. It’s been described as a modern noir and a love letter to New York City. The main character has left the high powered world of large corporate law firms to work on his own, with an office in Brooklyn from which he takes whatever cases he can. One day a woman shows up, claiming to be famous author Anna Riddick, who’s got $10,000 in cash and wants our protagonist to investigate whether her husband has been stealing and selling her rare books. After he’s carried out her wishes, the REAL Anna Riddick shows up, and now the protagonist is in over his head with a twisted plot of counterfeit books, possible suicides, impersonations and a small time real estate crook who’s suddenly striking it big. If the premise sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably seen the movie Chinatown, but this book is set in 2005 New York City and the world of books, so it’s not quite the same, and it will be interesting to see what the author does with the similar plot.
This month’s book group meeting will be a hybrid one on February 18, so if you’re interested in joining us, email me the week before at nmulligan@thefieldlibrary.org, and I’ll send you the link. It should be a fun discussion with a lively group.