Swing: a Mystery
by Rupert Holmes

My first contact with this book was in a moment of pity: the Mystery section’s stuffed to the gills - again - and we have to weed. I have to weed, really, and despite my tendency to treat every title like a cute little puppy at the pound, things are getting withdrawn. I’ve got our shelves down to single copies of the big-namers (because a little ol’ branch library just does not need three copies of “Plum Lucky”), individual Maigret titles we’ve had since the ’70s are being replaced with a space-saving omnibus… and then I get to that pile. No checkouts since ‘04, each one the only copy in the district, and they all look really interesting. I’ve only got the one pair of eyes, so of the 20-odd books, I check out 4, sparing them the axe until at least 2010.

So Swing comes with me on lunch break, and within the first dozen pages I’ve made an important discovery: this book deserves far better than pity.

The premise itself is nothing to write home (or a blog) about: it’s the summer of 1940, and our hero Ray Sherwood plays tenor sax in a swing band that’s touring middle America. They arrive in San Fransisco during the Golden Gate exposition, where Ray gets a proposition from a gorgeous young musician named Gail: he’ll orchestrate her piano composition Swing Around the Sun for a full brass band, in exchange for fifty bucks and her unending, beautiful gratitude. But before long, Ray finds himself tangled up in a serious mystery, and solving it may cost him much more than Gail’s affection.

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The House on the Strand
Daphne DuMaurier

My first experience with DuMaurier came from a decidedly odd moment at the library - while weeding the fiction section, I found Don’t Look Back (a horror short story collection) with some very familiar handwriting in the margins, railing at the idiocy of the works therein. Well, any book my ex-boss could hate that vehemently merited at least a look.

I loved it. Though there were times the details were overly mired in their time and place, I was left with the overall impression of a talented author presenting well-crafted tales. So when I ran across The House on the Strand as an audiobook, I figured it would at least keep me occupied until my Rex Stout ILLs came in.

The story is that of one Dick Young, who until recently worked for a major London publishing house, currently figuring out what to do next with his life. It’s also the story of Roger Kylmerth, steward to a minor noblewoman, and keeper of secrets for another, in the 1330s. The connection between them? A curious drug that transports Dick back over six centuries, to observe lives in a world long since gone. As Dick’s fascination with this other world takes over his life, his relationship with his wife and two stepsons grows increasingly strained, and the side effects of the drug harder and harder to conceal.

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The Hungry City Chronicles (series) by Phillip Reeve

I should start out with a confession: I’m a sucker for all things Victorian. I love the era’s bizarre mix of the uselessly beautiful and offhandedly cruel, crammed into overdecorated parlors and buried in their countless repressions and taboos. Such a tiny sliver of the world’s population - the white, middle-class English-speakers - trying so hard to make every aspect of their world just so. I suppose that appeals to the control freak in me; I smile at the idea of the little household despot, with her breath-defying corsets and 42 gazillion-piece place settings, who will run her home just as Caroline Beecher’s book dictates or die trying. Less charming was the way that same tyranny was applied in a global setting: colonial powers subjugating people far too old to be sent back up to the nursery after tea.

Phillip Reeve takes one of the viler Victorian notions, Social Darwinism, and gives it a science fiction twist: welcome to Municipal Darwinism, where whole cities borne on treads and wheels hunt down smaller, less “fit” towns, tearing them apart for material resources and humans to enslave. The system was devised after the Ancients (back in the twenty-somethingth century) caused widespread destruction in the Sixty Minutes’ War, leaving North America an uninhabitable wasteland and Europe and Northern Africa as the great Hunting Ground.

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