Blood & Whiskey #3
Road trip edition ft. new books by S.A. Cosby, Laura Lippman, Chris Offutt, Jane Harper, Jean Hanff Korelitz. Plus: Louise Penny, Bosch, true crime, a summer cocktail, an old-school playlist...
Hello friends and readers,
A two-week road trip (NY, VT, CT, NJ, NYC) gave me a chance to inhale a bunch of books, and I’m happy to share thoughts on a few faves. On the whiskey front, the road trip introduced me to music-infused bourbon in Alexandria Bay, NY, and pre-mixed flasks of Manhattans in Burlington, VT. This month I’m coming at you with:
New books from S.A. Cosby, Chris Offutt, Jane Harper, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Laura Lippman — and a mini Q&A with Lippman
Other book recs, including my wife on Louise Penny
Obama’s summer reading list and playlist
An NYC-inspired ginger/lemon/mint whiskey drink I call The Road Trip
A true crime guest rec from Tom Nissley at Phinney Books, Seattle
A playlist inspired by a recent reunion with my college bar band pals
Another book giveaway
S.A. Cosby’s breakout, Blacktop Wasteland, racked up a bunch of awards and his new one, Razorblade Tears (already a New York Times bestseller) will further establish him as a maestro of blue-collar, bullet-flying, southern-fried brutality and mayhem. This is the story of two fathers — one Black, one white — whose sons, a married couple, have been killed. The men can’t stand each other, but reluctantly pair up to find the killer. There’s a little too much head-squashing and knife-plunging for my taste, with a high body count and even a Coen-esque wood chipper cameo. (To my mother in law: this one is not for you.) But Cosby is the real deal, great with dialogue, darkly funny, and able to probe heady issues (racism, homophobia) even as heads get crushed like melons and his two vigilantes learn a bit from their respective (and numerous) flaws.
For a different take on Appalachian noir, Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills is less violent, though no less dark. (The title of his last book, which I also liked, says it all: Country Dark.) Army vet Mick Hardin is AWOL, drinking and sulking and getting pulled into helping his sister, the new sheriff, solve a backwoods murder. I adore Offut’s sentences — “The old man nodded, his eyes crinkling in a smile that never made it to his mouth” — and his characters, including one named Fuckin’ Barney and another called Dopted Boy (he was adopted), are right up there with Flannery O’Connor. He’s good with food and flora: biscuits and jam, crinklefoot ferns and ginseng root. And, as in Cosby’s book, whiskey features prominently. Not in a good way.
I enjoyed Australian author Jane Harper’s first two novels, The Dry (now a film) and Force of Nature. Her latest, The Survivors, is a tightly, meticulously crafted story of secrets in a small seaside community, where a years-old tragedy resurfaces, prompted by a recent murder. With multiple characters, timelines, and a slew of clues, it felt like those puzzles where all the pieces are one color. Harper is a gifted and nuanced writer who shines when she zooms in on the subtleties (a casual remark or tight smile here, a flicker, blink or sharp glance there) of family, friends, memory, time, truth, community. And like Offutt, she’s great with nature — in this case, the cruel and capricious sea.
In Jean Hanff Korelitz’s virally popular The Plot, sad sack writer Jake Bonner steals a deceased ex-student’s story idea and the resulting bestseller supercharges Bonner’s life. Then the threats start to arrive: I know what you did. You’re a thief. The real story, and the source of Bonner’s stolen “plot,” unfold slowly and deliciously from there, though it’s best that I avoid too much detail here. I’ll say this: I live in Seattle and enjoyed the literary cameos (Elliott Bay Book Co., Seattle Arts & Lectures, Benaroya Hall — see photo below), and as a writer I appreciated (and cringed at) depictions of the struggling writer’s life. Korelitz says of Bonner: “All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him.” Also: “For as long as Jake could remember he’d been torturing himself about the books he was writing, and then the ones he wasn’t writing…” (Welcome to my world.)
The Plot pokes at the same testy question driving Laura Lippman’s excellent new Dream Girl: who has the right to tell another person’s story? I’ve read most of Lippman’s books, going back to the start of her Tess Monaghan reporter-turned-PI series (Baltimore Blues, etc.), and it was fun to see Tess make a sassy cameo in Dream Girl. In a hat-tip of sorts to Stephen King’s Misery, Lippman’s latest gives us a cranky, thrice-divorced novelist, Gerry Anderson, bedridden and Oxy’d up in his Baltimore penthouse after an accidental fall, where he’s being taunted by a woman claiming to be the real “Aubrey” character featured in his mega-bestselling novel, Dream Girl. Like The Plot, there are nods to the weird world of writing and publishing: agents and award dinners and MFAs. In both books, the authors insist they “made it all up” and that the root source of their story (and, in turn, their wealth) doesn’t matter. In both stories — both featuring men writing about women, seemingly with nuance and complexity that exceed their writing chops (and empathy) — the source begs to differ.
Lippman is very funny, and often cranky. Anderson gives his agent “15 percent of a smile.” Of an assistant whose sentences all sound like questions, he wonders: “Is it so wrong that he wants to hold her head under water every time she ends a sentence on a rising note?” Ultimately, the biggest question for the protagonist is existential: “Do you know anyone, Gerry? Even yourself?” Dream Girl is pure psychological page turner.
I worked with Laura decades ago at the Baltimore Sun and interviewed her in my past life at Amazon (here, in 2012) — and scroll down for a pic of my 2018 onstage interview with Laura and her husband, David Simon, for Seattle Arts & Lectures. To keep the interview streak alive, I reached out for this mini Q&A:
Risk? I've never done an entire book from a man's POV and Gerry is such a prickly, unlikable man.
Fuel? Toward the end of the writing process, we were in lockdown — well, technically, under a stay-at-home advisory — and my daughter was in virtual school. I had to start getting up super early to write. And it was fantastic.
Favorite line? "You're a writer, make something up." One of Gerry's not terribly helpful helpers.
Speaking of ex-Baltimore Sun reporters turned novelists: Dan Fesperman (I loved his last one, Safe Houses) has a new one, The Cover Wife, that the NY Times said “lands like a punch in the heart … Or a stolen plane flying into a tower on a clear blue morning.”
Also read, am reading, plan to read…
The Turnout, by Megan Abbott — I justed started (it’s good!), and will review it in August. I’m also reading one of her older books, Bury Me Deep
The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee
My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite — we listened to this Booker award finalist on audio (somewhere in northeast upstate New York)
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin
The Heathens, by Ace Atkins (and an older one, Wicked City)
The Vixen, by Francine Prose (Maria Semple calls it “A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive.”)
The Cellist, by Daniel Silva (I have a man-crush on Gabriel Alon)
The Last Mona Lisa, by Jonathan Santlofer (coming in August)
What’s my wife reading? I’ll let her tell you: “I’m two books in with Louise Penny and the bucolic yet murder prone town of Three Pines. Tore through the first two of the series, starting in Burlington, VT (thank you, Sharon, for giving me Still Life!) — not so far from this snowy hamlet across the border. I think it snows there even in the summer? Would like to be friends with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.”
Watching: “Bosch”! We blasted through the 7th and final season of this series, based on the novels of Michael Connelly, one of my favorite crime writers. The series has gotten more complex and moody over the years, the characters evolving, the storylines intertwining. We also started season 1 of "Unforgotten," a British drama focused on cold murder cases. The lead cop duo is compelling, especially DCI Nicola Walker.
If you’re like me and you’re comforted by politicians who read books, ex-POTUS Barack Obama just posted his annual summer reading list (on Instagram and Twitter) and a fun summer playlist (also Instagram and Twitter).
Cocktail of the Month…
My spouse and I have never been good at recipes, viewing them as suggestions to adapt from. Same with cocktails. This month’s drink is inspired by Robert Simonson’s Three Ingredient Cocktails (scored at McNally Jackson Books in Soho), plus the tasty “Dalloway” I sipped at the Ace Hotel’s Breslin bar (rye, lemons, ginger, aperol, soda). This is a mash-up of the two, a twist on a whiskey sour or whiskey smash.
The Road Trip
3 ounces bourbon (I used Buffalo Trace; rye works, too)
1 ounce of Aperol
1 ounce simple syrup (made from a mash of lemon, ginger and mint, simmered with sugar until reduced and thickened, strained and cooled)
Mix in a shaker of ice and strain into a small glass with a few cubes. Add a healthy squeeze of lemon, garnish with lemon slice and mint leaf. Drink with a beer chaser. For a lighter drink, add seltzer and more ice. Decorate with books and post to Insta…
Bonus drinks: Up top I mentioned the music-infused “River Blues” bourbon, which came from Dark Island Spirits, in Alexandria Bay, NY, where they age their “musically matured” spirits in a warehouse piped full of tunes. And the Manhattan in a flask came from The Great Northern, in Burlington, VT (across the street from the excellent Queen City Brewery). I kept the flask, and plan to repurpose it regularly.
Bookstore Corner
This month’s bookstore rec comes from local pal Tom Nissley, owner of two great Seattle bookstores: Phinney Books and Madison Books. Tom is also a former Jeopardy! champ and the author of A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year, whose fascinating literary nuggets and trivia became part of my daily Covid routine last year. (Ex: A Catcher in the Rye was published on this date, July 16, in 1951. And later this month, July 27, marks the 100th anniversary of the day Ernest Hemingway’s mother kicked out her “lazing loafing” 21-year-old son.)
I’d like to highlight my favorite sub-sub-genre on the Crime shelves, the one I call White-Collar True Crime. You can have your serial killers and your unsolved murders; I’ll take the corporate malfeasers, who walk away untouched so often that it’s particularly satisfying when they don’t. Recent favorites include John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (about the Silicon Valley biotech mirage Theranos) and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain (about the opioid-addiction entrepreneurs of the Sackler family), but the gold standard for me remains The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, published in 2003, less than two years after the implosion of that high-flying company, a descent in part kicked off by McLean’s article in Fortune—the same magazine that had named Enron America’s Most Innovative Company six years running—“Is Enron Overpriced?” The skepticism in that article was mostly speculative, but in their book McLean and Elkind got all the goods on Enron’s accounting flimflam, and on the entertainingly arrogant characters who concocted it. Most entertainingly, they, like Woodward and Bernstein and like Carreyrou in Bad Blood, start playing their own role toward the end of the story, with Enron’s CEO hanging up on McLean and the CFO pleading, “Just don’t make me look bad.” It’s delightful!
Thanks Tom! And I’ll add a shoutout for Patrick Radden Keefe’s previous book, the incredible Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
Speaking of bookstores…
Books that I read this month (and others on the pile) came from Phinney Books; Watchung Booksellers (in my old neighborhood in Montclair, NJ); and in NYC I patronized these favorite haunts: Housing Works, McNalley Jackson, the Strand.
Books mentioned in Blood & Whiskey can be found on my two online lists: one at Bookshop.org (which supports independent bookstores by sharing a cut of each sale); the other at Amazon.com. As always, I encourage you to shop local, at neighborhood bookstores like Phinney and Watchung. You can find a store near you with Bookshop’s handy store locator tool (HERE), or the store finder at IndieBound (HERE).
Playlist…
In keeping with the road trip theme… In East Aurora, NY (outside Buffalo) I reunited with my two closest pals, Rob and Blaise. In college, for free beers and $25 apiece, we played in a bar band called, creatively, RNB. (get it? Rob Neal and Blaise!) This month’s playlist includes dusty old songs we played at Oscar’s and Scanlan’s in Scranton, PA — all of them now even more old-school than they were in the mid-80s.
Giveaway…
Last month I launched a monthly giveaway and I’m happy to announce the inaugural winner is Ed Santelli, an old pal from college, who’ll receive The Red Sparrow, by Jason Matthews (featured in B&W #1) and Kickflip Boys, by yours truly, plus one of the cool beaded necklaces my wife started making during Covid. Congrats, Ed!
This month, another giveaway: I’ll send 2 or 3 of the books in the photo below to one winner (picked from a hat). Just share/post this newsletter on the socials to enter…
Thanks for reading. Till next month….
-Neal
You can find me on Instagram; occasionally Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads
And it's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey…
-Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues”
