Blood & Whiskey #32

A new year of new books: Jonathan Santlofer, Richard Osman, Abbott Kahler, Kate Brody. Also mocktails for a dry month and a playlist full 'o whiskey.

Hello friends and readers,

Well, here we are in 2024. Election year. Nothing to worry about, right? I’m starting off the year-that-might-explode with a few weeks of sobriety (hurry up, Dry January, let’s go…) and a bunch of reading. Happy to share a few faves.

The Lost Van Gogh, by Jonathan Santlofer

This follow up to Santlofer’s excellent The Last Mona Lisa (which I reviewed back in 2021, here) reunites us with artist-sleuth Luke Perrone, art-thief daughter Alexis Verde, and INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith. This time they’re after a long-rumored final Van Gogh self-portrait, which Alexis seems to have found at an antique shop, a discovery that fires up this steamroller of a novel.

Santlofer is an artist and art teacher (some of his sketches are included in the book) who knows his stuff, knows a Picasso from a Gaugin, knows his way around a museum, which makes him a great tour guide through the shady world of art forgeries and art theft. The story is intricate and twisty, full of double- and triple-crosses, with occasional flashbacks to 1944 Paris, when the Nazis were looting art. There are lots of characters to track, all packing secrets and lies, so I recommend reading this is a few big-gulp sessions like I did.

From an upstate New York junk shop to Manhattan’s art galleries and auction houses to the museums and cafes of Amsterdam to the town outside Paris where Van Gogh lived and died, it’s a fast-moving and page-turning hoot of a historical thriller. It’s also an ode to Van Gogh. Says one character, standing beside Van Gogh’s grave: “Some people live a hundred years and do not accomplish a thing. Vincent lived thirty-seven and changed the way we see.”

I also loved the nods to other mystery books and writers, to the noir-packed Criterion Channel. (Santlofer created and taught at the Crime Fiction Academy at the Center for Fiction in New York — he’s noir through and through). And I thank Santlofer for this Van Gogh ditty, now tacked on my corkboard:

“If something in yourself says, ‘You aren’t a painter.’ It’s then you should paint. And that voice will be silenced.”

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The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman

I’m late to the party on this one. My wife got there first and raved, and now I see why — it’s a blast! The tone felt peppy and irreverent, a sly and winking spin on the whodunnit. In the Jigsaw Room at Coopers Chase Retirement Village in southeast England, a group of retirees meets weekly to sip wine and whiskey and discuss cold cases. When a builder is killed, followed by the greedy, cocky developer of their village, the group finally has a real murder case to investigate.

This cast of eccentrics — cops and crooks, boxers and priests, groundskeepers and farmers, Turks and Cypriots, all with slow-to-reveal backstories — reminded me some of Louise Penny, but even funnier and occasionally kookier. The murder club crew is a mix of sweet, grumpy, and mysterious, but all ultimately loveable. Meeting in the Jigsaw Room is an apt setting for the Murder Club’s sessions; the story’s scattered pieces come together slowly, messily, and then… surprise! Says one character, summing things up: “We all have secrets, don’t we?”

With lines like “Why send Starsky and Hutch when Cagney and Lacey could have done the job?” I’ve already ordered #2 in the four-part series.

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Where You End, by Abbott Kahler

Kahler is best known for her gritty-boozy nonfiction books — Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; The Ghosts of Eden Park (written as Karen Abbott) — all masterworks of narrative nonfiction that all read like crime novels. Now she’s made that bold leap into fiction (many a nonfiction writer’s dream, including yours truly), and the results are fantastic.

Set in and around Philadelphia, Where You End tells the spooky story of “mirror twins” Kate and Jude in the days after an accident has wiped out Kat’s memory. Jude is caring for Kat, telling her stories about their childhood, trying to “reconstruct her sister from the ground up.” When Kat begins to doubt some of Jude’s stories, she sets out to investigate her own missing life. She begins to distrust the one person she needs to trust with her ghosted life.

Mirror twins are identical twins whose traits are flipped — one is right handed, one is left handed; one parts their hair on the left, the other on the right. Looking at each other is like seeing themselves in a mirror, and that image (based on Kahler’s own mother and aunt) haunts the book. I kept picturing the twins in The Shining, and Kahler has fun with it. The twins speak in a secret language of jumbled letters that only they can decode — wint = twin.

Slipping back and forth in time (before and after Kat’s accident) we slowly learn who these sisters really are, and were, and that Jude’s descriptions of an idyllic childhood are pure fantasy. Jude seems to be protecting Kat, but from what? Kahler is a patient and poetic writer. She takes her time unraveling this taut mystery, which eventually introduces us to the twins’ troubled time in a culty group called “The Plan” (the dark details of which I won’t spoil here, except to say that recruiting for the club was called hunting rabbits). We meet a limping loan shark, an ex-dancer named Very Sherry, a handsome-pervy bad guy turned antiques dealer called King Bash. It’s all creepy, unnerving, tense and intense, especially as Kat begins to understand who she really is/was: “I am a person capable of losing control in unpredictable and dangerous ways.” Much later she wonders if her sister’s lies were meant not to deceive her but to save her.

If you missed it, I did an “Interrogation” Q&A with Kahler last week:

Interrogation: Abbott Kahler

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Rabbit Hole, by Kate Brody

I loved this book: smart, funny, raw and poignant, and far more self-assured than a debut should be. The opening line sets the tone: “Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself.” Our narrator is Teddy Angstrom, a school teacher who learns that her drug-addled father had been obsessed with the mystery of her sister Angie’s disappearance. He’d gotten pulled deep into the rabbit hole of Reddit and online conspiracies, a hole Teddy finds herself sucked into after his death. Despite a close relationship with her snarky Irish mother, and a steamy romance with a hot landscaper (great sex scenes, by the way - sometimes sexy, sometimes realistically awkward), and a good job that she mostly enjoys (“I teach the shit out of Joyce”), Teddy starts to lose her shit.

As Teddy spirals into subreddits she meets Mickey, a tattooed young student who sorta resembles Teddy’s sister and seems to know a lot about Angie — and Teddy’s father. The two team up to chase leads, both online (with detours into MySpace and AIM) and in real life (the story is set on the coast of Maine). But as Teddy discovers, sometimes “things that are broken cannot be unbroken.”

Teddy is a wonderful but heartbreaking character. She hates the Dave Matthews Band (ditto), loves her sick Irish wolfhound, Wolfie, enjoys rough sex with boyfriend Bill. But she’s so sad, grieving the loss of sister and father, and as she gets tumbled by the world of doxxing and DM-ing she seems headed for a fall. And she knows it, can feel the wolf inside her, “twitchy and ravenous.”

I reached out to ask Kate (a fellow part-Irish native New Jerseyan) a few Qs…

• Mood: A gritty, dark look at the way grief breeds obsession.

• Origins: I wrote a failed novel before RABBIT HOLE that was also about grief and growing up. The feedback I got from agents who passed on it was that it didn't have enough plot structure, so with my second attempt, I looked to a genre that I loved (mystery) and tried to incorporate those elements into a work of literary fiction. I knew right away that there would be a sister relationship at the heart of the book, as well as a kind of doppelganger (Mickey). I started with Mark's suicide to force myself into action, and I incorporated the Reddit parts as a way of thinking about how we live and communicate right now. I had become fascinated with Reddit and the larger true crime ecosystem, and it felt like a good fit for the ideas and relationships that I wanted to explore. Both grief and the internet can be lonely, isolating, intense places.

• Secret weapon: My friend, Jacquelyn Stolos, has been one of my first readers since college. She knows how to strike the right balance of cheerleading and criticism, depending on where I am in the process. I always feel like she understands what I'm trying to do, and she helps light the path forward in moments when I'm feeling stuck. It helps that she is a brilliant writer, too. Her adult novel is called EDENDALE, and she has a Middle Grade novel ASTERWOOD coming out next year. It's the kind of book that I would have read under my covers late into the night. I can't wait until my kids are old enough to discover it.

• Favorite line: So hard to choose! You could probably open Robinson's GILEAD to a random page and pick any sentence. I think often about the perfection of Amy Hempel's short short "Sing to It": "At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one."

• Risk: I gravitate towards characters and language, but I struggle with plotting, which is tricky when you're attempting a mystery. So the part I was most nervous about was making the plot feel propulsive and satisfying without trafficking in any silliness or cliche.

• Fuel: Books are the best writing fuel. I was definitely inspired by contemporary greats, like Miriam Toews and Kate Elizabeth Russell. KER's My Dark Vanessa is how I ended up with my/our brilliant agent, Hillary Jacobson. I was also teaching during the writing of the book, and the kind of deep textual attention that teaching requires improved my own work. I loved going deep into classics like Frankenstein and The Odyssey, as well as short stories by writers like Edna O'Brien, Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, and Nabokov. Sadly, if I'm in a groove with my writing, that usually means I'm eating like shit and barely working out. 

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Mocktail of the Month

As I get older my body keeps rethinking its relationship to drink. My tolerance is down (especially brown liquor, sadly), so I keep trying new things (like NA beer and low-alcohol cocktails). And each January I try to do the dry thing. This year I’ve had more fund than usual playing with low- to zero-proof concoctions using kombucha, bitters, syrups, seltzers, ginger beer, and some of those faux “spirits” (like the “Black Ginger” and “tequila alternative” I found at the bustling Cheeky & Dry nonalcoholic bottle shop up the road). Read more about the NA trend in my local paper, the Seattle Times, which featured this tasty drink:

Baby Juice

• 0.5 oz. fresh squeezed lime 

• 0.75 oz. grenadine (I used real pomegranate syrup)

• 0.75 oz. fresh squeezed grapefruit

• 3 oz kombucha

Pour first three ingredients into a small glass, then add ice cold kombucha. Garnish with a lime wheel. “Wets” in the household can add a splash of gin.

(*this one comes from Ryan Minch at the excellent Seattle bar, Liberty)

And if you’re just not into the dry thing, more into Wet January or Dampuary, here’s a drink from Abbott Kahler that’s nicely themed to Kate Brody’s book, too:

The White Rabbit 

• 8 oz vodka

• 4 oz triple sec

• 4 oz fresh lemon juice 

• A splash of simple syrup 

• Mint leaves

Says Kahler: “Delicious and deceptively potent” 

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Playlist of the Month

At least we can get a little whiskey in song...

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Finally, a request… My subscriber list is nearing 3,000 and I’m asking readers to be a pal and tell a friend about Blood & Whiskey — email your ex, post to the socials, tell your bookstore or book club, the hot landscaper or your therapist?

Also, I’m always grateful for any comments, questions, likes, etc.

Thanks for reading… Till next month,

-Neal

www.NealThompson.com

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