Stephen White image from Denver Post
How do you find the next book to read? I've heard it said that some people go to a bookstore and open a likely book, read whatever page they've fallen upon, and decide whether or not to read the rest of the book. Other people read the back cover or the endorsements from famous authors just inside the front cover. I even know people who actually read the reviews in the New York Times.
Me? I listen to interviews on NPR. Or my retired librarian friend Lou brings me the book she's just finished so I can read it and return it to the library before its due date. Sometimes my husband recommends a book he's just finished. Or my daughter, the poet, Grace Wagner assigns a must-read.
When I worked at the Edmond Public Library in Edmond, Oklahoma, I often read books that were being checked out and in a lot. This, dear friends, is not nearly as successful as recommendations from family, friends, and NPR. One rule that I developed while reading those books was that if I didn't like a book, I read one more by the same author before I write them off completely.
I am an indiscriminate reader, but I especially like mysteries -- thrillers, not so much. I value characters over plot. And, in my own work, I take pride in writing dialogue.
Richard in my walking group happened to mention that Stephen White wrote what he thought to be the best dialogue he'd ever read. The scene was a woman in shock trying to tell a police officer that she'd been raped. But he couldn't remember the title of the book. And bye-the-bye, White is a Colorado writer.
I will gladly eat grapes from Chile in January and strawberries from Mexico in February. But I'm an unabashed locavore when it comes to consuming books. I believe in supporting local authors.
White himself was a practicing clinical psychologist in Denver. His book The Last Lie opens with the scene my friend described and its dialogue is very well done. The Last Lie is the 18th of 20 books about Alan Gregory, a clinical psychologist who practices in Boulder. (My husband derisively refers to Boulder as San Francisco East because of its unapologetically left-leaning politics. Not a problem for me.)
I was, however, put off by White's first-person writing style. I have good reasons for preferring third-person. I'm sure I do. The only one I can think of off-hand is that the writer can't show the reader anything the protagonist can't see.
Plus, I'd never followed murder mysteries solved by a clinical psychologist. A Los Angeles cop. A San Francisco lawyer. A Colorado caterer. A little old lady who lived in Cabot Cove. Okay, so why not a psychologist?
Three things hooked me right away.
1.) White's language is a good three steps above most mystery writers. Who but a psychologist would describe a song getting stuck in his head as "one of those songs that could stick to my dendrites like a wad of gum adheres to the sole of my shoe."
2.) And he's a bit snarky. He describes "A waitress--some people wear their Boulder-ness so visibly that it is as obvious as a brightly colored outer garment....She had a touch of glittery makeup on the lids above her pale eyes. Maybe some eyeliner. I pegged her as waiting for the ski resorts to gear up so she could spend her days doing some serious boarding. For an underemployed recent grad, being a ski bum had to be more alluring than slinging Scottish ale and grilled cheese sandwiches."
But the pièce de résistance.
3.) Lucile's Creole Cafe. On page 59, White's hero has breakfast at Lucile's. Yes, it is a real restaurant! there are now six of them scattered across the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. You can get red beans and rice, shrimp and grits, and beignets from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Maybe not Café du Monde, but I can attest to their beignets being the next best!
The book itself was a little too Agatha Christie for me. In one of the chapters toward the end it tells you what happened, because of course, being first-person White couldn't give us enough information to figure it out by ourselves. So what's to keep a reader from skipping to that chapter and finding out who done it and why?
To give White a fair chance, I went back and read his very first in the series, Privileged Information, which I think is the much better of the two. It's rather interesting, in that it goes into some detail about means and methods of psychotherapy. It also discusses at some length the concept of privileged information. Both food for thought.
Will I read another of his novels? Maybe. But I can guarantee I'll eat at Lucile's again the first chance I get.
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