The Ophelia Cut -- a review

The Ophelia Cut is number 14 in John Lescroart’s series of murder mysteries featuring attorney Dismas Hardy, homicide detective Abe Glitsky, bartender Moses McGuire, and their various and sundry families, friends, partners, underlings, and bosses. Not to mention each book’s featured villain and multiple side-bar bad guys.

To prepare to write this review I read some other reviews. And that reminds me NEVER read a review by anyone with the word “critic” in their title.

Huffington Post’s Jackie K. Cooper, identified as a film critic spends a good deal of his review saying how much Lescroart’s readers look forward to his next novel, especially the Dismas Hardy ones. Then he pans it. Saying the first four-fifths of the book are great but the ending is “something completely unsuspected. Unfortunately it is also completely unsatisfactory.” Insert your favorite expletive here.

The ending is unexpected. (I would not have chosen to use the word ‘unsuspected.’ Perhaps it was Mr. Cooper’s auto-correct acting out.) And though I would not say it is "satisfactory," it is the right ending.

What I love about Lescroart’s novels is the continuing lives of his characters. I started his books with the first of his Dismas Hardy stories, Dead Irish, published in 1989. I didn’t read it then because I’d not heard of John Lescroart until a retired police detective recommended I read him. That was almost three years ago while I was writing my own novel Murder on Ceres (available at http://bit.ly/murderonceres.)

In Dead Irish we first meet Hardy, a has-been, tending bar for his Vietnam War buddy Moses McGuire, and drinking in San Francisco. Hardy had lost his baby boy, his wife, and his career as a lawyer. The book introduces us to Hardy’s best friend from when he was a member of San Francisco’s finest before getting his law degree. Abe Glitsky is the half-Black half-Jewish cop, big enough and serious enough to intimidate the scariest bad guy. And there’s Lou the Greek’s, a dive across from the Hall of Justice open from six a.m. to two a.m. serving alcohol and food to the legal community from cops to judges, clients to social workers, and everybody over, around, and in between. If I ever get to San Fran I want to visit City Lights Bookstore and Lou the Greek’s.

In The Ophelia Cut Hardy is described as “sixty years old.” This makes me happy. He’s almost as old as I am. We both remember the late sixties and early seventies.

It’s some thirty years since the Dead Irish story, twelve books follow these characters’ ongoing lives. I feel like I’ve known them a long time. There are marriages, births, deaths. Each book is complete in itself, beginning and ending a case, but the characters go on.

In The Ophelia Cut, Moses McGuire’s daughter is brutalized by a man who ends up dead and Mose is arrested. But did he do it? The dead man was a truly bad man with any number of associates who would be happy to have him dead. No matter. It falls to Hardy to defend Mose in court.

And we come to the ending that the film critic didn’t like. Let me just say I cried. Not at the shocking part. At that part I was shocked. It was later that I wept.

I am not in the habit of crying over murder mysteries. A visit to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, yes. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, yes. The movie Old Yeller, yes.

But murder mysteries? I don’t remember ever doing it before. Generally speaking the characters and stories are too distant from me as a reader. I do not know them intimately.

Harry Bosch’s daughter grew up, but Harry doesn’t change. I never knew Miss Marple as a young woman. Even Commissario Brunetti does not change, although in Donna Leon’s novels justice is sometimes ill served (which I find appalling but that possibility is real enough to keep me reading her next one.) These characters are not real people to me. Dismas Hardy and the people around him are.

The Ophelia Cut is John Lescroart’s best so far. My only regret is that I can read Lescroart’s books faster than he can write them and there is only one more, The Keeper – so far. 

Prologue to Dead and Gone -- a work in progress

image from nithyapens.wordpress.com

Prologue

    Carbon monoxide killed quietly, softly. Sixteen hundred parts per million. Enough to cause death in less than two hours. Possible side-effects could include headache, tachycardia, dizziness, and nausea. But, if she were asleep, she would be unaware of the discomfort.

    He didn’t want to hurt her. Or mar her beauty. She was as beautiful as his mother. She sang like a dream spirit. A sublime soprano. Ethereal. In time she would have been as good as his mother. But already the critics didn’t appreciate her. They questioned her interpretation. They said she lacked maturity and depth, that she hadn’t the passion the role demanded. What had that to do with perfection?

    The audiences were stupid and cruel. They refused to accept digital modulation of the instruments. Her voice, unassailable in its clarity and purity, was too fragile to stand up to the electronica. The producers had allowed her only five performances. If they would just give her time, her growing confidence would strengthen her presentation. But they replaced her before moving to Kyoto.

    That was months ago and she'd only gotten small parts. Insignificant rolls, insulting to her talent, her transcendent voice.

    “Some of them liked me,” she said through tears.

    “They did. They did like you.” He held her close and let her cry.

    “I can do it. I know I can.”

    “Stay at home,” he said, his chest tight with anger at the critics. They were idiots who thought themselves experts. His lungs, his heart seized with frustration. There was nothing he could do to make them see the talent and beauty standing in the spotlight right before them. 

    He saw the dream, the desire. Just as he had seen it in his mother – the hunger for applause. Even more for the awed silence just before the applause.

    “My dearest.” She caressed his face. “I love being at home, but a singer must sing.”

    He dropped to his knees and pressed his face against her. “Sing for me.”

    “I do sing for you. But there's a feeling. When I'm on the stage, there's a freedom. I'm somehow bigger. I can fly. Above the world. Into the universe." She smoothed his hair. "I can't explain it.” She took his hands and urged him to his feet. “It’ll be all right, you’ll see. The next time I’ll do better. I’ll get another part and I’ll do better. I can do this. I know I can.”

    He jerked away from her and paced, his face flushed and rigid. “It’s not you.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “It’s them. They don’t deserve you.”

    She put out a hand to stop him. “I do love you. Now be a good boy. Don’t get so upset. My day will come, you’ll see.”

    But he knew how it would end.

    He’d taken his time assembling everything he needed. He built the glass chest himself using his own crystal propagation method. Big enough to contain them both. The vacuum pump was one he’d had for years. Once the box was closed, he would withdraw the air reducing the humidity to near zero and achieving an expected preservation rate of perpetuity.

    New silk bedding – pale green, the color of new life – softened the sides and bottom. The glass could be dialed opaque before being lowered into position.

    As always, he was meticulous in planning and equally particular in following his plan. Any deviation marked carelessness in preparation or errors in thinking. He could excuse neither in others, nor indeed, in himself.

    It took less than two hours for each of the necessary elements of the evening to arrive at Denver from their origination space ports – lobster from the North Atlantic Coast, veal from the Argentine Prefect, fresh strawberries from the Andean foothills, and champagne from Greater Europe. Despite their centuries of decline, Europe still produced the finest wine.

    The most beautiful, the most perfect gift he acquired for her took forty days from the Takimoto OsteFarm on Poe Colony in Low Mars Orbit. A triple strand choker of perfectly matched, luminescent pink pearls.

    All the required items arrived the day before their anniversary. The final leg of their journeys, sixty-three miles, took more than an hour. Kevin picked them up at Denver Space Port and delivered them to the lodge. When the time came Kevin would also transport the glass case.

    That evening was perfect. He made dinner for her ending with strawberries and champagne. She sang for him. “A New Rose,” the closing aria from Beyond the Event Horizon’s second act.

    They shared a leisurely shower with the drying cycle shortened by half so they were pleasantly damp.

    He led her into the bedroom. With indirect lighting on the matte walls it seemed a room without walls, without boundaries. A small bowl of gardenias from Texico sat on a white marble pedestal. Their satiny blossoms infusing the room with the perfume of her childhood home. He knew the fragile flowers would soon brown, but not before she slept.

    He dialed the bed to neutral buoyancy and thirty-seven degrees Celsius, their own body temperature. Smooth, creamy satin spilled from the bed to the floor. White like the walls and the floor and the ceiling.

    As he intended, there were no physical sensations other than themselves – the sounds of their breathing, the feel of their own skin against skin, the musk of love and sweat intermingling with the scent of the flowers.

    Her black hair and rich sepia skin were the only colors in the room. And the pink pearls. Of course, the pearls.

Reviews and Ratings

When are the Ratings Stars Over-Rated?

 

     Mysteries and Science Fiction are the two fiction genres I read most often. And that is true of movies I watch, too. I have not standardly rated books I've read or movies I've watched. Doing so has always seemed a little too close to being a critic. Generally speaking, I hold critics in the same high disregard as Emergency Room docs.

 

    Having recently been exposed to some excellent ER docs, and preparing to publish my first novel, I guess it's time to mend my pretentious ways and join the ranks of the amateur critics. All the experts say I need to get my name before the public. Those experts ask me what platforms I'm on. Pinterest? Twitter? Facebook? And I say that most of the time my platform of choice is Earth. They are not amused.

   

    So now -- Netflix, I will rate the shows I see, and I will review them so my name and opinions will be out there. (I'm not sure Netflix is what they mean by 'platform.' But the opportunity pops up every time I watch a show and I watch quite a few shows. Where else would I get my fix of British crime mysteries?)

 

    And Goodreads, if I can figure out how or get my daughter to show me, I'll rate and review the books I read.

 

    Twitter and Pinterest? I don't think so. (You should read that last sentence in the familiar sing-song of disdain.) Who knows, maybe someday I'll see the error of my ways and join those 'platforms,' too.

 

    That brings us to the Ratings Stars. How to do this. How? Easy -- right? Right, if I didn't like or hated the book or show, it's one or two stars. Then things get sticky.

 

    The African Queen, Downton Abbey, and  Prime Suspect are five stars. A Prayer for Owen Meany and the Wheel of Time series are five stars. I will watch and read them again and again. And there are many titles out there that I would rate five stars.

 

    But the vast majority of books I read and shows I watch are three stars. When you hover over the

3 Stars rating it says "I liked it." So why do I feel as though I'm dissing the work by rating it only three stars? Maybe it's from my public school days when a C was not good enough. B's were a little more acceptable, but anything less than an A was suspect.

 

     I thoroughly enjoy Diana Mott Davidson's mysteries and those by Nevada Barr. Michael Connelly and John Lescroart get good solid 3 Stars from me and I will always come back to them. With this in mind, when you see I've rated something three stars, that means I liked it. And I will seek out more work by that writer or actor or director.

    If I give something four stars that means there is something outstanding about it, but I doubt I will watch or read it again -- maybe like Boston Legal or Dan Brown's  Da Vinci Code it's well-done and incorporates surprise or maybe even shock, but by virtue of having watched or read it that surprise is lost. As great as they are, my 4 Stars will not bring me back with the same degree of passion and wonder as those magnificent 5 Stars.