A Botanist's Guide to Parties and Poisons / Kate Khavari

 

Halloween Bingo 2024

I finished this book this morning while waiting on an oil change for my car. It is set post-WWI, at University College London. The main character, Saffron Everleigh, has been hired as a research assistant in the Botany department. She is following in her father's footsteps in that same department, trying to find her footing as a woman in the old boys club. The professor she reports to is supportive, but the head of Biology has assaulted her and continues to make demeaning comments.

Rumours, spread by the rejected department head and other men who feel that Saffron should be sexually receptive to them, cause her concern, especially when she meets a young man in Biology who interests her a great deal. Alexander Ashton has his own set of problems, namely shell shock/PTSD from the war, which makes him a bit unpredictable.

Saffron meets Alexander at a school dinner party, where everyone is shocked when a professor's wife collapses, apparently poisoned. Saffron has overheard the poisoned woman discussing the state of her marriage and quickly realizes that there are both personal and political currents swirling around the event. She soon also comes to the conclusion that she, as a botanist, knows more about poisons than the police do and she is determined to protect her employer.

Predictably, Saffron feels the need to conduct her own investigation into the matter and Alexander gets dragged along with her out of both worry and attraction. Also predictable is a bit of B&E using hair pins and some slinking around in greenhouses and gardens. If you have read any of the Victorian murder mysteries featuring female investigators, you will recognize the formula. The author doesn't make effective use of the 1923 time period, beyond Saffron not needing a chaperone while spending time with a male colleague. Alexander is damaged and attractive, but I didn't get a real feeling of who he truly is. He is apparently going on a university research trip to South America, so he must be a competent academic, but those three things plus his mutual attraction to Saffron are all I really learned about him.

What the author does represent well is the struggle that women experienced while trying to establish themselves in these patriarchal bastions, being sexually harassed, talked down to, and dismissed as lightweight (and sometimes still do).

I read this book for the Arsenic and Old Lace square of my Bingo card. That category has already been called, so I get to claim my first square!

Dead Man's Folly / Agatha Christie

 

4 out of 5 stars 

Halloween Bingo 2024

This is me being efficient and using my Appointment with Agatha book for this month as a Bingo book as well. This novel was published in the same decade as my last book, Death in Kenya. Both Christie and Kaye could see what their characters refer to as wickedness in the world that results in murder. Just as police know these days, it's usually someone close to the victim who has committed the crime. Plus ça change plus la même chose.

This is one of the better Hercule Poirot novels in my opinion. The little Belgian is actually more humble than usual, a very pleasant change. The addition of Ariadne Oliver was a big plus. Her career as a mystery author often makes her into an alter-ego for Ms. Christie, which makes me laugh—in this book, Christie makes her more scatty than usual. Poirot just prepares to be confused when she struggles to explain the game that she has devised or to answer a question coherently. As Poirot observes at one point, she fills in for Arthur Hastings during this outing. (Where is Hastings, anyway? I've lost track of him.)

All my theories were for naught. Christie fooled me yet again. I am getting used to being wrong repeatedly. I cannot criticize Hastings!

Okay, now the Halloween Bingo machinations: I used The Tell Tale Heart wild card to substitute Christie, a favourite author, for my Day of the Dead square.

Death in Kenya / M.M. Kaye

 

4 out of 5 stars 

Halloween Bingo 2024

I owned this book decades ago and gave it away at some point. I came to regret that decision and hunted down a replacement copy to add to my permanent collection. I have great fondness for Kaye's murder mysteries and it was a treat to revisit this one, even though my views of it have evolved. Unfortunately for me, my unreliable memory supplied me with the identity of the murderer. Thankfully most of the details had been expunged, giving me the ability to enjoy the structure of the mystery as well as the historical context.

Published in 1958, this was a very contemporary setting. In Kenya the Mau Mau Rebellion was underway and Kaye used it as the background for this story. She was married to a British military man and they were stationed in Kenya during the Mau Mau years, so she knew what life was like for those of European descent in that time period. This novel shows us the colonial mindset clearly and honestly it made me cringe. I didn't notice it nearly as much when I was younger, so I feel that I have progressed.

The mystery is pretty good, but the focus is on relationships: family, neighbourly, and romantic. Victoria is summoned to Kenya by her aunt, Lady Emily, owner of the Flamingo estate. Having been engaged to Emily's grandson, Eden, years ago, Victoria feels safe answering the call, as she knows that he has married. The author knows better, however, that being married doesn't mean safety. As Victoria gets to know the characters around the Flamingo, she realizes that there is Lisa (married to the land manager Gilly) who is obviously pursuing Eden. Then there is the son from a nearby property, Ken, who had an unrequited thing for Eden's wife, Alice. Victoria's flight lands the day after Alice has been murdered and she is immediately plunged into the middle of themurder investigation.

Having lived around many ex-pat communities in the British Empire, Kaye no doubt observed these kinds of interactions many times. She uses them in all of her murder mysteries to great effect. She also used lived experience—she was pregnant with their second child when her military man got his divorce and was able to marry her. Kaye claimed it was love at first sight, another phenomenon that occurs in these books regularly. It happens in Agatha Christie's fiction too. Perhaps that's why there are so many wayward spouses in their fiction. Insta-love doesn't seem like a stable basis for a long, happy marriage.

Okay, now the Halloween Bingo machinations: I used The Lottery wild card to abracadabra my Dark Academia square and replace it with Romantic Suspense.

This is also book 18 of my 2024 Read Your Hoard Challenge.

The Secret History of Bigfoot / John O'Connor

 

4 out of 5 stars 

Halloween Bingo 2024

The author describes himself as a “journalist and self-diagnosed skeptic.” He has a decent sense of humour and an entertaining writing style. I was thankful for all of these things. Why, you might ask, would I choose to read a book about a supposed ape-man roaming the North American wilderness? It got its start during the height of Covid, when my massage therapist of the time suddenly started spouting antivax propaganda. We had a history of chatting during my appointments but this became a source of irritation. She was a skilled therapist, so I felt around for less divisive topics to discuss. That was when I learned that she was a Sasquatch true-believer. She talked about them in a gossipy way, as if she had tea with the “local population” regularly. Nor did she limit herself to Bigfoot. We discussed UFOs and the Loch Ness monster, among other odd topics. I had to laugh to myself when she told me that she knew I had a science background and could I give her my opinion of the Loch Ness monster? She didn't believe me about vaccines, but was willing to trust me on cryptozoology!

I learned while reading this book that her intersection of beliefs isn't unusual. If you created a Venn diagram with three circles of paranormal investigators, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists, Bigfoot true-believers would be in the centre overlap. And it's like The X-Files--people want to believe. Perhaps because of the secular society we live in, leaning into unlikely theories may scratch the same itch that religion used to (although some religious sects seem to be getting steadily weirder too). Replace the church congregation with your Bigfooting buddies, and voila, you have found your tribe.

"Here was a creature that...could live without civilization, that was self-reliant and strong," Joshua Blu Buhs has written, and that, to Bigfoot's demographic--largely male, conservative, working-class whites whose lives were shackled to Hobbesian market forces--"was authentic and genuine, a repudiation of the society around them, a society that often did not value them or their opinions."

I think that most people are willing to entertain the idea of Bigfoot being out there, but aren't too motivated to go out hunting for them. I'm attracted to the idea that there's enough wilderness out there to support and conceal them. Just like my rational brain tells me that ghosts are fictional, but my ape brain makes me put down the ghost story as the shadows lengthen and the sun sets. Is it that vestigial fear of being a prey animal from our very early history? Is this why so many of us are afraid of the dark? Or, as someone pointed out, we're scared of not being alone in the dark. What's out there that we can't see?

The idea of unspoiled nature and the monsters it contains is so far-fetched that it's intoxicating to those who choose to believe in it. And there's the nut. We want to believe. So badly do we want to believe in something that we're willing to believe in almost anything, against much evidence to the contrary. Being hardwired for narrative, we ascribe meaning to things when there isn't any, invent mythological systems that render abstractions as concrete realities.

As a lifelong birder, I thought O'Connor's chapter comparing Bigfooting to the search for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker was genius. We know that the Ivory Bill existed and where its range was. But there have been no accepted sightings of the bird since 1944. Claiming to have seen one nowadays ruins academic careers and professional reputations, but people continue to search hopefully, cameras in hand, through the difficult terrain suitable to this woodpecker. If there are birds (fingers crossed) they are few in number, shy, and widely spaced. Still, folks claim to have sighted them fairly regularly. How many of these are Pileated Woodpeckers? Who knows? But it certainly shows the enormous difficulty of finding elusive wildlife.

Read for the Monsters square of my Bingo card.