Elizabeth Hand: Hard Light
A stolen passport will only get you so far.
That memorable first sentence reintroduces us to one of my favorite protagonists, Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary. Hard Light, the third installment in the misadventures of our anti-heroine, follows closely on the heels of the excellent previous volume, Available Dark, as we find Cass in full flight from that book’s violent denouement in Iceland, the aforementioned passport in hand. It belongs to the junkie ex-girlfriend of Quinn O’Boyle, Cass’s elusive long lost love, briefly re-found and then just as quickly lost again. Quinn plans on slipping into the country separately, having giving Cass a piece of paper with a man’s name and the name of a pub as her only guide to their hoped for reunion.
The excellent fourth installment in Sam Thomas’ Lady Bridget Hodgson series finds Lady Bridget bored at her country estate, where she’s fled with her deputy, Martha, and her adopted daughter, Elizabeth. The quiet is disrupted when she receives a message that her nephew Will (and Martha’s fiancée) is at the Tower of London and would they please come? They set out for London at once, eventually making their way to the Tower where they discover an unharmed Will but a demand from Cromwell’s head spy that they work undercover for him.
Anne Hillerman may be a unicorn—that very rare writer whose relative was a bestselling author, and who is able to continue that series and make it her own. In fact, I can’t think of another example. Tony Hillerman’s classic and beloved Leaphorn and Chee novels put me off of his daughter’s work but they shouldn’t have—this is a terrific novel and I can’t wait to read more. The younger Hillerman has made the series her own by having Leaphorn retire, and Chee married to the lovely Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito, also a police officer. Shifting the storytelling focus (or at least 50% of it) to a woman’s perspective changes things up enough to make these books Anne Hillerman’s very own.
I loved Judith Flanders’ first Sam Clair novel, A Murder of Magpies, and I may have liked this one even more, as some of her plotting was clearer than it was in the first novel. In truth, though, that part didn’t matter so much to me. What I really love is the setting – Sam is a 40-something book editor in London – and in this novel she’s caught up by the apparent suicide of the business partner of one of her dear friends. The friend and his partner own(ed) a London art gallery specializing in a well known pop artist (Flanders creates an artist who would have been a contemporary of Lichtenstein and Warhol) and then she plunges the action full bore into the world of publishing and art and where the two sometimes collide.