Customer Reviews

Somebody Else's Music: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian Mysteries)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I'm not sure how long Jane Haddam can continue surpassing herself, but she's done it this time. I was convinced that True Believers was her best, but then I read Somebody Else's Music.

Gregor Demarkian is pulled into a 30-year old murder by an acquaintance of Bennis'. What he discovers is that the murder, and the other events of the evening when it occurred, still color current events and everyday life for those who were involved.

Liz Toliver, the acquaintance, is going back to her hometown after a 30-year absence to take care of her aging mother. It seems that her schoolmates from all those years ago have been awaiting her reappearance, and it's clear that for quite a few of them, high school never really ended.

High school is a strange phenomenon in the US, and Somebody Else's Music brings us inside that strangeness, and lets us see just how devastating it can be for some students. The way the murders play out, and the way the interactions between the characters play out, are rooted in their high school behavior, 32 years later. The characters are real and precisely drawn, and when, finally, Liz Toliver overcomes her past and decides to live NOW, it was all I could do not to stand up and cheer.

If you're interested in reading an excellent mystery, beautifully written, read Somebody Else's Music. If you want to read a character study about a woman coming to terms with her past and rising above it, read Somebody Else's Music. And if you want to read what is, after all, an indictment of the foolishness that we Americans indulge ourselves in in high school, read Somebody Else's Music.

It's all those things.

Unfortunately, most of the people in Jane Haddam's new book do - all too well. Gregor Demarkian must leave Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia for a small country town in the Pennsylvania hills (cell phones don't work there because of the mountains). Although 30 years has passed since Betsy Toliver was locked in an outhouse with snakes, neither she nor the perpetrators of this indignity have forgetten - or forgiven. Jane Haddam creates a world of adolescence never outgrown that quite frankly gave me the creeps. The psychological horror unfolds page by page and just when you think you realize what's going on, the plot takes another twist. I loved seeing Demarkian so out of his element. I would have liked more of Bennis, though.

Successful writer and CNN celebrity Liz Toliver has never really gotten over her traumatic high school days as "Betsy Wetsy," the bookish, socially awkward butt of an almost over-the-top collection of nasty "popular" girls. This experience peaked during a bizarre night when Liz was nailed into a park outhouse with 22 snakes (she was well known to be phobic) while a classmate was murdered nearby. Now made even more famous by her coupling with a heart-throb rock star, Liz has to go "home" after 30 years to attend to her ill mother, dogged by the tabloid press which has her pegged for the killing.

Enter Haddam's Armenian-American veteran sleuth, Gregor Demarkian, retired chief of the FBI's behavioral science unit, hired by Liz's famous fiancé to look into the old, unsolved murder. The story shifts point of view among all these characters and only a writer of Haddam's wit and skill ("True Believers," "Skeleton Key") could carry off a story with such relentless venal and despicable types at its core - the brainless prom queen turned balding grotesque, the vindictive Machiavellian ring leader mired in sour alcoholism, the likely-to-succeed girl turned principal from hell, the faithful battered wife, the fat lady and the girl who got everything she wanted.

Demarkian, a confirmed city person whose ethnic experience leaves him baffled and bemused by the insidious small-town mindset, gives the story perspective and Liz, whose success has not relieved her myriad vulnerabilities and insecurities, gives it heart. Haddam's exploration of a cultural subset which finds its peak in high school triumphs is fiendishly believable and the resolution is aptly horrifying. A stylish and wicked success.

I was prowling the mystery section of my local library, hoping to find Something New (or really, Something Old Made New, since what I really wanted was an Agatha Christie/Ngaio Marsh/Dorothy Sayers that I had read fewer than 5 times; a new P.D. James would do nicely if there was one (there wasn't); had I really read _all_ the Ruth Rendell's (Inspector Wexford and otherwise) in the library? Yes, apparently so...I began to fear that this time there was no escape. I had reached the end of my particular flavour of mystery novel (usually British, always dry-witted, psychological, sharply observed, slightly cynical, literate, locked-room, no serial killers or gun-fixated male detectives) Had it really come to this? Would I have to read The Classics?

Mournful, vodka-infused, atonal music began to hum in my mind.

I don't know why I picked up one of Jane Haddam's books, but once I read a few pages without finding clunky dialogue or detailed descriptions of an autopsy, I realized that I could dodge Dostoevsky yet another day. And overall, I really enjoy the series. The recurring cast of characters (and the neighborhood Demarkian lives in is itself a character in the books, really) are enjoyable, intelligent folks, the puzzles are satisfying and occasionally unexpected. Several of the books have been so absorbing that I lost track of time--such a deeply satisfying experience, as a reader, and I strongly recommend the series as a whole.

Sometimes, though, I get this glimpse of the perspective lines in the books, the way the viewpoints converge, and they strongly remind me of my friends who go to ComicCon every year: intelligent, sensitive, and young in a way that has nothing to do with age. There are notes of that kind of youthful insularity in all the books, but in _Somebody Else's Music_, it is tune that's playing the whole time: gleeful geek revenge. The "bad" girls in the book were puppets, set up without redeeming traits at all. It's hard to believe, for example, that anyone over the age of 35, even in the most ridiculously tiny town, would call another person "Betsy Wetsy" _every single time_ they speak of them, sometimes three or four times in a single paragraph of dialogue. I say this as someone from a ridiculously small town, and while high school is a different thing in those kind of towns--they take on a life of their own--never once did I hear an adult refer to another adult by a mocking childhood nickname. The repetition of certain themes, tones, descriptions, and names became quite grinding for me by the end.

In short, I felt--as another reviewer did--that I had witnessed an exorcism rather than reading a book.

Reading this book left a nasty taste in my mouth. Not because I experienced the horrors the protagonist did in her youth, but because I was saddened to see that the author (presumably well out of high school) still had not managed to transcend the horrors that (presumably) happened to her in high school.

If you enjoy movies where the 90-pound weakling triumphs over all the meanies, plus gets to face them down and make a big inspirational speech, you should like this book. If instead, you understand that "real life" is a lot more complex than it's painted here, that some former bullies do eventually grow up to live happy, law-abiding lives, and that not every nerd gets to play out a four star revenge fantasy on his/her tormentors, you probably won't.

The characters - except for the two detectives who are pretty minor to the story - are all garishly drawn cartoons. Old antagonists just don't gain some weight and marry losers - they become obese and marry psychopaths who bash in their heads at the least provocation. The protagonist herself doesn't just get to be a published author - she gets to hobnob with celebrities plus is married to a famous singer. Wow! Aren't those meanies sorry they picked on her now!

The plot is likely to leave you scratching your head. A potentially powerful storyline - the prog's mom, with whom she has a antagonistic relationship, has Alzheimer's and is dying - is ignored. Mom is merely a device to help get the heroine back to town. The book closes with a scene from the heroine's son, Mark, about to get lucky. Mark is a minor character, too, and even people who like this book probably won't care overmuch what happens to him.

The book would have been stronger had it selected one or two bullies and focused on them v. Liz. Instead, every few pages, we're introduced to someone new. More cartoons pile up, until keeping track of who's who is near impossible. Liz, herself, could have been a lot more fleshed out. I wanted to sympathize with her, but she just didn't get enough page space for this to happen.

In the end, I kept reading simply for the shock value the book unabashedly delivered. All through, I could hear the author putting out her tongue and singing Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.

"Somebody Else's Music" is yet another compelling work by Jane Haddam featuring Gregor Demarkian.

Successful author Liz Toliver has been the victim of scurrilous articles in the National Enquirer suggesting that she may have got away with murder. Liz has managed sucessfully to overcome her childhood unpopularity, but the horror of her experiences in her home town of Hollman is relived frequently in her dreams. Part of those recurring dreams concerns an episode of brutal bullying directed at Liz by some members of her high school class that coincided with the still unsolved murder.

At the request of Liz's lover, an old acquaintance of his partner Bennis, Gregor agrees to accompany Liz to her hometown where she is to look after her aging mother. Gregor is tasked to look into the 30 year old murder and to establish the source of the National Enquirer stories.

This is more than a routine mystery novel. It's as much social commentary - in particular, highlighting and skewering the more extreme manifestations of what appears to many outside observers to be a peculiar and uniquely American rite of passage called 'High School'. Ms Haddam examines the lingering implications of behaviour learnt in high school that can do untold damage to less popular individuals and, particularly in small communities, that can continue to adversely affect many people for the rest of their lives.

It is a beautifully written book, with sharply drawn characters and a vivid sense of time and place. Highly recommended.

I very much enjoy Jane Haddam's books, including this one. But the Kindle edition has so many typographical errors that it could pass for Dutch (or secret code) in some places. It is quite possible to follow, since one can easily guess what the original text is meant to be, but one wonders how a reader could interpret around the same level of sloppiness in a text by, say, James Joyce......

I think this is the best of the Gregor Demarkian novels, all of which I love. The small town atmosphere, a requirement that everybody be the same and that anything different is just wrong, is brought out clearly. Reading it helps you understand where school shooters come from, as the in crowd harasses the outsider, with little or no objection (and sometimes active encouragement) by authority. Haddam's people are as real as your neighbors, and they're not all the same.

Liz Toliver, author and broadcast pundit, is forced to return to her roots. Holman, PA is her childhood home and the place of all of her nightmares. Her committed lover Jimmy Card is a perennial rock star and an old lover of Bennis Day Hannaford, whose current love interest is Gregor Demarkian. And so Jimmy, concerned for Liz, uses Bennis to call Gregor in to unlock not the secrets of the murder in Liz's past but a threat to Liz in the present. But the two are deeply linked, and the killings begin almost as soon as Liz returns to Holman.

We can feel Jane Haddam retracing her own high school years: rule by the popular, ostracism and torture of those who don't fit in or won't kowtow to the mob, and a faculty sympathetic to the "in" crowd. The line between civilization and barbarism runs right through this behavior, and Haddam puts the major players in the case on the wrong side of it, protected by a veneer of respectability and 'normality'. The tabloid press is on the wrong side, too; the supposed guardians of civil rule in the Fourth Estate are represented as an out-of-control mob (just as in her later Cheating at Solitaire).

Haddam evidently accepts Chesterton's belief that a detective story is a morality tale in which the conclusion restores the sanity of a world threatened by evil. Evildoers are killed by one of their number, revealed by Gregor, or brought to face exposure, ostracism, and sanction. The true victims are released by the truth. And the author, presumably, has gotten a lot off her chest.

The writing is, as usual, superb. The puzzle is tangled and misleading until Gregor (and Liz) line the threads up in their proper order. The only fault is the sheer length of the story, and especially of Haddam's characteristic internal viewpoint sections on each character. I found that the narrative carried me through without serious fatigue.

The plotting and characters put this between Haddam's first and second tiers, above Act of Darkness and Quoth the Raven, but below Precious Blood and A Stillness in Bethlehem.

Other reviewers have reiterated the plot, some with disdain. But the pure fact of the matter is, "Somebody Else's Music" is an uncomfortable comment on the small town folks who cling to the high school mentality that passes for culture and history in a limited environment. High school sports, social achievements, and academic standing are the limits of some peoples' lives--and they keep reliving those lives over and over, without ever moving beyond this limiting world view. This are real people in a small community, and against this backdrop, lies and murder become dark, frightening, and believable. "Somebody Else's Music" is one of the finest mysteries I've had the pleasure to read.