The Face of a Stranger, by Anne Perry. During that fortuituous conversation with Anne Perry, I mentioned that the sequel to A Stranger Here Below would begin with Sheriff Gideon suffering a memory loss from a head injury gotten after falling off his horse. She suggested that I read her The Face of a Stranger, in which her main character, a detective named William Monk, sustains a head injury, with amnesia, following a carriage crash. His memory – indeed, his entire past – has vanished from his mind. Nevertheless he is assigned a difficult case to solve, even though he has forgotten his professional skills along with everything else.
The Alienist, by Caleb Carr. I read this 600-page mass-market paperback while traveling on the train between Vermont and Philadelphia a few years ago to attend my niece’s wedding. Set in New York City in 1896, this thriller/history-mystery teams up a pioneering psychologist with police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (who served for a while in that capacity before becoming president) in trying to capture a serial killer. At that time, people who were mentally ill, as the killer is presumed to be, were said to be “alienated” from society and from their own true natures, and the experts who studied them were called “alienists.”
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. In England in the 1520s, Henry VIII seeks to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he can marry the much younger Anne Boleyn in hopes of begetting a male heir. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. To effect the divorce, Henry enlists the help of Thomas Cromwell, a commoner who has become a lawyer, a man every bit as complex and dangerous as his king. Mantel writes in the present tense and from Cromwell’s point of view. And she brings it off stunningly well. The novel is an absorbing and somewhat demanding read worth every moment you spend with it. The first in a trilogy, it is followed by Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, charting the ambitious Cromwell’s rise and eventual fall.
Lost Nation, by Jeffrey Lent. This novel is set in the early 1800s in a wild part of northern New Hampshire known as the Indian Stream country, not far from where I live here in northern Vermont: an Eastern frontier. The main character, Blood, is an independent, intractable man who sets himself up as a trader and becomes the target of local ire. The novel is chilling, violent, at times desolating, always convincing. Lent’s prose is vivid and his dialogue superb. I think he’s one of the finest novelists working today.
The Long Shadow, by Beth Kanell. Want to encourage younger folks to read historical fiction? Set in Vermont in 1850, this well-researched, gracefully written novel tells the story of two teen-aged female friends, a former slave, and a slave hunter. The period details are accurate and eye-opening. The themes – family ties, friendships, and the difference that a single person can make in others’ lives and within a community – are deep and important. More than a “young adult novel,” it’s a story that appeals to all ages.
Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien. This is the first in a series of 20 seafaring tales that, taken together, represent one long, magisterial novel. O’Brien’s main characters – the likable, outgoing British naval officer Jack Aubrey and his complicated friend Stephen Maturin, a physician and an intelligence agent, are unforgettable. The novels take them all over the globe, on water and on land. The scenes are so vivid you practically live them. I read the series for the first time in the late 1990s, when I was going through a difficult period in my life and needed to escape to a different world. I read them a second time to study O’Brien’s technique. And I sailed through them a third time for pure pleasure.
Deadwood, by Pete Dexter. An unpredictable, grim romp of a novel set in the gold-mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, which sprang up illegally in Indian Territory in 1876. Almost an anti-Western, it’s populated with characters famous (Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane) and, well, weird. Like the Bottle Fiend, who madly collects cast-off bottles, and the psychotic bounty hunter Boone May, who totes around a decapitated head in a sack. Miners, tourists, preachers, “upstairs girls,” merchants, bullwhackers, Celestials (immigrants from China), a lawman named Seth Bullock, a “whore man” called Al Swearingen. According to Wikipedia, author Pete Dexter “began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which a mob of locals [in South Philadelphia] armed with baseball bats beat him severely.” Maybe that explains Dexter’s slightly unhinged authorial voice in this astonishing work.
The Color of Lightning, by Paulette Jiles. In 1863, a freed former slave, Britt Johnson, moves his family from Kentucky to Texas. Britt sets up a business transporting freight by wagon across the prairie. While he’s away on a trip, a party of Kiowas and Comanches raids the Johnsons’ settlement. Britt’s eldest son is slain, friends and neighbors are killed or captured, and his beloved wife Mary suffers a head injury and is carried off into captivity. Britt won’t rest until his family is reunited. Author Paulette Jiles is a poet; her prose has mesmerizing descriptions of landscape and weather and the words and actions of people you come to care about deeply. (Jiles based this work on oral histories from post-Civil-War North Texas.)
True Grit, by Charles Portis. In the 1870s, Mattie Ross is 14 years old when a coward named Tom Chaney shoots her father to death in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and steals his horse and $150 in cash. Wanting revenge, Mattie makes her way from the family home in Yell County to Fort Smith, where she manages, with great difficulty and aplomb, to enlist the one-eyed alcoholic federal marshal Rooster Cogburn to help her track down Chaney in the lawless Indian Territory to the west. The story of what took place is related years later by Mattie, a wonderfully unreliable narrator, scarred by the past but still feisty and indomitable.
The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin. This literary mystery takes place in Istanbul in 1836 (the same year that my main character Gideon Stoltz seeks to solve a murder in a Pennsylvania Dutch community in Pennsylvania’s Colerain County, half a world away, as described in my mystery Nighthawk’s Wing). Investigator Yashim, an intelligent and “reasonably brave” Turk, must uncover the perpetrator of a string of grisly murders threatening the balance of power in the sultan’s court. Yashim is tall, well-built, in his 30s, a connoisseur of good food, an accomplished linguist – and a eunuch, which makes him almost invisible in his society. Goodwin gives the reader a history lesson about the 19th-century Ottoman Empire while spinning a great yarn.
