Kay Hudson

Back to short reviews: Here are a few of the books I’ve read over the last few weeks, in no particular order. I’ll be back with more in a few days.

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Sonali Dev’s A Distant Heart is a follow up to her previous novel, A Change of Heart, not quite as dark, but continuing the story of the organ theft ring which figured in that book. A Distant Heart, set in contemporary Mumbai, tells the story of Kimi Patil, a heart transplant recipient, and Rahul Savant, a police officer working on the organ ring case. Kimi and Rahul met as children, and the novel switches back and forth between their growing friendship in the past (“a long time ago”) and current events (“present day”). The novel includes elements of romance and suspense, but remains mainstream at heart, beautifully written but rather slowly paced.

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I downloaded up Joseph Egan’s The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s because I enjoy early Hollywood tales, not because I know much about Mary Astor (I think I’ve only seen her in The Maltese Falcon), and I didn’t know much about her diaries or her custody battle. Not much from the notorious “Purple Diaries” is reprinted in this book, and most of what was printed at the time was forged, but the story is interesting and kept me reading. It’s fascinating to see how the testimony at the custody hearing became wilder and wilder, and rose to the level of a national newspaper obsession for a few weeks in 1936. The writing is repetitious at times, and the proofreading mediocre, but I found the book entertaining.

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I picked up Hoax: A History of Deception, by Ian Tattersall and Peter Nevraumont, at my local Half Price Book store. Broken into 50 chapters, the book covers everything from harmless and amusing exploits to wild conspiracy theories to the downright dangerous (such as homeopathy and anti-vaccine hysteria, two bits of nonsense I find very disturbing). Faked photographs, faked deaths, successful and unsuccessful forgeries, scams and con games, flat and hollow earth ideas, military trickery and so on all pop up in the book. In this age of “fake news” and apparent willingness to believe Big Lies, there’s a lot to be learned from hoaxes of the past.

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Very little is known about the life of Kate Warne, the first female operative with the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, but Greer MacAllister has done an impressive job of giving her a story in Girl in Disguise. The novel begins with Kate applying for the job, answering a newspaper ad that no one, least of all Allen Pinkerton, expected a woman to respond to. Earning the trust and respect of her male colleagues is no easy feat, but Kate perseveres, working on cases of all sorts, until the Civil War turns her into a spy. Along the way she meets characters both fictional and real (including Abraham Lincoln), contemplates the moral lines she may or may not be crossing, and confronts ghosts from her past. MacAllister draws a fascinating picture of the mid-nineteenth century, of the Pinkerton headquarters in Chicago, and of Washington society during the Civil War.

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I actually downloaded Girl in Disguise over a year ago and promptly lost track of it among the hundreds of books in my Amazon cloud. Now and then I open the Kindle app on my computer, which gives me a wide screen, full color view of my electronic library, and browse. The cover of Girl in Disguise caught my eye, and I’m glad it did. I will, however, never catch up.