Treachery past and present

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Mystery and history mix well in crime fiction. Add a literary twist, a well-drawn cast of characters and a marvelously multilayered plot that moves from a crime-ridden London housing project to the bucolic Lake District and from the early 19th century to the present, and you've got the bare bones of Val McDermid's latest, The Grave Tattoo, read by Kate Reading, who gets gender, age and accent just right. The literary lure is a long-hidden lengthy poem by William Wordsworth, worth lots more than words, that tells Fletcher Christian's side of that nasty business on the Bounty. When a desiccated body with South Seas tattoos washes out of a bog, it brings Jane Gresham, a Lake District native and scrupulous Wordsworth scholar, back from London in hot pursuit of the poem she's long believed existed. She's not the only one after the prize and when the elderly folk Jane is interviewing start dying, the many plots thicken and the dangers quicken. McDermid tells it all with her usual flair and ends each chapter with a tantalizingly crafted entry from the diary Christian could have given Wordsworth.


Coming home

In our problem-plagued world where people are so easily uprooted, the meaning of home, exile and identity often take center stage. Yasmin Crowther's debut novel, The Saffron Kitchen, weaves these issues into a haunting love story that begins in Iran as the Shah came to power, moves to England and then back to Iran 50 years later. Banished from her elegant Persian family by her autocratic father for a suspected infraction, Maryam made a life for herself in London, married a gentle Englishman, had a daughter, but never felt at ease or at home and never forgot her first love, Ali. When a tragic accident wrenches mother and daughter apart, Maryam returns to Iran and, perhaps, to Ali. Sara, her grown daughter, follows her, hoping to understand her mother's anger and anguish, her history and roots, and hoping their soured relationship can be made sweet again. Maryam and Sara speak in very different voices, wonderfully realized here by Mehr Mansuri and Ariana Fraval, letting you into their separate yet intertwined lives, into the cultural differences that mother and daughter can't overcome. Endings, happy or otherwise, are left for you to ponder.


No exit

Anthony Swofford wowed us with Jarhead, his brutally blunt, bittersweet, best-selling memoir about life as a Marine lance corporal during the first Gulf War, vivid with images of boys being pumped up to kill, sitting in the sand perfecting their profanity. Now, Swofford, who comes from a multigenerational military family and who spent four of his childhood years on a military base in Tokyo, has turned his hand to fiction and, not surprisingly, has marshaled his upfront and personal insights into Army brathood as background for his first novel. Exit A, read by John Slattery, starts when Severin Boxx and Virginia Sachiko Kindwall are 17 and living on a U.S. Air Force base in Tokyo. She's the drop-dead gorgeous daughter of the base general and he's the star of the football team her father coaches. He's nuts about her, but she's nuts about rebelling and calling her all-powerful father's bluff. Their less-than-five-minute romance ends in real disaster and when we meet them again, 15 years later, Severin has let himself slide into an unfulfilled life and a messy marriage in California. Virginia, cut off from her father for years, paid for her rebellion big time and now leads a marginal existence in Tokyo. Do they get back together—can these these frayed, muddled lives be mended? Well, tune in, it's worth finding out.


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