Daily Deals for Intellectuals

With civil rights as a central theme, Black Water Rising is a brilliant and atmosperic debut crime novel set on the mean streets of Houston, Texas, in 1981. Its central character is a fighting African-American barrister, Jay Porter.

One summer night on a ship on a soiled Houston bayou, celebrating his pregnant wife’s birthday, Jay and Bernadine hear a girl’s screams, gunshots and then the splash of somebody falling into the water.

 Notwithstanding an instinct to remain away from difficulty, Jay rescues a well dressed white lady, a fine deed that, for Jay, opens a Pandora’s box of results. From here, Locke takes the reader on a classic descent-into-hell crime story in which the main character makes a series of wrong turns that lead him further and futher into a labyrinthine bad dream. She builds many layers into her story ( this is no linear account or easy crime solving matter ) incorporating political activism, issues of class and race, town politics and big business screwing over the tiny guy.

There’s masses of backstory too, as Jay’s past heavily informs his present. Jay was a student activist, organising marches and rallies in the unendurable atmosphere of the Deep South in the 1970s and at the age of twenty-one he barely escaped a jail term on a trumped-up charge. Is his past returning to haunt him, or is Jay just paranoid? Deftly , Locke uses Jay’s paranoia as a tool of mystery in her story, and nothing is kind of as it appears. Most curious is Jay’s previous relationship with the present white female Mayor of Houston, whose school days were also spent in political activism. Her adoration of and betrayal of Jay provides a lot of the books intrigue.

Locke deftly shifts between Jay’s past and his present in a fantastically subtle and nuanced demonstration of cause and effect, illustrating how an obsessed firebrand turns into a middle class barrister who just wants to keep his head down and provide for his folks. His internal struggle between idealism and cynicsm is the engaging human side of the story. As with plenty of other debut books, Black Water Rising appears like the book that Attica Locke was born to draft.

She was born in America’s Deep South in 1974 shortly after the peak of the Civil Rights Movement and her activist parents named her after the legendary prsion rebellion in NY’s Attica jail in 1971. Therefore politicised in the womb,this young African-American writer has exploded onto the literary scene with a political crime thriller that’s drawing comparisions to Dennis Lehane and Scott Turow.

Locke has superbly caught a piece of US racial history and as UK crime write Val McDermind expounded “Black Water Rising is a frightening freminder of how recently America was a really bad place to be young, gifted and black”.

It is also an engrossing and burning social commentary written with great style and understanding.

Jonathan Safran Foer may say his new novel is not a manifesto for vegetarianism but it seems, if not a biased appraisal of the meat industry that I love, then perhaps an exacting one.

Inspired not by the mouth watering desire for fried chicken for his own mouth, but the knowledge of what else besides chicken is going into the mouth of his child, Foer peruses the connections both he and we have with food.

The investigation, rather then exploration, that Foer embarks on brings him naturally enough to slaughterhouses.

Foer is an elegant writer and he writes engagingly about that age old recipe ‘why do we eat what we eat’.

He hasn’t changed my mind on fried chicken though.

It’s no secret amongst anyone who knows me that I am a voracious reader and a voracious eater. I love to feast on a meaty book and gnaw on some fried chicken. But what is not so well known, at least until now, is that I like to quaff wine too. Nothing better than a spritzy white and a leg of fried chicken at a summer bbq. Unless it’s a spritzy white boy being goosed by me at a summer bbq haw! haw!

But I digest, Peter Mayles The Vintage Caper has a light humor and  reassuring plot centered on the south of france, it’s food and it’s wine. LA entertainment lawyer Danny Roth is the envious owner of a $3 million private wine cellar.

When the cellar is ransacked Roth hires a wine expert detective to track the missing plonk. The investigations plonk Roth in the middle of france.

It’s there that Mayles writing shines like sunlight through your grandmama’s dress. Seductive descriptions of french culinary paradise await.

Insert wine cliche here, not complex, light.

The Adrian Mole series spans decades in the life of the not so endearing englishman Adrian Mole. What makes it special is that the whole series of books literally expands over the decades (much like your grandmas waistline) as the first novel was written in the late 70s under the title The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and 3/4.

In the last novel ‘adrian mole in the lost diaries of adrian mole’ Adrian had just got married and was expecting a baby. In this sequel to the sequel to the sequel he is now unhappily married and approaching 40. In true Adrian spirit he think he has prostrate cancer (decades earlier then the national average) his mother is now writing her own mole diaries of sorts in the form of a memoir called “A Girl Called Shit”.

It’s a real winner and Sue Townsend has a bitter black humour that this southerner thinks is downright tasty.