You want to like Victoria Gotti, daughter of the late Mafia don John Gotti aka “The Teflon Don” and “The Dapper Don” and author of This Family of Mine: What it was Like Growing up Gotti.  Victoria has an engaging intimate writing style; and is already a successful published author and journalist.  Despite the lurid cover photograph (see below) she comes across as an intelligent, modest and down to earth individual, a responsible parent, and a person who has overcome many personal challenges.  You also want  to know how this likeable person can defend and excuse someone found guilty of murder, loan sharking, racketeering, obstruction of justice and other criminal convictions even if that person is her father.

Throughout the first 245 (out of 375) pages of this book I kept waiting for Victoria to explain. She loves her father, this she makes very clear. Her childhood was mainly a happy and secure one growing up in a poor but loving family in the Howard Beach section of Queens N.Y.  Yes, she admits her father was a criminal albeit a “Robin Hood” type criminal using his ill gotten gains to help the less fortunate. Yes, she hated the fact that her father was in the Mafia, though mainly because she worried for his safety and felt having a parent in jail was disruptive to family life. But the justification she gives for his crimes? The government is worse. To quote “When an unofficial organization demands money for protection, it is extortion. When the government takes a percentage of your income, for protection (police department), your purchases, your sales, your house , your phone bill, your electric bill, that’s legal …it’s called taxation”. This stunning rationalization negated the previous sympathy I had toward Gotti. However it couldn’t take away the fact that she is an excellent writer and paints a vivid picture of growing up in a colourful, volatile and ultimately tragic family.

Age Group:

16 and up

Story:

Believing he can commit the perfect crime, Roderick Raskolnikov robs and murders and elderly pawnbroker.  He eventually finds himself not only engaged in a battle of wits with inspector Porfiry, a policeman who is determined to wring a confession from him, but also an internal battle with his consciousness that slowly begins to destroy him.

Awards:

None But it has stood the test of time.

My Thoughts:

There are very few books that I will read twice, but Crime and Punishment is one of them.  Dostoyevsky does a brilliant job at allowing the reader to enter the brain of a mentally ill criminal. 

Borrow Crime and Punishment from your local VPL Library!

Top Three Similar Reads:

1. The Trial, by Franz Kafka
2. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
3. The Stranger, by Albert Camus 

Have you read Crime and Punishment yet? If so, what did you think?

Age Group:

Adult

Story:

In the Red Dragon, Will Graham is asked by Special Agent Jack Crawford to rejoin the FBI to catch a      serial killer who butchers entire families.   Will Graham realizes that in order to catch the killer, he will need to speak with the man who almost killed him, Hannibal Lecter.

This is the first novel to feature Thomas Harris’ iconic character Dr. Hannibal Lecter.  This novel is usually followed by The Silence of the Lambs and then Hannibal. 

Awards:

None

My Thoughts:

I really enjoyed reading the Red Dragon, and actually enjoyed it much more then The Silence of the Lambs or Hannibal.  It is a well written, ingeniously plotted, gripping novel. 

Borrow Red Dragon from your local VPL Library!

Top Three Similar Reads:

1. Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay
2. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
3. Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy

Have you read the Red Dragon yet? If so, what did you think? 

This past weekend, I read 2 distinctly different, yet very good mysteries.  The first was a gritty serial killer police procedural called Sworn to silence.  The main character was fascinating - an ex-Amish female police chief of a small Ohio town.  Her small town is hit by a series of rape/murders of young women suspiciously similar to ones that had occurred many years before.   Contrasted with that was a cozy mystery written by Laura Childs as part of her scrapbooking mystery series (scrapbooking can be dangerous!) called Death swatch.  Again, another strong female lead who as owner of a scrapbooking store in New Orleans, solves the mystery of the death of a friend during Mardi Gras no less.  The book is full of interesting characters in a city that is probably the most fascinating city in North America.  I highly recommend both titles.

Winter has arrived.  And with it, cold days - bitter, damp - and wet days, the chill creeping into my bones like a virus.  In winter, there is nothing better than to huddle up with a mug of something warm and a good mystery.

No one does a good mystery these days better than Northern Europeans.  And no one does a mystery more apropos to a cold, wet, dreary day than Iceland’s Arnaldur Indriđason.

Jar City is the first book in published in English featuring Arnaldur’s detective Erlendur.  Erlendur is typical in many ways - jaded, lifelong cop, with personal problems that parallel the work he does as a detective.  But there are little ways in which he breaks the mold - he smokes like a chimney but doesn’t really drink (what detective does that anymore?!), he is divorced but  he doesn’t remain hopelessly devoted to his ex, his children are frequently in trouble but he doesn’t seem to beat himself up too much about it.  But what Erlendur is is a really good detective.

The Reykjavik police have a murder on their hands - the seemingly unprovoked killing of an old man.  Erlendur observes that most Reykjavik murders (and they only get about one per year) are messy, basic and pathetic.  So the initial assessment is burglary gone wrong.  But there are telltale signs that there might be more at stake here - a cryptic note left on the body, a lone photograph of a child’s grave.  Will Erlendur and his team be able to find the strands that connect it all?

Meanwhile his drug-addicted daughter has shown up on his doorstep, pregnant, with a request that Erlendur find a young bride who ran away from her wedding.  As if he didn’t have enough on his plate?

Aranldur’s Iceland is a dark autumnal place, full of wind and rain.  And it is a small place, a nation of such diminutive size that the entirety of the citizenry’s medical records can be programmed into one database to track the movement and development of genetic and hereditary disease.  Arnaldur constructs a mytsery of universal appeal in a very short crash course about a very unique place.

(And don’t worry - I am not being forward or impolite by calling Arnaldur by his given name.  His last name - Indriđason - merely means that he is the son of Indriđ.  Almost all Icelanders are called by their given name since they don’t have proper surnames as we understand them.  See?  I learned that by reading the book!)

Okay, off to take on the  Silence of the Grave, Erlendur’s second English-language thriller.

Everyone has that one actor that they truly can’t stand. It’s almost an identity thing. For instance, people might try to explain that they are the type of person who wouldn’t see a movie with so-and-so in it, no matter how good the movie is said to be. Maybe it’s immature and judgemental behavior, but if someone just bugs you, they bug you. Right?

So here I was, happy in my own little “I don’t like Nicolas Cage” world. Sure, it wasn’t a seamless world. I had to concede that I couldn’t help but like him in Raising Arizona (1987), but I was easily able to attribute that to the brilliance of the Coen brothers, rather than to Nicolas Cage’s skill as an actor. I also heard that the movie Leaving Las Vegas (1995 - based on the book by John O’Brien) was definitely worth seeing, from people whose opinions on movies I both trusted and valued. But my curiosity never reached the breaking point required to go ahead and rent the movie, and so chose instead to believe that Nicolas Cage wasn’t a good actor, and I didn’t like him or his films.

Accordingly, when I went to see The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog my expectations were quite low. I wasn’t even going to go in the beginning, but my friend promised me free popcorn, and it’s hard to resist free movie popcorn.

From the very first scene, where the camera slinkily follows a snake swimming through the dark and murky flood waters of Hurricane Katrina, it’s small head, bobbing up and down through a flooded prison, I realized this wasn’t just going to be a “at least I had free popcorn” type of movie. And it wasn’t. Dark, gritty, realistic and yet fantastical and surreal, Herzog lent his documentary filmmaker’s style to the film, keeping the camera rolling a little bit longer than the audience expected and allowing for surprising little details that made the movie more than just the run-of-the-mill crime drama.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) Rating: Restricted