Tag Archives: narrative tension

Cold War Hallucinations: Night Watch

10 Monday Jan 2022

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Review: Night Watch, by David C. Taylor
Severn, 2018. 290 pp. $29

At first glance, or even second or third, the crimes seem to lack any connection; after all, this is Manhattan, 1956, and anything can happen. A couple walking through Central Park come face-to-face with a man who threatens them, kill him, and walk away. A man throws himself out the window of the Hotel Astor, and his colleagues, almost shrugging, say he was depressed.

But Detective Michael Cassidy, who knows his native city and what its residents can do to one another, latches on to the details that don’t add up. He refuses to accept the anodyne explanations dished out by unreliable witnesses or the police bureaucracy, overworked and under political pressure from every point of the compass. Before long, the federal government casts its shadow over the investigations, doors close, and odd things happen.

What’s more, a sophisticated, relentless stalker leaves messages promising that he’ll kill Michael at a time and place of his choosing. Michael can’t figure out which criminal he’s put away who would try to take revenge like that.

Like Night Life and Night Work, the two previous thrillers featuring Michael Cassidy (and which bracket the current installment by a few years), this one offers similar pleasures. From the first lines, you have New York City, portrayed as few authors can, capturing the grit, energy, and quirks of an infinitely surprising metropolis. The story begins with horses waiting to pull tourists through Central Park in hansom cabs:

The horses harnessed to carriages at the curb on Columbus Circle huffed smoke from their nostrils as they stood heads down, their backs covered with plaid blankets, and waited for the night-time romantics who wanted to ride through the park bundled under lap robes in private darkness. The shrill wail of a police car siren rose in the west. The horses watched the car pass on 59th Street headed east toward Fifth Avenue, lights flashing. They dropped their heads again to eat hay strewn in the gutter by their drivers. They had been raised on concrete and were used to sirens. In a city of eight million there was always an emergency — someone trapped in an elevator, a restaurant kitchen fire, a domestic dispute, a liquor store stick-up, a body leaking blood across the sidewalk.

The narrative, chronometer-intricate, conveys the fits and starts of criminal investigation, with all the dead ends and improbabilities that Cassidy and his partner sense are built on lies, but against which they can do nothing, for want of evidence. Since Taylor shows you the bad guys at work, the reader knows more than our heroes do. Consequently, the tension derives not just from the “no — and furthermore,” many instances of which involve close combat, but the desire to see justice done — and the fear that the scoundrels will escape because the government protects them.

Unlike the previous two novels, the scoundrels here aren’t J. Edgar Hoover or the Mafia, but Allen Dulles, CIA director. The plot turns on the covert program, much written about in recent years, to test LSD as a “truth serum,” often without the subjects’ knowledge, in the name of national security.

Undated government photo of Allen Dulles (courtesy Prologue Magazine, spring 2002 (NARA, 306-PS-59-17740; via Wikimedia Commons)

Practically no one in the New York of 1956 has heard of this drug or what it can do, which adds to Michael’s difficulties solving the mystery, but the reader will understand, based on the hallucinations several characters suffer. The outrage that the government could inflict this, and with such righteous, cold-blooded cruelty, turns up the narrative heat. Nor is that all. The scientists behind the experiments include Nazi death-camp doctors recruited for their special knowledge about what abuses the human body can stand.

Accordingly, it’s all the more satisfying when Dulles tries to recruit Michael, who bluntly refuses, then, when prodded to admit that he dislikes Dulles, and why, puts it plainly: Michael can’t stand people who tip the table so that everything on it flows toward them. I’m going to remember that phrase.

I don’t believe all of the physical confrontations, at which Michael excels — a trope of the genre, to be sure, yet still implausible. Michael also rescues his beautiful girlfriend (trope number two), a newspaper reporter, though, to be fair, she rescues herself too and is hardly helpless. (Her clothes, especially high heels, cause trouble in the action scenes, a nice touch that underlines the gender straitjacket she struggles to wear as a journalist consigned to “women’s interest” stories.) Michael has a few convenient resources, like a brother who’s a political TV commentator and an aunt who’s a Washington, DC, powerbroker. Finally, despite the ever-present “no — and furthermore,” loose ends get tied up rather neatly.

But I can’t resist these novels — I’ve reviewed all three — and if you read them, maybe you’ll feel the same way.

Disclaimer: I obtained by reading copy of this book from the public library.

Antebellum Guerrilla War: The Water Dancer

13 Monday Dec 2021

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Review: The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Random House/OneWorld, 2019. 403 pp. $28

Hiram Walker, born a slave in Virginia in some indeterminate year, barely remembers his mother, torn from him and sold west when he was little. Brought up by Thena, a hard woman who has suffered similar losses and who wastes no words in expressing feelings, Hiram thinks he’s lucky but isn’t sure.

That presentiment grows even stronger when Howell Walker, their master and tobacco planter, owns Hiram as his son — sort of. Hiram become servant to his half-brother, Maynard, and receives some education from a tutor. As Hiram’s father relies on him more and more, the young slave fantasizes that he’ll be allowed one day to run the plantation, as if he were white. The other slaves, though proud of his gifts and accomplishments, which include a prodigious memory and eloquent storytelling, warn him to keep his head on straight.

It’s excellent advice but impossible to follow. One night, a drunken Maynard drives his carriage into the river. The white man drowns, and the Black man emerges, though he doesn’t know how, except that strange visions seem to have steered him to safety. That event changes Hiram’s life forever.

Portrait, 1852, of William Wells Brown, who escaped slavery in Missouri in 1834 and became a noted abolitionist author. His novel, Clotel, 1853, was the first published by a Black American (courtesy Project Gutenberg, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

From this complex, multilayered premise emerges a compelling though uneven novel that examines in minute detail the roots and branches of race prejudice. The narrative needs no timetable, save the implied pre-Civil War era, for though the laws have changed greatly, racial attitudes haven’t. As such, The Water Dancer feels almost like an allegory, with a dash of magic thrown in.

Normally, I avoid mixing magic and realism, but Coates provides a brilliant rationale for anything not strictly true. Hiram’s memory and storytelling make him a superb candidate to learn and practice a mysterious power capable of setting him or others free. This potential interests the Underground, a resistance organization pledged to destroy slavery from within. That effort will have its costs.

So there’s much tension from the get-go, and Coates’s prose style reaches lyrical heights. Many passages illustrate Hiram’s state of mind while elucidating a theme, as with this one, in which he discovers the pride in being Black that slavery and subservience have denied him:

I looked over and watched as the other colored men along the fence shouted and laughed with still others working the stables. And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us — the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all, the shared memories of corn-shuckings, of hurricanes, of heroes who did not live in books, but in our talk; an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you.

The Water Dancer is a vital, important book, and I urge you to read it, though I have reservations. The first half takes off like a rocket, borne aloft through passion that rises off the pages, a sharp sense of the physical, and that gorgeous prose. But then the narrative seems to go into orbit—a holding pattern, if you will—and the story loses momentum. Events that Hiram believes accidental or from his doing will turn out to have been ordained. Not only does that wear thin with repetition and challenge the narrative’s credibility, you get the impression that Coates is manipulating his characters.

To be fair, I like how memory and bearing witness shape the path to freedom, if not define it altogether; in that way, Hiram’s examination of his past makes total sense. I also like how each revelation resets Hiram’s wishes and strategies for living, which pairs his internal journey with his external one. All good novelists aim for that. Yet at times Hiram’s reflections seem forced, too incremental to matter, even abstract, like tiny essays Coates hides within his narrative, but which stick out anyway. The storytelling in these scenes exacerbates the tendentious, contrived approach, because some unfold with characters narrating to others or lecturing—and I, as reader, feel lectured too.

That said, Coates asks crucial questions. The Underground, though sworn to a single cause, attracts people with different goals, which means Hiram and his colleagues must constantly balance the needs of the movement with those of the slaves they mean to serve. Naturally, circumstances keep changing. Every political and social movement has to weather that difficulty, so this is true to life.

But Coates goes one better, splitting his dilemma into even finer parts, exploring where freedom lies exactly, and what actions lead to it. Does escape from the “coffin” of slavery suffice (an image that appears frequently), or does traveling into free territory accomplish nothing by itself? What about the family that remains behind, the love without which the absence of chains is only partially fulfilling?

The Water Dancer is a profound book whose story rises above the flaws in its execution.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

What a Woman Knows: Lilli de Jong

18 Monday Mar 2019

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Review: Lilli de Jong, by Janet Benton
Doubleday, 2017. 335 pp. $27

This riveting debut novel shows how quickly and thoroughly a woman’s life may unravel, to which the only responses must be fortitude, will, and, at times, subterfuges of which men know nothing — and don’t wish to know. In 1883, twenty-two-year-old Lilli de Jong loses her mother to untimely death, whereupon this Philadelphia family of plain-speaking, plain-living Quakers falls apart. Her father, a selfish, irascible furniture maker of great stubbornness and little foresight, takes to drink, upsetting the Friends elders, and he compounds the felony by inviting his cousin, Patience, into his home and bed. That gets him expelled from the local meeting, and Lilli from her teaching job at the Friends’ school.

Then her suitor and brother, having had enough of the furniture shop and its cantankerous master, go seek their fortunes in the Pittsburgh steel mills, leaving Lilli friendless and vulnerable. What’s more, the night before her departure, Johan, the boyfriend, makes her pregnant. Three men have therefore done what men so often do, shielded from responsibility or ostracism, while a woman takes the shame, the burden, and the calumny, visible to all.
Lilli talks her way into a charitable home for expecting, unwed mothers, by no means a happy place, though she realizes she could have suffered much worse:

After stirring hot vats of laundry, wringing out the steaming cloths, and hanging them on lines; after scrubbing floors on our knees, helping Cook peel potatoes and knead heaps of dough, wiping away the grime that falls to every surface from the city air, and unpacking crates of donated supplies left at the back gate, we should want nothing more than rest. But without work to occupy us, our minds wander to places of uncertainty and dread. Better to sit in an upholstered chair, lean toward the orb of a gas lamp in the parlor, and draw a brightly threaded needle in and out of a dish towel or an apron. Better to form lovely flowers than to consider that the promise of our youth has bloomed and died.

Mrs. G. W. Clark’s Open Door, home for unwed mothers, which opened in Omaha in 1892 (courtesy University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research and http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/peattie/ep.owh.cha.0005.html)

But the charity assumes — nay, almost demands — that these women give up their newborns for adoption. And when the time comes, Lilli refuses, unaware of the terrors, hardships, and exploitation that await but adamant that she won’t abandon her little daughter, Charlotte, flesh of her flesh, as others have abandoned her.

I love this premise, the inverse of so many novels in which a mother gives up a child, and either party tries to reconnect later. Not that there’s anything wrong with such stories, but consider the immediacy, the elegant, hard-edged simplicity of Benton’s approach. Her protagonist has an infant crying for milk, but Lilli has no money, no food for herself, and nowhere to live; meanwhile, she’s looked upon as a whore, vagrant, or juicy target. That predicament, which Lilli periodically escapes and falls back into, creates more electricity than your average hydro plant. Her conscience, developed from a young age and schooled in the Friends’ outlook, pushes against her needs constantly, and she struggles to do the right thing.

Consequently, Benton need not strain to place obstacles in Lilli’s way, for the world is stacked against her, and the “no — and furthermores” flow as naturally as a river. For instance, when Lilli reluctantly leaves Charlotte with a wet nurse and hires herself out in the same capacity to a wealthy family, you can probably imagine a few problems, such as the lascivious, unhappy master of the house. But furthermore, you have the doctor who must approve her position and whose half-educated word is law, and the myriad, uncountable ways in which the mistress of the house humiliates her.

Lilli narrates her story through diary entries, and though I like her voice and simple style, I wonder whether she could have written so fluidly. For a young woman who has read only those books that contain useful information and little or no fiction — her parents obeyed the stricture of plainness in all ways — Lilli has a highly polished pen that never hunts for a word or a thought. Benton wants to write a coherent novel, and no one can object to that, yet because the narration is so articulate, it doesn’t always feel contemporaneous with the action, as though Lilli writes years later. To credit Benton’s storytelling, however, this never occurred to me until I finished the book.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help noticing that Charlotte at times seems more like a four-or five-month-old infant than a newborn. That’s not a deal-breaker, except that I had to stop and think about my own children when they were infants, which took me out of the story. The plethora of exclamation points also puts me off, a bad editorial decision for several reasons, not least pushing a sober-minded, nineteenth-century young woman used to self-discipline too far toward a modern-day schoolgirl tearing a passion to tatters. Lilli’s story needs no adornment, any more than she needs (or would think to use) lipstick and rouge. At its best, which is very good indeed, Lilli de Jong delivers a powerful moral tale from simple, basic elements.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

In the Madman’s Court: Wolf on a String

11 Monday Mar 2019

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Review: Wolf on a String, by Benjamin Black
Holt, 2017. 306 pp. $28

As the year 1599 draws to a close, an impoverished German scholar named Christian Stern has wangled an introduction to the Prague court of Rudolph II, king of Hungary and Bohemia, archduke of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor. Called eccentric by some, mad by others — in whispers, of course — Rudolph shows more interest in magic and alchemy than in governing. Christian has read widely in the occult arts and considers them hogwash, but he’s willing to play the happy acolyte to ingratiate himself with His Majesty in hopes of patronage for natural philosophy—science–like the emperor’s other hirelings, Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 1591 painting of Rudolf II as Vertumnus, Roman god of the seasons, growth, plants, and fruit. The emperor liked the portrayal (courtesy Skokloster Castle, Sweden, via Wikimedia Commons)

The chestnut about being careful what you wish for applies here. No sooner has Christian entered Prague than he stumbles across a corpse of a young woman dressed in a velvet gown, wearing a gold medallion around her neck. Robbery can’t be the motive, and her attire suggests she’s well born. But when he brings the death to official attention, to his surprise, he’s beaten and imprisoned for the crime:

Bells in countless churches were tolling the hour; it seemed to me I had never in my life heard so bleak and comfortless a sound. The thought came slithering into my defenseless consciousness that I might never be released from this foul dungeon, unless it was to be taken out on a freezing midwinter morning much like this one and marched to some grimy corner of the castle keep and made to kneel there with my neck on the block, where my last sight of this world would be that of the hooded headsman testing the edge of his blade with a thick thumb.

Luckily, Rudolph smiles on Christian, and he’s released, but not to serve justice or kindness or logic. Rather, the emperor believes in a prophecy that a “new star,” a sign of good fortune, will cross the firmament. Who better than someone named Christian Stern (Stern means “star” in German) to represent these glad tidings? And there could be no better way to prove his worth than to solve the murder; the victim was the court physician’s daughter, one of Rudolph’s mistresses. Besides, the emperor can’t trust anybody else. Christian implicitly understands that the killing has immense political implications, though, as a newcomer, he has no way to know where they lead.

“To the gallows,” replies just about everyone he talks to, most of whom make no secret of their desire to see him swing. Christian can never tell whether their animosity results from his exceedingly rapid rise, how they perceive their self-interest, plain viciousness, or a combination of all three. All he can see is that he’s stumbled into a power struggle between Felix Wenzel, His Majesty’s high steward and the official who had him arrested, and Philipp Lang, the subtle, devious high chamberlain. Allying himself to either may well be fatal, but the day will come when Christian must choose sides. His predicament causes frank amusement among the courtiers, spiced by his amorous adventures, which, though risky, are common knowledge. How pleasant to be the source of merriment.

Black, a pseudonym for John Banville, the famous novelist, has told a gripping story whose tension never flags, and which has the ring of literary and historical truth, even though he made most of it up. He’s captured the timeless tale of a young man on the make, and this one’s so dazzled by the money, finery, and sexual favors on offer that he’s distracted from his task to solve the murder, a loss of focus that seems true to life. Christian has some leeway in that Rudolf’s easily distracted too, but that won’t last forever, and the mercurial emperor’s whims must be honored. Black has also re-created Prague in all its filth, lice, mud, grandeur, cruelty, and hardship, which puts you in the narrative and doesn’t let go.

The title comes from a remark by Kepler, who appears in a marvelous cameo, full of braggadocio and insight. He explains to Christian that if you bow a violin in precisely the wrong way — a remote likelihood for a skilled musician, yet still possible — you produce a sound like a wolf. What a perfect metaphor for Christian’s situation, potentially sublime yet fated to evoke a terrifying threat with only the slightest misstep. Black never lets his protagonist — or the reader — forget that.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Venetian Theatrics: Ascension

04 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: Ascension, by Gregory Dowling
St. Martin’s, 2015. 298 pp. $26

Alvise Marangon doesn’t know it yet, but he’s a perfect spy. He thinks he’s the perfect cicerone, who guides English tourists through his native mideighteenth-century Venice, showing them the architecture and history or the gaming tables and brothels, depending on their taste. Alvise even speaks fluent English, having spent many of his formative years in London, and he has a prodigious memory for useless facts guaranteed to fascinate the occasional British clergyman come to sneer at (and be secretly thrilled by) the popish decadence they think is Venice.

The return of the Bucentaur to the Molo on Ascension Day by Canaletto, 1730 (courtesy the Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Trouble is, cicerones don’t earn much, and though Alvise has developed a working partnership with Bepi, the gondolier with whom he splits his fees, he’s perennially short of cash. But he has two qualities in play from the first sentences of this beguiling, atmospheric thriller, and so long as he gives them free reign, adventure will never be far behind. To wit: Alvise shoots his mouth off and indulges his impetuous curiosity. And in Venice, where half the populace is watching the other half, those habits will get you in a heap of trouble, pronto, for the secret service is everywhere.

The story begins as Alvise and Bepi accompany two Englishmen to their hotel. The younger visitor is the proverbial wastrel, bent on losing his money at the gaming tables and in the fleshpots, whereas his companion, a tutor entrusted with his scholarly and moral education, is supposed to apply restraint. To Alvise, the pair seem typical of other visitors:

The young man looked amiable enough; he was gazing around at the scene with frank interest. Presumably all very different from the decorous orderliness of his home, where his mother would have bidden him farewell with a stately bow of the head and his father with a manly handshake. Here at Fusina, a family of Venetians were exchanging raucous shouts, hand-slaps, kisses and lively embraces with relatives who had crossed the lagoon to meet them. Gondoliers and servants in bright liveries were transferring parcels and trunks to waiting boats and yelling at one another for no apparent reason, and across the lagoon the towers and domes of Venice shimmered in the golden haze of spring sunlight. The scene appeared to fluster the tutor. . . .

And yet, appearances deceive. Rather quickly, Alvise senses that Shackleford, the tutor, has less than a passing familiarity with his profession, and that the visitors have come to Venice for a singular purpose other than sightseeing. Naturally, Alvise does his best to learn what they’re after, but when unknown intruders ransack the Englishmen’s baggage, and Shackleford disappears only to be found dead, the cicerone winds up in jail for his troubles. Since no Venetian sparrow falls without the knowledge (if not consent) of the secret service, they take a keen interest in the young tourist guide.

From then on, Alvise’s in for the ride of his life–and so is the reader. Dowling knows Venice intimately–he’s lived and taught there more than thirty years–so you can hear, see, smell, and taste the city in all its finery and decay. But there’s atmosphere, and then there’s atmosphere. The second-most important character in Ascension, after Alvise, is Venice, in its love of spectacle and gossip; intrigue around every corner; the delight in masks and concealment; the squalor, magnificence, and corruption. Dowling casts his Venice as a place where performers who know their role are the ones to succeed. Sure enough, Alvise has his theatrical gifts, which is why the secret service wants to talk to him.

But nothing comes easily, and “no; and furthermores” spring up like mushrooms. (Risotto con funghi, anyone?) From a forbidden, seditious book to a Rosicrucian cult to an eccentric nobleman nursing a grudge to a theater to the state shipbuilding apparatus, Alvise must bluff his way into and out of danger–and of course, getting in sometimes proves all too easy. But what he discovers is nothing less than a threat to the Serene Republic itself, timed to take place on the celebrations surrounding the Feast of the Ascension.

My only quibble about the novel is the nifty, not to say incredible, way in which Alvise escapes certain physical constraints. But I don’t think anyone will mind; I didn’t. Ascension is not only good fun, I note an undercurrent of political commentary that seems topical–the desire, in certain right-wing quarters, for strongman rule to create fear and respect among the “rabble.”

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Adventure on Ironbottom Sound: The Commodore

24 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Commodore, by P. T. Deutermann
St. Martin’s, 2016. 296 pp. $27

Ever wonder what it was like to command a U.S. Navy vessel in the South Pacific during World War II? Read this novel, and you’ll know.

It’s 1942, and Japanese land and naval forces are pressing the Marines dug in on Guadalcanal. The learning curve for the U.S. Navy, charged with maintaining and protecting that fragilely held Solomon Islands outpost, has been steep and costly. So many ships have been sunk that one sea lane has been nicknamed Ironbottom Sound. But Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey has been charged with winning the naval battle, and to do so, he’s assembled a task force and hand-picked his captains.

Cruiser U.S.S. Portland in dry dock for repairs in Australia after a naval battle off Guadalcanal, 1942 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia Commons)

Heavy cruiser U.S.S. Portland in for repairs in Australia after a naval battle off Guadalcanal, 1942 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia Commons)

Among them is Harmon Wolf, a Native American who, before the war, overcame bigotry to graduate Annapolis with a solid record, though his temper, as well as prejudice, have held back his career. For instance, Wolf once entertained notions of entering the Navy’s aviation program, but when a superior officer tossed a racial epithet his way, he tossed the officer through a window. That was deemed bad for business, but Bull Halsey likes aggressive punchers who’ll take the battle to the enemy, and Wolf promises to be that. Soon, he’s promoted to commodore, responsible for a squadron of destroyers.

The lone wolf is a well-worn cliché in military fiction, and by naming his protagonist as he does, Deutermann’s hardly subtle. Likewise, his prose is workmanlike at best (and sometimes repeats itself). Nevertheless, he does a good job portraying the naval mindset that Halsey and his protegés must struggle against. Wolf chafes against the military dictum that junior officers don’t challenge orders, because he senses that doing things by the book will only cause disaster. He quickly realizes that the Imperial Japanese Navy is much better than the office pen-pushers suppose–specifically, that the Japanese excel at night maneuvers; deploy more accurate, reliable torpedoes; have faster ships; and, most importantly, never fall for the same ruse twice. It’s as if the American brass have succumbed to their own propaganda about an inferior, incompetent enemy, a viewpoint that Wolf risks his reputation to correct.

Halsey is different, of course, and lucky for Wolf that he is, for Harmon’s plans don’t always work; as always in war, plans change almost immediately on contact with the enemy. Moreover, the Japanese score their victories too, which adds to the tension and makes The Commodore truer to life. The battle scenes in particular come across with intense vividness; Deutermann conveys what it’s like to be on the bridge or in a control room when high explosives fill the air, and he clearly knows his way around a warship:

J. B. King palpably jumped when the snipes opened the throttles and hit the turbines with a bolus of steam for fifty thousand horsepower. The forced-draft blowers screamed as they spooled up to feed fuel oil going into the fireboxes. King was the lead ship, so if the other two didn’t get the message, there was no danger of King driving over the top of a destroyer still loafing along at fifteen knots.

If you read The Commodore simply for the thrill of action or for a taste of the South Pacific Fleet, you’ll do fine, because you haven’t expected too much. The narrative could have assumed a whole extra dimension had Wolf connected the prejudice against himself with that against the Japanese–or, for that matter, the African-American stewards aboard ship–but Deutermann doesn’t care to go there. The Navy lingo can fly too thickly at times, with COMSOPAC and Div212 and the DRT in the CIC, and I’m still not sure what a Mike boat is. But those details don’t matter, and I’m not the kind of reader who throws a fit just because there’s a word I don’t understand. The action’s pretty clear, and that’s enough.

Also, Wolf’s outspoken way and maverick thought processes make him an agreeable companion, and Deutermann drops in the “no–and furthermore” device enough to keep you guessing. But he also undercuts the tension by having Halsey intervene, just when you think that Wolf has overreached once too often. And it’s no surprise when a pretty, willing nurse shows up, a war widow who seems to spend little time or energy mourning her late husband, another timeworn cliché.

For what it is, though, The Commodore makes the grade.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.