Today's Book Report

I just finished another Sharyn McCrumb mystery – this one from her Elizabeth MacPherson series. I’d only read her, sadly too short (two books) Jay Omega series (Bimbos of the Death Sun – SO FUN!), and was psyched to find another, possibly awesome, escapist batch ‘o’ books.

Gotta say, this main character is nowhere near as engaging and enjoyable – at least not in this particular book, set in Virginia, Highland Laddie Gone.

…amateur sleuth, Elizabeth MacPherson has the chance to revel in the rites of the old country at the annual Glencoe Mountain Games. But the innocent ethnic fair is cursed when the loathed Colin Campbell is found murdered. When a second reveler is found dead, Elizabeth lays to hunt and untangles all.

I’ve got some big-ass probs with the book. Fer instance:

• Most of the characters have been outlined with a brush so broad they make Randall Munroe’s xkcd  drawings look like stark, unadorned photorealism.
• The vast majority of the players, while not drooling idiots, are far from bright. If intelligence is in evidence, the person is conniving and/or cruel or just flat out clueless.
• All of the Mountain Games attendees, who profess great pride in their ancestral heritage, seem to have no actual knowledge of Scotland as a real place and show an incredibly dim grasp of the country’s history. Disney’s simpering, insulting and reductive takes on fairy tales and reality in general, come to mind.
  

Possibly McCrumb’s written these folks so thinly on purpose. Has she gone to events like this and been appalled by her fellow attendees? That old saw comes to mind:

Never piss off a writer. They will make you a character in their book, and make you die an awful death.

Yup, at least.

McCrumb’s Highland Games strike me more as a King Richard’s Faire sort of deal. Ya know, a fun, costumed weekend of play acting for, in this case, intensely vapid rich people. Interestingly, the sheriff investigating the murder is one of those Civil War Battle reenactors – another group mistaking fantasy for reality.

I’ve never been to a heritage festival. Sure, I’ve gone to Saint Anthony’s Feast in, what used to be, Boston’s Italian North End.

Begun in 1919, by Italian immigrants from the small town of Montefalcione in Avellino, Saint Anthony’s Feast has become the largest Italian Religious Festival in New England. Named the “Feast of all Feasts”

It wasn’t, for me, about celebrating my Italian ancestry or the religion I grew up in – it was about the pageantry, the bodacious people watching, wine and food.

Disappointed as I am, that this Highland tale and its characters aren’t anywhere close to being as fully realized as Bimbos’, I believe I’ll give McCrumb another shot. Besides, I already bought a used copy of The PMS Outlaws.

Hospitalized for depression over her missing husband, forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson is pleased to discover that insanity liberates one from polite hypocrisy.

Same protagonist as Highland Laddie but, hopefully, older, wiser and more than two dimensional.