New 06.25.05

Laurie R. King writes mysteries about Sherlock Holmes and a San Francisco police detective. She also writes about intriguing stories about people operating at the fringe for their own notion of what is right and what is wrong. She wrote a couple novels about a professorial type whose sideline was infiltrating religious cults in order to rescue people through benevolent kidnapping. Keeping Watch involves a character who appeared in an earlier book, Folly. Like the main character in Folly, Allen Carmichael, in Keeping Watch, is struggling to keep personal demons at bay. But his are the demons of memories of the war in Vietnam not bipolar demons that haunted the main character in Folly. A major part of the book is recollection of memories of being a soldier in that awful war. I can only judge by comparing King's recitation of truly horrible experiences to those written by veterans, but her account is believable. She had some good testimony to supplement her imagination and insight. I am grateful for the story even if it isn't first hand and even though it's so appalling. The literary skill King brings to the retelling is in her ability to create a parallel story of an abused child. What her character Carmichael does is help a shadowy underground railroad that identifies abused women and children, benevolently "kidnaps" them, and helps resettle them in a private victim protection program. The group also documents the abuse and hands the documentation to the abuser and the legal authorities to discourage pursuit by either. Carmichael has done everything from setting up surveillance cameras to document behavior to hiding "refugees" in his "station" on this underground railroad. This story revolves around taking a child from the home of an abusive father, but it wouldn't be much of a story if ended there. Things are not as straightforward or clear cut as they first appear. The Vietnam story mostly unwinds in the beginning of the book and the boy's story mostly unwinds in the second half, but they truly are parallel stories. Very well told parallel stories. The ending of the book is bit messy. It's sort of like the bass my mother-in-law caught when we were up at Sidetrack, that little cabin on Little Blake Lake. I rowed while she fished several times last summer. She's good. She feels the fish strike and she reels them in. The lake is full of little fish ã something has to feed the Muskies ã and she caught and released them by the dozens. When she finally caught a 15-inch large mouth bass, she was quite pleased. She cleaned the fish in the sink. This fish, which had not fought much when caught, had not flopped around at all in the boat, began flopping in the sink after being eviscerated (she wanted to leave the head on it so she could show it off to Nancy and David). The thing continued to flop and twitch as it was wrapped in aluminum foil and put in the refrigerator. Well, in Keeping Watch, very complex legal and moral issues were flopping about after the bad guy was in handcuffs and his partner in crime was dead from lawmen's bullets. There was a bit of resolution on a personal level, but practical, legal, and moral issues weren't addressed. King sort of wrapped things up in aluminum foil and put them in the refrigerator. Maybe there's another book in the works that will do a better job of actually dealing with the realities of the complex situation.

• A review from The Agony Column
• A Web page for Keeping Watch on the Laurie R. King site. This includes links to topics from the book like PTSD and Children of the Underground.