Shelf Life

Author: Jane Simon Ammeson

  • Bad Moon Rising: A Heidi Kick Mystery

    Bad Moon Rising: A Heidi Kick Mystery

             Bad Axe County has seen some bad days, but this may be the worse as Heidi Kick, former beauty queen and now sheriff learns that the medical examiners have determined that the homeless man recent found dead, had been buried alive.

             Even for Kick, who is pretty tough having survived the murder of her parents years earlier and the savage world of beauty competitions, this case is exceptionally hard. Being buried alive has always been one of her worst fears.

             So begins “Bad Moon Rising” In John Galligan’s third book in his Bad Axe County. Set in rural Wisconsin, Kick is grappling with her own fears and unresolved issues as more and more bodies are discovered. That’s not all that’s facing Kick. Married to a former standout local baseball player, she’s the mother of three young children and is up for re-election. Some people think she should be home with her children and start spreading lies about here.

             Galligan, who teaches writing at  Madison College in Wisconsin,  is also the author of the Fly Fishing Mystery series. Describing  Wisconsin as his favorite place to be, he also knows the culture of some of its more rural towns. Bad Axe County is fictional carved out by Gallaher between two real counties.  He doesn’t shy away from writing about some of the prevalent issues facing rural areas and how they impact his characters.

             “The region’s beauty and its challenges fascinate me,” he says. “There are hundreds of miles of spring creeks where wild trout still thrive. At the same time factory farms and sand-fracking outfits are moving in, and climate change is having a devastating impact.” There’s also meth to contend with and those who are so set in their ways they can’t accept a woman as a sheriff. In his books, he uses real situations to show what Kick is dealing with.

             Galligan also sees the closeness of such communities as well.

             “Neighbors look out for each other,” he says.  “You can find a pancake breakfast or a brat fry on any day of the week. People both leave and stay with equal degrees of passion.”

             This realistic look at the fictional Bad Axe County shows us why Kick remains despite everything.

             Country girls, says Galligan, can hunt, fish, shoot, get great grades in school, and be good at just about everything. That’s the kind of heroine he’s given us in this series.

  • The Photographer

    The Photographer

    If Delta Dawn, an elite New York society photographer, doesn’t see beauty she creates it as well as her own version of reality. A whiz with photo editing tools, she can create the scenes she wants to convey.  A scowling child. No problem, she can turn that into an adoring smile. A cold and aloof family. There are ways to manipulate the bodies in the pictures she takes to bring them closer together, soften their stiffness, and turn them into a lovely and loving family to be envied.

    Mary Dixie Carter by Beowulf Sheehan

              But that envy overtakes Dawn in The Photographer, Mary Dixie Carter’s mystery-thriller when she is hired to do a photo shoot of successful architects Amelia and Fritz Straub and their 11-year-old daughter, Natalie. A catty observer, Dawn quickly sums up situations—and others—quickly. Amelia, she  quickly notes when they first meet, despite being striking with a magnetic personality isn’t  as pretty as she is.  Her breasts aren’t as large, nor is her waist as small, and she’s at least ten years older. Dawn immediately prices Amelia’s Montcler coat as costing more than $2000. Then there’s Amelia’s handsome husband with his amazing green eyes. And let’s not forget their wonderful house.

              Seduced by what she sees, Dawn immediately sets about immersing herself into their life, volunteering to babysit. She soon has access to the house—drinking their wine, bathing in their tub, becoming good friends with Amelia and sending out seductive vibes to Fritz.

              “Several years back, I hired a photographer to take pictures of my two children,” Carter wrote in answer to questions I emailed to her. “The pictures came back, and they were beautiful, but my children’s eyes in the photos were cobalt blue, not their actual color. ‘I want my children’s eyes to be their real color,’ I said. She responded: ‘There is no real color.’ That sentence stuck with me. I started to think about the psychology behind that idea: There’s no real color, there’s no real anything. Delta Dawn doesn’t feel restricted to the reality of the situation. She alters an image to make it what she needs it to be.”

              This is the first book for Carter, who graduated from Harvard with honors and previously worked as an actress.  Though she says she’s not a good photographer, she took classes in both photography and photo editing while writing the book.

              “I learned enough so that I understand some of the basic concepts,” she says. “I did a good deal of research on photo editing and the various ways in which one can alter pictures of people.”

              When it came to her characters, Carter let them evolve as she wrote including Dawn.

              “I didn’t want her to edit herself,” she says. I wanted her to go as far as possible.”

  • The Panic Button Book: Press Now!

    The Panic Button Book: Press Now!

    Tammi Kirkness

             We’ve all been there. A deadline looming and your computer decides to go rogue. You call about a wrong charge on an account, our rooted around the world and back, repeating your story to four or five different people and then after waiting on hold for an hour are cut off. You run into a high school frenemy and find out s/he just signed a multi-million deal to a book about those high school days and how mean everyone was—giving you a knowing look.

             And that’s just the small stuff. But Tammi Kirkness has you covered when you’re hit with high stress situations. An Australian based life coach and wellness consultant as well as an international speaker, specializes in working with people who grapple with high functioning anxiety. That typically refers to those who seem to function well but are often overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy, are sure something bad is going to happen, compare themselves negatively to others, and tend to be workaholics and perfectionists. 

    To overcome anxieties, Kirkness incorporates well-researched and proven psychological treatments and Eastern techniques of reducing anxious states such as meditation and breathing from our core, sharing her insights in her extremely easy to use book, “The Panic Button Book: Relieve Stress and Anxiety Whenever They Strike” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2020; $15.99).

             Kirkness has many characteristics of someone with high-functioning anxiety.

             “A big part of my journey was working way too hard, being a perfectionist and putting way too much pressure on myself,” she says.

             Not only wasn’t it good in the short time nor could she keep it up for a long time.

             “There are things that we can do to help calm down our nervous system and still create success with sustainability,” says Kirkness. “I think taking time to pause and do some soul searching is generally the first step.”

             Other components include learning to take deep breaths which are calming and relaxing. Journaling—putting your thoughts down on paper—and meditating (there are free online apps for that) also make a difference. But what I found most useful about the book were the Decision Trees Kirkness developed.

             Dividing the book into sections, she covers Living and Working, Socializing, Relationships, and Parenting. Each has related scenarios such as “Do you have a difficult conversation coming up,” “Do you feel your partner is taking more than giving?” and “Are you not reaching your own expectations?” Then on the opposite page are the techniques you can take to help.

             As an example, one decision tree starts with the question “Are you trying to make something perfect?” Her two-step activity to counteract the need for get something done is to remind yourself that done is better than perfect. The second is to establish a clear timeline on finishing such as I’m giving this another 40 minutes and then I’m sending it in.

             Not all are simple two-steps like the above, but all are designed to provide relief from the immediate anxiety of situations and produce feelings of being more in charge of your emotions.

  • Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing

    Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing

           “This isn’t getting the work of the world done,” my mother would announce to no one in particular whenever she had sat for more than a few minutes.  Whatever the work of the world was—and I never quite figured it out– since my mom had a full-time job, grew roses, looked after my grandmother who lived next door, took Judo classes, cooked Julia Child-style dinners, and co-led my Girl Scout Troop, it certainly meant she couldn’t sit around

           If only mom had met Olga Mecking, author of Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2021; $11.58 Amazon price).

           Niksen isn’t about getting the work of the world done. Indeed, it’s not about any work at all. Instead, niksen is doing nothing, according to Mecking. And no that doesn’t mean vegging out on the couch watching the entire last season of “Homecoming” or reading posts on Facebook.

    “It is doing nothing without a purpose,” she says. “I believe we’ve forgotten how to do things just because, not without any larger purpose like becoming healthier. We run or walk because we want to reach a certain number of steps and not because it feels good. The same way, we can do nothing because it feels nice and not because it will offer us certain benefits–even if it might.”

    Mecking, the mother of three children, who lives in the Netherlands and works as a translator and freelance writer, says doing nothing comes naturally to her.

    “As a child, I loved sitting around in my father’s favorite armchair and just daydreaming,” says Mecking. whose article on niksen in the New York Times garnered 150,000 shares in just a few days after it was published indicating an embrace of the concept.  “But since I became a mom, it became really hard to do nothing. But I also realized that I niks around quite a lot even if these are in-between moments like when I’m waiting for my kids to come home or taking the tram on the way to run some errands. So maybe I don’t have many long stretches of time. but I do have many short moments – enough to do nothing.”

    Not me. I often find myself repeating my mother’s phrase.  Though I continue to wonder what the work of the word really entails, I know that it won’t get done if I’m sitting. I ask Mecking, if I’ll ever be able to shed my past and be able to niks?

       “It can be very hard, and I think especially for women, it can be even harder,” says Mecking about the struggle to just do nothing. “Simply because we do more work that’s unpaid and unsatisfying. Men protect their own free time and women protect men’s free time and kids’ free time, but no one protects the free time of women.”

       But there’s hope.

       “I think it would help us to re-frame doing nothing and to think of it as something valuable,” she says. “For example, if you can tell yourself that if you do nothing now then you can do better work later on, that’s already a big step. If we can learn to value niksen and downtime and taking time off the same way as we value work that would be great.  We can try reframing doing nothing and describe it as something that we need, like food or water. Think about it. Our bodies can’t work all day long without a break, no? The same way, our brains can’t either. It is impossible to expect people to be working with their brains all day long, be it at work or at home.”

           But whether you can niks or not niks, it’s okay says Mecking.

       “Sometimes it just doesn’t work,” she says. “Maybe it won’t work for you. It doesn’t mean that you’re a loser. You have to find a way to relax that works for you, and if that’s doing nothing then awesome, but if that’s going for a run that is great too! But if you want to try niksen, start slow, and take a look at how you spend your time. You might find that you do more nothing that you realize.”

  • Untitled post 2419

    Several decades ago, George Saunders and his wife were visiting Washington D.C. when their cousin mentioned that anecdotal evidence indicated President Abraham Lincoln had surreptitiously visited the tomb of his 11-year-old son, Willie.

    For years, the story of Lincoln, so overcome by grief, that he stole into the monument where his son was interred, nagged at the edges of Saunders’s mind. But Saunders, who teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University, had never written a novel and besides his writing was mostly satirical in nature.

    “But this material has been calling me all these years,” says Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House 2017; $28). “It’s like their story was a stalker, it kept showing up at my window and it needed to get out.”

    Justifying his foray into a new literary form by telling himself he’d had a nice run regarding his career—Saunders is an acclaimed short story writer who is included in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people the world, he decided why not try “this Lincoln thing.”

    Saunders still had doubts about his ability to tell the story in the way the way it needed to be told. But having grown up in Chicago as part of a devout Catholic family and now having adapted some of the tenets of Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition, he has written a book that though just recently released is already garnering great reviews.

    Bardo is a Tibetan concept–a kind of transitional zone says Saunders.

    “We’re all in the bardo right now that goes from birth to death,” he says, noting that Buddhists would call these transition stages reincarnation and noting that the book takes place just after that, in the bardo that goes from death to whatever comes next. “Now is the time to live–knowing that death is coming—if we can accept ourselves as a mess.”

    With all his research, Saunders has come to see how Lincoln persevered despite the immense weight of the Civil War, the deaths of so many Americans and that of his son as well.

    “We had a president back then who bent,” he says, “when others would have broken.”

  • Good Neighbors

    Good Neighbors

    There goes the neighborhood.

    Set in a town on Long Island not unlike the one where she grew up. Sarah Langan’s  Good Neighbors, an Amazon Best of February Pick, is formatted like a sociological study exploring a crime that happened in the past.

    “My roots are in horror and I thought about making this a slasher book,” says Langan, who projects normalcy despite having written award winning horror novels.  “But that seemed too simplistic for a book about our culture and themes like mob mentality.”

    Photo credit David Zaugh.

    But the foreboding of horror books is prevalent here as we watch the neighbors on Maple Street turn on the Wildes, the newest family on the block.

    It all begins with the falling out between two moms—beautiful, compliant and overwhelmed Gertie Wilde, an abused child grown into a beauty queen who is married to a once-almost famous rock and roller named Arlo. Their two kids have issues too. Julia’s vocabulary is profane but even more oddly, their son seems to believe he’s a robot. That’s quite a contrast with Rhea, an ultra-successful academic who seems to have the perfect everything—job, husband, and family that seems typical of all the families in the neighborhood.

    The Wildes want to fit in but if there’s an unwritten rule book about how to act and what to say, they don’t have a copy and their differences set them apart from everyone else. But beyond that, climate change is wreaking havoc adding its own sinister atmosphere to Maple Street when a huge toxic sinkhole opens up in the neighborhood’s  green space. But this is no ordinary gap in the ground.  Instead it’s an ever growing  malevolent force taking over the neighborhood. Evil, it first sucks up a family dog and then Rhea’s daughter who gets too close.

    “Most horror writers are gentle people who are outraged at how people are treated and what is going on in the world,” says Langan.

    For Langan, that outrage in Good Neighbors focuses on climate change and the toxicity of neighborhoods that occurs when people treat those who are different unkindly.

  • The Hunting Wives: The Ultimate in Girl’s Night Out

    The Hunting Wives: The Ultimate in Girl’s Night Out

                Southern belles behaving badly is the premise of The Hunting Wives, May Cobb’s new mystery-thriller about an elite circle of wealthy women in a small Texas town. Every clique has its queen bee and in this privileged hunt club it’s the oil-rich, manipulative, and magnetic Margot Banks who leads the group who are doing much more than just shooting skeet. The club’s other activities include downing pitchers of mojitos and martinis, barhopping, and indulging in serious flirtations. The defining membership rule drills down to the basic what happens amongst club members stays within the club. After all, they’re all happily married—wink, wink.

    May Cobb

                Sophie O’Neill, a life-style journalist from Evanston, Illinois, is struggling to adjust to small town life and being a full-time mother when she’s invited to go skeet shooting and then to join the club. At home, she has an adorable young son and an equally adorable—and adoring– husband, but she’s restless and looking for something though she doesn’t know what. It doesn’t take long before she’s adopted the club’s values including Margot’s penchant for handsome, hunky, and much younger men.

                Soon, she’s lying to her husband and coming home way too late. But that’s not the worst of her problems. When a young woman is found dead on the grounds of Margo’s large lakeside second home where the club members meet, Sophie becomes the number one suspect.

                “There women are very complicated and messy,” says Cobb in what is a major understatement.

    Cobb, who lives in Austin, Texas, returned to her home state after graduating with an MA in Literature from San Francisco State University and working in Hollywood for Rob Shelton, a writer and director known for such movies as Bull Durham, Bad Boys II, Tin Cup, and Cobb. She says the inspiration for this novel came about when driving the back roads of Texas and listening to her mother tell a story about her high school days when some rich boys invited her to their hunting club.

    “They sat on their cars and shot little rabbits and I thought this could go so wrong,” says Cobb. Sophie and Cobb have other similar characteristics besides both being young mothers.

    “There’s a fair amount of Sophie in me, the restless part,” she says. “I don’t know if that’s the writer in me but there’s a part of me that wants to move places and do things.”

    But Cobb, realizing that her days of going out to bars and listening to music were over at least for the time being, didn’t join a hunt club but instead started writing. It was a good choice as the book has already received great reviews.

    “I really did have a blast writing the book,” she says. “I wanted to write a story about obsession and how a person’s life goes off the rails.”

    Cobb, who thrived on mysteries like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys when growing up, didn’t plot the book but instead let it evolve as she wrote. Sometimes she was surprised by the twists and turns of her story line and what her characters did.

    “Stephen King says that he doesn’t plot as he believes the story is already out there and we just have to tell it,” she says. “I really tried to get into Sophie’s head and feel her boredom and that’s what drove her to make the decisions.”

    Whenever Sophie is faced with making a decision, she opts for the bad. She’s oblivious, at least at first, to all the conniving and lying going on around her until finally realizing, as her marriage breaks down and more people associated with the club are found dead, that she’s being set up to take the fall for the real murderer.

  • Hour of the Witch

    Hour of the Witch

    Bewitchingly beautiful with delft blue eyes, porcelain skin and blonde hair, Mary Deerfield has a handsome, wealthy husband, a lovely house, and bruises on her face that she tries to hide under her linen cap. Thomas, her husband, is almost twice her age and given to drunken rages, particularly as time goes on and Mary does not become pregnant.

    Mary’s parents are respected and well-to-do but can’t protect their daughter. There are no organizations to help battered women, no social workers or psychologists to dispense advice, nor can Mary just leave her home, move to another city and get a job. After all, this is Boston in 1662, and women have few, if any, rights. Ironically, Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the 21st century, was back then the kind of place where they burned women as witches.

    “Hour of the Witch,” Chris Bohjalian’s well-researched and chilling new novel, takes us into a past where, just by trying to exercise her independence and desire to lead her own life, a woman could be castigated as a witch.

    “When we think of New England’s history of hanging people for witchcraft, we beeline straight to Salem in 1692,” said Bohjalian, a New York Times bestselling author of 22 books whose works have been translated into 35 languages and three times made into movies. “But in 1656, the governor of Massachusetts had his own sister-in-law hanged as a witch. And the first real witch hunt was Hartford in 1662 — three full decades before Salem. One thing many of the women executed as witches had in common was that they were smart, opinionated, and viewed as outsiders; sometimes, they saw through the patriarchal hypocrisy that marked a lot of New England Puritanism.”

    Mary puts up with a lot; after all, she has little choice. But when Thomas drives a three-tined fork into her hand, she’s had it and files for divorce. Bohjalian said he was looking for a way into writing a suspense novel about the 17th century and found it when he came across the records of a woman named Nanny Naylor in the 1600s who successfully sued for divorce and won.

    “I was off and running,” he said.

    Bohjalian enjoyed studying Puritan theology at Amherst College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.

    “Puritans lived with anxiety and dread — just like me,” he said. “Of course, for them, Satan was as real as your neighbor and they fretted constantly over whether they were saved or damned. My anxieties were more of the 1980s ‘Breakfast Club’ sort.

    “I think ‘Hour of the Witch’ is very timely for a novel set in 1662,” he said. “And that was by design. When a magistrate on Boston’s all-male Court of Assistants calls my heroine, Mary Deerfield, ‘a nasty woman,’ I knew the reference would not be lost on my readers. Now, I never want to write polemics, but yes, there is a political undercurrent to the novel that will resonate.”

    Bohjalian said it wasn’t difficult getting into the Puritan mindset.

    “If you’re the sort of person who always questions your motives and has a healthy dollop of self-loathing, it’s actually rather easy,” he said.

    What, of all the research he did, surprised him the most?

    “The fact the Puritans didn’t use forks and drank beer like they were at fraternity parties in 1978,” said Bohjalian. “Their table manners must have been atrocious.”

    This review previously ran in the Times of Northwest Indiana.

  • The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Chicago Cubs

    The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Chicago Cubs

             Carrie Muskat, who started covering the Chicago Cubs in 1987, has written The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Chicago Cubs (Triumph Books 2021; $16.95).

             “Really there are more than 50 moments because it was hard to limit them so it’s 50 plus,” Muskat tells me in an early morning phone interview. “I always say I’m bad at math.”

    Totally immersed in baseball and the Cubs, Muskat’s latest book has an introduction by Anthony Rizzo, the first baseman for the Chicago Cubs and a three-time All-Star who in 2016 helped the Cubs win their first World Series title since 1908. Her other books include Banks to Sandberg to Grace: 5 Decades of Love & Frustration with Chicago Cubs.

    Carrie Muskat

    Described as “the perfect primer for new Cubs fans and an essential addition to a seasoned fan’s collection,” the book recounts the living history of the team and features such greats as Ryne Sandberg, Ron Santo, Anthony Rizzo, and Ernie Banks among others.

     Muskat, who has conducted numerous interviews with players, at times takes a different approach in her book by not only relying upon her own interactions but also by talking to people who worked behind the scenes about the moments included in  The Big 50. It was a way to gain a new perspective on some of the players such as Sammy Sosa that she knew so well.

    “I talked to broadcaster Craig Lynch about Pat Hughes, the radio play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs and got his insights,” she says, as a way of giving an example.

    In some ways, the those decades covering the Cubs was like being part of a large family.  In her time writing about Major League Baseball—she started in 1981—Muskat says she’s watched players like Kerry Woods, the two-time All Star former Cubs pitcher who is now retired, grow. The same goes for Anthony Rizzo.

    “I’ve enjoyed talking to people’s families, like Anthony’s, just talking about things,” she says. “I covered Shawon Dunston and then his son.”

    In her book, Dunston shares his insight on Andre Dawson in Moment 16 of  titled “The Hawk.” Dunston recalls having a locker between Dawson and Ryne Sandberg, who he describes as the quietest guys in the world. “Combined, they didn’t say more than 20 words a day, and I’m not exaggerating.”

    At the time, Dunston says he was “talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.” But by being between them, he learned to be quiet and think about the game before the game. “I learned how to be a professional because of Andre Dawson and Ryne Sandberg.”

    These scenes from the book support Muskat’s contention that players are really just people.

    “That’s one of the biggest things,” she says. “Even if they’re superstars, they’re just people when you get to know them.”

    There have been changes. Reporters used to sit in the dugout but not anymore.

    “It’s not as relaxed,” she says. “My favorite time is spring training which is more relaxed.”

    Muskat is freelancing now but she still is on the sports beat.

    “There’s always a story, every player has one,” she says.

  • Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

    Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

    Lauren Hough’s parents were members of The Children of God, so she told people they were missionaries instead of belonging to that infamous cult. A student at a conservative Catholic High School, she hid her sexuality. As a member of the U.S. Airforce she visited gay bars using the name Ouiser Boudreaux, taken from the character Shirley MacLaine played in “Steel Magnolias” so that no one on the base would learn her real identity—and sexual orientation.

    In other words she was always someone she wasn’t, trying to be what others expected of her.

    “I’d learned to survive by becoming what they wanted me to be, as best I could,” Hough writes in her collection of essays, “Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing.” “And when I couldn’t, I hid, erasing those parts of me that offended.”

    The collection includes an essay she wrote for HuffPost titled “I Was a Cable Guy.” I Saw the Worst of America” which went viral. One reader reached out to Hough to tell her how much she liked it. That person was Academy Award winner, Cate Blanchett. The two struck up a friendship and when “Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing,” Hough texted her to ask if she would read several of book’s eleven essays.

    “Surreal is also a good word to being able to text Cate and ask her is she’s ever considered doing an audiobook,”  says Hough describing the entire experience not only of partnering with Blanchett in producing the audiobook but her life’s journey and how she ended up as a published writer corresponding with a movie star. As for Blanchard, she said yes.

    “My conversations with Lauren over the last several years have been honest, raw, and sidesplittingly funny, and I treasure her friendship and penmanship beyond measure,” she writes.

    Hough says she wrote many of her essays in the dark, just hoping to connect, if only to yourself. Growing up, her family had moved frequently, and she lived in seven countries including Switzerland, German and Ecuador, and Texas just to name a few placed, experienced violence and been abused. In adulthood, she’d worked a series of jobs—bartending, bouncer in a gay bar, livery driver, U.S. Airman, barista, and, of course, a cable installer.

    Describing Hough as having hypnotic power as a storyteller, Blanchett says when she spoke Hough’s words in the audiobook that in “speaking her words, I truly understood the rhythmic heartbeat alive in every phrase. Aching to connect. Aching to be heard.”

    In her long search for belonging and being connected, Hough’s writings seem to have forged the connectiveness she sought.