Rachel Howzell Hall

I was looking for a new police procedural series to read and a friend recommended the Detective Elouise Norton series by Rachel Howzell Hall. This is the first of the, thus-far, four-book series.

Elouise (Lou) is an African-American LAPD homicide detective. She and her new partner Colin Taggert, a recent transfer from Colorado, investigate the death of 17-year-old Monique Darson who is found hanging in an unfinished condo complex. The complex is being built by Napoleon Crase, a man Lou show more suspects in the disappearance of her own sister thirty years earlier. Can Lou investigate the Darson case without bias? Can she find out the truth behind her sister’s disappearance?

Lou is the first-person narrator so we gather information as she does. The only advantage the reader has is some chapters told by the anonymous killer. Those chapters do give some clues, though mostly they suggest who he isn’t.

What will motivate me to return to the series is the character of Lou Norton. She is intelligent and high-spirited. She is told that on the street she is known as Lockjaw because “’Once you’re on a case, you don’t let go.’” Lou describes herself as “’sweet as apple pie’” but a colleague qualifies that description: “’Apple pie laced with arsenic and rusty razor blades.” She is respected by her colleagues because she is good at her job: “Not to brag, but I had solved 90 percent of the investigations I had led. Pretty good for a girl.’” Lou’s troubled relationship with her husband adds a personal subplot that will undoubtedly be developed further.

I especially love Lou’s irreverent sense of humour. She brags, “I could spot a fake Chanel handbag quicker than I could spot a hooker on fire.” She mocks her partner who concludes a suspect is a drug dealer with such certainty that “he folded his arms and nodded as though he’d just discovered Presbyterians on Uranus.” She mocks herself: “I was sweating like Kobe Bryant in Game 7 of the NBA finals against the Celtics and my reserve tank of patience had only three drops left.” She mocks witnesses who are not forthcoming, calling one a “’goddamned dingleberry’”, later explaining that a dingleberry is “’a piece of poop that sticks to ass hair.’”

I did have difficulty with some of the slang. For example, “strawberry” and “twink” and “chickenhead” had me checking a slang dictionary. There are numerous pop culture references; for instance, Lou tells one suspect, “’This ain’t a TV show and you ain’t Stringer Bell, so stop with the bad-ass-thug routine. You’re from Carson, son.’” An older man will be described as “’old enough to remember the last episode of M*A*S*H” or as someone who hasn’t smiled “since Cheers went off the air.” Some of the rap and hip hop references left me lost (KRS-One and Chuck D), and “Doin’ the Dougie”, meant nothing to me until I consulted Google.

I will definitely be checking out the other books in the series.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

Here's a detective to follow - an African American woman in LA, well respected by her co-workers and the brass, and this time she's caught quite an interesting case. When a Baldwin Hills home is set on fire and a mother and two children are killed, Elouise "Lou" Norton and her obnoxious loverboy white newbie partner get caught up in the mysteries of a heartland of the black bourgeoisie.

Snappy dialogue, great characters, Lou's funny quirks (everything she smells puts her off), and dangling show more ends of a not-quite-neatly-wrapped-up investigation make for a really enjoyable read, full of suspense and people you'd want to know. show less

Having been a bit of a fan of one of her earlier books - NO ONE KNOWS YOU'RE HERE - the chance to read LAND OF SHADOWS was gratefully accepted (courtesy of NetGalley). Set in Los Angeles, with another strong, flawed, believable and extremely likeable central female protagonist this writer has a fabulous way of making that world come alive. There's a strong sense of place, particularly in this book, set as it is in that sort of fringe world between deprived communities and incoming show more gentrification, stalled because of economic downturn and malaise. Add to that a couple of very different central protagonists - Lou Norton from the neighbourhood, a child from a difficult childhood, strong, flawed, resilient in many ways and vulnerable and self-destructive in others. The incoming cop - her new country boy partner - a bit of a fish out of water in the inner-city, somebody who has much to prove and not a lot of ideas on how to go about that.

Given she's the central character in this book, Norton holds up her end of the bargain very well. After her sister goes missing when they are children, she's spent her life and her career looking closely at the man she suspects was behind that disappearance. The fact that his name appears again in this latest murder gives her much to be wary of. Obsession can make a poor investigative tool and she's aware of that, whilst also utterly committed to finding what happened to her sister as well as this latest victim. She's also dealing with a serially unfaithful husband, and the implications that he has on her "happy ever after plans" once she finds out what did happen all those years ago.

She's a bundle of contradictions needless to say. Strong in the job, determined and quite forceful, she's a good mentor for the new cop on the block, albeit prickly and inclined towards sarcasm. Yet her home life, as luxurious and physically comfortable as it is, is a car crash. The fact that she stays anywhere near her husband might be a difficult dilemma for some readers to process.

Within the personal, and the interactions between the two central characters, there's a reasonable, slowish and very procedural investigation. The identification of the victim, the following up of her movements, the way her family operates, the connections between her family members, the past, the present, suspects, places and events all build a picture that eventually develops into a solution. Sure, some of these connections are predictable, and the creepy criminal voice lurking around the edges is a device that's been done to death, but much of that is carried by the strength of the characters and the by-play between Norton and Taggert and, in particular, her personal situation. There's some gentle poking of fun at all levels throughout this book. Norton doesn't take herself too seriously which really helps with some of the emotional turmoil, and the country boy daftness of Taggert never steps over the line into caricature.

Contradictions, inconsistencies and the personal and professional are part of what Hall explores with great precision in this novel. There's much in all of these characters that is required to add up to the whole. Part of what makes Norton a great cop is her compassion, her ability to see the grey, and her understanding that sometimes things aren't straightforward. Part of what makes these two characters feel like that should have a long, and very fruitful fictional life is the strengths, weaknesses and reality of both of them.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-land-shadows-rachel-howzell-hall show less

We still have a week of January left and this is the second book that I've abandoned. I feel like I should be giving an, 'It's not you, it's me' speech. Except it's not all me this time. Take a look at that cover. See where it says 'A Thriller'. That right there is the problem. I'm halfway through and I'm not feeling the thrill. Not even a little.

I can see that I should be and that, maybe, the last half of the book will suddenly become tense as the person or persons who are stalking our show more heroine finally take action beyond sending scary notes and threatening texts. I'll never know.

The thing I regret about setting this book aside is that I like Rachel Howzell Hall's writing. When I was a quarter of the way through 'These Toxic Things', I was having fun, mainly because of how well Mickie Lambert, the heroine of the story, was described. Her whole experience of life was so different from my own and I don't know anyone like her yet I found her very credible.

The thing that surprised me most is her relationship with her family. She's a grown woman, a college graduate a few years into a job with a start-up in an interesting field yet her baseline expectation is that, whatever happens, her family will take care of her. She breaks up with her lover, who is also her boss and she moves back home to mum and dad. She gets threatening messages and thinks she's being followed, she asks her father and her uncle (OK, they're cops) to fix it. Her relationship with her family is enviable but also feels juvenile. The degree to which she expects to be protected astonishes me. She seems to have led an incredibly sheltered life. She expects to be loved and she expects things to work out OK in the end.

Mickie has a strong tendency to romanticise her life, to turn everything into a story and usually a story in which everything is sweet and nice and people are good even if bad things do happen. She's been clever enough to turn this way of looking at the world into a job for herself. She 'curates' memories related to objects and places and people and stores them in a digital Memory Box. I know this idea would sell but I hated it as soon as I heard it. It's a turn-your-life-into-a-Hallmark-movie-with-you-as-the star approach that turns me off.

At the start of the book, I thought this was all good. I assumed that, when the toxic things promised by the title turned up, Mickie's worldview would be shattered, she'd discover that she's vulnerable to the nasty things in life and it would either break her or make her stronger. There are some good hints that her family know more than they're saying and it seems likely that Mickie is being pursued by two dangerous people, at least one of whom is a serial killer.

How can I walk away from all that? Well, because nothing is happening. I'm waiting for Little Red Ridinghood to meet the wolf but the wolf hasn't shown. And Mickie's groundless optimism and endless romanticisation alternating with complete panic when under any kind of pressure are beginning to irritate me. I'm starting to wonder if I'd end up cheering the wolf.

I'm six hours and a half hours into the audiobook. There are six more hours to go. I could almost read another whole book in that time. So, it's bye-bye Mickie. I hope your family can protect you from the monsters when they finally arrive - unless, of course, they are the monsters. show less