Author Archives: Jennifer Petty Hilger

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ by Richard Osman

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Oh, I wish there were a million more of his books. Instead, this far, there are only four in this series and one in the new series.

More to come, but who can wait when they are this good?

Osman is not only a maestro of the mystery but a comedy man. His characters are spot on cleverly written and usually hilariously so. 

Osman is a writer, who doesn’t assume the reader needs a long drivel of an explanation, so his brevity is flattering. We feel in on the joke when he describes someone.

The Thursday Murder Club is the first of this series and I’d never heard of it when I previewed the upcoming film. 

I immediately ran out for the book and was even more delighted. Each subsequent book was better but I begin here.

Four residents of Coopers Chase retirement community have formed a club. They each bring experience and a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ to the table when it comes to solving murders. This they do with alarming and hilarious alacrity, much to the consternation of the local constabulary. 

Osman’s gift is hiding the clues so well that you have no idea what’s coming. In the land of predictability you are blindsided every few chapters and it’s marvelous.

At first there is a murder at Coopers Chase. A builder and his henchmen are so busy swindling and bribing, they don’t realize they are being watched.

The Thursday Murder Club is going to get to the bottom of all this. Who is doing this killing? This bribing? Are they going to lose their homes? Oh no they are not!

If anyone thinks these four seemingly sweet, innocent, elderly people are what they seem, then they are in for quite the surprise. 

Watching these four — Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, Ron and their supporting cast — become friends is so heart-warming.

As cloying as it sounds, it’s such a good time to find a series of books that you can curl up with and just be happy in a world away from the world.

Jennifer Petty Hilger

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme.

She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West’ by Amy Gamerman

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Jennifer Petty Hilger

Even if it wasn’t the name of the mountain range in which the story takes place, it would be a great name for the people in this book. It’s a good story and thanks to a good storyteller, it makes a great book. That’s not, as we know, always the case so we’re lucky the right person sunk her  teeth into this.

Investigative prowess doesn’t always transfer from article to book but it does inThe Crazies. Amy Gamerman’s real-life talents as a reporter and writer for the Wall Street Journal helped her gather this information and transform it into a modern, western saga about trying to control the uncontrollable forces of nature with power and money. 

It serves us well as she weaves the stories, the real life sagas, of the past and present dramas of the people involved in one of the largest, craziest lawsuits in recent days. Oil tycoons, cattle farmers, ancient pioneers, regular struggling laymen, Hollywood celebrities, poachers … who isn’t involved? Everyone’s case holds some weight. 

If it’s my land, why the hell can’t I do what I want with it?  Rick Jarrett wants to harvest the ‘million dollar wind’ that blows through Big Timber,  Montana with 500 ft. turbines on his small parcel of land. “The wind that blew alike on the rich and poor had the power to make Rick Jarrett a wealthy man.”

His tycoon neighbors don’t want to look at these eyesore turbines. The hell with the townies and their right to make money off of their own land. 

Just because you have 80 bazillion dollars and don’t want to be staring at something ugly, why do you get to say no to it?  “I like people … I just don’t want to be around them,” said Russell Gordy, the owner of 155,000 acres of land he spent $96 million amassing. 

Many Hollywood celebrities, who have made Big Timber—the nearby town—their hideaway home, feel similarly. Much is at stake for the big-monied hermits, who have no interest in the locals and their poverty.

Additionally The Crazies are held sacred by The Crow, whose ancestors are, perhaps, the original indigenous people in North America. The first burial ground dating back between 12,707 and 12,556 years was found on a cliff west of The Crazies’ Walsall Peak. The remains of a child found with a stunning array of tools and objects were found in 1968. The DNA links the boy to a human, who lived 40,000 years ago near Beijing. He is the most ancient American ever discovered. The Crazies aren’t ill-named.

Nothing about this lawsuit and its participants is cut-and-dried and that’s what makes it a good story.

There is nothing new about the basic human desire for control—and money is rarely outvoted.

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Witchstone’ by Henry H. Neff

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Lazlo is an 800-year-old demon with a terrible work ethic, a movie star human ‘glamor’ and a wicked sense of humor. He’s selfish, lazy, snarky, maybe secretly kind of nice and in big trouble. His high-ranking, evil father is punishing Lazlo by making him work a thankless job in the devil’s bureaucratic offices. A Hell’s ‘“Hell,” if you will. 

While Lazlo runs up thousands of dollars in expense tabs doing nothing; he is supposed to be supervising the curse of a particular family; the Drakefords. 

The Drakeford Curse has been mutating the family with horrific outcomes since colonial times and Maggie, the current heir, is about to face ruin. Maggie is 19 and entering her darkest hours as a Drakeford. At the family compound in upstate New York, she is slowly transmogrifying. 

The Witchstone is an, as yet, unidentified totem at the center of what will unfold between Lazlo and the younger Drakefords. Lazlo , Maggie and young George, known as Lump, travel from upstate to New York City and then Europe. Lazlo takes the Drakefords in search of a way to break the curse. Or does he? Since he also tells his boss he specifically isn’t doing that. Then he tells someone else he might be thinking about, maybe not thinking of, not doing that. Smarmy to the last, we should definitely not trust a demon but we sorta do.

Demons from many sides intervene to stop the trio as they travel from fancy Italian hotel to cursed demon empress’s castle to holy church and every hell hole in between. Neff’s cast of demonic characters is unrivaled. I don’t usually root immediately for a movie to erupt from a book but this would be so great visually. Some of these creepy crawlers on the subway or tunneling underneath Central Park just scream for an agent. 

Best of all, the very end made me want a sequel—like a Bond flick with a forked tail.

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Life Impossible’ by Matt Haig

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Matt Haig has written some wonderful books.

I recommend The Midnight Library especially and I was pleasantly surprised to find something new in The Life Impossible. Many authors embrace a certain vein but Matt Haig takes a step further with each new book.

Seventy-two-year-old Grace Winters is ready to call it a day. She is a retired, widowed math teacher mourning the death of her only child 30 years ago. Nothing will change. How could it and why in God`s name would she want it to?

She has come to terms with her grief and her passionless existence until a letter arrives from a woman she cheered up one lonely Christmas in 1979. One Christina van der Berg has bequeathed Grace a house in Ibiza … Ibiza, Spain; what on earth?

While she is semi-upside-down having, “Minimally invasive, radio frequency-based vein ablation surgery”, Grace decides to go.

Through the format of a story told to a former student in an email, she tells us of her impossible new life.

It’s a wonderful, humorous, often lonely journey of putting one foot in front of the other. Grace is braver than she expects. She goes diving at night in a tie-dyed bathing suit! She finds a mysterious jar of sea water that fills itself. Finding herself talking to a goat she starts to question her sanity.

Alone in a new place she seeks out people who knew her friend Christina, to try to find out what happened. How and why did Christina die? How did she know it was going to happen? Many things seem unanswerable … but they are.

Nothing she is expecting is there. Nothing we can possibly expect is there. What she finds is more than unexpected. She finds connections to people, to a place, to an unearthly source of strength and consciousness and thought that will save Ibiza.

It saved Christina.

It will save Grace.,

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among Great White Sharks’ by Susan Casey

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I think it’s safe to write about sharks after Labor Day. I try not to do this earlier on in the summer for obvious reasons. It isn’t nice doing it early on. We all like sharks but we all like the beach too. I watched Jaws for the umpteenth time the other night and just thought, “Nope.”

Susan Casey appears to not have these thoughts. She is an editor and sports writer for outdoor magazines like Outside and Sports Illustrated. She was the editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. She has written extensively for Time, Esquire, and is the author of some great books.

She is brave. “Nope” probably isn’t in her vocabulary. She climbs and dives. She seeks adventure, especially in the water. She has explored the Mariana Trench among other exceedingly deep parts of the ocean. 

In November of 2000, she secured an invitation to travel to the Farallones islands west of San Francisco. The Farallones are a 211-acre archipelago 27 miles west of the city and the gathering spot for the largest congregation of Great Whites in the world each September through November. It is home to the Farallones White Shark Project led by Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle . 

Getting an invitation/permit wasn’t easy. Very few outsiders are allowed and initially she is only granted a US Fish and Wildlife media pass. But when they motor out in a whaler and come face to face with the sharks, she’s all in.

She will do whatever it takes to come back.  “… I lost track of time, crouched in the whaler’s scooped-out bow, bouncing from one railing to the other while the massive fish cruised under us like submarines; I could have kept it up, I think, forever.”

She travels to the nearby town of Port Reyes, to check in with Scot and Peter as often as she can and develops a friendship with the two men . There are conflicts with tourism operations and government operations.

People want to cage-dive, to see the “monsters of the deep” for themselves. People want to dive for abalone [highly-prized marine snails.] Other scientists are studying the birds on the islands. It has become a very complicated political /financial web to navigate.

In 2003 she gets a weeklong pass to stay if she writes an article about the birds. She agrees. Her accounts are scientifically fascinating. Detailed but not boringly so. Her personal stories are wonderful.

It takes a strong, colorful personality to survive on a poop-covered, man-eater-surrounded, cold, wet, isolated rock for months at a time. And, oh, there’s a ghost. (Susan immediately regrets bringing an antique ouiji board for example.) 

It should be an horrific, miserable, nasty experience but it’s not. It’s majestic. It’s ethereal. It’s incredible. 

Or to put it another way, to quote both the book and German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “ Every angel is terrifying.”

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.