The Heavens May Fall by Allen Eskens

Just finished this, my 3rd Eskens book and absolutely enjoyed it.  I would recommend reading these from the beginning because of some of the characters who flow through.  Published in 2016, 298 pages, this is my favorite so far. This is a very good twister, in that just when I thought I had something figured out there was another turn.  I am enjoying Eskens because he writes in a way that draws me in, I find myself trying to solve the crime and sift the nuances, very engaging.  This story begins with the result and then  retreats to tell the story.  

Back cover

The opening paragraph, "The courtroom had fallen quiet, the judge's words lost behind a low hum that droned in Max Rupert's ears.  Max reached for his water glass, a waxy paper cup on the rail of the witness stand.  It lifted empty and light.  He didn't remember drinking the last of his water.  He paused, the empty cup halfway to his lips, unsure what to do next.  Pretend to take a drink?  Put the cup back down on the rail?"  Max Rupert, the detective,  is angry with his former friend Boady Sanders, who has returned as a defense attorney now for the defendant, Ben Pruitt on trial for the murder of his wife, Jennavieve.  Their friendship is now no more, the lines have been drawn and crossed.  Boady has not taken a client case since the death of an innocent client but comes out of his  retirement professor job to help an old colleague  Pg. 10, "He found an empty conference room, a space the size of a jail cell,  where attorneys fed false hopes to clients, a room where desperation clung to the walls as thick as grease in a fast food restaurant."  .  

Pg 15, "No, Kenwood was a neighborhood that prided itself on living well and peacefully, a neighborhood that liked to be left alone."  This is the neighborhood where the Pruitts lived.  

Pages 140-141, The title of the book comes from the Latin, "Fiat justitia ruat caelum" meaning let justice be done thought the heavens may fall.  It is a phrase Boady uses in an Ethics lecture.   " If a person is ever presented with that choice, that person must always do what is right even though it may bring on great personal loss."

Page 153, Chapter 30 begins, "There is a fog that can infect a person's brain, a thick, feverish sludge that engulfs sound and thought with an effect similar to being submerged in a tub of water. Max  had experienced this fog after his wife died.  He visited it once again the week his brother died,..."  I read and felt perhaps Max was not as rational as astute  right now, still suffering pangs of losing his wife.  

Page 177, "Boady would have returned the gesture in kind.  Winning had everything to do with knowing the case better than your opponent and nothing to do with feathers ruffling."  , 

I honestly had no idea how this novel would end, I felt that Ben Pruitt, the defendant was innocent that he  could not have killed his wife, that the cops got it wrong, Max was wrong.  Boady also believed Pruitt who had been a very successful defense attorney.  Boady agrees to represent him because he believes in Pruitt.  Because Max arrested Pruitt and is convinced he killed his wife although the alibi seems solid, Boady and Max are opposite each other.  By page 277, when the events twist and turn and turn again I never saw it coming.  Nor did I expect the ending that  happened.  This to me is a perfect mystery, written by someone very familiar with investigations.  

Pages 216-217 return back to the start of the book with Max on the witness stand.  

An excellent intrigue,  another 5 *****..  

2 novels, The Life We Bury and The Guise of Another both by Allen Eskens

Author Allen Eskens at La Crescent library

This is unusual to combine 2 novels in one post, but in April, Allen Eskens, local MN author, and new to me,  visited La Crescent and  spoke at the library.  It was by far the best talk by an author that  we have enjoyed locally, although I always enjoy meeting authors and learning about them and their writings. This was in the mid afternoon and the crowd was there, packing our small space inside the library, mostly all retired women who mostly had  had read his books previously.  I wondered why retired men do not read, but in our house Jerry prefers to do other activities and has never been the book reader like me.  The week before I was in Sam's Club and noticed "The Life We Bury" which I purchased  because I knew I would be hearing the author soon.  I did not have time to read the book before meeting him, but just out of curiosity I did read the first few pages, and I could not wait to get to it.  I was finishing another book.     Allen talked about his tendencies to daydream finally proving worthwhile as an author, how he was a below average student until he was introduced to drama and acting by an astute teacher.  A Catholic school boy from Nebraska who now lives in MN and had a previous career as a successful criminal defense attorney, he attributes his success to daydreaming, a habit he still has which keeps him taking copious notes about characters as  thoughts run through his mind.  Very interesting and then his success and sense of awe being in the same room with authors like David Baldacci,  etc.  

First novel published 2014

Well I sat there listening to him and thinking, "great just what I need another author whose books I will be buying" and thinking about my over full shelf of books I already have to read, but oh well, as he explained one novel a year is about his limit and how he tries to write about what he knows, how some of his life experiences make their way into the novels, and how he never set out to be an author nor to write a detective crime series but that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th novels just flowed that way featuring the detective Max Rupert, who actually appears at the end of The Life We Bury, his first novel.  What a great novel, and certainly not one I would have ever been  exposed to were it not for this appearance.  We learned that it is currently under consideration for film, aka movie production.  It was amusing when Allen said that once a book rights are sold to a film production company it becomes like selling your used car, you relinquish all rights and decisions to the film company.  His analogy of seeing your former car come down the street with painted fins and teeth was humorous as were several of his revelations about going to New York as a recognized author and meeting authors of renown, James Patterson, etc or merely being in the same room.  

Back cover, 300 pages paperback

Well, I knew I would want to read more than one of his novels and so was glad I brought cash along as he had a few books for sale and would autograph them, as well as any that we had previously purchased, like mine which I had also taken along for my walk up town.   I like to support authors who take the time to go out and talk with people.  So here I am with Allen Eskens and if you notice cash in my hand, ready to buy a few more books from him, sheesh I never realize how short I am until I see me in photos, although he is about 6 foot tall!  I am a midget!  Enough of my introduction.  The Life We Bury is a great mystery novel, a different perspective and I can appreciate how he has been awarded the Best Debut Mystery by the Left Coast Crime Rosebud Award, the 2015 Edgar Award Finalist for Best First Novel which got him to New York to meet the who's who of mystery writers, ITW Thriller Award Finalist for Best First Novel and the MN Book Award Finalist for Best Genre Novel.   Of course I had him autograph my books, and I really thought I would add them to my collection but I am determined to downsize.  I will be sending them along to a  longtime friend from CA, who reads vociferously too and now lives in NC, he will enjoy these..  

The opening to the Life We Bury draws a reader immediately, " I remember being pestered by a sense of dread as I walked to my car that day, pressed down by a wave of foreboding that swirled around my head and broke against the evening in small ripples.  There are people in this world who would call that kind of feeling a premonition, a warning from some internal third eye that can see around the curve of time.  I've never been one to buy into such things.  But I will confess that there have been times when I think back to that day and wonder: if the fates had truly whispered in my ear--if I had known how that drive would change so many things--would I have taken a safer path?  Would I turn left where before I turned right.  Or would I still travel the path that led me to Carl Iverson?"  These are the thoughts of Joe Talbert, the main character and this novel is written in the first person, Joe is on his way to University of MN, to complete college despite everything against him all his life.  His mother is a no account alcoholic who tends to blame her sons for her difficult life, he leaves behind his 18 year old autistic brother Jeremy, but events will change that. Interesting that Allen Eskens does not go into depth to physically describe his characters.  I wondered about that when he mentioned it, but I found while reading that  but actually prefer to go with my thoughts.  He mentioned in his discussion that he only describes what may become pertinent at some point, such as that Jeremy is better looking that Joe.  Carl Iverson will become  the center of the novel as Joe struggles to complete an English  assignment writing about an older person's life.  Joe will choose to go to a skilled nursing facility and after a struggle be given the chance to talk with Carl, who is a convicted murderer serving the final days of his sentience as a terminal cancer patient, Joe will learn more about Carl's life as a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and in the discussions  talk to Carl about his own late grandfather and his death, something Joe has never spoken about with anyone. The other characters  major to the novel are Lila Nash,Joes' apartment neighbor;  Crystal Hagen the teenage girl purportedly murdered by Carl,;Carl's only friend Virgil; Andy Fisher, Crystal's boyfriend;  Doug Lockwood, Crystal's stepfather; Danny Lockwood, Crystal's stepbrother, Berthel Collins a public defender law clerk when Carl's case was tried; Boady Sander a law professor of the Innocence Project, and Max Rupert, the Minneapolis police detective.    There are other incidental characters but I did not note them.  As it turns out I will be developing a matrix because this author uses some of these characters in subsequent novels, such as Max Rupert, the detective.  

A few quotes from The Life We Bury, Page 7, "maybe she knew who my mother was and figured that no one can change the sound of an echo.."    Page 31, "The archive room had the feel of a tabernacle with millions of souls packed away on microfilm like the incense in tiny jars, waiting for someone to free their essence..."  Page 61, "but as a sinner needs the devil, I needed a scapegoat, some one I could point at and say, 'You're  responsible.".  

Page 89 struck me, as about the 3rd time in the novel that the message, "I wasn't there, I had no say in what was or wasn't ok"  There is a theme of not to judge unless you were there and maybe not even then, Carl teaches Joe this lesson again on their first meeting.

Page 193, " But in the end there's no hole deep enough.  No matter how hard you try there are some things you just can't run away from"  

Page 195 indicates that this life is our heaven, " if I didn't live my life as if I was already in heaven, and I died and found only nothingness, well...I would have wasted my life.  " 

This is a great book, 5 *****,  my only disappointment, just like life, Joe and Jeremy's alcoholic mother seems to get by with  short changing her sons. When Joe has to bail her out at the beginning I kept hoping he would not and would just walk away, but he is a better person than her. 

The Guise of Another published in 2015 , 265 pages paperback, is the debut novel featuring Max Rupert, the Minneapolis detective but introduces Max' brother Alexander Rupert. This is when I realized I would  develop a matrix  of characters to track their appearances in the novels.    This novel opens with a tryst between to people married to others and their foolish sexual activities that ruin their lives and kill James Erkel Putnam, driver of the Porsche who turns out to not be James, thus giving the title meaning.  

The opening of this novel, "That night, there were a few things that the man knew to a religious certainty.  He knew that he's soon be having sex with the woman sitting in the passenger seat of his Lexus.  He knew that neither his wife nor the woman's husband yet suspected their infidelities.  And he knew that any whisper of guilt he may have felt would soon be silenced by the tumult of their act."  

Back Cover Guise of Another

Alexander Rupert  is a Minneapolis detective banished to fraud units investigations.  His life is spiraling downward.  He was a Medal of Valor winner ( a police honor) but now under subpoena by grand jury on suspicion of corruption, shunned by other detectives, suspects his status conscious wife is having an affair but seizes an opportunity to resolve a complex case of identity theft.  Alexander encounters a trained assassin, Drago Basta, veteran of Balkan wars with many aliases, who has been searching for James Putnam for years,  The firm Patrio International  is a focus of contacts,corruption, murder and more .  As Alexander pursues his hunches against the wishes of his superiors but helped out by his brother Max, the identity theft and international implications explode from Minneapolis to New York. Alexander become too late smart as the novel winds down and he realizes that running off with Ianna Markova is not wise,  it will cost him his life.   

Page 25, "  Alexander's fall from grace.  Their recent conversations skipped like stones across the surface of their lives, never finding depth, never touching the trouble that had been visited upon Alexander."

This novel is another  5*****.  I could not wait to begin reading the 3rd.  

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

An outstanding novel, based on a true story and history of World War II.  As much as I have read about WWII, I did not know or had long forgotten the business of the Nazi medical experiments, particularly in concentration camps and of the Polish women, known as rabbits who became the subject of these atrocities  at Ravensbruck, Hitler's only major concentration camp for women.  This is the author's first novel and a very worth while read. This story of the Ravensbruck prisoners in Nazi Germany "is a story that begged to be told but only with the insight that a novel can provide"  so goes the commentary at the end of the book, a dialogue between the author and Lynn Cullen, another best selling author. 

The novel is 476 pages, published in 2017.  There is a supplemental section after the novel of Author's notes and then the reading guide as well as many photographs of the research, trips to Germany, actual photos of the Rabbits, Caroline Ferriday, her remarkable lilacs, Lublin Poland, etc.   It is written as the stories of three women, whose lives intersect, beginning in 1939 with Caroline Ferriday, a former Broadway actress and liaison to the French consulate.  Kasia Kuzmerick

Back Cover

is a Polish teenager who becomes involved in the Polish  underground Nazi resistance movement in Poland.  Herta Oberheuser is a young doctor seeking full time employment  who will become instrumental in the experiments.   There are plenty of other characters, Caroline's mother, her boss Roger at the consulate, Paul who becomes her French lover, his wife Rena,  in Poland Zuzanna Kasia's sister, her mother, her father, Pietrik and camp workers, and more.

Author';s notes first page.

The first page of the book "If I'd known I was about to meet the man who'd shatter me like bone china on terra cotta, I would have slept in."  Sometimes books with the interwoven stories of distinct characters do not tie it all together, or become tiresome flipping among the characters,  but not so in Lilac Girls where the author writes masterfully keeping connections and not  diminishing the story line. The author comments on page 492, "writing in first person, it's so easy to get immersed in the characters, good and bad.  So, yes it was a wonderful relief, after living with some of the terrible things that happened in the camp to switch back to write about Caroline's life in New York City." 

Being of Polish ancestry I was especially drawn into the nightmare of the stories.  I learned on page 207 that  "kroliki" in Polish means medical guinea pigs.  This caught my eye because my maternal grandfather's  half brother's last name was Krolicki.  The writing is excellent and originally  descriptive throughout the novel, as on page 460, " She and her strong-willed sister Kasia were as different as chalk and cheese"  Never heard that comparison before. 

Page 163, in Ravensbruck,  "As the days grew shorter, Zuzanna warned us to keep our spirits up, for sadness was often a more potent killer than disease.  Some just gave up, stopped eating and died."   


I give this book a hearty 5 stars *****.  I understand the author is working on a prequel now.