Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is a short novel translated from Italian. It takes place in an apartment building, and one of the tenants was murdered in the elevator. The main suspect is Amedeo, a resident who disappeared around the time of the death. But his neighbors don't believe that he did it--he is the only character who is universally popular. The novel is divided into ten sections, each narrated by a different character. Each has their own perspective, and from the pieces you can form an image of Amedeo. He is a good man, but he has secrets of his own that his neighbors don't know about--in fact, they are all surprised to discover that he isn't actually Italian. He speaks the language well, so everyone assumes that he is a native speaker.

Clash of Civilizations is a pleasant and absorbing read. Though framed around the problem of the dead neighbor, it really isn't a mystery. it's a portrait of a man, and a commentary on the problems of immigrants to Italy. I polished it off in a couple of hours, and enjoyed the read.

Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green

Hell to Pay is the seventh in Green's ongoing series that take place in the Nightside, a dark shadow city to London, where it's always three o'clock in the morning and everything and everyone is dangerous. The lead character is John Taylor, finder of lost things. Taylor is pretty dangerous, himself, and has been growing more and more powerful as the series continues. I skipped the sixth volume because I wasn't enjoying the story arc about how Taylor must save the Nightside from his mother, Lilith. But Hell to Pay goes back to the earlier style, which are dark fantastical PI stories.

Taylor is hired by one of the wealthiest residents of The Nightside, Jeremiah Griffin, who reputedly made a deal with the Devil to make him immortal. Griffin's granddaughter and heir has vanished, and he needs her back, immediately. It is unclear if she was kidnapped or if she ran away, and Taylor spends most of his time interviewing Griffin's family and observing how wretchedly unhappy they are. He traverses the city, going places where he's not wanted, from gambling dens to gay clubs to, most dangerously, the lair of Ladies who Lunch. He is attacked by bodyguards and commando nuns. And when he finds the missing girl, he must try to save her from her family.

Hell to Pay was a fun romp, gulped down in a few hours. I am very glad that we have returned to the original story type. It's a lot more fun than supernatural wars with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff

The most striking thing about the Enchantment Emporium is that, superficially, it was a lot like re-reading Huff's 1998 book Summon the Keeper, but darker. Both feature an attractive female protagonist in her 20s who comes from a family with magical powers, and has a certain smug superiority because of it. Both of the characters suddenly find themselves the owner of a business they know nothing about. The love interest in both novels is an attractive young man from the Maritime Provinces who lost his family in a house fire in his childhood. In Summon the Keeper, Claire is trying to deal with a portal to Hell. In The Enchantment Emporium, Allie is trying to deal with an invasion of supernatural creatures from the Nether realms.

The Enchantment Emporium is also a pretty straight romance, save for the addition of magic and supernatural creatures, and that's getting more common all the time. Allie meets Graham. Sparks fly. By the third date they're in bed together, and then of course they have the required Big Misunderstanding. Then circumstance throws them back together again, and they find that their differences didn't really matter. Cue happy ending.

The Enchantment Emporium is darker than Summon the Keeper, though. Allie's family is distinctly squicky. They are a very powerful and tight-knit family. It is a large family, each generation having more girls than boys. They like to keep the power in the family, so they intermarry. And before they've chosen and settled down, they sample freely among their cousins in the same age range. At the beginning of The Enchantment Emporium, we find that Allie has spent the night with two of her cousins, one male and one female. It is perfectly normal in her family. We are told that all of the members of the Gale family are physically attractive, and that they are all hard-wired to be drawn to power, and thus each other. They all want to have sex with each other, most of the time. No one is ever unhappy or unwilling or dislikes one of their cousins enough to prefer not to get it on with them. They are also very casual about placing enchantments on people they come into contact with, manipulating people and situations to their advantage. They are a law unto themselves, and they abuse that power in little ways all the time.

The women of the family are the most powerful, and Allie has a mob of bossy old aunties who run the family. But the men are fewer and spoiled, and choose which of their female family members they will settle down with. They are also essential to the family's rituals, grow horns, and more or less go into rut. The more powerful ones are always viewed as being at risk for turning evil. I've got to say, it seems pretty clear that it would suck to be a member of the Gale family, though they apparently view themselves as superior to mere humans.

Nevertheless, I found The Enchantment Emporium to be a quick and fairly entertaining read. It's a supernatural romance, and I mostly don't like supernatural romances. This is also a novel about Allie growing up. At the beginning of the story, she's very young and whiny. Getting away from her overbearing relatives and having to make decisions for herself is good for her. They are sometimes stupid decisions, but at least she's thinking for herself. She bosses everyone around, and they mostly let her. By the end of the book, Allie is well on her way to becoming a powerful, bossy old auntie herself. I found the book entertaining enough as I was reading it, but as I've been thinking about it more in writing this review, I find that I'm liking the work, the situation, and the characters less and less. If Huff writes a sequel, and she certainly left it open so that she could, I probably won't bother with it. Recommended, but it's very light reading.

Skid by Rene Gutteridge

I picked this one up from the new books shelf at the library. It's sort of a modern take on Airplane--it takes place on a flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam which doesn't go smoothly. It features a collection of eccentric individuals, both crew and passengers. They include a criminal who is being extradited to the Netherlands, an FBI agent, a blimp pilot who is totally sure he could fly a plane if he tried, a very nervous young man who is carrying diamonds, and a lady traveling with a pot-bellied pig. To further complicate the flight, a passenger dies, the prisoner disappears, and the pig goes on a rampage.

The hero of the novel is Hank, an airline employee who is traveling incognito to observe the level of customer service offered to passengers. It is, therefore, his job to be a difficult passenger. But Hank is a really nice guy and asks so nicely that the flight attendants respond fairly well to him and his requests. Hank is a very calm, polite, well-adjusted person. He is also extremely religious. It's fairly rare in novels like this for a very religious person to be portrayed in a positive way. Often books of this sort are very dark and cynical, filled with dark and obnoxious people. (Don't ask me what I mean by books of this sort--I can't really define the sort of book I'm talking about. I just know that it sort of reminds me of Dead Famous by Ben Elton and Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski--except that in this book the characters are mostly decent human beings, unlike in those works)

I was half-afraid that Skid would become tedious by the end, but actually it remained entertaining and enjoyable all the way through. I'm not sure that I really believed that someone could disappear on a plane--I mean, it's a cramped tube. How could someone vanish for any length of time once you've established he isn't in the latrine? But then again, I don't this is really meant to be taken too seriously--it's a zany adventure with fun characters and improbable events. It was entertaining enough that I might track down some of the writer's other works. Recommended.