April Smith (1)

As a reader, I’m very grateful for the lucky chance to stumble upon some great detective novels all set in Los Angeles: The Tin Collectors, Earth Angels, It’s Not A Pretty Sight. Raymond Chandler, who was himself not originally from Los Angeles, helped create the Hardboiled Noir genre. His descriptions of the locale were accurate and poetic. His English education ultimately came into good use for his writing career. This book about the FBI Los Angeles office is stereotypical in many ways with the Department Heads taking cases based on politics which is portrayed by April Smith as being held accountable by the people, which it isn’t. It is being held hostage to the press, however. The title North of Montana gives the false impression of being about the state of Montana. It is not about that. It is about a small neighborhood enclave of the City of Santa Monica above Montana Street. In the city of Santa Monica there are several streets named after US states. Above (North of) Montana Street are nicer apartment houses and better built homes. This book has interesting characters. Every detective story has more than a few littered throughout the narrative to distract the readers from solving the crime prematurely. The protagonist is a female agent who is competent but lacking case experience as she jockeys for a promotion. This was a great read. Fast paced, accurate details, sympathetic characters who are cleverly drawn. I find it hard to believe this was a first novel, it was so to my liking. I wish all writers could look forward to having their first books be this good. Published in 1994 but set in 1990. North of Montana is where the main character victim used to work before her demise. The jacket cover photo seems to be yellow center-line stripes found on every paved road.… (más)

Remember those old war films that focused on a small group of ethnically-diverse G.I.s or doughboys? There was a naive WASP, usually the officer, another WASP, son of privilege, a street-wise thug with a heart of gold, usually Irish or Italian, a Jew, and a Negro. Whether real units were always so balanced is another matter, but the situation gave ample room for playing the characters off one another during their common ordeal. April Smith’s book, A Gold Star for Mrs. Blake, is about their moms.
The story is about a quest, but for the sons of these mothers, theirs ends in the underworld. It is up to the remarkable women Smith depicts to complete the journey by following their lost boys to hell, in the form of a pilgrimage to the battlefields on which they fell and the immaculate cemetery created to inter their smashed remains. The mothers depart with mixed feelings of patriotic pride and mournful yearning. As in any quest, they pass through ordeals, make discoveries, and even recover surprising treasures. And all who make the trek have their lives unalterably changed.
For April Smith, this book represents a departure after a series of crime novels set in the present with a kick-ass FBI agent, Ana Gray, as their protagonist. When I first heard of it, I suspected an act of bandwagon-jumping, given the recent success of historical novels. But it turns out this book germinated for a quarter of a century, starting with access given to Smith to the diary of one involved in the Gold Star program.
That program—the offer to transport mothers who lost sons in World War I to visit their final resting place in France—had been unknown to me before coming to this this book. That, and a superbly-constructed plot, made me glad to have read it, a good read.… (más)