So the plot realizes that Rennie will never lift a finger to solve a mystery if she isn’t being personally inconvenienced in some way, so it poisons Turk in this chapter to kick-start the action. It might be interesting to have a sleuth character who refuses to investigate anything unless someone they care about is targeted, but that character wouldn’t be sympathetic at all in any but the most expert writer’s hands. Maybe a better writer would have this character dealing with major trauma as a result of a bad decision they made in the past that got someone killed. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder is a good example of that kind of traumatic backstory, but he works as an unlicensed private investigator so one can’t accuse him of only acting when he’s personally affected.
Rennie awakens to rain and a wake-up call from the front desk. She has a long paragraph about the rain and how much she enjoys having the future Duke of Robinhood in bed with her before she notices the phone didn’t wake him up. Because he’s a Gary Stu he has an “internal clock” that wakes him up whenever he needs to wake up, so it’s unusual. She still can’t wake him up, even with light slaps in the face, notices his vitals aren’t good, and runs down the hall to Francher Green’s room. You know, the Francher Green who’s the band’s manager and whom she tried to turn into a stone statue with her best Medusa impression in the third book after he told her that the police must have some evidence against Turk if they arrested him. I’m sure Kennealy-Morrison will make sure he loves her before the end of the series, but there is no way he thinks she’s anything but a toxic prolapsed anus.
He’s dressed because they were going to breakfast later but Rennie is
…wearing nothing but her tattoo and the thirteen silver bangles on her right wrist and the eight gold ones on her left—the famous bullet bracelets had been left at home, as not even Rennie had felt she could pull off diamonds in a cow pasture…
In the middle of her terror for her possibly dying true love, she still has to have a flex in her own mind about her precious, precious diamonds. That’s—pretty special.
Plus, nobody sleeps in bangle bracelets because they would be hella uncomfortable. How could Turk sleep in the first place with all the metal clanking? If the writer wanted her to be naked but wearing something, put a necklace on her. It’s still jewelry so her jewel lust should be satisfied.
She and Francher run back to the room. He wants to know what drugs Turk took, she denies everything, and he doesn’t push her on that at all. This could kill Turk if he took something and she just doesn’t want to admit it for whatever reason, but because he’s a character in a book Francher knows this isn’t the case. He “freezes” in the door while Rennie struggles to get a pair of pants on Turk and demands that he help her.
This is stupid beyond belief, but it’s also a very nice character moment for Rennie. She’d rather have Turk die than allow any other woman, whether some “groupie” at the motel or some nurse at the ER where they’re presumably taking him, to get a glimpse at his private parts. It’s completely in keeping with her character.
Francher tells her she needs to get dressed herself before the ambulance gets there and we get some clothes porn for Rennie (“yesterday’s bells and white gauze blouse and mirrored gold-embroidered velvet vest,” if you’re interested). Just FYI, anytime the writer refers to bells, if they aren’t ringing, she means bell bottom pants. Then she tells Francher she hasn’t called for an ambulance for her possibly-dying true love.
If they were married already, I’d assume this is a ploy to kill him with plausible deniability and inherit everything. Her actual reason for not getting medical assistance is even less plausible than that. She doesn’t want anyone knowing it’s Turk and
…I am absolutely not waiting around for some hick volunteer paramedics to hitch up the mules and mosey on over.
She is such a New York City provincial. This does match up with an episode in Kennealy-Morrison’s memoir where Jim was spending the night at her apartment and manifested an extremely high fever, which she treated with aspirin and liquids, on the advice of a family member in the health care field that she called, but did not get him to a doctor for. Her reasons for not getting him to an ER or a doctor aren’t spelled out in the memoir the way they are here, but I have to wonder: if Jim had died in Patricia’s apartment on this occasion because she denied him medical attention for whatever reason, the way she’s indicted Pamela Courson in print for doing in Paris, would Pam have the same grounds for calling Patricia a murderer based on her actions?
Somehow three of Lionheart’s members show up at the door—Rennie must have been screaming for Francher at the top of her lungs—and she tells them to get Turk into a van for the trip to the hospital. And what if he needs emergency attention on the way and dies in the van? Nobody in the van is an EMT as far as I know. The band members are Jay-Jay, Rardi, and Shane, whom I didn’t remember as he hasn’t had any on-page time except to be name-checked. Since the writer already used Shane O Falvey as the name of one of Morric Douglas’s bandmates in Blackmantle and Shane is Irish for John, I feel secure in thinking this is the John Densmore analogue. Since John played the drums in the Doors, I think Jay-Jay is also an aspect of him. I already thought Niles and Rardi are both aspects of Ray Manzarek, so I have to come to the conclusion that Mick Rouse is the Robby Krieger analogue.
Anyway, why did Rennie even bother getting Francher? He doesn’t do anything to help except tell her to get her clothes on and call an ambulance, both of which are good suggestions. Then she remembers she’s a Kickass Female Character and decides to do whatever the fuck she wants, which is to have people take him to the ER in a van. She gives her reasons as wanting to protect his privacy and that this will be faster than an ambulance, which she doesn’t know. What if they blow a tire and get stuck on the side of the road? No cell phones back then, no public phones on country roads either, so they’d just be stuck while Turk died. Of course we know that won’t happen since he’s the self-insert’s boyfriend.
And we can’t have the section end without the writer letting us know what a “badass” Rennie is.
When they still didn’t move: “Did you hear me? Just fucking DO it!” And such was the command in her voice that they leaped to obey.
And don’t you wish you had the presence to accomplish that outside fiction, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison.
The next section begins at the hospital, so none of the things that could have delayed them and killed Turk happened—what a surprise—and the nurse is trying to get Turk’s information. Rennie checks him in under his real name, cutting off Francher’s attempt to give his stage name “like a terrible swift sword, and watching like a hunting falcon to see where Turk was being taken.”
The overwriting, it burns!
So the nurse hasn’t heard of his name as the Earl of Wallowinthemire and Rennie takes a second to run down the nurse as a hick because people outside of the cities she’s lived in recognize him or not at her convenience. She claims to be his wife to approve treatment and assures the nurse they can pay for treatment. That wasn’t such a big deal in 1969 because medical treatment was in no way as ruinously expensive as it is now, and if you come into an ER in the United States they are legally required to treat you regardless of ability to pay. Then she starts wanting to know when she can see him and “be with him” and the section ends.
Kennealy-Morrison gives us one of her trademark time skips at the start of this section, which begins “three hours later” with Rennie greeting Turk in his hospital bed, which is somehow still in the ER, so I guess they haven’t admitted him to the hospital. Only Rennie and Francher have been allowed into the ER, and the three members of Lionheart get to cool their heels in the waiting room because they aren’t the living Queen Emma Peel.
Rennie has decided Turk needs to go back to New York, so she’s harassed Baron Hollywood Hogan into sending his “personal plane and pilot” for them. She also takes a second or two to slam the local airport as rural and hick and unworthy of her New York City superiority.
…the rather grandiosely titled Sullivan County International Airport—yeah, maybe, if the nations involved are Lilliput and Munchkinland…
If that airport flies to Canada, and it could since it’s in upstate New York, that makes it international, so fuck you, Rennie. But I do have to admire how she got in a twofer here, with the insult to the airport and the double literary cred flex (Jonathan Swift and L. Frank Baum). Why is Rennie so nasty and hateful? I know the writer thinks this is rapier wit, but it’s just nasty and hateful.
So everybody’s turned out for this latest crisis in the life of Rennie, including War God Cherry Blossom, Mary Prax, and Christabel Green. And Rennie gives us a little more of her queenly proclamations here.
The other three guys {Shane, Jay-Jay, and Rardi) would take the van back to the motel, once Turk and his escort were safely airborne, to join Niles, Mick and the roadies; after that, Lionheart would find their own way out of Sullivan County. For them, Woodstock was over.
How nice of you to make that decision for them, Rennie. It’s not like any of them might have wanted to hang around and watch the other acts. The members of Lionheart are just more of the forelock-tugging peasants that peopled odd corners of Blackmantle.
All of this was more important than finding out what happened to Turk, which we finally do. He ingested a massive overdose of what they call “downers,” although I think a doctor would use a more specific name. He had to have his stomach pumped and, because Rennie is the living Queen Emma Peel, she “had been commended for not waiting for an ambulance.” Why does the writer work so hard to make me hate Rennie with all this fellating of her and Rennie is always right?
That ends the time skip forward, and now we go back to her meeting with the doctor who’s treating Turk. She is every bit as nasty and hateful and offensive as she always is to anyone who tells her things she doesn’t want to hear. In this case, he’s telling her Turk did a shitload of drugs that almost killed him.
“We don’t do a bunch of downers at a time,” Rennie snarled in answer to the entirely non-judgmental and matter-of-fact medical question. They’d gone toe-to-toe in the hall outside the ER and she’d really tried to keep her temper…
Of course you did, Rennie.
So she ends up calling this poor doctor (mentally) a “[m]oron upstate cheesehead quack” for no reason other than he told her Turk did drugs that almost killed him. I don’t know what she means by “cheesehead” here, as that makes me think of Wisconsin.
And then, out loud, while she’s denying that Turk did the drugs that got pumped out of him at the ER,
If what you say is true, doctor—it is ‘doctor’ and not ‘veterinary’? Because I wonder—then it was obviously an accident.”
Notice she only does this to people who can’t respond in kind or aren’t allowed to by the writer. Since this doctor is a professional and can’t call her a septic little bitch, all he can do is look at her like she’s lying or in denial and goes along with her plans to move Turk as she is the living Queen Emma Peel. For whatever reason, she doesn’t want any cops involved as she thinks he’s been deliberately poisoned. I think a couple of steps in her logic chain have been omitted.
That’s the end of the flashback and now we’re back with Turk telling Rennie what happened. He only had a cup of red wine to drink, not out of the bottle, and it tasted weird. Wasn’t Rennie at this party too, thinking she needed to slap down Amander because “every other woman in the world is competition for him?” Why wouldn’t she know this, if she keeps as close an eye on him as it sounds like she does? We get one second in Francher Green’s POV before we’re whipsawed back into Rennie’s vengeance fantasy against the two hundred people at the party.
“We’ll never find out who did it. Which is too bad,” added Rennie evenly, “because I plan to kill them when I do find out and I’ll have to kill them all if I don’t.”
Why don’t you try winning a couple of fights before you plan on killing anyone, Rennie? But we don’t have time to linger on her hot-air threats because Mary Prax pops in to inform her, and the reader, that Amander Evans was found dead. And Kennealy-Morrison tries to be witty here but I’m sick enough of Rennie’s shit that I won’t bother.
Anyway, Rennie immediately assumes that she was murdered and wants to know who did it. They don’t say anything and she loudly lays claim to being Murder Chick. Odd how much she used to hate being called that, isn’t it?
And some kid got run over by a tractor but nobody gives a shit because he wasn’t famous. Francher and everybody else spent a page and a half freaking out about the cops possibly getting wind of what looks like murders and Rennie’s thinking about the story Baron Hollywood Hogan’s going to get because she’s a narcissist and there’s a mention of the three guys in the band who are apparently still in the waiting room because fuck them and Rennie tells Turk it’s time to go home, by which she means New York City, as if anywhere else exists for her.
The next section starts out with two and a half pages of boredom with Turk’s trip back to the brownstone delayed and Rennie arranging for Francher and Christabel to stay with him for the rest of the festival, although I’d think Amander’s death would have proved to her that he wasn’t a specific target and the section ends.
Rennie goes into the bedroom where Turk’s sleeping and has three-quarters of a page of reflection, which includes her murderous fantasies about whoever drugged Turk.
…she would kill whoever had done this to him. She would kill them lengthily, and painfully, and extremely imaginatively; wait, even better, she would almost kill them, for a very long time, and then she would almost kill them some more, and some more, and on like that, until she got bored or felt merciful, which would be never and never.
I wonder whether Kennealy-Morrison is going to let her bloodthirsty self-insert actually kill anybody during the course of the series. I would doubt it, unless the writer thinks she can arrange it to redound to Rennie’s credit or make her look innocent somehow. Because Rennie can never do anything wrong.
Turk wakes up and she helps him take a shower and get something to eat. What I just described takes up almost a page. She tells everyone (Mary Prax and War God Cherry Blossom and Francher and Christabel, I think) that she has to go back to the festival and they all protest. Rennie vents some more of her toxic violent fantasies, naturally.
I’m going to slit their throat with a boathook {whoever tried to kill Turk} and then bathe in a tubful of their hot steaming blood.
Servant series flashback!
Mary Prax tries to talk her down from her psychotic break and Rennie tells her that she thinks somebody poisoned Turk so she wouldn’t look into what happened to Cory Rivkin and Amander, which is a stupid plan on its face, as she hadn’t lifted a single finger to do that and mostly never would have. All the killer(s) did was make it personal. But that’s a mistake most killers in this series make.
War God Cherry Blossom thinks she’s paranoid, which is rich coming from him, and she gives us one last look at her bloody inner life.
I’m going to hunt them down and shoot them between the eyes like Old Yeller and leave their lifeless bullet-riddled bodies lying in a ditch. Only, unlike Old Yeller, it won’t be sad at all.
And—chapter! Boy, Rennie amped up her unbearability to eleven on the dial. I assume that Kennealy-Morrison thinks this makes her self-insert look tough and formidable and intelligent and resourceful and whatever other ridiculousness she can think of, but this is not a Strong Female Character. This is a nightmare of a girl who will never grow and change because her author thinks she is absolutely fucking perfect, always and forever, amen.
Credit where credit is due—I firmly believed that Rennie was going to solve the murders from the comfort of her brownstone(s) in New York City, but at least the writer figured out how unbelievable that would be.
Next time, chapter 12, in which the second day of the Woodstock festival begins and Rennie goes back, gets interrogated by the local sheriff, and poor Marcus Dorner shows back up.
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