Kennealy-Morrison pads about two pages with filler regarding how Rennie got back to the motel and what she did after she got there and Elk Bannerman makes an appearance with a telephone in a briefcase that causes her to go on a reference spree name-checking The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Illya Kuryakin before calling home to check on Turk. You know, the “co-protagonist” of the series.
So she’s in bed musing about what’s going on with Ned and whether she should try to get him a lawyer. So just because Marcus told her she needed to do it, she completely disregarded it? How mature. And she notes she isn’t going to go back to the festival because Jefferson Airplane isn’t playing for hours, so fuck the bands that are. How does she keep her job when she slacks off like this? Oh yeah, she includes her boss among the ranks of her worshippers/simps.
And now she finally remembers Ned has a wife, Demelza Poldark-Raven, whom she hasn’t even spoken to since her husband got—arrested? They haven’t said that yet, so what’s the problem? If Ned weren’t a complete moron in addition to being an asshole, he would have lawyered up himself, without his casual starfucker’s assistance.
Anyway, Rennie wants to go comfort Demelza Poldark and frames this to herself as a chance to be “helpful.” I see it as a way for her to make sure she’s seen being helpful and so gets attention and sympathy by proxy.
The Soncartneys are there, of course, even though I don’t remember being told that Graypaul and Pruelinda were friends with the Ravens, but Rennie needs to have her most famous, most important friends seeing her do something nice for someone else. Graypaul opens the door and “pulled her unceremoniously inside with an air of passionate relief.” Boy, sounds like he’s about to start fucking her, doesn’t it?
Demelza Poldark-Raven has turned into quite the delicate female in the hours since her husband got—arrested? I’m not sure. Graypaul describes this as “the local plod took Ned off,” so I can’t tell whether he’s actually been arrested. You know what could have helped with that? An editor!
Anyway, Demelza’s had a powerful attack of the vapors since then, as described by our Paul McCartney analogue.
…all she does is weep and lie there catatonically, and who can blame her.
Because the best thing to do when your man is hauled down to the police station is completely fall apart and force your friends to fuss over you rather than assist your husband. Otherwise, how can you be the center of attention?
Rennie spends a couple of paragraphs running down the room as not being worthy of the fame and power and glory of the Soncartneys, like the starfucker she is. Pruelinda is there and is also very glad to see Rennie, for what reason I’m not sure. She hasn’t shown any ability to calm down hysterical people in the past except by drugging them (Pamina in California Screamin’ and Pepper in A Hard Slay’s Night). But she’s Queen Emma Peel so I’m sure everything will work out.
So Demelza Poldark-Raven looks like shit and Rennie calls her by a couple of Welsh endearments and that’s all it takes for her to start crying in Rennie’s arms, which is so touching that it makes the Soncartneys cry as well.
Demelza decides that Rennie’s going to get Ned off the hook for killing Amander Evans—wow, that catatonia didn’t last long—and Rennie promises he’ll be home by lunch. Since Rennie is always right, I’m sure he will be. And she continues playing to her strengths by dropping “a ten-milligram Valium in a glass of water” and telling Demelza to drink it. When she does this, she’s talking to the other woman like she’s a child and calling her“a good little daffodil.” I’d use my psychotic break to beat the shit out of her for that, I can tell you.
Like the child she’s being treated as, Demelza wants to be sung to sleep. Rennie thinks Graypaul and Pruelinda should handle this, but they don’t want to, so Rennie gets to sing. So she’ll be replacing Niles Clay as the lead singer of Lionheart at some point so she can be the center of attention everywhere all the time?
And she’s playing the guitar too, you guys! I thought she played the piano, like she did in the previous book, but our protagonist is multi-talented. Rennie sings a folk song called “Melora” that she learned in college, presumably in her Journalism Ethics class for all the attention she seems to have paid, and her voice has become “a quite pretty soprano” even if not professional quality. I seem to recall the writer saying something less complimentary about Rennie’s voice in an earlier book, but I don’t remember what so I can’t call it out as a retcon. Plus, her guitar playing is “charmingly amateur.” It probably sounded like a cat being fed through a meat grinder, but moving on.
In addition to “Melora,” she does what’s described as an old Welsh lullaby called “Ar Hyd Y Nos.” Since Demelza’s a child, this puts her right to sleep. I do not like the infantilizing of women in this series, in particular Pamina Potter and Demelza Poldark-Raven. It reeks of internalized misogyny because you can tell this is the way the writer thinks a good, though lesser, woman (who isn’t Queen Emma Peel) should handle the matter of her husband’s death/arrest. It sure isn’t the way that a grown woman like Marjorie Lacing would handle it.
Now the Soncartneys are all in awe of Rennie’s singing and want her to become a professional, at which she demurs like a good narcissist to be persuaded and coaxed. They oblige with half a page of fulsome praise, and somehow Graypaul knows that Rennie’s first name is Ravenna. How the hell would he know? He was never told!
But she tries to make them promise not to tell Turk she can sing but they don’t. She has a very arch speech about how she learned to play that’s quite annoying and then the plot shoves its way back in when Rennie reveals to the Soncartneys that Ned found Amander and that’s why he’s “been brought in.” So is this trick arrested or not? This has become vexing.
For whatever reason Pruelinda doesn’t think Demelza knows Ned’s in the clutches of the cops, but then why would she have fallen apart like this? Is the writer paying attention to the words that emerge on her computer screen?
Rennie also believes that Demelza doesn’t know, which again leaves no reason for her behavior, and promises to have more security from War God Cherry Blossom’s firm put on the door. Who’s paying for that shit anyway?
And because we’re doing a soft reboot of California Screamin’, Rennie encounters Female Jimi Hendrix as soon as she steps out of the room. Like the charmless creep she is, she gets Female Jimi Hendrix to stay with the drugged and sleeping child-Demelza, as the Soncartneys are apparently as useless as tits on a bull. And how she does it is perfectly in character.
…Rennie explained hastily, and though she would never have been so crass as to remind Sunny that Miss Silver owed Miss Stride big-time for that little episode in San Francisco with Ro Savarkin, Sunny knew very well what was right and due, and instantly offered to spend the rest of the night companioning Demelza.
Female Jimi Hendrix doesn’t owe her jack shit for Ro Savarkin. Ro Savarkin owes her for Ro Savarkin. Female Jimi might just owe her for taking out Clovis Franjo, who planned to make her a drug runner, but the writer never bothered explaining whether Rennie had told her about this. But again we see Rennie’s main motivation for any good she does: to benefit herself.
Because Female Jimi Hendrix is now a child as well, Rennie “[got] her settled comfortably on the other bed in Melza’s room” and another bruiser of War God Cherry Blossom’s shows up, with a name that’s possibly stupider than his boss’s. This poor bastard’s name is Car Darch. I thought this was an anagram but then I Googled it and found out it’s a literary flex on the author’s part. And Car Darch is a woman in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by the way.
So Rennie tells this guy to sit down and guard somebody and he does it for no particular reason other than Rennie is the living Queen Emma Peel.
The next section opens with her going back to Woodstock and a bunch of name-dropping, specifically of Sly & the Family Stone, John Sebastian, and the Who. Rennie recaps in summary to Mary Prax and we get a roll-call reference to the previous books and non-canonical murders in the series. However, either she or the writer has forgotten a few of them. The first four books are referenced, but also Airplane House (the murder that took place while Jefferson Airplane was touring with the Doors in Europe, which is also the tour during which Grace Slick claimed in her autobiography that she slept with Jim Morrison), Golden Gate Park (which I assume is the Human Be-In), the Avalon Ballroom, and Hyde Park (which I can only assume is the murder at Brian Jones’s funeral). The murders Kennealy-Morrison and her characters forgot about were at the Winterland and the Matrix.
Why am I paying closer attention to the series than the writer did?
Rennie exposes her transactional view of relationships when she lets Mary Prax know that she has to give Baron Hollywood Hogan “something really big” to balance out her use of his plane and pilot to get Turk back to New York City. She has solving the murders in mind, which will work out as she’s the author’s self-insert.
For once, Mary Prax seems to recall her past history with being busted for murders she didn’t commit, but that’s in the rearview pretty quickly so we can get back to Rennie.
Although she’s “heartsick about Ned,” she still enjoys the sight of Pete Townshend hitting Abbie Hoffman in the head with a guitar, as it’s the kind of violence that resonates with her:
…for being an insufferable jerk, and oh, how many others, including herself, had dearly longed to do the same, and had cheered to see it…
There is no fucking way that Rennie Stride knows Abbie Hoffman. She’d have to give a damn about one cause or another to have made his acquaintance, and we all know Rennie cares about nothing but herself and her own aggrandizement. So I’m calling bullshit on this.
We get a brief moment of Jefferson Airplane getting ready to play at dawn, which is called out as a meaningful moment for the author in her memoir, but here we just get that it’s happening before the section ends. Any description of the performance would pull focus from Rennie, and we can’t have that.
The next section reintroduces Belinda Melbourne, one of the author’s two self-inserts from the second book. We get the information that Jefferson Airplane played thirteen songs, coming in second to Lionheart for the length of their set, and the crowd danced but I can’t tell whether the performance was any good. Later she runs them down as “[r]agged, sloppy, and nowhere near what they can really do.”
Anyway, Belinda begs a ride off Rennie back to Liberty (the town where the motel is) and also cadges a room for the day out of her, with the author careful to say Rennie “agreed happily.”
On the drive to the motel, Belinda hems and haws and beats around the bush about something until she finally admits she wants to be fixed up with someone and Rennie responds in the most artificial, self-consciously written manner possible.
“Who? Speak and be rewarded. If it lies at all within my power, and let me tell you my powers are considerable, I shall make it happen.”
No human being ever said anything like that. If you remove the “let me tell you” from what she said, it sounds like it could be straight out of The Sword and the Sorcerer. I still can’t understand why she didn’t continue with the Keltiad (other than the book of short stories) unless it was an issue about the rights to the property with HarperCollins. In other words, Kennealy-Morrison is shit with dialogue that isn’t subpar sword-and-sorcery.
Belinda finally ‘fesses up that she wants to bang Diego Hildalgo, the Jim Morrison analogue that we first met at Monterey Pop. Diego is also married, and Rennie spent quite a bit of time running down his wife in chapter 6. And Belinda also has a boyfriend named Hacker Bennett who’s a political reporter.
What’s Rennie’s response to this? I mean, we already know she wants to do this, but how does she express this to her “friend?”
“I told Turk ages ago that I was going to fix you up with Diego, when you finally dumped that idiot Hacker and when Diego finally decided he was ready for a real woman and dumped that gold-digging druggie tramp.”
That’s his wife, Rennie. In chapter 6 you said he was married to Portiapam. It’s not a simple matter of “dumping” her. There’s this thing called divorce that you were thinking about before Turk reminded you it was too declassee for his noble family and you rerouted into an annulment. And why is Hacker an “idiot” all of a sudden? In the two appearances he’s made in this series, Rennie’s had no feelings about him one way or the other. And have you noticed how her go-to insult is about the lack of intelligence of the person she’s insulting?
Belinda wonders if Diego Morrison is available and Patricia swears he is—whoops, I mean Rennie, with some more gratuitous insulting of Portiapam, whom she isn’t even bothering to give a name to here.
…he tossed the tramp out on her bony butt a month ago and hasn’t been with anyone since—except for the groupies, of course, but as you know they don’t count.
She then goes on to say that Diego Morrison paid Portiapam a bunch of money to leave, which still isn’t a divorce so it’s not nearly as over as she depicts it. She asks Belinda if she’s available and Belinda goes on a rant about Hacker Bennett nailing her shoes to the floor so she couldn’t leave and they are never ever ever getting back together. This is not supported in any way by anything we know about Hacker from the text. This is just poor writing.
Belinda starts to ask about Turk and Rennie cuts her off while knowing exactly what she was about to ask, then again when Belinda starts to ask about her. There’s an embarrassing attempt to introduce a ticking clock when Rennie says she’s running out of time, presumably to solve the murders, but swears that she will.
And—chapter! The internalized misogyny and slut-shaming are making a nice comeback. There’s still nothing in this chapter that couldn’t have been cut to make room for some plot-related action, but maybe Kennealy-Morrison was trying to make a word count. She’s still a better technical writer than Lori Foster, but that doesn’t make her good. I can’t believe this woman was once a professional writer.
Next time, chapter 16, in which Rennie flings insults and threats at Marcus Dorner, as is tradition, and Ned and Demelza Poldark have some presumably pseudo-comedic moments, and Ned tells the story of Amander, who is of course slutty as Rennie hates her.
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