As Demelza Poldark-Raven isn’t the living Queen Emma Peel, she’s all full of apologies and genuflection to Rennie which is nauseating enough that I won’t detail it. Then she leaves “so that Ned could make his statement.” I think that’s a land speed record for Kennealy-Morrison because that’s an editorial fail in the first sentence. Hey Rennie, Ned already made his statement. That’s the reason Marcus got in your face after you popped off to him and specifically told you that he’d witnessed Ned’s statement and there were things in it that he thought would be better delivered to Demelza by you. Admittedly, it’s qualified as a preliminary statement, but a reader could reasonably assume that the author’s forgotten what she wrote in the last chapter.
Then Kennealy-Morrison spends four pages talking about Woodstock and the way the media represented it. She shits on hippies (‘that damned Woodstock smile, like benign grinning tie-dyed zombies” and “colorful, longhaired locusts who came swooping down to devour all in their path”) and non-urban people (“upright uptight county burghers” and “anti-kid, anti-rock, anti-antiwar, old, rich Establishment audience who probably hadn’t had sex in, like, ever”) and the location (“deep in the heart of Redneckia”). It’s significant from a historical point of view, but as far as we can tell at this point has nothing to do with anything as far as the actual murder plotline goes, so none of this needs to be here.
Rennie, of course, is writing that absolute truth about Woodstock as “[s]he would scorn to write otherwise, and they [Burke Kinney “and her new overlords Ken Karper and Kiva Rodman, respectively crime editor and music editor at the New York Sun-Tribune{sic}] knew she would slice their ears off with a machete if they dared to edit otherwise, presuming to meddle with either her copy or her point of view.”
So I guess she now works for the New York Sun-Tribune, rather than the San Francisco Clarion, even though we haven’t been told, so why is Burke Kinney still her boss? He never left the Clarion. She also overlooks the fact that Ken Karper wouldn’t see any of her stories yet because he’s the head of the crime beat and the festival management has hushed up the murders so nothing has been written about them yet. Has Rennie forgotten that she is “queen of more general pop-culture content” and not a crime reporter? I feel for Kiva Rodman, though, who now has to deal with this nightmare of a girl who won’t even watch all the acts at the festival because she doesn’t like them.
But here’s what Rennie thinks of Woodstock, just in case you were wondering.
…Woodstock was an overblown, overrated heap of hooey and she hated the whole messy, self-congratulatory thing.
This is not what she had to say in her memoir; it’s possible she changed her mind over the years, but this is what she presents as her opinion at the time. Rennie/the narrator advises us that unnamed “[p]ress colleagues” had turned in accurate reports and had them changed before publication. None of this is particularly interesting, so I’m skipping it.
There’s another ham-handed segue which confirms that Rennie now thinks Ned and Demelza Poldark are idiots before Sheriff Lawdog knocks on the window of her car. Chin Ho Kanaloa is still missing in action, by the way (Future Me: and he never shows up again in this chapter, so apparently Rennie left him stranded at the police station).
She thinks he looks pissed off and, when questioned as to why she thinks that, tells him:
Cops are always yelling at me for some damn thing or another why should you be any different?
Then she tells him to bring it on because she’s such a Kickass Female Character, you guys!
But I have to give some props to Sheriff Lawdog here for his response. He isn’t my favorite character because I’m sure he’ll be a Rennie-worshipper by the end of the book, but he did have an almost-Niles-Clay-worthy moment.
“At the risk of being blasphemous, come down off the cross, Miss Stride, we need the wood.”
Uncharacteristically, Rennie laughs at this and mentally acknowledges that it was a good line. There’s no way she’d do this; an authority figure has dared to suggest she’s less than the queen of all existence, and she would take offense as surely as the sun rises in the east.
She thinks he intended to “disarm” her with that, but he goes on to give her the standard “keep-your-nose-out-of-police-business” speech in summary that she’s heard from every other cop she’s ever met. I have no idea why he thought it would work on the four-hundred-and-forty-first try.
Then we get about two full pages about Rennie’s sexual relationship with Ned Raven which she retcons as hard as she can to revirginize herself for Turk and swears she was “delighted” when he married Demelza Poldark, which segues into his affair with Amander, which segues into Rennie gloating over how “the Kiwi vulture” had eyes for Turk but he’s far too good for that, which segues into her primary obsession since she met him: groupies going after Turk and her irrational terror and hatred of them.
Again, if as she states here that “he’d never sullied himself with a groupie chick of any stripe,” there is no reason for her to either hate or fear these women. But, because Rennie is an author self-insert and the Turk analogue was in no way as continent as Turk with regard to groupies, the terror and paranoia about groupies will continue with no hint that this is not an attitude this character would hold based on Turk’s actions. It’s more of the same that we already had pounded into our heads in the third book, so I’m skipping it.
Rennie and Sheriff Lawdog have some “witty” exchanges until. In the next section, we finally get to what he wanted to talk about, the burglary that was the reason Marcus Dorner is in this narrative. Rennie can’t help but shit on the performers at Woodstock because shitting on lesser beings is what she does best.
Quite a few thousand dollars went missing. They were keeping it on hand for bands who insisted on being paid in cash before going on. Hardly an Aquarian mindset, to be so concerned about filthy lucre, but you can’t blame them, really.”
Yes, tell us more about how personal gain is evil, Miss Material Possessions are Everything to Me.
She gives him some background about Monterey Pop and takes the opportunity to shit on Ravi Shankar for getting paid for both festivals. I just wonder what this guy did to offend Kennealy-Morrison as much as she clearly is. In the text, the only reasons Rennie has to dislike him are that she doesn’t like his music and he wants to get paid for performing. Yeah, that’s a death penalty offense anywhere!
Then there’s about a page of how much certain bands at the festival are getting paid for performing and they start speculating about why all the bands started demanding cash. Well, because if they don’t have cash in hand there’s no guarantee they will be paid at all, but maybe that’s too reasonable to suit our Queen Emma Peel. We also find out that she thinks Blood Sweat & Tears is “boring,” and she doesn’t know enough about Sha-Na-Na to have an opinion other than they’re “unknowns.” They haven’t played yet, since they went on right before Jimi Hendrix, so I guess Rennie can’t be expected to hate them yet.
She calls Female Jimi Hendrix’s broken arm an “attack,” when she has no proof it was anything but an accidental falling box, but does admit Ned’s electrocution could have been an accident. Does she have any discernible logic chain at all? She asks Sheriff Lawdog if Cory Rivkin and Amander Evans’s deaths are considered murders yet and he says they are. Convenient for Rennie, especially with nobody knowing how Amander died yet.
Then Rennie browbeats him into admitting that Ned and Demelza Poldark-Raven don’t have anything to do with it and forces him through her sheer will to release them. After this, really the only audience-pleasing solution to the mystery is that Ned and Demelza Poldark are the killers. But of course they won’t be as Rennie is always right.
The next section begins with Rennie sitting around an ice-cream parlor on the town’s main street, thinking about what’s gone on until she’s greeted by her nemesis, who hasn’t really appeared in the series before this except to make the intuitively reasonable suggestion in the third book that Rennie killed Citrine because she can’t handle groupies wanting to fuck her man, and I think she might have gotten a brief mention in the fourth book, but she’s finally on stage.
Loya Tessman (which I think may be an anagram but I’m still not dealing with those anymore) sits down with Rennie and starts rattling away at a mile-a-minute while Rennie can only goggle in disbelief because they hate each other. Wait a minute, has Loya been told that? She isn’t behaving as if she knows that.
Rennie is all kinds of bitchy in her own mind about this woman and there’s a tortured bit about the word “kill” being Dutch for stream which is a segue into another one of Rennie’s violent sociopathic fantasies. And now we get about two pages of background about Loya and her husband and why she and Rennie hate each other, which Loya still doesn’t seem aware of, so I think our protagonist is projecting here. I mean, I’m sure she does hate Rennie because Rennie is a septic creep, but Rennie’s already proved that she has no ability to see anything from anyone else’s point of view.
Anyway, Loya’s husband is the head of a big talent booking agency (which we later find out represents Lionheart) and Loya runs a teen magazine along the lines of 16 or Tiger Beat, so they have enough power that she can’t attack them directly. Loya was also close friends with Devin Sweetzer (Not Danny Sugerman, the second murder victim in Love Him Madly), whom Rennie hates as much if not more. Rennie then proceeds to jerk herself off about her own “sterling reputation as a journalist” and “solid-gold connections” (Turk, Mary Prax, Baron Hollywood Hogan, etc.).
We get two and a half pages of Loya Tessman talking in summary and Rennie bitching about how awful she is and trying to figure out what’s going on and none of this shit is interesting. It turns out Loya wants to know what Rennie and Sheriff Lawdog were talking about and Rennie gets all the confidence in the world as soon as she’s in the power position. So she lies her ass off to this woman for no particular reason other than she doesn’t like her, and one of those lies is that Niles Clay is going to be fired after the current tour because of his insults to Turk’s ladylove. She goes on and on and on for about another page and a half, presenting Loya Tessman as credulous enough to believe one word out of our protagonist’s mouth, and in the middle of her lying she has this thought, which sums up Rennie neatly.
Sure, it was evil, but it served the bitch right for trying to pump Rennie like that.
How many times has Rennie tried to pump people in exactly the same way? But that’s okay because she’s the living Queen Emma Peel.
So Rennie shits on Loya Tessman for about another page before Loya leaves, and Dian Cazadora comes in. She’s the head of Sovereign Records and I’m voting for her as the killer, because Rennie doesn’t like her based on the fact that she told Rennie to get a man to help her open her wine bottle and the fact that she’s sleeping with a married man. So what does that say about Turk? He’s sleeping with a married woman.
Anyway, Rennie’s driving back to the motel, laughing and gloating about getting Loya to believe her lies and telling herself that the woman needed a lesson taught to her.
And—chapter! It says something bad about this book that we’re seven chapters and an epilogue from the end of this book and we don’t have one acknowledged suspect, and Rennie’s done almost no detecting. Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t know how to uncover clues or, really, even question someone about something, which makes me wonder how she managed for three years as a reporter doing interviews.
Hey, here’s something that she might have thought of doing. Since there’s an excellent chance that the killer was at the Rainshadow Records party to poison Turk and (presumably) Amander, Rennie should take her “little leather-bound notebook” and write down everyone she remembers seeing and/or talking to at the party. Then she needs to call up Turk and have him do the same thing. That would give her a list of suspects. I admit the killer could just have doped a bottle of wine beforehand a la Not Frankie Avalon in Ungrateful Dead and left it at the party, but it’s unlikely. But Rennie’s too busy telling lies to her enemy and taking her petty little revenge to try finding out who attempted to murder the love of her life. That also says something about our protagonist.
Next time, chapter 18, wherein Rennie and Marcus have a multi-page conversation, Rennie wants to blame Niles Clay for the murders somehow, and Lexicographer (remember her?) comes out of nowhere as a suspect in the murder of Amander.
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