Part the Tenth, or Scareway to Heaven

Intro, or the Stuff Before the Book is Opened

Scareway to Heaven:  Murder at the Fillmore East, the sixth book in the Rock & Roll Murders, was published in 2014, according to the copyright page.  Amazon.com lists the publication date as October 27, 2014, and this book again doesn’t have the ISBN number listed except for in the bar bode.  This was almost two years after the publication of the previous book in the series, Go Ask Malice: Murder at Woodstock.  Between that book and this one, she published the books Rock Chick:  A Girl and Her Music:  The Jazz & Pop Writings, 1968-1971, on July 11, 2013, and Tales of Spiral Castle:  Stories of the Keltiad, on June 19, 2014.  Son of the Northern Star, her historical novel about Guthrum the Dane, was listed in the Also By page of the last book as coming out in 2013.  The Also By page in this book just lists the book title without indication that it’s forthcoming or when it might be published, which implies the book is already published.  That particular book never was published.

On the Also By page, the author lists herself as Patricia Kennealy Morrison, and the Keltiad books are listed first, under the heading “The Books of the Keltiad.”  There are now eight books in this series, as Tales of Spiral Castle was the last Keltiad book.  The Beltain Queen and The Cloak of Gold exist, if at all, in only fragmentary, unpublished form.

Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison is listed after the Keltiad, then ROCK CHICK: A Girl and Her Music: The Jazz & Pop Writings 1968-1971 (the all-caps is an interesting choice), and then Son of the Northern Star.

And after that comes The Rock & Roll Murders: The Rennie Stride Mysteries.  All books in the series are listed, including the last published book in the series, Daydream Bereaver, which is listed as forthcoming, with no specific publication date.

The title of this book is a twist on the title of the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven,” which strikes me as odd since there seems to have been some one-sided bad blood between Patricia Kennealy-Morrison and Robert Plant, according to a story in her interview in the book Rock Wives. Plus, the song wouldn’t be released for another two years.

The Psychedelic Art lettering and the Blood Guitar, the two consistent motifs of the series covers, are both back.  This time the title, subtitle, and author name are in the upper left-hand corner, with the title in violet, the lines between the title and subtitle and subtitle and author name in teal-green, the subtitle in yellow-green, and the author name in a darker lavender than the series title and subtitle at the bottom of the page.

The central image of the cover is the marquee of the Fillmore East, with the façade of the building itself only solid-looking and detailed where the light from the marquee strikes it.  Otherwise, the building is insubstantial and sketched in.  A group of gray and black silhouettes of people are clustered around what we can only assume is the front entrance to the building, beneath the marquee.  A row of tiny lit bulbs is at the bottom of the marquee and the Blood Guitar mimics the vertical lines of the marquee:  the top of the guitar is at the top of the sign and the body of the guitar is at the bottom of the marquee.  The Blood Guitar is not done as well on this cover; I can tell it’s a Fender Stratocaster, but the actual shape of the guitar is warped.  It also drips onto the pavement but none of the silhouettes notice.

This is the weakest cover of the series, as far as I’m concerned.  Visually, it’s uninteresting as the only colors used on the cover, aside from the Blood Guitar and the title, subtitle, and author name, are variations on black, white, and a blue-toned dark gray.  The book is set in winter, so the artist is probably trying for a cold feel, but interesting things can be done with a limited color palette.  This isn’t it.

I’d rank the book covers as follows, from worst to best.

1. Scareway to Heaven
2. Love Him Madly
3. Go Ask Malice
4. Ungrateful Dead
5. California Screamin’
6. A Hard Slay’s Night

Patterns with the covers are becoming clear enough for me to predict what would have been done with the cover for Ruby Gruesday:  Murder on the Rock Limited.  The first two books of the series had blue as a background color and an object as the central image.  The next two books had brown as a background color and used interior settings with a central object.  The next two books had outdoor settings with a multicolored background for one and a monotone background for the other and a vertical central image located at the right-hand edge of the cover.  The first three covers did not have people; the next three covers do.  Since I haven’t done Daydream Bereaver yet, which would be both the first book in a new two-grouping and a new three grouping, I’ll hold my thoughts about Ruby Gruesday’s possible cover.

Something different on the back cover:  there’s a little wrought-iron fence with a gate, which I can only assume is the gate to the cemetery which will be mentioned in the back cover text.

As always, the back cover text starts out with a variation on a well-known Timothy Leary saying:  “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead…”

Reporter Rennie Stride and her superstar guitar-stud and part-time aristocrat fiancé, Turk Wayland—

Too many descriptors for Turk here.  And how can you be a part-time aristocrat? That’s like being a part-time Caucasian.  You either are or you aren’t.  And the writer overused the word “superstar” in the last book to the point where it looks like poison ivy to me.

–have settled down in a historic brownstone in New York’s East Village…

Uh, no.  We were told at the start of the last book that the Rennieturk liked this brownstone, but Turk wanted to flex on what a big…fortune he has, so he bought two other brownstones on either side of the one they wanted because it wasn’t big enough.  And if this was a historic home, wouldn’t they have had to get permission to make changes to it? By “historic” I have to assume it was designated a historic landmark, which would have put the kibosh on the whole renovation enterprise.

…following Turk’s band Lionheart’s…

That’s a remarkably awkward phrasing, but she does those sometimes.

…epic tour closer—a shockingly spectacular four-hour Madison Square Garden concert.

Man, I hope that Madison Square Garden concert doesn’t take up the first four chapters of the book. But I guess Kennealy-Morrison had to make up for giving Lionheart a bad performance at Woodstock in the last book, as he’s the “co-protagonist” of the series.  Despite being sidelined for most of the last book.

Even more shocking…

That’s an awkward segue there, but please continue.

…two dead people in a snow-filled cemetery, and they didn’t end up there the way you’d think.

What, you mean they didn’t die? Then how are they dead? And I don’t like the use of “you” here.  It seems too conversational.

More shocking still:

Lionheart’s lead singer, Niles Clay, comes pounding on Rennie and Turk’s door the day after the Garden concert, confessing that he may have been the one who killed them.

This in itself indicates that Niles isn’t the killer, despite the fact that Rennie hates him more than Marjorie Lacing, her possibly ex-mother-in-law—no word on where the divorce, oh pardon me, the groundless annulment, is—and I would think he’d get killed so Rennie can be the lead singer for Lionheart and get all the attention, forever and ever, amen, but somehow that’s not going to happen.  And he hasn’t confessed to anything—he’s just told them he might have killed them.  In other words, he doesn’t know.

Nothing new, for Murder Chick…

For somebody who took offense on the regular at being called Murder Chick, she’s adopted it with gusto to show her essential specialness and superiority.

So Rennie’s task, at Turk’s desperate behest…

I love this—it proves that, if left to her own devices, Niles Clay would fry in the electric chair at Sing-Sing while she roasted marshmallows on his smoldering corpse.

…is to prove Niles didn’t do it.

Really, though, isn’t investigating a murder the job of the police?  But there I go with my pesky logic again.  When will I learn?

Though since the two loathe, detest, hate and despise each other…

All four of those words mean the same general thing, but why use one word when four will do?

…that may be more of a problem than any of them thinks…

So she can only prove someone didn’t commit murder if she likes them? Looking back on the rest of the series…

The canned bio is the same as the one on the back of the fifth book, and the author photograph is the same.  The interesting bio was on the back of Rock Chick, where the author was called a “Celtic priestess,” which doesn’t mean anything.  Celtic isn’t a religion.  She stopped called herself a witch, never called herself a Wiccan, and seems to have stopped calling herself a Pagan by this point, so I don’t know where she is religion-wise here.  The portrayal of Rennie seems to indicate she may have returned to Catholicism, but I have no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.

While I was looking for the publication date of this book, I went over to Amazon.com and found her author page.  Here she is listed as “Chevaliere the Rev. Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, DTJ” and gives Jim Morrison (called here “her husband” without any caveats or addendums) credit for her writing fiction, as he “encouraged” it.  That’s not the way she portrayed it in her memoir, but whatever.

The songs that bookend the book are “Walking with Tigers” and “Steel Roses,” both of which are far too long to get radio airplay in the Sixties, as is traditional for the songs that the author writes.

Next time, the prologue, in which we get a description of the Fillmore East, meet Bill Graham in passing, some local color, and a mini-summary of the murders.  Cool, last time she forgot the murder info in the prologue.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 24, or Astrologer Wars: The Last Reporter

The last chapter of this book starts out with Rennie bitching at Turk about Lionheart getting ready to go out on their tour.  He tries telling her he’ll be fine but she’s dubious.  The writer establishes us in time by telling us Woodstock was a week ago and then we get a good two pages about the mythmaking of the festival which doesn’t amount to sweet fuck-all in terms of the plot, so moving on.

As Rennie’s good friend, Baron Hollywood Hogan insists on getting a “first-person” interview with Turk as the price for using his helicopter to get Turk back to New York.  Well, at least he’s as transactional in his friendship as Rennie is, and the writer doesn’t seem to know that sometimes one friend does something for another friend without expecting something in return. 

In this interview Rennie is forced to “play[] down her physical assault on Kaiser—of which, naturally, she was burstingly proud, and who could blame her—”

Anybody.  Anybody could blame her.  It is not proper to be so proud of beating someone who isn’t even fighting back, but that is the only way I think she could win a fight.  I’ve said this before, but she’s a walking Cluster B disorder.

Then she jerks herself off for a few paragraphs about how “terrific” her stories about this are, and we have to take her word for it because we never see one single solitary word of these transcendent stories.  Because she’s just such a glowing exemplar of proper behavior, she’s refused to handle any more stories about Lionheart as she’s now publicly with Turk and it presents the appearance of impropriety.  Shame she didn’t think that way in San Francisco when she was married to Stephen and screwing around with abandon.

So the second author self-insert, Belinda Melbourne, does the story, and the word “superstar” is grossly overused on this page.  There’s a little more about the aftermath of Woodstock before the narrator gets back to her major, indeed only, concern:  how beautifully things turned out for Rennie.

Kennealy-Morrison is now calling the Rennieturk “the Wayland-Strides,” which still doesn’t have a sufficient flavor of Lovecraftian horror, so I’m sticking with “the Rennieturk.”  That sounds like something you could deal with using a phased plasma rifle in the forty-watt range. The writer mentions Rennie’s “knuckles are all bruised and banged up from where she’d whaled on Kaiser—”

Yeah, to the point where he didn’t even notice he was being hit.

“—though that hadn’t stopped Turk from giving, or her from sporting, a Kashmir sapphire ring…”

Turk, you idiot!  You’re training her to try to get herself killed in order to be gifted with jewels!  If you don’t watch out, she’s going to get herself killed!

I still think breaking up with her would be cheaper, but the rich are different from you and me.

Then there’s over half a page about the renovation that’s being done on their brownstone(s) and all I can say is WHO GIVES A SHIIIIIIIIIIIIT!  Nobody!  Nobody, that’s who!  The Rennieturk can jam those brownstones where they’ll never see the sun again.

There’s a little dialogue about whether Not Keyzer Soze was crazy and Turk mentions he should be angry with her because she was stupid enough to almost get killed again but doesn’t tell us why he isn’t, unless he just wants to get her killed.  That’s not unreasonable—he has to live with her.

Then there’s about a page of catching up with the subsidiary characters, none of whom we give an actual shit about, and there’s a jab at Loya Tessman because she printed Rennie’s lies without doing her due diligence and perhaps taking into account that Rennie’s a mephitic bitch who hates her.  It goes without saying that Turk approves of her doing this.

Marcus went back to Los Angeles, and if he has a brain he’ll stay there and avoid the micro-Sauron gaze of Rennie.  Really, this character should have been dropped after the second book and his inclusion has been awkward ever since then.  Then Rennie insists he’s an FBI agent even though she has no proof whatsoever of this.  If he was, since he wasn’t on an undercover assignment, why would he keep it secret? Kennealy-Morrison hurts my brain with her illogic.

And then this book punches me in the face without warning, harder than Rennie’s ineffectual girly fists. 

Turk asks Rennie whether she’s in trouble with the law for trying to kill Kaiser, or, really, anything else, and we get the news that Sheriff Lawdog has advised her that they owe her—the only reason she does anything at all—and she told him that as payment she’d take that old table that she had an orgasm over when Ned Raven was being questioned.  Because she is a tiny-souled person who cares only for possessions and personal power and money money money.

That goddamn table!  If I’d been Sheriff Lawdog I would have set it on fire in front of her, but he didn’t have to read the whole book like I did.

Then there’s a bunch of unimportant shit about him giving them fresh produce and them accepting the dinner invite and every word of this should have been cut because none of it is important enough to kill a tree for.  Rennie gets Turk cocoa and starts to read to him from The Lord of the Rings, as that’s the only book she actually gives a shit about.

And—chapter!  There was nothing in this chapter that needed to be in the book and the entire thing could have been cut with ease.  I feel confident in saying that I’ll probably think the same thing about the epilogue, which is twenty-three pages long.

Next time, the epilogue—

–wherein the Duke dies, Rennie is astoundingly shallow, and starts to fuck Turk while reciting his titles.  Yeah, dude, she’s totally into you for the rocknroll thing, not your money and your titles.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 23, or Astrologer Wars: Attack of the Killer

This chapter has the heading of “Monday morning, August 18,” and I’m not sure whether it’s dawn yet because the famous Jimi Hendrix rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” took place at dawn on Monday, so I guess it’s still dark, even though the first paragraph tells us, after Rennie’s searched all the organized festival area, that it’s “full light out now.”  Is she going to settle the killer’s hash just before Jimi Hendrix starts playing? That’s so pretentious I’m sure she’ll do it.

Most of the crowd is gone, but there are still about “a…tenth of the hordes” who’ve decided to remain until the end.  Rennie’s pissed off because none of the cops are around, or at least she can’t find them, and heads back to the stage.  Did she forget about that security trailer where she called Turk yesterday? You know, the one she wanted people to think she was conducting a murder-related call in? Why doesn’t she just go to that trailer, call the sheriff’s office, and tell them she knows who the killer is and give them Not Keyzer Soze’s name? Would that be too sensible?

Like everything else in this book, the killer falls right into her lap like it’s her birthday, as he’s under the bridge leading to the stage, acting like a cliched movie killer as he’s looking out over the field with “pure malevolent satisfaction.”  She also compared him to the Billy Goats Gruff bridge troll, which I’m counting as yet one more dehumanization.  And then she says she knew he would be there.  How?  How, for fuck’s sweet sake? (Future Me: we are never told.)

By fiat of the author the killer senses Rennie’s behind him and turns around to reveal…Not Keyser Soze!  I called it on his first appearance in Chapter 2 just because Rennie didn’t like him!

He says he thought she’d figure it out.  Rennie flaunts her rightness in his face, even though she didn’t have one single solitary fucking clue that he had done anything at all until she read that column that he presumably wrote in that magazine which said God knows what but indicated he was the killer.

“And so I should be, you evil, evil son of a bitch.  You killed Cory Rivkin and Amander Evans.  You tried to kill Turk.”

Not Keyser Soze gives her a perfect opening for one of her psychotically violent rants when he tells her it wasn’t personal.

“Nothing PERSONAL? I’ll make it personal! I’ll make it so goddamn personal that between the fist I’ll jam down your throat and the telephone pole I’ll ram up your ass, you won’t be able to breathe.”

Then she tells him she figures he was behind everything else (Female Jimi Hendrix getting hit by a box, Ned the asshole’s electrocution, and the attempted kidnapping of Rainbow Galadriel) and he admits it.  Considerate of him, seeing she had not one shred of evidence against him for any of that.  And Rennie calls Rainbow Galadriel “that little groupie kid” because she’s a female who wanted sex with a musician, which is another mark of Cain for Kennealy-Morrison.

And with that, she dispenses with the one interesting idea she had in California Screamin’:  multiple unrelated killers operating independently.  And I was wrong about Dian Cazadora, apparently, because the only time a woman can be a murderer in this series is if she’s “insane,” and the source of her insanity has to be love for a man, because no woman can ever just be a killer based on so-called rational reasons like financial gain or pure malice.  Notice none of the male killers in this series have met her definition of insanity and have killed for business-related financial reasons.  The two female murderers killed to get rid of romantic rivals (or people they saw as romantic rivals).

Since it’s about time for a motive, Rennie asks him why and there’s some lame wordplay about “lunatic.”  Not Keyzer Soze admits to framing Lexicographer for Amander’s murder and “Rennie was possessed of such fury that she had been rendered momentarily speechless.”  That should happen more often.

Not Keyzer Soze gets into the schedule he’d planned for his killings and indicates that he did try to kill Turk to “keep [Rennie] out of my hair.”  Funny, because she wasn’t in his hair and hadn’t lifted a finger to start investigating anything at that point.  It’s like the murderers know how the plot is supposed to go and act in accordance with that.  So psychic of them.

Anyway, that column that Rennie read in the magazine was his, and he’d predicted in gauzy metaphysical language that one of the musicians at the festival would die.  He also calls Rainbow Galadriel “that little groupie,” as everyone in this series talks exactly like Rennie and shares her views even if they hate her guts.  Definitely a weakness in the writing style there.

Not Keyzer Soze knew Cory was allergic to peanuts and he was killed essentially as a test.  And, of course, since Rennie is always right, Amander did die of the peanut allergy.  This is the single stupidest murder in the entire series.  It is completely unbelievable and any editor who saw this should have told her to rewrite it.  Unfortunately, since Kennealy-Morrison was self-published, there was no one to do that for her.

We still don’t know why he did any of this because Rennie isn’t pressing him on it, but he admits to luring Amander away with a new horoscope to a deserted location and making out with her, presumably to transfer the peanut death and Rennie now decides he’s insane.  This would make the first male killer in the series to earn the epithet. She also notices he’s limping, and this is the first time in the entire book since the attack that she’s remembered to do that.  And she’s seen him since then.  But now it’s time for another one of her blowhard violent rants.  I’m going to be quoting a bunch of those in this chapter.

“I grudge you oxygen!  I grudge you your pulse! I grudge you your continuing ability to move your vile carcass across the protesting land! And by God I would like nothing better than to put a stop to all those things, right here and right now.”

And he isn’t even listening!  I love that for her.

Not Keyser Soze goes off on a monologue about how he accomplished getting her to the meditation tent, stopping to appease the queenly wrath of Rennie by throwing in a bunch of slut-shaming remarks about Amander, including “[s]he really was a little tramp.”  That’s an opportunity for Rennie to show her true goodness as a person thusly.

Unexpectedly, Rennie found herself feeling sorry for Amander; however nasty a piece of work the girl might have been, she hadn’t deserved to die like that. 

But the writer fucks it up in the very next sentence.

Nor had Cory, who’d been a far worthier person.

There’s a little time-wasting about how Ned can’t identify him and then Rennie revisits the motivation question.  Hold onto your hats—it’s a doozy.

So it turns out that Not Keyser Soze wanted to join the military—no word on which branch, as I’m sure that wasn’t something the writer thought was important—and go to Vietnam.  He’d been in the ROTC in college but got turned down for service due to “pronounced mental instability.”  After the turndown, he decided to be a hippie, got into the astrology business, and decided he needed to “outpredict” Lexicographer.  And I’m here to call bullshit on the “not getting into the army at the height of the Vietnam War.”

You know who was in the military? Charles Whitman.  Lee Harvey Oswald.  David Berkowitz.  Gary Ridgway.  Dean Corll.  Dennis Rader.  Timothy McVeigh.  Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.  John Allen Muhammad.  So don’t tell me you get turned down for the military because you’re unstable enough to kill people.  Did Kennealy-Morrison never hear the “kill kill kill” part of “Alice’s Restaurant?” The military would have taken Charles Manson if he’d decided to drop by the recruiter’s office!

Wait a minute, that reminds me of something.  Checking…

Yeah.  As unlikely as it is, Kennealy-Morrison completely forgot about the Tate-LaBianca Murders.  So far there has not been one word about them, despite the fact that they were very big news at the time.  Right now, as she’s confronting Not Keyser Soze, the murders were ten days old.  And they don’t exist for her. 

I wonder if we’re going to get anything about this in the two clean-up chapters after this where we’re assured that everything turned out beautifully for Rennie, and that’s all that matters, right?

There’s a bunch of uninteresting verbal abuse from Rennie that Not Keyser Soze doesn’t pay attention to as he goes on at great length about why he did it, until he finally arrives at the point of deciding to kill Rennie!  If only I thought it would work.

Rennie doesn’t think it’s going to work either as witness her inner thoughts.

The day she couldn’t take down a weed like Kaiser Frizelle was the day she’d hang up her spurs for good—she’d never so shame Ares’ training.

Oh, you mean the training you didn’t remember you had when Not Keyser Soze attacked you in the woods?

And the fact that Kennealy-Morrison absolutely refuses to write the character as being afraid at moments when any other human being would be is yet one more thing that ruins this character.

Rennie takes a moment to slag off the cops for not being there when she wants them and calls them “lazy bastards.”  Well, Rennie, if you’d bothered to CALL THEM AT ANY POINT, they might have shown up.  Like, for example, when you spotted Not Keyser Soze under the bridge to the performer’s pavilion, you could have turned around, gone to the security trailer, which you had already checked for him, and called the police.  Then you wouldn’t be in this position right now, you dimbulb numbskull lamebrain. 

But she decides to keep him talking because six and a half pages of the Fallacy of the Talking Killer isn’t enough to suit the writer.  This lasts for all of half a page before Rennie decides to attack him because he answered her when she asked a question about Turk.  It’s about as stupid as anything she’s done up until this point, although not half as stupid as beating up a cop while ripped to the tits on cocaine.

So she throws that antler-hilted dagger at him and hits him in the thigh, even though she has no training in throwing knives that we’ve been told about and that knife would not be properly balanced for throwing, so we’ll just put that down to authorial intervention. She gets off a little more violent ranting before she “went for him like the dogs of war let slip.”  I really don’t think she would have a Shakespeare quote ready at her fingertips when one paragraph earlier her state of fury has been described as “a screaming white silence.”

Not Keyser Soze isn’t particularly affected by being stabbed, and since Rennie’s having a psychotic break, we get some more violent ranting. 

“That’s for Turk!”  She suited actions to words, fetching him a right cross that connected with his jaw and could have felled a bison.  “And that, and that, and, oh, especially that, and this one’s for Cory, and Amander, and this, this is for Ned, and for Melza, and Lexie, and Sunny, and Rainbow Galadriel, and Turk, and me, and for Turk and Turk and Turk and Turk and Turk…”

This is actively embarrassing me on Kennealy-Morrison’s behalf.  This reads as if she’s having an orgasm from the violence while she’s writing the words. 

In reality Rennie couldn’t punch her way out of a wet paper bag, even though her hits are cartoonishly overpowered, which are described here by the climaxing author:

…bone-crunching clouts that would have flattened any sane human, leaving him bleeding from split lips and broken nose.

Not Keyser Soze doesn’t even attempt any self-defense here, let alone killing her the way he indicated just a few minutes ago that he intended to do.  So she starts trying to strangle him and Marcus “pulled [her] off by the scruff of her neck like a misbehaving puppy.”

Then Not Keyser Soze looked up at him and said, “Can you take that yappy teacup dog away? It’s been gumming my ankle for seven minutes straight now.”

Yeah, that was me. She argues with him to no avail except that he tells her they were already coming to get him.  At least this time she wasn’t such a numbskull she waved at the cops who were running toward her to save her and went back to the hotel to take mescaline with a murderer.

Then Sheriff Lawdog gives her “a respectful, almost military salute—”

So the cops remove the dagger from his leg, talk to him in their kindergarten teacher voices, and take him off to the police car.  What’s Rennie’s response to this?

“Why didn’t you let me kill him?” she raged, still restrained by his iron grip on her upper arms and still breathing fire and slaughter.

“Because it’s against the law, you numbskull bitch,” says Marcus.

Yeah, that was me again.  Anyway, he agrees that Not Keyser Soze needs killing, but then goes into detail about how much lying he’s going to have to do to keep her out of jail and she shits all over this because she’s Mrs. Stephen Lacing and the future Duchess of Robinhood and is thus effectively above the law.  That’s the gist of it, at least.

And Jimi Hendrix plays “The Star-Spangled Banner,” just like I fucking knew he was going to do, and gets a few paragraphs of rapturous prose.

And—chapter!  This chapter was as bad as milk that expired two months ago.  Not quite as bad as the equivalent chapter in Love Him Madly, but still bad enough.  And there are still thirty-seven pages left in the book.

One thing this chapter did do is convince me that Janet Irwin’s story about the “fistfight” between herself and Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, as detailed in “Your Ballroom Days are Over, Baby!” is correct.  Unlike the depiction of the incident in Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, where the fight is referred to by the author as “The Great L.A. Punchout” and the author gets her Emma Peel on, the fight as shown in Irwin’s article is basically depicted this way, with Irwin sitting on the stairs crying while Kennealy-Morrison pounded her ineffectively with her little girly fists.

Rennie is absolutely disgusting as a character.  She makes me sick with her privilege and her arrogance and how much everyone in the series who isn’t a villain wants to fellate her for her awesomeness.  At least it’s instructive as to how flexible the author is in her performance of autofellatio.

Next time, chapter 24, the first of the “things-turned-out-beautifully-for-Rennie” chapters, in which we get a little bit more about Not Keyser Soze, a bunch of historically significant but not plot-important detail, and things turn out beautifully for Rennie.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 17, or The Parallax Festival

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.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 16, or Not Presumed Innocent

This chapter gets headlined as “Saturday morning, August 17” and the writer employs a not-at-all-subtle metaphor involving the storm clouds rolling in, which gets the first paragraph of the chapter, and she uses that as a transitional device to get to the next paragraph.

It was under such a literal cloud that Rennie drove a small and subdued Melza Raven to the police station Sunday morning, accompanied by Rhino Kanaloa…

The infantilization of Demelza Poldark-Raven also continues.  Note that she is “small and subdued” after her epic hysterical-weeping-‘n’-catatonia fest of the night before, as well as not being able to manage driving a car (Future Me: at the end of the chapter Rennie does mention that Demelza can’t drive “American,” whatever that means) or getting herself to the cop shop alone.  She’s also being called Melza here, which is a nickname that’s been deployed throughout this book although I hadn’t mentioned it.  Another word for a nickname is a diminutive, something made smaller.

And we get an editorial fail right off the bat.  In the sentence above that I quoted, it states that Rennie drove Demelza to the police station, but later in the very same sentence the writer tells us that Chin Ho Kanaloa was driving because Rennie was tired and the road was bad due to the rain.  Can the writer not keep the start of a sentence in mind until she gets to the end? Why did Kennealy-Morrison leave “drove” in the sentence and not change it to “accompanied” or something along those lines, just to be consistent? How can memory fail that fast?

She also refers to wanting Chin Ho Kanaloa with them because he’s bigger than the cops.  So she thinks a civilian can intimidate cops inside the police station?

Then there’s a paragraph about the Soncartneys which is designed to remind you that they’re some of her very bestest friends, no kidding you guys!

And then Kennealy-Morrison executes one of her patented time skips which is a boring-as-hell detailing of what Rennie did after the end of the last chapter which mostly involves breakfast and does manage to tell us that Ned has in fact been arrested, which should have been clear to us before this.  Demelza Poldark-Raven is calm when she’s told and Rennie thinks she’s still stoned from that ten-milligram Valium she had the night before.  Even as a non-drug-addict, that sounds dubious, but moving on.

Marcus Dorner is at the station when Rennie shows up, which the narrator states she was expecting, and she still has the knee-jerk rage reaction combined with cartoonish threats of physical violence at his presence that we should be used to from all the times we saw it in California Screamin’.  The author calls this “a splendid fit of bad temper…a little personal thunderstorm of her very own…” as if this is something commendable.  Your mileage may vary—mine does. 

“Don’t start with me, Marcus!  Do not, or I swear to God I will snap your arm off and beat you to death with it.  Do I make myself clear?  Let her [my note: Demelza Poldark-Raven] go in and see Ned in peace.  You and I can handle whatever we need to be handling right out here on our own.  And you have exactly one minute to tell me about it.  Fifty-eight seconds.  Go.”

Nobody in the real world would ever put up with this shit for five minutes, which is one reason it’s so hard to suspend disbelief regarding this series.  In addition to that, we’ve never been given any real reason why Rennie is so consistently hostile to Marcus.  We can’t use the moving-to-Los-Angeles gambit to hang it on, since she was even more hostile toward him in the second book, after they’d started their little affair.  I can’t imagine why she decided to fuck a man she disliked so much, despite the narrator’s contention that they felt “considerable affection” for each other.  Somehow that never made it onto the page in any way other than “tell-don’t-show.”  My theory for this is that Marcus Dorner is the direct analogue for the guy she was engaged to in college and wound up not marrying.

Originally I thought that Stephen Lacing must be the analogue for that guy, but she doesn’t display the same venomous nastiness toward him.  Don’t get me wrong; she cuts him down at every opportunity, but she’s much milder in her dislike, which indicates that he could be someone who didn’t offend her to any serious degree.  Marjorie Lacing has the same venomous nastiness directed at her, so I still think she was Kennealy-Morrison’s fiance’s mother, but with Marcus as her son, rather than nephew.

But Marcus has reclaimed at least one of his balls from her and tells her in a low voice that she needs to see him first because Marcus witnessed him giving his statement and some things were mentioned that Demelza Poldark-Raven would be better off hearing from Rennie.  Yeah, that’s the mark of a healthy marital relationship right there.

Rennie doesn’t like it because he hasn’t caved in but agrees to see Ned, to which Marcus rewards her by saying “Good girl,” which I would find patronizing but this is Rennie so fuck that noise and the section ends.

So the cops show Rennie into the interrogation room where Ned is being held and the author provides an unintentionally revealing moment about her protagonist that I’m sure she thought was cute and quirky but comes across as more sociopathic, considering that a guy she had a sexual relationship with (which has been retconned to four weekends in service of revirginizing her for Turk) has been arrested for murder.  One would think the first, if not the only, thing on her mind would be finding out if he’s all right, and maybe what Marcus was talking about, but that’s not how Rennie rolls.

The only person in it [the interrogation room] was Ned himself, sitting at a dark-stained oak farmhouse table of Arts and Crafts design and considerable age, which Rennie lusted after as soon as she set eyes on it.

OOOH!  I wonder if they would sell me that table, it’s probably an original one, up here in the boondocks like this, it would look great in the downstairs hall, they would do so much better with a nice new one, I’ll buy them two to replace it, I wonder if they have anything else nice lying around that I could take off their hands, maybe a bench or something…

I have spent the ENTIRE series ripping on Rennie Stride for calling herself a hippie when it suits her and adopting the accoutrements of hippiedom while eschewing the substance of it.  She has the clothes, the music, the alternative personal lifestyle, and the rampant drug use, but somehow the disdain for money and social status and material possessions never sank in.  And she just keeps providing material for me to rip on.

After she has her orgasm over the beat-up police department table, she remembers that she’s there to try to help Ned, even though she still hasn’t lifted a finger to start investigating the murder of Amander Evans.  We also still don’t know how she died.  Since she and Turk were at the same party and he was poisoned, we can assume that she also got a drugged cup of wine, but we shouldn’t have to assume cause of death in a murder mystery.  How many chapters did it take to find out that Tam Linn was stabbed to death in the first book? I think something like ten? But then everybody had forgotten he was murdered at all for the same length of time.  And her investigation of Cory Rivkin’s murder has been limited to checking with his bandmates to see if he actually did have a peanut allergy.  At this rate, she might start her serious investigating in a month or two.

Ned tries to show some bravado but Rennie cuts him off at the knees and indicates she doesn’t think he knows this is serious business, even though he’s the one who’s been in the interrogation room overnight.  Credit where credit is due, though—she does correctly call the window in the interrogation room that’s mirrored on one side and clear on the other “one-way glass,” because you can only see through it in one direction.  I’ve heard this called “two-way glass” more times that I care to remember.  Two-way glass is ordinary window glass.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled snark.

When she’s asking him to Basil Exposition Dump about Amander’s murder, she takes the time to do a name-drop for “the gold Mark Cross pen that had been a graft gift last Christmas from RCA Records.”  Because God forbid one doesn’t understand that everything about Rennie is so super-special, including her goddamned ink pen.

So Ned left Demelza Poldark at the motel and went back to the festival, and there’s some time-wasting detail about the décor of the meditation yurt itself, before he finds Amander and takes quite a while to figure out she’s dead instead of stoned.  Ned doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Because, as a narcissist, Rennie has to tie everything back to herself in some way, the description of finding Amander’s corpse makes her “remember[] a hauntingly similar moment for her and Turk, in the Hollywood Hills house, a year and a half ago.”  Well, except for the fact that neither she nor Turk ever touched Citrine, and Citrine was in bed, and neither she nor Turk ever tried to wake Citrine up, yeah, it’s very similar.

Ned did the sensible thing and ran for help, even though he couldn’t be bothered to check her for a pulse, but Amander was thoroughly dead.  He brings up Cory Rivkin and wants Rennie to tell him what’s going on and who’s doing this, which indicates he at least knows what’s going on.  Rennie answers him with “Honestly, dear man, I don’t know.  I wish I did.”  But not enough to do any hardcore investigating, of course.

Ned lies about not recognizing Amander when he found her, but Rennie lets him rattle on for almost a page before confronting him and calling his story “twaddle.”  Hey, I had a post for a chapter in the last book called “A Fistful of Twaddle!”  Don’t be stepping on my territory!

Rennie’s figured out that Ned was banging Amander, which is a pretty safe bet since he’s Not-Mick Jagger, but she couches it as him looking guilty and her knowing the look.  He ‘fesses up and gives us an entire longish paragraph about how slimy everyone in the music industry is, except for Elkanah Bannerman, who’s protected from sliminess by his newfound personal association with Rennie’s family.

Then Rennie gives us an entire page of exposition dump about the record company tactic of forcing an unknown act on a venue as an opener for an established act, which I think was already detailed in one of the previous books, but this is not so unknown as to need an entire page of explication.  That was the reason why Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees on one of their tours, and why Lynyrd Skynyrd opened for a lot of bands before they hit the big time, including REO Speedwagon (an acquaintance saw this show in Murray, KY, in 1973) and Black Sabbath.  And the Doors gets dragged onstage for a bit before the narrator starts the next paragraph with “Getting back to Ned and Amander,” one of the more awkward segues I’ve seen in a while.  You know who could have helped with that? An editor!

Rennie gets the idea it was Elk Bannerman’s idea to make Amander the opening act for Bluesnroyals for the tour and gets mad about it for no particular reason except that he didn’t tell her and intends to take him to task about it.  I hope she does—maybe he’ll have one of his Mob connections fit her for cement shoes and give her a tour of the bottom of the East River.  I’m even more committed to this possible future for Rennie after the next couple of paragraphs.

Ned gives some backstory about their tour with Amander, in which all the guys were flirting with her, including him, and he “stepped in to protect her,” which of course ended up with them screwing, which in Rennie’s mind proves that Amander is a groupie and deserved to die.

Since Ned is trying to evade responsibility for where he stuck his dick, he indicates to Rennie that he told Amander he was happily married, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer and wanted to be “mentored.”  Which I don’t think was a word in usage as much then as now.  And Rennie’s a slut-shaming bitch as usual, calling Amander “this slutty little Kiwi fledgling.”  She then goes on with her internalized misogyny and slut-shaming.

“Who was, I have to tell you, no innocent sparrow.  She was hunting you like a yellow-headed vulture.”

Because when a woman wants a man, he has no choice.  If she pursues him, he has to fuck her because reasons.  Jim Morrison didn’t fuck all those women because he wanted to—it was just because they pursued him! It wasn’t his fault, really and truly!

I wouldn’t be quite so pissed off about Rennie’s woman-hating and slut-shaming if, again, the author had shown us that these aren’t good things and allowed her protagonist to experience negative consequences so that she could learn and grow and change as a character, but as we all know good and well by this point, everything Rennie thinks or says or does is sheer perfection and must never be questioned under threat of being hit by lightning.

Ned’s embarrassed that he got caught dipping his wick and Rennie goes off on him and ends her screed by wanting to know why he did it.  That’s the one thing in the whole book that rings true, and Ned can’t give her any reason for his fucking around that she’ll accept, other than that he isn’t “Sir Lancelot” like Turk Wayland.  Maybe that’s not the best person to compare Turk to, since Lancelot fucked his king’s wife.  I’m picturing Stephen Lacing smashing Turk over the head with a scepter.

Demelza caught him cheating and took off with the baby—what baby? We weren’t told that the Poldark-Ravens had a baby!  God, this is such sloppy writing.  This is why you need an editor!  And Ned calls Amander “the little tart.”  How respectful of the dead.  He also goes on the say that Amander “wasn’t very good” and was “a trampy little bint.”  Ned remains an asshole.

Rennie gives him a slight rebuke but moves on quickly as the slut-shaming of a competitor for her man (“Every woman in the world is competition for him”) satisfied her like an orgasm.  She then asks what evidence the police have against him and he admits his fingerprints were in her room and they’d had an affair, which is a lot more compelling than Rennie thinks.  The most likely person to kill a woman is a current or ex-romantic partner, and Ned doesn’t have an alibi.  But Rennie goes ahead and shits on the cops for not having evidence that would convince the living Queen Emma Peel.

I daresay so were Turk’s fingerprints there.

That’s a remarkably awkward line.  And if Turk’s prints were in Amander’s room, I’d vote for Rennie as the murderer.

And mine.  And the prints of half the artists at the festival…It was a party.  We were all there.

So that Rainshadow Records party was in Amander Evans’s room? But you said before that two hundred people attended that party.  Two hundred people can’t fit in a motel room.  Checking back, on page 123 the room the party’s taking place in is called a “small suite.”  A suite is traditionally a living/dining room with an attached bedroom and is still not big enough for two hundred people.  And, nowhere in the entire passage is the reader told that this small suite is Amander Evans’s room.  So there for your editorial fail, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison!

 Rennie doesn’t think the cops have any evidence and Ned asks her to find out.  Note that they’re still in the interrogation room with cops watching from the other side of the one-way glass. 

And then, since we’re still doing a soft reboot of California Screamin’, Demelza comes in and starts confessing to Amander’s murder, to which Ned responds by confessing to the murder instead of her.  This is a mash-up of Pamina Potter confessing to Baz Potter’s murder to protect her lover and Danny Marron confessing to Pierce Hill’s murder to protect his wife.  At least Brandi Storey Marron had the brains to arrive at the police station with high-powered lawyers and get Danny to recant his confession.  Neither Not-Mick Jagger nor Not-Bianca are smart enough to even call a lawyer yet.  And, lest we think we might have seen the end of the slut-shaming of Amander Evans, Demelza Poldark-Raven gets in a shot at her as a slut before the section ends.

The next section starts out with Rennie looking in through the door of the interrogation room five minutes later to watch “Mr. and Mrs. Raven continue to whale on each other.”  Whale actually means beat in this context, so the cops aren’t going to put a stop to mutual assault?  Rennie gets to feel superior because they’re both so stupid and explicitly compares it to the Pamina Potter situation in Monterey and states that the cops don’t believe either confession now.  I can see why they wouldn’t believe Demelza, but there’s no reason for them not to believe Ned.  They already thought they had sufficient evidence to arrest him.  But since Rennie is always right, I’m sure they’ve completely disregarded a suspect confessing to the crime he’s been arrested for.

Rennie thinks Sheriff Lawdog isn’t stopping them from fighting because he’s looking for someone to say something incriminating, which they both already did, but let’s just go with it in service of getting this chapter finished.  She then goes into the interrogation room and chews out Ned and Demelza Poldark for two entire pages, explaining in detail why neither of them could have done it, and does have an uncharacteristic little bit of humanity when she says she doesn’t believe Amander Evans was going to tell the London tabloids that Ned had raped her.  Since Rennie/Kennealy-Morrison hates other women so much, I’m surprised Rennie didn’t jump right on that to demonize Amander just a little bit more.  Anyway, she lays down the law to everybody, including Marcus and Sheriff Lawdog.  Why they listen to her I have no idea.

And—chapter!  We have hit the two-thirds mark of this book and Rennie still isn’t doing any investigating worthy of the name.  We don’t even have any real suspects, so Kennealy-Morrison didn’t learn the lesson I thought she’d learned from the first and third books:  always give us plenty of suspects so we can keep guessing. And what happened to Chin Ho Kanaloa? He got one mention in the chapter because he drove them to the station and then he vanishes. Maybe he’s trying to escape the narrative.

The author also seems to have forgotten about the person who attacked Rennie in the woods and got stabbed by the antler-hilted dagger.  We still don’t know if the attack had anything to do with anything, the same way we don’t know if Sunny Silver’s broken arm and Ned the asshole’s electrocution have anything to do with the two murders so far.  The plotting in this is pretty lazy so far.

And this series could afford to take a vacation from the slut-shaming.  Just a suggestion.

Next time, chapter 17, during which the burglary that brought Marcus Dorner into the narrative is suddenly remembered, Rennie does multiple pages’ worth of talking about the media misrepresentation of the Woodstock festival, and an old enemy of Rennie’s comes back into the picture, although she was only mentioned in the third book, so it’s really the first time we’ve met her. Since Rennie hates her, I’ve got a feeling she’ll be my new favorite character.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 14, or Quantum of Filler

Apologies for the hiatus. I got involved in some of my own original fiction-writing and didn’t have the strength to come back to the universe with Rennie and her merry band of worshippers/simps/jerks for a while.

Evenor plays badly, like all the bands so far except for Turnstone, and the first three paragraphs are a bitch by each of three members of Evenor:  Chet Galvin (one of Rennie’s more serious starfucks—he lasted for two whole books), Juha Vasso (one of Mary Prax’s lovers who only lasted for one book and apparently doesn’t remember they used to fuck), and Jack Paris, the drummer who hasn’t fucked either of our female leads and was the only reason Rennie thought Owl Tuesday’s performance was good.  It had to be, since the drummer was in her girl crush’s band.  Rennie is just made of horrible.

I think the reason Turnstone gave a good performance is because Miss Toke-One-Up was the lead singer instead of Tansy Belladonna, whom we know Rennie has a huge hate-on for despite her protestations of friendship.  On second thought, Rennie is made of horrible and petty.  This is borne out by her own thoughts after the musicians get through bitching.

…for her part, Rennie had been secretly, guiltily, almost glad that Evenor had been less than brilliant, because of how a stellar performance on their part would have made Turk and Lionheart feel—and yes, she was fully aware of what a horrible person that made her.  Too bad.

Rennie’s associated with guilt in the passage but has to deny any real awareness of why her behavior is bad.  Kennealy-Morrison does this a lot when Rennie has to admit to negative qualities, as though her awareness of this is a hall pass that excuses her from ever having to do anything about it, having to change and grow and become a better person, because the author self-insert is perfect.

As if to underline that Rennie is Queen Emma Peel, she’s warned everyone about the weather in this part of the state, and only those who listened to her are comfortable.  Is there any level to which the writer will not stoop to assure us of the superiority of her self-insert? I’m getting beyond sick of this.

Bardo, one of Evenor’s members who doesn’t speak unless it’s in quasi-mystical platitudes, has a big speech about the future of the music industry which is both absolutely correct and much less impressive viewed from a vantage point of forty-nine years in the future.  There’s some more filler conversation before Mary Prax shows up with Rhino Kanaloa, whom I now have a suspicion is Chin Ho from the original Hawaii Five-O series. 

Not this old, of course, since the actor was around forty when he was hired for the part and nobody in Rennie’s hip cool universe is allowed to be older than thirty. 

Dill Miller makes a special guest appearance to mention that Jefferson Airplane made an appearance at Grossinger’s, which fans of the movie Dirty Dancing might remember as the model for Kellermann’s, the resort in the film.  This is apropos of a remark Rennie made about the Woodstock festival being held in “Borschtland, the heart of the Jewish Catskills” and after Dill’s remark she’s all contemptuous amusement at the idea of rock groups playing for the petty bourgeoisie that she is so desperate to escape from herself.  There’s also an ageist slam at the “blue-rinse crowd” that leads into the Duke and Duchess of Robinhood going to Lionheart’s show at the—wait a minute, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden? Did they even book rock shows back then? I can’t tell, so we’re just going to call that bullshit for now.  It’s also bullshit that she could have gotten his parents and grandparents to the show, but she’s Queen Emma Peel so she’s goddamn fucking magic and let’s move on.

Oh yeah, Chet Galvin is now married to that painter lady he took up with at Monterey Pop after Rennie sucked his carcass dry and abandoned him by the side of the road in favor of an Irish murderer.  Don’t know whether Bernadette—wait a minute.  The character of Bernadette appeared on the sitcom Big Bang Theory in 2009.  California Screamin’ also came out in 2009, in which this character was introduced.  So Bernadette’s canonical name in these posts is now Bernadette Wolowicz.  When she was introduced, she seemed a bit smarter than Rennie, but now has been downgraded to being just as shallow and narcissistic as out protagonist when she comments on the anti-hippie signs along the road into the festival, which I have to assume were real.

“Yeah, we saw those too,” said Bernadette Galvin.  “Gave us quite a feeling of solidarity with the civil rights marchers, or at least as much solidarity as middle-class college-educated white kids can feel.  Sort of Jim Crow Lite.  Instructive.”

So Rennie doesn’t want to talk about what she knows about the murders but does anyway because Juha Vasso insists.  Strong Female Character, y’all!

But we know she would have anyway because Rennie never turns down an opportunity to be the center of attention.  Of course everybody’s impressed with her newfound Mafia connections—

–which somehow redound to her credit even though she had nothing to do with any of it.  Then Kennealy-Morrison spends the next two pages—the rest of the section—ripping on Janis Joplin through the mouthpiece of Rennie.  I just wonder what Joplin did to her to incur her wrath, other than fuck Jim Morrison once.

The next section starts out with the Honest Mollusk performing—yay!  Because Rennie hates their name I love them.  I’m perverse that way.  Anyway, they give a good performance and do that wren-hunting song from the previous book because everything has to be all about Rennie goddamn Stride.  And the ruminating on the wren song goes on for almost a page before poor unlucky Marcus Dorner reenters the chat.

For anybody who doesn’t remember Marcus Dorner from the first three books, he was Rennie’s husband’s cousin who was a police detective (the better for her to have a cop in her hip pocket), whom she wound up kissing in the first book, fucking and abusing verbally before their breakup in the second, and being anachronistically stalked by in the third in a transparent bid to fool the reader into thinking he could be the killer.  He’s in love with Rennie (as of book three) and into bondage.  Really, that’s all we know about him.  He’s not a well-rounded character, but neither are most of the supporting characters.

And she’s hostile right from the get-go.  What a surprise!

“Garcia told me you were infesting the premises.”

Yet one more instance of Rennie dehumanizing people she doesn’t like, in this case implying that her former lover is vermin.  How Turk and the author can jerk themselves off over her “impeccable courtesy” is beyond me.

He ignores the shot as he knows what a mannerless bitch she is and asks about Turk, which doesn’t please her, and he clarifies he was told by local law enforcement.  In an attempt to suck up to her, he compliments her on getting Turk out of the hospital as speedily as she did.  Marcus knows her way better than Turk does.  So why is he in love with her again? Oh yeah, Rennie’s Magic Hooha (trademark pending).

She doesn’t go for the attempted suck-up and they engage in a battle of pseudo-wits.  For seven pages.

I’m just giving you the highlights of their seven-page conversation as it’s boring as fuck.  Marcus is apparently a Federal agent now, which makes no damn sense of his presence at Woodstock.  The murders are being kept quiet and Rennie gets in a stupid allusion to Arlo Guthrie and the song “Alice’s Restaurant.”  Then she brags on how she got Turk back to New York using her connections as Queen Emma Peel and advises us that she told War God Cherry Blossom and Francher and Christabel Green that she would kill them if they didn’t “stay and take care of him till I get back,” which they were “happy” to do. 

I think they were just humoring the psychopath in their midst.  Marcus isn’t surprised by the death threats since he was the object of so many of them in the past.  He offers his sympathy about Turk, which she lets him know she doesn’t believe.  Then we get two and a half pages of backstory about Marcus and some catching-up regarding the Lacing family, during which she does some very stupid rattling-on due to her discomfort with being in her ex-lover’s presence.  And the homosexual brother-in-law and his lesbian wife have had another turkey-baster baby, this time a girl.  Brace for this next part, you guys.

“I’m her godmother, you know, and she’s named for me too,” she added boastfully.  “Charlotte Rennie.”

This drove me around the bend because of the weakness of Kennealy-Morrison’s writing style.  For once the dialogue did convey what she wanted it to, that Rennie was boasting, so she did not need to add the adverb “boastfully” to the dialogue tag, but because she is addicted to adverbs like nobody I’ve ever read, she could not restrain herself from using it.  And, because she did not have an editor with the power to force her to revise her work, this redundant little adverb is infesting the sentence.

Because no talk about the Lacings can be allowed to pass without Rennie spewing bile about her mother-in-law, Marjorie Lacing, who is still her mother-in-law as Rennie is still married to Stephen:

I’m told Marjorie threw eleven blue-tailed fits when she found out, more furious that they were naming the baby after me than after Charlotte, even. [my note: Charlotte was the madam who was the source of the family’s original money] Sorry I couldn’t be there to watch her throw even one of them: I bet they were well worth seeing.  She does that sort of thing so beautifully—she’s like a gold medalist in the Outraged Overprivileged Socialite Olympics.

Marcus is a complete simp for Rennie and approves of everything she says.  I can’t tell whether Rennie was at the christening but I guess she must have been, and we’re told that Marcus didn’t attend, with Rennie wanting to know if it was because of her.  I love his reply, even though we know he’s lying as far as he’s concerned.

He snorted.  “The whole world doesn’t revolve around Rennie Stride, you know.”

Her reply indicates she doesn’t believe this—

–and he starts questioning her about why she isn’t in New York, which she answers even though she isn’t legally bound to and doesn’t really want to.  And Rennie wants to work with Marcus again by investigating the murders.

Since Marcus has already been in contact with Sheriff Lawdog, he knows that they’ve told her to keep her nose out of police business and lets her know this, but sugars it up with another compliment about Rennie getting Turk away and throws in an insult about the local law enforcement’s “country noses.”  She really should have stayed with Marcus; he’s become as much of an asshole as she is.

Rennie gloats over her triumph for a couple of sentences before returning to her obsession:  killing whoever poisoned Turk.  Or rather:

…finding the vermin responsible for the poisoning and thrashing the living bejesus out of him.  Or her,” she added as an afterthought.

So probably two killers, one man and one woman.  We’ll see.

So Rennie tries to convince Marcus she can help him and offers to brief him on Cory and Amander’s deaths.  That’s about how much they’re worth to the story:  pawns to help Rennie achieve her aims.  Otherwise, fuck both of them.

They have some unimportant conversation for a couple of paragraphs before Rennie exposes some more of her hypocrisy.

“And before I’m done, I’m going to give this peace and love hippie crap the pointy end of several different sorts of sticks.  You wait and see if I don’t.”

See, Rennie’s only a hippie when it suits her and doesn’t give a shit about peace—as witness her contempt for singers who record protest songs—or love, unless it’s romantic and aimed at someone who can better her social status.  She’s a proto-yuppie.  She’d be perfect with Patrick Bateman.

Marcus is tired of her empty threats to unknown people and tells her Ned Raven is being questioned about Amander Evans’s murder.  Marcus notes that he likes Ned, although I don’t know how the two of them know each other well enough for that as cops don’t hang in rocker circles.  Oh, pardon me, the rockerverse. 

Rennie wants to see him and Marcus tells her he hasn’t been arrested yet. He also says he’ll leave her name at the police station and she can visit in the morning, along with an instruction to call King Bryant, the Lacing family lawyer that Rennie makes free use of whenever she wants. 

The next section has Rennie doing her job by listening to some of the acts, although I don’t know how she’s going to write about this because she hasn’t deigned to listen to at least half of the acts.  But authorial fiat, I guess.  The Grateful Dead get name-checked (and performed badly, of course), as do Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Kennealy-Morrison takes another opportunity to rip on Janis Joplin.

…Janis was in a much-dilapidated state and a foul mood of her own, due to smack, booze, and a ten-hour wait since her too-early arrival at the field; even her dearest friends thought that her historic Woodstock appearance would not be a pretty sight…

This is the narrator speaking, since Rennie has no way of knowing anything about the thoughts of Joplin’s friends, since she most certainly isn’t one.  The narrator’s as much of a bitch as Rennie, so that’s good to know.

Rennie’s not paying much attention to the show because she’s worried about Ned and her thoughts indicate she thinks he may have done something.  When Marcus comes back, he lets her know that Ned found Amander’s body and Rennie’s reaction is both weird and weirdly described for somebody she isn’t even fucking anymore.

And Rennie felt her front brain and back brain together kick her heart to the ground and stomp all over it.

And—chapter!  This was a lot of wheel-spinning.  Kennealy-Morrison’s also still trying to revirginize Rennie for Turk as the relationship with Marcus has been retconned.  It was in the middle of the seven pages I was just trying to get through, but I’ll quote it here.

…Marcus Lacing Dorner, Stephen’s second cousin and her imediately [sic} pre-Turk ex—

Sorry, no, that was either Chet Galvin or Finn Hanley.

–though really not much of an ex, given as they’d spent perhaps eight weekends together in all before coming to their senses.

That’s not how it sounded in the second book at all, but by now it should be a given that the writer can’t be trusted to truthfully depict people or relationships from previous books if it doesn’t suit what she wants to do in the moment. She refuses to be bound by what she’s already written.

And I can’t see Marjorie Lacing throwing fits.  Kennealy-Morrison showed her as far too controlled a person for that.  I could see her giving her disrespectful unloving son a cold look and making a remark along the lines of, “If you want to name your daughter after two whores, go right ahead, but don’t blame me when she’s living in a tent on the beach and giving blowjobs for quarters.”  Then she’d be all icy and never mention it again.

Next time, chapter 15, wherein Rennie comforts Ned’s wife by singing—what?—and takes charge of a number of situations, and Belinda Melbourne is conclusively proved to be an author self-insert because she asks Rennie to set her up with Diego Hidalgo, the Jim Morrison analogue.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 13, or A Retcon for the Reporter

Rennie gets back to the festival grounds around four in the afternoon and instantly wants to do some cocaine, “lovely fluffy white coke.”  She doesn’t trust any of the Drug Alley dealers to supply her because they’re all suburban hippie proles, but doesn’t need to because:

…she had that nice gold Victorian compact Stephen had given her in another life…adapted…long ago…for her present needs: one side contained about two grams of very decent cocaine, in the little spill-proof compartment formerly used for face powder, with the mirror in the compact lid to snort it off, and the requisite tiny spoon and short silver straw fitted very nicely in the attached, and empty, lipstick tube.

Anybody else remember in the last book when she got a huge, instant hate-on for Allen Goodwyn as a “flaming cokehead” because he had a “custom-made silver box with the tiny fitted spoon” and wondered why Pruelinda let him near the children?  At least he never beat up a cop while ripped to the tits on cocaine.

If the flaming skull fits, Rennie…

Oh, but that’s not all there is to Rennie’s stash box, oh heavens no.  The loving detail rendered on this object really does prove to me that she’s a drug addict who won’t admit it.

The other side was an ad hoc pillbox, and held, besides a sharp new single-edged razor blade to chop the coke, a well-curated selection of assorted caps and tabs:  Quaaludes, Turk’s occasional necessity on flights; Valium and Tuinal, for her to get to sleep on; and right there in the middle her own zipper-upper of choice, a couple of black shiny capsules of biphetamine, the gentlest sort of speed—if that wasn’t some weird oxymoron—or so at least the obliging prescribing doctor had told her.

So this doctor wasn’t a “moron upstate cheesehead quack” because he did what you wanted, even though the case could be made that your speed-dispensing doctor is a metric fuckton more of a quack than the poor nameless doctor in the ER.  Plus, how big is this damn compact? Is she carrying around the druggie equivalent of the TARDIS?

Right after this we get a couple of sentences denying any possible drug addiction on the Rennieturk’s part:  no, drugs bore them, and their drugs are medicinal.

She has a moment of struggle over the speed, but then heroically puts away the TARDIS stash box and vows to get through the weekend drug-free, mostly to set herself apart from all the other festivalgoers because she’s the living Queen Emma Peel.

Rennie’s getting food in the performer’s pavilion in the next section, because she’s privileged and not poor enough to have to go into town for food and run a chance of getting beaten or worse by townies but never acknowledges her privilege at any time.  Elk Bannerman—the guy who took over Rainshadow Records after Pierce Hill got murdered by one of Rennie’s casual starfucks—presumably wants to talk to her for the purpose of getting her to investigate Amander Evans’s murder, but she’s all emotional because he brings back memories of Monterey and she refers hypocritically to Tansy Belladonna as a “dear dead friend,” despite the fact that she called Tansy stupid and a slut almost constantly.

Kennealy-Morrison gives us two pages about Elkanah Bannerman, who’s apparently mobbed up but “unexpectedly cultured” and a former “yeshiva boy.”  And now, even though this wasn’t even hinted at in the second book where he first appeared, we get a big-ass retcon about how Rennie’s family has known his family for decades.

I guess this is a way to get detail about Rennie’s family—almost completely ignored by the series up until this point—into the narrative.  Somehow, her family decided that Elk Bannerman, whom she showed no signs of knowing at Monterey, would look out for Rennie.  As I’ve said many, many times before, if the writer can’t be bothered to pay attention to her own work, why should the reader?

The only interesting thing in the next half-page is Rennie’s grandmother’s name, Vincenza “Vinnie” Albini, and her grandfather’s, Kevin Michael McBridgetts (because McBride would have been too common for an ancestor of Rennie’s, even though Bridget and Bride were variations on the same name), and they lived on the South Slope.  These must be Rennie’s maternal grandparents, but we still don’t have a name for the mother or the father.  There’s some uninteresting stuff about the Irish-Italian conflict, Al Capone gets shoehorned in as an ex-suitor of Rennie’s grandmother—this series is as bad as Forever Knight as far as jamming in every famous person in the timeline—and West Side Story does indeed get mentioned, and Rennie comes back to the only reason she does anything:  to be owed, and she thinks Elk Bannerman owes her.

There’s some politeness as Rennie extends condolences over Amander and Elk inquires after Turk’s health before they get down to murder business.  Elk does a mini-recap of the murderers in the past books that Rennie’s dealt with, but none of the non-canonical Winterland/Avalon Ballroom/Human Be-In/the Matrix/Airplane House/Brian Jones funeral murders.  Elk promises to help her and she acknowledges that she believes he will.

Even though she’s supposed to be covering Woodstock as a reporter, she’s missed the day’s opening act, Quill, and we haven’t so much as seen her take any notes on the previous night’s performers.  I understand she’s had the shock of Turk’s near-death, but that was after the performances, so I don’t think she’s actually much of a reporter.

There’s a lot more police presence than there was the day before, but the cops become entranced by the simple honest hippies and their lifestyle, and Rennie gloats over it.  Yeah, I’m sure that happened.

It’s called “Cops Beating Up Hippies to Glenn Miller Orchestra,” just FYI.

Because she’s realized she needs to pay attention to some of the acts in order to write a story, she deigns to listen to the act currently playing, Santana, whom she likes.  After that she listens to Turnstone from the performer’s pavilion.  This is the band that Tansy Belladonna used to front and the one that Miss Toke-One-Up from the third book currently is the lead singer for.  They give a good show—obviously, as they’re Rennie’s friends.  Then there’s a page about Lionheart that mentions that the only band members who do drugs are Niles and Mick, who are her enemies, so does Kennealy-Morrison think that doing drugs is a moral failing? Only for them, I’m sure, since Rennie Stride the Living Queen Emma Peel is beyond our morality.

Canned Heat’s waiting to go on and Rennie’s surprised that Mary Prax isn’t nervous, as is her habit.  Rennie mocks her for this, and when that doesn’t upset her, guilts her for feeling good when Turk almost died.  That makes Mary Prax “instantly contrite.”  Yeah, I was missing those Ike Turner vibes in their relationship from California Screamin’.

Now that Rennie has crushed Mary Prax under her heel, the conversation turns in the direction that Rennie wants:  straight back to herself and her concerns.

There’s a truly confusing bit where Mary Prax makes the sensible observation that nobody’s going to treat two murders the same way they would accidents, and Rennie jumps down her throat.

“That is quite likely true.  But I am pretty darn sure I haven’t told you I suspect murder,” said Rennie, her eyes narrowed.  “I haven’t mentioned that to anyone yet.  Except the fuzz, of course.”

Pot really does fuck up your short-term memory.  Or Kennealy-Morrison pays little or no attention to what she writes down.  On page 135, the news of Amander Evans’s death is given to Rennie and her instant response is “Who killed her?” When no one answers, she claims her Murder Chick reputation as grounds for her line of thought.  I’d given Kennealy-Morrison the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe Mary Prax wasn’t there when this happened.

But it was Mary Prax who told her Amander was dead.  And she also points out that Rennie mentioned murder at the New York brownstone(s).  Why didn’t the writer cut this entire section of the scene? And the repulsive word “slaydar” pokes its ugly head into the story.

Somehow Elk Bannerman thinks that Amander may have been killed for something he’d done in his capacity as a mobster but there are no specific, and then the section ends.

The last four pages of the chapter are about Evenor getting ready to go on and Rennie helping Mary Prax get dressed for the show.  It’s all a lot of pothead philosophy about performance and crowd dynamics and groups and none of it is interesting.  The closest thing to a funny moment was Mary Prax worrying about whether the crowd would be able to see up her skirt, which is a micromini, so I’d say yes.  Don’t worry, though; they’ll probably be too stoned to remember what they saw.

And—chapter!  Thankfully, Marcus Dorner continued his winning streak of avoiding Rennie.  With some forethought and a little luck, he might be able to get through the entire book without ever encountering her.  But he won’t be that lucky.

This chapter just didn’t seem to have a lot of content.  The closest thing Rennie did to detecting was to talk to Elk Bannerman, but nothing happened except the crowbarred-in retcon of the Albini-McBridgetts and the Bannermans being old acquaintances.  This seems like a filler chapter, which the book already has too many of, and we haven’t even hit the halfway point yet (that’s a few pages into the next chapter).

Next time, chapter 14, in which Evenor gives a bad performance, a bunch of bitching about record companies happens, and Marcus is dragged into the narrative by the scruff of his neck.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 12, or Days of Wine and Poison

We get a title page with the date and the lists of acts for the second day of Woodstock before the chapter starts.  Specifically, it’s “Woodstock, Saturday August 16” and the acts playing are Quill, the Honest Mollusk, John B. Sebastian, the Keef Hartley Band, the Incredible String Band, Santana, Turnstone, Mountain, Canned Heat, Evenor, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, the Who, and Jefferson Airplane.

I am just so happy that the Honest Mollusk has shown up again.  I know Rennie’s going to shit all over them, since she already turned up her nose at the band name in the first book and they were previously managed by Jasper Alan Rickman Goring, but I’m going to enjoy their presence just the same.

Rennie flexes about being able to hire a helicopter from the airport she disdained to the festival, after the private plane she harassed out of Baron Hollywood Hogan leaves.  Mary Prax comes with her, and Rennie drops names of the other people on the helicopter, namely John Entwistle of the Who and a fictional character named Chris Sakerhawk, who’s been name-checked a few times as a musician friend of Rennie’s, but he hasn’t amounted to anything yet. 

Rennie takes it upon herself to advise the festival organizers about Turk’s poisoning and shits on them because they react in “a vague, hippie way,” meaning they aren’t as shocked and horrified as she would like.  And once again I ask you, Rennie, are you a hippie or are you not? You seem to be indecisive about that, just like a lot of other things.

Then she talks to the county police that she had done her best to interfere with by getting Turk out of town as fast as she could.  And the narrator notes she’s trying to get more information about Amander Evans’s death as Rennie has never had a pure-hearted impulse in her life.

To her surprise, the officer she’s talking to isn’t a “hayseed lawman” and “redneck” the way she assumed, as she doesn’t know the trick with the word “assume.”  Kennealy-Morrison’s classism manifests itself again.  After Officer Nameless tells her they’ve heard of her, like a good narcissist, Rennie wonders what stereotypes he’s been thinking about her, because nobody could judge a person based on what they see, rather than what they expect to see, even a trained cop, because no one can behave better than Rennie Stride.

…no doubt he had been characterizing her baselessly as—what? A pampered rock star’s compliant sex kitten? A liberal commie pinko reporter? A godless hippie slut? Who knew? But almost certainly not as the serious, hard-working journalist she really was.  Well, we all make mistakes…

Rennie, you don’t like your job at all.  The last time you liked your job was in the first book.  Ever since then, it’s been nothing but an imposition and the only joy you get out of it is the thrill of scooping other reporters on a story.  You are neither serious nor hard-working.  Get over yourself.

Officer Nameless drops the bomb on her that they know about the entire hospital incident involving Turk and Rennie responds like a six-year-old being called on the carpet by Mommy.

“I didn’t tell any lies…Only the little white one about how I’m his wife…we’re engaged in planning the wedding…I was just anticipating.”

Wow, you can’t lie convincingly at all, can you, Rennie? If you’re trying to sell a lie, it helps if you don’t admit in your second sentence that your first sentence wasn’t true.

He asks for her to expand on what happened because he doesn’t want to bother Turk in his convalescence and she takes this as a threat and goes straight back into her all-cops-are-pigs mindset, despite the moment of enlightenment she had in the second book, which is two years ago now.  Rennie also flexes on her ability to best cops whenever she wants.

…she settled at once into her old police-enlightening mode.  Hey, she’d fought Scotland Yard to a draw, twice; wrangling a rube upstate cop should be a pushover.

I thought you just got through thinking this guy wasn’t a hayseed or a redneck.  So he’s a rube again because you don’t like what he had to say? No matter how much you love to preen yourself over your own intelligence, you’re dumber than a sack of hair.

And then she goes on to think that DCI Dakers hadn’t “held a grudge.”  How the hell would you know? It’s not like he’s going to tell you about it because he’s an actual professional, like the ER doctor that didn’t call you what you are.

And Officer Nameless is actually the sheriff, and his name is Caskie Lawson.  Pretty sure this is an anagram but I lost interest in them long, long ago.

So she tells him about the party and he takes notes and comes across, in her words,  as neutral.  And of course that pisses her off. 

“So there you have it,” she said with renewed defiance.  “May I ask how you found out about Turk? Who blew the whistle on us?”

She is obsessed with people betraying her, regardless if they know her or not, had a good reason or not.  He lets her know pretty much everybody was overjoyed to rat them out, but before that he takes off his hat and she notices he’s got long hair for a cop and is young, and if Turk hadn’t been romantic endgame, I’d expect her to bang this guy because long hair on a youngish guy gets her hot as an erupting volcano.

Anyway, Sheriff Lawdog compliments her on getting Turk out of Dodge on Baron Hollywood Hogan’s plane and even says, “I hadn’t known you had such impressive resources at your command.”

Can he sound a little less obsequious? I mean, I guess he can, but not if the writer has anything to say about it.  Kennealy-Morrison has to establish the unquestionable superiority of her self-insert, after all.

Rennie comes straight out and asks for information about Amander Evans, and now Sheriff Lawdog has to make a decision about whether to be a good cop or a good bootlicker to the living Queen Emma Peel.  I imagine she’ll be part of the investigation in short order.

He picks bootlicking and tells her what they know, which isn’t much.  The only interesting thing we find out is that nobody knows how Amander got from the party to the meditation tent (where she was found dead).  Rennie thinks she was “left in the tent as some sort of sign or boast,” which there is not one single shred of evidence for, but as Rennie is always right, I’m sure that blue-sky assumption will be correct.  Rennie wants to know who found her and Sheriff Lawdog belatedly remembers he’s a cop and doesn’t want to tell her, which “amused” her.  Oh, you’re just so superior, Queen Emma Peel.

He distracts her with the results of Cory Rivkin’s autopsy, which she thinks he’s stringing out and thinks that “it never hurt to humor the cops.”  Then why do you never do that, you stupid bint?

Well, it turns out that Cory Rivkin died of a peanut allergy and had a card in his wallet about it.  They don’t know how he could have eaten peanuts unless someone had given them to him without his knowledge, and Rennie has one of her usual moments of callousness about a life ended prematurely.

“I guess suicide by groundnut is out of the question…”

Kennealy-Morrison writes that Sheriff Lawdog was “a little shocked by the flippancy,” but this isn’t flip.  This is just callous.  I know Rennie didn’t know him, but still she could attempt to mimic human emotions like a good sociopath would do.

She tries to redirect him to Amander but it doesn’t work.  She also finds out he’s a religious Christian and that awakens feelings of guilt in her that I’m sure will never be dealt with again.  Still, I had to mention the guilt as Rennie feels it so rarely.

Now Rennie decides Sheriff Lawdog likes her, for what reason I can’t determine, and makes a remark about what she’s “heard about upstate New York county law enforcement,” and I guess she’s flirting? Whatever.  At least the section is over.

The next section starts out with Rennie going back to the performer’s pavilion and being the center of attention, just the way her little heart desires.  Her circle of worshippers—whoops, I meant listeners—includes Ned and Demelza Raven, Graypaul and Pruelinda Soncartney, Rhino Kanaloa (professional body guard in the third book, looked to his protectee for instructions in a bad situation), Belinda Melbourne (Kennealy-Morrison’s second self-insert), Gerry Langhans (old Catholic-school friend of Rennie), and “some Britband and Dead personnel.”

Jerry Garcia’s also there and we get half a page of backstory about Rennie’s relationship with him, which she takes pains to tell us was never romantic.  Not sure why not, as he died in 1995 and wasn’t capable of suing her, unless it’s just because he wasn’t good-looking enough to suit Patricia—whoops, I meant Rennie.  And this half-page of backstory also jams in one of the non-canonical murders that the writer mentions but never wrote about.  In this case it’s a murder at the Jefferson Airplane house, imaginatively called Airplane House here, while the band was “on the road with the Doors in Europe back last fall.”  You don’t need the word “back” in that sentence, just FYI.

Jerry Garcia and Rennie start talking about some of the festivalgoers getting beaten up in Bethel and Rennie suggests they shouldn’t leave the festival site, which rightly offends him as the festivalgoers were hungry and wanted to buy food.  She’s such a clueless rich dilettante that this means nothing to her because it isn’t connected to her current Murder Chick mystery. 

We get about two pages of detail about food getting to the festival, which I find of limited interest but it might be catnip for someone with a historical interest in Woodstock.  Demelza Poldark-Raven gets things back on track by asking if Turk’s all right.  It took that long for anyone to ask?

Rennie tells her he is and gives some background before everybody gets into a discussion about how everyone is playing badly at the festival and Pruelinda and Ned think it’s the bad karma from calling the festival Woodstock when it’s not at Woodstock anymore and that’s pretty stupid and I can’t tell if everyone is stoned here, but it seems like they might be.

Ned does serve his Basil Exposition Dump purpose here by mentioning that several thousand dollars was stolen from the festival organizers and they may not have enough money to pay the acts, and some of the smarter ones are demanding cash up front.  Rennie’s pissed because the cops didn’t tell her that and Jerry Garcia has some helpful information to impart.

Deep breath, deep breath, just get it over with…

“They brought in some heavy-duty ex-detective cat…[p]rivate muscle from L.A….and he was at Monterey…maybe you know him.”

So naturally it’s poor Marcus Dorner, being dragged back into the narrative like a screeching cat into a bath.  At least I can take a little joy in Rennie’s reaction.

PLEASEGODPLEASEKILLMEWITHLIGHTNING…

For once she and I are in perfect agreement.

The next section starts with Rennie being paranoid and looking around for Marcus but he isn’t there.  Good for him.  There’s a bit about Owl Tuesday (Cory Rivkin’s band) dropping out of the festival lineup but playing a memorial show on the free stage where Amander Evans played.  Rennie decides to see their show and does some thinking about getting attacked the previous night, which I don’t think she told Sheriff Lawdog about. 

Because Rennie can’t be graceful or generous about anything, she sees the last five songs of their show, with Evenor’s drummer sitting in for Cory Rivkin, and shits all over the band as being second-rate, and this is their best show because they have Evenor’s drummer there.

Afte the show, she goes to question the band about whether he actually had a peanut allergy—

–although the autopsy did indicate he died as the result of one.  The guys in Cory’s band give us about a page of backstory and fond reminiscences about him before asking what she really wants.  Well, they’re smart.  I guess they had her number.

Rennie asks about the peanut allergy and they confirm that it was real and that he would never have eaten a peanut of his own free will, ever.  This takes a page.  Have I said that Kennealy-Morrison is needlessly wordy? Because she is.

Then she tells them she’s writing obituaries for Cory and Amander, which the narrator calls out as true.  I can’t wait to see Amander’s.  I’ll bet it says nothing but GROUPIE STAY AWAY FROM MY MAN I’LL CUT YOU BITCH two hundred times in a row.  What she takes away from this is that the other members of Owl Tuesday had not been questioned by the police and that, if Cory hadn’t eaten peanuts of his own will, he’d been given them by someone else and she thinks that means murder.

And—chapter!  Poor Marcus Dorner.  Poor, poor Marcus Dorner, to be forced back into contact with Rennie.  At least I figured out why all the men she’s been more-or-less seriously involved with (Stephen Lacing, Marcus Dorner, Ned Raven, Turk) have been so supine.  Kennealy-Morrison gave an interview to a writer named Victoria Balfour for a book called Rock Wives, and there was a line in that interview that really struck me.

When the interviewer asks Kennealy-Morrison on page 154 “if she’d put up with all the stuff Jim used to pull on her,”

“Never in a million years!” she answers vehemently.  “No way.  This wasn’t any kind of liberating relationship.  He called all the shots.”

So of course, in fiction, Rennie has to call every shot in every relationship, which she does.  This doesn’t help Marcus Dorner, but at least it answers one of my questions about the series.

Next time, chapter 13, during which Rennie does some drugs, has a conversation with Elk Bannerman, Evenor gets ready to play, and Miss Toke-One-Up from the third book sullies us with her presence.  Please let her be the next victim.  Please?

Go Ask Malice Chapter 11, or A Rainy Day in Woodstock

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. 

Go Ask Malice Chapter 7, or The Rennie Show

Rennie starts off the chapter mainlining champagne from her “paranoically guarded champagne bottle,” saying specifically that this is to keep anyone from dosing it with LSD, but she doesn’t draw any further connections between this incident and the one where she electrified the tea at that society gathering and suffered no consequences at all for it, except Eric thinking she’s awesome and “adoring” her when she told him the story, like a good brainwashed zombie.  Then she’s “feeding little pieces of shrimp to the tiny Persian kitten a fellow writer had brought along.”  Yup, it’s Kennealy-Morrison’s cameo!

The reason I know this is a walk-on by the writer in her actual persona is because I read her memoir.  She details bringing her Persian kitten to Woodstock in her shoulderbag and, if I remember correctly, even mentions that she fed the kitten shrimp in the performer’s pavilion.  She also does mention that this wasn’t a smart thing to do.  In the memoir, of course.  If Rennie had brought a cat to Woodstock, everyone would think it was the greatest thing ever.  The kitten’s name was Nilufer and she also figures in a scene where Patricia and Jim talk about what they think a cat can know.

Anyway, she’s feeding the kitten when somebody sits down and grabs her by the boob.  Pop quiz:  what does Rennie do at this point?

1. Turns into Emma Peel and beats the shit out of her assaulter?
2. Frees herself and spews death threats at her assaulter?
3. Doesn’t turn a hair because she knows who it is and he’s one of her anointed worshippers?

Instead of throwing an instant left cross death blow, she just grinned.

Number one, there’s no such thing as a left cross instant death blow, and number two, I hate it when anybody grins in this book.  It just seems so self-satisfied, which is one hundred percent in tune with our author and her self-insert.

Turns out the sexual assaulter is Ares Sakura, otherwise known as War God Cherry Blossom in these posts, the boyfriend of Rennie’s current best friend.  Since Rennie is hip & young & cool & special, she doesn’t get mad at him for taking liberties with her body, and I suppose Mary Prax wouldn’t either if her friend decided to rat him out.  Funny how that “ratting out” thing only applies to people Rennie doesn’t like who haven’t done anything legally wrong.  Then he kisses her on the cheek and gives her a drink, which she accepts.  Seeing that he assaulted her not even five minutes ago, why isn’t she a little concerned that he may have drugged that drink with something to make her easier to assault? Because he’s her friend? Most rapes are committed by people the victim knows.

Rennie wants to know if he’s seen Mary Prax yet and he advises he hasn’t, as he’s come straight here from the airport and refers to Mary Prax as “that girl of mine.”  At least he’s gauged her maturity level.

I’m having a big problem with War God Cherry Blossom’s characterization here.  His father is half-Japanese and we don’t know whether he was brought up in Japan even partially, but War God would have been taught the conventions of his culture by his father, who was raised in them.  War God Cherry Blossom does not behave even vaguely like a man who’s conversant with Japanese culture.  I have to assume that Kennealy-Morrison did no research of any kind into Japan and its culture that didn’t consist of samurai and ninja movies.  He is free with his hands to a degree which would horrify his father.  Google “skinship” or “manner hands” for more about the norms of physical contact in Japanese and Korean cultures.  There is no way his parents taught him to behave like this, and I’m unsure as to why he’s been made part-Japanese as his culture doesn’t seem to have any lasting effect on his behavior or personality, unless it’s solely to make the book more diverse.  That isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t seem like the handling of non-white characters is done in a respectful way in this series (for example, Kanaloa, the Polynesian professional bodyguard, looking to his rich white boss for instructions in a bad situation where Kanaloa himself would know better what to do in the third book).

We get some name-dropping of members of the Who and, of course, Graypaul and Pruelinda Soncartney, whom I thought we’d seen the last of in the previous book but we aren’t that lucky.  Rennie exults about being able to bask in the reflected fame of the Paul and Linda McCartney analogues and we get some self-contradictory information about War God Cherry Blossom’s company being hired to protect them.  Rhino Kanaloa gets name-checked and will be showing up later in the narrative.  Rennie asks War God Cherry Blossom about Female Jimi Hendrix and the late Cory Rivkin, and he says he was about to ask her.  Man, you’re all kinds of useful, aren’t you?

That’s the section break, and we get a whole paragraph about what Turk’s doing before we get whiplashed back to Rennnie.  “Co-protagonist?” What’s that? This is the Rennie Stride Mysteries! Take that, Turk Wayland Earl of Wallowinthemire!

And, since Niles Clay is there, the living Queen Emma Peel—in the person of the author—must mete out some karmic retribution for his disrespect of her.

Niles kept his face averted from her as he sidled past and ended up catching his toe in the hideous carpet, almost ending up on the carpet, nose first.

There is no way Rennie didn’t deliberately trip him, even if Kennealy-Morrison won’t admit it.  Rennie is the gestalt of all pettiness.  The author does admit Rennie is “amused” by his “ungraceful exit” and doesn’t hide it well enough for Turk not to notice.  But he just laughs, as he often does at her bad behavior and they do a little mild holding and massaging before the section ends.  Well, that section could have been cut with no trouble at all.  The only thing it does is establish that Niles and Rennie don’t like each other and that Turk is enthralled, both of which have already been established.  This needed a big red X through it by an editor.

The next section starts out as equally boring, when they go out to dinner but there are too many music people around so they leave.  What I described in one sentence takes almost a page to transpire.  Then Ned Raven from Bluesnroyals gets name-checked, along with his wife Demelza Poldark.  I have to think he’s Kennealy-Morrison analogue for Mick Jagger, although I have no idea what the man did to incur the author’s wrath.  Maybe I should actually read Rock Chick, a book I noped out on fairly early into.  I did learn that Kennealy-Morrison and Grace Slick weren’t actually friends, which I suppose is why she and Rennie hit it off in the first book—retroactive cleaning-up of the timelines.

So Ned Raven was one of Rennie’s casual starfucks in the first book, but they’ve maintained a closer relationship that she did with Robin Kelloway of Dandiprat or Owen Danes of Stoneburner, as witness his appearance in the second book via a phone call and his presence in the third book, inviting Rennie to fuck him in front of his wife, which Rennie dismisses as a joke even though she isn’t sure it was.  In other words, he’s an asshole.  He and his wife are referred to as “dear good friends” to revirginize Rennie for Turk.

Rennie wants to know where Not-Mick and Not-Bianca are and Bluesnroyals’s guitarist Del McCuin (Roger McGuinn was in the Byrds? That’s all I’ve got here) and he tells her that Ned got electrocuted on stage.  It’s official—I’m on the killer’s side now.

Unfortunately, as Del exposits (and you really shouldn’t have characters named Del and Demelza, as that could confuse the reader) about how that happened and, unfortunately, Ned’s fine after he comes to from being knocked unconscious for fifteen minutes.  Well, only the good die young, I guess.

Rennie brings up Lexicographer’s predictions and indicates she thinks the other woman was on the money.  How so? She predicted some trouble, nothing specific.  The trick with predictions is to keep them general enough so that, when someone looks back, they can interpret the prediction to cover whatever events happened.  So Rennie isn’t nearly as savvy as she thinks she is.

Del doesn’t know anything about Lexicographer and we get almost a page of Rennie summarizing and Del providing a little background for Cory and his band Owl Tuesday.  The background includes a slap at Freddy Bellasca, the head of Turk’s record company, because he didn’t want Owl Tuesday opening for Bluesnroyals and preferred a band called Sir Topaz, which Del didn’t like and indicates he’s “stuck with them.”  Due to the fact that Freddy Bellasca has incurred the wrath of the Rennieturk by running a record company and not bowing down before Turk Wayland in worship, he can’t make one good decision about anything at all, especially about his own line of work.  It’s pretty childish, but I’m used to that now.

Turk wonders what Cory’s band will do for a drummer now, after a demur about not wanting to sound “heartless,” and then we get a weird symbol that I have never seen in the series prior to this book which seems to serve as an indicator of a section break.  In this case, the section break was at the bottom of the page, and I’d had trouble determining if a section break had occurred in that situation, so someone must have pointed out that issue to the author.  After four full books in the series.  But there’s no reason for a section break here, as the paragraph after that starts with summary that states the three of them discussed the issue of Owl Tuesday’s drummer for a while, so I’m at a loss as to why that symbol is there.  It looks sort of like a fleur-de-lis on its side or the symbol Prince used for his name for a while, also on its side.  I don’t like it, but I’m sure I’ll see it again.

From here until the end of the chapter, with the exception of a little conversation at the end, it’s all summary.  Rennie and Turk are surprised they got decent food at a restaurant that isn’t in her sacred New York City and the writer at least states that this was “snobbish.”  Which it was. 

Del’s the designated info dumper here, and tells Rennie/Turk/the reader that Jimi Hendrix is driving in, the British acts are dribbling in, Janis Joplin is already there, and

…the Doors had been asked but declined, claiming they weren’t an outdoor band, or Morrison was afraid he’d be assassinated, some psychic he knew had warned him, or something…

There was a section in Kennealy-Morrison’s memoir about warning him when she got bad vibes about a concert, but if I remember right it was in Mexico City, not Woodstock, so I’m not sure whether I can call this another author cameo.

A lot of fictional bands and musicians get name-dropped, along with a bunch of real-life ones that haven’t consented to play at Woodstock and Rennie thinks this was a mistake in all cases, because she’s here so it must be the bestest ever festival in the whole world, you guys!

So Rennie’s kind of anxious when they go back to motel and demurs when Turk asks what’s wrong.  She mentally thinks of her “slaydar,” the insufferably twee way she refers to her instinct of murder, and that she’s learned to pay attention to it.

And—chapter!  Again, except for the almost-electrocution of the asshole Ned Raven and the meager background on Cory Rivkin and his band, this chapter has nothing to do with the plot.  It’s just a bunch of music-industry gossip and Rennie getting sexually assaulted by someone she considers a friend, but she’s too much of a prototypical Cool Girl to get offended by it.  She’s Not Like Other Girls, you guys!

Next time, chapter 8, during which Ned Raven turns up and acts like an asshole, Niles gets drunk and there’s a scene, and Turk is concerned about Lionheart’s upcoming album.  Yeah, another chapter where there’s nothing plot-related going on.