The chapter starts out with Rennie at her brownstone(s), with the horribly overnamed Thane of Gondor (their dog) barking at what is presumably Turk coming home. This opening paragraph heralds one of her patented time skips, as the next paragraph deals with her annulment, which she wouldn’t have gotten because neither she nor Stephen has grounds for it, but Kennealy-Morrison handwaves that as Rennie is the living Queen Mary Sue. Stephen has a hilarious reaction to getting shed of this waking nightmare of a wife.
…lavish and lovely parting gifts from Stephen…
Can’t say he doesn’t understand her need to be bribed.
…who had been happy and sad and relieved to finally reach the dissolution of their wedlock.
Then why didn’t he file for divorce at the end of the second book? It was absolutely clear that she would never come back and she’d been nothing but a shitty wife to him anyway. Plus, he could have gotten a divorce easily as Rennie had deserted him and committed adultery on numerous occasions. But silly me, Rennie is the living Queen Mary Sue.
Originally I wasn’t sure that Rennie would qualify as a Mary Sue because she has enough flaws that, if you piled them one atop the other, the result would be the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. However, Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t think her self-insert has any flaws, no matter how small, but from my point of view she is an irredeemably flawed character. I guess someone else could read this book and think Rennie is delightfully irreverent and kickass and a Strong Female Character.
I ran across the perfect description of Rennie on a WordPress site which has a section dealing with Kennealy-Morrison:
Anyway, Rennie’s having some of the patented artificial conversation on the phone and Turk—through his sheer psychic power—determines that it’s Mary Prax on the other end of the line just because it always is.
There are another three pages of conversation between the Rennieturk that are completely uninteresting and not relevant to the plot at all, except for the information that they’ll attend Mary Prax’s show at the Fillmore East. I wonder how much of this kind of deadwood her editor at HarperCollins had to convince her to cut.
Then there’s a bit of business which establishes how much better Rennie is than the other wives/girlfriends in the Lionheart circle. What a surprise, huh?
We get some more pseudo-banter between the Rennieturk before the subject veers off onto the subject of Niles Clay, and the character assassination begins. I can’t really impeach the timeline here, mostly because I’m not willing to go back into the last three books, but Kennealy-Morrison makes sure to tell us that “Lionheart had already been a major group” before Niles joined the band, but if I remember correctly from the third book (and I’m sure I do), he joined the group for their third album, and the first book in the series was set in 1966 (two years before what the writer gives here as the formation of the band) and at that time the group was only known to “the hippest of the hip,” which argues against them being a major group at that time.
And, of course, there’s some running-down of the character, including “skinny, poorly educated, working-class,” and that Niles isn’t Turk’s equal and they aren’t real friends, which is belied by the last book, where Rennie was quite threatened by his friendship with Turk and jealous that they had experiences before she entered the picture that she couldn’t be part of and accused him of wanting to fuck Turk and takes several shots at Niles’s sexuality despite the fact that he’s never depicted as anything but straight.
Turk’s aristocratic bona fides are trotted out as well, before Kennealy-Morrison starts insulting Dorothy Manzarek. Niles’s wife here is called Keitha (terrible name) Shiraz and is called half-Persian. Why the writer doesn’t describe her as half-Iranian I don’t know. As Dorothy Manzarek is Japanese, this seems like a move toward indicating who this is while still keeping plausible deniability. She also describes Niles’s wife as a “featherweight and feather-brained ex-model.”
So Dorotha and his “hangers-on” are telling him that he could do better if he left Lionheart, which I fully agree with. In fact, he should have been looking for a berth in a new band since the third book because he’s fully aware of what a bitch Rennie is and the baseless grudge she’s had against him for multiple books now. His wife and his entourage probably know that too, and want to get out ahead of the moment when Rennie convinces Turk to fire him. I have trouble thinking they’re being unreasonable here, but Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t have any insight into why people do things, otherwise she might realize how Rennie’s contributed to this situation. But she’s perfect so that’s ridiculous.
Then she goes on about how much Niles resents Turk, of which we have not been shown any evidence. Sweetie, the only person in this series that he seems to resent is you, Rennie, because he’s probably figured out that you’re going to break up the band, which is an even better reason to get out now. But Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t seem to have the psychological literacy to understand that.
Then we get almost two pages with the details of what’s called a “key-man clause,” which is too boring to repeat (but is essentially a non-compete clause–see, I explained that in less than two pages!) and which Niles is refusing to sign. Mick Rouse, who joined Niles in the third book to try to talk sense to Turk about Rennie in the Centaur Records Showdown, has signed his and is apparently pleased as punch with it. I guess Kennealy-Morrison forgot he didn’t like Rennie. And of course there is class (or “caste,” as she puts it) trouble within the band, which I’m sure isn’t helped by Turk doing his “I am the Earl of Wallowinthemire and you will obey, you stinking peasants!” routine.
And, since Niles is working-class, Kennealy-Morrison lets out all her snobbery on him. I would say Rennie does, but there’s no real difference between the writer and the self-insert now. At least it’s an interesting insight into how she viewed Ray Manzarek.
For the most part, none of them were consciously aware of it.
So they were all idiots, then? Cool cool cool.
Except, of course, when they were—when Niles made them aware—dragging out his mean little working-class inverse snobbery and insecurity and shoving it all up everybody’s nose.
There’s an editing fail here as not even two pages ago she listed the reason for his resentment as being that Turk was drawing attention from him, and now she’s listing the cause of his resentment as Turk’s aristocratic heritage. Are you even paying attention to what you write from one page to the next? And this is all tell-don’t-show, as the omniscient narrator lets us know this. I’m not even sure if the writer knows she shifts unpredictably between Rennie’s POV and the narrator’s.
The Rennieturk do a little discussing about what’s to be done regarding Niles but come to no definite conclusions as Turk’s too eager to get laid to devote much time to thinking and Rennie encourages it because she’d better get pregnant as soon as she can before he rethinks the entire engagement. The last line in the chapter is “Now what did you bring me?”
And—chapter! I have a hard time believing that any writer couldn’t see what a gold-digging chaos agent she’d created in Rennie, but that sweet, sweet self-insert fantasy must have clouded any clarity she had with regard to this series.
Niles Clay is the only regular character in this series that I like, probably because I’m a contrarian and I see what Kennealy-Morrison wants me to think. After he’s turned into a helpless serf with the Rennieturk’s boot on the back of his neck, there won’t be one character in this entire series willing to call Rennie on her shit. It’s sad what’s going to happen to him, but he’ll at least have several more chapters where he can let her know what a slag she is.
Next time, chapter 4, in which a bunch of uninteresting personal shit happens, as well as something which has to do with the murder plot.
This chapter really knocked me for a loop. It’s the worst chapter in the series so far, consisting of virtually nothing except Rennie getting fellated over how wonderful and stainless and the soul of perfection she is, and, combined with the life challenges I was having, it made me take an extended vacation from this hot mess of a series.
Total transparency—nothing important to the murder plot happens in this chapter. The only important thing that happens relates to the Rennieturk romance, for which I do not care one little bit. There’s also a tremendous amount of hypocrisy toward the Lacing family here. Again, I don’t know whether Kennealy-Morrison just forgot what she said in the previous books or hoped we did.
The fact that this entire chapter has a substantial amount of real estate devoted to shit-talking Marjorie Lacing and having Rennie exult in her victory over her hated mother-in-law also makes it pretty hard to swallow. It’s just the sheer smug obliviousness of it all, but since the writer’s been smug and oblivious for the entire series, I suppose I can’t expect that to change now.
“Rennie Lacing II,” said the first of that name, with immense satisfaction.
Fuck you, Rennie Stormborn. The only reason that she’s so happy here is that having Eric and Petra’s daughter named after her is an affront to Marjorie Lacing, who continues her multi-year streak of living rent-free in Rennie’s head. Then she proceeds to talk to the baby like the baby is a dog, which is off-putting enough that I won’t quote it. I don’t even like kids, and I wouldn’t talk to one that way.
Eric also continues his multi-year streak of being Rennie’s spineless simp, without even the excuse of a boner as he’s a gay man. I actually find him more repellent than Turk in this respect.
“Listen, if my brother can be Stephen IV, surely my daughter can be Rennie II,” said her brother-in-law. “And what an inspiration her namesake godmother auntie will be to her.”
How? Maybe he’s thinking about Rennie’s writer-given talent for evading the consequences of her own actions and marrying above herself, or her talent for surrounding herself with sycophants. I’ll give her credit—she’s very talented at these things.
Rennie has an unaccustomed moment of subtlety and recommends they keep referring to the baby by her nickname, which is Carly, around Marjorie. Then there are three paragraphs of exposition which do nothing except provide backstory and establish what Rennie finds commendable in the people of her inner circle: 1) that they fellate her about her own perfection, and 2) physical attractiveness.
In her descriptions of Eric, Petra (his lesbian wife), and the daughter that is Rennie’s property because of her name and her annoying-Marjorie value, the one consistency is their beauty. Eric is the “handsome gay brother-in-law,” Petra is the “beautiful lesbian wife,” and the daughter is “gorgeous.” Shallow enough, Rennie?
Then Kennealy-Morrison takes time out for a lament about how sad it is that Eric can’t marry his lover and Petra can’t marry hers (especially since the lovers married each other) and refers to the same-sex lovers as “their real spouses.” Dictionary.com defines “spouse” as “either member of a married pair in relation to the other; one’s husband or wife.” So it’s a term dealing with legal reality. Being loved by and loving someone you’re having sex with doesn’t make them your spouse. And, given her reluctance to write any meaty scenes between the couples, or allow Mary Prax to have any scenes with a same-sex lover, this feels like one of those looking-from-the-future moments that the writer does from time to time.
Eric, fulfilling his character function of being a spineless simp, underlines how beautifully things have turned out for Rennie, which is the overriding concern of each and every book. There’s also some food porn that isn’t interesting enough to get into. Petra isn’t involved in this conversation because she’s having “a liedown,” because if she were present her claim on Eric would supersede Rennie’s and no one can ever be allowed to have more of a claim on a man than our protagonist, including a wife. And in the next couple of paragraphs does admit this by saying she “…never did share well with the other kids.”
Then we get into more backstory about the status of her relationship with Stephen (still her husband) and the Rennieturk relationship. In the way she’s been doing for the last few books, she advises Eric her annulment from Stephen is “just a question of signing the papers,” which it totally isn’t because neither of them has grounds for an annulment, and even if it were a divorce, Stephen is the one who would be granted it since Rennie is the party at fault, and no-fault divorce wasn’t readily available in 1969.
As far as the Rennieturk relationship goes, she’s having major cold feet because of the unconsidered hasty marriage to Stephen that she made and Eric fulfills his spineless-simp position again by giving her a pep talk, assuring her that everything will turn out beautifully for her.
Let’s take a moment to examine Eric’s character, shall we? From what Kennealy-Morrison has written, all we know about him is that he’s homosexual, that he has a long-term lover, is the heir to the Lacing family fortune as the older son, and capes relentlessly for Rennie. He’s a pretty flat character, but there are things we can deduce based on the writing.
Eric has no familial loyalty to his brother Stephen, Rennie’s husband. We saw how she put Stephen through the emotional wringer in the first book with her desertion and her adultery and her inability to make a clean break, and his brother’s anguish means nothing to Eric. This isn’t because they have a bad relationship because we’ve been told by the writer that their relationship is good, so this is just an odd little blip on the radar, which turns into something else when we realize that he also feels no familial loyalty to his nameless sisters (relegated to walk-on, nonspeaking extra status in the books) or his parents. Based on the text, I’m uncertain how much loyalty he feels to his wife and his children.
There’s no suggestion that Robert and Marjorie Lacing have been bad parents to their children; indeed, Marjorie seems like a good parent in her attempts to protect Stephen from the suffering that Rennie is causing him, although since Stephen’s also a Rennie-simp he doesn’t appreciate her efforts. Robert Lacing seems to be a remote father, but neither the writer nor any member of his family take him to task for it. A case could be made for them not accepting him as homosexual, but they don’t know this. In fact, Eric has taken steps to actively deceive them about his sexuality by getting married to a woman and having children with her. That reads as if he’s protecting his position as the heir to the family fortune, more than trying to spare them from a reality they might find unpleasant. Again, based on what’s in the text, it doesn’t seem that Eric loves either of his parents (and actually runs down his mother at every opportunity to curry favor with Rennie), his nameless sisters, or his brother. Or, really, his wife and children either. He’s a cardboard cheerleader wish-fulfillment character whose only function is to cheerlead for our protagonist.
Anyway, the exposition and backstory of Rennie and Eric’s conversation takes up fourteen goddamn pages. FOURTEEN GODDAMN PAGES!
It’s all boring as hell so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. Mostly it’s about Rennie expressing doubts about marrying Turk because he’s a rich titled nobleman and Eric pooh-poohing her concerns. And this goes on for fourteen pages. There is no reason for any of the books in this series to be as long as they are, other than the writer’s reluctance to edit her work and kill her darlings. I guess she must have had enough of that at HarperCollins.
Despite how much Rennie hates the Lacings, she won’t stand on her oft-stated principle of not taking their money to turn down the money General Robert Lacing offered her.
“Not alimony. A buyout. Or a startup. Possibly a reward. Or a bounty.”
Jesus Christ, this is why this book is 462 pages long.
She continues, of course.
“Whether I remarry or not, it’s mine. I don’t know why the General would do that at this juncture, considering how I wouldn’t take a penny of filthy Lacing lucre when I lived in your midst at Hell House, or even when I moved out to starve hippishly at the Haight.”
Well, if you ignore all the times she took Lacing money and rationalized it to herself as something else with logic so labyrinthine that if you turned six corners the Minotaur would bite off your head.
And, funnily, I don’t remember Rennie doing any starving when she was living in her six-room apartment with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that she somehow could afford when she was flat broke.
So Eric the Spineless Simp insists she take the money—why the hell wouldn’t she, as she’s greedy as a pig—and there’s some wordplay where Rennie decides her father-in-law thinks she’s a whore. No, Rennie, he thinks you’re a greedy, sexually incontinent social climber and is dealing with you accordingly.
Then we get a page-long recap of the epic five-page fellating General Lacing gave her at the family ball in the first book because his son’s suffering means nothing to him compared to an opportunity to suck his daughter-in-law’s dick about her unique special wonderfulness.
And she’s also in his will, you guys! Which Eric says upsets his mother, but he’s a terrible child and doesn’t care. I bet Marjorie wishes she’d swallowed.
Then we get over a page of backstory about the Lacing ancestor who inspired the misunderstanding, whom we don’t give a shit about as the Lacing arc should have been done three books ago. Rennie keeps calling this ancestor and herself whores before she redirects to her Murder Chick rep, which doesn’t seem to bother her too much as she keeps bringing it up to people who know about it. Oh, she always fronts that it bothers her, but ignoring it would be a better coping tactic.
Kennealy-Morrison, through her self-insert, gives us a tally of the murder victims up until now, which comes out as twenty-two because the writer keeps sticking in non-canonical murder cases that are only mentioned in the narrative and not written.
And somehow in the backstory Kennealy-Morrison tells us that Rennie and Stephen together “decided on annulment rather than divorce” for no reason that we’re given. Although, as I’ve read all the books up until this point, it’s a retcon because Turk wanted the annulment in the fourth book for unclear reasons. And then the writer gives us evidence that she did absolutely no research at all into annulments, since she doesn’t even know there have to be grounds like fraud or that one party was underage, in addition to others.
Here’s what she says about why her perfectly legal marriage could be annulled.
“…the wedding was just that little justice-of-the-peace elopement to Maryland, super-easy to nullify…”
Not if there was no reason at the time the marriage was contracted why it would be invalid, but we’re in the Kennealy-Morrison wish-fulfillment fantasy universe here, where everything turns out the way Rennie wants it to, for no other reason than she wants it.
And then we slog through another two pages of exposition and backstory and she hits again that the annulment makes her “a never-married woman,” which provides more proof that Kennealy-Morrison is continuing to try revirginizing Rennie for Turk because sexually active women are all sluts in her eyes. Think I’m exaggerating? Check out my posts for Love Him Madly, where she foamed at the mouth over groupies and any possible access they might have to Turk.
Petra and Turk both show up for a page or so and Turk says he wants a lot of children. In the fourth book, Rennie told his grandfather that the nannies would raise her children, so I doubt she actually wants any, but she’ll make the sacrifice to cement her position.
Now we spend another three pages with all the other characters jerking Turk off about how handsome and talented and rich and saintly and perfect he is.
After that a section break covers a time-jump of three days, when Turk is leaving for Atlanta to make one of his band’s tour dates. He makes a remark that causes Rennie to slip and indicate that she’s lying to him about what’s going on with the annulment but he lets it go, just like he’s let every red flag in their toxic relationship go.
And—chapter! Man, I should never have taken a break from this because it’s even worse when you come back to it. As I said earlier, this is the worse chapter of the entire series (as far as what I’ve read up until this point). Yes, it’s even worse than the chapter in the third book where Rennie gets ripped to the tits on cocaine and beats up a cop, and not only doesn’t get arrested for it but the sheriff makes the cop apologize to her for the entire incident, and the writer plays it for laughs. Rennie is Leopold and Loeb rolled into one.
I did some reading ahead during my hiatus, and I do believe this book will be the hardest one for me to take due to the punishment dished out to Niles Clay for not sucking Rennie’s dick and turning into a brainwashed cultist. I may start calling him Nilemond Clayzarek. I think Ray Manzarek really managed to piss off Kennealy-Morrison by dismissing her in two lines in his autobiography, so literary vengeance must be taken.
Next time, chapter 3, during which the writer commences a nonstop character assassination against Niles, in addition to vomiting up a lot more recapping of the events of the previous book, and Rennie gets her annulment papers between chapters.
The chapter heading indicates it’s three weeks before the night of the murders. Wait, you mean we have multiple chapters to go before we finally get to the action?
And it’s a big flaw of this series that my first reaction to seeing that heading was to scream “Wait, you mean we have to spin our wheels for four or five chapters before we get to the murders?” (Future Me: I did some flipping through the book to see how much wheel-spinning was in store for us, and we don’t get to Niles arriving at their door until the end of chapter 7. So seven chapters of wheel-spinning. The Madison Square Garden Concert takes up about three chapters, which is insane.)
All that’s going to be in these first few chapters is personal would-be drama about Rennie and Turk and their perfect imaginary relationship that holds no interest for 98% of the book’s readers. In other words, a little less talk and a lot more action, please.
Total transparency—nothing at all happens in this chapter except for Rennie having a brief exchange with Turk about how wonderful New York City is, and then we get eight pages of summary about their house, their life in New York, how they made the decision to move, and some residual Stephen Lacing-bashing. NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS! This is not how you start off a book, people!
So the chapter starts out the way anyone who’s familiar with Rennie would expect: she lets her New York provincial flag fly.
God, she loved New York.
This was a joke in one season of Archer, when Ray’s brother kept calling it “New York City,” and Archer saying he could just say New York. In my opinion, that’s a New York provincial attitude, as a person can say that they’re from New York and not be from New York City (Ithaca, Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, the Finger Lakes region are all covered by “New York”). It implies that there’s nothing of note inside the County and State of New York other than New York City.
Why is she so crazy about New York City?
…this was her home: clever, vital, grimy, sublimely uncaring of anything beyond its rivers.
If you take out grimy, you might as well be describing Rennie, or Rennie as she sees herself.
Turk, who’s with her, serves as her sounding board and simps for her love for New York City.
It’s a real city, like London…[l]ike Rome must have been, back in the day.
The saying “back in the day” is a mild anachronism, but I’ll let it go because we have more of Rennie’s New York chauvinism in store for us.
“Oh, we’re better than Rome. We’re the mightiest city that ever was.”
One just knows that if Patricia Kennealy-Morrison had been born in Washington, DC, or Chicago or New Orleans, Rennie would be saying the same thing about those cities. But fuck North Babylon, NY, right?
Since Kennealy-Morrison lived in the East Village for almost her entire adult life, we now get some local color, as the Rennieturk are coming back from the Second Avenue Deli with food. Apparently it’s half a block from their brownstone(s). Then the writer uses the word “wodge,” which I wasn’t familiar with but is used correctly, even though it is another Britishism that Rennie shouldn’t know and is not appetizing in terms of a sandwich (it means lump or wad). Then we find out it’s mid-November, as if to rub the reader’s nose in how much wheel-spinning is in the offing.
And now, an entire book late, we get a reason for why the Rennieturk moved to New York City. It’s because New York City is closer to England than Los Angeles is and Turk has aristocratic responsibilities since his grandfather died. But he didn’t have those responsibilities when they first moved there, at the start of the last book, so this explanation doesn’t hold water. Besides, we all know the real reason is because the writer is a New York chauvinist and Turk is a cardboard automaton simp who would never stop her from doing anything at all because she calls all the shots in the relationship, just the way she’s done with every man she’s been involved with.
In order to divert us from Turk’s simp status, the writer tells us that “he intended that he and Rennie should live like grownups: six months a year in New York, split the rest of their time between L.A. and England, schedule subject to change without notice.” Something I’ve noticed Kennealy-Morrison does a lot—eschews the use of the word “adult” in favor of “grownup.” It just makes her characters sound more childish. Plus, why does he want to go to Los Angeles at all? Didn’t he have that wealth flex about having home recording studios at his each and every home? At least we find out that Rennie, after three years, has finally given up her impossible six-room apartment across the street from Golden Gate Park with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that she could afford when she was flat broke.
The writer then gives us some info about Rennie’s native New Yorker status.
Not without some snobbishness about Staten Island, though. And that’s our segue into Rennie’s scheduled Stephen Lacing-bashing for the evening!
Then she’d met and eloped with young corporate lawyer Stephen Lacing, and he’d made her drop out of grad school and dragged her out west to his hometown by the Golden Gate.
In Ungrateful Dead, the first book of the series, there is no indication that he forced her to drop out of graduate school. It was never spelled out for us that she’d dropped out, as she’d been either a year or two ahead of schedule because she was so ungodly young when she started college. She did leave during the spring semester, but since he’d left her there to follow him to San Francisco, one could assume that he’d allowed her to finish out the semester (or the quarter, depending on how the school was set up).
The case for him forcing her to move to San Francisco is a little more solid, but only because neither of them had any discussions prior to the wedding about where they would live, whether Rennie would work, and/or whether they wanted children. Because they never had one conversation of any substance before they got married, this is really on her.
It hadn’t taken her long to cut herself loose,
Kennealy-Morrison’s trying to make Rennie sound like a decisive badass Strong Female Character here, which she is not in any way. If she’d been as decisive as this makes her sound, she would have been divorced from Stephen way before Turk told her she had to get an annulment and the writer somehow thinks there’s such a thing as a no-fault annulment, which there isn’t. Again, because I don’t think I can stress this strongly enough, an annulment is only granted by the judge if there are grounds why the marriage was invalid at the time it was contracted. In Rennie’s case, there are no grounds. Stephen does have grounds for divorce (adultery and desertion), but he can’t get a divorce on his own initiative because Kennealy-Morrison says no and doesn’t seem to understand that no-fault divorce also wasn’t a thing in the late Sixties.
We get some more unintentional insight into Rennie’s character when Kennealy-Morrison tells us that Turk had given Rennie a list of neighborhoods where they might buy a house, and she checked them out with no intention of living in any of them and presenting the East Village place as the only option, “when they ended up living where she had planned on them living all along.” Rennie has disregarded Turk’s input in the fairly weighty matter of where they will live and done exactly what she pleased, the way she always does.
And now she starts running down New York neighborhoods that don’t measure up to her standards. But I thought New York City was the bestest ever place in the whole wide world, Rennie! Don’t expect me to believe that any part of it is less than perfect in your eyes!
It had been great fun imperiously ruling out vast tracts of Manhattan real estate.
Just like the queen she will never be in reality.
Upper West Side: too uptown. Upper East Side: too uptight. West Village: possible, but only with care—Near West Village: smug; Far West Village: thugs. Gramercy Park: gorgeous houses, but however much Turk and Rennie might pretend that they were quiet and well-behaved…
Here Kennealy-Morrison gets in a flex about how many castles Turk owns; no word on whether that includes the not-castle in Nichols Canyon.
Anyway, this running-down of wherever Rennie doesn’t want to live goes on for another half a page, then the East Village is introduced and gets four and a half pages about how it’s the hippest possible place for hip people to live and they go looking for houses and find them and then there’s renovation and blah blah yada yada yada bored skipping.
In fact, except for an upcoming flashback to a conversation that Rennie has with Mary Prax and the conversation with Turk at the beginning of the chapter, this entire chapter is nothing but summary about how beautifully things are turning out for Rennie. Since it’s as boring as it is, I’m only going to pick out a few more highlights because this has no relevance to the actual plot of the book except that the Rennieturk lives in the East Village and Niles will come knocking on the door with murder fears at the end of chapter 7.
Rennie has another flex on how rich Turk is, with the wording being almost exactly the same as another flex from the previous book on how rich the Duke of Robinhood is. There’s a perfunctory demur about how Rennie has always paid her share in past relationships—I guess Stephen Lacing just slipped her mind—or at least offered to pay her share and the men would never let her. Strong Female Character, y’all!
There were also tenants in all three of the brownstones Turk blew his cash on who had to be “relocated” and paid “colossal bribes” to get the proles out of their would-be castle.
At least we do find out what the live-in assistant’s husband got hired for—he’s a “handyman.”
And she calls their would-be castle “a brilliant investment for the Duchy of Locksley.” How so? The fucking duchy won’t see a penny—pardon me, a pence—out of it. It’s just the author jacking off about how much money her self-insert has access to through her adulterous lover.
Both of them have left their sports cars in Los Angeles as they don’t want them getting stolen, as there’s no real need to have them in New York City. Turk loves the anonymity, except when he doesn’t. And we get some more violent psychotic fantasies and talk out of Rennie, mentioning putting bear traps in their garbage cans to thwart fans searching through their trash and their poor sad doggo “rip[ping] their (note—anyone who “tries to mess with” Turk) throat out.” Mary Prax calls Turk “a stud” for taking the subway. How Rennie doesn’t kill her on the spot out of terror and paranoia is a mystery to me. Then there’s some uninteresting stuff about the tour and Rennie wanting to “be on a beach in the Bahamas,” which is a foreshadowing for Daydream Bereaver.
And—chapter! The chapter isn’t as hard to take as the one in the previous book, where it was nothing but Rennie and Baron Hollywood Hogan jawing at each other and him fellating her for her awesomeness, but it’s plenty bad on its own. We don’t need all this detail about the house and all its works—it contributes exactly nothing to the plot. If someone picked up this book and hadn’t read any of the rest of the series, I can’t imagine many people would make it past this chapter. It’s that dull. So not only are the last chapter and the epilogue now reserved for how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, it’s also the first chapter now.
Next time, chapter 2, during which the Lacing family—minus Stephen and Marjorie—come to visit and Rennie is psychotically hypocritical about how she feels, and Stephen is going to give her all the money in their divorce—pardon me, revirginizing annulment—because he’s just that whipped and that’s what the Queen Emma Peel deserved. The wish-fulfillment is embarrassing here.
The book does start off with a page and a half of “Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements” where Kennealy-Morrison lets her New York chauvinist flag fly. She also thanks Lenny Kaye and Bebe Buell, who provided the blurbs on the backs of two of the books in the series.
And now I see the most shocking thing I’ve read in the entire series:
Thanks to the Usual Suspects, my eagle-eyed betas who are really alphas…
And I’m choosing not to list the names, but how the hell could any of these people have read these books and not pointed out any of the numerous flaws?
After that are the lyrics for the “Walking with Tigers” song, and then the dedication. It seems to be dedicated to her nieces and nephews, as well as the children of a few friends and makes a “The Kids Are Alright” reference.
Now for the prologue itself!
The place and time are established as “New York, December 1969.” In case I haven’t advised of this previously, the entire prologue is in italics and has been in all the other books.
My supposition about the cover, that it’s meant to convey a snowy atmosphere, is borne out by the text, as we wait for the doors of the Fillmore East to open with the crowd, which consists of “…young people, in Navy peacoats and Army-surplus jackets and long Victorian cloaks and vintage furs and embroidered sheepskin Afghan coats…like steerage passengers on the Titanic…” We’re also told they’re waiting for the last show of the night. Then there’s a little historical background about the building before the doors open in the next paragraph.
The next paragraph is color detail about the venue, including a “VIP hideaway” in one of the lighting and sound booths so “visiting notables” can watch the show without having to mingle with the common rabble. I have to think this will be important in terms of the murder plot, but who knows.
The narrator is snotty about the dressing rooms, calling them “utilitarian” and sniffing at “the kind of dreary décor that would not be out of place in a politburo meeting hall in a drab city in Bulgaria.” Well, it isn’t New York City, so how could it be anything but drab?
The next section introduces us to Bill Graham, the owner of the Fillmore East, and someone named Kip Cohen, who is the theater’s managing director, and someone else called Kim Yarborough, the security chief, who’s in the “Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements” section and whose inclusion is explained by “for keeping the peace and being from the ‘hood.” Graham goes onstage to open the show and we don’t find out who’s playing, except that they’re nervous.
The next section takes up after the show, at two AM, and we get three paragraphs of description of the street that I will admit is pretty, along with two paragraphs about where people have gone and what they’re doing after the show. The writing here is fine, probably because it has nothing to do with Rennie or her cultists.
Finally, we get two paragraphs related to the upcoming murder plot. Three people, whom the author sees fit to call out as “stoned,” are on East Second Street and have arrived at “the old cemetery,” so I have no clue as to the name of this place. Servant series flashback!
So they climb over the cemetery gates—if they look like the one on the back cover, it doesn’t seem like a big deal—and we find out the three consist of “two young men, and a young woman whom they both pull up after them.” We know one of the men is Niles Clay (presumably), and the other two are the first two murders of the book. We also know Murdered Girl is a proper, unathletic woman who can’t climb a fence without help.
And they pulled her up by the arms, which makes me wonder why she doesn’t have two dislocated arms. Fuck us, that’s why!
Anyway, they arrive at “the lee of one of the largest and most dramatic monuments” and sit down. Of course it has to be a dramatic monument. What else is good enough for Rennie fucking Stride?
Then we have a three-sentence final paragraph, which isn’t awful but there could be a little more detail to tantalize a reader.
After a while, it grows quiet. One figure leaves; another enters, and leaves again shortly after. Then everything is very, very quiet.
I have to say I’m rather surprised that Kennealy-Morrison hasn’t made Niles either a murder victim or a bad guy, but I guess the thrill of making him essentially the slave of the Rennieturk was too appetizing a prospect for her to turn down. My preference would have been for him to die, but that wouldn’t be enough of a punishment in the writer’s eyes for daring not to worship her or fear her.
Next time, chapter 1, wherein we get a metric fuckton of New York chauvinism, some retconning about the Rennieturk’s move there, and another metric fuckton of boredom about their neighborhood and the purchase of the brownstone(s) and this entire chapter could be cut without damaging the book. Back to the multi-chapter wheel-spinning, I guess.
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.
Scareway to Heaven
Love Him Madly
Go Ask Malice
Ungrateful Dead
California Screamin’
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.
And so we come to the end of Go Ask Malice: Murder at Woodstock, and none too soon.
Just so you’re aware, the entire twenty-three pages of the epilogue will be dedicated to how beautifully things turned out for Rennie. Specifically, Turk’s grandfather the Duke of Robinhood died and he moves up to be the Marquess of Raxton, while his father moves up to the dukedom. It’s like the Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, where Starfleet officers advance in the ranks by assassinating their superior officers. You know, the one where Spock had a goatee.
Kennealy-Morrison establishes that it’s “several weeks later,” so we’re well into October of 1969, and we get a Time-Skip (patent pending) just as Rennie picks up the ringing phone. Did I mention I don’t like these time-skips? Because I don’t.
Some of the unimportant details we get include the fact that the Rennieturk has adopted a “huge…mahogany sable collie, Macduff the Thane of Gondor.” My heart goes out to you, doggie. You did nothing to deserve this. She’s letting him sleep on the bed although he isn’t allowed because he “made her feel safe when she was alone.” This indicates that she has some lasting side effects from all the murders and physical danger she’s been through, but the writer thinks this is a throwaway line and doesn’t go into any depth about Rennie’s mental state, which might or might not have improved the book and/or the characterization. The Rennieturk has also hired a “live-in assistant and her husband, Hudson and Daniel Link, over in their own flat on the other side of the house.” What did the husband get hired to do?
The author tells us Lionheart’s in Denver for a show on their latest tour and Rennie thinks this is Turk on the phone, because he calls her at least three times a day to check on the health of his balls, which are in her pocket. It is Turk, who’s bitching (this is expressed as “a mixture of pride and vexation”) about his grandfather not wanting to go to the hospital because he wants to die at home. I don’t see the harm in this, but whatever. Turk doesn’t like it so it must be wrong.
As is her wont, she calls up a member of the Lacing family, in this case Eric, and commandeers the family jet (“with transatlantic capability”), which just so happens to be gassed up and waiting in New York. What are the odds?
And Eric is “delighted” to help her, just like every male simp in this series. And he’s gay, so he doesn’t even have the excuse of a boner for his actions. We get about two paragraphs about Turk getting back to New York from Denver and Rennie getting packed up and them getting on the plane for England and going to the family seat which doesn’t need to be there and is boring as hell. There’s a reason for section breaks other than to separate someone throwing a punch from the other person getting hit like in the fourth book.
Kennealy-Morrison then busts out a two-page death scene for the Duke of Robinhood, which somehow manages to be all about Rennie, rather than the dying man. He brings up his concerns about her having children, or rather heirs to the family title, she reassures him, and he dies at the start of the next section. How the hell do you make someone else’s death scene about you?
Now that we’ve had a death in the family, you know what time it is—clothes shopping for Rennie!
Even though she knew her almost-grandfather-in-law was dying, or “didn’t have much time left,” as Turk told her on the phone before they flew to England, she didn’t bother either buying or packing a black dress. Because if she did that, where would be her excuse to spend Turk’s money on herself?
So the day after the Duke dies, Rennie goes to London to buy clothes. Here’s how she gets along with her future mother-in-law:
Turk’s mother had suggested Chanel, but Rennie, who’d had quite enough of that sort of thing with Marjorie Lacing…
You’d never know that Chanel suit she bitched so much about wearing was one of the few pieces of clothing that Rennie hung onto when she left Stephen in the first book. And you’d never know Rennie was once worried enough about Turk’s mother liking her to wear a nouveau-riche mink coat to impress her. Guess those days are over.
So she’s going to get something from Sarah Jane Parker (hideously nicknamed Punkins), who has everyone in the design studio working twenty-four seven to get Queen Emma Peel her clothing because she’s just that special.
And here comes the clothes porn, right on schedule.
Rennie was wearing a superbly cut black crepe A-line dress that Jackie Kennedy would not have scorned to wear to her husband’s obsequies; sheer black stockings and black leather court shoes completed the ensemble. A boucle wool coat collared with fox lay on the chest at the foot of the bed, with a matching fur muff and long leather gloves, all of it unrelievedly funereal in coloration.
So all of it’s black? Then just fucking say it’s all black!
Besides, since it’s a fancy aristocratic funeral, we’d assume everyone’s wearing black. That’s something we don’t need to be told, just like we don’t need to be told that Turk “was dressed somberly.” It’s his grandfather’s funeral—what the hell do you expect? A Bozo the Clown outfit? It goes without saying that Rennie gets the flaming panties for him as he’s “smashingly sexy” and I wish she’d stop using Britishisms when she’s from the Bronx. But I am surprised that Rennie’s dress isn’t up to her ass, as she seems to like wearing inappropriate clothing. Hey, did you know one of the symptoms of histrionic personality disorder is using physical appearance to draw attention to themselves by wearing bright-colored or revealing clothing?
In addition to the Tate-LaBianca Murders, the writer also appears to have forgotten that Jackie Kennedy wasn’t Jackie Kennedy anymore, as she’d married Aristotle Onassis almost a year earlier, which was a big deal at the time, but since it has nothing to do with Rennie she didn’t bother remembering it.
The dead duke’s wife, whose name is Agatha because old I guess, shows up and compliments Rennie’s outfit.
She also gives Rennie a long veil to wear as all the wives wear them. Rennie insincerely demurs but the dead duke’s wife insists, “[a]nd she could not refuse.” Because no social climber wants to piss off someone higher up in the pecking order.
The funeral procession starts off the next section, with Rennie wearing a “crepe pillbox hat” and the veil from the last section, and guess what? It’s jewel porn time!
Apart from her ring, her only jewels were her great-aunt’s double strand of pearls and a large antique diamond brooch borrowed from Turk’s grandmother.
Because Kennealy-Morrison knows that in Victorian times the only acceptable jewelry to wear during mourning was onyx or jet—namely, black—and in fact that was called “mourning jewelry,” but Rennie only likes expensive pretty jewels, the writer spends some of the same paragraph justifying Rennie wearing pearls and diamonds to the funeral.
White diamonds and pearls—modernly acceptable mourning ornaments. If the Queen wore it, which she did—as Rennie could perfectly well see, since Her Majesty was sitting RIGHT OVER THERE—it was okay.
After the jewel justification—
–she’s thinking about everything she’s going to have to learn for her new position and commending herself on being “a quick study.” Interesting she’s fine with someone teaching her about the duties of her position here, while she shat all over Marjorie Lacing for trying to do the same thing.
Rennie also calls herself Turk’s “affianced lady.”
And even when she’s trying to comfort Turk unobtrusively, she’s still “acutely conscious of the covert attention focused on the two of them.” But now, unlike every other time in the series, she doesn’t like that and is glad that the family pew gives them some “privacy.” And, just because she’s the living Queen Emma Peel, they get a space heater, just like the Queen does, but everybody else has to suffer.
The funeral gets a paragraph in summary, and we’re told it’s “brief and satisfyingly gloomy.” The procession to the family burying ground takes up another two pages and doesn’t really serve any purpose of plot or characterization other than establishing that Rennie’s marrying into a rich, noble family, which we already knew.
After the funeral, like the good narcissist she is, Rennie brings Turk’s grandfather’s death back to herself.
“To think I’ll be with you someday forever in that vault, an ocean away from my family and friends.”
Turk advises this doesn’t have to be, but it’s far beyond his capabilities to dissuade her from being irrevocably bound in death to the rich aristocratic family she’s lusted after all her life.
“But I want to. You’re the one I want to sleep next to for the rest of time, alive or dead. That’s the whole point. We’ll be there together. And all the Tarrant dukes and duchesses before and after us. I like that idea. And that chapel we just buried your grandfather from is the one we’ll be married in and the one our kids will be christened in and the one we’ll be buried from ourselves one day.”
And then she delivers the biggest gutbuster line of the series, the single funniest thing she’s ever written, and if you’ve read these posts you’ll know why.
“Continuity. I like that too. I like it a lot.”
And by continuity she means retconning.
The next section begins with almost four pages of summary about the Rennieturk going to Cleargrove, the family seat, and then they have breakfast, which is the cue for more clothes porn.
…a black silk Zandra Rhodes poet shirt and black pants and black boots and a choker of huge black keshi pearls…
So she did have black jewelry and black clothing—she just didn’t want to wear it to the funeral.
And if I remember right, which I’m sure I do, that black silk Zandra Rhodes poet shirt is the same one she wore to the hotel restaurant after she and Turk got back together in the fourth book, the shirt that Rennie wore the Victorian nipple rings underneath and the other diners could see them, which means it’s see-through. So she’s decided to wear a see-through blouse to breakfast in the ancestral home of her aristocratic husband, in front of his servants. Those servants may pretend they love her, but when they’re in private they gossip about the piece of lower-class trash that His Lordship dragged in from America, that’s for sure.
Since Rennie/the writer is a narcissist, all the headline are about the “Rock & Roll Duke and Duchess to Be,” and I can’t imagine how much this must piss off Turk’s father. Hope he’s been smart enough to hire that food taster that the Duke must have eschewed. So there’s a metric fuckton of reporters outside, which doesn’t include any from the chain that Rennie works for because Baron Hollywood Hogan “knew she would slaughter him like a hog…” More cartoonish threats of violence. So class. Much aristocrat.
Anyway, Turk’s “cheerful” after the death of the grandfather he presumably loved, and also “rebell[ing] against the mourning color scheme” because fuck respect, amirite? Wearing black would just pull attention from Rennie, and we all know she’s a black hole for attention.
And Turk grew a new nickname! Here are all the names he’s been called to date.
Turk Wayland
Richard Tarrant Earl of Wallowinthemire
Slider
Ampman
Flash
How many names does this fucker need?
And this is a nickname that she just came up with this instant. Slider was introduced in the second book and Ampman was introduced in the third. Whatever, moving on.
Nothing plot-related happens in the breakfast scene except that Turk tells her he’s planning on visiting the Soncartneys, which is a rare bit of successful continuity as the fourth book established the Soncartneys live about twenty miles from Cleargrove. Then the section ends.
Turk has a wealth flex at the start of the next section with his car, which is “a 1938 Bentley roadster, with big fenders and running boards, classic British racing green with black leather interior.” Rennie loves the car because it’s “special” and they go to the Soncartneys and are greeted and nothing of importance happens.
Rennie and Pruelinda did some shopping, which we aren’t shown, and Rennie came back with earrings for herself and shirts and books for Turk. Rennie doesn’t like books much, except for The Lord of the Rings. I wouldn’t turn a hair at that, except that Kennealy-Morrison’s been so bullheaded in giving her an English lit background that the character didn’t have. Whatever, moving on.
Kennealy-Morrison finally brings up the issue I had with Turk being a rock and roll duke but I’m allowing that since Michael Des Barres didn’t start his music career until 1972. And then there’s about a page and a half of backstory about the rest of the series and stuff we’ve already been told. Then we find out Turk calls his mother “Mummie.”
And the plot finally breaks down the door when Rennie tells Turk she’s called Stephen and told him to expedite the annulment. How the hell would he do that? He doesn’t have the power to do that! I just think the writer doesn’t know what’s involved in an annulment, except that it makes the previous marriage so it never existed and that makes Rennie a virgin for Turk. Plus, neither of them have grounds for an annulment, and she doesn’t have grounds for a divorce but Stephen does, which the writer never acknowledges at all.
Turk is “joyful” and Rennie admits she had no reason for not ending the marriage to Stephen except “laziness.” Well, at least she admits that. And then we’ve got a huge-ass retcon headed our way. Kennealy-Morrison, for all her Mensa membership and basing 88% of her identity on her intelligence, sure can’t be bothered to do basic research.
Anyway, as I told your granddad, annulment is the way to go.
Uh, no, Rennie. Turk was the one who mentioned annulment to you at the end of the fourth book, before you spoke to the Duke. Before that, the only thing you talked about was divorce, and talking was all you did.
Since we only had that little justice of the peace elopement in Maryland, it’ll be a piece of cake…
Kennealy-Morrison really doesn’t understand that there have to be grounds, reasons why the marriage was invalid at the time it was contracted, and neither of them has any. The fact of a civil marriage certainly isn’t enough to be granted an annulment. Plus, she sounds as if she thinks annulments are rubber-stamped, which they aren’t.
…most of the work has already been done over the course of the separation—we filed for annulment as soon as we lawfully parted company, and it’s been three years, after all. Neither of us will contest it, and it’s only a matter of signing off on the paperwork.
She’s describing a divorce, not an annulment. And Rennie is lying her ass off about having filed after leaving Stephen. In each and every book after the first, we’ve had nothing but remarks about getting to the paperwork sometime. This indicates that what she’s saying here is a bold-faced lie, but I’m not sure if Rennie is lying to Turk or if Kennealy-Morrison is lying to her readers through Rennie’s mouth. I think it’s the latter, though.
And she goes on about Stephen being such a beta cuck incel that he wants to give her a shitload of alimony—why? Fuck us, that’s why! Then she bestows her true opinion of the Lacing family on Turk and us.
…I’d rather not take anything from that lot. Getting legally pruned from the branches of the Lacing family tree will be reward enough. They can swing from branch to branch without me from now on, hooting and gibbering amongst themselves.
More dehumanization, this time to monkeys—how nice. Plus, this goes against her consistent behavior for the entire series up until now. I wish Eric Lacing the simp could hear her talking now. He lent her his jet and asked nothing for it like a week ago. Maybe she thinks he’s weak because he didn’t ask for something the way Baron Hollywood Hogan did.
Turk doesn’t call her on any of the inaccuracies and outright lies that she’s just told him, some of which he knows about, and she starts telling him about the wedding she wants. And there’s a “Raxton tiara” as well as a “Saltire tiara.” How many fucking tiaras does this damn family require? Every time Rennie lies, does the family get a tiara? If so, they ought to be swimming in those by now.
Rennie recaps the “you need to pop out heirs” conversation she had with the Duke at the end of the last book and Turk is fulsomely apologetic, as befits a simp. She’s also got everything relating to the wedding planned out, including the approximate date of October 1970, and lets him know that Giant Panda (Stephen’s fiancée) is pregnant. Then why didn’t Stephen just go ahead and file for divorce, regardless of what Rennie wanted? He was the one with grounds, anyway. But Rennie has to call all the shots because Kennealy-Morrison didn’t.
I love the fact that she tells him neither of her sisters will be bridesmaids because if one gets asked the other will be upset, and she’s too busy jamming her famous female acquaintances into the positions.
After another section break, Turk’s sad about his dead grandfather and Rennie offers to fuck to take his mind off it. Well, when all you have is a hammer…
He indicates he’s on board with that but keeps talking, which she doesn’t like, and takes two pages to tell him that he is the Marquess and is going to be the Duke and doesn’t need to take anyone else’s opinions or feelings into consideration, ever. Quite in character for her. Then they get into the beginnings of fucking and she starts reciting his titles back to him and swearing he won’t have to give up rocknroll.
The song which closes out the book is “Home Before Dark,” which is the only song in all five books that seems like it might just be short enough to get some radio airplay in the Sixties. Kennealy-Morrison isn’t a poet and doesn’t seem to be trying to write songs which could conceivably have been written and recorded in the Sixties.
And—it’s over!
How stupid do I feel for thinking that, because Kennealy-Morrison had been to Woodstock, this book might be a shade better than the others in the series? It’s not the worst book—Love Him Madly beats it out handily—but it’s still quite bad enough. I’d rank the books so far this way, from worst to best.
Love Him Madly
A Hard Slay’s Night
Go Ask Malice
California Screamin’
Ungrateful Dead
I did want to do a “Final Thoughts on the Book” section, but it would just be more of the same flaws from the previous books. All the aristocratic bullshit of Turk’s background, the malignant narcissism of Rennie, the ridiculous supine way that both Turk and Stephen handled their relationships with Rennie, the reader-insulting retcons (especially the annulment shit in the epilogue), and the poorly planned mystery plot.
Just off the top of my head, Not Keyser Soze could have pulled Rainbow Galadriel away after Cory Rivkin hit the floor, given her some excuses about getting her out of there before people start asking questions, gotten her to an isolated spot, and overdosed her with a shot of any of the readily accessible drugs at the festival, and he’d be in the clear. There was no evidence whatsoever that Female Jimi Hendrix’s injury or Ned the asshole’s electrocution were anything other than accidents, so he’d be in the clear. Cory’s death would also have been put down as accidental. If Not Keyser Soze had done the sensible thing and simply poisoned Amander with downers at the Rainshadow Records party the way he did with Turk, police would have dismissed that as a standard rock musician overdose, and again he would have been in the clear. But he was “insane” so he had to be stupid. Only Rennie can be smart.
The manner of Amander Evans’s death also bugs me in a big way. Kennealy-Morrison made it clear through Rennie that the analogue of this character was the sluttiest slut wot ever slutted, and I don’t like that she forced Amander to make out with her murderer, thus ensuring that it was her own sexuality that was the instrument of her death. It’s a very ugly thing for Kennealy-Morrison to do.
The main problem with this book was the poor plotting of the mystery and the bad pacing. When one has a set time frame to work with, the action has to be compressed. A writer can’t take time off to jerk off her self-insert about how awesome she is or to have wealth flexes like borrowing jets. The plot has to take center stage and this writer has never been able to do that as she has no grounding in the genre.
I also find it a weakness, as I’ve mentioned before, that I can pick out who the victims and murderers are based on whether Rennie likes them. That’s a pretty big flaw in a murder mystery series.
The body count for this book was two, so it’s the series book with the least murders. The book in the series with the most murders was Love Him Madly, with five. Most of the books have either three or four.
Next time, we begin the sixth book in the series and the longest book in the series at 462 pages, Scareway to Heaven. This is also the book that has the deadly dull “Rennie and Turk and their entourage arrange to go to dinner, then go to dinner at a hip restaurant and they have the coolest table because they are the coolest people, you guys” excerpt that Kennealy-Morrison published on her Facebook page before the book came out.
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.
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.”
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.
The chapter starts out with almost three pages about the rainstorm at the festival on Sunday. Rennie mentions the electricians being concerned about performer safety and the stage slipping in the mud. Then we get reminded that she’s a reporter and it’s her job to report on the acts at the festival, so she condescends to watch some of them.
She’d missed Gray and Prue and Thistlefit, which she did regret, and Owl Tuesday had of course cancelled, which was sad;
I thought you said they were a shit band, Rennie, and the only reason they were good when we heard them was because Evenor’s drummer was filling in for Cory.
Country Joe and the Fish put her to sleep and Joe Cocker annoyed the hell out of her, so she hadn’t at all minded missing them.
Maybe your job doesn’t revolve around what you like. Maybe you’re supposed to be writing up reviews of the performances and not tracking down murderers. It’s a good thing the publisher is your simp or you’d have been fired a long time ago. The paper really should have known to send somebody else to actually review the performances because Queen Emma Peel only does what she wants.
After a little more information about everything that occurred at Woodstock that Rennie missed and so can’t do her job of writing about it, Rennie again uses the stupid and incorrect word “detectiving.” Where did Kennealy-Morrison get the idea this word is cute?
In an act of uncharacteristic industriousness, Rennie decides to stay for some of the acts, presumably so she can write about them. I don’t know what the paper is doing when she isn’t turning in stories—they’ve got column inches to fill. How does the writer not understand this basic fact about newspapers?
By eight, when Alvin Lee finally went on with Ten Years After, the rain had started and stopped several times…Ten Years After was fine, and she liked Alvin, but the Band and the Winter brothers weren’t her thing, and Blood Sweat & Tears was the weekend’s one glaringly false programming note, too brassy and slick and poppy. The crowd was bored stupid by David Clayton-Thomas’ (sic) poser-iffic Vegas strutting and bogus vocal stylings…
And then she compares him to Hugh Masekela at Monterey Pop, to remind us that this is a soft reboot. Wonder what Blood Sweat & Tears did to piss off Kennealy-Morrison. Then Rennie gets some coffee and Crosby Stills Nash and Young goes on and she thinks they are good singers, for no reason we’re given. I’ve given up expecting specifics for why Rennie holds her musical opinions. More and more it seems like “Because I do” is the sum total of why she likes one band and dislikes another.
We get some detail about Rennie feeling lonely and what’s going on with the rest of Lionheart and Mary Prax, while it’s confirmed that Woodstock wasn’t the kick-off of Lionheart’s tour but a pre-tour date, clearing up that confusion from Chapter 1. And she mentioned that “the matter of Niles would be addressed by the rest of the band at some point, but that was their concern, not Rennie’s.”
Sure, Rennie. You don’t give a shit about your nemesis getting what you think he has coming to him. Don’t waste your time trying to depict yourself as a reasonable human being.
After this we get about a page and a half of Rennie/the narrator telling us her plans after the festival ends and it’s all boring as hell. There’s some indication that Rennie doesn’t want to leave the festival if Sheriff Lawdog hasn’t found the killer before the festival ends, but I don’t see her doing that, so we know the killer(s) will be found as Woodstock is ending.
Marcus shows up again, Rennie waves at him to come over (I think this is the only friendly gesture she’s made toward Marcus in the series, other than fucking him), and he tells her that somebody attacked Rainbow Galadriel.
Instead of just killing her immediately after she’d served her purpose in killing Cory Rivkin, which as far as we know wouldn’t have been a problem, the killer allowed her to run around for days, free to spew any information she wanted to anyone she wanted. Only when the living Queen Emma Peel deigned to notice her was she attacked.
She isn’t hurt because one of War God Cherry Blossom’s security people “chased him away.” That’s how the writer puts it. Chased him off like a kid prank-knocking on the door, not tried to apprehend a murderer. We also find out that nobody who works for War God’s company is shorter than six feet five.
Rennie freaks the fuck out about Lexicographer, who’s fine, and Marcus volunteers that Rainbow Galadriel isn’t upset about the experience and uses a phrase Kennealy-Morrison is fond of.
“I’m starting to think Rainbow’s too stupid to live.”
That touches on something I find very ugly in Kennealy-Morrison’s work: the idea that people who don’t measure up to a certain degree of intelligence aren’t people (chapter 1 of Love Him Madly) and don’t have a right to live (as Marcus just said). That’s a diseased line of thought that I don’t want to deal with, as it’s way too close to the “useless easters” rhetoric of Nazi Germany, so moving on.
To be fair, Marcus does correct himself to “too stupid to know a damn thing,” but the Rennie infection has clearly taken hold in his bloodstream and he should go to the nearest ER for treatment. Rennie tells him Rainbow Galadriel knows what the killer looks like, which a former cop should already have been aware of, and Marcus wonders if Ned Raven could identify the killer, as they now think it was the guy who told him where the meditation tent was. And somehow, despite the fact that Ned and Demelza Poldark-Raven went back to England earlier, they are now still there, as Kennealy-Morrison retcons to make them too upset to leave. I’d think being upset would make them leave faster, but that’s just me, I guess. (Future Me: Kennealy-Morrison was tricky with her wording earlier and said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if they were on a plane back to England, so they might not actually have left and technically not an editorial fail.)
Rennie thinks the killer is getting desperate and Marcus tells her they are too.
The next section starts with Crosby Stills Nash and Young (called here CSNY) is starting the second part of their set, which is electric, while the first part was acoustic. Since she doesn’t have any answers as far as the murder mystery goes, she decides to do her job and write her “summary story” mentally and clarifies that this is the story about the music at the festival, not the murders. How would you even write a story about Amander Evans being murdered as you still don’t know what killed her?
So Rennie shits on Woodstock for about a page as it isn’t up to her queenly standards.
Then she talks up Jimi Hendrix for about a page and a half and we get a list of Rennie’s favorite bands, which I think we can all figure out as these are the only bands that don’t get a waterfall of shit poured on them. Gerry Langhans from the second and third books sits down next to her and Rennie starts talking about time travel, which is just an excuse for Kennealy-Morrison to share her opinions on what modern-day people would think of it and, of course, from her heights of intelligence she shits on the festival again.
Gerry says something about the zodiac, which I’m thinking is foreshadowing about Not Keyser Soze being the killer, and then we get another two longish paragraphs about the bands and performances there, namely the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which she shits on and also shat on when they appeared at Monterey Pop, and then we get Sha-Na-Na, which I’ve been waiting the entire book for. Of course she doesn’t like them, before she’s even heard them.
And after Butterfield, immediately preceding Jimi, and the dizziest of contrasts, was slotted a sort of novelty band from New York, Sha Na Na, a dozen pompadoured doo-wop 50’s recreationists, college boys costumed in gold lame and greaser leather. They seemed as bizarre a miscast on this bill as Blood Sweat & Tears, but who knew, they might prove a lot more fun than they looked on paper.
And Rennie throws in a passing bitch about the Butterfield Blues Band being “a stage hog,” and the section ends.
Rennie’s trying to stay awake for Jimi Hendrix’s set and intends to call Ken Karper at the Sun-Tribune and have him relay her story to Burke Kinney at the Clarion. This doesn’t make any sense; if she’s still working for the San Francisco Clarion, why did she move to New York? I know she moved to Los Angeles in the third book, but that seemed more like a desire to cut ties with the Lacing family, even though she never carried through on her divorce and is still entangled in their lives. There still hasn’t been a word written about why she wanted to move back to New York. Maybe the writer just takes it for granted that anyone would move there if they could, as she’s as much of a New York provincial as Rennie is.
Anyway, no phones are free so she decides to wait and help herself to Danishes and coffee from the buffet and is irritated and bored because there is no one to entertain her in the tent. Kennealy-Morrison does some kind of stream-of-consciousness writing when Rennie remembers she has issues of the magazine that Liz Williams (remember her?) gave her and decides to read. Loya Tessman has a story in it and Rennie slags her off, then proceeds to slut-shame “San Francisco groupie queen Kaleidah Scopes” who has a column called “Rock Cocks.”
After she gets through with the first couple of issues, she sees someone else she knows has a column in the magazine, she reads it and rereads at least twice and figures out who the killer is. Or, as Rennie puts it, “at last, at long freaking bloody goddamn LAST, she had someone to hunt down and destroy like the rabid animal it was.” Note the usual dehumanization of someone she doesn’t like.
And—chapter! I’m not surprised that Kennealy-Morrison plays coy with the revelation that Rennie’s had. At this point we have two chapters and an epilogue, or fifty pages, left to solve the mystery. Based on the structure of almost every previous book, we know that the murderer will be revealed and dealt with in the next chapter, and the last chapter and the epilogue exist to tell us how beautifully things turned out for Rennie.
As usual, Rennie finds out who the killer is through sheer coincidence, the writer dropping solutions into her lap like every day is her birthday. No matter how much Rennie preens herself over her own intelligence, she has never gathered clues and put them together. She’s like a dumber distaff version of Dr. Gregory House.
Next time, chapter 23, during which the killer is revealed and, as usual, spends most of the chapter illustrating the Fallacy of the Talking Killer.
The wet shoes and socks finally served their plot purpose, as Rennie has gone back to her rental car and, as we’ll soon find out, the solution to Cory Rivkin’s murder falls into her lap, as does so much in this series.
This girl turns up and asks Rennie if that’s who she is, and we get a description of this girl. I’ll blow a twist in the chapter—this is the “groupie” that Cory Rivkin was with at the time of his death. Pay attention to the description, because Kennealy-Morrison is at pains to paint this girl as being of legal age despite both looking and talking like a child. Would Cory Rivkin having fucked a fourteen-year-old taint her beloved “rockerverse?’ Any numbers of rockers in the Sixties and Seventies had sexual relationships with underage girls, so why does she insist this girl is of legal age, based on nothing? Because she couldn’t slut-shame this girl adequately if she accepted her as a child? Maybe it’s the prettiness she noted in the below description. Maybe this girl has to be punished for being pretty, because aside from the hick deputy in the third book, nobody in this series to my recollection has ever called Rennie beautiful. Not even Turk.
…a bedraggled Woodstock waif. The child appeared to be about fourteen, but was probably four years older, though not much more than that, and very pretty under the grime of the field: long dark-brown hair, damp and straggly from the downpour, flowed out from under the scarf tied around her forehead like an Apache headband. Muddy jeans and peasant shirt, bare feet and big hoop earrings, a sodden backpack dangling from one grubby paw, and of course the damn Woodstock Smile, all completed the look.
Note the use of the word “paw” for hand here. It’s a quick and dirty dehumanization of this girl, and dehumanization is one of Kennealy-Morrison’s favorite tactics when dealing with people she doesn’t approve of. The entire section involving this girl is quite distasteful, with the author doing her best to depict her as stupid, so I’m going to try to just skim over the contents, which will be difficult as she was involved in Cory Rivkin’s death. The girl indicates she knows something about the murders and wonders aloud if she needs to tell the police, and Rennie maneuvers her into getting into the rental car and spilling her guts.
The girl’s name is as stupid as humanly possible but still not as bad as the Honorable Sacharissa Huntingforest from the fourth book as this girl’s name isn’t her real name. She introduces herself to Rennie as Rainbow Galadriel Silverwindmistdancer, and in the meantime they’ve gone to talk to Marcus, even though he isn’t a cop anymore and the matter he’d come to investigate has been resolved, so there’s no longer a reason for him to be around except authorial contrivance. Anyway, he tries not to laugh at her because he’s a shitty a person as Rennie is. Rennie calls her “the now-degrubbified child” and “the grandiosely self-nomenclatured ragamuffin,” in addition to “the waif” and “the stray” (more dehumanization) later on. Rennie’s contempt and self-satisfaction just rolls off the page.
Her real name turns out to be Sydell Radenburg, which I think is an anagram but I don’t mess with those anymore. Then Kennealy-Morrison does one of her patented time-skips and we go back to establish where we are and what’s going on. I hate her damned time-skips so much. True to character, Rennie hasn’t taken this girl to the police to help with their inquiry, but gotten her back to the motel room and called in Marcus to take her statement, essentially. And Rennie calls him Agent Dorner, even though he isn’t an agent of anything, so editorial fail. She explains away her broken promise to Sheriff Lawdog to give him “first crack at any information she turned up” by rationalizing that “this kid would turn to dandelion fluff and blow away at the first sign of an official lawman.” It’s all self-serving bullshit, but we know Rennie always can cobble together an excuse to do whatever she wants.
During this time-skip, Rennie forces Rainbow Galadriel to take a shower and has her clothes washed, which could be considered a kind gesture but Rennie has no fucking kindness in her soul. It’s really because this girl’s reminding her of Adam Santa Monica, the first murder victim in California Screamin’, and trying to undo her failure to save him by saving Rainbow Galadriel. But it’s not that Rennie didn’t save him; it’s that he annoyed her and she didn’t care if he died because anyone who annoys the living Queen Emma Peel is subject to the death penalty.
There is a funny and telling line after Rainbow Galadriel tells Marcus about how she knew who Rennie was.
Rennie pridefully swelled like a puffer fish, and Marcus scowled at her until she deflated.
That almost makes it sound like the writer knows what an ass Rennie is, but the rest of the series disproves that hypothesis.
Long story short, some guy gave Rainbow Galadriel a peanut butter sandwich to eat, then she met Cory, they started making out, he died, and she took off because she was scared. She doesn’t know who the guy was and he was dressed like everyone else at the festival, but he gave her three peanut butter sandwiches and took her over to the performers’ pavilion and had a performer’s pass. Rennie pries some description of Cory’s death out of her, which seems to have been painful if quick, for no particular reason as they already know he died of the peanut allergy. Then Rainbow Galadriel starts crying and Rennie and Marcus start talking in front of her like she can’t hear anything or is too stupid to understand. Well, maybe the author thinks she is.
Rennie, and possibly Marcus, figure out that the man who gave her the peanut butter probably wants to tie up her particular loose end, and offers to let her stay in one of the eight hundred or so rooms that Lionheart has rented. Not only is her stash box a TARDIS, so is this motel.
The room on offer is Niles Clay’s, as the band has left, and Rainbow Galadriel creams herself over the chance to sleep in his bed for almost a page, even if he isn’t in it. I guess this is a shot at her intelligence because Rennie’s already told us Niles is mad because he isn’t the “big sexy frontman of the band.”
In the course of talking to Marcus, Rennie manages to get in some shots at other women on the subject of Cory Rivkin and Owl Tuesday: Phrases used are “godawful groupie poetry,” “squealy fan stories,” and “illiterate besotted gibber.”
Somehow Rennie thinks this proves that Amander died of a peanut allergy too. Here’s her logic chain for that assertion.
Rennie sighed with exasperation. “Do I have to spell everything out? A p.b. sarnie killed Cory. What are the odds another one did the same for Amander?”
Pretty poor, seeing as WE STILL DON’T HAVE ANY CAUSE OF DEATH FOR AMANDER EVANS. She figures it’s this guy that also killed Amander, and I have to assume it’s Not Keyser Soze, as he’s the only guy other than Niles Clay that she’s been seen to despise in this book. I can’t even guess as to why he’d want Cory Rivkin dead, but I’m sure the writer can pull a nonsensical motivation out of her ass.
I’m also waiting to see if the narrative deals with my objection to the “kissed to death” peanut butter assassination.
Namely, since Cory Rivkin knew he was violently allergic to peanuts, he would know what they smell like and might just be sensitive to it. Since Rainbow Galadriel hadn’t brushed her teeth or used mouthwash, even if she’d eaten and drunk other things, Cory would have smelled peanut butter on her breath and shoved her away. Failing that, he would have tasted the peanut butter when he kissed her and would have called for help immediately. I’ll bet it doesn’t. (Future Me: Rennie claims that eating other things removed the peanut taste and smell. Our mileage varies.)
And Rennie goes on to admit they still don’t know if Amander had a peanut allergy and presses him to find out. I’d press him to find out the cause of death, but what do I know? I’m not Murder Chick.
Rennie and Marcus have about two pages of dialogue that don’t add much to the plot or characterization before the section ends. There’s no real reason for the section to end here, though, as Rennie just gives us two and a half pages of repeating what we just went over in the preceding section with Marcus.
And she still clings to the peanut-murder theory for Amander based on nothing at all. She is so stupid. But maybe the writer is trying to hold back the much more reasonable poisoning-by-red-wine at the Rainshadow Records party to be a final-act twist? It would have worked better if she’d done it the other way around and put in the peanut-murder as the twist. It wouldn’t be any more believable, but it would be more surprising. She does cut at Cory about not being successful enough to attract pretty groupies (what a bitch) and we find out that Chin Ho Kanaloa is still around, as Rennie’s going to assign a guard for the entrance to their eight-hundred-room wing of the hotel. Is she paying his salary? Well, that’s a stupid question. What’s Turk’s is Rennie’s, including all his money.
Turk calls and Rennie fills him in on the peanut-murder and Turk has forgotten all about her putting herself in danger that he was throwing a fit about the last time they talked on the phone. Or the writer has. One of these.
Anyway, what he cares about is Marcus being around and obliquely reminds her that Marcus is in love with her and finds it “droll” that Rennie runs into him every time he turns around. Which I don’t think he would, given how insecure Turk has been made in his relationship, but then the section ends and I don’t have time to worry further.
Rennie starts thinking about the performances on tap for Sunday and doesn’t want to see anyone except Crosby Stills Nash & Young and Jimi Hendrix, and cuts at him for insisting on closing the festival. Then she starts thinking about the burglary and asks Sheriff Lawdog about it when she sees him. That’s a major time-skip because we were still in her room when she was wondering and now she’s somewhere else. And somehow Sheriff Lawdog has decided that Female Jimi Hendrix’s falling box and Ned Raven’s electrocution were attempted murders, based on nothing we know about at the moment. And he also called Marcus “Agent Dorner.” Is he going to join the FBI and be assigned to New York City so Rennie can always have a cop in her hip pocket?
Rennie remembers Turk’s poisoning and mentions it, but has now downsized the suspect list to fifty people instead of two hundred, based on nothing we know about at the moment. I need to make a macro of “based on nothing we know about at the moment.” Anyway, Sheriff Lawdog also thinks this was a murder attempt and Rennie agrees.
And—chapter! It’s true that someone with a violent peanut allergy can die from just coming into contact with peanuts, which is why fast food places have the warning signs in the windows that food prepared there may have come into contact with anything that could create an allergic reaction. It’s just not likely that two performers at the festival would both be that allergic.
Just FYI, we have three chapters and an epilogue left, or sixty-two pages, and since the last chapter and the epilogue are for telling us how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, we have two chapters and twenty-seven pages to solve the murders.
So right now I’m assuming that Not Keyzer Soze is the one who murdered Cory Rivkin and probably Amander Evans. I’m still betting on Dian Cazadora for one of the murders, probably Turk’s poisoning as she was at the party. At least I know Loya Tessman isn’t the murderer, because she shows up in the deadly dull “the Rennieturk and their entourage go to a restaurant and sit at the coolest table” sequence from Scareway to Heaven that’s on Kennealy-Morrison’s Facebook account. This book needed a lot more work done on the plotting and I’m actually wondering if this is a first or second draft.
Regarding Niles Clay, I made the mistake of checking the end of the next book for his fate. The writer doesn’t kill him, but I wish she had—it would have left him with more dignity. Rennie is a micro-Sauron who will never experience the consequences of her actions and become a better person. Being Rennie would be like living in hell.
Next time, chapter 22, in which we get a lot of historical information about Sunday at Woodstock, Rainbow Galadriel gets attacked but is okay, and Rennie finally figures something out, but not because she collected clues and put them together, but because something else got dropped into her lap by the author like it was Rennie’s birthday.
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