Go Ask Malice Chapter 20, or Astrologer Wars: Return of the Lexicographer

Rennie’s in “a splendid fit of bad temper” due to the selling out conversation she’s just had, in addition to some lingering pique over her interactions with Marcus and Sheriff Lawdog.  And she admits she’d take out her anger on anyone who had the bad fortune to stumble across her.

Especially she didn’t want to encounter any artists just now, for fear she’d slap them senseless for faults as yet uncommitted—a little spot of pre-emptive criticism.

The author thinks Rennie’s bad temper and lack of impulse control and penchant toward violence redound to her credit, and seems to think this makes her protagonist sassy and kickass, but it doesn’t.  It really doesn’t.  It just makes her look like she has all the emotional maturity of a six-year-old.

And then we’re going on AGAIN about bands selling out, even though we just covered that subject thoroughly in the previous chapter.  At the END of the previous chapter, in fact.  Kennealy-Morrison’s writing is repetitious as all get-out.

She does go on to make a connection about how politics could take a page from this book and the future and turns left at Albuquerque by deciding that this could be a motivation for Cory Rivkin’s murder, although not Amander’s:  Owl Tuesday might have had the opportunity to sell song rights for commercial use and some members didn’t want to do that.  So that’s a reason for murder? And if it is, then Cory had to be the only member of the group who didn’t want to sell a song, or it wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

But she does come up with a plan of action to try to investigate her hypothesis:  find out what rights what band members possessed and who got the money.  She does think that the other band members may have killed him.  That seems a little involved—all it would take is one.  And she pays lip service to the fact that this may not be correct but as Rennie is always right, we know it is. Let’s see if she actually does any of what she’s just proposed. Odds are that the solution to the mystery just plops itself into her lap.

As she should have been able to foresee back at the motel, her “worn sneakers” don’t provide much protection from the wetness and she wants to change her shoes and socks.  Fortuitously, she remembers she threw extra shoes and socks in her car and commends herself for this by thinking, “How downright foresighted of her!”

This is example number 381, 755 of the writer protecting her self-insert from the consequences of her actions, no matter how small.  I admit it’s nothing next to the incident in chapter 20 of Love Him Madly where Rennie beat up a cop while ripped to the tits on cocaine and not only didn’t get arrested but the beaten-up cop was forced to apologize to her, but it says something about how heavily invested in her self-insert Kennealy-Morrison was if she goes to these lengths to make sure Rennie always has dry feet.  It’s not like she’s going to get trench foot for having wet feet for a few hours.  Plus, this whole digression about the comfort of Rennie’s feet has not one single solitary thing to do with the plot.

The plot sticks its nose back in by having Lexicographer show up in the performer’s pavilion in time to have a heart-to-heart talk with Rennie, which she never says is off the record.  Why doesn’t anybody who talks to Rennie make sure they tell her that this shit is off the record since they all know she’s a reporter?

What security there is tries to keep Lexicographer out, which hurts her feelings, so Rennie has to intervene for a myriad of reasons, chief among these being her need to throw her weight around, get some inside information from the suspect about the murder, and make sure Lexicographer thinks she owes Rennie.

She engages in some behavior designed to disarm Lexicographer, like getting her a shawl to keep her warm and getting her tea, before she lowers the boom.  This is Rennie’s usual MO.  Please be advised that this heart-to-heart talk takes up almost six pages.

“So,” she said then, and Lexie raised startled guilty eyes, as if she were a scolded puppy, though Rennie’s tone had been light. 

I doubt it.

“You might have let me know about it, really.  You and Amander, I mean…I need to be told.”

And Lexicographer tells her, “Why the fuck should I? It’s none of your business.”

Yeah, that was actually me.  In the actual book, Lexicographer is properly apologetic and rolls over to expose her throat and belly like a defeated dog and spills everything Rennie wants to know “humbly.”  Go fuck yourself, Rennie.

And then, because Rennie thinks Amander was a base little slut, we get confirmation for all of this out of Lexicographer.  It doesn’t say anything good about Kennealy-Morrison that her books are so full of slut-shaming, especially when most of it originates from her self-insert.  And it’s so artless it makes clear that Amander Evans is the analogue for one of Kennealy-Morrison’s vast army of enemies who must be destroyed in fiction because she couldn’t avenge herself on them in real life.  I’m quoting the entire villain speech to show the cartoonish, poorly written depiction of Amander-as-mean-slut.

There was no reason for her to throw it in my face like that [my note—Amander’s relationship with Ned Raven], except only to hurt me.

Or to enable the writer to cut down this nameless enemy as a mean-spirited slut, but please do continue.

And then she said we—us—that what we’d had wasn’t any more romantic or real than it had been for her with Ned.  That she’d screwed him just to get attention and make trouble and hurt him and his wife, that she got off on it; and that she had hooked up with me for pretty much the same reasons.  She said that was why she’d insisted we keep it a secret, so that now she could tell everyone she’d broken up with me because I was such a loser.  She actually laughed about it, as if I’d been so stupid to take it seriously.

One way this speech would work is if Lexicographer murdered Amander and is flat-out lying to Rennie about what went on between them because Lexicographer knows how terrified of and paranoid about other women she is and how possessive of Turk.  This would be a guaranteed slam-dunk and Rennie would eat up the depiction of Amander.

Another way this could work is if Amander had some personal grudge against Ned and Demelza Poldark-Raven and Lexicographer—say they were at an orgy and her sister died because they wouldn’t summon medical assistance for her—and she wanted to jab at Lexicographer but not give away her revenge plans.  But neither of these strategies is likely; it’s far more plausible that Kennealy-Morrison hated this character’s analogue so much that slut-shaming her was so gratifying to the author that this was the only reason it was included.

There’s a bunch more twaddle that doesn’t actually seem to affect anything, except for Rennie to get pissed at the possibility that the Sheriff might have been mean to a murder suspect and Lexicographer explaining away the bruises on her arms (both she and Amander had them) as occurring when she tripped over her cat and fell.  Well, that’s a weak fucking excuse, but Amander starts crying and Rennie comforts her, and if Lexicographer is the killer she’s gloating to herself about how easy it is to pull the wool over Murder Chick’s eyes.  I so hope she’s the killer now.

The next section is about two and a quarter pages of Rennie and Lexicographer continuing their discussion and Rennie wants to give Lexicographer a Valium!  Maybe she drugs people in this series as a means of control, or a means of not having to deal with them when she doesn’t want to, or maybe she wants to get them hooked on drugs because she’s an addict herself and isn’t self-aware enough to know it.  Rennie goes on to indulge the woman and talk with her about Turk and offers lodgings at the motel that apparently Lionheart owns half of, despite the huge crowd and lack of housing, and the section ends.  None of this section should be here, as it contributes nothing to the plot.

Rennie begins the next section by going to the security trailer to call Turk.  She knows she isn’t supposed to be “tying up one of the festival lines with a private phone call,” but she’s sure the people there saw her with the police and will think she’s using the phone for murder-related reasons.  I so hate Rennie.

There’s some labored dialogue that does nothing but show Rennie is worried about Turk, but does let us know that she will be staying until Monday to see Jimi Hendrix.  The other bands between now and then can go fuck themselves—Rennie’s such a lousy reporter if the Rupert Murdoch analogue wasn’t fellating her about how great she is, she would have been fired literally years ago—and Mary Prax has left the festival, so at least she can’t be so fucking precious for a while. 

Rennie fellates Turk about how smart he was to leave the festival, which actually wasn’t his choice due to the fact that HE WAS POISONED, which his true love seems to have put on the back burner.  That’s an odd choice for the writer to make, but whatever, because we’re getting to the part where Turk figures out she’s putting herself in danger again and wants her to stop.  And he’s right—she has no clues and no suspects, so she should leave the whole business to the police, especially since she hated one of the victims and barely knew the other one.  Kennealy-Morrison called these books cozies, which I was wondering about because one of the characteristics of a cozy mystery is that the reader doesn’t give two shits about the murder victim.

I have no idea why Turk thinks Rennie’s going to listen to him about this.  They’ve had this conversation multiple times, and she knows this is such a sore spot with him that he broke up with her because he couldn’t deal with the idea of her being hurt or killed, but she’s so spoiled and self-obsessed that there’s no way she’ll do anything other than continue to burnish her Murder Chick reputation.

He quotes the thing Rennie said that gave me Servant series flashbacks about her bathing in blood, and here’s her reaction.

Rennie smiled proudly; she couldn’t help it.

Okay, so she’s a sociopath.  Why is the author even pretending that this girl isn’t a nightmare of violence and cruelty and self-indulgence? Why doesn’t the author see that Rennie’s the natural villain of this series?

There’s uninteresting personal talk until Rennie brings up the subject of Niles Clay.  How does anybody in that trailer think this is anything other than a personal call based on what she’s been saying?

Turk sucks Rennie’s dick for a longish paragraph about how she’s kept all his “unforgivable” insults to herself and would never, never rat, and finally says he and Niles will “have it out” themselves.  I still think his position’s safe, not just because he’s still the lead singer in the next book, but because this band can’t give a halfway competent performance without him.  Of course Rennie makes some more violent threats toward Niles, which Turk completely endorses as his balls are in her pocket and have been since the fourth book.  Before the end of the conversation, he says the line, “Know your audience,” which Rennie has a big mental reaction to and must be significant, but we won’t get any clues as to why as the writer doesn’t play fair with the readers.

And—chapter!  Every chapter is crappier than the one which came before.  We’re now four chapters and an epilogue from the end of the book, and we can’t count the last chapter and epilogue because the writer is obsessed with showing us how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, so there’s three chapters to solve the murders.

I should have some concluding thoughts other than how much I hate Rennie, how poor the pacing is, how much I hate all the slut-shaming, how much I hate all of Rennie’s unearned privilege and arrogance, and how sick I am of the world turning itself upside down to accommodate her, but it feels like I’ve been saying that for the entire book up until this point.  I almost want to say that I wish Kennealy-Morrison would find some different ways to mess up her books, but then I remember how bad it is now and take the wish back.  Anyway, we’re almost done, and on to the worst book in the series, as each book in the series has been that before I read the one which came after.

Next time, chapter 21, during which we find out who the “groupie” with Cory Rivkin was and resolve his murder, while Rennie sticks to her dumbass theory that Amander also died of a peanut allergy for no goddamn reason, and there’s some interaction with Marcus that doesn’t even include him telling her that they don’t have a cause of death for Amander yet so her argument is built on sand.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 19, or Racing With the Ending

Rennie starts off the chapter pissed off that Sheriff Lawdog came up with Lexicographer as a viable suspect without one little bit of help from her.  Of course the writer just indicates she’s pissed off.  The rest of it is implicit.  Then we have two pages about the rainstorm that’s taking place, Rennie getting dressed for being out in the rain (and includes some clothes porn for Rennie:  “olive-drab rubberized Army-surplus raincoat she’d worn in college, one of Turk’s summer sweaters, bought to cope with the English summer, old jeans, worn sneakers for the puddles and mud, a colorful Ukrainian scarf tied over her pinned-up hair,” in case you were curious),  driving back to the festival, and being blessed with a parking place because she’s an author self-insert.  Damn, that was riveting action!

So Rennie gets back to the festival dressed like a model for Mugatu’s Derelicte collection and winds up drinking tea and wishing she could get into the meditation yurt to look at the crime scene.  All that’s stopping her is yellow crime scene tape and she has no morals to speak of, so I don’t get why she hasn’t done it already, unless it’s just because that would be work.  But wait a minute—I thought the festival organizers were trying to keep the murders quiet.  If they couldn’t keep the police from putting the tape up, they could at least remove it as soon as the cops are gone.  So that’s an editorial fail as far as I’m concerned.

Then she starts doing some thinking.  Hey, it’s what passes for detecting with her.  Rennie’s mad about “look[ing] like an idiot in front of Sheriff Lawson,” which isn’t surprising, and thinks that Amander and Lexicographer must have been pretty cagey in order to hide their relationship and get a half-paragraph about how shitty the “rockerverse” is. 

I have a problem with the whole Amander-Lexicographer affair based on what the writer’s done with same-sex relationships up to this point.  From this we can infer that Amander is bisexual, but that reads as a way of Kennealy-Morrison attempting to make her look even sluttier than she’s already attempted to depict her, make her look sexually voracious in a way that fucking a lot of men still wouldn’t do.  We’ve seen in her handling of her only bisexual female character, Mary Prax, that she can’t handle the actual writing of a same-sex relationship, as all of Mary Prax’s same-sex affairs took place off the page, usually in the spaces between books, and now that Kennealy-Morrison has hooked this character up with War God Cherry Blossom, she now has an excuse for never writing Mary Prax as anything except heterosexual again.  I just don’t understand why she keeps having same-sex relationships in her books when she can’t bear to write them.

Like a good narcissist, Rennie again has to bring this back to herself and goes on for about a third of a page about how much she wished that she and Turk could have managed the same thing.  I don’t know whether this is self-delusion or just lying to the reader.  Rennie loves being the public girlfriend, as is supported by the entire incident of getting a performer’s pass in this book and her behavior on occasions too numerous to cite since the third book, and this reads as nothing but her trying to paint herself as suffering from their public relationship.

Then we get an indication of how much of a sociopath Rennie is, in case we needed to be reminded of this.  I say again, I have no idea how Kennealy-Morrison didn’t understand how repellent her protagonist is unless she was just too close to the subject and too in the grip of her need to exact literary vengeance on her various enemies.

Too bad that little groupie had turned up dead in their bed and blown their privacy to hell forever…though of course it had been far worse for the groupie than for them, her being dead and all, and really forever.  Poor Citrine.  Or was it Amethyst? She couldn’t remember, and was briefly troubled to realize that she couldn’t.  Really, she should be able to, it was only a year and a half ago…

Her timeline’s a little off for Amethyst, as she died in May of 1968.  In case anyone’s forgotten, Amethyst died because Rennie manipulated Jacinta O’Malley into murdering her.  There was no acknowledgement of this from the author, but what she’s shown is far louder than what she’s said.  And we know the real names of both these women:  Citrine was Dorothy Crystal and Amethyst was Sally Butlin.  But since, in her mind, these women were so far inferior to Rennie, I’m not surprised she couldn’t remember their names.

This entire passage gives me a flavor of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake being momentarily concerned that her behavior and actions may indicate that she’s a sociopath before brushing off these signs and going along the way she normally does, until the next time she has to wonder if she’s a sociopath.

And then we spend about two pages with Rennie thinking about the sexuality of rock musicians and the lingering effects of non-hippie culture and the necessary hypocrisy of gay/lesbian/bisexual musicians who want to keep their careers.  It’s not terribly deep or interesting, so I’m skipping it.  The only plot-pertinent thing that happens is that Rennie decides Lexicographer couldn’t have killed Amander for reasons we aren’t privy to, other than Lexicographer is “too gentle and too smart.”

Man, you’re stupid, Rennie.

Then Not Keyser Soze turns up and Rennie snipes at him because his predictions weren’t accurate and  Lexicographer’s were.  She really isn’t coming across with all the intellectual firepower here that Kennealy-Morrison intended.

Not Keyser Soze isn’t as upset as Rennie thinks he should be and she keeps jabbing at him but he doesn’t react.  Eventually he does get in his own shot about how she can’t figure out who’s done it and refers to what happened to Turk.  Rennie fronts but anyone can tell the shot got to her, and he leaves.  So I’m guessing the killers (as this is a soft reboot of the second book, I’m betting there are two independent killers) are Not Keyser Soze and Dian Cazadora because Rennie hates both of them.  Due to the writer’s tendency to pull stuff out of her ass to finish up the books, I can’t even guess as to what their reasons will be.

The next section starts out with Belinda Melbourne wandering over to be a sounding board for our protagonist.  They go back over the uninteresting musings about sexuality and public perception of rock musicians (hey, we just went over this—was the writer not bothering to read her work after she wrote it?) and dismiss Elk Bannerman as a suspect because he wouldn’t care if she was bisexual, based on what we aren’t told.  And then Belinda proves herself as much a septic bitch as Rennie.

Young Amander did seem to enjoy flexing her fangs in public. 

Shame we weren’t given scenes of her doing this, rather than Rennie and Mary Prax and Turk ripping on people in a diner for being fat dumbass rednecks or bragging about Rennie’s ability to get a performer’s pass.  Seems like it would have been more valuable to the plot.

You said she was actually threatening to publicly accuse Ned Raven of raping her, when she was the one who came onto him for sexytimes.

Except that we’ve already heard Rennie telling Ned she didn’t believe Amander was going to do that.  Why would she have told Belinda this when she didn’t believe it herself? Other than to paint Amander as a slut and a bad person, of course.  And the word “sexytimes” is an anachronism.  You know who can spot anachronisms? An editor!

And she was only amused when Melza wanted to scratch her eyes out, as indeed Mel should have.

So you agree that Portiapam would have reason to inflict physical violence on you because you’re gagging for sex with her husband Diego Morrison, then? Yes? Good.

So our Kiwi songbird was a player and a tease and a mean little bitch, basically.

Nothing Belinda states as fact here has been borne out in the actual text itself.  I guess that would have pulled focus from the greater glory of Rennie.

Rennie tells Belinda she’s going to question Lexicographer when the police let her go.  She also says, “…it would be really nice if I could come up with something big, and shut off an investigation before yet another friend of mine is arrested.”  And what if your friend is guilty, Rennie? But we all know that will never happen because Rennie is always right and if a friend of hers committed murder, that would show that she was wrong about something.

The conversation’s cut off when more of Rennie’s acquaintances—they are not friends despite what the author calls them as Rennie doesn’t know what friendship is—show up and get into a conversation about the band Stoneburner selling the rights to one of their songs for a pudding commercial and Rennie gets all up in her feelings about it, even though this has not one thing to do with her, except that Owen Danes (one of the guys in the band, I don’t think we were ever told what he played) is a friend of Turk’s and one of her semi-regular starfucks in the first book.

“Owney ought to be ashamed.  In fact, he ought to be put in the stocks for it, so we could all throw rotten tomatoes at him.  I’d be the first one winding up for the pitch.”

It’s a mystery to me why Owen Danes didn’t fall smack dab in love with her and propose.  That’s a true head-scratcher there.

Anyway, the next three and a half pages are all about bands selling out, which bands would never sell out, the mechanics of selling out, and there is nothing plot-related in this sequence so I’m skipping it.  It’s also boring, by the way.

And—chapter!  It was a short slog but still a slog.  This chapter is made almost completely of filler, which it should not be because we’re five chapters and an epilogue from the end of the book.  Seeing as the last chapter and the epilogue are traditionally for delineating how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, we only have four chapters to come up with some suspects and solve the murders.  Here is the current list of suspects for the murders and Turk’s poisoning.

Cory Rivkin:  none.  Rennie hasn’t lifted a finger to investigate his murder after confirming with his bandmates that he did have a peanut allergy.

Amander Evans:  Ned Raven and Lexicographer.  Rennie doesn’t believe either of them did it, so we’re effectively back to none.

Turk Wayland (poisoned):  none.  She has done even less to investigate his poisoning than she did to investigate Cory Rivkin’s murder.  All she could do for Turk was bluster about murdering people and borrow transportation to get him out of town before the police could question him.  And why haven’t they just gone to New York and done that? It’s not like he’s across an international border.  Oh yeah, because the writer says so.

Hey you guys, I think Rennie may not be as smart as she thinks she is!

We’re ninety-nine pages from the end of this book, and since the last chapter and epilogue traditionally don’t count, we have 62 pages to solve the murders, with no suspects and (at least in Amander’s case) no cause of death.  Kennealy-Morrison continues to prove that she had no grasp of pacing.

Next time, chapter 20, wherein Lexicographer genuflects to Rennie with a nice talk and Rennie suddenly remembers that Cory Rivkin was murdered too during a conversation with Turk which takes up way too much of the chapter.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 18, or Elk Bannerman’s Whiskey

Fresh off her stunning and flawless moral victory over Loya Tessman, Rennie arrives back at the motel to see Elk Bannerman and a couple of his Mobbed-up flunkies (one of which she mentally calls “Mr. Bullneck”),

and sees Bannerman is drinking “twenty-five-year-old Scotch.”  You can’t tell how old Scotch is just by looking at it, and we’re not told the bottle was visible.  This is what 1,786 pages of authorial self-indulgence have brought me to.  Ordinarily I would have held the nitpick about judging the age of liquor visually, but Kennealy-Morrison has burned through every ounce of forbearance I have.  At least there are only 136 pages left in the book.

And a total of 1,013 pages left in the series.

For a total of 2,799 pages in the entire series.  Judging from her past books, one more novel would have put us over the 3,000 page mark.

Anyway, Rennie decides to talk to Bannerman for no particular reason and instantly finds out that he had some of his boys “talk to” Marcus Dorner, and she freaks the fuck out.  I’m not sure why he felt the need to do this, and she hadn’t asked, but meaningless conflict blah blah yada yada yada.  Rennie informs her Mob godfather that Marcus is “federales” (sic), indicating that the author doesn’t speak Spanish well enough to tell singular from plural, and asks Bannerman if he isn’t worried about getting arrested, albeit in a very twee way.

Bannerman says that Marcus “was happy for us to lend a hand,” which confuses the hell out of me.  Normally when a Mobbed-up guy sends people to talk to someone, a threat of some kind is made.  So I’m at a loss as to why Bannerman would have involved himself with someone even police-adjacent in this series.  The only reason I can come up with is the twenty-five-year-old Scotch the author must have been downing while writing.

Somehow Bannerman either made up the shortfall with the festival organizers or made the stolen money come back –the writing is muddy as hell here—and Rennie is profuse in her thanks “and scolding.”  Cement overshoes are still being measured at a location near you, Mr. Bannerman!

For no reason, he’s now interested in the two murders that have taken place and wants to know if resolving the burglary will help catch the killer and she advises that she doesn’t know.  She questions him about why he put Amander into the opening slot for the Bluesnroyals tour and there were no ulterior motives there, but Rennie does a veiled slut-shame that Bannerman doesn’t catch and she won’t make explicit.  And they get into a discussion about suspects!  Did the author hear me across space and time?

Rennie says there are too many suspects—that’s news to me since we’ve never even been given one name of a suspect—and no motive, which is true.  Maybe if you’d actually made that list of suspects from the Rainshadow Records party, you might have been able to narrow down your suspects.  But silly me, that might actually work without the heavy hand of the author intervening in favor of her self-insert!

Bannerman suggests she look at Cory Rivkin and how he got the peanuts and Rennie’s suddenly hopeful that Amander was killed by a peanut allergy too, but Bannerman doesn’t know if she had one.  That is one of the stupider things Rennie’s ever thought of, but the section ends with Bannerman using a bunch of Yiddish words that he’s never used before in the entire series.

In the next section Rennie’s met up with Marcus and is advancing the theory that the murders are connected.  Oh, I don’t know; since we’re doing a soft reboot of California Screamin’, it might just be that there are killers operating independently of each other, but since Rennie is always right, I’m sure they will be.

The author tells us that Bannerman and his boys took off for New York and they’re alone in the motel’s main lounge—how big is this motel if it has more than one lounge? Whatever, moving on.  The author goes into almost a page about Rennie and Marcus’s history with each other and is at pains to say that there’s no residual attraction there, no sirree bob!  It’s very precious, very arch, very twee, and Rennie yet again ignores the fact that Marcus is—or was—in love with her, despite the fact that she was told this no less than twice by her boyfriend and her best friend, but it doesn’t suit her to believe it because that would indicate all her hostility might reflect badly on her.  In fact, I don’t think it’s only Rennie ignoring this; I think the writer is ignoring it too, just the way she does with all of her self-insert’s bad behavior.

Rennie goes on to tell us that she didn’t want to have their talk in her room (and the narrator tells us she’s “[d]isplaying considerable delicacy of feeling” because that’s too much work to show) for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Turk’s a complete slob and that gives her flaming panties because it makes her feel owned, but not in those exact words. 

Then we get some detail that the author pulled straight out of her own ass to make her self-insert look better.  Kennealy-Morrison uses the word conceit in regard to her protagonist to debunk it, but the debunk doesn’t take.  Rennie is absolutely conceited, and she always has been and always will be.

And not that she in her conceit thought that Marcus still had the hots for her;

She’s still talking like a junior high school mean girl—I mean, “had the hots?” This is supposed to be a twenty-five-year-old woman, but she can’t express herself in a mature way.  Plus, she knows that wasn’t all he felt for her.  She was told no less than twice by Mary Prax and Turk that Marcus loves her, which she disregards with a level of denial I can only categorize as “sullen-toddler.”  And, since Kennealy-Morrison can’t stand having to deal with the fact that her self-insert caused significant pain to someone who wasn’t a villain, she applies a nice little retcon that’s quite similar to the one she used in California Screamin’ to minimize how much pain she caused Stephen with her desertion and adultery.  That shouldn’t be surprising since we’re dealing with a soft reboot of the second book.

…in fact, she had fixed him up a few months back with one of her acquaintances in L.A., a high-powered brunette investment banker she’d met through a reporting job, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Gee, notice how the women that any of Rennie’s significant fucks replace her with has to be completely worthy of being her replacement? Giant Panda, Stephen’s fiancée, is a gem expert with aristocratic heritage, Bernadette Wolowicz, Chet Galvin’s wife that he took up with at Monterey Pop after Rennie tossed him aside for an Irish musician-murderer and didn’t even bother breaking up in person, is an extraordinarily gifted artist, and now this nameless Marcus pacifier is an anachronistic girlboss character.  Not that Rennie thinks any of these women are her equals, of course; she thinks every woman in the world is inferior to her and simultaneously competition for her true love.

And none of her important past fucks bears significant hostility toward her, or is even upset with her in any way.  Because she’s just that fucking perfect and awesome.

So Marcus indicates to her she doesn’t have proof of the murders and the poisoning of Turk being connected and she reacts like a six-year-old, as is tradition.

“I heard you the first time!  I was thinking!”

Rennie doubles down and insists she knows they’re connected, and in the next sentence admits she doesn’t have evidence but believes they’re connected.  So which is it, do you know or do you believe? These are two different things.  And the author attempts to use overwriting to shore up her knowledge/belief that the murders are connected.

Because it is simply beyond the powers of my suspension of disbelief to think that Amander and Cory were not both felled by the lethal might of the lowly legume.

Wow, Kennealy-Morrison is just giga-shitty at dialogue.  It is relentlessly artificial, self-consciously “written,” and nothing any human anywhere could have said in real life as it is simply too awkward.  I don’t recall her having this many faceplants as far as dialogue goes in the first book, so it seems that she’s getting worse as a writer as the series goes on.  And the basis of her assertion that the murders are connected is “Because I say so.”  At least it’s in character.

Because nothing else seems to make any damn sense.

Neither does the argument you just advanced.  It would make a lot more sense if you assumed, the way I did, that both Turk and Amander were poisoned at the Rainshadow Records party, with Turk surviving because Rennie was with him and Amander dying because she was alone, or (and I’m sure this is what the author will go with) she was with a casual fuck who didn’t care enough about her to save her and just lugged her to the meditation yurt and forgot about her.  I’m sure the writer will use the last one as Rennie hates Amander as a nasty sexual groupie who could STEAL HER MAN.  Or at least could have if she weren’t dead.

We get a paragraph’s worth of insight into Marcus’s state of mind, with Kennealy-Morrison careful to tell us that he was “cranky” because he was hungry, and Rennie’s such a handsome person that she would have offered him food, the entire digression seeming to be only to assure the reader that Marcus isn’t mad at her because she used him and threw him away, but due to an unrelated issue.  And the writer states they both “labor under the delusion that both of them were ticked off at the other.”  But it isn’t a delusion on his part—she’s always been irrationally hostile toward him.  But we can’t think that because Rennie is just so perfect and awesome.

Rennie even allows that this peanut-murder theory is unlikely but that’s her story and she’s sticking to it.  And she calls it a “peanut bane.”  I wish Bane was there, as he wouldn’t tolerate her shit for a minute.  He might even remind her that WE DON’T KNOW YET WHAT AMANDER EVANS’S CAUSE OF DEATH WAS AS THE WRITER HASN’T SEEN FIT TO TELL US. 

But because Rennie is always right, I’m sure both of them will have bought the business end of a peanut, unbelievable thought that may be.  She does admit that she doesn’t even know if Amander had a peanut allergy yet.  Which would direct a more reasonable person to the red-wine-poisoning theory, but Rennie isn’t reasonable.

This conversation between Rennie and Marcus goes on for another torturous eight pages, during which we learn that Ned and Demelza Poldark-Raven have departed the narrative for England because the cops did in fact ignore Ned’s confession to the crime for which he had been arrested and Marcus asks her the laughable question, “Don’t you ever hate being right all the time?”

She isn’t right all the time, Marcus, and if anyone would know this it would be you.  Her reply to this is “Of course, but the alternative would be far worse, so I’ve learned to live with it.”  So she never even acknowledges in her own mind the times she’s been wrong about shit.

Then we get about a page of backstory for the previous books and how they affected Rennie, but moving on because this whole stretch is boring boring boring.

Marcus asks her if she has any ideas about who the murderer might be, because that’s how ex-cops do it—ask some rando reporter.  And he makes sure to suck up to her in order to get an answer but does subtly shade her by using her once-hated nickname.

Because I’m plumb out of ideas, and I humbly admit it to Murder Chick.

Marcus wouldn’t say “plumb out of ideas,” but the writer already proved nobody can speak consistently in this universe.  And her immediate response, as written by Kennealy-Morrison, is about her “hav[ing] the grace not to gloat, at least not right out there on her face where he could see it.”

There are no words for how much I hate everyone in this series except Marjorie Lacing and Niles Clay.  And the next thing she says it to try to obliquely accuse Niles Clay.  She is such a wretched, septic bitch.  She also remembers the attack in the woods because she slips enough to mention it to Marcus.  And why hasn’t she told the police about this again?

Marcus doesn’t say anything about the attack immediately but Rennie instantly believes Niles poisoned Turk because it suits her right down to the ground to think so, but isn’t so far gone that she can come up with a motive for him to murder Cory and Amander.  Marcus mildly rebukes her for suspect-jumping and she gives him some airy-fairy astrology talk that he doesn’t believe in and would have gotten Tansy Belladonna roundly mocked and laughed at behind her back by her “friends” Rennie and Mary Prax.  And the astrology talk goes on for half a page.

Finally Marcus, as the ex-cop, gets the idea to look at anyone who might profit from Amander and/or Cory’s deaths, a sensible thought that never occurred to Rennie before this.  Basically she tells him both of them were “inoffensive,” although Amander gets called “slutty” yet again and Rennie says she screwed anything that moved, which she doesn’t have any proof of.  The only man we know for sure she slept with was Ned, who was pretty quick to call her trampy but he was trying to get his own ass out of the wringer for her murder.  But if you have sex and are a woman who isn’t Rennie, you’re a slut.

Since Kennealy-Morrison is so free with her slut-shaming through the vehicle of Rennie, I’m going to give some back.  Rennie is easily every bit as slutty as she shames other women for being, except for the fact that she’s more self-deluded and hypocritical and has an author to file down the notches on her bedpost for her.  But the slut-shaming is so entrenched I shouldn’t bother getting mad about it, as it’s going to continue for the rest of the series.

At last Marcus picks up that someone was predicting bad things for the festival and Rennie refuses to tell him who, even after he threatens to tell Sheriff Lawdog she’s withholding evidence, which she is, but don’t expect the writer to agree with that, and mercifully the section ends.  Their conversation was the literary snark equivalent of the Bataan death march.  Who am I kidding—the entire series is like that.

Sheriff Lawdog turns up at the start of the next section to rebuke her for robbing him of the one suspect he had for the murders.  Well, that’s on you, Sheriff Lawdog.  You’re the one who decided to release someone who had confessed to the crime for which you arrested him.  What’s Rennie’s reaction to this?

Rennie looked pleased.

Because she’s a septic bitch who would be furious if the police actually managed to solve the case without her input.  I can’t think Kennealy-Morrison ever read a mystery in her life; she seems to have active contempt for the genre and, because she’s contemptuous of it, thinks writing a mystery will be easy with no experience or familiarity with the genre.  That’s the only way I can explain all the stupid lapses, like Rennie being so sure Cory and Amander were killed with peanuts and why she’s so sure the murders are connected despite no evidence.  It may have been easy for her to write, but it’s in no way easy to read.

The next seven and a half pages are quite boring and could stand being hit by an editorial weed-whacker.  Sheriff Lawdog and Rennie have a little bit of a disagreement which winds up with him being so charmed by her artificial speech patterns that he invites the Rennieturk to dinner with him and his wife the next day, which is Sunday.  Now we know he isn’t a villain, as he’s being ruled by his boner, just like every man in Rennie’s orbit who isn’t a murderer.  But she thinks he’s using charm to con her and becomes aggressive in a bit about the police hassling of the hippie attendees of the festival.  At least he isn’t trying to run them over with his car, Miss Attempted Vehicular Manslaughter.

He doesn’t get mad, she keeps trying to make him mad, and he finally tells her it isn’t going to work because she’s too stupid to figure that out on her own.  Rennie must have mistaken him for Marcus.

Then Sheriff Lawdog lowers the boom and lets her know that Lexicographer had been having an affair with Amander Evans and had been dumped a couple of weeks ago.  Well, now we know why Marcus made a big deal about the predictions of disaster, as Sheriff Lawdog probably told him before he spoke to Rennie.  And why is he still here, anyway? Marcus was here to assist with the burglary, and now that Bannerman took care of it, one way or the other, he has no further reason to hang around the festival.  He’s not a cop anymore, he’s not officially investigating, and he isn’t buddies with the sheriff the way he was in Monterey.  He should have hit the road faster than Ned Raven.

Rennie starts trying to shoot down Lexicographer as a suspect because she had nothing to do with uncovering her as a suspect and is a pure contrarian.  She also calls the evidence he has circumstantial, as if that makes it weak.  The only evidence that isn’t circumstantial is eyewitness testimony and video.  DNA is circumstantial, being in possession of a murder weapon is circumstantial, and your driver’s license at a crime scene is circumstantial.  It just confirms to me that Kennealy-Morrison had very little understanding of the genre she chose to write in.  And she uses that repulsive “trout in the milk” expression again.

Rennie wants to sit in on Lexicographer’s questioning, he shoots it down, but tells her he’ll let her know if the suspect needs a lawyer.  And she actually accepts this!

And—chapter!  This was a bad one.  Any interaction between Marcus and Rennie makes for what I see as the most painful scenes of the series.  The fact that the author had Rennie set him up with a girlfriend hits heights of condescension that I didn’t know existed.  They are not on a friendly enough footing for her to offer a fix-up or him to accept.  Kennealy-Morrison’s trying to prove Rennie’s assertion that he doesn’t love her, just like she’s trying to revirginize Rennie for Turk. 

The choices she’s made about her mystery plot are the worst ones she could have made, especially the one to hide Amander Evans’s cause of death.  If we knew what had killed her, like say an overdose of downers, we’d be able to hone in on the Rainshadow Records party as the place where she was poisoned, and maybe then the writer would think about that “writing down a list of suspects” radical suggestion I made in the last post.  Every objection she has to anything Marcus and Sheriff Lawdog tell her seems to be born out of pure contrarianism, rather than any real objection to their conclusions.  I can hardly believe this numbskull is being passed off to us as a brilliant, perceptive amateur sleuth.  It says a lot about her writing that we’re now six chapters and an epilogue from the end of the book without any real suspects, much less evidence.  Inspector Clouseau could find the killer in much shorter order.

Next time, chapter 19, during which it finally becomes Sunday, Rennie goes back to Woodstock even though it’s raining, does a lot of thinking about what she’s learned, Belinda Melbourne turns up, and they talk about bands selling out.  Yeah, that’s the important thing, not the murder victims.  Nice to know both author self-inserts have the depth of a mud puddle in Death Valley.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 17, or The Parallax Festival

As Demelza Poldark-Raven isn’t the living Queen Emma Peel, she’s all full of apologies and genuflection to Rennie which is nauseating enough that I won’t detail it.  Then she leaves “so that Ned could make his statement.”  I think that’s a land speed record for Kennealy-Morrison because that’s an editorial fail in the first sentence.  Hey Rennie, Ned already made his statement.  That’s the reason Marcus got in your face after you popped off to him and specifically told you that he’d witnessed Ned’s statement and there were things in it that he thought would be better delivered to Demelza by you.  Admittedly, it’s qualified as a preliminary statement, but a reader could reasonably assume that the author’s forgotten what she wrote in the last chapter.

Then Kennealy-Morrison spends four pages talking about Woodstock and the way the media represented it.  She shits on hippies (‘that damned Woodstock smile, like benign grinning tie-dyed zombies” and “colorful, longhaired locusts who came swooping down to devour all in their path”) and non-urban people (“upright uptight county burghers” and “anti-kid, anti-rock, anti-antiwar, old, rich Establishment audience who probably hadn’t had sex in, like, ever”) and the location (“deep in the heart of Redneckia”).   It’s significant from a historical point of view, but as far as we can tell at this point has nothing to do with anything as far as the actual murder plotline goes, so none of this needs to be here. 

Rennie, of course, is writing that absolute truth about Woodstock as “[s]he would scorn to write otherwise, and they [Burke Kinney “and her new overlords Ken Karper and Kiva Rodman, respectively crime editor and music editor at the New York Sun-Tribune{sic}] knew she would slice their ears off with a machete if they dared to edit otherwise, presuming to meddle with either her copy or her point of view.” 

So I guess she now works for the New York Sun-Tribune, rather than the San Francisco Clarion, even though we haven’t been told, so why is Burke Kinney still her boss? He never left the Clarion. She also overlooks the fact that Ken Karper wouldn’t see any of her stories yet because he’s the head of the crime beat and the festival management has hushed up the murders so nothing has been written about them yet.  Has Rennie forgotten that she is “queen of more general pop-culture content” and not a crime reporter? I feel for Kiva Rodman, though, who now has to deal with this nightmare of a girl who won’t even watch all the acts at the festival because she doesn’t like them.

But here’s what Rennie thinks of Woodstock, just in case you were wondering.

…Woodstock was an overblown, overrated heap of hooey and she hated the whole messy, self-congratulatory thing.

This is not what she had to say in her memoir; it’s possible she changed her mind over the years, but this is what she presents as her opinion at the time.  Rennie/the narrator advises us that unnamed “[p]ress colleagues” had turned in accurate reports and had them changed before publication.  None of this is particularly interesting, so I’m skipping it.

There’s another ham-handed segue which confirms that Rennie now thinks Ned and Demelza Poldark are idiots before Sheriff Lawdog knocks on the window of her car.  Chin Ho Kanaloa is still missing in action, by the way (Future Me: and he never shows up again in this chapter, so apparently Rennie left him stranded at the police station).

She thinks he looks pissed off and, when questioned as to why she thinks that, tells him:

Cops are always yelling at me for some damn thing or another why should you be any different?

Then she tells him to bring it on because she’s such a Kickass Female Character, you guys!

But I have to give some props to Sheriff Lawdog here for his response.  He isn’t my favorite character because I’m sure he’ll be a Rennie-worshipper by the end of the book, but he did have an almost-Niles-Clay-worthy moment.

“At the risk of being blasphemous, come down off the cross, Miss Stride, we need the wood.”

Uncharacteristically, Rennie laughs at this and mentally acknowledges that it was a good line.  There’s no way she’d do this; an authority figure has dared to suggest she’s less than the queen of all existence, and she would take offense as surely as the sun rises in the east.

She thinks he intended to “disarm” her with that, but he goes on to give her the standard “keep-your-nose-out-of-police-business” speech in summary that she’s heard from every other cop she’s ever met.  I have no idea why he thought it would work on the four-hundred-and-forty-first try.

Then we get about two full pages about Rennie’s sexual relationship with Ned Raven which she retcons as hard as she can to revirginize herself for Turk and swears she was “delighted” when he married Demelza Poldark, which segues into his affair with Amander, which segues into Rennie gloating over how “the Kiwi vulture” had eyes for Turk but he’s far too good for that, which segues into her primary obsession since she met him:  groupies going after Turk and her irrational terror and hatred of them.

Again, if as she states here that “he’d never sullied himself with a groupie chick of any stripe,” there is no reason for her to either hate or fear these women.  But, because Rennie is an author self-insert and the Turk analogue was in no way as continent as Turk with regard to groupies, the terror and paranoia about groupies will continue with no hint that this is not an attitude this character would hold based on Turk’s actions.  It’s more of the same that we already had pounded into our heads in the third book, so I’m skipping it.

Rennie and Sheriff Lawdog have some “witty” exchanges until. In the next section, we finally get to what he wanted to talk about, the burglary that was the reason Marcus Dorner is in this narrative.  Rennie can’t help but shit on the performers at Woodstock because shitting on lesser beings is what she does best.

Quite a few thousand dollars went missing.  They were keeping it on hand for bands who insisted on being paid in cash before going on.  Hardly an Aquarian mindset, to be so concerned about filthy lucre, but you can’t blame them, really.”

Yes, tell us more about how personal gain is evil, Miss Material Possessions are Everything to Me.

She gives him some background about Monterey Pop and takes the opportunity to shit on Ravi Shankar for getting paid for both festivals.  I just wonder what this guy did to offend Kennealy-Morrison as much as she clearly is.  In the text, the only reasons Rennie has to dislike him are that she doesn’t like his music and he wants to get paid for performing.  Yeah, that’s a death penalty offense anywhere!

Then there’s about a page of how much certain bands at the festival are getting paid for performing and they start speculating about why all the bands started demanding cash.  Well, because if they don’t have cash in hand there’s no guarantee they will be paid at all, but maybe that’s too reasonable to suit our Queen Emma Peel.  We also find out that she thinks Blood Sweat & Tears is “boring,” and she doesn’t know enough about Sha-Na-Na to have an opinion other than they’re “unknowns.”  They haven’t played yet, since they went on right before Jimi Hendrix, so I guess Rennie can’t be expected to hate them yet.

She calls Female Jimi Hendrix’s broken arm an “attack,” when she has no proof it was anything but an accidental falling box, but does admit Ned’s electrocution could have been an accident.  Does she have any discernible logic chain at all? She asks Sheriff Lawdog if Cory Rivkin and Amander Evans’s deaths are considered murders yet and he says they are.  Convenient for Rennie, especially with nobody knowing how Amander died yet.

Then Rennie browbeats him into admitting that Ned and Demelza Poldark-Raven don’t have anything to do with it and forces him through her sheer will to release them.  After this, really the only audience-pleasing solution to the mystery is that Ned and Demelza Poldark are the killers.  But of course they won’t be as Rennie is always right.

The next section begins with Rennie sitting around an ice-cream parlor on the town’s main street, thinking about what’s gone on until she’s greeted by her nemesis, who hasn’t really appeared in the series before this except to make the intuitively reasonable suggestion in the third book that Rennie killed Citrine because she can’t handle groupies wanting to fuck her man, and I think she might have gotten a brief mention in the fourth book, but she’s finally on stage.

Loya Tessman (which I think may be an anagram but I’m still not dealing with those anymore) sits down with Rennie and starts rattling away at a mile-a-minute while Rennie can only goggle in disbelief because they hate each other.  Wait a minute, has Loya been told that? She isn’t behaving as if she knows that.

Rennie is all kinds of bitchy in her own mind about this woman and there’s a tortured bit about the word “kill” being Dutch for stream which is a segue into another one of Rennie’s violent sociopathic fantasies.  And now we get about two pages of background about Loya and her husband and why she and Rennie hate each other, which Loya still doesn’t seem aware of, so I think our protagonist is projecting here.  I mean, I’m sure she does hate Rennie because Rennie is a septic creep, but Rennie’s already proved that she has no ability to see anything from anyone else’s point of view.

Anyway, Loya’s husband is the head of a big talent booking agency (which we later find out represents Lionheart) and Loya runs a teen magazine along the lines of 16 or Tiger Beat, so they have enough power that she can’t attack them directly.  Loya was also close friends with Devin Sweetzer (Not Danny Sugerman, the second murder victim in Love Him Madly), whom Rennie hates as much if not more.  Rennie then proceeds to jerk herself off about her own “sterling reputation as a journalist” and “solid-gold connections” (Turk, Mary Prax, Baron Hollywood Hogan, etc.). 

We get two and a half pages of Loya Tessman talking in summary and Rennie bitching about how awful she is and trying to figure out what’s going on and none of this shit is interesting.  It turns out Loya wants to know what Rennie and Sheriff Lawdog were talking about and Rennie gets all the confidence in the world as soon as she’s in the power position.  So she lies her ass off to this woman for no particular reason other than she doesn’t like her, and one of those lies is that Niles Clay is going to be fired after the current tour because of his insults to Turk’s ladylove.  She goes on and on and on for about another page and a half, presenting Loya Tessman as credulous enough to believe one word out of our protagonist’s mouth, and in the middle of her lying she has this thought, which sums up Rennie neatly.

Sure, it was evil, but it served the bitch right for trying to pump Rennie like that.

How many times has Rennie tried to pump people in exactly the same way? But that’s okay because she’s the living Queen Emma Peel. 

So Rennie shits on Loya Tessman for about another page before Loya leaves, and Dian Cazadora comes in.  She’s the head of Sovereign Records and I’m voting for her as the killer, because Rennie doesn’t like her based on the fact that she told Rennie to get a man to help her open her wine bottle and the fact that she’s sleeping with a married man.  So what does that say about Turk? He’s sleeping with a married woman. 

Anyway, Rennie’s driving back to the motel, laughing and gloating about getting Loya to believe her lies and telling herself that the woman needed a lesson taught to her.

And—chapter!  It says something bad about this book that we’re seven chapters and an epilogue from the end of this book and we don’t have one acknowledged suspect, and Rennie’s done almost no detecting.  Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t know how to uncover clues or, really, even question someone about something, which makes me wonder how she managed for three years as a reporter doing interviews.

Hey, here’s something that she might have thought of doing.  Since there’s an excellent chance that the killer was at the Rainshadow Records party to poison Turk and (presumably) Amander, Rennie should take her “little leather-bound notebook” and write down everyone she remembers seeing and/or talking to at the party.  Then she needs to call up Turk and have him do the same thing.  That would give her a list of suspects. I admit the killer could just have doped a bottle of wine beforehand a la Not Frankie Avalon in Ungrateful Dead and left it at the party, but it’s unlikely.  But Rennie’s too busy telling lies to her enemy and taking her petty little revenge to try finding out who attempted to murder the love of her life.  That also says something about our protagonist.

Next time, chapter 18, wherein Rennie and Marcus have a multi-page conversation, Rennie wants to blame Niles Clay for the murders somehow, and Lexicographer (remember her?) comes out of nowhere as a suspect in the murder of Amander.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 16, or Not Presumed Innocent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, back to your regularly scheduled snark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I daresay so were Turk’s fingerprints there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go Ask Malice Chapter 15, or Hello Rennie!

Kennealy-Morrison pads about two pages with filler regarding how Rennie got back to the motel and what she did after she got there and Elk Bannerman makes an appearance with a telephone in a briefcase that causes her to go on a reference spree name-checking The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Illya Kuryakin before calling home to check on Turk.  You know, the “co-protagonist” of the series.

So she’s in bed musing about what’s going on with Ned and whether she should try to get him a lawyer.  So just because Marcus told her she needed to do it, she completely disregarded it? How mature.  And she notes she isn’t going to go back to the festival because Jefferson Airplane isn’t playing for hours, so fuck the bands that are.  How does she keep her job when she slacks off like this?  Oh yeah, she includes her boss among the ranks of her worshippers/simps.

And now she finally remembers Ned has a wife, Demelza Poldark-Raven, whom she hasn’t even spoken to since her husband got—arrested? They haven’t said that yet, so what’s the problem? If Ned weren’t a complete moron in addition to being an asshole, he would have lawyered up himself, without his casual starfucker’s assistance. 

Anyway, Rennie wants to go comfort Demelza Poldark and frames this to herself as a chance to be “helpful.”  I see it as a way for her to make sure she’s seen being helpful and so gets attention and sympathy by proxy. 

The Soncartneys are there, of course, even though I don’t remember being told that Graypaul and Pruelinda were friends with the Ravens, but Rennie needs to have her most famous, most important friends seeing her do something nice for someone else.  Graypaul opens the door and “pulled her unceremoniously inside with an air of passionate relief.”  Boy, sounds like he’s about to start fucking her, doesn’t it?

Demelza Poldark-Raven has turned into quite the delicate female in the hours since her husband got—arrested? I’m not sure.  Graypaul describes this as “the local plod took Ned off,” so I can’t tell whether he’s actually been arrested.  You know what could have helped with that? An editor!

Anyway, Demelza’s had a powerful attack of the vapors since then, as described by our Paul McCartney analogue.

…all she does is weep and lie there catatonically, and who can blame her.

Because the best thing to do when your man is hauled down to the police station is completely fall apart and force your friends to fuss over you rather than assist your husband.  Otherwise, how can you be the center of attention?

Rennie spends a couple of paragraphs running down the room as not being worthy of the fame and power and glory of the Soncartneys, like the starfucker she is.  Pruelinda is there and is also very glad to see Rennie, for what reason I’m not sure.  She hasn’t shown any ability to calm down hysterical people in the past except by drugging them (Pamina in California Screamin’ and Pepper in A Hard Slay’s Night).  But she’s Queen Emma Peel so I’m sure everything will work out.

So Demelza Poldark-Raven looks like shit and Rennie calls her by a couple of Welsh endearments and that’s all it takes for her to start crying in Rennie’s arms, which is so touching that it makes the Soncartneys cry as well. 

Demelza decides that Rennie’s going to get Ned off the hook for killing Amander Evans—wow, that catatonia didn’t last long—and Rennie promises he’ll be home by lunch.  Since Rennie is always right, I’m sure he will be.  And she continues playing to her strengths by dropping “a ten-milligram Valium in a glass of water” and telling Demelza to drink it.  When she does this, she’s talking to the other woman like she’s a child and calling her“a good little daffodil.”  I’d use my psychotic break to beat the shit out of her for that, I can tell you.

Like the child she’s being treated as, Demelza wants to be sung to sleep.  Rennie thinks Graypaul and Pruelinda should handle this, but they don’t want to, so Rennie gets to sing.  So she’ll be replacing Niles Clay as the lead singer of Lionheart at some point so she can be the center of attention everywhere all the time?

And she’s playing the guitar too, you guys!  I thought she played the piano, like she did in the previous book, but our protagonist is multi-talented.  Rennie sings a folk song called “Melora” that she learned in college, presumably in her Journalism Ethics class for all the attention she seems to have paid, and her voice has become “a quite pretty soprano” even if not professional quality.  I seem to recall the writer saying something less complimentary about Rennie’s voice in an earlier book, but I don’t remember what so I can’t call it out as a retcon.  Plus, her guitar playing is “charmingly amateur.”  It probably sounded like a cat being fed through a meat grinder, but moving on.

In addition to “Melora,” she does what’s described as an old Welsh lullaby called “Ar Hyd Y Nos.”  Since Demelza’s a child, this puts her right to sleep.  I do not like the infantilizing of women in this series, in particular Pamina Potter and Demelza Poldark-Raven.  It reeks of internalized misogyny because you can tell this is the way the writer thinks a good, though lesser, woman (who isn’t Queen Emma Peel) should handle the matter of her husband’s death/arrest.  It sure isn’t the way that a grown woman like Marjorie Lacing would handle it.

Now the Soncartneys are all in awe of Rennie’s singing and want her to become a professional, at which she demurs like a good narcissist to be persuaded and coaxed.  They oblige with half a page of fulsome praise, and somehow Graypaul knows that Rennie’s first name is Ravenna.  How the hell would he know? He was never told!

But she tries to make them promise not to tell Turk she can sing but they don’t.  She has a very arch speech about how she learned to play that’s quite annoying and then the plot shoves its way back in when Rennie reveals to the Soncartneys that Ned found Amander and that’s why he’s “been brought in.”  So is this trick arrested or not? This has become vexing.

For whatever reason Pruelinda doesn’t think Demelza knows Ned’s in the clutches of the cops, but then why would she have fallen apart like this? Is the writer paying attention to the words that emerge on her computer screen?

Rennie also believes that Demelza doesn’t know, which again leaves no reason for her behavior, and promises to have more security from War God Cherry Blossom’s firm put on the door.  Who’s paying for that shit anyway?

And because we’re doing a soft reboot of California Screamin’, Rennie encounters Female Jimi Hendrix as soon as she steps out of the room.  Like the charmless creep she is, she gets Female Jimi Hendrix to stay with the drugged and sleeping child-Demelza, as the Soncartneys are apparently as useless as tits on a bull.  And how she does it is perfectly in character.

…Rennie explained hastily, and though she would never have been so crass as to remind Sunny that Miss Silver owed Miss Stride big-time for that little episode in San Francisco with Ro Savarkin, Sunny knew very well what was right and due, and instantly offered to spend the rest of the night companioning Demelza.

Female Jimi Hendrix doesn’t owe her jack shit for Ro Savarkin.  Ro Savarkin owes her for Ro Savarkin.  Female Jimi might just owe her for taking out Clovis Franjo, who planned to make her a drug runner, but the writer never bothered explaining whether Rennie had told her about this.  But again we see Rennie’s main motivation for any good she does:  to benefit herself.

Because Female Jimi Hendrix is now a child as well, Rennie “[got] her settled comfortably on the other bed in Melza’s room” and another bruiser of War God Cherry Blossom’s shows up, with a name that’s possibly stupider than his boss’s.  This poor bastard’s name is Car Darch.  I thought this was an anagram but then I Googled it and found out it’s a literary flex on the author’s part.  And Car Darch is a woman in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by the way.

So Rennie tells this guy to sit down and guard somebody and he does it for no particular reason other than Rennie is the living Queen Emma Peel. 

The next section opens with her going back to Woodstock and a bunch of name-dropping, specifically of Sly & the Family Stone, John Sebastian, and the Who.  Rennie recaps in summary to Mary Prax and we get a roll-call reference to the previous books and non-canonical murders in the series.  However, either she or the writer has forgotten a few of them.  The first four books are referenced, but also Airplane House (the murder that took place while Jefferson Airplane was touring with the Doors in Europe, which is also the tour during which Grace Slick claimed in her autobiography that she slept with Jim Morrison), Golden Gate Park (which I assume is the Human Be-In), the Avalon Ballroom, and Hyde Park (which I can only assume is the murder at Brian Jones’s funeral).  The murders Kennealy-Morrison and her characters forgot about were at the Winterland and the Matrix. 

Why am I paying closer attention to the series than the writer did?

Rennie exposes her transactional view of relationships when she lets Mary Prax know that she has to give Baron Hollywood Hogan “something really big” to balance out her use of his plane and pilot to get Turk back to New York City.  She has solving the murders in mind, which will work out as she’s the author’s self-insert.

For once, Mary Prax seems to recall her past history with being busted for murders she didn’t commit, but that’s in the rearview pretty quickly so we can get back to Rennie.

Although she’s “heartsick about Ned,” she still enjoys the sight of Pete Townshend hitting Abbie Hoffman in the head with a guitar, as it’s the kind of violence that resonates with her:

…for being an insufferable jerk, and oh, how many others, including herself, had dearly longed to do the same, and had cheered to see it…

There is no fucking way that Rennie Stride knows Abbie Hoffman.  She’d have to give a damn about one cause or another to have made his acquaintance, and we all know Rennie cares about nothing but herself and her own aggrandizement.  So I’m calling bullshit on this.

We get a brief moment of Jefferson Airplane getting ready to play at dawn, which is called out as a meaningful moment for the author in her memoir, but here we just get that it’s happening before the section ends.  Any description of the performance would pull focus from Rennie, and we can’t have that.

The next section reintroduces Belinda Melbourne, one of the author’s two self-inserts from the second book.  We get the information that Jefferson Airplane played thirteen songs, coming in second to Lionheart for the length of their set, and the crowd danced but I can’t tell whether the performance was any good.  Later she runs them down as “[r]agged, sloppy, and nowhere near what they can really do.” 

Anyway, Belinda begs a ride off Rennie back to Liberty (the town where the motel is) and also cadges a room for the day out of her, with the author careful to say Rennie “agreed happily.”

On the drive to the motel, Belinda hems and haws and beats around the bush about something until she finally admits she wants to be fixed up with someone and Rennie responds in the most artificial, self-consciously written manner possible.

“Who? Speak and be rewarded.  If it lies at all within my power, and let me tell you my powers are considerable, I shall make it happen.”

No human being ever said anything like that.  If you remove the “let me tell you” from what she said, it sounds like it could be straight out of The Sword and the Sorcerer.  I still can’t understand why she didn’t continue with the Keltiad (other than the book of short stories) unless it was an issue about the rights to the property with HarperCollins.  In other words, Kennealy-Morrison is shit with dialogue that isn’t subpar sword-and-sorcery.

Belinda finally ‘fesses up that she wants to bang Diego Hildalgo, the Jim Morrison analogue that we first met at Monterey Pop.  Diego is also married, and Rennie spent quite a bit of time running down his wife in chapter 6.  And Belinda also has a boyfriend named Hacker Bennett who’s a political reporter. 

What’s Rennie’s response to this? I mean, we already know she wants to do this, but how does she express this to her “friend?”

“I told Turk ages ago that I was going to fix you up with Diego, when you finally dumped that idiot Hacker and when Diego finally decided he was ready for a real woman and dumped that gold-digging druggie tramp.”

That’s his wife, Rennie.  In chapter 6 you said he was married to Portiapam.  It’s not a simple matter of “dumping” her.  There’s this thing called divorce that you were thinking about before Turk reminded you it was too declassee for his noble family and you rerouted into an annulment.  And why is Hacker an “idiot” all of a sudden? In the two appearances he’s made in this series, Rennie’s had no feelings about him one way or the other.  And have you noticed how her go-to insult is about the lack of intelligence of the person she’s insulting?

Belinda wonders if Diego Morrison is available and Patricia swears he is—whoops, I mean Rennie, with some more gratuitous insulting of Portiapam, whom she isn’t even bothering to give a name to here. 

…he tossed the tramp out on her bony butt a month ago and hasn’t been with anyone since—except for the groupies, of course, but as you know they don’t count.

She then goes on to say that Diego Morrison paid Portiapam a bunch of money to leave, which still isn’t a divorce so it’s not nearly as over as she depicts it.  She asks Belinda if she’s available and Belinda goes on a rant about Hacker Bennett nailing her shoes to the floor so she couldn’t leave and they are never ever ever getting back together.  This is not supported in any way by anything we know about Hacker from the text.  This is just poor writing.

Belinda starts to ask about Turk and Rennie cuts her off while knowing exactly what she was about to ask, then again when Belinda starts to ask about her.  There’s an embarrassing attempt to introduce a ticking clock when Rennie says she’s running out of time, presumably to solve the murders, but swears that she will.

And—chapter!  The internalized misogyny and slut-shaming are making a nice comeback.  There’s still nothing in this chapter that couldn’t have been cut to make room for some plot-related action, but maybe Kennealy-Morrison was trying to make a word count.  She’s still a better technical writer than Lori Foster, but that doesn’t make her good.  I can’t believe this woman was once a professional writer.

Next time, chapter 16, in which Rennie flings insults and threats at Marcus Dorner, as is tradition, and Ned and Demelza Poldark have some presumably pseudo-comedic moments, and Ned tells the story of Amander, who is of course slutty as Rennie hates her.

Go Ask Malice Chapter 14, or Quantum of Filler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Garcia told me you were infesting the premises.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her reply indicates she doesn’t believe this—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the flaming skull fits, Rennie…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLEASEGODPLEASEKILLMEWITHLIGHTNING…

For once she and I are in perfect agreement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the plot realizes that Rennie will never lift a finger to solve a mystery if she isn’t being personally inconvenienced in some way, so it poisons Turk in this chapter to kick-start the action.  It might be interesting to have a sleuth character who refuses to investigate anything unless someone they care about is targeted, but that character wouldn’t be sympathetic at all in any but the most expert writer’s hands.  Maybe a better writer would have this character dealing with major trauma as a result of a bad decision they made in the past that got someone killed.  Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder is a good example of that kind of traumatic backstory, but he works as an unlicensed private investigator so one can’t accuse him of only acting when he’s personally affected.

Rennie awakens to rain and a wake-up call from the front desk.  She has a long paragraph about the rain and how much she enjoys having the future Duke of Robinhood in bed with her before she notices the phone didn’t wake him up.  Because he’s a Gary Stu he has an “internal clock” that wakes him up whenever he needs to wake up, so it’s unusual.  She still can’t wake him up, even with light slaps in the face, notices his vitals aren’t good, and runs down the hall to Francher Green’s room.  You know, the Francher Green who’s the band’s manager and whom she tried to turn into a stone statue with her best Medusa impression in the third book after he told her that the police must have some evidence against Turk if they arrested him.  I’m sure Kennealy-Morrison will make sure he loves her before the end of the series, but there is no way he thinks she’s anything but a toxic prolapsed anus.

He’s dressed because they were going to breakfast later but Rennie is

…wearing nothing but her tattoo and the thirteen silver bangles on her right wrist and the eight gold ones on her left—the famous bullet bracelets had been left at home, as not even Rennie had felt she could pull off diamonds in a cow pasture…

In the middle of her terror for her possibly dying true love, she still has to have a flex in her own mind about her precious, precious diamonds.  That’s—pretty special.

Plus, nobody sleeps in bangle bracelets because they would be hella uncomfortable.  How could Turk sleep in the first place with all the metal clanking? If the writer wanted her to be naked but wearing something, put a necklace on her.  It’s still jewelry so her jewel lust should be satisfied.

She and Francher run back to the room.  He wants to know what drugs Turk took, she denies everything, and he doesn’t push her on that at all.  This could kill Turk if he took something and she just doesn’t want to admit it for whatever reason, but because he’s a character in a book Francher knows this isn’t the case.  He “freezes” in the door while Rennie struggles to get a pair of pants on Turk and demands that he help her.

This is stupid beyond belief, but it’s also a very nice character moment for Rennie.  She’d rather have Turk die than allow any other woman, whether some “groupie” at the motel or some nurse at the ER where they’re presumably taking him, to get a glimpse at his private parts.  It’s completely in keeping with her character.

Francher tells her she needs to get dressed herself before the ambulance gets there and we get some clothes porn for Rennie (“yesterday’s bells and white gauze blouse and mirrored gold-embroidered velvet vest,” if you’re interested).  Just FYI, anytime the writer refers to bells, if they aren’t ringing, she means bell bottom pants.  Then she tells Francher she hasn’t called for an ambulance for her possibly-dying true love.

If they were married already, I’d assume this is a ploy to kill him with plausible deniability and inherit everything.  Her actual reason for not getting medical assistance is even less plausible than that.  She doesn’t want anyone knowing it’s Turk and

…I am absolutely not waiting around for some hick volunteer paramedics to hitch up the mules and mosey on over.

She is such a New York City provincial.  This does match up with an episode in Kennealy-Morrison’s memoir where Jim was spending the night at her apartment and manifested an extremely high fever, which she treated with aspirin and liquids, on the advice of a family member in the health care field that she called, but did not get him to a doctor for.  Her reasons for not getting him to an ER or a doctor aren’t spelled out in the memoir the way they are here, but I have to wonder:  if Jim had died in Patricia’s apartment on this occasion because she denied him medical attention for whatever reason, the way she’s indicted Pamela Courson in print for doing in Paris, would Pam have the same grounds for calling Patricia a murderer based on her actions?

Somehow three of Lionheart’s members show up at the door—Rennie must have been screaming for Francher at the top of her lungs—and she tells them to get Turk into a van for the trip to the hospital.  And what if he needs emergency attention on the way and dies in the van? Nobody in the van is an EMT as far as I know.  The band members are Jay-Jay, Rardi, and Shane, whom I didn’t remember as he hasn’t had any on-page time except to be name-checked.  Since the writer already used Shane O Falvey as the name of one of Morric Douglas’s bandmates in Blackmantle and Shane is Irish for John, I feel secure in thinking this is the John Densmore analogue.  Since John played the drums in the Doors, I think Jay-Jay is also an aspect of him.  I already thought Niles and Rardi are both aspects of Ray Manzarek, so I have to come to the conclusion that Mick Rouse is the Robby Krieger analogue.

Anyway, why did Rennie even bother getting Francher? He doesn’t do anything to help except tell her to get her clothes on and call an ambulance, both of which are good suggestions.  Then she remembers she’s a Kickass Female Character and decides to do whatever the fuck she wants, which is to have people take him to the ER in a van.  She gives her reasons as wanting to protect his privacy and that this will be faster than an ambulance, which she doesn’t know.  What if they blow a tire and get stuck on the side of the road? No cell phones back then, no public phones on country roads either, so they’d just be stuck while Turk died.  Of course we know that won’t happen since he’s the self-insert’s boyfriend. 

And we can’t have the section end without the writer letting us know what a “badass” Rennie is.

When they still didn’t move:  “Did you hear me? Just fucking DO it!”  And such was the command in her voice that they leaped to obey.

And don’t you wish you had the presence to accomplish that outside fiction, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison.

The next section begins at the hospital, so none of the things that could have delayed them and killed Turk happened—what a surprise—and the nurse is trying to get Turk’s information.  Rennie checks him in under his real name, cutting off Francher’s attempt to give his stage name “like a terrible swift sword, and watching like a hunting falcon to see where Turk was being taken.”

The overwriting, it burns!

So the nurse hasn’t heard of his name as the Earl of Wallowinthemire and Rennie takes a second to run down the nurse as a hick because people outside of the cities she’s lived in recognize him or not at her convenience.  She claims to be his wife to approve treatment and assures the nurse they can pay for treatment.  That wasn’t such a big deal in 1969 because medical treatment was in no way as ruinously expensive as it is now, and if you come into an ER in the United States they are legally required to treat you regardless of ability to pay.  Then she starts wanting to know when she can see him and “be with him” and the section ends.

Kennealy-Morrison gives us one of her trademark time skips at the start of this section, which begins “three hours later” with Rennie greeting Turk in his hospital bed, which is somehow still in the ER, so I guess they haven’t admitted him to the hospital.  Only Rennie and Francher have been allowed into the ER, and the three members of Lionheart get to cool their heels in the waiting room because they aren’t the living Queen Emma Peel. 

Rennie has decided Turk needs to go back to New York, so she’s harassed Baron Hollywood Hogan into sending his “personal plane and pilot” for them.  She also takes a second or two to slam the local airport as rural and hick and unworthy of her New York City superiority.

…the rather grandiosely titled Sullivan County International Airport—yeah, maybe, if the nations involved are Lilliput and Munchkinland…

If that airport flies to Canada, and it could since it’s in upstate New York, that makes it international, so fuck you, Rennie.  But I do have to admire how she got in a twofer here, with the insult to the airport and the double literary cred flex (Jonathan Swift and L. Frank Baum).  Why is Rennie so nasty and hateful? I know the writer thinks this is rapier wit, but it’s just nasty and hateful.

So everybody’s turned out for this latest crisis in the life of Rennie, including War God Cherry Blossom, Mary Prax, and Christabel Green.  And Rennie gives us a little more of her queenly proclamations here.

The other three guys {Shane, Jay-Jay, and Rardi) would take the van back to the motel, once Turk and his escort were safely airborne, to join Niles, Mick and the roadies; after that, Lionheart would find their own way out of Sullivan County.  For them, Woodstock was over.

How nice of you to make that decision for them, Rennie.  It’s not like any of them might have wanted to hang around and watch the other acts.  The members of Lionheart are just more of the forelock-tugging peasants that peopled odd corners of Blackmantle.

All of this was more important than finding out what happened to Turk, which we finally do.  He ingested a massive overdose of what they call “downers,” although I think a doctor would use a more specific name.  He had to have his stomach pumped and, because Rennie is the living Queen Emma Peel, she “had been commended for not waiting for an ambulance.”  Why does the writer work so hard to make me hate Rennie with all this fellating of her and Rennie is always right?

That ends the time skip forward, and now we go back to her meeting with the doctor who’s treating Turk.  She is every bit as nasty and hateful and offensive as she always is to anyone who tells her things she doesn’t want to hear.  In this case, he’s telling her Turk did a shitload of drugs that almost killed him.

“We don’t do a bunch of downers at a time,” Rennie snarled in answer to the entirely non-judgmental and matter-of-fact medical question.  They’d gone toe-to-toe in the hall outside the ER and she’d really tried to keep her temper…

Of course you did, Rennie.

So she ends up calling this poor doctor (mentally) a “[m]oron upstate cheesehead quack” for no reason other than he told her Turk did drugs that almost killed him.  I don’t know what she means by “cheesehead” here, as that makes me think of Wisconsin.

And then, out loud, while she’s denying that Turk did the drugs that got pumped out of him at the ER,

If what you say is true, doctor—it is ‘doctor’ and not ‘veterinary’? Because I wonder—then it was obviously an accident.”

Notice she only does this to people who can’t respond in kind or aren’t allowed to by the writer.  Since this doctor is a professional and can’t call her a septic little bitch, all he can do is look at her like she’s lying or in denial and goes along with her plans to move Turk as she is the living Queen Emma Peel.  For whatever reason, she doesn’t want any cops involved as she thinks he’s been deliberately poisoned. I think a couple of steps in her logic chain have been omitted.

That’s the end of the flashback and now we’re back with Turk telling Rennie what happened.  He only had a cup of red wine to drink, not out of the bottle, and it tasted weird.  Wasn’t Rennie at this party too, thinking she needed to slap down Amander because “every other woman in the world is competition for him?” Why wouldn’t she know this, if she keeps as close an eye on him as it sounds like she does?  We get one second in Francher Green’s POV before we’re whipsawed back into Rennie’s vengeance fantasy against the two hundred people at the party.

“We’ll never find out who did it.  Which is too bad,” added Rennie evenly, “because I plan to kill them when I do find out and I’ll have to kill them all if I don’t.”

Why don’t you try winning a couple of fights before you plan on killing anyone, Rennie?  But we don’t have time to linger on her hot-air threats because Mary Prax pops in to inform her, and the reader, that Amander Evans was found dead.  And Kennealy-Morrison tries to be witty here but I’m sick enough of Rennie’s shit that I won’t bother.

Anyway, Rennie immediately assumes that she was murdered and wants to know who did it.  They don’t say anything and she loudly lays claim to being Murder Chick.  Odd how much she used to hate being called that, isn’t it?

And some kid got run over by a tractor but nobody gives a shit because he wasn’t famous.  Francher and everybody else spent a page and a half freaking out about the cops possibly getting wind of what looks like murders and Rennie’s thinking about the story Baron Hollywood Hogan’s going to get because she’s a narcissist and there’s a mention of the three guys in the band who are apparently still in the waiting room because fuck them and Rennie tells Turk it’s time to go home, by which she means New York City, as if anywhere else exists for her.

The next section starts out with two and a half pages of boredom with Turk’s trip back to the brownstone delayed and Rennie arranging for Francher and Christabel to stay with him for the rest of the festival, although I’d think Amander’s death would have proved to her that he wasn’t a specific target and the section ends.

Rennie goes into the bedroom where Turk’s sleeping and has three-quarters of a page of reflection, which includes her murderous fantasies about whoever drugged Turk.

…she would kill whoever had done this to him.  She would kill them lengthily, and painfully, and extremely imaginatively; wait, even better, she would almost kill them, for a very long time, and then she would almost kill them some more, and some more, and on like that, until she got bored or felt merciful, which would be never and never.

I wonder whether Kennealy-Morrison is going to let her bloodthirsty self-insert actually kill anybody during the course of the series.  I would doubt it, unless the writer thinks she can arrange it to redound to Rennie’s credit or make her look innocent somehow.  Because Rennie can never do anything wrong.

Turk wakes up and she helps him take a shower and get something to eat.  What I just described takes up almost a page.  She tells everyone (Mary Prax and War God Cherry Blossom and Francher and Christabel, I think) that she has to go back to the festival and they all protest.  Rennie vents some more of her toxic violent fantasies, naturally.

I’m going to slit their throat with a boathook {whoever tried to kill Turk} and then bathe in a tubful of their hot steaming blood.

Servant series flashback!

Mary Prax tries to talk her down from her psychotic break and Rennie tells her that she thinks somebody poisoned Turk so she wouldn’t look into what happened to Cory Rivkin and Amander, which is a stupid plan on its face, as she hadn’t lifted a single finger to do that and mostly never would have.  All the killer(s) did was make it personal.  But that’s a mistake most killers in this series make.

War God Cherry Blossom thinks she’s paranoid, which is rich coming from him, and she gives us one last look at her bloody inner life.

I’m going to hunt them down and shoot them between the eyes like Old Yeller and leave their lifeless bullet-riddled bodies lying in a ditch.  Only, unlike Old Yeller, it won’t be sad at all.

And—chapter!  Boy, Rennie amped up her unbearability to eleven on the dial.  I assume that Kennealy-Morrison thinks this makes her self-insert look tough and formidable and intelligent and resourceful and whatever other ridiculousness she can think of, but this is not a Strong Female Character.  This is a nightmare of a girl who will never grow and change because her author thinks she is absolutely fucking perfect, always and forever, amen.

Credit where credit is due—I firmly believed that Rennie was going to solve the murders from the comfort of her brownstone(s) in New York City, but at least the writer figured out how unbelievable that would be.

Next time, chapter 12, in which the second day of the Woodstock festival begins and Rennie goes back, gets interrogated by the local sheriff, and poor Marcus Dorner shows back up.