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Across the Page: Suggestions to get you through the holidays

This month’s Across the Page features three books to get you through the holidays: Patricia Cornwell’s latest crime thriller, Port Mortuary; Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s adventure story, The Big Bang Symphony; and Dear John, I Love Jane, a collection of essays edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre.

Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam)

Patricia Cornwell once again stretches her forensic science and storytelling skills in Port Mortuary, the 18th edition to her bestselling Kay Scarpetta series, and a gripping and terrifying novel.

The first edition to be narrated from Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s first person point of view since The Last Precinct, which was published more than a decade ago, Port Mortuary provides an intimate look inside a brilliant and expansive mind.

The story opens with Scarpetta studying Computer Tomography-Assisted Virtual Autopsy procedures at the Dover Air Force Base’s mortuary, but spends most of its time back in Massachusetts, where Scarpetta struggles with her new role as chief of the Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC).

When the body of a young man comes to the center after dropping dead from cardiac arrhythmia, Scarpetta slowly detects signs that the man may have been alive when he was placed in the body bag and in the CFC’s cooler. Scarpetta is appropriately haunted and confused by the horrific reality of this possible mistake.

She also understands that the situation threatens her professional reputation. Scarpetta’s lesbian niece, Lucy, has her own theories for what happened and suggests a possible conspiracy. “My niece and her phobias,” Scarpetta thinks, “Her obsession with explosives. Her acute distrust of government.”

But when Scarpetta is able to utilize the 3-D autopsy tricks she learned at the Dover Air Force Base, she soon sees there is far more to the mystery of the man in the body bag than she initially realized.

Cornwell is a master at suspense and Port Mortuary is a worthy addition to this celebrated series. It will keep you up at night.

The Big Bang Symphony by Lucy Jane Bledsoe (Terrace Books)

One of the most important details of Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s latest novel, The Big Bang Symphony, is that it takes place in the bitterly cold and isolated world of Antarctica. The setting creates an instant sense of unease, curiosity and urgency. But this is not just a story about Antarctica. It’s a story about three women – Rosie, Mikala and Alice – all of whom are there for very different reasons.

The book opens as the Air Force plane carrying the women attempts to fly through a storm and is forced to crash-land on the ice. That dramatic event sets the tone for the rest of the book and sends each character on her own unique journey.

Free spirited Rosie is there for her third season as a galley cook. Though she is focused and determined to stay away from anything even remotely romantic, she soon begins an affair with a married photographer. Mikala, a young musician and composer, arrives as an artist-in-residence. She is grieving the death of her partner Sarah, and secretly studying a visiting astrophysicist whom she believes is the father she never met: “She thought she had spent her life protecting Sarah. But maybe it had been the other way around. With her life partner gone, she had to face not only her absence but the absence of her father.”

And then there is Alice, a graduate student in geography who is as determined to break away from the shadow of her mother, as she is to prove herself professionally under the oppressive gaze of her advisor.

Bledsoe weaves a compelling narrative out of the three women’s lives, a narrative that explores the tension between art and science, love and resentment, grief and longing, and the needs of the individual versus the community. All of this is set against the dangerous, stark and beautiful background of Antarctica.

The Big Bang Symphony is Bledsoe’s fifth novel. She is also the author of the nonfiction book The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic.

Dear John, I Love Jane, edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre (Seal Press)

Edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre, Dear John, I Love Jane is an original collection of essays that focuses on women who left their men for other women. It is about the fluidity of sexuality and the variety of experiences and realities represented in the term “queer woman.”

In the foreword, Dr. Lisa M. Diamond, Associate Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies and the author of Sexual Fluidity, begins with a bold claim: “This gripping collection of first-person narratives will undoubtedly expand and deepen your understanding of women’s sexuality, whether you are gay, straight or somewhere in between.” It’s bold, but true.

The editors of the book, professional and life partners, have their own compelling back-stories, which they share in the introduction. While Andre never seriously dated men, Walsh is a divorced mother who spent most of her life as a “bona fide” heterosexual.

Similar to Walsh and Andre, the essays here encompass a genuinely wide range of voices from women of all different backgrounds-cultural, professional, and sexual. In “The Right Fit,” Kami Day tells the story of growing up in the Mormon Church and how, after years of a stressful and sexually unfulfilling married, she finally came to terms with her attraction to other women. “I remember one day in particular: I was dressed in a denim maternity jumper and red knee socks, standing in the middle of the living room, contemplating driving to Corpus Christi to find a female prostitute.” (If that quote doesn’t get you to buy the book, I don’t know what will).

In “Walking a Tightrope in High Heels,” Michelle Renae recounts the story of how she met and fell in love with her husband Jo at a small, liberal arts university that catered to Evangelical Christians. Though her intimate life with her husband was initially strong, she soon found that her feelings for women were interfering with her marriage. Renae writes with insight about the challenges and reactions that she and Jo have faced since deciding to open their marriage.

Some of the other affecting essays include Libbie Miller’s “Leap of Faith,” which tells the story of how she dealt with coming out to a husband she genuinely loved for years, and is now deployed in Iraq. In “Watershed,” Veronica Masen explains why she decided not to leave her husband and family for a woman that she fell in love with. “So now I am in limbo. I am celibate, and introspective, and shell shocked… There are days I know I am a lesbian, that I always have been and always will be, but for now I am choosing not to honor that part of myself purely out of a sense of responsibility and loyalty to my family.”

Our own Trish Bendix offers one of the lighter essays with “Credit in the Un-Straight World,” a humorous take on how her first crush on a girl forced her to reconsider her late blooming sexual identity: “My subconscious had no plans to bed a man. My conscious mind said I’m just not that kind of girl. The thing is, I’m totally that kind of girl. I’m just that kind of girl for a girl.”

Dear John, I Love Jane is an engaging, important and thoughtfully edited collection. Highly recommended.

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