I Am Completely Serious

Did anyone besides me in the whole world read Sharon Shinn’s attempt to write a murder mystery? It was called Wrapt in Crystal, and it's absolutely bizarre, because the guy “caught” at the end of the book was clearly not the actual murderer.

And I have never been able to figure out if Shinn knew this or not.

So, the murders were ritualistic and religious in nature - the killer kills a nun from one of a city's two prominent religious orders at set intervals, alternating between the two, and tying a religious relic taken from the last victim around the next one's wrists. As originally established, the murderer would have needed to be a local in order to move around the way they did. The guy the detective caught wasn't from the right planet. In the only scene in which he spoke, he acted like he didn't know the name of the goddess “his” crimes blasphemed against. His motivation for the assault he was caught in the act of committing was money.

The hero's a guy from another planet (this is basically Star Trek OC fic, he's a Federation officer) who investigates alongside a nun named Laura, who explains local customs to him, in between waving her tragic past in his face so he'll fall in love with her. He does, and at the end she leaves the planet to be with him.

Laura is obviously the actual murderer.

She'd lived in the city all her life and had the ability to move around it without being paid any special attention or identified later - she even pointed out to the hero at one point that people simply recognized her as "a nun," and didn't pay attention to her face. She was the only character connected to both of the religious orders whose members were being murdered, and she could easily have gotten any of the victims to go to isolated places with her.

She was both the only genuine religious fanatic in the book, and the only character whose devotion seemed to include violence; while she was never shown hurting anyone or herself, she talked about dying and self-harm a lot, generally in conversations associated with her love for her goddess. And while she talked a lot about how much she loved the goddess, she had reason to be feel betrayed by her - the deaths and betrayals of loved ones, her disillusionment with her order.

The final goddamn straw is that she was the last person to have access to the money the ostensible culprit wanted.

The only way this book makes any sense is if Laura committed the murders herself, then set this guy up when the detective started paying too much attention to her. I feel absolutely certain that she killed him shortly after the events of the last page.

And yet I have no clue whether Shinn intended any of this. It doesn't seem like she did - but how can you be so bad at writing mysteries that you get your culprit wrong in such a thorough and tidy fashion? I don't think that's possible!

Yet it seems even more unlikely that Sharon fucking Shinn, of all people, wrote something this sneaky and sharp-edged. So it has to have been accidental. Right?

...

This is like how Summers at Castle Auburn was obviously about lesbians, but ended with two straight marriages between people who had previously shown almost no indication of romantic interest in one another. Maybe Shinn sometimes gets possessed by the malevolent spirit of Sarah Waters.

(Originally posted September 24, 2014.)

I don't know what's giving me that idea! It's just, you know, little things:

All Tamar's habitual wariness deserted her. All her defenses undid themselves of their own accord.

"I don't know that I could leave you behind even if I wanted to," she replied slowly. "Even if I crushed this Kiss in my arm, I think I would still hear your voice. I have become attuned to you. Jehovah woke the bond, but I think it is a bond past breaking. I am afraid, too, but not of losing you. I am afraid of what it means to have found you."

Lucinda flowed to her feet and threw her arms around her sister.

Neither was Tamar used to indiscriminate hugs from chance-met acquaintances, but she did not draw back. This felt familiar, this felt right. Even when those delicate wings came curving around her shoulders, wrapping her in a texture that was half lace and half sinew, she did not pull away. It was as if she was embraced by her own soul, insubstantial but indestructible.

She felt her bones give up their accustomed fight and her blood go dancing backward in her veins.

- The Alleluia Files

As brownbetty has previously observed, Shinn's worldbuilding would seem to indicate that she's never heard about lesbians. But then, she keeps writing stuff like this. Though this is by far the most blatant I've seen her get, Wrapt in Crystal also had quite a bit of subtext. If the two worldly nuns and their guy had been up for resolving the situation by way of polyamory, the guy would have started feeling left out after a month or so.

Come to think of it, this isn't even really the first time she's subliminated an apparent lesbian love story by making the women siblings. Though the devoted sisters in Summers at Castle Auburn don't embrace passionately, their relationship was pressed directly from the Story A mold. The straight romances feels pasted on by comparison. Is there any evidence that Shinn reads manga?

Shinn has this problem where occasionally she doesn’t seem to buy her own romances. Summers at Castle Auburn was like that. There’s not really anything there to indicate that the heroine and the hero are in love. The book worked because of the heroine’s relationships with other characters, which were much more compelling. The romance existed independently of the plot - everything would have played out pretty much the same way if the hero and heroine hadn’t known each other. There’s no real reason for the romance to be there, but because it doesn’t clog up the workings of the plot, it doesn’t hurt anything.

Jovah’s Angel, unfortunately, has a clog in its system.

The book is the second in Shinn’s Samaria series, which can be categorized as Sci-Fi Where There’s Magic That Is Actually Bad Science (as opposed to Magic That Is Actually Believable Science, like I can’t say the title of this series because it’s actually a spoiler ack). Genetically engineered angels rule the planet Samaria, a human colony that has forgotten the advanced technology that brought them there, and is just on the verge of an industrial revolution. The world is inhospitable due to extreme weather, so the angels were created to keep the weather in check, which they do by singing weather-related “prayers” to the god Jovah - who is obviously an AI.

But something has gone wrong, and the only angel whose voice Jovah still hears is shy, insecure Alleya. When the previous archangel, the brilliant and charismatic Delilah, loses the use of her wings in an accident, Alleya is forced to step into her shoes. She must work together with Caleb, the world’s most brilliant engineer and an atheist, to solve the problem, while searching for the husband Jovah has chosen for her. Meanwhile, Caleb’s best friend Noah, another engineer, has become obsessed with the idea of repairing the despairing Delilah’s wings.

Cut for spoilers.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Today was Archangel. This book creeps me out a little bit more every time I re-read it.

The first time, I remember being very impressed by Josiah. He’s clearly a very cynical person, if not an actually evil one - the power behind the throne, he manipulates Gabriel and Rachel and Raphael, relatively simple-minded people, into doing what he wants. When he says that God has no emotional attachment to human beings, he’s talking about himself. And while it’s obvious to the reader that he condescends to and lies to everyone he meets, none of the characters ever realizes it.

Rachel never quite catches on that Josiah dismisses her faith as a cargo cult (though he says it pretty clearly), and Gabriel never realizes that Josiah, reassuring him of God’s existence, is just telling him what he wants to hear. Our heroes all sort of absent-mindedly think of him as the story’s non-threatening mentor figure who exists only to set up their own stories. And then they all live happily ever after within Josiah’s plot, without ever noticing there was a plot to begin with.

But this time through, I’m developing the sneaking suspicion that Shinn doesn’t realize it, either. I liked the book so much better when I thought she was in on it. My meta-book is so much more awesome than the real one.

Also, the book suffers from What These People Need Is A Honky syndrome. Why couldn’t Rachel herself have been ethnically one of the pseudo-Romani, exactly? Why did she have to be adopted? Was her blondness in some manner integral to her function within the narrative?

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)