Wandering Through Life: A Memoir

Silver Dagger Award winner Leon (the Guido Brunetti series) underwhelms with this meandering series of reflections on her life and work. In 30 short chapters, Leon recounts the “unusual things” she’s seen and done across eight decades, leaping around in chronology and subject matter. Early reminiscences about growing up in 1950s New Jersey are amusing—she paints an especially vivid picture of her aunt Gert, a “pillar of the church” and an unrepentant cheater at bridge—but too many entries fall flat: a two-page section in which Leon describes feeling abandoned by her mother when she’s left at her first day of grammar school demonstrates none of the depth or subtlety that suffuse her fiction. The author’s accounts of teaching English in Iran in the 1970s and inventing the off-color, Monopoly-inspired board game $audiopoly(“Caught distributing Bibles on number 7 bus. Fined 700 riyals. Lose one turn”) while a professor at King Saud University in Riyadh are more interesting, but fans are likely to be disappointed by the lack of insight into her writing. In the end, Leon’s early admission that she’s “feckless and unthinking by nature and [has] never planned more than the first step in anything I’ve done” appears to be an apt description of her approach to the memoir at hand. This disappoints. (Sept.)