Erika Grieg has a secret: a famed gallery owner in Chelsea by day, at night she is a first-class dominatrix who operates out of a dungeon in the basement. She also is whip-smart (sorry, but who could resist?) and tartly funny as she recounts how she got her start in S&M while at Harvard, and, well, let’s just say the worlds of art, painters, and wealthy bankers intersect in provocative and ultimately deadly ways. Bold Strokes is told entirely in the voice of Grieg, and it is a very appealing voice, indeed, shaped no doubt by Jane Boon’s conversations with those who spank, all generously thanked in the acknowledgments. And if you have no desire to go into any dungeons and are allergic to latex, Bold Strokes is highly entertaining even for those who just like to read.
The author has spent much of the last 30 years living in China, first as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English to college students and then as Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, from 2000 to 2007. He and his family returned to China in 2019, where he taught at Sichuan University for the next two years. Peter Hessler is a beautiful writer and a perceptive and empathetic listener, and from his vantage point as a teacher of two generations of Chinese, he plots the country’s extraordinary transformation over these years. Who couldn’t love the student who failed to gain admission to his class and yet showed up anyway, promising to come in disguise the next time if Hessler did not allow her even to audit the class? Some of the most revealing passages are about—during his second stint teaching in China—the experiences of his two children enrolled in lower school there. When the course called Morality and Rules is taught, his daughters use this time to zǒushén, meaning to daydream. His own college students did the same in their own mandatory political classes. Chinese students are more like American students than we may want to admit.
Long before the F.B.I. and very much long before CSI, Scotland Yard led the world in its investigative skills, solving the most notorious of murders since its founding, in 1829. Simon Read does a marvelous job of re-creating its knottiest cases, from “the Italian Boy” killed for his teeth in 1831 to the infamous Dr. Crippen, who poisoned his wife and was pursued overseas amid coverage that made it the tabloid story of the early 1900s. And then there is George Joseph Smith, who managed to kill three of his brides (he married them under aliases) and made it look like all had suddenly died in their bathtubs. Anyone who is amazed by the ingenuity of deaths in the world of Agatha Christie will read this book and discover all the methods of murder she left out.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
